From the London Independent, the gaily contrary, always entertaining, and often off-base Camille Paglia:

English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in America, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust. From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated north-eastern industrial town), I recognised commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America. Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M&M’s chocolate candies. A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise longue, said in a twanging Southern drawl: “I’m an M&M peanut / Toasted to a golden brown / Dipped in creamy milk chocolate / And covered in a thin candy shell!” Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly towelled in her monogrammed candy wrap. I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut’s jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.

Would those be the same neglected souls even now lolling in their own kidney-shaped pools, flush with advertising awards whose value Paglia wouldn’t think of noting? If she wants sexy peanuts, she should try some poetry outside the limited arena she’s clearly sampling (and sampling is a generous term). Paglia also says, as usual putting herself in the position (“like Andy Warhol…”) as singular visionary of a fairly obvious point:

Another of my unfashionable precepts is that I revere the artist and the poet, who are so ruthlessly “exposed” by the sneering poststructuralists with their political agenda. There is no “death of the author” (that Parisian cliché) in my world view.

I think she’s giving theory too much power; in my experience, the new generation of poets isn’t corseted by it. If Paglia looked just a little harder (especially at the internet, which she claims to love even as she bemoans its promotion of sloppy language), she’d find that the author is thriving, breathing beautifully even without Camille Poetry Resuscitation.

Rhyme and Reason [Independent, via Arts & Letters Daily]
The Camille Paglia IMterview [Andrew Sullivan]
Bite Me, Camille Paglia! [American Politics; this is nauseating on many levels, but I include it because it reinforces my real affection for Paglia—I don’t like it when fools like this attack her—and demonstrates how reactionaries are constantly falling right into subversives’ traps, e.g. “Women like her are enough to turn straight men gay!” Paglia would beam.]

Engaging piece about John Ashbery by Meghan O’Rourke in Slate:

John Ashbery wrote his first poem when he was 8. It rhymed and made sense (“The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds/ These are the fairies’ camping grounds”) and the young writer—who had that touch of laziness that sometimes goes along with precocity—came to a realization: “I couldn’t go on from this pinnacle.” He went on, instead, to write poems that mostly didn’t rhyme, and didn’t make sense, either. His aim, as he later put it, was “to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about.” It worked. Early on, a frustrated detractor called him “the Doris Day of Modernism.” Even today a critic like Helen Vendler confesses that she’s often “mistaken” about what Ashbery is up to. You can see why: It simply may not be possible to render a sophisticated explication de texte of a poem that concludes “It was domestic thunder,/ The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched/ His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.”

No wonder Ashbery is widely thought of as dauntingly “difficult”—or, in some camps, as something of a literary hoaxster. It would be a shame, though, if this prevented curious readers from picking up his books. Being difficult, after all, is not the same thing as being incomprehensible.

Read the rest here.

For me, and for at least one other person I know, getting something out of Ashbery—getting a lot out of Ashbery—came with hearing him read. He stood there at the podium of the Morgan Library looking as genial and harmless as Ed McMahon, and his words were calm and paced, not the verbal whirlpool of someone who’s trying to put something over on you. It was something like a reading by the late Kenneth Koch, but not theatrical (Ken was theatrical in the best way—his presence was a French circus, like the entire cast of The Rules of the Game in one person). As Ashbery read, paused, and just barely accented certain phrases, I understood that his poems simply expressed states of mind in interestingly juxtaposed groups. And that made them more than not-baffling; it let me focus on the words instead of the structure, on reacting to those states of mind rather than being mad at Ashbery for being so elusive or worrying about metaphor. It was a simple but key change, and I’m now happy to see his poems both “narrative” (as if all stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and explainable characters) and not. I’m thinking about Andy Goldsworthy’s willed natural events and how they tell a story of sorts—he throws a fistful of red dirt into a creek and watches it rush with color, for example, or watches a cairn undo itself in the ocean over time—and how enough of those in close proximity might resemble an Ashbery poem (O’Rourke calls him a “radio transistor”). If this seems like so much red dirt, just read aloud one of his poems, or better yet, let him do it for you.

The Instruction Manual: How to read John Ashbery [Slate]
The Natural: The Poetry and Madness of John Clare [New Yorker; quotes Ashbery essay at length]
Nancy Drew’s Father: The Fiction Factory of Edward Stratemeyer [O’Rourke, New Yorker]

Steve Martin has pretty good taste (he’s not, as rumored, dating Kristin Davis, but plenty of people were willing to believe it), though not always in movie roles:

Steve Martin will reunite with “Bringing Down the House” director Adam Shankman for a sequel to 2003’s “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

Shankman—who directed the Jennifer Lopez-Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy “The Wedding Planner” and the Mandy Moore drama “A Walk to Remember”—has become one of the hottest comedy directors in Hollywood. “Bringing Down the House” grossed $132.5 million at the U.S. box office and his latest project—the Vin Diesel comedy “The Pacifier”—took in $30.5 million last weekend when it opened at No. 1.

Shankman told Daily Variety deals are being worked out for Martin and other cast members from “Cheaper by the Dozen,” including Bonnie Hunt and Piper Perabo, but he said it was questionable whether Hilary Duff would return for the sequel. The story for the new movie follows the family with 12 kids as they go on a vacation and run into trouble with another family from the neighborhood that has eight kids.

“Cheaper by the Dozen,” directed by Shawn Levy, grossed $138 million.

That’s the key sentence, I suppose. I didn’t see Cheaper because I was afraid of what those fluffballs would do to a children’s book I didn’t want to see stripped of its high weirdness. Critics and friends I trust confirmed the fear; even that wouldn’t ordinarily keep me away from a movie I was interested in, but I hate seeing Martin act like an idiot, and I don’t mean The Jerk. Anyway, this sequel sounds deadly. I guess it’ll fund the stuff it’s great to see him do—plays, art-patronage, novellas, time for New Yorker pieces. But nincompoop matinees? He’s got the clout to make good G films (Lord knows we need some) and spare us this nonsense. Just because he can make funny faces doesn’t mean he should give up his right to be a stylish/comic Cary Grant type; Stanley Kubrick considered him for the Tom Cruise role in Eyes Wide Shut, which would’ve been mind-blowing. My Steve Martin is the Steve Martin of both Roxanne and The Spanish Prisoner, but not generic popcorn-pushers. He’s better than that.

Steve Martin Ready for Another “Dozen” [UPI, via Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]
People in the News: Steve Martin is head over heels for “Sex” kitty Kristin Davis [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]
Biography for Steve Martin [IMDb]
Interview with Steve Martin [Banjo Newsletter, via SteveMartin.com]

Categories: Martin, Movies