The New U.S. Poet Laure-sorry, what?

Modern poetry is

a well-written paragraph chopped

up into random collections

of sentence fragments

that resist easy

reading.

Profundity.

Random! Random! Read All About It!

Since the theme of the day does appear to be a random firing of neurons based on the stream of my google reader, I will admit that I have long had a soft spot for the gaudy verbal stylings of Wonkette.

I mean, c'mon, any piece of writing that includes this sentence--"Not in this Country, and not under our Dual Jurisdiction of the Declaration of Independence, Social Security, and the Bible."--and ends with a reference to Circuit City, such a piece of prose is like costume jewelry on the long arm of Liberty.

Wonkette : Stephen Colbert, if drinking had ruined his dignified diction...

The Creaking Door Of A Closing Confessional

I have to admit something. This admission is not only eased by the fact that no one will read it, it's also spurred by that fact.

I used to think it something of a curse that I never built much of a readership for this blog. After taking an extended break it occurred to me that a possible reason for this is that I had let this blog resemble its title--always meant half-facetiously--much too much. I was saying nothing, and sometimes I wasn't even saying it well.

Self-censorship is not always a bad thing. I won't ever get into any negative aspects of my social and/or artistic life in this space--I will leave those classy souls airing their spats on Facebook to their rarefied perches. But, reviewing most of my more, ahem, recent posts (assuming they can still be called that), I see that I had begun to limit myself almost entirely to the safety of posts announcing upcoming events. Obviously an effective strategy considering my whopping ten page views per week.

What started as a forum established with the hope that I could practice my wordsmithing and share the random deep and (mostly) shallow thoughts of my day-to-day existence had quietly sunk into the sterile cowardice of words for words' sake. This blog had passed out of the realm of self-censorship into straight up P.R. Not quite my original intention...

I'm not really sure how to make my planned transition, but I very much aim to return to subjects about which I have an interest and an opinion--politics, art, religion, and other various bullshit (did I just repeat myself?), etc. Relaxing into this will be tricky; it's not easy to loosen a locked jaw. I learned that on 7th Ave. But I will do my best. I mean, hell, I live in New York City...who really would notice another poor schlub screaming random liberal, anti-religious, absurdist-leaning Jeremiads in this neck of the woods?

I mean, hopefully a few more than usual, if I let those screeds actually reflect real feelings....but, you know, other than that....

La Poésie Financière

As a rule, I try to stay up-to-date on this, that, and the other—all three of which constantly occupy some sphere of the national mind—and, currently, the "that" seems to be the perpetual post-mortem of the financial crisis still laying waste to vast swaths of the American Empire.

In my most recent appearance as that bedraggled, over-educated NYC straphanger everyone knows and pretends not to be, I happened across an item in my crumpled New Yorker (see?) that reminded me of a prose-ish poem I'd written several years ago addressing just such (literal) changes in fortune.

On this blog, I rarely stray into anything as controversial as substance—though I do often grant myself the indulgence of polemicism (for instance). I'm going to break with that odd tradition and share the piece of writing in question.

I'm less the prescient type than the postscient type, but I would say that in some gut way I got the large-scale risks of systemic opportunism right with this one.

For what it's worth. (Heh...)

L'Esprit D'Agilotte

—Haberdashers dashed across the racks as if their hats could no longer hold the brains inside their crowns—Tailors torn from collar to crotch—Cobblers, dry tongues begging for their souls—

Agilotte arrived at the agora.

He strode through the bright bordellos of commerce much as a vintner sniffs at the corks of emptied casks. There was no water in his walk, though, just a touch of oil: he distasted mixing. He tightened his invisible hand into a fist, then rode his well-greased purse gently along the purveyors’ path, watching their stock fall like a feather.

—Carpenters’ minds warped out of joint—Smithys’ steely resolve bent out of shape—

He turned the purpose of the grand experiment on its back and tanned it in the sun until its brown was golden. Like the emerald turtles he emulated, he understood that trolling depths is only good for drowning, and who needs dip deeper than the wish of the fountain’s settled coins? After all, shallow waters are where the beasts won’t dive, and interest only flies as far as the smell of dying will take it. This is as far as Agilotte would go. But this was far enough. Nothing shiny lie farther.

He turned the corner, still intent on the baker’s dozen, the hint of special care hanging heavy on his pursed lips.

—Bankers’ reason dispossessed—

With expansive palm outstretched, he reached the store-front, but suddenly those five fingers thumbed the dim emptiness wherein the lower depths are lost every day. Agilotte had accidentally tasted the water of those currents through which no currency flows.

Being hot and cold, but not lukewarm, he spat the water from his mouth and turned his parched lips from his palm, but there was nothing there, the fare had taken all, and Agilotte, the maker of the mark, the dollar’s dolor, was left with nothing but what he thought he had bought.

—Buyer’s capital punished—

Agilotte remarked his empty palm.

Random Thought: Storytelling

To all the playwrights and screenwriters who, I'm sure, do not read this blog: one of the worst tools you can use to firm up your invention is to have a character remark about how "you can't make this stuff up" or some such.

Just...please, don't do it. Because it's a lie. You can make it up. How do I know? Because you did. And then you told an actor to pretend that you didn't. That's what actors do. But that doesn't mean you need to make them give the lie to what you do. Calling attention to the fiction of the fiction that we're watching is just not smart strategy. I'm only thinking of you here.

Okay, run off and play...

Sing Thee To Thy Rest

Other than my brief goodbye, I haven't really had a chance to address the recent loss of Steven Bach, a screenwriting professor of mine from Bennington College.

He was probably the first teacher I'd had who made me feel like I'd stepped sideways in the world, slightly out of sync with my life as it had been lived previously. "Him?," I thought. "This man, former senior vice president in charge of worldwide production at United Artists and producer of such movies as Hair, Raging Bull, and Annie Hall, has come down from the heights of the profession I'm hoping to enter just to thumb through my inconsequential dramatic doodlings? How did it come to this? I'm just a kid from podunk Georgia...."

He wasn't the kind of teacher you were ever "close" with; Steven was much too dignified to indulge in anything like gossip. But this dignity meant that he treated the ideas of those around him with respect. And if you faced his honest scrutiny with a confidence that your ideas deserved his attention--in short, with your own dignity--then even fundamental disagreements were amicable and informative.

This is not to say that every single student was treated to a jovial how-de-do and a cup of warm cocoa. Like every diplomatic soul, he had little patience for people who seemed unaware of how they appeared to others, or for those whose default response to criticism was to dig in their heels and bare their teeth. To quote a stoic of whom Steven undoubtedly approved, "If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself; if it be a lie, laugh at it." He preferred that people take their slings and arrows straight on.

After hearing that he'd passed, I went digging around and found an old notebook from one of my screenwriting classes with him, just to relive for a moment my brief time under his tutelage. Below are a few of the advisorial bon mots I was sufficiently amused and/or enlightened by to record for posterity:

• "Put a gun on the table--it's gonna go off. Hang a little girl from an orange tree--somebody's gonna notice, besides the Florida Orange Tree Council!"

• "I don't play."

• On the flaw in studio execs' stressing character likability over all else: "If I ask you to close your eyes for ten seconds and when you open them I have laid on the table a teddy bear and a rattlesnake, I know where your eyes will gravitate."

• To a student whose screenplay featured a man who may or may not be a sexual predator: "You've gotta take him off the hook of our wandering, debauched minds."

• "It's okay to be comical in a tragic situation, it's not okay to be trivial."

• On inborn talent: "...And Sibyl Shepard, when she was 25, was Sibyl Shepard."

• On our class time together: "This isn't the self-pity hour."

• On negotiating for anything you can get away with: "PriceChopper doesn't give food away, even though you're cute and you've got a pencil."

• On character development: "Nobody lives such a one note life except monks...and we're not so sure about monks even."

And finally, just to demonstrate his control of understatement:

• "We're the most harmless people in the world, in Bennington, Vermont."

He will be missed.

And Flights Of Angels...

Steven Bach, rest in peace.