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Kingfisher
Dedicated to the appreciation of photography, painting, poetry, fiction,
And Please Take a Look At Our Blog
Spring
2005,
Volume Four, Number One About the painting:
Triumph," was painted in Ireland during the winter of 1955. At the time,
others thought it dark and depressing. Morris loved it. He had been
inspired by the discovery of these parrot tulips thriving in Lady Banks
garden in County Cork. He took detailed notes and drawings -- struck by
a remnant of the old world. The once popular "Triumph" tulips had been
planted during the Tulip Craze of the 17th century. |
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Homage to Saul
Bellow; or to Solomon Bellows, the name he was born with, in 1915
"A nervy guy," I thought, upon first meeting Saul Bellow--back before he was Somebody. But he was well on his way. And I thought him from NYC, not knowing anything about him--that he was from the North Side of Chicago. I should have spotted that accent (if any), being myself from the South Side of Chicago. "He sure thinks a lot of himself. Doesn't he seem to know his way around?" I was an undergraduate writing student at the University of Washington, and Bellow was on a lecture tour. It was 1953. He was never far from the university world, most of his life. He had just published The Adventures of Augie March and we had not even heard of it. He read to us from the novel a fascinating account of trying to train an eagle. A toilet was involved, I remember, more than fifty years later. I think the huge bird used the back of the toilet as a perch, but I can't be sure, short of going back and rifling through the book and probably rereading most of it. And I don't want to do that. (Or do I? Perhaps.) After the reading in the Walker-Ames Room of Parrington Hall, a bunch of us went down to Howard's Coffee Shop and had a cup with him. He tolerated us kindly, I recall, though he talked and looked over most of our heads. Then he was gone. A week or so later I saw his academic resume lying on the desk of a professor/friend. Saul was applying for a teaching job. Later I gathered that he had applied at many, if not all, of the places he gave readings at to promote his book. It was Princeton that made him the offer he accepted. But it was at the University of Chicago that he spent most of the time following. The English department there did not hire Jews, according to Biographer James Atlas. But its Committee on Social Thought assuredly did, and it taught classes, had faculty, and held full academic status. To mock the Englishy English department, Bellow and friends like Harold Bloom used to speak Yiddish as they strode together down the hallways. I imagine it drove home the point of pompous exclusion pretty well. Of course I read everything I could of Bellow over the years. At the time this consisted of The Dangling Man and The Victim, and Seize The Day. Augie, of course. And over the decades, each of the very good novels that came out almost yearly. Quite a few books and quite a few years. When Bellow won the Novel Prize for Literature, a couple of decades later (1976), I was freelancing in Seattle, after having left the University staff, where I had worked for a decade. I asked the editor of The Argus--an old, respected weekly newspaper or journal--if they would be interested in a timely article on Bellow. It was a little out of their line, but they agreed, as they had to my idea about one on Sontag. In order to do a good job, I decided I needed to re-read Bellow. I started at the beginning. My, what a lot of production from a single man. I also re-read the short stories and his ventures into a form he was particularly skilled at, the novella. It took me weeks to do all that reading. Well, I was out of work, literally speaking, and had the time. Then I began to write. Of necessity it was pretty short. I think it began, "A nervy guy," I thought, when I first saw/met Saul Bellow. But then my article got better, from an intellectual or critical viewpoint. I turned it into the editor, who accepted it (without reading it, of course), for the deadline was at hand. They paid me $50 for it. Of course that was Old Money. It came to about eight cents an hour for my labor of love. And now he is dead. "Prematurely?" Well, yes and no. He was 89 years old. From the looks of his brown teeth in a late, grinning photograph, he still had most of them and pretty good health. And he kept writing and publishing books into his late 80s. He fathered a daughter to his third wife at the age of 84. The Actual (a novella) came out in 1997 and Ravelstein in 2000. Same old Bellow, I thought. There are many things to envy Bellow for, but it is better and more seemly simply to praise him and his mammoth accomplishments. I'll leave the envy to Updike, Oates, Greene, Henry Miller, Nabokov, and many less deserving writers who did not get the greatly overrated but still important Nobel Prize for Literature. And I must say that the Nervy Guy wore his medallion well, getting it so early in his long career. I mean, it didn't seem to change him one bit, or to slow him down any. I think we need a new word for such achievements. "Bellowian." How's that? Robert Arnold, Editor See Philip Roth's remembrance of this period in Bellow's life in April 25, 2005 issue of the New Yorker, p. 72 ILLNESS NOT JUST A METAPHOR Susan Sontag dies at 71 from the cancer that chased her for years
I was a free-lance writer who had newly discovered photography, back in the mid-70s, when I first discovered Susan Sontag's book, On Photography, for which she had just received a Pulitzer Prize. I convinced the editor of Seattle's The Argus to let me do an article on her, for she had impressed me with this book, and her other writing, which I had followed in the lit journals of the day.. So I began to read her more fully, and soon acknowledged her as an intellectual who could reach ordinary readers who were willing to give her enough time and thought. She wasn't difficult, though a bit preachy and morally superior. So I followed her career loosely over the following years. Her response to a personal problem, such as cancer, was to write a book about it and her experiences, and to delve deeply into the moral psychology of what was involved. Illness As Metaphor followed the photography book by only a year. How prolific she was, I thought; and what was more, she seemed to be living in the same world as I, though that world seemed to be mostly centered in NYC and Paris. Mine was Seattle and Berkeley. Never mind. Her world was highly recognizable. She wrote a couple of novels that were middling, and I read them and moved on to other writers. But each new book I managed to at least look into out of curiosity, and also into many of her articles published in literary and scholarly journals. So it was with great sadness that I learned that the cancer had come back and recently taken her life. I'd thought, along with the rest of the world, that she had licked it. But illness is no metaphor. It is a gruesome fact of life. None of us will live forever. (Though it may seem, on our bad days, that we will.) Oh, the article. I got a $50 for it, back in 1975, and it only took me a month to write, for I had so much to read first. A good deal. Her most recent book is Regarding the Pain of Others. (2003) One might consider it further reflections on photography, some 29 years later. The pain she finds is reflected in photographs of war and human suffering. Each war has its particular atrocities (though they managed to greatly resemble each other) and each government carefully stages what it wants reflected to influence and sway its general public. But, Sontag finds, it wasn't until the war in View Nam that the small 35 mm. camera came into its own and captured what was truly going on. Previously all pictures were staged, originally because of the great length of time the shutter had to be left open and movement would ruin the picture. During the Vietnamese War, Larry Burrows proved master of the small camera--the Leica and the Nikon-- that told us, truly and up close, that war was an inexperienced hell. And since then have we learned anything about the pain of other? Sontag says we have learned to ignore it in order to ourselves survive. And TV newscasts have done a lot to inure us to its horrors through nightly repetitions of scenes of manifest horror. Much of what Sontag writes about seems almost self-evident. But it must be analyzed and approached through a moral perspective. It is her high seriousness and unflinching candor that we admirers will most miss in her absence. EDITING SHOSTAKOVICH? WHO WOULD DARE? I MIGHT AND DID MEMORABLE WORDS FROM A NOTABLE WRITER And please note the ongoing references to photography, which is Sontag's métier, still and always. "An ample reserve of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry." ". . . the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic awareness, that terrible things happen." ( both quotes from page 13) "nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite." (page 22) ". . . the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." (page 41) "We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and of death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, 'off guard.'" (page 55) |
POETRY SECTION One of our favorite poets, W. S. Merwin, wrote the following poem, "Good Night," and published it in the May 2, 2005 New Yorker. We happily reprint it here, without permission. Sleep softly
my old love night is a
dream you know in the night
where you go We are anticipating the publication this year of Merwin's collected poems by Copper Canyon Press. It will be nice to have them all in one place. But so many. And of such uniform high quality. Rob't Creeley
"DO YOU THINK?" Kingfisher Journal mourns the passage of Robert Creeley, which leads us to a first reading of this well-known poet, who died recently at the age of 78. It was a mistake for us to put it off for so long, for he is a pretty good poet, except for a few minor mannerisms that seem distressing at first but can easily be overlooked. His collected is not out, but a good representation is in his Selected Poems, 1991, published by UC Berkeley. We quote a few fine poems from it below.
"Do you think . . . " Do you think that if Do you think that if Do you think that if Do you think that if Do you think that if Do you know anyone, Do you think that if (page 179)
His mentors were William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, and he acknowledges (perhaps over acknowledges) their lifelong influence on his work. Now, Williams generally has a lyric, craftsman's effect on poets, and teaches them to write quiet, keenly observant Imagistic verse. Pound's influence, though, is often stylistic and what we might today call "cutesy," filled with questionable abbreviations (such as "cd" for "could" and "sd" for "said" and "yr" for "your." These are totally meaningless, then and today, and call attention to usual words used in transition between more important words and images. It is almost as bad as lower casing all your words, including proper names and even (eg. "e.e.") initials of given names. But enough of this niggardly fault-finding. Creeley's early poems are full of devices and gimmicks, imitative of the worst of his mentors, but gradually build into substantial poems of a highly Imagist nature, and begin to win over the reader by convincing degrees of trust and admiration.
A Picture (page 117) A little a gentle stream. The trees There is a sky
One Day (page 199) One day after another--
Place (page 200) There was a path from the house Like that-- to go swimming, Poets highlighted in past issues of Kingfisher Journal
The Three Ms: Merwin, Heather McHugh [pictured], and Paul Muldoon |
AT THE MOVIES Oblomovitis is not dead. It is not even sleeping.
"OBLOMOV, OR A FEW DAYS IN THE LIFE OF . . . ," by Ivan Goncharov, 1859 A fine movie and much more enjoyable (and easier to get through) than the book. It is available through Netflix and, probably, other DVD mail-order movie rental services. This review of the movie by K. D. Magnusson of Albuqerque, N.M. sums it up pretty well. See also http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0079619/
tHE gLORIOUS sUNSHINE OF tHE uNTRAMMELED mIND Er, rather "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, and, in spite of my clowning around with its title (which is from Alexander Pope, incidentally) is a very good flick. We recommend it. The quotation: How happy is the
blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each
wish resign'd. -- Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard" Not once did Carrey screw up his face, grimaced hideously, or crack a joke. What did he do, then? He acted. I've always maintained that some of our finest actors and actresses are to be found among the professional comedians--Peter Sellars, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and now Jim Carey. And Winslet is the perfect match for him. Kooky and charming. He is Everyman, a modern lost soul, and plaintively so. Life is a thing up with which he cannot keep. He muddles and sleeps his way through life, and even has given up getting high. Not the others, though. It is a drug culture we live in today. Supporting actors, including Winslet, are ever on the search for something to bring them up or take them down again. And in a small but sweet role, Kirsten Dunst (seen below, proclaiming that she doesn't want to be observed high on reefer) plays a bimbo who wants to be loved for the self that is precisely lacking. ("How true," Annie Hall would say.)
She, more than Winslet, is the Lost Daughter. Winslet knows better than Carrey or anyone else in this wonderful, confusing film what she wants, and sets out to get it. But one's past, memories, get in the way. So they must get "vacuumed out." That is, destroyed. But our memories is all we are. Their compound. We are all victims of our personal histories, and that makes us irretrievable as caring souls. Or so Screen Writer Charlie Kaufman seems to be telling us. And the message is undeniable integral to the drama. The plot weaves in and out of believability. But the acting is so good that we are convinced these are real people, and we suffer along with them, and long for them to be happy together. Or apart, for that matter. Joel and Clementine (great names, by the way) are lovable and we are concerned with their future. If any, for this is an unstable world, and the perils of young lovers are many. A film that bears rewatching, but I plan to take a few months in between screenings. THE PIANO TEACHER Used to be a joke about a middle-aged man who became very strange and started watching pornography because he could feel his Kraftt-Ebbing. Nobody laughed then; nobody laughs now. It's not very funny. Nor is weird sex funny. But the joke has relevance, then and now. Krafft-Ebbing was an Austrian psychiatrist who published Psychopathia Sexualis. It was available in English as early as 1925. In it he describes a range of case histories of abnormal people whose sexual tastes bordered on the extreme. Today we call them perversions and send individuals to jail for practicing them.
Isabella Huppert is the piano teacher, a spinster who lives with her mother, who is pretty weird in herself. (Annie Giradot.) But as we watch Erika Kohut go about her daily piano instruction, we soon notice that she is a bit more than uptight. Demonic might be the better word. Clues start to come fast. She goes to a store that sells magazines and, in the back room, shows pornographic movies. She mixes uneasily but boldly with the boys and men there. (They actually show glimpses of a porno flick and pull no punches, so beware.) She is into self-mutilation and, turning the tactic around, causing physical harm to a female student she is supposed to be helping, but whose talent she is contemptuous of. A fit subject for torment, she believes. Let me count the ways. . . . Enter a handsome young male piano student. She treats him worse than dirt. He is used to easy success with girls. Intrigued, he keeps coming back for more. She tries to discourage his musicality, though he has plenty of talent. Schubert lieder of an erotic nature is played in ensemble fashion and there is plenty of batting of eyes and long looks when he is at the piano, and when he is not. No doubt she is attracted to him, in her own perverse way. What will happen? Well, she has S&M fantasies she want him to act out with her. "Hurt me" is putting it much too mildly. She wants to be bound and tortured in her own bedroom, with her own mother witness behind a barricaded door. He is incredulous, but he thinks it over.. And here we leave the recognizable world for one that is unreal and highly contentious. She wants her own aged mother to engage in a form of sexual intercourse with her. (Yes, the two women sleep in the same bed, for some unexplained reason. It can't simply be domestic economy. can it?) The movie soon becomes beautifully grotesque and unbelievable. The face of Huppert (who must be close to 50 now) is wonderful to watch--along with all that red hair. The camera loves her. But that is not enough to save the film or to explain its unsatisfactory ending. It's worth seeing, however.. I know: let's have a sequel. What are the twelve greatest movies of all time? Tell us and maybe we will publish your list. Or add some to ours. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any special order: 1. Citizen Kane 2. Apocalypse Now Redux 3. The Godfather, part 1 4. Once Upon a Time in America 5. The Third Man 6. All That Jazz 7. Casablanca (thanks, Scott) 8. Gandhi 9. Reds 10. Chinatown 11. House of Sand and Fog 12. Ordinary People We are open to suggestions and revisions. Send us your recommendation at the email address at the bottom of this page. Once Upon a Time in America Flesh and The Devil Ingmar Bergman Revisited The Past Recaptured Dune Again? Nora Things You Can Tell Lord of the Rings House of Sand and Fog Sylvia The Hours Return of the Lord of The Rings Girl With a Pearl Earring Before Sunset Before Sunrise
BACK ISSUES Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 2, No 3, W.S.Merwin/Richard Ford issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, William Stafford Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 2, David Wagoner Edition Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Edna O'Brien Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 4 Anthony Powell and Donald Justice issue. Robert C. Arnold
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