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BACK
ISSUES |
Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting, Spring
2003, Volume Two, Number Two,
Fifth Edition |
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| BOOKS Norman Mailer, The Ghostly Art, Jim Harrison, On The Side
AT THE MOVIES
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Weighing
In:
More
than twenty-five years ago I was a freelancer. I wrote an article for a
magazine, View Northwest, entitled, “Whither the PI?”
(I meant, Wither, but didn't know the difference.) They paid me well for it, partly because I did my own photography. A few
issues later, the magazine went under. But I got paid my $700. A number
of other writers, including Mike Layton, did not. It is the fate of many
magazines. In
the course of writing and doing the photography for the article I got to
meet a number of interesting people, including the Editor/Publisher,
Robert Thompson and the Managing Editor, Bill Asbury. (A month or two
later they offered me a job, which I took, but it didn’t work out well
for either of us and I soon left.) But,
before and after, I always enjoyed the Seattle PI and considered
it “my” paper. (I had worked in the newsroom of the Seattle Times
as a college student in journalism.) The PI was, and is, lively.
It has good columnists, reporters, photographers. Compared to them the Times
is boring. They don’t call it “the good gray Times” for
nothing. Its reputation is well deserved. So,
where is the problem, both in the winter of 1976 and now? The
finances of the Hearst-owned paper are shaky still today. Its circulation is down,
and ever since the Times became a super-competitor in 2000, when
an amendment to the joint operating agreement (signed in 1983) allowed
the Times to publish in the morning. The
PI circulation—already lower by about 50,000 daily
readers---dropped further. Now
the Times is asking that the JOA be dissolved under a provision
that if the Times suffers financial losses for three consecutive
years it may initiate such proceedings. The PI counters that the
losses are imaginary or manufactured, and the editorial workers strike
and 9/11 both contributed to the losses since 2000 and should be
factored in. The
Times (who maintains that it is “family owned” by the
Blethens, in spite of having sold 49.5% to Ridder of Knight Ridder) is
taking Hearst (who owns the PI) to court, and in response the PI
is suing the Times. “Whither
the PI?” has surfaced again, and will probably continue to be a
problem to the community of Greater Seattle until it is settled for
good. If it can be settled for good.
* * * The
loss would be a big one. A one-newspaper city is one in which there is
no reason to speak the truth or to be honest and fair, because there is
no challenge to inaccuracy or unfairness. Back
when I wrote my original article—so long ago!—there were several
staffers who are still with the PI, twenty-seven years ago this
winter. The
Times has no equivalent, no writers of such enduring stature and
achievement. Susan
Paynter was TV critic, I recall, her husband, John Engstrom, the
movie reviewer. He now manages the arts and entertainment department,
while she for years has been a columnist who is regional in her outlook but
international in her appeal, much in the same manner that Emma Bombeck
was. Joel
Connelly was a staff writer who had, I believe, the environmental
beat—a concern that keeps cropping up in his view of the political
scene, both local and national. For a time he was the Washington DC
correspondent and has played a long role in gathering news and opinion. (Richard Larsen was the Times’s
national equivalent, though nowhere near so good.)
Connelly’s outlook is remarkable in its broad perspective,
though thoroughly rooted in the Seattle-Bellingham-British Columbia
corridor. To miss him in the morning would be a big community loss. Other
outstanding PI writers include Regina Hackett, tops in the
Northwest on art, both locally and internationally. Her reviews of
gallery and museum openings are distinct and original. She has a
piercing eye and a gift with words. She took over
from Jim Faber, I think, and there is nobody around who can touch her.
(I wanted that job, but didn’t get it, and couldn’t have done it
half as well. Well, maybe
half as well. . . .) And
James Levesque! Newly moved from the wasteland he
handled so well, TV Land, he is now reporting sports. His absence
on the video beat in greatly missed. In sports he is just another voice
or columnist, though I must admit he is pretty good and I read him. As a
TV reviewer, though, he was read by viewers who readily admitted that
they didn’t watch TV. That is the highest of compliments. True,
the PI has some perennial boneheads. One is Jon Hahn, a folksy
columnist that is, and deserves, a big yawn. Nothing is too small for his gaze, and he will write on
his topic with some degree of accuracy
until there isn’t a breath of life left in it. Sports
writers except for Art Theil (B-, I’d say) are unexceptional, and the
Go-2 Guy, Jim Moore, deserves not to be gone to. There is nobody with the title of
Fishing and Hunting Editor, and it is a feature of so little interest to
PI Sports that such matters get routinely filled—as is the case
with obits—with whomever is handy. And the Editorial Page Writers, mostly syndicated and from the New York Times, are what you might expect from that big paper. Still, there is a nice political range to the page, from George F. Will and Rich Lowry, on the far right, to Sean Gonsalves, Paul Krugman, and Thomas L. Friedman in the middle or left. As for that flashy attention-getter, Maureen Dowd, well, she can go hang, as far as I am concerned. (She would probably feel the same way about me.) Marianne Means is a columnist for the Hearst Syndicate and a witty and compelling writer who is unabashedly liberal. And so is Nicholas D. Kriostof, with the NY Times, who recently argued that the war with Iraq was "fueled by wholesale deceit" (May 8, 2003) and the President and Secretary of State lied to the public about weapons of mass destruction and knew the figure they spoke to the world were entirely fabricated. It is a serious charge and might be true. People need to hear this sort of thing because they hear so much of the other. PI
Cartoonist David Horsey is unsurpassed (unless it is by Oliphant, who
I’d rate winner in a dead heat). I watched Horsey's drawings since college (UW) and
if you start out that good, where is there to go? It is impossible to
get much better. And I still like MacNeely, who sometimes shows up. This
is way too much material to deal with seriously in a single article. I
apologize. To rate and
compare the PI with the Times will take greater study and
much more careful writing. I’m not sure I want to devote the time to a
matter over which I will have no control in regard to its outcome.
Still, if encouraged by Kingfisher Journal readers, I might
reconsider. Robert Arnold, Editor/Publisher Will The Real Blue Moon Tavern Please Stand Up? The
other night, just before bedtime, Seattle’s Channel 9, PBS, broadcast
a half-hour program that kept me from nodding into my white beard. It was “Blue
Moon People,” a thumbnail history of the Blue Moon Tavern, a hangout
for bohemians and college students for nearly seventy years. After
watching
a parade of local luminaries and non-entities come forward, each
advancing (and sometimes quarreling openly with) his shadowy
remembrances and foregone causes, it began to grow on me that hundreds of us
must
have his or her own experiences of the place that exist for
each of us, in turn, which are oblivious to others, and if anybody
wanted to advance his own version of the tavern's history, it would be
equally true and untrue, representative and unique. So why not come up with
my own? It could be no less phony than the ones I was presently watching
on the small screen. So here it is:
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I |
Theodore
Roethke Commemorative Edition "I
love the world; I want more than the world, When July passes into August this summer, Ted Roethke will have been dead exactly forty years. It seems appropriate to introduce him to a generation of people who did not know him, or might not have read his poetry, and to those who may not have kept company with his large body of work, and his arresting images, these many years. The best way to do this is not to write passionately about the man and his poetry, as many able scholars and poets have done since his death at the age of 55—not young for a poet, but not old, either—but to let him speak for himself. Thus you will find in this issue of Kingfisher Journal enough of a selection of his poems to send you to, or back to, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, published and many times reprinted by Doubleday and its paperback affiliate, Anchor. ($10.47, paper, Amazon.com) Two from Open House (1941) He loops
in crazy figures half the night But when
he brushes up against a screen, For
something is amiss or out of place And the book's title poem: My
truths are all foreknown, The
anger will endure. His second book is The Lost Son (1948). It is important in his development, and in its own right: My Papa's
Waltz
We romped
until the pans The hand
that held my wrist You beat
time on my head Its title poem established him as an important poet. "The Lost Son" is a long poem. I quote from "Part 1. The Flight," about half-way through it, followed in context by the start of "Part II. The Pit." These have become famous lines, recognizable wherever poets gather most anywhere in the world.: The
shape of a rat? Is
it soft like a mouse? Take
the skin of a cat It's
sleek as an otter 2.
The Pit You either like this kind of stuff or you don't. I do, but, I find, not as daily fare. His later poems, however, wear well. You can read them with the same frequency and enjoyment as you can read Yeats. (How Roethke would love to hear people say that!) A few more lines from The Lost Son: Goodbye,
goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going, Money
money money
Theodore Roethke: Personal Notes
A man over six feet in height, he seemed to be slightly hunching; and he could easily and quickly squeeze into a crouch in those moods when, with self-critical humor or a challenging earnestness, he liked to fancy himself the prize-fighter. His walk was rather ungainly; it had an uneasy swaying effect, as if he were deliberately putting all his weight first on one foot and then on the other; yet along with this there was a bit of a slouch, a touch of drag, as if the feet were heavy. If he wanted to hurry, his motions reminded me of a person in a dream, making great efforts but held back by some intangible weight or marshy ooze. . . . He was not a straight away runner, not a track man, but rather a man of lightning foot-work, a short-paced skipper and dodger, a stage or ballroom dancer. At parties, I've heard women say, he was as good a dancer as he chose to be, lightfooted and rhythmic; it depends on whether he wanted to yield to the music or seize stage, be a participant or a dizzying star—or toy with his partner in a jocose or even raucous elephantine amorousness that betrayed more a sense of spotlights than of Don Juan intentness on results. He enjoyed looking like a naughty boy and was inclined to take looking for being; in any little enterprise à deux his eyes registering delight at his deviltry, were as likely to be seeking applause from observers as consent from the women in hand. (some women found him, with his unsubtle hands and mountainous verbal coynesses, bothersome and boring; some found the sparring fun; some dutifully disliked the passes, others hated to be passed over; and veterans of dining-table and parlor skirmishes could always be relieved by new volunteers, half-ready for the purple heart, and always able, if the pressure was too severe, to retire upon reserves of husbandly strength. The reserves had styles ranging from suitable indignation, fired from heavy batteries of propriety, to an insouciant, "You know your way around the course,, dear. Don't lean on me.") The large head was the more impressive for the thinness of the blondish, light-brown hair that left him close to bald. The blue-grey eyes, rather far apart, were rarely mild; if he was angry, or strongly moved in other ways, his glance took on an intimidating intensity. He had a large mouth that spread far and opened wide for the belly laughs that were the most characteristic expression of his gay moods; there were fewer of these in recent years. An ordinary social smile was difficult for him; the uneasy flash that he managed was a cross between a nervous simper and a grimace, as if he simply did not know how to do it or were fixing the lines of his face like an unimaginative actor responding mechanically to a director. Hence, if he was not roaring and gargantuan, he tended toward a severity of expression which betokened, however, less a we-are-not-pleased stance than a limited capacity for easy and casual amiability. In the face one was less aware of the bony structure than of the ample fleshiness; if he was not well or did not take care of himself, it took on a somewhat sodden cast. Indulgence could make it, at times, flabby and gross. Yet what looked like a heavy sulkiness could be transmuted, as quickly as his lumberingness of body into alert action, in to a variety of different strong and lively expressions: a snarl of contempt, a wide-eyed and even slightly pop-eyed burst of approval for an act or style he admire, an intense high-voiced excitement of a maker of plans, or even a grin and great chuckle of self-irony, with a pleasing medley of sharpness and good nature. [I omit a couple of thousand words of excellent exposition to skip to the concluding two paragraphs. Ed] . . .for all of a sometimes peremptory style, there was a kind of helplessness that made the staff helpful [to him]. He was frank, unpretentious, even rather innocent; stratagems and calculations were beyond him. He did not substitute talk for work. In trouble, he won sympathy; when he joked, laughter broke out. He had a wonderful capacity for self-criticism that would undercut all euphoric flights and grandiose dreams. He could jest richly about his own [mental] illness. Once, in wellbeing and good spirits, he looked back on a recent "high" period when he had been hospitalized, and roared gleefully, "Bet-a-million Roethke will ride again." At such moments he was irresistible. He was always
compelling. It was part of the good luck of my own life to know him
well, for fifteen years, this witty and imaginative man, sometimes
troublesome but more often troubled, sometimes combative but more
often playful, yet always of high earnestness and conscience in his
double vocation of teacher and poet—a
man in whom I felt something that, I came in time to know, was to be
called greatness. Originally published in Shenandoah, in Autumn 1964, pp. 55-64, this essay was reprinted in 1975 in the initial issue of Mill Mountain Review, which included a discussion of Pacific Northwest Poetry by a number of luminaries and was dedicated to Roethke. Robert Heilman was department chairman of English and a great champion of his teaching poet, who had myriad personal problems, but was indisputably a great poet and teacher. In fact, at the end of this essay Heilman said Roethke had a quality he sensed as greatness. Heilman's essay is long, so we regret we are able to quote only parts of it.
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