Oscar's "Best"

In honor of the Oscars, check out this list ranking all of the 82 movies that have won Best Picture--from worst to best.  Lawrence of Arabia is a little high for my taste, but at least Crash is where it should be.  A fun time-killer.

What Happened To Tony Soprano?

This insanely thorough and utterly convincing discussion of "Made in America," the controversial final episode of The Sopranos is a must-read for any fan of the show.  I won't spoil it in advance by describing its conclusions.  Suffice it to say, the whole multi-page post is well worth your time.

Is it even meaningful?

This discussion of Robert Hass's poetry has occasioned a mild brouhaha in the world of poetry. I have mixed feelings about both the reviewer and the poet (who, in the interest of full disclosure, I should add I worked with briefly in grad school), but I think it's generally a thought-provoking piece.

Sample excerpt:

The first line of Robert Hass’s first collection, Field Guide, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973, is “I won’t say much for the sea.” This offhand repurposing of idiom, funny and insightful, is characteristic of his poems—of course he goes on to say a million things for and about the sea. Field Guide was acclaimed, as each succeeding book would be, for Hass’s facility in translating into poems what is ridiculously referred to as the “natural world.” In the first three poems alone, we find: steelhead, mushrooms, apricots, gulls, sea cucumbers, slugs, a walnut tree, ironwood, waxwings, pyracantha, cliffs, bluffs, artichokes, a salt creek, owl’s clover, lupine, berries, hawthorns, laurels, “clams, abalones, cockles, chitons, crabs,” salmon, swamp grass, and a skunk. The preoccupation with nonhuman life is inextricable from a compulsive onomamania: “Earth-wet, slithery, / we drifted toward the names of things”; “I recite the hard/explosive names of birds: / egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.” This impulse is explained, sort of, in “Maps”:

Of all the laws 

that bind us to the past

the names of things are

stubbornest

When Hass’s pintails and blue-winged teals are lined up in a row, the deftness of his observations almost rivals that of the haiku masters he has so memorably translated: in a restaurant’s tank, “coppery lobsters scuttling over lobsters.” But as the above verse suggests, Hass is also given to pedantic soothsaying, telling the reader how it is in tones that suggest he is just slightly winded from having jogged down the slopes of Parnassus. The poetry takes on the tenor of the lecture hall, the quality of prose statement: Of all the laws that bind us to the past, the names of things are stubbornest. Is this true? Is it even meaningful?

Ruin, I Promise, Won't be Mentioned Again

My friend and mentor, Dean Young is currently in the hospital, waiting for a heart transplant.  I publish these two poems as a miniature ode to Dean, who is not only a great poet, but a great man.  (For more information on Dean's health, including a link that will let you donate to help Dean's medical costs, go here.)

Acceptance Speech

BY DEAN YOUNG

This time I’m not going to say a thing   

about deity. It’s not the blizzard,

it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing   

roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.   

Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again.   

Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split

to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw.   

A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets   

aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s   

strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable

beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon,

Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable   

in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu,   

we know you’re in there but no one’s   

blaming you for reluctance to come out.   

Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity   

throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud

and look what that got him: toothlessness

and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst   

teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant   

in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant   

in a steakhouse turned out to be more   

than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot   

of time in an asylum writing cruel poems   

if you can help it, one Artaud is enough.   

In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape   

in two rows of shapes that seems okay   

although to the right’s a capsized canoe   

full of mathematicians, to the left a bow   

about to launch the killer astrolabe.   

By what manner is the soul joined to

the body? How about climbing a ladder   

of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s

lying in some red dust, munching a thorn.   

You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate

for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong.   

See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds   

which is about average for a cloud.   

Happy birthday, happy birthday to you.

Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred.   

Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated   

planet. I know, a promise has been made   

but Tony’s been sick for years and no one   

knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures,   

corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone   

you’d trust to drive your car, but still.

Something awful’s coming, isn’t it?   

Would it help if I said Amen?

Sean Penn Anti-Ode

BY DEAN YOUNG

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing

the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge

is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.

Just the pressure in his little finger alone

could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid

whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head

until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb

so he’d get the first whack at the piñata?

He’s grown up to straighten us all out

about weapons of mass destruction

but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours.

Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat.

Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up

and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity.

Sleet in the face, no toilet paper,

regrets over an argument, not investing wisely,

internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment

of laboratory animals.

Life, my friends, is ordinary crap.

Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks.

Those puke bags in the seatback you might need.

The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.

Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.

Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling.

The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.

"Then the...whispers began"

From the Amazon.com review section, you MUST READ these reviews.  The product in question is a set of 6000 dollar speaker cables.  (Yeah, I said cables--not speakers.)  At a minimum, read both the "most positive" and "most negative"--both are inspired.

It makes me have hope in human kind, stuff like this....

Hat Tip: Browser

Gland On The Run

I haven't posted in a long time because a large part of what I've been doing and thinking about for the last few months has been my health.  Which has been sketchy.  Well, not sketchy, maybe--but not good.  I've had these sort of mental...lacunae, maybe, for lack of a better term.  (Okay, there's almost certainly a better term.)  They're a little the feeling you have when your blood sugar level suddenly spikes--like how it feels when you drink way too much coffee and suddenly feel like you're going to pass out.  Dizzy, and disoriented, and sort of... dazed.  Anyway, that kind of feeling has been coming on over me, at seemingly randomly intervals for the last several months.

There have been other things too... listlessness, an inability to concentrate, steady weight gain (despite not really ever being hungry)...all sorts of little problems with my otherwise Greek God-like body.  None is debilitating; by themselves, most are things to just shrug off.   But, coming all together for as long as they have, it seems more probably they're all part of some general... condition.  (Lycanthrophy, perhaps?)

Because I'm an idiot, I put off seeing a doctor until last week.  (In my defense, the episodes have been, at times, sporadic enough to at least make it seem reasonable that I was on the mend.)  Now, the results are in.  What my blood work seems to suggest is that my thyroid is the problem.  (It's weak, my thyroid.  Or at least lazy.)  If this is, in fact, the case, (we won't know for sure until I start medication) it's actually good news.  Hypothyroidism is said to be easily treated.  Of all the things I might have had, of all the things I've been worried that I had, this actually is one of the least worrisome.

Hopefully I'll be on medication within the next few weeks and the bright chipper smiling ANCIANT that you all know and tolerate will be back on point, posting not-all-that frequently about a narrow range of esoteric personal topics which maybe fifteen people in the whole world actually want to read about.

Until then, good luck, and good night.

London Calling

In a few hours, I leave for London with my wife.  There, we'll dine at two, three-star Michelin restaurants.  We'll see some plays (Deathtrap and An Ideal Husband).  We'll go to museums, stroll along the Thames, and generally recharge.  It should be wonderful.

And yet my heart is dark and full.  Leaving here means leaving behind the small white dog.  He will be surrounded by other dogs--mean dogs for all I know!--for ten days.  He won't have his own bed, or his own window, or his own mailman.  Worst, he won't know if we're coming back.  (But we are, Binks!  We are!)

Right now he's asleep, blissfully unaware of the fate that lies in store.  All the sorrow and worrying is left to us, his soon-to-desolate parents....

Halloween costume

After a walk in the dirt

Calm and wooly

Happy and shorn

Obi-Wan KeBink

"John Adams is a hideous, hermaphroditical character..."

An awesomely funny look at campaign rhetoric of old.  Must-see viewing for anyone interested in American history.  Or really anyone who wants to laugh....

Inky Lives

Over at ASWOBA, my friend John has a thoughtful, touching post about watching the Texas Rangers play baseball.  Worth a read, for sports fans and Texans especially.

Journal 10/19/10

Sweet lord it makes me happy to watch the Yankees lose. To see them lose to a team from Texas  (Texas!) makes it all the sweeter. Gratifying, also. The work Cliff Lee and I did on his knuckle-curve is really paying dividends. He still hasn’t mastered it to the degree I’d like, of course, but it’s enough to beat the Yankees. And that’s enough for me.

* * *

The month has not been a good one. I’ve had a sinus issue of some sort, with the result that I’ve been having dizzy spells on and off for the last several weeks. I can’t concentrate, I can’t read, and I can’t write. After trying out a variety of cures, I’ve finally managed to get the matter in hand. Sinuses are draining, dizziness has diminished, and my brain no longer feels like it’s been encased in an inch and a half of dirty bulletproof glass. At long last I can resume work on I Heard A Fly—an opera based on the sexual politics of Emily Dickinson. Before I can write the libretto, I need to learn Dutch (this I use to underline her philosophical affinities to Erasmus, William of Orange, and that woman who was the lead singer of Roxette. I think she was Dutch, wasn’t she?) Man, this opera is going to rock.

* * *

The Bink celebrated my wife’s return from New York (she’s trying to expand her Louis Vuitton knock-off smuggling ring to the East Coast) by staying up all night chewing on a cardboard box we have in our kitchen. When we awoke this morning, the entire kitchen floor was strewn with small shredded bits of cardboard. Why did he do this? Who knows. We think it might have been the rain. It rained here last night and the Bink, though wonderful and sweet and cute, is not what you would call hardened. Rain is very scary. I guess. I don’t know. He’s a weird dog.

This Will Bring You JOY

...unless you don't like The Muppets.

In which case, frankly, joy is not a thing that you deserve.