As a supplement to this week’s episode-length tribute to Deceased Artiste Norman Mailer, I offer this clip from a French TV documentary that I couldn’t fit into the show. It’s a classic bit of Mailer philosophy: on the surface it sounds a bit crackpotty, as if he’s fixated on something that is rather obvious. Underneath most of Mailer’s stranger or more extreme comments, though — as when he ran for Mayor of NYC, and among his platforms was a pitch to rid the city of bad architecture and “tissue-box buildings” — was an attention to conceptual thinking. This sort of thing is passé in this day and age, and is fact thought of as too intellectual and haughty for our really dumb-ass culture, but Norman was a feisty and cantankerous individual (even when young), so his tying in the numbing of the American society through plastic products with our immense thirst for violence is the kind of “colorful” conceptual connection that did allow him to be a guest on both the “smart” television programs (from Dick Cavett, Susskind, and William Buckley to the more dimwitted and ponderous Charlie Rose) and the pop-entertainment set (Carson, Mike Douglas, Merv, the fledgling Oprah). This kind of writer still exists, but just you try and catch them on the tube outside of CSPAN’s “Book Talk” or a fun but “guided” segment on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.
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Friday, January 11, 2008
The words of the poets are written on the subway walls
The act of riding the subway in NYC is a de-personalizing, de-humanizing, alienating, fucking drag. However, there is one small thing I’ve taken solace in over the past 15 years, and that is the “Poetry in Motion” entries which reside in amongst crappy ads for local dermatologists, awful pitches to Estudiar Ingles, and various and sundry other patent rip-offs. For those who don’t live around these parts, I should explain that the “Poetry in Motion” program selects verses from classic and not-so-familiar poems, and puts them up in amongst the horrible ads, making for some little glimmer of aesthetic trekking as we all go to and from work during rush hour.
The entries have ranged from Shakespeare to Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson to Kenneth Koch, and Robert Frost to mine own childhood fave, Ogden Nash. At points the verses are simply pleasant diversions, at others they are downright touching and timely. For examples of the deeply moving, I have to point to a rather sad bit by the otherwise glib-and-brilliant Mr. Nash that certainly woke me up one day when I was returning from some dismal office I inhabited: “People expect old men to die/They do not really mourn old men. Old men are different. People look/at them with eyes that wonder when…/People watch with unshocked eyes;/But the old men know when an old man dies.” For the timely, I have to note that when Kerry was running against the Chimp in Charge in 2004, these words by Yeats never sounded more topical: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” (Let’s hope that won’t be the case this year.)
“Poetry in Motion” is a gorgeous bit of art in the middle of the worst, most dismal rides you can get in the city. The web page for the program (which for some reason hasn’t been updated to include the 2007 choices, and the page does need a proofreader to check the names….) can be found below the image.
Poetry in Motion
The entries have ranged from Shakespeare to Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson to Kenneth Koch, and Robert Frost to mine own childhood fave, Ogden Nash. At points the verses are simply pleasant diversions, at others they are downright touching and timely. For examples of the deeply moving, I have to point to a rather sad bit by the otherwise glib-and-brilliant Mr. Nash that certainly woke me up one day when I was returning from some dismal office I inhabited: “People expect old men to die/They do not really mourn old men. Old men are different. People look/at them with eyes that wonder when…/People watch with unshocked eyes;/But the old men know when an old man dies.” For the timely, I have to note that when Kerry was running against the Chimp in Charge in 2004, these words by Yeats never sounded more topical: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” (Let’s hope that won’t be the case this year.)
“Poetry in Motion” is a gorgeous bit of art in the middle of the worst, most dismal rides you can get in the city. The web page for the program (which for some reason hasn’t been updated to include the 2007 choices, and the page does need a proofreader to check the names….) can be found below the image.
Poetry in Motion
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