League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on July 31, 2011

I’m somewhat amused that on pp. 92-93 of Douglas Coupland’s novel The Gum Thief, Coupland has a character who is an extremely boring and self-absorbed novelist rattle off a recommended reading list that is really quite excellent. Just added all of the suggestions to my “to read” list on Goodreads.

Here’s the passage, with links to the recommended novels:

Kyle was saying, “I guess I’d have to say that I have trouble believing in the future, and I think the past is largely an embarrassment. In general, I don’t trust people. There’s very little to believe in, and all I’ve ever been able to believe in are a few cherished books by a few people who I suspect feel life is as fleeting and ghastly and cruel as I do. I think Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers documents this sensibility as it occurred in a variety of long-vanished, almost mythically privileged cliques. I adminre Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, and pretty much everything by Kurt Vonnegut testifies to the wretchedness of life, with an occasional sunbeam sent along to brighten things up.”

…

“I guess I like work that examines unexpected crisis points in modernism. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio examines the collision between rural and industrial life in the early twentieth century. Bret Ellis’s Less Than Zero chronicles the implosion of secular middle-class values in pre-digital California. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a brilliant assault on a consumer culture, while everything J. G. Ballard has written can’t but make us rethink the path  our world is taking–particularly Running Wild, a book that makes me wonder if the only hope for our world is to spawn children who have mutated so far beyond our present selves that anything we have to offer them as a survival tool is pointless and quaint.”

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Tags: books, douglas coupland, gum thief, Literature, reviews

By Mark Traphagen on July 30, 2011

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Dylan Brody is to storytelling what John Coltrane is to jazz instrumentals. Just as Coltrane never just “played” a song, but made every note his own and shaped them into something new and unique, so Dylan Brody never just “tells” a story. He treats the very words like musical notes, shaping them, bending them, shifting cadence here, pausing deftly there, aptly applying alliteration, and always with a sense of beat (in both the metrical and poetic movement senses of that word).

Dylan Brody stories, while I’m sure they would still be amusing written down, are meant to be heard. Brody’s 2011 live album A Twist of the Wit provides an excellent opportunity to hear the “purveyor of fine words and phrases” sing his word-songs. He is a humorist/storyteller in the Mark Twain/George Ade tradition, but his delivery is what truly sets him apart. And, as he says in his introduction, “I’ve been told I perform with an old-fashioned elegance. I guess that makes me a post-modern throwback.”

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay A Twist of the Wit is that unlike most comedy albums, I can listen to this one again and again. Just like a beloved rock album that still gives you chills when it hits those familiar hooks, there are moments in TotW that I love to hear again and again.

What’s that you say, “I say?!” And well you may. Or you may say, “I don’t say, ‘I say.’ I say, ‘You don’t say!’.” Well, I say you don’t say ‘You don’t say!’. I say you say, “I say!,” so say, “I say!” you must.

“I imagine her liking gray hair, this impossibly young, improbably fresh-faced young grocery clerk. Then I remember I’ve been coloring. I imagine her saying, ‘It’s nice this way, too.’”

Brody’s stories are sometimes extended jokes, sometimes poignant slices of life, and sometimes just shocking. As an example of the latter, in the middle of a tale about having your past unexpectedly come back at you, he tosses off in an email to an old high school acquaintance, “Aren’t you the guy I blew?” This after having already embarrassingly asked the same question to three or four other people who weren’t “that guy.”

But by far the high point of the album is the final track, “True Romance.” Spoken like beat poetry over a jazz bass line, the story is Brody at the heights of his powers. He relates a flirtation with an attractive young checkout girl at the supermarket. It all takes place in his mind within the span of the couple of minutes it takes Brody and his wife to pass through the line. He deliciously plays back and forth between images of the girl and her (in his mind) desire for him, his wife’s playful tossing of the grocery items to him over her shoulder, and a sweet elderly couple in the next aisle. He ends with “true romance,” but without descending to sentimentality.

Here’s a little “twist” of Dylan Brody to give you a taste of his style, a recent video dramatization of one of thet racks on A Twist of the Wit.)

Dylan Brody’s Story Corner – Episode 1 from T R Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Purchase A Twist of the Wit (Amazon affiliate link)
Disclosure: The artist reviewed here provided a free copy of the CD for review purposes.

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Tags: comedy, creativity, Dylan Brody, dylan brody twist of the wit, humor, reviews, storytelling, video

By Mark Traphagen on July 17, 2011

Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even though I hated that greeting. “Q!” he shouted over the music. “How good does this feel?”

And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the the Mountain Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May on the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her.

John Green, Paper Towns

Photo by Whiskeygonebad http://www.flickr.com/photos/badwsky/ Creative Commons License

Category: It`s All About Me, Music | 1 Comment »
Tags: books, john green, Literature, mountain goats, mountain goats this year, Music, paper towns

By Mark Traphagen on July 9, 2011

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

From a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

In my essay on what it means to be an Inveterate Poet, I quoted from an essay by C. S. Lewis in his book God in the Dock :

The silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, but it was the greatness of Pascal that enabled them to do so. When we are frightened by the greatness of the universe, we are (almost literally) frightened by our own shadows: for these light years and billions of centuries are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myth, falls upon them. I do not say we are wrong to tremble at his shadow; it is a shadow of an image of God. But if ever the vastness of matter threatens to overcross our spirits, one must remember that it is matter spiritualized which does so. To puny man, the great nebula in Andromeda owes in a sense its greatness.

Obviously Lewis (and Pascal) understood what it meant to “feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” What art, literature, music…or just everyday observance has taken the top off your head recently?

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Tags: books, emily dickinson, emily dickinson on poetry, imagination, poetry

By Mark Traphagen on May 31, 2011

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This essay is part of a series on the dreamscape aspects of Jerome Charyn’s novel, the Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Read the introduction to this series. Click the series name above to see all the entries.

* * * * * * *

“To shut our eyes is Travel.” – Emily Dickinson, 1870.

“…if memory serves, & if it does not, then I will let Imagination run to folly.” The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (17).

(numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the novel)

* * * * * * *

Jumbo

After the death of her father, Emily is haunted in her dreams by a “Monster…with a ruffled, unfamiliar form, yet owning my father’s dark eyes.” Unable to call this Monster “Pa-pa,” she names it “Dark Eyed Mister,” and ponders whether it be an emissary from heaven or the Devil (281-2). Because of its hideous form, she settles on a hellish provenance, but is confounded because the apparition speaks sweetly, with her father’s sense of humor. It is clear that Emily’s dilemma is not theological. God and the Devil are as much her poetic devices as are sun and flowers and birds. For Emily, they represent the great paradox of life, how that which is most beloved can be at the same time that which is most terrible to us.

As her mother descends into paralysis and dementia, Emily herself becomes a Phantom in her own home. She caters to her mother’s delusions that “the Squire” would be home for dinner, but she indulges the fantasy as much for herself as for her mother’s benefit. She admits that her only route to Pa-pa was through Mr. Dark Eyes, but Mr. Dark Eyes refused to answer her call. Yet Pa-pa will come to her at the end of this section, and with momentous consequences.

One night the Monster appears to her in a dream, urging her to go up to the Evergreens (her brother’s house next door), a place she had been avoiding for years. She arrives to find her nephew Ned in the throes of an epileptic seizure. Her brother confesses that he, too, had been visited often by their father in his dreams.

The visit brings her back into contact with her sister-in-law Susan. Emily confesses internally that she has suffered a crush on Susan for years. Imagining Susan to be Cleopatra, Emily casts herself as Shakespeare’s Enobarbus, “who loved his Cleopatra from afar and breathed in Egypt’s purple smoke” (291). Of Enobarbus, Hudson’s The Works of William Shakespeare says, “Enorbarbus is rather the noblest character in the play. His blunt, prompt, rough-spoken sagacity, mingled with a certain slyness of thought, a racy infusion of humour, and a pungent, searching irony of discourse, interpret with remorseless fidelity the moral import of the characters and movements about him” (citation). Is that not an apt description of our Emily? #more-3077" class="more-link">(more…)

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