Frame shop on Grant St.

Excerpt from a poem by William Carlos Williams

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

Steve McQueen: Hunger

Goldsmiths'-trained artist Steve McQueen's first feature Hunger is a beautiful film about an ugly chapter in British history, the treatment of IRA prisoners in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in the early years of the Thatcher administration, when in response to being stripped of their status as political prisoners Bobby Sands and several others refused to wear prison issue clothing and eventually organized a staggered hunger strike to the death. The episode resulted in the deaths of Sands and nine others, which in turn electrified tensions and deepened sectarian divisions in the province, with a slew of riots through the summer of 1981, a spike in brutality and casualties for both civilians and military personnel, renewed IRA recruitment on both sides of the border and considerable political advantage for Sinn Fein over the more 'collaborationist' SDLP in the north. It was, to say the least, a deeply traumatic experience for the Irish and a highly-charged chapter in the history of British politics generally, one that has remained unexamined until now. The DVD issued by Criterion includes an episode of the BBC news programme Panorama from 1981 which dealt with the issue in depth, and it is a fascinating object lesson in politics and the media, as supposedly 'objective' BBC journalists harangue Sinn Fein spokesmen in the most biased and patronizing tones imaginable. It is easy to see how, in retrospect, a credulous British public trying to keep abreast of events might be persuaded of the rectitude of the government position, when earnest and articulate English presenters who seem to know the subject inside-out plead with heavily-accented, slightly scruffy Irish leaders to see the error of their ways. 'We' the British are the reasonable, the rational, the well-turned out and well-informed and, crucially, concerned outsiders doing our best to bring the light of reason to a somewhat less enlightened province confused by its own obscure emotional needs. It is a highly effective tactic in the state-sponsored war against political insurgence everywhere.

McQueen, who was born (in 1969) and raised in London, recalls (in a fascinating appendix) the British press coverage of events at that time, which included front-page countdowns of days spent starving - Sands lingered for 66 days - and mentions that his sympathies were always with the hunger strikers. It's a position that is communicated in the film without, significantly, dehumanizing the opposition; prison life is portrayed as a kind of hell for guards and prisoners alike, as is the wider social arena for all who were caught up in the vortex of events, except perhaps for Thatcher herself, who does quite a good job of dehumanizing herself (in clips of actual news footage) with high-handed rhetoric about "criminal murder, criminal bombing, and criminal violence" delivered to an adoring Tory House. But there is no mistaking the brutality of prison guards who regularly beat naked prisoners to a bloody pulp or drag them through enforced baths like animals in a factory-farm until they pass out. Sands himself (played brilliantly by Irish actor Michael Fassbender) is a sympathetic character whose humanity is inextricably and fatally mixed up with his unbending political passion. An entire third of the film is spent in wordless contemplation of his gradual decline, and this segment reflects the first section, similarly focused on visual events which are eloquent enough to speak without recourse to words, scenes of prison life from both inmates' and guards' perspectives. It is the sort of filmmaking that exposes its roots in visual art generally, with gorgeous cinematic images, of benumbed Chief Officer Ray Lohan (played by Stuart Graham) smoking outside in the snow, of Sands' bloody head surrounded by a sea of turquoise-tinted concrete, of swollen knuckles underwater or of bare white space opening inside a feces-smeared wall as it is power-washed. Such images are all the more arresting for their bleak aspect, because bringing such beauty to bear upon events as disheartening as these allows for a curiously poignant and subtle response in the viewer. It is sophisticated, visually confident filmmaking such as is rarely seen in first features, and McQueen ups the ante even further with the elegant structure of the whole, which positions his two image-oriented segments symmetrically about one long, static, extended take of Sands and a Derry priest (played by Liam Cunningham) who sit backlit, silhouetted and virtually motionless in intense discussion for a full 17 minutes before the camera pans to faces, so that we feel we are sitting at the next table and listening to a conversation in which different aspects of an already excruciating struggle are raised to the highest possible degree of rhetorical persuasion, pitting the dignity and commitment of one against the not uncompassionate pragmatism of the other. It is beautifully staged and acted, but the dialogue itself (scripted by Enda Walsh) is utterly exhilarating and should have won every award for screenwriting in the book. Hunger is a beautiful work of art and, more importantly, it is made by an artist whose political sensitivity has magnified his work's significance to a level of awareness we sorely need if we are to face our memories of these events and perhaps even the roles we played - if only as passive observers - in them.

Excerpt from an interview with Gregory Orr

Following are some excerpts from an interview with poet Gregory Orr in the March/April issue of The Writer's Chronicle:

"When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family ...

I have this theory that we're looking for stuff that's going to save our lives; poems and songs we love so much that they're a key to our own being ... If we put together the fifteen songs and poems that we love most in the world and look at them, it's like looking in a mirror and seeing yourself. It's not a mirror that shows your face; it's more one that's showing your soul ...

If you're a lyric poet you believe in the passions and the mysteries, especially sex and death. And you also believe that you compress language as much as possible until the process reverses, and all that concentrated energy radiates back out...

Whenever we're deeply moved by a poem or song, that seems a moment of the resurrection of the beloved ... it's something to do with the beloved as the world ...

Recognizing beauty in the world is recognizing the existence of the beloved."

ARIA on Grant St.

John Fante 'Ask the Dust'

It's easy to see why Bukowski loved John Fante ("Fante was my god") - the brash, young idealist Arturo Bandini holed up with a 5c bag of oranges in his Bunker Hill hotel room, hiding from the landlady and drunk on dreams of literary greatness between hangovers of self-loathing is a sort of prototypical Bukowski, and with its drug and alcohol-tinged fantasies, its intimate, off-kilter intensity and its antiheroic masculine energy, Ask the Dust prefigures many of Bukowski's thematic/stylistic concerns as well. It is a nonstop, freewheeling rant about life in the margins in 1930's LA, with intensely poetic, backlit edges and a deep emotional undercurrent that pulls you into the dark heart of the story before you even know what's happening. It's fascinating, completely original, authentic. Arturo and Camilla are unforgettable characters. They are contrary, difficult, and buzzing with static energy, with heat - there is a sort of scorched innocence about them. And it's funny too, overflowing with wild flights of hubristic fancy on the part of the great Bandini, lover of man and beast alike ... Here's a typical passage:

"I pulled the huge door open and it gave a little cry like weeping. Above the altar sputtered the blood-red eternal light, illuminating in crimson shadow the quiet of almost two thousand years. It was like death, but I could remember screaming infants at baptism too. I knelt. This was habit, this kneeling. I sat down. Better to kneel, for the sharp bite at the knees was a distraction from the awful quiet. A prayer. Sure, one prayer: for sentimental reasons. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have you read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book! Almighty God, I will play fair in this. I will make You a proposition. Make a great writer out of me, and I will return to the Church. And please, dear God, one more favor: make my mother happy. I don't care about the Old Man ..."

Apart from the wonderful comedic voice, there's some unusual writing in there, a subtle way of saying things differently; it gave a little cry like weeping. The book is saturated with that sort of writing, just a hair off regular; I went to the restaurant where I always went to the restaurant; it's conversational, familiar; where there were friends and friends; but always well crafted, often beautiful; the days of plenty - plenty of worries, plenty of oranges; and not without its moments of perfection; her eyes like crushed grapes; faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed in a pretty vase; the white line in the pavement leaped up ahead of us like a burning fuse ...

As a sustained piece of interior monologue it is especially interesting, cleaving close to the hidden shape of a private life in all its absurdity and zeal. It's what seals the comedy into the text, but it also makes us identify with this flawed and brazen character and care about his fate. The treatment of his internalized racism (something he must confront in his relationship with Camilla, who he denounces variously as spick and greaser) is exquisitely handled for all its volatility, and the conclusion is astonishingly moving, and satisfying in a symbolic way, with the gesture of the novel flung deep into the desert. If you opened the book at the end and started from there, you would be as intrigued as Bukowski was with the beginning when he stumbled upon the book in the LA Public Library and felt like he had, as he says in the introduction, found gold in the city dump. Fante's concerns could be said to encompass the city dump quite profoundly, and like Bukowski after him, he has found his gold there and fashioned it into a miniature charm.

Quote: Camille Paglia

"Sex object, art work, personality: Western experience is cellular and divisive. It imposes a graph of marked-off spaces on nature's continuity and flow."
from Sexual Personae

Tulips

'Culture': a poem by Aharon Shabtai

The mark of Cain won't sprout
from a soldier who shoots
at the head of a child
on a knoll by the fence
round a refugee camp -
for beneath his helmet,
conceptually speaking,
his head is made of cardboard.
On the other hand,
the officer has read The Rebel;
his head is enlightened,
and so he does not believe
in the mark of Cain.
He's spent time in museums,
and when he aims
his rifle at a boy,
as an ambassador of Culture
he updates and recycles
Goya's etchings
and Guernica.

translated by Peter Cole