Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Watching “Atlas Shrugged: Part I”


I dragged Mu with me to catch a Monday afternoon matinée of that Tea Party monstrosity: Atlas Shrugged, Part I.

And it was every bit as famously and hilariously bad as we had been led to believe.

It followed the events of the book (at least the first third of it, for this is a trilogy) with exacting, religious devotion (taking into account that the action was moved from the fifties to the year 2016 – not coincidentally, I imagine, coinciding with the end of Obama’s second term). This devotion extends so far as to turn Ayn Rand’s embarrassingly awful literary sex scenes into embarrassingly awful cinematic sex scenes. In fact, the sex is so awful to behold that you might almost suspect it of being self-conscious parody were the filmmakers not obviously being so painfully earnest.

I don’t (or shouldn’t) need to tell you about Atlas Shrugged‘s (the novel and the movie) painful didacticism and ridiculously constructed straw men nor how the first quality makes for a turgid novel and how the second makes for a poor excuse for “philosophy.”

What I do want to tell you is my dream, wherein Atlas Shrugged turns into a midnight movie cult classic, with people shouting something or doing shots whenever some painfully unrealistic villain appears or when the people on screen are pouring themselves a drink (the world of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie is filled with people who drink so much alcohol [mainly what is supposed to expensive looking scotch] that you’d think the ghost of Hunter Thompson had helped write the stage directions).

Some small part of this dream came true as one of our fellow moviegoers (there only five or six of us) was constantly laughing or exclaiming “Who is John Galt.” I can’t be sure whether he was a liberal parodying the ripe for parody dialogue or whether he was a true Tea Partier expressing his deep appreciation for all that grand, Randian genius on screen. Either way, he acted like a brilliantly senile Greek chorus to the proceedings. Mu was not amused, but I felt he added a real touch of meta to the experience.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Southern Poetry Review


I don’t subscribe to Southern Poetry Review, but I do make a point of picking it up at bookstores and browsing through it. But I never buy it because, inevitably, I am disappointed.

I want to like a magazine that specializes in poetry and comes at it from a Southern perspective. I love poetry. The literary magazines I read are almost invariably focused on poetry. I am also, in my own small way, a bit of a Southerner (my mother, herself an inarguable Southern gentlewoman, and others, might disagree). And because the South is well known for its fiction and prose, but is seen as second rate region for poetry compared to New England, Chicago, and Northern California, I want to see this magazine prove that skilled poesy exists in the South.

But the writing found in Southern Poetry Review almost always seems to fall into the same kind of lazy shorthand that plagues most Southern literature.

The great southern writers had a genius for bringing something innovative to their compositions. Faulkner introduced (and expanded upon) the tools and forms of European high modernism in the service of the Southern obsessions with family, place, and history. Flannery O’Connor’s application of Catholic symbolism and a lurid, gothic sensibility. More recently, I think of Harry Crews’ sudden flashes of nihilistic violence (less so, his extravagantly pornographic sex scenes).

Too many so-called Southern writers use lazy tropes (like “look at all these wacky small town character and there wacky ways,” used either in the service of cheap comedy or in the service of something more serious, but either way they are always of less interest than David Lynch’s middle American vision in Blue Velvet or his northwestern television epic Twin Peaks).

Southern Poetry Review always seems filled with writing that reads like a compendium of “lazy Southern lit tropes as applied to poetry.”

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto VI


I’m not ashamed to admit that I understand less and less as we move on (and we are only a tiny fraction of the way through the Cantos).

The Sixth Canto features references to Eleanor of Aquitaine and her first husband, King Louis II of France (as did the Fifth Canto) and to her husbands’ (she had three – including King Henry II of England) and children’s (including King Richard I, Coeur-de-Lion, of England) relationship to the Outremer and the Crusades, including to Acre, the last of the cities held by western Crusaders to fall.

In fact, insofar as I comprehend this, it seems to be entirely about the fascinating life of Eleanor.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Borders Restructuring


Supposedly, Borders needs $50 million in additional financing to emerge from its restructuring – and this in addition to the $505 million “debtor in possession” loan they already have access to. Their fear is that, following closing over a third of their stores, their annual sales will drop to half of what it was just two years ago (has the ebook revolution really moved so quickly?).

It’s been almost a week since I gave up on Borders and my anger is starting to fade. I still hope they succeed in surviving and I will still browse their shelves and even sometimes purchase something  from them when I find myself near one (which happens fairly often; my better half often shops for business supplies next to a Borders and I often drive her there, which means I meander over to see what’s new on their poetry shelf).

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto V


Pound is starting to hit his stride here, with the archaic and arcane mixtures one expects: Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt mixed with Italy and even a little bit of medieval England. But we don’t yet see those stanzas or turns of phrase that simply blow your mind yet.

I did, though, appreciate the lines:

Is smothered beneath a mule,
                      a poet’s ending. 

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Apologies to Atheists


I titled an earlier post A Recovering Atheist’s Take on the Rob Bell “Controversy”. Now, I would like to apologize to atheists and agnostics for using the term “recovering.” I should have simply said “former.”

Recovering atheists implies that atheism is some adolescent stage that a healthy person should advance from.

That is simply not the case. I am not an atheist anymore, but I respect both atheism and agnosticism as valid, mature, and rational choices.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto IV


The Fourth Canto begins to truly look like what one expects of the Cantos. Though the lines often seem to refer to some sort of narrative, they rarely refer to the same narrative.

This is where we see Pound’s obsession with words as individual objects and his use of words for their qualities, in and of themselves, rather than, necessarily, in relation to each other (as in coherent sentences, stanzas, or paragraphs).

He also starts digging deeper into his bag or erudition. For example, referring to the church at “Poictiers” – “Poictiers” being an old English way of spelling the French town of Poitiers.

And, for the first time, he starts mixing Chinese names and influences from Pound’s own studies and translations of Chinese poetry.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher · 2 Comments

Literary Magazines Are Alive & Well


The New York Times gave me a nice morale boost the other day (the article came out on April 7, but I don’t think I saw it until the next day).

Entitled, “Literary Journals Thrive, on Paper and Otherwise,” it gives us all a bit of hope. With all the articles about the decline of literature and poetry and the printed word and the institutions that support them, it was nice to see the other side of the coin.

The argument I liked most, was that so many lit mags are labors of love. As such, the publishers are driven to produce them as irrespective of financial success as possible.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Finally Seeing the Movie “Howl”


At long last, I saw the movie Howl with James Franco as Allen Ginsberg and a dapper Don Draper/Jon Hamm as the attorney defending the poem’s publisher, beat godfather, poet, and bookstore owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

There was no good reason for me to have waited so long to see it (there was a good reason not to see it in the theatres; during the sole week it was playing in Washington, my parents were visiting and had little interest in making the journey over to the independent cinema to see it, so my suggestions fell on deaf ears), but it was worth the wait.

James Franco gave a restrained and relatively non-meta performance as the poet. Jon Hamm was imperious and noble looking in his defense of art, literature, humanism, and the liberal mind (did you know that once upon “liberal” was not a dirty word, but rather what people regularly aspired to be?).

In high school, myself, Matt, Scott and some others expressly sought to model ourselves on the beats. We argued about the portrayals of Neal Cassady in Howl vs On the Road (Scott’s nickname was even Dean Moriarty on account of his willingness to drive anywhere).

Watching the movie Howl makes one want to be part of something bigger. Something important about literature and expression. But sadly, what has happened instead is that literature and especially poetry has been pushed to the edge of irrelevance.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Working in Coffee Shops


I noted a little while ago that I had started trying to do work in a little coffee shop down the street. The two dollars, plus some loose change for a tip, seems a not unreasonably fee for two hours of reasonably uninterrupted work, even for one who is struggling monetarily. And I have a self-image to maintain, and haunting coffeehouses is a critical part of that, as is wearing corduroy sport coats, carrying erudite sounding books with me to unlikely places, and letting my beard grow wild at least twice a year.

The whole working in coffee shops is hardly a new phenomenon, but I came across this article from The Atlantic on working on coffee shops. The short version is: Coffee shops, not just for European writers anymore.

He does a good job of capturing the particular elements that make it a handy place to work. Some minimal distractions (people chatting, passing by, the view out the window), but not the all encompassing, soul crushing distraction of the television. Also, the social pressure to be utilitarian inside a coffee shop. You can’t just watch videos of cats doing something cute with yarn or whatever. You must appear useful – to be actually working on something.

For an extreme example of this, there is Summit, a coffeehouse in San Francisco’s Mission District, whose primary purpose is to provide local start ups a place to work.