In bars, that is.
Because I saw this HuffPo post entitled Bars Are Great for Writers, But Not for Reading. Obviously, it was intended to gin up (did you see that pun I just made) some flames and back and forth and what not and it certainly got my goat.
You see, I love reading in bars.
I don’t get to do it much anymore. One of the things I really didn’t count when I became deeply involved with someone was that my solitary time at bars would greatly diminish. In fact, I think it’s safe to say it has nearly zeroed out.
But back in the day, it was my thing. And I loved it. The Pig an Whistle on Hollywood Boulevard was my haunt for several years. I would straggle in and belly up to the bar and drink Stella Artois and eat wonton chip nachos (so good!) and read. There are even certain books I have had trouble reading since my bar time diminished. Deleuze and Guattari’s almost deliberately unreadable Anti-Oedipus is actually more comprehensible when the intake of alcohol and alcohol absorbing nachos is properly balanced. Fully sober, the ‘body without organs’ means almost nothing to me.
There were novels and wonderful books that I read almost entirely inside the confines of a bar: Yabba Dew’s in Gulfport, Florida; the Pig and Whistle in Los Angeles; the Black Prince in Atlanta. The bartenders were understanding and I think the bars did okay, in spite of my apparently flagrant violation of the set purpose of the establishments.
A surprisingly engaging and enjoyable poet to listen to and the usual moderate of these conversations – the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles – stayed out of the way more often the usual, perhaps because the sanguine Kleinzahler was more willing than the melancholy Hirsch and the phlegmatic Szymbist to take control of the conversation (did you see what I did there with the four humours of medieval medicine?).
In his introduction, Charles noted that the poet, despite being famous for chronicling bars and diners and working class communities, was not a Bukowski. But the impression he gave was of a Robert Pinsky writing a Charles Bukowski. Does that make sense? Probably not. Well, I’m not going to explain.
The poet signed for me The Strange Hours Travelers Keep – which both delightfully named and has a wonderful cover. He aspires to Whitman’s continent spanning enthusiasm, but there is something narrower about him. The title comes from a line of William Carlos Williams and there is something of Spring & All in Kleinzahler (who is also a New Jersey poet). He wears his learning more broadly than Bukowski (again, like Williams), but has something of Bukowski’s resentment. Williams felt resentment, too, mainly for feeling left out of the conversation in favor of folks like Eliot and Pound, but this is a different kind of resentment. Something closer, indeed, the Bukowski. But more sober and plastered over with a fine appreciation of Milton.
There is a touch of misogyny to some of these poems – a ‘character’ in a poem calling Alma Mahler a ‘slut’ or a poem about a female poet who turned cruel eviscerations of her parents and the symbolic emasculation of a husband or lover into poetical success (defined, in this case, as grants, prizes, and choice campus appointments). I couldn’t call this trend pervasive or a trend, but just frequent enough to make me uncomfortable.
Kleinzahler has these wonderful exceptions to his high culture Whitman-ism. A lot of them have this delicious French influence, particularly the Surrealists (mainly Breton), though with too much conscious logic to is zig sagging motions to be truly Surrealist (and we are talking the actual movement; not ‘surrealist’ as short hand for ‘weird’), and also bits of Antonin Artaud’s structured madness. A lengthy prose poem, not suited to excerptation, I’m afraid, but that I highly recommend and which is well worth the price of the book: The History of Western Music: Chapter 4
The best poem that is also great distillation of his more usual style is the sad and melancholy portrait of faux-genteel poverty and terrifying loneliness, The Single Gentleman’s Chow Mein.
That his poems don’t take well to being shown in excerpts is a testament to how well they cohere, even when they appear random (that touch of Surrealism) or stream of consciousness.
I came across this article on watching an understudy play Henry V at the Folger production of Henry V from a season or two ago. As it happens, I saw that same production and also saw it with the understudy.
The early reviews had raved about the original actor and his commanding performance. The article writer was very hard on the understudy (though it should be said, I am pretty sure that the performance I saw was neither of the ones she saw). I actually liked him, though, and for many of the reasons that she did not.
I do not think it is set in stone that Henry is a confident king when the play begins; that he had exorcised all his demons in the previous, relevant plays (Henry IV, Parts I and II). I liked this uncertain king. A running theme in many Shakespeare plays is the conflict between the medieval and the modern. Romeo is conflicted by the medieval requirement for retribution and modern ideas of order (and also marrying for love, but that’s another topic). Hamlet is the quintessential character caught by that conflict: the warlike, medieval man that is the ghost of his father versus a Hamlet that needs to understand why and who questions ideas of valor and vengeance.
Why can’t Henry V be similarly conflicted? On the edge of the renaissance and the end of the high middle ages, is it such an outlandish interpretation that he could question his own fitness to be a medieval man of action?
the coffee philosopher 