Of the incontestable reasons to choose one book, one song, one painting over another is the caprice of personal preference. There being many worthy poets available to the loquacious commentator, in the case of Marie Ponsotwho has over half a century of versifying under her beltit was the title of her new collection that drew my gazeEasy (Knopf).
Additionally, the elegance of her response to why poetry matters is endearing:
There’s a primitive need for language that works as an instrument of discovery and relief, that can make rich the cold places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for us.Discovery and reliefwhat a wonderful expression.
Northampton StyleAnd from her new anthology:
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
Northampton-style, on the porch out back.
Its voice touches and parts the air of summer,
as if it swam to time us down a river
where we dive and leave a single track
as evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
that lets us wash our mix of dreams together.
Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.
When we disentangle you are not with her
I am not with him. Redress calls for tact.
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stir
as uneasy as we, while the woods go black;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer
and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slack
though the player keeps up his plangent attack.
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.
TV, Evening NewsAs it turns out, the ease that the collection’s title references is more about the joyfulness and lack of pretension with which Marie Ponsot addresses her calling. The subjects, drawn from life and its labors, are another matter entirely. Still, Easy does it. —Robert Birnbaum
seen on CNN, autumn 2005, Afghanistan
It’s a screenful of chaos but
the cameraman’s getting good framing shots
from behind one woman’s back.
The audio’s poor. The shouts are slices of noise.
I don’t know the languages.
No hot hit heroes are there.
No wicked people are there.
Achilles is not there, or Joshua either.
Rachel is not there, nor Sojourner Truth.
Iwo Jima flag boys? not there.
Twin Towers first defenders? not there.
My children are thank God not there
any more or less than you and I are not there.
I safe screen-watch. A youth
young in his uniform
signals his guard squad
twice: OK go, to the tanks
and the cameramen: OK go.
The tank takes the house wall.
The house genuflects. The tank proceeds.
The house kneels. The roof dives.
The woman howls. Dust rises.
They cut to the next shot.
The young men and the woman
breathe the dust of the house
which now is its prayer.
A dust cloud rises, at one
with the prayer of all the kneeling houses
asking to be answered
and answerable anywhere.
Whether Frank Gehry ranks as one of the greatest living architects or not, he is certainly one of the most famousthink the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Now comes a new monograph, Frank Gehry: The Houses (Rizzoli) written by Mildred Friedman, which exhibits his lesser-known work and designs for private houses.You can learn from the past, but you can’t continue to be in the past; history is not a substitute for imagination I use art as a means of inspiration. There are no rules, no right or wrong. I’m confused as to what’s ugly and what’s pretty.Using an elucidating mix of color photography, sketches, and plans, this 300-page tome is a well-designed exhibit of the envelope-pushing, rule-breaking, sometimes dazzling creations of a singular artist. —Robert Birnbaum
When I first became acquainted with Jonathan Dee back in the mid-’90s, he had two decent novels under his beltA Lover of History, The Liberty Campaignand he was a wisecracking senior editor at the Paris Review, educated at Yale and seemingly destined to write smart well-crafted novels. With The Privileges, Dee is on his fifth opus, and in a few words it is the kind of novel I prophesied that he would produce. You could stay home and write checks, of course, and when Adam stared making serious money that’s all she initially thought to do; but a big check was wasted on these halfwit dowagers with no idea how to do anything more substantial then send out invitations to a benefit, and before you knew it you were involved She did have a rule about staying away from disease charities; there was something about them that just struck her as especially haughty, a blithe tossing of money at the ineffable, like Won’t You Please Join Us in The Fight Against Death. She knew on some level that she was wrong about this but obeyed the feeling anyway.And Adam (musing at a $1000-a-head gala):
Another Wall Street tyke Another kid blowing his bonus money on a party where he thinks he’ll network with people that don’t even know he is alive. The whole bonus thing got to him actually, in a way it hadn’t before. He’d been given a big bonus this year, what did that even mean? Maybe he should buy himself a sailboat, or find more expensive hotels to stay in during the few weeks a year he was allowed to travel or see if he could find an even more overpriced school to send his kids to? He felt like a sap. Everybody acted like the amount mattered, when what mattered was getting a bonus at all. Of bring outside the small circle wherein it was decided how much a man’s work was worth.Elizabeth Strout’s blurb sums it up well:
Here is an incredibly readable, intelligent, incisive portrait of a particular kind of American family. Jonathan Dee takes us inside the world of what desire for wealth can do, and cannot do, for the self, the soul, and the family. The Privileges is told with admirable conciseness and yet with great breadth, and the reader is swept along, watching the complications of such desire unfold.—Robert Birnbaum
Of the infamous quartet of apocalyptic equestrians, Famine seems to be the least studied or, perhaps more accurately, the least visible. Economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda’s Famine: A Short History (Princeton University Press) ameliorates that with a fine balance of storytelling and scholarship. There is no question about the catastrophic effects of famine and mass starvation, but their originsecological shocks or political policyand their severity call for investigation.It is a great irony that the most deadly famines of the last centuryincluding the worst ever in terms of sheer numbersoccurred under regimes committed, at least on paper, to the eradication of poverty. The history of the USSR (1917 – 1989) is pockmarked by famine. Post-1949 China’s remarkable record of achievements in terms of life expectancy and material progress will always be marred by the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-61, resulting in the deaths of millions of people. Today, the people of the Democratic Republic of North Korea struggle to survive in the wake of a smaller famine.For what it is worth he goes on to claim:
as much as anything else, the slow, onward march of accountable government will rid the world’s last vulnerable regions of the scourge of famine The prospect of a famine-free world hinges on improved governance and peace. It’s as simpleor difficultas that At present, only the poorest regions of Africa remain at risk, and prolonged famine anywhere is conceivable only in contexts of endemic warfare or blockade.Which, when you consider it, is a remarkable development. —Robert Birnbaum
The velocity with which books can bedare I use the verb written?published these days is astonishing. Barely has a disaster decimated an unfortunate number of humans and their habitat, a scandal titillated millions, or a suspected-pederast superstar passes to his greater, when out pops a, uh, tome.In this passionate and illuminating book O’Hara chronicles the roots, rise, and future of the New American Tea Party movement O’Hara dispels the leftwing myths of a top-down ‘angry mob;’ eschews the vulgar and derogatory descriptions of the Tea Party protesters used by everyone from cable TV smear merchants to former President Bill Clinton and current President Barack Obama; beats back attacks on those peaceful ordinary citizens as racists and terrorists; and shows how the modern day Tea Party patriots embody the founding spirit and principles of our great nation [This] book is a living history and a call to arms. Now is the time for all good taxpayers to turn the tables on their free-lunching countrymen and enablers in Washington.You, no doubt, want to know what stirred up those peaceful, ordinary citizens (those gun-toting patriots with the signs likening the President to Hitler) referencing the American Revolution. O’Hara explains:
Beginning with the bailouts of the Bush Administration, Americans awoke day in and day out to headlines chronicling the radical transformation of our nation’s political, legal, and economic structures imposed for the common good. By February 2009, a rightfully skeptical public rose up in cities and towns across the country to tell their elected officials loud and clear to support not undermine the free-market economy that has made the US the most powerful and prosperous nation in human history.Oh boy! —Robert Birnbaum
There was a time when people would joke that they read Playboy for the interviews, eschewing any interest in the centerfolds and other decorative editorial. It should be obvious that what you can find on the newsstand is indicative of something about the cultural moment, and Loyola (of Chicago) University mentor Elizabeth Fraterrigo’s new tome, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (Oxford University Press), effectively makes that point. Playboy isn’t very serious [It offers] the kind of life part of the reader would like to live. It offers him an imaginary escape into the worlds of wine, women, and song. Then the other part of him says he has to go back to his family responsibilities and his work If we have an editorial policy it’s only by implication; live and let live. It’s a wonderful life and lett’s enjoy it. It’s a kind of argument for a liberal democratic society with emphasis on the freedom of the individual.This doesn’t refer to the money machine that became Playboy Enterprisescalendars, clubs, bunny tchotchkes, a Hefner TV program, the Playboy Mansion (in Chicago), and other shrewd branding. But those marketing initiatives were a large part of the deal. Ambitious lotharios could look to Playboy for style tips and necessary accoutrements for that sought-after good life.
Playboy took the figure of the carefree bachelor as a model for an elongated period of youthful enjoyment, sexual fulfillment, and pleasurable consumption, suggesting that young men who followed the advice of the magazine would ultimately lead more rewarding lives. The views and values of this iconic magazine have come to flow freely in the mainstream of modern America. Along the way, popular discussions of Playboy have become, in effect, debates about American life, then and now much more about the cultural preoccupations and anxieties of American society.The transformation of mid-century America is an interesting moment to look back on. One does marvel at the way Hefner’s creation rooted itself in the mainstream, especially in light of those wild, drug-crazed, and orgiastic ‘60s. The Making of the Good Life does well in making sense of that. —Robert Birnbaum