The “Silver Lining” to the War in the Ukraine

I suppose there are situations in which no one benefits, but the horror in the Ukraine is not one of them. One would think by now that the James Bond film franchise would have reached its limits of enduring popularity, but Bond appears to be on a roll that will exceed even the longevity of The Rolling Stones.

Come to think of it, that might be a potential in-joke down the line. Whoever the next Bond is finds himself (or herself — “Bond. Jessica Bond.”) stalking a villain who has purchased choice aisle seats near the front row to enjoy the umpteenth live performance of “Sympathy for the Devil.” As Bond works his way through the crowd, as the culmination of yet another spectacular chase scene, the audience includes quarter-second glimpses of all the living actors who have played Bond enjoying the show.

In any case, both the novels of John LeCarre and the James Bond franchise will benefit from Vladimir Putin’s nefarious endeavors in the Ukraine, which hasn’t exactly gone according to plan in the past nine months.

Hollywood’s facsimile empire aside, the war between Russia and Ukraine is a catastrophic policy decision on Putin’s part. There is no chance of long-term domination of Ukraine as a subjected country in a new Cold War. Nevertheless, Putin will fight on, even as a certain Tsar refused to concede during the Russo-Hapanse war of 1904-1905. Putin may manage to regroup during the coming winter and even gain the upper hand in Ukraine, but what Europe and the United States, and China, too, have learned about Russia’s military capacities will profoundly affect the next quarter century of global power struggles.

The Ukraine War is merely the opening act of a massive “skirmish” over nascent polar naval routes as the North Pole’s ice cap shrinks. Bond has never had an “adventure” at the “top” of the world. Get your parkas out before you head to the movie theater. It will be a chilly evening out.

Sunday, November 6, 2022

“Daylight Savings and Loan” filed its annual bankruptcy papers this weekend. “Fall back an hour.” Supposedly a rainstorm is on its way from Northern California to celebrate the shift to the sky going dark at 5 p.m. This is a bit early in the rainy season in Southern California to get a big storm, but this could mean that November is taking the place of December last year, after which things went dry and the reservoir levels began to get drastically low. Just knowing that rain is on the way put me in the mood to read something both entertaining and well written. I’ve heard that my colleague Charles Webb had a novel published by Red Hen a few months ago, but I’ve been too busy with various projects to go online and order a copy.

Fortunately, my mailbox contained a surprise a week or so ago: a novella (in a bilingual edition of German and English!) by Michael Meloan that is one of the most satisfying reading experiences I’ve had in recent years, in part because it handles a famous writer (Charles Bukowski) being one of its major characters with nonchalant deftness. It’s hard to classify Meloan’s slightly picaresque story, which is one of the things that makes it such a pleasure to read. Can a portion of it be read as a satire of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49? Meloan’s HighFrontier is certainly more believable as a send-up of Pentagon outsourcing. Of course, maybe I need to revisit the purlieu of Yoyodyne before passing judgement! It’s been a dozen years since I’ve been on their premises (in the full sense of that word), and maybe I’m a little too enchanted with Meloan’s protagonist, Ralph Hargraves, the first computer programmer narrator that I’ve ever found complex enough to care about his fate. In any case, Meloan has a gift for writing an unapologetically masculine prose that isn’t worried about how well it looks in the mirror. It’s flavorful without being exotic, and it doesn’t hurt that he has a fine ear for dialogue. He also keeps the backdrop of specific neighborhoods and locales in Los Angeles well in focus as the characters bicker, quarrel, and placate one another. My only quibble is that he spells “Marina del Rey” with a capital “D.” I suppose I could go through it with a felt tip pen and correct it myself when I read it a second time, which unlike most books I pick up I will most certainly do at some point in the near future.

Saturday, October 29, 2022

About ten days ago, I received a short note from Quentin Ring, the executive director at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in Venice, that the National Poetry Coalition was convening in Long Beach this weekend and that a poetry reading was being held to celebrate the occasion. What exactly the “convening” entails or how it might connect to Long Beach and its long history of poetry scenes is not mentioned anywhere that I can locate.

The poetry reading tonight is free and is taking place outdoors.

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https://www.eventbrite.com/e/coalescence-a-poetry-reading-in-long-beach-tickets-443739465687

COALESCENCE: A Poetry Reading in Long Beach

“A poetry reading welcoming the National Poetry Coalition to Long Beach with Harryette Mullen, Peter J. Harris, Cathy Linh Che, and Jessica Kim.”

Welcoming the National Poetry Coalition to Long Beach

Saturday, October 29
7:00 p.m.
THE HUB
100 W. Broadway
Long Beach, CA 90802
Doors open: 6:30 p.m.

October 25, 2022

Twenty five years ago, today, I was sitting in a seminar room in the Literature building at the University of California, San Diego. I had been accepted into the program at age 49. During the first four weeks of the ten weeks-long quarter, the other eleven students who had been admitted into that year’s first year class had all assumed I was around 42 years old. One other student, though, Tania, had mentioned the week before that her birthday was on October 25. “So’s mine,” I said. “I’m turning 50.” They looked at me as if in slight astonishment that someone so old would start a Ph.D. program, especially one with only a B.A. “Better than living out of one’s car,” I said. I was a typesetter who had become unemployed at the very moment when computers eviscerated that occupation.

Seven years later, I was teaching ESL students in Long Island, New York how to spell “above.” It was hardly a situation that justified my choice to get a Ph.D. I was determined, however, to find some way to revise my dissertation into a book that would pay tribute to the poetry scenes in Los Angeles over the past half-century. The first time I had applied to the NEH for support, the evaluation said, “Too bad he doesn’t have a Ph.D. That would give us confidence he could finish this very interesting project.”

When I applied the second time, they still said, “No.”

Despite the imposition of overwhelming committee work at CSULB between 2006 and 2010, I managed to get my book published by he University of Iowa Press in 2011. The NEH’s expert panel had predicted publication by “a minor university press.” So much for their experts’ ability to assess the cultural work being done on the West Coast.

On this occasion, therefore, I wish to thank the friends and comrades of the past half-century for all you have to inspire the journey I have undertaken the past half-century. I hold you close in the heart of my memories.

*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *

Post-Script:

Among other people who called today was Paul Vangelisti, who happened to mention that Christopher Knight had written an appreciation of the late Peter Schjeldahl for the L.A. Times. While it’s true that Schjeldahl stopped publishing any poems he wrote in the years after he began specializing in art criticism, I doubt he shared Knight’s view of poetry and poets. Here, for the record:

https://www.laweekly.com/perhaps-these-are-not-poetic-times-at-all

“I try not to read poetry, not even dead people’s poetry, It’s hard to explain why. I find something embarrassing about poetry. It’s such a weird, atavistic thing to do.” — Christopher Knight, L.A. Times art critic

Sunday, October 16

I’ve been working on a memoir about my years as a “small press” editor and publisher, and much of that involves sifting boxes of old papers to find appointment schedules and lists of things to do that I made a half-century ago. The emotional chronology occasionally catches me off-guard; at other times, the sheets aren’t marked with the month or year, but I know from notes mades in the quickly drawn rectangles of a handmade calendar what year it was. Fortunately, this search for details to firm up the accuracy of my narrative also serves as a chance to extract superfluous material from the boxes of “literary papers” that I am in the process of delivering to the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego (an institution that is not to be confused with San Diego State College). So far I have filled a half-dozen boxes with irrelevant material and am thereby sparing some poor student in the sorting chambers of UCSD’s Special Collections the tediousness of that task.

On Thursday morning, I drove down to UCSD to deliver a second installment of a dozen or so boxes. As was the case when I drove the first set of boxes down several weeks ago, traffic flowed at an unusually steady fluctuation between 60 to 70 miles per hour. Only once, for about a half-mile, did my speed drop under 50 miles an hour. What’s going on here? I thought. During the height of the pandemic, the one silver lining was that a commute suddenly became far less of a challenge in Southern California. I couldn’t remember traffic being this congenial in Southern California since the 1984 Olympics.

Among the mutually reinforcing side-effects of the pandemic, the work-at-home transition is playing out on all kinds of economic levels, including the price of gasoline. As I drove down, I realized that lighter traffic means less gasoline is being purchased. Since the oil companies expect a certain amount of profit and won’t accept anything less, the only way to keep that level of income in a region of the U.S. that they have grown used to as a major source of revenue is to keep the price as high as possible. The price for regular gas at the Mobil station on La Jolla Village Drive near UCSD was $6.60 a gallon, for regular. This is almost three dollars a gallon more than the national average.

For every self-interested action, there is are at least a gross of oblique and disproportionate reactions. If community colleges are now offering an extraordinary number of classes online, that means all the adjuncts who were hustling from one campus to another (which is to say, one gasoline station to another) have hit the snooze buttons on their odometers.

Then I thought about the billiards table of the planet’s nations: Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. And Nigeria and Venezuela. And Haiti and Cuba. And Vietnam and India. And China and North Korea. South Korea. Who has the stick, and where’s the 8-ball? The transmissions of my GPS satellite got quickly interrupted, however, by a man about forty years old in the Mobil gas station store saying to another man, “This should be illegal.”

I agree with the man. It should be illegal to buy gasoline at any price unless you can point to a map with only border lines drawn on it, and no names whatsoever, and identify where these countries are, in addition to providing some pertinent information about their history or current political situation. I don’t want a poll tax on voting or any kind of literacy test imposed as a way of restricting the franchise. When it comes to the “vote” we cast when we purchase fuel, however, it would help increase the urgency of action on climate change if we all shared our mutual knowledge of some basic facts about the global economy. That includes, of course, how public pension plans depend on the return on their investment in these fuels to make monthly payments to workers who have retired. The adjunct who works at home now is still very much at the center of the equation for providing the money needed to keep the extravaganza in fine fettle.

Friday, September 30, 2022

Several months ago, Robin Myers, a poet who co-translated my poems into Spanish for the Bonobos Editores edition pf PRUEBAS OCULTAS, wrote me and mentioned that WAVE Books was publishing her translation of Dolores Dorantes’s “COPY” and asked if I could help get the word out. Shortly afterwards, I was talking to Paul Vangelisti and he asked me if I knew of anything recent that would be worth his attention as a reviewer. I mentioned the book by Dorantes and got a copy to him the day before he left for Italy. While he was there, he worked on the review and I am delighted to report that Paul’s review has just been published.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/copiously-on-dolores-dorantess-copy-and-kyle-harveys-cosmographies/
Copiously: On Dolores Dorantes’s “Copy” and Kyle Harvey’s “Cosmographies”
September 17, 2022 • By Paul Vangelisti

I am also very happy to pass on the good news that Robin Myers has just had a poem published in “BEST POEMS OF THE YEAR.”

https://www.robinepmyers.com/poems

Sunday night, September 25, 2022 — 9:21 p.m.

I just learned that Pharaoh Sanders died in Los Angels two days ago.

This was music beyond a universal prayer in which the “depth of field” exceeded any possible parallels “with” language.

Nevertheless, my question of the moment is: how would Wittgenstein have revised his work if he could have heard “Promises”?

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https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/if-youre-in-the-song-keep-on-playing-pharoah-sanders-interview

“If You’re In the Song, Keep On Playing”: An Interview with Pharoah Sanders by Nathaniel Friedman (January 12, 2020)

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https://www.npr.org/2022/09/24/1124925662/pharoah-sanders-dies-at-81-obituary

https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/09/25/pharoah-sanders-dies-appreciation/

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““The whole musical persona of Pharoah Sanders is of a consciousness in conscious search of a higher consciousness,”

AND

“Pharoah has incredible power, and incredible tenderness soulfulness like a love of playing, of sound, that will spread your consciousness dazzled among his notes.” –Amiri Baraka