Grapes and Gripes: Sideways by Rex Pickett

Mark on my list About Schmidt and Sideways as two of my favorite movies, both directed by Alexander Payne (I’ve yet to see Election). Nevertheless, when I had the chance to read the book Sideways after seeing the movie, I was skeptical. The author’s notes did not help – Rex Pickett comments on how Payne adhered pretty closely to the novel. Thus, a part of me was nagging and pessimistic, insisting that this would be a less enjoyable escapade than the film.

At first I was thrown off from my low expectations. The opening scene is hilarious with rambunctious interactions ensuing between the lead, Miles, and his fellow oenophiles at their regular wine-tasting hub. The dialogue is sharp and witty, as the characters bite into each other. The action and commotion is thrilling. Miles’ friend Jack shows up and they’re set to go on their trip, with more to come. I thought, hey, maybe there is something to this book that I couldn’t get from the film.

Unfortunately, three-hundred pages later, I learned my mistake. The cynical, jibing dialogue gets old very quick. The protagonist becomes an annoying friend, who overdoes the witticisms and depresses the hell out of you. And Jack’s tumbles and falls aren’t as funny as they could have been, after seeing it on the screen. One thing appeared glossed over: Miles rats out Jack’s impending marriage, but never gets found out by Jack. Then there is this whole bizarre episode with a hillbilly stranger they meet and go boar hunting with, only to find out that he is slightly psychotic, taking shots at them. Entirely gratuitous. Granted, when Miles engorges himself with the spit bucket after discovering his busted book deal, the hilarity is just as intense as the film, but the relationships in the book aren’t as fully developed between the men and women as they could have been. Jack and Miles is well done, but Miles and Maya wasn’t as great of a ride. Plus, the dynamic of Miles and his mother whom he filches from is lost later in the novel. His plagues as a poor struggling writer turn him into a caricature rather than a character.

I was able to interact with the book on a different level after seeing the cinematic version, interested in the changes Payne, his producers and screenplay writers made and the rationale for those changes. I noticed on the basis of the book, they consolidated various scenes, moved around of characters, and made an intriguing decision to cast an Asian woman (Sandra Oh) as Jack’s paramour, Terra. I think it was a wise decision and provides fodder for good discussion about race and culture. In fact, all four main characters were not nearly as attractive in the film as they were described in the novel.

I am mostly certain that the wine critiques from Miles, Terra, and Maya are legit and that Pickett conducted extensive research. In these parts, the language is inventive and I feel as though I’m listening to a trustworthy wine connoisseur. Harmless fun to read, convivial and proffering tidbits about wine, the novel is a good summer read on the beach with a cold bottle of Chardonnay, though I’m more of Pinot guy myself.

Poet Brief: Khaled Mattawa

Born in Libya, and migrating to the United States for a college education and MFA, Mattawa currently teaches at the MFA program at Michigan. He never left his heritage behind, as his poems are infused with references to Middle-eastern places and practices along with commentary (usually not positive) on American culture. I appreciate his sense of irony and dark humor, as well as his sharp criticisms of societies, governments, and human nature as a whole, its history being anything but flattery.



His series, “Echo and Elixir,” includes engrossing poems that are absurd but so pressingly relevant. Without rhyme or any rigid structure, the poems still resonate with life and a strong rhythm. They are quickly paced and make twists and turns that can leave the reader behind if he or she does not keep up. I love the figuring of the discussion between the speaker and cab driver in this poem – the figurative treatment of language and the ballsy references to historic events.

Echo & Elixir 2

Cairo’s taxi drivers speak to me in English.
I answer, and they say your Arabic is good.
How long have you been with us? All my life
I tell them, but I’m never believed.
They speak to me in Farsi, speak to me in Greek,
and I answer with mountains of gold and silver,
ghost ships sailing the weed-choked seas.
And when they speak to me in Spanish,
I say Moriscos and Alhambra
I say Jews rescued by Ottoman boats.
And when they speak to me in Portuguese,
all my life I tell them, coffee, cocoa,
Indians and poisoned spears.
I say Afonsso king of Bikongo writing
Manuel to free his enslaved sons.
And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me
your Arabic is surprisingly good.
Then they speak to me in Italian,
and I tell them how I lay swaddled
a month’s walk from here. I tell them
camps in the desert, barbed wire, wives
and daughters dying, camels frothing disease
the sand stretching an endless pool
And they say so good so good.
How long have you been with us?
All my life, but I’m never believed.
Then they speak to me in French,
and I answer Jamila, Leopold, Stanley,
baskets of severed hands and feet.
I say the horror, battles of Algiers.
And they speak to me in English
and I say Lucknow, Arbenz. I say indigo,
Hiroshima, continents soaked in tea.
I play the drum beat of stamps. I invoke
Mrs. Cummings, U.S. consul in Athens,
I say Ishi, Custer, Wounded Knee.
And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me
your Arabic is unbelievably good.
Tell the truth now, tell the truth,
how long have you been with us?
I say my first name is little lion,
my last name is broken branch.
I sing “Happiness uncontainable”
and “fields greening in March”
until I’m sad and tired of truth,
and as usual I’m never believed.
Then they lead me through congestion,
gritty air, narrow streets crowded with
Pepsi and Daewoo and the sunken faces
of the poor. And when we arrive, Cairo’s
taxi drivers and I speak all the languages
of the world, and we argue and argue about
corruption, disillusionment, the missed chances,
the wicked binds, the cataclysmic fares.

Poet Brief: Julianne Buchsbaum

Presently a graduate student down in Missouri, Julianne Buchsbaum has already produced some fascinating poetry. Her poems contain evocative language and there is no wasted movement as she makes unnerving observations. Highly intelligent poems that make effective, but not erudite, allusions, mostly to Greek and Roman mythology. Phonetically, some of her poems soar, such as “Slowly, Slowly Horses.” The opening stanzas almost always hook you in, such as in the poem “Thrillsville”:

When the mind begins to see the lies it loves
with eyes that could have looked elsewhere,
old pain repullulates. Errors of architecture,

errors of eros, the train ride out is not
the train ride in. Is this the kind of life
you left us for? No one has a face in the dark.

Buchsbaum’s poems have a kinetic energy, but also a shade of darkness that entangles the readers. Following is one of her harrowing pieces with stark imagery and a beautiful commingling sense of dread and positive urgency.



Clouds Swell Out

The finale of fall hangs in yellow clusters.
You can't muster

the drive required for potent acts—to hide
like the cat who eyed

each skittering leaf and churring sparrow from
a dark sanctum,

frozen, invisible, dumb—such is your will.
The world is ill

with demands it can't meet; hence, the crickets'
deaths, the rosettes

of rot, the dusky clusters, and flourishing worms.
All this confirms

your wish to divorce yourself from the vista
and phenomena

of autumn which looms from raw branches a dark
afternoon. The stark

landscape deepening its shadowed dales cannot
stray a lot

from the invincible doctrine, though owls moan
misgivings. Alone,

you watch a jet's contrail zip open the sky
and the high

clouds swell out like huge, snowy hearts disgorged.

No Reservation: "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"

In my contemporary literature course I was exposed to Sherman Alexie’s premiere book of poetry and prose, The Business of Fancy Dancing. His play with language and innovative but relentless outlook on Native American culture on the rez were astounding. He has written much since, which I have not read, but I committed to reading his recent young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. As I embarked on reading this book, I used the mantra “MTV” to help myself as I attempted to re-imagine myself in the prime of teenage life, which was not more than six years ago.

First thing: the illustrations. The “art” by Ellen Forney. It proliferates throughout the novel. At times a gimmick, but more often complementary to the story with humor or expansive shading of the characters or scenes in which they dwell. They are drawn from Arnold’s perspective, but we forget this as its use as a literary device is more obvious. Still, they fit seamlessly in the story. My favorites were the caricatures of people in his life: his parents, sister, coach, friends, and girlfriend. These literal portraits of characters are vivid and plant the individuals as unique in the reader’s mind. A lot of culture references are included, usually playing on pop icons or stereotypes, which adds to Arnold’s white-Indian identity conflict. A coping strategy, the drawings merge humor with sadness in a profound way at points. How else can Arnold deal with his abysmal surroundings and pangs of humor?

Alexie overplays the Indian card at points - treading on territory in ways he has trodden before. He addresses this in an excerpt from an interview I include below. Still, the straightforward plot does take strange turns at points and even when predictable, remains engaging. Arnold’s a smart kid who breaks away from “the tribe” and attends a well-funded, whitewashed high school outside the reservation. He falls in love with a white girl (one of Alexie’s obsessions in his writing) and has a fall-out with his best friend, only to find another one at his new school. His parents let him down, his sister runs away, he becomes a basketball star, and reconciles his relationship with his best friend, Rowdy. Alexie tackles the popular issues high school students run into, mostly in successful ways, with striking candidness.

The writing style is sparse, consistent with his approach in Fancydancing, but in a different way. The book was too dialogue-ridden and at times felt like an Indian version of Wonder Years. Alexie’s po-mo irony shines through during some pivotal moments. He is steeped in a sharp sense of reality though, and respectfully doesn’t protect Arnold from real-world tragedy when his sister senselessly dies in a fire. I could tell from the honesty that this “diary” was at least semi-autobiographical. While this raised the “level” of the book in my eyes, on the whole it could have been slightly more sophisticated for the intended audience. After finishing the last page: Highly enjoyable. It succeeds in what it strives to do. I connected with Arnold’s experiences and reminisced about my own. A little more unconventionality would have perfected it.

From Seattle Times interview:
Q: So do you still feel like the title, that you're a part-time Indian?
A: God, I don't know what I am now. I'm a writer. I'm this sort of amorphous, ever-shifting writer.

Q: How do you answer criticism that you're exposing kids to a lot of negatives in Native American culture, from poverty to alcoholism to bullying?
A: It's what happened and what continues to happen. My dad died three years ago from alcoholism. ...

They [his critics] have no idea how bad it is. Nothing I've written actually comes close to how bad it can be and how bad it is, the level of desperation. The people who don't want it written about or who think it's stereotypical, within the Indian world, are just dealing with a lot of shame. And outside the Indian world, it's just a lot of romantic bastards.

Q: You mock white people in the book who say they love Native Americans. Is there a respectful way for white people to admire the culture?
A: The best way to deal with it is just to leave it alone. You know, you don't need to go into a sweat lodge to respect us. You don't need to wear turquoise earrings to come to my readings. ... People who are way into the Native culture rarely look at the whole picture. We're just as messy and ugly as anybody else. So "admiring" worries me. That's pretty myopic — widen your lens, I guess I'd say.

Stein’s Top Chef: “Book of Salt”

My campus will receive the author Monique Truong as its guest tomorrow. She will read a selection from her only published novel, The Book of Salt, and then an excerpt from a more recent project. I’m looking forward to her reading but also the following Q&A session. Her work fits into the discussions I’ve participated in during my Multicultural Literature course (a.k.a. books about women getting raped and “coming-of-age”). Seriously, I think she will have something to say about identity as an author and how an author connects to his or her characters.

An overly pessimistic and tough critic, (in all modes of life, not only books) I’ll only devote one paragraph to my problems with her novel. In fact, I’ll include an efficient, nifty list of the top three things that irked me.

1) She writes like a lawyer (she used to be one): the structure’s too tight and the figurative language overdone. Food is sensual and kinda like sex, or at the least an aphrodisiac. Okay, I get it. Too many parallels – the book ends up a funhouse of mirrors. More on this follows.
2) Binh is a slut. He sleeps around too much. Also, we get claustrophobic in his point of view – too many second person chapters to lovers or his bosses. Keep it in your pants, man, you’ll be less miserable. The overbearing religious father was pigeonholed from the outset. Not that he had to have moments of being a decent father, but there could have been moments of doubt about his hatred of his son - doubts that could be rescinded anyway.
3) Redundancy. Without a crucial plot, besides the point where Binh decides whether to return home or go to America, the layering of his character has to be diverse. Some sections could be consolidated to get through to the reader about Binh’s identity and conflict. One of the story’s threads could be cut out at no great cost.

Disregarding my immature tendency to make gay-food jokes, and to insist this book will become a Bravo Original Movie, let’s move on to how I enjoyed this novel. First, the Ho Chi Minh episode was worth the risk Truong took. She successfully avoided dropping cameos, any of the celebs whom Stein included in her company, and when she did include an incredibly well-knonw historical figure, made it worthwhile. The “man on a bridge” provided more depth to Binh’s crisis of returning home. But precisely what home? Minh’s emergence and the death of Binh’s father signify the rise of a new Vietnam. The French would soon be driven out and Communism would rise. Besides, the description of the meal they shared was tantalizing. Truong uses the art of cooking and the sport of eating in tremendous fashion. Lost on most Americans and descendants of the culinary-challenged United Kingdom/Ireland, the fusion of French and Asian senses for cooking and consuming is perhaps the novel’s strongest assets.

Some examples of how food works in the novel:
“We then exchanged words, sparingly, between generous forkfuls of food. Chopsticks had not been offered, and we did not ask for them. Why waste time on the technicalities of tableware when a feast is before us?”

“Salt-and-pepper shrimp finished in a glaze of browned butter!”

“He will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world.”

The relationship between Stein and Toklas is not central to the novel, but the bits offered to the reader are usually tasty. The portrayal of Stein’s eccentric artfulness and Toklas’ more rational, day-to-day thinking was well-executed. I especially enjoyed the moments where Toklas instructed Binh and communicated her particularity. Binh is allowed moments of creativity, but his adherence to meticulous recipes was needed.

Overall: A great premise carried out with lovely language and makes your mouth water with descriptions of food. But the desire for a trip to the fridge outweighs the desire for Binh to find happiness.

Bad Potatoes - "Law of Dreams"

I express or have enacted my Irish heritage in the following ways: 1) I read Angela’s Ashes in high school, 2) my favorite meal consists of Harp, medium-rare steak, mashed potatoes, bread, following by an Irish coffee and dessert, 3) I perpetually keep a bottle of Jameson on my desk - a balm on those late nights writing papers. So when my friend gave me a pre-publication (“Advanced Reader’s Edition”) version of a novel his friend obtained at a book publisher fair, I obliged.

I felt like a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, sifting through the pages with a curious, scrupulous eye. I kept several deft comparisons to similar novels in my pocket along with witty cultural references or jokes about the Irish that The Law of Dreams would confirm or disavow. Maybe I would boost the novel’s sales with my grand review.

Peter Behrens résumé piqued my interest. After producing a collection of short stories entitled Night Driving in 1987, he has since worked primarily as a screenwriter for Hollywood. This knowledge helped me detect the stench of “novel-written-to-have-movie-made-starring-Scarlett-Johansson.” Because, you know, she’s Irish and needs to reboot her career.

The novel sets out ambitiously and at first delivers but then dissolves into a cyclical mess the last 250 pages (out of nearly 400). The prologue takes a promising look at a pressured farmer/landlord in mid 19th-century Ireland. With the beginning of the famine and typhus fever spreading, he is forced to evict his poor tenants.

“That evening, inspecting his field of ripening wheat, plucking a stalk and pressing the grains out onto his palm, he tastes one on his tongue. Cracks it between his teeth.
Then opens his hand.
Light and dry the pale grains are, wholly ripe, practically weightless.
In a second, the casual wind has swept them away.”

A beautiful image, capturing the blight perfectly. This book promises a country’s beauty and agony, trust and betrayal, redemption, resourcefulness, and a plaintive gaze at evanescence. Our protagonist Fergus O’Brien will fall in love, work through his struggles, and eventually live in happiness or die a hero. He is my ancestor as well as Behrens’.

Wrong. While his struggles are laid out powerfully in the first section of the novel, his journey becomes a repetitive pornographic and disinterested wandering. Yet several Amazon reviewers draw comparisons to Joyce’s Daedalus! His first, unrequited love (Phoebe, the farmer’s daughter) and his second, passionate lover (Luke) are the only two women we care about. Their relationships are poignant and tragic. But then the tone of the story comes through: misogynistic and bitter, Fergus runs into some lamentful women, and eventually arrives at the heels of another intemperate female: America. The language is chauvinistic, especially during the sex scenes (more than the reader could wish for!) and the female characters are portrayed poorly. Fergus’ continuous wet dream leaves the reader unsatisfied.

But how does Fergus’ primary pursuit (perhaps secondary) of the American dream pan out? Can Behrens pull off an overdone conflict? For the most part, it works. The metaphor of salmon in the river – sometimes literally or figuratively caught by Fergus and sometimes himself being caught – is intriguing. The novel loses a beautiful lyrical quality partway through. We go from wheat in the fields and Irish landscape to horses. A blue Mr. Ed becomes man’s best friend.

In the end: a well-intentioned but unsatisfying affair. The idea of researching his family history and creating a story about his great-great-grandfather’s journey to Canada is fantastic. The song of himself – the struggle, hunger, love, violence, racism – all great, but it just doesn’t play a melody we haven’t heard.

Snowed in with Orhan Pamuk

East vs. West: a Crystallization of Humanity
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
First Vintage International Edition, 2005

Orhan Pamuk’s homeland of Turkey suffers the abrasions of existing as the rift between the tectonic plates of the Eastern and Western worlds. Snow principally succeeds in analyzing this tension; the local politics and the love story are coincidental. A grouping of epigraphs pinpoint the novel’s main sentiment: “The Westerner in me was discomposed,” from Joseph Conrad, and “Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people,” from Dostoevsky.



The conflict of the novel is embodied in the poet Ka’s return to his Turkish home city from Germany. Central to Ka’s struggle lies religion: “As Ka knew from the beginning, in this part of the world faith in God was not something achieved by thinking sublime thoughts and stretching one’s creative powers to their outer limits; nor was it something one could do alone; above all it meant joining a mosque, becoming part of a community. Nevertheless, Ka was still disappointed that Muhtar could talk so much about his group without once mentioning God or his own private faith. He despised Muhtar for it.” Pamuk’s characters refresh the tired battle between atheists and fervent believers.

Ka’s visit is incited by a report of suicides committed by Muslim girls who take drastic action after being prohibited from attending school covered in head scarves. His ostensible purpose is to investigate and write a report for a German newspaper, but his real motive is to reacquaint himself with the beautiful and recently divorced Ipek and marry her. His desire for her is entirely shallow, based on her tremendous beauty, and nothing more substantial than lust composes their relationship. The presence of a second author, the translator, may be the source of the inanity. It is possible that idiosyncrasies of the Turkish language are lost in the English language. Nevertheless, when their relationship tragically falls apart in the throes of miscommunication, the reader is neither surprised nor significantly affected. As our narrator informs us that “we are now approaching the heart of the matter: for until that moment I could have said I had seen nothing for which I had the story I have related in this book: Ipek was more beautiful than anyone could have imagined,” we are frustrated by a lack of imagination in describing her beauty.

Ka’s visit to the economically and spiritually depressed Kars is strangely enchanted. The city is blanketed in snow (a reiterated image) and awash in blinding whiteness. “It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. They fell silent for a while.” Rather than simply a sign of renewal or redemption for the town, the oppressive weather signifies a “carnivalesque” period. In a brilliant ironic twist, the roads are all closed and the town falls to a takeover by a “coup-de-theatre.” Nationalistic actors and a few soldiers stage a play in which an actress removes her head scarf – not to cleanse it as the audience expects – but to burn it in an act of defiance. Religious youths in the crowd become boisterous and protest this blatant offense against Islam, only to witness some soldiers/actors fire rounds into the crowd. Based on the premise of the theater and a play being performed, the audience is slow to comprehend that the guns have shot actual rounds, killing nearly a dozen people. This section is a striking depiction of political upstarts, using the theatricality of the event to point to the absurd events. During the last performance by the troupe, the leader Sunay is shot, lamenting, “How stupid all this is! They know nothing about modern art, they’ll never be modern!”

As a reader biased with the privileges and prejudices of being a member of the Western world, I experienced moments of uncertainty. I stood guilty in the face of characters who provided such indictments as: “When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When we write something, it’s just called ethnic poetry.” I appreciated the irony, but was unsure if I was missing out on other aspects of the story. Westerners are helped by the encouraged empathy with the narrator and his protagonist, who is just as much of a stranger in Kars as the reader. Narrated by a phantom for most of the novel, we only learn more about the author’s identity and relation to Ka late in the novel. “Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?” If this is truly the heart of the story, it is frail; the relationship between the two is unwisely presupposed and referenced to as an entity outside the novel. With the elision of all but six lines of Ka’s poetry, where we would hope to glimpse more of his life, the reader cannot see very much at all.

My expectations may have been inflated with the knowledge that Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk displays ingenious marks of the great Russian writers, such as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. Snow openly wrestles with ideas of freedom, religion, and humanity by employing similar techniques as Brothers Karamazov. Instead of the Grand Inquisition, we have Muhtar preaching on the tragic loss of identity in the East: ‘“But I didn’t tell you this beautiful story to show you what it means to me or how I relate it to my life; I told it to point out that it’s forgotten. This thousand-year-old story comes from Firdevsi’s Shehname. Once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart—from Tabriz to Istanbul, from Bosnia to Trabzon—and when they recalled it they found the meaning in their lives. The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus’ murder of his father and Macbeth’s obsession with power and death speak to the people throughout the Western world. But now, because we’ve fallen under the spell of the West, we’ve forgotten our own stories…How do you explain this?”



Ka’s poetry is incredibly intriguing but problematic. Nowhere do we receive more than several lines of his highly esteemed work. Instead, the reader is provided with notes from his journal and an interesting geometric figure – a six-pointed snowflake representative of his newest collection of poetry. Upon visiting Kars, his writing drought ends and a bevy of new poems results from the landscape, his conversations with others about God, religion, and love. The axes of this diagram are labeled “Memory, Imagination and Reason.” It is at these termini that he organizes his poems into different groups and establishes the relationships between them. At the center is the seminal poem, “I, Ka,” which is his European manifesto of individualism. Ka’s solipsistic wandering across town and poetical musing, his attempt to possess a beautiful woman rather than love her, and the narrator’s devotion to having his story told leave the reader wondering what else would Ka expect other than misery and lack of fulfillment?

Capote's Dilemma

How does literature effectively translate into film? Many of us have been disappointed by this endeavor: I may be going against the Academy, but One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest does not sufficiently capture the essence of the novel. The reversal process has proved equally frustrating: watching Requiem for a Dream and then reading Hubert Selby’s fare was anticlimactic. The most pressing problem for film adaptation is consolidation. How can a writer shape a 300+ page novel into a 100+ page screenplay? Does it tell the same story? Surely it must be told in a different way, e.g., highly imagistic, more reliant upon dialogue. The narrative voice is rarely articulated in a voice-over that does not misfit the tone and seriousness of a movie.

Enter 2005’s film, Capote. It traces the five-year journey of the celebrated author researching and writing In Cold Blood, a one-of-a-kind novel about the nonsensical murder of a well-respected family in a small Kansas town. Truman Capote’s incongruity of personality with the conservative community is reconciled with the help of his friend and colleague, Harper Lee. Due to the rapport Capote builds with the community, once the two suspects are captured, he is able to gain unprecedented access to them, garnering the bulk of material for his novel. For all the literati out there, during Capote’s creative/destructive process, Harper Lee’s rise to fame occurs with the advent of her [children’s] novel and subsequent film, To Kill a Mockingbird.

The novel and film complement each other tremendously: where the novel is silent, the film speaks. In Cold Blood invests a considerable amount of attention to setting up the family and their community while the remainder of the novel is mostly concerned with the drawn-out capture of the killers. In comparison, the film opens with the discovery of the dead family, followed by Capote’s first investigation, and then skips ahead to the capture of the killers. From that point, the film spends most of its time building the relationship between Capote and the murderer, Perry Smith. In contrast to the distance Capote maintains in the novel, the film portrays the agony he undergoes through aiding Perry in the appeals process while desiring for the executions to be carried out so that he could conclude his novel. On several occurrences, Capote manipulates Perry to obtain the information he needs to write his novel. The film succeeds much in the same way the novel does: it shows the humanity of such an inhumane person, without excusing his actions, and questions popular notions of judgment and justice. In this case, Capote stands as the accused man. He defends himself to Lee: “There wasn't anything I could have done to save them.” A relentless friend (they grew up together as neighbors), she tells him: “Maybe not. But the fact is, you didn't want to.”

The director, Bennett Miller, has responded to claims that the film is shot “sedately” because of the gray color theme and little camera movement. He argues that the film was shot with composure in a way that sensitizes the audience, heightening awareness of each scene. His artistic choice is matched by the sparseness of the shooting location, Canada, which evokes a bleak, autumnal Kansan landscape perfectly. With this background, the movie resonates strongly in its most subtle moments. For example, Capote talks with Lee about Perry, stating, “It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front.”

The whispering undertone of the novel becomes an overarching voice upon watching the film. Capote’s ambition for In Cold Blood is astonishing for both admirable and despicable qualities: it is a groundbreaking but egocentric affair. The film beautifully illustrates why he never completed another novel, explaining the profound epigraph to his following incomplete project: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” The two works combine to tell a lasting story that few novel-film pairs have ever achieved.

A Jewish Fiction Reading Event

A report from my first capstone English seminar:

Elisa Albert & Edward Schwarzschild Reading

Following the emphatic recommendations of several professors, I attended the dual-reading event of Jewish fiction writers Elisa Albert and Edward Schwarzschild. Upon hearing the label of “Jewish-fiction writer” my expectations were skewed, and like many other attendees, I expected their writing to be referential to the Holocaust. I was glad that Professor Friedman brought up the issue in her introduction, stating relief that these two writers write about something else, not at an expense to the remembrance of those events, but for the benefit of a fuller expression of Jewish culture and identity. The theoretical issue their literature most saliently brought up was the interference of the author’s biography with the reader’s perception of the work.

Elisa Albert was the first to read and narrated an excerpt from her novel about a dysfunctional family. The main action was centered around a controversial brisk ceremony and the misunderstandings of a non-Jewish husband and wife. Albert writes snappy and humorous dialogue, maintaining the rapt attention of the audience as she moves quickly through the story. Upon hearing about a family following Jewish customs and failing to co-exist peacefully, a listener in the crowd would wonder how much of the story was autobiographical. For example, one would think the sassy grandmother was based on Albert’s grandmother. Or, perhaps she dated a non-Jew and based the dynamics of the relationship in the novel on her real-life experiences. There were characteristics of the story that were explicitly Jewish (the ceremony for the child, some Yiddish terms), but the essence of the story was not exclusively Jewish or affective for only Jewish listeners. Albert and her writing may hail from a specific group of people, but her writing transcends cultural backgrounds in a profound way. The specific becomes the universal.

After Elisa Albert abruptly ended a section of her story (a cliffhanger meant to raise sales?), Edward Schwarzschild stepped up to the podium to read a story entitled "No Rest For the Middleman." The tone of his story was more reflective the pace more steady. His confidence was apparent as he took his time reading, inflecting his voice and letting the words soak in the ears of the crowd. Each writer’s approach to orally present their story suited the nature of each story. In addition to Albert, Schwarzschild was extremely efficient at dialogue. During the following question-and-answer session, he succinctly explained how dialogue should work in a story. He follows his prescription by creating dialogue that is multi-tasked: revealing character, contributing progress to the plot, and sounding representative of conversation that would occur in the real world. His story, set in 1920’s Philadelphia, illustrated the relationship between a young boy and his father who must engage in shady business dealings to make end’s meet. Schwarzschild made good use of the unreliable perspective of the child narrator, communicating an immense amount of information to the reader unavailable to the naïve narrator. His story had a poetic quality, instituting evocative images of knives (think Abraham and Isaac) and religious icons associated with forgiveness during Yom Kippur. Again, while the religion observed is Judaism, its role in the story is relevant to readers regardless of their individual religious persuasion.

Another interesting literary concept I encountered in relation to the reading was my return to Schwarzschild’s short story after hearing it read aloud by the author. I purchased Schwarzschild’s collection of short stories, The Family Diamond, after the reading event and looked over the story he read a second time a few days later. My reading in solitude produced two main effects: first, I understood new aspects of the story, such as moments of foreshadowing, that I did not understand the first time; second, some of the magic of hearing a story told for the first time without any foreknowledge was lost to me. Suspense is fickle and is lost quite easily. The experience of reading silently is vastly different from listening to a story told out loud to a group of listeners whose reaction is shared. I did enjoy the story on my own as much as part of a larger audience.

Inevitably, the writers were asked how they felt about being labeled Jewish fiction writers. They confirmed my suspicions and answered that they do not feel their writing is exclusively Jewish, ignoring the limitations of the label, but without denying the presence of their culture and faith in their lives. Schwarzschild did list several Jewish authors, including Salinger, Bellow, and Roth whom he found greatly influential at a young age and inspired him to write. Yet, these authors most likely have other non-Jewish influences and surely do not write with one particular audience in mind. On the part of the reader, biographical information pertaining to the author can be useful in understanding the sources of the story, but this information is limited, and should not fuel any counterproductive prejudices (not Gadamer’s kind, but the bad kind) the reader may have.

Meghan O'Rourke Visits TCNJ

[Some Biography]
Meghan O’Rourke has been the culture editor of the online literary magazine Slate for almost five years. She had also been a co-editor of poetry at The Paris Review since 2002. Her writing and poetry have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, the Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, and other publications. Her criticism has appeared in The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Yale Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. In 2002, she was the youngest of Columbia Journalism Review’s “Ten Young Editors To Watch” in the category of magazine writing. O’Rourke’s first book of poems, Halflife, was published in April 2007 by W.W. Norton. She currently resides in Brooklyn.


[Her Visit / Some Impressions]
A lover of elision, but also dedicated to a concise voice in her poems, O’Rourke writes subtle lyric poems that reveal something new to the reader upon each visit to her book, Halflife. Certain images recur in her work: in a post-9/11 world, smoke rising into the sky haunts her poems as her poems haunt the reader. Blankets (of comfort or suffocation) preoccupy her "quasi-coming of age" collection of poetry.

David Baker's observation is worth listening to, unlike most praise included on sleeve jackets: "Meghan O’Rourke sings with an exacting yet enchanted voice. The spare lyric poems of her Halflife accrue into a meta-narrative of the city—its latter days of memory, mutilation, and a due portion of compassion. The range of this poet’s work amazes me..."

I very much enjoyed her reading, to listen to poems I've read two or three times over, close-reading several of them. I can trace her stated influences (such as Stevens, Plath, or Williams) but understand that she has her own unique voice. Below is one of my favorite poems for the book. She fielded some difficult questions very well - especially the dense philosophical ones. She read two poems about New Jersey, specifically one about Sandy Hook, where I attended high school all four years of once upon a time ago. As a sidenote, I don't know why such a big deal is made out of how young and successful she is - I was up for a Pulitzer in kindergarten.


WAR LULLABY

Wet daggers of grass
cast shadows over one another
beneath the porch light—

the boy stretched on the lawn,
fighting sleep,
fingers the tournament ring:

inside the house
his mother shouts, blinds
slap in the breeze,

and upstairs the smallest stir
as they sleep, eyelashes like
tiny whips against their cheeks.

The dogs bark, a door slams,
the boys breathe deep,
then shudder—

I have seen them
sleepwalk
out of the arms of mothers.

Her comments add extra insight into the poem: "...But—especially as a young woman—you have to get away from Plath’s influence. Wallace Stevens was a useful counterpoint. Harmonium is reticent where Ariel is declarative. And reading Williams was crucial: his superb sense of line, his energy, his strange swerves. I wouldn’t have written “War Lullaby” if I hadn’t been reading Williams."

British Comedy Brief

From Paperclips:

What is it that we all love about Keira Knightley? Some may say her pouty face. Others may argue for her need of a three-meal-a-day fast food diet. Still, some may suggest her sexy accent. On the contrary, I offer that her sense of humor, British humour if you will, is what does it for me. We may admire the Britons for Chaucer, Shakespeare, countless other poets and writers; for preceding us in world domination; for the gin and tonic; for giving us David Beckham, or better yet Posh Spice, but the best gift bestowed on us thus far by our former rulers is British comedy. Monty Python is not the only example. This is a close a look at two highly esteemed British shows that should be added to the list and may increase your appreciation for the land of the Angles.

The Office
The basis for NBC’s hit comedy about the droll occurrences of a forgettable office filled with average white-collar citizens. There are two main differences between the two versions. Whether Americans have earned this reputation or not, programmers will not credit them with a attention span suitable to track a storyline that involves development of characters and their situations as the season progresses. Instead, the characters' actual lives are disposable and worth can only be found in their superficial personalities and accompanying jokes. Two of the prominent characters, the boss (David on the BBC, Michael on NBC) and his weaselly sidekick (Gareth on the BBC, Dwight on NBC) share common traits of arrogance and offensiveness on both sides of the Atlantic. The difference is on the British side where you laugh at their absurdity, yet also feel sorry for them. You sympathize with them for trying so hard to fit in but ending up disliked by their coworkers. Although there is much merit to the Steve Carrel version, the original provides much longer lasting rewards upon second and third viewings. The writing is good, the jokes funny, but the actors execute the script in a memorable way.

Extras
Another production from the creators of The Office, this Larry Sanders Show-inspired program ran for two series (six episodes each) on HBO. At points the jokes carry over from their first show, but co-creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant expand the scope of their comedy by writing in a guest celebrity for each show. Whether it be Kate Winslet instructing on how to talk dirty, Orlando Bloom’s egocentric chauvinism, or Daniel Radcliffe hitting on women twice his age and tossing around cuss words, each celebrity’s portrayal as a caricature of him or herself adds a winning element to the show. Ranging from Ben Stiller to Samuel L. Jackson to Sir Ian McKellen, each guest star self-ridicules without overstaying his or her welcome. Again, the comedy is complemented by the audience’s involvement in the characters’ lives, as is the case with the friendship between the main characters Andy and Maggie. They are actors who can only find work as extras in films while their pipe dreams slowly materialize. Some clips are available on YouTube for those who would be interested in a preview. The only drawback of most British shows is the extreme dryness of the humor. While at times honestly difficult to endure, if you appreciate wit and do not mind making a small amount of effort to follow the continuous jokes and plot, it is quite rewarding. Sadly, shows like these don’t last very long in America; just ask those involved in the tragic downfall of Arrested Development.

Sam Lipsyte's Home Land: A Look Back on High School

I was struck oddly by this book. I've thought of writing a not-so-fictional memoir of my high school experiences (a unique place) and the humorous tone of this book approximated the dosage I would use. Maybe it's due to our shared New Jersey heritage (though I'm from central and Lipsyte from north) or similar personal experiences. I'm not sure. The humor and absurdity of Home Land drew me in, but after a thorough read, I was disappointed it did not deliver more. You can avoid traps of kitschy epiphanies and platitudes while retaining some sort of genuine reflection.

First I must explain how I encountered Lipsyte's work. I came across a short story in the anthology The Anchor Book of New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus. Entitled "I'm Slavering" this short story captured a strained but meaningful relationship between the narrator and his drug addicted friend. Lipsyte is a master of exchanges, creating dialog with incredible movement and revelation of character, as seen in the closing conversation of the story:

I got up, took the man from Scarsdale's seat, pressed Gary's dead thumb in my hand.
"Are you sorry you did it?" I said.
"Get the hell off me."
I stroked his thumb, brushed it, tenderly, the way you would a blind, tiny thing fresh-pulled from a hole.
"Just tell me if you're sorry," I said. "Because here we are. Because, me, I've been following you. Do you understand that? I've been following you all along. So, just tell me, are you sorry?"
"Hell, no," said Gary. "I wanted to watch TV. Anyway, what's done is done."
"Done and gone," I said.
"Don't fucking wallow," said Gary, and pulled his thumb away. "Never fucking wallow. You wallow, you're pretending you were something else in the first place. I know who I am. I'm Gary. I go down into the street, I'm Gary. I've never stopped being Gary. There's no cure for it. There's no race. It's not a race, okay? It's a contest. Do you get what I'm saying?"
"Yes," I said. "I'm with you."
He walked over to the window, a vista of sky, brick.
"Don't be with me," said Gary.

The story begins with the narrator and a group of people waiting for Gary. He does not arrive so the narrator sets out for him. He tells the story of Gary cutting of his thumb because his parents wouldn't let him watch television late at night. After that, he got his way.

Then there are passages that are just funny like this one from Home Land:

"Lewis. Do you know, Lewis, that I can look right at you and tell by a single glance you are consumed by demons of nearly unimaginable ferocity? Do you know how I can ascertain this?"
"The shape of my head?"
"Primarily, yes. Do you pray, Lewis?"
"I don't believe in God."
"Who said anything about God, twat? Hey, do you like antiques? You'll never guess what I've got in my car."
"You're right, I won't."
"A goddamn war mace. It was used by Ostrogoths to split skulls. Fucked-up skulls like yours. Got it in the mail. From an Ostrogoth."
"I didn't know there were any around."
"He's an Ostrogoth by choice. You can be whatever you want to be in this country, in case you haven't heard."

I've continuously run into weak novels that take a good concept for a short story and attempt to stretch out for 200+ pages. So the protagonist, Lewis, writes sardonic letters to his alumni newsletter. He's an antihero; Holden Caulfield at 30; lonely and bitter and intelligent. Highlights: the absurdity of his life and his run-ins with the former principal, his friends, and enemies. Lipsyte avoids sentimentality - such a formidable trap for this novel's ambition. We can laugh about our shortcomings and ridicule the ones we love to hate, but in the end there isn't much left. There is an air of self-superiority, even for the burn-outs, but other than that is some fluffy appreciation for friendship. A complacency coagulates and we accept our circumstance and think happy thoughts. It reminded me of a John Hughes film straight out of the eighties.

Worth a read (quick one) for its hilarity, but don't expect to really care what happens. The anti-climactic climax with some slapstick sitcom action was fitting.

You Shook Me All Night Long: My Literature Manifesto

Lord, I have strayed away from the realm of an average reader into the dark, subterraneous waters of literary criticism. It’s a dark and dreadful place where people shoot arrows at you from ivory towers and with the snap of a finger take away your existence along with your fabricated purpose in life. God is dead; our creed relativism, not pluralism, and the literary canon is a cigar box filled with dried-up classics, foisted on you by a self-perpetuating old boy’s club of scotch-drinking, ass-slapping, jazz-loving white men who wear sweater vests and read Dylan Thomas poems for bed time stories to put their listless kids to sleep.

Alright, that is only partly true. I have encountered a good worth of literary theory and criticism this semester. And it’s not as abysmal as one may have feared. The myth has been dispelled. My mind has been rolling like a snowball down a mountain slope, amalgamating substance and groups of substance into itself before it crashes into some honeymooner’s cabin. It’s difficult to keep things separated and in the right place, but the experience has been welcomed. Some key questions: Why do we read books? What is it about the essence of literature and its function that’s kept us on our knees, awake late at night, fired up, or chilled frozen? Supposedly it begins with Plato and the Greeks and all thought since has been variations on the same theme. Imitation of the world. Passion captured. Imagination unrestrained.

Alas the issue of taste comes barreling down on us. It confounds us. Our palates differ; we get fussy over cake. Chocolate or lemon? Strawberry filling? Ice-cream. Mousse. One flavor. Multi-flavored. Textures. The writing on the top. Number of candles. Trick candles? A stripper inside.

One literary battle rages over the accessibility of a text. Jonathan Franzen, in his essay “Mr. Difficult” capitulates one side of the conflict:

“My small hope for literary criticism would be to hear less about orchestras and subversion and more about the erotic and culinary arts. Think of the novel as lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time; just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it.”

I agree with Mr. Franzen for the most part. A lot of work has become pretentious – difficult for the sake of being difficult, and even at times masking its lack of mattering. In other words, fuck subversion. Have something to say and say it well. William Gaddis is Franzen’s top suspect of erudition. He comments on the malaise of contemporary literature with such symptoms as a humanistic, calculated, self-aggrandizing attitude and masking vacuity with fancy dress.

We have lost our capacity for wonder. We are no longer surprised. I hope for the same thing as Franzen: we are familiar with what pleases us, but we still get weak in the knees when we come before it.

Jews and Christians have it right in their approach Scripture. The awe-striking reverence for the Torah during a commemoration of the Sabbath at a synagogue illustrates this perfectly. There is something profound to these words spoken, they speak to our hearts, souls, and minds, to our human condition and to timeless truths. I think of a work entitled Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson. Reading the word of God is much a phagorgasmic process. There is a very sensual nature to literature and language. We digest the sacred. I like how Ben Marcus puts it: “Plot would be another name for our bodies, carved hollow to receive something amazing.”

Marcus continues to describe a reader’s involvement in a story differently from Franzen:

“When plots are revealed they cease being plots. They are uncovered, as tedious as a fully nude person. Good fiction is busy keeping secrets, protecting its plots. The story, then, is what the story is hiding, and the hide is indeed a piece of skin, whose effect is to conceal the body.”

His emphasis on the undressing of a story is much appreciated. Artfulness and craft are critical parts of telling a story. Yes, there are times when a direct style is most profitable, but there is room for well-designed, unique forms of telling stories. Stories that reward upon multiple readings. As long as the method does not obscure the nature of the story completely, I enjoy an intelligent, challenging piece of literature. I think Franzen would agree. One of my favorite pastime activities is reading in between the lines. Both in literature and conversation.

Thus my own lofty ideas of literature are being formed and reconstituted throughout my reading endeavors. I am tattooed by traditional notions of literature, fundamentals of storytelling, character, conflict, but contemporary movements also have imprinted themselves on my mind. I enjoy existential angst. I enjoy flipping genres and readers’ expectations over and tickling their exposed bellies or punching them in the gut.

Reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s defense of poetry, I was struck by some of his exuberant romantic reflections:

“Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide – abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.”

This passage reverberates. We try to make sense out of a senseless world, and literature is one of the primary facets of this struggle. Desperate for redemption, we search for atonement. Akin to the plots of many tales, we are strangers in a strangeland, searching for signposts to lead us home. Our yearning is co-mingled with most characters in the novels we read, with the voices of poetry, with Dante's Virgil we journey through hell, only to arrive at paradise.

Wells Tower and Some Old Fashioned Pillaging

No, he is not some 18th-century British landmark. He is a writer who was schooled at Columbia and perhaps there exists a connection between him and Ben Marcus that contributed to his eventual contribution to Marcus' anthology "The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories." Despite possible collusion, his piece "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" was entirely worth a look-through. The voice of the narrator coupled with the diction makes the story. It's as though Beowulf existed, knew the prominent and forerunning epic was written about him and his secret identity is Samuel Jackson as Jules from Pulp FIction. He's like the actor/wrestler Rowdy Rodney Piper, kicking ass and chewing gum, except he's all out of gum. You want conflict? How about this: "Sons of bitches three weeks' boat ride off were fucking up our summer and were probably going to need their asses whipped." So our grisly but lovable host, Harald, goes off with his posse of vikings for some healthy marauding.

Juxtaposed with the machismo and utter brutality of these men is their sensitive love for women. Harald reveals his intense love for his wife Pila and their soon-to-be-born twins. One of his buddies, Gnut, falls in love with a one-armed woman from the village they attack. They steal her away from her father, beating the smack out of him in the process. Tower includes disturbing of intense violence in Tarantino fashion, divulging the reader with the art of a "Blood Eagle" which involves carving slits in the victim's spine and playing puppet master with their lungs and arms. Absolutely absurd. And finally, we are given a typical reflective ending one would expect Tower is up to: an attempt at a meaningful elaboration dealing with carnage, fear, and love. It works sufficiently, but does not reward the reader upon further readings of the story. It comes close, though, but cannot be taken seriously given the tone of the whole story. Here's a little bit from the end (spoiled!) that begins with one of the most ridiculous things a savage pillager could say:

"Where had the good times gone? I didn't know, but when Pila and me had our little twins and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, but you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sound of men rowing toward your home."

I am interested in reading more of his work, even moreso after reading this condemnatory comment (directed to Mr. Towers and the MFA alike) online by a Mr. "Johnny Zhivago":

"Down through the Valley" by Wells Tower was about the phoniest bit of nonsense I've ever read. It is because of Tower and the horde of MFA grads that I seldom read fiction anymore. The thing is so calculated rather than lived.... One senses that this is a person who has never lived life; never been married, or had children, or even is that experienced, yet he writes about "Life" -- and that is what it is, "writing about life" as if for a college course, rather than being art, which is life itself.

I allow room for such dismissal, but methinks it befitting to see for myself how pretentious this author may be.

Poets Brand New

"All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued." -Bob Frost

And thus we quote Bob Frost for the thousandth time and compile a hefty collection of up and coming poets, who have not published more than three books or outside the last seven years or so. After sifting through the collection, a good number of the poets begin to repeat each other in their stubborn, unintelligible fashion. I don't really buy into the avant-garde, but I do find that with cautious reading, you can discover some dynamic poets. Here's a look at a few from the collection entitled, "Leigitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century."

STEPHEN BURT

From what I gather, in lieu of his degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford, Burt is more a valued and prolific critic of contemporary poetry than anything else (see his essay on the elliptical poets). So how does this verse guru fare in his own exercise? He uses an easy-going free form while experimenting with line, most notably with white space in "Ocean State" (an ode to Rhode Island) and "Paysage Moralisé" in which every line ends with the word “place.” "Paysage" resonates with a confused nostalgic tone, the speaker caught in wanderlust and attempting to find a “place” in this world. "Morningside Park" casts many images together to net the speaker’s discontent as he is tossed about a “vertiginous” day. Burt adheres to his own observations pertaining to recent poetry: how it captures persona and personality and “close calls with uncertainty [and] critiques of language.” I can see hints of O’Hara’s spontaneity as he walks down a street and journalizes in his head. Alas, Burt shows good hustle, but should stick to coaching.

DA POWELL

I am already a lover of Powell (reading through his trilogy Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails) and was more interested in what selections the editors would make than reading his work for the first time. His approach to the line is gutsy: his length either amplifies a moment in the poem or arguably contains a poem remotely. His diction stands out immediately and connects with the visceral emotion of his poems. Your mouth will have to work strenuously with the rhythm, length, and word choice. Almost a sexual experience to read his work, which I would not dismiss as unintentional. Ending poems with phrases such as “pull me quick into winter” add a mysterious quality which lures the reader into further readings. There is a confessional aspect to much of his work, namely his experience as a gay man with AIDS in America: combating the illness, being treated, side effects, and losing many friends to the disease. And of course there’s the attempt to fit into a homophobic society which does not want to grant homosexuals the same emotions and human capabilities as normal citizens. He has bravado, taking for himself what is rarely permissable, but never veering into the schmaltzy or preachy, while adding a healthy dose of self-deprecation and pop culture references to maintain a freshness to his work.

DAVID BERMAN

Eccentric. Berman’s surreal writing brings about disturbing revelations of reality. Traces of John Ashberry’s nightmarish reflection mixed with black humor. Favorite lines: “People who / wear turtlenecks must have really fucked-up necks” (Democratic Vistas). Big on persona. I can see evidence of cyncism left by Gluck here. Reads like prose at points. “Community College in the Rain” is a hilarious bizarre conversation between the “Dougs” and “Announcements” made at the school. Anti-establishment, man. “Wild hotels of the sea” is a tremendous metaphor in a poem that details instability so well. My self-assigned task is to check out his band, "The Silver Jews" and see if I can connect his music with his poetry in any way.