Esther Press

Watched Westworld today. Plenty of plot holes--best to not think about them--but a very well-developed world. Sometimes the tone veers into camp a bit--Dick Van Patten's character opening the door, etc--but it mostly stays on course. I have to admit to grinning fairly often throughout this movie.

We watched another 70s film from Mike Leigh--Abigail's Party. It's centered around a secondary party of adults-- one of them being Abigail's mother, Sue--who can hear Abigail's party's music while they talk. We never see Abigail, only hear the party going on. The movie is really about the inter-relationships between the two couples and Sue (she's by herself, divorced three years), revealed through the endless little digs on one another, the consistent avoidance of any direct talk, the entire sinking feeling, the thin tissue of "connection," etc. But, within that, it is very funny. I think I enjoyed it because it does enter into that world of politeness and shows the terrible holes in it, and what those holes might mean.

If you would like a good double bill of films, choose the following, as we did last night:

Funny Games

Nuts in May

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I would highly suggest you do it in this order, as Funny Games will leave one pretty hollowed out. The director of Funny Games is Michael Haneke, who also did the very good Cache and the great The Piano Teacher.

Mike Leigh directed Nuts in May. He's always rock-solid, and this one is very funny.

John Updike informs us that literature must now include "the pleasures of parenting," so as not to be so "hateful."

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Likewise, we have a recent installment of reviews by William Logan here. An antidote appeared earlier this year.

Marjorie Welish, thank you for this.

Rodrigo Toscano, thank you for this.

Jena Osman's Public Figures, a work in progress, in new issue of How2.

More from the "Mission Accomplished" files.

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Received jubilat and Gary's Partial List of People to Bleach.

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This seems to be the first time that my highschool graduation committee hasn't been able to locate me. It's taken me 20 years to have this success.

On the previous post, there was a comment made by Kasey Mohammad about my skepticism regarding humor in poetry. (By the way, how does one get the comments section to appear like everyone else's?--mine's hidden away for some reason). In regard to my skepticism, in general, I think that can be lain at the feet of a pretty ridiculous Catholic upbringing, and how much phony behavior seemed to be going on. But, as it plays out in poetry, I think my friend Michael Burkard had something to do with that. When I was in grad school, I had taken several classes with Michael, and one of the many things I learned from him was his interest in distrusting certain quicknesses in writing. He'd advise on waiting just slightly past perhaps a more conventional address. With all of his work on the self and it's fictions, this seemed like a natural extension. Because he didn't trust the fictions of the self, or trusted that they were fictions, it made sense that he would be interested in what came forward first in writing and whether that was what one wanted, or what some other need needed. (This can become jumbled, and it took me some time to understand it). Likewise, there were several sessions in therapy (don't worry, I won't go into them) where the role of my laughter seemed more than a bit of a fiction, one could safely say, and that this laughter seemed like a coping mechanism, or at least a pose. I had never noticed this before. My therapist called me on this, to put it not so politely, and I was certainly defensive in the beginning, but I did come to see her point. So, I think these two things--Michael's teaching and my own therapy sessions--caused me to look at humor and joking much differently than I had before. Perhaps this is more information than anyone wanted to know, but I thought that it might be helpful.

Jacket 33 has a forum on Humor in poetry. You'd need to read it first for the following to make any sense.


As Ron Silliman suggested of Susan Howe in the Jacket humor discussion, I think I’m pretty suspicious of humor myself. I like humor, but I am wary of it—why it’s used, where, when, for it is a resource; why at certain points versus others. Or, simply, why all of the time? What is the author revealing and hiding by its use? I don’t tend to privilege one tone or the other—if we’re between the fake banks of comedy and tragedy—but I feel like Tragedy takes quite a beating on the whole in the article/talk, while Comedy doesn’t really get anything in return; it tends to slide on by with a bit of self-satisfaction, without much criticism. Which aides it’s very cause, of course, because criticism is the very seriousness that Comedy likes to deflect.

While Comedy is certainly right—(what do I know?)—to point out the over-reaching High Seriousness of Tragedy, and its oblivious sentimentality, I feel that, contrarily, Comedy gets away with a lot of glib deflection, which I find to be a controlling pose. Along those lines, I feel comedy tries vainly and agonizingly to avoid a level of feeling beyond what it—see controlling—often finds comfortable. Comedies, like tragedies, often have a very set level of depths that they feel comfortable moving around in, and so the “world”—being larger, of course—often feels restrictive, much like heavy-handed Tragedies do. I think this is what annoys me with comedy. Just as tragedy can be overarched and ridiculously sentimental, comedy can be quite controlling and anxious (is it funny? I’m funny, right? Why aren’t they laughing?), and sentimental as well. Not to mention, the attempt to be funny is often itself over-arched, that the joke dies because the joke is being attempted…that that attempt is obvious, and therefore mechanical, scripted, staged, implicit with an expectation of effect (laugh now—I hit your knee), That sense, here, too, in Bruce Andrews’ title, Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened.

Went on a little hike around Black Butte Lake/Eagle Pass, just outside of Orland, near Newville. Chico lies in the Northern Sacramento Valley, between buttes on the east and west, and then, a bit further off, the Mendocino and Plumas national forests, with Lassen national forest off to the northeast. We saw two deer on the lava rocks and a turkey vulture (no pic of him/her) hanging out on a rock under a tree. Here are some pictures:









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Gary Lutz's Partial List of People to Bleach is out.

Other takes on Juliana Spahr's The Transformation are here:

Nathan Austin, part 1, 2, 3.
Amy King