Totally Inappropriate Person

Poker Face

This Saturday I’m heading to the Met HD broadcast of Carmen.  The new production, directed by Richard Eyre, got a rave review by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times.  He particularly lauded the direction of the final scene, which he wrote was

executed with such stunning realism, a dangerous mingling of sex, rebellion and violence: the very essence of “Carmen.”

Carmen caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1875.  But in the past century-and-a-quarter it’s netted a number of high-profile admirers.  Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Debussy—many contemporary composers were quick to declare their love.  Hell, even Nietzsche thought Bizet had saved music with the opera. 

Ever since, it’s been fashionable to like Carmen for all sorts of PC reasons: its musical merit, its exploration of class, its feminism, its realism.  But let’s be real.  Tommasini is right.  Carmen is compelling because it is lurid, sexy, and ends with a good stabbing. 

Feminists of course always get upset with that last one.  If Carmen were a man, would he have to pay for his sins with his life? Of course.  That’s the plot of Don Giovanni.  At the very least he would be assaulted in his SUV with a nine iron.

But women are always more compelling than men.  Don Giovanni would be no fun without Elvira.  And Carmen would be a total snooze with just Don Jose.  In fact, it would be a bit like an extended poem by Matthew Arnold.  I’ve never been much a fan of his most famous, “Dover Beach.”

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night

 

As if to prove women are more interesting, Anthony Hecht wrote this brilliant parody entitled “The Dover Bitch.”

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.

Carmen must have been the perfect antidote to Arnold’s brooding—and chaste—Victorianism.  A woman who refuses to love only one man?  Arnold would have definitely thrown himself off those white cliffs.

Luckily we don’t live in such a bleak and bland world as Arnold.  We have our very own Carmens, like Lady Gaga.  As silly as the lyrics to “Poker Face” are, it’s hard not to admire Gaga’s take on a well-worn conceit.  Instead of the “rebellious bird” of Bizet’s “Habanera,” Gaga goes for the poker table.  Timely, clever, and catchy.

Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(She's got to love nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(She's got to love nobody)

P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)

I won't tell you that I love you
Kiss or hug you
Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning

I can’t wait to watch Carmen do some bluffin’ with her muffin—in high def no less—this weekend on the big screen.

Perloff v. Bishop

More Poetic Advertising

Readers of this blog will have already taken notice of my considerable love for Walt Whitman.  If you ever feel blue, just pick up some Whitman and you immediately feel better.  It’s like feeling the sun on your face—Whitman just makes you feel like glad to be alive.

A couple of posts ago I griped about a few of the advertisements in the Toronto subway.  I never thought I’d actually get to post about poems IN advertising, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do.

Levi’s has a new campaign which combines three of my favourite things: Whitman, jeans, and sentimentality.  The new “go forth” ad (below) uses an amazing montage of scenes of youthful revelry in a post-Katrina New Orleans and pits them against scenes of financial scandal in post-Lehman Brothers New York.

The whole thing is actually narrated by Walt Whitman, using an extremely rare recording of him reading an excerpt from “America” (the recording is available online, via the American Academy of Poets, here).

The wax cylinder recording, like the commercial, leaves out the last two lines of the full poem.

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, 
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The ad seems to be going for Obama’s call for “renewing America’s promise.”  I’ve never been so stirred by an ad before.  The fireworks are exciting.  And Whitman’s ghostly voice, echoing across the “adamant of Time,” is thrilling.  I think Levi’s did an amazing job of it.  It doesn’t feel like they’ve resurrected Whitman for nefarious corporate purposes (unlike the recent Direct TV Chris Farley ad).   

But I must confess: after watching it I wanted to read some Whitman—or advocate for fiscal reform—not go out and buy pants.

On Naples

When I was a kid we used to have Neapolitan ice cream in the fridge. It came in a box and was really messy to open up because you got it all over your fingers. But you got to lick them afterwards—in three flavours no less!

For a long time that’s all I knew of Naples: it made great ice cream. Many poems have been written about Naples. None to my knowledge about its ice cream. This is probably because Italians don’t eat ice cream like that any more (it evolved from Spumano, a 19th century dessert). They now indulge in gelato, a denser, creamier cousin to North America’s frozen confection.

Naples has an uneven reputation. It’s one of those love-it-or-hate-it places. I will always remember reading the first line of Ralph Kirkpatrick’s 1955 book on Domenico Scarlatti: “In 1685, Naples was as populous, as dirty, and as noisy as it is now.” Ouch.

Poets not surprisingly look on Naples slightly differently. Percy Bysshe Shelley called Naples home for a short time in 1818. He wrote two poems about the place. The first is happily titled “Lines written in dejection, near Naples.” He juxtaposes the beauty of the city against his current state, in which he has neither “hope nor health.” I don’t know what was bugging him that day, but it seems that the Naples of 1818 was a bit quieter than Ralph Kirkpatrick would have us believe: its voice is “soft like Solitudes’s.”

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The city's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

Two years later Shelley wrote a poem reminiscing about the great time he had there and praising the townfolk for creating a constitutional monarchy after the revolt of July 1820. One of the striking lines is the second, in which he refers to the sun as the “lidless eye of heaven.” This was an image popular a couple centuries before: Shakespeare famously used it in Sonnet 18 (the “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” one), and Spenser used it before him in The Faerie Queene (I, iii, 4).

Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!
Elysian City, which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!
Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice
Which armed Victory offers up unstained
To Love, the flower-enchained!
Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,—
Hail, hail, all hail!

One of the earliest poems about Naples was by the poet Statius, who was born there. His Silvae, written in the first century AD, were lengthy songs of praise. 2.2 was for a villa of Pollius Felix. No one has yet written a rhymed translation of these Latin poems, so it’s not much fun to quote. Suffice it to say he thought that Naples was pretty great.

It seems then that the poets love Naples. People who write books are a different matter. Mark Twain, like Raph Kirkpatrick, didn’t think so much of the place when he visited. He wrote that Neapolitans “crowd you -- infest you -- swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look sneaking and mean, and obsequious.”

I guess when it comes to Naples we praise in verse but complain in prose.

On that Poor Achaean, Taylor Swift

Some weeks ago I set out to write a post about rage.  It seemed like a timely idea since the American healthcare debate had reached such a level of indecency that many media outlets began replacing voter “anger” with the “r” word.  The week of August 10 seems to be the flashpoint.  Google “health care rage” and you’ll find several dozen news articles and op-ed pieces in newspapers like the Boston Herald, the Washington Post, and MSNBC using the “r” word (though not, curiously, the NYTimes).

That week also coincided with this blog’s look at the Iliad.  It’s the first work of literature ever written down in Western culture—and its first word is “Rage” (μῆνιν).  But I had just been to a wedding and wanted to write about something cheerier, so I chose “singing” instead.

This week, however, rage is once again impossible to avoid.  As if crazed rednecks misinformed low-income voters weren’t enough, now tennis champions, members of congress, and music stars are all throwing fits.  The targets of their anger are also surprisingly diverse: an Asian line judge, a black president, and a white teenage country music star.  Pace Jimmy Carter, it can’t just be race that causes such an outburst.  Why is everyone so angry?

William Blake didn’t see a problem with rage.  It was the keeping it to yourself part that he thought was dangerous.  His “A Poison Tree” makes a somewhat too-obvious statement about the importance of sharing.  He would have done well in the Oprah-age of personal confession.

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,--

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

For Dylan Thomas, of course, rage was a good thing, if you knew what to rage against.  Pleading with with your dying father to fight: absolutely.  Foot foul: probably not so much.  It’s hard not to be touched by this wrenching poem, which is somewhat surprisingly cast in a formal villanelle.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

Wallace Stevens is a poet I don’t like very much.  He’s too self-consciously intellectual to be any fun to read—all his poems are such work.  But this is of course a fatuous remark to make about a genius.  In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens ruminates about the workings of the mind using the metaphor of a ship at sea, siren calls, and a sailing buddy named Ramon.  The last quatrain has become famous for his remark about rage:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Using the word “rage” with “order” is indeed brilliant.  It sounds oxymoronic—using an irrational emotion as a verb which takes “order” as its object.  But it makes perfect sense.  As humans we try desperately to make things make sense.  But we’re of course severely limited by the irrational way we think of things.  Linguist George Lakoff has been making this point for years, most accessibly in last year’s The Political Mind.  Lakoff (following Erving Goffman) suggests that our frames of reference, not our reason, govern our understanding.  When we’re confronted with things outside our frame, we “rage for order.” 

That’s not a good excuse for yelling at the president.  And least of all for picking on poor Taylor Swift.  But it is natural to get angry at things we don’t understand.  We’ve been doing it—and writing about it—for as long as we can remember.

On a not-so “Fab” Ad

2007 was a heady year for environmental politics.  An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar, the “Live Earth” concerts gave people a reason to watch network television in July, fluorescent bulbs finally became affordable, and the lexicon absorbed a panoply of new buzzwords like “going green,” and “carbon footprint.”  That year some interest group, perhaps intoxicated from bio-diesel fumes, posted ads in the subway which read: “Caught Doing Laundry During Peak Hours!”  Pictured was a thirty-something woman holding a laundry basket—her mouth agape with horror at her misdeed.  I found these ads ridiculous.  Of all the environmental boogey-people to target, they apparently settled on what they thought was the worst of the worst: stay at home moms.  They shouldn’t do their laundry during the day when corporations have non-green-roofed, non-LEED certified office buildings to deep freeze.  They should do such indulgent activities at night.  “I’m sorry, Timmy, Mommy can’t tuck you in tonight.  She has to wash your clothes for tomorrow while the power grid is in low use.”

2009 has brought back another series of irksome ads.  They range from the silly to the irresponsible.  In the former category are the ChooseVeg.ca ads promoting veganism.  As a bloodthirsty carnivore I realize that I’m already biased against their message.  But touting the virtues of the “curious and insightful pig” and the “inquisitive, affectionate, and personable” chicken is too comedic to take seriously.  In the latter category are the MoneyMart ads which promote the fleecing of poor people with 400% APR payday loans (see the Slate article on their shiftiness here.)

But I suggest the worst offender for awful advertisements is Bell.  I’d like you to meet Liam.  Liam is part of Bell’s new “Fab Ten” promotion for cellular phones.  He’s from Toronto and describes his style as “Street Chic.”  In the ad he proudly sports “the perfect Cardi/Hoodie combo.”  Liam “[g]ot it on sale Xmas Eve when I was supposed to be shopping for a friend.”

Let’s get this straight.  Liam is vain aesthete/last-minute shopper who’s so selfish he can’t even do a simple task for a friend without pampering himself with another purchase?  Liam is, in short, a douchebag.  Who on earth would want to be like Liam?  I am, at this moment at least, proud to be a Rogers customer.

I generally like ads.  I’ll sound like Don Draper if I say that they can enrich our experience of everyday products by imbuing them with an aesthetic charm.  Imagine blow drying your hair after a shower without the image of lustrous locks billowing in slow motion.  It seems so regal to do something so quotidian thanks to the folks at Pantine.  But I’m afraid that this Bell ad appeals to a much baser instinct in us.  It doesn’t elevate the notion of style, but celebrates an empty kind of aestheticism that’s solipsistic and sad.  Why care about your friends when you can buy a phone for yourself that matches your hipster wardrobe? 

It’s good we have other arts, like poetry, to remind us that sometimes the world is indeed too much with us.  This poem by Wordsworth implores us to “go green,” but in a way that ads chastising desperate housewives could never do.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God!  I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

                              —William Wordsworth—