Pulitzer Prizes Announced

Lost in the melee after the Boston Marathon was the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize winners. Congratulations to them all. I am especially interested in picking up a copy of the poetry winner, Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds. Olds wrote most of the poems in this volume shortly after her divorce in 1997, but delayed publishing them for more than a decade out of consideration for her family, who she felt needed time to adjust to the new post-matrimonial reality. Although I am a fan of the New York Times, I am troubled that the Times won four awards. With the Wall Street Journal's one and another for the Washington Post, big Eastern papers took 6 of the 14 categories. Time was the newspaper business was robust and competitive; today there are only a few big papers that can compete with the NYT, fewer and fewer each day. One newspaper shouldn't dominate the Pulitzers, any more than one country should take all the Olympic gold medals. The newspaper business seems to be going the way of most big business, with all the talent and money collecting in the hands of a few dominating entities, the rest to be had by the dogs. Besides a growing gap between the rich and the poor in this nation, are we seeing a gap opening between the "papers of record" and the local rags? Look at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which 7 years ago won two Pulitzers of its own for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Since then it has been sold to a holding company named Advance Publishing, which proceeded to cut publication back to only three times a week and lay off half of the newsroom staff, all in the name of bigger profits. The resulting paper is a piece of trash that doesn't deserve to be hung in Sharon Olds's outhouse. Such is the state of newspapers in this country, which in my view are the foundation of the literary life here. Or at least used to be.

Poetry Month, Attempt #1

I found out today that April is national poetry month. Poetry is sadly neglected in modern life. It is an art form solely dedicated to beauty, expressed in language. What is it about modern life that we think we don't need more beauty?

In celebration of the month, I intend to scribble a poem every day. I will publish some of them here. Maybe all of them. Depends on how much Jameson's Irish whisky I take as I compose.

The first one is a limerick I composed on the fly for my son when his schoolteacher told him to write a limerick for a school assignment and he asked how it was done. I dedicate it to the pastor at our local church, Fr. Michael Flannery, who was born in Limerick, Ireland. What the heck.

There was a fine fellow named Gore,
Who hungrily ate more and more.
He scarfed twenty beets
And four cases of meats
And threw them up on his new floor.

What's Wrong With the Second Amendment

In the United States, we tend to treat the Constitution as holy scripture. Something written long ago that we dare not change a word of, lest we burn in hell. This is the reason, and maybe the only reason, our nation has such lax gun laws. It is hard to imagine if we were talking about anything else -- cars, alcohol, illegal drugs, the internet, immigration, or even housing -- that anyone would be so adamant in his resistance to change as gun rights activists are. Maybe the right of self defense is a basic human right. So is the right to health. Yet no one is arguing for a constitutional amendment to guarantee health care access, or even to prevent factories from pouring poison into our water. We accept that these issues of public safety can be managed through ordinary statutes and regulations, and we are fine with that. Just not when it comes to guns. From a practical standpoint, the revolutionary basis for gun ownership is moot. Back during post-Revolutionary America, it was possible for a group of people, unfairly treated, to overthrow a government and create a new one. But in today's America, such thinking makes no sense. Most people in the eighteenth century depended on the government for a limited number of things: currency, property rights, maybe a rare appearance in court, the local sheriff. And that was about it. Back then, when your national infrastructure consisted of a system of dirt roads and wooden bridges and a mail system powered by horses, overthrowing the government was possible. Someone explain how we could overthrow our government today. We would lose Wall Street, the banking system, currency, the highway system, the national parks, national defense, policing, fire departments, most schools and universities, the list goes on and on. No group of usurpers, no matter how brilliant and enlightened, could possibly take up everything the U.S. government does and keep it running. We lose our government, we lose our civilization. So we, and by that I mean certain people around here, need to find a drop of common sense and admit the truth. In the 21st century, no nation of people can throw off government rule without suffering a catastrophic setback. Russia, to take one example, didn't exactly emerge gloriously from the old USSR. In some ways it is a worse place to live now, and it wasn't so great back in the Soviet days. Look at governments in Africa, Central and South America if you want to see a blueprint for a post-revolution government. Modern life demands too many things for a government to cease to exist, even for a short time. When the Founding Fathers framed the Constitution, they could not have foreseen that modern life would become so complex that government would become an integral part of it, like a nervous system is to the body, running through every aspect of it, keeping everything cohesive. But that is what the government is today. There will be no revolution. So let's get over that ridiculous talk, and stop using defense against the government as an excuse for lax gun laws. We are a democracy; we vote. Let's concentrate on voting our way out of the mess we are in instead of shooting our way out.

Writing: Finding the Right Word

Good writing is not about finding the right word. It is about almost finding the right word. A good writer knows that no phrase can fully express what is in a person's heart, so the best writing is that which does not try, but instead leaves a conscious space between what is felt and what is spoken. Into this space plunges the imagination of the reader, and effective writing is born.

For example, when Paul McCartney was first asked by a member of the press how he felt about the murder of John Lennon, his simple reply was, "It's a drag, isn't it?" Some people thought that line was callously flip -- those people are idiots. The response was perfectly beautiful, restrained, and forced the listener to imagine what McCartney might have been thinking.

McCartney himself perfectly defended the point a few years later in an interview with Playboy, when he said, "If I said anything about John, I would have to sit here for five days and say it all. Or I don't want to say anything." Exactly.

Or how about the final line of Randall Jarrell's poem "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"? "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose." Cold and simple, far from the experience of a brutal death, and yet very, very close to it. Because we have to imagine the words the dead soldier might say about the way he died. The pain he might have felt. They are not given to us.

What of Robert Duvall's great lines in Apocalyspe Now, always the biggest laugh-getters for any audience seeing the movie for the first time: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," and the immortal "Some day this war is going to end"? Neither line comes anywhere near expressing what it says, and the huge gap between the words and their implications is where the humor lies.

None of this is to say that I am a minimalist. Or that I think words in art should not be chosen very carefully. But when I am reaching for an emotion, or seeking an effect on the audience, I don't think it is necessary to aim close to the emotion. Sometimes aiming far away is more useful.

This is, by the way, why I find political speeches, even the ones the pundits praise, so tiresome. Political speakers always try to get to the heart of the matter, they try to express the feelings of the audience with precision. This leaves me with a bored feeling. I don't want anyone talking for me. I want them to show they know what I am feeling without trying to put my feelings into words.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract." -- A. Lincoln.

Yes.

"I feel your pain." -- Bill Clinton.

No. Hell no.

Sentence(s) of the Week

"Everything Herb had, he earned -- with the help of God…." How could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this -- smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, p. 79