Posted on: August 25, 2008
The Silent Confucius, The Confetti Trees, Hollywood, Who
Else but Barbara Guest
by Robert Mueller
Barbara Guest’s books are wonderful because of how they come to us with their bountiful co-valencies and layering. The Confetti Trees, a series of short-short stories or quasi-filmmaking anecdotes that qualify as prose poems (Sun & Moon, 1999), has this implicating character, so that when it takes its measure in the rich play of glitter and artifice that are Hollywood, one of its expounding layers is a blending cosmic plot. Guest’s stories, deft and trothfilled-wacky in their fabulous causes, propose circumstances that concern none other than the coming to America of Confucianism. By way of making and divining not only events on the set but their twice-felt reflections, they are the outpouring of sublime Tao (taking the concept “universal law” to be the application thereof), and thus the cream of informed understanding of universal orderliness as ever-changing mobility, and even chanciness, all figured, if you like, in a concept labeled I Ching, the title of the famous treatise that has a commentary believed to be by our Confucius who is much-endeared (just as Guest’s stories may be).…
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Posted on: August 1, 2008
The World of Holden Caulfield:
Revisiting The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger. Photo by Lotte Jacobi. 1951
I read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in 1970 as a teenage girl with a disaffected outlook on the world very similar to the narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield. I recall thinking it was a wonderful book I could relate to on many levels: as a child of the 60s, I shared Holden’s disdain for pretentiousness, discourtesy, hypocrisy, regimentation, and social climbing. I longed desperately for some measure of peace with myself and the world around me in spite of my contempt for the behavior I observed in people – phonies, as Holden would call them. That was as far as I could go with my appreciation for this wonderful book at that young age.
A week ago I decided to have a reunion with Holden for the first time in over 30 years. What emerged from my excursion back to his world was a sense of awe at Salinger’s masterful creation of a bright teenager from an extremely prominent family experiencing what we would now refer to as a total meltdown.…
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Posted on: March 4, 2008
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. — Nabokov
I have always found poetry difficult, and for that reason interesting. I’m no poet (what little talent I may have is concentrated in the epigram): what verse I’ve perpetrated has been in the service of better understanding what it is, how it’s put together, and so often falls into the category of imitation, whose sincerest form is parody. These exercises for the left-handed have helped me to get a better grasp of poetry in general by bedeviling the details. So describing the process by which one such exercise fell into place, while violating a cardinal rule against self-explication, might be excused as being in some sense instructive for others, even though explaining the joke puts the humor out of its misery.
The object under examination is a faux-Shakespearean sonnet (the modifier describing both form and content).…
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