Comments on: Meditations in an Emergency

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:10:25 +0000

Answering machine? You mean you still have a land line?

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:05:57 +0000

Holy moly, I am such the culturally belated grownup. Still with the DSL…and would you believe I even use an ANSWERING MACHINE?! How 1990s is *that*? Thanks for the tip Sr. Robbins!

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:27:34 +0000

You grown-ups with yr obsolete technologies. Who has cable anymore? You can watch Mad Men on this very machine you’re a-ganderin’ — surfthechannel.com (quasi-illegal) or iTunes (legal).

By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:21:34 +0000

Truth in advertising: I don’t have cable, either, and haven’t seen Mad Men outside of the YouTube clip linked above. (But I know my Frank O’Hara, and used to own an Olivetti typewriter.)

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:21:38 +0000

Cable: I, too, can’t afford it….

By: Ms Baroque

Ms Baroque — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:31:55 +0000

Hey, you just like him because he has the same name as you!
We’re a little behind over here – series one only just finished a few months ago, we’ll probably get this in the late winter. Even then, it was on so late – 11.45 on a Sunday! – I gave up and just waited for the DVD to come out.
I can’t really understand why people are getting so het up about this. When I hear about it it made me laugh. It’s so – so – perfect… and yes, so slightly wrong, as I don’t think Frank was the household name in 1962 that he is now. (& even then I think “household name” is pushing it.)
Remember what that piece of sentimentalist crap, Four Weddings and a Funeral, did for Auden. I think they even issued a tiny little Selected Auden with a Four Weddings cover!
So there are two things here. One is the perfect thing: as in, O’Hara and his product placement, O’Hara the pop culture poet, a perfect marker for a show like Mad Men, which is ABOUT pop-ness, in a way. It’s about the meta aspects of our lives, anyway. Personally, while it is indubitably beautiful-looking and hideously watchable, I find it crass.
But, and it’s a big but, Don Draper is a great character. That guy is keeping the thing going, he’s giving by far the best performance, he has the authority. And the character is having a crisis. We know he has hidden yearnings. We know he’s tormented. We know he lives in New York. So why the hell wouldn’t he read O’Hara? Even today, people turn to poetry in times of stress. That’s why adolescents like it.
And the second thing is. Mad Men is so aggressively art-directed as to virtually BE an ad. An ad for itself, as a genu-ine purveyor of the past, maybe? But in its attention to visual detail – I swear that not only is it shot like a series of stills, but several of those stills are magazine spreads – in its staggering attention to these physical details, it has got some things wrong. And its choice of O’Hara may be one of them.
We’ll see. (Of course, I haven’t seen the new ones yet!)
I’ve been really taken up by Mad Men, in fact, have been meaning to do a big fat blog post. I’ll try and do that this week. I had a very interesting conversation with my mother about it, who was actually in that world at the time. But she doesn’t have cable.

By: Michael Gushue

Michael Gushue — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:45:09 +0000

Oddly enough, “who are the sort of people who read O’Hara?” sounds like a great ad campaign to me, in a sort of a “Got O’Hara?” way. Famous athlete in locker room with Lunch Poems, big movie director on set in director’s chair reading the Selected, famous scientist in lab coat with Collected Poems of F O’H on the lab table next to bunsen burner (do they still have bunsen burners?), and so on. Wasn’t there an ad a long time ago that was something like “What kind of man reads GQ?”

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:35:12 +0000

Ah, the W.B.! Well, Benjamin in the very essay you got that from also quotes Georges Duhamel: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”
And then B. says, commenting on the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator,” that “a man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.”
Up to about 218%, I estimate.

By: Doodle

Doodle — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:29:59 +0000

As the oft-quoted Walter Benjamin said, “today there is hardly a gainfully employed [person] who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.”

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:10:43 +0000

Don — Yes, of course bully for them! (& I was paraphrasing O’Hara there.) Just saying that underlying appeals for poetry populism, it seems to me, is an assumption that poetry is good for people. I want as many people as possible to read my poems, of course, but not because people should read more poetry. I recognize that’s not what your post is about, but as the New York article you link to has it, “Clearly, Mad Men isn’t just nostalgic for the days when men tossed back Scotch — but for the days when they tossed back Scotch and read books too!”
Anyway, I really think it doesn’t matter why someone discovers a love for poetry. I assume many (most?) of the people who buy the O’Hara won’t read all of it, & will install it on the bookshelf, forgotten. But what if one of these people who buy it because of media magnetism is inspired by it to devote his/her life to poetry & ends up in The New Yorker? That’s what happened to me. I was fifteen or sixteen & I’ve forgotten what show or movie it was, but one of the characters began to utter something beautiful in response to something another character said. There was a pause, & the guy said, “Yeats.” I went out the next day & stole Yeats’s complete poems from the Cheyenne Mountain High School library (I’m not sorry!) & immediately memorized “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” (I started at the beginning in those days).
I don’t think those two paragraphs contradict each other, for all sorts of reasons. Except that you’re absolutely right about the “sort” of people who care about poetry. As I was typing this, the radio informed me that tens of thousands of Palestinians attended Darwish’s funeral. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t cheer me.