Disappointed....again
From the July 24, 2006 issue of The New Yorker
As chance would have it, the circle motif from the last entry carries over.
Mixing septic clay and anti-matter in a way that does a disservice to them both. Again I shake my head at what this publication chooses to publish. The New Yorker, with vague, imagnined memories of the 30s, the 40s that ring of the greats made great, as the magnificent sweeping scythe culling the herd, taking heads. I know Salinger is on your tongue. The Glass Family. With Murakami and Nabokov feel your lips do naughty things. And yet with poetry so much seems to rely on name recognition (What magazine doesn't know Simic - the sound of brushed steel). Yes, that's the feel the magazine gives me now, brushed steel. It comes to me hip to a fault, cold, Post-Modernism applied to pop culture, just shy of acknowledging its successor. The plays, the wink to everything loud and with color. Even the cartoons - not so much funny as smirking right at me. It reminds me of my days selling men's clothing in the mall. Oh yes, I have been there in much younger days. Tommy Hilfiger clothing was the most expensive in my section and hardly anyone bought it, but it was coveted by nearly all who wandered into my tiny corner of Bizarro World. It was also, strangely enough, the most consciously ugly clothing I had ever seen. It wore that fact with pride. The way some take pride in being an asshole because they have money. The stories, articles, everything just seems like aloof friends of the namesake, asked to attend the party to give it a distant and haughty gravitas it does not understand, but recognizes as palpable. Their faces are just a little too scrubbed, and if I'm not mistaken, they're all wearing Hilfiger.
You won't find rough edges in this publication, at least none that aren't clearly there for a precise effect. No off hues, but spot on colors. Even gray is exactly Red, Green, Blue at 192. Every flavor you will experience has already been tested on focus groups you would never think existed. Unreal. It just seems unreal, and yet
"The Truth is the world, in all its devious glory, is all pillars of light - no less holy - erupting from third shift street grates. Its not even all Bukowski dirt, either, but neutral terra rotta, yet unseasoned by our strange desire to make it mean. Sit in the woods a while, watch worms diddle themselves between stick and stone. Ants haul their dead miraculous distances and not always home. Some birds alight fallen pines only to jump around somewhere new. On a blanket not fifty feet away, a co-ed is riding her teacher. She isn't concerned with her grade point, but her capacity to cum...An old Chinese man returned three times today to study a crack in the sidewalk." (from The Ramble Noose)