SLATE on Shane Gillis and the comedy swamp.

Excerpts from Seth Simons’ article in SLATE https://slate.com/culture/2019/09/shane-gillis-snl-conservative-comedy-legion-of-skanks.html

Sources inside SNL told Variety last week that, in hiring Gillis, the show was explicitly looking to add a comic who would “appeal to more conservative viewers.” But Gillis’ isn’t the mass-market, family-friendly conservatism of Jeff Foxworthy or Sebastian Maniscalco or dozens of inoffensive network sitcoms. It’s rooted in the scene he belongs to, a community bound less by love of small government or Christian values or the nuclear family than by cruelty and misogyny and grievance. It’s a world in which rape jokes are common currency, where slurs are just a normal part of the lexicon. Its members don’t have the critical acclaim or high profiles their work might have earned 20 years ago. They’re not starring in TV or movies; they’re not headlining Madison Square Garden; only a few have released specials on Netflix, Comedy Central, or HBO. What they do have are their own platforms, their own fans and subscribers, and a hearty contempt for the industry that’s passed them by even as they form the backbone of its oldest institution: the comedy club.

Treating “funny” as an unqualified good, no matter who or what is the butt of the joke, explains just about everything: the overlap between club comedy and reactionary podcasts, the coziness with the alt-right, SNL hiring a comic for his red-state appeal and firing him when that appeal became a liability. They’re of a piece, linked by the nakedly capitalist belief that products are justified by demand—that if people laugh at a joke, you were right to tell it. (Chappelle, at least, once believed otherwise.) Never mind that the product pollutes. Never mind that the joke is cruel. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. If you don’t watch it, it can’t hurt you. What, this swelling mass of people who hate you? Don’t mind them. They’re with us. We’re in the business of giving people what they want, and business is booming.

New Poem: DONALD TRUMP WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE ON CALIFORNIA

Inspired by the Nirvana song about actress Frances Farmer, though the setting and context differ.

It’s so relieving today
To know you’ll be flying away
As soon as you set the explosives timer
>
Your L.A. skyscraper never happened
No deference shown by Jerry and Gavin
And Orange County turned moderate blue
>
Fulfill GOP hopes!
Punch the liberals into the ropes!
Set emission controls on fire
>
Move the poor and desperate away
Overdevelop where they used to stay
Consider building more concentration camps
>
I’ll miss the comfort in breathing clean air
I’ll miss the comfort in breathing clean air
I’ll miss the comfort in breathing clean air

New Poetry Audio: GOOD SOLDIER

From my chapbook HOW TO TELL TIME:

NEW YORK’s Frank Rich on the difference between. certain U.K. Tories and U.S. Republicans

British Parliament’s continued defiance of Boris Johnson on a no-deal Brexit this week has required a group of conservative lawmakers to join the opposition party, forfeiting their parliamentary majority. What would have to happen for Trump’s more vocal Republican critics to stand in his way?

Nothing, apparently. With the sole exception of a single Michigan congressman, Justin Amash, current Republican officeholders, even those who purport to be occasional critics, have refused to challenge Trump even as children are put in cages and top administration jobs have been routinely handed out to grifters, bigots, and perpetrators of sexual assault. As Trump has said that his base would stand by him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, so Mitch McConnell has deferred to Trump and tabled new gun-control laws even after the deaths of 53 Americans in mass shootings in August alone.

As Edmund Luce of the Financial Times pointed out this week in a powerful column about “the surrender of America’s adults,” it’s not just senators like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, and Bob Corker who have retreated from taking real action against Trump despite their periodic furrowed-brow expressions of “concern” over his latest outrage. No less wimpy are departed Cabinet members like Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis, who have continued to withhold public criticism of a president they obviously thought was a danger to the nation. Mattis has said he is doing so out of a “duty of silence” to the administration he served. As Luce points out, the departed Secretary of Defense may also have a duty to shareholders: “Shortly before Mr. Mattis launched his memoir, he rejoined the board of General Dynamics, one of America’s largest defense contractors. Mr. Mattis’s worth to GD is inversely related to the value of what he can say about the future of U.S. democracy. The more he speaks against Mr. Trump, the likelier his company will suffer.”

As for Mattis’s specious theory of a “duty of silence,” history is replete with examples of the calamities that follow when good men stay silent while serving criminal regimes. Unlike their feckless and/or ignorant American counterparts, the 21 Tories who left their own party rather than countenance their prime minister’s abuse of power know this history. And none more so than Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson, who is leaving Parliament after 37 years rather than knuckle under to Johnson. “I knew what I was doing,” he told the BBC of his banishment. Elucidating further to The Guardian, he recalled a debate in the House in 1938, when the apostle of appeasement, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, accused his grandfather of undermining his negotiations with the Germans. “I think history will prove my grandpapa to be right under the circumstances,” said Soames, “and I think I will prove to be right.”

Though Trump might disagree, history has long since proven Soames’s grandpapa right. The American adults who have surrendered to their leader over the past three years are unlikely to be treated more kindly by posterity than Chamberlain.

Donald Hall on the cons and pros of poetry workshops.

Excerpt from interview with Donald Hall in THE PARIS REVIEW:

INTERVIEWER

Marianne Moore went to school and she wrote poetry, but she did not study creative writing in school. Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?

HALL

Well, not really, no. I’ve said some nasty things about these programs. The Creative Writing Industry invites us to use poetry to achieve other ends—a job, a promotion, a bibliography, money, notoriety. I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. Workshops make workshop-poems. Also, workshops encourage a kind of local competition, being better than the poet who sits next to you—in place of the useful competition of trying to be better than Dante. Also, they encourage a groupishness, an old-boy and -girl network that often endures for decades.

The good thing about workshops is that they provide a place where young poets can gather and argue—the artificial café. We’re a big country without a literary capital. Young poets from different isolated areas all over the country can gather with others of their kind.

And I suppose that workshops have contributed to all the attention that poetry’s been getting in the last decades. Newspaper people and essayists always whine about how we don’t read poetry the way we used to—in the twenties, for example. Bullshit! Just compare the numbers of books of poems sold then and now. Even in the fifties, a book of poems published by some eminent poet was printed in an edition of a thousand hardback copies. If it sold out everyone was cheerful. In 1923 Harmonium didn’t sell out—Stevens was remaindered, for heaven’s sake! A book of poetry today by a poet who’s been around will be published in an edition of five to seven thousand copies and often reprinted.

But it’s not the Creative Writing Industry itself that sells books; it’s the poetry readings. Practically nobody in the twenties and thirties and forties did readings. Vachel Lindsay, early, then Carl Sandburg, then Robert Frost—nobody else. If you look at biographies of Stevens and Williams and Moore, you see that they read their poems once every two years if they were lucky. Poetry readings started to grow when Dylan Thomas came over in the late forties and fifties. By this time there are three million poetry readings a year in the United States. Oh, no one knows how many there are. Sometimes I think I do three million a year.

In the sixties when the poetry reading boom got going people went to their state universities and heard poets read. When they went back to their towns they got the community college to bring poets in or they set up their own series through an arts group. Readings have proliferated enormously and spread sideways from universities to community colleges, prep schools, and arts associations. I used to think, Well, this is nice while it lasts but it’ll go away. It hasn’t gone away. There are more than ever.

New Poetry Audio: GOODBYE TO SOME OF IT Version 2

Appears in my new chapbook HOW TO TELL TIME

Epitaph for the Woodstock 50 that never happened

Jason Gross, excerpted from the article WOODSTOCK 50’s CAUTIONARY EXAMPLE:   MEMORIES OF A CANCELED FREE FESTIVAL in PopMatters:
If there is any tragedy, it's that Woodstock 50 began with all the ingredients for a great festival. They had a long-standing (if somewhat tarnished) name-brand, a cross-generational line-up of dozens of noted acts, and a well-established venue to accommodate them. But Lang and friends managed to blow all of that and tarnish their image even further. Lang's Aquarian Age thinking that you could fly by the seat of your pants (much the same way that the 1970 Isle of Wight fest did) and somehow pull off a miracle by sprinkling pixie dust that would magically make everything happen wasn't going to get an encore from 1969 to 2019. His ego and poor organizational skills couldn't save the day this time. Only in the movies does everything keep magically falling into place for shows.

New Chapbook: HOW TO TELL TIME.

Now available in both print and e-book editions.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W7S3G4W/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_H2qtDbCK9G5VY