In Which Steven Seagal and All About Eve Appear in the Same Paragraph

February 1, 2013July 25, 2014 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

When I was fifteen, I climbed a mountain with my father and younger brother and sister.

I assure you that this was not my idea.

I was relieved to reach the summit, but much distressed by the unpleasantness of the descent, the heat and bother and bugs and rocks. The unpleasantness was much exacerbated by my absent sense of balance and deep-seated fear of falling, which also precludes me from enjoying roller coasters, ladders, deck stairs, and broken dining room chairs. And at the end of it all, the gift shop was closed, and so it was sans-T-shirt that I proclaimed, with bad grace, my triumph over the mountain and physical exertion.

That mountain was Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire, the most-climbed mountain in the world, and the backdrop to the first essay in David Rakoff’s perfectly tuned collection entitled Fraud. Mr. Rakoff, who died last year, was a satirist and contributor to This American Life on NPR, and I’m sorry to say that he did not appear on my radar until last week, when my friend A. brought Fraud over to have a dramatic reading of an essay on Steven Seagal at a New Age center. My friend assumed, correctly, that my husband would find it vastly amusing, and indeed, he did (as did I). However, the reading also led to plans for a Seagal movie marathon, so I wasn’t sure how indebted I was feeling toward A. Until I opened up the book (he accidentally left it behind) and found the epigraph:

You’re maudlin and full of self-pity. You’re magnificent. –Addison De Witt

Anyone who begins a book by nodding to All About Eve has earned my love and admiration. Seagal marathon forgiven. I’ll be returning the book before I have a chance to finish the essays, but I’ll come back to it, soon, I hope.

Six Words

January 24, 2013January 30, 2013 / Carolyn O / Leave a comment

You’ve probably heard of the possibly apocryphal Ernest Hemingway six-word short story: “For sale. Baby shoes, never worn.”

I’ve been thinking about this flashiest of flash fictions since I saw bits of the inauguration on Monday, when Senator Lamar Alexander stood up and quoted Alex Haley’s personal motto: “Find the good and praise it.”

I love that.

That’s what I’m trying to do, in a small way, here.

And while we’re on the subject of the inauguration, here’s a commentary on the Inaugural Poet’s work, from Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post. Do yourself a favor and don’t read the comments on the piece — people can be truly awful. Ms. Petri gently questions the efficacy of contemporary poetry, through the lens of what she sees as a less-than stellar Inaugural poem. (For another take on contemporary poetry, read Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” here.)

I didn’t see Mr. Blanco read, but it’s the rare occasional poem (and by that I mean a poem written for a public occasion or event) that I find moving or unstilted. Poems aren’t essays; it’s difficult to write one in the best of circumstances, and to write one for a huge audience on a specific theme is more difficult still. Modern audiences aren’t as aurally attuned as the groundlings of Shakespeare’s theatre, or the audience at nineteenth-century recitals, so there’s another challenge.

Ms. Petri asks, “Can a poem still change anything?”

Of course.

Poems change us. Poems written five hundred years ago, poems written yesterday. Poems we write and poems we read. Poems ask us to see the world, even if it’s just a tiny piece of the world, in a new way, ask us to feel a loss or an exultation not our own, ask us to admit our own vulnerabilities, our own inability to know everything. That’s the thread that runs between William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say” and Milton’s impossibly epic–in the true sense of the word–Paradise Lost, which asks its reader to confront questions about life, death, God, fate, sin, knowledge, art, education, war, suffering, love, parenthood, childhood, creation, poetry itself. And more.

Poetry changes us because we change when we face these questions.