Monadology In search of the unifying principle. Leibniz This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube.

Modern Poetry

February 28, 2007

by HB

A week ago, Nate asked me why I like Elliott Smith. He was puzzled, since he likes the music for reasons that he believes I might censure (which may well be true). But like him I do.

I admit that when I first heard of Smith I suspected that I would have much the same aesthetic reaction that Nate predicted: oh, that’s silly, self-indulgent music for depressed teenagers from suburbia. (To be fair, I was pretty down on pop music in general at the time.) But the first Smith song that I remember listening to was “Needle in the Hay,” while it played over the famous scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, which was in turn my first Wes Anderson film. I recall not remarking on the song in particular, nor being particularly moved by the scene. In fact, I was ready to criticize it from the start for being maudlin and self-indulgent, as many suicides can be. But somehow, I found that I couldn’t make any such criticism: the seriousness on Luke Wilson’s face, the beautiful fluorescent light, the jump cuts, and above all Elliott Smith’s song fit together to make a moment that, if not particularly lucid to my analytical mind, seemed like an undeniable whole.

By the end of the movie, I was fascinated with Wes Anderson, and soon figured out that repeated viewings are amply rewarded. I’ve found that each scene of his seems to be note-perfect, as though it were a piece of music progressing according to its own natural order, into which individual parts, by natural and graceful choice, happen to fall. This isn’t just the result of careful planning, like putting dalmatian mice in the background of shots; each expression, each tone of voice, appears to have its own precise meaning that bears on every other part of the movie’s story. Watching these movies over and over again, one finds that the same elements have different meanings, much like what Zuckerkandl says goes on when different words are sung to the same music. The unchanging notes still hold together in their own order, but our understanding can only unfold certain strains of their meaning at any one time.

What does this have to do with Elliott Smith? Well, I find that one could easily make similar criticisms of him that people do often make of Anderson: that his repertoire is limited and repetitive; that he’s self-indulgent and juvenile; that his simple sketches focus too much on depression and failure, perhaps even making his audience less virtuous for observing his work. (Admittedly, that last one is probably pretty rare.) But Anderson’s not only demonstrably an excellent artist (one might even say poet); I’d argue that he also makes speech possible in a new and remarkably useful way for those of us alive today. People criticize him for his omnipresent irony and cultural reference, but for Anderson references aren’t just for empty display of his knowledge and irony isn’t a mask for his fear of speaking seriously. Each element of his movies is deployed for particular purposes and to tell a particular story: a Simon and Garfunkel song isn’t meant to be a cultural reference point, but a shared note of experience; a character’s use of the word “feelings” isn’t supposed to make fun of pop psychology, rather he’s using his limited, possibly sappy vocabulary to communicate a simple point in honesty. Sure, it’s not the only way to speak these days; but through its care and complexity, an Anderson film is able to tell some stories honestly and beautifully about crass, messed-up lives from today. He takes the ordinary and arranges it to illuminate the eternal, or at least the fundamentally human. That’s a pretty great accomplishment, in my view.

It’s at this point that I think of yet another man whom I had assumed would be stupid and self-indulgent: Baudelaire. I remember thinking that senior year must suck if we had to read some guy talk about rotting carcasses and old whores’ breasts. But of course I found that Baudelaire was a poet. And that he had the unenviable lot of living in mid-19th-century France. Somehow he wrote true poetry, even after nearly everything beautiful to him had been destroyed. And though he was defiantly a modern, in Le Cygne he showed me that the desolation I felt when looking at the ugly world around me wasn’t new in essence, even though the bleak scenes might be on a larger scale than the ugliness of earlier times. Similarly, Philip Larkin was an honest-to-god poet who was able to write amidst ugly, bourgeois, stultifying surroundings, to keep to classical form, and still speak honestly and beautifully. A poet! In the 20th century! I can still scarcely believe it. Speech is a little less pained, and life a little freer, for them having written.

I’m not prepared to make some sort of comparison of worth among Baudelaire and Larkin and Smith. But I guess I’d say that I like the latter’s music because it’s composed of simple wholes that are not in fact sentimental or self-indulgent, and do in fact honestly evoke and describe the pain and desire of life over the last two decades. In some ways, his music is very similar to the blues. But it’s tough to sing the blues in its traditional form these days, especially if one’s white and from Nebraska. What does such a soul do? He sings, if not the blues, then a version of it one can sing when one’s grown up with the kind of sophistication found in pop and rock music.

I don’t know too much about his lyrics yet. But there’s one song, “Rose Parade”, that reminded me of a Baudelaire poem. If you don’t have it available, you can probably find it on Pandora; I’ve reproduced the lyrics below, although I can’t say that the meaning’s all there when reading the text.

they asked me to come down and watch the parade and to march down the street like the duracell bunny
with a wink and a wave from the cavalcade
throwing out candy that looks like money
to people passing by that all seem to be going the other way
said won’t you follow me down to the rose parade?
tripped over a dog in a choke-chain collar
people were shouting and pushing and saying
and when i traded a smoke for a food stamp dollar
a ridiculous marching band started playing
and got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song
won’t you follow me down to the rose parade?
won’t you follow me down to the rose parade?
won’t you follow me down to the rose parade?
the trumpet has obviously been drinking
because he’s fucking up even the simplest lines
i’d say it’s a sight that’s quite worth seeing
it’s just that everyone’s interest is stronger than mine
and when they clean the street i’ll be the only shit that’s left behind
won’t you follow me down to the rose parade?
won’t you follow me down to the rose parade?
won’t you follow me down to the rose parade?

It’s difficult to find the beauty in a bloated corpse, or a fluorescent light, or a cheap dress, or a dog in a choke-chain collar. But we’re the richer for having it shown to us.

Comments

On February 28 at 6'17 AMPermalink, Amanda wrote:

1

I sometimes get so caught up in the study of literature, writing and teaching that I almost forget why I’m in grad school, almost forget that I love poetry. How beautiful to read this post and know I haven’t forgotten! Those last two lines of your post are what I love most about poetry. I hope my poems, as full of ugliness and pain as they are, hold some of that unexpected beauty and richness for a few readers.

I have the following ars poetica of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s up on my wall. She certainly achieved the aims in this poem again and again; she even wrote a sonnet to Euclid! I suspect Nate might appreciate the British spelling in this poem.

xliii

Still will I harvest beauty where it grows:
In coloured fungus and the spotted fog
Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog
Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows
Of rust and oil, where half a city throws
Its empty tins; and in some spongy log
Whence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog….
And a black pupil in the green scum shows.
Her the inhabiter of divers places
Surmising at all doors, I push them all.
Oh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge
Turn back forevermore with craven faces,
I tell you Beauty bears an ultra fringe
Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!

On February 28 at 10'19 AMPermalink, KevinD wrote:

2

I’m not prepared to make some sort of comparison of worth among Baudelaire and Larkin and Smith. But I guess I’d say that I like the latter’s music because it’s composed of simple wholes that are not in fact sentimental or self-indulgent, and do in fact honestly evoke and describe the pain and desire of life over the last two decades.


How very true that is. I read in an article that a colleague of Smith’s decribed him as “painfully straightforward”, which doesn’t make for much of a character but is certainly an asset when writing apposite lyrics. I’ve seen some of the rare t.v. interviews that exist and he appears a little reticent but honest and charming and this shines through in his work. I suspect similar of Wes Anderson and his films.

In Stained Glass eye, an unreleased track, Smith exemplifies your final sentence perfectly in a waltz time.


People sink your boat
When you cut a tragic figure
They drink their lemonade
and throw you a line

Boil your problem down
To yes or no, what’s the matter?
They bomb your promenade
and this makes it shine

You must play the comic
if they want one
and describe their moment
when they’re in one

People pass you by
Passing up the chance to know you
They’re irregular
in the usual way

“You should crack a smile
Once in a while, it makes you pretty”
It makes you wanna give
them a piece of your mind

But they can’t be people
not if I’m one
If i have to be like them
i’d rather be no one

Couldn’t make the scene
not with all the people looking
All these connoisseurs
on guard all the time

I’d rather spend the day
blank as hell by the window
Looking out of my
Stained Glass Eye

Kudos to Nate for pointing me to Elliott Smith. It’s been very rewarding.

Kevin

On March 1 at 1'21 PMPermalink, hb wrote:

3

Thanks, guys, for the kind words and for the further reading. Kevin: Do you recommend a way to hear a version of that song? I haven’t had a chance to do much research on it. Amanda: I’m flattered beyond words that my post had the effect on you that it did.

On March 1 at 8'52 PMPermalink, Nate wrote:

4

HB wrote:

People criticize him for his omnipresent irony and cultural reference, but for Anderson references aren’t just for empty display of his knowledge and irony isn’t a mask for his fear of speaking seriously. Each element of his movies is deployed for particular purposes and to tell a particular story: a Simon and Garfunkel song isn’t meant to be a cultural reference point, but a shared note of experience; a character’s use of the word “feelings” isn’t supposed to make fun of pop psychology, rather he’s using his limited, possibly sappy vocabulary to communicate a simple point in honesty.

A poet! In the 20th century! I can still scarcely believe it. Speech is a little less pained, and life a little freer, for them having written.

I particularly appreciated reading these points; I hadn’t thought so particularly of what made Anderson and Smith’s irony different. Now that I pause to consider it, ironic indulgence is something that drives me crazy: it strikes me as lazy, pretentious, and generally the sort of thing that stifles inspiration rather than encourages it. But there is something about shared speech that creates honesty in both of their work. Certainly Smith, disavow any certain communication with his audience as he in fact did, wrote in an astonishingly lucid manner. His songs are achingly transparent. So transparent, in fact, that it was only the marvelous sophistication of his ideas and utter refusal to break that deadpan of his that kept his music from being emo. The more I listen to Smith these days, the more his manner of singing seems insistent upon remaining musical, rather than lapsing into something primarily lingual. HB’s right to say that the meaning is not all there without the music.

Anderson, similarly, never condescends to his characters, never treats them as mere metaphors. I suspect that this may be an artistic instinct that is fundamental to his success—he sees that there is a kind of honesty to writing, playing, and filming a character which is wondrous in whatever form it takes. This acuity of vision—I’m asserting that he first recognized it in other art—is much of what leads him, I would theorize, to write so sparsely. To stray farther and farther from extended dialogue, from the kind of writing that requires inertia to make things happen. Instead, he starts from the perfect moment—in RT’s case, with Margot getting off of the bus—and constructs a movie that deserves to be paired with that divine beginning.

I apologize for not being more coherent on this subject—it’s not easy to write well about movies, and it’s vastly more difficult to write well about music. HB confronts that honestly and directly in speaking of Smith’s songs as “wholes”, a term without much content but with an undeniable truth to it.

I apologize, HB, for perhaps thinking that you wouldn’t appreciate music about pain, which is to take too simplistically your philosophy of “standing up”.

Amanda:

I quite enjoyed the Millay poem you quoted, as it deals very directly with a subject I’ve attempted to elucidate many times both to myself and others. It also is a wonderfully vibrant sonnet—few poems have comparable ability to immediately envelop the reader. I’ve never seen a rhyme scheme like that for the ending, though—it took me a re-reading to even figure out what the heck was going on.

Kevin:

I’m thrilled to find what a Smith fan you’ve become. I must admit that there was little doubt in my mind, given that you were a Cohen and McLean fan already, that if you gave Smith a chance you’d be converted.

Thanks for stopping by, mate.

On March 1 at 11'39 PMPermalink, hb wrote:

5

Nate wrote: it’s not easy to write well about movies, and it’s vastly more difficult to write well about music. HB confronts that honestly and directly in speaking of Smith’s songs as “wholes”, a term without much content but with an undeniable truth to it.

Yeah, in re-reading this post, I find that I didn’t really say much about Smith or his music directly. And calling a piece of music a whole is startlingly useless in isolation: it eliminates, perhaps, only atonal music and techno.

I apologize, HB, for perhaps thinking that you wouldn’t appreciate music about pain, which is to take too simplistically your philosophy of “standing up”.

The misunderstanding is no doubt due solely to my own poor explication. I think we agree that pain is a premise of human existence.

On March 2 at 4'02 AMPermalink, KevinD wrote:

6

hb.. there’s a wealth of ES unreleased tracks and demos at
http://www.elliottsmithbsides.com/index2.html

Check out the Place Pigalle Demos for Stained Glass Eye.

On March 2 at 5'59 PMPermalink, Sarah Ball wrote:

7

Has anyone noticed the similarity between ‘Rose Parade’ and the Thomas Hardy poem ‘Exeunt Omnes’? I have often compared Smith to Hardy, particularly in their approach to suffering: both have a profound understanding of it which they betray through their similar straightforward artistry. Please tell me if you disagree, but it seems to me that they both capitulate to it, turning in on themselves, rather than taking the healthier, higher road of turning that understanding outward into pity. One can ask - is the first understanding of suffering more conducive to artistic expression than the second? Is it merely easier to express, and so more prevalent in our society (someone mentioned ‘emo’ earlier)? I have a sympathy with both Smith and Hardy, and it was exciting to stumble across ‘Exeunt Omnes’, which brought ‘Rose Parade’ so quickly to mind. By the way: I think that Smith’s capability of expressing suffering is fully realized in his song ‘Pretty Mary K’- not the one on Figure 8, but the one from the Either/Or era Demos. In my opinion, this song contains his most powerful lyrics.

On March 2 at 9'00 PMPermalink, Nate wrote:

8

For everyone’s convenience, I thought I’d post the poem and lyrics that Sarah mentions in her comment:

Exeunt Omnes

I

   Everybody else, then, going,
And I still left where the fair was?…
Much have I seen of neighbour loungers
   Making a lusty showing,
   Each now past all knowing.

II

   There is an air of blankness
In the street and the littered spaces;
Thoroughfare, steeple, bridge and highway
   Wizen themselves to lankness;
   Kennels dribble dankness.

III

   Folk all fade. And whither,
As I wait alone where the fair was?
Into the clammy and numbing night-fog
   Whence they entered hither.
   Soon one more goes thither!

Thomas Hardy

Pretty Mary K (Either/Or era)

Pretty Mary K walks along the dock
With some sailor’s pay shoved down in her sock
Pretty Mary K with some little boy in blue
Who can’t stay away from you

Pretty Mary K took him back to town
I’m down here by the bay where the water pounds
Up against the wall crying black and blue
Keeps me away from you

Pretty words that you whispered
Maybe I misunderstood
Somebody’s not payin attention
What they promise and their word isn’t good

Oh Mary K, I can see your face
Down there in the waves, faded and erased
but I know it’s just a reflection of the moon
A big fake resembling you

I’m gonna go down in the water
Fill my mouth up full of sand
I’ll be waiting still impatient
with my dead imagination while you’re with some other man

Pretty Mary K is off in somebody’s room
I’m down here by the bay my arm around the moon
But I’ll be with you soon just as soon as I pay
A walk ‘cross the water with pretty Mary K

Walk on water pretty Mary K

Elliott Smith