A poet’s grave is better than anything in the Louvre. In the dirt, beneath a large book-shaped stone, is a box containing a person who laid bare their heart for whoever cared to pay attention, and whose life was shaped by some of the same strange forces as your own.
Yes, gone are the days when an insular clique of critics had the ability to make or break artists’ careers — and good riddance. That was more power than anybody deserves. The quality of a critic’s work now carries more weight than their cult of personality. That’s not a bad thing. Insightful, incisive, and inventive writing will always have a future and an audience. So long as there’s art, there will be art criticism.
Art criticism is not in crisis. Good art criticism is the crisis.
It started with a thump, the grim sound of a bird hitting the window of my little office shack. When I ran outside to check, I found the first hermit thrush that I had ever seen in our yard, lying dead in the grass. As I lay those few feathered ounces to rest beneath a rose bush, my sorrow was tinged with something like embarrassment. Here I was, studying nature and writing books about it, and I’d had no idea that this celebrated bird was wintering in the shrubs just a few feet from my desk.
The book is a rigorous study into the chasm between how you dream your life may go and the realities of life. It examines the frustrations, the unexpected news, the ways decisions reverberate, the ways wealth – or the lack thereof – can compound.
Farrell has six volumes of poetry published; it would seem there were stories, opinions, reminiscences, jokes and goodness knows what else he wanted to tell, which he felt were better suited to the short story form rather than poetry. The result is a collection of short pieces with the lilt and beauty of poetry – lyrical verse, perhaps, in the wolf’s clothing of the conventional short story.
As John Scanlan demonstrates in his new book The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life, trash and the political imagination have always nourished each other. Taxpayer money handled by political criminals also circulates through similar secret underworlds. Mounds of refuse were stacked “higher than automobiles parked at curbs” in the Lower East Side during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. It made the downtown Yippie provocateur Abbie Hoffman, who was organizing a protest at the time against the government’s neglect of his neighborhood, wax apocalyptic: “Future historians would write that America was destroyed by a nuclear attack when in actuality the people just stopped picking up their trash.” The strike was only nine days long, but it forced Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller to offer a new contract to the workers, proving that some vermin will run away from trash rather than toward it.
On reading this book for the first time, I bought a copy and sent it to some dear musician friends, where the wife of the partnership has early onset dementia. He pronounced it ‘consoling’. On re-reading the text I was alert to the slightly random nature of the experiences. But as a document of the extraordinary power of music to transform lives, even at the end, it cannot be faulted, and I would recommend it as a source of hope to anyone who is affected by life-limiting conditions.