Search for ‘Christian Lorentzen’ (2 articles found)

Listening to John Ashbery

Ashbery tells the story of the genesis of his poem “Pyrography,” commissioned by the Department of the Interior with a deadline of one day (another poet had been commissioned but not produced a work) for an exhibition of American landscape painting at the Smithsonian. Ashbery at first demurred but then agreed to write the poem when told what the fee was. When he turned it in, officials in Washington felt taxpayer dollars were better spent elsewhere. It’s too bad that happened because the opening lines have a strange patriotic beauty:

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping
Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages
Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak.
This is America calling:
The mirroring of state to state,
Of voice to voice on the wires,
The force of colloquial greetings like golden
Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.
In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives;
The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio.

On bullshit, etc.

In 1969 Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York. He called for the city’s secession from the State of New York to become the 51st state; a ban on private cars in Manhattan; free public bicycles; devolution of powers over policing, education, housing and welfare to neighbourhood authorities; a casino on Coney Island or Roosevelt Island to generate tax revenue; and something called ‘Sweet Sundays’, one day each month on which all mechanical transportation, including lifts, would be banned. His fliers were apocalyptic: NEW YORK GETS AN IMAGINATIONOR IT DIES! His slogan was ‘No More Bullshit.’ On the campaign trail, when a student asked him what he would have done about all the snow that hadn’t been ploughed in Queens that winter, Mailer said he’d have pissed on it. One night he called his own supporters ‘spoiled pigs’. It was well known that nine years earlier he’d been arrested for stabbing his wife. ‘The difference,’ he said, ‘between me and the other candidates is that I’m no good and I can prove it.’ He won 41,000 votes, or 5 per cent, and came fifth, though not last, in that summer’s Democratic primary. His running mate, the columnist Jimmy Breslin, got 11 per cent in the race for City Council president. ‘I found out,’ he later said, ‘I was running with Ezra Pound.’ Nothing of the pair’s campaign platform was absorbed into city politics, unless you count the public bicycles that arrived this spring, which rent for $9.95 a day.

When Anthony Weiner entered the New York mayoral race in May, everybody knew he was, by a new measure of techno-uxoriousness, no good. […] There have been sideshows: Eliot Spitzer, who was governor of New York State until he was revealed to be sleeping with prostitutes with his socks on, is running for his own redemption – he has the more modest office of city comptroller in his sights. Of course, he has joined the chorus telling Weiner to go away. And an intern of Weiner’s wrote a tell-all about the campaign (he calls the interns ‘Monica’; people work for him to get an in with his wife, and thus with Hillary Clinton); Weiner’s communications director called the treacherous intern a ‘slutbag’.

Until it emerged that he had his id wired to his portable electronic devices, I had thought Weiner a rather bland politician: a striver and a party hack, another jockish pretty boy, a Paul Ryan of the centre left. In the 1980s, just out of college, where he played hockey (still does, every Monday night), Weiner rose through the office of then Congressman Charles Schumer (now known as ‘Wall Street’s senator’), and was elected New York’s youngest ever city councilman in 1991, using race-baiting tactics in a predominantly white district. He won Schumer’s congressional seat when Schumer ran for the Senate in 1998. In Washington he fell in line, and voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. He made a failed bid for the Democratic nomination for New York mayor in 2005, remembered mostly for a neighbourhood sanitation programme called ‘Weiner’s Cleaners’ (the name has now been scrubbed of all but phallic resonances), raising his profile as a ‘wonkish’, essentially Clintonian Democrat. The allegiance was confirmed in 2010 when he married Abedin in a ceremony presided over by Bill Clinton. In no time they’d assumed the familiar pose of the shamed libidinous pol and his long-suffering loyal bride. Marriage turned out to be a political liability for Weiner. His phone was the thing he used to rattle the cage.

Joe Flaherty, Mailer’s 1969 campaign manager, wrote that it was ‘a dull campaign in a sad city with a grimace of despair carved into its face. Mailer and Breslin managed, for a short season, to turn that grimace into a grin.’ Weiner put grins on the faces of all the city’s political reporters, and his rivals are a fairly dull bunch. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn would be the first female and uncloseted homosexual mayor of Gotham; she’s also been tarred as an accomplice of Michael Bloomberg in rendering New York a city run by and for the rich. To her left, at least tactically, is public advocate Bill de Blasio, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s administration, who focuses on inequality; his script sounds like an awkward adaptation of the ‘Two Americas’ routine deployed in 2008 by John Edwards (who showed that a genuine sex scandal comes with a divorce, a love child and a near-miss at a thirty-year jail sentence). Between Quinn and de Blasio is the mild-mannered, African-American Bill Thompson, a former comptroller who tends to split the difference between their policy prescriptions. The pugnacious current comptroller, John Liu, is mired in campaign finance troubles and running behind Weiner. Whoever emerges top out of this vacuum of charisma will have the advantage over the Republican who trumps an even weaker field.