Prison Broken?

Prison Break - one of American TV's best-loved and most entertaining guilty-pleasures of the 00s - set itself an intriguing structural challenge: the first season would be mostly set in a maximum security prison, and be all about attempted release from said constraint; the second season is about escaped convicts unleashed and on the run. In brief: control vs. chaos, or perhaps, formal versus free verse. If season one was poetry, season two of Prison Break is prose. The tone is different, and dissipated.

One thinks of the difference between the films The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal - where, similarly, the issue was of order and escapade. Visions of Dr. Lecter strolling about sun-stroked Italy wearing a hat and carrying a Herald Tribune like a retired Interior Decorator from Des Moines was a let-down, to be sure. So too, the squalid squabbles of the "Fox River 8" once set out in the vast landscape that is America. But, thankfully, thematic and poetic elements survive, not least the mythic underbelly of the whole show - such as Pandora's Box (another PB). Now, as T-Bag (Robert Knepper, pictured) says, "the hat is over the wall" - Situation Normal all fuzzed up. Michael couldn't have counted on - his pretty expertise never even considered - the ramifications of his original mission (shades of neo-con non-planning in Iraq).

He does begin to reflect (in a Catholic confessional) on his guilt, responsibility, and other childhood matters, as we begin to understand how his origins as a gifted wunderkind stem partly from terrible childhood experiences (mirroring the religious "dark night of the soul" episodes in the middle of the first season). There has always been a Crime & Punishment element to the series - a sympathy for villains with complex inner lives - and it is good to see this continue.

The second season has yet to jump the shark (I am at episode 12) - but if the writers continue to use the cheap eye-trick of FBI agents ringing on one door only to cut wide and later learn it was a house across town (trope stolen from TSOTL) I will put it in a basket. Also, not since John Webster has so much murder been allied to such narrative excess - surely, not all the characters need to be killed off at such metronomic intervals?

The violence levels on the show have risen - and one wonders whether Fox is encouraging the repeated use of torture as a commentary on the anti-Geneva Convention activities associated with extraordinary rendition, or a way of dulling our minds to its horrors. The "water-boarding" treatment of one of the main characters in Episodes 11 and 12 was particularly harrowing - cruel and inhuman. It is disappointing to note that The Emmy Award nominations for this year have entirely overlooked the show. Season 3 airs mid-September ...

Quizzed Shows

The BBC lied. Perhaps not shocking news, but it should be. Those three letters (two the same) once symbolised - along with wartime propaganda - a sense of integrity, a sense of British decency. No more. A few years back, the elegant, if somewhat worthy film Quiz Show told the story of how the Golden Age of American TV in the Eisenhower Era was exposed for the sham it was - about as honest as a two-bit carnival in Idaho - but the story seemed remote from contemporary experience - we all knew, or thought we knew, that the Wizard of Oz was trumped up quackery, and that grand illusions and narratives were the order of the day; unflappable, cynical, we took our daily doses of TV with grains of salt leavening the laudanum - in a blissful opium dream, unwilling to consider the truth, or consequences. Well. If institutions like the BBC fix their contests and call-ins, for better TV, what else is fixed, in British society? Dossiers for war? Reports on police culpability in the shooting of innocents? Dear me. Everything is broken, as Dylan once sang. Say it ain't so, Joe, as the other song goes. But why so much dishonesty at the Beeb? I'd suggest one of the signature styles of the times is a signal failing of integrity, especially among the competitive younger generations. You see it in the suits and ties and purple shirts of Estate Agents everywhere, beetling about town in their tiny clown cars, jumping out to lie like a snake-oil huckster in Montana and sell you a subsiding shed for a mansion. They lie to us, to make money, to get ahead. Blair lied (ho hum), the spin doctors lied (yawn), now Comic Relief seems to have been involved in sexed-up phone-ins. What's next? Don't tell me someone might start fixing poetry contests, rigging juries, and promoting mediocre talents simply for fame and fortune? Resist the temptations of the BBC!

Irish Poet Deserta

Carcanet has recently published Selected Poems by Thomas Kinsella. Kinsella is fast approaching his 80th birthday (born in Dublin in 1928). This year, he was awarded The Freedom of that city (as was U2, shamefully before). As younger Irish poet-critic David Wheatley recently indicated in his Guardian review, here is a major Irish poet to reckon with - a figure who, if the poetry world were at all balanced, proportional and fair - would be mentioned in the same (or an earlier) breath as Heaney, Longley and Mahon (indeed, he is of an older generation and is in fact their senior in many ways).

I am currently making my way through this new collection, with something akin to awe and gratitude (as the blurb might say). How do we not all know these poems (or do we?). "Baggot Street Deserta", so far, has struck a particular chord - its combination of evening young man's reflective doubt, and poetic high rhetorical flying, manages to get a bit of Yeats, a bit of Prufrock-era Eliot into something that's also entirely Kinsella's own style.

Listen to Kinsella's recent interview on Irish radio.

French Made

There's a good and interesting review written by the British poet and critic, Lachlan Mackinnon, of an important new anthology of English poetry translated into French, in the July 6, 2007 issue (no. 5440) of the TLS. The book in question is from the canon-making Gallimard, and is titled Anthologie Bilingue de la Poesie Anglaise. It is relatively comprehensive, stretching from Beowulf to Simon Armitage, at over two thousand pages.

According to the review, the translators (there are dozens employed) mostly get things right, and, though there are rather curious omissions (Kenneth White) and curiously obscure inclusions (Michael Edwards), the work is ultimately impressive: "the editors of this volume and the translators have achieved an extraordinary entente cordiale."

Eyewear recently lived in Paris for a few years (2001-2003) and is much encouraged by this newly-expressed interest in the English poem. Poetry is apparently less of a living form among the French, with a few Oulipo-exceptions, unlike, say, fiction, or the theoretical essay, so even French poetry gets relative short shrift in France. There are also fewer anthologies of poetry, than in English publishing. I recall, last year, entering a stylishly-situated, and book-crowded bookshop on Saint-Germain, and having the anthology section pointed out to me by a disinterested shop assistant. It was a few brief shelves way at the top, and he gestured at a ladder. I'd climb it for this new book.

Interminable Entertainment

Eyewear would like to report that the war to colonise our imaginations has been won. Prince, as we have all heard in the last few days, has begun to disseminate (I select this term carefully), his songs for free, via newspapers and the Internet; meanwhile, reports stream in of a generation of "screen kids" raised on a steady diet of web-based, digi-tainment. Meanwhile, the Potter franchise - a mighty juggernaut - rolls forward.

Students of media and culture might want to suggest a term for this landscape of ours - one with no foreseeable horizon - "Interminable Entertainment". Put bluntly, there is no end in sight, to TV episodes airing, music groups releasing songs, films being produced, books being published - and new works being created and distributed in media as yet unknown. Creators have a moral right to protect these works - but do we, the targeted audience, have a moral right to resist? To ever shut down, turn away, avoid the never-ending stories and unceasing cacophony of new releases, new writers, new stars, new franchises, and on and on and on. Truth is, and exhaustingly, the people who, like busy bees or productive ants, scurry to make new things for us to consume as cultural entertainment, cannot stop, if they wanted - new people would replace them. Why? Two reasons: glamour and money. The industries that sustain a never-ending supply of product for our minds pay well, and, if only by association with celebrities and famous artists, are considered prestigious by many.

You may say I am being a curmudgeon here. But the lack of surcease, for instance, in the idea of televisual fare, is utterly numbing. Knowing, as I do, that moving images used for narrative pleasure, will be a form of mass communication for the next century, if not longer, fills me with dread and melancholy. All those concepts, all those pitches.

To keep it new, reviewers and marketers speak of new forms of distribution - but, whether the entertainment comes through a TV or other screen (or directly onto the retina) it is still someone selling something to us, to entrance us - shadows on a cave wall, that, alas, and classically, continue to deviate from a sunnier truth.

Poem by John Menaghan

Eyewear is glad to welcome John Menaghan (pictured) this Friday. Menaghan was born in New Jersey to Irish-American parents. He lives in Venice, California.

He is winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and other awards. Menaghan teaches literature and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he also serves as Director of both the Irish Studies and Summer in Ireland programs and runs the annual LMU Irish Cultural Festival. Several of his poetry collections have been published by Irish press Salmon, such as All The Money In The World and She Alone.

Menaghan’s recent move into playwriting has seen his one-act play A Rumor of Rain performed at the Empty Stage Theater in Los Angeles (as part of an evening that included work by John Patrick Shanley and Neil Simon). He is currently working on two full-length plays, one set in Berkeley, California and the other in Belfast, Northern Ireland and a sequence of short plays on the theme of leaving and being left behind. His third volume of poetry is forthcoming from Salmon in 2009.


Home

This place suffused not
with spirits but thin traces
gaunt remains of deeds
done words spoken or left
unsaid undone undoes her
now all these years later
coming back to find she
has no home not even one
away from home no firm
connection to the earth no
place that calls her back
and says abide here you
will thrive and feel fully
alive don't look back or
so the wisdom goes and
maybe it's always folly
this effort to visit a past
life situation context lost
dissolved surrendered at
the border to some newer
world so many years ago
some lustrous future once
her future till it too grew
old became no more than
just another past she'll
try to visit someday and
discover it too lies beyond
her grasp teasing her with
dangled shards of fact
fragments of circumstance
so many places where she
once existed still exist
themselves after a fashion
still remain but do not
know her name . . .

Poem by John Menaghan

Reprinted from She Alone (Salmon Poetry, 2006) with permission of the author.

Moving On Up

There are - according to engine Google - 13 million or more hits that come up when you search for "eyewear". This humble blogspot is now so popular, it is 4th on that list. Who ever said "men seldom make passes / at girls who wear glasses"?