Wednesday 24 February 2021

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: ON POETS & LAUREATES

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has died, aged 101, and by coincidence (or not) on the 200th anniversary of John Keats' death. See my previous post for more about the Keats anniversary, and for a poem of mine from 1972 about him.

I've gone back to 1999 for this piece about Ferlinghetti, whom I interviewed for the Financial Times Weekend; the angle being his recent appointment as Poet Laureate of San Francisco contrasted with the long-running story about the choice of a new Poet Laureate of Britain. I've appended a little note about the editing of the piece, and about Ferlinghetti's interview, which was entertaining in the extreme...

You can link to it here at Medium, and with this link you do not need to be a subscriber, though you might well consider being one.

Tuesday 23 February 2021

ACROSS HAMPSTEAD HEATH: Keats' 200th anniversary

For the 200th anniversary of John Keats' death, I've unearthed a long-lost poem (of mine, not his) I committed way back when & prompted a little essay about the day I wrote it & more since then. I'll reprint the poem below, but if you want to know the story behind its writing in 1972, and about Keats' and my relationship, you can get the full package over at Medium. Use this friends link, and you'll get have access to it even if you don't subscribe to Medium. 

 

ACROSS HAMPSTEAD HEATH

He measured the room with a fury of pacing;

It shrunk, more confining, with each angry stride.

His eyes at the window through dim glass were tracing

The flight of a swallow, its leisurely glide.

But he felt no leisure; he was bound to his writing,

And each unfinished line made his solitude worse.

His muse was his torture, each thought fled him fighting

Against being committed to the prison of verse.


Just to be one with nature, footsteps drowning his cry

But the swallow had hidden, in some corner of sky.

Darkened clouds passed him quickly; the words came and went,

He failed to grasp them with his weakening eye,

And could not now write them; his pen gone bone dry.

Words flown away wasted; the energy spent.

Monday 22 February 2021

TALES FROM ISOLATION ROW: DAWN ADDAMS, THE SAINT AND LIFE MAGAZINE, MAY 17, 1954

Tonight
on isolation row: I watched a 1964 episode of The Saint called The Lawless Lady, with Dawn Addams opposite Roger Moore (this was their second pairing I've seen). Anyway, a few clicks later, I am looking at the May 17, 1954 issue of Life magazine. Big stories: The 'tragic' fall of Dienbienphu; too much fuss over the 'boring' Army-McCarthy hearings; Roger Bannister breaks the 4 minute mile; and a big show at the Met with Sargent, Whistler & Mary Cassatt (in case you thought Cassatt has been ignored until recently). But what was the cover story? Dawn Addams' wedding in Rome to Vittorio, Prince of Roccasecca di'Volsei. Guess who showed up late, and had to order off the menu at the reception? Charlie and Oona Chaplin (you may remember Addams in King Of New York?) There was a scandi royal wedding that week too and Sister Cecilia battling commies in Slovakia....Life did it all: celebrity gossip & right wing politics, and an amazing set of ads for the American Way of my childhood dreams...
 

 

Thursday 18 February 2021

RUSH LIMBAUGH: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Rush Limbaugh went up quickly last night on the Guardian's website; you can link to it here. His was the kind of life that tests the obituary writing concept of "nil nisi bonum" to the utmost. I tried to keep my writing balanced while not "normalizing" him as either a political thinker or broadcasting stalwart. This meant that a few points needed to be left out.

I had pointed out then when Limbaugh was a struggling high school student, his parents, pillars of privilege in the Cape Giradeau community, got him an internship at a local radio station--and he was quickly on the air as "Rusty Sharp", which would have been a good stage name for the rest of his career.

Later, when he dropped out of college, he faced the draft, like all of us from the Vietnam era. He appears to have been deferred by a medical condition called a pilonidal cyst, which is on that grows around the cleft in the tailbone cleft just above the buttocks. There appears to be no truth to his sometimes claim that it was a football knee injury; he played only one year in high school and his coach recalled no injury at all. Limbaugh, like many war-mongerers, was himself a "chicken hawk", which did not stop his constant attacks on Bill Clinton for his deferments. 

I mention Limbaugh's link to Morton Downey, and earlier TV talk hosts like Joe Pyne and Alan Burke. They were all right wing; Downey in the 70s, the other two in the 60s: when I was in high school I went along with the other two "smart guys" in my class to be in Burke's studio audience. He was more erudite than Pyne, who looked like Jimmy Hoffa's meaner brother, but part of his shtick was putting down his audience, and some of his guests, with ad hominum insults. The thing was, these guys were never considered legitimate news and not billed as such, and their programmes were not carried on networks (because of the fairness doctrine) but sold in syndication to local stations. I also mentioned Long John Nebel, the greatest of the all-night talk DJs, the model for the Nightfly in Donald Fagen's great record detailing the Sixties. Nebel was proof that weirdness sold, and the lesson was not lost on Limbaugh's predecessors, nor on Limbaugh himself.

He realised that he could turn political discussion into a sort of late-night freak show: equate his political enemies, "liberals" "feminazis" whatever, as loonies just like the people who told Long John at three ayem about being kidnapped by aliens and having pilonidal cyst probes while in their spacecraft.

It was the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan that opened the door for right-wing talk radio and eventually Fox News. Roger Ailes was no one's fool, and he saw the opportunity characters like Limbaugh provided now that stations and networks no longer faced an obligation to at least be truthful or let the other side present its own arguments. O'Reilly, Hannity, my namesake but no relation Tucker, Ingraham and the rest all spring from the viagra loins of Limbaugh.

The one case left out, which probably should be in, was his treatment in 2012 of Janet Flake, a Georgetown grad student who testified in Congress about the denial of access to contraception which many health-care plans enforced on women. Limbaugh attacked her and her parent non-stop for weeks, calling her a slut and a prostitute---and it cost his show sponsors. It was not quite a beginning of the end, but from that moment until now, in the obituary season, it was hard to argue Limbaugh was an honest player in the political world, rather than an ideological bully more interested in attacking those in whom he perceived weakness than actually bolstering the right ot the Republicans. But they were grateful for his help--hence Trump's awarding him the tarnished Presidential Medal of "Freedom", which in the end didn't get Limbaugh's support when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.