Halloween in Chicago

Near the Navy Pier, this little girl in her wings -- like a Vivian Girl from a Henry Darger painting! -- was climbing a lamppost while her mother sat on a bench talking to another woman and watching the fiery waters come shooting up out of a fountain. They'd lit the water all molten lava colors for Halloween, and there was fog-machine mist pouring out too. But the winged girl was the enchanted thing.

Sarah Palin, who understands it?

I watched an awful bit of video in which Sarah Palin called Joe the Plumber on stage, eyed his tight pants and shirt with a look that bordered on the lascivious, and said to the crowd at her rally, "Oh, I knew I'd like him -- Carrharts and steel-toed boots, he's one of us."

Here's my question: is this the gesture of a cynical politician who's manipulating the public by appealing to a lowbrow class-resentment, or is she an authentic populist fascist who believes what she says?

What do you think?

P.S. I know that neither answer makes one feel any better, but I'm still curious.

Dental Products and the Homosexual Agenda

My dentist in Houston is wonderful. When we talked about Halloween, he said he was thinking of going as Sarah Palin, but he wasn't sure. Turns out the local bars are expecting a huge turnout of Palin impersonators, so they're referring to the street party going on between the bars in Montrose as "the Night of a Thousand Sarahs."

On the way out I stopped to pay my bill, and there under glass on the counter is a correspondence between my dentist and Jerry Falwell. It took place during the heady days of TinkyWinky, and Bruce had written to Falwell to point out that dental dams were often lavender and that this might be a sign that those pushing the homosexual agenda had infiltrated the dental product industry. Falwell wrote back and thanked him for pointing this out, and said he'd pray for him.

Holy smoke.

Back in the USA

Ten hour flight today. I can report that there's a great article in the New Yorker this week (the issue with goblins being scared away by a couple of kids trick or treating as McCain and Palin on the cover!) about evangelical youth and sex, and how at risk those kids are because of not having access to birth control and because sex is so pressurized for them. It makes perfect sense, psychologically, but I was still startled to learn about the pregnancy rate of girls who take those virginity pledges. Kids who grow up under these anti-sex principles have a rate of unplanned pregnancy and of STDs much higher than for children of godless liberals; it's pretty fascinating. And I can report that Dr. Strangelove holds up very, very well, and Taxi Driver maybe doesn't; the former's dire wit seems just right for this moment, while the latter's portentous mood feels a little crazed.

And now I have had quite enough time zone crossing for a bit, and I'm glad to be on earth in newly cooled-down, autumnal Houston. Tomorrow: tux shopping, a student conference, a root canal, and a class on Whitman Whew.

cultural literacy

Today I did two radio interviews, one for National Radio in Ireland, and one for Night Waves on the BBC's Radio 3. The Irish interview took place in a studio in Oxford, so I couldn't see my interviewer, just hear his voice as he delivered a set of questions and responses to my book THEORIES & APPARITIONS so insightful that I was happily taken aback. I don't think the book has found such an insightful, active reader, one who drew subtle connections, mapping out the architectural structure of the book with an acumen so sharp that I felt instructed about the poems myself. This just wouldn't happen, couldn't happen, in the U.S., not only because we simply don't have radio like this but also because we barely have such poetry critics.

Later, I went over to Broadcasting House in London -- see their moody, beautiful sculptural facade, above -- and appeared on Nightwaves, a wide-ranging cultural program. Present were a theatre critic talking about a production of Love's Labor Lost, a film historian discussing Hunger, a new documentary on an IRA hunger strike in an Irish prison, and yours truly. The interviewer handled all of us with equal ease, and he was consistently penetrating, charming and alert. We talked about John Berryman, Wordsworth, Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau. I couldn't help but think about the relative poverty of American cultural life by contrast; here was an urbane center, where arts and ideas of all sorts were held in esteem, and taken seriously through an attentive, critical, engaged examination.

And then I walked out, an hour later, into a snowstorm. Honest. It seemed the weirdest thing, the windshields of the parked cars all gone completely white.

Vermeer-ish

It was the kind of London day when the weather seems to leak over from Amsterdam: big dramatic white clouds, with gray undersides, scuttling along quickly in cool dryish air, and the light somehow both very clear (picking out every detail on the buildings, especially when they're in the sun) and soft at once. It's exactly the kind of sky on those big Dutch pastoral scenes by Ruysdael, the ones with flat fields and bits of woods and clusters of cows under the big sky. And the same as in Vermeer's street scene in Delft, this light that's so paradoxically precise and kindly at once.

I had lunch at Villandry (like Dean & DeLucca with tables) with Robin Robertson, a wonderful Scots poet and my editor over here, and Fiona Sampson, a poet whose work is new to me and the editor of Poetry Review, and Hannah Ross, my publicist at Jonathan Cape. I got an earful of good gossip on British poetry, and then went to the Soho Gym in Covent Garden, which is a world center of beauty -- a high concentration of breathtaking fellows. I wandered around some Covent Garden stores before bravely (I thought) coming home on the bus. What is it about taking the bus in a strange town? Always that slight anxiety that it might go God knows where, and you wouldn't know where (or even how) to get off, or that everybody in the world but you knows how to pay the fare and what kind of ticket you need. Nobody tells you; people who ride the bus are supposed to know already. I confess I have never been on a bus in NYC in my whole life, and here I am riding from Trafalgar Square to Westminster to Pimlico.

A very desirable address