Courting Barbie

“Are you going to see ‘Barbie’, a friend asks?

“I’m going to write about not seeing it,” I say to my friend.

Besides, I’m very busy these days, reading Robert Musil’s great masterwork, The Man Without Qualities, (vol.1), written in German originally and not-so-long ago translated into a newish English edition.

Musil’s ideas are bumping into one another all over the place. And so I feel the need to descend to a lower, more procedural level of consciousness in order to thrash out at least some of Musil’s supercharged life-and-death issues in the complete utter darkness of personal privacy.  He’s a deep-sea diver of a writer, dazzling on the surface and even more exciting when you put the scuba gear on and swim straight down until you reach the ocean floor to find a sentence like this—“It was between these two poles of Neither and Nor that the pendulum of evolution was swinging when mankind first learned, more than eighteen but not quite twenty centuries ago, that there would be such a spiritual court at the end of the world”, (p.268.)

Rather suddenly the English language is of interest to me again. I pick up WCWilliams longish-poem in Spring And All, ’To Elsie’, that begins, ‘The pure products of America/go crazy’ and ends with ‘No one/to witness/and adjust, no one to drive the car.’  

Whatever happened to those lines of Williams, I wonder? Where are the ‘pure products of America’, having gone crazy? I always think of Williams as a straight-forward poet in which I am almost always tempted to see what appears to be a very simple colloquial presentation, then come to believe I’m seeing the poet suddenly get up and walk off the field, having left behind a kind of creation mosaic made up of glittering bits and pieces, little pieces of glass and stone that one of my friends finds in the sands of Ocean Beach and makes into jewelry.

 No Barbie, no Billie Jean King…screen shot, Sept.4, 2023.