John Ashbery on John Clare’s Mouse’s Nest (Commonplace Book)

[Mouse’s Nest, the commonplace selection from a week ago] exemplifies what it is in [Clare] that I find endlessly fascinating. Here is Clare on his rounds again, telling us what he has just seen but neglecting to mention why he thinks it ought to interest us or even him. Though it has been likened to Burns, there is no suggestion implicit or otherwise that the sight of this “wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie” has stirred Clare to reflections on his own unsatisfactory condition or that of mankind in general; there is not even a sign that Clare’s mouse is cowrin’ and tim’rous. Clare just happened by; before he recognized the creature as a mouse, he thought she looked odd and grotesque. Subsequently he saw no reason to revise his estimate and even less to humanize or allegorize her. Instead, after noting that she found her nest again, his attention turns, as the poem is signing off, to the undistinguished landscape. The water is having difficulty making its way over the pebbles. It must be a dry summer. The only hint of grandeur in the closure is the appearance of the cesspools – broad, old, glittering, they have their dignity under the sun, even though most travelers would hurriedly pass them by with pinched noses. And the poem is done. Clare was here – he saw what there was to see and noted it down, then went about the business of idle observation, ready to collect further swatches of nature as casually as one might pick a wildflower, press it between the pages of a book, and forget it.

Superman Returns: a rant about story failures

Superman Returns was an uneven movie. Much of it was lame (stupidity about crystals, a boring Lois Lane), and some of it was good (Jimmy Olsen and James Marsden were so good they unbalanced the movie, putting my sympathies with minor characters rather than the main ones, and Lex Luthor had a great first scene). Much of the film chugs along in an uninteresting way -- I already saw the original movies, didn't need a movie that did the same thing the 1980s movies did. I can still rent those movies if I want to. I want something NEW from the new Superman movie. I want more than a pale study of the nostalgias. Characters need to be reinvented from time to time (as Frank Miller reinvented Batman in the Dark Knight Returns). Making Superman's cape darker is not enough. As Brad pointed out to me you can tell how boring the movie is by looking at how each character (with the exception of Lex Luthor) is introduced for the first time in the film. They don't get great introductions because Singer knows we already know them. These are characters we have seen before, so no fanfare -- there they are, doing their usual thing.

Then we get to the scene where Lex Luthor's goons pound Superman on kryptonite island. (Yeah, it's weird that Superman cannot tell for a while that it is a kryptonite island -- that is a storytelling failure I don't want to talk about right now; I suppose it has something to do with the fact that is is a kind of hybrid kryptonite-crystal thing but the movie does not feel like being clear on this point). The scene is powerful. Kevin Spacey is an uninteresting Lex Luthor for a lot of the movie, channeling Gene Hackman as Routh channels Reeves, but Spacey SHINES in this scene. J. Hoberman, in his review in the Village Voice describes "the cold sexual enjoyment [Luthor] projects watching the weakened Man of Steel being stomped," which is exactly right. Then Luthor, wonderfully not above getting his hands dirty, comes in for the final, up-close and personal stab and it is really horrific. Superman falls. I got choked up, which is impressive during a movie that was not that good. It was just a very good scene. Eventually Superman goes on to foil Luthor's evil plan, and the movie takes a dull turn and goes on for 45 minutes more than it should. At the end Luthor, escaping kryptonite island, gets stranded on a little desert island with Parker Posey. The end.

Luthor wanted beach front property and now he has it, though not in the form he expected. He wanted lots of land and now he is stuck with only a little. Plus he has to put up with Parker Posey being annoying. The screenwriters must have been patting themselves on the back: "Hilarious! Ironic! Classic!" But it is just wrong. That is a punishment appropriate to a comedy character, a buffoon like the bad guy in One Crazy Summer, a guy who is going to shake his fist in the air and yell "Darn those crazy kids!" Superman does not come face to face with Luthor again after Luthor kicks him off the cliff. That is just wrong. Comedy punishment cannot be the end for the guy who tortured and degraded Superman in a quasi-sexual way. The film demands a scene where the nearly indestructible Superman confronts the man who brought him to the edge of death. Do something creative with the scene, fine, but you cannot leave it out. And they did. And they are idiots.

While cleaning my house this weekend for relatives I watched a chunk of View from the Top, the horrifically bad Gweneth Paltrow movie where her highest dream is to become a flight attendant (Mike Myers is the instructor, and Candace Bergen plays her role model). The big bad in the film is Christina Applegate, who -- gasp! -- switches her exam with Paltrow's, damning Paltrow to being a local flight attendant rather than an international one (her dream). Applegate gets to fly to Paris while Paltrow is stuck is Cleveland. Eventually Applegate is caught -- a copy of the test is recovered and all the "i"s are dotted with little hearts, Applegate's "trademark" (as she says). Say what you want about the film, it doesn't forget to have a final confrontation between its main antagonists (a cat-fight), where our hero emerges the winner. How embarrassing is it that, at least on this fairly important point, Superman Returns cannot claim to be a better film than View from the Top?

Quick Housekeeping

A few random blog issues:

[I tried to post this Saturday but blogger went wonkey -- first the post would not take comments, then it vanished altogether. Here it is again].

1. I don't mind off-topic comments to the posts (actually I like them), but this post is an announced free-for-all: if there is something you want to say, something you want to complain about (there is an option to comment anonymously), something you think we should be talking about here, or something you think I should be blogging about, say it. It's your blog too, and we have a very smart people hanging out here.

2. If you are a lurker, become a commenter. I know many more people are reading than commenting, and I have quite a few people that send me emails about posts that would be better as comments. Like I said, we have very smart people here (quite a bit smarter than your average blog audience). And I have no problem, as I hope you have figured out, hearing from smart people who disagree with me.

3. If you have a website or a blog and you want to be added to the list on the right put the address in a comment to this post and I will link to it. Likewise, if you are keeping my blog a secret from people, let folks know it is here. The more people we have hanging out here the better it will be.

Nikki Cox

Married with Children was a hugely popular show during its ten year run (1987-1997), and spawned an unbelievably shameless rip off in 1995, Unhappily Ever After (which ended in 1999). Each character from Married With Children is copied exactly, even the dog (who appears in the latter show as deranged puppet bunny; the dog’s thoughts, often voiced on Married with Children, become Bobcat Goldthwait's talking bunny). Nikki Cox was hired to play the analogue to the Christina Applegate role, the unbelievably sexy older sister (the twist being that Nikki Cox's character was very smart where Kelly Bundy was very dumb).

Nikki Cox is now on the show Las Vegas, but between Unhappily Ever After and Las Vegas she had a short-lived sitcom called Nikki (2000-2002). It’s a predictably terrible show, at the same quality level as Christina Applegate’s post Married with Children sitcom Jesse (1998-2000). But Nikki Cox has an odd quality one imagines escaped the producers of Unhappily Ever After, and could not be properly directed on Nikki (though at least they tried). Nikki Cox a beautiful actress, but a Mary Tyler Moore quality interferes with her obvious sexuality. You can see a good mix of pictures of her here (compare the picture in the upper left to the one in the lower left of the page). Someone like Jessica Simpson is more alluring for being so wholesome, it's part of her appeal. But with Nikki Cox something has gone off the rails and you can see, in the sitcom Nikki, a battle between sexuality and the ghost of Mary Tyler Moore. Like a good Freudian slip, miscasting can reveal a lot about the inner workings of a show, its creators, and the actress in the odd position of having to navigate between two very different kinds of signals.

Comics Out 1 November 2006

1. Comics Out

Justice League of America #3 by Metzler, Benes and Hope is out today. The first two issues, like Identity Crisis, had a quality I like but cannot quite put my finger on. I tried "architectonic" before but that was not it. I want to say "novelistic" but that is a silly, empty thing to say with Metzler being a novelist and all. Plus "novelistic" is not a word, or shouldn't be. Someone who likes the book should try to find the right word, and tell me what it is.

I am a little confused if Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert's Batman is out today -- it is not listed as coming out on the Midtown site nor at Jim Hanley's but the preview is up at Newsarama and it says it is out today. This issue ends Morrison's first arc and will be a better place to start judging the thing, which has been disappointing so far.

Also out is the softcover version of The Fountain, soon to be a big movie. I was interested in this: can anyone recommend it? And Ping will want me to point out that the new issues of Manifest Eternity and Exterminators are out today, as well.

2. News

Newsarama has some reports about where the Marvel Zombies franchise goes next, including an Army of Darkness crossover, which is a very good idea to add to an already good idea.

And I know this is very late but I just found from Whedonesque that Joss Whedon's "Buffy Season 8" comics, which he will be writing (at least an arc), will be out as early as March and will run more than 20 issues.

3. Planetary

I have added some footnotes to Monday's Planetary rant, to clear up people thinking that I am, you know, stupid or something. I could have spoken more clearly on a detail, but I am still right.