Carmine Starnino's THIS WAY OUT

This Way Out (Gaspereau; 2009) is Carmine Starnino’s fourth collection of poetry. The immediacy of my reading/review of Peter Richardson’s Sympathy For The Couriers was a fun experience, so I’m doing the same here. Part of that immediacy and fun echoes from the poems themselves, so it’s a natural reaction. Here’s all twenty-eight poems in order of their appearance.

NEXT DOOR CAFÉ

Reading the first five and nine-tenths lines created a feeling identical to that of the speaker’s opener: “We were bored.” The lassitude and caroming plural pronoun confusion, the directionless “dark” finally explodes with the appearance of “bison”. It’s fascinating that light has to be stolen or coerced or bargained for (“cadged”, with a play on “cage”). I see this as a criticism on the sanctity and necessity, the given of Grace (yes, the capitalization has ironic purpose) for epiphany. How is joy, or at least relief, achieved? Who knows? But more to the point, who cares? This reminds me of the joke: “I’m happy, but I don’t know why” (said with honest perplexity). The rest of the poem has the speaker still involved in the lives of the habitués of darkness, but at a self-possessed, creative remove. Here, then, it’s no surprise technically (though a delightful surprise in musical shift) to experience the onrush of concrete nouns: shot glasses, whisky, tables, cellphone, lighter, cigarette, stools. Even adjectives and directives become tactile: lamped, cue. The “uh” disgust of “Sun-up found a few run aground, up shouldered hulls” marks a further distancing between observer and observed, the latter becoming more desultory and piteous not by the line, but by the phrase. There’s a pithy, affecting use of ship/ship passage metaphor in the poem’s last lines: hulls, keels, slewing, with “smashed” (in the second-to-last line) the unfortunate, but inevitable, conclusion to another word (poem’s line two) which then takes on ominous overtones, and which challenges the reader with a missed foreshadowing.

OUR BUTCHER

A funny allegory on critic as gleeful slaughterhouse hack which takes a gentler turn (never divorced from bloodiness) towards the love of assessment and handling. Poetry as a living thing, “risen again”. (I like the “again”, the glory of initial creation.) Also, the butcher as careful practitioner: note the multiple uses of many adjectives, verbs, nouns.

FRONT DOOR

A subtle poem, still easy to confound after multiple readings. The “key”, the two people (probably lovers, but possibly friends at opposite ends of the risk/security spectrum). The door is given anthropomorphic cachet, and it doesn’t much work for me, though the brief lines and suggestiveness of the pair salvages what could have been a dry idea.

VITA BREVIS

I’m familiar with “Early Truffaut”, but not “late Rosselini”, though the previous lament for desired affiliation -- rather, genuine entrenchment -- makes clear the “chasing”. Poems steeped in local detail run the risk of alienating readers unfamiliar with the territory, but Starnino uses landmarks and cultural esotericism to service emotional vividness, movement, and recognition. Reading this poem after anything in the first section of Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking is to make plain the emotionless, plodding transcription of endless historical detail in the latter volume, detail technically mangled and ideologically driven. Long after boring “walkabouts” have worn out their treads, threads, and treatises, poems like “Vita Brevis” will still be around to delight anyone who treasures authorial vulnerability, idiosyncrasy, colour, and mood.

SHAG

A hilarious encapsulation of the cupidita eterna, both canine and human. “Nearly put me off sleep for good”, the opener, takes on additional meaning after the rounded final one and one-half lines. “Dogged” is funny, and I also voiced the two syllable version, also appropriate.

HEAVENOGRAPHY

I usually skip sentence and line beginners that repeat and fill the entire poem, but Starnino’s strategy of run-on typeset prose works to affirm the clouds’ evanescent omniprevalence, “stuck between going and gone”. ”Atmospheric farting around” is a riot, an alternative version to Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory”. There’s a storm hidden in many, however. The insistence of “working-class” perhaps hopes to mimic grim, shoulder-to-wheel feats in certain poetry schools. Or am I wrong in seeing (among other such projects) Christian Bok’s seven year Sisyphean Eunoia behind this? The clouds’ perishability, their self-elevated confusion -- the parallels are many and witty. (“Working-class clouds are above it all, regard the hydraulics that give them their height as a right.”)

THIS WAY OUT

The title poem is a fond neighbourhood reminiscence. Set in nine stanzas, each of seven lines (for God’s Earth adornments? That old futzer makes a few humorous appearances mid-go), “This Way Out” is an amused, mocking moniker for progress and sure-footed direction. “Parc Ex//God said, and up sprang side streets of shoebox/flats (plus rats), chain-link fences, plain-/penny bricks, and paint-splashed garages.” Yes, God created light, four-legged critters, and those endlessly fascinating and mischievous bipeds, but shouldn’t He also take a bow for rats and dilapidated buildings? No? What a grandiose vision, then, of God. And (since we’re made in His image) of us. The H-bomb and four-corner imperialism is related to grandiosity. But perhaps I digress.

Detail is vivid; movement is quickened through compression, and even the sonic repetitions are quick (“sticks: Parc Ex”, “ice. A good price”, “a room, a roof,”, “this. What bliss.”), to amplify the emotion the assonance evokes. A few quibbles. The excellent “where balding towels and pink panties/drip dry together” is weakened with its completion, “like arranged marriages”. The other half of the metaphor was suggestively , absently, powerful before I came to those three words. And for a poem soaked in the everyday, the specific, the awe-fed unique, the generic “my paper”, “plonk/and beer”, “double-/parked cars”, “spice smells” chloroformed the senses a tad. I wanted the paper, the wine, the beer, the car, the spices, named. “The price paid for a new story//of creation” is delightful, a double play on God and the building itself.

NINE FROM ROME

A set of nine variously strung sonnets, each letter to a different friend, the sequence proceeds, with oscillations, from immersion in image and detail to contemplation, and finally, spiritual stocktaking and confident conclusion. Notice how the first in the sequence (to Michael) calls up Nietzsche’s famous “try[ing] to live/always in expectation of some impossible grace”, and how the intelligent-negative approach of the author relaxes into it by sequence end. “[T]ired of antiquities” (to Norm) mirrors the speaker’s having “had enough” of his tiresome past, or perhaps more accurately, his tired rehashing of it. The “gods that fill the hand” and “a thrill too quick for art” further deride the social pressure to mine the past, while counteracting the habit by praising the present, the felt, the non-referential, culminating in the last enty’s “unpoemed emotions”. There are other notable passages. When the lovers, on a walk, come to the proverbial fork in the road, they don’t take the one less traveled, but neither, instead opting for descent into “the uriney gloom”. What a tart, clever, brilliant response to that tired Frostian chestnut, the final lines enshrined, to which thousands of New Age sheep whose experience with poetry consists of anthologies edited by Wayne Dyer, swoon. (I would have thought this letter would have been addressed to David.) "You're next, jaws of wall hiss at me. I shrug.” (this one to David). Yes. And the triple scythe-swipe of the previous sentence inters the very idea. The second-to-last word of the last poem (to Mary) is key to the entire sequence (not given away here). It’s not ambiguous in notion. Only in specific unfolding.

PUGNAX GIVES NOTICE

When was the last time you read a poem set in the Roman Colosseum, a vivid character study by turns humorous and pensive? I love the first line -- “He’s done with it, the tridents and tigers,”-- for several reasons. I’m partial to poems that enter the ring already sticky with emotion. Garcia Lorca’s duende, the ecstatic dance a hair this side of death, often begins with a sense of a story, or movement in full swing, the poem (in this case) being a fragment of something else unable to contain the outsized emotion. The reader (at least this one) is disoriented, but agreeably so. What kind of a poem uses “tridents” in the first line? I love that word. It brings back memories of watching cartoons at seven years of age, some villain (usually Satan, as I recall) prodding the fork onto some beleaguered soul. And there’s a cartoonish association to fights in any ring (video games, anyone?) which the humour (“the chintzy palm branch prizes”) feeds, though, as the poem develops, that two-dimensional cut-out warrior becomes a “rounder’ figure, to borrow Forster’s term. Age brings fatigue, but also an understated wisdom, as Pugnax would rather “dawdle at the baths, tame his nights with tea,/be spellbound by the smell of soap, find a wife”. A play on nights/knights, an internal rhyme that helps the spell. The preceding quote is also a charming irony, a reversal of the heroic staple where the woman stays at home with her safe and dainty pleasures -- tea, soap -- while her man slays dragons or gladiators. Full circle, Mr. Mom, finding his feminine side -- whatever the cliché, the point is that Pugnax has grown. And the shocking juxtaposition of new experiences -- baths, tea, soap, and then wife -- recalls the gorgeous passage in Robert Lowell’s “The Old Flame” (“a new landlord,/a new wife, a new broom!”). I’ve read that passage to quite a few people. Many get the charm, but to them it’s hokey. To me, it’s heartbreaking (in the context of the complete poem). “Pugnax Gives Notice” approaches that great New England reminiscence.

SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

A sort of vignette next to Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower”, more mellow in mood. Musically resounding and metrically intricate, and I’m guessing most will understand the reason for the monorhymes.

FLEA MARKET ECLOGUE

This felt like an exercise. An interesting one, but not necessary. Even if it’s a “true story”, or based on one, I didn’t feel either of the two had an immediacy, either individually, or between them. I love a good eclogue -- MacNeice’s immediately come to mind -- and perhaps because of past associations, prefer the rhetoric heightened exponentially while not sacrificing believability.

DOGE’S DUNGEON

W/out beeing puhdantik, uh revulooshunairee taik onn uh die eeng topik, w/out yr avredge tweed-n-pype pooh-poohing, lol! Ann leeve thoze Etruskanz alone, Fartists!

DELTA HOTEL, SAINT JOHN

Lots of movement here. Images are deftly merged with psychology, so it’s easy to miss the metaphorical skewering and multiple definitions on a first go-round: “stalls”, “Tip Top suit gone to seed”, “knotted”, “bluffing”, “business cards”.

LUCKY ME

Section Two of This Way Out begins with a reverie on father, and like the prize in either hand, the outcome of the choice is a formative joy as well as a later warning (“shutting illusions off”). This is fearlessly intelligent family reminiscence, and the metaphysical gold that results is worth the hard excavation and pressure-washing. I’m also impressed that “Trident” makes another appearance (line three); I’m hoping I’ll hit the trifecta on a submarine poem in the last half of the book.

TALE OF THE WEDDING RING

Precious, the fantasy conjures Irving Layton’s “A Song about Woman”. The latter’s “ ‘she is perfect, my lovely daughter!’ “ is a tone-strong contrast to “Tale Of The Wedding Ring” ‘s last-line Billy Joel cliché.

FILM NOIR

Atmosphere without particulars lacks bite. I wanted more of the mysterious “we” to be fleshed out, a la Len Gasparini’s similarly placed “Empire Theatre”. “Film Noir” has many dramatic, even charming, possibilities which were missed.

WHISTLING

The Wordsworth epigram leads to a symbolic whistling lesson -- the hard beginnings of transposed listening to voice and composition. You don’t need a pedantic explanation of onomatopoeia to appreciate “My whistling’s more like whiffling”.

MORNING AFTER

A sensually linked revelry, the symbolism of the title making the substitutions obvious. Some nicely turned phrases touching one another, and combining in unusual ways, like sampling small portions of a gourmet smorgasbord. I won’t quote here since the pleasures are diminished by separation.

FOUR MONTHS PREGNANT

Ha! The defenselessness of a napper, especially so in the presence of a ruthlessly, unsentimentally observant poet. Deployed in (more or less) non-traditional hexameter, the end rhymes mimic the tonal shifts nicely. Note the assonantal chiming of the separated first and eighth line “mind” and “sky” which act as a lovely pause before the surprising (humorously in the first/second lines; darkly in the eighth/ninth lines) unfolding. Really, a wonderful contrast between pregnancy and moribund fate. Unflinching, marrying sex and death. Bravissimo!

LAST THOUGHTS

There is simply too much going on here for a mini-review. How’s that for a cop-out? Actually, I don’t want to give much away here, even by suggestion. A tour de force, compressed with consummate skill, actions calling to painfully parallelled thoughts, images crisp with overtones. This is the best in the book. I hope it’s repeatedly anthologized.

TO THE COUPLE IN APARTMENT 949

“It’s no laughing matter”, but the poem is. A bracing exploration of that common experience of the noisy neighbours. Some funny references -- folkloric, plaque-inscribed, superstitious -- in the last stanza.

DEATHS OF THE SAINTS

Strong rhythms. This is a joy to read aloud, the rollicking peaks-and-valleys trade acting as counterpoint to the horrific historical record.

SQUASH RACKETS

Reverberating motion from line one to line sixty-two, a fiesta of sound and sense and imagination. Even more impressive to me since I hate squash (but love racquetball -- though I now have a new appreciation for that dead-ass squash ball: “small, hot, beating in bird-panic”). Game and match to Starnino on this one.

DUCKS ASLEEP ON GRASS

Can’t say too much or else this review will self-dest --

The rolling “b”s act as foreboding pulse. Another joy to read out loud.

VIRGINIA

A subtle, clever analogy on the conceiving, gestation, marketing, and ultimate discovery -- “the wind drags everything to pick up its scent” -- of a book of poems, disguised as an appropriate “making hay” experience. Wryly humorous and wistful.

PIMPINELLA

The death-bed scene is usually the kiss of death as a subject for poetry, inviting mawkish soldering by the poet/bedside sitter to his or her fading beloved. Starnino, wisely, as is frequently the case in This Way Out, opts instead for concrete substitution. The last recognition is painful (in experience, not poetic crafting), a psychic tattoo.

THE BUTTERFLIES I DREAMT IN CHILDHOOD ARE HERE

A worthy submission into the tradition-drenched study on the evanescence of beauty. Its fourteen lines might tempt one to stamp “sonnet” on it, and it’s true that the beginning of stanza three ushers in an effective turn, but it’s quickly shifted towards its dominant subject and mood. Besides, a more surprising turn exists at line seven, and I like that it’s structured as the stanza’s second line, increasing the jolt. No, I thought the poem led to a regular five-five-five line outlay, and the missing last line makes sense after “child’s eyes closed”.

THE STRANGEST THINGS

Preliminary comments on This Way Out’s third and final section, the eleven-poem sequence “The Strangest Things” (the title a phrase from W.C. Williams’ Kora In Hell), before dealing with the poem in a more global sense.

The individual poems in the sequence frame the overriding emotion in their titles -- “Puddle, Corner Jean Talon And Outremont”, “Roadkill, Unidentified, Hwy 401”, i.e. --, and place names serve to show the speaker coming across the object or sense impression accidentally, which then triggers that emotion.

Starnino departs severely from metaphor and image in “The Strangest Things”. “Weeping Willow, Parc Angrignon”, especially, is bogged down in abstractions and interiority. Cliches follow one another (“things taking a turn for the worse./I look myself hard in the eye”). Perhaps this is a knowing strategy to emphasize the similar emotional flatness of the speaker, but elsewhere I’ve stated that aesthetic effectiveness lessens, as well, when the temperature is set at low-and-steady. (Contrast similar moods in Lowell’s “A Severed Head”: “panted with calm inertia”.) That said, there are some tight, defiant surprises among the weeds: “What to make of a diminished thing/is anybody’s guess./I have enough/to be going on with/without needing to put on airs” from “Smell Of Something Bad, Kitchen” jabs Frost once again, this time dismissing “The Oven-Bird” ‘s stance (yes, I realize that canonical sonnet can be read many ways) of simultaneously grieving over, fetishizing, and making a strength of declining poetic powers and/or years. “Get up, stretch, take the air, my friends tell me./No thanks” (“Weeping Willow, Parc Angrignon”) further snuffs the emotional evasion. And particulars increase, with alacrity. Blasts such as “Hotheaded/hair-trigger", from “Loud TV From Next Door, Notre-Dame-de-Grace”, explain (though never apologize for) previous flat funk. I also like the ending of “For Sale Sign, Wilson Street, Notre-Dame-de-Grace”: “There was nothing more to be said/and we didn’t”. A perfect way to end that particular sub-poem. (Frost would have liked that: “Any fool can get into a poem, but it takes a poet to get out of one.”)

Much anguish and ink has been spilled over the confessional poem. I won’t add much to those poetics here except to note the obvious: it’s a dangerous tack, especially now, when the brilliant and seminal efforts of Lowell (misidentified as confessional) have led to a half-century (and still going strong, or weak, as it were) of self-indulgent embroidering. Starnino escapes the “look at me” nausea, but not, completely, the difficulties in emotional and aesthetic transposition necessary for a successful confession. And the sequence’s finale, “Hairline Wall Crack, Study, Parc Ex Flat”, puzzles me. Emotionally static, linguistically unadventurous, narratively unnecessary (after the aforementioned “nothing more to be said”. I interpreted that individually, as well), structurally confusing, it’s a limp ending to an otherwise stellar book.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Starnino’s always been concerned, and effective, with structured sound and emotional accuracy and depth. But in This Way Out, he’s further developed narrative and ideational skills. A force, now, on multiple poetic fronts, I hope for, and expect, further organic integration.

On The Deck With Anne

Spent the day in the Big Smoke, back at twilight. My gal's out musicifying. Garbage out, then locked up in the shed, till takeaway. It's about that time the bears do their midnight smorgasbord raids. Cashew butter (for me) on toasted olive bread. On the deck with a tall-can of Tuborg, a Cuban Guantanamera Christales (tired of waiting for some couple's baby to be born), Anne Sexton, and my pink mini-whale iPod stuffed with Rory Gallagher, Eddie Hinton, Chan Marshall and co.

"Dead of a dark thing, John Holmes, you've been lost/"*

The white-haired semi-retired chap across the street is watering a plant. Four vehicles in the driveway, and it's quiet. Tupperware party, Baptist meeting, or three-generational in-dwelling? Across from him, two of the Catawampus Kids out the front door. The three-quarters blind teen held, caressed by her boyfriend, then both away on his double skateboard.

"If this is death and God is necessary let him be hidden/from the missionary, the well-wisher and the glad hand."

The strawberry leaves, a score of green cupped hands. The basil and japonica, from their separate pots, arch and touch like shy lovers. A mosquito, grey mote, draws vanishing hieroglyphics in the dusk. The last ground robin forges a multiple hop-and-stop on the side lawn, and Chrissie Hynde falls out my ear as I alert the bird, our behemoth cat Sabrina making a dash for the nature-toy. The black-letter outline is almost a uniform shadow on the page. A front porch light, beacon through the massive four-poster-boled fir branches, shines.

"John Holmes, cut from a single tree, lie heavy in her hold/and go down that river with the ivory, the copra and the gold."

*All quotations from Anne Sexton's "Somewhere In Africa".

Commentary Is Superfluous

Reb Livingston, in an interview:
http://galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com/2009/05/featured-poet-reb-livingston.html

"Of course, I never would have voluntarily signed up for a poetry course, it was required for all Creative Writing majors."

Read This On A Dare-- It, Uh, Was Enervating, (Or) How I Stopped Theorizing And Learned To Love Poetry

"The point is that the purely theoretical, no longer muddied up by the effort to try and actually do theory, is not theory. The effort to become theoretical, or the effort needed to theorize, which itself comes from outside theory proper and from the domain of reading (in de Man's understanding of that word)--this effort that is an effect of some resistance to pure theory, is indeed theory." --from this link >>http://mikejohnduff.blogspot.com/2009/05/resistance-to-theory.html.

The destructionist has the word (and maybe a stage with a trap-door).

Vancouver Poetry

There're a couple of recent anthologies of Vancouver based poetry out, neither of which I've yet had a chance to read. But since I'm soon to write a review of three recent collections of poems that are set in the Lower Mainland, each by a single author, I thought it interesting to go back to an earlier anthology -- Vancouver Poetry -- edited by Allan Safarik in 1986.

Roughly chronological in outlay, Vancouver Poetry at times scuttles this approach to interface poems with the same locale, theme, and/or image(s). Red Lane's "Death Of A Poet" and Milton Acorn's "Words Said Sitting On A Rock" have each author commemorating their effort to the other. Speaking of Acorn, there's a hilarious five page passage by Joe Rosenblatt, more correctly described as a short story: "Milton & The Swan", the highlight being, " 'Did you know that the first case of bestiality occurred with Leda and the swan and that ...'/'Forget it, Milt,' I said. 'I FEEL DEPRESSED.'

I like Safarik's catholic approach of allowing "furreners" into the mix, since the anthology focusses on Vancouver as nebulous backdrop or initial motivation, not in-house birth certificate-stamped clubbiness and intercity xenophobia. From this, we get (of all people) Blaise Cendrars' "Documentaries: VIII. Vancouver". The poem is pedestrian (or perhaps simply poorly translated by Monique Chefdor), but the ending -- with narrator on ship --is lovely: "on the/starboard quarter Samoyed dogs are climbing up/Flaxen in the grey-white-yellow/As if fog was being taken in freight." Unfortunately, in the same vein (or is that "vain"), we have an entry by Jack Spicer entitled "Seven Poems For The Vancouver Festival" where his faux-vatic somnolence- inducing poetics masquerading as poems litter the whiteness: "Nothing but the last sun falling in the last oily water by the docks/They fed the lambs sugar all winter/Nothing but that. The last sun falling in the last oily water by the docks."

An eclectic stew of nuggets (or, rather, chestnuts), curios, and needles in haystacks (more on that at post's end), this collection is what every honest anthology piecing should be: an adventure, a risk-taking. Yes, there is Pauline Johnson's "The Lost Lagoon", with its fascinating mix of deft phrasing, colour, and straining sentiment ("I dream tonight that my paddle blurs/The purple shade where the seaweed stirs,"), rightly included. But there is also the (at the time) unpublished poet Tim Lander's mini-"Howl", the eight-page "Gods". Concise, yet honestly spilling along in terse-lined emotional enjambments; metaphorically simple yet apt, and unfolding in sinister detail and entrapment; prophetic and historically wise at the same time: "Gods" is a found gem by an editor who cares enough to dig up neglected or unseen keepers, and who then has the courage to print it, knowing that the solidified weight of collective belief always prefers what others have already enshrined. Bravo, Safarik.

Vancouver poetry has been infested with Olson-Duncan poetics, as brought to town by the aforementioned Spicer in the early 60s. Unfortunately, that line was dominant from that time through to the 80s (the "ousiders" of poetry? Not in these parts). And the documents are recorded herein: the unmusical turgid musings of Robin Blaser's "Image-Nation 15"; the simpleton politics of bill bissett's "Killer Whale"; the pretentious, joyless, boring, poorly integrated metaphors of Brian Fawcett's "Summer Solstice".

Yet who cares if the quality is sporadic. It's that way in any locale, and at any time, even in selected retrospectives, (unless one's compiling an international canon). For every dull, self-important and bloated Kerrisdale Elegies (eight pages of Bowering's "best" is included in this book), there're Peter Trower's "Annie Of The Corridors", Clement Stone's (who?) "Noon On Water Street", where "freight/Creaks in the winch; smoothly a sea gull slips/Down waves of air,", and the following "I Have Walked Down Into This City" (reproduced here in full) by another poet I'd previously been unfamiliar with: Tom Osborne. (The poem's slightly reminiscent, in sad yet defiant manifesto, of Milton Acorn's "I've Tasted My Blood", and though not approaching that classic, is still a lasting contribution.)

I HAVE WALKED DOWN INTO THIS CITY

I have, says Sonny
walked down into this city
without a dime in my pocket
and come out with the night
drunk and fed
thirty dollars left ...

I have figured it was no more go ...
curtains, lead-filled overshoes
blood in the eyes
a kid on the way ...

I have been refused death
and service
beer and money
and sometimes love ...
a place to stay ...

I have been given warm full days
round woolen nights
the soft curl of a lover's arm
and the eight ball straight in ...

I have never lived with the matadors
or the Arab tribes
the anaconda
of the tigers of Bengal ...

never accepted the bad with dignity
or the good with content.
I have done nothing about famine
or slaughter --Expo '86 --
these leavings of the slipper
wicked sisters
pumpkins at midnight.

I have, it seems sometimes
not done much more
than walk down into this city
without a dime in my pocket
come out with the night
drunk and fed
thirty dollars left.

Henry James' "Daisy Miller"

"Innonence ruined." That seems to be the common blurb on this popular Henry James novella. Daisy Miller, though, was never innocent -- but delightfully manipulative -- and her ruination in death (as clankingly melodramatic as Miles' death in The Turn Of The Screw) is a needless moral lube job slathered over the cogs of the plot.

What of her death? Well, James, as elsewhere, wants to eat his cake while having it permanently enshrined in a culinary museum. "Innocence" must be brought down, but instead of acting with anger (rather than bemusement) towards his voyeuristic, sycophantic, death- (not eros-) "stiff" (as Daisy Miller perfectly pegs him) creation of Winterbourne, James shirks the courage of his emotional conclusion by having the young lady's suitor Giovanelli cause her fatal contraction of malaria by the "foolish" meeting at the Colosseum. The new, moneyed aristocracy must be chastised, but it remains for the lower-rung social hangers-on to be the fall guys.

A moral is only effective if it's at the service of a tragic, or at least sympathetic, dilemma. Daisy Miller is well-written, and has a great deal to say about the clashing of the barbarians -- the old aristocracy with their moneyed counterparts -- but James flinches when both, or either, have to be fatally excoriated. The amoral Italian commoner has the plot-dagger placed in his set-up hand.

Kentucky Derby

The Kentucky Derby goes in about twelve hours, and it's the first year in 38 that I haven't followed the run-up. Several reasons: I've been busy with other races/tracks the month of April (and the Derby, though "the most exciting two minutes in sports", is analogous, in this way, with cooking a seven-course meal for a day, then immediately scarfing it down); I've followed it enough to know that the trainer (Mullins) of the pre-race fave is a secretive scoundrel, and that (like last year) it's a less than stellar field; and the Churchill Downs Inc. group are becoming more and more faceless and soulless, escpecially so after the demise of their only serious ownership competitor -- Magna.

I'm sticking to the second-tier tracks, even on Saturday, (though I'll cheer for Edgar Prado's charge in the run for the roses).