Archives Project: STL #22

Title: "If Such a Category Exists"
Description: On Specialization
Date: 25 November 2003

I just learned that this post was linked as a resource for a class on modern American poetry. I swell with pride.

My "morning in rare book room" post a couple of weeks ago nearly violated my 'no dissertation' rule, and this week I'm going to break it altogether. But it's more to note an occasion than to surrender my mind to a single subject, and I promise next week I'll be back in the wider world. Writing a dissertation requires (and more importantly, signifies) becoming a specialist in some small portion of an academic discipline. "Specialist" to me is a dubious concept. I'm working on a doctorate in English, which to the layperson (opposite of specialist) might seem the appropriate credential for teaching Beowulf, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Powerpuff Girls. But actually, specialization is far more specific (special) than that. Me, I'm going to be a specialist in 20th century American poetry of the Objectivist tradition. 'Specifically' I'm working on a book on Louis Zukofsky, obscurest of the obscure. The poet and critic Bob Perelman, in a good book called The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky, mentions the immense labor that goes into creating difficult art, and the commensurate labor in reading it. He writes that the value of such work relies largely on hearsay because "the writing remains illegible or semilegible for any reader who is not a Poundian, Joycean, Steinian, or--if such a category exists--a Zukofskian." While I resent the restrictiveness and pigeon-holing that specialization represents, I recognize that the work that reading works of genius demands requires it. And there's no doubt in my mind about the supreme value of difficult art.

If such a category exists, I guess I belong to it. The curator of an upcoming exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center of 20th century poets (it'll display manuscripts, letters, rare editions, etc) asked me to write a biographical sketch about Zukofsky for the exhibit. Mind you, this person is on my dissertation committee so it's not like he heard about me through the grapevine or something, but this task, which I guess will wind up as the blurbage on the placard next to the display, may represent the first formal exercise of my specialty. While I'm against specialization on principle (when I'm famous I'll write an essay "Against Specialization"), I confess that being consulted in this way is quite a thrill.

And so, here's the statement, coming soon to a museum placard near or far from you:

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY (1904-1978)

The son of Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants, the husband of a composer, and the father of a concert violinist, Louis Zukofsky valued language, music, and family. Like two other great Modernists, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, Zukofsky spoke another language before learning English. Perhaps because of this outsider’s perspective, his poetry shows a fascination with the musical aspects of language, with the sound of language, even at the expense of sense. He once even described the bounds of his poetry as set by a “lower limit speech” and an “upper limit music,” and imitated musical forms like the fugue and the motet in his writing. Some of his poetry may make little “sense” on a first reading, due to its eccentric syntax and obscure references, but can still be enjoyed for pure musicality. Although the surface pleasures of Zukofsky’s language are always available to us, certain passages are elusive because they simply were not written for us. He referred in print to his wife (“Blessed/Ardent/Celia”) as his “one reader,” and there is a sense of hermeticism to much of his work, as if it is written in a private language we can never fully understand. Lines like “music, thought, drama, story, poem/ parks’ sunburst—animals, grace notes-/ z-sited path are but us” have some meaning in the context of a larger work, but only a family intimate would that the final three words evoke Arbutus Lane, the street where his adult son lived. His work is full of such private references.

Zukofsky persevered through almost complete indifference from publishers and readers, supporting his life-long writing with jobs for the WPA, as a technical editor, and for many years as a teacher at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Though little known to the wider world of letters until late in life, he compiled a large body of work, including an eight-hundred page poem entitled, with characteristic understatement, simply “A”, hundreds of lyric poems, a controversial translation of the Roman poet Catullus, essays, fiction, and a book of Shakespearean criticism. He referred to “A” as a “poem of a life,” and while this obscure and beautiful twenty-four movement work is far from a traditional autobiography, we can see in it a life filled with intellectual pursuits, love of family, and an appreciation of daily interactions. While we can trace through its pages personal and public events from the 1920’s to the 1970’s, elaborate motifs based on Bach, horses and Marxism, transliterations of foreign languages, and even a condensed history of the world, he boils down his work to a simple equation: “As I love:/ My poetics.”

Archives Project: STL #21

Title: One Bad Movie
Description: A prayer against Matrix: Resurrection
Date: 22 November 2003

I stand by my prediction that soon you won't be able to tell the difference between Matrix movies and Tron. I also hate computer-generated animation, but that's the tale of another day.

So I've been working like a dog, well a dog-of-letters anyway, for the past seven days. My research has taken up virtually all my time, with breaks to eat and to teach. So what do I willingly do when I have some leisure time at last? I pay money to see a movie I expect to suck. And wouldn't you know, it did suck, even far beyond my capacity to believe it.

The Matrix was a cultural phenomenon. I, too, was fascinated with the look and feel, the technique, and the unspoken fear that information technology has mediated our lives so much we can no longer see the real. I never took the philosophical pretensions seriously, but why would you with so much stylish spectacle? The Matrix Reloaded, as I mentioned way back in STL #2, seemed totally stale, and a little icky too. But Matrix Revolutions is so bad it staggers the mind. In the first fifteen minutes, three of the primary characters storm a Marilyn-Manson-inflected night club to confront, uh, "The Merovingian." There's some now familiar Matrix-issue combat, with lots of guns and walking on walls and such. It seemed to me as I was watching it that it might serve as good demo for one of those first-person-shooter games. Little did I know that the shootout in the coat room would be the best scene in the movie. After a half hour or so of stilted dialogue full of Capital Letters about people with Ridiculous Names, we have to suffer through what seems like an hour of men in absurdly inefficient and cumbersome suits of armor fighting mechanical insects. As least this section of the movie gave me something to laugh at: first at the 'inspirational' speech the general (well, some general--we're asked to keep track of too many people in this part) gives to his mechano- warriors, who pump their ridiculous mechanical fists in the sky. It was kind of like Mel Gibson from Braveheart addressing the Transformers. The special effects of this battle were chuckle-inducing too: I doubt if in twenty years we'll be able to see a qualitative difference between this movie and Tron.*

The original Matrix had some cultural significance, as I indicated above. Now, it's a weapon that the Robots from Mars use to oppress The Last Free People. The best thing about the matrix was always that you got to wear sunglasses at night and were a kung-fu superstar in it. But when you start think about the matrix too much, (like for instance if you sit through three movies about it) you start to wonder things like, why you can stand on the ceiling but not stop bullets? And if these supersoldiers are so powerful, why do they have to fight at all? I remember one time Superman punched a hole in time--now that's strong. But the big final showdown of Neo and Agent Smith seemed like a conventional fight between two dudes who can fly. The whole "One" versus an army of Smiths is supposed to be some kind of individualism over group thing, but that has no connection with the matrix per se and is about as current as Ayn Rand (or Robots from Mars).

Revolutions was far worse than any of those movies I complained about last summer. The only recent movie I can compare it too in scope of dreadfulness is the Kate Beckinsale vehicle Underword. Sometime I'm going to have to learn that beautiful people running around in leather suits firing guns from each hand does not a good film make. But why you would ruin such a simple and beautiful thing I'll never understand.

*And while on the subject, I think the best way of describing this whole underground militaristic world is as "Tron meets Das Boot."

Archives Project: STL #20

Title: Bedtime Story
Description: Philip Pullman
Date: 13 November 2003

I've been reading some pretty dense criticism and writing a pretty confused synthesis of it for nine hours now. My eyes are bleary; it's time to quit. I think I'll turn in, maybe do a little reading. Yeah, I've been reading all day, but bedtime reading is my reward for sticking with my allday reading and work. The last book I finished in bed was Philip Pullman's brand new Lyra's World. It's a small book, what they'd call a duodecimo I believe, which is to say it would fit into the inside pocket of your coat. The story "Lyra and the Birds" is only 49 pages, so if you're not too tired, you can read it all tonight, and over breakfast look at the fold-out map and other ephemera like postcards and travel ads. The story is a further adventure of Lyra, the heroine of Pullman's remarkable His Dark Materials trilogy. Those three books--The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass-- take place in a world where "experimental theology" takes the place of physics, everyone has an animal familiar, and a girl might run into witches and talking polar bears. The books are "for kids" I suppose, but the world is so sharply realized that you forget in reading them. The fact that Pullman's themes are in dialogue with Milton and Blake doesn't hurt either. And did I mention God is senile?

I haven't read those books for a couple of years so don't want to comment on them here. The new installment occurs two years after they end, and as the title indicates takes place in Pullman's London, beginning, like The Golden Compass with Lyra learning what she shouldn't in fictional Jericho College. (She's a ward of someone there, not old enough to be a student.) This story is a meditation on interpretation: "Everything means something" Lyra tells her daemon, or other self, "we just have to learn how to read it." Not to give anything away, but Lyra's first interpretation of events turns out to be wrong in the end.

I'm not sure how to read this story: is it self-contained story, or does it suggest more to come? The answer might be with the parts of the book which are not the story: the map, the postcard from a character in The Amber Spyglass (also of our world, as it turns out), even the epigraph from Baedecker all suggest travel. Perhaps our new journey is just starting with this little book. In his foreword Pullman remains coy: these extras "might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven’t appeared yet. It's difficult to tell."

He also write that these things "might have been put down absentmindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves... in our world." That's sort of a parable for a strong imagination like Pullman's, who can assemble such fragments into a whole that we can read and delight in. After reading Pullman, I get the idea that in the real world, Harry Potter's cute shenanigans are read only by the kids on the short bus, and J.K. Rowling grumbles in envy at Pullman's name. But in our world, we haven't yet taught children to read such imaginative richness, or maybe we're afraid to let them.

Archives Project: STL #19 (Kinda Dumb (But I Like It))

Title: Kinda Dumb (But I like It) Description: Let us lift our goblets to The School of Rock Date: 6 November 2003

Soon after we got home from seeing “The School of Rock,” my wife put an AC/DC record on the turntable. “That’s obvious,” I said, because the movie had ended with Jack Black in an Angus Young style schoolboy uniform (let out considerably), fronting a band of 10 year olds playing “It’s a Long Way To the Top (If you Wanna Rock and Roll). “I know,” she replied with pride.

Because the movie was directed by Richard Linklater and written by Mike White (Chuck and Buck, Freaks and Geeks), I thought it might be more than the big dumb comedy it appeared to be. Not that I particularly like either Linklater or White, but I at least expected them to play with the expected formulas a little more. But this movie plays out pretty much exactly as you’d expect. The unlikely outsider insinuates himself into a position of responsibility, does it his way, succeeds until exposed. Precocious but uptight kids encounter zany teacher, learn there’s more to life (namely, the perfect rock show that can change the world); even more uptight parents see there children in new way; and so on. When the teacher tells the kids to ‘stick it to the man’ by playing rock music, we arrive at the movie’s paradox: rock and roll has become institutional rebellion. Even the stuffy principal likes Stevie Nicks. Black’s character momentarily observes this paradox, but the larger issue, that rock only exists in quotation marks these days*, is glossed over, as is the sex and drugs part of the trinity.

I don’t want to give the impression I didn’t enjoy the movie. Jack Black screws up his face with typical fervor, and its often funny, but nothing you don’t expect from him. The first time I ever saw Black was a “showcase” of Tenacious D which didn’t divulge J.B. and K.G.’s comic intent immediately. Black’s imbibing of heavy rock mannerisms is so complete (“I see a lot of potential Back Stage Bettys in the audience tonight”) that I couldn’t tell if these two chubby middle aged dudes strumming acoustic guitars was a ‘real’ band or not. That uncertainty—wondering if he’s really joking or not—is the key to Black’s success. Likewise, a parody needs an element of loving what it’s lambasting. A detailed knowledge and appreciation of hard rock always comes through in this movie, mostly through Black, the True Believer, who may be sincerely quoting “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) (“We roll tonight...to the guitar bite”) to ten-year olds, who might really mean it when he prays to the God of Rock for the power to blow people's minds with our high voltage rock.”

“High Voltage” brings us, of course, back to AC/DC. It wasn’t their first album (High Voltage) that Niffy put on, but the Holy Grail of Heavy, Back in Black (the one that starts tch tch tch tch). The story is familiar: the singer dies from choking on his own vomit so his mates recruit a singer who sounds like him or close enough and record the party record of the decade. That I think is the best that this particular school of rock can give us.

So when I say that “School of Rock” is stupid and obvious, I mean it in the same way as if I was describing an AC/DC song, or religious devotion; I mean it in a good way. So let’s all raise our goblets to rock and keep praying for the gig that changes the world.

*stolen from Simon Reynolds’s blog blissout.blogspot.com

Archives Project: STL #18

Title:The pleasure of discovery
Description: A Morning in the Rare Book Room
Date: 28 October 2003

I'll post this without comment. I did finally finish my dissertation, and discontinued my blog. There's a lesson there.

One of my informal rules is that I don't talk about my dissertation here, for the simple reason that that's what I'm avoiding when I do this. But I had an exciting moment this morning in one of my favorite places, the reading room at the Harry Ransom Center that bears comment. You see, I'm giving this paper at a world-famous conference in central Arkansas (a-hem), and I've been slicing away at what I've got because it's a little too long. Why editing would lead me to additional research is a good question that only now occurs to me, but I had come across references to an edition Ezra Pound did of the 13th century Guido Cavalcanti, which I thought might bear on the topic of the paper Louis Zukofsky's First Half of "A"-9.

Pound you know, the grandpa of hard American poetry. Louis Zukofsky was his younger disciple, and something of a mirror image: where Pound was anti-Semite, he was Jewish, while Pound was fascist he was radical. You may not have heard of Zukofsky, though he's exerted a lot of influence over a lot of contemporary poets he also may not have heard of. The HRC hold the Zukofsky archive, which has become the focus of my research. (Last winter they were renovating the reading room, where I have to go to do my research. Whenever I went by the Loading Zone sign, I would think the LZ was a secret message.)

Because of almost complete indifference from nearly everyone, Zuk had to seek his own publishing arrangements. His first book publication, The First Half is a thoroughly homemade affair made on a mimeograph machine and bound in manila folders. The title poem is only 75 lines, but the book is 41 pages, the majority of which are quotations from Karl Marx, and rest including a poem by the 13th C Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti in the original and in four different translations, and some text describing the poem and its prosody. My paper, which I won't get into here, argues that the book itself exhibits bibliographic codes which supplement the semantic codes of the poem itself to help us fully understand LZ's argument.

Why Zuk uses Cavalcanti's poem as a vehicle for a Marxist argument I'm not sure, though the he was a favorite of Pound's, who published a scholarly edition, with some commentary written in Italian. The large book looked impressive enough, with red card stock covers (bearing the creepy stamp ANNO X, denoting the 10th year of Mussolini's reign), alternate readings in the margins, and plates of earlier editions. What really caught my attention was the second half of the book, which reprinted his attempt at getting a bilingual edition of Donna Mi Pregga into print in England ("With all these printers, all this paper, and all this ink, it is manifestly idiotic that we can't get the editions we want"! railed EP). This is the template LZ was copying in his First Half. The same poem, one of the same translation, the same exegesis. Why LZ is copying this I still don't know, nor do I know if or how I'll address this edition in my paper, but the thrill of recognition more than justified the effort.

The Cavalcanti is rather rare, with some 500 copies published, and the Zukofsky extremely rare, with only 55. I've never seen mention of the correspondence of these volumes in print, so it's possible that no one ever put these two rarities together before. Discovering this simple, fact is more satisfying than creating any elaborate theory to explain them. It's the pleasure of the observable.

Archives Project: STL #17

Title: 3-2
Description: Rage, rage against the Yankees and the Marlins. The sporadic review of culture casts its eye on the American Pastime.
Publication Date: 25 October 2003

Looking back over my only piece of sports writing, I come across a few incoherent statements that I've tried to fix. I can't see myself writing about baseball again in the near future, even after two pleasing World Series victories by the assorted Soxes.

After a couple of deadline Saturday morning posts in the last few weeks, I'm in danger of slipping from the weekly to the occasional. It's surprising to me that I haven't already-- in fact I planned a maybe weekly, more likely sporadic schedule when I started this summer. But during the summer I had the time, and found writing these weekly memos to the void amusing, if not rewarding. Lately it's been more hectic, but if I can't find an hour or two a week to jot down my thoughts, I might as well slash my wrists right now. I have a few ideas in the back of my head: there's a couple of books I've read for my dissertation that might be of general interest, an engaging conversation I had with one of my students about Kill Bill's warrant and why it shouldn't apply to the depraved fantasies of Marshall Mathers (the kids, they love Eminem b/c he's "real"), the accumulating mass of Songs:Ohia and the similarly studied obscurity of Will Oldham, which seems to lash out against itself in the beer anthem that never was "Work Hard Play Hard," a definition of 'high lonesome,' or the beautiful wordless comic that I read last week, "The Last Lonely Saturday." But I can't think about any of that right now. This lovely Saturday morning is troubled by a dark cloud on the horizon, or maybe that's a tropical storm offshore: tonight, the Florida Marlins could win the World Series for the second time in eight years.

I've found that I've been resorting to a rhetorical technique that my alter ego Drunk Tom uses frequently. Instead of finishing the point I'm trying to make, I break off and shake my fist at the sky, uttering a sound that can best be captured as "GARGH!" I call this 'argument from inarticulate rage.' I blame my increasing usage on the current Series. When Drunk Tom cries "GARGH!" he has either forgotten what he was going to say or stumbled into a contradiction. The other Tom uses argument from inarticulate rage because he knows that the universe resembles baseball, and sees that no win is possible. The phrase "Yankees Win" is distasteful enough, as every other time you turned around in the twentieth century this consolidated source of power had vanquished some contender or another. In fact, the first World Series I can remember was the Yankees and the Dodgers. Their strategy then as now is blunt: stockpile as many star players as you can, at any cost. As a result, you get people who aren't in any sense Yankees playing in pinstripes. This strategy didn't work to well during the eighties, but during the current dynasty the team has been able to surround a homegrown set of stars like Mariano Rivera and the smug Prince of New York Derek Jeter with guns for hire like Clemens and big Jason Giambi. It's a little distasteful, both because of the money and the predictability of it, but the cultural continuity of it is nice. We always know that the Yankees are good, and in fact the statement bores us.

The last time the Marlins had a winning season, they bought it off the shelf. It was the best team money could buy, but had no cohesion and was parceled off as soon as they won the Series. By comparison, this team is a lot more interesting. The have only one big name player, the superlative catcher Ivan Rodriguez, and he seems to be interested in sticking around with some talented youngsters. This team runs, which is more interesting than watching big necked sluggers swing from their heels. Why then does the notion of "Marlins win!" make me so nauseated? That's simple, I can tell you right now: I don't believe in them.

Its not just that they're an expansion team. I've followed my hometown team the Seattle Mariners most of my life (I'm a little older than they are.) But they are an expansion team that hasn't paid there dues, nor have they cultivated an informed fan base. I remember the contrast between the fans in frosty, long-suffering Cleveland leaning out of the right field stands signaling 'fair ball' on a double down the line, and just a few days later a bunch of Floridians playing beach ball in the stands. Despite the fact that they're an exciting young team who had the best record down the stretch, the Marlins averaged 16,000 fans during the regular season (though now the locals have jumped on the bandwagon and are filling the Walmart-like Pro Player Stadium to the rafters.)

It's not just because they're a wild card team. I don't care for baseball imitating football, I don't care for gimmicks to wring out more advertising money, and I don't care for pushing the end of the season to the edge of November. Although I'm grateful to the Marlins for eliminating the Braves, so that I only had to hear their fans collective Tomahawk moan a couple of times this October, their presence in the World Series is Wrong: they didn't win the most games in their league or their division. I'm willing to let that slide sometimes, but they have a lot else going against them.

It's not just because they're from Florida. I can't hate the state too much. They did, after all, go for Gore in the last election. But you may have guessed by now that I'm a baseball traditionalist, and in a matter of fact I'm also a mythicist. I usually don't go much for Eternal Recurrence and whatnot, but baseball follows a cycle: hope in born in the early spring, as we hear reports on our heroes practicing in the warm South. Strength and skill are tested throughout the summer, and valor and stamina in the fall, at the closing of the season. I can tell you right now, there's no crisp air in Florida. Florida is where baseball starts, not where it ends.

So I favor the Yankees marginally, because to me the proposition "same as it always was" is better than "whatever." It's the terms of the argument that frustrate me--what's the point in finishing this? What really depresses me, the reason I'm locking up the knives this weekend, is that I know what we're missing: the two most beautiful old ballparks left, and two sets of knowledgeable, long-suffering fans. This phantom Series would have no possible loser, because both "Sox win" and "Cubs win" the same two possible meanings: "Curses don't stick forever" or maybe "it's the end of the world." I've seen some objectively great games this post-season, but their outcomes frustrate me beyond words. I half-believe that this dream Series is taking place somewhere else, where managers can stick with their aces all night if they want to, and where my arguments have a satisfactory end.

Archives Project: STL #16 (unnumbered)

Title: "I love you Bill and I always will"
Description: None. The topic is Kill Bill Part One
Publication Date: 15 October 2003


This one is less pretentious than I remember, but still a very mixed bag. I excised some factual errors, but left in the misidentification of the klaxon-y hospital theme as an original. I later discovered this theme in Female Convict Scorpion, a cited influence. Note the crucial role of the horizontal rule in this piece.

I should do a new piece on Death Proof. I actually sought out and watched two source, Vanishing Point (really good) and Crazy Larry and Dirty Mary (good performances by Vic Morrow and Adam Roarke, but gratingly annoying turns by the title characters played by Peter Fonda and Susan George.)


Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Kill. The Verb. Imperative. The highest degree of brutality. Bride's reason to live. Slamming a rapist's head in a door until he is dead. Blood spouting from the stump of a neck. Stone Cold Revenge.

Bill The Direct Object. A twist, a rhyme, a tiny deviation. A name sketched on a window pane. A wry smile. A love that extends from metaphysics to typeface. The #29 song of 1969 ("Bill, I love you so, I always will/I look at you and see the passion eyes of May/Oh, but am I ever gonna see my wedding day/I was on your side Bill when you were loosin'/I never scheme or lie Bill, there's been no foolin'/But kisses and love won't carry me till you marry me Bill")

There's a fine line between silly and perfect.

---

Quentin Tarantino is a major force behind the ascendency of the geek's cultural status in the 90's, along with comics geeks working in film and television like Joss Wheedon and Kevin Smith. Actually, a more significant force would probably be the scads of money that ran after computer geeks, and the cultural fetishes like comics and genre films of the 70s jumped to prominence incidentally. If that's what we have to thank for QT's ability to make movies, that's fine. But it seems there's a more intricate connections between commercial and cultural strands of geekdom: both feature obsessive attention to detail (computer code simply won't work if you mis-strike a key; if you don't know "Switchblade Sisters" you won't appreciate Darryl Hannah's eyepatch), both are concerned with protocols and procedures. On the other hand, both have the tendency to live in sealed-off world, whether it's dreaming in Perl (I actually overheard someone say this once) or handicapping fights between the Hulk and the Thing (pick 'em).

At this point I could proclaim myself a film geek and take rightful possession of Kill Bill as my own. But I can't quite do it. I don't know about Darryl Hannah's eye patch first hand, and even worse I can't remember if it was "Switchblade Sisters" or something else. Instead of endlessly replaying Shaw brothers' kung-fu movies I do things like my job and be married. Sure, I recognize some conventions, like the subtitles using the common thick yellow type favoured by vintage Hong Kong movies, and the unnecessarily thick lines dividing split screens as a similar nod to 70s film technology. I also get the devotion to the rituals of taking out the Crazy 88 killers one by one, or the ceremonial importance of acquiring your weapon. But these things are almost archetypes by now; Tarantino I'm sure has done a lot more in mining the dross of 70's exploitation cinemas for its gold. You get the impression the this film is a distillation of the best of a whole hidden culture. If it meant that I could enjoy this movie more, I wish I had become a full-fledged film geek.

What I do love about Kill Bill is Tarantino's love of artifice: we see it in the shuffled chronology of the narrative, in a striking animated sequence, in a rogue answering machine that disguises the Bride's name (to preserve her mythological status), in the switching to b&w, in the absolutely beautiful use of color in the House of Blue Leaves chapter (including the pool that turns from blue to red, the silhouetted fight against blue screen, and the Bride's bright red and yellow entry into the icy garden to duel O-Ren Ishii).

There's also a dark humour at work here; what's more it's a real humor that doesn't require recognizing the Bride's track suit as identical to Bruce Lee's, but is based on pacing and human interaction, like the fight with Vernita Green. Remember, Tarantino isn't only the obsessive video clerk who translated City on Fire into Reservior Dogs, he's also the only director who's ever got the patterns of Elmore Leonard's snappy exchanges onto film, in Jackie Brown. But, then again, he's also the guy who got us to laugh at Thurman sitting up stock straight with a giant hypo sticking out of her chest. As you'd expect, some of the humor comes from the absurdity of the carnage, but this is where QT encounters his strongest criticism: is all this stylized violence, this savvy collage of pop culture, this snappy dialogue just to quicken the pulse of a generation sunk a quagmire of pop culture, delighting in their recognition of minutiae? I don't really have a problem with that. If he can compete with the artless violence of Jerry Bruckheimer, for instance, he might teach a jaded audience something about pattern, about knowing a tradition, about, gulp, the rewards of loving art.

I wrote about Sofia Copolla's divergence from auteur-ness two weeks ago. While Tarantino remains firmly in that camp, he has at the same time reached out to assemble some admirable talent. I enjoyed all the perfomances, particularly Uma Thurman's, which might be the most rugged woman in film history. Sonny Chiba goes from clown to grave warrior at the drop of a sake cup. Behind the scenes, Yuen Wo Ping's fight choreography is of course beautiful (and beautifully framed by QT), and the music lingers in the memory: in the hospital, in the tea house, and what I think is a RZA (who else but the leader of the Wu-Tang Clan could score this film?) original, the burst of klaxon-like notes signifying the church (it reminds me somewhat of RZA's score of Ghost Dog in its minimalism).

Since Kill Bill is only half over, maybe I'm being too hasty with my praise. Maybe being the distillation of the best of grindhouse cinema ain't that great. But I'm more than half-willing to start training as a black-belt film geek to be able to judge.