Word: mcmichaels
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NOWADAYS, whether or not we like the idea, it looks as if it's going to be important to understand the culture of Southern California. After all, it has formed two Presidents and provided a congenial atmosphere for the retirement of a third. James McMichael's Four Good Things, a new long poem about--of all things--Pasadena, makes such an effort. It is also about worry, death, sex manuals, taxes, domestic architecture, the Industrial Revolution, real estate, and the American soul...
...that place--Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald. It thus qualifies as classically American, written with the speculative range, freedom of imagination, and fierce, clear eye that have invigorated this country's proudest works. the verse is clean, quiet, and lapidary; all the excitement is in watching McMichael take up one "unpoetic" subject after another and illuminate it; he turns all the world on the emotions of a child who is trying to find out what his father does all day and why his mother is dying...
...central technique is making connections. What, for example, is the connection between Pasadena and the Industrial Revolution? McMichael notes that the rich of California, whom a world market brought into being, made houses out of William Morris's criticism of shabby machine production standards. Very beautiful houses, actually, and McMichael describes the principle of their construction with a wonderfully quiet (and faintly nagging) accuracy...
Uncertainties in the market combatted by mastery and planning. Every American presidential candidate has tried to allay our anxiety by showing us how we are all going to get somewhere. McMichael insists that planning and anxiety are almost Siamese twins. Americans, with their city planning, economic planning, estate planning, family planning, with their game plans and saving plans and lay-away plans, would seem to be the most anxious people on earth...
...Congress already concerned with the ending of the session ("What message?" asked a member of Tip O'Neill's staff last week). Many activists were disappointed. "The White House has given us a very good chronicle of exactly where we are right now," says Jane McMichael, executive director of the National Women's Political Caucus. "But it also makes clear how much more remains to be done...