Jason Evan Camlot

Department of English
Stanford University
gazon@leland.stanford.edu

 

David McGimpsey, Lardcake.Toronto: ECW, 1997.

 

Twenty years ago–when an attempt to critically disassemble television still seemed like a viable project–social critic Jerry Mander pointed out that this “delivery system of co mmodity life” works exclusively in one direction: “These are not metaphors. There is a concentrated passage of energy from machine to you, and none in the reverse. In this sense, the machine is literally dominant, and you are passive” (171). David McG impsey’s recent book of poems entitled Lardcake may stand as an informal rebuttal to Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, or as proof that on at least one occasion the ingestion of artificial light has not f ollowed the dominating process that Mander claims to be unavoidable in TV-viewing. You don’t need a Ph.D. to know not to believe everything you see on television, but McGimpsey’s doctoral work in American literature and popular culture adds an interestin g twist to his collection of poems about our most vapid obsessions. It suggests, in addition to an obvious over-exposure to television light (in McGimpsey’s house the TV must always be on), a perhaps equally “unhealthy” immersion in the institution that, traditionally, most disdains the effects of the mass media, even as it inevitably succumbs to certain elements of the logic of mass culture.

 

As Mark Edmundson has put it in his description of the current use of liberal education “as lite entertainment for bored college students”: “University culture, like American cul ture writ large, is ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images” (40). To a new Ph.D. recipient and veteran TV-watcher like McGimpsey, the manifest ironies that emerge from this relationship between e ducation and television are useful for making insightful poetry about the most unsightly effects of our tabloid technologies. Poems that appear late in the book address the ironies directly, for instance, Master Po’s advice to Little Grasshopper–“Kill a prince & fly to USA, grasshopper / It will appear as incomplete on your transcript” (“Master Po” 72)–or the transcription of the first valedictory address at Oprah State University, in which the top graduate expounds her new learning:

 

Now as we head out into the world
I can look an employer square and say
don't believe the Enquirer, feel 
   good about yourself!

Next fall, I will sit down
in my XXL OSU sweats
and laugh at all the ridiculous headlines.
("Oprah State University" 73)

 

McGimpsey’s work clearly aims at something other than an acquired knowledge of how to laugh at the headlines and the accompanying sense of empowering distance from the “ridiculou s” tabloid world. Rather, these poems reveal the overwhelming ignorance and self-deception of such a “distanced” position, and, further, how this ignorance that we all occasionally share can be emotionally poignant. A recent poetic precedent to McGimpse y’s project might be Lynn Crosbie’s Miss Pamela’s Mercy, which contains the monologue “Love Letter from Gary Coleman” and a piece called “Sabrina” about “the smart one” in Charlie’s Angels. These poems begin to sketch out the p ossibility of a serious language with which to express our experience of the purest television trash. McGimpsey’s book expands upon this possibility and actually realizes it, showing us that it is possible to speak about our lives with television in a la nguage that is crisp, elegant, and often very sad. The sadness I refer to results from the gradual revelation of the depth of our investment in the icons and images of entertainment we so casually dismiss.

 

The book’s first section establishes the parameters of the world of Lardcake. It is a world of black humor, white enriched flour, and especially of the myriad shade s of gray that complicate the space between what we really want and what we know is “bad” for us. To weigh the value and effect of the images we consume is ultimately to put ourselves on the scale, complete with the knowledge that our taste for crap may be one of our most engrossing characteristics. How to write intelligently about our very real desire for brain candy? To begin his exploration of this ethical dilemma, the author develops a voice that provides an immanent account (perhaps a bit too imma nent to function as critique) of the intimate relationships a viewer can cultivate with the “stars” of Marshall McLuhan’s “cool” medium of television. We are given voices that morph the televised and the human in ways that suggest a new species, or, more appropriately phrased, a new brand of media consumer: the couch poet-ato.

 

These initial poetic personae are reminiscent of the pathetic Ratso Rizzo played by Dustin Hoffman in the film Midnight Cowboy. The fantasizing poet becomes king of the Hollywood (Florida) pool-side buffet, seeking the love and recognition of those who have never really deserved to be recognized themselves. This undeserving recognition, “television success,” to use a phrase from the book, fuels McGimpsey’s own deta iled exploration of narcissism, that process by which we privately love ourselves while looking at broadcast light. The narcissism is that of the prime-time viewer and of the prime-time poet at once, and the question of the day, both in terms of why we w rite this and why we watch that, is stated concisely: “If it doesn’t appeal to narcissism / is it appealing at all?” (“Jurassic Dave” 22). In the comfort of television solitude, turned away from the peopled world, the couch poetato revels in affect and f inds a virtual community, a kind of social separation that is akin to the fantasy of canonization that fuels a community of never-to-be-discovered writers:

 

In Aphelia House I lunge at my TV-friends
when they say things that let me down;
I'm less demonstrative with real people,
preferring to avoid their meaningful 
   comparisons.

.........................................

There's no tragedy in Burgerworld tonight
no woebegotten talent undiscovered;
the world has done its work in forgetting
Jennifer Plath, T.P. Eliot and Dave Joyce.
("Roger Clintonesqueria" 16-17)

 

The meaningful comparisons of real people soon fall away even as a context that the resident of Aphelia House would hope to avoid. The second section of the book further collaps es the distance between poet-viewer and TV-friend, providing a series of monologues delivered by the protagonists of “classic” television. Here we find Charlie contemplating life with his Angels, Howard dreaming of happier days with his wife Marion, and Darrin articulating his urge for less witchcraft and more secretarial banality. Compared to the television-monologues that appear later in the volume, which are somewhat more contemporary, this cluster may be called historical or archival, and evokes a k ind of insipid, entropic aura that is perfectly appropriate to the perpetually re-run characters. These characters divulge the deep dissatisfactions that lie behind their shallow manifestations of personality. They are hungry for change, speaking repeat edly from the end of their ropes. As Charlie explains his “Reality” in one of the poems just mentioned:

 

I am a hungry man
I will eat my hand one day
to calm my feelings of failure
("Charlie's Reality" 25)

 

Here McGimpsey develops a thesis that suggests that the poet and his work are analogous to the life of a minor sit-com character after the show has had its first run. These unreal people–“my TV-friends”–must continue to live, no? to do somet hing. Similarly, the writer must continue to watch and attempt to show something for all that time seated and staring at rapid bits of light. He proceeds to prove that he is not impassive to television icons generally deemed meaningless, by ide ntifying the inflected opinions of these icons. The form of the dramatic monologue serves this purpose well, bringing concrete immediacy to what might previously have been approached only as, well, pre-recorded television.

 

In one such monologue, for instance (the second in the section about Charlie’s Angels), Kelley turns to the touchstones of literature in her attempt to compose a let ter of resignation from the notorious detective agency:

 

I've been thumbing through the book of 
   quotations
trying to find the right way to say fuck you
a way to slam the door like a teenaged Zeus

all silver with precious hurt & insight;
the grease of the bards is used and tasty
& made for situations just like this.
("Kelly Leaves the Charles Townsend 
Detective Agency" 33)

 

The poetic irony (concerning poetry) is perfect; the fictional television character flipping through the “poetry listings” for a pre-cooked morsel of “used and tasty” expression, so that she might leave her own inane “situation” (comedy) behind. In Mc Gimpsey’s world, television becomes fodder for poetry, which in turn becomes the pre-fabricated means of escape from the predictability of television. The only element that is truly absent from the cycle played out in these shorter television monologues is an emotional attention span protracted and resilien t enough to tolerate the disturbing intricacies of an actual human confrontation. All of the monologues in this section are organized in three line stanzas, perhaps mimicking the diminutive capacities of the “us” of the book–we who find ourselves thumbi ng through the TV-guide so as to avoid finding “the right way to say fuck you” to our various situations.

 

The longer poems of the third section gravitate away from the clipped stanza toward the linear density of the tightly spun yarn, and the sense of trapped urgency is consequently replaced by a more elaborate field of exploration. Still, even the long poems of the book are lean (“fat free, better for you,” McGimpsey might say), and the line becomes the crucial unit for holding the expanded world together with hard precision–like the toughness of Bukowski, but without the toughness. For although these poems are populated with important figures of white masculinity–Babe Ruth, Hank Williams–their goal is as much to penetrate the heart of white-trash sensitivity and mortality as i t is to canonize the glorious inaccessibility of the interior of such male heroes. For instance, the legend of “Babe Ruth, Yankee slugger extraordinaire, / … just another who didn’t really die,” is advanced by imagining the moment that “Babe Ruth… th roat cancer victim” checked out of the hospital:

 

Friends, he just excused himself from the 
   hospital bed,
too scrawny for pinstripes,
his face drooping, badly ravaged,
& wandered out under the weary stars
& went somewhere altogether Ruthian
& picked himself up a brontosaurus bone.
("Babe Ruth in Love" 51)

 

This passage stands as but one example of how McGimpsey more generally convinces us of the materiality of popular legend and media fluff by bringing it all under a knife. Thus, in addition to Babe Ruth, “throat cancer victim,” we have Dr. Huxtable’s graphic back surgery, “a mysterious virus” in the neck of Bill Stedman (of Hawaii Five-O), and bits of the dying thirtysomething characters being taken by t he river “under the ice to a Delaware beach” (“All the thirtysomething Characters Die” 69). This interest in the deteriorating bodies of the stars is another means of exploring the narcissism of our love for the comfort of h eadline gossip. While tabloids help us to obsess about the gravitational status of Oprah (and ourselves), McGimpsey helps us to recognize the narcissism and the selflessness that exist simultaneously in our concern for a famous stranger’s body. As the b ook’s thirtysomething poem states, “what sells isn’t sex or product performance / but bittersweet emotion” (69). This is the challenge that McGimpsey takes upon himself: to write effectively about the sentimental glue that holds our prime-ti me world together without succumbing to saccharinity, but without denying the sweetness of saccharin, either. Remarkably, he achieves this difficult balance with consistent success.

 

My favorite poem of the book, “In Memoriam: A.H. Jr.,” provides an excellent example of how McGimpsey succeeds in corporealizing the immaterial cliché of sit-com personali ty. While the Tennysonian title and pretense of this homage to the actor Alan Hale, who played the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island, suggest parody, the result is startlingly the opposite, an account of a television personality in his final days of cancer and chemotherapy that integrates motifs from the “show” and “real life” in such a way that the physical reality of what we watch comes through with remarkable effect.

 

He'd say "when I get back to civilization
I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do:
I'm going to have a tall glass of cold beer
& I won't spill a drop.
I'm going to order a steak, New York cut,
medium rare & two inches thick."
How thick?  "Two inches thick!"
In the plate will rest the slightest residue:
blood, spice & fat
agents of flavor after the meat is gone.
("In Memoriam: A.H. Jr." 50)

 

But what are we to make of all of this graphic bodily decrepitude in a book of poems about television? Even the Lynn Crosbie piece mentioned earlier has Gary Coleman “hooked up to a machine” (probably for treatment of his kidney disorder). Most likely it comes from the natural realization that, in the end, the emotional sustenance we acquire from television–and in this sense we are all hooked up to machines, in palliative care –resides purely in the “agents of flavor” because “the meat” is always already gone. Thus, to give a body to an ephemeron from television, and then to watch it waste away, is ultimately to give the medium the dignity of death, something that, in my pre- Lardcake experience, it had never had. Previously in my mind shows were simply canceled. Now I begin to understand a more significant mourning, one that may be embarrassing to admit. What is so admirable about McGimpsey’s articulation of su ch mourning is that it is completely remorseless. Don’t bother trying to remind me now that television is an inherently “cool” medium:

 

Saying it was only a TV show
is like saying it was only a friend,
only my brother, only my father.
("In Memoriam: A.H. Jr." 49)

Works Cited

 

• Crosbie, Lynn. Miss Pamela’s Mercy. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992.
• Edmundson, Mark. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As lite entertainment for bored college students.” Harper’s Magazine 295 (September 1997): 39-49.
• Mander, Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Morrow, 1978.
• McGimpsey, David. Lardcake. Toronto: ECW, 1997.