German Bus, American People

The recent indie film, nominated for a clutch of Oscars, Little Miss Sunshine, is the latest road-movie from an America that, from The Grapes of Wrath, to Easy Rider, on to Thelma & Louise, has forever pictured the bad-lands journey West ("to California") as both mythic and inherently doomed. Since The Day of the Locust, if not before, it's been de rigeur to note that people come to California to die, and this film is no different.

The family unit, united in tragedy, circles the (volks) wagons, and keeps out the Injuns, in this case, a majority of moral (or morally dubious) characters, from a perverted cop, to loud-mouth bereavement councillor to a cruel beauty pageant director. A late sublime moment ensues, when the failed Number One Proust Academic in America, lately suicidal, careens down a corridor, solely to reach the Little Miss Sunshine desk in time, his priorities realigned by the sense of the journey.

Like in all good quest narratives, the knights achieve their wisdom through their trials and tests as much as by what they locate at the end (of the rainbow, consider the empty promise of Oz). I am left with an ambiguous sense about the justness of the conclusion, which I won't reveal, except to say, it leaves an issue of sexual permissivity hanging in the air, that is most charitably resolved by saying, innocence cannot be corrupted by a tin man or cowardly lion, and perversity is, ultimately, in the eye of the beholder, not the dancer or the dance. This may surprise us all and beat The Departed for best film.

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IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

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"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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