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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES 

Self-Disdain in Tender Is the Night 

Hitchcock and Kafka: Expressionist Themes in Strangers on a Train 

Poetry and Process 

Diabolical Dreaming in Stephen King's "The Man in The Black Suit" 

Figuring Science: Revisiting Nature in Bacon's Novum Organum 

POEMS 

Gacela of Mountains and Clouds 

The Possibility of Rain 

Oxygen 

Cabin Packrat 

Meditation, with Birds 

The End of Winter 

Singing the Blues: A Meditation 

Turn Of The Earth 

A Winter Discipline 

Compass 

Eating Blueberries in New Hampshire 

A Visitor 

The Sun 

REVIEW 

David Nasaw; The Chief The Life of William Randolph Hearst 

Abstract

DARREL MANSELL clearly delineates the similarities between Dr. Richard Diver, the protagonist of Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald's late novel, and Fitzgerald himself, his career and view of the world. It is a devastating critique. 'The decline of Dr. Richard Diver is the decline of the West and its art form the novel. . . . That eastward vision for Fitzgerald is the recidivism of culture to its origins in barbarism. Laconic barbarism expressing itself in a new, essentially non-verbal art form, the cinema. The cinema will be the cultural power in the new world; power that once belonged to the word, to Doctor Richard Diver, and to the novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald." Mansell is Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He is the author of a book on Jane Austen and of many articles and essays. He is currently at work on an essay on the polygraph, the lie detector.

PETER J. DELLOLIO demonstrates that Alfred Hitchcock in "Strangers  on a Train" carefully constructs the visual imagery, finding "formal figures that telescope or mirror . . . his protagonists' thoughts, feelings, and perceptions through a variety of spatial and formal equivalences." These means, Dellolio contends, are derived from Expressionism, without being "traditional or textbook examples of expressionist cinema." Dellolio lives and works in New York City. While his primary interest is criticism, particularly of cinema, he has published essays on art and film, fiction, poetry, one-act plays, and a screenplay of a James Joyce short story which he also directed, Counterparts, that has been shown at national and international film festivals. The current article is part of a larger study of Hitchcock's "cinematic world."

APRIL D. FALLON asserts that the "nihilistic, deconstructive postmodern, solipsistic view of the individual consciousness" characteristic of the Modernist Poets should be replaced by what she terms a "poetics of process." With such a view, "time loses its nature as a mathematical quality and becomes a quality in which our experiences become inseparable from how we perceive them: our emotions, values, and past experiences color our present experiences. It is only in moments of real duration or immediate experience that the self experiences reality, yet this reality is not one of permanent or eternal forms, but one of immanent flow." Interdependency is a key concept, similarly derived from the Process Philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. Assistant Professor of American Literature and a poet at Kentucky State University, Fallon has published poems in many venues and has a chapbook, The Ice King, from Kore Press, and has given scholarly papers on William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Li Po.

J. P. DANCING BEAR has published poems in Seattle Review, Evansville Review, National Poetry Review, Poetry International, and many other journals. He has published two chapbooks, Blue Hand (Pudding House Press, 2002) and What Language, which won the 2002 Slipstream Press Chapbook Contest. He lives in San Jose, California, where he hosts "Out of Our Minds," a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the DMQ Review.

TODD DAVIS published his first book of poems, Ripe (Bottom Dog Press), in 2002. His poems have appeared in The North American Review, The Nebraska Review, The Mid-American Poetry Review, and numerous other journals. He teaches English at the Pennsylvania State University at Altoona.

JAMES DOYLE, Ft. Collins, Colorado, has published one book of poems, The Silk at Her Throat (Cedar Hill Publications, 1999). His poems have appeared in more than 200 journals, including The Iowa Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry, and South Dakota Review, and in the anthology, Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading (Prentice Hall, 1996). His poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

MAUREEN TOLMAN FLANNERY has published two books of poems, Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico, Remembered Into Life and Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places. Her poems have appeared in more than 100 journals and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, St. Anne's Bridge, Meridians, and the recent anthology, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge. She lives in Chicago.

SCOTT GALLAWAY has published poetry in Cumberland Poetry Review, Crucible, Hiram Poetry Review, Evansville Review, and other journals. He lives in Bowling Green, Ohio, and teaches at Bowling Green State University.

ABIGAIL HOWELL, Seattle, Washington, has published poetry most recently in Willow Springs, North American Review, and Borderlands. In 2002 she placed second in the Matt Clark Prize Competition.

HOLLY HUGHES spends her summers working on boats in Alaska and her winters teaching writing at Edmonds Community College in Washington. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Duckabush Journal, Crosscurrents, Pontoon, and The Hedgebrook Journal. She lives in a 1930s log cabin in Indianola, Washington.

ANN SILSBEE's book, Orioling (Red Hen Press, 2003), recently won the Benjamin Saltman Prize. She has also published a chapbook, Naming The Disappeared (Vista Productions). Her poetry has appeared in The Seneca Review, The Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

SHARRON SINGLETON has published poems in The Louisville Review, Christianity and the Arts, The Red Rock Review, and other journals. She lives in Southfield, Michigan, near Detroit.

CHRIS SOUZA, Swansea, Massachusetts, has published poetry in The Concho River Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sycamore Review, and West Branch. She has twice received the Academy of American Poets Award.

THOM TAMMARO is the author of two collections of poems, When the Italians Came to My Home Town and Minnesota Suite. He has edited several anthologies, including Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest (1993) and Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest (1995), both from the University of Minnesota Press. His poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly. He lives in Moorhead, Minnesota.

JAY UDALL is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Home in the Dark (Sunstone Press, 2002). His poems and stories have appeared in many publications, including South Dakota Review, Georgetown Review,_ Wind, and Potpourri. He works as the office manager of the Navajo Uranium Miners and Widows Fund and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

DON WELCH, Kearney, Nebraska, has had poems appear recently in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, and South Dakota Review. His most recent book is The Alley Poems (Lone Willow Press, 2002). His poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

TOM HANSEN examines a neglected Stephen King story as a way of revealing the author's art lurking below a work "so transparently, so blatantly supernatural that not even those not easily caught have thought to look beneath its glittering surface." In doing so Hansen discovers "a little story that surreptitiously transcends the genre it so obviously exploits." Because King's recent "lifetime achievement" prize at the 2003 National Book Awards was so controversial -- disdained by the high-flyers and defended as recognition of King's success in reaching his audience – this essay is as timely as it is deft in exploring the psychological dimensions in King's story. Hansen, retired emeritus Professor of English at Northern State University in South Dakota, has published essays and poems in many journals, including The Midwest Quarterly.

DENNIS DESROCHES argues persuasively that Francis Bacon, sometimes cited as a proponent of the rape of nature in the service of scientific progress, actually cautioned that "if indeed nature is to be 'seized and detained,' we must also, according to Bacon, 'wait upon nature instead of vainly affecting to overrule her.'" So Bacon instead believed it "possible for nature to be the subject of inquiry without its being subjected by that inquiry." Desroches teaches at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in the English Department. His dissertation, also at McMaster, concerned the readings and misreadings of Francis Bacon's scientific thought and its importance to contemporary models of scientific knowledge production.

ARTHUR SCHERR is an independent scholar who has taught history and geography at several New York colleges and published numerous articles on history and journalism. He has written a book entitled I Married Me A Wife: Male Attitudes toward Women in the American Museum, 1787-1792 (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and has published articles and reviews in various journals, including The Historian, Mid-America, American Journalism, and The Midwest Quarterly.

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