ROBERT FLANAGAN

AGAINST ALL ODDS

What heavyweight championship prizefight ranks as the single biggest upset in boxing history? “Cinderella Man” James J. Braddock’s victory over Max Baer? Gene “The Fighting Marine” Tunney’s defeat of Jack Dempsey? No, it’s 42-1 underdog James “Buster” Douglas’s 10th round demolition of the undisputed, fearsome world champion “Iron” Mike Tyson.

In The Last Great Fight veteran boxing writer Joe Layden provides a thoroughly researched account of the build-up to and after-affects of the Tyson-Douglas encounter in Tokyo, Japan on February 10, 1990. While the bout’s outcome is known to anyone with the slightest awareness of boxing, the narrative achieves tension via Layden’s “Convergence of the Twain” approach; shifting back and forth from the Titanic Tyson to the iceberg Douglas.

As Tyson’s tale, proclaimed early on in Ring and Sports Illustrated and later in People and the National Enquirer, is widely known, it’s the lesser-known story of Douglas that provides the greater interest in The Last Great Fight. Buster’s Columbus, Ohio world is filled with interesting characters: his inspirational mother Lula Pearl; his rock hard middleweight brawler father Bill “Dynamite” Douglas; his uncle and trainer J.D. McCauley, and his manager John Johnson, a former assistant to Ohio State University’s legendary coach Woody Hayes.

That James Douglas got a shot at Tyson’s title was in itself a fluke. Promoter Don King looked to give Tyson a few easy paydays before matching him against the No.1-ranked challenger Evander Holyfield. As Tyson was the fan draw, little consideration was given to the choice of opponent. “All that was needed, really, was a warm body…Someone who could be counted on to look mildly inspiring (and inspired) for a round or two, throw a few heavy punches, and then hit the canvas. Someone with boxing skills, a superficially impressive resume, and a reliably faint heart.” In other words, someone like the erratic underachiever James “Buster” Douglas.

When Douglas was announced as Tyson’s challenger most boxing experts agreed that it would be no contest. “Sports Illustrated quipped that Tyson would go through Douglas `faster than a plate of sushi.’” Only a few thought “Buster” had a chance, among them the Columbus Dispatch’s Tim May who predicted the upset.

The bout proved to be a turning point for both fighters. For a time Buster’s triumph made him seem bigger than life. As Layden puts it: “Buster Douglas was Rocky made real.” Yet Douglas as well as Tyson would soon suffer personal troubles, health crises and career set-backs. Neither would ever again reach such a professional peak.

To this day Tyson remains emotionally troubled and now struggles to stave off bankruptcy. Douglas, on the other hand, appears financially and psychologically solvent. “I had my moment,” he says. “It was a beautiful thing; now I’ve moved on to bigger and better things.”

THE CRAFT AND WRATH OF ALAN DUGAN

Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Dugan, a hard knock bard who held fast to his craft and all career-long stood an independent outsider to the passing fads of contemporary poetry! Sing of his stoic joy, independent spirit and gift for oracular song, both tough and true.

Because a new collection of Alan Dugan's poems is cause for celebration. Author of POEMS, POEMS TWO, POEMS THREE, etc, on up to his new 400 plus page POEMS SEVEN: NEW AND COMPLETE POETRY, Alan Dugan has carved out one of the richest, yet relatively unheralded careers in contemporary American poetry. A literary maverick, Dugan is brutally honest, skeptical and yet celebratory in poems that are terse and formal, and timeless in their treatment of daily life as seen in the light of legend and classical tradition. (Three of his poem titles may serve to suggest his skeptical, stoic and underdog point of view: "On A Myth: On Conventional Wisdom;" "What Happened? What Do You Expect?" and "On Being Out-Classed by Class.")

As poet Louise Gluck wrote in The Threepenny Review: "Where another more solemn poet takes on or offers up apocalyptic truth or elevated perception, Dugan deals in the goods: vice, guile, hunger, deception, stasis."

He's able to write so close to the bone because professionally his deep love of classical poetry inoculated him to the various and ephemeral poetry schools (think fish): confessional, deep image, and the (oddly redundant) language poetry, and personally he refused to believe in society's conformist mind set: "...they said: `There/​ are only two sides to a question; to/​ propose a third is treason if true.'" (The Crimes Of Bernard) That final twist -- "if true" -- is quintessential Dugan.

Dugan is blessed (or cursed) with the ability to see through to the gritty reality often hidden in the gauzy mists of myth, yet has the heart to celebrate the courage and heroism of history's usual losers. "Even if a man has been/​ chopped down to be/​ a basket case and has/​ gone mad with it, he/​ doesn't lack honor nonetheless..." (On Visiting A Veterans Hospital.)

In his poem "On Hurricane Jackson" such bifocal vision reveals both the pathos and brutality of a modern boxer's fate while at the same viewing it as a parallel to classical heroism.

Although now the boxer's nose is broken and
"one eye/​ will not focus and the other is a stray..." and "trainers whisper in his mouth while one ear/​ listens to itself, clenched like a fist;/​" "his perfect youth,/​ laureled in newsprint and dollar bills,/​ trimphs forever on the great white way/​ to the statisical Sparta of the champs."

Dugan knows and accepts the fact that time both mocks and enshrines our heroes, that time finally will have its way with us all. "Miniature Greek gods support the Roman hour/​ having nothing else to do, or hold/​ some dead white grapes to girlish smiles/​ as the time runs round in a gold ring." (from On a Baroque Clock)

Yet there is never a mournful tone to his work. Rather he seems to delight in history's absurdities.
His poems are filled with deadpan humor and the titles alone might be worth the price of the book: "What the Hell, Rage, Give in to Natural Graces;" "His Hands Have Five Knives Each;" "Funeral Oration for a Mouse;" "Memory of Old Forms Under Hell's Angels;" "Death's Chicken, Named Amelia;" "Fabrication of Ancestors;" "Speech to the Student Clowns at the Circus Clown School at Sarasota, Florida;" "Perverse Explanation for Mutilated Statuary;" "Monologue for a Sixth Avenue Screamer;" "Oxymoronic Hospital Blues."

So let us celebrate these collected poems, Homeric in power and range, bawdy as those of Catullus, and edged with the razor wit of Juvenal.

There are more famous poets than Alan Dugan but none better.

THINKING FICTION

It’s no surprise that British novelist and critic David Lodge should publish Consciousness and the Novel, “connected essays” on the portrayal and role of consciousness in fiction. The characters who inhabit his own comic novels of class and cultural conflict, Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work, are highly self-conscious beings, and his most recent novel, Thinks…, is, as one might expect, about someone thinking. (Its heroine Helen Reed, a novelist and lapsed Catholic, thinks, but not like the man with whom she’s involved, an atheistic cognitive scientist, thinks she thinks.)

What links Lodge’s eleven essays is the premise that literature is “a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive that we have” and that it is “complementary to scientific knowledge.”
Citing the works of a broad range of writers from Jane Austen to Nicholson Baker, Charles Dickens to John Updike, and Virginia Woolf to Philip Roth, as well as taking into account the writings of Soren Kierkegaard and numerous neurobiologists and psychologists, Lodge examines how the novel represents consciousness; how such representation has changed over time; how the novelist’s consciousness and unconsciousness function creatively; and what, if any, is the role of the critic’s formal analysis in the process.

All this may sound like heavy going, but it’s not. Pieces such as “Bye-Bye Bech,” “Henry James and the Movies,” and “Waugh’s Comic Wasteland” are lively verbal performances marked by psychological insight and scalpel sharp wit.

One reason Lodge’s creative and critical works are such joys to read is the sense of play in them. “Writers discover what they want to say in the process of saying it,” he says, and in his own works it’s evident he had fun in their discovery.

The essay “Kierkegaard for Special Purposes” is a shortened version of an address Lodge delivered at an international conference of scholars in Copenhagen. (In a prefatory note Lodge confesses to never discovering the meaning of the conference title, “Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It.”) Was he invited to speak there because of being an expert on Fear and Trembling? No. Rather because the main character of his novel Therapy, Tubby Passmore, a depressed writer, refuses to crank out another season of his hit TV sitcom “The People Next Door” unless the network produces his movie of the week script on the life of depressed Copenhagen philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

Lodge is a writer’s critic. He knows the creative process from the inside out and does not, when working outside-in as a critic of fiction, presume analysis to be superior to synthesis. Rather, he approaches the literary work under scrutiny with respect for its different form of knowledge. His essay “Literary Criticism and Literary Creation” ought to be required reading for all graduate students in English as part of their education in enjoyment, as should his earlier essay collection The Art of Fiction.

He is not anti-critical however. In The Practice of Writing, another of his essay collections, he shows appreciation of deconstructionist guru Jacques Derrida and employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought in a structuralist reading of a Harold Pinter play.

Nor does Lodge pretend to special knowledge as a novelist. “Readers of novels often assume that the knowledge of a particular subject displayed in their pages must be the visible tip of a submerged iceberg of information, when in fact there often is no iceberg – the tip is all there is.”

Here’s a tip: If you like being in smart company get to know David Lodge.