TBD: Confirmation

From confirmation hearings for Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Kay Ryan before the United States Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Recreation, and Poetry, Patrick Leahy, D-VT, Chair.  The excerpted testimony comes from the third afternoon of the nine-day hearings in early July of 2008, in which Senator Orrin Hatch, R-UT, requested that Ryan explain her poetic philosophy underlying “He Lit A Fire With Icicles,” her elegy for German writer W. G. Sebald.  Many later recalled this relatively heated exchange as one of the most memorable of the hearings in part because of Ryan’s coinage, “The Enjambed States of America.”  The slogan “UnbreaKAYble,” which appeared on bumper stickers, T-Shirts and at the end of television and radio ads purchased by the 527 group Citizens To Confirm Kay Ryan, has been compared to the “I Believe Anita” slogan that was publicized similarly during and following the Senate confirmation hearings for then-nominee to the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas.

Senator Orrin Hatch: And Ms. Ryan, do you recall your use of enjambed line breaks to break up a rhyming couplet of iambic hexameter at the poem’s conclusion?

Kay Ryan: Senator, I—It has been some time since I wrote that poem.  I’m not sure that—

SOH: The poem’s sixteenth line ends with the word stay.  And the poem’s twentieth, its final line, ends with the word away.  Isn’t that correct, Ms. Ryan?

KR: Yes, Senator, that does, that sounds correct, to the best of my recollection.

SOH: Then do you also recall that the final four lines, and I’ll read them, “When he could feel his feet he had to back away,” do you also recall that this single sentence, six iamb feet lined up like ducks in a row dah-dum, dah-dum, dah-dum, that it is in fact four lines, at least according to your poem as published?  It is four lines, isn’t it?

KR: Yes, Senator, I believe that is correct.

SOH: I’ll get back to the issue at hand then, Ms. Ryan.  I’m sure you won’t be surprised, and I’m sure the other members of the committee and the members of the public here today won’t be surprised to hear that I’m curious about how you came to the decision to break apart that single thought.  I say single thought, of course, since that is the traditional, and, well, agreed upon definition of a sentence.  A single thought.

KR: Senator, I think what you’re—

SOH: And I consider enjambment, the breaking up of that single thought, a serious matter.  I think all Americans do whether they agree with my position, which I know is a matter of deep personal, moral feeling, whether you agree with me or not.  I’m sure that my constituents from the great state of Utah agree that it’s a serious matter.  But frankly, Ms. Ryan, based on the record that myself and others here today have tried to bring to light, I’m not sure I am yet convinced that you treat this matter with, really, the gravity it deserves.  And that concerns me.  It does.  It concerns the American people.  So I would hope that the other members of this committee would give pause before simply rubber stamping a Poet Laureate who went out and enjambed single, inviolable thoughts, thoughts contained in rightfully codified, systematic meter, went out and enjambed them willy-nilly.  The, really, the question before you, Ms. Ryan, is whether or not there was a legitimate reason, a poetical basis if you will, for your dissection of the poem’s closing thought in the manner you did, in fact, dissect it.  And I give you the opportunity to explain yourself, if you can, here today.

KR: I thank you, Senator Hatch, for that opportunity.  Before I answer though, I believe some clarification may have—may be, rather, in order.  I think what you’re calling a rhyming couplet of iambic hexameter is perhaps, if you’ll excuse me, not entirely accurate.  It is true that those final four lines can be considered six iambs, and that the second iamb of the first and third of those lines is enjambed.  But it might also be said that each of those four lines is a trisyllabic foot unto itself, a Cretic or amphimacer foot.  These are matters left up to interpretation, and intended to be left to interpretation, by the American people, as established in the precedent of 15 Poet Laureates and many, many Consultants in Poetry for the, to the Library of Congress before me.  I feel I should also note that the poem’s previous lines do not follow this structure, whatever we choose to call it, and that the couplet itself, is in question even if undoubtedly this poem does contain some rhyme.  A digression, perhaps, that I hope this committee will forgive.  The larger issue, however, if I take your meaning correctly, Senator, is a question of my loyalty to integrity and, I believe, by implication, clarity.  The suggestion has been made today and in the previous weeks, before I was able to speak for myself, that my use of enjambment is confirmation of a not-so-secret belief that some parts of thoughts, some words, and therefore some citizens of this great nation are more important than others.  In other words, my critics would have it that I have a tendency toward prejudicial emphasis.  I want to assure you, Senator Hatch, as well as the other members of this committee and all of the American people that this great deliberative body represents, I want to assure you that nothing is farther from the truth.  And I think if you go back and look at the context in which these, well, these line breaks occur, that is in the whole poem and the author it was trying to honor, I think you’ll see that I had intended to show exactly the opposite.  It is my belief that the integrity of a single thought is unbreakable, just as this nation has proven it is unbreakable, following our bloody second birth in the Civil War.  What the poem suggests about Mr. Sebald, who is, for the record, a man I greatly admire for his unwillingness to insert even a single paragraph break into his narratives.  The poem suggests that we must notice the juxtapostion, the natural pauses for mutual regard, for perspective, the stopping and restarting that takes place within integrity.  And again, I would suggest that this notion is confirmed in our history and in our character as a nation, a nation that is united because it is enjambed, the Enjambed States of America, if you will.  We are joined by our integrity as a culture, as a nation, as individuals.  But we are set apart, as states, as people, set next to each other, enriched by our relation to each other.  We comprise a more powerful whole because of our undeniable separations.  We are enjambed as a nation and within ourselves and it is the fact of this enjambment, the acknowledgement of it, that makes us so great.  It is what makes us unbreakable.  That’s not exactly that that poem is about, but that is, was rather the basis of my use of the, I want to re-emphasize, rather narrow usage of the technique.

SOH: Ms. Ryan, are seriously suggesting–

Senator Patrick Leahy: Senator Hatch, your time has expired.   We must—

SOH: Mr. Chairman, I retract, I—One more question, please, Chairman.  I will be brief.

SPL: I don’t think I need to remind you, Senator, that we would all like to ask the nominee a lot of questions that—

SOH: I do apologize, Chairman Leahy, I simply want to know if Ms. Ryan is aware that W. G. Sebald, the subject of her poem, was a German citizen who wrote extensively about the so-called atrocities committed by the American army liberating Germany in WWII.

SPL: Senator Hatch, your time has expired.  I will thank you to respect—

KR: Mr. Chairman, excuse me.  Excuse me.  If the chairmen permits, I’ll answer the Senator’s question.

SPL: Very well, Senator Hatch, you may ask your final question.

SOH: Are you, Ms. Ryan, aware of Sebald’s writings on the so-called fire-bombing of Dresden?

KR: I am.  I am well aware of Mr. Sebald’s sympathies.  I would ask, request that you judge me, however, on my own work, and not by supposed association with the sentiments of anyone else.   My tenure as Poet Laureate would be loyal to the best interests of the American people and nothing else.

SOH: Thank you, Ms. Ryan, for your testimony, and thank you Chairman Lahey, for your consideration.

SPL: I prefer, for future reference, keeping to the schedule to being thanked, but I thank you both for your brevity once consideration was granted.  We will, uh, will take a ten-minute, a flexible, ten-minute break now.  This hearing is now in recess.

TBD: No Line Breaks, Not Poems About Not Writing

1.
This morning, I sit in the car, listen to the famously homespun man from my home state reciting a poem called “Lonely Lake.”  Reportage of a beautiful, silent experience with an unnamed Other, every moment soaked in that familiar longing for God knows what and humorless attention to the world’s detailed confirmation of nominal meaning, the poem recalls nothing so much as poems like it.  Busy not working, the poet has noticed the world around her, sponged it all up, contemplated, tested experience against its anticipated description.  She has crafted something carefully small, flawless as a photograph of sunlight in water.  Still, I sit in the car, in the air busily soaking up the lukewarm rain now that the air conditioner is off, let the careworn voice chant the poet’s last few lines, my breath chuffing protest of predictability.  Stepping out into the street, I look across the park at the sun holding up the rain clouds beyond the trees, thrusting daylight toward me, at the water birds stalking the grass.  Everyone else spends the moment somewhere dry and out of sight, as if the scene is mine alone.  Is there a more tempting way to look at a landscape?  As if I’ve come so far for good reason?  As if I’m supposed to do something about all this.

2.
Do not, I repeat not read that interview with the writer instead of not reading it.  And don’t go back to Google when you’re done, don’t see there’s another farther down the page that might be better.  Do not read the other one since maybe the first is just him responding to the wrong questions.  Yeah, the second has better questions, more interesting answers, but he’s still keeping the magic all to himself, and the inspiration you thought you’d get from hearing how a book you loved got made will only reveal how shallow that love is.  Don’t think that maybe the book wasn’t so good after all, that it maybe says that same thing over and over, that we’re just who we are and that’s it, since the world doesn’t allow much else, and certainly don’t waste any time worrying that your own book might not even say that much.  Don’t realize away your innocent experience of the story when you experienced it, now that you begin to see the mind that made it, and don’t worry about the politics of your own unwritten story.  Do not, not now or later, wonder what he would think of the people in your world, the ones struggling to live on the page, the others still unimagined.  Do not confuse his book that exists with yours that wants to, don’t make that confusion an excuse to stall progress.  Don’t imagine anything but more things happening in your own world.  Don’t have a conversation with the writer, and do not, if you do, turn it into an argument.  Don’t try to parse his faux humility, actually certainty that some just got it and some just don’t.

3.
The best poem I read all week, new graffiti appears in the bathroom of the coffee shop.  A rectangle of Sharpie ink holds a heading, Petition To Kiss The Jonas Brothers, and three entries in the same hand.  The first is obscured by crayon or lipstick, some waxy stuff the color of a new bruise.  It’s hard to imagine anyone but whoever is under the substance being the one who put it there, satisfied then that the joke is no longer on her or him.   Names two and three, Angie B., Airplane, stay slapped onto the wall in plain view, apparently unnoticed, or undamning, or still eager for those fraternal kisses.  Then, underneath, in some shakier hand’s pencil, two more additions: Excited Pedaphile.  Sex.  Like some British comedians’ absurdist sketch, the list has quickly careered out of control, the penciled genius turning the joke inside out, into infantility itself, a destructive commentary that assembles some new form.  It’s hard not to imagine the thoughts of other coffee drinkers who notice me walking out of the bathroom, then right back in to linger on the names one more time, making sure I have them right in my mind.

In The News: IOU

So, I figure if California can issue 28,750 IOU’s worth $53.3 million dollars, then I–on a holiday weekend when I’m a million miles away from home and all I’ve got is sky and church lady pie and firecrackers and road and family and a little baby who gives kisses and smells like pears and wants to swim in the pool and a mother-in-law I need to steal secrets from and a husband who just flew in from London and a tupperware dish filled with banana pudding and old friends who are getting divorced and need to tip champagne glasses and other friends who have fallen in love or seen Hawaii or gotten new jobs or degrees or just gotten (happily and a bit to their surprise) through another day; when it’s all crickets and fireflies and sitting on the porch; when the heat’s so thick, your mind swims and your limbs hang limp; when your mother keeps calling from the other room, calling and calling, and you remember all the times she called for you, the lilt of her voice, and you can’t tell if you’re ten again or a hundred, and the door swings open, and Get off the computer, she says. Come on in for some coffee–well, then,  I can issue an IOU too.

Dear Reader, IOU. I can’t promise my word is any better than California’s, but, heck, at least it’s summer, and if I don’t pull through, you can drown your sorrows in lemonade and call it all a midnight dream. Happy, happy Fourth!!! May you make it to Monday with your appendages intact and your debts all paid.

ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Forgive Me – Part II

NOW AVAILABLE

You’re at your computer. Tickets are a tense, electrifying few seconds from going on sale. Eyeing the time, you’re hitting “Refresh,” and elsewhere, all your friends are doing the exact same thing. That’s Paul Siegell’s jambandbootleg. A widespread, high-spirited head rush. Desperation, fretfulness—all out life-leaping. “The party starts in the parking lot,” indeed. With poems shaped like a guitar, the American flag, even a Golgi apparatus, Paul’s monumental artworks could easily transform into posters. His is a poetry of exploration, heart and astonishment. Simply put: read Paul Siegell’s music. Read it as if listening to the most banging bootleg.

LOT’S OPEN!!!

Please check it out here: A-HEAD Publishing, and here: AMAZON

(Amazon’s already on backorder. Oops! But go ahead. They’ll still fulfill it. Pronto!)

FOR REAL???

“For centuries, people have tried to take words and turn them into music. What Paul Siegell does in his collection of poetry, jambandbootleg, is take music and turn it back into words. And he does it exceptionally well, capturing both the excitement of concert-going and the poetic essence of the improvisational music scene.” —MARC BROWNSTEIN, bass player of the Disco Biscuits

ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL

TBD: DIY Labyrinth

N gives in, starts writing a story about writers.  He figures, hey, why resist, all his characters talk that way already.  They say, “denouement.”   Say, “tellingly.”  “In the end…”   They scour experience for details that gesture toward meaning, spending most of their time alone, shuffling through the world or the worlds in their own minds.  They are all so self-aware that their interactions read like transcripts from group therapy sessions, every bit of dialogue confessional, reflective, narrative, wandering, wondering.  Their few actions are outbursts, often literally, always effectively, and more often than not these isolated incidents are fueled by liquor, loneliness, and a slow-burning sensation of powerless responsibility.  In the beginning, he stalls over a choice: first- or third-person?  A coin flip and the caffeine jitters decide: first.   Twenty minutes later he splits the difference: multiple first-people.  And if they all talk the same, fine.  That can just be part of the overall statement, or whatever: inside of ourselves, we all speak in the same cadence.  Sitting in breezy, leaf-strobed sunlight on his recently deceased mother’s favorite chair, the one where she would survey the birdfeeders while sipping morning tea and jotting in her journal, N bangs two full pages up onto his grimy laptop screen in under an hour.  When he finally looks up, the sky is making its move from orange to pink beyond the birds, the trees, and the houses across the street

Having avoided this kind of story, maybe this particular story for a long time, N is ambushed by how easy it is to write.  The paragraphs pile up and his hands are drawn to the keyboard, as if the clattering plastic keys are magnetic or life-sustaining, as if his fingers draw some mystical energy from the molded plastic squares, as if the wearing away of the letters on them somehow spells an incantation conjuring newly vivid awareness of his life unfolding in time and of the secret understanding hidden all the while in his own mind and its malleable memories.  The story heads off on its own, following a path he can only discern one sentence at a time, deep into the past, far off into the world, and probingly ever-closer to the molten core of human life.  The characters, given names and the merest description by N, step out of haze into clear light, doing what they will, writing their own dream-like tales, careening toward and away from each other, leaving glittering debris at the sites of their crashes, a luminous milky way of hopeful sadness laced into every moment, every line, every word of the story.  N wakes after only a few hours of sleep that night, the details of newly dreamed strands of the story fading with each step to his mother’s chair and his sleeping computer, entirely new ones flooding his mind even before the word processing program starts up and offers another blank page.  By dawn he has twenty pages, single-spaced, a cacophonous choir of the many voices inside him.  Some are those of people he had long forgotten knowing.   Many, to his surprise, and despite their unique timbers and lilts, are voices of his own, never spoken aloud, but for all of his life, he now realizes, murmuring in the dark recesses of his consciousness.  As the birds outside the window sing their blessings for another day born, he reads, for the first time, what he has written.  Tears welling in his eyes, he is paralyzed by his love for his own creation as his pages scroll up the screen, once, twice, three times before he is sure he is right, that he has something here, something pretty great.  Blinking quickly evaporating warmth onto his cheeks he sits back for a moment, sips from his mother’s favorite mug, and hollows himself out with the thought that she will never read these pages.

Two years later it is summer again, and N’s novel is shipped to bookstores with his mother’s full name and a descriptor, who showed me why to write and how to live, on the dedication page. He quits his job at the public transit advocacy nonprofit, gets his little cousin to watch his cat, sublets his apartment to a friend of a friend’s friend, and heads out on the road for his book tour.  Waiting nervously for the bookstore employee’s introduction to wind up at his first stop on the tour, he stares at the blown-up cover on an easel.  He frowns at the book’s title, With Hoops of Steel.  It was not his first choice, not his idea at all, but the publisher has, his agent told him, “put a pretty big push behind the hardback, PR-wise,” so N has given in, has let them decide how best to get his story in front of as many people as possible.  Besides, his agent had pointed out, the phrase is Shakespeare, from Hamlet, the play the characters almost put on at the end of the story.  N then pointed out that it is Polonius talking, that it is part of the “to thine own self be true” speech that lets you know Polonius is a fool.  His agent had stared at him for a long moment then said, “but that still works for this story, right?”  At the time, N had thought his agent was suggesting the title might be saying something about the tragic inability of people to truly hear each other’s distinct voices and their willingness to live out other people’s bad advice.  Those seemed like central themes.  Now, as the smattering of applause from the half dozen members of the audience ushers him to the podium, he thinks that his agent might not have meant that at all, might not have any idea what the story is really trying to say, and worse, that he might not be sure what the story is trying to say, or if any story should be trying to say anything.

The reading goes fine, and after signing several books, he accepts the offer of the young woman who ran the reading, and after a few drinks at downtown bar, he makes out with her in her car before heading up to his hotel room and its few dozen cable channels.  The rest of the tour goes similarly, the few people who show up seeming to enjoy the sample chapter and the way he reads it.  Reviews of the novel follow him across the country, some laudatory, some ho-hum, only one scathingly negative.  In a hot southern city on the last leg of the tour, N returns to the apartment of a friend who has let him stay the night and finds a message from his agent.  Bad news: the publisher isn’t happy with sales and is “pulling the second publicity push,” the radio talk show circuit and an upcoming convention for booksellers.  He can still do Atlanta and Miami if he wants, but his expense budget has been halved and they can only pay for a room in one of the cities.  N sets his phone on the coffee table and sits on his friend’s couch where he slept last night, sweating into the cushions, looking at the hardwood floor’s sun-shaped stains of sunlight streaming from the holes where’s where the cord goes through the mini-blinds.  The holes are lenses, someone once explained, bending the streaming photons into a picture of their origin.  He stands up, goes into the bathroom and takes a shower.  Toweled off and dressed, he calls his friend and says he’ll ride the streetcar downtown and meet him after work for drinks.  He’ll buy.  They bar hop, stuffing in burgers between cocktails and beer, and by midnight, they are both hammered.  N’s friend needs to get some sleep, he says, so they should head home.  In the bathroom, N holds himself up at the urinal with one hand as his swimming eyes bring the wall’s call and response graffiti into focus.  The words are a frightening revelation to him, the voices almost bare of character, just somehow surprisingly typical opinions and accusations jockeying with each other.  “Bush is the best,” they say.  And, “Nope, he’s a dick.”  “Thats what u suck tho.”  Who are the people in his own story, N wonders, what world did he think that they lived in?   He heads back into the smoky thunder of the bar, finds his friend, then a taxi, then the couch where his last hope for his novel’s success died that afternoon.  He falls asleep inwardly humming a wordless tune his mother sang to him when he was little.  He lies awake for hours thinking he couldn’t have done anything differently, that it doesn’t matter if he could, that he is here now, alone, that he’ll figure something else out, and he wracks his brain for what, possibilities only half-considered before he’s onto the next ones.  In the end, he gives up, letting himself falling to a swirling sleep, waking with all his dreams forgotten, his head aching and containing only one voice, his own, which asks over and over, what pushed me to this, the place that I have now come to rest?

In the News: Train Wrecks

I often talk to my NYU students about the “I” they create in their essays. Your “writerly I,” I tell them, has to be your very best I. She’s the one with the clean home, with fresh roses on the counter, with the husband who kisses her “right there” (and here she points to that pale tender spot behind the ear) every morning before he leaves for work. Your “writerly I,” I say, has to be infinitely more interesting than you could ever be. At the very basic level, she shouldn’t go to Weight Watchers, and if she does, she shouldn’t talk about “points” (12 in a King-Sized Snickers!!!).

There are other things she should also keep under wraps–say, letting a baby “cry” while she finishes a sentence; or her habit of sucking on bird feathers and long strands of hair when she was a child; or, uhm, her terrible, crazed love for “The Bachelorette” (Can you BELIEVE Jillian let Jake go?). But sometimes our I’s get the better of us, and we end up writing the whole sentence, or with a mouthful of feathers, or worse, watching the entire episode of “The Bachelorette,” even as the train comes to a halt and lets poor Robby-the-Bartender out in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.

But this isn’t about “The Bachelorette,” it’s about the news, and everywhere this week, there’s news. We’ve got Jon & Kate & their 8, and even though I have no idea who they are, I find myself clicking on the link when it says “Jon ‘hurt’ by Kate’s remarks about ‘activities.’” If that isn’t bad enough, there’s South Carolina governor Mark Sanford who told his staff he was “going to hike the Appalachian trail,” but ended up flying to Argentina to see his mistress. (Perhaps a good move for a “writerly I” but a very bad move for a married governor.)

Everywhere we look: train wrecks. And as badly as we might want to look away, we’re still staring. The week began with the commuter rail crash in Washington D.C., and then it kept crashing and crashing, and suddenly, not only were Jon & Kate calling it quits, but Ed McMahon was dead (and right after that horrible TV commercial about the gold!), and then Farrah–who, as a girl, I dreamed I may someday become–was dead too.

Now this: Michael Jackson, King of Pop, dead. Legend, train wreck, legendary train wreck. This is the man who turned his “I” into just about the freakiest (though oddly sweet) “I” the world has ever seen–he’s PYT; he’s DOA; he’s gone.

So…it’s one of those weeks when I’m not quite sure what to make of the world, not quite sure how to avert my eyes. Perhaps, my husband will come home–with fistfuls of roses–and kiss me, just there, where my rubberneck meets my ear. Until then, it’s all just Human Nature, and I‘m just a Tabloid Junkie.

TBD: Other People

1.  We first noticed him in the park.  As S and I followed the dog into the clovery meadow between groping oaks, he was off to the right in the shade, bent 90 degrees at the waist, agitating his torso like a washing machine, outstretched fists churning a blurred menace in the 90-degree air.  Was this preparatory exercise for capoeira?  What else explained the juxtaposition of these movements with his odd get-up: forest green cargo pants, a black T-shirt and thick-soled boots?  His close cut hair, a uniform length all around his skull, made him look both militant and outside any organization.  The dog chased his tennis ball and did circles around us in the sun, finally flopping onto his side while still in motion so that he slid to a rest on his back, panting beside us.  When we looked up the man was gone.

A few days later we saw him in the park again.  While the dog yanked me toward some urgent odor, the man ran past us a few dozen yards away.  He was dressed in the same clothes as before.  All around us, joggers, bikers, rollerbladers and walkers wore activity-appropriate outfits, often clumped in chattering pairs or groups, smiling at each other and proud of their dedication to their own fitness.  Next to them, this man, all alone and stone-faced, overdressed in street clothes with skin-head overtones, seemed more than out of place. He looked dangerous, or at the very least crazy.  Over the next weeks we saw him a few more times, always identically dressed, always running or performing combative exercise with the air.  When we saw him together, S or I would point him out, careful not to look like we were looking.  “There’s your friend,” I would say.  “He’s your friend,” she would say.  “Go ask him where you can get some of those pants.”  Pulling up to the apartment building in the last light of another hot day we caught the finale of his routine.  He was galloping sideways down the sidewalk across the street like an overgrown child.  He stopped at the corner and calmly walked away from us down the block.  As if this all was all perfectly normal.  As if he had done what he had had to do, preparation for some great physical undertaking yet to come, and for now it was time to go back to the sorts of things the rest of us all did, blending in to bide time until that inevitable confrontation.

Yesterday evening, S and I brought the worn-out dog home from the park, and crossing to our block with the sun in our eyes, we saw the man walking toward us.  There he was, in his makeshift fatigues, enlarging himself in my vision with every steady step.   My muscles tensed and my mind raced.  Had he heard us snickering at him, noticing us gaping at him in the park?  I looked down at the dog as if he needed my surveillance.  Just as the man came past me, I looked up and met his eye.  I was shocked by what I saw before he shyly looked away: the sweet dark eyes of a tentatively curious young man, much younger than I had seen, much more gentle than I ever would have suspected.  “He’s foreign, right?” said S when we were safely down the block.  I agreed.  Something in that facial stucture suggested he was seeing the strange details of everything, everyone around him with a kind of reverence.  As if he saw the rest of us just as amusingly inexplicable as we saw him.  But more generously, with much more hope and kindness.

2. I got up yesterday and made my way out into cyberspace.  On a site probably best known for its porn clips and jokes in horrible taste (they also always have a few things that are pretty amazing that few others have publicized yet, and the porn is pretty easy to avoid, so, yeah, I’m a regular) I saw an image of two men crouching in the street beside someone who appeared to be bloody and struggling, with the caption, “Woman standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a Basij.”  At first I paused to marvel that the webmaster of this apolitical site thought the name of Iran’s now-not-so-secret police was well-known enough that his visitors would understand this description.  Then I began to study the image.  These people could be anyone.  Nothing in the image made it look like Tehran.  I considered the possibility that this was a joke/snuff clip, ridiculing the violence on the other side of the world while turning it into a Tom and Jerry-like spectacle.  The site had done this before.  I had accidentally watched motorcyclists crushed by tractor-trailers and other caught-on-video deaths, tricked by a caption or an image that didn’t give away the grisly scenes.   The possibility that this Basij video was a snuff clip from Tehran piqued my curiosity though.  A scene from that conflagration that would make it to this site was just too strange a cultural crossroads to refuse.  What scene from this struggle was so spectacular?

In the video, the woman is in the arms of a few shouting men as the person holding the camera shakily circles the scene.  Suddenly her eyes loll to the side and the shouting increases in rate and volume.  Something blossoms at her mouth, and then across the rest of her face like a dark ribbon.  Even though I knew what I was watching, it took me a moment that I was seeing blood seeping out of her mouth, nose and eyes.  That’s what I remember seeing.  I could only watch it once, and now recalling it in detail, I don’t want to see it again.   In the last few seconds of footage, the sound drops away and the mourning, frantic crowd scrambles silently around the body of this woman whose life has disappeared right before them and now us.

The video had been posted in the morning.  By midday the Times was reporting that a funeral for the woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, had been broken up by the Basij, and that the video of her death had become a sensation over the weekend in Iran.  Now Iranian state television is saying that her death was staged.  The opposition describe her as a martyr.  She is beautiful in the photo that accompanies the article on the Times website.  “Is everyone in Iran really good looking?” S asked me last night as we watched a lame Daily Show report from Iran.  It’s hard, looking at the photographs from Tehran each day, not to suspect they all are.  I suspect part of the attraction is how full of life the faces of the protesters appear.  These people who flaunt death, who put their lives in the street to demand better ones, they look nothing like us but appear exactly as we hope we would in such circumstances.  No wonder the Republicans identify with their oppression.  No wonder they look beautiful to all of us.  In a connection world, everything is a mirror.  And maybe that’s why this footage is so moving: it doesn’t really allow identification.  In the video of Neda’s death – everyone just calls her Neda now – she is beautiful, and her expiration is not exactly ugly.  But watching that video one is overcome not so much with the tragedy of a life cut short in its prime, but by the terror of how much is unknown and undocumented by the amateur photographer.  Seeing those black ribbons suddenly appear on her face you are horrified by how little you understand what is going on.  How was she shot?   Where did the bullet enter her body?  What was this life that you have seen ended?  What would it have been?  Why are you the one watching it disappear instead of the one lying there in the street, unable to hear all those people silently wailing all around you?

3.  These days I avoid writing my novel by reading a draft of one my friend has finally finished writing and by doting on the small dog with whom I live.  It is surprisingly comforting to read page after page of this story, the making of which I have been witness to for six years, a story that is so much better put together than it was in pieces that reencountering each previously read scene is like being reunited with a presumed-dead loved one.  It is unfathomably gratifying to speak to a creature who hangs on every word I say, cocking his head for better comprehension, a look of such eager love on his face that I find myself speaking to him all day long.  Together, the dog, the pages and I, help each other believe we understand each other and ourselves.

Reading E’s book I begin to see again how I will be able to write my own.  I recall conversations we had in which he described wrestling with passages, and then I see them there on the page, mostly wrestled through.  I think of my own comments over the years about particular moments or habits of the structure, and then I see them accounted for or rightfully ignored.  He has created a whole thing, 550 pages of a story that needs reading.  The lively insights of his characters, the purity of their voices, the places where I see the mechanics of the plot reflect the tenderness of E’s own mind – all of these are not just impressive.  They are beacons of hope.  Sitting down to read these pages that few others have seen, and I believe many will love, I am buoyed by the people I see in the scenes and the person I can detect behind them.  My friend and his characters are better than I had previously suspected.

Walking the dog, I am aware of the eyes of others upon me.  A couple weeks ago, when my sister was visiting, she overheard a woman say, “Look at that man walking his Chihuahua.”   I’m not sure if I was more disconcerted at being perceived as the kind of man who walks a Chihuahua or as a man at all, since the feeling adulthood always seems to elude me.  Besides, he’s only half Chihuahua.  Half rat terrier.  S tells me that I have stolen his heart away from her, and for now perhaps that is true.  He sleeps by me, sits on my lap when he can and stares me in the eye when he wants to know what is happening next.   I am in love with this little dog, because he is smart and adorable and good natured and obedient, but also because he so clearly is a person underneath that little fur tuxedo, because you can see, as you can with a great character in a novel, the way his mind works, how he considers his position in a room, why his particular life happens to belong to him.  And every day I love him more because my heart breaks that he can’t tell any of it to me.

If I notice, I am always caught in the tidal awareness of what I do and do not know about others.  I concoct back stories and conduct possible conversations in my head.  I ache for details of the lives out of my grasp.  I revel in their unwillingness to be my own.

In the News: Walls Sweet Walls

I’ll never forget the first time I stayed up late enough to watch Johnny Carson. I must have been eight or so, and it must have been summer so I must have smelled like watermelon and bug spray and stuck-on chlorine. There in the TV-blue of the night, I watched as Johnny rolled out walls on wheels, and on the walls: giant ears; then more walls with noses, eyes, chins. My mom laughed, so I laughed too. The walls have ears, she said, and I laughed again. And noses, I said. But then she explained to me that it was a saying. Oh, I said, the walls have ears!!!

These days the walls don’t just have ears; they have lawyers too. An article in this week’s Time magazine devotes itself entirely to the sticky topic of Facebook and divorce. Apparently, lawyers around the country are monitoring various social networking sites and bringing the information they find to trial. These lawyers have a clear message: if you’re going to claim you’re “broke,” don’t post pictures of yourself on your new Harley, and if you’re leaving your man, try to refrain from telling the world that you’re “free at last (!!!) and gonna get every penny I can from that sorry son of a…” Well, you know what I mean.

And I completely see where they’re coming from. I’m often wowed by how much information people give on Facebook. Just last week, I met up with two friends for lunch, and one–before we even looked at the menu–said to the other, “Okay, spill it! I saw your Facebook status. What’s going on?” And things were going on, big things. And when I got home and pulled up her Profile page, it was there, clear as day, word for word.

But, at the same time, there’s this gulf–this ginormous gulf–between what’s really going on and what we’re writing on our walls. Right now, if I click on my Facebook tab (not that I’m looking at Facebook when I should be writing!), I find that one ‘friend’ is “meow, meow, meowing;” one is “chillin in chilly New Jersey;” one is “getting her drink on after the babies go to bed,” and I guess I’m left feeling the gulf even more; I’m left thinking that just because at any given moment I can find out what my ‘friends’ are “doing,” I still don’t know them any better than I did months ago, before I joined Facebook, before my summer nights were lit by the white of my computer screen.

I guess, though, there aren’t any answers. Unless, of course, we can make the wall have legs and those legs can walk on over here, and then, make it have hands, and in the hands, a good bottle of wine, and then slap a big, pretty mouth smack in the center of the wall, and after that, we can sit out back and talk all night long. Until then, I think I’ll turn off the computer and do whatever it is people do when they’re not sitting around trying to figure out the writing on the walls.

TBD: Titles

Possible Titles For My Unfinished Novel

The Ages

The Endless Journey

Living A Lost Cause

The Book That Didn’t Save Him

A Labyrinth Of Wondering

Words In Hiding

Swallowing Darkness

How To Be (Bad At Being) Alone

_

Potential Titles For My New Novel

Blood Gun

The Spy Conspiracy

Unswerving Action: A Dirk Gambles Mystery

The Sexing Of Minerva

Desire’s Apex

The Notebook*

The Soul-Seller

Money To Burn: A Prescott B. Baines III Thriller

_

Increasingly Unlikely Titles For My Autobiography

Unbridled Bravery, Endless Lust

Milton Reborn

A Life At War With Caution

The Library Filler

His Always-Moving Pen: A Star Of The Page And The Stage Of Life

Son Of Greatness, Father Of Followers

Success Story: Thriving Against The Odds And Ends Of Literary Life

Who Needs Glory When You’ve Got the World In The Palm Of Your Hand?

Author Of The Ages

_

Titles Of Web Pages I’ll Visit In Lieu Of Writing Today

Gamefaqs.com/castlevania/zombie-soul-cheat-codes/manufacturing-time.htm

Amazon.com/how-to-books/writing/plot/that-is-of-any-interest-to-readers/

Huffingtonpost.com/megan_fox_has_toe_thumbs/seriously

Twitter.com/carrot-top/

Plasma.org/getting-money-for-your-blood/FAQS/how-often-can-I-give?

Hulu.com/Old_Episodes_Of_Knight_Rider.htm

Google.com/search/50859/software+write+for+me+free/results

_

New Title For This Blog Post

Quitting Time

_

*Titles cannot be copyrighted

In the News: The Holocaust Museum

There’s a poem by the late poet Jane Kenyon that runs through my mind on mornings like these. “I got out of bed/on two strong legs,” Kenyon writes. “It might have been/ otherwise.” She goes on to write of flawless peach and birch wood, of laying down for a noontime nap with her love, of having dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks, and finally acknowledges how one day—in spite of her plans and the dreams she has in her bed in a room with paintings hanging on its walls—it “will be otherwise.”

I first read the poem in the late-90’s when I was a graduate student and teaching poetry at Goldwater Hospital. It was the first time I had been around so many people with physical disabilities, and the presence of all those disabilities unnerved me. My first months working there, I often found myself on subway platforms walking in tight circles and being fully aware of the strength of my legs, of the tightening and lengthening of my hamstrings and quadriceps, of the give of my calf and the arch of my foot. “Two strong legs,” I would mumble to myself, over and over, disappointed that for so many years I had taken those legs for granted.

It was around this same time that I traveled down to Washington D.C. to visit a friend and went for my first and only time to the Holocaust Museum. We had walked around the city for hours and hours, and we made it to the museum just before closing time, allowing ourselves not nearly enough time to take it all in, or maybe it was just enough time; maybe all the time in the world would not have been enough, would have been too much. The museum’s impact was heart-wrenching, so heart-wrenching, in fact, that I still find myself caught off-guard—my breath catching in my throat—when I think about it.

It is the shoes that have stayed with me, thousands of them, shoes from the Nazi’s victims—piles and piles, large and small, ornate and simple, men’s and women’s and children’s, leather, cloth, hardly worn, worn through the soles—and I remember standing in the empty place between the piles and thinking of all the feet that had been in those shoes; feet that had blistered, that had been rubbed by a lover; feet that had kicked balls and had turned back home; feet that had soaked in the tub and walked through strange streets and gotten damp from puddles; feet that had danced; feet that belonged to legs; feet that had bones with marrow, that had veins with blood pumped from a heart.

And that is where it always ends for me: the heart.

On Wednesday, Stephen Tyrone Jones, a security officer at the museum, went to hold the door open for an elderly man. The 88-year-old, James W. von Brunn, who as a self-proclaimed white supremacist had a history of anti-Semitic efforts, then opened fire on the museum, fatally wounding Jones. A photograph outside the museum depicts the inadequacy of mourning: a few lilies stuffed inside a water bottle, their petals already falling. I think of those who will walk by that water bottle today, think of the legs that will carry them, of the breakfasts they ate, of the rooms they sleep in.

My husband kissed me when he left for the office just a bit ago; my daughter is napping; my hands are lemon-y from the sponge I used to wipe the counter; and now, like Jane Kenyon, like Stephen Jones, I do the work I love. These days—especially with the death of a dear friend’s husband a couple of months ago—I am more aware than ever that it will some day be “otherwise,” but it makes my heart sick to think that sometimes that happens because of the sheer disregard for human life displayed by von Brunn and far too many before him.

Vote for the best bumper stickers

I went a little crazy designing bumper stickers this week. Proof positive of my love and adoration for PBQ! Remember: any of these can be changed and/or redesigned. So have fun discussing the possibilities…

 

Newsprint

Sexy & Pink

Groovy

Art Deco

Funky

Flowers

Map

Eyes

Road

Emily’s Hand

January at the Bubble House

Readings: 

Lisa Grunberger teaches comparative religions and writing at Temple University. Her chapbook of poems, Root Canal: Love Poems is forthcoming from Poets Wear Prada Press (Roxeanne Hoffman, editor, Hoboken, NJ). She has published in such journals as The Paterson Literary Review, Mudfish, Nimrod, The Drunken Boat and The Baffler. Her book, Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position, an illustrated humor book, about a Hippy Jewish Grandmother who discovers a new life in yoga, is forthcoming from New Market Press in the spring, 2009.

Christy Schneider fears the distractions of clutter. Through writing, she discards and assembles words for images that include Darth Vader’s mask and Frida Kahlo’s braids. Her poetry has been described as “challenging but satisfying.” Her writing has been printed in Labyrinth, eyelevel and Art Matters . She works as a museum educator and interprets artifacts including a ceramic roach trap from 1800 and a lock of George Washington’s hair. She lives in West Philadelphia, where she enjoys trees and Victorian architecture.

Further Adventures Into Private Parts

Arlene Ang

400 pieces of eight for a joint if lost in good
company like an evening marrooned with bananas—
and all along i thought i was plagiarizing
my scent in port royal in the captain’s cabin
in his chest of maps—he allowed me to feel
around wooden legs allowed me to sleep
on that blue stain act of beard allowed me as if
there was no depleting the enemy ship’s gewgaw
or mainsail lyrics—the cook chopped off
another limb for the soup scene: gang green
and you’ll never know it wasn’t chicken—i said
don’t roger me at the rail said i wasn’t
always this invariably brutish wasn’t a first
wife until the middle seas—i allowed him
to board my harmless fishnet mermaids
allowed him soft wigs in the hold allowed him
as if we’d never get caught playing odd tricks
and skulls with everyone’s beer bottles

Issue: Pirates 

Pirate Story

Michael Agresta

(Singapore, 1785)

The royal ships form a line across the mouth of the harbor, blocking access in and out.  The old hotelkeeper, whose only customers are travelers and sailors, shakes his head at the horror of these pirates.  Even the whores can squeeze a living out of the local menfolk for as long as this blockade continues, he complains, but his hotel is nearly ruined.  The whores smooth his hair and tell him it will pass.

There is talk of the crown founding another port twenty miles down the island, where a high promontory offers more protection against the pirates.  But no one really believes that the pirates can be headed off so easily—a few raised cannons would offer little advantage against their fearsome fleets.  When the pirates come for us, he hears a young man saying in his bar, we can do nothing but surrender.  Still, days pass and no black flags appear on the horizon.

To the hotelkeeper, the pirates seem capable of anything.  There are rumors of pirates masquerading for months as legitimate deckhands before murdering their captains and commandeering the cargo.  One guest tells him of a port on the Bay of Bengal where a pirate posed for years as a mild hotelkeeper, until one night, without warning, he slit the neck of a sleeping diamond-merchant and took his treasure out to a secret island refuge.  At the end of this story, the hotelkeeper notices a strange light in his guest’s eyes, a crookedness of his smile and a whiff of sea-grime to his hair.  Just to be sure, he double-locks the door leading to his quarters before he goes to sleep.  If these pirates really have infiltrated everywhere, then better not to take chances.

One day, a messenger comes in from the guardian ships in the harbor to announce that the people of the port must send a tribute of food out to their royal protectors.  A week later, the tribute is expanded to include women.  The whores are furious, but the townspeople relent when they come to understand that pirate elements now control the guardian fleet—that instead of protecting the town from enemy invasions, the harbor ships now serve to prevent the townspeople’s escape.  Without battle, the port falls to the pirates.  At dawn, the ships raise the skull and crossbone standard. 

The hotelkeeper brings his daughters out to the docks, and he is surprised to see himself among only a handful of townspeople obeying the pirates’ directives.  Could they be plotting a rebellion, holding out hope of actually defeating the pirates in open combat?  No, he soon learns:  those not obeying have some other dealings with the pirates whereby less tribute is required of them.  After the shock of the silent conquest is over, these townspeople begin to wear long bandannas and steal from the market on whim, explaining to him with spitting disgust that they, “always was a pirate all the time.”

He would complain to the governor, but the governor is among those in league with the pirates.  He visits the hotelkeeper’s lunch hall each afternoon with a parrot on his shoulder, and each day he reports the news of another pirate conquest—Auckland, Manila, Cape Town.  There are no more pillagings, just shifts in administrative policy as the pirate viceroys take over.

The hotelkeeper keeps his faith in the power of the crown to beat back the pirate advances and restore tranquil order to the empire.  One day, however, the governor pays for his lunch (an act surprising enough in itself) with a newly minted coin.  On its face is an engraving of the king, same as before but with a large hoop earring and goatee.  The hotelkeeper reads it in the papers: always was a pirate, switched at birth by pirate conspirators, allied with pirates against all other powers of the world until pirates alone control the open seas.

The hotelkeeper takes the coin and buries it with his other profits, drawing himself a cryptic map and marking an “x” where his treasure lies.  Then he takes on the uniform of a pirate and goes out onto the seas, seeking a land without piracy where he can die in peace.

He never discovers such a land, but he does find camaraderie among his crewmates on the pirate ship Black Dagger.  In the chaos before they board a merchant ship, sword clenched in his mouth, his fellow pirate, a man named Shoemaker, admits he has never really considered himself a pirate.  He just took to acting like one, he explains, so as to stay on the right side of history, “to keep an eye on me and mine.”  Only one eye—the other is hidden behind a black eye-patch, which, as Shoemaker now reveals, is unnecessary, a hoax.  The old hotelkeeper-turned-pirate soon begins to notice other inconsistencies in the behavior of his crewmates—ungrowled r’s, aversion to adventure, unexpected acts of kindness and charity.  One evening, during an emotional group conversation about fathers and sons, it comes out that no one on board was born a pirate; all assumed the identity only once it seemed to be the only option left. 

They vote unanimously to pull down their Jolly Roger, turn the ship around, and head for terra incognito, where they might found a colony outside all influence of piracy.  They stop for provisions at the port the hotelkeeper once called home, and they are immediately arrested.  The hotelkeeper is shocked to see the townspeople in conservative, un-ragged attire.  “Never was a pirate,” one tells the hotelkeeper, straightening his cravat, “’Twas only putting on for show.”  While in prison, the ex-pirates learn the good news:  the king was not a pirate after all; he was merely impersonating one to draw the pirates closer to his trust, thereby giving him a chance to attack them on even footing.  The pirates have been vanquished for now.  Long live the king.

The hotelkeeper is eventually released, judged harmless on account of his old age.  The governor, who has seized the hotel, gives him a job and a cot to sleep on in the back of the laundry room.  The hotelkeeper never returns for his buried treasure, having lost the map in the course of his travels.  Poverty does not bother him; his daughters are gone, and he has grown too old for whores.  He still imagines, though, as he sits on the silent harbor dock at night, that the treasure map will come floating back to him some day.  In his mind, the map arrives rolled tight inside an empty bottle of rum, carried by the ever-changing currents from one pair of hands, covered with battle-scars and silver rings, to the soft, wrinkled hands of an old hotelkeeper, now folded in his lap.

Making Place: Betsy Andrews’ New Jersey and John Hennessy’s Bridge and Tunnel

Susan Briante

 Bearded prophet poets, working-class rock star heroes, and philosophizing mobsters—think of the most eloquent spokespersons for the American character and you’ll end up thinking about New Jersey. From Walt Whitman’s reflections on the Camden docks to Tony Soprano’s view from a car exiting the Holland Tunnel, New Jersey offers a glimpse into our working-class, immigrant, urban and—often masculine—psyche. Our strip-malls and swamp lands, superfund sites and subdivisions, beaches and pine barrens remain a source of unending national interest—equal parts fascination and morbid curiosity—that has earned New Jersey a special place in the American imaginary. Massachusetts can have its Robert Frosts and Robert Lowells, New Jersey lays claim to poets such as William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.
            Two recently published first books of poetry, Betsy Andrews’ New Jersey(University of Wisconsin Press, $14.95) and John Hennessy’s Bridge and Tunnel(Turning Point Press, $17.00), offer a next generation’s startlingly surreal and surprising poignant perspectives on New Jersey lives and landscapes. With unflinching vision and generosity, they remind us how much we still have to learn from New Jersey.

“The Turnpike made place replacing places,” writes Betsy Andrews early in her book-length poem, New Jersey, winner of the University of Wisconsin’s 2007 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Andrews takes readers on a dark, funny, lyrical drive along the New Jersey Turnpike, a roadway that acts for Andrews as the spine of the tragicomic beast we call America at the inauspicious turn of the 21st century:

            behind the sonic barricades
            cordoning off the casualty roll call from
            Pennsville, Westville, Groveville, Yardville
            Robbinsville, Belleville, Bernardsville, Somerville
            a moment of happiness in a heap in the road
            a calendar year where 10 days go missing
            “This stuff doesn’t happen in New Jersey.”

In lieu of narrative, this ride gains velocity from repetitions—recurring quotes from US soldiers in Iraq, “unnamed intelligence officers,” and commanders at Guantánamo Bay; an intermittent first-person; moments in New Jersey’s past and recent history—all of which stream by like mile-markers. The poem moves like the road itself:  “the Turnpike, a constant snapping apart/ a constant pounding together new relationships between scattered forms.”
            A deft and incisive creator of lists, Andrews inventories the crops grown in New Jersey (soybeans, peaches, eggplants, onions) and the toxins in its air (arsenic, mercury, cyanide, zinc), as well as Turnpike exits and names of towns. It is a move that recalls Whitman, who provides the book’s epigraph and gets a mention in a recurring list of rest-stops named for famous New Jersey inhabitants, including accomplishments as well as rest stop amenities (“Walt Whitman: Oh Capt My Capt, Calamus, Cinnabon and an ATM”).
            Andrews has Whitman’s ear for litanies of nouns and modifiers, but she also shares Ginsberg capacity for apocalyptic vision. And that’s where much of the poem’s strength resides. She manages to create drama from stark juxtaposition and astute observations: 
            the flatbed tipping up like a sexpot
            road crew in orange hard hats taking instruction from a little machine
            flyover ramp, bypass, hazard warning, speed limit sign, closed-circuit TV
            are no guarantee against the metallic taste of the sauce break
            in a mixing bowl of divergent intent
            “We don’t give our cops nightsticks
            for ornaments,” says Jersey City’s boss
            the swamp drops its trashy eyelid
            sucks the highway supports like cock

Throughout the book, perhaps Andrews’ greatest accomplishment comes in reminding us that our landscape is not innocent—the war is everywhere: implicit in highway sensors and military convoys, in every mile over which we travel and gallon of gas we consume. In Andrews’ hands, the Turnpike becomes a place of transport and transaction as well as a litmus strip for national greed, paranoia, and stupidity.

If Andrew’s New Jersey is part Whitman, part Ginsberg, John Hennessy’s Bridge and Tunnel evokes the New Jersey of CKWilliams and Robert Pinsky. With a clear view to New Jersey’s city dwellers and the industrial landscapes through which they move, Hennessy forges his poetry from chimneys and causeways, cranes and overpasses.
            The book’s first section consists mostly of personae poems devoted to working-class figures—milkmen, paperboys, washerwomen—, family and friends. Hennessy has an almost Gerard Manley Hopkins-like love for the strong stresses of compound words and dizzying internal rhyme, as can be seen in this example from the poem “Irish Washerwomen in the New World:”

            Take Great-grandmother Dolan, with her pocket full
            of husbands and several spare names, her salt-spit
            and snakebite, poker-face, terrier bitch, Donegal
            wit, dog-track bag and four-pronged walking stick

Through these characters, the reader realizes that the bridge and tunnel of the book’s title represent more than routes over which many New Jersey natives travel to jobs, lovers, or family in New York City or Philadelphia. These bridges and tunnels also represent life transitions that form the thematic center of this collection. The character Dog-Star, with his love for killing birds, embodies the rage and confusion of adolescence. A father suffers a transient, restless adulthood. In one of the book’s most poignant poems, the speaker recalls the worried but joyous passage into parenthood. Occasionally these anecdotes seem too familiar, and often there’s a kind of neatness in their telling that I want complicated. Still, the characters rendered in Bridge and Tunnel reach beyond autobiographical testimony to demonstrate how the industrial landscape works its dark and powerful influence upon them: “sun half an hour high over Merck, the morning/ divided by smokestack.”
             Another series of poems features mythic figures, including Urban, Persephone, Salome, and Pan, who find their tales recast in the Garden State. One of the most successful of these sets the story of Job in the industrial corridor of North Jersey. In his response to Job, an angry God schools Job on the complex system of Northern New Jersey’s industrial spaces.
            Have you kept watch beyond the skyline of blue fires
            rippling from steel towers, squat brick chimneys
            belching jetties of yellow smoke, the networks
            of PVC pipe and signal lights, train tracks
            and bridges, tug-boat docks and loading cranes.

Here is Hennessy at his best: rendering the strange beauty of a world familiar to anyone who has flown into Newark Airport or exited from the Holland Tunnel. Hennessy’s understanding of that landscape comes from his own experience growing up in New Jersey. But it’s no accident that not a single city is named in the book, while the Exxon refinery and Merck chemical plant serve as place markers and spiritual centers (whose “single gleaming green” became “our Northern Lights”). Hennessy shows us how both city and community become shadowed by industry—although the odd bonds of family and friendship remain.

             
In 2003, The New York Times ran an article, “A School of Literature That’s Called New Jersey,” in which writer Gregory Jordan quoted editors and academics who extolled a New Jersey literary tradition rivaling that of the South. Jordan explained that the New Jersey School “passes the most crucial test of what constitutes a literary region: many of the writers seem to be engaging in an extended conversation with one another” while at the same time these writers knew how to link New Jersey symbols and circumstance to “larger American dilemmas and myths.”
            Andrews and Hennessy support a case for such claims, extending a poetic conversation begun by the likes of Whitman and Williams—and one that continues in the work of emerging poets such as Greg Pardlo, Nancy Kuhl, and Rosa Alcalá. It’s not an idealized version of our national or regional myths. Chances are the New Jersey represented by these writers won’t be replicated in tourist brochures. In fact one of the most compelling claims both Andrews and Hennessy make is that commerce and corporation threaten our sense of place. It’s hard not to worry about the time when the endless repetition of Target—Wal Mart—Best Buy shopping centers will render identical every American highway and city. Still, in the short term, we can be assured that even after Tony Soprano has uttered his last accented proclamation, we have not yet heard the last word from New Jersey.

Pirates

 

Cover, Issue #78

Tumbleweeds

Patrick Carrington

I skitter across the heat of lonely towns 
like a drop on a skillet, stopping only 
to smooth myself out in bars 
with strings of women 
who don’t tie themselves 
to lives like mine. There was a time

when the prophecy of dust clouds rising 
from a young woman’s broom 
made me wonder 
where you hide glass slippers 
in a place this shattered. And when 
she slipped the brass rail on her foot

to swallow the medicine of sour mash 
like a sword, I’d wait for midnight 
and give myself to her as wholly 
as her hundred proof misery. I don’t 
stare anymore at the ripped wallpaper

of upstairs rooms or look to windows 
with the circular reasoning of denial 
and wait for some magic
as her arms flutter above me,

due north. It takes no chimes to roll me, 
no wind to send me limping 
over the world, to the next town 
where no one will welcome me home.

At Sea

Laura Didyk

My lover naps below
while I sun on the stern
in my sundress and dream

myself a woman born
for building ships.  In the
cushion of sleep I build

this one as I tarry on our
Alaskan island more than a century ago.
My lover is taken at sea

by a striking pirate 
who is, underneath it all,
kind and soft and has

adorned my berth
in silk and jewels from the hold.
He touches me evenly

with kid gloves (twenty-two days at sea
and my thighs are much fleshier stories).
The blue woman and the red woman

etched on his forearms steer
the small of my back.  This dreamed
vessel, its handsome

mate, immaculate sails,
the worldly character of the sun looming above,
are all my doing.  I make myself

the only woman aboard
my bandit gets to win—a bottle 
of port at my hip.  What I pity most is the untravelled

stationary woman who at night 
falls into blank sleep, and awake,
veers from the world’s distant climes

 

and men.  The breast is a solemn
and familiar place, frightened of setting out—
but the bones, dearheart, the bones want motion.

Map the body’s route then the love you plan
to steal and hoard.  If nothing else
stay shoreless.  The land

husbands your power.
O serious traveler, ready yourself
to dream, to snatch the sable yawl

from the hulled body of the harbored boat
and row. In your berth with your pirate
when the aged ship rocks

fore and aft, there is no other region
you’ll want more than this.  Nothing
as delicious as this old salt in your bed.

The Poem that Fell from Grace with the Sea

Donald Dunbar

You have pretty eyes; your face is the
rust on the side of a lost freighter
and the first mate is jumping overboard.
You’ve got your sealegs now, your bedlegs I mean
know the roll and splash of waterbeds
but regular beds too, even futons
like discount Korean yachts.  This air always
does this to me, the salt wind anchors
in my throat and the peach lights
above the sidewalks moan as we leave the bar,
hum, I mean, like the day janitor
tomorrow who’ll mop the drinks
you’ve spilled; who’ll nuzzle the lipstick
you’ve smeared all over the payphone.

Why we say yes

Hello and welcome to our blog!  

Rather than prattle on about why we decided to create one and what we see as its objectives, etc., we decided to allow the blog to speak for itself, from the start.

We’re kicking the great blog experiment off with this:

We were in Chicago for the recent Associated Writing Program’s conference, and sent our staff this e-mail:

“We’re doing a panel here at AWP and would like an answer to this basic question: When reading PBQ submissions, what excites you, what makes you say, ‘Yes?’ What have you seen too much of, what elicits a fast ‘no?’”

Below are all of the answers we received, which might give you a glimpse into why PBQ can’t really be pinned to one aesthetic; why the answer to that question—the one we’re asked most at conferences and other speaking engagements—is so hard to answer, and why we like each other so much.

Answers are in the order they came in and segregated by city of origin, for no reason other than Marion and I had to compile these sections separately.  Meet the staff:    

 

New York Staff:

Matt Longabucco:

This is an abstract answer, but what excites me–I think I’m talking mostly about poems, here–is familiar language made strange and strange language made familiar.

What feels overdone: trumped-up beauty, hiding behind hermeticism.

I’ll be curious to hear what others think…

I agree with Greg [below], so many interesting responses–it seems many of us are longing for a voice that can give a name to some part of the world around us.  The lack of a definitive voice–at least one we can share to some degree–is both the curse and boon of the very technologies we’re discussing.  And when I sift through lit mags online–not, of course, because I want to read them but because I want to see where I should submit my shit–I’m stricken with how few names stand out as absolutely necessary for me to click (when I’m not decrying the names I recognize as belonging to coteries I can’t penetrate, that is). 

“Hiding behind hermeticism” means that there are ways of making a poem sound good without saying much, and that those ways in fact seek to justify a not-saying.  I have no problem with difficult poems, but I do have an issue with difficult styles that don’t involve any risk or commitment, that don’t raise the specter of the poet looking back at the poem and thinking, “God, did I really write that?  Did I mean that?  Was I ever so naive/misguided/enthralled/derivative/earnest as that?”  The prospect of such a reckoning occurring lets me know something is at stake in what I’m reading…

Jason Schneiderman:

What excites me is that which moves me.  And I think this is true for all of us.  The study of art is all an effort to discover what it is that moves us– and while there are ways to predict what one will like– there have been times I wanted the lonely landscapes of Hopper and times when I’ve wanted the lush suggestions of fauvism.  But we always have to keep ourselves open to that spark of unexpected emotion.  We can make rule to save ourselves time, but we have to be open to the new, to the unexpected, to discovery. 

Nat Bennett:

I’m late, I know, but I’ll just add that for the most part, literary mags don’t excite me and so (and I know this confirms the paucity of my opinion’s justification) for the most part, I don’t read them.  I’m excited by someone inviting me into something strange or making me see something I’ve been missing all along.  I think I agree with Greg that too often we get the same old beauty dressed up in a different jacket or something that doesn’t challenge our sense of reading — at the same time the performance of one’s own difficulty seems well worn too.  I think what excites me most is when someone finds the precious stones that have been lying around in plain sight all along.  I like poems and stories that remind me that we’ve leaned too hard on the usual ways of getting the world onto the page.  I’m excited by an unexpected living mind, for a moment, filling up my own.

Greg Pardlo:

What I find frustrating is the sense that we are overly accommodating to readers. (Of course, I realize the dangers in the opposite.) The sense that poetry should serve as a form of entertainment as opposed to serving in any way as provocation. I’m excited by poems that suggest to me a new way of processing experience. I’m less enthusiastic about poems that present an agreeable world–whether that world is a crappy-as-we-know-it-to-be world or a world of sublime beauty only interrupted by the occasional death and subsequent period of mourning.

Passion disrupts the laws of physics and Reason. When passion is present in a poem (passionate Nature, passionate humanity), I like to think no conclusion can be foregone. I guess I’m saying something similar to what Matt is suggesting in that I prefer the lovely distortions that passion (not simply in the grandiose sense) brings to reason. I’m excited by the possibilities that passion, or the “irrational,” offers toward reconciling or short-circuiting or reconfiguring the tragic ambivalence of civil, moral and otherwise structured life.

Emily Gordon:

Poems that reference the writer’s real modern life, not just an idealized mode of poetic observation that’s dated and stilted–and not true to actual experience as it’s lived now. I think of Galway’s “The Avenue Bearing…” poem and its mentions of the names of stores, the prices of things, the way people really speak–that is, really speak in the year he wrote it. People speak differently now and can write differently now, at least some of the time. Whitman and Ginsberg and Nikki Giovanni and the rest of the folks we read and like–they tapped into the language and habits and products and transactions and storefronts of their time, and for some reason many submitters to literary magazines seem to be fearful that they’ll brand themselves as young or superficial or not belonging to the ages if they let themselves use the real idiom of their real lives, whatever those lives consist of.

Nicole Callihan:

Poems that feel like real poems; stories that don’t feel like stories at all.

Gaar Adams:

Although I appear to be a bit late in replying to this excellent thread, I’m going to throw my half-baked opinions out there, even if they struggle to stand on their own two legs.

During one of my first PBQ meetings, I remember Nicole semi-jokingly starting the argument that the short story was dead.  And while I wouldn’t put my full weight behind that sentiment, I do catch myself eye-rolling and yawning pretty frequently during short stories.  To me, the short story almost always feels like an unnatural length, an unnatural goal.  Far too many short stories fall into the unfortunately categories of:

1.) authors who aren’t talented enough to write a poem

2.) authors who aren’t ambitious/talented/put-together enough to write a novel

I don’t want to strip the short story of all of its value, though.  All I’m saying is that personally, short stories not only have to convince me of their merit as stories but also in terms of the usefulness and purpose of the form.  Authors have to make me believe that the short story is the only way for this story to be told successful.  Otherwise just write a damn poem.

What excites me most is to read the first three sentences of anything, knowing from this little bit that the author knows how to work with and mold the English language.  There’s nothing more frustrating than an author who can’t control their own language.

That being said, I miss you all!  Keep my seat warm until June.  If anyone has the inclination to follow my Yemeni/Middle Eastern adventures for the next four months, feel free to take a peek at my life/occasional thinly-veiled political rants at: yementravels.blogspot.com

Philadelphia Staff: 

Bryan Dickey:

When you’re competing for our space, it needs to grab , it needs to be immediate, and it should be as vivid and amazing as it possibly can be.

If it’s not awesome, why am I reading it? If I don’t feel like this person writing is really challenging their talents, why would I encourage their continued practice of the great art of writing.

The idle finger on the track pad has no loyalty to anything but the sublime.

Jen Fromal:  


When reading PBQ submissions, I am excited when I come across unique ideas presented in a well-written, concise, and creative way. Fiction and poems about tainted love, a death in the family, or other familiar topics often come across as trite if they are not written in a new and interested way – such as having the piece told from the point of view of the broken heart or the corpse. I’ll give a piece a “yes” if it holds my attention, makes me feel strongly a certain way (whether it’s hatred, sadness, etc), and if I keep thinking about the content after I’ve finished reading. Pieces that I have “yes’d” are memorable to me weeks later because of their strong imagery, characters, or overall plot. A piece will generate a “no” if it’s something I feel like I have read before a hundred times (i.e. going through a divorce), if it’s badly written, or if there are very weak parts (i.e. the ending is horrible).

Amy Weaver:

1.       The cover letter doesn’t matter at all, in my opinion. I never read it unless  a) I’m really impressed, or b) the writing is so horrible, I’m looking for more to laugh about.

2.       You should only attempt rhyming if you are REALLY good at it. Otherwise, you sound like you’re 4 years old.

3.       A fast no—anything that contains a cliché statement of any sort. 

4.       What gets me excited?

a.       Writing with movement, which occasionally might involve well-done rhyming/slant-rhyme, but it certainly isn’t a requirement.  

b.      When an author finds new words, new imagery for the millions of thoughts and feelings that have been expressed countless times before.

c.       When the author finds a way to make me care, because most of the time, I’m probably coming at the poem/story after already reading a few packets filled with 10 or so pieces of crap each and I’m ready to slit my wrists.

Dan Driscoll:

I used to think that good stories made me want to skip to the end, but I realized that I really only do that with stories that I don’t like.

I don’t really know what specifically makes me say yes, but it’s usually an absence of things that make me say no — and there’s no checklist, things that go wrong in one story can make another one great. 

A pet peeve is description that makes me think the author is focusing more on describing something than on the story, or putting a lot of energy into description that I imagine the author thinks adds up to the readers sense of the author’s cleverness or acuity but doesn’t do anything for how I think of the story. (Admittedly, I think myself clever and insightful for being able to perceive this about the author while I’m sitting at home holding a piece of paper.)

So a story usually becomes a “no” when I start to think too much about the writing. If description is bad or unnecessary, I start to think about how (or why) the author is writing instead of being wrapped up in it… or, if there are strange gaps or weird moves in the story or structure, I start thinking about why the author is making that move instead of enjoying being pulled through it.  But it’s not that stories can’t do unusual things — they just have to be made to work.  And I don’t think that really settles it, because there are a lot of times when I’m very much thinking about what the author is doing, but in a giddy way, or with a happy disbelief (“I can’t believe this is happening”). Maybe what makes a “yes” is a story that doesn’t let me think about how it’s written until after I’m done with it (or one that makes me feel stressed out because I want to think “how is the author doing this?” but don’t want to stop reading)?

I don’t know, and I think that’s something that’s nice about fiction.

Nice simple answer, right?

Paul Siegell:

I say yes when someone does something that gets me focused. When, for the moment, everything else is blocked out. When all I can concentrate on is what the writer has written.

It has to be somehow unlike anything I’ve ever read, and it usually take some kind of risk. I need to feel that the world just opened up a little, and that I can believe in that opening. And if it’s artistic, that doesn’t hurt either.

Unlike others, I do read cover letters. Just like a title, it helps me prepare for what I’m about to read.

Andrew Keller: 

The first sentence and paragraph in a fiction submission is key for me.  If something doesn’t hold my interest right off the bat, I put it down.  Time is short.  Cover letters don’t mean a thing.  Usually I think the author is trying to impress me with other publications, but I’m rarely impressed by that.  A good piece of writing is a good piece of writing.

Poetry is kind of the same.  If I read the first poetry piece in an envelope and I don’t like it, I’m not going to spend a lot of time with the rest.

A big thing for me is if a piece of writing sounds too “forced.”  If it does, then it’s out.  I think this goes back to what Dan said about the reader getting so into the piece that you forget about the writing.  Grammar is a big part of it, as well as diction.  Sustained voices that are coherent also help.  

Andy Segedin:

1.  I’m always looking for fiction that is fresh and has a definitive rhythm to it.  I, and this is just me, pride PBQ in being a somewhat alternative magazine with no singular voice.  Other magazines can do that.  I (we) want something different.

2. Recently, with the packet I have on my desk for instance, I get a lot of self masturbatory (can I say that?) work, generally involving a struggling intellectual who is either a.) hoping to find him/herself or b.) looking for love.  Chances are if you’re a writer, and I don’t mean to generalize, you’ve dealt with these thoughts before.  The worst part is, some of them are really well written – if only they harnessed those emotions and talent into something else.

3. Typical ” he said/she said” narratives sort of grind me down.  That being said, and I don’t know if you’d include this, I think it’s important to always to give it at least 2 pages.  You want the writer to get to the point, but you don’t want to bind them into doing it immediately.

Tracy Shields:

I am typically drawn to odd, but natural realities in fiction. Nothing perfect. But flawless in its presentation. I prefer short, compact, clear and unpredictable. I also love a subtle psychology in a character. A nervous tick. An insecurity. A regional idiosyncrasy. Some exposed ugliness. The more real and fleshed out the piece, the more likely I am to be drawn into its dilemma. I’m not always looking for something with a beginning, middle and end. I like glimpses of things. Parts of stories. But they need to make sense in some way. Like many of my fellow editors, I too am hoping to find that story that, when I read it, shakes me to my core, makes me feel vulnerable or alive again. Makes me feel connected. I read not only because I’d like to go somewhere, but because I am searching for a deeper understanding of my self. If a writer can give me that, I’d say “yes.”

Diving In

Hello, Andrew Keller here — senior editor at the Philadelphia (Drexel) office.  

Instead of giving you a this-is-me, slice-of-life, first-time thing, I’m going to get to blogging in the hopes that: a) we’ll get regular readers who come back week after week, and b) because of that, what I do, who I am, and the kinds of things I’m interested in will come across slowly.  Ok?  Ok.  

I just read the responses to what editors like, and I can’t think of a better way to summarize what we all look for than what Matt Longabucco said in his first sentence:  ”familiar language made strange and strange language made familiar.”  I totally agree, and I would add that what Matt seems to apply only to poetry is a somewhat universal rule for things art-related — at least for me.  

This statement applies to one of my favorite books of poetry in the last couple years.  You can find a great example of the familiar becoming strange in the title: The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears.  Written by Ryan G. Van Cleave and published by Red Hen Press these poems tap into what may be the result of de-familiarizing the familiar.  Namely, they’re funny as hell.  And touching. Van Cleave points out the absurdities of pop culture and pop music, among other things.  Word from Red Hen people is that Van Cleave is working on a sequel.  No doubt he’ll have a lot to say about Spears’s activity of-late.

Another good poetry book from Red Hen is Hitler’s Mustache by Peter Davis.  (Unfortunately, I lent this book to a neighborhood barista who then packed up and moved to Vermont.  So Virginia, enjoy the book.  I’ll get it from the library again soon).  Mustache is a book that’s also funny, but the humor comes mostly from the fright of looking more closely at the figure we all love to hate.  You can read more about the book at Davis’s blog, www.hitlersmustache.blogspot.com.  The collection is surreal and the wordplay alone is enough to make your brain hurt for a long time.  

If you’re looking for good music, the band Power Animal is probably my favorite right now.  Check out their music at www.myspace.com/poweranimalpa.  Keep in mind that, for now, the guy did all the music himself.  They’re traveling down to Texas really soon — in fact, they might be there now — to re-record the demos and put out a proper CD.  Not that the demos are bad; they just don’t have as much punch as when you see them as a full band.  But yes, this music is highly suggested if you like things like the Books, Sigur Ros, and Mum.  Or simply highly suggested.  

Enjoy the rest of winter.  Spring is coming!

Collapsible Me on Tuesday Evening

Last night was excellent. What really wins me about being downstairs at The Bubble Tea House (7:30 – 2nd Tuesdays – 34th and Sansom in Phila) is that it sets me free to be the jellyfish I was dreaming about all day. In March, like this, ain\’t nothing better.

Mr. Hiram Larew stood tall and threw his voice out over us and thank you thank you Hiram Larew. Ms. Ditta Baron Hoeber fixed her eyes on that end we all must come to and face down one day soon. She was tenacious; she refused to look away. She never faltered, striking melancholies at many angles.

Mr. Larew pronounced disappointing, pronounced savory, pronounced in a voice all his own, bending the language to him. I was glad for every bit of it. He gave his 17 minutes legs that could move, truly.

As different a pair as they were, there was an ease that they shared. Their perceptions were formidable, visceral and crafty. The perceptions were unique to these writers, but they were accessible. I was a stranger, but they led me through a familiar territory. I was inclined to listen.

There is something to say about the strangeness of the language here. In keeping true to their own voices, they made the experience singular for me. Therefore their own, theirs to share, therefore most enjoyable.

Extreme Fishkin, what can I say about them? They rocked so well. I want them to attend all future business meetings with me.

See you all April 14.

In the News: Losing our Religion

When I was little, my dad made space noodles. Some say we were so poor we only had a pot and three spoons, and so dad and Joe and I would sit around the pot, our spoons in hand, eating those salty buttered noodles straight out of it. Others (my mom) would roll their eyes at such a thing, saying we weren’t that poor, he was just too lazy to do the dishes. Whatever the case, we always prayed before we ate. It went something like this: Dear Lord, thank you for this food and this family and that we get to be here together. Amen.

It’s been thirty years since we sat together like that, and God seems to have gone the way of those greasy carbs: a sort of vaguely comforting memory that makes me both hungry and sad. A study out this week shows I’m not the only one whose faith is more memory than practice. According to the study, more Americans than ever identify themselves as having “no religion.” In fact, one in five people say that they have no religious identity and one in four do not expect to have a religious funeral.

Strange to imagine a funeral without religion. I’ve been to a few. You stand around drinking champagne and talking about how much fun the dead person was and how the dead person would have wanted you to stand around and drink champagne. Nobody mentions anything about a better place, and then your feet start hurting from all that standing and you go find a better place, another bar around the corner with more seating and stiffer drinks. To the dead, you say, over and over.

But it’s all got me thinking. First, there was no prayer in schools. Which I’m good with. Really, I am. But, then, no prayer at home. Before we know it, there won’t even be prayer in foxholes. How about you, reader? Any moments that you find yourself around the proverbial pot of noodles begging Jesus (or the God of your choice) for something special? Do tell.

David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

I got absorbed last night in a New Yorker essay about David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass Infinite Jest.  

It had been a while since I had thought about him.  When I heard about his suicide last year I was so saddened.  For a while, it was all could think about.  I read every obituary I could find.  Most people said he was an “ironic” writer.  But I knew this was wrong.  Wallace had a love/hate relationship with cliches.  If anything, he tried to point out the hollowness of relying on irony all the time.  This was apparent to me even though I had never finished the one book of his I had started.

A couple years ago I started to read Jest, but I had to stop in the middle because it was too intense.  Gave me panic attacks and vivid dreams:  one where I was reading a passage of the book that didn’t exist in print, another where I was asleep but writing a new part of the book next to my pillow.  When you read Infinite Jest, it becomes part of you, all 1,089 pages with footnotes.

When Wallace died I vowed to get through all his books, if nothing more than to pay him tribute.  Soon, I had read Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, without leaving with a crushed soul.  Both are non-fiction.  I especially liked Wallace’s title essay of the latter book.  The best part about these essays is that he doesn’t fall prey to his cynicism.  He has the balls to have an open mind, even if he knows it will be tough down the road.

One more thing.  The only place that seemed to get what Wallace was doing was The Onion.  When I read this article shortly after he died, I knew Wallace would have been proud.

Provokateur

I wanted to pick up on Greg’s idea about provocation as the exciting in art.  Greg, I’m not sure I’m with you.  I feel like “provocation” tends to carry the valence of didacticism and condescension.  I fear that I may have a slightly cartoonish idea of what “provocation” is—that I focus too much on artists that announce that they’re being provocative.  I remember reading the wall text for a Chapman Brothers exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that was quite sure that the statues on display were making me rethink my ideas of childhood sexuality.  The sculpture in question consisted of prepubescent mannequins with penises, vulvas, and sphincters where their noses, mouths and other parts ought to be.  It had nothing to do with my thoughts on children.  All it did was make me think that I wouldn’t let a Chapman Brother babysit.  I almost got kicked out of the Hirshhorn for taking the wall text seriously at a Félix Gonzalez-Torres show.  The wall text said that by taking the top sheet of a stack of paper the viewer “completed” the art.  I rearranged the paper.  Apparently there was only one way to “complete” the art.  Though I wasn’t provoked by the work (I quite like the work)—I was provoked by the limiting interpretation the wall text was imposing.

 

I went to a reading where the poet refused to read the first poem.  She passed out copies of her book, told us the page, and then breathed heavily into the microphone and told us after a minute or two that we could finish on our own.  I wasn’t provoked into reconsidering ideas of performance, poetry, the technologies of writing and paper, as the reader seemed to be quite sure I would be.  I’d actually already thought about all those things.  I was, however, provoked by the fact that she was wasting my time.  All I really left thinking was that this was a poet who hates her audience and likes herself.  The next day on her blog, she announced that she was offended that so few people had come to the reading.  It made me think of Artaud “dying of the plague” for two hours—while only Anais Nin stayed to watch—and I can’t imagine she would have stayed if not for the diary entry.  This for me is not a high point in artistic experimentation.  It’s a high point in the history of narcissism.   I’m not sure that I would ever want to attend a performance whose intention is to provoke me.  I mean I did make it all the way through Dogville, but I’d like those three hours back. 

 

So, Greg, my question is what you mean by provocation?  I will admit that I love being shocked.   These lines from Natasha Saje shocked me:  “Reading the Late Henry James/ is like having sex, tied to the bed. / Spread-eagled, you take whatever comes”  Kiki and Herb have often shocked me, and I want to be shocked.  Eldridge Cleaver shocks me.   Todd Solondz shocks me.  For me shock consists of having something un-thinkable or un-say-able suddenly forced upon me in such a way that I can’t immediately process it, but I know that I want to.  I think the sublime is a close parallel or synonym.  That moment of being literally beside oneself as the work works on you.   

 

NO MORE LIT MAGS!

Maybe I’m doing the wrong thing by having my first blog be a little confrontational, but, I’d really like to continue the conversation/debate that’s been going on for years:

Why form any new literary magazines?

My basic question, or push against this is, “What audience is that new mag. serving that is not already served?”

I could be boldly antagonistic and take my questions this far: “Is the new mag’s objective to serve the authors more than the audience?” That is, does the magazine serve the audience not served or the author not published?
Let’s be honest—many mag’s look like…sorry, there is no more accurate analogy…circle jerks. You publish me; I’ll publish you. Friends don’t let friends go unpublished.

So, maybe I am being unfair: I acknowledge that I inherited a magazine with a solid reputation that was already more than 20-years old. But I don’t believe that if I hadn’t I’d form my own; I believe I’d try to work for an already established one, which is what I did when I first joined PBQ.

Unless a magazine does something that isn’t being done, and a few are, an argument can be made that new mags are hurting all of us, rather than benefitting the literary community. There is a finite amount of readers; are we not watering down the well? Are we not weakening everyone’s publication credits? Are we not in competition with each other, rather than joining forces, thereby supporting each other?

Many, many years ago when the Internet was young, I wrote a column for the arts for the Inquirer and did a piece on the validity of online publication. The conclusion that still holds true is that even within online publication a hierarchy exists—that online ‘zines might come and go, but there will always be those who have proved their staying power. Insofar as publications that “count” toward Fellowship awards, in academia, for residences, for book publications, there is a hierarchy.

Comment on this blog. Please. But first, go to clmp.org and look at the member list, which of course isn’t even inclusive of all mags in existence. Then tell me why it should grow.

Devendra Banhart

I came upon a youtube video of “Little Yellow Spider” last week and it opened me unto the world of Devendra Banhart. I guess the first thing that came to me was, is this what would happen if Jim Morrison and Charlie Manson had a baby? Obviously a revivalist of both, Banhart’s style ranges from Latin and Hindu sounds, which I found to be intensely global and mysical, to deeply rooted undertones of hippiesque folk stuff born out of the sixties and seventies. In fact, despite the well-roundedness of being raised in Venezuela until age 13, it’s his American folkish sound and lyrics that make more of a statement than anything else.

I can’t say I’ve noted any real individuality to his lyrics. For the most part, they evoke the Beatles; that overly simple, catchy phrasing with a line or two of great depth about war or something.  I Feel Just Like A Child is one such example:

From my cave to my grave I guess I’ll always be a child

Well, I need you to help me reach the door,
And, I need you to walk me to the store,
And, I need you to please explain the war,
And, I need you to heal me when I’m sore.

You can tell by my smile,
That I’m a child.

And I’m a bit bored too, with the make love to the animals and the moon and stars stuff at this point- despite our re-awakening via global warming that we are all connected– he’s saying the same drug-induced shit that Morrison said, that Lennon said, that Jefferson Airplane said, and all the other psychadelic freaks of that era. Then again, he’s a genius if you consider that we are the snake eating its own tail.

Music aside, my biggest disappointment lies in the man behind the scenes. Personality is a big part of the way I experience sound.  I need to know who’s behind the tune, for me to appreciate it. So, I found an interview he did a while back, just so I could see him move and talk sans stage presence and I came to the bitter conclusion that he’s really just another retro knock off. He has nothing new to say right down to his predictable remarks about dropping acid. Come on, man. Adding that little “if you have a good acid trip [like I did]” incongruously to an interview is like wearing a V-neck, argile sweater to a country club. Conforming and bland. Like, have an identity of your own, man. This ain’t the sixties. Is anybody even dropping acid anymore?

Anyway…

What he does seem to offer is something the younger generation can appreciate: a glimpse into what it might have been like forty years ago. It is very interesting to watch how well he embodies the spirit of Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and the hippie movement, in general. I give him credit for that (check out the home-movie version of Freely and tell me that’s not eerily reminiscent of the Manson Family, which, by the way also resided in Topanga Canyon). But we’ve lived through those times. These are new times upon us, and I don’t believe they can or should be approached in the same way our parents approached things. Do we really need to smoke dope, play guitar, grow our hair and dis war to shake the world into realizing it’s time for a change?  These are bullshit, desperate times and our art, music and culture should reflect that. Not sink back into the comfort of a bygone era.

Overall, I want to look forward, not back. Give me something new. Not some archetypal hippie talking smack about his fans being his “extended family” and owning Jim Morrison’s sofa and singing about “pigs” giving birth to a child with hooves instead of hands. That’s too Helter Skelter for me. If there’s one thing I can surmise about this guy it’s that his retro style is too perfected. And sadly, that’s a paradox. As Jefferson Airplane ’s co-founder Paul Kantner once said: “If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there.”

The purpose of poetry

Hi! Shafer Hall here.  Long-lost PBQ editor in NYC.

My post tonight is short, because I have to write a wedding ceremony for my friends.  Friends and family are funny — they say “oh hell, Shafer’s the writer, he’ll write it.”  And it’s an honor and all, but I always kind of want to ask “have you ever read any of my poems?  Do you really want me to write your wedding vows?”  But the answer is usually yes.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking today about the purpose of poetry.  It used to be a great thing for a wedding to be very poetic, but these days it seems like it’s all about business.  And you know what?  I didn’t start writing poetry for public use.  I started writing it to amuse myself, and to help myself figure things out.  Poetry in a public forum was a side-effect.

Mostly a fun side-effect, but sometimes it’s a pain in the neck.  Not tonight, though — as much as I complain about it, I think the poetry business can be fun once I dive into it.  The wedding’s on Saturday, so I’ll let you know on Sunday (earlier this time — sorry Tracy) how it went.

Savage Detectives

Yes and yes again about this question of complexity, or difficulty, or opacity. Seems that Greg and Matt and Jason are staging a trace of a much longer debate about that modernist notion of the erudite ideal reader (a la T.S. Eliot), on one hand, and a Whitman-esque aesthetic accessibility on the other. Or maybe the subject beneath the subject here is about our beliefs in the capacities of readers. (Funny, but a version of the debate shows up in the work I did on the way 40s-era postwar German journalists who were invited to the United States to undergo “reorientation” seminars rolled their eyes at American ideas about clarity and simplicity in news coverage. The Germans thought it silly that the Americans would fret over the content of news stories for a paper whose audiences was made up of factory workers; the Americans thought the way the Germans preferred difficult language and sophisticated expression to be a dangerous form of elitism).

Makes me wonder about the ongoing seductions of big fat novels and literary fiction. Consider Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives. Folks are calling it a masterpiece, and rightfully so. I just finished the whopper last week – and I can still feel that sense of having been altered by the experience. Bolano’s 650-page “love letter” to his generation is a book about the literary field of Mexico from 1976-1996. The writers, the life of writers (their networks, associations, idiosyncracies, audacity, sex and sadness), fill these pages so that they brim like a Bosch painting. Bolano conjures the experience of that world as it begins to disappear. He does so via a 3-part structure: diary entries made by a 17-year old aspiring “visceral realist”; a 400-page oral history section (think Rashomon on steroids); a return to the diarist’s perspective.

Among the wash of voices in the middle is a moment that’s still stuck with me. He has his two main characters—Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano- show up at a Mexico City café where they sit for hours with a man in a white suit. The reference is fast, a seemingly inconsequential detail, and the scene is rendered from the perspective of one of the 53 or so narrators who make up the middle section. Part of me hopes that wise-acre Bolano makes an intentionally reference to Tom Wolfe here in the midst of this mega-novel.

Let the man in the white suit be Wolfe.

Why? Because the book’s made me think about the links and differences between “the new journalism” and “the new kings of non-fiction” (see Ira Glass’s recent collection)—about the way Bolano’s novel is a fictionalized version of his experiences as a writer in Mexico City—about genre and methodology—the arts as opposed to the social sciences– the motives for ethnography or for fiction or for essay (which seem to be to find a vocabulary for the range and complexity of the human heart).

All that, and Wolfe wrote a “manifesto” in Harpers’s a few years ago where he called for the “sociological novel.” And I think Bolano nailed it.

Does this demanding “sociological novel” blur the dividing line between complexity and accessibility? Perhaps it reminds us of the pleasures of both.

Nostalgic for Anticipation

My first literary magazines were comic books.  This is a stretch, I know, since the adjective literary seems, at best, misapplied to most comic books and many of the ones I’m remembering in particular.  Let it be said here and known forever more that Web of Spiderman (as opposed to The Amazing or Spectacular Spidermen, which had their moments) never contained anything within its pages that might be mistaken for literature, and despite the gender studies-larded dissertations that must have already been written about Archie comics, I’m not sure appending that adjective to the title of anything that ever contained Jughead is worth our while either.  In fact, their very un-literary-ness is some of what made comic books seem so great back in those years when it was hard to realize I was enjoying To Kill a Mockingbird even though I had to read it for school.  I followed the adventures of Scout and Boo Radley in good part because I wanted to do well on the predictable pop quiz.   Comic books, by contrasts, were simply pleasurable and, in the truest sense, wondrous.  Each flimsy page’s status within the canon (even before we know that word we understand one exists) wasn’t at issue; I read them to find out what happened next. And because I loved some of those images.   Much of this territory has been well-trod by the Lethems and Chabons of the literary world as well as the Wares and Barrys of the grown-up comics world .  I don’t mean to suggest I’ve discovered the appeal of comic books (especially for a certain sort of adolescent boy) and what that says about the identities we went on to form.  In fact, a lot of that sort of analysis seems hollow or maybe simply about as relevant as the wallpaper.  Sublimation of alienation, no matter the idiosyncratic trappings, isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.  All I’m really noting, I guess, is that I learned to be eager for the next installment; to evaluate the month’s offering in comparison to others’ to cultivate a taste for certain artists and a disdain for others all of whom were creating right then; to understand that these various publications were talking to each other, and, better, talking to me, from comic books.

I got thinking about all this while trying to figure out why I don’t read literary magazines all that much these days.  To be fair, except for a brief period after college, I’ve never been a particularly voracious reader of lit mags.  Thing is: I don’t really read comics that much anymore either.   That urge to keep up with a particular artistic vision has dissipated.  Again, I assume I’m not all that exceptional in this respect.  I visit TalkPointsMemo several times a day, and I hit my regular op-ed pages, Twins baseball scores, the Lords of Apathy.  You maybe frequent a few blogs, a few facebook pages, a site or two that curates the best Youtube videos.  And we know what this is all about because we are told all the time: the death of print, the ascendance of celebrity gossip; the shrinking of the American attention span.  All of that seems pretty undeniable, but I’m not sure it really answers the question: why did we (and I mean I, of course) substitute thirst for a certain kind of brand-new information with a habit of perusing another?  How can it be that I get from Obama inner circle gossip what I used to glean from new-to-the-world poems and stories, and before that, the drawings of Jim Lee that explaining the stories of Chris Claremont?

Surely I don’t.  But I don’t miss my old comics, even if at times I miss the feeling of dying to know what the next one will be like.  That’s not the same feeling as wanting to know what the Watchmen movie will be like (answer: about as proud and unreasonable as was the comic), since the end of a comic movie is nearly as opposite, in its finality, as the end of comic book can be.  It’s also not quite the same as picking up a well bound lit mag and wondering if there’s anyone in there you didn’t realize would make you jealous, so piercing is her prose, so devastating are his lines – but it’s much closer.   Maybe we should all try to cultivate that yearning a bit more than we do.  I’m guiltier than others, I know, when it comes to letting impatience overrule the willingness to slog through to something great.  I suspect, however, I don’t read literary magazines (or comic books) for the same reason most people don’t – because so much of them isn’t great, because so much of them is attempting something interesting, instead of, what?, creating it, justifying it, simply succeeding?  We feel that we don’t have time to sift the imperfect gravel to get to the few jewels.  And we’re right, since those few jewels don’t outweigh so much of that truly awful stuff.   But the search for the jewels is wrong-headed, or rather, the focus on the jewels themselves is.  Instead, I should probably be reading for the feeling of anticipation itself.  Maybe this will turn into a great poem, have a great line, do something I didn’t know I wanted to see done. Maybe I’ll be glad I read this only when I get to the next issue.

This morning I spent a few hours trying out a new (to me) comic book series, The Walking Dead.  It’s a version of the now traditional zombie narrative, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with bigger muscles, more characters, and more episodes.  It is at times quite gripping, at others predictable or overblown.  Rarely, if ever, is it all that profound.  Being in a post-apocalyptic wasteland would suck, it says, and it would suck in different ways for different people, it adds, between hatchet blows to zombie skulls.  It would – THWAK – force you to do things you never knew you would or could.  I know that TWD will disappoint me since, in the first twelve installments, it has already begun to force the same characters to do many of the same things.  But at the end of the last book they found a zombie prison, and I’m glad to say I can’t help but want to know what happens in there.  And so I’m off to Barnes and Noble to pick up trade paperbacks #3 and #4, containing issues 12-18 and 19-23.  Maybe while I’m there I’ll drop a few dollars on a literary magazine I’ve never seen before.  Maybe I can wait a few more hours to hear more about the AIG bonuses.  Maybe someone has written something for me, something I don’t yet know to miss.

Fluorescent Writing

Although I’m a blogger elsewhere, this is my first blog post for PBQ, and it’s an honor to be here!

In this moment of the waning work day, under keen fluorescent lights and some sinister ceiling pipes whose purpose I’ve never understood, I’m seeking answers from other poets: Are poetry and a day job incompatible? Journalism flourishes under lights like this–essays, sometimes, and blog posts, vaguely passive-aggressive work emails, Facebook status updates. But poems seem–to me, anyway–to require a little more insulation around the wire of a poem-driving experience or emotion.

I think–I’ve read enough interviews with poets to guess–that often means time and space, quiet and light, no commotion, or maybe the unworklike commotion of the public library reading room. I have a feeling there are a lot of poets who romanticize the lives of other poets who are getting writing done–academics with their summers off, non-academics with their free evenings and weekends, parents with their constant source of inspiration, non-parents with their enviable flexibility, people in writing-related jobs who get to bat around words all day, people in totally physical jobs whose minds are free to make up the words to bat aroun, people with the luxury to be online all day and look up species of turtle, people delivered from the crazed humming of the internet who can imagine the turtles all by themselves and make up names for them till they can look them up in the encyclopedia.

For my part, I’ve found a surprising source of poem-writing: tapping on my iPhone while at the movies. It’s a strangely fertile environment. If it gets poems written, I’m good with it. But it would be nice to have a poetry break during a lunch break and have it work as well as the movies do.

Emily

Banksy

I think this is just lovely.

It feels like I’m the one on display looking at these.

Banksy

HEY JUDE, THIS KID IS FREAKING ME OUT

Just back from a deliciously “molto bene” week in Italy (“We make pizza of evening!”) and now I’m off to the University of Pittsburgh. Haven’t been back since I graduated, Spring 2000, but my first poetry teacher, Jeff Oaks, completely hooked me up and holy moly assigned my book to his Intro to Poetry class. Tomorrow’s my day to come in, do the Q&A, roll around the How. Never done this before so I’m kinda buggin’ out, but if I rock 1/10th as hard as this kid I should be alright. (((Any advice?))) I’ll let you know how it went next week.

Provocatee

It is 11AM on a Tuesday, and I am confused. I am teaching my Intro to Poetry class, a group of twenty-two people who are recalcitrant, skeptical and defensive—certain only that they registered for the course because “it fit my schedule.” It is my self-appointed duty to ensure they end the semester not only acquainted with contemporary poetry and the basic tools needed to unpack much of it, but it is my duty to serve as a cheerleader for the pleasures of sympathetic or what I call submissive (as opposed to passive) reading.

On this day I am confused because one of my students has asked me a question of such simplicity that in the face of it, I find myself recalcitrant, skeptical and defensive. We are reading a poem called “Fictions” by William Kulik. It is a prose poem that begins, “In that novel you bought at the chain, a young woman looks back on her life.” The poem wends toward the memory of a fight between parents (a memory provoked by the novel) and ends with “you and your brother huddled in a corner of the room hugging crying Mommy daddy please stop we love you we’re sorry.” The difficulty of reading a poem like this in an introductory class is not so much that it is written in second person, a move intended to blunt the taint of solipsism evident in a speaker’s epiphany of childhood trauma brought on by having read a book featuring characters with whom he identifies. We can’t get enough of such navel gazing, in fact. The difficulty is not so much either in having to undo the convolutions and folds of meta- and subtextual narrative. The difficulty, I find, is in answering the question regarding coincidences between A) the novel within the poem, and B) the literal level of the poem. The young woman in the “novel” is a mother of two boys. My student wants to know if the two boys in the novel are the same two boys we encounter at the end of the poem. I’m speechless. Of course, these boys are not the same people. I stammer. Perhaps this is a difficult poem, I say. Let’s try something easier. Let’s consider, for example, Shakespeare’s foils and narrative echoes. Foul ball. They haven’t read Shakespeare. What now. Listen, the two sets of boys represent one of the several coincidences crafted by the poet, which are designed to conduct the charge of equivalencies the climax of the poem relies upon. Am I making any sense here?

Later, at home I describe the classroom exchange to my wife. She suggests it is an example of a member of one culturally privileged class (me) feigning inability to comprehend the patent, unsubtle reasoning of a layperson (my student). I don’t get your point, I say. She says, take your head out of your ass. But we’re talking about coincidences. The point is coincidences do not simply occur. Constructing associations between events and between characters is a generative act. It requires use of the imagination. Coincidences are like metaphors in that they are subject to the same logic that requires the reader to reconcile two discrete occurrences. It takes creativity to identify a coincidence, which is neither meaningful nor meaningless. In a poem, coincidences, like metaphors, are intended to provoke the reader to extrapolate an ever-greater complex of associations.

Child psychologists say that children are naturally synesthetic. This is something we grow out of. We grow into the discourse of teasing out, reasoning, favoring the perfect over the slant rhyme. We accumulate the calluses of rough-handling objectivity. Perhaps it is a fiction of autobiography, but I feel I’ve always been inclined to identify a thing in terms of its family of relations, however oddball such relations might be. I’ve always been provoked by the overwhelming oneness of things. I admit there is something egotistical about begging provocation. If we divide society into the subjective class and the objective class, I am antagonistic toward the latter. I am not proud of this. But provocation is nuanced and delicate. When I say I want a poetics that provokes, I mean I want a poetics of flux and intonation, a poetics that challenges this primal binary of subject/ object, a poetics of equivalencies rather than one of resolutions. Whether the poem uses the second person or is written in the present tense, it should do something to seduce me into submitting the defenseless child of my subjectivity to its care. I want to be indiscriminant, prodigal, promiscuous, yes, submissive in the safe house of the poem. I have to trust the poem is not going to let just any old body in.

In the News: March Madness

Several years ago, I went to an Oscar party. It was one of those fabulous shindigs where you wear a big dress and walk on a red carpet then fill out your “picks” and sit around eating sausage balls ‘til you see if you won the pool. About a dozen sausage balls in, I did it: I won five hundred bucks. Yep. 500 big ones. I’ve long forgotten how I spent the money, but I’ll never forget how I won it.

You see, it was a year when I hadn’t gotten around to seeing too many movies—or, ahem, maybe just frequented the kind of ridiculous romantic comedies that don’t actually get nominated for awards—and so, right after putting on my Spanx and right before leaving for the party, I did a little research. I googled “Oscar Picks,” and wa-la—pass the sausage balls, we have a winner!!!

Until yesterday, I had locked this up in the place where we lock our dirty little secrets, but then, skimming through the news, I came across a story about “bracketology” and how a computer program from Georgia Tech has already crowned UNC as the NCAA Men’s basketball champion.

Being a Cackalacky native myself, I have to admit I bleed Carolina blue, but I’m not so sure how I feel about chance in the age of Google. The thing is I love to win, and, frankly, I’m not afraid of doing a little research. So, what do you think? Is technology killing our fun? Or, am I a just a google-eyed fool to put my money on the Tarheels?

I’ll blog about it tomorrow

 

PBQ staff editor Amy Weaver shared this article with me from the Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=zs61txc4kwr4kd1q1rjbfxt41952gdmf

a discussion of Procrastination, Genius and Mediocrity, and Leonardo da Vinci. 

 

It’s a thought-provoking piece, to be sure, but I’m wondering if too many concepts are conflated:  am I procrastinating about not writing my memoir collection because I am using time instead to grade student papers, read submissions to PBQ, or schedule a reading?    

 

The author, W.A. Pannapacker also brings up mediocrity vs. genius and fear of success, but the overriding theme:  “Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first:” is exactly what confuses me—how is doing those other things procrastinating?  Does not the minutia of our existence demand to be handled first?   I mean, the students will demand their grades, authors who submit to PBQ will demand a response, etc. 

 

What is the way out of mediocrity and into genius, but not out of a job? 

 

Will we “waste our time” of we try to answer that here? 

 

About a month ago I participated in a promotional event for high-school seniors who are interested in coming to Drexel, but have not yet committed.   Our job was to present our department in a truthful, but positive light.   At one point in the day’s activities, I led the students in a mock editorial session, where we read “submissions” to PBQ, and then discussed them as our editorial board does, then voted on the work.   The potential students loved the session and I was greatly impressed with the caliber and specificity of their comments.   Their parents, watching from “the peanut gallery,” became so engaged in the discussion that several times they chimed in, apologizing as they did so, but unable to help themselves.   

 

When the session was over I had one of those rare, lovely moments:  I thought, “I rocked that session.   Damn, I’m a good editor and teacher.”   The mini-workshop had highlighted both of those skill sets and I was proud.  The energy in the room was palpable and I was inundated with students and parents wanting to continue the conversation.

 

I came home from such a great afternoon and waiting in the day’s mail was a rejection slip.

 

So, I thought, “Oh, ok.   What I am meant to learn today is that I am not a writer, but a teacher and an editor, and I should be grateful for that; that I have something I know I am good at.”

 

I related the above anecdote to our own dear, lovely Marion Wrenn, and she simply said,

“Don’t you see what you’re missing?    The amount of time you put into being an editor and teacher far outweighs the amount of time you spend writing.”

 

So—I think the question I’m really throwing out here is, short of expanding time itself, how does one prioritize the non-immediate?  How does one not procrastinate away one’s genius?

 

Did I just waste half an hour?

 

 

 

Are We Not Bloggers? (C’mon, it’s a Devo Reference)

So, my larger question today is why blog? What is a blog? What does this count as? In some ways, blogging seems like the purest form of speech possible. No money is changing hands—no points on the job market, no use value—just interesting people talking to interested people, about whatever the chosen subject may be. And unlike *some* blogs that are really just book proposals on the web (Stuff White People Like, anyone?), this blog at least is really just an existential engagement with the void. Yes, dear reader, to me, you are the void. Or you circulate in the void. Or at least you represent a completely unpredictable and totally open ended version of humankind that I call the void.

I lived through the first version of hypertext theory, back when the web was new (I was the author of the now defunct “Bitterness Home Page”). Most of the utopian vision has either been realized or been proved silly. I can tell you that back when everyone was super-excited about the rhizomatic structure of the world wide web, they weren’t talking about the Scrabble wars on Facebook. Frankly, the web has always seemed to me like either a more convenient form of reference (does anyone really miss the yellow pages or the card catalog?), or a repository of printed documents. In other words, I’m not sure that the internet has brought anything into being that wasn’t there before. I’m watching Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story on youtube right now. Because it’s illegal to sell (the use of the songs is unauthorized), the only version I’d ever seen was so blurry you could barely make out the Barbie dolls. I bought a copy after I first moved to New York, I kid you not, from a guy who called my office to sell me toner, and when I didn’t want toner, asked if there were videos I’d been looking for but couldn’t find. The Youtube version is much better. And going up to the guy’s office to get the video tape was super creepy. But still—youtube to me is just a place for things I want. Same stuff, easier Once I start playing the rhizome, it goes bad. One of my students wrote about watching floating otters on youtube, so I went to watch otters on youtube. The videos are short, so I start clicking up, and I end up listening to a twelve year old girl discussing her feelings. Which frankly felt much much creepier than the walk up to the office to buy a bootleg copy of Superstar. So maybe it’s not that I don’t know that the internet hasn’t created something new—it’s just the intimacies it’s offering are ones I don’t want.

And I think that Blogs are part of that intimacy—and I haven’t wanted it. My husband had a blog for a while, and my mother read it every morning. Then she’d call me and know what my husband was thinking before I did. I refused to read his blog. The man lives with me, we talk all the time. And this became the primal scene of blogging for me: my mom knowing my husband better than I do. But two things happened this week that are making me think that I might have to spend more time in the blogosphere. The first was the memorial for Reginald Shepherd at NYU. Everyone commented on how important his blog had been. The second was a scathing “review” of an acquaintance by an acquaintance. Over dinner, a friend asked me if I knew them and if I knew why one would do such a hatchet job on the other. I do know them, I’m fairly sure that I know why the one sank his fangs into the other, and when I went to look for the review, it turned out to be a posting on his blog. My first thought was, “Oh, I thought it was a real review. This doesn’t matter at all.” But then as I read the comments and looked at the links, I realized how many of my friends were commenting, linking, and generally discussing it. So does this actually matter? The amazing thing about the blog, and this “review” (blog post) in particular, is how intimate it is. I know all the players and they all know each other. There’s no editorial buffer. You may notice that I’m skirting the names here—I haven’t decided to actually get involved yet—but that’s because it feels like a mud pit. Is this a new mud pit? Is this different from the Mary McCarthy/Lillian Hellman feud, or the James Whistler/John Ruskin feud, but on a smaller, less articulate scale? Or is this something different? What I found most shocking was that after the posting, an editor had offered the hatchet wielder a chance to review for his magazine. Clearly the membrane separating blogs from the magazines is thinning. And here you find me blogging for PBQ.

***

Greg I feel you on the dilemma of teaching—how do you manage to preserve what you love about a work while offering it to students. And how to predict what they won’t know? I think it’s very hard to be a teacher (Kathy, as having had pedagogical success last week, you may want to weigh in) in so far as what makes you a successful student may make you an unsuccessful teacher. As a student, I scrambled to fill in any gaps in my knowledge—though I remember thinking that Ibsen was rather obscure when first taught “A Doll’s House.” Because I’d never heard of him. Now, I try to fill in as much background as I can before I bring in a poem to class. I’m always surprised that students can be hostile when confronted by something they don’t know. I was once teaching “The Wild Iris” and I started explaining the difference between perennials and annuals. My students were furious—how dare Gluck include such obscure information. My attitude was, “it’s ok, I’m here to tell you these things… that’s why I’m the teacher.” I think that “difficulty” is always something to be negotiated between teacher and student. For me, the best part of literature is the strangeness of the language. Wordsworth, for example, is often quite bizarre. But you have to be comfortable with the rules and norms and expectations of anything before you can enjoy it as being strange. The more I teach, the more I realize how much learning happens through immersion—a necessarily time consuming process. I have a letter posted over my desk at BMCC from a professor complaining that her students aren’t up to the literature she’s giving them. I keep it there because it’s from 1924, lest I consider our dilemma a new one.

Confessional Blogging

It’s almost 9 and I’m poised to hop in my car and head to the gym to attempt, once again, a 5K on the tread mill before my knees give out. I should stick with the bike. Bike is safer. And yet, as runners know so well (something which, I myself am learning for the first time), nothing compares to the feeling of energy your body generates when your legs propel you down the road– or in my case, propel me no where closer to anything but the dashboard of my hamster wheel.  

 

So, I was reading Citizen of the Month, checking out his links page and was overwhelmed at the gazillion people out there blogging (update: he’s cut the list in half). Not that this hadn’t occurred to me years ago. Because it had. And I became obsessed with wanting my own blog until I realized I had nothing to say or too much to say. At any rate, years passed and I eventually became a blogger. But there always was and always will be a fine line between exposing what I think is “interesting” and going overboard– 

Example of going overboard:  I was telling my sister-in-law last night that I had it in me a while ago to publish my diaries from the divorce. When I started transcribing them though, the reading was tedious. I came off as sounding uglier than the ex. Here’s this pathetic woman allowing her husband to do the stupidest shit and instead of taking action, all she does is bitch about it. And to make matters worse, she hasn’t a shred of dignity left and ends up sleeping with him as a means of shutting him up. And she writes: “it’s all for the kids. Keep it together for the kids.” Then there was my mother on my case, saying, “what are you adding to the world by writing something like that?” and “what will the children think when they read that some day?”

Needless to say,…I gave up the divorce journals, and the blogging.

There is something so self-serving about blogging. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on. I feel the egocentrism oozing from my skin sometimes. I’m privy to certain people’s judgments about bearing my soul on places like facebook and myspace. And quite frankly, the attention some people seek in their blatant “LOOK AT ME” status updates is quite ugly. Who’s paying attention anyway? Who reads this shit?  Jason said it rather aptly in Are We Not Bloggers?  that blogging is ”really just an existential engagement with the void.” Brilliant. 

Thing is, I love the written word. I love to write. I write on napkins at restaurants. I write on public restroom walls. I write a million emails a day. And I have written in a journal since age eleven. I have 97 hard-bound volumes that line the bookshelves of my office like doctor’s reference manuals. Writing is a part of me. Keeps me real. Keeps me raw. Whether readers pay attention or not. I mean, just as we all have that seed of hope in us for years that some day we just might become famous or rich, I think we all want to be heard and understood. And that’s the trick of blogging. You can almost imagine that you’re famous (unless of course you keep track of your daily hit count– ouch!). 

The other motivation, for me, at least, is exposure. I’m like a verbal nudist. I like the freedom and airy irresponsibility of the confession.  I can’t tell you how often I come across friends of mine that say things like, “John and Mary have the perfect marriage.” And i think, bullshit. John probably wears women’s pantyhose and Mary is anorexic because John is a control-freak. Their kids have A.D.D. and they both had to tap into John’s 401K because Mary is a shopaholic. People are so disturbingly into protecting their perfect identities and looking good that when something does go wrong (and it does), the amount of shame and humiliation is enough to bury them. I’m not talking about airing one’s dirty laundry. I’m talking about being real. 

There was a point to this. And the point is– whether blogging is self-serving or not, so be it. I’m not going to change. I love reading other people’s secrets. I’m glad there are a million people out there doing it. It goes to show not how egocentric people are, but rather, how we all need to reach out and touch others. There’s no shame in that.  I am drawn to confessions. And i love sharing in the commitment people undertake to expose themselves to the world. It’s not so much for attention, as it is a manner in which to communicate. It is not so much egocentric, as it is a belief in oneself that his or her words have impact. It is a way in which so many people try to connect. Try to feel alive. It’s why Dante wrote his Inferno, why da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Why my ex has tattoos. And G wears his hair in a ponytail. It’s why the tiger lily is so f’ing orange. Because inside we are not empty.

Wedding Poetry

Hey folks, I am still locked up in joyful (barf) wedding celebration. I kinda started to get sick of talking to people I don’t know, so I kinda clammed up, which cause the slightly-drunk father of the bride to ask “what’s the matter with you? You seem like you’re f*#cking stoned.”

BUT, the ceremony went really well. I wrote a closing poem that said all the things you’re supposed to say, but said it with a bouncy meter and with a lot of slant rhymes, and everyone was REALLY happy with it. I guess sometimes people like poetry.

Perspectives

I like tall buildings. I like tall buildings with rotating restaurants, observation decks, and those silvery view finders that make the user look like she’s manning a spotlight on a battlement instead of spotting some monument on the horizon.

This jones of mine for impossible perspectives demands to be met when I travel. (Ask Kathy—she’s got the itch too: we’re forever looking for rotating restaurants when we head out to an AWP. Any tips for Denver? Anyone?)

I love it too when this desire for impossible perspectives shows up in literature—think Gatsby’s green breast; think De Certeau’s vertiginous homage to Manhattan from atop the World Trade Center; think Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel Netherland, which culminates with a healing vision of London from atop the London Eye. His hero and his hero’s 9/11-traumatized family are reunited in one of the po-mo Ferris wheel’s pods, contained, secure, and simultaneously hoisted in a see-through bubble above the city.

So, on my recent visit to London, I made sure to hit the Eye too. My boyfriend and I (hi Jonathan!) had days and days of sunshine, odd for London, and now we’re convinced the Thames is always glittering: we missed the fog, but we could see for miles from the Eye.

Picture it: we’re in one of those plexi-glass capsules, slowly ascending the 443 foot Ferris wheel structure (it’s also called The Millennium Wheel and the whole structure a carnivalesque lark above the skyline). All my spidey-senses tingling, feeling all that god’s-eye-hubris such views inspire.

And I started to think about the way movies teach us to see. Here’s the panoramic establishing shot: ‘Ello London. Vast grey horizon glittering into the distance. (Does an establishing shot work like deductive reasoning? Is this the move that movies make from the general to the specific?)

Now cut to this: less than an hour after we’d spun over the skyline, we were on the Tube to Hampstead Heath. The Heath is a huge hunk of public park land (story goes that here Keats heard his nightingale). From its highest point you can look back and see the city skyline in the distance. So we tumble out of the station, hoof it up the hill, look at one of those “You Are Here” maps, then make our way into the bramble. The trees have not yet bloomed, so the woods feel stark, a hovering quiet shot through with blue sky and a sinking afternoon sun.

(Hang on. If the establishing shot moves the viewer from the general to the specific; does the inductive move of the specific to the general mean that a close up is a kind of inductive cinematic rhetoric?)

Now picture this, in close up. We spot a man sitting down with his back against a trash bin. I can see he’s bobble-headed, can hear he’s singing to himself—so I think, OK, a drunk in the park.

What I don’t see right away is that his pants are around his ankles. What I don’t see, until it’s too late, is that he’s got his pecker out, holds a Stella in his other hand, and greets us with a grin and, wait for it, “‘Elloooo!!!!”

London.

The Self-Aggrandizing, Hyperlink-Crazy South by Southwest Blog

I’m writing this blog from Dallas, Texas.  I’ve been on the road touring with Hermit Thrushes (I play guitar) since Friday, March 13th.  So far so good.  We had shows all the way down to Austin from Philadelphia, plus an in-studio radio set with KXUA and a newspaper interview in the Fayetteville Flyer, both in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  Also, a highlight for me:  a shout-out in Magnet, one of my favorite music magazines.

We’ve been traveling in a big retired retirement home bus that runs on diesel (we’re working on using veggie oil).  To offset some of the costs, we took four extra people on the way down — Elizabeth Devlin, an autoharp player; Cheryl Nguyen, a violinist/violist who is doubling as our merchandise seller; Greg Sandler, who is possibly making a video documentary about this trip; and Gater, a guy from West Virginia who was moving to Austin.  Elizabeth, Greg, and Cheryl are still with us on the way back.  We also just picked up Danielle, on her way to Fayetteville.

The man who made mostly all of this happen is Sam Tremble, a PBQ editor from Philadelphia.  He has a gift of finding people who are making things happen and convincing them to let the band do something, anything.  He’s also been blogging about this trip in Philadelphia’s Citypaper.

Two bands worth checking out that we’ve played with so far:  Invisible Hand and Quiet Hooves.  Quiet Hooves, from Athens, Georgia is what I think of when I think of Athens music — bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Beulah, Circulatory System (who I’ve just been told is coming out with another album August 4th), Olivia Tremor Control, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Major Organ and the Adding Machine.  Oh, I could go on for a while about Athens bands.  Circulatory System is one of my favorite albums.

We still have about one week left in the tour.  We’re playing in the same places we hit on the way down.  Hopefully the bus will get back to Philadelphia in one piece.  I’ll have more hyperlinks next week, I promise.

Very Short Reviews Of Stuff I Have Encountered In The Last Week

Battlestar Galactica Series Finale: great the first time it ended, then fairly disappointing.

The Walking Dead, Issues 13-59: so much better than what you’re reading right now.

Dawn Of The Dead (The Old One): worth your two hours of staring, if only because you would want to get away with that kind of stuff in a mall too.

Night Of The Living Dead (Obviously The Old One As Well): one of those movies you (I) regret not seeing earlier; also, because of a f**k up by the distributor, in the public domain!

My Now Unignorable Obsession With Zombies: I could totally survive.

Bite Me Best Penne Vodka And Greek Salad: still the best comfort food for a hungov—ahem, overworked man who lives gratefully in delivery distance.

Paul Krugman Vs. Tim Geithner: makes me miss Rocky IV and its 60% montage content… Can we speed this thing up please?  I’m ready for all-celebrity news again.

Newark Shuttle To Port Authority: all the fun of living through a 35 minute earthquake, plus the rich, musky odor of migraine-inducing diesel.

The Diesel Jeans Website: horribly offensive?  Surely.

Stringer Bell On The Office: what a strange waste.

Sad Cypress By Agatha Christie: quite nearly, but not entirely, a complete waste of time. Not particularly strange though.

My Student’s Papers: vampires, red ink-sucking vampires.

2666: almost as much as Sebald’s Austerlitz, a kind of perpetual motion machine for causing mind to wander hither and yon.

New Orleans Museum of Art Sculpture Garden: waaaaaaaay creepier than anything in The Walking Dead.

My Brother’s New Song, “pretty things happen to me,”: meant, I know, as a joke, but – I can’t help it – just want I need to calm down.

Self Center Justified

2:43PM
Dear Poetry, I wish you would just tell me what you want. Let’s stop fooling ourselves; this was never a healthy relationship. I’m a coward. I want to be dominated. I don’t want to take responsibility for the expression of my desires. I am a danger to myself and others. I will eventually do you harm in my efforts to provoke a fight out of you. I will play every form of philanderer, backstabber and cheat, every simplistic rendition in the discourse of every identity group I can’t even begin to define, yet will conveniently allow to define me. I have no essence, no initiative and no creativity. I am awaiting your instruction. I am awaiting your surrender.
 
3:16PM
Dear Poetry, I honestly don’t get you sometimes. I see how you strut around making everyone seem so smart and sexy. Do that for me so I can leave the house in the morning. Just be seen with me in public. I don’t care about your feelings. You don’t have to love me, just let people suspect that you might. Look at me the way the famous poet looked at me in that moment when he mistook me for Barack Obama, that moment before he admitted his mistake and I took his look of recognition, the brightening of his ancient eyes, for delight in seeing once again a face he could only remember as belonging to his favorite student. In that moment I saw my name in the index of his biography with so many page numbers listed behind it. Imagine his disappointment. Imagine mine. Do me a solid. Would it be so hard for you to let people see you laughing at some intimate nothing I’ve shared?

 

3:52PM

Dear Poetry, you’ll have to forgive me. I grew up in a culture of insecurity. Insecurity gets a bad rap when it is actually the only tenable position for any floating soul desiring presence or claiming (knock, knock) physical being. How can we be secure in anything other than our delusions? Forgive me. Some would call such a thing faith. I heard from my high school sweetheart recently. Right, who hasn’t heard from their high school sweetheart? Facebook seemingly folds time and space. It adds the truth of shared experience by people whose existence we had forgotten to the time-warped distortions of our own memory. Their memories are at once corroborating and contradictory. Whereas truth was once a memory I had allowed to grow into the shape of my fondness, truth is become a woman I had once fantasized about now offering to pray for me, and to send me literature from her church, and doing so without irony. I mean, what does she want from me? Is she really that secure in her desire or is she just goading me into a fight like she used to?

 

4:24PM

Dear Poetry, please don’t tell anyone about this conversation. I’m very particular about my image. I don’t want people to get the wrong impression of me. It would drive me bananas to think of people walking around making false assumptions about me. Sometimes I can see the decisions a stranger is making about me patently worked out across their face. Their calculations grow more complex the longer I stare at them. I wish I could write a poem that would stare at the reader. Pow! Right in the eye, and say, hah, I’m not what you think I am!  You’ll never figure me out, though I really wish you would try. Help me, dear poetry. You’re my only hope. Amen.

In the News: Sweet Mary Jane

The year was 1994. My hair was eighties big, and I was living in a sorority house in Norman, Oklahoma. The sky was huge, and I was wide-eyed, playing cool, playing real cool, taking drags of long cigarettes and talking Bukowski. Dude, Ham on Rye was sooooo much better, I’d say in one dank living room or another but then it happened. Wanna hit? somebody said, and before I knew it, I was pulling a Phelps.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I saw the charm in the dented-up-Dr.-Pepper-can-cum-bong, but, frankly, I fell asleep waaaaaaaaay too soon with a bad taste in my mouth and a bit of a headache. So, I have to admit, I was pretty surprised yesterday when I looked at the news and saw that in President Obama’s “liveblogging Town Hall” the vast majority of the 90,000 questions revolved around legalizing the sweet stuff.

 

You see, for me, marijuana’s always been a blip on the screen, some frat party gone wrong, but apparently it’s at the forefront of a lot of American’s minds (when America’s not exactly at the top of her game!) and seemingly in a lot of their backyards. I recall many a summer night when sitting in my own backyard I’ve gotten a wiff of the ole skunk coming from next door. I’m always shocked: my neighbors are in their 60’s; they have jobs and kids and know who to call for a plumbing job; but all roads point to the fact that they also enjoy dancing with sweet Mary Jane.

 

So maybe I’m missing something in this whole “Legalize It” debate. It’s one of those times that I’m thinking, hmmm, really, wow, one of those times that I’m a little stunned by what goes on behind closed doors, but maybe there’s something I’m not getting. Enlighten me, dear reader, give me your opinion on the Green.

Running Late so Why Not Read?

Anyhoo—I have a huge number of things that have to get written, mostly for editors who offer me far more affection than I deserve considering my general tardiness with assignments—so of course I spend the day immersed in two books that 1) I’m not slated to review and 2) are not related to my dissertation.  And then I saw Hedda Gabbler starring Mary Louise Parker and Peter Stormare (he’s the guy who puts Steve Buscemi in the woodchipper in Fargo).  But whatevs, y’all are here for the poetry talk (and now I’m just boasting).

So I won’t talk about the book on disability studies—though I have to say that I’m finding it really quite compelling.  Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell was so concerned about deaf people having sex and making deaf babies that he gave a whole speech about the problem in 1883?  I know!  It’s like, seriously, just because deaf people can’t use telephones, they have to be sterilized?

The second book is Great Expectations, which I haven’t been able to put down.  I always thought that I hated Dickens (apparently Dickens fans universally acknowledge that Tale of Two Cities is a terrible book), but it’s fantastic.  And it also seems related, to the current crop of stories today about adolescents being charged with sexting.  Why do we persist in using the word “children” to refer to adolescents?  Just seems to muddy the waters.

OK, so a quick note on poetry.  I’m spending some time with Robert Penn Warren.  I feel a personal connection because my Mom used to play with his dog when William Meredith was dogsitting for him.  And I’m reading his two poem cycles “Audobon: A Vision” and “Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Who Called Themselves the Nimipu, “The Real People”: A Poem” side by side.  And the first seems like a revelation. It’s from 1969, and it’s majestic and haunting and spooky.  The second feels flat and halting (it’s from 1982).  The first is like vortex, and the second a failed collage.  I’m trying to figure it out.  I hope to have thoughts on this for next week.  But it is reminding me of how wonderful paperbacks are now and how awful they used to be.

And that makes four books of procrastination.

Is India the answer?

This is quite a stretch, but since the heaviness of global warming birthed its own little counterculture I’m finding an inundation of all things Indian—as in India. As in back to the hippiesque Hindu spiritualism of art, music, writing and living. I’m not talking about that corny new age spiritual crap that we used to make fun of back in the 80’s every time the mere mention of “Swami” popped up on a self-help book. I’m talking about a deeper, more homegrown desperation for something so old and enlightening that we hope it saves us if only we could grasp its essence.

For starters, I strolled into Barnes & Nobel yesterday to buy, among other things, a book. Any old fiction book would have done. It was one of those days. But  I came upon a display table with a corporate manufactured sign above it that said: “Treasures from India.” Among a rather large collection of  items were Pulitzer Prize winning and New York Times bestselling novels like The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, and The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. There were books on Hinduism and Buddhism, Ghandi’s autobiography and other spiritual goodies like Indian mediation cards.  I bought the Lahiri book, caving into the new craze, wondering why there was this slew of material coming out of New Delhi.

A couple days before that, I noticed Devendra Banhart’s Little Yellow Spider and Carmencita. If anyone knows anything about the lovely Devendra, you’d know that he’s heavily influenced by Hinduism. In fact, his parents named him after a spiritual leader they were following at the time of his birth. That he was able to slip his Hindu leanings into his music and get a record contract confirms my point.

Even in myself, I’ve noticed a subconscious gravitation towards Indian culture. I rented Ghandi last week. I listen to Lata Mangeshkar’s Vaishnav Jan to repeatedly. I predicted Slumdog Millionaire would win the grammy for best picture. I have this strangely pressing desire to go to India and ride the Darjeeling Limited and sip sweet lime.

I won’t even mention Bollywood or Indian fashion making its mark here. From bindis and tikkas to saris and antique Indian jewels, we are appropriating Indian style like the Russians appropriated blue jeans.

And heck, ask yourself why places like Whole Foods are marketing Hindu gods like Shiva and Shakti, prayer candles of the Buddha and yogi incense.

I know these are rather superficial examples. But still, I insist. I feel something deeper.

Expanding culture in a superficial way is one thing, taking bits and piece from one country and adding it to another creates an amalgamation of unique global style. Like the time we all went nuts for anime, or when everyone started wearing the Arabian Yashmagh’s and didn’t even know why. But this new Indian invasion isn’t as one-dimensional as the Macarena. It’s not just about adding flair. It’s not just a book on a shelf or a movie with a picturesque landscape of the Taj Mahal. There’s an underlying message attached to our passion for India and it’s an ancient and spiritual one that seems to offer an answer to our modern day moment of truth.

The fact is, we feel like we’re at a make it or break it moment in time. Like this is our last chance. The fall of Rome, so to speak. We’ve lost our faith in religion, in government, in business. We’ve lost our hope that the planet will be here forever (or at least that humans will be here forever- the planet probably isn’t going any where). Most importantly, we’ve lost the privilege to be ignorant and naïve and wasteful. And I think that’s where India comes in. It gives us the possibility that, if we do fuck up, we can come back again.

In a recent study on faith in America, Hinduism was up compared to Christianity, which remained the same. This may very well be due to an influx in Indian immigration, or more likely, people are converting. Hinduism, after all, accepts and addresses issues which Christianity does not, namely Evolution and the interconnectedness of all things. More importantly, it gives us the opportunity to reincarnate. And that is what we’d all like, isn’t it? The chance to come back and do it all again?  I keep thinking of Bill Maher’s comment in his film Religulous that Christianity’s belief in human superiority to animals and other living things has only been detrimental to the environment.

The religions of India seem to address our global concerns in other ways as well. Think karma. Think vegetarianism. I know this is a stretch. But how many people now are pushing for less animal consumption based on environmental issues. It wasn’t long ago that PETA implored congress to impose a “sin tax” on the sale of meat because, as they state, “meat is the number one cause of global warming, a looming environmental disaster that threatens the United States.”

Before I start chanting om and change my name to Vidyadevi, I’m kinda wondering how India itself is reaping rewards from its own ancient wisdom. I mean, let’s get real. The country is in shambles, facing pressing problems such as “significant overpopulation, environmental degradation, extensive poverty, and widespread corruption.”

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the following environmental  issues alone are contributing to the problems India faces: deforestation; soil erosion; overgrazing; desertification; air pollution from industrial effluents and vehicle emissions; water pollution from raw sewage and runoff of agricultural pesticides; tap water is not potable throughout the country; huge and growing population is overstraining natural resources…

Look, I undertstand how we need hope. I get that we are trying as hard as we can to change and do good for our survival. Most of us, anyway. But I just think that glamorizing and devoting ourselves to the ephemeral spirituality of a culture that is running itself into the ground really isn’t the answer. Sure, we can appreciate India’s art, we can pray to all gazillion of their gods. We can read their literature and eat their food. But we cannot get so wrapped up in thinking that India or Hinduism or possibly even reincarnation is the answer, so much so that we neglect our reality.

Global warming and all the other insanity of this country incites us to find our strengths and our ability to recreate ourselves—not become something else entirely or fall prey to some cyclical trend. Sure India has a lot to offer in the way of answers. But it’s not “the” answer. I personally don’t know what the answer is, or if, indeed, there is one. Like the snake eating its own tail, we seek the eternal return. But is it possible?

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http://blogs.indystar.com/thoushalt/2009/03/new_survey_on_f.html

 

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=5dbb57b1707ee3b07cb20c2abc5994e4

All Wyn Cooper Wants to Do

I went in to my friend Alex’s Almira Studio last night to record a new song I wrote while I was in Houston.  I don’t write a whole lot of songs, but when I do I find it’s a lot of fun and very satisfying.

Houston is a very bayou-y, bluesy town, and the new song popped out after a few days of that bayou and those blues.

It’s a funny relationship between songwriting and poetry.  I tend toward free verse, which doesn’t always lend itself to songwriting, but limericks make great songs (as Johnny Cash or Ben Nichols from Lucero would tell you.)  Townes Van Zandt and whatever that guy’s name is from Deer Tick both write great songs that are kind of halfway between free verse and form — they rhyme a whole lot, but they don’t chain themselves to their rhyme schemes, and even though there are a bunch of rhymes, it comes out feeling like free verse.  An example of an entirely free-verse song is Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do,” which (studio impresario Alex Battles tells me) is actually just a poem written by some poet.  Sheryl’s producer found it, and they recorded the song more-or-less verbatim from the poem.

I just Wikied that bastard — Wyn Cooper’s the name of the poet, and the song earned a Grammy nomination for best lyrics.  Bravo.

The most musical of poetic forms is certainly the villanelle.  I think villanelles look silly on the page; when you read them aloud is when they really start to pop.  Alex has had some success creating songs from some villanelles written by Maureen Thorson and I, but villanelles don’t seem to translate directly into songs the way limericks do, and there were some of our villanelles that Alex wanted to make songs out of, but they just wouldn’t quite fit.

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Slumdog

I taught a course in advertising history last summer and we spent a lot of time discussing the way “the culture industries” try to train us to see the world. In the 20s, for example, when PR and advertising were new professions, when mass production demanded mass consumption, advertisers tended to celebrate modernity: what’s new is good! They hailed the consumer with a promise of aid: we will help you navigate all this newness!

 

That soon morphed into a promise of magic: use this product and you will get that job or find that man; drink this beer and that woman’s boobs are within reach! Raymond Williams famously described this “magic system” when he unpacked the way advertising, fundamentally, produced consumers.

 

I can’t help but think of this history when I watch a film like, say, Hancock— Will Smith’s little super-hero ditty, the one who’s denouement amounted to Hancock making an offer of gratitude and friendship to his estranged mate and her new husband by turning the moon into a billboard.

 

(I had literally just shown my students a dated documentary – on VHS!—whose dystopian view of the future (it was called, for pete’s sake, Advertising and the End of the World) included a warning about the looming possibility of space-aged, rocket launched billboards. They laughed in class. Then they went to see Hancock).

 

Product placement has so seamlessly become part of the cinematic ether we fail to see it. It’s there among The Truman Show’s faux ads (Dog Fancy is a real magazine); it’s there in Cloverfield’s rubble (“What are we gonna do?!” “Wait, let me lean against this wall emblazoned with the Sephora logo and let me catch my frantic breath.”)

 

But Hancock is a special beastie: it makes the viewer want to cheer the logic of advertising in its entirety. Three cheers for the special logic that makes the moon a billboard! And the audience is all warm and fuzzy because our grumpy hero has acquiesced to his calling, has returned to fulfill his destiny, and his sign of peace is to put his new pal’s logo on the moon. (Now, OK, granted it’s not a Nike swoosh. Instead it’s the logo for a non-profit human rights campaign a la Bono and Project Red. But it’s still an ad, sustainable capitalism or not.)

 

And Slumdog Millionaire is Hancock’s steroidal brother.

 

Slumdog is based on Q & A by Vikas Swarup, Swarup’s first novel. He worked as a career diplomat, wrote the book in his spare time, and it’s a picaresque, Dickensian romp. As it renders the social hierarchies, institutionalized racism, ethnic tensions, and daily exploitative violence of India, the book unfurls its own conservative slant, pinning the hope of a new/redeemed/culture on the spirit of good-hearted individuals. It leaves the systemic social forces and structures that limit the range of choices available to those individuals unscathed. It seems to argue, instead, that suffering is a function of biography.

 

But the film version takes this conservative view much further. What do I mean? Swarup’s narrative was far more complex than Boyle’s film: the game show host was a rapist; our hero gets on the show so that he could punish this villain; so, at book’s end, when our hero wins, the villain is punished and the show is destroyed. Slumdog Millionaire compresses multiple major female characters into one, and, more importantly, leaves the game show in tact.

 

Boyle’s film erases this part of the narrative and makes the film a more obvious love story. It fills us all with feel-good hope, and reassures us that all will be well if we put our trust in reality TV.

 

(In this way the film reminds me of Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s The Shining. In King’s novel, the Overlook is destroyed; in the film the house remains– Jack freezes to death in the hedge maze. The effect is deeply creepy and implies that the house lives on, its power in tact. A Kubrickian comment on the damage and danger of the nuclear family. But Boyle’s film is a seemingly hopeful reversal, though nonetheless creepy: the TV show remains in tact, fosters our hero’s reunion with his beloved, and gives them enough cash to rise above the social suffering, economic blight, and sex-slavery that threaten to do them in).

 

Three cheers for the global spread of reality TV!

 

Magic system indeed.

Events: Story Slam Philadelphia

PBQ’s First Ever Story Slam

When: Tue, April 14, 7:30pm – 10:00pm

Where: Bubble House, 3404 Sansom Street, Philadelphia (map)

Description: Painted Bride Quarterly hosts its first ever anti-poetry month Story Slam on Tuesday, April 14, 7:30 p.m. at Bubble House 3404 Sansom Street. Our story slam is an interactive improv writing experience: Think “Whose line is it anyway?” crossed with Henry Rollins. Compete for prizes and cash. Go home with a free mini notebook! Admission is free and open to the public, though competition requires betting on yourself (don’t worry; you’ll see). Contact pbq@drexel.edu for more information. But we’re not going to tell you everything.

A Short Thought

 

This is my on-stage dress.

 

 

I just got back from two and a half weeks on the road with Hermit Thrushes.

We went to Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, etc.  The best part about traveling is seeing great music communities and meeting interesting, thoughtful people from all over the place.  There were moments when I’d be sitting in the bus thinking, “Wow, this country really is beautiful.”  Actually I had a lot of those moments.  I saw cows and fields, things that I don’t usually get around Philly.

 

This is the band

 

 

On stage, we each wear a color of the rainbow and we have cloud and rainbow amp covers.  Nick and I wear dresses.  I say this because in Dallas, Texas someone came up to me and asked if we were radical fairies.  I said, “Is that a queer thing?”  She said yes.  I replied, “Well, not really, but yes.”  The next night, the sound guy asked if we were a pride thing.  A few nights later, in Asheville, North Carolina, a guy said our music was “fairytale punk.”  

 

Taken in Austin, Texas before Gater (red hair) said goodbye to us forever

 

 

So cheers to getting out of the city for a bit and realizing this country is great.  Until next week!

TBD: How To Hate The Kindle

I am inspired by Marion to admit that every now and then I notice I am a target.  We who consume a certain amount of media (that amount being quite a bit), especially of the electronic variety, end up with those concentric circles on our backs.  The periodical-addicted, another population that counts me in its number, may sometimes notice the plethora of crosshairs woven into their shirts.  Live in an advertising-drenched market, like, say, the town that told Mad Men what to call itself—you’ll notice the bullseye all the more often.

I refer, less cleverly than I’d like, I’m sure, to that the cross-platform, multi-media, several stage marketing campaign that seems to find you everywhere you go, from the morning’s stumble to the bathroom, to the evening’s quiet repose. Somehow, some algorithm-armed marketer fed all the raw numbers into the machine and it spit out a picture of you.  And so, everywhere you go, you are pitched the new product, told it will go great with whatever it is you already consume, that it is what people like you are forking over good money for these days.

To be clear, I don’t mean one of those carpet-bomb campaigns that hit everyone.  (I’m looking at you, Watchmen.)  I’m talking about the product that isn’t being pushed on most people more than once or twice, but, because of your particular predilections, it’s being waved in your face, from multiple angles, multiple times a day.

This plague befalls me a few times a year.  For a few weeks, I’m inundated with the same ad again and again.  And then, Keyzer Soze-like, the ad is gone.  I’m not sure what the last one was, but I remember Pom.  You know Pom.  It’s that insanely-expensive pomegranate drink that, in some vague way, is more healthy for you than, for instance, falling downstairs into an open box just filled up at the needle exchange.  Antioxidants or something.  When the Good Lord saw fit to bless this earth with bottles of this stuff, the Pom people had their sights on me.  The ads fluttered out of my magazines with the subscriptions cards when I went to my mailbox.  They obscured the articles I tried to read online with pop-up, pop-over graffiti.  They interrupted the rebroadcasts of the Daily Show I used to avoid reality.  People I know—people I liked—told me they had tried it.  I felt like the over-sexed wolf in one of those Tex Avery cartoons.   I could put Pom in a safe, jam it into the cargo hold of an Antarctic-bound plane, take a cab to the world’s tallest building, ride the express elevator to the top floor, lock several doors behind me and turn around… to find Pom, Droopy Dog-like, right behind me.

You’re wondering, perhaps, if I tried Pom.  Of course I did.  I’m not made of stone.  And it was terrible.  Or, if not terrible, significantly disappointing.  I knew it would be.  We all did.  But in the face of so much effort to get the bottle to my lips, I was unable to escape the coordinates locked on me.  I did as I was told.  I poured the intravenous blood-colored stuff down my throat, almost gagging on my own shameful weakness.  You have done this too.  I know it.  You have been made curious.  You have been seduced into believing Pandora’s better treasures are inside that new box of, what is that stuff?, cereal?!   It looks like the stuff I sweep up from under my couch once a year!  How could you eat that?  Ugh.  ….What?…um, yeah…no, I did see that ad during Friday Night Lights…yeah, with that talking bird, yeah….uh, okay…sure, I’ll try a bite.

I write all of this as preamble to the following promise: I will not try the Kindle.

Bezos wants me to have one.  He wants it so bad.  Bezos, I get a strong sense, is staying up nights calculating how he can bump into me on the street and send both of our accoutrement sailing, papers dancing in the wind, so that in all the confusion to get my beloved paper back in the right order, he can slip one into my bag, like a gray, mute stowaway who will become a charmingly fish-out-of-water/beloved companion and win me over, all the while secretly trying to destroy the very way of life all that I hold dear and the livelihoods of professional lumberjacks the world over.

Bezos has gone on the Daily Show to tell me about the Kindle.  He has convinced my friend Jonny to tell me about the one he got as a present.  Bezos has convinced talented comedic writers to insert the word Kindle in the dialog of characters I hold very dear.  Today, he even blackmailed (for that is the only possible explanation) Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, a 21st Century sage if e’er there was one, to start an ongoing conversation—ongoing!—about the merits of the Kindle.

Well, Bezos, if you’re listening—and I know you are—listen to this: No.  Not no thanks.  No.  No Kindle.  No glorified etch-a-sketch.  No fake book that smells like what I can only assume is not a book.   No safe harbor for trees doomed to become the novels I buy and read half of.  I will chop down that tree, pulp it up, print words upon it, bring it to St. Marks Books, pay for it with my credit card and then read half of it all by myself if I have to!  No more wire hangers!  I mean Kindles.

Sometimes you have to take a stand.  Like Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart.  Or that other time, when he was drunk and said all that Anti-Semitic stuff.  I take my stand here, on the Internet, less racistly, sure, but with no less conviction, and with that same crazed look in my eye.  Because just as Gibson was raised as some sort of Catholic who apparently thinks he is persecuted by Jews even though he’s been paid millions of dollars often by Jewish people to have strange things done to his hair, I was raised a book-lover who will not forsake his Luddite fetishization of printed matter, even if, hypocritically, I declares so here, in the pixelated world of words that do not sit reassuringly on the shelf but instead slip a bit farther down the page every day.  They, Bezos and the Pom people, they’re out to get us, they’ve targeted us, me and Mel.  And we won’t go quietly.

….What’s that?  Rehab?  …Tell you what…you give me a month in that nice one where Mel went, and I’ll give the Kindle a shot.

WFMU

I quite fancy this radio station and would like to share their likes with you.  The chef’s recommendations this evening come from the “Most Recent Archives,” a veritable buffet of choice musical meat for your commercial-free enjoyment.

http://wfmu.org/

Freshness abounds.

ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Earning “Poem”

Going back to my alma mater the other week as a published author was pretty surreal. Full circle in front of my old PITT professor’s Intro to Poetry class as I talked Poetry and path and answered questions about my book. A great crew of students he has to teach this semester. Made me feel like I went to a smart school. Or thumthin.

I saw myself in them (was them 10 years ago), and wondered if any of them saw their future selves in me.

Anyway, among many, one thing that stood out was one of the students pointed to one of my pieces and asked, “What makes this a poem?”

So true. Made for a fantastic discussion about “turn” and the kind of work the reader has to do in their own heads.

For me, sometimes I’m reading things, published things, and I’m like WTF? Not because I don’t understand it, but because I’m trying to figure out how it fits into what my brain and education tells me is a poem. Like many words before me, sometimes it takes a few reads. And even then there can be no certainty.

My question to you is, have you ever encountered a poem, or even written one yourself, and asked, “What makes this a poem?” What about it earned, or didn’t earn, such status?

I’m a Little Slow

I love Michelle Obama, but I recognize that her ordering a vegetable garden for the White House lawn is not a progressive move. In fact, it is almost so safe as to make me suspect it is insincere. SLOW FOOD. Yeah, I get it. Americans want to eat food made from locally grown ingredients. We want our houses built with locally grown and reclaimed materials as much as possible. We want our clothes, well, perhaps we haven’t gotten that far yet. We will know we have gotten that far when we favor clothing from local manufacturers and designers—or rather, since we already do favor them, when they can find a way to produce affordable clothes.
But many communities have been toying with the whole general SLOW MONEY thing for over a decade now. By issuing local currency, for example, a community can slow the egress of its resources. Imagine the practice of businesses honoring the coupons of their competitors extended across industries. Imagine “store credit only” applied to an entire community. Shop at the bodega instead of driving out to the big box in Jersey. But even on a larger market scale, slow money suggests we invest in long term, slow dividend stocks. Still I think we favor the local twist on our slow forms of exchange.
I have been trying to convince my wife, who is a financial planner, that microfinancing is the only ethical form of banking. It’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” year round. Since the economy has turned everyone into entrepreneurs, instead of hedge funds and corporate shell games we should be investing in the skills, talents and services of our neighbors. This requires the observance of what I like to call the SLOW NEIGHBOR movement. Imagine a mafia don whose influence is based solely on his or her ability to mediate disputes, introduce potential mates, and to connect people with complementary resources. Disputes between communities would be battled out using a few square feet of cardboard and a boom box, representatives from each group demonstrating the moral superiority of their arguments by spinning on their heads.
In our homes, of course, we must practice SLOW LOVE. I’m not making this one up. In March, the Times reported on the “One Taste Urban Retreat Center” in San Francisco, a sort of collective that “places a near exclusive emphasis on women’s pleasure.” They practice what the founder of the center calls “slow sex,” which is entirely centered on physical pleasure to the exclusion of romance, foreplay and pillow talk. Arguably, however, the slow love movement is more accurately represented by Prince’s eponymously titled song and focuses on shared, or rather, distributed pleasure—something more decadent yet nonetheless local.

In the News: Autism Awareness

In college, there was a guy I was crazy about. He worked at the computer café, and I would go in day after day to print out poems and type up papers. It was the first I had ever heard of an “internet” or a “cappuccino,” and while I wasn’t brave enough to go onto the “World Wide Web,” I was brave enough to sit around making whole meals out of lattes and muffins, all in hope that this man would notice me.

Nothing. Not a smile or a hello—or, if I was lucky, maybe a half-smile and a quarter-hello—but still I’d rip up pink packets to pour into the latte or bite on the end of my pencil or wrap my hair in a bun only to have him turn away from me as quickly as he had turned towards me. I mention this because I truly ached for his affection. I wanted it. Badly. It was such unrequited love, and though it pained me, I found myself time and time again, going back for more.

After college, I did my best to forget about him, but I was reminded of him several years later when I walked into a classroom to teach poetry to children with autism. Suddenly, I was in a room whose very walls seemed made of unrequited love. I felt lost and useless, and I’d sip my deli coffee and hand out pencils, all the while longing for the affection—or even just the attention—of the children.

Around that time, I read a heartbreaking story by a mother of a child with autism. The family had taken the boy to the beach, and the boy, who was four, was searching for sand dollars. So intent was the boy on finding those sand dollars that he walked away from his family and though his mother quietly followed him, she let him wander as far and as long as he wanted. The boy searched for over an hour and, the sky darkened with dusk, and in all that time, the boy never looked back. Not once. He never looked to see if his family was still there.

Yesterday was Autism Awareness Day, and for the tenth year in a row, I found myself in a classroom of students with autism. This year, instead of feeling hopeless, I felt delighted and intrigued, lucky even. (Life without dreams, one of them wrote, is like a pencil without wheels!) In all these years, I’ve learned a little about unrequited love, and I’ve realized so much of it is just a shift of focus. Some of those loves (ahem, “computer guy”) are barely worth the paper they’re printed on, but it’s the other loves—the ones that aren’t simply reciprocal but are, in fact, far deeper, far more complicated—that clench my heart.

I think of the mother who followed her son; how she finally went to him; how she strapped him into the car, brushed his salty hair out of his eyes, and took the long road home; but even more than that I think of the boy and his love for the sand dollars. I imagine a whole canvas bag filled with the ocean’s currency and how—even though a sand dollar could never love a boy back—the boy must have reached inside the bag as the stars flashed by the car window, and for the whole trip home, he must have run his finger along the ridge of one of those sand dollars, over and over again, letting its sharpness make an indent in his skin as he told it stories that not even his mother could hear.

Hollywood vs. my brother

 

Every Friday night my brother is at Joe Pop’s in Ship Bottom putting his own spin on Frank Sinatra. When he’s not there, he’s at the Quarter Deck and at 11, after all the other karaoke stints are over, he’s at Kubel’s where the clients are as old as the paneling on the walls but the applause is just as loud as anywhere.

And it’s the same thing. He never progresses past “Fly Me to the Moon,” or “Zing! Went the Strings of my Heart.” But each time he goes up, the crowd cheers. With his smooth mix of originality and Sinatra-isms, like the snapping of his fingers, Eric is pure entertainment.

Hollywood, of course, would never think so. 

Unlike the perfection and polish we, as an audience, are accustomed to viewing in sitcoms and dramas on TV or the big screen, my brother does not offer the same Hollywood standard of refinement and honing. He’s not a pro. He never went to Julliard or trained on Broadway. He never went to acting or entertaining school. He was never lucky enough to know someone who knows someone who knows someone else who could get him in to meet Martin Scorsese or the head of EMI. He could care less about becoming the next Harry Conick Jr. And when he hits the wrong note up on Kubel’s 5×5 ft. stage, there’s no editing out the mistakes. Pure. Raw. Unadulterated. And that’s OK. He doesn’t seem to mind, and despite moderate flinching from the audience, neither do we. What’s more, even though he’s just as influenced socially and culturally by the industry’s ideal of what is “standard” entertainment, it has no bearing on his courage or ability to perform anyway.

I, on the other hand, cannot claim the same amount of courage, regardless of having a fairly decent voice. When we make our rounds of the karaoke bars, it takes me five Yuenglings and a shot of tequila before I get up to do Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” Is it stage fright? Not exactly. I’ve been teaching in front of classrooms and speaking publicly on and off for 15 years. Maybe it’s disinterest. Again, this is far from true after a sober realization of wishing I pursued a career as a singer. No. My lack of courage comes instead from having watched too many Turner Classic movies. It comes instead from falling prey to the idea that the media define what is acceptable or unacceptable. It comes instead from being tricked by the smoke and mirrors of perfection Hollywood has created. And it comes instead from a belief that if I can’t sing just like Patsy, I shouldn’t sing at all.

It’s pretty safe to say that while Eric is the exception, I am the rule. There are hundreds of thousands of people who do not possess an ounce of stage fright and are born with sufficient amounts of ambition for this kind of life. But something holds them back.

That “something” might be that their definition of talent isn’t really theirs at all. It belongs to corporate America, to the 10 o’clock news, to Hollywood and the music industry. It’s an extremely narrow, corporate point of view that dictates how we appreciate art, music, film, theater, even the clown at a neighborhood children’s party. And it skews our thinking of what normal is as far as the concept of performance is concerned.

Take Britney Spears for example. For more than ten years she seems to have set the standard by which all other female entertainers follow. Sony/BMG Label Group (Spears’ record label), thus, defined a good performer on youth, looks, sexiness and blond hair. And after which, America was inundated with Britney look-alikes: Christina Aguilera, Hillary Duff, Hanna Montana, Jessica Simpson and so on. They literally stopped taking a chance on any other entertainers that did not fit this description. “Pink” somehow squeezed through, but only after ditching her edginess for a more conforming look.

Another example: When it comes down to what is aired on radio stations, the repeat time for a “top ten” hit outweighs and out-buys what any local, new artist could ever squeeze through the turnstile of opportunity. One song, in fact, must earn the amount of money required to pay royalties on mechanical rights, performance rights and now, movie rights. And so air-time is essentially monopolized by a few hundred hit songs all trying to earn their keep. There is no room for anything else. When I think of how many times they still play Rod Stewart when there are so many new and noteworthy bands out there, I want to vomit. 

Statistically speaking, it’s sad when you learn how limited our choice of entertainment is.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is an umbrella trade organization that represents a little over 1600 record labels and claims that it “creates, manufactures and/or distributes approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.” But of those 1,600 or so labels there are only four major ones: EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, which control 70% of the industry. In March of 2006 Myspace had 1.4 million registered, unsigned bands. How many of them will ever see the likes of a Warner Brothers contract? Answer: less than one percent.

Of all the potential talent that exists in this country alone, there are only one or two albums each week that will sell a million copies—only a pathetic few actors (about ten) will be handed a check for 20 million for one film. And with big Hollywood corporations like Disney and Viacom buying up independent radio stations, TV channels, movie production studios, newspapers, book publishing companies and even cell phone provider companies we are left with less and less diversity and a more corporate, Disney-esque view of the world. It’s no wonder I find it hard to get up on stage and sing my heart out. One wobbly note tosses me into the slush pile of performers who weren’t schooled in the Mickey Mouse Club.

Here’s an embarrassing fact. I was in my late 20’s when I found XPN. For those of you who still don’t know exactly what XPN is, it’s an independent, member-supported radio station from the University of Pennsylvania, that (get this) still includes contact information where you can send your own, original music if you’d like it to be considered for air-play. When I came across this station, purely by coincidence, it was during a phase of instinctual curiosity and a basic need to find folk music, a genre of music I grew up with but truly believed died out with bell-bottoms and hip-huggers. My parents, both musicians, played their Martin acoustic guitars almost every where they went, singing songs from Bob Dylan, Eric Andersen, Peter, Paul & Mary, Emmy Lou Harris and others. As I grew older, I found it hard to believe that there wasn’t a new generation of people who might produce music like that, but I never, ever, ever, ever heard any folk on the big stations. So, for the longest time, I figured it didn’t exist. Until one day, I began a search. When I hit 88.5, there it was: a whole new world of music revealed to me.

Josh Ritter, Wilco, Clem Snide, Martha Wainwright, Joe Purdy. Ray LaMontagne, Damien Rice, The Damnwells, Bon Iver, Glen Hansard. And on and on. I wondered why big labels never picked up half these musicians. I wondered why radio stations never played them. Though I was grateful to find this genre of music, I was eerily disturbed by the fact that it’s been kept such a secret; that “variety,” “diversity” and “talent” don’t earn as much money as over-produced bleach blondes with belly rings and double-D’s.

There are several arguments of which I will not get into: 1.) that Hollywood caters to popular demand and gives us what we want; 2.) that Hollywood defines popular culture and tells us what we want; or 3.) a combo of both. Anyway you look at it, there is a huge gaping disconnect between the popular entertainment that we’re spoon fed and the reality of a more natural, flawed, human entertainment. For a change, listen to one of XPNs live studio sessions compared to one produced by a Clear Channel-owned station. This difference is enormous. When Regina Spektor was invited to XPN for a live session, you could hear pages turned, throat clearing, notes that were improperly hit. She sounded magnificent. She sounded real. And it made all the difference in the world when it came to appreciating the human quality of her performance and believing I too should be able to sing and make a few mistakes.

Gladly, Hollywood has no authority at Kubel’s where there’s no TV hovering over the bar and the crowd of shots drinkers mostly, has much lower expectations of a good performance. It’s Friday, and that means karaoke, which ultimately means my brother. 

This week he’s doing one of Sinatra’s best, “The Lady is a Tramp.” He promised a few regulars the week before that he’d do it. And he always keeps his promises. I’m there for support. Though he doesn’t need it. When he grabs the mic from behind the bar, he tests it once or twice for feedback. He nervously laughs and then says, “hit it Johnny,” despite knowing that the DJ’s name is Rob. As the music starts, he begins keeping time with a finger snap and a foot tap. There’s a twinkle in his eye. His voice is a little off. He doesn’t hit every note. But he’s charming. He really draws you in. I think what makes him so good is that he really believes he’s Frank, if just for the time it takes him to hit that last, sustained C note.

I sometimes laugh at guys like Eric who will never amount to all the hype I’m used to seeing on the big screen, but I shouldn’t. He deserves credit for maintaining individuality in a world where expectations are at the mercy of a very small, narrow-minded clique of people who pick and choose entertainment for us. I give credit to the audience too, for sacrificing their more rigid and illusory vision of what entertainment “should be.” It’s very hard to overcome socially determined notions of fashion and behavior, and simply enjoy entertainment for entertainment’s sake. It’s hard to accept other interpretations of performance without feeling ashamed or embarrassed for the one performing. 

Of course, a little bit of Hollywood mixed with a lot of reality makes the best performance. And that’s possibly why Eric is so worth watching. He gives us both. And even though he’s not getting paid for his rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema,” he’s happy. Occasionally one of the “dames” at Kubel’s will buy him a drink after the show. That’s pay enough—and it’s usually always the same: “two fingers of Jack Daniels over the right amount of ice.” Just like Frank.

Resources: stopbigmedia.com, musicthinktank.com

Intimate Internet

So, I was talking (blogging) a few weeks ago about how I don’t really like the intimacy of the internet, though the more I think about it the more I think I was wrong.

After all, I usually start out by thinking about the horrors of the internet—the 2am nasty-grams, the resurfaced bully trying to friend me on facebook, long recriminating e-mails that get forwarded about, e-mails from students with obscene e-mail addresses.  Not that paper mail hasn’t brought me some horrors, but for some reason, paper always seems to have a dignity that Outlook and Gmail lack.  I also seem to read paper more thoroughly. I tend to read upsetting paper-text over and over again to a calming effect.  Upsetting e-text seems to have new passages and nuances each time I return to one.  E-text seems to grow and morph as they get read.

Which might be because I was raised before e-mail and texting.  E-mail was something you got when you went to college (from your college), and those early days of internet access were strange—listservs, chat rooms, ftp sites.  One day we’d be told that using our University of Maryland e-mails was like writing on college stationary, and then next day my friend Henry was sending around a picture of John Wayne Bobbit’s severed penis.  These were the days when there was ASCII porn (yes—naked ladies made up of text symbols—more like a mosaic than a photograph), and I lived in an all male dorm, and the world wide web was just about to debut.  But back in those days, there was nothing intimate about the internet.  E-mail felt more like voice mail—quick, functional, nothing to save or savor.  The interfaces were all very DOS, and everything felt geeky and nerdy.  You had to know what you were doing, and the whole enterprise was cumbersome and slow.  Phone lines and modems were no fun, kids.

Now, it all seems much sleeker, and more human (yes, I do seem to have just implied that geeky and nerdy are the opposite of human)—both more threatening and more exciting.  Everything comes fast, and everyone seems to show up.  I got an e-mail last year from a Dutch guy I met at an international scouting camp in the early 90s.  Thanks to facebook, I now know that the prettiest girl in the eighth grade thought that I was kind of cool.   The internet is a weird space because you’re there and not there.  You deal with the information on your own schedule, but it’s somehow uninhibited.  It’s easy to focus on how nasty the internet can make people—but people are also incredibly willing to make themselves vulnerable—and for the same reason—we’re all so far away from each other.

So I gave a reading at Central High School in Philadelphia—I’ve been their visiting poet for going on five years now, and it’s always amazing.  I can’t believe how great the students are—how nutured and supported they are—and even when someone seems kind of mad about what I’ve written, they ask, and as long as someone is engaging what I actually wrote, anger is cool with me.  I stand behind my work (and a podium).  But I always feel amazingly welcomed and appreciated and respected.  I look forward to going there all year.  This morning I got a thank you note from one of the students (she found my e-mail, I’m guessing, on my website), and it was really nice.  I mean, I always worry about a reading and how it’s gone, and it was what I needed this morning.  It was moving.  I felt good reading it and I read it over and over.  So, Internet, for letting us find each other and talk, I say good on you.  And I embrace the intimacy you’ve got on offer.

****

My  biggest news this week was that “Late August,” a chapbook manuscript by Barbara Brackney, was taken for publication by the good Jack Estes of Pleasure Boat Press.  She was one of my best students—she died of cancer in 2007—and we worked together on her chapbook manuscript when she was very ill.  I bring her memory into these thoughts on intimacy and the internet because I never met Barbara face to face.  She was a student in an online class that I taught.  She lived in Michigan.  We did speak on the phone, but my memory of her personality is all from text—her directness in the chat room, the cadences of her poetry, and quick trajectories of her e-mails.  Her writing was always filled with urgency.  She knew that had a limited amount of time. I was glad that I knew her, and I’m glad that I’ve been able to help her poems stay in the world.  Again, Internet, I’ve got to say thank you.

NaPoWriMo

Hey folks, I’ve been on up the river in the Texas Hill Country for days, far from any laptops or even electricity. I have a sunburn.

It is April, and that means National Poetry Month, and that means that poetry bloggers everywhere are joining Maureen Thorson in NaPoWriMo.

The better part of a decade ago, Maureen started publishing a poem a day on her blog for the entire National Poetry Month of April.

You can find out more about NaPoWriMo (and even join in) at http://www.reenhead.com/mole/mole.php.

You can read my NaPoWriMoems at shaferhall.com.

Happy poeming!
You

Listen to This: Ghost Towns

Among the many paradoxes of Web 2.0 culture is the way the counter-cultural ethos of the 60s, fused with the digital utopianism of the 90s, has triggered not only a “prosumer” revolution but a deep and abiding fear of the end times. Folks like Andrew Keen, for example, warn that the digital free-for-all we’re witnessing has dark implications for more traditional cultural institutions: from the music industry to news to (gasp!) our standards of what makes good literature good. Culture as we know it, he warns, is disintegrating.

So it’s a lovely irony that in an era when traditional newspapers are on the verge of extinction that some of the best writing about the economic crisis helping that extinction along has emerged. Take, for example, NPR and Chicago Public Radio’s “The Giant Pool of Money,” which is also available as a daily podcast called Planet Money (http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1242 ). Or open up the pages of The New Yorker or Harper’s and you are bound to find a stunning piece or two of essayistic journalism on the housing crisis. (See, for example, some of the pieces called out here: http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Housing%20Crisis ).

It’s the coverage of the mortgage crisis that’s got my attention. The images of tract housing abandoned mid-development, of suburban homes overgrown and forgotten, sidewalks and driveways cracked and sprouting weeds—these images haunt.

For some the ‘burbs have always held a certain clutching terror—we’re over-exposed and alienated, keeping up, shutting down or acting out. (Consider, for example, the way Desperate Housewives delights in reinforcing these ideas.) That’s part of the draw of cities, where we can run away and reinvent ourselves, more anonymous in the crowd than in the seeming quiet of our home towns. (Now compare Desperate Housewives with Sex and the City).

But if we go a little further back, say to the 70s, New York City was not the shiny fabulous place Carrie &Co. would have you believe. Think, for example, of Fort Apache the Bronx or Escape from New York. The big bad city was burning itself down; its rubble and ruins emblematic of a failed economy, failed administration, failed communities.

In the 21^st century, though, we’ve got wounded cities, cities attacked by external forces—be they man-made or natural, the terror was not from within but without. (Though in the case of NOLA it was a toxic mix of both). And people are returning to these wounded cities, seduced rather than repulsed. The city is no longer the sole locus of despair.

The shift in focus from the city to suburbs shows up innocuously in the transformation of Hitchcock’s Rear Window to Shia LaBeouf in Disturbia. Or as Rebecca Solnit points out in her excellent A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the modern suburban landscape is nearly lunar: no trace of children at play; the tracks of animals more prevalent than those of kids now kept inside for fear of strangers and the draw of computer games. (Now, mind you, that’s a whopping generalization—as I write this I’m thinking of Kathy’s amazing neighborhood, Collingswood, NJ, a community so rich and vibrant and full of kids on big wheels you have to be uber-careful when you drive).

But the shift is getting stronger. The ruin and rubble we’re beginning to see as foreclosures pile up, as people pack up and leave (by choice or by force), this disintegration is reminiscent of the city of the 70s. If Escape from New York represents an old vision of New York’s dystopian future, how will modern films imagine the future of the suburbs?

The sociological forces impinging upon people—the getting and spending, the greed and the getting gotten by adjustable rate mortgages—are having a semiotic effect. Our signs are shifting: the new wasteland is not urban blight, it’s suburban failure.

So when panicked pundits predict riots this summer, do they think they’ll happen in the Bronx? Or will the mayhem unfold at the mall? Or will it matter: we’ll all be inside blogging about it (if we still have a roof over our heads).

ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Al Young

Jazz, Poetry, & Allen Ginsberg’s Socks: An Interview with poet Al Young

Absolutely check out Michelle McEwen’s phenomenal interview with Poet Laureate of California, Al Young. HERE IS THE LINK

Spinning Rhetoric

Spinning Rhetoric

First of all, if anyone is paying attention, I apologize for missing the last two Fridays. I realized I just called attention to my negligence, but it is what it is. How long do they say it takes to establish a life habit? 30 days? Give me awhile.

A life habit I’ve had for about four years now is spin classes. At my gym last week, I had an instructor I’d never had before and I was struck by her word choices. She kept saying things like, “I want you to be uncomfortable right now” and “If you are happy right now, you do not have enough resistance on. You should not be happy.” And simply, “This is work.”

I had enough resistance on, but I was hard pressed not to react to her phrasings. I questioned the impact of her methodology. I looked around at my fellow spinners and saw their faces grimacing, their exhales determined, many sets of eyes squeezed shut. I believe I’d never seen them all in such pain.

Other spin instructors use phrases more like, “Your time; your ride.” And about as aggressive as they get it is, “Come on, give me another turn” or “Speed! Speed!” But all through their classes, they are saying, “You got this!” “We’re putting on more resistance because….we can!” “Here comes the best ten minutes of your day!”

Of course, this all made me think about projection, perception, about the power of suggestion, and of course, about teaching.

I get these students who have been ruined by their high school teachers. I’ve read studies that discuss how students get more and more discouraged as they go on in their education, more and more anxiety-ridden about their own work, their own ability.

We all know if you call a kid a stupid jackass enough times he will come to think of himself as a stupid jackass. If we say, “This is hard. This is hard,” doesn’t it become harder?

So, teachers with a positive outlook, a certain methodology, try hard to make work feel like play? Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, the teachers intent is too transparent; the exercise not fun enough to “forgive” that.

During grad school and my TA ship I was told the secret of the inner circle—when you write your comments at the end of the paper, find something positive to say, then tell the student what they should work on and fix, then end with something positive.

Sugar with the medicine; hello and goodbye with a friendly smile and a hug, even though our time together is all bad news. This positive bread sandwich is probably just as transparent, but I would still contest that it’s better than all bad news. At least give me a hug when you’re done.

How do teachers of writing break through all of the morass we must, the basic resistance to assignments, the fact that we’re dealing with individuals who have their own approaches, the damage that other teachers have caused, the fact of writings very subjectivity.

If you’ve taken a spin class or do any other physical work or exercise where you need to break through the “wall” to get to the other side, you know. That metaphorical wall is similar to writers block:

That feeling of “I am never, ever, ever going to make it today. I am just too tired. My legs simply do not have the energy.” Is the mantra for the first ten minutes of the run, the spin class, and then, even as I’m going for my towel draped over the handlebars I’m thinking, “Yes, yes. I could do this all day.” The body fills with joy, something close enough to joy.

The writer sits down at the blank screen or page and says, “I’ve got nothing to say.” But if she starts writing anyway, starts saying anyway, eventually she’ll break through the wall and be saying something and her fingers on the keys or her hand holding the pen will barley be able to keep up. The body fills with joy, something close to joy.

As writing instructors, we need to walk around the room as they write, and shout, “You got this.”

In the News: Getting out of Dodge

All of my misery fantasies end the same way: I’m in Wyoming. Alone. As old and as gray as the gray, old sky. I’ve just locked up the diner where I made about forty bucks on the late shift, and it’s windy as all get out, and I’ve got a helluva long walk home, but I don’t really mind because I’ve already lost everything, and the wind’s all I’ve got. Oh, and maybe a pack of cigarettes, and if I have the cigarettes, maybe a lighter, maybe one my brother gave me, years ago, when we were in the habit of picking up bad habits.

I don’t know why. It’s just my go-to, my if-I-lost-everyone-and-everything-I-loved-at-least-I’d-still-have-Wyoming-because-I-sure-do-love-that-sky-and-how-it-makes-me-feel-so-un-alone. Of course, the fantasy has its variations, most of which are apocalyptic and involve my weather-battered husband and our wild-haired infant daughter-turned-teenager, but all of them take place in Wyoming.

I thought of this the other day when Yavuz Burke, a native of Turkey and a Canadian citizen, stole a Cessna 172 from a Canadian flight school and landed it in southern Missouri after almost six hours of eluding F-16 fighter jets. I imagine Burke as a young boy in Turkey, drawing in the dirt with a stick, putting a big X right there in the heartland, Missouri, he’d say to himself, that’s where I want it to all go down.

Reportedly, Burke went into a general store and bought himself a Gatorade. He’d also tried to purchase a Beef Jerky but didn’t have enough cash. Canadian authorities are quoted as saying that Burke is “not a happy individual,” and I love that they bring happiness in. Hmm…happy men do not steal planes, fly them to other countries, walk into a 7-11 and plop down a buck-fifty for a Gatorade. Thirsty men, maybe; happy men, no.

But it’s all got me thinking about place, about how it buoys us and frees us, how it gives us hope or sends shudders down our spines (read: the burbs), how it makes us re-imagine ourselves. If we have the wind, we say, then maybe we can make it. Even just another day. And yea, yea, I know, I know, no matter where you go there you are, but I’m curious, what’s your place? Where does your mind send you? And what, please tell, is it saving you from?

Comics have the same structure as the Blogosphere, is what I’m trying to say

So, anyway—all of my old comics have come back from the ‘90s to haunt me, and some of them are pretty awesome. I’m looking forward to re-reading Martian Manhunter: American Secrets—thought I’m not sure what I was quite thinking when I bought the Marvel 2099 series (Marvel Superheroes in the year 2099) sequence, except that that the foil covers aren’t quite as cool as they were. But comics are a lot like blogs—these endless new iterations in what is a fundamentally disposable medium, and the networks are endless. I stopped reading comics because it gets too expensive—the narratives are always crossing over into other and you end up being unable to keep anything straight. Also, like blogs, the same discoveries kept being made. Every 10 years, DC seems to reset its universe to great fanfare, only for it to creep back into the same problems (an excess of parallel dimensions, an excess of melodramatic loose ends, an excess of reinvented heroes). Blogs have that same, oh, yes, you just noticed what Baudrillard was saying 10 years ago, and now you’re presenting it as your own idea, which it is, but still, I don’t have time for you. It’s like listening to high school students discuss theology, or really deep problems, like how whether we can know that what we call “blue” is seen the same by everyone (answer: we can’t know) or whether or not we can think without language (answer: not really). Re-reading my comics is a bit like rehashing Hemingway short stories, or going through a photo album. Everyone has the same pictures—there are a limited number of poses a human being can strike without being in an Annie Liebowitz shoot—but these are mine. There’s a limited number of melodramatic situations any given hero can encounter, but these are in my personal archive, so they’re fun to revisit.

In the meantime, can anyone tell me why Rateyourprofessor won’t take down a page from a university where I haven’t taught in 4 years? I keep asking, but they sort of ignore me or tell me they’ll look into it and then never look into it. It’s not really helping anyone decide whether or not to take my class—which is their excuse for creating their nasty little universe of vitriol, venom and effusion. And yes, the top three reviews are 5’s all across the board, but it’s just annoying. When people google me, I don’t want the fourth hit to be teaching evaluations. It’s like finding my tax returns or my dental records.  I love teaching, but it’s very much tailored to the individual or the class– as far as my public persona is concerned, I’d like to stick with my poems and essays.

Language: The deeper meaning behind asking for a “Cooler?”

Wine coolers from the 80’s.

You know what I really miss? Remember back in the 80’s when you wanted to feign superficiality and dumb-blondness? You’d approach someone at a frat party with a bottle of whatever you happen to be holding at the time, you’d cock your head or flip your hair from one side to the other, and then you’d say, in a high-pitched, Southern Californian girlie voice, “Cooler?” As if you were offering someone that symbol of shallowness and bad taste– the then ubiquitous California Cooler.

I don’t know where that expression came from or who started it, but it was brilliant and I want to bring it back.

I searched on urbandictionary.com, just out of curiosity, to see if it even existed as a term. The only thing that came up was the actual drink: cooler: (n.) A sweet alcoholic beverage. Usually fruity flavored with vodka. Mike’s Hard Lemonade. And then the example: “It took me 5 coolers before I got tipsy! Next time I’m getting a six pack.”

Who ever submitted that entry is an idiot. Stick with your quasi-beer or fruity-vodka or whatever, dude. Mike’s Hard Lemonade is NOT a cooler. And second, asking for a “Mike’s?” or a “Hard-Lemon?” doesn’t exactly carry the same nostalgic and relevant weightiness as asking for a “Cooler?” Besides, this entry is greatly misleading. The essence of the beverage, if I remember correctly, was that, when you drank it, the immediate urge to vomit followed shortly after having consumed it. It was so cheap and so badly designed that it made an entire generation of young alcoholics sick for a good five years. And those of us who were smart enough to avoid it, invented the catch-phrase in consolation.

What exactly was a California Cooler I’m still not sure. Some uber-cheap concoction of wine, juice and soda, I believe. I wasn’t much of a drinker back then but I do remember someone handing me one, saying, “drink it. It tastes like peach schnapps.” I think we were in the woods behind my house at the time and after consuming half a bottle I rolled off the rock I was sitting on and puked into a pile of dead leaves. That was the beginning and the end of my wine cooler days. After that, I simply soaked in the culture that went along with it. It soon became evident what type of people drank those things. Under-aged bleach blondes and dudes that were trying to lay cheerleaders. I know that’s an awful sweeping generalization, but when you consider that the company made millions..well…it all becomes clear.

The idiom itself, I’m guessing, sprang up organically as a mockery against “those” people. And eventually became a blanket expression for anyone not making any sense at all. It definitely made the user feel superior. And it culminated into having so many uses. It passively defined a stereotypical group of idiots. It was a subliminal message to your core posse that there were bimbos in close proximity. Or it merely served as a direct assault upon some brainless faux pas one of your friends might have made in public.

Like this girl from college I knew. Her name was Lil. We were all snowed in one year during finals and she ate half a bottle of aspirin because, she said, she was hungry. How else can you define something like that but to say, “Cooler?”

Or this mimbo I knew from the frats in Newark where we used to party on weekends. I had no interest in this guy so, when he asked for my phone number I gave him this one: 867-5309 (Anyone of my generation would catch the Tommy Tutone reference). I used to think that was hysterical. The next week I haphazardly bumped into him on campus and he was all like, “hey, you gave me the wrong number. This one’s been disconnected.” Like I was a number off or something.

Cooler?

You see how fun it can be? I want to go out to bars and go up to total strangers who are like, twenty years younger than me and I want to say, “Cooler?” and see if it catches on. Like how old hippies keep regurgitating that ever-present word “groovy.” Hell, that expression never died. So why should “Cooler?” If anything needs to come back into mainstream American culture it’s that.

I mean, when you think of half the things fashion trendsetters have brought back, “Cooler?” is mild in comparison. Call me crazy, but large plastic earrings are back. The term “fabulous” is back.  Shoulder pads and moccasins with fringe are back. All of them should have been buried with Rod Stewart and jump suits twenty years ago.

But “cooler” should stay. Or rather it should come back. All you have to do to is watch out for any thick-headed, moronic human behavior and when you see it, acknowledge it like this: just tilt your head a little to one side while asking someone…or no one at all…if they’d like to have a Cooler.

Simple and fun. Works best with a bottle in hand.

I read an article back in ‘07 that a beer distributor was thinking of bringing the California Cooler back to market. Underneath a shrewd exterior of doubt and cynicism (i.e. who the hell would drink this shit after what my generation went through?), I secretly hope it’s revived. It would definitely give more weight to my argument that this gem of an aphorism needs to be a part of America’s disintegrating culture once again. I mean, duh, if my attempt to bring “Cooler?” back is to be successful, I guess I can’t have one symbol of mindlessness without the other.

Cooler?

NaPoWriMo etceterizes.

One of the nice things about NaPoWriMo is that it sometimes makes poets out of ordinary civilians. I think it’s grand — I wish everyone would write poetry.

I had a funny conversation with a friend who is writing poems this month. She’s a short story writer. I’ve had this conversation many times before. It goes something like “man, I sure do like some poetry, but I don’t know anything about it, you know, I don’t get it at all.”

I was trying to decide where this idea started that poetry is something mystical and opaque. I pointed out to my friend that poems, not short stories or novels, are closest to the way we tell stories to each other. Most people when they tell a friend about something unusual will strip their story down to the most important and interesting details. They will not always use complete sentences, and they will speak in a casual and free tone with their particular voice. They’ll allow themselves unusual asides and digressions as they see fit. This is a poem.

I think I could teach anyone to write a passable poem in less than ninety minutes.

When I was thinking about poems and conversations, it occurred to me that when we exchange stories they might be metaphorically linked to each other. But that was hours ago in the shower, when everything was so much clearer. I’ll have to think about it some more.

Listen to This: The Hand Dip

Before you read any further, go take a look at Ravi Shankar’s poem “Hand Dip” in this issue of PBQ (#79). I’ll be here when you get back.

What makes Shankar’s poem such a pleasure is the way it snowballs into its rhetorical move: it is a definition. But it is a definition of a made-up word. When Shankar submitted this poem to PBQ, the combination of erotic imagery and Dr. Seuss-like language play– “nervy frottage, pervy wattage”– got the attention of our editorial staff.

But Kathy & I recused ourselves from the editorial decision: while the staff was charmed by the poem’s wit and velocity, they did not know the poem’s erotic definition of “a hand dip” had been borne of an informal writing “challenge.”

The year prior to the poem’s acceptance at PBQ we met Shankar at AWP. As is true for most professions, annual professional conferences are often the site of serious networking—and as the cliché goes, most of that networking happens after hours in places like the hotel bar.

Such is the case for “Hand Dip.”  At 3am I realized I’d misplaced my cell phone. I had not backed up its memory, so if it was gone, then I was in trouble. I blanched. But the conference director happened to be at this post-conference soiree. He quickly took action, got on his walkie-talkie, and disappeared. Within moments he was back, my cell phone in hand. Giddy with gratitude—and a lack of sleep—I made a joke about the proper measure of thanks. A hand shake? A bear hug? Whereupon some wiseacre in the smoky mix made an off-color remark about shaking something a little further south. We all laughed and wondered what name such a gesture should have: someone came up with the term “hand dip,” then someone else one-upped the stakes: we dared each other to write poems using the word “hand dip.” Based on this late-night challenge, several poets wrote and published their “hand dip” poems in literary magazines. In the poetry world, a publication results in a line on the CV, and that line will add to professional legitimacy the poet applies for grants, awards, and tenure.

The sociologist in me loves this social moment turned creative arc—from the haze of cocktail-hour inspiration to creation to legitimate publication. The popular term used to conceptualize such schmoozy social behavior is, obviously, networking. But “Hand Dip” illustrates more than the informal networks within the professional poetry field (or the drunken reverie of professional conferences). It also suggests the balance and tension between collaborative work and individual ambition, the creative stakes of poetry. But it also reminds me how every act along the continuum outlined here somehow reinforces a basic faith in the idea of creative writing as craft, as community, as the literary lifeworld we create and inhabit.

TBD: If there is an important distinction between a slam and a jam

At a recent meeting Marion and I (possibly others as well) got excited about the idea of a New York rip-off of the “Poetry Month Story Slam.”  We thought maybe we’d call it a “New York Story Slam Jam,” the distinction, besides the location, being that the event would not be a slam.  We don’t want to foster, nor, more importantly, do we want to go through all the work to create a structure for, judgment.  Instead, the event would feature our lively contributors, feeding off each other’s energy, combining each other’s ingredients to make something momentarily sweet.  Hence, a jam.  The theme, the topic upon which all the writers would have up compose–that would be “slam.”

Before you decide if this is a good idea, consider what happens when we slam  in New York.

So what do you all think?  Which contributors should we invite to participate?  Where should we do it?  What’s your favorite Onyx song?

TBD: What we might call a new literature of anxiety

This blog is not supposed to be personal or confessional.  I know this.  And I know that I’ll probably regret admitting what I’m about to admit for reasons bigger than breaking blog rules.   But I must confess, I, personally, have been having a low-level anxiety attack for about a week now.  When I think back on it, I’ve had many of the symptoms for longer.  Since the end of January or so.  But no, now that I think of it, I felt this way back in September, October and November too.  Being a certain type of person, I’m probably always on the verge of high anxiety.  However, being on the verge of it and in the midst are very different states.  The distinction between then and now is a kind of heart-burn-restless-sick-to-the-stomach-weariness.  I don’t sleep very well.  I pace.  My conversations with people are strange and drifting.  I eat both more and less than I should.  I procrastinate in such a way that my skin dries out and my eyes sink farther back into their sockets.  Little things set me off.  Mostly they have to do with imagining someone else thinking something unkind and, worse, accurate about me.  That I am not up to snuff at work.  That I am not a particularly good friend.  That I will  never amount to much.  My mind gets much more specific, but I’ll spare you the detail.

The excuse for the unpleasantly personal confession is inclusion of myself in a larger trend.  I am, apparently, not the only one.  I am trendy.  You know, the economy and such.  It’s f@#$ed and so is our place in the world.  We’re all in the midst of this shared feeling, and I use the term midst deliberately, because the mood is palpable, as if the air has become soupy, or maybe granular.  We are walking around pushing our way through this stuff, and when we stop to rest more of it settles on us.  I was telling my friend Eric about my ailments and he reminded me of Planet Money’s report about the increase in broken teeth.  We are all biting down harder these days, it seems.

All of this, except maybe the procrastination-eyeball thing, is something Anderson Cooper could tell you.  And as I tell my students, any issue that CNN thinks they know how to dissect is one in which we’re going to have a hard time finding the pancreas and the precious, precious bile inside.   But I’m thinking of another angle: a new literature of anxiety.

Stick with me a moment.  For a while now, we have seen a lot of stories about the apocalypse, and even more stories about the shadowy conspiracies behind the guy behind the guy who runs everything.  Our worst fears seem to cause us to retreat to fantasies of survival (McCarthy’s The Road, anything with Zombies) and malevolent Wizards of Oz (The X-Files, Lost, etc.).  Surely anxiety about the precarious and delicate nature of late capitalist comfort and the void left in a godless universe are at the root of these horror stories.

The anxiety we’re all feeling is a bit different though now, I think.  We are worried about the end of all this, of course, even if some of us think that it – and I’m referring to whatever it is that’s closest, for you, to that over-generalizing phrase The Way We Live Now – has already outstayed its welcome.  We are still titillated by our own plans for what to do at the apocalypse and we are still comforted by the notion that all this badness in the world is someone else’s fault.  These days, however, feel closer to the good old hide-your-head-under-the-desk-when-the-A-bombs-coming-raining-down-even-though-we-know-it won’t-help days.  We feel completely naked to whatever the world has in store but also somehow complicit in both our own exposure and letting what is out there in the dark get so big and toothy.  I’m not saying that anything has fundamentally changed in the world this past year.  Most of us are still hurtling deeper into debt and box office receipts are bigger than ever.  I am claiming that a lot of people, a lot of American people in particular, feel as though something big has shifted though.

And so, I suggest that we need new literature for this moment.  We need old literature too, of course, and there are plenty of classics and also-rans that apply to this moment.  I suppose all I’m saying is that I’d like to get something out of all this heartburn.  I’d like some poems and stories that tell me the truth, literature that aches with its own complicity, heart-racing for the nothing behind it, darting eyes seeing the same old stuff anew.

I ask you: what would that new literature of anxiety look like?

ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Man who always goes to sleep

ALSO, here’s an interesting look at what it takes to get a manuscript ready for publication, reacting to critics and editing. Pretty funny, too.

Whenever I Am About to Publish a Book… by MARK TWAIN

~@~

In the News: Pirates!!!

I must have been six. The circus!!! We yelled. The circus!!! We spit-washed our dark places, dug out our cleanest clothes and prepared to stuff ourselves silly with stringy cotton candy. We could hardly believe what we were about to witness: dancing bears and sad clowns, ladies with suntanned-colored pantyhose and men with lions, whips and mascara. All of my when-I-die-I-wanna-go-to-heaven-and-be-a-trapeze-artist fantasies were about to be fueled, and I pinched my cheeks, hoping to be ‘discovered’.

What we hadn’t prepared for that night at the circus was the creature in the tiniest ring. The spotlight spun figure-8’s on the ceiling, hundreds and hundreds of infinities, loop-de-loop-de-loop, until finally it settled on the knobby-kneed, wide-eyed creature in the center. Ladies and gentlemen, the announcer said. Drums rolled, and we looked at the creature, noticing the unimaginable: a single horn in the middle of its head. We gasped as the drums kept rolling. The world’s only remaining unicorn!!!

Looking back I realize that much of my disappointment stemmed from the fact that the creature was a goat; everyone knows that unicorns are flying horses!!! But there was something else. Here was one of the great myths of our childhood unveiled, and in that unveiling, it looked like nothing we had ever fathomed. What was next? Real cowboys? Pirates?!?!?!

And yes, it seems, pirates were next. Suddenly, they’re all over the news: getting shot in the head by Navy Seals, earning top billing at Pentagon meetings. A few years ago when the head editors here at PBQ wanted to do a “Pirate” issue, I thought, uhm, okay, but now it makes all the sense in the world; now I think perhaps they had their fingers on the heartbeat of something that was just drifting around in the blue, and that something happened to be beating in the barrel chest of a parrot-toting, jewel-loving, plank-walker-making, sea-legged-Argher of a man.

But it’s got me wondering about what’s coming next. How about you? What were the great mythological creatures of your childhood, and how, dear reader, do you imagine they’ll unveil themselves?

The Lost Generation

Dorothy Parker

I am once again, sitting in Les Deux Magots. I am a nobody. But it’s one of those right time, right place moments. Dorothy Parker is inside. She’s drunk and laughing at the center of a clique of American and British expatriates. She’s singing over and over, “I like to have a martini, two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.” This causes more laughter and more singing to the point of glasses breaking on the floor. It’s close to three and the serveur is pressing everyone to leave. There’s only about ten or so left inside and out. And I am quite surprised to be one of them. Karen and I lost our chance to catch the Metro back home, so we walked from the Violon Dingue by way of Saint Germain de Pres.

Sartre & Beauvoir

Just as we are about to leave, in walks Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I am beside myself. The maitre di tells them the place is closing. And Sartre looks at Simone and says, “Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” She takes a quick peak inside, notices Dorothy parading around on the tabletops drunk as her male friends on the floor hold her up and says, “Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male’s superiority.” Sartre then nods his head in agreeance and they leave. But not before Sartre has the chance to go over to Parker and spank her on the ass.

Of course, by this point, Parker falls off the table into the arms of one of the Americans. Simone gives her the finger. And then the serveur comes out from behind the bar and shuffles everyone onto the boulevard and locks the doors, leaving Karen and I, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Dorothy Parker standing on the corner wondering what the hell just happened. Karen and I decide to wait for the metro across the street at an all-night club instead of walking the rest of the way home. Sartre and Beauvoir take off toward the Latin Quarter, arguing over Sartre’s infidelity. And Dorothy Parker is scraped off the sidewalk by what looks to be the spitting image of Henry Miller, who comes meandering up the street just as polluted as Parker, shouting, “There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy!”

Henry Miller

A Modest Proposal for a Leisure Ethic

I was talking to a friend today about a rather prolific poetry blogger X (male) who has a rather ardent fondness for a rather annoying poet Y (female) and wrote a number of blog posts along the lines of, “anyone who doesn’t like poet Y just doesn’t like strong women.”  Anyway.  The posts went on for a long time, and basically convinced me that Poetry Blogger X wanted to sleep with annoying poet Y, without telling me much of what was of value about annoying poet Y’s writing.  For example, one virtue of annoying poet Y was her attempt at writing a manifesto—not that he said the manifesto was any good—just how wonderful that someone of our generation was writing one.  Uh-huh.  There is a reason that the age of the manifesto has passed, and it’s because only a moron thinks that poetry should do only one thing.  I was particularly angry about annoying poet Y because having taken a class to hear Poetry Blogger X and Unknown Poet Y read together—meaning that I had provided about a quarter of her audience—annoying poet Y posted on her blog that she was offended that more people hadn’t come to hear her read.  You’re welcome, annoying poet Y.  She also referred to the audience as being “cowed” by her performance.  I’ve never felt bad about having *not* heckled a poet before.

So, anyway, as I was telling my friend this long story (the topic was “The Second Worst Poetry Reading I Ever Attended and How It Convinced Me to Stay OUT of the Poetry Blogosphere”), my friend said, well, you know, Poetry Blogger X does work very hard.

This is true.  Poetry Blogger X works hard.  Between poems, blog posts, essays, and reviews, he probably works more in a day than I do in week.

But wouldn’t it be nice if he didn’t?  Wouldn’t it be great if everyone just worked less?

Law Firms right now are letting their lawyers take a year off at a reduced salary.  Unions are working to reduce everyone’s hours, lest anyone be fired.  What if we began to actually value leisure, not as something we pay for and make fungible (saving for a trip to Hawaii or London or a week at EPCOT Center), but as an ethic.  What if we all said that we should spend time being citizens, or staying home to cuddle, or just recuperating and chilling and thinking.  I think that Academia is very rare in that they value the idea of the sabbatical—that one works better when not working—or at least that one’s obligations should be relaxed periodically.  I often think that in America it’s very hard to be a good citizen, because we’re all so busy—and yet an informed citizenry is the very engine on which democracy runs.  So what’s so great about Poetry Blogger X writing about poetry faster than I can read about poetry?  What’s so great about the Collected Poem’s of Frank O’Hara?  Wouldn’t’ you rather have a selected?  Have you ever been glad that you sat through the mega-extended director’s cut?  Wouldn’t you rather see the shorter version?

Obviously, this is a modest proposal.  What I’m really asking for is less of what I don’t like in the world.  But really, wouldn’t it be great if we all did less?  If someone said, Yeah, Jason is always so interesting and relaxed.  I guess it’s that Protestant Leisure Ethic.

Congratulations Lungfull!

I am currently dealing with a bit of a crisis of faith precipitated by my mother attempting to friend me on Facebook, but I’ll take a break from my whining long enough to congratulate Brendan Lorber and Tracey McTague for successfully publishing another issue of Lungfull! Magazine.

Lungfull! (lungfull.org) is an independent journal that regularly publishes print issues of over 100 or so pages of poetry. Lungfull’s cool because they publish the first draft of the poem alongside the finished product, lending them their tagline “a compendium of horrible mistakes.”

Painted Bride at age thirty-seven is certainly a grandmother of poetry journals, but congratulations again to Lungfull! who, at seventeen, is certainly our favorite crazy uncle. Of poetry journals.

I think I’m gonna just not respond to my mother’s friend request.

Listen to This: Shrimp!

There is much to love about Amy Hosig’s brief poem in this issue (http://pbq.drexel.edu/poetry/hosig-amy_shrimp.php). In its 14 lines, “Shrimp” makes me remember why poetry feels good to read.

Volta. I’m most drawn to the poem’s turns, and the particular nature of what feels like more than a mere turn of thought or change in argument. What Hosig does in a line characterizing her hope that the shrimp she’s about to eat “…spent their life, hopefully, / jetting about” is to hold the reader in a light uncertainty: does she hope the shrimp were hopeful as they jetted about? Or is the hope that they jetted about hers? It’s obviously the latter, but fun as hell to feel the possibility of both before the line breaks and we’re dropped into a more specific thought.

Oddly, it’s like cross-dressing comedian Eddie Izzard’s schtick where he starts nodding his yes, yes, yes, then switches to “oh, no, no” in repeated rhythmic waves.  ( I can’t find the exact scene, but check this out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYcnEonB04E&feature=related )

What the nodding Izzard turns into a hoot of indecision appears more subtly in “Shrimp,” obviously, but it’s there in the duality, the lift, the turn at the ends of key lines.

Or in whole lines doing similar work. Take “make me” in her last stanza:

Oh you little shrimp

who involuntarily

died for me,

make me,

like the intelligent whale,

able to change you

into song.

On one hand the poem feels like a classic Christian intercession prayer. But “make me” makes us feel that moment of limbo once more: we expect the next line to be “happy” or “thankful”—the simply statement of the emotion that’s been “jetting about” this poem of gratitude: You make me happy.

But instead, Hosig’s prayer is for metamorphosis– her own, specifically, and ours, by dint of reading the poem as it unfolds. Her prayer for the dead is also a prayer for the living. And it’s in the way the line “make me” makes a promise, makes us wait, and delivers something more than what she’s made us think will come. The experience of uncertainty and surprise gets built into the structure of the poem.

Poesis, vates— poet as maker, seer; dulce et utile, baby, dulce et utile. Happy poetry month.

TBD: Notes For My New Novel

Maybe he doesn’t work at the bookstore anymore.  He goes there to pick up an old check?  After the scene at the doggy daycare, she wouldn’t be browsing magazines if she thought he might be there.   Also, she should be wearing the shirt from the night where he met her sister.  Ties into the blue theme.

More sex.  Three new scenes?  (They need to go all the way.)

Also, before the car crash, a new scene where he’s talking about the sex with Kenny at a restaurant and the woman from her office overhears.   This is where the milk coming out of the nostrils part can go back in.

Cut out the long thing on whales.  Steve is probably right – this has been done before.

Too many singing in the shower scenes.  Cut six of them.

Dr. Toliver is not his father, but he has to be the prime suspect at the party so that the road trip happens.  Need new reason for suspicion.  Smokes a pipe?  Line dancing?  Someone tells him his dad used to have wavy hair?

He has to go to the bank after the Laundromat, otherwise why does he have the coat hanger with him when he bumps into her again?

Move last chapter to somewhere near the beginning of part 2 so the talent show coincides with death of the grandmother.  Write new last chapter that sums up living in America these days.  A parade?  Reality show?  Race riot?  Maybe he has to fill up a friend’s car with a really big gas tank – super expensive.

Prettier adjectives for the camping chapter.

Something missing from the Mount Rushmore part.  Do pumas live around there?  Possums?  Research.

She doesn’t accuse him of stalking at the dentist.  But she does at the Lamaze class.  More room for drama there.  Could be really touching if it’s handled right.

What if all the dream sequences have him chasing a butterfly that symbolizes his hopes for the future?    Maybe work in some stuff on Native American beliefs when he goes to the “haunted” museum.  Then it makes more sense.

Tone needs to be Tolstoy crossed with Palahniuk.  But the exact same feel as a Johnny Cash song.    Rhythm.

Not enough descriptions of people’s clothes.  Add more.

They need to have a kick ass band for the wedding.  Like a dream band.  They can do Salsa, reggae, hip hop, show tunes, 70s rock (no 60s because of the protest theme – too obvious).  Irish line dancing too much?  The singer is hot, but not hotter than the bride.  And the guitar player can do that thing with his teeth.  The first dance should be November Rain or the Humpty Dance.  Either way, this part needs to be written really, really well so people get how freaking awesome the whole night is.

If his mother doesn’t kick him out of the house in chapter 47 they can just live together there at the end.

Swearing or no swearing?  Need to nail this down for the part where he drops the hammer on his foot.

More brand names.

Her cat runs away.  And they find it in the park with bite marks all over.  Foul play.  Professor Fraussenpunch?

Probably too many scenes where they bump into each other (14 if you count the Ferris Wheel?).  Cut one or it will seem like he is stalking her.

Start writing tomorrow!

ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Post-Print

PLUS:

INTERNET-AGE WRITING SYLLABUS AND COURSE OVERVIEW.

BY ROBERT LANHAM

~@~

In the News: All That’s Old

Woke up in Rome; now, in Athens. Hiked up a hill for the Aprokopli, and it makes me wonder about all this news, why we sift through the papers all day long, why so many living rooms are stale with the light of the Weather Channel, why so many kitchens hum with what’s just happened. I guess it’s just as good as thinking waaaaaaay too far ahead or waaaaaay too far behind, but tonight, in this strange Athens’ Internet port, none of the news matters to me; only this matters to me; this now; this way back when.

Faithful Saturday Blogger Sick with Flu

Sorry loves– I’m home being ill and doing things with a neti pot that should not be recounted.

To the Lighthouse

It’s late April and it’s 90 degrees in Philadelphia.  Right now I’m listening to the loud omnipresent hum of what I assume is a cooling device for the meat/produce store loading dock right next door.  It ends and, before I know it, it begins again when I’m in the middle of doing something else in my room.

It’s 3am and every time I try to sleep I start sweating profusely.  

I just spent an hour with my favorite book  – To the Lighthouse.  Even though I’ve read it about seven times (mostly in college), there’s something mysterious that draws me in.  No matter where my copy might be (lost, at the bottom of a pile of magazines, at a friend’s house), I think, “I should be reading that book.”  And then I’m reading it and it’s like an entirely different piece of fiction.  

I also just read tonight that there is going to be a new David Foster Wallace book, titlted “This is Water.”  It’s a commencement speech that he gave at Kenyon College.  I’m pretty sure I read it all online (it’s not that long, and you can read it here), but it’s most definitely worth re-reading.  Here is Wallace at his big-hearted, big-brained best.  

The refrigerator is running again and I’m still sweating.  Maybe the weather will be better tomorrow.  

Maybe.

Listen to This: Convergence Culture

Gotta love the ironies of digital culture. A big fretful debate among publishers is whether the printed word is on the way out. But the first big internet retailer made its money selling books online. Amazon is a great example of what some folk call “convergence culture”— the term is a bit slippery: for some it means the way older media forms appear inside the newest media channels (like books and movies and TV shows showing up online); for others it refers to the way the technologies themselves are converging (that we can watch videos on our cell phones, which double as e-mail devices, and internet sources).

And now the Library of Congress is getting into the game. Check out their digital archives. The LOC has made its Slave Narratives, oral histories, and American Life archives available online. “Nearly 3,000 of the oral history interviews are now available on the Library of Congress’s W.P.A. Life Histories Web site, memory.loc.gov/ ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html, with more to come.”

Since the late 1970s the Library of Congress has been quietly unpacking and vetting the contents of the WPA’s Federal Writers Project, making the materials available to researchers. During the Great Depression, as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government employed over 6000 poets, essayists, journalists, and writers to interview and document the stories of the nation. Editors included John Cheever, Zora Neale Hurston, Studs Terkel, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, Kenneth Patchen and many more. They produced the famed American Guide Series, and they also produced the Slave Narratives. The timing was crucial: social and economic crisis met up with the literary, historical, and sociological imagination of the federally-employed writers. Plus, in the late 1930s the population of once-enslaved people was dwindling. Armed with microphones and notebooks, the editors went out into the nation and collected their stories. The editors also amassed oddball anecdotes and local histories. They believed—even in the face of a culture rife with white supremacy, anti-immigration laws, and the like—that they could celebrate a national culture of diversity. W. H. Auden called the whole project “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state.”

And now all that material is available online. You can download audio files and listen to the voice ex-slave Fountain Hughes.

Take that, Facebook. I got yer “25 Things” right here.

Or, better still:

Dear 21st Century Writer, what should a poet do with those voices? What would a novelist do? Or an essayist?  What would you do? Would you listen? Bear witness? Or…

Uncollected Concerns

I’ve been missing zines today, and thinking about how they seem to have disappeared from my radar now that blogs have taken their place. One of the novels that I’m working on in my dissertation features a 16 year old writing a zine for victims of sexual abuse, and now I imagine he’d have a blog instead. Of course, he wouldn’t be isolated—he’d spend his days in chatrooms full of survivors of sexual abuse—and the novel would more or less evaporate. But there was something wonderful about going to an out of the way bookstore and discovering a zine. I read some pretty amazing zines at St. Marks back in the ‘90s. But now I can watch Karen Carpenter: Superstar on Youtube, so it all balances out. And chapbooks are doing great. Who doesn’t love chapbooks?

* * *

Is the book really disappearing, or is it libraries? My own trusty university library is increasingly purchasing electronic versions of books (I find such a thing unreadable for more than a page or two) and joining consortiums to make books flow easily from campus to campus. I suppose that the promiscuous books of library collections (indiscriminately read by endless eyes) aren’t very good for a publisher’s bottom line, but it seems like there should be a solution here to something.

* * *

Kids, the internet is rotting your brain. It gives you cortisol. I just need to focus.

* * *

Craig Arnold, please be found, come home.

In the News: Flying Swine

Yesterday at the gym, breathing in the thick sweaty breath of my fellow Brooklyn-ites, I watched the TV screen flash from one surgical mask to the next, each fastened tight beneath a pair of sad, worried eyes. At the bottom of the screen, in all caps: “IF YOU’RE HUMAN, YOU’RE AT RISK.”

I was reminded of a cough I developed when I was six. It raged through me, sent me in wilds fits that left my eyes watery and my throat sore. I remember it as being accompanied by chills, by an inability to eat, by nightmares and cold sweats and general malaise. I thought I was dying.

A few years later—after going through rounds of medication—I mentioned it to my mother. We were driving, I’m sure, to some new place, and Remember when I had the whooping cough, I asked. What? She said. You know, that cough, when I was in first grade. She took a swig of her Diet Coke and laughed. That was psychosomatic, she said. Psycho-what?

In your mind, she said. We think you were just trying to get attention. But the pills? I asked. Fake, she told me, they’re called placebo. I stared out the window long and hard. Had I really not been dying? Had I really not narrowly escaped Ole Man Reaper?

Because of this, I never really believe I’m sick. A couple of weeks ago, when Eva and I were laid up in the house, and I was sucking down chicken soup and reading US Weekly, I kept thinking, I hope no one finds out we’re faking it. Yes, we were coughing and going through tissues like mad and we didn’t really have voices and we were curled up like two shrimp in the bed, but deep down inside, I wondered if it was really all just in my mind.

And now this…Pigs flying…151 dead in Mexico from the Swine Flu…if you’re human, you’re at risk. None of this is accompanied with a reminder that 35,000 people die each year from the HUMAN flu. I’m just wondering if it’s all in our minds a little. What do you think: is America suffering from the same cough I had as a girl? Or should I stop getting on so many airplanes and invest in a mask or two?

This is not a post

I learned tonight that I don’t always have the resources or the capability to be a sturdy human being when the world chips away at me. Friends yelled at me. Work shat on me. Some crazy white trash ho in a Pinto (I didn’t even think those things were around anymore) kept screaming “Bitch!” at me in the parking lot of McDonald’s. The swine flu is driving me insane. One f’ing toddler, living is squalor, some where down near the Mexican border is dead and the world is resurrecting their face masks from back during the Avian flu. The word “pandemic” is sweeping the blogworld. I’m losing confidence in myself. These antibiotics are depressing me. And I can’t have sex for six more days.

What’s a girl to do?

The good news is, CG is engaged, or shall I say Wuffle-lump and Lover- nugget are officially engaged as per her announcement on facebook today. Probably done over the phone or in facebook chat. Probably haphazardly. Like he blurted out “I kinda feel like taking the next step.” While she concluded, “marriage?” Which ultimately led to being “engaged.” Folks, theirs is a four month relationship. Not even. Three weekends together that I know of, since Christmas. Do you even get engaged in your 40’s after three drama-driven weekends unless you’re a diner waitress in South Jersey trying to get rid of your current ten-miles-of-bad-road boyfriend with something else? WTF. As Delores, my cleaning lady would say, “don’t let me get my strut on.”

I’m bitter. It’s the antibiotics. It’s not me. But I wonder sometimes if, in all fairness, I have some worldly right to pass such harsh judgment on people I don’t even know. Who cares! Right? I mean, do morals need to be applied to facebook? These are the philosophical questions I seem to be unable to answer at the end of the day. What’s more is that I realize I am getting more involved in a virtual world, unhitched over the surreal. Not what is real, but rather a “representation” of what is real.

So, I start to read actual, real magazines and books to combat all this “virtual” stuff. An article on the Kindle, for example, from ADBUSTERS magazine caught my attention:

“The trouble with abstract thought is that the concepts we play with in our minds often become preferred to the real upon which these concepts were originally based. As soon as we draw a picture, or take a photograph, of a bird we often no longer care whether the bird continues to exist. The picture is, in our visual society, superior to the chirping bird. This trait of our world-view leads to a despairing and paradoxical situation where our cultural storehouse of symbols, imagery, art and concepts increases in direct proportion to the death of our planet, living beings, other world views, beautiful landscapes, etc. [emphasis mine]. ” -Melt Your Kindle, by Micah White (Adbusters Magazine).

Simultaneously, an artist friend of mine out in San Francisco was working on a design project on the life of Marcel Duchamp and I was able to appropriate this blurb of his life, circa 1923: “his [Duchamp's] legacy includes the insight that art can be about ideas instead of worldly things.”

It sounds so positive on the one hand, and so nihilistic on the other. So, which is it? Is it a good thing that all that we think and feel can be absent of actual, worldly things, or is the very nature of abstract thought destroying us a la Dawkins’ memes?

As CG’s status goes from “in a relationship” (March 28) to “engaged” (April 30), I can’t help but wonder if she recognizes that she and her “smoochy-bear” only exist in the very narrowest sense. That their love isn’t so much love as a representation of love. And that I (as distant and as virtually unknown to her as I am) am a big part of her virtual engagement. Not only am I a witness. I am also taking the components and pieces of her engagement information and I am reconfiguring them. I am re-presenting them to you, which makes me a large part of her life, real or otherwise.

Understand this: I barely know this woman. I think we went to high school together. That’s about it. But today, shortly after she announced she was engaged (to which someone responded: “to who?”), she posted a computer-generated picture of what her and her fiance’s baby would look like IF they had one. Talk about creepy. Just imagine a picture of some baby with CG’s haggard, forty-year-old face morphed with Smoochy Bear’s weather-beaten, I’ve-spent-a-lifetime-suckin’-down-whisky looks. Cute, huh? But, whatever. They named it “Chris” and just like we used to carry around an egg in Home Economics class, they can virtually burp this thing and change its poopy diapers and hope to god that their computers don’t crash.

But I wonder if Marcel Duchamp saw all this sur-reality coming. I really doubt it. Heck, he was concerned with chocolate grinders and urinals (the “Fountain” by the way, according to a panel of 500 top artists, was named the most influential artwork of our times.”). And what about Magritte? I always loved his painting of a pipe and underneath it are the famous words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” this is not a pipe.

But it is a pipe, isn’t it?

No. It’s a representation of a pipe.

But CG and Smoochy Bear are engaged to married, aren’t they?

No. They are a representation of two people engaged to be married.

And so, you see the dilemma and the freedom with which I carry this argument. On the one hand, I am writing judgmental things about people I barely know. On the other, I am merely only judging a representation of those people, in which case, I am not so much a judge as I am a “critic.” An art critic, if you will. If, indeed, you consider a urinal or the sloppy love story of two recovering alcoholics “art.”

In light of all that, I suppose I shouldn’t complain about the ho in the Pinto, the antibiotics or the no sex stuff. Those are real. Those are really real facets of my life. They are to be appreciated much like the bird chirping outside my window, the beauty of the earth’s landscape, and the slow, imperceptible sweep of swine flu making its way through the world in a cough or a sneeze.

Listen to This: Technomagical Thinking

Ever pulled the plug on your hair dryer and blown a fuse? I knew someone who did that, then soon realized the power was out in her whole building, indeed the whole Eastern Seaboard. The blackout of 2003 had many of us feeling that undeniable feeling of “ooops.”

‘Fess up. Maybe you’ve felt it too, that odd mixture of culpability and confusion. The brain seeks closure, causality. My hand + that switch + lights out East Coast= shit.

What is that emotion? A twinge of guilt, a whiff of ego? It’s funny the way technology brings out the magical thinkers in us. This adult feeling has a darker twin in the way children sometimes feel at the loss of a loved one– that somehow, in some deep, undeniable way, the child is at fault.

But I’m starting to think that funky combo of narcissism and culpability at the heart of “breaking” the power grid, for example, is inversely proportional to a new emotional relationship I’ve developed with my Blackberry: I’m addicted. And I’m clueless.

Picture me thus: whaling away with both thumbs, texting and e-mailing; wild-eyed with the velocity of information. But do I know why I can’t save a photo file? Have I a clue where the photo-taking button actually is? Am I constantly/inadvertently taking pictures of my knee caps? At least I’ve stopped “butt-dialing” random folks in my address book. And what’s with all those icons? An “app” used to mean chicken fingers back in the day.

I’m so old I “learned the computer” back in the basement of Armitage Hall at Rutgers University in Camden. I learned COBOL; I programmed in BASIC. I actually developed a program for a video store cash register and got a B+ in the class. Not bad for a diehard English major. But even then, when computers were new, the lot of us in the basement often looked up from our monitors, blanched, convinced that we’d somehow made the wrong keystroke and broken the hard drive.

Do kids weaned on X-Box ever feel like they might break the machine? Bring down the grid?  Or is this generational angst, borne of a moment when old technologies were new?

Still, I dusted off my skills in late 1999, when Y2K was a looming crisis and only those who knew the old languages could save the day. C’est moi.

So imagine my chagrin at thumbing my Blackberry like the worst cliché of an octogenarian learning e-mail. AS IF I SHOULD WRITE THE REST OF THIS BLOG IN ALL CAPS.

I don’t think this dual capacity to relish new communication technologies while simultaneously owning my “unsophisticated user” status is unique to Web 2.0 culture.

Take, for example, driving a car. In a snow storm. You’re in a skid. The dreaded fishtail. And you recall what Driver’s Ed. taught you to do: don’t hit the gas! Don’t jam the brakes! Spin the steering wheel into the direction of the skid, lad, spin it into the skid. But me? I assume “crash positions” a la Airplane. Hands and feet off the wheel, off the pedals, whooping whoops until the car comes to a stop.

I was reminded of all this when I saw a graffitied NYC MTA subway map recently. (Go here: http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/submap.htm ). Some wiseacre had tagged it, specifically in the wide open expanse of blue to the upper right of what can only be described as the technicolored spaghetti of the subway grid. In the spot where the waters of the East River turn towards Rikers, where the Sound is a promise the map makes, someone wrote “There Be Dragons Here.”

We fill the limits of what we know with magic. We are all cartographers at heart. Drive on.

In the News: Pretty is as Pretty Does

As a girl, I loved few things more than I loved the Miss. America pageant. As I remember that oh-so-lucky night of the year, my Aunt Anne would make a swimming-pool-sized batch of French onion dip and pour us each a fuzzy navel, and then, well past any decent bed time hour, we’d sit on the nubbly rug in the cool of the den casting our votes for the winners. Back then, Miss. Texas always seemed to win, and everyone wanted to feed the starving children.

These days, my husband hardly even looks at me when I jump up and down and clap my hands together. It’s on! I yell. Tonight! It’s on and we’re gonna watch it!!! But then night comes and goes, and I completely forget about it until a day or so later when I come across some grainy picture in the Daily News of a woman with flowers and a crown, and oh crap, I say, we missed it again.

I’d imagine we’re not the only people who missed the pageant. (Any watchers out there?) But I’ve been thinking a lot about these tiara-wearers, and I guess what I love most about Miss. Americas is that the only ones we ever hear of are the ones who “disgrace” the crown. Think: Vanessa Williams, that blue-eyed beauty of the 1984 crown who resigned after it was revealed that she had posed (uhm, naked) for some “questionable photographs.” Now, try to think of any other Miss. America winner. Stumped? Me too.

This week, though, we’ve got Carrie Prejean, and while Prejean was not the actual winner of last week’s Miss. USA pageant (she was second to the lovely Miss. North Cackalacky!), she’s got a whole slew of talk going on around her. First, there are her breasts: courtesy—some believe—of California pageant organizers (Thanks, fellas! With these babies I’m unstoppable!); then there are the “semi-nude” shots of her circulating on the ole interweb, but more than anything is a little comment she made during the usually uninspired interview question. Only “opposites” should be allowed to marry, she said, when asked about same-sex weddings. (Clearly, she knows me and my husband because we’re quite the opposites!)

No, readers, trust me, I have no desire to hear what you think about same-sex marriage. I want, instead, to advocate a revamping of the interview portion on television pageants. I want us to compile a list of questions so wild and controversial that they will spin the pretty heads off these ladies, spin the heads off all of us sitting in the light of the den with nothing but our vat of dip and a dream. It’s not that I want it to get ugly, I just don’t want it to be so darned pretty. I mean, heck, it’s easy to want to feed the starving children, but give me a little more meat on the brain-bone. Any suggestions?

The essential nature of things

I am currently reading “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra and learning a thing or two about Eastern Mysticism and subatomic particles. This is one of those books where the author has read almost everything in the world there is to read and so he decides to throw two of the most dissimilar topics together so as to stave off his own boredom. Motherhood and radiation. Shoe shopping and polar ice caps. House cleaning and sex (scratch that last one). You get my point.

Anyway, it took me till chapter three to get the parallel between the two. But in a nutshell this is it: both eastern mysticism and physics must be taught and learned without the advantage of the known senses. We cannot see subatomic particles. We cannot smell them, taste them, hear them and most importantly, we cannot even think about them LOGICALLY as they, apparently, defy logic. But we can see “the consequences” of them in how they react in certain natural and unnatural situations. Capra writes on the subject of the atom: “What we see, or hear, are never the investigated phenomena themselves but always their consequences.” Eastern mysticism is much the same. Knowledge of life and wisdom cannot be taught with logic. It cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched. But we can experience the consequences of that knowledge as it exists in the form of our spirituality. In fact, “whenever the essential nature of things is analyzed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical.” This is much how “faith” runs. It cannot be explained. It’s not logical.

So, of course, that all got me thinking about my own life in general and how I am incessantly trying to figure things out. Analyzing. Deconstructing. Wondering about people and/or situations that cannot be understood. Plucking a part, detail for detail the why of why we do the things we do. And here, I come to find out it’s pointless. That the essential nature of things is a deep mystery, not to be understood by logic.

Granted, this is a great way to think when trying to understand half the crazy shit in the world. It’s almost as if it gets me off the hook of trying to really understand anything. Perfect example: Black Friday 2008, a Wal-Mart employee is killed by a stampede of shoppers. The story popped back up into the news this week because Wal-Mart is settling out of court and paying two million in damages to people who were injured in the incident and for “community service.” Whatever the hell that means. But what gets me when I really think about this is that a corporation is being sued for a death caused by a crowd of individuals.

Why are we suing a corporation?

Have we lost our sense of responsibility when it comes to acceptable shopping protocol? Is it safe to say that when a bunch of humans gather together they lose sense of their human-ness and become animals, incapable of logical thinking, incapable of proper behavior? At what point do you go from being an individual to one among a “stampede”? At what point in evolution do we as humans become candidates for a “crowd-management plan” that now has to be instituted in Wal-Marts all across the country? What the hell was on sale that day anyway?

Yes. The essential nature of things is a vast and deep mystery. Faith is required to explain certain things. Mystics know this. Physicists know this. Now I need to know it because I highly doubt i’ll ever be able to explain the weirdness of the world. And more so than anything, I can now say that humanity is probably as clueless about their own nature as the sub-atomic particles we’re all made of.

Listen to This: Force Multipliers

Years ago, at St. Mark’s New Year’s Poetry Festival, Bob Holman stood up and spoke this poem: “If you see something / say something: / banana.”

The crowd cracked up.

That was the first successful 9/11 joke I can recall. And, unlike Gilbert Godfrey’s earlier failed attempt at a 9/11 joke at the Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner (a joke that made the grief-stricken the crowd shout “TOO SOON!” and made the comedian leap instead into a raunchy rendition of “The Aristocrats”— the “greatest dirty joke ever told”– all of which is captured in the documentary film of the same name), Holman’s timing was perfect.

The MTA’s “If You See Something, Say Something” security ad campaign was launched in 2002. New York City had already long been in the grip of Orange Alert, so long that we’d become accustomed to being mobilized. Eyes open, cell phones at the ready: something seen, something said. Unattended baggage on a subway? On it. Notice someone in bulky or inappropriate clothing? Suspicious! Dead guy riding the Q? OK, that one took longer to call in.

[Sure did: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,182321,00.htmlhttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,182321,00.html ]

The “See Something, Say Something” public service motto, emblazoned all over NYC public transit has become part of the cultural wallpaper, a comforting refrain for those of us who use buses and subways and occasionally teeter on the edge of the void: what happens if I’m down here and it happens again? London’s subway bombings? Eep?

And just as the heart torques toward hysteria, we recall our role: be a good citizen. If you see something, say something, and that way maybe the whole thing can be avoided. And even better: since everyone else sees those signs too, then they’ll see/say something and that will further expand the force of ground-level urban surveillance, and we’ll all be safe in a web of like-minded onlookers looking out for each other. Force multiplied.

But the MTA’s motto puts us in a tightly restricted position. It’s not asking us to do more than describe what we see. “Be alert,” “Be wary,” “Take notice,” “Report.” And as much as my love of poetry would have me argue that the act of description goes a long way toward conjuring the world(s) we inhabit, it is not an act of explicit reflective interpretation. It is not an act of analysis, or sense-making; it does not ask us to ponder or question or wonder. All of which, granted, might interrupt the crucial flow of information: evidence on the ground must make its way quickly to security forces who can take appropriate action, or we’re all in trouble.

But we’re also all in trouble if we don’t actively practice the art of reflection, analysis, interpretation. Deliberate force expansion is not deliberative democracy. Perhaps the best supplement to Orange Alert is a robust blogosphere—essayistic blog entries where writers perform the act of thinking, enact an urgent expression of idea, critique what we come to take for granted.

“If you see something, say something: banana.”

TBD: What We Talk About When We Talk About Dove

Where was I?  It was a barbecue.  In Brooklyn.  We were on a roof where you could see a lot of the city.  We could also see that we couldn’t see a lot more of the city.  Bigger buildings occupied significant swatches of the panorama.  If you got up on the structure housing the spiral staircase down into the apartment you could see the Statue of Liberty.  Otherwise, you couldn’t.

Someone said, “That new Filet-O-Fish ad?”

Someone Else said, “I know, right?

Someone Else’s Girlfriend said, “When that comes on?  I have to stop everything.”

At first I thought this conversation was headed toward hating the ad.  I would not be surprised to learn that some people find it annoying.  In the ad, bearded white guys, (maybe hipsters, maybe regular guys, probably some frustrating new hybrid), hang out in a garage while a Big Mouth Billy Bass look-alike sings/raps/laments that one of the beardos is eating McDonald’s only sandwich invented to combat declining Friday sales during Lent (see History here) while he, the bootleg Billy, isn’t eating one, said incantation accompanied by what I believe is the tune/beat that the old Casio SK-1 used to play when you pressed the “samba” button.  At once, you are awash in uber-hip trends you didn’t even know existed and nostalgia you didn’t think it was possible to feel.

It’s a pretty obnoxious piece of video.

But it’s also got a lot to love in it, that love being of the “I can’t believe all of this stuff I know about is happening at once” variety.  This is like a strange dream that takes place in my parents’ old house except it’s not because there’s a pool in the basement and for some reason all of my coworkers are sorting the recycling to pay for my walkathon, you might think, while watching it.  Except you can’t think that, because the ad is so absorbing that you cannot think anything, cannot do anything except be enveloped in the insane collage of half-remembered tropes that really only point back to themselves.  That kind of love.

My barbecuing someones, two out of three of them beardos themselves, of course, loved it.

“That is my favorite thing to watch in the world,” said SEG.

“She punched me in the neck to make me stop talking when it came on last week,” said SE.

“Yeah, I get really happy whenever it comes on too,” said S.

They weren’t, I note now, speaking of poetry.  And maybe they couldn’t have been.  But  I think ads—and I’m talking about good ads, ads that verge on being works of philosophically important works of art—take up a lot of the space in our minds that poetry could these days.  Part of the issue here is the “coming on” that ads do.  (I’m resisting an unfortunate extension of the unintended sexual metaphor embedded there.  Please award me two points for restraint.)  The opposite of verse, advertising seeks us out.  They come to us (knowledge that makes searching for ads on YouTube an uncomfortable business, by the way).  But more problematically, good ads prey on our love for unexpected allusion, dream-like images, and just-out-of-reach ideas.  They satisfy our craving – promising even greater satisfaction down the line, granted – for momentary sublimity, or, to be less grandiose, novelty.

As I’ve said before, using pixels far below these words on this very page, I’m not the first person to point this out.  In fact the Germans are already up to something.  And as much as I think the Late Capitalist ship is going down, I am a pretty big fan of consumerism.  In fact, my little brother and I once bonded importantly over the short-lived Messin’ With Sasquatch Ads, a moment that entailed a nearly identical conversation to the one I recount above.  It was he who, at the age of 13, posited: “ads are better than TV now.”  He meant that they are funnier. And that they have better learned the lessons of juxtaposition and gesturing toward what is hilariously not on the screen we can see in the early seasons of The Simpsons and the late ones of Seinfeld (when they mostly abandoned the studio audience and thus the pace-murdering laugh track).  In fact, the ads probably taught those lessons first, and they stepped up their game when real storytellers appropriated the techniques.  The gist of all this is that those “groundbreaking” Dove ads are crowding Sonnet 41 out of our minds.  Not because, as the standard logic goes, ads are so mindless that they stupefy (I think this is an acceptable usage) us through mere exposure, but because they are such sensational delicacies.

I filled up on tastily carcinogenic flame-broiled sausages and left the rooftop barbecue early to come home and grade papers.  These days I find this task more difficult than I used to do, I think because my episodic TV drama addiction has gotten way out of hand.  And true to form, after two disappointing essays in a row, I sat down in front of Hulu to catch up on the few remaining episodes of Rescue Me I haven’t seen.  Dennis Leary’s fireman character, regular viewers know, just keeps encountering self-creating problems and I was eager to see which ones he would face in the episode entitled “Pussified.” Ahem.

The episode kept being interrupted by the same spot, an Ad Council PSA warning teenage drivers to pay attention while they drive.  In the ad, Fred Willard, in top form, plays a poor imitation of typical teen.  I know the thing by heart.  When I say that I believe Fred Willard’s deadpan is a true invention of beauty, my tongue is well away from my cheek.  Murder probably is not on the long list of acts I would commit to be able to deliver words the way he does, but it’s close.  Watching the PSA, I recited Mr. Willard’s lines along with him, just as I sometimes used to do with my recording of Dylan Thomas reading Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, practicing the cadence that wrings the perfection from words and images we’ve heard and seen before.

Where was I?  I was here in my chair where I type these words now.  And I was, ludicrously or not, out there somewhere in the landscape of possibility we see, patchily, when we encounter and reencounter real poetry.

In the News: The Unwelcome Woman

I once dated a guy who summed up each of his exes in one pithy line. There was the redhead who smelled like baked organic goods and left him for a woman. There was the way-too-young painter who showed up on his stoop in the rain with a glass bowl of goldfish whimpering like a puppy and begging for love. There were, of course, and in no particular order: the anorexic who made the world’s best mashed potatoes, the bore who in awkward moments would spout knock-knock jokes, the crappy poet, the would-be home-wrecker, the wannabe prude, the Jesus-freak-turned-Wican-turned-yogi, and, uhm, me.

I lived in fear of what I would become. It seemed “the tall, thin one with soft hair who was equal parts wise, compassionate and hilarious” was out of my reach. Would I be “the one who was always hungry and thought magic was pulling nickels from behind kids’ ears”? How about “the one who never remembered to shave”? Fortunately, the guy beat me to the punch. He made me: “the one he dumped on Valentine’s Day”.

While I can’t say I’ve been a big fan of his since then, I will admit that I love that he never named names. Especially since he was one of those types that liked to surround himself with his exes, throwing parties where we’d all stand around ducking knock-knock jokes and wondering who the crappy poet was. As you can imagine, after one particular Valentine’s Day, I didn’t bother showing up for the parties, but the no-name-naming stuck with me, and I thought of it again this morning when I read about Elizabeth Edwards.

Edwards, as you likely know, is the wife of one-time Presidential hopeful John Edwards. John had an affair—one of those headliner fathering-a-child kind of affairs—and Elizabeth has been extremely forthcoming in her thoughts regarding the affair. She grants interviews; she’s written a memoir, but she does it all under a single condition: that the name of the woman—Edwards calls her simply “The Unwelcome Woman”—not be uttered.

As a writer and a thinker, I love that the ‘uttering’ feels too intense to Edwards; as a regular ole gal, I’m a little like, uhm, who are you? The artist formerly known as Prince? I mean, isn’t a Jennifer Flowers a Jennifer Flowers no matter how bitter the smell? Enlighten me, folks. What am I missing here?

Listen to This: REO Speedwagon

I have a major intellectual-aesthetic-poetry crush on Gregory Pardlo and Teresa Leo.

Poet Lore has a crush on Greg too. Cornelius Eady selected Greg as this month’s featured poet. Be sure to check out the stunning “Problema” poems included there–  http://www.poetlore.com/issues.php (Actually, APR had a crush on him first, awarding him the Honickman Prize for his stunning collection Totem—available on Amazon. But my crush is longer still, tracing back to his early poems, his Serengeti years, his Rutgers days).

And Elixir Press has a big crush on Teresa Leo’s Halo Rule. http://www.teresaleo.com/

Each time I read Teresa’s poems I’m stunned by the way she masterfully combines rigor, heart and wit. And you MUST check out “Arc: A Quest,” the essay she penned for APR. Basketball, a broken tooth, artist colonies, and the art of crafting a poetry collection: the wild range of material coheres via the magnetic pull of her thought process. Cool indeed:  http://www.aprweb.org/issues/july07/leo.html

And the attendees at the New Jersey Poetry Festival now have a crush on them too.

Greg and Teresa read for PBQ yesterday at Diane Lockward’s New Jersey Poetry Festival in West Caldwell, NJ. http://www.dianelockward.com/fest.html.

Lockward runs an warm, welcoming, amazingly efficient day of readings–  4 hours, 12 journals, 24 poets, AND the Mayor showed up and dubbed her West Caldwell’s Poet Laureate. Huzzah.

So, fine, everybody loves them now.  But PBQ loved you first; we’ve loved you longest. And we’ll keep on loving you as your stars continue to rise. Cue REO Speedwagon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-mw1HGJjdA

Do I sound desperate? Fear not. I’ve decided to expand the range of objects of my affection.

Helloooo, New York Quarterly:  http://www.nyquarterly.org/support.html

Come here often, Now Culture?:  http://www.nyquarterly.org/support.html

How you doin’, The Literary Review: http://www.theliteraryreview.org/

In the News: XXX 4Chan

When I was a girl we were allowed to sit at the foot of Mama Heaton’s bed while she watched her ’stories’ under one condition: that we covered our eyes when people kissed. It strikes me as funny now, all that we did see: sister betraying sister, father betraying self, mother betraying ex-boyfriend-turned-surprise-son-turned-bigger-surprise!-used-to-be-daughter; but the moment someone leaned in, the moment they got close enough to smell the pear-breath of another, the moment they tipped their heads, well, that was the moment when we were supposed to clamp our hand tight over our eyes and not let a single drop of love get in.

Sure, we peeked. I mean, how could we not? But the good thing is: no matter how much we might have peeked, there wasn’t a heckuva lot we could have seen.

TV has never scared me. Barring Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” and that guy who ran naked across the stage at the Oscars a hundred years ago, there’s not a lot that can happen on the small screen. Cliff Huxtable, Archie Bunker and Charles Ingalls all kept their clothes on for the duration of my childhood, and I can imagine–if you don’t let your child watch VH1–you can feel pretty safe about what’s going to come up on the screen.

The internet, though, now that’s a whole nother story. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel I’m always a click or two away from seeing waaaaaaaaaay too much of something I don’t want to see. That’s why today when I saw the “YouTube Inundated With Porn” headline, I nodded my head wildly. I thought the “powers that be”–whoever they are–had finally realized what’s going on on the ole interweb.

Apparently, however, it’s something else entirely. Early Thursday, online community group 4Chan which describes itself as being the “home of the sickest, strangest and most horrifying stuff on the internet” uploaded hundreds of videos that began with footage appropriate to children before segwaying into graphic sex acts. The attack, the group says, was coordinated to prove that not even powerhouse Google can control its content.

Maybe I’m old fashioned–still sitting at the foot of the bed waiting for the dirty parts–but I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. A cyber-attack, they called it, but all I was thinking was, doesn’t this happen every day? I guess I’m wondering how much the average Joe trusts the cyberworld. Are you all as leery as I am? Do you sit with one hand on the mouse and the other hiding your eyes? Please tell. And, no matter what you do, don’t click: here.

Listen to This: Boundaries?

Kazim Ali’s recent American Poetry Review columns have been stunning. His most recent is a bad-assed belletristic constellation of texts (where he makes a common cadre in media studies—Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, and The Matrix—meet up with Melville & Dickinson), and it transcends the boundary of a “column” to become an essay.

Ali thus reminds me that 1) poetry magazines are indeed the ideal venue for aesthetically gorgeous and intellectually rigorous essays; and 2) the term “belles lettres” has unfortunately come to be used as a derisive moniker for essays that rely on “long, spooling, New Yorker style stuff” (as the fictional Charlie Kaufman says of Susan Orlean’s work in the film Adaptation). The art of the relevant tangent makes some readers—and teachers of college composition—roll their eyes.

But what if the effect of the artful essay could be similar to the most stunning poems? Or, to twist this line of thought to include the work of Kathleen Graber (check out http://pbq.drexel.edu/issue78/content/prose/1.html ), Ciaran Berry (http://www.siuc.edu/~siupress/berrythesphereofbirds.html ), and Gregory Pardlo  (http://www.aprweb.org/bookprize/pardlo.shtml): what if some of the best poems could be described as essayistic?

All of which brings me back to Kazim Ali’s recent APR column, “Write on My Wall.”

When he uses a riot of texts to ponder the body and its boundary(less)(ness) he makes me wonder about the “boundaries” of literary magazines. Does PBQ reinforce or blur its boundaries when, say, I link to APR?

http://www.aprweb.org/

To Henry Israeli at Saturnalia Books?

http://www.saturnaliabooks.com/

Or the Crab Orchard Review?

http://craborchard.siuc.edu/

(All of whom have published my essayistic trifecta above—Pardlo, Graber, Berry).

Online, are PBQ’s boundaries rigid or porous? On one hand we engage in a mutually constitutive game: we reinforce the cred of the sites and sources we link to, and by linking to them we reinforce our own. But we also soften our own edges. Building links into this blog I feel like Whitman’s noiseless patient spider; sending out filaments I conjure a web of ideal works, call our aesthetic into view.  But spider webs are virtually invisible things; you’ve got to cock your head to see them.

In the News: Last Stop Disney World

When my parents got divorced, my brother and I were still young enough to believe that there might be something we could do to bring them back together. We spent the summer of ’77 coming up with one elaborate plan after the next, hoping that they would fall back into each other’s arms. The most elaborate of those scams involved playing dead. We arranged ourselves on the floor—arms and legs at chalk-outline angles—and waited to be discovered. The fantasy ended the way all of our fantasies ended: the four of us at IHOP feasting on pancakes and the waitress bringing free helpings of extra whipped cream.

The other scams—equally as earnest and proving to be just as ineffective—involved broken washing machines, bizarre mall abductions, missed phone calls and official letters from the government. But as wild as our young imaginations were, we never—not once!—ended up at Disney World. I mean, to end up at Disney World, the land of magic and make-believe and Goofy and sunshine, well, that would just be too idealistic, too silly, too much.

Philadelphia mom, Bonnie Sweeten, it seems would beg to differ. While our fairy tale didn’t end at Disney World, Sweeten’s fairy tale did: with her in handcuffs. Not exactly what you dream of as a child–from Mickey’s wonderland to the Orange County Jail–but Sweeten had come upon tough times, and based on the recent embezzlement discovery by her employer, times were about to get tougher.

The story began on Tuesday when Sweeten called 9-1-1 from what she claimed was the trunk of an SUV driven by two otherwise nondescript “black men.” The whole thing just got more bizarre: Sweeten had “borrowed” her friend’s ID to get onto the plane; had left her 8 month-old at home; had withdrawn $12,000 from local banks to fund her escape. $12,000. That’s it. I’d imagine after a few Big Gulps and the price of admission, Sweeten didn’t have much of her booty left.

But it’s got me wondering about how–if I knew my days outside of the clinker were numbered–I’d like to spend my time. This isn’t about disappearing; it’s about living it up. Sweeten chose Disney World; I might choose Rio with its pulsing life or all those canals of Amsterdam  or Paris with its Moules Frites and tiny cafes. How about you? Ah reader, do tell.

Listen to This: Broadway

Media scholar Jonathan Burston has been doing some fascinating work on Broadway mega-musicals—you know the kind: Phantom of the Opera, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast. His focus is not merely the Disneyfication of Broadway theater (which is its own rich, wicked topic—get it? Wicked?). Burston is also interested in the transformation of the actor’s experience of  work—from the act of, say, making acting choices, to, for example, doing it just like they did in London, or singing a song just like the first Phantom did it. Check out his latest at

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a910302817~db=all~jumptype=rss

The actor’s craft has been reduced, compressed, turned into a quasi-creative factory labor under the logics of not only late capitalism but of what Burston calls “recombinant Broadway”—shows that started out as (animated) films become Broadway shows then turn back into films, version after version proliferating like a reflection of a mirror caught in another mirror. Think Hairspray. Waters’ film made its way to Broadway then made its way back into a cinematic form—complete with a cross-dressing John Travolta doing a tremendous Baltimore accent. We come to the theater with a sense of what we’ve already seen; we head to the movies already familiar with the songs.

Burston writes about some of the creative frustrations of theatrical performers as a result of these new forms with particular force. I’m hooked on such insights. If you’re like me, then you too dig Inside the Actor’s Studio, have felt a giddy curiosity when, say, Natalie Portman describes her craft in one breath and her favorite foreign-language curse-word in the next. The boundary between audience and actor, fan and celebrity has always seemed porous—and electrified.

But several shows of late have explicitly played with that boundary. Take the revival of Hair. Happily breaking the 4^th wall since its original production in 1967, the current revival ramps up the impact of that seemingly radical theatrical gesture. The whole way through the new Broadway production its players (members of The Tribe) gallop up stairs, stand on chairs, dance in the aisles— all of which culminates in an extraordinary Technicolor theatrical freakout where the audience is invited, cajoled, corralled on stage as the entire theater erupts into the plays anthem: let the sun shine. And in an age of Broadway mega-musicals and movie-to-stage transfers, there’s something radical about audiences singing like they’re at church.

Plus, I saw Slava’s Snow Show and watched clowns literally sit on some grumpy audience member’s head (this before they blew snow into the crowd to the tune of Carmina Burana). Or take Spring Awakening with its staggering narrative and imaginative staging: you can get seats on stage if you so desire. And as you sit there watching the drama unfold, watching the audience in the theater proper watching you on stage as you watch the play, you’ll be thrilled and surprised when one of the other audience members on stage turns out to be a member of the chorus, but you won’t know this until the cute little Asian girl in 7-jeans and a t-shirt stands up on her chair and starts to wail.

But actors have always been running through the aisles. And even Ayn Rand knew that an audience seated on stage heightened the tension of a show (recall her play The Night of January 16^th). And if you dig this line of inquiry, check out Peter Greenaway’s uber bizarre-o masterpiece The Baby of Macon (1993). If actors are frustrated by the logics of a system demanding the near-exact reproduction of performances because producers believe that that’s what audiences have come to expect—the pleasures of consistency and familiarity, the reproduction of a performance rather than the reinterpretation of a text– then what to make of this secondary pattern? Some audiences relish the pleasures of boundary play. If audiences are on stage, if actors are in the audience, then are we not all somehow implicated in the broader transformations Burston describes?

TBD: As Yet Unsent Letters From A Relocated Man

Dear Heat Rash,

I’ll just come out and say it: what gives, Ms. Rash?  I thought we understood each other.  As our days together now add up to a full week, however, I feel it necessary to write to you in an effort to clear the air, as it were.  My understanding, before making your acquaintance, was that you were looking for kind of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am thing.  If you’re hoping for something more long term—and I think it’s pretty clear you do—I’m going to need some more information.  Like just what the hell you want from me, for instance.

I am well acquainted, having neglected to wash my cross-country ski socks and underwear for my entire sophomore junior varsity season, with your cousin Fungal Infection.  Fun, as I called him for short, stayed with me somewhat longer than I would have liked, frankly.  But we got on well enough after the initial friction.  Once I did what he wanted, he was pretty content.  And, after a short time, Fun seemed to grow bored of our relationship.  I guess that’s the nature of any sadomasochistic fling; you make a habit of something kinky—like rubbing all sorts of humiliating creams on humiliating parts of your body several times a day—and eventually your partner wearies of what once enflamed him.  If we’re being perfectly honest, I wasn’t that sorry to see him go.

I mention ol’ Fun because you often get compared to him and from everything I’d heard, you are supposedly the “milder” of the cousins.  This is what I get for depending on public reputation, I suppose.  I can’t help but feel that some of the deception is your fault though.  When we first met you were mild.  Your little love bites weren’t exactly my cup of tea, but they weren’t a big problem either.

A week later, there are parts of my body I wouldn’t show in public for money.

Since Fun liked the creams, I tried that.  How was I to know this would enrage you?  Look, I get that I did the wrong thing, but the way you treated me after that was nothing short of abuse.

Next, and I’m not proud of this next bit, I did a bit of cyber-stalking to find out what you do like.  (BTW, those pictures really don’t do you justice.)  So, yeah, that’s how I came up with the soapy washcloth and the fan-drying.  And you seemed to like that.  For like a day.  But even devoting myself first thing in the morning, last thing at night and even in the middle of the day, to you, solely to you, doesn’t seem to be enough now.  Just what the fuck is going to satisfy you?!

Here’s the thing.  I don’t see how this can last, and I don’t think you’re accomplishing anything by dragging the situation out.  I really think it’s best if you just tell me what I need to do so we can end on the best terms possible and go our separate ways.

Sincerely,
N
______

Dear Al,

You are the best.  I know we haven’t been spending as much time together as you would like.  Believe me.  The feeling is mutual.  I would tell you I’ve been busy, but honestly, I haven’t been busy at all.  Most of my time these days is eaten up here at this desk where I’m writing to you.  I try, not hard enough mind you, to get words on the page.  Yeah, yeah, I’m back to the novel.  And, I realize this is an activity you have long suggested we could do together.  I know, know.  You have done this sort of thing with plenty of friends.  And yeah, I get it, a lot of them are famous.  (Actually, Al, I think the name-dropping is getting a little old.  And really, have you read any of Bukowski’s poems lately?  Not sure you should keep going around bragging about that.)  The thing is, I need to do this by myself.  I know you think you’d be a big help, but every time we’ve tried to work together it just hasn’t gone very well.  We seem to be best for each other in festive situations.  Okay, you’re right.  You have been very comforting in some of the hard times too.

All of which is neither hear nor there.  I’m writing for a few reasons.  First and foremost, I wanted to invite you to dinner tomorrow night.  My sister is coming to town and we’re going to go out.  I know you guys don’t get along all that well these days, but I’d really like you to be there.  Even if we have to keep you on opposite ends of the table, I think the meal will be a lot more fun with you there.

Second, I want to apologize for last weekend.  I know we’d planned to stay out all night on Friday, but I was just exhausted from the week.  I’m not exactly sure why I’m apologizing since you and the whole rest of that goddamn frat bar seemed to have formed a mutual admiration society.  But a broken promise is a broken promise, so I apologize.  You really could have come home with us like I suggested though.

Finally, I think we may have to mainly hang out on the weekends from now on.  Staying up with you is great, but I kind of hate myself in the morning every time.  And then my whole day is wrecked.  No offense.

Okay, I have to go meet up with Smoothie now.  Do you guys know each other?   I feel like you could be the best of friends.

All my love to Mrs. Cohol and little Zima, Boont, and Vanilla Extract,
N

______

Dear NOLA

I think I love you.

Normally, I wouldn’t be so forward, but sometimes I get the sense you don’t even realize I exist.  I feel like if you took the time to really get to know me you’d see how much we have to offer each other.  You get a lot of attention from people like me, and I’m sure that you’re really looking for someone who will stick around and make a real difference in your life.  I get that.  I do.  But I can’t help that I have to go back to New York at the end of the summer.  And unlike a lot of those other people, I care about every part of you.  I bet a lot of people tell you they think your Garden District is beautiful and your jazz scene is totally unique.  They are right.  But I am even more entranced by your rusting riverside cranes, your ripped-apart crawfish shells littered everywhere, and the way you smell just before the sun goes down.

I know we don’t actually know each other very well, and it’s probably too soon to be saying so, but it seems like you’re maybe trying to shut me out.  If you just let me into your heart, you’d see how well I could get along with the others in your life.  And eventually, I think I could, truly, become important to you too.  If we only ever hang out by ourselves though, I don’t see how this can go anywhere.  I’m not trying to pressure you.  Really.  I’m simply saying that you and I could be so much more.

This isn’t an ultimatum.  I’m going to stick around for a while no matter how you feel about all this.  However, few things would make me happier than some sign that you love me too.  I’ll see you in Audubon Park, at dusk.  If you fee like it, put on all that Spanish Moss.  I love the way you look with your hair down like that.

Love, really,
N

In the News: The Word

As I remember it: first there was God, and then there was Oprah. Then for maybe a week or two there was Dr. Phil, but Oprah from her very, very high place in the blue, blue sky saw she had created a beast (think: fallen angel), and so finally, there was just Oprah again.

And she was the Word.

And no one questioned the Word because the Word was powerful and fun–spunky even!–and when we thought about it, we’d love to have the Word over for coffee (we’d serve it from a silver urn!), and if the Word wanted to stay for lunch maybe her chefs would come over and whip up some sort of deliciousness (truffled egg salad on multigrain!), and if lunch bent into evening, and the Word wanted a white wine spritzer, who were we to question the Word?

Word?

Well, questioning the Word is exactly what’s happening. Newsweek’s latest cover story claims that the Word abuses her influence to spread wild health claims. Don’t want to age? Take these 60 daily supplements recommended by the eternally young Suzanne Somers. Don’t want your child to be autistic? Just say no to the life-saving vaccinations your doctor is forcing on him. And–possibly my favorite–are you fat? Well, woman, it’s because of a thyroid dysfunction caused by a lifetime of “swallowing” the words you’re aching to say!

(Frankly, the only words standing in my way of being skinny are a polite “No, Thank you” when the waiter offers the dessert menu. But that’s a whole nother post…)

I guess our only hope for redemption is Angelina Jolie who just yesterday stripped the crown from Oprah and now reigns as “Forbes Most Powerful Celebrity in the World.” If only Jolie could do for the lit mag world what Oprah did for the novel. Can’t you see it: the masses reading PBQ on the subway? Start: here. Or here.  Or here.

Ah, Words. What do you think, reader? Oprah: Word or Wash? Jolie: Capable of filling such big, mythic shoes or will she go the way of…the way of…well…of…far too many words?

TBD: If, These Days, There’s Any Hope For The Paragraph As A Reasonable Approximation Of Thought

Vegetable Garden with Donkey, 1918, Joan Miró

Slowly unpacking from a weekend trip to Tuscaloosa, I had iTunes play an On The Media interview with the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones and my browser on a Slate article worrying that JD Salinger might have been writing all this time and, worse, might be getting ready to burn it all.   I sat down to a piece of cheese toast and browsed Ron Rosenbaum’s article while SFJ explained his use of jargon and allusion in various publications and formats.  Salinger had a right, like Nabokov, to keep us from reading what he considered to be unworthy of the public, according to RR.  If we didn’t want to encounter phrases we didn’t know, we shouldn’t follow SFJ’s tweets.  The microwaved cheese had over-softened the toast—no toaster oven.  Where is my phone charger?  Maybe still in the wall below the Glade plug-in.  RR went to Salinger’s house once, just stood in the driveway.  Once, a New Yorker editor wasn’t sure if enough people knew about Echo and the Bunnyband. Sic–that’s the kind of joke you get if you’re as worldly as SFJ.  He sat in a Denny’s down the road and wrote the author a confessional letter, then went back to the driveway and slipped it in with the mail.  The green underwear with the gray band: I hadn’t worn them, but they’d acquired a bad smell packed next to my running socks.  I got up to get a sharp knife for the rubbery toast.  What is it that has always hardened my heart against Frere-Jones?  That note of pride in his voice confirms whatever it was.  The dog cowered under the coffee table as I dug in the bag; I was planning to leave him behind this time, wasn’t I?  Too many people misreading Catcher: that’s why he had retreated into Live Free or Die obscurity.  Twitter, and a New Yorker article for that matter, they’re instruments, and he wants to see what they can do.  He wants some cheese too, I see, as he licks his chops sheepishly, ears turned down to a driver’s ed ten and two.  What did Emerson say? That there’s no worse feeling than finding your great idea in print under someone else’s byline?  Is it the same thing, or some sort of opposite, discovering a shared love for the wrong reasons?  Don’t tell me what to like and how to like it if that’s why you wrote that. Have a bite, boy. This cheese isn’t that great anyway.  Nabokov, he was a perfectionist, sure, but at least he published eventually.  Pharoah Monch: you couldn’t expect anyone to remember him decades hence, and isn’t it delicious to know what that means in the mean time.  Maybe it’s his knowingness, his eagerness to avail us of his definitive empiricism.  And about what?  A mash-up of a song that wasn’t punk rock enough to begin with?  Maybe it’s seeing what you hope isn’t your reflection extended into a landscape of cheesiness itself overlayed upon a real place with too many important particulars, some gray leaf-strewn driveway on a gray near-winter afternoon.  Who writes that letter?  Who writes about writing it twice?  Some version of me?  If I don’t write my version, I’ll comfortably never know.  Maybe if you write as much as Emerson you have that feeling seldom enough that you can steel yourself against it, instead of letting it bombard you with the bone-softening recognition that you do not really yet know how to talk to the imagined many because you talk to yourself so much about yourself.  Enough.  That’s enough, boy.  Don’t whine.  This bag is just to go to the coffee shop so I can work on a new chapter.  Where are the keys?  I’ll sort the laundry later.

ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Forgive Me

PLUS, another great poem by Painted Bride Quarterly contributor Arlene Ang:

What Happens to the Postwoman When She Stops Delivering the Mail

~@~