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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Post-Print

PLUS:

INTERNET-AGE WRITING SYLLABUS AND COURSE OVERVIEW.

BY ROBERT LANHAM

~@~

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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

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