Mr. Digressius

Solid & Salvific: "Saving Sourdi" : Part Two

2012-02-08T23:01:00.000-08:00

To follow soon.

Solid & Salvific: "Saving Sourdi" : Part One

2012-02-07T16:49:00.000-08:00

At some point today, I will write about May-lee Chai’s story, “Saving Sourdi,” but I’ll follow Emily Dickinson’s idea of the circuitous route in getting there.

I’ve always been a proponent of bringing a book with you wherever you go. This may not be such a grand idea for some folks, those perhaps used to subway drives into the city every morning. But for a kid who grew up in what used to be, in speaking of physical and geographical space, wide-open areas, bringing a book with me wherever I went was a lesson I had to learn and relearn.

The South I grew up in was a place where a parent took you to the library to get books. The library was a wondrous place, a place where all the books literally reflected light when you opened the door and looked at the shelves. I have a fascination and fondness for mylar covers to this day, probably, because I view them unconsciously as the brilliant nimbus surrounding a book, a piece of wonder itself that reflects in form the inspirational and fantastical fictional luminescence that the book holds within it. Libraries in my days didn’t have carpet on the floors. The floors were tile, hard and solid and sending the somehow reassuring sound of shoes and heels striking the floor when they did so (libraries can actually be too quiet for one’s concentration; sometimes I feel practically unsafe when I sit in a library now; I always have the feeling that someone is sneaking up on me, and the library has somehow short-circuited my sense of hearing’s ability to notify me of it), and I had at least two reasons to be thankful for this; it created more light (I will always remember the libraries in my youth as being very bright places) and, as an asthma sufferer, it lessened the presence of dust. The libraries I went to were also very clean; sadly, I can’t say as much for the brightness and cleanliness of modern public libraries. They have now lost a grand interaction with natural forces, they miss out on what could be a pastoral reading environment, and they seem like tombs and bureaucratic vaults rather than inviting temples to things sacred. And, yet, in spite of myself, I love our libraries still.

Now, however, people having books with them or reading and transforming mundane wait time into something so much better is a trend I am very glad to see changing. Begrudgingly, I have to admit that the electronic explosion has helped this tremendously. Now, almost everywhere I go, someone is reading a book or, more often than not, has an e-Reader. I’m firmly and forever in the give-me-a-real-physical-book camp. I’m also very sorry that so many authors have been cheated regarding profits made from electronically scanned versions of their works that major publishing houses don’t feel the need to pay them for (we would call this piracy were I to undertake such methodology to get an author’s work; somehow society always sanctions illegal methods for those with lots of money, power, position, and status but fine if not jail us little folks when we do the same thing). I am, however, thankful that Kindles and Nooks and whatever other devices are out there encourage the young and young-at-heart to read wherever they are and whenever they are threatened with minutiae and the boogey of boredom. I don’t know, because I’ve never done it, but it must be fascinating to want to read a book while sitting at the mall or at McDonald’s or while waiting for one’s license renewal, download said book in a few minutes’ time, and then read it. Because, although I see the physical book itself as a cogent technology and media, perhaps the greater and more important thing is simply to get people to read. I think we are edging out of the era in which, according to Philip Roth, people spent fewer than two hours a day reading. I see many people lost in books now, and I honestly think we’re a better world for it.

So it was yesterday that I found myself following my principles and reading a book that I received a reviewer’s copy of gratis, namely Literature & Composition: Reading, Writing, Thinking (edited by Jago et al., not to be confused with the many books that have similar titles, e.g. Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing edited by Kirszner & Mandell; it’s not that the titles are misleading – they’re all literature anthologies aimed for AP programs or college courses – it’s just that they’re trying to compete in a market place that decreases imagination by encouraging publishers to use titles that always and eternally let their readers know exactly what to expect; we used to call that Hell).

My mother told me that literature gives us windows into other times. One could say the same about people’s souls. And so it was that I got to look into May-lee Chai’s soul yesterday in the most unlikely of spots (not in heaven but in National Tire and Battery in Antioch, TN) for the most likely of reasons (trying to diagnose problems with a 2003 Kia Rio that has nearly 200,000 miles on the odometer); I had time to sit, and, having time to sit, I’ve trained myself - with tenacity that a dog-handler would appreciate – to do two tasks (sit and read) at once. All that to say: I was reading “Saving Sourdi.”

Mining Meinke, or Twenty-Six Years Later

2012-02-05T05:32:00.000-08:00

Be forewarned regarding today's post. There will be digressions upon digressions . . .

Peter Meinke came to Belmont University sometime around 1993 or so. I am unsure of the exact date, though I could probably look it up had I the time and inclination. But soon my workaday world will start, and that will be the end of it all regarding the time I may put toward such things. Better to get the post written, I suppose. Meinke's visitation wasn't controversial in any way. The visitation, or, rather near-visitation, that was controversial was Dr. Jim Brock's attempt to get Joseph Brodsky to visit our campus. The administration thought Jackson Brown, the author of the Life's Little Instruction Books series would be a better choice. Evidently, from what I gathered in conversation with people through the years, Brodsky, upon hearing the school was convening on the issue of himself or Brown opted out of the contest altogether, perhaps upon principle that a culture deserves the results it gets, especially when one is as short-sighted and often as bigoted as enclosed religious groups become when erecting institutions and becoming associated with them and riding their coat tails (see the current controversy over religious groups asking for the right to exclude members at Vanderbilt University for more). I was enraged at Belmont, especially Dr. William Troutt (who was a friend of Brown's if rumors and information were true), regarded James Brock as a martyr for fighting the issue and undoubtedly hurting his career, and disappointed in deeply metaphysical ways that, with my limited resources, I had just missed seeing, hearing, and meeting one of the poets I regarded most highly in the world, in all of literature. Indeed, we got Jackson Brown. Of course, I refused to go. Had I been smarter, I would have attended and asked him what he thought about being Brodsky's replacement, as it were. I'm sure he would have had a pithy little anachronism for it all. And I suppose because I'm still writing about his, perhaps it shows what little I've accomplished in my own life and my fixation with this event speaks to an immaturity . . . but, on the other hand, how does one recover from having the opportunity to meet one of the most fascinating, powerful, and inspiring poets of one's time taken out from under you by the thing he spoke most often against: a bureaucratic behemoth that regulates our lives beyond our own small defenses? How does one get over the fact that you never got to meet the most humble of poets, a man who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet opened his acceptance speech reminding his audience of all the great poets who were more deserving of the award than himself, those who should have been recognized by the world, but, ultimately, weren't? I honestly don't think I will ever get over this. And Joseph is dead now, perhaps a step closer to the anonymity he saw in the world no matter how often he glossed it over with notions of his very own, self-styled version of Christianity or Christian notions in his work (the mere mention of which might have caused Belmont to send him our way). Anyway, all of that to say: Peter Meinke was the first good choice by the administration at Belmont in bringing a literary cultural experience to its campus. Spearheaded by the wonderful wizard of Belmont Boulevard, Dr. John H. E. Paine, Peter came to our campus and gave a reading of his works.

At the time of this reading, I was in my early twenties. And, for whatever reason, Peter had chosen to spend the evening reading selections of poetry. And, though I liked it, I truly didn't understand or appreciate it. At that time in my life, I was heavily steeped in either classics or contemporary authors that I viewed as banging on that door. I was collecting the Northwestern Newberry Library Editions of Herman Melville's works and would rather have done this and had funds for this more than anything else in the world. I would read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bunin, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Poe any chance I could get. One of the saddest moments in my life was when I had to simply accept that fact that I would probably never be able to afford Hawthorne's Journals, because they simply weren't published in a way that made them within my range of purchasing power. I sat up on the night of my honeymoon, very early in the morning, actually, staring out a window and wondering why Nashville didn't have a poetic voice that could bring out some sort of meaning beyond the mundane reality it seemed to exhibit. (Later, I would learn of Randall Jarrell.) That sort of tells you where I was at. So, let's face it, Peter Meinke, as wonderful an author as he is, wouldn't have appealed to someone constantly looking into the face of that.

So, here I am, twenty-six years after its initial publication, approximately twenty years after I met Meinke, reading selections from The Piano Tuner for the first time. And the time doesn't matter. Because Meinke is a master. There's not a scarier, more literate story out there than "The Piano Tuner." There's not a more startling story out there than this one. If you're not scared at the end of that, you're lying. The only response I had was: this is why people need to carry weapons. A gun would have leveled the playing field; anything less, yes, the homeowner was a dead duck. If you've never read this work, I don't want to ruin it for you with spoilers. But the story subverts your expectations every step of the way. You think it's going to be a two-men-sharing-different-cultural-contexts story, then you think it's going to be a damaged war veteran teaching universal pity to a veteran who did well, then you think it's going to be an outright crime story, and then, well, it gets scariest with the last several words. As a literary product, it's simply amazing. And, yes, some people are going to criticize it for having a big bad Black man as the boogeyman, but you'd be foolish to do so. This is as fleshed-out of a character as you're ever going to get. You're only looking for racism (sometimes a type of reverse racism in itself, which, in this case, I think would be the only way one could fault this work on those grounds; finally, I'm saying: don't bring the charge of racism against Meinke; you'd be foolish to do so) if you find it here.

I was, after that point, overwhelmed with Meinke's great powers of characterization. I honestly would have to sit down and read and reread these works to discover the tools of the master craftsman behind these works. But each character seems as real as someone you've known. Each story is fully believable. Each story is powerful, hopeful, and sad in their own ways. And I know my descriptions are getting rather juvenile here, but Meinke is mining the everyday. And though, admittedly, these works aren't going to rival Herman Melville or even James Dickey any time soon, they contend with many and perhaps most of the contemporary fiction I read now. It's like a literary version of a George Foreman comeback. You stick these stories out there, and they're just as powerful as the day they were written. I knew women, my mother's relatives, as a matter of fact, quite like the women in "Ruby Lemons." And though I've never met a brother and sister like the ones in "Alice's Brother," the delineation of their vocal and mechanical movement toward truth and personal revelation that's been waiting a lifetime is, if not fully believable to me (because I've never had such an experience), resonant with a life experience you can nevertheless feel the impact of; the story leaves you with a feeling of emotional sadness for this pair as well as longing for their perhaps future consummation of an inclination toward a love we don't recognize as a society. If a story can make you do that, I'd say the author's done his job. (I can hear Philip Roth railing against the publisher, many years later and in absentia, of course, who said he wouldn't publish Nabokov's pornography as I wonder about the people who won't read this story now based on my description of it.)

Well, work just literally called via cell phone. The day's begun. Make sure you add some literature to yours.

Work Cited

Meinke, Peter. The Piano Tuner. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986.

The Many Voices It Takes

2012-02-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've had a predisposition toward buying old books, the older the better. And I don't do this with any eye toward collectible value. I'm looking for knowledge, definitely not resale value. I stopped that long ago when I sold Sherman Alexie's Water Flowing Home for a pittance so that I could afford my wife some earrings for her birthday. But by continuing to buy old books I've learned those lessons that historians warn us about when they use the now cliche but still quite true phrase: "Learn history or be doomed to repeat it."

Lately, I've been thinking about the voices in our society. We've had many voices speaking for and against the common people, trying to take their pay and benefits worldwide. And I'm speaking both literally and metaphorically, here. Our voices have never been more important. But we forget just how many voices it takes. One of the now long-forgotten voices in the fight for civil rights in America was Harry Roskolenko. I don't mention his name to suggest that he was more important than others; I do so to point out, rather, that he was just as important as the other voices that have now been engraved in our (again) literal and metaphorical cultural consciousness. Somehow, even for the best and worst endeavors, we always worship the figureheads and forget about all the mass of people it takes to make a movement move through the impediments forged against it. As we are now trying to change the world that we are living in (and Republicans in political positions - Bill Haslam in my part of the world - are the worst evidence that we're not vocal enough), we must remember that all of those Occupy Wall Street people are wonderfully necessary for their part in achieving change. And if the Occupy movement has moved on (which, evidently, it hasn't, because there is new legislation being created to make putting a mattress and sleeping materials on a public area illegal), then we need to find the next best thing.

But don't forget Harry. Go back and look at what this guy had to say and wonder why he's been forgotten. And perhaps use his body of work as a gauge to judge just how much work it takes to effect change as well as just how valuable one person can be in doing their part, whether they have a statue of themselves sitting on a hill or not.

The Ethical Wonders of Daniel Woodrell: Part Three

2012-01-16T20:06:00.000-08:00

Every word resonates in Daniel Woodrell’s short story, “The Echo of Neighborly Bones.” This is assuredly not an easy task, but it is such an easy story to read that one is beguiled into taking the trip quickly and thereby missing most of the beauty and writer’s craft found in the work. (I also have suspicions that one day we’ll find – like we’ve found heavily worked and reworked manuscripts of Whitman, Keats, and Byron – reams of x’d and o’d and tic-tac-toed pages of these novels many years from now and realize that Woodrell’s task was monumental in its culling. The greater shock would be that he, like Vladimir Nabokov, worked the words out in his head and committed them to practically publishable form from the outset. I hope I'm still alive when such things are revealed.)

I’ve said something before about Woodrell being the last of the Laconic writers. And I’m using the term here in the sense of “effectively cut short” rather than “rude,” unless one takes the position, and one might, that Woodrell’s terseness is spitting in the face of some literary traditions. We’ve had our loquacious Southern and Southwestern and Midwestern writers (some of the categories people who decide such things attempt to place Woodrell into). Woodrell, however, manages to be just as powerful and capture the traditions of the geographic regions he pays homage to in books the size of or not much bigger than a poet’s first outing. The kicker is that Woodrell also manages to be much more poetic than most writers weaving books with larger looms and baskets upon baskets of thread. And the aforementioned spitting comment might be hyperbolic, but I promise you that several if not many writers are offended by or jealous of what Woodrell accomplishes in his typical word count. And my mixed metaphors aren’t doing my reputation any favors. And this is about Woodrell, anyway.

There’s not truly a protagonist in “The Echo of Neighborly Bones” unless, perhaps, we consider the dog, Bitsy, for that position. Everyone else has sinister issues and the only possible sense in which we may consider them the protagonists of the work is in the mere sense of being main characters. They are not morally superior. Or that's what a cursory glance's reading would lead us to believe.

Remember that in an earlier post, I told you how I, the long past twelve-year-old I, sent .22 rounds through a tree line because people rendered an animal I loved into an undignified state. In Woodrell's tale, the greatest indignity of cold-blooded murder is committed upon a beloved pet. And, let me tell you further, that there are many animals I've valued much higher than humans. And I've met nonhuman animals with nasty or violent predispositions. That's why I hate cats. Cats will hurt you for no reason; that's why their supposedly loving owners lovingly de-claw them. But as is always the case, it is the premeditated aspect of crimes, especially murder, that cause them to have greater penalties. And no one premeditates better than the human animal. And that's why the Minnesotan foreigner - he is more a barbarian in the full meaning of the word, much more barbarian than the less than Classic meaning associated with our current connotation and meaning associated with such phrases as barbaric acts (which would, though, accurately describe Boshell's desecration of a corpse, whether he views it as retribution or not). This story, indeed, pits barbarity (the notion of being outside the mores of a culture, of being crude because one doesn't follow a region's customs) against things barbaric (the notion of outright savagery).

Jepperson is a seemingly highfalutin (perhaps because he was, at one time, at the bottom of his social cast and, therefore, went looking for a social cast whose stature was viewed as being so low that he, upon his entrance into this society, could foolishly think himself above it) foreigner who begins as a barbarian in the social sense but then commits an act of barbarity and becomes, thereby, savage. Whose viewpoint we are talking about, of course, matters. In Jepperson's world, shooting a dog for eating one's guinea hens probably is acceptable legally, socially, and practically. But according to the customs of the society he now lives in, he went from foreigner-barbarian to savage-barbarian when he refused to participate in Boshell's forthright offer of wergild and, instead, shot Bitsy. In a way, it's a current take on the fight between Roman and Anglo-Saxon law. Boshell gets his ultimate comeuppance when he states: "They [guineas] go for about a dollar fifty a bird, neighbor - still seem worth it?" (7). Except for the fact that he's talking to a dead man who will never make reparations for his actions, it could have been argued that, indeed, Boshell has taught the Yank a lesson.

Ultimately, this approximately six-page story has a moral and/or ethical resonance that something this short just doesn't have a right to. That kind of alchemy is what is so beautiful about the best literature out there. Our expectations are constantly exploded like the most fascinating of fireworks displays if we only take the time to develop the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the minds to comprehend. Woodrell will be happy to have you, though I'm sure he'd like you to approach him in a neighborly way.

Succinctly, everyone should read the opener to The Outlaw Album (as well as the rest, of course).

Work Cited

Woodrell, Daniel. "The Echo of Neighborly Bones." The Outlaw Album. NY: Little Brown, 2011. 3-9.

Ethical Wonders in the Fiction of Daniel Woodrell: Part Two

2012-01-15T02:46:00.000-08:00

In yesterday's post (found here for you clickers who live to click and just won't scroll: http://mrdigressius.blogspot.com/2012/01/ethical-wonders-in-fiction-of-daniel.html ) I forgot to mention the best proof, perhaps, behind how my reading's real-life context of Daniel Woodrell's The Outlaw Album matched the ethical stance often found in his works. So, here goes:

The lady aforementioned was sitting by herself, received the phone call, and begins crying. Not loud. Not making a show of it. But unable to keep the cliche stiff upper lip, not that one ever should; why the British have made a national pride of not showing human emotion, I'll never know. But, as I'm sitting there, I'm wondering what my response should be. Should I go to her? There were a thousand reasons not to, the greatest of which was my own heavily guarded introverted personality, something that's been both a bane and a blessing all my life. I struggled with it: to go or not to go? And, while I was self-wrestling and to his credit, a man, who shattered every stereotype in a moment (except for the fact that he wasn't rich; had he been, it would have topped it all off), went to her, said something quietly kind to her, and then put his arm around her shoulder, said a few more nice words to her, and patted her shoulder and left her to grieve, now no longer alone, now embraced into a common human dignity, now, perhaps, feeling not so terribly bad after all. Her loss, of course, will always be the dull, gray nothingness of loss, but having one person come to you in such moments, may, indeed, be therapy through friendship, a healing commonality through the caduceus. (And I know I'm making an erroneous allusion here; it's the rod of Asclepius that deals with healing; but if the mistake has been made and continues to receive reinforcement as a symbol, and, if the caduceus is the symbol of the protection given to cheats, liars, and thieves, well, aren't we all one of those at some point in our lives and shouldn't we all at some point take wings and have god-given speed to move beyond our limitations? It seems only right and fair; we live so far beyond the pale of the shakers and movers and the divine that, at some point, we should partake of that world, too. And there's something about those two snakes entwined on the rod, looking at each other, hypnotized by each others' eyes that seems to be the opposite of the typical human response of looking the other way that deserves our attention, that deserves deep thought and interpretation.)

Perhaps I'm making too much mysticism out of Woodrell's work and my world. But the whole reason for this post was to show how what we think is an alien culture may very well touch upon something in our own lives and may, further, allow us to make responses in the real world based on the mistakes we perceive in the actions of characters in fictional constructs. No, I take it back. The real reason behind this post was to explain why I once sent .22 bullets ricocheting off trees surrounding my neighbors' homes. No, I take it back, the real reason for this post was to show how Daniel Woodrell . . . It's all of a piece, people. And it all - the stories, the life events surrounding our emergence into a text, the ramifications of reading - spins on some otherworldly wheel and creates new possibilities and moral mandates for us. That's what makes great literature.

You cannot read Winter's Bone without feeling Ree Dolly's pain when she is shown the completely beguiling facade of friendship (an Aunt approaching you on a cold day with a hot cup of tea or some such) and then brutally accosted with animal viciousness, beaten within an inch of her life (in fact, the women involved have their shovels in hand and are already digging her grave). You also cannot help but have an ethical and/or moral response to Ree's own beautiful doggedness, only spoken in the hope for children she has now in her care:

"Whatever are we to do about you, baby girl? Huh?"

"Kill me, I guess."

"That idea has been said already. Got'ny other ones?"

"Help me. Ain't nobody said that idea yet, have they?"

Ree's humiliation at this point is total in a physical sense. I could relate it to you, but reading Daniel Woodrell's description of it would be a million times more complete, satisfying, and moving. Ree, however, never gives up. She has to surrender. She's beaten into surrendering. But she never gives up. Because she cares for someone else, several someones else, actually, she cares for these innocent people relying on her more than she cares one iota about anything to do with herself. She forgoes everything for them. And another life's lesson related to this is this: Be careful for whom you sacrifice your own well-being. You may very well never be repaid and bring yourself to destruction in the process. That's why, if one asks me (and someone as great as Harlan Ellison would disagree with me), this is where literature is moral rather than ethical. In fact, this is where literature has to be moral rather than ethical. Ethics have to do with a rational and logical human construct, but there are forces out there that are irrational, illogical, and more than human. Although, now that I think of it perhaps the fact that humans have a sort of rite of conduct (rather than rite of passage) that brings us into a euphoric state based on right action, well, that seems damn refreshing and inspiring doesn't it?

Forgive me. I have digressed a thousand times in this post. Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll finally discuss "The Echo of Neighborly Bones."

Work Cited

Woodrell, Daniel. Winter's Bone. NY: Little Brown, 2006.

Ethical Wonders in the Fiction of Daniel Woodrell

2012-01-14T06:04:00.000-08:00

I received Daniel Woodrell's newest published work, The Outlaw Album, as my Christmas gift. Funds were few this year, and we made sure we fulfilled the obligations that Christmas, for me, is always all about - children's fantastical wish-fulfillment (and I don't see anything wrong, anti-religious, or Freudian about that, although I do see something inherently wrong with each of the things in that parenthetical list, especially as they are usually always combined when attempting to denigrate something innocent and wonderful). The context of my reading, which I somehow find apropos in a momentous way, was this:

My wife needed brakes for her car, and, not usually being the kindly sort, something came over me - Christmas joy and the pressing happiness of having a new book to read - I decided to while away the few hours the job would take at the McDonald's across the street, fattening up intellectually and physically. To be truthful, though, reading Woodrell is always a leaning out. His words are few and sparse, though powerful; he's one of the only Laconic writers we have left, though I'm not sure he could be accused of having the type of defensive and challenging humor of machismo Spartan society. He's just challenging. (The only thing I've ever found humorous in Woodrell is his description of a conjugal act - not that it has to be done in a marital sense; it could be illicit as well - as a stick eddying in a stream. It can be found toward the end of Woe to Live On.) He challenges your morals, beliefs, and view of humanity. Are we as inherently violent as the world he represents or reflects? Is the milieu found in Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, or Tomato Red (to name three that left me with many disturbing, troubling, and lingering ethical and worldview types of questions) created acts or wonderfully rendered sociological studies? Whatever the case, all of this meshed while I was engaged in a wonderful reading act while a homeless woman, a homeless newspaper vendor, actually, received the news that someone very dear to her had died. The information came through her cell phone while she was sitting in a McDonald's restaurant drinking coffee. The irony of the commonplace setting for such a tragedy, I hope, isn't lost on anyone. We live in a world where our tragedies are rendered practically worthless. The very marketability behind building structures that the planners and demographic-scrutinizing advertising associates and executives (they used to all be called executives until someone didn't want to pay them as much money for their services) who make such ridiculousness actual, well, the ulterior motives behind the physical structures that arise in our midst, mixed with the life events we often experience within them, tend to leech out their mystical aspects, their heavenliness, the universal elements that are sent our way in these strangely cleansing tragedies. And they will do so unless you prepare yourself for this happening to you one day, to counter-balance the blandness when it threatens to overtake your more ageless self. And so this beautifully beset woman learned that her dear friend or relative died before she could start eating her South American bred sausage housed in its bleached and cheapened-flour biscuit. The irony is painful, perhaps not as painful as the moment, but painful nonetheless. I suppose there might be better contexts for reading Woodrell's work, but I consistently think now that, from my experience, we learn much from the matrices (can we ever rescue the word matrix from the silliness of the instantaneously cliche movie media?) in which literature and our so-called real lives intersect.

In any case, Woodrell's work has always been about an alien culture for me until I read "The Echo of Neighborly Bones." I assume, perhaps wrongly, that it outlines an ethic, belief, and feeling that only a Southerner or someone from a truly rural culture could understand. Unless an animal has been as real and companionable and understandable and meaningful as a person to you in your life (and I'm not talking about those people who put their little doggies in designer clothes and diamond jewelry or those people who promulgate those asinine calendars every year with animals in postures and making faces that make taxidermists jealous), you'll never understand why someone would shoot someone else over a cruelty to an animal and/or disrespecting the dignity of an animal. You'll never understand why at twelve-years-old, I sent .22 bullets through both a rifle and a tree line because my idiotic neighbors dressed my German Shepherd in idiotic clothes and then sent her running for her life and humiliated back to me.

Work calls. I may continue this later. In fact, I should. Perhaps I will. In any case, if you want to spend some time reading wonderful work and pondering the nature of your own ethical stance in our universe, read anything by Daniel Woodrell.

The Sounds of Abuse, Why Harlan Ellison Matters, and I’m a Hero.

2012-01-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

If you’ve grown up with abuse, you know what it sounds like. Like the classical, misused, and now cliché description of pornography - "I know it when I see it" -, abuse is just as physical, obscene, and stitched-painfully-in-your-heart memorable. You’ll know it when you hear it, see it, and you’ll even get a weird aura that comes over you when you almost supernaturally sense its very first stirrings. And though I’d never wish this ability to sense abuse on anyone (because you have to go through it yourself and then, I think, recover from it to be able to harness its aftermath for the good of others), this very ugly sixth sense served a cute little kid happy in his playing today. Because right after that he was violently screamed at and then smacked in the head with a stick that was sizable enough to hurt you or me. And the difference, too, is that you or I probably would have had a chance or the life-instilled reaction to raise a hand, back away, punch, strike, defend. And as usually happens after living with abuse - and I hope it works this way for this kid - one makes sure those skills are learned, practiced, used.

So, here it is. The story.

I’m going to the world’s greatest comic shop in the world. Or, at least, my region’s greatest one, the one I’ve been going to since I was about twelve or so. Maybe younger. I’m selling some comics, taking a box in. On my way out, I nearly bump into this little, happy, smiling guy on a scooter.

“Hey, sorry about that, buddy? You okay?”

He just smiles and scooters on, happy, happy, happy. It was great to see. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way.

And that’s when the screaming started. Not the why-the-hell-were-you-scootering-when-I-told-you-not-to kind of admonition. It was dragon scales and nails and high pitched and ear-piercing and a constant verbal assualt, raising, rising, breaking through the parking lot.

So I stop. Like I said, I know the sounds.

Dad, an employee at the restaurant’s side delivery door where all this is happening, gets the kid and yells at him and tells him to go in the door, and the kid’s not doing.

Good for him, I’m thinking.

Finally, screaming from Dad and a woman I can’t see all the while still going on, Dad wrestles the kid in the door. And then it’s voices like gun shots ricocheting off the walls. Bad.

Dad steps out the door for some reason. He probably can’t handle it, either.

And then the kid is running out the door.

But he can’t beat his Mom leaning out the door, nor the length of the stick, nor the sickening moment when it strikes.

Strangely, I nodded, like, “Yep, seen that before. Called that one right. Knew what was coming.”

Dad instantly read my look, and already starts coming over. I didn’t even realize I had already dialed 9-1-1 until he was there. Practiced skills, I guess.

He’s got pleading hand gestures, asking me not to call, trying to explain that he’s sorry, saying “Sir, please” to me a lot.

“She hit him with a stick” is about the only response he’s getting from me. And then he’s getting closer, and I tell him to back off, yadda, yadda.

He goes back to the delivery door. The yelling dies down quite a bit, though it’s still there, though now it has the sounds of Why-the-heck-didn’t-you-let-me-handle-it and Look-now-see-what-you’ve-done-he’s-calling-the-police.

And, yes, I am.

Then, painfully ironically, this kid’s brother (I’m assuming; like I’m assuming these people are Mom and Dad, but I, of course, could be wrong; it could have been Uncle and Aunt; or Mom and Dad’s best buddy, or anyone - abuse knows no relational restrictions) comes out the front door of the restaurant and in perfect English (did someone send him to me thinking if it were all explained in English, that I would tell the police, “Oh, okay, guys, never mind, getting hit in the head with a stick ain’t so bad?) why his Mom had to do it, that he was scootering up and down the sidewalk and wouldn’t listen, and . . .

And I told him it’s never okay. Not here. Not there. Not anywhere. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week. Never.

And then Mom’s out.

And what a Mom. She’s not pleading like her I’m-assuming-Husband. She’s telling me in broken English that he was scootering like mad, crazy, wouldn’t listen, and who am I to be acting like’s it’s big deal? And on and on.

And then they all leave, because I’m unrelenting. And then that’s when the craziest thing entered my head.

I thought of Harlan Ellison. How Harlan Ellison would have wanted me to do this. How Harlan Ellison always tried to remind us of how we have a responsibility to stop, look, and listen. And defend.

And that’s why Harlan Ellison matters.

You don’t ever let the m&^OT%@#ers win. Not ever.

Don’t ask me why I thought of him. I have no idea. Except that great literature gives us ethical and moral mandates. And that’s why we read the great ones. And it carries through into real life stuff.

And, by god, I hope Harlan knows how much the world needs from him. And just how reading “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” as a formerly abused kid mattered like all hell’s get out.

I hope I helped this kid. He will, at least, know that people will stop and try to right wrongs.

If his Mom got arrested, I’ve got no qualms about that.

Have I done stuff wrong? Yep. But I’ve never hit my kids, any of them, with a stick.

Do I have moral faults? Yes, and far too damn many of them.

But today I’m a hero.

I’m not a hero for any stupid, idiotic, self-congratulatory reasons.

I’m a hero because I did what a human being with a moral and ethical conscience should do: Stop, watch, listen, and act from the courage of seeing another human being, especially a happy and innocent human being, hurt and suffering for it.

To borrow a very old cliché and change it a bit: Here’s watching out for you, kid.

Let’s say it again: Here’s watching out for you, kid.

Go home. Read “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” Watch Frtiz Lang’s M. Watch The Grave of the Fireflies.” Search your heart and be ready when the time comes for you to do the simple but nearly always forgotten thing first: Stop, dammit. Stop and watch and be an annoyance and make others watch you and wonder why you’re being a weirdo and get thereby an audience of witnesses.

And stay there.

Because somebody’s going to need you.

Watch your children. Watch your elderly. Protect and defend not just yours, but those who need it.

Be good.

A Page-And-A-Half Powerhouse

2011-12-21T01:58:00.000-08:00

If you've never read Angela Carter's short-short (before the "short-short" nomenclature was in existence and college-hip usage), "A Victorian Fable," you should. In fact, you should go and find it and read it right now.

Without the glossary Carter provides with the story, it would be impenetrable, which would give further credence and after-the-fact cultural force to the secretive nature of the netherworldly, secretive, and shadowy cant employed by the characters who don't want their information, whereabouts, and habits broadcast to the public at large (and the judges). Although they want the commerce, they want it on their terms. And, just like their lives, they want the money-changing to stay just a few steps ahead of the cat-and-mouse game (with the police) that always dogged their lives. Too many steps ahead, and the thrill of it all would be gone. Chasing the customer and securing the exchange - which was actually enforcing a change, moving the individual from his or her notions of propriety and inhibition and fear of being caught to a sense of protection among thieves and those who bodyguard transactions of the illicit - was both the transgression of securities as well as an acknowledgment of the other side of humanity which was, nevertheless, a part of our, well, humanity; looking at the other side is a sort of embrace (for however long we allow it).

This story has both cultural and linguistic mandates, all wrapped up in a literary style that is simply remarkable. Indeed, it's magical. It's like a lesson and a gift all at once. Just in time for Christmas.

Angela Carter's influence, is, even today, cogent and undeniable.

Work Cited

Carter, Angela. "A Victorian Fable." Burning Your Boats. NY: Henry Holt, 1995. 16-24.

Quote of the Day

2011-12-18T21:36:00.001-08:00

"We are fragile things, tormented by the dark and by the fearful things coming toward us through the dark. It is not just the death, which is an abstract til it cudgels, but the vessels in which that terrible smell takes up residence. It is a fear that swirls in the air until we choke, and it drives us to cowardice and brutality and flight. And all we have to keep us human in the face of it, is the sure and certain knowledge that we are all one. We must reject actively the meanspirited suggestions of lunatics and those with secret agendas, that this is some sort of 'divine judgment.'

Any god responsible for such terror and plague death, is no god we should consider worthy of our attention . . .

Only kindness and rational thinking permit us to weather the plague. Eventually . . . some lone virologist will find the answer. . . . But when the day comes . . . will we be able to say that the monster offered itself and we refused to become one with it because we were nobler and saner than the mere alibi 'I'm only human' provides?" (xxv)

Work Cited

Ellison, Harlan. "Introduction." Angry Candy. NY: Plume, 1989. xi-xvi.

Jim Daniels's "My Father Worked Late"

2011-12-17T06:54:00.000-08:00

I could relate to you the mundane realities that Jim Daniels turns into mysteries in his poem, "My Father Worked Late." But there would be no point. You would do better, because the experience would be first-hand instead of second-, by reading the poem yourself, reading the fantastic quality of Daniels's carefully chosen words and attention to form. The reality of the poem is hard to escape, and the mysteries make us - or made me, at least - wonder what the inescapable working conditions of our lives to do to us as well as wondering, at the poem's end, what conditions, perhaps, we could have turned to our advantage or at least lessened the effects of (or our response to) so that we don't pass what's debilitating to us onto our children. I spent much of my past working thankless jobs and horrible hours, living the very real cliche of being a slave to the daily grind. And if we look beyond the cliche of "daily grind," we'll see the metaphor is truly horrific, and I can attest to the fact that it's horrific for a reason. There was nothing worse - and I hope there will be nothing worse in the future for me - than the times when I literally worked night and day. Desperation taught me to get sleep whenever and however I could. Fifteen minutes in my car in a busy parking lot before work, five to ten minutes on a toilet seat timed with the chime of a runner's watch, sitting in a chair in a darkened office where the position of my body made it unclear whether I was looking at you or asleep, in darkened rooms where few people had keys, . . . the darkness, the isolatedness, the improbability of visitation or access to keys, the chances of someone not spying on my resting place due to their own embarrassment, all of that was a factor in whether or not I would get sleep. But the sadness of the poem, and, thankfully the reality that I believe has changed for me, is the desolation of having, in the end, nothing to give. That's a horrible way to end life. Daniels's poem is two pages relating his father's entire adult life; by today's standards, that timeline might very well make it a candidate for a contemporary epic if all else holds true. Ah, but the end. See, Daniels's father is and isn't a hero in the end. His efforts were just as heroic, perhaps. In fact, I'm going to say they were. Because I've lived it. There's nothing less heroic about a guy working sixty-five to seventy hours a week on the back dock or in the cooler of a milk plant when compared to an aged king fighting a dragon. There's nothing less heroic than working two full time jobs (M-F 7-3; Tues night 10-6; Thur night 10-6; what I called "the zombie shift" 10 at night on Friday to 6:00 PM Saturday; 6 AM-6 PM Sunday) when compared to cleaning the Augean stables; I used to think so-called Herculean tasks earned one respect, love, valorization; I know now that it leads to people accusing you of not doing enough and scratching your eyeballs out for what you're not doing for them while you're working all the time, well, for them; it's the worst kind of Chinese puzzle. Anyway, the difference between Daniels's epic timeline and the tradition of the epic lies in the rewards. It's not lost on me that Daniels's father's stroke has nothing to do with a sword.

Work Cited

Daniels, Jim. "My Father Worked Late." Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 5-6.

Quotes of the Day

2011-12-15T03:32:00.000-08:00

From Elizabeth Henley's (a poet I will assuredly write about more thoroughly later) poem, "The Puritan Conflict":

"A round and heavy sixpence for the days
When no flag flies or hurdy-gurdy plays"

"There's nothing good and free as country light,
The sun upon the laurel and the oak,
And love that locks the farmhouse door at night."

A Pig in the Heart of the Rhino: Our Bookstore Humanity

2011-12-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

It is undoubtedly true that we are losing our humanity. All one needs to do to see the proof of it is to go looking for a new bookstore.

I would venture that most books that are not mandated on a college or university syllabus are now primarily purchased online, ethernet dollars sent to electronic shops, encrypted information for the kind of easily digested texts most of us gorge on. The e-book is little more than peripheral popcorn. We'll be stringing our trees with it if we're of the pretend-rustic, nu rural bent, all the while without realizing that it just doesn't sustain us.

What can sustain you is a bookstore like Rhino Books. It's a place I've avoided for a very long time now, years in fact. My wife says we no longer have money for books, even though I sideswipe her with an illicit purchase here and there, usually always online (electronic dollars are easier to hide; one never even sees them until the email notating the deed is already done; electronic time is irretrievable, undeniably only psuedo-real and, therefore, seemingly false; it makes a falsifier's job all the easier, . . . so easy, so easy . . . ). And I've had days in bookstores in which I walked out with a bill that would make a gambler's compulsive heart scream with the happiness of an act that is only topped by the thing it's calling for: the defibrillator. And, in a strange way, that's what bookstores are for me: defibrillators to my too-long-hesitant humanity.

But Rhino brought my humanity back. Walden's Booksellers (R.I.P.), Borders, and Barnes & Noble don't have the magic that Rhino captures. These are beautiful books (some of them secretly once owned, I think, by James King; that's my suspicion) in a beautiful store. There is legitimate sculpture and artwork adorning the walls, and the book selection is wide ranging and selected from owners who obviously tended their intellectual gardens with care. And, feeling slightly like a thief, I snagged a copy of Harlan Ellison's Angry Candy from the stacks in the bathroom; the nice lady working there was nice enough to let me into the door marked "ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE INTO THIS MAGICAL RABBIT HOLE!" (actually it said something like "No Admittance. Employees Only."; and now that I've tipped your hand to their secret, you damn well better not go in there, because they'll know where you got the info and then they'll be looking for me - and then I'll be looking for you - and there's a book in there that I still want to buy, and I'm going to be one mean 1/4 ton man if it's not there when I go back). Anyway, I digress. I didn't steal it, but I did trade it for a Bram Stoker short story selection from my stack. (Woefully, I didn't have enough money for three books; had I, I could have gotten a fourth book free . . . ah, Fortuna!). But the experience was magical of its own accord and brought me back 'round to the only religion I know: never denying the opening of another spiritual window unto your life.

Because they are there, and because I stopped, I had the fortuitous experience of purchasing Ellison's aforementioned book with Robert Burns' The Anatomy of Melancholy. Both so focused on things gray and supremely powerful and imbued with force exhibiting the doggedness of a god, I was able to while away the time waiting for my daughter's brilliant violin concert by contemplating death, loyalty, care, friendship, commitment, courage, and love. And it was all because of a bookstore that is nothing less than a temple of a very unique and passing away sort, a place where the written word still passes from hand to hand with the mundane but powerful pecuniary sacrifice that reminds us just how transitory wisdom and love can be depending on how fickle we are in judging the things we tie our heart-strings to.

You're magic, Rhino, one of a few places resurfacing in this intellectual oasis of my life and time, therefore I'll imbibe the water you provide for the time you're here.

Rhino Books
4006 Granny White Pike
Nashville, TN 37204
(615) 279-0309

A Thanksgiving Day Treat

2011-11-24T05:21:00.000-08:00

If you stare long enough, the football player will disappear, and the cheerleaders will have skimpier outfits. (And I'm not sure what the little person in grey will do, but I'm sure it'll be entertaining.)

(Image copyright NFL and Fox Sports 2011).

P. S. I also think I can add this as another Gary Coleman sighting. He's not dead folks, he just hibernates until he can attend another NFL game. He only comes out for the nachos and cheese, then stealthily disappears. Gary Coleman Sighting is the greatest American past time since Bigfoot reconnaissance.

My other sighting is here, 17 April 2011:

http://mrdigressius.blogspot.com/2011/04/gary-coleman-is-alive-willis.html

The NFL Fan: Very Confused Individual

2011-11-15T22:09:00.000-08:00

I feel sorry for this guy. I feel so sorry for this guy that I actually hope he gets what he wants in life:

Yep, that sign says, "Jordy can I be your shorty?"

That's referring, of course, to Jordy Nelson, wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers and, evidently, this guy's NFL crush. Wow.

Rick Hautala's "Surprise"

2011-10-30T03:50:00.000-07:00

In quite prophetic fashion, Rick Hautala has reinvigorated the power of irony. This is accomplished within six pages. It was accomplished in 1993, and few of us care to remember or understand with what power his prophecy still resonates today.

First, let me state right off the bat that I've been no fan of Hautala's in the past. It's not that I disliked nor disparaged Hautala for any reason. It's just that I've never been infused with desire to read any of his works. I've come across his name in many horror anthologies alongside the name of a man of whom I'm a very great fan, namely Joe R. Lansdale, but I've never taken the time to read anything of Rick's. And this is rather hypocritical of me, I suppose, in consideration of the fact that he was a Facebook friend of mine for a little bit now. That statement will either be a condemnation of the notion of a "Facebook friend" or a hint at the promise that might result from becoming "Facebook friend."

In any case, a week or so ago, I was overcome with guilt and slight desire to climb back atop my stationary bicycle and work off some calories. I also was in the throes of my annual search for new (or new to me) Hallowe'en grist for my intellectual and nostalgic mill. I have fond memories of Hallowe'en literature from my childhood, some of it which truly scared me, some of it that widened my world- and cultural view; in remembrance of those experiences, I make a nearly spiritual journey into Hallowe'en anthologies and monster (everyone once in a while, horror) stories.

I had thirty minutes, I had the Byron Preiss anthology called The Ultimate Zombie, and I had the inclination to look for the shortest, most interesting-looking piece first. Hence, I chose the short, short story, "Surprise."

Now, I'm going to be frank. I've read much better writing. And there's something about 3rd-person viewpoint rendered in the psychoanalytic distance of the psychologist-from-his-chair viewpoint - rendered, ironically in the language or pseudo-language of the psychoanalynd (the patient undergoing psychoanalysis; I believe I have the obsolete term correctly rendered) - that reeks of all things sophomoric in writing. And I won't mention the off-setting vulgarity of the language. But even though these thoughts were in the back of my mind while I was reading "Surprise," something in the forefront of my cerebellum kept me engaged with the story. I felt I was watching the hands of a practiced artisan as these words kept moving bit by bit toward a big picture yet to be revealed. And I was right.

This story revolutionizes the Zombie genre and does so long before the Zombie genre existed and before all Zombie enthusiasts had wiped their diapers and crawled out of the woodwork.

See, in Rick Hautala's "Surprise," the surprise is that we both do and don't get a zombie, here. We get the traditional zombie only in the last few lines of the story, before we come to the full realization that, without pandering to far-too-liberal sociological sophists, society's pressures and money-powered, domineering institutions can, indeed, turn us all into zombies. Going bankrupt (been there), losing one's house (haven't been there, thank god), destroying the sanctity of the most important relationships in one's life (sadly, been there), wallowing in self-pity (ah, yes) can all be the result of and the symptoms of trying everything you can to right the wrong of not being wiser than the serpent in one's financial affairs. Does that sound weak, effete, ridiculous? I dare you: come into my world and find out. If you don't think the system is stacked against you and that there are evil people out there with socially-sanctioned and legal ways of peeling your skin off, well, then you've been very, very damn lucky or, maybe, in cahoots with the ones peeling the skin off folks' eyeballs for an extra 10% market share.

What surprises me the most is just how prophetic Rick was in writing this story. I never had a reason to look at the publication date of this book (which I only bought a couple of years ago) until I was trying to find out just how contemporary this story was; I thought it could have been written last week.

Rick Hautala predicted this housing and investing collapse eighteen years before it happened. And that's damn powerful stuff. And that's what great writers do. And it scares the hell out of me, because, as many of us have, we're all hoping, in a similar vein, that Harry Harrison's prophecy for the apocalypse (transcribed and captured most popularly in the movie Soylent Green) won't come true. Looking at Africa (generational civil war and poverty) and China (black market organ harvesting), though, I'm not sure that it already hasn't. It's already true that, for all it's value, we might as well be ingesting the green pulpy stuff that the U.S. dollar represents; it would, perhaps, do us more good than spending it.

In any case (and, yes, I know: I'm ending this abruptly; but that's just because I've been awake since 3:00 A.M., and I'm played out), if you want a powerful, powerful story, pick up Rick Hautala's "Surprise." It resonates in a way that genre fiction just doesn't have the right to, meaning Hautala's worked his way out of any pigeon-hole an editor or publisher would want to put him in with this one. And as a reader of his fiction, I'm enriched by it. It's the first time I've felt enriched in a very long time.

Cause for Hope: Home Foreclosures & Rick Hautala’s “Surprise”

2011-10-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

(NOTE: This is my set-up for a post about Rick Hautala's short story, "Surprise." Read about the horrors, and a full post will follow soon.)

“The good news is that bank repossessions have been falling. Lenders repossessed 64,813 homes in August, a six-month low and a 37% decline . . . Meanwhile, foreclosure auctions were scheduled for 84,405 homes, the lowest number in more than three years” (Censky CNNMoney).

I’ll be %^^ed if I know what economists, money lenders, and politicians call a good thing.

But I sure as hell know that I’ll never even begin to acknowledge, much less believe, that 64,813 homes being repossessed and 84,405 being foreclosed on - and don’t believe the pseudo-jargon bullcrap of shading the truth, because let’s face it, it’s the people being foreclosed on, folks; it’s families being displaced, not the physical structure of the house; it’s people being uprooted and cast to the winds - well, I will never, ever, ever have the wool pulled over my eyes that would keep me from seeing that 64,813 repossessions and 84,405 foreclosures (in a single month, mind you) are two horribly awful things.

Those 64,813 homes being repossessed. 84,405 foreclosed on. That’s a low month. And some bull$%^& artist wants you to believe that that’s a good thing.

All it takes is for you to be one of the 149,218 to see the falsity of this. All it takes is for you to be the one researching these numbers because you’re wondering if you’re going on the chopping block in the months ahead (as you’re desperately scrambling to find a way out of it all) to know that a single foreclosure is a damnably awful thing to go through, to live through, and that you’re forced to live with the depressing foreknowledge that it’s undoubtedly going to affect you in a bad, bad way for a long, long time, well, that‘s all it takes for you to tell CNNMoney, Annalyn Censky, and every profit monger and politician who are spouting this %^^# as a reason for hope that you know they‘re absolutely full of $%^^#. You’ll feel that way unless you’re a skin flint or one of the many who have been beaten so long that you’re part of a new beat generation. If you’re a skin flint, you’ll be slavering over the new things you’ll be able to buy in the summer; if you’re part of the new beat generation, you’re probably too weak from being beaten down to want to beat someone else, although I hope that anger will soon arise and you‘ll feel a resurgence of determination to get something back.

Ironically, this idiot forgot that the title of her article was “Foreclosures Rise in August.”

Sometimes I think bad writers and editors should be punished with capital punishment. But I really want to go for politicians, profiteers, and county commissioners first.

Because ruining lives can actually be worse than snuffing them. And, trust me, I’m speaking from personal experience here. Going through these things can truly make you wish you didn’t have to see the next sunrise.

Works Cited

Censky, Annalyn. “Foreclosures Rise in August.” CNN Money. 15 September 2011.

Hautala, Rick. “Surprise.” The Ultimate Zombie. NY: Byron Preiss, 1993. 268-73.

Chesty Sanchez: Guerilla Seniorita

2011-10-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright Antarctic Press 1995)

The title for this post is probably the worst corruption of language anyone's ever seen or heard (other than anything George W. Bush, Jr. ever tried to say or write), but I think the title is still, nevertheless, apropos. Forgive me for my linguistic faux pas, and I think you'll see that Chesty Sanchez, if she's ever to have a life today, will have to necessarily do so with a very hottee guerilla mindset.

First, a bit of personal context. I completely missed the 90s. I don't mean that I recollect in tranquility. I mean that I was caught up in academic studies, earning a B.A. in English and then a Master's degree in the same, and the popular culture of the time was completely lost to me. In fact, to be honest, I would have disparaged it. I thought Popular Culture Studies were for children. But I don't feel that way today.

Currently, I'm catching up on the sensuality-crazed 90s, and, again, to be honest, I'm having a lot of fun. I mean, how can you, even today, not like a nun dressed in leather, dressed in bit-piece armor, and a loincloth? And why did Ben Dunn cave in and cover up the cleavage? Who said a nun can't be sexy? I know a guy who used to do construction work at a, well, I don't know what it was called - an anti-convent? a convent of consequence? a hospital? a maternity dorm? - for pregnant nuns. So someone, in fact, lots of someones, must have been sensuality-crazed long before these comics arrived. And what do we do? Like we always do, we cover it up. And that's my only argument for the pagan strain of humanity. They, as far as I know, never tried to cover up their humanity, especially not behind false sanctimonious notions. Because if, with your sanctity, you're just trying to cover up what you've done, there's not much spiritual about that. Lots of religion, though.

Anyway, this post is about Chesty. That'll be my digression for the day. And it served to let you know how I was led to Chesty: via Warrior Nun Areala.

So far, I've read none of Chesty Sanchez, and many will fault me for making a post in praise of her without having done the responsible thing.

But, let's be honest. If you saw Batman when Bob Kane first sketched him, how could you not realize that's a great character. It is of course true that bad narratives can ruin characters, but the potential I'm seeing in Chesty Sanchez, even for today's audience, is awesome and awe-inspiring. With the resurgence we've had in popular Mexican and Hispanic characters (Nacho Libre, Machete, Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, etc.) for Mexican, American, and Mexican-American audiences (and, obviously, it goes even further than that, and I hope no one's going to accuse me of shortsightedness or prejudice, here; I'm admittedly shortsighted at times, though I guard powerfully against prejudice - we're all susceptible to some degree or another; not acknowledging this only leads to denial and foolishness), well, Chesty Sanchez should be prime material for resurgence and resurrection. I'd love to see her teamed with other characters, would absolutely love to see her teamed up with some Dark Horse characters (Hellboy and Chesty . . . Ghost and Chesty . . . The Goon and Chesty - just think how she'd turn Frankie's world around . . . and, personally, I was in love with and thought Michelle Rodriguez - man, I love the way she thinks - stole the show in Machete, so how about a Luz and Chesty team-up?), but I'd more than anything like to see her have her own viable series. All of this would probably force Steven Ross to take out his creative toolbox and narrative drafting programs. But in a time in which many Americans are embracing Mexican-American culture on their terms more or less (I mean, Jack Black isn't exactly Mexican, folks, in case you couldn't tell, although he creates a darn memorable Mexican character, at least if you're asking me), Chesty Sanchez just might be the character to bridge ethnic, political, and georaphic cultural comic boundaries.

In fact, Chesty's already done that; she started life in Mangazine and was brought into the stories of Ben Dunn's flagship character; that's transcending lots of boundaries right there.

Anyway, I'm played out for today, I guess this is a plea to the universe and creators everywhere. I'd love to see a Chesty comic soundtrack (another media that was greatly revived in the 90s by comics creators and musicians reviving the total story immersion that was a part of everyday life in the 60s and 70s) by Brian Tyler or Track Team (Jeremy Zuckerman and Benjamin Wynn).

Anyway, Steve and Chesty, I'm pulling for you!

More Fuel For Maury Davis: H.E.R.B.I.E. of B.A.B.Y.L.O.N.

2011-10-14T14:47:00.001-07:00

Even though he murdered a woman by nearly decapitating her, Maury Davis, in a televised sermon last week, told his flock of sheep (I believe that's what Christians call them: the shepherd and his flock) that they should not watch shows with gay stuff (he meant this literally) in them and should also ban Nickelodeon. Now, personally, I support PBS over Nickelodeon any day. But not for any religious reasons. The shows are just smarter. But, anyway, here's more fuel for Davis's inane fire:

IT COULD JUST BE THE ROBOT OF THE BEAST!!!!!!!!!

(Image copyright Marvel Comics and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, 1978)

Gary A. Braunbeck Is Getting Cheated

2011-10-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

13 October 2011. Maybe it was something about the 13. Nevertheless, I felt lucky. Aldi’s bathroom wasn’t working (someone had stolen part of the pipe for, evidently, the copper), so I had to walk to Dollar General for nature’s necessities.

And that’s how I found Gary A. Braunbeck’s Mr. Hands for $1.25. And, boy, then did I feel really lucky. I’ve heard a lot about Braunbeck for years. I’m a big, big fan of Joe R. Lansdale, and they have shown up together in anthologies, Subterranean catalogs, and other crossways through the years. And now I’d get to read him.

And then I, in a fan boyish-stupidly way, high jacked Braunbeck’s Facebook wall and posted the following:

“You can’t do better than getting an early Hallowe’en fix Gary A. Braunbeck style at the Dollar General for $1.25! Gonna read me some Mr. Hands . . .”

I accompanied a cover of the book.

And then came Mr. Braunbeck’s reply. He said he was, at first, going to post “like” but couldn’t do so in honesty and good faith because, see, he hadn’t been paid for this Leisure Books edition. Now, to be fair to Mr. Braunbeck, he prefaced all this and said that he was happy as heck that I was reading his book, happy that he’d found a new reader, and was happy that I was happy. But the reality is that he is not paid for these editions (and similar versions that, evidently, show up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble); nor is he paid for e-Books like Kindle.

Now I don’t know how all this transpires, whether it’s signing a bad contract or some company legally cheating their stable of writers (which everyone in the United States of America, if not the world, is into these days; whether we’re talking teacher, firemen, policemen, writers . . . everyone who owns services of transmission and dissemination wants to cheat us all), the sad, sad fact is that neither I nor Mr. Braunbeck could approach this experience without that happily innocent experience of holy childishness. All because of company machinations.

In part, we live in a $#*!!% world thanks to corporate malfeasance. I’m truly p.o.-ed that those b____ds have now encroached upon my reading experiences.

To give the devil his due, I’ve never once purchased one of Mr. Braunbeck’s books. He lost a sale, but may very well have gained a return reader/purchaser (though I’ll never be able to afford what I really want: The Cedar Hill Stories vols. 1 & 2 and whatever else it takes to complete them; I’ve heard those are his master stroke). I wonder if this is similar to the disgruntled attitude I often have with my main employer; there are things they’ve done, especially recently, that have made my life difficult as well as affected my financial bottom line, too. And, for all the talk I hear about authors not doing well, the ones I’ve met who have made it to even a mid-list degree are doing pretty damn well. I’ve seen two of their homes. And, because I can’t separate money and the person, I left forever thinking less of them; that is, admittedly, an awfully petty and covetous and jealous way to be. But that’s the way I reacted. It’s the truth. I won’t deny it.

But to do our duty as readers, we shouldn’t support companies that are cheating their authors. As I told Mr. Braunbeck, it just goes to show that legal cheating beats outright stealing every time. And, damn them all, corporate America just keeps proving it to us over and over and continue to cheat us with impunity. Those with the power to stop them don’t do so. And we forget that we’re the ones with the power. Just look at the Middle East. Want to throw down a king? Just take to the streets. Want to defeat cheating publishers? Write them your 2,000 words and keep faxing it to them, tweeting your 150 or so characters (whatever it is), find their phone numbers and text them and call them and leave them messages saying how much you don’t like writers getting cheated.

Seriously. I dare you.

Quote Of The Day

2011-09-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

"[A]ctually, the planet is going to
be fine as soon as the people get off" (109)

- A. R. Ammons

Work Cited

Ammons, A. R. Garbage. NY: Norton, 1993.

Almost Forty

2011-09-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

I think I'm losing my mind. Facing forty in a couple of days reeks of too much bone powder, liver dust, knee leakage, and intestinal problems extraordinaire.

Pulling out my and my wife's marriage picture (we weren't rich enough to pay someone and, honestly, wouldn't have done so anyway; my wife is more than an accomplished photographer and the hiring of one would have been at least a double insult) proves I haven't aged gracefully. I like both myself then and now, but the svelte, attractive, dashing, literate man has turned into the apotheosis of porcine steadfastness. That other guy, frankly, was just too much work.

Well, work of another sort. Here's an eidolon dropped on me by a wise professor: "Pay me now or pay me later." That was his motto for his entire worldview and vision for the greater universe at large. Back then, I worked hard to be literate, and, truthfully, I was shockingly so. I'm very proud of that young man. Now, I work hard to be ugly. You don't know how many hours I put in - in the gym - to look this bad. Talk about irony.

In any case, it caused me to pull out a book I haven't pulled out in a long time: A. R. Ammons's Garbage, a book I found in the discount bin at the now non-existent Davis-Kidd bookstore (another damning example of what happens when corporate entities "take over," although it usually means "taking straight to ruination" - the fast road to hell, oblivion, and the smoking dust of worthlessness thankfully and finally cremated), and, well, back then I perfectly understood Ammons's ideas about spiritual poverty in the modern world, symbolically rendered as soy beans (which I immediately, upon his advice and logic, began eating; the most protein per pound and on the cheap, at that); now, thanks to the rise in prices of most every damn thing, I'm just about in the same financial shape, though it's more ham and turkey sandwiches ad nauseum these days.

Anyway, pray for me, send me well wishes, or throw things at me - so that it will remind me what my task in old age will be: showing you that if I just keep hitting the gym that I can still beat your sorry @$$ no matter what our respective ages are; and I dare you $%%^@@!@#%s to break into my house thinking it's going to be an easy haul - as I turn 40.

Mr. Digressius Just Learned . . .

2011-08-21T17:14:00.001-07:00

Jose Saramago's grand progenitors built a pig sty for a home.

Jose Saramago's progenitors grew up in that pig sty; it was what they called home.

Jose Saramago's grand progenitors lived and their progeny grew up in a pig sty where the people fell asleep next to piglets brought indoors for the winter.

And Jose Saramago, through his progenitors and moving forever forward in time, has brought condemnation upon our world of bulleted and jacketed and pinstriped misanthropes who partake in a new part of sly, snide evil that wraps itself in luxury.

And because of this, I am angrily and fiercely prideful in my hope of what our descendants may bring.

Amazing Serendipity: Prefatory Remarks

2011-07-17T18:50:00.001-07:00

There are honestly times in which I think what you spend a part of your life doing, and I mean in times past, has a way of creating some sort of a strange alchemy that continues to find its way into different times, places, phases of the present and future. And you don’t have to get too metaphysical with this; Mikhail Bakhtin talked about how we are set into a kind of set of grooves (the image I had reading it was a long-play record, though I know that’s not what he intended) that cause us to move in certain directions and come back to moments of significance. I don’t believe in a lot of things, especially people who completely relate every event in their life to a manifestation of religious forces. I call that machination. However, if you substitute spiritual for religious in that statement, I’m still not sure I agree with it. Totality - of any sort - isn’t far from totalitarian; interpreting all things that happen to you as a sign of some spiritual, religious force or a set of psychological categories or even as a sign that you are formed by a collection of actions that you’ve taken throughout your growth up to that point, well, all of those things can become very stifling, debilitating, desiccative. That’s why I’ve either moved beyond them or stopped trusting them. I could be mistaken; perhaps I still need those things, but they always brings lots more trouble than they’re worth for me, myself, personally. In spite of my best intentions, I laughed watching someone explaining sigils, which might just, in fact, be cogent ways toward finding personal power and securing some bit of control over one’s journey in life. So I’m fascinated, since reading was my first intellectual joy in life (I had assuredly experienced joy if not rapture before then), when texts I’m reading seem to be chosen by something outside myself or seem to speak one upon the other in ways I couldn’t have predicted. In other words, I would never have chosen the texts that meld this way, but work wonderfully together they do, nonetheless.

For me, it usually always starts with poetry.

Back From Harry Potter

2011-07-15T17:40:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt, Harry Potter (the first book and all those that followed) is the most important popular genre novel of at least the last decade; it is going to fight for the top spot, that is, most important popular genre novel ever.

And the films were great fun with a lot of moral questioning thrown in.

We know what it's like to be brave again in the face of death thanks, in large part, to J. K. Rowling books and the films they generated. We haven't had this kind of massive focus on serious issues that have captured the public imagination that Harry Potter has caused.

(Okay, my baby daughter wants to type, so I'm cutting this short. More later.)

Film was darn good; highly recommended; we all cried but were happy.

Geoff Johns Just Killed Mogo

2011-07-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright DC Comics 1985)

(Well, he did it a couple of months ago. And it still feels like it just happened. And it's still shocking. And I'm still mad about it.)

Mogo was one of the coolest, completely unique creations in the Green Lantern universe, created by one of the coolest, most unique, and important writers we have, namely Alan Moore. (Dave Gibbons supposedly had something to do with it, too. But when given the description of something like "planet with a big stripe and a green lantern symbol in the middle of it," how much credit can you take for it?)

So, Geoff Johns, you suck. I'm not even going to put your name on as a label for this post. Because you just killed Mogo. And you suck.

That's all I'm saying today.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words: Joe and Karen Lansdale

2011-07-13T10:54:00.001-07:00

(Image copyright The Damned Interviews 2011)

A lot of people are talking about marriage being an outdated institution. Ironically, gay rights activists seem to be the most vocal and dogged proponents of its continuance, albeit, perhaps, through change or stretching a definition beyond usefulness. I'm not arguing either side, just showing that I know the issues and acknowledging that readers will probably have one view or the other regarding it; in other words, I'm saying you've got the right to. And Joe Lansdale has one of the coolest gay characters in contemporary literature; of course, I'm talking about Leonard Pine.

Oh, wait, I'm not. What I'm really talking about is the strength of Joe and Karen Lansdale's matrimonial pact and how it begs the question that marriage is outdated or doesn't last or isn't what it used to be or all the other cynical mishmash that people say when divulging upon the subject. This picture, taken and published on The Damned Interview's blogspot for 31 March 2011 (which I just read today; I seem to get to everything late) says it all.

See, Karen sits patiently, quietly, unassumingly in the background of that photo. It's kind of like Chewbacca taking up the rear. I bet you couldn't beat your way through, and I bet it would take the same amount of wasted effort in your attempt to beat your path through, either Chewy or Karen Lansdale with a stick, a blaster, or a pipe wrench if you were trying to get to what they were protecting.

If there's a contemporary photo that should represent modern relationships, this is it. Because there's a powder keg of power in the background of that photo.

If you don't believe me, ask Joe hisownself. He'll tell you just like he's told his readers in various introductions and autobiographical snippets through the years. Karen made it possible for him to write and for us to have the great Lansdale oeuvre that we all enjoy.

Without her, it wouldn't have been possible.

Joe, Karen better be treated damn well on the anniversary and Mother's Day, know what I'm saying.

In closing, here's the comment I left the folks at The Damned Interviews:

"You know what I like about this interview? I like the picture, because it has Karen Lansdale, Joe's wife, waiting patiently in the background as if she weren't the bedrock upon which Joe was allowed the freedom to build his career. And he'll tell you so, too. You go, Karen. I think you've just become one my inspirational favorites."

Work Cited

Anonymous. "Author Joe Lansdale." http://www.thedamnedinterviews.com/2011/03/author-joe-r-lansdale-2/

Today I Read: "Snaked" by Clifford Meth

2011-07-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

Clifford Meth's "Snaked" is pretty good reading if you've got the stomach for it. It's not going to be nominated for a Pulitzer or cause the National Critics Book Circle folks to be evaluating his oeuvre anytime soon, but it doesn't mean that Clifford Meth doesn't have any less heart than anyone else at that rank. Because Meth isn't trying to make it to the big leagues. He's already got his spot, thank you. I just came to his work late. He's been occupying that space for a stretch of time now.

I still can't figure out exactly what it is that causes me to like Meth's work. It's honestly something intangible. There's a persona that comes across the entirety of his work that can't be reduced to the mere collection of words between covers, and it's not exactly his writing style that wins me over. In some unexplainable way, you read this stuff and know that, take him or leave him, this guy is being straight up with you. Maybe that's it. Clifford Meth has a straight forwardness that I appreciate.

He also takes potshots at Republicans in "Snaked," which I don't mind. I used to think Democrats were going to help things, but now, unfortunately, it looks like both sides are caught in a limp and lame stalemate that looks like it's going to result in these superpowered rich guys agreeing to borrow more money from China or some such that will lead to our destruction based on their mutual agreement. Anyway, I hate talking about politics now. But it's apropos. I think Meth is commenting on just how far some idiot politicians are willing to go even if it results in hypocrisy, causes them to compromise their morals (do they even have them anymore?), etc.

There's a great character that's so good that, even though he's a killer and prisoner, well, I felt bad for him when his author killed him off. I hope we get more Nick stories. This could be Meth's answer to Hemingway's Nick.

Anyway, it's nearly one in the morning, and I'm played out.

If you want a good story, you could do a lot, lot worse than "Snaked."

(And don't ask me about the comic. I'm getting to it, okay? It's on order.)

The American Spirit?

2011-07-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

It strikes me that on the 4th of July, though I was waking up from a daze brought on by naproxen and cyclobenzaprine, prescribed because I threw my back out, I nevertheless went to the gym to work out, a very modified and low-weight routine that still was an exercise in maintaining the indomitable bit of me. It has always been in moments of mundane crisis that I prove myself. Working out while hurt, buoyed by medicine, I can say that I didn’t let the injury beat me totally. Somehow I extrapolate this metaphorically to America’s beginnings as a nation.

Injured, the people who grew to be so much more than settlers, took a lease out on power and paid it forward for succeeding generations to mostly squander. I still find hope in and think the American spirit is simply a mixture of virtue and the determination to be indomitable. We can argue all day about what virtuousness means, but you know it when you see it. And we definitely see its absence in most of America today. Success at any cost has replaced maintaining a larger social order by attaining to personal excellence for both your own and others’ sake. Now everyone is in competition. Geoffrey Wolfe made a statement over thirty years ago that is much more truthful today than when he first wrote it:

“Everyone wants more of the less that is left, or else he does not want any of it enough” (xxi).

In many ways, we don’t want anything enough. Because if we wanted, let’s say, profit enough, we would see the truth that profit that ends with oneself while robbing others of theirs simply isn’t profit. It’s stealing. Tricking someone into terms and conditions or taking advantage of a purchaser’s lack of experience has, indeed, made many American companies and their worldwide offshoots extremely profitable. Yet it has ruined us, and the aftershocks are still quite painful. I believe that the American spirit, were we ever to tap into it would be more symbolized by the soldier who gives his life attacking a machine gun battery so that his brothers in arms and sisters in compassion will have a chance to survive that battle and another day. It secures a glorious momentary hope for the future that may just blossom into its lived-out realization. And then there is gratefulness and thankfulness. Most people don’t have a drive to achieve, they have a drive to earn, a spur to their greed, a spear stuck in their side that makes them wanton for blood. We have lost the ideal, we have lost a sense of awe, and we spurn nostalgia rather than embrace it. By nostalgia, I don’t mean a weak love of all things Pollyanna. By nostalgia, I mean the passionate and spiritual participation in a notion that makes one, upon reflection, feel part of a grand, universal plan resulting in an ever-expanding sense of love and betterment for yourself as well as others.

Work Cited

Wolfe, Geoffrey. "Introduction." The Edward Hoagland Reader. NY: Random House, 1979.

Too Many People With Gilded Hammers

2011-07-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

There's an old instructive (and often instructional) chestnut of Abraham Maslow's that I was reminded of the other day:

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail."

That's my paraphrase. I hope I have it right. But I went to an event in an uppercrust part of town tonight where my full beard and bulky build garnered lots of glad-we're-not-like-him looks, and, while I was urinating and, because my son, deities bless him, never stops talking (like, ever), I was relating a quote from Fareed Zakaria, the gist of which was that America has some options in solving its debt that places like Greece don't. He was saying that America was lucky. One of the things he said was that if Congress simply doesn't act and thereby doesn't renew the Bush-era tax cuts, a significant portion of the debt will be paid over a two-year period or so.

Well, another guy, the one, of course, urinating in the stall next to me, the one wearing a very expensive golf shirt, the guy with a white, immaculately groomed Friar Tuck haircut, the guy who was old but thin and tan and made for better urinals than the ones I'll be seeing in my life, well, he disagreed saying, "That's not true. That's Deomcratic bull[malarky]."

See, that guy's a wielder of a gilded hammer.

Once the gold's chipped, you're going to see the metal underneath, the metal that was forged from hard work-a-day workers whose pensions he's ripped off.

It makes me want to rip off his hammer.

I could probably pay off my mortgage with it and get my kids through college debt-free, to boot.

A Hoarse and Harsh Melody

2011-06-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

Here I am, nearly forty years old, reading a book written for children and becoming enamored of it. Reading, in turn, Bill Willingham and Joseph Brodsky. Stopping to eat food I don’t really need, the act of gluttony punctuated, as it is in a way that I couldn’t resist its viewing which I surely would have had I foreknowledge that such nonsense was coming my way, by a commercial for a reality show called Love in the Wild. I think back to a movie of my childhood, Time Bandits, (released, I believe, thirty or so years ago) in which the main protagonist’s parents sit watching a show where people are terrorized and everyone laughs. The child looks at his parents and the watcher (in this case, myself as a young boy) realizes the boy's parents are like the defunct people ruled by the evil tyrant attempting to control the universe. It sounds laughable, but it seems the media of our world is, indeed, quite tyrannical. The emotionless vacuity that we are encouraged to, ironically, give ourselves wholeheartedly to is no different, it seems, than what a participant in that soul-ravaging media predicted for us with ease generations ago. Can we find a place to slip into and thereby save ourselves? Or did that film present such possibilities with the doubled-edged sword of escapist fantasy? To do that to children . . .

I am at a loss for meaning. I am at a loss for a sense that each day will burgeon into something. I don’t understand any longer how to make my life fruitful. I could pray, though it strikes me that the crickets are outside my window tonight. In a few poignant moments that I think have had great force catalytically, the crickets were always those moments’ chorus. They are my personal equivalent of the Fates or something even more ancient. And this summer is not nearly as black as the last. And yet the crickets chirp.

Did Horace, I wonder, spend his time listening to the rants of poets or dramatists who pandered to a popular audience? And did he actually, in spite of himself, enjoy some of it? Did he find himself joining in? Was he envious of the success of those performers who had, undoubtedly, more cheers than his words ever garnered? I wonder. And did he walk toward home realizing he’d just been robbed of a bit of his soul, of his life’s purpose?

Because each day is now, in all honesty, a burden. I seek emptiness. I want to cull the influences that infringe upon my peace of mind. We have so little momentary fragments of the entire whole of allotted contemplative opportunities. The times in which I don’t have them run off like ticker-tape. I resent each moment someone asks me to do something; my chance for reflection is, once again, gone, eclipsed, stillborn, snuffed.

Everything attacks me.

And I’m not sure what to use for my defense.

Children Have No Rights: Judicial Travesty

2011-06-22T19:34:00.000-07:00

Nothing angers me more nor shows the current state of our judicial system than two stories in the news.

James Ray is found guilty of negligent homicide for people dying in a sweat lodge spiritual retreat.

But a mother who let an adult boyfriend, a boyfriend who supposedly quickly went inside to get a drink of water, supervise her 18-month-old baby while the baby and five other children played next to a creek. The child died Sunday night. Why is this not negligent homicide? This baby would still be alive today had either adult been responsible and kept their eyes on a child playing next to water. An 18-month-old child cannot defend themselves, cannot protect themselves, cannot ask for help, and rarely will even know when they're in danger. A mother's and an adult's negligence killed this child. Again, this child would be happy, healthy, and alive today had either adult done what they were supposed, if they had taken care of, had been careful (and all that that word implies) with that child.

There have been advocates fighting for children's rights for years now, angry that children have no voice. The divergence of these cases shows it to be painfully true.

Out of the Mouth of Babes

2011-06-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

My daughter told me this morning:

"Be careful when you read your book, Daddy."

And that's true, because you never know how a book will affect you.

Ants of the Salmonella Apocalypse

2011-06-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

Many people don't understand how I can receive an ad in the mail or a salesperson on my doorstep and go absolutely bat@#*& and rabid, at that. But I do. I've had two moments of outright glory: 1) having a guy tell me (after I asked him to leave if he was selling something) that he was selling nothing but charm and charisma, and seeing him, within the three seconds I counted down for him, running down the hill that leads into our subdivision, hands in the air, yelling, "I'm just trying to sell something! I'm just trying to sell something!" 2) Telling a punk supposedly selling magazines (for a local high school he couldn't remember the name of) in no uncertain terms to get off my porch, to which he responded with a comment about male genitalia; I lept three steps to the ground and told him to prove me one, and he backed carefully up and picked up his pace when I kept following him until he got onto my neighbors' porch, at which point I realized I had no shoes on, and he realized it was best for him to ring the doorbell quickly to get someone else on the porch in case I made good on my promise to prove just how humorous he was going to sound while I was grinding his face in the asphalt; I think I said something about a genitalia face burger, but I never know what I say nor do I remember well what happens when I go in these rabid fits over salespeople. So that's probably not quite right. And I'm not suggesting that you do these things. You shouldn't. You also shouldn't become a salesperson nor visit my neighborhood should you do so anyway. There's nothing more demeaning than having to earn the money for your daily bread by disrupting the casual happiness of folks' daily lives.

And I don't know much about ants. What I know about ants is only what I've read - very little - of E. O. Wilson. I once sent a letter to E. O. Wilson with my idea about what I think is lacking in his ant research: proof that ants are the strongest things on earth. See, I've watched ants. And I've seen them carry things that seem, at first glance and without truly scientific observational tendencies, to be exponentially much bigger than they are. This led me to my belief that, comparatively, ants would far outperform human powerlifters. Considering an ant's weight and what it can carry, I think the typical ant, microgram for microgram, just might be the strongest thing on the planet. Other than watching ants scurry out of the anthills I've kicked over as a kid or watching them literally infest a microwave in a building (which immediately and not even bothering for permission, I took to a dumpster and allowed it to dive its way to a better and more apropos existence) or wondering about the anomaly (though for E. O. Wilson, with his voluminous knowledge of ants, it might not be) of why ants always quickly take away fingernails as if they're delicacies, . . . well, other than all this, my knowledge of ants is kind of minimal.

My experience with marketing and American business, though, is not. To be savvy and not lose all your money in the United States of America, you have to be very weary, tenacious, and lasting. It infuriated me that I had to make a phone call to opt out of a charge on one of my credit cards a few years back; that call cost me an hour of my life that was spent in a futile experiment in language development that, me being me, resulted in my teaching unsavory English to an Indian, at which point, magically, the Other quickly understood that I did not want to buy anything additional for no obvious reason and I was notifying them of such because I had to do this or be charged for . . . what? . . . not calling them, I suppose? . . . were I not to go through this, well, we'll just call it nonsense now. What's past has passed.

Anyway, I'm a child of the 80s. I did have the happy fortune of being consciously aware of the world during the Bicentennial, with all of its red, white, and blue craziness. I got to see my father, sporting a black mustache in the day, dress up like George Washington. Yes, it was almost as strange as it sounds. Okay, it was stranger, actually, because no one seemed to mind. They accepted George Washington with a black mustache. What I'm getting at is that it was my generation, those whose youth was tinged with Americana but whose adolescence was lived in the 80s, who had a deluge of marketing schemes and scams flowing like headwaves - and with a lot of power behind them - their way. I consider myself a fetishist to this day. And I'm not talking about anything sordid. It's just that, having a predisposition to be a perfectionist, when all these marketing ruses arose, I naturally, I think, became a completist. If there were 1,000 versions of Han Solo figures, well, I needed them all to gain a full picture of Han Solo as a character; each toy revealed something different about who he was (his personality) what he did (fought in forest climes; fought in arctic climes; fought in water-dominated geographies; you know, Han Solo Forest Gear, Han Solo Bespin Dress, Han Solo Hoth Climate Gear - yeah, yeah, I know I'm not getting the names right; all boxes are long thrown away, and I'm not knowledgeable anymore of the names, and I'll be darned if I'm actually going to look them up), where he went, and what weapons he chose for every outing, etc. I'm still this way today. Recently, I swear to you that I had a mystical experience: all the original Watchmen items that I never thought I could afford all magically came my way, beginning with my purchasing the Watchmen watch (you know, the smiley face with the bloodstain, the watch with the neon green hands, the watch that was underproduced because, prior to its release, someone thought, this is a crazy idea and a fairly steep price, and it's, like, 1988, and only so many people are going to be able to afford a grandiose piece of comicbook-themed plastic priced at $25) and ending with my receiving the original Watchmen buttons for a $2.99 beginning bid plus shipping when all the bidding power I had left, thanks to a depleted account, was about $15; that eBay docket only had nine total views, seven of them my own. Which means: after all the interest garnered by the movie (at which point you couldn't purchase any Watchmen item without mortgaging the damn thing), people have lost interest and aren't, well, watching anymore. And people foolishly believe Watchmen is old news and objects of mystical desire, objects that prove the charge levelled against me by my holy half-shadow self that I'm following pagan practices, begin to surface again for universal pilgrims like me.

Anyway, where in the world am I going with all this? How is all of this connected? Why all the digressions.? (Because, obviously, I'm called Mr. Digressius and also because the circuitous route can be a lot more fun, informative, and ultimately more life-altering than the direct approach.)

Terminix sent me an ad, mailed it to my house, in fact (think of the cost of the paper, postage, etc., especially considering that I'm already their customer for termite and other coverage and that has never lapsed, defeating one premise of sending me the letter). It says:

"Ants are not just annoying, they can be a health threat. They can expose your family to diseases like strep, staph and Salmonella. And they may have already infiltrated your home. Bugs like cockroaches, ants and spiders aren't just pests. They're monsters. So you were smart to trust your pest control to Terminix in the past, and it would be wise to resume your protection now," etc.

It also has the following quote on the back (notice how the word "ants" is in brackets, which makes me very suspicious that this quote may, in all actuality, not be referring to ants at all):

"Salmonella

'[Ants] have been suspected to be carriers of more than a dozen pathogenic bacteria including Staphylococcus, Salmonella, Pseudomonas and Clostridium.'

- Texas A&M University
House-Infesting Ants and Their Management"

Now, the place I live, see, we're not all that educated. I mean, just stringing those words together sounds scary, but, hey, we're not bothered by all that stuff being in the processed foods that we eat every meal, so why do you think we'd be scared of it being in ants? They've probably just been snacking on our snacks; that's called symbiosis. Every species deserves their relative Cheezits or whatever. That's it; they're just passing the Cheezits back to us. Don't worry. More Salmonella problems arose from the deregulation (or lack of regulation enforcement: "Oh, oops, this first syringe's got some Salmonella in it; let's just get a sample of the far edge of this sample - like, say, in another bucket altogether - and see if we can't make this all come out right") of American peanut butter factories than ants' eating our junkfood. And Staph? You're more likely to get Staph if you're an American veteran in a Veteran's Hospital or local high school football player or wrestler putting on that non-washable gear (pads and such) and then getting cut at practice.

And, wait a minute, isn't Clostridium an STD? That's what it sounds like to this Southerner. So, okay, that one you might want to worry about. An ant with Clostridium eating on your food might not be a good thing.

See, ants have been around many more centuries than we have. If ants could pass along that much Salmonella, they would have gotten: George Washington, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, ah, heck, Cleopatra, probably. I bet Jesus touched ants.

So what infuriates me is that Terminix evidently thinks little of ants and believes that most Americans reading this are going to be dumb enough to 1) read this, 2) get scared by it, and 3) pick up the phone, fearing salmonella-carrying ants of the apocalypse, and pay anything at all for protection.

Children of the 80s know better. Nukes didn't get us. Ants surely won't.

From The Hmmmm . . . Department

2011-06-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

(This and images hereafter copyright Gold Key Comics / Western Publishing Co., Inc. 1972)

I don't know why, but this picture makes me think of how there are more weddings in June than any other month. And before any of you get sordid ideas, this comic, from Gold Key's Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, is referring to a man who is shipwrecked on an island and, unfortunately, has a spell cast on him that makes him literally carry this thing on his back forever. Geez, I've got lots of things I could say, but I'm not. I'm going to be good. I will say, though, that I wish Sam Kinison were still alive so I could send this to him; he would love this. Anyway, just so you know, some things never end, even if you wish they did; just like in all good comics, there's a lesson for everyone, here, see:

Beware, children. Be very, very 'ware.

Work Cited

Anonymous. "Monster On My Back." Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery. No. 39 (Feb). Poughkeepie, NY: Gold Key / Western Publishing Co., 1972.

Green Lantern: Celluloid (Digital Now?) Success

2011-06-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright DC Comics and Warner Bros. 2011)

I've just returned from the film, and I have to say that it was a success. The special effects were awesome, and I have a whole new respect for Abin Sur; in just a few minutes' of the film's opening this guy absolutely kicks @## and proves himself an absolutely hardcore soldier. Unreal. The story is great, the acting is great. There are a few silly parts, mostly between Hal and his best friend and between Hal and Carol. I don't want throw any spoilers out for people who haven't seen it, so I'll just say that it's worth spending the money to see this one on the big screen of big screens. Even with the disappointments I register below, I'd highly, highly recommend seeing the film. The major theme is overcoming fear through the power of will. We face that many times in life, so it's a great theme to be discussing. That's something lots of people could actually take with them from the film. Oh, and, as always, make sure you're not one of the yahoos who gets up and leaves as soon as the credits start. I must not live in the most intelligent part of the world because 85% of the people left and missed a very poignant scene.

My only disappointment: Kilowog. (WARNING: ONE SPOILER AHEAD.) As much as I like Michael Clarke Duncan as an actor, his voice just wasn't right. He honestly didn't even sound intimidating. And Hal Jordan beats him down two minutes into training. That's absolute rubbish. Kilowog is my favorite Lantern; he decorates my room in several places, so this wasn't good for me. Ah, well.

(WARNING: MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD.) There's one thing they missed, too. There are pictures on the internet of Kilowog looking annoyed by a Lantern pest, the Lantern who is an insectoid. There's a scene where Hal attempts to save Carol by giving the villain his ring. Completely illogically, he's still able to control it. It would have been so much more awesome if Hal said, "Well I lied, too" and little Bzzd, unbeknownst to be in Jordan's collar or some such, blasts the crap out of the evildoer. That would have been cool. Major opportunity missed.

Bellying Up: Poets, Metaphors, and Such

2011-06-17T05:57:00.000-07:00

I suppose many poets have come upon the same or very similar metaphors, and it probably says more about myself than either David Rivard or Alan Dugan that Rivard’s metaphor of “a curtain bellying like a pregnant cloud” (found in the poem, “Plural Happiness,” a poem that was sent to my grateful email account by the Academy of American Poets, aka Poets.org, as part of the Poem-A-Day program) immediately brought to mind Alan Dugan’s similar line “The curtains belly in the waking room” (from his poem, “Landfall”). People have told me that I’m far too accusatory of late; in fact, one person said that I was “68” (which I’m not, though I hope to be, I suppose, someday, as long as I’m not 68 and suffering a malady or a cocktail of illnesses) and, ah, well, here’s the statement in all its glory:

“Sounds to me like you're more the busy body argumentative fool . . . your 68 yrs old.....Go figure! Now that's what I call OLD! now add bitter, resentful, senile and overly critical. In all your years, it's sad you haven't learned the basic rules of wisdom (Love your neighbor as yourself) or respect toward others. Take my advice and go sell crazy somewhere else, nobody's buying here.”

Nobody’s buying crazy? I see people buying crazy every day. Why else do we open the internet page or watch daytime television or Entertainment Tonight? Anyway, I’ve done bad stuff lately and need to be very careful of my karma. So I’m not going to make any cynical observations regarding David Rivard or this metaphor’s arising in his poem. I suppose if one looks at windows enough and one were to see one filled with wind, well, even I might think of it as a belly, though it would require a lot of talent out of me that I don‘t have right now and might even require some rather large levels of intellectual growth. As to the poems: Neither Dugan nor Rivard leave the image at that, though. Dugan follows his with these masterful lines:

“Sails are round with holding, horned at top, / and net a blue bull in the wind: the day. / They drag the blunt hulls of my heels awake / and outrigged by myself through morning seas. / If I do land, let breakfast harbor me” (12).

And Rivard’s poem goes on to speak to unexpected happiness, even in reflection of past events, the passing of years, the passing of those aforesaid events, and, perhaps, a nice vacation; I’m from the South and, further, from the Southern sector, evidently, that has no idea what “Gros Vent” is or means; but it sounds like a vacation. I have had the experience of having children that succeed admirably in spite of the genetics I sent their way, so I can fully appreciate this line: “in the riddle of our recessive genes once n a while / something surprising waits for anybody out & about.” And sometimes I have found it to be true that “the best happiness is always accidental,” though I’m not sure I truly believe the “accidental” part; part of my daily routines, like predictable sweet tea and pork rinds and jiggling the pig (something only Tennesseans have to do; we still raise them things), make me quite happy.

So I’m glad to see that metaphors don’t end. Just as I’m glad to see this metaphor extending from higher culture to popular culture (this metaphor is both in the book and the animated version of the following citation, so it's had a shelf-life of at least twenty years):

“I thought of my family: vulnerable, unsuspecting . . . never dreaming that damnation bore down upon them, sails pregnant with a pirate wind, a necklace of heads about its prow” (Moore 18).

That’s what I call one to end on.

Works Cited

Dugan, Alan. “Landfall.” Poems Seven. NY: Seven Stories P, 2001. 12.

Moore, Alan. Watchmen. Illus. Dave Gibbons. NY: DC Comics, 1987.

G-d's Been Good To Me - I Hope: The Watchmen Watch

2011-06-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

Kurt Busiek is a trouper. I recently read his autobiographical sketch on his website, and he says that at fourteen, when everyone else was getting out of comics, he was just really getting into them, meaning, he was getting into them in a ramped-up way he never had before. This makes me feel slightly guilty. Like I missed an opportunity or wasn't true to myself somehow or, perhaps, part of my integrity was chipped off. See, at fourteen, I was getting into literature in ways I never had before, so my interests veered off from comics. This was after, though, I saw my favorite comic, The Uncanny X-Men go from Dave Cockrum's otherworldly brilliance to John Byrne's masterful comics-cum-renaissance-echelon art to a cartoony, nearly juvenile style of art work that just didn't work for me. Brent Anderson's pencilling kept the good stuff nearly alive - and I probably would have stayed had he stayed - but by the time Paul Smith's artwork was showing up in the title, I left.

Two men, one writer and one writer/illustrator (and, magically, I was later to learn that there was a John Byrne connection, here, too) brought me back to comics: Mike Mignola and Alan Moore.

I was taken with Mignola's art. I also liked the quintessential good-guy-demon, Hellboy. He had a kind of humanity that is now, ironically, almost not found in humans anymore. Were it left to Mignola alone, though, I would have stopped with Hellboy and probably not gone much further.

Alan Moore revolutionized my world. I was sixteen in 1987 and wasn't reading any comics anymore. I had gotten on a religious and literary bent, was very serious about the world. And so I missed Alan Moore's comics in their own time. Or, perhaps, there's a lesson there to. Perhaps I'm the litmus test that proves, if any proof were needed, that Moore's comics are, indeed, timeless. I read Watchmen for the first time nearly twenty years after its initial publication. There are probably a lot of folks like me who were astounded by Moore's writing many years after they were first penned and said, "Wow. Why weren't comics like these around when I was a kid?" And then, in a timewarp's way that Moore would appreciate, you realize, well, they were.

Anyway, I'm kind of played out on this right now and feeling stupidly proud of an insight that I've had (found here: http://mrdigressius.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-i-just-realized-watchmen.html) - that I (like a child who's never had much of an insight and wants to claim, therefore, that it's the world's best) am really making and enjoying too much of -, so, I suppose, I'll warp, I mean, wrap things up.

G-d's been good to me. At least, I hope it's G-d. Now that I do, indeed, love Watchmen and all things related and have weathered the storm of the movie (and one of the things that was rather interesting about reading Watchmen for the first time several years before the movie was made is that I was in the same position many of its indigenous readers were when Watchmen was first talking about being optioned; the same movie-or-no-movie debate was hashed out many years ago and then arose again not too long after I first read the book; it was a living anachronism, a zombie anachronism, if you will) and am still looking for things while others have stopped after the media storm, some things are surfacing and coming my way, for which, I am very, very appreciative. I never thought I would have this, and I'm wondering if I should actually break the package and wear it or not:

(Image copyright DC Comics 1987)

What I Just Realized: Watchmen

2011-06-12T22:53:00.001-07:00

It's not too hard to figure out what the rest of this cover implies, though I never got it, for some reason, until just now:

(Image copyright DC Comics 1987)

The "F" is gone from "FALL OUT," leaving "ALL OUT"; the "S" might as well be gone from "SHELTER," leaving "HELTER"; being a child of the 60s or its aftermath or even if you're a Beatles fan, it's not hard to supply the rest, and there you have it, folks:

ALL OUT HELTER SKELTER.

That resonates with so many things in the comic, especially as it relates to splitting the atom and the possibility of acutally being destroyed in a nuclear war. It was a very real fear of my early childhood on up to adolescence. The arms race was truly nutty and truly scary, like 'ol Charlie himself.

What I've Realized

2011-06-12T17:33:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I was a . . . if not troubled, then neurotic adolescent (sometimes neuroses are brought on by having known very good people, expecting more to be out there, and then seeing a world very much more evil than one ever could have expected; the range of possibilities one can find in the world is very much the polar extremes of what one has experienced; thus, it can be a personally true but very inaccurate - and, thereby, useful or even dangerous - gradation of potentialities; all to say, sometimes we should blame very much the world instead of the neurotic). Somehow music, particularly hard rock and heavy metal (then the difference in terms was important; now they seem to me, at least, foolishly interchangeable; metal was the Scorpions at their shreddingest; AC/DC was - and still is - quintessential hard rock) was comforting, inspirational, and, believe it or not, life-sustaining.

But there was one band I just couldn't quite appreciate, because Rob Halford had a whining, petulant voice. I can remember stealing money to see Kick Axe at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee and then, ironically, having everything I bought stolen from me that night. Anyway, I was there to see Kick Axe who produced one of the best metal albums ever: Vices. It ranks with anyone's best. Many people looked down on me when I told them I wasn't there to see Judas Priest; in fact, had I not been with other people, I probably would have left after seeing Kick Axe. The headliner's music, frankly, was overlaid by a whiner singing the lyrics. I know I'm speaking blasphemy for a lot of people. I think Halford became better with age, better when his pretty boy arrogance was tempered with life experience.

I also wasn't impressed with Ripper Owens when I first heard him. He was awful, soul-less, a living cliche who thought by doing cliche for cliche's sake that he was somehow making a statement. He was simply living an old and now mundane rock and roll dream.

And then I bought Live in London and was astonished. It remains one of the best heavy metal live albums ever.

(Image copyright its respective owner and Judas Priest, I guess)

Sunday Post

2011-06-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

Complete post to follow soon.

The Follicles of Dr. Michael Dunne: Wooing Intelligence To This Earthly Realm

2011-06-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

Dr. Michael Dunne had an intellect powered by a literary knowledge-based 426 hemi. And it’s a hell of a lot better than what most newer, sleeker looking, mass-produced heads people are walking around with today. They can act like they can accelerate and swagger as if they’re going to make good on anticipation, but few had the power of those Michael Dunne hemisphericals. He wasn’t fooled or faking one bit.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, though. Every time I saw him in his office, he was reading some literary journal and looking like he’d just ripped off every e-selling sucker there was on eBay, like he’d gotten it all and gotten away with putting it all on his FEMA card. This was a Louisiana ex-patriate dropped in the middle of nowhere middle Tennessee but somehow loving it. I guess it speaks to the power of the inner life, the inner mind, what have you. But, good lord, the look.

The Michael Dunne look (here comes a bit of roasting, though it’s all, nevertheless, true, and I hope no one will mistake fond fun for sarcasm; I truly respect this man) is what you’d get if you put Disney’s Merlin in khakis and a cheap dress shirt, if Merlin had hair sprouting from every pore on his face and head both and let it grow until, we assumed, his wife forced him to go get waxed. There are three things in my adulthood that have made me agonize over my undeniable future of cellular decay: my fear of Alzheimer’s, old folks’ insensitivity to heart-stopping accumulations of the most deity-rankling smells in their own homes that they sit in every day until they’ve got a smell that can walk up and shake hands with them and read to them and go fetch food and pills for them (I’m convinced that, rather than disease, it’s these anthropomorphic bodies of putrefaction and stench that finally do them in), and Michael Dunne’s nonchalance in the face of his face’s hair growth. He’d walk around and smile with these barely perceivable, so-thin-they-were-almost-invisible-but-visible-enough-to-scare-you hairs all over himself. What I think is: they were mystical feelers with which he pulled knowledge down from the ether. There was a slight lack of newness whenever the incipient waxing had taken place. But maybe it was like a weightlifter’s recovery time.

Anyway, enough with putting Dr. Dunne in the friendly fire pit. If any of you young would-be intellectuals want to know what intelligence is, you should go find Michael Dunne and glean whatever you can from him. He never caved into the vomit-inducing habit some colleges now have of giving lazy, weak students passing grades. We had to students taking graduate level courses who would show up late after every break and turned in weak work. (I’m not being holier-than-thou here. I’ve inevitably turned in weak work. In fact, I did so on the doctoral comprehensive exams. I paid my price and did better. Even though one professor said I had the best set of exams he’d ever seen, others didn’t feel the same about my production.) They got what they deserved, what they earned, in Dr. Dunne's class. Sometimes treating people rightly, truly, and fairly is the hardest thing of all, at least for some folks. And I hope I have never put myself in a position to have such just desserts. Anyway, all that to say: the man had standards. And he had standards because he had a level of knowledge that valued the next level of intellectual evolution rather than whimsically looked to some pasty present that would let kids be kids.

Here’s a tip of my hat to you, Dr. Dunne.

Wonder Of The Day

2011-06-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

Just how does Kat Denning talk the way she does? She is one of the people who seems so unique that she doesn't have to act, she can just talk and pretend to act, and she'll continue to get acting part after acting part after acting part.

Standing Up To Bad Guys

2011-05-22T20:30:00.000-07:00

"There were good guys and there were bad guys, and if a bad guy had done something to anyone - yourself, your girlfriend, your friend, anyone - you'd go after them. You have to stand up to bad guys" (126). - Steve Rude

Today is also holy because an abused woman, who was a victim at the moment of suffered violence but won't be a victim from this moment onward, is doing the right thing and bringing a piece of crap to justice.

Work Cited

Rude, Steve. "Rude's Awakening: The 'Dude' on the Importance of Art Over Commerce." Conducted by Chris Knowles and Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson. Comic Book Artist Collection Volume 3. Raleigh, NC: Twomorrows, 2005. 126-35.

Amazed By My Own Blood

2011-05-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

What can you do when the person who continues to amaze you, that you’re most inspired by, the one who seems to keep achieving unbelievable things as if they were as mundane as taking bottled water down from the shelf, well, what do you do when that person is your very own son?

You know what you do? You just continue to love him and be amazed by him. And you stay there for him so that you can be whatever it is he needs: a loving father, a caring soul, a stalwart defender.

Son, I love you because you’re you and because, in some reciprocal way, you make me who I am.

Happy Birthday, son.

Bugability: Neal Barrett, Jr. Bugs Me Out, Or How Writers Are Holy And Why That Matters

2011-05-22T17:53:00.000-07:00

Writers are holy.

I don’t care what information you have to the contrary. You can cite the drunkards and the suicides and the misanthropes and the bizarre. Go ahead. And I’ll tell you they’re holy.

In an age when language has devolved, the thing we’re forgetting is that thought devolves right along with it. You’re only as good as you’re last reified thought. And one solid way of realizing and refining what you think you’re thinking (get that? make sure, it’s rather important) is writing it down. Or typing it up. Or whatever tool you’re utilizing to inscribe your own words for your very own soul to see instead of feel. Seeing it makes a major difference to your consciousness.

And I’m going to be harping on Neal Barrett, Jr. for a bit. Because if you’ll spend some time with him, your soul will be better for it. I finally received A Different Vintage and thought, well, this is his old stuff. I’ll wait a bit before reading it. It’s a damn good thing I didn’t. (It’s a lesson I’ve learned twice now in dealing with Jr.‘s writing. Don‘t wait. Because if you do, you‘ll be sorry; you‘ll feel a loss but won‘t be sure why.) I even skipped the first story thinking the first couple of sentences sounded a bit dated. So I read “Hero” and “The Flying Stutzman.” Both stories are excellent. I especially appreciated the 70s version of The Flying Dutchman.

But then I read “Nightbeat,” that first story that I had initially skipped. And I was knocked down cold. At first I thought it was about people. Then I thought the characters were insects. And then I didn’t know what the heck was going on, but I knew it was brilliant. What Barrett does is take a whole new way of seeing things, a whole new species of life, a life that’s just close enough to human to be slightly recognizable, and creates an entirely new vision and vocabulary for it all. And he does that in a mere eight pages, but eight pages have never been so uniquely inspirational.

This is important, because in participating in this kind of reading experience, we’re all evolving. It doesn’t mean there aren’t classics out there that can’t move you just as much. It means, rather, that popularity is b*&^$#*!. Because Neal Barrett, Jr. has written works that are firebrands we should be using to see our way to the next set of cliffs. And, instead, we’re buying junk like John Grisham. And I’m not necessarily knocking the man. He’s a product of a mass media that sells spots for such work; someone, of course, is going to step into it. And I’m sure J.G. worked hard enough to get where he is. But why the hell won’t Kroger get a couple of nuclei forming in their mind’s eye and put what people need on the shelves. Here’s the next modern-day beatnik prayer:

Oh, Kroger, when will you put what we need in our roly baskets?

Oh, Walmart of the great three stars, when will you give us a bargained soul for clearance prices?

Oh, Target, oh, Target, when will you put Neal Barrett, Jr. on your shelves?

Because that’s what we need to do. If you’re not branching out and looking at both new writers as well as the old ones who are passing away from the market’s embrace, you’re making a damn big m*&^%$f*()^%#g mistake.

See, there’s no truth in the idea that writers are immortal, that writers don’t die. I don’t know what kind of space-juiced genetics that Neal has that has kept him around this long, though I’m damn thankful that they have. (Maybe he really is Oral Blue, after all.) But, believe it, there will be a day upon which Neal Barrett, Jr. and other great writers will never again be able to write another single word. Not one iota. Even writers having an immortality through their work is a kind of mistaken notion. There are many more forgotten writers than remembered ones.

So the best thing I think you can do, especially in this economy (though the money aspect of it is the universe’s way of masking what’s truly important), is to go rediscover some formerly great (read popular) writers that people have told you are wonderful. They told you so for a reason. The best thing I ever did was to start collecting once-highly rated short story collections. It gave me new faith in the universe. Good writing then, I discovered, is still amazingly good writing now. And this from authors who are as obscure as the pebbles I walked on top of as a child. My advice: go find those pebbles and cast them in new waters.

Wandering Through The High Grass Of A Good Path

2011-05-21T05:19:00.000-07:00

I guess what I’ve been looking for in everything I do is a higher moral order. And our world isn’t one that revolves around a stolid, staid, moral, and true axle. And my country is one in which conflicted notions of democracy, religious and spiritual truths, and profit have concocted a horrendous complexity that I don’t think we’ll ever see our way out of. We’re living in the midst of its diseased biology, and we can’t see a way to puncture it’s tissue or where we can go once we’re eating our way into it. I suppose, though, action is better than cessation.

This all puts a premium on moral decisions and their realization. One moral act is one more moral act. One moment of resistance to temptation is one moment of temptation’s going unrewarded. That doesn’t change the fact that morally inept and misguided teenagers addicted to drugs or adrenalin are going to break into houses and, perhaps, graduate from home invasion to murder this summer, but it counts for a notch on the universe’s grand yardstick of worth. It doesn’t mean that the whole host of evil things (the totality of which I can’t enumerate and would make for rather boring reading) that people to do one another will never outnumber the good people do. Or does it?

How many people are incarcerated in prisons compared to the number who have never seen the inside of a prison’s walls, even if for a let’s-preach-to-the-inmates visit or a scared-straight visit? Although the number of lawbreakers is much larger than any of us realize, the number of law abiders, evidently, is much, much larger. One evil act perpetrated on oneself can make us see the holiness of revenge through a disturbing red haze, but the daily glory of people living lives in which they hurt no other person and infringe on no one else’s rights or property should make us feel some hope for the future.

There’s a tremendous amount of inanity in our world. And sometimes I think spending too much time in inane endeavors leads to atrophy if not directly relates to good people making bad decisions, but I don’t think it leads to the kind of black-hearted, willful decision to aggress on other human beings.

I’d like to say I approve the preceding message. But I know something’s going to happen today or tomorrow or next week that will make me shake my head and wonder how I could ever have been so naïve to write this. But all it will take is the remembrance of one good person doing one good thing for me to see that value or moral rightness and come right back around again.

Watching Over Me

2011-05-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

If ye have the faith of a child . . . which is what the whole Shazam thing is about anyway . . . having the truly good heart of the innocent even in the face of evil, guile, and wrongdoing . . . which means it's actually pretty powerful stuff . . .

(Image copyright me, I guess; I own the thing, see.)

Perpetually Heartening: A Review of Neal Barrett, Jr.'s Short Story, "Perpetuity Blues"

2011-05-18T15:01:00.001-07:00

(Image copyright Golden Gryphon Press 2000)

Neal Barrett, Jr. made me cry today. Here I am, nearly forty, and I cried while reading a story. And it was a story about a girl, at that.

Now, maybe it was the fact that I’m fighting a cold and a bit loopy from it, but I can’t blame it on the medicine because I hadn’t taken any yet. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve lost a lot of sleep this week. Or maybe it was the fact that, amid all the blaise, droll, mundane, and depressingly real things he mentions in the story - things like porno mags and how people lie for the their own self-interest and how there are places in the world that will leave you no avenues of escape and how we’re almost down to a state of life that is nothing more than the sum total of the heavily-marketed, mass-produced and massively cheap products that we ingest on a daily basis - well, if you take all these horrible things and want to thrown in some alchemy and create a modern-day miracle, well, if you wanted to do that, you couldn’t do better than write a story like “Perpetuity Blues.”

Because “Perpetuity Blues” is a gem. It’s a gemstone. It’s a sorcerer’s stone. It’s going to change you when you read it. I swear it so.

Why I waited so long to read more of Neal Barrett, Jr., I’ll never know. Joe Lansdale was the whole reason I read him in the first place. I kept hearing Joe’s voice in interviews raving about Neal. And I take Joe as a damn credible person. When Joe says someone’s good, you can count them good. So I read The Hereafter Gang. And here’s my honest assessment of it: it was alright. It was brilliant for the first third of the book or so. And then it was intriguing for another third or so. Then I had to force myself to finish it. That’s a fact. It didn’t pay off the way I thought it would, either. That being said, I had the same feeling at different points in my life reading great literature. I think The Hereafter Gang is one of those books I’ll have to reread later in life to completely, as they say, get it. I don’t think I got it yet. What I did get after that was Piggs, which I thought was damn awesome and was all of those things I was expecting from his more highly acclaimed, supposedly more literary work. I thought the real Neal Barrett, Jr. shown through like a beacon of brilliance in Piggs. Still today, it’s one of the best books I’ve read. I love every character in it. Take a mallet and hit it anywhere, and it rings true every time. That’s the Neal Barrett, Jr. that I know.

That’s the Neal Barrett, Jr. who came through for me today.

John Gardner (the The Wreckage of Agathon John Gardner) said that great writers remind us of the simple truths of life. And who cares that so many people already know this story is great? Does it matter that, in some people's eyes, that I'm coming to this late? I don't think so; do we castigate someone for finally reading War and Peace and being inspired by it? No, because we can't control time or circumstance or when things happen. We can’t control who we end up with sometimes. And then we have options. We can leave, but that might mean putting yourself in a whole different keg of explosives. We can’t control how hard things are going to be. As much as it makes me start to go completely Ahab, and whether I stab the phantom mask in the eye or not, people with more power and money than I have make decisions that cost me very truly damn dearly. Killing them doesn’t help. There’s just another and another and another heartless, Republican %@$&@*! super-rich, snobbish, snub-nosed (rubbed to a nub from all that flesh-eroding brown-nosing) dude (look up the word dude; that‘s not a neutral word, and it’s no compliment, either) or dudette to take his place. Poseurs with false grandure, all coming from the fact that they have more than enough money or have fooled enough people into believing that they‘re moral paragons. Hear the canned laughter. That’s called irony finally revealed. And, yet, amid such realities, people still help people. Good can still be found. On the verge of death, we care about life. When we see others in pain, sometimes we stop and help. It’s the times we stop that matters. Or is it the remembrance of the times we didn’t stop that convicts us and teaches us in the moment that we finally decided to stop?

“Perpetuity Blues” brings up such questions and even better ones.

But the writing matters, too. Neal Barrett, Jr. has style. He has style in spades. He slaps down a black ace, peels it off the face of the card, and then flies off to some ethereal world and starts turning up diamonds with it.

I could spend some time for you summarizing it, but why? I think that would take the beauty out of it.

If you want to experience a fine story that might make you a better person through the reading of it, go find a copy of “Perpetuity Blues.”

(If you want a summary anyway, go here - they wrote one better than I would -):

http://www.goldengryphon.com/perp-frame.html

Inspiring

2011-05-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright Marvel Comics)

Weirdest Face In The NFL Contest

2011-05-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but I think there should be a weirdest face in the NFL contest. I'd start with A. J. Hawk. I don't know what it is about his face, but the poor guy's just ugly. Sorry, A. J. I've been rooting for you since your college days. And, in case you're wondering, yes, he has passed those de-beautified genetics on already, but I'm sure his daughter will be much prettier than he ever was. All of my children have succeeded admirably despite the suspect genes I passed on to them.

(Image copyright the NFL and Green Bay Packers)

Never Called

2011-05-18T06:49:00.000-07:00

Somedays you just don't get any respect or maybe this was too hard for the refs to see. I never noticed it while I was watching the game the first time, for that matter. Most days, grabbing B. J. Raji's facemask might just be the only chance you've got. (And if you don't think these look conclusive enough, click on them to biggerize them, especially the second one.)

(This and images hereafter copyright the NFL and Green Bay Packers)

Quote Of The Day: Henry David Thoreau

2011-05-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

"There is never but one opportunity of a kind" (150).

Work Cited

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Ed. William Rossi. NY: Norton, 1992.

Quote Of The Day: Dag Hammarskjold

2011-05-16T18:01:00.000-07:00

"'To fail' - Are you satisfied because you have curbed and canalized the worst in you? In any human situation, it is cheating not to be, at every moment, one's best. How much more so in a position where others have faith in you" (156).

Work Cited

Hammarskjold, Dag. Markings. Trans. Leif Sjoberg and W. H. Auden. NY: Knopf, 1973.

Quote of the Day: Sean O'Casey

2011-05-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

"Then he would close his eyes, sever the tension by a great effort, and sigh for the cowardice of his human heart" (472).

Work Cited

O'Casey, Sean. Autobiographies 2. NY: Carroll & Graf, 1984.

Quote of the Day: Kurt Wagner, aka Nightcrawler

2011-05-14T20:35:00.001-07:00

Like I said earlier, you find truth where you find it; what follows are famous words from the world's most famous mutant acrobat with the gift of teleportation and the serenity of a noble soul:

"Perhaps, mein freund, this truly is the great secret: the world -- like a juggler's balls -- goes round and round, and the trick is to live, the best you can while you can. For that way, there will always be lights shining bravely, joyously -- even in the deepest darkness."

Work Cited

Claremont, Chris. "The Gift." X-Men Vignettes. Illus. John Bolton. NY: DC, 2001. 110-122.

Quote of the Day: J'onn J'onzz, aka Martian Manhunter

2011-05-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

You find truth wherever you find it, I guess:

"Panic can kill the afflicted." - Martian Manhunter (as written by Adam Beechen)

Whether you're afflicted from the outside, through the actions of others or other forces (e.g. nature, the economy, politics), or from the inside, from thoughts and actions of your own, I guess the preceding are rather wise words, speaking as they do about the need for calmness and staying centered.

Work Cited

Beechen, Adam. "The Last Martian," aka "Alone Among the Stars." Justice League Unlimited. Illus. Carlo Barberi. (Oct) No. 24. New York: DC, 2006.

Words Beyond Words: Thomas H. Cook's The Quest for Anna Klein: Followers' Cut

2011-05-13T10:13:00.001-07:00

(Prefatory Note: When Blogger finally resurfaced this afternoon, Wednesday's material was initially lost. So I reposted what I remembered of Wednesday's blog. Now Wednesday's material is magically and mysteriously back. My thoughts on this material were better today, and since it's not only my error but, rather, also Blogger's, I'm leaving it as is.)

(Image copyright Otto Penzler books 2011)

Not too many people proudce strong work every time out. Thomas H. Cook, however, does. I've recently been reading an advanced reader's copy of his new book, The Quest for Anna Klein. I'm not going to provide a thorough review of it yet, because I haven't finished reading it. But I've read enough to know this is damn fine work. And as much as I liked The Last Talk with Lola Faye, I can say that this one blows it out of the water. At least, the first section of this book is simply captivating. I hope the author won't look down on me for saying so. Sometimes authors have their angels, and then readers recognize one they're not so fond of as their supposed best. I hope that is not the case here. But, like I said earlier, Thomas Cook has never put out a bad book. He's never even written a mediocre book. I don't know why he chose to write genre fiction, but when he writes it, it's similar to what Pushkin said about his lifestyle: though he drank and gambled and chased women, he did it so much differently than anyone else. It's the same with Cook. He's writing genre fiction, but it becomes something different under the nib of his pen. He's mined genre fiction until the silvery stuff showed up. Anyway, get this book when it comes out. Fifty pages proves it. It's not that I'm not going to finish reading this book, but fifty pages of this kind of material is enough for me to know that it will be one of the most highly recommended books this year. And I might be the first one to say it: He's going to get rich off this book, too, because someone's going to want to turn this into a movie.

Words Beyond Words: Thomas H. Cook

2011-05-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

When you're good, you're good. And this guy's damn good. Thomas Cook keeps mining genre fiction until the silvery stuff shows up. I liked his last book, but this one blows it out of the water. Thomas H. Cook is a testament to why you should never do less than your best. This guy's been writing great books every time out. When you work that hard every time out, every once in a while you produce something that defies description. In other words, you just need to experience this book:

(Image copyright Otto Penzler Books)

Quote Of The Day: A. S. Byatt

2011-05-10T22:55:00.001-07:00

Sometimes great literature doesn't stick at the first moment you read it; even A. S. Byatt says so:

"He thought of Honore de Balzac, from whom he had learned much, some of it erroneous, some of it simply too French to be useful in the world he still lived in" (306).

Don't worry, it'll all come back around. And don't dare use this as a moment to disparage the French. We owe them much for fascinating cultural contributions to our world, and, for all you warrior-minded folks, their resistance fighters were paragons whose example cannot be undervalued and shouldn't be forgotten or left untold because of whatever current political issues some Americans have with them. And if you haven't read the remarkable Brit Byatt, you should.

Work Cited

Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. NY: Vintage, 1990.

Mother's Day: Memories Personified

2011-05-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

The last time I remember touching my mother’s hair, I was brushing it for her because she no longer could. It was hard, almost stiff, and had lost all its golden-brown luster. I have a picture of her in which her hair literally shines; on this day and the ones following it, it didn’t anymore. She was sitting in a blue, Colonial-style rocking chair next to a cabinet of porcelain animals she liked to collect. There was not much left of the person I knew inside her then or it was sequestered so deeply within her in a stalwart defensive posture that it couldn’t risk moving toward the outside because then the interior would be lost and, thus, the exterior would fall utterly and irreparably. But I loved her then just as much and perhaps even more than I ever did. She had little control of her body or what was going on inside it, but she was waging a war inside that was grand and momentous. We’ve all been recently educated by the media (only because a celebrity was afflicted with the disease) about the statistics on pancreatic cancer, so we know the hopelessness of the survival rates. When my mother was first diagnosed, they said she had six months to live. She damned that prediction as well as a trove of statistics; she lived another six-and-a-half years.

Living longer with a terminal disease is an extremely difficult endeavor; you have to wage length of days against quality of life and take your chances with the disheartening realities that are the result of what could be, depending on what happens in the game of dominos you’ll be playing with your cellular structure and immune system, a Pyrrhic victory. I’m glad she fought. I love her for fighting. I was able to spend many days with her that I never would have otherwise. It’s quite bitter-sweet. I was the one with her during the school day. I missed a tremendous amount of school, and I guess the school system looked the other way. Now that I have children of my own in school, I can’t believe I was allowed to miss so much. But I’m glad they granted us, myself and my mother, the time. On the days I attended, I was with her after school and at night when my father never came home. I was with her when she would fall or fall into comas, necessitating my young self to call an ambulance and taking that ride with her and staying with her in hospital and recovery rooms. The hospital staff, like the school personnel, looked the other way and turned the other cheek about policies they had regarding minors being alone in rooms with patients as well as staying with them past visiting hours. I was given a cot to sleep on that, used so often, became, in a sense, mine. I was a regular at the hospital grill with a meal ticket if I didn’t have cash, and I was allowed to order meals on my mother’s menus. No one asked or check on why a pancreatic cancer patient was eating so much (double the normal amount, in fact), nor did the nurses ever forget to give me the menu before they went away. It might seem like a small thing, but, trust me, when everything else in your life is chaotic by means of watching the cohesive wholes of your life, structures that once had stable bases and sound integrity, well, when those things are crumbling – whether by chipped pieces or entire portions – small things become monumental. Through all these experiences, I learned a lot about love, responsibility, courage, pride, suffering, and longing for something you’re losing and will never have again. A slow death means you’re longing for the thing while it is still in your hands, longing for it before it’s actually gone, longing for it because you’re watching it get a few steps closer to leaving, closer to irretrievability. And so it was with a feeling of rightness in the world that I was the one who received the call from the nursing home – that my father and his family finally committed her to - that she had passed away. It seemed at that moment that the universe was in cahoots with me if no one else was. With that call, I had won and achieved something more than anything in the world could equal, and it proved to me that there was, indeed, a moral order to the universe, for had my father been the recipient of that call it would have undoubtedly proved the opposite. Children, there is no father’s day without a mother’s day, but you may very well find yourself celebrating only one or the other. Then, perhaps, you may have children of your own and might be able to reverse your own childhood’s fallout.

There is quite a lot I learned from my mother. Without a doubt, she was the best person I’ve ever known. She was staunchly moral without, metaphorically speaking, smelling like a moth ball. She was strikingly beautiful before disease ravaged that part of her that, in her way of tricking the would-be destroyer, only caused her soul and spirit to beautifully compensate for her physical loss. In life, because she had strong principles, morals, and tenets, she was an excellent judge of character in a way that our current society – confusing right and wrong with physical appearance and beauty, the size of someone’s bank account, the amount of 15-minute-segments of fame one achieves, and celebrity status – cannot. I want to reiterate that. My mother came from a large farm family. She was overlooked and neglected if not abused as a child. I’m not sure she ever forgave, except in a religious sense, the things her father did to her. But she carried those lessons with her for the entirety of her life, and she shared them all with me. What she knew intuitively about people was the real-life equivalent of a book of magic, albeit a grim but instructive one. I have a theory, undoubtedly baseless linguistically but maybe true in another sense that only illogic and magic could account for, that grimoires are called such because truth unsettles you whenever you learn it and whenever you are forced to face it because it denies you the ability to leave it, to turn away or hide from it, or to fight it. Indeed, truth in general and as an abstract idea, as well as the undeniable truths of life in practical and actualized senses, makes life more wonderful in a way but much less fun. Truths are rarely entertaining, but finding truth carries a satisfaction with it that is beyond measure and compare. And I cannot prove that to you; you have to come to that understanding on your own, for the ways toward such ends are personal and unique. As was the end of it all that the phone call represented. Why would it have been wrong for my father to receive the call? For whatever bizarre and irrational reason, my mother evidently wanted to marry a man she thought was a moral person encased in a very rough exterior. It was her one lapse of judgment, but it cost her so very, very much. She guarded against making such a mistake ever again or allowing me to fall into such mundane horror. If you think I’ve incorrectly matched those words, try living with something that pecks constantly, on a daily basis, at your soul. All it takes is for one little sore that never heals to prove to you that daily snipes at your principles and spirit can be devastatingly painful. Anyway, thanks to my Momma, I know evil and idiocy as well as uprightness and courage when I see it now. Only something evil would have allowed a man who was absent from her life more than present in it to be present when the final call came. For that final call was a summons. It was a summons to change. Change is a fascinating thing, a mystical thing, grander than any physical force the world can muster. And my father didn’t deserve to be aware or present at that moment of transformation. And I faced it stoically and cried during it and finally reveled in the wonder of it all. Usually in moments of doubt or sadness, in those moments when I feel as if the world is mining underneath me and I’m about to descend and then fall into the abyss, I still find and feel its inspiration. I feel it even today.

I’ve been living with the transformation ever since. I feel my mother’s spirit in and around me constantly. Though I carry it with me always, I’ve failed it often. But I’ve held it closer than anything, closer than my own breath. And that counts for a lot. That’s why she’s never departed. I’m her home now, and nothing else could honor me so much. It’s with love that I write this mother’s day song of the soul. I hope it goes out to the world as a symbol of what love can be, but I’m just as happy if it stays something just between me and Catherine Marie Dady McKenna. Momma, since you believed so, God bless.

Mother's Day

2011-05-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

Post to follow soon

Impressive

2011-05-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

LeBron had a bad game because Boston gave him a hard way to go. There was a lot to be thankful for in this game for Celtics fans. This was a show of force. I have to admit, though, I've never seen the game called so differently between two different home courts than in this series. Anyone who doesn't think refereeing can change games should watch these three games in a row and pay a lot of attention. Bookies could do a lot worse than having one NBA referee in their pocket. But Boston made amazing plays all night, held the fort with excellent defense, dominated the paint, tore down rebounds, and finally looked like the Boston Celtics team who fought their way to the playoffs. If Boston wins the next game, this is going to resurrect lots of Boston Garden memories.

A Silver Fox Of A Story: Robert Silverberg's "Capricorn Games"

2011-05-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

I love old books. I’d rather purchase an older book with any defects than a newer one with its arrogant, pristine prissiness. Often I’d rather have an old book with its worn cloth-covered boards, the cloth perhaps scratched or cut through so that the cardboard stock is visible and looking at you; or maybe the dust jacket will be tattered in spots, corners folded or nipped out of existence; it might even be water-spotted and molded and, therefore, sadly deserving of immolation in fire or a less dignified death by off-handed toss into the rubbish bin. But not before you’ve read it through at least once.

Because (here comes a classic, Mr. Digressius transition) books aren’t like the music industry. And I’m not even sure the music industry is like the music industry. In other words, the music industry is so focused on ever-current, highest-sales-possible popularity that, in its incessant search for the next new thing, never, ever, therefore, has an identity; the music industry never knows what its about or it forgets so quickly that it might as well never have a sense of self since a sense of self implies some sort of stability and length of time and memory. Sadly, of course, this is undoubtedly where the book industry is headed. Like a noteworthy author told me in a recent email, it’s all feces. And that paraphrase is my attempt of talking about the current book industry as nicely as I can. Books, never attaining a sense of time or memory, will never be, therefore, truly memorable.

I like short stories for the same strange, personal, esoteric reasons that I prefer old books to new. The short story is the underdog of the writing world. He’s gotta snarl and snap his teeth and claw around and undeniably, thank the gods, prove his posturing to get any attention these days. Novels pay. So short stories are love personified. Only a fool in love - with the form - writes anything that doesn’t pay. But those foolhardy lovers are out there and can change your life in an instant or make that one instant so fantastic that you will be changed forever after. So don’t underestimate the short story. Even though I give you that warning, you’ll do so anyway. I’m glad, though. Because that’s what will make a good short story’s appearance magical. You’ll have to search it out, undertake a journey to find it, and so a good short story will be in the same category as the will-o-the-wisps, fairies, leprechauns, unicorns, and pixies.

Anyway, all of the preceding is window dressing for the true item inside the decorative nonsense of this post. It was with somewhat a bit of relish (speaking symbolically there rather than literally) that I found and purchased a vintage 1979 paperback copy of Robert Silverberg’s short story collection, Capricorn Games. And initially it had nothing to do with the book’s author; I have read absolutely nothing by Silverberg up to this point.

With older books you get to appreciate some of the things you might not have had you read it in its own day, and I have to admit that this is one instance where the cover of the book rather than its author attracted me first. The Star Wars-faux font of the “Starblaze Editions” logo on the front of the book, with its diamond-shaped and diamond-circled stars, is practically nostalgic for me. I saw many toys, magazines, Icee and Slurpee cups, movies, and ads as countless as the stars of all the intergalactic galaxies in such similar typeface many, many times in my youth. The comic book stylization of the drawings - and especially that uniquely 70s and 80s style of leaving the pencils un-inked (a design that would find its next moment of evolution in Dungeons & Dragons books and the entire industry it spawned) - by Kelly Freas are something you won’t often see today. You’ll see un-inked pencil drawings with color added over them (look at the Conan comics illustrated by Cary Nord, colored by Dave Stewart, and published by Darkhorse Comics for an example), but this type of illustration truly flourished and died, I believe, in the 70s-80s era.

I even like the material of the cover itself, something that is very close to linoleum. Seriously. I think you’ve seen the last of that material ever being used for the cover of a book again, too. Some new author should, however, create a retro, faux-vintage book from this era and bring it back, though. It’s a material that has a texture and these small lines ingrained into the material that one has to turn to the light to be able to see. It has the same magical effect of seeing golden dust motes in a stream of sunlight for the first time.

And so it comes to be that the first piece of writing that I have ever read by Robert Silverberg falls into the larger plan of my existence. And it’s the title piece. If one were to overshoot the theme of this work, it might be called an erotic work though the word sensual seems to fit it much better. There is nothing exactly titillating about this book, though the sensuality of the universe, meaning a grand appeal to the five senses, pervades it. The single, barely mentioned animal act at the story’s culmination is related as a condemnation of not being able or capable of attuning oneself to something higher. Sex, in this instance, equals failure as well as a distraction from facing ultimate truths.

I’ve told people for many years now that every piece of writing has a thesis. I use that term because main idea simply doesn’t work, nor does theme capture the basic plan of a literary work. What I’m talking about is how every piece of literature has something to prove. You can even claim the old aesthetic plea that art is produced only for art’s sake. And that’s a lie. Every bit of work produced in aesthetic movements (people foolishly think there’s been only one) always had something to prove, something to glean from the work, a lighter burden for them that, nevertheless, the reader was made to take on. In other types of literature, that burden gets heavier. Poetry is the most complex form of language we have and should and usually does (if you ask me) offer the greatest moral obligations and moral propositions (and not talking about any mere, dogmatic morality, here) to its readers. Short stories, being, perhaps, the next closest short form of literature to poetry, also has few words to waste. (Truth be told, no literary work should waste words, but you get the idea, I hope.) The short story has to do its work quickly and, because of that, it creates a puzzle whose clue has to be hinted at early on. The clue and thesis in “Capricorn Games” is this: the “celebrated Nicholson, who had lived a thousand years and who said he could help others to do the same” will show “Nikki - smooth, glistening, satiny Nikki,” her “body tuned and fit,” “showing no sign of bodily decay,” the “cozy and soothing idea” of how she “can live forever and never grow old” (1 and 2). This is what the story will provide evidence for and prove or disprove in the end.

This is a complexly woven tale of many personalities, and what you find is that the entire room is full of Capricorns playing what Robert Silverberg calls Capricorn games, manipulative instances of “organization of other human beings into patterns that serve the needs of the Capricorn” (1). Everyone at the party thinks they are the ones manipulating someone else; some have greater insight and realize they are all trying to manipulate everyone, thus all part of a reciprocal, potentially losing proposition.

Nikki, seemingly beauty personified, would seem to be the most manipulative person of all. We’ve all been rendered dumbly giddy in spite of ourselves when face to face with undeniable beauty. She, however, is rendered inconsolable when faced with complete understanding and ultimate centeredness or, if you will, calmness. In other words, beauty always spoils. Nikki never wanted to live a thousand years. She wanted to live a thousand years and still appear, in her physicality, to be twenty-four years old. The tale of how all of this is revealed to Nikki and her readers is one you should undertake.

As a side note, I have to give kudos to Silverberg for writing at such a high level. He provides a great quote of deathbed dialog between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and he provided me with one new allusion and some new vocabulary (I’m know I’m revealing my lack of something, here) : Schonberg’s Verklarte Nacht, tungsten, crux ansata, deliquesced, debentures (which I thought I knew the definition to, but, ultimately, didn’t), lamasery.

What I appreciate about this is that Silverberg wasn’t pandering to his audience in 1974 (when this tale was first published); too many authors write with weak, vapid vocabulary now in an effort not to tire or exhaust their audience as well as not give them the task and burden of doing a little bit of work. I like Silverberg immediately for having given me some work to do. The endeavor will add to my intelligence, and I think everything we read should. If writers won’t be caretakers for our language by using it wisely, who will? If writers don’t safeguard words that are of a higher order, they will simply fall away. One’s use of vocabulary can be fantastic and charges of a text’s impenetrability are a weak excuse for toning down the language.

As an ultimate compliment, “Capricorn Games” is a story I had to read three times before I felt I understood it and had a grasp of its various shades of meaning. More is revealed to the reader on subsequent readings. Literary works that can bear rereading are becoming rare these days, especially in popular genre categories. I’m very glad I found this book, and I hope that other contemporary authors might raise their game to Silverberg’s level.

Edward Albee For Sale

2011-05-05T19:08:00.000-07:00

Money and safekeeping enough . . .

(Image copyright autographedcards)

Someone should go get it:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Edward-Albee-Playwright-Signed-Autograph-Bibliography-/370334316147?_trksid=p5197.m263&_trkparms=algo%3DSIC%26itu%3DUCI%252BIA%252BUA%252BIEW%252BFICS%252BUFI%252BDDSIC%26otn%3D10%26pmod%3D280603149232%252B370502827709%252B370085118924%26po%3DLVI%26ps%3D63%26clkid%3D8948808637918839933

Christopher Fry For Sale

2011-05-04T18:55:00.000-07:00

There's still craziness in the world, because that's the only condition that explains what would cause one to put these items up for sale:

(This and all images hereafter copyright their respective sellers)

http://cgi.ebay.com/CHRISTOPHER-FRY-playwright-etc-signed-written-letter-/370502827709?pt=UK_DVD_Film_TV_Autographs_CV&hash=item5643b07ebd

http://cgi.ebay.com/CHRISTOPHER-FRY-TYPESCRIPT-SIGNED-/370085118924?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item562acac3cc

http://cgi.ebay.com/Christopher-Fry-celebrated-Playwright-signed-autograph-/280603149232?pt=UK_DVD_Film_TV_Autographs_CV&hash=item41554043b0

The Hand Of A Master

2011-05-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

Pretty Good Reading: Mr. Stuffins

2011-05-04T06:46:00.000-07:00

Mr. Stuffins is pure entertainment. But after having spent a night reading the poems of Sarah Manguso and dealing with the competent but still grand-standing posturing of someone who's trying to make their self (and, oh, I mean that in all the excruciatingly, philosophically, mind-bendingly, multifaceted ramifications that such a word as self can be made to have by our faux-apocalyptic posturing poets - or, well, poet, because I guess there's only one; surely you couldn't have two doing such things, because, well, then they couldn't be called apocalyptic, could they? doesn't apocalyptic imply not only an end, but, rather, the end?). Anyway, after reading such work, I'm just as inclined to grant the proposition that Mr. Stuffins can have just as much meaning as anything else in the world. In fact, I like Mr. Stuffins as a character much better than the poetic personae created in Manguso's poems.

The basic plot of the comics is as follows: a boy whose parents are going through a separation is taken to a toy store that a scientist working for the NSA is running through while holding a top-secret black-ops (and more - much, much more) training (much like a pure distillation of all training) program while he is being chased by rogue NSA agents so that, to save the world from such a deadly program, he stuffs said program into a sing-along teddy bear called Mr. Stuffins whose toddler-training is replaced with martial arts acient and modern, Eastern through Western, fists to katanas to the realistic equivalent of quickscopes; the aforementioned boy (completely innocent of all knowledge of this NSA brouhaha occuring and in a nobly sad attempt to retain some sort of innocence amidst the family-tragedy kind of chaos going on his life) convinces his Dad to buy the teddy bear instead of more stereotypically masculine toys and has his world, thereby, changed forever.

There is a lot of fun here. I don't want to ruin the narrative wonder for anyone, so here are some of my favorite pictures from the book, but trust me when I say this is definitely worth typical retail price and absolutely worth used price; get it however you can; this is even something I'd share with my kids (we live in a different world than Peter Pan's and Treasure Island's contemporary-in-their-own-time readers did, after all; as long as you don't miss the classics, you can pull in great contemporary stuff like this in our own time):

(This and all images hereafter copyright Boom Studios 2009)

(The first part of the dialog in this picture has Mr. Stuffins telling the bunny, "You and me, pal. It's go time.")

And trust me when I say that part of the convincing aspect of this story is that Mr. Stuffins doesn't spend much of the story dealing out with fuzzy bunnies. He does some serious damage to some serious folks. The emotions of the family become very poignant if not believable (I can't say; I've never been in that kind of family situation). In any case, I've enjoyed this much more than many things I've read in the recent six months or so, and it definitely beats 90% of the comics I've read from 2009 onward, especially those of the biggest two comics-industry market-mongers. So, there. Go get your Mr. Stuffins.

Work Cited

Cosby, Andrew and Johanna Stokes. Mr. Stuffins. Illus. Axel Medellin Machain. Los Angeles: Boom, 2009.

Joseph Conrad For Sale

2011-05-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

Or I wish I hadn't gone to college on some other days so I could afford this:

(Image copyright george-houle-books-autographs)

If I were you, I'd go get it now:

http://cgi.ebay.com/JOSEPH-CONRAD-LETTER-SIGNED-1919-MR-HUGH-PINKER-/390028102763?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5acf7c8c6b

Robert Graves For Sale

2011-05-03T14:24:00.001-07:00

I wish I hadn't gone to school a semester and purchased this instead; I'd be better off:

(Image copyright davidjholmesautographs)

If I were you, I wouldn't hesitate a second:

http://cgi.ebay.com/English-Poet-ROBERT-GRAVES-Two-Autograph-Letters-Signed-/320638667497?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4aa78dcae9"

The Face Of A Master

2011-05-03T07:26:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright The Guardian)

If you don't know who this guy is, you should find out as soon as you can, buy and read as many of his books of poetry as you can, and be amazed by a poet who still rhymes and is as accessible as watching a sporting event yet as powerful, timeless, and moral as the best of the Classical Greeks.

Oh. And he rhymes. Yes, he still rhymes. (Just in case you missed that part in the paragraph above.) And he loses not a darn thing in the process.

The Hand Of A Master

2011-05-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

Pretty Good Reading: The Question "Pipeline"

2011-05-01T18:14:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright DC Comics 2010)

Greg Rucka has, evidently, become the Question scribe for the forseeable future. It would make me too happy for words if Denny O'Neil would turn this into his regular gig again. I did, however, enjoy the first bit of the story called "Pipeline" that I read today. It's all-out action and pretty well-written. There's not much philosophical depth behind it (very, very little, in fact), but Renee Montoya comes across as one tough character. So far, I like this better than Rucka's last Question outing (no pun intended). It's out in trade paperback now, or you can go collect Detective Comics, issues 854-865.

One That Didn't Get Away

2011-05-01T17:23:00.001-07:00

See all that eBay stuff balances out; you win some you lose some (this is, by the way, the best action figure of Colossus ever made):

(Image copyright of me, I guess; I own the darn thing, after all)

One That Got Away

2011-05-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ah, eBay. You remind what it's like to lose in life . . .

(Image copyright Orange Goblin, I guess)

The Hand Of A Master

2011-05-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

Cowpunk Ultraviolence: A Review of Chet Williamson's "'Yore Skin's Jes's Soft 'N Purty . . . ' He Said'."

2011-05-01T04:26:00.000-07:00

(I didn't get a chance to finish editing this before I was called to other duties. Any typos are a reflection of a lack of time if not a reflection of a lack of attention to detail or, perhaps, a lack of intelligence.)

I respect Joe Lansdale highly and think he's an excellent writer. I think his work is changing the culture in which we live. I mean that wholeheartedly. So I've been buying up everything with his name on it for lo these many years now. One of the texts that eluded me over the years was the so-called Cowpunk anthology (they used the term in 1989; were they the first to do so? I would love to hear back on that one . . .) that he co-edited with Pat LoBrutto: Razored Saddles. People wanted crazy money for this one, yet I was finally able to locate a former library copy that was decently priced.

You can definitely tell when a good hand has chosen stories for an anthology. If you want undeniable proof of this, compare the 1982 edition of The Best American Short Stories, which was edited by John Gardner, with others. Gardner chose shockingly good pieces, was brave enough to choose the stories based on nothing but their own merit, and produced a collection that still competes with any collection of stories published today. And I would bet my brother's (whee) bottom dollar that this collection will compete if not beat anything published tomorrow or thereafter. So based on slightly illogical thinking, I assumed I would like most of the stories in this anthology. And like is not a good word to use here. It's similar to the word beautiful in that it's problematic; when I was hard into my studies of the grotesque in college, I learned to appreciate things that were aesthetically beautiful rather than surface-beautiful (if I can make such a malignant portmanteau word there). I thought I would appreciate these stories or learn something from them or be moved by them or have my views altered in morally expansive (for aesthetic epiphanies are as moral - or, I would argue, much more moral - than any sermon you'll hear today; God, how I've begun to hate Churchy Sundays . . .) ways.

A writer I've been interested in for a while now is Chet Williamson, whom I've also unintentionally avoided because I simply can't find an affordable copy of a collection of his stories. So I was happy to find and was intrigued by his story entitled "'Yore Skin's Jes's Soft 'N Purty . . . ' He Said'." I mean, that's a title, folks. Wow. I'm honestly not joking, here. In spite of myself, I thought, Well, I've got to read that one first, even though it was the last story in the collection and proabably receives some of its power by being the cogent send-off of a ever-increasing-(I hope)-heartrending collection; anyway, I read it first. It reminded me outright of the scene in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man where Billy Bob Thornton and Iggy Pop and another character walk up to a very scared Johnny Depp and say, "He's got purty hair," "Aw, how you get your hair so soft like that; no matter what I try, mine's like old barn hay," etc. But what happens in Chet Williamson's story is what they don't show you in the movie. I don't want to ruin it for anyone who might read it (or the film; you should definitely go watch that now if you've never done so), so I'll just say it's gruesome and violent, something I probably should have expected from a book called Razored Saddles, although this story makes me think it would have been more apropos to entitle it Razored Bellies or something of the sort.

Now, to give Williamson his due, I can't say the writing's bad, because it's not. For horror ficiton, it's damn fine writing. And I can't say the idea behind the story is bad, because it's not. The unfolding of the tale is also damn fine. An illustrator of Western dime novels envisions the West just as it is depicted in those idealistic little captions under the pictures; he decides he'll go there. What makes this so complicated is not simply the difference between reality and fiction, but that the little artist, when he receives his paintings back after they've been sent off to the printer or photographer or whatever, has been secretly painting his own face over the masculine faces who are holding hands with the other masculine faces that he painted on these once-heterosexual couples to begin with. So he's actually envisioning an idealistic West with his own, so to speak, coming-out-of-the-closet euphoria. Because he is hot with euphoria. And he thinks he'll find it in the West, he just forgot that "Wild Wild" patronymic that's supposed to precede it. Or, because the novels he illustrated were the kind they were, maybe he could never even fathom such a place. But he does, indeed, get the Wild Wild West. And, sadly, he's still happy for it. And that, after scenes of unspeakably hinted-at-more-than-made-explicit violence, is the truly brutal part of the story.

And so I'm trying to figure out how to take this story. Because I'm not one who believes in the tripe usually trounced out when someone's defending horror or explicit horror or over-the-top graphic violence. In other words, I don't believe violence or its depiction is cathartic. Here's Laurent Bouzereau writing such a defense in completely unconvincing terms: "Whether it's in the streets or on the news, violence is everywhere. While few except criminals and psychopaths enjoy violence, many of us love it in films. . . . So I agree with pyschiatrists who claim that watching violent movies can be a cathartic experience" (viii). He doesn't even provide a thoughtful rationale after making such a serious, weighty claim. And that's the problem I have with people trying to defend it. Either be like the heavy metal artists I loved in my youth and simply say that's just the way it is, the way it will be, and what we're gonna do and admit that you're not going to be able to intellectually justify it nor have any desire to do so (but Bouzereau's editors and publisher probably didn't have the stones for such as they that; they're trying to make this all sound half-heartedly academic because half-hearted academics can still sell books to libraries and such) or have the guts to truly think this entire thing through and provide a rationale that will either prove that you were exactly right or make your theories crumble into dust. It takes a lot of pluck for that, though. You've got to come from brave stock for that sort of endeavor.

Anyway, if you want to read a disturbingly good story, go find Chet Williamson's "'Yore Skin's Jes's Soft 'N Purty . . . ' He Said'." I still highly recommend it.

Works Cited

Bouzereau, Laurent. Preface. Ultraviolent Movies. NY: Citadel P, 1996. vii-ix.

Williamson, Chet. "'Yore Skin's Jes's Soft 'N Purty . . . ' He Said'." Razored Saddles. Ed. Joe R. Lansdale and Pat LoBrutto. Arlington Hts., Illinois: Dark Harvest, 1989. 249-68.

The Hand Of A Master

2011-04-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

SOINC: There's Some Good Eatin' There, Buckaroos

2011-04-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

No, it's not a sound effect, it's a fast food restaurant. I think, though, it would look much cooler speeled, whoops, spelled S'oink! (always including the exclamation mark).

(Image property of the man to whom I owe all thanks for this one; so, thanks Speicher)

A big storm went through Gallatin, Tennessee a couple of weeks ago and did damage to several store signs (McDonald's, Goodwill, and others). This store, located on Hartsville Pike close to Summit Regional Hospital, must not have had an attentive stupidvisor, whoops, supervisor watching while it was being erected. I'm not sure how this got all the way through production and placement atop its slightly permanent pole, but you can now see it only here because evidently someone finally noticed it and took it down in what was probably a harried sense of shame.

S'oink!, y'all!

If History Serves Harlan Ellison

2011-04-29T06:44:00.000-07:00

If history is worth anything, Harlan Ellison will be remembered as a writer who reminded us what it means to have spirit, boldness, courage, and good old-fashioned (and never to be underestimated - as Harlan proved over and over and over) pluck.

(Image copyright comix.com, and, just so you know, Harlan's eyes - even a single one of them potentially suffering from cataracts or simple loss of vision that comes with age, would still be much more all-seeing than the one on the watch.)

Forebodings & Tidings: Harlan Ellison

2011-04-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I have the strange feeling that every one should say a prayer, keep Harlan Ellison in your thoughts, or light a candle in honor of himself and his genius.

A Bad Show, Indeed: A Review of Sarah Manguso's Essay, "The Fallacy of Prose Poetry"

2011-04-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

Normally I don’t take issue with things like this. But I must admit that I was slightly shocked by the following statement from Sarah Manguso’s essay (found on the Academy of American Poets’ website, poets.org), “The Fallacy of Prose Poetry: An Extension of Eliot’s ‘Reflections on Vers Libre,'” which compares the categorization of types of contemporary poetry to children living with the challenge of autism: “The relentless naming and sorting of contemporary poetries has always suggested to me a group of autistic kids locked in the Quiet Room, trying to find their way out.” Now I have to admit that I’m not the most sensitive person in the world and sometimes I definitely do not have enough empathy. Nevertheless, this statement gave me pause. And so I waffle on whether this statement is reprehensible or merely – or perhaps grossly – irresponsible. I also wonder whether the folks at the Academy of American Poets read this essay carefully and thoughtfully before agreeing to place it on their website. Whatever the case, I suppose I have to agree at this moment with the old and admittedly overused adage that possession is nine-tenths of the law; Poets.org owns this statement as much as Sarah Manguso does and is, therefore, liable for it. The problem I have with this statement is, on one hand, the same problem I have with any writer making false or empty claims. The falsity of this statement is that I honestly don’t believe Sarah Manguso has any idea what autism truly entails, what facing the daily difficulties of autism is like, or what being locked in a room at a vulnerable age or with a disability that makes one vulnerable is truly like. On the other hand, I find it strange and ironic that someone who has lived through her own extreme difficulties would evidently not have empathy for others in the midst of their own struggles or how she couldn’t see that this statement can only derive from a lack of sensitivity. I don’t see how she wouldn’t condemn me – or shouldn’t condemn me – if, for instance, I made a comparison of something I was deriding with the anguish that CIDP patients face, especially if I did so in a way in which I was concomitantly deriding the thing compared and belittling the difficulties faced by those who have chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. I do not want to censor any writer, and I do believe that sometimes writers have to say things to wake us up. Sometimes in waking us up, writers give us the equivalent of a bolt of lightning. This bit of writing, however, feels like the mean-spirited behavioral intervention used in the not so distant past against special education students: a direct spray of water in the face for making a mistake. I don’t see how either one of these interventions, supposedly pedagogic or supposedly poetic, leads to knowledge or greater insight. I cannot find the least bit of reasonableness or writerly responsibility in Sarah Manguso’s use of this phraseology. And I honestly hope that this was not a ploy on her part to gain notoriety; that would definitely be deserving of outright condemnation.

Work Cited

Manguso, Sarah. “The Fallacy of Prose Poetry: An Extension of Eliot’s ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’.” Essays on Writing. The Academy of American Poets Poets.org, 25 April 2011. .

What Annihilation Looked Like Back In The Day

2011-04-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright Notre Dame football and the NCAA, I suppose)

What Doing It Any Way You Have To Looks Like

2011-04-28T12:40:00.001-07:00

What Determination Looks Like: Part Two

2011-04-28T12:39:00.000-07:00

What Determination Looks Like: Part One

2011-04-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

Bad Show? Ah, Rick Remender . . .

2011-04-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

I like Rick Remender. In fact, I think the only comic that comes close to approaching the sophisticated mixture of violence and traditional comic book action of X-Force is his Uncanny X-Force (and in both cases the artists’ collaborations are very much an integral part of the success of the titles, but the main part of this blog post will be concerned with a small bit of writing - even though this is quite the wonderful illustration that makes me envy Amal Farouk's living conditions enormously, very much, quite a bit, well, you get the idea). But I have to ask about the language of the following panel:

(Image copyright Marvel Comics 2011)

Is it really, truly ever okay to say something like “Your mind has become such a muddy, splintered place . . . I feared you weren’t astute enough to follow the crumbs I left”? To me, this seems like awful writing. But let's give the devil his due. There just might be a mud-splattered, entirely wooden area that gets splintered to pieces where someone has left crumbs hidden among the splinters, though if they’re covered in or with mud I just don’t see how anyone could, well, see them. I think Remender is astute himself enough to know that mud doesn’t splinter, so there must have been some wood in there, perhaps put there by Fantomex or Deadpool in a moment of jest.

Work Cited

Remender, Rick. "Unintended Consequences." Uncanny X-Force (8). Illus. Billy Tan. New York: Marvel, June 2011.

If You're A Republican, You Can Probably Still Use This Greeting . . .

2011-04-27T04:35:00.001-07:00

(Image copyright Filmation 1978)

I have friends who will move against me for saying the following things. Ah, well, I love you all still, though I hope we can disagree politically in a civil and democratic fashion and that it won't result with some axe-in-the-back-cum-Bill-the-Butcher tomfoolery (I know never to turn my back against such). With no further ado:

What with rising gas prices, rising grocery prices (originally raised during last summer's rise in gas prices, these grocery costs never went down after the gas prices did; somehow that doesn't seem right; it's also bitingly ironic how gas companies continue to make record profits while average Americans are recording record percentage loss of income as well as any kind of disposable income; the notion of disposable income is now laughable for 90% of the country; in fact, we've become disposable ourselves, I think - or, at least, that's how many people in power think of us - and that's probably what the next documentary of American life, taking a cue from action flick, will be called: The Disposables!), and the attack on Medicaid and Medicaire and Social Security as well as their malignant reluctance to work out affordable health care for all Americans, I guess Republicans are the only ones who can honestly believe that they'll live long and prosper. But I'll never truly grant them that one. Like Oscar Zeta Acosta believed, there's great value in having the proclivities and abilities of a cockroach. You survive. (But he didn't. He died, evidently, during a violent altercation brought on by a drug deal gone bad. So some believe. I think he slid off the side of the boat and made his way to an Edenic shore that he quickly decorated with rusting barrels and fire-blackened barbed wire and scavenged-stone fire pits and has been happily writing under pen names the past thirty or so years now. Somehow I bet he even got a companion to swim up from the depths or climb down from the trees. Sometimes peace, elucidation, and epiphany come in the strangest of ways.)

Quote of the Day: Paul Tillich

2011-04-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

This is like one of those Dutch paintings where you see a mirror inside a mirror inside a mirror . . . I'm not sure why Tillich puts quotes in the second sentence or whom, exactly, he's quoting. Is he quoting his own paraphrase of Seneca that appears in the very same book in which it is quoted, meaning he would have to cite the reference for the book within the book . . . ?

"Seneca says that no courage is so great as that which is born of utter desperation. But one, must ask, has the Stoic as a Stoic reached the state of 'utter desperation'?" (17).

But the thought, anyway, is a good one. Can someone who is trying to remain emotionally unaffected reach a pitched emotional tonality?

Work Cited

Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale UP, 1952.

Nerve-Racking or Nerve-Defusing?

2011-04-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

In contrast to the sounds of life that inspired Gerald Stern and that seemed to bring him a sense of inner peace (in yesterday’s initial post before the several posts of silliness and nonsense I wrote about), the sounds of life that create music in “Sunflower,” one of Dean Young’s masterfully manic poems, well, these sounds of life represent something quite different. Dean’s inner restlessness isn’t quelled by the ticks and tocks of daily endeavor. Where Gerald Stern seems to find reassurance and a nearly spiritual calmness in everyday noises, Young seems to find the prosaic elements of life to be maddeningly blasé. (Claiming descent from the gods can probably do that to you, though, so Dean may have stacked the deck quite too well against himself if such a thing is possible – although one would surely wonder why anyone would do such a thing, but it doesn’t take long before you realize Dean’s just the kind of guy to create a persona who adds two cards to a deck so that he can have more stacked against him, and, of course, then you’re caught in quite a lengthy explanation of lunacy and find yourself in literary endeavors that you only finally see when a moonbeam reflects from the mirror . . . wow, this is all nutty and I’m wondering where it all comes from and whether such rants are part and parcel of entering Dean’s world . . . ) Here’s a portion from “Sunflower”:

When Dean Young vacuums he hears
not just time’s winged whatchamacallit
hurrying near but some sort of music
that isn’t the motor or the attic
or the sucked-up spider’s hosannas
or his mother pounded into a rectangle
or what’s inside him breaking

Now, again, I always get caught up in questions of rhythm and style, and these “or”-led statements kind of bother me; sticking “or” at the beginning of several lines doesn’t a poem nor a poetic element make. Repetition of word or form or stylistic is okay, but doesn’t do a whole lot for me. I do like the crazed hatred of the sounds of daily tasks. Larry Bird once told a reporter that mowing his lawn with a push mower was therapeutic. I never saw how. So, perhaps, and probably in that sense alone, Young and I might be kindred spirits. It’s not that I don’t want to be kindred spirits with Dean in other way; he seems like a truly fun and remarkable guy; but I don’t think I’m at this level, and, so far, I’m not sure I quite buy into his universe. He is, though, just as much if not more fun than Stephen Dobyns, Charles Simic, or A. R. Ammons. I have to say, however, that I thoroughly appreciated the way in which Gerald Stern found a kind of sustenance in and how he welcomed common, recurrent sounds; this, indeed, can be a kind of harmony. But I also really like Young’s acorn (that’s the only way it’s crazy enough)-released-from-the-nut-house persona in this poem. Because part of me knows that sounds of daily tasks are things I have, indeed, hated. The sound itself is sometimes a jeer, taunt, or insult; I know you have to do this job you don’t want to do, and I’m going to make noise while you do it, just to make you mad, to see how far you’ll go, whether you’ll smash me to pieces or relinquish your morals and just quit. Yes, I’ve been there. So, how does this all end for Dean? It ends with a modern day man’s, nearly farcical Ahab kind of moment:

. . . when Dean Young
has his thunder, nothing moves. Not
the dust in the hose, not the music

All in all, I guess this post served its purpose of contrasting two views regarding whether the sounds we hear every day are pleasant or nerve-racking.

Sublunary Note:
Of course, whenever, I think of Dean Young, it always causes me to evaluate whether or not I actually have anything in my life to complain about. Although it seems he’s finally found a heart transplant (http://isak.typepad.com/isak/2011/04/breaking-a-heart-for-dean-young.html ), the costs of such things are enormous, for the operation and post-operative expenses both. A young lady I knew died awaiting a lung transplant. The cost itself was enormous. If you want to have a heart-rending moment that will astound you with just how tall and solid a wall medical expenses can be, look here: http://www.transplantliving.org/beforethetransplant/finance/costs.aspx . Anyway, this lady would also have had to been able to afford around-the-clock care after her procedure. The first time she came up for a transplant, they refused her because a psychological exam came back stating that she was morbidly depressed. I’m almost morbidly depressed thinking such a reason can cause one to be passed by when you’re that close to a life-saving operation. All of that to say: if you still want to donate to Dean’s cause to help defray costs and expenses, go here:

http://www.transplants.org/donate/deanyoung

Work Cited

Young, Dean. “Sunflower.” Skid. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2002. 3.

Over Three Years & Still Not Beaten . . .

2011-04-24T18:21:00.000-07:00

(Image copyright Marvel Comics 2008)

Nothing beats the first six issues of X-Force; even today, this comic stands on its own. This hit the stands in February 2008. It was exactly the X-Men comic I was waiting for.

Reading This With My Daughter

2011-04-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

The Frederic Marvin cover is priceless . . .

Blessing You This Easter Day

2011-04-24T17:57:00.001-07:00

This is me, blessing you, and going monkey all the way whether in this life or the one hereafter . . .

Quote of the Day: Herman Melville

2011-04-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

"Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets."

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.

Work Cited

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. NY: Pocket Book, 1949.

Easter Haiku

2011-04-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

Today, while I was working (will I ever be able to work one job and get by financially?), I saw many people visiting cemeteries. My memories of cemeteries are awful; I cannot remember whether it was raining or snowing when I rode in the hearse to the place they would lower my mother into. Sometimes I remember rain; sometimes I remember snow. I wonder what this is a sign of. The last time I visited her grave, I placed a picture of the family she'll never be able to see there. Her grandchildren will never know her, and they'll never have a grandmother (as both grandmothers passed away before they were born). Two of the most wonderful people in the world will never know their grandchildren. This is a testament to something in this life; it says something about the nature of this universe that we're living in. Anyway, this mixture of Easter Sunday and the visitation of cemeteries made me think this haiku to be an apropos selection for the day:

Into the blinding sun . . .
the funeral procession's
glaring headlights

Work Cited

Virgilio, Nicholas. "Into the blinding sun." The Haiku Anthology. Ed. Cor van den Heuvel. NY: Fireside, 1986. 284.

Celtics Sweep the Knicks

2011-04-24T17:29:00.001-07:00

Although it was highly unlikely, the Celtics managed to put New York away in four games today, this Easter Sunday. Now they have to contend with an extremely athletic and youthful team, the Miami Heat (unless Philadelphia can commit a cardinal sin and come back from a 3-1 deficit). The refs tried to give it to New York today and KG put a stop to all that. The Celtics will definitely need the rest to both, well, rest and also to plan some sort of strategy to use against the Heat, a team that blew them out of the water the last time they played them. That insult probably still rankles.

Wooing Simplicity

2011-04-24T06:06:00.000-07:00

Today is, for some, still the Sabbath. Though it holds little religious association for me - at least no context that makes me want to get up, dress up, and find my way to a waiting congregation -, I still think of it as a day of communion, perhaps even spiritual communion. And this kind of thinking always leads me back to poetry. Because spirituality is found in things that have nothing to do with dogma or spiritually-clad ideology; there’s more spirit in a picture passed down a family line than what you’ll find in any sermon you’ll hear today. There’s more lifesaving force in a hug and a smile from a child than what you’ll get yodling your spirituals today. Every person I know who’s committed a despicable act was attending church last Sunday. And here’s something I should have mentioned above: with the poetic way of doing things, there is no one day of religious fervor. With poetry, you take it with you all the time. And it’s not just about poetry. If any writer is worth his or her efforts nowadays, they instruct you in what matters about living. And they do so in a way that profoundly effects you. And profound effects have no expiration date.

Anyway, here’s a poem by Gerald Stern for your perusal. Whenever I read poetry I’m always conflicted about the line. What’s poetic about Stern’s line-by-line breakdown of words and syllables? I don’t know. Honestly. But people with greater credentials than me say he’s got this stuff just right. What I find profound in Stern’s poem is the simplicity in living that it represents. There’s a bit of craziness there, too, that crazy-like-a-fox kind of craziness that is truth mixed with a tiny bit of flair. I'm not sure that side-to-side flipping is some sort of crazed Sealy posturpedic mysticism; but, then again, I'm not sure that it's not (if that makes any sense). This poem made me think back to the days when there was nothing better than sitting in Franklin, Tennessee with my Aunt Ruth and Katie Mae Fagan, both of them as family to me as family gets, drinking iced tea and listening to the slow traffic go by as the sounds of it came through the porch screen door or the open windows with breeze-infused curtains that moved like kindly spirits (just as theirs do, I hope, move to me on days like today when I think of them with nothing but and nothing less than love):

Romance

After thirty years
I am still listening to the pipes,
I am still enchanted
with the singing and moaning of the dry boards.

I am lying there night after night
thinking of water.
I am joining palms, or whistling Mozart
and early Yeats.

I am living without savagery,
stretching my body and turning on my left side
for music,
humming to myself and turning on my right side
for words.

Work Cited

Stern, Gerald. “Romance.” Paradise Poems. NY: Random House, 1982. 56.

Gary Coleman is Alive, Willis!!!!!!!!

2011-04-17T06:16:00.001-07:00

Whatchoo tawkin' 'bout, foo'?! Gary Coleman is aliiieeeevvv . . .

Here's proof (from the Packers vs. Falcons playoff game 2011):

Don't leave yet, Gary! He tried to make a quick exit (he only came out for the chips and nacho cheese dip):

But the insectoid, rolly-polly segmented head is just too unique to mistake for anyone else:

His Graciousness Albert Drake

2011-04-13T21:52:00.001-07:00

The connections we make is this life are so few and therefore so important, I felt that my receiving a letter from Albert Drake was a moment of grace. I have a hard time ever defining the world in religious terms now; so I guess I'll just say that I'm very thankful for being the recipient of a letter from someone whose literature I greatly admire. His letter made me finally understand that any person writing what they care about the most is adding to the stock our universe, so that by writing about stock (cars - or whatever kind of cars; Albert could you so much better than I), we add to the stock of the universe from which others can select items toward their own (and, reciprocally, others') betterment. I value your creed highly: "I'm really the only one saving that crazy hot rod history." Keep saving that history, Albert; it has ramifications beyond the obvious.

Question of the Day: Thomas Disch

2011-04-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

"Is any degree of comfort compatible with virtue?"

Work Cited

Disch, Thomas. "The Very Rich." ABCDEFG HIJKLM NPOQRST UVWXYZ. London: Anvil, 1981. 74-5.