Syntax of Things

Gimme Drugs

I mentioned on Friday that I planned on today being the third-day of a much needed three-day weekend, and that originally meant a third day away from all things work, including, believe it or not, Syntax of Things.   But I wanted to send April and the Poety month out with a sho(u)t and get you ready for May, which with it being a month short on letters is apparently going to be all about the short story, and you all know how I feel about the short story, just don't ask me to try to write one in a month.  Anyway, here's farewell to yet another month of poetry and even more of a farewell to my first month away from my hardcore nicotine addiction, a smoke-free month for yours truly.  And still no ceiling-crawling babies.

Heroin
by Jim Carroll
[audio of poem]

Sat for three days in a white room
a tiny truck of white flowers
was driving through the empty window
to warn off your neighbors
and their miniature flashlights.

by afternoon
across the lake
a blind sportsman had lost his canoe.
he swam
by evening
toward the paper cup
of my hand.

At dawn, clever housewives tow my Dutch kitchen
across the lawn
and in the mail a tiny circus
filled with ponies
had arrived

You,
a woman with feathers
have come  so often lately
under my rubber veranda,
that I'm tearing apart all those tactless warnings
emroidered across your forehead.

Marc,
I'm beginning to see those sounds
that I never even thought
I would hear.

Over there a door is knocking
for example
with someone you hate.
and here I beg another to possess somehow
the warmth of these wooden eyes

so beside me
a lightbult is revolving
wall to wall,
a reminder of the great sun
which had otherwise completely collapsed
down to the sore toe of the white universe.

its chalky light
rings
like a garden of tiny vegetables
to gather the quiet of these wet feelings
together

once again

like the sound of a watch
on your cold white wrist
which is reaching for a particular moment
to reoccur...
which is here...now.

{from Paris Review, Issue 48, 1969}

Baby Photo Friday: Pro Edition

The New Equation

Doesn't it seem like in the last few weeks the old guard, even some of the n(+1)ew, has decided to ban together and throw all their stale piss & vinegar in the direction of the blogs?  I tell you, for those of us who do this for little or nothing, for the few bucks we may make from ads or the book or two we may get in advance or the occasional email of thank you from an author or publicist, all of which adds up to mean that we're paying money out of our own pockets to do this, sometimes it's a little tough to be on the receiving end of this criticism, of being told in so many words that we may be partly to blame for what's going on with newspaper book sections, that because we don't have a list of credentials or a convenient fraternity with a somewhat storied history that we don't deserve to take part in the discourse, or at least that we should be branded as "lesser than" or insignificant or, perhaps, ignored and maybe we'll go away.  Actually, it makes one wonder why these folks waited so long to begin their campaigns to save the review sections, doesn't it?  Did they not see this coming when their newspapers became part of the mega-conglomerates?  Why weren't steps taken then to assure that what they were doing was significant enough to warrant preserving?  And now, instead of falling back on the mostly ineffective (though I do hope this one does work) act of petition signing (aka pissing in the wind), instead of gathering the old guard together for what amounts to eulogies for the dead, why not convene to figuring out what should be done, what direction to take, where to go from here?  The act isn't going away, the stage is just in need of some remodeling.  Lucky for all of you blue hairs, we kids have found some cheap, fairly easy, and rather effective tools and materials from which to build your new platforms.  Oh, and the audience is already there and waiting.

Meanwhile, I have books.  Stacks and stacks and stacks of books.  Books I've read that need to be mentioned on this here blog.  And I have a three-day weekend of my own making and a promise to myself, and now you, that I will give some time this weekend to telling you about some of these books. 

If I don't, then start a petition...

Corso

The month of poetry is coming to an end and who better to end it with than mild, wild, late, great Gregory Corso? {Be sure to check out the links after the poem.}

Marriage

Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap--
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son--
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just waiting to get at the drinks and food--
And the priest! He looking at me if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on--

then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climatic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce--

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting by baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust--

Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear not Roman coin soup--
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking--
No! I should not get married and I should never get married!
But--imagine if I were to marry a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and highball in the other
and we lived high up a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No I can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream--

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes--
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and--
but there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All in the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible--
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait--bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

+  Video of Corso discussing Jack Kerouac
+  Woodstock Journal's tribute to Corso
+  Patti Smith on Corso
+  LitKicks has the full text of Corso's great "Bomb" and a biography 
+  Corso teaches Allen Ginsberg's poetry class

Oh Bother

The most intense intellectual debate I've allowed my rather exhausted self over the last few weeks has been what the theme for the wee one's first birthday will be.  I'm a little embarrassed to admit that her favorite thing right now seems to be the Teletubbies.  Now I know this goes against the whole hipster dad ideal and probably exposes me as some sort of bad parent for allowing the wee one to be sucked in by something so inane, or any TV for that matter; after all, I can hear folks saying, she is so young and she can't control her intake.  But sometimes parents need a break and we have this free watch-on-demand channel on our cable, Sprout, which shows all of these low-impact shows for tots.  Well, she's become a fan.  Now you can say to her, "Hi Sproutlets," and she'll turn her head toward the television.  It's rather cute in an "uh oh" sort of way.

So no, this isn't an excuse, this isn't a warning that all of you future parents need to heed, a "beware the Sprout", or a mea culpa for turning the wee one into yet another TV-addicted youf.  She'll be fine.  I've already started feeding her a steady diet of books.  Literally.  She enjoys chewing on the corners.  I'll have her devouring some Kerouac before you know it.  Right now, it's about keeping our sanity, allowing us as parents and as people to catch our breaths for a few minutes, to let the television do what it might be good for, babysitting.  It's not like we do it for hours on end and truth be known she spends most of her Sprout time playing with the toys around her, screaming at the dogs, or plotting ways to impress us her with her cuteness so that she can build up ample toy-buying credit when she hits toy shopping age.

But back to the debate.  Yesterday morning, my wife sent me a link to all of this Teletubby party ware and that's when my alarm bells went off.  First of all, I had given birthday-party theme zero thought.  I figured we'd show up with the wee one and all would go from there.  But of course there would need to be a theme, a backdrop for photos and videos, something to benchmark all of her future birthday parties.  My only concern was trying to make a convincing argument that we don't want it to be the Teletubbies.  After all, she's also a fan of the Teletubby-like Boobahs, and the Boobahs are less well-known, therefore in my skewed version of parent cooldom, this would be better than caving to the popular, this would still allow my baby to be different--separate and somehow better--and will keep us from being one of those parents who think that just because little Danny likes the look of a shiny pistol he'll need to have a cowboy-themed party.  Then I thought, Pooh.  She likes Pooh.  Everyone likes Pooh.  Pooh is classic; Pooh has a certain quality about him.  Pooh gives you this:

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie."

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie."

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken, I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie."

Can't it be Pooh?  I don't think Elaine was impressed.  "Does she even like Pooh?" she IM'd.  "And is it even possible to find Boobah party stuff?" she continued, her defense of the Teletubbies obvious.  After all, she spends the most time with the wee one and she knows more than anyone what she likes.  That's why I'll probably end up caving.  I'm not going to be some cool-obsessed Neal Pollacky arbiter of taste.  If the wee one loves her Teletubbies then let her have her Teletubbies.  It does mean that I have some work to do if I'm going to get Pooh up to number one in her heart before she turns two.  Or three.

And on the bright side, at least it isn't Barney.

Darwin's Pigeons

It's hard to imagine that the religious right almost kept Darwin's theory from ever seeing the light of day.  And to think Darwin would have become one of the leading minds in the world of pigeon studies:

The near-miss was unearthed in 150-year-old correspondence between Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, and a clergyman, the Rev Whitwell Elwin. Elwin was one of Murray’s special advisers, part of a literary panel that was the Victorian equivalent of a modern focus group.

He was asked by the London publisher for his opinion of Darwin’s new work, which challenged Old Testament ideas of Creation. Unsurprisingly for a man of the cloth, Elwin disapproved. Writing back from his rectory in Norwich on May 3, 1859, he urged Murray not to publish. Darwin’s theories were so farfetched, prejudiced and badly argued that right-thinking members of the public would never believe them, he said. “At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs,” Elwin wrote, adding that the “harder and drier” writing style was also off-putting.

He suggested that Darwin’s earlier observations on pigeons should be made into a book as “everybody is interested in pigeons”. He enthused: “The book would be received in every journal in the kingdom and would soon be on every table.”

Here & There

Just in case you didn't know--godknows I didn't--this is TV Turnoff Week.  And while I'm all for it, I'm afraid that it's a proven fact that depriving your wee one of her daily dose of Boobahs can cause irreparable damage.  If you don't believe me, I can provide video evidence of her face when I cut off the Boobahs while explaining to her that the tele is rotting her developing brain.  Of course, you'll have to wait until next week to watch it.

_____

According to this story in The Columbus Dispatch, nonfiction is kicking fiction's arse in Ohio schools.  Teachers teaching toward the No Child Left Behind exams is given as a major reason, but I'm willing to bet that part of it is that nonfiction is much easier to teach and much easier to find teachers able to teach it. 

_____

Reason Magazine takes a look at the online audiobook service, LibriVox:

On Libri­Vox, the fact the recordings are free is but a fortunate by-product of a larger process with broader economic and philosophical implications. LibriVox is an example of what the Yale legal scholar Yochai Benkler—author of The Wealth of Networks, an influential analysis of “open source” economic networks—calls “commons-based peer production.” It’s a commons because it has no links to the marketplace in which goods and services are exchanged for money and because nothing is proprietary. It’s peer production because its volunteers coordinate their activities themselves without a traditional workplace hierarchy.

_____

A quote to help you with your morning coffee:  "The entire poem [50 Cent's "Ghetto Qu'ran"], we can agree, never quite reaches the heights of Notorious BIG's "Somebody's Gotta Die" - but surely beats anything by Keats."  From this New Statesman article judging the growing brawl, not between East Coast/West Coast, but between Rap itself and some of the big boys of the literary canon.

Taking its cue from that article, Guardian Book blogger Miles Johnson believes that today's poets can learn a thing or two from the rappers:

Of course, some learnt this lesson 200-odd years back. Lord Byron was the Original Gangster of English poetry. As the first "celebrity poet" he had a notorious string of hos and always kept some duelling pistols handy in case some playa hater started mouthing off about his mama. In Don Juan's notoriously scornful dedication, he also successfully merked his rivals in the poetry game: Bob Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Just as rappers thrive off having tiffs, Byron was famously enraged with the Lake Poets going soft whilst he remained authentically gangsta.

_____

The winner of Britain's National Short Story prize has been announced.

Change...Same

Herbert Gold, one of the men called on to defend Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer from an overzealous Marin County district attorney, recounts those days and what we've learned since:

A theologian and a professor at Mills College (serendipitously named Dr. Come and Dr. Wendt) testified to the high moral importance of Henry Miller. Along with Mark Schorer, distinguished literary critic and chairman of the English department at UC Berkeley, I testified to Miller's literary value. The district attorney nagged us with questions about the blasphemous immorality of such foreign -- French -- words as bidet, asking if I would like my mother to read such a word.

Keenly, the district attorney, insisted that conversations among characters in the book were, in fact, statements by Henry Miller. ("I refer the witness to page. ... Please read aloud to the jury.") I found myself explaining the function of a literary sign called quotation marks. A character speaking is not the writer's speech.

Meanwhile, the more things change...A Bentonville, Arkansas (home base to Wal-Mart), man is seeking $20,000 in damages after his two sons, ages 14 and 16, came across a copy of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book in the local library.  According to Earl Adams, there have been "many sleepless nights in our house" since his boys peeked in the book, supposedly unaware that it would contain images of whole lesbian sex.  Adams told his local paper, "For some reason, God placed this burden on me, and I will follow God’s plan to preserve a sense of decency in our public libraries. The responsible adults in our community need to ban together and protect our children from the selfdestructive paths that have been paved by the immoral counterculture that dominates our legal and educational institutions."

Baby Photo Friday: Mine

Typed

From Joan Acocella's "The Typing Life," a review of Darren Wershler-Henry's The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker:

Nietzsche used a typewriter. This is hard to imagine, but in the effort to stem his migraines and his incipient blindness—symptoms, some scholars say, of an advanced case of syphilis—he bought one of the new contraptions. So did Mark Twain, and he was the first important writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript, “Life on the Mississippi,” to a publisher. Henry James also had a typewriter, and a secretary, to whom he dictated. That is a famous fact; it is said to have contributed to the extreme complexity of James’s late-period style. (But why would oral composition make a writer’s prose more complex, rather than more simple? Again, Wershler-Henry does not address the question.) James got used to the sound of his Remington; when it was in the repair shop and he had to use a loaner, the new machine’s different sound drove him crazy. For many years after his death, his devoted typist, Theodora Bosanquet, claimed that she was still receiving dictation from him. Indeed, through her spirit medium she was informed that Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and John Galsworthy, all as dead as James, also wanted to use her stenographic services.

Wershler-Henry tells us about William S. Burroughs, who wrote in certain of his novels—and may have believed—that a machine he called the Soft Typewriter was writing our lives, and our books, into existence. We also hear about Jack Kerouac, who typed “On the Road” on a roll of paper so that the job of changing the paper would not interrupt him and thrust him back into the world’s inauthenticity. Kerouac was a fast typist—a hundred words a minute. Two weeks after starting “On the Road,” he had a single single-spaced paragraph a hundred and twenty feet in length. Scholars disagree as to whether the scroll was shelf paper or a Thermo-fax roll or sheets of architect’s paper Scotch-taped together. As with Burroughs, Kerouac’s relationship to the typewriter was heavily mediated by drugs. He would buy nasal inhalers, pry them open, and eat the Benzedrine-soaked paper within, followed by a chaser of coffee or Coca-Cola. Don’t run to the drugstore. They’ve changed the formula.

*

If you haven't already, you really, really need to check out the best Kurt Vonnegut tribute site I've seen yet:  Vonnegut's Asshole.  The site's creator, Eric Spitznagel, explains its purpose:

It should be shocking. But somehow, Vonnegut's asshole has a certain innocent charm. And that's probably because he wasn't trying to titillate or offend his readers. He was just showing us something that he considered perfectly normal and unremarkable. For most people, an asshole is something that's very, very private - and certainly nothing they'd want to share with the world. But Vonnegut had nothing to hide when it came to his asshole. It was as if he thought that owning a sphincter was just an ordinary part of being human.

Vonnegut's asshole had a profound effect on me as a kid. (There's really no way of writing that sentence without it sounding a little odd.) I was 10 or 11 when I first read Breakfast Of Champions, and it was the first book that I picked out on my own. I can still vividly recall the day when I got to the page with Vonnegut's asshole drawing. I was in school, reading the book over a plate of cold tater tots during lunch, and I guess I laughed a little too loud. My teacher at the time - a humorless old bastard named Mr. Spearing - walked over and glanced at my book. When he saw the asshole drawing, he was livid. "That is not funny at all," he screamed at me. "It's just childish and immature! It's absolutely disgusting!" He ripped the book out of my hands and refused to let me read it in school again.

...

This is what my writing friends and I discussed in that San Francisco bar. We debated why Vonnegut's asshole drawing had caused so much controversey, and what it meant, if anything. We wondered if he was trying to take the piss out of literary hubris, or at least his own lofty reputation. It's difficult to take anybody seriously, even an icon like Vonnegut, when you've seen his bunghole. At some point (and this may have been the booze talking), I suggested that it might be interesting to find out how other authors would've illustrated their own sphincters. Would it resemble Vonnegut's unmistakable asterisk? Or would they take more creative license and draw something a bit more unique?

The next day, a few of the writers took me up on my challenge and sent drawings of their assholes. No two were exactly the same, and some of them were downright fascinating. Before long, I decided to solicit asshole drawings from every writer I knew, asking them to contribute to my growing collection. I didn't necessarily want an accurate depiction of their asshole. I wanted something a little more conceptual. I asked them: "What is your asshole's personality? Is your asshole happy or sad? Angry or carefree?"

Meanwhile the Vonnegut tributes can be found almost everywhere (except Fox News), including the Orange County Register's Ken Friedenreich who shares his encounter with the man:

After greeting me at the door of the brownstone, our staff photographer followed a few minutes later with his gear. Vonnegut smoked throughout the interview. I told him that we shared a "karass" because we were both born on Nov. 11, though decades apart. (The same date in 1918 marked the end of World War I, the "war to end all wars.") We laughed. The occasion of the interview was publication of essays, under a title that was another barrage of neologism: "Wampeters, Foma and Grand Falloons."

The interview was polite and respectful. Here was a famous living writer. I am in his home. He is blowing smoke. "I've become an explainer," he said.

After the photographer packed up, we got down to other business. Scotch. A quart of it. Vonnegut and I spoke of anti-war protests, and I said they were social events and asked what impact a current artist could have on leaders if someone of his stature participated in a protest.

"Like the impact of dropping a cream pie from a step ladder," Vonnegut said.

We also spoke of comic writing, and he said all good comedy "is like a mousetrap whose spring you keep tightening until ... it snaps." He thought it an acquired skill.

Vonnegut seemed very comfortable being popular and increasingly flush. His woman, Jill Krementz, was already establishing herself in her photographs of celebrity writers – Borges, Capote, Heller and many more, including her beau. She was hard at work in the basement as Vonnegut and I talked upstairs.

Before I left, Vonnegut signed a copy of the new book for me and presented it with a flourish – it has a happy-face doodle – so 1970's.

Missles

The Underground Literary Alliance gets a little media attention this week in the Philadelphia City Paper:

Recently, the group has reorganized, resolved some of its internal disputes and recruited new members like Jessica (Disobedience) Wilbur — a zine writer who is moving to Philly this summer to get more involved. The ULA has even released two books on its own imprint, Security by James Nowlan and The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus by Wred Fright. A recent blog post from England's Guardian that mentioned the ULA alongside literary journals McSweeney's and n + 1 has been especially invigorating.

[...]

"Would Francine Prose really sell a zine without the establishment to back her? I don't think so," says Wenclas. "We're coming from the tradition of Allen Ginsberg, who hurled potato salad at his professors."

What about the critics who've said ULA was actually hurling sour grapes? They've got it wrong, Wenclas says. In fact, he turned down the opportunity to review books for BookForum rather than "bend over and take it" from an editor. The fact is, he'd rather write zines and scrape by for Xerox money for the rest of his life than achieve an inauthentic "success" underwritten by a corporation.

Like a favorite dish prepared at an unfamiliar diner, sometimes the Underground Literary Alliance can be a little hard to stomach, but I give the group a lot of credit for their repeated attempts to push the envelope and their willingness to question the status quo.  And recently their efforts have been winning them more fans, including yours truly.   

J. Lethem Wants to Be Slashed

Before Levi Asher gets his hopes up, this refers to Lethem's desire to be incorporated into someone's slash fiction.  That's what the folks at Wired are hoping the slashers out there will do for (to?) him:

Lethem, always a fan of art that exists in a copyright gray area, is eager to encourage fanfic writers of all stripes. He admires Henry Jenkins' seminal book about fanfic, Textual Poachers, and champions the creative appropriation of pop culture icons. "Fanfic is a beautiful allegory of appropriation," he said. "But that doesn't mean the exact gesture is the most aesthetically promising one." Translation: Fanfic rules because it tweaks copyright law, but it's not always good art. Maybe Lethem just hasn't read some of the fantastic Harry Potter fanfic that's out there?

You can find out more about Lethem's thoughts on copyright in a day or two; I'm working on a profile of the literary copyfighter for Wired. While you're waiting, start writing that Lethem slash fiction, and send in links. Also, do let me know if there's already some tawdry Lethem slash floating around on the Web.

Kudos to Patricia Storm, who, according to Lethem, was the first person to slash him.  You can see her slashing here.

Space

Here's a snippet of Jack Butler's poem "The Kid Who Wanted to Be a Spaceman":

I wanted so badly to be a spaceman.
I became a Christian by accident at six — I’d only stood
—– to ask if this was the invitation,
but they thought I was coming forward,
and then I saw my mother weeping in terrible relief
—–and they were shaking my hand,
and it felt good to be congratulated for my moral courage,
and I kept quiet.

All this in a revival in a shotgun shack of weathered rough-
—– cut lumber in a cotton field.

How can I tell you what happened to my religion
when the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still
lifted his master in a gesture like the Pieta
and took him back to the flying saucer and brought him back
—– to life?

If you want to read the rest, you'll have to head over to Pretty Fakes where Prof Fury has reprinted the poem in its entirety.  Its well worth a few minutes of your morning, any morning, to read some Butler, any Butler.  Have you taken my advice and grabbed a copy of Jujitsu for Christ yet?

Versing Optimism

America's poet laureate, Donald Hall, talks to the Christian Science Monitor about what he sees as an increase in the popularity of poetry:

"A book of poems by a well-known poet used to get a print run of 1,000 copies, and you'd be lucky if you sold out," says Mr. Hall. "Now more publishers are printing 8,000 to 10,000 copies for a first edition." He also notes that many literary magazines are being published, and when you add their modest circulations together, the result is a large readership."

Hall believes this upward trend has been fueled by readings – at colleges, literary festivals, and other venues – which have become increasingly popular since the 1950s. "The poetry reading used to be a rare event," he explains. "Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems." But hearing a poem read aloud "can be like reading it many times. You have a helping hand to get you into the poem. You have an actual body, an actual voice, and a series of gestures."

Heavy Hearts for the Hokies

I know there are a couple of regular SoT readers from the Blacksburg area, so I would like to extend to them and to the entire Virginia Tech community my deepest condolences.  I'm usually a news junkie, but honestly, tonight, I can't watch anymore.  Maybe it's the fact that I've become a dad and now I put myself in other parents' shoes, thinking horrible what-ifs, enough so that I start getting a little paranoid, wondering if I still have those fallout shelter blueprints handy.  Thankfully, I have a few years to enjoy before the wee one's no longer wee and I'll have to send her out into that.  But what the hell will that world be like by then? 

I'm sure our parents thought the same thing.

Meanwhile, I'm going to give you something that will hopefully bring a smile to you on this most horrible of days.  Some of you may know that my wife and I record a three-minute snippet of the wee one's life almost every day, and have been since she was born.  Well, this footage is almost a month old, but it's my favorite so far.  It has everything that being a baby seems to be about: joy, innocence, amazement, helplessness, humor.  Oh, and Kermit the Frog.   Enjoy.

Here/Everythere

A 17-year-old Iowa boy who plans on going into "the ministry" says that the dirty language and the using of Jesus' name in vain that he found in Of Mice and Men made him uncomfortable, so he wants the Newton, Iowa school board to remove it from the classroom.  Will there be any books--other than the Good One--left in Iowa and Kansas?  Stay tuned.

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Meanwhile for some news that proves that all ain't bad in the classrooms, an English teacher at a New Jersey school who amazingly is being allowed to teach On the Road this year will have her students do their reports on the book using typewriters instead of computers.  Damn good idea.

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Fiction meets reality, Big Brother edition: according to this story, there are thirty-two closed-circuit TV cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell's flat in Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

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Scientists in England plan on studying the smells emitted by aging books at Cambridge University's library in order to discover the whats and hows of book decomposition and to find ways to better preserve the collection.

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Baton Rouge's The Advocate looks at the new noir anthology from Akashic Books:

The theme of these books is the dark side — usually involving some criminal activity. Every city has this underside, this hidden subculture whose members wouldn’t fit in suburbia. New Orleans is a natural, and crime writer Julie Smith, a resident of Faubourg  Marigny, exploits the seamy side of the city in her detective stories. She’s a perfect choice to edit a noir fiction collection set in New Orleans.

New Orleans is really two places now: the city that was before Hurricane Katrina and the city that is left. Or, as Smith notes in her introduction, “pre- or post-K.” To accommodate both New Orleans incarnations, Smith has divided the stories in this collection into two parts, the first 10 stories, pre-K, are grouped in the section “Before the Levees Broke,” the second part, post-K, is called “Life in Atlantis.”

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The Boston Globe's Frederick Burger examines Faulkner as a tourist attraction and gets this great quote from writer Bill Emerson who was sent to Oxford in 1954 to interview Faulkner for Newsweek:

"He couldn't have been more surly.  He was wearing cutoff khaki pants and was bare chested and had a bristle beard. I didn't care how he looked, but I thought it was a fairly uncouth and primitive reception. There was the not-too-veiled suggestion that I might suffer physically for the intrusion and that the intrusion infuriated him. . . . He was a feisty cat, a plucky nipper. He had plenty of fury, but he also had a magnetic quality. He was short, but you didn't get a sense that he was little."

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Benjamin Percy has been awarded the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for his story "Refresh, Refresh".

Baby Photo Friday: In Her Easter Bonnet

Buk on Poetry

From the Poetry in Motion CDROM:

"Reading the poets has been the dullest of things. All I get is a goddamn headache and boredom. Poetry itself contains as much energy as the Hollywood industry, as much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive."

Goodbye Blue Monday

Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84.  Sometimes I hate falling asleep with the radio on.

Vollmann Live on Tape

If, like me, you've never been able to catch William T. Vollmann in person, here's a way to at least grab a copy of one of readings so that you can hear the man for yourself.  For a tidy $7.50 (plus another three for S&H), the good folks at Politics & Prose will send you a CD of Vollmann's March reading at the store, the one that The Sacramento News & Review's Ralph Brave descibes in this article:

Lumbering toward the podium set up with a microphone at the back of the bookstore, head jutted forward from his body, the parts of which somehow don't seem to belong together, dressed in a plaid shirt and blue jeans, few sitting in the packed audience at the Politics & Prose Bookstore on upper Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., would have known that this was the National Book Award-winning author they had come to see and hear, William T. Vollmann. Vollmann looks so plain, his dress so casual, that one might have easily mistaken him for the store's janitor, if one noticed him at all.

The people who had come to see him were a diverse sort. Some were state Department and international aid types who had read the author's works about his travels to dangerous places and among the poorest of the poor. Others were college students doing their senior theses on his novel The Royal Family or one of the many others. There were also those who had read only a single Vollmann article, picked up at random in some obscure journal or magazine, but had discovered the best article they'd ever read on that subject, whether that was the war in Bosnia or the life and times of a Thai prostitute. No two people in the audience, it seemed, had read the same Vollmann work.

He opened his reading with an announcement that it would be brief, so as not to bore anyone, and then he would take questions. And everyone was invited afterward to join him for a drink at a nearby bar if they wished. When Vollmann begins reading, there's a wooden quality to his speech, as if it's coming from somewhere within him other than his chest and throat--almost as if, instead, it's coming from his head. There's also a slight hesitation and delay between and before each word comes out, as if even the most common utterance first goes through a filter.

The Return of Ask Dr. SoT

Been some time since I've answered an imagined question to Dr. SoT. Tonight's question is from my wife, who asks:  "why do you act so stupid sometimes?"

Well, wife of SoT funny you should ask.  New research has revealed that there is a possible scientific explanation for this stupidity.  If you'll look at the image above, you'll see on the right the male brain during normal "thinking and reasoning" activity.  On the left is the male brain during orgasm, a state that most males seem to go through too many times during the course of any given day. Just throw a box of donuts in front of your average male and you'll see what I mean.  Anyway, what it shows is that the frontal cortex, where reasoning occurs, is deactivated, meaning that during the BIG O, the male of our species becomes, well, dumb.

I would go into more detail but adkajdf;kda;lkdmmmv;akerupwoeuirf.

More here.

The Unsullied Womb of Beathood

Poetry month is nearly half over and I've yet to acknowledge it here at Syntax of Things.  I'll remedy that with this mp3 of Jan Kerouac reading her poem "Hey, Jack!".  It's an interesting mix of Jan's words alongside her mostly absent father's voice breaking in from time to time as if to set the tone, his words a background to the subject matter of the poem, her subject matter, just as his absence from her life was a major theme for Jan until her own death.  The complete poem can be found below the cut.

Watch out Oprah, Here Comes Spin

I long ago lost my free access to Spin so I had no idea that the magazine that Klosterman ran into the ground has started a book club.  Here's how they describe it:

In an attempt to prove that musicians aren't just products of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, SPIN.com has gathered together an eclectic group of literary-minded musicians to participate in our monthly online book club. Each month, a different artist will select a book that has impacted his/her music career and our club will read and discuss. We bring you the highlights.

Last month's selection was none other than Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, as chosen by Shawn Harris of the Matches.  But if you're looking for proof as to why this will never work--and why Oprah shouldn't worry too much about Spin's power to impress the publishing world thus usurping her position as Ruler of the Books--then look no further than the "book club forum" in which the hot topic has nothing to do with books or writing or...well, it's all about "Jessica Alba In Anal Action Movie!" 

Broken Eggs Here & There

The litblogosphere's favorite punching bag, Sam Tanenhaus, spoke at the 22nd annual Literature Lecture in El Paso and one attendee left more than a little disappointed:

When the guero is finished with his talk, I buy his book so I can ask him what role he thinks Chicano literature is going to play in American letters. And because I asked straight up like that, he couldn't bring up Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who we both know ain't Mexican-American. The pobre had to answer something, and you know what he told me? He just doesn't see it having a big role in literature, such as other media and the Internet.

Then I countered with como puedes decir eso with so many Mexicans coming into this country, only I say it in English so that he can understand me, and he shrugs his shoulders and says that the Internet and blogs are going to have a huge impact and no one can predict where literature is really going. {SoT:  My emphasis. He really said that?  Sam Tanenhaus said the blogs are going to "have a huge impact?"}

And I'm satisfied, because that's right: He has no idea where literature is going. I thank him y me despido de el.

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Lionel Shriver, one of Raleigh's most well-known writers--despite the fact that so few know that she's actually from Raleigh--will be reading here on Tuesday in support of her new novel The Post-Birthday World.  The News and Observer profiles her:

"When I look back on it, I realize it was a rich childhood and I'm glad I grew up there," she said in a phone interview last month from New York City, where she visits friends and family each year. "I feel a sense of identity. True, I didn't stay there. I haven't set a whole string of novels in North Carolina. But if the state wants to claim me, they can have me."

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More than just dust collects atop Miranda July's fridge. {via}

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Jane Campion plans to bring the story of Keats' love affair with Fanny Brawne to the big screen.

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Over at The Boston Globe, Jan Freeman writes about "wanton eggcorns."