unRonic

Sorry I Didn't: a Post to She Knows Whom

2012-02-15T00:01:00.000-06:00

Sorry I didn't buy you a bundle of crimson sex organs grown in a warehouse in the Meadowlands by immigrants making less than I do with chemicals that have more constiuent parts than I do. Also, I meant to pick you up a polysteyrene ursus americanus holding a facsimilie of symmetic ventricles but the pick up truck along Hylan boulevard only carried ursus maritimus and the ventricles more closely resembled arotas which is frightfully illogical if you really understand their distinct functions

I didn't pay thirty-two yuan for a sheet of recycled paper thickened up with petro-resin and embossed with half naked infantile angels and someone else's words professing something about someone, perhaps you; sorry about that.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth or Chinese trinckets or thickened, folded sheets of tree pulp or dying flowers or a spa treatment or oysters or wine or my credit card balance but I do feel the same about you as I did three days ago and as I will tomorrow and countless days after that.

The Mortician: An Essay on Writer's Block

2012-01-31T03:29:00.000-06:00

It is raining. This is melting the snow. It took a few good days of rain to finally melt last year's two feet of snow and that came around March. It is January and it snowed two days ago. This snow is gone already.

I had started mending my friend's parents' lawn today. Maybe this is why I falsely believe it is spring. I put on a worn out shirt and my cowboy-tight, ripped work jeans. It was like theolddays. April. Mucking a golf course east of Wichita before undergrad on the east coast.

It is muddy here in this Staten Island yard; not as muddy as the trenches of Kellogg, nor as silty but overgrown and reeking of years of rotting peaches from a lone, diminutive, un-pruned tree. Mulberries poke their heads out through weeds like rye. These must be cut by me and cut again and cut again. It rains harder.

Harder. Hard enough to dampen my clothes faster than my body heat can dry them out. I retire to my car. Tilting the seat toward Kill van Kull where a ship passes. I doze with my knees poking through their well-deserved holes. I doze like theolddays only, now, I don't get paid for lounging. Rain means another day I have to wait for a check. This keeps me from dozing. I head for coffee. Find some at a deli. It is terrible.

I hope some voodoo or wishful thinking will clear the rain. I am paid by the job not the hour now. It kills me to wait here as opposed to theolddays where I would sleep in the heat, my check trickling up like a broken sprinkler-head futilely trying to nurse a new berm.

I suck the coffee through the hole in the lid; let the windows blur. I go in and let Mrs. Spinelli know I will be back in the morning. Another day the check is delayed.

I drive around for awhile in the false spring. I drive deliberately through puddles and listen intently as the water meets the running boards like a dozen snare drums. There are new suspension parts behind my tires, it is good to get the salt off. Salt begets rust. Rust begets break. Break begets wreck. Wreck begets repair. Repair begets bills. Bills beget a necessity to work with my body again.

This is a writer's problem.

The mind is no use to anyone so the body must be sold. Turn a spade, watch a child or cat or watch many children and be called a professor. My mind is no use to anyone but the mortician. She will dissect my brain and make my poems expensive realizing they are so rare: like diamonds except with less dictators and more women.

Enhance Your Shelf Life NOW: Debunking the Debunking of Sexism

2012-01-23T20:00:00.000-06:00

This Salon article would be laughably ignorant if it were not so painfully ignorant. In it, male novelist Teddy Wayne (an author who has written a novel I have never heard of) complains that Jennifer Weiner (author of, apparently, many novels I have never heard of) complains too much. Using some less than artful euphemisms, Wayne argues that Weiner is wrong in her assertion that the New York Times is "sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance."

Weiner goes to great lengths to prove her point. If you are like me, however, pictures make a lot more sense than words so here are some from an organization (VIDA) for which I intern. (I am admitting my bias here, see)

VIDA is an organization devoted to women in the literary arts. To boil it down to absolute terms, VIDA is seeking to create a conversation about women writers and cultural perceptions of them and their work. VIDA's most fundamental project is The Count. This is where I come in. As an intern I am in the trenches doing this counting. It sounds straight forward of course, "how many men?" "how many women?" It is not. Often bios do not reveal one's gender. Often names do not either. For example, my dad's name is Alex, so is my female cousin's. Part of a Counter's job is to definitively ascertain the gender of an author. Then we can actually count them. But first! we must figure out how to categorize their work. Is this a literary piece in and of itself? For example a poem in Poetry. Is this a critical piece by one author about another? For example, the contents of the book review section of the Times disclosed above. Whose literature is being talked about? Obviously and as expected, mostly men. There is another pie chart to accompany this one over on the official count page. It is reveals whose opinions about literature (the reviewers) are being published. Again, as expected, mostly men.

I should be able to stop here because the point is made fairly clear by all the incredibly straight forward evidence that VIDA presents. Unfortunately, Wayne somehow read all this and came to a different conclusion. Look at the above pie chart one more time. Seriously, I'll wait. Study it. Got it? Okay now read this:

In short, midlisters are middle-class professionals scraping out a living — and being a midlist male author who writes about males is a distinct financial disadvantage. Not only will you not get reviewed in the Times, but you won’t get reviewed in the women’s magazines that drive sales

That thing about women's magazines had something to do with the incredibly condescending view Wayne has about women's book clubs (or something) but the important thing is that he really believes males are reviewed less in the Times. Remember the pie chart, right? Okay.

Wayne did raise a point that VIDA has not looked into or at least has not published any awesome pie charts on: shelf placement. Is Wayne on to something when he moans that if you are a male "Barnes & Noble will relegate you to the back shelves"?

I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt so I looked into it. One of the perks of being an enormous literary nerd with no job is that I also have no friends and so can while away an entire afternoon jotting notes about book shelves and not worry that there is a whole world out there waiting to be grappled with, engaged in and employed by...

Anyway. I really wanted Wayne to be right because if nothing else it would prove that while the scholarly world(we'll call the Times scholarly...for now) overlooks women, maybe the commercial one does not.

I went down to my neighborhood Barnes and Nobel; below are the hard numbers. I started with the front shelves. If the men are all on the back shelves it should be easy to prove Wayne right by just counting the first shelves I see when I walk in. I chose the shelves "New Fiction" and "New Writers" to also look into Wayne's "book-editor-friend's" statement: “When we buy a debut novel by a man, we view it as taking a real chance.”

Hm. Okay, strike one, we'll get this next one.

"Taking a real chance," eh? Okay, strike two. I get three right? (There were only two categories that pertained to fiction and/or new writers but sure, 3 tries it is.)

An entire shelf dedicated to a man? Damn. Guess that make strike 3 right? (Yup, but I'll give you an honorable mention. Janet Evanovich had her own shelf too, right next to the $2 reese's bars under the cashier's stand. Women's literature is evidently equal to that of sugary impulse buys.)

Now that Wayne's little reverse sexism theory has been shot full of holes lets sink this ship for good. But first! Wayne tell us how he really feels:

Yet the Franzen-Weiner-Picoult-Stockett universe is the literary 1 percent; they’re all doing just fine, male or female. If you’re upset that you’re deprived of two separate reviews and a profile in the Times, as Weiner evidently is, then, to quote Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” you have “uptown problems, which aren’t really problems at all.”

Got that, female writers? You should be happy with money. We do not need to have intelligent discussions about women's writing so long as we give them money. Shut up, look pretty, here's a royalty check. Which might explain Wayne's parting shot:

male authors are somewhat like male porn stars: getting work, but outearned and outnumbered by their female counterparts, who are in far greater demand from the audience

I have no idea what Wayne was hoping to accomplish with his invective. It seems obvious to me that sexism remains an enormous force in this country. The examples are numerous and growing daily. Pick one. All male presidents. All male presidential candidates. Predominately male CEO's. Predominately male editors and on and on and on. I suppose Wayne was more worried about authors that never make it to the B&N shelves but maybe hangout on the St. Mark's shelves. I point you again toward VIDA. The reviews conducted by The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review and Granta all qualify as the "midlist" writers that Wayne was talking about and only one publication (Poetry) covered an equal or greater number of women compared to men. The simple truth is that Wayne (and anyone who believes him) is wrong; blatantly so. And to finish this all up, take a careful look at the author picture on the right. I happen to be a male writer. I am even openly heterosexual. Yet here I am lending my voice to feminism. Clever ploy to get in good with the ladies? No. Resistance against an unfair system which is silently repressing equal expression? Absolutely. If we men are really the great writers all the major journals and critics say we are, we will not mind a little fair competition and discussion with women. Those who defend the status quo have something to be afraid of: their own inadequacy.

Owning It: a Candid Discussion of Depression

2012-01-06T21:43:00.003-06:00

Caveats of caveats, all things are caveats. First, let me say this is not a pity party for me or anyone else nor is it an invective against anyone else or me. This is being open and honest and hoping to create a conversation about something which, quite frankly, it disgusts me that no one really talks about.

Depression.

Over a year ago now a friend of mine, a bright star in the darkness that life can all too often seem, committed suicide. When that happened I had vowed to finally open up and talk, publicly, like really fucking publicly, about my own battles with depression as a way of owning up to and hopefully helping others open up and own up. I never did.

The issue was and is that most people who do not have depression, and even many who do, do not admit what it really is, what it really means and what it really does in one's life. As such, I was afraid to talk about it. Well here I am and as a young professional ever-grasping for more opportunity this is a risky thing to be talking about on something that comes up under the top three Google results of my name but I forge on.

To be upfront, depression is a disease. The same way a cold, canker sores, MRSA and syphilis are diseases. And like all of the above, especially the latter, requires treatment. Being a twenty-something male in a patriarchy such as ours makes it damn hard to admit that but this is a fight one cannot fight alone. If you do not get antibiotics for MRSA you will end up with a wooden leg and none of the perks of a pirate ship, syphilis, just look at Stalin. It has to be treated. That said, there are many ways of doing so. Too few people, and this is the result of the rampant negative characterization on many fronts, turn to medication. I remember reading a Times article which had the audacity to crack jokes about the sexual side effects of one of the more popular anti-depressants; the one I happen to take. If there is anything that is going to scare a twenty-something male in desperate need of treatment away it is telling him that he is going to end up with ED as a twenty-something. I can't speak of the side effects for women but it goes without saying that they are not wanting for any more reasons to have their sex-live stigmatized.

I "wrote a letter" as we curmudgeons are wont to do but it wasn't published. I argued, essentially, that while there are side effects, usually the benefits far outweigh them. Diminished sexual function vs. the ability to function at your 9-5? Yeah, I'll take the latter thanks. It didn't help that the Times (and many others) compared the effects to those of placebo. Yes, sometimes one course of treatment does not work. That's why there are lots. Some are even gummy, I hear.

The Times comparison to a placebo is more nuanced than it seems however and might not even be that bad. Based on some research I read about in the New Yorker it appears that the brain can actually heal the body just because it thinks it can. Harvard researchers are seeing signs that people who have been told they are taking a placebo start feel better anyway. There are a wide range of science-y explanations and questions for this but it all adds up to chemicals in the brain. This might not work for say, your splintering, post-MRSA shin, but it probably means a lot for things like depression.

Depression is widely attributed to an imbalance of the neurotransmitters Serotonin and Norepinehprine. The chemicals usually used to treat the disease are typically "reuptake inhibitors" responsive to one chemical or both. "Reuptake" refers to the fact that the cells that produce these chemicals often suck them back up when they are supposed to remain floating in the brain. This also, is where the side effects come in. An SSRI (e.g. selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro) blocks the "reuptake" of serotonin but it can also block the normal uptake of the chemical causing depression to get worse among other things.

What's important in all the technical jargon above is that depression is based on chemicals, involuntary productions that do or do not occur the way they are supposed to in your brain. Essentially, it is not your fault.

It is not your fault.

What is your fault is refusing to do anything about it. Man up and admit you can't do it alone because you can't and guess what, no one anywhere has ever done anything alone. Yes there are go-getters out there (I consider myself one) there are trend-setters out there (I hope to be one) there are unique individuals out there (I know I am one) but none of those things happen in a vaccuum. You can't be top of the pack without a pack to beat, you can't set a trend without people to follow it, you can't standout without a background. Everything relies on something and someone else. That is how evolution built us. Don't fool yourself into thinking you are bigger than the problem by refusing to ask for help. Asking for help, admitting you have such an unfortunately stigmatized disease, is the bravest and best thing you can do to deal with it.

But wait there's more!

Don't set it and forget it. You can't just go to the doctor, get a bottle of pills and start seeing roses and sunshine and unicorns, but if you can, let me know which doctor you see cause I want in on it. From personal experience, an anti-depressant essentially makes it easier for one to treat oneself. Before the medicine I would wallow, quite literally, in whatever I was feeling (with depression it is often that you feeling nothing at all) and would just sleep or browse the internet aimlessly. What Prozac has helped me do is see that I am not well and take my own steps to get better. Yesterday morning I was feeling that way. I woke up late and just wanted to stay in bed. I figured the cards were already stacked against me because I missed out on much needed time to be productive. It can happen. No medicine is not a cure all. When you get an infection you have to take amoxicillin and usually do something else like rest or eat better. With depression you have to take medicine and take care of yourself. Without Prozac I might have just stayed in bed and let everything get one hundred thousand times worse but I got up and kicked its ass. I picked up my bass, put on some real angry, gritty, nasty Black Flag songs and went to town. I played like I was in my high school pop-punk band again, in my apartment, in my underwear but unfortunately without that one cheerleader who always used to stand near the front at our shows. But hey, it felt good and I ended up making use of the rest of my day. Was it one or the other or both? The answer is probably all of the above with the most importance being that I took the situation into my own hands (specifically my now very blistered fingers) and did something with it. That's the key.

Move and you will move on.

With the help of a friend, I recently discovered the depths of misery and then simultaneously the heights of self-affirmation. To make a long and yet to be concluded story short, she did something bad to me but I got over it in part because I was able to take the energy I had for feeling like crap and turn it into energy for lifting weights and reading lots of books and also because a friend is a friend no matter what happens. Would I have been able to put all that negative energy to positive use without help? I doubt it -- no wait -- I know I would not have been able to snap out of that without help.

There are so many cliches, "bad things only happen because good people do nothing," "life is what you make it," blah, blah, hopelessly-optimistic blah.

But it's all true. If you don't want to be depressed. Stop being depressed. There are a million ways to do so. Find yours. Don't be afraid to admit it starts with a trip to a doctor or therapist. It's better than the alternative, trust me.

If you still don't think it's manly to be honest about your feelings, here are some videos of a guy who could definitely beat the shit out of you telling you about his. They're long videos but they're worth it.

This post is dedicated to the memory of David Sommerhauser.

Facts > Wtf-ever you just said

2011-10-30T22:02:00.001-05:00

So, this guy

Governor Rick Scott of Florida

said this

Our country is now completely dependent on Russia for travel to and from space. A private business would never let any part of its operations be dependent on someone else.

about this

ignoring the fact that these guys

Yes, even the heroic private company that is saving our space program.

do exactly that.

Do this

here: http://goo.gl/zS0qZ

Three Week Hunger

2011-10-25T03:29:00.000-05:00

I seem to have established a blogging pattern of once every three weeks. I know I am breaking all kinds of rules by doing this. First, I should be doing it once a week, second I shouldn't be making a post about how I never post.

However, I think self-deprecation is necessary at times and particularly revealing about personality. I think my problem is that I tend to overthink my words. I know that this blog is not read by anyone for world advice or creative insight. Though, that is probably anyone's loss. I mean, the reason I am not here every other day is I do not want to waste my and your time on petty stuff. That is not to say people who do blog more regularly are petty just that if I were to blog that often it would be.

My writing hunger, occurring only in three week intervals is interesting me and I wonder about the cause. I have reached a few theories about why I come back to this when I do:

Money. Creativity is a function of contentedness and contentedness is an inverse function of stress. When my bank account is nice and cushiony I have the freedom of mind to write rather than worry about which check needs to clear first.
Time. I think I play a pendulum game with my leisure time. I give huge blocks of it away to editing my work, other people's work, my magazine, other people's magazines, political causes, environmental causes and bass guitar solos only to later about-face and drop everything to have some personal time, wherein I write.
Sleep. This one I am still working out. I have had about 1000000 good ideas come to me just before falling asleep and had to pry myself from the warm clutches of my bed. This was a bit of a learning curve. I kept promising to myself that I would write the ideas down in the morning. However I started to realize that they were the beginning of dreams, that is REM stuff spilling into the last remnants of consciousness and if I did not write them I would never see them again. So write I did. Jumped out of bed like I was haunted to get them down. Most are still just ideas but I think they are going places. Other times I cannot make a pen move when I am tired. Others I ramble out forever thinking I am writing the next On The Road to come up with an incoherent piece of crap...which I guess is a lot like On the Road. Right now, I am somewhere in between that REM/incoherrent stage. I am definitely tired but my ideas seem to be coming out well. In fact, this late night post which started as just musing on the strange cycles of my work ethic has actually turned into an analytic Ars Poetica. Which is groovy.
Decision Fatigue This is some pretty neat new science. It seems to be that the more stuff you have to choose between the worse you get at it. Your mind gets tired and actually stops deciding which usually means defaulting and picking something that was actually picked for you not by you. When it comes to writing there is no default. Every word is a choice and to make even one choice badly can ruin everything. Inhibition certainly plays a part when decision fatigue takes over. How many systems have we derived to work around inhibition? I think of automatic writing, first-thought-best-thought and a rather myriad of mental function inhibitors. Inhibition is just the brain trying to protect you from dying so when you inhibit the brain you take inhibition with it. Neat eh?

So here we have it these are my reasons for avoiding my personal challenges. What are your favorite cop-outs? The first step to recovery is acceptance.

I am not positive about the etymology of the word concerted but it calls to mind the image of many things working together to produce one thing more forceful than simply their sum. This marks the beginning of a concerted effort by my constituent parts to work together to make ~~this blog~~ my writing better than I am probably qualified for.

#OccupyWallSt: What I Saw, What I See

2011-10-07T12:36:00.001-05:00

I caught wind of the #OccupyWallSt protest in some abstract internet channel a few weeks ago. I remember thinking, "Hm, is this another psychotic right wing thing?" Some thing suggested the protesters were men and women after my own heart but with the majority of the noise these days being made by the Tea Party I assumed the worst and forgot about it.

The other night I caught an excerpt of this video on the news playing in a bar after the Yankees game. This combined with the macing convinced me that I needed to contribute. Politics be damned, freedom of speech and assembly comes first.

It's just a bonus that I espouse the overall theme of this movement, which, despite reports to the contrary, is quite clear: an unregulated, unaccountable financial and corporate universe is no longer welcome in America.

Of course, there are many other things going on here and while "distracting" it's about time someone made some noise. I saw a great number of signs and stickers against "fracking" the ecologically decrepit method of extracting natural gas by injecting sand, water and chemicals into layers of rocks. There were gay rights banners. Support for teachers, students and universities and as of today organized labor.

It was a bastion of fervent liberalism in what has seemed to be a vacuum of far right denialism. It was glorious. It is also terrifying. Terrifying that it has come to this. Thanks to "Citizens United" and five out of nine Supreme Court Justices it has become apparent that voting and corresponding with elected officials no longer gets anything accomplished. After all, why read an email from a constituent when you can just read numbers on a big corporate check. The Tea Party had also somehow convinced us that taxes on billionaires who pay none and also aren't using their money to hire people is a bad idea.

Thankfully, the left woke up. Okay, so there is not a single leader, no bullet list of demands, and most of the "Wall Street" banks are actually in midtown but the intentions are pretty clear. Wall Street is a metaphor for out of control financial and corporate universe. The taxpayer funded bailouts meant nothing to them; they blew them on bonuses. Politicians and judges are helping them fix their cash funnels directly to other politicians and judges ears while simultaneously depriving their employees the right to organize to speak using words instead of green backs.

Well, thankfully, we went ahead and organized anyway. This is what the real first amendment looks like; This is what democracy looks like.

More than anything else, this has reminded me that there is a committed left in this country. Something I am very proud of not just because I am left handed. Maybe the protest itself will not solve the problems but I do believe it will energize people to harass their dollar-bill blind folded representatives and convince the politicians who already to listen to fight harder against the right. I will continue protesting and I will also be writing, emailing and calling. You should too.

Oh, right, this is a literature blog and since I'm sure you cannot single out the famous poets and professors who were there from any of these pictures I'll close with a quote:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;

-WB Yeats "On Being Asked for a War Poem"

Poetry should be silent, the poet should be silent: a citizen more than an artist.

A Brief History of Caleb Ross

2011-09-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

I can only personally account for roughly three years of Caleb's life. The other details of this history have been accrued through applying biblical numerology to his blog posts and anecdotes from Creative Writing professors we shared. It should be noted that probably no part of the following history is true but parts of it might be.

Caleb was born to wandering shepherds Brian and Diana sometime around the reign of Herod II

Caleb was a precoucious child whose first love was music. It has been said that he was capable of playing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" on a 25 key Schoenhut at age 3.

For his loyal service to Giovanni Verrazano, a street in Staten Island bears his name.

To pay for college Caleb sold used office furniture to an up-and-coming Greg Daniels.

Caleb took the only known photograph of Helen of Troy. Unfortunately it was shot on a roll of Kodachrome which he forgot to develop before the chemicals were discontinued by Kodak in 2009.

Caleb converted Jonathan Goldsmith to a full-time Boulevard Wheat drinker.

More amazing than all these is the real life genius of Caleb's writing and his untreated workoholism. When I signed up to participate in this tour it was for two novels. Now it's two novels and a novella. All the while he has been helping other writers revise and publish as well as running numerous blogs, forums and podcasts. If there is something this man can't do it hasn't been invented and done by him yet. Cannoli Pie published an excerpt of Stranger Will here and a review of it here.

The first book of Caleb's I ever read came with a picture of him shirtless holding a guitar. I am not sure what I was supposed to get from that. Perhaps this is related.

This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross (also known as Caleb Ross, to people who hate Js) as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter:@calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com /rosscaleb

For more Author Photo Comics fun, click over to the Author Photo Comics tag at Caleb's website.

Meta-Opinion: Opinion Writers Suck

2011-09-27T14:16:00.001-05:00

I have commented before on the New York Times's haphazard increase of Opinion Writing. I was not naive enough to believe it would be the last of my complaints. This time I am singing (Henry Rollins style) in a very different register. The basic outline of my last argument was that Opinion Writing needs to be kept far away from news to try and preserve the sanctity of bias. This time, the absence of basic proofreading is the flaw and the potential victim is "Writing."

Mark Bittman writes about a tenet of the food movement for this past Sunday's Review: eating in not out. True to the nature of Opinion Writing, Bittman is very anecdotal in his telling of the story. There is research that backs him up on some of his better points such as the social and nutritional value of meals where the entire family is gathered at the same time over the same food but Bittman hardly nods to it.

The central theme of the article is that the cost of food as a deterrent to eating healthy is a myth and that other factors such as time/convenience and elements of addiction play the most prominent roles. As I am acutely aware, it is cheaper to cook food at home than to eat off of the dollar menu at a near by fast food hovel. I also agree, and I think science does too, that there are other social and biological factors that affect this unhealthy consumption.

Bittman claims to know the solution: fresh vegetables and dried beans from the grocery store and a change in the socialization of meal time. This is all well and good except that he either neglects to mention or is blissfully unaware that people often opt for the much less nutritious offerings at the supermarket because of prices. Macaroni and cheese is cheaper than a head of broccoli, white bread is cheaper than whole wheat and soda is cheaper than milk. This is where the problem is. The grocery store is no safer than burger joint. Bittman is right to hurry people out of McDonald's but he's wrong to rush them into the A & P. This is a fault of the anecdotal nature of Opinion Writing. Because Bittman is only giving his opinion he can do it without researching much of his argument. In fact, most of the points he makes in the article he also makes in his bio on the Times website. This, combined with the fact that he is not specifically reacting to any recent news regarding these food issues means he is pontificating rather than reporting.

The real gaffe is when the article cites examples that actually prove itself wrong.

The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people.

Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone.

(italics mine)

And herewith is the issue I have with the writing. Someone, should have read this over in an effort to weed out this glaring contradiction. If it really is so much cheaper to eat from the grocery store why are there non-profits focused on making grocery food affordable? If Bittman is aware of the cost of groceries why did he assert that they are so much cheaper in the first place? Does anyone really know? It makes for a very confusing logical loop that simply should not be.

I will not go all John Simon here and start blaming Bittman for the Fall of the English language or something silly but this case does point out that it is becoming increasingly acceptable to write disregarding the logic of your own statements. Articles are taking the form of long-winded monologues about personal invective with no regard for their validity. I probably agree with Bittman on the issue of food but I disagree with his way of writing about it. He is actually making some good points but he is making them in a way that comes of as sneaky, skewed or wrong which hurts everyone involved. I fear that opinion writing is moving more in this direction of unanswered monologue and hope that, as a journalistic medium, it falls out of fashion sometime soon.

Don't worry, it is not lost on me that my bemoaning Opinion Writing is in fact Opinion Writing. This, however, is a blog not a newspaper. I have also made the effort to carefully elucidate my point with written examples and pictures of sweaty hardcore punk rockers.

This is Ian Mackaye, friend of Rollins (above). He is responsible for aspects of the food movement in his own right.

Irene on the Beach

2011-08-30T22:34:00.000-05:00

There is a ton of talk about how human activities affect aspects of nature. Global warming is a contentions issue, perhaps it shouldn't be but some minds are hard to change. It is undeniable that ocean surface temperatures have been on the upswing for the better part of two decades and it is well know that ocean surface temperature is an important carburetor for extreme tropical weather. I will not attempt to make assumptions about why ocean temperatures have risen. Even global warming science is uncertain about all the causes and the magnitudes of difference each makes. There is a separate, indisputably human contribution to the devastation wrought by tropical cyclones which we are not working hard enough to mitigate and in many ways are actually making worse: over-development of the coast.

The first solution is the most obvious and is a lesson I picked up pretty quickly living in flood-prone Wichita, Kansas. Simply, stop building houses where nature is volatile, i.e. flood plains and low lying coasts. Around Halloween 1998 it rained a lot in Kansas. I remember trick-or-treating in the rain for the first time in our new, more affluent neighborhood. My dad was not terribly keen on us staying out so long but I heard rumors that people who live in big houses give out bigger candy bars too. In the end I think I ended up not with bigger but perhaps more candy simply because as the few families roaming the streets for sweets, we were rewarded in spades for our bravery (read foolhardiness). The real treat would come the next day. We didn't have to go to church! Now, if you know anything about my Catholic parents, which you probably don't, you know they would not miss Sunday Mass for hell or high water. However, when the water is high enough to flow OVER the bridges of the Cow Skin Creek (a small tributary of the Arkansas River) locking us into our subdivision, a single exception can be made.

"Well we can go on Monday to make up for it."

Lots of houses along the creek were destroyed in part because the Cow Skin is a creek in name only. It's actually part of a well established flood plain. The flood plain in Wichita is so volatile that a canal was dug at what was once the western edge of the city. On an ordinary day there is naught but a trickle. After a big rain however, the Wichita-Valley Center Floodway (aka The Big Ditch) actually has more water and a faster current than the 1,469 mile Arkansas.

The city of Wichita has since spent a ton of money buying people out of their homes to widen and deepen parts of the creek in order to ease flooding and it has been a mostly well executed and well received project. I for one, got a kick out of the massive digs and walls that were built around the creek over the years. I felt like I was witnessing the Midwest's answer to the Aqueducts. I couldn't help but wonder though, why are we buying people out of the homes they built directly in harm's way? Why did we allow development so close to this time bomb of a creek?

To put things simply, we would see a lot less damage from these kinds of storms if we would stop putting things directly in front of them. The evacuation zone on Staten Island (where I was nervously riding out the storm) saw significantly less damage than the same areas in Manhattan despite the smaller surge afflicting the latter. This is due both to the fact that Manhattan has none of its original wetlands to protect it and that the island has been developed all the way from one edge to the other. New York City is spending time and money trying to reclaim the area's swamps and that is a good thing. Swamps are the natural first defense of the continent against storm surges. Their mucky ecosystems are very efficient at dampening the impact of rising tides; way more so than, say, a parking lot or a high rise. This is all well and good and ecosystem restoration should definitely be encouraged and continued but a much easier starting point is to just stop building stuff on beaches.

Extent of the surge. Park behind my apartment.

Significant erosion on an exposed beach.

Bonus points to whoever knows the literary reference used in the title.

The Devil Works in Entirely Predictable Ways: the Existential View of Excuses

2011-08-22T18:20:00.000-05:00

Collectively, the majority of internet writing matured beyond one person's rants about his or her personal peeves around 2005. Evidently the same is not true for print as Neil Genzlinger just did that in the New York Times. I must say that I am not a big fan about the Times' recent switch to more opinion pieces (I think the rise of opinion news is proof of the decline of IQ; I digress) but the new Sunday Review has been a mostly engaging section.

Genzlinger's article might have been amusing if attached to that section and roughly 1000 words shorter but it somehow found it's way to the New York (i.e. local) section of the paper and my feelings are a little hurt. Firstly, this thing is not news, it's definitely opinion. Secondly it's really poorly formed opinions. Nobody likes a terrible busker, but nobody really writes major publication articles about it either.

Thirdly and mostly I was struck by the author's (how should I call this) immaturity, hubris, ignorance, animalistic denial of intellect? Probably all of those.

Advocating for annoyances he wished were punishable by fines he wrote:

This woman took five minutes to order a glazed doughnut and rummage around in her purse for the money to buy it. Lines exist for a reason: They give us time to get ready for the transaction ahead. Ms. Clueless shirked her preparatory responsibilities and instead made me late for work[...]

You caught that right? This mystery woman caused our hero to be late for his job. She made him be late. I suppose he just omitted the part of the story where she forced him at gun point to stay in line and miss his train because of some fetish she has for control and high calorie foods, something like a reverse of the story Death by Doughnut.

Okay, I get that this thing is a farce but the attitude it represents is very real and tragic. Yes, tragic, as in really depressingly unfortunate and nearly unstoppable. There is this condition of deniability going around like a commutable virus in an elementary school though instead of sneezing we are saying "not my fault." It's an old existentialist thing going back (at least in my experience) to Sartre. You are entirely in control of yourself and that is all. An example: walking to work this morning you are killed when a tree struck by lightning falls on you. People would argue that was natural an unstoppable and so forth the truth is otherwise. You didn't have to walk to work that way, you know that lightning strikes trees during bad weather and that walking under one is dangerous. Of course we cannot set up our entire lives to avoid all possible iterations of mortality, we would go insane if we tried (paranoid schizophrenia, agoraphobia etc.) which is where the fact that all you can control is "you" comes in. You can accept that there is a slight risk of the tree falling and walk under it anyway and so on and so forth.

Now away from the theoretical stuff and back to reality. The Doughnut Lady did not make Neil late to work. Neil made Neil late to work. If one of my employees came in for a shift and blamed his tardiness on the person in line in front of him took to long to pay (or more often "the bus was late") I would say, "So?" and hand him his write-up. God may work in mysterious ways but everyone knows how the devil works: idle hands, sub-prime mortgages, Four Loko, all instances of people trying to spread responsibility or take none at all.

Before this irrevocably crosses that IHATEITWHEN-rant line we supposedly graduated from in the 0's I'll make the very strict point to be gleaned from this somewhat humorous article. You are in control of your life. Don't read that as just another "carpe diem" tattoo or shitty book turned Julia Roberts movie, realize it as the only truth there is. If you don't believe me, spend an entire day doing absolutely nothing and let me know what happens, write down your goals and then just stare at the list, open your bills and don't pay them; you get my drift.

Monster Monday: Borrowing from Claire

2011-08-14T14:00:00.010-05:00

While Claire is out I am feeding, cleaning up after and playing with her lop-eared friend.

As such, I figure it within my rights to leach just a smidge of the popularity from her weekly post.

Okay, I can handle being carried but this other rabbit over here is making me nervous.

May not look like much but that irregularly antisocial rabbit is actually being held and remaining calm about it. It's also his first mirror pic.

Rabbits generally do not like to be picked up. It reminds them of, well...

...scary things.

So you can imagine how much training, petting and treating it took to make Mr. Monster comfortable enough to be held. I got clawed on a few of his more impatient days, and while that eagle may look like a tough guy a rabbit has some pretty nasty moves (and sharp hind feet) when he wants to use them.

Word Choice: The First of a Saga

2011-08-04T10:00:00.016-05:00

At some point I am going to have to wake up to the reality that I am not going to earn a living selling poems. I am pretty sure the only people who do are the people who translate the Greeks and then sell the books to college literature surveys. This harsh reality has led me to ponder what an English degree can do well that other degrees cannot, besides being able to lick hundreds of manuscript queries a week without getting a single tongue paper cut. The conclusion? Pick words for people and charge for it.

This series is not meant to be a treatise on people confusing their and they're. If you still need help with that you have probably already stopped reading because nothing on this page has exploded yet. Rather, I hope to point out that I can word things better than many people who actually get paid to do it. This blog started as something devoted to the way people misuse a particular word. It quickly had to leave its original calling because the misuse of the word, though flagrant, was not as commonplace as I had at first guessed. Beyond that, the name sounds cool and suggests that I am out to change something. Which I am and now, full circle being reached, we have gotten back to words.

For this first installment I will go with probably the two most abhorrent words I can think of. These two are fine by themselves but together they are like Sid and Nacy: bad for each other and everyone involved.

"a Novel"

I like novels, I know people who write novels and I mean them no harm and so forth but these words have got to go or need to make new friends. Both would be good.

The problem as I see it is that the words "a Novel" are a threat to my intelligence.

"Ok, um, err, it's a big thick papery thing at ~~Borders~~ it's either a novel or a book on tape in a box that looks like a novel."

Seriously, you don't need to tell me I will figure it out.

Or is it that you are concerned we will mistake your "novel" for something else? A steaming pile of misogynistic bovine leavings?

Perhaps.

I just leaned over to my book shelf and checked, yes, a good friend of mine has the words "a Novel" in the title of his novel. I do not blame him but I do sort of blame his publisher. I imagine it was their fault. It is an endemic epidemic really and I doubt that any one person will change it soon and maybe the words themselves do not need to disappear but they could stand some company.

Allow me to widely misquote something if you will. Futurama did a series of straight-to-DVD movies after their first cancellation. The second in this series, The Beast with a Billion Backs was styled after 1950's monster films. The liner notes had a mini "movie poster" that featured the tagline "A MONSTER OF DUBIOUS MORALITY!!!" Which is hysterical, but moving on. Such a tag would go well after "a Novel." Caleb Ross's Stranger Will would do well with that actually. Stranger Will: a Novel of Dubious Morality.

Like I said, I do not think its Caleb's fault that his title has the words novel in it and even if it is I can still chalk that one up to Caleb being a writer of our times. I do not think a writer wants to put "a Novel" after his or her work though. Much the way I do not title my poems "D.B. Cooper, a Poem." I suppose I could start, just to even out the score. I worry that people would be offended by it though. After all I do not need to remind people that it is a poem when

the lines look

like this

and there are

inanimate objects

are carnivorously

personified

and such.

I think "a Novel" is entirely a product of The Marketing Department. I did some very un-academic, non-scientific looking into and reached the conclusion that the newer the book the more likely it is to be called "a Novel." Additionally, product descriptions make those words more important than the author/publisher did. Don DeLillo is a fine example of both points.

This is his novel from the 1980's

This is from 2003

We see "a Novel" has been added to the title of the newer book, yet the subtitle is roughly a quarter the size of the main title. Now look at this picture.

The two parts of the title are now the same size. The latter picture is from a website trying to sell you the book.

J.D Salinger raises another point.

His says "a novel by" which is more of a description than a footnote to the title which is nice. However his "buy now" page on the same website does not remind you that it is a novel. One could argue that it should. DeLillo got the "a Novel" treatment and his was only a tiny blip at the end why is Salinger immune? Is it because we all know that Catcher was a novel and but cannot say the same for Underworld because it is new? Was DeLillo's "a Novel" really part of his title and therefore on the by page whereas perhaps Salinger did not write that it was simply added to the cover? Who knows.

That is sort of my point with this whole thing. Who invited these guys? Perhaps they are of value but I err on the side that they are not. The naked words, usually followed by a colon which indicates description, "a Novel" are a distraction from the art in hand. A title may be the only words you ever read by a given author. It would be nice if those words freely and clearly expressed exactly what the author wants you to know without having to lug around a dangling marketing appendage.

For those who were holding out for an explosion: here is a simulation of the moon colliding with a theorized sister moon. Read the story in the journal Nature.

Response to General Overachiever's "Questions" from July 10: Part 2

2011-07-19T12:00:00.003-05:00

A few days ago Claire asked her friends the following:

When you begin a new project, how do you choose to start? Do you plan it out first, mapping the steps and setting deadlines? Or do you dive in without more than a second thought? And either way, why?

I spent so much time answering the first question I am going to have to do this one separately because it is an important question. It should be noted however that I am not famous or considered any type of expert at anything so if you choose to follow my methods or advice you do so at your own peril.

A project for me begins with the most engaging part of the story or poem. I used to call these "thunder bolt lines" because they take awhile to make their impact fully known (think of the flash then the boom) and because I usually end up a little deaf and blind afterwards, that is, I feel sick until I can write it down. That's as close as I get to some magical fairy like muse experience. The rest is all good ol' fashioned elbow grease and maybe a little (read lot of) wine or scotch.

Recently, the thunder bolts have ended up being titles rather than lines which is interesting to me.

The elbow grease mentioned is usually research. I haven't been a law enforcement officer or a world renowned painter in a creative rut so I have to read up on it. For this novella like thing I have been writing for a year or so now I intend to do research on painting. The world renown part is all my creative hubris imagining what it will be like when everyone worships and anthologizes me. I am also considering practicing with a handgun at a shooting range for the only novel I can honestly say I have ever attempted to write. They say "write what you know" and you can't know everything, but sometimes you have to write about everything so research, even for creative work, is important.

Now "writing" for me is a generous term. The above mentioned longer works of fiction are being written mostly in my head at the moment. The novella, actually is entirely in my head and while not concretely productive, it is still important. It prevents the story from being tainted by the wrong kind of critics. I believe in making a story mine before I get it out there. Others probably disagree with me.

Poems are a bit of a different beast. My preferred method of working on a poem is something of an ekphrastic method, i.e. writing about art. I typcially do that not by actually writing poems about pottery or something but by writing poems while or directly after reading the work of a good poet or in many cases the news. I am not sure what the merits of this are but it is fun.

Finally, I do not pretend to know when a piece is finished. I know what I am trying to get across but I never know if I am getting that through to others. When, and only when, I am certain that a piece might possibly be finished does it see the light of day to anyone but myself and perhaps a first reader. Advice from friends is one way to see where it is and rejection from a magazine or publisher is another. Both are good.

My answer to Claire's final question, the one about organization, should be self evident.

If not:

Everything I Know I Learned from the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Vocabulary

2011-07-18T20:27:00.000-05:00

The boys in...not much released the first single off of I'm With You (their album slated for August 30th with Josh Klinghoffer not John Frusciante on guitar). It is titled "The Adventures of Raindance Maggie" and it sounds awesome. My fears of the Fru-less crew have be assuaged. Klinghoffer appears to have done just fine but I will reserve judgment until August 31st.

As this blog and my other pursuits may have indicated, I am somewhat of a book worm. I used to call myself a writer, now I say I am a "reader, writer" because to write well you really have to read well. I feel like I have that down at this point. However, this was not always the case. I am pretty sure that in high school I read a grand total of three books: The Catcher in the Rye, One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest, and The Complete Works of Robert Frost.

Somehow I took to writing poems but with the narrow list of things I read (and yes that list is indicative of the required books that I actually read cover-to-cover as required [note: there are none]), inspiration had to come elsewhere. It was, as my teenage fanboydom would dictate, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When I found out their first performance EVER was just Flea slapping a bass and Keidis reading a poem I was gung-ho to try it out. And the rest, as they say, is...what do they say it is again? Anyway most important to poems are the words and without good books as a guide I had to find words somewhere else; here are some words I learned from RHCP:

altruistic

microcosm

emolliate

masochistic

ingenue

lexicon

dopamine

malinger

melancholy

The process was much like reading. When I came across a word in the lyrics as written on album notes I looked it up and the word became a riff for me for days. Anytime I hear these words I immediately think back to these songs. I do not use the words much, really they are pretty obscure or techno-specific, but I think about them and I can probably sing (off key, of course) all the lines these words are lifted from.

Hey, it may not seem like much, but I would argue its pretty good for a kid who hated to read.

Though I've gotten decidedly better about it.

So continues this series of posts about one man's coming of age thanks to one band's music

Response to General Overachiever's "Questions" from July 10

2011-07-13T15:00:00.001-05:00

Claire had some questions for her readers on Sunday and true to my boisterous, opinionated nature I have some (long-winded) answers.

"Through what medium do you normally express yourself?"

The short conventional answer to that question is that I write but the nature of the writing is very varied. Inter-personal and political topics often manifest in poems I think because it is more accepted for a poem to end without an answer. While the American short story (and to a slower extent the novel) are getting better at being more open ended like their European counterparts it remains true that the average American reader wants stories that have endings. If the situation in North Africa and the Middle East is any proof, political issues tend to drag on and a poem of any length is more easily disposed to openendedness partly because nobody gets poetry anyway. I typically turn to fiction for more tangible things. Sort of like Maury in twelve point Times New Roman, my short fiction emphasizes things like uncouth character traits and relationship flaws.

I have a caveat to this however. I do not really think I am expressing myself in these pursuits. I am expressing perhaps my interests or sympathies but I like to consider myself somewhat more than the sum of these parts. Creative Non-Fiction has emerged as something of a cousin to short fiction while also being a less dry form of memoir and has been helpful in pointing out that fiction writers are not necessarily autobiographically veiling their lives in their work. Because of the distinction people are less apt to argue that a book is true to the writer's life. The Beats were really good at doing the latter of course and with their prominence in American literature it is possible that they are to blame for the overused "autobiographical" reading of literature. However, it seems that lately writers are doing a better job of keeping their personal lives out of their writing. This is particularly reassuring when one reads characters like Brandon Tietz's Aidin.

Self expression is something of a flower-power term that I would rather steer clear of. Other people probably should too. I certainly do not advocate for repression; I simply prefer an emphasis on more far reaching themes and tones than those of single significance. Think of The Beatles: "You're really only very small and life goes on within you and without you."

Everything I Know I Learned from the Red Hot Chili Peppers

2011-07-12T10:00:00.028-05:00

I doubt that I was terribly unique as an American teenage male to start buying up as many RHCP albums as I could find by the time I was old enough to cuss. Nor do I think that music has magical powers to do things like start revolutions or heal a troubled heart. However, I do think music can be particularly good at getting in your head and pumping life into all the little ideas you have ever pondered on while waiting for encouragement to act on.

It is through music that we regularly find validity for things we are unsure about. Not only do break-up songs, love songs, protest songs, and party songs give us inspiration to proceed on the seeds of our own ideas and let us know others have been there, they also give us a melody to whistle while we work. Weather we are smashing headlights on a cheating boyfriends truck or taking a midnight train going anywhere, music shows us that we won't be doing it alone. I owe so much of my inner companionship to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The band's forthcoming album slated for the end of August started me on a path of reverie because for the first time in my freethinking life the Red Hot Chili Peppers are in the studio without John Frusciante. Yes, I was alive for Dave Navarro's filling in while Frusciante took a brief heroin hiatus from 92-97 but because of well meaning parents and those pesky obscenity labels I was not able to get my hands on any album prior to Californication until I got better at The Internet (more on that later) and thus had a Frusciante-centric Chili Peppers experience. When the rumors were confirmed to me that John Frusciante had left the Peppers to make room for, quintessentially, his understudy Josh Klinghoffer I felt as though I had been dumped by my first girlfriend...again.

When asked why I took it so hard the only conclusion I could reach was that I basically owed my life to those four dudes from L.A. Not in a tragically highschool way of having some emotional instability that I self medicated with their music, but rather, somewhat more maturely, that I owe a lot of the vivacious growth in my personality to interests and ideas that I believe directly correlate to and were cultivated by their music.

Probably most illustrative of this is that I started playing bass at age 13 in the summer of 2002. The band had just released their first album of my pubescent life, By The Way. I remembered awesome things from the late nineties such as the video game music video and refrain of 1999's title track, "Californication." And Otherside's psychedelic, Man Ray-influenced video played well to my overactive imagination. I would eventually get back to these pre-teen memories as my affection and obession grew but in the summer of 2002 I memorized and still know by heart almost all the basslines from By the Way. Flea played bass the way it was meant to be played: out loud, more than just root notes and rhythm and with blue hair.

From left to right below: Flea on the By The Way Tour in 2003, Dave Samms and myself in Emporia, KS 2008, Nick Probst and myself in Wichita, KS 2008

So begins this series of posts about one man's coming of age thanks to one band's music.

Quickie: Caleb J. Ross is Not a Pretentious Douche Bag

2011-07-04T20:01:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine is soon to take a twenty something hour flight to Russia and I recently read an article about Vladamir Nabokov. After very little conversation it was decided we should book swap. He is sending me Lolita and I am him Stranger Will and Charactered Pieces by Caleb Ross. In preparing the books for shipment I noticed something:

not only is Caleb's name upside-down but the ISBN is affixed to a no nonsense, library-couture cloth binding via a sticker. How cool is that? I know that sounds nuts but if you really think, it says a ton about the man and his work. No need to go over the top and get fancy binding, embossed covers, gold fringe, all that jazz. Nope just a name and a sticker. After all, aren't we in it for the words not, proverbially, the cover? Don't get me wrong, Caleb designed a great dust jacket (which is why I am sending it naked, don't want it to get lost in all the airport undressings) but to opt for such simplicity outside really testifies to the serious writer that Caleb is inside.

Film

2011-07-03T10:00:00.002-05:00

Lately I have been trying to remember my old interests. I once used to play a bass guitar, take tons of photographs and work on my car. Fortunately, I seemed to have worked myself out of a job on the latter but the first two are do for a resurgence.

It's always been my philosophy that the best rain during a creative dry spell is to deliberately break your own artistic rules. I for one hate really kitschy photographs for example; "Holga App" iPhone photos on facebook are among the worst. To save this before it becomes a rant I will just say that I don't own an iPhone and that a Holga not a creative medium. Anyway, I thought about getting a digital camera and doing regular "photo blogging" but I just cannot bring myself to own a digital camera after so many years of devotion to my good friend D-76 process film. Also, I can't afford one.

However, I did find one artistic rule I can break for the sake of rekindling my inner photographer: paying someone else to develop my film. In the past I have only ever gotten my color film professionally developed simply because the chemistry for color film is absurdly expensive.

Being that I live in NYC's most um, tan, Borough, it has been hard to find a reliable, nearby photolab that does not also sell Snapple and Tampons two aisles over. Cue the good ol' fashioned mail away photo lab. I remember my parents sending rolls to a company called "Seattle Film Works" back in the day but their prices are a bit higher than The Darkroom's.

So "The Darkroom" and a stranger's chemicals all over my film. Nervous of course, but excited to back "behind the lens."

Below is an excerpt from a previous rekindling expedition. I took my favorite lessons from high school advanced photography, (Gilbert Fastenaekens night photography and Man Ray's solarizations) and combined them thus:

Also evidenced is my econmic status at the time. Though this is a final print, it was made on a scrap. Waste not...

Things Not to Do After Dicing Habanero Peppers, A List

2011-06-29T21:44:00.000-05:00

Go to the bathroom
Rub your eyes
Shave
Scratch an itch
Rub your friend's eyes
Eat something
Blow your nose
Help your friend go to the bathroom
Have chapped lips
Blog about it.

My garden has caterpillars and I don't like that. I am making a "pesticide" out of garlic and hot peppers. This has failed once so far before so tonight I have brought out the big guns. Seriously, if they survive this they can just have the broccoli.

Oh and to relate this to books, here is a link to a book by a Red Hot Chili Pepper that has been on my list since I was sixteen:

Also, I hear they have an album out soon; first one in four years and with (yet again) a new guitarist. But more on that later.

Free Time Approacheth

2011-06-24T09:49:00.001-05:00

Very soon I will have the time to kick it at the beach on a daily basis, get all the reading and, more importantly, the writing that has been bouncing about my brain in pinballs of verse done with. Not a chore but a task akin to that of Aeneas. I shall soon embark on a journey of the mind.

Bookshelf, prepare thyself.

Affinities

2011-04-21T17:40:00.003-05:00

There are a lot of things that I like.

But generally speaking there are two which I find to be "awesome" above all others.

Sleep and reading books.

Unfortunately these two do not get along. Who can intermediate?

Let's see how this goes...

Long Distance Phone Calls

2011-04-18T21:24:00.000-05:00

Does such a thing as long distance calling even exist anymore? Everyone has unlimited this that and the other thing, with a side of chili fries on their cellphone now. Anyone remember calling cards? I may be young, but I distinctly remember talking to my grandparents by first calling a 1-800 number on the back of a credit card like slab of plastic from Sam's Club.

I spent some time on the phone today talking with my dad and my sister. Separate calls and separate people. But were they really? I once noticed that my dad and I write the letter "d" the same way, something like a grain of rice attached to a cursive "L." When I first noticed it, I wondered if handwriting was genetic. Anyone who knew my dad at my age would tell you he and I are spitting-mirror-looka-images (which makes me somewhat fearful of my future) so obviously those genes came on down. What about the muscles in my wrist? Or the patterns of electrons in my brain? Is there DNA for that?

The question has become all the more vivid recently due, not in a small way, to "growing up."

For one, I realize that it is not so bad to be a lot like my parents. I mean, come on, they did raise me, and I am pretty damn pleased with myself and my life, so if they could churn out a kid like me, meh, they must not be that bad. Secondly, whether it be nature or nurture, it is inevitable that I will become them. My father is a hardworking, rarely sleeping, do it all for my family kind of guy. And I, while familyless, will gladly report to my day job Wednesday morning even with an inch and a half of skin dangling from my neck because of a work related injury. I skip some sleep tonight to read and critique my friends books (something I hope I will one day call my career) and I will take directions from people with lower IQ's and education levels simply because, by God, it's my job. If you think that is just me poking fun at food service workers, seriously, ask my dad about the people he works with. My mother has the body of a mustard seed and the heart of a mountain. How all that often unrequited goodness (shown especially during my ages 13-18) fits in just 5'0" under 115 lbs I will never know. I, surely you see the connection, am a card carrying Democrat.

My sister, pale as a parsnip, is raising an urban garden on her Kansas apartment patio. I am raising one on my New York apartment stairwell. Today my dad said "There is nothing like something that comes out of your oven by your own hands," as we talked about how to perfect my burgeoning interest in bread baking. To me, it sounds a bit more like the mind and the pen.

Either way, I am beginning to see where I come from.

Kicking the Door Down: Brandon Tietz's Kickass First Novel

2011-03-03T02:04:00.000-06:00

Out of Touch by Brandon Tietz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you don't hate Brandon Tietz's protagonist, Aidin, within the first ten pages of this novel I seriously question the software of your moral GPS. If you don't desperately want to be Aidin by the last ten pages you and I didn't read the same book. Out of Touch is a novel about bizarre changes. As if caught by an atomic powered puberty, our anti-hero finds himself the victim of an unknown medical condition which leaves him entirely devoid of feeling. A cumbersome and metaphorical position for the holder of a limitless AmEx, plenty of uncut coke, a marshmallow cereal stash of pharmaceuticals and the women who er...ehm "love" him for it. As the standard accouterments of the asshole playboy becoming fleeting reveries of feeling, Out of Touch shapes into a fantastic parable for growing up.

Tietz writes like a mid-westerner. His voice is distinct and direct. Being a thoroughly modern novel Tietz breaks all the right rules when it comes to writing. Less like a novel, less even than a speech, Out of Touch is like he's telling you his own story over a bottle of Cristal at a velvet roped club. Conversational, ignoring grammar where necessary for the sake of sounding spoken rather than read; this work is closer to poetry in that way.

The novel has its bumps. I caught spelling and other non-helpful (see above) grammatical errors. The middle of the book hiccuped somewhat. The action gets lost, the voices of all the characters lose their distinction and began to sound like ventriloquists of each other. In the end it all works out alright though. Literally. Trying to stay on the safe side of spoiling I'll just say that it's a whiplash ending. Not a "my lawyer will hear about this" twisted-metal whiplash, more the long lines for admission, zero to sixty in 3 or less and "is it over already?" kind. A roller coaster you will have to ride more than once. What's more, the ending was as thick a story as the entire preceding novel and twice as ballsy. Quite a feat and quite a save.

Read this book. A must for Palahniuk and Easton-Ellis fans, Tietz successfully pays homage to some literary heavy weights and is easily elbowing his way to their stack on the shelf.

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Something to be Said for the Real Thing

2011-02-21T18:28:00.001-06:00

AKA: E-Readers and the imagined plight of the printed word.

Hello, my name is Stephen. My hobbies include gardening, auto-maintenance and drinking. I hate long walks on the beach. My second favorite pastime (losing by a hair to sleeping) is reading; so much so that I don't even own a TV. I have read and seen and heard a ton about the future of books and periodicals in an ever increasingly digital world and as an advocate for all the real things I see it as a great time to be a reader or a writer.

To add to my dating tape intro, I also really enjoy photography. Not the kind your average hipster studies with his or her iPhone and a "Holga" app, but the real kind with film, silver coated paper and lots of smelly carcinogenic chemicals. I am quite cantankerous about it, ask anyone who has seen me at an art gallery, plenty of "I can do that with chemistry and light instead of a button on Photoshop but you don't see me charging five grand a print..." etc. I have a nearly tearful affection for anything made by hand with sweat and blood, wood and leather. There is something instantly magnetic to me about anything that has a reality to it something that can weather, age, season, grow and maybe even die.

That said, I also own and E-Reader and publish an E-zine.

On my friendly Kindle this morning I read an article in the New York Times about libraries trying to preserve marginalia, or stuff other people have scribbled on books. A group of dudes and dudettes has even banded together and begun spending money on how to best keep such a strange and borderline vanadalistic practice around in the digital age with something of a mournful tone.

I had to laugh.

For some strange reason there is this belief that digital and physical print cannot exist peacefully in the same world. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why. We have both keyboards and pens don't we? TV's and picture frames? As stated, I am a contradiction: lover of the handmade, consumer of the digital. But where is the harm in that? Will all books one day be compressed to files I will have to use my (device of choice here) to read? No. Will all periodicals one day meet such a fate? Maybe.

The maybe is an interesting one because if periodicals in print form were to go away, would it be that bad? If you look at environmental damage from litter and consumption and at overhead cost for ink and shipping it seems that digital would be the medium of choice for ever increasingly green and penny conscious magazines. Even so I doubt all things will go away. There is still the scholarly periodical, the literature periodical, circulars dedicated to a more permanent standing that will likely remain as paper and that is great. Just like Latin is great for naming new sea creatures but maybe not so great for ordering a cheeseburger, print is great for poems but maybe not for Justin Bieber gossip.

Books won't go because books are books, you cannot and will not be able to dispense with a book. The only thing Kindles and Nooks prove is not that print is becoming outmoded but there is so much great writing out there wanting to be read that it is hard to find room for it all. An example. I have at least two dozen books on my Kindle at the moment, none of which I had to pay for. Books older than a certain year or under public domain for any other reason have been donated in their digital form by charitable organizations hoping to spread the word. Stuff like Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Pamela are among my "To Read" list on the Kindle. Why the digital version over the book? Simple: free, easier to carry, and who knows if I will really like it. In the case of Pamela, regarded as English's first modern novel chances are high that I won't like it. So why get a big stuff version of it that will collect dust on a shelf until I give it away or burn it for heat? And who has time for a library anyway? Like many twenty-somethings I go a lot of places and end up waiting on a lot of things. Fortunately I can now lug around some fifteen or so of my favorite distractions to my favorite waiting areas such as bus stops, doctors offices and ferries.

On the book front, I also have a stack of six "Currently Reading" selections between 400 and 1000 pages each. I keep busy. Not to mention the fact that I just dropped nearly seven Hamiltons on a few hardbound first editions from some literary badasses over at Otherworld Books. Digital stuff is easy to steal, just ask my "Music" folder on my hard drive but writers are people too and people get hungry. When it comes to literary greats of too little attention I am all to happy to spend a good night at a bar on just two books. Who knows what will become of a small press writer? The next Stephenie Meyer? The next Thomas Pynchon? Where will their first books be? I would bet it is easier for an upstarts e-book to get lost before his hardbound and that's just not cool.

I like my paper books and I like my E-Books. As for marginalia, I make notes in both; I write my name on the inside cover of every book and I highlight every turn of phrase I like or that has the possibility to change my life. One upside to the Kindle is that it stores all my notes and I can find them in a breeze, don't have to thumb through 500 onion skin sheets of Pound to find that poem I wanted to read. One upside to a book: it's still a human made (though with more machines than hands) and genuine thing I can lug, mark, damage and even age with me. A writer can sign his or her book when I meet them at a reading, an e-reader can get me free copies of books that I was supposed to read in high school but didn't. Both fit, both work. I'll leave it up to you to guess which I prefer, but I'll finish by saying that E-Readers are no more the end of print than Word Processors are the end of writing. Find me someone who types everything he wants to remember at the grocery store, find me someone who gets all her news from only print sources.

2011-02-06T21:07:00.001-06:00

PACKERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Story Like its Protagonist: Lost in a World Beyond its Control

2011-01-20T23:44:00.002-06:00

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fair warning about this novel: it is hard to put down; be sure you have a free schedule. The story is captivating and thought provoking. The insights into the struggle of honesty and dignity are vibrant. Unfortunately the writing style does not measure up. The valuable parts of this book could be told with as much emphasis in roughly 100 fewer pages. Hosseini is a bit too fond of exposition and internal monologue. His tendency towards these detracts from the overall sincerity and importance of his story. Additionally, the plot twists are past the point of cunning and more in the realm of "whip-lash." It is really just too improbable of a journey in many places. This book's redemption is the portrait it gives of Afghanistan and her people. An important portrait as it is one that is misunderstood by many and poorly understood by the rest. The book weaves through a wilderness of desolation, betrayal, heartbreak and a host of other ills and ends on just the faintest glimpse of a smile. More than a book about the growth and change of a family, this is a microcosm for the entire country of Afghanistan; moreover, an aspiration and a prayer for all those affected by war. Though a bit tangled in what was most likely an editor's or publishers amendments, this story is at the very least worth one read.

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Virgil's and Fagles's Aeneid, Read It, or Don't...meh

2011-01-09T13:53:00.000-06:00

The Aeneid by Virgil

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A "borrowed" epic, Virgil tells the legend surrounding the founding of Rome as Aeneas flees the burning ruins of Troy. A combination of The Iliad and The Odyssey and a clear foreshadowing of Dante's Comedia; this long poem features the most well known aspects of these others: the adventure, the honor, the lineage. Unfortunately, it tends to drone on. If anyone has read the Old Testament they will know the long lists of names of who begot whom in the stories of kings and prophets. If you couldn't stand those stay away from this. However, it is a must-read if you want to appreciate Dante to the highest degree. Robert Fagles (the translator of this edition) has great versions of Homer's poetry, linguistically speaking, this edition is not as fulfilling as his work with Homer.

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A Note On Translation: Part the First

2010-11-30T22:42:00.002-06:00

Recently I have been spending a disproportionate amount of time reading other languages' famous works. From epics to existentialists my focus has been anywhere but America lately. For one, I am nearly finished with my longtime goal of reading from The Iliad through to Comedia. Secondly, it is appealing to take in and attempt to share "foreign" paradigms. In an increasingly global-village society, works of translation help to illuminate exactly how related we eight billion individuals actually are. Translation is an important portrait of humility as well. It is the recognition that no, one civilization didn't get it all figured out before burning to the ground, but maybe we can borrow from each other and get just a little closer before our society does the same

One of the best lessons I have learned editing Cannoli Pie is that my ideas and expressions are not nearly as thrilling to promote as are the good thoughts I have learned from others. The magazine has been a great stage for much fresh talent and wisdom and translations work in the same way: one's ideas flowing through the hands and medium of another to send ripples a little farther across the literary pond.

There is a great body of amazing literature to be read. I am personally conflicted about how far to pursue the art of my native language or whether to invest in another language in order to redistribute the wealth. This question is well framed by writers Coleman Barks and Ezra Pound. Barks is famous for Rumi, it is hard to know where Rumi ends and where Barks begins in poetry. Pound's arguably most famous poem, "The River Merchant's Wife" is actually by eighth century poet Li Po. In these poems, maybe the translators are owed more the credit for the poem as probably a considerable amount of the translators flavor is sensed over the original author's. So if I were to seek employment as a translator post grad school, who would be remembered: me or the man or woman I introduce to or recall to English readers?

On the Epics: Homer, Virgil and Dante have seen and will continue to see myriad translations but the original authors maintain the credit. Over at goodreads I chanced upon a review of The Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles which sung the praises of (insert earlier translator's name)'s ability to stay true to Homer. It bothered me. Mostly because I have read two different translations of The Odyssey and believe me, the translator matters. However, to the general reading public, the translator is just a viaduct to spread the misadventures of a bunch of oily tough guys. It may be unfair to generalize based on one misappropriated review but it is illustrative of something and I fairly certain I can back it up. Can you remember the translator of the edition of The Odyssey you had to read in high school? What about when you covered Camus in World Lit first semester in college?

Who deserves the credit for a translated work and why? The test of greatness for translators of epics seems to be how close you can get to the ancient Greek/Latin/Italian, yet for other ancient translations (read Barks) the praise comes in relating it to "modern times." Which is the correct answer? How many liberties can you take when translating a work?

There is a lot to talk about. I'll have more of my thoughts up soon; in the meantime read what Lydia Davis has to say on this topic over at Paris Review.

Those Purple Pills Got Nothing on this Ecstasy: Rumi's Poems of Love and Longing

2010-11-17T00:07:00.000-06:00

Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing by Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am not sure whom to give credit for this book to, Rumi or Coleman Barks. For the gift of translating it we certainly owe a debt to Barks but for the power and the truth contained we more deeply owe Rumi.

This is not a book of love poems for a sweetheart or a Valentine. This is a book to be given or read only in the cases of deepest and most positive realization that your life is bound up in another; romantic or otherwise. These poems are not about the kind of love which belongs on Hallmark cards, in fact, Barks refused to lend his translations to that exact company. These poems are about the kind of love that has a deep resonance rather than a high pitched squeal. I won't be so shallow as to say "love hurts" would be a theme, I will go farther and say "love consumes" would best sub-title this book. Not the everyday consumerism that leads us to be drunk on our credit card bills at malls and department stores but the same feeling over addictive and unstoppable behavior for the well being of another.

I cannot get across what this book is worth in terms of "love" alone, more aptly this book is religious even if not one of the major ones. Perhaps this is the first holy book of a new religion. However, if you only want to find very hot, sexy poetry, you will find it; only cute, vampirey "cannot live without you" poetry you will gag on it. So you must approach this book expecting more. It will satisfy all the basics, but only if you deeply read and employ your intellect to understand the profound place Rumi speaks from can you reasonably understand this book.

However you choose to approach it (I recommend the deepest way) this book will be one you can and will turn to again and again no matter who you are.

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Kafka for Now, A Note on Translations Soon

2010-11-16T15:59:00.001-06:00

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very good read. My first dabbling in Kafka from a somewhat extended dabbling in existentialism. If I had to buy this book again I would not be buying it for "The Metamorphosis." A decent tale, but "In the Penal Colony" and "A Report to an Academy" were the real winners. I plan to do a comment on books in translation in the very near future over at ~~http://unronic.blogspot.com~~. here by the end of the week; I promise.

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D-Bags, Girls and Tough Guys: the Poetry of Justin Hyde

2010-10-18T23:29:00.001-05:00

The two poetry chapbooks of Justin Hyde arrived at my door by way of friend and novelist Caleb J. Ross. Ever since reading Hyde's books I have been wrestling with the daunting task of faithfully representing them in a book review. Now allow me to immediately back-pedal what I just said. I detest reviews of every stripe that begin with a preface about how hard it was to find comparisons and make judgments about a book; album; movie; what-have-you; and then immediately do so. However, I think I can prove by merit of the thirteen day wait since announcing plans to cover these books and actually doing so that it has been a bit of a challenge.

What I can say is that I finally found good comparisons for his work not in other poets per se but in musicians. A caveat to that: Justin Hyde's poetry ain't no love songs.

Hyde's two books of poetry are Down Where the Hummingbird goes to Die (Outside Writers Press 2008) and Another Casualty at the 34th Street Bus Stop (Liquid Paper Press 2009). The former is winner of the Jack Micheline Memorial poetry contest and the latter was first prize in the Nerve Cowboy Chapbook Contest. While both of these awards are telling of the author, the best preface I had to these books was a picture that (accidentally?) stowed away in the media mail. Here we have Mr. Hyde himself, several years younger, sleeves rolled up, showing off a potato of a bicep with a white terry cloth robe in the background captioned in pen on the reverse: "This is me acting like a douchebag in some chicks dorm at the university of Iowa. I think I was nineteen, maybe 20." That truly puts it best; douchebags, growing up, girls, and a guy showing his tough side with a lot more going on underneath.

Hummingbird's intro makes note of good ol' Chuck Bukowski and the comparisons are apparent and easy. Alcohol, shitty parents, sex, trouble-making and finally trying to snap the cycle. I will leave the dead Bukowski horse unbeaten; I will not do what others can do for me. Casualty is very much in the same line of writing as Hummingbird and it is a shame the two are not one in the same book. Both are short enough that you want there to be more of them at the end, and so similar that there is no good reason to separate the two.

As for what Hyde really measures up to, look to the west coast. Musicians Tom Waits, and punk bands Rancid and Sublime are the kindred souls to Hyde's books. Waits's repertoire is only bested for length by his (imaginary) rap sheet, but the song "Saving All My Love" about a drunk whore-monger with good intentions immediately comes to mind when reading "I Used to Get so Very Lonely" from Casualty.

for twenty dollars

we could go

upstairs

and i could do

whatever.

all i wanted

was to talk

for a bit

and

get to know

her view

of the world.

she looked at me

like i'd just

shit in her lap

and said

if we wasn't gonna fuck

get the hell on

cause she had mouths

to feed.

The Rancid song "Radio" about a boy and his alcoholic father parallels the poem "A Drunkard Feeds His Son Bananas from a Jar" from Hummingbird not necessarily in words but in intentions. About the the things that keep us from spinning out from our centers: Rancid says "when I got the music I gotta place to go," and Hyde:

i don't think i can leave this little man

fathers do it all the time these days,

but that's not the type of cowardice i'm cut out for.

[. . .]

his eyes are bluish black

the left one still a little lazy.

they stare me down like a lighthouse.

As has been pretty obvious I have not said much about other poets, or even other "writers" in this review and I think that is okay. To be bold, Hyde's work goes beyond what many contemporary writers are doing. He breaks the language barrier for poetry inviting in more of the punks and the seedy-parolee type than most other writers know how to do. 80% of poetry seems to come in two forms: the ancient-iambic-and-dry (you know, the stuff of high school memorization) and the "it's-good-but-what-the-hell-does-it-mean" stuff. Do not get me wrong, I respect our roots and I like a challenge, and Hyde's work is by no means dumb, but it has a broader reach because it is more directly honest and more grounded in the everyday. Hyde is a story teller writing poems with concrete truck loads of introspective self-loathing, but I would not call him a poet. I just don't think the word is cool enough for a guy who writes like this. As S.A. Griffin says about him, "[Hyde] elevates the ordinary to the level of the extra ordinary[sic] and then brings it home again as something simple enough for the reader to appreciate and experience. Trust me, much easier said than done."

Tuesday To Do List:

2010-10-05T13:10:00.000-05:00

-write review of Justin Hyde's books (good stuff, check for it soon)

-Get some submissions packets in the mail

-read the news

-keep jamming to ska

What's on your list?

If You Only Read One Trans-Genre, WWII, Science-Fact-tion, Literary Heavyweight, Conspiracy-Thriller this Year...

2010-09-09T17:21:00.006-05:00

Make sure it has poetry about a man freezing his junk off with liquid oxygen:

The was a young man from Decatur

Who slept with a LOX generator

His balls and his prick

Froze solid real quick

And his asshole a little bit later

-T. Pynchon

While browsing the annals of twitter this morning I came across a List of twenty-six good reasons to read, (or reasons why it is bad not to read for all my pessimist friends). I figured that list qualifies as good a reason as any to (finally) tackle a thick little novel called Gravity’s Rainbow

I first covered Pynchon eons ago on the subject of his novella The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine. Even then I noted his style as unconventional, wordy, fanciful, and a bit hard to get into. It pales in comparison to Gravity’s Rainbow. Beyond from my previous complaints about commas, word choice and syntax, Pynchon seems to be deliberately harassing his readers in Gravity’s Rainbow. I remember reading an article about this book saying that over 200 characters make an appearance in this novel, it jumps from settings around England, Holland, Germany, Russia, Japan and Africa, the inner dimensions of a few no so steady minds and regularly breaks into song. You heard me.

The novel is written to be read almost like a screen play rather than a novel. Certainly by the characters and events of this novel, as well as others, Pynchon has evidenced that he is highly focused on film. Several of the stars of this novel are actors and directors; most famously, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and his films are mentioned. His action of applying a screen play to the narration of a novel is masterful and worthy of respect in its own right. What I found while reading this book was that it’s a little bit like getting into Shakespeare. I never had much trouble with ol’ Billy; after reading just a few lines of iambic pentameter and Elizabethan English and I could remember how that dialect of English worked and easily go with the flow. Gravity’s Rainbow was the same way for me. It took me one busy month to finish it and what I found out was that it was better to read a little, even if not a whole chapter, everyday rather than to wait for a weekend when I could read fifty pages at a clip simply because if I took any more than a day off from reading I would forget how to read him.

Now back to that list one of the biggest boons to Gravity’s Rainbow is point number three: [Reading] Improves your vocabulary. I would like to think I am a pretty well read person, and I have survived most of college so I can safely say that my vocabulary is at least functional, but for this novel I found myself having to read with a dictionary in my lap because every page featured a word I didn’t know. Not bad for an author who spent most of his adult life working for Boeing, hell that’s an accomplishment for any writer. To substantially challenge your readers is no easy feat, nor is it easy to challenge them but keep them reading, Pynchon is able to do both because aside from all the traps of language, vocab and literary form, this novel really has a significant plot.

Most of the story takes place in Germany just after World War II. It is based on the historically accurate chase for V2 rocket materials by the Allies dividing up Germany into the pieces that would herald the Cold War. Throughout, this novel is steeped in actual, documented historical facts and quotes, with the amazing fictional side story of a Monty Python style version of James Bond flick. Gratuitous sex, wild parties, deep conspiracies, science fact that seems way more like science fiction, deep, twisted psychology, and a crumbling hero all add up to keep readers drooling for more.

The most profound aspect of this novel is the symbolism embedded in the plot. As the story moves we see people fall to insanity, moral depravity, drug abuse, ruthless competition and ultimately ending with the strange sexual murder of youth in the quest to obtain a weapon. The implications are obvious, the questions implied about military influence are frightening and the truth is very nearly blinding. What makes this novel so great to read is much more than the academic challenge, or the adventurous characters, it is the questions, the internal searching and the warning, or rather the, “what-have-we-done?” sentiment toward modern technological and military civilization.

The five things Gravity’s Rainbow does best as per the list of good reasons to read are as follows. I already mentioned vocabulary. If you can get through it without having to look a single word up, well then maybe you should be here instead of me. “Number Eight, Improves Discipline” is a good one. It’s no easy thing to get all the way through this book, I think the Simpson’s cracked a joke about that in one episode. “Number Eleven, Gives you Something to Talk about.” I’ll say, get me a few heavy thinkers and some cold drinks I am sure we would go on for days…hard part is finding people who have read it. “Number Twenty-One, Can Change your Life.” As corny as that answer sounds it definitely gave me a new way of viewing and understand social relationships especially in terms of technology and the military. Finally “Number Six, Builds Self-Esteem.” Everything about this book has “challenge” written all over it, and since the world is fresh out of awesome things to keep us busy like conquer Troy or scalp Nazi’s tough books will have to do.

The limerick at the intro is one of the highlights of the book. It comes from the scene where the protagonist meets up coincidentally with American troops merrymaking in the Mittelwerk at Nordhausen. The spritely Yankees were taking turns writing dirty poems about parts of the V2 rocket as they dismantled the base before the Russians were to arrive.

Happenin' Staten

2010-08-19T21:04:00.002-05:00

Hi, hi,

I know I promised that Gravity's Rainbow talk weeks ago but I feel like I have a legitimate excuse.

I just packed me, my stuff, a few choice books and a friend into my '93 Honda and drove out to New York.

Long story short, I am getting a fresh start on my English degree with a concentration in literature and a minor in writing at the College of Staten Island (CUNY).

Today I filled out an apartment application and may be moving in as soon as Monday.

Life out here is almost too good to be true, weather is beautiful, life is good, inspiration and motivation are everywhere, I have all the right help, and as soon as I have a place of my own, I promise, I will do something worth reading on this damn blog.

Until then, read the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost, if fiction is more your thing, read Ernest Hemmingway, or Jonathan Safran-Foer. Those are my top picks anyway, see you all very soon.

Gravity's Painbow

2010-08-02T21:01:00.003-05:00

the pain is for the way it makes your head feel.

Thomas Pynchon wrote an amazing novel called Gravity's Rainbow. A literary expedition through post WWII German that does more questioning than answering. Topics covered include pop culture of the 20's through the 60's, paranoia, mental illness, sexuality, technology, violence, quantum physics and conspiracy.

I have no idea where to begin, but I hope to be able to give a pretty good over view of this book, at least in regard to what it does for literature...no telling when I will be able to tackle the miles of symbolism.

Branching Out

2010-06-20T14:18:00.006-05:00

We're working on starting a real ezine. This is an official call for submissions of all good poetry, plays, prose, fiction and art. Serious business folks, get in touch with our submission editors at submissions@cannoliepie.com

Thanks, see you soon!

I'll Make this Quick

2010-06-10T21:30:00.002-05:00

I am officially and completely out of new release poetry and small press books to read. I've exhausted my AWP stacks, Amazon can't seem to find me anything suitable, so I'm turning to all of you. I have catalogs on the way from a few small presses (Graywolf, Copper Canyon, Wave, etc) but that leaves me with a lapse of new things to do. Ezra Pound and some books about Buddhism and Haiku have been tying up a lot of my free time, but I feel so alone without new poetry to critique.

If anyone out there knows a title worth reading, or a press worth buying from, pass it along. I'll give you something (like a pat on the back, etc) if your suggestion inspires a review.

Short on Words? Not Quite. New Poetry by Aaron Kunin

2010-05-02T16:29:00.015-05:00

Barely over two weeks old, be the first to read about Aaron Kunin's The Sore Throat and Other Poems from FENCE Books.

English is one tricky language when it comes to sound and meaning. Poetry often profits by punning on twists of sound or taking it a step further and working with euphemisms and connotations. These techniques in literature can be as humorous as they are insightful; Aaron Kunin is sure of that.

His new book, The Sore Throat and Other Poems, fits right in this tract of linguistic pliability, but rather than simply punning or riffing or vamping as earlier beat style or jazz poets have, Kunin has taken to entirely reestablishing word usage by limiting this entire book to 200 different words or less. This has the potential to be repetitive in a book of poetry that is over 100 pages long, but Kunin has presented an effective form for handling the nuances of words, the implications of language as well as a tryst of poetic meditation, and genuine perception of human reality.

The real eye catcher of Kunin's book is his deliberately limited vocabulary. Referring to an approach which resembles "automatic writing," Kunin determined a basic subconscious vocabulary of under 200 words and set out from there to provide new "translation" of the poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" by Ezra Pound and the play Pellas et Melisande by Maurice Maeterlinck. It is not necessary to be familiar with either work to absorb the feel of Sore Throat as Kunin brings to it a style that is definitively his.

Beginning with the poem "A Word With You," Kunin lays the foundation of his work. He writes "The word is a fact, after all; / We can be sure of that / [...] the fact / of your narrow throat, ah! / Remember that your talking habits / Change the word, and change who you are," stating that, while we are dependent on language to communicate, language is also dependent on us to have value. The relationship between language and us is symbiotic in that we use it to change perceptions, and that it changes ours. Kunin employs this book is to explore the relationship of words to their expressions. These lines from the same poem indicate the importance of humanity and feeling to language: "My god! How the machine can gasp, / Sob, sigh, and weep. / And yet, it is not like us," Presses; typewriters; computers; all these can show words, but cannot express them, cannot feel them or make others feel them the way a human can. For everything they can do, they are still not as subtle or stern with language as we are with each other.

Kunin also works with various line forms that would be a disservice to try and reproduce here, but he portrays verbal dialectic interestingly with stanza breaks and word placements in some poems. Some of his poems actually look like a verbal dialog on the page. Above all, his insights to language, its flexibility and applications are what Kunin conveys most effectively through this book. There is not just a portrait of the confines of our language but also the confines of our minds, our interests and our deepest feelings and how all of these fight and struggle with each other to get out just who we are. This fight of words is undoubtedly the "sore throat" Kunin uses, referring to all the agitation that comes from such interwoven complications. One of his most poignant insights is also one of his most fantastic uses of his limited vocabulary from the series "The Sore Throat" he writes "I'm inventing a machine / for concealing my desire. / And I'm inventing another / machine for concealing the / machine. It's a two-machine / system, and it sounded like / laughter. And I'm inventing / a machine for concealing / the sound." Here Kunin expresses the limitation of language and the confines of humanity, we want so much, but at the same time we try to hide are wants, while trying to look like we are not hiding anything, and through it all we have no sound, no language but laughter, and even that becomes an enemy.

This study of the flexibility of language lends it self well to the dynamics of romantic relationship. Our personal interactions, especially with lovers, beget the necessity of variations of meaning and intention which Kunin explores in these poems. On the familiar dialect between physical and emotional relationship he writes, "For the moron, what's good is a hard-on / Always hard: longer wide and always easy," in the poem "What's your pleasure brother?" He twists this statement a few pages later in the same poem writing, "All pleasure and goodness I grasp; / I am just a boy or a moron;" continuing with "You mean so much to me -- just to hear / You talking with a vowel in your throat! / I like more more than I can say; / There is no word can mean so much!" Kunin is reflecting on both the physical interests of relationship in sex to which he refers to the most climactic moment as the vowel in the throat followed by a much deeper pensive into how much one means to another. Sex and pleasure are one thing and to enjoy them is one thing, but for there to be "no word [that] can mean so much" is on a completely different plane of connection. What Kunin has done is broken relationship down into a dialectic of language, the physical, while pleasurable and meaningful, is expressed via a single vowel. The deeper feeling of how much one means, how much one is liked by the other, cannot be summed up with any word. One is summed up simply, while one cannot be summed up at all. This is the struggle of language, and this is the struggle of many relationships; creating a grounding between physical appreciation and emotional. The blur between these understandings of relationship are mimicked in the blur between words, intention and perception that Kunin has established in this book.

A problem with Kunin's experimentation is that his poems have a built up desire to bouncing words around. Kunin makes this limited vocabulary work by finding all the nuanced ways or reworking something, unfortunately his poems often wander into a sort of vamping that they would be better off avoiding. In a particularly interesting and creative piece, one of a several poems titled "The Sore Throat" Kunin uses different demarcations of speech to influence tone. Writing "'I'm your toy,' he complained" followed by "'If there's every anything I can do for you, anything at all, / just let me know,' she demanded." he brings a new perception to relationship dynamic. There is no outright intention in the words spoken, but in his way of noting the speech he expresses the familiar tensions. His statement is a frustration. Her offer to help is really needy and possessive. This poem makes great use of these ending throughout itself, ending all the bits of dialog in something besides "said" nothing is just "said" as he writes, "Talk isn't ever / 'just talk.' It always / has to be about / something don't you think?" his intentions in this part of "The Sore Throat" series are smart and well aimed but midway through the writing becomes tumultuous. After his fruitful use of dialog markers, Kunin breaks up his poem's tone by writing, "can see, in my, me a, say that you think / nothing, head you, gain you, it's all you see / but you won't see, must not, right if I won't / begin, we can't, no rats, left / seeing, being report, felt," while this stanza holds a sense of internal questioning, a frantic monologue, and an interesting investment in repetition it strays to far from the direction of the conversation between the two characters occurring in the stanzas immediately before it. This instance is not singular, but occurs in several poems within the series, detracting from the overall coherency of the pieces, but the poems maintain most of their intentions.

Aaron Kunin's The Sore Throat and Other Poems

was released in April 2010 from Fence Books. A book that truly explores the depths and shallows of both language and ourselves. Certainly worth a read.

Unabated, Stripped Down and Real: Poemland by Chelsey Minnis

2010-04-24T13:52:00.015-05:00

April is poetry month. Combined all the seasonal flowery imagery of life in bloom, rain and sunshine, bunnies and softly singing birds, have been numerous events, publications, gatherings, readings, slams, and (ugh) iambic pentameter

How do you cut through all that fluff?

Write a book that has no cover picture, no acknowledgments, no titles and no (grammatical) punctuation. Sparing all the fine ornamentation of the old, the dead, and the rhyming, Chelsey Minnis has written Poemland, a book that makes no argument for anything or against anything. It's poetry, and that's it.

The first line of the book really says it all "This is a cut down chandelier." Minnis warns her readers right out that is is not your usually book of rhyme lamentation of love, life, death, sex, careers and the ever fleeting rewards of an MFA. Every "poem" in this book is untitled and essentially the book itself reads like one fast paced long poem. There are breaks between, I am not sure if you could call them stanza, or poems, let's say sections that are page of all back featuring the UPC in white at the edge. This book is obsessed with the UPC, any savvy reader will look at this and immediately guess that Minnis is up to something with this symbol, commentary on the manufacture and sale of poetry? Too lazy to come up with a new design? Completely dada? Who knows, but it suits the book well, rejecting all attempts at surrealism, or romanticism that poetry book covers often strive for.

Minnis takes pot shots at the writing world, throughout this book. She is reminiscent of great outlaw poets like David Lerner, D.A. Levy, Jack Micheline, and Harold Norse. Not only are her words bare of excessive accoutrement in the form of imagery and sound techniques like rhyme and alliteration, she also calls her own community out on whatever the hell it claims to be doing, "Some people know how to write but they have no taste... / Oh I have seen it many times... / Sometimes there is a prize winning anti-sentimentality...". She challenges the writing community, opposes strict formality, ignores conventional imagery and finds purpose for it all making a few unconventional statements about poetry's favorite victim, love.

I was at first pleased with her berating, bashing and beating of poetry but as the book continued on I was beginning to wonder where she was going. I can handle a poem or two about how much poetry needs to change, because that is an important topic which few take seriously. However, you cannot dedicate an entire book, especially one so minimalist, to the task merely of hating poetry, luckily, right as my patience was wearing thin with Minnis's complaints she did break into a complex voice of her own, asserting some of the greater values of life which poetry has always sought to do. It's worth noting that even she is doing what poetry has always done, she is doing it differently thus maintaining her own values and placating my interest in keeping away from the normal Minnis' lines, "Some times I get the right feeling in the afternoon... / And that's when I write a poem for you... / I like things about you...like your head... / You have such a head... / And you are not tripe..." are an early glimmer of the unconventional but endearing introspection that Poemland provides.

She continues, "I'm going to hug you and throw you down...on the ground..." near the midway point of this book showing a touching dose of humanity. Relationships are complex, too often the poet makes a relationship sound only dominating and hurtful or only potently mechanically sexual, or only lovey and puppy-doggish. Nothing quite sums up the reality of human relationships like a hug and a throw to the ground. From a sexual bent, it's fun and rough, from a domination view, it's commanding. She does so much work in such unembellished words; that is truly a strong suit. Continuing in the vein of relationship, but now adding a touch of revenge Minnis writes, "I can only think of orange-colored emotional rage.../While blood trickles down my chin.../I should hit you with my bandaged hands." The trickling blood and the willingness to hurt even when the means to do so are damaged is a very irrationally human way of dealing with our issues. We'll ignore the poor shape we're in if we can just dole out a little bit more pain than we are feeling.

The force behind Minnis's work is truly in the baldness of the lines. She does not forces her readers into her self made paradigms or attempts to define objective truth. She writes, you read, that's it. No games, no pictures, no titles, just words and the meaning you glean from them. Poemland is left essentially bare, drawing on a few deep wells of the human psyche, Minnis leaves her words open to bend with the reader. She spends roughly the first have of her book undoing all the parties and champagnes and awards of the "affluent" writer and spends the last half handing the reader something completely unabated and real.

Poemland was published in 2009 and is available from Wave Books. An absolutely great book, especially if you're looking for a quick read and nice break from some of the more pretentious poets you've run into this April.

More Fun than an Imploding Hospital: Charactered Pieces by Caleb J. Ross

2010-04-20T00:36:00.016-05:00

A book that begins by begging Tom Waits, "the world's hero" not to sue on account of a few...borrowed...lyrics is either up to no good or off to a great start. Charactered Pieces, a collection of short stories by Caleb Ross, is both.

Ross has filled this roughly sixty page book with a myriad of physically, mentally and spiritually misshapen characters. Ross's protagonists all have something a little out of the ordinary. No, not like that, just enough to make them more interesting than your average joe and very engaging to follow.

A few of most noteworthy characters include a Las Vegas barfly who may or may not being living in the back of her pickup truck, some guy from work named Bill or Bob, the title story's protagonist, a woman with an extra appendage which is not entirely hers, and the builder haunted by the ghosts of the former occupants of one of his projects.

The application of metaphor is a particular strength of Ross's. His stories never beat the reader over the head with silly contrasts like black and white, day and night; yet he still manages to make a compelling impact on the reader. In "My Family's Rule" Ross makes strong use of familial conversations and gift exchanges to convey the overall tone of a breaking family's world and ties it all together with the very compelling imagery of the demolition of a hospital where all the family members were born. While an imploding medical facility, and all its capacity for life and death, is not a terribly delicate plot, it is remains very forceful and provokes a very strong understanding of the situation surrounding this family.

While there is not one story within this book that has a hard time getting the reader in and making a commanding statement by the end; one story stuck out as a bit clumsy. "An Optimist" tells of a former drug user, now divorced, working a failure of a job, struggling to stay clean and out of trouble all for the son he is locked in a custody battle over with his former wife. The conclusion to this piece is heart wrenching in the most honest way, and again, Ross makes beautiful use of metaphor throughout. The story also is randomly accompanied by Chinese fortunes (a herald from the protagonist's job) which adds a very creative and evocative touch. However, Ross gets a bit too creative with description and dialog and the story breaks up at a few places within itself. He tries to apply a few too many varying techniques to some common elements of fiction, and that makes this would-be spectacular piece average at best.

Don't let his one slip scare you away. Even though this story was a bit rough around the edges it still holds true to all the incredible talents that Ross establishes in earlier stories. Apart from his terrific metaphors, Ross is a true master of characterization. Not one person that Ross includes in his stories is hard to believe. If you haven't met someone in this book, your best friend's cousin has; and that is great. A spectacular example of Ross's character skills comes from the above mentioned "An Optimist" (see, I'm fair) in which the divorced man, who favors the word fuck, eventually reveals through a complex internal monologue that "it's been six years-in the warmest bed I've ever shared." It is always good to see that a character is more than just a life hating nihilist with a dead end job. Everyone has a little spark of poet to them, and much applause to Ross for not neglecting that fact.

Between his spectacular characters, interesting stories, excellent metaphors all held together with great imagery and vivid description, Ross is a must read. He's young, fresh and down to earth enough to admittedly "steal" lyrics and write an "Acknowledgement" section that sounds more like a bonus story than a Hollywood awards speech. Keep an eye on him, he is bound to turn up more great work in the future.

Charactered Pieces is available from The Outside Writer's Collective, released 2009. Pick this one up! It's short, cheap and worth every penny and minute you will spend on it. You can also find out more about Caleb J. Ross at www.calebjross.com and as he says in his acknowledgments, if he is ever in your town, invite him out for a beer, he will likely accept.

I just had to add these:

Rough Flight, but a Perfect Landing: James Hynes's novel, Next

2010-03-11T22:35:00.006-06:00

First thoughts:

funny, satirical, poignant, maybe a bit too obsessed with sex, somewhat clumsy, but an ending that will not disappoint!

Next, by The Lecturer's Tale author, James Hynes, starts off, humorously as noted with a middle aged man by the name of Kevin Quinn touching ground at the airport in Austin (our author's real world home) while musing on the foil-potato-chip-can-likeness of his plane compared to a the potential Sting(er) of a terrorist attack. We quickly learn that the world has been marred by the recent 666 attacks, 6 different European cities have been attacked on June the 6th, and people everywhere (especially the new career seeking Kevin) are a touch nervous.

Next to him on the plane is seated a (much) younger attractive woman who immediately reminds Kevin of loves both current, lost, and never really attained and he fires into a middle aged tail spin, stalking (seriously) about the city of Austin with just some hope of getting nearer to her. For what? He doesn't even know, but she seems like an answer to him.

The story follows his mishaps through the city of Austin and is lovingly sprinkled with doses of great satire about both politics and social phenomena (the latter got some huge laughs out of me and made this book very unRonic worthy). Now as to what exactly Texas has as far as political satire goes...well your guess is as good as mine.

Generally speaking, Mr. Hynes is great with the conventions of fiction; there were no glaringly painful moments of Meyers-like over emotion or over romanticism, in fact, it is appropriate to say that Hynes's writing style is very agreeable and engaging. Next might be a more post-collegiate generation's Catcher in the Rye. It's much sexier than Salinger's classic but contains some of the same themes of searching and coming of age, albeit an older one. I can even see similarities between the two; both boys roam through a somewhat strange city, both spend way too much money on cabs, both chase after petty but pretty women, and both have a certain disdain for the world. A caveat to that association is that Next is nowhere near as evocative as Catcher and the two should really not be confused as being of a similar vein; merely the plots reflect each other's

As far as creative writing goes there is a great deal in Hynes's style that is worth remembering and "borrowing" as we "writers" are wont to do. However, there are a few stylistic complaints and mostly those fall to some of Hynes's repetition. At times he repeats phrases that would have been better summed up, left out, or at the very least, tied back into their afore-mention on preceding pages. Legal reasons prevent me from directly quoting here, but I will do my best to paraphrase. At one instance in the novel Hynes points out that Kevin is strolling through an area of old warehouses that have been transformed into trendy bars, later, walking back down the same street, Hynes reminds us that Kevin is walking by old warehouses that have been transformed into trendy bars as opposed to just saying that Kevin is walking by those same warehouse/bars he passed earlier.This handling of words is a bit uncoordinated and really detracts from the novel at many points where the rest of the text is particularly engaging. It's more a case of frustrating deja vu than harmonious, lyrical repetition.

But, Hynes is a master of description throughout the novel and set the scene and the climate very well. The metaphoric implications of temperature, light, sweat, and all the other tactile details of a Texas summer day are very vivid and lend themselves extremely well to the decidedly "tense" feel of the whole novel. Hynes deserves much applause for his handling of environment and detail.

Next's ending is really what the novel should be read for. While it doesn't entirely make up for a few of the shortcomings of the proceeding pages, it is certainly something worth the reader's time. Just remember, the page numbers don't always mean it's nearly over.

So overall, Next is an "OK" novel (actually it's a Texas novel but...). Among dissapointments in some word choices throughout the book which were terrbily distracting, the characters were a bit flat with the leading male being a bit too sexually frustrated/compelled/focused/obsessed and many of the women altogether too perfect. The details Hynes chose to include were very fitting and appropriate and there should be no arguement that he knows how to paint a great verbal picture. The majority of the pages pass a bit slowly, but the ending really stitches everything together in a unique and endearing way.

Give Next if you have the time, but I wouldn't go crazy for this one.

As Good a Day as Any

2010-03-04T13:10:00.004-06:00

For a fresh post on some good reading.

On the menu today:

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First thoughts:

Lot 49 is in serious need of some commas but is a whirlwind story none the less.
Ivan is a great alternative to the old worn out distopian novel.

So, Lot 49, by Pynchon. I've heard tell that Tommy is the guy you go to after you've gotten fed up with Chuck Palahniuk, or that people only read Chuck because they don't know about Tom. Either way, I haven't read much Palahniuk, seen the movies and have just been somewhat shy about approaching the books. There is just something about a book becoming a movie in its own time that seems a bit off to me. I guess I am bit pretentious when I say that if it can be made into a movie so easily, it's probably not a good book, but if you really think about it, the difference between pictures and words is so enormous that the translation should be difficult. Anyway, I digest. (Yes I know it's digress). Pynchon wrote a pretty good story. It's interesting, it's certainly engaging, it was, to use a cliche, hard to put down at times, but damn man, use a comma. That's the thing, Pynchon has a very inhuman way of describing things and details often get lost in their own descriptions which made the novel very difficult to jump into. A little bit like one has to get used to reading iambic pentameter when she hasn't picked up Shakespeare for awhile. Pick it up if you're looking for something to tickle your brain, just don't even attempt to read the thing on a train, plane or automobile, and don't use it as a novel to fall asleep to. You need all your wits to follow this mad man's pen.

Ivan was a whole other story. A few weeks (months?) ago I talked about The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which was a captivating story but a very worn out distopia. I've read my share, they were my favorites in high school. 1984, Brave New World, you know the lot. And they all seem to follow this pattern: the world sucks and it's trying to beat me up and I am the one Lone person awake to reality, no wait, there are others like me, hurray! let's bring the system down, oh crap it looks like they won in the end, but shocker! there's an appendix and we actually won. Ivan is different. It is, as the title divulges, about one day in the life of a man named Ivan Denisovich, a Russian sentenced to ten years hard labor in a Siberian Gulog. Instead of complaining about how much life sucks, he talks about how great today is. Hey, it's only negative 10 degrees today, not negative 40, alright there are two rancid potatoes in my bowl of stew, I only got beat up by a guard once. The thing that bugs me about the other novels is that if the distopias were really as good at keeping people controlled as they were written to be no one would even be able to see the difference, and that is basically what life for Ivan is like. He's been in so long that he doesn't see his world as painful anymore, he sees it as the world he must live with. It's brutal, don't get me wrong. You don't leave feeling exactly happy for the man, but he leaves the novel sort of happy and that's what makes it hard. He's happy in a living hell, because today was less hellish than others. That's what I've always thought would make a good distopia: a man or woman living in surroundings that suck (by our standards) but enjoying them because they do not know better. A world where the distopia has one. That's the most powerful, and Ivan is great for it.

Pick up both, they're slim and easy to enjoy. Ivan is my personal favorite of the two, but Lot 49 does have it's merits and is not at all a novel that should be ignored.

Valent-irony

2010-02-21T12:57:00.001-06:00

So last week was the lovely holiday we all love to love, Valentine's Day. A little history on the event, it's actually a Catholic holiday (The Feast of St. Valentine). Valentine was a Martyr for the Christian faith, and in the Catholic tradition, vestments are red, indicating blood and passion, for all services on the feast of a Martyr. So that is likely where the red/pink obsession of February 14th comes from. The rest in really up to legend, popular Catholic legend says that Valentine wrote letters to imprisoned Catholics expressing his love (platonic) as well as God's love for them, and encouraging them to keep the faith. Really, he was not so dissimilar to modern foundations that send calling cards and toothbrushes to soldiers overseas, just little reminders that they still matter to us.

Anyway, there's a brief run down of the insanity now for the most tickle-me-pink irony of that lovey dovey dayvey...er day.

It's the Holiday of Love right? The day where couples either get their start or really show each other that they care right? Sure, I suppose that's what it is, or could/should be. And hey, nothing says "You're special to me" like giving her the exact same number and arrangement of roses that 75% of all other committed men are giving their sweeties right?

That's what really go to me. I spent last week end in New York City (visiting my sweetie, yes I'm just as sappy as the rest of you) and it just struck me about how foolish this Holiday has gotten. This is more commercial than Christmas. At least Christmas has all those insane people who won't let you forget that Jesus is the Reason for the Season. Through the streets of Midtown Manhattan in the days before the big Two - One - Four -Twenty-Ten, I must have seen five men per block with a dozen roses. Is the irony of that lost on everyone? Do you guys really believe you're giving her anything special by buying her exactly what the commercials told you to? Girls, do you really feel special when you get the same roses your best friend, mother, aunt, niece, and sister got? Do we pretend we're original when we do this crap? It's so silly, but maybe I'm just bitter.

But I'm probably not. There was a commercial on the Rock station where I live right before Valentines day. I don't remember the details, and I don't remember that phone number that they always repeat three times in that hypnotic voice (nice try guys) but I do remember the tagline "Roses, give some, get some." Yeah... I think all upright committed men and women have a call to stand up against that. Seriously? Is that what it is? Valentine's Day is now a day of exchanging physical goods for sex? There's a word for that...it starts with a P, I think...maybe it will come to me later....

I also liked the diamond store that was advertising that you can get her both chocolate AND diamonds. For every thousand dollar string of shiny rocks you buy her you get some candy too! Sweet!

Seriously people? Can we really say this Holiday means half as much as we would like to believe it does when all we do is buy the exact same crap because a few violin-laced commercials told us to? I know it's too late for this year, but next year let's all try to be a little more thoughtful than roses, diamonds, chocolate and sex. While all these things are great, I really hope there is more to a relationship than that.

Now for something completely different.

I just wanted to make a brief comment on a very very good book I read recently (and we could even say it fits with the theme of love) called The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. I try to use this blog to comment on both social phenomena as well as the finer aspects of culture, but I must admit the latter has been lacking so this is my chance to right that wrong.

Anyway, The Alchemist is a book about a boy (age is approximately twenty) who leaves home and sets out to find his Personal Legend and experiences the world and some very interesting people. From helpful to hurtful, kind to cruel, he meets them all and manages to make meaning of each person he runs into for his own personal story. It's a book about, literally, chasing dreams, and I think if you've ever wanted to do something, anything, with a passion this is a great book. It's an easy read. I knocked it out in two days, but I bet I could have downed it in one if it were the weekend. I would say kids as young as fifth grade would be able to handle the words, but I don't think you'll really start to appreciate the story until college age. That seems a bit like a double standard I'm sure, there really is just something to this book that comes from the shared experience of being out on your own, and while one can imagine that from a young age, we really don't start to live it until college.

So check out The Alchemist good book for yourself or your kids. I really think it would make a great bed time story read over a few nights for very young children, but it also really deeply spoke to me as a worldly college student. A truly great novel, do not pass it by. And for the record, the intro to this book is worth reading, but save it for after.

Hate and Loathing of Introductions

2010-02-07T18:29:00.001-06:00

I've been doing a great deal of reading lately. All kinds of famous greats, Jack Kerouac, Ezra Pound, J.D. Salinger, Margaret Atwood names that I've been told most people know, and I have encountered, well a bit of a complaint with the modern publishing world.

Introductions.

I hate them. Straight up, I know that's a strong word and probably a bit harsh but I'm certain I can back them up. The most noteworthy introduction was featured in the book "On the Road, The Original Scroll", the unedited, unpublished version of Kerouac's hit novel published by Penguin. The book is roughly four hundred pages long. (I could tell you exactly but the book shelf is all the way over there, a good step and a half away from me...alright fine, I'll check.)

Ahem. The book is exactly four hundred eight pages long with a one hundred one page introduction. That's absurd. One quarter of the book is ANOTHER book describing the book. I could go on about that, but it's not the point.

What really bugs me about the "introductions" so popular among publishing companies these days is that a bunch of scholars texts are scraggled together and stapled to the front of the work and tell you what exactly to think about it. I must admit I have not read the introduction to "On the Road" (partly out of principle, partly out of lack of time) but I know academics well enough to know how they write.

So the problem is that we can no longer pick up books and just read them for our own edification as defined by our own values and experiences. We have to have a publishing company tell us what to think before we even open the story. And I know what you're gonna "well it's not OUR fault the publishers put that crap in there" and yeah, kinda, but we keep buying them and so they keep including them. I don't know what exactly the right thing to do is here. I'm not advocating of a Dead Poet's Society-esque demolition of all introductions (but wouldn't it make a point if we ripped them out and mailed them back to the publisher?) I think what needs to happen is we simply need to skip them altogether, or save them for AFTER we read the original story. Think about it. Kerouac put his book out about getting up, going, sucking up life, burn burn burning not about academia and study, and while his book is important and worth study, that's not the point of the story.

So there's my advocation. Next time you pick up a novel with an introduction, skip it. Read the story and then come back to the introduction if you really want that added spice of knowledge.

The introductions to both On the Road and Atwood's hit, The Handmaid's Tale sort of ruined both stories for me. I stumbled through the first several pages of the book and found out things about the author and the text that I would have preferred to figure out from the novel itself. In my experience, introductions are more hurtful than helpful and should be avoided at all costs.

The does of Irony that goes with all of this is that Kerouac was about living and moving and just going with no holds barred and his book has been caged in by an intro. Atwood's distopian novel, like all distopian novels, advocates for thinking for oneself and the importance of literature and is cheapened by an un-authored preface. Read the stories, not the intros.

-titus

Haibun and Small Presses

2009-11-17T12:10:00.000-06:00

A quick post before I scamper off to class.

I've discovered a few really rad things that I just had to share.

First of all, my poetry writing class has introduced me to a new form of poetry that I think is simply amazing. It's called "haibun" and as you may be able to tell it is similar to haiku. In fact, it is a form of haiku. It basically involves long, unlineated poetry contrasted with formal haiku (5 - 7 - 5). Many people have given haiku their own spin over time, changing from the normal "nature" theme, changing lines, and even syllable counts, and such changes are seen in modern haibun. I for one, prefer to keep it "old school." It's my opinion that working in the form is a good way to draw out creativity. If you put yourself in a box, this one being 5 - 7 -5, you have limited access to creative tools and are therefore forced to become more creative to get out of that box. Anyway, enough of my opinion. Here are some great examples of haibun that contemporary writers have chosen to loan to the wide world of the internet. Enjoy, and write some of your own!

My second props of today go out to small presses. Specifically SunnyOutside Press. It's a fact that some of the best creative works go unnoticed by the masses and popular opinion for years. Often a talented creative person waits until he or she is dead to be recognized for his or her gifts and contributions to the human experience. Small presses are great stores of creative, brilliant, passionate, but unpopular works. If you're into reading creative work, google small presses, look through what they have to offer and buy a book. Usually a small press work is very cheap. I bought a book of poetry from SunnyOutside titled "State Sonnets" for about $15 after S & H, and have thus far enjoyed the purchase. Can you get anything good for under $20 at a chain book store? Unless Twilight and James Patterson are your versions of good, no. So look for small presses and buy their stuff. Help them stay alive, passion goes a long way to feed the soul of an artist, but they need money to eat and sleep and buy more paper to feed the passion. So buy books! Also worth noting, SunnyOutside didn't just sent me a book they sent me promos and a hand stamped thank you card. If that's not customer appreciation I don't know what is! I get that it's just advertisement and an attempt to buy a repeat customer, but it came in very interesting formats, so props to that.

-titus

Welcome to Unronic!

2009-11-15T16:30:00.000-06:00

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the very first installment of my other blog. Some of you may know I did some political blogging off and on during the election season over at Politics Out of the Blue, so I want you all to know that this is strictly my arts, culture, music and humanities blog. I'll keep all the politics on a separate channel.

This all got started one fateful day on Facebook.

I remember reading an acquaintance's (anyone else ever question how one can really have HUNDREDS of friends? who are we kidding?) status that said something along the lines of this

"Soandso 'thinks isn't it ironic that I have bruise in the same place, from the same person from about the exact same time last year?'"

I thought to myself, "No, you moron, that's not ironic at all, it's wildly coincidental, but NOT ironic." And thus decided that I would start a blog to, once and for all, clear up the meaning of the word ironic, and provide great examples of things that are NOT ironic, as well as scrounge the internet for things that ARE ironic.

That was several months ago, and I have since decided that, yes, I will continue to inform the world that irony actually refers to the outcome of a situation being the opposite of what is expected, but I will expand the blog to include the root of my passion for writing the misuse of language.

Here's the deal, I love humans, and I love the humanities. Language is how we get across the wild fathoms of our hearts and minds, and is such an immensely important gift that we really need to be careful with it. I get that language is dynamic and changes based on how it is defined, but it is important to keep it well and properly defined. A prime example of how the degradation of language can be devasting is shown here. So the larger picture is, humans do some great things and come up with really fascinating arts and modes of expression and I'm going to use this space to talk about them as they strike me.

If I discover a brilliant form of art or communication, you'll find out about it here. If I find something that nearly makes me lose all faith in humans and culture as we know it, you'll definitely find out about it here, and probably loudly.

What started as a foray into the abuses of the English Language has become evolved (if only in my mind) into a full on disclosure of, well, all things interesting.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

-titus