Echoes along the dirty, sacred river: settling up with the past

 In this bright future, you can't forget your past. - Bob Marley

The past cannot be cured.  - Queen Elizabeth I

Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse (1903)

 In the process of moving something around in the basement bunker where I write, record The Kentucky Muck Podcast, and try to play a little music now and again, ended up going through old files. No matter how much of a minimalist I aspire to be, nothing makes me feel like an gold medal level hoarder quite like going through my files.

I have a bad habit of putting things away in an attempt to not lose it, only to forget where I put such and so thing away shortly thereafter.

"Well shit," -- what I say to myself when I run into myself having made my life far more complicated than it needed to be because I found every 10 mm socket* I bought to replace the one I lost, only to find them all in the same re-purposed thing-of-a-jig box that was too too cool to throw away*-- which is to say, I found some old writing. I posted one of the poems on my Facebook page this past Sunday. I also found a book length draft of short stories I wrote while living in Illinois, including one mostly completed almost novella I had tentatively titled "Next Time, Plan Ahead." Although I'd left myself a notation that the it was on the second draft and that draft was complete, handling the pages reminded me of why it never made it past the second draft.

It was abandoned.

I abandoned it primarily because my second ex-wife*** was horrified by the fact that the bulk of my inspiration for my fiction^ came from my life -- which is to say, what was our married life.  I could provide the literary antecedents, or go down the rabbit hole of realism as a form of art. I abandoned what amounted to a year's worth of writing because, at the time, I thought I was saving a marriage.

Other than the fact that I more or less forgot about the work -- because I've been focusing on newer work, teaching, journalism, labor organizing, and getting married to the love of my life -- I haven't thought about the stories I wrote living in Illinois because... well, I'm generally in a happier mental place than I was the time. As an artifact, rereading the work brings back some really negative shit. Some of it's sad. Some of it makes me hate myself a little.

But, if I'm being honest -- and I'm always honest with you, Dear Friends and Readers -- little echoes of all that shit crop up more often than I'd like. Echoes of old habits. Old mistakes in dead relationships. Old feelings born out of the mismatched wiring of doomed relationships -- I'll tell one of those stories soon. But the trick, I've learned, is to face the echo and see it for what it is.

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* 10 mm sockets are like socks that never seem to make it back from a laundry trip, except that instead of a lone, pairless sock that could, in theory, be paired with another lone pairless sock -- there's always more than one in the sock drawer -- you've got an entire socket set (24 separate doodads and watchadoodles) that are completely USELESS. 
** In addition to hoarding things with an archivist's passion, I also love to save things that I can then put other things in to save, only to put that thing I put things in inside a larger thing with basically the same purpose. My mind palace -- and my basement-- is  a never-ending garden of Russian nesting dolls. 
*** Yes, I have two ex-wives. I write about them both from time to time, though rarely through the lens of fiction.
^ Fiction, n. A narrative that may be based on real life things but it not bound to the honesty of the events. Fiction, rather, is bound to the honesty of the writer's intent and purpose, as well as bound to the integrity of the narrative.

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I was a literary snob: low culture, high culture, and Southern Culture on the Skids

I didn't get this here baby just a choppin' on wood. -- "Voodoo Cadillac", SCOTS

But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe. - Stephen King, On Writing

"The Sisters of Eluria"

Formal education is a mixed bag. When approached with the proper mindfulness and humor, the process can be enlightening. Or at least, it used to be able to be enlightening. The powers that be have been stripping away everything worthwhile about formal education, moving away from educating a future citizenry in favor of training an army of monkeys to bear the tax burden the corporate class feels they should not have to bear at all.

But, one of the drawbacks to a formal education -- even when it was a good -- and especially a college education -- and in particular to a degree in literature -- is that sometimes, you end up getting bit by the green meanies.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard a college lit professor swear an oath against a popular writer -- in this case, Stephen King -- I'd be able to pay back student loan debt tomorrow. Seriously. There's so much jealousy and bitterness masking itself as critical contempt that it hardly seemed worth it to mention that both Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote FOR A LIVING. And while I'm not a fan of every word the guy's written -- I certainly think he needs an editor sometimes -- the fact is he's one of the more popular practitioners of the writing craft still living.

Which, if most of his academic critics were honest, is really the only problem with him. Tommyknockers could be forgiven as a serious lapse in an otherwise good string of books if he were dead and the unabridged version of The Stand were on some canonical list.

One of the things you run into in among the would-be and self-proclaimed American literati is the overwhelming notion in order to be "literary" a work must be all style. I understand this. I'm a word guy. Sometimes I just like how words sound together, and it's important to be able to string words together in an interesting.

Unfortunately, another problem you run into among the would-be an self-proclaimed American literati is that they have, for the most part, swallowed the idea that anyone who is truly engaged in the artistic process should not be able to make a living because:

1.  America is full of tasteless philistines;
2.  American culture doesn't respect the place of the arts.

You hear the second reason in public more than the first one because, well, the literati only talk that way to other accepted literati. But it's utter bullshit. Yes, thanks to the stripping away of literature and art appreciation classes from college general education requirements, it's true that the general population is increasingly less schooled on what is generally thought of as higher culture, and they are less apt to make connections between The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Force Awakens. I think about my old man, though, who was not schooled on the arts -- he was, in fact, a high school drop out who later went back for an education after serving in the military -- but who would proclaim, "I don't know art, but I know what I like."

He liked George Jones, Johnny Cash, Juice Newton, and the Cincinnati Bengals. He also loved going to the beach. He was also something of a storyteller, as his father was before him, and he was a voracious reader of the newspaper and watched the news every night.

When I started writing poetry, he didn't quite understand what would make me do such a thing. But he didn't wrinkle up his nose and tell me I was wasting my time, either -- something that more than one self-anointed member of the literati and my first ex-mother-in-law has suggested over the years.

The other thing I think of is when I published Living Broke: Stories, some of the best reception I got was from people who didn't, as a general habit, read books. They liked my stories because they identified with the people in them. All the stories were honest, un-sanitized, and sometimes brutal.

I get some of the best kinds of responses to my poetry from readers who tend to avoid poetry as well.

It's not that Americans don't have taste. That's not the problem.

The problem is that many of the purveyors* of the arts market them as some kind of exclusive club. It's not.

Sometimes it's about throwing chicken at the audience.**





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*Purveyors, not creators. I'm talking about commodifiers and sellers of art, not artists.
** If you haven't been to a Southern Culture on the Skids live show, you're missing out.

The cold settles in: more on activism, Quixotism, and the drive for a better life

and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came oh it beat and it boiled and it rang..it’s ringing

ring like crazy, ring like hell
turn me back into that wild haired gale
ring like silver, ring like gold
turn these diamonds straight back into coal. 

- Gregory Alan Iskov, "The Stable Song"

Every place I've lived, regardless of the general climate, is home to the same joke:

"If you want the weather to change, wait five minutes."

Given that River City was enjoying some comfortable daytime temperatures last week, the re-emergence of winter-like weather this week is yet another reminder that Ohio River Valley Weather will find a way to refuse a more optimistic seasonal categorization.  

Now, before you think I'm complaining, Dear Friends and Readers, please know that my memories of #ZOMBIESNOWPOCALYPSE2015 are still fresh.The truth is this winter has been, so far, a fairly typical winter. It would be easy to call it too cold (because right now, it sure as hell feels like it), but given Metro Louisville's inability to handle any kind of inclement weather with any aplomb it is difficult to see the winter as anything but a catastrophe waiting to happen.

I love it for all it's follies and foibles, though. Louisville has embraced me as much as any place can embrace an itchy-footed, semi-domesticated, rarely-do-well with a better than average vocabulary.

Wherever home happens to be, it's perfectly normal to find attributes about the place that make it special to you. For example, I call Louisville home. It helps that my wife lives here, and that I'm close to family. The thing I love about Louisville besides that is that it's still basically a small town... or, at least, it behaves like one. For the most part, people here do too, though anyone who hasn't been to a city that knows its a city and behaves like one would maintain that a large population and a few tall buildings are all that is required to make a city.

This is untrue.

A city has a different heart and a different soul. Not better. Different. Cities move fast and leave the past buried in dust -- at least, until it can be resurrected to turn a greasy buck for some carpetbagging capitalist. *

Louisville still has that small town heart. It's true that the carpetbaggers are at the door -- Omni Hotel, Google Fiber -- but it's difficult to not let them in after you've already invited them in and allowed them to shit all over the furniture.** I love it hear because in spite of the efforts of people to polish it, the underbelly of the city is still -- well, a turd. River towns are always a little grimy, and they need to be. All manner of things come up and down river and are deposited here. People. Goods. Art. Pollution. A sacred connection to something older, deeper, more meaningful, and fundamentally human*** that you simply don't find in other places. Yes, there is humanity in other places. Yes, there is a way to the sacred and the divine in other places.

But a river is an ancient artery that records every age. As a matter of fact, where I sit right now is nothing more than a long dry riverbed. Waters move and cut and focus the geography, leave behind something for people to use and live and take care of. The riverbed is a living thing, recording and remembering the history we don't take time to notice.

It will be this history that sits in judgement over us long after we have become the very fossils we ignore in the name of profit.

Lately I've been trying to figure out ways to leave a positive mark on the rocks instead of a negative one. Some plans have fallen through -- working to organize local adjuncts to demand better from their masters has lost serious momentum^. Working to maintain a radical labor union has also proven nearly impossible, as I am apparently too caustic and hurt people's feels^^. This has caused me to have rethink my relationships with people and remember that most relationships are transitory. But as long  as my marriage is good and my close family still embraces me, life is good.


If you like what you read, please consider helping support the author. Thanks for reading!

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*Read: locally, the "Democratic" mayor and metro council's clear disregard for working people by allowing Omni Hotel developers to not hire union carpenters. Read also the vote in metro council tonight that, if it goes through will go against a standing union contract to bring Google Fiber to town. Yes, this town still has a small town heart and a small town soul... but Mayor Fischer and his "economic development team" are trying really hard to murder it.
**Read: 4th Street Live
*** To be human is to be of the dirt. We are a grimy bunch. And there's something sacred in that, too.
^Everyone agrees that change is necessary, but they're waiting for someone else to do the lifting... which never works. It's all of us or none of us.
^^It's true. As eloquent as I can be, I'm also an asshole sometimes. But don't mistake that admission for an apology. Having a difficult personality and being wrong are two different things. And I'm not wrong.

Singularity and the Freewheeling Critter: Ray Kurzweil at the Kentucky Author Forum

My view is that consciousness, the seat of “personalness,” is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. -- Ray Kurzweil

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- Albert Einstein




Although I haven't read much of Ray Kurzweil's work, I was familiar with him. He famously declared, via the title of a much lauded and much criticized book that "The Singularity is Near." His many accomplishments have been overshadowed somewhat by his status as a futurist -- which, in an age where people still seek certainty and the surest way forward in order to avoid scuffing their shoes, makes him fill the Edgar Cayce/Nostradamus role whether he ever meant too or not.

Singularity,as Kurzweil defines it, is the point where technological evolution and human biological development merge. Pragmatically,this would mean that instead of needing a hand held computer to communicate,play Angry Birds, and search Google, humans would have access to these capabilities via extra-biological implants.

His predictions take certain things into account, of course, like all predictions. No matter how much you attempt to claim the cloak of objectivity (which, to be fair, Kurzweil doesn't seem to) those ol' a priori arguments never go away. While he acknowledges that there will be moral and ethical implications that need to be addressed he ... at least conversationally (I need to read his work to be more sure of this) seems to assume that with greater access to information that humanity will be able to handle the lines that will inevitably be blurred -- indeed, lines that are already being blurred, such as our cultural concepts of privacy, and the ever raging concern over intellectual and creative property rights

which just an extension of the same ownership by Divine edict obsession that the early Europeans settlers carried with them.

He also dismisses the notion that these technological extensions of self could become intellectual and critical crutches. I thought of a comment by a student at Arizona State University; the student claimed there was no need to remember certain things -- like state capitals or the year the Civil War ended, for example -- because Google was so accessible.

And NO, I'm not saying that rote memorization has anything to do with being intelligent. But it DOES exercise the brain, make it work in ways it wouldn't normally. And having access to certain pieces of information without technological extensions could come in handy. Say, when the WiFI goes out, or if you're somewhere where there ISN'T ANY WIFI.

I did appreciate his vexation about language, though. He called it humanity's first invention, but acknowledged the problematic nature of language...in that it can describe and reflect but that there's always a risk of something being lost in the translation. Language is necessarily reductive and inherently culturally biased. We're still grasping at language to adequately describe aspects of the human experience that can't be empirically studied. Kurzweil says this is tied to our individual "personalness" which is "scientifically impenetrable."

That's how I define the purpose and function of poetry, and of the arts in general, actually. Poetry (and art in general) is the attempt to reflect, describe, explain, or be critical of individual and collective experience. Science has it's uses, though. And I enjoy finding the mystic buried in the empirical. This gives me hope that we might stumble as a culture onto the truths that lie at the heart of existence, that we might be able to see them without interpretation and without ego.

But it would still be helpful to simply know that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota.

Location:Louisville, KY,United States

Eastward-ish - Into the Sunset: Tempe, AZ

Many demolitions are actually renovations. - Rumi


There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. - Wendell Berry


There's what's right and there's what's right and never the twain shall meet. - Raising Arizona 

O, what's left of the flag for me?

My time back in the Valley of the Sun has reminded me of a few things. The first thing I'm re-reminded of is how nice it is to see old friends. I was able to cross paths with Kenny, who let me sleep on his floor in spite of the trauma it visited upon his cats, Koufax and Drysdale, and Scott McNulty, who let me crash on his couch for night.  I was also able to see Dan and Julie, Alan and Katherine, Colleen and Donald and John and Reese along with other regulars, from the now defunct (May it Rest In Peace!) Horse and Hound -- the bar that was my home away from home for most of the time that Arizona was the place I hung my hat.


I was also reminded of the impetus that made me leave here in December 2009-- albeit, I will admit, with some dragging of the feet. And I can best describe my reasons by highlighting the list of offenses committed on me by this loathsome, arid, devil's asshole (think Dante's Inferno, the lowest level):

1. My first night here, I puked blood. 
2. At one point, my feet and lower legs swelled to three times their normal size. (Think of a fucked up Popeye.)
3. I experienced the Arizona version of Montezuma's Revenge.
4. I was in a perpetual state of dehydration no matter how much water I drank.
5. Being here caused me to spend more than I should have.

Now, it could be argued that I puked blood because I ingested far too much beer and not enough food. Though how that ever made a difference, I haven't a clue. I will admit that, upon returning here, it occurred to me just HOW MUCH time I spent at the bar, or drinking. I recalled the summer I perfected my margarita recipe...  well, I sort of remember. Really, with that much tequila and Triple Sec, who the fuck remembers anything? I'm lucky I wasn't arrested, naked from the waist down,  in the middle of the ASU main campus, pissing on the administration 

building.

My visit wasn't all bad. In fact, it wasn't even mostly bad. I was also able to ride the light rail downtown and meet a dear friend, Michele L, for coffee. My eventually-to-be-ex-wife and I became friends with her and her studious husband, Richard, when Michele worked with Melissa at Child's Play Theatre in Tempe. Michele and I got along almost instantly, bonding over the Arts, literature, and penchant for being a bit long of jaw. Richard and I became friends because, like his wife, he's very smart. He also has a preternatural ability to win at the horses -- a skill that ... probably because I would have used it for evil rather than good... I haven't really acquired. (Not that it ever stopped me.) 

The Phoenix-Tempe-Mesa metroplex has a lot wrong with it, but the light rail isn't one of them. Clean and efficient, it took all of 36 minutes to get from Tempe to Central and Roosevelt in downtown Phoenix. If you're familiar with driving in the metroplex or with the I-10, you will know that's an amazing time. If you're not, take my word for it.

I left Tempe yesterday and spent last night -- somewhat at the last minute -- at my friend McNulty's closer to downtown. I have less of a connection, truth be told, to actual downtown Phoenix. I spent most of my time here on the East End. I worked at ASU's main campus. I drank at the Horse and Hound. We shopped and ate out in the East End. I went downtown once on the light rail, maybe twice, right after they unveiled it -- which was always delayed between construction delays and the protests of those short-sighted people who refuse to see the present and future importance of a working public transit system. 

I suspect that many of them have never had to rely on public transit, would not be caught dead on public transit, and (among all the men and maybe some of the women) drive gas guzzling cars because they know their penises are too small.

Though while it's been good seeing friends, I feel like I'm looking at Arizona with new eyes and seeing a host of old problems and issues that I recognized when I was here before. A 6 year old undocumented Mexican being arrested by a Maricopa County Sheriff who is more of a criminal himself. A governor who, but for scaring rich white people in Scottsdale, would probably have to go back to being a hairdresser. 

Or a Republican Vice-Presidential candidate.

I thought about living here before, and how angry I was. All the time. I don't know if it was the sun... and believe me, I do think the sun fries people's brains out here. How else do you explain the Minute Men at the border? Or the fact that Arizona insists on trying to support a hockey team?

Your guess is as good as mine, Dear Reader. Lawdy, Lawdy.

Be warned, though. Don't confuse righteous indignation with random anger. I may not have much of the latter. But as time goes on, I have more and more of the former. And I don't intend to misdirect my righteous indignation. Or sacrifice my sense of peace in the process.

Buk Notes: John Fante

It's not necessary to read John Fante in order to understand what Bukowski was shooting for; one of the nice things about Buk is that even if you don't really get it – and most people don't – there's still something to enjoy. Readers of Bukowski who dream of being writers have tried – without success – to repeat what he did; generally, they begin with the notion, not without reason, that in order to write like Bukowski one has to live like Bukowski. The first mistake comes, however, in thinking that any form of emulation is the same as art. The second mistake is in looking at his body of work and seeing only “a drinker with a writing problem” as a writerly friend of mine once proclaimed him to be.

Although he openly balks at influence in his later work, Charles Bukowski does give one writer credit. And no, it wasn't Hemingway. And no it wasn't any of the Beats, with whom Bukowski is often mistakenly categorized. The writer that he credits the most – beyond the French writer Céline – is John Fante.

Fante is the author of Ask the Dust, Dago Red, West of Rome, The Road to Los Angeles, Brotherhood of the Grape, and others. In the Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust, there's a short preface by – you guessed, Charles Bukowski – in which he claims that Fante's work was the only work he found in the library that seemed like it was written for him.  Fante wrote about growing up in a poor blue collar family in Colorado, about being Italian-American, about being Catholic, about being a writer, about being a writer and selling out to write movies, about his troubles at home, about his combative relationship with his children (including the writer Dan Fante), and about his own feelings of inadequacy. Fante was one more in a slew of West Coast writers – that include Nathanael West and John Steinbeck – who had trouble making it in the East Coast / New Yorker style controlled world of literary publishing.

When you read Fante, you begin to hear the echo that drew Bukowski in and that echoed in his work as well. As a matter of fact, you hear the same thing when you read Céline, or Steinbeck, for that matter, though they are as stylistically removed from Fante and Bukowski as Mahler is from Metallica. You see more of Buk's style in Fante – but of course, it's not the same, either, any more than Hemingway wrote like Sherwood Anderson. Fante's sense of hyper-drama is different from Bukowski. With Bukowski, the tone is more acerbic, and even at his raunchiest, more judgmental. Fante's hyper-drama is comically inflated:

“So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your flash-in-the-pan genius, your one-story-writer: a thief. I held my head in my hands and rocked back and forth. Mother of God. Headlines in the papers, promising writer caught stealing milk, famous protégé of J.C. Hackmuth haled into court on petty thief charge, reporters swarming around me, flashlights popping, give us a statement.”

Ask the Dust is about getting published... the hunger, the failure, and even in face of potential success, the inevitable failure. Fante's world is one in which there is always moral balance: something good must be accompanied with something bad. The protagonist, Arturo Bandini, is a young writer living on nothing but good will and stolen oranges in Depression-Era downtown LA. His one credit is a short story, “The Little Dog Laughed” published in a magazine edited by J.C. Hackmuth, his literary hero. He carries copies of the magazine around, passing autographed copies to people who aren't really impressed. And as if the comic hubris and ego-crushing wasn't enough, Bandini then meets Camilla, a waitress, and falls in love with her. But she's in love with the bartender Sam, and Sam despises her. The only way Bandini will win Camilla over, Sam tells him, is to treat her badly.

The book is poignant in it's descriptions day to day living, love and loss and failure, Catholic guilt, and the self-doubt every writer experiences. Camilla is impressed with him at first, but only comes around when he's abusive. She spends time in an asylum, goes back and for the between Arturo and Sam. She ends up throwing Bandini over for Sam, who wants to be a writer – he writes westerns – and who is also dying of cancer. Bandini ends up dedicating a copy of his book – which he finally writes and is finally published by J.C. Hackmuth – to Camilla and throwing into the desert.

In the messy business that fiction writing has become – or maybe, that it's always been – there's always been the question as to whether what a writer writes in fiction bears any resemblance to real life. And with a pop culture that has both hyper-reality television and fantasy laden tomes, both of which serve as escape hatches rather than magnifying glasses of contemporary life, there's even more suspicion of writers who want to write something real. Fante was roundly criticized for this in his non-screenplay work. Bukowski was critisized for it too, though mostly by academic critics who didn't acknowledge anything after the Modernists.

The art in Bukowski is something you have to read with a knowing eye to catch. He had no intention of pointing it out, because he believed (I think correctly) that it wasn't his job to spoon feed infantile readers.

The art in Fante is a lot like that. It's easy to dismiss it as masked autobiography, or – the gods help us all – “creative non-fiction” (the bane of literary trends over the past 20 years). The point isn't whether the story is about a struggling young writer or a struggling young wizard. Literature isn't meant to be an escape... though it often can be. Literature – especially fiction – is a lens that brings life into hyper-focus. Fante accomplishes this in a grand tradition that he picked up from writers like Knut Hamsun, and which can also be seen in Eurpoean writers like French writer Céline, Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, and German writer Günter Grass. For that matter, the mantle was also picked up by writers like Stephen Crane and Nelson Algren. And maybe part of the true art is that while most readers look at Fante and see a Catholic writing about Catholic guilt – and at Bukowski and see a drunk writing about drinking – there's something else happening that you only see if you bother to pay attention.

[This was written, primarily to continue a discussion that Kaplowitz and I have had on Grindbone Radio, as well as off air. I also wrote it because, well, I wanted to add my thoughts to his well written piece here.]

Ain't It Grand, These Culture Wars?

There's no subtlety to any of it.

Grand circle jerk symmetry

internet artists (not) extraordinaire.

It's all too easy.

Buy into the myth wholesale.

Pretend, for moment, maybe two,

maybe thirty, that you're running

a pirate radio, pushing out

incendiary prose the way they used to

“back in the day” when

all our giants were still alive.

There are no more 3 AM saints,

standing over mimeograph machines,

living in the basement with

an abandoned AB Dick printing press

typesetting and publishing words

sacred enough to offend your grandmother.

But please. buy into the myth.

It helps pass the days. Days spent

whiling away in some institution

or another... proprietary pretense

awkward hipster princesses

read a few lines of Kerouac

and learn to drink like

(you think) Bukowski did

and a few young girls

will think you're a true original

because they've never seen

anything like you on Jersey Shore.

It's all too easy. / Scratch that.

It's all too hard. And you make it harder.

And not in that good way

you think Bukowski meant

when he wrote about whores.

It's too damn hard.

And you make it harder.

Because you think

drinking the right cheap beer

and wearing the right retro clothes

have anything to do

with anything. Schtick will

get you laid. But it won't

make you into the giant

you tell yourself you are

in your day job

where the boss

never seems to call you

by your real name.

Open Letter to the Alumni Association

Dear Sanctimonious Leeches and Intellectual Parasites:

I would very much like to thank you for the glossy quarterly publication in which you highlight the accomplishments of those past, present, and future graduates who you feel distinguish the grand Alma Mater in this age of for-profit degree mills and economic and educational disparity. I have always felt especially grateful to have attended because of the people I met there, student and faculty alike, who encouraged me to grow and to think and have helped me to become the fully realized human being I am in the process of becoming.

Among them, one teacher stands out more than most. And I would mention his name, but since you have never mentioned him in the aforementioned glossy publication you insist on mailing me every three months, I can only conclude that he continues to toil in the shadow of an institution that neither notices nor cares that he has set upon the world more artists and free thinkers than your College of Business has loosed successful entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, I'm fairly certain that your College of Business – which, allowed by your President and Board of Regents, and in a premeditated and unholy fashion, swallowed whole the English Department from which I managed to graduate … twice … – has done little more for the world than set upon it an army of mediocre middle managers, all of whom were made to retrain their replacements when the companies they worked for sent all the jobs overseas.

Now, this teacher I speak of is a great poet and an amazing human being – and though that statement is a bit repetitive, I feel, nonetheless, obliged to mention both since you may not have yet made the connection. He had done none of the things that merit attention from the College of Business graduates who have risen to offices of institutional power and affluence... the poetry haters who used to pass out ruffies to sorority girls at parties the way priests hand out wafers of bread on Sunday. As a related aside, consider this: people who claim to hate poetry or to not understand it have clearly missed the point. Granted, the Modernists – Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the like – sort screwed over those of who came after because they removed poetry from the trust of the people and deposited it in the sorry Savings and Loan otherwise known as the modern college and university system. And because of those dead sorry bastards there's a lot of even sorrier living ones who have never known that poetry is a more potent aphrodisiac than chocolate.

But this does not excuse you, leeches and parasites, from the guilt you share in the whole sale theft of the American Dream. Whole generations have come up believing they need you to succeed, and if they can't afford you that they aren't worthy. And if by success they mean living the half life of a cubicle caught middle manager, techie toiler, tax payer, and amasser of debt, then your Ponzi scheme has succeeded. You rotten sons of bitches.

Along with the glossy magazine you send me every three months with the pictures of the unknowing poster children of the apocalypse, you often send me letters asking for money... a tithe, no doubt from the income you feel like you have helped me to earn. And while I would gladly spend that $25 on beer for the teacher to whom I owe so much, or for any one of the people– poets and artists all – who have graced me with their friendship, there is very little you can do, either in your form letters or in your glossy magazine to convince me that I ought to contribute to your war coffers.

If, after receiving this letter, you still feel the need to send me the glossy magazine every three months, it's your postage, not mine; the same goes for the letters you send that have gone unanswered until now and will again after I finish. But if you have any respect – scratch that – you are at all concerned about the time wasted by the poor dumb kids you put on the phone to call and try and talk me out of the little bit of money I manage to gather up, remove my phone number from your rolls; because not only will I try and convince them they need to drop out and go find themselves, I will also try and talk them into setting the the Administration building on fire before they leave under cover of night.

You are weasels of the lowest order, the spoilers of healthy minds and rapists of good solid souls. You will get no more of me.

Regards,

Mick Parsons

Mount Carroll, IL

Essay: Intractable, Part 1

I grew out of a narrow tradition; as a writer, my education began with The Great Books on the dusty top shelf of the reference section in the library. I read Descartes, Spinoza, Aristotle, Plato. But that was later, when I was in high school. The first book of any literary consequence I ever read was George Orwell's 1984. I was ten. The magnetic weight of that book struck me, even though I didn't understand it thoroughly until I had read it many more times. And even though I didn't understand it all that well, I did begin to understand one thing: I began to understand that if I was going to write – which, by that time, I had already begun – that my goal was to write something that had that same kind of magnetic weight.

Naturally, I had no idea what an impossible standard it was that I set for myself. I had no idea that most writers are NOT artists and that by deciding that I WOULD BE an artist was more or less assigning myself to more trial, misery, glory, pain, and epiphany than anybody would choose if they had any sense.

If Orwell was the book that made me want to be an artist, then it was James Thurber's story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, that made me an English major. He's a writer that's generally ignored by both the academics and the outsiders; academics ignore Thurber because he wrote primarily to entertain, sometimes to poke fun, but never to tear down the upper middle class readership of the then young and frenetic New Yorker. He was no Sinclair Lewis. Outsiders ignore him because the New Yorker has become everything that's wrong with contemporary American writing and the intelligentsia; it's insipid, snobbish, lacking in balls or editorial integrity, and is completely isolated from a large segment of writing in America, and has been since Steinbeck. When I read Thurber now, I see him as one in a lineage of American writers that began with Mark Twain; like Mark Twain, Thurber is often pigeon-holed based on his early work. But that's not the only thing they have in common. Twain and Thurber were successful as artists because they showed a clear sense of the absurd. Thurber understood that Mitty, in his day dreaming, had more to do with what America was becoming than the wide-shouldered, straight-backed version that played out in the movies and popular literature. America was, in Thurber's time, a land of desperate, spineless dreamers. And in that realization, there is brilliance that still shines even though we have changed from desperate dreamers to just plain desperate.

But I loved books, and I was developing a love for literature; so I did what seemed to make sense. I threw myself into academia, into the canon. Some of them I loved; most of them I didn't. A few of those have warmed up to me over the years... not because I've developed a greater understanding of their place in the canon but because I'm hitting an age where their words speak to me instead of at me. Robert Frost is one. Dickens is another... though I limit myself to Hard Times and The Old Curiosity Shop. Whitman spoke to me at an early age; but then so did Chaucer and Milton. Milton is one I have always appreciated because his humane treatment of the devil in Paradise Lost remains a literary achievement that few have come close to. I don't agree with his intent or his final statement on the matter of humanity, the devil, and what it all means; but he was a Puritan's Puritan. He put protest in Protestant. So I overlook my glaring disagreements because … well... he was kind of an asshole. And even when I disagree with other assholes – because I have often been accused of being one myself – I at least like them. Just a little bit.

But even though I loved academia, I was struck with how dogmatic it could be. All institutions are dogmatic, whether they're academic, religious, or political. So I sought out other voices: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Corso. On The Road and Coney Island of the Mind stick out to me as significant influences on my development. Development, not style. I discovered literary rebellion. And it was wonderful. But to really appreciate and understand it, I had to move outside of academia; which began a long series of bouncing from job to job, in and out of academia. Getting divorced had something to do with that, as well. But I see that less a cause and more part of the effect of how I was developing, what I was becoming. 

Flip Flops at the Art Museum

The arrhythmic sound of my feet
smacking against my flip flops
echoes in the grand halls
of the art museum. We’ve
lost one another, as usual,
taking in the frenetically organized
collections to suit our own likes.
You take pictures, while, in my mind,
I’m stealing the things I like
for the memory palace under construction
(that looks suspiciously like the
the library from graduate school)
so that I can enjoy them all later
in solitude.

Most everyone else
wanders in crowds
like they’re on tours
being told about how
this painter
murdered his lover
or how that sculptor
suicided herself
as a martyr for feminism.

People who can’t make art try
to turn themselves into
their favorite artist’s creation
though none would ever claim it: wear
just the right clothes and
modular eye glasses, strike the pose as
pseudo-Warholian artifacts
among the Abstract Expressionists. The
surrealists are confused. Everyone’s
a lesbian around the Georgia O’Keefes.

The guards eyeball me as I wander the galleries
free form. My flip flops echo loud,
announcing my movements
and helping drown out
the hollow talk of the investor-patrons
and amateur critics
who paint their faces (obsessively staying within the lines)
with expressions of self-satisfaction and
deep, deep loathing. They watch me, too, as I flop by
unaffiliated. They distrust my well-worn hat,
the smell of cheap beer,
and the stench of my last cigar.

In one of the installations
(a dark closest with tiny twinkling lights)
I run into to a couple of kids
taking advantage of the dark space
to giggle and grope. He’s hoping
for good locker room talk. She’s expecting
a cable TV inspired adult romance.
They kiss loudly. It’s sloppy. I push
by them and back into the main gallery
littered with classics and moderns
and one or two contemporaries
(i.e. alive and poor) whose work
is political enough
to be installed near Rothko
and Chuck Close.

She finds me in front of the de Kooning
(not his best.) I hear her approaching. I know
it’s her by the sound of her flip flops. She’s
smiling and hugging her camera. Now
that there are two of us, the guards
have moved on. I hear the girl giggling, and
the echoes of well-fed conversations. I know
we’ll stop in the gift shop
on the way out,
and it will be that much longer
before I can smoke
or get something to drink.

4 New Poems: Essays

Essay: Regarding Poetry

Left to its own devices
a poem is its own and
only best explanation.
Everything else
is some dead poet’s ego
getting in the way, trying
in vain to outlive the lines.

Essay: Regarding Occupation

Every job is designed
to do one thing – use you
up, brain and body.
One way or the other.
The trick is knowing that
and having the insight
to sleep in.

Essay: Regarding Art and Compromise

Whenever a would-be artist
speaks of compromise –
with the husband or wife, the kids,
or the day job—check the eyes.
If you look close enough, you’ll see
what’s left of the soul evaporating
and escaping out the ears.

Essay: Regarding Happiness

The Puritans and the Buddhists
got it right – all life is suffering.
Today I put two dollars on a horse.
It held its own until the last turn.
Up until that moment, I was floating
on my chair. When it lost (came in last)
I drained my beer and walked home.