I do not know your name, O weed,
Your genus, species, class, or breed,
But I think the only fact I need
Is this: that if I touch you, I will bleed.
Check out the animated show Bat out of Hell on YouTube!
I do not know your name, O weed,
Your genus, species, class, or breed,
But I think the only fact I need
Is this: that if I touch you, I will bleed.
About a month ago, I sent my book, House of Words, to Garrison Keillor. Mr. Keillor is a busy man, an astonishingly prolific writer of many funny, fabulous books and a tireless maestro of radio magic; so I doubted he would have time to even hold my little house of words in his hands. Surely he has people who intercept these things as they arrive, and surely these people would take one look at my book and fail to recognize its breathtaking brilliance. And off the poor little pageturner would go to a recycle bin in some Dylanesque Minneapolis back alley and thence to the frozen prairie pile of some St. Paul pulpmill, eventually to be made into paper for Mr. Keillor’s next book.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, just yesterday, Korrektiv Press received an email from one Kathy Roach. Mrs. Roach, with whom I later had the pleasure of speaking on the telephone, was writing to request permission for Mr. Keillor to read one of the poems from the book on the following Monday’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac. That’s three days from now! Korrektiv Press gleefully granted permission, as did I, and so the wheels were set in motion for my one minute of fame. I’ll take it! And thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web, we can time travel forward to Monday and experience The Writer’s Almanac right now on Friday night. Thank you, Garrison Keillor, for a splendid reading of my poem, “You and I.” You, sir, are all those things; and I am the discoverer of you. Or is it the other way around? See how that can turn? Either way, I am giddy with gratitude, grateful with gidditude, and feeling slightly above average.
I. Mr. Potterax
1
Mr. Jonathan Potterax, the owner of a loud guitar
and of large dog,
A “green” and a stacker of volumes, has married
at the age of 28,
He being at that age a virgin,
The term “virgo” being made male in mediaeval latinity;
His poetic reveries
Having driven his wife from one consumer excess to another.
She has abandoned the Land Rover
For it was lacking in vehemence;
She is now the high-priestess
Of a modern and ethical Tupperware party,
And even now, Mr. Potterax
Does not believe in plastics.
2
His brother-in-law has taken to photographs,
But the sister-in-law of Mr. J. Potterax
Objects to filterless cigarettes.
In the parlance of Jackie Mason:
“80% of men cheat in America…the rest cheat in Europe”;
And thus the empire is maintained.
II. Mr. O’Brienax
When Mr. O’Brienax visited the San Diego area
His whiskered whisky dripped among the teacups.
I thought of Lickona, that shy figure among the eucalyptus-trees,
And of myself in the shrubbery
Gaping at the lady in the swing.
In the palace of Mrs. Phlato, at Professor James Fortunatus Dixon’s
He twitched at the lips like a freshly hooked coelacanth.
O this twitching was submarine and profound
Like his old man hooch’s
Hidden under a rock beside the above-ground swimming pool which hadn’t been cleaned for months,
Where worried bodies of drowned bottles drift down in the green silence.
Shooting back three or four fingers of the stuff,
I looked for the head of Mr. O’Brienax lolling in a chair
Or grinning over a screen
With bits of tobacco and rolling papers in its hair.
I heard the roar of a big machine
Two worlds and in between
Hot metal and methadrine
I heard empire down
In fact, I heard the beat of Mr. Andrew Eldritch’s clever allusions
Over the dinny confusion of the Glas pax
As my dry and passionate slant-6 devoured the afternoon silence.
“He is a charming man”–“But after all what did he mean?”–
“His red nose and red eyes … He must be unbalanced,”–
“There was something he said that I might have challenged.”
Of dowager Mrs. Phlato, and Professor and Mrs. Dixon
I remember dried-up pimento stuffed olives
Resting at the bottom of empty conical stemware.
Yes, I went out drinking with the Editor and Associate Editor last night – why do you ask?
But seriously – check out, say, this issue, and see if you don’t think these people are realio, trulio Friends of the Kollektiv.
And then decide if maybe they deserve your vote.
(You can vote once a day!)
Cubeland Mystic sent me this with a note saying, “This one has your name on it.” And, yeah, it pretty much does. Thanks, CM.
Go here, listen from 14:30 to 27:00. The bit about cleaning up the devil off the floor is an O’Connor story in real life. But it’s all amazing, if rough on faith.
According to the Crass Cheapshot Catechism of Madison Ave., the benefts of Dietrich Mateschitz’s wondrous beverage extend to the spiritual world…
Of course we won’t be holding our kollektiv breaths to see Red Bull GmbH’s marking dept. throwing up an equal opportunity mullah spinning like a dervish on the stuff in his minaret seeking out his 72 virgins…
(After all, I imagine that Europe is earnest in its desire to avoid joining the block parties presently occuring in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula.)
Isn’t that right, gentlemen?
Via The Wall Street Journal: Where Have the Good Men Gone
Today’s pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn’t say.
Ouch.
“We are sick of hooking up with guys,” writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, “I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I’ve Dated.” What Ms. Klausner means by “guys” is males who are not boys or men but something in between. “Guys talk about ‘Star Wars’ like it’s not a movie made for people half their age; a guy’s idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends…. They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.”
The Belarus Free Theatre has been gaining a lot of new fans lately, including Tom Stoppard, who helped support a production in New York last month. Zone is more performance art than drama (and low tech performance art at that), but it’s well done and remarkably playful considering the subject matter. And subject matter would have to include the subtitles, which are random quotations of various statistics, such as “70% of the radioactive debris from Chernobyl fell on Belarus”, or “100% of the workers cleaning public restrooms are women”. Almost random: during one segment involving a woman and a ballon, we read “80% of pregnancies end in abortion.”
Belarus—as one speaker says after the production—is old school when it comes to tyranny. Alexander Lukashenko has ruled the country since 1994. His policies are the reason that in their own country the troupe must perform out in the woods or in private apartments, and suffers arrest, beatings, and constant intimidation. As someone says towards the end of the clip, When a Belarusian poet is silenced, it violates our right to hear her. So stand up for freedom in Belarus and watch this clip … at least some of it.
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
Walker Percy
Bob Dylan
Literature & History
Letters from an American
This American Life
The Writer’s Almanac
Charlotte was Both
The Onion
From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
America
Commonweal
First Things
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
DarwinCatholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Wiseblood Books
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