Among The Jumbled Heap

The Yankee South

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankee...

If a body see a body…

Salinger, J.D. (Jerome David) 1919-2010 J.D. Salinger and I go way back.  It was he who stuck "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a poor sinner" into my little brain.  Yep, this is that damned Jesus Prayer that drives Franny Glass bonkers in Franny and Zooey. As much as I hate the man for giving me that ear worm, i'm sad to see him gone. My good friend The Hamster has the best remembrance of the man I've read.  Go check it out http://wheresmyhockeymask.blogspot.com/2010/01/...

Poetry makes nothing happen…

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. -W.H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" I've been thinking a lot about poetry and politics. This is one of those recurring themes in my thought...

The Last Twelve Years

I'm a two pack a day man, smoke like a fiend Like a burned out bearing in a bad machine I cayn't breath in the mornin' till I get myself a cigarette lit Say, Daaaa aaaad Blame, anyways a man cayn't quit. --Roger Miller I did not meet her as a teenager, as so many others do. True, I saw her often, flirting with the gutter punks and metal heads, men, women, she was indiscriminate, flirty bitch, and I was not attracted to her. I was NOT. Paul introduced us. He had not known her very long...

Gin Phillips, Hawthorne Books, Book Objects:

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right. My friend Anthony is--to put it mildly--a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she'll get mad.   (That's Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we f...

Real Presence

"Lead us not into..." Willie think 'bout temptation till his mind go blank Replaced with action and boldness to act. Thoughts wither like corn in a Texas drought. "Listen real hard you can hear da corn grow," His daddy say one summer in Indiana. But that was twenty years, two thousand miles, Thirty degrees ago, an' now Texas Gonna burn a hole in 'is soul. 'Turn dis soul ta bread. It might be useful. Ain't fit ta e'en put butter on now. Feed the body. Starve the soul. "Willie, maybe the body ...

WordPress Upgrade

Hurrah! I have upgraded to WordPress 2.7 . I've also installed WP2.7 on my local machine with the help of XAMPP and intend to build my own theme as soon as time is available...which is rarely. I'm tired of the damned red, white, and blue.

The Tao of Coetzee

Like an infant that has not yet smiled. I droop and drift, as though I belonged nowhere. All men have enough and to spare; I alone seem to have lost everything. Mine is indeed the very mind of an idiot, So dull am I. The world is full of people that shine; I alone am dark. They look lively and self assured; I alone, depressed. I seem unsettled as the ocean; Blown adrift, never brought to a stop. All men can be put to some use; I alone am intractable and boorish. But wherein I most ...

If you are reborn, you can be my child.

The name David Foster Wallace is seldom mentioned without the word "prodigy" in the same sentence. Sometimes "prodigy" is preceded by "fucking," as in the following: "David Foster Wallace is a fucking prodigy." Sometimes this sentence is further punctuated with an "asshole" at the end, either with an ellipses or with the combination conjuction article, as in the following: "David Foster Wallace is a fucking prodigy...asshole." OR "David Foster Wallace is a fucking prodigy and an asshole." W...

More of Andre on Writing

I am currently obsessed with Andre Dubus. He is a contemporary American Short Story writer. A heckuva talented writer and a great human. I'll write more on him later, but I can't resist throwing out some of his good quotes on writing. An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them, which become a sentence. When a writer does that, day after d...