Among The Jumbled Heap

Cat Power

Cat Power, whom I love, (and really who doesn't love Cat Power?) turned up in this odd picture on the Department of Education website: That's her holding a copy of the Giving Tree, and looking very much like One of These Things is Not Like the Others. There are, in fact, so many odd things in this picture that I could stare at it all day and still feel like I had not seen it. Like that guy with the yellow cowboy boots. Or the way the fella on the other side of Cat is kind of leching on her...

Rejection

The past year, I have been diligently sending out my short stories to various journals.  This is a major psychological step for me.  My stories have always been just that, mine, and I have not wanted to share them with a larger audience.  A feeling, I'm sure, that is partially rooted in my own fear of rejection.  So far rejection is all my stories have found in the wider world. This past week I received yet another letter saying "no thanks."  This one came from Cezanne's Carrot, a journal who...

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...

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...