Riverside Park, probes day before Xmas 2008

This commemorative terrace and balustrade, part of the staircase inserted at 97th Street into the 19th-century, rustic perimeter wall enclosing Riverside Park, honors the distinguished architect John Mervin Carrère (1858–1911).

Find more photos like this on PTN Live

Keeping Up with Keeping Up

I am working on a review of My Life at First Try by Mark Budman... but as usual I am cogitating on it long to get my impressions in order. But in the mean time for some real decent online reading:

Vestal Review Web Issue 35
Vestal Review has been published continuously since March 2000. Mark Budman is the Publisher/Editor/Webmaster.

Sean Thomas
Robin N. Koman
Mary McCluskey
Kate Blakinger
Douglas Bruton
Folding Shackleton
Alison Christy
Elizabeth Kuelbs
Craig Daniels
Bruce Holland Rogers

Smoke Long Quarterly Issue 24

Sarah Black
Edmond Caldwell
Bill Cook
Thomas Cooper
Scott Garson
Shane Goth
Tiff Holland
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Darby Larson
Tara Laskowski
Samuel Lee
Charles Lennox
Ravi Mangla
Heather McDonald
Jen Michalski
Gregory Napp
Susannah Pabot
John Riley
Ania Vesenny

The term "smoke-long" comes from the Chinese, who noted that reading a piece of flash takes about the same length of time as smoking a cigarette. All the work we publish is precisely that—about a smoke long.

Snow Walk at the Saltgrass Marsh

Mobius Click or the Electrical Pliers

Klein, my maker.
[Insert 200 pages of National Electrical Code.]
My handles are cobalt blue. How about you?
I am a tool slave used by Joe the electrician.

In his leather pouch I snuggle to the red beaks. Many a copper wire I've bent, till Joe shorted me on 440 volts. FLASH -- burnt him back, WHANG BANG! Laid him out square between kisser and the eyes. Before Joe came to I skipped with a screw driver in the pouch of his arch enemy Tecumseh.

He should not have stuck me in that box. Did he not see the skull and bones? Whacked with electric -- now he sees nothing. Don't worry, they all come round.

We are riding along Sunset Blvd., Tecumseh and I, in a canary yellow corvette.

Joe is in love with Alice, his anima -- before I skipped I snipped Joe -- an id lobotomy. Very quick... painless. Hit them with one thing then snip with another. So Joe the electrician fumbles in darkness looking for my handles.

If I were you I would sneak up on him and clip free his tool belt.
But watch for the groping fingers.

(first published Gator Springs Gazette)

nothing like an ocean, Jim Tomlinson, KY short stories

nothing like an ocean, a collection of short stories written by Jim Tomlinson, from Berea, KY was recently published and released from The University of Kentucky Press, and is available through Amazon.

For those who share an interest in Kentucky, in Appalachia, and who enjoy real good honest story about people we might know ourselves, and those stories written real well -- I recommend you check out this book.

I had pre-ordered out of curiosity and looked forward to receiving the collection with a mild anticipation of what looked to me an interesting read… my reading habits are erratic, I tend to read at least a half-dozen books at once -- Jim’s first story in this collection caught me and has pulled me right on through to the end.

He writes in a delicate manner that I do not think I have ever seen myself writing. I am amazed at the mastery of his skill in depicting in small and subtle details the essence of his characters. But he does not write, as he says in an online interview that I found, in single characters, he writes in pairs and multiples of how characters relate and intermingle with each other. You can see and feel this focus on the social fabric come through strongly in his stories.

I want not to give anything away from the pleasure of your discovery, but a taste for those opposed to mountain top removal for coal extraction -- I consider that Jim brings a human context in one story, Overburden that should be used as a poster child, wrapped up in the squeeze of an acorn.

The best testament that I can give to Jim’s craft as a writer is that yesterday on the train into Manhattan, on my way to visit a restoration shop in Connecticut, and a subsequent ferry across Long Island Sound, I was reading and by the time I got to the end of one story I was tearing up and had to set the book down.

It was not a terrible tragedy, it was that Jim has an extraordinary talent to calmly explore and reveal the emotional depths of his character’s lives… even when they are not quite aware of it themselves.

Jim is a masterly writer; his stories come smooth to the reader but it is obvious that good honest labor, with a dose of pain and compassion has gone into creating them. As writer to a writer, and my knowing full well what it takes to get where he has got in his writing, I am sincerely impressed.

This is damned good stuff.

And I am going to make a point to go out today and stand near to the Atlantic.

A Theocratic-Anarchist Visits St. Joseph’s Oratory

I stand at the wall in the hallway at this wooden box where there are little envelopes and stubby pencils. These yellow pencils too short for a man’s hand with blunt tips best for a scrawl but not elegance of handwriting. If I take one of the envelopes and scribble on it my pledge, or my prayer, it will reveal my name as well as that this man who wrote this contact information is crude in the way say of a farm laborer, or a ditch digger, or the fellow that day-to-day drives the white metal machine that cleans the streets. Who will presume that is a lie?

This station is located around the corner from the stair leading up. It is as if a stopover on the way to the steps to god. It is alone in the hall against a bare wall. Or, it is a short way along in a sterile corridor that leads to the door that goes outside. There seems no reason to stop here other than the attraction of the wooden box. A slot in the top for acceptances of cash, coins, bills.

There are these little bitty cardboard cards printed with the visage of a deceased priest. Nobody I ever knew, nor that I have ever heard mentioned, having read in no books nothing about him. There is a comfortable anonymity between us in that I do not know of him and that by the separation of death on his part I presume he does not stand in some other alternate parallel consecrated hallway a poor soul stuck in the vicinity of this formality of a wooden box in order to watch over those who may linger here as if caught in a moth trap.

The back of the card has a green paper glued to it with a hole in the middle the size of a dwarfed pea that shows a blue dot. Étoffe ayant touché aux ossements du P. Moreau, fondateur. Filched and tucked in my shirt pocket as a reminder of this pause in the climb I turn quietly and with the deliberation to follow behind my wanderlust companions as I move toward the stair and on upward.

Intimations of Regionalism

Before you go any further read this story at Night Train: The Tree That Girdles Itself by Donna D. Vitucci. It has nothing to do with this blog post, but it might have something to do with a future blog post. Stay tuned and expect a test.

me in the workshop preparing my mobile housing unit

As people, as writers, when we present our faces to the world we often feel a need to fashion neat little simplified boxes in which to portray ourselves as something less than the complexity that we are… otherwise folks just feel a need to jump up running and screaming?



A fellow writer that I have been paying attention to recently opened a blog where he expresses that his growing up is from Northern Appalachia to which he assigns Tioga County, PA. Fried Chicken and Coffee.

So, often, particularly online in an e-zine, when you read a story there will be somewhere attached a small biographical snippet about the writer. These can either be literal and nearly true, or as false and misleading as anything Mark Twain would pretend in a lie. In my case, with my writer’s persona I pretend to be from Northern Appalachia… in fact I am from Tompkins County, NY which is the northernmost county in Appalachia (I checked with my geographer friend on this). I claim this origination despite my having fled that scene more than thirty years ago for the adventure of first Washington, DC and then NYC and now these past nearly 20 years commuting across Long Island from pseudo-rural south shore along the Atlantic to mega-urban workzone of the 5 Boroughs.

That said, Tompkins County is a schizoid place in comparison to 99.99% of the remainder of what is known as Appalachia, either Southern or Northern, and up until my friend placed his blog FLAG squarely in the Northern Appalachian geography I had sort of imagined to myself that nobody knows what Northern Appalachia is about as a culture and therefore it was, at least for me, fresh meat to barbie. But hold on here…

The reason Tompkins County is schizoid is that it has Cornell, an Ivy League University, as a sort of oasis in the midst of rolling hills with Cayuga Lake as an added bonus. Not to mention Ithaca College and the media studies or the amazing proliferation of music in the zone. So you have Ithaca as the predominant city of the county, and you have Cornell where there is this mass of buildings, but also a mass of human brain matter refined to a very high scale. Some of it is yearning to escape planet earth, some of it is yearning to get lost in the woods and some of it goes sailing on Sunday. The place has poetry, it has literature, and it had Nabokov, AR Ammons (the man needs an enema) etc. Ginsberg liked to read there and Kerouac shopped at the Brahman Bookstore. Madame Blavatsky even made visits to the town, and there have been many many writers brought up, exaggerated and spit out by the region. So to describe Northern Appalachia as a shed with a wood stove, sour mash and dueling banjoes just does not quite work for me, alone, I mean, there needs to be this radical contrast between the culture of totally geeked out brains and cabbage farmers or UFO nuts or rabbit hunting or the big yearly drug bust.

So I remember in the 70s you could go to town and watch Gary Snyder give a reading. You could meet other local poets and have arguments about who lost the post office box key. There was not hardly any book a poet would want to buy that you could not find in the local new or used bookstores. Get in the truck and drive up to Buffalo to wonder why Gary Snyder was drunk on his ass in midafternoon. Wander down to Binghamton to hob nob with Gil Williams at an open reading he sponsored. Drive through a blizzard to sit in a sweaty room with Robert Bly banging a drum. Or a quick cut up to Syracuse for a bit of Samizdat on the Syracuse University student radio station at 3 am. And it was called, proudly we called it, regionalism.

At the time Regionalism was like it was this new thing that we pushed around to claim our identity. A lot of good that it did. The most prolific example of product that I remember was a young woman that wrote a chapbook of poems about raccoons that centered on her emotional attachment to how cute their little black masked faces looked.

When I moved down to Maryland outside of DC I took advantage to spend days off at the Library of Congress. What I found out was that I could ask to see old books there and I went a bit wild asking for all of the books I could find from Central New York writers as far back as they would go with it. I found a lot more of them than I ever found at home (Brooktondale and/or Besemer to be exact, not all that far from Bullamanka).

There is a whole lot that happened in the Central NY region in the 19^th century as far as writing went, and religion, and a whole lot of poetry. It was not only the basket birthing of the Women’s Movement that went on there. Catching on to this wealth of historic poetry, and picking up a bit on the rhythms of those agrarian tendencies toward empyrean heights of cornseed epiphany I approached my friend John Gill (then in Trumansburg with Crossing Press) and suggested to him an anthology of this older poetry. His comment was that it was bad poetry then, it is bad poetry now. At the time I took him at his word.

It is pretty bad poetry, but in lingering on the topic of regionalism I think there is some importance to our claim of a place as attached to our identity as either a human, or as a writer, or as any sort of artist that we have an historical consciousness of what that place has meant to be to the larger remaining portion of the world in the past. If that historic literature/art, despite it being bad, is inaccessible to us then we have no clue as to what the larger whole is of what we claim as our regional identity.

All this when brought together I suspect that I need to claim a different piece of outer space as it is that I see all those people from south of my spiritual center are so outlandishly staid in their back country hill and holler ways. I would almost rather be from Ohio.