Styxbiometricks

After kissin’ his soul mate for 4,096th time Guarana divided a binary quandary as she suddenly found herself transformed into an albino cyber amoeba. Spit and sizzle. Yet, every word spoken at floating stuff switched Guarana from AC to DC and Mrs. Blob is unsure if she is attractive today or not all depending on their packaging. But hooking, with her infrared watch, Guarana propositions the floater's wrist and with immediate excursion his ark module mates her musty hippo. Kazam zip fuck!

Bump flesh, flesh bump.

Mere cells exuding projectile meaning as water-eyed Guarana studies nascent gel before now after then telegraphs unto wee hours of mourning for metronome stations across her balmy poolside music, steam air, and palms burnished over hades swim zone. Guarana caught in a buoy can jumping up tears ligaments to cause his mate to shut her lid so darkness gives him cause to want weed tinted portals on their wandering affair. You know, underwater breathing keeps Guarana safe from predators and sex change artists who will not disembark from warm safety of shored rock lines. Sinking, submerged, androgynous amber burning croak bytes. Oceanus' thin cosmic slush line spurting between here and there on targets.

~~

First published Magazine Minima vol. 0.1 for Jonathan Carr, sometime in the late 20th century. The piece was written for the FLASH form, it is worth looking at the original publication to get a sense of this symbiotic integration.

The following narrative was NOT included with the original publication.

I like a story that leads one to believe that there is a story but hints at the same time that there may not be any story at all. Collage is a model to build upon for this purpose in that recognizable elements are blended with strips of color and alluding phrases to mimic connections of meaning that may, or may not, have substance. Synaptic jumps. Indecisive discomfort of question, a condition of life, is not quite hell, so the dividing river as an aquatic biosphere of myth & imagination is the primary metaphor. The thin line is like that space between dark and dawn when the swamp creatures suddenly go native and the birds sing eerily. Condensation of post-modern prose requires techniques of indirection and reflection to elicit a vision of a full world perspective in few words. Mrs. Blob, a cinema twist, familiarity with the hilariously camp horror. Here we have a note that triggers recognition surrounded by notes that submerge meaning. The meaning flows in and out of the sequential progression of the prose. Cut n' paste method with an applied intelligence of complex pattern recognition and selection. Taking the absurd and arbitrary and giving them a fantasy of meaning. Our mask is one of action, things moving around, and attracts through recreation, the creating of the new, in sex, the biologic counterpoised against the mechanical, AC/DC. The alliteration tends one towards feeling sedated, and missing the encoded meaning hid behind the rhythms of repetition, then bang, verisimilitude occurs in the flashing of common and vulgar, vulgate words, Spit. The enunciation of speech is a projection of thought in a river biosystem that is an imagined place conditioned and created by imagination… everything changes shape and meaning on the edge of hell, the veil of our sanity torn. Oceanus is the mom of the river Styx, a river that I imagine flows very slowly and stagnant. A log file not restored in order on the launch time.

Brevity

Sometimes a thing said simply needs to be kept short.

Book Reviews and Personal Culture/Canon

"Writers who are familiar with classic literary works are better able to engage with the ideas deemed most relevant to a culture." Well, yeah sort of, but I think this concept is a big load of propoganda that diverts us from an understanding of, "Who's culture?" Most often in these canonical reading lists I find quite certainly the culture that is identified and pushed is not mine. The ideas deemed relevant may not be relevant to me, though I am sure it is relevant to a drunken Robinson if I slip my lift-boy tips into Robinson's pocket.

Show me please, I ask of these lists, What is my culture?

For me a good book review is a writer’s review of a writer’s work, and as such it is not meant as an uber-analysis, best-of, recommended that the world buy this and read this for the purpose of a publisher's marketing department to enhance sales of product, but an explication of why I, as a writer, would appreciate or learn something from this or that writer’s book, and why I may propose that other writers, or curious (dare I say discerning) readers, may want to read a particular book.

Yesterday my wife and I discussed around the futility of critical words to ever recreate the essence of a work of art, to which eventually I agreed once I had a clue what it was that we were discussing. The variations of human experience are multiple and if not unique to each individual at least they make a good show to appear unexpected. Critique is an artifice conditioned by our talent, and in some cases training, to observe ourselves in the process of observing and to be able to articulate that experience.

In a world that works so desperately to depersonalize our understanding and to capture our attention, my only interest finally is in the local and the personal, wherever and however it may occur, and as much as possible to do so in the purely subjective. This is what I think, and what I feel. If I did not intend to communicate then I would not bother to try, but in the end Dear Reader you are free to go where you so desire and think whatever suits your fancy.

I like to listen (though my wife may tell you that I prefer to bounce around the room and shout). Talk at me.

Add to that, too often my impression is that writers, young and old, neglect a habit to read a whole lot of really good trashy sub-par not-perfect material in preference to what they have been pointed to as the canon of great examples. This tendency, IMHO leads to a sterile literature.

A good gardener knows without thinking how to turn manure into beautiful flowers. And lest one not understand, a sustainable human population requires that we do something imaginative about the accumulation of night soil. In the light of morning one person’s steamy pile is as good as another’s.

Well, great examples have criteria of selection and what I intend to say here is that the canon that appeals to me is the one that I select for no good reason... and I encourage all writers, and readers, to carve out their own canon, to ignore the bright lights, bright signs, best sellers, pillars of literature and to look into themselves, see and sense what they feel and experience in reading a book, and settle as to what they themselves desire to read, and why, and to stick to it.

How a Poem Happens

Philip Levine interview by Brian Brodeur.

http://tinyurl.com/dlkxwb

Levine is one of my favorite poets.
Excellent poem, excellent interview.

Quick, Google Alert me!

We suggest that rather than read this blog entry you may want to visit with us for a view at the real time ant cam.





A friend, a fantastic writer, relates that she does not understand the stories in The New Yorker. She wonders, as I wonder, how they can be so finely written and yet so boring to read. She ends off to say that her curiosity is piqued by the idea that people pretend to enjoy the stories in The New Yorker and that this thought makes her giggle. I like that.

Another friend, another skilled writer, relates that they regularly critique stores from The New Yorker in their blog, and with that practice they admit that they do not particularly get the stories either, though they try to say good things (that is where craft comes to the surface) -- they suspect that the mentioned authors may be making anonymous comments in return to the often well measured critique.

Then there was a comment, an inquiry as to a comment one writer made in their blog about the poor show of a specific author (not one to do with The New Yorker, whose name I will not mention here for reasons to become shortly apparent) who suddenly found his backwater blog comments being questioned in a semi-stalker manner by the so specifically named author.

Seems as writers we can all Google Alert, particularly if we have a unique name, to see who does not like our product. To which, the incessant reading of obscure reviews and paying attention to answer to every one of them no matter how incurably trivial I wonder if there is not a certain latent obsessive compulsive psychosis on the horizon.

So that got me to think how I do not relate at all very well to the stories or poems in The New Yorker, and my thoughts about how I as a happily obscure writer do relate to the venerable publication more through the people that I have known associated to it than ever to the merit of any of the literate material.

When I first came across The New Yorker it was at the home of a world expert on ants, his son was my best friend in High School.

When you meet a world expert in most anything there is a certain cache to the experience that bleeds over to wonder what culture there is to the renowned. Their ancestry was 1st generation American from Australia, and that lent a sense of the exotic, for me at least, to the renowned ant expert. Within the northern most reach of the Appalachians, Tompkins County, NY they had come from outside the small circle of our hick farming and university burb. They landed on the university side of the Ag situation, as ants and etymology in general have a lot to do with things like growing three-hundred acres of beans.

She is the first woman that I know who was involved with the League of Women Voters. As an aside, she had two daughters who quite tragically died each of rare and quickly terminal diseases in the prime of their young adulthood.

On his hearing that I wanted to be a poet the word I got back from the world expert on ants was that poetry is a good start for a novelist. It has been one of those tenants that has stuck with me as a guiding light and when I am able to sustain an entertaining narrative past a few thousand words it may yet prove true. I do not know if that maxim to me came in full cloth from the ant expert from the bowels of The New Yorker, or not. You can never quite know where an influence originates.

The world expert on ants took up cultivation of orchids when he retired. He had a room built onto his modest home in order to accommodate this agrarian hobby. The very last word I heard from the ant expert was to all us younger ones to not waste our money to drink cheap beer. He advised us to pay a good price for a good beer. Then he died of complications of diabetes.

It was my friend's mother, who read The New Yorker, while us younger savored the cartoons, and so I have always associated the style of the stories as appealing to my friend's mother. In short I suppose I see a reader of The New Yorker as the spouse of a world expert on ants, and folks who drank a whole lot of beer. God knows what they were actually reading.

At one time The New Yorker was one of a few paying markets for short stories and in part I sense that as with many print media, or old established companies, they are feeding off the weight of the baggage of their legacy. What I mean is that they created through their promotion and publishing a type of literature and in doing so they also created their own ideas about what they were doing in creating a type of literature and that their support of the stories, and poems that they feature now has everything to do with what they think that they are doing. And what they think they are doing has to do with what they did before, and very little, as I see it, to do with the risk of doing something entirely different in the future. In short I suspect that they publish what they publish because they feel it is safe... as long as they do not spike down their subscription base that may, or may not, actually be reading the magazine if not laughing at the cartoons and wondering about the class oriented advertisements.

Though I am not a world expert on anything, not even myself, my wife likes to read The New Yorker and when she finds something that she thinks will interest me she passes it over. Otherwise I tend to keep my distance. We have ants in this approach to Spring season that crawl around our bathroom sink. I like to watch them.

In the work side of my life I have a friend, an architect and not a writer, who is, or was, it has been a while since I was told this story, a friend of the poetry editor at The New Yorker. My friend related how a cadre of younger poets was complaining that the magazine was catering to a clique of specific older writers. The poetry editor got it worked out to include these complaining poets. Then another group of poets came along and complained that they were being excluded. Then I consider that I can't remember ever reading a poem in The New Yorker that I liked and/or had any clue what it was about. I kept my mouth shut on that one when my friend brought it up.

Sometimes a smile is the best answer.

Lichtenburg Figures

World's largest model train railway.

Yesterday on the train I finished reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and started re-reading Kafka's Amerika. It has been a very long time since I read Kafka's book. I look forward to learn what the years have done to my understanding. When I first read the book I was not much older than the protagonist.

I am fascinated by the European conceptions of America, and the reverse in American conceptions of Europe. Also I like model trains, transportation and railroad simulations. Likewise fascinated with the connection of these narrative/action dioramas with the construction of story. As well, that this simulacra is a tourist attraction, as is any historic theme village a knock-off of an amazement park.

Outside of Madison Square Garden yesterday, standing on the corner waiting for the light to change so that we could cross the street, I noticed a tourist with a vid camera recording the traffic in the intersection. My first thought... boy, will that be fun to edit when he gets home. Then it occurred to me that it would be an interesting project to do a NY'ers tour of Manhattan. Ride around on top the red double-decker faux English bus thing. Put together a video so that bedridden people could get a 1st hand sense of 'being there' without having to leave Wisconsin, or wherever these lost people show up from.

In another on-the-street incident we were walking down the sidewalk and there was a fellow pointing his camera at his own face, holding it out at arm's length, not a cheap camera, mind you, a pretty classy one with lenses. I am sure he included his face with the tall building in the background. In retrospect I think it was the Empire State. Just as we passed him I said loudly, "It looks good!" Just as the flash went off. We kept on the move. I wonder if he smiled.



Off the train into the parking lot of thousands of cars at Ronkonkoma, and I mean thousands, I was walking along and heard one car running. I looked around, nobody there, nobody in sight. A Civic was sitting there running, locked, keys in the ignition and nobody around to be seen in the parking lot anywhere.

I stood there for like three minutes looking at the car running and thinking WTF should I do about this? My conclusion, please please please remember this long enough to tell someone about it. I walked away. Went home.

It is the only time I have ever felt actually tempted to steal a car w/ the idea that the owner who I imagine was stressed out had to walk out of the parking lot, across the station tracks into the station, so far away they would not be able to see their car, to get to a phone. Why no cell phone who knows, call a locksmith. Either that or it was a very absent minded commuter that had arrived there in the morning, run out of their car, left it running and never thought twice about it. So I had this idea to like move the car to the other end of the parking lot, about 4 acres away. So, if they had returned and found me sleeping in their car, warm and belligerent with an opened copy of Kafka’s Amerika saddled over my nose it certainly would have made for a fun scene.

Yesterday in a business conversation with my son/partner I told him that I had read about a 300 acre organic bean farm in my home village in Upstate NY that the owners come down to NYC every Wednesday to sell dry beans at the Union Square Farmers Market. Several years ago I did the exterior restoration of the Barnes & Noble across the street from the market. I am quite familiar with the street scene there. So my son wanted to know why I talked about dried beans. It is not his home turf so he does not relate to the place in any semblance to how I do -- which for me is a mix of desire, fabulation and repulsion. I told him that I thought it interesting to contemplate if I had taken a different road in my life and been a bean farmer and never left home. He thought it was funny that I would want to go into the bean business, rather than play with stones as I have done. I took it as a really interesting story with zero economic value other than that to play with stories keeps my mind off our meager position in the current economic situation. We also had a longer conversation about Iceland. Some fishermen should keep fishing.

When all else fails, make up a good story.

~~

I thank my friend Carrie Berry in Scotland for directing us to this very kool vid.