Last Bender

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
          By the time I reached Clara Turback’s place the daylong squalls of rain had stirred the city up from the bottom. The air smelled like fish. The facades of buildings winced beneath a sooty rain. It drilled the puddles and plopped on windscreens. Pigeons huddled and shivered in eaves and awnings. People dashed [...]

The Sacerdotal Clowns
 
Surrealism is too massive a topic for a blogh entry, but I would like to mention three American poets whose work I’ve always loved and who are in one way or another surrealists. Surrealism is more than an aesthetic movement, it is an entire orientation towards reality and art, and is one of [...]

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
          She stood a little behind the door, in silk pajamas. The light shimmered in folds of rose and egg yolk. She stepped back and said, “I got your message Mr. Bartell. Come in.” Sun burned through the cloud cover, warming the sidewalk and shutters. “Have a seat. I believe you prefer exotic soft [...]

theory and the novel
 
The divide between those who take a theoretical approach to the novel or poetry and those who take an empirical one might appear to be unbridgeable, especially given my heated rejection of any a priori theoretical determination of a novel’s composition. But I am not a dogmatist in this and recognize, first [...]

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
          He led me out the back of the bar and into the women’s room. There wasn’t much space for the two of us and he grunted that I should climb out the window and hop down into the alley. I did it and it was tough getting through. The rain didn’t make it [...]

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
          “This jerk leaves his native land to pursue a career in stoop sitting,” the neon fat man said. I hit the button. Traffic was crawling. We were at Forbes Square. Malcolm’s statue soared overhead, the wheels of the motorcycle dwarfing idlers taking lunch in the dry areas between his feet. I was paralyzed [...]

The Golden Khersonese
STUDIES IN THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE
MALAY PENINSULA BEFORE A.D. 1500
By Paul Wheatley
Kuala Lumpur
University of Malaya Press
1961
An historical geography, in the hands of the right author, is an instance of what I would call the poetry of fact. Most poets are attracted to nonfiction. Blaise Cendrars, the great French writer, traveler, rogue, raconteur, [...]

CHAPTER THIRTY
          The voice answered the phone with a terse, trebly sound somewhere between a ‘yeah’ and a ‘hey’, suggesting hello by brightness and proximity. It was a busy, grease-covered sound conveying none of the contempt for manners implied by its timbre. In response I tried to imitate it.
          No one in my family [...]