Last Bender

OK, this will be short, and it is inspired by my daily dull scrolling through Google news, which yielded up this today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8246313.stm, an article that at least recognizes that some people hate The Beatles. Now, I don’t hate The Beatles, they’re too harmless to hate. And I’m not an idiot, I understand totally what [...]

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO           “How’s Linda?” I asked.           “Alive,” she said, looking around at the glass walls. When her eyes landed on a head she stuck her tongue out and barked, “What is this place? Is that a fucking head? Is it real?”           “Yeah, it’s a head.” She shook hers. “Linda don’t walk good [...]

A friend wonders how I can show people works in progress. He would find it paralyzing. And of course the wrong response can really ruin a thing. But I came of age in a very social bohemia where hanging out and making art were not separate activities. Even in misanthropic, xenophobic, paranoid and cynical middle [...]

Here are some sentences from the beginning of an essay by Philip Lamantia, reprinted in Surrealist Subversions editied by Ron Sakolsky, published by Autonomedia, 2002 www.autonomedia.org.  I enjoy any use of the word imbecile, especially when applied to Chas Olson et al “A concerted abandonment of fixed forms (from sonnets to free verse), rhyme and [...]

By way of Henry Gould I’ve been reading poet John Latta’s blog: http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/. He writes in the Homage to Sextus Propertius mode but his echoes range much farther than that, and the poets he quotes! I love anyone whose scorn for the fatuous, flatulent poetasters of Flarffff and Lingo and Pobiz and POST doesn’t lead him [...]

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE           That night, when a commotion in the halls woke me up, I thought, almost with relief, here we go. I had had a pretty good run of luck. They didn’t get me in the war, and the years since had been quiet enough, quieter than I expected or deserved.           There were [...]