Last Bender

The serious scholarly activity of PhD poets, sane and measured as it is, or purports to be, is simply professionalism, ventriloquism, transvestism. In the arts there are no rational theses, just the dressed up rantings of hallucinating primitives. Poets are witch doctors in suits, shamans with TVs, witches who ride old Volvos instead of broomsticks. [...]

First off, I apologize to mentally retarded people, developmentally disabled people, mentally-challenged people, differently-abled people: you did nothing to deserve the insult of being compared to Republicans. In my mind your honor is intact, I simply note that RINO can stand for something else. It was the Glenn Beck rally that got me thinking about [...]

My friend and saviour Stacey has a new blogh, about homesteading with her friend Scott in in remote regions of the north. It is called Cooter Hollow. I am envious of their venture, though I know I could never endure the mud, the smoke, the hauling of water through snow and ice. But I have [...]

My old friend Al Giordano at The Field has written a provokative and moving piece about Penny Arcade, the performance artist. The review of her career is fascinating, but more to the point for me are his thoughts on art and audience, on media and market, on being a working class artist and autodidact and [...]

Looking Like Arizona
Yesterday, as i walked home from work, I overheard a comment made by one student to another. The comment needs context. At Cornell, today is the last day of classes and the students traditionally hold a large party known as Slope Day. Once Upon a Time, Slope Day was an unorganized event. There [...]

1982 Janine
“I groaned and said, ‘Forget politics Sontag, and let us get back to sex. You are such an expert in sex, Sontag.’
“This was untrue. She had read a lot about sex and liked to practice very complicated gymnastic couplings which struck me as more bother than they were worth and made her very angry [...]

Malcom McLaren
Sometime in the gutter of 1977, or was it 1976?, in a suburban basement, my friends and I watched Weekend, the NBC once-monthly news show, hosted by Lloyd Dobyns, which aired in the Saturday Night Live timeslot. We were extremely excited because the subject of that night’s show was The Sex Pistols. We (I [...]

 
 
The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985
Kevin Killian, David Brazil, Eds.
Kenning Editions
My friend David Brazil, and Kevin Killian, have edited an anthology of Poets Theater. This is a topic I have taken an interest in over the years, and their introduction and extensive (and lively) notes are a thorough and knowing review of the subject. [...]

Fire and Evolution
FIRE
The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution
By Frances D. Burton
University of New Mexico Press
Albuqurque
2009
THE HORSE, THE WHEEL, AND LANGUAGE
By David W. Anthony
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
2007
I didn’t expect to read three books on Fire this year. Some research is like that. I usually have a program of reading, a project, most often a novel, [...]