Last Bender

Leafing through a book I came across in spare time, The Best Poems of 2010, I thought, is the problem simply that the world is now over-described? With the tens of thousands of poets swarming the pleroma like gnats on a warm winter day perhaps the word horde is simply exhausted. I don’t want to [...]

  Recently my pal in all things literary, Miette, shared the following search term, used to reach one of her bloghs: “my anxious young pussy eater was only priming me for the fucking i was about to get” N0t being one to miss an opportunity, i pasted the tasty morsel into Google and found Mrs. [...]

  Chanticleer Last fall I bought a stewing rooster from Kingbird Farm at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. Over the years, decades actually, I have been a big fan of the soup chicken. Mostly because a soup chicken costs a lot less than a regular chicken. They are scrawny, tough but flavourful birds. Slow cooking produces [...]

Two years ago, when I was hosting my daughter’s wedding and faced the prospect of feeding a large crowd of friends and relatives, I broke down and bought a gas grill. My preferred fuel for cooking is hardwood, but that takes hours. Next is lump charcoal. That doesn’t take hours but like wood rain puts [...]

  GAHA: Babes of the Abyss is finally finished, at least, provisionally finished: I am editing the manuscript to send out to my first readers. This implies I have more readers in reserve, which is true, but we are talking 4 people here and 5 people there. And grateful I am for having them! We [...]

In my review of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square I asserted that the protagonist’s schizophrenia was a literary, not psychological diagnosis. I will admit to a certain flippancy in the comment, but I was disturbed by the diagnosis, it was not what my understanding of schizophrenia is. But it may have been close. The idea that [...]

Saturday night my daughter Z and her husband L came to dinner. It was a normal, lovely winter night, colder than most this year, with a high wind and blowing snow kept at bay by the fire in the woodstove. There was candle light, a Mozart violin sonata, and baked fish with red peppers and [...]

A poet friend, Bridget, writes that her boss says she should read William T. Vollman. She wants to know what I think of Vollman. My email back: “I’ve never been able to read Vollman, he bores me to tears. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to. He’s highly regarded and very eccentric for [...]

Mitt Romney has said in an interview on CNN that he’s not interested in the poor. That’s not surprising, no one is. Certainly not Barak Obama. The fact is the last presidential candidate who was genuinely concerned about the very poor was gunned down in Los Angeles in 1968. Jimmy Carter famously went to the [...]

I thought George W. Bush had gone into retirement with his bush hog but no, it turns out he took a job as an Italian Cruise Ship Captain…MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!