http://lastbender.com The Website of Author Jon Frankel Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:15:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The Wovel   On Morning Edition today there was a piece on The Wovel, an audience plotted web novel. It is also a wheeled snow shovel, a device (judging by the number of Google hits), that is more familiar to people than the evolving literary form. The story presented it as an ... http://lastbender.com/fiction/the-wovel/ CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Monozone was deep into panic. Beneath the zippered, gridlocked surface, under stockings, panty shields and contact lenses, inside the ironed shirt, the benzedrine suit jacket and gold crown, brushed into the rug, pinned up for the wig, tanned and henna'd, straightened, permed and dreadlocked panic surged and raged and ... http://lastbender.com/fiction/the-last-bender-chapter-17/ Thomas Hardy These are perfect sonnets by the master. His thought is crabbed, his metre a little eccentric at times, so that he reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of Sydney and Shakespeare, who contorted themselves to fit the little sonnet, and of Yeats, especially the first of the She, ... http://lastbender.com/poetry/old-dexterities-in-witchery-gone-thomas-hardy/ Tim Congdon Tim sent me this in February of 2008. I will miss him. He ‘tore through the iron gates of time’. My love to Zach, who lost a father. The rest of us lost a poet and a sort of human wolverine who refused to concede to disease or reality ... http://lastbender.com/poetry/in-memoriam-tim-congdon/ CHAPTER SIXTEEN           Every time I shut my eyes to sleep I saw exploding glass. Or felt the man's blood rush down my fingers. I shook and chattered my teeth and soaked the sheets in sweat. At last I fell into a deep senseless sleep.           So senseless I failed to ... http://lastbender.com/fiction/the-last-bender-chapter-16/ This is a quixotic post, more personal than I usually do, and really, it's just a signal sent out into the void, hoping for contact with anyone who lived at 3 Berry Place in Darwin, Australia in 1983. I lived in a tent in the back yard for 3 months, ... http://lastbender.com/blogh/3-berry-place-darwin-australia-1983/ A Midnight Thirst   A midnight thirst comes upon me. The air between us burns. We bend to the moon.  Nocturnal shifting in the shadows, Hiding from the high hoots of owls, Patient steps of panther feet. Faces pressed against the moss Hearts like bats in circles.  http://lastbender.com/poetry/a-midnight-thirst/ Studs Terkel used to describe himself as a radical conservative. Radical, in the sense of ‘root’, and conservative, in the sense of preserving this root. I am certain that the root or radical he wanted to conserve was a radical notion of freedom, and that he saw radical freedom as ... http://lastbender.com/blogh/radical-conservative/ CHAPTER FIFTEEN           Wet wind blew against the windshield. We got out and walked, hands deep in P coats, through the smell of boat fuel and tar and the distressed cries of cattle punched to their knees in the abattoirs. Then more machinery, then the bells and horns of freighters cutting ... http://lastbender.com/fiction/the-last-bender-chapter-15/ Over at Cahiers de Corey Josh has a post about poetry that just depresses the hell out of me, though maybe it’s just the jolly season that has me so down. He seems to suggest that a poetry stripped of beautiful language, that is aesthetically distrustful of the poetic itself, ... http://lastbender.com/blogh/heard-ward/