The Wild One is Thirty-eight

My latest piece is up at http://www.tcj.com/reviews/82891/. (Again I apologize for my inability to provide a clickable link.)

It begins

The first story in the comic The Adventures of Tad Martin, #Sick Sick Six ((Teenage Dinosaur and Profanity Hill. 2015), by Casanova Frankenstein, “the artist, formally (sic) known as Al Frank,” is entitled “Tad Martin Vs. Popeye Rape-Whistle in The Secrets of Corpse-Fucking.” The publisher believed me the perfect person to review it. One week later, a journal editor had the same idea. I was flattered by the attention. At the same time, I thought, How the hell did Creative Writing 101a get me here?

I just finished…

…”Conflicts and Contradictions” by Meron Benvinisti. Actually, I had finished it once before, a year ago, after my brother-in-law Gordie, who has taught about Israel/Palestine at Amherst for decades, called it the best book written on the subject. When Gordie said this again recently, I planned to buy the book, but Moe’s didn’t have a copy. Then I noticed it on my “Recently Read” shelf and realized that, not only had I read it, but I didn’t remember a word.

To remedy the situation, I read it again. When I had read it before, I had been reading a number of books about Israel/Palestine. The others had been “history” books about decades or wars, studded with facts to which my brain could easily attach. But Benvenisti’s book is more a personal essay. To distill it to its essence — or perhaps less than its essence — he seems to be saying that the problem is that you have these two groups of people sharing the same patch of land, each believing equally they are entitled to it because their god gave it to them.

I am not counting on either of these gods — or anybody else’s for that matter — to straighten this out.

The Greatest

I apologize for not knowing how to provide a link that can be directly clicked upon, but I received this yesterday, and it is probably the finest compilation of photos anyone has ever connected me too.
http://www.beautyisshe.com/
I don’t know what “beauty she is” is exactly — but it’s great stuff. (WARNING: a couple are x-rated.) I wouldn’t try going thru them all at once, but I do recommend clicking on the music as you get to each number.

I just finished…

…”The Savage Professor” by Robert Roper. Bud, as I have known him for 40+ years, has authored several fine novels and notable non-fiction works. This, his first crime thriller, concerns a world-renown epidemiologist, who returns to his Berkeley hills home to find the nude, dead body of a former colleague/lover in his bed. And that is only the beginning of his corpse-rich problems. The ride through them includes a flurry of jabs at Berkeley places, personnages, and lifestyle quirks, several grizzly desecrations, and a stirring knife — well actually scalpel-vs.-straight-razor — fight. When I singled some of the more gore-soaked moments out for praise, he said, “You know, some of my readers thought I overdid things there.”

When you are talking to a guy who was recently singled out to review “Tad Martin vs. Popeye Rape-Whistle In: The Secrets of Corpse-Fucking,” you are not going to have that as a problem.

I just finished…

…Feather Crowns, by Bobbie Ann Mason. I’d liked Mason’s early short stories. I’d liked In Country, book and movie, too. But I hadn’t read anything by her since, until I plucked this out of a take one/leave one box. (I left one on ESP, which someone else took.) Anyway, this was quite fun. No brain twists or jolts but many affectionate sounds and smiles. One momentous event happens and then a second and lives are shaken and stirred. Most of the action takes place in rural 1900 Kentucky, with one dip back in time, and two brief, separate ones ahead. Mason imagines her way through this for her central character in ways that left me shaking my head in appreciation of her skill. A fine reminder of the pleasures a well-done, traditional novel can provide.

The Marvel and the Albatross

My latest is up: http://broadstreetreview.com/art-architecture/misleidys-pedroso-musculatura-viva-at-galerie-christian-berst

It begins:
Maybe 30-years ago the jazz pianist Jessica Williams speculated to a Downbeat interviewer about what she did. It couldn’t be a profession, Williams said. It didn’t pay enough. Was it a disease, she wondered. A mania? A curse? A calling imposed by heredity or the gods? I suppose most artists who can’t keep up the Honda payments ask themselves that in one form or another. Misleidys Pedroso may not, but her work, tempura and watercolor on paper, displayed through the rest of this month at New York City’s Christian Berst Gallery, raises the question of why one creates with a unique volume and clarity.
Pedroso will turn 30 in September. She has lived her entire life, with her parents and older brother, in Guines, a city of 70,000, 30 miles southeast of Havana, in a Soviet-era concrete apartment building, which faces the sea. Born deaf, she does not speak, read or write. She expresses her needs or feelings through the simplest signs. She spends most of each day at home.

I just finished…

…Tom Clark’s biography of Charles Olson.
Lately, I’ve been letting randomness influence my reading selections by picking the Best Available out of the Free Little Library boxes that have sprung up around my neighborhood, and this was the first I finished. It was instructive enough that some of my thoughts influenced and were incorporated into a piece I just submitted for publication, but here is where they began.

Olson was a terrible husband, and awful father, and not much of a friend. He had a good stint with the OWI, as a civil servant during WW II, but he flopped as an academic, and while attracting a small swarm of acolytes, his stint as an administrator at Black Mountain College led, through his whacky ideas, to its demise. He doesn’t even seem to have had it together enough for social welfare benefits, preferring to leech off those he knew for support in his final years.

I know Olson is considered a great poet, but I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the selections Clark presented, nor of the prose which is highly regarded (esp. by other poets I don’t read). Clark never makes clear, either by his own words analysis or the words of others, what is important about Olson’s work, so I was left absorbed by the calamity of his life.

The man was unable to find help for himself and he didn’t exist within a community which could find it for him. That was more compelling to me than his work.

The Chocolate Speaks

My latest is up at http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2015/04/the_chocolate_s.html
It begins:

One recent afternoon, I found myself in front of the TV, its sound muted, watching an NCAA basketball championship semi-final between Michigan State and Duke. Ten young men ran back and forth, right-to-left, left-to-right, upon this court. It occurred to me that I had been watching this game for sixty years, and I did not feel that, oh, the last semi-infinity of this exposure had added to my stores of wisdom or emotional depth. Basket upon basket had been scored or defended, and civilization did not appear to have advanced one whit. The activity upon my screen, and my bothering to view it, seemed particularly pointless on this occasion. Perhaps that was Truth being presented like a flaming sword. Or maybe it was the not-quite quarter-square of the medicinally prescribed, blackberry-flavored, dark chocolate Kiva bar I had ingested a couple hours earlier speaking.

The Morning After

I sent this as an e-mail. But I liked it enough — certainly more than the poetry of Phillip Olsen — to put it here.

“How was the fight?” I asked.
“What fight?” Jose, the barrista at my morning’s café, said. “Pacquiao fight. Maywether run.”
Mexicans may not appreciate the “defense” part of the manly art.
Me, all I knew was Pacquiao was “good” and Maywether was “evil,” and I am for the good.
Liston – Patterson was my first indication this may not work out.

THEN I GOT THIS REPLY FROM THE EXCELLENT MILO GEORGE

Ha! Mexican fight fans aren’t happy unless both fighters are pissing
blood and tiny chunks of vital organs the day after a fight. If
Mayweather ran so much, how did he land more power punches on Manny
than Manny threw on him? He was walking Manny down toward the end; if
it had been a 15-rounder, Floyd would have knocked him out.

Mrs. Woerner

For our 55th high school reunion, my class made a gift in honor of a former English teacher, Berenice Woerner. We were also asked to write a reminiscence about her. Here is mine. But first some background for those of you her weren’t at Friends Central with me.

I entered FCS in 4th grade in 1951 and graduated in 1960. It had a Lower School (K – 6th) and an Upper School (7th – 12th). Mrs. Woerner headed the Upper School’s English Department. She also supervised the school paper, whose editors, as I recall, she appointed, and the yearbook, whose editors were elected. Mr. Farraday, whom I mention, was the Dean of Boys and taught biology and, I think, religion. The grading system ran O (Outstanding), A (Above Usual), U (Usual), BU (Below Usual) and SBU (Seriously Below Usual). Now that that’s clear…

After I was elected co-editor of my class yearbook, a position I hadn’t contemplated seeking, a pal in the English section that Mrs Woerner taught, besides the one in which I sat, explained that she had touted my qualifications to it. Those votes that endorsement swayed had swept to victory a candidacy I hadn’t known existed.
But I owe Mrs. Woerner for more than that.

For one thing, by selecting my 6th grade, Mad-comic-influenced story, “Dog Net,” for inclusion in The Literary Supplement, she gave me my first publication credit, a fact omitted from my official CV. Then when I reached the Upper School, she became, with Mr. Farraday, one of my two champions. And, boy, in adolescence, did I need champions.
Mrs. Woerner always liked my writing, but she set tough standards for me. Never gave me a final grade of “A”… I mean, “O.” Told me to read Hemingway and Kerouac, when my idea of a café was the Hot Shoppe, and “The Road,” for me, ran no further than the Schuylkill Expressway.
But when my college Hum. II instructor suggested I take a Creative Writing class, and between me and it loomed this praetorian guard of aspiring Creative Writers, uniformed in black turtlenecks and wielding green bookbags, past whom I could see no way to slip, I thought, Well Mrs. Woerner liked my writing too… And in that class, I found, not only this calling, but more importantly, I met my wife. Sure, it took a couple years to bring all that together, but nevertheless…
Life turns on luck and effort and corners turned, left or right. Remove one straw and the entire structure changes.

I understand that, since she had by then lost her sight, Mr. Farraday read my first novel to her. Hearing of that continued caring touched my heart, and thinking I had fulfilled a promise that she had spotted before it had occurred to the awkward kid in whom she saw it made me feel, yeah, proud. Though I must admit, there are passages in that book, at which my image of this reading, makes me softly cringe – and smile.