I don't yet have the details for all these readings:
SEPTEMBER 3rd, solo reading at Temple University, in Center City, Philadelphia.
OCTOBER 24th, with KENT JOHNSON in Chicago.
OCTOBER 27th, with DALE SMITH in Austin.
OCTOBER 30th, solo reading in Tucson.
NOVEMBER 3rd, solo reading at Chapman University in Orange County, CA.
NOVEMBER 9, solo reading at Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, 7PM in the Art Gallery at Westby.
calling our president "a dupe, a tool, or a co-conspirator of Goldman Sachs." On this blog, I've always suggested that Obama was the second coming of Carlos Menem, a charismatic tool of the banksters.
complete with poetry readings and lamp shades that had been left in a lake to rust.
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Al Martin, 7-6-09:
[...] Imagine a 100-square blocks in a city on a hot summer night. Only one out of every twenty streetlamps is working, and even that is low-wattage. These lamps are broken and swinging back and forth in the wind. There’s rusted out steel drums lying here and there. Pyres of burning scrapwood. In the background there are shadowy figures darting in and out of buildings, trying to salvage anything or strip the remaining buildings of anything that’s worth anything.
Since no electricity is being provided to these residents anymore, what this private management cum security company does is they bring in old water trucks. Then these water trucks are placed at certain locations during certain times. The people then totter down with their old plastic buckets and bottles to get their water [...]
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Hi Charles,
How is Chax Press doing? I sense a lull of some sort, which is perfectly understandable, given our dismal economy. Like the country at large, I think American poetry is more or less bankrupt, with our poets invisible, irrelevant and mostly incoherent. The creative writing programs constitute a vast ponzi scheme peddled mainly by smarmy crooks and failures. Our books don't sell, and you can't give the journals away. Everything must be subsidized since there is almost no public for it. Two days ago, I told a stupid university-backed journal to bug off after they kept pestering me to answer an asinine question about my "favorite 70's icon or moment." I'm nauseated, Charles, frankly, by this whole scene.
Finally, and not to be a pest, but is my book still scheduled to be released soon? If not, I'd like to post the entire mns online, a la Bill Knott, just so I could forget about it.
Sorry to sound so negative, but I know you well enough to speak my mind entirely.
Linh
Hi Charles,
OK, I'll wait. Four weeks sound great. Thanks. Ah, I wish I could come out there and have a few beers with you. It's amazing how naive and silly I am, still, regarding this sordid poetry racket. I keep thinking there must be ways for poets to engage the wider public on the biggest, most urgent issues, but who's doing that, really, short of maybe Amiri Baraka? Why isn't Clayton Eshleman quoted in newspapers and on television? I met Bruce Andrews a while back in NYC, then went home and watched the YouTube video of him being ridiculed by Bill O' Reilly. I applaud Andrews' willingness to joust with the mainstream media, but all America saw was an academic buffoon being bullied. OK, I'll stop my rant now.
Linh
My identity as a poet doesn’t exist, due to the class background you speak of. Every child at the orphanage knew they were on an assembly line that would shoot them out into the bondage of lower-class robot-slots; army, factory, the meniality of a desperate dead-end life….
Extra added attraction: When I was 15 years old, the orphanage sent me to the state insane asylum at Elgin, Illinois, where I was incarcerated for a year. This was 1955, and the situation there at the nut house (as we inmates always called it) was not exactly constitutive of safety or security. To be a fifteen-year-old, warehoused in an enormous dorm, surrounded by older men in disparate and often dangerous stages of mental distress, is not a fate I would wish on anyone. Psychopharmacology barely existed, or it was in a rudimentary period back then in 1955. Many “patients,” as the minimal staff of “caretakers” and semi-illiterate overseers (prison guards, really) termed us when they weren’t shouting “Hey, you, asshole, scrub that fucking floor,” most of us were not medicated and some were subjected to ECT (electroconvulsive therapy, “shock treatment”). How I survived that hell I’ll never know, and in fact most of my time there I have blanked out of my mind. (Need I mention there was no schooling facility, no educational activities provided to me and the other teenagers there. Nor were we segregated or separated or safeguarded in any way from the general adult population, some of whom were psychotically harmful both to themselves and others. Yes, I can recall being beaten and pushed around and abused in the usual manner of such places.)
So what fucking “identity as a poet”? I don’t have an identity as a human being, much less a poet.
But what the hell, on the other hand, maybe the state insane asylum (I don’t think they use that term anymore now, but that’s what it was called in 1955, as I recall it) at Elgin, Illinois—maybe the state’s incarceration warehouse for nut jobs, where I spent my fifteenth year being abused and beaten and degraded every day, maybe that shit-hole wasn’t any worse really than Exeter or whatever prep-school in which Pinsky and Strand and Bidart and Charles Wright and C.K. Williams and William fucking Matthews were also suffering the traumas of their teen-angst years at the same time as me, back there in 1955….
I mean, it’s all relative, ain’t it?
A comment at Google Maps:
Oh Cry Me a River! - Ted - Jul 9, 2009
I'm a member of the club and can't believe all the race cards being thrown around. It's a PRIVATE club and if more Americans read the Constitution once in a while, that means we can do whatever we want. The libtards and BananaBamas are can slam our club all they want. It is NOT going to get their kids into this pool. It only creates pointless racial hoopla.
Amy Goldman said she's been a member of the club for two years. She said the pool wasn't particularly crowded and the children from Creative Steps were "well-behaved and respectful."
She said there had been black members at the club in the past, though she couldn't remember seeing any this year.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon, July 8, 2009:
Spencer Ackerman yesterday attended a Senate hearing at which the DOD's General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, testified. As Ackerman highlighted, Johnson actually said that even for those detainees to whom the Obama administration deigns to give a real trial in a real court, the President has the power to continue to imprison them indefinitely even if they are acquitted at their trial. About this assertion of "presidential post-acquittal detention power" -- an Orwellian term (and a Kafka-esque concept) that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares at all about the most basic liberties -- Ackerman wrote, with some understatement, that it "moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective." Law professor Jonathan Turley was more blunt: "The Obama Administration continues its retention and expansion of abusive Bush policies — now clearly Obama policies on indefinite detention."
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accompany an interview of Doug Henwood in the Brooklyn Rail:
[...] what we’ve seen—first in the Bush administration and now from the Obama administration—is that the public is getting nothing in return for the vast amounts of money spent [for the bailouts]. We don’t know where the money is going—it’s completely opaque. The Fed has admitted that they either don’t know, or they’re not telling. There was an amazing exchange in Congress a few weeks ago between the Fed’s Inspector General, or whatever her title was, and a Republican congressman who was asking her where the money has gone. She was either incapable of giving an honest answer or didn’t know the answer but she just couldn’t even lie effectively. It was remarkable. We don’t know where all this money is going.
And we’re not getting any significant institutional change out of it. The Obama administration seems to want to recreate the status quo before the bust. They occasionally talk about creating a new economy, a new economic model, but they’re not really doing it. They really seem to be in awe of Wall Street power and unwilling to challenge it in any significant way [...]
[The Obama administration is not "in awe" of Wall Street, but its puppet.]
NBC, 7/8/09:
Campers sent packing after first visit to swim club
More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.
"I heard this lady, she was like, 'Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?' She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child,'" said camper Dymire Baylor.
The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers' first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.
[...]
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An email from Mathew Sharpe, 7/8/09:
Dear all,
I am participating in a fiction project on eBay called Significant Objects, which is being curated by Rob Walker (who writes the 'Consumed' column for the New York Times) and Joshua Glenn. A few dozen writers have each chosen a nearly valueless trinket -- an ashtray, a creamer, a mass-produced animal figurine -- and written a very short fictional story about its significance. The objects are being listed for sale on eBay, accompanied by the short stories about them. The idea is not to hoax anyone on eBay but to see if the objects accrue value by being written about in this way. Writers include Kurt Andersen, Jenny Davidson, Ben Greenman, Lydia Millett, Stewart O'Nan, Luc Sante, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Cintra Wilson.
Please take a look, and if an object/story pair strikes your fancy, follow the link to eBay and make a bid. If you win, you get the object and the story.
http://significantobjects.com/2009/07/08/mule-figurine/
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250460613654
You may also follow the progress of the endeavor on twitter:
http://twitter.com/SignificObs
Best wishes,
Matt
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In Israeli jail, McKinney expects more from Washington
Sat, 04 Jul 2009--Former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney, who is in an Israeli jail for trying to take humanitarian aid to Gaza, says the White House has done nothing to secure her release [...]
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TIM ARANGO in New York Times, 11/29/08:
When Benjamin Franklin returned to America in 1762, after almost five years in London, he was shocked at the housing prices.
“The expence of living is greatly advanc’d in my absence,” he commented. “Rent of old houses, and value of lands ... are trebled in the past six years.”
Franklin, it seems, had come home to a real estate bubble. It eventually popped — bringing on a credit crunch and deep recession that was the macroeconomic backdrop to the American Revolution.
Sound familiar?
[...]
.......
Washington Irving, writing about the Mississippi Bubble:
A Time of Unexampled Prosperity
In the course of a voyage from England, I once fell in with a convoy of merchant ships, bound for the West Indies. The weather was uncommonly bland; and the ships vied with each other in spreading sail to catch a light, favoring breeze, until their hulls were almost hidden beneath a cloud of canvas. The breeze went down with the sun, and his last yellow rays shone upon a thousand sails, idly flapping against the masts.
I exulted in the beauty of the scene, and augured a prosperous voyage; but the veteran master of the ship shook his head, and pronounced this halcyon calm a "weather-breeder." And so it proved. A storm burst forth in the night; the sea roared and raged; and when the day broke I beheld the late gallant convoy scattered in every direction; some dismasted, others scudding under bare poles, and many firing signals of distress.
I have since been occasionally reminded of this scene, by those calm sunny seasons in the commercial world, which are known by the name of "times of unexampled prosperity." They are the sure weather-breeders of traffic. Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when "the credit system" as it is called, expands to full luxuriance; everybody trusts everybody; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from the facility of borrowing.
Promissory notes, interchanged between scheming individuals, are liberally discounted at the banks, which become so many mints to coin words into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon in circulation. Every one now talks in thousands; nothing is heard but gigantic operations in trade; great purchases and sales of real property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure, as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the aggregate as solid capital, and falls back in amazement at the amount of public wealth, the "unexampled state of public prosperity!"
Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them maddening after shadows. The example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation; bubble rises on bubble; every one helps with his breath to swell the windy superstructure, and admires and wonders at the magnitude of the inflation he has contributed to produce.
Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment. It elevates the merchant into a kind of knight-errant, or rather a commercial Quixote. The slow but sure gains of snug percentage become despicable in his eyes: "no operation" is thought worthy of attention that does not double or treble the investment. As he sits musing over his ledger, with pen behind his ear, he is like La Mancha's hero in his study, dreaming over his books of chivalry. His dusty counting house fades before his eyes, or changes into a Spanish mine; he gropes after diamonds, or dives after pearls. The subterranean garden of Aladdin is nothing to the realms of wealth that break upon his imagination.
Could this delusion always last, the life of a merchant would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant. Let but a doubt enter, and the "season of unexampled prosperity" is at an end. The coinage of words is suddenly curtailed; the promissory capital begins to vanish into smoke; a panic succeeds, and the whole superstructure, built upon credit, and reared by speculation, crumbles to the ground, leaving scarce a wreck behind:
"It is such stuff as dreams are made of."
as found at the Anacostia stop of the Washington Metro, 7/2/09:
as found at the Anacostia stop of the Washington Metro, 7/2/09:
