EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Twelve - the number by which space and time are divided, but don't try to get your head around that one. There is a nice symmetry in the number twelve. According to my bible, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, twelve symbolises the inner complexity of the universe. The group of twelve characterises the months of the year, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the twelve apostles of Christ, the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve knights of the Round Table. (Perhaps I should add the twelve labours of Hercules and the twelve days of Christmas for good measure.) In the Tarot, the Twelfth Major Arcanum (The Hanged Man) marks the end of an involutionary cycle, the next card (XIII) being death, which should be understood in the sense of rebirth. But what kind of rebirth? Will all be revealed in Issue Thirteen?
To think that this time last year we were producing an issue on the riots. Then all was hand- wringing and oh dear, what has gone wrong in this green and pleasant land of ours. The mawkishness wasn't so different a year later, except that all was optimism and hope instead. The reason for this sudden reversal? Why, the Olympics (and Para Olympics) of course. As with the riots the previous year, I was in London during part of the Olympics and was able to see certain things for myself, what with people going overboard for Team GB, wrapping themselves up in Union flags and generally making prats of themselves. Commentators seemed unanimous in agreeing that Britain had finally 'turned itself round' after the riots. What stood out for and dismayed me most about all this was not the athletics, fine as it was on occasion, but the way people were being encouraged to identify with 'our side' - or Team GB. The adage, "Sport is war by other means", seemed suddenly to take on a whole new meaning during these games. One man phoned in to the London radio station, LBC, to say that he believed that people who criticised the games should be charged with treason - and the presenter hardly demurred. On another occasion, a man, who was standing in the vicinity of a demo, was arrested for not looking happy enough. I kid you not. He was taken away and questioned by the police for 2 hours before they realised he had Parkinson's disease and could not control his face-muscles sufficiently to smile as he was required to. This story is not apocryphal. Later that month, I was dragged along to the fireworks display at the end of Edinburgh Festival. Great fireworks, wonderful abstract shapes in the sky. Pity about the dreary patriotic music though - Parry, Walton, et al; in fact, I almost expected a 'rousing' rendition of The Dambusters March! - and the announcement over the loudspeakers about what a great year it had been for Britain. (Diamond Jubilee, Team GB, and so on and so forth...) Meanwhile, the economy continues to go down the tubes and we are being softened up for yet another military adventure - this time against Iran. Will they never learn? Or perhaps they learnt a long time ago that war - like sport - is a great distraction from everything else.
In the face of all this idiocy, there's not very much that poets can do, except perhaps to retreat into themselves and concentrate on what they do best. Poetry runs along its own groove and despite things politicos say poets should do, creates its own agenda for poets. Poets are simply not in control, because what matters when you are writing a poem is not your intention at the start of the poem, but the poem itself as it emerges, which is all too often a different beast entirely from the one you intended to write at the outset. Indeed, you might end up with one that was not only not on the menu, but which also ironically subverts what you had in mind when you started. This defeats all other objectives. In the end, all I can suggest is that poets be the best poets they can be by writing the best poems they can write and leave the rest to chance. That is their only 'duty'. I know that for people of a political persuasion, that's not enough, which is why they have so often tried to intervene in the process of making poems by telling poets their business. That doesn't work; the only thing that works in the end is the poem, not the end it supposedly serves. Poets should be proud not to be useful.
Anyway, that’s my rant over for this particular issue, Dear Reader, and I hope you enjoy what follows.
QUOTE - Thomas Frank
"Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of backlash culture."
CONTENTS
Poem Luca Paci
Shard John Bennett
Poems Drude Clark
Poem Benjamin Nardolilli
Quote Albert Einstein
Poem Thomas Michael McDade
Poem Rehan Qayoom
'Aphorisms' Ian MacFadyen
Poems Dr. Ernest Williamson III
Poems Valentina Cano
Poems Kushal Poddar
Essay Richard Livermore
Poem Anthony Ward
Poem Michael H Brownstein
Poems Mitch Grabois
Poems Carl Scharwath
Quote Charles Bukowski
Shard John Bennett
Poems Drude Clark
Poem Benjamin Nardolilli
Quote Albert Einstein
Poem Thomas Michael McDade
Poem Rehan Qayoom
'Aphorisms' Ian MacFadyen
Poems Dr. Ernest Williamson III
Poems Valentina Cano
Poems Kushal Poddar
Essay Richard Livermore
Poem Anthony Ward
Poem Michael H Brownstein
Poems Mitch Grabois
Poems Carl Scharwath
Quote Charles Bukowski
POEM - Luca Paci
S{I}X V/ari/ation(S)
1.
That autumn
dies
Should
Every metaphor
Pass away
Into the infinity
embalmed poet dies
Every metaphor
Spring ~ metaphor
survives
After spring ~ poet dies
Should be
Every metaphor
of love be embalmed;
alarmed?
That autumn
Every metaphor
Passing the infinity
Should be night.
Every <………>
Should be embalmed;
In the perfumed metaphor
Passing The poet dies Passing The poet
Passing away The poet Should be embalmed;
Should be
2.
metaphor
Passing dies
Should
Every metaphor be alarmed?
That metaphor
of love embalmed;
Passing The poet
The poet Should Into the infinity
Passing The poet
Passing away The
`Should`
Should be survives
After spring ~ poet
Into the infinity
Should be night. The poet
Passing
Every
Spring ~ metaphor
dies
Every away
Into the infinity
Pass away
Into the infinity
Should be
Passing The poet
Every metaphor
Pass
3.
Pass away
Into
Every metaphor
Should be survives The
Should
Should Every away
Into the infinity
metaphor
of love
Should be
Passing The metaphor alarmed?
That be
Passing
Passing dies
metaphor
dies
Every
Should be night. The
After spring ~ poet
Should
survives
After spring ~ ~ poet
Into The poet
The poet Should Into
Passing The poet
The poet That metaphor
of love be infinity
Should Every metaphor alarmed?
4.
the infinity
metaphor
Should Every away
Every metaphor
Should survives
After spring ~
Should
survives
dies
Every Pass away
Into
Every
metaphor
dies
Every
away
Into the infinity After spring ~ poet
poet
Should
survives poet
The poet That metaphor
Should be night. The
After Every away
Into the be infinity
Should Every
Passing dies survives The
Should
Passing The metaphor alarmed?
That be
Passing
5.
Should be away
Into
poet
Should dies
Every
Into survives The
Should
Passing The
Every
away Every
After Every away away
Into Passing The
poet
The Every metaphor
Should
Should be The metaphor alarmed? poet
Should Every away
dies survives The
6.
metaphor
away
Into survives The
poet
Should
metaphor
poet
The Every metaphor
survives poet
Every Pass
Every metaphor
Should survives
metaphor
Should survives
After
Every
away
Into That metaphor
Should be The metaphor alarmed?
That
dies
Every
away the be infinity
Should Every
After Every away
dies survives The
Should be night. poet
poet
away
Into the infinity
Should
Passing The
S{I}X V/ari/ation(S)
1.
That autumn
dies
Should
Every metaphor
Pass away
Into the infinity
embalmed poet dies
Every metaphor
Spring ~ metaphor
survives
After spring ~ poet dies
Should be
Every metaphor
of love be embalmed;
alarmed?
That autumn
Every metaphor
Passing the infinity
Should be night.
Every <………>
Should be embalmed;
In the perfumed metaphor
Passing The poet dies Passing The poet
Passing away The poet Should be embalmed;
Should be
2.
metaphor
Passing dies
Should
Every metaphor be alarmed?
That metaphor
of love embalmed;
Passing The poet
The poet Should Into the infinity
Passing The poet
Passing away The
`Should`
Should be survives
After spring ~ poet
Into the infinity
Should be night. The poet
Passing
Every
Spring ~ metaphor
dies
Every away
Into the infinity
Pass away
Into the infinity
Should be
Passing The poet
Every metaphor
Pass
3.
Pass away
Into
Every metaphor
Should be survives The
Should
Should Every away
Into the infinity
metaphor
of love
Should be
Passing The metaphor alarmed?
That be
Passing
Passing dies
metaphor
dies
Every
Should be night. The
After spring ~ poet
Should
survives
After spring ~ ~ poet
Into The poet
The poet Should Into
Passing The poet
The poet That metaphor
of love be infinity
Should Every metaphor alarmed?
4.
the infinity
metaphor
Should Every away
Every metaphor
Should survives
After spring ~
Should
survives
dies
Every Pass away
Into
Every
metaphor
dies
Every
away
Into the infinity After spring ~ poet
poet
Should
survives poet
The poet That metaphor
Should be night. The
After Every away
Into the be infinity
Should Every
Passing dies survives The
Should
Passing The metaphor alarmed?
That be
Passing
5.
Should be away
Into
poet
Should dies
Every
Into survives The
Should
Passing The
Every
away Every
After Every away away
Into Passing The
poet
The Every metaphor
Should
Should be The metaphor alarmed? poet
Should Every away
dies survives The
6.
metaphor
away
Into survives The
poet
Should
metaphor
poet
The Every metaphor
survives poet
Every Pass
Every metaphor
Should survives
metaphor
Should survives
After
Every
away
Into That metaphor
Should be The metaphor alarmed?
That
dies
Every
away the be infinity
Should Every
After Every away
dies survives The
Should be night. poet
poet
away
Into the infinity
Should
Passing The
SHARD
John Bennett
Most Wanted
The Committee was incensed. By his nonchalant shoulder shrugs and his winning smile that came out of nowhere like a whip lash.
"You'll say anything that pops into your head!" The Committee Chair declared, and the others on the panel shook their heads in solemn agreement.
Their indignation always grew stronger when they were assembled in numbers, like they were now, elevated above him on their dais. It was, thanks to Homeland Security, a summons he couldn't ignore without generating a warrant for his arrest.
There was a lot of disgruntlement about Homeland Security, but the Committee was behind them 100%. Authority across the board had been beefed up since 9-11, to the point that even cultural branches of government like the Committee now had the power to issue warrants and mete out prison sentences.
"More accurate," he said, cordially enough, "would be to say I'll say anything that pops out of my head. For instance, what you just said popped into my head, but I would never say anything like that."
"Bah! What I said triggered what you said!" said the Committee Chair, and the others (there were at least thirty of them up there) leaned back in their plush chairs and chortled.
"More accurate still," he said, whiplashing them with a smile, "is that your statement is untrue. If I had to make a guess, I'd estimate I say less than 5% of what's in my head, regardless of how it got there, which is a far cry from anything."
"You're missing the point!" the CC said.
"There's a point?" he said.
"There most certainly is," said the Co-Chair, someone he recognized. It was Hank, one of the field agents who had interrogated him frequently over the years in less threatening times. Hank had worked his way up the ladder.
"Hank," he said. "How the hell are you, man?"
Hank jerked his head to the right as if he'd been slapped, and the CC began furiously rapping his gavel against the mahogany surface in front of him, welting it with dents. "Sir!" he boomed, affecting legislative oratory skill. "You will desist from addressing the board at-large unless answering our questions, and under no circumstance will you address a member specifically. Do I make myself clear?"
"Not really," he said.
"This has gone far enough!" said the CC. "Persist in this fashion and you will be held in contempt! Now--how do you plead to the charges brought against you?"
He was standing on a circle of red tile just big enough to contain his feet. He'd been told in the briefing prior to the hearing that stepping outside the circle would automatically add 30 days to his sentence. When he observed that this implied he'd already been found guilty, he was given another 30 days.
"And this isn't a hearing," he said. "It's a trial."
He got 30 days more for obstructing justice.
***
Dots had been connected. In a 500-page decision, the Supreme Court (acting under the authority of a perennial-war decree from the President that nullified the requirement for a case to be brought before them before they could reach a decision) put forth a strong argument for literary terrorism having its roots in the Beat Era, possibly with Henry Miller as its catalyst. The break from conventional form and content led to the breakdown of morality and patriotism, and some pundits went so far as to claim the Beats were responsible for the Korean Conflict. But there was no hard evidence to support these accusations, and the Court, in a sterling demonstration of impartiality, shot down the state of Alabama's legislation calling for the summary execution of any surviving poet and/or author from the Beat Generation who crossed the Alabama state line.
But the situation was grave, and it was clear to all thinking men with unchecked power that peace and tranquility would never return to America until the roots of terrorism were ripped up on all fronts, including the literary front. The Beats were gone, true, but they had passed on the poison of their beliefs, not to another movement, which would have been easy to deal with, but in true terrorist fashion to nefarious individuals whose writings were indecipherable and therefore a red-alert threat. And it was at this alarming juncture that the Committee, whose main function until this time had been to assure that trouble makers did not receive grants, became an arm of Homeland Security, and their power took on the force of an Inquisition.
Standing there on his circle of red tile, his legs aching and his mind weary, he realized his mistake, which could be summed up in a single word--Shard. Almost twenty years earlier, as his writing tumbled pell-mell outside all parameters, he labeled it shard writing, and labels were something the Committee understood. He was labeled the Shard Writer, master literary terrorist.
It mattered, at this point, standing in his red circle before the Committee, not one iota what he said. His every utterance and every word he put to paper was now treasonous.
He lifted his left foot and slowly touched his toe outside the red circle, stunning the room into silence.
It was his last act of defiance.
POEMS - Drude Clark
The Crash
Halo of light casts
glaze onto
crackling white
hospital sheets
Bright chaos of gold
hair glitters
cruel shards of
shattered windshield
Raw hole gapes red
where my crushed
daughter’s lips
once played first flute.
Power
This morning my gold
ankle bracelets call out
from their darkness at
the bottom of my jewelry box.
I dunk them in a jar of cleaner,
seldom used but kept just in
case.
Spread to dry on the
kitchen counter, strands of gold--
dangling hearts with good luck
elephants—shoot sparks back
at the sun through the kitchen
window where the alchemy of
drying gold meets solar power.
If you want to understand electricity
come to bed with me. We might
short out the city lights.
POEM - Benjamin Nardolilli
One Night Stand Eve
You press the button and the penguin begins
To sing, its beak clacking up and down
In rough accordance with a pre-recorded song,
Meanwhile a small creature pops out
From an egg resting at the behest of the artificial feet,
Completing the complex in its apotheosis
Of obnoxiousness and totalitarian holiday cheer.
Forgive me for not joining in the cheer,
Assembling with you to not laugh and clap away,
I know the fate of this device,
It will come thousands of miles from the Orient to rest
Packed up and boxed away in the basement,
Unplugged and forgotten , amusing no one,
Another quick ruin produced by our seasonal joy.
And maybe I am a downer for focusing
On such a demise and the waste of our breakthroughs,
We have this bird flapping away
Instead of so many cures, school rooms, and trains,
But this is the story behind all your ornaments
Which go from being on display to being put away,
They go to the same place as your goodwill towards men.
QUOTE - Albert Einstein
"If you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
POEM - Thomas Michael McDade
Legless Man, French Girl
He dented a Lincoln and the cops jailed him for driving without legs
I put wheels on lengths of Christ’s dogwood for him but that’s not bail money
Money is for drinking at a bar called Dirty Dave’s, I don’t Polyurethane my work
In a dark corner a French girl teaches me to braid her hair
I should have carved the number twenty-two celebrating his combat missions
She tells me what a great dancer he was before losing his legs
Her father worked the canals; she decorated the mules with wild flowers
She’s had her photo snapped at the Temple of Neptune, skipped stones on the Mediterranean Sea
She whispers the man without legs sold fake ID’s that never failed
His hair is as white as the head on a beer but I know he’s bald
She says she’s been an extra in horror films with the legless man and she pushed him
off a cliff after he smashed her mailbox with a witch’s arm
She pulls gold discs from her cleavage to hide in her braid
She hums a tune she heard at the Village Gate
She lost her brother to Asian Flu the day before the legless man lost the last one on train tracks
She’s weaving a tapestry of the scene.
She licks my finger, rubs it across her left eyebrow
She’s heard rats screech the legless man’s name on St. Patrick’s Day
She says he lives with an abortionist and that’s handy
Her son is a crooked racehorse rider
A coin drops from a braid, she asks if I’ll be her pimp; she trusts me says I’m practical
She wants me to crack my knuckles for her and I do both sets
She says the legless man is glad his pins weren’t sawed off in the Civil War
He says she’s jail bait but she’s thirty he says it’s still true
When I’m done with her hair she takes out two mirrors
from under her skirt; I hold one she checks my work
She approves says she’ll reward me when I line up a wealthy client
She takes my hands says they are as rough as old mill housing bricks
She moisturizes them like they’ve never been before
She says people who suicide wear poker faces
She says we must bail out the legless man,
claims I’ll merchandise her along our braided way.
POEM - Rehan Qayoom
Walk Through the Town Today with Fettered Feet
Eyes filled with raging tears are not enough
It is not enough to hide the taunts of love’s secret
Walk through the town today with fettered feet
Arms flung out, dancing in ecstasy
Dusty hair awry, and with shirt all bloody
Through gawping crowds in bazaars of love
Its guardians, its common folk
Past its slingshots its arrows, its stones of slanders
Shackled through the happy dawn, the oppressed day of failures
Who would get it but us? We alone know
Who is the sincerest lover
Who deserving of the murderer’s blow
Come friends prepare your aching hearts
Let us return to pay death its debts
POEM - Dr. Ernest Williamson III
The Lie of Virginity
even in my day the rain
rained
on the King's parade
as seasons snuck with convenience inwardly like a puss filled sore
jumping in rhythm with arrogant gulps
as I felt patches of wet discontent
from the skies
muddle through the air
like the plight
in Noah's
day
though I can never pen-point a season
of staid
sunlight
stretching from prowler to heavenly
sides
brilliantly kissing my face
for no humane
reason
I can meander my dreams
from victory to death to chance
As I smiled
utterance
slipped from my bruised lips
like liquid rainbows and largess
dipping
stretching
across my pale yellow teeth
before
I was laid
to
rest
I lived
though ever so often
gaps of dirt yearn for my obedience
'APHORISMS'
Ian MacFadyen
From Life: A Vade Mecum
For Nick and Hilaire
No one ever sees the sun in a dream.
The best chef in Paris can’t make cakes from shit.
Nebuchadnezzar lives in Hollywood but you can only reach him on his answering machine.
The roulette ball does not know that zero must come up
once every thirty-seven spins if the casino is to stay in business, but it never fails to behave accordingly.
You can’t insult a work of art.
In a few billion years the Milky Way will collide
with the Andromeda Galaxy.
The desire to die may last as long as life itself.
Death isn’t the end of exhibitionism.
‘Apotheosis’ is another word for oblivion.
You shouldn’t play with matches unless you’re prepared
to be immolated.
You can see further in the fog because you look harder.
The Kama Sutra is available in Arabic.
The most important faculty for the historian is imagination.
In life, as on film, people have their jump-cuts and their fades.
What the conman looks for in the face of his victim is not
stupidity or greed, but shame, fear and loneliness.
The best place to hide a needle is not in a haystack but in a pile of needles.
Nothing dates faster than the next generation.
Just because someone vanishes, it doesn’t mean they’re no longer around.
The Uncertainty Principle exists.
Cyanide is addictive.
Human tears are preserved in cotton wool by Mullahs in Egypt.
Every gravestone contains a significant typographical error.
The sardonic observer is a very poor marksman.
Nothing happens.
Listen and you will see vanished crowds skating on a frozen lake or returning from a football match on a cold, smoky, afternoon in a northern industrial town over eighty years ago.
We do not love ourselves with an entirely reciprocated love.
Each of us is entirely responsible for our own birth.
You have many friends you will never meet, but all your enemies are already known to you.
The answers to riddles are always more mysterious than the riddles themselves.
The autopsy of the greatest actress of the 20th century revealed that she had silver nitrate in her veins and petrified images of klieg lights in her eyes.
An actor is more than a mere impostor but if he or she cannot play that impostor then acting becomes a complete charade.
The love of a rabbit for a rattlesnake is an exemplary form of undying love.
Time is a window opening onto a hot dark sky, it’s summer in the city and everything seems possible and at the same time you can already feel it all ending, so you pull back before you let your glass of wine slip out of your fingers and it shatters on the pavement below.
Everything you say about the world is true, but you disagree.
You want to be remembered, but you will never know the people who believe they remember you or why it seemed so important at the time.
You want to be forgotten, utterly, but people may remember and revere you, having confused you with someone else entirely.
The late hours are always the very early hours, and vice versa.
Total excess is a courageous form of austerity.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was filmed in The Little House On The Prairie.
You can experience something if someone tells you it’s possible.
Teeth are visible bones.
Nothing is less paradoxical than a paradox.
There are desert flowers which bloom only once every hundred years, witnessed by no one.
Criminals become saints when excoriated by the mob.
The virtuous are most beautiful when vilified as heretics.
Lost worlds of romance and mystery are especially potent because they never existed.
Happiness is only achieved by those who enjoy being terrified.
Mirrors are manifestations of disturbances in the Maxwellian ether.
The Cree Indians understood that money cannot be eaten.
Despite the detective fiction of the 1920s and ‘30s, very few people are murdered in libraries.
The fig, not the apple, was the first fruit of knowledge.
Images plead silently for their own destruction.
Every narrator is a sadistic mythomaniac.
The flame of dawn was blue before the invention of the acetylene torch.
The greatest magicians are fooled by their own tricks.
Hollywood is a canning factory.
There are more songs about September than any other month.
If Christ had been hanged, there’d be scaffolds in churches.
The desire for perfection is a form of iconoclasm.
The saguaro plant is protected by the black widow spider while the gila monster, sheathed in poisonous pearls, guards the rocks of the desert.
‘Shit’ and ‘Science’ come from the same Indo-European root.
People often close their eyes while talking on the telephone.
The Hobbyhorse Law states that the one who rocks will be rocked.
Every body is a book bound in human skin.
The most frequent expression used in the movies is “Let’s go!”
‘Once Upon a Time’ happens over and over again, even though it leads ineluctably to ‘THE END’, to be followed by the Director’s Cut.
POEMS - Valentina Cano
Sacred Ground
Your head bobbed,
taking time to bend
the light around you
until the distortion
made me blink.
You wore a headdress
of the softest fur,
polished tentacles of lust.
Your eyes, fire pits,
drum circles of light.
There was no way out
of their chant.
I was caught.
Eurydice in the Morning
She stopped running.
Her legs trembled
as her muscles locked shut,
a groan of metallic sinew
pulling tight.
There was nothing to do
but gaze out at the land
she wouldn’t reach,
the fields of flowers
bowing in the morning,
as her body calcified
there in the sun.
A pillar of doubt.
A tower of ifs.
POEMS - Kushal Poddar
The Perfect Lives
Two kinds walk here.
Down these roads, this earth.
Those who survived the suicide
and those who did not.
Our mother said we should not discriminate.
Thus we become knowledgeable-
there exists different people.
Those who did and those who did not.
They all stroll in summer fields.
At noon our shadows hide.
It whispers, Count and do not turn.
Two kinds:
those who turned back and those who did not
stroll together,
their hands forging one long chain.
The best chef in Paris can’t make cakes from shit.
Nebuchadnezzar lives in Hollywood but you can only reach him on his answering machine.
The roulette ball does not know that zero must come up
once every thirty-seven spins if the casino is to stay in business, but it never fails to behave accordingly.
You can’t insult a work of art.
In a few billion years the Milky Way will collide
with the Andromeda Galaxy.
The desire to die may last as long as life itself.
Death isn’t the end of exhibitionism.
‘Apotheosis’ is another word for oblivion.
You shouldn’t play with matches unless you’re prepared
to be immolated.
You can see further in the fog because you look harder.
The Kama Sutra is available in Arabic.
The most important faculty for the historian is imagination.
In life, as on film, people have their jump-cuts and their fades.
What the conman looks for in the face of his victim is not
stupidity or greed, but shame, fear and loneliness.
The best place to hide a needle is not in a haystack but in a pile of needles.
Nothing dates faster than the next generation.
Just because someone vanishes, it doesn’t mean they’re no longer around.
The Uncertainty Principle exists.
Cyanide is addictive.
Human tears are preserved in cotton wool by Mullahs in Egypt.
Every gravestone contains a significant typographical error.
The sardonic observer is a very poor marksman.
Nothing happens.
Listen and you will see vanished crowds skating on a frozen lake or returning from a football match on a cold, smoky, afternoon in a northern industrial town over eighty years ago.
We do not love ourselves with an entirely reciprocated love.
Each of us is entirely responsible for our own birth.
You have many friends you will never meet, but all your enemies are already known to you.
The answers to riddles are always more mysterious than the riddles themselves.
The autopsy of the greatest actress of the 20th century revealed that she had silver nitrate in her veins and petrified images of klieg lights in her eyes.
An actor is more than a mere impostor but if he or she cannot play that impostor then acting becomes a complete charade.
The love of a rabbit for a rattlesnake is an exemplary form of undying love.
Time is a window opening onto a hot dark sky, it’s summer in the city and everything seems possible and at the same time you can already feel it all ending, so you pull back before you let your glass of wine slip out of your fingers and it shatters on the pavement below.
Everything you say about the world is true, but you disagree.
You want to be remembered, but you will never know the people who believe they remember you or why it seemed so important at the time.
You want to be forgotten, utterly, but people may remember and revere you, having confused you with someone else entirely.
The late hours are always the very early hours, and vice versa.
Total excess is a courageous form of austerity.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was filmed in The Little House On The Prairie.
You can experience something if someone tells you it’s possible.
Teeth are visible bones.
Nothing is less paradoxical than a paradox.
There are desert flowers which bloom only once every hundred years, witnessed by no one.
Criminals become saints when excoriated by the mob.
The virtuous are most beautiful when vilified as heretics.
Lost worlds of romance and mystery are especially potent because they never existed.
Happiness is only achieved by those who enjoy being terrified.
Mirrors are manifestations of disturbances in the Maxwellian ether.
The Cree Indians understood that money cannot be eaten.
Despite the detective fiction of the 1920s and ‘30s, very few people are murdered in libraries.
The fig, not the apple, was the first fruit of knowledge.
Images plead silently for their own destruction.
Every narrator is a sadistic mythomaniac.
The flame of dawn was blue before the invention of the acetylene torch.
The greatest magicians are fooled by their own tricks.
Hollywood is a canning factory.
There are more songs about September than any other month.
If Christ had been hanged, there’d be scaffolds in churches.
The desire for perfection is a form of iconoclasm.
The saguaro plant is protected by the black widow spider while the gila monster, sheathed in poisonous pearls, guards the rocks of the desert.
‘Shit’ and ‘Science’ come from the same Indo-European root.
People often close their eyes while talking on the telephone.
The Hobbyhorse Law states that the one who rocks will be rocked.
Every body is a book bound in human skin.
The most frequent expression used in the movies is “Let’s go!”
‘Once Upon a Time’ happens over and over again, even though it leads ineluctably to ‘THE END’, to be followed by the Director’s Cut.
POEMS - Valentina Cano
Sacred Ground
Your head bobbed,
taking time to bend
the light around you
until the distortion
made me blink.
You wore a headdress
of the softest fur,
polished tentacles of lust.
Your eyes, fire pits,
drum circles of light.
There was no way out
of their chant.
I was caught.
Eurydice in the Morning
She stopped running.
Her legs trembled
as her muscles locked shut,
a groan of metallic sinew
pulling tight.
There was nothing to do
but gaze out at the land
she wouldn’t reach,
the fields of flowers
bowing in the morning,
as her body calcified
there in the sun.
A pillar of doubt.
A tower of ifs.
POEMS - Kushal Poddar
The Perfect Lives
Two kinds walk here.
Down these roads, this earth.
Those who survived the suicide
and those who did not.
Our mother said we should not discriminate.
Thus we become knowledgeable-
there exists different people.
Those who did and those who did not.
They all stroll in summer fields.
At noon our shadows hide.
It whispers, Count and do not turn.
Two kinds:
those who turned back and those who did not
stroll together,
their hands forging one long chain.
ESSAY
Richard Livermore
The Greatest Novel I've Never Read
I've never done this before - written about a book that I've never read - but somehow, if I am ever going to read it, I need to give myself compelling reasons to read it. I know that it has sold millions in the US, but that was never a good enough reason not to ignore it completely. And judging by some of its advocates, I am tempted to think that this book, like Mein Kampf or Mao's Little Red Book, is a bit of a bible for some people, which its adherents like to wave in the air. Furthermore, they seem so full of certainty as to its virtues that I find myself pulling back automatically in order to get a little perspective. Not only that, but it's a thousand pages long. I've read longer books or almost as long and got something out of them. Musil or Proust, for example, or Tolstoy, Thomas Wolfe, Melville or Joyce. The most recent book of comparable length I have read was Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet and I certainly got something from that. Yet somehow I have a feeling that this book is not of that kind. I don't think I'll encounter Wordsworth's "still sad music of humanity" in it, the tragicomic undertow of life which makes us aware that in the overall equation of existence there are hidden variables which never fail to fuck things up for us, even when - especially when - we think we've got everything under control. The book I am talking about is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. As I have said, I haven't read it and therefore some might think that I am not qualified to write about it, and they're probably right. Nevertheless, to read a book, surely one needs a reason; one needs to be enticed and, so far, I can't say I am. Any advice on this delicate matter would therefore be very welcome.
The problem in part is that I feel the book is more propaganda than 'literature'. Not that I'm a great fan of 'literature', but I think you know what I mean. Propaganda is characterised by the radical divorce in it between conception and execution, so that the work as a whole serves the ideas which the writer wants the reader to have. In 'literature' the conception and execution emerge in the same moment of writing in such a way that there is a unity between them, and neither serves or dominates the other. And because the conception does not impose itself on the execution, the work as a whole can 'breathe' freely and explore the highways and byways of form and content combined. Whether or not Atlas Shrugged meets this criteria I have no way of knowing, because I haven't read it, but, from what people say about it, I'm inclined to think that it doesn't. Rand's work has been discussed rather a lot in the Cif columns of The Grauniad lately. Indeed, it has been described there by Don Watkins of The Ayn Rand Institute as "a paean to American liberty" or "a hymn to the American spirit". One contributor to the discussion even went so far as to say, "Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written and the ideas expressed in it and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism are necessary to save the world". That's a glowing endorsement if ever there was one. (For those interested, Rand defined Objectivism as a philosophy "based on the concept that reality exists as an objective absolute.") But before we get completely carried away by all these encomiums, it behoves us to ask what exactly this book, which is both the "greatest novel ever written" and "necessary to save the world", is all about? Well, according to another, less enthusiastic, contributor to the debate, "Its thesis is that the only people who are important are extremely wealthy industrialists who built their businesses all by themselves without any help from anybody. Employees are, at best, a burden. The government is composed of looters and the mass of the people are parasites. The iconic hero is a character named John Galt... Galt leads a gaggle of 'producers' on strike, leaving the rest of the world to collapse without them." So much for the plot of the work, which, on the face of it, doesn't sound too promising to me. However, nothing daunted, it's advocates say we should read it because, if we don't, we simply won't know what we're missing. Well, to be honest, I've never read Mein Kampf either, but I don't find that a compelling reason to go out and buy it. One reason for not reading a book may be what it's advocates say about it. If for example, they talk in such superlatives as it's "the greatest novel ever written" and its ideas and philosophy are "needed to save the world", it might be wise to be a bit cautious. No novel can live up to that kind of promise, since in the nature of things they all have their relative strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis one another. Or are we to assume that Atlas Shrugged is the only exception?
If I am going to be seduced into reading a book, I need to know - or at least believe - I will get something out of it. Of course, that may depend on whether I am ready to read such a book. A book which is like water off a duck's back at one time of life may have a profound effect at another. Receptivity is often the key. However, I have yet to be convinced by what people tell me that I may get something out of Atlas Shrugged. It's philosophy seems to me to be just too narrow and unattractive. It's belief that altruism is the greatest of all evils seems a teensy-weensy bit simplistic. Individualism - of the non-conformist Oscar Wilde variety - is, I believe, an admirable thing, (Whatever happened to real eccentrics? That's what I want to know.) but an individualism which is synonymous with egoism doesn't strike me in quite the same way. Ninety-nine per cent of our evolution as a species has been bound up with ensuring our survival through co-operation and a certain degree of selfless altruism. And I suspect that is written into the human genome at some level. Psychopaths do not seem to share these traits and there may be good evolutionary reasons for that too. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of people do. It's also a very curious fact that, according to a BBC Horizon programme on psychopaths I recently watched - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07nUN916NUs - there may be four times the proportion of psychopaths in the higher echelons of the large corporations than there are in the population as a whole. (The last thing I want to do is encourage the 'science' of neurobabble, but this programme does makes some interesting points.) Why does that not surprise me? After all, you do need a good dose of ruthlessness, to get ahead in these institutions. To consider a class of people with such a high proportion of psychopaths to be somehow possessed of indispensable heroic virtues strikes me as being just a wee bit bizarre - especially as the same programme argues that these people get ahead more through charisma and charm than what they actually contribute to an organisation. One of the reasons why I can't read too much Martin Amis, despite his undoubted qualities as a writer, is that his world seems to me to be peopled by psychopaths. So much so, in fact, that I don't think I have found a character in any of his novels who I could say was attractive. Amis, of course, doesn't treat them as heroes, which is some kind of relief I suppose. However, when such people are treated as heroes or saviours of humanity, I start to become a little more skeptical.
However, I don't want to get too much into the philosophical aspects of Rand's work. I haven't read it, and I might well be doing it an injustice. What I would like to ask of her fans is simply that they give me good reasons to read her work as fiction, which exemplifies something of the art of the novel. In what way, for example, may I equate this "greatest novel ever written" with A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu with its gallery of extraordinary and vivid characters such as Madame Verdurin or Monsieur de Charlus? Does she write about sex like Collette or Genet? Does it contain a relentless exposure of institutional alienation - a la Kafka? Is it on a par with Burroughs or Joyce in terms of formal innovation or experimentation? And what about the writing itself, will I find the language it uses stimulating on its own level and not just as a vehicle for conveying ideas? I don't want to fetishise the above authors in any way, because I'm all too aware that they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but I do think that Rand enthusiasts - of which there seem to be many - need to tell us why her work is so admirable beyond being a propaganda vehicle for ideas they themselves obviously agree with. If I am going to be tempted into reading a book, I need to be persuaded that from the point of view of the art of the novel, I will get something out of it. After all, if I find the ideas still-born then I'm going to need something more than ideas if I'm to go out and buy it.
Notwithstanding all these arguments - and arguments are rarely decisive - and bearing in mind that it is before the collapse of the wave-function - not after - that we live in parallel universes of multiple possibilities, I remain open to the idea that one day I will read Atlas Shrugged and find, as I read it, that it is the greatest novel ever written and that its philosophy of Objectivism is needed to save the world. I may doubt it right at the moment, but that might change if (or when) I pick up the book and start the epic 1000 page journey into its heartland. However, as things stand right at the moment, I think I will need a lot more convincing.
POEM - Anthony Ward
Denomination
He would call women whores
Who wouldn’t sleep with him
Tantalised by the wrappings
He craved to tear off
While others were angels
He wouldn’t sleep with
Preferring to keep them perfect
Preserved in their packaging.
POEM - Michael H Brownstein
My Journey
Three days of hiking with only bottled water
is penance enough for one lifetime,
the path littered with opera and breath-beats,
the sarcasm of the bullfrog, the yelp of red fox.
Every night enough stars shoot across the sky
to grant every wish for a hundred years of wishing,
every aspiration, every melody, every quarter note.
Sweat streams puddle down the corridor of my back,
my ears open into mouths, my tongue catches sound on its tip.
Near the end of the trail, resting, every goodness within me,
within my back, my hands, my blistered feet, my muscles,
everything thyme, sage, peach water, an essence of Aradia.
In the end I did not enter the shiny box of darkness.
I dyed my hair instead, removed my teeth,
fell back in love.
That was what was written on the exit sign
at the beginning of the trail
leading back home.
POEM - Mitch Grabois
The Shittiest Neighbor You Ever Had
Staying with a friend in town
I watched a leopard slug traverse the gutter
near my car tire
I had forgotten there were slugs in Michigan
For a few seconds I felt transported to Humboldt County
on California’s north coast
I looked up and saw the old woman across the street
mowing her wide lawn on a riding mower
She reached one side and turned
The mower said Toro across its rear
She was a citizen who had vociferously supported the turbines
the hostile takeover of Riverton Township by a corporation
who had buffaloed the county commissioners
who pulled the wool over their eyes with scams like
“The Good Neighbor Fund”
Everyone awake in Riverton recognized that the corporation
was a shitty neighbor
worse than the worst neighbor you’d ever had
To start, their easement agreements required that we
give up our freedom of speech
I would not give up my freedom of speech
for a lousy two-thousand dollar payoff
I watched the slug make his slow way toward the curb
toward grass and nourishment
He moved at his own speed
He wouldn’t be rushed
I wouldn’t be rushed either
I refused to be given
the Bum’s Rush
My bones felt heavy
my joints creaky with advancing age
I drove away
careful not to crush the slug
More consideration than the commissioners
had given us
POEMS - Carl Scharwath
Fractured
The days have the atmosphere of a convex mirror.
Untraceable nomadic obscurity, abstraction,
lack of emotion, the absence of lyrical self-hood.
Yet the fragmentation of the universe
is somehow mirrored in the ambiguous
nature of life itself.
Everyone Has An Elegy
Facade assaulted in a small sadness,
as erratic moments
rise up from despair.
Early Morning
Life mirrors a morning dewdrop
a small universe perilously draped on a forgotten branch
evaporating into nothingness.
QUOTE - Charles Bukowski
What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honour their own lives, they piss on their lives, they shit them, away. Dumb fuckers, they concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.
The problem in part is that I feel the book is more propaganda than 'literature'. Not that I'm a great fan of 'literature', but I think you know what I mean. Propaganda is characterised by the radical divorce in it between conception and execution, so that the work as a whole serves the ideas which the writer wants the reader to have. In 'literature' the conception and execution emerge in the same moment of writing in such a way that there is a unity between them, and neither serves or dominates the other. And because the conception does not impose itself on the execution, the work as a whole can 'breathe' freely and explore the highways and byways of form and content combined. Whether or not Atlas Shrugged meets this criteria I have no way of knowing, because I haven't read it, but, from what people say about it, I'm inclined to think that it doesn't. Rand's work has been discussed rather a lot in the Cif columns of The Grauniad lately. Indeed, it has been described there by Don Watkins of The Ayn Rand Institute as "a paean to American liberty" or "a hymn to the American spirit". One contributor to the discussion even went so far as to say, "Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written and the ideas expressed in it and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism are necessary to save the world". That's a glowing endorsement if ever there was one. (For those interested, Rand defined Objectivism as a philosophy "based on the concept that reality exists as an objective absolute.") But before we get completely carried away by all these encomiums, it behoves us to ask what exactly this book, which is both the "greatest novel ever written" and "necessary to save the world", is all about? Well, according to another, less enthusiastic, contributor to the debate, "Its thesis is that the only people who are important are extremely wealthy industrialists who built their businesses all by themselves without any help from anybody. Employees are, at best, a burden. The government is composed of looters and the mass of the people are parasites. The iconic hero is a character named John Galt... Galt leads a gaggle of 'producers' on strike, leaving the rest of the world to collapse without them." So much for the plot of the work, which, on the face of it, doesn't sound too promising to me. However, nothing daunted, it's advocates say we should read it because, if we don't, we simply won't know what we're missing. Well, to be honest, I've never read Mein Kampf either, but I don't find that a compelling reason to go out and buy it. One reason for not reading a book may be what it's advocates say about it. If for example, they talk in such superlatives as it's "the greatest novel ever written" and its ideas and philosophy are "needed to save the world", it might be wise to be a bit cautious. No novel can live up to that kind of promise, since in the nature of things they all have their relative strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis one another. Or are we to assume that Atlas Shrugged is the only exception?
If I am going to be seduced into reading a book, I need to know - or at least believe - I will get something out of it. Of course, that may depend on whether I am ready to read such a book. A book which is like water off a duck's back at one time of life may have a profound effect at another. Receptivity is often the key. However, I have yet to be convinced by what people tell me that I may get something out of Atlas Shrugged. It's philosophy seems to me to be just too narrow and unattractive. It's belief that altruism is the greatest of all evils seems a teensy-weensy bit simplistic. Individualism - of the non-conformist Oscar Wilde variety - is, I believe, an admirable thing, (Whatever happened to real eccentrics? That's what I want to know.) but an individualism which is synonymous with egoism doesn't strike me in quite the same way. Ninety-nine per cent of our evolution as a species has been bound up with ensuring our survival through co-operation and a certain degree of selfless altruism. And I suspect that is written into the human genome at some level. Psychopaths do not seem to share these traits and there may be good evolutionary reasons for that too. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of people do. It's also a very curious fact that, according to a BBC Horizon programme on psychopaths I recently watched - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07nUN916NUs - there may be four times the proportion of psychopaths in the higher echelons of the large corporations than there are in the population as a whole. (The last thing I want to do is encourage the 'science' of neurobabble, but this programme does makes some interesting points.) Why does that not surprise me? After all, you do need a good dose of ruthlessness, to get ahead in these institutions. To consider a class of people with such a high proportion of psychopaths to be somehow possessed of indispensable heroic virtues strikes me as being just a wee bit bizarre - especially as the same programme argues that these people get ahead more through charisma and charm than what they actually contribute to an organisation. One of the reasons why I can't read too much Martin Amis, despite his undoubted qualities as a writer, is that his world seems to me to be peopled by psychopaths. So much so, in fact, that I don't think I have found a character in any of his novels who I could say was attractive. Amis, of course, doesn't treat them as heroes, which is some kind of relief I suppose. However, when such people are treated as heroes or saviours of humanity, I start to become a little more skeptical.
However, I don't want to get too much into the philosophical aspects of Rand's work. I haven't read it, and I might well be doing it an injustice. What I would like to ask of her fans is simply that they give me good reasons to read her work as fiction, which exemplifies something of the art of the novel. In what way, for example, may I equate this "greatest novel ever written" with A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu with its gallery of extraordinary and vivid characters such as Madame Verdurin or Monsieur de Charlus? Does she write about sex like Collette or Genet? Does it contain a relentless exposure of institutional alienation - a la Kafka? Is it on a par with Burroughs or Joyce in terms of formal innovation or experimentation? And what about the writing itself, will I find the language it uses stimulating on its own level and not just as a vehicle for conveying ideas? I don't want to fetishise the above authors in any way, because I'm all too aware that they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but I do think that Rand enthusiasts - of which there seem to be many - need to tell us why her work is so admirable beyond being a propaganda vehicle for ideas they themselves obviously agree with. If I am going to be tempted into reading a book, I need to be persuaded that from the point of view of the art of the novel, I will get something out of it. After all, if I find the ideas still-born then I'm going to need something more than ideas if I'm to go out and buy it.
Notwithstanding all these arguments - and arguments are rarely decisive - and bearing in mind that it is before the collapse of the wave-function - not after - that we live in parallel universes of multiple possibilities, I remain open to the idea that one day I will read Atlas Shrugged and find, as I read it, that it is the greatest novel ever written and that its philosophy of Objectivism is needed to save the world. I may doubt it right at the moment, but that might change if (or when) I pick up the book and start the epic 1000 page journey into its heartland. However, as things stand right at the moment, I think I will need a lot more convincing.
POEM - Anthony Ward
Denomination
He would call women whores
Who wouldn’t sleep with him
Tantalised by the wrappings
He craved to tear off
While others were angels
He wouldn’t sleep with
Preferring to keep them perfect
Preserved in their packaging.
POEM - Michael H Brownstein
My Journey
Three days of hiking with only bottled water
is penance enough for one lifetime,
the path littered with opera and breath-beats,
the sarcasm of the bullfrog, the yelp of red fox.
Every night enough stars shoot across the sky
to grant every wish for a hundred years of wishing,
every aspiration, every melody, every quarter note.
Sweat streams puddle down the corridor of my back,
my ears open into mouths, my tongue catches sound on its tip.
Near the end of the trail, resting, every goodness within me,
within my back, my hands, my blistered feet, my muscles,
everything thyme, sage, peach water, an essence of Aradia.
In the end I did not enter the shiny box of darkness.
I dyed my hair instead, removed my teeth,
fell back in love.
That was what was written on the exit sign
at the beginning of the trail
leading back home.
POEM - Mitch Grabois
The Shittiest Neighbor You Ever Had
Staying with a friend in town
I watched a leopard slug traverse the gutter
near my car tire
I had forgotten there were slugs in Michigan
For a few seconds I felt transported to Humboldt County
on California’s north coast
I looked up and saw the old woman across the street
mowing her wide lawn on a riding mower
She reached one side and turned
The mower said Toro across its rear
She was a citizen who had vociferously supported the turbines
the hostile takeover of Riverton Township by a corporation
who had buffaloed the county commissioners
who pulled the wool over their eyes with scams like
“The Good Neighbor Fund”
Everyone awake in Riverton recognized that the corporation
was a shitty neighbor
worse than the worst neighbor you’d ever had
To start, their easement agreements required that we
give up our freedom of speech
I would not give up my freedom of speech
for a lousy two-thousand dollar payoff
I watched the slug make his slow way toward the curb
toward grass and nourishment
He moved at his own speed
He wouldn’t be rushed
I wouldn’t be rushed either
I refused to be given
the Bum’s Rush
My bones felt heavy
my joints creaky with advancing age
I drove away
careful not to crush the slug
More consideration than the commissioners
had given us
POEMS - Carl Scharwath
Fractured
The days have the atmosphere of a convex mirror.
Untraceable nomadic obscurity, abstraction,
lack of emotion, the absence of lyrical self-hood.
Yet the fragmentation of the universe
is somehow mirrored in the ambiguous
nature of life itself.
Everyone Has An Elegy
Facade assaulted in a small sadness,
as erratic moments
rise up from despair.
Early Morning
Life mirrors a morning dewdrop
a small universe perilously draped on a forgotten branch
evaporating into nothingness.
QUOTE - Charles Bukowski
What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honour their own lives, they piss on their lives, they shit them, away. Dumb fuckers, they concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.