When I peruse the conquered fame

I've had this poem by Whitman lodged between me ears all day!!!!!

When I peruse the conquered fame of heroes, and the
victories of mighty generals, I do not envy the
generals,
Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his
great house;
But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was
with them,
How through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging,
long and rong
Through youth, and through middle and old age, how
unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they
were,
Then I am pensive--I hastily walk away, filled with the
bitterest envy.
-Walt Whiitman

Political ethos...

My philosophy is this...voting for John Kerry is alot like wearing a condom. It may be initially uncomfortable for you and your partner at first, but it's just a responsibilty that you have to take. A precaution to ward off future headaches.

That said to each his own.

Hymn of Praise for the Sunflower Sun

Praise and adulation--my loans fianlly came in this morning. $3000! I can finally eat!

Uncle Mike and I, in lieu of paupers cuisine, made spaghetti using sloppy joe sauce last night, if that tells you anything...

The loans came at the last possible conceivable moment, but they came. yesterday I lost ten pages I was trying to "post" on a blackboard assignment and then I dropped a class...more w's on my academic transcript than a dot com address and hell if I care (I'm still a full time student even with the dropped class). Been a crazy ride so far, but at least I ain't been buckled in the passengers seat. At least i know the color of the blazing sun I'm driving into....

Off to buy food and pay bills... send a shot out to daniela and arya, crazy cyber muses (and emotional pillars) whose collective smile splashes eternal kisses concevied in the moment..... Thanx for keeping my spirits aloft!

Freaky...

Reading Hemingway's THE GARDEN OF EDEN for class and it's really freaking me out, partly because it's about a WRITER named DAVID whose wife cuts her HAIR and then falls madly in love with a beauitful EUROPEAN GIRL. After a while DAVID the WRITER falls in love with the same beautiful EUROPEAN GIRL and wants to leave his wife, only DAVID's wife is happily involved with the EUROPEAN GIRL at the same time.

Ahhhh..Too many David's, so few goliaths. If this book has taught me one thing it's that it is never wise for a writer named David to get MARA-IED to a lesbian. Hahahaha.

Hip-Hip Hooray!!!!!!!

Yeah! My favorite local band FREUDIAN PRESS just put more free Mp3's on the web.

http://freudianpress.indiegroup.com/

Their lead singer is a fairy-tale psycheldelic pied piper named Charlie and boy, talk about having your twin double on stage. We've been each other's doppleganger for a number of years. His music is just amazing and his story telling capacity is magical. Charlie's never lost his childhood pixiedust. Listen to 'Lil' Tommy Jones' and to THE LIGHT...also AFTERNOON DELIGHTFUL DAYDREAM could be the soundtrack to our bloggin' campaign....

Listen to the tunes and let me know what you think!

Everyone gets to Yes in the end....

This is extracted dialogue from Linklater's Waking Life concerning Philip K. Dick's novel FLOW MY TEARS THE POLICEMAN said.

It was about that book, "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said." You know that one?

Uh, yeah yeah, he won an award for that one.

Right, that's the one he wrote really fast. It just like flowed right out of him. He felt he was sort of channeling it or something. But anyway, about four years after it was published, he was at this party, and he met this woman who had the same name as the woman character in the book, and she had a boyfriend with the same name as the boyfriend character in the book, and she was having an affair with this guy, the chief of police, and he had the same name as the chief of police in his book. So she was telling him all of this stuff from her life, and everything she is saying is right out of his book. So it's totally freaking him out, but what could he do?

And then shortly after that, he was going to mail a letter, and he saw this kind of dangerous, shady looking guy standing by his car, but instead of avoiding him, which he says he would have usually done, he walked right up to him and said, "Can I help you?" And the guy said, "Yeah, I ran out of gas." So he pulls out his wallet, and he hands him some money, which he says he never would have done, and then he gets home and thinks, wait a second, this guy can't get to a gas station, he's out of gas. So he gets back in his car and goes and finds the guy, takes him to the gas station, and as he's pulling up at the gas station, he realizes, hey, this is in my book too. This exact station, this exact guy, everything. So this whole episode is kind of creepy, right?


And he's telling his priest about it, you know, describing how he wrote this book, and then four years later all these things happened to him. And as he's telling this to him, the priest says, "That's the Book of Acts. You're describing the Book of Acts." And he's like, "I've never read the Book of Acts." So he goes home and reads the Book of Acts, and it's like uncanny. Even the characters' names are the same as in the Bible. And the Book of Acts takes place in 50 A.D., when it was written, supposedly. So Philip K. Dick had this theory that time was an illusion and that we are all actually in 50 A.D., and the reason he had written this book was that he had somehow momentarily punctured through this illusion, this veil of time, and what he had seen there was what was going on in the Book of Acts.

And he was really into gnosticism, and this idea that this demiurge or demon had created this illusion of time to make us forget that Christ was about to return, and the kingdom of God was about to arrive. And that we're all in 50 A.D., and there's someone trying to make us forget that God is imminent. And that's what time is. That's what all of history is. It's just this continuous daydream, or distraction.

And so I read that, and I was like, that's weird. And that night I had a dream. And there was this guy in the dream who was supposed to be a psychic. But I was skeptical. I was like, he's not really a psychic, you know I'm thinking to myself. And then suddenly I start floating, like levitating up to the ceiling. And as I almost go through the roof, I'm like, okay, Mr. Psychic. I believe you. You're a psychic. Now put me down please.

And I float down, and as my feet touch the ground, the psychic turns into this woman in a green dress. And this woman is Lady Gregory. Now Lady Gregory was Yeats' patron, this Irish person, and though I'd never seen her image, I was just sure that this was the face of Lady Gregory. So I'm walking along, and Lady Gregory turns to me and says, "Let me explain to you the nature of the universe. Philip K. Dick is right about time, but he's wrong that it's 50 A.D. Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.' And so time actually is just this constant saying No to God's invitation. That's what time is, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's 2001. There's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in." Then she tells me that actually, this is the narrative of everyone's life. That behind the phenomenal differences, there is but one story, and that's the story of moving from No to Yes. All of life is like, "No thank you, no thank you, no thank you," then ultimately it's, "Yes, I give in, yes, I accept, yes, I embrace." That's the journey. Everyone gets to Yes in the end, right?

American Buddha

Check this site out fell'o wanderin' wayfarer's!

http://www.american-buddha.com/site.map.htm#SITE%20MAP

Somewhere I have never traveled....

"I want to do everything. I want to see everything. I want to go everywhere. I know what kind of situation it is. Inside, I got everything straight."
-Bruce Springsteen

"What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald


"Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before."

-Shel Silverstein

If only all writers could have perfectly spoiled lives....

-from this week's writers almanac...

It's the birthday of horror novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine (1947). He's the author of many novels, including The Shining (1977), Pet Sematary (1983), and most recently From a Buick 8 (2002).
His father, a merchant seaman, deserted the family when he was two. He has no memories of the man, but one day he found a boxful of his father's science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, including an anthology of stories from Weird Tales magazine and a book by horror author H. P. Lovecraft. That box of his father's books inspired him to start writing horror stories.
After college, King worked jobs at a gas station and a laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin' Donuts. He said, "Budget was not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on. It was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March." His writing office was the furnace room of his trailer home, and all of his rough drafts were typed single-spaced, with no margins, to save paper.
He sold a series of horror stories to men's magazines, and he said that the paychecks from these stories always seemed to arrive when one of his kids had an ear infection or the car had broken down.
His first novel was Carrie (1973), about a weird, miserable, high school girl with psychic powers. The hard cover didn't sell very well, but when his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000, King couldn't believe it. He said, "The only thing I could think to do was go out and buy my wife a hair dryer. I stumbled across the street to get it and thought I would probably get greased by some car."
He went on to become one of the most popular novelists of all time. Before him, most horror novels took place in drafty old mansions and castles. His horror novels take place in ordinary American small towns, at fast food restaurants, local libraries, and little league baseball games. King says that he writes about his own fears, and he claims to be afraid of spiders, elevators, closed-in places, the dark, flying, sewers, funerals, cancer, heart attacks, and being buried alive, among other things.
The first time someone asked him for his autograph was in a deli. The man behind the counter looked at him funny and asked if King was somebody famous. King got excited about being recognized for the first time, but then man said, "I know, you're Francis Ford Coppola." King said yes, he was Francis Ford Coppola, and he gave the man a signed napkin that said, "Francis Ford Coppola."
Last fall, the National Book Foundation gave King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Previous recipients of the medal have been Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller and Toni Morrison. Some members of the literary community objected to King receiving the medal because they claim he doesn't write literary fiction.
In his acceptance speech, King said, "I salute the National Book Foundation Board, who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as a rich hack...Giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that...bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction. The first gainers in such a widening of interest would be the readers."
When asked what he wanted to achieve when he first became a writer, King said, "I wanted people to leave jobs, to ride past their stop on a bus or train, to burn dinner--because of my books. I wanted to take them prisoner."

Canticle of Thanks

Canticle of thanks means pressing the little blue-bagged mystical taliman that your spiritual sister gave you a little over a week ago into the side of your temple and saying the greatest name over and over again as the blithe voice on the opposing side of the phone informs you that the amount you requested has been approved and will be dispersed this coming Monday. Canticle of thanks means that finally, after all this time, you won't have to kill yourself to make ends meet. Won't have to work until three in the morning. You'll be able to muster at least five hours of sleep. You'll be able to get a meal plan. Be able to buy the rest of the books you need this semester.

Canticle of thanks means finally, after all this time, getting on with your life.

Orcella Rexford (one of those weird inexplicable Blogging tugs)

Here's a painfully reproduced IN MEMORIUM of a spirit by the name of ORCELLA REXFORD culled from the 1946-1950 edition of THE BAHA' I WORLD (copyrighted by the permission of Angels)....Sometimes I flap through old editions of BAHA'I World and chant the prayers for departed for pioneers from the 'old school' era. When I was lead to this reading tonight, I was requested to transcribe it--so here it is....please remember her in your prayers. Like all of us bloggers, perhaps she's just another lonely spirit waiting for an occasional intra-dimensional connection:

ORCELLA REXFORD

Orcella Rexford (Loiuse Cutts-Powell) was born June 12, 1887 in Tracey, Minnesota. Planning in her youth to become a college professor, she attendd the university of California, Berkeley, where she studies four languages and majored in philosophy and psychology, found her interests changing, and became a writer and lecturer.

The name "Orcella Rexford" is a cryptogram chosen for her by an old acquaintance in New York City. To Orcella this name symbolized her wish to link her personality to cosmic forces for good, which would give her the greatest impetus for development.

Orcella first heard of the Baha'i Faith from Mrs. Myrta Sandoz of Cleavland, Ohio, and was later confirmed by Dr. Edward Getsinger in Boston, Mass. She became a believer in 1918-1919.

Since belief and action were inseprable to her, while studying the faith with Dr. Getsinger she brought along two students from her own classes. These, too, became Baha'is. Soon she began to organize classes for Dr. Getsinger. In order to serve the Faith with Maximum efficiency, Orcella now took stock of educational equipment and capacities; she even investigated her geneaology to appraise possible inherited tendencies and thus fully to obey the commandment, "Know Thyself". As a child she had often been told of her second great-grandfather, William Jarvis, appointed by Jeffersonas consul and charge d'affaires at Lisbon, who gave his services without cost to the then young and impercunious American Government for nine years (1802-1811). Orcella felt that her tendency to pioneer, and to contribute her servcies to a righteous Cause, might have come down to her from this ancestor.

........

"She talked like a Baha'i, she radiated it; she seemed like some spiritual elf, trying to share with us teh ethereal joy of her religion. "Baha'is love peace.' She explained "They are hospitable. NO one has too much, for all too share. Children must get consent of both parents before they marry. Those who come into the faith receive a special outpouring from the Holy Spirit. This comes always with a new manifestation. Oh, If I could be your spiritual mother, and bring you into peace, the happiness, the utter contentment, that the faith has given me."

A fool, a beautiful fool.....

Cool quotes of the week, compliments of the Writers Almanac


"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."

-Roald Dahl


"The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths."

-Ken Kesey

Making out with Mara....

Mara's a sloppy kisser. Even when I pull her into me and bend the lids of my eyes I immediately feel uncomfortable. Her tongue sways seemingly between my lips sharply like a credit card being swiped. The inside of her mouth tastes like someone has decomposed. Her teeth feel like cold moldy slices of stalactite burrowed deeply in a rancid, underground insect riddle cavern.

I don't like making out with Mara at all. I'd rather be known as the neighborhood dish at the local nusring home than be forced into making out with Mara.

I keep trying to shove her away from me, but her hands grope everywhere, biting into the back of my neck, with thick, poison nails. When I manage to get a moment where her lips are not breathing into my mouth, Mara endeavors to suck out the pigment from the bottom of my chin.

It's like we are back in junior high making out under the tube-slide and Mara won't stop giving me hickies. She's wearing vintage JEM perfume. She want's everyone to know that I made out with her. She want's people to see her in my Varsity jacket and little-class ring hung around her neck. She wants people to see our initials added together in the locker room using permanent marker.

D.V.B.
+
MARA

Our names forever branded and multiplied in a crooked heart that is shaped more like a liver.

I hate Mara and I've been making out with Mara all day. I've been pinching my nostrils and piercing shut my eyes. I've been writing dry, arid, tasteless academic papers. I am always so scared shitless what my prof's will think, even if they just rectify a facile comma splice.

After all, I am the crazy writer. I'm supposed to be an authority.

But I have to make out with Mara. I have to do all the tedious, dry academic homework. Have to write more footnotes to another man's genius. Have to work crazy hours so I can pay my exorbitant tuition.

Have to do a lot of things I'd rather not be doing right now so that one day, during a missed curfew make-out session in the backseat of my father's Chevette, I'll be able to taste the fresh pasture of her tongue; I 'll be able to feel the early dawn of her flesh and I'll look up and see that Mara has become someone else. Perhaps even an angel.

But today. No writing. Just academic shit. Just making out with Mara for hours and hours until I fall down exhausted and she slides on top of me, wanting to know why I give so much to someone who looks and tastes like her.

I don't like kissing Mara.

Try not to cry

......from this Saturday's edition of Writers Almanac:

"On this day in 2001, it was a clear, crisp, sunny morning in New York City. Students were in their second week of school. People were getting to work in cars, buses, and trains. Alessandra Fremura had planned on leaving for work at 8:00, but her babysitter was 20 minutes late. Virginia DiChiara couldn't get her golden retrievers to come in from the backyard, so she decided to have another cup of coffee. Kenneth Merlo was supposed to go in the office, but he decided to spend the morning helping a friend hook up her computer instead of going to his office. Michael Lomonaco stopped in the lobby of the World Trade Center to order some reading glasses from the one-hour eyeglass store. Michael Jacobs was running late when he reached the Trade Center lobby. He rushed to make the elevator, but the doors slid shut in his face. A musician named Michelle Wiley was at home in her apartment. She sat down at her piano in her nightgown and shower shoes, and stared out her window at the Twin Towers before beginning to play."

Bliss

Here's one for all you strugglin' writers out there compliments of NPR's writers almanac. Enjoy!


It was on this day in 1952 that Ernest Hemingway came out with his last novel, The Old Man and the Sea. After he published his first two novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), he was considered the best living American writer, and he was probably the most famous writer in the world. But he began to write less and less fiction in the 1930s. He went on long hunting and fishing expeditions. He became an intrepid journalist, covering the civil war in Spain. He moved to Cuba and organized a private spy network to uncover Nazi sympathizers. He patrolled the Gulf of Mexico in his fishing boat, looking for Nazi submarines, though he didn't find any. He covered the invasion of Normandy on D-Day and the liberation of Paris, and he was one of the only armed journalists fighting alongside the other soldiers. After participating in the war, he had a hard time getting back to writing. He said, "[It's] as though you had heard so much loud music you couldn't hear anything played delicately." He finally published his first novel in 10 years in 1950, Across the River and Into the Trees, about World War II. It got terrible reviews. Critics said that maybe he was overrated as a writer. Journalists started contacting him, asking to write his biography, as though he were already dead. Hemingway had been working on a long novel that he called The Sea Book, about different aspects of the sea. He got the idea for it while looking for submarines in his fishing boat. The book had three sections, which he called "The Sea When Young," "The Sea When Absent," and "The Sea in Being," and it had an epilogue about an old fisherman. He wrote more than 800 pages of The Sea Book and rewrote them more than a hundred times, but the book still didn't seem finished. Finally, he decided to publish just the epilogue about the old fisherman, which he called The Old Man and the Sea. He knew that the book was almost too short to be a novel, but he was tired of not publishing anything. The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize, and two years later Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He didn't publish another novel in his lifetime.

Since everyone is getting married...

Since everyone and their pet ferret is tying the matrimonial noose this weekend, I thought I'd submit my favorite love poem of all time; a sublime romantically tithed stanza from Wreckx-n-effex Rump Shaker "All I wanna do is a vroom-vroom-vroom an da' boom-boom!" NO! Just kiding. Here's William Shakespeare and one of the many mantra's I live by:

Sonnet CXVI

LET me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

-William Shakespeare

"You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention..."

The magic of fiction is that somehow, though different incarnations of your life, you find yourself looping, swishing, circling through recursive periods and you find the vertical hard slant of the book that has spoken directly to you once again stationed at home in the grip of your palms; its spine slightly tattered, its glossed titled creased like outdated billboards. The pages of your book have become sallowed with expired coffee daubs sprinkled throughout chapters, its plot and characters a familiar comfort like scented holiday nostalgia; its language a reunion of taut syllables steamboating across the page puffing the scent of imagery into the transparent margins above, halting just short of the optical shore where sight diffuses language at the tablecloth edge of reality...a still-life pond of language dribbling into your lap below.

My first formative read in High school was Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy.
Apparently Walker's text served as the spiritual sonic impetus for Tori Amos's song Cornflake Girl. ( I was going to marry Tori Amos of course. She'd have to marry me! Once she met me.) I still remember reading Walker's novel ten years ago this autumn, 1994, beginning of my Junior year in high school. I was sitting on the swing on my old front porch in the neighborhood where I grew up; the neighborhood where Uncle Mike has just relocated. It was probably the first time in my life I had ever seriously read anything outside of class...

Like my Father I'm a tad dyslexic and the words entered my vision like circus contortionists; with chipped shapes and sights and subtle nascent kicks. The creature of langauge swiggling into my sight, clanging against the tissue of my optic nerves with the quiet quavering resonance of a timpani.

I kept with it, kept reading and kept trying to write and ten years later I find myself living less than a mile from where I grew up, my hair cropped short (just like it was ten years ago...exactly)....a few more subtle facial blemishes dotted across my face and deeper skid marks tracked beneath my once optically strained sockets. Ten years later and I'm re-reading Alice Walker's THE COLOR PURPLE for Prof. Worthington's splendiferous 20th century lit class. Ten years later and I'm still dutifully searching for myself, following the linguistic creek of inky words, hoping to follow this treacle of language into a deep ravine fraught with self-discovery.


"
God don't think it dirty? I ast.

Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love--and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.

You saying God Vain? I ast.

Naw, she said. NOt vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

What it do when it pissed off? I ast.

Oh, it makes something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

Yeah? I say.

Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

You mean it want to be loved, just like hte bible say.

Yes Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces, give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Alice Walker, THE COLOR PURPLE