Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
TWO-WORD (SINGLE SYLLABLE) TITLED FAVORITE BOOKS
The last list, in which I included Ted Berrigan’s TRAIN RIDE, started me thinking about two-word book titles in which each word only has one syllable. So I made that the requirement for last night’s list (as well as the usual, that they have to be books I dig (including plays in book form since that’s how I know many plays and sometimes prefer them), and I couldn’t use “the” or “a”—too easy) (I’ve done something close to this in the past but not exactly, so some titles popped right up in my mind but the rest I had to dig for, which is the point, because it helps me fall asleep much easier, which I obviously did leaving a lot of blanks):
A?
BLACK SPRING by Henry Miller, BIG SUR by Jack Kerouac and BLUE SKIES by Simon Schuchat
C?
DARK BROWN by Michael McClure
END GAME by Samuel Beckett [Woops. I've been reminded by Ray DiPalma that ENDGAME is one word. Should have checked it on my bookshelves before I wrote this up. In my mind it was two words. Oh well. Ray also reminded me that there's a Beckett work called EH JOE that actually fits the bill. So thanks Ray!]
FILM NOIR by Bruce Andrews (although the way the Irish say “fillum” some would say that’s two syllables, but not in upscale “American”)
G?
HEART BEAT by Carolyn Cassady and HIS LIFE by Glen Baxter
IN TIME by Robert Kelly and IN THRALL by Jane Delynn
JACK’S BOOK by Barry Gifford & Lawrence Lee
KING LEAR by William Shakespeare
LUNCH POEMS by Frank O’Hara, LET’S GO! By Otto Rene Costillio, LIGHT YEARS by Merrill Gilfillan and LIGHTS OUT by Geoffrey Young
MAN’S FATE by Andre Malraux
NIGHT SHIFT by Carl Hanni
OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder
P?
Q?
RIP RAP by Gary Snyder and RAW DEAL by Jerome Sala
SOME TREES by John Ashbery, SOME DO by Jane Delynn, STRONG PLACE by Tim Dlugos, SMILE PLEASE by Jean Rhys and SUNG SEX by Kenward Elmslie and Joe Brainard
THANK YOU by Kenneth Koch, THESE DAYS by Lee Lally, THREE POEMS by John Ashbery and TRAIN RIDE by Ted Berrigan
UP FRONT by Bill Mauldin
V?
WHITE MULE by William Carlos Williams
X?
YOU BET! By Ted Greenwald
Z?
A?
BLACK SPRING by Henry Miller, BIG SUR by Jack Kerouac and BLUE SKIES by Simon Schuchat
C?
DARK BROWN by Michael McClure
END GAME by Samuel Beckett [Woops. I've been reminded by Ray DiPalma that ENDGAME is one word. Should have checked it on my bookshelves before I wrote this up. In my mind it was two words. Oh well. Ray also reminded me that there's a Beckett work called EH JOE that actually fits the bill. So thanks Ray!]
FILM NOIR by Bruce Andrews (although the way the Irish say “fillum” some would say that’s two syllables, but not in upscale “American”)
G?
HEART BEAT by Carolyn Cassady and HIS LIFE by Glen Baxter
IN TIME by Robert Kelly and IN THRALL by Jane Delynn
JACK’S BOOK by Barry Gifford & Lawrence Lee
KING LEAR by William Shakespeare
LUNCH POEMS by Frank O’Hara, LET’S GO! By Otto Rene Costillio, LIGHT YEARS by Merrill Gilfillan and LIGHTS OUT by Geoffrey Young
MAN’S FATE by Andre Malraux
NIGHT SHIFT by Carl Hanni
OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder
P?
Q?
RIP RAP by Gary Snyder and RAW DEAL by Jerome Sala
SOME TREES by John Ashbery, SOME DO by Jane Delynn, STRONG PLACE by Tim Dlugos, SMILE PLEASE by Jean Rhys and SUNG SEX by Kenward Elmslie and Joe Brainard
THANK YOU by Kenneth Koch, THESE DAYS by Lee Lally, THREE POEMS by John Ashbery and TRAIN RIDE by Ted Berrigan
UP FRONT by Bill Mauldin
V?
WHITE MULE by William Carlos Williams
X?
YOU BET! By Ted Greenwald
Z?
Friday, September 25, 2009
BURROUGHS' QUOTE
Someone who knew William Burroughs (I only knew him slightly) told me the other day that supposedly on his deathbed he said:
"The antidote is love."
That gibes with my experience.
[Simon Pettet e mailed me this clarification of my third hand info above:
"Love? What Is it?
Most natural painkiller what there is
LOVE"
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S Burroughs - edited with an Introduction by James Grauerholz.
Grove Press, 2000 page 253]
"The antidote is love."
That gibes with my experience.
[Simon Pettet e mailed me this clarification of my third hand info above:
"Love? What Is it?
Most natural painkiller what there is
LOVE"
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S Burroughs - edited with an Introduction by James Grauerholz.
Grove Press, 2000 page 253]
Thursday, September 24, 2009
NOT RIGHT: OUR SO-CALLED HEALTH SYSTEM
I spoke with a friend yesterday who is ill. They have an undefined serious debilitating illness that has caused them to lose their job and in that process lose their health coverage.
Under Cobra, the system that allows workers to continue with their health plan by making their own payments, it's costing my friend fourteen hundred—one thousand four hundred—dollars A MONTH to continue health care coverage for themselves and their family.
Not only is this adding to the general stress of the ways in which the Great Recession has hit this family, and causing greater stress which in turn I am sure contributes to the health issues, but my friend and the doctors involved have to find ways around looking for some obvious causes that may be long term and therefore the health plan may not cover!
My friend and their family is what this country calls "middle class"—a term rejected in the 1960s by my radical friends of that time as meaningless. They used to say (and as I've said here before): "If the ruling class rules and the working class works, what does the middle class do, middle?"
No, what we have in this country—very much like many so-called "developing countries" or what used to be called "the third world" or more honestly in my boyhood, "poor countries"—is a ruling class of overseers, the one percent who control as much or more of this country's wealth as the bottom 95%—yep, you read that correctly—and their minions who do their bidding or more importantly do what is in the interest of that one percent—i.e. the managers of corporations, the media managers and their minions, and most of the politicians in DC and various state capitols.
Just talking to my friend got me so riled up about this stupid so-called "healthcare system" in this country I could go on a tirade for days, let alone one blog post. But I think this quote from a post on Huffington yesterday by Robert Creamer sums it up pretty obviously:
"We spend $7,290 per person and end up in 37th place. They [the French] spend only $3,601 and they are number one. That's just not right.
On the average, Frenchmen live almost three years longer than the average American. That's infuriating.
What's more, every legal resident of France is covered by health insurance, and in the U.S. 46 million people are uninsured. When someone in France goes to the hospital, everything except a small co-payment is covered - it's that simple.
The government doesn't deliver health care in France. Private doctors and hospitals do most of that. It just provides health insurance for everyone.
[For the whole article go here.]
How simple. How successful. How too democratic and in the spirit of equality and justice for all. Not in the USA! Oh no. Here it's "every man [and woman and child] for themselves" and what's the wealthiest one percent is theirs and what's ours is theirs too, and we can die trying to fix it, because their minions ain't giving up access to their small chunk of that wealth for our sakes.
[And here's another Huff Post article that answers the GOP criticisms of "the public option" in a pretty original way.]
Under Cobra, the system that allows workers to continue with their health plan by making their own payments, it's costing my friend fourteen hundred—one thousand four hundred—dollars A MONTH to continue health care coverage for themselves and their family.
Not only is this adding to the general stress of the ways in which the Great Recession has hit this family, and causing greater stress which in turn I am sure contributes to the health issues, but my friend and the doctors involved have to find ways around looking for some obvious causes that may be long term and therefore the health plan may not cover!
My friend and their family is what this country calls "middle class"—a term rejected in the 1960s by my radical friends of that time as meaningless. They used to say (and as I've said here before): "If the ruling class rules and the working class works, what does the middle class do, middle?"
No, what we have in this country—very much like many so-called "developing countries" or what used to be called "the third world" or more honestly in my boyhood, "poor countries"—is a ruling class of overseers, the one percent who control as much or more of this country's wealth as the bottom 95%—yep, you read that correctly—and their minions who do their bidding or more importantly do what is in the interest of that one percent—i.e. the managers of corporations, the media managers and their minions, and most of the politicians in DC and various state capitols.
Just talking to my friend got me so riled up about this stupid so-called "healthcare system" in this country I could go on a tirade for days, let alone one blog post. But I think this quote from a post on Huffington yesterday by Robert Creamer sums it up pretty obviously:
"We spend $7,290 per person and end up in 37th place. They [the French] spend only $3,601 and they are number one. That's just not right.
On the average, Frenchmen live almost three years longer than the average American. That's infuriating.
What's more, every legal resident of France is covered by health insurance, and in the U.S. 46 million people are uninsured. When someone in France goes to the hospital, everything except a small co-payment is covered - it's that simple.
The government doesn't deliver health care in France. Private doctors and hospitals do most of that. It just provides health insurance for everyone.
[For the whole article go here.]
How simple. How successful. How too democratic and in the spirit of equality and justice for all. Not in the USA! Oh no. Here it's "every man [and woman and child] for themselves" and what's the wealthiest one percent is theirs and what's ours is theirs too, and we can die trying to fix it, because their minions ain't giving up access to their small chunk of that wealth for our sakes.
[And here's another Huff Post article that answers the GOP criticisms of "the public option" in a pretty original way.]
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
BRICK CITY
There's a heartbreaking but also heartwarming serial documentary playing this week on the Sundance Channel called BRICK CITY.
(Thanks to Jaina for hipping me to it.)
It's co-directed by two of the producers (Mark Levin and Mark Benjamin—Forest Whitaker is a producer as well) and follows several city residents, officials and others over the course of last summer, 2008, in Newark, New Jersey.
Newark is a city I have a lot of personal history with. My mother came from there and her parents still lived there when I was born. I had many cousins on my father's side who lived there as I was growing up. It was our "downtown"—where we went to shop for new school clothes and Easter outfits (the famous-to-us Bamburger's Department Store).
It's where we often went to the movies, the arcades, to concerts of popular, jazz and rock'roll bands and singers. I played music in bars and clubs there as a young man, after going to a boy's Catholic Prep day school there, St. Benedict's that at that time catered mostly to the two largest immigrant groups in the area—Italians and Irish—as a means for getting their boys into college and hopefully into a profession (now the main ethnic group there is African-Americans, and the school is much bigger and better and more varied in its approaches to learning than the strict place I attended, thanks to an alumni that is said to be second in this country only to Notre Dame's).
I dated many girls who lived In Newark, including those from other than Irish Catholic families which meant me being an interloper in neighborhoods that weren't necessarily so welcoming to an Irish Catholic boy (including Italian-American girls and African-American girls, at a time when that was not just frowned on but could lead to much trouble and even physical harm from all sides), and so on.
This was all before what most people in this area who are old enough call "the riots"—but some call "the rebellion" or "uprising" etc. that occurred during the 1960s, mainly on two separate occasions but the last of which in 1967 caused permanent damage to what was beginning to be called "the ghetto" as it was almost completely burned down (the results of which are still in evidence in empty fenced in lots where wooden row houses went up like tinder and have still not been replaced or where government financed brick townhouses have risen in the now landscaped ruins, or where single brick or cement buildings remain standing from my boyhood days there).
But even before that, there was a campaign whose aim was to build a "New Newark" as the then city hall called it. Yet here we are almost a half century later and parts of Newark still reflect what happened in the 1960s. It's known as BRICK CITY partly because it has a lot of structures built of bricks, and once was a city that made a lot of bricks, but mostly these days because it's seen as such a hard place to live, and you have to be hard to survive in it.
This documentary follows mayor Cory Booker on his rounds, especially with meetings of his top police command, but also with possible investors (in a meeting with some Chinese officials he and his staff get across the reality that Newark has a huge international airport, closer to New York City than any of New York's airports ironically, a huge port, one of the biggest in the world I think they claim, and yet it's a lot cheaper than New York or New Orleans etc., one Chinese official nods and says something like "New Jersey cheap, yes, okay, that's good, New Jersey cheap") and ex-cons and students and the array of his constituency.
It also follows some individual citizens, most fascinatingly, a young, pregnant, female member of the Bloods named Jayda who is both troubled and in trouble, but is also articulate and a charismatic screen presence (in fact, it's interesting to note that almost all the people in the film who are struggling just to survive and/or come from "the streets" as they say [including the police chief and some other city and school officials], are natural movie stars—i.e. you can't stop watching them and want to see more—whereas the people with the power and the money come across mostly, not entirely, as almost lifeless in comparison).
It's well worth watching if you can get it, or when it comes out on DVD. People have been bugging me for years to watch THE WIRE and THE SOPRANOS and other shows about deep seated urban—and their nearby suburban—crime and other problems. I checked them out and saw what everybody was digging in these shows, the grittiness of a reality shaped by great storytelling and acting. But BRICK CITY is the antidote to that fictionalized reality. It's the real thing.
(Thanks to Jaina for hipping me to it.)
It's co-directed by two of the producers (Mark Levin and Mark Benjamin—Forest Whitaker is a producer as well) and follows several city residents, officials and others over the course of last summer, 2008, in Newark, New Jersey.
Newark is a city I have a lot of personal history with. My mother came from there and her parents still lived there when I was born. I had many cousins on my father's side who lived there as I was growing up. It was our "downtown"—where we went to shop for new school clothes and Easter outfits (the famous-to-us Bamburger's Department Store).
It's where we often went to the movies, the arcades, to concerts of popular, jazz and rock'roll bands and singers. I played music in bars and clubs there as a young man, after going to a boy's Catholic Prep day school there, St. Benedict's that at that time catered mostly to the two largest immigrant groups in the area—Italians and Irish—as a means for getting their boys into college and hopefully into a profession (now the main ethnic group there is African-Americans, and the school is much bigger and better and more varied in its approaches to learning than the strict place I attended, thanks to an alumni that is said to be second in this country only to Notre Dame's).
I dated many girls who lived In Newark, including those from other than Irish Catholic families which meant me being an interloper in neighborhoods that weren't necessarily so welcoming to an Irish Catholic boy (including Italian-American girls and African-American girls, at a time when that was not just frowned on but could lead to much trouble and even physical harm from all sides), and so on.
This was all before what most people in this area who are old enough call "the riots"—but some call "the rebellion" or "uprising" etc. that occurred during the 1960s, mainly on two separate occasions but the last of which in 1967 caused permanent damage to what was beginning to be called "the ghetto" as it was almost completely burned down (the results of which are still in evidence in empty fenced in lots where wooden row houses went up like tinder and have still not been replaced or where government financed brick townhouses have risen in the now landscaped ruins, or where single brick or cement buildings remain standing from my boyhood days there).
But even before that, there was a campaign whose aim was to build a "New Newark" as the then city hall called it. Yet here we are almost a half century later and parts of Newark still reflect what happened in the 1960s. It's known as BRICK CITY partly because it has a lot of structures built of bricks, and once was a city that made a lot of bricks, but mostly these days because it's seen as such a hard place to live, and you have to be hard to survive in it.
This documentary follows mayor Cory Booker on his rounds, especially with meetings of his top police command, but also with possible investors (in a meeting with some Chinese officials he and his staff get across the reality that Newark has a huge international airport, closer to New York City than any of New York's airports ironically, a huge port, one of the biggest in the world I think they claim, and yet it's a lot cheaper than New York or New Orleans etc., one Chinese official nods and says something like "New Jersey cheap, yes, okay, that's good, New Jersey cheap") and ex-cons and students and the array of his constituency.
It also follows some individual citizens, most fascinatingly, a young, pregnant, female member of the Bloods named Jayda who is both troubled and in trouble, but is also articulate and a charismatic screen presence (in fact, it's interesting to note that almost all the people in the film who are struggling just to survive and/or come from "the streets" as they say [including the police chief and some other city and school officials], are natural movie stars—i.e. you can't stop watching them and want to see more—whereas the people with the power and the money come across mostly, not entirely, as almost lifeless in comparison).
It's well worth watching if you can get it, or when it comes out on DVD. People have been bugging me for years to watch THE WIRE and THE SOPRANOS and other shows about deep seated urban—and their nearby suburban—crime and other problems. I checked them out and saw what everybody was digging in these shows, the grittiness of a reality shaped by great storytelling and acting. But BRICK CITY is the antidote to that fictionalized reality. It's the real thing.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
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