William Burroughs on depression: "Feed your cats"

That unlikely cat-fancier William Burroughs found in their feline company an antidote to depression and suicide, and at the very least wondered what might happen to his companions when he was no longer able to care for them. Such tender mercies he extended to few in the human condition.

Online at the current Exquisite Corpse, Simone Ellis presents an interview with Burroughs that was done in 1989. As ever WSB strikes his favorite pose of irascible sage, which became his favorite guise to interviewers as he grew older. The author of The Cat Inside -- who was host to a succession of cat-familiars and other hangers-on -- found despair the unforgivable sin and worked on multiple projects to keep himself from peering into the inevitable abyss.

Here's Burroughs, worrying about the future welfare of his cats, amid the far-ranging chat from Egyptian hieroglyphics to spotting alien spacecraft:

WSB: Do you know that famous story about the Zen Master who appeared before the Emperor with his paintings? He bowed three times and disappeared into his paintings.

SE: ah ya. (laughs) do you think that will ever happen to you? Or does it often happen to you?

WSB: I hope. I hope. Yeah. (long pause) You know… I think the only really important function for people is to feed their …cats.

SE: (slightly uneasy laugh)

WSB: That would bother me more than anything else... when I pass. If I should die? That’s what would deter me from suicide… My cats … my cats… what would happen to my cats?

SE (an audible sigh, and then quickly…) Not that you’re gonna…. (Simultaneous with his reply…)

WSB: Not that I ever … everyone looks at me reeel funny when I say that I have never considered suicide.

SE: Never considered it?

WSB: Never considered it.

SE: … huh.

WSB: Never considered it.

SE: But you’ve haven’t always had cats, William?

WSB: uh… oh….no… well… I

SE: …but you had other reasons?

WSB: Well humm, I never considered suicide. Well whether you consider that there is a life after death or whether you don’t, I don’t see how suicide could be other than deleterious to your ummmm …chances.

SE: Deleterious?

WSB: Yes! I mean say you believe in life after death and you’ve committed suicide, what you’ve done is you have admitted the unforgivable sin of despair…

SE: (chuckles)

WSB: … that is you have not tried to come to grips with whatever problems that you’ve had. ...

Flann O'Brien: "The Workingman's Friend," and Word of Mouth tonight in Athens, GA

Yesterday, October 5, was the birthday of Irish poet and playwright Flann O'Brien, born Brian Ó Nualláin, who published At Swim-Two-Birds in 1939. It should not go unremarked that he also wrote "The Workingman's Friend," about the consolations of porter, the drink that sees all men through their times of triumph as well as tribulation. In honor of the occasion, let all raise a glass to the memory of the good Irishman, who had the humor to die on April Fool's Day, 1966.

“When things go wrong and will not come right,

Though you do the best you can,

When life looks black as the hour of night -

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“When money's tight and hard to get

And your horse has also ran,

When all you have is a heap of debt -

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“When health is bad and your heart feels strange,

And your face is pale and wan,

When doctors say you need a change,

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“When food is scarce and your larder bare

And no rashers grease your pan,

When hunger grows as your meals are rare -

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“In time of trouble and lousy strife,

You have still got a darlint plan

You still can turn to a brighter life -

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

"About her zebraic arcane," by Ralph La Charity

Ralph La Charity at tonight's Word of Mouth, Athens GA

As if any proof is needed that poetry and a pint make good company, there's the Word of Mouth poetry read at The Globe in Athens. Tonight will feature a reading by Cincinnati poet/artist Ralph La Charity, as well as local Athens-area wordsmiths. The once-a-month meet is getting popular in the upstairs space, and the open reading list fills up quickly, so poets and listeners are advised to show up early. Pints and other libations liberally served, and the word-sling begins at 8 p.m.

"Aloud Allowed"

by Ralph La Charity

Do the old ones who are gone

hear us when we ring in, singing?

I believe they do. It is all & precisely

what they do. When I'm dead,

I'll listen, too.

The old ones who are still here

have vivid dreams of those they knew

who now inhabit silence.

Death, overpopulated ear

cocked & rotting & never not

filled with such promise . . .

Since what the dead do is listen

it is crucial not to address them:

every uttered word is already overheard

& their overwhelming promise,

as last mute magicians cocked & rotting,

is that the word alive

go elsewhere always,

antic & aloud

Pierre Joris: "Why do I translate?"

The Nomadics blog of Pierre Joris is one of those truly rare things on the internet these days, a delight to read on a regular basis. The author, teacher, and translator (not necessarily in that particular order) has interesting things to write on many topics, from linguistics to melting Arctic ice, with a global perspective welcome in America's ever-more-parochial age.

He also, very obviously, enjoys writing in many different forms. From his own biography, Joris has written more than forty books (poetry, essays and translations) while also teaching at SUNY Albany. He's translated Picasso and Kurt Schwitters into English, Kerouac and Corso, Pete Townshend and Sam Shepard into French. Forthcoming in late 2010/2011 are Paul Celan: The Meridian (Stanford University Press), Exile is my Trade: The Habib Tengour Reader (Black Widow Press), and The Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (poems).

And, of course, he blogs. Here's a recent post showing that even a polymath ransacks his files looking for material and occasionally finds something that illuminates not only his writing but his personality as well. By way of introduction to his entertaining blog, here's an excerpt from "Seven minutes on translation" which is worth a mention.

Why do I translate?

Because it pleases me.

Because it beats watching television, except when the Mets are on, but they play so lousily much of the time that I avert my eyes & continue to translate looking up only to check the score.

Because, to be frank, I want to know what the poets in Ghana are up to.

Because I am foolish enough to believe the 16th C philosopher & poet Giordano Bruno who said that all science has its origin in translation, and was burned at the stake for that and a few other peccadilloes in 1600 on the Campo Fioro in Rome. Bruno is of course the patron saint of translators.

Because by accident of birth I was blessed or damned with a batch of different languages and a perverse pleasure of pitting them and their different musics against each other.

Because I can.

Because I love doing it.

Because I have to because if I and everybody else don’t translate the world will be a way shittier place than it already is. ...

Because I speak with many-forked tongue and always wanted to be a Mescalero Apache healer.

Because the congealed mass of anglo-‘merican ugliness, greed & basic Christian fascism will continue to blow up the people & libraries & homes & museums of a hundred Baghdads unless we can make enough American citizens realize the beauty of the other, of the poetry of the other, of the speech of all the others. ...

Because, although I gave up translating into French a number of years ago, last year I could not resist saying yes to translating 25 pages of Allen Ginsberg’s poems for a French version of Philip Glass’ opera Hydrogen Jukebox, given that the last time I saw Allen in Paris he asked be to be involved with the translations of his work, something I had neglected to do until now when the occasion to pay back my dues presented itself out of the blue.

Because the Mets are losing again.

"Oconee River, Athens," by Felicia Mitchell

Photo of Felicia Mitchell (on the laptop) by Bunny Medeiros

Oconee River, Athens

by Felicia Mitchell

It has been a year now

since I saw a hawk

resting on a tree branch

overhanging the riverbank

while I walked at dusk

with an old friend who talked

about this bird and other hawks

and about kayaking the river

and about how brown water flows

from the Oconee to faucets in town,

pumped from a river’s basin

into our mouths, into my mouth,

where it can be as hard to shape words

to describe a hawk on a riverbank

as it is to spot a red-shouldered hawk

perched in a tree by a river in a city—

but sometimes words flow

like a river and you find

a hawk resting there.

"Oconee River, Athens" originally appeared in Blogging Along Tobacco Road in January, 2010.

Fred Tomaselli: "escapism was our dominant commodity."

"Field Guides," photocollage by Fred Tomaselli (2003)

The current issue of BOMB magazine features an interview with artist Fred Tomaselli, whose geometrically-arannged assemblages are both beautiful and provocative. Although his work doesn't draw from specific pop-culture images there is a free-wheeling use of bright color, strong line, and bold shape that echo the immediate impact of commercial advertising, and with reason; as a child in California his bedroom window looked out over the candy-apple colors of Disneyland.

His collages -- many with whirling, jewel-like appliques in a ground occupied by human figures -- are layered with acrylic, a gloss that enhances what Tomaselli refers to in the interview as his escapist art: "it seemed that escapism was our dominant commodity," he tells David Shields, whose recent book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010) is itself a kaleidoscope of thoughts about the disconnect between current writing and contemporary thought. Shields makes the case for a new approach to writing which is increasingly open to "unprocessed material": “randomness, openness to accident and serendipity; . . . criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; . . . a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.” The internet as a new, random, reflexive source for the creative artist.

Here's an excerpt from Tomaselli's BOMB interview reflecting on America's burgeoning "culture of the unreal" in his childhood.

Fred Tomaselli California played a significant role in inventing and perfecting our “culture of the unreal,” and my sense of reality has been forever altered by growing up there. Back then, both the left and the right were actively manipulating reality in rather novel ways and a lot of those manipulations escaped like kudzu to infest the rest of America. On the right, you had the corporate-entertainment/government complex, which gave us Disneyland, Hollywood, Richard Nixon, and, of course, Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s masterful blending of entertainment and politics first succeeded in California. After he became president, our nation of toddlers would never again accept anything less than “happy talk” from its future leaders.

At roughly the same time you had post-Manson/Altamont California, which was not a very pretty place. You had the Symbionese Liberation Army literally going up in flames and throngs of burned-out hippies disappearing into the New Age, but all that seemed to be happening somewhere else, like in rural communes or on TV. What I mostly saw was a baroque mix of youth culture on the skids: coked-up disco freaks, gang bangers, bikers, flamboyant glam rockers, skuzzy stoners and, a bit later, punk rockers.

Like many disaffected, white, working-class youth at that time, I was a stoner (a hippie without ideology, I guess) and then I eventually morphed into a punk rocker. While I slogged through the big wipeout of the ’70s, another crash-and-burn was going on as modernism was coming undone. All that utopianism had been reduced to smoldering rubble and it seemed appropriate to dig into this trash heap of history and see if there was anything worth saving.

The one big common denominator in all of this was our culture of escapism. Even though serious artists weren’t supposed to make escapist art, it seemed that escapism was our dominant commodity—it was responsible for the shape this country was in. It was also somewhat responsible for the shape I was in, so I started there. ...

"Organism," photocollage by Fred Tomaselli (2005)

Tomaselli's careful constructions are a visual reflection of how unlimited choice can lead to a need for escape. Human figures are surrounded by galaxies of bright objects, about to be overwhelmed by a process of choice made no less random by the every object's apparent availability. In such a situation, how does the individual make critical decisions? Tomaselli's California childhood made it apparent that, in an unreal American culture at least, we could have it all. The realities of a new century, however, remind us that there are limits to everything: even in a seemingly infinite age of information, the individual, and the artist, retains the necessary ability to choose.

Banned Books Week: Are there books that should be banned?

A recent column in the Christian Science Monitor, "5 books almost anyone might want to burn," sparked a storm of responses when it suggested there are certain books that ought to be destroyed. "What about books that take on some seriously taboo topics, like Holocaust denial, terrorism, sadism, or pedophilia?" the writer, Husna Haq, suggested, providing a short list of books that "strangely, have never been banned." Hitler and Osama bin Laden are represented -- as well as the Marquis de Sade.

The result was an emphatic "no" from readers. In a subsequent article Haq took a step back and considers that no matter how repugnant the contents may be, the act of banning a book is dangerous indeed, writing further that those who attempt to ban books, especially on political grounds, are often trying to revise history or control the thoughts and collective psyche of society.

With that said the article considers the fate of writers whose works have been banned for political or unpopular reasons, and who have been jailed, abducted, or even killed for their work. On this last day of Banned Books Week 2010 readers should remember that the idea of censorship is a continuing struggle worldwide.

Here is an excerpt of Haq's article published in the Christian Science Monitor of October 1, titled "Let's not forget the writers."

Banned Books Week tends to focus on books rather than their authors. And many of the spotlighted books were published decades and centuries ago, putting their authors out of harm’s way. ...

This year celebrate Banned Books Week by doing more than reading banned books from decades past. Instead, try learning about contemporary writers and journalists whose governments have banned their works – and often imprisoned or tortured them – in an attempt to control the thoughts of the citizens by controlling what they can read.

They may be the Orwells and Paines of tomorrow.

(Above: Eynulla Fatullayev. Below: Prageeth Eknaligoda)

Azerbaijani journalist Eynulla Fatullayev wrote a series of articles critical of his government. One discussed consequences for Azerbaijan of a US-Iranian war, which Azerbaijani authorities perceived as a threat of terrorism, according to Amnesty. Mr. Fatullayev was sentenced to 8-1/2 years in prison. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that his conviction violated rights to free expression, that he had been unfairly tried, and that there was “no justification for the imposition of a prison sentence.”

Uighur poet Nurmuhemmet Yasin is serving a 10-year prison sentence for writing an allegorical short story that Chinese authorities consider a condemnation of their rule in the Xingiant Uighur Autonomous Region.

Like many before her, Iranian journalist Hengameh Shahidi is serving a six-year sentence in Evin prison, Tehran, for articles she has written deemed critical by the regime.

Journalist and human rights defender Chekib el-Khiari is serving a three-year sentence in Morocco’s Taza prison for his writings.

Sri Lankan journalist, cartoonist, and political analyst Prageeth Eknaligoda disappeared soon after he left work at the Lanka-e-News office Jan. 24, 2010. His family suspects he was abducted by the government for his criticism of President Rajapaksa.

Banned Books Week: One best-selling author's battle with censorship

Ellen Hopkins is the New York Times bestselling author of Crank, Burned, Impulse, Glass, Identical, Tricks, and Fallout. Her novels are praised by teens and adults, as she has said, because her readers tell her "that my books don't feel like fiction, and that my characters feel like friends."

She recently wrote at The Huffington Post about her experience with parents and schools that find her books and their subject matter too adult for young readers. This has resulted in cancellations, school bans, and "dis-invitations," as Hopkins refers to the awkward process of rescinding appearances before school groups, made sometimes by representatives who have not actually read her books.

Earlier this year she created an anti-censorship poem, "Manifesto." Her publisher, Simon and Schuster, supports Hopkins's efforts to confront censorship and prominently features a link to the poem on her author page. Here's an excerpt from her article at The Huffington Post. "Manifesto" can be read there as well.

Some call my books edgy; others say they're dark. They do explore tough subject matter -- addiction, abuse, thoughts of suicide, teen prostitution. But they bring young adult readers a middle-aged author's broader perspective. They show outcomes to choices, offer understanding. And each is infused with hope. I don't sugarcoat, but neither is the content gratuitous. Something would-be censors could only know if they'd actually read the books rather than skimming for dirty words or sexual content.

My first dis-invitation was last year in Norman, Oklahoma. I had donated a school visit to a charity auction. The winning bid came from a middle school librarian, who was excited to have me talk to her students about poetry, writing process and reaching for their dreams. Except, two days before the visit, a parent challenged one of my books for "inappropriate content." She demanded it be pulled from all middle school libraries in the district. And also that no student should hear me speak.

The superintendent, who hadn't read my books, agreed, prohibiting me from speaking to any school in the district. The librarian scrambled and I spoke community-wide at the nearby Hillsdale Baptist Freewill College. (The challenged book, by the way, was later replaced in the middle school libraries.) The timing was exceptional, if unintentional. It was Banned Books Week 2009, and my publisher, Simon & Schuster, had recently created a broadside of a poem I'd written for the occasion. My "Manifesto" was currently

being featured in bookstores and libraries across the country.

Segue to August 2010. Simon & Schuster repackaged "Manifesto" just about the time another dis-invitation took place. Humble, Texas is a suburb of Houston, and every other year the Humble Independent School District organizes a teen literature festival. I was invited to headline the January 2011 event. The term "invitation" would later be debated, as no formal contract was signed. But through a series of email exchanges, the invitation was extended, I agreed, we settled on an honorarium, and I blocked out the date on my calendar (thus turning down other invitations).

This time it was a middle school librarian who initiated the dis-invitation. Apparently concerned about my being in the vicinity of her students, she got a couple of parents riled and they approached two members of the school board. Again, no one read my books. Rather, according to the superintendent, he relied on his head librarian's research -- a website that rates content. He ordered my "removal" from the festival roster, despite several librarians rallying in my defense.

According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, removing an author from an event because someone disagrees with their ideas or content in their books meets the definition of censorship. And in protest, five of the seven other festival authors -- Pete Hautman, Melissa de la Cruz, Matt de la Pena, Tera Lynn Childs and Brian Meehl -- withdrew. Our books are all very different. But our voices are united against allowing one person, or a handful of people, to speak for an entire community. ...