“New Year's Eve always terrifies me” (Bukowski)

... each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand --
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,I don't know ...” 

"Pull A String, A Puppet Moves"

Charles Bukowski, from

Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame:

Selected Poems 1955-1973

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe, just '60s kids in the Village

"I was a dreamy somnambulent child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with my inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat." (Patti Smith)

The young, daydreaming wizard of southern New Jersey soon intuits that New York City is a more appropriate stage for her talents, and by the summer of 1967 Patti Smith is sleeping in Village doorways and living for art. Her bohemian dreams coincide with those already there and just as hungry. Robert Mapplethorpe is dropping LSD and already drawing his visions of the universe when they become friends, Dante and Beatrice on the Lower East Side.

Just Kids (Ecco/Harper) is a valentine to the blossoming relationship they shared and which deepened until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The memoir is Patti being tough and tender, romantic in the way artists often remember their own struggle, and filled with the people who made music and art their passion in New York of the 1970s. Robert's drawing and photography develops its challenging reputation as Patti begins to sing her own music, and this became a common creative bond that propels them in their personal life as much as their careers. For Patti the book allows her to wrap her troubles in dreams, even as the threadbare bohemian life becomes a distant memory through rock and roll.

As she re-traces the past, the book's real charm comes in the personal glances at Robert's life and career. His death in 1989 from AIDS and a portfolio of controversial images has made him, still, a confounding figure to many art historians. Just Kids allows a look at the artist as a friend and a companion, with his own troubles and dreams: he meets John McKendry, married and the curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:"John's devotion to Robert's work spilled over to Robert himself. Robert accepted John's gifts and took advantage of opportunities that John opened up for him, but he was never interested in Robert as a romantic partner. John was sensitive, volatile, and physically fragile, qualities that would not attract Robert. He admired (John's wife) Maxime, who was strong and ambitious with an impeccable pedigree. Perhaps he may have been cavalier with John's feelings, for as time went on, he found himself entangled within a destructive romantic obsession."

The savvy curator and the romantic bohemian are a good match: "John McKendry could not have given Robert a better gift than the tools he needed to devote himself to photography," Smith goes on. "Robert was thoroughly smitten, obsessed not only with the process, but also its place in the arts."

This is a carefully-written and nicely detailed memoir, more gracefully artful than gratuitously salacious, although there is ample opportunity to read between the well-phrased line. Patti writes of the first musician she knew: "I never knew if his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe."

For the girl who loved Motown and r & b, New York in the 1970s became the land of a thousand dances as she wanders in and out of the music and poetry scenes that are quickly developing. The names and locations are already familiar, from nights at the Chelsea Hotel to CBGBs. Robert is on his own trajectory, but together Patti and Robert became so entwined that Patti's marriage to Fred Smith, in 1979, sent an unexpected tremor of apprehension between the two of them. "What about us?" Robert asks. "My mother still thinks we're married." Patti hasn't considered that. "I guess you'll have to tell her we got a divorce." "I can't say that," Robert shoots back. "Catholics don't divorce."

And like the good Catholic boy who's being bad, Robert understood his work wasn't meant for everyone, and he went out of his way to show it. His first hard-core photos were in a portfolio, marked with an X, and placed in a glass case for viewing only to those over eighteen years of age. Once these images became public, he didn't hide from the eventual storm of protest and notoriety, although they formed a fraction of his work. 

Soon enough there were more important personal issues -- he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. The story is an old and eternal one: in Just Kids, passion, art, and love are redeemed by youth. If the outlines are familiar, the book is told with enough toughness to avoid being overly sentimental.

As Robert wanes, the operatic overtones of their artful romance are often leavened by Patti and Robert with wit and humor, even to the end. After his death, as his belongings are sold at auction, Patti can't make herself attend the sale, afraid she couldn't bear to watch. She recalls a phrase Robert used if he obsessed about something he couldn't have: "I'm a selfish bastard. If I can't have it I don't want anyone else to." Patti has given readers no small gift by sharing her continuing love and affection for Robert with the rest of us.

December 30 is Patti's birthday; in William Burroughs' rare admiring phrase, the poet/performer is still a "rock'n'roll shaman" at 67.

Charles Olson, born December 27, 1910

"We're all moving, moving, moving. Isn't it nice?"

Charles Olson

"Proust's Madeleine" (Kenneth Rexroth, born Dec 22, 1905)

"Proust's Madeleine"
Kenneth Rexroth 


Somebody has given my
Baby daughter a box of
Old poker chips to play with.
Today she hands me one while
I am sitting with my tired
Brain at my desk. It is red.
On it is a picture of
An elk's head and the letters
B.P.O.E.—a chip from
A small town Elks' Club. I flip
It idly in the air and
Catch it and do a coin trick
To amuse my little girl.
Suddenly everything slips aside.
I see my father
Doing the very same thing,
Whistling ``Beautiful Dreamer,''
His breath smelling richly
Of whiskey and cigars. I can
Hear him coming home drunk
From the Elks' Club in Elkhart
Indiana, bumping the 
Chairs in the dark. I can see
Him dying of cirrhosis
Of the liver and stomach
Ulcers and pneumonia,
Or, as he said on his deathbed, of
Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.


Kenneth Rexroth was born on December 22, 1905. Jonathan Williams wrote this note in 2005, and it was subsequently posted on The Jargon Society webpage: 

I want you to offer a toast to Kenneth. It is by far the best I know. Its provenance is worth a brief telling.

One wet, dark, winter’s afternoon in the 1970s, Basil Bunting, Tom Meyer, and I found ourselves in the small town of Langholm, on the River Esk, in the Borders of Scotland. Langholm is noted for being the home of one of the four or five best tweed mills in the world. And for being the birthplace of Hugh MacDiarmid, a great reprobate of a poet if there ever was one. Curiously, the town fathers had offered him “The Freedom of the Town,” a modest ceremony to allow a little extra drinking to take place. We had driven from Bellingham on the North Tyne to join in.

We found the great man at a table in the corner of the pub, surrounded by friendly mill workers, plying him with drams of Gren Fiddich single malt whisky and pints of bitter beer. MacDiarmid came to his feet when he saw Basil Bunting. “Now then, Mr. Bunting, may I propose a toast in your honour? It is from the ancient Gaelic Scots, in a new translation by me:


“MAY YOUR BOTTOM
NEVER BE USED
TO STRETCH A BANJO!” 

Edgar Allan Poe and "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym"

"Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg, in the agony of the moment, that those silent and disgusting images would stay for us, would not abandon us to become like them, would receive us among their goodly company!"

(from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 1838)

Terry Southern once quipped that the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was never found in high school reading lists "by virtue of its extreme weirdness." Today, it seems that the Gothic overtones of Poe's own life (and death) continue to make his an American story of excess and a mythic, singular literary weirdness of its own.

By the standards of any age, it was a miserable way to go; in his surviving papers he left begging letters to magazine editors asking for as little as $10 to pay the fare to Richmond or Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe, dark romantic writer and poet credited with inventing the genre of detective fiction, then suffered a death far more Gothic and gloomy than any of his stories.

It began badly when he was found, aged 40, wandering the streets of Baltimore, penniless, raving unintelligibly, dressed in someone else's clothes, possibly having been beaten up. He died four days later, on October 7, 1849, in the hospital, having uttered the final words: "Lord, help my poor soul."

From there it only got worse, although he was at the time probably the most famous writer in America. His cousin Neilson Poe omitted to tell anyone he had died, and so fewer than ten people turned up for the funeral. The priest couldn't be bothered to give a sermon, and the entire ceremony lasted three minutes.

But since his pauper's death Poe has left a rich and extraordinary literary legacy. His innovations in detective writing can be seen as the direct antecedent to Sherlock Holmes, for instance, and to the story-telling style of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His stories also sparked the expansive and creative imagination of Jules Verne.

His "Balloon Hoax" of 1844 - in which he wrote a newspaper article reporting as fact the fictitious crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon -- cuts a straight path to Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds 94 years later. And Dan Brown's huge success with The Da Vinci Code would have been impossible without Poe's "The Gold-Bug," in which Poe incorporated ciphers as part of the story.

But it is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket -- Poe's only complete novel -- that sends grisly shivers down the spines of many readers. Its bizarre images of cannibalism, unexplained plague, and travelers shouting to the dead on a doomed vessel (and the fear of the dead receiving them "in their goodly company") are elements in a unique horror tale that should find a prominent place in today's ever-expanding pop market of vampires and zombies and flesh-eaters of all kinds:

At this instant another sudden yaw brought the region of the forecastle for a moment into view, and we beheld at once the origin of the sound. We saw the tall stout figure still leaning on the bulwark, and still nodding his head to and fro, but his face was now turned from us so that we could not behold it. His arms were extended over the rail, and the palms of his hands fell outward. His knees were lodged upon a stout rope, tightly stretched, and reaching from the heel of the bowsprit to a cathead. On his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge sea-gull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood.

Poe himself brings the story to an uncertain, abrupt edge-of-the-world end that leaves the tale unresolved: the boat is headed through a final portal guided by a ghostly, white figure that suggests beyond is the South Pole -- or another world entirely, marked with Arabic signs and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

In 2009, to the amusement of Poe experts, the double anniversary of the start and end of his life led to an unseemly scramble between several US cities -- notably Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston -- to claim "ownership" of the writer.

In Baltimore, nearly 160 years almost to the day since his sorry passing, Poe finally was given the send off that his multitude of fans passionately believe he deserved. A life-size recreation of his body was carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his home in Amity Street, to the Westminster Burying Ground, where not one, but two full-length ceremonies were held in front of an estimated 700 admirers.

Playing their ace card, organizers of the Baltimore funeral put out a press release: "We have the body!"

"There's a somewhat symbolic struggle going on to claim him," said Stephen Rachman, president of the Poe Studies Association. Of all the great classical American writers of the 19th century -- Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name but three -- Poe had the most hapless existence. "Poor Edgar Allan Poe, of them all he was the poorest; his life was very precarious," Rachman said.

Jean Genet (born December 19, 1910): "dreaming is nursed in darkness"

No matter how "civilized" a nation appears, it is the individual who must live daily within its socialized constraints no matter how difficult. The current debate over the National Security Administration's eavesdropping is only the most current example of how fiercely individual boundaries can be debated. 

During a state of war, the rules of civilized society and its accepted boundaries are suspended for many reasons. Jean Genet's dark and chaotic daily world found an answering echo in the chaos of World War II, a conflict which was a trick mirror to life's surface appearance of order and propriety. For those who know Genet's work, "dark" is used here in the way Nabokov's Lolita can be described as "humorous" -- which it is, with its waves of world-weary acceptance.

The author who was abandoned as a child, and who turned his life of juvenile crime into a novel (The Thief's Journal), eventually snubbed the French literary establishment which had ignored his work by refusing to accept its later awards. He who writes well enjoys the last laugh.

From a literary point-of-view, this is great reputation building. Yet reading Genet's last novel, Funeral Rites, is a sobering experience in the moral and ethical questions of war -- serious questions for a writer who was a sexual outsider. The author who once famously said "I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green," here treats war as the universal human condition.

What individuals do in war, as well as love, transcends the boundaries of politics, idealism, or ethics. Funeral Rites is a serious book about the differences between men, the governments who send them to die, and the personal conflicts that seek some kind of resolution in the confusion of battle (and sexual attraction).

The novel's plot becomes a funhouse mirror of relationships formed in immediate circumstance. Genet himself is the thinly-disguised narrator, who then becomes a character in the novel, and then part of a fantasy relationship during war-time France. (Genet's dead lover's brother is Hitler's lover too, in Genet's war-time fantasy).
Is it meant to be humorous? Yes, in the ironic sense; when the normal order of life is stripped away, a sense of humor (and acceptance) is a welcome defense against the rising tide of death and uncertainty. There's a long literary history of ironic war humor: Heller and Vonnegut are the familiar ironists from an American perspective: their tales are told by the winners, leavened by obvious humor. Genet's European tale is darker, but with the same themes of sex, fate, and fantasy.


The book begins as a eulogy to Genet's lover and resistance fighter, also named Jean, killed on August 20, 1944 during the street-fighting for the recapture of Paris. The lover's brother is likely a German collaborator; at Jean's funeral he meets his lover's mother, a bourgeois middle-class woman who is hiding a Nazi officer. From the mother's "pink, plump face" to the neighbor's assessment of the 20-year old dead soldier's simple pine-wood coffin, Genet's sharp description of middle-class values could be an echo of Flaubert in Madame Bovary:

"We had not come to see a face but the dead Jean D., and our expectation was so fervent that he had a right to manifest himself, without surprising us, in any way whatsoever.
'They don't go in for style these days,' she said. Heavy and gleaming, like the most gorgeous of dahlias, Jean's mother, who was still very beautiful, had raised her mourning veil. Her eyes were dry, but the tears had left a subtle and luminous snail track on her pink, plump face from the eyes to the chin. She looked at the pine wood of the coffin.
'Oh, you can't expect quality nowadays,' replied another woman in deep mourning who was next to her."

In the confusion of war-ravaged Paris, Genet fantasizes a relationship with the Nazi officer and another German soldier. One reviewer notes Genet's potshots at the French middle class: even in the middle of chaos and German tanks advancing on Paris, a woman retires to her bedchamber so she can, as Genet properly puts it, "release her wind," rather than embarrass herself in front of her "client," a German soldier.

In a move Genet privately expected, the book's original French publisher balked at the last moment -- the experience of war just past was too new, they felt, the writing too scandalous. A limited edition appeared in 1948, and was finally openly published in Paris, and a translation worldwide, in 1953.


"A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness," Genet wrote. In 1975 the French Ministry of Culture awarded him a prize, which Genet refused, for a screenplay he had written. In 1983 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres, and two years later The Balcony, which had been notoriously rejected by several producers when it was initially offered for stage production, was included among the repertory of works performed by the Comédie Francaise, a bastion of French cultural respectability.

After that, Genet was involved in various political causes, the most enduring being his association with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He moved to Jordan in 1970 and lived with the Palestinians for the next fourteen years. According to critic Mary Ann Frese Witt, Genet had a “desire to abandon stasis for action, poetics for politics.”
 
It would be interesting to discover what Genet thinks of America's current debates, from records surveillance to income inequality. He would not be surprised to discover the old issues haven't substantially changed: even well into in the 21st century, the haves and the have-nots are having at it, again.

"Crimes of which a people are ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man." (Jean Genet)

Reynolds Price, 2002: "the South was a very separate country"

Bomb magazine offers a surprising mix of artists and writers talking together, often across disciplines. The magazine's website also includes pieces from the archives, such as a warm 2002 conversation between Reynolds Price and Caleb Smith, who was studying at Duke University at the time. Smith has gone on to teach at Yale, and his academic interests have included topics from antebellum literature to his 2009 Yale University Press book, The Prison and the American Imagination.

The Bomb interview, part of which is excerpted here, is a comfortable chat between teacher and student. Price died in January 2011; he was diagnosed with a spinal cancer in 1984 which left him a paraplegic. The illness did nothing to dampen the author's wit or his opinions. As Smith notes in 2002 about Price at his home in Durham, North Carolina: "He sits on his wheelchair more like a monarch on a throne. ... Reynolds and I poured a drink and talked. Recorded here is simply a visit, which between us is something shared, not paid."

RP I wasn’t able to go to Eudora Welty’s funeral in August, so I wanted to get down there and do something in the way of rounding off my long friendship with her. We had dinner with some of Eudora’s friends and family and went over to her house, which is sitting there empty now, waiting for museumification. It seemed both very desolate and also very haunted by her presence. She had lived in that house every day from the time she was 15 years old; she died at 92. It was her central place of residence for all those years, and there’s a lot of her still in the house. Finally we drove on through Alabama up to Atlanta, where we spent the night, then through South Carolina and on home.

The deep South is not the upper South. It’s deeply different — much older feeling (though it’s not) – and yet there are tremendous likenesses. The social life and the accents and the body language of my friends who are my age and come from Mississippi are almost identical to the ones I grew up with as a boy in eastern North Carolina. But it’s 800 miles away.
CS I’ve just come back from my first trip ever to Charleston, and it felt like even the things I was discovering about that place were somehow genealogical to me. 

RP And what does it all come out of except slavery and the Confederacy? I finally have to think that’s what the South is still about. I was born in 1933, in the Depression; and at that point, the South was a very separate country. People rarely left unless they were miserable with their station in life or fleeing their mother or father.
CS You think people’s whole imaginations about the world were more regionally bound? 

RP God, yes. My father, who was born in 1900 — a wonderfully witty and perfectly viable man — saw no reason whatever to go outside the state of North Carolina. He made a trip to New York once on business, and he couldn’t wait to get home — those harried people were driving him insane. Then in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s virtually everybody with a college education got out of the South — everybody who was interested in the arts went straight to New York City. I stayed, for complicated reasons that had nothing to do with virtue. We were the most hated place on the face of the Earth in those days, because of the tragic responses to the civil rights movement. Some of the hatred was righteous judgment on the South, and some of it was just utter hypocrisy — as though the whole nation isn’t profoundly racist.

And now, again, the South has slowly emerged and is looked upon as a very attractive part of the world — but also still very exotic and a little scary. When you get off the interstate at a diner in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and see the waiters and the staff, you realize that this ain’t Kansas, Toto.

CS I took a walk around a swamp in Charleston. You’re about a foot above the stillest green water you’ve ever seen in your life. Alligators are sunning themselves on these planks. The Spanish moss. It’s the tropical gothic that’s been so fantasized. 

RP People think we made it up. (laughter) The first time I ever went through one of those gardens was with some Duke colleagues of mine in the late 1950s, in a rowboat. You paid a young black man, probably 13 years old, to row you through the swamp. One of the people with us was British. He saw these very live alligators and this very dark water, and he said, “About how many people a year do you lose in here?” The young man said, ”’Bout 11.” (laughter) I loved his precision — 11 people vanish in that swamp in a year. 

CS Not ten, or a dozen.
RP No, 11. (laughter) That was very Southern too.....

(At top, Reynolds Price in 1961, by Wallace Kaufman from The New York Times)

Cheers, Keith! Richards turns 70.

"Gotta walk before they make me run ..."

Keith Richards, born Dec 18, 1942

Carbon footprints in the sand: the growing divide between newsprint and digital delivery

Much as the twenty-four hour news cycle and the web have their benefits (the web's attention-span disorder promises a clean slate, or a high boredom quotient, ever more rapidly -- good news for politicians at least), the permanence of the printed word itself continues to inspire hope in some unusual corners -- Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, purchased the venerable Washington Post in a move that promises unexpected surprises in the new year. 

The information on the web can't be piled up for later reading-and-tossing quite like newsprint -- you have to go look for what you want on the web -- but on the other hand, the jury's still out on the environmental impact of pixel vs. newsprint. More than likely the Amazon/Post combine will ultimately seem a good advertising and marketing move for a merchandiser's future, rather than a valiant effort to maintain print media's status quo.

The New York Times recently ran an article in its Paper Cuts blog about the ongoing question of the web's environmental impact versus newspapers' "dead-tree existence" -- Nicholson Baker finds that electronic server farms may have a broader ecological impact than the processing of ink and newsprint, and existing research figures suggest a somewhat-frustrating draw about the relative impact of each.

Until the web can be piled up like the Sunday paper in black, smudgy drifts next to the Barcalounger, it seems like newsprint will survive in some form far more messy than Kindle, and more reliably necessary than cable news. Here's an excerpt from the Jennifer Schuessler article, which can be read in full at The New York Times.

Dave Eggers, the fledgling press baron behind The San Francisco Panorama, the much-ballyhooed (and drop-dead gorgeous) newspaper by the McSweeney’s gang, has been making the rounds with his full-throated argument that the future of the news business can be written not just in pixels but with old-fashioned paper and ink.

“There are a lot of things that newsprint can do uniquely well that the Web cannot,” Eggers recently told The Chicago Tribune. “The two forms could coexist, instead of the zero-sum situation that we seem stuck in.”

As it happens, The Panorama includes an apologia for its own glorious dead-tree existence, in the form of an essay by the novelist Nicholson Baker considering “the strange possibility that the transferring of information digitally is more environmentally destructive than printing it.” (Alas, and perhaps to the point, Baker’s article, along with most of The Panorama, is not available online.)

Baker, who is on record as loving Wikipedia and Google but not the Kindle, visits the Otis paper mill in Jay, Me., which was once the world’s largest but was shut down forever last spring. The shuttering of Otis may seem like good news for trees. But the biggest threat to the Maine woods, Baker suggests, isn’t logging. It’s the kind of low-density development that comes when the logging stops.

As Don Carli, a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, put it to Baker, “Hamburgers and condos kill more trees than printed objects ever will.”

As Baker reports, some 18 paper mills closed in the United States in 2009, with more than 34 paper machines permanently shuttered. Meanwhile, the growth rate of the huge server farms needed to fuel the Internet and related gadgets is “metastasizing,” as Carli puts it to Baker.

The carbon footprint of data center server farms — roughly equal to that of paper mills today — is set to double in the next five years. And those server farms are often powered by coal, which tends to be harvested in far less sustainable ways than wood pulp. ...

Right now, there are no good accountings of the environmental impact of pixels versus paper. Until we have a better understanding, Carli said, let’s stop green-bashing the print media.

“It may provide more benefit to the environment and society than you realize,” he said. “Print itself doesn’t have a larger footprint than digital.” Without better measurements, “you can’t really make a case either way.” ...

Still time: Gift ideas from the reviews at Bellemeade Books

Here is a last round-up of previously-reviewed holiday suggestions and interesting literary sites that are worth a browse for gift ideas. As always, these can be found by clicking on the links, and books can be purchased using the Amazon search box here on Bellemeade Books. However a reader celebrates the final weeks of a departing year have a good read, and enjoy best wishes for a successful and happy new year!

(Above) How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks (Stop Smiling Books/Melville House Publishing) is a tech geek's wild ride through Dave Tompkins's ten-year research and interviews, taking tangent at every opportunity to weave together the improbable uses and history of this one technological wonder. Like most of the inescapable gadgets that come to permeate popular culture the vocoder is unrecognizable from its original form, much like the defense-industry origins of what became the internet which followed it in the 1940s. Now the electronically-altered human voice surrounds us, and How to Wreck a Nice Beach (the title is a phonetic play on the human ear's ability to recognize meaning in speech even in distorted form) is probably more history and detail than a casual reader might need, and Tompkins's writing style is that particular style of rock-music writing, the pop-baroque: Homer Dudley "invented the vocoder when he realized his mouth was a radio station while flat on his back in a Manhattan hospital bed, eyes on the ceiling, a goldfish as his witness."

The Paris Review interviews -- nearly sixty years' worth -- are now all available online, and they are a pleasure to have available at last all in a single place to discover, or discover again. Those who have wandered bookshops and old magazine stacks and stumbled on stray volumes of The Paris Review Interviews in their multi-part book form are now free to spend leisurely hours discovering that their literary heroes (and sometimes, villains) are just as they imagined -- or not as the reader imagined them at all. As expected, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and Faulkner cast long shadows, while Auden, Cheever, Anthony Burgess, and Kingsley Amis best one another's observations sounding as if they had cocktails in hand. (“After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now'": that's Terry Southern's witty 1958 talk with Henry Green.) In an unexpected wistful moment, tough-guy Hemingway lets his guard down: “. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (City Lights, 2006, edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy Peters) is an especially timely read, collecting correspondence, reporting, magazine articles, and testimony excerpts surrounding the creation of the poem and the subsequent trial. There are some genuinely affecting early letters to friends (in one he addresses Kerouac as "Dear Almond Crackerjax"). It's difficult now to comprehend what an impact the trial had on American culture. It's equally difficult to imagine contemporary culture without judge Clayton Horn's decision, or justice Potter Stewart's words: "In the free society to which the Constitution has committed us, it is for each to choose for himself." Ginsberg was so uncertain of the trial's outcome that he spent most of the time out of the country, and as a result his letters to Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Corso, and many others are a written record of the trial behind the scenes.

Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV) is a continuing experiment in getting the word out -- literally -- by vending machine. Here's an excerpt from the post at maisonnueve: Inspired by the Distriboto machines she’d seen in Montreal, Toronto poet Carey Toane dreamed up the idea of a machine that would dispense poems. When fellow poet and fiction writer Elisabeth de Mariaffi got on board, they found themselves sourcing Wrigley’s Excel gum machines on Craigslist and 3 months later, in April 2010, launched Canada’s first mechanical poetry journal, Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV).“The idea came out of the renaissance in handmade, DIY self-publishing in Toronto and the larger lit community, with all the beautiful hand-bound chapbooks and letter press books just begging to be handled and cracked open and enjoyed for their tactile qualities as much as for their content. I covet these things,” Toane says.

Visions & Affiliations is a lavish and entertaining two-volume chronology of Bay Area poetry, and part of a continuing timeline, being compiled by San Francisco writer Jack Foley and his wife Adele. 

The force of creative chaos that runs through this Bay Area history from 1940 to 2005 is less an organizing principle than, in Foley's words, a human response that defined character: "As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality." His wife noted in an interview that while Bay Area poetry is covered extensively the book is broadly about California poetry and features, among many others, such Angelean luminaries as “Tommy the Commie” (Thomas McGrath), Philomene Long, William Pillen, Amy Gerstler, and David St. John. For an excerpt from Visions and Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline 1940-2005 there is more at Jack and Adelle Foley's web page.

"The Snowy Day" and other holiday books for kids

The holidays are a special treat for children. The excitement comes not just from the expectations of holiday celebrations but the extended break from studies and, over everything, the promise of snow. Here is a short group of books with a winter theme, a selection of books about winter celebrations -- not just Christmas, but Kwanzaa and the winter solstice too.

Above: The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats (Viking Juvenile) This classic picture book isn’t strictly a holiday book, but carries a timeless appeal for its depiction of the magic of winter. A young boy awakens to find that it has snowed during the night, and goes out to explore his city under its snowy white blanket. The story is told without text, making it ideal for pre-reading children, and is a trailblazer for its depiction of a young African-American child as the protagonist.

The Shortest Day: Celebrating the Winter Solstice, by Wendy Pfeffer (Dutton Juvenile). This book simply explains the phenomenon of the winter solstice, and how and why it came to be celebrated by peoples around the world. The solstice is described primarily in the context of the natural world, making this book widely appropriate for both freethinker and religious families of all denominations. Instructions for science activities and simple solstice celebrations are also included.

Tim and Sally's Year in Poems is a good starting place for young readers. It's a jaunty and colorful trip through the seasons and their celebrations, from the sighting of springtime robins to building winter's snowman. The joys of holidays from Independence Day to Halloween, and Easter to Christmas, are captured in original poems and illustrations. There's even a bit of pause for grown-ups in the onward rush of the year: "I meant to drive to work today" celebrates simply sitting on the porch and watching the passing parade of nature, even as the hours meant for work tick away. And children get their own summer daydreaming hour, too, with its important lesson of enjoying the seasons just for themselves. More information about the author, the illustrator, and the books themselves can be found at the Tim and Sally website: www.timandsally.com.

The Magic Tree House #29: Christmas in Camelot, by Mary Pope Osborne (Random House) Reading The Magic Tree House chapter books to children can be a wonderful way to introduce them both to the concept of longer stories and to the history of America and other cultures. For children already familiar with the Magic Tree House, it can be a special treat for them to experience a seasonal story set in the world of characters they know so well. In this tale, Jack and Annie must go on a journey at Christmastime to save Camelot from being forgotten forever.

Kwanzaa Kids, by Joan Holub and Ken Wilson-Max (Puffin) This lift-the-flap book is an excellent introduction to Kwanzaa for very young children. With its many Swahili terms and different traditions, Kwanzaa can be a bit challenging for children to learn about. This book cuts to the essentials, with each two-page spread giving a very short explanation about one of the Nguzo Saba – the seven Kwanzaa principles – and showing the corresponding candles on the kinara. The illustrations are bold and colorful, and help make learning about Kwanzaa easy and fun.