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Tentatively, A Convenience
Goodreads Author
Born
in Baltimore, The United States
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Influences
YOU & them
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October 2007
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/tentativelyaconvenience
Thanks to the idiocy of Goodreads policy my books are no longer easily found & do not all appear here. Instead, 5 of them appear under "Tentatively a Convenience": https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... .
My name is "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE". It is NOT "Tentatively, A Convenience". The completely disrespectful push for conformity is on. Such 'normalization' of my spelling, wch I've been using since 1979, is a symptom of what I call "AU", Artificial Unintelligence - both that of algorithms wch can't possibly cope w/ the human imagination & that of robopathic humans - say the type of person who studied creative writing w/ a professor who isn't a creative writer & who isn't published. This type of person then proceeds to learn 'how to be Thanks to the idiocy of Goodreads policy my books are no longer easily found & do not all appear here. Instead, 5 of them appear under "Tentatively a Convenience": https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... .
My name is "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE". It is NOT "Tentatively, A Convenience". The completely disrespectful push for conformity is on. Such 'normalization' of my spelling, wch I've been using since 1979, is a symptom of what I call "AU", Artificial Unintelligence - both that of algorithms wch can't possibly cope w/ the human imagination & that of robopathic humans - say the type of person who studied creative writing w/ a professor who isn't a creative writer & who isn't published. This type of person then proceeds to learn 'how to be creative' in a completely uncreative way & goes on to not be a creative writer or to be published either but to still be convinced that they're qualified to edit actual published actual creative writers. That's a form of regrettably delusional behavior fostered in them by their inability to educate themselves outside of potty training.
Alas, some GoodReads fiend has removed my date of death! I had it as "September 3, 1953" - before my date of birth so that my death won't happen in my lifetime. Some humorless GR person must want me to die. Foo on them.
Making matters even worse, my bk "footnotes" has been removed from the database here & I'm now listed as the author of "15" bks instead of the correct SIXTEEN. "footnotes" was still for sale online the last time I checked so I highly recommend getting a copy before they disappear altogether.
OTHERWISE, please read this extensive interview w/ me by poet/essayist Alan Davies as part of "Otoliths 27" ( http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/20... ). It's a DOOZY, I promise. It'll also hopefully be published as a small & cheap bk
ALSO, my friend Anthony Levin-Decanini has started an excellent new (as of mid 2013) improvising series called "Crucible Sound" in Pittsburgh at Modernformations Gallery & I was honored by his interviewing me regarding improv for his relevant blog. I quite like the interview & I hope you do too. Here's the link for part 1:
http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...
& the link for part 2:
http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/201...
I hope you find it interesting enuf to subscribe to the blog & to check out the other programs. If you're in or nearby Pittsburgh, PLEASE ATTEND THE CRUCIBLE SOUNDS! Things like this don't last forever, but while they do they can be quite lively!!
The photo of me is by my friend Julie Gonzalez. Maybe someday I'll write a bio in here but, in the meantime, I'll just sign w/ some of my email signature:
electronically signed,
He-Who-Has-Written
Amir-ul Kafirs
Some tenuous beginnings of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory):
(for all x)x = (for all x)x (Anything is Anything)
(A Double Negative As Not A Positive)
(A finite quantity represented as a set containing
an infinite quantity of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of rational numbers)
does not equal the same finite quantity
represented as a set containing an infinite quantity
OF A DIFFERENT DEGREE of its subdivisions
(such as its subdivision in terms of irrational numbers).)
m + n does not equal n + m is isomorphic to x
the ceiling of x is greater than or equal to the ceiling of the ceiling of x
(Enough is Enough)
The Formula o ...more
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Tentatively, A Convenience
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Tentatively, A Convenience
As far as I 'know', most of these questions have been created by Goodreads staff to stimulate the 'Goodreads authors' to make public statements that m…moreAs far as I 'know', most of these questions have been created by Goodreads staff to stimulate the 'Goodreads authors' to make public statements that may be of interest to people ON Goodreads. That's all well & good. The questions are generic & more or less irrelevant to my actual praxis but that's ok. I aim to please. SO, how DO I deal with writer's block?
1st off, I don't have "writer's block". EVER. Or any other kind of creative block. Why don't we hear about "Composer's Block" or "Pornographer's Block"? Maybe the writers who have writer's block are simply impotent, people w/ no ideas worth translating into texts in the 1st place.
2nd. when I see a writer's block I want to carve it, I want to carve a swan into it & watch it melt. Is that sadistic? I don't think so, the writer's block isn't able to feel pain. Or is it? There's always Hylozoism. Maybe the writer's block is ALIVE! Did you ever think of that you insensitive impotent sniveling writer?!
3rd, when I see the writer's block I wonder whether it's a Rubik's Cube. Maybe I just need to twist those little facets until everything lines up, until everything is 'perfect'. But what wd it say to US if it cd talk? 'Please, STOP, my reactive arthritis is killing me'?
4th, there's always the risk of getting the writer's block PREGNANT. I've known thousands of deadbeat writer's block dads. Sure, they act like they're completely comfortable w/ having knocked up a block, a chip off the old block.. but are they really? Look out for those furtive glimpses at table corners, room corners.. They're thinking of the wee ones.. & that one night stand when they had to PROVE to themselves that they weren't impotent, when they were going to stick it to that writer's block no matter what it took. But did they think further? NooOooOoooOo.. Bad plotting, bad narrative structure, no outlining, no thinking of how-it-wd-all-end. (less)
1st off, I don't have "writer's block". EVER. Or any other kind of creative block. Why don't we hear about "Composer's Block" or "Pornographer's Block"? Maybe the writers who have writer's block are simply impotent, people w/ no ideas worth translating into texts in the 1st place.
2nd. when I see a writer's block I want to carve it, I want to carve a swan into it & watch it melt. Is that sadistic? I don't think so, the writer's block isn't able to feel pain. Or is it? There's always Hylozoism. Maybe the writer's block is ALIVE! Did you ever think of that you insensitive impotent sniveling writer?!
3rd, when I see the writer's block I wonder whether it's a Rubik's Cube. Maybe I just need to twist those little facets until everything lines up, until everything is 'perfect'. But what wd it say to US if it cd talk? 'Please, STOP, my reactive arthritis is killing me'?
4th, there's always the risk of getting the writer's block PREGNANT. I've known thousands of deadbeat writer's block dads. Sure, they act like they're completely comfortable w/ having knocked up a block, a chip off the old block.. but are they really? Look out for those furtive glimpses at table corners, room corners.. They're thinking of the wee ones.. & that one night stand when they had to PROVE to themselves that they weren't impotent, when they were going to stick it to that writer's block no matter what it took. But did they think further? NooOooOoooOo.. Bad plotting, bad narrative structure, no outlining, no thinking of how-it-wd-all-end. (less)
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Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory)
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Not Necessarily NOT Very Important
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HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) "Systems Management"
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The Kavyayantra Press Reading Series: "vii"
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Puzzle Writing
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But Not Limited To:
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THE SCIENCE (volume 1)
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Yet Another Slow-Burning Feast of a Few Months Mischief in the U.K., Maybe (A Partial(ly) Epistolary Account of Non-Non & Non-Participation, Maybe)
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Tentatively, A Convenience (Goodreads Author),
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Reactionary Muddle America
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review of Ron Silliman's Lit by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 16, 2025 This is the 7th bk I've read & reviewed by Silliman. I added him to my Top 100 Poets website ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100P... ) (wch only has 23 poets listed on it review of Ron Silliman's Lit by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 16, 2025 This is the 7th bk I've read & reviewed by Silliman. I added him to my Top 100 Poets website ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100P... ) (wch only has 23 poets listed on it currently) after I read his Ketjak & The Age of Huts (an early edition) wch I loved.. even after the honeymoon. Lit was somewhat different for me than the previous bks b/c I just enjoyed reading it as poetry (or perhaps I shd say as "writing" since the term "poetry" is largely meaningless to me), something I rarely do since I have a problematic love/hate attitude toward poetry in general. Lit is the letter "l" in Silliman's huge bk the Alphabet, wch is the 9th bk I'm starting to read by him now. It was supported in part by "the National Endowment for the Arts" [..] "Creative Writing Fellowship" (p -i), something I find extraordinary & something that makes me, therefore, suspect this bk of being less radical than I might otherwise think it to be. "I" starts off w/ an anagram, wch surprised me: "Blue. Lube." - p 1 & continues on w/ a progressively increasing number of words per stanza/paragraph, like Ketjak, wch I thought might be based on Fibonacci Numbers but wch isn't. "Big. Boy. Then. Theme. On time. Saids. Bide. Buddy. Up over. To bending pony." - p 1 It's probably worth mentioning that after I read Lit the next Silliman bk I read was The New Sentence wch includes such astonishingly close reading & analysis of poetry that I realize that I'll never do Silliman's work a similar kind of 'justice'. W/ that in mind I feel like I'm excusing a superficial review in advance - wch isn't really my intention. Unlike Ketjak, this has commas & question marks: "imagined January's smog-ridden tale, whose waggingplot evokes yams?" (p 2) & then there's "Osip Brik": "detached as Osip Brik" (p 2), whose name I recognized asa Russian Revolution poet. I quote from my review of The Age of Huts: "The next poem, in paragraph form, is called "I MEET OSIP BRIK". Brik was a Russian avant-garde writer & critic during the Russian Revolution. Silliman wdn't've met him b/c he died in 1945, Silliman was born in 1946. Of course, he cd be 'meeting' him in a more formal sense. The 1st paragraph is as follows: ""Sidewalks, people waving, is incoming insurgents. Experience of the predicated. Spaces in which land mass. Smell of warm, weather of I. Needle of diamond or pine. These are only Q-tips and have no other morning. The season is not the presence of the new which it recognize. The lower the themes, the higher the life. A needle I suddenly diamond to pine. Great sneeze of sense shake in the loose sleeping. News from the insect room. Blink objects forget lepers here. Several the voice, one the brain." - p 76" - http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... "II" starts w/ 2 words, "Read it." (p 4), leading to my wondering if "III" wd start w/ 3 words. Silliman always seems inspired & keeps me guessing. Take this excerpt from "II": "Red an green or red or green. Hour-like. The smell of new bread. Derricks in the gulf pierce skin of earth. Coffee jitters. Man in the caboose waves back. Tar heater has its own sound. More than a dozen. Or a pear tree." - p 5 That seems almost straight-forward imagistic to me. "Silliman is wrong and I can prove it." - p 7 Ha ha! Either/or (both) Silliman is being self-reflexively humorous or he's quoting someone else (either fictively or factually) who's perhpas, a critic of his poetic theories &/or his politics &/or whatever. Whatever the case, I find it funny. "III" starts off w/ 4 words - or is it 5? Is "Hoagy's" one word or 2? "Hoagy's busted in San Salvador & B's skull, bulblike, glows" - p 16 "IV" is all multi-sentence paragraphs/stanzas. A sample one is this: "Interruption generates summer, supper (an RV on a suburban lawn with the sign "Your tarot read here"). The androgynous economist trademarks lip and tongue. New theory of twilight. After nachos comes sex. Or that Nolan is Frankenthaler made neat. The blue parrot jealous of the simplest finch. I still haven't mentioned oranges. Boxes and brigands. Over the overpass to old Pot Hill. An emotion midway between anger and despair. The usual crowd at Taco Palace. The parked cabbie fast asleep." - p 22 Why do I enjoy this sequence of sentences? Maybe b/c each new sentence takes me to a new place. & then it's over. Sortof. But why begin sentences w/ a capital letter? Do you ever ask yourself that? In BalTimOre the cabbie wd probably be nodding out on heroin - is it the same wherever Silliman is writing about? On page 24 he takes the title for a spin: "Lit, then flickers, whispers, flashes out." (p 24) I took it for granted that the title "Lit" stood for the beginning of "Literature" but maybe it refers to fire. Or neither. Or being drunk (He's lit). "Three pigs got two bros spread-eagled against stucco wall." - p 24 Why do I distrust that? you don't ask. When whites, esp, use slang like "pigs" I have to wonder how much they're trying to impress the listener/reader w/ their street-smart politics - but what I see is stereotyping language. I've been stereotyped by hostile people my whole life, always negatively, so I distrust people who use stereotypes. Then again, I'm reading Silliman's sentence as if it's 1st person wch I have no good reason to believe, it cd be a quote. & what about "bros"? Having been raised by a family that wasn't exactly in my favor, the term "brother" as one of solidarity doesn't sit well w/ me, hence I don't use it politically. Are all black men my brothers? Nope, I've been tormented by many black men - & I've had good experiences w/ black men. Generalizing them in order to show that one isn't racist is just plain stupid. In another bk by Silliman he refers to something like 'right-wing anarchists' wch I took exception to. So let's look into Silliman's politics shall we? Silliman was the editor of The Socialist Review. An interview w/ him on a Poetry Society of America webpage begins: "Do you value the examination of the political in poetry? If so, what experience(s) taught you its importance? "The simplest answer to this would be one word: Vietnam. But a truer, fuller answer would have to do with my having grown up in one of -- if not the -- poorest families in my community and my having worked for many years with prisoners and as a housing activist with very poor residents in San Francisco's Tenderloin." - https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essay... Ok, I admit, I was going to write something snarky about Socialism, about National Socialism (Nazis), Fascists (Mussolini was a militant Socialist before he created Fascism), about Pol Pot (Cambodian genocide) & about how Socialists tend toward being a vanguard-for-the-proletariat (ie: power-hungry), about how Stalin betrayed the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, etc, etc, - but why pick on Silliman? "V" is formally different than its predecessors (wch were formally different from each other), this time having 4 groups of 12 stanzes, each w/ 3 lines apiece. "8 Bees are harvesting the clover. The sky remains grey for weeks. The tricycle lies abandoned by the steps." - p 26 "4 Tamed by Milton, I lie on Mother's head. The bee was a large as a mouse. The bush grew against the side of the house, huddled against the wind." - p 28 Can we assume that "The bee was a large as a mouse." was intended to bee "The bee was as large as a mouse."? Or is Silliman being tricky? "VI" is a description of a town where's he an academic. "The region itself is L-shaped, a string of towns down along the coast, then suburbs spilling eastward to the mountains, beyond which lies the desert. In the spring when the jacaranda blooms, the streets are lined with purple. Those young navy boys don't know a drag queen when they see one. At the base of the bridge is Chicano Park. All of the students wore cutoffs. Melvyn suggests a game of charades. My room was painted seven different shades of white." - p 35 "VII" is sideways. "New paragraph: old tricks. Dear squeegee, vend hither. Cloves pierce the orange rind, while out the dusty window a neighbor stands at his mailbox staring at an envelope, a rooster crows, and in my daypack is a broken telephone. The wind is full in the sheets on the line and the pages must be cut apart before you begin writing. The cat sniffs at the sausage. A small red metal "glass" in which toothbrushes and razors are stuffed. Jitterbugging, here we come! The blue one is the creme rinse. Mike Heath on a pop fly. Floss, 100,000 Indonesian political prisoners have been kept in jail since the coup 17 years ago." - p 39 "Nobody's mutter beats Anselm's." - p 40 I knew Anselm Hollo & considered him a friend. One thing I loved about him was how absolutely immersed in poetry & poets he was. "VIII" consists entirely of a one-paragraph quote from Thoreau: ""Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersets in the air—and so come down upon your head at last. Antaeus-like, be not long absent from the ground. Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life—a distinct fruit and kernal itself, springing from the terra firma. Let there be as many distinct plants s the soil and light can sustain. Take as many bounds in a day as possible. Sentences uttered with your back to the wall. "Henry David Thoreau November 12, 1851" - p 44 I take it that Silliman identifies w/ Thoreau's advice - but do I really have enuf to go on to do so? Perhaps he just wanted to quote Thoreau re writing w/o necessarily agreeing w/ it. "IX"'s 2nd stanza seems like somewhat standard poetry to me. Just sayin', I'm not knockin' it. "Hand trim lawn. Under these stairs find cool shadows. Poor stereo lacks one speaker. Shape of word one. On line sheets form sails. Boy shoots with his cheeks, ricochets whisper. Goggle. Blue lube, big bad boy." - p 45 For me, it's just refreshing for "On line" to refer to a clothesline & for "Goggle" to be "Goggle" instead of "Google". In "X" I noticed the rhyming (& wordplay) more than I had previously: "4th: the count adds up Dear gem spa, it's 5:15 (aha) what limit to pure differential clatter (cough) the stuff of art (thus fart: Life parts, the River Jordan, marts of perfect bondage, margins) starts to get simple: fee fi phoneme, name it, sit straight sing "Hail to the Chief he's a dirty little thief"" - p 50 Then there's calling attn to pronunciation oddities in English: "Laughter slaughters laughter" - p 52 "XI" starts like this: "Painter's reconstruction of the color white Clatter of birds' wings crowds the sky Sighing, declarative sentences makes wrong judgment or none Sandwich wrap harbors dark nine grain bread Out the window, fog shuts sky Rhyme invoked scandal greases new semi-gloss wall" - p 57 I imagine Silliman's different moods as he writes each of these poems. The above? A scandal-grease mood, the kind you keep in sandwich-wrap for a rainy day. "XII" starts w/: "Words wiggle, tickle, setting cat's whiskery nostrils atwitch, rooster's yodel, breeze in tall grass (little spider), grasses, is as/was is (fuzzy), a blue prick bleeds & what remains (flock of gulls) means, O new Spring (!)" - p 62 Note that there's an exclamation mark!, possibly the 1st one I've ever seen him use. I'm glad he refrained from writing a poem in wch every sentence ends w/ one. That might prove fatal to the reader. "being neither fosters purchase, sculpted tragedy of a playground killing turned into "features" fathers a false remorse (sullen competent cop shakes head), mothers no new insight, the boy just bled two pages away from where Garfield contemplates lasagna." - p 66 My reviewer notes about this says "more believable politics". That strikes me as an odd thing for me to say. The above is media analysis, the implication of having tragedy 2 pages away from comedy in a 'news'paper. & if you're going to 'thank god' for anything, thank it for word-play: "But. Bit. Chewing. Down into. Onto a chunk of. Ontological chocolate." (p 68) & sew on. ...more |
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review of Ron Silliman's The Age of Huts by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 23-25, 2025 B/c of the word limit on Goodreads only the beginning of the review will appear there. The full review is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... . I'm s review of Ron Silliman's The Age of Huts by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 23-25, 2025 B/c of the word limit on Goodreads only the beginning of the review will appear there. The full review is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... . I'm still on a roll of reading Ron Silliman bks. This'll be the 6th one I've reviewed in less than 6 wks. I actually look forward to reading each successive one (I'm reading them in chronological order) b/c I'm interested in what new strategies he'll develop. I imagine that there're other people out there, presumably poets, who've read & reviewed Silliman's work w/ a more insightful take than what I'm offering but those reviews don't appear to be on Goodreads so I might be the only person in this community who's tackling this work (can you hear it cry OOF?). Of the ones I've read so far (Crow, MOHAWK, SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS, Ketjak, & BART) I've noted that Ketjak used only sentences ending in periods & that BART used only phrases punctuated by commas. This formal limitation has a profound effect on one's reading experience. It seemed almost 'inevitable' that the next step wd be to have sentences only ending in question marks. I was looking forward to that & here it is: Unlike the previous 5 bks I read, wch are each organized under a single procedure, The Age of Huts is broken into 3 sections, each differently organized. The 1st of these is entitled "Sunset Debris". This is the one that has every sentence be a question. I found reading it absolutely amazing. I 'don't know what to make' of Silliman's titles: perhaps they have a meta-meaning that I'm not getting, perhaps Silliman likes to imply a referentiality that he then deliberately doesn't deliver on, perhaps they're a joke. In my Silliman reviews, I've neglected to mention the publishers. This one's published by James Sherry's ROOF. Ketjak was published by Barrett Watten's THIS. Every press that publishes Silliman's work is excellent, they represent a 'cutting edge' of poetry. I wonder what, if anything, has superceded them? If you're interested, checking out Olchar E. Lindsann's monOcle-Lash Anti-Press ( https://youtu.be/j3rUJqr59_Y ) might be worth paying attn to. The Age of Huts is from 1986, 39 yrs ago, & it still seems fresh to me (that's why I slapped it). The cover was done by Lee Sherry, married to James at the time, & the production was by Susan Bee who I assume? deduce? to be Susan B. Laufer. Some of Silliman's previous bks, BART, e.g., were written in notebooks, apparently based on obsevation. My 1st question to myself while reading "Sunset Debris" was 'Are the questions all overheard?': "Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Do you like this? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet? Is it perfect bound? Do you prefer ballpoints?" - p 11 That's how it begins. I've read that Silliman is a prison activist so the next sentence came as no surprise. "Do you know that the true structure of a prison is built around an illegal commodities market?" - p 13 Perhaps what was most interesting for me about this succession of questions-only was my wondering Who wd ask this question? & under what circumstances?. Such questions cd be asked in every instance but some instances might be less easily answered than others. Take this: "Do you opt for or against irrevocable acts?" - p 14 To me that's a strange question, hardly one likely to occur in a casual conversation. I imagine it directed to a class considering philosophical matters or in a psychological analysis of someone in trouble. But I don't think either of those possibilities quite nails it. Did Silliman conceive of this question as an origin-puzzler? & what if one responds to a question by imagining an answer to it? ""When does a question become a command?" - p 15 Never? If questions can't be commands is that a point in their favor to you? The questions might usually seem to stand on their own but, sometimes, they seem to be part of a sequence - not necessarily a sequence of questions honing in on the possibility of a particular answer, more questions put in a sequence for alliterative or other purposes. "Who broke the cup? Why did the guard rail break? Will there be a break in the weather? Did they make a break for it? How shall I break it to you?" - pp 19-20 The possible purpose for that sequence may just be to string together varying uses of the words "broke" & "break". There may not be any 'point' to it otherwise, there may not 'need' to be. & then there's the probability of nonsense just for the fun of it: "Is the world of leisure suits, civil suits, air conditioning?" - p 26 & what about this?: "What makes you not an example of right-wing anarchism?" - p 26 To me, "right-wing anarchism" is an oxymoron. That seems like the kind of idea that a Communist or Socialist might posit in order to justify yet-another pogrom against anarchists, something like the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by Trotsky. It makes me wonder what type of political activist Silliman is. "Where in the dream do you find recognition of the dream? What if I begin forgetting and writing the same sentences over and over? What if cognizance of the past began to diminish and I started to repeat myself? Is the same idea in different terms the same idea?" - p 26 Now that's a sort of trick question: since the last question starts w/ "Is the same idea" it already establishes the "same idea": thusly when the "same idea" aspect is questioned by the ending there's a sort of disingenuousness to it: since we're told it's the "same idea" then, yes, it's the "same idea". He might as well have asked: 'Is the same idea the same idea?' After all, the 2nd "same idea" is in a different place in the sentence & occurs at a different point in time. As such, it can be shown to be NOT the SAME "same idea" but a different one. As I recall, such questions are common in math. Wchever "same idea" has been written 1st, hundreds of yrs ago, is the ONLY "same idea", all others are imitations. Silliman makes frequent reference to other writers. Sometimes his choices surprise me. "Isn't it crucial that this only be viewed in the context of certain other workers, e.g., Acker, Watten, Andrews, Coolidge?" - p 27 Kathy Acker, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Clark Coolidge. The latter 3 have been associated w/ Language Poetry, but Acker? Eventually, the reader notices that sentences seem to be recurring. For the most part, these questions stand on their own & don't have a cumulative relationship to the questions around them, there are exceptions. "When does it get there? Does it sniffle? Does it waver? Is it apt to break? Is it apt to break up? Is it apt to break down? Will it wash? Will it wash out? Will it wash ashore? Will it, Washington? Is that a crack? Is that a ripoff? Is that a snide remark?" - p 31 Such sequences of apparently related sentences, wordplay, don't seem to have any meaning aside from the pleasure of their playfullness. That might apply to everything written here. It's the process that's important, not a more typical semantics. The questions have meanings but it's there interplay that provides the substance, not those meanings. The author isn't intending for you to wonder whether something's a snide remark. Then a question happens that looks familiar, one that I'm sure I've read before, maybe in a variation, & the reading changes to include an expectancy, a looking-for repetitions. Something similar happened in Ketjak. "How does lighting this cigarette cause the bus to arrive?" (p 30) "Isn't the problem of the question that it locates us, places us in a relation, some tangible formulation, to the text or the act of the text, s if to test meaning, to see if it will exist if can thus somehow fix all of the other terms in our equation?" - p 36 & how is that a "problem"? the next section is called "The Chinese Notebook". Given Silliman's emphasis on the use of notebooks in such bks as Ketjak & BART the making of this section explicitly referring to the notebook is 'important' in relation to such questions as: "Is the same idea in different terms the same idea?": "18. I chose a Chinese notebook, its thin pages not to be cut, its six red-line columns which I turned 90°, the way they are closed by curves at both top and bottom, to see how it would alter the writing. Is it flatter, more airy? The words, as I write them, are larger, cover more surface on this two-dimesnional picture plane. Shall I, therefore, tend toward shorter terms—impact of page on vocabulary?" - p 44 Are these clues?: "5. Language is, first of all, a political question. "6. I write this sentence with a ballpoint pen. If I had used another would it have been a different sentence? "7. This is not philosophy, it's poetry. And if I say so, then it becomes painting, music or sculpture, judged as such. If there are variables to consider, they are at least partly economic—the question of distribution, etc. Also differing critical traditions. Could this be good poetry, yet bad music? But yet I do not believe I would, except in jest, posit this as dance or urban planning." - p 43 "The Chinese Notebook" seems like the theoretical basis for the other parts of this bk. If language is "a political question" then one's use of it is presumed to be an application of one's political philosophy & intentions. If one is considering issues of distribution then the author of this bk must be considering the limited distribution that his small press publishers are able to get for their works. If the author insists that this is poetry, even though it obviously fits far easier, at least in this section, in w/ philosophy, then why hesitate to call it "urban planning"? As for "philosophy"? It's highly doubtful that this wd get grant money or be published as philosophy. It's too open-ended, too inconclusive, too vague, too unspecific to make it as phisilophy - but it's fine as poetry - & I like it better that way. What I've never understood, or been able to relate to, is why 'poets' are so hell-bent on being 'poets'. Why not just WRITERS? Why not Language Writing instead of Language Poetry? That strikes as a career move, poets want to be seen in the context of a poetry lineage, it doesn't have to make any sense except to give them a context in wch they're likely to receive greater appreciation & support. There's money out there specifically for poetry ("This book is funded in part thanks to a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts" - p 4) Take it from me, I've insisted that I'm NOT a poet for the last 50 yrs. It's at least partially b/c of this that the poets whose works I read wd never read my own works. They'll only read it IFF I call it "poetry". Personally, I think "urban planning" might be more fun. & more creative. It also wdn't get grants. "20. Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all. Would this definition satisfy Duncan?" - p 45 The poet Robert Duncan is also referred to in Silliman's BART. I get the impression his work is important to Silliman. "29. Mallard, drake—if the words change, does the bird remain? "30. How is it possible that I can imagine I can put that chair into language? There it sits, mute. It knows nothing of syntax. How can I put it into something it doesn't inherently possess?" - p 46 Is this the reasoning, therefore, behind Silliman's way of arranging words in a way that evades pinning down? Does "chair" become a word that defies being put to its usual use in language to refer to a familiar object? But since when does anything have to "inherently possess" knowledge of "syntax" in order to be used in any particular way by language? What I like about Silliman's writing isn't that I think he somehow 'solves' philosophical questions but that he takes a different approach to arrangement. I don't think he 'solves' any philosophical questions at all, the mallard & the drake are still going about their business. Silliman can't turn the chair into language but he can do what other writers do & describe it in a way so that people reading the description will know what he's referring to. What does he want? "54. Increasingly I find object art has nothing new to teach me. This is also the case for certain kinds of poetry. My interest in the theory of the line has its limits. "55. The presumption is: I can write like this and "get away with it." "56. As economic conditions worsen, printing becomes prohibitive. Writers posit less emphasis on the page or book. "57. "He's content just to have other writers think of him as a poet." What does this mean? "58. What if there were no other writers? What would I write like?" - p 48 I remember being fresh out of high school in 1971 & being at the Woodlawn Cemetery grounds having a conversation w/ Debbie Sauter. She took great exception to my speaking in "What if" terms & philosophically berated me. I admit to feeling much the same about #58: "What if there were no other writers?" How wd that even happen?! What Silliman wd "write like" might have more to do w/ there being no other humans, e.g.. In other words, his questions are so preposterous that his apparent investigation seems trivial in contrast to other implications. "71. An offshoot of projectivist theory was the idea that the form fo the poem might be equivalent to the poet's physical self. A thin man to use short lines and a huge man to write at length. Kelly, etc. "72. Antin's theory is that in the recent history of progressive formas (himself, Schwerner, Rothenberg, MacLow, Higgins, the Something Else writers et al), it has become clear that only dertain domains yield "successful" work. But he has not indicated what these domains are, nor sufficiently defined success." - p 50 More references to other poets. At the time of this bk's release, 1986, there was no commonly available internet so searching for more info on the people mentioned wd've been difficult. What wd a reader not familiar w/ the poetics named have made of it all? #71 wd've been easy enuf: it's not necessary to know that "projectivist theory" refers to the work of Charles Olson & it's not necessary to know the work of Robert Kelly (you can see Kelly in my movie about Franz Kamin entitled DEPOT (wherein resides the UNDEAD of Franz Kamin) : on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/qDwGVNIJbgE - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/depot_201906 ). In #72, however, it wd help the reader if they knew the work of David Antin (see the beginning of my review of David Antin & Charles Bernstein's A Conversation with David Antin here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), Armand Schwerner, Jerome Rothenberg (recently deceased), Jackson Mac Low (see my movie entitled "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading Jackson Mac Low's "Asymmetries 1-260"" on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/0Zn9rl8PBqc ), & Dick Higgins & his Something Else Press (see my review of the Dick Higgins edited A Something Else Reader http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... ). "98. Good v. Bad Poetry. The distinction is not useful. The whole idea assumes a shared set of articulatable values by which to make such a judgment. It assumes, if not the perfect poem, at least the theory of limits, the most perfect poem. How would you proceed to make such a distinction?" - p 53 Agreed. If one were to use such terms one might at least qualify what they mean to you before applying them. It might be more useful to just skip the "good" & the "bad" & go straight to what one's standards are. "109. So-called non-referential language when structure non-syntactically tends to disrupt time perception. Once recognized, one can begin to structure the disruption. Coolidge, for example, in The Maintains, uses line, stanza and repetition. Ashberry's Three Poems, not referential but syntactical, does not alter time." - pp 53-54 That seems like quite a claim, to "disrupt time perception". I deduce that that's what Silliman thinks he does. I'm not sure I agree but I find it interesting. It seems to me that if "time perception" is disrupted that a very palpable feeling wd be sensed. I don't think reading Silliman's poetry has that effect on me. It's more a matter of my becoming more aware of unusual technical procedures & the way they disrupt expectations. For me, that's not quite the same thing as disrupting "time perception" - maybe it is for Silliman. "145. There are writers who would never question the assumptions of non-objective artists (Terry Fox, say, or even Stella or the late Smithson) who cannot deal with writing in the same fashion. Whenever they see certain marks on the page, they always presume that something besides those marks is also present." - p 58 Again, interesting. I wdn't call Terry Fox, whose work I like very much, or Robert Smithson, "non-objective" artists, even if the art criticism of this time (1986) wd've done so. Is Terry Fox's destruction of a flower garden at a museum café in protest of the destruction of the Vietnamese environment w/ Agent Orange & the like "non-objective"? Is Smithson's Spiral Jetty "non-objective"? I can say, tho, that creative people are often only provisionally open-minded - so I agree w/ Silliman's point about writers who can't deal w/ "non-objective" writing. Whether Silliman's writing qualifies as "non-objective" is a different story - it seems to me that his subversion of objectivity depends on objectivity to work. Visual Poets are more "non-objective". The full review is here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticS... ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of A. A. Attanasio's Arc of the Dream by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 16, 2025 I've only read one bk previously by Attanasio, In Other Worlds (my review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). The writing in that one takes th review of A. A. Attanasio's Arc of the Dream by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 16, 2025 I've only read one bk previously by Attanasio, In Other Worlds (my review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). The writing in that one takes the reader on a pretty wild ride, the main character goes thru fantastic transformations that. just. don't. stop: "the author just keeps accelerating the pace of dramatic change throughout, it's relentless." Arc of the Dream is similar, 5 mere mortals become subject to an extra-terrestrial creature that enables them to have special powers so that they can help the ET get off this planet, thusly surviving. It's a thriller, never a dull moment. If I were to speculate, I'd reckon that Attanasio has used consciousness expansion drugs w/ great success for inspiration. The main action takes place on Hawaii. I've been there & been to both of the volcanos that're featured. I even have a tattoo of one of the volcanos on my left knee b/c I scarred myself on it & I put white tattoos of what scarred me next to the scars. As such, there's a bit of familiarity to the story that enhances it for me. I even made a movie there called "Signs & Symptoms of Leptospirosis". It includes my girlfriend & me walking naked w/ monster masks, hands, & feet thru the active volcano on the Big Island. A sign warns people that if the volcano erupts they'll be burnt into nothingness w/in 15 seconds. We were fine. "No wonder the Polynesians thought the land belonged to the Gods, Donnie Though. No one else would want to live here. Mountaintops, oceanbottoms, lava fields—the gods always get the crappiest real estate. "Donnie was a seventeen year old from Honolulu on his high school's senior calss trip to Mauna Loa, the biggest volcano in the world." - p 1 Donnie has a withered laeg & lives in a home for orphans where he's tormented by Dirk, a young bully & criminal. As if that's not enuf, he finds the alien object, roughly the size of a quarter. There the trouble begins. "The bright object was a slender metallic ovoid, cool to his touch and shimmery as a piece of the wind. He picked it up and the sunlight fanned off it in a spectral smile as he turned it with the fingers of one hand, like a monkey with a strange fruit. It was featureless." [..] "He had not the slightest inkling that the object that he was holding was alive, let alone that it was a vaster being than himself. "The alien in his palm was terrified and in great pain. It was a 5-space being exquisitely bound to a precise point within the continuum, and by moving it, Donnie was killing it. Within its iridium shell, its brain was verging on panic. A conflagration of horror and confusion consumed it." - p 3 The ET, Insideout, checked out Earth for thousands of yrs before it picked a landing spot. Have you ever ridden w/ a driver who's indecisive about picking a parking spot? This was worse. "The mountain was more inviting because it was surrounded by the warm waters the dolphins loved. Insideout had rejected the site on its first flyby because of the electrical clutter there, signifying again the presence of the photon-loud but otherwise songless animals that the alien had come to fear. There was a sinister texture to their thoughtwaves, and the jumble of radiation that they were dumping into the photon field was appallingly centerless and growing louder with each orbit." - p 10 Not to mention that there's an impressive thunderstorm outisde as I write this & that I'm listening to Alice Coltrane's ashram music. So do the arc & Donnie hit it off? "The arc had been moved! Insideout was churning with the expanding knowledge of what had happened: Some animal had moved its physical form! It could see the beast in electromagnetic light—one of the radio noise creatures, climbing clumsily over the black rocks, the arc in its hand. "Donnie saw himself climbing up the rocky incline, and when he reached the exact place where he was standing now, the trance imploded and all memory of the alien's memory was snuffed out in him. He stood like a flash of rain, all awareness of Insideout falling out of him." - p 12 The arc is stolen from Donnie by Dirk, the bully. In previous times, Donnie had gotten revenge on Dirk. "Another time, Donnie had concocted his own curare, tipped a bent needle with it, and taped it to his shoulder under his shirt. After Dirk slugged him there in his daily endeavor to strike the righteous nerveblow that would numb Donnie's whole arm, his hand swelled up as black and rubbery as an eggplant. He spent two days in the hospital sweating a possible amputation, and Donnie claimed it was purely accidental." - p 37 Well, Dirk becomes one of the 4 humans that Insideout needs to return him to his landing spot or he will die. Another of these 4 is Reena, a woman rescued from a hospital home in France where she's living the life of a vegetable thanks to brain damage, Insideout temporarily makes the barin damage go away, empowers her w/ telepathy & enables her to control what other people do. She leaves France & travels to Hawaii where she's to meet her fellow temporary superhumans. She worries, rightly so, that once Insideout is helped to escape his death on Earth, she'll revert to her brain-damaged state. Insideout promises to save her. ""When my arc is complete, I'll have almost infinite power. Enough power and computational potential to turn you into light with me and to put you back together again whole. On my way home, I'll take a short detour and return you to an earth where you don't exist yet and where you can live a normal life."" - p 122 The ET speaks to Howard, another of the special 4(ces), via Dirk: ""There is no future." Dirk took Howard's arm and turned him to face the ocean so that the wind was kissing him. "The past and future are always here. All times, all minds, all screams and songs are here. But where is here?" Dirk bent close to his ear and said "Rihgt inside the atoms that make up your brain, Howie, That's where reality lurks. Not as atoms but in atoms. Right inside the protons that make up those nuclei is all the time there ever was, is, or will be."" - p 140 It turns out that a completely relaxed state-of-mind is the best weapon against the orcs that our heros must battle in order to get Insideout back where it wants to be. ""Yes-out-of-mind," Reena echoed. ""Lusk is handier. It means the same thing, you know. The primal affirmation of onesness beyond thought. The spell of wholeness. Your ancestors didn't think much of it. To them it was a kind of sloth—a sin. But what can we expect from the great-grandchildren of the rat? Humans are never satisfied unless they're toiling. But to stay close to me, you have to be languid. Lazy. Lusk."" - p 174 Dddduuuuddddddeee! You ARE a stoner!! There's an Epilogue in wch the reader is informed about how everyone fared. "Dirk correctly figured out all the details. The arc, he thoerized, had conserved its inertia and the cosmos' total quark-number by using its hypertubes to draw enough energy from the vacuum field to equal Reena's mass. If that energy had been released simply as energy, much of Hawaii would have been vaoprized. Instead, Insideout condensed most of the 4.86 X 1025 ergs of Reena's mass-energy to atoms and fused those atoms to a molecular lace of naphtol ethers, oleo-resins, and cinnamic acid—several hundred cubic liters of a harmless gas. Reena had disappeared in a puff of colorless smoke." - p 255 Right. Insideout cd do that but cdn't just fix her brain & leave her on Earth where she & Dirk cd live happily ever after. Well, that's b/c: "Megauniverses opened, and timelines spread like crystals across the interface of the singularity and the continuum. The One burst apart, and infinities of shapes unraveled inside the swooping parabola of an event horizon. Mind surged helplessly through these mazing patterns in the form of energy, bewildered and dazzled by the expansive awareness of radiance—radiation!—quanta streaming outward!" - p 258 Ok, ok, I twisted things a little there. Get rrreaaaaallllly stoned & read this bk. It's fun! ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of Ron Silliman's Bart by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 12, 2025 I'm on a spree of reading the Ron Silliman bks in my personal library in chronological order. I'm looking forward to the more challenging ones. I'm also glad for the easier o review of Ron Silliman's Bart by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 12, 2025 I'm on a spree of reading the Ron Silliman bks in my personal library in chronological order. I'm looking forward to the more challenging ones. I'm also glad for the easier ones, this is in the latter category. So far, everything I've reviewed has had one simple structural approach that's filled out to varying degrees. This is no exception. The last bk I read & reviewed by him was Ketjak, written in 1974. This one was written in 1976 but not published in this second printing until 1988. The 1st copyright date is 1982. Was the 1st printing then? Why such a long wait between writing & publishing? Bart begins w/ this: "Begin going down, Embarcadero, into the ground, earth's surface, escaltors down, a world of tile, flourescent lights, is this the right ticket, labor day, day free of labor, trains, a man is asking is there anything to see, Glen Park, Daly City, I'm going south which in my head means down but I'm going forward, she says he should turn around, off at Powell, see Union Square, see Chinatown," - p 1 I pointed out in my review of Ketjak that all the sentences end in periods, there're no question marks or exclamation marks. Here, the bk cd be sd to be one long unfinished sentence, the separating punctuation is made w/ commas, the bk ends on a comma before the time & date of writing is given, followed by 2 photos of BART trains. BART = Bay Area Rapid Transit, the subway. The whole bk was written in (a) notebk(s) while riding rapid transit. "man gets on with a racing form in hand, looks apprehensive, you always see stress in everyone's face, it's in their eyes, how they hold their mouths, as if it took an effort to keep their lips in control, from contorting, you don't need to know them, any day, especially after work, Civic Center 12:08," - pp 3-4 "back now at Embarcadero, more people on, this has a different rhythm than buses, Duncan writes on them, anthology of literature scribed on public transit," - p 4 Duncan & Silliman in an anthology of public transit writings, that might be interesting. What's Silliman doing? "1:59, I'm only half-done, is that it, an act, something done deliberately, of description, which mean place, but of travel, meaning place shifts, alters, speech chain Moebius Strip, had not expected the crowd. but that's alright, this blue ink is lovely, a pleasure to watch, jotting is what I do, wander around the platform, take photos," pp 12-13 "I don't ask her name, the Daly City train comes, I get on, it's so crowded I have to stand, I keep writing, I'm much more conspicuous now, people are staring, I can't hold on and write at the same time, I nearly fall, I'm going to have to stand all the way back, we'll be back under the bay in a second, 80 mph, a man watches me write this, I remember what Einstein said when asked to explain the theory of relativity in 25 words or less," - pp 22-23 I found this simple in a way that I imagine most readers might be able to relate to. A man systematically rides the subway, jotting observations in a notebook. The formal device of having each jotting separated by a comma provides a meta-structure. This isn't exactly one of my favorite Sillimans but I like it nonetheless. ...more |
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Tentatively, Convenience
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review of Ron Silliman's Ketjak by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 12, 2025 This was written from June 2 to November 17, 1974 but not published until 1978. I probably read it soon after it came out, no later than the early '80s. I remember being im review of Ron Silliman's Ketjak by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 12, 2025 This was written from June 2 to November 17, 1974 but not published until 1978. I probably read it soon after it came out, no later than the early '80s. I remember being impressed by it at the time, convinced that Silliman was an important new writer. I'd found out about him thru friends in Baltimore & thru reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, the NYC-based journal for discussing Language Poetry. For me, Silliman represented the best of what Language Poetry had to offer. &, yet, after reading this & a few other works that I was impressed by, I stopped reading him. I continued acquiring his bks w/ the intention of probably reading them.. but I didn't. This was partially based on changing priorities in my life, I was always busy & always busy w/ new things. Language Poetry had been interesting for a few yrs but I'd moved on. My own moviemaking work, Neoism, the Church of the SubGenius - they were all more compelling. Furthermore, most of the LP political analysis seemed academic & Marxist & I'm an anarchist so it just didn't gell w/ me. Now, 45+ yrs after LP's heyday, it interests me again, Silliman particularly so. Despite some critics claiming that LP had nothing new to offer, I think that Ketjak embodies a refutation of that. SO, I reread Ketjak in 2025 & found it even more stunning than I think I probably did around the time when it was 1st published. 1st, the structure: the structure is what enables the sentence 'magic' to happen, to work. There're roughly 4 spaces between each paragraph & each paragraph includes the sentences of the previous paragraph w/ much more added on. Hence, paragraph 1 is: "Revolving door." - p 3 & the 2nd paragraph begins w/ "Revolving door." but adds on a 2nd sentence: "A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, begins a slow mingration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line." (p 3) Paragraph 3 begins on p 3 but doesn't end until p 4. It contains the previously quoted 2 sentences but adds on 7 new sentences as well as augments the last sentence quoted above so that it now reads: "A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages. tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow mingration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line." Those 2 sentences retain their beginning & ending position. It's an accumulative progression. HOWEVER, Paragraph 4 not only becomes considerably larger, albeit still contained on one page (p 4), it also ends w/ a new sentence: "We ate them." This new ending was a surprise for me. The pattern continues w/ Paragraph 5 becoming larger, retaining the old sentences & adding more, such as: "Mention sex." It ends w/ "Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them." (p 5) Paragraph 6 now stretches from p 5 to p 7. As w/ every paragraph, it still begins w/ "Revolving door." Paragraph 7 stretches from p 7 to p 9. Paragraph 8 being on p 9 & goes 'til p 14. Here're some sample quotes: "Revolving door. Dry blood. Song of the garbage collectors beneath the bedroom window. Seeds of the fig. How will I know when I make a mistake. Presentness. Soap. The half-formed friendship before he died left her with a taste of unfinished business. The garbage barge at the bridge. I tugged at the cord to coax the plug from the socket. The Japanese floor manager in a red sport coat, red trousers, white shoes. Those rural boys are bulky, mean, that get called the Bulls." - p 9 Sometimes, the prose is borderline explanatory: "One wants a place to locate events of the mind. Prose like a garden. Solid object. Frying yellow squash in the wok, with string beans, bell pepper, tofu, sprouts. An old spool for cable made into a table. Normal discourse. Prefers instruments of percussion, for discreteness. Write this down in a green notebook." - p 12 "Mention sex, fruit, candy, cities, books the cinema , or geology." - p 12 "How could one ever hope to have known prose." - p 13 It ends w/: "We ate them. The flag." - p 14 The simple elegant effectiveness of this structure for me revolves around the way each new paragraph recontextualizes the repeated sentences by surrounding them w/ new material &/or augmenting them. I responded by recognizing the old sentences & feeling like they'd set a mood that then became a different mood - but still w/ familiarity. This is truly a new way of writing. Silliman doesn't impose a strictness of repetition, he adds playful variables. "Mention sex." on p 5 becomes "Mention sex, fruit." on p 6 wch becomes "Mention sex, fruit, candy, cities, books." on p 8 wch becomes "Mention sex, fruit, candy, cities, books, the cinema, or geology." on p 12 - each iteration in a new paragraph. "Bedlingtons were at first meant to hunt rats in coal mines." (p 6) "Bedlingtons were at first meant to hunt rats in coal mines, later they were bred to show." (p 8) "Bedlingtons were at first meant to hunt rats in coal mines, later they were bred to show, are nearly blind and crazy." (p 22) "Bedlingtons were at first meant to hunt rats in coal mines." (p 63) Note that by p 63 the sentence has reverted to its original content. "Bedlingtons were at first meant to hunt rats in coal mines, later they were bred to show, are nearly blind and crazy." (p 83) Louis Zukofsky was a famous poet, his son Paul was a famous violinist. "When Zukovsky debuted Reich's Violin Phase on the west coast, the first person to stomp out was Mario Savio." - p 21 Given that Paul Zukovsky is by far one of my favorite violinists & that I have a recording of him playing Steve Reich's "Violin Phase" on reel-to-reel this caught my attn. I didn't know who Savio is so I did a data search. He "was an American activist and a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement." That might seem ironic to some but don't forget that John Cage was given a very hard time by leftists when he gave a reading in Italy that was later released on the Cramps label. Of course, we don't have enuf info to know why Savio left, maybe he had diarrhea. Paragraph 9 goes from p 14 to p 25. It ends w/ "Caves of the tuna. We ate them. Each ear pierced in four places. The flag. Log fort." (p 25) It's as if he's carrying notebooks in wch he jots observations, the sentences don't have to be 'complete' in the sense of portraying an action w/ the requisite parts of speech for a 'full' narration. Instead, it's as if they're fragments that stand on their own. "Each ear pierced in four places." may be a description of just one person or of several people, it doesn't matter, it's this one detail that's chosen. He doesn't write: 'There were 2 teenage girls waiting at the bus-stop, each of them had both ears pierced in four places.' He's focusing on details that don't have to 'add up' to anything, these phrases combined by juxtaposition can play off each other w/o having to 'add up' to a single narrative picture, they don't have to be description of a single neighborhood or school-room or whatever. They're modular, each time they're in a new combination w/ new neighbors they have a new comparative 'flavor', like ingredients of a stew that don't melt together into a homogeneous texture. They maintain their individuality. Paragraph 10 goes from p 25 to p 48. This one ends w/: "Caves of the tuna. Bowl in which map of the world was etched. We ate them. Couple at the next table, over coffee, discuss power relations of their home. Each ear pierced in four places. Question of sexuality. The flag. I told him I was tired, bored by sense of his misuse, my voice the line drawn. Log fort. As map could extend beyond the map margin." - p 48 The "Couple at the next table, over coffee, discuss[ing] power relations of their home." are self-contained - we don't 'need' to know if they're in a coffee shop or a restaurant or at a picnic table. Sometimes the sentences are long, full of commas. These strike me as humorous, as deliberate alternatives to the 2 word sentences - as if a discourse has just been waiting to be let out - but, still, despite the length, no discourse really appears: "Disturbed that your approvers seem oblique to the intention, unaware that the concentric circles expanding about the stone thrown into the lake will extend to the shore, that the flute's vibrations form an act that yet others will be consequent to, as your own presence was predicated on the odor of pine in the air, you turn the orders of your attention to your fingers in relation to the stops along the bamboo shaft, a fix on precision, aware without saying so that evasive action cannot solve it." - p 49 Paragraph 11 goes from p 49 to p 93. That's it. The last paragraph. It's probably fair to say that this is the CLIMAX, it's a BIGGIE. Not only does "Revolving door." begin the paragraph it's also in the middle: "This is logic. Piss smell of eggs. Revolving door. The gentle knocking of a sock filled with sand on my forehead." (p 61) This, of course, is noticed by the reader: What? A phrase is repeated?! The repetition doesn't have to have 'meaning', but it has an effect, it keeps thing lively. "We ate them." is now in 'the middle' too (p 64), it's nowhere near the end, it's just something the reader notices, its original appearance was striking & now its reappearance in a dramatically different location is also striking. It's the way that this manages to engage the reader w/o making 2 + 2 always = 4 that makes this an important (no longer) new work. It worked for me. Here's what might be the longest sentence: "Equivocation, synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and habits, temperament, coitus and generation, voice, movements, places, diet, physiognomy, anitipathy" [sic] ", sympathy, modes of capture, death and wounds, modes and signs of poisoning, remedies, epithets, denominations, prodigies and presages, monsters, mythology, gods to which it is dedicated, fables, allegories and mysteries, hieroglyphics, emblems and symbols, proverbs, coinage, miracles, riddles, devices, heraldic signs, historical facts, dreams, simulacra and statues, uses in human diet, use in medicine, miscellaneous uses." - p 69 Unless I missed it, all sentences end in periods, there're no question marks or exclamation marks. Take this example: "Was this the topic sentence." (p 70) One wd expect this to end w/ a question mark. This absence has yet-another curious effect on the reader, nothing dramatic, just a subtle 'hanging' - as if all sentences are statement examples. &, yes, there's more than one typo. Does it matter? "Because accum"[ul]"ation is not conscious, we shuffle about in circles, in hot rooms with the windows shut, becoming gradually heavier, weighted and slower, until finally we begin to discard, to shed, to toss off, panama hat, white blazer with wide lapel, cuff-links, black brocade shirt and white silk tie, until we stand, arms 'akimbo' in white cuffed flares, see-thru net tee shirt, feet wrapped in sandals." - p 84 I'm reminded of where I am now. We're in the midst of a "heat wave" here in PGH, it's supposedly 90°F outside but it feels hotter than that to me. I'm stripped down to just wearing socks so that I can try to keep my feet clean while I walk around my house. Most of my windows are shut but if they were open there wdn't be a refreshing breeze, just a palpable heat. Jokes can be found right in the midst of whatever: "I don't make the language, I enforce it." - p 89 References to the tenor sax, variations, are recurring. Here's one that appears for the 1st & last time: "The tenor sax is a phallus or cross." (p 92) "This publication has been funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts." - p 94 Those were the days. It wdn't've been funded if there had been a field arrangement of sentences, the NEA had its limits. I have 2 bks that get into NEA funding a little: footnotes & Wrjtjng spelled w/ a "q". All in all, I recommend Ketjak, what the reference to the "Monkey Chant" is all about is beyond me. See how it stimulates yr mind w/o following standard tropes, this is an excellent example of what can be done w/ language w/o conforming to norms of expression. ...more |
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review of Jerry Clark & Ed Palattella's Pizza Bomber - The Untold Story of America's Most Shocking Bank Robbery by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025 My full review of this is at: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticC... I rarely read 'True Cr review of Jerry Clark & Ed Palattella's Pizza Bomber - The Untold Story of America's Most Shocking Bank Robbery by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025 My full review of this is at: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticC... I rarely read 'True Crime' bks. I reckon I just don't like that much. I do get engrossed in them - but not to get my jollies off, I find them consistently tragic. I'm from Baltimore, where I was exposed to more than enuf debased humanity to last multiple lifetimes. I read this b/c I remember hearing about the crime when it happened & didn't ever hear about its solving. Even after reading this, I feel unsettled - as if we'll never know the true story - esp the true story of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong & Bill Rothstein. One might ask: Exactly what do I mean by "debased humanity"? I mean people who've gotten so deranged that they no longer have much feeling for other people, people who want to hurt other people w/ the same detachment that people generally treat inanimate objects. Usually, this state-of-mind comes about from a more general lack of ethics in their environment coupled w/ excessive drug use - esp crack & speed. Having a megalomaniacal mindset contributes but isn't absolutely necessary. The crime was committed in 2003 but the bk wasn't copyrighted until 2012 - that's a long time coming. The "AUTHORS' NOTE" begins: "This account draws from personal observations, contemporaneous notes, interviews, court documents, transcripts and other official records, as well as news media reports, particularly those in the Erie Times-News. The opinions expressed in this book are the authors' alone and not those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." - p -iv The "Introduction" begins: "Since the founding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in 1908, its agents have infiltrated the Mob, probed corruption and pursued terrorists. But fewer than three hundred of the FBI's investigations have earned Major Case status, which refers to the bureau's most complex and serious probes. "The first Major Case was the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping, on March 1, 1932. Six decades later, the FBI opened a string of some of its most famous Major Cases in recent times, OKBOMB, Major Case 117, covered the investigation of Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, in Oklahoma City, on April 15, 1995." - p 1 Jerry Clark, the coauthor of this bk, was the FBI agent in charge of the COLLARBOMB (Pizza Bomber) investigation. His coauthor, Ed Palattella, was a reporter for the Erie Times-News who covered the case. As such, it's not surprising that the presentation of the FBI wd be a fairly straight-forward presentation of it as the country's main law-enforcement agency out to do capture major criminals for the protection of the citizen. Many people wd beg to differ. 1st off, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's notorious boss for decades, was a closeted gay man w/ well-known biases that interfered w/ any actual detection work. His orientation was to create a PR image, his reality was that he was very oppressed & oppressive. He's sd to've denied that organized crime even existed. Black Panthers were certainly framed by the FBI - as were Native American political activists. Even the Oklahoma City Bombing has been under scrutiny: the FBI allegedly had infilitrators in Right Wing groups connected to the bombing, they allegedly knew it was going to happen.. & did nothing to stop it. In other words, trusting the FBI isn't exactly something that its record gives confidence for - but nowhere in this bk is the FBI or any of the other law enforcement agencies called into question. "Before joing the FBI, Clark investigated large-scale drug trafficking as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, in Cleveland; before that, he had worked as a forensic therapist, a probation officer and a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, the NCIS. Clark had more experience with bank robberies and other violent crimes than any of the six other FBI agents in Erie at the time; his whole FBI career he had been assigned to violent crimes—fugitives, kidnappings, bank robberies. He had a bachelor's degree in forensic psychology. He had wanted to be a psychological profiler, who used clues to develop the protrait of a criminal." - pp 25-26 One of the reasons why I don't like True Crime bks is that, for the most part, they're tragic & I don't like tragedy. The COLLARBOMB case is tragic b/c Brian Wells, a pizza deliverer, was killed after robbing a PNC bank w/ a bomb strapped to his chest. Wells was caught almost immediately after robbing the bank, he told the police that the bomb was going to go off & kill him & that he didn't know how to stop it. The bomb squad didn't get there in time to stop it & Wells had a large hole blown thru his chest. The bomb squad supposedly had traffic problems. Really? If it had been one of their guys who had the bomb strapped to them do you think the bomb squad wd've gotten there in time?! Maybe they're not familiar w/ sirens & flashing lights, they're used for navigating thru traffic. I cd care less about the bank being robbed of a mere $8.000+ - that's trivial in contrast to Wells's death. "As the police questioned Wells and a television camera rolled, the homemade contraption exploded and tore a fatal wound into his chest." - p 2 Maybe they shd've taken the situation more seriously. Easy for me to say, right? I wasn't there. The author(s) quote from Wells' high school psych profile. "The study found Wells suffered from nascent psychological problems. "The . . . record appears to indicate psychpathic tendencies along with paranoid flavor," it said. "The school psychologist gauged Wells' 'self-projection" by having him draw a person. Wells drew "a make figure that appears to be physically strong and dominant," according to the study. "This large figure appears to indicate slight manic and gradiose signs in this adolescent. It appears to be related somewhat to studies of aggressive psychopaths." "The study portrayed Wells as an intelligent but troubled and defiant loner with no need for authority. "He claims that he will not please others," the study said, "and he presently sees adults as being too demanding and that he will lead his own life in his own time."" - p 9 I can't say that I'm very impressed by the above psychoanalysis & find it close to useless for knowing who Wells was around the time of his death. It seems to me that having "no need for authority" is a healthy thing & that seeing "adults as being too demanding" was probably equally sensible. Much of the way he's described just seems like a portrait of adolescence. Dropping hints about psychopathia doesn't seem to've been born out in his life. We come to the robbery: "Lapinski told him the manager was at lunch and would be back in about a half an hour, or around 3:00 P.M. ""I don't have until 3:00," the man said, "I don't have that kind of time. I need $250,000." "He lifted the baggy white T-shirt. A graycolored device hung from his neck and rested on his chest. It looked like a bomb. "Lipinski looked at the man. He still wanted $250,000." - p 17 "Lipinski got more cash from other teller stations. She put the money in a white canvas bank bag and gave it to the robber: $8,702. ""It's not enough," he said. ""What do you want me to do?" Lipinski said. "She told him it was all the money she had." - pp17-18 "The robber got out. He walked to the McDonald's drive-through sign, which was posted in a flower bed. He got down, lifted a rock that was embedded in the landscaping and grabbed a piece of paper stuck to the bottom of the rock. The robber stood, read the note and lifted his eyes. He looked toward an Eat'n Park restaurant on the other side of Peach Street." - p 19 Erie isn't far from Pittsburgh. PNC banks & Eat'n Parks are quite common. Reading these descriptions makes me feel like it happened in my home turf. Wells gets caught. "The robber told Stafford he was wearing a ticking time bomb. "Stafford shouted a warning. The troopers fell back. Weibel called the Erie police, the only local department with a bomb squad. The call reached the Erie police station, six miles north of the Summit Towne Sentre, at 3:04 P.M." - p 20 "He said a black man locked the bomb around his neck and ordered him to rob the bank. "Here we go, Dawdy thought. He had heard this story before." - p 21 Somehow, I doubt that Dawdy had heard this exact same story before. ""Holy shit," he thought. "This man is dead." "It was 3:18 P.M.—ninety-one minutes after Wells left Mamma Mia's, seventy-eight minutes after he left the TV tower site, fifty-one minutes after he walked into the bank, forty minutes after he left the bank, twenty-nine minutes after Trooper Weibel stopped him in the parking lot, fourteen minutes after Weibel called the bomb squad." [..] "Clark and the others backed off. Three minutes after the detonation, at 3:21 P.M., the bomb squad pulled up; they had driven as fast as they could through the traffic." - p 28 It took them 17 minutes to get out of the police stn & to drive 6 miles. Let's say it took 5 minutes to get in their vehicle. That leaves 12 minutes to drive 6 miles. That's a mile every 2 minutes. That means an average speed of 30 mph (not counting lights). "As he reviewed this finding, Jason Wick, the ATF agent, thought the late arrival of the Erie bomb squad had been a blessing. If the bomb techs had arrived before the bomb exploded, they might have moved the wire mesh to get to the gust of the collar bomb. Then not only Wells would have died." - p 106 "No one wanted to cut the bomb off Wells' neck. Vey, using a newly sharpened dissecting scalpel, cut off his head instead." - p 88 The authors (well, presumably, the reporter half of the duo) present some setting-the-scene history about Erie. "At its best, the city mined its heritage to its benefit. Erie became famous in the War of 1812 as the port where Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry built the ships he used to defeat the British fleet near the present-day Put-in-Bay, Ohio, in the Battle of Lake Erie, on September 10, 1813." - p 32 One of my favorite movies that I've made is called Bent. A minor portion of it was shot at a reenactment of a military camp in Put-in-Bay. Here's a link: https://youtu.be/pq9wSjKJf9E "Some nights on the South Pier, Diehl-Armstrong would laugh with Barnes about another murder—how, twenty years earlier, she shot and killed another live-in boyfriend on July 30, 1984. She would chuckle how she was acquitted in the case that established her notoreity. ""I shot the motherfucker six times," Diehl-Armstrong would say, "I got away with it." ""How'd you do that?" Barnes would say. ""I told them he was beating me up."" - p 34 Note that that purported dialog is presented as if it's a factual recounting when, in fact, it's a reenactment of an alleged conversation, reenacted by a crack head 20 yrs later. What's the likelihood of its being accurate or even anything other than imaginary?! It's this sort of thing that makes me question this bk. The writing is that of a 'news'paper reporter, the style is such that it's presented as 'reality', the typical 'news' approach - &, yet, the news is often fabricated w/ a manipulative end in mind - even when there's a degree of innocence involved, it's basic to the nature of the 'news' to put forth its stories as 'fact'. Now, I don't think it's contested that Diehl murdered her live-in boyfriend from 5 to 7 ft away w/ a handgun that she brought into the rm where he was for that purpose. As for the allegations that her boyfriend, a Vietnam Vet w/ PTSD, was actually beating her up? This bk provides no evidence that this was true. It may be the case that Diehl was completely making this up in order to justify her murder of him. Keep in mind that this was 1984, the yr of "The Burning Bed": " The Burning Bed is a 1984 television drama film starring Farrah Fawcett, Paul Le Mat, and Richard Masur. Based on the 1980 non-fiction novel of the same name by Faith McNulty, it follows battered housewife Francine Hughes and her trial for the murder of her abusive husband, James Berlin "Mickey" Hughes. Hughes set fire to the bed her husband was sleeping in at their Dansville, Michigan home on March 9, 1977, after thirteen years of physical domestic abuse at his hands. "The film was written by Rose Leiman Goldemberg and directed by Robert Greenwald. It aired on NBC on October 8, 1984. The movie premiered with a household share of 36.2, ranking it the seventeenth highest rated movie to air on network television and NBC's highest rated television movie." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bur... While Diehl's murder was committed before the Oct 8 broadcast of "The Burning Bed", I'm speculating that her trial was after the broadcast. It seems likely to me that the popularity of the TV program was highly influential on Diehl's being acquitted. Her defense didn't have to based in reality, it only had to appeal to the public mindset of the time. According to the narrative of this bk, this was her 1st murder - there was at least one more to come & the possibility of several more. A footnote on page 40 adds another mysterious death around this time of another man who'd dated Diehl: "While Diehl was incarcerated and awaiting trial," [for this 1st murder of Bob Thomas] "another death occurred in the rented house on Sunset Boulevard where she had killed Thomas on July 30, 1984. On April 4, 1985, the owner of the house, E.C., a sixty-five-year-old man whom Diehl-Armstrong once dated, was found hanging from a nylon rope in the house's entranceway. The coroner ruled the death a suicide and reported that E.C. left two suicide notes and was suffering from throat cancer but was also distraught over Thomas having been killed inside the house. A fiend of E.C. told the coroner that E.C. "had been extremely distressed since this murder," according to the coroner's report. "He had been the object of much harassment."" One cd potentially count this as violent death #2 that Diehl was at least patially responsible for. "The first criminal case against Diehl resulted from her work for an abortion clinic. The Erie police charged her in a sting in April 1980. The police accused her of telling an undercover female Erie police officer that the officer was pregnant, based on the results of her urine sample. The police said Diehl recommended the officer pay at least $150 for an abortion at a clinic in Buffalo. The urine sample was that of a male police officer. The police charged Diehl with conspiracy and attempted theft by deception. "Without pleading guilty, Diehl entered a program for first-time, nonviolent offenders. She got two years of probation, which included sixty hours of community service." - p 38 While my overall tendency is to believe that Diehl-Armstrong was a murderous & highly manipulative person, I keep questioning the narrative that's presented about her. Sting operations aren't to be trusted, they're entrapment - that doesn't mean that the above story isn't true, it just makes me wonder what the defense's version of the story was & if it differed significantly from the prosecution's. This bk depicts the younger Diehl as attractive, charming, & sexual. As such, maybe it's no wonder that even after murdering her boyfriend she managed to get married 7 yrs later. "Marjorie Diehl became Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong in 1991. Her first and only marriage ended in death. Her husband, Richard Armstrong, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had such a fear of germs and bacteria that he drank bleach with meals. Diehl accused him in April 1990 of threatening to kill her, mutilate her and burn down her house. He entered into a plea bargain and was sentenced to a month in prison in early January 1991. Richard Armstrong married Marjorie Diehl while he was on parole, on January 23, 1991. [Uh, there are so many red flags w/ the above that it's practically record-breaking! She gets him put in jail for threats of violence against her & then marries him while he's still on parole after he gets out! Surely, that's a sign that violence turns her on.] "Armstrong died twenty months later. Paramedics arrived at Diehl-Armstrong's new house, at 1867 East Seventh Street, in Erie, and found him sitting on the floor, having vomited, and resting against a couch, unable to walk. He said he had been suffering from headaches for two days, had become increasingly dizzy and fell that afternoon and struck his head on a table. He said, according to Diehl-Armstrong, that it felt as if something had busted in his head or a hammer had hit him. The damage left him with a brain hemorrhage. Armstrong fell into a coma at the hospital, was declared brain dead and died on August 24, 1992. He was forty years old." - p 45 Um, does that seem suspicious to anyone? The author(s) of this bk are careful to not accuse Diehl-Armstrong of a 2nd murder here but I don't think a suspicion of such is uncalled-for. Much of the bk is spent on diagnosises of Diehl as manic-depressive &/or otherwise mentally ill. This, of course, is used to explain her homicidal & other behaviors. "["]some of the greatest artists and writers who ever lived were bipolar." "Diehl-Armstrong considered herself a part of this illustrious group—the rarified ensemble of the socially and artistically brilliant and praised—rather than a member of a certain class of murderers. ""I am not," she once said, "one of these people that goes around like Ted Bundy and does these horrible things."" - p 48 & it's this aspect of Diehl that's so unsettling to me in the sense that while I believe she's guilty of "horrible things" I'm not really sure of what truly went on in her mind. She's depicted in this bk as having talent as a child - but as an adult, she's mainly depicted as living in deranged squalor. Did she ever play concerts as an adult? Did she ever publicly display talent of any kind? Was her private life full of creativity? These questions aren't answered in this bk. One friend of mine who's a prison activist says: "People aren't the worst thing they've ever done." That doesn't mean that people such as Diehl shd be excused for murder, it does mean that if we really want to understand her it wd help to know what her life was like when she wasn't murdering people. ...more |
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review of Catherine Asaro's The Phoenix Code by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 18, 2025 This is the 1st bk I've read by this author. I'm always looking for newer science fiction by women authors. This isn't really that new, 2000, but it's at least review of Catherine Asaro's The Phoenix Code by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 18, 2025 This is the 1st bk I've read by this author. I'm always looking for newer science fiction by women authors. This isn't really that new, 2000, but it's at least from the 21st century. I'm most reminded of John Darnton. While this is SF, it's just as much a thriller & somewhat of a romance. I enjoyed it.. but it seemed a bit formulaic, maybe written w/ being a 'best-seller' as a goal. The story is set in 2021, so it's one of those near-future SF tales, now past, that give the reader a chance to decide how good its predictions are/were. Given that this is now 2025, I don't have much of an idea of whether lifelike androids existed 4 yrs ago or not. It doesn't seem that improbable.. but I doubt it. "People packed the auditorium. Every seat was filled and more listeners crammed the aisles. An unspoken question charged the room: were today's speakers revealing a spectacular new future for the human race—or the end of humanity's reign as the ruling species on Earth? "This session was a diamond in the crown of IRTAC, the International Robotics Technology and Applications Conference in the year 2021, held at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland." - p 1 I grew up about an hr & 25 minutes drive from Goddard & a friend of mine's father worked there. That makes this story seem close-to-home. Pittsburgh, where I live now, is home to quite a bit of robotics research & some friends of mine have studied robotics at CMU. I remember talked w/ a guy who works in robotics at a party & he was quick to disavow any knowledge of what the robots he worked on were intended for. In other words, he knew they were for military purposes & wanted to have a clear conscience in case he was working on something meant to kill people. The main character here is "Megan": "She worked on artificial intelligence for androids—humanlike robots. Usually she looked to the future with optimism. Sometimes, though, she wondered if they were only creating ways to magnify the human capacity for destruction." - pp 1-2 I'm interested in the development of androids & robots. This concern w/ their militarization is common for political activists thinking far-enuf ahead & w/ SF writers who've been speculating for many decades now. A famous early speculative work concerned w/ this subject is Isaac Asimov's one that involves laws for robots that restrict them from harming humans. It's dramatically unlikely that such wishful thinking will ever be applied. Militarized robots will definitely have the ability to kill (&, presumably, already do). Megan gets a top-secret job at Mindsim's NEV-5 where they're working on an android. It's located underground in the desert & she'll be the only human there. She meets one of the more utilitarian robots & asks it to define amusement. Instead of defining it it provides a short list of synonyms. Megan replied. "Megan smiled. "Would you like to experience amusement? Pleasure? Zest?" In alphabetical order, no less. ""I have no need to do so." "Oh, well. If Trackman was the best that NEV-5 had to offer for company, aside from a barely functional android, she was going to be on the phone or Internet a lot. If the loneliness became too much, she could reprogram Trackman to converse better. It was a poor substitute for human fellowship, though, not to mention a waste of the LP's resources." - p 24 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this bk was witnessing the android's development of human characteristics - largely as a result of Megan's interaction w/ it + her reprogramming of it. "They didn't want him too human, though. If they succeeded, he would have the power and memory of a computer, the creativity and self-awareness of a person, the training of a commando, continual perfect health, and the survival ability of a machine. Weapons could be incorporated into his body. He would be smarter, faster, stronger, and harder to kill than any human soldier." - p 26 The android started off as "RS-4", their 4th attempt. This turned into "Aris". Eventually it became humanized more as "Ander". ""Aris needs to separate from us," Megan said. ""You know," Caitlin said, "if he doesn't, his autism could become more severe." ""Autism?" Kenrock asked. "Mack answered. "Some of his responses resemble autistic behavior in human children."" - p 65 What if the flood of autistic people in our society now were actually an introduction of androids on a mass scale? Raj, another robotics specialist that Megan has admired from afar, joins her at NEV-5 where he displays his strength. "Although Ander weighed as much as a human man, Raj showed no sign of strain. Megan wondered why he spent so much time developing his muscles. Although he avoided her in the gym, the room's activity log indicated he worked out with weights every day. It seemed an odd hobby for a reclusive genius, though she had no good reason for why she thought so. She certainly appreciated the results." - p 112 I don't like to distinguish that much between the works of men & women writers. Still, I'm inclined to find the above quote to be somewhat of a woman writer's touch. I'm a man, I don't work out in gyms & find doing so to be a waste of time given our very short lifespans. I've always thought that the shape of my body shd be the direct result of my lifestyle. At its best, this lifestyle has been very active, full of sex & walking & general busy-ness. The result has been thinness. When I was more muscular it was b/c I was doing physical labor that involved lifting & moving heavy objects. As I got older I got pot-bellied, probably mainly from drinking too much alcohol (& having less & less sex). I'd rather not have a pot-belly. I've always been repulsed by heavily muscled bodies that're the result of working-out, they're as overkill to me as silicone breast implants. These heavily muscled male bodies seem to be mostly an aesthetic preference of some gay men & of some stereotype-preferring heterosexual women. "She certainly appreciated the results" is a representative of the female preference for the stereotypical male man. Such a preference in Megan is an aspect of how this bk is a romance novel. "Don't prickle, she thought. Taking a breath, she lowered her arms. "People give me grief about how hard my reports are to read. Okay, so I'm no Shakespeare. But I do my best. And Raj, you of all people should have understood it."" - p 118 I found the choice of Shakespeare amusing. How many people in 2021 actually read Shakespeare & find it easy-going? Not many, I reckon. He wrote in what's now known as Early Modern English & he used Iambic Pentameter. There's a mellifluousness to it that's a bit far from common speech these days. Opening my Complete Works randomly I quote: "P. John. Thine's too heavy to mount. "Fal. Let it shine, then. "P. John. Thine's too thick to shine." It becomes less abstruse then when they exchange phone numbers. & then there's the romance novel again. "Megan sighed and settled against him. She felt a sensual comfort in his presence and was glad he had stayed. He moved his hands over her and kissed her deeply, exploring her body as she responded to him. Her arousal was warming from a simmer to a more demanding heat despite her intent to hold back. He pressed his hips against her pelvis in a rhythm as old as the human race, and she felt him through the layers of their clothes. Tingles ran down her spine and spread lower." - p 130 Since she was standing on her head w/ her legs spread she was like a Jacob's Ladder & lightning cd be seen sparking between her knees en route to her ankles. ""Input your crosslight codes," Raj said. "Ander went so still that for a moment Megan thought his mind had frozen again. He stayed that way for one second, like a statue. Then he deliberately set his hand on Megan's breast and turned to Raj, "I cut out the crosslight code, asshole." "No. Megan stiffened with sudden understanding. The crosslight code was the rewrite she had done to strengthen his conscience. Without it, he had neither caps on his behavior nor a significant sense of moral responsibility." - p 161 You can see where this is going. Man's need for pussy will take the whole race into a black hole someday. Actually, the big surprise is something I saw coming from a mile away. "Megan could guess what had happened; he figured out that the management might watch him if he won too much, and then his mind became caught up in a constrained loop that included that code. When the code reproduced itself, he ended up seeing spies in every corner. "Welcome to AI paranoia." - p 192 I wondered why Google Assistant told me to stop watching her the other day. But, really, I think the android was just smoking too much pot. Ander continues to develop past 2nd base. "He quirked a smile at her. "You're doing an IA." ""I'm afraid to ask." ""Irony attempt." ""It was for your VAS." "He gave her a look of mock solemnity. " 'Very accomplished sagacity.' " "She waved her hand at him. " 'Vexatious acronym syndrome.' " - pp 195-196 Now they're both seeming very human b/c they're too stupid to capitalize the 1st letter in each word of their acronymns. The Romance Novel proceeds apace as the love interests are captive together in a bathrm. Every time that's happened to me I've ended up getting laid so it wasn't so bad. "She wasn't even sure what to make of that. "I didn't even think you noticed me much." ""How could I not notice? Do you know how hard it is to concentrate when my boss is a red-haired Valkyrie with the face of an angel and the body of an erotica model?" "That caught her off guard. "Good grief." "He reddened. "Sorry. That was tactless." "Tactless? It sounded great. "No. I mean, thank you." She sat on the edge of the tub. Mischief lightened her voice. "I can't think of anyone I'd rather be trapped with in a Motel Flamingo bathroom." "Sitting next to her, he grinned. "No one has ever told me that before."" - p 233 My words exactly. I won't quote page 303 b/c that's the part where the big surprise happens, the one I figured out hundreds of pages ago. ""Yes," she said. "I will be your wife."" - p 328 Now, if we were talking about the Heaven's Gate cult we might say: "And they all died happily ever after." ...more |
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Jun 18, 2025 07:13PM
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review of Jerry Clark & Ed Palattella's Pizza Bomber - The Untold Story of America's Most Shocking Bank Robbery by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025 My full review of this is at: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticC... I rarely read 'True Cr review of Jerry Clark & Ed Palattella's Pizza Bomber - The Untold Story of America's Most Shocking Bank Robbery by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025 My full review of this is at: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticC... I rarely read 'True Crime' bks. I reckon I just don't like that much. I do get engrossed in them - but not to get my jollies off, I find them consistently tragic. I'm from Baltimore, where I was exposed to more than enuf debased humanity to last multiple lifetimes. I read this b/c I remember hearing about the crime when it happened & didn't ever hear about its solving. Even after reading this, I feel unsettled - as if we'll never know the true story - esp the true story of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong & Bill Rothstein. One might ask: Exactly what do I mean by "debased humanity"? I mean people who've gotten so deranged that they no longer have much feeling for other people, people who want to hurt other people w/ the same detachment that people generally treat inanimate objects. Usually, this state-of-mind comes about from a more general lack of ethics in their environment coupled w/ excessive drug use - esp crack & speed. Having a megalomaniacal mindset contributes but isn't absolutely necessary. The crime was committed in 2003 but the bk wasn't copyrighted until 2012 - that's a long time coming. The "AUTHORS' NOTE" begins: "This account draws from personal observations, contemporaneous notes, interviews, court documents, transcripts and other official records, as well as news media reports, particularly those in the Erie Times-News. The opinions expressed in this book are the authors' alone and not those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." - p -iv The "Introduction" begins: "Since the founding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in 1908, its agents have infiltrated the Mob, probed corruption and pursued terrorists. But fewer than three hundred of the FBI's investigations have earned Major Case status, which refers to the bureau's most complex and serious probes. "The first Major Case was the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping, on March 1, 1932. Six decades later, the FBI opened a string of some of its most famous Major Cases in recent times, OKBOMB, Major Case 117, covered the investigation of Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, in Oklahoma City, on April 15, 1995." - p 1 Jerry Clark, the coauthor of this bk, was the FBI agent in charge of the COLLARBOMB (Pizza Bomber) investigation. His coauthor, Ed Palattella, was a reporter for the Erie Times-News who covered the case. As such, it's not surprising that the presentation of the FBI wd be a fairly straight-forward presentation of it as the country's main law-enforcement agency out to do capture major criminals for the protection of the citizen. Many people wd beg to differ. 1st off, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's notorious boss for decades, was a closeted gay man w/ well-known biases that interfered w/ any actual detection work. His orientation was to create a PR image, his reality was that he was very oppressed & oppressive. He's sd to've denied that organized crime even existed. Black Panthers were certainly framed by the FBI - as were Native American political activists. Even the Oklahoma City Bombing has been under scrutiny: the FBI allegedly had infilitrators in Right Wing groups connected to the bombing, they allegedly knew it was going to happen.. & did nothing to stop it. In other words, trusting the FBI isn't exactly something that its record gives confidence for - but nowhere in this bk is the FBI or any of the other law enforcement agencies called into question. "Before joing the FBI, Clark investigated large-scale drug trafficking as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, in Cleveland; before that, he had worked as a forensic therapist, a probation officer and a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, the NCIS. Clark had more experience with bank robberies and other violent crimes than any of the six other FBI agents in Erie at the time; his whole FBI career he had been assigned to violent crimes—fugitives, kidnappings, bank robberies. He had a bachelor's degree in forensic psychology. He had wanted to be a psychological profiler, who used clues to develop the protrait of a criminal." - pp 25-26 One of the reasons why I don't like True Crime bks is that, for the most part, they're tragic & I don't like tragedy. The COLLARBOMB case is tragic b/c Brian Wells, a pizza deliverer, was killed after robbing a PNC bank w/ a bomb strapped to his chest. Wells was caught almost immediately after robbing the bank, he told the police that the bomb was going to go off & kill him & that he didn't know how to stop it. The bomb squad didn't get there in time to stop it & Wells had a large hole blown thru his chest. The bomb squad supposedly had traffic problems. Really? If it had been one of their guys who had the bomb strapped to them do you think the bomb squad wd've gotten there in time?! Maybe they're not familiar w/ sirens & flashing lights, they're used for navigating thru traffic. I cd care less about the bank being robbed of a mere $8.000+ - that's trivial in contrast to Wells's death. "As the police questioned Wells and a television camera rolled, the homemade contraption exploded and tore a fatal wound into his chest." - p 2 Maybe they shd've taken the situation more seriously. Easy for me to say, right? I wasn't there. The author(s) quote from Wells' high school psych profile. "The study found Wells suffered from nascent psychological problems. "The . . . record appears to indicate psychpathic tendencies along with paranoid flavor," it said. "The school psychologist gauged Wells' 'self-projection" by having him draw a person. Wells drew "a make figure that appears to be physically strong and dominant," according to the study. "This large figure appears to indicate slight manic and gradiose signs in this adolescent. It appears to be related somewhat to studies of aggressive psychopaths." "The study portrayed Wells as an intelligent but troubled and defiant loner with no need for authority. "He claims that he will not please others," the study said, "and he presently sees adults as being too demanding and that he will lead his own life in his own time."" - p 9 I can't say that I'm very impressed by the above psychoanalysis & find it close to useless for knowing who Wells was around the time of his death. It seems to me that having "no need for authority" is a healthy thing & that seeing "adults as being too demanding" was probably equally sensible. Much of the way he's described just seems like a portrait of adolescence. Dropping hints about psychopathia doesn't seem to've been born out in his life. We come to the robbery: "Lapinski told him the manager was at lunch and would be back in about a half an hour, or around 3:00 P.M. ""I don't have until 3:00," the man said, "I don't have that kind of time. I need $250,000." "He lifted the baggy white T-shirt. A graycolored device hung from his neck and rested on his chest. It looked like a bomb. "Lipinski looked at the man. He still wanted $250,000." - p 17 "Lipinski got more cash from other teller stations. She put the money in a white canvas bank bag and gave it to the robber: $8,702. ""It's not enough," he said. ""What do you want me to do?" Lipinski said. "She told him it was all the money she had." - pp17-18 "The robber got out. He walked to the McDonald's drive-through sign, which was posted in a flower bed. He got down, lifted a rock that was embedded in the landscaping and grabbed a piece of paper stuck to the bottom of the rock. The robber stood, read the note and lifted his eyes. He looked toward an Eat'n Park restaurant on the other side of Peach Street." - p 19 Erie isn't far from Pittsburgh. PNC banks & Eat'n Parks are quite common. Reading these descriptions makes me feel like it happened in my home turf. Wells gets caught. "The robber told Stafford he was wearing a ticking time bomb. "Stafford shouted a warning. The troopers fell back. Weibel called the Erie police, the only local department with a bomb squad. The call reached the Erie police station, six miles north of the Summit Towne Sentre, at 3:04 P.M." - p 20 "He said a black man locked the bomb around his neck and ordered him to rob the bank. "Here we go, Dawdy thought. He had heard this story before." - p 21 Somehow, I doubt that Dawdy had heard this exact same story before. ""Holy shit," he thought. "This man is dead." "It was 3:18 P.M.—ninety-one minutes after Wells left Mamma Mia's, seventy-eight minutes after he left the TV tower site, fifty-one minutes after he walked into the bank, forty minutes after he left the bank, twenty-nine minutes after Trooper Weibel stopped him in the parking lot, fourteen minutes after Weibel called the bomb squad." [..] "Clark and the others backed off. Three minutes after the detonation, at 3:21 P.M., the bomb squad pulled up; they had driven as fast as they could through the traffic." - p 28 It took them 17 minutes to get out of the police stn & to drive 6 miles. Let's say it took 5 minutes to get in their vehicle. That leaves 12 minutes to drive 6 miles. That's a mile every 2 minutes. That means an average speed of 30 mph (not counting lights). "As he reviewed this finding, Jason Wick, the ATF agent, thought the late arrival of the Erie bomb squad had been a blessing. If the bomb techs had arrived before the bomb exploded, they might have moved the wire mesh to get to the gust of the collar bomb. Then not only Wells would have died." - p 106 "No one wanted to cut the bomb off Wells' neck. Vey, using a newly sharpened dissecting scalpel, cut off his head instead." - p 88 The authors (well, presumably, the reporter half of the duo) present some setting-the-scene history about Erie. "At its best, the city mined its heritage to its benefit. Erie became famous in the War of 1812 as the port where Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry built the ships he used to defeat the British fleet near the present-day Put-in-Bay, Ohio, in the Battle of Lake Erie, on September 10, 1813." - p 32 One of my favorite movies that I've made is called Bent. A minor portion of it was shot at a reenactment of a military camp in Put-in-Bay. Here's a link: https://youtu.be/pq9wSjKJf9E "Some nights on the South Pier, Diehl-Armstrong would laugh with Barnes about another murder—how, twenty years earlier, she shot and killed another live-in boyfriend on July 30, 1984. She would chuckle how she was acquitted in the case that established her notoreity. ""I shot the motherfucker six times," Diehl-Armstrong would say, "I got away with it." ""How'd you do that?" Barnes would say. ""I told them he was beating me up."" - p 34 Note that that purported dialog is presented as if it's a factual recounting when, in fact, it's a reenactment of an alleged conversation, reenacted by a crack head 20 yrs later. What's the likelihood of its being accurate or even anything other than imaginary?! It's this sort of thing that makes me question this bk. The writing is that of a 'news'paper reporter, the style is such that it's presented as 'reality', the typical 'news' approach - &, yet, the news is often fabricated w/ a manipulative end in mind - even when there's a degree of innocence involved, it's basic to the nature of the 'news' to put forth its stories as 'fact'. Now, I don't think it's contested that Diehl murdered her live-in boyfriend from 5 to 7 ft away w/ a handgun that she brought into the rm where he was for that purpose. As for the allegations that her boyfriend, a Vietnam Vet w/ PTSD, was actually beating her up? This bk provides no evidence that this was true. It may be the case that Diehl was completely making this up in order to justify her murder of him. Keep in mind that this was 1984, the yr of "The Burning Bed": " The Burning Bed is a 1984 television drama film starring Farrah Fawcett, Paul Le Mat, and Richard Masur. Based on the 1980 non-fiction novel of the same name by Faith McNulty, it follows battered housewife Francine Hughes and her trial for the murder of her abusive husband, James Berlin "Mickey" Hughes. Hughes set fire to the bed her husband was sleeping in at their Dansville, Michigan home on March 9, 1977, after thirteen years of physical domestic abuse at his hands. "The film was written by Rose Leiman Goldemberg and directed by Robert Greenwald. It aired on NBC on October 8, 1984. The movie premiered with a household share of 36.2, ranking it the seventeenth highest rated movie to air on network television and NBC's highest rated television movie." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bur... While Diehl's murder was committed before the Oct 8 broadcast of "The Burning Bed", I'm speculating that her trial was after the broadcast. It seems likely to me that the popularity of the TV program was highly influential on Diehl's being acquitted. Her defense didn't have to based in reality, it only had to appeal to the public mindset of the time. According to the narrative of this bk, this was her 1st murder - there was at least one more to come & the possibility of several more. A footnote on page 40 adds another mysterious death around this time of another man who'd dated Diehl: "While Diehl was incarcerated and awaiting trial," [for this 1st murder of Bob Thomas] "another death occurred in the rented house on Sunset Boulevard where she had killed Thomas on July 30, 1984. On April 4, 1985, the owner of the house, E.C., a sixty-five-year-old man whom Diehl-Armstrong once dated, was found hanging from a nylon rope in the house's entranceway. The coroner ruled the death a suicide and reported that E.C. left two suicide notes and was suffering from throat cancer but was also distraught over Thomas having been killed inside the house. A fiend of E.C. told the coroner that E.C. "had been extremely distressed since this murder," according to the coroner's report. "He had been the object of much harassment."" One cd potentially count this as violent death #2 that Diehl was at least patially responsible for. "The first criminal case against Diehl resulted from her work for an abortion clinic. The Erie police charged her in a sting in April 1980. The police accused her of telling an undercover female Erie police officer that the officer was pregnant, based on the results of her urine sample. The police said Diehl recommended the officer pay at least $150 for an abortion at a clinic in Buffalo. The urine sample was that of a male police officer. The police charged Diehl with conspiracy and attempted theft by deception. "Without pleading guilty, Diehl entered a program for first-time, nonviolent offenders. She got two years of probation, which included sixty hours of community service." - p 38 While my overall tendency is to believe that Diehl-Armstrong was a murderous & highly manipulative person, I keep questioning the narrative that's presented about her. Sting operations aren't to be trusted, they're entrapment - that doesn't mean that the above story isn't true, it just makes me wonder what the defense's version of the story was & if it differed significantly from the prosecution's. This bk depicts the younger Diehl as attractive, charming, & sexual. As such, maybe it's no wonder that even after murdering her boyfriend she managed to get married 7 yrs later. "Marjorie Diehl became Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong in 1991. Her first and only marriage ended in death. Her husband, Richard Armstrong, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had such a fear of germs and bacteria that he drank bleach with meals. Diehl accused him in April 1990 of threatening to kill her, mutilate her and burn down her house. He entered into a plea bargain and was sentenced to a month in prison in early January 1991. Richard Armstrong married Marjorie Diehl while he was on parole, on January 23, 1991. [Uh, there are so many red flags w/ the above that it's practically record-breaking! She gets him put in jail for threats of violence against her & then marries him while he's still on parole after he gets out! Surely, that's a sign that violence turns her on.] "Armstrong died twenty months later. Paramedics arrived at Diehl-Armstrong's new house, at 1867 East Seventh Street, in Erie, and found him sitting on the floor, having vomited, and resting against a couch, unable to walk. He said he had been suffering from headaches for two days, had become increasingly dizzy and fell that afternoon and struck his head on a table. He said, according to Diehl-Armstrong, that it felt as if something had busted in his head or a hammer had hit him. The damage left him with a brain hemorrhage. Armstrong fell into a coma at the hospital, was declared brain dead and died on August 24, 1992. He was forty years old." - p 45 Um, does that seem suspicious to anyone? The author(s) of this bk are careful to not accuse Diehl-Armstrong of a 2nd murder here but I don't think a suspicion of such is uncalled-for. Much of the bk is spent on diagnosises of Diehl as manic-depressive &/or otherwise mentally ill. This, of course, is used to explain her homicidal & other behaviors. "["]some of the greatest artists and writers who ever lived were bipolar." "Diehl-Armstrong considered herself a part of this illustrious group—the rarified ensemble of the socially and artistically brilliant and praised—rather than a member of a certain class of murderers. ""I am not," she once said, "one of these people that goes around like Ted Bundy and does these horrible things."" - p 48 & it's this aspect of Diehl that's so unsettling to me in the sense that while I believe she's guilty of "horrible things" I'm not really sure of what truly went on in her mind. She's depicted in this bk as having talent as a child - but as an adult, she's mainly depicted as living in deranged squalor. Did she ever play concerts as an adult? Did she ever publicly display talent of any kind? Was her private life full of creativity? These questions aren't answered in this bk. One friend of mine who's a prison activist says: "People aren't the worst thing they've ever done." That doesn't mean that people such as Diehl shd be excused for murder, it does mean that if we really want to understand her it wd help to know what her life was like when she wasn't murdering people. ...more |
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Jun 18, 2025 09:51AM
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review of Ron Silliman's SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025 I'm reading my Ron Silliman bks in chronological order, the early ones I read 45 yrs or so ago & now I'm rereading them for the sake of writing review of Ron Silliman's SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2025 I'm reading my Ron Silliman bks in chronological order, the early ones I read 45 yrs or so ago & now I'm rereading them for the sake of writing these reviews - w/ an eye to collecting them in one or more bks to be called Everybody Loves a Poetry Critic. Whether I'll live long enuf to do that is another story. I've already written at least 219 poetry reviews but there are ssooooooo many more I'd like to write, if I were to read & review all the poetry bks that I have an eye on in my personal library this whole project cd drag on for yrs. SO, I've reviewed Crow (1971) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) & MOHAWK (1973) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ) & now it's time for SITTING UP, STANDING, TAKING STEPS (1978). By then, Language Poetry was getting somewhat well-known amongst people interested in new mvmts in poetry. Silliman was on the West Coast of the US & on the East Coast there was "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine. This chapbk was published by Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press, Hejinian was also a part of the West Coast Language Poetry scene & her chapbks were very nicely done w/ good quality paper & color printing, these were crafted, the inside text is in blue ink. This is from back in the day when the NEA actually supported work like this, as it did here. I.E.: the NEA supported it as long as it didn't deviate visually from their norms, what I call "Field Writing", wch is what much of what I wrote at the time was, wd've been rejected out-of-hand for not conforming to their "double-spaced" requirement. This chapbk is unpaginated so I've given the odd-numbered pages numbers for reference sake. "High gray sky. A large wood table with only a green bottle of "white" Rhine wine atop it (empty). An open umbrella upside down in one corner of the room. Ritz crackers topped with cream cheese and, beside them, crayolas. Gray plastic bottle of lemon ammonia on its side on the green tile in back of the toilet. My red-and-black checked CPO jacket atop a guitar in my rocking chair. Butter on the knife. Dobermans and Danes." - p 7 SOO, it starts off descriptively, seemingly a description of the same place & time. What I imagine is Silliman carrying a notebk that he writes in whenever moved to do so, akin to carrying a sketchbk. However, unlike narrative description he doesn't try to contextualize the sentences, he doesn't say anything like: 'Here's the room where I'm living for awhile, I've taken a break from the city to concentrate on writing under a rural influence.' Instead, the sentences just accumulate & can be deduced from w/o guidance from the writer. The descriptions become more 'unglued' from a potentially obvious context. "Chipped cup. The submarine on the horizon in the sunset. State of null karma. Undefinied descriptive predicate. Little lobes. Some handsome hands." - pp 7-8 Seemingly, the more he writes, the broader his scope of what interests him & the broader the environment. "All toes of identical length. Odor of stale soap, bus depot john. Abductor muscles. The bitterness of women. The problem of truth in fiction. Abandoned railroad cars on a siding by a rock quarry. Advanced life support unit. Geometry of the personal. Midget in a large felt hat. Fork lift. Abandoned industrial trackside cafeteria amid dillweed stalks. My droor thing. Corridor of condos. Post-nasal drip. Hot hamster. Send in the notebook. A salt-water cave. Eroded ruins. The bend in the pelican's wing-spread. Algae in a tidepool. An old windowless house of concrete, its door rusted off, with nothing inside it but odor and an open safe." - p 9 Sometimes the details surprise me: "Hair in an Afro-blowout" (p 11), "A lad with an Afro blowout." (p 12) All in all, I enjoy this writing technique. It wdn't work for me if each of Silliman's sentences weren't so evocative but the writing's very crisp & there seem to be 'no wasted words'. ...more |
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Cognitive Dissidents
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A meeting place for people dedicated to subverting oppressive 'realities' by whatever means we're inspired to use. A meeting place for people dedicated to subverting oppressive 'realities' by whatever means we're inspired to use. ...more
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Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Librarians Group is the official group for requesting additions or updates to the catalog, including: * Adding new books or editions * Editing book information (including covers) * Combining and merging book editions * Edits to page counts, quotes or awards * Correcting author profiles for authors not in the Goodreads Author Program If you're a Goodreads member with a new request, click Join Group. Once you're added to the group, you can post your question following this link. Simple requests (e.g. page count updates) typically take around 48 hours depending on the volume of requests, while more complex requests could take up to a couple of weeks (e.g. adding a new book). Authors, if you are a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can edit information about your own books. Find out how in this guide. Keep in mind that Librarians don't: * Grant or give insights into Librarian applications / Librarian status * Move ISBNs or ASINs between editions * Help with non-catalog Support questions (e.g. How do I reset my password?) For help with these queries or to submit general questions, comments or feature requests, try Goodreads Help or use the Contact Us form. If you're a Librarian and want to process requests, please refer to our Librarian Manual to ensure edits are performed in line with Goodreads policies. ...more
Working Class Readers
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What sort of books do working class readers enjoy? Clearly all books! but OK if we are thinking reading in a class conscious way, what might we highli What sort of books do working class readers enjoy? Clearly all books! but OK if we are thinking reading in a class conscious way, what might we highlight to other working class readers. This might be books by working class writers; it might be books about working class lives or jobs or themes; but it might be something else! ...more
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Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Harry Matthews, etc.
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