Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain by Jim Carroll
1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion

2/
The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverbrating
In your mind

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds

3/
You should have talked more with the monkey
He's always willing to negotiate
I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame
The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

4/
Here's synchronicity for you:

Your music's tape was inside my walkman
When my best friend from summer camp
Called with the news about you

I listened them...
It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound
Less and less light
Until you hit solid rock

The drill bit broke
and the valley became
A thin crevice, impassible in time,
As time itself stopped.

And the walls became cages of brilliant notes
Pressing in...
Pressure
That's how diamonds are made
And that's WHERE it sometimes all collapses
Down in on you

5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the phrases were curious:
Like "incognito libido"
And "Chalk Skin Bending"

The words kept getting smaller and smaller
Until
Separated from their music
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge
Which fit only in the barrel of a gun

6/
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible
Because that's where the pain came from
That's where the demons were digging

The world outside was blank
Its every cause was just a continuation
Of another unsolved effect

7/
But Kurt...
Didn't the thought that you would never write another song
Another feverish line or riff
Make you think twice?
That's what I don't understand
Because it's kept me alive, above any wounds

8/
If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence
And looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits

Perhaps inside them
You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms
Where it all began...

No matter that you felt betrayed by her

That is always the cost
As Frank said,
Of a young artist's remorseless passion

Which starts out as a kiss
And follows like a curse

it was a Waterstones back then - a much nicer store than it is now (sadly). I pretty much ran all the bookstores at LAX at one point or another

but enough about me

here's to Jim Carroll

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/books...

http://catholicboy.com/

back in the 90s when I was a bookstore manager one of the the stores I ran was a bookstore in terminal 3 at LAX. Im not certain what carrier he used but Jim Carroll would fly out of LAX T3 routinely. I spoke with him a few times; sort of established that it was him and so forth. He was all excited about this movie being made from one of his books. Most times though when he came in he'd smile at me ruefully and give me a nod and walk right up to our poetry section and run his finger over the spine of one of his books. Then he'd give me another smile and a nod and then split; almost scurry out the door. I'd like to think it was a little pre-flight ritual he had. Who knows?

Jim Carroll RIP

Jcamilo wrote: "Seriously, I wont pass the part that printed texts have a begining, a middle and an ending. The person who wrote this actually reads? Ever read James Joyce? Or that guy Kafka? Or got his hand in an..."

you touch on a good point:

when our experience of story telling was primarily aural/oral our minds worked differently than they do now or were used differently in any event and different mental strengths played a role in making society run the ways it did or didnt

when mass printing came into town things changed dramatically and society itself was in some ways influenced by these changes - the human mind came to be used in a different way and different strengths emerged while some decried what was being lost in the departure from a primarily oral/aural tradition

now we are undergoing another change in media delivery and new strengths emerge: for a (trivial?) sweep of breadth we may be giving up analytical depth (think on this: I, who am noone special, know a lot more about a lot of things than Dr Johnson ever did but on the other hand in a narrowly defined range of knowledge I could not compete with him - which is better?)

maybe it's not even a question of better because what does that mean? societies crumble and reshape themselves through these kind of changes - the world around us changes and a new generation with new moraes and strengths and weaknesses of temperament and acuity will emerge

and they'll have their own problems

Oro shouldnt the teacher serve some gatekeeping or filtering function?

if a teacher selects a 'good' book and fails to inspire the students with it that is a failure to teach

but not all books are created equal and the practice described above creates no room for a conversation about what makes a good book good - and that's a systemic failure

"BEREA, Ohio — Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/boo...

"JONESBORO, Ga. — For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.

But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/boo...

(so instead of reading Harper Lee some of them choose to read Dav Pilkey's Capt Underpants? is this a good idea?)

welcome Joanie!

like Randal Jarrell? then they're whatcha callit - belletrists

actually I dont think that at all

I think that Kakutani Michiko's reviews are stirring and luminous and that they limn entire books in just a handful of sentences

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2...

great essay - thanks for the link

read the Portis essay for some background, it's not just about 'intellectual property', not even by half

you are talking about a guy who has silenced himself for going on 50 years

the fact that Rand cant write a human character is no accident - it is correlative to her "philosophy" which displays no grasp of actual human nature

and both phenomenon are manifestations of her pathology

best of luck to Lauren and JE

looks like more suggestions from more sources may help our favorite authors get added

I put you in but you arent showing up yet

I'll add you tonight

Ben wrote: "i can almost see mildred in there baking pies...

actually, that's about 25 minutes from my house. it's a really depressing part of burbank... which is saying something..."

no kidding - that's like saying 'it's a particularly hot part of Hell'

perfect - thanks JE