Lore O' The Cult O' The Fugitive Kind-part 1

LORE O' THE CULT O' THE FUGITIVE KIND
EXORDIUM

In order t' abscond into the myserious,nocturnal Zones
o' the Fugitive Kind Cult,
one must first cast aside irrevocably all notions o'
rationality,logic,societal conceptions
o' psychic processes...
y'll find n' point o' departure,'n' obviously,there
can be n'fixed destination,there's instead absolutely
'n' inevitably nothin' more nor less than a huge
Question-there be n'final fixed
answers latent,rather,enigmatic 'n' fanatically
paradoxical tidbits scattered as if debris
upon a sterile lily-white slaughtered skin o' a
tree...
T'be a human animal in this world as it now ekyists is
t' be incarcerated not only in one's flesh:condemned
t' a lifelong sentence t' solitary confinement in
one's own lonely skin for as long as one be alive upon
this earth, 'n' simuletaneously,condemned t' be free
as an individual:free t' bury oneself in
hypocrisy,banality,conformity,self-abhorrence,self-destruction
o' one's every precious bit o' creativity,'n' jes as
free t' brave alienation,the harsh beauty o'
individuality,the
Self's evolution,the marvelous act o' creation at
every moment,in everything one does.
'N' one be incarcerated in that s'called "human
condition"-perhaps one hates one's debilitatin'
dead-end marginal job,yet one turns t' jelly at the
thought o' havin' n'income,
n'shelter,nothin' but oneself out there on that
Street,in that City,hungry guts,n'phoney
womb o' security t' bullshit oneself wi'...
question at this point being,would you,could you
deliberately 'n' wi'out qualms,actually cut oneself
loose t' become one o' them sociological
entities-"fringe citizens","street
people","the homeless", the indigent "po' trash","the
deviants", the FUGITIVE KIND?
There be n'question o' the reality o' such subcultural
characters out there in this
"land of the free and home of the brave". But for one
t' choose t' join those ranks?
Has it ever occurred t' you,that y'jes might be a
seminal prophet,anonymous 'n'
suppressed,overflowin' wi' magnificent aesthetic
masterpieces,'n' it be that goddam dog-eat-dog world
that prevents recognition 'n' heightened self-esteem
'n' spiritual
metamorphosis? yet in fact one can achieve notoriety
as a creative individual
in spite o' societus if one acts upon one's desires,if
they be authentically those incendiary desires o' the
true artist. One need not be a helpless,hopeless
victim o' anything.
The most vitle 'n' pertinent first step is for one t'
acknowledge the mere fact that one ekyists, as that
entity one be at this MOMENT,'cause o' what one has
chosen for oneself up t' this point,'n' t' not allow
oneself t' become strung out if one is not what one
wants t' be,rather,do whatever it takes t' be that
Self which one must be! Exorcise them demons
o' fear 'n' cowardice! Chances are one'll be
ravenously hungry at times,'n' be forced t' sleep on
rooftops or in a ditch,'n' be free o' burden o'
possessions 'n' duty. What be o'
utmost significance be this liberated Zone o' one's
body,fecund soil o' one's mind,
the priceless mergence wi' one's Soul,the creation o'
one's unique individualistic
Self.
One is never a representative or epitome o'
humanity,one has made the choice t' become a mutant,a
member o' a whole other breed o' evolutionary species.
One be one
being,alive for whatever absurd folly o' fate,'n' it
be one's Self one must face in the
Magick Mirror o' Ekyisyence.
Be this a philosophy? Let us contemplate for a moment
the phenomenon o' a wild manchild from a totally
isolate bayou environ,who emerged forth into the world
'n' in fifteen years o' painful nomadic ekyisyence
created this seminal cult,
the Fugitive Kind,o' which he was the ultimate
epitome-what he created o' those fifteen years o'
eksperyenchul knowledge livin' Blues,be a strange rare
breed o' what be conceptualized here as Folk
Philosophy.
It be a n'end enigmatic,isolate phenomenon that an
individual born o' a Native American 'n' AfroAmerican
mother who happened t' be a practicin' root doctor 'n'
Witch,'n' a po' trash Cajun father, could,neath the
streetbred facade,be androgynously 'n' marvelously
sensitive
'n' attuned t' the infinite ramifications o' emergin'
Fugitive Kind philosophy,woven o' wild natural
materials o' Blues Culture,'n' Hipster breed o'
authentic Bohemianism that
emerged in 1940s,'n' although never having once been
in any kind o' school,would
go on t' not only live this philosophy,but write a
book about it,'n' t' create a body o' Blues
music 'n' poetry overwhelmin' in its originality 'n'
profound Folk wisdom.
Inspired by his Legacy,how could one not choose t'
live,by whatever means it takes in the terminal
struggle for survival,t' accept one's horrendous 'n'
crushin' freedom,
t' flee the nowhere situation that be societus,t'
merge wi' Shadows o' Great Unknown,
t' don Wild Skins o' the Fugitive Kind's Night,t'
brave the thorough lack o' material
security,in order t' cultivate one's true Self,merely
t' be a Self at all!
(end o'
part 1)
GypsyMan AKA:Gypsy James O'Toole

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1950s Literature: The Lost World

It wasn't a golden-age, except for lovers of American-made cars, Abstract Expressionism, film noir, and rock and roll. It was marked by hipocrisy on a grand scale in the matters of race, sex, gender and personal freedom. It witnessed the genesis of two of our worst American ills: (chilling music here) the suburbs; and what has now become an ecologically unsustainable addiction to highway-connected sprawl. It was also the last decade in which a certain venerable art form often called "the novel" was actually held in the same kind of high regard as other popular, powerful arts.

Given the fact that movies, music and design from the era is woven tightly into our culture today, it is peculiar that literature of the 1950s, except for certain Beat Generation classics, is largely forgotten. I don't mean disdained or denigrated. I mean unstudied, undiscussed, ignored. I'd like to see it resurrected for the purposes of literary study. I think we'd learn much about where we've come from by doing so.

Culturally, what is conveniently known as The Fifties actually began in about 1947 (when Russia got the bomb) and ended in Dallas in the early afternoon on November 22, 1963. My main thesis here is that in the literature of this period we find a singular phenomenon, almost a cultural fossil, not likely to be found in any other literary strata available to us.

I would describe the fossilized artifact as follows:

If we accept the assumption (and I do) that with the advent of civil rights, youthful radicalism, feminism and post-Dylan pop music the cultural landscape changed entirely and irrevocably (though that is lately challenged in the Bush era), then we'd have to submit the following as corollary: that the 1950s represents the very last rear guard of that two-thousand year-old, pre-liberated Western culture--in which racism, sexism, suppression, open hipocrisy and religious piety were all taken as bedrock facts immutable and more or less unquestioned.

For that fact alone--that we can examine these cultural artifacts in their final, most advanced and also most corrupt state--I think the literature of the period is worth studying. Perhaps unsurprisingly it is in the literature of the period--as opposed to film and in the plastic arts--where we find these notions most thoroughly explored; where we can find them manifested in characters we might recognize from the inside. I would say it were true even if allowing that some of the authors would not have been aware of their contribution to this particular lode.

We find this rear guard populated by writers of various talents and tendencies. By reciting the following list I make no assertions about quality or self-awareness; only their fitness for study as literary fossils. I am talkiing about authors like James Jones, John O'Hara, Robert Penn Warren, James Gould Cozzens and Joyce Cary. We can place early Mailer there before he smoked pot and deconstructed himself and ran for mayor. Saul Bellow's early works fit: his Augie March without a doubt, in any case. And does anyone remember that John P. Marquand was often on the best seller lists then? We might even put some of Hemingway's later works there for they qualify temporally and culturally. And John Knowles' middle-school classic "A Separate Peace" is copyrighted 1959. There are many others too numerous to mention.

The cut begins after Faulkner and ends before Kesey. It disincludes Kerouac, Burroughs, Algren, Barth and Pynchon for what I think are the fairly obvious tendencies of these writers to have utterly rejected what was then convention. They staked out new, ironic territories on the left bank of the river. It disincludes James Baldwin too because his work is essentially part of what I would call liberation literature, and presages much that would come later. Nor does it include so-called pulp fiction because pulp ficition authors rarely found consideration as "serious novelists."

No doubt the list will include largely (if not entirely) white males. Its possible this fact may deterr some from being intrigued. So would the acknowledged suspicion that the literary family mentioned above found extinction with remarkable (and perhaps justifed) speed once the Beatles showed up. History had to make room for moptops making wisecracks by day and by night, summoning Dionysian screams from their audiences. By 1964, the last rear guard of traditional Western culture had been heaved over the side--and as the New York Times noted on the day the Beatles hit the tarmac at a newly-renamed Kennedy Airport: "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

But the signature works of the 1950s represent a paradigm worth review. I would say that, turned to the light in a certain way, the works of this period, of this group of men, in their proud, often unwitting, occasionally plodding doggedness, reveal glimpses we had not expected to see; facets of ourselves today often enough in ways we had perhaps hoped to avoid; examples of what was left behind and why; cautions; and often enough to make it interesting, some pretty good writing too.

--Renaissance

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Can You Please Just Leave Us Alone (on 9/11) From Now On?

Five years on and for at least some of us who live near Ground Zero, 9/11 brings not only memories of the fire that rained on our sidewalks then but of the faux-patriotic simpletons that have trod our sidewalks every anniversary since then.

They come on loud-piped Harleys festooned with stars and stripes; they parade in kilts and play bagpipes in front of our Korean market as if we had only just been wishing we'd hear those lilting strains. They come in uniform from parts unknown to pay homage (that's fine), but they also come in dressy ensembles and attend fancy dinners wearing nametags as if on a junket to Cap d'Antibes. And they also come, by the busload, in flip-flops and dumb t-shirts to snap pictures of allegedly hallowed, inauthentic graffitti on Liberty Street and sometimes to scrawl earnest inanities of their own.

The police, heavy into overtime and only slightly drunk on authority, shout into loudspeakers and blithely prevent folks from crossing streets that would otherwise allow them to execute quotidian duties--buying stamps at the post office, for instance. The cops aren't trying to bother the folks that live down here, just to manage the crowds that have morbidly assembled.

Predictably the parade of elected officials descends. Then we are in a state of near lock-down. In Lower Manhattan, if they block street A and the island is too narrow to provide another means of getting to street B, then you are out of luck: you can't get there from here. Isn't that soothing?

Perhaps most troubling is that at year five, the balance has begun to tip from where the 9/11 mood is somber to one where the 9/11 mood has a discernable flavor of celebration. Many I am sure must have felt this way when Memorial Day slipped from being associated with sacrifice to being associated with grilled kielbasa.

Humans have a way of incorporating all events good or ill to suit them and eventually what suits them is to have a good time. I am fine with that. But if we are going to start getting all relaxed about it, can we please drop the "additional security measures" that drive locals to distraction? And here's an idea for all potential 9/11 observants come '07 (present readership excepted of course): instead of coming down to share in the half-somber, half-celebratory atmosphere, how about staying home? We've really had enough, thanks.

--Renaissance

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Put a Fork in PostModernism

I've done my penance. I've read Gravity's Rainbow, V., Giles Goat-Boy, Infinite Jest, The Runaway Soul, Underworld and plenty of other weighty, witty bricks that constitute much of the so-called PostModern canon.

I certainly admire the sparks and flashes thrown off by its talented illusionist/practitioners. But while I'm not going to say they all read alike or that I am any kind of expert in the field, I can at long last say despite favoring Don DeLillo's work in particular and the nonlisted-above Sot-Weed Factor by Barth (a singular work), that I just don't find real sustenance in PostModernism.

I do like novels of ideas. Iris Murdoch, for instance, has always impressed me with her ability to spin tales of physical and psychological mayhem that include meaningful doses of philosophy and mystery. However I think the whole problem with PM is rooted in the faulty notion that not just novels but we ourselves can credibly become untethered from our own histories.

By positing that we can shape-shift; can become something else than what we seem, can carapace ourselves in multiple identities, is not only manifestly false, it is a ruse. Of course you'd wish you hadn't said all those things last night drunk. But you did (fictionally speaking). And if you choose to elide that fact, you're left wandering in the murky, unconnected outer circle of hell where the uncommitted spend eternity.

PM fiction lives and breathes the notion of no-commitment. There is no commitment to character, for certain. There is little emphasis on putting a three dimensional human being in-situation. There is much deconstruction of the integrity of the individual, as if to perform that parlor trick were really an option and not just a wild hope for the dissolute and the fearful.

LIve up to ideas, I say, and embody them in character. Let ideas be couched in the squishy, sloppy places we call home. Let us come down from the wobbly pinnacle where literature posits us as not real things at all, but just a happenstance of traits and cartilage.

In its failure to do so, PostModernist literature seems an amusement, but a disconnected one (necessarily) and in the end, pretty thin soup.

--Renaissance

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Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers! (Remember them?)

Perhaps this is an ironic dispensation but its message at least deserves a hearing.
NYC, particularly Manhattan, is becoming a class-stratified, far-too-expensive chalet for the nouveau riche and their gentrifying minions. It has become the haven of the affluent, especially those matriculating into overrated, astronomically pricey insitutions of higher learning. Look at the East Village: it is now the provenance of NYU students with expense accounts, crushingly bourgeois attitudes,
and the imposture of their species. The lesson of downtown? A smoothie bar is the death of a neighborhood, indeed, death of a community. Most of the real estate on and below 14th St. (I'm only harping on NYU because I frequent its vicinity moreso than other school environments) has been upended, demolished, and built anew to accomodate the collegiate gentry. Gone are the many rock clubs, dive bars, bookstores, and flea-bag art joints. I propose a solution: citizen action committees to bring back the violence, decay, drugs, and insanity that once characterized the region. Organized vice will wipe out the cancer of NYC's failed modernity. Talk to anyone who lived downtown in the seventies and early eighties: they will tell you how life was dirty, dangerous, and delightful. We cannot enjoy ourselves anymore because we cannot afford it; neither can we enjoy the style of life now being created. Bring back the sleaze, stilettos, and razors, people will flee, property rights will go down, the rich and scared will vanish, and we can indulge our fantasies of creation, knowing that, at last or again, a true city flourishes.
--Martin Scriblerus

Visual Distortions in the Urban Modality

Recently I've noticed, or else my subjectivity has, the impairment of the empirical, the fickle false-firing of perception on the streets of NYC (or so I would like to think). Especially on the East Side, mostly walking north on 2nd or 3rd Avenues, persons coming towards this roving I/Eye transform, or rather, begin a process of accelerated aging, that is mystifying and disheartening. Two examples:

1)at 4:53pm on Tuesday, July 18, a woman in her mid to late twenties, nearly two blocks away, slowly advanced towards me. Slowly, as she got nearer, her lips pursed, brow furrowed, ridges on her upper lift appeared, her entire body sagged under gravity's cruel make-over.

2) at roughly 9pm on Thursday, August 10, a man in a suit, brandishing a suitcase
and smoking a cigarette, walking apace with a woman similar in age, furiously blossomed into a octogenarian, a burst-capillary nose and thinning hair no more salient than the lines that began to impress itself in various directions across his face.

These instances, these phenomena, could be evidence of the shortcomings of my perspective, perception, vision. But what if certain streets warrant the instantaneous senescence of its walkers? What if these streets offer a portal into the future of its patrons, illuminating the process of their disintegration? Dear Reader, have you experienced this? What are your thoughts? --Curley

Modern Times, Modern Timidity w/out the Toilet Titians

In times of economic instability, cultural stupidity, spiritual rigidity, artistic redundancy, political tomfoolery, psychological conformity, sexual morbidity, bellicose cruelty, and social futility-- these times, in fact--bathroom graffiti in NYC grows ponderously vacuous. Once the domain of primitivist grandeur and deft poetic sloganeering, lunatic pornographic come-ons, and other voices of the void, the toilet museuems have been transformed into cauldrons of banality without the redemption of cliche, irony without the restraint of paradox, School of Visual Arts noodlings instead of amatuer scrawlings, political manifestos so appallingly centrist and rife with newspeak they seem to have been borrowed by CNN. In short, the city bathroom gallery has been converted into a message board for stockbrokers and repressed Upper West Siders. Alas: the bathroom bards have flushed themselves down the toilet or vacated their former dwelling spaces. Beware: let none of your intelligence or orifices touch anything in here. A quarantine is in order.
--Martin Scriblerus

A Fine Day in Kennebunkport

I went to Maine with my wife and two kids and stopped at the nearly-too-cute town of Kennebunkport where Bush the First is known to summer. Not sure if George the Younger were out lobstering that day but the town was tricked out as if he were.

"Welcome Back Mr. President" on the Crab Shack may have referred to either Bush.

But the peace demonstration along the waterfront could only have beed directed at Bush the Second. We could not have timed it better had we planned it. Moments after parking the car by the crafts fair, we agreeably joined step with the marchers--a couple of hundred of them--as they walked slowly into the center of town right past where we were parked.

Some bystanders seemed to disagree but most flashed peace signs or thumbs-up. I suppose peace-marching in New England is an exercise in stating the obvious, but it struck me as so happily all-American and so typically New England nonetheless. No fuss, no muss. Just a peace-march past the Presidential compound, thank you very much. And I'll have that with fries.

My favorite sign: "Liar, Liar, World on Fire"; second favorite: "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

--Renaissance

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More theses for monophysites

I mentioned over a month ago that more theses would be added.
But theses, like feces, need to marinate to evolve requisite
piquancy. Relevancy? You be the judge, I'll be the executioner:

3. The law of excluded middle, the philosophical notion that any
proposition must be 'either/or' and never 'and,' applies as well
to the opposition of question and answer. Nothing can be both a
question and an answer, lest it become a 'quanswer,' a fancy
pronunication and spelling of 'cancer.' Something like 'chancre'
for 'canker,' 'chancre' being a portmanteau of 'chance' and 'err,'
which should never potentially be the same thing.

40. Never mention God unless God gives permission. But God never
gives permission. Silence is a god.

42. Some stories have no true beginning or end. These, in fact, invite
us to invent the opening and the closing. Do neither: let breathing
space prevail.

30. I will never reduce myself to ashes. Consequently, the ashes will
never reduce themselves to me. How strange--I was from the dust and to
the dust I would go, if I could go, but I'm tracking mud through this
idea and mud is not on the list.

19. Meaning is overestimated to those who think. Those intellectuals
who tell you otherwise are arranging thoughts and not possibilities.

21. When will the forceps free my head from the memory of my mother's womb?

22. Initiate two contradictory acts at once and you will kill
the populace without violence.

49. Can ideas be contemptuous of their purveyors?

26. When you are walking, go haunting. They want have a ghost of a chance.
--Curley, 2008

Misuse of the Blues

Lord knows the blues have seen better times.

These days its easy to forget that the blues used to be deeply felt, marginal, electrifying and subversive all at once. If you hadn't noticed it was the rock on which rock was based, you've been under one for half a century.

Now we can turn on the television and see blues as a mainstream cure-all for boredom; a three-chord quick-fix for what ails-ya. In car commercials it screams that the little four cylinder econobox got game, yo. In floor cleaner commercials it shouts that the new age mom ain't gonna take that dirt no mo'. And if you're interested in a bank that's based on eight bar progressions, and that sounds like Robert Johnson is making loans in the back, you can take your pick.

I don't know what to say about fixing it. But I do think we ought to start penalizing ads for misuse of blues. If there's a guy staring out of a cubicle and suddenly its as if Muddy Waters is whanging away in the hallway, that's a fine. If the  NowhereMobile goes by and you hear Screamin' Jay Hawkins and you feel like Satan is waiting at the crossroads, that's a bigger fine. You see where I'm headed.

I sure hope Muddy and Screamin' Jay (or their estates) are getting paid for the music. I have no problem with that.

But its just sad to see the music that changed America become such a ready shill for the mundane. It makes me blue.

--Renaissance, August 15 2006

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Privacy as We Know It

Recently AOL released hundreds of thousands of search request records to the scholarly community, believing it would aid sociological research. What they found was that it caused a front-page uproar about the nature of privacy in a digital world.

If you haven't read about it, the short form goes something like this:

Even when you search anonymously, your various requests can be grouped as having come from the same machine (and in the case of AOL, where you're logged in, you're just one data cell away from being identified from the get-go). Once grouped, your searches can be narrowed down to the point where its almost certain the viewer can guess who the person is, or with minimal additional research, discover who it is.

Last week the NY Times got in touch with a woman in Maryland who had searched for information related to owning an incontinent dog. They had her identified via her searches; and she confirmed those unhappy pup searches were hers.

The news is, search isn't private. And by implication, not much else on line is, either.

The larger issue is: why does that matter so much?

We're living in the infancy of an age of infinite connectivity. We're used to doors and walls and barriers, and at least amongst those of us who remember when there was no internet, private communication.

But it looks from here like infinite connectivity is also opening up an age of infinite visibility. Everything you do on line can potentially be seen by everyone else. Privacy zealots would like to pretend we can wind the clock back, but we can't. The notion that you can have perfect access to all known information plus perfect anonymity is pure hubris. Isn't going to happen.

A newer generation seems more comfortable with this--or at least the generation that seems to care little whether they posted weird, whacky stuff about themselves on MySpace does. And maybe they are on to something. Instead of worrying about who finds out that you searched for adult diapers and duct tape in the same session, how about if society just got more tolerant over all?

Aside from the times when you find out your neighbor has searched for "bomb kit" and "jihad" and "economy class" in the same session, why should you (or for that matter, law enforcement officials) really care what they searched for?

That's a question for another post: maybe we have too many laws and need to concentrate on enforcing only those that really matter (like the one that would catch the abovementioned traveler).

The digital age has forced us all into the same digital sandbox. We are all in the sandbox toying with these new, visible selves. Get used to it. Me, I am using a pseudonym. It's a personal thing.

-- Renaissance Aug 14, 2006

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Shaw versus Shakespeare; or, what's the weltanschuang, Kenneth?

"While my province burns,
I sing of love,
giving that fiery wheel a shove."
--John Montague

The recently revised world narrative of conflict, death, and suffering (for this triad has always been with us; pace Hegel, history doesn't repeat itself, it just publishes added editions) has turned the American populace into doomsday prophets,neurotic despondents, and cynical experts on international affairs. Oh yes, the cult of post-millennialism also runs rampant--at least in the NYC area-- in the form of proselytizers and ranters. Jews for Jesus (probably a front for the Christian Right), Jehovahs, Latter Day Saints, and numerous Hispanic pentecostal groups proclaim that the end is near and repentance and atonement should be seriously pursued before God or Moloch pour soul-snuffing lighter fluid on us all.
Of course, hysteria has been our kith and kin since the Witchcraft Trials. But hardly on this scale. We have decided to pursue, by and large, a policy of collective confusion with a dash of know-it-all-itis, a speck of crisis-mongering, and, most appallingly, a streak of retributive justice for people we would rather kill off than understand. Yes, the US is becoming a breeding ground for fanatics. As Freud notes, "...devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risks of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neuroses spares them the task of constructing a personal one." Amen. I mean, goddman. If cooler heads won't prevail, an outside perspective is needed. I know just the man.
George Bernard Shaw is seldom read now-- a shame, really, because he could save us all. This Irish dramatist, essayist, socialist, and vegetarian wrote enough text to paper over a continent and most of the content of his words dealt with the major social issues of the day (any day), including war, suffering, and justice. It was Shaw, a contrarian of the first order, who wrote that "Any victory at all is a victory for war." Not only did he write and dramatize a world even our current crop of naysayers, hatemongers, and handwringers would recognize, they might also learn to remedy their sad prognoses and misguided attempts to criticize the world. And the man is damn funny. Humor has political power--let all heed this truth--and Shaw wielded humor like a tomahawk missile. But unlike said weapon, he never missed his mark.
I was reminded of Shaw after reading Michael Holroyd's appreciation in the Times Literary Supplement a few weeks ago. In a piece entitled, "Dionysos, Do the Right Thing," Holroyd, Shaw's official biographer, claims that Shaw, much more than Shakespeare, illuminates our world and casts a sensibility that is artistically and politically more tenable. Holroyd watched an adaptation of The Bacchae in which Euripides needs to decide whether Shakespeare or Shaw should be rescued from the underworld to lead us back into right thinking. Apparently, the treatment ultimately decided on Shakespeare. Holroyd reveres Shakespeare but condemns the decision: Willy glamorized war and validated nationalism; Shaw excoriated war and loathed patriotism
and critiqued them both. As long as patriotism is with us, to paraphrase GBS, the human race will never live in peace. How true. But no more justification is needed here: the proof is in the plays and many essays. Read them and see what you think. If you agree that Shaw is a writer for our times, recite some lines to your neighborhood fanatics: perhaps they will see the real light or else shrivel up and disappear altogether. He is truly a man to meet.
Oh, yes: he also had red facial hair, a trait shared by this correspondent and a shade of Shaw on one's face can't be a bad thing. Not in these days.

Sightings

Over the years, one cultivates acquaintances or voyeuristic gazes with other writers.
Here are some samplings of my interactions and, as often, non-interactions:

Part 1:

With the exception of being a "bodyguard" for horror writer Clive Barker in a DC
bookstore as a teenager (the week before he had been attacked by a "fan" with a straight razor), it was Irish writers who were first in my sights. Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney offered me booze when I chaffeured him to a reading. Nuala Ni Dhonhnaill and I taught a class together and were depressed together for a full four months. Ciaran Carson visited the class and, later, after downing some whiskey, said over and over again, "This city of New York, New York City, it is fucking strange, man, this city." Michael Longley was amazed when I recognized him in mid-town Manhattan, a self-described "fat poet from Belfast, like Walt Whitman in appearance anyway." Tom Paulin arrived for our interview at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin so drunk he demanded I carry him up to bed instead. I pitched a script to Neil Jordan and am still waiting to hear back, five years later. Paul Muldoon asked me if I thought I looked "Curley." When I approached Tom Murphy in The Floating Tide pub across from the Abbey Theatre, he backed away. "I thought you were from Florida or Utah. Definitely a Yank, though." When Emer Martin showed up at a reading I threw in Soho in a cowboy hat and a blue sequined dress, I realized that the Irish were capable of style, after all. At seventy-five, John Montague walked down Thompson Street arm in arm with a woman no older than twenty-five. In Paris, Samuel Beckett
had told Montague that there was no such thing as love, that "there was just fucking." Beckett died on December 22, 1989, the same day I began reading him.....

Anti-Theses for Anti-Theists

Martin Luther presented 99 Theses; I propose 50, not necessarily sequentially and in installments. My aim is not Reformation but Malformation, but perhaps the two are identical tendencies. After all, as that non-clerical poet Pope once wrote: "Extremes in nature equal ends produce." So then:

2. A paradigm and a para-nickel equal fifteen nonsenses.

5. In this age of silicon, I long for the age of vellum.

6. Nitrous and nectar are vaguely adequate as antitheses.

36. The French word for breast, "poitrine," is the only blemish
on that language's beauty.

33. Will you dance with a part of the whole or wholly part from the dance?

20. Is there anything more insufferable than a hot-air balloon?

16. I predict the preterite, so back I go.

9. A field and a tree will never fight.

12. When one falls from great heights, great hates feel less so on impact.

13. If an anonymous person shakes your hand for no reason, follow him or her to the ends of the earth to reciprocate.

--Curley, 2007

Onset of the Tempest

There can be no post-Renaissance without the initial birth, and summer 2006 is not so much a resurgence but a particular moment of creative vitality. Paradoxically, the life of the arts emboldens even as world culture buckles under paranoia, piety, recalcitrance, and conventionalism. What would the inverse dynamic yield?

That, my friend, is for neither of us to contemplate. Right now, we should keep our eyes on the shadows (yes, the shadows are in fact metaphorical) of occluded and subterranean artistic forces, local and more widespread, which will lead us into the light. Summer 2006 is already in its mezzo-stage: help ignite the shape of things to come now before it* ends. Monsieur, it is high time to buy new blue silk to leash your lobster; Madame, your parasol is on fire!

*"it" refers to the moment, the phenomenon, the desire, the hope, the summer.

--Curley