FOLK SONG ~

Louis Killen

Louisa Jo Killen

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/arts/music/louisa-jo-killen-folk-singer-with-a-booming-tenor-dies-at-79.html?hpw

Nicolás Guillén ~

I Have



When I see and touch myself 

I, John, a Nobody only yesterday,

and today John with everything,

and today with everything.

I glance around, I look,

I see and touch myself

and I wonder how could it happen.



I have, let's see,

I have the pleasure of walking through my country,

master of all there is in it,

looking very closely at that which

I couldn't have, nor could have had before.

I can say, sugarcane crop,

I can say, mountain,

I can say, city,

I can say, army,

now mine forever, yours, ours,

and a vast splendour

of sunbeam, star, flower.



I have, let's see,

I have the pleasure of going,

I, a peasant, a worker, a simple man,

I have the pleasure of going

(just an example)

to a bank and talking to the manager,

not in English,

not as 'Sir',

but calling him 'companero' as we say in Spanish.



I have, let's see,

that being Black

no one can stop me

at the door of a dance hall or a bar.

Or even at the hotel reception

yelling at me there are no rooms

not a tiny room, not a large one

or a small room where I might rest.



I have, let's see,

there are no rural police

to seize me and lock me in jail

or uproot me from my land

and throw me in the middle of the highway.

Having the land, I have the sea,

no country club,

no high life,

no tennis and no yacht

but from beach to beach and wave on wave,

gigantic, blue, open, democratic:

in short, the sea.



I have, let's see,

I've already learnt to read

to count,

I've already learnt to write,

to think,

to laugh.

I have, now,

a place to work

and I can earn

what I have to eat.

I have, let's see,

I have, what was coming to me.




 _______________________________

translated by Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres 

 

from Yoruba from Cuba 

(Peepal Tree 2005) 

 

http://www.afrocubaweb.com/nicolasguillen.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Guill%C3%A9n 

LEO ~

When





When the cat

doesn’t get

its way



 
it does

what none of

us have yet


 
learned

to

do




it

goes back

to the

 

couch

curls up

shuts up



_____________

Bob Arnold

"Br'er Rabbit" 

 photo © bob arnold

My first woods cat, Br'er Rabbit is, we believe, the great great and many more greatfathers to our present cat Kokomo, who has many of the Br'er mannerisms and comes from the same territory Br'er sired forty years ago. 
What comes around.

87% OF THE WESTERN US IS IN A DROUGHT ~

One of several hundred pine trees flame up along the Tuolumne River too close to Yosemite National Park. By Friday afternoon, the fire was less than 5% contained, and was spreading in several directions 

Photograph: Marty Bicek/ZUMA Press/Corbis

 

LONG AGO & FARAWAY ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/world/asia/tom-christian-descendant-of-bounty-mutineer-dies-at-77.html?hp

BOOKSELLER ~

John Fuchs

I never knew his name over all this time. But his name was John Fuchs. I only learned this after he died at age 67 and I always figured him a decade younger.


Sweetheart came home with that news after John's wife Deirdre came up to her at the grocery store and said, "I don't know if you know or not, but John passed away last March."


Sweetheart was stunned, as I was when she came home to tell me the news. Deirdre filled in as best she could until it all became too overwhelming for her once again, and she had to say goodbye and walk away.


I would later scroll the Internet to backtrack into Brattleboro news, Rutland news, Bellow Falls local news where John and Deirdre lived.


John had been at a town meeting and had risen from his chair to address a question about the local library — of all things — this local bookman and lover of books, and dropped then and there of a heart attack midpassage.


A tall and lanky man, quite carefree and common placed, we would always meet at used book sales over the years and wait in line together, his wife and mine. Unlike many booksellers there was no push to John, no grab and muscle, no greed; he took his time and methodically handled through all of the history books, often buying these as a scout for another bookseller. He'd be happy with a small box of books and consider it a good day's find.


Our conversation never concerned itself by name, strangely, we just picked up where we had last left off, which was often a season or two passing and here we were again in a line waiting and catching up on news: snow loads, mud in the roads, gardens growing or not, maple syrup run, "How was the book sale in Weston?" John would tell me, shrug of the shoulders or briefly excited. A mild mannered smile. It hurts to lose someone like this.


In one of the obituaries for John I read how he had an earlier life in New York City: teaching at a Catholic school, gardening, avid landscaper. He and Deirdre tried their hand at an early Vermont hardscrabble life in the 70s and went back to NYC in the 80s, only to make a final return over the last decade, which is when I would run into them. Often together, like Sweetheart and me. I guess likes do attract.


 
I also liked what one of John's sons, a fireman in New York City, said about his father, “He was into local politics big time, very involved. He always liked to be in on the story, he just liked knowing what his money was being used for,” his son said. “He was a very fair person and a very loving father.”


Straight ahead; and of course John and Deirdre would raise a fireman.

__________________

Bob Arnold

LOVE IS BUT A FOUR LETTER WORD ~

An Afghan Poet Shapes Metal and Hard Words

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/asia/an-afghan-poet-shapes-metal-and-hard-words.html?hp

photo  : Christoph Bangert for The New York Times



 

PATRICIA SMITH ~

TRUE THAT

In my neighborhood

I got jumped

because my daddy lived at home.

Then,

when he didn't live at home anymore,

I got jumped

because he had the nerve

to visit.

LAUGH YOUR TROUBLES AWAY

                   Motto, Riverview Park, 1904-1967, Chicago 

1.

Every city had one, a palace with a fried tint to its air,

a hurting-hued screech of no underneath, everything

plummeting or ascending, a monument to hazy flailing

and sudden fun vomit. Swing the Riviera onto Belmont,

and you see the Pair-O-Chutes rising to heaven on dual

strings, headed for the pinpoint and release, then the sick

whip and fall, the little public murder, a blaring grace

so storybook gorgeous, suddenly flood in the throat.

Revelers board creaking Fireball cars and slice the August,

mistaking acid bubbling in their bellies for symptoms

of glee, then stop to stuff quavering guts with plastic

and syrup. Their quick sustenance has wafted all day

all day on a river of grease. They hunger for white cakes

curled stiff with sugar, sausages that pop huge heat,

pink candy of cotton chomping rot down their throats.

The jagged stains of compromised fruit circle screaming

mouths and paint shadow across the teeth, making them

horrible. Bulbs flash. Wet Polaroids are lifted and waved

like church fans to etch and clarify in the summer steam.

The aged horses are dizzied, diseased. Chained to a tilting

stake, they blur through the drag, deferring to their brutal,

squirming burdens. Potbellied flies, nasty to the point

of charm, nibble passages toward the horses' blue hearts.

Above it all, the freak show M.C. — his shout an odd mixture

of pity and sex — dares us to witness sweaty sloth, tiny floating

corpses, so much skin unlike ours, more legs than allowed,

and a Negro who can separate himself from his eyes.

While on the midway, your father will never win the thinly

stuffed neon grinners — the bears, dolphins, curlique serpents,

Kewpie dolls, and counterfeit Mickey Mice that leer from shelves.

He hurls balls at weighted milk cans, blasts at a measured parade

of bobbing ducks, guns water into a pinpoint, guesses a woman's

weight. Finally, he just buys something soft and ugly, a token

you will clutch and sing to until, too blackly loved, it melts.

At dusk, he steers you away from the midway's squalling edge,

where everything seems to be happening, where the hooting

and laughter have a raw, unmeasured throat. You pout, he pulls,

and, not for the first time, you wonder what he hides.

2.

I am their pickaninny, dressed in a repeating river,

All of me is droop and sustain.

My drenched dungarees are gravity on me.

I have learned to smile at the several versions

of my name, my face is complete in its teeth

and studied dumb ogle. Oh, woe is me I say

while the white boys wind up, and damn if they

don't always smack that huge disc, dead center.

I rise laughing from my clockwork baptisms,

the canned river funked with my own spit and piss,

just to see another man clutching the red ball,

his eyes harder than the first of these. Sometimes

 an awed Negro dots the crowd, his numbed smile

a link chained to mine. I spot one using his body

to block his little girl's view of me, so I make

my voice louder: I oh sweet jesus kind suh no,

I lawd ham mercy suh I believes I might drown

I please let me dry off in this sun a little I mercy

me you sho does look strong suh until she twists

hard away from her daddy and full unto me.

I have just enough time for her to sound it out:

D-D-D-unk-unk Dunk a N-N-N-ig-ig-Nig-ger

and then I salute, and hold her father's eyes as I fall. 

HAVE SOUL AND DIE

       For Mary Wells

Stiff wigs, in cool but impossible shades

of strawberry and sienna, all whipped

into silky flips her own flat naps could

never manage — the night hair different

from the day hair, the going out hair,

the staying-in hair, Friday's hair higher

and way redder than Monday's — all these

wigs, 100% syn-the-tic, thank you, lined

up on snowy Styrofoam heads and paid

for with her own money, what could be

slicker than that? No lovesick player

flopped his wallet open for those crowns.

So she wasn't Diana. Who wanted to be

all skeleton and whisper, hips like oil?

Didn't need no hussies slinking in the

backdrop giving more throat, boosting

her rhythm. So what if her first album

cover drew her pimpled, bloat-cheeked,

Sunday hair skewed? She roared gospel

in those naked songs, took Berry's little

ballads and made men squirm on their

barstools. They spun in her dark.

Wasn't she the alley grunt, the lyric played low?

Didn't people she never met run up to try

and own her tired shoulders, shouting Mary!

like they were calling on the mama of Jesus?

And everywhere she dared to step,

Detroit devilment bubbling beneath sequins

that can't help but pop under the pressure

black butts provide, every time she dropped

'round to paint the town brown, neon lights

slammed on, cameras clicked like air kisses,

and pretty soon somebody said Girl you know

you just gotta sing us something and even though

she didn't have to do a damned thing but be

black, have soul, and die, she'd puck those lips

just so, like she didn't know how damn electric

it all was, and every word landed torn and soft,

like a slap from somebody who loves you.

TO KEEP FROM SAYING DEAD

             For Gwendolyn Brooks 

Winter, with its numbing gusts and giddy twists of ice, 

is gone now. It's time for warmth again.

So where is Gwendolyn Brooks?

Its huge shoulders slumped, Chicago craves her hobble,

turns pissed and gray, undusts her name.

To know her,

you need to ride her city's wide watery hips,

you need to inhale an obscene sausage

smothered in gold slipping onions

while standing on a chaotic streetcross

where any jazz could be yours.

Walk the hurting fields of the West Side,

our slice of city burned to bones in '68: 

Goldblatt's, the colored Bloomingdale's, gone.

Lerners, where we learned pinafore, gone.

No more havens for layaway, no more places

to plop down a dollar a week for P.F. Flyers

or wool jumpers with seams glued shut.

The meat market with its bloody sawdust, torched,

its Jewish proprietors now crisping languid

under Florida sun. And flap-jowled Mayor Daley,

our big benevolent murderous daddy,

gifted us with high-rise castles crafted of dirty dollars,

battered cans of bumpy milk, free cheese.

To know Gwen, you need to know the Alex,

the only movie theater West, where frisky rats

big as toddlers poked slow noses into your popcorn,

then locked red round eyes on Cleopatra Jones

and sat, confident and transfixed.

After the movies and any street corner's friend lunch,

we'd head to "the store in back of that fat man's house"

to surrender hoarded quarters for the latest 45,

stripped licorice in black or red,

pork rinds, Boston Baked Beans,

or fat sour pickles floating in a jar in the corner.

The fat man's wife, Miss Caroline,

plunged her hammy forearm into the brine,

pulled out the exact pickle you pointed to

and shoved it deep into a single-ply paper bag.

Only the truly Negro would then poke

a peppermint stick down the center of that pickle

and slurp the dizzy of salt and sugar.

We gnawed rock-stiff candy dots off paper columns,

suffered Lemonheads and Red Hots,

pushed neon sweatsocks down on Vaselined calves,

and my Lord, we learned to switch. For a dime,

the fat man would warm up the record player,

click reject and give us a hit of Ms. Fontella Bass's

heartbroke heart clamoring the rescue

or Ruby Andrews steady wailing in a woman way.

There were so many millions of each one of us,

ashy goddesses walking the wild West,

strutting past sloped storefronts where brown meat

and hog heads crowded the windows,

past shuttered groceries, and gas stations

with pump boys eyeing our new undulating asses,

past fashion palaces where almost no money

satisfied our yearning for hollow glamour

with cheap threads already unraveling.

Observe the kick-ass angle of our crowns.
Chicago girls just keep coming back.
They don't hear you,
they don't see you,
they ain't never really needed you.
They got the Holy Ghost and Garfield Park,
on one city block, they got a hundred ways to buy chicken,
they jump rope nasty and barefoot in the dirt,
they got the ooh achie koo,
the pink plastic clothesline underhand,
they got the slip bone. They got the Gwen in them.

Any jazz could be ours, and her jazz was.
Unflinching in riotous headwrap
and thick, two-shades-too stockings,
she penned the soundtrack of we because she knew,
because she was skinny early church and not bending,
because no man could ever hold her the way hurt did,
because she could peer at you over those Coke-bottle specs,
fast gal, and turn the sorry sight of you into her next poem.

Each year she stays gone, we colored girls aimlessly bop
and search dangerous places for music.
Chicago bows its huge head, grudgingly accepts spring.

God, if there is a You, there must surely still be a her.
Stop the relentless seasons. Show us Your face,
explain Your skewered timing.
Your wacky choice of angels. 



__________________________

Patricia Smith
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
(Coffee House Press, 2012)

ELMORE LEONARD ~

WRITERS ON WRITING;

 Easy on the Adverbs,

 Exclamation Points and

 Especially Hooptedoodle

 

By ELMORE LEONARD 

(October 11, 1925 – August 20, 2013) 

 

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want. 

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.'' 

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.'' 

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful. 

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.'' 

This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points. 

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.'' 

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight. 

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue. 

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight. 

What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''

''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue. 

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

BLUESMAN ~

Albert Murray

May 12, 1916 ~ Aug 19, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/books/albert-murray-essayist-who-challenged-the-conventional-dies-at-97.html?hp

DELIVERY ~

Just in time, or from-time-to-time, our net server for mail, after a dysfunctional patch, has deposited all the mail as one fell swoop mass mailing so we will have a double and triple electronic-file dumptruck'd onto us. It makes one think about modern life. . .

Brion Gysin & William Burroughs eyes closed tight with the Dream Machine

It reminds me of the milkman I used to wait for, as a child, roaming into our neighborhood with his old pickup truck and the back bed stocked with rattle glass milk bottles filled to the brim, paper capped, inside their metal trays. There'd be a thick and work-darkened quilt over the cold bottles and chunks of ice — that was it for "refrigeration". He'd stop, lift out from under the quilt what he thought my mother wanted and set two or three bottles into a metal basket he then carried up from the foot of the driveway to our house.

We even had a "milkman" metal door hatch built into the side of the kitchen wall so the deliveries could be made with someone managing the door inside. We'd say "hello" to each other

 as bottles empty and bottles full were exchanged. Of 

course if no one was there to greet on our side, the door stayed closed and the milkman just went about his business and left bottles of milk in the tiny chamber, and took away the empties. 

Sometime later we had a bread man, "Mike," cheery as Phil Silvers, and he brought acres of Dreikorns white bread, muffins, even delicious glazed donuts. All to our door! Both drivers parked their trucks not in the driveway but in the direction of the street, not minding at all the little further walk because when they got back to their vehicles they could just shove ahead to the next house. It all worked like a charm. Rain or shine.

And when it didn't — we mowed a lawn with mowers with churning sharp blades (hand powered reel mowers, not gas powered), or read a book (something with paper pages). Way off in the house, or out in the yard working, we might hear the telephone ring on the wall in the kitchen. No such thing as an answering machine. Whomever it was, they'd call back. Or visit! Need milk or bread because Mike may have had a breakdown, or the milkman got tied up with his cows? Send one of your three sons down the street to fetch a bottle or a loaf of bread, and those three boys ran! or hopped onto their bikes, and there was a variety store on almost every busy corner. One of the boys would be back, breathing hard, before mom needed the last sandwich made — it was an interesting concoction of white bread, butter, sliced bananas, sprinkled with sugar. It's August and we ate them on the run.

Bob Arnold

http://briongysin.com/