Red Fez

Issue 59 of Red Fez is up today and along with it a new poem from me!

http://www.redfez.net/poetry/1881

New poems

happy hour indeed - two new poems penned by this gal over at The Camel Saloon!

http://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.com/

Fug You!

Fug You is the missing piece of the 1960s counterculture puzzle I didn’t know I was looking for. I started reading the Beats in high school and from there explored all the obvious alleys and backroads. I obsessed over Ginsberg, struggled in vain to reconcile Kerouac with the myth surrounding him, and learned magick by way of Gysin, Burroughs, and their cut-up approach to reality. I delved into the neurophilosophy of Timothy Leary, the transcendental love of Ram Dass, and the culture-hungry Zen of Alan Watts. I explored new worlds via City Lights, Grove Press, and Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology. I danced to the music, and I thought Kesey was Paul Newman-handsome. I thought I had as clear a picture of an era as possible for someone who wasn’t there. I felt the vibe, and that alone seemed to give my readings some glistering quality of the Real.

Then I came across Fug You and realized my mental syllabus was incomplete. Part autobiography, part scholarly historical documentation, Fug You is the book that will bring a new generation to familiarity with Ed Sanders, his avant-garde country-jazz band, and his contribution to American letters. The years described in this book span from 1960 to the early 1970s when Sanders pulled back from his work as a folk-rock star and poet to pen his book about the Manson family. As told by Sanders, the decade comes across as a roller coaster ride of highs and lows, victories and failures. Structurally, Fug You mirrors this wild ride. The whole account is broken down into short sections that rarely exceed two or three pages in length. This made for a slightly disjointed reading, but it worked – it made sense in terms of the content, and in an odd way it conveyed a sense of fun.

Fug You is Ed Sander’s life story. From small town origins, Sanders found himself in the Lower East Side of New York studying Greek and Egyptian at SUNY. He started writing poetry, contemplated a life as an academic, and ultimately took a fork in the road right before grad school. He pulled from his knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics and classical poetry to reinterpret poesy’s inherent possibilities. 1962 saw the birth of one of his first claims to fame, Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts. Through this avenue, Sanders published his own poetry as well as material by Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, d.a. levy, Gregory Corso, Ted Berrigan, Diane DiPrima, Leroi Jones, and others. The magazine was a success and helped launch the 1960s literary zine culture. Poetry junkies can download complete issues for free at http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/fuck-you-press-archive/.

While building his resume as a poet and exploring the world of the underground press, Sanders formed with Tuli Kupferberg The Fugs, an avant-garde band preoccupied with political malcontent, the Civil Rights Movement, love, gropes, beauty, and poetry (They put several of William Blake’s poems to music.). They were weird, loud, crude, funny, and fantastic. They were an anomaly.

Freaky music scaffolding the background, poetry running out the margins, Sanders spread himself thin. He started work in the underground film scene, headed up LEMAR – an organization promoting the legalization of marijuana, partied with modern day god-icons like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, was witness to the horrors of the 1968 Democratic Convention, contributed to the protests led by the political rebels who would spawn the Yippies, organized a mass exorcism of the Pentagon with the likes of Kenneth Anger in tow, etc. etc. etc. The 1960s in America was a decade of high weirdness, fun, art, and love. All of this comes through in Fug You. In fact, this happy tome may be just the puzzle piece you were missing, too.

The Land of Laughs and Other Fictions

The Land of Laughs is a Thing in flux. It is a text-based retirement community for the heroes and bad guys of a Technicolor childhood. It is Calvinism in an afternoon juice box.  It is a glossy brochure of fear and obsession in Anywhere, America. It is a children’s book masticated and digested by lurching Cynicism in a trench coat. It is the buffer zone between desire and manifestation. Mostly, it is a reminder that reality in the hands of intention is totally malleable – we write our own stories as we go.

Obsession marks the connubial common ground Thomas Abbey and Saxony Gardner find themselves on. She: marionettes; he: indigenous masks. Both: the books of Marshall France, children’s books author, Jewish refugee in flight from the 20^th century’s land of monsters, across-the-board dog-hater, and former recluse (now dead and ever-dying). It is Marshall France that brings the two together and Marshall France that caravans them to Galen, Missouri, where France spent the last half of his life.

On leave from the New England school where he teaches English and in flight from a childhood in the shadows of a famous father, Thomas commits to doing a biography of the little-known children’s author. Saxony accompanies him in the capacity of research assistant, but their professional relationship quickly disintegrates into a mess of sex, resentment, and, of course, their mutual obsession with France. Things between them are further strained by the seductive and weird Anna France, Marshall France’s daughter and the single greatest barrier between Thomas and the end of his book.

As he and Saxony explore the town of Galen and its inhabitants, strange disturbances interrupt the otherwise syrupy flow of small town life. A child is hit by a car, but he isn’t laughing the moment before like he is supposed to. A man dies by electrocution almost fifty years before he was supposed to die by natural causes. And what’s with the cult of bull terriers that have taken up residence in Galen? Hints and suspicions scaffold narrative skeleton and there the pinking flesh: a shadow thread runs from the puckered bellybutton of France’s writings to the hidden navel of the town. Thomas Abbey is the tightrope walker that traverses it, guided by France’s books and his mysterious forty-odd volumes of the Galen Journals.

This novel is all about the magic of our own fictions. Thomas Abbey writes Marshall France. Marshall France writes the clowns and saints of cosmic Anywhere, America. And in closing with the possibility of Thomas writing his father’s biography, he finds the chance to finally rewrite his own childhood. I am left wondering at my participation in the writing of The Land of Laughs through my particular interpretations and visualizations. I am left wondering at the moments of my own life as they bloom pregnant fruit from the personal fictions that clutter my bookshelves and brain tissue.

Words Worth Quoting: From Bucky Fuller's Earth, Inc.

            All good science fiction develops realistically that which scientific data suggests to be imminent. It is good science fiction to suppose that a superb telepathetic communication system is interlinking all those young citizens of worldaround Wombland. We intercept one of the conversations: “How are things over there with you?” Answer: “My mother is planning to call me either Joe or Mary. She doesn’t know that my call frequency is already 7567-00-3821.” Other: “My mother had better apply to those characters Watson, Crick, and Wilkerson for my call numbers!” And another of their 66 million Womblanders comes in with, “I’m getting very apprehensive about having to ‘go outside.’ We have been hearing from some of the kids who just got out—they say we are going to be cut off from the main supply. We are going to have to shovel fuel and pour liquids into our systems. We are going to have to make our own blood. We are going to have to start pumping some kind of gas into our lungs to purify our own blood. We are going to have to make ourselves into giants fifteen times our present size. Worst of all, we are going to have to learn to lie about everything. It’s going to be a lot of work, very dangerous, and very discouraging.” Answer: “Why don’t we strike? We are in excellent posture for a ‘sit-down.’” Other: “Wow! What an idea. We will have the whole population of worldaround Wombland refuse to go out at graduation day. Our cosmic population will enter more and more human women’s wombs, each refusing to graduate at nine months. More and more Earthian women will get more and more burdened. Worldaround consternation—agony. We will notify the outsiders that, until they stop lying to themselves and to each other and give up their stupid sovereignties and exclusive holier-than-thou ideologies, pollutions, and mayhem, we are going to refuse to come out. Only surgery fatal to both the mothers and ourselves could evacuate us.”

            Another: “Great! We had might as well do it. If we do come out we will be faced with the proliferation of Cold War’s guerrillerized killing of babies for psycho-shock demoralization of worldaround innocent communities inadvertently involved in the abstruse ideological warfare waged by diametrically opposed, equally stubborn, would-be do-gooder, bureaucratic leaders and their partisans who control all of the world’s means of production and killing, whose numbers (including all the politically preoccupied individuals around the Earth) represent less than one per cent of all humanity, to whose human minds and hearts the politicos and their guns give neither satisfaction nor hope. Like the women in Lysistrata who refused intercourse with their men until they stopped fighting, we Womblanders would win.”

For the Media Junkie: Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage

This slim volume has texture enough to keep one mentally burrowing through the implications for days after. First impression is a total visual assault—pithy quotes from other great thinkers, photos galore—Marilyn Monroe, illustrations from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a sculpture of the “biggest and best woman in the world” (82 feet in length and 20 feet in height), surreal architecture born of past and present edifices superimposed, blurred yet potent photo collages. All of this and then McLuhan’s own text. Take my word for it, every sentence is quotable. This is not just a study of media and its influences; it is a collection of aphorisms for the modern info-saturated age.

 

 

The meat and gravy of McLuhan’s inquiry is this: Where do media technologies end and where do I begin? Where do I end and where does the media take hold and consume my external world? The key is that McLuhan does not make a distinction between the internal and the external self—no old hat dichotomies for this guy. Rather than viewing media as something by which we are bombarded by the outside world, The Medium is the Massage suggests (or, really, outright dictates) that humans and their media technologies are impossible to clearly divide at any one point. Consider Zeno’s paradox. The wheel (and thus the car) is an extension of the human foot. The television tube is an extension of one’s own visual operating systems.

The point is that we are submerged in a mediasphere that is ubiquitous yet for the most part goes unnoticed. This, however, is not to say that there are not implications that go hand-in-hand with the advent of this brave new world. Questions of personal, societal, and cultural identity arise, questions of privacy and security arise, questions of the way we communicate and interrelate with family, peers, coworkers, and authorities arise. Such issues were especially relevant at the time of publication in 1967, as the evolution of media was speeding up with greater and greater force, print technology, phones, radios, and, finally, television. As has been the case for most of history, technology typically is innovated much faster than the populace has time to come to terms with the shedding of former technologies, and issues of ethics may arise in some cases. In a nutshell, the majority of the global population is going to be around twenty years behind its technology in terms of acceptance, familiarity, and thoughtful application. For this reason, The Medium is the Massage was especially important in its time.

 

 

The mediascape has changed and is in many ways completely alien to that of the 1960s, but McLuhan’s theories hold. The media may change, but the core implications still must be dealt with head on. I would go so far as to say that this book is more important than ever here and now in our age of World Wide Webb-ing.

The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

It has become very popular in the minds of doctors, parents, teachers, and community leaders to wave the “Neuroses” banner at the first sign of behavior that does not fit snugly into the narrow confines of consensual reality, or The Norm, as the square in his cubicle, teeth freshly white-stripped, might say. This followed by pills and labyrinthine therapy sessions that can confuse and discourage as often as help. This followed by chasing the white rabbit down one pseudo-rabbit hole after another.

Dr. James Hillman holds that diagnosis, therapy, and prescription drugs fail us because of their singular approach: behavior and neuroses directly stem from childhood and genetics—nature and nurture. What experts are missing, according to Dr. Hillman, is the overwhelming evidence that there is something more, something that seems to hold precedence over both nature and nurture. This spark of Something is variously called daimon, soul, genius, holy guardian angel, among other things. The daimon is not only present at birth, it is there before birth. Unlike most conceptions of “soul” the daimon retains a level of existence separate from the human it accompanies. The daimon makes its presence known in gentle pushes felt from time to time, in tragedies, in moments of inspiration, in insights into being and character that seem to rise above conscious knowledge of one’s self.

It is the daimon, the soul, the genius that calls out to us, driving us through impulses and hints to the destiny that is ours to take for our own from the day we are born. Manifestation of the daimon in the physical universe may raise questions as to its intentions. For instance, children who are already in their youth compelled by their daimon toward their destiny may act out in accord with the frustration arising from inability or parental dominion. Even the actions of serial killers can be understood through the framework of this theory, as an impressive capacity for action might be viewed as misdirected and therefore can be “cured”. Because the theory has such implications, this book is a must read for parents and civic leaders, in my opinion.

But as yet I have not given this theory Hillman’s preferred title. He refers to the notion of the daimon and its presence in the lives of every living man, woman, and child as the acorn theory. Latent within the acorn is the majestic oak, and within the core of all humans resides a comparable acorn, the daimon, adventitiously making itself known from time to time by way of insights and pushes, guiding every individual to his ultimate calling and destiny. This book has totally changed my conception of myself and my potential for change and self-molding.