City park a bench come Spring passersby doing their thing King slips into Queen being antique clown bums a smoke everybody doing something and those have nothing at all nothing their thing this Spring. Cool cat gesticulated crouch down by the empty reservoir live on social media channel pothole posts and midnight tweets comic flickers…
Some Comics Explained
Words were never so simple as we were taught to believe. Tricksters of the trade make things look like all the chess moves were preordained. And if we are reading second hand, through the prism of translation, so much the better for our lack of understanding! Words are not to understand, but to experience, to…
Sex, Catechism, and Nature
Did He smile to make me? The Tyger knows the answer but waits behind the tree while the smithy pounds the fire to awoke cold eyes. Did He make me to eat, be eaten, or both, the blacksmith beating, the heart now bleating, dressed in cute bows, the smithy now a ceremony? Nature prefers wildernesses,…
Vintage
The only place for this is here, where vintage plumbums inkling at a ridiculous price for what you threw out, paid to have hauled off, to the ground sea. Established then when demur removes memory, and in place restores smell, sound, touch in a space without echoes, and no logos, and especially no pathos. Argument’s…
Notes on “Pure and Faultless Elation Emerging From Hiding”
Pure and Faultless Elation Emerging From Hiding, by Lim Lee Ching, with Drawings by Britta Noresten. Introduction by Neil Murphy and Afterword by Jeremy Fernando. Poems Sequenced by Mary Ann Lim. Layout by Yanyun Chen. Paperback edition first published 2017 by Delere Press, Singapore. In a December, 2014 interview with Sara Lau for Obscured,…
Review: “The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online”
I review “The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online” at Berfrois. Fun for everyone! The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, Edited by Houman Barekat, Robert Barry, and David Winters, OR Books, New York and London. 203 pp.
Diary: How to Improve the Text (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
Diary: How to Improve the Text (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) John Cage titled his diary, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” (1965), suggesting a zen koan where every move in one direction is a move in another direction. Cage was not too into the game of…
Gerard Reve: “The Evenings”
Day job workers share in common evenings. Time off, free time, leisure time, time-wasting, occupy the evenings. What to do? The question often haunts office and factory workers (workers clutching daytimer calendars are bothered by another version of the question). The evening absorbs the question of what to do like a fountain swallows wish thrown…
Edna O’Brien’s “The Country Girls”
Edna O’Brien’s “The Country Girls” is the first in the trilogy telling the life and times of Kate and Baba, two girlfriends from country situations who get to the city trying to move away from the tangled mores of Irish family, church, education, and politics of the mid twentieth century. The second in the trilogy…
