Tag Archives: Marriage

Twenty Love Poems: 3

One hears the old saw men
want only one thing but
if one may want a thing one
might as well want more
than one than one of that
thing men want but one
and more of that one over
and over again once more.

Then too why all this business
of all the eggs in one basket
when one’s father realized
two are living together sans
anyone’s blessing two alone
remarked with the old saw
why buy the cow why when
one’s getting the milk free.

And what did he wonder
about his cow apparently
now on the open market
and he calls his girl a cow
as if one could afford
to buy one a whole cow
comes sans dowry
save existential wave.

Love is a many splintered
thing like the tiny wood
jackstraw one can’t get
out with a fine tweezer
that sliver of sharp glass
entirely incapacitates
one’s grip on life and love
and the cow moos like a saw.

Nothing, Cont.

Speaking of nothing, Henry Green wrote a novel titled “Nothing” (1950). “Nothing” shares some of the characteristics of the early radio and television soap operas. It’s nearly all dialog; one can’t see the narrator, but the storyteller sees the reader. “Nothing” is about the nothing that is the something at the center of human activity. One forgets the narrator is watching one’s every move. From dialog only the characters are drawn, succinctly and diversely, such is the clarity of their voices – that they talk mostly of nothing is nothing. It only matters what one says. By nothing is not meant something insignificant; on the contrary – it is only through the direct encounter of nothing, where the characters are stripped of all their lies and workarounds, diversions and investments, that the essence of true life is revealed.

Yet it’s 1948, and these “Nothing” characters don’t seem as affected by the recent war as Barbara Pym’s characters in similar settings. “Nothing’s” John, knowing his daughter Mary “was to be out of London the next forty-eight hours on some trip in connection with her Government job” (133) – but we find out little to nothing about that job or what the connection is. The war of course was an unpleasant affair, its results mostly visible in the everyday details of work-a-day life: the difficulty of finding a suitable flat or flatmate, parsing wardrobes, the reopening of restaurants as places of interest, the local church the center of social, cultural, familial life (think jumble sales, lectures, and clubs of all sorts), and the shortage of marriageable men or men with the proper attitude toward marriage. Thus stripped of diversion and meaningful advertisement these folks on the edge of nothing seem a peculiar precursor to our time when commercialism and popular culture, and the adulation of the famous for being famous and nothing more, seem to reckon yet another coming.

pure poetry, 2000

Readers who like unlikeable characters will love Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Lila Moscowitz. Lila is stubborn, spoiled, angry, bitter, promiscuously self-destructive. And, frosting on the cake, she’s a poet. That’s not to say she’s without redeemable qualities. She’s funny, hilarious, in fact, a natural wit, and as honest as a person can be without losing all of one’s family and friends and readers. Her humor is laced with sarcasm and irony. She’s quick, street smart and intelligent, independent. Experienced readers will recognize that Lila is not Binnie, that the narrator of a novel should not be confused with the author. This narrative truth is emphasized toward the end of the book when Lila takes some questions after a poetry reading:

“‘Did you really dance topless at the Baby Doll Lounge?’ Another one of the college girls is contemplating a career move, no doubt.
I smile as if I’ve got a secret, and I say, ‘I refuse to answer on the grounds that it could incriminate me.'”

Lila may be a poet, but she’s not stupid:

“That I never danced topless at the Baby Doll Lounge or anyplace else either is not what they want to hear.”

Does she “write every day,” another student asks, and Lila pretends for the audience that she does write every day. She’s then asked “how much money do poets make?” Here she tells the truth (192-193).

But while the perspicacious reader knows Lila is not Binnie, we all know that poetry does not sell, so why not only does Binnie put “poetry” in her title but structures her book with poetic devices, informing each chapter with epigraphs, definitions of poetic conventions? Didn’t she want her book to sell? The answer has to do with wheels within wheels, or how to turn a stand up routine into literature:

“Many of the poems I write are about sex. I have a gift for the subject. The ins and outs of it. My poems lean toward the sordid side of the bed, the stuff of soiled sheets” (21).

We don’t get to hear those poems, but they apparently are full of the tension created by want harbored in inhibitions freed in seduction, romp enclosed in forms, procedures, praxis, which express mores without which somehow sex is not nearly as much fun. The fun is enclosed in a box of gravure etchings. The notion of form as enclosure is conservative. The poet might want out, not in. Lila’s own explanation might solve both Binnie and the reader’s questions:

“There is freedom within the confines of form the way a barrier protects you from the elements of disaster. The way there is love in the bonds of marriage. ‘Without boundaries, you can be only adrift,’ I say. ‘Lost. Without lines drawn on the map, you are nowhere. It is better to be a prisoner of war than to be without a nation, a place, a people'” (194).

Jesus may have said the opposite – Come, follow me, and leave all that nonsense behind. Of course, most of his followers wound up wanting it both ways.

“Maybe they should stay in their cages and sing their hearts out. Unbridled passion…results from being tied to the bedpost” (194).

Which is to make of Lila a dynamic character, one who’s changed over the course of the work. She finds love only by losing love. She’s human, fallen, having slipped on her own banana peel, but she gets back up, and writes a book that stirs and calms the forms.

Pure Poetry, by Binnie Kirshenbaum, a novel, Simon & Schuster, 2000, 203 pages.

Reviews of Alma Lolloon

Another review of “Alma Lolloon” released into the cybersphere, this one by Ashen Venema, author of “Course of Mirrors” and blogger friend. I paste below, and below that, please see the “TinyLetter” opportunity.

Ashen’s Review:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is fun. Want to write a book
By Ashen Venema on December 19, 2017
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
This is fun. Want to write a book? Forget empowering how-to-do courses. Instead, entertain your knitting circle; guaranteed not to be the silent reading audience an author might fantasise about, for good or bad. More, they’re keen to have their characters included in your story.
Do knitters or writers have a plan before they set out to do their craft? Alma, a waitress, determined to write a book about her five husbands has no plan. She shares the process by reading installments to Hattie, Rufa, Anny and Curly, her knitting friends. The knitters frequently interrupt. Hattie, considered to be a writing expert, spouts her wisdom with relish – a book – ha – what makes you think you can …
Alma is undeterred. The first scenes recount the surreal events following the unplanned pregnancy of an American teen. Story or not, the ladies are hooked. They frequently debate the merits of the story, if it is a story, and what the whole point of it might be.
Grammar, speech marks, arc, none of this matters to Alma as she reads to her listeners. They’re obviously entertained by the occasional odd simile, or they wouldn’t show up at the rotating local venues where they meet. ‘Where’s this going?’ they query. ‘But that’s incredulous,’ they exclaim. Stay silent, burst or share and be crucified. Through the sardonic, provoking and lamenting chapters shines Alma’s need to express her unique truth.
Active listeners can be rough, in the understanding, of course, that it doesn’t pay to tell the truth. There are laugh-out-loud moments. Portland’s American lingo weaves through the themes of existential crisis, lost utility and simmering rage, sprinkled with humour and funny lines. ‘My epiphany slowly crawled up the back of my neck, morphed, split, and then two headed to my ears, one each …’ or ‘Rack stood five feet nine inches, nine inches and a half if he would bother standing up straight. Well, Jack Rack is mistakenly shot and the story moves on …
I enjoyed the hilarious discussions on marriage, and on men as occasional providers.
Could it be said that ‘men’ is a category of books?
And then, Alma finds out, there are those who choose a book for its cover.

~~~

My Weekly Tiny Letters

My this week’s Tiny Letter copied below. Would you like to sign up?

Three reviews of “Alma Lolloon” are now loose in the cybersphere:

Bill Currey bound his review in a tweet, to wit:

Bill Currey @williamcurrey
And here I thought I was going to get a Joycean map with footnotes and all to Linker’s Portland! I stumble blindly onwardly towards, if not to summation, at least to termination.

Joe Linker @JoeLinker
Replying to @williamcurrey @PhilippaRees1 and 2 others
Thanks for the review, Bill. Sounds like something Beckett might have said.

And Dan Hennessy posted a review of “Alma Lolloon” to his “Tangential Meanderings” blog (AKA: itkindofgotawayfromyou). Click here to read Dan’s review.

And if you’ve not read Philippa Rees’s review of “Alma Lolloon,” it’s at Queen Mob’s Tea House. Click here.

Bookmark Giveaway!

We’ll be spending the holidays with the grand girls, and for an art project we’ll be making bookmarks for a Joe Linker book.

The bookmarks use standard, toxic free materials, of paper and fabric, thematically linked to the books with original artwork.

If you’d like to receive a complementary bookmark, please send a reply to this tiny letter telling us what book you’d like the bookmark for (Penina’s Letters; Coconut Oil; Scamble and Cramble: Two Hep Cats and Other Tall Tales; Saltwort; or Alma Lolloon), and also include a snail mail address for us to mail you the bookmark. All bookmarks will be sent out by Dec 31st. If you prefer, we can send you an e-bookmark. Reply the same as above but with an email address. What’s an e-bookmark? Not sure, we’ve not made one yet.

You can view the covers of the five books here.

Thanks for reading, Joe

Alma Lolloon: 3rd Installment of Work in Progress

I’m still proofing and editing my new novel, Alma Lolloon. I hope to have it out by December. Meantime, I’m posting installments Saturdays here on the blog. Here is the third installment.

(Alma has told her knitting group she is writing a book. The book is to be about her five husbands, and the knitters agree to hear Alma reading from her book in installments at their Saturday knitting sits.)

3rd Installment of Alma Lolloon:

I simply would like to have someone to talk to, someone who actually listens to me. Is that too much to ask? So even though I don’t know you, and you might not be listening anyway, I’m talking to you, and I’m going to share everything. That’s not a trigger warning. Simply a goal. You might safely skip parts, your attention wandering. I’ve already skipped a few beginnings. But I want you to get your money’s worth. Even if you’re reading on-line for free or something, or you picked up this abused paperback copy you’re holding in the neighborhood library box. Go on, take it, read it on the bus. It takes time to read, and most of us value time. The thing is to sit down and relax. Breathe. Smell the paper and the ink, or whatever it is they print words on and with these days. Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea, a glass of wine, or pop a can of beer, or pour a juice or a clean clear glass of fresh water. Feel my hands kneading your shoulders. You carry tension there. I know. Let it go. Drop the shoulders. I know you have your own story. Let that go, too, for now.

We must have ritual. Ritual is what stops the crazy traffic on the bridge so the tall lovely ship can slip quietly by. Make some space in your day for reading as a kind of ritual. Nothing serious, of course, on the contrary, just a few quiet moments to yourself, for some peace and silence, to get away from your scares for a few moments, those voices in your head that won’t shut the hell up, or to find yourself, or to forget yourself, or to remember something you maybe should have never forgotten and is such a joy to find again. I’m well aware you could be reading something else, something more dramatic, sexy, literary, trashy, or some delightful ichor with goor and geer from some silly battle zone somewhere, or some soapy sap television shows are often stuck together with, if that’s what you like. Sure, and you’ll find soap here. I’ve eaten plenty of soap in my lifetime. My mouth is clean. Or non-fiction, some people prefer because it’s supposedly true. Nothing like getting one’s facts straight. We all need ritual, but we should not consider ritual what is merely compulsive.

“Moonishnessly”: for Susan, Who’s Been Reading the Toads

Moondance 2

Moonishnessly

We were children then, when we settled on the moon, amid drifts of silver shadows. Our parents were still alive, down on Earth. We had no fear of flying, outside of airplanes, no fear of flying on the wings of birds, daily flights to the moon, one-way flights. We walked on the moon all night long, moonishnessly. And in the morning, covered with moondust, we climbed down to the blue ocean for a salt-water bath.

Love and the Age of Democracy

Imagine life as a serf in an empire. Your father wants to give you to a neighboring monastery in exchange for a pig. But this is actually better than his first proposal, in which he promised your hand in marriage to an old man in a neighboring village. Fortunately, the old man died before the deal could be sealed.

In The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell argues that the emergence in the middle ages of romantic love as expressed by the troubadours created individual consciousness. “Campbell: But with Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience. That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for. It’s a personal, individual experience, and I think it’s the essential thing that’s great about the West and that makes it different from all other traditions I know. It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system. The monolithic system is a machine system: every machine works like every other machine that comes out of the same shop” (p. 187).

Campbell is talking about consensual marriage, as opposed to arranged marriage. Even today, the price paid for consensual marriages, in that they often go against the grain of the parents’ wishes for their children, as in the Tristan romance, and again in Romeo and Juliet, is personal freedom and existentialism. You’re on your own. This is the same price Jesus paid, but the Church did not follow Jesus, instead creating a new monolithic system. “Come follow me,” Jesus said; we’ll make our own way, against tradition. This is the creation of the individual as an entity separate from the earthly lord who gets his authority from the state or church or both. In consensual marriage we find the roots of egalitarianism and democracy. What’s love got to do with it? All you need is love, and the courage to, as Campbell says, “follow your bliss.”

Modern corporations are not democracies, nor is the Church a democracy. Men who marry their jobs or the Church can not live an existential life. They are not free. They have no individual consciousness, and they pay no price, as long as they stick with the arrangement. But these marriages are not based on Amor, which is freedom and personal identity for which one pays own’s own freedom and assumes responsibility for oneself. To become one with a desk? Come, follow me. Sit here. Break is at 10:15.