Amazon.com's poetic statement

"It appears that it's National Poetry Month again, and I would be a poor servant of poetry (SOP) indeed, if I did not do my own small part in extolling the virtue and nobility or this ancient and noble art! So, in defense of poetry and of poets:

-Poetry is more efficient than fiction. Why read 500 pages of fiction (Freedom by Jonathan Franzen for example) that belabors a point that a really good poem can make more memorably in one or two pages.

-Poetry is more complex, more difficult than fiction. It is more comprehensively moving than fiction. As an art of sound and rhetoric, it involves you totally.

-Poetry is for adults.

-Poetry doesn't sell. Pardon me, but the bestsellers list doesn't exactly speak to the superiority of fiction! Fiction, when it's not so painfully earnest, is downright silly! That poetry doesn't sell is no - I repeat, no - point of shame to poets or poetry!

-The world of poetry is small and intimate. If reading fiction is like being in a sports stadium, reading poetry is like being in a mid-sized conference room. You can mill around and soon meet everybody.

Let's see... that's about it, I think. Thank you for the chance to discharge of my duty as a SOP, because truly we need a National Poetry Month (as we need a Feline Cancer Awareness Month or a Recycle Your Beer Bottles Month). Pace Frank O'Hara, who said that let the children eat candy, he doesn't give a yam whether people read poetry or not - poetry does continually require institutional promotion and support.

Oh yeah, this book - it's terrible!"

I need to work on my empathy

1.

Last Christmas my dad stopped me when I was outside, warming up my car, and he stressed that I must "work on my empathy." My relationship with my sister had started to break down and I barely talked to her this past Christmas; I never talk to her now. I'm not sure how to do it either.

I also treated a woman here in Stillwater very poorly and I rarely see her around now. My friend asked me if I have ever been hurt, we were drunk, and I said "fuck yeah, I've been hurt," or something like that. Probably not as funny or visceral. Probably, I just said "yeah."

2.

I kept thinking I've been writing poems from this "character" named Tommy but they all sound the same. I need to ditch the artifice and realize this is just my fucking voice. Every poem I have written since I moved down here has been me and only me. With the exception of a few early ones (I've tried to bring in this feminine voice, but she sounds like me too, or my sister). I don't know what I am doing sometimes.


3.

I tend to get pegged as a "funny guy." This is fine sometimes but most of the time I wish it wasn't, and I know it's partly my fault. Boisseau used to recommend Old Male Poets to me she thought I'd like him. I kind of did, well, I liked half a book, but I finally came to the realization his work lacks ghosts.

Boisseau kind of pointed to this and so did Hadara: poems contain ghosts, or ghost words of the Real Poem you're trying to write. There has been this intangible aspect to people's poems I either like or I don't like and it's because that most the language of most people's work is so polished it is dead--think of the Poet as the big furry thing in those Warner Bros. cartoons strangling the life out of a pretty thing, desiring to name it George. Their poetry lack ghosts. The poem has been busted.

I don't know if I have any right to say this--I can't write for shit most times and my work is fairly clear and accessible.

I guess I try to keep ghosts in it--one way to do this is to stay messy I think, if just a little messy. I don't want to be beautiful all the time; I always think of anti-lyric (not so much prosody as "how would I say this").

When I'd go back to Boisseau and tell her I didn't like the Old Male Poet she recommended, she somtimes would say "I don't either." I liked this a lot: she knows there is something of worth in people's work she doesn't agree with. I miss that right now.


4.

My friend Andrew's daughter Eleni did. She drew Tommy and called it "Tommy is sad."



Andrew asked her why Tommy looks up. She said "most people look up when they are sad."

Man...

I only ever talked to C.D. Wright once and she warned me that the worst thing that will happen to me is that I will imitate myself. That seems to be happening right now.

Like, I am trying to use Takashi Shimura in a poem. Or the feeling of being Takashi Shimura (he is in the blog pic). I don't know how to write those eyes.

Dang.

Needs more drunk Tina Fey

i.

This move to Stillwater is coming up quick. I still need to finalize everything.

ii.

I saw three movies in the last 48-ish hours: Inception (friday), Ponyo (Saturday afternoon), and American Splendor.

iii.

Of the three American Splendor was the best--it's visually interesting like the other two movies, messes with story structure in a po-mo sense like the other two movies, but is very clear and easy to follow. That the film functions as biography probably creates that structure to mess around in. I also identify with the film's very Ohio-ness--I've tried to write about this before: It seems Ohio, and to a similar degree Indiana and Michigan, produces the working/lower middle class intellectual stiff. Examples include Vonnegut, Bukowski (who is from LA, yes), Michael Moore, and Pekar.

An early scene in American Splendor has Pekar showing his "comics" (mere scripts with stick figure drawings) to R. Crumb. Pekar talks about the potential to make comics very different from what we expect and compares his work to French filmmakers and the Italian De Sica. I liked this a lot. He doesn't see himself as a revolutionary--there's no manifesto--he's just trying to communicate the Incommunicable At Times, and trying to do it in the least bullshit way possible. There is no high-art/low-art with guys like that. Comics can be uttered in the same breath as new-wave European cinema. Pekar, and the others, mix all culture up, use whatever they can to reach as many people they can. It's an aesthetic I embrace but have a difficult time articulating. I probably won't ever be able to do it.

iv.

Call it general cinematic malaise, but people seem to confuse "intelligent" with "muddled." Human beings themselves can be intelligent and muddled--look at Pekar, Vonnegut, Buk, John Berryman, Einstein, etc. Films shouldn't be--Kurosawa, to paraphrase, said a great movie should be one that's clear and understandable for everyone. Inception doesn't seem clear to ChristopherNolan. An "auteur" I guess, this film and Dark Knight suffer from too many ideas packed into two and a half hours. Nolan needs to simplify his ideas--why not make Extraction, where the characters steal corporate secrets from the minds of billionaire CEOs first, and then make Inception in 2012?

The first third of this film is excellent. Nolan drops us in media res at a real-time pace--we get thrust into the process of infiltrating dreams for corporate secrets in a well crafted action sequence--before Nolan slows down and walks us through the "process" of infiltration in a quick, articulate way. The concept of inception--to place a thought into one another person's mind--is interesting, but complicates the dreamscape and the film's world too much. By the second half the rules established earlier fall apart and I wasn't sure what was going on anymore.

This could be Nolan's ultimate flaw. He makes interesting "intelligent" films but makes them in an era where we crave for any authenticity from Hollywood. That Nolan gives us a sharp-looking film with a cool idea is "good enough" when it's clear that it is not good enough. Nolan may never get feedback he really needs: to simplify his ideas, to focus better.

v.

Ditto Ponyo I guess. Not a lot happens in a narrative sense, but I like Miyzaki's films for their poetic intensity--his movie's small moments make them great. Read the synopsis here. Sosuke lives on a small house on a cliff with his mom (Tina Fey). His dad captains ships and is gone long stretches of time. Early in the film, Sosuke's mom expects Sosuke's dad to come home, but he bails--takes on a second shift. Mom's reaction? She opens a big beer, gets drunk, and angry, but not in a Maury Povich-mom sort of way. It's longing and it's something organic that I don't get from Pixar movies. It's hard to describe the great stuff in Ponyo.

It's easier to describe what kind of sucks about it--nothing seems to happen, there's a little tension but not much. The story is told from the perspective of Sosuke and, like stories told by kids, it's boring construction-wise. To quote my friend Robin, who watched it with me: All the parents respect me (Sosuke) and my Kindergarten girlfriend is jealous of this super cool/perfect girl from the sea. Ponyo drowns this town and everyone seems all right with it. The moon, somehow, has come very close to the earth and could crush it, but whatever: everyone respects Soskue and he'll figure it out because he's fucking five years old.

vi.

I hope this all makes sense. I hate when people write stuff and call it a "rant." That's not interesting.

Poor White text via Project Gutenberg

You can get Poor White here.

I read three chapters last night--Hugh McVey, a lankey Missourian, moves east to Ohio to find a connection with people around him. It's yet to work out. I've only read this and Winesburg but Anderson, and to a lesser degree James Thurber and Kurt Vonnegut, capture Indiana-Ohio male loneliness well. And Anderson wrote in a period of rust-belt prosperity too. Thurber wrote from the safety of New York. Vonnegut saw the tail end of it.

That's all I got right now.

I could've read Sherwood Anderson but went with Real Genius (1985)

i.

Martha Coolidge's film works best when Chris Knight (Kilmer) and Mitch Taylor (Gabriel Jarret) deal with the alienation of work in a specific field. Creative writing students and scientists connect only at that point of alienation it seems; they both think in ways that dumbfound businessmen and communicators of the world. The two montages--an inappropriate number: You should have one or three, a golden ratio--of Knight and Taylor's adjustment seem particularly relate-able. To ride easy on talent only to be forced to use it. I hope I don't sound arrogant. My old roommate Ethan was a chemist. Most of our conversation revolved around tv shows and movies, but we also shared in the triviales of publication, funding, and "the right programs." Things other people in other fields don't worry as much about, maybe.

It's when the film gets silly does it suck. Building a five-megawatt chemical laser seems ridiculous but it is handled well. Val Kilmer and his friends jump the shark when they break into a secret military base to sabotage said-chemical laser and point it at Prof. Jerry Hathaway's (William Atherton) house, which they destroy by filling it with popcorn. The film's tonal shift from college-growing pains to espionage lacks the bite of wild tonal-shifts found in Korean movies like Old Boy--that we benefit from a culture that dictates form might be why we fail at shifting tones as easily.

I like Real Genius a lot though. William Atherton's character reminds me of Whitney Terrell. Not that Whitney's a villain. Both men exude a toughness/cockiness and Knight and Taylor both crave for his approval on different levels through the film. Knight barbs him but needs to graduate. Taylor, intimidated/admired that Hathaway picked him out, finds a mentor in him. All this shit gets thrown out the window when the duo creates a death machine. The white males in UMKC's program felt that way about Whitney--the desire to one-up him and receive approval. I was the poet so I was a bit outside of the admiration.

ii.

Robin took me to Arthur Bryant's for my birthday. The two things I know about Calvin Trillin are these: (1) he's from Kansas City (2) he called Arthur Bryant's the best restaurant in the world. I kind of agree on the latter. The sauce is excellent, a gritty-bitter difficult to emulate, but Gates has better fries and meet--except maybe burnt-ends, which Bryant's does a better job of.

The original is located at about 18th and is probably the furthest east any upper-middle class white people travel within the city. I don't think Trillin brings this up but I hear this addage from said white people: "Arthur Bryant's is the only place where you see all walks of life together, eating, joking, living happily," etc. etc. etc. This disregards the fact that black people cook and serve the food for white people. I never see any accountants with blackberries hanging from their belts eating with trumpet players in bright yellow suits.

An old guy and his wife ate at a table near us. Lewis and Greg were also there. The old guy wore what looked like a bushwhacker hat--Lewis joked that this guy's attire was fairly accurate of what white people think of east Kansas City: The whole place is a safari to them, the outback to them.

It's funny to see other white people order at Arthur Bryant's and Gates. They hold up the line, ask for extra-crispy fries or light sauce on short-ends. They then get what everyone else gets or nothing at all--like the soup nazi episode in Seinfeld.

iii.

Sean and Amy gave me Poor White, Anderson's novel after Winesburg, Ohio. I've read just a little. A young man lifts himself up from his bootstraps, becomes a great inventor. Anderson's prose works much like Winesburg's here. The omniscient narrator operates in exposition with few scenes. It seems to make more sense than in Winesburg--Lewis pointed out those stories are narrated by a periphery character who seems to have an exceptional amount of dirt on the whole town. A more sinister Della Reese or Bruno Ganz noting the inhabitants. Poor White's narrator is no angel or side-character. There's also not much going on so far. It lacks the paper pills, the strange images of Winesburg. The quiet desperation as well. Maybe it'll pick up.

I went back to Dayton last week a broke-ass. Friends paid my bills at places--mostly cheap beer and chicken wings in hot sauce. I tried to leave as small a foot print as possible.

Dad and I get drunk at BW3s every trip I'm back now, it seems. It's cheap and near enough to the house he lets me drive. I'm much taller than my dad--he's 5'10, about 180. More stubborn than me and tough, an inner-city public librarian. We both drank until near blackout. He never drinks at other times, I think.

I told friends I'd make it rain for them one day. A reference to Fat Joe's song, because I'm still white and lived in a town that was technically a suburb. My Dad's response: "Are you the Kwisatz Haderach?" His question a reference to Frank Herbert's Dune and it's white male messiah with a poison knife. A messiah whose eyes turn blue after he's chosen.

Writing's been tough the last few weeks. I feel it might be coming back.

Odds and ends

i.

I saw Chang Rae Lee read at the Kansas City Public Library. Whitney Terrell brought him in. Lee signed books and then Lewis, Zac, me, and some others went to the Harry's Country Club to sit around and drink. I talked to Chang Rae about Korean cinema. He said something good and precise: The closest American filmmaker to the Korean style is Quentin Tarantino and even he is conservative. Where Tarantino ties himself to his aesthetic completely--Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, Pulp Fiction all operate chaotically, but still within a strict genre form--Korean filmmakers like Im Sang-Soo and Park Chan-woo deconstruct form and convention with exactness. They shift from slapstick comedy to ultra violence in a single scene. Such are Koreans--they work hard, then party as if they're ready to die. And only they can pull it off.

This is my problem: I blow up the form before I learn it. I run too much off of energy.

ii.

I think I can expand this idea through the metaphor of neighborhoods. Drive through an old neighborhood in a city and you'll see lots of different houses close together: Second Empire, Queen Anne, etc. Old trees envelope them. The yards are green but a little wild--they look like Woody Allen from the early 70's--and dandelions hang out in there and on the burns. My work always ends up like this; a unity in variety if that's possible (usually I fail at that, too, like this metaphor).

iii.

Now think of suburbia or better Kansas. No trees stand over big bright cookie-cutter houses. The yards uniform and wide, buzzed like R. Lee Ermey, they all look the same. If there's a variety in houses, it's a more explicit economic indicator. Bigger means you sell more and care less about detail. My work never ends up tight, but I must appreciate this approach: It is safer, can be fun. I could learn to play more golf in this environment. I will like driving through old neighborhoods more.

iv.

I'll be reading with Marcus Myers, Jeff Pollard, and Karla Deel Friday, April 30 in Lawrence, KS at Mirth Cafe, 745 New Hampshire.

v.

I will attend the PhD in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University this fall.

The gift for breeders

Last night I stayed home and drank a little Svdeka, Lewis left it over here the night before, and watched a rerun of SNL featuring John Ham. It was terrible.

During the show they ran this Kindle ad:



Those people don't look like they read--maybe they do, but I'm pretty sure they don't. If they lived in Kansas City, they'd hang out in Broadway Cafe all day and hold Mother Night or Cheese Monkeys to their faces, eyes darting for others around the place. Maybe not Mother Night, but Everything is Illuminated.

They'd then come to Dave's Stagecoach and try to drink at tour table, commend Lewis for his jukebox picks, patronize the one black customer--the guy with pitbulls in his pickup truck, who loves thrash metal. The Kindle Kids will ask him if he loves Lil' Wayne.

I have a lesion on my face from something, that's why I'm crabby.

Jimmy Chen posted HTMLGiant's official Kindle Post a few weeks ago. It was funny and I never thought about the 1996 implication. Remember Newton?

I started reading Mother Night--a .48 paperback copy. The paper smells like cinnamon. About page 60, I met Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason Jones D.D.S, D.D and the other and the other "antiqued fascists." Jones praises Howard W. Campbell Jr., the Nazi propagandist/American spy, for telling the truth "when everybody else was telling lies." Clearly, Campbell told lies--the truth Jones and his friends embraced were not real at all. Campbell doesn't say anything. Yet, at least. I'm still working through it.

I wonder if Glenn Beck might be like Campbell in some way. What does he say when Mr.Upper-Middle-Class-Guy from Cincinnati, who threw dollars at Parkinson sufferers at a Teabag Rally, shakes Mr. Beck's hand and calls him a ray of light. Deep down, I want Beck to really be a sham, a guy who undermines the right in secret. A Kurt Vonnegut character.

I like the smell of cheap books. I like the sentences of the rust-belt intelligentsia.

I found Triple Canopy today thanks to HTMLGiant. The second piece I read came from Triple Canopy 5: Television for the People.

In high school, I took video production classes and hung out in the studio all the time. One video segment I made every week was Stag Beetle--I played a luchador with the power of the bug. Instead of a colorful mask, I used my dad's ski mask.

Nothing seems to work right now.

In the beginning, everyone looked like Tim Tebow

Writing this thesis has got me thinking about the intentionality my pop culture artifacts lack. If I use pop culture, it needs to be in a way to get to the image without distracting the reader. Robert Haas had a poem that used the climatic scene involving Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai. I over complicate and get to convoluted. I'm not sure how to get around that. My sentences all sound the fucking same.

I submitted to the Poetry Society of America's chapbook contest in December. I rounded up the poems I felt like were the most successful, further edited them, and sent the whole thing out at the deadline. Everything seems insurmountable. Even when I get work placed, and start to think about a chap or a book, the whole thing never feels done. I think this is why I don't have multiple chaps or a manuscript done. Who wants to read? Who will read it? I think I communicate clearly but everybody leaves, so I must not articulate myself very well.

I found Ron Silliman's post about contests this morning (scroll down a little for the post)--this made me feel a little bit better.

Keep truckin' right?

FRiGG Law and Order Issue 27

FRiGG 27 is up now. I have a poem in it. Ellen Parker, the editor, asked me in the fall if I watched Law and Order. I said yes and she asked me to contribute something. Julianne Nicholson probably doesn't read poetry. That might be a good thing, because I think she's pregnant. Her husband's last name is Cake.

Mathias Svalina's Destruction Myth is quite good and exciting. I have been reading it with the intention of reviewing it for New Letters. The last time I talked about wishing America would implode so I can write Tomaz Salamun or Charles Simic poems with greater authenticity--they write well, they're funny and they're beautiful. The mix of violence, surrealism, and hope, I thought, could not be captured by a white, male, American poet.

Svalina nails this feeling by using American cultural artifacts within the context of Judeo-Christian-American creation myth. It's violent, it's funny, it's beautiful, and it's sad. He's successful when me, and others, are not. He does not graft Eastern European images onto American sentiment. It never gets hollow. The form gets a bit repetitive, but the poems never die in the shell. He reminds me of the best of Simic and friends.

I hope that's accurate. That's the spirit I'm trying to capture in the review. I don't know how to review anything though.

On escaping America

Robert Whiting lacks a "literary gloss"--his sentences clunky at times, with a focus on pure information--but his ability for providing the funniest and most relevant details makes him enviable. I read You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld, and The Samurai Way of Baseball (also called the The Ichiro Effect) when I lived in Japan. He is funny, clear, mostly precise, and informed. Japan Times is currently running a four part series about Bobby Valentine's managerial run with the Chiba Lotte Marines. I lived in Okayama, two hours west of Osaka, for six months from August 2005 to March 2006. Valentine's Marines won the Japan Series that fall, sweeping the Hanshin Tigers--the team from Osaka. Our friends felt much grief; the Tigers haven't won a Japan Series for 25 years now. The Marines hadn't won a series since 1974. It was Japan's equivlent of the Cubs sweeping the Indians in a World Series.



I see the maps of America broken up and kind of wish it would happen. Maybe I could make better art. I'd live in the Canada zone, so I would have free health care and could quit thinkings about how I should've been an engineer--you know, for the benefits, without the worry to pay for broken legs or heart attacks. The loss of country would help with generating grief. I could be a real Tomaz Salamun--a poet who has actually known cultural defeat, experienced a greater anguish than bear market-byproduct ostricism. I wonder if other white males who write think about this.

Sam Pink's I am Going to Clone Myself then Kill the Clone and Eat It has been picked up by a Norweigan press--they will call it I LOVE YOU. Pink posted a link to Flamme Forlag, the publisher. I looked around and found this book in the catalog. I loved the google translation of the excerpt:

There er'n, there he is, right? Du må slå'n me' brettet da, mæl til bakfra, prøv å få'ni bakken, så kan vi sparke'n. You must slå'n me 'board as, Mæl to the rear, try få'ni ground, so we can sparke'n. Eller du kan ta nosen, så tar jeg tailen, og så bare smeller vi ti'n me' trucken. Or you can take Nøsen, I'll take the tail, and then just slams we ti'n me 'truck. Ja, da kan'n faen meg angre. Yes, when kan'n goddamn regret. Ja, jeg er rett bak deg. Yes, I'm right behind you. Bare gå du, er rett bak deg. Just go, you are right behind you. Og så prøver du å slå her, ikke sant? And then try to turn here, right? Her. Here. Vi bare beiner før det kommer no'n, ta're me' ro. We legs for the upcoming no'n, ta're me 'ro.

Just go, you are right behind you. Why isn't this translated into English? I though 8-bit was in.

Bullet suspended for possesion of unloaded firearm.

Gilbert Arenas' indefinite suspension from basketball will result in the NBA being further branded as a "thug league" with their players being branded, unfairly and uninterestingly as "thugs" (it's already started).

This, of course, further overshadows guys like Milwaukee Bucks' rookie Brandon Jennings. Jennings circumvented the NBA's draft rule--players need to be one year removed from high school or nineteen years old--by moving to Italy and playing there a year. Some credit the move to Europe for his rapid maturation as a player where he faced former, and future, NBA talent on a night-by-night basis. He's second among rookie's in scoring (19.0 pg), first in assists (5.9 pg), and tenth rebounds (3.8 pg). Not bad for a guard. That he opted to play in Italy is even cooler--the move of, say, a poet rather than a jock. I don't think jocks think much about the opportunities their talent gives them. Poets don't either really, I guess. They all move to New York, or Paris, which bores me and fellow lower-middle-class-background-artist-wannabes-in-student-loan-debt I know.

This makes Jennings not a jock or a poet, but a cool guy.

What I like most about Jennings is what I like most about Arenas--he's funny, seems personable, and is aware of his talent. Arenas proved to me he's not necessarily aware of his actions outside of games--especially joking about having a gun given the current cultural climate. I hope Jennings will be fine. He seems like he has a good head on his shoulders. I think Arena will be fine, too. This could open up the Josh Childress-esque opportunity of playing in Greece for $20 million over three years tax-free.

One-star reviews of White Noise from Amazon.com

Verification, others

Warning--just stay away

I just a read a short story of his in the latest New Yorker and was reminded of this book, and it struck me how much he hasn't changed in 20 years. Fist of all academics writing about academics is as bad as writers writing a book about a writer writing a book. In general the book is condescending, obvious with characters who I had absolutely no interest in.

Infuriatingly Self Important

It is rare that I have a reaction of violent dislike to a book, and even books that I do not especially like I can find something respectable or interesting about the text, but I hate this book. This is the sort of literature that gets first-year philosophy majors to cream themselves because it is oh-so-insightful and important, and allows all the armchair intellectuals of the world to feel a little bit more superior because they assume the cleverness of Delillo's writing is lost on lesser minds. This isn't a novel, it's an extended postmodern manifesto that exposes the philosophy for the empty, whiny system of nihilism that it is. This novel has no characters, only insufferable stereotypes who can't walk through a produce isle at the grocery store without disappearing up their butts with lengthy, obnoxious monologues that somehow equate buying apples with death (exemplified by the single most unbearable character I have ever come across, Murray); it doesn't have drama, only histrionics. What makes this a thoroughly unenjoyable and ultimately uninteresting is that it is a work that sags under the weight of its own importance; it is so persistently self-conscious that I can't take it seriously as a work of literature--it spends a couple hundred pages trying to convince me how great it is without actually being great. What's more, if this novel were a failure as a novel but still offered some genuine insight into the experience of the individual in a post-modern world, it would still succeed as a work of philosophy. But it doesn't; every sentence feels like a catch-phrase rather than a substantive statement.

The difficult thing about criticizing a novel like this is that defenses of it are always predicated on the notion that disliking it reflects a misunderstanding of postmodernism itself--that is, those who dislike this novel obviously are not sophisticated enough to untangle the dense threads of philosophic intent that make it what it is. But, I do understand postmodernism (don't like it but still understand it) and still feel this is a failure. While reading it I was reminded of the infinitely superior Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut), and thought that this is what that great work would read like if stripped of all its originality and craft. That is a successful postmodern novel; this one is several long hours of my life I will never get back.

God Did I try

For years I heard what a wonderful book this is. Finally I bought it to read. And read, and read, and read, even though my wife, a brilliant engineer said she hated it when she read it ten years ago and that I was wasting my time. It took me a month to finish, and every night it put me to sleep after about three pages. The Hitler studies concept was brilliant (except Mel Brooks had already done it) and there were indeed some amusing parts, but pretentious does not begin to describe this book. Thank God for... readers because I thought surely something is wrong with me if I'm the only person in the world except for my wife who doesn't like this book. Then I found out I wasn't alone--there are a lot of us on the sidewalk who see that this emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Not only that, he's butt ugly besides. I absoulely recommend this book. You will, like many, either love it and join the cult, or like many of the rest of us, be utterly amused that so little can be taken for so much by so many. One way or another, you are going to feel good about yourself, and so much smarter. In my case, I decided I am much too smart for this book. Definitely decide for yourself; it's a litmus test of intelligence, and you can't fail.

Boring as Hell

Books like this (and for the most part, many works of Pynchon and Vonnegut) provide social commentary and overblown allegories of life in the modern age. White Noise is trying so hard to teach lessons and issue warnings that the message comes across as subtly as a teacher holding up multiplication table flash cards. Along with Breakfast of Champions and The Crying of Lot 49, this is the kind of book that I will no longer feel guilty about not liking. Boring and unrealistic, with a plot that wanders like a donkey lost in the desert, this self-important book provides me with absolutely no reading enjoyment. It's like listening to a 20 minute guitar solo by some bored jazz musician who turns his back to the audience. I've left the concert, see you at the bar. Read William Vollmann instead.

absolutely unreadable - no, unless your teacher insists,

I'd tried to read White Noise a number of times, thrown it across the room each time. But this time, with a couple of transatlantic plane flights in my arsenal, I couldn't fail to finish, right?

Wrong. White Noise is terrible. It's full of dialogue that no one would ever say, precious, precious, gimicky, and gimicky. Every word is too clever by half, including "and" and "the." I take it the grating serial monologs making fun of consumerism (oooh - how unprecedented!) are meant to emphasize the disconnectedness of modern life. But instead they show only the consequences of writing an arid echo chamber of a piece drained entirely of humanity or anything remotely resembling any claim at accuracy. It is, however, tremendously effective at annoying its readers.

Fear not DeLillo haters. This will be off the syllabi before too long. And how we will celebrate!

Horrible read, weak characters, bad writing style.

Biggest problems with this book is the overuse of quotations to tell a story. The author might as well have writen a screenplay. The result is a confusing and choppy read. I would have prefered he reserves quoting his characters only when it would add something to the story. The prose itself is also weak. The author's descriptions of the characters' relationships with each other, the surroundings, the events are clumsy and weakly staged. He is also inept at pacing the events to keep the reader intrigue and hungry to read on to uncover the plot. Lastly, this book fails to draw the reader into the events taking place because we don't care about any of its characters. The writer would have created more believable characters we can sympathize with if he had taken us into the secret recesses of their souls where emotions like fear, happiness, self-doubt etc. reside. A writer should write for his reader in mind and not for himself. For a good book try Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, Ms.Rowling's Harry Potter books or Memoirs of a Geisha.

How sad if this is one of the great books from the 80's.

I read an article comparing Don Delillo and Chuck Palahniuk's writing style. What an awful comparision. I have read two Delillo books and both have been dreadfully boring.

In White Noise the characters are annoying and the conversations are awful. The book seems to have very little purpose and goes no where. If this is one of the great books of the 80's, I will not be reading any more books from the 80's.

The Beginning of the End of the Novel

Delillo's disese has been spreading ever since this novel was published. The redundent fragments, the uncomphrehensable descriptions, and the false meaning that is being controlled by his illiterate notions of the dreaded "conspiracy".
Delillo's attempt to debase literature and humanity is praised which makes it that much more ironic and ultimatley a pathedic sign of the power of publicity.

I read Robert J. Baumann's Man About Town earlier

I am excited about writing again.

Winter Break Reading List

I'm taking these books back with me to Dayton:

Euonia, Christian Bok
Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems, Noelle Kocot
Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Paper Lion, George Plimpton

I never read Kurt Vonnegut in high school. He seemed reserved for 6'0, 160 pound boys who play guitar and have minds for math. Bukowski was more the speed for 6'4, 275 pound boys who watch Nicolas Ray and Sam Peckinpah films. Robin had a lot of Vonnegut. Last Christmas, she lent me Jailbird to read on the plane--she thought the way Vonnegut connected all of his ideas neatly together could be a good resource for my work. I liked it, and finished it quickly. As a 6'4, 236 pound man, I feel better about reading Vonnegut. I like his imagination and I like the ginger smell and the feel of the greened archive paper of Del paperbacks--they help his sentences. An hour ago, I bought the Del paperback of Breakfast of Champions over the hardcover version at Half Price Books in Westport.

If I get anywhere with my own stuff, I want my first book, at least the cover, to look like a Kurt Vonnegut Del Paperback from 1979--san-serif font, with a lot of reds, oranges, and yellows. A smooth painted drawing of a green skinned Don Quixote riding a donkey with no eyes and mouth.

Vonnegut supposedly always wanted to be a poet, but didn't feel up to snuff. I think, if he was around now, he could be considered an above-average prose poet simply based on his ideas and their general strangeness. Cats Cradle's chapters short chapters remind me of prose poems I see around the internet, or in small journals--inventive titles, short scenes. "The Girl Pool" (33-34) and "Vice President in Charge of Volcanoes" (23) come to mind.

I tried to teach Ball Four in my composition class--it did not go well. I've always wanted to read George Plimpton's Paper Lion, and I found a copy for $4.48 at Half Price Books.

I feel unhip in cheap bookstores.

I think I can read all of these this break.

you shall die by your own evil creation

My friend Brandon showed me Fletcher Hanks' work in June 2007, shortly before both of us left Dayton, Ohio. I moved to Kansas City, he moved to White River Junction, VT to study at the Center for Cartoon Studies (comics college as he calls it). Brandon worked at a Donato's Pizza down the street to make money for his move--he banked most of it save petty cash for cigarettes, High Life, and the occasional book. He had bought I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! and I only leafed through it, thinking the art and language was crazy. It looked great--Hanks worked in solid lines (partly due to production costs) with saturated colors. I bought I Shall Destroy... months later, after I moved, and read it more. Hanks language and images are great--I ripped off a golden octopus and invisible chemical men with pink day-glo claws for a poem. When I brought Hanks back up to Brandon, he said "Oh yeah, that's stuff is pretty fun. There's not much you can learn from it though." He's right. Sam Pink, Russell Edson, and James Tate (at least Tate's prose work) seem to be the poet equivalent of Hanks--it's crazy, it's weird, it's intense, but you can't learn much from it. They're all their own forces.

A new Hanks collection, You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation came out at the end of July. I got my copy last Friday. It's a good collection--just as odd as I Shall Destroy--but what's strong about this new collection isn't so much the work itself, but the supplements. You Will Die features an essay providing background info on Hanks--the first collection does not have one, instead featuring a "comic essay" by editor Paul Karasik at the back of the collection. The intro works better than Karasik's own comic essay from the first collection--we see examples of Hanks' correspondence school assignments, we get a better gauge of the man personally, (he's still painted as an abusive drunk and scoundrel, but we have more corroborating evidence) and professionally (we get an idea of Hanks artistic process in the early days of the comics industry).

We also get a bit of context of the work. Stories collected in I Shall Destroy are certainly vivid, wild, and colorful, but they're also displayed in a vacuum--it's hard to imagine Hanks' comics and characters come from 1939. The stories still have an element of the underground comics of the 60's and 70's (or at least my perception of them--my interest in comics stems more from Brandon's passion for them). What I find interesting with You Will Die is the intrusion of advertisements geared towards kids--these ads creep in at the end of some of the stories. These ads--"EARN YOUR OWN BICYCLE!/GET STRONG WITH THIS SUPPLEMENT/SPY WATCH AND DECODER RING"--put Hank's work in context. Ten year old boys, not hipsters or academics in theirs 20s and 30s, bought and read his work. There was nothing chic about it, no comics culture to counter, which makes it that much more significant and interesting. Whether Karasik intentionally leaves these ads in the stories isn't clear--I gather these were probably the best versions of the story available and the ads were kept in to keep the design of the book consistent.

You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation's stories lack the weird punch of the ones in I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets. Stardust fails to fling gangsters into the clutches of golden octopi, Fantomah doesn't punish rich white hunters by making them giant green aliens and send them home on planes. The stories, while still drown in broad strokes and saturated colors, aren't as interestingly weird. Kind of like James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys.

I recieved Tomas Salamun's Poker in the mail, but I am watching Around the Horn on ESPN

Tony Reali: "You wear ties mailed to you?"
Tim Cowlishaw: "It happens."

Gary Sullivan's Pet Peeves

They are valid.