I thought I’d seen everything. Obviously, I’m a self-deluded egoist, even if I’m only flinging around a saying. But now I’ve seen everything, up to and including a study on the cultural significance of Brian De Palma’s ‘Scarface’. Ken Tucker lays it all out for you in SCARFACE NATION.
Poet, Allen Grossman, caught the attention of The New Republic with his latest, DESCARTES LONELINESS.
Last year’s children’s holiday book list couldn’t be irrelevent already, could it? From Hornbook Magazine’s archives, their picks for 2007.
Charlotte’s Web meets Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan, not Steve McQeen)? Well, sort of. Check out Elise Broach’s MASTERPIECE.
Dennis Hopper recites Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, “If”:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
A.N. Wilson’s novel, WINNE AND WOLF, muses on the what-ifs of Hitler having spawned and Salon magazine praises it as a well-mulled must read.
DRIFTLESS, by thirty year absentee, David Rhodes, gets a pleasant nod from The New Yorker.
Italian crime fiction shorts are compiled by Giancarlo de Cataldo (translated by Andrew Brown) in CRIMINI. Then it gets good reviews. Could be time to expand my crime fiction experience. Could be yours, too.
Two YA fantasies get the once over at The Christian Science Monitor.
hold my hand boy
say good bye
is parting such sweet sorrow
when the heart doesn’t cry
off to cali lights
that never grow dim
where you’ll bury your pains
keep them hidden within
on a shiny new playground
you can play
no broken hearts
to litter the way
just another tradeoff
to hide from the truth
why are you running boy
what will you prove
see your playground
all glittered in gold
sparkling from another’s tears
it’s this i know
you can lie to yourself
but you can’t lie to me
you can cloak your soul
so the world won’t see
but don’t you know boy
you can’t trade your soul
for a shiny new playground
glittered in gold
(Read more of Kim Michelle Richardson’s poetry here)
Editor’s note: ‘Midnight Poetry’ is a showcase for work by poets across the spectrum—from the pantheon of literary giants to contemporary, underground and new voices.
If you would like to submit your work for consideration, please see our Submission Guidelines.
Mike Huckabee does a good bit of complaining, but they’re still saying DO THE RIGHT THING is worth the read.
Harold W. Fenton edits the LEGENDS OF PAUL BUNYAN to acclaim in Minnesota. Hey, they’ll like it in other places too, but it was bound to start up there.
“We Call Upon the Author”, performed live May 30, 2008 in Fiorentino, Italy:
What we once thought we had we didn’t, and what we have now will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain
Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain
Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain
He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon
Well, he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain
Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!
Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!
Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet
Ask me things, but I don’r know where to start
They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father’s heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain
We call upon the author to explain
Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain
Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease
Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain
Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?)
Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain
I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix
Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain
Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“The waves, the waves were soldiers moving”. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain
Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!
Random House pulls out of BookExpo Canada 2009 because they feel the show “is no longer effective in helping us promote and sell books together with the booksellers”.
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.”
AuthorScoop
