“The next number will be ‘I’m in the Mood for Love,’ sung by a member of the Eagles Club.”
*
“Chases Dirt” — motto of Old Dutch Cleanser, in poem by Ted Berrigan, “Smashed Ashcan Lid.”
*
I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes and my only plan is the old Chinese Way of the Tao: “avoid the authorities.”
Jack Kerouac, “Biographical Resume, Fall 1957,” in Heaven & Other Poems (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1977).
*
skyscraper, air port
faded metaphors
Sky Harbor
name of an airport somewhere, acc. to Norman
From the same notebook
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch
[From February 1992. The club member was — who else? — Alfalfa. The Ted Berrigan poem is here. Sky Harbor International Airport is in Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, Norman!]
Monday, October 10, 2016
From an old notebook
From an old notebook
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, discussing Ashbery’s poem “Europe” :
Koch: There’s no key to understanding the poem, of course, no hidden meaning?Related reading
Ashbery: No, it’s just a bunch of impressions.
Koch: Why is the idea of keys and hidden meanings not appealing to you?
Ashbery: Because somebody might find them out and then the poem would no longer be mysterious.
“A Conversation,” in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991 , ed. Anne Waldman. (New York: Crown, 1991). The conversation appears to date from 1966.
All OCA Ashbery and Koch posts (Pinboard)
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk (Also from the notebook)
Sunday, October 9, 2016
The new normal
Are full-body chills & nausea the normal symptoms of a Presidential debate?
— emily nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) October 10, 2016
Not from The Onion
[The Chronicle of Higher Education , October 7, 2016.]
It’s a genuine headline, and the article is not behind the firewall. The links in the article (all worth following) add up to yet another reason not to go to graduate school: toxic personalities.
[Note: This post makes a generalization about academic life, identifying no individual, in or out of academic life, as a toxic personality.]
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Priorities!
More than four hundred faculty and staff have lost their jobs at my university as a result of Illinois’s manufactured budget-crisis. But there is still money for fireworks at the end of a football game. They ran just now for fifteen minutes or so, rattling windows at some distance from the stadium.
Priorities!
Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)
Reality TV?
Just a thought: is the cheap-looking background in Donald Trump’s self-serving taped “statement” meant to look like the kind of background one sees on cable news? Is the background meant to give (someone) the impression that Trump is answering an anchor’s question and not merely reading from a script?
[Fair warning: the link goes to the tweet with the video.]
Ginsberg Zippy
[Zippy , October 8, 2016.]
A tip of the hat to Allen Ginsberg. The last stanza of his poem “On Burroughs’ Work” (1954):
A naked lunch is natural to us,The poem appeared in Reality Sandwiches (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963).
we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don’t hide the madness.
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
A Kerouac notebook page : Poor flowers
Usage tip of the day
From Leddy’s Imaginary Dictionary of Usage (2016).
Milk and sugar may be added.
Friday, October 7, 2016
David Letterman on Donald Trump
An excerpt from an interview, as quoted in The New York Times:
“If I had a show, I would have gone right after him. I would have said something like, ‘Hey, nice to see you. Now, let me ask you: what gives you the right to make fun of a human who is less fortunate, physically, than you are?’ And maybe that’s where it would have ended. Because I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t know anything about trade agreements. I don’t know anything about China devaluing the yuan. But if you see somebody who’s not behaving like any other human you’ve known, that means something. They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription.”[I made this post before learning about the latest Donald Trump news.]
