Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

Saturday, December 14, 2024

The Syrian dictator Assad has been forced to run for his life and is now in Moscow. It is unclear how many, if any, of his closest associates were permitted to avail themselves of a “Humanitarian exception” and sneak into the kennel of exile along with Assad. Putin knows perfectly well the horrors that Assad had his henchmen perpetuate in the prison at Sednaya. At least 30,000 people were tortured and murdered in a manner that can only leave any thoughtful person reluctant to believe that human dignity actually exists as anything other than a necessary fiction incapable of defending itself against the avariciousness of evil. Evil as a mental virus feeds on human consciousness, and there is no antidote or vaccine.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/12/7/syria-war-live-news-govt-says-president-al-assad-has-not-fled-damascus?update=3370892&gsid=564ff7be-3c6b-495c-935e-52927fb4e397

***

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” the saying goes. Israel has wasted no time in expanding its war of debilitation in the region. Gaza: check. Iran: check. Syria: check. Does any serious threat to Israel’s continued existence actually exist at this point? The major question, in fact, is how well is Israel prepared to deal with its success? The people of Israel probably have no more idea of how to take best advantage of the sudden disarray and disminishment of their enemies than the rebels in Syria are truly prepared to reinvigorate a nation ravaged by a merciless dictator.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues to inflict an unfathomable amount of sorrow on all those being skewered by the nationalist ambitions of a Russian billionaire for whom the word dictator is too mild an accolade.

Given the current horror show — the truly Grand Guignol — of current events, it’s understandable that some people might just want to crawl into bed and read a book that they first read back when they were young and one could indulge in some “escape fiction” with only a moderate amount of shame for turning one’s head away from the slaughterhouse on the other side of the world.

For those so inclined — and I do not fault you at all — here are some notes I dug up from long ago tat I jutted down about “The Shining.”

****

THE SHINING – “Redrum” Redux

“the Shining” by Stephen King
Signet Books, New American Library – Times Mirror (paperback, 1978)

The climax of the book made me remember the original nurder/suicide of Gray, the alcoholic caretaker Since there was no mention of putting in a new furnace, why didn’t it blow up when Grady murdered his family and himself? Did the ranger arrive an hou after it happened? That’s damn had to believe! So the hotel should have blown up with Grady’s death.

Later on, after Wendy asks Jack if anything happened in 216 when Jack went up to check the room, and then asks him a second time, it’s obvious that she doubts him. At that point, it would only make sense for her to go up and check. How much better it would have been if she had gone up to check, had gotten trapped in the room, gone raving ma; then Jack and Danny would have to look for her and they would hear sounds coming from the place. They would have to decide to go in there and rescue her. Danny and Jack would have a serious confrontation what they had seen in there, and a question of the father’s courage forms in Dany’s mind, and they finally go in there.

Perhaps combining certain sequences where Danny has to fun down and get a passkey and the fire hydrant hose then writhes at him. On the whole, there is too much one on one in this story.

The hedge animals are used very well. Jack, Danny, and Halloran all confront the hedge animals. Once again, though, Wedny does’t confront them. It’s as theought she is kept of out of the story – she doesn’t confront room 216 and she doesn’t confront the hedge animals. The whole story falters because of this.

The wasp thing appeared to be only a one-time incident, but the lock on the attic trapdoor which Hack had put there after the wasp incidenct comes back beautifully a the climactic scenes.

The woman in 217 should have been involved in the climax in some way. What if Wendy and she had had a direct confrontation. Or at least if all these people were waiting down by the furnace when Jack is down there just before it blows up – the part should have going full-force there.

What stands out about these notes is how I am emphasizing the diminishment of Wendy as a leading character in the story. She is certainly not reduced to cameo status, but one does not have the sense in the story that King sat there and ran the story line through her eyes. How would the entire story be seen through her subjectivity? My emphasis on women writers in my publishing project, therefore, was aligned with how I saw women presented as active agents in lthe culture at large.

**********

As a postscript, I believe these notes were written back when Craig Bolotin was my roommate in the two-bedroom apartment I lived in on Hill Street in Ocean Park. The notes probably reflect the kind of conversations we had about story structure back then.

Brian Thompson, R.I.P.

The outpourings of public grief are very impressive. It would be hard to top the vigils at the Dakota after John Lennon’s murder forty-four years ago this December 8, but New Yokers are apparently going all out in pausing in their busy lives to honor the late Brian Thompson.

One visitor from Southern California is quoted as saying, “I haven’s seen so many spontaneous roadside memorials since I drove through Little Saigon in Westminster, Garden Grove, and Santa Ana just after Lt. Calley’s death was announced.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-mental-health-care-denied-illegal-algorithm?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature
“(UHC) is one of the ten most profitable companies in the world. …..While the massive insurer — one of the 10 most profitable companies in the world — offers plans to (40 million) people (throughout the entire U.S.A.), it answers to no single regulator.”

********

New York Times: “Torrent of Hate for the Health Insurance Industry”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/americans-little-sympathy-murdered-health-223930677.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/nyregion/social-media-insurance-industry-brian-thompson.html

The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/07/brian-thompson-unitedhealthcare

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait just a freak-flag moment!!!! Why is there much a vociferous lack of compassion for a fellow American who is no different than a professional athlete or a professional politician- just another guy trying to make a good living and provide for his family? Mr. Thompson had a wife and two children. What part of their sorrow do you not understand?

First of all, the health care Americans were provided before 2016 was fairly mediocre. But as I’m sure you remember, Donald Trump promised that we as a nation would have “fantastic” and “beautiful” health care if we elected him president. And he fulfilled that promise, as far as I can see. I’m not sure why he talked about “the concept of a plan” in the 2024 campaign debate with Kamala Harris, since our health care system is “fantastic” and “beautiful” after he got to work in his first term.

And new that he is returning to the White House for another four years, why don’t people realize that whatever new plan he has will be even more fantastic and beautiful. Over 70 million people voted for him, so I assume their health care is nothing short of incredible.

So, in the absence of any public comment by both President-Elect Trump and President Biden, please join with me in chanting: “CEO Lives Matter!” “CEO Lives Matter!”

****

But before we protest this senseless murder of a hard-working CEO, let’s review some recent history.

Within days after a police officer in Minneapolis publicly knelt on George Floyd’s neck long enough to cause his death, protests broke out across the United States. “Black Lives Matter” roiled social discourse to such an extent that President Trump considered taking extreme measures to quell the outrage that tens of millions of people felt, not just about Floyd’s execution but the long, often repressed history of police brutality.

In contrast, following the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, I have not heard of a single public demonstration that rebukes this action. Where is the outrage now? Is a CEO’s life any less valuable than George Floyd’s? Americans should be flooding the streets demanding congressional action now to make sure this kind of tragedy never happens again. Instead, they remain silent, or worse still, get snarky, and in doing so, are complicit in the assassination.

Let’s be clear about this: the assassin’s real target was the profit-making system of health care in this country. Those of us who believe that profits are more important than people need to speak up now; otherwise, the assassin’s attempt to intimidate corporations from the perfectly legal ways they conduct business will result in the collapse of the health care economy, which is the most prosperous in the world!

Unfortunately, there is a disinformation campaign going on tn the United States that claims health insurance companies engage in what is termed “delay and deny.” What is needed is not less “delay and deny” but even more “delay and deny.” People who enroll in these insurance policies need to understand that they are nothing more than a herd of cows being nurtured until it’s time to pass through the slaughterhouse of hospice care. The food industry model is the template upon which health care shapes its policies.

CEOs Lives Matter! Be the first one in your community to make a sign and stand at a freeway entrance or major intersection! Be willing to block traffic and get arrested. If you don’t protest, you are indeed expressing your approval of the agenda of the assassin of UHC’s CEO.

Footnote: Should anyone think my invocation of “profit” is off-the-mark, I would like to cite this recent article in The New Yorker/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-the-murder-of-the-unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-means-to-america?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_120724&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_digest&bxid=5bea15dc24c17c6adf1d75ea&cndid=50555100&hasha=7caeec83f7eb1d1e07520665f3b23972&hashb=96cf50f0c09e5a1d79e45f7efc213ce05278e7f8&hashc=37c43a5c3a11da12bdc55f9c622d0baf0ec7493490d9327a7099d22dd53e6a5e&esrc=bounceX&mbid=CRMNYR012019

“Of course, the solution, in the end, can’t be indifference—not indifference to the death of the C.E.O., and not the celebration of it, either. But who’s going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it’s not going to be the people, who have a lifetime of evidence that health-insurance C.E.O.s do not care about their well-being. Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?”

My answer to the last question in that paragraph is “No.” An emphatic no.

*******

Former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis has weighed in on the public’s apathy about this political assassination:
“I’ve been watching it, and I’ve been shocked by it,” Davis told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “It’s actually troubling to see it, and I really am surprised that people are reacting that way considering the tragic loss here and the violence of what happened.”

He added: “It’s a huge problem. People’s lack of sympathy is really troubling. And the problem with that is, the people who have this kind of animosity, simply because of the circumstances may not be prone to help—and the police are really looking for help from the public on this.”

If I could interview Mr. Davis, I would ask him to comment on the difference between “lack of sympathy” and “animosity.” One can lack sympathy for someone else’s plight without feeling animosity.

Definition:
: a strong feeling of dislike or hatred : ill will or resentment tending toward active hostility : an antagonistic attitude.

Mr. Thompson’s assassin felt extreme animosity toward a specific hearth insurance company. The public trolling of Mr. Thompson’s assassination is a reflection of the widespread belief that some health insurance companies treat those they insure with te same callousness with which Thompson’s assassin disposed of him. The only difference is that one execution is carried out in a manner hidden from public disoourse, Mr. Davis.

Hostility means that someone will act in a pugnacious manner. I have not heard of anyone impeding the police search for this murderer. “The police need the public’s help,” is the current plea. “And what would we get in return for that help?” I would ask. Would police refuse to follow orders and not physically attack demonstrators against the injustices of a capitalist system? When the police show they are willing to help those who oppose the deleterious behavior of large corporations, instead of serving as their enforcers, then perhaps the public will give more help in a case such as this one.

*****

Breaking news on Monday, December 9, 2024
An influencer by the name of Michael McWhortle urged his followers to “cooperate with authorities” and perhaps that inspired someone in Altoona, Pennsylvania to contact police when they spotted someone who seemed to be a possible suspect.Apparently, this “person of interest” is alleged to have had a ghost gun, a fake i.d., and a handwritten manifesto denouncing the health care insurance industry. It’s a little hard to believe that someone who planned a murder in considerable detail would have retained the very things that would be most likely to convict him. If tis is true, it goes to show that an “ordinary” individual criminal is no different than a group of government bureaucrats. “What’s the exit strategy?” is the first question anyone should ask before they undertake any task that affects other people’s lives. President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld all failed to ask that question before they manipulated information to justify te invasion of Iraq. Imagine the deaths of thousands of people whose lives were just as important to them as Brian TWompson’s life was to himself and his family, and with that magnification begin to comprehend the confounding amount of sorrow that afflicts people in Iraq. Brian Thompson’s family no doubt is very sad, but the grief that first needs to be acknowledged is not Thompson’s family or cohort of business executives, but the long forestalled apology that the people of the United States owe to the people of Iraq.

For the record, it appears that the name of the “person of interest” alleged to have targeted Urine/You’reinHorricCare Health Insurance CEO Brian Thompson is Luigi Mangione.

Just as poets will write for several decades and have a volume entitled “New & Selected Poems,” visual artists who have produced an intriguing body of work deserve to have a major retrospective at least once, if not also a second and instance, in their lifetimes. One artist who might well have been granted such concentrated attention is Kathi Flood. A combination of things has worked to forestall such an exhibition, not the least of which was the pandemic. Covid-19, of course, altered the lives of tens of millions of people in the United States in ways that can never be recuperated, so Flood is hardly alone in that dispiriting interruption.

Nevertheless, as artistic social life begins to acclimate itself to the stupendous technological changes of the past quarter-century, it would behoove a major gallery to at the very least make her one of the featured artists of a retrospective of some sort. Among all the activities of human consciousness, art has a singular capacity to defamiliarize the hypnotic allure of the present tense; it’s all too easy to succumb to the whiplash messages of our individual inadequacies when confronted with the indefatigable dismissals of our self-worth. Kathi Flood’s jaunty collages and assemblages create an environment that pulls out of that tailspin and revivifies our internal landscape with the poignancy of our cherished yearnings. How, in fact, do we manage to hold out against the bullying odds of what is construed to be a zero sum game? Resistance involves minor moves, the kind only an adept guerrilla sociologist can bring about.

The Long Beach Museum of Art takes pride in having been part of the first breakout points.of the work associated with the Woman’s Bouse project that led to the establishment of the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. LBMA would be a perfect venue to present a retrospective of Flood’s work.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work offers colorful narratives about urban life, much of it specific to Los Angeles. I categorize and comment on local issues such as traffic patterns, over-development, qualities that define a city, and the architecture of Los Angeles. I use sociology and psychology to consider contemporary issues such as telemarketers, surveillance, the complexity of modern life, relationships and communication, consumerism and excessive materialism, fashion, the evolution of media, politics, adjusting to the Electronic Age, the quality of our medical care, psychotherapy, the development of language, school cultures, and art marketing in Los Angeles.
As a guerrilla sociologist, I make farcical, narrative assemblages, wallworks and installations that heroicize the sweaty, vulnerable, fumbling, stuttering, impulsive aspects of humanity in the face of corporate globalization and its resultant dehumanizing effects. I chew on issues that threaten our self-reliance, such as surveillance, demographic over-quantification and standardization. I work tongue-in-cheek, and employ worthy objects, objects with a rugged complexion and empathetic potential.

My process embraces my affection for Americana as a symbol of desired values – a powerful work ethic, the responsibility to be an active citizen, and attention to community. I hunt and gather antique supports, ephemera and worn objects in backroad antique malls, gutters, and auto junk yards. I use lots of text, fibers, photography, etchings, and drawings to shape bombastic tales about bad drivers, singles ads, overstimulation, our quest for privacy, undrivable mall parking lots, grassroots politics, and the qualities it takes to maintain a creative life.

I aim to describe the richness and absurdity of urban life today, to catalyze reflection. I want to encourage everyone to tell their stories, to soften the frustration and isolation that we feel, and to infuse a poetic trance back into this impatient world.

— Kathi Flood

Website: https://www.KathiFlood.com

November 27, 2024

I first met Murray Mednick at the second iteration of the Padua Hills Theater Festival, which was staged on the grounds outside a theater in the foothills of Claremont. There was a grove of olive trees whose branches were the support system for stage lights that came on soon after dusk. An evening would often feature four substantial plays, and things would start around 6 p.m., with the fullness of summer light still going full tilt. The indoor theater had been locally fomous earlier in the century, but an earthquake had damaged ir beyond being useful as a theater. There were buildings around the perimeter, however, that were able to serve as sets for plays, including a kitchen.

Mednick was one of the earliest members of the off-off-Broadway movement that included Maria Irene Fornes, Robert Patrick, and Sam Shepard. When Mednick moved to L.A. in the 1970s, he didn’t get involved with “the industry” at all, but focused on theater that was closer to the stage’s ancient sense of its consciousness as a ritual involving poetry. From its inception in the late 1970s, the Padaa Hills Festival became almost overnight the one place those in the know regarded as a “must attend.”

It was immediately clear to me that Mednick was not just a playwright, and I included his writing in POETRY LOVES POETRY in 1985. Now, thanks to poet Peggy Dobreer, Murray Mednick’s first collection of poetry is now available. “Living Poetry” deserves to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, at the very least. There is no other book of poetry quite like it. When Peggy said that Murray would like me to write a blurb, I was thrilled to do so.

“Murray Mednick’s LIVING POETRY is both a startling debut and a culminating distillation of a life that could not have yielded anything other than these dauntingly memorable poems. All of the greatest dramatists wrote their plays eihten as verse or prose poems, but Mesnick’s poems stand apart from his extraordinary plays as a summit few others have attained. A sternly exultant, street-level ferocity encapsulates his poems within a clairvoyant wisdom that is second to none. “The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” Any readers who find themselves caught in the throes of regret or wistfulness will find their longed for succor in the visionary condor of Mednick’s indominatble poems.”

For those curious about is plays, here are some.links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Mednick

A conversation wit Murray Mednick:
https://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=566

THE GARY PLAYS:

Murray Mednick Stages L.A.’s Interior Sprawl in ‘The Gary Plays’

Three Plays by Murray Mednick

I have long admired the poetry of Terrence Winch, whose work I first noticed in Michael Lally’s mid-1970s anthology of maverick poets from Crossing Press, NONE OF THE ABOVE. I wrote a review of Winch’s BOY DRINKERS that Paul Vangelisti published in NEW REVIEW OF LITERATURE many years ago. I am hardly alone in the pleasure I get from reading Winch. Other poets and critics who have admired his work include Maureen Owen, Denise Duhamel, Michael Lally, Bob Hicok, Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Billy Collins, Steve Kowit, Mark Wallace, Meg Kearney, Joan Retallack, and Matthew Rohrer. You can find their comments at:

Poetry Books

Other websites to learn more about Winch are at:

Home

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/terence-winch

Recently, Terrence Winch selected one of Harry Northup’s poems to be featured on POEM-OF-THE-DAY.

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/10/harry-northup-pick-of-the-week-ed-terence-winch.html

Another of Harry’s poems has just appeared in MAINTENANT 18, A Journal of Contemporary DADA Writing and Art, edited by Peter Carlaftes and Kat Georges. Contributors to that issue will celebrated by gathering at Beyond Baroque on Friday, December 13, 2024, at 7:30 PM.,

As Gatsy’s Books in Long Beach closed its doors, the proprietor, Sean, sold me a piece of the furniture and then invited me to take a carton of whatever books had not yet been sold. One of them was by Ernest J. Gaines, a novelist I’d heard of but never read. No one in graduate school at UCSD had ever mentioned him, but then again no one at UCSD ever mentioned James Baldwin in a seminar either. Gaines is a more methodical writer than Baldwin, but his ability to depict the complex diversity of an African-American community is nothing short of astonishing.

Why doesn’t Netflix use its money to make a movie out of this novel? Surely there is a young African-American filmmaker who could launch her or his career by directing an adaptation. Ideally, whoever composes the music for it should somehow channel the influence of the late Quincy Jones,

I may be getting old and no longer teaching full-time, but I still want to speak up for the work that deserves more attention.

*******

A friend I’ve known for over 50 years is having bis “Breath Day” today. I sent him a card through an email that is a painting that Linda recently finished.

I am a Scorpio, too, and Laurel Ann Bogen recently drove down from Long Beach to celebrate my 77th “Breath Day” with Linda. Thank you, again, Laurel Ann, for your thoughtful gift, both of your presence at that evening’s dinner with Linda and for your gift itself of the tubes of paint that I have already begun using.

Monday, November 3, 2024

Several weeks ago, I predicted a Trump “buzzer beater” victory in the national election, and nothing has happened in the meantime to make me change my mind. If anything, a poll mentioned in an article in the Washington Post convinces me that he will be the one inaugurated as the next President in January, 2025.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/01/presidential-election-results-scenarios-trump-harris/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert

QUOTE: A Washington Post-Schar School poll last week showed 51 percent of voters across the seven swing states approved of his presidency. UNQUOTE

Now please notice that this is a poll of seven swing states. That poll did not measure what percentage of voters in the entire United States approved of his term in the White House from 2017 to 2020. My guess is that it’s around 45 to 47 percent. After all, Trump’s first term as President was particularly unpopular in several states with large populations. So while I don’t have an official poll to cite, it’s extremely unlikely that Trump could break the 50 percent barrier of first term approval on a national level. Why does he remain so unpopular? For one thing, he’s an incoherent prevaricator. Narcissism is the fountain of youth for compulsive liars, and Trump guzzles from it as if it were a diet cola.

I predict that Trump will win the popular vote in a majority of the seven swing states. In doing so, I repeat my original prediction: he will lost the national popular vote for the third election in a row. More people in the United States detest, loathe, and despise him than admire him. Unfortunately, the election rules are set up so that if he wins for instance, the popular vote in Michigan or Pennsylvania by less than 15,000 votes, he wins all of that state’s electoral college votes. A win is a win in any given state, and such an outcome could give him an Electoral College victory for the second time in the past three national elections.

I am terrified that so many of my fellow citizens want a tyrannical bully for a leader. Trump will proclaim, of course, that losing the popular vote for the third election in a row gives him a mandate to generate radical chaos in the federal government’s policies. There are a number of outcomes that are not going to be popular with those who voted for him, and during the next four years I will remind them of their responsibility for making those disappointments possible.

I can only hope that California does not experience its long-expected calamity of an overwhelming earthquake, since Trump will be even more contemptuous and disdainful of this state’s needs than Bush was of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or Trump himself was of those in Puerto Rico after their natural disaster in his first term. As for myself, I have only a smidgen of hope that I will be spared the attention of his assiduous, boot-licking lackeys. I hear their giddy algorithms of retribution already at work, singing of a vitriolic fascism.

*****

If Biden had announced, halfway through his term, that he was indeed only a one-term president, things might have turned out differently. VP Harris has done as good a job in running a three-month campaign as anyone could ask for, but Biden’s performance in the first debate ultimatey weakened the case for voters to choose a Democrat in the 2024 election. The blame for Trump’s return to the White House primarily rests on Biden’s shoulders and history will judge him very harshly.

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Exene Cervenka and John Doe performing at the Beyond Baroque Gala

Los Angeles is still feeling the afterglow of the corporate success of its baseball team. News reports claimed that one hundred thousand people, more or less, converged on the streets of downtown Los Angeles for a raucous parade of baseball players and team officials. I was happy for the exuberant joyfulness of everyone who was there. In truth, it wouldn’t make much difference to New York City if the Yankees had won the World Series. After all, that team has won over two dozen World Series. Unlike the Dodgers, the Yankees didn’t lose a World Series to a team that cheated in order; nor did the Yankees have to forego a World Series victory parade four years ago because of the pandemic. This World Series triumph allowed a city to release long forestalled energy.

Of course, for some people it takes an event on the scale of the World Series to distract them from the oncoming debacle of the national election. For those who are more easily calmed, there are two events this weekend that you should know about: the 2024 LitLit gathering, and the Beyond Baroque gala. The former is free; the latter costs $200 a ticket.

beyondbaroque.org

https://givebutter.com/c/beyondgala

Below are links to the vendors of print culture that will be in residence at LitLit, which is sponsored by the Los Angeles Review of Books. If you can’t make it to THE PIT, then browse these cultural outlets for some fascinating and intriguing books!

https://9vtbackslash5.com

https://www.826la.org

https://www.altaonline.com

https://www.lapl.org/angelcitypress\

https://www.artbook.com

https://www.as-is-press.com

https://colourbloccreativ.com

https://www.ediblela.com

https://errant.press

HOME

https://hatandbeard.com

https://heavymannerslibrary.com

https://hessepresse.com/home.html

Home – Alt

https://www.cindyrehm.com/hexentexte

https://insert.press/pages/about-insert-blanc

https://www.inventorypress.com

Home

https://www.legacyunbound.org

https://www.magrabooks.com
DISPLACEMENTS – Bill Mohr
https://www.magrabooks.com/books/displacements
Displacements
$10.00
DISPLACEMENTS features two previously unpublished prose poems, as well as a monologue and a sermon. If the mutability of collage, as Alan Wald suggests, engenders the poetic logic of prose poems, Mohr’s comic permissiveness tethers their unfamiliar juxtapositions with puckish vivacity. The other pair of pieces strike a more contumacious note in the narrator’s refusal to reconcile himself to a specious fate. In each work the lift-off of each sentence pushes aside not only what has preceded it, but the recoil of what might yet happen.

https://nueoi.com

https://shop.paperchasepress.com/pages/about-us

https://parallevarmag.com/About

https://rarebirdlit.com/about-rare-bird/

https://www.smc.edu/sm-review/index.html

https://www.semiotexte.com

https://www.slantd.com/our-story

https://www.catranslation.org

https://www.catranslation.org

https://www.whatbookspress.com/poetry.html

https://www.wordsuncaged.org

Home – D

Home |

November Poetry Curator Carrie Etter

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Caliban Chronicles: Special Edition

http://calibanonline.com/newsletter/CC37.pdf

Two weeks from today will be the final day that anyone can cast a legal ballot in the nationwide elections for which voting has already started. Approximately 16,000,000 citizens who are enfranchised, or one out of ten of every likely voters, has already made irrevocable choices. As I predicted a couple weeks ago, I believe that Trump is going to win a buzzer-beater election in which less than a total of 10,000 votes distributed across three or four states will eke out his victory. In those “swing states” Jill Stein will probably receive a total of slightly more than 100,000 votes. I do not make this prediction with any pleasure. Rather, I tremble as I write these words because that will mean the FCA (Fascist Christian Association) has triumphed. This cluster of American citizens wants more than Trump in the White House, however. They want an Ayatollah with a Crucifix to be be in charge of all matters: religious, social, and cultural.

These fanatics are not nationalists. As Ava Kafman’s excellent article points out, what I have called the FCA objects to the conflation of their religious agenda with nationalism. Modifiers matter, and from the point of view of ulta-Christians, nationalism as the primary keyword denigrates the only “deep state” that deserves our loyalty: the Kingdom of God. This is the cause that Jill Stein is aiding and abetting.

Trump’s victory in the Electoral College will be due in large part to his appeal to the MAGA legions of the FCA, which were his bulwark in the past two national elections. In addition, Trump has understandably gained the support of many working-class voters whose economic well-being has been ravaged by inflation. Trump’s narrow but decisive victory will also be due to the intransigence of Jill Stein in a buzzer-beater election. I fear tor the worst, of course. Jill Stein justifies her self-aggrandizement because she thinks her ideals are worth the rest of us enduring Trump for another four years. I actually loathe her more than Trump, who could at least plead that he is incapable of controlling his narcissism. Stein is perfectly capable of doing the right thing; she just lacks the integrity to do it. Nadar and she have done more damage to this country that Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell combined.

A fellow poet-editor, Lawrence Smith, has posted an eloquent appeal to all voters to consider the consequences of voting for a candidate who offers nothing more than a fantasy high of self-indulgent self-righteousness. I hope you will read his statement and take it into account as you cast your vote. I posted the link to his special edition at the start of this blog entry.

If you want a woman who is also a person of color to be elected president for the first time in this nation’s history, then this is no time to be voting for a woman who has no chance of winning the election. In case you wonder if she might have even have a million to one chance of winning the election, just ask yourself if she receives secret service protection. Of course not! And I can safely say that she will be finish yet another campaign without receiving a single threat to her physical well-being. Just as Donald Trump will have “absolute immunity” in the White House, thanks to her efforts, she has “absolute immunity” on the campaign trail. I’m glad has it. That’s how the First Amendment should override anyone’s temptation to abuse the Second Amendment. I only wish that I did not lose sleep at night as I think about the internment camps that Trump and his heir apparent have planned for people like me, who support “the enemy within.” Perhaps Stein’s real goal is to hope that she will be exempt from sharing my fate.

************

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/magazine/texas-politics-billionaire-preachers.html

How Two Billionaire Preachers Remade Texas Politics
They control Republican politics in the state. Now they’re poised to take their theocratic agenda nationwide.

Oct. 2, 2024 Updated 8:41 a.m. ET
by Ava Kofman