On being a poet in the world and on writing poetry in bars.
Weekend Reading – In Praise Of All The Saints
Midweek Staff Meeting – I Don’t Like Him Either
It’s true – it’s hard to like Cyclops.
You can deny workers raises and give that money to CEOs instead, but in Cali, that could cost you.
Fools! Children do not need to know poetry!
In case you had no idea what I did for a living, I worked on these two organizing campaigns.
Paper is still the best (for in depth comprehension, anyway).
It Sucks That Amazon Bought Comixology
I like Comixology. And I read comic books. Three to be precise (Aquaman, Action Comics, and Batman, to be precise). If you’re not familiar with Comixology, the are basically a great platform for reading comic books on a tablet or computer (but especially on tablet).
When I first went back to comics, I used Comixology to catch up on the first half dozen issues of what DC Comics has called the ‘New 52,’ essentially, a reboot of its universe, before buying new copies at the comic book store or book store, as they came out.
Even better, I went back and read some famous story arcs from back in the day (actually, not that far back; mostly from the 80s and 90s): X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Infinity Gauntlet, Civil War, and the first couple story arcs of Alan Moore’s time writing for Swamp Thing, to name a few (to name a few more, that story arc where Wolverine goes to Japan, which I still love).
But I won’t buy anything from them now that they are part of the Amazon evil empire. And it’ll probably mean that I’ll buy a lot fewer comic books. Especially since they’ve already started their evil empire thing, but closing up the eco-system and making it impossible to make in-app purchases (which is a fancy way of saying the ability, while reading a comic on my iPad Comixology app, to simply press a button and purchase the next issue after I’ve finished the previous issue).
For example, I was super excited when Marvel rebooted Moon Knight. I used to seek out his comics as a child and it seemed like a great opportunity to see a new take on him that would not require catching up on five years of back story. But the first issue sold out quickly and my local comic book stores haven’t been able to restock it. Before, I might have gotten it on Comixology and then bought the later issues at the comic book store. Ain’t gonna happen now.
Probably for the best. If I were only thirty-eight, it would be different, but I’m about to turn forty and I think that reading three monthly comic book titles is enough.
Addendum: Since writing the above, I bought a (traditional) copy of Moon Knight #1. It’s pretty cool. That is all.
Jeremiad, Or, Steve Jobs was A Shill For Consumerism
I bought George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man at the Lantern, thinking that it was by G.E. Moore. Not so. But this Moore is a lively, if inconsistent writer. At something over a quarter of the way through, after Moore has abandoned painting for lack of talent and determined to take up poetry, he writes about Mallarmé.
Moore had been educating himself in French poetry, starting with Victor Hugo and working his way up to contemporary French poets (contemporary, in this case, meaning the 1870s) in a process of (somewhat) calculated autodidacticism.
He writes about ‘Mallarmé’s Tuesday evening, a few friends sitting round the hearth, the lamp on the table.’
I kept reading for another half dozen sentences before pulling up short and going back to that sentence and finally comprehending that he had been attending weekly literary salons at the home of Stéphane Mallarmé. My mind was blown by the reality of what I have missed by being born too late.
And yes, it is different now. It’s worse.
Our cultural heroes and leaders are not writers and poets and dramatists, nor essayists and philosophers, but libertarian technophiles who see the latest app as part of an inexorable process that magically culminates in the alleviation of suffering or hunger or some other global ill. The whole shebang is a self deluded shell games, like the South Park underwear gnomes, they convinced that they have embarked on the first step of a messianic journey that leads inexorably, inexplicably – magically! – to some greater end.
At the same time, we have not yet completely thrown off our adulation of pirating financiers nor the revelation of the fast descent into madness, pain, and suicide of Lord only knows how many former college and NFL players much diminished our fawning love athletes playing dangerous games of brute force.
I’m not claiming that Baudelaire’s debaucheries are to be emulated nor Shelley’s private (as opposed to public) morals modeled, but for fuck’s sake, can we stop calling Steve Jobs a great man? He was a megalomaniacal marketer. For fuck’s sake, people! I have an iPhone, but the building of a fief-like cult of consumption within a consumer addled culture has not broadened our minds, lifted our souls, nor made the world an appreciably better place. Indeed, it can be argued that Steve Jobs most lasting legacy will the impact of a spate of Chinese suicides on the families they left behind.
So… for fuck’s sake, people, shape up!
I know it’s hard, because it’s all so seductive. I used to work for a couple of tech forward firms, including a semi-early adopter of using emails to ‘activate’ activists and, later, a company that managed text messages for nonprofits and political campaigns. I wrote texts and copy for smartphone apps and social media and told their clients how these new strategies that I developed, these new technologies that I was selling would change everything! The people who signed my checks, they absolutely believed it. And, in some small, meaningless, tactical way, they were right, but in a larger, more important way, they were dead wrong and all the world’s souls will ultimately suffer for not seeing it.
Weekend Reading – A Bad Way To View Writing
Black Boy (By Richard Wright)
Believe it or not, just last month was the first time that I had read Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. It was one of the books that I read in Thailand. It has been sitting in my e-reader (a statement with some metaphysical implications; what/where is a book when it is in, no the general ether, but the ether of a particular device?)
It’s not the sort of thing that’s put on the high school curriculum, at least not in a state, like Florida, where the powers that be have very little interest in the history (nor the future) of African-Americans.
Good lord is it a wonderful, beautiful, brutal read. The first section, covering his life in the South in the early twentieth century. Yikes. Anyway who complains about cultures of violence or the use of the n-word within the black community needs to read this book (incidentally, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing some great stuff on this very topic lately; look it up). He writes about poor black kids and the bravado driven by this constant, crushing fear of white people. An uncle killed by whites for the crime of having been financially success and his aunt and mother afraid the leave the house or even ask for the body (much less assume ownership of the business or property). White employers trying to goad the author into literally killing another black adolescent. It’s just terrible to read and more terrible for knowing that it all happened – and that far worse happened, only without a future Pulitzer Prizer winner to chronicle them.
The second part covers his joining and departing the Communist Party. He leaves without disavowing the believe in class struggle and, really, without relinquishing his own, personal communism (small ‘c’), only relinquishing membership in a top down organization.
It reminded me of when I read the piece that Arthur Koestler (now there’s a fellow that no one reads anymore! and I stand by my prediction that, soon enough, Christopher Hitchens, for all his wonderful prose-fying, will find his work placed in the same basket) contributed to the collection The God That Failed. No one is praising Stalinism or suggesting that it was anything but a blight, but, despite the disavowals, not even a staunch anti-communist like Koestler can avoid capturing some of the romance of being a leftist and radical and a communist in the twenties and thirties. The idealism of it all. Wright doesn’t try to walk back the great thrills of that time in his life, like Koestler does, and the work is better for it. It reminds me of a review of a recent Family Guy episode where Peter takes up smoking. Yes, smoking is bad for you. Awful. The world would be a better place if no one smoked anymore. But it’s cool. It just is. Humphrey Bogart looked cooler smoking. Audry Hepburn looked sexier lighting her cigarette. And let’s not even talk about the way Catherine Deneuve could send shiver up the spines of any human (male or female, gay or straight) with the slightest fraction of sex drive just by blowing a puff of smoke from a gauloise. I feel that being a communist in the early thirties was like that.
the coffee philosopher 