Article: 825 of alt.etext Path: news.cic.net!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!redstone.interpath.net!mercury.interpath.net!not-for-mail From: ctporter@mercury.interpath.net (Chris Porter) Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,alt.zines,alt.etext Subject: (news)letter 1:25 Date: 19 Sep 1994 07:46:30 -0400 Organization: Interpath -- Public Access UNIX for North Carolina Lines: 423 Message-ID: <35jtmm$g1s@mercury.interpath.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: mercury.interpath.net Xref: news.cic.net rec.arts.books:109084 alt.zines:5761 alt.etext:825 (news)letter "Say the thing with which you labor." Thoreau from the porter micro.press Volume 1, Number 25 September 15, 1994 _________________________________________________________________ Please send suggestions and submissions. To get on the mailing list, send your name and address to: CTPorter 317 S. Tate St., Apt. 3, Greensboro, NC 27403 or e-mail ctporter@mercury.interpath.net Your input is appreciated. Alan Shapiro is a poet who teaches here at UNC-Greensboro, and though I've never had him as a professor, those I know who have think the world of him. I found three poems of his in my rambles, two in the current issue of TriQuarterly (Spring/Summer 1994) and one in the newest Threepenny Review (Fall 1994). I'll never forget the reading he gave when he first came to campus -- he read this poem in which the protagonist, a child, is sexually abused (I think I remember this right). It was a very haunting poem and I couldn't help but wonder if the poet was the protagonist. Too often the audience assumes that the written "I" is one and the same with the writer. The writer can never quite escape his life but that doesn't mean that every little incident the writer describes has a basis in that writer's personal history. So there the audience sat, after he finished reading, wondering just who this guy is that's been invited to teach here. Surely a great poet, but ... what about the "baggage"? His latest poems still have that quality, they make the reader contemplate just what is this "wholeness" that many people take for granted in others. "Manufacturing" (TriQ) uses a family-owned business as a metaphor for the rite of passage from adolescent to mature man. We sometimes think that men can be stamped out in molds, fashioned from the cloth of kids according to instructions that the assembly worker can follow. Boys are taught that there are two types of men -- those that screw and those that are screwed, and heaven forbid if you are one of those pansies who are among the ranks of the screwed (I soften Shapiro's words here -- he uses profanity very effectively). A worker passes out in the bathroom and this presents an image -- the protagonist's father, the real man, pulling up the pants of the drunk who will be fired, a reverse striptease blurring the lines of the macho. Another image is the model in the Cutty Sark billboard that overlooks the plant: a sailing captain who can drink, who has control at all times. The "Captain" is contrasted with the men who might not be able to control that drinking, or who might dress a man in compassion, even though the drunk's a loser. And yet, all of us are trying to be the "real" men that our culture demands of us, suffering from those hidden twists of life, "hammered down so far inside me / it's almost too securely there to feel" (72). The other two poems deal with broken relationships, "Lethe" and "Ex-Wife: Infatuation" (3Penny). In each a simple touch or the tone of a voice can bring back such deep feelings, remembrances of the better times during which the protagonist might have been more naive but in his growth lies the breakup. The woman calls the protagonist to the garden for a look at a swarm of bees. Her touch on his shoulder reminds him of better times, but it's not to last: Time, unresting time, beautiful and perverse, how suddenly it could lift us clear of our own shade to a luminous attention it just as suddenly extinguished, as the bees moved on Even the structure of the poetry reinforces the depths the words instill: "Manufacturing" is built of eight twelve-line stanzas, solid blocks in a whole; "Ex-Wife: Infatuation" is a triptych of three stanzas, first of seven, then of six, then of five lines, from the good memory, to why the relationship can't last, finally to the reality of how life between them now is. I love poetry like this -- the more you study it the more it offers you. The more I read of Alan Shapiro the more I appreciate his poetic craft. Lit Punks I've been enjoying the fifth issue of The Baffler, edited by Thomas Frank and Keith White. The theme for this issue, and maybe the crux of the whole periodical, is "Alternative to What?" wherein they look at what is considered alternative in the mainstream media, then show why that subject is itself mainstream, an invention of corporations and advertisers. Tom Frank's "The Teen Rebel as Model Consumer: The Hip World of Sassy" (95-101) takes a look at the magazine for young ladies and shows that the purpose of the magazine is to create a new generation of shoppers who will overhaul their expensive wardrobe every two months. Steve Albini's "The Problem with Music" (31-38) examines what it means to sign a contract with a record label: he shows that musicians work very hard for little money. It's a compelling argument if you believe the figures that he lists, but I don't. The record company, for example, is shown to make the lion's share of the money (710,000 hypothetical dollars), while the band members get $4,031.25 each. Sure there are probably cases where such disparities exist, but I doubt if that's as common as the author leads the reader to believe. There's a little bit of everything in this issue, always well written: comics, reviews, poetry, and short stories to go along with the essays. My favorite piece is a hilarious call to arms from a fed up "sandwich artist" from the Subway chain who takes the "corporate pigs" to task. He only worked there because they make commercials featuring their employees, and they didn't use him in one. How's he supposed to get to Hollywood now? Instead of fame, I have to show up at this rinky-dink store every night, abused and alienated by the go-nowhere nature of your outfit, and serve overpriced sandwiches to worthless clods who don't want to cook for themselves and who look at me like they OWN me -- just because I'm making their next meal. (55) I wish I could introduce this writer to the guy in the last issue who complained of the young minimum wage workers. But there's a Subway just down the street and I know I've looked at the workers with disdain when they've been too chatty -- "just give me the sandwich, you with the earring in your lip." This is a fun little magazine, though I have to be careful of it. It's like the social criticisms of Noam Chomsky -- they make the reader think about the real forces behind our society, but too heavy a dose and you get positively paranoid. And what can you really do about it in the end? Blah I tried to read T. Coraghessan Boyle's The Road to Wellville and got bogged down in it. The main reason I picked it up, beside having enjoyed Boyle in the past, was the packaging of the book. It deals with Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, he of the cereal fortune, and the book came within a box all done up as if it were a cereal. Very creative marketing. But I put the book down after 200 pages because I was bored. The first Boyle novel I read, and the only one I've completed, was Budding Prospects (see issue number 16), and I think that spoiled me for Boyle - he hasn't been as funny since, in my opinion. Before deciding to leave off, I kept thinking of Ken Kesey's Sailor Song: I considered putting that away after 150 pages but at least the boring part was inspired -- boring or not you knew something was bound to happen. With Wellville I felt this bland tug of the narrative: I wanted to finish it so I could say I finished it. Something is going to happen, sure, but I couldn't find any interest in what that something might be. I didn't like the movie Little Buddha, either. This is the story of three modern day kids in whom the light of a reincarnated Buddhist master is found, so they all go to this certain sect's main monastery to see who is the real Little Buddha. Interspersed within this narrative is the story of the real Buddha, Siddhartha, played by Keanu Reeves. If you know the story from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, for example, that half of the movie drags. It's too florid, it moves really slow, and whoever cast Reeves in that role ought to have their credentials checked -- it just didn't work. The modern half of the story kept me interested, and I wish there had been more of it and less of Keanu as mystic. Oft him anhaga are gebideth ... Tobias Wolff's essay in The Threepenny Review, "Civilian" (14-17) details his experiences on coming home from the Vietnam War. With wallet full from his discharge, he wanders around the country searching for the situation in which he can write. Living with his father is no answer -- he falls into the macho army boy routine with seedy ex-Army buddies, too much drinking and picking fights with the peaceniks. His ex-fiance offers life on a farm with hard, honest work and the writing comes along. They quickly realize, though, why they broke up in the first place. He travels then to England, works hard to enter Oxford, succeeds, and there has an epiphany while translating an Old English Gospel version of the Sermon on the Mount. He would, he decided, "do well to build my house upon a rock, whatever that meant" (17). What does it mean? When you've been building on sand, "great will be the fall," and I think it's easier to recognize when we've built on sand than when we've found a rock. One part of that rock for Wolff is the education, the tradition of Oxford. He'd been having such a tough time translating, having to look up all the words, until suddenly he needed no glossary with this passage -- the words "spoke themselves." How inspiring that is when a foreign language comes alive like that. Running with the Wolves There are some sticky issues to be found in Bill Buford's Among the Thugs: The Experience, and the Seduction, of Crowd Violence. The author, an American living in Britain, decides to write a book about the violence that became so much a part of English football during the 1980s. At first the author puts a lot of humor in this book, as he attempts to get to know some of the hooligans. They're funny in an illicit way -- you shouldn't encourage them but since they'll do it anyway why not appreciate them? After a couple of chapters, though, there are no more funny parts: he draws us into the violence and when it isn't funny anymore, we still don't leave. Buford becomes a welcome part of the hooligans as he gets deeper and deeper into his research. But where does the research end and the endorsement and creation of the violence begin? This is not to say that the author trashed buildings and people -- instead Among the Thugs is more an attempt at analyzing the hows and whys of crowd behavior, and he does this well. There is some value to the book; it's not just exploiting violence. But at the end, when England travels to Sardinia and a riot is "created" because everyone there expects a riot, it becomes absurd -- there are more photographers and reporters there than English supporters. But still the supporters riot, trashing the place before getting stomped by the Italian police. The irony is that while glad that the rioters finally receive their due, that particular crowd wasn't made up of many of the "regulars" Buford had been studying. They were a created mob of hangers-on and hooligan wannabees caught up in the "glamor" of a riot. Photography So much of my time lately, while not on the Internet, has been spent looking at photography books. A collection titled Weegee's New York was kind of droll -- he makes art out of the seedy scenes of life, crime scenes, arrests, the night life. Not to say he's not a great artist, but a huge collection of his work becomes monotonous. One book I've been enjoying is a fine collection of photographs in Peter Hamilton's retrospective of Robert Doisneau. Doisneau is a French photographer who combines the glossy Life or Vogue fashion look with an eye for the street that often adds drama to his work. One I particularly liked was this, "Cissy in the Playground." On the Net James Parry, as "Kibo," is a legend on the Internet, even boasting a couple of newsgroups in his honor, including "alt.religion.kibology." Word has it that in the early days of the Internet he would search through all of the posts to the Usenet looking for any mention of "Kibo." Finding one, he would answer it with some kind of riposte (certainly he'll have fun with this introduction). The legend grew -- he never missed a "Kibo," but now, alas, things are just too crowded, too many "Kibo" fans to satisfy, so now mentioning a "Kibo" doesn't guarantee a response. He is still a prolific poster of messages and it's fun to come across his posts when he will answer many of the "Kibo" mentions en masse: he is a master of the non sequitur. But he's also a fine thinker and here, as an example, is a recent posting of Kibo's "Elements in my Grand Unified Theory Of Everything": 1.) Gravity does not move in straight lines. It only appears so to an untrained eye. Gravity actually moves in cursive handwriting. 2.) The Earth has a second moon, The Noom, which is never visible because it is always rotating faster than the Earth so that we never see it because it's always beyond the horizon. 3.) Cats and dogs are single atoms. Cats are positive, dogs are negative, and fleas are the binding force. 4.) If you go several hours without blinking you'll die when your brain dries up and at the autopsy it'll look like a little raisin unless they put it in water immediately. (Matt McIrvin helped with this one.) 5.) The heaviest known substance is soap suds, because enough of that foam could crush anything! 6.) It's only possible to eat four Morton pot pies in one lifetime. (Tom Dignan proved this experimentally. I wish him a speedy recovery.) 7.) JFK was killed to hide the conspiracy to change the musical "A" to 448 cycles per second, a move designed to fool people into thinking that "different" notes sound different. Get real! They all sound the same to me, and someday you too will realize the truth. 8.) The galaxy was formed by a very slow process akin to claymation. 9.) On any multiple-choice test, more answers will be "C" than "A" because of the Coriolis Force, except in the Eastern Hemisphere. 10.) "SeaQuest DSV" will be cancelled after its second season. 11.) Anyone who disagrees with my theory is a crackpot! What brilliance! No wonder he has so many worshippers! (* Comments *) Some responses from last week's Quote, featuring the denigration of day care and the workers. Corey Nelson wrote Daycare workers aren't bad for the families of the 90's; they are there to help and earn a living themselves, like everyone else. I'm not a daycare worker myself, but if these people are so concerned that daycare is so evil, I wonder what they will do when they need some help sometime. I'm actually a 32-year-old mom who shut down her 8-year-old software testing company last Dec. that was older than my kids. Paul hit kindergarten and I realized that I was missing my kid's childhood. That can't be replaced and I thank "deity of your choice" that I have a husband with a good paying programming job so that I had that opportunity to indulge in "stay home" parenting for a while. With money, jobs, and peer pressure what it is today makes this a rare privilege. We can't afford this forever and I have to look for a job by the end of the year and I know that daycare is a tool necessary for my success at earning a paycheck for the family. I can only hope that people can appreciate those others that take the great responsibility to care for all those kids all day and make daycare a positive experience, instead of an adversarial one. Then JD Fulton: I found my daughter's day-care teachers -- and that's what they were, teachers, despite the low pay and (in general) lack of formal training -- to be hard working, dedicated women with infinite patience and a gift for teaching. They deserved three times what they were paid. In fact, they deserved combat pay. A friend once described a day-care center as a giant Petri dish, and he was right. At least one child in a center is sick each day...and the teachers are exposed to a lifetime of infectious agents in just months. I asked one teacher about it, and she acknowledged that, yes, she had been sick every other week for the first few months. But then her immunity had built up, and she was fine. As I said, the teachers deserve combat pay...and as a society, we should reexamine the status we accord such jobs. He then took me to task for saying that the Internet and America On-Line (AOL) "are two different mentalities": Humm, I wish you hadn't used that nasty word "mentality." Most AOL users pay their own bills; old-time net users are rather like overgrown teen-agers with free access to the NSF/university pantry. Heck, at work I have a KRF trading screen. Anyone who doesn't have a trading terminal is an out-of-the-loop, clueless rube from Dullsville with a sucker mentality who deserves to be abused, right? Anyway, I use AOL as an access point because it is by far the least expensive option where I live. That raises the issue of a two-tiered info society. Those with fat wallets or cyberjobs will flourish, those without suffer.... Point well made: I really don't like AOL though it has more to do with the corporate mentality behind it than the users who frequent it. And thanks to ¸sa S”derman-Houston for such a wonderful letter. She addresses several issues with a very interesting viewpoint I think many readers would enjoy. I'll get her permission and post some of the comments next issue. Thanks ¸sa! Man as Political Animal I was sad to see Doug Wilder drop out of the VA Senate race, an election that it appears Oliver North will win. While channel- surfing last week I came across a debate between all four of the Senate candidates (Chuck Robb and Marshall Coleman joined North and Wilder), and it was the two independent candidates, Wilder and Coleman, that impressed me. North was the stereotypical flag- waving, "not a politician" candidate that will always do well; Robb was ramrod straight, always speaking to North while ignoring the other two, and like North he didn't answer one question without a lot of obfuscation and stuttering. Wilder, on the other hand, was passionate about his stands and he came off very determined, less as a politician than as someone who cared; Coleman lacked Wilder's passion but made great points -- he argued very well. It was a very good debate, much more substantive -- despite Robb and North -- than I would have expected from a Senate race. Meanwhile Marion Barry has won his party's nomination in the race for the Mayor of Washington, DC. This is the same person who was busted out of office after being videotaped smoking crack four years ago. One reporter, analyzing Barry's win, suggested that it was just that crack conviction and the term in prison that probably helped Barry: he won with the support of inner-city voters who could look past that as just a mistake to overcome. I agree that people can get past their mistakes, but here's a guy who's abused the mayoral office just recently, and they want to send him right back there. Seems he should prove himself at a lower political level first. And about Haiti: I will not say a word about our intended "police action" there. I'm tired of the way things work on the political front so I thought I'd give someone else a chance -- please write about the US and Haiti for the next issue so I can spare my readers my own brand of cynicism on that subject. Otherwise it won't be addressed, so write, somebody ... Quote of the Week In his article "Moneyball" in the current issue of Harper's magazine (37-46), David Guterson describes the effect of the corporate takeover of televised sports on the behavior of his sons: My boys are rendered spellbound -- literally -- by the pastiche of improbably acrobatic slam dunks performed for the purpose of selling Nikes or Reeboks, and will frantically call for silence in the room so as to better concentrate on what they're witnessing. These advertisements are, to their way of thinking, every bit as important as the game itself, and the subject of much conversation among them. They can recite an ad's script in its entirety and relate a play-by-play account of its narrative content and progress. (40-41) I can't complain about that -- I used to memorize baseball statistics when I was a kid. And truth be told, how many of us watch the Super Bowl just to see the new commercials? Thanks to Bob Porter for the photograph, "Pool at Kitts, KY."