RAY BRADBURY

I posted this originally in 2010, and thought it appropiate to republish now in honor of  one of the great storytellers, the late Ray Bradbury.-tb

It was my good fortune to happen upon a Ray Bradbury panel at the 2009 ComicCon in San Diego,where the Master himself was taking and answering questions from a large, adoring crowd. It was , of course, a love fest for one the pioneers of fantasy and speculative fiction, an appreciation for a writer many of us have a lifetime's relationship with this imagination. For all his work in pre-Code horror comics, pulp fiction magazines and paperback books, considered for years to the be the Red Light District of Literature, his oeuvre is one those rare productions that have proven to be something everyone else, from critics to mainstream media, have had to catch up with. The callowest of lit-crit 101 pronouncements are applied here: does the  work have legs, and do you marvel at the style and techniques the writer used to move you along with the narrative . A good writer  is able to overcome a reader's objection to fantastic tales; the writer who's work remains current is the rare breed who's tales transcend the genre from which they originally sprang. So one learns how to get  adult" about those pulpy fantasies that gave you pleasure when you were a teen, someone still learning about the world through the stories one heard.You have to say that you did a fair and accurate summary of Bradbury's career and a fair estimation of his work. If you’re a good genre writer and you stick around long enough, you have a very good chance of having a host of recently minted book critics and biographers elevating you the higher ranks of Faulkner or Twain.

It's happened a dozen or so times , particularly in the mystery/crime arena with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. Sometimes the shoe actually fits, given that Chandler and Hammett were both innovators of form who had their lyric flights and coolly compressed melodramas informed by a tangible and subtle played romanticism.

Others have been less believable, as in the case of Jim Thompson, who is genuinely creepy and entertaining, but lacks music and wit, or James Ellroy, who mistakes intensity and encroaching unreadability as requirements of writerly worth. Elmore Leonard resists the temptation to let critics and upper echelon authors seduce him with praise and a general invitation to take his work more seriously; he is the kind of professional you most admire, someone who continues the work, writing one brilliantly middlebrow entertainment after another.Would that a few of our "serious" authors adopted the work ethic and wasted fewer pages and less of our time with their reputations.Some writers literally beg to be taken seriously; they implore us to read their novels deeply and let the philosophical conflicts resonate long and loudly.Has there been a John LeCarre novel that hasn't been compared to the world weary speculations of Graham Green's ambivalent attaches and minor couriers wrestling with the issue of Good versus Evil under a shadow of a silent Catholic God? Has there been a discussion among fans of James Lee Burke that didn't slip into a tangent about the American Southern tradition, with Faulkner's and Flannery O'Conner's names repeatedly dropped like greasy coins? It's not such a bad thing, though. LeCarre and Burke are fine writers and do manage to provide a complex settings where the moral battles take place in their work. Their presence in the high rankings needn't make anyone squeamish.

Stephen King, try as he might, will not remain on the top shelf no matter who places him there. He is the master of premise, one great and magnificent idea after another, but then he goes soft in the head and rushes through his novels with flights of illogical that even excusing them as part of a horror novel's delirious nature cannot excuse the slip shod execution. Bradbury? He is very good, sometimes even brilliant in all his amazing convolutions, and I think it would do everyone a great favor to not burden him with the weight of "literary importance". There are issues and morals and philosophies galore slithering through the paragraphs of his stories and novels, but Bradbury above all else is fun to read. I think it's enough that he be admired as craftsman with a slight touch of the poet. Bradbury, however sage we might wish him to be, never shed the basic rule of all professional writers go by; you need to be read by an audience that wants to be entertained.

Sea Gods

It's been an occasional pleasure of mine to collaborate with a visual artists, their vision, my poems interpreting that vision. An old friend, Jill Moon, created this sculpture for the city of Ocean Beach, California (with able assist from Matty Welch). This poem I devised when I viewed while in OB to absorb some good old fashioned community  counter culture vibes is my perhaps sad attempt to tell a tale that has less to do with Jill's sculpture than whats' been rattling around my empty can of an imagination. In any event, that piece inspired this piece. I hope you enjoy both.  SEA GODS The same old gods guard the parking lot by the sea, winds make the clouds over the horizon darken, the ocean seems to boil, ships no longer need sails or sextants to make their way around the globe, it is the day and night of the satellite, reading the ruins of the earths hard face, tankers full of oil, the promise of brown skies and asthma,  inch toward land, sea gods with tri-colored scepters rising from the foaming surf to part the waters, refineries on the coast line hum with  the making of canned fury, a promise of  more jobs in valleys choked with brown air, full of cars going to that parking lot by the sea, to visit the sea gods in crowns and fins and draped in a kelp that carries a memory of  fish that swim elsewhere now, or not at all.

God's nod

"The Buddha was silent  about the existence of God".

Likewise, God is also silent about the existence of God. Unfortuately, not everyone agrees; to have silence be a key to any metaphorical doors that might open up and reveal a metaphysical superstructure of even further quiet and calm is simply too much.Their God is a busy multitasker, making decisions, running the Universe and beyond. It's heresy. Interesting that's these people who make all the noise regarding his greatness and kindnessI am something of a terse Kierkegaardian: i arrive at something that feels like proof of His/Her existence when I stop wading through murky theological concepts and take an action with whatever reserves of faith that I have. An act of faith. Whatever the results happen to be are not so much God's  will for me as much as it is the next thing he wants me, all of us, in our own ways, to attend to. I  suspect that even God does not the  know the outcome of the actions we take. He is there, though, to offer to turn up the light in our search for an inspiration.  All we need do is ask . And be realistic enough that God will not answer us in ways resembling a bungled sign, a letter, phone call or email. The occasional hunch or inspiration, yes. Everything else  is too flashy.

Post-Literacy or Super-Literacy? | Quarterly Conversation

Post-Literacy or Super-Literacy? | Quarterly Conversation:

Daniel Pritchard does a fine overview of Douglas Glover's new tract," Attack of the Copula Spiders", an polemic that seems, judging from the examples cited in the review, seems to be the exhortations of yet another language-police blowhard . The basic premise is that although there are more of us buying books or book related products, that despite the fact that more books are being published and purchased in the the various media than ever before, the sheer volume of words between covers has made our sense of how to make a sentence work most effective has lost it's musculature. Our syntax has gotten flabby.

The short and  the expected of the book is that    he desires a return to when writers and critics cut to the quick and made a sentences connect like a sock in the jaw. For all the heat Glover tries to generate , though, there is a lack of even the lightest wisp of smoke. Most of us will be better writers, for sure, if we learned the basics and studied those writers who revealed techniques that created an expressive and most memorable style, but the simple fact is that most of us who are otherwise competent with words, construction of sentences and the compositional fundamentals that come with that are not very expressive or memorable in our lives as writers.

 Most of us are average, routinely fluid in the mechanics, but otherwise tone deaf to the fickle element of style, the quality that makes technique in something become artful, elegant, forceful. In short, I suspect Glover realizes the obvious point that quantity diminishes quality and wrote this grumbling tract so may hear himself grouse. 

TED BURKE, like it or not: The poor are patronized, Baseball gets punked

TED BURKE, like it or not: The poor are patronized, Baseball gets punked: Lucas Howell couldn't cram enough conditional observations into this over-alert lyric; the poet, seemingly a sympathetic lyric writer by na...

Dolly wants to kill you

"The Home" by Kathryn Levy. - Slate Magazine:

This poem attempts to tell its tale from within a nightmare in progress, the effect being that the verse here, with its rococo imagery and colliding associations between abuse, violence and gossip among dolls and a government's unjustified , illegal, irrational war of choice, is itself incoherent.  

For rhythm and sound and general imprecision , Kathryn Levy's poem resembles the worst traits of the otherwise redoubtable Joyce Carol Oates; this is the say that there is an overwhelming strain of professional victimhood, that those harmed in violent communities, whether doll or actual, or who suffer due to occupying armies, drone strikes, destruction of destruction of infra structure and the local economy, have in some sense volunteered for their pathetic stations, that the unstable social forces around them have conjured up a seductive, pervasive and persuasive rhetoric with art, news coverage, entertainment, class envy and saturation advertising that great sacrifices are required for the righteousness of our way of life to survive and to again flourish mightily as it is claimed it had in some hazily described Golden Age. 

I am not a fan of the poem--again, Levy's tone is neither rhythmic or smooth nor effectively jagged as, say, Robert Creely's "I Know a Man" turns out to be.  There is no entry way into this poem; while there is an attraction for works that do not announce their meanings,are opaque and obscure, one would usually prefer the works to have a style and and arrangement of contradictory elements that would create atmosphere, at least. One would expect a poem trying to suggest a set of ideas that it doesn't want to say outright to be suggestive.

 This would be a means with which the central themes of useless sacrifice and petty rationalization of torture to be connect with a larger pathology in the culture. I do like the presentation of dolls as something on which the nascent characterization of adult behavior by young children are projected upon, and I like the underdeveloped link with war and wanton, rationalized destruction; this is a world where metaphysical certainty, the argument that there is an immutable meaning to our visible world and events in them, are instead improvised, variations on a theme that is less melody than slippery rules in a children's game. The best we can do is read this and admire what seems to be the author's thinking and wonder how a better poem would have done with this insights.

Fuhgeddaboutit - Oy vey! - Salon.com

Fuhgeddaboutit - Oy vey! - Salon.com:

Chris Matthews, chief bullhorn at MSNBC, is a pundit who has his faults, but even at his worst moments serving up bombast and belligerence he remains a better man that Salon's video commentator Frank Conniff. Conniff is billed as a comedy writer. Fine. But beyond the fact that he appears to be a cheeseburger shy of a heart attack, he is remarkably unfunny, at least as far as his performance . Watch this video and determine if this guy, a paid professional, is actually any funnier than you and your buddies when you're on your second  twelve pack cracking wise during an interminable half time act during the Super Bowl.  His face seems wedged into the camera lense, stuck by way of cheese fries and fattened, sagging flesh. There is a reason comedy writers ought to remain in the conference room,  trolling porn sites and rubbing one out on an old copy of Vogue.