From Ralph Solonitz, of course…

(Ralph originally sent me this on 21 December.)

Roldo Bartimole writes (Note, Roldo sent me this piece on 18 December. I delayed publishing until today because of my most recent retreat.):

Geez, those Plain Dealer comments can really be tough.

They zeroed in on poor Brent Larkin for his praise of former school superintendent Barbara Byrd Bennett. Oh, I almost forgot. She wasn’t superintendent. She was the CEO here. Such pretension.

She’s now boss (CEO? Superintendent?) of the Chicago schools.

Larkin traveled there to add to her glory.

Larkin does treat her with the velvet gloves he reserves for fakes and phonies. He drags out BBB’s former assistant here and his former editorial page employee who typically backed BBB to praise her anew. No critics are heard, of course.

Critics? What critics? There are no critics.

He makes it seem as though Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel really had to coax BBB to take the job.

When Emanuel offered, writes Larkin, “She didn’t exactly Continue Reading »

From Ralph Solonitz, of course…

Note: Ralph originally sent me this art on 17 December, after I began my most recent retreat, and I am posting this, and one other visual commentary on the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary today. I am still working on my own full response, but in a sentence, I would say this: Preventing future murders such as these is a matter of mental health reform.

Good morning all,

I’ve taken a few weeks off from publishing here, but not from reading, thinking and writing, and one of my accomplishments during this time has been to read the correspondence of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as published in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield. As has long been my practice, I copied out passages that I found interesting or thought producing for my electronic chapbook.

Over at Powells I left this review of the book:

Good afternoon all,

I discovered Kurt Vonnegut when, I think in 7th or 8th grade, my father gave me a Dell paperback copy ($1.25) of “Player Piano;” “Mother Night,” “Breakfast of Champions” and “Slaughterhouse-Five’ quickly followed.

Vonnegut’s non-fiction works are also familiar to me and though I thought I understood a bit about the writer behind the stories, Wakefield’s collection of the Master’s letters have opened many windows for me. So much so, that I have added more than 20 extended passages from his letters to my electronic chapbook and now want to go back over the next year are re-read Vonnegut’s opus.

Much is made of Mark Twain as the greatest American writer, and while in the 20th century English departments champion Fitzgerald and Hemingway and a score of others, for my money, Vonnegut, for his clarity, honesty and heart, is second only to Twain.

I have never before read an entire volume of a writer’s correspondence. I now believe that has been a mistake. Vonnegut writes to his brother in 1995 (p. 361) that:

“Any work of art is one half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking to you. Does he or she have a reputation of seriousness, for sincerity…? So I dare suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind.”

Vonnegut was speaking about paintings, but I think his words must apply to writing as well and before today I would have disagreed with anyone suggesting that writing cannot stand alone. Now I am not sure and this is just one of the many thoughts from Vonnegut’s letters that have me thinking.

Do all you can to make today a good day,

Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write

As I considered how I might re-open Have Coffee Will Write for the new year, I decided that I wasn’t writing enough myself. That I was tossing interesting bits, for me, of dinner-time conversation on the table for a few good friends, but not hearing much said back. Vonnegut might have responded: “So it goes.”

My choice for a starting point is not directly from Vonnegut’s communications, but rather a commentary that Wakefield wrote as an introduction to the third section of the book: “The Sixties.” Here is what he wrote:

Had Slaughterhouse-Five been written and published in the 1950s, it would not have made the same impact. The timing of the novel’s publication was eerily right, for by 1969 many Americans had become critical of the war in Vietnam, not only because the Tet Offensive of 1968 illustrated how badly we were faring in the conflict but also because of the revelation of atrocities like the My Lai Massacre, the use of napalm against civilian populations and the saturation bombing of Cambodia and Laos that began in March of 1969 – the same month Slaughterhouse-Five was published. A novel based on the firebombing of Dresden during WWII would not have seemed relevant in the preceding decade as it did now; it would not have struck such a nerve.

The events in Vietnam and the protests against the draft, led by college students, increased the growing influence of the youth culture, who made Vonnegut their literary hero in questioning the accepted wisdom of the status quo. Kurt was as surprised as anyone and had never wanted to be a “spokesperson” of the young.

— Dan Wakefield’s introduction to “The Sixties” from his Kurt Vonnegut: Letters. p. 75

Writing is a matter of desire, practice and acquired skill. Publishing is a matter of luck. One of the realities that has kept me sane (and writing) over the years is that rejection letters may be the result of a flat tire or indigestion caused by “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato,” and are not necessarily the result of bad writing.

I think Wakefield’s observation here is spot on. Why didn’t Vonnegut write Slaughterhouse-Five in the ’40s when the memories of Dresden were fresh? Why did he need more than 20, but not 25 or 30, years to shape his narrative? Did he need distance? Did he need skill? Did he need time to process? Perhaps all of those or none of those.

Would Slaughterhouse-Five have been a success if published in 1974? In 1979? We can’t know. Perhaps other events would have created another clearly obvious convergence. Who knows?

This is important, however, for my own writing. I write. A lot. I’ve only finished, however, one novel, Cold Silence, completed in the mid-’90s. The book began with an idea for a murder scene in the ’70s, was typed at for a couple of years in the early ’90s and finally written in about 90 days.

I have been typing at my current project, Absent Son, for more than five years — I have hundreds of pages written — but have yet to produce a finished first draft. There is, I believe, a Vonnegutian crossroads approaching for my book and I mean to be ready when the bus rumbles through.

Writing is work. Publishing is luck. The latter, however, cannot happen without the former and, as always, the solution is butt in chair; write.

Do all you can to make today a good day,

Jeff

From Ralph Solonitz, of course…

Matt Taibbi writes:

If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

Depending upon travel times, I’ll either catch the 1230 or 1300 showing…

Thomas Frank writes:

There is a scene I always recall when I try to remember the exhilarating effect that Occupy Wall Street had on me when it was first getting going. I was on a subway train in Washington, D.C., reading an article about the protests in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It was three years after the Wall Street bailouts. It was two years after everyone I knew had given up hope in the creativity of Barack Obama. It was two months after the bankers’ friends in the Republican Party had pushed the country right to the brink of default in order to underscore their hallucinatory economic theories. Like everyone else, I had had enough.

Anyhow, the subway car was boarded by some perfectly dressed, perfectly polished corporate executive, clearly on the way back from some trade show, carrying a tote bag that bore some jaunty slogan about maximizing shareholder value or what a fine thing luxury is or how glorious it is to be a winner—the kind of sentiment that had been commonplace a short while before but that the American public had now turned bitterly against. The man was clearly uncomfortable with it on his person. And I considered the situation: Once upon a time I would have been embarrassed to hold a copy of this magazine on a crowded subway, but now it was people like him who would have to conceal what they did. Your service to the 1 percent would no longer be something you could boast about without feeling the contempt of your fellow Metro passengers.

A while later I happened to watch an online video of an Occupy panel discussion held at a bookstore in New York; at some point in the recording, a panelist objected to the way protesters had of saying they were “speaking for themselves” rather than acknowledging that they were part of a group. Another one of the panelists was moved to utter this riposte:

What I would note, is that people can only speak for themselves, that the self would be under erasure there, in that the self is then held into question, as any poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism would push you towards. . . . I would agree, an individualism that our society has definitely had inscribed upon it and continues to inscribe upon itself, “I can only speak for myself,” the “only” is operative there, and of course these spaces are being opened up . . .

My heart dropped like a broken elevator. As soon as I heard this long, desperate stream of pseudointellectual gibberish, I knew instantly that this thing was doomed.

This very kind of poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism bullshit pronouncement is the primary reason why, although I continue to support Occupy Cleveland and will still deliver meals to those occupying Public Square, I stopped going to meetings.

Carlinisms…*

Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?

From my dad, of course…

*I associate this kind of word play with the brilliant comedy of George Carlin…

Rule No. 14 – Eat Only Foods That Will Eventually Rot.

Rule No. 15 – Eat Foods Made From Ingredients That You Can Picture in Their Raw State or Growing in Nature.

Rule No. 16 – Go Food Shopping Every Week.

Rule No. 17 – Buy Your Snacks At The Farmers’ Market.

Rule No. 18 – Eat Closer To The Earth.

Rule No. 19 – Eat Only Foods That Have Been Cooked by Humans.

From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

From Ralph Solonitz, of course…

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.

…How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said No,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

(2007)

From The Hunger Moon, New And Selected Poems, 1980-2010 by Marge Piercy.

Lyrics…

Carlinisms…*

Why do you press harder on the buttons of a remote control when you know the batteries are dead?

From my dad, of course…

*I associate this kind of word play with the brilliant comedy of George Carlin…

From Ralph Solonitz, of course…

Mumia Abu-Jamal tells Chris Hedges:

When I first got out in the yard and I heard groups of men talking about how Sarah was going to marry Jim or how Frank had betrayed Susan, I thought, Damn, these cats all know each other and their families. That’s odd. But after a few minutes I realized they were talking about soap operas. Television in prison is the great pacifier. They love Basketball Wives because it is T and A with women of color. They know how many cars Jay-Z has. But they don’t know their own history. They don’t understand how they got here. They don’t know what is being done to them. I tell them they have to read and they say, ‘Man, I don’t do books.’ And that is just how the empire wants it. You can’t fight power if you don’t understand it. And you can’t understand it if you don’t experience it and then dissect it.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

[W]hat was most striking to me as I traced the recent history of this phenomenon is how explicit it has become. Obviously, those with money and power always enjoyed substantial advantages in the US justice system, but lip service was at least always paid to the core precept of the rule of law: that – regardless of power, position and prestige – all stand equal before the blindness of Lady Justice.

It really is the case that this principle is now not only routinely violated, as was always true, but explicitly repudiated, right out in the open. It is commonplace to hear US elites unblinkingly insisting that those who become sufficiently important and influential are – and should be – immunized from the system of criminal punishment to which everyone else is subjected.