Readings: Sam Shepard

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Among those contemporary artists whom I admire, Sam Shepard ranks high. Big-time playwright, big-time actor, participant in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review (1975), the guy seems to have done it all. Shepard has recently published a new collection of short (some of it very short) fiction, Day Out of Days. I paid cash for it.

In the excerpt I’m providing here, the central character has been trapped in his car by a blizzard in the environs of “Indianapolis” while driving aimlessly around the mid-West in apparent quest of things that may have existed, once, in the past. Or something like that .

At any rate, as he begins to panic, trying to drive in a white-out, his mind goes through some old memory files, of which the following excerpt is one.

[NOTE: The drawings suit the mood of the piece, as it struck me.]

These are some of the things that go sailing through my head as I strain forward to keep the car between the lines: Leaving the desert on a clear day. Boarding the Greyhound. Getting off in Times Square. Huge poster of a pop group from England with Three Stooges haircuts. Blood bank with a sign in the window offering five dollars a pint. Black whores with red hair. Chet Baker standing in a doorway on Avenue C. Tompkins Square Park, with its giant dripping American elms. Cabbage and barley soup. Hearing Polish for the first time. Old World women in bandanas and overcoats. Cubans playing chess. Rumors of acid and TCP. Crowds gathered around a black limo, listening to a radio report of Kennedy’s killing. Jungles burning with napalm. Caskets covered in American flags. Mules hauling Martin Luther King’s coffin. Stanley Turrentine carrying his ax in a paper sack.

I was in Ann Arbor, just turned 21, during the year he’s remembering by the end of this passage. I relocated to New York City, and saw some of these things first-hand, two or three short years later.

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Readings: more Sandra Agricola

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I think I’m in love. I’m not certain whether it’s what she says—the tough abundance of her revealed intelligence—or how she says it. Or, maybe, it’s the larger context—the vast world of her gift’s creation—the place in which her word-constructed visions are made manifest. Whatever it is that grasps me (the poet as I imagine her, gazing my way with bedroom eyes), I sit at her feet disarmed, enthralled. I have excerpted her at Rodak Riffs before; below I offer a few more passages that have had their way with me:

from “The Origin of Evening”

[…]

Ah Eve, the origin and cause of evening,
tonight you are forgiven for coming on too strong
and leaving all of us, both
the quick and the dead,
in bed alone.

[…]

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx …. Meanwhile,
God and the Devil are having their own problems.
One is bored and considers divorce,
the other is married to his job.

from “Body and Soul”

[…]

All my life I’ve tried to exchange this life
for another,
I’ve tried to inherit the Good Society—
fat lab growing old by the fire,
cypress wood and fieldstone,
Charles Dickens and lobster tails,
John Crowe Ransom with Grand Marnier.
But that’s beyond my time,
beyond my time.

from “Nocturnes: The Gift of Suicide”

[…]

Someone who once knew me said I didn’t have many friends
Because I didn’t know how to be a friend. I guess that’s right.
He's gone now, too. Maybe to prove his point, maybe coincidence.
[…]
I’m telling you all this not so you’ll go away feeling kind-hearted
and rush to the aid of some lonely bastard outside the grocery
store when his sack breaks and fifteen cans of Vienna sausage
go rolling across the parking lot. I’m telling you so you’ll understand,
when it happens to you, that time spent trying to remember
what you said or did, time spent improving your communication
skills and general attitude toward man is time wasted. Hamlet
said, ‘you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.”
What he meant was you will try to get at the bottom of a problem
by the killing the subject. The mystery, the problem, remains.
The best thing is to wait.

[...]

Ah, Sandy…I’m waiting. I’m waiting.
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R.I.P. - J. D. Salinger

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If there was one book that had the most influence on my love for literary fiction, back in my "formative years," it would have to have been The Catcher in the Rye.

J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn both gone on the same day.

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My, my... It's a perfect day for bananafish.

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R.I.P. - Howard Zinn

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There aren't very many Americans who have sold millions of copies of books containing the unvarnished truth. We have just lost one of those few.

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Rodak's Writings: A Poem

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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Autumn Leavings


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx My first-born child
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx has turned 21.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx After you’ve spanned it a few times,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 21 years goes by like (snap!).

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Ah, but then I must be
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx good as dead.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’m putting my papers in order,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx archiving the meantime.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’m hanging all my sketches,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx prior to the dying of the light.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’m putting my papers in order,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and this is one of them.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I’m putting my papers in order order,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and hope to have time left over

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx to righteously file
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx the shuffled leaves of my soul.

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Reflections: Some Free Advice

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Before People Magazine and reality television, children, just about all we had, by way of socially licit voyeurism and church sanctioned schadenfreude, was Abigail Van Buren: “Dear Abby.”

Distraught, confused Americans, trying so hard to be good, but needing a wise word, blown like a kiss from the palm of a helping hand, scribbled their angst on drugstore stationary and mailed it off to Abby, each tortured soul hoping against hope that Abby would post their shame and anxiety for syndication in her daily column: instant, though anonymous, celebrity (signed “Porked in Pittsburgh” or “Hosed in Harrisburg”); posterity’s stamp of authentic existence.

By way of example, Abby once famously advised a gum-snapping adolescent female—plagued by panty-drenching lust and agonizing over whether or not she should resort to “the Pill” and submit to her boyfriend’s frantically urgent probing— that she should hold the Pill between her knees; she should preserve all that heat for a husband-to-come.

Never mind that enterprising chicks from coast-to-coast immediately launched practical experiments proving that defloration would be quite possible although one’s knees were welded together; Abby’s sardonic meme, once launched, lived on and on.

Consider, for instance, these lines from Sandra Agricola’s poem, “Nocturnes: The Gift of Suicide” included in her 1988 collection, White Mercedes:

Xxxxx We rarely give in to beauty.
Xxxxx As if we held aspirin between our legs, saving ourselves
Xxxxx for that special Beauty.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx_______

Xxxxx Yet how quickly we spread our legs for grief.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx_______

And that, children, is the meaning of life.

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Rants: Where Did Our Love Go?

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Perplexed about the recent ruling of the Supremes? Well, don't be: this isn’t complicated. It’s a matter of the super-rich asserting their right to control the political system of the country which they firmly believe they are mandated, by virtue of the wealth they generate, to rule.
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Ayn Rand lays it all out in her writings, particularly the novel, Atlas Shrugged.
XDemocracy, which empowers “the mob,” is antithetical to the philosophy of the plutocrats.
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Leona Helmsley once succinctly exposed the mindset of the super-rich; when charged with tax evasion, she reportedly uttered the classic line: “Only the little people pay taxes.” Well, you and I are “the little people” and lest there be any confusion on the matter, the Supreme Court has made it official.
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Get used to it. It’s going to get much worse.
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