Quote(s) du Jour: Poetry Is...

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The poet sits before a blank piece of paper with a need to say many things in the small space of a poem. The world is huge, the poet is alone, and the poem is just a bit of language, a few scratchings of a pen surrounded by the silence of the night.

[...]

The task of poetry, perhaps, is to salvage a trace of the authentic from the wreckage of religious, philosophical, and political systems.

~ Charles Simic, "The Flute Player in the Pit"; The Unemployed Fotune-Teller
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Riffs: Quiz du Jour

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The Quiz:

What is the correlation between the following four years?

1950
1962
1965
1967

Clue: It migrated north from the Delta.
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Rodak's Writings: A Very Short Story

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This was my response to a "picture challenge" proposed this morning at my Facebook writers' group. The challenge being simply to write a piece inspired by the picture posted here:

Billi-Jo Tells a Joke



She finally decided on just the plain bra and white cotton panties. She wasn’t sure yet about the black heels. With the shoes, would it be too obvious that she was wearing an outfit identical to the one worn by Nooki Knightly in “Donkeys, Deirdre and Little Doggies”?

Billi-Jo pondered these things as she reached up to open shutters on the one window in her little room. The room she had been asked to leave. She could almost feel the dark eyes of Nooki, the star; Nooki the desired; Nooki the money pit, drilling through the ample flesh of her back from the poster on the wall above her single bed, setting the fine hairs on the back of her neck on fire. XXX. Well, she would be leaving the room, alright. But it wouldn’t be by the door. No.

She wasn’t at all sure that the shoes would stay on her feet, anyway. She could sort of picture them in her mind, sailing in slo-mo just behind her, as her big body—the one that never had sold—rolled and billowed like a plump, pink cloud against the backdrop of a broad, blue sky. She imagined the scene as shot from an angle where the building couldn’t be seen. There were always windows in these scenes, but Billi-Jo didn’t want that. She did not want to imagine the faces of strangers, their arms folded across their chests, their mouths like the black slashes of straight razors, watching her leaving the scene from their dark, disapproving windows.

Or should she say that the shoes would be sailing above her—like a pair of black carrion birds—crows—or whatchamacallit?—turkey buzzards. They had those back home in West Virginia. Almost heaven. Ha! As if. Ugly things, those buzzards. Sitting by the roadside, sticking their ugly, red heads right up inside of the road kill. The stink that lingered inside your car, for miles and miles afterwards.

Billi-Jo decided that she would definitely wear the shoes. The idea of being escorted to the Dance by a pair of big black buzzards appealed to her. It was a thing that would never occur to a shallow bitch like Nooki Knightly. All Nooki ever thought about was money. And Nooki.

Well, we would just see who made the bigger splash in the tabloids tonight! Splash! Ha! Stop it, Billi-Jo, she chuckled to herself. Just stop it! Yer killin’ me!
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R.I.P. - Ollie Matson

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Upon the Death of Ollie Matson

The heroes
of my boyhood
are dying
one-by-one.

Each day
seems to bring
a new obit
in the NY Times —
some sports star
of my youth
passed on.

Players are young
when they play –
that’s the nature
of the Game.

So I can estimate
my remaining days
by the average
player’s age

(...less about ten.)

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Reflections: Charming the Savage Breast

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EARTH(MOTHERS) TO BACHMANN & PALIN:

H/T: Darwin Catholic via Kyle Cupp

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Readings: A "MacGuffin" - What Is It?

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In a recent post, I noted that I was reading Stanley Elkin’s novel, The MacGuffin, and shared an excerpt from it, along with a few words of my own concerning pervasive fear, or paranoia. I’m still reading the book and have a bit more to say about it as I approach its final pages.

I have a fairly good vocabulary, including slang, but I was not familiar with the term “MacGuffin.” Curiosity about the word was one of the factors prompting me to pick up this particular Elkin novel when it caught my eye at a used book sale. On page 183 (of 283) of the novel, I have identified what I believe to be Elkins’ working premise of what a MacGuffin consists of, as examined in the mind of his protagonist, City Commissioner of Streets, Robert Druff. I will provide that quote below; but first I will share some of the fruits of my investigation of the term, undertken before starting to read the novel. Here is a short explanation of “MacGuffin” from the relevant Wikipedia article:

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.” The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is. In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, or a potential threat, or it may simply be something entirely unexplained.


This slightly more colorful and poetic explanation is provided further on in the same article:


Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh, that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!". So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

Elkin’s novel takes place within what seems to be one 24-hour period in the life of Druff: the day upon which (in his paranoia) he comes to believe that he “has a MacGuffin.” As indicated in the Wiki article, the MacGuffin comes to drive the plot:

Here it ain’t been but a day, he thought, since he’d first surmised the MacGuffin and just look where it had taken him. His first tentative suspicion confirmed, connected to his second tentative suspicion, that one to a third and that to a fourth and so on. By God, he might have been hooking a rug! Because everything was linked, everything. If he had a sidekick (just about all that was missing here) he would tell him so. Begin with an initial observation. Make an observation, would tell him, any observation, any observation at all. Like one guy leading another through a card trick. Everything inevitable and conjoined in the vast, limitless network of things, merged in the world’s absolute ecology. There was, it seemed, no such thing as a loose end. Not in this life, there wasn’t. The universal synergy. In the end, thought our City Commissioner of Streets, all roads led.

The message: all roads lead. It is the leading, not the destination, that governs a man’s fate. The fault is in our selves and in the stars: the distinction is moot. The life of Everyman is a work of fiction, the author of which is unknown and probably unknowable. (Or so Elkin—the author—would have it.)
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Rodak's Writings: Sparring With the Political Right

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I don't know what prompted me, but this morning I made a brief visit to a right-wing, online publication which several years back was among my daily web-surfing stops. This visit resulted in my sending off the following note to a writer whom I first met in that venue:


Hiya, D____:

Being in a puckish mood this a.m., I made one of my extremely rare visits to The Corner @NRO. I came across a post by J_____ in which he discussed the confusion caused by having to differentiate between two George Bushes (I can see how this would confuse many typical individuals of the conservative persuasion.) He also discusses the virtues of Ayn Rand. I was prompted to send J_____ the following note:

Dear J_____:

Not complicated: “Dubya” worked just fine.
xxx--Rob

p.s. I strongly feel that Atlas Shrugged should be required reading for the youth of America. It depicts, in dumbed-down terms, precisely the evil that is bringing Western civilization to its knees. The fact that “Shrugged” advocates, rather than warning against, this evil is a thing that needs to be flagged, of course, when putting the book into the hands of the young. But, with that caveat made clear, I would have all young people read the novel at high school age, before they fall prey to the Limbaughs, the Becks, the Hannitys, the O’Reillys and the rest of Evil’s somnambulant minions.
--Cheers!

Perhaps you, D_____, would like to lend your considerable prestige to my nascent campaign to make Miss Rand required reading in our nation's public schools? (It might be good to beta-test the thing in charter schools, where the danger of youth being irretrievably corrupted by irrational fear of a New World Caliphate delivered by Black Communist Choppers is undoubtedly the greatest.) Can I count on your support?

As always,
--R.
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