Dystopia in Kentucky

 A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

More here.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #13

Prologue to the Adagios Quartet

One narrow world that might be anywhere; but, for you,
it's here and it's now, now. Palest full moon in the window,
muted blue-grey shadows, smoke coiling within
variegated scintillae of light.

Just lie there.

Don't move.

That's good. Nothing like a man who can follow
the figures of beauty, fathom the fingers, the splaying
of light. Your hands are beautiful, smooth
and worn, firm and supple, a hint of moisture
glancing off the wet plucked eye suspended in the balance,
in the frame, and yes, I'm calling your name, seeking, seeking, speaking
from experience, from what I know you crave; so, come,
here, now. I know what you need and you know how good
it can feel, giving yourself over to the abandoning emptying
and to keep breathing, hot, like that, on the back of my neck. Man . . .

Did a dame ever have it so good, so easy, a place to worship,
a temple in which to slide moist lips and eloquent tongue narrating
a wordless world turning upsy-turvy placing these jewels
ever so gently between teeth, and time, and breathe,
hallelujah, breathe, breathe, breathe. Wild and wondrous
before this fragility of need and it's heavenly to kneel,
desire flickering defiantly among stilled shiftings of forever,
lovely so opened, awake in my mouth. And, you know,

it's the rhythm,
it's the glide and sway, it's you moving with me and I with you
tasting the sweet explosions spectacularly cascading
across the moon drifting slowly
out of this poem, this frame, this time, air porous
with inevitability, menace and caress held at bay, thighs tangling
in strands of the futureless future guttering
among shafts of light and yes, that's it and that's all.

- Judith Fitzgerald gives an interesting assemblage of notes to her poem on her website.

The Pangrammatic News Continues!

Glum Schwartzkopf vex'd by NJ IQ

General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, Jr. found out on Wednesday morning that his knowledge of his home state was shabby to say the least.  When taking the online NJ IQ challenge, the retired General was amazed to discover that the most mall-per-capita city in the US was not indeed Hackensack as he thought.  This came as a major disappointment to him, though he soon recovered when he found something to be proud of, viz., that Ben Stiller was definitely NOT born in NJ.  Of course the military leader was quick to punt the criticism onto someone else when reporters began quizzing him about his failure.  

"You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself," he said with a glare.

Having been the top Army representative during the Gulf war, reporters asked him what he thought about the state of the current struggle.  After pausing thoughtfully, he quipped, "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion."

Tempestuous Procedures

Sometime around 1610, Shakespeare penned The Tempest, one of his most famous and interesting works.  Except he didn't really write it.  At least not the whole thing.  On his own.  I dislike as much as anyone bickering and arguing about whether Mr. Shaxpere or Sir Bacon, or whomever the hell else might be involved actually wrote one play, sonnet, line, or word, but evidence in The Tempest is overwhelming.  Yet this work remains, without the Author's explicit signature, one of the great literary masterpieces of all time.  The work, whether we like it or not, is a great work, with or without Shakespeare's involvement.  If it was completed by a court jester or a plebeian patch worker, or a bourgeois land-owner, our Marxist critics will have a bit of a time reading it, but they cannot deny its beauty (actually, the New World allusions, the dis-Utopian and power-play tendencies of the play make it quite a Marxist mayhem!).

I assume that I do not need to argue the point that The Tempest is a great work.  Nor should I need to argue that it stands apart from its author(s).  But consider this:

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

How can I logically read a Graham Greene or Vladimir Nabokov novel I know has been tampered with?  Do I want to read it?  I have become familiar with the authors based on the books I have read previously, and now it is quite difficult to overcome my desire to reject these posthumous offerings.

My reasons for not wanting to read these books are different than you may think.  It is not because I want to preserve an aura of health and holiness around the author's oeuvre.  I have come to terms with the fact that someone I have never heard of, who was chosen at random by Knopf's low-ranking no-name publisher, will finish Vlad's book.  Nor do I really care whether he or Twain or Kafka requested that their stuff be burned (they should have burned it themselves, a fact which reduces their intelligence in my mind) after death.  I don't want to read the books for the same reason I have never liked Michael Jordan--it's all a publicity stunt.

The Original of Laura, will cause more debate over its construction and publication than over its literary content.  That pisses me off.  The publisher is going to put the 138 index cards that the novel was penned on in perforated sheets so you can reconstruct the novel yourself.  WTF.  Lolita was written the same way.  Can you imagine putting Humbert Humbert's reflections on innocence after his final encounter with Lola?  Didn't think so.  This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

As Prospero says in the Epilogue to his play,

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I hope to God that the writings of average authors will stand above their stories and give good credit to the only name that will appear on the dust jacket (besides Alfred A. Knopf pub., or HarperCollins).  That they may say, "What strength I have's mine own."

Beard-Off Conclusion

The anticipation was overwhelming, I know.  Due to a massive influx of visitors (I think 3 people visited the site over the past month, and only one was my mother!), the poll was successfully decisive.  The best Literary Beard of all time is Henrik Ibsen!

The Humble and Defecatory Posture (and Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #12)

Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors.  The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him.  Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees.  Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious.  Luther's shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther's 16th century shoes, awaiting epiphany.  The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station johns, heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush.  Women's slippers, centurion's dusty sandals, dock-worker's hobnailed boots, Pope's slippers.  All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping.  Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched just past the firelight's circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Shittard
Squitard
Crackard
     Turdous.
Thy bung
Hath flung
Some dung
      on us.
Filthard
Cackard
Stinkard:
     St. Antonie's fire seize on
           thy toane,
If thy
Dirty
Dounby
     Thou do not wipe ere
            thou be gone.

Will you have any more of it?  Yes, yes (answered Grangousier.)  Then said Gargantua,

A ROUNDLAY
In shiting yesday I did know
The sesse I to my arse did owe:
The smell was such came from that slunk,
That I was with it all bestunk:
O had but then some brave Signor
Brought her to me I waited for,
       in shiting:
I would have cleft her watergap,
And joyn'd it close to my flip-flap,
Whilest she had with her fingers guarded
My foule Nackandrow, all bemerded
     in shiting.

Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais