1 RUE IN ELEGY I spent my precocious youth reading detailed warnings about the era we are now all…
3Pomes from IF BERLIN
“Fate rarely opts for the strictly comic or the simply tragic when the tragicomic will do.”-Pastor Prime . 3Pomes from…
A READER WRITES
Sent: Friday, December 7, 2018 5:47 PM Subject: M & N Steven! Much great writing on your blog over these…
EXCERPTS FROM “THE VELVETEEN GULAG” [a memoir]: CHAPTER 2: IMAGINED
1- I can’t remember if it was Kurt’s idea. Maybe it was mine. Ideas come out of the air at that…
EXCERPTS FROM “THE VELVETEEN GULAG” [a memoir]: CHAPTER 27: GIANTS
The Convoluted Real Life Romantic Adventures of a Bohemian Serf Abroad and at “Home” During Fewer Than Two Months of…
2 SAUL and WALLY TALES (two short stories)
Few people are aware of the fact that Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison were chums. This unlikely twosome inhabited…
THE GRADUATE (a short story from DIFFICULT TEXTS)
Miriam with the curly blonde hair that when you looked closer was full of white and gray. Her point being…
THE GENDARMES OF MOROCCO: a Short Story
Local hysterical-realist writer Donald DeLillo’s self-parodying novel, Cosmopolis, begins with an epigraph from a Zbigniew Herbert poem: ―a rat…
THREE OBLOMOVIAN OBLOQUIES
1-JUNGIAN (Borgesian?) EPITAPH In the summer of 2002, two women I’d known in Berlin, in the early ’90s,…
FATHERSTORY: THE INVERSIONS
Without Life’s bizarre and often ironic twists and turns and dips and loops, it wouldn’t be Life… it would be…
JUST SAYIN’ : A FOOTNOTE or “A TOUCH OF IRONY”
So imagine a Central American nation (with a history of political assassinations) in which the former head of the Secret…
ONE OF THE CHIEF ARCHITECTS OF OUR LONG-RUNNING PLANETARY NIGHTMARE FINALLY DIES, ESCAPES JUSTICE BY SLIPPING INSENSATE INTO ETERNAL VOID, LIKE HIS MANY VICTIMS, INSTEAD OF HELL: BIZARRE ENCOMIA POUR IN FROM FURTHEST REACHES OF HEALTHY-SENSE-OF-IRONY-DEPLETED EMPIRE
PFFFFFFT….
KUDOS, by RACHEL CUSK: a Book Review
Too often, when I fall for the trick of being seduced into buying a new book (of literary fiction), I…
MAJESTIC IMPERIAL PANOPLY: DIVERS and SUNDRY LINKS/JAPES/GRUMBLES
1 IMPERIAL HEADLINES 2017-2018 *Pregnant 19-year-old accused of raping boy, 14 *If a nuclear bomb is dropped on your…
THURSDAY NIGHT BY THE LIBRARY
Nanette Glitz referred to the mop-filled warren in the basement containing the janitor’s closet as “the physical plant,” a…
WE CAN ONLY EMBELLISH: a radio-play script
A: that was good. B: thanks. A: good is such an understatement sometimes. B: thanks. A: good is vicious…
21 UNFORGIVABLE ONE-LINERS
Let’s keep wrapping our heads around the spectacle of McCarthyite Lefties until it feels right! Let’s empower Women…
MR. GOOLD: a short story
The neon artist, shit, I heard he’d been in a psychedelic band in the late ’60s when nothing was…
THE MEH-TRICKS: ART IS ALWAYS UNDER ATTACK
I had an old friend who was a self-proclaimed “Communist” (who spent more than one Xmas in his banker-sister’s Central…
SUPPORT OUR… UH…. OUR… UH….
DR. RED: a short story
I see someone has promptly raised a hand. This is very good. Because I want to ask a question.…
LIVES of the POET
1. PREAMBLE A man approaches a microphone mounted on a canting stand in the beam of an unspectacular spotlight…
DANGEROUS CRYPTO-MEGA HITS OF THE OTHER WORLD
1966 1966 1969 1972 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1982 1983 1983 1993 1994 1996…
LET THE WALLS COME TWOMBLING DOWN
When I was the object of desire of a mover/shaker in the Art World, she observed to me, one afternoon,…
How the CENTURY of the CHILD became the most CHILDISH CENTURY
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:…
THOUGHT PROCESS
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is…
4SNAPPY POMES of the ULTRAMODERN
target boss Death has no real say in the deal like the check out churl in a corporate co-op…
WHITMAN, HEFNER, PLATH, DELILLO, GHOST MOTORS and CERN (et al)
1METAPHORPHYSICS, METAMORPHYSICALLY: Another Round of TEDDY vs SYL Reading and writing are the only Arts I know of…
RADIANCE: A NOVEL (the first 6 chapters)
the human condition is just the beginning 1THAD This text is based entirely on a mixture of direct observation,…
IMPURITANICAL ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG
ONE of my paintings, of one of My Lovers (acrylic on canvas, c, 3’x 2′) from when I was a…
HELENS of TROY: a Short Story/ an Attack on Nationalist Sports and Athletes/ a Confession
Berlin’s normally rainy early summer has produced a drought, blowing a gritty breeze that powders the sweat before it beads.…
A Philosophical Lesson in Comparative Reading and Writing (and the corollary mechanics of same) for my friend Jeff Wheelwright, the Last of the WASPs
About two months ago, I read a silly article and commented on it, as I often do. The article was…
totally naked with wild dogs: an allegory
Barry lectures: One out of every hundred people, or perhaps one out of every two hundred, harbors the seed of…
THREE THINKY THINGY-BOBS
1THE CAMPFIRE GENE; THE CAVEMAN in the JACKET PHOTO Roughly ten years ago I was up late (as any writer…
4 BERLIN POMES
sick in berlin getting sick in berlin its own black romance like love in paris a fling strangers too…
PERVERSE CONCEITS of the SO-CALLED NORM
Normative Content Farm The Millions is at it again, reassuring its pajamas-wearing audience that they are still The Norm and…
SARAH and the BODHISATTVAS
I went to school with snarky stoners and rich Foreign students (mostly Iranians) and lots of entitled shits. I always…
THE IMPERIALIST RADIKAL T-SHIRT CONCEPT GIVE-AWAY of the MONTH KLUB
SOUNDTRACK:
SURREALISM and its UNWITTING MISSIONARIES
I came late to Sex or it came late to me. In 1968 I had already been a Beatles fan…
THIS INCREDIBLE SEX COMEDY, a (completed) NOVEL: AN(other) EXCERPT
As the breadth, length, depth, mass and attitudinal range of the Commercially Available Novel all shrink toward the nugatory…
FURTHER EXCERPTS from KOOTCHIE TOWERS, A Novel: Chapters 5 & 6
It is 1974 and Benji Schamansky is a sideburned, aftershave-splashed, college prof with a bestselling paperback, THE PHYSICS of LIT,…
COLLECTED APHORISMS and OBSERVATIONS of PASTOR PRIME [continually updated]: A NOTEBOOK
1. “Anger with your father IS your father.” 2. “It is notoriously difficult to convince people living in a modern police state…
THE REAL JIMMY DAVIS (a short story)
A Lit trend I’ve noticed, since writing this story in 2009, is that using an unreliable narrator, in a short…
MUSTER of TRIVIUMS: a reflection on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine in Two Parts
It’s hard to believe that this piece on Nick Baker’s The Mezzanine is almost ten years old. I was asked…
THE ELEPHANT EYE MYSTERIES (an allegorical horror story)
Wednesday night they went and saw an arty Italian horror movie at the TLA and after the lights went…
GRAYSCALE
This life is inconceivably beautiful. It is a life of the mind. It is always late summer, the blacks…
Top 5 Patricides of Midville, Illinois (a short story from DIFFICULT TEXTS)
[by request from a reader: one of the hairier postmodish texts] Top 5 Patricides of Midville, Illinois …
ERYN; EDWINA (a short story from DIFFICULT TEXTS)
[Among my topics, as a Writer, are subtler manifestations of Racism and Sexism… but I always felt it was more…
SENEGAL: a Short Story by Guest Writer JEFF WHEELWRIGHT
[Editor’s Note: removed August 14th, and reinstated August 17th, at Jeff Wheelwright’s request] Senegal By Jeff Wheelwright Chapter One…
BEDTIME
FILM CLIP: THE TREACHEROUS COCK Nighty night, kiddies…
SUPRA-NATIONAL INSENSITIVE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION DAY
The third annual SNICAD (Supra-National Insensitive Cultural Appropriation Day) went off with barely a glitch, yesterday, in an undisclosed location,…
KIKI ’68
Before I met my Wife, and before I learned to earn some money in the German music business, I…
Excerpt from THE BOMB COLLECTOR (a novel)
In early 2008 I finished a 41,000-word novel (c. 200 pages?) called The Bomb Collector. I wrote it with the…
AND ANOTHER THING…
THE RACE/ GENDER/ BODY/ BELIEF SYSTEM VICTIMOLOGICAL STANLEY CUP What nobody really talks about is the stiffly vicious…
COMACOSM: A VERY LONG and STRANGE SHORT STORY
When you have the sweet disease (compulsive writing) you will write things and put them away and later…
