William S. Burroughs used to say (via Brion Gysin) that writing was fifty years behind painting.
I’ve been testing that.
A half century ago, Pop Art framed the visual media environment.
Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup I” portfolio of silkscreens was printed in 1968.
Fifty years later, editor John Trefry selects an abridged version of my “Campbell’s Soup I” for Burning House Press.
Suicide is tricky. For the individual, it promises an absolute end to a certain kind of temporal pain, sure — but then, just as quickly, it transfers that pain onto others. And according to its algebra, the multipliers can be huge.
In the absence of Mr. Cobain there’s a little game I’ve played, The Kurt Cobain Game. I wrote about it for Hobart today: “Kurt Cobain Doesn’t Know Much Of Anything.”
New poem, “Midsummer Threnody,” in the latest Hawk & Whippoorwill.
This is, more correctly, a very old poem — written a decade ago, submitted nine years ago, moments before H&W went on long-term hiatus.
The hiatus is over. And so is my old approach to poetry. Free verse is tolerable, and can even be occasionally good, if you look at it as not poetry but prose — lazy prose.
It’s the solstice, and I know that genres are shifting their bearing.
I saw Twitter from nearly the beginning — and cynically ignored it.* In the beginning, I may have had good reasons. At the time, I was completely offline, amassing millions of words in manuscript.
Eventually I got on @michaelstutz, but retained my ambivalence.
Something has recently changed all that — a sure, subtle change in the air, that you can feel, that means this is a time for being and creating online and sharing ideas. And the way Twitter’s evolved in recent years, especially with longer character counts and the addition of threads, it brings new & exciting possibilities for writing. Original Twitter, or “Old Twitter,” is almost entirely a long boring stream of ‘status updates.’ Not anymore. There’s no doubt that the whole thing’s suddenly compelling.
And now it took me no time at all to get blocked by my favorite story-threading Internet kook — who crossed the line of deceny by doxxing innocents as part of one of his rants.
* Well, not entirely true. I’ve run a stable of characters, as an experiment in online fiction, since the beginning.
Treasure Island, Florida and its environs is one of the best hotbeds of mid-century modern architecture in America—right on the Gulf of Mexico, about a mile from Jack Kerouac’s last home, was an example of every major architectural style and trend from America’s high point.
In an effort to bring awareness to what they had, years ago I got Treasure Island on the front page of The New York Times. They didn’t get it then, even as the national spotlight was thrown upon them.
I’ve been making some trips down there to document what’s left, and I’ve become happily surprised by something else: there’s new interest and hope in historic preservation. Now that mid-century modern is so hot, this might be a very good year for the city.
