local trees

remembering poet Paul Hannigan

PEOPLE, BE GOOD

was Ruskin’s first sermon,
Carlyle preached silence
In forty volumes.

Libraries creek and groan,
The beds where monsters
Are bred. This is the
Bela Bartok Memorial Shopping Center

And this is a whole tongue
Brown and green from the
Dirt and grass it licked and ate.

And here’s a sheep’s head.
Baa. And there, the Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart Barbershop.

People, be good.
Just you try it.
How would you begin?

thanks Don Share

from Ben Friedlander--Gloucester Postcards - a set on Flickr

Pop Sensation examines old paperbacks...

Bookshelf Porn

documentary about Django Reinhardt

LP covers by Andy Warhol

review of Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch

With a pulley-system someone dropped planks through an apartment window (no sound). With a tiny broom a custodian steered hissing water along the curb. Somebody else wrapped a deli display-case in blue plastic. Someone wiped the demonstration slicer he had whirring on the sidewalk. I wondered why everything in restaurant-supply stores looks dusty. A white truck double-turning (does that make sense?) stripped the fender off an old black woman's sedan. Pedestrians winced...

"An American Type": The end of Henry Roth

The fluorescents shone on the Hearst printing presses within the great square plate-glass windows of the Examiner Building, flooding the corner. He paused, the anguish within him seeking to cleave to anything,
whether purposive, fatuous, anything. Slowly, the great, black machines behind the plate-glass window started moving, reeling out a Sunday comic sheet ... Accelerating, they flew past, swifter still and swifter, until gone were Jiggs and Maggie, lost in a multihued ribbon of paper and a high-pitched hum. And banality was gone, triviality was gone, gone the strip's silly postures and problems. All had become a freshet of blended color, diving downward and leaping upward in strict angle, and again, as if the artist's palette had become a cataract...