Versus Silver Debuse

Ewokphobia

2010-10-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

The cruellest thing you can do to a man with a pathological fear of teddybears:

mailbox

2010-10-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

I hope this is real graffiti, not something staged by the photographer. Either way, it inexplicably made me piss myself laughing.

(No offence to anyone in Chinatown, of course. I'm sure it's not true.)

If you don't like what I'm saying, Good!

2010-09-05T04:22:00.000-07:00

All entertainment, be it poetry, dance, cinema, novels, pop music, storytelling or stand-up comedy, has a duty to challenge the audience. Even the escapist genres of "sci-fi" and "fantasy" should not take the easy route and pander to the reader's flabby prejudices and bigotries, but should assault their consumers by shoving these repugnant bigotries back in their faces like a regurgitated meal. They should hold up a distorting fairground mirror and show the audience a grossly exaggerated version of themselves that will make them shudder, even as it makes them laugh, and that will impede their enjoyment of the show by making them think.

And some viewers will come out of the show laughing and say, "I don't really look like that, so it means nothing. I have to change nothing in my life."

But others will walk out having been made to think. They will say to themselves, "I know that was a hideous exaggeration, and I'm not really like that, but it was only when I saw myself looking grotesquely distorted in that mirror that I noticed I am a bit flabby at the edges, so maybe I need to get myself in shape."

And still others will come out of the fairground shaking their heads and saying, "You know, even that outrageously stretched and unbelievable exaggeration of myself, which broke my suspension of disbelief because it was so shocking—well there are fat fucks out there who are even more morbidly obese than that. Maybe there is social problem that we must stop ignoring."

Let's not take this metaphor any further because fat is not a moral phenomenon and in extreme cases may be a disability (and the very concept is often an opportunity for misogyny and discrimination). No, the phenomena I'm really proposing we distort and exaggerate to the point of discomfort in our art are political and moral grotesquenesses like racism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, discrimination, ableism and normative triumphalism, social imperialism, moral inflexibility, prejudice and sexual repression.

Because however much we may laugh at the exaggerated representations of these evils in satirical art, we must recognise that there are trace elements of all of them in ourselves. We have all judged people because of the colour of their skin or the shape of their eyes. We have all seen news from a third-world country and thought, "If only they were more like us." We have all told (or been tempted to tell) a sick person to "pull themself together". We have all grumbled at the inconvenience of having to negotiate an access ramp when stairs would be easier. We have all seen somebody who acts or dresses outrageously being victimised and thought, "They're really bringing it on themselves."

And we have all made statements like those in the preceding paragraph, and thought ourselves clever and good and liberal for doing so, while ignoring the fact that some people have not done all of these things, because they are the victims in these cases. Shove your smug inclusiveness back in your face.

So, artists, when you present the archetypal villains of your piece as vicious Nazis, why not remind your audience that they picked on the Jehovah's Witness kid in high school? When your evil horde are bearded, be-turbaned devils enslaving their own women, don't forgive your readers who campaigned against women's right to choose their own reproductive destinies and control their own bodies. If your fantasy includes monsters who traumatize or devour children, don't let people dissociate that from the monster who sits on his privileged arse in Rome covering up and protecting those who despicably abuse children, to protect the good name of his organization. If your bad guys or the subjects of your lampoon hold ridiculous and moronic views about race or gender or science, make sure your viewers know that it's their and their neighbours' opinions on poverty and social education, healthcare and glass ceilings, natural evolution and anthropogenic climate change that you are mocking.

There is no excuse for laziness, for prejudice, for retrograde and reactionary thinking, for smugness. We're all guilty of these flaws sometimes, but as an artist it is your fucking job to overcome the weak and the obvious in your public work. If you can't rise to this, go shoot yourself in the shit-eating face and leave the stage to those of us who are not afraid to alienate our audience.

(For someone else's thoughts that helped inspire this rant, read British comic Stuart Lee's autobiography, How I Escaped my Certain Fate.)

Review: Blood on the Ground

2010-08-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

Jakob Cayne, Blood on the Ground. Autoautopsy Press, 2009. Pp. 488. CAN$28.99.

"This is gritty and disturbing crime novel with obvious hints of Calder, a bouquet of Welsh and some Palahniuk in the swallow. The hapless protagonist, unhappy in a life of crime, flees from the clutches of the gangster cartel to which he is indentured, only to find that beneath the streets of the unnamed Canadian city is a bizarre underground world of urban fantasy monsters darker than he had imagined, and possibly more dangerous than the one he has left behind. Both the crime and the dark fantasy pats of this novel are well-written and entertaining, with faced-paced fight and chase scenes, an engaging protagonist, terrifying but believable villains, and an inevitable but thrilling dénouement in the tunnels beneath a sewage treatment works. The mechanics of the underworld perhaps stretch credibility in places, and to be honest the story is a bit too long, but there is no denying this is an excellent read.

"But.

"Billed as a début novel by 'acclaimed critic, poet and anthologist' Cayne, this work must be read within the context of the author's oeuvre. Cayne's poetry (as any web-search through the review sites will confirm) is derivative and turgid, borrowing a romantic style and Eighteenth Century diction and yet labelling itself avant garde because of the controversial and political subject matters he likes to address. With this in mind, the ostensibly readable crime novel, mixing genres and literary influences to disguise the lack of deep content, is guilty of the same sins. However entertaining this single volume might be, this is no Stieg Larsson in the making, but rather a derivative and degenerate writer with little to recommend him."

(reproduced by permission of the author)

The music of pyuuuuuke

2010-02-15T23:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on Radio Lethbridge's Literature Hour show, imaginatively themed around "luuurve poetry" (I"m sorry, they really did say it that way), five minutes of airtime were dedicated to each of four Canadian writers, among them a certain plucky, amateur, deservedly obscure hack, Sylvia Barschatz, plugging her second book, The Music of Love.

Barschatz herself was blandly inoffensive and placid as always (the only amusing moment being her use of the expression "my editor" to describe what is in fact her husband), and unmemorably gave us a good indication of the quality of her book. The rather gushing junior DJ, however, spouted what must have been publisher's copy, and described the scribbler's latest efforts as "a bold and unconventional tour de force into the glorious heights and gut-wrenching lows of our favorite emotion", and the "startlingly original language-use" of a "darling of the poetic establishment."

Reviews of The Music of Love from more reputable sources tell a different story—this is neither a novel nor a book of poetry, but the worst of both genres: 600 pages (still only 2/3 the length of her previous outing) of turgid, ill-constructed, unattractively typeset prose that may borrow from blank-verse and stream-of-consciousness traditions but never approaches the poetic in style or quality. A protagonist as depressingly gray as the ghost girl of her début novel, a love story as convincing as a leprous horse in schoolgirl uniform, and a dénouement as staggeringly unoriginal as the title of the book itself.

The only thing bold or startling about this sordid little five minutes of fame was the audacity to claim Barschatz is a "writer".

Keep it up, Independent Radio. This is why we love you.

Emu Boy?

2009-11-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

So I met an Emo boy in the surgery this morning,
Skinny jeans like black tights
with skeletal hands on the hips
Anarchic Angel teeshirt, new, too clean,
Bottle-black sneakers with tongues hanging out thirstily,
and a crimped fringe down to his throat.

Who knows what was wrong with the Emo boy this morning.
Apart from the obvious, I mean.

Deciphering Reynolds

2009-09-19T03:59:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up an envelope of mixed ephemera and personal notes at the Bamff rare book fayre, which included a page in the hand of the legendary mid-20th Century poet Georges Reynolds. This is clearly his revision notes on a longer poem, obscured by his notoriously abbreviated style and some fire and water damage down the right hand margin. Can anybody help identify which poem is being revised here?

An interesting take on graffiti

2009-07-11T06:22:00.000-07:00

Some of us have always argued that graffiti is art not crime, but this exhibition in London, What is Crime? has an interesting take on graffiti in the context of political violence, among many other images suggesting that neglect and infringement of civil freedoms are the real obscenity in our world, not acts committed by petty criminals. (Anyone over that side of the water able to go see it and write us a review?)

As the above link to the exhibition includes the filepath "currentexhibition.htm" it probably won't remain true beyond the August end of this show, at which point you'll find it in the archive. A brief discourse on the graffiti image can be found at the King's news site (as students at the Center for Crime and Justice at that college co-organized the exhibition).

So what is the crime?

Wiscon panel titles

2009-05-24T04:59:00.000-07:00

Some lovely sounding panel titles according to the Twitter stream:

"bisexuality in sci fi"
Disability + BSG
subversive kids' books
"Resolving Time Travel Paradoxes"
Warrior women
What's In The Air
kick-ass moms
Verb Noir launch party
"Gadgets: Then, Now and When"
unspunky teen protags
NOT ANOTHER F*CKING RACE PANEL
portrayal of working class in SF
Dr Horrible Party
robots revolutionized by love

(I may have misinterpreted some of these... but it's more fun to crowd-source this stuff than look at the actual programme...)

Found on the inside wall of a locked cemetery this morning

2009-04-15T12:02:00.001-07:00

Animated Graffiti

2009-03-18T16:02:00.001-07:00

This has been doing the rounds for a while, but I just saw it again today and it has just the right combination of inventiveness, irreverence, grotesqueness, repugnance, and sheer Lovecraftian alienness to tickle my boxes. Enjoy!

Go give the artist some love: this shit is more poetic than a thousand jolly rhymers will ever achieve.

Wasteland

2008-12-08T15:12:00.000-08:00

This stinking cesspit of human filth
sucking the wealth of the country
into the Opulent Wasteland

Even rats living in their own shit
don't crowd together in so many millions
eating their young and puking blood

If you planted a giant white mushroom
in this garbage heap the Opulent Wasteland
it would be no loss to the world

No enslaved masses would mourn

I flee civilization heading west
leaving behind the Opulent Wasteland
the taste of ash in my mouth
the burning fuel the melting asphalt
unnoticed by the Cyborg the reactionary
I head into the fire

First published in Croydon Times, December 1994.

Crush you into the steps

2008-09-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

The message behind this red tank moving inexorably up the steps of a train station in Italy seems to be one of warning, a show of strength, a cry of rage, of anger, of fear, a blood-curdling yell of, "We shall crush you! Crush you into the steps! Crush your head! Splinter your bones across the public transit system."

Stand against the red tank at your peril. Never mistake this military machine for a benign force, or think it's on your side or under your control. Never leap into the road to welcome your new crimson overlords. Run. Run for your lives. We cannot be stopped.

Real and imagined disgust

2008-08-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

The New Scientist news service this week posted a story, 'Why real and imagined disgust have the same effect'. This story is based on an interesting article by Jabbi, Bastiaansen, & Keysers ('A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation, Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways', in PLoS ONE), which may have implications for the diagnosis and treatment of autism as well as behavioural studies of empathy. As you may recall, disgust and repugnance are topics that fascinate me (as they do most writers of disturbing literature). It disappoints me, therefore, that the authors of this study, looking for a passage of "disgusting" literature to test out on their experimental subjects, were unable to come up with anything better than this:

You turn around because someone is leaning on your shoulder, suddenly looking into the open mouth of a drunken beggar... you see his rotten teeth, surrounded by pustulant sores, while he suddenly releases the reeking content of his stomach all over you... You feel your stomach turn over as you suddenly feel the acidic taste of a clump of his vomit on your lips.

Next time call in a professional, gentlemen.

Spot the fallacies in this moronic review

2008-06-23T06:23:00.000-07:00

Taken from the Bamff Poesie Revue, May/June 2008. The reviewer: does not deign to give his name; gets the title of my book wrong; confesses ignorance twice in this text, and yet still presumes to judge; clearly has never read nor written good poetry in his life; unwittingly admits to peculiar perversion in his choice of erotic titillation.

Precisely the sort of review no self-respecting author would pay any attention to.

The Angel--final stanza

2008-06-10T12:57:00.000-07:00

And the angel, never flying, still is lying, still is lying
In a shallow layer of concrete just beneath my cellar floor;
And her lips have all the colour of a faded dying flower,
And her skin has the lovely palour of a snow-swept midnight shore;
And her wings from out that concrete that presses down against the floor
Shall fly upward--nevermore!

Importance of Repugnance

2008-05-26T12:01:00.000-07:00

Repugnance is such a sweet thing.

Some will argue that instinctive disgust or emotional discomfort are themselves moral absolutes, that the horror some of us feel at incest or sexual mutilation or grandmother surrogacy or live experimentation is a vital cue that these practices should be strictly illegal. The White House has suggested that repugnance is a sufficient reason for embrionic stem cell research to be banned. Even some who try to be reasonable argue that repugnance or children's instincts should be seen as good advice, a default position—not to be followed slavishly, but listened to nevertheless. I would argue that emotions such as repugnance, instincts such as horror, and prejudices such as disgust at others' sexual practices are the last things that should be used to drive ethics, law, or scientific decisions. On the contrary, our first reaction to the existence of an instinctive repugnance should be to question it, to ask whether there is any reason or rationale behind this gut-feeling, or whether it is, like most phobias, horrors, prejudices, and knee-jerk reactions, unrelated to any moral or reasonable judgement. Far from considering instinctive or childlike beliefs and feelings to be somehow pure, innocent, and closer to the divine, you should consider your fears and disgusts to be at best socially constructed or, even in the case of behaviours with a biological basis, as little more than decontextualized misfirings of evolved survival instincts. (Of course some things that are morally repugnant are also quite reasonably and rationally objectionable, but it is the latter that should be used as an argument against them, not the former.)

So this is obviously not why I am going to argue that repugnance is important. Is sweet.

Repugnance, phobia, prejudice, disgust, and common decency are some of the most powerful emotions available to the artist seeking to make an impression on his audience. Why else is the most disturbing and memorable moment in the otherwise laughable (and I suspect deliberately comedic) Exorcist the scene in which fourteen year-old Regan MacNeil masturbates brutally with a crucifix? By combining child sex with blasphemy, Friedkin more or less guarantees that he will offend pretty much everybody. The sado/masochistic torture and mutilation that recurs in the Hellraiser films similarly affect us as viewers on a visceral, gut-wrenching level (as does much of Barker's genius writing in the Books of Blood); the final dismemberment of Uncle Frank (left) is especially gross because he seems to enjoy it.

The head-in-butt scene in Society (right) shows again that sexual horror is the most horrific. The eating of real shit in the infamous internet meme Two Girls One Cup is more repulsive to most viewers than most violence, even the graphic rapes in Baise Moi. Presuably fearing that their second-rate knock-off film might not be horrifying enough in its own right, the makers of the Korean remake of Ring felt the need to have several of the doomed teenagers die of fright in flagrante delicto, and then throw in a completely gratuitous aborted foetus in the hospital scene. The first season of Lars von Trier's Riget ends with an adult male head emerging from a pregnant woman's vagina, hence capping anything else gross or creepy that happened in the show.

But it is not enough to tap into a common revulsion or fear; a horror artist also has to exercise a certain creativity and imagination, to confound expectations and do something unexpected and shocking with the common material. Two of the most common phobias in modern humans—spiders and snakes—have given rise to countless movies, most of which are neither clever nor at all scary. Certainly not disturbing in the way that good horror or science fiction can be. Piling on gross-outs in the form of spraying gore, vomit, shit, and other bodily fluids is also an easy, and cheap tactic for low-budget film-makers. Much better to use imagination. Don't try to shock me, unless you have the wit and the balls to surprise me as well. Whatever you might say about his writing, Lovecraft was a thousand times more shocking than any gore-porn schlock-jock horror writer you care to name; the idea that we are tiny and alone in a hostile universe that we don't dare try to understand is more shocking than the idea that some perverted ghost might try to cut up some fucking teenagers with agricultural machinery. Infinitely more.

Vampires and Femmes Fatales

2008-05-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

Behind the bush (photo (c) 2007, Chaoss)

J'espère que tu as obtenu ainsi un bon prix (photo (c) 2005, inevernu)

In administration (photo (c) 2007, Graffiti Land)

Irrashaimasen (photo (c) 2007, dimitridf)

She might bite you (photo (c) 2007, amayzun)

I might bite myself (photo (c) 2006, Franco Folini)

More Spamku

2008-04-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

Perfect proportions
allow your rod elongate
easily attained

Your effort
waiting for nomination
will be rewarded

Master in bed games
Find out new ways to give her
Real Kung Fu with this

Being able to
satisfy their desires
all over the world!

(with thanks to Mandy Hand and Lezzie Springer.)

Communion

2008-01-16T04:23:00.000-08:00

And then I shall strip naked and dance on the hillside
in a thunderstorm
until the police arrive and ask me
to desist.

With stone in my eye
and grit in my knuckles
a taste of blood in my mouth
I stagger home to you.

New Year Resolution

2008-01-03T15:04:00.000-08:00

What you write should be perfect, should be beautiful, and should be unadulterated by the hands of a filthy editor.
Only you can judge the quality of your own writing; a rejection letter is a sign of the poor taste of a jealous publisher.
Write and publish all you can, by any means necessary; the world will recognise genius when it sees it, and history will remember you.
Be merciless with those who question, compete with, or denigrate you. It is not your place to be charitable or a flatterer.
Be strong. Courage!

Hello Pussy!

2007-12-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

The Mainichi Daily News (via boingboinG) brings us news that Hello Kitty products specially designed for men are now going on sale. Well I'm so glad I don't have to wear that girlie tee-shirt any more. HK fans can officially be of both sexes (at once?).

Seriously though, this is the best news I've heard since this product was released!

Not about nature?

2007-10-31T23:31:00.000-07:00

Back in the mid- or late-'90s, a haiku of mine was published in the now defunct Gorge "journale of the literary and the untamed". As it is terminally out-of-print, I think it safe to reproduce the poem here.

Fear blazing my brain
night air chills my bones like rot
the city is dead

Writing in his vanity column recently, Brodersen cites this as an example of "incomplete compliance with the Haiku form" (sic), because it does not "contain a season word" and "a reference to the natural world". I leave the reader to deduce for herself if this poem does not intensely evoke both season and nature, have a well constructed kireji, and correctly counted onji, or if Brodersen is just wowing us with his jealous imbecility again.

In the words of the Old Man

2007-10-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

I never knew
all this time the number of eyes
that had feasted
on what I thought was my breakfast

I never knew
how it would hurt to see you as others see you
as others long for you
luscious as you were for me in the early years

I never knew
and you thought it would never harm
not yours this knife
that twists in my gasping side

I didn't know
until I came face to mournful face
at your graveside
with a congregation of smartly dressed old men

Norton who...?

2007-09-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

It seems that Norton has never heard of Debuse, or at least claims he has never read any modern poetry that combines speculative themes, experimental modes, and poetic creativity. Since a poem of his was once published alongside mine in the Speculative Haiku anthology of 1991 (and we met at the launch party where, if I remember correctly, he took me to task for sneering at the "champagne"), this can only be a dishonest and deliberate slight.

I have only to say that Norton's own poetry is only as speculative as wondering what might be on television tonight, only as experimental as drunkenly trying doggy-style for once, and only as poetic as the Kindergarten limerick performed by the educationally challenged child with drool down his tee-shirt. Needless to add, the column he writes for the Bamff Weekly Gazette is not going to win any awards from the Science Fiction Poetry Association any time soon. Savvy?

"To keep out barbs and blades..."

2007-09-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

'ɥɔnoʇ ʇsǝɹǝpuǝʇ ǝɥʇ uǝʌǝ s|ǝdǝɹ ʍou
ɹoɯɹɐɹǝqʎɔ ʎɯ ʇnq

'ǝɯ ||ǝs p|noɔ sʞɐǝɹɥdɥsǝ|ɟ ǝɥʇ sǝɔuǝɟǝp ʇsǝq ǝɥʇ
sǝ|ɔsnɯ ƃuıɥɔʇıʍʇ ɹoɟ ǝʎǝ uɐ
sǝxǝ|ɟǝɹ pǝɔuɐɥuǝ
p|ǝıɟ W3 ƃuıʇdnɹsıp-|ɐuƃıs ɟo o|ɐɥ ɐ
uıʞs ʎɯ ɹǝpun ɥsǝɯ ǝɹıʍ-ouɐN

Truth

2007-07-21T20:43:00.000-07:00

"?"

What is "truth"? Is yours the same as mine?

Ghost in the Shell: Innocence

2007-07-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

So I finally picked up this DVD last week, drove myself mad last night figuring out how to turn off the subtitles, and then watched probably the coolest film opening with a cyber-hooker being shot that I've ever seen. (And that's saying something... some of the imported cyborg snuff out there is shit hot!)

Apart from some confusion at the end concerning what they meant by "ghost" in the context of uploaded/downloaded minds (in the cyber-age data is copied not transferred) there is nothing to complain about in this film. Seriously. Gunfights, explosions, murderous hookers, a handsome hero with synthetic eyes, lush CGI clashing with anime characters, the whole bit. I am going to watch this again. Now.

My grandfather's grandfather

2007-07-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

My grandfather on Japan
I lived for three years
In a cage under the ground
Now I hate them all

My grandfather's grandfather on Africa
Returned from the dark
Telling of conquest and game
Silent 'bout the slaves

II Robot

2007-06-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

This is a beauty!

Over at Collider, Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica) says in an interview that he is working on a script to a sequel to the 2004 Will Smith film I, Robot.

Well the fact remains that if you're going to do sci-fi in Hollywood and you want to pesuade your producers that it's going to make enough money to warrant their spending several tens of millions on special effects so you don't have to make an unwatchable piece of crap like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, then you probably need to (a) hire a slick but soulless hack like Goldsman to rewrite your script; (b) cast a guaranteed buck- and fannie-magnet like Smith to play your dumbed-down lead role; (c) remove any hint of moral complexity from your plot and characters; (d) add some horribly old-fashioned morality tale saccharine to make everyone feel good about themselves for not having had to make a difficult decision; (e) go shoot yourself in the fucking head before you subject us poor defenseless citizens to your bullshit in the first place.

That's not poetry, that's force-feeding excrement to children. Now you can feed what you like to your kids, but don't label your excrement "soy protein" and try to feed it to everyone else's kids too.

On the other hand, if you've never read Asimov, you might be under the impression that there are some kind of cool sci-fi ideas in the first film. And hey, at least they didn't make the stupid version that Ellison wrote. That would have sucked and bombed.

Found verse

2007-04-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

Reconnoitre crystalligerous seaplane reassimilating Kurt
Don't let them ridicule you anymore!
Ebony jezebel wraps her sucking lips around
my late client with his wife and their only daughter were involved in a motor accident
Black hole of Kolkata is pierced by plastic mate
Hello! I am tired this afternoon.

Debuse abusé

2007-02-20T14:53:00.000-08:00

In a petty, whining editorial in this month's issue of the Contemporary Review of American Poetry Brodersen coins a new epithet "Debusean", which he defines in a footnote as:

given to predictable modes while inflating ones own originality

Now it is true that this is not a common adjective, but of the nineteen occurences of Debusean to be found in a popular search engine, the most common definition would seem to be:

Debusean: startlingly unpredictable, under-appreciated, critically incisive.

A less magnanimous scholar than I might be tempted to define an epithet Brodersenian at this point. But check your dictionaries... we already have a perfectly good word for cretin.

Cyborgpunk

2006-12-31T02:39:00.000-08:00

Oil-slick spectrum gleams on my
shimmering scalp
reflections ricochet from the
spinosaurus ridge
of silver filigreed silicon wafer that
stabilizes my senses

I pause long enough for a trillion flops
my eyes glowing
ultraviolet in the traumatic undercity dark
my tongue smelling
the fear of patrolmen whose silver link to home
is silent
my fingertips hearing the only bytes whispered by
my hijacked satellite

Think of you my love, taken
careless?
Or foolhardy in your ambitions again?
No poetry
in the minds or brains of the thugs holding you
who only care
that a criminal on their wanted list will now
never walk free again

Then I pounce
like
a patient but hungry
snake
breaking necks with my
brain
infiltration entirely
silent
nothing to keep me out of the
archive
unseen untraceable unremembered
gone

Erased your record

Found poetry

2006-09-16T17:24:00.000-07:00

Who says poetry is dead among the spraypainting classes?

There is a subtle playfulness in this art, an undercurrent of desperation, the anger of a young man (for surely the artist is male) disenfranchized by the culture to which he is contributing to the extent that shock is the last weapon left to him. Of course the furniture and food metaphors defy analysis, and the humour is blunt but effective. Someone give this boy a grant!

Anonymolocation

2006-08-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

I am not, I repeat not, really in Afghanistan.

Revenge

2006-04-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

This is it. My opponents believe they can impugn, incite, irradiate, ignore, and ignite me with no consequences. They have never been so wrong in their frequently-mistaken lives.

Barschatz calls my work "pedestrian" (sic) and "marathon" at the same time; she of the 900-page coming-of -age novel with neither birth nor adolescence in its pages. She of the ghosts that waste pages but never interact with the characters. She of the gray covers and fading print. Cayne compiles the definitive list of avant garde poets of 2005, and neglects mention Debuse even as an also-ran. Who ever read Cayne's poems outside of his own anthologies? Who ever still thinks that eighteenth-century diction is garde, much less avant? Brodersen calls me "unpublished" when I have delivered more books of poems to the world in the last ten years than he has written lines. Brodersen who considers Haiku "free form". Brodersen who considers found poetry as "without creativity or merit". Brodersen who failed the Mensa entrance exam the year we both sat. Who considers his wife's work "crucial to the development of our culture". Smith who reviews for Village Voice but has no experience of writing or rhyming beyond highschool. West who thinks the study of meter more appropriate use of a poet's time than the photographing of graffiti. Bradley who never leaves Toronto for fear that it may not be there when he returns.

From now on, I will be here to respond. It may not be pretty.