... as for the following blog, what can I say, perhaps an apology for my nod to Finnegan, but what the hell, “A man's errors are his portals of discovery.” – James Joyce.

 

2 February 1882, sprowled future of his fates yawled, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, becaught the fornicreators John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray. Elderest of ten progeny; though two sibships swerved absent from life, bowed by typhoid, James by a commodius viscous of recirculation back past, found his chance out of Rathgar and Clane o’ County Kildare. Re-sur, inventilated, as Stephen Hero violer d'amores, fr'over tracted rails, passen hub rearrived as a Young Dubliner, there to truduce a shining star and body! O’ Fate fanespanned most high heaven, the skysign of soft destiny to the lashstroung side of Nora Barnacle, re-nee Molly Bloom. Thus the unfacts, he did possess, too imprecisely, yes, a few retaletolds to idendifine the individuone, his sly slopperish matter of history. But within time, the facts chase towards the east in quest, past the scraggy isthmus to Europe Minor Himalayousness to his penisolate war in the heights of topsawyer's rocks, Zürich, where the Hero writ the poemsies, writ Ulysses. Arms nixed with larms dangling, appalling Killykill toll, a toll. The camibalistics fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner), clashes cease and none so soon, never too soon the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown. Soon Joyce’s secular phoenish and arc flight settled in the centre-ville de Paris, la Ville-Lumière. Here nouvel wordsies flocked to the papyrush, swiftease on the leftlet banks drawn to the age. Oftwhile balbulous eyes, poorly in life since a youth spent in Baile Átha Cliath, attempts goodly cheirurgery neuflike times, but success – a minutias worth, so addle liddle a pawn, suchess.

 

Somethemores Vita animas wakes, comes to Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus and Malachi Buck Mulligan, Finnegan, Paddy Dignam and so many more dreamydeary pholks, brings pocketbarely of farthingscads trinkets by way of green clapboard Shakespeare & Cie. Came Exiles, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Pomes Penyeach, Finnegans Wake, breathed and bred in the century loinings of wordscrafts, the broadest way immarginable.

 

Then, onset of the new nonanon camibalist, offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Joyce. Never a solid man, he spent retaled days in linens and in leaps of mind in alltitude and malltitude. Auld age not, but Stercoral perforation did, sent him on exodus alone. Joyce relapsed brought about by tragoady and indespite transfusions, slipslid into a cataleptic dreamsy. In grey grays, he lifted away at 2:15 AM on 13 January 1941, blackguardise the whitestone hurtleturtled out of heaven to resclaim his soul. As oaks of old now lie in peat, elms leap where ashes churn, he rests in Fluntern Cemetery within a rroarslieds of the Zürich Zoo. A skyerscape of the most eyeful entowerly was James Joyce. Whish! Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Again! Take. Mememormee! Till thousandsthee. The keys to. Given. A way a lone a last a loved a long the

“Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.”

 

At Christies Auction House today in New York, an 1827 first edition copy of an Edgar Allan Poe poetry collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was sold for $662,500 -- the most ever for a 19th century book of poetry. The 40-page collection, and Poe’s very first publication, was inspired by the work of British poet Lord Byron. Only a dozen copies are known to exist of the fifty initially pressed. Oddly enough Poe did not attach his name to Tamerlane; the author is only indicated as "A Bostonian." Also sold at auction was a two-page, hand written manuscript containing the first 8 stanzas (of 16 stanzas) of "For Annie" ("Thank Heaven: the crisis --- the danger is past....") from 1849, written just months before his death at age 40. The manuscript, which was written for a one of Poe's loves, Nancy L. Richmond, far exceeded the $50,000-$70,000 estimate, netting a mind blowing $830,500 at auction, breaking the 19th century literary manuscript record.

 

The book and manuscript, both somewhat worn and wrinkled, came from the private library of television producer William E. Self (he was the executive in charge of production for such classic shows as Batman, Lost in Space, The Green Hornet, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, and Land of the Giants). Both pieces were sold to anonymous bidders.

 

“As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester — and this is my last jest.”

This past week in Great Britain, in honor of their National Poetry Day, the BBC commissioned a poll to name Britain’s favorite poet. And oddly enough they chose the great American writer T.S. Eliot, best known for his landmark poems The Wasteland and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but moved to England in his mid twenties where eventually he became a British citizen.

 

According to the BBC, more than 18,000 people voted online. Eliot won by a narrow margin, just ahead of John Donne, the 16th and 17th Century metaphysical poet, with Benjamin Zephaniah coming in third. Zephaniah was the only living poet on the list. Born in 1958, he is a Rastafarian dub poet who last year was included in The Times' list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers. Coming in fourth was Wilfred Owen, the First World War poet who was killed in action at the Battle of the Sambre just a week before the war ended, and rounding out the Top Five was Philip Larkin, who was also renowned as a novelist and a jazz critic.

 

Many in academia’s hierarchy were a bit perturbed by the lack of rhyme or reason to the top ten finishers. No John Milton or W. H. Auden (maybe because he became an American citizen) or Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes or even this old guy named Shakespeare. Most of the great Romantic poets were also shut out: William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Carol Ann Duffy, the current Poet Laureate of Britain, didn’t make the top ten, nor did Rudyard Kipling, who back in 1995 was named Britain’s favorite poet.

 

The rest in the exclusively male top ten include William Blake, William Butler Yeats, John Betjeman, John Keats and Dylan Thomas.

 

According to those carrying out the BBC poll, for several months Wilfred Owen led in the voting, most likely reflecting the concerns over the rise of UK soldiers killed in Afghanistan this past summer. But very surprisingly, in the last few weeks, Eliot and The Wasteland pulled it out in the end.

 

While the results of the poll demonstrated a growing interest in contemporary poetry and that classic poetry still seems to have a strange hold on reader’s affections, the National Poetry Day event and Top Ten list comes on the heels of a survey conducted by the UK Literacy Association that found more than half of primary school teachers could name no more than two poets.

About the Awful

I was bored on the 9th of Octover 1940 when, I believe, the Nasties were still booming us led by Madalf Heatlump (Who had only one). Anyway, they didn't get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn't pass-much to my Aunties supplies. As a memebr of the most publified Beatles me and (P, G, and R's) records might seem funnier to some of you than this book, but as far as I'm conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I've ever ready.

God help and breed you all.

 
A Reason for Breathing

I pictured myself on a boat on a river with tangerine trees and nervous dysplasia. This was to be the final chapter in my life savings. I pulled the plug and boarded an Amtrak to nowhere. I had suffered insomnia all my life, but, like Isaac Newton, had put it down to apples. It was hereditary (so was my forehead). I wished to remain anonymous in a world of Philadelphians. I ticked myself off and put myself in my place, a two-bedroomed brownstone of ill repute. I was convinced I'd been here before. Call it what you will, I call it daft. Had I walked these same dusty springfields before? Or was I just a victim of circumnavigation? Yea, tho' I walk thru Rudy Valle, I will fear no Evel Knievel. Junk food made me silly; fast food slowed me down; I had to get off at the next stop. I alighted to the sound of a military bandit.

"Do you take this woman anywhere in particular?" the voice rang out. I panicked slowly and continued to exercise my discretion.

 
Interview

Question: How do you write your books?
Lennon: I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in me pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.
Question: Why do you kill people off in your books?
Lennon: That's a good way to end them. I suppose they were manifestations of hidden cruelties. They were very Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. I was very hung up then. I got rid of a lot of that. It was my version of what was happening then. It was just the usual criticisms, as some critic put it.
Question: What were you really trying to say in your book? Why don't people understand it?
Lennon: I understand it. If I wrote in normal spelling there would be no point. I'm not saying anything. There is no message.

 

Today is the centennial of John Fante’s birth. The author of Ask the Dust, Dago Red and Wait Until Spring, Bandini was born in Denver, Colorado, April 8th, 1909. But along with the likes of Raymond Chandler (born in Chicago, raised in England – his first novel, The Big Sleep, published the same year as Ask the Dust, 1939), Charles Bukowski (born in Andernach, Germany, raised in Baltimore) and James Ellroy (actually born in L.A., raised in El Monte), Fante helped create the literary vision of Los Angeles. John Fante just may be the quintessential L.A. writer, if not its literary patron saint.

 

Here are some snippets from his novels:

 

“I took the steps down Angel's Flight to Hill Street: a hundred and forty steps, with tight fists, frightened of no man, but scared of the Third Street Tunnel, scared to walk through it—claustrophobia. Scared of high places, too, and of blood, and of earthquakes; otherwise, quite fearless, excepting death, except the fear I'll scream in a crowd, except the fear of appendicitis, except the fear of heart trouble . . . Otherwise, quite fearless.”

 

"We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming."

 

"I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed."

 

"So fuck you, Los Angeles, fuck your palm trees, and your highassed women, and your fancy streets, for I am going home, back to Colorado, back to the best damned town in the USA -- Boulder, Colorado."

 

"It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me." 

 

"Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!”

 

“ ‘Arturo,' she said. 'Why do we fight all the time?'
I didn't know. I said something about temperaments, but she shook her head and crossed her knees, and a sense of her fine thighs being lifted lay heavily in my mind, thick suffocating sensation, warm lush desire to take them in my hands. Every move she made, the soft turn of her neck, the large breasts swelling under the smock, her fine hands upon the bed, the fingers spread out, these things disturbed me, a sweet painful heaviness dragging me into stupor. Then the sound of her voice, restrained, hinting of mockery, a voice that talked to my blood and bones.”

 

“When the last had been destroyed the pieces blanketed the surface of the water, and the water was invisible beneath. Sadly I stirred it up. The water was a blackish color of fading ink. It was finished. The show was over. I was glad I had made this bold step and put them away all at once. I congratulated myself for having the strength of purpose, such ability to see a job through to the end. In the face of sentimentality I had gone ruthlessly forward. I was a hero, and my deed was sneered at. I stood up and looked at them before I pulled the plug. Little pieces of departed love.”

 

“Come down out of the skies, you God, come on down and I'll hammer your face all over the city of Los Angeles, you miserable unpardonable prankster.”