thomas h. smith aka t. kilgore splake | one book

Poetry Dispatch No. 314 | February 25, 2010

ONE BOOK

by
thomas h. smith
aka
t. kilgore splake

in march of 1979 i was camping in michigan’s upper peninsula “pictured rocks lakeshore” area and warming myself over the coals from last night’s fire. nursing a heavy-duty hangover and drinking the first coffee of the morning i wrote my first poem in a green-covered 4”x6” notebook. suddenly this burned out college professor with a failed marriage and captive to demon rum ethers had become a poet.

i have spent much time wondering over what a poet is, as well as seriously doubting if i qualified to be a poet. in order to hide my real self, i borrowed the kurt vonnegut character kilgore trout and developed the pseudonym t. kilgore splake.

with this new role as a poet, i quickly began using my creative imagination to write more poems describing the great variety of different human behaviors. no longer was i tommy smith following what my mother, father, and society demanded of my life, but a new man in the process of reinventing my “self.”

arriving in the poetic arts late in my years, i tried to make up for the time lost to other writers. i published several chapbook collections of my poetry with “angst productions” press. in 2009, i decided it was time to write my personal memoir. my the winter diary would define who i was and in my remaining few years describe what i was hoping to accomplish.

while reflecting on the life and times of tom smith, i felt like a visitor to the douglas gordon “24 hour psycho” show at the museum of modern art held in new york city in 2006. the hitchcock movie was slowed down to two frames per second, making a viewing nearly a day long event. thus, i found that reviewing my life in slow motion allowed me to take a harder look at the many things that happened to me.

any author writing a memoir has to decide what things to reveal as well as the personal history that will be left out. in the winter diary i did not talk about running away from home to join the navy during my senior year in high school at three rivers, michigan. i also chose not to tell of drunkenly opening beer bottles on the back bumper of my pickup truck while driving through canada to maine one spring. indeed, a “dui” in a foreign country with my summer thorazine prescription would have been quite a personal detail.

stephen elliott, author of the adderall diaries said a memoir must have perfect sentences, tension, honesty, and cannot intentionally lie. i believe that my the winter diary meets his literary requirements. however, to prevent a possible lawsuit or two, i did alter a couple of names and dates in the book.

after receiving several compliments to the winter diary, i think that walter mclaughlin, editor of wood thrush press in albans, vermont, summed up my writing best. walt said:

“i spent an entire afternoon with TWD, to my own surprise. not what i had planned to do. but, it caught me just the right time, when i needed something whacky, offbeat, yet very real.

you are a nut, no doubt about that! no need for you to look over your shoulder-normalcy lost sight of you long ago. and that is the best compliment any poet can receive from another.”

it seems a shame that when many poets pass away their voices and works are forgotten and quickly vanish. in the last couple of years i have lost three close writing friends: cait collins, editor of “the hold,” dave christy, editor of alpha beat soup, and the nationally known cab-driving poet dave church. i truly hope that someone is saving copies of their writings in literary archives so they won’t disappear.

my the winter diary covers the details of my life, and also has several splake poems in the commentary to emphasize my history of becoming a poet. following the 2009 publication of the winter diary, i discovered many additional thoughts about the life and times of tom smith, and published the winter diary notebook.

what might be called the splake-smith memoirs, volume iii, my manuscript “lost whispers” is currently getting a take-no-prisoners-parsing from a couple of close writing friends. in the late spring or early summer of 2010, i hope to publish “lost whispers” as an extension of my personal writing history.

the early morning poem i wrote while camping in the “pictured rocks lakeshore” area gave me a new life as well as provided me with a fresh creative vision. as i have grown intellectually, i find that now i exist outside the mainstream of modern society. i no longer feel any necessity to be treated as “one of them.”

with the discovery of my poetic epiphany and writing itch, i definitely agree with baron wormser who said: “this is it. this is who i am. this thrills me. whatever this poetry is, i want to live there.”

t. kilgore splake | painting by Henry Denander taken from the book The Poet Tree (Kamini Press) Please click the image if you are interested in buying this book.

splake biblio

books

• 2010 lost whispers novel in progress
• 2009 the winter diary gage printing
• 2009 the winter diary notebook gage printing
• 2009 backwater graybeard twilight thunder sandwich publishing

chapbooks

• 2010 union printer mary-mark press
• 2010 the poet tree kamini press
• 2010 backwater bard lofdt musings moon press
• 2010 splakeus and lillies moon press
• 2009 beyond the cliffs miskwakbic press
• 2009 deuce miswakbik press
• 2009 the brautigan table miskwabik press
• 2009 beyond the cliffs miskwabic press
• 2007 samantha miskwabik press
• 2007 connections: ann arbor-keweenaw miskwabik press
• 2006 betsy miskwabik press
• 2006 the dredge miskwabik press
• 2006 shadows passing miskwabik press
• 2006 dream song dream miskwabik press
• 2006 cold mountain passages miskwabik press
• 2006 bum wine miskwabik press
• 2004 next stop paradise the hold
• 2004 rainbow diary thunder sandwich publishing
• 2004 evergreen thunder sandwich publishing
• 2002 lac la belle morninga thunder sandwich publishing
• 2002 tailings thunder sandwich publishing
• 2002 slouching toward calvary thunder sandwich publishing
• 2001 the murderous clown angst productions
• 2001 rainbow rising angst productions
• 2001 “cliffs” angst productions
• 2001 cocaine asterius press
• 2000 morning mourning angst productions
• 2000 being becoming angst productions
• 2000 light lightness angst productions
• 2000 kerouac upper peninsula diary angst productions
• 1999 trout dancing sonata hodge podge press
• 1998 porcupine mountain papers angst productions
• 1997 last train out angst productions
• 1997 opening day breakfast musings green bean press
• 1995 memories angst productions
• 1995 odyssey to civilization and back angst productions
• 1995 celebration of thea angst productions
• 1995 twilight long white angst productions
• 1993 boho beat theater angst productions
• 1993 expatriate homeboy returns angst productions
• 1993 sadness of backwater women angst productions
• 1993 keweenaw love story angst productions
• 1993 a loving enemy my muse angst productions
• 1992 springtime for oona and brautigan angst productions
• 1991 soft echoes behind the waterfall angst productions
• 1990 a hole in reality angst productions
• 1987 notes from the cave angst productions
• 1985 ghost soundings angst productions
• 1983 paris express angst productions
• 1983 alaskan letters angst productions
• 1983 beyond the fire angst productions
• 1981 october softly angst productions
• 1981 mute whispers angst productions
• 1980 dark musings angst productions
• 1980 dark musings angst productions
• 1980 moon shadows angst productions
• 1979 reststop angst productions
• 1979 pictured rocks poetry angst productions

photographic chapbooks

• 2002 available light thunder sandwich publishing
• 2000 shadows visible angst productions
• 1996 available light angst productions

dvd-films

• 2001 full moon trailer engel productions
• 2002 evergreen engel productions
• 2003 splake # i angst productions
• 2004 splake # ii angst productions
• 2005 “cliffs” angst productions
• 2006 a poet’s day angst productions
• 2006 le metrops engel productions

soft-covered upper peninsula books

• 1984 superior land lights angst productions
• 1985 pictured rocks memories angst productions
• 1988 keweenaw: copper country angst productions
• 1989 soul whispers poetry angst productions

upper peninsula broadsides

• 1990 superior peninsula themes and places
• 1990 pictured rocks
• 1990 keweenaw copper country
• 1990 superior land lights
• 1990 waterfalls of the upper peninsula

small press editor

• 2004-2008 splake was the editor of “cliffs soundings” that was published by miskwabik press in calumet, michigan. there were four issues of “cliffs soundings” published each year.

bertolt brecht | the burning of the books | bad time for poetry | reading the paper while brewing the tea

Poetry Dispatch No. 313 | February 22, 2010

Bertolt Brecht

Brecht, it seems to me, still remains under the radar in this country. Invisible. An enigma of sorts. Much of this dealing with his Marxist politics, no doubt, though he lived here in exile from 1941 to 1947 — escaping Hitler, Nazi Germany. And wrote three of his best known plays at that time: Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Life of Galileo.

I can’t recall any student in the past twenty years telling me he studied or was taught Brecht in college. I suspect most college students, English majors today even know his name—with the possible exception of theater arts majors. (And some may have heard the music, his songs, or have seen a production of his world famous “The Three Penny Opera”, in collaboration with Kurt Weill, and/or “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.”

Poet, playwright, theater director, social critic…his cause was relentless. His voice, heard throughout Germany, Europe, and pockets of America, perhaps.

His poems, not that well known, are rock bottom real…flinty: the common tongue wagging uncomfortable images/ideas to ponder, entering the reader’s psyche, harboring there a long time…Don’t you see? Do something. Be something. —norbert blei

THE BURNING Of THE BOOKS

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power ,
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth ? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you!
Burn me!

BAD TIME FOR POETRY

Yes, I know: only the happy man
Is liked. His voice
Is good to hear. His face is handsome

The crippled tree in the yard
Shows that the soil is poor, yet
The passers-by abuse it for being crippled
And rightly so.

The green boats and the dancing sails on the Sound
Go unseen. Of it all
I see only the torn nets of the fishermen.
Why do I only record
That a village woman aged forty walks with a stoop?
The girls’ breasts
Are is warm as ever.

In my poetry a rhyme
Would seem to me almost insolent.

Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter’s speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my desk.

READING THE PAPER WHILE BREWING THE TEA

In the early hours I read in the paper
of epoch-making projects
On the part of pope and sovereigns, bankers and oil barons.
With my other eye I watch
The pot with the water for my tea
The way it clouds and starts to bubble and clears again
And overflowing the pot quenches the fire.

[from Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956, Routledge, 1987]

charles p. ries | one book

PoetryDispatch No. 312 | February 18, 2010

ONE BOOK

by
Charles P. Ries

What is a book? Is it a manuscript that, in one form or another that has been rejected by over 300 agents and has not found a publisher a book? Are the 600 copies I have created at my local Kinko’s-FedEx for $5.00 and then sold for $10.00 a book? I don’t know, but after years of immersing myself in this writing trough, I no longer care. I just write what I write. And I publish any way I can.

I caught the heat twelve years ago. Before then I had not been born to the word. I did not write fiction, poetry, short stories, articles, reviews, interviews, but when the light shown on me I became a hot rocket. I have published five books of poetry and too many reviews, articles, and interviews to count (but no one gets ‘book credit’ for any of this kind of writing, do they?). At one point I was the poetry editor to three on line publications. I was consumed with writing. I loved it. It was everywhere.

Not long after my literary birth, I decided it was time to try short stories. So I wrote twenty six of them focused on my growing up on a mink farm in Wisconsin. I am quite sure that each story in this collection was rewritten in excess of twenty times. When I submitted it to agents as a short story collection, I was rejected by over 100 agents. So I hired myself a developmental editor and she guided me through restructuring the short story collection into a novel based on memory. My guess is we rewrote that manuscript about fifteen times before submitting it to agents who loved it, but said was too small a story to make money on. So I began to publish The Fathers We Find myself and sell it. But I didn’t stop there. I wrote a continuation of The Fathers We Find called, A Life By Invitation and again queried agents; and again received a hurricane of rejections. So I worked with my developmental editor to weave material from The Fathers We Find as flash backs in A Life By Invitation. The final product was wonderful. I queried over 200 agents. I still have the entire list of agents whom I queried and who rejected my manuscript; I call it my Page of Pain. That manuscript sits in my drawer until one day the heat returns and I will again rebuild it.

But nothing is wasted. No effort goes unrewarded. I continue to sell The Father We Find and people love it. They laugh, they cry, they are puzzled. Sometimes it is this love that keeps us writing. It is this love that makes me realize, I have something to say and people love how I say it. So if there was one book I would like you to read, it would be The Fathers We Find.

PUBLISHING RECORD

BOOKS DUE IN 2010

• Girl Friend & Other Mysteries of Love by Alternating Current Press, Leah Angstman, Editor.
• I’d Rather Be Mexican by Cervena Barva Press, Gloria Mindock, Editor.

PUBLISHED BOOKS

• I’d Rather Be Mexican, http://www.TMPoetry.com (download free) 2005
• The Last Time, Moon Printing and Publications 2005
• Odd, Four-Step Publications, (second printing) 2004
• The Fathers We Find: The Making of a Pleasant Humble Boy, (Prose) Bad Monk Press/Kinko’s FedEx 2004
• Monje Malo Speaks English, Four-Step Publications, (third printing) 2003
• Bad Monk: Neither Here Nor There, Lockout Press/Four-Step Publications 2001

Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews, and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry. Most recently he was awarded the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association “Jade Ring” Award for humorous poetry. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and a former member of the board at the Woodland Pattern Book Center. Charles is Co-Chairman of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. He will have two books of poetry published in early 2010: Girl Friend & Other Mysteries of Love that will be published by Alternating Current Press, Leah Angstman, Editor. And I’d Rather Be Mexican that will be published by Cervena Barva Press, Gloria Mindock, Editor. He is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). Most recently he was interviewed by Jane Crown for Blog Radio. You may find that interview by going to: www.janecrown.com and clicking on archived shows at the bottom of the page. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

brian turner | here, bullet

Poetry Dispatch No. 311 | February 16, 2010

Intro: Words and War

by
Norbert Blei

Some of us with a literary bent, with a history and love of contemporary literature under our belts and in our hearts, still wait for news from the current war fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan, hoping to discover the truer tale, the latest chapter on man’s inhumanity to man in those two theaters of violence.

I’m not a great lover of war literature, though I respect and admire the best novels, poems, plays and essays that came out of prior confrontations, from WWI to Vietnam. We all have our favorites from this times and battlegrounds.

But it all seems so quiet out there since we set foot in Iraq. Where are the writers? Where’s ‘the’ or one of ‘the’ novels? Has no one but Robert Bly cried out to the nation as he did in August, 2002 with the poem, “Call and Answer” (which he was kind enough to allow Cross+Roads Press to reprint in its broadside series, “Broadside Beat #5, 2005) ?

click the cover above to see the back please…

Or is the work being done—but just not receiving the attention it deserves? Which I suspect may be the case. Keep the voices down…bury them in the small presses, little magazines, street literature. But why? Nobody’s listening? Nobody cares? Publishers see no market in it? Are political and corporate factions more concerned with bringing down government, destroying democracy rather than listening to our varied voices? Talk shows are hungry for hot-headed politics over reflective novelists, poets, essayists. If a Vonnegut came along today, would anybody care? Recognize him? Norman Mailer? James Jones?. Where’s the next Tim O’Brien? Michael Herr? Has our once great literature of national significance been reduced to celebrity trash, the manufacturing of mystery /thrillers ala James Patterson?

Has anyone ever heard of Brian Turner? Has he appeared on any major talk shows, network or cable? Have there been any articles about him in People Magazine? Vanity Fair? Maxim? Any “war writing buzz” whatsoever?

Here’s some poetic news from one of our current fronts. Just in case you miss him sometime on Oprah.

BRIAN TURNER

Body Bags

A murder of crows looks on in silence
from the eucalyptus trees above
as we stand over the bodies—
who look as if they might roll over,
wake from a dream and question us
about the blood drying on their scalps,
the bullets lodged in the back of their skulls,
to ask where their wives and children are
this morning, and why this hovering
of flies, the taste of flatbread and chai
gone from their mouths as they stretch
and rise, wondering who these strangers are
who would kick their hard feet, saying
Last call, motherfucker. Last call.

Two Stories Down

When he jumped from the balcony, Hasan swam
in the air over the Ashur Street Market,
arms and legs suspended in a blur
above palm hearts and crates of lemons,
not realizing just how hard life fights
sometimes, how an American soldier
would run to his aid there on the sidewalk,
trying to make sense of Hasan’s broken legs,
his screaming, trying to comfort him
with words in an awkward music
of stress and care, a soldier he’d startle
by stealing the knife from its sheath,
the two of them struggling for the blade
until the bloodgroove sunk deep
and Hasan whispered to him,
Shukran, sadiq, shukran;
Thank you, friend, thank you.

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

[from HERE, BULLET, Alice James Books, Farmington, Maine, 2005]

BRIAN TURNER earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the l0th Mountain Division (1999-2000). His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, American War Poems: An Anthology, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. He currently lives in California.

ed markowski | valentine’s day

j.d. salinger | 1919 – 2010

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND # 207 | February 3, 2010

J.D. Salinger

1919-2010

I’ve been mulling this over since his death last week, January 27th at the age of 91. Here’s where I am ‘at the moment.’ The beginning and end of it all.

At a certain point in his life (the revolutionary 1960’s, as a matter of fact), Salinger reads the American landscape (what the 60’s and 70’s were about—and even before that, in the 50’s) and like a number of American writers then (the Beats), before then (the Transcendentalists), up to the very present, (Pound, W.C. Williams, etc. somewhere in between), Salinger turns his attention (addresses his psyche?) East.

He’s half Jewish, with little spirit of Judaism directing him, so it seems). Instead, Buddhism calls…he turns East… and begins to explore his way then and there / here and now.

This is stuff best left to future Salinger scholars, nevertheless has been gnawing at me the past few days, worth speculating upon, especially if you were a fledgling writer, part or on the edge of that time in this culture, (attempting to understand the Zen concept of nothing being everything)…trying to find your own way through the maze of literary forms, literary history…who’s saying or said what, when, and how?…and suddenly your hear Holden calling, coming through the rye.

Back to early Salinger. He’s a ‘born writer’ writer, a given from early youth, high schoolish attempts to put the word down. He gets himself some higher education—no degree. Takes a night course in writing (Columbia University …1939) from Whit Burnett (Story magazine). Lands a story there in 1940. Then tries his luck at The New Yorker in 1941, receiving 7 rejections in a row that year. Though, eventually, lands one (same year…or ‘42)—which takes almost five years to see print. (One of the characters in his early stories is named Holden. Hmmm…). At which point (somewhere around there) he is drafted into the Army. Sees some action. Normandy? Meets Hemingway (receives his blessing.) Comes back—an authentic American vet. (Rite-of-passage, WAR–though he doesn’t write about it in the usual Hemingway, Mailer, Jones, etc. American way, but in a most Salingeresque way, “For Esme’—with Love and Squalor”) By now he’s got a real taste of it all. Everything. Gotten his feet wet in the American short story, tested the waters of literati New York. And goes through the traditional writer’s plot of marriage, divorce, family, work, art, desire, silence, spirit…the unrecorded living novel called daily life.

He hits with THE CATCHER IN THE RYE in 1951 and everything is new and old history from this point on. (He can live rent-free the rest of his life on this book alone—though, of course, he doesn’t know it at the time.) But it grows on him. It all grows on him. And ‘for whom the bell tolls’ eventually begins tolling for him, in his own mind. Success spells D E A T H. He’s begun to care less. Understand silence. He just wants to write. More. Be left alone. “Glass.” He sees through the American dream. Innocence, where art thou? Why hast thou forsaken me?

Innocence–thy name is Phoebe. “If you want to know the truth.” (CATCHER, 1951)

Two years later he hits with the collection: NINE STORIES (1953). It’s all there. Everything else you may need to know about Salinger. For the epigram to this work he has chosen some old, familiar Eastern words:

We know the sound of two hands clapping.
But what is the sound of one hand clapping?
–A Zen Koan

Eight years later (1963) he publishes FRANNY & ZOOEY. His third book, second story collection. He will publish only one more in 1963, (a lifetime achievement of only four books), RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAM, CARPENTERS and SEYMOUR, AN INTRODUCTION.

And ‘see more’ we do. Glass or no glass. Here’s an excerpt from “Franny”:

“Well, as I said, the pilgrim — this simple peasant-started the whole pilgrimage to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you’re supposed to pray without ceasing. And then he meets this starets — this very advanced religious person I mentioned, the one who’d been studying the Philokalia for years and years and years.” Franny stopped suddenly to reflect, to organize. “Well, the starets tells him about the Jesus Prayer first of all. “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ I mean that’s what it is. And he explains to him that those are the best words to use when you pray. Especially the word ‘mercy,’ because it’s such a really enormous word and can mean so many things. I mean it doesn’t just have to mean mercy.” Franny paused to reflect again. She was no longer looking at Lane’s plate but over his shoulder. “Anyway,” she went on, “the starets tells the pilgrim that if you keep saying that prayer over and over again — you only have to just do it with your lips at first — then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook. I mean that’s the whole point of it, more or less. I mean you do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything’s about.” …

“But the thing is, the marvelous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing. I mean even if you’re terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it’s perfectly all right. I mean you’re not insulting anybody or anything. In other words, nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you first start out. You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying, the starets said. All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself. On its own power or something. He says that any name of God—any name at all — has this peculiar, self-active power of its own, and it starts working after you’ve sort of started it up.” …

“As a matter of fact, that makes absolute sense,” Franny said, “because in the Nembutsu sects of Buddhism, people keep saying ‘Namu Amida Butsii over and over again — which means ‘Praises to the Buddha or something like that — and the same thing happens. The exact same —” …

Franny gave a minimal glance down at her left hand, and dropped the stub of her still burning cigarette into the ashtray. “The same thing happens in ‘The Cloud of Unknowing,” too. Just with the word ‘God.’ I mean you just keep saying the word ‘God.'” She looked at Lane more directly than she had in several minutes. “I mean the point is did you ever hear anything so fascinating in your life, in a way? I mean it’s so hard to just say it’s absolute coincidence and then just let it go at that— that’s what’s so fascinating to me. At least, that’s what’s so terribly —”…

…”I didn’t say I believed it or I didn’t believe it,” … “I said it was fascinating.” …”I just think it’s a terribly peculiar coincidence, that you keep running into that kind of advice—I mean all these really advanced and absolutely unbogus religious persons that keep telling you if you repeat the name of God incessantly, something happens. Even in India. In India, they tell you to meditate on the ‘Om,’ which means the same thing, really, and the exact same result is supposed to happen. So I mean you can’t just rationalize it away without even —” …

“You get to see God. Something happens in some absolutely nonphysical part of the heart—where the Hindus say that Atman resides, if you ever took any Religion — and you see God, that’s all.” …

[from: FRANNY AND ZOOEY (1961)]

In the vein of old Zen lingo (which I’ve been know to speak myself at times): “There is nothing to say and I am saying it…”

Including this, ‘in the beginning’:

Melville began with “Call me Ishmael”…Tried and true. Damn right biblical, in his life and times.

Twain raised the vernacular American voice to perfect pitch: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”

Salinger spoke, speaks to us still: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

And that’s the literary truth. The sound of one hand clapping. —norbert blei