Notes at 105 degrees Fahrenheit

I’m assembling a book, and I"ll be posting as many images and prose pieces as new sequences  for  awhile, hoping to continue to blog on a Thursday/Saturday schedule.

  

Notes at 105 degrees Fahrenheit

ART:  BILL BISSETT (bill bissett) here’s an excerpt:

whats missing from my writing is total prais uv th
life uv th mind  what it can reseev  envisyun  create

imagine…

whats missing from my poetree  statements totalee
  in support uv free edukaysyun  guaranteed min
imum inkums 4 evreewun  lessnings uv th fetish uv
work n strengthening uv all yuunyuns  

(He’s in a league of his own. Such technique! Makes me want to cry. Here’s another example:  http://billbissett.com./html/bill_poetry_cooking.htm)

ART: DEF

“beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.” Jane Hirschfield

ART: G for GIACOMETTI

Giacometti made his stick-thin men out of metal. Thin men with small heads and thin arms and tiny spindly legs. Just bone. “I’m trying to get to nothing,” he told an interviewer.  “The more I take away, the closer to nothing I get.” If he’d lived long enough, Giacometti might have found a way to create a metal sculpture that didn’t exist. Giacometti said the bulk that remained became obscene. “Too much,” he said, “I’m looking for nothing. I want it to disappear, but the more I take away, the fatter it gets.” ----from The Book of Changes by Jack Remick

EXCERPTS FROM TWO REVIEWS

Doll Palace, by Sara Lippmann. I gave it a 3.90 on Amazon’s scale of 1 through LOVE

“I am no stranger to poor judgment,” says a character in one of these stories of contemporary life, and Doll Palace contains a lot of characters in a lot of different situations but she speaks for all of them. The book probably is too smart for me, but I’m going to say a few praises. Sara Lippmann turns modern American joylessness into an art form, using humor, satire, and an underlying goth sensibility combined with a brilliant sense of place and detail---that’s the dazzling part of the collection, the detail of everyday life at all ages and stages.

There’s a lot of young, smart mouth anomie, well heard in my imagination by her writing. Favorite story: the title piece “Doll Palace.” I also admired the writing technique in “Houseboy” and felt for him when in existential exasperation he asks: Where do I go? The whole world is cry.

Wishbone, by Priscilla Lee. This one got a 3.50

I was expecting more of the wacky whimsy that was Dream of Flying into Electric Beehives, but Wishbone is way different, a book of poems about coming of age, sweet and honest and authentic, an extended family and friends portrait, China to San Francisco (and some Maine mixed in). A set of three consecutive first lines, back to back to back home runs:

North Yarmouth: “an ordinary town of great sorrow.”

Rock n Roll Odyssey: “At night his penis is a small Cyclops, half-asleep,”

The Duckman at Redwood Shores: “Every day before the world falls apart,”

And there is some goofy humor (“My therapist, Amy, goes into a trance/and starts eating pistachios. She tells me/I was born to a woman attracted/ to shopping and meat ball recipes, and/my grandmother wonders if my kidneys grew in right.”) 

LARKIN

From “Aubade” :  I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

ELDORET

Photographer – Derek Workman

http://www.kalaharireview.org/gallery/eldo-one/

http://www.kalaharireview.org/gallery/eldo-two/

http://www.kalaharireview.org/gallery/eldo-three/

http://www.kalaharireview.org/gallery/eldo-four/

Eldoret is a principal city in western Kenya. It is the capital and largest city in Uasin Gishu County. Lying south of the Cherangani Hills, the local elevation varies from about 2100 metres above sea level at the airport to more than 2700 metres in nearby areas (7000–9000 feet). The population was 289,380 in the 2009 census, and it is currently the fastest growing town in Kenya. It is also the second largest urban centre in midwestern Kenya after Nakuru and the fifth largest urban centre in the country.