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Terri Brint Joseph

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~  Some Opening Words on the Late Great Terri Brint Joseph
~  Agent-de-change by Stanley Rowen: Remembrance of Terri Brint Joseph

~ Rock-Climbing, a poem by Terri
~  Walking: Beirut and Paris, 1974-1987, a poem by Terri

~ Lessons Learned with Terri Brint Joseph
~ Meeting Terri Inside a Book! (or, When a Book Lures You, Listen!

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On visiting a brilliant bookshop yesterday, The Magic Door IV

Yesterday, I finally had the chance to visit a local independent bookshop, The Magic Door IV , that I had been meaning to for years, but its store hours (2:00-8:00 p.m.)* had always made it impractical for me to drop by when I had a regular 8-5 office job working for somebody else. In May, when out of the blue it occurred to me that I had still not patronized the The Magic Door and its hours were no longer an issue, I dropped by on Memorial Day (May 29th), but the store was closed for the holiday. Undeterred, when Father's Day rolled around three weeks later, I decided I'd go then. Almost out the door, though, I thought maybe I better call first, make sure they're open. Sure enough, they were closed for the Father's Day holiday. They were closed, and yet the owner, Dwain Kaiser, answered the phone anyway and urged me to drop by on Tuesday. He was adamant that I — whom he didn't know from Adam as they say — drop by the store on Tuesday, insisting as one wo

As Taught by Paul Frizler; or, Swan and Shadow by John Hollander

I discovered this masterful poem for the eyes and soul back in the autumn of 1989. I was an undergrad at Chapman University, when I took a course that altered my life's course inexorably, "Introduction to Poetry, 101". The poem above was featured in Poems, Fourth Edition: Wadsworth Handbook And Anthology , a textbook I still own and reference regularly. "Swan and Shadow" by John Hollander was used as an introductory illustration of what was then commonly called "concrete poetry," but today is better known as "visual poetry". The class was taught by the most eccentric and engaging genius of a professor I ever had, the late great, Dr. Paul Frizler , B.A. at the ripe old age of nineteen, Ph.D. in English by twenty-six. Frizler personified lightning. He was eclectic and sincerely outrageous. I remember his regaling us of his encounter with Jim Morrison at UCLA. Unlike Morrison , however, Frizler's eccentricity was ne

Exhuming The Body by William Sansom

Considering William Sansom's short fiction was once widely anthologized in frighteningly titled story collections (e.g., London Tales of Terror , Ghosts in Country Houses , The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories , as well as several installments of The Pan Book of Horror Stories ), with a novel named The Body , readers already acquainted with his better known, more diminutive, phantasmal forebears, could understandably conclude that Sansom's first novel The Body was likewise macabre. Honest mistake, that. And perhaps also disappointing for those mystic connoisseurs of the obscure with a taste for Sansom's peculiar style of understated extravagance -- a style similar to yet not quite as distilled as that of those refined denizens of the fin de siècle , nor as baroque as the later Lovecraft crowds he was often lumped in with (peruse any of the table of contents of one of the dozens of anthologies Sansom contributed to in order to better see my point) -- wh

No Exit -- "The Concentration City" of J.G. Ballard's

"The Concentration City" (1957) is one Hell of a story. That Ballard named his leads Franz and Gregson and set certain bureaucratic procedural crime dramas around them made me think immediately of The Metamorphosis , but I'm not positive Ballard was intentionally riffing off Kafka here. And regarding Concentration City's history there's multiple mentions to a time "before the Foundation" millions of years ago, which seems to be a gracious nod in Isaac Asimov's direction. Hong Kong's concentrated high rises. Photo by Michael Wolf Franz aims to fly in Concentration City (it was a dream he had) but there's really no room to fly in a city that has no open air space -- not even for a single bird. Any available space is already occupied with construction. So he hatches a plan with Gregson not so much to escape Concentration City but to ride the commuter train, a "Supersleeper" that connects the various Sectors and Fe

Some Thoughts on Night by Elie Wiesel

Night , despite being only 109 pages long, is not a quick, easy read. The book for me, and I think for a lot of people, doesn't end even when you've read the last page. Because the beyond-horrific, indescribably inhumane images of the Holocaust, experienced through the eyes of a child, Elie Wiesel, remain forever. At least they have for me. The innocence and optimism of a childhood perspective in the opening ghetto scenes of Wiesel's hometown, starkly contrasted with the child's inevitable spiritual despair and rejection of God, is some of the most powerful -- and poignant -- prose I've ever read: " Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load--little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it, saw it with my own eyes... those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.)...."We continued our

Getting Attuned to the Surreality of J.G. Ballard's "Prima Belladonna"

I'm proceeding slowly through The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard in 2013, and hope to have at least something to share on each story eventually. There's potential spoilers below. First story up for study is "Prima Belladonna" from 1956, a story originally collected in Vermillion Sands . "Prima Belladonna" is told by an unnamed narrator as a reminiscence. A recollection of a long-ago, idealized time known in his culture's history as " The Recess ," that " world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer ..." that lasted for a decade. People worked only a few hours per day during this era of ennui , assuming our unnamed leading man is any indicator of the cultural norm, spending their hours not in labor but instead on balconies with beer, playing i-Go, a game described as " decelerated chess," as if chess (for the lay person, not a pro) wasn't slow enough already. Ballard's got that wry wit going

A.M. Homes' autograph (Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories)

I remember reading Salon's 1996 interview with David Foster Wallace about five years after it'd been published — this was just after DFW had been hired by the Claremont Colleges and the L.A. Times had run an interesting piece on his work and arrival to the university, and my interest in this writer that I'd heretofore never heard of, was immediately piqued; and piqued enough, I might add, that I immediately and rather obsessively went online to learn more about him — in which Laura Miller asked DFW who were the contemporary literary writers he read and admired. A.M. Homes was at the top of his list (and this despite labeling her first novel Jack as being "imperfect" — as if his first novel had been perfect! — zeroing in on a short story of hers called "A Real Doll" that had particularly captivated him with what sounded like a bizarre mix of satire and social commentary on the sorry state of our culture's disconnectedness. After re

"Escapement" by J. G. Ballard

I'm seeing, sensing, absorbing the preternatural prescience and all-too-real surrealism of J.G. Ballard . In one of his first published short stories, for instance, his gem "Escapement" (1956), a man watching the tele with his wife experiences a bizarre hiccup in time's immutable ticktock, during which he discovers himself reliving the same fifteen minute span from 9:00-9:15 P.M. over and over again. As if time were trapped on a cassette tape that never stopped playing. The television show our increasingly incredulous man is watching keeps repeating itself, but his wife doesn't even notice! In fact, while her husband can't get past 9:15, it's almost 10:00 P.M. for her. Our man tries switching channels to escape. Same result: Rewind. He calls a quiz show to tell them he knows the question they're going to ask in order to try and convince somebody — anybody — that something very strange is going on with the clocks, that they're stuck in

The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann

Rarely has a book evoked in me such deep abiding disgust (and that's a compliment, definitely a laud ) over what I'm witnessing described that I cringe practically every page, close my eyes every other paragraph, almost vomit in my mouth each chapter, feeling simultaneously repelled and yet compelled (how does William T. Vollmann do that?!) to continue reading. Reading The Royal Family's akin to viewing macabre masterpieces like the The Exorcist or Alien , watching with one eye open and one eye closed as the gross images elicit visceral reactions that shock and shock and shock some more, and just when you thought you'd become desensitized or too jaded and couldn't be shocked anymore, Vollman somehow ups the ante and shocks you worse again -- and that's a compliment (not a complaint) to Vollmann's genius documenting what in lesser hands would appear as exploitation or cheap titillation, rather than a gritty, streetwise, all-too-horrifically-real

"Literary Life" in China, part I: Notes from Lin Yutang's classic My Country and My People

In Lin Yutang's masterful tome on his native China, My Country and My People , originally published in 1935, he has a chapter devoted solely to China's "Literary Life". The "Literary Life" chapter is then subdivided into eleven subsections, all of which, for my money, are long enough and densely packed enough with knowledge, history and analysis to be legitimate chapters in their own right. Below are my notes, summaries, observations, ephemera & many excerpts from the first two subsections of "The Literary Life" chapter in My Country and My People . And know at the outset here that I am a neophyte on the subject of China's literary life, and am nevertheless attempting to read and write about a country and its people despite my woefully little knowledge on the subject. In other words, if you happen to encounter this post and are an expert on China and her Literary Life, please chime in with corrections if corrections here exist needin

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