political, literary and poetic correctness are terminal spiritual diseases - all hail irreverence!!!

Now all over the news, U.S. Energy Department says Covid-19 likely resulted from lab leak in China, but was not being developed as a weapon. If Covid-19 truly was a novel coronavirus, then how’d it get into a Chinese lab, if it wasn’t made there? And, why make it, unless as a weapon?

Meanwhile, some off the beaten path mischiefs...

Poetic Outlaws

The Bookstore

By Julia Vinograd

I went down to the bookstore this evening

and found myself in the poetry section.

But for every thin book of poems

there was a thick biography of the poet

and an even thicker book

by someone who’s supposed to know

explaining what the poet

is supposed to’ve said and why he didn’t.

So you don’t have to waste your time

on the best the writer could do,

the words he fought the darkness and himself for,

the unequal battle with beauty.

Instead you can read comfortably

about the worst the writer could do:

the mess he made of his life,

how he fought with his family,

cheated on his lovers, didn’t pay his debts

and not only drank too much

but all the stupid things

he ever said to the bartender

just before getting 86’d will be printed for you

and they’re just as stupid

as the things everyone says just before getting 86’d.

The books explaining the poet

are themselves inexplicable.

The students who have to read them

cheat.

I left the poetry section

thinking about burning the bookstore down.

Some of a poet’s work comes from his life, ok.

But most of a poet’s work comes

in spite of his life, in spite of everything,

even in spite of bookstores.

So I went to the next section

and bought a murder mystery but I haven’t read it yet.

I find I don’t want to know who done it

and why;

I want to do it myself.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

What an exquisite ... indictment

In 2003, shortly before I was diagnosed with seriously life-threatening MRSA, this leaped out of me one day as fast as I could write it ...

I AM A MAN

I am a man.

I said,

I am a man!

What means it,

being a man?

A man is a warrior:

he lives by a code of honor,

his word is reliable,

his actions confirm his words,

his commitment is holiness,

his enemies are welcome at his hearth,

he fears but moves forward,

he cries and gets up again,

he hates but forgives,

he loves and let’s go,

he doubts but trusts God,

he’s a good friend,

he seeks resolutions,

he demands nothing,

he risks everything,

he regrets his mistakes,

he seeks to make amends,

he puts others’ welfare first,

he accepts apologies truly made,

he expects nothing back,

he lives ready to die,

he laughs when he “should” scream,

he screams when he “should” laugh,

he sings just because,

he shrugs off insults,

he learns from misfortune,

he cusses God for making him,

he wishes he was done,

he loves children and animals,

he relishes a woman’s scent,

he smiles when he’s content,

he knows God’s his master,

he walks in rainbows,

his garden is the world,

his way is nature,

he loves fishing,

his wife is his soul,

his food is life,

his pay is whatever he receives.

Yep, he’s crazy.

Poetic Outlaws

Affirmation

By: Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.

Aging, everybody knows it.

Even when we are young,

we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads

when a grandfather dies.

Then we row for years on the midsummer

pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,

that began without harm, scatters

into debris on the shore,

and a friend from school drops

cold on a rocky strand.

If a new love carries us

past middle age, our wife will die

at her strongest and most beautiful.

New women come and go. All go.

The pretty lover who announces

that she is temporary

is temporary. The bold woman,

middle-aged against our old age,

sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.

Another friend of decades estranges himself

in words that pollute thirty years.

Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge

and affirm that it is fitting

and delicious to lose everything.

Sloan Bashinsky

Heh, we grouchy old men do have some tales and memories. I heard years ago that once we reuin our reputation we can be free. A number of women, one at a time, somehow woke up parts of me I didn't know existed. But for them, I might still be who I was before they came along. Perhaps old men, and old women, don't look forward much to coming attractions, like we once did. I tend to wake up mornings wondering why I'm still here? The Mother Ship used to abduct me and then grow tired of me and bring me back, until they figured out it wasn't worth their trouble. The Smithsonian then captured me and stuck me in a room with other grandfossils for what seemed like aeons. Then, I got lucky and sweet-talked and ruckused them into letting me out during the daytime to roam around. Lumbering toward the White House, where I'd seen on CNN and FOX were only slightly edible creatures called politicians, I snuck behind a large bush and gnawed off my right hind foot to which the zoo keepers had fastened a tracker. I've been roaming loose ever since, keeping an ever watchful eye over my hindquarters for bounty hunters.

Poetic Outlaws

Teachers, Censorship, and Banned Books

By: Pat Conroy

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. 

Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The Catcher in the Rye, under Gene’s careful tutelage, and I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book’s galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene’s defense of The Catcher in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the executors of his will.

Few in the world have ever loved English teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, “Lord, this is how I found the world you made.” They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the literary powers to make that historical event anything other than grotesque.

People cuss in my books. People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball games. I’m perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. 

I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because bookbanners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works— but writers and English teachers do.

I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send my affection to their students. West Virginians, you’ve just done what history warned you against—you’ve riled a Hatfield.

Sincerely,

Pat Conroy

Sloan Bashinsky

Fuck all, Pat! Kapow!!!

And now some pure raw beauty that made angels sing forever...

Mary Chapin Carpenter's 

"I Take My Chances"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqoGFBSjHcY

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com