On Silence

Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything.
But silence breaks the heart. ~ Phyllis McGinley

One More Time With Feeling

I don’t own a television. This has been an idiosyncrasy of mine for five years and, bar the odd drama series like Six Feet Under or comedy like Curb Your Enthusiasm, I don’t think I’ve missed much.

So it always amazes me when I meet people who love their box so much it not only has pride of place in their bedroom, they have memorised lines from their favorite show. You say, ’Hello Jerry,’ and they answer, ’Hello, Newman’ without missing a beat.)

With Hollywood TV writers picketing for a larger piece of the expanding corporate-profits pie, TV schedules have been riddled with reruns. Striking actorwriters, including Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos) and Tina Fey (30 Rock), gathered on Wall Street to make their demands.

One picket sign said, "We can’t BEAR studio BULL", objecting to studios telling writers there was no more revenue to be had from new media, despite selling advertising on those mediums. Apparently writer-producers like John Wells of ER, Marc Cherry of Desperate Housewives, and Larry David of Seinfeld and now Curb have sidestepped the skirmish; they are considered superstars and paid handsomely for their efforts.

And so it was with more than a small dose of curiosity that I joined my Seinfeld-obsessed friend Adam Shapiro on the ultimate rerun: The Seinfeld Tour, run by Kenny Kramer, the man Larry David based his Cosmo Kramer character on. The real Kramer, it turns out, lived across the hall from David in Manhattan Plaza, a midtown building that used to provide subsidised housing for artists.

Today, he makes his living peddling this tour. He calls it "art imitating life imitating art imitating life".

Shapiro, who was visiting New York from Durban, is now the proud owner of a "Yada Yada Yada" bumper sticker. Thankfully, he didn’t purchase the "Assman" car licence plate.

Before his Seinfeld hit, David was paying $67 for an apartment worth $1 500 (other famous Manhattan Plaza residents include Tennessee Williams, Angela Lansbury and Terence Howard). He was struggling to get booked at local comedy clubs, thanks to his reputation for throwing on-stage tantrums.

David’s dream at the time, says Kramer, was to earn $70 000 a year as a stand-up comedian. His mother told him he’d never make a penny doing comedy. Jerry Seinfeld, meanwhile, was making tens of thousands of dollars thanks to his "Did ya ever notice . . ." routine - jokes that David derisively called scraping the bottom of the barrel, right alongside dick jokes. But it was David that Seinfeld turned to when he was offered a show on TV. And it was the real Kramer and David who brainstormed a show based on the real Seinfeld (David used himself as the inspiration for George Costanza).

Kramer, while involved in getting Seinfeld off the ground and often inspiring entire episodes with his real-life antics, was not cast as himself - David said he’d found a far more interesting actor in Michael Richards. And certainly there is something sad about watching Kenny Kramer scrape up the commercial crumbs with the tour that he’s been running for 12 years.

Kramer, dark, but cheerful, claims that David has given him a blank cheque that he’s never had the occasion to cash. "I talk to Larry all the time," he told us. "He’s very happy because his wife dumped him. Until now, he’s never had the money, the house and the fame all at the same time. He’s loving it."

IF you’re a fan, the Seinfeld tour comes highly recommended for such notable landmarks as Roosevelt Hospital (where George went to get actress Marisa Tomei’s number), the West Side YMCA (where Kramer went to take notes on men’s shower techniques), the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Centre (where Elaine went on a date with the gay guy that she thought she could turn straight), and the façade of Tom’s Restaurant, where the foursome took their daily brunch (the interior is a studio on the Seinfeld lot in LA). Of course, no Seinfeld tour would be complete without a visit to where the Soup Nazi once struck terror in the hearts and bellies of the lunch crowd. While the place was closed two years ago, the store front of Al’s Soup Kitchen International still exists. A video that Kramer made preshutdown has Al (who was originally named by a writer from The David Letterman Show) saying: "Seinfeld was great for my business but it ruined my life. Now my store is filled with immature idiots who watch Seinfeld."

At the time of writing, the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers had agreed to return to the negotiating table. But then again, what do I care? I don’t own a TV.

This first appeared as a column in The Sunday Times Newspaper, South Africa

On Seeing

"Looking isn't as simple as it looks. Art teaches people how to see." -- Ad Reinhardt

Do we look at art to take from it, to get resolution, or do we open ourselves up to it? Every artist is obsessed or deeply concerned about something. He uses art to explore this obsession or concern. When we look at art, we're looking at these obsessions or concerns.

We've come to see for ourselves. It is an autopsy. We treat the work of art as a crime scene. Note: This is a crime for humanity, not against. We become a witness, we suspend our judgement and we respect the evidence. If we cannot suspend judgement, we lose our sense of wonder and become defrocked or jaded. Every crime scene is a shocking scene. The shock draws your attention, it says: "Wake up. Look!"

- From Filip Noterdaeme's notes, NYU SCSPS

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

By Sylvia Plath

You're Not in Kansas Anymore, Thank God

At the New Yorker Festival, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk discussed the concept of home. Rushdie said that in The Wizard of Oz the only words he disagreed with were "There's no place like home."

Rushdie: "[In the story] it felt like the lesson [Dorothy] needed to learn was that she didn't need to leave home at all. Rubbish! There was nothing going on in Kansas."

One Smart Cookie

I guess it’s still tough being a woman with an opinion

THE author and activist Naomi Klein sees recent history collectively: “At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the ‘War on Terror’ to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans’s residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.”
In the seven years since Klein wrote the anti-globalisation bible No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, she has found a much more sinister enemy to expose: disaster capitalists. John le Carre calls Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, “scary as hell”.
I went to the New York Society for Ethical Culture to hear Klein talk about how governments use disasters to spread the American version of “free market” capitalism. She’s not accusing them of creating the disasters, but rather of pushing through agendas that the public would never usually allow were they not reeling from post-disaster shock. Shock, she says, reduces us to a childlike state.
The idea for a book came after Klein spent time in Iraq in 2000, researching how the invasion was supposed to have laid the psychological groundwork for (Bush’s Iraq envoy) Paul Bremer’s extreme country makeover.
“By shock therapy I’m referring to the economic policies that were really seen by many Iraqis as a continuation of the war, like the huge layoffs in the public sector, the dismantling of the army, the opening up of the country to unrestricted free trade,” she said. “It was an extraordinarily unfair way for Iraqis to enter the free market.”
Klein told Time magazine that she first used the phrase “disaster capitalism” when she saw something very similar to Iraq happening in Sri Lanka. “Just days after the tsunami hit, the government started pushing a very unpopular agenda of water and electricity privatisation.”
What I found most fascinating was Klein’s recounting of her hostile reception from the international press (Klein hails from Canada). A German journalist kicked off the interviews thus: “I explained your thesis to my wife and she said: ‘Has Naomi Klein lost her mind?’” The publicity tour, Klein said, turned into “one big therapy session”. Another journalist ventured: “Your book made me depressed. The forces you describe are so strong and we are so weak.”
To which Klein gave this excellent answer: “If your job is to report on how to change the grim and horrific things that exist in the world and you simultaneously believe that this is undoable, and you use your power and platform to spread futility and powerlessness, then, yeah, when confronted by the need for immense change, I would get depressed too.”

Worth checking out online is the short film about The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which Klein made with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron. Google it.

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times

On Writing

"If I'm doing my job, I'm reading the culture. I'm reading the world we're living in." ~ Author A.M. Homes at the 2nd annual Brooklyn Book Festival, in conversation with Francine Prose.

The Brooklyn Book Festival

I went to hear Dave Eggars, the editor of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly Concern in conversation with the Nigerian-born author, Chris Abani. Eggars most recently wrote What is the What, a novel based on the life story of a Sudanese Lost Boy, Valentino Achak Deng. All author proceeds to the Lost Boys of Sudan.
Achak Deng, 26, wasn’t at this talk – he’s studying international diplomacy at a college in Pennsylvania. “It’s strange for him,” said Eggars. “One day he’s a sophmore, but next week he’ll come to New York to speak at the Clinton’s Global Initiative.”
Eager to take any money made from the book to Marial Bai in Sudan to build a primary school, Achak Deng waited patiently for four years for Eggars to finish the book. Now he has started the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation in Sudan. He’ll take it over once he has completed his studies.
Eggars’ slide show showed the village of Marial Bai, razed to the ground during the war, now rebuilt as a returnee camp. “We went to see what could be done,” explained Eggars. “It was a listening tour.”
Achak Deng is particularly concerned with assisting young women in getting a secondary education. “Eventhough attitudes in Sudan are changing, it is still the tradition to marry off 13 and 14 year olds.”
One slide showed Achak Deng talking to two fourteen year old girls. One wanted to be a doctor; the second, a nurse. “Valentino who is usually very optimistic, told me that they will not reach their goals, not in this generation, but in the next,” said Eggars. “The men are becoming open to change and to women’s empowerment. The returnees like Val have brought with them a more progressive attitude from their time in the West.”
After taking in the needs of Marial Bai, Achak Deng has changed his original plan. “We realised that there are enough primary schools. So everything was adjusted according to the community’s needs,” explained Eggars. “Now he’ll set up a teacher training college, a secondary school, and a micro loan program for single mothers who are entrepreneurs.”
Eggars and Achak Deng are also working on another book that will form part of the McSweeney’s Oral Histories collection. They are telling the stories of women who survived the war. While listening to the stories, Eggars said that many times he and Achak Deng had to stop and ask the women if they were OK to continue. “They would say, ‘I’m not afraid. Let’s keep going’,” says Eggars. Many Sudanese girls were kidnapped and sold into slavery or to men who they would be forced to marry. They often endured horrific beatings and rape.

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times.

On The Box

A review in The New York Times this past February described The Box thus: "A pedigreed crew is behind this surrealistic dinner-theater on the Lower East Side. Owners include Simon Hammerstein, the 28-year-old grandson of Oscar;
Randy Weiner, the “Donkey Show’’ writer; and Serge Becker, the night life impresario. The actors Jude Law and Rachel Weisz sit on the board of the opera house-cum-concert saloon. The entertainment will be eccentric: Thai fighters one night and opera singers in Mexican wrestling masks the next."

Dinner and a table from which to watch the nightly show that begins at 1am costs $125, or you can stand for a more affordable $25.

Currently on at the Box, however, is the rather uninspired and cliched show called Pandora. It’s hosted by a former Cirque Du Soleil star, MC Raven O, and boasts variety acts that are billed to be in the spirit of Ziegfeld and Busby Berkley. All that translated into rather average burlesque interspersed with a magician, a lasso champion, and a fire eater. And then there was this: overly raunchy, S&M-style acts thrown in, I would imagine, to shock. I’m no prude, so trust me when I say that they were simply not sexy even though they featured full male and female nudity. One saw MC Raven O, wearing nothing but a pig’s snout and a white blood-smeared butcher’s apron, masturbate (yes, really) and snort like a pig as a trapeze artist did the splits above his head. In another, a large woman in a leather waist-corset -- and nothing else -- pulled out a butcher's knife and ran it through her lips, spattering fake blood onto her fetish-sized breasts. The rowdy and rather drunk crowd roared their approval leaving me to wonder about the American psyche.
When it comes to sexual violence or humiliation – even if it’s make-believe – I’ve discovered I’m a Mother Grundy. If instead of Dita von Teese spinning about in a cocktail glass there’s going to be a bloody Marilyn Manson-style scene, shouldn’t there be some sort of disclaimer?

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times.

Biko Chic

It looks like Steve Biko has become South Africa's Che Guevara (following Nelson Mandela, of course, who was given the Che treatment for the first ten years after apartheid ended). In a story for the Associated Press, writer Celean Jacobson reported that T-shirts bearing the image of Steve Biko, the symbol of black resistance worldwide who was killed by apartheid police, can be found for sale at flea market stalls and exclusive boutiques across South Africa.

She asks an interesting question:

"Is [the new trend] a sign the post-apartheid youth culture is embracing Biko's message of racial pride and African unity, or just crass commercialization of one of the most important figures in South African history."

Jackie Radebe, 23, who bought a Biko T-shirt after reading "I Write What I Like," sees him as a selfless leader whose politics of brotherhood are still relevant to South Africa.

"He had genuine compassion for the plight of the people, genuine concern about poverty, crime and loss of pride," Radebe said.

While Biko would celebrate the "breakthroughs this young democracy has achieved," Radebe believes his hero would be disappointed in the country's leaders.

"As far as morals, integrity and principles ... contemporary political leaders seem to be driven by money and self-interest," he says.

Read the full article here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_en_ot/south_africa_biko;_ylt=AjsordfrfaK_E7_DpsXbHSgE1vAI

Steve Biko Foundation:

http://www.sbf.org.za

Mashups are the New Black

Today at the Peter Som fashion show, amidst gorgeous metallic flowers, brocades galore, and corn and rasberry patent leather on skinny belts and towering pumps, this mashup made me sit up and take notice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltKyaedTDUU

Call me a romantic, but in my opinion it stole the show.

It is The Police Vs. Snow Patrol, humorously but appropriately renamed "Every Car You Chase."

The Last Poem

I have dreamed of you so much
You are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to touch
Your breathing body,
To kiss your mouth
And make your voice come alive again?
I have dreamed of you so much
There's no more time for me to wake up.
I have dreamed of you so much,
Have walked so much, talked so much,
Slept so much with your phantom,
The only thing left for me
Is to become a phantom among phantoms,
A shadow a hundred times more shadow
Than the shadow that moves and goes on moving,
Brightly, over the sundial of your life.

Robert Desnos (Editions Gallmard). English version: Paul Auster. To hear this poem as a song by Sophie Auster go to sophieauster.com

Damn Thirsty

First
The fish needs to say,

"Something ain't right about this
Camel ride --

And I'm
Feeling so damn

Thirsty."

~ Hafiz, Persian poet and sufi master (c. 1320-1389)

Above the fold

I call my friend Dan Levin my 26-year-old mentor because his attitude reminds me to be fearless in my own pursuits. In just one year of writing Dan has been published over thirteen times in various sections of the New York Times. Dan had a story published on the front page of the International Herald Tribune today. Hurrah! It's a wonderful tale of how a microfranchising business that gets spectacles to the poor has brought myopic Indians back from the brink of dire poverty just by enabling them to see better so that they can resume their work.

Here's the PDF of the front page: http://iht.com/pdfs/frontpagepdf/asiafrontpage.pdf


And here's the link to the piece: http://iht.com/articles/2007/07/23/business/scojo.php

The Inimitable Norman Mailer

Watching Norman Mailer shuffle slowly across a stage at age 84, hunched forward and clutching two canes, is as good a reminder as any to "Dance, dance, dance" while you still can as Dougy (Lawrence Tierney) says in Tough Guys Don't Dance.
I went to one of the evenings of The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, a retrospective taking place during the next two weeks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Paley Center for Media and Anthology Film Archives. Sandwiched in between a screening of the adaptation of his 1984 novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Maidstone, a film shot in the Hamptons in the summer of 1968 and released in 1971, was Mailer himself.

Maidstone is one of Mailer's earlier films -- improvisatory semifictional cinéma vérité. They're worth seeing, writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times "for the insight they provide into the ideas and ambitions that fueled Mr. Mailer’s writing in the 1960s and ’70s, the wildest, most productive and most contentious period in a career that has never been especially calm or easy to comprehend." With all due respect to Mr Scott, what's not to comprehend? The man liked to fight and he liked to fuck. He also liked to watch others fuck. And of course there were drinks and drugs. But more than that, he liked to share what he liked to do with others. Or, as they say, he liked to live large. In Maidstone his sexual energy is palpable, almost visible emanating off his person. His chest hair, like his sexual appetite, borders on primitive.

"Fame was not only his burden, but also his subject and his method," wrote Mr. Scott.

I watched Mr. Mailer tonight as he strained to hear the questions (he's very deaf now) and worked hard to keep his feet, clad in black sheepskin Ugg boots despite the heat, from shaking. He coughed as he spoke and told the audience that he has respiratory troubles, yet his voice held such enthusiasm as he proudly announced that he'd been married six times, fathered nine children, served time in jail, gotten into fights. This is a man who took his own life by the jugular and got lock jaw as he bit down hard. I picture him, as he was in the final scene in Maidstone bloodied and crazy-eyed, almost tearing off Rip Torn's ear with his teeth [Torn had attempted to assasinate Norman T. Knigsley (Mailer) and Mailer was outraged that he'd dare. Torn's response: “When — when is an assassination ever planned? It’s done, it’s done.” ]

Here, a couple of classic comments that Mr Mailer made this evening:

On why he made Tough Guys Don't Dance: "I made the move to convince other directors and producers to let me make more movies."

On writing scripts: "Movies are more spooky [than novels] because you're taking reality and distorting it. It's very intense."

On directing: "Sometimes when an actor improvises a line [like Lawrence Tierney did with the line "I coulda told him never to call an Italian small potatoes" in Tough Guys] you almost want to say 'no' even though you know it's good. Your authority when directing a film is so tenuous. To those of you out there who want to be directors I say Godspeed. It was certainly one of the most interesting activities I ever undertook."

On terrorism: "America is essentially a Christian country. Americans find it hard to work six days a week and knock over the next guy to get ahead and then go to church on Sunday....We needed to create a villian large enough for the essential spiritual crime of capitalism. For a long time that was communism. Now it's terrorism and none of our politicians have the wit, the grace, or the courage to attack it for what it is. It's bullshit mountain."

On space travel: "Now that I'm 84-years-old I couldn't give a God damn if we ever get to Mars."

On criticism: "If you didn't like the movie, you can find friends."

On bliss

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.” ~ Joseph Campbell, American author, editor, philosopher and teacher.

[Your "bliss," said Campbell, are those moments where you feel truly happy -- "not excited, not just thrilled but deeply happy."]

My therapist is making faces at me

Posted without the permission of Cary Tennis from salon.com (but it was just so damn funny, I couldn't resist. To read more Cary Tennis, go to http://dir.salon.com/topics/since_you_asked/)

Hi, Cary,

I started seeing a new therapist lately. And she does this thing that annoys me no end.

Whenever I tell her something emotionally important, she'll squint her eyes, lean forward, and act like she's really listening.

Now, I am sure she really is intently listening to me, but the squinting and the leaning in really distract me and make me think she is acting.

I want to tell her, but don't know how. Should I? Thanks.

Unnerved,

Dear Unnerved,

Yes, I think you should tell her. But that's the difference between me and a therapist: I will actually tell you what I think you should do.

Doesn't it drive you crazy the way a therapist will never tell you what to do? You'd think every now and then she could just tell you the answer.

It's like, what should I do here?

Well, what do you want to do?

Well, I want to avoid the fucking DMV.

Is there any reason in particular why you want to avoid the DMV?

Yes. Those fluorescent bulbs! It's like a military induction center. It makes me feel sad.

So you want to avoid going to the DMV because it makes you feel sad?

Yes. Sort of.

And what will happen if you avoid going to the DMV?

Well, my license will expire.

Uh huh.

And I'll get pulled over.

Uh huh.

But but fuck the DMV!

Uh huh.

Because the DMV sucks!

Uh huh.

I am hoping the therapist will say, Just go to the goddamned DMV, you moron, and get your license renewed. But I've never had a therapist do that. They're always interested in whatever fucked-up reason I have. But isn't that why I'm there in the first place? Don't they already know that I'm full of fucked-up reasons for not doing stuff I'm supposed to do?

So then I thought, what if I brought an extra hundred bucks?

Here's an extra hundred. I won't tell anybody. Just between you and me: What the fuck do I do now?!

But they turn it back on you and ask about your feelings.

OK, but face it: Isn't that what we really want -- to have somebody ask us about our feelings?

I mean, therapy is probably the only place in the universe where for a few moments you can confront, in a novel and concentrated way, the actual "you" that is causing so much grief, and get a good look at it from all sides -- prompted, of course, by the therapist, who keeps encouraging you to observe and investigate this troubling, chaotic self that is causing you so much trouble. It is a somber and high honor, actually, to confront this self so thoroughly. It is often as though you are seeing it for the first time, and it occurs to you that without all that infuriating and seemingly idiotic prodding, maybe you would never really see this self that is at the root of so many of your problems. Maybe you would never really see it, that is. So maybe it's worth it, even if confronting your true self requires you to cross a certain line you are not used to crossing: To say clearly what you see before you.

In many ways, saying clearly what you see before you is taboo. You are not supposed to do that.

But what if, for instance, the therapist were to pull out a gun and point it at you? Would you say clearly what you see before you?

And the therapist says, how do you feel about that?

Well, it puts me in mind of the possibility of dying, actually.

And what is this encounter between you and the therapist anyway, if not a life-and-death encounter? Why are you there, anyway, if not to face your deepest fears?

I'm not saying your therapist should pull a gun on you.

I'm saying this: It is taboo to say what we see.

It is unbearably intimate.

We are not supposed to tell anyone what we see when we look at them. So I suggest you break the taboo and tell her.

After all, you buy an expensive ticket when you enter the therapist's waiting room. Where does this ticket take you? It takes you across the gulf of taboo. It is an expensive crossing. Make it worth it.

A woman too...

"Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul." -- Joseph Brodsky, Jew, Russian poet, English essayist

Beggar’s Composure

These porcelain Pinschers.
Life-size, larger even
than your living room
(and my composure)
should bear.
I swear I see teeth.

Clever.
When you come down
you’re already one up.

My hand stretched to itching,
my rent-paying smile,
is how it will be.
“Good to see you,
Colin, I love your place.”

A line to keep me
plunging all night.

But what if: my pockets
hauled them down
(my beggar hands)
and my smile was submerged,
stashed in reserve,
for that maniac fern
on its pink-marble perch?

I could meet you with an eyebrow,
say: “Class, Colin, pure class.”

Knowing full-well that irony
gets on fine without you

like your money
without me.


Kevin Bloom, South African poet, editor, award-winning journalist and soon-to-be-published author

Posted with permission of the author

A Maiden Voyage

For your reading pleasure, I present the first newspaper piece that I've had published in the United States -- a profile on Paul Auster in The New York Sun. I doubt that anyone reading this blog would have stumbled upon it. Who reads the The New York Sun anyway, right? ~Enjoy!

http://www.nysun.com/article/50799

Auster's wife, the author Siri Hustvedt, shared an incredibly grounding piece of wisdom when I interviewed her last year for Harper's Bazaar. I asked what advice she has for their daughter Sophie, 19, who stands on the brink of stardom. Hustvedt, who found fame later in life than her daughter (at 35), said:

"If she can remember that the work and the response to the work are two different things, she'll be fine."