Here’s a vivid summer memory — and it comes to me courtesy of my dear old friend Sarah in New York, who posted this picture on Facebook not too long ago. Below is the very beach on Long Island where my older brother and I would park in the early 1980’s when we were supposed to be at church on Sunday morning.
We would eat Entenmann’s donuts and we would listen to WBLI on the radio. (If you are from Suffolk County, you can’t not hear the chipper WBLI jingle every time you read those four letters.) If memory serves, the station played Casey Kasem’s countdown on Sunday mornings.
I was pretty young, and I was awed that my brother deemed me cool enough and trustworthy enough to conspire with him in playing hooky from the service. I was fully complicit, too. It was my job to run in and out of the church quickly before the service started, in order to grab the Sunday bulletin, with which my mother had instructed us to return every week.
The first time I colluded with my brother this way, I overdid it a little. Upon our return and gave my mom a lot of unrequested detail about the priest’s sermon, and what it had meant to be. My brother later pulled me aside in the room we shared, and gave me some sage coaching: “You don’t need to make up a whole big story.” That was the first time in my life that I learned not to over-embellish a lie.
You see that? You can learn a lot from a religious upbringing.
Drawn by Adam Hughes, inked by Karl Story, and colored by Anthony Tollin.
(I had to consult the Facebook nerd-hive-mind to find out the creative team behind this piece — thanks to Charlie McElvey for the info, and, by extension, Frank Becker. 🙂 )
I’m honored today to share some terrific news — four samples of my writing will be featured via Richard Hansen’s unique “Poems-For-All” project in California. As the video below shows, Mr. Hansen produces miniature “books” of poetry that are about the size of business cards. They can then be distributed randomly.
Here’s the description on the Facebook page for Poems-For-All: “They’re scattered around town — on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip; stuffed into a stranger’s back pocket. Whatever. Wherever. Small poems in small booklets half the size of a business card. To be taken by the handful and scattered like seeds by those who want to see poetry grow in a barren cultural landscape.”
The poems selected were “Consciousness Haiku” and the first stanza of “Confession.” (Mr. Hansen suggested it worked fine as a standalone poem.) “Confession” first appeared at Dead Beats Literary Blog in 2013, and was then featured last year by Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine.
In addition, Mr. Hansen selected my 100-word horror story, “There in the Bags,” as well as my entries for the popular online Six-Word-Sci-Fi Story Challenge. (He also publishes micro-fiction in the “little book” format.)
This is such a cool, unique project, and I’m grateful to be able to participate.
For more information on Poems-For-All, check out the video below. Or you can visit the blog for the project here: https://poems-for-all.com/.
The gales cry,
their sounds rise,
so strangely like
the wailing of children.
The gales
have ripped a rift in purgatory.
Along the low hill’s haze
and indistinct palette of grays,
the thinning slate shapes
are either columns of rain,
or a quorum of waifish wraiths.
Condemned but inculpable
are those little figures —
long ago natives maybe — in an ironic,
insufficient sacrament:
this obscuring rain’s
parody of baptism.
If that faultless chorus
should never see heaven,
they will ever be wind without end
their lamentations ever
shrill within rare
arriving spring downpours.
Always will the squall
imprison their calls.
You and I should refrain
any temptation to breach
these palisades of rain —
lest we be greeted by each
iron-colored countenance:
the sorrowing slim nickel
of an infant’s visage,
little boys’ graying faces,
the silvering eyes of the girls.
[Note: I began writing this yesterday morning, which was, at a sensory level, just like the fictional morning described. Southwest Virginia indeed has some unique weather, affected, as I’m told, by its sprawling mountain ranges. (They circle the Roanoke metro area.)
The rain yesterday was abrupt and shrieking. I posted on social media that I’d experienced “that eerie moment when the wind sounds strangely like the wailing of children.” So hence the poem that I finished (?) tonight. I think a lot of my friends will find it funny; they certainly were laughing at my poet’s melodrama yesterday. One said it was a nice turn of phrase, too — and that it could be the start of a story.
I’ve never written what I’ve considered a “horror poem” before. (“The Writer” in 2013 was never intended as such, anyway.) But the genre is alive and well, at least in the small presses. Horror poetry is frequently requested in the calls for submissions you can find on Facebook’s various “Open Calls” pages, anyway. (And if you’re an indie writer, those pages are great to peruse anyway.)
Hey gang, I found out tonight that Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine is having a sale this weekend on both its 2016 Anthology and all of its back issues — check out its Facebook page right here for details: https://www.facebook.com/PeekingCatPoetry/.
If you follow this blog, then you know I’ve been lucky enough to see my own work selected for many issues, as well as the Peeking Cat Anthology 2016. And I can personally guarantee that there is always a roster of terrific poets sharing their voices there.
If you’re looking for some thoughtful Autumn reading and you’d like to support indie lit, then consider picking up a copy or two.
I posted it on my Facebook with the disclaimer that I knew it wasn’t a very good photo. I saw an Osprey V-22 military aircraft flying past the moon over my neighborhood the other day, and I thought it would make an amazing shot. But I still need to learn to work the damn zoom function on my camera phone. And, as you, can see it didn’t turn out so hot.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Osprey aircraft, it is a kick-ass, high-tech aircraft that is sort of a hybrid between a plane and a backwards helicopter. It can point its immense rotary blades forward or upward, like a wicked 1980’s G.I. Joe toy, or a goddamn genuine-real-life Transformer.
So a couple of my friends keep “liking” it on Facebook, or commenting that they like my photos, but I’m pretty sure they’re doing so ironically by now.
Bear in mind, some of these people are British. They have a dry sense of humor, and some of them are inscrutable. You can hardly tell when these people are making fun of you. They’re as dryly witty as goddam Benjamin Disraeli, and I’m usually on Facebook before I’ve finished my first cup of coffee.
There is one erudite lass in particular about whom I have grown paranoid. I just picture her snickering at me while doing British things, like sipping tea and eating crumpets/crickets/rickets/trumpets/whatever while enjoying “Benny Hill” and socialized healthcare and sending telegrams to Churchill about the Blitz. Seriously.
A couple of Facebook posts last night cheerfully proclaimed the 30th Anniversary of The Beastie Boys’ “Licensed to Ill.” That’s mostly right, I guess … the album was released in 1986, although it came out on November 15, not the end of February.
I remember “Licensed to Ill” being a phenomenon when I was a freshman at Longwood High School — reverence for it transcended a lot of high school subcultures. (And at Longwood, I think those subcultures overlapped considerably more than your typical John Hughes film would suggest.) The preppie kids loved the album, the jocks loved it, and a lot of the honors kids were into it too — not to mention just mainstream kids and random weirdos like me. My favorite song was “Brass Monkey;” I was thrilled whenever it was played at parties. (I can’t feature it here, as there are no authorized videos of it online.)
This album had what I remember as a unique vibe to it in 1986. People online call the Beastie Boys “the first white rappers.” I don’t know if that’s true. (Some people said the same thing about Vanilla Ice only four years later). And I’m guessing such a distinction shouldn’t be important. But the Beastie Boys were different.
Previously, rap was perceived only as a kind of counterculture art form for disaffected, young, urban African-Americans. The Beastie Boys were a rap group specifically with which suburban white kids could identify. I hope I’m not saying anything politically incorrect here — of course we all realize that any music can be appreciated by anyone, according to their tastes. (People are occasionally surprised when I myself can recite the Geto Boys as easily as W. H. Auden’s poetry.) And all sorts of kids in the mid-80’s liked Run-D.M.C. and The Fat Boys — they just didn’t have the huge, visible mainstream appeal that the Beastie Boys had.
The Beastie Boys had a wider appeal. Their music was irreverent — they sang about “Girls,” liquor, and the “Right to Party,” in a manner suggesting that they’d probably never been altar boys. They were drunken, pot-smoking malcontents, and expressed some not terribly progressive attitudes toward women. Yet it was perfectly natural, or culturally expected, to hear them blasted at a parentally approved, non-alcoholic party for young teenagers at a suburban, middle class home. The same preps who wore “Ocean Pacific” and played with hacky sacks also played the Beastie Boys. So did some kids in Key Club and the honors classes. A couple of cheerleaders I knew had crushes on Mike D. And it never seemed unusual or ironic, like that time when a nearly all white, suburban crowd chanted along to Boogie Down Productions’ “South Bronx” at a Longwood Junior High School dance.
For some reason, the Beastie Boys’ broad fan base was never really evident among the student body at Mary Washington College — although The Jerky Boys and the Geto Boys both had their share of fans there. I don’t remember them being played once. I think maybe it was because that small southern college subculture leaned so heavily on classic rock and the new “alternative,” with new wave and punk having strong, visible minorities of fans. (Man … if I had a dime for every time time I heard The Allman Brothers in college, I could have paid off my student loans a day after graduation.)
Strangely, I wound up listening to “Licensed to lll” the most often about two decades later, when I was in my mid-30’s. I was going through two weird phases in my life. The first was a newfound love of hip-hop and rap, because I am a weird guy, and I’m always late to the party with these things. The second was a bizarre, temporary sense of financial responsibility. I was constantly saving money. (I think maybe I wasn’t eating right or something. It didn’t last.) But I was constantly listening to old or cheap secondhand CD’s, instead of buying new ones or one of those newfangled mp3 players. (At the time, the iPod’s antecedents seemed just too high-tech and opulent to me.) So there was always a leather case of 80’s and 90’s music CD’s riding shotgun with me in my 1992 Ford Taurus.
I was driving frequently between Whitestone, Queens and my girlfriend’s apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, rocketing up and down “the 278,” the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The Beastie Boys were my miscreant co-pilots; “No Sleep till Brooklyn” was both a kick-ass song and situationally apropos. I played the album constantly, along with L.L. Cool J.’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” and the “MTV Party To Go Volume 2.” Then I’d swap those out with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s more mellow, sensitive “Fear,” just to remind myself that I really was just a softspoken college boy who’d grown into a nerdy thirtysomething (“nerdysomething?”).
I found out recently that Adam Yauch (the Beastie Boys’ member “MCA”) died of cancer. This happened four years ago, I just hadn’t heard. For some reason, it was especially unsettling to learn that a rebellious entertainment figure from my teen years had died from an illness that I usually associate with people older than me. I never loved the Beastie Boys as much as I loved U2, Depeche Mode or Tori Amos, but I found it more troubling than I would have expected. I’m not sure why, but I’ve decided not to dwell on it.
At any rate, if you still love Ad-Rock, Mike D. and MCA, you can play the embedded videos below. But you absolutely should pull up “Brass Monkey” on Youtube to get your full 80’s vibe on.
I shared this popular poem a couple of days ago when I found it on Facebook, as I have several female friends who it fits to a tee. Author Meg Haney was kind enough to permit me to copy it and run it here.
“This is a Poem for the Monster Girls”
by Meg Haney
This is a poem for the monster girls
The ones who have no stars in their skin
Only fire and iron and rhinoceros hides
For the ones who have walked fire alone
Into those dark forests and shouting storms
On those deep dark and endless nights
This is a poem for those who didn’t emerge
With that crown of gold or prince charming
No Disney choruses or extended dance numbers
The ones who stayed in the wild strengthening their soul
and forging their hearts to a brand new and different sheen
for the ones who didn’t remain in their beds
pulling the covers overhead hoping for rescue
but Stood facing the monsters and storms
they walked the fire and faced the dragons
and often made peace with those that lived inside
Those who struck at the fiends at the gate
The invading forces and the wicked pain
whipping with wild blows, shouting their own storm
This is for the not Princesses, the unroyal and deposed
For the wild warriors and mythic goddesses
Those who will never stoop to be a simple queen
Never don an insipid crown or sit on a cushioned throne
This is for those who know that this story is for you to write
You and you alone this is for you to craft as a tale of hero or woe
This is for those who have learned to breathe fire
letting it shine through their scars and light the way for others.
Stop waiting for Prince Charming…
Get up and go, find him, the poor fool may be in need of a good rescue
Heck he could be stuck in a tree or something
Why the hell were the public schools so zealous back in the day about requiring book covers? In the Longwood School District, you actually got in trouble if your invaluable, publicly issued tome was without one.
Seriously, why? Hardcover textbooks were sturdy; they weren’t the frikkin’ Dead Sea Scrolls. Nor did the average student throw them off of overpasses or in front of passing trains or whatever. (In college, I threw my “Statistics of Psychology” textbook out of a second story window once, but that was a political statement.)
In retrospect, the practice of converting brown paper grocery bags to book covers seems a little ghetto. But you know what? I think most of the kids I knew did it, instead of using store-bought book covers. (We WERE the 99 Percent.)
My Longwood High School Alum Tim Gatto posted on Facebook recently about how a bunch of the guys wrote their favorite quotes and song lyrics on their books. (I picked up on that trend from him.) As Tim pointed out, it was Facebook before there was Facebook.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 