(posts) the poem "Sure"

Sure
 —Arlene Tribbia

I miss my brother sure
he drank Robitussin
washed down with beer
sure he smoked dope
& shot heroin
& went to prison
for selling to
an undercover cop

& sure he robbed
the town’s only hot dog stand,
Gino’s like I overheard
while I laid on my bed
staring up at the stars
under slanted curtains

& sure he used to
leave his two year old
son alone so he could
score on the street

but before all this
my brother sure
used to swing me up
onto his back, run
me around dizzy
through hallways and rooms
& we’d laugh & laugh
fall onto the bed finally
and he’d tickle me
to death sure

a creative writing exercise on here

The sun blinks. The cells in this body never should have asked permission. The foreign bot-god could make another you to love the corpse you leave actually dead.

Things, special dead special things. God raising families of corpses night and day, rain or shine, until they negotiate mentally through oxygen and make a deal with the black angel.

Offer Satan my white horse and ask him, What is real? What made me and why? Buildings now ruins, people now dust.

Sign here and explode, angel. Leave the heir sterile living or dying. Promise to the black angel.

about "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave"

Dracula, dying alone, gasping, clawing at the skies, clawing at the cross behind him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Hammer released "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave" in 1968. I saw it when I was a little kid. This ending made an impression.

about a recently published obituary

The Wednesday, November 9 edition of The Dallas Morning News included an obituary that was written by the deceased. It is rather long; here is a link (which might expire) and four screenshots to try to catch it all.

 

https://www.restlandfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Richard-Shlakman/#!/Obituary

I enjoyed reading this, but it also reminded me of a scene from Young Hearts Crying, a Richard Yates novel. In the scene, a writer is working on a short biographical statement to go with his photo in his soon-to-be-published debut book; he gives the draft bio to his wife.

And this was the finished copy he brought out for Lucy's approval:

Michael Davenport was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1924. He served in the Army Air Force during the war, attended Harvard, lost early in the Golden Gloves, and now lives in Larchmont, New York, with his wife and their daughter.

"I don't get the part about the Golden Gloves," she said.

"Oh, honey, there's nothing to 'get.' You know I did that. I did it in Boston, the year before I met you; I've told you about it a hundred times. And I did lose early. Shit, I never even got beyond the third—"

"I don't like it."

"Look," he said. "It's good if you can work a light, self-deprecating touch into something like this. Otherwise, it's—"

"But this isn't light and it isn't self-deprecating," she told him. "It's painfully self-conscious, that's all it is. It's as though you're afraid Harvard may sound sort of prissy, so you want to counteract it right away with this two-fisted nonsense about prizefighting. Listen: You know these writers who've spent their whole lives in college? With their advanced degrees and their teaching appointments and their steady rise to full professorship? Well, a lot of them are scared to put that stuff on their book jackets, so they get themselves photographed in work shirts and they fall back on all the dumb little summer jobs they had when they were kids: 'William So-and-so has been a cowhand, a truck driver, a wheat harvester, and a merchant seaman.' Don't you see how ludicrous that is?"

another overly generous review—this time of an Italian death metal band's debut

The influences are classic, but new life runs through these veins

 

Miscreance debut a heavily and colorfully barbed wire of sound on Convergence. The opener “Flame of Consciousness” represents the album well—pointy riffs, deft musicianship, roaring vocals, impatient songwriting, slips of atmospheric interludes, and wildly smooth guitar solos.

 

Forty-two seconds into the second song, “Fall Apart,” a studded few moments of rapid double-bass drumming carry a ready-fire riff. Ten seconds later, the riff changes, and the throat opens up, roaring verbal warfare. And at 3 minutes the mood falls into the young dawn with a guitar solo rising in gorgeous tone.

 

“My Internment” opens with a staircase-climbing dual-guitar riff over a hokey and fun deep voice-over, but from atop the stairs come some of the album’s best vocals—raw, animalistic—enough to terrorize the neighborhood. And at 3:00, Miscreance finally finds a riff that can move you, and the band plays out the song.

 

The young Italians' white-high-top metal recalls genre pioneers Death. Miscreance also cites Atheist and Sadus as influences. But this young band is fresh. The only issue with Convergence is that, over and again on the album, the fun stops as quickly as it starts, and at times it seems no riff is too small.

 

The band issued a demo called From Awareness to Creation in 2018 and put three tracks on a split with Australia’s Vile Creation last November. Convergence was released September 19, 2022, in three formats via Unspeakable Axe Records, Danex Records, and Desert Wastelands Productions. The band plans to tour Europe with Chilean band Ripper in 2023.

 

something about going to Tulsa

Mr. Barnes,

I went to Tulsa once, more than 25 years ago, to visit my sister. She and her husband had just moved there so he could die near where he was born. He was diagnosed with cancer a few months into the marriage. The last time I saw him, he was in a hospital bed in Dallas, and his head was deformed and exploding with his disease. That visit was goodbye.

A few weeks later, I was pulled out of Spanish class so my family could join my widowed sister's side. I rode to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the back seat of my other sister's boyfriend's coupe—a Camaro. I felt the giddiness, nervousness, and melancholy one feels when one doesn't know what else to feel. But the mood in the Camaro was fine, with my other sister and her boyfriend magnetically alive and well. They seemed happy. Those two had great chemistry, like cocaine and alcohol.

In Tulsa, we found my parents, who had arrived from Dallas to console the inconsolable. My sister, 22, tragic, had been living with death in a strange city, and now death left her alone in that house. So she grieved, and we offered our presence as comfort. Little did I understand of sadness and grief.

(posts) the obituary for Stephanie Ambrose May, October 2020

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/dallas-tx/stephanie-may-9392010

something about Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms"

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms looks back at a love that fought in World War I. The lovers are Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley. Here is Fredric beginning his relationship with Catherine:

I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge, you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.

This passage stuck with me. Through most of the novel, I wondered if Frederic and Catherine really loved each other—or, at least, whether each loved the other at the same time. I thought that maybe they were lonely and scared and just wanted to love and comfort someone. She seemed to doubt his sincerity, and he seemed to be either keeping his distance or trying to persuade himself she was something more than she was. Then, by the end, their love—which of course is borne of loneliness and fear—becomes painfully real.

Catherine may be crazy, but she is a great and complicated character. She knew all along that their relationship was doomed.

I held her close against me and could feel her heart beating and her lips opened and her head went back against my hand and then she was crying on my shoulder.

"Oh, darling," she said. "You will be good to me, won't you?"

What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying. "You will, won't you?" She looked up at me. "Because we're going to have a strange life."

And one of my favorite Hemingway passages is this exchange between Catherine and Frederic:

"We won't fight."

"We mustn't. Because there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we're gone and then they have us." 

"They won't get us," I said. "Because you're too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave."

"They die of course."  

"But only once." 

"I don't know. Who said that?"  

"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?" 

"Of course. Who said it?" 

"I don't know." 

"He was probably a coward," she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them." 

 

Note:  A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929.