Greetings. There is a dead bee on the window sill behind my desk at school. I killed it at least three months ago. Putrescent it is not. I wonder why decay has not set in it. Perhaps the cold draft coming in from the window has sustained it.

“For most people, the name Pavlov rings a bell (pun intended).” Excerpt from reading. I can’t tell if I hate this statement or am subtly seduced by its resolute dorkitude.


August Kleinzahler is a poet who came from New Jersey and now makes San Francisco his home. I just read his book of memoir-ish essays, Cutty, One Rock. Nick Flynn is a poet who lived in Boston for a long time and now owns a house in upstate New York. I just read his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. We are all hungry for authentic experience, and memoirs are but one feeder stream that feeds into the greater Gulf of AE. This is how I made sense of my recent memoir run.

These are different books. Kleinzahler has a discriminating eye for sources of cognitive dissonance that we do not notice because they are almost ever-present. He takes on cant without onanistic cheerleading about how being un-PC makes him cool; the attention he does pay to himself is deprecating and reveals charisma at the same time. All in all, I would like to be a poet in San Francisco who does what he does. Incidentally, if you deign to listen to NPR on occasion, here is the opening paragraph of (and link to) Kleinzahler’s polemic against Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac:

Readers may remember how the U.S. military blared Van Halen and others at the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, when he took refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City during our invasion of Panama years ago. This method of rousting the wicked proved so successful that it was repeated during the recent Afghan experience, when heavy metal chart-busters were unleashed on caves thought to be sheltering Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. The English Guardian newspaper reported last year that we were breaking the wills of captured terrorists, or suspected terrorists, by assaulting them first with heavy metal followed by "happy-smiley children's songs." The real spirit cruncher turns out to be the "Barney, I Love You" song played for hours on end. Even the most hardened, sadistic killers buckle under "that kind of hell," or so asserted a reliable source. But if that fails to work, I suggest a round-the-clock tape of Garrison Keillor reading poems on his daily Writer's Almanac show.


(By the by, Keillor is himself a gifted polemicist. See e.g. his review of Bernard Henry-Levi’s book, the link to which is here and the equally polemical Hitchens response to Keillor is