New Comics (Comey + The Summit)

Some doodles to pass the time.

First, Comey commentary:

James Comey on George
Stephanopoulos's show

And second, since the "Summit" between North Korea and the corrupt chaotic gang running the US will supposedly take place at some point soon (June? never), here's a prediction (if they pull off a real peace deal, they'll earn my thanks):

The Summit

A Few Comics

From time to time to amuse myself I draw comics, I guess you could call them. They're really visual gags. I've posted a few in the past, and here are three new ones. My apologies if any of the text isn't clear, but my usual handwriting can veer between post-calligraphy and hieroglyphics.

Please click on the image to see a larger version, and enjoy!

Hail the Combover

The Mustache Reigns

Cheshire Tillerson

All copyright © John Keene, 2018.

Paul Beatty Wins Man Booker Prize

(Photo by John Phillips/Pool photo via AP)

Congratulations to Paul Beatty, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize, for his novel The Sellout! Paul is the first Americanever to receive this prize, which the Booker Prize organization opened up in 2014 to all novelists writing in English, and is the second black writer in a row to receive the award, after Marlon James, who received it for his volume A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the third over all, with Ben Okri, the first black writer to receive the Booker back in 1991 for The Famished Road. Paul's novel is a hard-hitting, sometimes harsh satire about the United States, American history, slavery, segregation, and racism, and hardly relents from its blistering opening pages to its conclusion. 

I first met Paul over 25 years ago when he was among the initial readers at the Dark Room Writers Collective. He had just published his first book of poems, Big Bank Take Little Bank, and had recently won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe poetry slam. Each of the poems in that has narrative force, but it wasn't until Paul published his acclaimed novel White Boy Shuffle (1996) that the world, I included, realized he was not only a poet of originality and talent but a fiction writer to reckon with. He has since published another volume of poetry, Joker Joker Deuce (1994), as well as two more novels, Tuff  (2000) and Slumberland (2008), and as befits a master of satire, he edited Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor, in 2006. 

Congratulations again to Paul, and a hat tip to the Man Booker Prize jury for its excellent and unanimous decision!

Poem: Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen (from Reed College's website)

Since I'm going to be very busy the rest of this week (cf. the next post), I need to be more concise with these introductions, and so today I've selected a poem that requires the reader do a bit of the heavy lifting, though it really isn't that tough--though the poem is "heavy," in the sense that people of my father's (50s and 60s) generation used to use that term, which is to say, complex and profound. The poem is "Any Lit," and the poet is one of my favorites, Harryette Mullen (1953-). She once gave me and everyone else in the poetry workshop she was teaching an excellent bit of advice, which was: instead of waiting for the right time to write, to devote even a tiny sliver of each day towards writing a poem--or writing anything--and so by the end of every week, every month, every year, you'd have something before you. It's not always so easy to do, but it does work!

Harryette has published seven books of poetry, and I first learned about her work from members of the Dark Room Writers Collective, who had come across her second, highly innovative book, Trimmings (1991), which formally riffs off the work of an experimental predecessor, Gertrude Stein, suffusing Steinian language with even more play, eros and soul. Harryette was on her way, and the poem, a quintessential example of her work over the last few years, below demonstrates her playfulness, wit and humor, but also her rigor. It utilizes formal constraints but in a different way than rhetoricians urging a close study of Quintilian or Oulipo poets wielding n+7 techniques by combining many of the rules, which is to say, mechanisms of possibility, of the two. So there is the rhetorical device of the anaphora that launches each line, and the epistrophic repetition of the final word beginning with "m," with the constraint that the fourth word in each line has to possess the initial sound "u," as in "yew," followed by the words "beyond my." The regularity creates anticipation as you read and listen, since you have a sense of what's coming but you are continually surprised. Then there is the issue of these metaphorical comparisons in analogical relation, creating their own logic line by line, but then collectively creating a logic (or illogic), that feels like an apt figure for literature or, more specifically poetry. 

Okay, it sounds crazy, but look at what this poet does with it. I find it can't get her poems out of my head for a while after reading a few of them. You are a euchre beyond my Mah Jongg.... A great teacher as well as person, Harryette is a professor of English at UCLA, and in addition to her poetry has published important scholarly and critical works, and fiction. I would love to see what she might do with (and to) a novel!

ANY LIT

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone
You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia
You are a union beyond my meiosis
You are a unicycle beyond my migration
You are a univese beyond my mitochondria
You are a Eucharist beyond my myocardiagram
You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur
You are a eureka beyond my maitai
You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper
You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird
You are a unit beyond my mileage
You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind's eye
You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key
You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe
You are a Utah beyond my microcosm
You are a Uranus beyond my Miami
You are a youth beyond my mylar
You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia
You are a Ukrainian beyond my Maimonides
You are a Euclid beyond my miter box
You are a Univac beyond my minus sign
You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro
You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan
You are a U-boat beyond my mind-control
You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma
You are a eurethra beyond my Mysore
You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow
You are a ubiquity beyond my minority
You are a eunuch beyond my migraine
You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness
You are a urinal beyond my Midol
You are a uselesness beyond my myopia

Copyright © Harryette Mullen, "Any Lit," from Sleeping with the Dictionary, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. All rights reserved.

Poem: Nicanor Parra

One of the living greats, Nicanor Parra (1914-), whom I posted about last December on the occasion of his receipt of the Cervantes Prize, has among his delectable trove the following gem, a poem written to young (and all) poets, that could serve as a distillation of his entire approach to poetry, and a guide for any poet--or writer, for that matter--who thinks that she must follow one school or style or method. The ultimate challenge is always the one Parra, in his witty way, identifies. Here goes:

YOUNG POETS

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing 
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

Copyright © Nicanor Parra, translated by Miller Williams, from Poems and antipoems, Edited by Miller Williams. Translators: Fernando Alegría and others. New York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1967. All rights reserved.