by Mark Bibbins, Editor

When California Arrives It Lasts All Year

Dreadful sorry and packed for balmy air,
I’ve no use for this shudder of adventure,
these conspiracy-worn streets puffed with pollen and froth.

There’s nothing like nurture to seduce a frontier
into collapse. In a cavern, in a canyon,
violet roses hung like bats.

I bend myself over the bed this time
just to see if I break, and when I don’t
I belly up, sick from the rotten bill of goods

I keep selling myself, herring boxes without tops.
It’s not that I didn’t exist here,
ankle deep in the foaming brine.

I have tried to keep the chalkboard clean
even as dust clapped a cloud about my head. I came here to learn, no?
And all I do is cover my ears. Please, no more recollection.

I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you.

Lynn Melnick’s first book of poems, If I Should Say I Have Hope, is just out from YesYes Books.

Sit down by the fire and warm yourself up with a whole bunch more poems and stuff. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“More than one-third (36%) of Americans who live in the South agree that God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event, compared to nearly 3-in-10 (28%) Americans who live in the Midwest, 1-in-5 (20%) Americans who live in the Northeast, and 15% of Americans who live in the West. Republicans (25%) are, however, equally as likely as Democrats (28%) and independents (26%) to agree that God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event.”
 — It’s almost time for America’s annual passion play. Let’s hope God can take a break from killing Muslim kids in Syria to bless the most-deserving group of gigantic millionaires scratching their anuses through tight colorful leggings this Sunday.

“The Municipal Transportation Agency — and residents’ love-hate relationship with the notoriously late and overcrowded public transit system — has been the bane of many mayors, with current Chronicle columnist and former Mayor Willie Brown once famously saying he would fix Muni in 100 days. That was in 1995.”
 — Even though San Francisco has the only real public-transit system of the Western United States, it’s still kind of a mess. It’s also what New Yorkers talk about during the three months they spend shivering in the frozen dark of winter: “Oh but that Muni system, that’s why I could never live in a beautiful coastal city where it never gets cold but ladies can still always wear boots and gentlemen can always wear a suit without being sweaty.” Anyway, surprisingly successful Mayor Ed Lee (he got Twitter and a bunch of other fancy tech firms to move to the former abandoned hobo land of Mid-Market) just announced he’s going to “fix” Muni.

Photo by Torbakhopper.

The year 1845 was a time of unimaginable deprivations: No smart phones, no Twitter, no Words With Friends, plus there was a lot of cholera, and those Irish street gangs, and also slavery somewhere. The Gowanus Canal was not just a repulsive sewage channel and heartbreaking symbol of environmental devastation, but a primary means of public transport through Brooklyn — construction on the great bridge to Manhattan wouldn’t be begin for another quarter century. And on this day in 1845, it was probably also very cold.

For a mostly unknown writer and poet from Baltimore, January 29 was one of his last good days. The New York Evening Mirror published his poem “The Raven,” which became an immediate sensation for a people without Hulu or Vine. Edgar Allan Poe had already sold it to The American Review, which was a political journal kind of like the National Review except that it wasn’t a non-profit blog full of racism and idiocy. Poe received nine dollars from the magazine, which published “The Raven” in February. And then the content was “scraped” by the rest of the parasitic media, so Poe became famous but not at all rich from his labors.

His young wife/cousin would soon be dead, and Poe himself was in the grave a few years later. He was buried in Baltimore on October 9, 1849. And his obituary, a bizarre fiction written by a lunatic enemy of Poe’s, appeared on that same day in the New York Tribune. It is the source of, among other slanders, the commonly held belief that Poe was an opium addict. The lunatic, an editor named Rufus Wilmot Griswold, had in 1842 become obsessed with hatred for the mild-mannered Baltimore writer. Somehow — meaning, “exactly what you would expect from a venomous sociopath New York editor” — the Baptist religious fanatic Griswold also became the legal executor of Poe’s literary estate. The poem, by the way, reportedly follows a rhyme scheme of AA,B,CC,CB,B,B, although some say it’s ABCBBB.

Photo by Laura Crane.

Okay, no matter how you feel about Simon Rich, there is no getting around the fact that this is FUNNY. Go forth and chuckle.

‘IT’: Seriously, Guys, Get Out Of Maine Before You Die Terribly

What a great labor of love it is to discuss Stephen King’s most magnificent octopus (okay, technically, I guess that would be The Stand, but I didn’t read it until a year ago, so it didn’t make as significant a dent in my psyche) in our august online publication. Let’s stick to the novel, but you are free to go bananas about the Tim Curry television movie in the comments. For the record, you’ll never watch him as “Rooster” in Annie the same way again (thank the Turtle she wound up with Daddy Warbucks instead). I guess when you have a mouth that looks like a yawning maw of terror, you’re gonna play a lot of roles that involve menacing children, no? YES.

IT is my favorite. I think King has better books, and he certainly has better novellas, but IT is really the ur-King. You’ve got the total-terror-fest factor, of course, the children-in-danger factor, the inappropriate-sexuality factor (hang on, hang on, we’ll get there), the Neil Young lyrics (“Out of the blue and into the black”), the abusive-husband factor, the saying-weird-things-in-lower-case-italics-factor…

the deadlights… down here we all float

(Argh, even typing that freaked me out. I bought the book at a mall when I was ten-ish and read the whole thing sitting on the bench outside the store, because I knew I would not want to associate any part of my bedroom with the book on an ongoing basis, y’know?)

But, really, it’s the creepy dark historicity that makes this Classic King. Derry isn’t just evil, it has always been evil. The last two centuries have been evil. Evil is on a ROTATIONAL SCHEDULE in Derry. It’s all “oh, okay, things are only awful here this year,” and then “oh, no, literally thirty percent of the town’s children will die in a variety of ways this year.” The fire at the Black Spot, the tramp-chair, those horrible photographs that move, etc. We all (or not, you do you) enjoyed “this next book is about… an evil lamp!” on “Family Guy,” but Stephen King is really about places of despair and cruelty that seep down and infect subsequent generations. I guess Maine is a real place, and people live there and probably have, like, cookouts and ball games and stuff, but how on EARTH do you live anywhere near the Kenduskeag Stream and not assume there are quiet, horrible forces seeking boymeat in your near vicinity?

Stephen King is so iconic to me for childhood depictions now that I automatically assume anyone older than me had a The Body/ITchildhood. “So, when you were a kid, you sat around reading dirty magazines and smoking in your tree fort and talking about dicks and calling each other a-holes and writing wistful poems for red-haired girls, right?” “No, I am an eighty-year-old woman, and this is not something you should ask strangers on a bus.”

Speaking of children, I had one of those “oh, shit, I’m a mom” moments when I cracked this open for the re-read, got four sentences in, remembered that six-year-old George Denbrough was about to have his arm ripped off by Pennywise the Clown while playing innocently with his stupid newspaper boat, said NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE OCTOPUS GIF and skipped ahead. Let the fictional pre-teens and the middle-aged suffer and die, I ain’t watching Georgie float. And yo, Bill, get off your freaking flu-y ass and go help your brother with the damn boat. And their parents! Who is letting their six year old play in a flooded gutter unattended? It would be bad enough in, like, Montclair, NJ, but this happens to be a town sitting on a wellspring of eternal evil.

The first wheel of terror takes place in the late 1950s, and there are so many great parenting/teaching/peer respect fails here (apart from the obvious “Bev’s Abusive Dad” plot arc, which definitely blew my hair back as a ten year old with super-progressive hippie parents), that ideally, if we all sat down and read it together, our society would be rid forever of its weird 1950s nostalgia. Because people didn’t know about suffocation hazards, you’ve got an OBVIOUSLY mentally disturbed child collecting dead animals in an abandoned refrigerator in the woods. Guys, seriously, you have to take the doors off those things when you throw them out. You have a little 80s-era gay-bashing to signal when the badness has returned (mad ups to King, though, for taking a hard line on a real-life gay-bashing). Then there’s the asthmatic kid making it up for attention who should be denied his medication at will. (I know, I know, he WAS making it up,* but it’s the general principle here.) Oh, and look, a stuttering child. It’s not like they had The King’s Speech back then, or anything. You just got taunted until you fought off a demonic force by THRUSTING YOUR FISTS AGAINST THE POSTS until you no longer cared about the cruelty of your fellow children, because you’d had sex with another child in order to… something?

Which brings us to the Inappropriate Sexuality factor. Why did our heroes all have to have sex with Bev? I never quite got it. I mean, I’m definitely happy that Stephen King decided to give the poor fat kid a huge penis. (“It’s nice they get something, because they have a hell of a time.” — Life of Brian, on the meek inheriting the earth.) I just am legit not clear why that large penis had to enter another child. I guess the idea was that it would help them “stay together,” or “not get separated in the tunnel” or something, but if any of you went to a weird college and wrote a dissertation on the subject, please do share in the comments.

* Well, not “making it up.” He had a psychosomatic illness brought about by his mother, who was running the Bates Motel at the time.

Lessons Learned From IT and Never Forgotten

• If you decide something has totemic significance to you, it will probably help you defeat malevolent paranormal forces, even if it is kind of dumb, like knowing the names of birds.

• Don’t take balloons from strangers. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t make eye contact with strangers. Stay in your own room or a well-lit mall, reading books and keeping your grades up and making plans to move to New York, where the ghosts are more like Ghostbusters-ghosts.

• Bad places to hang out: the woods surrounding your haunted town, water towers, gutters, empty refrigerators, Easter egg hunts in abandoned factories, libraries after closing.

• Don’t date people who hit you.

• Don’t begin relationships with people who remind you of your dad, who hit you.

• Don’t try to hug it out with your childhood bully.

• Before getting married, ask your fiance(e) if they have any odd feeling of attachment to their hometown, and think they might have engaged in a child sex orgy in an attempt to fight off eternal extraterrestrial evil and might someday need to return to finish the job.

• If so, let them go, but do not follow them under any circumstances and take out a decent life insurance policy against their safe return.

• When you get your period, take the box of tampons out from under the sink and say: “YOU ARE MY CHILDREN, I FEED YOU WITH MY BLOOD.” That probably works with the Diva Cup, too.

• Maine is fucking terrifying, and you should avoid it at all costs.

• Don’t/you can’t go home again.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• Did you read King’s op-ed on gun violence? He talks about Rage, which came out in 1977 and which many of us read before it got yanked, and others found in used book stores. You should probably hang onto your copy, it’ll be worth something some day.

• IS this the scariest Stephen King novel? What’s your counter-proposal?

• What are your thoughts on Tim Curry? Be exact, do not be brief.

• Okay, what is the single scene/image/line that burned itself onto your brain?

• Sometimes the lyrics become ridiculous, though: “Born down in a dead man’s town.” — Bruce Springsteen. I do not think Bruce was really thinking about gouts of blood coming out of the sink, Stephen. It was more the loss of American manufacturing in the heartland, or something. I don’t know, didn’t David Remnick have a big piece about it?

• The problem with writing about IT is that “it” is also a really common word, so each time you have to decide if IT or “it” makes more sense. Why did King do that to me?

• Remember how Pennywise’s eyes would change to a color that would be comforting to you, personally? What would Pennywise’s eyes look like to you? To me, Pennywise would have empty, bleeding sockets, because it would mean I had gouged them out and run away to a public place.

Previously in Classic Trash: ‘Twilight Series’: Bite Me Four Times Shame On Me

Nicole Cliffe is the books editor of The Hairpin and the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

“R&B; singer Frank Ocean intends to press charges against bully boy Chris Brown for punching him and starting an all-out brawl outside Westlake Studios in West Hollywood on Sunday night. Police want to talk to Brown, who is still on probation for beating up Rihanna on the eve of the 2009 Grammy Awards. Ocean, who publically came out in July as a bisexual, is ‘desirous of prosecution,’ L.A. Sheriff’s Office spokesman Steve Whitmore told The Post. ‘We’ll find out what happened.’”
 — Two new trends: 1) R&B; singers using their fists like street thugs. 2) Police officers using their words like R&B; singers.

“She confidently asserts that the tapes are not faked, and that the vocal range is too broad to be made by a human. She also suggests that Bigfoot individuals have a language, possibly including ‘Sasquatch swear words.’”

“Apparently the avenues by which lusty millennials come to grope and perchance know one another are brusque, confused and rife with deception, and probably aren’t reliable precursors to unions of enduring bliss. Which is to say: they’re as imperfect as they’ve always been. While we Homo sapiens have paired off in diverse methods across disparate epochs, we’ve seldom done it with ample information or any particular finesse. There was no saner, better yesteryear: just a different set of customs, a different brand of clumsiness.”
 — The Times’ Frank Bruni talks sense in the wake of the Manti Te’o scandal and that other recent example of our semi-annual bout of hysterical handwringing over the notion that things are different for kids today.

“Is it any wonder that virtually all Wall Street ‘professionals’ are habituated sociopaths who lie for a living just to skim a few pennies (metaphorically speaking: make that millions of “other people’s” dollars in the real world). And is it any wonder that all banks demand their inner workings never see the light of day so they can operate in absolute secrecy, and exchanges like the above, and 22 more, are never read by the public.”
 — Would you like to be a fixed income trader? Well, that era is ending, but it was a good grift. (via)