Crumbling Slowly, Part 4

Part 4 of Crumbling Slowly Down to the Ocean is now running at L.A. Taco:

I sipped my Maker’s Mark and shrugged indifferently. “I dunno. He’s having a colonoscopy? A guy named Hector Escobar sounds like he needs a colonoscopy. I have visions of undigested carne asada and chunks of green salsa in his colon. It’s not a good prognosis.”

“Do you want to know about Hector Escobar or not?”

“Rock on.”

Read Hector Escobar

“Mr. Bukowski’s Wild Ride” Book Cover

Look, kids, it’s finally here! The front cover art for Mr. Bukowski’s Wild Ride, the new chapbook due for publication the week of July 1, 2008, and for sale through consignment arrangement at that fine San Francisco retail outlet and literary legend, City Lights Books; we will slowly branch the book out from that launch into other indie bookstores. Book orders can also be placed online through Lulu.

The fine artwork was provided by Gent Sturgeon, the kind-hearted and affable art books buyer for City Lights. The layout and design was by my own Miss L and I think she did a helluva job … Well, okay, I was looking over her shoulder the whole time and saying, “No, move the sun there, and let’s put a palm tree there, and … I’ll be damned. It looks like he’s standing on the edge of a desert, cigarette in one hand, beer can in the other, with such a bemused expression …”

More on the exhausting production of the book later — it’s hard to believe we’re finally coming down to the end of the production cycle of the job — but we have a terrific intro from the eloquent Joseph Mailander, a nice preface by Harry Calhoun, who once published Bukowski in chapbook form, a kind foreword by poet David Barker, a terrific afterword by Vaughn Croteau of Plug Nickel Press, and a sharp back cover blurb by our dear old friend, mystery novelist John Shannon.

The Perils of Excavating in Quarries While Drunk

Did you know that in his time Franz Kafka was a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmens Comp institute in the Czech lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Neither did I. Explains his bleak outlook and penchant for looking under stones best unmoved. Yet it does not explain why John Grisham, who was also a practicing lawyer, can’t write for shit.

In December of this year — just in time for Christmas — Princeton University Press is releasing a 440-page doorstop, Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, bringing together, for the first time in English, “Kafka’s most interesting professional writings” as a professional bureaucrat (so he was a part of the system he feared) and sharp litigator.

These documents include articles on workmen’s compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka’s writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Beautifully translated, with valuable commentary by two of the world’s leading Kafka scholars and one of America’s most eminent civil rights lawyers, the documents cast rich light on the man and the writer and offer new insights to lovers of Kafka’s novels and stories.

Coming up next are lost marlin fishing manuals from Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson’s grade school compositions.

Related: Kimberlea, Kafka the Fraud, An Extraordinary Czechoslovakian Jew, Kafka at the Black Sea, and Bukowski’s Metamorphosis

Crumbling … Part 3

Part 3 of my 10-part fiction series for L.A. Taco is up and running:

I had to get to know her a little better first; in this part of Hollywood, jumping into a car with a stranger, no matter how attractive and appealing the imagination of the libido can make it sound, can be counterproductive to one’s attempts to remain above ground. Just ask the unclaimed bodies resting in shallow graves up in the Angeles National Forest.

Read Crumbling Slowly Down to the Ocean, Part 3: The Moss Foundation

Poetic Justice

Dateline: Middlebury, Vermont.

First, the crime:

On Dec. 28, a 17-year-old former Middlebury College employee decided to hold a party and gave a friend $100 to buy beer. Word spread. Up to 50 people descended on the farm, the revelry turning destructive after a chair broke and someone threw it into the fireplace.

When it was over, windows, antique furniture and china had been broken, fire extinguishers discharged, and carpeting soiled with vomit and urine. Empty beer cans and drug paraphernalia were left behind. The damage was put at $10,600.

Twenty-eight people — all but two of them teenagers — were charged, mostly with trespassing.

And the crime scene …

The vandalism occurred at the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, where poet Robert Frost spent more than 20 summers before his death in 1963. Now owned by Middlebury College, the unheated farmhouse on a dead-end road is used occasionally by the college and is open in the warmer months.

Then the punishment …

More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost’s former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.

Using “The Road Not Taken” and another poem as jumping-off points, Frost biographer Jay Parini hopes to show the vandals the error of their ways — and the redemptive power of poetry.

“I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property in the future and would also learn something from the experience,” said prosecutor John Quinn.

There you go …