Appleman Triathlon 2008

Liz and Olga about to swim
As the Star Spangled Banner waved

How we are different from them

He’s the one that used to mow your lawn. His father remembers your father. They are fifth generation “landscape architects.” The grandfather used to own the farm that became this neighborhood. His uncle works in the industrial greenhouse. His mother works as a nurse’s aid. They are all around you. You think they only drink beer.

They have no history. They live for now, working just hard enough to pay for life’s necessities and a little extra. Tomorrow will be the same. Nice life. This is how they have lived for thousands of years. Ambition is something for the foolhardy dreamers that life leaves by the side of the road like so much roadkill. Ambitious men fail. The prodigal son was ambitious. It’s dangerous to dream, it wastes time and doesn’t feed the chickens, goats, horses or car. The only good ambition is getting a new roof on your shed, a new cast iron pot, a new knife, a new gun, a new car, a new HD TV. The only safe goal (it’s not quite an ambition) is getting that one more little thing that makes life enjoyable. Its all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock and roll. In whatever order you prefer, it doesn’t really matter as long as there is bread and circus.

For all their faults they are still the salt of the earth. Without them there would be no harvest, no tailor, no roads to drive that new car on. Someone has to do the work and they are both grateful and resentful at the same time that there is work to be done. You can count on them. They work hard and at the end of the day they die and their children work hard too. It has been this way for millennia and will be for many more. They are eternal and blind.

We are different of course. We have a vision! A vision not shared with them. It’s this vision, not ambition, that drives us and we pursue it with a blindness beyond foolish. A curse they say. They mock us when we fail and despise us when we succeed but without us there would be nothing. We built the pyramids with their labor. We painted the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel; we carved the pieta and build the Grand Coulee Dam; we said we would send men to the moon and we did.

We crafted each Civilization with our minds but we grew tired and let the Goths, the Huns, the Hordes in and presided over the last meeting of the Roman Senate. We built the great engines of industry and, when they fail they ask us to fix it. They won’t fix it, they can’t. We can’t always fix it ether; being mortal our vision is only so large, so comprehensive.

Our soul cries out to the Universe, to God: You made us in your image, perfect our vision, our wisdom, our understanding so that this time it will be perfect.

You want to melt into them. No cares, no worries, just life but your mother said you were special. “You come from a long line …,” she said, “You must be better than the best of them.”

Wilderness House Literary Review Volume 3 Numer 2

I am pleased to announce that the Summer 2008 issue of Wilderness House Literary review is now online. Of course it's the best issue yet. http://www.whlreview.com/

Louisa Solano Square

Louisa in all her glory.

After reading too much Bukowski

I walked to the shed to look for something I could pour down the gopher hole. The little bastard won’t go away and no matter how much fox piss I pour around my garden fence he just digs under it. I wonder what would happen if I poured fox piss down his hole or better yet pissed down the hole myself. No this time I need to kill the bastard.

Last summer I put up netting for my pees to climb but the gopher, blind as a bat, got ensnared and pulled down my pees, all four feet and his head wrapped up in at least 2 layers of netting. When I walked up to him with a pitchfork ready for the coup de grace he hissed at me and chattered his teeth. Ok I said to myself, get your self out of there; with luck the coyotes will eat you. For three days he squirmed and writhed in the net. Not a single coyote showed up, not a single goshawk, not a single predator big enough to munch on an oversized rat already trapped and ready to be served for dinner. I’m sure there were tens of thousands of flies, worms and other insects ready to devour a carcass but no one willing to do the initial deed.

After three days I relented. I went out to the garden with a pair of scissors, intent on cutting the carcass loose. At best I expected to find a dehydrated, compliant ball of fur ready for an easy passage to the great burrow in the sky or whatever passed for paradise in that pee-brained rodents head. Instead I found a furious, angry gopher more interested in extracting an ounce of revenge from me than passing quietly into that good night. I picked him up by the net while he wiggled, wreathed and swore at me as only an angry rodent can. I let him bite down as hard as he could on the scissors, my blood boiling up in petty sadism. I was ready to cut him free but he pissed me off. I poked at him with the scissors and contemplated impaling him on them but in the end I just cut him loose. He ran away and down his hole with the netting still wrapped around his hind feet. I jammed the pitchfork in his burrow entrance. If he wanted to visit my garden again he’d have to dig another hole. I didn’t see him for a year. I’d hoped he’d become fertilizer over the winter but I was wrong.

The first warm day in late April I saw the little bastard waddling around the yard like he owned the place. I tore out the back door grabbing a snow shovel I still hadn’t put away. I was going to brain the little SOB but he ducked down one of his holes just before I reached him. I slammed the snow shovel down over the open home hoping he’d poke his head out. That’s what I would have done if I was a curious rodent and I would have had my brains splattered all over the ground. Instead the snow shovel broke into a dozen pieces, the wooden handle split in two and the red plastic scoop just shattered. I jammed what was left of the wooden handle into the warren and vowed to get even. Nothing useful in the shed.

At the hardware store, how to kill a gopher? Have-a-heart traps? No better than the netting I caught him with last summer. Rattraps? I’d probably get the neighborhood dog. Smoke bombs? Yah! Four for $9. I took a dozen.

I went home and stuffed four smoke bombs down the hole the little bastard dove into when I chased him with a snow shovel. I put a large flowerpot over the opening and listened with satisfaction while the smoke bombs roared like four small rockets. Foul sulfurous smoke billowed up from a dozen holes in the yard. Where the smoke rose in feeble wisps I set off more bombs and repeated the procedure with every hole in the yard that looked promising. Near the porch was one last large rat hole I had overlooked but for the small wisp of foul smelling white smoke that gave it away. It was a large hole and recently used so I stuffed my last four smoke bombs inside, covered the hole with a flowerpot and sat back in the smug expectation that I had committed rodent genocide. As I was congratulating myself I noticed that smoke was rising from under the back porch, no matter I got the sucker.

One month later the sulfurous stench of anti-rodent smoke still fills my house. When I walk into the house I feel like barfing, until I get used to it. At least I killed that goddamned gopher … I think.

Found Art

This was found on Yahoo News.

The handwritten, a lyric essay

I once spent well over $200 on a Mont Blanc fountain pen. I used it for two or three years until the nib had worn down to a razor sharp edge that effortlessly sliced through the pages of my journal. The pen was guaranteed for life but exercising that guarantee included the cost of shipping, handling and insurance or more than the cost of a lifetime supply of cheap BIC pens. So I gave the pen body to a very grateful young lady who was starting a diary. For her, getting a second hand Mont Blanc was a paradise worth saving for: an investment of about $50, to get a world class writing instrument. I bought BIC pens (or their equivalent) in boxes of a dozen after that.

When I was in a scribbling mood I would take my journal to a café in Harvard Square Cambridge, usually the Café Pamplona (on the corner of Bow and Arrow Streets) in the evening or the Café Piroschka (in Holyoke Center on Dunster Street) in the morning, and scribble for several hours about life, love and my alternating bouts of ennui and angst. Most of what I wrote was awful but rain or shine I had promised myself that I would write at least one full page every day. At my peek I may have written ten, fifteen, twenty or more pages in longhand, day after day.

My goal was to teach myself how to write. I believed that since I could tell a good story I could learn how to write a good story and since telling a good story was a result of good mind – mouth coordination it made sense to me that writing a good story would require good mind – hand coordination. To that end I began a journal. I think the theory is mostly true and I think in practice it works. I wrote in longhand for years, writing around a million and a half words, but I ultimately turned to a typewriter then a computer but that would take much more than a decade.

At the beginning it was very difficult to find something suitable to write. I could talk to the other denizens of the café’s for hours then turn to my journal and have nothing at all to say. Those conversations have not been wasted; they have formed the basis for a lot of what I’ve written about over the years and some of my favorite characters were those I encountered the bars and café’s of Cambridge. I wrote about the weather more than once when I simply could not translate a story I could tell with my tongue into a story I could tell with my fingers. It’s not always an easy translation. There are many stories I’ve told “off the cuff” for years that I’m only just beginning to be able to write about. The truth is I still occupy two parallel linguistic universes, the one I can speak about and the one I can write about. I am finally more comfortable in the universe I can write about. I am so much smarter, wittier, and brilliant and articulate in print than in person.

In person I find myself getting angry when I cannot find the right word or remember the right fact in the middle of a conversation. I’ve wondered if, in person, I might have early onset of senility but my writing gets better and better.

People who write in journals are called diarists not journalists. Journalists are writers who, like formal poets, must write in a very strict format. The who, what, when, where and why of journalism starts with the most general statement about a news item (who got killed) and gets progressively more detailed as the story lengthens. The “juice” in a journalist work is always at the end. Newspapers and other purveyors of journalism are in the primary business of selling advertising space not literature so the honey only serves to drag a reader in front of advertisements, much like the unavailable but beautiful babes at a car show. The reason for the journalists form is that an editor should be able to arbitrarily cut from the bottom to make the article fit the available space. Very few journalists are truly accomplished in this art form and it shows in the butchery of articles on the inside pages of our nations daily newspapers. Editors cut to fit and articles often end abruptly, missing information hinted at but not delivered.

Diarists on the other hand write sequentially and most often about their personal lives or about the immediate world in which they live. There was a period in my life when I despaired of ever writing anything of import and I fantasized that my journals might define my era and be compared favorably to the diaries of Samuel Pepes. I read the abridged version of Pepes’ diaries and they contained the same kinds of stories I was writing about except that during the course of his writings he moved from being a middle class English civil servant to one of the highest appointed positions in England, that of Secretary to the Admiralty. The traditional British Admiralty Board consisted of an appointed politician known as The First Lord of the Admiralty, a position Winston Churchill held, The First Sea Lord, the top professional seaman and The Secretary to the Admiralty, the top civil servant, held by Samuel Pepes. Two hundred years separated Churchill from Pepes. The best I can say I did in the decade or so I was writing my diaries was to move from assistant art director at the East/West Journal to assistant art director at Sail Magazine. Not a lot to brag about when comparing myself to Samuel Pepes.

I wrote 15 ¼ volumes in longhand before abandoning my journals. I still occasionally pick up the last volume and scribble a paragraph or two but the sprit is gone and disuse of the muscles used to hold a pen now quickly lead to cramps. Before I began the journals I would outline a story on 4 x 6 cards in detail before beginning to write or type a rough draft. It was torture. I realized that if I was to become a fluid writer I needed to find a way to express myself on paper as easily as I could in air. After several false starts with a loose life folder I settled on a bound notebook.

Volume I was one of those green mottled cardboard backed “composition” notebooks sewn in one large signature with 120 pages. The idea of filling a book this size was daunting. I wrote the date on the cover: June 1, 1972. By the time I committed to this “journalism” I had already written quite a lot but had been hedging my future. Would writing remain a psychologically required hobby or would it play a large part in my economic future?

When I was in my early teens I announced to my mother that it was my intent to become a writer to which she wearily replied, “Well, you come by it naturally. You come from a long line of failed and petty literati.”

Writing had become a challenge, an urgent necessity that, at the age of 20, I felt I was not making the kind of progress I assumed I would be making if I were to become a professional writer. Drastic efforts were needed if I was to become accomplished, if posterity were to know my name. In the first page of Journal Volume I wrote with my fountain pen,

“June 1, 1972 – Today was the start of my new life. I woke up at 6:00 A.M. and wrote a letter to Suds Macklem (after my father died a neighbor, Suds Macklem, became my intellectual mentor). I told him that I had decided once and for all to become a writer.

What I had lacked was self-discipline. So to correct my lack of self-discipline I have taken several big steps, which, at least psychologically, help to order my mind. The major steps I have taken are to start this diary, get up at 6:00 A. M. everyday except Sunday and to write at least one hour every day before breakfast. …”

On Saturday, November 4 1972 I write,

“… It is a cold wet November day, almost winter. They say it’s snowing in western Massachusetts.
Poem {It is winter as the sky, that cold grey body that hovers, threateningly, over our heads from November till April, hangs low and absorbs every drop of heat with its cold, cold wind blown rain.}

I haven’t much energy today due to getting drunk last night, GAC, Casablanca. I can feel myself falling into a rut. When I started this journal I was destitute, I had no money, no job. Now I have a job …

It took me four months, almost to a day to complete this volume. It will take considerably longer for the next as it is 400 very large pages.”

An annotation on the inside back cover reads 40,000, my estimate of the number of words I had written. Not yet a novel.

The next 14 volumes were large smyth sewn signature “Record” books sold by the Harvard Coop. Volume II had 432 numbered pages. I began the volume on November 5th 1972 and finished May 17th 1973. The last entry was 6 pages long. I recorded that I was paid $10 for the pilot chapter for a book on John Keats’ Ode On a Grecian Urn. The job was to write a “Cliff Notes” on a series of well-known poets. I did three or four sample chapters but Simon and Schuster eventually passed on the project. I debate on abandoning, temporally, my life in Cambridge for an adventure in Newfoundland. I eventually did but not for several more volumes. “It’s frustrating not doing anything and not being able to decide what to do,” I wrote, “I am riddled with indecision.” I agonized about going into the typesetting business and where to raise the money if I did. I end with, “I have, in the confines of this volume gone from abject poverty to relative opulence and back to poverty again. On the other hand I have a lot more experience now than I did 100,000 words ago.” On the endleaf I note: “total words since June 1, ~150,000.”

For twelve more volumes I scribbled every day. Poetry, philosophy, and outlines of books I wanted to write, snapshot portraits of characters and a never-ending series of complaints about my love life, ennui or angst.

Volume XIV (14) was the last volume I completely finished by hand. I had given up my fountain pen by volume III and by the end of volume 14 I was no longer obsessed with my daily entries. I began on August 11, 1980 and finally filled the last of 432 pages on February 10, 1986. The last entry was, “The next volume will be generated electronically and bound in a three ring notebook.” and so it was. After three hundred or so pages of complaints about my life I bought another bound “journal” but it was not the same. My hands cramped when I attempted to write longhand. My writing just “petered out.”

By 1986 my life as a professional writer was at a standstill. I had not sold a literary piece in years. I had abandoned literary writing, abandoned graphic design and academia. For the next 15 years I wrote technical books, political diatribes and “edgy” columns in technical magazines. My daughters became the center of my life and I gave away my Everyman’s edition of the Diaries of Samuel Pepes.

A Feminist Manifesto

My daddy was a southern gentleman. He was taught to venerate women, to acknowledge the superior position women held as progenitors of the species. Men, he was taught (and firmly believed), had to find their own way, create their own reason for existing and as a result had to seek challenges. Men become bankers, lawyers, engineers, and artists, whatever their egos and imaginations conjured up, and they told themselves over and over again that it was important. They told their woman how important they were and their women smiled. Being important or rather being more important than the next fellow was the only real goal men could achieve.

My daddy also said that you should hold doors open for women and otherwise help women not because it was chivalrous but because without women civilization would collapse, because women carry the burden of the future, because everyone in every society knows it’s the right thing to do. That’s why even in war women are generally exempted. In this respect women were lucky he would say. They held the preeminent position of importance simply by having a womb and could, without working very hard, hold positions of great consequence.

Sometime in the mid 1970’s I held a door open for a woman walking behind me into a store, letting her pass through first. She turned to me, glared, slapped me as hard as she could and screamed, “Sexist pig!” Times had changed. The venerated position woman held in societies imagination was crumbling. We had entered an era where women were no longer honored, venerated and otherwise protected from the world at large. Indeed women no longer wanted that protection and some angrily and aggressively sought to abolish any and all vestiges of the old system. My daddy would have been appalled.

For women living in an era where infant mortality was high, the simple maintenance of the population was an all out effort and a permanent requirement of every capable woman in society. No wonder she was honored and largely exempted from male warfare. For most of man and woman’s existence, for tens of thousands of years, this was the norm and many villages, towns, states, societies and civilizations have collapsed as a result of insufficient fertility. The Age of Chivalry was characterized by repeated plagues that decimated the population or worse so an active, breading population of women was essential to survival and everyone knew it.

By October 25 1889, the day my daddy was born in Baltimore Maryland, the telephone and light bulb had recently been invented and August Auto had just built the first working internal combustion engine. The telegraph was 50 years old, transatlantic cablegrams were 25 years old and a transpacific cable a long 16 years away. The World still loomed large. My granddaddy, Stephen Douglas Glines, was born in 1861, a Civil War baby. In 1889, almost everyone’s father or grandfather fought in the war. Before the Civil War surgery was a brutal affair performed without anesthesia of any kind. In its wake, the Civil War left hundreds of thousands of veterans with missing limbs or painful injuries ameliorated for the first time with morphine and ether. Surgery became safer and Caesarian births became almost endurable and very survivable. The population began to explode but two world wars had the same effect as the plague on fertility rates, women had to produce to make up for the millions lost. And make up they did with the help of antibiotics and other marvels of modern medicine. In less than 100 years the population of the world grew from less than one billion people to almost six billion. Women had performed admirably.

Now what? By the mid 1970, after I had been forcefully awakened to feminist ideas, there was talk of drastic overpopulation in the world. China reached one billion people and began enforcing a one child per family law. The birth control pill decoupled childbirth from sex and the United States (as well as most of the “developed” world) began a long period of declining population growth from births, unsustainably low fertility rates. In the nearly 40 years since 1970 the population of the United States added 100 million people, mostly from third world immigration. Women as bearers of children lost their worth and became as misplaced as men in their search for personal meaning.

Bras were burned, demands were made and laws were changed. By the turn of the 21st century women had pushed their way into the boardrooms of the Fortune 500, into the Presidencies of first, second and third world countries and into the forefront of the arts and letters. In 2007 more women attended college than men and college presidents were lamenting the need to lower the standards for men so as to keep sexual parity in the classroom. As the father of two college graduate daughters (and no sons) I cheer their professional and personal growth and understand that my own legacy – my name will not survive – depends as much on what they produce professionally as any offspring they may have in the future. Such offspring, the lineal descendant of someone else, with another’s name not mine, are of interest to me as grandchildren to be spoiled but my true legacy will be in the great works of art my daughters will produce, in the great novels or magnificent screenplays or towering monuments to civilization they create, a gift to future generations that will bear their name, my name. How can I be anything but a feminist?

Over the past few millennia the male of the human species has contributed the majority of the intellectual vigor to society. This is not to say that had women been given equal access to education over this epoch they would not have made an equal or greater contribution. My own single antidotal observation made in the 1970’s was that on average women are far brighter than an equal cohort of men. When I was a college undergraduate I spent many hours at Radcliffe College before it allowed itself to be swallowed up by Harvard University. I spent an equal amount of time at Harvard itself. As a whole the women of Radcliff were the brightest group of individuals I have ever met. That cannot be said for the men of Harvard College who, in the early 1970’s, were as a lot, far duller than that august University would want anyone to believe.

If the women of that generation, my generation, succeeded it’s because the services of their wombs were largely deprecated. Women, like men, needed a reason to exist so off they went to the universities, the trade schools and the military. Today we gleefully send women off to war, appoint them to our corporate boards and perhaps elect them president. It’s a heady time to be a woman and a grand time to be a father of two.

But shadows appear on the cracking walls:

In China the one child per couple law has an unintended consequence: In most modern societies a male heir is considered desirable as the carrier of the family name. In China female babies are regularly aborted in favor of the only child being a male. This has lead to a relative decline in the female population and while the population continues to grow there is a looming population collapse beginning around 2030. One child per couple is not a sustainable fertility rate and with fewer and fewer female children China will face a dramatic crash in its population.

In the United States, the European Union and even in post Soviet Russia the fertility rates have fallen below that needed to sustain the current population. With an aging populace economic demands on the working population require full participation and greater efficiency by both sexes. Women have achieved full equality! Is that what you expected? But economic efficiency has its limits, people can only work so many hours. Without a growing population business stagnates. The population and economy of North America is being maintained largely by a massive influx of Spanish speaking immigrants, both legal and illegal. In the European Union the same thing is happening with a similar influx from Moslem countries, Turkey and North Africa. Only Russia faces a real immediate decline in population with slim hopes of a near term population rebound and little net immigration. Improving efficiency and the labor of women in the workforce will allow Russia to grow economically but only for a while.

The world is changing. The imminent collapse of populations in China and Russia will probably bring a resurgence of the traditional roles for women if the societies are to remain structurally intact. It is unclear whether the social, political and intellectual advances made by women in these societies can be maintained in the face of these new demands. In the West, both in Europe and North America, a different change is taking place. Immigration from countries where infant mortality and fertility rates remains high is fundamentally changing the complexion the West. Will that end the remarkable intellectual and artistic renascence of women in the West? I don’t know but it is clear that in many parts of the world, modern medicine or not, a new generation women will have to give birth more often than they have in recent generations.

I hope, for the sake of my daughters and their daughters, that women will be able to do it all, be mothers to their children and contributors to the future in whatever other pursuits they choose. Only time will tell but for now I remain a cheerleader for my daughters and a stanch advocate of equal access and treatment everywhere. One can only hope that in future generations they will say of us, “That was a golden age.”

Wilderness House Literary Review Volume 2, number four released online

LITTLETON, MA – January 3 2008 – The Wilderness House Literary Review committee is pleased to announce that Volume 2 number 4 has been released on the Web. This edition of WHLReview.com includes works of fiction by novelist Anne Brudevold as well as short fiction by Denis Emorine, Murray Elias Denofsky, Shannon O’Connor, Thomas Wauhob and Werner A. Low. As well as essays by Elizabeth Glines, Jim Woods, Mignon Ariel King and Steve Glines and poetry by Anne Cammon, Bonnie Pignatiello Leer, Carolyn Gregory, Daniel Y Harris, Doug Holder, George Held, Helen R Peterson, Hugh Fox, Lyn Lifshin, Marc Jampole, Orvill Lloyd, R L Swihart and Tolu Ogunlesi.

Into the heart of Winter

I shiver and look upon a frozen vista
twisted and tortured
by air so cold life itself stops …
for a moment.

Between death and me is a thin pane of glass.
It divides this sheltered life from the cold.
A cold not so unspeakable that if that pane of glass broke
I could not save myself by walking to a neighbor
but cold enough that if I didn’t walk to a neighbor
I would die.

In our winter quarters, suspicious, careful,
sequestered in our chrysalis
we peer out our windows at our neighbors
and hope that they too understand
the tenuous hold we have on life.

My second good idea

On the use of a lock and key-like interface to determine characteristics of power distribution on a direct current power bus.

I don’t think I’m unique. Every once in a while I get a good idea and sometimes I get a really great idea. We all do. Who hasn’t had a “Eureka!” experience? You find yourself doing something you always done but the process or the device annoys you, just a little. Then you think to yourself, “Why don’t they make it this way or do it that way?” Eureka! You’ve just an invented something.

We usually don’t do anything about ideas like that. It simmers, stews in our brain, and then goes away, filed in that “someday I’ll do something about it” box. Once in a while we discover that someone has patented a device that works just the way you imagined it would years before and we kick ourselves. We never kick ourselves very hard, never hard enough to do anything about it. If we had patented the idea or even talked about the idea publicly then we might be able to get the patent invalidated because our idea is considered prior art but who has time, who has an economic incentive? Not me.

I’ve had two ideas good enough (so far) to file patents on. The first one would have improved the performance of the Internet cheaply by “caching” content in nearby locations. Companies like Akamai do it today but more expensively than I would have. Some “Venture Capitalists” were interested but then the dot com bubble burst and I abandoned the patent. Anyone can use it now if they want to. You can pay me to show you how.

Last summer I had another great idea. I have lots of computers here and a network befitting a small company as well as lots of gadgets requiring lots of AC power strips. I buy power strips in bulk. Staples once had a sale where you paid $5 for a power strip and you mailed in a rebate form for $5. The power strips were free. I bought about 20 of them. I used them all very quickly. Power strips are like socks in a dryer – they disappear. I had to buy more.

The reason I need more and more power strips is because every electronic “thingie” I have won’t just plug into a plain old 115 volt, 15 amp, 60 Hertz AC, 3 pronged plug. All my electronic devices run on 3 to 12 Volt DC power and have a power supply that plugs into a 115 Volt AC power receptacle. These power supplies reduce the voltage with a small transformer and “rectify” the power, turn it from alternating current into direct current with a diode bridge. Going any further is a technological rat hole from which I might not escape so let it suffice to say that a power supply is one of those brick like devices with prongs that plug into your 115 Volt AC wall socket that accompany your cell phones, etc. The problem with these bricks is that only one or two of them fit onto a standard power strip. If you’ve got five or six of these bricks then you may need two or three power strips “daisy chained” together. Each of those bricks burn energy even when the device isn’t on or being charged.

Eureka! Instead of an AC power bus why not a DC power bus where all the devices can plug in directly without needing a power brick? Brilliant! Except for the fact that each of those devices require a different voltage and current. Eureka! Why not have a plug that acts like a key describing the voltage to be supplied and the current to be allowed.
Oddly enough this revelation occurred at 3:40 a.m. I remember because it woke me up and I lay in bed wondering if I would remember it in the morning. I decided that I probably couldn’t so I got up and wrote most of my patent application before 6 a.m.

I let the idea sit for a couple of weeks, made some lousy drawings, filed the provisional patent application, waited, and waited and when the application acknowledgement arrived from the US Patent Office I rejoiced. Now I had a chance to get rich just like the fellow that invented the safety pin or safety razor.

Then, nothing happened. The world didn’t beat a path to my door. Somehow I always thought there were vultures that hung out at the patent office looking for inventions to mass-produce. If there are they missed my filing. Ok, if the world won’t beat a path to my door I’ll knock on some doors myself. There are a limited number of major corporations in the business of producing consumer power supplies and power strips. They are not hard to find so I created a package and send one to the legal/licensing department of every major corporation offering to license my invention. The only reply I got was a very defensive letter from a major Japanese electronics manufacturer stating flatly that nothing they manufactured violated my patent. Apparently their lawyers cannot read any better than their tech-writers can write manuals.

So ends, for now, the saga of my second good idea. It sits molding in a file draw at the United States Patent and Trademark office. To pursue a real, full patent would cost thousands of dollars or so they tell me. Which means that all those major corporations need only wait out the year a provisional patent offers protection before being free to use anything they want. At least I can say with pride, “Patent applied for.”

You can pick up a copy of the patent application here.

The boys of summer on the way home

It’s not often that I get a scoop but by being at the end a chain of emails from person or persons unknown I have three of the most revealing pictures of just who the members of our beloved Boston Red Sox team really are. No further comment is needed. I wish I knew who took the pictures. I’ll probably find out sooner or later – in the mean time enjoy.

Washoe, first of a new species to experience original sin, experiences death.

The news report said:

(AP) SPOKANE, Wash. - October 31, 2007 - Washoe, a female chimpanzee believed to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at a research institute.

Washoe, who learned American Sign Language in a research project in Nevada, died Tuesday night at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at Central Washington University's Ellensburg campus, said institute co-founders Roger and Deborah Fouts. She was born in Africa about 1965.

A memorial is planned for Nov. 12.

May god bless.

Nothing like tooting ones own horn

Wilderness House Literary Review and ISCSPress editors and authors are named Cambridge Massachusetts Poet Populist finalists.

The editors of ISCSpress would like to extend their congratulations to members of our community who have been named Cambridge Poet Populist finalists. The Cambridge Poet Populist is an informal office for a local poet, chosen by the people to represent poetry for the City of Cambridge.

The Poet Populist will facilitate the creation and appreciation of poetry throughout the city for all residents of Cambridge. The Poet Populist will maintain a schedule of public appearances throughout their one-year term in the position. The Cambridge City Council will award $1,000 for the first year.

Our finalists friends are:

Irene Koronas, is the poetry editor of Wilderness House Literary Review (whlreview.com) and author of “self portrait drawn from many,” Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville MA, 2007, http://www.lulu.com/content/929148. ISCSPress had the pleasure of designing this book.

Molly Lynn Watt, is the editor of the annual “Bagel Bard Anthology,” designed and published by ISCSpress, Volume 1, http://www.lulu.com/content/261048; Volume 2, http://www.lulu.com/content/729666. Molly is also the author of “Shadow People,” Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville MA, 2007, http://www.lulu.com/content/596300. ISCSpress designed this book.

Philip Burnham, Jr., is the author of “A Careful Scattering,” Červená Barva Press, Somerville MA, 2007, http://www.lulu.com/content/1214473. ISCSpress designed this book.

Deborah Priestly designed the cover of the Bagel Bard Anthology # 1, edited by Molly Lynn Watt and published by ISCSpress.

Wilderness House Literary Review has published Diana DerHovanessian, another finalist. Kudos goes to the remaining finalists as well, Richard Cambridge, Denise Bergman and Jean Dany Joachim. We will make an endeavor to include them in future editions of the Wilderness House Literary Review.

Wilderness House Literary Review Volume 2, number three released online

LITTLETON, MA – October 8 2007 – The Wilderness House Literary Review committee is pleased to announce that Volume 2 number 3 has been released on the Web. This edition of WHLReview.com includes works of fiction by novelist Anne Brudevold as well as short fiction by Andrew Bertaina, Brett Yates, Jim Woods, John Hildebidle, Randall Brown, Ruth Jespersen, Shannon O’Connor, Susan Tepper, Sylvia Holt and Terry Sanville. As well as essays by Lloyd Hudson Frye and Tom Sheehan and poetry by Anne Brudevold, Abbott Ikeler,Alan Britt, Bonnie Marie,Carolyn Gregory, Chad Parenteau, Chris Crittenden, Diana Der-Hovanessian, Duane Locke, Eleanor Goodman, Felino Soriano, Gloria Mindock, Howard Lee Kilby, Irene Koronas, Irisha Pomerantzeff, John Hildebidle, Jon Ballard, Judy L Brekke, Julia Carlson, Michael Amado, Patrick Carrington, Shannon O’Connor and Tino Villanueva, Tom Sheehan.


Wilderness House Literary Review has compared favorably by Boston Globe to Ploughshares, the literary magazine from Emerson College. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards, Industrial Myth and the Wilderness House Literary Retreat. The Wilderness House Literary Retreat is supported by the Rotary Club of Littleton Massachusetts.

WHLReview.com is sponsored by Industrial Myth and Magic. Industrial Myth is a Public Relations firm based in Littleton Massachusetts. Industrial Myth maintains a practice specializing in literary properties. It’s not good enough to just have a better mousetrap--you need a more compelling story. It’s not just advertising, it’s not just marketing, it’s not just product design … it’s everything. It’s an industrial myth and that’s magic. See www.industrialmyth.com.

Contact Steve Glines, sglines@industrialmyth.com, 978-633-3460

Guaranteed Overnight Theater

GOT at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

This past weekend I participated in Guaranteed Overnight Theater or GOT. I haven’t had so much fun in years. We survived in spite of my mistakes. Silly me saying the event would start at 5 P.M. on a Friday – what was I thinking … that theater and writer types live on the same schedule I do? Twelve people showed up and two promptly left. I think I must look scary. One gentleman came in very late with a rather morose short story he wanted converted into a script. When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen he left. We lost another overnight – an email stating that she would rather work on her own plays and did not wish to collaborate further. Well la de da, that left 8 of us.

By 10 PM we had the outline of 7 mini scripts and a framework that would tie them all together. By 10 AM we had reassembled and disassembled to work on our various scripts. By 1 PM we were ready to rehearse. We managed to do about 3 walkthroughs before the show.

Four Bagel Bards participated, Gloria Mendock (I designed her first book), Anne Brudevold (we’re serializing her novel “Hunter Moon” in WHLReview.com), Jacques the Haitian Firefly (no comment) and me.

We played to a packed house of twelve. The work was titled “The Open Mike” (or “Modern Vaudeville”) and began with your typical open mike poetry by Wilhelmina Shakespeare followed by Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemmingway. This was for warm-up. Then we did "The Pig and the Wolf," how theatrical types would have changed "the three little pigs" and "Little Red Riding Hood." The next playlette was titled, “Dating through the Decades,” in three acts. Following up on a theme that worked we did, “Internet Speed Dating in Person.” This was very funny with Jacques delivering the punch line flawlessly. Jacques also started in “The Dance Class,” where he believably seduced his way through a dance class leaving a student dazed and confused which lead to “The Shrink.” In “The Shrink” a traumatized dance student explains why he’s fallen in love with a sex addict. Another punch line delivered perfectly. “Brra dump dump,” says the imaginary drum. The last act had Anne Brudevold tormenting Jacques as a sadistic massage therapist in “The Last Gas.” Throughout the open mike Gloria Mindock and I played “the audience” sitting with a table between us on stage dripping sarcastic battery acid lines between playletts.

Enjoying himself in the audience was David Bertolino, former proprietor of “spooky World” and now an aspiring playwright and theatrical producer. His next work will be opening in Boston next May – Oh, how can we possibly wait? – is called “Deep Throat, the play.” Seriously, see www.deepthroattheplay.com.

We had a blast and hope to repeat our stunt in January when we can next have access to the little theater at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education (or sooner should another theater materialize).

Photos:
Top - Jacques & Sophya in "Dating through the decades"
Middle: Sophya, Jim, Jacques and Mary Ann (standing) in "Speed Dating"
Bottom left: Lynn in "The Pig and the Wolf"
Bottom right: Jim finishes the script of "The Shrink"

Glittering literati to honor famed poet Jack Powers

The glittering literati of Boston will be gathered this weekend to honor the acclaimed poet Jack Powers on the occasion of his 70th birthday. If you have never heard of Jack Powers then you have not been part of the literary scene in Boston for any of the last 40 years. Jack founded “Stone Soup Poetry,” the oldest continuous open mike venue in Boston bringing the likes of Laurence Ferlenghetti, Gregory Corso and many more to the scene. Stonesoup also published over 20 poetry anthologies and dozens of individual poetry chapbooks. Jack was also on the founding board of FIRST NIGHT.

The event is a potluck dinner this Saturday Sept 15, 2007 at 5 P.M. at the International Community Church in Allston, 30 Gordon Street. Expect to see the pick of Boston’s glamorous and not so glamorous literati there. Music by the "Blue Dust Drifters" and Jennifer Matthews.

The small press scene (is there any other literary scene in Boston?) is very incestuous. Gloria Mindock, proprietress of Červená Barva Press, has just published a collection of poems titled “Blood Soaked Dresses” with Ibbetson Street Press. While Ibbetson Street’s proprietor Doug Holder’s latest book “No One Dies at the Au BonPain,” published by another small press, Sunnyoutside is received glowing reviews from Ibbetson Street author and small press bad boy Hugh Fox and in Small Press Review. ISCSpress, as usual managed the production of “Blood Soaked Dresses” and Hugh Fox’s latest, “Way, Way Off the Road.”

Rumor has it that bagel bard, Simmons professor and all round nice guy, Affa Michael Weaver is preparing a new volume of poetry to be published by one of the big boys (a brand name NYC publisher) and after a front page interview in Poet & Writer and an upcoming splash in Poetry magazine his national and international fame is beginning to spread beyond Boston, Baltimore and Taipei. I smell major literary prize.

In other news “Guaranteed Overnight Theater” or GOT is coming to Boston (Cambridge actually) next weekend, September 21 and 22. GOT has been a perennial favorite in Philadelphia for the last 10 years. GOT is unlike any other theatrical experience. Halfway between improvisation and tag-team writing GOT puts writers, directors and actors together for 24 hours of creativity. Starting Friday evening the team writes a play or series of plays, Saturday afternoon they rehearse and Saturday night a performance is given. It should be exciting. GOT will be at the theater at the Cambridge Center for Adult education.

Pale imitation of a poem

Pale imitation of a poem
for Jack Powers

Inspiration on the back, side,
inside flap of an old utility bill
three poems to be read once
then placed in a filing system
only a fireman could love:

“Old man rises
for Madonna with child
noisy, smelly, subway car
modern manger, god bless,
god bless”

“Screams to the Almighty
murder the infidel
blasphemous
pox upon your house
… all your houses ….
And we wonder why God is silent?”

“bus
travelers in common
a conversation stricken
at our destination when
we become fearful, alone again.
Why? When we had
so much in common?”

On the first day of school

Remembering your first day of school

The First day of school
was the best day of my life.

It was the start of a new year,
the next incarnation, reinvention of me.

Not beige and sullen as I left it in June
but tan, strong and muscular - energized.

Voices deeper,
horseplay harder.

I showoff what I’ve learned this summer,
that I too can be strong and, oh, I read a book.

It said that your first day of school
was the best day of your life.

That your redesign of yourself,
your, my, our act of renewal brought us closer.

Exciting thoughts to keep us warm this winter
if darkness spoil or obscure our vision.

Remember the first day of school
you wore petticoats and I was so proud.

Musings on a long weekend

Last Monday I was at the Out of the Blue Gallery to hear Anne Brudevold read poetry at the Stone Soup poetry venue. Stone Soup is the oldest poetry venue in Boston at 35 plus years. I wanted to hear Anne read. I love her prose but hever heard her poetry. Her novel “Hunter Moon” is being serialized by Wilderness House Literary Review (whlreview.com) expect another couple of chapters in the next issue available about October 1. I’ve been editing the novel for Anne over the last year or so as part of my job at ISCSpress (iscspress.com). Some literary agents we know are now reviewing it. Expect it to be published next year sometime. Thom August’s mystery novel “Nine Fingers,” another editing job by yours truly, has been picked up by Dorchester Press and will be out in January.

Chad Parenteau, the current moderator at Stone Soup said from the podium that I was in the “office, I mean the audience.” It’s beginning to feel that way since we are producing, editing and designing so many books for the small press community in Boston.

Speaking of Wilderness House Literary Review, Gloria Mindock of Červená Barva Press has finished editing an anthology of Volume 1 of WHLreview. ISCSpress is publishing it and it should be available in a week or so.

We’ve also just finished doing layout for three; yup count em, three books for noted Boston poet and playwright Don DiVecchio. The books include a volume of poetry titled “Circle of Crows,” a collection of plays, poetry and stories titled “Voices from the Invisible” and a wonderful broadside titled “Eleven Ways to Change the World.”

An upcoming releases also created by ISCSpress and to be published by Červená Barva Press is Phillip Burnham’s touching poetic tribute to his wife titled “A Careful Scattering.” Phillip’s book is a collection of the Christmas cards he created with wife over a 40-year period. Phil wrote the poems while his wife, Louise (who died of cancer in 2002) and their daughter Elizabeth created the visual art. It’s beautiful and I’m sure will be a hit for Christmas this year.