Ed Meek's book What We Love

Ed Meek digs underneath the broad lawns and narrow minds of the suburbs to unearth a deeper and at times darker, truth about ourselves and our lives.

—Doug Holder, Editor and Publisher, Ibbetson Street Press

Ed Meek, whose work recently appeared in Cosmopsis Quarterly 2, has a great book out called What We Love. It's available online at Amazon.com.

William Michaelian: In Watermelon Sugar

This short review of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar is also included in the Richard Brautigan Archives, an extensive wiki-based site founded, organized, and maintained by Birgit Ferran in Barcelona, Spain. The Archives contain a wealth of material on the author known for such classic works as Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion, and So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. Quotes, images, studies, criticism, obituaries, interviews, links, and more are included.

Reality is a poor excuse not to enjoy the work of Richard Brautigan. It is also the best excuse. Either way, I recommend you set reality aside; let it rest awhile; if you find you need it later, chances are it will still be there. If it isn’t, well, as they say, good riddance.

Brautigan’s gentle vision, melancholy humor, and ear for language are all beautifully evident in his short impressionistic novel, In Watermelon Sugar. The story begins simply and in earnest:

In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.

Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.

And work out it does. Effortlessly, Brautigan builds a bridge composed of dry timber and sad, sweet images, and places them beneath a colored sky and sun in a comfortable living room as big as one’s imagination will allow. One end of the bridge is at the reader’s feet. The other is in a small community of peaceful souls once shared by mournful tigers, which ate people with regret, sang, apologized in English, and offered to help the narrator with his arithmetic even as he was being orphaned. The narrator, now an adult, holds nothing against the tigers — and, indeed, nothing against anyone. Life is simply the thing it is. Not everything can be explained, nor does it need to be:

. . . Fred had something strange-looking sticking out of the pocket of his overalls. I was curious about it. It looked like something I had never seen before.

‘What’s that in your pocket, Fred?’

‘I found it today coming through the woods and up from the Watermelon Works. I don’t know what it is myself. I’ve never seen anything like it before. What do you think it is?’

He took it out of his pocket and handed it to me. I didn’t know how to hold it. I tried to hold it like you would a flower and a rock at the same time.

‘How do you hold it?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.’ . . .

To me, that simple confession, “I didn’t know how to hold it,” perfectly describes Brautigan’s feelings toward life itself. How do you hold something that is infinite, delicate, and always changing? The answer: You don’t. You write a book instead, give it to the world, and hope it takes root in watermelon sugar.

Richard Brautigan was born January 30, 1935, in the Pacific Northwest. He lived for many years in San Francisco, and was called by many “the last of the Beats.” He committed suicide in Bolinas, California, at the age of forty-nine.

William Michaelian: The Wall Poems of Leiden

If I remember correctly, I posted the following entry in the Highly Recommended section of my website about two years ago. The Wall Poems of Leiden site is definitely worth visiting. I see the Project is now complete, and that it contains 101 poems in all.

Recently in my literary Web wanderings, I stumbled onto a link to a wonderful outdoor poetry project in the Netherlands city of Leiden. The Wall Poems of Leiden gives the background of the project, which was begun in 1992, and which, when completed, will encompass 101 poems painted on walls throughout the city. The poets represented hail from all corners of the world and include such luminaries as Marina Tsevetayeva, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Anna Akhmatova, Keats, Yeats, and Rimbaud, as well as many others I’ve never heard of and don’t know how to pronounce. What a truly great and civilized idea! Links are provided to photographs of each wall poem printed in its original language. Below the pictures are English and Dutch translations. Visitors can follow the links from one page to the next in a sort of “walking tour,” or choose links from the complete list on a separate page.

I would love to see something like that here. Maybe there are similar projects scattered around the U.S. If there are, I'd love to know where, and to find out more about them.

Kendra Stanton Lee: The winter of my discontent

Since the first leaves of autumn began to crisp and fall, so, too, have my pleasure, academic reads fallen from my lap to the floor. I have purchased, borrowed, and resurrected from the archives several books of interest. The farthest I have gotten in each is several chapters deep. I've tried fiction and non, brooding and beautiful, romantic and cruel. Everything piques my curiosity but fails to sustain it. I have failed pop quizzes in my class because somehow I developed an allergy to required reading. I became a book club delinquent as month after month I flaked. And then I became a book club drop-out. Is this the winter of my discontent as a reader?

My non-fiction instructor opened class the other night reminding us that these winter months (up here in bleak New England where the sun sets at 4:30p.m.) can be a great time to delve into our writing, to open up the veins of wintry thinking and bleed them out into our work. Perhaps this is the reason I have had no inclination to be a reader since the days grew long and cold and dark. I was frittering away my time trying to do that which I am not meant to do during this season. My brain was longing to produce the kinds of pieces that my brain loves to read during the rest of the year.

I suspect I am not the only one for whom winter triggers a desire to write, rather than to read, to focus on the output rather than the intake. Further, are there particular seasons in which certain genres of fiction or non-fiction are en vogue for you, and other seasons in which those same reads collect dust on your shelves or accrue overdue fines at the library?

Or has Netflix simply ruined us all?

Kendra Stanton Lee's work can be found in Cosmopsis Quarterly 2 as well as on her web site at http://www.kendraspondence.com.