Starr Glazer
Starr Glazer jumps her Simple Seven off the road, a difficult skip at night, and then pedals up to the top of the levee. The path is smooth here, lit by a sky streaked with orange clouds, reflecting the myriad light of the chemical plants across the river. She looks to her left and takes in the view. From this distance, at night, the massive zig-zagging assemblages, dotted with silver and gold lights, look like cosmic tinker-toys, and like spiralling chromosomes as they glitter across the shifting black water.
She rounds the bend to the right, and glides toward a steaming pot of Green Dragon, the best white tea at The Beige Fez, West Baton Rouge’s finest tiki-bar.
Paul Dean’s Stereobook
I am pretending to be famous enough to call this booklet “Paul Dean’s Stereobook.” Hah! . . . I just finished photoshopping the front cover and a few spreads from this, the second edition of Stereobook, and thought I’d post them for you. The publisher, The Barefoot Press of Raleigh NC, recently sent me two cases of this vintage chestnut, and so it will soon be available online for purchase at hexachromatic.com. Not IMMEDIATELY, not right now, not QUITE yet . . . but soon.
sad news of passing
Today’s sad news of passing is of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Kurt Funnygut as my father calls him. The obituaries are out on the net.
So it goes.
Did you know that his first wife and their two daughters are born-again Christians? How did that marriage not work out?
all the several ways of beginning a book
“The thing is this.
That of the all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I’m sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.”
—Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol 8, 1765.
my comic science fiction novel
In re: the previous post:
Welcome to my comic science fiction novel. Whoa-ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!
I finished editing my Color Quotes last week, over LSU’s spring break. Now I have days that, even with my classes, yawn with spare hours. What to do? I figure I’ll just spill my debut novel out onto the internet and see what happens.
Is it not funny, my comic science fiction novel? Franz Kafka thought his novels were hilarious, and would laugh while reading selections aloud to his horrified friends. But I understand. Funny is that which makes you laugh. If you haven’t laughed yet, then check back. Maybe you’ll laugh later.
Revolutions
Revolutions. What a laugh.
The first psychedelic song, the birth of the genre, was the last song on the Beatles album Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows. Now, THAT was a revolution.
One chord. ONE chord! And yet the permutations of that chord, of that sound, seemed infinite. Loop the track and you might not notice the segue for days.
That was 1967, so now it’s, what, 58 years later and nothing, NOTHING, has matched that one song. What happened? Where, and wither, went the revolution? It was all on the flip side of Revolver, the back of the black and white album cover with the band a chiaroscuro silhouette, as black as the vinyl. The fab four posing by a grand piano, serious artists now, in black silhouette. Ringo’s hilarious and gear horizontally-striped sunglasses. All the possiblity in the world, right there in black and white.
The vinyl spiral runs counterclockwise, but the turntable spins clockwise. And the sound swells up from the black spinning disk. It’s all black and morbid and final now, the Beatles all dead, all except Pete Best, a TV star now, but the first pyschedelic song is still alive, rising from the black depths, still calling: turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.
Downstream.
Star eyes
“Star eyes
When if ever, will your heart know
That it’s you for whom these eyes glow”
—Don Raye & Gene De Paul, Star Eyes, 1943.
Old devil moon
“Just when I think I’m
Free as a dove
Old devil moon
Deep in your eyes
Blinds me with love”
—E.Y. Harburg & B. Lane, Old Devil Moon, 1947.
The golden toad of Costa Rica
“In the 1980s zoologists became aware that many amphibians around the world, principally frogs but also salamanders, were in steep decline. . . . The golden toad of Costa Rica (Bufo periglenes) population . . . plummeted. Its color was spectacular: males in the breeding season looked as though they had been dipped whole in orange Day-Glo paint. . . . In the spring of 1987 hundred of thousands of breeding toads made their annual appearance on schedule in the only place the species occurred. . . . The following year a team . . . could find only five individuals. No golden toad has been seen since, and the species is presumed extinct.”
—Edward O. Wilson, The Future Of Life, 2002.
a broad orange stream
“At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly onto a pasture dotted here and there with black and white cows and sloping down, tier after tier, to a broad orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond.”
—Flannery O’Connor, The River, A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories, 1955.