Spurning comformity,
On July 23, 1903,
Dr. Ernst Pfenning
of Chicago
became the first person
ever to own a Ford Model A
automobile.
He paid 750 bucks for it.
CLS #40
On July 3, 1883 the SS Daphne sank off the coast of Scotland,
killing almost 200 people onboard—
also, on that same day, Franz Kafka was born.
His dad yelled at him a lot,
and both his parents worked 12-hour days.
Young Franz preferred his governess.
At 23 he got his law degree,
did some clerking in the courts of Bohemia,
working some graveyard shifts,
and eventually tried his hand at running an asbestos company
with his brother-in-law.
He wrote some fiction on the side
with his buddies Max Brod and Felix Weltsch;
they called themselves the Little Prague Circle.
He courted a few girls,
but never tied the knot.
He caught TB in 1917.
To cure it he became a vegetarian
and drank gallons of unpasteurized milk.
It didn’t work.
He died of starvation in a sanatorium when he was 40,
with only a few stories published,
and all of his novels unfinished.
He had left his good friend Max
in charge of all of his writings,
and his last request before dying
was to have everything burned,
even his letters, sketches, and diaries.
Max didn’t follow his orders.
CLS #35
Eadweard Maybridge,
born Edward Muggeridge in England,
changed his name a lot.
He moved to The States in 1855,
settling in San Francisco,
where he killed a man
for porking his spouse,
saying,
“Here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife,”
as he shot the guy.
Pleading insanity,
he was acquitted.
He took a lot of pictures,
and proved that all four of a horse’s hooves
did in fact leave the ground at once during a gallop.
He left SF to go take pictures of the Midwest,
put his son in foster care,
and, in 1879,
created the first movie projector:
the Zoopraxiscope.
Shortly afterwards,
he created the world’s first porno film.
At the age of 74,
after returning to his native England,
he died.
CLS #27
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born into a family of “swells”
on New York’s West 37th Street in 1884.
Her mom called her Granny,
and when she was 20
she got hitched to her fifth-cousin once removed,
who was already a Roosevelt,
so she never even had to change her name.
She lived in the White House for 12 years.
In 1945 her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage,
and she had to move elsewhere,
settling in Hyde Park, NY.
Soon she became a delegate to the United Nations,
which she did for the next 8 years or so.
In 1961 she got hit by a car and was badly injured,
and died the next year.
A few years later Paul Simon wrote a song for her,
but changed Roosevelt to Robinson
because it was a better fit for the movie it was used in.
CLS #44
Sam Kinison’s dad was a Pentecostal preacher,
and young Sam tried his hand at it for a bit too.
Sam would shout and howl a lot while preaching.
Taking up stand-up,
because the church sent him packing after his divorce,
Sam’s meteoric rise was fueled by much liquor,
many illicit substances,
and a beret.
Sam died when,
six days after getting married again,
his Pontiac Turbo Trans Am
was hit by a pickup truck
driven by a drunk 17-year-old
just outside of Needles.
CLS #9
Without a teaching credential,
and with his doctorate still uncomplete,
the 24-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche
became a professor of philology at Basel.
He soon renounced his Prussian citizenship,
choosing to be stateless from then on out,
but fought in the Franco-Prussian war anyway,
where he probably got syphilis,
but certainly got a bad case of dysentery and PTSD.
He went back to Switzerland after that,
taught some classes, wrote some essays,
and became friends with Wagner.
But some nasty stomachaches and migraines,
plus the fact that he was going blind,
led to his forced resignation from the school.
In isolation, cutoff from his former friends,
living off a nice pension,
writing and moving around a lot,
his books not selling,
the 44-year-old suffered a nervous breakdown
after hugging a horse that was being whipped in the street.
He had a few strokes,
gave his sister the rights to his works,
which she didn’t really understand,
caught pneumonia,
which ended his life at 55,
the same year the 20th century began.
me and my tv
the persistence of vision
leaves scumbled traces
dripping motions of body and soul
in a blurred juxtaposed
mismatched
doo-wop-sock-it-to-‘em kind of way
flashes
dips and dives dancing behind a dusty screen
backlit
half-dead already
watching
always waiting for the next flash
brightly lit
and unscrambling
a hinting at life
coolly insensate
always insane
staying in one place
to sit staring with uncaring eyes
stung with rasters and cathode-rayed into silence
three two one
blastoff
gone with silence and a muffled roar
blinking from time to time
just a slab of meat
waiting for digestion
to run its course
craning neck to see
to constantly make something out of nothing
to be beheaded and estranged
forever shooting par for the world’s course
at rest
mildly enthused
and scraping at the surface of things
CLS #29
Ellen Naomi Cohen
1941: Born in Baltimore.
1957: Started going by the sobriquet Cass in high school
1965: After seeing the Hell’s Angels on a talk show, added a Mama to it.
1968: Got hit in the head with a pipe, which added 3 notes to her vocal range.
1970: Sang in Vegas for $40,000 a week.
1971: Married a Bavarian Baron for a few months.
1974: In a London apartment, after performing for two sold-out crowds at The Palladium, she died in her sleep.
CLS #17
The inventor of Life Savers,
Hart Crane’s dad,
sold the rights to the patent
right before they became the next big thing.
Although raised on a steady diet of Christian Science by his mom,
Hart turned out to be gay,
and he soon fell in love with a Danish merchant mariner.
Always bickering, his parents finally divorced when he was 18.
His big poem about the Brooklyn Bridge
was published when he was 31.
Nobody liked it, and he stayed drunk most of the time after that.
A few months before turning 33,
he jumped from a steamship into the Gulf of Mexico,
after getting beat up for picking up on a man,
screaming as he leapt, “Goodbye everybody!”
His body was never found.
CLS #14
With his real father dead, a bit of an oedipal urge for his mom, and a militant martinet for a stepfather, Charles Baudelaire fled to the Paris brothels, caught syphilis and gonorrhea, and went about reciting his poems and getting into fights in the taverns, then upon turning 21 he inherited a fortune and some land, but it only lasted him a couple of years, and he was soon eating on credit and promptly tried to kill himself, but was unsuccessful, so kept having to borrow money from his mom, and at 36, the same year his stepfather died, he published his first book of poems, but a few years later, after his publisher went bankrupt, Charles, who was doing a lot of laudanum, hitting the opium pipe pretty hard, and drinking just about everyone under the table, had a stroke that pretty much left him paralyzed for the last two years of his life.
CLS #33
Miss Pickford was born a Smith in Canada.
Her dipso father died when she was three.
The Bishop of Broadway renamed her Mary,
and a bartender named a blood-red vodka drink after her.
In 1909 she was in 51 films,
but Talkies killed her career.
She died like her father did,
from tippling a bit more than a lot—
though she,
The Girl With The Golden Curls,
made it all the way to 87.
CLS #10
Baruch Spinoza’s mother died when he was six,
and a little later his dad was killed in a war.
The Jews kicked him out of the fold when he was 24.
After that,
he started calling himself Benedictus.
He moved around some,
and made eyeglass lenses for a living.
At 44 he died from a lung disease
brought on by breathing in glass dust,
never having married,
nor had and kids;
and having published only two books—
one anonymously—
which nobody at the time
liked very much.
CLS #7
Dummy Hoy caught meningitis at age three,
and it left him deaf.
He once, from way out in deep centerfield,
threw out three runners at home
in the same game.
After retiring from The Bigs,
he settled down on a dairy farm in Mount Healthy, Ohio.
He died 99 years after he was born.
CLS #20
Carrie Nation was a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus.
Her mom thought herself to be Queen Victoria from time to time.
The first man she married was a drunk, and died from it.
The 2nd one lent her that famous surname.
God spoke to her one morning,
telling her to smash up a saloon
and break all the bottles with rocks.
Later, she used a hatchet to do the job,
while singing hyms.
She called it “hatchetation.”
When she died they threw her body in an unmarked grave.
Nine years later prohibition went into effect.
CLS #22
When he was a kid
Marcel Proust had asthma.
He spent a lot of time at his great-uncle’s house.
The army got him for a year,
and then he moved back in with his mom.
He never got a job.
Later on his mother died.
He spent the last three years of his life in a cork-lined room
writing a book
about his memories.
CSL #11
Leo Czolgosz was bullied as a kid.
In 1901 he asked Emma Goldman for some reading recommendations,
in Cleveland,
where he’d voted Republican the year before.
The anarchists there abhorred him and thought him a spy.
With a .32 revolver and a photo of Bresci in his pocket
he moved to Buffalo.
William McKinley tried to shake his hand,
But Leo refused,
shooting Old Major in the gut twice instead.
The crowd almost killed him before the cops showed up
To drag him away.
They electrocuted him 53 days later
and dumped sulfuric acid in his coffin.
His last words were,
“I am sorry I could not see my father.”
CLS #43
Never one to skirt his duty to God or to country
Asa Dunbar started the Great Butter Rebellion in 1766
by leaping on a chair in the Harvard dining hall
and screaming,
“Behold, our butter stinketh!— give us therefore butter that stinketh not!”
51 years later his grandson
Henry David Thoreau
was born.
CLS #12
At 21, Nellie Bly spent 10 days in a madhouse
after faking insanity for a story.
Four years later
she wended her way around the world
in less than 80 days.
When she was 32
she got hitched to a 72-year-old millionaire.
Finally,
in her 52nd year,
she died of pneumonia.
NAMES
Your name might mean something, but it is most likely that meaning has nothing to do with you, outside of the connotations it might make arise inside the heads of those who know you, because they probably already identify the person that they know as you with your name. People are named after months, presidents, rock stars, baseball players, states, countries, months, seasons, but rarely emotions or states of mind. Names can be descriptive of a person, but more often nicknames do a better job of this, because the person being described is not known yet when their name is given to them, and nicknames are given in response to the person in some way, like if someone is lucky or big or left-handed or magical or fast. People don’t like to hear their names mispronounced. They are very touchy about it. Also, they don’t like to see their names spelled wrong. The feeling of your name becomes so familiar the further along life’s road you go that it becomes almost palpable, as if you could start to feel the sound of your name filling and outlining the shape of selfhood—the way that a person is the person who they are, that is why you are that specific entity you keep referring to as “I” or “me.” People are often times startled and uncomfortable when they run across another person who has their same name. Sometimes the name is spelled slightly different, as people tend to spell their names in all kinds of odd ways to give their names more distinctness, but it is still unnerving to most, and will cause both people involved to probably feel a bit more lost and unoriginal and disenchanted with life. Though people with famous or very common names, like Michael Jackson or John Smith or Mary Jones, tend to feel much more attached to the identity of their name, as if their version of the name is somehow descriptive of only them, and not that famous person or all those thousands of others who share that same sound and spelling of it with them. It is as if the less precious the name is, the less it has to be guarded and kept safe, the less vulnerable it is to the slings and barbs of the world, and in losing its meaning in the masses of others it finds its own real meaning without any attachment to the way in which it is said or written or the way it “looks” to the person’s mind’s eye. It has an intrinsic value beyond the mere surface of its gesture. The name comes to fit the person like a glove, or a body bag. Even the way the person comes to hear his or her name inside their head is different from the way they hear the names of others with their same name. It is something intangible.
Dining Alone
The looks of other people
spoiling things
not like my look
when I look at other people
as I always do
a stare that is not so careful
all the time
looking
back
at what I’m scared
to look at
right there in front of me
while I pretend to look away
and scratch my face or yawn
anyway
just looking
this way
while belying my eyes with a sigh
is hard enough
though the sad sacks
rarely look back
I still wonder
if behind their looks
they are wondering
if their looking
is the same as mine
an ogled wrinkle in time
a passing whim
a game we play
in trying not to make
our gazes ever meet
playing for playing’s sake
or passing on the street
there is always
some other face
to look at
being put into a dory while drunk
shattered gimcrack solutions for white-coated ideas
of how to make things happen
and possibility of course
worn like an old hat
giant puppy-dog worries
steeper than you could be intimating like solids that are not foods
cruddy over/under crumbling in a time lapse movement of frames
silly and justly so
there is not time and plenty of it for it all
to go slowly faster
spumes are not out of the ordinary here
crests come and go
botching up the routine
and look
there are saddles on the rain clouds
so we can be met with peace during wartime too
getting to the pictures of the point
we can’t be so recherché as to miss it
now
not like the way the ocean boils
or how the whimper of condors bears out its own meaning
there must be spelunkers who know mountaintops
there are swimmers who hang glide
Golliwogs must be content to reside in the cellars of mourning
being forgotten is sometimes for the best
likely story
there are no means to brace us for the final plop
down into the wooden skiff of odd things
too much bloviating and not enough small talk
pleasure in a gasconade of hot air
seething with life’s last humble push
ground down to the dust in Jupiter’s rings
safer havens than this may exist
but it seems unlikely
considering the current state of these this that and the other things
always happening
always here
always alone
set adrift
like this
.pluvial.
She puddled her way along the street, cold, staring ahead, not noticing much except the flurry of rain being spilled all over her, gusts of rain-filled wind hacking away at her face and clothes, razoring her eyes as she went on sliding her slitted looks like knives between the microscopic distance between rain drops that were bulleting towards her, because she was lost this way, just because, it was all that she could think of, this being lost, and so she didn’t care about the rain splattering all around, she didn’t even think about it, it wasn’t a big deal, and she slipped and skidded and penguined on down the street, getting drenched, getting pummeled, being beaten down to a pulp by the driving rain and the wet squalls plastering her, trying to send her down for the count, but she was resilient, she was feeling a bit invincible, and even though that thought didn’t make sense to her, it was comforting, and she began to bunny-hop a little with each step, not so careful of her movements, and it was the rain trying to cut her, it was the rain spoiling her day and making her clothes sop with wet, and it was the rain disappearing the building tops, it was the rain missing somebody and unhappy and longing for some nameless thing, it was all the rain, and it wasn’t going anywhere…
