Thursday, August 6, 2009

Ron Silliman & His Blog


As some readers may know, I've spent a fair amount of time over the last 5 years visiting Silliman's Blog. Ron reviewed a book I published in 2005 there, as well as posting a couple of long quotations from private e.mail correspondence before I began to comment on his blog comment box. (I came to the internet too late to participate in the Buffalo Listserv, which had already sort of been abandoned by the time I arrived.)   

I first encountered Ron Silliman at Cody's Book Store in Berkeley. This has to have been about 1967. I was attending Berkeley as an English major. I'd seen him around in Berkeley a lot--he wore a tired old dirty yellow wide-wale corduroy coat, and his unruly blonde hair stuck out. In my junior year, I took my first course in writing with Robert Grenier, and began tentatively to think of myself as pursuing writing. I attended a couple of poetry readings; one, which was a vaguely anti-war occasion, took place at a school auditorium in Berkeley, and Ron was one of the participants. He read a poem which sounded to my ears a good deal like Kelly-Rothenberg-Eshleman-Spicer, with heavily accented line-breaks, and some "soft" "deep"-imagery. This kind of writing was very prevalent at the time, and would continue to attract devotees for another 6-8 years, before petering out. I think of it as one aspect of the New American Poetry that grew out of Black Mountain, picked up some steam from the environmental movement, counter-cultural anthropology, etc.

My first contact with Ron must have been when I sent poems to him for consideration in Tottles, the little mimeo that Ron published for a few years in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Ron may have heard about me from our mutual friend Barry Watten, who had followed me by one year to the University of Iowa Workshop. Ron and Barry had known each other in Berkeley, before I ever knew of them. When our workshop days concluded, both Barry and I found our separate ways back to the Bay Area, and it was then, when Barry and Ron shared an apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, I believe, that we first met, though it may have been a year or so earlier. This would have been about 1973. I was married, and had a young son, by that point, but Barry and Ron were unattached, and would remain so for some years longer. I had begun working for the government, a position I imagined was to be a temporary gig, little realizing that I would remain in it for 27 years, retiring in 2001, just nine days before 9/11. 

We were all aspiring poets at that point, and were trying to figure out ways to make a living while still finding time to read and write. The system of teaching-grants-publication seemed largely closed to us, and, given our aesthetic proclivities, our financial and career prospects looked fairly bleak. Barry ended up as a typesetter for the West Coast Print Center, Ron did some social work. My commitment had to be greater, since I was supporting a family. 

As my family and work obligations increased, I found I had less and less time to devote to writing, while Barry and Ron began to participate in a growing regional literary movement which eventually coalesced into what they now self-describe as the "Language Movement". Had I not started a family and a career, I would probably have become a card-carrying Language Poet in the mid- to late 1970's. On the other hand, I was never a joiner or the clubby type, and had I not been providing some kind of support for my wife and child, I suppose my marriage would have collapsed, along with my fragile self-confidence. I had grown up in Napa in the 1950's, and was never an "urban" kid. I tended to think of poetry-writing as a private matter, rather than a social and political act. I rather found readings and lectures stifling affairs, embarrassing and filled with tension. 

Ron and Barry, on the other hand, craved public exposure, and wanted to further their literary careers. I had started a magazine, L, and had gotten grants to publish books (Bill Berkson's Blue Is the Hero, Ted Greenwald's Common Sense, Robert Grenier's Sentences Towards Birds, Patrick Schnoor's Sonnets, my own Stanzas For An Evening Out, Larry Eigner's My God/the Proverbial, among others). My book was a summary of the work I had done since my undergraduate years at Berkeley, the Iowa period, up to about 1976. In an act of kindness and generosity, Ron reviewed my book in the San Francisco Book Review, finding in my scattered formalities an implied eclecticism which turned out to be a wholly accurate reading. I was a writer who had not found himself; that was the message of the book. 

During the late 1970's and 1980's, Ron and I met occasionally for coffee or lunch in San Francisco, where we both worked. I think we shared a number of common interests, but my preoccupation with fulfilling the demands of family and parenthood clearly was diverting me from art and literature, and I think Ron could see that a friendship based on mutual literary ambition wasn't going anywhere. As his determination and involvement in writing grew and intensified, mine was increasingly frustrated. 

In the Eighties, I would pursue an academic degree in design (Landscape Architecture), and stop writing altogether for a period of about 15 years. So, in a manner of speaking, "I spent the best years of my life" in drudgery and duty, years that I might have been getting a Ph.D. (I'd abandoned that path at Iowa after only one year in the doctoral track, and deciding not to resume it at Berkeley in 1973). During these years, I traveled a good bit, coached some boys' baseball, got a Master's in LA, fly-fished, spent a year in Japan, and began to collect books. 

In a larger sense, my account of my mostly "off-again" relationship with Ron is the story of my own life. In the early years of this century, with the appearance of the internet and blogs and websites, I was finally freed from the obligations of duty. We lost our son in 1996 to an automobile accident, my wife's career in the computer industry flowered during the Nineties, and by the time of my retirement in 2001, I finally found time, at long last, to think about writing, an avocation that had lain dormant for a decade and a half. As a full-fledged honorable mention on the Neglectoreno Project website, I'm here to tell you that the neglect was all my fault, not the result of people not appreciating me.  

Ron and Barry started their families about 10 years after I had. I can still recall how boring and dreary all that milky, sticky family stuff seemed to them in the 1970's. Why couldn't we all just go out and play? Because the alarm clock went off at 5 AM, and the kid had to be picked up at the babysitter's at 4, and the mortgage payments were due by the 5th of each month, that's why. My failure to find a path towards an eventual identity consistent with my early literary efforts, I now regard as a voluntary sacrifice. But it was a pathway I felt bound to take. I knew that had I chosen the straight academic path, I'd have ended up working in a small rural college, probably in the South, isolated and forlorn. If I'd insisted on doing some kind of quasi-literary work, we'd have sunk into poverty and desperation, an eventuality that seemed less and less attractive.

Silliman's Blog was among the first sites I began to visit regularly when I logged onto the internet. Almost everything Ron talked about sounded utterly familiar, and I had no trouble finding (often contentious) things to say in response to his frequently sweeping assertions and pronouncements. After awhile, people began to think, I suppose, that I was almost his sidekick. But our relationship, such as it was, or is, wouldn't qualify as anything but a mild acquaintance. As I drifted away from writing in the late Seventies, so did the friends I had in it. Ron has been faithful and accommodating throughout our "online" friendship; but I wouldn't want to speculate upon how much of that kindness is pure nostalgia.  

As Ron's star has risen, I've been encouraged to see that someone whose work I always imagined, from the start, would eventually succeed, has managed to propel himself to a position of prominence and authority.  But we don't agree on a lot of things, and I feel no reluctance to express that difference. This has caused a number of disagreements, frequently leading to his censuring my comments. This is a policy I question, inasmuch as it should be perfectly obvious that if you believe someone is wrong about something, the best way to deal with it is to let that person display their opinions openly; if indeed they're as wrong as you believe them to be, won't that become obvious over time? 

As I've said before here in my statement of blog policy, using selective moderation to control debate is a dishonest way of presenting issues, and Ron shouldn't be doing this in the interests of controlling his agenda. It's possible, I suppose, that people will censure you for your own good, but in my experience, the real reason people censure you is to avoid addressing, or making public, concerns which they find uncomfortably challenging. Refusing a post of mine, for instance, in which I criticize our sitting President, constitutes a form of censorship, no matter what excuse he uses. "I can censor it because it's my website, and only certain kinds of comments or objections will be tolerated." Well, okay. But that only makes philosophical sense if what you're doing is inherently partisan. Why have a comment box at all, if your primary purpose is the presentation of a kind of propaganda? Is it just to field bland, tame approbation? I find Silliman's refusal to actively engage his commentary, also to be a disingenuous tendency. Blogging is an often chaotic marketplace of free-floating opinion, multi-contextual, and difficult to control. But that unpredictability, its unmanageable flow, is what makes it vital. 
                  
I have no doubt that Ron now thinks of me as an embarrassment to his online agenda as high priest of post-Modern literary theory and thinking. But I don't mind. I am uncooperative, and I like to break rules, question authority. If the price of friendship is not being allowed to voice one's opinions, the price is too high.     
  
                                                 

40 comments:

jh said...

hey man
he dissed me today too
i simply made a general comment
about the stretching for material
with recent political posts
not one word all summer about baseball
and he disses me
sheesh
you'd think i'd uttered a shameful profanity or something
or directed a racial or sexrelated bogotry-loaded slur at an unknown commentator
ah well
as random comes the comments so random comes the umps
kerplunk

j

Kirby Olson said...

Funny piece.

You and I basically have both stopped commenting at Ron's blague, I suppose, for all practical porpoises. I do still post something, but I do it in a completely cynical way, because I know he won't let through anything that challenges his viewpoint.

So what I do instead is promote Corso or Codrescu, when the situation seems to fit.

And otherwise just watch the incredible log-rolling machine as it marches through history, crushing everything for a hundred miles around.

He's hell on wheels.

Stalin was a very good poet, people say. One of the top poets from Georgia.

TC said...

Power bloats.

Ed Baker said...

wow! sounds like we've

traveled/travailed, more-or-less the sme "high-way!

I got married in 1975 bought this house, two children AND

by 1975 or so 100% dropped out of The Poetry Scene to be my own One-Man General Contractor/Wood Butcher...


dropped back in in 1998!

and lucky to yet be here and still, largely ignored!

and

just the other day regarding a s.e.r.e.u.s comment on x-governor Palin Ron sense-or'd me
"for your own good"

just like My Government is protecting me "for your own good"..

I can't wait 'til my retired-on-..SS check is taxed more

jh said...

dissin and pissin everybod'ys dissin and pissin can't get no leg up can't get no cred if i don't get some somethin soon i may just wet the bed

cyber blues got them tedious cyber blues
good thing i wear slippers
cuz i cannot tie my shoes
i gots them cyberblues

who dissin who

Anonymous said...

Silliman has become an institution of the kind he has always railed against, protecting territories... reifying principles... capriciously choosing which comments are permissible... accusing others of what he is guilty of himself.

Steven Fama said...

The personal poetic history you write about here is quite vivid.

In comparison, the stuff about the "censoring" of your comments in the Silliman blog comment box seems full of airy froth.

In any event, please post the dang comment that wasn't posted, and refer, if you please, to the post to which it related. That way, it can be seen what the heck you are complaining about, specifically.

I disagree with your "anything should go in comment boxes" approach. I've blotted out (removed) a comment or two that are thinly (very thinly disguised) commercials for some silly product or another, which basically say "interesting!" (usually with exclamantion mark) and then provide a link to the product home page.

I've also removed a comment that seemed (was) ugly and mean. The same way, if a person came to my house and said the same thing, I'd throw them out. Same way I'd wash it off, and immediately, if somebody pissed on my front stairs, or threw an egg against a window. Same way I'd pick up and throw away a pile of garbage left at the side alley.

A person's blog ain't a town square (though even there limits on the content of speech can be imposed). A person's blog is their home.

And Curtis, your comment over on Silliman blog today, expressing astonishment that Ron linked to your post today, but not to many others you've posted in recent months / weeks, is also incomplete.

Do you have a record (e-mail trail) that you specifically notified Ron of those previous posts, including sending him the URL of those particular posts?

If not, maybe Ron didn't see those other links. He does not, I am certain, work up his lists o' links by reading everything on the 'net, then deciding which couple or several dozen to list. On the contrary, people mostly send him suggestions. Did you send that to him? Unless you do that, you shouldn't complain about not be listed on the links. If you don't, you are relying on Ron's own searching, or that somebody else will let him know about it.

Curtis Faville said...

Steven:

"Airy froth."

Yes, well, I wouldn't turn my blog into a three-ring circus by posting deleted comments from other peoples' blogs. My point here is to furnish a little historical perspective, and to restate my principles regarding censorship.

When someone deletes a comment, the assumption is that it was done to fend off trolls and trouble-makers, or to keep out cuss-words, or actionable content, etc. But doing so for political reasons strikes me as deeply dishonest. If Ron, for instance, restates his unequivocal support of a political position or figure, I think that's fair game. Anyone should be allowed to challenge that partisanship, and I'd go pretty far in defending anyone's right to do it informally, even rudely, as the case may be.

My sense is that Ron deletes posts because he finds them "embarrassing" to his argument, or to the constructed online identity he wants to present of himself, and those he considers to be "associated" with him.

I'm not "allowed" to say things against Ron's position etc.

Oh yes I am.

Ed Baker said...

well

"Airey Froth"

has just re:placed my very favorite
(non)image:

"Starry Dingle"

Ed Baker said...

pee est:

not to kick a dead poet
how-ever I just re:called

out of the depths of my
vastenesses of mymind/memory that
on a trip in mid 60's

I

to get to the Starry Dingle


I had to cross The Firth of Froth


and along with me a frothy, warm General Guiness

or six..

AND DIG THIS i JUST FOUND THIS ...

http://www.lyricsbay.com/general_guiness_lyrics-unknown.html

jh said...

did you see that
silliman turned this piece
into a commercialized double entendre

the poetry of sparring

sninko sninko witoh sparh

Curtis Faville said...

Not sure I understand what you mean, jh.

??

Grumpy Old Dude said...

Everybody wants to be a cop. Give you a ticket for bad grammar, arrest you for your spelling, take you to court for your contentions. There is an anal proclivity among white Protestant males to twitter (in the original sense) over the inconsequential and elevate it to the heights of absurdity. Give it a rest, Curt. You gonna play in Silliman’s house, you gonna play by Silliman’s rules. Spare us the boo-hoo about how you had to get out of the poetry line to raise a family. That’s an on-going project for many a poet, male and female (like they don’t got a bitch to pitch), and they seem to deal. Maybe their life-styles aren’t up to the (again) white middle class standards (Napa, did you say?), but they’re still putting out the goods. Silliman is intelligent enough to have capitalized on a niche and hoist himself to the top of the heap (or close to it). Yet he is faulted for that. But because of a past association, you think you should get cuts to the front of the line? Think again, Curt. Read a cross-section of poetry blogs and their comments and get a clue as to why poets were not going to be allowed in the Republic. As for Silliman, whether you like it or not, his blog provides a service of utilitarian value. Envious of his power? Get some of your own. His opinions and observations on the American Pop Poetry scene are, as are your own, ultimately disposable.

Curtis Faville said...

Hey Old Dude, you sound like Kri Kristofferson on Qualudes.

The great thing about being obscure (as I am) is that you don't have to worry about saving face, or preserving your reputation. Let Silliman do that.

The other thing: There's no self-pity here. I take full responsibility for what I did in my life.

My point in relating this is to furnish a little background about the issues surrounding Ron's relation to me.

"...because of a past association, you think you should get cuts to the front of the line? Think again, Curt."

Not at all, Dude. In fact, I go out of my way to distance myself from Ron's positions, whenever I feel they diverge significantly from my own.

My position vis-a-vis the internet is you don't cut off arguments (i.e., moderate your own debates). If Ron wants to diss half the poetry community, he should at least be courageous enough to deal with some of the blowback.

Are you passionate about ANYTHING? Let's see you express your opinions. Come on out of the closet, and be heard.

And I don't like anonymous posting--if you're going to get personal, take off the mask.

Cheers, old guy,

C

Curtis Faville said...

The other thing, Grumpy, is that I made ALL THE RIGHT DECISIONS.

I have NO REGRETS about not having chased the tin laurels.

What decisions did you make? Are you grumbling into your beer at the local tavern? Are you the tough guy who asks no quarter, and gives none?

Good for you, Old Dude, I'll throw a carnation into your grave.

Kirby Olson said...

Silliman is a very good writer, as writer. I loved his CHINESE NOTEBOOK.

I like most of what he writes.

It's clear, and he throws a good hard fastball.

But if somebody hits one out of the park, he won't allow the footage.

It's not fair, and it's kind of uninteresting, now, to read the comments as a result.

Stalin was also a good writer, I think. And Hitler was an amazing watercolorist.

Even Nero was quite charming on the lyre.

Curtis Faville said...

Dictator poets. That's a funny conceit, Kirb.

Tell me this: Why does Silliman get to consistently put down Robert Lowell? What's his beef with Lowell?

It's that Lowell was the poster-boy for American poetry during the post-war period. His upper-class roots were unacceptable. He was boiling over with energy and talent, but he didn't qualify as an "experimenter"--even though, if you look honestly at his work, there was really no one who wrote the kind of poems he did between 1945 and 1960--in a generation of experimenters.

I don't see why you can't like Olson and Creeley and Lowell and Seidel and Mac Low and Ian Hamilton Finlay all at the same time. Why the necessity of putting people down? This is going to sound like the saddest old "eclectic" nonsense, but if Silliman wants to dis everyone in sight, he needs to take a little heat. How about some open debate. How about telling me why Lowell is such a shit, and Duncan is so wonderful?

jh said...

it is my sense that silliman enjoys some of the contentiousness he purposely arouses and he took your post and put it in his listlitany today...at least nodding to the fact that there is some sort of fallout but what it does is give him press and he'll feed off it...also i think he takes on the role of fatherteacher to some who dine at his diner...and so censorship is a little way to make things interesting

so you made your point he made his by posting a link to your post
and it looks to me like he may be winning the advertisement battle...or...maybe nobody gives a damn not even ron...i don't know

poets are by definition somehow controversial control vers yo and many seem to convey interesting spirits of contention

i find the relationship interesting from a very distant point of view

double entendre might not be the best term
but it seems to me he took some delight in linking to you in his list...and did it as a way to poke some fun

Kirby Olson said...

I think the value he saw in it is that it separates him from any responsibility for Curtis' viewpoint from within his own phalanx (L-poets). He's always thinking about the bottom line, and how he can keep his status within his social group, and how he can raise the status of his social group (Balzac called it a cenacle).
.

Anonymous said...

It's really very depressing that Silliman's blog gets the attention it does -- a bit like wondering just who would support Palin and then realizing...oh,God...this one and that one. The man can't write -- prose. Poetry? Not really. And he is awful to look upon -- an even more obese Alfred Hitchcock with a scraggy beard nattering endlessly about nothing really: the latest Harry Potter movie, the latest slight poem from this one and that one and when asked to actually show the wonderfulness or awfulness of a poem all he can do is something an English major who had suffered brain damage along the way to pleading with a professor about the low grades he has been getting could do.

Kirby Olson said...

They realized early on with kickbacks, cronyism, and other tricks, they could corner the market on poetry. It didn't succeed but they got a lot more attention than they should have, and the cenacle never broke. They usually do, leaking all kinds of inside stories. This one really did wreck contemporary poetry, but Silliman does at least have a brain. He sometimes even feels guilty, I think.

Curtis Faville said...

Ron Silliman is a decent, responsible human being whom it has been my pleasure to know and interact with (at least on some level(s)).

My disagreements with him are almost wholly intellectual and not "personal."

It is never my intent to impugn his reputation or honor.

If he should think that it is, he is mistaken.

I do wish that some of the topics that he opens for discussion could be explored with some greater fullness and range. That he evidently wishes not to do this, I find troubling.

I just turned 62. Ron is about the same age. Maybe none of us has the time to waste disputing matters that we'd rather wish had been decided in ways that suit our impending mortality.

Smugness and self-confidence are the enemies of inquiry (and truth). Let's all guard against them.

Annandale Dream Gazette said...

Why don't you do the decent thing, Curtis, and delete Anonymous' last comment. You keep saying you don't allow anonymous comments---seems like a good time to prove it.

Kirby Olson said...

In the June July 2009 issue of Policy Review from the Hoover Institute Claire Berlinski writes, "The term ' corruption' compasses such practices as bribery, fraud, embezzlement, kickbacks, cronyism, and extortion. These are CRIMES" (74).

I think most artistic circles indulge in these to some degree. Especially cronyism. The surrealists wrote almost about noone except their inner circle, using the circle as a kind of rugby scrum to advance themselves.

A few broke out or were expulsed -- one of the most interesting writers in the movement -- Soupault -- started writing novels and smoking English cigarettes -- but stopped making it to meetings, as well.

But he was also very heterogenous -- one of the few to write criticism of non-surrealists but in a positive vein.

I think it's important to be open to those outside your circle, and to those outside your own typical thought patterns. How else can you learn anything?

Reviewing one another's books is a kind of "kickback," and it does seem that the L-circle has been very indulgent in that matter.

Steve Fama said he sees blogs as being like your own house. Except they're not, because few let just anybody into your own house. Silliman has had a million hits or more on his blog. How many of those people have been to his house?

I see his blog as being more like a newspaper. It's virtually the only newspaper of the community of poets that encompasses Black Mountain, Beat, and other traditions that he considers post-avant.

The problem with not letting comments through is that you'd never know that some in that community don't like Obama, or trust him. You'd never know that some like Robert Lowell, and do trust him.

Ron's editorial grip is too tight at least for a newspaper -- insofar as newspapers do still allow contrary opinions. The NY Times has a couple of centrists that they allow to speak from time to time, while presenting them as conservatives which they aren't.

Corruption among the modernists (Williams and his circle, Pound and his circle, Moore and her circle) also indulged in at least a kind of cronyism. The Dial was considered to be a closed circle, and Moore was often considered to be disproportionately publishing friends.

You had to move in those circles to be published, many thought. Moore denied that. She did publish some outsiders, and didn't publish some insiders.

Poetry has been notoriously corrupt over the last twenty years -- something that Foetry outed to good effect. I think we have to keep asking what is fair, and what isn't, if poetry itself is to flower, as opposed to certain poets who are in the inner circles.

Even within a cornfield you want to have some outsider genes to keep the thing from becoming too bland, and too predictable, and hence too easily overcome by various kinds of inner rot.

Delia Psyche said...

I hope you can see your years of "drudgery and duty" as like Ammons's years of glass factory and principaling, Carver's years of crap jobs and lugging his family's clothes to the laundromat--years that made you who you are, made it possible for you to write what you're writing now. Maybe they made you a better writer than you would have been had you remained a lone academic wolf.

Curtis Faville said...

David:

Absolutely!!

100% correct.

At some point, I'll discuss some of the advantages of having had the opportunity to talk to thousands of people at key points in their lives (retirement, death of love ones, disability, parenthood, employment, taxes) and what that taught me. This would never have been available to me in an academic setting.

Curtis Faville said...

Steven:

I think I'm going to have to agree with Kirby, with respect to the "in one's own house" concept.

Blogs are a new form, with new rules, and new issues regarding taste, free speech, and control.

I feel it is every blog-administrator's duty to preserve, insofar as it is possible, the concept of free speech. Censorship is something that should be resisted at all costs. There are instances in which completely crazy people--the kind of people who you might find screaming on a streetcorner to the sky--whose comments don't belong, but aside from this (and scatology, and vicious personal attacks), I see no defense for censorship, particularly when it is motivated by political agendas.

Curtis Faville said...

Dear Annandale:

Well, my biggest concern is anons attacking other people from the protection of anonymity. I can live with anonymity, as long as it isn't abused.

Annandale Dream Gazette said...

Right, I agree --- that's what he/she did in that very mean post, and why I wish you would delete it.

Curtis Faville said...

Dear Annandale:

Sometimes it's better to let people speak. IF what they're saying, and the way they say it, is as bad as you think it is, then there's a good chance it will self-destruct.

If Anon posts add'l such "body slams" I'll probably not allow them.

J said...

I find his over-controlled, moderated, hyper-eclectic boutique-blog exhausting--something like "all things the hipster-poet needs". Yet also sort of conservative in bad way (ie like Podhoretzian, not Poundian) gives an indication of his writing, I don't think I'll be looking for the Best of silliman on Amazon.

He seems like one of these crypto-rightist literary types (seen also on Olson's blog) who once denounced Nixon and now wishes the israelis and their US allies would just start WWIII.

And I don't trust the obese (however talented)

Curtis Faville said...

The range of Silliman's interests, alone, makes him an interesting read.

He is a friend to innovative poetry everywhere. Much more so than I ever could be.

I don't get along with him a lot of the time. But I doubt whether that's a commentary on my insight, or his lack of same.

Ron's not on the right. He's on the left.

Air Jordan said...

What a great blog!There have a chance that we can have an furthur exchanges and cooperation.I will always pay attention to your blog.

Ed Baker said...

well:
enouph about you and "y'all"
let's talk about ME!

I have if all goes well
3 new books coming out... any-day now... all paper 'things'

told all three publishers to send a "review" copy to Ron Silliman for his blog.

ALL THREE shot back: "Who's Ron Silliman? And, what HAS he done
...recently?"

and

rules are like habits... hard to drop OR break

next time there is a van Gock retro instead of going in through the entrance
go in through the exit! a shorter to now line AND going against the current IS AN EYE/MIND OPENER-BENDER

ciao, Kokie-san

Curtis Faville said...

Hey, man, don't I rate a review copy too?

Ed Baker said...

heck, I'll have to buy you a copy out of my Social Security check..

tell you what

I'll sign it AND do a little drawing, stamp it with my chop
number it "1/25,000"
and 'tip-in' via a book-plate "this book belongs to Larry Eigner"

(I bet you thought that I was gonna say "Ron Silliman"!)

then you can sell it on the World-Wide Web /HonestAbeBooks for
$1,200

which will just about cover the increase in my (coming) Health Care Insurance which I won't get until after I am dead.... if then.

Curtis Faville said...

Ain't no money in literature, man, get y'self a new gig!

But by all means send me a friendly copy, and if you give me your address, I'll send you some of my books.

Ed Baker said...

you wrote books?

Half-the-world writes books

..mostly fiction, poetry, and dramamean...
so,
we will most-likely do some trading?

total of pages in all yore-in books MUST equal/equate with mine to make things faire?


I'll include my colonies of dust- mites (motes?)

hey, isn't 'motes" plural in French for 'words' like lays belles motes?

well

enough about this.. I gotta assemble two new book-cases so's I can
relocate my first editions of some of my dead friend's books and letters

just in case a new (cute) muse shows up... and these things impress her!

and
as you know Them Cute Muses are very hard to impress-nate.. on any level.

Air Jordan said...

Nice blog!There have a chance that we can have an furthur exchanges.May be we have common interests.Let's keep in touch.Also I will always pay attention to your blog.

Jordan Sneakers said...

The new line is absolutely stunning! I have been so entertained by your blog,keep smiling and take care!