New Directions: Aram Saroyan’s Q&A with Gerald Hausman

After meeting Gerald Hausman as a fellow poet and colleague in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, I soon admired his poetry. The work seemed to me a fresh incarnation of a tradition I identified with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Uniquely, looking into those early chapbooks today, the work continues to hold its charge.  Over the years, while we stayed in touch and exchanged books, it was only recently, with the publication of two new books, Little Miracles and Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, both of which might be characterized as nonfiction novels, that I recognized he’d in the meantime emerged in a way I never could have imagined. In his prose the same ease and accuracy remain, and a deceptive modesty in the tone, but the explorations have expanded and magnified in all directions. I haven’t read anything that has affected me so powerfully in years. A.S.

Read more

First In, Last Out: A Year of Retail Mask Mandates

In mid-May, the CDC revised its guidelines on masks. Vaccinated individuals could go maskless both indoors and out. The news came on the tail end of a long shift at my retail job. We’d strictly enforced the mandate since last May. It felt like, mid-fight, the enemy combatants had called out from their opposing trench that the war was over. Maskless customers filtered in throughout the evening. Without word from On High, the battle was over. And that battle had been about more than just public health.

Read more

Notes from the Underground

The author–a columnist at Inside Higher Ed–thought this piece belonged in First in the Month. Your editor was glad to take him up on his proposal to reprint it…

In the sort of coincidence that makes a columnist’s work much easier, the Library of America published Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel on April 20 — the same day, as it turned out, that a jury in Minneapolis convicted a police officer of murdering George Floyd last year.

Read more

If Bob Dylan Says “Home”

Out our front door, Marin is so steep the mountain goats need crampons. But the Hispanic fellow, early 40s, GE Appliance truck, curbed his wheels and popped out. Adele had the garage door open and he’d spotted the Mustang. “Can I take a look?” .

He walked around it. Twice. “I’ll give you thirty-five, Cash.”

“Let me get my husband. He’s the one who drives it.”

Read more

Towards Giving It the Olde College Try

for Mas’ud Zavarzadeh

I buried it outside the Hall of Languages, at the top of the hill.  Took a shovel, dug a hole in the pristine lawn at the end of the walkway and buried it. No one seemed bothered by it: not the campus police nor the associate prof looking for tenure. No one seemed to care.

That was forty years ago.

Read more

Act of Imagination (& Larceny)

The groove in the Rolling Stones’ classic cover of “Just My Imagination” (1978) comes straight out of Waylon Jennings’ “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” (1975). No plaints here. Geniuses steal. Follow the echoes below…

Read more

Driving While Brown: Stories from the Struggle Against Sherriff Joe Arpaio

Journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block spent years chronicling the human consequences of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawless approach to immigration enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona. In Driving While Brown, they tell the tale of two opposing movements that redefined Arizona’s political landscape—the restrictionist cause embraced by Arpaio and the Latino-led resistance that rose up against it.

What follows is a Q&A with the authors of Driving While Brown.  

Read more

Act Locally!

First of the Month‘s correspondent Leslie Lopez has another outlet for her reportage from the Pueblo. Here’s a local labor story with national resonance that she published last month in La Cucaracha

Read more

Roller Skating Tuesday

Lana Del Rey is set to release a new CD in July. Last time around she didn’t seem intent on “making the next great American record.” The will to go pop (without compromising) that made her Norman Fucking Rockwell undeniable in 2019 was missing from Chem Trails over the Country Club, which she put out earlier this year. The absence of f-words on Chem Trails may be a sign LDR sensed someone like Olivia Rodrigo would render slack style sub-urban (and all sold-out), but it also hints LDR’s rock ‘n’ roll attitude was on hiatus. OTOH, Chem’s Trails‘ “White Dress” came through, with a little help from the video. That, in turn, sent me back to a roller-skating video posted here last summer.  Compare and contrast, or just roll on…B.D.

This Heat: You Are Not Dead Until You Are Warm and Dead

Dashiel Tao Harris writes about the first time she kissed a boy in this valedictory to childhood, but what may be most striking about her post is its focus on her friendship with another girl who’s becoming a woman too. American lit has often been stuck on amity between boys-to-men. It’s past time for young women to take their friendships to the page…

Read more