Culturewatch
Travels With Mary Jane (A Pot Memoir)
In his book Boxing Babylon, Nigel Collins used a quote of mine from a magazine story I wrote on the late Philadelphia boxer, Tyrone Everett, who was shot to death by his girlfriend when she found him in bed with a transvestite.
French Kiss
In an episode of Call My Agent, the French TV series streaming on Netflix, Andréa, who is gay, winds up having angry, hot sex with a man she detests and who has bought the talent agency at which she is a partner.
Off the Wall
“Is that a fucking thumbtack?” Fritz said to the Skeleton-and-Roses poster behind me. Some of us regulars from the café were zooming. “It ought to be behind glass. In a vault.”
Too Black, Too Strong: Henry Aaron R.I.P.
I am a third-generation baseball player. My grandfather, Robert McInnis, was an outfielder and catcher who barnstormed with Negro League players.
The Bitter Logician and The Trimmer: Rereading Allen Grossman and Eugene Goodheart in My Middle Age
Penniless and nearing thirty circa 1990, the one ace up my sleeve was that I “worked with Grossman.” Grossman. The Brandeis English department’s quite literal resident “genius” poet and pedagogue. In August 1989, Allen R. Grossman had in fact received a John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant. Needless to say, I owned no mutual funds back then, but Grossman’s stock was on the rise when he was my doctoral adviser.
The Politics of Forbearance: Shirley Sherrod in Our Time
This story was originally published here at “The 19th.”
A decade after she was forced to resign as Georgia state director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Shirley Sherrod says she “holds no ill will” towards Agriculture secretary nominee Tom Vilsack, who played a key role in her resignation. She hopes that if Vilsack is confirmed, he will return to the role — which he held under the Obama administration — with a focus on Black farmers.
Addio Alle Armi
Bruce Jackson wrote this reflection on an Italian cultural festival, lessons of Attica and a perfect night in Piacenza a few years ago, but it’s still on time.
We Are All One
If not that, two.
Reese Pieces
I watched Legally Blonde (2001) for the first time last night. I have become interested in Reese Witherspoon. The turning point of the story is a piece of sexual harassment, and I found it moving.
Was Spencer Haywood Good For Business?
The Spenser Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball, and the Making of an American Iconoclast, Mark J. Spears & Gary Washburn, 2020.
Christmas and the Multiplication of Light
Fr. Rick Frechette is a medical doctor and Catholic priest who has been working in Haiti for a more than a generation. He wrote the following epistle to his family and supporters last Sunday, December 20th, the day before the Winter Solstice.
“One Fast Move or I’m Gone”: Kerouac and Big Sur
Prose by Zalokar (AKA David Golding) (x2), Bob Levin, Richard Meltzer, Aram Saroyan, and Theodore Putala prompted by Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and the documentary, One Fast Move or I’m Gone, about the stretch in Kerouac’s life chronicled in that novel. You can watch One Fast Move for free online here. (H/t Theodore Putala.)
Gentlemen[1] (Author Keeps Punching)
The basement had bare concrete floor. bare plywood walls. Ceiling beams lay exposed. Pipes showed here and wires there. Storage cartons rimmed the perimeter, reliquaries for the bones of books Shemp’d authored. Dust a more likely outcome than university archive.
Corso’s Shirt (Poverty & Poetry)
What follows is a brief excerpt from Robert Creeley on the Poet’s Work, in conversation with & photographs by Bruce Jackson–a new book documenting a Q&A between Jackson and Creeley that took place in 2001. In the passage below, Jackson’s prompts are bolded.
Feelings of a Prisoner
The author wrote this poem when he was detained in Tacoma ICE Processing Center. He has since been deported to Jalisco in Mexico. His poem is translated by David Golding.