Behold nineteen Luzinskis

The Bull wore number nineteen.

I wear blue jeans and write about New York City.

"Lastly, a writer dressed in blue jeans and a dress shirt, read from his book Fight for Your Long Day. He said in his introductory comments, “If I want to sell the book, I guess I need to let you know who I am. My name is Alex Kudera.” The audience clapped enthusiastically. His reading described a day in the life of a very tired adjunct in New York City. So much of what he dealt with Heather could relate to: trying not to leave anything behind, rushing in and rushing out of the classroom, the students desperately trying to talk while you are trying to make it to your next gig and don’t have time to listen, the colleagues and chair who say demeaning things to you but are impervious to the way they talk down to you. It felt good to laugh about it instead of the daily grind of dealing with it, day in and day out."

~~ from Adjunct Headquarters, "Subconference of the MLA" by Lydia Field Snow

Philly

"I knew the meek [ain't] inherit shit."

~~ from "Ganny: Truer Words at a Funeral" by Joseph Earl Thomas

home

I think of the opening of The Joke by Milan Kundera whenever I return to Philadelphia.

Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble on Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia 

 

Eugene N.

 

Michael Weingrad's Eugene Nadelman arrived from Philly.

Save Chinatown

 

arrives September 17

Michael Weingrad's Eugene Nadelman: A Tale of the 1980s in Verse is available for preorder now.

Letter from Philadelphia

"My father grew up here and escaped. I ran back."

No one was in my life

"Adjunct survival led me to a bird that flew into my apartment only this past year while teaching abroad in Suzhou, China. Not dead yet and employed overseas again, I’d chased contract work to 'the Venice of the Far East'—a mainland city of man-made lakes and narrow canals—but I was alone. I had no friends. Gardens bloomed throughout the city, but there was no housing bulletin board at an American church. I had people in the program—teachers, students, staff—that I would exchange pleasantries with or occasional chitchat, but there was no one I was close to. I wasn’t going to stay up all night discussing politics, literature, or anything else. No one was in my life, and talking all about it no longer appealed to me."

~~ from "An Old Friend Called" by Alex Kudera

a primitive way

"My strength was nearly depleted when Avi stopped pressing hard against me; at last, I could see he was no threat to attack. I didn’t see anything we could win by furthering this contest, and I recognized that Avi’s theft was the initiation of the physical encounter, if not the first act of aggression. In hindsight, it’s hard to remember another time when anything I was involved with was settled in such a primitive way."

no conversion required

"Whereas Avi wanted me to know who I could become, the boy already knew who I was. An identification, no conversion required.

"He appointed me as his countryman, but he didn’t stop and give me time to pledge allegiance."

#awp22

If you're around the AWP Bookfair on Saturday, I may be able to help you acquire a copy of Auggie's Revenge or the reprint of Fight for Your Long Day.

Haiti

An earthquake in Haiti has killed at least twelve people. The subsequent aftershocks have lead to various tremors and disturbances not at all limited to one wandering soul finding my blog on Haitians in Philadelphia and my childhood home posted around the time a far more devastating earthquake struck.

Three Philly schools "reset" tuition

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Lasalle, Rosemont, and Immaculata have all "reset" their total for tuition, room, board and fees to attract a larger applicant pool and increase enrollment. Lasalle's new total of $43,476 per year may be less than full retail on some 2018 4X4 "King Cab" trucks, but it's still a lot of money for college (but now, ironically, compared to other local schools, it's not). Weren't we naive when we expressed shock and awe as a full degree went past 100K total years ago. . . 

Kenneth Goldsmith in The New Yorker

I'd read so many online responses to Yi Fen Chou (the "pooped" poet), Vanessa Place, and Kenneth Goldsmith that I did something I rarely do these days.  Which was to sit in the library and read the entire Alec Wilkinson piece on KG, a poet I'd never heard of until the last few weeks, despite spending the majority of my life in University City in West Philly. It's almost a surprise I wasn't born in Clark Park, right where John Ebersole has sworn off white poets writing about race and dreamed up Public Pool. Based on Ebersole's online poetry personality, I'd assume he is a migrant to University City, not someone like me who grew up there, but I don't know. Anyway, the un-New Yorker-ish "resentfully" (an "ly" from those guys?) is noted, a jab that doesn't add anything to the profile, but in a life of grading, parenting, commuting, surviving, it was reading to enjoy. It was a break, a chance to read an extended profile of a writer, and I've enjoyed many of these over the years, often when I was previously unfamiliar with the writer's creative work, and mostly from Harper's Magazine or The New Yorker. Wilkinson's profile captured KG's quirks. I saw multiple points of view about his poetry's value, or not, thoughts about his copying, and I appreciated he's read Ulysses several times and much admires Benjamin, Joyce, etc. (these guys aren't my guys, but it's disturbing that they could be dismissed as dead white guys). Goldsmith comes across as a nerd-dandy-intellectual of sorts, somewhat aware that he is playing the poet-fool, out there hustling in funny clothes. So he's a human being—a goof?, a jerk?—but not a murderer. He's a wealthy man, perhaps, but no doubt, this is only relative to the pervasive poverty in the world of poetry (news alert: in fact, he is rich by any definition although the pervasive poverty of poetry remains). His projects sound creative, if not poetic, and he'd tell you, I think, he's a plagiarizer by more than one definition. It would make sense to me if his appropriation did not stand the test of time although with art, and the commerce surrounding it, one never knows. Past poets who mastered PR and marketing in their own lifetime have managed to stay in print long after it. I'm thinking mainly of Allen Ginsberg, whose strategy (sorry, I meant spontaneous impulse to do this or that) included meeting late in life with writers associated with WWII fascism, Celine and Pound, protesting nukes and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and standing in the background of Bob Dylan music videos (for more detail, read American Scream). Even when he rambles on race, I doubt The Donald will reference KG as "one of those New York Jew poets who cracks out of tune," but KG, VP, and PP's detractors have gotten me reading more poems. It reminded me to hunt down some poetry and prose from a writer I associate with Philly, Linh Dinh, as well as some new ones, Franny Choi, Nomi Stone, Jenny Zhang. And by coincidence I heard Candace Wiley and Skip Eisiminger read poetry at an event I organized down here. My version of Philly poetry has nothing to do with KG. It starts with Lamont Steptoe and Don Riggs, and it extends to so many talented others who've mainly lived in South Philly, Center City, particularly back when it was affordable, or even in the suburbs. These poets have studied and taught variously at Penn, Drexel, Temple, CCP, and other schools; some are from the region and others moved to Philly because an artist could afford its cost of living. After Alec on Kenny, I was on a roll, reading about and by all manner of older affluent why-pee-poes. I read most of the Jane Smiley interview in the new print copy of The Paris Review, highly recommended, and then a chunk of the Bernie Sanders profile from Mother Jones. From the New York Review of Books, I read a paragraph or two of George Soros on Ukraine, but that was all I could stand although I often recommend his father Tivadar's book on surviving the Holocaust in Hungary. I thought I'd read in the print version that Goldsmith had relatives on both sides who died in the Shoah, but when I returned more recently to the online version of the article, even after some skimming, I could not find this detail although that's not to say that these facts had been disappeared.

44 redux

In a post on Dan Fante's Point Doom, I mentioned being the same age as the narrator, and now it's as if my age is chasing me around the web. Recent findings?

The prison guard featured in a story about the most unequal place in America is 44. He works a night shift in Louisiana for $8.50 an hour.

The guy who learns the vast comic collection he has saved since childhood is worth about $500 is also 44, and now he has to find alternative funding to pay for his kids' college educations.

And the suspect in the Anderson Hall assault on an adjunct is 45.

So, to an extent, it's my age, even in food stamps lost, that's hitting me over the head on this first of November, and it doesn't feel like a good time to be a mid-forties male in America.

I better write fiction quickly from now on. . .

(Returning to this on February 3, 2014, and 1) from a student essay on a magazine advertisement I learned Jennifer Aniston is 44 2) newly crowned Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Frank Sherlock is 44! and, alas, 3) we've lost a great actor who was 46.)

(Stumbled upon on March 1, 2014, a Times Op-Ed, on what you learn in your 40s that begins, "If all goes according to plan, I’ll turn 44 soon after this column appears.")

peace and trade, redux

Here's a follow up to the peace and trade blog below, Philly style with Michael Nutter in Tianjin. I can't prove that this sister-city business lifts all boats in both towns, but I can't prove it doesn't, either (although there are news articles everyday about how young people around the world are struggling).

"Staggering" is Mayor Nutter's first description, and his impressions sound similar to mine during last summer's visit to Suzhou and Shanghai. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Seeing what goes on here is a reminder of the things we can do and must do to maintain our presence on the world stage," Nutter said.

It also underscores "what our federal government can do if we would have, at times, a little less debate and a whole lot more work and understand that investment brings job and activity and furthers American interests," said Nutter, who also is president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Make no mistake, Mike, China is very much the kind of place where behind the amazing skyscrapers, ports, bridges, and trains, you can still see the signs of hand-to-mouth living. Then again, every place in the world is like that.

Philadelphia wandering

I flew in on remarkably small planes from GSP to Dulles to Philly and a few hours later, I was visiting my older sister and her family in always sunny University City. After we all ate at an Indian restaurant, I walked back through Penn and Drexel's campuses and saw new buildings and construction all over. The University of Pennsylvania had a whole bunch of new restaurants where I used to frequent the other movie theater as a kid. It was either the Eric III on Campus across from the library on 40th or the GCC on Walnut. But that was so many years ago and now even the Marathon Grill that replaced the Burger King is long gone. It seemed like a happy, healthy, economically stimulated area on an early Saturday evening, far removed from any evidence that American median incomes have slipped by four grand over the past four years or that our median family is worth 77K. It's probably bad form to bring all that up, yeah, I know.

So I walked down Walnut in the colder-than-I-thought-it-would-be weather and popped in to the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore to make sure my same signed paperbacks of Fight for Your Long Day were still on the shelf. Yep, they were. Untouched and unread, so I took them out to check for my signature and then replaced them all save for one which I left open to display, leaning on the paperbacks on a higher state of shelf. Will someone find it and read or at least give it a quick glance? Will a reshelver take this as a clue that it's time for the books to be returned? There appear to be sales in new and used online, but it's a little unclear if the everchanging quantities of new and used available on amazon are genuinely indicative of such.

Who cares, right?

Yeah, so I sauntered over to the magazines and found the latest editions of Boulevard and The Paris Review. Boulevard had an Anis Shivani follow-up, a retort and reply, to the AWP/MFA gangs who've been dissing his disses on the question of whether creative writing can or cannot be taught, or is not or is a form of therapy. And, well, I must confess it is making me feel a little better right now, the writing is therapeutic I should say, but the whole thing seems like some ridiculous binarism than even kids who didn't write their first messages on IBM punch cards can easily debunk, deconstruct, or de-whatever-they-want-to-call-it.

For the average applicant, as talented as she or he may be, the programs themselves seem increasingly impossible to gain admittance to although evidence suggests that in some cases cheating and plagiarism can work for other elite programs. If I remember correctly, George Saunders reported almost 600 applications for 6 spaces at Syracuse, so there seems to be very little reason not to resort to criticizing them as part of one's own quest for readership. If I'm not mistaken, Roberto Bolano did worse than this kind of thing as a young poet in Mexico, and I'd suspect that this is part of how he established his "name" even if he wrote his long novels years later in Spain. The actual writing of the books would be the minor problem, right?

Hah!

But back to rejection and economic doom, Saunders's underlying economic message is that one is most likely to become just another rejected statistic who has lost hundreds of dollars in application fees so that a handful of select writers might indulge in tuition wavers and "generous stipends," all the while dreaming of healthy salaries, quality health benefits, and secure retirements that may prove to be entirely out-of-reach or nonexistent. The finances are most likely to be middling at best either and any way unless the poet is willing to resort to some other art for the sake of turning a buck. But aside from the fact that he is dying, just like the rest of us, and must endure such terminal pleasure in cold, dreary upstate New York, Saunders is doing quite fine.

Me? I played it warmer, if poorer, and stayed in South Carolina when my wife moved to Ohio for her good opportunity. I wanted to live with my daughter full-time this year, but there was no job for me, and I couldn't bring myself to apply for one of three sales positions advertised at Subaru of Dayton or return to begging for adjunct classes while some other "important" writers write the same books over and over again. (I'd love to see more of these capitalist repeaters show some cojones and say something public, and positive or negative, about Fight for Your Long Day. Books are being written on top of women with no benefits teaching six classes, and the higher-ups mostly ignore this situation.)

For the record, in car sales, the opportunities to write are even more fleeting than they are for the adjunct instructors of English comp, but health benefits are generally still available for full-time workers at the dealerships. When I sold Toyotas over 20 months in Philly, I'd drink beer and scribble in a bar late at night, but I never produced anything more than the roughest sketches. I was tired, naye, exhausted, most of the time, and it's as if nothing has really changed over time.

So I put down Boulevard, hoping Shivani is enjoying the fact that he has so many readers for "frenemies" (a term borrowed from this recent Alexander Chee), and although it's the one I'd prefer to be loyal to, and its editor was briefly kind to one of my rejected stories, alas, I'm just another writer with a kid who shouldn't be indulging in any full-retail-price literary journals, and so I felt like I was doing something wrong when I purchased The Paris Review instead, at a corporate-U. B&N no less, by slapping down a plastic amazon card. Its contents included a "novella" by Sam Savage, an interview with both a poet and fiction writer, and news of their $10,000 prize, which although I'll never win, I might enjoy indulging in dreams of such.

So that's it. Then I left the bookstore and walked home, through the mad, overbearing construction at Drexel University, buildings being built on what used to be the cement sidewalk, where I could likely still be an adjunct instructor if I hadn't made the decisive break in August, 2007. No novel and no little girl I'm almost certain, and now it remains to be seen as to whether this newish trajectory produces any more books or kids.

I'm feeling more optimistic about the second novel. A second child seems highly unlikely.

But one way or another, the second novel, the true first novel and the weirder and more original one, is going to come out.

For some crazy reason, maybe just the 45 minutes of editing I put in at 7 a.m., I know this to be true.

Ridge Avenue

I remember driving by this Ridge Avenue homeless shelter many times on my way to 8:40 a.m. Writing for Business and Industry classes at Temple University. In one of my 10 to 15-year-old economy cars (quality "hoopdees" for all your urban transportation needs), I'd glance to the left, see the men already standing outside, and be grateful I had an apartment, a fine collection of adjunct "opportunities," a working car heater, and more. If I'm not mistaken, Sam Katz once visited and spoke to the men during one of his failed mayoral bids.

And now, poof, the shelter disappears. . .

. . . or, rather, it has been replaced by another Stephen Starr joint, in this case, a catering operation employing 60 people (but the article states none of the previous tenants applied for work at the new venture).

Here's an excerpt from the news:

However, with Gov. Corbett's decision to cut off of general-assistance money to 30,000 Philadelphians in August and with the approaching winter, homeless advocates say the situation could quickly worsen.

"We will not be surprised if we see an increase in the number of people who need shelter," Scullion said. "It might not be today, but when it breaks, it will be tough."

Andrew Latimore, 57, who is homeless, said it's been hard for people who've been cut off from general assistance.

"A lot of people are off their checks now and only have food stamps," Latimore said. "You can't stay nowhere with food stamps."