Oh yeah, I'm a fan of The Great Gatsby, too!

Going to comment on something literary? Then I guess it best to keep literary. OTT, just like The Great Gatsby himself.

"It's Fall, that means it's a good time for an Early Harvest."

A line Ah-nuld would be proud to use if he had my book. Look at that. My publisher did up this picture and posted it on her Facebook page. It's not great to give to kids on Halloween, but it IS great to read in between visit from the little monsters. And let's face it, you're going to need some comfort from all the scares.

My Office: U2 Bitches

I’m not really up for talking about my poetry 100% of the time. The poetry is there; I think it speaks for itself. I will try to share whatever news I can about what’s going on, but I’m not up for sharing until I have something down for sure. Life right now is just talking with the publisher, talking to my local paper (which I will post an update about when it goes live), getting review copies of my book sent to the right places, and tying up web loose ends. I’m learning to code over at Codecademy in order to program my own website. I’d like something with a better domain and more personalized. So with that in mind, let me take you on a rant with me:

First World Humans, will you step into my office? Yeah, we have to talk. I hear you bitching about U2 putting their new album on your iPhone for FREE. (Read that twice.) Yeah, what the hell is wrong with you? I mean other than the fact that you have another one of Steve Jobs’s overpriced iProducts? When has anybody ever complained about getting something for free? For free! And what's more, they've done it in the single most carbon-neutral way music could ever be transferred. And yet your first world problems have you bitching about how to get it out of your purchased folder even though none of the songs are downloaded until you click the iCloud. I feel like this new lingo is bogging down my prose, by the way, but that’s a different subject.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to defend the quality of U2’s new material or try to dictate what your tastes should be. Regarding your esteem of them, that’s your choice, and I can understand pretty much all the complaints anybody has about the group even though The Joshua Tree and especially Achtung Baby are masterpieces by just about any rubric. Yeah, Songs of Innocence is U2 past their prime but if we’re being honest so is some of the material on All That You Can’t Leave Behind when they graduated from weirdos to classic rock elder statesmen. You know what happened when NIN put out an album for free online that was way past their prime? I downloaded it and thought what a cool guy Trent Reznor was to put his latest piece of crap (maybe half piece of crap if you want to be generous) for FREE. I wasn’t going to pay for The Slip! Now that I’ve heard it I think I’d drop a couple of bucks on a physical release without shipping and handling. Maybe. It’s still a cool thing that Trent Reznor did for the fans. If I throw on NIN you can bet it’s most likely going to be Pretty Hate Machine or Broken, but I’m still thankful for The Slip. It’s still like a friend came by and hooked me up with a free album and I’d be a fucking asshole if I were to bitch my friend out for doing that… even if it was Metallica’s Garage Days Inc.

It's only privilege that has you looking a gift horse in the mouth and bitching about it instead of, oh, I don't know, just not downloading it? Ignoring the fact that it’s spam in your purchased folder? Deleting it? I mean, do you bitch about every single piece of spam you get in your inbox? I don’t think so. Otherwise you’d stop being a human and just turn into one giant bitch. Speaking of which, if you are a bitch please leave comments c/o Craxblorg here at http://craxblorg.blogspot.com/ I’m sending out an invitation to every single human being on this planet to shut up about U2's free album. Shut up about the “botched” roll out. Shut up about the money involved. Shut the fuck up about U2 “devaluing” their brand. Maybe you like complaining. That’s okay. Everybody likes to complain. But if you’re going to do so, I suggest you at least get good at it first or take a long hard look at Maddox’s brilliant take-down of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. Now get the fuck outta my office.

Hendrix Family: Re-issue Band Of Gypsies

I don't know if you've read this new Rollingstone article. If you just clicked that link, then of course you have. And if you did then the gist of it is as recognizable to any Hendrix fan as it is to me because I consider myself to be one of his greatest fans. Jimi Hendrix to me not only represents the "everlasting yeah" that Bill Hicks has described, a state of guitar nirvana that has never been reached before and probably will never be reached again, not only one of the greatest songwriters of all time penning thoughtful lyrics to juicy tunes, but the greatest single encapsulation of the Seattle attitude ever. My condolences to fellow 27-club member and Seattle-ite Kurt Cobain (although neither hailed from the city itself). Jimi Hendrix represents a blues player not only steeped in traditions Clapton could only approximate, but adept at all sorts of guitar trickery that Clapton never even dreamed of. In fact, I think Jimi Hendrix is the reason Clapton decided to mellow the fuck out and stick to the sidelines even on records credited to him. If you think I'm down on Clapton remember that this is from a guitar student who (like Eddie Van Halen) considers Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton to be perhaps the greatest guitar record of all time.

Now, as for what the article portends, I'd like to personally make an honest entreaty to the Hendrix Family and its overlord be she benevolent or malevolent, Janie Hendrix. Janie Hendrix, we have so much of Jimi's catalogue reissued at this point, in sound that may not be a new transfer but nonetheless is presented in superior quality. We have First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, which was meant to correct the sins of The Cry Of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and even a third posthumous album that record company scum at the time felt fit to issue after the musician's untimely demise. We also have South Saturn Delta, BBC Sessions, Jimi At Woodstock, Valleys Of Neptune, the truly awesome West Coast Seattle Boy, and even a reissue of The Jimi Hendrix Experience Box Set with bonus tracks- all of which show varying degrees of quality.

All of these are great in my eyes because they always represent new views of an amazing artist whose talents were so prodigious that even his out-take material represented better material than 95% of the crap that passes for entertainment- in all eras. But we have West Coast Seattle Boy now, which documents portions of those legendary New Year's Eve/New Year's Day shows of 1969-1970 with Band Of Gypsies. Hendrix Family, what I want as a fan, what I'm willing to pay money for, is for the rest of the recordings of these historic dates. I want "Who Knows", "Machine Gun", and "Power Of Soul" from Band Of Gypsies. I want "Stop", "Message To Love", and "Burning Desire" from Live At Fillmore East, but mostly I want you to dig deep into those tapes and give me the full experience of "We Gotta Live Together", Buddy Miles's masterpiece that for whatever reason hasn't seen the full light of day.

I don't know what the hell you're sitting on the complete tape for! Does Buddy break out into a totally anti-white-man rant in the middle of the "we gotta live together" chants that he's doing "just like in Church, now"? Does he break out like a Tourette's-syndrome patient into a bunch of "crackers" unexpectedly, mid drum-riff? Does he call for a revolution against the then-nascent Reagan administration over its activities in Vietname and kow-towing to Henry Kissinger? Speaking of which, this is becoming like that 18 minutes of tape missing from Nixon's private recordings that everybody was talking about for Watergate. I don't know what the hell he's up to for a mysterious some 4 minutes or so missing from the total song length, missing even from the extended version featured on Live At Fillmore East. Or is it even Jimi who goes off track during the recording? Maybe he's decided enough of the everlasting "yeah" and gone with the everlasting "no" instead for a change.

Whatever the case, I, as a Jimi Hendrix fan, want those god damn tapes. BTW, any bootleggers want to send me CD transfers of those original tapes are more than welcome. Contact me. Hendrix Family, you can do a lot better by us fans to release those concerts or even just the original Band Of Gypsies album by itself than you could to release those bastardization Hendrix releases, The Cry Of Love and Rainbow Bridge. Please see the error of your ways and understand that if even Robin Thicke can pay tribute to Hendrix/Band Of Gypsies, if only in an album cover then there has to be something there that you could bury the hatchet with Buddy Miles, no matter what his demands are for the portion of his songs that were included purposefully on the recording and approved by Jimi himself. Short of being a snuff death recording (of which I'm damn sure it's not!), Hendrix Family, release these tapes!

Bitterzoet Magazine [Op. 47]

It's been too long since my last update, I know. I really should take the plunge and put up the 50 dollars it takes to get a year's subscription to Duotrope. I had this idea of getting paid for my work first. I haven't netted a red cent from my efforts. Not that I mind too much, though. Nobody ever went into poetry saying, "That's where the money is! I'll be a millionaire!" Anyhoo, I've been published in Bitterzoet Magazine. It's a poem that I am indeed very proud of entitled "Caesar's Embarrassment: A Double-Dactyl." I was very proud of all the poems I sent to the magazine, but this one just seemed like it was going to get picked up quickly. It had that je ne sais quois about it.

Word on the street about my first book is that it may drop before my birthday (18 October) this year and if it does I will definitely be feeling celebratory. I don't know why but 27 just seems like a good age to debut. I look forward to seeing what happens with it. I will, of course, update as updates come.

The Author's Lament

I thought I'd post this little ditty here at the end of this amazing month in more honor of that amazing author himself, Mr. James Joyce. I hope you get as much delight from it as I did.

By M.J. McManus

I might write clotted nonsense
By strenuous endeavor,
And make the puzzled critics
Ejaculate, "How clever!"

I could, like Mr. Joyce,
Confound the prim reviewer
If my timid nose would let me
Dive headlong into a sewer.

But my work is undistinguished,
And my royalties are lean,
Because I never am obscure,
And not at all obscene.

16 June 2013

Hello, everybody, and welcome to a very special edition post by yours truly, Euphrates Arnaut Moss. Today, as it is most likely you well know, is Father's Day. It's also, as you less likely know, Bloomsday, the incredible celebration day of the year in which not only has Ulysses been read in its entirety by a cast of Irish actors in 1982, but the day on which many people around the world recognize and promote by feasting on cheese sandwiches, burgundy, liver and onions, and kidney. Some even conduct their own Ulysses by visiting shops and attempting to re-create everything Leopold Bloom did on this most auspicious of days in 1904 (some posit that it is the day of the first date of James Joyce and his beloved Nora Barnacle while others strongly deny it and say that it has a different significant meaning- possibly of the copulative kind). It is also, as probably nobody but a select few reading this knows, the day of my mother's and her older sister's birth in the years of 1959 and 1955 respectively. A most happy of birthdays goes out to Janet Hobbs and Colleen Strand! I love you both as dearly as a son and nephew can possibly love their proper counterpart. Today I've given dad a copy of the new Iggy & The Stooges album and my Mom a copy of Fleetwood Mac's self-titled album and a 10-dollar gift card to Starbucks.

In celebration of this day I include here the poem of Oliver St. John Gogarty, whose text is partially and not entirely accurately re-created in Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses in the very opening "chapter" (I prefer to call them divisions but what you will, I'm sure). Joyce names this poem in the book "The Ballad of Joking Jesus" but St. John Gogarty named it "The Song of the Cheerful (but Slightly Sarcastic) Jesus." It is reputed to be quite blasphemous, but I would never know having not given a slight shred of credence at any point in my life to the myth of "The Christ." Nevertheless, here are the lines in their entirety:

I'm the queerest young fellow that ever was heard.

My mother's a Jew; my father's a Bird

With Joseph the Joiner I cannot agree

So 'Here's to Disciples and Calvary.'

If anyone thinks that I amn't divine,

He gets no free drinks when I'm making the wine

But have to drink water and wish it were plain

That I make when the wine becomes water again.

My methods are new and are causing surprise:

To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes

To signify merely there must be a cod

If the Commons will enter the Kingdom of God

Now you know I don't swim and you know I don't skate

I came down to the ferry one day and was late.

So I walked on the water and all cried, in faith!

For a Jewman it's better than having to bathe.

Whenever I enter in triumph and pass

You will find that my triumph is due to an ass

(And public support is a grand sinecure

When you once get the public to pity the poor.)

Then give up your cabin and ask them for bread

And they'll give you a stone habitation instead

With fine grounds to walk in and raincoat to wear

And the Sheep will be naked before you'll go bare.

The more men are wretched the more you will rule

But thunder out 'Sinner' to each bloody fool;

For the Kingdom of God (that's within you) begins

When you once make a fellow acknowledge he sins.

Rebellion anticipates timely by 'Hope,'

And stories of Judas and Peter the Pope

And you'll find that you'll never be left in the lurch

By children of Sorrows and Mother the Church

Goodbye, now, goodbye, you are sure to be fed

You will come on My Grave when I rise from the Dead

What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly

And Olivet's breezy—Goodbye now Goodbye.