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Volume 1 Issue 1
SPECIAL GUESTS:
The Gas Station Des Beaux Arts
........................William Dubie
Les Coquelicots
........................John Wojdylo
Andrei Codrescu: The WELL Interview
........................The WELLbeings
Honey Harvest
........................Robert Curtis Davis
Civil Service, Part I
The first chapter in a six-part serial
........................Kenneth Wolman
CORE may be reproduced freely *in its entirety only* throughout Cyberspace.
Please obtain permission of authors to reproduce individual works. Send
submissions, subscription requests, etc. to rita@eff.org. CORE is available
via anonymous ftp from eff.org (journals directory).
__________________________________________________________________________
Rita Marie Rouvalis, EIC rita@eff.org
Unroll that Scroll
CORE. The latest blaze of organized electrons to blast
across Cyberspace.
While I was editing this first issue of CORE, it was suggested
to me that I print out what I had, tape the pieces end-on-end, and see
what this did for my creative process. This idea seemed more reasonable
than ruining what remains of my eyesight and wearing out my arrow keys.
So, risking life and limb, I climbed onto my rather mobile chair
and stuck the resulting eight-foot-long sheet of paper to my office wall.
Then I stared. And stared. And stared some more. I decided that what
was appearing before my glazed eyes was what the ancient Phoenicians
were *really* after when they invented scrolls; they just didn't have
computers yet.
The Phoenicians didn't have a California-style flare for interactive
electronic interviewing, either. Not too long ago, Romanian poet Andrei
Codrescu was given a temporary account on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic
Link), a conferencing and e-mail service offered by the folks who publish
WHOLE EARTH REVIEW. For a pre-determined time span, WELLbeings (as WELL
subscribers prefer to think of themselves) fired questions at Andrei.
The result is cool; read it for yourself.
Oh, special thanks to my CD collection and Hurricane Bob.
__________________________________________________________________________
William Dubie (dubie@tnpubs.enet.dec.com)
THE GAS STATION DES BEAUX ARTS
Originals ring the pumps, oil (Quaker State?)
on velvet, each frame as slate,
masters of mechanics, with profiles fluorescent
as an Elvis collar--high art and octane for your dollar.
The tiger on velvet is the one in your tank.
Drive by a vulture for Icarus, Judas Priest,
before your pistons need grease.
The gallery of gas, petroleum--
Pointillism is ink in a shirt pocket; surrealism,
The abstracts of oil and water rainbowing the station,
made possible by a grant from Mobil Corp.
__________________________________________________________________________
John Wojdylo (infidel@maths.uwa.oz.au)
LES COQUELICOTS
(after Monet)
A moment of solitude. A corn field with poppies: stalks away in rhythm. And a
hill overlooks a
vineyard, another overlooks a village with children playing in the school yard.
buildings modern and cosmopolitan, and cities shriek, bustle, noise. Monuments,
churches intoxicate, noise.
Noise.
The countryside: silence, a gentle breeze, vineyards, lush green pastures, sweet
dancing poppies.
It might have been 1820. The lady wades forward, a red sea around, a wake
behind.
There, a bridge! Downstream:
narrow, meandering water, willows and other trees on either side, and a
dusty road. Upstream:
a splendid white castle half in shadow in the late afternoon sun.
To her left, a row of trees far away, were they planted? To her right, over the
A river. A city. Carts. Automobiles.
Or poppies, as far as the eye can see.
She longs to return, to
relive memories, to savour experiences now that she is older and wiser.
To savour, far from home and family, security, convenience, safety.
What if old friendships have become
too dim for rekindling?
Alone. In a land of strangers. In a poppy field in a distant land for which
she yearns.
The Lady's little brother has joined her, and he's picked some poppies and is
smelling them, and
wonders how such a pretty flower has no scent. Mother and sister are not far
behind.
____________________________________________________________________________
The WELLbeings (lcole@well.sf.ca.us)
ANDREI CODRESCU: THE WELL INTERVIEW
The voice and charming Romanian accent of Andrei Codrescu are
familiar to many of us. His weekly commentaries on National Public
Radio's "All Things Considered" are heard by as many as five million
listeners.
Mr. Codrescu is the author of more than twenty-five books of
poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs. His most recent book, published
by Addison-Wesley, "Raised By Puppets Only to Be Killed by Research" is
a collection of radio commentaries and newspaper essays.
Just published is "The Disappearance of the Outside," a book of
philosophy drawn from his recent visit to Romania. The material for
this book prompted a call from MGM to discuss the possibility of a
film. He is also the founder and editor of "Exquisite Corpse," a
literary journal.
Seeing his homeland again has prompted Mr. Codrescu to help with
the country's development effort. Prior to the overthrow of the
Ceausescu Regime, a single typewriter was regarded as a printing press,
far too dangerous to be left unregulated. The result of such regulation
is a country that today lacks the typewriters, copiers, facsimile
machines, personal computers, and video cameras necessary for the flow
and sharing of information. Mr. Codrescu is working with a nonprofit
organization called Information Tools For Romania to encourage desktop
publishing in Romania.
Mr. Codrescu lives in New Orleans with his wife Alice and their
two sons. He is a professor at Louisiana State University in Baton
Rouge where he teaches English. He was born in 1946 in Sibiu, Romania,
(most references say Transylvania) and came to The United States in
1966. He has also lived and worked in San Francisco, New York, and
Baltimore.
Gregory McNamee (gmcnamee)
Andrei, I'm curious to know what Romanian writers you recommend
to American readers (which presupposes the availability of English-language
editions of their work); what Romanian writers _must_ be translated into
English immediately; what American writers are important to Romanian
readers.
Andrei Codrescu
Greg, Romanian literature exists in suspended animation waiting for
translators. I don't translate what I really love --poetry-- because I
don't want to wreck it. But I can make a list of poets and novelists (and
two poetry critics) who can probably stand up to some wreckage. Romanian
literature is mostly poetry because poets knew how to wrap themselves in
a special language that protected them from grosso bureaucrats whose spew
drowned the pais for 45 yrs. It is very beautiful stuff filled with
oblique hints for survival. We disdained prose writers and, consequently,
have no real dissident tradition Russian-style.
Ron Buck (macbeth)
Andrei, them members of the poetry conference would very much like to
have a list of your poetic works available in the states.
Andrei Codrescu
My new poetry books are "Comrade Past & Mister Present," (Coffee House
Press), "Belligerence" (Coffee House), and then there are a few others
in obscure corners of hidden bookstores in bad parts of town. Thanks.
Bob Jacobson (bluefire)
What's it like to be a seer in the South? I mean, have you ever gone
"down on the bayou" or are you only there temporarily, until something
dramatic propels you north or even back to Romania?
And what's your opinion of the poetic enterprise? I've heard a criti-
cism that poetry (at least in America) is declining into an an intro-
verted, overly descriptive personal mode and losing its social context
and content. Do you agree?
Andrei Codrescu
The South is a lot like the Balkans: slow, inefficient, bureaucratic,
charming, full of stories and people who know how to tell them, a certain
ambiguity in language born out of colonialism, stubborn insistence on the
local, inability to say no to bad guys (like Rollins Co.), an excess of
politeness that hides 800 forms of resentment. In short, what's good about
it is what drives you crazy. It's a perfect place for a writer because
there is lots of interestingly used language ready for overhearing, and
much to observe. Even my most resolutely illiterate students can spin a
good yarn with perfect timing, either because they grew up under the dining
table listening to large families yammer, or because it's so hot in the
summer you have to tell cool stories to yourself. And there are many
varieties of home-grown craziness here that are peculiarly linked to the
word.
Poetry in America is another story, and at the risk of vanity here, I
would recommend the two anthologies I edited myself, "American Poetry
Since 1970: Up Late," and "The Stiffest of the Corpse: an Exquisite
Corpse Reader, 1983-1988." I edited the first one because I couldn't
find a commercial anthology to teach from so I made my own. I also
edited it because I think American poetry's become a boring lowpaid
whitecollar profession in the past decade, thanks to MFA Writing
Pograms, the NEA, and other well-meaning instututional strangulation.
It used to be (and still is, in Eastern Europe, Lower East Side, and
wherever my friends live) that poetry was a dangerous practice rightly
feared by nice people. A poet was considered liable to do any unpredictable
thing at any given moment, a power few people can claim. When poetry is
domesticated, that possibility is removed. No more Slack. Well,
I'm in the Slack Business -- I advocate and teach it. So you can say
that there is the Dangerous Slack Poetry made by the poets I
anthologised (and many others of their ilk) and the Academic Poesy of
non-threatening confession and stylistic contemplation which is the
prefered mode of Mainstream Am Lit, a small pie with eight hundred
thousand grubby but clean fingers in it. Alas.
That demands a corresponding increase in attention from the people to
whom the flow is directed, a commodity in short supply at the best of times.
In other words, there are more producers and fewer consumers, more writers
and less readers, more performers and less listeners. That's fine with me
because I'm an anarchist and I don't believe in "audience." I think everyone
should produce even if no one's buying. Eventually (I mean already!)
somebody'll be producing Attention, hence professional listeners, etc.
The age of Audience for Pay is here. If you give everybody a dollar
to read your book everybody wins. I knew this kid in San Francisco,
ten years old, used to go to poetry readings, then ask everybody
for a dollar to be quiet. Today he's one of our most famous poets,
Mr. John Ashbery. Just kidding, John.
Barry Michael Balch (barry)
My question has to do with your being a poet, going into exile and
then becoming a poet again in a second language. Having grown up in
American English, it's pretty transparent to me, I don't see how it
effects me. As you became a writer again in American English, what
did you discover about our language? What are its particular
qualities and peculiar ones. What can it express easily and what
only with difficulty? What does it sound like (I have a smattering
enough of German and French to be able to taste them as sounds and
music but strangely I don't have this experience of English).
Andrei Codrescu
The language switch question is one I have often pondered in both
languages. It's a long story, but briefly, learning a new language
(and living in it) is being born again. You have all this new sound
and no taboos (nobody told you no-no about certain words). It's like
being simultaneously forgiven and given license to cause more trouble.
Romanians are wired for language more poetically, Americans more
practically. R is more oblique and metaphorical, A is more direct and
actual. They both feed my poetic perversions. In "Disappearance of the
Outside," my new book (has anyone advertised more things in here?) I
hold forth at some length about language switches. (I believe that the
brain contains "holes" for every language, including Mongolian kitchen-
speak, and that when you try, you just slip these langs. in the holes
already there for them. Unfortunately, my ports are serial so I can
only speak and think well in one lang. at a time.
Jay Allison (jwa)
OK, how about your radio commentaries? Your voice and ideas are
refreshing on "All Things Considered" because they don't fit. Your sound
is not standard; your thoughts are weird. What a welcome change.
1) Are you given pretty much free reign editorially? Does your material
always pass inspection...for instance, did NPR broadcast *all* the essays
in "Raised by Puppets...?" Have you been censored?
2) Do you listen to much public radio? What is your opinion of the
programming? What might our public broadcasting system do that it is not
doing now?
Andrei Codrescu
NPR has let me do pretty much what I want, which is amazing even to
me. There are some pieces in the PUPPETS that were not broadcast for
reasons having to do with timing -- some comments on the news became
dated. In fact, I invited displeasure several times by being as bad
as I could without actually saying the 7 words, and still the pieces
were used. There are two possibilities: 1) I'm very good, 2) I'm not
very subversive. Pass the cyanide.
I have very few opinions about radio because I rarely listen. I like
community radio that has ALL THE NEWS on: ideally, the station is in
a tower where somebody can watch everyone in town, tell people about
who's visiting who, what dogs have no leash, etc. For the longest
time I couldn't stand to hear my voice -- now I listen as if it's
someone else. And it is. Someone called on the phone the other day and as
we were talking he said, "Shuddup, you're on the radio!"
Do you really think I'm weird? I was hoping to be anonymous.
David Newman (dn)
Andrei, you mention the "well-meaning institutional strangulation" of the
NEA. Should a government fund art? How?
Andrei Codrescu
Yes, govt. should fund art as long as it funds missiles. It's a matter
of tax-money priorities. When we stop funding missiles, we should stop
funding art. PERSONALLY, I think EVERY ORIGINAL GESTURE should be declared
ART, and receive FUNDING. But if you do it twice, cut the money!
David Newman (dn)
Ok, Andrei, you asked for it.
What is art?
Andrei Codrescu
Whatever isn't nature, 2) A friend of mine, 3) Whatever escapes analysis,
4) The next thing I say, 5) Something even the dead can dig, 6) Etc
Jay Allison (jwa)
Do we have to stop now? Can't we just go to the bathroom and come back?
__________________________________________________________________________
Robert Curtis Davis (sonny@trantor.harris-atd.com)
HONEY HARVEST
In the hour of our dripping bee-harvest
In the time of our undammed honey's golden flow
When pollen-burdened bodies drop cargoes of nectared sweetness
To fill the ample ambered vats within my waxy chambered comb,
Who shall stand on the far ramparts fanning fanning
To cool the vast and ordered industry of my hive?
Who shall stroke the rounded belly of my favored queen?
Who shall invade the teeming intricacies of the guarded nests
And scorning formic acid dript from angered slavering jaws,
Steal the sugared prize from 'neath that potent nose?
Who shall rape the fat ripe bodies of the swollen aphid herd
Plunder the toothsome richness of that honeyed hoard
And stroking stroking make them yield sweet juices down?
Listen! What lisps in sibilant whispers there on the edge of darkness?
Quick! Plug the bungs on waxen casks brim'd full against hoar winter's frost
Words of a necromancer's charm spin out from the damp and coiling mist
Chilling incantations roll down the cold cold corridors of this old old earth
I stand, am ready, unafraid; my honeyed horn is full
I shall feed among the lilies, dance upon the high spiced mountain
And sing the unsung satyr's song.
___________________________________________________________________________
Kenneth Wolman (ktw@hlwpk.att.com)
CIVIL SERVICE
a six-part serial
Part I
Many of the supervisors were lifers, and wore a kind of
Civil Service uniform. Their shirts were solid, glaring
starched-white with pre-wrinkled collars, plucked from the
bottom of the pile at Klein's. The ties were narrow, dark,
and looked like they'd been sewn by Ray Charles. The pants
were strictly sub-basement, dark and coffee-stained so-
called summer weights with razor cuffs not quite covering
howling red socks and Navy-last clunky black shoes, scuffed
and needing heels. Variants there were: but the first
impression as you stepped from the elevator was of
uniformity, a perfect blend with the bile-green walls.
By contrast, the caseworkers were a weird mix, and
Gelfen was one of them down to his ass-tight jeans and
McCreedy and Shreiber boots. He would sit, when nothing much
was going on in the office, contemplating with a mixture of
admiration and lust the braless boobs, flat stomachs, and
rock-crusher hips of the young women who worked with him,
and who, like himself, had dropped into Welfare for a few
years after college to pick up a fast dollar without
working. For two years, since 1966 and getting his Masters
in Sosh from Brooklyn, Gelfen had held down a desk in the
New York City Department of Social Services, first in
downtown Brooklyn and later, when he pulled some seniority
and friendly strings in the Union office, in a cavernous old
building in the East Bronx, a ten minute bus ride from his
apartment.
There was a voice in his back brain that would, now and
again, warn him to get off his ass, for he was 26, too old
to jam stupid, impressionable Child Welfare workers on the
stairs during lunch hour, filling them with something other
than ideals about saving the Wretched of the Earth. The
voice would tell him to go back to grad school and/or get a
real job, instead of mopping up after other people's
miseries and swills. Gelfen did his best to ignore the
voice: irritating as the job could be, at least it paid the
rent. He lived alone in a rundown but reasonably solid
tenement near the Harlem River, listening with half an ear
to the music of the Puerto Rican family directly upstairs.
Some friends had once been by, and after three solid hours
of top-volume performances by Tito Rodriguez, Eddie
Palmieri, and Jose Maria Peneranda, they decided that God
was a Puerto Rican who had created ``cockroach music'' to
smoke pot by. In any case, the Esperanza family was
inoffensive enough, and they, for their part, were knocked
out to have a non-complaining neighbor who would even split
a few _cervezas frias_ with them on the front steps of a hot
afternoon. Affectionately grinning, they referred to Gelfen
as ``El Heepee,'' and were always ready with a friendly wave
in the market or on the street. That, Gelfen suspected, was
because they'd never seen the black looseleaf Welfare
notebook inside his vinyl briefcase. Nobody who'd ever been
on Welfare could dissociate the meaning of that book from
the person who carried it.
Gelfen was pretty sure the upstairs PRs were reliefers.
The first day of the month once fell on a Saturday, and
Gelfen, heading out at noon, spotted Mrs. Esperanza standing
against the hallway mailboxes, practically embracing them,
waiting for the mailman to show up with a sack filled with
Welfare checks. Gelfen's caseload was largely Puerto Rican,
too, and he figured he didn't think of his neighbors in
quite the same way he did his clients, probably because the
Esperanzas, in their turn, didn't know the truth about him.
With his own clients, Gelfen could never quite shake
the gnawing intuition that they were in some covert way
trying to hustle his good nature into their pockets. He
listened to the hard-luck stories they pitched at him with
an arm that could have made Tom Seaver die from envy; and
even when he was _sure_ he was being set up as the
intermediary between the client and the City's money, more
often than not something in their stories - a practiced
vocalism? a facial expression? an implied threat? - always
caused him to submit.
_I no get my cheque, Meestah Geffen_, when he knew
goddamned well they probably had.
(Suppose, however, they weren't lying, and he was the
ogre responsible for a family of eight spending the night in
- oh Christ! - Crotona Park?)
Or, _Meestah Geffen, I need de money to buy meelk fo'
de babee_ which had been fathered on her by a common-law
_esposo_ who was supposed to be in Puerto Rico with his
mother, but who was, in the meantime, stopping by to screw
the broad every night until he dropped.
(But what if she was for real? What if Miguel Serrano,
age 21, father of four children by three women, was in fact
taking R & R in Mayaguez, and the chick was playing it
straight? Gelfen imagined reading in the _News_ that her
little girl, suffering from a massive absence of calcium,
was lying wet-eyed and scared in Lincoln Hospital, dying.)
Or, _I canno' work, Meestah Geffen, I hab de asthma_, a
crock of shit for sure, because the guy looked like he could
acquit himself honorably in the ring, and probably was
driving a cab in Queens or Brooklyn, where he wasn't known.
(But what if he really _did_ have asthma, better known
as the Puerto Rican endemic disease? Gelfen had been in
Welfare about four months when he saw a woman client die of
an asthma attack on the floor of the Fort Greene Intake
unit, and he puked from a combination of horror and disgust
at the poor woman's contorted, royal-purple face trying like
hell to suck in those final breaths.)
So despite not-infrequent suspicions that he was being
gotten the better of, Gelfen followed the line of least
resistance: like his coworkers, he phonied records, wrote
duplication grants using different codes to cover his
tracks, and unless his own ass was near the fire, let his
clients get away with the fruits of their creativity. It was
easier than following the City's policy manuals, which
prescribed an investigation process worthy of Scotland Yard:
checking the rent and utility receipts; checking the
closets, the drawers, the kitchen; checking in, above, and
under the beds; checking school records to make damn sure
the family _had_ all the kids it was collecting on. Nobody
did this anymore except a few old-line caseworkers who had
joined up back when the job title precisely described the
function and m.o.: _Social Investigator_. Gelfen's training
supervisor for his first few months had been a huge Jamaican
ex-cop who loathed Welfare clients with a near-religious
passion and probably (imagined Gelfen) loathed himself for
sticking around to indoctrinate Trainees with the glee of a
CIA man into the secrets of sniffing out the unwashed
jockstrap, the half-used tube of Delfen, the semen-stained
bedsheet, even (a grand catch!) the set of works in the
bureau drawer. Gelfen, for his part terrified of this
limbo-dancing Jack Johnson who still kept his carry permit
and snub-nosed .38 in his desk, went along with the process
and did the whole number on his first clients, who he was
sure came to hate him with a hatred only prisoners could
feel. When he was transferred to a regular casework unit at
the end of three months, he put the huge Jamaican behind him
and assimilated into the common run of things as described
to him by a coworker his first week:
``You come in at 9:04. You shuffle some papers from one
side of the desk to the other. You go across the street for
breakfast, check out some chicks, buy some cigarettes, get
the _Times_, go back to your desk by ten, read, smoke,
answer a few phones, generally fart around, go to lunch from
twelve to two, float around the office from two to four,
work like hell from four to five, and go home.'' Gelfen,
enervated by the weight of the job when done By The Book,
fell right in line: laid back most of the time, made
desultory visits when the mood hit him, and picked up his
paycheck every second Friday. The only times it got tight
were for three days following the 1st and 16th of each
month, when Intake looked like the flight of the Hebrews in
_The Ten Commandments_, a room jammed floor-to-ceiling with
half-fed people who _no get de cheque_.
To be continued next issue . . . .
<<<<<~~~~~~|~~~~~~>>>>>
August 1991