Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The first issue is out online. From the website : Mascara is an online journal seeking to promote poetry of excellence and originality. We are especially interested in the work of contemporary Australasian poets. Our criteria for selection are quality of image, language and innovation. The word ‘mascara’ entered the English language in 1890. It derives from Spanish, Arabic and French origins, its meaning evolving from the word mask, masquerade, to darken, to blacken. The Arabic word ‘maskhara’ means buffoon. Our Editors Boey Kim Cheng Boey Kim Cheng was born in Singapore and is now an Australian citizen. He has four collections of poetry: Somewhere Bound (1989), Another Place (1992) Days of No Name (1995) and After the Fire (2006). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Michelle Cahill Michelle Cahill is Anglo-Indian. She writes poetry and fiction. Her first collection ...

after reading Love in the Time of Cholera Love makes Florentina Ariza cunning, it makes me helpless. Love makes him mad with a pen, it makes me mute with desire. Does cholera commit the lover to lifelong devotion to the one loved? I don’t know. I only know malaria, the Kenyan sun branding the flesh inside out, the icy river swirling round the crossing cattle, and the mottled darkness inside the mosquito net hanging like a ancient wedding veil over me.

Two exhibitions now at the International Center of Photography are worth catching. "Let Your Motto be Resistance: African American Portraits" features 86 works drawn from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery. "Biographical Landscapes: The Photography of Stephen Shore 1969-79" presents 164 color prints of this American photographer, including his series "Uncommon Places." Arranged in roughly chronological order, "Resistance" begins wonderfully by juxtaposing two photographs. In the first, Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, flexes his right bicep, his arm stiff and straight, a gesture of phallic strength paralleled by the metal stake behind his bicep. Whereas he is half naked, W. E. B. Du Bois, in the second photo, is starched up in collar, tie and suit. His forehead is a gleaming dome of intelligence, and his well-kept moustache and beard give him classical gravitas. Addison N. Scurlock W.E.B. Du Boi...

At many points, this film documentary has a made-for-TV feel to it. There are the talking heads, the role-plays, the snippets of music. There is also a slightly desperate air in its attempts to make Mozart our contemporary. The operatic productions shown are often in modern costumes and sets. The routes across Europe Mozart took are now replaced by crowded motorways. The biographical information presented seems basic, and straightforward. The film corrects some factual inaccuracies in Milos Forman's "Amadeus" (no, he did not die a pauper, nor was he buried in a paupers' grave), but raises no scholarly controversies about the life, or the works. What makes the film worth watching on the big screen is the beautiful cinematography. Some of the visuals are quite stunning. Also, to echo one reviewer, the performers are terribly good-looking.

The novel invites me, as the reader, to identify first with Juvenal Urbino, the husband of Fermina Daza, the man who has it all, before seducing me to empathize with Florentina Ariza, the man who lost Fermina to Juvenal but loves her for the rest of his life. Both identifications, so cunningly sequenced, require only imaginative empathy, which I give willingly to get into the skin of characters otherwise so different from myself. So it is with a shock, not of identification, but of recognition, that I read the satiric set-piece on the Poetic Festival, and the Chinese winner: When a bewildered Fermina Daza read out the name, no one understood it, not only because it was an unusual name but because no one knew for certain what Chinese were called. But it was not necessary to think about it very much, because the victorious Chinese walked from the back of the theater with that celestial smile Chinese wear when they come home early. he had been so sure of victory that he had put on a yello...

In the interview with Mark Halliday, Bidart spoke of his love during his undergraduate years for Trilling's The Liberal Imagination . He quotes from "Art and Fortune" a sentence that concludes a passage about "the beautiful circuit of thought and desire" (James' phrase): The novel has had a long dream of virtue in which the will, while never abating its strength and activity, learns to refuse to exercise itself upon the unworthy objects with which the social world tempts it, and either conceives its own right objects or becomes content with its own sense of its potential force--which is why so many novels give us, before their end, some representation, often crude enough, of the will unbroken but in stasis. Bidart comments on this passage: This image of the will "unbroken but in stasis"--after having "exhausted all that part of itself which naturally turns to the inferior objects offered by the social world"--and which has therefore ...

from Mark Halliday's interview of Frank Bidart (appendix to In the Western Night ): The notion of "action" in Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater is crucial to my understanding of poetry (and of writing in general)--so crucial, that I want to get polemical about it. It source, of course, is Aristotle's Poetics , the statements that "tragedy is the imitation of an action." Fergusson cites Kenneth Burke on "language as symbolic action," and quotes Coleridge: unity of action, Coleridge says, "is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end, no only of the drama. but of the epic, lyric, even the candle-flame of an epigram--not only of poetry, but of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusve of all the fine arts." But the sense that a poem must be animated by a unifying, central action--that it both "imitates" an action and is itself an action--has been largely igrnoed by twentieth century aesthetics. It ...

A friend sent me this link to Andrew Gelman's blog on statistics. In that post, Gelman writes: Dick De Veaux gave a talk for us a few years ago, getting to some general points about statistics teaching by starting with the question, Why are there no six year old novelists? Statistics, like literature, benefits from some life experience. The first few slides in De Veaux's presentation are relevant to the issue.

Started reading Love in the Time of Cholera at Christopher Street Pier this afternoon. The Statue of Liberty was small but clearly visible from where I sat. Once in a while, the interval unmeasured by me, the yellow river taxi motored to the pier. Across the Hudson, the tower blocks of New Jersey. In front of me, a very young man, bare-chested, sat in a lotus position. Then he stood on his head. Then he sat down, and bent his leg in an impossible position behind his back. Two guys and a girl sat to my left, with a dog, and a stuffed white tiger. Two men, who had obviously been spending a lot of time at the gym, were talking about their boyfriends, one speaking in a girlish tone that issued so unexpectedly from his mighty chest. It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urg...

The significant action takes places in rooms: the huge house south of France, in which David recalls and recounts his relationships with Giovanni and his fiancee Hella; the jail cell, in which Giovanni waits for his execution; the bar where David first meets Giovanni; the room above the bar where Giovanni murders Guillaume. And Giovanni's room, at the back of a mean building, far away from the city center, near to the zoo, a room which is also all the other rooms: memory, prison, love tryst and crime scene. I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room. I did not really stay there very long--we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer--but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea change there. To begin with, the room was not...

James, who edits Mimesis , reviewed my chapbook for the Roundtable Review , an on-line journal of the arts, based in the UK. Scroll down the page to find the review.

I am embarrassingly behind in my reading of fiction (and poetry, and essays, and philosophy and...), and so I went to the Strand this afternoon and made a rash purchase of $80.00 worth of fiction, just to make myself feel better. What did I buy? Ian McEwan's Atonement Don DeLillo's The Body Artist Faulkner's Light in August Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera John Updike's Rabbit Redux (I could not find Rabbit, Run ) James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and because I am a good poetry citizen, I also bought poems: Charles Simic's The Voice at 3.00 A.M.. I feel so much better already.

I decided I need to know more about Sikhism in order to refer to it in my "Book of the Body" sequence. (Perhaps I should change the title now that I know Frank Bidart has a collection and a poem with the same name. The ass-pain of being johnny-come-lately.) Started reading McLeod's collection of essays on Sikhism, while sunbathing on the grass patch on Christopher Street pier this afternoon. Contrary to the older idea of Sikhism as a hybrid of Islam and Hinduism, McLeod argues that the Islamic contribution is not fundamental nor direct. Many of the ideas that seem most Islamic--such as the unity of God, the role of the religious preceptor--could also have been derived from the Sant tradition (a devotional tradition of North India which stressed the need for internal spirituality as opposed to external observance), with important secondary contribution from the Nath tradition (a yogic sect). McLeod also takes issue with the supposed "syncretism" of Sikhism. He ar...

Watched Manhattan on Thu at Film Forum, and was impressed by its moral penetration in the guise and instrument of comedy. After watching Match Point , and Hannah and Her Sisters , I did not understand the fuss over Allen. Watching Manhattan makes me want to watch Hannah again to see what I missed. Last night, browsing at Shakespeare and Company, invaded by the Potter fans waiting for the midnight launch of The Deathly Hallows , I came across a book of interviews given by Allen. He was not happy with Manhattan after finishing it; he was seldom happy with any of his pictures after finishing them. They did not turn out how he would have liked them. Still, unlike the procrastinating artists/writers in his films, he had sufficient integrity and determination to complete his projects, though they did not satisfy him.

Talk about New York for R. 1. To Hotel Peninsula Thanks for bringing me around New York City! Have enjoyed my time with you, especially when it’s just me and you alone... Whom did I think I went to meet at JFK? A friend, of course, of ten uneven years, an ex- colleague, a Malay woman, to whom race and sex counted for less than yet another damn birthday coming on your first outing to my new birthplace; the first old friend I told about my first boyfriend, an outing of a different kind that put an end to false romantic barricades like age and race. You saw me before Hudson News, and recognized what? My face? Arms akimbo? Pose contrapposto ? Convenient signs that told you where to find Cosmo or me on your arrival. Defamiliarized through your dark eyes, I saw my solid ghost direct the cab to Madison Square Garden, overheard me overhearing the Algerian driver flirt on his phone, feared again the fear of being wrecked. The Honda spurted through the tunnel of the night lit by occasional lamps...

I was browsing Netflix when I came across this 2000 film, directed by Schnabel, based on Arenas' autobiography of the same name. Reinaldo Arenas, according to the blurb, was a "famed Cuban poet and novelist." The blurb continues, "[a]lthough vilified for his homosexuality in Fidel Castro's Cuba, Arenas finds success as a writer but must eventually emigrate to New York City to enjoy unfettered creative freedom." The formula should have alerted me to the film's potential bias, but, not knowing much about Cuba, let alone the gay situation in it, any alarm bells would have been stilled by my desire to be absorbed in the movie, to abandon myself to its powers. The movie makes much of anti-gay persecution in the form of political trials and forced confessions, labor camps, and incarceration. The harrowing scenes are reminiscent of similar ones played out in Soviet USSR, facist Germany and Maoist China. Arenas is depicted as a noble, and finally tragic, spirit ...

1. Sayville Ferry 2. Atlantic Ocean 3. Beach 4. Cherry's Bar 5. Ocean II 6. Beach II 7. Fire Island It came to me days after my return xxxxxxx from the island, xxxxxxx the real ending, the resolution of this brief resort to old symbols, experience, of a sort, and, most of all, memory’s cold, calm burn. Staring into memory’s eyes, I saw xxxxxxx the Atlantic, xxxxxxx then the island, and on a towel small as a handkerchief my hollow body sleep, no joy, no grief, like a swan’s wingbone tossed up on the shore. The beach, burning up the air, was empty, xxxxxxx sucked me to it, xxxxxxx to the body and I entered it. I opened my eyes and I knew something that rises and flies from the Ocean had penetrated me. I am no small matter. There is an ease xxxxxxx in a gold helm, xxxxxxx with a gold shield, that tells me I’m born to overthrow gods, born to whistle till night comes and the cold land gives up its ghost like a steady breeze.

from Robert Irwin's review of Ken Jacobson's Odalisques and Arabesques : …Jacobson shows that the history of Orientalist photography begins weeks afer the invention of photography itself. The secrets of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s method of trapping light were revealed to a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts on August 19, 1839. Eighty days later, the Orientalist painter Horace Vernet made a daguerreotype of the entrance to the Harem of Muhammad Ali in Alexandria. From the first, the history of Orientalist photography developed in parallel with that of Orientalist painting. ***** from Matthew Peters' review of Peter Brooks' Henry James Goes To Paris : In an interview published in 1994, Brooks spoke of the "temptation" of writing a biograpy of a literary figure. Biography, he believed, was "one of the few forms that a literary critic can use, in our culture, to reach a large audience." * Brooks contrasts the c...

from Harold Love's review of Brian Vickers' Shakespeare, "A Lover's Complaint", and John Davies of Hereford : Using computer and stylistic analysis, Vickers proves that "A Lover's Complaint" is not by Shakespeare, but he is too positive that the last poem of the Sonnets is by John Davies of Hereford. ***** from David Hodgson's "Partly Free," a defence of a limited free will against a wholly materialist explanation of our decisions and actions: But there can be a positive role for a person's conscious experiences in plausible reasoning, if that reasoning proceeds otherwise than as precisely determined by rules: namely, by contributing to appropriate decisions through gestalt experiences to which we can respond, even though they are too feature-rich to engage as wholes with general rules. My support for this premiss is an original argument of mine, which I will briefly summarize here. I accept that our conscious experiences correspond...

One can say that Band obliterates the distinction between inside and outside, that Torqued Torus Inversion does so for up and down, and that Sequence does the same for start and end. One can say those things, and other stuff, and completely fails to capture the experience of entering into these works. For these works require your participation, a requirement that is, as Patrick McCaughey in TLS puts it, "more demand than invitation." It is disorienting, threatening, awe-inspiring to travel along the walls and corridor of these torqued works. Their weathered steel walls, slanted and curved, remind me of mountainsides sliding precipitously towards me, or of cliffsides hanging over me. The narrow, slanting portals are like the mountain entrance to Petra in the pictures I have seen, but they open out, not to anything habitable or human, but to canting chambers of space. Traveling inside the works, I long to understand their overall shape but the experience confounds that unde...

Roxanne, my publisher, submitted a free book ad for Payday Loans to the Muses Review. Click on this link and scroll down to see the ad. I wonder how many people view these ads each day, week, month etc. Not that many is my guess.

It is a terrific read. Deeply sympathetic towards his subject, Guy brings to life Mary's winning qualities and her struggles with Scottish lords and English opponents, including Elizabeth I, her cousin queen (actually, her father's cousin). The archival research is mind-boggling, the interpretations sure and nuanced, the writing clear, argumentative, and exciting. It opens with a set-piece description of the execution, and closes with a narrative of Mary's final hours. In the first, we follow the movement, and view, of Sir Thomas Andrews, the sheriff of the county of Northamptonshire, as he knocked on Mary's door; in the closing, we are in the room with Mary praying with her servants when she heard the fateful knock. The heart of the book is Guy's detailed interpretation of the casket letters, documents the Scottish rebels made up to prove Mary's guilt in killing her husband and king, Darnley. And the epilogue, like the closing chapter of eighteenth century nove...

I have not read the Michael Cunningham novel but "A Home at the End of the World" the movie (2004) failed to move or even convince me. The depiction of the ménage à trois flounders on the unbelievable innocence and virtue of the bisexual man, played by Colin Farrell. The issues also seem overly simplified to one of possessiveness and jealousy among three partners, finally "resolved" when the straight woman left the two men. The film also conforms to the common double standard of depicting onscreen sex. While Colin Farrell's character is stripped naked when having sex with the woman (titillating both staight women and gay men), the character is always fully clothed when gropping the gay guy, played ably by Dallas Roberts. Roberts is also always fully clothed even in scenes depicting his tricking. Against this American fantasy of innocence and self-sacrifice, the much older British film "Prick Up Your Ears" (1987) seems almost radical. More than a biopic...

I enjoyed Sessum's memoir about growing up gay and effeminate in the American South of the 1960s. The writing is witty and well-wrought. He has a knack for telling a nicely-turned anecdote though, in a few places, the writing strains for metaphorical resonance. As in this attempt to link Eudora Welty's carefully vague love story to her bourbon (a drink introduced in the first sentence of the chapter, Skeeter Davis, Noël Coward, and Eudora Welty ): They were mostly circumspect when discussing their lost loves. Frank (theater journalist and Sessum's friend) would often allude to his "dusky endeavors," as they had come to refer politely to his interest in young African Americans, some of whom had touched him deeply with their aspirations and narratives of maternal love. Miss Welty welcomed these stories of nuanced carnality, as Frank was careful not to tell her the details. One especially hot night under the glow of the big light that hung over his kitchen table, Mis...

Timothy Monaghan, editor-in-chief of the The Ledge , wrote to tell me that my poem "Brother" is the featured poem for July 2007 on the magazine's website . Earlier, he had also nominated the poem for the 2007 Best New Poets Anthology, published by Meridian Press, but I have not heard from the Meridian people. Is that a good or bad sign?

1. Sayville Ferry 2. Atlantic Ocean 3. Beach 4. Cherry's Bar 5. Ocean II 6. Beach II I keep a respectful distance, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX after this morning’s incident, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX from the Ocean. In the summer evening light, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX footprints on the beach appear XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and then disappear. Some vacationer has left XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX a squarish tower standing, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX three walls of tall driftwood arranged in ascending height, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX the fourth side two lines XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX of pretty pink seashells. Just outside the stockade, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX like a medieval midden, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX shells are leftover bones. A little further on, XXXXXXXXXXXXXX another keep, short driftwood XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX piled on top of each other, protected by sand ramparts, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX with an entrance facing X...

1. Sayville Ferry 2. Atlantic Ocean 3. Beach 4. Cherry's Bar 5. Ocean II I hailed the Ocean today, as if it was a friend, buoying me up as if I was bodiless. Then one huge wave caught me, not unaware, not unprepared, but with zero opposing force. This was what being overpowered felt like: my feet were swung over my head, my torso was lost to my mind, my mind was thrashing underwater in the flooded cave of the nose. Only when I staggered up the beach did I remember putting out my desperate hands to stop myself from being dashed against sand. The cuts on my left palm were many but tiny. Don’t be a baby, I scolded. Back in my room, I washed away the sand caking my balls, stuffing my ears, and corking up my ass. No tweezers, so my nails picked at the chips buried in my palm, tearing the tiny tears bigger to remove them. When I lowered my head, my nose watered, the Ocean’s reminder that it is not my friend, not even an enemy, but impersonal, like eternity.

1. Sayville Ferry 2. Atlantic Ocean 3. Beach 4. Cherry's Bar (after Frank Bidart, tentatively) Abandoning Hyperion , because of its imitation of Milton, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Keats asked his reader to pick out some lines from the poem and put an “x” next to “the false beauty proceeding from art” [like this: X ] and a double line next to “the true voice of feeling” [like this: = ]. What he discovered: UPON MY SOUL ‘TWAS IMAGINATION[.] I CANNOT MAKE THE DISTINCTION. Ginger, the drag queen, was having a rough night. The crowd was thin and hard XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX to please; was it then the foul-mouthed performer decided XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX TO BARE HER HEART as she had done so successfully in other bars where the crowd was thin XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and hard to please? In her Farrah Fawcett wig, and shimmering scarlet sheath of a dress, she said —My man broke up with me after we were together for SIX years… XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX SIX YEARS XXXXXXX...

1. Sayville Ferry 2. Atlantic Ocean 3. Beach Like an iron, the sun XXXXXXXXXXXXXX is pressing me XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX against the beach. I can feel XXXXXX through my towel XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX the heat of the sand, and the lumps of sand, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX hard and soft, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX like manly breasts. Save me, Ocean, XXXXXXXXXXX I cry half-heartedly, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX f rom this heat. The ocean roars XXXXXXXXXXX very far away XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX in my seashell ears, but beach sweat runs XXXXXXXXXXXXXX down to the small XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX of my browning back.

1. Sayville Ferry 2. Atlantic Ocean In order to preserve my solitude. In order to preserve the spirit. I’m resorting to the ocean for help because the ocean is deeply impersonal. The waves are strong and cold and give me courage to disown these gay men sunbathing nude on the beach. You, I say, have nothing to do with me . Waves roar with approval. I disown nation and race too, and the women, bare-breasted, who represent humanity, and so, heat, decay, death. I have nothing to do with you, reindeer. The waves are that strong, that consoling. I’m borne aloft by the ocean’s cold lift.

1. Sayville Ferry It is to be a short crossing from Long xxxxx Island to Fire xxxxx Island, the sun a tent on the steel field that is the sea. All is ready for a mythology, including the shortness of the crossing. But the idea, island, acquires a face, xxxxx the white and red xxxxx stripes of Cherry’s Bar, the rainbow flag, and the Stars and Stripes, and, nearer still, the beach hotel, which pipes Madonna’s biggest hits from the eighties. Soon I will be landing, trying my feet xxxxx on the boardwalk, xxxxx trying the key to the air-conditioned standard room sleep and, hopefully, sex will make a home, and hours of existential defeat. Now to face the arrogant survivors xxxxx appraising the xxxxx pale arrivals— bronze helmets of seasonal residents, bronze shields of departing experience— “We found the fire. We are burned. Here it is.”

Read this on the Chinatown bus traveling back to NYC. The heat of these erotic epigrams from the Greek Anthology was preferable to the stuffy warmth of the bus. One seduces, while the other reduces. I thought Hine's prose introduction says the obvious in unnecessarily complicated language. The very first sentence is a labyrinth: The twelfth book of The Greek Anthology compiled at the court of Hadrian in the second century A.D. by a poetaster Straon, who like most anthologists included an immodest number of his own poems, is itself a part of a large collection of short poems dating from the dawn of Greek lyric poetry (Alcaeus) down to its last florescence, which survived two Byzantine recensions to end up in a single manuscript in the library of the Count Palatine in Heidelberg--hence its alternative title, The Palatine Anthology , usually abbreviated to Anth. Pal. What is the focus of this sentence? What is the antecedent of "which"? Why the bombast in "florescenc...

I've just returned from Fairfax, Virginia, about 30 minutes from D.C. During the past week, besides celebrating 4th of July, I also visited the National Air and Space Museum , at the Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center. Never a military nor an aircraft enthusiast, I still enjoyed seeing the actual Flying Fortress that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima (though I could not stomach the story of scientific and military triumph the guide was telling about it), the British Hurricane fighter that fought against the Luftwaffte, and the Enterprise space shuttle. A Concorde took pride of place in the civil aviation section. It had tiny windows. On Saturday, I was in Williamsburg . Its historic downtown was a colonial pageant. Shops and taverns sold triangular hats and women's white caps, fruit preserves, blue and white porcelain, and "colonial lunches." Costumed colonials gave directions at the building entrances, re-enacted historical scenes, and marched from the Capitol to the Governor...