Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Walnut Literary Review Issue 01 is out. Poems by Annie Finch, Ocean Vuong, and Zhuang Yusa. I have three poems in it. * The Side Effects of the Cocaine , a comic, tells the story of David Bowie's life from April 1975 to February 1976. Addled from the addiction he claimed to have picked up in the USA, Bowie saw Jesus in a vision, which saved him from self-destruction and launched his Thin White Duke persona. Controversially he was quoted as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader." The story in the comic, written by Sean T. Collins, is tight, in a before and after structure. It does not explain too much, but enough for anyone who does not know Bowie's story to follow the comic. It compares rock stars to Hitler the expert manipulator of media, and asks why we give ourselves up to druggies and dictators. The serious message is inflected by a keen ironic awareness of role-playing. Near the end of the comic, when Bowie is asked by an interviewer wh...

I thought I was done with my pillow book, but it is not done with me. I could replace the weakest link. Which one is it? The cartoons I loved xxx The cartoons I loved to trace were Conan the Barbarian, wrists lashed with ropes to his ankles, and Flash Gordon, heaving under chains. Superhuman strength against unbreakable restraint. xxx Matt tied to his bed, that was the first time I was hard enough to penetrate. xxx To make Wolverine, the adamantine has to go in. *

For a movie that purports to explain the origins of the X-Men, the explanation of the origins of Wolverine remains murky to me. Why was the child Logan living with a man he thought was his father, but was not? Why was he sick, with a sickness which the child Victor Creed had when he was younger? Why did Creed keep so malignant a vigil beside Logan's sickbed? Did he know that Logan was his brother then? The answers may be obvious to the comic book fan, but for this quarter-fan, the movie, directed by Gavin Hood, was more obfuscating than not. The sequence showing the two men fighting in all the major American wars--from the Civil War to Vietnam--nicely made the point that the brothers were the two faces of American military power. While Victor Creed hired out his bloodlust, Logan was the troublesome conscience. The rest of the movie did not try for too philosophical a message but plumbed for adrenalin-pumping entertainment in the form of aestheticized violence. The movie was obsesse...