Chamblee54

Content below was originally published May 21, 2008. … There is a gentleman in Iran who is protesting the Islamic regime by burning Quran. This would not seem to be good for his general health, unless he enjoys getting an aerial view of Tehran from a crane, with a rope around his neck. In Catharsis, Abbas points out that the approved method of disposing of a tattered Quran is to burn it. This brings to mind the controversies stateside about burning the flag. The proper method for disposal of an old flag is to respectfully burn it. …
In these commentaries about Quran, I notice that no one ever says “The Quran”. This is strange to me, because the holy book of our culture is THE Bible. The B-word almost never appears without THE. I am not sure how Arabic works. Do they routinely use devices like THE to specify objects? One thing about use of THE with the Bible. Christians have this notion that this text is THE word of God. This idea … which is rarely challenged by believers … is ridiculous to this reporter. God does not write books … and that applies to ٱلْقُرْآن‎ as well. …
Content below was originally published May 24, 2010. … In 1968, Lenox Square was an open air mall, with a bowling alley and grocery store. There were concrete statues of Uncle Remus characters on display. Two doors were kept locked in the restrooms downstairs, beside Davisons. When the mall first opened, those rooms were “colored men” and “colored women”. … One day, there was a man on the courtyard, with a stack of newspapers. I asked what it was, and the man said it was mostly politics. I gave the man fifteen cents, and got a copy of “The Great Speckled Bird”. …
“The Bird” was 16 pages of tabloid sized newsprint. There were two things in that edition that I remember. There was a story about a man who had been in ‘Nam. He was proud to be the first Marine to piss in the latrine at Da Nang. There was also a crude drawing of a naked woman. An arrow pointed to the vagina, with a caption ”pussy- good for screwing and or babies”. The Bird was not known for subtle sophistication. … In 1968, someone printed a “greatest hits” edition, with the headline ”New Era prints hippie smut sheet”. …
The content below was originally published May 9, 2011. … “thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool black air”: “now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch, I bang it.” … the late Charles Bukowski, who was called Hank by those who knew him. Out of the millions of useless drunks feeding the urinals on planet earth, at least one had literary merit. …
… After nine paragraphs, and two poems, there is the phrase that pays … graphomaniacal fecundity . (spell check suggestion:nymphomaniac) As best as we can figure, gf means that Hank wrote a lot of stuff. If you keep your quantity up, the quality will take care of itself. Hank seems to agree, spitting out product “like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.” He seemed to take pride in doing what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac … he doesn’t write, he types. If you google the phrase graphomaniacal fecundity, you can choose from 71 results. …
… A blogspot facility called poemanias quotes the paragraph from the New Yorker, with the title “On Bukowski’s afterlife”. Fourhourhardon (spell check suggestion: Nonhazardous) reprints the entire thing. Neither provide a link back to the original. Goliath and Petey Luvs Blog take the same copy-paste approach. The first tries to get you to pay for more reading material. … “He was a contemporary of the Beats, but not quite one of them because he was darker and not as willing to smoke a joint and sing Phil Ochs songs on the lower east side. ” The truth is, Hank hated marijuana, and had the classic alcoholic attitude about it. … Pictures today are from Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library. The social media picture was taken March 21, 1960. “Cameo Lounge”