October 2015

I am concerned with a branch of fiction; not a large branch, if you look at the rest of the tree, but one which has been astonishingly fertile in the last thirty years. The avowedly fictitious ghost story is my subject, and that being understood I can proceed.

Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.

Francis Gastrell was very annoyed. He had bought a nice new house only to find hordes of uninvited guests tramping through his garden and helping themselves to sprigs and branches from his mulberry tree.

As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The air is too warm, the heating always on; there are pink plants drooping against the Roman blinds.

A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I will not’ but that this is a preference.

"Don’t go down the rabbit hole,” my husband tells me, but it’s too late. It is 3 A.M. and I am still at my desk, the lamp burning hot on my notebook.

Sometimes one can feel disgust, revolt, despair. To be confronted with a situation that seems by any standard beyond reason, beyond purpose, where one looks into the toothless, rotting mouth of a political and economical system.