By Charles Bukowski

poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can’t find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.

I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.

if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:

a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant’s fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke

anything
anything
but
these.

“poetry readings,” by Charles Bukowski from Bone Palace Ballet © Ecco, 2002. Via. Buy the book.

Nadeem Aslam’s enthralling new novel, The Wasted Vigil, is about remembering the past. His characters find themselves in a house in ruins but fragrant with memories and humanity. At one level, they are stand-ins for the forces that have shaped modern Afghanistan - an English doctor, a Russian woman, an American gem trader, another American spy, an Afghan woman who wants to run a school, and a troubled Afghan who wants to rid his country of all foreigners and non-believers. Placing such an extraordinary, and arguably unlikely, cast of wounded people in one shattered home is risky: in less qualified hands it could become prosaic. But, like Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient before him, Aslam knows how to handle the rich material in front of him, because he is not merely a novelist; he is an artist and a poet.

Salil Tripathi reviews Nadeem Aslam’s A Wasted Vigil in the New Statesman. Salil has also profiled Nadeem for Tehelka.

nadeem-aslam-salil-tripathi

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Thursday said he was “outraged” by department workers who had sex, used drugs and took gifts from employees at regulated oil companies, while one senator called for a Bush administration official to resign over the scandal.

The Interior Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report on Wednesday that found “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” at the department’s Minerals Management Service, whose employees handled billions of dollars in oil and natural gas supplies that were turned over by companies as in-kind royalty payments for drilling on federal lands.

More

The friend who sent me the above news writes in a message: “Let’s see: we have sex, drugs, high gas prices, a wealth of double entendres around “lubricants” and “drilling,” and an Interior Secretary (an “interior secretary”) with name like a porn star alias (cf. Dirk Daggler in Boogie Nights). And what has Obama done with it? NOTHING! Dear God, another Lemming Democrat. Really and truly, they deserve to lose.” (Thanks, J.H.)

sex-drugs-oily-republicans-lemming-democrats