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Unless you count the airports, I’ve never been to New York City. I’ve spent a few nights in places like Buffalo and Niagara Falls and one week at a camp upstate, but I’ve never set foot in or near the city. I don’t even really understand burroughs. Is Brooklyn part of NYC?
Anyway, suddenly things are happening in and around the city — things connected to me. I can tell you about two of them right now. The other two things have to wait. But I’ll give you a hint: sea creatures.
- I just talked to a fellow who’s publishing a book with HarperCollins about poetry.
- I’m about to give an interview to someone who left the city and moved upstate. I suspect we’ll touch on poetry in that one . . .
- ?
- ?
Last week, in the final 1/10th of my 2000 mile drive, my new car rolled through Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland: the so-called Tri-Cities of Washington state. My all-season tires (one Firestone/three Goodyear) read the landscape first revealed to me only a week earlier through Kevin Sampsell’s rich memoir. Reading A Common Pornography was like cradling his head in my hands, feeling the bumps and scars. Written in short vignettes, it’s a perfect book for someone with ADD. I mean that only in the most complimentary way. His memoir’s something that could be read in short bursts, all at once, or perhaps even in random order. It could be like picking out Bible verses and making them mean something to you.
I’ve met Kevin once and we’re Facebook friends. I’ve known of him a lot longer, having seen him coordinate events at Powells. But I didn’t know anything about his background nor what makes him who he is today. On the surface, I could say we have a lot in common: a new-wave Catholic childhood, UFO sightings, an obsession with Bigfoot. But he had it a lot harder than I did. I mean, his family was pretty fucked up. And that doesn’t always make a good memoir, but I found myself feeling close to a guy I barely know.
The sex and pornography in his memoir are . . . innocent. In some cases it’s almost sweet. When Kevin writes about homosexual experiences, for example, they’re matter-of-fact — just on the page. They happened, but he doesn’t call them any particular name. Nor does he label himself or seem to need some identity. He eloquently reveals events that may or may not be typical of how a person becomes whole. I found his candor uplifting.
Take loaded statements like this: Instead of using the money from the insurance company to hire builders for the house, Dad decided to “save money” by doing it himself. That could be every family, right?
I wasn’t able to make it to his Portland reading, the one where he proposed to Barb. But I did watch the video. I was moved. May they have wonderful lives together. May Kevin continue to write brilliant words.
My father-in-law was a very good man. I last saw him in November when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We weren’t sure how much longer he had, but we got to see him in Milwaukee, WI, where he was staying with his youngest daughter while getting radiation for pain management. About a month ago, he and my mother-in-law drove back to their home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he died two weeks ago. His second of four daughters, my wife, went back there to see him a few weeks ago. Since I’d been in November, I stayed here.
There’s a nice obituary that appeared in a couple of papers up north. It doesn’t fully capture what he meant to me and my wife. A Finnish immigrant, Ben’s real name was Pentti. He didn’t know any English when he came to this country at age 6. But he was a great storyteller and K became a writer, I think, because of him.
 She gave to her parents her contributor copy of the new book: Finnish-North American Literature in English: A Concise Anthology. I doubt he was able to read the entire 600 pages before he died, but I know he was proud to see his daughter’s work included, along with other Finnish American/Canadians such as Anselm Hollo and Stephen Kuusisto.
Ben was always kind to me. He wanted to give me something each time we met: cuff-links, a watch, shirts he wouldn’t wear. He and his wife of 56 years just gave us a car. We drove it from the U.P. through Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and into Oregon last week. Betty let me take some of his cool clothes too. This is what Theodore Roosevelt National Park looks like in February. I’d like to think Ben would think his hat looks good on me.
Perhaps it will take exposure in the national news to get Portland police to stop shooting minorities, mentally ill people, and other unarmed victims. The local press sure hasn’t been able to stop them. They just keep pulling the trigger.
and then I’m turning the game off before the ads begin.
Source: Adweek.
I graduated from Virginia Tech in 1992 and I’ve been working full-time since then. I received a Master’s in 1996 from North Carolina Central University. I’m a librarian and faculty member who has worked at the same institution since 1997. We are a union shop.
After getting over the sticker shock of University of Virginia’s Ted Genoways, I located this database which divulges the pay at public Virginia universities and a few out-of-state ones. Let me be clear, Genoways’ $134,000 annual salary is obscene. No editor of a literary journal deserves that.
Is it fair that most of my professors from Virginia Tech currently earn less than I do, twenty years after I was there? Certainly, cost-of-living is cheaper in Blacksburg, VA than Portland, OR, but the disparity of time, years in the profession, etc. I just find it all depressing.
My supervisor in the library at Tech earned less than $40,000 in 2009. I was her student worker from 90-92. She’s been there for nearly thirty years. Granted, she doesn’t have a Master’s Degree, but why does she make so little after so many years? Is what she does worth $100,000 less than producing a quarterly journal?
Virginia Quarterly Review’s well-paid editor calls me bored and frankly, I am. After his latest rehash of his one trick, I posted a comment and he attempted to divert attention from the real issue. It’s a technique I’ve seen him use before: tell the person who dares to question him that no one else is interested. He’s partially correct. My comment was late to the party and I doubt many people were still reading at that point. Where he’s wrong is evident on an earlier response to his piece. On Sat Jan. 16, 2010 8:38 AM PST Matt Bell noted that Genoways’ salary is 134,000 a year, purportedly the same as a full professor at UVA. I know that if you want to ride ponies in Charlottesville, you’ve got to have some money, but sheesh! Bell’s comment has been “recommended” by 1327 Mother Jones readers at the time of blog entry. So Genoways should take note.
Here’s what I said: I’d like to thank the commenter above, Matt Bell, for bringing Genoways’ salary into the open. Last year, I looked up some UVA public records and commented on the VQR’s annual budget, which is more than one half million dollars per year. I posted comments in response to yet another piece he wrote about disappearing literary journals: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/14/ner As a rebuttal, and because I’m a librarian, he suggested that he would fight anyone who would shutter libraries because they are money pits. Huh? It’s time that Genoways comes clean about his incredibly privileged position, which came to be because he is friends with UVA’s president’s son, John Casteen IV. Genoways should acknowledge that he’s used public funds both to publish his own book of poetry and Casteen IV’s. It’s the kind of corruption that Mother Jones used to expose.
The most defensive part of his response reads:
I met John Casteen IV months after I started in this job. More than a year after I was hired. Even if I had known him sooner, the fact that it was a presidential hire doesn’t mean the president sits on such search committees. I never met John Casteen III until after I was hired—and have seen him precious little ever since. And the subvention for the VQR Poetry Series isn’t paid out of “public funds.”
Unless I’m reading the org. chart incorrectly, VQR answers directly to UVA’s President, John Casteen III. Genoways’ friendship with the prez’s son IS undoubtedly a hugely privileged position to be in. It afforded the former to take over the fallen University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series and publish both himself and Casteen IV. Genoways mentioned the subvention paid to produce these books. Not sure where the money comes from if not the taxpayers. His pocket? Well, where does that money come from? And the University of Georgia must have to pony up something: staff time at the least. The VQR self-publishing series is a misuse of taxpayer money to create fake credentials for the VQR staff and board members. And most offensively, the president’s son. Good Old Boys.
Genoways tries to make this about something else: All because Casteen IV and I said, in 2005, that charges against poets and editors on the website that you ran at the time were “leveled carelessly and with no acceptable standards of proof” and called such practices “wrongheaded and dangerous”?
He should read again what I’m saying. This has nothing to do with their comments about my site. In fact, I liked their article. As many people noted, it was practically plagiarized from my site. It was flattering in that regard and I chuckled about the two quotes above. After all, Genoways was the one who leveled charges against Jorie Graham and two of her students in the context of an interview with me.
It’s been almost five years; don’t you think it’s time to move on? Aren’t you supposed to be finishing the memoir that will finally save America?
Not sure how he heard I’ve written a memoir. And if he thinks it’s going to save America — well — that’s a rave review. Thanks!
rperlman calling whitenight. come in whitenight.
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