Bongani Madondo responds to Benj DeMott’s correspondence posted at “Mad Love (& Hate) Pt. 2.”
Mad Love (& Hate) Pt. 2
Benj DeMott replies to Bongani Madondo’s correspondence posted at “Mad Love (& Hate) Pt.1.“
Mad Love (& Hate) Pt. 1
What follows is the first part of a (slightly compacted) dialogue between Bongani Madondo and Benj DeMott that began after DeMott sent Madondo New Year’s greetings with a link to a Nina Simone classic.
Fly Girl
It was moving to read those final four pieces in First‘s tribute to Estrellita. Her writing (only one aspect of her work) seemed to just get better and better. At one point, stupidly, I thought the songy stuff was both contrived and oversimple, now it seems like the genius it was.
When I moved to a certain block in downtown Charlottesville with my ex in ‘93, Susan and I started noticing this Olds 88 (or was it a Cutlass Supreme? anyway something hilarious) always parallel-parked on the street. And it WAS old, beat out, gray. Across the back of the trunk was painted I BRAKE FOR OCD. This caught my attention since like Carmelita I was/am a sufferer. Side panels: TEXACO logo with that DO-NOT-ENTER circle painted over it, drops of blood dripping down. I could imagine talking to this person.
Always Late with First Kisses
The late Carmelita Estrellita submitted this lyric to “First” back in 2013. Your editor didn’t post it then but now is better than never.
Estrellita’s Last Quartet
Carmelita (AKA Natalie) Suzanne Estrellita died last Friday. She was 60 years old.
The transgender rhymer was a world-class wit who realized, per Oscar Wilde, “those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.” Like Wilde, Estrellita got off some of her best shots in conversation, but many of them made it into lyrics she published in “First of the Month/Year”: “anguish as a second language”…”loss is more”…”Am are I?”…”knee-jerk heart”…”jerk de soleil”….”you don’t know me from ishmael/I don’t know you from dick…”
“Slow Fade” Revisited
What follows is (a slightly compacted version of) Alex Cox’s introduction to the Drag City reprint of Rudy Wurlitzer’s novel “Slow Fade,” which takes in the screenplay Wurlitzer wrote based on the novel (and his encounters with Sam Peckinpah). That screenplay, according to Wurlitzer, is now “in L.A. crouched in a waiting room.” Let’s hope film scum won’t keep it in limbo…
Wurlitzer’s World
Short story writer Scott McClanahan posted the following Q&A with Rudy Wurlitzer online a couple years back. It was then reprinted in the third volume of “First of the Year.”
Anthropology
Right now I’m still putting together minor horrors of “my” country—“stephaniepimp” tweets “1st New Years wishes to my daughter” so it appears on the news ticker of CNN Kathy G & Anderson Cooper. Do stephaniepimp and her child both feel the love, support each other, bond, unite, and hate the haters?
Birthday Boy
After weary, beery decades of whatall and whatnot, Richard Bruce Meltzer is at long last o.o. (Officially Old.)
King Bibi
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is our prime minister for life.
So it seems. So he evidently believes.
Not only believes. He acts accordingly. To make sure, he has done the two necessary things: (a) eliminate every possible competitor, and (b) surround himself with male and female nincompoops, no one of whom could be considered by anyone a plausible successor. Indeed, the idea that any of this lot could ever become prime minister sends shudders down our spines.
Roots Moves II
Part 2 of an essay that begins here.
It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. There is, indeed, a providential mechanism, but it only works in such a way as to mix a little genuine greatness with a lot of spurious greatness; leaving us to pick out which is which. Without it we should be lost.—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”
Arnold Weinstein: The Magical Use Of Language
Arnold and I were talking about the modern world. He thought a moment and then said, “History is a thing of the past.” The comedic surface of that remark, coupled with its profound undertones, was typical of his extraordinary mind.
Migration Suite
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, Van Fleet Mississippi 1928
(After Isabel Wilkerson)
ida mae’s most memorable toys were
water moccasins
she dangled them
from the tips of sticks tossed the snakes
into the air & caught them (on the sticks
not in her hands)
Pimpology
True story # 1: It’s a late spring Thursday in New York City in the late ‘70s and I’m a kid in high school. For reason I can’t recall, the entire student body was dismissed at noon. A halfaday!
Free! What to do? What to do? My pal Joel has an idea. He opens his copy of the New York Post–yes, we read newspapers back then–to the movie section and points to a small ad. It’s the final day of Pam Grier film festival at the RKO Warner in Times Square. Yes, indeedy, five, count ‘em, five of her finest efforts–Coffy, Foxy Brown, Bucktown, Sheba Baby and Friday Foster–for the price of one three dollar ticket.
The Chilean Road to Hell And/Or Socialism: A Nihilistic Workers’ Inquiry (Part 2)
Part 2 of an essay that begins here.
5.1. Health and Its Discontents
Some of my best friends, and I’m talking about people in their twenties or early thirties, the ones with truly radical and self-sacrificing souls, have been so terminally unhealthy and non-athletic, or anti-athletic, that in the rare moments that we end up playing a sport, they invariably fall ill, they turn red or purple, they vomit and they take to bed for days.
Edwin Denby
George Schneeman, Edwin Denby, 1977, fresco on cinder block. Private Collection, New York
Once when we were having lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, I complained to Edwin about hearing myself on a tape of some recent poetry reading. “Yes,” Edwin said matter-of-factly in his customarily soft, slightly gravelly voice, “that resentment tone.” Thinking back on it over the years, I may not have understood the intriguingly commiserating aspect of Edwin’s remark.
Roots Moves
“Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose… We owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.”—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”
Simone Weil once lived in a building around the corner from Tiemann Place in West Harlem where we held our 29th annual “Anti-Gentrification Street Fair” in October.