191 Arden Road, Gulph Mills

Another circumstance attendant on Season in Hell: White Candle on P.F.S. Post. Prior to my Liverpool visitation, and Arts Fest/Atherton Hilton, Jennifer had spent several days visiting me here, on Arden Road in Gulph Mills (191), where I was stationed for my PSU semester breaks, '94-'96. By late '96, this tribe was back in Glenside, on Lindley Road. From here, I liked to hang out on Lancaster Avenue in Ardmore, where there was a Borders (books/music), when Borders was still around. And Tower Records in KOP.    

Philly's Elite Main Drags

Philly and its environs are laid out and built with a sense of graciousness and sumptuousness that is difficult not to notice over a long period of time. It's been my pleasure to admire the sense of absolute architectural elitism which makes so many vistas here Heaven-on-Earth ones. These vistas are most apparent on a seemingly endless string of exquisite main drags, which take the region and sprinkle it with star-dust. Some of the main drags I'm about to mention are more about earthiness and serviceability, others are more about the aforementioned architectural razzle-dazzle effect. All take this area and, for me, radically transcendentalize it. The list I've assembled cannot be, nor is meant to be comprehensive; but these are the main drags I know best, and which I've spent a big chunk of my life imbibing:

Conshohocken- Fayette Street

Plymouth Meeting- Germantown Pike

Chestnut Hill (Philly)- Germantown Avenue

Glenside- Easton Road

Bryn Mawr- Lancaster Avenue

Ardmore- Lancaster Avenue

King of Prussia- Dekalb Pike

Center City (Philly)- Walnut Street

West Philadelphia- Baltimore Avenue

North Philadelphia- Broad Street

South Philadelphia- South Street

Manayunk (Philly)- Main Street

Old City (Philly)- 2nd/3rd Streets

Ambler- Butler Pike

Jenkintown- Old York Road

Abington- Limekiln Pike

North-East Philadelphia- Five Corners

Penn's Landing (Philly)- Delaware Avenue

If you can make it to these, you will not be disappointed. Peace!

Preface

With the new Monday Journal out with a vengeance (online & print), worth noting that Vlad has something else coming out of note: a second print edition of his late Nineties chapbook Derelict. When Derelict was released, Vlad still lived in Philly, and much of the action in the chap takes place in Philly. Vlad asked me to write a preface for this second edition, and I did.

Bio Time

My bio in the new Monday Journal is about the quandary which arises for publishing authors over long periods of time. To make a long story short, the quandary is what to leave in and what to leave out. You can emphasize or deemphasize academic or publishing creds, prizes, grants, fellowships, or what have you. Sometimes I get bored these days & just say I'm from Philadelphia.

Personal Mythologies II: September 20, 2003: KWH

 

 This mp3 offers the second installment of the Personal Mythologies series at KWH in 2003.

This Charming Lab: March 27, 2004: KWH

 This mp3 offers the entire This Charming Lab reading, held at Kelly Writers House in 2004. 

English 271: How Does This Sound?

I've put in a good amount of work, consolidating the events that transpired at Loyola U. in Chicago in 2008. All the particulars of the course (English 271, How Does This Sound, Ultramodern Metaphor, 25 East Pearson Street, room 306, Prof. Laura Goldstein) and my involvement in it (Opera Bufa 2.5 days, my lecture on the third day) are now well documented. There are some details as to how the lecture day (June 19) went that are worth relating. The funniest is a quirk of Loyola classrooms, as a ricochet against Opera Bufa. Loyola, of course, is a religious institution. It follows from this that all the classrooms come equipped with a rather large, plasticine Christ-figure, hanging in a lofty position at the back of the room. Room 306 happened to be a downwards-slope model academic room, so that when I lectured, I was gazing upwards at the class of about twenty students. The plasticine Christ appeared to be gazing down at me from a great height. I remember feeling a wry sense of amusement at this circumstance; Opera Bufa is an intermittently racy book, and some of the passages the students wanted me to explicate were racy ones. If Jesus were there, would he have approved?

Adam Fieled: Treated Image Self-Portrait: 2020

 

Sergei Belyaev: The Break: 1998

Lost in a World of Confusion: Nicole Zach: 1998

Crossroads: 2020

Why is the legend of Robert Johnson relevant in 2020? After a hard-bitten, chaotic, fractured decade, a decade beset by shadows on all sides, many individuals feel like the deals they've made to survive are with the Devil himself. What the 2020s will be about is anyone's guess. My prophecy involves a 30% improvement on the Teens; more action, more liveliness. Especially beneath the surface, where the media, the government, and all kinds of imposing influences can't see.

Mary Harju, Rue St. Denis, Montreal, Quebec, 2003 (Adam Fieled)

1790 Butler Pike: Another Vision

A Vision: 4th Ave & Hallowell Street in Conshy...

The miracles of photo manipulation: 4th Ave & Hallowell Street in Conshy is one of the optic highlights of the entire Ply-Mar area. The view of the 300 Four Falls Building is stunning. What would Van Gogh, doing a plein air routine, have made of such an optic feast? Well, here ya go...

Hannah Miller

Hannah Miller was an important social presence for the Philly Free School in the mid-Aughts. Hailing from the West Coast, she split her time then between books & politics; and she was devoted to a liberal socio-political vision of Philadelphia that Mike & I approved of. 

Among other new appearances of Hannah online, in & around P.F.S., Poetry Incarnation '05, & the Highwire Gallery, Hannah appears in this Something Solid sonnet from '17, too, which I can be heard reading here. 

The White Album: A Tale of Two Editions

Yesterday, the second edition of The White Album was released by Eratio Editions. I thought it would be reasonable to post here links to both editions, the Eratio and the Ungovernable Press (2009), so here they are: the au courant and the nine years ago. The discrepancies between the two editions are major, and you can see for yourself who in poetry might prefer which edition to the other, and why.

King of Prussia: Lunar, Loopy

My new page in Otoliths 50 allowed me to discuss the Philly suburb King of Prussia, and its fantastic architecture. King of Prussia (Upper Merion) is as fascinating to me now as it was twenty years ago, if not more so, because the sense of transcendentalism/ethereal levitation in-built to it ages well, has not diminished for me over time, so that being in or seeing King of Prussia is always a treat. Conshohocken (Plymouth-Whitemarsh) architecture tends to be stately rather than lunar or loopy, and the dichotomous tension between the two styles/modes of presentation make for two physiological reactions which complement each other in intriguing ways. I may eventually have something to say about lonesome, windswept Bridgeport at some point too.  

"Squawk, Squawk, Squawk..."

If Mata Hari were about to file her report, she'd be happy to note that the fourWtwenty-eight print anthology, which was released from Charles Sturt University in Australia in December 2017, and features a fragment used in Something Solid, is now available online in pdf form.

Uranus into Taurus, and Apps

The Sun just entered Taurus; more importantly, as a long-term influence, Uranus enters Taurus shortly as well. In the interest of Taurus-level gravitas, another solid auditory Apps experience.

Posit Sounds...

For those who want to hear how Posit sounds.