This blog is dead....

I started this blog a year or two ago to let a c0-worker know what I was reading. Strange mutations happened to it, over the last summer, due to being out of work and either waiting for surgery to correct chronic sleep apnea, or recovering from that surgery with pain killers.

Anyhow, back then, I didn't know anything about goodreads.com. Basically, that social networking site pretty much does everything I wanted to do here, and more. So, I have a profile over there, now:

http://www.goodreads.com/profile/RichRistow

The likelihood of this blog ever returning is next to nil.

I still hate the word "hiatus"

Still no plans to return to this blog or revive it. However, I have moved on to do something very much different at strangelatitudes.wordpress.com. Basically, it's about me gathering material about living overseas.

The Same Old Academic Job Rant

Crossposted from my MySpace......

"You had a really strong interview, and a really strong teaching demonstration. Unfortunately, there were two other candidates, and they not only already had full time teaching experience, but they had PhD's too," the Dean told me.

So it goes. I didn't get the job I interviewed for. I'm relieved that the waiting is over, but one can easily say I'm disgruntled at the state of academia. Getting a full time job teaching in college is a hard task indeed. There's a couple of reasons for this. First of all, there are literally hundreds of English and creative programs across the country, graduating, every year, qualified people with MFAs and PhDs. If you have an MFA and no publishing record, then your degree really doesn't mean much. Plus, if you have an MFA and a publishing record, the school in question will likely hire the person with the PhD anyway – it doesn't matter if an MFA is a terminal degree, a doctorate satisfies most of the administration bean counters outside of the prospective department.

That's not what has me disgruntled. That's just the way it is, and I can live with that. There's something a little more annoying afoot. This semester, I've been scheduled to teach 4 courses, and there's a distinct possibility that I may pick up another. At many community colleges, that's a full time teaching load. At universities, that's more than a full time teaching load. (As in: full time at Jr. College is 5, and full time at a University tends to be 3). Basically, adjunct instructors are the spackle chairpersons use to fill cracks in their schedules.

Think about. English departments are in a unique position. Everybody has to take freshman comp and research writing, and on top of that, many other departments often outsource their specialized composition courses, like the ins-and-outs of APA style, to English. So, that means hundreds of required sections on the books, and there's never enough full time faculty to fill them all. The situation is actually a little more pronounced on the community college level, where there are no indentured servants – ahem! graduate students – who will work for next to nothing. Adjuncts are just above graduate assistants in the academic pecking order.

Sure, we get paid a little more, but at a fraction of the amount non-tenure track full time faculty get. Plus, there are no health benefits, and no paychecks over Christmas and the summer months. Adjuncts are cheap labor. Let me put it this way: recently, because my internet got turned off due non-payment (my phone and water are about to follow suit), I've been putting in for just about any job I can find. One of them was night time shipping and receiving at Macy's. The application process asked me to figure out my hourly salary and include it. They gave me a formula to follow, and under that formula, I discovered that I make, roughly, about $8 an hour.

The maddening thing, most of all, about this is that most English departments have their hands tied. Due to state and federal funding shortfalls, there's not as much money floating around higher education as one might think. Even more, just because an English department may have the documented need for, easily 6 to 7 full time instructors, doesn't mean that school is actually going to allocate money for those positions. So, the answer is to employ a lot of people very cheaply. All of that "cheap labor," myself included, willingly take part in this fiasco because we harbor dreams of getting a full time job someday, and we need lots of "experience" getting there. (And for my part, this is why I boldly accepted an offer to teach English I on a Saturday morning at 8am. Yeah, the students are just as thrilled with the idea too, but like me, they probably have their reasons for signing up).

So, school is back in session. I'm teaching a full time load at way less than half a full timers salary. Did I mention that even the semester started, I'm not going to see a dime for a month? As for the not getting the job I interviewed, the Dean said he'd put my application back into the stack and into the running for the two positions they're filling for fall semester. I'm not holding my breath, though – although, I do secretly dream of getting one of those jobs. In the meantime, my wife and I can't pay our bills on time, and we worry how the hell we're going to meet our mortgage. Oh, and on Tuesday, I have a job interview at Macy's.

I Hate The Word "Hiatus"

Well, the truth is this: I don't plan on updating this blog for quite awhile. Long story, but it comes down to a time issue. Perhaps, one day, I'll come back to it and revive it -- who knows. Priorities shift, and at the moment, I'd rather write fiction. That said, at the suggestion of some friends, I have set up a MySpace page. The blog over there, however, is probably going to be a lot different than this one.

A Cloud In Trousers

Vladimir Mayakovsky is one of the poets who gets very, very little attention in America. This could be for many reasons. First of all, the market for poetry is not highly lucrative if your name is not Maya Angelou. The poetry shelves, over at the local Barnes and Noble or Borders, is filled, mostly with proven names – Robert Bly, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, et cetera. In short, one is not likely going to find a lot of what is current or contemporary or profoundly important, and even further, one is not likely to find a whole lot of foreign poetry in translation, either. There will be, however, sappy greeting card verse in those Blue Mountain Arts editions. Second, Mayakovsky was a resolute Bolshevik, at his worst, his work reads like revolutionary propaganda for Lenin, even to the point of trying to mythologize him. Quite often, his detractors point to this facet of his work as reason to avoid reading him. That’s a shame.

Mayakovsky does hold a unique place in the history of poetry. In Russia, he had no literary precursors. That is, you’ll find no allusions to Pushkin in his work. His work, also, was militantly avant garde and futurist, owing, mostly, in technique, to the French surrealists. Simply put, Mayakovsky is more akin to Andre Breton and Paul Eluard than he is to Pushkin. Roughly around the same time, Pound and Williams were in America, seeking to find new, non-metrical, non traditional ways of writing. Mayakovsky was of that spirit. In his best poems, like “A Cloud in Trousers,” his imagery is startling, fantastic:

The scorched figurines of words and numbers
scurry from the skull
like children from a flaming building.
Thus fear,
in its effort to grasp at the sky,
lifted high
the flaming arms of the Lusitania.

Other times, with sarcasm:

Glorify me!
The great ones are no match for me!
Upon everything that’s been done
I stamp the word “naught.”

As of now, I have no desire to read.
Novels?
So what!

Mayakovsky’s time was a time of upheaval. Perhaps, this is better explained by the following video. It comes from series of documentaries on the history of the avant-garde in Russia…...

Ristović's Horror

Over the course of the last few decades, Charles Simic has become a force in American poetry, so much so that his lines are usually recognizably his – short, spare, wry, surreal, and deceptively simple. His body of work cans images as diverse as a dinner fork to the ghost of Emily Dickinson and the Virgin Mary in a car, with her boobs flapping. Beyond his own work, Simic has also made other important contributions, as he has become quite a prolific translator, mostly of Eastern European poetry, including people like Vasko Popa and Aleksandar Ristović, to name a few. Quite often, the lines of Popa and Ristović resemble Simic’s, and that’s probably more than just a coincidence brought about by Simic’s own sense of style. One could easily venture to guess that, based on Simic’s own Serbian heritage, that the opposite is true – that Popa and Ristović, in their native language, were the definite influences.

If one thinks of both Popa and Ristović, they differ slightly in tone from Simic. Popa strikes one as surreal, but mythic. Ristović can be subtle, but his poems can be quietly disturbing at the same time. They could be taken, also, as an example of how to write genre poetry too. Take, for instance, the following four line from his sequence “Canvas,” which appears, excerpted, in his book “Devils Lunch: Selected Poems”:

The pig is squirming

In the bathtub,

His master is tickling him

With a long knife.

The poem, really, is one line away from being close to a Japanese tanka. The images are precise, and the word chose is startling. In the first line, we get the image of a squirming pig.

In the second line, the sense of unease and out-of-place comes into play. The “Pig” is in a “bathtub.” The animal is not in a slaughter house, but one can make a reasonable assumption that it’s in somebody’s bathroom. If this were farm imagery, one could argue that maybe the bathtub is outside, and there would be a case for that. Ristović isn’t telling the reader exactly where the bathtub is located. In a sense, he’s leaving that up to the reader to decide. For most readers, tubs and restrooms naturally go together, and if that’s the case, it’s definitely off-kilter – who keeps a pig in the house, anyway?

The next two lines really build on that. “Tickling” can be taken as an act of playfulness, because, after all, it’s often attributed to childish behavior or acts of endearment that assumes a certain intimacy. Thus, one would normal not associate “a long knife” with “tickling.” The knife, really, is an image and an implement of violence, it’s sole purpose is to cut, hack, or stab – either for domestic use, as in cooking or eating, or for explicit use of killing. So, basically, the association of the two words brings in a sense of menace. In many respects, the four lines come off as more disturbing that if it simply said,

In a bathtub,

a man repeatedly stabs

a squirming pig,

and the blood squirted

everywhere.

All too often, horror poetry tries to shock through gory imagery. More often then not, that fails, as it comes off heavy handed and silly, where the writer has tried to give deference to the gore, not the sense of line or image. Ristović’s work is filled with subtle tensions, which comes off, if one is thinking in genre terminology, as “Quiet Horror.”

Matt Cowan's Interesting Blog

If one hangs around the Horrorworld messageboards long enough, one is bound to run into Matt Cowan. He's definitely a really nice guy, and it would be an understatement to say that Matt loves supernatural horror fiction. Also, it would be an even bigger understatement to say that Matt loves Ramsey Campbell's work. (If you ask him nicely, Matt is always more than willing to tell you just how greatly he values Campbell's fiction.) Recently, though, he's started to carve out his own corner of the internet, over on vintagehorror.com. It's definitely worth to time to check out, as he's posted about Lovecraft, M.R. James, and, most recently, the tradition of Christmas themed ghost stories.