Provincetown Arts Magazine and Che: A Novella

I want to thank Chris Busa and Provincetown Arts magazine for writing about the novella in the "Buzz" section of this year's issue. Busa selects a section of Che's text and describes the novella as "a hybrid of poetry, fiction, and cultural commentary. Some moments offer startling insight into how language itself can expose fresh thoughts." And Che is in extraordinary company: Nick Flynn (The Ticking Is The Bomb [Norton], Another Bullshit Night In Suck City), Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm and War), Nicholas Meyer (The Day After and Star Trek II and IV), and Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States) all appear in the same "Buzz."

Giving The Grammazons Some Love: Clark (& Shea) on the Grammar of Effect and Intent

Waves bringing in the full moon high tides as we approach midnight on this spit of land/sand/island, with the force of Mailer and O'Neill and Hofmann and Motherwell. . . and into this I welcome the Whitmanic joy and defense of language in sense and exuberance: Ammon Shea's description of Roy Peter Clark's The Glamour of Grammar, to celebrate our motives and intuitions (I still find it hard to excuse the use of the hyphen as a dash--for it misses the length of the breath by the minus of it; so, driftwood, be raft more than fragment; rope instead of snip). Here's what we mean:

The visual nature of word-space-punctuation not only contains reference but leaves an impression, suggests--linguistically--allusion, acts--itself and in juxtaposition--as metaphor. . . and as potential. The grammar is as much past as it is present and potential. The Greek/Pound's three-fold reasoning ought to still hold here: Does the structure have a music? Does the structure have a logic? Is there enough about the structure that feels new? And do we guide the reader in making sense as much as the reader must accept a new measure of rhythm and threads of logic that seem found--frayed or whole--in an entirely new land?

Roy Peter Clark writes, according to Ammon, the relaxed "grammar of purpose, a grammar of effect, a grammar of intent. . . [that] gives you a little push and says, 'Go, go, go.'" Ammon Shea: "Clark wholeheartedly endorses breaking the commandments that make no sense, as long as in the breaking the writing itself holds up": in the progress of our evolution we question "rules that have little influence on the making of meaning" (Clark feels).

In other words (or: in words): "encourage. . . more joy."

Go out and voyage, my friends. The language is ready, and sensual.

"Magnifying and applying come I,
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,"
--Walt Whitman