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© Prentiss Taylor

Prentiss Taylor’s 1935 photo of Zora Neale Hurston performing the crow dance. | Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

• View Susan Sontag, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway and the rest of Emily Temple’s silly photo finds — 15 in all — at Flavorwire’s winsome Books section

Other Emily Temple posts at Flavorwire

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Go to the original at Zócalo Public Square

When Killers Target Kids

The Science of Empathy Grapples with the Unthinkable

Photo: Abode of Chaos

by Simon Baron-Cohen

On July 22, 2011, 33-year-old Anders Behring Breivik killed 69 people, most of them teenagers, on the island of Utøya in Norway. On March 19, 2012, 23-year-old Mohammed Merah shot and killed a teacher and three young children at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.

Both killers targeted children, which makes the crimes especially shocking …

READ MORE

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Courtesy photo

KILLER DRONE

Rhymes with phone or moan and

means: I’ve grown so dense and lazy

I can’t even be bothered to bomb you

personally, so I dispatch a robot to rob you,

relieve you of everything you thought

rightful or yours. Rhymes with snores.

– Al Young

© 2010 by Al Young

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178 pages
$9.00 USD
ISBN: 978-0-9815047-7-3

Cover design: Jessica & Doug Rees | Cover photo: Paul Goettlich

THE HOUSE ON DANA STREET

(from “Med Café Stories”)

He, the new young man never knew
what to make of Jimmy Lynn’s house
on Dana Street in Berkeley,
writers coming and going, mostly blacks,
talking revolution never tired of
talking about what it was all about
being black
what the whites did to the blacks.
We got those college degrees, yeah!
Some writing movie scripts, some
writing poetry, some doing it all,
Al Young sitting late night on a stool
at the kitchen counter, paying respect
to his older friend,     Al was relaxed,
while Jimmy was in motion,
Al listening to Jimmy telling it like it is.
Listening closely to Jimmy’s paranoia
which as it turned out,
we said one by one, “it wasn’t paranoia,
it was hieroglyphics on the wall.”
World politics vindicated Jimmy.

At Jimmy’s house, some writing novels,
some writing plays, Big Herb
Handsome, devilish, and trailing a
King’s robe behind him.
“Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea
I’ll tell you about my play.
The Day of the Nigger
let me explain the storyline, it’s the
day all the white people are killed
except, of course, some women.”
He grinned.
Jimmy, an intellectual who supported his art life
working on the docks,
gave free room and board to one young man,
“until you get a place,” he said.
The new border, light-skinned, ethereal, smiled
dreamily;  was he listening?  to urgent discussions in
this Parisian Left Bank on Dana?
While they talked revolution, the young man’s soul
whispered dreamily,     “Lena Horne   Lena Horne”
He was inside his own song and sweetly melancholic
as if he knew then he would later die young.

When I met him, he was floating, flute in hand
into the Med Café, speaking in rhyme, keeping time.
Some thought it odd but all thought him beautiful, with
sea green eyes and gold skin.
I couldn’t understand his words but sat with him
xxupstairs
where the blacks sat at the Med if not at Robbie’s.
The new boarder dreamily wafted in and out
of the Dana Street flat, like a mirage,
like a collage on the wall,
to be viewed or ignored by writers, musicians, artists,
smoking pot, making movies, talking about Camus as if
the subject was inexhaustible.
Jimmy let him stay there, saying wistfully,
“I just wish the young man would pick up his socks
and underwear from the floor.”
“But he’s so beautiful,” I said.
The young man overhearing, smiled sadly,
“Yes, of course, I am beautiful.
My mother is LENA HORNE!”

© 2011 Dorothy Jesse Beagle

Jesse Beagle, San Francisco, 1987 (National Poetry Week at Fort Mason)

1731 Tenth Street
Suite A
Berkeley, CA  94710
U.S.A.
510.528.8713
http://beatitudepress.net

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MemoryBanque.com

clickable

MEMORYBANQUE

The Website of Raymond Holbert

“Having had the pleasure of meeting and posing for Bay Area photographer Ray Holbert often through the years, I wasn’t surprised when he greeted me of a Saturday afternoon in Berkeley’s self-anointed Gourmet Gulch as I stepped out from a corner produce store. ‘Al,’ he said, ‘I’m doing a series on gray-haired people. Would you mind if I took some shots of you?’ Of course it was one of those days when I felt altogether unphotographable. But — given my penchant for improvisation and clinging to the now-moment — I naturally said yes. Later, when I visited Ray’s site to look at the lovingly captured portraits and images of his Professional Photographic Projects (Face Fashion, My Shoe and Foot Fetish, The Gray Hair Series, The Red Hair Series, Brown and Tan Blondes, Black and White; the range of his projects and passions grows), I realized I hadn’t seen anything yet. My heart warmed up the last lines of “Old Light,” a very old poem of mine: ‘The passing of time’ll shatter your heart / & light the photographer’s hour.’ In a world overwhelmed by visual and graphic imagery, Ray Holbert’s pictures sparkle and sing.”
— Al Young

clickable

Watch Ditching the Dye, a KCBS/5 video based on Holbert’s Gray Hair Series

“The Gray Hair Series of individuals you see here is an ambition to include as many variations that I can conveniently find of this regal and honest indicator of time that can show as grace, style, sophistication, class and age. Beauty is expressed in all kinds of ways and at all ages. I hope that these images indicate that. I continue to learn as I photograph the subjects with a lot of anecdotes and information that have helped me to learn more as I photograph members of this huge segment of the American population. Gray hair is not really gray but a variation of several shades of a gray spectrum as well as silver, platinum, smoke, metallic, bronze and golden grays. There is no set pattern that is absolute to the graying of the world. The loss of pigment in the hair follicle can take place as early as the teenage years and some hardly show a touch of gray at their latest years. This contradicts the idea of one gray generation.”
– Raymond Holbert

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Courtesy insureourcondo.com

Romantic

My love said take
All my books,

You can take all my clothes,
My hats, my shoes, my gloves,

You can have my watchband,
Take my sifters,

You can have my glass head
And my silver darts,

Take my wild boar, my astronaut,
You can have my pots & pans,

And my replica
Of the United States, and take,

While you’re at it, all of the
Presidential figurines,

You can have all my matchbooks,
My binoculars, my exceptionally fine

Collection of cleaning products,
My one-of-a-kind snake-charming horn,

Take my sand dollars & beach glass,
Take all of my spices and salt & pepper,

You can have my smoked ham & brown mustard,
You can take my Progresso soup,

Take away my bread, take my spoons,
You can have my sheets and my pillows,

Take my rugs and my three erasers
Take my pitcher and the scarf you gave me,

Take my feathers my fox took
From my hawk, take my walking stick,

You can have my broom and my glass eye,
You can take away my atomic clock,

Take my dog, take my rule book.
Take my decoy and my bamboo cage,

You can take my girl waiting on
Her suitcase, my Michael Jackson doll,

You can take my mother and her priest
And their holy-water basin,

Take my drill and my hammer.
You can have all my brushes & combs,

Take my handkerchiefs and my scissors,
Take all of the keys you can find

In the house, take my scythe, my hoe,
My rags, my lamp with the lovers

Asleep in one another’s arms, take
My sprite sitting on a stump daydreaming

Over an empty book, take my moose,
Take my coffee can of loose change,

Take all of my ant traps, take my
Windowpanes, take my steps and my doors,

Take my chicken shack & my wheelbarrow,
Take my combat ship plaque, take my

Vatican champagne flutes, my earplugs,
Take my quilts, take all of my quilts,

I would not take one stitch
Of one of your quilts, though I love them,

I sweetly interrupted.

– Dara Wier

Video still of Dara Wier courtesy umass.edu

© Dara Wier, all rights reserved; reprinted with permission of the author; from DARA WIER | SELECTED POEMS, Wave Books, 2009

www.wavepoetry.com

Dara Wier in recent conversation with Cynthia Arrieu-King at Jacket2 Magazine

Poems by Dara Wier at PoetryFoundation.org

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How Dara Wier’s poem “Romantic” now links to Mae Ola Varner’s obituary at AlYoung.org

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