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Promiscuously Autobiographical
“I’m promiscuously autobiographical, but it’s never gotten me into trouble.” Samuel R. Delaney, interviewed by The New Yorker Continue reading
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What Comes Next
I think the progression from Adonai deciding to break with the other Levantine gods in his tribe and end child sacrifice with Abraham, through the genocidal conversion of Northern Europe and much of the rest of the non-Asian world to Christianity, culminating in a genocidal slaughter of Islamic children by modern Likud Israel funded by… Continue reading
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Eating Cookies in America
Eating cookies while readingTrout Fishing in America They are molasses forwardwith a crisp ginger finish like driving from cane countryback home to New Orleans Continue reading
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Doleful Histories
Why fetishize one manI don’t care who hisabsent father might bewhen the world is litteredwith the bodies of so manysons mothers daughtersmurdered in that man’s name Continue reading
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The Middle East
Middle of what? The eurocentric “West?” West of what? The East in the Middle of the West is how you get confused boundaries and their inevitable wars. At least the Romans arranged their subject people rationally. Example: Palestine. When Rome merged with the Germanic world things got weird. They took the Levantine game of chess… Continue reading
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East of the End of the World
An hour east of the End of the World sign somewhere just inside Delacroix a city is vanishing into America, dissolving wholesale in a Starbucks blender, as if buried in the contaminated sediment of The River; a Las Vegas scale, prime-time vanishing act in which a city is transformed into a waterfront Disney attraction, minus… Continue reading
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Bob Kaufman
One exception to my suspicion of full on surrealism is Bob Kaufman. Postwar atomic automaton America could not be viewed straight on like the industrial films of 1960s early morning television. It required hallucinatory ViewMaster snapshots to portray its twisted Twilight Zone reality. Imagine this was the only possible approach. Unlike Ginsburg’s angelic screeds like… Continue reading
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I Sing The Body Plasmatic
I’m not struck by lightning when I write. Rather I am a neural magnetic container of a creative plasma which occasionally escapes into recombination, condensing into words. This is the creative disease which fluctuates between melancholic contemplation and maniacal creative discharge. Like an instrument it must be tuned to a certain contained waveform so that… Continue reading
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Marginalia to Andrei Codrescu’s “comrade past and mister present”
“Our job,“ said brother/Blaga, “is not to uncover it but to increase its mysteriousness.” I am not a surrealist and it’s probably too late to try at 68, unless I start taking LSD and shrooms again and write while tripping in the way the lines sometimes erupt when I’m drunk and land as obsidian, but… Continue reading
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The Sin of Sinners
I’m still struggling to digest Sinners. It was brilliant until the film decided to make the music of oppressed indigenous people from Northwest Europe, Scots and Irish–the latter victims of a genocide–the new “Devil’s Music.“ Why not silly cracker music like Turkey in the Straw and My Old Kentucky Home? Why not outright minstrel music?… Continue reading
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Meditations in an Emergency Room
Alone at the end by a service door, relaxing on the gurney bed listening to the bustle elsewhere They’ve taken the loud, homophobic Christian zealot in handcuffs somewhere else. Two monitors beep just out of sync; waiting for them to meet again is not an ideal distraction. Just here for the stitches, thanks. Boredom. Shift… Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 