literature
-
The Android Cried Me A River
I wrote this while rereading the Valis before I went to an art show opening of works dedicated to celebrate the anniversary of the 79th occasion of the birth of Philip K Dick The Android Cried Me a RiverOn the occasion of the 97thanniversary of the birth of Phillip K. DickTake heart, the AI chatbot Continue reading
-
Finding Cortázar’s La Maga
Surrealism and synchronicity: I happened onto Andre Breton’s Nadja while trying to find a new book on my Kindle. My Kindly suggestions are usually overwhelmed by my partner’s voracious appetite for light reading. Fortunately my decision to drive into László Krasznahorkai has led to other interesting books. I noted in the book’s description that it influenced Continue reading
-
Tell Me About It
” I will tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.” — Richard Brautigan Continue reading
-
The Island of Doctor Jeffers
Reading the long, narrative poems in the stout Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers takes me back to a book I read long ago: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. So many of his characters are monstrous deformities, half human and half animal. Not that such people don’t exist-the news today is filled with them-but Continue reading
-
Out of this World
I did not read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child–which is kind of surprising in retrospect– unless I read it at a moment when I really need toescape from the world and have blacked out why and the books. Based on this quote I just ordered The Magician’s Nephew. I think it’s a good Continue reading
-
Agoraphonia
Trying to read Bernadette Mayer’s Agoraphobia over lunch in a crowded food court is like a holiday in schizophrenia. The sentences run like rivulets after a wave back into the ocean of voices echoing off the walls & I can no more find the sense of it than I can explain the mathematics of fractals Continue reading
-
Bury me in that warm country
There is a primordial order, transcendent / of languages, the form for casting poetry. Continue reading
-
The Man Who Knew Godot
Long ago when I first started as an undergraduate I was at a bar speaking to an old man and told him I was an English major and he asked me to recite a poem. I couldn’t. Maybe I could manage Poe’s The Bells for I had that by heart once. Memorizing poetry was a Continue reading
-
Suttree
I was mumbling last month about starting up a Bloomsday reading again a few weeks ago but dropped it. And I haven’t cracked my much sticky noted and underlined disintegrating binding copy this year. Instead I am currently readinf Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, and I’m feeling disposed to call it the American Ulysses. It’s as Continue reading
-
Well Bottom Blues
Not my current state of mind but a part of the blog title’s genesis. The well bottom is like the bottom of the sea. Things down here stay very still, keeping their original forms, as if under tremendous pressure, unchanged from day to day. A round slice of light floats high above me: the evening 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).
.
Well Bottom Blues 