Some remarks about some things
notes, investigations, digressions galore
Ted Burke
- Location
- San Diego, California,
- Birthday
- July 15
- Title
- Bookseller, writer, musician
- Bio
- Bookseller, musician, writer and poet living and working in San Diego, California. His writing has appeared in the San Diego Reader, Kicks, San Diego Door, Roadwork, Revolt in Style,and City Works.His poems have been included in the anthologies Small Rain: 8 poets from San Diego (1996,DG Wills Books),Ocean Hiway: eight poets in San Diego (1981,Wild Mustard Press) , and is the author of many chapbooks, including Hand Grenade, Open Every Window,No One Home and City Times,limited editions published by his own Old House Press.
MY RECENT POSTS
- ALVIN LEE
March 11, 2013 12:28AM - David Shields lives on the
edge of other people's lives
February 20, 2013 12:53AM - Dean Young and the End of
Days
February 20, 2013 12:50AM - Traci Brimhall burns the
marriage contract
February 20, 2013 12:47AM - Turn that shit down, Granpa
February 09, 2013 11:55PM
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “Rand was smitten by
Monroe's persona no less than
any other
star struck kid and
p…”
March 08, 2012 06:46PM - “@George Hoffman:
Actually, Mailer didn't refer
to himself
as
"Aquarius"…”
January 01, 2012 07:12PM - “Mailer's meditation on
violence and evil will not be
every
one's idea of a good
n…”
January 01, 2012 07:07PM - “@Miguella: His
contradictions were what made
his brilliance
exasperating; I
sup…”
December 17, 2011 10:40AM - “Thanks wendy. It's not
that I'm against subjecting a
work to
critical
examination…”
August 14, 2011 06:44PM
Ted Burke's Links
MARCH 11, 2013 12:28AM
ALVIN LEE
Alvin Lee, pioneer rock guitar hero and leader of the British blues
band Ten Years After, died the other day at age 68 from a
complication following what's been described as a routine surgery.
Lee was not one of my favorites at the time, the late Sixties
through the Seventies, mainly… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 20, 2013 12:53AM
David Shields lives on the edge of other people's lives
Lowen Liu does a savvy take down of later day
deconstructionist David Shields and his new
book, How
Literature Saved My Life in a recent piece in
Slate.
Click the link and relish the reviewer's astute debunking of a
writer too lazy to be a genius on his own
… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 20, 2013 12:50AM
Dean Young and the End of Days
How to Glow , a poem by Dean Young, is
chaotic
poem at first reading, but it does have a rhythm and vibrant sense
of starting off with one proposition and concluding with an end , a
result, that one did not expect. "And end" is just the
word,
… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 20, 2013 12:47AM
Traci Brimhall burns the marriage contract
The poem ""If
Marriage is a Duel at 10 Paces" by Traci Brimhall
is less a ritualized settling of grudges than it is a
supremely phrased and acidly etched sequence of couplets lampooning
the hackneyed metaphors that are applied to timeless institutions
.In this instance absurd compari/… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 9, 2013 11:55PM
Turn that shit down, Granpa
Truthfully, I used to like Aerosmith quite a bit and still get an adrenaline rush when I hear their best tunes. Guitar-centric rock was my preference in the Sports Arena days, but where other bands of the era now bore me and dated themselves badly, AS were pretty much the best… Read full post »
NOVEMBER 19, 2012 9:40PM
JACK KEROUACK: notes on a resentment
The idea that Jack
Kerouac is a great American writer and that On the
Road is a great American novel has been an ongoing hard
sell by his publishers and those who own the copyrights on his
books ever since I can remember. It seemed that way since I
first… Read full post »
NOVEMBER 5, 2012 5:53PM
THE LONG GOODBYE KISS: Dylan and Genius
Bob Dylan, I think, is a class of artist who had a enormous ,
galvanizing, revolutionizing style for a period of his career ,
years in which he released an impressive series of albums ,
fromAnother Side of Bob Dylanup to Blood on the
Tracks, that are one of those bodies of/… Read full post »
SEPTEMBER 12, 2012 11:47PM
TEMPEST--Bob Dylan
TEMPEST--Bob Dylan
The hero worship of Dylan continues unabated . The poor man is more Living Legend than Artist, who sense of imagery these last few decades has been more a storehouse of tacky stage props than anything quotable, witty or head turning. A generation of critics remains… Read full post »
AUGUST 26, 2012 10:30AM
COSMOPOLIS: a novel by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo again shows that he's our best novelist of American
absurdity with this strange off-kilter comedy that centers around
the events of an eventful day in Manhattan.
Against a backdrop of raves, a Presidential motorcade, a rock
star's funeral, mysterious street demonstrations and the cons… Read full post »
AUGUST 14, 2012 5:43PM
Books and their secrets
Thinking that books should have secrets like people do implies that
you think books are very much people in the first place; the
further implication is that books have their own private agendas to
execute upon the world by way their
readership.
Books, if they had personalities and whims and
manifest… Read full post »
(Posted previously, but it merits a repeat publication.-tb)
Feminism has made the demand that there be more strong women in this life and the next so that young females coming up will have living and legendary examples of those who've come before who've not allowed their gender to relegate to t… Read full post »
AUGUST 12, 2012 6:34PM
AYN RAND AND THE RELIGION OF THE LETHAL EGO
(Posted previously, but it merits a repeat publication.-tb)
Feminism has made the demand that there be more strong women in this life and the next so that young females coming up will have living and legendary examples of those who've come before who've not allowed their gender to relegate to the… Read full post »
AUGUST 9, 2012 1:42PM
Bleaky, batty and brilliant
The Dark Knight Rises has inspired a
dedicated coterie of nay sayers who complain that the film is a
lugubrious bore, muddled in plot and spectacularly pedestrian
in superhuman feats; considering that the director is Christopher
Nolan , an artist who chases bad ideas with the same meticulous
am/… Read full post »
AUGUST 7, 2012 11:26PM
Making a living
Rock and roll is all about professionalism , which is to say that
some one of the alienated and consequently alienating species
trying to make their way in the world subsisting on the seeming
authenticity of their anger, ire and anxiety has to make sure that
they take care of their… Read full post »
AUGUST 6, 2012 3:47PM
Endorsement: Clint Eastwood makes Romney’s day | The Salt Lake Tribune
Endorsement: Clint Eastwood makes Romney’s day |
The Salt Lake Tribune:
Eastwood is one
of my favorite directors, and it's frustrating when a hero endorses
a candidate who espouses policies that essentially embody a
meanness… Read full post »
Gore
Vidal will be missed because he was , perhaps, the last of the
Great Public Intellectuals with the ability to discourse
knowledgeably on an impressive variety of inter-related subjects.
We can run down the list of items he had a nuanced opinion on:
literature, politics, antiquity, American histo
… Read full post »
JULY 29, 2012 1:53PM
Whattaya know?
I was making one of my constant vain attempts to clean the
apartment when I came across a dog-eared mass market of Danny
Sugarman's Jim Morrison memoir No
One Here Gets Out Alive.
Sugarman passed away in January of 2005, and a little bit of a
flash back was all I needed… Read full post »
JULY 29, 2012 10:01AM
SNAP SHOTS AND STILL LIFES
JULY 28, 2012 10:26AM
Loose Fitting
(A slight
expansion of a previous post.-TB)
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
I thought this
small verse I wrote was a decent attempt at the loose-fitting
sonnet form, as practiced by Ted Berrigan and featured in Gerald
Stern’s engagingly gangly book American
Sonnets. The distinction betwee/… Read full post »
JULY 21, 2012 3:31PM
Clip your wings
Truthfully, I
used to like Aerosmith quite a bit and still get an adrenaline rush
when I hear their best tunes. Guitar-centric rock was my preference
in the Sports Arena days, but where other bands of the era now bore
me and dated themselves badly, AS were pretty much the best… Read full post »
JULY 20, 2012 6:17PM
SHUT THE FUCK UP
There events in our lives that are so stunningly horrible and
unexpected that the only response, it would seem, is silence, the
ghostly quiet that follows a bloody battle, the closed mouth
response that takes over after all expectations and assumptions
about decency, order and general goodwill have b…
JULY 19, 2012 10:30AM
Dating in the '90s
Dating is one of our
interaction rituals where we test our theories of what will happen
to us in circumstances that have yet to occur. Getting older
is the tempered good fortune of realizing how funny your initial
notions were in the first place. As usual, we are the last
ones… Read full post »
JULY 17, 2012 3:15PM
Muddle
I am not
against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing down poems in
order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the
non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their
wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet
who cannot get away… Read full post »
JULY 14, 2012 2:50PM
The hiss in history
"Desert Sounds" By Howard Altmann. - Slate Magazine:
It's the desert and it's too damn hot and
things about are still, motionless to the extent that you swear you
can hear their atoms expand and produce a muted groan . There is a
crackle to the things that move, an irritating… Read full post »
JULY 14, 2012 3:09AM
what poets dream about
Poets dream about writing poems
about moonlight , still waters , vapor escaping from a yawning
mouth on a cold night , love that will not reciprocate no matter
the intensity or rigidity of your yearning and, I wager, writing
poems about poems besides said still waters, under said moonlight.
You… Read full post »
Verbal Remedy AKA Denise
John Hughes
Dorinda D.
Paul Levinson
Joan Walsh
Karen Templer
Salon.com