Friends at Grinnell College Honestly, you were the best audience I've had in quite a long time. I felt very welcomed. And I felt a synergy among us that really enlivened my performance. So thanks! From the bottom of my heart. I know that's a cliché but my gratitude is certainly heartfelt. Gratitude and props to Dr. Carolyn Jacobson for coordinating the evening, providing great publicity, and giving such a generous introduction. And many thanks also to Dr. Shuchi Kapila, English department head, for your hospitality.
And thanks also to my daughter Amanda for a truly lovely visit. It was a genuine treat for your old man to give a reading at your school. I love you, hon! Congratulations on your last semester at Grinnell. Here's the new, one-day-old poem I read tonight. (Terza rima in pentameter, if you're into such esoterica.) I wrote this poem as a response to Robert Lee Brewer's Poem-a-Day Challenge for National Poetry Month, in his Poetic Asides blog sponsored by Writer's Digest. During the month of April, Robert issued a prompt each day, accompanied by a sample poem he had written from that prompt. This poem was inspired by a prompt to write an animal poem. In "Leviathan," I have ranged freely, pretty loose and easy, with a coterie of legendary or literary animals that fall within the general herd of While the topic may be loosey-goosey, the craft is tight: roughed-up pentameter with terza rima In any case, back to the reading at Grinnell College: here are a couple of photos, courtesy of Molly McArdle. Thanks again for a magical evening, everyone!
Oh, also, a couple of students bought Ghost Wars but didn't ask for them to be signed. Yes, they were already pre-signed, but if you like I can sign them more personally. Just tell Amanda. Quite easy to arrange. Added 1 April 2012: I just found out that "Leviathan" was published by the University of Iowa's arts and writing website, The Daily Palette. Quite fitting I found that out today because I'm now taking up again Robert Lee Brewer's poem-a-day challenge, as part of National Poetry Month, 2012. Hope I end up again this time with a poem as lovely and lucky as "Leviathan." Take care, everyone. |
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Thanks, Grinnellians! ... Leviathan
Labels:
grinnell college
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Pause for the Cause (6.0) ... Bertram's Blog, Grinnell College, and eBay
![]() My article today on Bertram's Blog is titled "Submitting to Literary Magazines 101: Professionalism." It is the first of a set of articles I will be writing for Pat Bertram based on my experience as a poetry editor at the North American Review as well as at other magazines. The purpose of these articles is to help make it easier for you to get your poems (and other writing) published. The basic question of these articles: how might you be hurting your chances of getting published by not knowing the "unwritten rules" of submitting your work? Sometime in the next couple of days, I will host an article by Pat Bertram on promoting one's books. I'm looking forward to that. It's the first time I will have a guest blogger on The Man with the Blue Guitar. ![]() This reading is truly a treat for me because my oldest daughter Amanda is a student at Grinnell College. She is in her senior year and will be graduating from Grinnell in the next few weeks. I am truly glad to have the distinction of giving a reading at Grinnell College while she is still a student there. ![]() Why don't you take a look at that auction text now? The clever and fun questions and answers alone are more than worth the price of admission! Okay, friends, that's all for today's "Pause for the Cause." I hope you are having a great "hump day." Don't forget to watch the 100th episode of the TV show Lost later tonight. The most intelligent TV show ever! |
Labels:
ebay,
grinnell college,
guest blogger,
lost (tv),
michael martone,
pat bertram
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Cutlass Supreme Tour ... Shaindel Beers - A Brief History of Time
VG: Shaindel, as I was reading A Brief History of Time, I became interested in your use of traditional forms — the villanelle, sonnet, ghazal, sestina. To start off, could you very briefly define the sestina for readers who may not know the form? Then, could you please define your take on what a sestina is and can be for a poet? What opportunities does it offer the writer to connect with readers that other forms, including free verse, may not? ![]() VG: Wow, that's really interesting. I'm glad that little website has been a help to poets. To be honest, though, when I write a sestina, I don't really do that iambic pentameter thing. You know, maybe I never did, ha ha. SB: I think the sestina is a fabulous form. It sounds impossible at first, but it's really a great challenge. When I sit down to write a sestina, I actually feel an adrenaline rush. It's something about the "problem-solving" aspect of it. I write out the end-words in order on my paper beforehand (though now I've discovered an online form that does it for you), and I get to work with those six end words just waiting for me all down the page. I think I've always written the first stanza before deciding on the end words to make sure it's going to work. I'm sure I could write a sestina with random end words, but I like feeling like I'm on the right path to start with. And I'm not ashamed to admit, I count the iambic pentameter on my fingers. So, if you see me in a bar or coffeeshop with a notebook, counting on my fingers, now you know I'm up to composing a form poem. VG: No shame there. Doesn't everyone count meter on their fingers? Or tap it out on the table? SB: What I like about the sestina is the reassurance of those six end words. You have a frame to build something on. I also like the obsessiveness of the end words; some poems need to be a sestina — for instance, Anthony Hecht's "Sestina d'Inverno," in which two of the end words are "Rochester" and "snow." Anyone who knows Rochester, New York, knows how those two words go together and deserve the repetition throughout this poem. My poem "Moonlight Sestina" describes new love, and one of the end words is "infatuation," which, I thought, worked nicely because what is infatuation but to keep coming back to thoughts of that person again and again and again? VG: Thanks. How did this particular sestina get started (as a sestina, that is)? Is this the same for all your sestinas? Do you start off saying, "I'm going to write a sestina about _______?" Or do you start off with a character or image or scene or topic and then find out as you're writing that the poem wants to be a sestina? SB: I think this particular sestina got started as me wanting to write a sestina about what seemed like the least likely topic for me to write a sestina about, and I came up with the adult entertainment industry. But then I realized the cyclic nature of the industry and how people get into it and can't get out of it, and it seemed the most perfect form to write the poem in. I think some poems seem to come to me wanting to be sestinas. Even the title, "Why It Almost Never Ends with Stripping" is in pentameter. It was meant to be. VG: Wow, you're serious about that pentameter thing. Good for you. SB: I think I have one unfinished sestina that I need to get back to, and I think that it went unfinished just because I had too many other things going on, and I couldn't (or didn't) give it the attention it deserved. VG: The world waits for that sestina! Okay, moving on. In terms of craft, how does this sestina work? How did you choose the words? (For example, what led you to that genius "con-" repeton?) What innovations are you making on the form here? I did notice you often do something hip and new at the ends of your form poems: your 14+1 tailed sonnet, your ghazal with the nonstandard ending, the sestina where in the envoi you change a repeton to plural to both hide the word and expand the meaning — fun stuff. SB: To be honest, this was a much more standard sestina originally. I mean, I've always played with form — I had the syllable "con" because I wanted to play with enjambment and other elements like that and open the form up a bit. I think it's important to look at things the New Formalists did to make form more interesting. I think we've all seen some pretty wretched form poetry from the past — which was really beautiful for what they were writing then, but no one outside of a boy band needs to rhyme words like "love" and "above" or whatnot today. The big change that opened this poem up (to me) was that Hunger Mountain was doing an issue on "appropriated form," and I sent in tons of poems, and I didn't know how much the form needed to be "played with" in order for the poem to be considered an "appropriated" form poem. Roger Weingarten emailed and asked if I would consider changing the end word "money" to a synonym in each stanza, and it worked beautifully. Something about that one end word changing makes the obsession with money seem even more real — like, no matter what you call it, it's all the same thing, and you can fall into a trap of doing almost anything to get more of it. I later learned that the syllable "con" is French slang for "prick," which I thought worked well, considering the nature of the poem and that the sestina is originally a French form. That was one of the "happy accidents" involved in this poem. VG: You know usually I don't cotton to that synonym-as-repeton device. I'm pretty insistent about alterations happening with rich consonance. And I'm talking here as both a teacher and an editor. I would very rarely publish a sestina in the North American Review that relied on synonyms for repeton change. But I would certainly have published yours hand down if you had submitted it to the NAR. Okay, Shaindel. So far my questions have been craft-oriented. Let's try something a bit more personal. Could you tell me what this particular poem means? Also, what do you envision this poem "doing" out in the big bad world? SB: This poem is really important to me because I think it's one of the first poems I wrote that I wanted to "do something." I mean, we all want our poems to connect with people, but I wanted this poem to change one particular person's life and, on various levels, to inspire social change. I had a friend who I met when she was in law school and I was an adjunct college instructor, and she started doing what many young women do — stripping to work her way through school, but what was shocking to me was how quickly everything in her life deteriorated. She went into this downward spiral of drugs, pornography, and prostitution, and it seemed to come out of nowhere to the point that it was unbelievable. I'm sure that many, many people's lives don't fall apart this way, but hers did. And I'm aware that she had factors in her life that may have predisposed her to this kind of meltdown (in case anyone tries to say that I'm generalizing and emails me with their testimonial of their perfectly happy life in adult entertainment). But I came to know friends of hers who had the same sort of life. One of the girls contacted me after a roommate of theirs was found dead from a drug overdose in their apartment, and I told her, "You have to get out of there," meaning that crowd, that whole lifestyle. I really felt like that was the path a lot of these young women were on. One of them was raped in the VIP/private party room of a club, some of them were set up by police officers who tried to bust them on drug charges but were really trying to extort sex from them — all kinds of horrible things happened to them. And no one seemed to care. And they seemed to know that no one would believe them; they just looked at some of these things as the way it was. I'm not in contact any more with the original friend who was in law school because things spiraled out of control in ways that made me feel I had to cut contact with her. I did hear from a cousin of hers who thanked me for writing the poem and told me the poem had kept her from following in her cousin's footsteps. One of the girls told me she reads the poem whenever she thinks of going back. And I completely understand the temptation. It's hard for me to imagine someone calling me and offering to fly me in to a club and pay me a few thousand dollars for a weekend of work and me turning that down, but that's what my one friend has been doing, and I'm so proud of her. She's staying in school and working as a server at a restaurant and sticking with it all so that she doesn't lose control again. I don't know if I would have that kind of strength, if I had had all of that money available to me, to leave it behind. I think this poem has done a lot of good already, and I hope it keeps doing more. Whether or not it helps more girls decide to get out of that lifestyle or keeps others from going in, I hope it makes people think. I hope it makes people be less judgmental toward adult entertainers, and I hope it makes people who are consumers of adult entertainment think of the women in it as people, not objects. It's definitely one of my most "talked about" poems; I know that Carolyne Wright teaches it at Seattle University and other college instructors have contacted me to tell me that they're teaching it in various classes. In another interview, I mentioned that I wanted to write poems that are "important, not just good," and I feel like this is one of those. VG: I'll be teaching it too, Shaindel. May many more poems like this one come to you. Brava. Now my last question. Though actually "each" of my questions above has been made up 2, 3, or more questions, huh. Sorry about that! Okay, here goes. What is your "personal relationship" to form (other than free verse, of course). Will you continue, do you think, to work with rhyme, meter, and inherited forms? Why? Or why not? SB: I think being able to write well in form is an important skill. There's something to what Frost said comparing free verse poetry to playing tennis without a net. I write more free verse than anything else, but I think that form is part of the tradition. Even if we don't use it every day, it's nice as poets to have it at our disposal. Why would you turn down having more tools in your toolbox? I hope to continue working with form because I feel like it works a different part of my brain; it's almost mathematical. Sometimes, getting the right number of syllables or the right end word is just like solving for x. I want to get better at villanelles. I don't think I've written a successful one yet (though there is one in my book). I want to try a double sestina (though I still need to look up exactly what that is). I've never even tried a pantoum or terzanelle. There's definitely still a lot out there to try. Why not just go for it? VG: I haven't been brave enough to try a double sestina. Instead of six words, you have twelve. So twelve 12-line stanzas and a 6-line envoi, blah blah. Denise Duhamel wrote a great one called "Incest Taboo" that's just tremendous. It's in her book Two by Two. In an interview she says something like, when she first learned about double sestinas, she wrote six or seven in a row. Good God. I'd be lucky to finish one in my whole life! Shaindel, thanks for such a lovely interview. I hope this sells lots and lots of copies of A Brief History of Time. It was a lot of fun! SB: You're welcome. It's a pleasure to finally "meet" the developer of the Craft of Poetry website, which made all of my sestinas possible, and to have such an in-depth discussion on form. Take care! Friends, thanks for joining us. Do purchase your own copy of A Brief History of Time, either direct from Salt Publishing or from Amazon. Would you also please leave a comment down below? Thanks. Oh, about the fetching "country girl" picture above, which I snagged off her Facebook, Shaindel said: Simply lovely, don't you think? Clearly a woman who's enchanted with her cameraman. Happy Earth Day, everyone! |
Labels:
sestina,
shaindel beers
Friday, April 17, 2009
VidPo (1.0) - "Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too" by Jim Hall
Today we have a poetry video in which I perform my favorite poem of all time, "Maybe Dats Youwr Pwoblem Too" by Jim Hall.
Jim Hall is most well-known as the bestselling, award-winning mystery writer James W. Hall. His 15 mystery novels include, most recently, Hell's Bay, Magic City, and Forests of the Night. Perhaps my favorite book of Hall's is his collection of humorous essays, Hot Damn: Alligators in the Casino, Nude Women in the Grass, How Seashells Changed the Course of History, and Other Dispatches from Paradise. According to his website, Hall's "books have been translated into a dozen languages, including Japanese, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Croatian, Dutch and Russian." He is also "the author of four books of poetry, The Lady from the Dark Green Hills, Ham Operator, False Statements, and The Mating Reflex [as well as] a collection of short stories, Paper Products." The poem "Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too" appeared first in the Beloit Poetry Journal and later in Jim's 1980 poetry collection The Mating Reflex.Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too — a poem by Jim Hall
All my pwoblems
who knows, maybe evwybody's pwoblems
is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth
dat I am SPIDERMAN.
I know, I know. All da dumb jokes:
No flies on you, ha ha,
and da ones about what do I do wit all
doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat's funny yeah.
But you twy being
SPIDERMAN for a month or two. Go ahead.
You get doze cwazy calls fwom da
Gubbener askin you to twap some booglar who's
only twying to wip off color T.V. sets.
Now, what do I cawre about T.V. sets?
But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit,
wit da sucker cups on da fingers,
and get my wopes and wittle bundle of
equipment and den I go flying like cwazy
acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.
Till der he is. Some poor dumb color T.V. slob
and I fall on him and we westle a widdle
until I get him all woped. So big deal.
You tink when you SPIDERMAN
der's sometin big going to happen to you.
Well, I tell you what. It don't happen dat way.
Nuttin happens. Gubbener calls, I go.
Bwing him to powice, Gubbener calls again,
like dat over and over.
I tink I twy sometin diffunt. I tink I twy
sometin excitin like wacing cawrs. Sometin to make
my heart beat at a difwent wate.
But den you just can't quit being sometin like
SPIDERMAN.
You SPIDERMAN for life. Fowever. I can't even
buin my suit. It won't buin. It's fwame wesistent.
So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows.
Maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin.
Nobody can buin der suits, dey all fwame wesistent.
Who knows?
NOTE: I suppose you've noticed that in my performance I changed "color T.V." to "HD T.V." It just seemed to need updating. I hope Jim is okay with this change, which I made to help the poem work better for a contemporary audience. Actor's prerogative, you know? Maybe this will elicit some good discussion in classes wherever about what can be changed in a text, and so on.
Labels:
jim hall,
video poetry
Thursday, April 16, 2009
VisPo (1.0) - "Immigrants" by Ren Powell
I'm starting something new today. I'm going to make The Man with the Blue Guitar, among the many things it already does, a showcase for Visual Poetry. And by "showcase" I mean not just my poems but the poems of other people.
Okay, the debut VisPo video is Ren Powell's "Immigrants."
ImmigrantsA poem by Ren Powell
There are fish swimming just above my ceiling
under the feet of the tenants on the second floor
I can hear them swirling the water
with each thrust of a fin, with each
slap of a gill, I can guess they aren't big
probably the size of pennies
copper, green and orange
but making a lot of noise
And sometimes the tenants upstairs
clog in Appalachian fashion
and the fish get really pissed-off
and whisk up a buzz about it — to each other
but I can hear them.
They say, "Jesus Christ,
I can't believe I left the Amazon
for this."From Powell's Thanks for the Cornflakes,
a bilingual book forthcoming from
Wigestrand Publishers in Norway.
Ren Powell is "a writer, translator and poet — a native Californian living on the west coast of Norway since 1992. She is the author of three full collections of poetry and has eleven books of translation to her credit. Her own poetry has been translated and published in six languages" (http://www.renpowell.com). Part of what makes this poem fascinating is the fact that Ren Powell is herself an immigrant. Check out Ren's website to learn about her work in human rights and social justice.
Labels:
immigrants,
ren powell,
video poetry,
visual poetry
Monday, April 13, 2009
A Pause for the Cause (5.0) ... Suite101

Suite101.com has published an interview with me, thanks to Linda Sue Grimes, Suite101's poetry guru, who graciously invited me and then guided our conversation. Interestingly, she conducted the interview completely within Facebook. Many thanks, Linda Sue!
Also, do browse through the good stuff at Suite101, a leading online magazine and anthology of articles on the arts, literature, writing, and a plethora of wide-ranging topics: food, music, business, education, health, science, sports, technology, travel, and on and on.
You poetry enthusiasts out there may find it interesting that Linda Sue Grimes's Suite101 articles use the spelling "rime" rather than "rhyme" — she has a fascinating article explaining her reasons for this preference. I would be interested to hear what all y'all think about the question of "rime" vs. "rhyme." Please read Linda Sue's article on the topic and then weigh in with a comment below.
Oh, and of course, if you have remarks about the interview, do share those in a comment as well. Thanks, everyone!
Labels:
interview,
linda sue grimes,
rhyme,
rime,
suite101
Saturday, April 11, 2009
A Pause for the Cause (4.0) ... Fiera Lingue

Four titles: two poems on Filipino American subjects, titled "Organist and Butterfly" and "Swimmers"; and two other poems, "Letter to Hugo from Indigo Farm" and "In Your Gifted Dream," which form a tribute to the poet Richard Hugo, imitating the letter- and dream-poem format in his book 31 Letters and 13 Dreams.
I am honored and delighted to be in the company of the fine poets featured by Fiera Lingue. Grazie, Anny!
Check out the homepage of the Poets' Corner at Fiera Lingue as well as Anny's personal blog Narcissus Works. They are both wonderful websites on contemporary literature across the world. Fiera Lingue, for example, has sub-sections that are pertain to literature in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Italian, all with different content. Amazing. Check it out!
Labels:
anny ballardini,
fiera lingue
Sunday, April 5, 2009
In his Inky Apron, My Father Smiles
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been posting and commenting on my poems reprinted by editor Shawn Wong in the 1996 textbook Asian American Literature. The immediate occasion for these blog posts, as I have mentioned previously, is that I was contacted through Facebook by members of an Asian American Lit class at the University of Georgia, and we have been discussing these poems online. At about the same time, interestingly, my own Asian American Lit class at the University of Northern Iowa reached these poems in our ongoing course schedule. Here, then, is the last of the five poems from Shawn Wong's textbook:
— Vince Gotera, first appeared in Ploughshares (1989).
Reprinted in Asian American Literature: A Brief
Introduction and Anthology (1996). Appeared also
in Fighting Kite (2007).
Readers of this poem often say it's about "the making of the artist." Not quite like James Joyce though, I'd say — more like "the making of the artist as a young preschooler." My father did train me for amazing feats, of sorts. He worked with me on the alphabet at age two or three so that I was reading before I was four years old. When I was about six, he decided he would make me into a chess Grandmaster. So every day, we would drill on the chessboard, sometimes for hours. The King's Gambit. The Sicilian Defense. The Ruy Lopez Opening. (I only now learned, via Google, that there's an interesting irony here because the Philippines was named after King Philip not by Magellan, it turns out, but by the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos. Fancy that. Ruy Lopez. I wonder if my father knew that.)
We would replay famous chess games, such as the 1956 so-called "Game of the Century" in which chess master Donald Byrne lost to 13-year-old Bobby Fischer; as we duplicated the moves in these replayed games, Papa would have me analyze what made each move weak or strong. I suppose Papa was probably glad he taught me to read early, because he had me begin reading chess strategy manuals at this time. We spent a lot of time with endgame puzzles and checkmate tactics. (The only result of this training is that I ultimately lost my love for chess and now play only seldom.)
Back to the poem . . . I have always thought that this poem is not about me (as those who call it a "making of the artist" may assert) but rather about my father. His strong ambition for himself, later deflected to/through me. His dogged andeavors and planning, culminating with earning his law degree. His disappointment at the Philippines enacting a law to prevent American lawyers from practicing there (since Papa was a naturalized US citizen). His even deeper disappointment that he was also not able to be a lawyer in his beloved America; to pass the bar in California, he would have had to go back to school, but since he was already a lawyer, he felt that such schooling would be below him. His further bitter disappointments as he worked jobs in the US that he felt were similarly beneath him: selling encyclopedias door-to-door, selling dress shirts at a department store, working as an offset printer running enormous printing presses. (Some of this is also described in the autobiography started on this blog.)
Of his many jobs, the one I remember fondly was when he worked in a print shop. Ten years old, I loved the gigantic machines Papa ran, the sharp smell of the ink, the thunderous noise in the shop when the presses were turning. Probably the only way he could have been more heroic to me was if he ran a bulldozer or earth mover on a construction site.
Needless to say, he was keenly disappointed in himself for not being a lawyer, for having to work under supervisors he felt were intellectually inferior to him, etc. Today though, I gotta say, when I go to a print shop for my work as a magazine editor, all that love for Papa comes flooding back when I smell that ink-laden air, hear the thudding whirr of the presses. I don't think Papa ever knew how much I idolized his printing-press work. Though I suppose, even after the fact, that would not have been sufficient consolation for his workaday suffering.
In terms of craft, nothing much jumps out at me that I haven't already discussed at length vis-à-vis other poems, except for the emphasis here on the letters of the alphabet. Not only in the earlier section when the child speaker is learning the magic of reading, but also the letter-based logo on the ten-year-old child's ball cap, the UCSF of Papa's work (University of California, San Francisco), and the single numeral "2" followed by the letters "A.M." And finally of course, the father's work with letters — vowels and consonants — making Papa a sort of primal man of letters, though he would not have appreciated that complexion in the least.
To round out Papa's story, he eventually did find work that suited him. As I have noted in various posts here, my father was a WWII veteran who had deep concern for veteran's issues. Papa ultimately found an occupation, not just a job, as a Contact Representative for the Veterans Administration; he assisted veterans with all sorts of problems: pensions, health care, service-connected disabilities, etc. Although this was not working with the law, the job was sometimes legalistic, and more importantly Papa felt great satisfaction in being of service to other veterans. So this is a story with a happy ending.
And I bet my father did know about that Ruy Lopez who named the Philippines. Papa was a heck of a smart guy.
NOTE: the graphic above is the cover image from the Wikijunior Animal Alphabet.
Oh, also, there was one small change between the Ploughshares and textbook version and the one above (same as in Fighting Kite): the earlier "two a.m." was changed to "2 A.M." to coincide with customary usage (numeral with A.M. or P.M. in small caps) as well as to include yet one more single-character entity to match the alphabet letters throughout the poem.
Added 7 April 2009: a slide show of this poem. Enjoy!
Labels:
alphabet,
chess,
martin avila gotera,
shawn wong
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Want some H-2-Tone? MARtone, that is.
Check out this eBay auction: Writer Michael Martone's leftover water: Imbibe literary genius (dozens of authors) in one swig!
Go to the auction listing (click on the auction title above, in blue) and read the auction description by water seller madcabre. It's a hoot. Be sure to look at the questions and answers near the bottom of the auction page too. Great literature, I tell you.
Oh, and keep watching this blog post. As the auction continues, I'll be posting more here. And also, when the auction ends, I have permission from madcabre to upload the text into the blog.
Double oh . . . put in a bid! The bids are up to $10.51 right now. This item could be the beginning of your Michael Martone shrine/museum, a sure moneymaker! The auction ends on Monday morning (
Triple oh . . . please be sure and comment below. I really want to know what you think about this whole affair. And if you bid, do tell us if you win. Or if you lose, we want all the juice . . . and your story better hold water. Good luck!
Update on
Update on
It was an interesting finish, rather like David and Goliath: winner Mandood has a current feedback score of only 1 while runner-up Hot-66 has a score of 56. This means Mandood has only completed 1 eBay transaction in life, compared to the respectable 56 transactions of Hot-66. One wonders how Mandood — presumably an inexprienced newbie — knew to "snipe" (as eBay parlance refers to the action of appearing in the last moments of an auction and outbidding the competition without leaving them time to retaliate). I suppose, though, one could argue that Mandood didn't actually snipe because there was still a minute and a half left for Hot-66 to respond with a higher bid. Evidently Hot-66 had previously decided to go no higher than $20.00. In any case, the winning bid was — ka-ching — $20.50. Sold! (Gavel thump.)
$2.47 per ounce. Assuming that the seller madcabre bathing in the water and gargling it then returning it back to the bottle has added to the liquid volume, we might estimate a slightly lower per-ounce-price of $2.28 (though of course if we are counting only the Martone water, then we still have $2.47 as the final price per ounce). In either case, quite a coup for madcabre, who has not only earned $20.50 for water that would ordinarily have been discarded, but has also gotten a bath and a gargle out of the deal. Which of course means that madcabre has now absorbed many H2O molecules of literary genius(es) both externally and internally. Well done, madcabre!
NOTE: Watch this blog post further . . . it will grow in size and import as I insert the text of the auction page and Q&As over the next few days. Whew, it's been a fascinating auction, folks.
Please comment below. It would be interesting, for example, to find out who the four bidders were, that is, both their actual eBay usernames and their real names in the quotidian realm. Also, who is madcabre? Muwah hah hah. Whoever you all are, sign in please.
Over and out. For now.
Added on 29 Apr 2009: eBay auctions are left up for only 90 days. In order to make the Martone-water auction available beyond its expiration, seller madcabre and I have agreed that my blog will host his eBay auction text for the enjoyment and edification of Michael Martone fans.
Writer Michael Martone's leftover water Imbibe literary genius (dozens of authors) in one swig! Seller: madcabre (140) Description You are bidding on approximately 8.3 ounces of Dasani water (plus backwash) in a 20-ounce plastic Dasani bottle (lot number NOV0909 TOC0931L3). This was left by writer Michael Martone on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009, after a reading at Brigham Young University, during which Martone read the "Contributor’s Note" where he talks about his mother writing his school assignments, " Why should you want Michael Martone’s leftover water, especially when Elvis’s may come up for bid again? You may recall from one of Martone’s "Contributor’s Notes" that: "In his role as host of a reading, he is often faced with what to do with the leftover water of his guests ... Martone is left behind to secure the room, coil the microphone cables, clean up, kill the lights. Part of the cleaning up part has always included the disposing of the evening's water. Often the lecture halls and auditoriums are not outfitted with a sink. Indeed, the whole point of the headache of providing water in the first place has been the fact that the hall is not in close proximity to sources of water. So Martone has found that he has fallen into the habit of finishing the water himself, drinking the dregs from the glasses or bottles left by the readers like a priest ingesting the leftover Eucharist at the end of Mass. Martone does this more out of a sense of neatness and order, but, he supposes, there is some of the spirit involved as well. He has witnessed some really amazing performances, listened to the work of famous and remarkably gifted writers. And he has drunk their leftover water. Perhaps a part of him believes some of that talent and skill will find its way into his own metabolism through this communion with greatness. It is a kind of inoculation, by means of this tainted fluid, with the cooties of the greatest. Martone hopes, as he drinks, that its inspirational properties, if not the medicinal ones, have 'taken.'"So, you’re securing decades' worth of literary genius — "the cooties of the greatest" — all at once, through the cooties of this pioneering collector. Whose DNA might you find swirling in this literary stew? Gordon Lish, Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, William Gass, Jane Smiley, Lewis Hyde, Susan Dodd, Susan Neville, Tony Early, Louise Gluck, Dean Young, Louise Erdrich, Charles Baxter, AND MORE! Plus, with over eight ounces of the muse-juice, you can pass it around at your next writers’ group meeting and still have liquid to spare. Save it a few years, collect other writers’ backwash, spit in it yourself, resell it on eBay and make your money back, do what you want to do: you bought it; it’s yours. Whatever you do with it — whether you gulp it down in one swig, savor it a sip at a time, share it with friends, or simply place it as a trophy on your writing desk — you may be assured of immediate inspiration and better literary output, followed by fame and adulation, and most likely a hefty advance on your next book, not to mention the royalties from the movie version, starring Sean Penn and Winona Ryder.* In addition to this priceless H2O, the winning bidder will also receive a handwritten Postcard of Authenticity from Michael Martone congratulating him/her on his/her wise investment and certifying that the leftover water is indeed Martone's. *Results may vary; seller makes no guarantee, expressed or implied, of literary potion’s actual effectiveness at making your writing better. Questions & Answers
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