"Joe Green--forgive me for using your name without

prior warning--writes funny poetry of an horrific sort.

The late Andrea MacRobbie once sent me something

of yours that was ghastly-funny in much the same

way reading Nathanael West's fiction reminds me of

witnessing a traffic accident: gotta look, gonna be

 ill.  That'sa compliment, believe me."



Yeah, I read it in the early nineties in a

San Francisco ballroom at the conference 

of Computers Freedom and Privacy to an

audience of hackers, science fiction writers,

Luddite astronomers, FBI men and police agents.



At the bar afterwards the ex NYPD head of homicide told

me that it was the greatest thing he had ever heard..

hahahah True.  Then I had to go to have a drink with a 

woman who had written 99 Star Trek sonnets.  I liked them.



And I have been to Hell and Back as you

can see if you listen to Inferno2 here.

http://thejeunessedoree.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=78399



And I miss Hugh Kenner and that's the point.


 
  





Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Rachel Loden wrote:
> Thanks, Doug--I appreciate that. And thanks to Ken for his apology. I didn't
> see it before I wrote my somewhat tetchy reply.
>   

I'd say "Don't mention it" but since you already have, no sweat (except 
in an un-airconditioned house), it was just one hornet sting in exchange 
for a first.  "But HE STARTED IT."  If I didn't I was damn close to 
being the instigator.  Some comedic thoughts follow:

    * Maybe what I felt was a weird sense that when writers discuss
      humor, they're not funny even if they're funny writers.  I hope to
      God that Kurt Vonnegut didn't discuss his theories of comedy. 
      "Funny" is George Carlin, Rodney Dangerfield, Milton Berle, or
      Laurel and Hardy.  Unfunny are people who analyze the comedy of
      Carlin, Dangerfield, Berle, and Laurel and Hardy.  One of my
      undergraduate teachers, the late Albert Goldman, who invented
      Popular Culture as surely as Al Gore invented the Internet, could
      sedate a methamphetamine addict by analyzing the comedy of Lenny
      Bruce.
    * Has anyone (other than a candidate for a diploma in
      psychoanalysis) ever stayed awake through Freud's *Jokes and Their
      Relation to the Unconscious*?  Come clean--I know at least one of
      you has.
    * Isn't trying to analyze or "understand" humor rather like the
      proverbial effort to herd cats? or nail Jello cats to the wall?
    * Funny thinkers remind me of Woody Allen or Hugh Hefner's Playboy
      Philosophy.
    * Edmund Kean is alleged to have been the originator of "Dying is
      easy, comedy is hard," and he may have meant more than how you
      play a comedy.
    * In the last 18 years people have told me I write funny stuff, or
      write with a strange vein of humor, which is not the same thing as
      saying I'm "funny."  A gentleman named Matthew Corrigan, still(?)
      at York University in Toronto, but to whom I was TA (that's sort
      of like being an academic batman) in spring 1970 in Binghamton,
      said I was a "funny fellow."  I had no idea what he was talking
      about and I still don't.  If I really tried to write funny, it was
      a grievous fault and grievously hath I answered it.  I am not Neil
      Simon.  I don't think I'm funny.  I think I've acquired through an
      increasing and increasingly unpleasant life a sharper sense of the
      ridiculous that occasionally--in heatstroke-weakened moments, for
      example--turns to outright nastiness and mockery.  I don't laugh
      at the disabled but one of my favorite cartoonists is an artist
      named John Callahan.  He is a quadriplegic who draws cartoons
      about not handicapped people but about cripples.  That is how he
      describes himself, thank you.
    * I love satirists: Rochester and Pope are two faves.
    * Joe Green--forgive me for using your name without prior
      warning--writes funny poetry of an horrific sort.  The late Andrea
      McRobbie once sent me something of yours that was ghastly-funny in
      much the same way reading Nathanael West's fiction reminds me of
      witnessing a traffic accident: gotta look, gonna be ill.  That's a
      compliment, believe me.

Off to study telephonics.

Ken

--------------------
Ken Wolman    rainermaria.typepad.com

There's a lot of wisdom here among the employees,
Some of us have street smarts and some have Ph.Ds.
We're all bored and tired but we've all learned ways to cope
Some of us drink after work, the rest of us smoke dope.
      --Austin Lounge Lizards, "Industrial Strength Tranquilizers"


 
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