ZAPP Gets a Makeover

I missed last week's visit to ZAPP.  The old Honda Accord is just not as reliable as it was when it rolled off the line in '91.  Perhaps I'm expecting too much from Henrietta Honda, but I'd like her to hang on, at least until the end of graduate school.  We'll have to see.  Anyway, when I returned to ZAPP this weekend, I realized that the great migration from cardboard holders to the plastic variety had occurred, while I was out. 

The archive now has a sense of permanency to it, and, as it was explained to me, the Zines are now better protected.  Did you know that cardboard imparts acid into whatever it has contact with?  Something to consider if you have collectible magazines at home that are sitting in a cardboard acid-bath. 

The archive is open today form 1-5 at Seattle's Hugo House.  Learn more about ZAPP and Hugo House by visiting: http://www.hugohouse.org

A Really Bad Poem

Lew L. Humiston
Prolegomena to a New Poetics
Winter Quarter
Writing Prompt: A Bad Poem (In Class)

Ode to Virginia

Fawn colored milk

sheds from the bosom of mother earth.

So laments: THE great, soggy, Virginia. Rocks

in her pockets to help shed the weight of literary heaviness.

She has no room of her own—big enough to shelter glass-fragile melancholy.

She’s sinking now—not too quickly…………..not too slowly—just at the right speed

to make her point, before the waters of sorrow ruin a good hair day.

Before Virginia’s bouffant surrenders to the tickle of the Ouse. 

This is a test of the phone to blog posting I've just set up.

A New Quarter

After a bumpy Fall quarter, Spring is off to a bang.  Prolegomena to a New Poetics is the order of the day and we've started off with the heavy lifting, by way of the Iliad.  Somehow, I've gone my whole literary life without ever reading this epic poem.  Credited to a gentleman by the name of Homer, the Iliad recounts the sacking of Troy by the Greeks.  The descriptive prose is nothing short of inspired.  In fact, the ancient Greeks believed (some probably still do) that writing is inspired by the Muse.  I haven't made it to second-base with the muse, but I'm working on it.  Homer went all the way.