Random Shots

My brother Simon and long-distance pal Leo Kulinski have been kind enough to email some tips as to how I can tackle the automatic double-spacing on ANGEL HEAD. It involves delving into the code for the pages (or something). I will study their advice and then plunge in feet first and try to tackle it. Though I am a little hesitant. The last time I attempted something similar, albeit I tried it with less sage advice from friends and family to back me up, I accidentally wiped six months of postings on SUFFOLK PUNCH. This time it will be different. I hope.

In the real mail this morning I got a superior lit-gifting from poet t.kilgore splake: a copy of "Back Beat" by Albert DeGenova and Charles Rossiter (Cross+Roads Press 2001). Albert has been a contributor to ANGEL HEAD, and his style is well-appreciated by yours truly. Rossiter's work I don't know, but now I can get acquainted with it. Norb Blei's books are always attractive volumes--they could sit on any bookshop poetry shelf and nobody would be able to tell Cross+Roads wasn't a subsidiary of a major publishing house--but this one is particularly appealing to this old angel head because of a fantastic Emmett Johns drawing of Jack Kerouac in Messianic posture reading his poetry to a crowd. That old cache of impossible cool the Beats--and above all Kerouac--have is well communicated by Johns. Required bus stop reading for me for the next few days, oh yes.