Disruptive Juxtaposition

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Good Ground - Excerpt #2

SGT. SAUSAGE-CASING TO THE RESCUE

by M. Darski
July 17th, 20__

Sgt. Eric Luchessi got his arms, head and torso through the window without much difficulty, but it took some maneuvering for the 5’ 7”, 400-pound Suffolk police sergeant to hoist his considerable midsection into the den of a Sag Harbor home burglarized last year.

A Suffolk jury watched Luchessi’s entry on a videotape played in court Friday. Police invited Sgt. Luchessi to perform the demonstration entry because of his size. According to prosecutors, his relative and eventual success proved that defendant David Flaim, who is an inch shorter and 100 pounds lighter, could have made the same type of entry with ease.

Flaim, 38, is charged with burglarizing the Sag Harbor home of next-door neighbors Sal and Bonnie Orzelak by hefting himself up through the Andersen casement window and leaving through the side door with assorted high-end electronic devices including a Hi-Def plasma-screen TV, five of seven surround-sound Bose speakers (w/ subwoofer), and approximately 700 DVDs.

Defense attorney Crisp O’Hara has suggested that the 305-lb Flaim would not have fit through the window opening. O’Hara said Friday that the video of Luchessi climbing into the house proved “precisely nada”, in part because Luchessi needed a ladder to reach the window 69 inches off the ground, and used it for leverage as he thrust his way into the house. O’Hara called the action “as unlikely as it was unsightly.”

During cross-examination by O’Hara, Luchessi conceded that he could not have gotten in through the window without the help of something “to get myself off the ground,” but added that some patio furniture in the Orzelaks’ backyard “could have done the trick easy” when it came to Flaim’s intrusion.

Sgt. Luchessi, one of the arresting officers in the case, took part in the experiment as a favor to an investigator on the case. Luchessi said he was happy to help, even if it cost him some ribbing by officers who dubbed him “Sgt. Sausage Casing.” “If this will keep one more cocky good-looking klepto off my Main Streets, I don’t care what they call me,” said Luchessi.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Open house

Here come the parents!

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Every time you close your eyes

So many student papers. Like, so.

*

RJ: from "Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

*

What kind of love? It doesn't matter at this point - the poem's first line - because I'm hooked. Whatever kind of love I'm inclined to read this love as - fraternal, sexual, paternal, pantheistic - I now have this ticking instrument in mind. & the reader's got to know what kind of love we're really discussing here. Also, how about the triple stress of "fat gold watch"? Love it.

*

Currently Arcade Firing. Aren't they due for another album? They've got to be sitting on a trunk full of songs by now. If my band's first album happened to be Funeral, I'd be nervous about my follow-up too. But hey guys, it's all good. Let us have what you've got.

Monday, September 25, 2006

White eager Cessnas

RJ: from "Midsummer" by Derek Walcott

Certain things here are quietly American -
that chain-link fence dividing the absent roars
of the beach from the empty ball park, its holes
muttering the word umpire instead of empire;
the gray, metal light where an early pelican
coasts, with its engine off, over the pink fire
of a sea whose surface is as cold as Maine's.

*

Perhaps I've been reading too much of The Odyssey - as rendered into gorgeous iambic pentameter by Robert Fagles - but these lines of Walcott's strike me first & foremost as highly metrical. Each line, five beats. But in the absence of a common metrical foot, Walcott constantly keeps his reader's ear imbalanced. Extra beats abound. Spondees - stress / stress - pile up ("the WORD UMPire" / "PINK FIRE"). I enjoy these effects more and more these days.

*

True confession time: when I was in high school I thought Emerson's poetry was top-notch.

*

Say Walt Whitman and his long rambling "breath unit" settled down with a metrical fellow such as, oh, say, off the top of my head James Merrill or even for an older & weirder case Emily Dickinson. What would their children's cries sound like?

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Grist for the mill

These things come up in recent poems:

~ The 80s kids' show
Pee-Wee's Playhouse

~ Iggy Pop's Lust For Life

~ The "rule of thirds", a photographic principle which states that objects of importance should be on or near the points of intersection on a hypothesized 3x3 grid

~ Solar calculators

~ Big Lots discount superstores

~ Automatic sensor-based faucets in public restrooms

~ Faceoffs of substantial duration in Japanese manga

~ Zeno's Arrow

~ Childish impressions of Benito Mussolini