Easter egg, 2011. This is one I decorated. I meant it to be patriotic, but it just looks like a melting snow cone.
Photo: Happy Easter
John-Henry Doucette
Writing, and humble photography.
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Belligerent Q&A, Vol. V: Three People Who Have Not Seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail + One Who Has
Dozens of Americans cannot calculate the airspeed velocity of unladen swallows, identify witches beyond the shadow of a doubt, or deal with the French.
They live with a secret shame – they have never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Some of them will even try to hide the secrecy of their shame by talking about it when you ask them to do that.
To prepare this very special Belligerent Q&A, I traded emails and Facebook messages with three people who have never seen the movie. To ground this live wire of an endeavor, I also questioned one person who has seen this film.
Q. Who would cross the bridge of death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he (or she) see. What is your name?
My name is Judy.
Q: What is your quest?
I’d love to find our missing iPod Touch.
Q: What is your favorite color?
My favorite color is green.
Right. Off you go.
When Judy Le of Norfolk, Va., isn’t successfully crossing the Bridge of Death and thus avoiding being hurled into the volcanic gorge below, she is the assistant director of presentation overseeing joint ventures at The Virginian-Pilot, the finest newspaper in the great Commonwealth of Virginia. She noted:
I haven’t seen the movie because I don’t have a good sense of that kind of humor.
Next …
Q: What is your name?
Elisabeth Anne.
Q: What is your quest?
My quest, my quest, to find the Holy Grail/and this, and this I shall not fail.
Q: What is the capital of Assyria?
(Overly expressive language omitted.)
Q: What is the capital of Assyria?
Sigh. Bassyria, seriously.
Elisabeth Anne King, who taught second graders for 10 years, now runs a daycare center. She lives in Westerly, R.I., when she is not being hurled into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.
Would have accepted Assur. Also Ninevah. Possibly Nimrud. Shubat-Enlil is pushing it. So are Kalhu (the ancient name of Nimrud) and Dur-Sharrukin. But there were options, you see.
Q: Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he (or she) see. What is your name?`
Andrea. Is that it?
Q: That’s just the first question. What is your quest?
Worldwide women’s freedom of oppression.
Q: What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
That is not an important piece of trivia I would know. However, I would guess 30 mph.
P.S. That question is weird.
When not being hurled into the gorge, Andrea Wells Latham of Virginia Beach, Va., is co-owner of Ice Art Inc.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, introducing David Kidd, a scholar from Norfolk, Va.
Q: What is your name?
I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Or you can call me David, beloved of the LORD. Doesn’t get much better than that for epithets.
Q: What is your quest?
I seek the faulty Brazil – or whatever other cool mistake auto corrections can give.
Q: What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
(A long period of Facebook silence follows; Kidd is dealing with his kids.)
Q: Dave?
Wha – An African swallow or a European swallow?
Q: I don’t know — (Thrown into gorge.)
Le, King, and Latham, will receive a DVD copy of a film they obviously need to see – Places in the Heart, starring Sally Field, Danny Glover, Ed Harris, and John Malkovich, who acts with his customary subtlety and grace as Mr. Will.
Just kidding. Monty Python and the Holy Grail it is. And just in the nick of time.
Kidd, meanwhile, will have the glory of second-hand quotes to keep him warm.
Earl Swift shall rock you Thursday at the TCC lit fest in Norfolk, though in this headline ‘rock’ = ‘read to’
Norfolk, Va., author and journalist Earl Swift now has a more active name. His old-country handle? Earl Lentissimo. Photo by Saylor Denney.
Norfolk, Va., author and journalist Earl Swift, formerly of The Virginian-Pilot, will read on Thursday as part of Tidewater Community College’s 10th Annual Literary Festival.
The festival’s theme is “How words can help consume delicious natural resources.”
Wait, I have that all wrong. TCC’s lit fest theme is really “Words of hope for our fragile planet.” Maybe next year.
But back to Swift.
He’s an award-winning journalist. His work has appeared in Parade and Best Newspaper Writing. In 2007, some of his best stories were collected in The Tangierman’s Lament. He’s also the author of the riveting Where they Lay: Searching for America’s Lost Soldiers, and Journey on the James: Three Weeks Through the Heart of Virginia, which began as a newspaper collaboration with photographer Ian Martin.
Swift’s latest book is due to be published in June. It’s called The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. If I’d had a subtitle that long back in high school, I would have been more popular.
This past weekend, Swift said he was still choosing the selections he will read Thursday, but was leaning toward something from The Tangierman’s Lament, something from The Big Roads, and a project that is in the works. The latter piece is one he hasn’t read in public before. He hasn’t read anything from The Big Roads, either.
He’s looking forward to Thursday:
The festival has a theme: ‘Words of hope for our fragile planet.’ I’m kind of bound to make selections that are connected to the theme. That’s something that has made me come up with stuff that I normally wouldn’t do.
You can read more about Swift at this link to his website.
The Big Roads is a history of how the U.S. interstate highway system came to be, and how it “changed the face of a continent.” To me, that fits in well with TCC’s theme. Nothing bucks up a wimpy planet like a thorough paving.
Should be a great lit fest. By the end of the week, pretend experts say, the Earth will be 5 percent sturdier. And, forever more, space children will taunt Earthlings thusly:
Your planet’s so fragile TCC called it out in a literary festival theme.
The reading is at 12:30 p.m., Thursday, April 14, at the TCC Roper Performing Arts Center, 340 Granby St., Norfolk. Free admission. Info at (757) 822-1450. There is some metered street parking but the best bet at lunchtime downtown is one of the garages, either at Freemason and Boush streets, or at MacArthur Center.
Some of Swift’s books will be available for sale, too.
Photo: Florida Coast & Clouds
- Florida Coast & Clouds, 2008. Photo by John-Henry Doucette.
I shot this on a flight back from Florida in 2008. Just snapping away out the window, but I like the image. Kind of pretty and creepy. A friend called it scary, but it isn’t quite that too me. That light reflecting draws my eye away from the clouds. So scary isn’t the right word to me.
This was right after Vox Optima got a Canon Rebel XTi for my usual work camera. It’s a basic camera that has served us well. When I got it, I was shooting everything I could to get a feel for it. It tends to saturate everything, but I like that heavy color feel. I shot outdoors with it today, and it worked great – or as great as I can work it, anyways. A useful camera, but I’ve been thinking about the next one lately.
For indoors stuff, I’ve been thinking about getting something that lets more light in. A lot more light in, really. I like natural light, but sometimes the Rebel isn’t quite there for someone with my technical limitations. Any suggestions are welcome.
We’ve never really done anything with this image, so it wasn’t particularly useful for my job other than as practice for the much more useful image I hope to shoot someday. Not that there’s anything wrong with shooting something pretty. Or a little creepy, even.
Belligerent Q&A, Vol. III: Travis A. Everett of Tunnel Traffic
Travis A. Everett, who is from Texas, wears a hat with not one but two Ts on it in this photo. He is the founder of Tunnel Traffic, an occasional reading series. Texans seem to like a certain kind of alliteration. Photo by John-Henry Doucette.
Tunnel Traffic is an open-mike reading series that generally is held at Borjo Coffeehouse near Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.
The series was developed by Travis A. Everett in coordination with the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. One of its sponsors is Barely South Review, the program’s online literary magazine. By way of full disclosure, I’m a student in the MFA program and was one of the fiction readers for the review this past year.
I recently traded emails with Everett, since the next reading is coming up on Wednesday, April 13. The topical reading series is meant inspire new work and provide reading experience for students, according to the webpage. Writers write to prompts announced before each reading. The vibe is meant to be low-pressure and casual.
In addition to his studies at ODU, Everett is a poet and the founding editor of escarp, a text message-based review of “super brief literature.”
This Belligerent Q&A is about Tunnel Traffic. In case you missed the photo cutline above, let me mention that Everett is from Texas. I wonder if that will come up.
Q: Just who do you think you are? Please use three examples in your response.
- An accident waiting to happen
- A typography/design geek
- A weekend programmer
Q: It seems to be an interesting choice to name something Tunnel Traffic and expect people from Hampton Roads to want to experience it. Please describe your marketing plan in a limerick, haiku, or rhyming couplets.
I come from West Texas
where sky is the coolest thing
you can drive under
Q: The bling, the flashy cars, the reality shows – hasn’t the public had enough of the ostentatious lifestyles of the creative writing community and its twisted, insatiable passion for the subversive forms of fiction, poetry and narrative nonfiction?
Well, I think that’s actually one of the problems contemporary literature faces. So the equivalent of a Benz and a bottle of Cristal is a stuffy reading voice or a highly referential style that both resist non-writers — and the reality-show analog is writing about a writerly life like it’ll matter to anyone who isn’t a writer. There’s room for that, of course, but I also think it’s a really self-fulfilling prophecy to bemoan the lack of readership for very writerly books of poetry and prose. So in that sense, yeah — I think the public has had its fill of a specific kind of writerly lifestyle.
Q: Your readings are “topical” – please explain. Does that mean topical like a Jay Leno monologue, or topical in a way that prolongs one’s will to live?
Or topical like anti-itch cream? So you can listen to one late night monologue and hear a joke about, let’s say, a runaway Toyota, and you might laugh. But a single joke doesn’t show how far the content can stretch. Let’s say it’s topical like a roast, or a slam-dunk contest: shedding the usual rules of the dance give it a relaxed, fun, informal atmosphere with an undercurrent of both inter- and intra-personal competition.
In some sense it doesn’t matter, on The Tonight Show, if Jay has the best Toyota joke or not (as long as his joke is at least funny) because he’s not in a topical context. But if you take a number of late-night hosts and other comedians and let them know you’re having a runaway-Toyota-joke-night, they’re each going to be looking for an angle no one else will take and as a result they’ll cover a lot more territory, territory they probably wouldn’t have opened up as individuals outside of that context.
Q. We’ve covered so much ground here. What else would you like to say?
If you commit to coming, a topical prompt will help you write something you probably wouldn’t have written otherwise. Seeing how other writers approach the same task can help expand your sense of what words can do. It’s a low-pressure way to get reading experience.
The next Tunnel Traffic reading is scheduled from 8 to 9:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 13, at Borjo at W. 45th St. and Monarch Way. The topics are Easter eggs and/or gunpowder. Members of the public are welcome to come out either to listen or to read.
Poetry that recognizes the struggle against sexual assault
Breaking the Silence, Speaking for Peace, a poetry reading to raise awareness of the struggle against sexual assault, will be held Monday, April 11, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.
The reading features several ODU poets, including Luisa Igloria and Tim Seibles. They will read poems that speak to survivorship, peacemaking, healing from trauma, or the struggle against sexual assault.
The event is sponsored by the MFA Creative Writing Program at ODU and the ODU Women’s Center. The reading is from noon-1:30 p.m, Monday, April 11, in the James Lynnhaven Room, Webb Center, Norfolk. Admission is free.
By way of full disclosure, I’m an MFA student at ODU.
Igloria, director of the MFA program, said via email that she had been looking for an event to commemorate National Poetry Month. Wendi White, graduate assistant with the Women’s Center, approached Igloria about holding a joint project.
White works with the center’s Sexual Assault Free Environment, or SAFE, an educational program on sexual violence and relationship issues. She’s in her first year with the MFA poetry program.
White, via email, said the poetry event will help raise awareness about sexual violence and help people prevent it – with attention, of course, also paid to the issue of sexual assault on college campuses. Regarding the connection between poet and audience, White added:
This is a very powerful transaction that can transform how the reader sees the world, and therefore, the world itself. … (P)oetry can create empathy for survivors and lift up the possibility of peace in a way that moves people to action.
Serving the Old Dominion University community since 1976, the Women’s Center is the oldest center of its kind on a Virginia college campus. Our programs and services address the special challenges and opportunities women students encounter as they pursue their academic goals. Also, recognizing the critical role that both women and men play in creating a world that is free of gender bias, our goals include promoting healthy relationships and a safe and equitable environment that is free of barriers to all persons.
Said Igloria:
When folks hear of either one – poetry, or women’s/gender issues – I think that it may still very well be the general perception that these are ‘fringe’ types of topics but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. …
This reading event is open to the university, as well as to the general public. Folks can participate by being part of the audience and coming to hear great poetry read, or by reading one or two short poems. It can be either their own original works or by another poet, as long as the poems selected address the general topics of violence against women or our struggles in general to create peace in our world.
It may seem like this is a broad umbrella, but I think this makes it possible for different voices to participate in the activity.
Featured readers include Til Cox, Tyrice Dean, Travis Everett, Jennifer Graham, Igloria, Renee Olander, Noah Renn, Seibles, Marion Charlene Thomas, Cesca Janece Waterfield, and White.
For more information or to participate, reach White via wewhite@odu.edu or (757) 683-4160. Members of the public who want to read must contact White before Wednesday, April 6, to sign up.
Igloria wrote that she’s still determining what she’ll read.
Thinking about and preparing for it makes me think of how very central and very important language is in shaping the realities of our lives, globally as well as where we are; and I think poetry has this capacity for making us aware of the effects of language, and for speaking very intimately to us as well as addressing concerns that are universal.
When I listen to (or read) a poem, I feel very much in the presence of a very human experience; poetry makes me feel like a witness to human events that are important and real, no matter how ‘small’ they may be. Perhaps that’s why I recently ranted (a bit) about the way National Poetry Month is being ‘celebrated’ in some popular venues.
Mike D’Orso book signing Wednesday in Norfolk
Norfolk, Va., writer Mike D’Orso will discuss and sign copies of his new book this week at Borjo Coffeehouse near Old Dominion University.
D’Orso, an award-winning author and formerly a journalist with The Virginian-Pilot, collaborated with the actor and environmental activist Ted Danson to pen Oceana: Our Planet’s Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them. It was published by Rodale Books earlier this month.
The event is being held by Prince Books, a terrific bookstore in downtown Norfolk that for years has supported local writers – even when we haven’t had anything to sell.
Prince Books is one of the best things about downtown Norfolk. I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.
The discussion and signing is at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 30, at Borjo, 4416 Monarch Way, Norfolk. That’s at the corner of W. 45th Street and Monarch Way. Pretty much all of the parking around there is metered before 8 p.m., so bring a couple of quarters.
As regular readers of this blog may recall – love you, Mom – Mike spoke with me for a couple of posts earlier this month, including guest starring in the inaugural edition of the inexplicably and, let’s face it, only relatively popular Belligerent Q&A feature.
Also a more serious discussion on one of his great journalism stories can be found here.
Hope to see you Wednesday at Borjo.
They have coffee and grownup bevs for sale. Just throwing that in there.
Why We Have the Internet, Vol. III: <$20M Need Not Apply Edition
Second from the right above. Red tie. Yeah, him.
Gene Simmons wants to insure you as only the god of thunder and rock’n’roll can do.
The KISS bassist and businessman has joined forces with a financial services group. This is a real thing for about a year now. The Internet says, so I’m 51 percent sure.
First, some palate-cleansing KISS haiku.
No more tomorrow.
Time is today. Girl, I can
make you feel okay.
— ‘Love Gun‘ by KISS (1977)
Did I make you feel okay? Did I take you somewhere, such as the wide expanse of real estate roughly in the middle of good and bad? You’re welcome, baby.
Okay, Paul Stanley actually wrote that one. And Paul Stanley doesn’t have to shoot for the stars when there’s a Hardees around the corner.
But Gene Simmons is the awesome one. He breathes fire. Spits blood. Wears platform shoes so motivated it’s like he’s walking around on two little stages.
He isn’t kidding around:
Turn it up. Hungry
for the medicine. Two-fisted
to the very end.
— ‘I Love It Loud’ by KISS (1982)
Gene Simmons is so mighty he makes you break the rules of poetry. When you try to make a haiku of his lyrics, the middle line doesn’t scan.
Anyways. Third from the left below.
In the gag version, the signatures aren’t under the right guys.
Look, Gene Simmons is classy. Ask Terry Gross. Just don’t try to click on the interview at NPR.org:
Audio for this segment is unavailable for legal reasons.
What is available?
Life insurance products for the wicked well-off via Cool Springs Life co-founder Gene Simmons.
I feel good about this.
Because Gene Simmons is the mastermind of merch. Books. TV. KISS fragrances. KISS collectible wine. KISS high performance ear buds. KISS logo trailer hitch covers. The Lord of Rock framed 24 karat gold-plated LP. KISS baby shoes (the extended tongue was a nice touch).
All fine and good.
But it takes more than KISS Destroyer diaper bag sales to keep Gene Simmons in cold cream.
Based in Franklin, Tenn., the (Cool Springs Life) is engaged in providing life insurance to wealthy Americans and foreign nationals through a proprietary premium finance platform known as ‘The Cool Springs Life Equity Strategy.’
Right on. Maybe I can do my part as a consumer. I could use some high cash value life insurance, for example. But I’d also like help arranging a loan to pay the premiums. Hmm.
Cool Springs Life partners with the most reputable and respected life insurance carriers to offer you access to products that can provide extraordinary cash value accumulation. These products have historically exceeded the projected borrowing costs for this product.
Just don’t waste anybody’s time, a near-haiku warns:
Cool Springs is designed
for individuals with …
over $20 million …
— ‘Request More Information’ by Cool Springs Life LLC (2011)
Nuts. Last line is over by a syllable. Meanwhile, I’m under by roughly $20 million.
At least, thanks to Gene Simmons and YouTube, I can rock out for free.
Let’s do this thing:
NPR interview hat tippage: Erim Foster at Erim.net
Why we have the Internet, Vol. II: Disemboweled Tauntaun Edition
With George Lucas returning his Star Wars films, in 3-D, to theaters beginning next year, I’ve considered whether I should begin saving up for a ticket, rather than, let’s say, Old Dominion University tuition or food for my family.
Since I learned the first will be The Phantom Menace, I think I’m still state school-bound – in part, because I’ve found grad school as warming as the innards of an ice planet transport animal. Please click that link, and consider that this packaging come-on sounds an awful lot like sad, on-the-nose Star Wars dialogue:
Now with open belly rescue feature!
Because, you see, they redesigned it.
I suspect the problem with the The Phantom Menace is that – in addition to already being repackaged and redeployed to theaters a few short years after introducing the subatomic suck bomb of Jar Jar – it lacks the vision of improving certain tie-in toys by disemboweling them.
Still, Star Wars remains a cultural touchstone, though some of the most interesting ideas from the SW universe are not Lucas-originated. Also, they’re online. Consider what a gift it is …
To order this and deliver it unto me, S&H be damned.
To look at this whilst considering the progress of man as expressed by our arts.
To criticize this. And this. And this. Also, this. Oh, this, too.
And to pity the owner of this.
Mr. Internet keeps Star Wars interesting despite itself.
Hat tips: ThinkGeek, Awesome Internet Site, That’s Nerdalicious, Technabob, Geek.com, and the Star Wars Collector Archive
Before the race, a roll call of remembrance and hope
Before the races began at the Oceanfront this weekend, members of the Hampton Roads DetermiNation team gathered Friday evening at the American Cancer Society office on Expressway Drive in Virginia Beach, Va.
Team runners and loved ones worked around a conference table. They made ready their signs and jerseys. They wrote name after name.
Lisa Creech, a 26-year-old Beach woman, decorated her jersey – and a tutu – with red and white ribbons ribbons affixed with safety pins. Each ribbon bore a name. Red ribbons were for survivors, white in memory of those cancer has claimed. Creech said:
My dad passed when I was 16.
Her father had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. An uncle, a thyroid cancer survivor, has brain cancer and recently learned that he may have bladder cancer. She’s running for both of them. She’ll carry the names of many other people on ribbons:
I had one change from red to white right in the middle of fundraising. It just makes me want to kick butt that much harder.
Lisa Creech and her mother, Pam DeSantis, worked to decorate Creech's jersey and a tutu.
Mark Moritz, a 36-year-old Beach man, is running to raise money and awareness. He’s running in honor of his father-in-law, a survivor for six years now. Among others, he noted, looking at the many ribbons he had marked with names:
Not even everybody, I’m sure. I’m sure I’m missing somebody. …
I hope (the ACS) just keeps raising money. We know there’s a problem. The more people see it, the better the chances.
Mark Moritz holds up his jersey, decorated with names of cancer survivors and others whose lives have been lost to the disease.
Mimi Kopassis worked with her daughter, 23-year-old Eleni Kopassis, who is running to help the fight against cancer, and for family and friends. Mom is proud:
I think it’s awesome. A wonderful cause. We need to have more people participate.
Eleni Kopassis said the people who are battling various forms of the disease are her inspiration:
If people can survive cancer, you can pretty much do anything.
Eleni and Mimi Kopassis hold the jersey Eleni will wear when she runs this weekend.
The American Cancer Society DetermiNation program involves a number of endurance events across the country. You can learn more about the society and the program at this link. You can learn more about the Shamrock weekend effort by the local team here. And donate, too.
After the jerseys and posters and a tutu were decorated on Friday, there was a dinner. Lots of pasta and bread. Pure carb loading.
My wife, Cortney, spoke about her recovery from thyroid cancer during the dinner. For those who know us, you know what our past few months have been like. You also know that we’ve been lucky and blessed. And you know that saying I’m proud of her is only the tip of something I can’t seem to put into words.
Here’s one thing she had to say last night:
When it becomes your reality, it’s terrifying.
But of course there’s hope. That’s why a lot of folks among the runners at the Shamrock this weekend are carrying names with them. White ribbons to remember, red to show this thing can be beat.
A few shorts months after her operation and her treatment, my wife is running tomorrow. She’s running for a lot of folks we know and love. She’s also wearing a red ribbon for one of the many heroes running this weekend – herself.
Cortney Doucette, my wife, holds up one of the ribbons she will wear during her run tomorrow at the Beach. She's one of the local DetermiNation team members raising money for the American Cancer Society.
John-Henry Doucette 
