Jascha Kessler Six months in Los Angeles, and I’m still alone in my place. But not too depressed. No longer mourning the loss. Ready for the present, perhaps, if not my future. Let well enough alone. If it’s well. If it’s enough. I sit at a good though monotonous job at Technetronics, Inc., assembling micro-components for the guidance system of what must be the latest model cruise missile. I have the feeling I have come to the wrong...

Jascha Kessler It is the polity that forever confronts the spiritual company I call The Tribe of the Poets. Future historians will doubtless look back upon the Twentieth Century as an interregnum, a period typical of an uncertain transition from the disintegrating order of one civilization to that of a still-embryonic, coalescent society, whose proper order remains for the future. Such periods of agony are often a mixture of glory and...

Howl Now - Living Soul Rap: In Memory of Allen Ginsberg

Jascha Kessler Lots of influence. Lots of anxiety. The graduation photo that once stood on the baby grand stuffed into the small living room on the sixth floor just beneath the ash-dropping chimney of the incinerator shows a 16-year old with clear eyes and the carved features of some unknown, handsome youth. Somehow it does not show the acne, although an-aged writer sees in his shaving mirror today its faint scarred pittings. Neither...

Jascha Kessler The title of the following observations might better be offered as, “…from wanton destruction by the present heirs and/or occupiers of the lands of their original creators.” As we were sadly aware, immediately upon the lightning-swift liberation of Baghdad after a campaign of less than four weeks it was discovered, even as guns were still rattling outside, that the Iraq National Museum had been despoiled by gangs of...

Jascha Kessler The assumption that “contemporary history” is also manifested in “contemporary literature” is one of those notions with a long tradition. It can be traced back in critical discourse to Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he remarked that poetry is superior to history. The metaphysical problem underlying historical writing was already present in Plato’s The Sophist: where it is asked whether “history,” a narrative...