Ms. Sandman

Sunday, January 21, 2007, 23:49:00 CST

Dear Dr. M.,

It was women, finally. RB was my teacher in Houston. She had built a reputation as a novelist, which she cared about more than the reputation she had built as a feminist. When she was my teacher, she wrote a “blockbuster” turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, but it wasn’t a story I cared about: a perfect white upper-middle-class family to whom one bad thing takes place and the ensuing complications -- what they lose. In reality, RB was [sophisticated and] a down-to-earth earth mama type I personally liked. She had a little shrimp of a husband who was good to her and an educator in his own right, though not a professor, an educator of high school students, and two grown daughters, who had, naturally, all made good decisions in life.

Our student group were seen as people who had almost all come from bad families. The school picked the handful of perfect cheerleaders who had grown up -- we were ten years past high school -- and promoted them to careers as poets and writers. The rest of us they duped, paid us a pittance to work 60-hour weeks and left it at that. Economics is so very important to my discussion.

We were taught, via United Church of Christ and in our early Presbyterianism (as children), that we have one life -- not many, not karma (which is from Hinduism and should not be correlated to Christianity), not afterlives, though there is an afterlife. In our tradition, afterlife was “transcendence and light” and hell was “exile from God.” "Transcendence" meant without bodies, as did "exile." Soul was elemental to worship; spirit meant harmony in the beauty and peace of nature. My religious, yet private inner interpretations were good for me as a child, not harmful. Religion becomes even more important later, since it is more likely to include rather than to exclude people, as employment excludes.

Class is an issue. Those who knew where they wanted to find themselves later had boasted -- your father was a lawyer; Leni’s was land rich; Rona would marry -- and planned accordingly. I had not boasted about all the professions that were in my extended family: my father a corporate microbiologist, teachers, farmers, dentist, chemist, photographer, woman physicist, psychiatrist, business woman, women-behind-the-men, behind the women and children, news broadcaster for Time-Life, and the others. Little financial help came from home due to my mother’s tight rein on finances.

No one encouraged me otherwise: I needed to earn a low wage to survive. You and Leni saw yourselves as the rich girls in the group and didn’t help us psychologically toward survival. Men needed us to be lower than they. The men I knew were not prospering financially, often, but were in the arts. I was not raised to “marry for money,” either, so it did not occur to me to try to do so -- I gave all of it away -- help especially -- for free and got little help in exchange. I had to file for bankruptcy. Rich men I met later wanted to be patriarchal toward me, and I was and am resistant to that, still.

If even one person had known me better: my mother, my father, you, Rona, Leni, other friends, Barry -- someone might have learned that I had wanted to major in comparative literature, not in English, and not in English THREE TIMES, but no one did know me well enough, and there were no academic advisors at any of the schools I attended except at Binghamton, and my “advisor” there was not paid to be an advisor; she just was one, my professor in Shakespeare and creative writing, since it was needed, and she realized it. That degree (M.A.) was my favorite.

These were all mistakes -- not knowing even one person who knew me was a mistake, one you had not detected, and you were likely the most astute (about the psyches of other people) of all the people I had met up to that point, perhaps still. No one taught me to pursue what I wish, what I most want. I did that in terms of sexuality, because that was taught -- to define our sexualities -- but we were not taught to define ourselves outside of sexuality and writing.

It is gay, another gay thing, that gay men have sexuality, and no one else, almost no one else, does. Women are not allowed to have their own sexuality, still; it always creates cataclysms and judgment if she does. And most men are conformists and fetishize the women’s bodies and demand that they be crafted and petite and free of body hair, heads dyed blond. Or else they are VERY mean, indeed.

It is still my sexuality, to be with a man, and I stick to it. The ex-Catholics involved with giving therapy turned that into an illness, one treatable at 12-step groups: heterosexuality. They have no message for me. Those "doctors" were supposed to be nuns and nurses, so they became high-paid “therapists” instead and converted each drive inside someone to illness, disregarding sin and traditional teachings unless it came from other world religions. I do not place you in their group as a therapist because your training was so extensive by comparison to theirs -- they really had none in us nor we in them -- but they are supposed to supervise us.

None of them knows a thing about employment. They ought to be held accountable for leaving their religion so sloppily, for insisting on a privilege system that doles out joy and families and physical comforts and appropriate work to the few, while reserving great swaths of bad life for the many. It is not something that is supposed to be able to happen to trained people -- more trained than they are -- yet it does.

Father-time

Sixth post at Ana Verse,  Friday, January 20, 2006, 02:13:00 CST

For about four years, between 1987 when I wrote a 120-page novella, and 1991, when I wrote a 300-page literary opus that dealt in God, Hamlet, Oedipus, and a shielded version of my love life and that clinged to my deepest desire to love and respect humanity, I suspected that I might have been molested as a child by my father. The suspicion was fearsome at first; nonetheless, I quickly accepted it as an excusable aspect of family life. I was much more ferocious on the subject of adult male violence against women who were too trusting of them. After I was attacked in my apartment, I asked my father, in near hysteria, whether he had done such a thing. "No," he said emphatically, an answer I have upheld to this day. I was too beside myself to tell him about the recent attack, out of a different sort of worry or fear. My father was a good but not a rich man, a microbiologist not a doctor, a churchgoer not a Jew or an atheist, a WWII army veteran who stayed in the US while his cousin was shot down over France. We were living in holocaustal times, just following the first US attack on Iraq. That nervous, yet important exchange, not the best and fortunately not the last in what had been a dear father-daughter interest, was not on record.

Six months later, when two fellow graduate students took me to a psychiatric "hospital" in west Houston, no one mentioned false or blocked memory theory, but I was drugged. The woman graduate student was a Republican from southern California and told me it was CIA. I had worried intently that the graduate students at the school I attended were document thieves and village copiers, and to some extent, I know that they were kids; a few of them were wonder kids.

I realized, but not in time to save my own or his life by thought or deed, that the block or difficulty was my own in living in our times. No one I knew deserved my love or trust, except my touchingly humble father and a very small and unrelated group of good souls I had had the positive fortune to know. Instead, I had trusted too many for too little reason. I had given too much ear, when less ought to have been required. I had withheld my dislike too often. I had learned to be a minor to every major whiner around. Life might have kept its curve had I cultivated my heart and not only my mind.

What is a blog? What is a bogle?

First post at Ana Verse,  Monday, January 16, 2006, 10:14:00 CST.

What is a blog? What is a bogle? What is a day off from doing nothing? From "nothing doing." What is a sun sign? What is a moon? What is a tsunami? What is a fraction? What is caring disorder? My favorite therapists (of eleven) were one, Murray, M.D. (adjustment disorder & suburban housewife neurosis at 17 -- there were violent boys in our neighborhood who had enacted domestic abuse against me, perhaps as witnessed in their houses and about which few could actually afford to care since the alternative in education terms would seem to have been boys' schools all over again); four, Ms. Siebert, MSW (who resembled a happy, well-adjusted suburban housewife and mother herself and who served as a mother for me in urbania); five (Dr. Hall, a terrific male psychologist who gave no diagnosis but who suggested something my adorable friends got later -- a longer form of psychoanalysis intended for writers and artists), six (a psychiatric resident named Griff who refrained from diagnosing after a domestic assault, even though I told her that that plus writing were causing me to feel uncharacteristically religious); eight (Susan K., MSW); nine, (my all-time favorite, Deb Otto, MSW) and eleven (Dr. Honebrink, Ed. D.). Total years in therapy: Exactly eight. My worst therapist was number 10, Daniel Carlson, M.Div. He mocked me for wearing nice clothes into the city and wanted me to list every lousy person I had ever met, something I refused to do. My seventh therapist, in retrospect, was Micki Fine, M.Ed.

Micki acquired me after Dr. Alan Hurwitz had diagnosed me with bipolar disorder in 1991. Religion and writing were related to mental illness, afterall. I had hoped I had just been hungry. Micki diagnosed me with PTSD right off, as if she were in a little quarrel with psychiatry. For three years, she got me to go faintly where I did my work, and she sneered at what I did for play: visit a quiet actors' bar. When I got a boyfriend three years later, she diagnosed me with a need for five twelve-step groups (AA, Alanon, Sex Addicts, Co-Sex Addicts, and Coda). My Ph.D. was toward English not toward chastity. She might have said to me, as my boyfriend's mother had said to him, 'You're not an alcoholic; you're a friendoholic." Or, "You sure are attracted to Catholics, aren't you?" But she didn't say that. My Catholic drinking friend, who had the same therapist, had five boyfriends, not five 12-step diseases. She was without diagnosis beyond having had a violent dad, her PTSD dating back to childhood; other writers we knew, gay or straight, had what is usually termed by the uninterrupted as "lovers." Love to the Catholic clinician sounded like a lifelong disease in certain men and women who are unauthorized to have it with members of the opposite sex.

Many years have flown by since, many of them without my active participation. Without meaning to or wanting to, I have ''achieved" eight years of adult celibacy; the only good one of those was my first in sobriety. My pelvic area aches for interior toning, for massage. I have dull-looking skin and my muscles look like loners. Micki was wrong about love and sex being only for the designated or the few and to speak of them as unnecessary.

Almost everyone we knew was wrong about beer. Whereas before, I had accepted the general definition of alcoholic as someone who drinks a lot of beer, I now know it to be a mixed determination. In fact, I now know that beer drinkers are better people, even if they do run into aches and groans associated with their favorite form of sour dough. True, they're likely poorer people, but the men are more handsome. The women are a little swelly, perhaps, and may run an occasional sinus infection, but isn't it better to drink a few beers than to pill-pop (as if for recreation), to let her get a little braggy in her laugh now and then, her teeth a little bucked, than to brand her a bad mother when she isn't even a mother and wasn't one and will not now be one, despite a furious insistence on who she was as a person (I was a native Minnesotan Swedish/English/Scottish American Protestant young writer!) and a glorious capacity to reproduce still? Ice cold milk, milk with ice in it for me, then. Rounds.

Letter to Garrison Keillor

Maybe you'll friend me still. That would be just. You friended that gal who teaches at Normandale, a friend of a deep friend of mine in Chicago, a serious secular religious poet in Joliet, Bill Yarrow. Feminine wiles? Jane Bowles. I'll go back on my Scottish oath re: Olga Kaymashnikova, the escort from Moscow, who inspired my best friend in writing his novel but who later demystified their union by asking $3.5 K an hour for her son or two, Nikolai. I do not agree with feminine wiles, not in the long run. I like men to be big time, deep set men who love deep set women. I wrote today at my Facebook page, thinking of you a bit because Stephen Dunn's poetry about divorce was in your bookshop in St. Paul:

(Based on another photo at Laura Hinton's profile page): "Evie Shockley is so mild. I met her in an elevator in Atlanta. She did not grow shockingly in five years. She is protected, a garden herb, and herb is better than hosta. I met Stephen Dunn in the same elevator. I was shocked, can you believe that? by Hilda Raz's son's speech on the panel where Dunn had described his date with Liza Minnelli. Hilda Raz lost a daughter. Her son gained a persona, backed by biological components. I was impressed at the book fair by his male-pattern baldness. A biological genius. And yet, I was reduced and in the elevator mentioned crying about it, about ordinary women, to Dunn, who had already known about Raz's son."

Leo Kottke is my friend. He is my friend because he is decent, not for any other reason. I had lunch with him one day in Excelsior. I ate like a man, soup, as I always do. I tend to be thin at times yet eat without apology. He looked a little rueful when I told him that I have bipolar disorder, as if saying so would not work. Then I said a publisher released Janet Frame. And "fat chance that would happen." He knew Kay Redfield Jamison and said he was in a correspondence with her. I thought, she is a publicity researcher but in no way a primary creative genius, hers a middle path, research, fluent in English, talent at predicting pathological resistance to melancholy in artists after her revelations as a pseudo scientist, no Sylvia Plath, whose nature poems alone outstrip her. My doctor, Faruk S. Abuzzahab, is polite about Jamison who renamed the illness bipolar disorder though she did not go to medical school. I wonder what she and Leo corresponded about? I guess I thought he'd had (past) major depression, not bipolar. My old dad had died of cancer in '92, just after my d'x with bipolar. I loved him so much. Seven years later, I sat in an A.A. meeting at St. Luke's Presbyterian in Minnetonka, where I was baptized, why I despised cult leaders in the room. I told them he had died. It was obvious I was flipping out but not why. Daughter of a WWII reservist whose Wisconsin Synod Lutheran and Episcopalian lovers had suggested incest. Fucking Episcopalians! I didn't think anything like that even prior to my d'x in Houston, but silence dictated. I had told Christa. Christa was a Mexican-Irish gal from San Juan Capistrano. She had said, "Were you molested as a child?" And I had said, "Yes, I think so," but my "think" was not related to Freudian hysteria (I was not hysterical) but to the age of the molesters, who were fourteen.

If you don't friend me, I'll have no way to forgive you. Christa would say, "Offer it up!" I drove once, not expected, to my boyfriend's house in Sugar Land from Houston. Twenty-five miles. He acted amused when he opened the front door. I said, "I'm not stalking you. I love you," and he said, "Come in. What are you doing standing outside?"

See "Letter to John Berryman" on Ana Verse: http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2013/04/letter-to-john-berryman.html
 

M ILLNESS

Here are several links to M ILLNESS group at Fictionaut:

"On Friendship at Huffington Post":

 http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/2014

"Uncle!":

 http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1683

"Orderly thought":

http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1676

"Psychotic":

http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1674

"Beauty is a Verb to be continued ... ":

http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1666

"Gay or Mental":

 http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1655

"It took me a while to figure out what Millness meant":

 http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1652

"How does mental illness define a writer?":

http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1647

Jeffrey Side and "American Candid"

[So] on Saturday in England Jeffrey Side split a hair using an exacto blade.  He proved in email correspondence reproduced on his blog, that he had said in email that Bobbi Lurie's email to him long ago had become increasingly psychotic. He had not said in email that she was psychotic. I relayed his opinion to her in the past without forwarding her those emails, and I told her that he had said "emails ... psychotic," not her, but she insisted that it was the same. His diatribes against me use her to make his points. And now she is in the minor poetry news in a third-person light. Side didn't answer her email yesterday. His long blog post accuses me of incompetence and "malicious gossip." He blocked my comment to the post at his blog. He issued my two e-chapbooks of stories. He did that without ever commenting, even once, about the work in the e-chapbooks. I had to depost "American Candid" at Ana Verse about midnight last night, including its yesterday's emailed comments from Bobbi Lurie, when I learned that she had not even seen Side's blog post about her until then though I had told her about it on the phone.  Nor has she fully read it yet. I don't blame her for not keeping Internet minutiae clear as she packed for her family's cross-country medical trip for her son. The offence, this time, that Side documents in his diatribe, is the difference between "her email" and "her," the failure to perceive it mine, he says.  He does not note her belief that there is no meaningful difference in view of the word "psychotic."

I thought, I need to depost "American Candid," the partial transcript of the Otherstream flaming thread that Side started against me on August 1 at FB for digressing about prosetics and for posting a fiction-related link at The Argotist Online. "American Candid" is interesting to read for its prose behaviors. Side misreads in it in front of everyone, though it moves quickly (it certainly moved quickly when it was live), and men in the thread (participants are men except two) seem to forget during it that the title of the thread is a flame. Whenever I interject even there (the header has my name in it), one or more men accuse me of hijacking again. Mostly, they talk about war in it. I like it as a document of theater, live theater. I may repost it if I get full clearance again. [Reposted 9 p.m.] Bobbi, too, misread. She thought that in "American Candid," I had posted my correspondence with Side, though Side had done that.  She says the word "psychotic" is incriminating even in defense against it. She emailed she could find a lawyer. I said, well, Side feels justified in printing email correspondence to defend his character.

Side and Bobbi had a correspondence that he didn't print that began in discussion of the British poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Side sent Bobbi quack remedies for cancer, she told me, and when she lived in London, she met many Brits who believed in false-hope remedies such as those Side proposed to her.

"Take it outside!" as I relate in "American Candid" Zon said in 2001.  To the outside, it seems men are on a side named Side, and women are lurking.

 

In a message dated 8/12/2012 11:49:19 P.M. Central Daylight Time, bobbilurie@.com writes:

YES, JEFF SIDE'S BRAIN: DRINKING

WATER WHILE STANDING ON YOUR

HEAD AND SPEAKING IN HUNGARIAN

IS NOT A CURE FOR CANCER, JEFF

SIDE'S BRAIN...YOU'LL JUST MAKE MY

CANCER WORSE...

American Candid

Jeffrey Side contends that I "hijacked" threads and spammed with fiction-related links at the OtherStream and The Argotist Online groups at Facebook, yet he deleted one thread in which he contends my transgressions occurred.  In another thread at OtherStream group, I deleted, though Jeffrey Side maintained he deleted, my comments about PROSETICS that intruded upon consideration of Dana Gioia's forthcoming review of Jack Foley's work.  Tim VanDyke kindly sent me a partial transcript of Jeffrey Side's OtherStream thread titled against Ann Bogle.  I abruptly left the OtherStream group after reading a comment by Chris Watts, formerly of Bard College, who typed that he planned to misattribute statements in that thread and to publish them online.  I reread the partial thread a week later and decided it is in the genre LIVE THEATER.  Here it is, verbatim (I love it that Side's typo is "form"):

• The thread that Jeffrey Side started August 1, 2012 at the OtherStream group at Facebook:

[Thread header]: "I’ve had to remove Ann Bogle from the Argotist FB group, as she was relentless in her determination to carry on starting threads that were not poetry related, and also “hijacking” other threads by posting comments not related to the threads’ topic matter. I explained to her that the Argotist group was solely for discussion of poetry but she ignored me, and continued unrelentingly. I, therefore, had no choice but to remove her form the group."

o Anny Ballardini I like Ann Bogle, sorry she did that, but then I almost never follow this list, because of Time, that is why.
6 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey, poets are my people, and poetry my reading, and poetics my guide in considering prosetics. Poets consider developments in fiction less than I consider developments in poetry. My security breach in broaching fiction and creative nonfiction at The Argotist Online, where my poems have appeared, the offense of it to you, has indirectly helped me to understand poetry's segregation of genres, similar to the separation of prose narrative (fiction and cnfic) and poetry in American creative writing programs and within most literary journals. Genre is a passion for me, and I like to quote Lyn Hejinian, "prose is not a genre but a multitude of genres."
5 hours ago • Like • 2
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Anny Ballardini Well, we have prose poetry
5 hours ago via mobile • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle PP/FF, the title of Peter Conner's anthology of prose poetry and flash fiction, is another guide for me, both in considering musical applications to prosetics and the differences between pp/ff.
5 hours ago • Like
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Jeffrey Side Ann, your opinions on prose fiction are not offensive to me in the least. They are just inappropriate subject matter for a poetry discussion group. Why don’t you start an FB group for your ideas? I’m sure it will be welcomed.
5 hours ago • Like • 2
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Rich Haber hey jeff, here's an idea for you: fuck off, you pretentious fop. and ann, why bother? my ex once gave me a miraculously helpful piece of advice - never stay where you're not wanted.
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber censorship is bad enuff from mainstream asswipes, but among artists? it's totally shitbox
5 hours ago • Like • 2
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Ann Bogle Jeff cross-posted his statement (above) at The Argotist Online then removed me as a member of that group. May I request that you let The Argotist Online group know that you have not canceled my voice and related posts at OtherStream in case they care to respond directly.
5 hours ago • Like
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Jeff Swanson Jeff, you wear a powdered wig and have a heart beauty-mark on your face? I never imagined you like that.
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber lol - what's language all about, if you cant stretch denotations into connos, eh mate?
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side I’ve always wanted a mate who doesn’t use punctuation.
5 hours ago • Like • 2
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Jeffrey Side … apart from after the contraction “connos”, that is.
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Rich Haber, I appreciate your awareness and support, but reserve the imperative use of fuck for unnamed soldiers who kill, maim, and dislocate civilians.
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber whew, smells of authoritarianism in here. putz
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side Yes, Jeff, Ann is right. I am not a soldier, and so to say “fuck” to me is not right.
5 hours ago • Like
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Rich Haber hmm, good point, ann. but i'm from bklyn. fuck isnt reserved at all. i'm not reserved. wouldnt wanna be anything like it, neither, double negs not withstanding. or understanding, fer that matter.
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Chris Watts Glad I stayed the fuck out of that one... I love you all, love reading you all, so there.
5 hours ago via mobile • Like • 3
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Jeffrey Side I never use four letter words unless I’m ejaculating.
5 hours ago • Unlike • 2
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Rich Haber "...and I love ehhh vreee bahh deeee, since I fell in love with YOU!"
5 hours ago • Like • 2
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Jeffrey Side That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said up to now.
5 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Rich Haber, one guy at an A.A. mtg. in St. Cloud gained the sympathy of the group by clarifying that the U.S. had trained him to be a killer and he had ret'd from Iraq and hit a man at a bar for which he was charged and sentenced to attend A.A., itself a form of religion. I was in attendance with a friend and told her before the mtg. I did not wish to identify myself as an alcoholic, though it was a "closed" meeting, open only to self-described alcoholics, and she said, say that you have a desire not to drink alcohol, the only requirement of membership, so when it was my turn, I said, "My name is Ann. I have a desire not to drink alcohol." My presence that night was regarded a little suspiciously but I thanked them for letting me attend at the request of my friend.
5 hours ago • Like
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Ann Bogle So, there was my chance to say fuck you to a killer, and I didn't do it. I thanked him and the others for letting me sit in the room as an out-of-town visitor of my friend.
4 hours ago • Like
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Rich Haber i've done some serious work, trying to reconcile my ambiguity about our volunteer armed servicemen and women - kinda lengthy to jump into here. in short, my feelings and thoughts surround those who would sacrifice their own lives for their "countrymen"
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber conflicting with nationalism vs one big world family
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeff Swanson Hm, that's interesting. Instead of sacrificing yourself for your countrymen, you refuse to fight so that you may forge a relationship with your world country. I like that.
4 hours ago • Like
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Jeff Swanson Because god knows, these days it's not your "countrymen" or "countrywomen" you're fighting for, but the Oligarchy who sent you out to protect their interests.
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber never said that, jeff. truth is, i dont have the guts to shoot anyone. but the sad fact, that all these military families are so misguided and confused, is just sickening. their bravery and loyalty is ignored - as in song Universal Soldier.
4 hours ago • Like
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Rich Haber and the oligarchy cant send soldiers if the soldiers wont go.
4 hours ago • Like
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Jeff Swanson Of course, but why wouldn't they go? They want to be rich, right? If you don't play the game, you don't maybe might gonna be rich someday, right? So play the game, or we ain't gonna let you be rich, kid!
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber you must be young. we antiwar activists started antiwar groups INSIDE the military, during the viet nam "police action" - nothing that size is happening now, but there is an iraq vets antiwar group, joined at the hip, with the viet vets group and vets for peace group - very difficult, getting soldiers to turn on their officers and say - Sir, that order is illegal, Sir!
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber joining the army isnt about getting rich. never was. they were the lowest paid workers in the working class, worldwide. nowadays, different story, with the corporatists transforming us into a military society - man, we are so wayyyy off topic. so jeff, you are not the other jeff's alter-ego? another cyber-identity, using another IP address?
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeff Swanson Dude, you're not thinking laterally. We play by the rules in this country because we all want to stay in the game, and the game is getting rich. Nobody wants to disobey, because then they get put in the penalty box, i.e., jail, and despite free room and board and all the sex you can stand, jail's no fun.

And no, I am not Jeff Side. If I was an alter ego of his, do you really think I'd call myself Jeff? I'd call myself Rich Haber.
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side I can vouch that Jeff is not me. I would never use the word "dude" when addressing an older person than myself.
4 hours ago • Like • 2
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Rich Haber lol oh u kids. i'm no military expert but we used to chant "Just turn back if the orders are whack!" - the basis was that any soldier is morally and legally bound to refuse to obey an order that is "illegal" under the articles of war, as laid out in the geneva conventions
4 hours ago • Like • 2
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Jeff Swanson In California, we call everyone Dude. It's a term of great respect among our kind.
4 hours ago • Like • 2
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Ann Bogle ANN BOGLE, ANN BOGLE is my blog post that links to Kevin Thurston's blog, Fucking Lies (Polite Happiness) and a poem posted there written by Han Scrable called "Scrable on Bogle." My correspondent, B'go, in considering the poem Scrable wrote, offered lines Bob Dylan owned before he gave them to the world. B'go writes, "I was thinking that as far as extemporaneous prosody on cigarette shops that this was the gold standard."
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber omg AB at her best. oh ouch
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber well u got yer Major Dudes and ur minor chords and it's just too sadly bad when poetry sails and prosody fails, among cheers and jeers and what have we heres
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber rich, to day-job boss, "I'm soooo sorry I quit"
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Dylan's extemporaneous prosody on cigarette shops the gold standard. Jeffrey Side, this is what might be described as a "successful' thread with its passions and participants loving and fighting. Do you feel it might reach those academics you most hope to persuade of your arguments in poetics? As I asked in WHAT at F'naut without your answer, who are they you most hope to persuade? I claimed that in your recent jottings in comment threads on FB that it seemed you had "enemies" in mind with names, you used the word "enemy" to describe academic gatekeepers of post-avant (not your word, that's Adam Fieled's) academic poetry. If you cultivated similar enemies? Would that help your position academically? Protestant heritage not belief causes me to fault behavior not men.
4 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side The digressive development of this current thread (entertaining as some of it has been) is the reason I removed you from the Argotist group.
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber frumpified foppery, frugally fritting fruffery thru the tulips of triangarulation - tut-tut, i say, get thee to a nunnery. whatta waste of good oxygen.
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Luis Lemus Attica, Attica... #FistRaisedinSolidarity (smile) Aren't artists supposed to stand together, fraternal bickering aside? I have read this and other threads trying to discern the point of this brouhaha only to ultimately conclude this is a tempest in a teacup. Make art, not war. The forums for writer and artist are a pretty small sandbox; let's play together (smile). Peace.
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeff Swanson Ann Bogle's extemporaneous prosody on Ann Bogle is the Ann Bogle of this thread. Ann Bogle.
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side I agree, Luis. Rich obviously doesn’t like me because I removed Ann from the Argotist group for perfectly legitimate reasons. I can understand his loyalty to her as a friend (I assume he is a friend) but there’s no need for him to be abusive to me. Even Ann hasn’t resorted to that—at least not yet.
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey Side, you had represented (though I might have wanted an editor in you besides) my e-chapbooks, so, for that career-related investment I had made with you, I failed to defend Bobbi Lurie more fully (by disassociating from you? retracting my e-books?) when you described her as psychotic in an email. The links to my e-books are probably still working. Rachel Lisi designed the cover of one of them, and Daniel Harris gave ten illustrations. All I wanted to say, and you are avoiding the subject rather stupidly, is, and I said it in more than one place and way, your poetics collection of essay, responses, etc. and fight with Seth Abramson about it, did not name names in a way that might have been useful in considering or applying your arguments. Your cry that it went by not celebrated caused me to plunge in as a reader preparing to review your email correspondence, Other Voices, with Jake Berry. Jake, in turn, took a dip, a little swim, in my prosetics, and responded kindly. I am in your coral as a writer, and you are revoking my digressive strategies. It seems strange you represented my collections as e-books unless you were aligning yourself in another silent debate in poetry.
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle And btw prosody is a system of versification.
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber digression=development=devolution=dissolution=de-salvation=salivation=spit=jackshit
3 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeff Swanson Scatological versification.
3 hours ago • Like • 2
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Ann Bogle 59
3 hours ago • Like
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Rich Haber ok, jeff, calling my dear friend bobbi psychotic is beyond whatever shitball i rolled out for you. i'm not obliged to be polite because you deserve human respect. you don't. you're just a waste of time. this is my last posting to you, scumbag.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle I feel sorry that Carol cannot select "like" for Jeff Swanson's comment about volunteer army defending oligarchy. Carol Novack, love you Carol, is broke, something she'd always feared but that was not likely to occur in her lifetime, I told her, and it didn't. I miss Carol.
2 hours ago • Like • 3
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Jeffrey Side Ann, I was unaware that the links to your ebooks were not working. I will correct that. If I had intended to remove the actual ebooks I would not have left them as listed on the site. If that is what all your silliness is about, then you should have told me the links were inactive instead of causing trouble here. I assumed you were more mature than this.

Regarding my saying Bobbi Laurie was psychotic. I said her emails to me had become psychotic and confusing to me, much like your posts here have been. Here is the email exchange you and I had about it. The first email is my response to your asking if I would do an ebook of her poems, which I initially refused to do, but later agreed to.

Me:

I've had dealings with Bobbi Lurie in the past, and to be frank it wasn't all that pleasant. Her email exchanges with me became more and more psychotic and confusing, and her tone and language were belligerent towards me. Sorry for my negativity, and I appreciate your trying to help her out.

You:

Thanks for letting me know of the experience you've had with Bobbi, as sad as it makes me to hear it. I have had to make my way carefully with Bobbi myself, as I know her life circumstances have not been easy, and she becomes suddenly distrustful. The internet, especially, though she is a good writer there, sometimes even better than good, at times deluges her with confusion.

Me:

The only way I could consider doing an ebook for her is if you or Marc Vincenz act as intermediaries for me.

You:

Sound good. Let me know if there's anything we need to do first and when. Thanks so much, Jeff.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber in case anyone is interested, bobbi's son Noah just went blind and she is recuperating from an ear operation. i will forward anything anyone wants to send her.
2 hours ago • Like
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey Side, I did not type that the links were not working.
2 hours ago • Like
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Jeffrey Side You said I retracted your ebooks.
2 hours ago • Like
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Luis Lemus Jeff (not to take) Sides: ultimately my loyalties lie with AB and not C, as she is at the very least an acquaintance of long standing and someone whose work I respect utterly. You also have some respectable offerings, therefore urging respectful restraint and understanding on all sides. Abrazos.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey Side, define "psychotic" then. You are wildly evasive. Who knew you were wild? I wrote "distrustful" and you are not? I wrote "confusion" and you are not confused. Bobbi knows about this correspondence that Jeff quotes here, accurately (it is plain that Jeff and I do not have day jobs), painstakingly, and ... okay, Princess Di ...
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side Luis, I have nothing against Ann. She seems to think I retracted her ebooks that I published, which I have not—the links to them are just broken, which I will fix. This is the cause, it seems, for all the trouble she is causing. All she had to do was email me, let me know the links were broken and I would have fixed them.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Bob Spryszak you're all wrong... the word fuck is an aphrodisiac. Every other use is just silly.
2 hours ago • Like • 2
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Rich Haber cant read either - "...I failed to defend Bobbi Lurie more fully (by disassociating from you? retracting my e-books?) when you..."
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side I am always confused by your posts, Ann.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber this is how wars get started. i'm outta the kitchen, cant take the heat. bye.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey Side, you are misreading. Or you misread quickly once. I asked whether your refusal to issue e-book by Bobbi after you had engaged in a long (?) personal correspondence with her, ought to have required (of me) that I retract my e-books and dissociate from you. I have not stated that the links are not working or that you retracted the e-books. You have stated that, and you are misquoting me.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeff Swanson There is more personality on display here than in a hundred ordinary internet locations.
2 hours ago • Like • 2
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Rich Haber ps - luis, you are a true peacekeeper. glad to make your acquaintance.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side I thought you were complaining about the broken links. It seems you are not. What you do regarding Bobbi is up to you. I did agree to do an ebook for her, but refused to deal with her directly as I can’t get on with her and nor she me. I asked you to act as go-between, which you agreed to. But I’ve not heard anymore about the matter from you, until now.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber pps Bob Spryszak who is that guy in your ID pic?
2 hours ago • Like
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey Side, in the real publishing world, writers have agents. Your proposal to publish her e-book as long as there were a "sane" chaperone was rejected, by her, in full awareness of your opinion of her correspondence with you.
2 hours ago • Like
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Jeffrey Side Well, Ann, all I can say is that you are very underhand showing her my email behind my back. I hope you don’t do this with all your friends emails.
2 hours ago • Like
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Jeffrey Side By the way, I don’t think you are such a sane chaperone after all, if you behaviour here is taken into account.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Bob Spryszak Rich - it's Billy Sunday.
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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David Simmer II I'm having taco salad for lunch!
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey Side, I related it to her, yes, without forwarding your or my email about her to her. Here, I have fetched the Bob Dylan prosody cited above. Fetch is a game even cats enjoy, mine did:
2 hours ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle Bob Dylan wrote this: I want a dog that’s going to collect and clean my bath
return my cigarette and give tobacco to my animals
and give my birds a commission.

I want, I’m lookin’ for somebody to sell my dog
collect my clip, buy my animal and straighten out my bird.

I’m lookin for a place that can bathe my bird
buy my dog, collect my clip, sell me cigarettes and commission my bath.

I’m lookin for a place that’s gonna sell my dog, burn my bird and sell me for a cigarette
bird my buy collect my will and bathe my commission

I’m lookin for a place that’s gonna animal my soul,
knit my return, bathe my foot and collect my dog,
commission me, sell my animal to the bird to clip
and buy my bath and return me back to the cigarettes.
2 hours ago • Like • 3
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Jeffrey Side You are as mad as a hatter, Ann!
about an hour ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle I left it a little vague in my writing to the board of Mad Hat re: my position as creative nonfiction editor since 2008. I don't know whether I'll stay or be fired or fade or move with Douglas Querl to Houston. Can the Board (of four) fire someone they are not paying and who spent capital resources on them? I withdrew my bid to work as p-t paid managing editor of MHR. I realized, long story, that to work underpaid for MHR would be worse than not to be paid at all.
about an hour ago • Like • 1
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Jeffrey Side Seriously, Ann, why don’t you start your own FB group? Using other peoples' groups and threads for your own aims is not fair.
about an hour ago • Like • 1
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Ann Bogle OtherStream is Bob Grumman's wor(l)d, and he hasn't said no prosetics yet.
about an hour ago • Like
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Tim VanDyke Actually, it isn't his wor(l)d, not solely at least. But it is so obvious you are trying to drive an agenda home through everybody here. It is also obvious there are plenty of other venues for your agenda. So the fact that you aren't using those venues raises some questions.
about an hour ago • Like
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Bob Grumman FacebookI love the word, Ann, but I don’t know exactly what it means yet. Anyway, I’m not the one in charge here, so I wouldn’t be able to ban it even if I thought it should be banned.
49 minutes ago via • Like
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Ann Bogle Tim VanDyke, you are advocating self-censorship, I think, yet not of Jeffey Side.
44 minutes ago • Like
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Rich Haber S.O.P., when confronted with un-labeled genre-defying misun-named disabuse of scrawly and unruly electronic blips fathomed within boxes of windowlytic eye-bytes, the crowd will invariably ostracize and otherwise pariah-cize and prioricize for demoltion, said practitioner of such witchcraftery. giving up waiting for ?? among even the best of american artists, where x = c, so no one has to guess at the cost of freedom
43 minutes ago • Like
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Rich Haber wow, billy sunday. enigmatic for sure. a movie waiting to be made.
41 minutes ago • Like
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Ann Bogle Bob Grumman, prosetics at Google still offers prosthetics as an alternative and most of the links are for prosthetics. In WHAT at F'naut I trace the origin of my using the word in 2001 (it was while visiting mIEKAL aND at Dreamtime). I had arrived wearing a winter white wool coat carrying a tawny leather briefcase full of prosetics notes and captured writings, and Zon commented that I seemed like a Hollywood scout or agent, who needed, he said a little later, "to roll in clean dirt." I could not stay out of mIEKAL's lap, and Zon came in the office, where m. and I were collaborating in html prosetics, and saw the way we were sitting, in m.'s lap facing him, and Zon said, "Take it outside! Take it outside!"
35 minutes ago • Like • 1
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Tim VanDyke I just see you and your agenda petulantly and unnecessarily overstaying its welcome, Ann. There are plenty of other places more suited to your needs. I don't think asking a baker not to speak at a fundraiser for the physics department is exactly censorship,
34 minutes ago • Like
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Rich Haber anyone for a game of whack-a-mole?
29 minutes ago • Like
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Ann Bogle Jeffrey Side, I'll ask that you preserve this thread and ask your cohorts who are administrators to preserve it as welll, as the work laid here has value, and if anyone of you knows a way to transfer this thread to a group I start for Prosetics, I will transfer it.Tim VanDyke, fuck you, though you probably haven't killed anyone yet. If you had said "barker" but you said "baker" among physicists. My aunt, Frances Alsmiller, b. 1929 in Wisconsin, was a physicist who worked on the Apollo Project and at Oak Ridge and who was married for almost 50 years to a physicist named Tut Alsmiller who worked by her side. They collected art.
13 minutes ago • Like • 1
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Rich Haber just started reading WπHπAπT - history, eh? don't know how berry fits into this, hope he comes out rosy, cause i like his music.
8 minutes ago • Like
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Ann Bogle Jake Berry is up with p(rose)y and an American. I still hope to review his correspondence with Jeffrey Side, published as Other Voices. Mark Wallace, American candid!
2 minutes ago • Like
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Ann Bogle 89 comments, 3 like this.
about a minute ago • Like • 1

[Thread continues (or not) in two groups, Otherstream and The Argotist Online, at Facebook.  I am just a chick.  How would I know what those men later wrote?]

Alles ist gut, das will gut

Sane Hatters' Review

After Carol moved from NYC to Asheville, she attracted sane people whom she appointed to serve on the small board that decides things for her endowed non-profit, Mad Hat. Her crazy friends and faux relatives who formed around the journal must carry on their baggage alone, without her as Mad Hatterish conductor. I am part of a diaspora. I left my position as cnfic editor in protest of the way the board treated Carol's friend and caregiver, Douglas Querl. Goodbye, MHR, after four good unpaid years' work. All's well that intends well.

[There was nearing a quorum of German speakers at Mad Hat, so I translated Ana Verse to German using the Microsoft translator embedded in the left sidebar]:

Gesund Hatters Review:

Nachdem Carol von NYC, Asheville, zog sie vernünftigen Menschen, die sie bestimmt auf der kleinen Platine dienen, die Dinge für ihr dotierten gemeinnützige, Mad Hat entscheidet. Ihre verrückten Freunde und faux Verwandten, die um die Zeitschrift gebildet müssen auf ihr Gepäck allein, ohne sie als Mad Hatterish Dirigent tragen. Ich bin Teil einer Diaspora. Ich verließ meine Position als Cnfic Editor aus Protest gegen das Board Carols Freund und Betreuer, Douglas Querl behandelte. Auf Wiedersehen, MHR, nach vier guten unbezahlten Jahren Arbeit. Alles ist gut, das will gut.

[Then I translated the German version back to English in Google translator]:

Healthy Hatters Review:

After Carol of NYC, Asheville, she drew reasonable people they intended to serve the small circuit board, the things for her prize-profit, Mad has decided. Your crazy friends and relatives faux, which have formed around the magazine on their luggage alone, without wearing a Mad Hatterish conductor. I am part of a diaspora. I left my position as editor in protest against the Cnfic Board Carols friend and supervisor, Douglas Querl treated. Goodbye, MHR, after four good years of unpaid labor. All is well, wishing well.

Letter from Ann Bogle to Buffalo Poetics Listserv on August 18, 2012 (excerpt):

"Alles ist gut, das will gut" is a partly censored item (the original paragraph in English was censored twice; the machine-translated German version and its machine-retranslated English version were not censored), both at Facebook Mad about Mad Hatters' Review group by Marc Vincenz and due to his diligence at Fictionaut, where Carol Novack had asked me to administer a small group for Mad Hatters' Review in the spirit of cooperation and Marc Vincenz had later delegated to me the same duty.  I got Marc his first job at Mad Hatters' Review, co-editor in poetry, in the first week of October 2010, though he never stated his job title that way.  He stated on the Internet editor in poetry.  Carol Novack who might know that best besides the two of us has died.  In her will, she stated that her friend and caregiver, Douglas Querl, may stay at her house, deeded to Mad Hat, a non-profit she formed, as long as he likes and that her cats stay there as well and the house not be sold for 40 years.  It was to operate as a writers' retreat, overseen by Douglas or subsequent caretaker, and meeting place for the Mad Hatters' Review staff past and present.  The attorney in Asheville who wrote the will that Carol signed, Robert Karriker, later discovered that as a deceased person, Carol cannot decide what becomes of the endowment or properties within the non-profit.  The board of four or five (names withheld) wrote Douglas an eviction letter, came to the house and removed the cats and brought them to an undisclosed location (though there was a picture of Clicquot on Facebook being nuzzled by the Asheville bank employee, friends with Karriker, whom Carol met late in life).