Category Archives: Dave Torneo

12/03/2014
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Bloom Magazine, Chris Mattingly, Dale Scott, Dave Torneo, David Brent Johnson, Gail "Hal" Halvorsen, Ledge Mule Press, Major League Baseball, Malcolm Abrams, Rachael's Cafe, Romayne Rubinas, Ross Gay, The Back Door, The Junky's Christmas, William S. Burroughs, Writers Guild at Bloomington

Hot Air

The Immaculate Fix

Get ready for another reading of William S. Burrough’s The Junky’s Christmas.

Burroughs

Burroughs

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It’s become a holiday tradition in these parts, thanks to the combined efforts of The Burroughs Century and the Writers Guild at Bloomington. B-town scribes Tony Brewer, Arthur Cullipher, Ian Uriel Girdley, and Shayne Laughter will perform the piece in a live radio theater performance Wednesday, December 17th, 8:00pm, at Rachael’s Cafe. Trumpeter Kyle Quass and saxophonist Chris Rall will back them up.

Ian Girdley also will read from his new book, This poem Drank the Wine (sic).

Burroughs’ seasonal moral: Not all gifts are sugarplums and good can arise in the absolutely unlikeliest of places.

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Whee, Me!

Malcolm Abrams and David Brent Johnson are the perpetrators of this:

From Bloom Magazine

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Click on the image for the full story. Perhaps my fave part of the above is the exclamation point after my name. You’d think that would be more appropriate for a profile of, say, Vladimir Putin or Taylor Swift.

What’s the opposite of an exclamation point? An upside down exclamation point? Nah, Spanish already has claimed that. I dunno. Anyway, read.

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Start The Presses!

Ledge Mule Press has issued its second book, Then Gone by Romayne Rubinas. With two tomes on its résumé, the Press can now be considered the real deal.

Book Cover

Hand-Printed & Hand-Bound

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Poets, writers, and all-around Hoosier sophisticates Ross Gay, Chris Mattingly, and Dave Torneo run Ledge Mule. Then Gone was produced on a hand-fed Chandler & Price letterpress machine and was hand-bound by the three. The trio opted to produce only 200 copies of the book so it just may become a priceless collectors item one day.

Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait for the deaths of the principals involved before the thing pays off.

Ledge Mule’s first offering was a collection by poet David Watters entitled Hollow & Round. It came out earlier this year.

Catch Romayne reading her poems at The Back Door, Saturday, December 6th, at 7pm. She’ll appear with poets Kate Schneider and Shaina Clerget.

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Queerball

How cool is this? American major pro sports’ first on-field/court/ice arbiter has come out. Major League Baseball umpire Dale Scott has been calling balls and strikes in the Big Show for some 29 years and just this month revealed publicly he’s gay. Scott’s been involved with a fellow named Mike Rausch since the year after he broke into MLB. Scott and Rausch got married last month.

Scott/Rausch

Scott (L) & Rausch

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Even cooler, MLB big shots have known Scott was gay for years now. “…[T]his is not a surprise to Major League Baseball, the people I work for,” Scott told Outsports online yesterday. “It’s not a surprise to the umpire staff. Until Mike and I got married last November, he was my same-sex domestic partner and had his own MLB I.D. and was on my insurance policy.”

Yet another reason for me to love baseball.

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You Want A Hero? Here.

There was a time in the deep murky mists of memory when the people of this holy land actually did good things just to, well, do good things.

For instance, in 1948 after the Soviet Union had imposed a blockade around the city of West Berlin, a US Army Air Corps pilot named nicknamed Hal regularly flew a C-54 transport plane (like the one pictured below) into Tempelhof Airport. His usual cargo — 10 tens of flour. Berliners, America had realized, needed to eat. Under the direction of General George C. Marshall, the Berlin airlift, known as Operation Vittles, flew thousands of tons of food into West Berlin.

Berlin Airlift

A Berlin Airlift Plane Landing At Tempelhof

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Earlier that year, Hal had met a bunch of kids who watched as the stream of transport planes flew into Templehof. They’d asked him for some candy. All he had were a couple of sticks of gum. He tore those sticks in half and handed the four pieces to the kids who proceeded to tear off bits of the wrappers and pass the scraps around. The kids, having experienced the deprivations and horrors of war and occupation, simply sniffed the bits of wrapper. The looks of sheer glee and gratitude on their faces, Hal later said, were unlike any he’d ever seen.

So he started recruited his own crew members and, eventually, crews of other planes in his unit to donate their rations of candy and gum. The crews would makes little packages of the sweets and attach them to parachutes made of their handkerchiefs and, as they flew over the gang of kids, would drop the treats. It soon was raining candy at Tempelhof.

After a time, Hal had gotten scads of private citizens and candy manufacturers to donate some 21 tons of candy for his makeshift operation. The kids took to calling him the Candy Bomber.

Nobody splashed candy makers’ names all over those transport planes. No individuals screamed out to the world what fabulous souls they were for dumping tons of candy into waiting kids’ hands. They simply wanted to bring joy to the kids. Simultaneously, they were feeding a city of 2.5 million people.

Here’s your hero.

Halvorsen

Gail “Hal” Halvorsen In 1989

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Thanks to Pencillista Col. John Tilford (Ret., US Army) for sending in the link to the following vid. In it, Halvorsen is honored for his candy drop. Sure, it’s hokey, mucky and gushy, but if you’re not crying by the time you’re finished watching, you’re probably dead.

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Believe it or not, even I can be corny now and again.

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01/10/2012
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11/22/63, Barack Obama, Bringing the Shovel Down, Craig Thompson, Dave Torneo, Democratic Party, Eric Burdon & The Animals, European Space Agency, George Clooney, Guns, Habibi, ICBM, International Space Station, John F. Kennedy, Miles Kington, NASA, Nuclear Weapons, Open City, R.E. Paris, Republican Party, Ross Gay, Ryder, Samuel Beckett, Sky Pilot, Stephen King, Steve Jobs, Teju Cole, Vietnam War, Walter Isaacson

The Electron Pencil:

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TODAY’S QUOTE

“Astronomers. like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.” — Miles Kington

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LOOK TO THE SKIES

If you’re a space geek and an early riser here in Bloomington (a scant club, I admit), you’ll have plenty of opportunities to see the International Space Station over the next couple of weeks.

With the late sunrises at this time of year the sky remains dark even after some of us unlucky souls are planted at our desks, casting dirty looks at our fellow miserable coworkers. But if you’re alert and can spare the energy to look upward you can see the mighty ISS shooting overhead between the hours of 5:30 and 7:30am.

Here’s NASA’s schedule of sightings from Bloomington:

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The ISS is home to a half dozen astronauts: three Russkies, three brave and handsome Americans, and one Japanese. Sorta neat how Russian and American spaceguys (and gals on occasion) are now cooperating for long months aboard an orbiting laboratory, isn’t it?

The International Space Station At Sunrise

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This is especially so considering that the true aim of each country’s space program back in the 1950s and very early ’60s was the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Eventually, thousands of ICBMs were pointed at cities in the two nations for the purpose of incinerating them with thermonuclear weapons.

It’s a wonder any of us who grew up in those psycho, edgy years are even acquainted with sanity now.

For that matter, who among our parents and grandparents alive during the Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima years would have dreamed Japanese and Americans would be among the tightest of geo-political pals in the 21st Century?

Believe it or don’t, there is a bit of good in this mad, mad world.

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RYDER’S TOP TEN ISSUE

My pals R.E. Paris and Dave Torneo and I are three of the featured writers in the Ryder magazine annual Top Ten issue.

R.E. breaks all the rules and selects some three dozen books that fascinated her and, in her learned view, are representative of trends in the publishing universe. Her choices range from the “Steve Jobs” bio by Walter Isaacson to Stephen King’s “11/22/63,” an alternative history that supposes John F. Kennedy had survived his wounds on the eponymous date, and to the Islamic fairytale graphic novel, “Habibi.”

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Dave, one of the most serious readers I know, writes about his ten best books of the year. He actually read the 800-page “Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956.” Man, Beckett probably kept the Royal Mail in the black all by himself. Torneo also dug Teju Cole’s “Open City” and Ross Gay’s “Bringing the Shovel Down.”

Beckett

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Me? I pointed my smart-assed knives at the city and state’s elective office holders, pricking the top ten political stories of the year. (And, yes, the pun is intentional, on three levels). By happy coincidence, one of my top stories is Bloomington’s rewriting of its gun laws to coincide with Indiana’s. I note that it is now legal to pack heat in the Monroe County Public Library.

Comforting, isn’t it?

Guns N’ Books

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Anyway, pick up the Ryder this month or you’ll be woefully ignorant for the rest of the year.

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WE DO FACEBOOK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

A no-spamily, no brattle zone.

◗ Special educator extraordinaire Erin Wager-Miller directs our attention to movie hunk George Clooney’s take on the difference between the two parties in this holy land. The Dems, Clooney feels, can’t sell themselves as well as the Republicans.

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Here’s a closeup of the quote:

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SKY PILOT

Eric Burdon & The Animals‘ 1968 song was not about the elation of soaring through almost unimaginable altitudes (which I’d thought when I first heard it as a 12-year-old). It was an anti-war polemic about a military chaplain in Vietnam who blesses a unit of soldiers preparing to go out into the jungle for an overnight raid.

Now, nearly half a century later, we still pay military chaplains to sprinkle holy water on men and women to go out to kill and be killed. And, just as in Vietnam, this nation’s bosses still can’t give us valid reasons why in the hell they’re doing it.

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