back; chris cheek: The Church – The School – The Beer

So I'm back from a long week in God's Country, in heat somewhat hotter tho less humid than Florida's, tending to not particularly fun familiar business. As always when I'm staying in the old homeplace, I find myself pawing thru my Dad's shelves & taking things down (& back here). This time around, I found myself engrossed in CM Bowra's The Greek Experience & a crunky 1940s-era biography of Freud. Also reread Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I must have gone thru a dozen times in childhood. It still reads well; funny, I didn't remember all the Christianity, which now slaps me across the face. And read thru a bunch of volumes of poetry, which I'll try to blog over the next few days.

***

The Church – The School – The Beer, chris cheek (Plantarchy, 2007)

[21/100]

The method by which these transcribed talk pieces were produced is almost too complex to go into. chris cheek spent an hour a day walking around downtown Norwich in a nice gray suit, talking into a hand-held CB radio transmitter while listening to various texts piped into his earphones; simultaneously, he was being filmed from across the street, where auditors could listen to his live transmissions & watch a video feed. (There's much more, which I won't even try to describe...) At any rate, the published transcriptions – no doubt a pale shadow of the several-ring media circus this project was – a wonderful mingling of overheard conversation, sociological speculations, immediate observations, & sheer rambling, are a wonderful read. No-one composes on his feet like chris cheek does. Is it "poetry"? Who the hell cares.