Recently Published in Frighty #2!

 (The blogger finally gets around to announcing on his blog his latest credit, publication in the newest release from one of the most exciting human-centered happenings on today's literary scene.)

Tired of AI slop?! Of the overregulated robotic by-the-rules mindset which comes with it?

One solution is Wred Fright's new Frighty zine. The kind of off-the-wall from-the-people writing that won't be done by robots.

The issue includes a short rant by myself.

Read about the second issue here.

Humanity is back!

Reading Lists

 IN RESPONSE to reading lists appearing in some corners of the literary world-- invariably containing the names of currently approved authors-- I offered my own "Literary Unorthodoxy" list.

In response to my list, New Pop Lit Assistant Editor Kathleen M. Crane then came up with her own, titled "Another Reading List."

(She offered twelve names. Mine only had ten.)

Insightful Review of The Loud Boys

 A new review of the novella The Loud Boys is now up at Amazon. Check it out!

New Mention

 For what it's worth, I received a mention in a recent column at Compact magazine, grouped in with promoters of "rebellion lit": those writers and literary projects out to renew the art. (Long-time followers of this blog know I've been at it for awhile.)

Here's the column: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-american-novel-will-not-be-substacked/

How to Be Topical

 MAKING LITERATURE RELEVANT

Now up as featured story at New Pop Lit is my short story, "The Advisor," about a mega-billionaire advisor to the U.S. President. "Yanked from news headlines," as long-ago promotions used to say.

The Question is whether other writers will begin penning tales about broader society during the here and now-- or remain stuck creating ever more examples of Selfie Fiction??

For myself, too much is happening in this country to ignore. Writers have voices. Time to use them!

Ode to Money: A Poem About America

a poetic rant by Karl Wenclas

GIVE US your gold cards, your five-million-dollars to immigrate payments, global billionaires yearning to own five hundred-foot-long yachts in Miami or sixty-thousand square-foot mansions at Mar-a-Lago, bolstered by taxpayer-funded crypto.

GIVE US your rich, your schemers and grifters, your bitcoins and gold-plated tributes to greed and acquisitiveness.

KEEP OUT the poor but let in South African apartheid fans of spaceships and brain implants, tech bro money grabs, a once-great nation now consisting of posturing plutocrats and a bloviating orange-colored President eating carnival peanuts, front man for the circus show, busy capitulating to dictators while placing political puppets in positions of influence, issuing edicts halting any regulation of the money-making madness.

Meme coin bubbles masquerading as investments, pushed by armies of CON MEN, hucksters hawking exploding electric-powered Cybertrucks and accelerationist AI robots.

BOOK your ticket to Mars! You'll be abandoned on the red planet like thousands have been abandoned on this one, legions of homeless left on the streets consuming drugs leftover from oligarchs counting their profits.

This used to be a country-- a land of honor and integrity, a nation of citizens, united, We the People looking out for everybody, no one left behind, but the safety nets have been shredded, cut by chainsaws, gaping holes in them, the circus is closing, sideshow hustlers sneaking out the back door with all proceeds. 

Those still on the high wire, or flying above it all on the ketamine adderall trapeze, LOOK OUT, or you'll come crashing back to earth, to the ground, the dirt, the raw-wound skin-bruised muck of reality, with the rest of us.

The Trump-Musk Blitzkrieg

 

IT'S OBVIOUS what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing-- old-fashioned 1940-style blitzkrieg, like when Germany invaded France, moving swiftly and gobbling up territory. Merely a variation of the tech bros mantra of "move fast and break things," only this time applied to politics.

The idea being to move faster than your set-in-its-ways opponent can think. For Trump and Musk, it's been a scandalous break-the-rules, outrage-the-Democrats every day, from dismantling federal agencies to raising tariffs on friendly nations to insulting allies. Democrats are stunned. What happened to their clubby world? Like the French general staff in 1940 (young Charles De Gaulle excepted), they're fighting the last war, not this one. What they feel they need is time to discuss the matter before moving. Before doing anything. Maybe this and maybe that. Maybe if they do nothing and cross their fingers, Trump will collapse. Yet his entire movement and his 45-day second administration thrives on action, including change or at least the appearance of change.

In 1940, while most of the French army froze or fled, De Gaulle kept his head and organized his own tank-based assault-- against the blitzkrieg. It worked on a limited scale, only enough to serve as a lesson of how to respond. For the left, now, in the United States, the response should be: Attack! Against Trump-Musk weak points.

I'll mention one: the wildly overvalued Tesla Motors stock price, upon which much of the richest-man-on-the-planet's wealth-- and myth-- is based. Indeed, keeping that stock-price bubble inflated is a large motivation for Musk's entry into the federal government, to gut federal agencies that investigate and regulate companies like his.

Needed: report upon report revealing safety problems with his cars, and about the endless broken promises from Musk about everything from potential sales to the benefits and possibilities of so-called Full Self Driving. That's his weak point. The stock price will plummet at some date in the future, and reveal him for the huckster he is, or has become. But why wait?