This is my blog and I'm sticking to it

The other week I downloaded about ten versions of "Eve of Destruction." Barry McGuire did the original,but it was covered by 30 or 40 pop and folk and punk bands, the most famous of which is The Turtles. Can the the force behind the most delightfully saccharine song of all time -- "Happy Together" -- put the guts and raw anger into "Eve of Destruction."

Nope.

It sounds wussy coming outta the mouths of Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (Flo and Eddie to those of you...). And what bugs me most is they leave out the verse that contains the immortal words "Yeah my bloods so mad, feels like coagulatin'." Turtles, how could you?

Anyway, listening to 10 versions of "Eve of Destruction" while CNN is covering Hurricane Katrina in the background is sure a weird experience.

And speaking of Katrina, New Orleans poet Camille Martin should be moving to Toronto any day now. Just after she'd finished packing her scores of boxes of books, preparing for a mid-September move, Katrina came along and she had to flee from her home. She got safely to her mother's place a few hours away (a few hours that took about 10 hours in the turtle-slow Katrina-flight traffic) and decided to stay there for a while till she knew if she'd be able to return home and see what's become of her stuff. Looking on the bright side, she told me, "Well, now I don't have to worry aobut how I'm going to fit all my stuff into my tiny Toronto apartment."

I told her I'd set up a reading for her when she arrives in Toronto, so she can meet some local writers and feel welcome. In fact, I haven't met her yet myself, aside from a couple of telephone conversations and an exploration of her poetry on the Internet. Joel Dailey, a New Orleans poet and publisher who I've also never met, put us in touch. Joel, too, fled to safety in Houston just before the storm hit, and I'm hoping he hasn't lost his small press collection, his back issues of his fantastic magazine Fell Swoop.

Like tons of other people, I'm sure, I look at my possessions -- my Ron Padgett collection, my Opal Nations collection, my Patricia Highsmith collection, my Mervyn Peake collection, my David McFadden collection, my Bill Knott collection, my James Tate collection -- and I realize how fleeting this material world can be.

On that note of melodrama:

Over and out.