Hugh Fox
CASH-DICTATOR
—Hugh Fox, E. Lansing, MI
I just wish my thirty unpublished novels would
get published and made into films, all about Jews
converting to Christianity and then back to Judaism
again, about guys and gals falling in love, breaking up,
getting back together again fifty years later, and then
dying, about my mother's funeral and her life as
secretary, M.D.'s wife-dictator, about a millionaire-
friend in NY whose money came from his wife, she
died and he married Vampira Moneystarved...into
print, then filmed, some millions in the bank, buy
houses for my kids in Carpinteria or Venice (California),
San Diego...get them all within a mile of me, kids
and grandkids, and be surrounded-surrounded-surrounded
by kids, son-in-laws, daughters-in law, little grandkid
monkeys full time instead of me and the computer and
"light snow for the next hundred days," a Brazilian
wife whose sisters are dying off ("I've gotta get back
to Brazil!"), and bytesville wrapping around my neck
all day and strangling me on my way to my urologist.
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Thanks; Hugh! It's an honor and a pleasure to have Hugh Fox with us today. Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. Polio at age 4, cured by a pre-Salk experimental medicine that worked. Spent his children totally immersed in the arts, was part of the All Childrens' Grand Opera group run by Viennese genius Zerlina Muhlman Metzger, studied violin and composition with P. Marinus Paulson, art and ceramics at the Art Institute in Chicago, was pushed into Medicine by his M.D. father, finished four years of pre-med and a year of medicine, then got an M.A. at Loyola in Chicago and a Ph.D. in English/American Literature at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It was at Urbana-Champaign that he met and married Lucia Ungaro Zevallos, a Peruvian poet-critic who was getting her Ph.D. in Romance Languages, and after the marriage they moved to Los Angeles where he taught for ten years at Loyola-Marymount University and was immersed in the film-world. At the same time, thanks to his wife, he began to go to Peru to visit his Peruvian family and slowly visited all the major ruins in the pre-Columbian Americas. He met Harry Smith in Berkeley in 1968 and they became best friends and for some twenty years Fox would visit Smith 2-3 times a year in New York City/Brooklyn and work on Smith’s magazines, get to know the poets and writers in the New York scene. He was a Fulbright Professor for a year in Mexico (1961), two years in Caracas (1964-'66), which especially made sense because he married a Peruvian in 1956. In 1968 he moved to Michigan State U. and taught there until he retired 6 years ago. While at Michigan State U. he had a Fulbright professorship in Brazil where he met and married a Brazilian M.D., studied Latin American literature on a grant from the Organization of American States at the U. of Buenos Aires, and after beginning to make archaeological discoveries and have his books on archaeology published, he received another grant from the Organization of American States to spend a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile. He has some 104 books published.
—Hugh Fox, E. Lansing, MI
I just wish my thirty unpublished novels would
get published and made into films, all about Jews
converting to Christianity and then back to Judaism
again, about guys and gals falling in love, breaking up,
getting back together again fifty years later, and then
dying, about my mother's funeral and her life as
secretary, M.D.'s wife-dictator, about a millionaire-
friend in NY whose money came from his wife, she
died and he married Vampira Moneystarved...into
print, then filmed, some millions in the bank, buy
houses for my kids in Carpinteria or Venice (California),
San Diego...get them all within a mile of me, kids
and grandkids, and be surrounded-surrounded-surrounded
by kids, son-in-laws, daughters-in law, little grandkid
monkeys full time instead of me and the computer and
"light snow for the next hundred days," a Brazilian
wife whose sisters are dying off ("I've gotta get back
to Brazil!"), and bytesville wrapping around my neck
all day and strangling me on my way to my urologist.
___________________
Thanks; Hugh! It's an honor and a pleasure to have Hugh Fox with us today. Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. Polio at age 4, cured by a pre-Salk experimental medicine that worked. Spent his children totally immersed in the arts, was part of the All Childrens' Grand Opera group run by Viennese genius Zerlina Muhlman Metzger, studied violin and composition with P. Marinus Paulson, art and ceramics at the Art Institute in Chicago, was pushed into Medicine by his M.D. father, finished four years of pre-med and a year of medicine, then got an M.A. at Loyola in Chicago and a Ph.D. in English/American Literature at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It was at Urbana-Champaign that he met and married Lucia Ungaro Zevallos, a Peruvian poet-critic who was getting her Ph.D. in Romance Languages, and after the marriage they moved to Los Angeles where he taught for ten years at Loyola-Marymount University and was immersed in the film-world. At the same time, thanks to his wife, he began to go to Peru to visit his Peruvian family and slowly visited all the major ruins in the pre-Columbian Americas. He met Harry Smith in Berkeley in 1968 and they became best friends and for some twenty years Fox would visit Smith 2-3 times a year in New York City/Brooklyn and work on Smith’s magazines, get to know the poets and writers in the New York scene. He was a Fulbright Professor for a year in Mexico (1961), two years in Caracas (1964-'66), which especially made sense because he married a Peruvian in 1956. In 1968 he moved to Michigan State U. and taught there until he retired 6 years ago. While at Michigan State U. he had a Fulbright professorship in Brazil where he met and married a Brazilian M.D., studied Latin American literature on a grant from the Organization of American States at the U. of Buenos Aires, and after beginning to make archaeological discoveries and have his books on archaeology published, he received another grant from the Organization of American States to spend a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile. He has some 104 books published.
WORKERS
—Hugh Fox
Workers with salaries, every day at the
hospital, 95.5% jovial, of course always
a pathologist or radiologist with midnight-
all-day-downness, and then into the
favelas / ghettos / slums, painless, slouching
porches, clunkers, some of the young blacks
wearing human clunker uniforms, once in
a while an old Bohunk planting La Boheme
flowers, can I buy a pliers, pair of shoes, coat,
notebook, copy of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
not made in (Cheerios next) China?
__________________
The devils that chase us: love and lust, ennui and torpor, sadness and sorrow. This week, write about the devils that chase you. What niggles at you in the night? One (or more!) of the Seven Deadly Sins? Old or new griefs? Shine some light on the big or little beasts for our Seed of the Week and send your exposés to kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726.
Poems-For-All Celebrates Nine!
March is Anniversary Month for Richard Hansen’s Poems-For-All, and this year PFA will be celebrated by two readings of previously-published PFA books, the first presented by Sacramento Poetry Center at HQ for the Arts, 25th & R Sts., Sacramento, and the second by Rattlesnake Press at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento. Both will begin at 7:30 PM. Here are the readers for these two stellar events:
MARCH 1st: Hosted by Sacramento Poetry Center/Bob Stanley
Featuring:
Manny Gale
Frank Graham
Rachel Hansen
Ru Hansen
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Rebecca Morrison
Geoffrey Neill
Danny Romero
Rivkah Sass
Abe Sass
Bob Stanley
Mary Zeppa
MARCH 10th: Hosted by Rattlesnake Press
Featuring:
Martha Ann Blackman
Taylor Graham
Ann Menebroker
frank andrick
Bill Gainer
Rachel Hansen
Ru Hansen
Kevin Jones
Kathy Kieth
Joyce Odam
Headed for New York?
Next time you're in The Big Apple, you have to stop at Poet's House. (You may even find some books there from Rattlesnake Press, though apparently some of them have disappeared...shoplifted? What an honor!) Free and open to the public, Poet's House now has a new location in Battery Park City, overlooking the Hudson, and it features many wonderful programs, displays, readings, classes, symposia, a Children's Room. (Did you know the U.S. has a Children's Poet Laureate, Mary Ann Hoberman?) May will feature a seminar on Ecopoetics, including Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, and many other familiar names. Check it all out at www.poetshouse.org
__________________
A CHRISTMAS LETTER TO MY BROTHER TOM
—Hugh Fox
Out in the Ohio wildlands, all the family but
me there, my M.D. wife on call at the hospital
over Chirstmas week, he asks me to come
down anyhow, "Come down and visit with the
rest of them, there's this great hotel just 14
hours away in Akron...if you can get off
our mountain in the middle of the glacier-storms.
I can always lend you a climbing axe so you can
carve steps in the ice...we've still got sixteen cows
and five bulls left, and a hundred and fourteen
swans...you oughta try swan-meat...kind of like
Bernadete...her and her swan legs...oops...
sorry for the lusting...that's the way it gets
when the sun breaks through the clouds.
Which isn't often around here. Most of my
paintings these days are black on black...
maybe a little grey (optimism) thrown in."
___________________
FATHER O'MALLEY
—Hugh Fox
Father O'Malley Christmas Day Mass
At Holy Cross Church in Somerville,
sermon-time, "It's beautiful, isn't it,
decking the halls with holy and silent
nighting it, jungle-belling and queens of
angels and all the lonnnnnnng historical
tracking...I just wish-wish-wish I could
believe in eggless-spermless conceptions
and resurrections of any kind...I'm
retiring on New Year's Eve...I guess I
can believe in solstices without sungods...
but..." tears, back to the altar, prayers
for the dead.
__________________
Today's LittleNip:
I feel a very unusual sensation—if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.
—Benjamin Disraeli
__________________
—Medusa