Richard Morris Admiration Society

Richard on Facebook

2011-01-15T02:29:00.000-08:00

Monse Richard Morris and Michael AndreOx

on Thursday · · Comment ·

Erin Gregston likes this.
- Pamela Hesser wow!
  Thursday at 9:10pm ·
- Jeanette Cave awwww, thank you, suzinn and thank you, Michael, for being there for him...this is the dear, dear man who talked to us nightly, perhaps even when he wasn't feeling too good
  Thursday at 10:52pm ·
- Pamela Hesser I have one of his books. I cherish it.
  Thursday at 11:31pm ·
- Mary Butkovich Byberg i remember mons...so kind
  Thursday at 11:51pm · · 1 personLoading...
- Michael Andre Richard was unusually helpful and always reasonable and answered almost every letter within a day.
  Yesterday at 3:00am ·
- Jeanette Cave
  at one point, he was voted the sexiest man in books and lit...we took the 'vote' at varying times throughout a few days...I can't even remember who was involved in or initiated this, (I didn't do anything but cast my vote)...he was quite pl...eased when we told him that most of the women in books and lit said that intelligence was far, far sexier than any of the other criteria...I remember his reaction, a little shy, a little embarrassed but extremely flattered and pleased.
  
  When people were debating and correcting others about physics and things that Richard specialized in, I would IM him and say, "Is this driving you crazy?" He answered, "No, actually I find it amusing that neither of these guys knows what on earth they are talking about but they both think themselves absolutely right!" (or something along that line)
  
  I was always amazed by his patient advise re: writing and his encouragement. He was in several of our clubs where we would try our hands at group writing efforts or post our articles or poems and he was always encouraging and never overly critical. I'll bet he was a wonderful professor!
  
  One of my strongest personal memories involved a night when he and 'long-legged fly' were in the room and I said something about being too undereducated to join the discussion and they both came back at me not to ever say that about myself again. Richard told me that he knew people with Masters Degrees who weren't even half so wise...it meant a LOT to me that he said that...I will remember it always.
  
  Regarding books we'd read, he and I both contended that some of the books we read we had read before some of the people in the room were even born so asking us to discuss it was like asking us to pull some vague memory out of our hats.
  
  Okay, these are fond memories...but they still make me sad...wish he were here.
  
  (okay, sorry about the long post...*sighs*...yet AGAIN!)See More
  15 hours ago · · 3 peopleJeanette Cave and 2 others like this.
- Jeanette Cave hahaha, I clicked on my own to 'like' it...I'm so dorky...I meant to 'expand it'...

40 Minutes and 33 Seconds

2008-04-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

As Allen Ginsberg was known as the Beat poet, John Cage was the Silent composer. His most famous work is 4’ 33” of Silence.

I published a lot of Cage’s writing. On the morning of 11 September 2001, I had it all in the Kinko’s on Reade Street, and was determined to make it into a book. But the building shook. I said to myself, “Gas explosion. Someone’s been careless.” I looked out the window. There were flames a couple blocks south. Damn careless! I resumed my work with greater care. Eventually there was another explosion. Parts of the World Trade Center bounced off the window. People outside were running. Only the cashier and I remained in Kinko’s. “Oh my God,” she said on her cell. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

I danced the John Cage Waltz starting precisely at 3:00pm 26 April 2008 at the southern foot of Trinity Place and then concluding north of there in the middle of James Street at 3:40.33pm. I walked silently past the site of the WTC. It was a mediation and a mourning. I mourn John Cage and Richard Morris and my mother who died March 6 and the victims of 9/11 and the many more victims of miasmal America’s horrible revenge.

http://johncageshoes.blogspot.com/

I walked to a waltz composed by Elodie Lauten. I entered St James Church at the last second.

Letter from Angie Babbit

2007-07-29T03:06:00.000-07:00

Michael,

I think my email address used to be "babbitan@emporia.edu" because the offending university took first six letters of one's last name (if one had that many) and the first two letters of the first name and voila, a clever email address.

So, in fact, my name is not Babbitan. It's Angie Babbit. Angela Michelle Babbit (formerly Talbert), if you want to be precise. You can call me Babbitan, if you want to. Nobody will ever know the difference.

When I asked Richard months later why he was embarrassed by my question, he said something like, "nobody had ever asked before." I guess everyone else had assumed it was a play on words, or maybe they were afraid to ask?

Did I ever tell you about my second meeting with Richard? I got lost on the way to the restaurant. He'd given me directions -- something like "It's just south of the sex clubs." I wasn't about to tell the cabby to take me to the sex clubs, so I found a pay phone and asked information for the address to the place. When I got to the wrong restaurant, I told the cabby to take me to Richard's house. After paying the $35 cab fee, I was completely broke, considering I still had to get back to Kansas. Richard wasn't home. There was a little restaurant down the hill, and a skinny waitress was very eager to help a lost girl from Kansas. I waited her tables while she called over to where Richard was still, an hour after our meeting time. I took a bus, which I should have done in the first place. I think it was $2.

By this time I had a splitting headache which didn't go away. We walked across the street for dinner, and once we were seated he said, "I left my pen at the other place." He looked pretty intent on getting that pen back, and I assumed it was something special to him, so I offered to go find it and he agreed. Without further (or previous) conversation, I went across the street, and the pen was gone. When I returned he said, that's OK, he'll just ask the waiter for one. It turned out the pen I had been searching for was just a disposable Bic pen, and the only reason he wanted it was to sign one of his books for me. You should know that Richard's books were never the primary reason I was interested in him. I have two, and I am embarrassed to say I haven't read either of them through. But there he was, giving me his book, first thing. I gave him a candle that I'd found in Oakland.

There was veal with capers, and some zucchini on the side. I'd already told him I couldn't afford it, and I think he was put out. He had to wait over an hour for me, and I was asking him to pay for my meal!

My headache persisted, and I went to bed early that night on his roommates' hard bed. I was grateful for foghorns and wind chimes.

Michael Andre wrote:

Angie --

Flipping through an old notebook, I encountered remarks you made about Richard, and I posted them.

http://richardmorrissociety.blogspot.com/

Michael

Angie Babbitan

2007-07-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

"Take Richard Morris to bed with you. He's a surprise at every turn of the sheet." Angie Babbitan asked him if he had slept with that reviewer. Richard was embarrassed, then admitted she was speaking from experience. It was more than a play on words.

When Bad Things happen to Big Cities

2007-02-15T16:55:00.000-08:00

Jo Ann’s Bed & Breakfast
(San Francisco 9 July 2003)

Jo Ann’s décor favors the pretty over the beautiful, the trite over the thoughtful.

*

Alcatraz -- what a laugh to see it at dawn! New York could do so much more with Riker’s Island.

*

Jo Ann not only owns a B & B; in the basement she runs a day care center. She’s mild & sweet to please the children.

(10 July 2003)

They are retrofitting the Golden Gate Bridge. Many buildings are still closed after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. I had forgotten it. As people outside New York have forgotten the WTC. Actually there are WTC-deniers, folks so opposed to war in Iraq that they pooh-pooh 9/11 entirely.
People mark time in cities from great disasters: the Chicago Fire, the London Fire and Plague of 1666, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral is undergoing a “seismic strengthening project.” The motto on the clock tower is from Eccl.: “Son, observe the time and flee from evil.”

Richard Morris
(11 July 2003)

San Francisco fears earthquakes the way New York fears terrorists.

I came here to see Richard Morris as he lies dying. I was also going to see Yvette, one of the women who flutter about him; Yvette too has cancer, although hers seems to be in remission.

Richard has made me his literary executor. I’d like to meet his executor and Mary, his heir. I’d like to get a copy of his will. I’d like to get him to write something nice about John Brockman & the Reality Club so that I’ll be able to approach John about Richard’s novel and a collection of letters.

*

Hummingbirds audibly sip.

*

Ethan Ellenberg is his agent, Louis J. Phillips his executor, Mary van der Slice his heir.

*

San Francisco de Asis
(Sunday 13 July 2003)

Junipero Serra founded a mission house, Mision San Francisco de Asis, more commonly called Mission Dolores, according to my guide book, right here where I’m sitting this Sunday morning. There’s a park called Dolores a few blocks from here, ands I guess “dolores” means “sorrows.”

Dolores strikes me as an unhappy name for a child. I chatted with a black woman and her toddler on the bus; she’d named the child Destiny. I got off before I reached my destination--the child was growing restless. At another bus stop, near Baker Beach, a talkative black man told me he’d won the lottery, i.e. he’d received Section 8 housing in San Francisco. The Chronicle says the economy is so bad here in San Francisco that a lot of folks are getting Section 8 housing. That’s housing for the homeless, part of the mission of the state.

The man also told me he’d spent years on the lam as a Viet draft dodger. He got on disability after he fell from a window while stoned on drugs & alcohol.

Life is Hell when you forget your mission. Despair is unattractive in men past 40. Mary van der Slice displays her despair like a medal of honor. San Francisco was once someone’s mission.

Bastille Day
San Francisco

If God exists, Satan has controlled the Catholic Church for a thousand years. Should the Vatican, like Alcatraz, be stormed by sans-culottes? Today’s the day.

Three years after 1903 the Trinity struck Frisco down. Now the very name, Frisco, is despised. Frisco and Oakland have Brown mayors.

The victims of the priest sexual abuse scandal were unemancipated believers. Are ’hos emancipated? They sure can free a man of his wallet.

I’ve had no luck lately at fresh amatory conquests.

Last Day in San Francisco
(15 July 2003)

The shadows are getting longer, my hours here short. I visited Richard probably for the last time this afternoon.

The Palace of the Legion of Honor is an art museum with an encyclopedic approach; little bits of everything--high quality--a mini-Met. There’s a portrait of the founders’ daughter by Dali. It’s surreal. The museum is, oddly, a “three-quarters-scale replica” of Napoleon’s Palais de la Legion d’Honneur, according to my guide book, Moon Metro. It has a Francophile cast; can a museum have too much Rodin? It was built in 1924, after the Great War. It’s surrounded by a golf course and a Veteran’s Hospital called “Fort Milley.” I wonder if the V.A. hospital in Brooklyn by the Verrazano is “Fort Hamilton”? It would be a nice way to honor men who have fought for their country. It implies that they are still on duty, still guarding us in their fort.

I think yesterday I tried to liberate myself from the whore ideal, the whole ‘ho ideal--to render silly homage to Stewart Brand & the Whole Earth Foundation. I met Stewart through John Brockman. I wonder if Richard knows Stewart?

Richard never indulges in trivial small talk. He’s best answering questions, although when Lew Phillips and I crossed swords over L.B.J. Richard threw in facts which made his opinion clear.

Mary showed me some of her artwork. It was much more sophisticated than I expected. She doesn’t like the Legion of Honor, but artists often disdain the art of the past. I gave her a hug. She wondered why I didn’t kiss Richard.

Richard can’t eat solid food. Like David Bourdon, Richard has cancer of the esophagus--and the heart, the stomach, the liver, the lymph nodes. He’s calm. He’s self-sufficient; he asks his own questions and answers them. He’ll also answer my questions and your questions.

Napoleon knew soldiers fought for honor. The American Legion is merely a veterans association.

Richard submits graciously, at least in my presence, to the ultimate grim necessity. He’s a soldier of philosophy. He fosters an alt.reality.

Wine & Perrier

2006-12-11T05:22:00.000-08:00

Harry Smith was the master of ceremonies for the Richard Morris memorial 30 November at Karin Taylor's Small Press Center. Bob Heman, Jeff Wright, and Vyt Bakaitis read from Richard's works. Robert Buecker, Maude Boltz and Fletcher Copp invoked Ray Johnson. Friends of Richard sent testimonials which Harry read or handed out.

Memorial

2006-09-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

A memorial for Richard Morris will be held at the Small Press Center in New York 6-8pm on Thursday November 30.

Ward

2006-06-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

I've started a Wikipedia article on Richard. Through history many a Richard Morris has shined. Did you know our hero's middle name was Ward? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_(Ward)_Morris

Inside the Outside

2006-06-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

Presa Press has just published a new anthology of avant-garde American poets called Inside the Outside. It features Richard Kostelanetz, Kirby Congdon, Harry Smith, Lyn Lifshin, Mark Sonnenfeld, Lynne Savitt, Hugh Fox, Eric Greinke, Harry Smith and last and most important--Richard Morris. The book is dedicated to Richard. It features some of his best writing. You can order it from Presa Press, PO Box 793 Rockford MI 49341. It costs $29.95, and it's worth much more.

Harry Smith and I are running The Richard Morris Project out of Unmuzzled OX, 105 Hudson Street, New York 10013. We're planning a memorial for Richard at the Small Press Center. I hope poets from Inside the Outside will read. I'll post more information about the memorial as the details get straight.

NAPOLEON'S PENIS

2005-10-15T00:59:00.000-07:00

Napoleon’s penis is supposed to have been amputated during the autopsy of his body. This object, which is said to look like a cross between a buckskin shoelace and a withered eel, is now in someone’s private collection. It’s possible that you’ve heard this story. If you have, I hope you didn’t believe it. It seems to be one of those urban legends that is always floating around. There were seventeen people present at Napoleon’s autopsy. Some of them were French and some British. If you believe the story, you have to conclude that they were all involved in a conspiracy formed for the sole purpose of removing Napoleon’s member before the body was put in the ground.

No, this isn’t going to be a book abut Napoleon’s penis, or about Napoleon, or about sexual parts, or the British, or the French. It isn’t going to be a book about withered eels or buckskin shoelaces, for that matter. It’s going to be about a lot of things, but not those particular ones. I mentioned the story because my mind seems to jump around from one thing to another these days. Just now, it happened to land on that subject. Mentally, I’ve gotten caught in a kind of shoes-and-ships-and-sealing-wax-and-cabbages-and-kings syndrome. If I start thinking about the Albigensian Crusade or cats or tamales, before I know it I’m meditating on the subject of quantum cosmology or blowjobs instead. There’s no help for it. I find everything to be equally interesting.

So it probably won’t surprise you if I say that I had hardly started thinking about Napoleon’s supposedly purloined penis when unrelated images began to pop into my mind. First, it was neutered cats, then it was pickles and before I knew it, the first landing on the moon. "One small step for man, one great leap for mankind," someone was saying. But I wasn’t paying much attention when he said it. I was watching a couple of people fucking.

I was in my twenties and an almost-unpublished writer. I had an apartment in a building owned by a Mrs. O’Brien. She had converted it from a residence hotel to a building with rooms and apartments. After she did, it really wasn’t much different than it had been before. That night, one of the people on my floor had invited several of his neighbors to come into his room and watch the great event on television. As the telecast was going on, a guy and a girl got tired of watching. They slipped into a sleeping bag and fucked. They had obviously planned it in advance. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have brought the sleeping bag with them. They weren’t planning to spend the night on the floor of our host’s room, after all.

Oh, no one was exactly horrified by what they did. If they wanted to get it on in a sleeping bag while someone was saying one great leap for mankind, that was fine. As good a time as any other. Or maybe even a better time than any if you don’t like listening to grandiose statements that would have been eminently forgettable under most other circumstances.

There’s so much that is forgettable today. People used to be more poetic. But nowadays it seems to be a lost art. They used to swear before God and say things like Fee Fi Fo Fum and death be not proud and I am a citizen, not of Athens or of Greece, but of the world. You would hear them say things like ars longa, vita brevis and let them eat cake and is there no balm in Gilead and you starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish, you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck! Nowadays it’s hey baby, do I make you horny or a great leap for mankind.

No, I’m not trying to claim that everything is going to hell today. That’s something people have been saying at least since the time of Socrates. We were probably saying it when we were australopithecines running around on the African savannas. And there’s no more justification for it now than there was then. Oh, we have our problems, but so did Australopithecus afarensis, and so did the Greeks. You know, problems like the Peloponnesian war, what Zeus was likely to do if he got mad at them, and people who ate themselves out of house and home because they gave too many parties, or because they liked boys a little too much. And then there were all those crazy philosophers with ideas that no one could make any sense of. It used to be that you could understand what people were saying. There weren’t people like Socrates and Diogenes and Zeno running around. And there really wasn’t much that could be done about it. You couldn’t give all of them hemlock, after all. No, I think we have to conclude that things aren’t so bad today. At least they’re no worse than they ever were, even though nobody says much that is very poetic.

Well, anyway after I thought of the lunar landing, I thought of Stanko saying, "La lumière est la vie, et en même temps la mort." Light is life and at the same time, death. It sounds a little trite, doesn’t it? Oh don’t worry about who Stanko is, or about what he said. He’s a Serbian-French sculptor, and that must be the kind of thing Serbians say. And Stanko is a pseudonym anyway. I have one of his works in my living room. I bought it one time when he needed some money to stay out of jail.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, this book isn’t about Stanko either. But you’ll discover what it’s about soon enough. As soon as I figure that out, I’ll let you know. As I’ve already said, it’s likely to be a book about a lot of things. Like computers and Puccini operas and monsters in lakes and vampires and the Trojan war and God and religion and saints, among others things. It’s will also be about life and about death and about sex. It would be impossible to leave ....

Reactionary and Progressive Labels

2005-09-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

the evolutionists: the struggle for Darwin's soul (Freeman; New York: 2001) by Richard Morris

Two of my closest friends are McGill psychiatrists. We’ve been friends for forty years. David was born in my hometown, Kingston, Ontario. As psychiatrists working in hospitals, they deal with seriously crazy people. They tend to label everyone. As a consequence of this long close friendship, I try to avoid labeling anyone.

Nevertheless, I would say that in the United States the classic reactionary is a born-again Protestant male. Credo quia absurdum, wrote Tertullian: “I believe what is absurd.” If you claim creationism is true and evolution is false, you will also believe the lies of George Bush. On the other hand, religion can be progressive. I attended a Jesuit high school. In biology, evolution was taught as fact. The Catholic Worker is a progressive movement within the Catholic church, perhaps a political antithesis of Opus Dei. The Catholic Worker helped create Liberation theology.

The progressive seeks to correct injustice. The reactionary perpetuates injustice, for he believes it is God’s plan. The reactionary seems to gloat over the suffering he causes.

Are You Ready?

2005-09-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

When Jesus comes
back it’s
not going to be
easy.

He’s
going to want to know
why you never saw that
beam in your eyeball

and why
you never cut
that right hand
off. Maybe

you thought it
was bad the first
time, with all
those devils

getting cast
out, and the dead
brought back,
and people

walking on water and
everything. Well,
this time it’s
going to be

worse;
there’s going to be
shit
flying.

--Richard Morris

[From Assyrians published by The Smith, 1991]

Richard Morris Admiration Society

2005-09-03T02:07:00.000-07:00

Richard Morris died in San Francisco 28 August 2003. He was 64. He was widely admired in the small world of alternative presses and daring websites. A witty poet, Richard was the publisher of Camels Coming Press and, more famously and most helpfully, the executive director of COSMEP. The acronym stood for different things in different years but it remained substantially a Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers. Richard edited an invaluable monthly newsletter and answered every query by return mail. I remember him presiding over one meeting smoking a pipe.

Richard was a hard-working writer. Over thirty years we averaged a letter a week. To get the writing going he drank tea. To go to sleep, to kill the jitters, he drank red wine. He was a wine expert. He was also, for instance, a ranked chess player. But he had no teeth. He had been in an automobile accident in the course of a week-long marriage. He had no teeth and many scars.

And then one day the doctor told him he had cirrhosis. And so Richard drank much less wine. When he stayed at my apartment, I made the mistake of saying, yes, he could smoke. When I returned ten days later, there were donuts in the fridge, fancy wine on the counter, and smoke everywhere.

Oh yes he told me about Viagra and, by the way, he was sure glad that whole silly occasional impotence thing was behind him. But then he got a cat-scan for that long-term stomach ache, for that damn cirrhosis, but this time it was abdominal cancer, and soon the cancer was everywhere, in five places, including the esophagus.

Beginning in 1979, Richard became known in the wider world as the author of a series of science books. He had a public. These texts were translated and published to good sales in dozens of countries. His royalties would range from a few pennies from Brazil to many thousands of dollars from Japan. But he continued publishing small-press chapbooks of poetry and drama read mostly by his friends and peers. His first posthumous book, called The Last Sorcerers, followed his death by a few months. Paracelsus was his favorite sorcerer.