AD Sullivan journal 2013

    She apparently was strutting her PR stuff last week, when she apparently lied to D, her replacement at our office, in an off the record remark. She claimed the director for housing authority (who allegedly ignored the pleas of a homeless woman) was the appointment of the congressman, who served a mayor before becoming congressman, when in fact the appointment was made by the mayor after him and prior to the Virgin Mayor. She wanted D to make the congressman look bad, continuing the campaign she had waged on behalf of RR when she still worked in our office. This suggests another RR maneuver, finding another backdoor way to get at the congressman when his first plan failed. RR may be nervous about losing his position as Deputy Mayor if the Virgin Mayor is forced to resign, since the Congressman and the Small Man would be the people who get to decide who to replace the Virgin Mayor with. The fact that she would lie to D on such easily checkable fact suggests she is ...

  RR’s friend, who snuck into the neighboring town’s housing authority a few months ago made his first serious move against the Neighboring mayor. She wrote all about it for RR while still in the office, a regular puff piece about the man when RR was shifting his priorities and was using his civic association to get this man to be named county prosecutor, a man employed by the State Senator – the Neighboring Mayor’s arch enemy. This ally of RR and would be county prosecutor claims the Neighboring Mayor’s attorney (a long-time ally) had been subpoenaed by the feds and had neglected to tell anybody. This all harkens back to that office meeting a month before her resignation when she boldly claimed the Neighboring Mayor was corrupt and had a 16-year-old girl he’d impregnated stashed in a housing authority building. It is still not clear to me why she – most likely at the urging of RR – has this vendetta against the Neighboring Mayor. Or is there some personal connection th...

      The poem she posted today almost vindicates the entry I made in my journal yesterday – as if she could read my mind. At times, I let my imagination run wild with the belief that some of her poems in the past have been written in response to something I’d posted on my website. But since I’ve kept this journal private, refusing to post anything from it, she would have had to have read my mind to have this poem come as a reaction. What is that old saying: great minds think alike? It is possible, however, that I may have revealed some of my thoughts in a poem I posted called “the way it is,” and this poem may be a reaction to it. My poem was a somewhat nasty observation about the dog-eat-dog world she finds herself wrapped up in these days. Koch pointed out in one of his books about how poets tend to hide one meaning behind another. At times, I’ve suspected her of focusing her attention on one person in order to get close to another person, and that she se...

   So, what exactly is a personal assistant/PR/writer for the Virgin Mayor expected to do? It isn’t like she any more qualified to perform such tasks, than she has been for any one of her other professions from chef to horse trainer. I suppose with the title comes rapid on-the-job training like her boss at the restaurant required her to do when he hired her to tend bar back before any of the stuff she’s been through since. She is a quick learner, if nothing else. Will she be writing press releases? Considering that the mayor already has a PR guy from Newark, her job must lean more heavily on the personal assistant aspect. She once claimed that her identity comes from what she does for a living, and I believe this. At the same time, she’s impatient, assuming that her talents will eventually lead her to attain greatness. She’s always in a rush, which may explain her need to – as she calls it – to trickle up. She has immense talent and yet feels the need to take s...

   As with many of her complex poems, the Ode to Kenneth Koch about a lecture he gave back in 2001 needs a more thorough review than the one I gave a couple of days ago. Again, it is unclear exactly when she wrote this piece. I’m assuming it is something she penned back in 2001 after she attended the lecture at Columbia University. The poem was written as a tribute to him. An already award-winning poet at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, she may or may not have actually given the poem to Koch as testimony to her ability to imitate his style. Koch saw no harm in imitating poets you like, and, in fact, believed it was essential to eventually finding a voice of your own. He may even have been very impressed by her parody of him. By parody, I mean in the higher, literary sense, not the buffoonery the everyday public might think of such as the National Lampoon or Mad Magazine. Literary parody means adopted the style of another writer, using her...

  Sometimes you have to let things play themselves out, letting the inevitable happen. She and RR have aligned themselves so firmly with the Virgin Mayor, his fate becomes their fate – whatever that may be. Why her objectives might not be perfectly in sync with RR’s, if the Virgin Mayor survives his legal challenges, then the two of them will survive as well. But there are other possible outcomes that may leave the Virgin Mayor untouched, while they could be cast aside by other power brokers, who have their own agenda when it comes to the Virgin Mayor. If the Virgin Mayor cuts a deal to get out of his legal trouble, he may be forced to resign and leave them unprotected If he fails or resigns, then it is possible she and RR will simply walk away and find someone else to attach themselves to. Again, Joey D seems the most logical choice for her. The question is: what do each of them want to get out of all this. RR clearly wants his job back as a cop. But if not possi...

  Great irony played with the poem she posted today which has almost nothing to do with what she intended. This falls under “it’s a small world” category Her poem – circa 2001 – looks back on her days at Columbia and is an ode to one of the great literary professors Kenneth Koch with whom she apparently studied, prior to his passing away in 2002. I met him back in the late 1970s when his former student and a close friend of mine, David Shapiro, introduced me to him when I was attending William Paterson College. I was an interloper, not one of the college’s literary elite that included Joel L and Michael R, who Shapiro also introduced to Koch. Michael R was the real poetic talent of the school, someone who should have gone on to become one of the next generation of great American poets, worthy of meeting Koch and later Koch’s friend, John Ashbery, to whom I was also introduced. In fact, one of the art professors introduced me to Ashbery, claiming I was a great writer –...