28 Feb. 2005
GE Money Bank
P.O. Box 981403
El Paso TX 79998-1403
Dear Moneygrubbers:
According to the “Important Notice Regarding JC Penney Credit Card Account GE Money Bank” that I received today I can reject the usurious raise in your interest rates if I notify you in writing before the Effective Date that you posit “As [I] may have previously been notified, on or about February 7, 2005.”
To the best of my knowledge I did not receive such a notification, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no outstanding balance in my "JC Penney account ending in XXXX."
I herewith do, indeed, reject your new terms. I have destroyed my JC Penney credit card.
This is the second such outrageous increase in credit card interest rates that I have rejected in the past couple of weeks. The current period is an extremely stupid time in the history of the U.S.A. for you greedy money people to raise your rates. I hope you go belly up shortly, and to help that event along, I am going to post this letter on my blog.
Sincerely,
Lewis Turco
_______________________________________________________________________________________
REMARKS
Lew,
I agree.
We just earlier this week got a "pre-approved" (of course, it is not really pre-approved at all) Discover Card letter, with (in exceedingly fine print) cash advances at 29.99 percent and overdue amounts at something approaching 33 or 34%. I don't remember. Both Mary & I got letters which I gleefully burned in our fireplace and consequently got some heat (and thus use) out of. Small comfort.
The bankers certainly need to be better reined in, but to my mind they are better controlled than these out-of-touch-with-reality & we-make-all-the-rules-and-can-change-them-at-will credit card sharks.
Best wishes in these hard times.
Your friend, Tom
P. S. I am still remembering every so often and chuckling about 'hairy fishballs.'
Tom,
My memoir, "A Nest of In-Laws," was published on-line today at
http://www.nightsandweekends.com/red/
It will be included in my forthcoming book titled La Famiglia / The Family: Memoirs late this year or early next, most likely.
Lew
Nicely put together, Lew.
I've, of course, heard many of these before, but somehow you make a narrative of it – and it's not just the chronology. I remember quite clearly the resolves never to go to Dresden again.
Best,
Tom
And look where we wound up.
Lew
Lew –
What a delightful memoir...it brought back a flood of memories for me. My dad's sister Daisy had what we called a "farm" in Tallman New York. We called it a farm because we came from Jersey City, as urban a place you could ever find. She and her husband Sal (they had no children) used it as a weekend retreat from their grocery/butcher business in Jersey City and, predictably, every weekend the family (all the Buttigheris and their spouses and kids) would go up on a Sunday.
My Aunt Daisy, who was the worst hostess ever, would bristle at the fact that we were all coming up and creating a mess. She made it appear as though we were all on the dole. She was, shall we say, in order to be kind, a cheap d.o.b. She was the only one who had bucks in those days (40's), so the thought of providing for a gang of kinfolk sent her into a tailspin.
But it never happened. My father and his brother and other sister all brought more than ample food for everybody. So, in order to discourage us, my devious Aunt Daisy said, “If you want to come up here you have to work.” But that plan didn't work either because all the menfolk did just as she ordered. They picked peaches, mowed the lawn, weeded and weeded some more, and she had a big apple tree, so the women picked up those that had fallen and baked many an apple pie.
Italians are great for putting up a false front...ever smiling but later on complaining and muttering under their breaths. On the way home, in the car my mother (your cousin) and her sisters-in-law would complain about Daisy's cheapness and Daisy would complain the day after to my father about the "bacano," Sicilian for the disruption and intrusion. But amazingly, nobody ever said anything openly and just carried on as though everything was honky-dory. Daisy would greet us at the farm with open arms smiling and laughing as though she were delirious to see us! And we would unload the car with all the prepared food and tell her how happy we were to be there.
Why did we do it? We did it to keep the family as a unit, cohesive despite the cracks and falling mortar in its foundation. My father and uncle would say we went there to let the kids get a breath of fresh air and enjoy running around on the lawn, despite Aunt Daisy's admonitions to "stay off the lawn....” It was a battle of wills.
On reflection, it reminded me of the Bates Motel because there were times when we stayed overnight and the kids were relegated to an upstairs bedroom (with a red lightbulb) and we had to sleep on a mattress on the floor. I had a terrible allergy to dust and would spend the entire night sneezing and not being able to breathe. It was horrible. But there was something very comforting to hear the sonorous sounds of the grownups playing cards downstairs, and ultimately, it lulled me to sleep. Snot and all.
So you see, my dear cousin, everyone has a story to tell about the screwballs and dotties in our families. But let me tell you, there is nothing like the charades performed by an Italian family....
Ann Badach
Thanks, Ann,
Great response, as always!
Lew
Lew:
If these are what I suspect they are, knowing how you feel about us I don't see any reason to read them. They will die on my computer, alas, unseen.
Betty
Betty,
Ah, that's what I like! A person who jumps to conclusions. Actually, I love your family and always have, with a couple of exceptions. But please, do me a favor and DON'T read my memoir.
Lew
Mea culpa-mea culpa! As you knew it would, you prodded me into reading it. Don't know if the rest of your "nest of in-laws" have read this; if so, they are probably not nuts about it, but You’re right. It's funny, and while it pokes fun at us, it is good.
Betty
Thanks, Lew! Looks lively, and – like a family. You seem to have Ruths coming and going in your family. Can't help noticing that...
it probably means you'll
never be ruthless....
Cheers!
Ruth Harrison
Ruth,
Your review of my book of memoirs A Sheaf of Leaves has been published in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XLVI, No. 1, February, 2009, on pp. 18-20. Congratulations! I just got my subscription copy; if you haven't gotten your contributor's copy yet, you ought to have it soon. Thank you so very much. I am quite Ruthful.
Lew
Oh, wow! Very very cool! I am so pleased. I had about given up getting it into somewhere ...so this is fine news! I look forward to a copy when it comes – Cheers!
Ruth
It's truly a GREAT review, Ruth. I'm going to run off some photo-copies and I'll send you one. It's actually one of the best reviews I've ever gotten.
Lew
P.S. I got this yesterday:
Dear Mr. Turco, I am writing you to let you know that my review of your book Fearful Pleasures from Star Cloud Press is now available online at the Meridian magazine website. You can access the magazine by going to The review is available on page 95 of http://www.readmeridian.org/issues/22/reviews.pdf I enjoyed reading your collection of poetry very much. I hope you find the review interesting and useful. Sincerely, Suzanne Morgen, editor http://www.TrellisMagazine.com Dear Suzanne Morgen, Many thanks for letting me know about the publication of your review of Fearful Pleasures and for the review itself, which I found to be thoughtful and interesting. You ask the same question several times, though: How can someone who has spent his life writing about formal verse write such a collection of poems? The answer is simple: All language is formal; or, as I say on page one of the "introduction to the Discipline of Literature, Form" of my The Book of Literary Terms, a companion volume to The Book of Forms, "Every element of language is a form of some kind. The letters of the alphabet are forms, conventions upon which the members of a culture have agreed in order to communicate; so are words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, whether spoken or written." This being so, all the poems in the various collections to be found in Fearful Pleasures are formal; they're just not traditionally formal verse poems. For instance, "The Sketches" are prose poems in parallel constructions, which is easy to see if you hold the book at arm's length and look at them. Each "stanza" is actually one sentence, and each poem ends in a "coda" sentence that is set off from the body of the poem. The constructions of these poems are to be found described on the pages identified on page 227 of TBoF3; also under "parallel," "parallelism," and "parallel structure" in the index of TBoLT. The poems of "Awaken, Bells Falling," are all written in either quantitative or normative syllabic prosody (check p. 20 & the index of TBoF3 for all these terms), except for "The Moment Before" which is a calligramme; Every other poem of "The Inhabitant" beginning with "The Door" is written in quantitative isoverbal (word count) prosody (pp. 15-16, TBoF3), all the rest are prose poems written in various parallel constructions (pp. 9-15, TBoF3); "The Weed Garden" is syllabics again, as are "The Book of Beasts" and "Seasons of the Blood," except that the latter are all in Japanese forms (check index of TBoF3); "Twelve Moons" is written in accentual prosody, specifically William Carlos Williams' triversen stanza (index); the rest of "American Still Lifes" is prose poems in a Williamsian Imagist style; "Compleat Melancholick" is back to syllabics; ditto "New Poems," also "A Sampler of Hours"; "Phobiamania," though, is quite different: prose poems built on a system of repetitions and semi-repetitions which are, of course, a type of parallel structure (refrains & demi-refrains). Interestingly enough, the old magazine The Formalist published quite a few of these as the editor, Bill Baer, recognized their formality even though they weren't metrical. And the book ends with "The Green Maces of Autumn" that returns to my customary system of quantitative syllabics, in the main. This last set actually was written over the entire time span of my writing life, and it's where I ended up living after I retired in 1996. Yours, Lewis Dear Mr. Turco,
Thank you for
taking the time to respond to the question posed within my book review. I did
not notice all of those poetic elements but I had seen and enjoyed many of
them. The audience and contributors to Meridian are probably not as familiar
with your work and poetic form; therefore, I felt that my review should be
broader and aimed at an audience reading and writing free verse. I hope that my
review has exposed your book to a broader public and that many more people will
benefit from your poetry as I have. Sincerely, Suzanne Morgen,
editor Dear Suzanne, I greatly appreciate
your review; I've read it several times and I've shown it to members of my
family and some of my friends. I'm delighted that you let people know that I
write something besides traditionally formal verse. In fact, that's one of the
reasons why I use a pseudonym for my formal verse; nevertheless, people seem to
think that that's all I write because of The Book of Forms. Another review was
published at the same time as yours, by Ruth Harrison in The Hollins Critic, of my A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs, so I'm feeling quite coddled and appreciated these
days. Thanks again, Sincerely, Lewis
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