Listening to: Hossein Omoumi- Persian Classical Music

Lest one of my previous comments be misconstrued,
i am not at all in favor of Forced Sterilization. But i
think it would be a dandy idea to have gumball
machines full of RU-486 on every street corner
in the world.

"In the world few people act from principle; present
feelings, and early habits, are the grand springs: but
how would the former be deadened, and the latter
rendered iron corroding fetters, if the world were shown
to young people just as it is; when no knowledge of
mankind or their own hearts, slowly obtained by experience,
rendered them forbearing?" --Mary Wollstonecraft, A
Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

...my first ever Esperanto palindrome: Oj! ululu lune,
sori el amo. Dido, male, iros en ulululujo. Which
means: 'Oh! howl moonly, to soar out of love. Dodo, on
the contrary, will go into howlpersonreceptacle.'

The reason our criticism is generally more interesting
& better written than our poetry (admit it, in any
journal you read the reviews first!), is simple. Criticism
has to be about real books & personalities, & their
puzzling or clashing contexts. But the poetry is mostly
about other poems: usually one's own, that the hapless
reader has never seen!

"We are black within and sealed from light." -Michael
McClure, "For Artaud"

Watching TV for story-hunger is like getting a tapeworm
for companionship.

'...a time comes when you stop reading the articles...just the
ads...they tell the whole story...' --Céline, North (1960)

"Political science" will not exist until it is understood that
Government is something that just doesn't work above a
certain size. I am reminded of an article once written by
Asimov, on the subject of those giant versions of familiar
animals, so beloved of hack science fiction. He starts with
a mouse & makes it weigh a ton, then analyzes each of the
systems of that mouse's body & shows how in order not
to die at once it must be modified; & before he's done the
result is not a one-ton mouse, but something much like an
elephant... Yeah, & we go on using mouse scale
words for elephant scale realities. A tiny example:
the personalization of the war, as if it were against one
super-villain, a Saddam the size of a mountain, instead of
against millions of human beings just like ourselves...

Ah, but listening is on the way out. In the future there
will only be "sending a message" (i.e. pulling the trigger)
& "receiving a message" (catching the bullet).

A corporation is not so much a machine for making money,
as a device for diffusing responsibility.