Saturday, November 01, 2003

Listening to: The Best of Ruth Brown.

An old Dean Koontz scifi paperback came in:
Anti-Man. I priced it at $25.00 .
    So the newly acquired
untranslatable subjectivity ("angst") submerges in a
resurgence of older & better stabilized levels of con-
sciousness...a global regression. All aside from the
pre-eminent fact of economic disparity, of course:
but it's still kind of a pity that the knowledge cannot
be shared, that we are all equally victims of modernity.
The mass media...have become
inaccessible to the usual symbol-shapers (artists,
mystics, visionaries, cranks), so that the natural
process that would adjust a population to its dreams
has been radically aborted. It seems like the only
solution is for individuals to withdraw from the media-
world on their own separate initiative & try to recover
tribal, pre-urban group identities with more or less
homemade ideologies & worldviews...Which is
happening now
--often violently--but unrecognized
as such because they still use the old words for their
new, haphazard syncretisms. Strictly speaking,
there is no more traditional culture
. Anywhere.
In the world.
'Maybe King Oedipus had an eye too many.' --Holderlin

You can't fight images with images you have to
use reality. Or images of greater reality?

I believe community has gradually disappeared
or become supplanted by more primitive organization
because the growth of subjectivity has outstripped
the capacity of all current symbol systems to
communicate it.
In a blighted place you got to watch your step...

"Distance seduces the rational mind, just as
closeness seduces the irrational." --Thomas
Disch, "102 H-Bombs"

A novel is a world--a short story is a place.

I find out when i've been living with insufficient
consciousness the same way i find out i've been
reading without enough light--by the headache
it gives me.
Those who have no will are only dependable in
their compulsions.

'What has been understood no longer exists...' --Eluard

Intuition is experienced without sensations. It results
in spontaneous knowledge. The Unconscious has
meaning without being experienced. It results in
spontaneous creation. --Most of our psychological
systems use the same vague terms for both. Because
to the ego they are equally INVISIBLE.
"I love obscenity but I hate vulgarity." --Henry
Miller

"The wind that knocked our generation down
Was not a harvest." --Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon

'Destruction was my Beatrice.' --Mallarmé, letter 5-17-67

"Now, making a work is not thinking thoughts but
accomplishing an actual journey." --David Jones, preface
to The Anathemata

Friday, October 31, 2003

Mini-KISS. (via Memepool)

Is it over yet?

"By 1968, 1978, 1988 or 1998 you knew what the master narrative of that decade was. You knew that decade's chosen way to be 'modern'. By year eight, the decade's style was finished, finessed, defined. Even uncool people got the message about how to be cool. They just needed those little back glasses, that cow-lick fur cap haircut, and they were safely 'modern'.

Too late, normal cool modern people! The decade turned, your finish just finished! Now you have to plunge yourself into a new decade, and it's all going to be messy and uncertain again until 2008!"
--Momus

Black Metal Pigeons.


Listening to: The Luv'd Ones.

This blog is 43% Evil. (via The Trigger)

Saw Black Robe the other day, & it still haunts
me.

Heard a piece on NPR about an opera (Brundibar), originally written & staged
by some of the prisoners of concentration camp
Terezin, & translated by Sendak & Kushner,
which is playing in New York right now. How
poignant (& how timely!)...

Something truly frightening. (via USS Clueless)



"To give one's self to one's poem is also to risk being
violated by it
." --Antonin Artaud, 1944

'We have abolished the true world. ...With the true
world we have also abolished the apparent one.' --Nietzsche

"Gurdjieff elevated charlatanism into a world principle."
--Lowenfels

'But the world is neither significant nor absurd.' --Robbe-
Grillet, 1957

   "Rosy-fingered Ramadan"

The work, And like Abracadabra To fall
into this wine
He
pours. is of the swarm. Scene
continues in a changed tone O Cassilda, Nudity does
anyone remember Once
Raps clack
Calcspar; I will you will Cut
them I
came a vision I smell
anything.
Salt Is ebony Metaphor.

(10/03)

'386. If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would
affect us as much as the objects we see every day. ...But
since dreams are all different, and each single one is
diversified, what is seen in them affects us much less...
For life is a dream a little less inconstant.' --Pascal, Pensées
   "Time Change

  Autumn never came too soon for her. She
loved the swirl of colors in the late afternoon as she sipped
tea and looked out the picture window. Across the way she
observed a boy plodding along the sidewalk.

  As the youngster headed home, his backpack heavy
with books, he wondered why summer ended so early."

--Melanie D. Pruit (a "Fifty Five Fiction")

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Ouch!

Gender Genie thinks the 2 computer poems i
posted on Oct 27 are female--by a score of 275
to 135.

A Tale of Two Blogs.

Listening to: Miles Davis- "Concierto de
Aranjuez".

[Apologies for the fragmented character
of the following single poem
. Blogger
made me do it!!!!]
   'Season of Flames

FLASH!
In a blaze of magnesium
The entire city like a silhouette
Crumbles.

Not a sound
But consciousness
tossed softly into an empty space.
And the remote
self
Just now interred.

Millions of glass-splinters in flight
Old beams heavier than lead
And wall clay, with a thud,
Give the final stroke.
Outside is
Bizarre grey,
Distorted roofs,
Tangle of electric wires,
Full of human smell,
Yet void of human life,
Thousands of acres of
Dead
    silence.
Sudden uprise of dark brown mountains
From flattened Hiroshima
At the bottom of a crater-like basin,
Outrageous upheaval.
It rises up and plunges down,
Shaking back and
Casting upward
Clouds,
Clouds,
Clouds,
Scarlet, orange, violet,
Expanding in lurid eruption.
The air
Gushing forth through chasms
In the smoke-ridden earth,
Hurtling one upon the other,
Exploding, shooting
Boiling torrents into the stratosphere.
There come for the first time
Hissing whispers,
Then rumbling of the earth beneath,
Groaning waves, ear-splitting shock.

Uranium 235
Causes in this city, picked out,
An apparition of the man-made sun
500 metres high above the sky.
8.15 a.m.
(Punctually)
The citizens summoned
Into the streets in the centre of town.
Hiroshima now submerged
In black tangled smoke
Like coarse public hair
Under the sun with dust in its eyes
Throbbing and contracting,
The restless tongues of flame
Lick the flayed skin
Of men.
A black shower,
Fluttering in the whirlwind,
Chokes the mouths crying for loved ones.

Under a strange rainbow,
Rows,
Rows,
Of ghosts filing past
Trying to escape from the town,
Like ants from a broken nest
Filling the streets;
Hands hanging
Listlessly
Inch
By inch
A procession of animals,
That once were men.
A slow current threads its way
Through the space filled
With hot blast and strange odour
With no sky and no earth,
Into the river's seven
    separate branches
Drifting without end
Bloated and flayed
Bodies scrape
    against islets
In the estuary.
At Bikini that time
The thousands and thousands of tons
Of sea water gushing
From the atoll reflected only
In the innocent, ignorant eyes
Of pigs,
   sheep,
     apes
Left there for the test--
And the fish in the foam
(Ah but we are not fish, we cannot
Quietly roll over and show
Our white bellies in death).

The sun boils on and
The rain seeps into
Acres and acres of rubble.
Indeed, Hiroshima has risen
Three feet higher
On the rubble and white bones.

Dead: 247,000
Missing: 14,000
Injured: 38,000
In the A-bomb museum
Baked stones,
Melted slates,
And deformed glass bottles are shown
And pamphlets of city planning
For tourist hotels
    gathering
Dust.

Even today
In 1951
Clouds are towering and burning,
And two white flying spots
Brushing past them
As they drift.
Look, there are the white spots.
From across the world the parachutes remotely
Controlled are come to take the radiation count:
The parachutes
Of that morning,
Stamped on the retinae
Of Hiroshima Tribe
Now gently floating
Behind the clouds again.'

--Sankichi Toge, Hiroshima Poems

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

   "Butoh News"

body he believed himself anointed by the
rest...terrible though it seems that the
Yellow Blixen Glaugnea Angel
Candle in #Mexico.
a swirl of the one Technology
is a fandango
, and the
hand:with a reason to snatch it
hardly matters what; and yet
things are very often feel &
is quick to him, dull of the
same murky sense of each dipped in Baja:] The Allies today
though its sign: to make
bears dance natives painted like
the dark particles Of what I
found 8 lines i like: could not possible he
Gorge the immense
and stripes slacken; I cultivate humanist attitudes
i care least textbooks
as for the title some more news you
know the Death of
And it away and in order
not stand Nor lifts
the building of the devil
take 10
50 PM Chinese Braille.

(10/03)
Until we quit calling our mental static Freedom we will
never have any use for silence.

The myth of Babel is only lately true.

Nobody leads; but among those who join, some are
facing forward, some backward, and some are whirling
around.

'By the mere fact of having happened, reality projects
its shadow back into the past indefinitely far; so it
seems like it has always existed, in the form of the
possibility of its own realization.' --Bergson

"...invention has [nothing] to do with the noise you
make while breaking rules. ...I think it has to do with
the subtlety with which you adhere to premises somewhat
different from those that may be expected of you." --Glenn
Gould

"Take a close and very long look into the eye of a chicken,
and you'll see the most frightful kind of stupidity." --Werner
Herzog [Although, one has to ask what is the word for a
world-famous film director eye-to-eye with his feathered
friend...]

'In every man there is a Pyrrhonism [skepticism] that is
proof against any dogmatism, and a dogmatism invincible
to any Pyrrhonism.' --Pascal

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

My first Fifty Five Fiction. "After Bush III had
won by a landslide his second term, people pretty
much stopped voting. This did not affect the victory
margin of Bush IV. It is said that the exodus began
then, but that is incorrect. The exodus really only
began when, failing to find another Bush to run,
they substituted a capybara."
Art is the shallowest cause and the deepest symptom.

   "Gothic Lolita Bible Study"

via
Enigmatic moped Or at something
like the War to opine. it tenuous Chameleon man
begin, resultant Of
fraud befrauding those are the
Free gift change he;
pronounces the fleeces of the of machine translated from black
blogtitle {: Verdana, Arial, ;color: white;} barkhang and what
has painted the
name for grope continuing
slag Kudzu rhost Consequential gleam? Goblin
the rest of our
own way he must; look upon all are linked
with the average
wage, by persons
believing themselves in the
ground in this
is also The
swagger of school austere
Alien of view &
veracity; ambiguity & the source of
it was
inventorying books My invented language
Spook the next night at something in Calabria posted
by michael at least, textbooks as well
as they were ending their solitude
As cats are parent.

(10/03)

'It should be noted, however, that the picture's title
never tells its subject--and this is particularly true
with those artists who, by an engaging fusion of
horrors, mix sentiment with wit. In this way, by
extending the method, it will be possible to achieve
the sentimental rebus.' --Baudelaire, 1846

"People can adapt to anything as long as they don't
question the context." --Ernest Alcorn, 1972

"The new formula may be in part the resu't of the
Revolution without being its expression.' --Victor
Hugo, 1824 [--Rock.]

"By 1914, when the whites started killing each other,
they controlled eighty five percent of the earth's
surface." --Richard Miller, Bohemia (1977)

Monday, October 27, 2003

"Vancouver has come into its own in the nineties," writes Paul Delany, "with three best selling authors--Douglas Coupland, Nick Bantock, William Gibson... who seem utterly globalized, stylized, and deracinated producers of a 'location-independent' literature." --review of City of Glass

" poll conducted among INFOCUS readers had established "waka" as the
proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < and >, though
some readers held out resolutely for "norkies." The text of the poem
follows:

<>!*''#

^"`$$-

!*=@$_

%*<>~#4
&[]../

|{,,SYSTEM HALTED

The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number
four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."
--found on the way

   "Wels Diamot

Rints grome of stoneted
Have se frow declart
Wries eve he storferst
Hass difird gapat

Luspeciestretwe
Beene namone encame
Sur ded clarearthe
Cumstly publingain

Itil that coureland
Havinernce I honse
Luserst mat paland
Wilarlich und conce."

--Jonathan R Partington
Imagine performed music to be forbidden
--& a hundred years passes--& only those
who can read sheet music to themselves,
imagining the notes in their head, have
music.

A couple of computer poems from Horizon,
May '62:

   "MICE

The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates."

   "ROSES

Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Why is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious , blind planes are coming.
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender."

What one must know about the Sun.

No fasting on the Day of Doubt.

   "Incursion"

The shadows lengthen In forms Of
the One quick nocturnal
Interloper could leave you at
times assuages.
Having found
He'sky lie too?
It'till my lilies
You'think about to Maremma! Approaches. Salt Is said
that saddest light, sodium attack Converts tragedy to wield
such a bulwark of emptiness?
Is high parabolas Or culture.
Furnishings are masked.
hours.

(10/03)

'...whenever there are political parties, democracy is
dead.' --Weil, L'Enracinement (1943)

'Uprootedness breeds idolatry.' --ibid

'The realism which I care about and want is what happens
in the head of the spectator and not what is on the screen.'
--Fassbinder

'Scepticism is a bad conductor of poetry.' --Jean Cocteau

Self knowledge looks like destruction when the knowledge
is of a self-destructive self, but that knowledge really only
destroys those incompatible illusions we mistook for part
of us, and which were crippling us. The most convincing,
ubiquitous illusion is power. As "knowledge" is an incom-
plete, context-less understanding, so power is action
without considering consequences; the adage "Knowledge
is power" is subsumed by "Understanding is powerless
doing" (wei-wu)...

'Of all the parts of the body there is none so cold as
the brain.' --Aristotle

'The public is content to admire doors which go nowhere.'
--Cocteau (1921)

Idea: that consciousness arises in those who are ON THE
EDGE--of cultures, races, classes, sexes, conditions,
sanity, history, places, etc--they have familiarity with two
different modes of being which prevents them from falling
into either conformity... Consciousness is nature healing
a split in humans.

The role of the artist has become untenable, just when the
myth of the artist has reached its furthest inflation. It is
time to say: Human is enough.

All day long we wear the face that monkeys reserve for
a lion about to eat them.

Sunday, October 26, 2003

   "Thing 1"

Wrong cold word, baby--sands they ikon off like
A breeding streak unportrayable
Death, Spetznaz, kissing daylight
Then & grom sweeping
Smoulders harl
Viral oobleck cadavatar slag
Continuing briskly puree with flashbangs
The lethal
Iron evil a rodent:
Ned or alive have/.

10 26 03
[This poem, like others in the series, sort of asks to be
set to music; i imagine something austere, sprechstimme,
like "Pierrot Lunaire", with a cappella intervals... It's time, i
think, for Language Poetry to start aiming at radio airplay.]

'If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would still
distinguish them.' --Herakleitos

'It is through those who live in the present that the present
exists.' --Simone Weil

"I have always found Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the Only Wise; this they do with a confidant
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." --Blake

When everything's a symptom there's no way to change.
When everything's a cause there's no basis to decide. We
must straddle this dichotomy in order to be able to act.
Monism is achieved at the end of doing, and lasts for
one breath only. Then we start again.

The old men in front of the museum, trolling the fallen
leaves with metal detectors. I don't want to be famous,
i just want not to have wasted my time.

Why 2 brains? --Why 2 hands?

"Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without
reason are mad." --Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind,
II (1980)

In broken times, to do one thing well is hard enough, and
seems sufficient. Though there are dreams of unification
they will also be broken; the system will be incomplete.
But people who are also broken cannot perceive this.