Saturday, June 12, 2004

"First Nations communities suffer from a couple of centuries of objectification. Our stories and teachings have been collected like museum pieces and stored on shelves and in books where they seem to atrophy and become more and more distant from daily life. It is not uncommon to hear people questioning the value of these old teachings and their relevance to contemporary situations. This has created a very disempowered situation. Without our own stories, we go to the stories of others, and those who have the most powerful story telling technologies (TV stations, media outlets, films) have also had a fairly consistent agenda of colonizing indigenous peoples. Mass media continues the colonization of indigenous peoples by giving us stories that are not our own, filling the vacuum left by the loss of our traditional technologies." --Parking Lot
You get used to being cold, you get used to being tired, you get used to being hungry, you even get used to being in pain, but you never get used to being disrespected.

Cathedonia.

"Judgment at Westchester"

Two crows clyted in the burnt-out hulk of a house.
They shook the rain from their feathers, then one said,
"Those who made this landscape must be proud."
The other: "Havoc is power, nonetheless."

06 12 04

Get rid of those suspicious art supplies.


Friday, June 11, 2004

Listening to: Seasoned Reasonings by The New Elements.

"Line 9. Of this peculiar character Ibn Khallikan remarks (ii. 43), 'There were four poets whose works clearly contraried their character. Abu al-Atahiyah wrote pious poems, himself being an atheist; Abu Hukayma's verses proved his impotence, yet he was more salacious than a he-goat; Mohammed ibn Hazim praised contentment, yet he was greedier than a dog; and Abu Nowas hymned the joys of sodomy, yet he was more passionate for women than a baboon.' " --Richard Burton, notes to his translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886)

Shining Trapezohedron, dwells thy agent dead
not on Mount Fucking Rushmore though they'd urge it
but with his true kin vilely massed worms slime-shrouded
inventor for neon scissors outclassed thy yegg

06 10/11 04 quantitative sari

"Or: I work at the language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a course, and so, blindly. In this i am not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a way. For the way in itself. It is well enuf to speak of water's having its destination in the sea, and so to picture almost a knowing in the course; but the sea is only the end of ways--could the stream find a further course, it would go on. And vast as the language is, it is no end but a resistance thru which a poem might move--as it flows or dances or puddles in time--making it up in its going along and yet going only as it breaks the resistance of the language." --Robert Duncan

Death of a Salesman. (via Fishblog)

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

I remember Reaganomics, all right. I was working downtown at a bank. Every year there were more street people. We were the underground people, we lived in the tunnels & skyways. We only stood in the same world when we waited on our bus, & we resented even that. For the most part we refused to make eye contact or acknowledge them in any way.

I was a librarian of mortgages. I handled one stage of the paperwork. I remember, i don't know for how long but i lost track, i was doing a hundred foreclosures a day. It began to prey on my mind: that many families thrown out of their houses, that many dreams shattered. After awhile i had to quit & try to move away. I knew i didn't belong there, in the underground, with the happy saved.

The Neoformalists have failed to imagine farther back than Frost; they have no more use for Pope than for Ginsberg.

"Empty landscapes seem to inspire games." --DeLillo, 1983 interv.

"All of Philip K Dick's novels seem to bear at least three stigmata of his long apprenticeship to Ace Double Novels.' --Robert H Canary

"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." --Lovecraft

Laid off after ten years on the job, i have $40 in the bank, $20 grand in debt, an 18-year-old car & a 15-year-old ulcer. Duncan: "A poet who sits in the light of words like a cat in the mote-filled sunlight of a window."

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

"Orthodoxy was never a religion of speculation anyway, but a waterfall of sound and colour, bleeding beauty off into the wings, overwhelming its unhappy brood with its mystical cant, and sending its harmonious dirges down the soul river of time." --Larry Frolick, Grand Centaur Station (2004)

The ancient bricks more beautiful than anything we can think to fill this space with.

"The Suq al-Warraqin, or bookdealers' market, in tenth century Baghdad contained one hundred booksellers." --Night & Horses & the Desert ed Robert Irwin (1999)

"Maybe, Murray supposed, he would get there in ten or eleven years' time. The fact that it would take the 31 years left to him, and still not be completed, might not have dismayed him had he known the fate of the other great multi-volume European dictionaries that were under way at around the same time. Although Emile Littre's rather short Dictionnaire de la langue francaise took only a decade from publication of its first volume to the last--though 32 years from the conception of the plan--the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Worterbuch, which was six times bulkier than its French equivalent, was begun in 1838 and fully finished only in 1961. If that was not long enough, the Dutch dictionary known as Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was started in 1851 and completed in 1998, 147 years later. And a nineteenth-century attempt to fix the entire Swedish tongue between hard cover continues today into the twenty-first century, with scholars still stuck on the complexities of Swedish words beginning with the letter S." --Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything (2003)

Salvage in itself is a worthy art. In fact, it may be the art of arts.

"Poker is to New Orleans as waltzing is to Vienna, firecrackers to Beijing." --S Frederick Starr, New Orleans Unmasqued (1985)

Can you imagine a people giving up electric for gaslight, for aesthetic reasons?

Monday, June 07, 2004

"Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray,
That I may live to say, The dog is dead!"

from Richard III

the mad cow
that infected
america

is dead the
madness lives
on


06 06 04