My favorite single piece of music is probably Alban Berg's "Lyric Suite".
It has more & more complex emotions embodied in its twists & turns than
anything else i have ever heard; & yet retains a clarity & control that is no
less than astonishing. I first heard it in Vienna in 1977. I was at a classical
concert &, if truth be told, was on the verge of nodding off after a strenuous
day of walking the city. Suddenly i sat bolt upright & my eyelids rolled open
like a cartoon character. The music had swiftly changed into something
bizarre & powerful. I looked at my program, & the next time i was in a music
shop i tracked down a record of it (not even waiting till i was back on the
other side of the Atlantic)... I have memorized portions of it by now, yet every
time i listen to it it still surprises me. The only other time i got to hear it performed
was about 15 years ago in Dallas, in the orchestrated version. Up to that point
in the concert everything had gone smoothly & uneventfully. Then the energy
level lifted dramatically, & i could tell (even from the second balcony) the musicians
were turned on by the chance to play something difficult & interesting (which in
Dallas happens maybe once in ten years, alas!). I think people who put down
twelve-tone music have either never tried to listen to this piece, or have heads of
solid wood... I became an instant convert to modern composers. Although i have
seldom heard anything quite magnificent (with the exception of certain works by
Messiaen & Penderecki), just the flavor of this music is refreshing compared with
the tired old chord sequences (in 19c symphonies i can hear the ending coming
five minutes before it happens)... --I want to write one line that sounds like that in
my head.

I have to take exception to this statement by Free Space Comix: "Also, it [Language
Poetry] never had the grip on the public imagination that, say, Beat Poetry had,
probably because it lacked any "lifestyle" element -- no costumes, no drugs --"
i always wore a costume when i read my language poetry.

My Muse wouldn’t leave me alone.

SMELLS LIKE STATE TERROR

America is on the march
And ev’ry Sunday sits in church
What we don’t own we still control
From oceans to the world’s last oil

Hello hello hello hello
Hello hello hello hello

Keep your mouth shut! --Pledge allegiance!
To our warheads! --And our legions!
Dubya said it! --I believe it!
Freedom’s crazy! --I don’t need it!
We got Lotto,
A one-line credo,
Dunce bravado,
And global veto...yeah!

America is big & strong
And better than that ragtag throng
We tolerate for ready labor
Let them fawn & beg for favor

Hello hello hello hello
Hello hello hello hello

Keep your mouth shut! --Pledge allegiance!
To our warheads! --And our legions!
Dubya said it! --I believe it!
Freedom’s crazy! --I don’t need it!
We got Lotto,
A one-line credo,
Dunce bravado,
And global veto...yeah!

America decides the future
We’ll just keep on getting richer
While we rob & starve the poor
Until there isn’t any more

Hello hello hello hello
Hello hello hello hello

Keep your mouth shut! --Pledge allegiance!
To our warheads! --And our legions!
Dubya said it! --I believe it!
Freedom’s crazy! --I don’t need it!
We got Lotto,
A one-line credo,
Dunce bravado,
And global veto...yeah!
Yeah!

Beauty is the sweetness and bitterness of being someone else in
love with this I: not I as a person, but as a landscape of possibilities. Helplessly, hopelessly, out of inner necessity, there is the love--and whose, if not the source od what happens? In dreams (rarely) i remember i was such a one, a violent force of becoming; i followed after the self that incarnated all forms, all reasons, all feelings, and all potentials, individualized, each a world... and knew never would i catch up with myself as i really am... though by waking i would, and die... I did, and nothing remains but Beauty. How to explain this sort of dream,except by saying it is a metaphor for the advent (perpetual) of consciousness? Ah, i have no metaphors more than this one, nor any for it. Real life infatuation is a result of trying to find one. The desert comes from not even having Beauty in your dreams, from not being loved by it.

What gulls us most of all is having to take sides when it was only a matter of an incoherent lie succeeding a coherent one.

“ ‘It is not a bad thing to hear voices,’ said Krag, ‘but you mustn’t for a minute imagine that all is wise that comes to you out of the night-world.’ “ --David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

The story behind the "Simon Necronomicon".

Started writing new words to "Smells Like Teen Spirit". The refrain:

    Keep your mouth shut! --Pledge allegiance
    To our warheads --& our legions!
    Dubya said it, --I believe it!
    Freedom's stupid! --I don't need it!
      We got Lotto!
      A one-line credo!
      Dunce bravado!
      And global veto!

--but i decided to kill myself instead.

Partch emulator. I love the internet. (via Metafilter)

You know, if i was only paying attention to the American media, i might think the
Israeli-Palestinian problem is in the process of being solved. Instead of, like,
a wall being built around them (hasn't anyone seen "The Pianist"?)...(via IndyMedia)

Tales of Hell are pastorals, because of their unchanging light.

“No Place affords a more striking conviction of the Vanity of
human Hopes, than a Publick Library.” --Samuel Johnson

Vermeer was not a realist: he was a mystic of the visible.

‘...but twelve years are more in America than half a century
in Europe...’ --de Tocqueville

A name is the place of a name.
A place is the name of a place.

“The tongue is an eye.” --Wallace Stevens, Adagia

‘Gide dinner. Letters from young writers who ask if they should
go on. Gide replies: “What? You can keep yourself from writing
and you hesitate to do so?” ‘ --Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-
1951 (tr J O’Brien)

What we have so far called genius is more like the wings of those
reptiles who were not yet able to fly with them.

Rembrandt’s Beef; helps me to think about the nature of compassion.
For, in order to look at that side of beef as if it were human & capable
of human suffering, you must also be able to look at humans like
meat. Otherwise you will only see your own suffering.

I got a rejection slip that said, this is very fine writing & I like it but it
doesn’t FIT IN... Periodicals only exist today in order to reify a
point of view.

When i walk down stairs it's a controlled fall, that i continually interrupt
and launch again to sustain the smooth movement of. This, then, might
be a provisional definition of mature art--whose labor has disappeared,
like scaffolding, and yet it holds to a line of necessity (the unseen stairs
of my path) which is both arbitrary and contingent upon a specific context
of reality (not a theory or a feeling but a thought like the solution to a
quadratic equation: definitely ambiguous). --And there is the despair of
having nowhere to fall (no Culture), separate from the despair of being
unable to jump no culture, personally)--

A few more 21c fashion statements, from the recent G8 summit.

Sitar Rock, from "Norwegian
Wood" to "Losing My Religion" (may be a mandolin?). The sitar as signifier. How it goes from being about the
absence of sitars in the Rock of that time, to being about the presence (i.e.
other sitar songs) of sitars in Rock.

Working as a phone psychic.

Texas pledges allegiance. (I knew there
was something that needed to be fixed in this place...)

Just as Nietzsche may be said to have "invented" the 20c, Diderot certainly was the
inventor of the 19c... I wonder who will turn out to be this one's prophet...? The logical
choice, of course, is Orwell (although a tongue-tied Big Brother was, er...beyond
the reach of his irony)--or Kafka--, but my vote would be for H P Lovecraft. All his themes are here:
the Incursion from the Past (what started as Retro & finished as Back-to-the-Book-Funda-
mentalisms); the Horrific Revelation (Sept 11); the Uncaring Universe (cutting of
programs for the poor); & Humanity's Dethronement from Primacy (a rodent in the White
House).

    ”THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE

Here is the cross-road of Hell,
Under the white clouds floating below the blue stars,
Where the red lumps of flesh,
And the dark-red clods of iron,
Burnt aflame continuously and fell down.

Though the powder smoke covered the battlefield was now cleared,
In the valleys of hill-pass where the mist is now cleared,
There is no single pine-tree where birds may dwell,
Nor a wild chrysanthemum where bees or butterflies may stop.
Is it because the heat of the earth is already cooled off,
Or the bullet-scars are too deep in the naked surface of the earth?

Even though the wild bush grew into a faded grace
In the front garden of Panmunjôm,
What nightmare are you going to plot again,
You, the Demilitarized Zone, entangled with barbed wire,
155 miles from the east to the west,
And 4 kilo-meters from the south to the north?

Pondering all through the long, long autumn night,
I admit the map is our own.
Only the hostile aliens whose speech quite unknown to us
Got a more miserable heart than Brigadier-General Duds’s
Who was captured again by prisoners
In the miracle of the ultra-atomic age that owned freedom.
Whom shall I appeal to, then?

Climbing up the blue mossy rocks,
Under the maples all over the mountain,
How long must I keep standing here, face to face,
Vacantly with you, the fallen leaves as my friend,
As if I were a fading pine-tree of drooping branches?”

--Ho-gang Zang, op cit

“America is like England. America is very much what England would be
with the two hundred most interesting people removed.” --Ezra Pound (1914)

"Men who get tired of struggling with reality commit suicide. Nations
that get tired go to war." --Lewis Mumford, 1918

"The number of protons in the universe is about 10 to the 80th power. The
number of possible games of chess is much larger, perhaps 10 to the 10
to the 50th... If the universe were the chessboard, the protons the chessmen,
and any interchange in the position of two protons a move, then the number
of possible games would be something like the Skewes number [10 to the
10 to the 10 to the 34th power]." --G H Hardy, Ramanujan

"...l'objectif est une des formes du subjectif." --Remy de Gourmont

Sylvia Eggers on Creep Poetry (via Babelfish):
"" creep poets " have therefore a large affinity for new techischen media, understand themselves as information June gravel, are anti-canonical (although they quite avail themselves of a listing of potential creep authors - likewise classical avant-garde strategie[ 6 ]), against each form of the narcissus mash in the literature, lean the poetic " I " off and pull the encyclopedia " what's going to the on in my head " write before a concept, which - to that extent are a Stefan's critic ron silliman to agree - manifestale portions has, but straight by the range " passenger manifesto " [ 7 ] to remain wants: completely in reflect " creep poetry " - expose themselves exposed and thus reibflaeche/n produce."

I like that "information June gravel" bit especially.

   "RIDERS

Lean Riders--clean Riders! YES! on the tall-neat-beautiful horses
passing across terrain of green-and-growing things, gun butts
atwinkle, metal of spurs ajingle, chaps and rider-use boots
real-horses-up and gliding across sagebrush -- and Texas. --NOW!
   WHAT?!
do we have on the fast-down sprawling of concrete that stretches
on -- ON -- the long-gray-dread-bones of this country that loooves,
JUST WORSHIPS! its wheels -- AND "Death-on-the-Highway" threat-constant
on those long-gray-dread-bones? WHY!! WE HAVE many (MANY!) horse-powers
in oil-grimy-suffocates, where paw the small, mighty hooves of pistons
up-down, up-down up-...in the slick-dark holes (enclosed) that ARE!
CYLINDERS! ...how many CYLINDERS! ya got there, HEY? Twelve!!? OH, my!
YAY!! gee whiz! I have an "eight". -- We're speeching on gasoline engines
here (the "fabled" internal combustion) and wheels attached underneath to roll
all hell out of Land-Miles, especially those set in Distances-paved (HIGHWAYS!)

BUT now, let us consider just "wheels two and cylinders few," (rigged) set-up
(engineered) to "split the wind," and slightly resembling (reminiscent of) those noble
horse-rides-of-the-old-times, because there is a steed-like object here,
and one Rider shall "mount up and take off." BUT this is a "hog"! called
that in the language of the hogmen -- the "hog riders," themselves.
(Real road-slurpers, YES!) And mean little pig-eyes boo-peep out of MUCH
hair of the Riders on their "hogs," AND not ANY (discernible) Higher Purport
than the Going -- hog wild. -- Jewel-flapped saddlebags, fringe work
to impossible! unnecessary optionals to god-awful, the flash and the flaunt of cheap-show
to Ostentation's hell's limits, and the handlebar thongs lying out rigid-and-long
to whip like sticks in the air thick-made by the wild beast's wild passing --
THAT is a "hog" being ridden by a "hog rider." AAARRRGH...pop-pop...phuuummm..."

--David R Bunch, The Heartacher and the Warehouseman (Anamnesis Press, 2000)
[Need i add, his prose is much finer...?] Bunch's poetry makes a good case for the
use of different color typefaces, i think (instead of all that typographical differentiattion),
just as Dickinson's dashes might be better replaced, for us moderns, with a half linebreak...

I have a poem in the new anthology from Nthposition, Times New
Roman (a typeface, alas, that i really like--!). Be the first on your block to download the whole thing for free!

If the impeachment of Clinton was "about the lying, not about the sex", then i think they have a good
case for impeaching Bush, eh?

Here are Three Tankas from Richard Wilbur's recent Mayflies.

"On Lyman Flat

Scattered raindrops fall
On the roadside trees, jolting
A leaf here or there:
So troops stand at attention,
Motionless but for eye-blinks.

All Hallows' Eve

They are not the dead,
These sheeted tykes at the door,
Asking for candy:
But they are our successors,
And we their ghostly elders.

Wild Asters

In the frost-quelled field,
Asters yet fly the yearning
Colors of desire.
All honor to Aaron Burr,
Whose last whisper was "Madame...""

I can count myself at least a part-time member of any number of tribes, but possibly
the most subtle & bewildering identity i have, is that of parasinistral alienation (left
handed made in school to write with the other hand).[ --And out of all left-handers, a sub-
minority (like me) is actually right-hemisphere dominant in its real right-hemisphereness (so
to speak): in 70 percent, the left-hemisphere (usually dominant) is just on the wrong side*.]
I know this by the way i hold a pen. Lefties seldom attain literary distinction (Lewis Carroll
almost stands alone), much moreso artistic. It's not so much a fraternity as a handicap, though,
in practice. (Nobody favored another person for this quality alone.) Can't be a brand, because
it's only visible in the act of writing or reaching, & it's the product (sometimes) that comes out
differently. Can't be an ethnicity, because it's not noticeably hereditary & anyway just finding
out who was what in the old days is near-impossible. And a kitsch? A blik? (Collect left-handed
tools.) Like in Santeria, where Christian coverts continued their worship of old gods under the
new names of saints, to be parasinistral is to be conscious to yourself of "passing", of a kind
of meaningless deceit. Before i've had my coffee (or, long ago, under the influence--) i may reach
first with the left for something. I don't even have a vocabulary for most of these effects... And
finally, being parasinistral (& not just sinistral) is historical: at some point they quit stopping kids'
natural inclination--so this is a minority that will die out.

Article in an art magazine about Eastern European artists since the fall of the Soviet Empire.
The "intelligentsia" as a vital concept--something we lack in America. (A pundit is usually
just a loudmouth.) Reborn as blogstars? (Stay tuned.) I do know this: the television will not
be revolutionized. "Bohemia" at one time wanted to have this honor. But what it ended in
producing was merely celebrity-bohemians. How is that different from a starmachine-made
celebrity? Two systems, overlaid: the system of recognizing merit by a pedestal, toward which
all heads are turned; the system of oligarchy, in which those that have, get--those that haven't, lose
even more. Sort of a lottery fills the space between them. (It's sure not meritocracy!!!!) But observe
also the different rewards: the celebrity is rewarded with ubiquity, the successful oligarch with secrecy.
With being nowhere. (Or--Mt Olympus.) In fact a lot of analogies can be drawn: the transmogrification
of demi-gods, ktp. ("American Idol" again. One shot at fifteen-minute "immortality".) In this situation
to have any of the characteristics of the old intelligentsia, gives a certain "unelectability". You want
to be like everyone else, so they won't resent you when you win.

Certainly it is possible to distinguish the culture of fascism, from the culture of "militainment".
The latter doesn't care what you believe (any more than it cares about the truth: instead
of the Big Lie, there's a self-deception amounting to solipsistic indifference to the existence of
any truth) so long as you have your ducks in a row, a flag on your bumper, & no back talk
when the next sacrifices are announced. It's whatever the opposite of totalitarian is--nullitarian?
Since corporations are artificial intelligences that are unable to perceive humans as individuals,
the only "freedom" is--being overlooked.

I remember when i heard some buildings have been built with FAKE elevator call-buttons. Aha! i
thought. At last i have a metaphor for our "representative democracy"! --Would it really be such
a loss, if the buttons were removed altogether? But we love those buttons, just as we love the
illusion of fairness in competition, even as we instruct our offspring in the fine art of beating the
curve (& doing their homework for them). Well, a gradual disillusionment is at hand. The middle class
will be finding out what the underclass already knows about the system; & at last, all infrastructure
will be dismantled save the mechanisms of reward, of secrecy & celebrity. The future is cryptozoic.

Great new song: "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes. Curious how the almost impervious
Radio-Mockba airwaves of Dallas can yet allow once in a while a good song to slip through. --I have
NO SUCH HOPE for American Poetry Review.

"When vacantly I hear the rain
   Falling down on the paulownia--
Sadness echoes on every leaf,
   For I am despondent beyond all measures.

Never again will I plant
   A tree whose leaves are so broad."

--Sang yong Gim, ibid

"Not succeeding with books or swords,
   I am already a useless man!
Fifty years of spring-time
   Have I passed doing nothing.

But Oh! Should any blue mountain
   Deceive me or prove not to be a friend?"

--Czôn-têg Gim, ibid

Can it really be nine years since ":Everything Zen"??

"'The fallen pine on the blue mountain!
   Why are you lying there?'
'Unable to stand against wind and frost
   I was uprooted and fell down.

If you meet a good carpenter,
   Tell him that I am here.'"

--Unknown, ibid
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*This is too important not to give sources. I believe i got this
idea from the work of Dr Jerre Levy, as described in Ch 15 of
Jack Fincher's Lefties (1977); i have not kept up with
the research in recent years, which has truly become torrential
via the popularizing of Right-Brained-Artist mythology, as well as
(i believe) largely spurious generalizations about gender differences
in hemispheric specialization. On an unrelated note, i observe that
fully 80% of the returns on a Google search for "Jerre Levy" consist
of a single term paper, which has a ludicrous misspelling in the 2nd
sentence.

Europe goes to Mars, launched from a base in Kazakhstan.

There's a song by Rush, i think it is "The Freedom of Music", where they simultan-
eously quote Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" while giving it a reggae
twist, then immediately reverting back to their hard-rock framework. It's thrilling, &
i think not only because of the wit & dexterity involved. I remember the time it came
out, call it the late-Seventies of after-the-revolution-but-we-haven't found-out-yet-we-
lost; & particularly in relation to another phenomenon which only became visible in
retrospect: the re-segregation of pop music, a sad thing indeed, & truly terrible in its
consequences for the ensuing depleted genres of white & black music alike... At around
that same time i guess, Eric Clapton's "I Shot the Sheriff" was also taking a reggae flavor;
& both of these (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to introduce a new form (not even as
"exotica" did it endure, alas) feel like a spice wind from the Third World, tantalizing &
unattainable. They promise the brotherhood of all races, tangentially. Something we don't
even dare dream of, anymore.

The ethnic as signifier. Consider: as branding (Greek kitsch in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding";
everywhere tourists go, what they expect they find), as protest (beats looking to Castro's Cuba,
hippies to Hindu India, punks to England's dole-kids), as recovery (everyone can find a genealogical
flavor to their whitebread loaf, if they go back far enough), as alien (the Islamic Other, suspect by
virtue of their clear absence from Television Reality, until now), & as blik ( artists fascinated by
Japan, or Mexico, or Greco-Roman Antiquity, adopt whatever they can understand, or misunderstand,
for their own uses). And even those born to a real tribe, in a deracinated world, come to their own
culture as outsiders--as tourists. Their homeland is the new global order, in which they have no place,
except as raw material & labor for the factories of Octopus Corp; is it any wonder that a desperate few
opt for the protest angle, even if they have to violently distort their own tradition? Yes, "al Qaeda" is
our own kind of barbarian. No wonder we find the reflection intolerable.

Though there are foolish & hateful forces at work now who want to criminalize nonstandard sexualities,
they ultimately cannot succeed, for the division runs right through society, from the army to the halls
of government; but certainly a "chilling" if not a return to the closet, could ultimately ensue: & a stifling
of what is for me (as an outsider) the interesting development of, if not orientation-subcultures, at least
the cultural effects of selfconscious difference ("queerness" valorized). In places where abundant, it
almost feels like an ethnicity... I was particularly fascinated by the Seventies lesbian movement to find
out what a woman (or "womyn") -centered society could be like. Too bad the artificial language Làadan
never caught on. This was a genuine philosophical inquiry, of the sort academic philosophy has been
dead to for generations now... It was snuffed too soon, & too few monuments remain; i would have
liked to see what came after, once the debt to Rousseau was digested & outgrown. (What i think about
the differences between men & women: (1) differences of Jungian typology count for more, & are invariably
confused with & dichotomized into, according to the type of the theorizer; (2) only after we have achieved
a society that is gender-blind & propaganda-free, will we even be at a point where we have a "control
group" for this experiment; (3) woman are more rational, men more irrational--it's not that men are more
violent, but more likely to jump to the absurd conclusion that violence solves anything--in keeping with
the different causal timespans of, respectively, pregnancy (most of a year) & conception (part of an hour);
(4) it's probably pheromones that cause us to see this as a polarity, & not a universal yin-yang continuum;
& (5) the sexuality of women is rhythmic, men arrythmic: how can this not influence cosmology?

The Man: "Stuff just keeps getting more, & more, & more...until *BOOM!* the Eschaton: all different."

The Woman (to herself): "In the morning I know I'll have to put the toilet seat down again, like every
other morning."

   "Inverse Proportion

Is your voice silence?
Then your unsung song I clearly hear--
Your voice is silence.

Is your face darkness?
Then with closed eyes your face I clearly see--
Your face is darkness.

Is your shadow brightness?
Then when you are gone, at the dark window your shadow shines
Your shadow is brightness."

--Yong-un Han, ibid

What i think of as my "philosophizing" has been mainly a tedious attempt to
get my bearings & understand this cultural moment as a context for what i want
to do--without (very often) acknowledging, that the primary reason for it is only
the eternal question, "Why won't they let me play?" --Would i have tried at all, if
i perceived them then as i perceive them now: balancing sand grains in the middle
of a huge desert. I probably would have said, "This is no proper game, & these people
aren't intentionally excluding me. They are mad." --I think of the movie
"The King of Hearts", where after the townspeople run away, the loosed inhabitants
of an asylum take over & play at running it, using the clothes & props they find there.

Often NeoFormalists wish to include in their program the sister-arts of music & painting,
in which melodic composers & figurative artists seem to correspond to their party. And
indeed, the longing for the comfort of a lost tradition may be at the root of all three "retro"
tendencies. But it is both tempting & wildly amiss to draw direct parallels. I can see, on
the one hand, how highly abstract poetry is like instrumental music, & asyntactical poetry
is like atonal music, in that either one chooses to focus on the artistic materials themselves,
more than on the familiar pleasures of (pseudo-) mimesis. (These new pleasures can also
become as familiar: to me atonal music is like an exotic cuisine, when my palate tires of the
meat & potatos of the same old chord progressions, time after time...) On the other hand,
classical music & "realistic" painting are far removed from, say, a recording of the kind of
sounds humans make when experiencing actual emotions, or a photograph of an actual
landscape. (Picasso: "All painting is abstract painting.") Whereas narrative poetry is story-
telling & not that distant from the shaping of an anecdote in the hands of a raconteur... The
revivalists, in trying to extract workable formulae out of the social & historical contexts that
gave them meaning, are simply taking the signifiers of a style as direct indicators of value.
Which is something only a barbarian would conceive of. My idea of reinventing tradition is
rather different. We now have a huge vocabulary of all the things that have ever been tried
anywhere. First we learn to talk to each other (something that is surprisingly hard, once you
go beyond immediacies & cant), & especially, to listen. The forms will arise of themselves,
out of the need to communicate.

   "HAVE SOME SEX IN LIEU OF TAX

Somahomahah (1) retrieves amorous borax ranks from stipulated
damping sops up brickdust cow dung drags
air pellets into bunions mull over air (2)
locks wash damages motor nerves arc herons
cleanse semi-territorial megabytes adapt to chiefly ritual
mirror (3) splitting imbricates sacrificial bulk comics pass
ramifyingly by it alone slides into (4) flanks
of ridge-lines localized with absurd force shoots
maroons back to act (5) the other cobelligerent
outpatient stacks scopic drives oil (6) molar husks
toe slightly obsessional cocktails articulate base factor
five bundles frontal sound (7) shots into pints

(1) employees chosen for their smiles and round bottoms must be able to demonstrate the difference between subject knowledge and causing grievous bodily harm
(2) a corporate card goes pop when accepted while a purchasing card goes plop when rejected experience tells us
(3) a place where mind meets memory not to be confused with a one-horse town or a final frontier often dismissed for what is bunkum
(4) more or less identical to tomorrow's on-line success although icebergs say yes it is and yes it does
(5) leave well alone as there is no such thing as a fact a free translation or a flexible friend
(6) in combination there appears to be little contrast between a thick and a thin tongue but as modifier little may well be marked
(7) knowledge that has been disembowelled for its intrinsic strength and tested for its elastic qualities will be sealed as sound"

--Johan de Wit, Hippototescope (West House Books, 2000)

This little book (sent to me from England by And Rosta), of twenty-five 12-line poems with
seven words in each line & seven footnotes to each poem, certainly challenges the intrepid
reader. Seeing one of them in isolation, i think "brilliant"; trying to read several in succession,
i find myself skipping ahead in search of some payoff which, apart from the occasional &
seemingly inadvertant sound effects, plus the undeniable charm of a large vocabulary, seems
nonexistent. The footnotes contain a slight wit, but their relation to the footnoted words
is also apparently arbitrary. Finally, there is left the conjecture that this is the fruit of an automatic
procedure, some matrix filled in by a random process perhaps, or anyway a hidden one; & the
thought that now that this form has been invented, there remains the problem of finding a use
for it.

    ’Burried In This Earth

The smell of houses, still burning--

Broken bricks and scorched wooden boards are clumsily scattered,

Pushing aside the soil of dark earth
Where horrible bullets showered like pelting rains,
Every man was looking for something
That was left, not burned yet,
The thing that was left not burned yet.

The thing burried in this earth
Was expected to bloom once more,

It may well be a dream,
Or something
That was sowed in the name of hope.
The will anxious to dig out
Something burried in this earth.

That only, that only
Is the thing at last that is left among us.’

--Zông-on Bag, ibid

Just to lighten things up--the Thai Elephant Orchestra.

   'At the Moment When Passing a Rotary

In the burnt street,
Where passengers are almost scarce,
The north wind unknown mixed with snow-falls
Whizzled at intervals challenging,
The electric wires towards the square
Cry with ping.
   When I walk alone in such night-street of winter,
   I used to think subconsciously of the country lane
   of my childhood.

Under the glassy sky of the night
The cross is just vacant without passengers.
Some drunkers seemed to pass by
The building street so dimly laid,
Or as if picking a quarrel at once
Images are taking lonely their returning ways,
The night-streets of the world,
Thus becoming dark,
Casually they pass by all of a sudden.

The night is over, and the dawn breaks--
But while walking reluctantly,
Even at the moment when passing round a crowded rotary
There one may feel some expectation,
Perhaps, a small planet may linger
Around the wild gaze of a whore--'

Sang-ro Yi, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

   "Caravan to Timbuctoo"

Not terraces that snow embraces, jade;
Tarmac labyrinth in which we prosper
Or perish, with the car-flown flags that fade--
Modemtweet a cacophony of Hesper.
Why perish wisdoms more than modemtweet?
Shiloh i owe a depth of ullage to
Compels with blood & eke a furry whisper
But tarmac grips the very route-permute.
Now sometimes i have glimpse of another plea
Nestled in the solar setting-flash
That i might gladly lend obeisance-leash
If only there were other lord than jade

05 30 03

Ever since i saw the prologue to "The Exorcist-2: The Heretic" i've been
fascinated by Lalibela, Ethiopia. It was years
before i even knew what its name was. And civil war kept out tourism for
nearly a generation. Fortunately it's over now. I don't know if i'll ever go,
but it is indeed one of the wonders of the world--a holy city carved out of
stone.

"Gospedelic"--i saw this word in a music review. Isn't it perfect for that wordless
track of ululation, "Great Gig in the Sky", on Dark Side of the Moon?

A stanza i invented: the "snowflake". Has lines of 3, 5, 7, & 9 syllables--in any
order. (Or with an additional 11-syllable line, for a pentad.) Thus combines rigor
& irregularity...

'Every era believes that there is a literary genre that
has a kind of primacy. Today, for example, any writer who
has not written a novel is asked when he is going to write
one. (I myself am continually being asked.) In Shakespeare's
time, the literary work par excellence was the vast
epic poem, and that idea persisted into the eighteenth cen-
tury, when we have the example of Voltaire, the least epic
of men, who nevertheless writes an epic because without an epic
he would not have been a true man of letters for his contempo-
raries.' --Borges (1964), in: Selected Non-Fictions

'The long, long night of the Eleventh Month!
   I will cut its waist in two.
Putting the half confusedly
   Under the quilt of the spring wind,

So that, the night he comes back,
   I will unfold it for him.'

Zin-i Hwang, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

"the flight was long. we flew on a japanese plane that had strange wallpaper of drawings of little characters from all nations. the ones from italy were botticelli and michelangelo figures. strange to see a man's penis on the wallpaper of a commercial airplane though." --Beck

More on Salam Pax. (via Metafilter)

"DB: With the U.S. economy deteriorating and with more layoffs, how is the
Bush administration going to maintain what some are calling a garrison state
with permanent war and occupation of numerous countries? How are they going
to pull it off?

NC: They have to pull it off for about another six years. By that time they
hope they will have institutionalized highly reactionary programs within the
United States. They will have left the economy in a very serious state, with
huge deficits, pretty much the way they did in the 1980s. And then it will
be somebody else’s problem to patch it together." --interview with Noam Chomsky

There are some works i seldom listen to, yet represent for me a sort of ne plus ultra of musical
achievement; one of these being the "Threnody to the New Victims of Hiroshima" by Q.R. Ghazala, an
electronic musician who builds his own instruments, including the "vox insecta" which performs this.
His aim was to synthesize an insect voice that is the voice of all insects, & doubtless he has succeeded.
The monotonous, almost subliminally-varying buzz is just a little more disturbing than white noise, & one
can ask if an insect orchestra would really not invest more effort in dynamics, since bugs in general seem
not overfond of repose. But these are quibbles. It's a masterpiece.

I saw "Bruce Almighty" the other day--it had some funny moments. But i think the filmmakers
really missed their chance with the schmaltzy ending. He should have kept meddling until he
destroyed the world a la "Dr Strangelove". Wouldn't that be a gas? But perhaps, as
people keep saying, "irony is dead". --Or rather, that is not a story that can be told from Dubya's
POV...

Can't get that place Tokelau out of my mind. One boat goes there a month from Samoa.

I remember getting the word "Availibilism"* from someone in the 80's; & i see in the end all my
philosophies converge there. Or, to be more respectable, "bricolage". Use what you have. Don't
pine for gold-nib pens & violet-indigo ink (which once i mixed up just so i could write in that color--),
don't wait for the Nobel committee to come knocking on your door. If you find yourself shipwrecked
on an island (preferably Tokelau) without modems, make art out of sticks & mud...

"Imagine giving the KKK billions of dollars to victimize African-Americans. This is essentially what's happening when you pay your taxes, you're paying for the harrassment, eviction, and murder of Palestinians Arabs. You're paying for the bullets to kill and cripple Palestinians pre-teens." --Kurt Nimmo at Dr Menlo dot com.

Horned Kangaroos--no, it's not genetic engineering (this time), it's Australian fossils.

Oh, alright, i gotta post it--if only for the parasite key ring.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I find the word (though spelled "AVAILABISM") on the "Voluptuous Horror
of Karen Black" website--though i'd almost swear i saw it used somewhere
in Angry Women (Re/Search)--perhaps by Karen Finley...

    ”Moorawathimeering

Into moorawathimeering,
where atninga dare not tread,
leaving wurley for a wilban,
tallabilla, you have fled.

Wombalunga curses, waitjurk--
though we cannot break the ban,
and follow tchidna any further
after one-time karaman.

Far in moorawathimeering,
safe from wallan darenderong,
tallabilla waitjurk, wander
silently the whole day long.

Go with only lilliri
to walk along beside you there,
while douran-douran voices wail
and Karaworo beats the air.”

--Rex Ingamells in: The Jindyworobaks, ed. Brian Elliott 1979

moorawathimeering- the Land of the lost, a sanctuary for outcasts
atninga- a group sent to carry out tribal justice; vengeance party
wurley- dwelling; hut or shelter of boughs
wilban- cave
tallabilla- outlaw
wombalunga- carry
waitjurk- murderer
tchidna- footprint
karaman- leader
wallan- strong
darendarong- avenger
lilliri- shadow
douran douran- north wind
karaworo- eaglehawk

The Heavy Metal Umlaut.

More Euro news.

‘ “Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts; ...All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents... I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds. ...this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; which is never petty, nver ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be...this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of a hundred and four; count them, Chevalley, count them: May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success...” ‘ --Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958; tr Archibald Colquhoun, 1960) [one of the best things ever written about Texas & Texans--wasn’t.]

The new death camps. (via metafilter & others)

So the address i'd been playing chess at--http://b2-b4.tk (now dot com)--is Tokelau! Where's that?

Atari emulators, like that car the Excalibur--modern underneath, retro on top--are a kind of glimflash.

Blogwise dot com has listed "Xvarenah" among its blogs on poetics. I wonder if meta-blogging is the next big thing...

“In 1921 a poetry magazine Zangmi-czon or the Rose-Village was published, where Zong-hwa Bag (pen name, Wôltan or Moon and Shallow) and Yônghûi Bag (pen name, Hoewôl or Thinking of the Moon) wrote decadentic poetry. In the following year a literary magazine Bêgzo or The White Tide produced three poets, Sa-yong Hong (pen name, Nozag or The Dew Sparrow), Sang-hwa Yi (pen name, Sang-hwa or Thinking of Fire), and Gi-zin Gim (pen name, Palbong or the Eight Peaks), and they were rather humanistic. In the same year a poetry magazine Gûmsông or The Venus was published by a group of nationalistic lyrists, Zu-dong Yang (pen name, Mue or The Endless), Zanghûi Yi (pen name, Gowôl or The Old Moon), and others.” --In-Sôb Zông, A Pageant of Korean Poetry (1963)

‘This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic.’ --Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (tr Donald Keene 1958) [--H'm. Poetry is tragic, while blog is comic...but poetics is comic & blogger is tragic...]

    ’This Body

This body
Is a blown leaf.
Till it is buried under the earth, wet by dew,
According to the blowing wind, in the evening sky,
I will be blown and willwhisper.

This body
Is a broken piece of a ship pushed in on the seashore.
Till it is frozen by the cold wind,
As the waves move among the reeds,
It will move and swing.

This body
is a sick and useless body.
Till the ants build their storehouses in this body,
It will recite and sing as it sees and hears,
And I shall pray in a remote place.’

Un Zo, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

Pollack recants on NPR. I guess that storm wasn't so threatening, after all...

SARS from Mars.

An interview with Coffin Joe.

The lunatics in charge...

Listening to: "Sepharad: Songs of the Spanish Jews in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire" (DHM, 1996).

N.B. we are greatly mistaken in trying to force ourselves to concentrate more often than a few times a day, or longer than a few minutes at a time. Coffee only simulates the effects of concentration: it shuts out peripheries, but does not direct to one centerpoint. That takes interest. For concentration is the preparatory state for a precise act. When no such exactitude is needed, concentration wastes itself either in embellishments or excess pre-fitting (this accounts for how a lot of postmodern art looks, busy without being energetic; its "surrealism" is often all too premeditated). The normal state for humans, as other mammals, is relaxation (ditention, for maximum alertness to marginal sign-threshold phenomena). (Nowadays we have to learn how to relax without falling asleep or into a trance, and it's easier to fake it with alcohol & downers than condition the CNS to move quickly through several states.)

Prolonged concentration becomes stressful, generating the psychic equivalents of embellishments (complexes) & excess prefitting (neurosis). Boredom may be defined as a drive towards concentration in the absence of any interesting thing to focus on. It comes from habitual concentration on banal objects. A free person doesn't choose to force his attention; it happens automatically with learning. What makes something interesting is its potential for completing a larger gestalt (i have also described this as "relevant novelty"). Thus you have to have a worldview-context in order to be able to interest yourself in many things. Otherwuise they're just Noise, or else stimulation for an idle curiosity that won't bother to make sense of it, and learns nothing. (TV without real education is perceived very differently than TV with; that is, even its banality can be informative.)

Autumnal & eternal rose,
Where dreams divide & time lays siege,
The stuff of deliquescent throes,
A moment in the eyes of one mad liege.

Pale, I remember, ultramarine
Was then the sea. Now fathoms close
About that locket’s fall, while green
Remains to me the wither of the rose.

Her revenant rose & came to dwell
Here with a fragment from that dream
Who twice himself tried ring the knell…
What profits dry bones strewn where roses teem?

So two unfound ones fill the clothes
Of others born to such prestige
And fake it. Nonetheless, some rose
Wafture permeates the rusted cage.

11 17 00

'The rancid chrysanthemum aches' --Hagiwara Sakutarô, Howling at the Moon

Isn't Insomnia the anguished knowledge that you have wasted the day, that you have done nothing?--And the wish for immortality, of whatever ilk, isn't that a spiritual insomnia, the thirst for infinity from never having grasped one's finitude in the world's particularity?? The fame that would fill our ears is a rude misunderstanding translated into archetypal clarity; the plenitude that consoles and delivers a creator at the time of creation is a precise comprehension of one perfect nuance of form--and you can jabber all you want about Art and artworks and never come close to this paradox. It is not for sharing. What the community can possess is an abundance of creative persons and room for them to grow in. Either a place sparkles with its own energies or it is a dustbin and matter-trap (though it explode, rage, and whirl with unconsummated inertias). When will there be a civilization that treasures silence, then music, and only after, speech? --Not by talking about it--

In case you wondered what the leaflets we dropped on Iraq look like.

A haiku by Lt. Smash:

   “Sunrise

A beautiful dawn
Scent of sulfur in the air
Not a tree in sight."

"The underlying problem is not that certainty is the opposite of doubt, but rather that certainty is the opposite of complexity. I sometimes think that the political spectrum today runs not on a left-right axis, but rather on a simple-complex one." --Silliman's Blog

I'm a Badger.

I see the Wikipedia article on 70 Virginis has been amended to reflect my contribution. When this star was first discovered to have a planet, all sorts of news reports went out that a "new water world" had been found. It took me a lot of searching, but i found the original article. Which i realized used information about the distance of the star that was out of date. According to Hipparchos, it can't have oceans (except at considerably more air pressure than on Earth), & so it is not a good candidate for life. But there is virtually nothing on the internet to reflect this--even on sites that give the correct distance... I may still write about this star one day; it has generated its own mythology so quickly.

      "Ort of the Bad Hours"

The brother of a cactus once i knew,
Scattering of dog bristles
Across the rust tile floor.
At six thousand feet
An upsidedown mouse.
I remember the silver dazzle
Of almost formless mist
We were driving through yesterday,
And the Wiki comes with me.

9 15 01

A wonderful compendium of some of the uses Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been put to, & related matters. (via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Zeitgeist. There was a time when, as a Whig (Retro Avant Garde), i prowled antique malls not in search of objets de virtu, but for icons redolent to me of the periods that i preferred to my own. Just the other night i saw "Down with Love", & realized that to be Whig is no longer even slightly Avant--it's mainstream. (Which won't make me throw out my kidney-shaped two-tier coffee table, though.) Moreover, this tendency has been visible in all sorts of places you wouldn't expect: there's been a renaissance in "Hard" scifi from about the early 90's; & even Retro chess openings, starting likewise thereabouts (Scotch Opening, Four Knights' Game--which i would've sworn would never be played again between grandmasters). And now i see that what we are experiencing is not just a Cold War Nostalgia--it's a McCarthy Flashback!

This is how i'd display my links if i knew how to do it. (via Dr Menlo) The artform of the Blog finally starts to leave its print-based shapes behind...

I say i forget everything--why? Does this mean i believe thoughts are only words and when i stop using a set of words i no longer have those thoughts? Or are thoughts consumed--without ash--in recombination? (Well, what happens to my food? I name kinds of dishes, but not each one: maybe what i thought yesterday and today, is just one kind of idea, a matter of chef's convenience, but the active part is its atoms--) I mourn the natural progression of conscious act into reflexive habit, not in my muscles, only when it happens with the brain-muscle... I remember everything, really: in the "unconscious". So this complaint is like saying: I shouldn't sleep. (Did Gurdjieff? Even at the wheel!)

The recurrence of my concerns is proof enough they were underground awhile and have surfaced again, like certain subway trains.

I'm not a naturally reflective person and it seems absurd to me now that i thought i was. The sort of self-perceptions i do have are almost traceless, they come and then meeting some interceptor disappear before ever having been verbalized & made permanently conscious. Like iridescent colors, green becoming red and everything in between, instantly, so that we don't have a chance to identify one at a time, but call it: iridescence. And i call it: forgetfulness. But isn't it rather the ternal watchfulness of that intercepting force, that my emotions seem viewed through an opera glass far away and small and brightly unreal? That puts a distance in front of my response? Should i say it's--reflection? Reflecting daylight...into a camera obscura. And so it is that i make images. Because in my dark room i am curious...but with a curiosity that is satisfied with any image--.

Four-kanji proverbs. (via Language Hat) --I think i'm going to try this in Lojban!

"He's a tormented soul, because he doesn't want to turn into a monster; yet he enjoys the feeling of power.." --Stan Lee on The Hulk (substitute: The American Empire)

In a film i saw, [the Spanish surrealist playwright] Arrabal called Bobby Fischer a mystic. Yes. As there are insights which change nothing, so also does the world have impotent divinities.

If a sculptor of marble gets diverted into making mud-pies, that's not tragic. If the world runs out of marble and he goes around busting up old statues for their material, that's just being practical. But if the world still has marble and he believes (whether told or self-deluded) that marble must be made in the mind and can only be had by wishing for it, that's tragic.

    "The Last Artists"

They learned every coercion,
  forgot how to ask.

(4 17 83)

'Where men are lacking, strive to be a man.' --sayings of Rabbi Hillel, quoted in: Kaufmann, Religion in 4 Dimensions

Art would be so much less a mystery if we all were artists and never kept what wasn't fully inspired. Then we wouldn't have to bust our definitions trying to include everything that anybody ever kept...trying to put into words the nonverbal part because all we understand is words...

The avantgarde is a necessary position because today art must provide what used to be taken for granted, a common cultural context... --i wrote to [my publisher]. But the absence of culture is our common context, and so the struggle is not against dead traditions but against indiscriminate eclecticism. Most of those who appear to be "traditional" artists* have borrowed a few signs from the impressionists, some from the Dutch Masters (not much! not enough!), and the rest from the corpse-corpus of Academic painting as it has lingered in textbooks alone. What is their attitude? That subject matter and a certain "finish" make a legitimate picture. Well? By their refusal to take chances, they are killing art with Boredom. (Wanting to paint just like Rembrandt or Vermeer is a slavish ambition, but at least it's ambitious--like all those who climb Mt Everest after the first one...)

HERE IS THE NIETZSCHE QUOTE ALL NIETZSCHEANS OVERLOOK: (From Kaufmann's Will to Power)
'46. "Weakness of the Will": that is a metaphor that can prove misleading. For there is no will, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result in a "weak will"; their coordination under a single predominant impulse results in a "strong will": in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the precision and the clarity of the direction.'
---------------------------------------------------------
*this goes double for NeoFormalists. What an epidemic of epigonorrhea!

We got in an old book on "Fighting Venereal Diseases". Glued inside the front cover is a letter dated 1920 from the Treasury Dept, US Public Health Service instructing that "This book is to be placed in all Dallas barber shops...You may not be aware of the fact that during the year 1919, over fifteen hundred Dallas citizens visited specialists on venereal diseases and were found to be infected with either gonorrhea or syphilis. Thirty-four of these fifteen hundred died."

The first new Chicken joke of the 21c: "comrade #1: Comrade, why did the free-range chicken cross the road?

comrade # 2: Because she enjoyed exercising her rights as a free citizen of the range!" (from tinylittlepenis.com)

"Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, has compared the invasion of Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Poland. He told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that 130 Americans had died "for a lie", adding: "I see no difference between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Poland in 1939." Both invasions were based on what he said was an artificial argument of self-defense. President George W Bush had used the September 11 attacks as Hitler used the 1933 burning of the Reichstag to repress domestic dissidents." (from drmenlo.com)

Eduardo Kac had a rabbit made with jellyfish DNA, so it glows chartreuse in a certain wavelength of blue light. Here's his page on what he calls "transgenic art". I wrote this limerick about it:

      "On Alba, the G F P Bunny"

   With help from some whitecoats, Ed Kac
   Patched the genes of a rabbit in spots,
     So the right wavelength'd blues
     Turn her pelt bright chartreuse.
   What's wrong with this picture? Er...lots.

5-13-01

Texans who hunt illegal aliens. (I'm sure they hold hands & pray first.)

"Adamant nights in which our wisest apes
Met on a cracked mud terrace not yet Ur
And with presumption more than amateur
Stared the random starlight into shapes." --Merrill

"All those contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties comic art. They're semiotic phantoms..." --William Gibson in: Mirrorshades

--Take a moment to consider that phrase: semiotic phantoms. I'm beginning to think the Twentieth Century can be explained by nothing else; that our term "ideology", far from referring to any sort of reasoned system, describes rather the simple prevalence of such phantoms that, once expected, punctually make their appearance. I have examined all the books that purport to contain ideological systems, in search of a definitive solidity, but found nothing but immense heaps of patches. The phenomena came first & every objection of common sense had to be dealt with, as it naturally arose. Patches, & still more patches! The phenomena were sacrosanct. Here is a true koan: why is it easier to believe some things than others? (You know, the first time it was raised, they made him drink fucking hemlock.) And i'm still looking for the counter-koan: what do you do to make someone stop believing something they believe in just because it makes them feel good?

Like maybe: WAIT THREE HUNDRED YEARS.

I don't want to hear another person talk about the NeoCons as if they had managed to give intellectual rigor to their politics of bigotry & superstition. They are anti-intellectuals who read, but that doesn't make them intellectuals; if you read for the sole purpose of justifying your prejudices, that makes you an anti-intellectual. (Something the Right has no monopoly on, to be sure.) And it's mostly their "semiotic phantoms" which have infested the present landscape, & caused so much grief & havoc by the stupid things people do who believe in them.

Do you want an example? What about this thing they call "reality television"? It's actually games played with non-professional actors, of course; & only as real as the cameramen & the editors of the raw footage care to present. But what is the idea that it propagates? That none of us is any better than the most venal, self-serving humans they can scrape up. That ALL PEOPLE, EVERYWHERE will do ANYTHING for money. How very useful a belief for the architects of empire! This semiotic phantom, which properly should be called "Normalcy = Moral Squalor", although the people who harbor it would consider it a solacing & sometimes amusing adult-realism, was at one time the exclusive possession of pirates & robber barons, & heartily condemned by the majority of people who knew in their bones that a society is based on reciprocity & acceptance of civil duties, as much as it is on public buildings & infrastructure. And i don't even now think that it has become the belief of a majority of Americans...

Listen. I was just reading in Counterpunch an excellent article on Things You Can Do Against the Republicans. But little by little something started nagging at me, till at last i had to stop in disgust. It was steeped in a certain class-illusion, one i was born to & cannot wholly abjure, that i have to characterize to myself as the "Periclean Bourgeoisie Syndrome". It has to do with one's sense of personal empowerment, of the sphere of action possible to a person of your station in life. If i had been born otherwise, i know it would be utterly impossible for me to believe in some of the things i have, such as "you can be anything you want to be" & "what matters is what's inside you"... Not that it's not a good thing to want to always tell the truth, for example, believing that this is in all situations the route to an optimal outcome. But even the most privileged slave of Pericles himself could have told you that dissembling is required to the precise extent that there is inequity in personal power. (I would have made a bad slave.)

I think of a certain scene in the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair", when Pierce Brosnan is out racing his million-dollar sailboat with another rich man. Then he wrecks it on purpose, just for the hell of it. This is a portrait of American politics. Once i cheered, because the sailboat of "my team" won. Does this mean i really have a boat of my own in the race? You could say this is cynical, because it promotes apathy. My answer is that as a philosopher begins by removing all the false notions before he can ever come up with a new one that is possibly true, you have to give up your class illusions in order to see what kind of action is possible for you in the real world. I WILL be voting in 2004. But not to salve my conscience!

So, what does a real "blow for freedom" look like? What about that anonymous casino employee who broke the story of William Bennett's gambling addiction? Damage control can try all it can, but he's never going to be as shiny as he was before. And there's a certain blogger in Iraq, who i think has accomplished more than any other figure on the Internet (except maybe Michael Moore--): simply by being what he is. A human being, who happened to be born in Iraq... And how different these things are, from the idea of asking complete strangers for money, till you've accumulated enough to build your own million-dollar sailboat--that the officials probably won't let you run in the race anyway.

"...Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few." --Shelley

'Just as the most terrible fears come at noontide, when, risen to his zenith and hidden behind his violet shields, the evil Dragon [i.e. the sun] weaves his spells, so the deepest mystery is revealed only when the masks are removed.' --Sologub in: The Russian Symbolist Theater

"People often die in the night, devoured by their own nightmares." --Greg Bear in Mirrorshades

"There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone, but the details are not known. There are those who believe it would be better if one of the seven were a financier." --R A Lafferty, "About a Secret Crocodile"

"Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817).
Founding the Dupont Company wasn't enough for this eccentric French aristocrat who had immegrated to the United States. An avid naturalist and birdwatcher he also compiled two dictionaries in 1807, which he entitled Crow-French and Nightingale-French. In them he gave what he called the French translations of the various calls of the crow and the nightingale.

The cat, claimed the French-American author, is a better speaker than the dog. 'The cat,' he explained, 'has the advantage of a language which has the same vowels as pronounced by the dog with six consonants in addition: m, n, g, h, v and f. Consequently the cat has a greater number of words.'" --Robert Hendrickson, American Literary Anecdotes (1990)

An old poem of mine from the Eighties:

Hitler lost
but the concentration camp
won

"Solitude is the richness of self. Loneliness is the poverty of self." --May Sarton

'I still am able to find some enchantment
In trifles I meet quite by accident:
A book with title and the ending missing,
This rose I hold, withering, without scent.

It pleases me that drops of rain are trembling
Silver and pure upon its moiré velours,
That I found this rose on a dirty sidewalk,
That I'll toss it into the trash, for sure.'

--George Ivanov, in: Modern Russian Poetry

One of my Volapük poems: "Neif tü Reinüp" ('Knife at Raintime')

   Fidil pefalöl dese lusil,
   O lecütel, tobuls no dönu
   olükömons is lienetiks.
   Exilonok mekavamüster
   nesinifodio sembal, e
   mutob gegivön ad ol voli
   kölöfikum keli älärnob
   da logs ola, voli de fil kel
   päfanon fa ob de oliks muds
   tel, e voli dolas luplikün
   in ola lad keli ädünob.

(Ort fallen from the sorry sky, O great deceiver, Mad Octobers will not arrive here again. The artificial mystery has banished itself to some meaninglessness or other, & i must give you back the world more colorful i learned through your eyes, the world of fire that was caught by me from your mouths twain, & the world of most wolfish griefs in your heart which i served.)

Accent always on the last syllable.

"Maned with light, ember and anodyne" --Jamres Merrill, Divine Comedies

Read in Plimpton's Shadow Box about the meeting of Marianne Moore & Muhammed Ali. They wrote a poem together. Later she went to watch him box--wearing her tricorne hat.

...[In the closed stacks] i scanned Enver Hoxha's memoirs. The Albanian dictator was describing a meeting with Tito. Tito's dog kept farting. Then they went for a ride in a rowboat. The dog swam after them &, climbing aboard, almost capsized it (Hoxha couldn't swim). The dog shook himself dry all over Hoxha's suit, soaking him.

"...justifications for the prison's existence, six-foot letters in a language nobody could read." --Paul Park, Soldiers of Paradise (1987)

"A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age." --Neil Postman, Technopoly (1992)

The first qualification to be a poet nowadays is not to read poetry. There is no second qualification.

Do i not believe in my own freedom at all, even as i understand that so much of this & my earlier acknowledged errors, happened precisely because i knew better & refused to do the sensible thing, over & over? It's like the gambler who continues to lose money--you can't call it, after a certain point, hope. Only the shape of hope. Which is almost a calling, a cry for hope to come... I believe that, as long as i don't mistake this wrongness, my lucidity itself will protect me. With the same fearlessness, once i hitchhiked cross-country with nothing but a dime in my pocket; but the only proper use of this state, very likely, is the beginning of a very ambitious artwork (which all its other uses, are nothing but metaphors for--)... these knots i seem to be weaving, aren't they evidence of stories beginning to tell themselves, somewhere deeper than i have yet been able to look for them?

A new speech by the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. There aren't many public figures i respect, but she is one of them. (via Robot Wisdom) Vonnegut's always worth listening to, too.

"Saturated


I am trying to reconcile two thoughts, though life keeps firing back, disrupting the ability to create. I want to do well on the occasion of this presentation. I focus on the hope of the mother-wordsmith and the father who makes moving pictures. I think their daughter incredibly lucky to be born to such art. So I try to reconcile the two thoughts, to whittle them down to their most precise point, so I can turn them inside out and make something new and learn from the mere act of creation.

My memory, a month later, is still saturated with images of oak trees in New Orleans; not just the proud stately ones which are insured for millions of dollars and inhabit the emerald grounds of the plantation famous for being so photogenic. Breathtaking, yes, but so scrupulously maintained; awe inspiring, no doubt, but that¹s not where my mind wanders. Instead, I keep reliving the scene at South Alexander Street where the oak trees are almost as old and beautiful, but more reckless as they have been victimized, boxed into a corner. That was a long time ago, a hundred years or more, and they have long forgotten how to be polite. There remain no vestiges of Southern hospitality on South Alexander Street, where the roots, the thick, twisted, knotted fingers, of the live oak trees have taken over, demolishing the sidewalk; an intriguing disarray of cracked and buckled concrete slabs. The handiwork of a silent terrorist. The sheer heft of these roots, and the force with which they reveal their presence, strikes me as powerfully poetic and even comforting, the way they just go on and on undeterred. I think if I could just capture the right words I would have a poem benefiting the birth of a child.

The second thought I have concerns my beautiful seven year old niece who, from the day she was born, has brought such enormous joy into my life. Hilary Rodham had it right when she said it took a village; that¹s what it¹s like in our household: husband, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. I show my niece a photograph I took inside a historic New Orleans townhouse; it¹s a life size portrait of a proud Creole matriarch. My niece studies the woman¹s finery, runs her finger across the photo, then asks me, in a voice that is both sweet and filled with concern, a question so frank it startles me, sets off a tremor in my solar plexus.

³Aunt Melanie, was she a good person?²

I can¹t imagine why my niece would ask such a thing. I look at the portrait. I look at my niece, her face so pretty and open to a world of possibilities. At that instant, though, her voice is tinged with something inexplicably fully-grown. I do not know how to answer her, but it never occurs to me to say that. Instead, I offer a pat explanation about how the woman most likely thought of herself as a good Catholic. I know it¹s a weak answer, but I hope it¹s enough to suit her.

Later my niece and I play a board game, and I still think of roots and my own childhood; the way we used to have to call the plumber once or twice a year because the cottonwood¹s roots stifled our plumbing. I think I might want to hunt down my grandma¹s old ivory dominoes and teach my niece how to play, just like my grandma taught me. And I continue to think about roots and childhood and difficult questions. And I am saturated with thoughts of these things."

Melanie Pruit

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism
Free Inquiry Spring 2003 5-11-3

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed
to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
They Thought They Were Free
By Milton Mayer
http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free_nn4.html
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945",
University of Chicago Press. Reissued in paperback, April, 1981.
As Harpers Magazine noted when the book was published in 1955 (U. of Chicago), Milton Mayerâsextraordinarily far-sighted book on the Germans is more timely today than ever·ä
This crucial book tells how and why 'decent men' became Nazis through short biographies of 10 law-abiding citizens. An American journalist of German/Jewish descent, Mr. Mayer provides a fascinating window into the lives, thoughts and emotions of a people caught up in the rush of the Nazi movement. It is a book that should make people pause and think -- not only about the Germans, but also about themselves.
But Then It Was Too Late
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the universe was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was "expected to" participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to think. There was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings" and "consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.
"Your "little men," your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, "everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to ö to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked ö if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in ö your nation, your people ö is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done ( for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or "adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn't an anti Nazi. He was just ö a judge. In "42" or "43", early "43", I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an "Aryan" woman. This was "race injury", something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case a bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a "nonracial" offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party "processing" which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the "nonracial" charge, in the judge's opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.
"
"And the judge?"
"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience ö a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That's how I heard about it.) After the "44" Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don't know."
I said nothing.
"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was "defeatism." You assumed that there were lists of those who would be "dealt with" later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a "victory orgy" to "take care of" those who thought that their "treasonable attitude" had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
"Once the war began, the government could do anything "necessary" to win it; so it was with the "final solution" of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its "necessities" gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."
 Milton Mayer
http://www.rense.com/general37/fascism.htm
(via Metafilter)

"Party like it's 1939!"