Dogs playing poker. Everyone's seem them.
Why isn't C M Coolidge a household name?

We will bury you.

I've got this great idea for a technothriller: you know
these "worm" viruses that're all over the Internet?
What if one got into a nuclear power plant's computer?
--Well, i can't sell that one, 'cause it already happened.
(via slashdot)

Remembering: The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber (1961),
a rollicking satire about a future where "wordwooze" is written by
the operators of writing-machines, who still pride themselves on
the glamour of authorship. (Maybe that term ought to displace
"quietude" in our critical vocabulary--since "quietude" sounds
like it's good for something.)

French Symbolisme left its seeds in many other literatures
(though barely in English--Stevens? Plath??)--none more
gaudily than Russia's; & the strangest of the Russian
Symbolists has to be Sologub. He writes like he can't
make up his mind to be a mystic or a Satanist, an aesthete
or a terrorist... Very little of his poetry has been trans-
lated, but a couple of the novels are available. Here's The
Created Legend on pdf.

Years ago another poet tried to flimflam me by a word,
"Althusserian", of great beauty but very little significance,
so far as i could discover. Maybe now it has one.

It has always bothered me that the division in sonnets
between the octave & the sestet, comes about six
syllables short of dividing this 140 syllable form into
the Golden Section. E.g. 86 + 53 = 139 for a much
more numerologically satisfying arrangement. Or 137
= 85 + 52, which i have sometimes lineated as 13-11-13-
11-13-11-13 & 11-9-7-9-7-9. For a long time i only wrote
thirteen line sonnets ("treizains"), & the same numbers
i mentioned above for 137 syllables total can easily be
lineated into 11-10-11-10-11-10-11-11 & 10-10-11-10-11.

The trouble with Magnetic Poetry for me always has been
that its vocabulary, while perhaps "poetical" enough for
the non-poet, makes saying anything new & interesting
virtually impossible. However, with Shakespeare Magnet
Poetry, that just might have been solved.

Gustav Meyrink wasn't just your regular Decadent drug-taking
occultist visionary writer--he lived in Prague. (Unfortunately,
there is very little on the internet about him in English.) I
recommend all his novels--The Golem is a classic--they are
still in print in paperback, i believe.

When you get burnt out on hard rock, it's time for the
triple-saxophone noise music of Borbetomagus.

"[Ed] Kienholz's last work was his burial, which took place
outside his hunting cabin on a mountaintop in Hope, Idaho.
A heart attack felled him at age sixty-seven, and now
his corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front
seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar
and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti
beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk.
He was set for the Afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes
the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz,
rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole: the most
Egyptian funeral ever held in the American West, a fitting
exequy for this profuse, energetic, sometimes brilliant,
and sometimes hopelessly vulgar artist." --Robert Hughes,
American Visions (1997)

Listening to: Tommy James & the Shondells.

The names of the moons.

"For I have left the three Christs of Ypsilanti" --Anne Sexton

Ah! we just got in Alfred Wegener's book. I remember
when i first heard about his theory of Continental Drift,
in the late 60's, it was presented as radical & controversial;
today it's scientific orthodoxy. But does the man in the
street really have an inkling that the very ground beneath
our feet is sliding across the earth's mantle like a drunk
on a banana peel?

Just saw "Seabiscuit"; & while it's just okay as a movie of
its pretensions, i can't help thinking how much we have
changed in our sympathies for the underdog. We started
as an underdog nation--& now we pretty much limit ourselves
to an unvoiced "glad it's not me" whenever we discover
the existence (normally well-concealed: at least in the
camera-eyes of Consensus Reality) of one of these "losers".
Now we've become the Global Bully; now it's those who
desire peace & understanding that're underdogs...

Chinese punk band Brain Failure toured the US this past
spring. (via Giant Robot magazine)

A great contemporary illustrator.

Reading: Mr Weston's Good Wine (1927) by T F Powys.

Listening to: Laura Nyro, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat.

Bell Hooks is mad.

A young Muslim woman blogging from Kuwait. (via Turning Tables)
This one & this one from her. This one from Salam Pax.
The picture over there is becoming much clearer...alas.
"You know what? Something like this could never happen to the
Ministry of Oil." --Riverbend Blog

   "Celebration of Failure

Through pain the land of pain,
Through tender exiguity,
Through cruel self-suspicion:
Thus came I to this inch of wholeness.

It was a promise.
After pain, I said,
An inch will be what never a boasted mile.

And haughty judgement,
That frowned upon a faultless plan,
Now smiles upon this crippled execution,
And my dashed beauty praises me."

--Laura Riding

The song of Gulf II--not a protest, but a Teenage Death
Song.

"Assuming, as seems reasonable, that the president of the
United States was neither drunk nor on LSD..."

I didn't win, but i'm sure these are all way-cool*. (My entry
follows:)

"One Hundred Years Ago Today, GUELPHS
Apeared

In the time of the Fall of the Towwers, a singular
volume apeared, & went for long unnoticed in the
places were “serious’” literature was still cherished
(if not practiced); in fact it took the
hopeful-despairing expedient of posting the entire
text onto wat was then known as the “Inter-Knit” (the
pre-Nousphere, we would say now) for it to connect
with an appreciative readerschip. --I beg the Gentle
Reader’s indulgence for so coy & redondant an ovreture
here, but I think on the centenary of its issuance it
is worth reflecting on the truly astonishing
beginnings to our present aera, namely a certain
pseudonymoic schience-fiction novel “GUELPHS: by
Graywyvern”--yes, it orginally purported to be a
meed-up story!--though a story that now has became the
truth of our lives.

From its verry first scene we are plonged into a
near-icomprehensible world: Ophion, the largest
satlite of the gojiroid (giant planet) Ygg--already
discovered from Earth, at the end of the 20c, in its
way eccentrical orbit round the sunlyke star 70
Virginis--a satlite rulled by its bizzare climate. For
eleven weeks or so it is “Mudmonth”, or
apastron-winter, a time of mild wether & much
biological activity on the part of its bundant
lifeforms. Then comes “Drymonth”, four weeks of
blestering heat, wen most of that satlite’s florra &
fauna retreat into subterranean sheltre; & a final
week-&-a-haff (“Wetmonth”) of planet-wide monsoon
rains, after wich the cycle is repeated.

But GUELPHS is no more about its fizzical setting,
than “Paradise Lust” is about gardening. The real &
secret intent is to present that world’s inscrutable
three-legged sophonts, the “Wodwos”, at a cusp of
crysis in their cultural zistence. And this crysis
turns out to have bigtime relvance to the
human-historcal time in wich the book apeared. For
although the Wodwos--lyke everry living thing on
Ophion--are constructed cording to a plan of
trilateral symtry, somthing terrible has gone rong in
their social life. A worldview of polar
extremes--Duelism--has take over the minds of many
Wodwos: to the point were this race, never before
given to clective violence, has embarked upon a
programm of wat can only be scribed as genocidal war.

Ironically, of course, the “Ghibellines” wich the
war-party (“Guelphs”) wish to sterminate--only zist as
a delussion in the minds of those same Wodwos, whose
self-division has projected onto innocent others,
everrything they cannot cept in their own nature. Our
story begins at the height of the conflict, & it would
requiere manymore pages than I have at my disposal to
portray the quest of Jasper Wodwo, wich ends in a
rediscovery of the legendary Scroll of Badroulbadour,
with its mind-blowwing message of a Prior
Understanding. Suffice it to say that once this lust
book is disseminated, first by a nascent subterground,
& then openly, the zisting worldview, with its
creasingly lethal injostices--is seemingly doomed.

I will not dwell upon the marvelous inventiveness &
wit of “Graywyvern”, whoever he was; but it is
salutary to note three things about this seminal, nay,
salvific work: first, all the action takes place
within the incessant downpore of the rainy season, &
confines itself to the boundaries of the City of
Magnificent Splendors; secundly, the subtle use of
neologisms (vented words), especially his word for the
Third Logical Category, “JAU” both-true-&-false or
neither-true-nor-false, depending on context)--a word
that has since passed into the lexicon of everry
remaining langage on this our own Earth; & lastly, the
perverse & curious denouement of Graywyvern’s novel...

In the book, Jasper fails.

6-16-03"
--------------------------------------------------------------
*So far my favorite is this one, which should save Pynchon
about 8 more years of work.

   "Five A.M.

Street by street the lights go out, and the night turns
  gray, bringing respite to this and to all other agencies,
With the gears of commerce unmeshed and stopped, the
  channels of communication slowed and stilled
(Radio, ticker, and spirit control)--

Bringing peace, briefly, to the members of the board and
  bench and staff,
Sleep, for a space, to the journeymen of the switchboard
  and the dictaphone,
Rest to the lieutenants of steel, and wool, and coal, and wheat,
And to the envoys from abroad (Her Majesty's, His Excell-
  ency's, and the mysterious Mr. X),
And to the representatives of the people (both houses), and
  to the vicars of the Lord (conformist and dissident)
And to the inspectors of the arson, forgery, bomb, and homicide
  squads--

While the crated shipments of this agency (with those of others)
  stand in guarded sheds at Quebec,
Wait for release on rainswept wharves of Shanghai and the Rio,
Move, slowly, from a dark siding in Butte."

--Fearing

    "MOMUS

MOMUS is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.

Yes, Momus,
Men have flung your face in bronze
To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
Thrown over and through with a smile that forever
wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the
iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone
into dreams, by God.

I wonder, Momus,
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look
with deep laughter
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,
solemn repetitions of history.

A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from
your kindliness of bronze,
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple,
silent;
Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and
women
Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,
the salt of tears,
And blood drops of undiminishing war."

--Carl Sandburg

Listening to: Ginastera.

The power of a poem, like the power of a mirror,
lies in its coordination. --And we think we see
another room there; another life.

A bumper sticker: smileyface "Christo Teama".

You knew this was coming.

I'm losing track: is Burning Man still cool, or has it
"jumped the shark"?

DNA that plays tic-tac-toe.

Twin Oaks is an intentional community founded in 1967 on the
ideas of B F Skinner, & is still going strong. (Their main business:
making hammocks.)

Alt-Culture from Russia.

"I got caught in a verbal slugfest between the two of them
recently in Los Angeles. The high point was when O'Reilly
cleverly riposted Franken's account of his lies by screaming:
"Shut up! Shut up!" A particularly sound argument, I thought.

Franken, in turn, said, "Bill, we're not on Fox News." " --Molly Ivins

'Speak, you also,
Speak as the last,
Have your say,

Speak--
But keep yes and no unsplit,
And give your say this meaning:
Give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,
Give it as much
As you know has been dealt out between
Midday and midday and midnight.

Look around:
Look how it all leaps alive--
Where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.'

--Paul Celan, tr M Hamburger (1980)

"The old hunger, left in the old darkness,
Turned like a hanged knife." --Merwin

Kurt Nimmo explains the Blackout. (Me, i think
it was Mars.)

It's not about the Kitty.

...we are not yet to the point of being able
to use places, we are irremediably nomadic,
& our expectations of places far exceed the
sense of obligation we should bring. Therefore
at present, networks of short duration & high
velocity preferably serve the purpose of places.
[Note: dixit 1987] When friendship itself is
sacred, we will know we are ready to dwell upon
the land.

Ego is the ship's figurehead--not its motive power,
its steering or its buoyancy.

"The really important things in the world are the
huge silent inexorable things." --Diary of a Drug
Fiend

"The first bomb that fell on Brighton actually
came through his roof while he was taking a cold
bath, and although it did not explode, he never
recovered from the shock." --Colin Wilson, intro
to The Violet Apple by David Lindsay

Listening to: The Ventures, "Harlem Nocturne",
from their second (?) album, on Dolton.

Melanie reviews:
 "I haven't sent out any mass movie reviews lately, but I'm doing
so now because I want to alert my fellow film fans to a pair of
the summer's biggest surprises.  Yes, the year is more than
halfway over and so far there has been precious little to recommend,
especially throughout this summer when there has just been so much
junk, although I did very much enjoy Paramount's The Italian Job (a
good old fashioned heist movie with lots of color and/or atmosphere)
and the New Zealand import, Whale Rider, as well as the very
entertaining box office blockbuster, Finding Nemo..and, okay, Bruce
Almighty.  I also confess that I have yet to see Seabiscuit, or even
28 Days Later.  

     Still, I do feel compelled to let everyone know that, even in the
dog days of summer, there are currently two performances generating
Oscar buzz (or Oscar worthy buzz), and they're both as close as your
neighborhood multiplex, courtesy of mainstream studio, Disney Pictures.
I'm referring to Johnny Depp in the unlikely blockbuster, Pirates of the
Caribbean (based on a theme park ride), and Jamie Lee Curtis in Disney's
third version of Freaky Friday.  Depp first. Of course, this guy is one of
our most adventurous actors, and, lord knows, he's given some pretty
spectacular, award calibre performances.  I'm thinking specifically of
Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, neither of which generated any favor
with Academy voters (though both were nominated for the Golden Globe
award, as was Depp's persuasive work in the gentle, sleeper romance,
Benny & Joon).  Anyway, Pirates is the first unqualified box office smash
with which Depp has ever been associated (runner-up: Sleepy Hollow), and
a lot of the credit belongs to him especially, for a performance that is as
shrewd as it is theatrical and over the top; no one else could've given this
same performance and made it such an utter delight.  Depp has been pretty
open about how he modeled his performance as whacked-out Captain Jack
Sparrow on no less than Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.   This one
has to be seen to be believed.  Is it truly Oscar worthy?   Hard to say, but
the buzz is there, and building, and the performance is certainly both inventive
and very watchable--and if Depp finally gets a nod, in a year of thus far
rampant mediocrity, then good for him.

     Next, Jamie Lee Curtis.  I'll be frank, ever since I first saw Curtis in
Halloween (the original and the only one in the long running series in which I've
actually invested my time), I've thought she  radiates a natural intelligence
that few producers/writers/directors have been fully able to work to her
advantage.  Why is it that she so often seems lost amid the swill?  Well, part
of that has to do with being able to sniff out better scripts (but it's hard to
sniff them out if they never come your way in the first place).  To be fair,
Curtis hasn't done so bad, witness her British Academy Award for Trading
Places, as well as her Golden Globe for True Lies. She also has 1988's zany
A Fish Called Wanda on her resume. (I  confess to being a big fan of her
late 80's/early 90's sitcom, Anything But Love...and, yes, I even liked her in
1985's notorious flop, the unfortunately titled Perfect.)  Anyway, in Freaky Friday Curtis has her best--and splashiest--movie role in years and years as a straitlaced
psychologist (psychiatrist???) who magically swaps bodies with her misfit (i.e.,
surly) 15 year old daughter, who also just happens to be an aspiring rock-n-roller,
for a single day--the day in question being the eve of Curtis's character's second
wedding.  Curtis' performance is gloriously dead-on funny, and free of vanity as well;
she is ably supported by Lindsay Lohan in the role of the daughter.  Again, there's
Oscar buzz already, in this case, according to USA Today, by no less than the New
York Times, whose reviewer, A.O. Scott, wrote: "It is unlikely that any other actress
this year will match the loose, energetic wit she brings to this delightful movie." (USA
Today reporter Susan Wloszczyna makes mention of Scott speculating about Curtis'
Oscar potential without actually including the specific "O-word" quote, in an article
dated Monday, August 11.) I'll be frank, when I saw Curtis in the movie, a day before
I read the USA Today piece, I myself had visions of an Oscar nomination dancing in my
head, so the subsequent article was a pleasant surprise, an affirmation, if you will.  
(I feel compelled to add that last summer [2002] I watched in awe as Diane Lane emoted
--in the best possible sense of the word--her way through the borderline sleazy
Unfaithful...I knew then I was watching something special, and I was hoping
that Academy members were paying attention; Lane's Oscar nomination earlier this
year was a joyous turn of events...it didn't matter that she didn't win, at least she
was recognized by her peers.)

     Of course, Depp and Curtis have a few strikes against them, mainly being in
comedies, especially mainstream, Disney family-fare.  Further, all this goodwill could
fade the instant the fall's big prestige items begin to hit the screens (Cold Mountain,
The Last Samari, Big Fish, etc.).  Still, right off the top of my head, I know for sure
that Julie Andrews, who reinvented herself, in more ways than one, in Victor/Victoria,
and Tom Hanks, who enjoyed a comeback (after  a series of uneven films in the years
following his initial success in Splash), with Big, were both nominated for Oscars--and for movies that were not only variations of "switcheroo" comedy, but were
also early starters.  Victor/Victoria was released late winter/early spring of 1982,
while Big was released in the summer of '88, so maybe there's hope.  (Okay, neither
Andrews or Hanks won for those particular films, but please, please, always remember:
just because comic performances are longshots, doesn?t make them any less worthy...
we just have to keep crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.)  Depp and Curtis
also have the strategic advantage of having been around for a few years, paying their
dues as it were.

     Will I be rooting for these two stars in three or four months, when the awards
season begins in earnest?  I honestly can't say, but for now I'm quite happy to sing
their praises and encourage others to see what all the fuss is about for themselves,
especially when the films in question are so readily accessible.

Thank you,
Mp"

The more intuitive you are, the spookier your world is.
Not more frightening--but more mysterious: & more
inhabited.

Suffering corrupts; unavoidable suffering corrupts
unavoidably... After i am dead, where will be the pain i
endured? Nowhere. Only the crippled work will remain.
Do i want that? I wouldn't want it done to my children.
I would want them beautiful & complete. (I would send
them to a better place if i could. Art as that better
place.)

If ideas are tools, we choose ours by the picturesqueness
of the rust encrusting them.

Is not fashion, propaganda without content?

The child makes the ritual, the child disbelieves the ritual
(unmakes it)--two powers denied to normal adults.

Initiation is to discipline. Even ego-death is an initiation
into the mysteries of ego crafting. Techniques are
natural initiations. Tests are artificial initiations. ...Love
is a mixture of the two.

There's a peculiar & very American desire to do
without psychology, which is akin to the desire to
eat what you want & dispense with all knowledge of
nutrition. And the results are not that different. In
the name of a specious "freedom", we have the unedifying
spectacle of a nation wholly given over to the tyranny
of its appetites.

Emotional states should be named with verbs, not nouns.

The virtue of storying our lives is that, since there are
only story-consolations, our sorrows become amenable
as they fit the outlines of story-sorrows. The depth of
grief yield but to death: it is necessary, except for very
tranquil interludes, to live on the surface--a facade of
artificial continuity. Artists must know this, & also heed
it. Where they give up storying, they come face to face
with ultimate destruction.

"If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human
being might almost impersonate Providence to another."
--George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

All about the Voynich Manuscript--the most mysterious
book in the world.

Silk is a notoriously difficult medium to paint on. Here's an
amazing webpage by a talented dallas artist...

A website devoted to the earliest recorded music, with
samples.

Insane Clown Posse responds to their being named Worst Band
of All Time:

"Once again, Insane Clown Posse is proven yet again
to be the most player-hated band of all time. Blender
Magazine decided to have a review of the Top 50 Worst
Band of All Time. And, naturally, ICP made nothing
short of #1 on their list, with The Wraith as their
worst album.

Honestly, how much do these 12-year vets-of-the-game
have to accomplish to get recognized by mainstream
media? They've got 2 Platinum Records, 4 Gold Records,
1 Gold Home Video (from their own feature-length movie
Big Money Hustlas), another Gold DVD right around the
corner (Bootlegged in LA), their own merchandise line
(HatchetGear), their own record label (Psychopathic
Records) with offices in the USA and Europe, an annual
fan convention (The Gathering of the Juggalos), the #2
wrestling league (JCW), an upcoming video game (Backyard
Wrestling), their own comic book series, and, of course,
legions of dedicated, diehard, worldwide fans (The
Juggalos). They've brought themselves up from nothing
to become an international musical phenomena, and yet,
somehow, they still get no respect from fine mainstream
publications such as Blender Magazine."
[I've heard them, & in the immortal words of J R
Compton, they "suck great green donkey dicks'.]

Listening to: Wanda Jackson--
"I've been to Nagasaki
Hiroshima too
the thing I did to them baby
I can do to you" ("Fujiyama Mama")

It is less wrong to dress up to write a poem
than to dress up for readings. At least that marks
the real occasion.

Better to write down bare metaphors than force a
poem where the first line hasn't spoken itself.

It will be real progress (for us!) when as much
of human knowledge is in people's heads as it was
in the 18th century.

Looking at someone, i can pretty much imagine that
they are what i would be if born into their conditions
& circumstance. But the moment they begin to speak,
my imagining fails.

Why do we poets fear a future without criticism when
all the best poems were written when there was none?

Why is it harder to forget my art ambitions than
my chess ambitions? Because art never humiliated me--
my failures i kept secret even from myself.

Rimbaud gave us a formula--an easy formula--for
making art. "Live excessively, & your art will be
intense." But excessively-living sheep merely
produce mediocre art that is messy.

Perhaps the most entertaining artist to emerge from the
90's Swing Revival.

Sayings of Asmodeus: Human inefficiency is all that
preserves life on this planet, so don't kvetch about it.

Stingy poets: if it has one thing worth saving, save it.
Greedy readers: who want all the fruit without climbing
the tree.

Admit every day: you do not know how to write. You only
know ways that sometimes work. (There are others.)

Writing bad is a symptom. Look elsewhere than your papers
for the disease.

What only is not denied me is the dubious elaboration of an
obsession. Is there light past the gnawing at the duodenum?
Perhaps the only honesty left to poets anymore is the
furtiveness with which they begin in adolescence. That is
timeless & sincere. The shamelessness of later on allows
them any amount of lying, unfortunately. Therefore the worst
amateurs strike me as more poetic in their practice than our
professional poets.

After one of my co-workers became an avid
proselytizer for Matthew Stokoe's Cows, i
coined the phrase "Extreme Literature" for this &,
say, Poppy Z Brite's Exquisite Corpse. Lately i
ran across a book i'd read long ago, Memoirs of a
Gnostic Dwarf--& this is another one to add.

"* TAWNYA H. (Female, age 31) from NEBRASKA*
8-26-2000
.....[ ].....
53. "LOVE: Poems by Danielle Steel".. by Danielle Steele (*****)
Danielle Steel pours her heart out in this great book of poetry. She dedicates this book to John, the love of her life. She touches upon and writes about all the different aspects of love; laughter, smiles, pain, misunderstanding, confusion and heartbreak. She puts great feeling into her writings with such style and elegance. Her poetry is as unique as her novels. Her poetry is easy to read and very enjoyable. Some of my favorite poems are: 'From Opposite Ends', 'Peeling Away', 'Silence', 'No One There', 'Lies', 'Trying to Pretend', 'Carved In Stone', 'Year of the Bears', 'Dread', 'Peekaboo', 'Cold', 'I Go', 'Desperation', 'Fragile Moments', 'Fear Not, Farewell', 'Bereft', 'Crash Into My Life', 'Sketch', 'Someday', 'If I Can', 'Fingering Our Land', 'Couples', 'Are You Still There', 'Pretend Forever', 'Snow In Your Hair', 'Only Close', 'The Inside of Your Arm', 'No Man, Our Man', 'Come Back', 'First Hello', 'Now I Want the Have', 'Hurray for the Leagalized Lover', 'Are You Comfortable', 'Champagne In My Shoe', 'Attic', 'Cool', 'Too Much', 'Nary a Care', 'Sunshine Dancing', 'Friend', 'Comfortable', 'The Gift of Love', & 'Each of Us'. So, as you can see, there are a LOT of good ones in this book! I highly reccomend it for any poetry lover!"

Survivor art.

Mandarin speakers use both sides of the brain.


Limericks are called "therewazzas" in More Fun in Bed (1934).

A novelist & writer about geishas has an entertaining
& fact-filled page on the world of Murasaki Shikibu: "We do
not know what Murasaki Shikibu’s name was. She was a member
of the Fujiwara clan, as were a high percentage of courtly families.
"Shikibu" refers to her father’s position as Senior Secretary in the
Bureau of Ceremonial (shikibu-shô) early in his court career. "Murasaki"
(the word denotes the color purple) comes from the name of a
character in the Tale of Genji. But what did people call her before
she wrote the Tale? I give her the childhood nickname Fuji (wisteria)
because some Heian sources mention her as Tô Shikibu, "Tô" being
the Sino-Japanese reading of fuji. She undoubtedly had another
official personal name, which some scholars think may have been
Takako, written with the character meaning "incense" plus the
feminine ending -ko."

Interesting infrared photography page.

And here's one on pinhole photography.

A group blog for graffiti artists.

Or you can salvage "art" from thrift stores... (I suppose this
is the equivalent for the internet.) Vote on the newest candidate!

Although Somtow Sucharitkul helped write the screenplay
for "Burial of the Rats", the only witty thing about it is the
tiny rat-guillotine in the first scene or so.

I wonder how we got a xeroxed copy of "The Last Will and
Testament" of Myrna Loy??

Line endings: you go to the store at regular intervals,
Sense endings: but you run out of this that, continually.

We cannot admit that the power of magic has no force,
for that would imply that the arena of its actions--the ego
--is not a real thing. Therefore magicians have always
resorted to force & trickery to keep from themselves this
damning knowledge.

Eye vs. Hand. Voice is Eye + Hand. Eye-poems, Hand-poems.
But no Voice-poems anymore. The poets are mute, why?
("dissociation of sensibility") --silent reading, television &
movies, decayed speech: broken paradigms only...

"The author of the Journal of a Pupil describes a meeting
between Gurdjieff and Crowley, but it is clear that they had
nothing to say to one another. He says, 'Crowley had magne-
tism, and the kind of charm that many charlatans have; he
also had a dead weight that was somehow impressive'-- that
is, Crowley was a 'man of power'. 'His attitude was fatherly
and benign, and a few years earlier I might have fallen for it.
Now I saw and sensed that I could have nothing to do with
him.' He does not describe the tea, except to say that Gurdjieff
kept a sharp watch on Crowley, and says, 'I got a strong impression
of two magicians, the white and the black--the one strong,
powerful, full of light; the other also powerful, but heavy, dull,
ignorant.'" --Colin Wilson, The Occult (1971)

Experiences which repeat...until by some chance or
change we are able to recognize ourselves in a pattern:
only then, dreaming but lucidly, may we escape it...
and this is the truth that has been obscured by the
dogma of Reincarnation. It seemed such a secret--
to remember through whatever might come (even to
ego-death)--they took extraordinary precautions to
preserve this knowledge; what remains is but an
elaborate sarcophagus, & not even the dust of that
secret remains, in any living theology you can name,
among the very ones that discovered it. For an insight
really cannot be transmitted. Its idea can, but it has
to live in you by the fire of its spontaneous ignition. The
words alone won't do it. Worse, they put you to sleep more--
because you feel you're safe: the war has been won...
   Ah, but to keep a journal! You record
all your forgettings indelibly: you can never forget that you
forget, constantly & only relieved by intervals of clarity:
& not always those in which you write. Keeping a journal
is to realize the truth of reincarnation, & if you are of a
thoughtful disposition, it makes you more a philosopher
than any learned Ph.D. in its history, simply because you
interrogate yourself for the meaning of existence, not
on exceptional occasions, but habitually. I think i value this
more than the making of art, even if it is less perfect &
useless to others. That other is what i make of the flies
i catch; this is the very web of my spiderhood.

Genre pleasures are pleasures of recognition. But also:
of playfulness with the rules.
   That a writer has something personal to
say, is in genre an accessory; an overlay.
   The ideal reader's reaction when they have
finished a genre work is to rush out and buy another one,
not to reread the same book.
   A genre work that stands alone and is too
unique, would be a kind of BETRAYAL.

When Mystery is banished, knowledge & ignorance alike become
something other.

Why theorize? --a question not contained in most theories!

Sense is pre-existent; meaning is a relationship of ego to
sense.

No symbol is a symbol unless it causes a change in
consciousness. Symbols are more akin to drugs than to
nonsymbolic pictures & phrases.

This society. The discrepancy between the path you would take
as defined by the lines, & the path you have to make around
potholes & road debris, grows ever wider; now, if you save your
tires, you run th risk of being stopped as a drunk driver. All our
social forms approach this pitch of absurdity. But it's been
happening so gradually no one laughs.

A nice elegy for the death of the seven-inch
single. But cheer up, there's still lots of vinyl knocking
around on the secondhand market--! Every once in a
while, i'll play one on my Sony-Japan portable record
player (that cost me $170 on the internet a couple
years ago, & weighs almost nothing it's so completely
made of plastic)...& it sounds better than the same
recording from a CD.

The color of numbers. (via Metafilter)

"I put a spell on you..." (via Rebecca Blood)

Arnie looks like a "condom stuffed with walnuts". --Clive James (via Bart Cop)

A Metaphor. I shower with scalp hotter than
hands; shampooing, feel two waters: cold on
head, warm on hands--in the same place.

Academia: burrowers deeper & deeper into the
semi-meaningful, in flight from noise. --An
attitude college graduates must graduate out of.

Quantitative verse: using a fist for a sieve.

Headline: "Blind Sailor Challenges the Ocean".
The story of my life.

"Descartes was all wrong about animals. It isn't
the animals who are robots; it's us." --Colin
Wilson

N.B. the term metaphor means nothing more than
to showcase the focussing power of a name. It is
self-referential but not infinite or basic on that
account. There are different kinds of focus a name
can aid. --But i use 'metaphor' rather than 'name'
because the other seems to cover only those opaque
arbitrary coins we feed our data-machines with. If you
imagine Shakespeare's "a name to conjure with" --or
one of your childhood idols-- you will not need to be
limited to the word 'metaphor'. To name is to create
& destroy at once. This is clearest when someone
renames something better than it was named before &
the old name drops out of circulation. (At present
this process is distorted by propaganda. The real
namers are carefully excluded from the name-factory's
controls.) A poet today, then, is confronted with a
double conundrum. There seems to be "nothing new to
say" (nor any new way to say it), & no one will listen
anyway. Both of these are half-truths. If a poet really
does exercise his power of naming (& most of us i
suspect refrain, from whatever reason), it does get
heard. And that is new for the context enough, & all
that any other breakthrough was, too, before it became
mythologized... --Anyway, this for me demonstrates
the inherently political context of our poetry. But
how unpoetical our politics are! Indeed Magic seems
a more promising career...even to have to reinvent
it entirely, than to struggle against two centuries'
accumulation of dead poetry--these "ideologies"--
names that hide.

We name emotions like languages have
conventionalized names for the sound that
a dog or cat makes.

'In the second unspeakable hour love makes the heart
taste a violent death, and the heart goes through death,
but it does not die. And yet the soul has not known
love for long, and has barely moved from the first to
the second hour.' --Hadewijch, in Medieval Woman
Writers, ed. Katharina Wilson, 1984

Arrogance: how others judge my work, judges them.
Not arrogance: how others judge me, judges them.
(I tend to want to have it the other way.)

Nothing has done me more harm than the will to
believe. It always perverts my devotion.

Publishing poetry--like trying to guess the combination
of a safe, but most of your guesses aren't even
considered numbers.

I don't remember my dreams, i don't even remember
that i dream. Only, sometimes, i belatedly infer it--
by a thought that i could not have had, waking.

Of all the reasons for a musician to cover a song or a
critic to write about a book, doing justice must be the
rarest.

The Impossible Object Principle. Keep a reality
& a fiction simultaneously in mind. Write in such
an ambiguous way that it applies to both. Then
periodically describe either unmistakeably, &
later the other too. Thus is created in the mind
an Impossible Object.

   "Electability"

peshmergonomics
fish-goat, cactopus

fistula grieving
divine fritinancy

viaticum

08 07 03

   "This Cataract of Solitudes"

Sometimes i am permitted to forget about
the street-silt buildup glazing my pockmarked windshield
i focus beyond, reaching like a prayer
for the infinite horizon that is still
grinding of gears for some more perfect thrum...

sometimes i am permitted to recuperate
the length of a hummingbird's hiccup
what passes for ripe wisdom among the wise

08 07 03

"A cold, arcane, malign and watching spark" --Lin Carter

He's kind of like if a folk artist was into serial killer chic.

A picture of one of my paintings (but it's not credited to me).

A weird book that is far from incomprehensible, but i defy you
to make anything out of it.

Nagasaki today.

Chess is full of romantic stories. One of my favorites
is how Frank Marshall waited nine years to spring a
secret weapon (now known as the "Marshall Attack"
in the Ruy Lopez) on his arch-enemy Capablanca--
who proceeded to refute it over the board.

Pineapple curry.

The future's indigo.

Sometimes i think the Internet is like nothing so much as
the aboriginal "Songlines".

Musical instruments that play themselves. (via Momus)

One of my favorite groups is 3 Mustaphas 3; their take on
World Music is both Turkish & hip, & if the fez ever becomes
a fashion article, you can blame it on them.

Who is Joan Houlihan & why is she saying all these
terrible things about us?

When things like the unscheduled Texas redistricting, which
sent legislators fleeing out of state to avoid a quorum, & the
California gubernatorial recall, which basically is about undoing
the outcome of a legitimate election, take place, you know the
Red-assed Baboons are taking the Tanya Harding approach to
this game. Further evidence of the validity of my thesis regarding
the relevance of Lovecraft for the 21c.

The Ummo hoax*. One of these days i want to write a
scifi story about the real Wolf 424, & incorporate as much
of this as i can...

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

Nearly 20,000 haiku about Spam. (I contributed.)

I always thought Devo's mythology was at least as interesting
as their music.

---------------------------------------------------------------
*More on Ummo. "...'quadrupolar logic', or 4-poles logic, that could humanize math
and computing. Instead of reducing all situations to (True/False), they evaluate
the (True/False/True&False/not True nor False)."

'Since that time I have seen several generations
of humans in the morning raise their wings and eyes
toward space with the inexperienced joy of the
chrysalis hailing its last metamorphosis, and in the
evening, before sunset, die, heads drooping like
wilted flowers which the wind's plaintive whistling
sways.' --Maldoror (tr Lykiard, 1970)

My wife put Linda Ronstadt's "Heat Wave" on the answering
machine. It's pollution level "purple"* for the second day
--which is worse than red i guess--on the radio they say:
"Don't go out unless you have to." Now that's something
worth killing & dying for!!

I like horseshoe crabs. Five hundred million years unchanged--
they must be doing something right.

'...something like the weeping of children/
Is in your poems...' --There's a street named after her in Berlin now.

---------------------------------------------------
*"In August 2002, the North Texas region suffered its
first-ever "level purple" air quality alert, where
the air was so bad that everyone was cautioned to stay
inside. After smog build-ups violated EPA ozone standards
22 times that summer, federal authorities warned that
highway funds could be withheld unless improvements are made."

Cruelty lessons. (via Rubber Hose)

Print & post. (via Metafilter)

'At Marathon every night you can hear horses neighing
and men fighting. No one who has expressly set himself
to behold this vision has ever got any good from it,
but the spirits are not wroth with such as in ignorance
chance to be spectators.' --Pausanias (Loeb, 1918)

'Yea, be assured, those storied horrors set
In the black depths of Acheron are here,
Here in our very life.' --Lucretius III.978-9 (tr Charles
Bennett)

"Years ago I was present when a woman consulted
Madame Blavatsky for a friend who saw her newly-dead
husband nightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the
odor of the grave. 'When he was dying,' said Madame
Blavatsky, 'he thought the grave the end, and now
that he is dead cannot throw off that imagination.'"
--Yeats

Listening to: The Boredoms

Today Salam Pax comments on TurningTables's blog. Whoa.

Hiroshima Day.

The innocuous religion.

OuLiPo lives!

Listening to: Shakira.

Fossil subjunctives. Every time i've ever used a subjunctive in
my writing, some editor has taken exception so i think we can
say the subjunctive is safely dead--or embalmed on bumper stickers.

It's 104 degrees F. in Dallas. (--Okay, it's 125 in Baghdad.) Everyone should
close up & go home. You would for a blizzard!

Kimchee.

Fabio & the goose.

What would Cthulhu do?

They don't make poets like this anymore.

The Church of Gary Numan.

Mystery cherihews.

Which Sidney Sheldon novel has an epigraph from Rimbaud?
Morning, Noon and Night.

You need to read The Dictionary of the Khazars.

Then there's the Cherokee-Esperanto hybrid called Poliespo.

Lojban Rock.

On the one hand, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; on the other, Abraham
Lincoln Gillespie.

R Crumb illustrates PKD's theophany.

   "Abandoned Servitude"

Measured-in-breaths respite, this hall of mirrors
Glitteringly spins like a ball of mirrors.

Cross & recross the 38th Parallel,
Our lost patrol after the fall of mirrors.

There are those who refuse all chemical love,
And then surrender to the call of mirrors.

This blind astronomer carves the Milky Way
To be his targe against a squall of mirrors.

08 04 03

"I've no great cause to love that spot of earth,
Which holds what might have been the noblest nation;
But though I owe it little but my birth,
I feel a mix'd regret and veneration
For its decaying fame and former worth.
Seven years (the usual term of transportation)
Of absence lay one's old resentments level,
When a man's country's going to the devil.

Alas! could she but fully, truly, know
How her great name is now throughout abhorr'd;
How eager all the earth is for the blow
Which shall lay bare her bosom to the sword;
How all the nations deem her their worst foe,
That worst than worst of foes, the once adored
False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,
And now would chain them, to the very mind;--

Would she be proud, or boast herself the free
Who is but first of slaves? The nations are
In prison,--but the gaoler, what is he?
No less a victim to the bolt and bar.
Is the poor privilege to turn the key
Upon the captive, freedom? He's as far
From the enjoyment of the earth and air
Who watches o'er the chain, as they who wear."

--Byron, Don Juan 10th canto lxvi-lxviii

When's the last time you heard an anti-gun country song?

Brights don't pray--but if they did...

On Steal This Disc there's a track of David Bowie singing
in German. I wish i had all his records in German. He sounds
so much more serious.

Speaking of poetic novelists, let's not forget the other Elizabeth
Smart.

"Forthwith, in full Gorgonian venom steeped,
Allecto seeks the realms and lofty halls..."
--Cranch's Vergil (1872)

The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed by Racter, was
supposed to be the first computer written book (1984).
Well, not quite... There is a lot of stuff about computer-generated writing on the net, but
none of it IMHO beats a simple word randomizer. The real art is selecting
vocabularies.

"Web space is not so much disembodied as differently bodied." --Charles
Bernstein (via Wood's Lot)

Some beautiful photos of a warehouse fire by J R Compton.

Finally, something on the elusive palindromically-named
language Malayalam. (thanx Aimee)

Gabriele D'Annunzio was a colorful character, a pretty good
writer, but what fascinates me about him is his house.

Some images from Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden.

   'Instead of a Foreword

During the terrible years of Yezhovshchina [the purges]
I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in
Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then a
woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind
me, and of course had never heard of my name, came
out of the numbness which affected us all and
whispered in my ear--(we all spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
   I said, "I can!"
   Then something resembling a smile
slipped over what had once been her face.'
--Anna Akhmatova (tr. Richard McKane)

Koko the sign-talking gorilla has a website. I think the children's
book about her & her pet kitten, Koko's Kitten, is a beautiful
& profound meditation on what it means to be...human.

"Olduvai Theory" states that the lifespan of industrial
civilization will be something like a hundred years: 1930-
2030. It's an argument that ignores politics entirely, &
simply looks at world energy production figures. Provocative,
even if you think you know better.

Listening to Bjork: Homogenic.

I love those minor urban myths of rock, like the one about
Klaatu really being the Beatles incognito.

A collection of Jabberwocky translations into various languages.

Still looking for Sabalon Glitz. Korla
Pandit, however, i found a record by before i read about him in
Incredibly Strange Music; i am glad to say, he lived long
enough to enjoy his revival. Tomita is one of my special synth heroes:
i think his version of Mussorgsky is better than the original.
And then there's Magma--which is kind of like art rock meets artificial
languages.

(part 1)
I wrote this for a radio contest (the first & last sentences
were given):

   "Portrait in Cobwebs"

Dallas can be a funny place sometimes: the lights, the viaducts
at night with a solitary walker; from the air it can look quite
magical. The figure stops, bends over the rail. To throw
something off? I used to live in a church. High up on one
side under the roof, with not much of a view, but it was
cheap. After the debacle i'd put most of my stuff in storage.
The room i lived in now was more like a book-lined closet.
I folded up my futon in the morning so i could have floor
space, & the ceiling slanted wildly.
   I never seem to end up living in rectangular
rooms somehow, just these crazy shapes that have no
name.
   But there was a stereo downstairs that i
could use. Often at night i would sit down there in the huge dark
drafty echoing hall with a handful of secondhand records & a
goblet of Rumanian wine in my white-gloved hand. I felt secure,
even though the outside door didn't lock & this wasn't the best
of neighborhoods. In fact, the people nearby were all filled with
superstitious dread of the place. They said it was run by witches,
or it was haunted.

(part 2)
   Which suited me fine, & the others there. We
felt a bit less mundane commuting from our day jobs at bookstores,
warehouses, & Deep Ellum boutiques, back to a haunted mansion to
sleep where wind sang in the cracks & crannies at all hours & a
hundred buckets barely sufficed to get it through a thunder
boomer.
   I was a lot like that myself; my walls weren't
solid but rustled with subtle voices, & my emptiness loomed in
the neon night with only the barest of candle flickers visible to
people rushing past to gain the freeway. Something within me
also was rushing past, barely glancing at the startling lines of a
landscape of ghosts.
   They said it was haunted. But no one had ever died
here; & how can you have a haunted house without deaths? No, no
one had died here that we knew of, in a hundred years of being
first a church & then a hippie rooming house. No deaths, though
once a runaway they allowed to crash in the basement had tried to
kill herself by slitting her wrists. Supposedly the ceiling was still
stained by a spurt of blood, but i never looked for it. Not in the whole
time i stayed there.
   That was the summer of Mazzy Star. From every
half-open sliding door as i walked to my own snug garret on the
brokendown creaky balcony, the mournful soft strains of Mazzy
Star's second album would always be playing. It sounded beautiful
& debauched, the way we wanted to be.
   Instead, we were children. Children with candles.
Nothing, i think, will ever be more beautiful to me than the gold that
was flung across the staircase at sunset, which i watched every
chance i got: a mystic incandescence, poured upon the worn &
ageless oak-panelled wall.
   It created in me moods i couldn't express, couldn't
shake. And so i embarked on a project (we all had "Projects"): i would
paint invisible pictures. I don't know now what it was supposed to
mean, though i thought i knew at the time. I still have the pictures.
   You look at them through 3D glasses, the cardboard
kind with one lens red & one lens blue. This destroys your sense of
colors--you just see flashing & contradictory input. It doesn't hold
still. It kind of makes you queasy after awhile. But it's overwhelmingly
elsewhere. The sense of depth is nothing like real space; i wasn't,
even in that, a realistic painter. It's rather, an abstraction that
uses the elements of depth perception to give a sensation like
nothing else that has ever existed, & which cannot be described.
   But sometimes i hear Mazzy Star again &
i know. For a moment i know. Or maybe i just remember.
   Five years i lived in the church. And to think
it all began with that radio program.

12 30 99

   "The Last Mystery of the Senses"

soulful nebulosity
of his downed doodle

dark or only dim
lunar evection

08 03 03

"Monotonously weary seemed the way,
While light declining faded slowly away.
Some haze obscured a gradual westering sun,
And all the oppressive firmament was wan.
In it voluminous appears to form
From the horizon a continent of storm,
A ponderous bulk of gathering indigo,
Tinged in its formidable overflow
With hues of livid purple poison-flowers.
In ghastlier whiteness for the night that lowers,
Strewing forlorn the desolate desert pale,
Some grinning skeletons of men assail
My vision; while a monstrous bird of prey
From a putrescent corpse rends fierce away
The clinging flesh with horrid sound of tearing.
Its beak abruptly plunging, pulling, baring;
Bald-headed, hideous neck low crouched betwixt
The pressure of strong talons curved, infixed:
Now the proud brain, like fearful Madness, mangling,
Like Sin now with the reeking bosom wrangling;
Like ignorance, disease, war, tyranny, starvation,
Eating the vitals of a noble fallen nation!
This creature, as they pass, a moment glaring
Voracious-eyed, with vasty vans that cover--
A little further on obscene doth hover
A grey hyena, and he laughs a peal
Of beastly laughter from forth the sand: there is a howl
Dolefully borne from where the lean woles prowl!
Then silence falls upon the deepening gloom,
And sultry air forebodes the smothering simoom."

--Roden Noel, from "A Vision of the Desert"

While Mr Bush was in West Dallas earlier in the day,
a neighborhood resident was taken into custody
after he expressed his attitude toward the almost
popularly elected president by mooning him." --Dallas
Peace Times Aug-Sep '03

My favorite political artist--Sue Coe.

Who needs Nigerian yellowcake? (via memepool)

Listening to: "Ulysses' Gaze" soundtrack.

   ”To Vote for the Terminator”

The rat-brained robot scribbles
Leaves the sibyl’s keeper culls.
A blurred & burdened hedgehog
Gathers them, agog,
To aftermath Jagannath’s squashed kills.

My rat-brained muse, black fathoms
Divide us. Flickering drums
Sleep through the ragged cycles
Love becomes.

08 01 03

"There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal.
By seeming kindness turned to snaring,
They feel no falseness.

Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greennesss.
Their light looks fleeter.

But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under oxter.

Alas, the signal given,
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living."

--W H Auden, The Orators

Coldplay: from obscurity to accompanying movie
trailers in six months.

Pollution level: Orange.

Listening to: The Bangles.

   "Ritual for the Relocation of the Goddess of the Night"

The worm that through the green fuse drives the whale
Blazes out at dawn
On the word of the blurry witnesses
On the weaknesses i made mine

Geometric tortoise in the clouds
Burgundy paisley notebook where i keep

07 31 03

It has occurred to me that, though by historical
machinations i am on the side of the outlaw (of every
sort), what i really am suited for is to be a responsible
member of a rational government. This thought does
not please me. but in that alternate universe where i
would be permitted a place, no doubt all the prestige
would have shifted to the other side.

"I was cruising, willy-nilly, following a feather in the
sky, and I happened across your blog in which you
mentioned "It's a Beautiful Day". So I thought I'd write
to say Hal Wagenet, one of the original members of
IABD, is a dear friend and just won himself a seat on
the Board of Supervisors of Mendocino County.
Be well,

Lanny [Cotler]"

The moment knows everything but the most important
thing--what happens to moments.

"One of your cold jellyfish poets that find themselves
cast up by some wave upon a sandy subject and so
wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a theme and let
us see it through their substance--as if that were a
great feat." --Sidney Lanier, "Poem Outlines"

Tron on Beta.

   "The 38th Parallel

With restraint and patience in my restless bosom
I reached stealthily near the 38th parallel,
And shrunken, casted my eyes carefully around,

The sad heart turned my steps into secluded lanes.
My hairs stood up at the casual sound of grass-leaf.
And every step of mine was full of hatred.

Children of a village chatted about the uncertain border.
They should have been more cautious in their answer to me.
Whatever action the enemy may take, the children and I could be confidential.

Where is the 38th parallel? I couldn't realize it, though crossed over.
Forests and fields, South and North, were in the same colour,
Who did thrust the arrow in the innocent land?

      May, 1946"

--Sông-yôn Czoe

Question: how do tribes define themselves in a society
where costuming is to some degree a matter of personal
taste? and to a greater degree, dependent on what's
available and what's allowed? Related thought:
boundaries that are defined with subliminal repulsions,
is counter-magic, in a way. I thought of how, tuning
through the music band, I jump away from some classes
of music like a hot surface. I so strongly dislike sports,
etc that an ambience of those sounds is sufficient to
keep me from casually wandering into a space that
contains them. In a population which is largely funct-
ioning on autopilot, no greater force than this is
necessary, especially where it isn't critical to defend
class privileges or possessions (e.g. at the symphony.
I can go there [or i used to be able to, before each
season became sold out in advance to $200 season
ticket holders--] , but the presence of people dressed
up makes me uncomfortable). --How a city is
organized according to caste dislikes, through a gradual
process of unconscious sorting. --How it is a very
useful ability to tolerate feelings of extreme dislike
in order to transgress these minor aversive boundaries.
   [2003. Perhaps it was by this
means that all but a certain kind of player, was driven
out of the Game of Politics.]

They died for raisins!? (via Metafilter)

Listening to: The Boredoms.

We got in the album by "It's a Beautiful Day", with the
Victorian-looking girl silhouetted against blue sky. I
always pay cash for this item for the store, even
though i doubt anyone is looking for it anymore,
just because i think "White Bird" is the most beautiful
song of the Sixties.

Effortless data reproduction [i wrote in 1986] is a
time bomb ticking away in the heart of capitalism.
Probably nothing else is needed to defeat it in
fact, so we ought to be imagining what can be
done when it all starts to collapse.

"I painted my footsoles purple for the day when the beautiful color would show" --The Book of Nightmares

   "GREEN LIGHT

Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
Familiar, but not quite recognized.
Followed and taken home and slept with.
Traded or sold. Or lost.

Bought again at the corner drug store,
At the green light, at the patient's demand, at nine o'clock.
Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
Found unsuitable.
Smashed, put together, and pawned.

Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen by the light of day;
Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off duty.
The agent, in broken English, took copious notes. Which he lost.
Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
Sad, but true.

True, or exaggerated, or true;
As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
As it is that the people go;
As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just the same;
As some one dies and it is serious, and true;
As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and pointless;
As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people change,
It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

Bought at the drug store down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always night, or day;
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o'clock.
Borrowed or bought. To look well. To ennoble. To prevent disease. To entertain. To have.
Brokn or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or lost."

--Kenneth Fearing

"Actually the language of Microsoft mingles
paganism and legalism." --Alan Sullivan

"AIR DAYS, in the Western Worship Boxes, traditionally
the Wednesday, Friday and Half-Man Day following the
first Sunday that a dog has suffocated the weather.
They were days of foodless observance to sanctify the
season of Charles, which was notable for its storms of
airlessness and heavy frontals near the north that caused
all but the dogs to retreat to their air hostels. Air days
are of very ancient and uncertain origin. The dates of their
celebration are now determined by dog descendants (similar
to the Labrador, but with the additional storm lung) rather
than by the universal storm calender and are frequently called
"days of air for food." Difficulties with dog populations
in the Western Worship Boxes generated the mass suffocation
of Ohio (1973), and the speed-fasting experiments of Buffalo
and Schenectady (1980-1982), in which the Western population
of those cities mistimed the exit day of their religious
food-minus, thus breaking their fasts before the season of
Charles had restored air to their homes, when the storm dogs
still stalked the houses, breathing up the airless wind and
eating the air and rain, praying to Charles that the people
would not return." --Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String (via)

A detailed overview of Depleted Uranium & Gulf War (I)
Syndrome (scroll down to July 23): Out of 722,000 who
fought, 160,000 have been granted disability--& ten
thousand have died.

A new Lojban book has just come out!

It's the Mexican "KISS"--!

Poppy Z memorializes John Kennedy Toole. (via Schism Matrix) I love the
way New Orleans writers support each other... & there's a statue of
Ignatius on Canal St.!

"-- What do you love so much about New Orleans?

It's my hometown and I love many things about it, but
to be honest, I'm not entirely satisfied with the way
I have portrayed it in my work so far. I hope I've done
a better job in my new novel, LIQUOR, but in my previous
work I feel I've been somewhat guilty of perpetuating an
incomplete stereotype: Dark, Romantic, Haunted, Lushly
Gorgeous New Orleans. That side of the city does exist,
but it's a small side and creates an inaccurate picture.
I love this city and doubt that I will ever live anywhere
else, but it isn't just beautiful and spooky - it will eat
you alive and gnaw your bones if you're not careful. I
don't mean only the crime, or the poverty, or the filth,
or the sadness - though these certainly factor in. There's
just something here that a lot of people can't take. They
visit, they see the fun parts, they fall in love with it,
they think they want to move here, they do move here and
leave after a few months because it's driving them insane.
There's a way of life here that I call Divine Stupidity,
which is the subject of John Kennedy Toole's novel A
CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, the best book ever written about
New Orleans. Living here is very much like living in the
Third World. You have to be tough and you have to learn to
laugh at things that would enrage people living in a sane,
sensible place." --from poppyzbrite.com FAQ

Who painted the Black Paintings? (NYTimes: pockeet; pockeet)
(via ALDaily)

Of course, if you believe Global Warming is a myth, none of
this happened.

(part 1)
   The fate of syllabism in the
poetry of English has been a Quixotic one. Isolated
names--Bridges, Dylan Thomas, Auden, Marianne
Moore--each has created an inimitable style, without
any of them leaving a useful general mode for others
to follow. After them syllabism more or less evaporates
--Plath is considered a free-verse poet, Hollander a
traditional formalist; present-day literary politics
hardly even finds a name for this aberration, much
less a place for it on their crabbed maps. But i think
it is more suited to the present state of our language
than either quantitative or accentual prosodies, for
the excellent reason that both vowel quantity &
accent are now in flux, & probably will render the
future reception of such works the exact equivalent
of the generations after Chaucer that didn't know how
to sound his lines.
   Secondly, i think adding counting
to poetry is an important means of engaging both
hemispheres of the brain for creativity--but this
is a much vaster topic than i will go into here. What
would make syllabism a truly constructive force
in our poetry (aside from a recognizably great
exemplar, of course--)? There need to be further
rules, varyingly exacting, & seen to be appropriate
for the things we are trying to say.
   Perhaps at some point i will
upload the essay i wrote for Hellas on my own
proposals i called "neoprosody", based on (briefly)
odd-number counts & various combinations of
long-short couplets. I see this as connecting to
what has already become a naturalized tradition
of writing haiku & tanka in our language. There
are several world literatures, in fact, worth
studying in this regard; the most promising, in
my view, being Welsh.
   Hopkins & Thomas both imitated some
of its effects, notably the complex consonance
called cynghanedd, but it was Rolfe Humphries (known
today as a translator), in Green Armor on Green Ground,
who really adapted the complete verseforms & managed to
write passable poems in them. (It is curious how technical
tomes of prosody now give definitions for englynion &
cywydd in so many words, but you can look far & wide &
never come across an actual example...)

   "For a Wordfarer (Englyn Unodl Crwca)

Speak them slowly, space them so:
Say them soft, or sing them low;
Words whose way we may not know any more.
Still, before the days go,

Sing them low, or say them soft.
Such a little while is left
To counterpoint the soundless drift of Time,
Let rhyming fall and lift.

Space them so, with lift and fall
Decent in their interval,
Late, archaic, who could say?--but always
Graceful, musical."

--Humphries

All the same, i would say that only three, relatively
free imitations, are really successful as poems: the
justly-celebrated "The Sunlight on the Garden" by Louis
MacNeice, 'There are some birds in these valleys'
by W H Auden,

(part 2)
& this neglected masterpiece, by
W S Merwin:

   "Some Winter Sparrows

i.
I hear you already, choir of small wheels,
    Through frayed trees I see your
  Shaken flight like a shiver
  Of thin light on a river.

ii.
On a bitter day I juggle feathers.
    My hands hatch, I am better
  Answered than puppet masters,
  With small winds at my fingers.

iii.
You pursue seeds, wings open on the snow,
    Coming up then with white
  Beak, speaking; in my deep foot-prints
  You vanish, then you flower...

iv.
Like no other: one white feather in either
    Wing, every turn of yours
  Surprises me; you are quicker,
  Girl, than the catch in my breath.

v.
Vanity: alone with many crumbs, teasing
    Each briefly. When the rest
  Get here, the crumb nearest you
  Will be worth scrapping over.

vi.
Caught in flight by harbor winds, you stumble
    In air, your strung-out flock
  Shudders sideways, sinking, like
  A net when heavy fish strike.

vii.
More snow: under a green fir-bush bowed low
    With flakes broad as cats' paws
  You hunch, puffed: if you do not
  Move maybe it will go away.

viii.
I find you too late, shrivelled lid half drawn
    Grimy eye, your wings' rigor,
  Dishevelled breast feathers worse
  Than ice inside my closed hand.

ix.
And more than one. Who would save bits of string
    Kinked as stubbornly, as short,
  As dirty, knotted together
  Into fours, as your feet are?

x.
You shriek like nails on a slate, one of you
    Falls dead at my feet, skull
  Split; and it is still winter,
  Not yet the season for love.

xi.
Those blue pigeons: there is snow still to fall.
    But in the brief sun they
  Bob, gobble, begin their dance.
  You doze then, row of old men.

xii.
Whether the gray cat is at the corner,
    The hawk hunting over
  The graves, or the light too late
  To trust, you will not come down."

  Two of mine:

    "Designated Driver"

Flower ewer, a wan unaware werewolf
    stares into your stark gulf
  as though there a hieroglyph
  revealed the hidden plaintiff.

Flower ewer, a wan unaware werewolf
    himself against makes war
  whose software spites his hardware;
  thus, as I pour, I despair.

  "Spiderland"

  For pure air, this tasteless poison;
  punishment for those whose foison
overachieves; you fight lies until noise
    destroys that horizon.

  Your love shrivels like a raisin,
  richer, more swart; you emblazon
body with hues of yet unrisen rays
    and craze in that prison.

  If, when you’ve garnered your dozen
  trustables, none pays to cozen:
call it mercy--mumming what treason does,
    muzzled, at that season.

Remembering the summer after i graduated from
high school, when i was engrossed in the most challenging
mathematical calculation i ever attempted: to integrate
the formulas of the Lorentz-FitzGerald Effect (which i
could only ever find in most skeletal form in any reference
book), so i could calculate directly the subjective &
objective travel times of relativistic acceleration (such
as Carl Sagan, for example, gives in several of his works,
in graphic format). I covered page after page with
algebraic transformations of the basic calculus equation;
it was just a little bit beyond me, & the tantalizing
frustration of it was exquisite. Finally i put it into a form
that i could use, & immediately set out to calculate
the travel times to all my favorite stars. This information
which seemed so important at the time, i have never
found any use for.
   And now i think the whole genre of
humans travelling to other planets & interacting with alien
intelligences, should be recognized as (1) a metaphor
for colonialism, & (2 a culdesac for storytelling. We,
who hardly can recognize the Other in humans who are
very much different from us, & not at all in such
highly intelligent species as chimpanzees, elephants,
& the higher cetaceans, do not deserve to meet
anything stranger; & the only story of it that could
be told, is the same tragedy of Earth. I see only two
fruitful branches of scifi to further explore (& perhaps
a third, as yet dimly adumbrated--): descriptions of
the near future that actually take account of such
necessary debacles as global warming, & hence help
acclimate us to beginning to construct some non-oblivious
response; & descriptions of hypothetical nonhuman
cultures, such that other modes of being can be
explored in a way that shows us how arbitrary our
own is; lastly, something that J G Ballard in an
illuminating if offhand remark, has pointed the way
to; "...I'd like to see more psycho-literary ideas [in
scifi], ...synthetic psychologies and space-times,
more of the sombre half-worlds glimpsed in the
paintings of schizophrenics..." --This latter, though,
might be thought of as what has always been the
province of poetry: mystification.

Saw & greatly enjoyed the New Zealand movie "Whale
Rider" which, like all such excursions into the sociology
of the collision between modernity & traditional cultures,
leaves me feeling both saddened & hopeful. And perhaps
there is no apter symbol for it than those very whales,
whose endangerment reveals to us a terrible failure of
imagination--. And i am returned to the old question:
where is the traditional culture i myself have lost
along the way? (If i were a Texas bluesman i might
know the answer.)

Listening to: Dennis Brain performing the Mozart
horn concertos. How sad the French horn can
sound! Do the songs of the whales say nothing
to us?

I thought for awhile they were playing "Einstein on the
Beach", but it turned out to be "Koyaanisqatsi". This set
me off remembering days when i had checked out the
boxed set of records, & listened to them obsessively,
hour after hour, day after day; you could not really
understand the subtle modulations except in such
dosage. (Like a TV show you watch so much you begin
to notice continuity flaws in the set from episode to
episode.) and the meaning i got from this piece was
a most curious one: a mild, despairing elation, not
some ultimate deliverance from words (& because
of words, from the human), but perhaps the simple
perception that they have been left behind & are in
fact already not needed anymore... The work itself,
a time capsule from the future, stood like a big
sphinx of quartz (pangram: "Jackdaws love my big
sphinx of quartz"), square in our certain path--&
yet there was no fear in it.
   It is the only truly Buddhist work, i think,
in Western music.

   "Sad Song of Cuacuauhtzin

My heart craves the flowers,
that they be in my hands.
With songs I am saddened,
I only try to compose songs on the earth.
I, Cuacuauhtzin,
with anxiety I desire the flowers,
that they be in my hands,
for I am dispossessed.

Where would we go
that we never have to die?
Though I be precious stone,
though I be gold,
I will be dissolved,
there in the crucible melted down.
I have only my life,
I, Cuacuauhtzin, I am dispossessed.

You make resound
your kettle drum of jade,
your red and blue conch shell,
you, Yoyontzin, Panting One.
Now he has come,
now the singer has risen.
For a short time be happy,
come and be present,
those with the sad heart.
Now he has come,
now the singer has risen.

Open the corolla of your heart,
let it tread the lofty heights.
You have hated me,
you have marked me for death.
Now I go to His house,
I will perish.
Perhaps because of me you will weep,
because of me you will be sad,
you, my friend,
but now I will go,
now I am going to His house.
Only this my heart tells,
I will not return,
never will come back to the earth,
now I will go, I am going to His house.

Only useless effort,
enjoy, enjoy, my friends.
Should we not be happy,
should we not have pleasure, my friends?
I will take with me the beautiful flowers,
the beautiful songs.

Never I do it in springtime,
I alone am in need,
alone am I, Cuacuauhtzin.
Should we not enjoy, my friends?
I will take with me the beautiful flowers,
the beautiful songs."

--Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, Miguel León-Portilla (1992)