Surely the greatest hindrance to human freedom
is the fact that not everyone wants it, needs it, or
knows what it is when they have it... But if i contemplate
this too long, i become speechless.
   I'll side with any libel at 2 p.m.

Even so in significant an object as a paperclip, i cannot
help but regard with the same insistent awe that a preindustrial
human would at its precision of form & absolute symmetry.

"Dry facts, like biscuits..." --Sacheverell Sitwell

"...warring dualities..." --Ruth Pitter

Poets can still feel like they're taking part in a grand collective
enterprise: the denial of our extremity.

...the Albigensian Crusade (which would have discredited the
Christian Church forever if men had memories)...

"...why should the gracious fountain of life give us passions,
and the power of reflecting, only to imbitter our days and inspire
us with mistaken notions of dignity?" --Wollstonecraft

Fairness is a duty enjoined by the existence of typological
differentiation. But objectivity is a despicable pretence.

...eclecticism itself has a significance (cultural dispossession,
Late-Empire-style) which no act of appropriation can transcend.
That is, being uncultured, we approach past (& exotic present)
cultures in an inescapably superficial way--as COSTUME. And
the more we realize this, the more desperately we grasp at the
attainments of others.

"...Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on
condition he said the Lord's Prayer..." --Virginia Woolf, To the
Lighthouse (1927)

"Twin Peaks", if i'm not mistaken, brings
something new to network television: the
acceptance of dreams, visions, psychic &
religious experiences as an integral part
of ordinary life.

Real religions typically survive almost any
amount of persecution. Whereas these new ones
would be snuffed out by the smallest tax,
methinks...

The trouble is, money isn't real to me; & i don't
understand, when it warps human relationship, why.

The coercion of Technology is NOT the Rule of
Reason. (That's just its protective coloration
when attacked.)

Bad art is made by beliefs about art; good art
occurs in a state of incredulity.

...the style of parenting that seeks to perpetuate
its own lifestyle (materially) is simply self-
betrayal: a kind of significance-suicide (if it
has to be done over, the first time didn't
count). What should be perpetuated is dynamic
freedom & custodianship.

Even cultures require an Art of Dying. --[&]...our
previous selves!

Chalk-drawing on the sidewalk is what we are. One
good rain & we're gone.

I'm starting to get used to new book
dust jackets that are printed to look
like a worn leather binding from a
hundred years ago, but i just saw one
that closely resembles a tattered
book jacket from mid-century. Woodgrain
Contact Paper Award, i say! Lemme
guess--the next thing after CD's will
be solid state; & they'll be
shaped like eight-tracks.

"The phrase was still in vogue that 'only
3 people understood Relativity' at a
time when Eddington was complaining that
the trouble about Relativity as an examina-
tion subject in 'Part III' [the hardest,
last test for the Mathematical Tripos]
was that it was such a soft option."
--Littlewood's Miscellany

Yes!

   "Conditional

Beckon some cragsman's paradise from the sky,
Heart-beat slows down, lungs halt their heave,
So to descry, conceive
How it was with me when that sport began:
Muscle and nerve wrought for me by the strain.
Fain as of old I feign that yet I can.

Pass by some image of the world's desire,
Eye beam narrows, glance sharpens to discern,
So to attire, adorn
Some visitant from when that hunt began
Whose hardihood now tells me what is vain.
Fain as of old why feign that yet I can?

Butterfly thought, sail gaily through the void,
Seeking your mate, belike--gale-borne astray,
To be destroyed, betray,
Ice-caught, the thoughts from which your life began:
Torn downy wings that will not sail again.
Fain as of old, I feign that yet I can."

--I A Richards

#4 Sign of the Apocalypse: the Governator.

#5 Sign of the Apocalypse: The Olson Twins on the
cover of Rolling Stone

Listening to: Electronic Concept Orchestra- Moog
Groove (1969).

   "Poem Plame"

Wedge of windshield droplets pungent the
Wipers miss
Land without humanism
Spark-like 'mid unearthed
Slope-side figtree-roots, sprockets Mabuhay harl

Sly fen of smog Dracula
Exultant
Repose of spears. Bubba the Love Sponge
Big freaky cereal die boxes of death
Siliconpimp Hertz

Rain fen of gym loss,
Tenuous night spatula,
Nixie taunt

10 09 03

One of the most haunting modern star-myths is
what has come to be known as "The Epsilon Bootis
Affair". In the late 20s, Dutch experimenters
at Eindhoven recorded a curious effect of time-
delayed radar echoes (LDE) apparently originating
from near the Moon, & more specifically, at one of
the (Lagrange) points in space where an object
could repose indefinitely in a stable orbit. Some
44 years later the young Scottish writer Duncan
Lunan plotted these echoes & seemed to discover
a star map--of the constellation Bootis--which
singled out the star epsilon Bootis. Or at least,
a star map from 13,000 years ago (having shifted
in the interim)! --I first read about this in the
January 1974 issue of Analog, & his
almost Lovellian speculations, of an intelligent
race from a planet of the dimmer, yellow star
being slowly destroyed as the brighter, red giant
star expanded, so that finally they would send
a probe to communicate the nature of their disaster
(which arrived here a little early for our
scientists--)...inspired one of my own scifi
stories. (Odd, that when another writer treated
this star, he totally disregarded Lunan's thesis!)
  Later determinations of the star's
distance & hence luminosity (shortening its lifetime
to such an extent that a life-bearing planet around
it become unrealistic) caused Lunan to retract, but
it is still a beautiful idea.

"After all, the 'Rheginosian Dragonic
Stronghold' could not stand inviolate
forever."

"The Dead Will Cuckold You."

'A Throw of Dice Will Not Abolish Chance.'

"Witches ride brooms...because Nature abhors
a vacuum."

Pavane.

Amethysm.

Music about Pynchon.

"Speculative poetry's only recognized grandmaster..." (More.)

"If gravity were like weather,
fickle, girdling the planet
in waves and pockets, there would
be days on which we could not move.
We would lie helpless, strapped
to the slowly turning earth.
For hours at a time we would consider
the nature of such an existence,
its underpinnings, its weights."
--Bruce Boston

Lojban palindromes.

Klingon Klezmer. (via Bartcop)

"The vision of the R'lyeh Lodge is the
formation of a Setian civilization in the
San Francisco Bay Area."

Hello Cthulhu Lunchbox.

   "Wahhabi Sunrise"

Silvery ughten, drivemist
Pinkgold Governator shapes.
Rubble of elves. Black coolth snack
Out of this wandering slag
My foehn sprockets. The Cryptic
Crosses to bleak Gibraltar,
Its music swirls as windshield
Smears map the oncoming gulf

10 08 03

"In the book [Nightwood], [Djuna] Barnes's
real-life friend Daniel Mahoney, a self-hating
homosexual doctor infamous on Paris's Left Bank,
becomes character Dr. Matthew O'Connor, a Tiresias-
like prophet figure. Barnes lifted material from her
conversations with Mahoney for O'Connor's witty but
sad exegeses on human suffering. Barnes certainly
suffered for that artistic license. Mahoney showed up
one night at her apartment about a year after the
book's publication. There he held her hostage from
1 to 5 a.m., screaming at her, demeaning her writing
and knocking her down twice when she tried to
escape. Barnes wrote to Eliot, 'Little did I know what
a book could do to one.' " --Carol Casey

Listening to: Beck- Odelay.

What if your cat dies & you can't bear to get rid
of it?

'Translation is very much like copying paintings.'
--Pasternak

Bright colors now mean Toys & Snack Food.

"This wild fastidious hope is quick to languish;
Its smooth diaphanous escape is swifter
Than the pack of truth; no mortal can distinguish
Its trace upon the durable hereafter." --Elinor Wylie

'Yet though all night I reel under the feet of the gods,
dawn ever returns me to the mystic, white sea.'
--Callimachus, The Lock of Berenike (tr Lombardo
& Raynor, 1988)

'The dead are tired of poppies.' --Marina Tsvetaeva

"Story is the anathema of the true philosopher."
--John Hawkes, Whitejacket (1988)

"Chopin's music gradually becomes tubercular." --Gilbert
Highet

S[ensing]: I see it, I want it. / [I]N[tuitive]: I imagine it,
I want it.

"Democracy as pap, sir, is on a trial basis." --Dr Awkward

'...Night, night,
once you were the bride of mysteries
adorned with lilies of shadow--
In your dark glass sparkled
the mirage of all who yearn
and love had set its morning rose
to blossom before you--
You were once the oracular mouth
of dream painting and mirrored the beyond.

Night, night,
now you are the graveyard
from the terrible shipwreck of a star--
time sinks speechless in you
with its sign:
the falling stone
and the flag of smoke.' --Nelly Sachs

"Like bagpipes rotting through the walls." --Edith
Sitwell

"There is a stone, a cubic mile in size, a million
times harder than diamond. Every million years a
very holy man visits it to give it the lightest possible
touch. The stone is in the end worn away. This works
out at something like 10 to-the-35th years..."
--Littlewood's Miscellany

"A too-persistent research student drove his supervisor
to say 'Go away and work out the construction for a
regular polygon of 65537 sides'. The student returned
20 years later with a construction (deposited in the Archives
at Gottingen)." --ibid

Can't stop laughing. (via Boing Boing) More (via Metafilter)

Born-again Yakuza. (via Rob Pongi)

A collection of ambigrams--including the first stanza
of "Jabberwocky".


Gary Coleman got 12.000 votes. (via Buzz Machine)

Chinese Braille. (via Language Hat) --what a
cool idea. Should be the name of a band.

"Some hermit of Hilarion's school austere" --Southey

Alien of the Day. (via Pickover)

Listening to: Frank Zappa- The Yellow Shark. (in
which Z. makes like Arnold Schoenberg...)

A 19c. Texas sculptress.

Music is only sweet against silence. Without it, it's
only another kind of noise. Space, too, is only per-
ceptible in relative silence. Thus is named "the desert"
--by what we discover there, by leaving (some of)
our noise behind. But silence is not a product to be
exploited or carried home. --Perhaps one can only
obtain a loosening of the noise-compulsion, if
that...

Philosophy is the building of a road. Out here, you
wander, you are grateful for one when you come
to it, but you can have no illusions about roads
belonging in this place or emanating from it
somehow. Exile, tsimtsum. For, of course, we came
from a forest or savannah or anyway a place with
trees, shade, & water. (=Talk) There is something
uniquely terrible about a dense throng of cacti.
The Old Ones.

A poem is a butterfly. A butterfly, that can live for
a thousand years.

  This wall visible from the moon, who will know
  i made my part of it any better than the rest?

  Late afternoons sometimes i suspect its purpose
  isn't even to be visible from the moon.

11 26 90

Translated "Raps Clack Calcspar" for the International
Palindromists' Club: "Los golpes chasquean la piedra
caliza."

'And the sun goes down in waves of ether
in such a way that I can't tell
if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.' --Akhmatova
(tr. Jane Kenyon)

Being forced to listen to sagittarians [ES-P] is like
watching paint dry. It's not possible for me to do more
than sample their words now & then to see if they're
still fumbling around on the same subject--& yes, they
are. If they were carpenters like they are thinkers, they'd
hit their thumbs more than the nail. It makes me want to
snatch it away from them... (Books written for this reason.)

...suffering is a koan i must answer with my life (joy),
but i keep wanting intellectual solutions. Nixon financed
his first political campaign with poker money he won
in the war.

'...human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which
we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we
long to move the stars.' --Madame Bovary, xii

'Metaphorical language is the result of the disproportion
between man's short life and the immense and long-term
tasks he sets himself. Because of this, he needs to look at
things as sharply as an eagle and to convey his vision in
flashes which can be immediately apprehended. This is
just what poetry is.' --I Remember, Boris Pasternak

Lawrence Durrell died; i burn a stick of frankincense &
myrrh in his honor. Later i fix some onion soup in the
kitchen only to discover, in the living room where the
two smells blend, a typically Durrellian irony.

A language with only a future tense. (via Enigmatic Mermaid)
Or not.

"...a Fladerdale drawbridge, both before and after its recent reconstruction. Booze, drugs, recklessness, or senility played a role in all these unfortunate incidents. I've seen that bridge. It has an awesome system of claxons, lights, and barriers. But with so many lost or damaged souls about, tragedies are inevitable. Perhaps the local authorities should add one more sign to the set: Caution. Darwin at Work." --Alan Sullivan

Results of a large blog survey.

The changing pear-shape of the Earth.

"I met a Californian today with a guitar, from
which he was reeling off a merry Strain, and
asked him how it was possible he could be so
light-hearted while the flag of his Country was
passing to the hands of the stranger. Oh, said
the Californian. give us the guitar and a
fandango, and the devil take the flag." (via
Bellona Times)

AIDS update. (via Dr Menlo)

Spook the spooks. (via post-atomic)

Found poetry from Japan. (via ptarmigan)

"RB: It strikes me that so much of what I see in Japanese print media seems very retro.

DC: They were doing retro 20 years ago, you see. We didn’t start doing retro until five years ago. They are still ahead." --Douglas Coupland (via Caterina)

"It felt a bit ridiculous- four grown people all
out shopping for Barbie notebooks and strawberry-
scented erasers… but I knew it was necessary."
--Baghdad Burning

A flaw in Mesklin.

"Tony Roberts has painted the distant world of
Mesklin (from a novel by Hal Clements, Mission of
Gravity) as if it were one of Albert Bierstadt's scenes
of the western United States..." --James Elkins

...Sitting Bull's remark about white people: "The love
of possessions is a disease with them."

In a limited universe of signifiers, things say them-
selves, & truth is self-evident. In an unlimited,
difficulties arise at every stage...questions of point
of view & veracity; ambiguity & the right to opine.
--Thus it seems revolutionary to open up a universe
of signifiers, however slightly. But i rather believe
the conditions for revolution precede its articulation...
The trouble is, writers of history identify the whole
process with the final conflagration. Thus writers
appear to foretell catastrophic events, over & over.
But they don't!

"Larvenschlupf, Sternschlupf, mit allen/ Kielen/ such
ich dich,/ Ungrund." ('hatching of grubs, hatching of
stars, with every/ keel/ I search for you,/ Fathomless.')
--Celan

"Etna da luz azul a Dante." --Juan Jose Arreola

[In Baja:] The Virgin Mary, painted in a satellite dish.

The ocean is too yang: bitter, violent, cold. Three
ways yang. As "three pieces equals mate" (a saying
in chess), three ways yang equals death.

Very low humidity makes you aware of being a bag
of water--a leaky bag. Rain here must be like the speech
of god. Sleep, in such a place, like smuggled ice. You
get out of your vehicle, immediately you recognize
there is "nothing to do". --Could one persist in that
realization, it would lead to enlightenment. But that
would be like prolonging astonishment beyond the
instant of realization. A secure beginning might be:
reluctance to describe.

...i found a dead vulture, crucified on a cactus--it
must have died a terrible death--i wrench a tail
feather loose for my hat; & wear it the rest of the trip
though it gets raggeder & raggeder in the cramped
confines of the bus.

Wind + Sun explain everything here. Boulders
spraypainted with names & years. I guess humans have
been doing something like this ever since they first
ventured into a desert. The immensity seems to demand
some defiant response. Ego vs non-ego in the starkest
opposition. (Interplanetary exploration will be no
different!) The alternative--is to identify with it all.
(And the alternative to that?)

The desire for meaning creates the Void. People ask
the meaning of life, the meaning of the world...they don't
ask the meaning of a pile of rocks.

Using spook words in poetry is like that sculptor
who exclusively uses cast-off radioactive debris
in his art.

   "Hillbilly Heroin"

1.
  Altair, rhostgitten oblong,
Foins through the rooky owl-light.

2.
  Fanboys wax much piqued at
Groovy jackal zoo.

3.
  All cold over there
As the color red leaps out,
As windy dreams bloom.
10 07 03

   "Nation Building"

Bling- bling- bling- plunk. Blood flag. Iron
Grom sweeping the lungfish will
Down go the dire did-- grammar
Prismatic, squib bullion; snow
ARPA, snow SUKLO, neon
Scully & rain up then foehn

10 07 03

   "Felons of Gyms"

Fasting lipogram to rail
Gun Rumsfeld in KISS makeup
Great hatred little room kiln

Mackerel democracy
  It filters through wry puree
OxyContin did. Detox
  Twice, Marduk Emerald the

Cryptic: Secert Service name
Cat bell take?

10 04 03

Consumerism & science: a popular religion & a
priestly one. Technology is where they intersect,
& increasingly that which justifies them both; art
exists only on the sufferance of its consumerist
uses.

Fable. Everyone has a cough. The old wizard listens
as they all shuffle past. He pronounces the fate of
each according to the quality of the sound.

"In diesem Amethyst
sind die Zeitalter der Nacht gelagert" --Nelly Sachs
('The ages of night/ are embedded in this amethyst')

"...suffering is the tension between what is and what is
not." --The Jungian Senoi dreamwork Manual

"Intellectus noster non tangit terminum eius." --Albertus
Magnus

The Insomnia of Reason is what produces Monsters.

"It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our
world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in
their native music and utter at intervals the words they
have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope
and wallow like dogs." --Emerson

A joke told by Mikhail Gorbachev: "They say that Mitterrand
has 100 lovers. One of them has AIDS, but he doesn't know
which one. Bush has 100 bodyguards. One is a terrorist, but
he doesn't know which one. Gorbachev has 100 economic
advisors. One is smart, but he doesn't know which one.
(quoted in 12.10.90 Time magazine)

"Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Laotse once stood before a
jar of vinegar--the emblem of life--and each dipped in his
fingers to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius
found it sour, the Buddha called it bitter, and Laotse
pronounced it sweet." --The Book of Tea

The selling of paintings is still as mysterious to me
as if there should exist a traffic in fairy toadstools.

Rewriting a poem is like patching a meteorite with
concrete. (Sometimes, however, years or months later,
another chunk from the same swarm falls into its
ordained place!)

"Snake slander is everywhere." --Bly

Toward midnight i heard about ten gunshots (more than
one kind) & called the police. An hour later some sort
of siren came around... The next night i slept soundly.

    "My aporia achieved
the glamorous anticipation of an answer" --Lyn Hejinian

"Quick cats'-paws on the generous stray-away" --Keats

To denounce Egotism with the ego is a little like the
War to End All Wars which is always being fought--
& for other reasons...

"Under the flowery oleanders pale" --Matthew Arnold
(quoted in Powys, Visions and Revisions)

Modern warfare is so destructive it ought to be called
something else....In the long-range cultural context [1991],
rather, it signifies that the United States has reached a
point in its decline where neither its productivity nor
the prestige of its ideals can anymore convince the world
of its preeminence. Only sheer tonnage of bombs is left.
So we can expect to see lots of "little wars", as the real
leaders of the new order emerge as precisely those nations
[who refuse] to squander their resources on senseless
militarization... [And pyrrhic indeed shall those victories
be:] The Superbowl can be won; wars, like a forest fire,
just end. The important thing [for you & me] is not to
feel powerless. What has ended, what has been taken
away, here, are a few illusions about where things were
headed--& that's good. As for the rest...terrible though it
is to live through, even vicariously, i think that the hollow-
ness of its justifications are far more obvious to the Allies
today (though its leaders are obliged not to snigger); &
it's whole feel is so anachronistic, that it must not be many
generations to come before the world's population will
know this only as one of the many luxuries the Twentieth
Century boasted, & which they can no longer afford.

"In the eighth century of our era the dilettante of the
Japanese court established the tea cult and the play of
'listening to incense'. ...the game was not merely to know
which was which, but to give each of them a beautiful
and allusive name, to recall by the title some strange
event of history or some passage of romance or legend."
--Pound

The horror, the horror.

'No age is in such need of poetry as that which
thinks it can do without it.' --Jean Paul Richter

Is despair like a faith in the impossibility of all
efforts?

Everyone does Madonnas, never any Crucifixions...

Maybe that's the part of language (or at least,
textbooks as presently written) i care least for:
naming all the furniture. When a picture is a much
better description. Suppose there were a language
only for describing the invisible?

"Anthologies are to poets what zoos are to animals."
--David Antin

The absence of a common intellectual framework is
to the mind's cathedrals as the absence of mason guilds
is to real cathedrals that want to be built. All that can
happen today is the Watts Towers.

"You may be sure that a question which requires
music for an answer can't be put into words." --A Voyage
to Arcturus

I ought to just regard Art as a game i'm allowed to
play by myself but not with others...(My imaginary
playmates: the dead.) To be accepted, to be noticed, to
be cherished--this our birthright has been stolen; & we
are forced to fight amongst ourselves for scraps.

"Let no one consider the original noise." --Barrett Watten

"So, in 1975 CEOs earned about 40 times the
average wage, by the end of the Reagan era
they were earning 130 times the average wage,
and we thought that was a wildly unequal society,
but now it's 500 times." --Paul Krugman

I've been waiting to see if Rush Limbaugh has
really jumped his own bad shark yet, & things
are very promising... (via Eschaton)

"Maximum number of miles that Ford's most
fuel-efficient 2003 car can drive on a gallon of
gas : 36

Maximum number its 1912 Model T could : 35"
--Harpers Index (via Robot Wisdom)

"But as outrageous as Limbaugh and Schwarzen-
egger are, nothing can top Missouri Republican
Senator Christopher Bond's now former communica-
tions director, Ernie Blazar. He decided to set up an
anti-Democrat web site called "N8354N," the tail
number of the plane that carried Missouri Democratic Governor Mel Carnahan, his son, and his assistant.
All were killed in the crash. The plane crashed just
prior to the 2000 election that pitted Carnahan
against the incumbent John Ashcroft. Carnahan,
whose name remained on the ballot, beat Ashcroft anyway." --Wayne Madsen in Counterpunch

One can love one place or many places, but not
“the Earth”. The same with cultures & Culture,
humans & Humanity. We rootless ones, i suppose,
identify with whatever flotsam we bump up against
--popculture, subculture, well-worn arcana--without
ever grasping the meaning of any whole, that
comes only from having grown up surrounded
by legible relationships.

Improvisation is like a game you make up the
rules of as you go along. Others soon want to join;
& if you persevere, you have made a language.

Sapir Whorf. Can historical consequences be
traced from the fact of there not being a word for
something?

“The wolves were ending their song when, from
the sea, the whales answered it.” --The Starship
and the Canoe, Kenneth Brower (1978)

“...in our hearts we are nothing if not cosmologists,
hanging in a cold cage sifting the ruthless jewels of
existence.” --Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of
the Cosmos (1991)

“To Szalay the physics life was not that much
different from the rock-and-roll life. The dress, the
hours, the hair, the sense of fraternity, the brothers
who knew what and how you played, were common
elements. New ideas had to be taken on the road.
You went from conference to conference to colloquium
singing for your supper, dazzling with your insights,
your sleight of hand with math. You were judged,
as Wheeler said, by your ability to project a thought
with power. You flew all night and ate strange food
with people you’d never met before, but plied the
same integrals, you had the same heroes. Afterward
you jammed with your colleagues.” --ibid

Meanwhile, in Chechnya...

Good news--if you ride a bicycle.

"and you will disappear under the accumulation from
stones which they will make rain on you/
when you are transformed into a black animal which barks"
--Lycophron (machine translated from French of the
Greek)

It appears that Javant's zine "Taboo Jadoo"
can be printed or downloaded from here.
My invented language Glaugnea's grammar
(with a lipogrammatic introductory essay)
is in #4.

2002: A Palindrome Story.
Also: The Great American Hypertext Novel.

A German member of OuLiPo.

"...I've made more money at this [lipogram] than from
all of the plays I've written." --Mark Dunn

A musical progressive lipogram.

Tribute to Perec.

“His lab’ring heart with sudden rapture seized
He paus’d, and on the ground in silence gazed.
Unskill’d and uninspired he seems to stand,
Nor lifts the eye, nor graceful moves the hand:
Then, while the chiefs in still attention hung,
Pours the full tide of eloquence along;
While from his lips the melting torrent flows,
Soft as the fleeces of descending snows.
Now stronger notes engage the listening crowd,
Louder the accents rise, and yet more loud,
Like thunders rolling from a distant cloud.”
Merrick’s “Tryphiodorus,” 148, 99. [cited here--
this is T.'s "Destruction of Troy, Being A
Sequel to the Iliad", i think.]

Byron (xxi.) rhymes Tryphiodorus with "storehouse".

Name for a band: Wet Cardboard.

On the back of an SUV: two Sanskrit "OM"
decals & a Dallas Cowboys.

   "Better than Botox"

Cadillac Boedecker snow
On the gray kudzu
Halcyon DMZ harl
Counterweighted bank vault door
Wooden water wheel
In a swirl of gray exhaust
R'lyeh froglegs sparkage

09 29 03

   "The Patriotic Murders"

Winter child the whisper
Thousand tell:
I uncached my Glock.
There's commencement to deadness
In the great boom ahead;
A goblin nepenthe,
Who Hoffa'd his
15kg cufflinks.

09 30 03

   "Authors"

Ravel nepenthe
Commencement to deadness swarms
Briskly done
Bare name die of a foe, sleepwalkers qibla
Halcyon whispers leaping flames day

What hold had it tenuous
Chameleon man from Baboon Delusion swirl
Spewing for grope continuing slag
Kudzu rhost
Consequential gleam?

Goblin the free gift change he;
38th parallel particles ravel
Mouthe chrome malison

10 02 03

A bunch of machine translators here.

Could be a heavy metal band name generator.

Theory is making a game that is like the problem--
& then thinking that to win the game is to solve the
problem. Well, maybe for especially gamelike
problems...

"19.

Firecrackers sounding like shots of handguns rattle
The afternoon of early July at a late time
For celebrations and it is an inglorious
Fourth we have come to, like the birthday of a very
Sick man: no simple affirmations will do today.
In the dying wind the nation's stars and stripes slacken;
I guess this must be the flag of its disposition
Not to save itself. Only now, much later, all flags
Down for the night, we watch some bunting--no more a flag
Than the flag is our old glory--as it fitfully
Gleams in the streetlamp's conditional light, like a truth
Which the sad, difficult telling of half-conceals, half-
Discloses, through our few tears ungleaming in the dark."
--Hollander, op cit

"Quisque suos patimur Manis." --Vergil, VI.743 ('We each
undergo our own ghost [-experiences].')

" 'Knowledge deposed, then!'--groaned whom that most grieved
As foolishest of all the company..." --R Browning
[In "The Flight of the Duchess" he rhymes 'instinct' with 'quince-
tinct', 'rescue' & 'burlesque you', 'syntax' & 'tin-tacks', 'accident'
& 'flaccid dent' (1), not to mention that intriguing pair, 'turmoil'
& 'sperm oil'...& those are just the good rhymes. What
is one to make of 'inquisitive' & 'visit, I've'...?] Well! I found 8 lines
i like:
  "Oh, which were best, to roam or rest?
The land's lap or the water's breast?
To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves,
Or swim in lucid shallows just
Eluding water-lily leaves,
An inch from Death's black fingers, thrust
To lock you, whom release he must;
Which life were best on summer eves?" --from "In a Gondola"
  Philosophical question: could it be that a poet would prefer
cacophony to music, if they wrote enough?

Dreamed i was On the Bus again, part of a caravan for people
with AIDS. Most of my dream i was cleaning up one particular
bus. Before i awoke i stepped outside & saw that the caravan wasn't
moving & the bus i had been in, had no wheels.

Perceptives think Chance is on their side, Judgers think Chance is
against them. Both are wrong.

"The burden of returning is remembering he has no secrets." --John
Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990)

Wrote a snarling "farewell to Dallas" piece for JR. Probably won't
send it to him. But i like the beginning: "As this woeful & ensanguined
empire slouches, like a lunarscape in motion, towards a darkling appointment
with Entropy it dare not foresee, i find myself preparing to eloign."

"Heine tells us somewhere, how, driven by the roar of
street-fighting, into the calm cool galleries of the Louvre,
sick and exhausted in mind and body, he fell down at the
feet of the Goddess of Beauty there, standing, as she still
stands, at the end of that corridor of mute witnesses, and
as he looked to her for help, he knew that she could never
bend down to him, or lift him up out of his weariness, for
they had broken her long ago, and she had no arms!"
--John Cowper Powys, Visions and Revisions (1915)

'If she only knew that all his poems had been written to her
and to no one else, every single one, even the one to Night,
even the one to the Spirit of the Swamp. But that was something
she should never know.' --Knut Hamsun, Victoria tr O.
Stallybrass

"This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing." --Merwin

"...the migration is itself a ritual performance, a 'religious'
catharsis... nomadism must satisfy some basic human aspiration
which settlement does not. It is paradoxical, but not surprising,
that the great religions--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian
and Buddhist--were preached among settled peoples who had
been nomads." --Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here?
(1989)

"Das tier kennt nicht die scham der mensch nicht dank." ('The
beast is void of shame, the man of thanks.') --S. George

A Colombian drug lord is offering to surrender [1991] on
condition that he be allowed to build his own prison...
  What a metaphor.

"Our ways our sole high deeds, our roads our destinations."
--Hollander, Powers of Thirteen (1983)

"For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish
never surrenders." --Melville, Mardi (1849)

"Wisdom had come from the wizening of Christendom..."
--Hollander, op cit

  I dream of the beauty of Alzheimer's
  in a world that has lasted so long...

  to forget how i got there,
  to have lost these days.

06 03 91

Shocking. I cleaned my yellow sink with dutch cleanser
and it turned white!

Listening to: The Mills Brothers.

Practicing for Year Zero. (via Wood_s Hole)

Mormon colonies in Mexico. (a book we just got in)

Finally got around to seeing "The Anarchist's
Cookbook": not a bad movie (it made me nostalgic
for old times in the Revolution that Wasn't) but a
terrible slander on Anarchists who, apart from the
"spraypaint anarchists" who think vandalism is a
political act in itself, were the most moral people
i've ever known; people who could spend 2 hours
arguing whether it's okay to eat rennet.

Interstitial arts. (via Ptarmigan)

Craig Hill thinks about poetry publishing. (See his blog for follow-ups.)

One of my favorite singers comes to a bad end.

Gothic Lolita. (And let's not forget Gothic Lolita
Bible.) (via Memepool)

I found this here while searching for "J A Lindon":
"Here's a limerick I picked up off the net a few years back - looks better
on paper.

3_
\/3
/
| 2              3 X pi             3_
| z dz X cos(--------) = ln (\/e )
|                   9
/
1

Which, of course, translates to:

Integral z-squared dz
from 1 to the cube root of 3
times the cosine
of three pi over 9
equals log of the cube root of 'e'.

And it's correct, too."

Ten technologies that deserve to die. (via bOING bOING)

A new art medium. (via Dave Barry)

The Free State Project. (via Samizdata)

"I believe it is by persons believing themselves
in the right that nine-tenths of the tyranny of the
world has been perpetrated... 'The times certainly
require,' says he [George III], 'the concurrence of
all who wish to prevent anarchy. I have no wish
but the prosperity of my own dominions, therefore
I must look upon all who would not heartily assist
me as bad men, as well as nbad subjects.' That is
the way he reasoned." --William Makepeace Thack-
eray, "George the Third"

"...Remember that he believed himself anointed by
a Divine commission; remember that he was a man
of slow parts and imperfect education; that the same
awful will of Heaven which placed a crown upon his
head, which made him tender to his family, pure in his
life, courageous and honest, made him dull of compre-
hension, obstinate of will, and at many times deprived
him of his reason." --ibid

"King George's household was a model of an English
gentleman's household. It was early; it was kindly; it
was charitable; it was frugal; it was orderly; it must
have been stupid to a degree which I shudder now to
contemplate." --ibid

"Ulf slit open his belly, led him round and round an
oak tree, and in this way unwound all his intestines
out of his body, and Brodir did not die before they
were all pulled out of him." --Njal's Saga, ch. 157

"Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth
And woke far on. I did not know the place." --Edwin
Muir

"...Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors."
--Ada

"Vita brevis, ars longa, tempus acutum, experimentum
vero fallax, iudicium difficile." ("Life is short, the Art
long, opportunity elusive, experiment dangerous,
judgment difficult.') --Hippocrates

"The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly;
all others stand helpless before the destroyer." --Kakuzo,
The Book of Tea

A poetry magazine: LOGISTICS.

Red-assed Baboon inner monologue. (via Rebecca Blood)

Why is there something rather than nothing? (via Metafilter)
Answer: there isn't.

Listening to: Wishbone Ash- Nouveau Calls.

#3 Sign of the Apocalypse: Pynchon on the Simpsons.
(via Silliman's Blog)

"I had been told by Elinor Wylie, after one of her trips to
London, of a meeting with Virginia Woolf which--though
Elinor may have distorted a little--had sounded rather dis-
agreeable. Mrs Woolf, she declared, had asked her why she
tried to write literary English; she had told Elinor that it
would be much more interesting if she let herself go in her
native American and tried something in the line of Ring
Lardner." --Edmund Wilson

The mass production of "facts": an abstract artform. (Its
aesthetics is called "plausibility".)

"I told him there were thirty-five women to every man
in madhouses and thirty-five men to every woman in
jails." --Rhoda Lerman, The Girl that He Marries (1976)

One who is broken-hearted cannot write criticism. It all
seems equally pitiful.

An artist wages transcendence against his alienation; a
pseudoartist cherishes alienation as a badge of honor.

Poetry in a book is like a record in an album cover.

Songs about being rock stars; poems about being English
professors.

Perhaps in all times & places the spirit of emulation
is responsible for the bulk of poems produced. (How
odd that none of our criticism will cop to this.)

The survival of the art of poetry should only be measured
by the amount actually memorized in people's minds today.

"To divine is human." --Michael Edwards, The Dark
Side of History (1977)

"And of all the infirmities we have, the most savage, is
to despise our being." --Montaigne, On Experience
(Florio's tr)

Translations as divination. What draws you to an
author, to a text, as the next direction of your own
writing.

"...Expiring in the frore and foggy air." --Shelley,
The Revolt of Islam, Canto IX. xxv.

The Miskatonic Acid Test.


"...But this our native or adopted land
has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us. Do we need a poet
to interpret Nature's teachings, we must look into our own hearts,
if perchance we may find a poet there.

What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is
the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry -- Weird Melancholy.
A poem like "L'Allegro" could never be written by an Australian. It is
too airy, too sweet, too freshly happy. The Australian mountain forests
are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation.
They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair.
No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands
the dying year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier.
In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout
among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark
hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills
is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly
over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out,
shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks,
and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter.
The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth
of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like monstrous sea-calf,
drags his loathsome length from out the ooze. From a corner
of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives
painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.
No bright fancies are linked with the memories of the mountains.
Hopeless explorers have named them out of their sufferings --
Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair. As when among sylvan scenes
in places

"Made green with the running of rivers,
And gracious with temperate air,"

the soul is soothed and satisfied, so, placed before the frightful grandeur
of these barren hills, it drinks in their sentiment of defiant ferocity,
and is steeped in bitterness." --Marcus Clarke, preface to Poems by
Adam Lindsay Gordon

Update on Welsh poetics, in Welsh & (a little
bit) in English. (pdf, via Wood_s Hole)

Lying being both socially necessary & morally
unjustifiable..., every viewpoint which depends upon
forgoing it (as a token of earnestness) will be rendered
ineffectual or else succumb to unwitting hypocrisy.
  --This is a myth about the Death of God, i
think--
  --but a true myth.

We are all targets in the same murky battlefield--whose sense
of each other, naturally, derives from the competition for
shelter. So i cultivate humanist attitudes i don't often feel
& actively refute in my thinking, in order not to lose touch
with that future time in which people will be born with a
reason to have them.

The re-marginalization of artists won't be the end of the
art-making impulse, merely its spurious authority &
glamour... It will be salubrious for Art, certainly. Those who
were in it for reasons of the ego will then move on to
other things.

When time making pots didn't have to be stolen from time
making spears, it was easier to be an artist. But they didn't try
to be priests, either.

There is a mystery named by the color greenish-orange.
Know this, & you know a secret about all mysteries.

Computers are a greater snare than even drugs. They appear
to confer intelligence without effort, as drugs appear to confer
an inconsequential joy.

"To say, of course, that an art form which cannot pay its own
way is also generically defunct is a respectable American
argument; happily it is no longer applied to any other art form,
from Grand Opera to aerial bombardment." --Charles Newman,
The Post-Modern Aura (1985)

"Our frailties are never more on display than when we give names
to Time." --ibid

The Big Lie. Nothing is so contagiously inspiring as
total commitment to a blatant fraud. It's as awesome as levitation.

We Americans are so childishly delighted with the bare act
of choosing, like Midas in the first hour of his "golden touch",
it hardly matters what; but very often i am as weary with the
plethora of indistinguishables, as Midas after years of the curse,
till i cry out: only give me one necessary task & the barest
sustenance, & i will ask no more! --But my art refuses me.

Listening to: Sons of the Pioneers.

An incomplete list of my favorite novels. Against the
Grain. Geek Love. Smilla's Sense of Snow. Crime and Punish-
ment. A Thousand Acres. Bleak House. Moderan. Sugar Rain.
Diana of the Crossways. Black Easter. Doktor Faustus. Under
the Volcano. Nightwood. Little, Big. Nova. The Golden Note-
book. V. Tlooth. Valmouth. Norstrilia. Dune. Jack of Shadows.
Moby Dick. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Riddley
Walker. The Ticket that Exploded. Maldoror. Beautiful Losers.
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. The Glass Bead
Game. Flowers For Algernon. The Worm Ouroboros. Wolf
Solent. Underworld (Delillo). The Cannibal (Hawkes). Lithium
for Medea. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Invisible Cities.
Dictionary of the Khazars. Stand on Zanzibar. Voss. Another
Country. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Golden Witchbreed.
City (Simak). The Demolished Man. Vathek. Pale Fire. Interview
with the Vampire. Watership Down. the Cipher (Koja). Lilith
(Salamanca). The Crystal World. The Intuitionist. Philadelphia
Fire. Holy Fire.

   The smell of woodsmoke
On a bright autumn morning
   Many memories
Swirl like the dark particles
Of what was once green & tall

09 28 03

For a bumper sticker: DIEBOLD RULES?

Every image without humans is a name for solitude.

As cats are the opposite of painting, rabbits are the
opposite of magic.

"...in any reading of the Tarot it is the Fool who asks
and the Fool who answers every question." --Bill Butler,
Dictionary of the Tarot (1975)

Integrity is all the more essential in isolation, though it
seems that lies there harm no one & to oneself are trans-
parent. But it is only in truthful relation to yourself that
you exist--the other kind is merely the maintenance of a
convincing façade.

Our system has more safeguards against good leadership
than the goddamn Roman Empire.

And at last i begin to wonder: was it maybe a mistake to
have associated Art with meaning in the first place? When,
most of it has more in common with birdsong, than the
delicate encoding of an insight...?

A strange dream last night. Most of it
i've lost with my morning coffee, but
i remember i was inventorying books for
an estate sale...old books, some of great
value, most not... At last i found the
most important one of all--it was about
three feet tall, one or less wide, &
bound in black ermine fur, with tooled
leather pages of various dark colors.
All the type was gold inlay. The book
was a collection of aphorisms about death.
I opened it (the cover wasn't stiff, but
flexible, less like a book than a satchel,
say) & read a few on one page. Right before
the alarm went off & i woke, i remember
the last one, by someone with a Russian
name i didn't try to pronounce:
   "The Hour of Death arrives, now goes
 confessor to the Confessor, assassin to the Assassin."

'And not even the blasphemers of the demiurge
have dared to deny that the universe is most
beautiful, but rather, they maintain that
because of this beauty, souls are harmed.'
--Proclus

   "The Dark Side of Blogging"

edge. Burning leaves good squirm, harl
In the stable of Receive.
Harmony the swarms build slag
Doughnut sprockets, evil swarf
Exultant pain froglegs pain
Chrome kissing daylight gazelle
Can't tenuous praetor blood flag calx
Crystal sequoias. Qibla
Where, dilithium rhost can't gecko

Wheedle prismatic edge verse;
Fractal nozzle crystal ghost.

09 27 03

"The source of all disorder was the
loneliness of the jackal, God's first-
born." --Marcel Griaule, Conversations
with Ogotemmêli (1965)

Geomantic Poles (centripetal & centri-
fugal spaces): the Cave & the Savannah.
A house is a pseudo-cave. A yard is a
pseudo-savannah. Perhaps this is the deep
origin of esoteric/exoteric, sacred &
secular; even, private & public... Dance
on a savannah makes Waves, whilst a dancer
in a cavelike area is a Particle.

Listening to: Golden Rain, "Ketjak: The Ramayana
Monkey Chant" (it took some searching, but i
remembered i had this record).

"Porno Megastore" (for Verbophobia)

When that dire November hurls its sway
And all Undead-Americans are exultant
To have seen the last sequoia's day:
Let the chameleon man begin, resultant

Of fraud befrauding those whose suavity
Is greasepaint rhost. Instead of kissing daylight
Turquoise, we shall join up too. The tea
Party has room for losers' panache, & froglegs...

The pro-Saddam wing. Charge of the fiery lilac
Harl, no records but our oval eclogues;
A good squirm will be had. Not fray-peripheral,
To hairlip the Pope whose 15kg dildo

A genealogy of orcs reaps feral.
In the stable of harmony, the swarms build.

09 26 03

Review of 2 guitar lines. "Seven Nation Army" by
The White Stripes. The lyrics are downbeat, but
the guitar has the swagger of a successful scam.
"Like a Stone" by Audio Slave. Says everything
there is to say about the year of 2003 A.D. in
one snarling run of distortion. I lay down my pen
in respect. (Till i read some more news again...)

Helsem's Rising Star.

Paradoxism.

Finally, a publication i was waiting for.

Don't read this. (via dr menlo) [I guess if this
election thing doesn't work out, we could just
all join the Republican Party, eh?]

Overview of Xenakis.

A brief email exchange on the exo/esoteric divide:

"Michael,

Very useful info. Thanks. I'm shocked that this
essay is still up! Or maybe you saw it cached
through Google? I haven't had that AOL account for
years. The essay was part of a class I taught at
the Garret about three years ago, I think. It was
intended as a kind of blog before there was blogging,
but not many people responded to it. I'll see if I
can still access it and add your comments as a note.

Very interesting that you mention "folk poetry,"
which is a phrase I've been using in my recent
thinking as a way to distinguish poetry whose author
is not deeply invested in whether or not s/he has
an audience from poetry that is written as an entree
into the po-biz marketplace and thus is written
with the express goal of cultivating an audience,
whether that audience is other poets, critics, readers,
or search committe chairs. It's probably not
"folk" in the way that the folk art (painters,
sculptors) is "folk," though, where the term seems to
connote lack of academic training and thus no
adherence to the conventions of "High" art, though not
necessarily a withdrawal from the trade marketplace
(Finster, for example, must make quite a good
living). I think I use the term in reference to poets
who choose to stay outside the game of "courting"
approval. I think entangled in my thinking about
this is also what seems to be a trend in the last
five years or so (maybe it's post-post?) to go "Low"
in diction, tone, subject matter (I think of
Brenda Coultas's new book A Handmade Museum). In
fact, I probably got off on this track while thinking
about the current popularity of the prose poem,
which seemed to rise creepily out of many people
realizing simultaneously that the prose poem is a
flexible way to achieve the ends of poetry while
simultaneously working in a way that was at the
moment considered to be out of vogue...
notwithstanding the underground tradition of the
prose poem itself.

bc" (Brian Clements)

>From: michael helsem <*************.com>
>To: ************.com
>Subject: evolution of difficulty
>Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:07:23 -0700 (PDT)
>
>i think the proper framing of this issue
>is in the distinguishing of "folk poetry"
>from "court poetry", which is visible in
>many, if not all, of the world's considerable
>literatures. in our Western European lineage,
>the Alexandrians seem to have been the first
>poets to write for other poets; & the name
>of Lycophron became synonymous with "pretentious
>obscurity". among the Troubadours, there was
>such a thing as "trobar clus"--& the same poet
>could write both hermetic & accessible poems
>without incongruity. in Old Norse Court Poetry
>(perhaps the most difficult--in every sense--
>that has ever been written) it is hard to imagine
>these involuted figures as anything except brain-
>teasers for people with WAY too much spare time.
>finally, in Late Tang poetry, such writers as Li
>Shangyin wrote poems that were so equivocal the
>very subject of them has been an object of debate
>ever since. i think we can conclude that wherever
>coteries form, their natural inclination is toward
>privatizing their discourse.
>

If you believe Global Warming is a myth, this
didn't happen either. Or this. Bruce Sterling:
"I hope you can get a 'wakeup call' during a blackout."
Another smoking gun. (pdf via bOING bOING)


A thoughtful Islamic critique of Islamist funda-
mentalism. (via Shia Pundit)

Austin sidewalk grattifi (particularly the
third one). (via Prentiss)

I wonder how my CD turned up in this catalog?

My favorite sonnet is either this one or this
one, both by Millay (who not only wrote the
best sonnets of the 20c.--she wrote most
of the good ones). But on the whole i regard
this form, as i once remarked elsewhere, as
"the cynosure of poetasters". It has driven out
a whole ecosystem of delightful short-poem
forms which are now extinct, much like the
effect the introduction of rabbits had on Aust-
ralia... It's not the form per se that's so bad,
but "sonnetthink": that crown of olive-leaves
invariably assumed by the Sonnet Bard. (Or,
one sets out to write an "anti-sonnet"--what
good is that for a starting point?) Only a little
better is the haiku in English: but reading these
is an experience that mercifully ends in short
order.

Favela chic.

I just this instant made up a new poetry
movement: you use a combination of
spook words & Buffy slang. (It hasn't got a name yet,
but i am open to suggestions. --A possibility:
"Fissionable Quiche." [via the Metafilter discussion])
("Ptecois"?)

Then there's what i like to think of as "Real World
Poetics"... (via Viridian Design)

To cuss in 121 languages.

Alexander Cockburn on the life of Edward Said.

You might say that the force of increasing
individualism has caused the separate (Jungian)
types to become more distinguishable, & to
form their own emanations [preferred surr-
oundings] more distinctly than ever before.
Social unravelling leads to the accumulating
of a yarn-ball for each color...

The Ego is a magic circle maintained by
mostly invisible taboos, avoidances,
distinctions & practices. Making this fact
explicit is a step toward acknowledging &
utilizing non-Ego powers. As soon as you
draw a line, you posit Doors. Why are they
conceived as separate entities then? Because
you won't try to open a door you believe is
merely painted on the wall.

Muse-Silence. Begins for a poet with those
things he cannot change & has ceased to have
new feelings about... Properly considered,
it is a call to arms. But the only way through
--is surrender.

In order to become human, a measure was
lost; humanity itself is a leaping of bounds.
But that gesture completes itself in the
finding of new measure...

'Cosmic images are sometimes so majestic that
philosophers take them for thoughts.' --Bachelard,
The Poetics of Reverie (1960)

As long as minimum wage jobs exist, the
Blues will not lack for a rationale.
Grunge is Blues for teenagers who work
at starbucks & feel exploited, but do
ten hours at a warehouse job & tell me
"Black Hole Sun" answers to your condition.

   "Aubade: Tan Sierra"

Megachurch the free gift,
Tutelary minimum wage.
Speed-trap cops with radar guns
Stop my breath in the cool gray
Morning drive.

Sky of but haggard revelations,
Brakes on the fritz, even to scribe
A momentary plaint takes
Way too much of my Wolf Age watch.

Bollywood song, a jewel flung
Out into the cratered streets
Salves the day of Niagara bailing,
Lets me (for a moment) not lose.

09 26 03

My ideal of a healthy audience-artist
relationship in the present epoch would
have to be that of Bob Marley & the
Rastas. Though it may be my fate, i
really don't want to be a "poet's poet".

Survival Research Laboratory's monster
machines: a Mystery Play for our times.

If not a great age of literature, it is anyway
a great age of dust jacket illustrations.

A useful Spanglish/Spanish/English dictionary.
[I figure in 50 years, "Spanglish" will be the
de facto language of Texas...]

An article on "they" as a singular neuter pronoun
--& its surprisingly long history. (via AL Daily)

Osama bin Laden's "Best of Manhattan".

Hats for cats. (via Rebecca Blood)

To make CD's with that old 78 crackle.

   "Oneiric Flashbangs"

Time-starved, desultory
Poking at not-quite beginnings
That will never be anything more--
And this is in the idle
Half-hour found;

09 25 03

   "Poem

One of the old guys said
a good test of poetry was
that if you thought of a true
poem while shaving you'd cut yourself
well
lots of times I'll be reading a poem
and stop right in the middle
cause I just remembered
the great shaves I get
from my Wilkinson Sword-Edge blades"

--Bill Knott

Neo-Victorian Frump Boots.

Real heroes.

Melanie reviews:
" When is a Woody Allen movie not a Woody Allen movie? When it¹s Anything Else. No, no, see that¹s the name of the movie...Anything Else. Coincidentally, that¹s what it¹s also being marketed as...as in, anything else but a Woody Allen movie. It¹s quite a horror, really, that DreamWorks SKG has opted to treat writer-director-actor Allen as an afterthought in his own film, and has instead decided to reach out to a whole new, younger [for Allen] audience by building the ad campaign around twentysomething actors Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci. Allen, the winner of three Academy Awards (for writing and directing Annie Hall [1977] as well as scripting Hannah and Her Sisters [1986]), besides being the most nominated writer in Academy history (thirteen Best Original Screenplay nods) should be accorded a little more respect, especially since Anything Else is the best movie he¹s helmed in years, maybe since the deceptively silly musical Everyone Says I Love You in 1996, or 1994¹s backstage/gangster romp Bullets Over Broadway before that.

As reported in an internet posting, Anything Else is like that scene toward the end of Annie Hall, in which Allen, as Alvy Singer, watches two gorgeous actors, male and female, rehearse a scene in a play he has written based on his on-again, off-again relationship with Annie. That¹s exactly how much of Anything Else plays: a younger version of Annie Hall, only this time the characters seem even more screwed up; at the very least, their neuroses are not made out to be all cute and cuddly. The main character is a nebbish comedy writer named Jerry Falk, played by up and coming actor Jason Biggs (age 25, previously known for the American Pie movies, as well as a stint on Broadway as The Graduate¹s Benjamin Braddock--the Dustin Hoffman role, get the picture). Falk is at a cross roads, both personally and professionally, when he meets, in the form of Allen, a sixty year old teacher trying to break into the wonderful world of comedy. Allen¹s David Dobel encourages Falk to get rid of the dead weight in his life, like his creepy agent (Danny DeVito), and most especially, Falk¹s live-in girlfriend, a ridiculously needy headcase played by Christina Ricci...but more on her in a bit.

The central relationship in the film is the one between Falk and Dobel, and Woody Allen has created something special in the doing. Dobel genuinely likes Falk and wants to form a writing team with him and move to California (for a sure thing tv gig), but Dobel sees that Falk is hopelessly stuck in a cycle of self-defeat, so he must first prod the young man to take a good look at the world he¹s chosen for himself. The trick is that--and don¹t think Allen isn¹t aware of this--as good as Dobel is for Falk, he¹s also a liability. Instinctively, Dobel knows this, but he¹s starting to feel the wear and tear of age, not to mention his own emotional shortcomings, and he needs Falk with his promise of youth and vitality if he (Dobel) ever hopes to break free of his own rut. At the same time, however, Dobel is still capable of putting Falk¹s needs ahead of his own and really wants to see his new friend prosper.

Woody Allen has often used other performers as the mouthpiece for his particular brand of high strung, self deprecating schtick. Mia Farrow did it--splendidly--in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and John Cusack had his turn in Bullets Over Broadway. Not bad. Kenneth Branagh, however, struck out in Celebrity (1998). Now it¹s Biggs¹ turn and he¹s quite a smart choice for the role. Allen has drawn a nice performance from the perfectly cast Biggs, and one can imagine the young star developing even more as an actor under Allen¹s future direction. These two belong together. Allen, for the most part, plays the straight man here, which is not to say he doesn¹t earn a few laughs. After all, his character is a bit of a survivalist nut, and Allen knows how to milk the gag; just the idea of this by now overly familiar scrawny shrub of a man toting an arsenal is worth a chuckle or two...sometimes, on the other hand, it¹s just scary, which also seems to be Allen¹s point. Anyway, the scenes of Biggs and Allen bonding, especially while trekking through the park, are touching and even a little sad in a slice of life kind of way. Give Allen credit for deft underplaying, as well as some of the most breathtaking shots of Central Park, in all its lush glory, ever committed to film (courtesy, as well, of cinematographer Darius Khondji).

Now, about Christina Ricci and the terminally helpless Amanda. Ricci, with her ever so dry delivery, was a marvellous child actress, especially in her role as Wednesday in the two Addams Family movies. As an adult, in things like The Opposite of Sex, she tries way too hard to impress as a cynical, dangerous, tough chick and generally annoys, but in this film Allen taps into something great about this actress, and the two of them create a memorable, albeit disturbed, character. Christina Ricci has an unusual presence. She¹s short and physically awkward besides having a head that seems almost too large and too round for her petite frame; moreover, she has big brown saucer-eyes and a cute little mouth. Even at age 22 (now 23) she is not unlike a Munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. The beauty part is that emotionally unstable Amanda has men falling all over her--at least for awhile--because of her waifish, little girl lost aura, especially those wide brown eyes that penetrate the soul. The full thrust of her propensity for terror doesn¹t surface until much later, and by then her partners are in too deep to make a clean break. Ricci is certainly effective casting, (she¹s also impeccably lit, like a real old time movie star) but the performance itself borders on brilliance. Even so, it¹s unlikely this actress will ever get the acclaim she deserves for bringing this unpleasant character to life. She¹s too believably self absorbed to inspire much goodwill. But what fun Ricci has playing her! Just look at how this woman¹s loose and limber body language is at odds with her repeated pangs of emotional discomfort. Notice, too, the ease with which Allen¹s words, with their irregular cadence, tumble out of Ricci¹s mouth. (The drawback of Allen¹s otherwise wining battle of the sexes/office comedy The Curse of the Jade Scorpion [2001]--think His Girl Friday, or The Desk Set--was that previous Oscar winning actress Helen Hunt seemed to have a hard time getting her mouth around Allen¹s words, and the carefully scripted putdowns often fell flat; one longs to see what a truly gifted comic like Lisa Kudrow, with her not of this planet timing, could do with the Hunt role, but I digress).

Ricci¹s Amanda can¹t seem to help herself, she just goes along from one blunder to the next, blithely unaware of her own power to annihilate those who love her. It¹s just her nature, and once her flighty, immature mother, grandly played by the great Stockard Channing, shows up needing a place to stay (she also brings along a piano), all the pieces begin to fall in place. Of course, Woody Allen has often been accused of being a misogynist, but in this movie he seems more genuinely confused by, rather than contemptuous of, women. It¹s this confusion, the process of sorting it all out that prompts Allen to write such interesting parts for actresses. That the women aren¹t always likable, I now see, is beside the point. Allen is very much fascinated by women (their contradictions, their allure and hold over men), and particularly in this case, he¹s making a concerted effort to unravel what he sees as a great mystery, even though it¹s not always pretty. That¹s just a guess, an observation. Most male writers and directors aren¹t as interested in fully exploring their obsessions. Likewise, many male writers and directors are content to create female roles that aren¹t nearly as challenging (for actresses, that is) or multi-dimensional, especially, god forbid, not in romantic comedies (in which more and more, all thought goes into a laborious set-up, and character development only exists to serve the plot).

It¹s a shame that DreamWorks has elected to market Anything Else as a generic romantic comedy, when what it really is, is a sometimes painful character study (or studies), a meditation on relationships, and not just the male-female kind, but also male bonding and mother-daughter stuff. Still, for all its observational flair, Anything Else is happily full of Woody Allen¹s stock-in-trade one liners (but no spoilers here); it¹s only upon repeat viewings that Allen¹s genius for structure and compassion for human beings in general truly comes to light. I very much enjoyed this movie. I took something with me from the experience, and it¹s hard to explain, what, exactly without giving away all the movie¹s surprises. Suffice to say, there¹s something truly special at work here, but it takes patience...and any longtime Allen fan knows as much. Early word on Anything Else was very encouraging though many of the subsequent reviews have been polite, if unenthusiastic...too bad. Those critics who continually compare Allen¹s recent output to his 1970¹s-1980¹s heyday are missing the point. Allen is our most disciplined filmmaker. He writes and directs at least one picture a year and generally does so without a lot of fuss, and because he typically works within a modest budget, his movies (with name-brand actors often taking reduced salaries) aren¹t much of a financial risk. It doesn¹t matter to Allen, nor should it, that he has yet to top, say, Hannah and Her Sisters. He¹s an artist, and once he¹s done with one project, he¹s ready to move on to the next. He doesn¹t need to fret and keep looking over his shoulder. A finished film just is what it is; if one doesn¹t hit, maybe the next one will. It¹s unrealistic to expect anything more. Allen is trapped by neither failure nor success. His desire is to keep moving, to keep working, and Hollywood could use more of that sort of professionalism, a throwback, if you will, to the old studio system of yesteryear. Yes, there really is something to be said for workman-like precision.

The early grosses are in, and it appears DreamWorks¹ marketing gamble has backfired. The opening weekend figures for Anything Else are less than any of the three previous movies Allen has done for the same studio, starting with 2000¹s Small Time Crooks, Allen¹s biggest moneymaker in a decade (worth watching for Elaine May¹s priceless performance). Woody Allen has a loyal, though steadily shrinking, following--and that¹s who the movie should have been aimed at all along. For those who are interested, both 2001¹s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and 2002¹s Hollywood Ending offer nifty plot construction. Scorpion is a wild yarn about a female efficiency expert and a male insurance investigator who are unwittingly roped into a burglary scheme; Hollywood Ending features Allen as a down on his luck movie director trying to keep a case of hysterical blindness under wraps. Going back to the 1990¹s, Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Bullets Over Broadway, and Everyone Says I Love You are worth a look, but skip 1997¹s too mean-for-it¹s-own good Deconstructing Harry (Allen¹s last nominated screenplay).

In the past decade, Allen has made movies for Tri-Star, Miramax, Fine Line, and DreamWorks. His deal with the latter runs out with the release of Anything Else. His next picture is for Fox Searchlight. Hopefully they won¹t drop the ball. The project is off to an interesting start. Allen usually has specific actors in mind when he writes a script, and in the case of the upcoming venture, he was set to cast Robert Downey, Jr. and Winona Ryder (who appeared in Celebrity). Unfortunately, the insurance premiums for those two often troubled performers were too high for Allen¹s budget so he appears to have settled on Will Ferrell, a former Saturday Night Live cast member, and Chloe Sevigny, a one time supporting actress nominee (Boys Don¹t Cry, 1999) and oft photographed fashion show junkie, I mean...groupie. "

Listening to: Jennifer Batten's Tribal Rage (not a
good name; actually it's progressive rock instrumental
music, with some excellent guitar chops--).

Listening to: Boards of Canada.

They have tried to tell us that causality
is meaning--that the skeleton is the body.

"Myth is the twilight-speech of an old man
to a boy. ...Myth is the facts of the mind
made manifest in a fiction of matter. The
speech of an elder in the twilight of his
life is not his history but his legacy; he
speaks not to describe matter but to demon-
strate meaning. He talks of his past for
purposes of his future. This purpose is the
prejudice of his memory. He remembers that
which has been according to what could and
should be, and by this measure sifts the accu-
mulation of his memory: he rejects the irrelevant
event, elaborates the significant detail,
combines separate incidents of similar principle.
Out of physical processes he creates a metaphys-
ical processional. He transposes the chronology
of his knowledge into a hierarchy of meanings.
From the material of his experience he plots,
in retrospect, the adventure for the mind which
is the myth." --Maya Deren, The Divine
Horsemen (1951)

The Bulldozer is our sacred cow.

"Deaf is the heart to which the Lares call from
the desolate floors in vain." --Zanoni

How can community exist without a sense
of place?

"In the past two years, 500 export assembly factories have shut down in Mexico, throwing 218,000 workers on to the street. Their crime was the $1.26-an-hour base wage they were paid by companies such as Alcoa Fujikura to produce auto parts for export to the US. Those wages are now "too high" in the global economy. Never mind that the Alcoa workers in Acuna live in makeshift cardboard huts that lack potable water. Never mind that many of the workers in nearby Piedras Negras were selling their blood plasma twice a week to Baxter International for $30 in order to survive. Those same auto parts are now being made in Honduras by workers earning 59 cents an hour, in Nicaragua for 40 cents an hour and in China for 27 cents an hour." (via Wood_s Hole)

"Kabul is a glimpse of Dresden post-1945,
with contours of rubble rather than streets,
where people live in collapsed buildings,
like earthquake victims waiting for rescue.
They have no light and heat; their apocalyptic
fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall
stands that does not bear the pock-marks of
almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie
upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for
a modern fleet of trolley buses are twisted
like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top
of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of
machines erected by the Khmer Rouge to mark
Year Zero. " --the Guardian (via Robotwisdom)

"Granting Permission Not to Read Experimental Poetry"

I speak; the cave speaks.
Too dark, but falling
Beyond the flat waste
While the wrinkled fractal lives,
Your hard, entire robot sinks.

09 22 03

Melanie asked me a very good question,
viz.: Were there any precursors to
"Rashomon"? My first thought was the
play within a play from "Hamlet", which
reflects the main action in parabolic
fashion, but they do not occupy positions
of equivalence. Likewise in Don Quixote,
what Quixote & Sancho Panza experience of
the same events is dramatically different
--but the author unequivocally takes the
side of the realistic interpretation.
Durrell, of course, with his "Alexandrian
Quartet"--but that was after. I think you
must look to Browning's verse novel The
Ring and the Book for a story that is
told in different ways by different char-
acters.

Those who insist on fitting every
experience into a coherent worldview, end
up learning only what can be paraphrased.
Which is like being unable to read poetry
(even in your own language) except in
translation--.
   Description, though, itself is
a genre of poetry. --Bad poetry.

It is the magician's privilege to disbelieve
in magic.

Science, wishing to disesteem marvels, says
they are worthless if untrue & then proceeds
to prove their impossibility. But science
holds sway among the people solely by virtue
of its marvels & its promises.

"poetry should be at least as well written as Pirates of the Caribbean" --Oh Wait

"those mountains are a military secret." --Rubber Hose

My Lunatick heart...

"THIS IS WAR

There is no one
to show these poems to
Do not call a friend to witness
what you must do alone
These are my ashes
I do not intend to save you any work
by keeping silent
You are not yet as strong as I am
You believe me
but I do not believe you
This is war
You are here to be destroyed"
--Leonard Cohen The Energy of Slaves

Customer brings a huge tub of books; also
seven roaches, of which i successfully kill
five.

Wesley Clark's blog. Hm...maybe someday, the
candidate-blogger who gets the most hits,
will win.

An urban legend about Klingon.

First new Kraftwerk album in 17 years. (via plastic)
[Not a sign of the Apocalypse--i think.]
[[What about a new film by Jodorowsky?? Grr--
wonder if they still make LSD sugar cubes?]]

   "Farewell Galileo"

Brave little probe years in the cold alone
Patient to glean pictures of strange new worlds
Now like the Spartan band you will take the plunge
To a fiery end on a billion mile command.

09 21 03

Listening to: Penderecki- Dies Irae

   "As I Was Passing

As I was passing near the jail
I met a man, but hurried by.
His face was ghastly, grimly pale.
He had a gun. I wondered why
He had. A gun? I wondered...why,
His face was ghastly! Grimly pale,
I met a man, but hurried by,
As I was passing near the jail."
--J A Lindon in: Howard W Bergerson,
Palindromes and Anagrams (1973)

   "Doppelganger

I.

Entering the lonely house with my wife
  I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush--
    Blackness that moved,
  A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
  Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever--
  I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
  Though I knew I should act at once.

II.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
  He came, and I saw him crouching
    Night after night.
    Night after night
  He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

III.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone--
  Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
 I dared not
  Put him to flight forever.

IV.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
  Revealed in the ragged moon
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes,
  A shape amid the shadows,
    Blackness that moved.

V.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
  I saw him, for the first time,
Entering the lonely house with my wife."
--ibid