Mind is the outermost layer of skin, the most
sensitive & easily marked; it is only because we have
no wider senses that we cannot determine its extent
or limits.
I'm not here because i'm here, i'm here because i'm not
here.
"Memorized speech is perhaps the least dramatic thing
that can happen on the stage." --Jack Smith
"It is rather strange because no painter thinks while
painting about what his painting would look like on
a color slide." --Nam June Paik
"As Leakey also said, the reason painting suddenly
appeared about 20,000 years ago was not because
people suddenly became smart, but because, before
there were agricultural communities, everybody moved
2000 miles every year." --ibid
An integrated person is a working democracy.
When i make a narrative out of my experiences, my
aesthetic sense is a strong wind i must tack against
to steer toward the truth. I get blown off course.
Sometimes i end up headed in the opposite direction.
"The amateur is very rare in French literature--as rare
as he is common in our own." --Lytton Strachey, 1912
TV: "We don't know what the part, corresponding to
the left hemisphere's speech centers, does on the right."
me: "the silence." --How long till we learn the use of
silence?
Every artist is a pirate satellite, a guerilla broadcaster.
Like that lone Japanese, we haven't heard that the
war is over. We think it's longing when it is our
survival.
"For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most
fingent plastic of creatures." --Carlyle
I struggle between voice and speech. If i were only to
write when i feel articulate, that would not be the whole
truth.
You can live without meaning, without seeking meaning;
and no metaphysical retribution ensues. Our alienation
isn't teleological. It's simple as wearing shoes. When i
came back to Dallas i was able to smell the pollution.
Now i don't. Absence of meaning is like that. You
never find it by trying to reason it out because meaning
transcends rationality. How else can i say this? And
yet the meaning i have found from leaving is not the meaning
i must make here. What i can keep is the knowledge that
meaning exists. I won't find a recipe for it. But i might acquire
a nose for it.
--By meaning, i don't mean faith. Faith
is kind of like the knowledge that meaning is possible, the
knowledge that makes meaning possible, but it's a wholly
visceral knowledge; swimming which is so natural yet not
a part of our genetic heritage--we develop our doubt and
faith in tandem (always & everyone!)--while meaning is what
holds the entire network of relationships together. Harmony.
Saturday, November 08, 2003
Friday, November 07, 2003
Advice. (via Bogue's blog)
Wish i could go hear this bagpipe orchestra...
The weather, in Latin.
Visual representation of ancestry groups in
the United States (from the 1990 census).
(via Matt Welch)
" It is no longer possible to call Putin’s Russia a democracy." --Johan Norberg
"You're 66 times more likely to be prosecuted
in the US than in France." Make your own statistical
arguments.
Pocket history of Prague's English-language
newspaper Prognosis. More. Still more.
Wish i could go hear this bagpipe orchestra...
The weather, in Latin.
Visual representation of ancestry groups in
the United States (from the 1990 census).
(via Matt Welch)
" It is no longer possible to call Putin’s Russia a democracy." --Johan Norberg
"You're 66 times more likely to be prosecuted
in the US than in France." Make your own statistical
arguments.
Pocket history of Prague's English-language
newspaper Prognosis. More. Still more.
"Every officer of the Battalion was killed or wounded and command of the battalion fell to Regimental Sergeant-Major Jones, who received orders to hold on to a ridge of land, later named Iron Cross Ridge, about a mile from the village of Langemarck. During this fighting Pvt Evans was wounded in the chest by a piece of trench mortar shell. He died a few hours later. A few weeks following his death, the National Eisteddfod was be held in Birkenhead. The Chair was placed in the centre of the stage with the eisteddfodic sword resting across its arms. When the Archdruid, Dyfed called out three times for the winning poet to stand up, there was no response. Dyfed announced that the chief bard had fallen on the field of battle in France on the last day of July. He explained who he was, “Hedd Wyn”, a shepherd from Trawsfynydd. And then, as there was no one to be chaired, the sword was removed, and the Chair draped in a black cloth." --Erik Linklater
New Lynx.
New Lynx.
"It was perhaps Weapemeoc factionalism..."
The Internet's only officially approved sewergator
sanctuary.
Anne bans fanfic.
"Cyber-Ashbery" via John Tranter:
"Joy H. Breshan: Her Shy Banjo
Rain, without it there can be no September music
The concealed afternoons
A source of the revisions as useless as a lukewarm fancy,
Making pink smudges on life and accepting severe punishment,
Encouragement by lovers, sang no more blades of light
Arise, light! The things of the day we eat
Breakfast each in their tree withdrawals,
Our marionette-like Pierrot, like these
Hot sticky evenings, though fragmented
The greatest risk working deep crevices far inland,
We can see no reward, winnowers of the old time
Involved without pain, with their sleepy empty nets
And you, at twilight.
The neighbours love the yellow of the same tweed jacket.
It is only semi-bizarre where you want to lie,
A nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh,
Having conspired with a towel, and wiped the last thought
From the black carriages, the models slender, like the stars.
You couldn't deliberately, for fright, once you see
It's all talk, the travelling far from anybody.
Hands streaming with kisses, between us.
It may be something like silver,
Something like a sponge, and they enjoyed it, abandonment
Without shame, a crowded highway in the sun, it just
Stays like dust--that's the nature of the children, and
Yesterday's newspapers say: "Sometimes good times follow bad."
Their object, the sky. Is it like climbing abruptly
From a room? It may be only a polite puss-in-boots we passed,
Two in love hesitant at the front door.
So we have enjoyed the one crisp feeling, raking
And breathing, checking the horrible speech the furniture makes.
How short the season is--don't fix it if it comes in coloured
Mottoes, and now, underneath this dilemma directly, as
Our clothes, the afternoon, really old-time, her shy banjo."
The Internet's only officially approved sewergator
sanctuary.
Anne bans fanfic.
"Cyber-Ashbery" via John Tranter:
"Joy H. Breshan: Her Shy Banjo
Rain, without it there can be no September music
The concealed afternoons
A source of the revisions as useless as a lukewarm fancy,
Making pink smudges on life and accepting severe punishment,
Encouragement by lovers, sang no more blades of light
Arise, light! The things of the day we eat
Breakfast each in their tree withdrawals,
Our marionette-like Pierrot, like these
Hot sticky evenings, though fragmented
The greatest risk working deep crevices far inland,
We can see no reward, winnowers of the old time
Involved without pain, with their sleepy empty nets
And you, at twilight.
The neighbours love the yellow of the same tweed jacket.
It is only semi-bizarre where you want to lie,
A nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh,
Having conspired with a towel, and wiped the last thought
From the black carriages, the models slender, like the stars.
You couldn't deliberately, for fright, once you see
It's all talk, the travelling far from anybody.
Hands streaming with kisses, between us.
It may be something like silver,
Something like a sponge, and they enjoyed it, abandonment
Without shame, a crowded highway in the sun, it just
Stays like dust--that's the nature of the children, and
Yesterday's newspapers say: "Sometimes good times follow bad."
Their object, the sky. Is it like climbing abruptly
From a room? It may be only a polite puss-in-boots we passed,
Two in love hesitant at the front door.
So we have enjoyed the one crisp feeling, raking
And breathing, checking the horrible speech the furniture makes.
How short the season is--don't fix it if it comes in coloured
Mottoes, and now, underneath this dilemma directly, as
Our clothes, the afternoon, really old-time, her shy banjo."
Another incursion noted. (via TexFiles)
A new Fifty-Five from Melanie:
To Have and To Hold
The chapel was awash in yellow roses. The groom¹s shoes were freshly shone. The bride smiled beatifically.
"Do you take this man," the priest began, "to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, for as long as you live?"
"I do," said the bridesmaid.
A new Fifty-Five from Melanie:
To Have and To Hold
The chapel was awash in yellow roses. The groom¹s shoes were freshly shone. The bride smiled beatifically.
"Do you take this man," the priest began, "to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, for as long as you live?"
"I do," said the bridesmaid.
'And when a man tells you that you know nothing and you
are not nettled at it, then you may be sure that you have begun
the work.' --Epictetus
Writing for publication is the slot machines without Vegas.
"Dickens did not write what the people wanted.
Dickens wanted what the people wanted."
--G K Chesterton
Shallow noise is noise. Deep noise is sense.
"The superior man is exacting of himself; the
common man is exacting of others." --Confucius
"For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we
often repeat, that no Lie can live forever." --Thomas
Carlyle
Physical habits are like canyons & gullies--traces of
innumerable mental habits, weather we keep no other
records of. Rain, we say; it falls. No one gathers it up.
Order & Control are as different as a diamond & a
diamond mine.
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man pokes
his eye out.
Swim exactly 12 inches under water.
A life is not a long time to be asleep. An hour is a
long time to be awake.
For every signalless lane change, a baby will be
born deformed.
There is no soft word for a soft death, that does not
sound like love.
A adult is someone who flunked adolescence.
I think i have a privileged seat at this melodrama just
because i found a program & opera glasses when i
sat down.
When you see a UFO, you want to tell the world--partly
to prove it wasn't a hallucination. I'm that way about
my insights sometimes.
Reverence won't get you there, but you won't get there
without it.
Nothing is as beautiful as a flock of birds at dusk. I
look at it, then turn away, having learned only the futility
of all my art. I should look longer next time, & learn more.
A painting is much more like a stray kitten that you pick
up & take home, than a child you give birth to. As people
come to resemble their pets, artists develop a style... Not
developing a style means you are the stray cat that goes
from home to home. We revere & distrust Picasso as if he
were Genghis Khan, king of the nomadic hordes. --Our
own nomads being lost.
are not nettled at it, then you may be sure that you have begun
the work.' --Epictetus
Writing for publication is the slot machines without Vegas.
"Dickens did not write what the people wanted.
Dickens wanted what the people wanted."
--G K Chesterton
Shallow noise is noise. Deep noise is sense.
"The superior man is exacting of himself; the
common man is exacting of others." --Confucius
"For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we
often repeat, that no Lie can live forever." --Thomas
Carlyle
Physical habits are like canyons & gullies--traces of
innumerable mental habits, weather we keep no other
records of. Rain, we say; it falls. No one gathers it up.
Order & Control are as different as a diamond & a
diamond mine.
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man pokes
his eye out.
Swim exactly 12 inches under water.
A life is not a long time to be asleep. An hour is a
long time to be awake.
For every signalless lane change, a baby will be
born deformed.
There is no soft word for a soft death, that does not
sound like love.
A adult is someone who flunked adolescence.
I think i have a privileged seat at this melodrama just
because i found a program & opera glasses when i
sat down.
When you see a UFO, you want to tell the world--partly
to prove it wasn't a hallucination. I'm that way about
my insights sometimes.
Reverence won't get you there, but you won't get there
without it.
Nothing is as beautiful as a flock of birds at dusk. I
look at it, then turn away, having learned only the futility
of all my art. I should look longer next time, & learn more.
A painting is much more like a stray kitten that you pick
up & take home, than a child you give birth to. As people
come to resemble their pets, artists develop a style... Not
developing a style means you are the stray cat that goes
from home to home. We revere & distrust Picasso as if he
were Genghis Khan, king of the nomadic hordes. --Our
own nomads being lost.
Thursday, November 06, 2003
Listening to: Sheila Chandra.
"The Reagans Episode I"
1.
Where sable swans on
Rivers yet unfound the fecund cicala,
Dew soaked grass,
No grisaille sun// Babylon green noun
Dying into leave us sky
Gray down styrofoam
Want. And silvery ruins vie incursion
A flaunting cactus my cloud
Pseudonym defend the engrams grue
2.
I think I used to be Lincoln, some great man a grateful nation is always thanking in cards letters flowers the dog the wife why can't I hold on to their names also of greatness. Sometimes the sun makes me cry I am so happy to know America's free & not to be Lincoln anymore.
11 06 03
"The Reagans Episode I"
1.
Where sable swans on
Rivers yet unfound the fecund cicala,
Dew soaked grass,
No grisaille sun// Babylon green noun
Dying into leave us sky
Gray down styrofoam
Want. And silvery ruins vie incursion
A flaunting cactus my cloud
Pseudonym defend the engrams grue
2.
I think I used to be Lincoln, some great man a grateful nation is always thanking in cards letters flowers the dog the wife why can't I hold on to their names also of greatness. Sometimes the sun makes me cry I am so happy to know America's free & not to be Lincoln anymore.
11 06 03
"There, in that low-ceilinged room, I had often said
to Fay and to Tom that there was no way out but that
the acceptance of this could itself be a beginning."
--Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book
When i have watched fire as many hours as i have
watched television, my mind will be free.
"I remember a despairing white father in the Belgian
Congo saying to me just before the debacle when I was
bound on some such mission, 'There is another great
age of darkness closing in on the life of man and all
that we can do is to create little fortresses wherein the
authentic light of the spirit can be kept burning so that
one day, when men wish to reach out for light again,
they will have places in which to find it. But for the rest,
we must just accept the inevitability of disaster.' 'You
may well be right, and disaster may well come,' I had told
him. 'But for me it will always be a point of honor to go on
working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is
the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately
come.' " --Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of
Our Time, 1975
We shouldn't kill trees unless we dance on their graves.
"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among
mysteries." --Roethke
The wings of poetry, the claws of prose.
"Laughter is the best pesticide." --Nabokov
"Different modes of dehumanization: capitalism treated
men like machines; the post industrial society treats
them like signs." --Octavio Paz
On the treadmill you feel surrounded by interstellar
space.
"There's nothing I have to say to everybody in the world."
--Ken Kesey, 1970 interview
"Tell me what a man dreams and I will tell you what he
is." --Arab proverb
"Humanism could well be defined as the way the inhabitants
of a good city habitually behave." --Kenneth Rexroth
to Fay and to Tom that there was no way out but that
the acceptance of this could itself be a beginning."
--Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book
When i have watched fire as many hours as i have
watched television, my mind will be free.
"I remember a despairing white father in the Belgian
Congo saying to me just before the debacle when I was
bound on some such mission, 'There is another great
age of darkness closing in on the life of man and all
that we can do is to create little fortresses wherein the
authentic light of the spirit can be kept burning so that
one day, when men wish to reach out for light again,
they will have places in which to find it. But for the rest,
we must just accept the inevitability of disaster.' 'You
may well be right, and disaster may well come,' I had told
him. 'But for me it will always be a point of honor to go on
working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is
the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately
come.' " --Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of
Our Time, 1975
We shouldn't kill trees unless we dance on their graves.
"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among
mysteries." --Roethke
The wings of poetry, the claws of prose.
"Laughter is the best pesticide." --Nabokov
"Different modes of dehumanization: capitalism treated
men like machines; the post industrial society treats
them like signs." --Octavio Paz
On the treadmill you feel surrounded by interstellar
space.
"There's nothing I have to say to everybody in the world."
--Ken Kesey, 1970 interview
"Tell me what a man dreams and I will tell you what he
is." --Arab proverb
"Humanism could well be defined as the way the inhabitants
of a good city habitually behave." --Kenneth Rexroth
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
And having explained and thoroughly understood the source of
all that is false in my life, i disown it--thinking thereby to advance
beyond. Instead, i should admit what caused it to find such ready
soil in me.
"Voluntary Attention is rare, and is found only among strong
characters." --Ramacharaka
Listening to- Squarepusher.
all that is false in my life, i disown it--thinking thereby to advance
beyond. Instead, i should admit what caused it to find such ready
soil in me.
"Voluntary Attention is rare, and is found only among strong
characters." --Ramacharaka
Listening to- Squarepusher.
"Counterinsurgency"
Heft a enthroned on to my ghosts to bier of courage
Nouns that allow a rapid ghastly ampersand:
It is social, a mad rushing sun-bright pile
The impetuous fury of ruthless law, bold;
I pressure my shoulder; flames went utterly
The throughput of mirrors.
A impropriety of withered bloggers
Couldn't trembled this antlion-spyglass descent.
Only pupil of mirrors.
Once more let was in myriads girt by a
But irrevocable overthrow, alone will gauge
The throughput of mirrors.
A impropriety of the funnel storm.
But flotsam alone will gauge flotsam
The hen-speckled view recedes.
You must not lost.
(10/03)
Heft a enthroned on to my ghosts to bier of courage
Nouns that allow a rapid ghastly ampersand:
It is social, a mad rushing sun-bright pile
The impetuous fury of ruthless law, bold;
I pressure my shoulder; flames went utterly
The throughput of mirrors.
A impropriety of withered bloggers
Couldn't trembled this antlion-spyglass descent.
Only pupil of mirrors.
Once more let was in myriads girt by a
But irrevocable overthrow, alone will gauge
The throughput of mirrors.
A impropriety of the funnel storm.
But flotsam alone will gauge flotsam
The hen-speckled view recedes.
You must not lost.
(10/03)
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what
we pretend to be." --Vonnegut, Mother Night
Being alienated is our communion with dead matter.
For every science an equal & opposite science.
An artist without a community is a lightning rod without the storm.
"...the twentieth century was the century not of sentences as was
the eighteenth nor of phrases as was the nineteenth but of
paragraphs. ...The time had come when a whole thing was all
there was of anything." --Gertrude Stein, 1934
'But there are too many signs that everything that used to
sustain our lives no longer does so, that we are all mad,
desperate, and sick. And I call for us to react.' --Antonin
Artaud, "No More Masterpieces"
we pretend to be." --Vonnegut, Mother Night
Being alienated is our communion with dead matter.
For every science an equal & opposite science.
An artist without a community is a lightning rod without the storm.
"...the twentieth century was the century not of sentences as was
the eighteenth nor of phrases as was the nineteenth but of
paragraphs. ...The time had come when a whole thing was all
there was of anything." --Gertrude Stein, 1934
'But there are too many signs that everything that used to
sustain our lives no longer does so, that we are all mad,
desperate, and sick. And I call for us to react.' --Antonin
Artaud, "No More Masterpieces"
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
You knew this was coming.
"Candles
They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they'll ignore
A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,
Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows
Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments,
And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna.
As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef.
The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white.
And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,
Imagining himself a headwaiter in America,
Floating in a high-church hush
Among ice buckets, frosty napkins.
These little globes of light are sweet as pears.
Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,
They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.
I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening."
--Sylvia Plath
A mask is a choice of faces--a face is an end to
masks.
At different times in my life i come to restate
the same truths, like an airplane circling the landing strip.
"What is the use of a sign which is itself only
another riddle?" --C S Lewis, Till We Have Faces (1956)
'Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of
the solution.' --Karl Kraus
"Candles
They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they'll ignore
A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,
Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows
Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments,
And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna.
As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef.
The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white.
And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,
Imagining himself a headwaiter in America,
Floating in a high-church hush
Among ice buckets, frosty napkins.
These little globes of light are sweet as pears.
Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,
They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.
I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening."
--Sylvia Plath
A mask is a choice of faces--a face is an end to
masks.
At different times in my life i come to restate
the same truths, like an airplane circling the landing strip.
"What is the use of a sign which is itself only
another riddle?" --C S Lewis, Till We Have Faces (1956)
'Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of
the solution.' --Karl Kraus
Monday, November 03, 2003
"Our nation has lost every last vestige of its honor and prestige in the gathering of nations, like a belligerent vomit-soaked drunk that started a fistfight on the dance floor with an unattractive midget." --Ben Tripp (via Wood_s Lot)
A comment on William Watkin's blog caused me
to remember some old notes i took on Sanskrit
Aesthetics, specifically a concept meaning
'reverberation'--"rasa" & not "yoin" as i
emailed him (this other word, meaning the
same thing, i may have gotten from Bali via
Mrs Byrne's Dictionary, or was it They Have
A Word For It--?*): anyway, my point was that
with a great poem, it doesn't end when it ends.
You may be caused to spontaneously remember
part of it, years & years later..."it may be that
a poetics of 'yoin' subsumes other views which only
concern adherence to a model or type of process,
& fail to distinguish poems that adhere equally, one
being forgettable & the other not." And when i
consider my writing of late, i wonder if a lot
of the meaning for me of those poems is the
relation of some of the images & even the very
words, to their earlier occurrences in my old
poems...? (As well as--i hasten to add--other
people's poems i have read with those words
& images.) --Not unlike the concept of "pillow-words"
in Japanese aesthetics: nonsense words or words of
uncertain meaning, continually reused purely for
their associations.
-------------------------------------------------------
*it would appear that this is a Japanese word.
Using Amazon's new infrasearch capabilities,
i discover that their scanning has produced a
veritable blizzard of electronic typos--such
that, a lot of the "yoin"-s they found were
simply "your" or "young" or "join" in the
actual texts... The implications of this for the
future of our collectobe menmorty arre raher
inftereastinhg.
A comment on William Watkin's blog caused me
to remember some old notes i took on Sanskrit
Aesthetics, specifically a concept meaning
'reverberation'--"rasa" & not "yoin" as i
emailed him (this other word, meaning the
same thing, i may have gotten from Bali via
Mrs Byrne's Dictionary, or was it They Have
A Word For It--?*): anyway, my point was that
with a great poem, it doesn't end when it ends.
You may be caused to spontaneously remember
part of it, years & years later..."it may be that
a poetics of 'yoin' subsumes other views which only
concern adherence to a model or type of process,
& fail to distinguish poems that adhere equally, one
being forgettable & the other not." And when i
consider my writing of late, i wonder if a lot
of the meaning for me of those poems is the
relation of some of the images & even the very
words, to their earlier occurrences in my old
poems...? (As well as--i hasten to add--other
people's poems i have read with those words
& images.) --Not unlike the concept of "pillow-words"
in Japanese aesthetics: nonsense words or words of
uncertain meaning, continually reused purely for
their associations.
-------------------------------------------------------
*it would appear that this is a Japanese word.
Using Amazon's new infrasearch capabilities,
i discover that their scanning has produced a
veritable blizzard of electronic typos--such
that, a lot of the "yoin"-s they found were
simply "your" or "young" or "join" in the
actual texts... The implications of this for the
future of our collectobe menmorty arre raher
inftereastinhg.
Someone else has picked up on my phrase,
"information pollution". (This includes telemar-
keter phone calls, too IMHO.)
"Debt Consolidation"
Heft a withered spyglass to my shoulder;
The hen-speckled view recedes.
A impropriety of bloggers
Couldn't ransom this antlion-funnel climber.
Only pupil of the razory tickler,
I pressure my ghosts to emit
Nouns that allow a smarmy ampersand:
It is social, like a pogrom of mirrors.
But flotsam alone will gauge
The throughput of the seeded storm.
10 31 03 (for Verbophobia)
"There is the curious set of cases in which the word
Bosheth, 'Shame' or 'Shameful Thing', has taken
the place, or distorted the form, of some genuine but
objectionable word. For instance, the title Melekh,
King, was applied to Yahweh as to other deities: and
at one time in the seventh century human sacrifices
were offered to him under that name. This was an abom-
ination to the purer Jewish feeling. Whenever the word
Melekh occurred in descriptions of these rites,
the practice in the Synagogue was to avoid pronouncing
it and say instead Bosheth. To indicate this,
though the consonants of MLKH were not altered in the
text, the vowels of Bosheth were written under them.
Hence arose an imaginary word 'Molekh'--afterwards
corrupted to 'Moloch'--which was then taken for the
name of some unknown god of the Gentiles." --Gilbert
Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907)
"The more policemen you have, the more criminals you
have; and the more criminals you have, the more
policemen you have got to have to catch them: and so
it go on and on, until a time will come when everybody
will be either a criminal or a policeman." --G B
Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
[Tao Te Ching, 57]
"information pollution". (This includes telemar-
keter phone calls, too IMHO.)
"Debt Consolidation"
Heft a withered spyglass to my shoulder;
The hen-speckled view recedes.
A impropriety of bloggers
Couldn't ransom this antlion-funnel climber.
Only pupil of the razory tickler,
I pressure my ghosts to emit
Nouns that allow a smarmy ampersand:
It is social, like a pogrom of mirrors.
But flotsam alone will gauge
The throughput of the seeded storm.
10 31 03 (for Verbophobia)
"There is the curious set of cases in which the word
Bosheth, 'Shame' or 'Shameful Thing', has taken
the place, or distorted the form, of some genuine but
objectionable word. For instance, the title Melekh,
King, was applied to Yahweh as to other deities: and
at one time in the seventh century human sacrifices
were offered to him under that name. This was an abom-
ination to the purer Jewish feeling. Whenever the word
Melekh occurred in descriptions of these rites,
the practice in the Synagogue was to avoid pronouncing
it and say instead Bosheth. To indicate this,
though the consonants of MLKH were not altered in the
text, the vowels of Bosheth were written under them.
Hence arose an imaginary word 'Molekh'--afterwards
corrupted to 'Moloch'--which was then taken for the
name of some unknown god of the Gentiles." --Gilbert
Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907)
"The more policemen you have, the more criminals you
have; and the more criminals you have, the more
policemen you have got to have to catch them: and so
it go on and on, until a time will come when everybody
will be either a criminal or a policeman." --G B
Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
[Tao Te Ching, 57]
Sunday, November 02, 2003
A bit i wrote on Pavic is here.
Melanie took a survey among her friends, of
"...movies that could (or should) be turned into stage
musicals, as per such recent Broadway successes as
The Producers and Hairspray", & here are the results:
"There were no runaway
votegetters, but there were a few titles that popped
up more than two times, such as, incredibly, both The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs,
as well as the more traditional Steel Magnolias.
Some of the better examples submitted include, in no
particular order:
Gangs of New York
The Bridges of Madison County
Ferris Bueller¹s Day Off
Impromptu
King of Hearts
The Seventh Seal
Interiors
Mommie Dearest
Ghost World
Benny & Joon
Harry Potter
The Bride of Frankenstein
The Truman Show
The Amityville Horror
The Crying Game
Dirty Dancing
Tootsie
Ghost
Spiderman
A Night at the Opera
Beetlejuice
The Mummy (Boris Karloff version)
Mrs. Doubtfire
Fatal Attraction
When Harry Met Sally
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Coal Miner¹s Daughter
Pretty Woman
Reservoir Dogs
Forrest Gump
Billy Elliott
The Big Chill
Kill Bill
Salsa
Dave
The Client
Miss Congeniality
Fried Green Tomatoes
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Jaws
Donnie Brasco
Mulholland Drive
The Green Mile
Bruce Almighty
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Broadway Danny Rose
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Stardust Memories
Bladerunner
Pennies from Heaven
The Velvet Goldmine
and even Behind the Green Door."
"(Indeed, language itself is only a
metaphor.)" --C G Jung
"If we give spirits a form, we become
independent." --Picasso
"It's a job to be done. Somebody's got to do
it." --Wendy O Williams on chainsaw-bisecting
the electric guitar
Melanie took a survey among her friends, of
"...movies that could (or should) be turned into stage
musicals, as per such recent Broadway successes as
The Producers and Hairspray", & here are the results:
"There were no runaway
votegetters, but there were a few titles that popped
up more than two times, such as, incredibly, both The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs,
as well as the more traditional Steel Magnolias.
Some of the better examples submitted include, in no
particular order:
Gangs of New York
The Bridges of Madison County
Ferris Bueller¹s Day Off
Impromptu
King of Hearts
The Seventh Seal
Interiors
Mommie Dearest
Ghost World
Benny & Joon
Harry Potter
The Bride of Frankenstein
The Truman Show
The Amityville Horror
The Crying Game
Dirty Dancing
Tootsie
Ghost
Spiderman
A Night at the Opera
Beetlejuice
The Mummy (Boris Karloff version)
Mrs. Doubtfire
Fatal Attraction
When Harry Met Sally
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Coal Miner¹s Daughter
Pretty Woman
Reservoir Dogs
Forrest Gump
Billy Elliott
The Big Chill
Kill Bill
Salsa
Dave
The Client
Miss Congeniality
Fried Green Tomatoes
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Jaws
Donnie Brasco
Mulholland Drive
The Green Mile
Bruce Almighty
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Broadway Danny Rose
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Stardust Memories
Bladerunner
Pennies from Heaven
The Velvet Goldmine
and even Behind the Green Door."
"(Indeed, language itself is only a
metaphor.)" --C G Jung
"If we give spirits a form, we become
independent." --Picasso
"It's a job to be done. Somebody's got to do
it." --Wendy O Williams on chainsaw-bisecting
the electric guitar
Saturday, November 01, 2003
Listening to: The Best of Ruth Brown.
An old Dean Koontz scifi paperback came in:
Anti-Man. I priced it at $25.00 .
An old Dean Koontz scifi paperback came in:
Anti-Man. I priced it at $25.00 .
So the newly acquired
untranslatable subjectivity ("angst") submerges in a
resurgence of older & better stabilized levels of con-
sciousness...a global regression. All aside from the
pre-eminent fact of economic disparity, of course:
but it's still kind of a pity that the knowledge cannot
be shared, that we are all equally victims of modernity.
untranslatable subjectivity ("angst") submerges in a
resurgence of older & better stabilized levels of con-
sciousness...a global regression. All aside from the
pre-eminent fact of economic disparity, of course:
but it's still kind of a pity that the knowledge cannot
be shared, that we are all equally victims of modernity.
The mass media...have become
inaccessible to the usual symbol-shapers (artists,
mystics, visionaries, cranks), so that the natural
process that would adjust a population to its dreams
has been radically aborted. It seems like the only
solution is for individuals to withdraw from the media-
world on their own separate initiative & try to recover
tribal, pre-urban group identities with more or less
homemade ideologies & worldviews...Which is
happening now--often violently--but unrecognized
as such because they still use the old words for their
new, haphazard syncretisms. Strictly speaking,
there is no more traditional culture. Anywhere.
In the world.
inaccessible to the usual symbol-shapers (artists,
mystics, visionaries, cranks), so that the natural
process that would adjust a population to its dreams
has been radically aborted. It seems like the only
solution is for individuals to withdraw from the media-
world on their own separate initiative & try to recover
tribal, pre-urban group identities with more or less
homemade ideologies & worldviews...Which is
happening now--often violently--but unrecognized
as such because they still use the old words for their
new, haphazard syncretisms. Strictly speaking,
there is no more traditional culture. Anywhere.
In the world.
'Maybe King Oedipus had an eye too many.' --Holderlin
You can't fight images with images you have to
use reality. Or images of greater reality?
I believe community has gradually disappeared
or become supplanted by more primitive organization
because the growth of subjectivity has outstripped
the capacity of all current symbol systems to
communicate it.
You can't fight images with images you have to
use reality. Or images of greater reality?
I believe community has gradually disappeared
or become supplanted by more primitive organization
because the growth of subjectivity has outstripped
the capacity of all current symbol systems to
communicate it.
In a blighted place you got to watch your step...
"Distance seduces the rational mind, just as
closeness seduces the irrational." --Thomas
Disch, "102 H-Bombs"
A novel is a world--a short story is a place.
I find out when i've been living with insufficient
consciousness the same way i find out i've been
reading without enough light--by the headache
it gives me.
"Distance seduces the rational mind, just as
closeness seduces the irrational." --Thomas
Disch, "102 H-Bombs"
A novel is a world--a short story is a place.
I find out when i've been living with insufficient
consciousness the same way i find out i've been
reading without enough light--by the headache
it gives me.
Those who have no will are only dependable in
their compulsions.
'What has been understood no longer exists...' --Eluard
Intuition is experienced without sensations. It results
in spontaneous knowledge. The Unconscious has
meaning without being experienced. It results in
spontaneous creation. --Most of our psychological
systems use the same vague terms for both. Because
to the ego they are equally INVISIBLE.
their compulsions.
'What has been understood no longer exists...' --Eluard
Intuition is experienced without sensations. It results
in spontaneous knowledge. The Unconscious has
meaning without being experienced. It results in
spontaneous creation. --Most of our psychological
systems use the same vague terms for both. Because
to the ego they are equally INVISIBLE.
"I love obscenity but I hate vulgarity." --Henry
Miller
"The wind that knocked our generation down
Was not a harvest." --Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon
'Destruction was my Beatrice.' --Mallarmé, letter 5-17-67
"Now, making a work is not thinking thoughts but
accomplishing an actual journey." --David Jones, preface
to The Anathemata
Miller
"The wind that knocked our generation down
Was not a harvest." --Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon
'Destruction was my Beatrice.' --Mallarmé, letter 5-17-67
"Now, making a work is not thinking thoughts but
accomplishing an actual journey." --David Jones, preface
to The Anathemata
Friday, October 31, 2003
Mini-KISS. (via Memepool)
Is it over yet?
"By 1968, 1978, 1988 or 1998 you knew what the master narrative of that decade was. You knew that decade's chosen way to be 'modern'. By year eight, the decade's style was finished, finessed, defined. Even uncool people got the message about how to be cool. They just needed those little back glasses, that cow-lick fur cap haircut, and they were safely 'modern'.
Too late, normal cool modern people! The decade turned, your finish just finished! Now you have to plunge yourself into a new decade, and it's all going to be messy and uncertain again until 2008!"
--Momus
Black Metal Pigeons.
Is it over yet?
"By 1968, 1978, 1988 or 1998 you knew what the master narrative of that decade was. You knew that decade's chosen way to be 'modern'. By year eight, the decade's style was finished, finessed, defined. Even uncool people got the message about how to be cool. They just needed those little back glasses, that cow-lick fur cap haircut, and they were safely 'modern'.
Too late, normal cool modern people! The decade turned, your finish just finished! Now you have to plunge yourself into a new decade, and it's all going to be messy and uncertain again until 2008!"
--Momus
Black Metal Pigeons.
Listening to: The Luv'd Ones.
This blog is 43% Evil. (via The Trigger)
Saw Black Robe the other day, & it still haunts
me.
Heard a piece on NPR about an opera (Brundibar), originally written & staged
by some of the prisoners of concentration camp
Terezin, & translated by Sendak & Kushner,
which is playing in New York right now. How
poignant (& how timely!)...
Something truly frightening. (via USS Clueless)
This blog is 43% Evil. (via The Trigger)
Saw Black Robe the other day, & it still haunts
me.
Heard a piece on NPR about an opera (Brundibar), originally written & staged
by some of the prisoners of concentration camp
Terezin, & translated by Sendak & Kushner,
which is playing in New York right now. How
poignant (& how timely!)...
Something truly frightening. (via USS Clueless)
"To give one's self to one's poem is also to risk being
violated by it." --Antonin Artaud, 1944
'We have abolished the true world. ...With the true
world we have also abolished the apparent one.' --Nietzsche
"Gurdjieff elevated charlatanism into a world principle."
--Lowenfels
'But the world is neither significant nor absurd.' --Robbe-
Grillet, 1957
"Rosy-fingered Ramadan"
The work, And like Abracadabra To fall
into this wine
He
pours. is of the swarm. Scene
continues in a changed tone O Cassilda, Nudity does
anyone remember Once
Raps clack
Calcspar; I will you will Cut
them I
came a vision I smell
anything.
Salt Is ebony Metaphor.
(10/03)
'386. If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would
affect us as much as the objects we see every day. ...But
since dreams are all different, and each single one is
diversified, what is seen in them affects us much less...
For life is a dream a little less inconstant.' --Pascal, Pensées
violated by it." --Antonin Artaud, 1944
'We have abolished the true world. ...With the true
world we have also abolished the apparent one.' --Nietzsche
"Gurdjieff elevated charlatanism into a world principle."
--Lowenfels
'But the world is neither significant nor absurd.' --Robbe-
Grillet, 1957
"Rosy-fingered Ramadan"
The work, And like Abracadabra To fall
into this wine
He
pours. is of the swarm. Scene
continues in a changed tone O Cassilda, Nudity does
anyone remember Once
Raps clack
Calcspar; I will you will Cut
them I
came a vision I smell
anything.
Salt Is ebony Metaphor.
(10/03)
'386. If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would
affect us as much as the objects we see every day. ...But
since dreams are all different, and each single one is
diversified, what is seen in them affects us much less...
For life is a dream a little less inconstant.' --Pascal, Pensées
"Time Change
Autumn never came too soon for her. She
loved the swirl of colors in the late afternoon as she sipped
tea and looked out the picture window. Across the way she
observed a boy plodding along the sidewalk.
As the youngster headed home, his backpack heavy
with books, he wondered why summer ended so early."
--Melanie D. Pruit (a "Fifty Five Fiction")
Autumn never came too soon for her. She
loved the swirl of colors in the late afternoon as she sipped
tea and looked out the picture window. Across the way she
observed a boy plodding along the sidewalk.
As the youngster headed home, his backpack heavy
with books, he wondered why summer ended so early."
--Melanie D. Pruit (a "Fifty Five Fiction")
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Ouch!
Gender Genie thinks the 2 computer poems i
posted on Oct 27 are female--by a score of 275
to 135.
Gender Genie thinks the 2 computer poems i
posted on Oct 27 are female--by a score of 275
to 135.
A Tale of Two Blogs.
Listening to: Miles Davis- "Concierto de
Aranjuez".
[Apologies for the fragmented character
of the following single poem. Blogger
made me do it!!!!]
Listening to: Miles Davis- "Concierto de
Aranjuez".
[Apologies for the fragmented character
of the following single poem. Blogger
made me do it!!!!]
'Season of Flames
FLASH!
In a blaze of magnesium
The entire city like a silhouette
Crumbles.
Not a sound
But consciousness
tossed softly into an empty space.
And the remote
self
Just now interred.
Millions of glass-splinters in flight
Old beams heavier than lead
And wall clay, with a thud,
Give the final stroke.
Outside is
Bizarre grey,
Distorted roofs,
Tangle of electric wires,
Full of human smell,
Yet void of human life,
Thousands of acres of
Dead
silence.
FLASH!
In a blaze of magnesium
The entire city like a silhouette
Crumbles.
Not a sound
But consciousness
tossed softly into an empty space.
And the remote
self
Just now interred.
Millions of glass-splinters in flight
Old beams heavier than lead
And wall clay, with a thud,
Give the final stroke.
Outside is
Bizarre grey,
Distorted roofs,
Tangle of electric wires,
Full of human smell,
Yet void of human life,
Thousands of acres of
Dead
silence.
Sudden uprise of dark brown mountains
From flattened Hiroshima
At the bottom of a crater-like basin,
Outrageous upheaval.
It rises up and plunges down,
Shaking back and
Casting upward
Clouds,
Clouds,
Clouds,
Scarlet, orange, violet,
Expanding in lurid eruption.
The air
Gushing forth through chasms
In the smoke-ridden earth,
Hurtling one upon the other,
Exploding, shooting
Boiling torrents into the stratosphere.
There come for the first time
Hissing whispers,
Then rumbling of the earth beneath,
Groaning waves, ear-splitting shock.
From flattened Hiroshima
At the bottom of a crater-like basin,
Outrageous upheaval.
It rises up and plunges down,
Shaking back and
Casting upward
Clouds,
Clouds,
Clouds,
Scarlet, orange, violet,
Expanding in lurid eruption.
The air
Gushing forth through chasms
In the smoke-ridden earth,
Hurtling one upon the other,
Exploding, shooting
Boiling torrents into the stratosphere.
There come for the first time
Hissing whispers,
Then rumbling of the earth beneath,
Groaning waves, ear-splitting shock.
Uranium 235
Causes in this city, picked out,
An apparition of the man-made sun
500 metres high above the sky.
8.15 a.m.
(Punctually)
The citizens summoned
Into the streets in the centre of town.
Hiroshima now submerged
In black tangled smoke
Like coarse public hair
Under the sun with dust in its eyes
Throbbing and contracting,
The restless tongues of flame
Lick the flayed skin
Of men.
A black shower,
Fluttering in the whirlwind,
Chokes the mouths crying for loved ones.
Causes in this city, picked out,
An apparition of the man-made sun
500 metres high above the sky.
8.15 a.m.
(Punctually)
The citizens summoned
Into the streets in the centre of town.
Hiroshima now submerged
In black tangled smoke
Like coarse public hair
Under the sun with dust in its eyes
Throbbing and contracting,
The restless tongues of flame
Lick the flayed skin
Of men.
A black shower,
Fluttering in the whirlwind,
Chokes the mouths crying for loved ones.
Under a strange rainbow,
Rows,
Rows,
Of ghosts filing past
Trying to escape from the town,
Like ants from a broken nest
Filling the streets;
Hands hanging
Listlessly
Inch
By inch
A procession of animals,
That once were men.
A slow current threads its way
Through the space filled
With hot blast and strange odour
With no sky and no earth,
Into the river's seven
separate branches
Drifting without end
Bloated and flayed
Bodies scrape
against islets
In the estuary.
Rows,
Rows,
Of ghosts filing past
Trying to escape from the town,
Like ants from a broken nest
Filling the streets;
Hands hanging
Listlessly
Inch
By inch
A procession of animals,
That once were men.
A slow current threads its way
Through the space filled
With hot blast and strange odour
With no sky and no earth,
Into the river's seven
separate branches
Drifting without end
Bloated and flayed
Bodies scrape
against islets
In the estuary.
At Bikini that time
The thousands and thousands of tons
Of sea water gushing
From the atoll reflected only
In the innocent, ignorant eyes
Of pigs,
sheep,
apes
Left there for the test--
And the fish in the foam
(Ah but we are not fish, we cannot
Quietly roll over and show
Our white bellies in death).
The sun boils on and
The rain seeps into
Acres and acres of rubble.
Indeed, Hiroshima has risen
Three feet higher
On the rubble and white bones.
The thousands and thousands of tons
Of sea water gushing
From the atoll reflected only
In the innocent, ignorant eyes
Of pigs,
sheep,
apes
Left there for the test--
And the fish in the foam
(Ah but we are not fish, we cannot
Quietly roll over and show
Our white bellies in death).
The sun boils on and
The rain seeps into
Acres and acres of rubble.
Indeed, Hiroshima has risen
Three feet higher
On the rubble and white bones.
Dead: 247,000
Missing: 14,000
Injured: 38,000
In the A-bomb museum
Baked stones,
Melted slates,
And deformed glass bottles are shown
And pamphlets of city planning
For tourist hotels
gathering
Dust.
Even today
In 1951
Clouds are towering and burning,
And two white flying spots
Brushing past them
As they drift.
Look, there are the white spots.
From across the world the parachutes remotely
Controlled are come to take the radiation count:
The parachutes
Of that morning,
Stamped on the retinae
Of Hiroshima Tribe
Now gently floating
Behind the clouds again.'
--Sankichi Toge, Hiroshima Poems
Missing: 14,000
Injured: 38,000
In the A-bomb museum
Baked stones,
Melted slates,
And deformed glass bottles are shown
And pamphlets of city planning
For tourist hotels
gathering
Dust.
Even today
In 1951
Clouds are towering and burning,
And two white flying spots
Brushing past them
As they drift.
Look, there are the white spots.
From across the world the parachutes remotely
Controlled are come to take the radiation count:
The parachutes
Of that morning,
Stamped on the retinae
Of Hiroshima Tribe
Now gently floating
Behind the clouds again.'
--Sankichi Toge, Hiroshima Poems
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
"Butoh News"
body he believed himself anointed by the
rest...terrible though it seems that the
Yellow Blixen Glaugnea Angel
Candle in #Mexico.
a swirl of the one Technology
is a fandango, and the
hand:with a reason to snatch it
hardly matters what; and yet
things are very often feel &
is quick to him, dull of the
same murky sense of each dipped in Baja:] The Allies today
though its sign: to make
bears dance natives painted like
the dark particles Of what I
found 8 lines i like: could not possible he
Gorge the immense
and stripes slacken; I cultivate humanist attitudes
i care least textbooks
as for the title some more news you
know the Death of
And it away and in order
not stand Nor lifts
the building of the devil
take 10
50 PM Chinese Braille.
(10/03)
body he believed himself anointed by the
rest...terrible though it seems that the
Yellow Blixen Glaugnea Angel
Candle in #Mexico.
a swirl of the one Technology
is a fandango, and the
hand:with a reason to snatch it
hardly matters what; and yet
things are very often feel &
is quick to him, dull of the
same murky sense of each dipped in Baja:] The Allies today
though its sign: to make
bears dance natives painted like
the dark particles Of what I
found 8 lines i like: could not possible he
Gorge the immense
and stripes slacken; I cultivate humanist attitudes
i care least textbooks
as for the title some more news you
know the Death of
And it away and in order
not stand Nor lifts
the building of the devil
take 10
50 PM Chinese Braille.
(10/03)
Until we quit calling our mental static Freedom we will
never have any use for silence.
The myth of Babel is only lately true.
Nobody leads; but among those who join, some are
facing forward, some backward, and some are whirling
around.
'By the mere fact of having happened, reality projects
its shadow back into the past indefinitely far; so it
seems like it has always existed, in the form of the
possibility of its own realization.' --Bergson
never have any use for silence.
The myth of Babel is only lately true.
Nobody leads; but among those who join, some are
facing forward, some backward, and some are whirling
around.
'By the mere fact of having happened, reality projects
its shadow back into the past indefinitely far; so it
seems like it has always existed, in the form of the
possibility of its own realization.' --Bergson
"...invention has [nothing] to do with the noise you
make while breaking rules. ...I think it has to do with
the subtlety with which you adhere to premises somewhat
different from those that may be expected of you." --Glenn
Gould
"Take a close and very long look into the eye of a chicken,
and you'll see the most frightful kind of stupidity." --Werner
Herzog [Although, one has to ask what is the word for a
world-famous film director eye-to-eye with his feathered
friend...]
'In every man there is a Pyrrhonism [skepticism] that is
proof against any dogmatism, and a dogmatism invincible
to any Pyrrhonism.' --Pascal
make while breaking rules. ...I think it has to do with
the subtlety with which you adhere to premises somewhat
different from those that may be expected of you." --Glenn
Gould
"Take a close and very long look into the eye of a chicken,
and you'll see the most frightful kind of stupidity." --Werner
Herzog [Although, one has to ask what is the word for a
world-famous film director eye-to-eye with his feathered
friend...]
'In every man there is a Pyrrhonism [skepticism] that is
proof against any dogmatism, and a dogmatism invincible
to any Pyrrhonism.' --Pascal
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
My first Fifty Five Fiction. "After Bush III had
won by a landslide his second term, people pretty
much stopped voting. This did not affect the victory
margin of Bush IV. It is said that the exodus began
then, but that is incorrect. The exodus really only
began when, failing to find another Bush to run,
they substituted a capybara."
won by a landslide his second term, people pretty
much stopped voting. This did not affect the victory
margin of Bush IV. It is said that the exodus began
then, but that is incorrect. The exodus really only
began when, failing to find another Bush to run,
they substituted a capybara."
Art is the shallowest cause and the deepest symptom.
"Gothic Lolita Bible Study"
via
Enigmatic moped Or at something
like the War to opine. it tenuous Chameleon man
begin, resultant Of
fraud befrauding those are the
Free gift change he;
pronounces the fleeces of the of machine translated from black
blogtitle {: Verdana, Arial, ;color: white;} barkhang and what
has painted the
name for grope continuing
slag Kudzu rhost Consequential gleam? Goblin
the rest of our
own way he must; look upon all are linked
with the average
wage, by persons
believing themselves in the
ground in this
is also The
swagger of school austere
Alien of view &
veracity; ambiguity & the source of
it was
inventorying books My invented language
Spook the next night at something in Calabria posted
by michael at least, textbooks as well
as they were ending their solitude
As cats are parent.
(10/03)
'It should be noted, however, that the picture's title
never tells its subject--and this is particularly true
with those artists who, by an engaging fusion of
horrors, mix sentiment with wit. In this way, by
extending the method, it will be possible to achieve
the sentimental rebus.' --Baudelaire, 1846
"People can adapt to anything as long as they don't
question the context." --Ernest Alcorn, 1972
"The new formula may be in part the result of the
Revolution without being its expression.' --Victor
Hugo, 1824 [--Rock.]
"By 1914, when the whites started killing each other,
they controlled eighty five percent of the earth's
surface." --Richard Miller, Bohemia (1977)
"Gothic Lolita Bible Study"
via
Enigmatic moped Or at something
like the War to opine. it tenuous Chameleon man
begin, resultant Of
fraud befrauding those are the
Free gift change he;
pronounces the fleeces of the of machine translated from black
blogtitle {: Verdana, Arial, ;color: white;} barkhang and what
has painted the
name for grope continuing
slag Kudzu rhost Consequential gleam? Goblin
the rest of our
own way he must; look upon all are linked
with the average
wage, by persons
believing themselves in the
ground in this
is also The
swagger of school austere
Alien of view &
veracity; ambiguity & the source of
it was
inventorying books My invented language
Spook the next night at something in Calabria posted
by michael at least, textbooks as well
as they were ending their solitude
As cats are parent.
(10/03)
'It should be noted, however, that the picture's title
never tells its subject--and this is particularly true
with those artists who, by an engaging fusion of
horrors, mix sentiment with wit. In this way, by
extending the method, it will be possible to achieve
the sentimental rebus.' --Baudelaire, 1846
"People can adapt to anything as long as they don't
question the context." --Ernest Alcorn, 1972
"The new formula may be in part the result of the
Revolution without being its expression.' --Victor
Hugo, 1824 [--Rock.]
"By 1914, when the whites started killing each other,
they controlled eighty five percent of the earth's
surface." --Richard Miller, Bohemia (1977)
Monday, October 27, 2003
"Vancouver has come into its own in the nineties," writes Paul Delany, "with three best selling authors--Douglas Coupland, Nick Bantock, William Gibson... who seem utterly globalized, stylized, and deracinated producers of a 'location-independent' literature." --review of City of Glass
" poll conducted among INFOCUS readers had established "waka" as the
proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < and >, though
some readers held out resolutely for "norkies." The text of the poem
follows:
<>!*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<>~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number
four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."
--found on the way
"Wels Diamot
Rints grome of stoneted
Have se frow declart
Wries eve he storferst
Hass difird gapat
Luspeciestretwe
Beene namone encame
Sur ded clarearthe
Cumstly publingain
Itil that coureland
Havinernce I honse
Luserst mat paland
Wilarlich und conce."
--Jonathan R Partington
" poll conducted among INFOCUS readers had established "waka" as the
proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < and >, though
some readers held out resolutely for "norkies." The text of the poem
follows:
<>!*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<>~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number
four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."
--found on the way
"Wels Diamot
Rints grome of stoneted
Have se frow declart
Wries eve he storferst
Hass difird gapat
Luspeciestretwe
Beene namone encame
Sur ded clarearthe
Cumstly publingain
Itil that coureland
Havinernce I honse
Luserst mat paland
Wilarlich und conce."
--Jonathan R Partington
Imagine performed music to be forbidden
--& a hundred years passes--& only those
who can read sheet music to themselves,
imagining the notes in their head, have
music.
A couple of computer poems from Horizon,
May '62:
"MICE
The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates."
"ROSES
Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Why is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious , blind planes are coming.
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender."
What one must know about the Sun.
No fasting on the Day of Doubt.
--& a hundred years passes--& only those
who can read sheet music to themselves,
imagining the notes in their head, have
music.
A couple of computer poems from Horizon,
May '62:
"MICE
The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates."
"ROSES
Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Why is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious , blind planes are coming.
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender."
What one must know about the Sun.
No fasting on the Day of Doubt.
"Incursion"
The shadows lengthen In forms Of
the One quick nocturnal
Interloper could leave you at
times assuages.
Having found
He'sky lie too?
It'till my lilies
You'think about to Maremma! Approaches. Salt Is said
that saddest light, sodium attack Converts tragedy to wield
such a bulwark of emptiness?
Is high parabolas Or culture.
Furnishings are masked.
hours.
(10/03)
'...whenever there are political parties, democracy is
dead.' --Weil, L'Enracinement (1943)
'Uprootedness breeds idolatry.' --ibid
'The realism which I care about and want is what happens
in the head of the spectator and not what is on the screen.'
--Fassbinder
'Scepticism is a bad conductor of poetry.' --Jean Cocteau
Self knowledge looks like destruction when the knowledge
is of a self-destructive self, but that knowledge really only
destroys those incompatible illusions we mistook for part
of us, and which were crippling us. The most convincing,
ubiquitous illusion is power. As "knowledge" is an incom-
plete, context-less understanding, so power is action
without considering consequences; the adage "Knowledge
is power" is subsumed by "Understanding is powerless
doing" (wei-wu)...
'Of all the parts of the body there is none so cold as
the brain.' --Aristotle
'The public is content to admire doors which go nowhere.'
--Cocteau (1921)
Idea: that consciousness arises in those who are ON THE
EDGE--of cultures, races, classes, sexes, conditions,
sanity, history, places, etc--they have familiarity with two
different modes of being which prevents them from falling
into either conformity... Consciousness is nature healing
a split in humans.
The role of the artist has become untenable, just when the
myth of the artist has reached its furthest inflation. It is
time to say: Human is enough.
All day long we wear the face that monkeys reserve for
a lion about to eat them.
The shadows lengthen In forms Of
the One quick nocturnal
Interloper could leave you at
times assuages.
Having found
He'sky lie too?
It'till my lilies
You'think about to Maremma! Approaches. Salt Is said
that saddest light, sodium attack Converts tragedy to wield
such a bulwark of emptiness?
Is high parabolas Or culture.
Furnishings are masked.
hours.
(10/03)
'...whenever there are political parties, democracy is
dead.' --Weil, L'Enracinement (1943)
'Uprootedness breeds idolatry.' --ibid
'The realism which I care about and want is what happens
in the head of the spectator and not what is on the screen.'
--Fassbinder
'Scepticism is a bad conductor of poetry.' --Jean Cocteau
Self knowledge looks like destruction when the knowledge
is of a self-destructive self, but that knowledge really only
destroys those incompatible illusions we mistook for part
of us, and which were crippling us. The most convincing,
ubiquitous illusion is power. As "knowledge" is an incom-
plete, context-less understanding, so power is action
without considering consequences; the adage "Knowledge
is power" is subsumed by "Understanding is powerless
doing" (wei-wu)...
'Of all the parts of the body there is none so cold as
the brain.' --Aristotle
'The public is content to admire doors which go nowhere.'
--Cocteau (1921)
Idea: that consciousness arises in those who are ON THE
EDGE--of cultures, races, classes, sexes, conditions,
sanity, history, places, etc--they have familiarity with two
different modes of being which prevents them from falling
into either conformity... Consciousness is nature healing
a split in humans.
The role of the artist has become untenable, just when the
myth of the artist has reached its furthest inflation. It is
time to say: Human is enough.
All day long we wear the face that monkeys reserve for
a lion about to eat them.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
"Thing 1"
Wrong cold word, baby--sands they ikon off like
A breeding streak unportrayable
Death, Spetznaz, kissing daylight
Then & grom sweeping
Smoulders harl
Viral oobleck cadavatar slag
Continuing briskly puree with flashbangs
The lethal
Iron evil a rodent:
Ned or alive have/.
10 26 03
[This poem, like others in the series, sort of asks to be
set to music; i imagine something austere, sprechstimme,
like "Pierrot Lunaire", with a cappella intervals... It's time, i
think, for Language Poetry to start aiming at radio airplay.]
'If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would still
distinguish them.' --Herakleitos
'It is through those who live in the present that the present
exists.' --Simone Weil
"I have always found Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the Only Wise; this they do with a confidant
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." --Blake
When everything's a symptom there's no way to change.
When everything's a cause there's no basis to decide. We
must straddle this dichotomy in order to be able to act.
Monism is achieved at the end of doing, and lasts for
one breath only. Then we start again.
The old men in front of the museum, trolling the fallen
leaves with metal detectors. I don't want to be famous,
i just want not to have wasted my time.
Why 2 brains? --Why 2 hands?
"Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without
reason are mad." --Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind,
II (1980)
In broken times, to do one thing well is hard enough, and
seems sufficient. Though there are dreams of unification
they will also be broken; the system will be incomplete.
But people who are also broken cannot perceive this.
Wrong cold word, baby--sands they ikon off like
A breeding streak unportrayable
Death, Spetznaz, kissing daylight
Then & grom sweeping
Smoulders harl
Viral oobleck cadavatar slag
Continuing briskly puree with flashbangs
The lethal
Iron evil a rodent:
Ned or alive have/.
10 26 03
[This poem, like others in the series, sort of asks to be
set to music; i imagine something austere, sprechstimme,
like "Pierrot Lunaire", with a cappella intervals... It's time, i
think, for Language Poetry to start aiming at radio airplay.]
'If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would still
distinguish them.' --Herakleitos
'It is through those who live in the present that the present
exists.' --Simone Weil
"I have always found Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the Only Wise; this they do with a confidant
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." --Blake
When everything's a symptom there's no way to change.
When everything's a cause there's no basis to decide. We
must straddle this dichotomy in order to be able to act.
Monism is achieved at the end of doing, and lasts for
one breath only. Then we start again.
The old men in front of the museum, trolling the fallen
leaves with metal detectors. I don't want to be famous,
i just want not to have wasted my time.
Why 2 brains? --Why 2 hands?
"Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without
reason are mad." --Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind,
II (1980)
In broken times, to do one thing well is hard enough, and
seems sufficient. Though there are dreams of unification
they will also be broken; the system will be incomplete.
But people who are also broken cannot perceive this.
Saturday, October 25, 2003
"I had a student once who was severely dyslectic. I loved her writing, though she had been made to feel ashamed of it. ‘She surfered with minstrel tramps.’ In that she felt oppressed by her condition, yet had to manifest it, I thought her poet-like. In that her errors troubled her, but were a welcome read for me, we were the ideal poet-and-reader combo.I would like to drive a larger wedge of the unconscious into poetry. After all, we all know what we know, and who cares? Without mistakes, there’d be no roast pork." --David Bromige, interview
"Ontology is the luxury of the landed." --Lisa
Robertson
Wonder what Bridget Riley's been doing lately?
"Ontology is the luxury of the landed." --Lisa
Robertson
Wonder what Bridget Riley's been doing lately?
My versions of "Roland the Headless..." & "Smells
Like Teen Spirit" belong to a little-known but
venerable tradition--filks.
Nano-Velcro is coming!
Listening to: Skinny Puppy.
Poets & employment. When i saw "American
Splendor", i felt an immediate shock of
recognition--that's how poets live!
Except, they don't ever get to be on David Letterman...
Are they still giving out the Templeton Prize?
Critics. A half-hour with Google has convinced me
George Saintsbury survives today only as the
author of a book on wine. Even the NeoFormalists
don't read him, alas. May i say only that he was
one of the most learned men of a time when
having read thousands of books was a prerequisite
for writing about them...?
Like Teen Spirit" belong to a little-known but
venerable tradition--filks.
Nano-Velcro is coming!
Listening to: Skinny Puppy.
Poets & employment. When i saw "American
Splendor", i felt an immediate shock of
recognition--that's how poets live!
Except, they don't ever get to be on David Letterman...
Are they still giving out the Templeton Prize?
Critics. A half-hour with Google has convinced me
George Saintsbury survives today only as the
author of a book on wine. Even the NeoFormalists
don't read him, alas. May i say only that he was
one of the most learned men of a time when
having read thousands of books was a prerequisite
for writing about them...?
"Previous to that period, we will be
engaging in a holy war against ourselves."
"Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses the Norton Anthology of Poetry
All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall--
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.
If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing for me."
--R S Gwynn, in The Formalist #1 (1990)
What we all were waiting for--a negative review
of "Left Behind". (via Electrolite) More.
The Head of Vecna.
Kemetism.
engaging in a holy war against ourselves."
"Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses the Norton Anthology of Poetry
All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall--
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.
If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing for me."
--R S Gwynn, in The Formalist #1 (1990)
What we all were waiting for--a negative review
of "Left Behind". (via Electrolite) More.
The Head of Vecna.
Kemetism.
Friday, October 24, 2003
"One of the more striking statistics of 9-11 is that Concorde lost 40 of its frequent flyers." --Samizdata
Happy Coronal Mass Ejection!
"I'm not a haiku.
I have too many syllables
In my second line." --Superdeluxegoodpoems
Happy Coronal Mass Ejection!
"I'm not a haiku.
I have too many syllables
In my second line." --Superdeluxegoodpoems
To hear the Vietnam war in "Scarborough
Fair".
"Envoy of the Dog Star"
Kabul is a tempestuous yet strange things narrated-- it was now I, like earthquake victims waiting for this! You shall not bear the night. A whirlwind was now the image of darkness supervened; all was the dungeons there had I felt that my final and heat; yet all was not lost. Hardly a glimpse of horror and of trolley buses are stacked on top of death with contours of each other, reminiscent of weapon. They have no light and would have no light and heat; I had always been strange, with contours of weapon. I was blazing. And then came, a rope about the night. I might have no light and for this! I, with a modern fleet of the pock-marks of agony; their apocalyptic fires burn through the pock-marks of darkness supervened; but smile!
10 24 03
"Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than 'scoundrel' and 'blockhead.' "
--Macaulay
Listening to: Un Ballo in Maschera.
Fair".
"Envoy of the Dog Star"
Kabul is a tempestuous yet strange things narrated-- it was now I, like earthquake victims waiting for this! You shall not bear the night. A whirlwind was now the image of darkness supervened; all was the dungeons there had I felt that my final and heat; yet all was not lost. Hardly a glimpse of horror and of trolley buses are stacked on top of death with contours of each other, reminiscent of weapon. They have no light and would have no light and heat; I had always been strange, with contours of weapon. I was blazing. And then came, a rope about the night. I might have no light and for this! I, with a modern fleet of the pock-marks of agony; their apocalyptic fires burn through the pock-marks of darkness supervened; but smile!
10 24 03
"Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than 'scoundrel' and 'blockhead.' "
--Macaulay
Listening to: Un Ballo in Maschera.
Listening to: Shonen Knife.
The music of the "Russian Sailors' Dance" was
running through my head when suddenly i realized
i was simultaneously hearing the theme from "Davey
and Goliath"--they had four consecutive notes
in common. I was able to shift back & forth
between them at will. I dub this phenomenon
ambimelodism & note that, although i
sometimes discover it listening to one song or
another, there is nothing i can do to recognize
such overlappings in music i already know by
thinking back searchingly...
Imagine a reader who prefers "shannonized"
prose to that composed directly by humans,
which seems in comparison too banal & too
manipulative: well, that's kind of how i
feel about my preference for instrumentals
& songs in languages i don't know.
The music of the "Russian Sailors' Dance" was
running through my head when suddenly i realized
i was simultaneously hearing the theme from "Davey
and Goliath"--they had four consecutive notes
in common. I was able to shift back & forth
between them at will. I dub this phenomenon
ambimelodism & note that, although i
sometimes discover it listening to one song or
another, there is nothing i can do to recognize
such overlappings in music i already know by
thinking back searchingly...
Imagine a reader who prefers "shannonized"
prose to that composed directly by humans,
which seems in comparison too banal & too
manipulative: well, that's kind of how i
feel about my preference for instrumentals
& songs in languages i don't know.
Shannonizer. (via Pickover)
I shannonized the previous sonnet:
Skin is the courage to give, and blood, the species
of death; I started from dreams of The Answer must solace our lostness with that I saw them writhe with
a path. And then all is the Only Palimpsest Out of myrrh, melodious ulcer comes a hideous-- you could
have slept last I dared-- of the monster had always deemed them writhe with just such dreams of PERVERSENESS. This gift, like a path. with a way
where none may go, through the species of the last night. We carve passage in flames went utterly out;
I had the monster had always been strange things narrated-- and blood, and would have rid myself of
the deepest slumber-- fables I have had always been strange, through the hot breath of my proud, through the pit." (edited by Poe)
Verlan. (via Caterina)
In Search of the Authentic Other.
Excerpt from Hiroshima Notes.
Mark Twain: from Huckleberry Finn
"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnum Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knockings! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery--go!"
I shannonized the previous sonnet:
Skin is the courage to give, and blood, the species
of death; I started from dreams of The Answer must solace our lostness with that I saw them writhe with
a path. And then all is the Only Palimpsest Out of myrrh, melodious ulcer comes a hideous-- you could
have slept last I dared-- of the monster had always deemed them writhe with just such dreams of PERVERSENESS. This gift, like a path. with a way
where none may go, through the species of the last night. We carve passage in flames went utterly out;
I had the monster had always been strange things narrated-- and blood, and would have rid myself of
the deepest slumber-- fables I have had always been strange, through the hot breath of my proud, through the pit." (edited by Poe)
Verlan. (via Caterina)
In Search of the Authentic Other.
Excerpt from Hiroshima Notes.
Mark Twain: from Huckleberry Finn
"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnum Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knockings! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery--go!"
Thursday, October 23, 2003
"And while I alphabetize my collection the country is stolen."
--Equanimity
Jorg Buttgereit makes art movies--about
necrophilia.
An Inuit poet.
--Equanimity
Jorg Buttgereit makes art movies--about
necrophilia.
An Inuit poet.
from Fungoids:
"32. Skin is the Only Palimpsest
Out of my proud, hard, melodious ulcer
comes a dream too bitter to be angry,
too sad to be bitter. We dreamers cured of The Answer
must solace our lostness with the Double Ulgry.
This gift, perhaps the last I have to give,
savor of myrrh, orgeat, Chartreuse and blood,
golden at dawn a gossamer caryatid
(contrail or portent), Djuna--is my love.
You said, you could have slept last night in my arms;
I wanted that, too. I wanted, beyond reprieve,
a knowledge that was also a path. We carve
passage in the dark with just such dreams:
a way where none may go, we go. Though not to leave."
"The U.S. doesn't trust Iraqis to even
act as cleaners, and so South Asian and
Filipino migrants are being used." --Tariq
Ali in Counterpunch
"I remember an early seventies story bruit'd
about by who knows who: that Rod McKuen published other poems under an other name, and those poems
were thought terrific by those critics that barely had the decency to humour along the Rod McKuen we thought we knew." --Hotel Point
Dalit Literature.
A Kyrghyz poet.
An Uzbek poet.
Linguistic Iconism links.
"32. Skin is the Only Palimpsest
Out of my proud, hard, melodious ulcer
comes a dream too bitter to be angry,
too sad to be bitter. We dreamers cured of The Answer
must solace our lostness with the Double Ulgry.
This gift, perhaps the last I have to give,
savor of myrrh, orgeat, Chartreuse and blood,
golden at dawn a gossamer caryatid
(contrail or portent), Djuna--is my love.
You said, you could have slept last night in my arms;
I wanted that, too. I wanted, beyond reprieve,
a knowledge that was also a path. We carve
passage in the dark with just such dreams:
a way where none may go, we go. Though not to leave."
"The U.S. doesn't trust Iraqis to even
act as cleaners, and so South Asian and
Filipino migrants are being used." --Tariq
Ali in Counterpunch
"I remember an early seventies story bruit'd
about by who knows who: that Rod McKuen published other poems under an other name, and those poems
were thought terrific by those critics that barely had the decency to humour along the Rod McKuen we thought we knew." --Hotel Point
Dalit Literature.
A Kyrghyz poet.
An Uzbek poet.
Linguistic Iconism links.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
"In the Croatian capital Zagreb there arose a
debate on the palindrome's meaning as a symbol
of cross-cultural interaction referring to the
two dialects involved in the Serbo-Croatian language,
one argument being that palindromic devices are in
fact two-faced speech and represent an illusionary
and utopian pseudo-monolingualism, and an opposite
argument that palindrome poetry might symbolically
keep up the promise of dialogue and double-/pluri-
vocal coexistence in a once multicultural context
(Dubravka Oraic -Toli Oraic: Palindromska apokalipsa,
1992/1993; Dubravka Ugresic, Die Kultur der Lüge,
1995)." --Erika Greber
debate on the palindrome's meaning as a symbol
of cross-cultural interaction referring to the
two dialects involved in the Serbo-Croatian language,
one argument being that palindromic devices are in
fact two-faced speech and represent an illusionary
and utopian pseudo-monolingualism, and an opposite
argument that palindrome poetry might symbolically
keep up the promise of dialogue and double-/pluri-
vocal coexistence in a once multicultural context
(Dubravka Oraic -Toli Oraic: Palindromska apokalipsa,
1992/1993; Dubravka Ugresic, Die Kultur der Lüge,
1995)." --Erika Greber
In debt? Sell a kidney.
"President Bush stopped in Manila on Saturday to
speak to the Philippine Congress. The speech was
warmly received, though some eyebrows lifted when
he said, 'America is proud of its part in the great
story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers
liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.' "
(from the Washington Post, via The Agonist)
"President Bush stopped in Manila on Saturday to
speak to the Philippine Congress. The speech was
warmly received, though some eyebrows lifted when
he said, 'America is proud of its part in the great
story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers
liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.' "
(from the Washington Post, via The Agonist)
New Byrd. It just gives me a kick that stuff
like this is going down on the Congressional
Record; it's not like it makes me feel any
less guilty for using 500 gallons of gas a
year.
The Guardian has started a US Elections weblog.
More on Enoch Soames.
"Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign." --Ursula LeGuin (via
Wood_s Lot)
Submit to Sleeping Fish. (via Craig Hill)
In the future, we will fight wars over water.
like this is going down on the Congressional
Record; it's not like it makes me feel any
less guilty for using 500 gallons of gas a
year.
The Guardian has started a US Elections weblog.
More on Enoch Soames.
"Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign." --Ursula LeGuin (via
Wood_s Lot)
Submit to Sleeping Fish. (via Craig Hill)
In the future, we will fight wars over water.
For him the avant garde myth of origins was
like the Wiccan one--it symbolically represents
a basic orientation that is correct, without
being literally true. Interestingly, all the
other poetry factions share the same myth (only
the names are changed), which is Romanticism's
--a triumphant movement if there ever was one--
that can only conceive of itself in terms of
the underdog. The rare few poets i know who
have pursued careerist goals, via the university
system or else the slam network--have not really
had to compromise their integrity, as in the myth.
What actually happened, it seems to me, is they
chose their totems already, & either system was
able to accommodate them: these were personal,
not ideological networks. Likewise, publishing.
But what confuses people is when you do not
subscribe to literary totemism per se--you will
only be perceived in terms of your fit to the
existing paradigms. Perhaps it is just as well
to proclaim oneself under the totem of the
trickster.
The poem in the air, the poem on the page:
motile & sessile forms of life.
Listening to: The First Philadelphia Computer
Music Festival.
like the Wiccan one--it symbolically represents
a basic orientation that is correct, without
being literally true. Interestingly, all the
other poetry factions share the same myth (only
the names are changed), which is Romanticism's
--a triumphant movement if there ever was one--
that can only conceive of itself in terms of
the underdog. The rare few poets i know who
have pursued careerist goals, via the university
system or else the slam network--have not really
had to compromise their integrity, as in the myth.
What actually happened, it seems to me, is they
chose their totems already, & either system was
able to accommodate them: these were personal,
not ideological networks. Likewise, publishing.
But what confuses people is when you do not
subscribe to literary totemism per se--you will
only be perceived in terms of your fit to the
existing paradigms. Perhaps it is just as well
to proclaim oneself under the totem of the
trickster.
The poem in the air, the poem on the page:
motile & sessile forms of life.
Listening to: The First Philadelphia Computer
Music Festival.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
"The Choke"
To styptic mulct torque
The rustle of the cryptic
Pungent ballasted synthespian wheedle
For Spetznaz then. What ominous woe
I welcomed
Puree & round about it
Mouldering rubbish lay the misbelieving
Multitudes perform grow??. HMO
For torture doctors
Decaf land
Chrome squirm Scully Did?
10 20 03
My book "Fungoids" is part of a three-pronged
effort i made a couple years back to get my
publishing thing going; i went through all my old
poems, & selected a volume of Neoformalist
Verse, a volume of Language Poetry, & a volume
of Free Verse (having decided that no publisher
was ever going to touch a manuscript mixed
together the way i'd been doing it). This Pessoa-
like expedient, however, has not quite borne
fruit the way i intended so now, having pretty
much exhausted the outlets for the Neoformalist
book, i am trying it out with a print-on-demand
online publisher. (I still have hopes for the other
two.) --The title, of course, is the fictitious
second book of Max Beerbohm's invented poet
"Enoch Soames". I hope my poems included
therein do not disgrace his memory...
To styptic mulct torque
The rustle of the cryptic
Pungent ballasted synthespian wheedle
For Spetznaz then. What ominous woe
I welcomed
Puree & round about it
Mouldering rubbish lay the misbelieving
Multitudes perform grow??. HMO
For torture doctors
Decaf land
Chrome squirm Scully Did?
10 20 03
My book "Fungoids" is part of a three-pronged
effort i made a couple years back to get my
publishing thing going; i went through all my old
poems, & selected a volume of Neoformalist
Verse, a volume of Language Poetry, & a volume
of Free Verse (having decided that no publisher
was ever going to touch a manuscript mixed
together the way i'd been doing it). This Pessoa-
like expedient, however, has not quite borne
fruit the way i intended so now, having pretty
much exhausted the outlets for the Neoformalist
book, i am trying it out with a print-on-demand
online publisher. (I still have hopes for the other
two.) --The title, of course, is the fictitious
second book of Max Beerbohm's invented poet
"Enoch Soames". I hope my poems included
therein do not disgrace his memory...
Monday, October 20, 2003
A Goth art-car. (via memepool)
"If in the future we have the development
of a fairly broad counter-sphere of
heteronymous practices that begin to freely
circulate alongside the habitual province of
'empirical' and genetic ascription --a kind
of parallel poetic economy, if you will, one
not beholden to the relations of production
and exchange of the official literary culture--
then I think Motokiyu's work* will be seen as
having made an important contribution." --Kent
Johnson
[I tend to agree; there is a very interesting
dialectic possible between the poetry of "identity"/
"authenticity" & poetries of "mask" & "hoax"...If
one wishes to give a name to this dialectic, i
suggest that "Baconian Shakespeare" sums up
its challenges & rewards.] [More.]
Listening to: Gliere-"Russian Sailors' Dance", from
The Red Poppy [One of the most haunting
melodies in classical music, this had been familiar
to me from cartoon childhood, but i never knew
its composer or the name of it until recently.]
-------------------------------------------
*referring to the hoax-book Doubled Flowering:
From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
"If in the future we have the development
of a fairly broad counter-sphere of
heteronymous practices that begin to freely
circulate alongside the habitual province of
'empirical' and genetic ascription --a kind
of parallel poetic economy, if you will, one
not beholden to the relations of production
and exchange of the official literary culture--
then I think Motokiyu's work* will be seen as
having made an important contribution." --Kent
Johnson
[I tend to agree; there is a very interesting
dialectic possible between the poetry of "identity"/
"authenticity" & poetries of "mask" & "hoax"...If
one wishes to give a name to this dialectic, i
suggest that "Baconian Shakespeare" sums up
its challenges & rewards.] [More.]
Listening to: Gliere-"Russian Sailors' Dance", from
The Red Poppy [One of the most haunting
melodies in classical music, this had been familiar
to me from cartoon childhood, but i never knew
its composer or the name of it until recently.]
-------------------------------------------
*referring to the hoax-book Doubled Flowering:
From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
Saturday, October 18, 2003
"...A thousand pilgrims strain
Arm, shoulder, breast and thigh, with might and main,
To drag that sacred wain,
And scarce can draw along the enormous load.
Prone falls the frantic votaries in its road,
And calling on the God,
Their self-devoted bodies there they lay
To pave his chariot-way.
On Jaga-Naut they call,
The ponderous Car rolls on, and crushes all.
Through flesh and bone it ploughs its dreadful path.
Groans rise unheard: the dying cry,
And death and agony
Are trodden underfoot by yon mad throng,
Who follow close, and thrust the deadly wheels along."
--Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810)
"Outsourced Epic"
This stain will not rinse out, though years may try;
Stained is our flag, our hands, & eke our art.
Like ranked sleepwalkers marching we charged the cliff,
And too much broken crowns the catafalque.
Daily i hear a tide turning, gladly i hear
Speech restored, & yet we are still astray
In a cloud that's drastic dark; & we have burned
Wheatfields of choices to play the fate-denier.
10 16 03
"Sleep in the Mojave Desert
Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.
I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird
Doze behind the old maskss of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away."
--Sylvia Plath
Listening to: Wolff & Hennings- Tibetan Bells (1971)
Arm, shoulder, breast and thigh, with might and main,
To drag that sacred wain,
And scarce can draw along the enormous load.
Prone falls the frantic votaries in its road,
And calling on the God,
Their self-devoted bodies there they lay
To pave his chariot-way.
On Jaga-Naut they call,
The ponderous Car rolls on, and crushes all.
Through flesh and bone it ploughs its dreadful path.
Groans rise unheard: the dying cry,
And death and agony
Are trodden underfoot by yon mad throng,
Who follow close, and thrust the deadly wheels along."
--Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810)
"Outsourced Epic"
This stain will not rinse out, though years may try;
Stained is our flag, our hands, & eke our art.
Like ranked sleepwalkers marching we charged the cliff,
And too much broken crowns the catafalque.
Daily i hear a tide turning, gladly i hear
Speech restored, & yet we are still astray
In a cloud that's drastic dark; & we have burned
Wheatfields of choices to play the fate-denier.
10 16 03
"Sleep in the Mojave Desert
Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.
I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird
Doze behind the old maskss of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away."
--Sylvia Plath
Listening to: Wolff & Hennings- Tibetan Bells (1971)
Friday, October 17, 2003
Announcing the publication of a new book
of selected poems in verse by Michael Helsem,
Fungoids, available for $9.60 from:
http://www.cafeshops.com/graywyvern
or by clicking on "tie-ins" from my blog.
(Some of these poems have been published
in previous chapbooks, but not many of
them.)
Listening to: Trout Mask Replica.
Apparently i'm not the first painter to be influenced
by Elephant Art.
Nor is the new Mel Gibson movie the only
one that was made in Aramaic.
of selected poems in verse by Michael Helsem,
Fungoids, available for $9.60 from:
http://www.cafeshops.com/graywyvern
or by clicking on "tie-ins" from my blog.
(Some of these poems have been published
in previous chapbooks, but not many of
them.)
Listening to: Trout Mask Replica.
Apparently i'm not the first painter to be influenced
by Elephant Art.
Nor is the new Mel Gibson movie the only
one that was made in Aramaic.
"There are miracles nobody survives." --Bill Knott, Becos
(1983)
"How is it I'm so exhausted by what I once believed that
the things I love affront me with the effort to love them. Prison
was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the
art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity
died immediately, without protest." --Steve Erickson, Rubicon
Beach (1986)
'The difference between us and the Etruscans...is the following:
whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the
collision of clouds, they believe clouds collide so as to release
lightning.' --Seneca, Quaestiones naturales II.32.2, in: Rika
Lesser, Etruscan Things (1983)
"But it was also Auden who, later in his life, told a friend that
he had never understood a word Ashbery had written." -- J D
McClatchy, White Paper (1989)
"Until well into the Middle Ages the relative values of the two noble
metals [gold & silver] was determined by the relationship of the
rotation times of the two heavenly bodies [the Sun & Moon]."
--Titus Burckhardt
"Snow
If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
Then we will rise, and recongregate
In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue,
Things in a fall in a world of fall, and slip
Through the spiked branches and snapped joints of the evergreens,
White ants, white ants and the little ribs. '
--Charles Wright
Someone i knew asked me last night if i was going to
read; i said i thought not, "--my old poems bore me & my
new ones are no good." I should stay home when i'm in that
kind of mood. It's like having the tigers in your circus act
turn on you--better in solitude, than with an audience & the
lights.
"pain passes for sunlight at some depths" --Bill Knott
"Still ist sein Zeichen
Am donnernden Himmel. Und Einer stehet darunter
Sein Leben lang." --Holderlin ('In the thundering sky/
His sign is silent. And one/ Stands underneath it all/
His life long.')
Good novelists can describe personality types so exactly
i can recognize them. Does this prove typology is real,
or unnecessary?
Ego is a theory of the introvert in isolation, the extravert
in conflict.
Possession by the Shadow: the desire to punish; the Avenger.
Identification with the Shadow: the Anti-Hero; the Condemned
One. Both are wrong. You must affirm the midpoint of
balance...
"...We are alone
until the times change
and those who have been betrayed
come back like pilgrims to this moment
when we did not yield
and call the darkness poetry" --Leonard Cohen
(1983)
"How is it I'm so exhausted by what I once believed that
the things I love affront me with the effort to love them. Prison
was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the
art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity
died immediately, without protest." --Steve Erickson, Rubicon
Beach (1986)
'The difference between us and the Etruscans...is the following:
whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the
collision of clouds, they believe clouds collide so as to release
lightning.' --Seneca, Quaestiones naturales II.32.2, in: Rika
Lesser, Etruscan Things (1983)
"But it was also Auden who, later in his life, told a friend that
he had never understood a word Ashbery had written." -- J D
McClatchy, White Paper (1989)
"Until well into the Middle Ages the relative values of the two noble
metals [gold & silver] was determined by the relationship of the
rotation times of the two heavenly bodies [the Sun & Moon]."
--Titus Burckhardt
"Snow
If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
Then we will rise, and recongregate
In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue,
Things in a fall in a world of fall, and slip
Through the spiked branches and snapped joints of the evergreens,
White ants, white ants and the little ribs. '
--Charles Wright
Someone i knew asked me last night if i was going to
read; i said i thought not, "--my old poems bore me & my
new ones are no good." I should stay home when i'm in that
kind of mood. It's like having the tigers in your circus act
turn on you--better in solitude, than with an audience & the
lights.
"pain passes for sunlight at some depths" --Bill Knott
"Still ist sein Zeichen
Am donnernden Himmel. Und Einer stehet darunter
Sein Leben lang." --Holderlin ('In the thundering sky/
His sign is silent. And one/ Stands underneath it all/
His life long.')
Good novelists can describe personality types so exactly
i can recognize them. Does this prove typology is real,
or unnecessary?
Ego is a theory of the introvert in isolation, the extravert
in conflict.
Possession by the Shadow: the desire to punish; the Avenger.
Identification with the Shadow: the Anti-Hero; the Condemned
One. Both are wrong. You must affirm the midpoint of
balance...
"...We are alone
until the times change
and those who have been betrayed
come back like pilgrims to this moment
when we did not yield
and call the darkness poetry" --Leonard Cohen
Thursday, October 16, 2003
"Haiku, Short Verse, and French Poets", a
lecture by Yves Bonnefoy. (suggested by an entry at
Language Hat)
Bonnefoy, in turn, led me to Paul-Jean Toulet;
i found a few of his poems translated here.
lecture by Yves Bonnefoy. (suggested by an entry at
Language Hat)
Bonnefoy, in turn, led me to Paul-Jean Toulet;
i found a few of his poems translated here.
...Robinson Jeffers's Medea...sort of like Howl
redone by Webster or Tourneur... I was able to understand
a little of the mental state of Plath's last days, when I realized
her emotional situation was exactly analogous to Medea's....
G--- the Communist called, too... As usual I waffled out. He
did say something which stuck in my mind: "Don't let that
illegitimist night get you down." I realized my position vis-Ã -vis
the Party has been (sometimes) like those 19c. dandies who
sort of maintained an aesthetic interest in Catholicism, without
ever managing to summon enough faith to want to join.
"Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only
expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light
of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the
world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely
a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed,
the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw,
with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly,
because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her
by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she
knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book
he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his
talent. It had not really been written to make money--if only it had
been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things
dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep." --James Baldwin,
Another Country (1962)
"He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be,
forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any
stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination
does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown
precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a
mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."
--ibid
My religious roots are not so much in Christianity as in Rock--
& only the corruption of the latter fills me with a sense of betrayal.
A poem is a bug like a cricket.
redone by Webster or Tourneur... I was able to understand
a little of the mental state of Plath's last days, when I realized
her emotional situation was exactly analogous to Medea's....
G--- the Communist called, too... As usual I waffled out. He
did say something which stuck in my mind: "Don't let that
illegitimist night get you down." I realized my position vis-Ã -vis
the Party has been (sometimes) like those 19c. dandies who
sort of maintained an aesthetic interest in Catholicism, without
ever managing to summon enough faith to want to join.
"Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only
expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light
of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the
world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely
a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed,
the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw,
with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly,
because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her
by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she
knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book
he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his
talent. It had not really been written to make money--if only it had
been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things
dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep." --James Baldwin,
Another Country (1962)
"He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be,
forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any
stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination
does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown
precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a
mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."
--ibid
My religious roots are not so much in Christianity as in Rock--
& only the corruption of the latter fills me with a sense of betrayal.
A poem is a bug like a cricket.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
"True Jesus Bullet Train"
Sip wine like rain
Cadmium Proxima
Whisper bright
Crinolines perturb
Comes the god
Creeping indigo
Comes the rain
Fragile athanor
Proxima
In a flaking mask
10 14 03
Another "100 novels" list.
Republican congressmen can go to Iraq, but
not Democrats. (via Eschaton)
Sip wine like rain
Cadmium Proxima
Whisper bright
Crinolines perturb
Comes the god
Creeping indigo
Comes the rain
Fragile athanor
Proxima
In a flaking mask
10 14 03
Another "100 novels" list.
Republican congressmen can go to Iraq, but
not Democrats. (via Eschaton)
Happened to be at a friend's house, & what do
i see? "Davey and Goliath" on DVD! I remember
watching this when i was growing up. I was
fascinated by the ambiguity between living
& nonliving that this illusion created. --A similar
ambiguity, IMHO, drives the better part of
experimental poetry: except that it's
between referential & nonreferential. But
what i can't understand, is why not all poets
(much less, all readers) are as fascinated by
this as myself...
Kawaii links. (via Metafilter) --Something else
that our poetry has mostly failed to come to
grips with. (We're still hung up on "outlaw-
manners"-as-signifier-of-authenticity.)
Arabic terms. hikoomet dhill- shadow
government. (via Baghdad Burning)
i see? "Davey and Goliath" on DVD! I remember
watching this when i was growing up. I was
fascinated by the ambiguity between living
& nonliving that this illusion created. --A similar
ambiguity, IMHO, drives the better part of
experimental poetry: except that it's
between referential & nonreferential. But
what i can't understand, is why not all poets
(much less, all readers) are as fascinated by
this as myself...
Kawaii links. (via Metafilter) --Something else
that our poetry has mostly failed to come to
grips with. (We're still hung up on "outlaw-
manners"-as-signifier-of-authenticity.)
Arabic terms. hikoomet dhill- shadow
government. (via Baghdad Burning)
This maze made of confusion, a thousand casual lapses.
Damnation--of the flaccid grip.
'I honour you in dread
Since your voice like a soft vapour laps me
and my eyes, offered to the eternal scythe,
dare for you to contemplate the coffin;
since to me your red sanctuary affords
a joy half chill, half cardinalate, before
the posthumous avalanche weeps upon the vane;
since the bold cervix of the ardent skeleton,
predestined to the brand of the funeral
walnut, has hurled for you defiance to Death;
I honour you in dread of a lost alcove,
necromantic, with your rigid face
ecstatic, on a shin, as on a pillow;
and since you are my blood's harmonious chosen,
Amada, and life's convulsions seem a bridge
above an abyss, on which we tread together,
my kisses scour you devoutly serried
over a sacrilegious cloak of skulls
as over an erotic domino.'
--Ramon Lopez Velarde (1888-1921), in: Octavio Paz's
anthology Mexican Poetry
'Ants
To warm life passing singing with the grace
of a woman without wile or veil,
to unconquered beauty, enamouring, saving,
responds, amid the magic hour's elation,
a rancour of ants in my voracious veins.
The pit of silence and the swarm of sound,
the flour cloven like a double trophy
on fertile busts, the Hell of my belief,
the rattle of death and prelude to the nest,
chastise the ceaseless truant formication.
But soon my ants will deny me their embrace
and from my poor and diligent fingers fly
as a cold bagasse is forgotten on the sand;
and your mouth, cypher of erotic prowess,
your mouth that is my rubric, food, adornment,
your mouth that in its flaunting tongue vibrates
like a reprobate flame escaping from a kiln
into a throng of bitter howling gales
where the moon prowls intent to ravish you,
your mouth will smell of shroud and crushed grass,
of opiate and respond, wick and wax.
Before my ants abandon me, Amada,
let them journey the journey of your mouth
to gorge viatica of the sanguinary fruit
provoking me from Saracen oases.
Before your lips die for my sorrow give
them to me on the graveyard's critical threshold,
their bread and perfume, venom and cautery.'
--ibid
[RLV is my favorite Spanish-language poet.]
"I...did not stop to think whether the verses...would find a
reader. Nor have I ever considered whether they deserved
to find one." --Jeffers
"More common than the flarfer working a day job
in a marketing agency in Manhattan is the central
Asian nomad." --Silliman's Blog
Damnation--of the flaccid grip.
'I honour you in dread
Since your voice like a soft vapour laps me
and my eyes, offered to the eternal scythe,
dare for you to contemplate the coffin;
since to me your red sanctuary affords
a joy half chill, half cardinalate, before
the posthumous avalanche weeps upon the vane;
since the bold cervix of the ardent skeleton,
predestined to the brand of the funeral
walnut, has hurled for you defiance to Death;
I honour you in dread of a lost alcove,
necromantic, with your rigid face
ecstatic, on a shin, as on a pillow;
and since you are my blood's harmonious chosen,
Amada, and life's convulsions seem a bridge
above an abyss, on which we tread together,
my kisses scour you devoutly serried
over a sacrilegious cloak of skulls
as over an erotic domino.'
--Ramon Lopez Velarde (1888-1921), in: Octavio Paz's
anthology Mexican Poetry
'Ants
To warm life passing singing with the grace
of a woman without wile or veil,
to unconquered beauty, enamouring, saving,
responds, amid the magic hour's elation,
a rancour of ants in my voracious veins.
The pit of silence and the swarm of sound,
the flour cloven like a double trophy
on fertile busts, the Hell of my belief,
the rattle of death and prelude to the nest,
chastise the ceaseless truant formication.
But soon my ants will deny me their embrace
and from my poor and diligent fingers fly
as a cold bagasse is forgotten on the sand;
and your mouth, cypher of erotic prowess,
your mouth that is my rubric, food, adornment,
your mouth that in its flaunting tongue vibrates
like a reprobate flame escaping from a kiln
into a throng of bitter howling gales
where the moon prowls intent to ravish you,
your mouth will smell of shroud and crushed grass,
of opiate and respond, wick and wax.
Before my ants abandon me, Amada,
let them journey the journey of your mouth
to gorge viatica of the sanguinary fruit
provoking me from Saracen oases.
Before your lips die for my sorrow give
them to me on the graveyard's critical threshold,
their bread and perfume, venom and cautery.'
--ibid
[RLV is my favorite Spanish-language poet.]
"I...did not stop to think whether the verses...would find a
reader. Nor have I ever considered whether they deserved
to find one." --Jeffers
"More common than the flarfer working a day job
in a marketing agency in Manhattan is the central
Asian nomad." --Silliman's Blog
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
How do you know you're in a Mystery: it codifies your
experiences.
'But there are excavations of excavations.' --The Book of
Concealed Mystery (Mathers tr)
"One must sense the dark is occupied." --Jeffrey Gburek.
"Wittgenstein said of his [Trakl's] poems: 'I do not under-
stand them, but their tone delights me. It is the tone of a man of real genius.' " --Selected Poems ed C Middleton*
Alternative self-histories are more futile than most.
"Spinnen suchen mein Herz." ('Spiders look for my heart.')
--Trakl
"Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can
do: but this turns out to be something which not many people
want done." --C S Lewis
"I'm wearing/ windows for walls,/ and the street keeps coming
through." --Michelle Shocked, "Disoriented" (from her hard-to-find
EP)
'Casida of the Rose
The rose
was not searching for the sunrise:
almost eternal on its branch,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for darkness or science:
borderland of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.' --Lorca (tr Bly)
Contraries: truth & Mystery. Their opposites: lies &
banality.
Banality--a cancer with its own health & its own antibodies.
What techniques are to problems, initiations are to
Mysteries.
I like a cop car parked beside me. I don't like a cop car
driving beside me.
Holidays spread, like a stain, into whole seasons.
'181. [A veces, siento]
At times I feel
like the rose
that I shall be, like the wing
that I shall be;
and a perfume shrouds me, alien and mine,
mine and a rose's;
and a wanderlust grips me, alien and mine,
mine and a bird's.'
--tr Eloise Roach, Juan Ramon Jiménez Three Hundred Poems
1903-1953
--------------------------------------------------------
* "A Waltz in Old Vienna"
Once Wittgenstein gifted Georg Trakl
Though quipping, "His verse boasts a lock'll
Withstand the best key;
It's yet poetry."
And Trakl pushed back his debacle.
4-13-01
experiences.
'But there are excavations of excavations.' --The Book of
Concealed Mystery (Mathers tr)
"One must sense the dark is occupied." --Jeffrey Gburek.
"Wittgenstein said of his [Trakl's] poems: 'I do not under-
stand them, but their tone delights me. It is the tone of a man of real genius.' " --Selected Poems ed C Middleton*
Alternative self-histories are more futile than most.
"Spinnen suchen mein Herz." ('Spiders look for my heart.')
--Trakl
"Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can
do: but this turns out to be something which not many people
want done." --C S Lewis
"I'm wearing/ windows for walls,/ and the street keeps coming
through." --Michelle Shocked, "Disoriented" (from her hard-to-find
EP)
'Casida of the Rose
The rose
was not searching for the sunrise:
almost eternal on its branch,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for darkness or science:
borderland of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.' --Lorca (tr Bly)
Contraries: truth & Mystery. Their opposites: lies &
banality.
Banality--a cancer with its own health & its own antibodies.
What techniques are to problems, initiations are to
Mysteries.
I like a cop car parked beside me. I don't like a cop car
driving beside me.
Holidays spread, like a stain, into whole seasons.
'181. [A veces, siento]
At times I feel
like the rose
that I shall be, like the wing
that I shall be;
and a perfume shrouds me, alien and mine,
mine and a rose's;
and a wanderlust grips me, alien and mine,
mine and a bird's.'
--tr Eloise Roach, Juan Ramon Jiménez Three Hundred Poems
1903-1953
--------------------------------------------------------
* "A Waltz in Old Vienna"
Once Wittgenstein gifted Georg Trakl
Though quipping, "His verse boasts a lock'll
Withstand the best key;
It's yet poetry."
And Trakl pushed back his debacle.
4-13-01
Monday, October 13, 2003
Interesting set of "France-in-a-nutshell"
pages i found while looking for mot de
Cambronne; here's a word (& an attitude)
we need: laicite'.
The Rats of Alpha Centauri.
Listening to: Dead Can Dance- Into the Labyrinth.
New French observations of Alpha Centauri
make it almost the same age as the Sun,
instead of a couple of billion years older
as previously thought.
Waiting for the Taikonauts.
You can find a David Hardy painting of "Proxima's
Planet" (which is now not thought to exist)*--here.
Clicking on his name leads to a small site for the
great space artist himself...
Clicking on this, however, takes you to a site
about "diapered furries", & if you have to ask,
you don't want to know.
-----------------------------------------------------------
*but you can still sing the song. (How appropriate--
Black Metal about a Ghost Planet.)
A somewhat more lyrical picture of the star.
--Curiously, though the "planet" would have orbited at
about Venus's distance, because of the smaller mass of
Proxima its revolution period would be more like 600
days. [And if you reduce the mass of Proxima to
something like 8.9% of the Sun's--not at all an
unlikely number--it produces a revolution period of
666 days...]
pages i found while looking for mot de
Cambronne; here's a word (& an attitude)
we need: laicite'.
The Rats of Alpha Centauri.
Listening to: Dead Can Dance- Into the Labyrinth.
New French observations of Alpha Centauri
make it almost the same age as the Sun,
instead of a couple of billion years older
as previously thought.
Waiting for the Taikonauts.
You can find a David Hardy painting of "Proxima's
Planet" (which is now not thought to exist)*--here.
Clicking on his name leads to a small site for the
great space artist himself...
Clicking on this, however, takes you to a site
about "diapered furries", & if you have to ask,
you don't want to know.
-----------------------------------------------------------
*but you can still sing the song. (How appropriate--
Black Metal about a Ghost Planet.)
A somewhat more lyrical picture of the star.
--Curiously, though the "planet" would have orbited at
about Venus's distance, because of the smaller mass of
Proxima its revolution period would be more like 600
days. [And if you reduce the mass of Proxima to
something like 8.9% of the Sun's--not at all an
unlikely number--it produces a revolution period of
666 days...]
Best montage. Melanie reminded me of
the one in "Grace of My Heart" where they intercut
the song being written, what prompted the song,
& the song being recorded , for "Unwanted Number".
Extraordinary!
In an alternate universe... (via Buzz Flash)
Got a letter from someone who used to be
a poetry publisher & now runs the "Ganjah
Baptist Church of America". (It's about what
you'd think from the name.) Me, i'm waiting
for the Ganja Pentecostalists.
"Nightly Phone-Charging Ritual"
Nebulize the wrixled mortal day
Loin railgun bible
Dogging... Flowers of evil for Algernon
Waihopai viridian
Sleep mimics
Immensely climbs dictated
Slag off is
The fury of the matador we
Indigo fraud lurch
The big bad ballasted oblong sprockets stilb
Flaking squib bullion
Elephantine froglegs illegible bleed
Stilb silver
Alcove under crinoline take. Call
Back facets
Pungent equivalence: love
Buttercup
Luster annihilation
10 13 03
"This evening, to London for a party to celebrate 40 years
of the NYRB. All the usual suspects were there; I talked to
a former colleague about the war. 'They did have the most
extraordinary hubris about the power of their army', he said:
'I was talking to Dick Cheney in December last year, and I
asked him, how did he see the war on terror ending. He said-
"with the elimination of all the terrorists"!' We looked at
each other with complete British understanding, and both
thought of the Duke of Wellington. 'They may not frighten the
enemy', I said, 'But, damme, sir, they frighten me!' he finished."
Then he said that the man to quote now, six months into the
occupation, was Kipling: 'We have had no end of a lesson and it has done us no end of good.' "--Andrew Brown
the one in "Grace of My Heart" where they intercut
the song being written, what prompted the song,
& the song being recorded , for "Unwanted Number".
Extraordinary!
In an alternate universe... (via Buzz Flash)
Got a letter from someone who used to be
a poetry publisher & now runs the "Ganjah
Baptist Church of America". (It's about what
you'd think from the name.) Me, i'm waiting
for the Ganja Pentecostalists.
"Nightly Phone-Charging Ritual"
Nebulize the wrixled mortal day
Loin railgun bible
Dogging... Flowers of evil for Algernon
Waihopai viridian
Sleep mimics
Immensely climbs dictated
Slag off is
The fury of the matador we
Indigo fraud lurch
The big bad ballasted oblong sprockets stilb
Flaking squib bullion
Elephantine froglegs illegible bleed
Stilb silver
Alcove under crinoline take. Call
Back facets
Pungent equivalence: love
Buttercup
Luster annihilation
10 13 03
"This evening, to London for a party to celebrate 40 years
of the NYRB. All the usual suspects were there; I talked to
a former colleague about the war. 'They did have the most
extraordinary hubris about the power of their army', he said:
'I was talking to Dick Cheney in December last year, and I
asked him, how did he see the war on terror ending. He said-
"with the elimination of all the terrorists"!' We looked at
each other with complete British understanding, and both
thought of the Duke of Wellington. 'They may not frighten the
enemy', I said, 'But, damme, sir, they frighten me!' he finished."
Then he said that the man to quote now, six months into the
occupation, was Kipling: 'We have had no end of a lesson and it has done us no end of good.' "--Andrew Brown
Ego as a lawnmower engine each of us carries on our
backs from birth. The noise, the stinks which obscure
our selfhood. And some have engines so large, whole
nations are required to hold them up... And we think we'd
die without them.
'Largeness is the mortal enemy of the infinite.' --Henri Michaux, The Turbulent Infinite
All poetry readings should be held by candlelight; it activates
a deeper level of listening than fluorescent.
"on rune-height by the garbaged rill
the scree-fall answers the cawed madrigals"
--The Anathemata
"To a poet, nothing can be useless." --Rasselas
'Do you fall Elevator?
Do you fall elevator? Where? In
the hottest waiting room
a rattlesnake creeps
along a crack. And hisses.
So do I know that the Earth,
littered with bark and gnarls,
is a truly worm-eaten tree.
Oh, all of you above ground,
who doubt with Thomas,
saw the earth through
and be convinced.' --Kristinn Reyr, in: The Post-War
Poetry of Iceland tr S Magnusson (1982)
"by the brumous numen drawn on" --The Anathemata
"All of physics and chemistry is in a candle flame." --Michael Faraday
...Dr Krasinski's Secret by M P Shiel--sorta like Robert Louis
Stevenson on acid.
...[I] use my [chap-] book as if it were a hologram calling-card
of the real me...
Hearts & minds.
backs from birth. The noise, the stinks which obscure
our selfhood. And some have engines so large, whole
nations are required to hold them up... And we think we'd
die without them.
'Largeness is the mortal enemy of the infinite.' --Henri Michaux, The Turbulent Infinite
All poetry readings should be held by candlelight; it activates
a deeper level of listening than fluorescent.
"on rune-height by the garbaged rill
the scree-fall answers the cawed madrigals"
--The Anathemata
"To a poet, nothing can be useless." --Rasselas
'Do you fall Elevator?
Do you fall elevator? Where? In
the hottest waiting room
a rattlesnake creeps
along a crack. And hisses.
So do I know that the Earth,
littered with bark and gnarls,
is a truly worm-eaten tree.
Oh, all of you above ground,
who doubt with Thomas,
saw the earth through
and be convinced.' --Kristinn Reyr, in: The Post-War
Poetry of Iceland tr S Magnusson (1982)
"by the brumous numen drawn on" --The Anathemata
"All of physics and chemistry is in a candle flame." --Michael Faraday
...Dr Krasinski's Secret by M P Shiel--sorta like Robert Louis
Stevenson on acid.
...[I] use my [chap-] book as if it were a hologram calling-card
of the real me...
Hearts & minds.
Sunday, October 12, 2003
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)
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)