I remember Reaganomics, all right. I was working downtown at a bank. Every year there were more street people. We were the underground people, we lived in the tunnels & skyways. We only stood in the same world when we waited on our bus, & we resented even that. For the most part we refused to make eye contact or acknowledge them in any way.
I was a librarian of mortgages. I handled one stage of the paperwork. I remember, i don't know for how long but i lost track, i was doing a hundred foreclosures a day. It began to prey on my mind: that many families thrown out of their houses, that many dreams shattered. After awhile i had to quit & try to move away. I knew i didn't belong there, in the underground, with the happy saved.
The Neoformalists have failed to imagine farther back than Frost; they have no more use for Pope than for Ginsberg.
"Empty landscapes seem to inspire games." --DeLillo, 1983 interv.
"All of Philip K Dick's novels seem to bear at least three stigmata of his long apprenticeship to Ace Double Novels.' --Robert H Canary
"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." --Lovecraft
Laid off after ten years on the job, i have $40 in the bank, $20 grand in debt, an 18-year-old car & a 15-year-old ulcer. Duncan: "A poet who sits in the light of words like a cat in the mote-filled sunlight of a window."
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
"Orthodoxy was never a religion of speculation anyway, but a waterfall of sound and colour, bleeding beauty off into the wings, overwhelming its unhappy brood with its mystical cant, and sending its harmonious dirges down the soul river of time." --Larry Frolick, Grand Centaur Station (2004)
The ancient bricks more beautiful than anything we can think to fill this space with.
"The Suq al-Warraqin, or bookdealers' market, in tenth century Baghdad contained one hundred booksellers." --Night & Horses & the Desert ed Robert Irwin (1999)
"Maybe, Murray supposed, he would get there in ten or eleven years' time. The fact that it would take the 31 years left to him, and still not be completed, might not have dismayed him had he known the fate of the other great multi-volume European dictionaries that were under way at around the same time. Although Emile Littre's rather short Dictionnaire de la langue francaise took only a decade from publication of its first volume to the last--though 32 years from the conception of the plan--the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Worterbuch, which was six times bulkier than its French equivalent, was begun in 1838 and fully finished only in 1961. If that was not long enough, the Dutch dictionary known as Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was started in 1851 and completed in 1998, 147 years later. And a nineteenth-century attempt to fix the entire Swedish tongue between hard cover continues today into the twenty-first century, with scholars still stuck on the complexities of Swedish words beginning with the letter S." --Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything (2003)
Salvage in itself is a worthy art. In fact, it may be the art of arts.
"Poker is to New Orleans as waltzing is to Vienna, firecrackers to Beijing." --S Frederick Starr, New Orleans Unmasqued (1985)
Can you imagine a people giving up electric for gaslight, for aesthetic reasons?
The ancient bricks more beautiful than anything we can think to fill this space with.
"The Suq al-Warraqin, or bookdealers' market, in tenth century Baghdad contained one hundred booksellers." --Night & Horses & the Desert ed Robert Irwin (1999)
"Maybe, Murray supposed, he would get there in ten or eleven years' time. The fact that it would take the 31 years left to him, and still not be completed, might not have dismayed him had he known the fate of the other great multi-volume European dictionaries that were under way at around the same time. Although Emile Littre's rather short Dictionnaire de la langue francaise took only a decade from publication of its first volume to the last--though 32 years from the conception of the plan--the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Worterbuch, which was six times bulkier than its French equivalent, was begun in 1838 and fully finished only in 1961. If that was not long enough, the Dutch dictionary known as Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was started in 1851 and completed in 1998, 147 years later. And a nineteenth-century attempt to fix the entire Swedish tongue between hard cover continues today into the twenty-first century, with scholars still stuck on the complexities of Swedish words beginning with the letter S." --Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything (2003)
Salvage in itself is a worthy art. In fact, it may be the art of arts.
"Poker is to New Orleans as waltzing is to Vienna, firecrackers to Beijing." --S Frederick Starr, New Orleans Unmasqued (1985)
Can you imagine a people giving up electric for gaslight, for aesthetic reasons?
Monday, June 07, 2004
Friday, June 04, 2004
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Monday, May 31, 2004
"It is curious why anybody should pooh-pooh a study of fossils or various forms of rocks or lava. Such things grant us our only vision into Natural History's big book; and it isn't a book in first-class condition. Far from it! Just a tiny scrap; a slip; or, possibly a big chunk is found, with nothing notifying us as to how it got to that particular point, nor how long ago. Man can only look at it, lift it, rap it, cut into it, and squint at it through a magnifying glass. And,--think about it. That's all; until a formal study brings accompanying thoughts from many minds; and, by such tactics, judging that in all probability such and such a rock or fossil footprint is about so old. Natural History holds you in its grasp through just this impossibility of finding actual facts; for it is thus causing you to think. Now, thinking is not only a voluntary function; it is an acquisition; an art. Plants do not think. Animals probably do, but in a primary way, such as an aid in knowing poisonous foods, and how to bring up offspring with similar ability. But Man can, and should think, and think hard and constantly. It is ridiculous to rush blindly into an action without looking forward to lay out a plan. Such an unthinking custom is almost a panic, and panic is but a mild form of insanity."
--Gadsby
--Gadsby
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie
Dust unto dust
The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell
Too strong to strive
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
The cowed and the meek
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak."
--Ralph Chaplin, in The Match (Summer, 2004)
''Abu Ghraib and God's declassified papers''
Date: Friday, May 21, 2004 @ 00:05:15 CDT
Topic: Gabriel Ash
"By Gabriel Ash
YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)
(YellowTimes.org) -- Because they contained forward-looking statements that might have affected history, certain chapters in the Bible were marked "Top Secret" and excised from the original. One of these chapters has now been reclassified for public view. Here it is in its entirety.
And the Lord said: who is this nation, whose good fortunes are surpassed only by its hypocrisy? Who is this nation, that preaches the world my name, whose deeds besmirch my name to the world? Who is this nation, whose coins bear my name and whose actions are stamped with the name of Caesar?
Who is this nation, whose poor are sheltered in dungeons and whose wicked are exalted in churches? Who is this nation, whose soldiers can see in the dark and whose leaders are blind in broad daylight?
Who is this nation, that joins house to house, that lays field to field, till there be no place, so that it be placed alone in the midst of the earth? Who is this nation, that would not walk behind me but fancy I walk ahead of it?
Who are these people, who demand my commandments in courtrooms and remove them from their hearts? Who are these people, who cherish the life of a fetus and spurn the life of a child? Who are these people, who feed the bloated beef and give the hungry thistles? Who are these people, who move their lips in my service and their hearts rejoice in destruction? Who are these people, whose sons are idle at the table and whose guests are working in the kitchen? Who are these people, who mistreat the foreigner, enslave the orphan, and mock the widow, trampling on my word.
Who are these people, who hang my image on their necks and their faith they put in missiles? Who are these people, whose jets are faster than sound and compassion slower than a turtle.
Who are these people, whom I sent my son to free from evil, and they fancy he came to free them for evil? Who are these people, whom I sent my son to teach my word, and they fancy he came to free them from my word?
I say therefore: They don't know me and I shall not know them.
I say therefore: The money they put my name on, I shall make worthless. The prisons they built to spurn me, I shall make my houses, and the houses they built to praise me, I shall make their prisons. The missiles they built in pride shall strike them with fear. The bombs they have made their idols shall fall and destroy their houses.
I therefore say: the fires they started shall consume them. The charity they have given, that shall be given to them, no more.
And the advocate that was sitting stood and said in front of the Lord. Aye, you will besmirch your name by your own deed. Aye, you have promised and you will have broken your promise. Aye, you will let the innocent die among the guilty, and the world will turn away from your name. Aye, Lord, let them have a warning, so that they repent and be saved. For even if there were only fifty good people in the whole of this nation, you ought to spare them, for you are justice.
Therefore, this I advise: to these people who worship images I will bring images. I will make images of their folly, pictures and videotapes of their inequities, and will give them for all to see. From the darkest prison they have made to torture you I will bring them images of your suffering. And they will see the images of your images suffering. And they will see the depth of the sickness that have taken them away from you, and they will see the depth of iniquity to which they have condemned you. And those whose hearts are closed to the word will tremble before the image.
I say that there are many good people still in this nation, and they will wear sackcloth and put ashes in their hair and come out in the streets to wail and to repent and to mend their ways and to ask for your mercy.
And the Lord said: Do as you advise. But I examine the heart. Verily I say, you shall be surprised, and not for the better. A rotten apple does not become a good apple in a good barrel, and a good apple quickly rots in a rotten barrel.
And so it was.
[Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is an unabashed "opssimist." He writes his columns because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword - and sometimes not. He lives in the United States.]
Gabriel Ash encourages your comments: gash at YellowTimes.org"
Dust unto dust
The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell
Too strong to strive
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
The cowed and the meek
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak."
--Ralph Chaplin, in The Match (Summer, 2004)
''Abu Ghraib and God's declassified papers''
Date: Friday, May 21, 2004 @ 00:05:15 CDT
Topic: Gabriel Ash
"By Gabriel Ash
YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)
(YellowTimes.org) -- Because they contained forward-looking statements that might have affected history, certain chapters in the Bible were marked "Top Secret" and excised from the original. One of these chapters has now been reclassified for public view. Here it is in its entirety.
And the Lord said: who is this nation, whose good fortunes are surpassed only by its hypocrisy? Who is this nation, that preaches the world my name, whose deeds besmirch my name to the world? Who is this nation, whose coins bear my name and whose actions are stamped with the name of Caesar?
Who is this nation, whose poor are sheltered in dungeons and whose wicked are exalted in churches? Who is this nation, whose soldiers can see in the dark and whose leaders are blind in broad daylight?
Who is this nation, that joins house to house, that lays field to field, till there be no place, so that it be placed alone in the midst of the earth? Who is this nation, that would not walk behind me but fancy I walk ahead of it?
Who are these people, who demand my commandments in courtrooms and remove them from their hearts? Who are these people, who cherish the life of a fetus and spurn the life of a child? Who are these people, who feed the bloated beef and give the hungry thistles? Who are these people, who move their lips in my service and their hearts rejoice in destruction? Who are these people, whose sons are idle at the table and whose guests are working in the kitchen? Who are these people, who mistreat the foreigner, enslave the orphan, and mock the widow, trampling on my word.
Who are these people, who hang my image on their necks and their faith they put in missiles? Who are these people, whose jets are faster than sound and compassion slower than a turtle.
Who are these people, whom I sent my son to free from evil, and they fancy he came to free them for evil? Who are these people, whom I sent my son to teach my word, and they fancy he came to free them from my word?
I say therefore: They don't know me and I shall not know them.
I say therefore: The money they put my name on, I shall make worthless. The prisons they built to spurn me, I shall make my houses, and the houses they built to praise me, I shall make their prisons. The missiles they built in pride shall strike them with fear. The bombs they have made their idols shall fall and destroy their houses.
I therefore say: the fires they started shall consume them. The charity they have given, that shall be given to them, no more.
And the advocate that was sitting stood and said in front of the Lord. Aye, you will besmirch your name by your own deed. Aye, you have promised and you will have broken your promise. Aye, you will let the innocent die among the guilty, and the world will turn away from your name. Aye, Lord, let them have a warning, so that they repent and be saved. For even if there were only fifty good people in the whole of this nation, you ought to spare them, for you are justice.
Therefore, this I advise: to these people who worship images I will bring images. I will make images of their folly, pictures and videotapes of their inequities, and will give them for all to see. From the darkest prison they have made to torture you I will bring them images of your suffering. And they will see the images of your images suffering. And they will see the depth of the sickness that have taken them away from you, and they will see the depth of iniquity to which they have condemned you. And those whose hearts are closed to the word will tremble before the image.
I say that there are many good people still in this nation, and they will wear sackcloth and put ashes in their hair and come out in the streets to wail and to repent and to mend their ways and to ask for your mercy.
And the Lord said: Do as you advise. But I examine the heart. Verily I say, you shall be surprised, and not for the better. A rotten apple does not become a good apple in a good barrel, and a good apple quickly rots in a rotten barrel.
And so it was.
[Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is an unabashed "opssimist." He writes his columns because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword - and sometimes not. He lives in the United States.]
Gabriel Ash encourages your comments: gash at YellowTimes.org"
Friday, May 07, 2004
"Tomorrow Quencher"
This shine is my night,
A work of turbulent years,
A tree with tapers & popcorn strands bedight;
Wake with tears
And not know why. In the Holy See
An old man gathers his kafka chips & fears
Fitfully
The rumor of Dyson Spheres;
His attention tapers to a high
Shelf where poems lie low
Including this one. Shadowless circling fly
Brings bleak news of long ago
Sunken things
Waking. To & fro
On querulous iridescent wings.
Commuting, a sentence. Woe
To the leaders who are always sure
Time loses what the villagers forgot.
Fallout evermore
Puissant, not
Glowing; secret. Written in
Deep alphabets, this travelling spot
Of blankness or sin
And i may live to watch unwind fractal plot
Into rout
Into ruin. Knots intrude,
I'll make them part & worth the puzzling out
O freaked solitude
Of birth pangs.
Without hope, without light, without food
I sharpen these fangs
And drive. A grayness imbued
By futurity, ferrying all
To a far shore where the flicker workers form
One line. Pall
Of chrome, nacreous flintknapper storm
Troops; traipse wan
Deserts that affirm
Your abject victimhood as pitiless man
Versus a pitying worm!
04 30 04
This shine is my night,
A work of turbulent years,
A tree with tapers & popcorn strands bedight;
Wake with tears
And not know why. In the Holy See
An old man gathers his kafka chips & fears
Fitfully
The rumor of Dyson Spheres;
His attention tapers to a high
Shelf where poems lie low
Including this one. Shadowless circling fly
Brings bleak news of long ago
Sunken things
Waking. To & fro
On querulous iridescent wings.
Commuting, a sentence. Woe
To the leaders who are always sure
Time loses what the villagers forgot.
Fallout evermore
Puissant, not
Glowing; secret. Written in
Deep alphabets, this travelling spot
Of blankness or sin
And i may live to watch unwind fractal plot
Into rout
Into ruin. Knots intrude,
I'll make them part & worth the puzzling out
O freaked solitude
Of birth pangs.
Without hope, without light, without food
I sharpen these fangs
And drive. A grayness imbued
By futurity, ferrying all
To a far shore where the flicker workers form
One line. Pall
Of chrome, nacreous flintknapper storm
Troops; traipse wan
Deserts that affirm
Your abject victimhood as pitiless man
Versus a pitying worm!
04 30 04
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
"Speaking about epics, mother,
How long is it since you gathered mushrooms...?"
--Zukofsky
"Lancelot Link"
Swiftly moving beasts
As they hurried to terrible the
Uttermost
Regions of the globe sagging verandahs &
Have peeling paintwork brought this
Evil down thing to
Pass down the grow. Winding metal road
Of the wildest of At all
Sublunary doorway of the old timbered
Hotel few
In children have abandoned
Tipsy telegraph poles to the hills beyond
Let of me
Then remember this ridiculous
Masquerade too utterly
Monstrous for the crack
Of edge-: a
Stockwhip singing chrome
Singularly alike in general
Contour chrome through a cloud of rising
Emerald dust acid & with a creeping
Shudder scanned
The empty landscape
04 27 04
"Let seem seem beginning of be." --Bob Perelman
Jubba.
How long is it since you gathered mushrooms...?"
--Zukofsky
"Lancelot Link"
Swiftly moving beasts
As they hurried to terrible the
Uttermost
Regions of the globe sagging verandahs &
Have peeling paintwork brought this
Evil down thing to
Pass down the grow. Winding metal road
Of the wildest of At all
Sublunary doorway of the old timbered
Hotel few
In children have abandoned
Tipsy telegraph poles to the hills beyond
Let of me
Then remember this ridiculous
Masquerade too utterly
Monstrous for the crack
Of edge-: a
Stockwhip singing chrome
Singularly alike in general
Contour chrome through a cloud of rising
Emerald dust acid & with a creeping
Shudder scanned
The empty landscape
04 27 04
"Let seem seem beginning of be." --Bob Perelman
Jubba.
Monday, May 03, 2004
#144
Between oolong in the mouth, oolong
in the nostrils, there's
an absolute gulf. On that sea, stars
are winking bubbles
left by the first passage of Sxwaixwe.
01 18 92
"The House in Bonac Revisited
I am in love with the impossible:
From the beginning, I have tried to bring
Into the toils of language the fierce thing
No word may gather and no tongue may tell--
And it was in this room that first the spell
Was cast upon me for a curse, to wring
My heart in labor and in suffering,
Under these rafters that I love so well.
How many a night, how many a lonely year,
With mind grown bitter and with blood gone dry,
I have wrought these cunning toils! Nevertheless,
All longing was repaid, all bitterness,
In moments when my heart stood still to hear,
Even for a moment, that fleet foot go by."
--John Hall Wheelock, in: This Powerful Rhyme, ed Helen Plotz (1979)
'This body
grown fragile, floating,
a reed cut from its roots...
If a stream would ask me
to follow, I'd go, I think.'
--Ono no Komachi in The Ink Dark Moon (1988) tr Jane Hirshfield & Mariko Aratani
"We are living even now among punishment and ruins." --Wendell Berry
Stonehenge Aotearoa. (via Metafilter)
Between oolong in the mouth, oolong
in the nostrils, there's
an absolute gulf. On that sea, stars
are winking bubbles
left by the first passage of Sxwaixwe.
01 18 92
"The House in Bonac Revisited
I am in love with the impossible:
From the beginning, I have tried to bring
Into the toils of language the fierce thing
No word may gather and no tongue may tell--
And it was in this room that first the spell
Was cast upon me for a curse, to wring
My heart in labor and in suffering,
Under these rafters that I love so well.
How many a night, how many a lonely year,
With mind grown bitter and with blood gone dry,
I have wrought these cunning toils! Nevertheless,
All longing was repaid, all bitterness,
In moments when my heart stood still to hear,
Even for a moment, that fleet foot go by."
--John Hall Wheelock, in: This Powerful Rhyme, ed Helen Plotz (1979)
'This body
grown fragile, floating,
a reed cut from its roots...
If a stream would ask me
to follow, I'd go, I think.'
--Ono no Komachi in The Ink Dark Moon (1988) tr Jane Hirshfield & Mariko Aratani
"We are living even now among punishment and ruins." --Wendell Berry
Stonehenge Aotearoa. (via Metafilter)
Sunday, May 02, 2004
You don't think like a survivor, i said. You pile up all the things you can possibly think of to feel bad about, & then drop this treasure on your head, but that is not how a survivor thinks. A survivor only looks at the immediate problem to be solved, looks at it without reacting emotionally, & may have a vague notion of a wider view & goal, but never gets fixated on feelings of urgency & ultimate attainment. I know this sounds like a truism but it is still essential. It may not yet be so bad that only those who think like survivors will survive, but i'm certain that we will not be given warning or training should the moment itself arrive. You must start thinking like a survivor today.
Mieville's List. (via Mosses From an Old Manse)
Mieville's List. (via Mosses From an Old Manse)
Saturday, May 01, 2004
"To possess a telescope without the other essential half--the microscope--seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension." --Leonora Carrington, House of Fear
One of the curious unspoken conventions of contemporary poetry is that it's all about the same length: just enough to fill up a lettersize page...
"Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power." --Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen (1980)
"The key thing to remember with literature is that it's a wholesale business as opposed to the visual arts, which is retail business." --Richard Kostelanetz in Atticus Review
Plot is the.gollup (gameliness) of Story.
'Tolstoy's excuse as a preacher is that he had two disciples who derived the practical consequences of his homilies: Wittgenstein and Gandhi.' --Cioran
"What good exterminating evil distorts if the sun itself should be owned by spiders?" --Attanasaio, Last Legends of Earth
"Dogs, sewed up in lamb skins, whisper repent, or wittily property is use." --Gerald Burns
A poem cannot levitate one dust-mote. --saying of Asmodeus
Burroughs [my rabbit] always snatches her cracker with vast avidity; often as not, not having hands, her first bite drops the rest between the floor-grate, & i have to retrieve it. How like humans & happiness!
Certainty is a feeling-state not a knowledge-state. A feeling-state, moreover, caused by a particular degree of ignorance...
'I don't believe in Rilke's angels; I believe even less in his poor.' --Cioran
Proverbs from A Maltese Anthology, ed A J Arberry:
One man dies of drunkenness, and another dies for (want of) a drop.
An agreement between two people is reached in two days; an agreement between three requires two months.
Praise the sea, and remain on dry land.
He who is born round will not die square.
Whoever says what he likes will have to hear what he doesn't like.
For the sake of a cent he will skin a louse.
From the point of view of the rest of the Earth, those who are killing the most of their fellow humans--are heroes.
One of the curious unspoken conventions of contemporary poetry is that it's all about the same length: just enough to fill up a lettersize page...
"Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power." --Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen (1980)
"The key thing to remember with literature is that it's a wholesale business as opposed to the visual arts, which is retail business." --Richard Kostelanetz in Atticus Review
Plot is the.gollup (gameliness) of Story.
'Tolstoy's excuse as a preacher is that he had two disciples who derived the practical consequences of his homilies: Wittgenstein and Gandhi.' --Cioran
"What good exterminating evil distorts if the sun itself should be owned by spiders?" --Attanasaio, Last Legends of Earth
"Dogs, sewed up in lamb skins, whisper repent, or wittily property is use." --Gerald Burns
A poem cannot levitate one dust-mote. --saying of Asmodeus
Burroughs [my rabbit] always snatches her cracker with vast avidity; often as not, not having hands, her first bite drops the rest between the floor-grate, & i have to retrieve it. How like humans & happiness!
Certainty is a feeling-state not a knowledge-state. A feeling-state, moreover, caused by a particular degree of ignorance...
'I don't believe in Rilke's angels; I believe even less in his poor.' --Cioran
Proverbs from A Maltese Anthology, ed A J Arberry:
One man dies of drunkenness, and another dies for (want of) a drop.
An agreement between two people is reached in two days; an agreement between three requires two months.
Praise the sea, and remain on dry land.
He who is born round will not die square.
Whoever says what he likes will have to hear what he doesn't like.
For the sake of a cent he will skin a louse.
From the point of view of the rest of the Earth, those who are killing the most of their fellow humans--are heroes.
Friday, April 30, 2004
" 'A sad spectacle!' exclaimed Thomas Carlyle, contemplating the possibility that millions of planets circle other suns. 'If they be inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly; and if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!' " --from Martin Gardner's Order and Surprise (1983)
Sometimes when i am feeling particularly arrogant, i console myself with the thought that the only thing that kept me from a mathematical career was, i couldn't convince myself that calculus was true.
"We know so much intellectually, indeed, that we are in danger of becoming the prisoners of our knowledge. We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place. We behave as if there were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed. As a result we are no longer sufficiently aware of the importance of what we cannot know intellectually, what we must know in other ways, of the living experience before and beyond our transitory knowledge." Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter (1961)
[How nostalgic the first part of that makes me feel!--]
As a child i felt toward cars & other vehicles much as primitive humans must have felt toward animals.
"I have always been grateful that I was born into a world and shall die in one where the lion, however diminished in number, is still roaring. Heard in his and my native setting, it is for me the most beautiful sound in the world. It is to silence what the shooting star is to the dark of the night." --ibid
I dreamed that i buried my heart. It was still alive but not beating, & i buried it deep in the ground.
I'm still thinking about what that means...
It looked like cicadas do when they're still in thev larval stage: gray & moist & ugly. I tried to get some images of what comes next. ...I realized i couldn't have the rest of it yet--not until i live it--but somehow there's a rightness in waiting. ...--Or: i have never planted my heart here; that's why nothing has grown.
Fantasy flourishes in the decline of empire, becoming indistinguishable from empire itself.
Sometimes when i am feeling particularly arrogant, i console myself with the thought that the only thing that kept me from a mathematical career was, i couldn't convince myself that calculus was true.
"We know so much intellectually, indeed, that we are in danger of becoming the prisoners of our knowledge. We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place. We behave as if there were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed. As a result we are no longer sufficiently aware of the importance of what we cannot know intellectually, what we must know in other ways, of the living experience before and beyond our transitory knowledge." Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter (1961)
[How nostalgic the first part of that makes me feel!--]
As a child i felt toward cars & other vehicles much as primitive humans must have felt toward animals.
"I have always been grateful that I was born into a world and shall die in one where the lion, however diminished in number, is still roaring. Heard in his and my native setting, it is for me the most beautiful sound in the world. It is to silence what the shooting star is to the dark of the night." --ibid
I dreamed that i buried my heart. It was still alive but not beating, & i buried it deep in the ground.
I'm still thinking about what that means...
It looked like cicadas do when they're still in thev larval stage: gray & moist & ugly. I tried to get some images of what comes next. ...I realized i couldn't have the rest of it yet--not until i live it--but somehow there's a rightness in waiting. ...--Or: i have never planted my heart here; that's why nothing has grown.
Fantasy flourishes in the decline of empire, becoming indistinguishable from empire itself.
Thursday, April 29, 2004
letter from Melanie to a local radio station:
" Hi, I must tell you how disappointed I was in your show this morning, specifically regarding American Idol, and, especially, the treatment John Stevens and his fans have been getting in the media. I was not in a position to call the station, so as to present the other side's case, or I would have. Although I actually heard you say you didn't want to gang-up on John Stevens, that is, in essence, what you did, and you have not been alone; Edna Gunderson of USA Today is a prime offender, and Paula Adbul has behaved poorly by appearing on Entertainment Tonight and saying Stevens needs to go, although Ms. Abdul would never be so forthright to any AI contestant to his (her) face, and that makes her a coward.
I've been listening to this noise for a week, monitoring the Idol message boards, as well as the countless newspaper articles and the coverage on Entertainment Tonight, and I think some people are grossly simplifying the results of last week's show and/or the appeal of John Stevens, himself. First, let me say, for the record, that I am not some lovesick-- white--teenage girl, nor am I someone's doddering old granny. I am an active, happy, vital person who works two jobs and also does some volunteering. Great, good enough. Okay, yes, I do like John Stevens, and so do a lot of my friends, some more than others. Yes, I have voted for him, more than once, even. That said, I've also voted for some of the other contestants, and my thought has always been that this season's round of American Idol was, and is, destined to be won by either LaToya London or Fantasia Barrino. With that in mind, the order in which all the other candidates go home shouldn't really matter. They all have to go eventually. Jennifer Hudson, in my humble opinion, was never destined to win this contest. The judges might have been salivating at the thought of a three way race between the so-called divas, but that was just wishful thinking, because Hudson was always the weaker of the three: inconsistent and at times bombastic. Her renditions of "Imagine" (as part of the first group of 8) and "Circle of Life" were stunners, but even though she sang "Weekend in New England" on pitch, it was still way over the top, at times painfully so. Therefore, in regards to last week's outcome, isn't it possible that voters just preferred the other six singers? Isn't it possible that it's just that way?
As somebody pointed out on an AI post, at this point voters need only be concerned with who they want to see on tv the next week, not who they think can sell the most units. That particular decision need only be made once the contestants are slimmed down to the final two or three. It's of little consequence in the meantime. Further, it's the job of the record label's marketing department to figure a sales strategy, not the American public. I'd probably buy a John Stevens cd, if he did covers of some of the oldies.
As far as changing the voting system goes, that's a bad idea, at least for the remainder of the season. I was always taught that you don't get to change the rules in the middle of the game just because your team is losing. Allowing people to vote only once may have to happen in the future, but not now. Another bad idea is switch the process so that people vote off the weakest contestant. The beauty of the show, and its voting system, is that encourages the notion of a pre-sold fan base, and people can rally behind (or around) whomever they want, and for whatever reason. Just two or three weeks ago Simon Cowell answered a question posed by Ryan Seacrest (regarding talent vs popularity) by saying that people have the right to vote whichever way they feel. There is no right or wrong way to vote. Obviously, the winning candidate should possess a mix of personality and musical ability, but who's to say at this point, what will happen, or, rather, what won't happen?
Obviously, John Stevens has a huge fan base. Just how huge is subject to debate, but it is fair to say a lot of people like him for one reason or another. It is unfair, however, to make judgements against the people who for vote Stevens (as in they feel sorry for him, or think he's cute, or that they don't have any friends, or that they're all little old ladies, that they all power vote, etc.). As I've already stated, I like Stevens. His style is smooth and straightforward, and certainly much more pleasant to my ears than some of the heated oversinging by many of the other contestants; the girls, specifically. Maybe other voters feel the same way. They just prefer one style to another. Why so much attention is being paid to this young man, who's done nothing, really, except go out and sing to the best of his ability each week, is beyond me. After all, and I hate to mention names, but here goes, George Huff for the past two weeks has given awful performances, and yet he's been given a reprieve and no one seems to be upset about that. (Nor do they seem upset that he was set-up as a stooge on last week's results show.) Also, the other girls, Diana and Jasmine, pale in comparison to LaToya and Fantasia, but that they've been allowed to stay another week hasn't prompted nearly as much as outrage (as the Stevens thing). Jasmine Trias is a lovely girl, but seems out of her element at times. Diana DiGarmo is loud, and she's proven she can hold a note, but she's often all over the place in regards to pitch, and yet she gets asked back week after week. As long as there are other singers that I honestly believe are weaker than John, I will continue to vote for him, and that's my privilege. Once Diana and Jasmine are gone, and possibly George, John will either have to step-up his game, or go home, but that time has not yet come.
I wish people would remember that John Stevens was passed through by the judges, legitimately, and that he had the most audience votes of anyone in his group of 8 (when he sang the Billy Joel song). To compare him to William Hung is just plain mean, and unbecoming of any adult. Not only is John Stevens only 16, he's also someone's son, and I'm sure it can't be easy for his parents to pick up a newspaper, or turn on a tv or radio and find someone blaming their kid for whatever is going on with that show. Stevens is blameless, and picking on him isn't going to help.
Finally, consider the judges. Several weeks ago, Simon Cowell, an early Stevens supporter, said he liked John Stevens and that he (Cowell) thought Stevens was what Middle America wanted. Apparently that has been proven true, but now, suddenly, Simon and the gang want to dictate the way America should vote. Last Tuesday, the judges all but told America that the three divas were going to the finals. If that's the case, if it's so predetermined already, why not just cut to the chase and not include the American voting public in the first place? Simon didn't help his case by hurling insults to Stevens (comparing him to Stan Laurel, for example). If anything, Simon probably strengthened the Stevens fan-base's resolve (that is, if you believe the fans' votes even count; there are those who believe the producers manipulate the show according to their whims).
Well, it should all be over after tonight. It's Latin music night, and my guess is Stevens has met his match. I honestly don't think it's going to be a great night for him. Who knows, maybe he'll come out there and be really great, but I wouldn't want to have to face that sour group of judges.
Thank you for letting me vent,
Mp"
" Hi, I must tell you how disappointed I was in your show this morning, specifically regarding American Idol, and, especially, the treatment John Stevens and his fans have been getting in the media. I was not in a position to call the station, so as to present the other side's case, or I would have. Although I actually heard you say you didn't want to gang-up on John Stevens, that is, in essence, what you did, and you have not been alone; Edna Gunderson of USA Today is a prime offender, and Paula Adbul has behaved poorly by appearing on Entertainment Tonight and saying Stevens needs to go, although Ms. Abdul would never be so forthright to any AI contestant to his (her) face, and that makes her a coward.
I've been listening to this noise for a week, monitoring the Idol message boards, as well as the countless newspaper articles and the coverage on Entertainment Tonight, and I think some people are grossly simplifying the results of last week's show and/or the appeal of John Stevens, himself. First, let me say, for the record, that I am not some lovesick-- white--teenage girl, nor am I someone's doddering old granny. I am an active, happy, vital person who works two jobs and also does some volunteering. Great, good enough. Okay, yes, I do like John Stevens, and so do a lot of my friends, some more than others. Yes, I have voted for him, more than once, even. That said, I've also voted for some of the other contestants, and my thought has always been that this season's round of American Idol was, and is, destined to be won by either LaToya London or Fantasia Barrino. With that in mind, the order in which all the other candidates go home shouldn't really matter. They all have to go eventually. Jennifer Hudson, in my humble opinion, was never destined to win this contest. The judges might have been salivating at the thought of a three way race between the so-called divas, but that was just wishful thinking, because Hudson was always the weaker of the three: inconsistent and at times bombastic. Her renditions of "Imagine" (as part of the first group of 8) and "Circle of Life" were stunners, but even though she sang "Weekend in New England" on pitch, it was still way over the top, at times painfully so. Therefore, in regards to last week's outcome, isn't it possible that voters just preferred the other six singers? Isn't it possible that it's just that way?
As somebody pointed out on an AI post, at this point voters need only be concerned with who they want to see on tv the next week, not who they think can sell the most units. That particular decision need only be made once the contestants are slimmed down to the final two or three. It's of little consequence in the meantime. Further, it's the job of the record label's marketing department to figure a sales strategy, not the American public. I'd probably buy a John Stevens cd, if he did covers of some of the oldies.
As far as changing the voting system goes, that's a bad idea, at least for the remainder of the season. I was always taught that you don't get to change the rules in the middle of the game just because your team is losing. Allowing people to vote only once may have to happen in the future, but not now. Another bad idea is switch the process so that people vote off the weakest contestant. The beauty of the show, and its voting system, is that encourages the notion of a pre-sold fan base, and people can rally behind (or around) whomever they want, and for whatever reason. Just two or three weeks ago Simon Cowell answered a question posed by Ryan Seacrest (regarding talent vs popularity) by saying that people have the right to vote whichever way they feel. There is no right or wrong way to vote. Obviously, the winning candidate should possess a mix of personality and musical ability, but who's to say at this point, what will happen, or, rather, what won't happen?
Obviously, John Stevens has a huge fan base. Just how huge is subject to debate, but it is fair to say a lot of people like him for one reason or another. It is unfair, however, to make judgements against the people who for vote Stevens (as in they feel sorry for him, or think he's cute, or that they don't have any friends, or that they're all little old ladies, that they all power vote, etc.). As I've already stated, I like Stevens. His style is smooth and straightforward, and certainly much more pleasant to my ears than some of the heated oversinging by many of the other contestants; the girls, specifically. Maybe other voters feel the same way. They just prefer one style to another. Why so much attention is being paid to this young man, who's done nothing, really, except go out and sing to the best of his ability each week, is beyond me. After all, and I hate to mention names, but here goes, George Huff for the past two weeks has given awful performances, and yet he's been given a reprieve and no one seems to be upset about that. (Nor do they seem upset that he was set-up as a stooge on last week's results show.) Also, the other girls, Diana and Jasmine, pale in comparison to LaToya and Fantasia, but that they've been allowed to stay another week hasn't prompted nearly as much as outrage (as the Stevens thing). Jasmine Trias is a lovely girl, but seems out of her element at times. Diana DiGarmo is loud, and she's proven she can hold a note, but she's often all over the place in regards to pitch, and yet she gets asked back week after week. As long as there are other singers that I honestly believe are weaker than John, I will continue to vote for him, and that's my privilege. Once Diana and Jasmine are gone, and possibly George, John will either have to step-up his game, or go home, but that time has not yet come.
I wish people would remember that John Stevens was passed through by the judges, legitimately, and that he had the most audience votes of anyone in his group of 8 (when he sang the Billy Joel song). To compare him to William Hung is just plain mean, and unbecoming of any adult. Not only is John Stevens only 16, he's also someone's son, and I'm sure it can't be easy for his parents to pick up a newspaper, or turn on a tv or radio and find someone blaming their kid for whatever is going on with that show. Stevens is blameless, and picking on him isn't going to help.
Finally, consider the judges. Several weeks ago, Simon Cowell, an early Stevens supporter, said he liked John Stevens and that he (Cowell) thought Stevens was what Middle America wanted. Apparently that has been proven true, but now, suddenly, Simon and the gang want to dictate the way America should vote. Last Tuesday, the judges all but told America that the three divas were going to the finals. If that's the case, if it's so predetermined already, why not just cut to the chase and not include the American voting public in the first place? Simon didn't help his case by hurling insults to Stevens (comparing him to Stan Laurel, for example). If anything, Simon probably strengthened the Stevens fan-base's resolve (that is, if you believe the fans' votes even count; there are those who believe the producers manipulate the show according to their whims).
Well, it should all be over after tonight. It's Latin music night, and my guess is Stevens has met his match. I honestly don't think it's going to be a great night for him. Who knows, maybe he'll come out there and be really great, but I wouldn't want to have to face that sour group of judges.
Thank you for letting me vent,
Mp"
'Night Soul
My soul is sad at the end my soul
is sad to be tired at the end is sad
and tired to be in vain my soul is sad
and tired and at the end in vain
I long for your hands on my face
I long for your fingers on my face
like angels of ice your fingers on my face
I long for the ring to be brought to me
I long for their cold touch on my face
like a golden horde deep within the sea
And I long at last for their remedies
in order not to die exposed to the sun
to die in despair exposed to the sun
I long for them to bathe my eyes
where those in despair lie sleeping
Where so many swans are at sea
swans making their way over the sea
stretching in vain their sullen necks
while down in the winter gardens
there sick men are gathering roses
I long for your fingers on my face
touching my face like angels of ice
I long for them to moisten my eyes
the dead grass of my glances the fields
where so many lambs lie scattered'
Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses (1889; tr Richard Howard 2003)
I am still under the spell of the Myth of the Book! I ought to recognize books have affirmed in me what needed affirming (my subjectivity) but did nothing to solve my problems (i could only grow up & into their solution)--& that's all that books are for. Thus i have no responsibility in writing one, than the same. And yet, & yet...
This ought to be a dialog with someone else.
I can never realize that most other people make do with the most childishly simple maps of the world, or none at all; & that a complex one (like Lojban) will never be more than a kind of caviar for intellectuals--& only one of many, for that matter.
'It is said that during the time the Sung empire was being overrun by the Mongols, the Chinese commander-in-chief was flat on his belly, watching a cricket fight, when he received the news that the capital was surrounded by the enemy and that they were in utmost danger. He just couldn't tear himself away from the crickets, he first had to see who the winner was. The city fell, and the reign of the Sungs was over.' --The Conscience of Words, Elias Canetti (1979)
America: freedom of speech w/out freedom of thought.
"And there impale perfected seraphim
Anguished by answers truant to their love." --Burns Singer
The reason i don't write much, is the same reason a scuba diver doesn't sing.
My soul is sad at the end my soul
is sad to be tired at the end is sad
and tired to be in vain my soul is sad
and tired and at the end in vain
I long for your hands on my face
I long for your fingers on my face
like angels of ice your fingers on my face
I long for the ring to be brought to me
I long for their cold touch on my face
like a golden horde deep within the sea
And I long at last for their remedies
in order not to die exposed to the sun
to die in despair exposed to the sun
I long for them to bathe my eyes
where those in despair lie sleeping
Where so many swans are at sea
swans making their way over the sea
stretching in vain their sullen necks
while down in the winter gardens
there sick men are gathering roses
I long for your fingers on my face
touching my face like angels of ice
I long for them to moisten my eyes
the dead grass of my glances the fields
where so many lambs lie scattered'
Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses (1889; tr Richard Howard 2003)
I am still under the spell of the Myth of the Book! I ought to recognize books have affirmed in me what needed affirming (my subjectivity) but did nothing to solve my problems (i could only grow up & into their solution)--& that's all that books are for. Thus i have no responsibility in writing one, than the same. And yet, & yet...
This ought to be a dialog with someone else.
I can never realize that most other people make do with the most childishly simple maps of the world, or none at all; & that a complex one (like Lojban) will never be more than a kind of caviar for intellectuals--& only one of many, for that matter.
'It is said that during the time the Sung empire was being overrun by the Mongols, the Chinese commander-in-chief was flat on his belly, watching a cricket fight, when he received the news that the capital was surrounded by the enemy and that they were in utmost danger. He just couldn't tear himself away from the crickets, he first had to see who the winner was. The city fell, and the reign of the Sungs was over.' --The Conscience of Words, Elias Canetti (1979)
America: freedom of speech w/out freedom of thought.
"And there impale perfected seraphim
Anguished by answers truant to their love." --Burns Singer
The reason i don't write much, is the same reason a scuba diver doesn't sing.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
I abandoned my strict Byzantine palette long ago but i think if you put one of my pictures against an old one you can still see the resemblance. What has changed is now different colors have taken over some of the functions--a dark purple for the indigo, an orange or even cadmium yellow for the vermilion--.
"The Question and Its Mark
May I cast a spell on the many swans of Leda,
making at last one spastic blizzard in spring
with only enough divine mania to take one
blinding day from her?
The godbirds and their scopophilia
keep her open for view and review, with ever
new speculum and never the elegant jewelry
of stigmata or a heart of quartz.
May I give her only one death? Can we live if she
lies closed in a single final pose, no syphilitic
autopsy or cygnet interrogation?
May I mark her prophecy,
her presence in the very air, with a single
gargoyle on the streetside wall on a place
of worship, finally allowed inside if only by
disappearing into the stones?
Leda possessed a pair of knees that also bent
in prayer. I ask of you only what she asked for there."
Brenda Shaughnessy
Experience illustrates theory, it never proves it.
"Much of Fermat's best work was done while one of the most savage wars in history raged all about him. Yet he never alludes to it in his correspondence." --Eric Temple Bell
"An orchestra is a herd animal. They sense weakness like a pack." --Kate Tamarkin
The things i should be proud of, i don't even remember.
The cat finds happiness in repose, the dog in excitement; but i am like the rabbit, driven from frenzy to lassitude & back again, never long in either.
Boredom for them is a bulwark, a touchstone.
I fight the Vampyre with blood transfusions.
May I cast a spell on the many swans of Leda,
making at last one spastic blizzard in spring
with only enough divine mania to take one
blinding day from her?
The godbirds and their scopophilia
keep her open for view and review, with ever
new speculum and never the elegant jewelry
of stigmata or a heart of quartz.
May I give her only one death? Can we live if she
lies closed in a single final pose, no syphilitic
autopsy or cygnet interrogation?
May I mark her prophecy,
her presence in the very air, with a single
gargoyle on the streetside wall on a place
of worship, finally allowed inside if only by
disappearing into the stones?
Leda possessed a pair of knees that also bent
in prayer. I ask of you only what she asked for there."
Brenda Shaughnessy
Experience illustrates theory, it never proves it.
"Much of Fermat's best work was done while one of the most savage wars in history raged all about him. Yet he never alludes to it in his correspondence." --Eric Temple Bell
"An orchestra is a herd animal. They sense weakness like a pack." --Kate Tamarkin
The things i should be proud of, i don't even remember.
The cat finds happiness in repose, the dog in excitement; but i am like the rabbit, driven from frenzy to lassitude & back again, never long in either.
Boredom for them is a bulwark, a touchstone.
I fight the Vampyre with blood transfusions.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
a cento from Dobson
We grate our scrannel Musick, and we dote:
Jest of cloister humourist.
Verse is a drug not sold in any mart
With sore desire some dolorous place to win;
A small gray spot--the record of a tear.
04 18 04
What i want to see is a makeover reality show that takes people who are ignorant about the world, & educates them.
(You could start with the Chief Executive!)
Blogs as an example of braidtext. There are kinds of material, each a color in the weave: in mine, they are quotes, journals, contemporary musings, politics, & links. Recurrent subjects furnish continuity. Whole books could be written on this model ('Follow the brush').
Do cats have egos? Is ego a function of being a carnivore?
"The job now is to get back to that other perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all competently wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having." --Wendell Berry in: The Poet's Work ed Reginald Gibbons (1979)
"As above, so below": fractals.
'Poetry is the plow that turns up time so that the deep layers of time, the black soil, appear on top.'
--Mandelshtam, ibid
'But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again.' --George Seferis, ibid
Time is the enemy we receive succor from.
We grate our scrannel Musick, and we dote:
Jest of cloister humourist.
Verse is a drug not sold in any mart
With sore desire some dolorous place to win;
A small gray spot--the record of a tear.
04 18 04
What i want to see is a makeover reality show that takes people who are ignorant about the world, & educates them.
(You could start with the Chief Executive!)
Blogs as an example of braidtext. There are kinds of material, each a color in the weave: in mine, they are quotes, journals, contemporary musings, politics, & links. Recurrent subjects furnish continuity. Whole books could be written on this model ('Follow the brush').
Do cats have egos? Is ego a function of being a carnivore?
"The job now is to get back to that other perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all competently wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having." --Wendell Berry in: The Poet's Work ed Reginald Gibbons (1979)
"As above, so below": fractals.
'Poetry is the plow that turns up time so that the deep layers of time, the black soil, appear on top.'
--Mandelshtam, ibid
'But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again.' --George Seferis, ibid
Time is the enemy we receive succor from.
Monday, April 26, 2004
We have two stores, & i was giving someone directions over the phone as to how to find a book i knew was on the shelf: I could just visualize it—but the person i was directing couldn’t find it. The next time i was over there, i looked for it & found it. It was just where i’d said, but in a different corner. My brain had stored certain features of the location automatically, & yet not all of the surrounding relationships correctly. And suddenly i realized this was how humans have Metaphor. As soon as you start storing memories by salient features, they are going to start coinciding; & sometimes in ways that can be seen as meaningful. This also connects to a mystery that long has had me wondering: the way Latin words translate into so many different English words. They had, so to speak, a net of looser weave; or, they called a lot of things by the same name we would have distinguished. Or, you could look at the Romans as having a poetic cast of mind even in everyday life. (Learning to express yourself in an artificial language with a limited vocabulary requires a similar effort.)
Bloggin the Stans. (via Rubber Hose)
I didn't know they made a movie of Melville's Pierre! (via Third Factory) [Pierre, of course, is where the good Herman invents Postmodernism three generations before Modernism even existed--no wonder his critics were baffled--which puts me in mind of the other day, when we received all of Bob Hope's "Road" movies on VHS, & i announced to several equally bewildered bystanders the insight that Hope had been toiling in Camp Country before the thing even had a name. --But that's another story.]
I didn't know they made a movie of Melville's Pierre! (via Third Factory) [Pierre, of course, is where the good Herman invents Postmodernism three generations before Modernism even existed--no wonder his critics were baffled--which puts me in mind of the other day, when we received all of Bob Hope's "Road" movies on VHS, & i announced to several equally bewildered bystanders the insight that Hope had been toiling in Camp Country before the thing even had a name. --But that's another story.]
Whoa.
New Patti Smith website. (via Poetry Hut)
"We are feeding our young people into a machine designed to do nothing more than supply energy to the delusions of our government. It was a long time ago, but I remember Vietnam. ...There is an inevitability here that Sophocles would savor--his problem as a writer, though, would be to find a single character with the dignity--which is to say, self knowledge--to qualify as a tragic figure. Our current administration & its war would probably amount to nothing more than a satyr play..." --Reading and Writing
New Patti Smith website. (via Poetry Hut)
"We are feeding our young people into a machine designed to do nothing more than supply energy to the delusions of our government. It was a long time ago, but I remember Vietnam. ...There is an inevitability here that Sophocles would savor--his problem as a writer, though, would be to find a single character with the dignity--which is to say, self knowledge--to qualify as a tragic figure. Our current administration & its war would probably amount to nothing more than a satyr play..." --Reading and Writing
A reader responds (to this):
"It's yours till you volunteer it for a tribe or you die and a tribe
claims it for their own, I think. Individual pieces of writing have shifted
tribes over time, much as other artifacts have: drug laws were once feminist
and then not.
(Obviously I disagree with Silliman that an intimate knowledge of the
writer's tribal allegiances at the time of writing is necessary when a
reader encounters writing. It may or may not add amusement value, that
much I'll agree with.)"
Ray
"It's yours till you volunteer it for a tribe or you die and a tribe
claims it for their own, I think. Individual pieces of writing have shifted
tribes over time, much as other artifacts have: drug laws were once feminist
and then not.
(Obviously I disagree with Silliman that an intimate knowledge of the
writer's tribal allegiances at the time of writing is necessary when a
reader encounters writing. It may or may not add amusement value, that
much I'll agree with.)"
Ray
Only a Million.
"For the coming national anthem, may I suggest Chalabi, Allawi, Hakeem and Talbani in a gaudy, Iraqi version of "Lady Marmalade"?" --Baghdad Burning
"For the coming national anthem, may I suggest Chalabi, Allawi, Hakeem and Talbani in a gaudy, Iraqi version of "Lady Marmalade"?" --Baghdad Burning
Nine Skathons of Sxwaixwe
#107
Sxwaixwe, they say, came from the union
of a garden slug
& a raven... Few have ever seen
his chartreuse scales, his
esplumoir; many have heard his laughter.
#108
Sxwaixwe laughs like a baby crying.
Sxwaixwe wears a tall
black silk hat, & lives beneath the Sound.
He has clairvoyance;
his cranium's tetrahedron-shaped.
#109
There is a book belongs to Sxwaixwe.
In it, he records
ev'rything that happens: past, present,
& future, but not
in any particular order.
#110
I saw Sxwaixwe once, walking backwards
in Pike Place Market
with his hat & his multicolor
coat. I watched him stop
& buy a vista of Mt Hekla.
#111
Sxwaixwe appears sometimes in your dreams
but only in part:
headless torso; wings & hat alone...
He is an omen
of erratic luck & weird events.
#112
Sxwaixwe gives oracles in Scrabble
takings you have to
anagrammatize yourself into
sense; visions seen
in oily puddles; shrieks of seagulls...
#113
Without Sxwaixwe we would have no fog,
espresso, leather
jackets, or yellow trees in autumn.
(Especially sacred
to Sxwaixwe is Caffe MedicÃ...)
#114
Squid-headed Cthulhu, Sxwaixwe, & the
Jesus of twoway
cards & Mexican gilt-framed icons
are siblings, slug-born,
but engendered by diff'rent Fathers.
#115
Sxwaixwe gave me this Form, to notate
my ruminations,
weave coincidences, & invoke
the spirits of this
gray-green crowded water-ruled abode.
01 10 92
[These were part of my attempt to contact a Coast Salish deity, one that resided at the bottom of Puget Sound, for my own purposes.]
#107
Sxwaixwe, they say, came from the union
of a garden slug
& a raven... Few have ever seen
his chartreuse scales, his
esplumoir; many have heard his laughter.
#108
Sxwaixwe laughs like a baby crying.
Sxwaixwe wears a tall
black silk hat, & lives beneath the Sound.
He has clairvoyance;
his cranium's tetrahedron-shaped.
#109
There is a book belongs to Sxwaixwe.
In it, he records
ev'rything that happens: past, present,
& future, but not
in any particular order.
#110
I saw Sxwaixwe once, walking backwards
in Pike Place Market
with his hat & his multicolor
coat. I watched him stop
& buy a vista of Mt Hekla.
#111
Sxwaixwe appears sometimes in your dreams
but only in part:
headless torso; wings & hat alone...
He is an omen
of erratic luck & weird events.
#112
Sxwaixwe gives oracles in Scrabble
takings you have to
anagrammatize yourself into
sense; visions seen
in oily puddles; shrieks of seagulls...
#113
Without Sxwaixwe we would have no fog,
espresso, leather
jackets, or yellow trees in autumn.
(Especially sacred
to Sxwaixwe is Caffe MedicÃ...)
#114
Squid-headed Cthulhu, Sxwaixwe, & the
Jesus of twoway
cards & Mexican gilt-framed icons
are siblings, slug-born,
but engendered by diff'rent Fathers.
#115
Sxwaixwe gave me this Form, to notate
my ruminations,
weave coincidences, & invoke
the spirits of this
gray-green crowded water-ruled abode.
01 10 92
[These were part of my attempt to contact a Coast Salish deity, one that resided at the bottom of Puget Sound, for my own purposes.]
Saturday, April 24, 2004
"Poetry which relates to the beings of another world ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque."
--Macaulay, Essay on Milton
"Salve salvage in the spin.
Endorse the splendor splashes;
Stylize the flawed utility;
prop a malign or failing light--
but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth."
--Gwendolyn Brooks, from "The Second Sermon on the Warpland", op cit
"America
If an eagle be imprisoned
on the back of a coin,
and the coin be tossed
into the sky,
the coin will spin,
the coin will flutter,
but the eagle will never fly."
--Henry Dumas, ibid
A palindromic tanka cited in Alpha to Omega, Humez & Humez:
"na ka ki yo no
to o no ne bu ri no
mi na me za me
na mi no ri bu ne no
o to no yo ki ka na." ('The sleeping figure's eyes open in the middle of a winter's night--can it be in anticipation of the sound of the wave-borne boat?')
"...it was once proposed that Groucho play the role of Dr O'Connor in a filmed Nightwood..." --Anthony Burgess
--Macaulay, Essay on Milton
"Salve salvage in the spin.
Endorse the splendor splashes;
Stylize the flawed utility;
prop a malign or failing light--
but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth."
--Gwendolyn Brooks, from "The Second Sermon on the Warpland", op cit
"America
If an eagle be imprisoned
on the back of a coin,
and the coin be tossed
into the sky,
the coin will spin,
the coin will flutter,
but the eagle will never fly."
--Henry Dumas, ibid
A palindromic tanka cited in Alpha to Omega, Humez & Humez:
"na ka ki yo no
to o no ne bu ri no
mi na me za me
na mi no ri bu ne no
o to no yo ki ka na." ('The sleeping figure's eyes open in the middle of a winter's night--can it be in anticipation of the sound of the wave-borne boat?')
"...it was once proposed that Groucho play the role of Dr O'Connor in a filmed Nightwood..." --Anthony Burgess
Friday, April 23, 2004
Ambergris--the Untold Story. (via Kathryn Cramer)
Ted's Head.
The eccentric blog of Toadex Hobogrammathon. (He also has a novel at Ubu Editions.)
Another Look at Pale Fire.
Ted's Head.
The eccentric blog of Toadex Hobogrammathon. (He also has a novel at Ubu Editions.)
Another Look at Pale Fire.
To expand upon my yesterday's comment ("Features, Not Tribes."), which i see now was part of a crossbloggal discussion of this, i see the present situation as one in which poets choose (for temperamental or personal-history reasons) from among several presented "dialects" of poetry (& not excluding many of the poetries of the past, or from other cultures); our eclecticism has the cross-dimension of being more pure or more mixed, but all the same it does very little to originate. And of course we choose our tribes, also, & analogously: & one of the reasons we use a certain dialect is that we think we have something in common to discuss with others who use it (see my essay on Blixen).
But tribal divisions only map onto dialects insofar as poetic centers enforce (or fail to enforce) the dialects that correspond to their perceived canon. And one cannot talk about blixen, to return to this designation for 'dispersed groups', without recognizing that hardly anyone belongs to just one blik, nor does a large percentage exactly correspond to each other--although correlations can certainly be found.
Further complicating this is the small fact that our animosities mostly map onto mythical entities. (The "avant garde" is only one such.)
But if we start talking about features, how much less danger is there of falling into name-calling or reifying! For instance, here is one feature: linebreaks/ no linebreaks (="prose poetry"). That doesn't imply anything about the poet's subject matter, sexual political religious orientation, or place of origin... Other features i find interesting: wide parataxis/ limited parataxis; monolingual/polylingual; human-generated/computer-generated; persona/non-persona...
Just the other day i invented a new form. I take a number of rhime-equivalent pairs (words whose A=1, B=2...Z=26 sums are the same number); & use them as endwords in any order. Additionally, the poems i wrote in this form counted syllables--most of them were in "snowflakes", where i use lines of 3, 5, 7, 9, & 11 in any order (then repeat). --I haven't named it yet.
Syntax was fairly straightforward, with slight disjunctions between lines and/or stanzas; a few of the referents were esoteric, but most of the poems was intelligible, if a bit vague. I think of the basic dialect as post-Symbolist, with a smattering of Langpo. These poems, as with most of my other output, were not "addressed" as such; they refrain from the tribal. And while rhime is a procedure i have used before, i have only used it in couplets before now.
Is this "experimental"? Is it "avant garde"? Is it "Quietudinous"? Is it "Confessional"? Is it "NeoFormalist"?
Is it "Flarf"? Is it "Umbrist"? Is it "Xenon Mercurist"?
But tribal divisions only map onto dialects insofar as poetic centers enforce (or fail to enforce) the dialects that correspond to their perceived canon. And one cannot talk about blixen, to return to this designation for 'dispersed groups', without recognizing that hardly anyone belongs to just one blik, nor does a large percentage exactly correspond to each other--although correlations can certainly be found.
Further complicating this is the small fact that our animosities mostly map onto mythical entities. (The "avant garde" is only one such.)
But if we start talking about features, how much less danger is there of falling into name-calling or reifying! For instance, here is one feature: linebreaks/ no linebreaks (="prose poetry"). That doesn't imply anything about the poet's subject matter, sexual political religious orientation, or place of origin... Other features i find interesting: wide parataxis/ limited parataxis; monolingual/polylingual; human-generated/computer-generated; persona/non-persona...
Just the other day i invented a new form. I take a number of rhime-equivalent pairs (words whose A=1, B=2...Z=26 sums are the same number); & use them as endwords in any order. Additionally, the poems i wrote in this form counted syllables--most of them were in "snowflakes", where i use lines of 3, 5, 7, 9, & 11 in any order (then repeat). --I haven't named it yet.
Syntax was fairly straightforward, with slight disjunctions between lines and/or stanzas; a few of the referents were esoteric, but most of the poems was intelligible, if a bit vague. I think of the basic dialect as post-Symbolist, with a smattering of Langpo. These poems, as with most of my other output, were not "addressed" as such; they refrain from the tribal. And while rhime is a procedure i have used before, i have only used it in couplets before now.
Is this "experimental"? Is it "avant garde"? Is it "Quietudinous"? Is it "Confessional"? Is it "NeoFormalist"?
Is it "Flarf"? Is it "Umbrist"? Is it "Xenon Mercurist"?
"I Have Folded My Sorrows
I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gay unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.
Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.
Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.
The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity."
--Bob Kaufman, op cit
'Subversion is perhaps only a rotation of crops.' --Jabès
"War that shatters her slain,
And peace that grinds them as grain,
And eyes fixed ever in vain
On the pitiless eyes of fate." --Rossetti
"Their only labor was to kill the time;
And labor dire it is, and weary woe..." --Thomson
"...for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls." --R L Stevenson
I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gay unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.
Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.
Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.
The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity."
--Bob Kaufman, op cit
'Subversion is perhaps only a rotation of crops.' --Jabès
"War that shatters her slain,
And peace that grinds them as grain,
And eyes fixed ever in vain
On the pitiless eyes of fate." --Rossetti
"Their only labor was to kill the time;
And labor dire it is, and weary woe..." --Thomson
"...for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls." --R L Stevenson
Thursday, April 22, 2004
"...I was Lee Marvin watching a grain combine
eat a Cadillac in an open field..." --Michael Atkinson
Lazuri. More.
Features, Not Tribes.
eat a Cadillac in an open field..." --Michael Atkinson
Lazuri. More.
Features, Not Tribes.
Momus hears a Tatar pop song, & decides to make an album called "Songs from Imaginary Central Asian Republics".
I had a great thought as i looked at the Seattle Art Museum's African collection: NARRATIVE IS A MASK. Narrative is to what happens, as a mask is to the face. The mask dances; the mask in repose. It is story because we live in time & all that we perceive we perceive in time. Description becomes animated as much as characters are. Symbols are only: inanimate characters. And the Africans knew this...
"A Black Man Talks of Reaping
I have sown beside all waters in my day,
I planted deep, within my heart the fear
That wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.
I scattered seed enough to plant the land
In rows from Canada to Mexico
But for my reaping only what the hand
Can hold at once is all that I can show.
Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields
My brother's sons are gathering stalk and root,
Small wonder then my children glean in fields
They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit."
--Arna Bontemps, op cit
'God is saved by the void.' --Jabès
"Values are vowels." --Ron Silliman, "The Chinese Notebooks"
"We anew view swart waves' flowing wilderness..." --C M Doughty, Mansoul
"A Black Man Talks of Reaping
I have sown beside all waters in my day,
I planted deep, within my heart the fear
That wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.
I scattered seed enough to plant the land
In rows from Canada to Mexico
But for my reaping only what the hand
Can hold at once is all that I can show.
Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields
My brother's sons are gathering stalk and root,
Small wonder then my children glean in fields
They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit."
--Arna Bontemps, op cit
'God is saved by the void.' --Jabès
"Values are vowels." --Ron Silliman, "The Chinese Notebooks"
"We anew view swart waves' flowing wilderness..." --C M Doughty, Mansoul
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
I've forgotten how to be an artist without publicity.
Paraplegic afternoon, with the dogs standing around as puzzled as i.
"Mortality
This is the surest death
Of all the deaths I know.
The one that halts the breath,
The one that falls with snow
And nothing but a peace
Before the second zone,
For Aprils never cease
To resurrect their own,
And in my very veins
Flows blood as old as Eve.
The smallest cell contains
Its privileged reprieve,
But vultures recognize
This single mortal thing
And watch with hungry eyes
When hope starts staggering."
--Naomi Long Madgett, in The Poetry of Black America ed Arnold Adoff (1973)
'The honor bestowed upon the icon is bestowed upon the prototype.' --Basil the Patriarch
'The I is not the stake, but the game.' --Jabès
'Distant Howling
In Alsace,
on 6th July 1885,
a rabid dog knocked down
the nine-year-old Joseph Meister
and bit him fourteen times.
Meister was the first patient
saved by Pasteur
with his vaccine, in thirteen
progressive doses
of the attenuated virus.
Pasteur died of ictus
ten years later.
The janitor Meister
fifty-five years later
committed suicide
when the Germans occupied
his Pasteur Institute
with all those poor dogs.
Only the virus
remained above it all.'
--Miroslav Holub (tr Ewald Osers) in: Poetry With an Edge (ed Neil Astley 1988)
Paraplegic afternoon, with the dogs standing around as puzzled as i.
"Mortality
This is the surest death
Of all the deaths I know.
The one that halts the breath,
The one that falls with snow
And nothing but a peace
Before the second zone,
For Aprils never cease
To resurrect their own,
And in my very veins
Flows blood as old as Eve.
The smallest cell contains
Its privileged reprieve,
But vultures recognize
This single mortal thing
And watch with hungry eyes
When hope starts staggering."
--Naomi Long Madgett, in The Poetry of Black America ed Arnold Adoff (1973)
'The honor bestowed upon the icon is bestowed upon the prototype.' --Basil the Patriarch
'The I is not the stake, but the game.' --Jabès
'Distant Howling
In Alsace,
on 6th July 1885,
a rabid dog knocked down
the nine-year-old Joseph Meister
and bit him fourteen times.
Meister was the first patient
saved by Pasteur
with his vaccine, in thirteen
progressive doses
of the attenuated virus.
Pasteur died of ictus
ten years later.
The janitor Meister
fifty-five years later
committed suicide
when the Germans occupied
his Pasteur Institute
with all those poor dogs.
Only the virus
remained above it all.'
--Miroslav Holub (tr Ewald Osers) in: Poetry With an Edge (ed Neil Astley 1988)
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
"Lament for the Chapbook-Makers"
1.
The world of zines,
hobbyist prophets.
Not an underground
but an attic. We bank
on future collectibility,
though the paper blizzard
shows no sign of tapering off.
Declasse distress
& sleight of hand
meet on the xox'd pages
a Babel of aesthetics,
reflecting the war
only in its equal disorder.
But we're forced to do it.
Prestige beyond numbers
still, in the big leagues
of the publishers' minor markets.
More reviews than books are read.
Believers in the great Victorian novel public,
or in the Beat Thing,
teachers or would-be freelancers,
a lot of misfits
with no other axe to grind...
despised amateurs
with cosmic visions.
No center for this cult
than the discovery of the cult itself.
A poet with a vocation
is a menace to others.
History consoles,
especially the biographies
of latterly deified saints.
Much more than looking at each other,
much more than truth-telling.
O this balloon i keep almost letting go of!
Crutch of my life & its blighting.
Ethical enigmas give way to verbal
& i still don't, like Akhmatova,
find it helps one bit.
How beauty of the fleeting moment
produces this compulsion
is not a genre.
There are so few drugs that work.
The city, an addict.
Some with eyes on the red sky.
So i labor at this renegade accumulation
mindful of present dangers
like a figurehead carver
on a ship in a storm.
My version of tradition
not hawked in the thoroughfares
but whispered at midnight.
This is a public poem.
2.
If the bridge i am building collapses
there may be reasons,
there may not.
If the bridge i am building begins
to look like a web full of caught bugs,
it may still be a bridge
but a bridge to a diff'rent place.
3.
The watchers,
a tribe of aliens
with a tribe's beliefs.
But many fewer.
And other tribes the powerful.
That rankling, though a lesser
stigma than some. Invisibles.
This is the true love.
Sometimes it bursts through
the bounds of the rituals.
Lives can be transformed
if you're young enough.
Love in the margins
of our machine lives.
In spite of parasitic
infestation.
I'm amazed it's at all
but seldom grateful.
4.
Masterpieces in obscure media
as a protest obscurer still,
he conceived the chief aim
of his leisure moments.
But the beauty of the project
soon palled,
so much work it takes!
(to say Damn the Competition);
might as well go on strike.
5.
Too amateur a venue
for one so published,
this billboard i deface.
I resort to leatherbound editions.
Rumors of intimacy
rebound from the hard walls
void of bookshelves
or, indeed, posters.
And hist'ry, that debunked debunker,
comes to the rescue
in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.
02 13 92
'I believe that if the geometrician were to be conscious of this hopeless and desperate striving of the hyperbola to unite with its asymptotes, he would represent the hyperbola to us as a living being and a tragic one!'
--Unamuno
Everything after the Gulf War seems both empty & sinister.
"Animo qui aegrobat videmus corpore hunc signum dare;
tum doloribus confectum corpus animo obsistere." --Lucilius ('A sickness of mind, we see, makes its mark on flesh; racked with pains, that flesh then ravages the mind.' tr Janet Lembke in: Bronze and Iron (1973))
1.
The world of zines,
hobbyist prophets.
Not an underground
but an attic. We bank
on future collectibility,
though the paper blizzard
shows no sign of tapering off.
Declasse distress
& sleight of hand
meet on the xox'd pages
a Babel of aesthetics,
reflecting the war
only in its equal disorder.
But we're forced to do it.
Prestige beyond numbers
still, in the big leagues
of the publishers' minor markets.
More reviews than books are read.
Believers in the great Victorian novel public,
or in the Beat Thing,
teachers or would-be freelancers,
a lot of misfits
with no other axe to grind...
despised amateurs
with cosmic visions.
No center for this cult
than the discovery of the cult itself.
A poet with a vocation
is a menace to others.
History consoles,
especially the biographies
of latterly deified saints.
Much more than looking at each other,
much more than truth-telling.
O this balloon i keep almost letting go of!
Crutch of my life & its blighting.
Ethical enigmas give way to verbal
& i still don't, like Akhmatova,
find it helps one bit.
How beauty of the fleeting moment
produces this compulsion
is not a genre.
There are so few drugs that work.
The city, an addict.
Some with eyes on the red sky.
So i labor at this renegade accumulation
mindful of present dangers
like a figurehead carver
on a ship in a storm.
My version of tradition
not hawked in the thoroughfares
but whispered at midnight.
This is a public poem.
2.
If the bridge i am building collapses
there may be reasons,
there may not.
If the bridge i am building begins
to look like a web full of caught bugs,
it may still be a bridge
but a bridge to a diff'rent place.
3.
The watchers,
a tribe of aliens
with a tribe's beliefs.
But many fewer.
And other tribes the powerful.
That rankling, though a lesser
stigma than some. Invisibles.
This is the true love.
Sometimes it bursts through
the bounds of the rituals.
Lives can be transformed
if you're young enough.
Love in the margins
of our machine lives.
In spite of parasitic
infestation.
I'm amazed it's at all
but seldom grateful.
4.
Masterpieces in obscure media
as a protest obscurer still,
he conceived the chief aim
of his leisure moments.
But the beauty of the project
soon palled,
so much work it takes!
(to say Damn the Competition);
might as well go on strike.
5.
Too amateur a venue
for one so published,
this billboard i deface.
I resort to leatherbound editions.
Rumors of intimacy
rebound from the hard walls
void of bookshelves
or, indeed, posters.
And hist'ry, that debunked debunker,
comes to the rescue
in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.
02 13 92
'I believe that if the geometrician were to be conscious of this hopeless and desperate striving of the hyperbola to unite with its asymptotes, he would represent the hyperbola to us as a living being and a tragic one!'
--Unamuno
Everything after the Gulf War seems both empty & sinister.
"Animo qui aegrobat videmus corpore hunc signum dare;
tum doloribus confectum corpus animo obsistere." --Lucilius ('A sickness of mind, we see, makes its mark on flesh; racked with pains, that flesh then ravages the mind.' tr Janet Lembke in: Bronze and Iron (1973))
Monday, April 19, 2004
"As their APC's and tanks keep getting blown up, the Americans have to take any face-hardened steel plating available and start welding. ...Now you see these improvised fighting machines all over Iraq. Once painted with that solid olive drab color, they are now patchworks of red, black and green, with random pieces of metal sticking off everywhere, bristling with guns. They look incredibly bizarre. I call it the Mad Max Rolling Sideshow." --Christopher Deliso
"Another thing that generally cheers me up is "banking" my finished works. All my adult life, I've had this non-rational belief that my main function in life was to get as many works into my Final Account as possible. I actually have a physical feeling of contentment when I imagine myself inserting a new finished work into the slot in the building that holds The World's Cultural Works. It's exactly as in Monopoly as one accumulates properties, hotels and money!" --Bob Grumman
(With me, it's more like, as Leonard Cohen once replied to an interviewer who contested his self-description as 'mediocre': "The evidence accumulates.")
(With me, it's more like, as Leonard Cohen once replied to an interviewer who contested his self-description as 'mediocre': "The evidence accumulates.")
"There is no bad or even good Iraqi poet. ALL of them are excellent and superior. This has been the rule since God created the poets and allowed them to produce poetry. Every country had a time in its history when there was no great poet alive. It never happened in Iraq, nor will it happen." --Calling It like It Is
The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging.
The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging.
"We had no way to talk about any of this. We were at the same time terribly intimate and terribly aloof. We could work shoulder to shoulder for days on end, on what we knew for sure were battle lines; we knew the smell and taste of each other's breath and sweat, but we never stopped, we never paused long enough to look each other in the eye.
And we had no vocabulary for these things. No
concepts, really, for what was happening. Another world was breaking through to ours, and we were awash in it. We had in fact invited it and here it was, and mostly we saw it as good. We set blind boundaries, changed them, made impromptu rules, forgot them, quarreled, worked together. While some of us drifted out of reach on hard drugs, or the pure chemistry of denial and need.
But we had no words, not even the thought to look for
words to speak what was happening. OR
before we identified he weather pattern, the storm had
already broken.
You could put it like that." --Diane DiPrima, Recollections of My
Life as a Woman (2001)
And we had no vocabulary for these things. No
concepts, really, for what was happening. Another world was breaking through to ours, and we were awash in it. We had in fact invited it and here it was, and mostly we saw it as good. We set blind boundaries, changed them, made impromptu rules, forgot them, quarreled, worked together. While some of us drifted out of reach on hard drugs, or the pure chemistry of denial and need.
But we had no words, not even the thought to look for
words to speak what was happening. OR
before we identified he weather pattern, the storm had
already broken.
You could put it like that." --Diane DiPrima, Recollections of My
Life as a Woman (2001)
' "What I have received as my inheritance," he said, "is the hope for a book. Poisoned legacy! with each of my works, a little more of this hope fades away." ' --Edmond Jabès, The Book of Shares (1987) tr Rosemarie Waldrop
There is something poetic about the planned but unwritten novel that a written one lacks. I must beware of loving too much this aura.
The discovery of self-modulation, of varying one's style, is the basis for most contemporary art careers. Sometimes it is most baseless; sometimes truly independent of scrutiny. I have almost loved this more than the medium itself. It has lured me from truth when truth was unavailing. I have considered it the mystery of myself. --Though it is not even the central mystery of art.
"Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed president of Haiti, is represented with his attribute, a rooster, and the name of his party written in sequins. He may be finished as president, but he is well on his way to becoming a voodoo spirit figure." --Regina Hackett in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer 2-15-92
"I am the son of the future but she shows me only her mourning veil" --W S Merwin
...the intensity i feel at being rejected is a direct measure of my degree of egotism. [Wherefore it is a good thing to happen once in awhile?]
It was parental supervision that made Americans want to live anonymously. To compensate, they devise lifestyles.
There is something poetic about the planned but unwritten novel that a written one lacks. I must beware of loving too much this aura.
The discovery of self-modulation, of varying one's style, is the basis for most contemporary art careers. Sometimes it is most baseless; sometimes truly independent of scrutiny. I have almost loved this more than the medium itself. It has lured me from truth when truth was unavailing. I have considered it the mystery of myself. --Though it is not even the central mystery of art.
"Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed president of Haiti, is represented with his attribute, a rooster, and the name of his party written in sequins. He may be finished as president, but he is well on his way to becoming a voodoo spirit figure." --Regina Hackett in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer 2-15-92
"I am the son of the future but she shows me only her mourning veil" --W S Merwin
...the intensity i feel at being rejected is a direct measure of my degree of egotism. [Wherefore it is a good thing to happen once in awhile?]
It was parental supervision that made Americans want to live anonymously. To compensate, they devise lifestyles.
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Listening to: Insha-Allah. (My first guess, on seeing the CD cover, was "This looks like the 'Guns 'N' Roses' of Pakistan". Actually, they're a bit better than that.)
A Mystery, Solved.
A Mystery, Solved.
"We want to live in a country even a crazy man can head and not have it be dangerous for us or the world." --Llewellyn H Rockwell, Jr (via Antiwar)
Falluja Roundup. (sigh...)
Perspective. Listening to "Ohio", i said, "One day Nixon will be nothing but a footnote to that song."
Falluja Roundup. (sigh...)
Perspective. Listening to "Ohio", i said, "One day Nixon will be nothing but a footnote to that song."
Opponents of gay marriage betray themselves, not of being unable to make a simple analogy, but of being trapped in the definitions of externals--for they have never been in love.
"an alien pox in the polished dark" --Shaughnessy
He spent many studious years making sure that nothing could be done. When he was satisfied, it was already too late to start a new subject. So he began to broadcast his findings. Against his intentions he became a pundit & a celebrity. Everyone wanted to hear that there was absolutely nothing to be done.
04 12 04
"According to the Will of God"
The warning on his desk unheeded,
Bush went fishing. Plans succeeded
Both to break a tyrant's crown,
And to bring an empire down.
04 13 04
"an alien pox in the polished dark" --Shaughnessy
He spent many studious years making sure that nothing could be done. When he was satisfied, it was already too late to start a new subject. So he began to broadcast his findings. Against his intentions he became a pundit & a celebrity. Everyone wanted to hear that there was absolutely nothing to be done.
04 12 04
"According to the Will of God"
The warning on his desk unheeded,
Bush went fishing. Plans succeeded
Both to break a tyrant's crown,
And to bring an empire down.
04 13 04
Friday, April 16, 2004
A review which segues into an essay on gender/politics which is truly brilliant.
Slow Life.
Two paintings which some knowledge of the painter's life changes utterly.
Slow Life.
Two paintings which some knowledge of the painter's life changes utterly.
I guess we were due for a Minstrel-Show Revival.
Howard Waldrop Blogs! (via Boing Boing)
How To Own The Internet In Your Spare Time. (via Beyond the Beyond)
Howard Waldrop Blogs! (via Boing Boing)
How To Own The Internet In Your Spare Time. (via Beyond the Beyond)
You Are Trapped In That Bright Moment When You Learned Your Doom.
'That there might be too much snow in the notion of fire' --Cesar Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry, tr Clayton Eshleman (1979)
From Edward Bear- The Seven Deadly Needs: To Know, To Be Right, To Get Even, To Look Good, To Judge, To Keep Score, and To Control.
'That there might be too much snow in the notion of fire' --Cesar Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry, tr Clayton Eshleman (1979)
From Edward Bear- The Seven Deadly Needs: To Know, To Be Right, To Get Even, To Look Good, To Judge, To Keep Score, and To Control.
A Snowblogger. (via Metafilter)
"Somebody was clearly trying to get the attention of a simpleton, and failing."
--Tom Tomorrow
Moribundia. (via Mosses from an Old Manse) As globalization homogenizes everything within its reach, people long for vestiges of the authentic--old cafes with bad food.
"Somebody was clearly trying to get the attention of a simpleton, and failing."
--Tom Tomorrow
Moribundia. (via Mosses from an Old Manse) As globalization homogenizes everything within its reach, people long for vestiges of the authentic--old cafes with bad food.
"Execution of a Retarded Man"
The day the clown cried
Was a day of gunfire
Like the day before
And the day before that.
The clown cried seeing
All the hearts of men
All the ruins of those hearts
And the ruins that those hearts made;
He cried to know
What could not be done.
He cried for a day
Then he started to move.
The tears were still wet
On the cheeks of the clown
But at last he was moving,
For the clown had cried.
04 15 04
The day the clown cried
Was a day of gunfire
Like the day before
And the day before that.
The clown cried seeing
All the hearts of men
All the ruins of those hearts
And the ruins that those hearts made;
He cried to know
What could not be done.
He cried for a day
Then he started to move.
The tears were still wet
On the cheeks of the clown
But at last he was moving,
For the clown had cried.
04 15 04
Yesterday, on NPR, a bit about the Kirghiz, & their epic poem (banned under the Soviets) which everyone quotes & many know by heart: their culture & their history... There's a place to be a poet in... [1992]
"...to gain essentially the same powers, the Renaissance mage strove for moral purity (,) but the modern magician embraces the non-rational." --T M Luhrman, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989)
Thought of writing a novel as more like a symphony. Instead of plot, there are themes on which you embroider. This is most apparent when you read several books by one author. The ostensibly different subjects tend to vanish, in recollection. Leaving--motifs.
I am such a creature of words. While prowling around the back room upstairs i came upon a receipt from a Tibetan importer (for B--'s store) & one of the items listed was a "phurba". A magical dagger! It was a real thrill to see the word there, albeit somewhat tarnished by the price (only $22?) he had paid for it.
"I found the software in Assembler, Fortran, and Cobol*, the most ancient of computer languages. Might as well have been classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit." --The Cuckoo's Egg
[*3 of the 5 i know.]
Today, free day at the [Seattle] art museum, i watched an hour long video on Francis Bacon. I was appalled to hear how he uses the unprimed side of the canvas--technically unsound--but it suits his brooding sense of mortality (as does his gambling). I still admire his work tremendously. Almost alone it seems to capture our late twencen reality (rather than its myths about itself): & afterwards, as i stood before the one painting of his they have, i reflected that my own paintings would be no real loss to the world, since one of his contains everything i've tried to say in all of mine. ...it occurred to me that Bacon's point of view (if something so visceral & nonintellectual can be so designated) is Jacobean, without the moralistic tone. Whereas most contemporary painters begin frivolously, from theory & career considerations, or from ego's frolics. Bacon identifies with his subjects so completely that it becomes impersonal...--but not in our usual hackneyed sense of "objectivity"; rather, feeling suffering & decay & degradation as the essence of life itself, or what (i would say) life has become for us, in the absence of myth & creative meaning. And the only transcendence, apart from sex, is the fact of the painting itself... My one criticism of Bacon, then, is that he depicts a world in which his paintings are impossible. Or (as he does show them!) a world without art's power. --a mistake all too common since humanism has lost its moral authority-- But after all, that's the world most people do live in!
...one night here they had on TV some show that was like real life cop stories--straight documentary footage--for the entertainment value of its morbid disorder. I can easily imagine, in front of every TV set, a whole tribe of Bacon grotesques, fixated like lampreys on their own imminent ruin.
"...to gain essentially the same powers, the Renaissance mage strove for moral purity (,) but the modern magician embraces the non-rational." --T M Luhrman, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989)
Thought of writing a novel as more like a symphony. Instead of plot, there are themes on which you embroider. This is most apparent when you read several books by one author. The ostensibly different subjects tend to vanish, in recollection. Leaving--motifs.
I am such a creature of words. While prowling around the back room upstairs i came upon a receipt from a Tibetan importer (for B--'s store) & one of the items listed was a "phurba". A magical dagger! It was a real thrill to see the word there, albeit somewhat tarnished by the price (only $22?) he had paid for it.
"I found the software in Assembler, Fortran, and Cobol*, the most ancient of computer languages. Might as well have been classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit." --The Cuckoo's Egg
[*3 of the 5 i know.]
Today, free day at the [Seattle] art museum, i watched an hour long video on Francis Bacon. I was appalled to hear how he uses the unprimed side of the canvas--technically unsound--but it suits his brooding sense of mortality (as does his gambling). I still admire his work tremendously. Almost alone it seems to capture our late twencen reality (rather than its myths about itself): & afterwards, as i stood before the one painting of his they have, i reflected that my own paintings would be no real loss to the world, since one of his contains everything i've tried to say in all of mine. ...it occurred to me that Bacon's point of view (if something so visceral & nonintellectual can be so designated) is Jacobean, without the moralistic tone. Whereas most contemporary painters begin frivolously, from theory & career considerations, or from ego's frolics. Bacon identifies with his subjects so completely that it becomes impersonal...--but not in our usual hackneyed sense of "objectivity"; rather, feeling suffering & decay & degradation as the essence of life itself, or what (i would say) life has become for us, in the absence of myth & creative meaning. And the only transcendence, apart from sex, is the fact of the painting itself... My one criticism of Bacon, then, is that he depicts a world in which his paintings are impossible. Or (as he does show them!) a world without art's power. --a mistake all too common since humanism has lost its moral authority-- But after all, that's the world most people do live in!
...one night here they had on TV some show that was like real life cop stories--straight documentary footage--for the entertainment value of its morbid disorder. I can easily imagine, in front of every TV set, a whole tribe of Bacon grotesques, fixated like lampreys on their own imminent ruin.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Cher Doll and Her Celebrity Friends. Wow, for a second i thought this was a put-on, like Why Cats Paint... And seventy five years from now, won't they be perplexed as to what we took seriously, & what we didn't?!
Harry Crews--the Band.
Harry Crews--the Band.
Jesus Vs. Satan in a Cage Match.
Listening to: The Starsound Orchestra Plays the Hits Made Famous by Madonna.
150 poetry books were published in April. (via Poetry Hut)
Listening to: The Starsound Orchestra Plays the Hits Made Famous by Madonna.
150 poetry books were published in April. (via Poetry Hut)
"The lights go out, the fan stops and in the sudden quiet someone holds up the flame of a cigarette lighter for the doctor to carry on operating by." --Eyewitness Report from Falluja
"Thinking is like a thin king. There is also a knight." --Lime Tree
Redoubled Flowering. (via Fishblog)
"Thinking is like a thin king. There is also a knight." --Lime Tree
Redoubled Flowering. (via Fishblog)
"It's said that Heinrich Himmler turned white as a sheet upon witnessing the business end of a gas chamber during one of his rare inspection tours of the camps, and had a difficult time eating his lunch afterwards." --Billmon (via Wood_s Lot)
"To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for."
--Alexander Smith
"Latte Infix"
Beggar conjure, reindeer dogtrot door
To radium call
Pummel leave shriek (up) blackened
Day unkind
Easter disperse latte crossfire gray newbie
And rogue bonobo.
Pouncy ceasefire latte bleed practice
For the world of light Pitcairn
Gray Easter
Conjure reindeer Fallujah corpses grope star
Shattered eyes it?; shortened field
Chartreuse sifts down; flying dogtrot beg
Jade bomb hush.
Gray of evil loom
04 11 04
"The novel used to feed our search for meaning... It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel... We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings." --Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991)
--Alexander Smith
"Latte Infix"
Beggar conjure, reindeer dogtrot door
To radium call
Pummel leave shriek (up) blackened
Day unkind
Easter disperse latte crossfire gray newbie
And rogue bonobo.
Pouncy ceasefire latte bleed practice
For the world of light Pitcairn
Gray Easter
Conjure reindeer Fallujah corpses grope star
Shattered eyes it?; shortened field
Chartreuse sifts down; flying dogtrot beg
Jade bomb hush.
Gray of evil loom
04 11 04
"The novel used to feed our search for meaning... It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel... We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings." --Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991)
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
You would not think, from our novels, poems, or music, that we are all of us continually getting sick all the time. But isn't that part of the crisis--health care (even if only the middle class's--alas) meant for something rare, & the need becoming common? And isn't it part of the unemployment crisis (the nonpolitical, non-outsourcing part--), the unwillingness to take on full-time workers with benefits?
"You can't have a revolution without a cosmology."
--Z Budapest
"I don't think I have to break a guitar to get a violent sound out of it." --Neil Young in Guitar Player [a propos of self-destructive artists]
Blind Painting has taken the art world by storm. Having tired of idiots & elephants, copyists & corpse defilers, it seemed both refreshingly authentic & encouragingly critic proof. Nevertheless a school of Blind Painting critics has arisen. Or rather, two schools. One considers only the intentions of the one who paints.The other measures yardage.
04 09 04
"To bones, fat is only fog." --Brenda Shaughnessy
Jupiter, high
Through the late night haze
Powerful still
A pain in my throat
As in past winters
04 12 04
Assembly
Line made for the blind
To handle
What could be so dear
As those dark hours?
04 12 04
"You can't have a revolution without a cosmology."
--Z Budapest
"I don't think I have to break a guitar to get a violent sound out of it." --Neil Young in Guitar Player [a propos of self-destructive artists]
Blind Painting has taken the art world by storm. Having tired of idiots & elephants, copyists & corpse defilers, it seemed both refreshingly authentic & encouragingly critic proof. Nevertheless a school of Blind Painting critics has arisen. Or rather, two schools. One considers only the intentions of the one who paints.The other measures yardage.
04 09 04
"To bones, fat is only fog." --Brenda Shaughnessy
Jupiter, high
Through the late night haze
Powerful still
A pain in my throat
As in past winters
04 12 04
Assembly
Line made for the blind
To handle
What could be so dear
As those dark hours?
04 12 04
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
"Had langpo presented itself as, say, third-generation projectivism, nobody would have complained." --Ron Silliman
"Baghdad is calm and relatively quiet if you don't count the frequent explosions." --Baghdad Burning
"Baghdad is calm and relatively quiet if you don't count the frequent explosions." --Baghdad Burning
"It seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language." --George Steiner, Extraterritorial (1971)
"For Neoplatonism, evil has no metaphysical reality, but Gnosticism engaged evil as the reality of this world, which presumably is why Gnosticism now lives, under a variety of disguises, while Neoplatonism is the province of scholars." --Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism
'There chaunced the like errour to the Greekes, and to the Latines, in the woord Phos, the which signifieth a Man [phi omega sigma], and the Lighte [phi omega-with-a-tilde sigma = phi alpha omicron sigma]: wherupon the Priestes of the Saturnalia in times paste being deceived in the ambiguite of the woorde, offered everie yeere a man to Saturnus, when they mighte aswell have appeased him with burninge of lightes.' --Of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences (1569 translation; reprinted 1974)
"Spelling is defunct..." --Liber AL Vel Legis
"For Neoplatonism, evil has no metaphysical reality, but Gnosticism engaged evil as the reality of this world, which presumably is why Gnosticism now lives, under a variety of disguises, while Neoplatonism is the province of scholars." --Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism
'There chaunced the like errour to the Greekes, and to the Latines, in the woord Phos, the which signifieth a Man [phi omega sigma], and the Lighte [phi omega-with-a-tilde sigma = phi alpha omicron sigma]: wherupon the Priestes of the Saturnalia in times paste being deceived in the ambiguite of the woorde, offered everie yeere a man to Saturnus, when they mighte aswell have appeased him with burninge of lightes.' --Of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences (1569 translation; reprinted 1974)
"Spelling is defunct..." --Liber AL Vel Legis
Monday, April 12, 2004
"Falluja"
filled twelve stars
with my deaths forever left away
laughs darkness through you
wind
underworld together
strangers of shading shine
one dream is and
was again
flowing blindfold
04 05 04
Into the Valley of Death.
filled twelve stars
with my deaths forever left away
laughs darkness through you
wind
underworld together
strangers of shading shine
one dream is and
was again
flowing blindfold
04 05 04
Into the Valley of Death.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Von Trier is a true Gnostic; & he is just as disagreeable as one of them would be if transported to the 21c.
If Norah Jones married Ariel Sharon, that would make her the palindromic "Norah Sharon".
Another point i would like to make is that innovation more often comes from those on the periphery, or of dual identity, rather than at the literary center. Why should the latter innovate? They are served well enough by the status quo.
If Norah Jones married Ariel Sharon, that would make her the palindromic "Norah Sharon".
Another point i would like to make is that innovation more often comes from those on the periphery, or of dual identity, rather than at the literary center. Why should the latter innovate? They are served well enough by the status quo.
"In 1989, the world had 157 billionaires, perhaps 2 million millionaires, and 100 million homeless." --State of the World 1990
"...[Russian] is a tissue of idioms, which has never been systematized, as French or English has been. It is a language produced by illiterate people. ...It was not till the middle of the eighteenth century that a standard usage emerged." --Edmund Wilson, "My Fifty Years with Dictionaries and Grammars", in: The Bit Between My Teeth (1965)
"...the g in the masculine genitive singular () is pronounced as if it were a v ...had been pronounced as g in Bulgarian, but the Russians... never bothered to change the spelling." --ibid
"This language, so rich in vocabulary, was immensely expressive as a literary medium, but it was a language all made up of special locutions, and its wildly irregular inflections would have been hopelessly recalcitrant to any discipline as the European languages had undergone." --ibid
"O rhubarb burning by the sea!" --Mervyn Peake
"One of their [=the Peratae] books was most oddly entitled The Heads of the town up to the aether. It seems to have been, essentially, a description and enumeration of the powers of the lower heavens, which makes us think of the Archontici." --Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics (1960)
[I think it was after reading Jack Spicer in The New American Poetry, & then going on to read more about him, that led me, first, to the Gnostics (by way of Doresse, tracking down where Spicer got the title of one of his books from, as i always liked to do in big libraries--), & later to my emulation of this naming-a-new-book-after-a-lost/fictive-old-one as a standard practice.]
"...[Russian] is a tissue of idioms, which has never been systematized, as French or English has been. It is a language produced by illiterate people. ...It was not till the middle of the eighteenth century that a standard usage emerged." --Edmund Wilson, "My Fifty Years with Dictionaries and Grammars", in: The Bit Between My Teeth (1965)
"...the g in the masculine genitive singular () is pronounced as if it were a v ...had been pronounced as g in Bulgarian, but the Russians... never bothered to change the spelling." --ibid
"This language, so rich in vocabulary, was immensely expressive as a literary medium, but it was a language all made up of special locutions, and its wildly irregular inflections would have been hopelessly recalcitrant to any discipline as the European languages had undergone." --ibid
"O rhubarb burning by the sea!" --Mervyn Peake
"One of their [=the Peratae] books was most oddly entitled The Heads of the town up to the aether. It seems to have been, essentially, a description and enumeration of the powers of the lower heavens, which makes us think of the Archontici." --Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics (1960)
[I think it was after reading Jack Spicer in The New American Poetry, & then going on to read more about him, that led me, first, to the Gnostics (by way of Doresse, tracking down where Spicer got the title of one of his books from, as i always liked to do in big libraries--), & later to my emulation of this naming-a-new-book-after-a-lost/fictive-old-one as a standard practice.]
Friday, April 09, 2004
"Reminds me of something my translator said to me the other day when I was moving to a hotel. "If you get a room on the 7th floor, then you will die last" -- thinking of a car bomb like the one that went off outside the Mount Lebanon. But then he added, "If it's mortar fire, you die first." I love the Iraqi's sense of humor." --Empire Notes (via Domus Carataci)
Poetry and the confessional. Scholars of the elegiac poets of the Classical world are at pains to caution us against reading too much self expression into their lapidary plaints. Later, the "Archpoet" startlingly rants on the flimsiness of a charity coat; Byron hints at incest to keep up his publicity profile; & Poe's enemies impute to him every derangement he ever imagined. Eventually, we find acolytes adopting what they construe as a "Poet Lifestyle" before ever reading a poem by anybody else. From one angle we can see in this the evolution of The Poet as a commodity separable from his or her poetry (& also, BTW, an equal separation of Poetry from poems--). Art having come to acquire the trappings of a secular religion, the demand is created: for saints.
Meanwhile, a counterreaction ensues; & perhaps a legendary poet like Sylvia Plath is only now beginning to be read as a craftsman & not a scary martyr. But among unsophisticates (at every level), just as the ghost of anapestic tetrameter couplets lingers wherever adolescents start to jingle, there is a core belief in the poetic efficacy of painful experience.
Clearly, good writing & having something to say, cannot be completely divided, yet we must warily circle slippery Antlion-Cones of Victimhood & watch out for Bamboo-Mantraps of Witness Authenticity at every step. What else was the Yasusada Affair about, but the forging of a Holy Relic?
If i were to spearhead a proper counterinsurgency against this Babelovian Confusion, i would start with the injunction: LET HISTORY BE HISTORY, LET RELIGION BE RELIGION, LET POETRY BE POETRY. There may well be a point in the development of subcultures where the need for testimony outweighs aesthetics. And i think those subcultures will naturally develop the criticism they need in their own time, without outside interference--especially from condescending "mainstreamers".
And there have always been, & will continue to be, cases where pathology & poetics contrive to be indistinguishable. (It may be that these are the most interesting poets of all, after contemporaneity fades--.)
But this needs to be kept from becoming a general principle of equivalence. Poetry, & its audience, will be better served in the end by craft definitions rather than by extraneous personal ones.
Toward this, i observe that the cult of "authenticity" must be destroyed, by whatever means necessary.
04 09 04
Meanwhile, a counterreaction ensues; & perhaps a legendary poet like Sylvia Plath is only now beginning to be read as a craftsman & not a scary martyr. But among unsophisticates (at every level), just as the ghost of anapestic tetrameter couplets lingers wherever adolescents start to jingle, there is a core belief in the poetic efficacy of painful experience.
Clearly, good writing & having something to say, cannot be completely divided, yet we must warily circle slippery Antlion-Cones of Victimhood & watch out for Bamboo-Mantraps of Witness Authenticity at every step. What else was the Yasusada Affair about, but the forging of a Holy Relic?
If i were to spearhead a proper counterinsurgency against this Babelovian Confusion, i would start with the injunction: LET HISTORY BE HISTORY, LET RELIGION BE RELIGION, LET POETRY BE POETRY. There may well be a point in the development of subcultures where the need for testimony outweighs aesthetics. And i think those subcultures will naturally develop the criticism they need in their own time, without outside interference--especially from condescending "mainstreamers".
And there have always been, & will continue to be, cases where pathology & poetics contrive to be indistinguishable. (It may be that these are the most interesting poets of all, after contemporaneity fades--.)
But this needs to be kept from becoming a general principle of equivalence. Poetry, & its audience, will be better served in the end by craft definitions rather than by extraneous personal ones.
Toward this, i observe that the cult of "authenticity" must be destroyed, by whatever means necessary.
04 09 04
"Ever
Where, swift and wool in going?
Fell always wishing like this.
Tomorrow, want less and hunger bigger.
Fewer terror but stronger, staggered.
Taken heart outside to dry.
Rain surprise and ruined.
Silver cold and stops the swelling.
Why hurts from other body?
Why photo soothes with flat?
Salt soaks blood tender.
Brihten flesh in slap.
With word, not blood silent.
Not leave and take me
nowhere, swift and wool in going."
--Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy (1999)
[This took the roof of my head off...]
Where, swift and wool in going?
Fell always wishing like this.
Tomorrow, want less and hunger bigger.
Fewer terror but stronger, staggered.
Taken heart outside to dry.
Rain surprise and ruined.
Silver cold and stops the swelling.
Why hurts from other body?
Why photo soothes with flat?
Salt soaks blood tender.
Brihten flesh in slap.
With word, not blood silent.
Not leave and take me
nowhere, swift and wool in going."
--Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy (1999)
[This took the roof of my head off...]
Interview with Ljuba Popovic.
"School of Blind Painters"
House to house combat, trading
Small arms fire & hand launched missiles.
A structural absence of light
Bristles.
My vocabulary did
This to me.
Most people are staying indoors
On this delicate morn of Good Friday
Where an accurate body count
Fills the expectant void with
Newsprint boxkites.
Falling headliner
And my holey fedora vie
For the honor of ending this poem.
04 09 04
A Ukrainian poet.
"School of Blind Painters"
House to house combat, trading
Small arms fire & hand launched missiles.
A structural absence of light
Bristles.
My vocabulary did
This to me.
Most people are staying indoors
On this delicate morn of Good Friday
Where an accurate body count
Fills the expectant void with
Newsprint boxkites.
Falling headliner
And my holey fedora vie
For the honor of ending this poem.
04 09 04
A Ukrainian poet.
Sadr calls for calm. (via Juan Cole)
Faces of the Fallen. (via Michael Moore)
A good, but depressing, article on the emerging One Party State. (via Wood_s Lot)
Faces of the Fallen. (via Michael Moore)
A good, but depressing, article on the emerging One Party State. (via Wood_s Lot)
"...the noticeably large divergence between the spoken and the written language...almost to the extent of there being two distinct stages of linguistic development--as that, say, between Middle English and modern English."
--Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (1974) [referring to the end of the 19c.]
"I do not believe it an overstatement to say that writing in Japanese is always something of an act of defiance. ...the culture is primarily visual, not verbal, in orientation, and social decorum provides that reticence, not eloquence, is rewarded." --ibid
"...the suicide rate for Japanese writers is 'three hundred times higher than that for Japanese men as a whole'..."
--ibid (footnote)
2 tankas by Borges: (tr.)
'The sound of a bird
which the twilight is hiding
has fallen silent.
You wander in your garden.
I know that you miss something.'
'Not to have fallen
like others of my lineage,
cut down in battle.
To be in the fruitless night
he who counts the syllables.'
--from Borges: A Reader ed. Monegal & Reid (1981)
[Was there ever so poignant a use of the word "syllables"...?]
'Isaac Luria the Lion taught that the soul of a dead man can enter an unhappy soul to sustain or instruct it; perhaps the soul of Omar lodged in FitzGerald's around 1857.' --"The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald". op cit
Sign in the window of the Revolutionary Bookstore: "Phony Communism is dead/ Long live real communism". (I can't disagree with the sentiment, but that word is ruined forever.)
And i'm supposed to write--what? an epic about Empire's Nemesis--lyrics about being unemployed??
...how little difference it really makes what's in your head, when your lifestyle is the cancer.
"In the estimate of Fortune magazine, not more than one thousand individuals own or control 90 per cent of the world's economic capacity." --The Big Bang Never Happened, Eric J Lerner (1991)
[footnote: i don't see that nonuniform distribution of stars in an infinite universe wouldn't still result in Olber's Paradox...]
'Hypocrisy is quite as inseparable from being a man as sliminess is from being a fish.' --Kierkegaard
--Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (1974) [referring to the end of the 19c.]
"I do not believe it an overstatement to say that writing in Japanese is always something of an act of defiance. ...the culture is primarily visual, not verbal, in orientation, and social decorum provides that reticence, not eloquence, is rewarded." --ibid
"...the suicide rate for Japanese writers is 'three hundred times higher than that for Japanese men as a whole'..."
--ibid (footnote)
2 tankas by Borges: (tr.)
'The sound of a bird
which the twilight is hiding
has fallen silent.
You wander in your garden.
I know that you miss something.'
'Not to have fallen
like others of my lineage,
cut down in battle.
To be in the fruitless night
he who counts the syllables.'
--from Borges: A Reader ed. Monegal & Reid (1981)
[Was there ever so poignant a use of the word "syllables"...?]
'Isaac Luria the Lion taught that the soul of a dead man can enter an unhappy soul to sustain or instruct it; perhaps the soul of Omar lodged in FitzGerald's around 1857.' --"The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald". op cit
Sign in the window of the Revolutionary Bookstore: "Phony Communism is dead/ Long live real communism". (I can't disagree with the sentiment, but that word is ruined forever.)
And i'm supposed to write--what? an epic about Empire's Nemesis--lyrics about being unemployed??
...how little difference it really makes what's in your head, when your lifestyle is the cancer.
"In the estimate of Fortune magazine, not more than one thousand individuals own or control 90 per cent of the world's economic capacity." --The Big Bang Never Happened, Eric J Lerner (1991)
[footnote: i don't see that nonuniform distribution of stars in an infinite universe wouldn't still result in Olber's Paradox...]
'Hypocrisy is quite as inseparable from being a man as sliminess is from being a fish.' --Kierkegaard
Thursday, April 08, 2004
"Dance of the Seven Veils"
Gray in my whiskers
By a low sun; the drive through
Bank, Condoleeza
Takes the stand; heavy fighting
Breaks out all over Iraq.
04 08 04
Gray in my whiskers
By a low sun; the drive through
Bank, Condoleeza
Takes the stand; heavy fighting
Breaks out all over Iraq.
04 08 04
"Perhaps the worldwide public appearance of UFOs and the appearance of LSD, both of which events took place shortly after the first atomic bombs devastated entire cities, are not isolated separate events but, on the contrary, closely linked." --George C Andrews, Extra-Terrestrials Among Us (1986)
'And I entered into that house, and it was hot as fire and cold as ice...' --The Book of Enoch (1) tr R H Charles (cited in the book above)
"Caterpillar"
And nothing has disturbed the stern portico
of the Voynich House... pale cerulean
batrachian sunrise raised from Mexico
with carven hieroglyphs in an alien
space pidgen, eyes scouring the sidewalk
on the way back from food stamps. Azure zero cypher
fingertips on fire, cumulus bulwark
gray (lutefisk) gray or animal sapphire
the thirty-second Perfect Number--found.
And nothing has disturbed the stern portico
of the Anglisc lingvo...: seasons underground
our glimmer train instilleth vertigo.
The troll of the Aurora Bridge beckons.
04 10 92
"With Stupidity and sound Digestion a man may front much." --Carlyle
"Aelian writes of Trizus, the tyrant, that he commanded his subjects not to speak together, and when they used signs, instead of words, he also forbade those; whereupon the afflicted people met in the market-place to at least weep for their misfortunes, but neither was that permitted..." --Jeremy Taylor
"...even in the doctrines heretical there will be superheresies..." --Religio Medici
The difference between alchemy & chemistry is that of a eucharist ritual without & with a psychoactive drug. The drug in scientific ritualism is guessing & confirmation. The ritual came first.
'And I entered into that house, and it was hot as fire and cold as ice...' --The Book of Enoch (1) tr R H Charles (cited in the book above)
"Caterpillar"
And nothing has disturbed the stern portico
of the Voynich House... pale cerulean
batrachian sunrise raised from Mexico
with carven hieroglyphs in an alien
space pidgen, eyes scouring the sidewalk
on the way back from food stamps. Azure zero cypher
fingertips on fire, cumulus bulwark
gray (lutefisk) gray or animal sapphire
the thirty-second Perfect Number--found.
And nothing has disturbed the stern portico
of the Anglisc lingvo...: seasons underground
our glimmer train instilleth vertigo.
The troll of the Aurora Bridge beckons.
04 10 92
"With Stupidity and sound Digestion a man may front much." --Carlyle
"Aelian writes of Trizus, the tyrant, that he commanded his subjects not to speak together, and when they used signs, instead of words, he also forbade those; whereupon the afflicted people met in the market-place to at least weep for their misfortunes, but neither was that permitted..." --Jeremy Taylor
"...even in the doctrines heretical there will be superheresies..." --Religio Medici
The difference between alchemy & chemistry is that of a eucharist ritual without & with a psychoactive drug. The drug in scientific ritualism is guessing & confirmation. The ritual came first.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
"If wars were fought only by the men on the ground, the men facing one another in real battle, most wars would end quickly and sensibly." --Anthony Swofford, Jarhead (2003)
The Myopic Void.
Listening to: Giovanni de Chiaro- Scott Joplin on Guitar.
The Myopic Void.
Listening to: Giovanni de Chiaro- Scott Joplin on Guitar.
"...as I blog this, all the mosques, Sunni and Shi’a alike, are calling for Jihad."
--Baghdad Burning
What the Arab World is Seeing.(via Counterspin)
--Baghdad Burning
What the Arab World is Seeing.(via Counterspin)
"There are more statues of Stalin in Albania than petrol stations." --Edwin Morrisby, op cit
"...each given name in Japan, men's & women's alike, is in theory at least supposed to be a unique coinage made up for the occasion by the parents, rather than being selected (as is customary in the West) from a ready-made repertory..."
--Nihongo
"No eye sees the seas I know." --David Morice in 5/92 Word Ways
"The author is of the opinion that Basque is in fact, New High Cro-Magnon." --Michael Girsdansky, The Adventure of Language
"I was against the U.N. resolution on the use of force in the Persian Gulf. In fact, I debated Charlton Heston on the Donahue show." --Jerry Brown, The Nation interview [1992]
"Sirius is too young to remember." --Basil Bunting
The six men who crossed Antarctica on dogsled spent 2 months under the Ozone Hole. There, exposed skin burns severely within a few minutes... They have seen the future...
"I more & more am coming to believe that the wellsprings of many of our biggest decisions have nothing to do with those storylike contrivances we insist are our reasons; more like avalanches than stimulus-response... After i had been here awhile i realized i didn't know why i left Dallas; that everything i'd believed were causes had vanished like a summer rain which leaves the sidewalks dry an hour later." --letter
'Each person takes his revenge on the world. Mine consists in carrying my grief and anguish deeply embedded within myself, while my laughter entertains all. If I see someone suffer I symoathize with him, console him to the best of my ability, and listen to him quietly when he assures me that I am fortunate. If I can keep this up to the day of my death I shall have had my revenge.' --Kierkegaard's Diary (among the books at Teahouse K-- Y--)
...I exchange maybe ten words a week with V--, otherwise i only talk to telephone zombies. Wondering if the Krishnas on Vancouver Island are filled up, or still there even...Ha! they'd probably send me to an airport to shake down the newly-disoriented arrivals from depression-elsewhere.
'The Desert is Monotheistic.' --Renan
"...each given name in Japan, men's & women's alike, is in theory at least supposed to be a unique coinage made up for the occasion by the parents, rather than being selected (as is customary in the West) from a ready-made repertory..."
--Nihongo
"No eye sees the seas I know." --David Morice in 5/92 Word Ways
"The author is of the opinion that Basque is in fact, New High Cro-Magnon." --Michael Girsdansky, The Adventure of Language
"I was against the U.N. resolution on the use of force in the Persian Gulf. In fact, I debated Charlton Heston on the Donahue show." --Jerry Brown, The Nation interview [1992]
"Sirius is too young to remember." --Basil Bunting
The six men who crossed Antarctica on dogsled spent 2 months under the Ozone Hole. There, exposed skin burns severely within a few minutes... They have seen the future...
"I more & more am coming to believe that the wellsprings of many of our biggest decisions have nothing to do with those storylike contrivances we insist are our reasons; more like avalanches than stimulus-response... After i had been here awhile i realized i didn't know why i left Dallas; that everything i'd believed were causes had vanished like a summer rain which leaves the sidewalks dry an hour later." --letter
'Each person takes his revenge on the world. Mine consists in carrying my grief and anguish deeply embedded within myself, while my laughter entertains all. If I see someone suffer I symoathize with him, console him to the best of my ability, and listen to him quietly when he assures me that I am fortunate. If I can keep this up to the day of my death I shall have had my revenge.' --Kierkegaard's Diary (among the books at Teahouse K-- Y--)
...I exchange maybe ten words a week with V--, otherwise i only talk to telephone zombies. Wondering if the Krishnas on Vancouver Island are filled up, or still there even...Ha! they'd probably send me to an airport to shake down the newly-disoriented arrivals from depression-elsewhere.
'The Desert is Monotheistic.' --Renan
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
'O Lord of the Dark Blue Throat,
I have the very same Six Thou hast.
And yet, estranged from Thee, I suffer misery.
There surely is this difference:
Thou art the master of the Six,
By the Six I have been robbed.'
--Lal Ded, tr Jayalal Kaul
I hear "Twin Peaks" is a big craze in Japan [1992]; they say David Lynch has wabi.
from Linguica 13: "Recent events seem to have somewhat broadened the spectrum of permissable discourse in the American mass media. Now they're willing to admit something's wrong, which is a step in the right direction. It remains to be seen whether even this small awakening can withstand the winds of amnesia (till November is the utmost of my hopes). Meanwhile Empire & Entropy contend in the arena of anomie; & smart money favors the arms merchants."
"Here the coelacanth awaited us in a large trellis-work cage that was hauled up from the depths. I observed its slow and measured movements, its primitive appearance, its sharp hooked teeth. Most of all I was conscious of its eyes. Definitely not your usual opaque fish eyes. These were alert, watching, waiting. The eyes of a predator, the eyes of man's ancestor." --Edwin Morrisby, Unpackaged Tours (1988)
"Without these shadows I would be
In air one wave of ruinous light" --Gwendolyn MacEwen
'I fear continually that the premature night
will hunt me down darkly one noon...' --Waclawiwaniuk (tr)
"Basho and friend are of course moved by the sight of the child who has been left to die from exposure and starvation, but precisely in the way that one would be moved by the sight of an abandoned kitten or puppy; tossing it a bit of food, he and his companion are content to continue on their poetic journey once they have resolved their emotions by assigning the waif its place in the pseudo-Buddhist world-view of late 17c. Japan, and--most important of all--have memorialized the incident with a learned poetic allusion." --Roy Andrew Miller, Nihongo (1986)
I have the very same Six Thou hast.
And yet, estranged from Thee, I suffer misery.
There surely is this difference:
Thou art the master of the Six,
By the Six I have been robbed.'
--Lal Ded, tr Jayalal Kaul
I hear "Twin Peaks" is a big craze in Japan [1992]; they say David Lynch has wabi.
from Linguica 13: "Recent events seem to have somewhat broadened the spectrum of permissable discourse in the American mass media. Now they're willing to admit something's wrong, which is a step in the right direction. It remains to be seen whether even this small awakening can withstand the winds of amnesia (till November is the utmost of my hopes). Meanwhile Empire & Entropy contend in the arena of anomie; & smart money favors the arms merchants."
"Here the coelacanth awaited us in a large trellis-work cage that was hauled up from the depths. I observed its slow and measured movements, its primitive appearance, its sharp hooked teeth. Most of all I was conscious of its eyes. Definitely not your usual opaque fish eyes. These were alert, watching, waiting. The eyes of a predator, the eyes of man's ancestor." --Edwin Morrisby, Unpackaged Tours (1988)
"Without these shadows I would be
In air one wave of ruinous light" --Gwendolyn MacEwen
'I fear continually that the premature night
will hunt me down darkly one noon...' --Waclawiwaniuk (tr)
"Basho and friend are of course moved by the sight of the child who has been left to die from exposure and starvation, but precisely in the way that one would be moved by the sight of an abandoned kitten or puppy; tossing it a bit of food, he and his companion are content to continue on their poetic journey once they have resolved their emotions by assigning the waif its place in the pseudo-Buddhist world-view of late 17c. Japan, and--most important of all--have memorialized the incident with a learned poetic allusion." --Roy Andrew Miller, Nihongo (1986)
Monday, April 05, 2004
The Wallace Stevens Walk.
1st Blogiversary.
Orcinus on Fallujah.
Poems for Madrid is now available for downloading. (My triolet was supposed to be in there somewhere, but it looks like something happened. Anyway, here it is:
those who disagree
must die
to free
those who disagree
from their infirmity
that's why
those who disagree
must die)
"Appalling and incomprehensible mercy--
The seeing see only this world."
--Franz Wright
1st Blogiversary.
Orcinus on Fallujah.
Poems for Madrid is now available for downloading. (My triolet was supposed to be in there somewhere, but it looks like something happened. Anyway, here it is:
those who disagree
must die
to free
those who disagree
from their infirmity
that's why
those who disagree
must die)
"Appalling and incomprehensible mercy--
The seeing see only this world."
--Franz Wright
"...Cromwell's cannons were inscribed 'God is Love'.)" --Eliot Weinberger
'Everybody seemed intent on his daily round and went smilingly about the business of carrying out his instructions. It was essential to smile--if you didn't, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit--if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience.' --Hope Against Hope (tr Max Hayward 1970)
"for Xtmprsqzntwlfb"
Transhumant stars, napalm of forgiveness
this grim & crenulated heart
Odo, Abdurrahman:
behind the mountains there are mountains
Saragossa espresso
gneiss of skraelings
books with broken spines
HD36395
Necropolis mass-transit
here runs on time
collateral damage dead spider decor
Aldus shrugged
my melted face oodoolay
my Voynich coelacanth
05 24 92
"There is a Skagit Indian myth that tells of a common language spoken by humans and animals and nature. It prophesies: 'When we can understand animals, we will know that the change is halfway. When we can talk to the forest, we will know that the change is come.' " --Brenda Peterson, Living by Water (1990)
'Everybody seemed intent on his daily round and went smilingly about the business of carrying out his instructions. It was essential to smile--if you didn't, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit--if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience.' --Hope Against Hope (tr Max Hayward 1970)
"for Xtmprsqzntwlfb"
Transhumant stars, napalm of forgiveness
this grim & crenulated heart
Odo, Abdurrahman:
behind the mountains there are mountains
Saragossa espresso
gneiss of skraelings
books with broken spines
HD36395
Necropolis mass-transit
here runs on time
collateral damage dead spider decor
Aldus shrugged
my melted face oodoolay
my Voynich coelacanth
05 24 92
"There is a Skagit Indian myth that tells of a common language spoken by humans and animals and nature. It prophesies: 'When we can understand animals, we will know that the change is halfway. When we can talk to the forest, we will know that the change is come.' " --Brenda Peterson, Living by Water (1990)