Enckegap.

Reading: Drowning Towers.

Science fiction of the near future that doesn't consider this, is as absurd & unrealistic as that of the Golden Age where other planets always had breathable atmospheres & everyone spoke English.

Dhimmitude. And a critique. Some background.

Momus on Slowness.

A new Lynx.

As ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, my hair growing out figures a history of the 60's.

"But while Rochberg rejected serialism, he did not reject the atonal composition out of which serialism had grown and which characterized its harmonic syntax. Instead, Rochberg began to construct his music out of both tonal and atonal languages. In so doing, he dramatically reinterpreted the notion of stylistic uniformity that had been a hallmark of the Western aesthetic since antiquity. He refused to abandon "past" musical styles, insisting that they continue to live—transformed by his individual artistry but recognizable nonetheless—in his new art. By including these diverse musics, Rochberg believed that he had expanded the emotional range that modern music was able to express. He had found a contemporary language that could both bear the weight of despair and point to transcendence."
--from the Rochberg page

Aldebaran you cipher
so as not to sleep
& you give yourself to that despair or this
myth tentacular, monarchist glass

locusts light
on your hands a funest thing
take day left rim receive bleed to will
sea to indigo

ungainly visitors flood & swarm your sleep
witness steal
terminal moraine where glass
in the haunted burgundy cipher

the last thing
sleepwalker to this
& the tremulous shadows of indigo
vend their own sick astonishing light

so where will you go now destitute of will?

   07 09 04

title for all: "Presence of Mind". i think i will call this form tawang, which
is Pashto for 'basket'.

The End Announced Yet Again of Literacy. I think the people who have time to read are probably reading more than ever before. And the people who aren't interested in reading are still just as uninterested. But the people whose free time is at a premium are feeling the squeeze--& reading
is only one of the many personal pleasures that are becoming scarcer, in times of troubles.

New Mieville.

Paul Riddell has a blog!

Japanese Name Generator. (via Zen Asparagus)

the gyring, pustulent light
invades our hearts' sleep
in Normandies of terrible will
not to be singled out on the plain of glass

indigo
the last thing
to ask in the proffered glass
all shaven each craven at witch sleep

this policy was now an adopted thing
dark die bitter steal
tanks in the street of draped indigo
the driver's face a cipher

soft freezing rain will
follow this
burden or flutter mysteriously light
as the winners steal

07 08 04

Poem by poem t'ward wit-eclipse
A pro-war bard is losing steam.
The Muses have deserted him...
Could be the company he keeps.

   07 07 04

"Reading Spengler is like watching Romanticism train wreck into Modernism."

"The earliest poets were pretty small."

Children at Abu Ghraib.

in the burning glass
there is never any sleep
& the tremulous shadows of indigo
enfold, soundlessly, each broken thing

let free will
in the house of glass
scatter no more hazard light
let the mother of mutterings sleep

who, pursuing the procurator since this
very steal
& beginning to be legible cipher
have not required this

crystal mutiny peace light
binary stroke & fragrant cipher
say what will
be will be say svelte drogulus steal

07 07 04


burning indigo
Titan's sleep
path of crushed snails questioned thing
quadrangular immovable oneway glass

the juicy murder trial thing
still picking out glass
whose ghastly hope spoke of indigo
desert sleep

crystal do them desert woke with the same will
someday soon will steal
slag from light
in the haunted burgundy cipher

spasmodic eyes siphon this
cellcam ban phlogiston sleepwalker cipher
avalanche lungfish fetch this
star you cannot steal

07 07 04

our night of repairs the will
does not change, pellucid indigo
no longer the light
to divide gray thing from barely grayer thing

silken this
regard of nacreous glass
pure cipher
returning as marrows filled not sleep

another redundant door outside where steal
away the blown light
the ashen stars of a final will
sleepwalker to this

utter army indigo
obeisance any flash or flicker cipher
purblind thing
rains before dawn steal

07 06 04

"...the greatest single expanse of unexplored territory remaining in the Solar System today."

A contemporary Russian painter.

I was reading a Blok poem, or sequence of poems, in which some of the endwords repeated across poems; & though it was an unrhymed translation of what was surely a rhymed original, the effect pleased me & i wanted to utilize the form in a sequence of my own. Accordingly, i took the approximate dimensions of Blok’s sequence (five 16-line poems of four stanzas each), &
determined that a “super-sestina” of nine endwords would fill 81 lines (one stray line left over)--in which each 16-line unit would have 7 endwords repeating & 9 not. The first step was to
find or construct a Latin square, i.e. a matrix of nine rows of the digits 1 through 9, in which no row or column repeated a number. I could have easily found one on the internet, but i decided to construct my own. First, i took the sequence 1-9-2-8-3-7-4-6-5 as the base i would use, & after writing out this square:

   1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9
   9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
   8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7
   7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6
   6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5
   5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4
   4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3
   3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2
   2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1

i reordered the rows according to my base (slightly disarranged):

   1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9
   2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1
   9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
   3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2
   8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7
   4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3
   7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6
   5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4
   6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5

& then the columns:

   1-9-2-8-3-7-4-6-5
   2-1-3-9-4-8-5-7-6
   9-8-1-7-2-6-3-5-4
   3-2-4-1-5-9-6-8-7
   8-7-9-6-1-5-2-4-3
   4-3-5-2-6-1-7-9-8
   7-6-8-5-9-4-1-3-2
   5-4-6-3-7-2-8-1-9
   6-5-7-4-8-3-9-2-1

which gives me my final matrix. What words to use? I scanned my Gmatria lists--

56 light, Marx, will, radix, ghoti, zebub, Odinn, Karnak, sigil, this, iron, Latin, Denebola, udjat, Agharta, ether, shit, hobbit, qoph, Isis, daimon, cannibal, lgorab, abort, term, poet,
comet, wolf

57 ions, suq, Lapis, Apsu, Banus, Cipango, vugg, grackle, Gemini, rose, cipher, moon, hylic, callais, aether, Ziv, sleep, wood, steal, lingo

58 science, night, Kakkabu, Cathay, ullage, smegma, emerald, thing, star, fragile, glass, calendar, zodiac, rune, indigo, Marfik, Aldebaran, guano, Schedar, Amerika, arts, upadana,
reading, drive, hazard

& picked out:
       will
      light
      this
      cipher
      steal
      sleep
      glass
      thing
      indigo

which become my endwords 1 through 9. Now all i have to do is write these poems:

will-indigo-light-thing/this-glass-cipher-sleep/steal-light-will-this/indigo-cipher-thing-steal

glass-sleep-indigo-thing/will-glass-light-sleep/this-steal-cipher-this/light-cipher-will-steal

indigo-sleep-thing-glass/thing-glass-indigo-sleep/will-steal-light-cipher/this-cipher-this-steal

light-sleep-will-glass/indigo-thing-glass-sleep/thing-steal-indigo-cipher/will-this-light-steal

cipher-sleep-this-glass/light-thing-will-indigo/sleep-steal-glass-cipher/thing-this-indigo-light

will. I will probably use "snowflakes"...

‘Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected.’ --Mandelstam

For the Fourth, we decided to celebrate that most American value--freedom of speech--by going to see Fahrenheit 9/11. --Afterwards, the audience applauded.



“The decision to read a text as a fiction rather than a historical utterance neatly solves the problem of the Khlebnikov legend by setting it in its proper fictive domain, but the link between the legend and the biography can subvert this critical strategy. Consider, for example, the message Khlebnikov inscribed on a postcard and mailed to his friend Dmitry Petrovsky shortly after being drafted. He wrote, ‘The king is out of luck, the king is under lock and key. Infantry Regiment 93 will be the death of the child in me. Address: Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, Co. 2, 93rd Inf. Reg. (Res.).’ If we choose to read those lines as a poem, we automatically activate a particular set of literary conventions: we mark out a quatrain by virtue of the meter and rhyme, ignore everything from the word ‘Address’ on, and posit a finished lyrical miniature replete with allusions to the imprisoned king of fairy tales and to a variety of literary texts. The poem is rich enough to create the contexts we need, not only to make sense of the poem but to make the poem satisfy us aesthetically. There is no need, in other
words, to identify the lyrical ‘I’ with the historical Khlebnikov outside the text. On the other hand, a nonfictive or ‘historical’ reading is equally plausible. Petrovsky writes in his memoirs
that when he received the postcard he gasped with surprse and ran off to his friends to see what could be done to get Khlebnikov discharged as soon as possible. Clearly he read the poem as nonfictive discourse, taking the poem’s lyrical subject to be a real person with a serious problem on his hands. His was undoubtedly an impoverished reading of the text, but not without merit.” --Paul Schmidt, pref. to Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, v. III (1997)

‘...whoever does not understand the new has no comprehension of the past, and whoever comprehends the past must also understand the new. The whole tragedy arises when, instead of the real past with its deep roots, we get “yesterday.” This “yesterday” is easily understood poetry, a hen-house with a fence, a cosy little corner where domestic fowl cluck and peck about. This is not work done upon the word but rather respite from the word.’ --Mandelstam, in: The Silver Age of Russian Culture, ed Proffer & Proffer (1975)

More machine intelligence from Yahoo (note the sponsored links).

Virtual fireworks. (thanx Melanie!) --Click where you want them.

The air perfumed with onions frying in olive oil.

  new
  habits, the
  glue still wet

07 01 04

‘When substance [zhi] outweighs style [wen], we have a rustic; when style outweighs substance, we have a clerk. Only when style and substance are equally combined do we have the cultivated man.’ --Confucius, cited by McCullough ibid

Not many artworks i know of are like a glass of water or a bottle full of coke. I think this metaphor has passed its expiration date. Let art be like tea. Under distant suns you gather the fragrant leaves; prepare them under very particular conditions; then (after vicissitudes) you bring water & new fire & time to steep. Only then is the artwork (& the metaphor) complete.
   Let us vie opinions on the best climate for growing & the best education for preparing & the merits of various fires & waters. But enough of FORM VS CONTENT!

Is it more appalling that Saddam Hussein should have ordered someone to have their tongue torn out; or that he was able to find others to carry out such commands? If you walk up & down in this world for very long, it still seems deplorable, but less & less surprising. You may seek for years in vain to find allies in planting trees or teaching illiterates to read--the quest for henchmen is a matter of mere steps.
   I used to not hate those whom i called “innocent Republicans”, the ones who never thought about it but simply accepted the immutable fact that this was their home team, & they should root for it. But as it has become an effortless task to find out unwelcome political truths: there is only self-delusion, & willful ignorance. Not innocence, not anymore. They are henchmen, small henchmen it is true--but the faraway crimes of this administration are never small to those whose lives they destroy.

   A small swirl of birds
in the gray dry dawn, music
   at the gas station
pelts down; i leave it mid-phrase
driving Djuna's turquoise car.

07 01 04

"The short Teijin Contest diary devotes two of its twenty-eight lines to the musical compositions presented and four to the costumes of the former Emperor (brown robe and yellow trousers), the men and women of the Left [team] (red cloaks over cherry-blossom robes), the men and women of the Right (green cloaks over willow robes), the poets and scorekeepers of the Left (red robes with trousers of pale brown damask), and the poets and scorekeepers of the Right (green robes with trousers of yellowish-green damask)." --McCullough, op cit

A genius way to market poetry.

" I think we made a disastrous error in the classic strategic sense when in 1991 we concluded that we “had won the Cold War.” No. We simply didn’t lose it as badly as the Soviets did."
--Chalmers Johnson

   "The Pillar of Storge"

snails
recur, like
they know something

06 30 04

Asleep at midnight, up by 4:45. Saddam's ugly mug on the tube. More rain in the offing.

"By and large, if a poet was good enough to gain admittance to Kokinshu, his style was, by definition, basically anonymous. ...The challenge to the sensitive observer posed by such oblique indications of authorship constitute, we may conjecture, one of the pleasures of poetry as game." --Helen McCullough, Brocade by Night (1985)

Dallas with Seattle skies. There was a year in the 80's when it rained all summer. I wonder if this will be like that one. I used to joke, ours was the only climate global warming would improve: 'cause it couldn't get any worse. In fact the savage hot summers that we'd learned to accept (like some remorseless proof of Original Sin or something) have been rather scarce in recent years. We had a real one a couple years back--& people who hadn't been here that long were appalled. They had no idea what they were getting into, obviously. There was a sort of wicked satisfaction in saying, this is what i've had to put up with, all my life. You won't get used to it, but in time you'll feel superior to those who live elsewhere, in halcyon regions
where eighty degrees is a heat wave.
I imagine the same snobdom must prevail in Dante's Nine Circles.

"...sacred words, which, to him, were not the wind, but the infinite circling maze of leaves blown before the wind." --William Sharp

A Sudanese painter. (via Sharp Sand)

The earliness of the hour precludes humor.

pemmicanize Miskatonic Mesklin, tribune
Omaha; pink School of the Americas pearl

Gibraltar smurf Gestapo sepulchral sob fnord

06 29 04 q. mujtass

I see that DaVinci Code-wannabe The Rule of Four is a thriller wrapped around the mysterious Hypnerotomachia; we are almost at the point where books themselves are magical, awe-inspiring objects; & the Past--well, anything could have happened...!
   Without a culture that bears in itself continuity & justification of what came before, one has to construct such continuities as one is able. Beyond that forlorn, heroic effort, there is only the superstitiousness of grown children who have never been given the bare means of deciphering any evidence whatsoever.
   "IS SO!" "IS NOT!"
   How thrilling to live at the end of a phase, & know it.

One of my art reviews gets a rebuttal.

   cool morning
the fake handover
   here believed;
now the squid slithers
Europa dark seas

06 28 04

Listening to: George Rochberg- Music for the Magic Theater (1965)

Rereading- The Drowned World (1962). (And i see that Kim Stanley Robinson has a new book out on global warming...)

'Orioles in the tree, and the length of vowels
Determines the measure of a classical line.
But on one day each year quantity overflows,
Spills from nature's bosom, like Homeric meter.

And like a caesura that day opens with a yawn:
Dawn brings tranquility and almost painful peace;
Oxen in the pasture, and golden indolence
Thwarts me from extracting rich, round notes from my reed.'

--Osip Mandelstam (tr Jane Gary Harris), in: The Silver Age of Russian Culture (1975)



"...a return to the 70's was inevitable." --Word Placements

   "Dialogue of Lenin & Moon"

Here begins the land of phantoms.
Your precious blood,
but they were only dreams.
Shine on the evening waves gray
The master is here!

Dextrous rats.

6 26 04

Some of these i read (i did go to school); one day i'll write my own list--but the time when all educated people have read the same books, is clearly at an end.


Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Anon., - Beowulf
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Listening to: Petula Clark- I Couldn't Live Without Your Love. (Her versions of "Bang Bang", "Homeward Bound", & Elusive Butterfly" are good, but skip "Strangers in the Night"--it's wretched.)

Brown Shirts. (via Metafilter)

"Kamo no Mabuchi (1697-1769), perhaps the finest waka poet of the period, proclaimed 'sincerity' (makoto) to be his poetic ideal, following the Manyoshu; but, because he chose to express his feelings in a language a thousand years old, his poems often seem tepid even when the occasion demands powerful, direct expression." --Donald Keene, World Within Walls (1976)

LOL.



"Should one think “Ron” as in “Jess,” the undersung genius collagist, or “Ron” as in “Dion,” the minor indefatigable rock-moppet?" --Hotel Point

I'm glad i'm not in sports & have someone who doesn't even play the game, say: "He's not as fast as he used to be."
   I'm fast as i used to be--& far more deadly.

Ah, some Clyfford Still online! (via Wood_s lot)

The Sculptor of Crazy Horse.

"Well, the folks at the American Film Institute have done it again. Last night they aired their seventh consecutive annual retrospective of great moments in the history of cinema. The new special was devoted exclusively to songs made popular by movies (including a few that were originally introduced in Broadway musicals, but I digress). Last year, you'll recall, the AFI spotlighted filmdom's greatest heroes and villians. I thank my lucky stars that the powers that determine such things (people in the industry, critics and academics) had the good sense to zero in on 'Over the Rainbow', from 1939's The Wizard of Oz, as the #1 choice. The song¹s appeal, especially in regards to a then 17 year old Judy Garland¹s classic, subtle interpretation, is timeless. Of course, we all know by now that we almost had Shirley Temple as Oz's Dorothy, not Garland, and that 'Over the Rainbow' was barely saved from the cutting room floor, as it was believed to slow down the action of the story. Happily, and I don't want to knock Temple, this is one of those peculiar instances in which everything came together as if by magic. Of course, 'Over the Rainbow' won the Academy Award in 1939, but, in addition to this new AFI tribute, it was also named--in 2001--the greatest song of the 20th century by the Recording Industry Association of America in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts; the music is by Harold Arlen and the lyrics are by E.Y. 'Yip' Harburg. What a privilege for all of us to have this song as part of our collective consciousness.

Following close behind was 'As Time Goes By,' made popular by 1942's Casablanca, although the song actually predates the movie. At #3: 'Singin' in the Rain' as joyously performed by Gene Kelly in the 1952 release of the same name (though, there again, the song dates back to The Hollywood Revue of 1929). Fourth place went to 'Moon River' as heard in Breakfast at Tiffany's. There was little doubt in my mind, which songs would dominate the top of the AFI list, but tyring to predetermine the final outcome was a real mind bender, because each of the top four, and you might as well throw in Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas' (from Holiday Inn) at #5, have had great cultural impact. No doubt, they're all special, but 'Over the Rainbow' is a personal favorite, and always has been, so I'm especially delighted by the outcome.

A recent newspaper article suggested the tunes were selected based on being a song with actual lyrics (which ruled out, among others, the Pink Panther theme, and the haunting tune from Laura [the words by Johnny Mercer were added later, after the film's release]), as well as certain points such as defining a character, advancing the story, and, of course, cultural impact. It's hard not to be impressed by many of the choices, (quite a few Oscar winners) such as 'All that Jazz' (Chicago), 'Seems Like Old Times' (Annie Hall), 'Do Re Mi' (The Sound of Music), 'Buttons and Bows' (The Paleface), ³I¹ve Had the Time of My Life² (Dirty Dancing), ³Come What May² (Moulin Rouge!), ³Put the Blame on Mame² (Gilda), ³I¹m Easy² (Nashville), ³Springtime for Hitler² (The Producers), ³Isn¹t it Romantic² (Love Me Tonight), ³Yankee Doodle Boy² (Yankee Doodle Dandy), ³Summer Nights² (Grease) ³On the Good Ship Lollipop² (Bright Eyes), ³Stayin¹ Alive² (Saturday Night Fever) , ³Jailhouse Rock² (Jailhouse Rock) and even ³Old Time Rock n Roll,² featured prominently in 1983¹s Risky Business, but there were a few muddles. Oh sure, ³Gonna Fly Now, ³ the theme from Rocky, advances the plot , but do the words ³Gonna Fly now² repeated during a bridge in the song really constitue lyrics? That one is iffy to me. I¹m also disappointed that the AFI opted to single out Mary Poppins's ³Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious² (sp? get over it) instead of its Oscar winning ³Chim-Chim-Cheree.² And I¹m sorry, I never had much patience for The Lion King's ³Hakuna Matata,² though I can¹t deny its popularity. Oh, and there had to be something more worthwhile than Marlon Brando warbling ³Luck Be a Lady Tonight² from Guys and Dolls.

Of course, with as many worthy entries are there were, there were bound to be some regrettable omissions, but only a few. I, for instance, would¹ve loved it if George Clooney pantomining the catchy ³I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow² from O Brother, Where Art Thou? (actually sung on the Grammy winning soundtrack by Dan Tyminski) had been included or Lulu purring her way through ³To Sir With Love² (from To Sir With Love). What about Cat Stevens¹s memorable contributions to Harold and Maude, (³If you want to be be me, be me...² and all that), or Tim Curry strutting his considerable stuff in ³Sweet Tranvestite² from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (talk about cultural impact)? Who can believe there wasn¹t any room for the marvellous Betty Hutton and her many catchy musical numbers, including the greatest showbiz anthem of them all, ŒThere¹s No Business Like Show Business² (from Annie Get Your Gun), or Barbra Streisand belting out ³On a Clear Day² (from ³On a Clear Day You Can See Forever). Or what about ³Baby, it¹s Cold Outside² (a 1949 Oscar winner, from Neptune¹s Daughter) My biggest disappointment however, was the omission of any songs from The Music Man, bus most especially ³Trouble,² Robert Preston¹s most defining moment onscreen (and lip-synched--to his own vocal track--to utter perfection). Of course, my own sister was named after ³Tammy² the mega selling hit song from Tammy and the Bachelor, so it would have been lovely for it to have been honored, but alas...

Of course, backing to Straisand, she was well represented, what with ³Evergreen² (her 1976 Oscar winner from the remake of A Star is Born), ³The Way We Were (the Oscar winning title track to her 1973 smash with Robert Redford), as well as ³Don¹t Rain on My Parade² and the sublime ³People² from 1968¹s Funny Girl. Judy Garland was also featured prominently, thanks to not only ³Over the Rainbow² but also ³Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas² & ³The Trolley Song² (both from Meet Me in St. Louis) as well as the torchy, ŒThe Man That Got Away² from the 1954 version of A Star is Born, and the rousing ³Get Happy² from Summer Stock. Liza Minnelli scored with the title tunes from both Cabaret and New York, New York--and good for her (both songs composed by the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb). Bob Hope, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly also popped up more than once. So did Bette Midler and Julie Andrews. The latter¹s The Sound of Music (with songs by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II) was included three times. West Side Story was another movie with multiple mentions, as was Singin¹ in the Rain and a few others. (Of course, limiting each each movie to only spot one the list would¹ve made room for some of the titles mentioned above, but how do you not include both ³Make ŒEm Laugh² and ³Singin¹ in the Rain² or ³The Trolley Song² and ³Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas²?) And of course, Walt Disney¹s animated musicals turned up frequently, with the biggest vote getter being ³When You Wish Upon a Star.² The 1940 Oscar winner, from Pinocchio, placed as high as #7.

Finally, about the telecast itself. A few quibbles. Two songs, ³Puttin¹ on the Ritz² and ³Diamonds Are a Girl¹s Best Friend,² were shown as they appeared in two different movies; Blue Skies and Young Frankenstein for the former, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Moulin Rouge! for the latter. The AFI did not elect, however, for the same treatment in regards to ³Unchained Melody,² which was reintroduced to moviegoers via 1990¹s Ghost (as per The Righteous Brothers¹ 1960¹s cover), but one had to read the fine print to see that the song, a 1955 Oscar nominee, originally appeared in the movie Unchained. Also, why not segue from ³Ol Man River² in the 1930¹s black and white version of Showboat to the 1950¹s technicolor redo? And while it was great to see American Idol¹s Clay Aiken on hand as one of the commentators, it would have been cool if current AI champ Fantasia Barrino had been interviewed in regards to ³Summertime² (from Porgy and Bess), since her performance of that classic song clearly propelled her to the winners¹ circle. FYI to Hugh Jackman, Audrey Hepburn didn¹t sing ³I Could Have Danced All Night² in My Fair Lady. She was dubbed by Marni Nixon, who also dubbed for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Natalie Wood in West Side Story. It was almost a very good night for Nixon, as her most famous trio of dub-jobs were highlighted, though nobody acknowledged her contributions to any of the films in question. And what about Dolly Parton? She was given ample credit for the title tune to 9 to 5, but when it came to ³I Will Always Love You² (from 1992¹s The Bodyguard), Whitney Houston got all the credit, even though Dolly wrote the song years and years earlier and had even sung it herself in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (in which she made contributions to the original Broadway score). What a way to make a living, indeed.

Any comments, questions, other feedback???

Thanks for your consideration,
Mp

PS and, of course, the Beatles singing "Get Back" on the rooftop of the Apple building at the conclusion of Let it Be does nothing to advance the plot, after all, it's a documentary, but, boy, what a pivotal moment in pop-culture history"

"We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation." --Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003)

Nemesis appears in a poem.

Keep track of the real score. (via Tom Tomorrow)

Retro Future. (via Metafilter)

Bride of Chucky Ecards.

Ghazal Page.

I bought a painting for Melanie at a vintage clothing store; it was a delightful cubist-impressionist cityscape, redolent of "Populuxe" living rooms & doctors' offices, & it only cost thirty dollars. After we got it up, i thought to google the artist, one "Viktor Schreckengost". Not only did he turn out to be a well-known industrial designer of midcentury, whose credits include the "Mercury" bicycle, "Americana" dinnerware, & the cab-over arrangement that big flat-front truck cabs all use now--there was an almost identical painting (watercolor like ours, but orange instead of blue & green) on a gallery site for $7000.

"...yer got yer one great invention, remember Holmes? The neuter personal pronoun; ve/ ver/ vis, I am not his, vis/ ve/ ver, nor am I for her, ver/ vis/ ve, a pronoun for me..." --The Bone People

Giovanni Ribisi as Salam Pax.

Listening to: Loretta Lynn- Van Lear Rose.

A society of gamesters, like ours, except that instead of letting everything in their lives be decided by competition, it's decided by chance: a roll of the dice. Would that society be any more unjust than ours?

" 'I can't see that,' nodding back towards the hidden well, 'ever waking now. The whole order of the world would have to change, all of humanity, and I can't see that happening, e pou [affectionate term of respect for an old person], not ever.'
   'Eternity is a long time,' says the kaumatua [elder comfortably. 'Everything changes, even that which supposes itself to be unalterable. All we can do is look after the precious matters which are our heritage, and wait, and hope.' " --Keri Hulme, The Bone People

Once again the natural foods store where i do most of my shopping, has discontinued one of my staple items. This must be the dozenth time. I know that modern hyper-capitalism tends to punish loyal consumers & reward the "fickletons" (those who switch to the new as soon as it appears), but you'd think a place with a semi-sustainable philosophy would be above such considerations. But i see this in a wider context, as a part of the dominance of one kind of perception over another, that (whether or not consciously) competition & economic stress are used to justify favoring. It's like radio stations that only play one kind of music--the "format"--instead of (as in the old days) having DJ's who pick out their own choice of perceived good music. It's class over the separate individual. And under the mercy of a democratic "market", the unpopular is phased out, whether or not it may actually have been better than the more popular ones. And people think there's no point in fighting that iron hand. Imagine, though, that this were a Commons--an ecosystem--in which variety itself is seen as a benefit. We might even put up with a slightly less efficient economy, just to hang on to things we care about for themselves. Yeah, think of that.

Among the Meek so endangered, find poets & poems.

A new constrained-writing webpage. (via Language Hat)

Spin this, motherfucker.

The Final Frontier. (via Doc Searls)

Pray for Reason. (via Neal Pollack) (But don't dispense with your voodoo dolls, either.)

Now that it's starting to appear that the Revolution will be Televized after all--i miss Umbrism.

As in lying shorn on this chained field.

Looks like i'm going to be working for the rival bookstore starting Monday. I told someone it's like, in Cold War imagery, a top Soviet scientist was defecting to the West--or vice versa. But really, i'm just glad i landed something quick before they packed me off to credit-card debtors' prison.

It was like crossing a swaying rope bridge, more frightening than dangerous, that disappeared into fog; & then it turned out not to be so long, after all (i've been unemployed for years at a time). This time, however, i felt like i was being followed (like so many people in the world--& whole nations--) by a whirling toothed machine advancing at an inexorable rate, ready to chew me in shreds should i falter or pause to rest. And i think what the world needs right now, almost more than love, almost more than peace--is debt amnesty. (Students of history will know that such a thing, far from being the physical impossibility we believe, has occurred repeatedly under the pressure of social change & economic catastrophe.)

But of course, that's crazy talk! You can't say that!

Thoughts on a beautiful morning, from the branch library at opening time, not without bitterness.

I like what the Roches' compilation album liner-notes say about their famous a cappella rendition of the chorus from Handel's "Messiah": "Why did the dog lick his balls? Because he could."

"One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush is much too strong." (via Hightower)

   the delicate wake
of two ducks swimming closely
   in the cool morning

olive waterway, pale sky
i on the bridge, hurrying

06 17 04

Online serial SAT-vocab novel. (via Caterina)

"He started picking up debris off the beach, and randomly at first, and then with a steady and abnormal concentration, he had built a spiralling construction of marramgrass and shells and driftchips and seaweed.
'What are you doing?'
He whistled and pointed to it.
It whistles?
He lay down on the sand with his ear by it, and she went to him, puzzled. Simon got up quickly. Listen too, he said, touching his ear and pointing to her. So she did, and heard nothing. Listened very intently, and was suddenly aware that the pulse of her blood and the surge of the surf and the thin rustle of wind round the beaches were combining to make something like music.

She adds, 'They only make music when someone's listening. They're focusing points more than anything...' " --Keri Hulme, The Bone People (1984)
Poems.

The Other Exile-Myth. An interpretation of the Sixties: All Hell Broke Loose. And things have never been the same since. Which is not untrue. But so have the people who came after, grown into changed beings. Only, so to speak, the dismay of the elders who were there in the Sixties still hangs in the air, & can be channelled by others who really weren't there when the status was quo. And they apply it to the far different wrongs of today.

By a curious & significant rhetorical inversion, those who disagree with them are accused of being deceived by a Spook from the Sixties. Young Republicans fancy themselves as hardnosed realists. (Not barbarians.) But this myth lends seeming legitimacy to all manner of vandalism against infrastructure: it's supposed to be putting things back where they were.

Seasons reversed down under. Do they call summer summer by the weather, or by the calendar? It's June, it's winter, & the connotations match, seem normal. Well, there are left & right political hemispheres of speaking; only, they seldom acknowledge that together their languages comprise a totality (even if only a totality of misunderstandings). This is not the part about right & wrong: this is the part about not being able to even talk to each other. Which actually is more important than stopping the wrong. Because it's the root of the wrong. The words we define differently, the aspects we choose to highlight or leave out. I know very well that the preponderance of right lies with the left, but it is wrong not to ever attempt to reach out. We are not going to be able to have the luxury of an utter rout, even after winning in November. You can't put the other half of the country in jail.

Most poetry chapbooks are like one course of tapas. At
the time you think, "This is really sort of
interesting," but afterwards you wish you'd gotten
more for your money.

Once again my email service has been "upgraded", shutting me & my antiquated browser out of my own mailbox. I have a new address which should be included on the link on this page, & i will be using it exclusively from now on... We are nomads, even in Cyberspace.

Under God. (thanx Melanie!) --Let me clarify. The part that is Stoic ethics, is good & worthy of being promulgated. The part that is Buddhist charity, ought to be pondered more by people who profess themselves to be "followers of Jesus". The part that is syncretic razzmatazz, has entertainment value but not much more. And the part that is totalitarian bullying--should not continue for one hour more.

An object of veneration appears surcharged with meaning. An object of contempt appears devoid of it.
The sage walks through the world.

Voting Democrat is like running into a tree to keep from hitting a child.

Listening to: "Jacob's Ladder" by A. Schoenberg.

"...our Scholar GoH [Guest of Honor] was also from a non-Anglophone background. Editor and translator Marcial Souto told us he grew up in a house with one book, which he read over and over again even though its beginning and end had fallen off and were lost. ...He discussed the joys and problems of translating: being 'the most attentive reader the book will ever have' and knowing that even in the least of books there is something to lose." --Arthur Hlavaty, in Nice Distinctions 6

Seeking, i grow superstitious. They play a rarity on the radio & i take it for a sign.

Sedlec. (via Planing Lakes)

Painting is Back.

"A Shadow Over Westchester"

words
are born
free, yet everywhere

the
only emperor
is the emperor

gray
clouds march
across the ruins

gods,
feared, whatever
they might be

06 12 04

RONALD WILSON REAGAN ENTERS INTO HEAVEN

'A raw, snarling noodle' with his fake dyed hair
Revenge buoys telepath
'Insane anglo warlord' sans his wits quits here
Tape lets you beg, never
Deluded a mob vents its programmed moan
Revenge buoys telepath
He took & took & took--yet you'd still fain give
Tape lets you beg, never
So here's my kiss-off to the shame of this
Revenge buoys telepath
He pledged an age of gold & what we get is iron
Tape lets you beg, never
And "Republican" means never having to say you're sorry.

06 12 04

"A Dollar's Worth of Blood, Please

With the last memo checked: They will sign, success; with the phone put down upon the day's last call; then with the door locked at last,
Wait; think;
What should the final memo be?

SAY THE LAST WORD,
SAY THE LAST WORD ADDING ALL WE'VE MADE AND LOST,
SAY THE LAST WORD THAT WEIGHS THE TRIUMPH SEALED IN INK AGAINST THE DEBT PRESERVED IN STONE AND THE PROFIT LOCKED IN STEEL,

One final word that the doorman knows, too, and the lawyer, and the drunk,
That the clerk knows, too, sure of tomorrow's pleasant surprise,
And the stranger, who knows there is nothing on earth more costly than hope and nothing in all the world held one-half so cheap as life,

One final word that need never be changed,
One final word to prove there is a use for the hard-bought distrust and the hard-won skill,
One final word that stands above and beyond the never-ending weakness and the never-failing strength,

SAY THE LAST WORD, YOU LONG STRAIGHT STREETS,
SAY THE LAST WORD, YOU WISE GUY, DUMB GUY, SOFT GUY, RIGHT GUY, FALL GUY, TOUGH GUY,
SAY THE LAST WORD, YOU BLACK SKY ABOVE."

--Kenneth Fearing

"First Nations communities suffer from a couple of centuries of objectification. Our stories and teachings have been collected like museum pieces and stored on shelves and in books where they seem to atrophy and become more and more distant from daily life. It is not uncommon to hear people questioning the value of these old teachings and their relevance to contemporary situations. This has created a very disempowered situation. Without our own stories, we go to the stories of others, and those who have the most powerful story telling technologies (TV stations, media outlets, films) have also had a fairly consistent agenda of colonizing indigenous peoples. Mass media continues the colonization of indigenous peoples by giving us stories that are not our own, filling the vacuum left by the loss of our traditional technologies." --Parking Lot

You get used to being cold, you get used to being tired, you get used to being hungry, you even get used to being in pain, but you never get used to being disrespected.

Cathedonia.

"Judgment at Westchester"

Two crows clyted in the burnt-out hulk of a house.
They shook the rain from their feathers, then one said,
"Those who made this landscape must be proud."
The other: "Havoc is power, nonetheless."

06 12 04

Get rid of those suspicious art supplies.

Listening to: Seasoned Reasonings by The New Elements.

"Line 9. Of this peculiar character Ibn Khallikan remarks (ii. 43), 'There were four poets whose works clearly contraried their character. Abu al-Atahiyah wrote pious poems, himself being an atheist; Abu Hukayma's verses proved his impotence, yet he was more salacious than a he-goat; Mohammed ibn Hazim praised contentment, yet he was greedier than a dog; and Abu Nowas hymned the joys of sodomy, yet he was more passionate for women than a baboon.' " --Richard Burton, notes to his translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886)

Shining Trapezohedron, dwells thy agent dead
not on Mount Fucking Rushmore though they'd urge it
but with his true kin vilely massed worms slime-shrouded
inventor for neon scissors outclassed thy yegg

06 10/11 04 quantitative sari

"Or: I work at the language as a spring of water works at the rock, to find a course, and so, blindly. In this i am not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a way. For the way in itself. It is well enuf to speak of water's having its destination in the sea, and so to picture almost a knowing in the course; but the sea is only the end of ways--could the stream find a further course, it would go on. And vast as the language is, it is no end but a resistance thru which a poem might move--as it flows or dances or puddles in time--making it up in its going along and yet going only as it breaks the resistance of the language." --Robert Duncan

Death of a Salesman. (via Fishblog)

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."

"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?

"Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray,
That I may live to say, The dog is dead!"

from Richard III

the mad cow
that infected
america

is dead the
madness lives
on

06 06 04

the pain of war cannot exceed
the woe of aftermath

Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore"

Figuring out the president.

"Tomb of the Unknown Detainee"

they
let me
know who's boss

with
a cellcam
it's not torture

remember
outside there's
a different law

time
to go
my breaking said

05 31 04

"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

"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"

"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

"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.

#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)

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)

"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.

" '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.

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"

   '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.

What Went Wrong.

Who Died In Here?

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.

   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.

Ask Sistani. (via Cursor)

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.]

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

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

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

   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 Medicí...)

#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.]