Cold War.

Supermarionation.


“A cento from Francis Thompson”

1.

The flying fringes of the sun’s cloak frush
The garrulous leaves among!
Young Century, born to hear
His dear nonentity--
The obdurate seasons thwart;

Sad tree, whose perishing boughs
Through the unsustaining ether.
In thy feasting-flagon’s impurpurate glows!
Her Muse, that died with her auroral dews!

Whose amethyst
Songs cannot hymn in.
This outworn vesture, tenantless of thee,
When the stars pitch the golden tents
And all so sickened is his countenance,

A silvern segregation, globed complete
To lie as in an oubliette of God,
In this Avenian sky,
And as it came,
Yet thy child still?

2.

Fate, in her extreme blindness,
Ere Winter throws
Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme
Carveth all too painfully,
Behold, I pace amidst the gloom:
With double potence of the black and white.

3.

O Halcyon! was thine auspice not of rest?
The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard,
Call up a burning blot:
Of destinate verse.

Why should amazement be our satellite?
The blank desert, blank and tan:
Let even the slug-abed snail upon the thorn
Then laid upon the snarling sea;

Star gathering.
I, the boundless strict Savannah
Now all things show amiss;
All the savour, all the touch,

Behind this dim and mortal jelly. Ah!

08 25 04

“The Scream, Stolen”


If they haggled the pilgrim mirror
Made off with cypress windmill
The suicide doors of viceroy Neverland

Black Kalashnikov
Not darkness
Vultures loose of art

Let Dubyastan receive its radint witness
Let loves torque
In the shadow of radiant harm

Pour pilgrim exiting ink
The last exciting

08 23 04

Listening to: Brain Salad Surgery.

The Coast Salish are referenced in the movie Black Widow.

Another cover- Lena Lovich: "I Think We're Alone Now" (in Japanese).

A comment my computer wouldn't let me post:

as one who selfpublished for years & also put out a zine, i know that the main difficulty is actually not finances but distribution. how many times have i been told a bookstore won't stock my book because "it didn't have a spine" or an ISBN number? (since when did Bowker become God?) i'm afraid those bloggers who haven't been through small-press hell can afford to be skeptical about this new medium, but to zinesters of old (i.e. the 80's) the Internet has been an improvement in every respect.

on the theoretical level, i also approve of the obliteration of the distinction between "published" & "unpublished" this tends to foment. such distinctions nilpertain READING anyway--they're more about the snobbery of Who's In & Who's out. and i don't see why it won't erode as well the whole Romantic identity of The Poet (along with every other form of irreducible selfhood) which is not a bad thing either: "The Poet" having become the principal commodity of poetry-writers, we will have to start doing SOMETHING ELSE for OURSELVES (poetics, anyone?).

"My childhood was a police state full of jackals." --The Hounds of No

Meanwhile, in an alternative fiscal reality... (via A Ghost of Mine)

“A cento from The Hawk in the Rain”

Now he rides the morning mist
Too tender to let break, start to the edge
And walk away from it. Closer than thinking

Yet is he monster.
Instantly beak, wings, talons crash
The diamond point of will that polestars

Unconscious under the shock of its own quick
Nightmare of command in the dawn, and a shot.

08 17 04

Add to my Heavy Metal list- "Run to the Hills" by Iron Maiden.

Reading- Persepolis.

" 'If one were as rich as those people! They pass so close to us; they see us, and we see them; but the distance between is infinity. They don't belong to the same world as we poor wretches. They see everything in a different light; they have powers which would seem supernatural if we were suddenly endowed with them.' " --New Grub Street

An effect, often seen in 20c lit, but uncommon in films: what i call meta-irony, or an abiding ambiguity as to whether something that occurs or is said, can be intended ironically or not. This i was reminded of, while rewatching the Coens' Miller's Crossing. In some ways it has become almost axiomatic, in 21c. poetry... Which means, for those coming after, we "have some 'splainin' to do".

The Welsh figure dyfalu (a series of variegated metaphors pertaining to a single subject) & Mallarmé's (supposed) procedure of describing
its effects & not the object itself: & then, by degrees, one progresses to unconnected sequences of metaphor, as the metaphors each become more & more far-fetched. This as a norm. Then, whenever the subject of a metaphor seems guessable, there is an incursion of meaning, which causes the reader to suspect the whole is a Symbolist poem, & not a nonsense poem. A different kind of knife-edge.

Looking at the cover of Tracey Ullman's album, it suddenly struck me to wonder whether, like Sandra Bernhard, she actually performed each of these songs in a different persona. (How much more interesting Pop could be!) --It's so much easier to believe in heteronymy, when you are a musician; pretending to be sincerely emoting, from the start, is a kind of mask already.

Translations as song covers.

HG Poetics sent me (via Hotel Point) to this Kentjay link: which
mentions the Aymara who, curiously enough, are rumored to have developed a "three-value logic" & as such, became the object of an attempt by the redoubtable Dr Llambias to render their system into Lojban...

"EPSILON

"There broken vows and death-bed alms are found
And lovers' hearts with ends of ribbons bound,
The courtier's promises, and sick man's prayers."
Pope

Tunnels honeycomb the Moon. In them men fly. Relieved of five-sixths of their earthly weight, arm-flapped wings of a condor's breadth suffice. They spend their lives in this labyrinthine tomb. A hundred years from now, they call it Heaven. Jasper was one of them.

Greatly he loved winging, from the moment he drew back the lacquered lid & gazed upon his personal pair the color of fire, through the careful adjustment of velvet armstraps, to the first deep tunnel-breath. He stood on the ledge of his tiny but elegant grotto, savoring the cool humid gym-smell of their reprocessed air. Down below were streams of traffic. He fell.

Winging always gave him this: a sweetness like freedom, & then the compulsory dreaming.

Jasper's birdphones immediately began to guide him through the busy multilevelled flow. From immemorial practice his muscles responded to every shifting nuance of the music that steered him & each of the others, the unceasing hymn of ornithopter flight. It emanated from deep within the heart of the city Orphalese itself: a huge computer devoted to no lesser task than the one great hymn. They call it the Bird Brain.

A part of everyone's day being taken up in service to the rapt following of these broadcast commands, a rushing array of entrainment, they all needed little else of communion, & spent the rest of their time in sundry private pursuits. Jasper painted.

He was painting when Sylvia came to visit.

A gust from her stagey arrival made the bells on the iconostasis tinkle. He turned his head slightly & saw her cloudy silhouette, like a word still unspoken. "Jasper?" she said when he hadn't stirred. He closed one eye & all was red; he changed to the other & blue reigned. She heard him sigh, & tried another name that he sometimes answered to.

"There are too many colors," he said finally.

How taken for granted these splendid aeronautics, embodiment of the ages' desire, the danger too a thing of no moment, only to wing among the others & emulate them. He never even heard the voices in his ear anymore, nor saw the rough-hewn walls of their cavern flickering crossed by a hundred thousand shadows. Jasper in winging instead sometimes imagined the pictures he would paint, oil paintings given eerily ambiguous three-dimensionality, through being painted in red & blue registers at once, entwined or opposed as the spirit took him. This he had invented himself.

True, he never yet had produced an image worthy of his thought. He persevered.

Sylvia without the special glasses on would see only a confused mass of colors. And she would ask him mockingly about this or that portion. Was it really finished yet? Shouldn't he do something about the way these clashed? And he could only respond, Put on the glasses.

No more, no more.

She held up one hand, palm toward him, & asked, "How many fingers?" "Six," he said grimly (it looked like four). "You'll wear out your peepers in this light." (She knew it was nothing physical, or they would have given him new ones.) "It's the only light there is."

Once, when they were still lovers, he had painted her all over with body paint. That was before his breakthrough. Or her betrayal. She turned in the mirror, eyes full of sharp-edged laughter, & said nothing. He brought her instead her wings. On the ledge they'd embraced hungrily, & then leapt off in unison, her arc a little smoother & more shallow.

Now she studied his latest picture. "There's so much here I don't understand," she said in a new voice, one that almost sounded as if she were looking into abysses. Hushed (he had become quite acute of hearing). But what could he answer? That as his sight dimmed, his vision increased in power, in grace? "How can what you intend ever find its way into visible expression, if your hand doesn't know if it's holding a brush of pale red or pale orange hue? I know, I know, you tell me you remember, but aren't nuances the very substance of your art,--of any art? Be honest, you paint as tumblingly as now you wing."

He shuffled to the doorway & let the breeze lift his indigo hair, a tinge of resignation in his nonchalance, like a scumble of gray over brown. "My peepers get in the way sometimes Sylvia--the way the body of a lover can interfere with the deepest feelings of your love."

"I won't follow these crooked flights," she said after a pause, "but this body is still in your way, if you'll turn around."

She left his food wrapped in a hundred-year-old shawl.

Orphalese, inverted city, hollow within that blasted orb where no one anymore even goes up to scuff the lifeless regolith; Orphalese, divided into zones according to the chosen hue of their lunar wings--this city he found himself now slowworm in. His wings gathered dust as his blindness snowballed. There were hardly even handholds on the walls of the cavern, in fact, so his course zigzagged from eyrie to eyrie (connecting the dots); while the others winged in geometric vectors. Yet he began to feel for the first time that his huge rock-bubble home was really real.

He let his nails grow into climbing claws. Spidery conversations by filtered earthlight, costume to costume, now took up his time. Everyone was wearing the black polkadot on red motley of a Ladybird Beetle. Had quit counting the black cigarettes whose golden filters they left spent on the floor like cartridges. For it was Imbolc.

Their principal talk is of the newest heresy, para-Koreshism, the twist on which is to have that looming blue globe at most a sort of optical derangement, for their world in reality was to consist of a single great hollow concavity, within an endless depth of solid stone. This Jasper's fading vision might aid in believing, but he could never shake that crucial exchange with Sylvia, long enough to entertain any lighter heresies.

Her lover of old had returned from final devivement.

Lawrence Welk's harpsichordized rendition of the "Exodus" theme greeted him as he cleared the stone doorsill with difficulty.

"Jasper! old droog," cried a familiar hoarse richness. "I heard what happened. Zounds!" Gandalf guided him to a table, & soon he tasted the mysterious reminiscence of an "Alexandrian" (one part blue curaçao, two parts green Chartreuse) cocktail, sweet & heady as a late unlooked-for love. The music changed, not disagreeably. They sat at the Poets' Table, unoccupied at this hour. "Speak," said Gandalf. His third eye, surgically implanted & optically irrelevant, regarded Jasper with a fixed stare.

Jasper considered the matter. Dawn-shadows of some unimaginable catastrophe, or mere jealous delusion? First, one does not return from the grave like that. No way, no how, no algorithm. Starkly true that Sylvia had lied, or the cad himself (yclept Phoebus Phoenix)--or else the machinations of LunoPangenesis Ltd!? "She says they'd already called it quits," he offered. He could barely make out a turquoise blur near his hand. It radiated chill without his touching.

"Then what's the tsurris?" "How much wiser to choose a corpse over one whose future is stasis & futility," answered Jasper in a croak unmoistened by all sweet liqueurs; "I know what I know." And later, when the purloined arclight made like original earthshadow, who was there to say it wasn't enough?

"Death have no dominion? Dominion is death & death, dominion. That's all." He gazed at the bright mirage of an entrance. Much later, & nearer to the last eclipse, he remembered this moment as a bitter talisman & unheeded warning. Sylvia had become a ghost, who wandered freely through his moods & stumblings, without ever breaking his clasp or quite filling it. His last picture burgeoned. Its turmoil frightened her till she learned not to look at it. They made love with a tapestry across it, figured with spectral arabesques, a dwindled malison. They spoke little of Phoebus, & she never in fact met him again. But they did hear of his bizarre celebrity.

Jasper dreamed, not of flying but of falling.

"Of the many things you have taught me," she used to say, "some you shouldn't have: & until your illness I only knew how to love one way. Now love is a chorus of contradictory voices, all harmonized by the fear of suffering. Jasper, I've realized something terrible. I don't want to watch you become an empty shell. I don't want to watch myself betray you."

More passionate than ever, they touched helmets in the pitiless vacuum. "I shall found a sect of Koreshians who worship your shadow, perhaps. And perhaps too I shall just forget I ever encountered that evil painting."

PART TWO

Often he would hear her songs passed on by others, who visited him in the cave now he never left. Her lyrics proclaimed the end of an age of secrets, but her music withheld all closure; & this was itself a kind of secrecy.

Each visitor took away a little more of his sight. After a point, it is said, he either died by his own hand or someone else's, to do his bidding. But this takes us too far ahead of the story. For she did return to him, once, before the end.

He was auditing a frail black platter of Penderecki, fabulously rare & expensive. "Almost angels," she remarked of the tormented choir.

"What? Ho! Who's there?" He peered in the wrong direction.

"Sylvia, when you knew me."

"I know no Sylvia."

"That is so."

"I tried," he said falteringly. "No. You didn't try. You fled from a second attempt." She moved closer in the candlelit fastness. "Let me tell you a story."

"More & more the tunnels become constricted, narrowed then completely blocked by repairs & meaningless construction of arbitrary barricades; finally, the population of flyers will be reduced to circling barely each in his own length. Heaven will depopulate, space exile for the ones unable to bear gravity. What was I thinking, there never even existed a colony on the Moon. Back in the twentieth century, a hundred years ago, the point was reached where they either had to choose to continue to explore the planets, or waste their wealth on guns & bombs & you know how folly always wins. You know which they chose. We were never here, we never flew on the Moon."

"I seem to recall something of the sort," he admitted. Her eyes shone with a pearlescent rigor.

"And you, you cannot meet Phoebus for he is yourself, risen from the grave; & you aren't even dead yet. You see the difficulty."

"What was it we loved then, in the spaces between the stars? That desert more than desert, those questions we only shatter ourselves against?" "Have you forgotten, Jasper? You painted it." They turned to the shrouded image.

Before their eyes it changed. They saw the world, a seething hierarchy of balanced forces, a maelstrom in incessant transformation. They saw the strand of human-entelechy come spiralling out of the center of the picture, making itself more separate & more prominent, extinguishing many others so that it could proliferate & itself diverge into different strands, which then struggled each to impose its own style & milieu. The outpost on the Moon flickered briefly, part of Man's ongoing lunar reveries...the furious efflorescence of fossil fuels & technological exploitation one huge flash in the pan, then all the following centuries of global poverty & spiritual exhaustion, the song that burns, the apology never delivered...

They saw themselves, & all they might have become: Phoebus the shadow of his blindness; & cars in the daytime driving with their headlights on.

PART THREE

Hurtling out of the morning glare, under the blast of noon, at crimson eve cars driving, driving, like Diogenes--with their headlights on in the daytime."

--Clutch Cargo

More song covers i forgot: Melanie's amazing "Ruby Tuesday". Juice Newton- "Angel of the Morning". Elton John- "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

"Tennyson's 'Fatima' (1832) is a cross-dressing poem, in that it speaks from the woman's point of view." --Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion (2001)

And what about Sonnets from the Portuguese?

The forgery of a Dickinson poem by Mark Hofmann is the subject of The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrall: "The Bible is an antique volume--/ written by faded Men..."

"Intermezzo: Venetian Nights.
I. Veneta Marina

The masts rise white to the stars,
White on the night of the sky,
Out of the water's night,
And the stars lean down to them white.
Ah! how the stars seem nigh:
How far away are the stars!

And I too under the stars,
Alone with the night again,
And the water's monotone;
I and the night alone,
And the world and the ways of men
Farther from me than the stars."

--Symons

Heteronymy as the Olympic drug scandal of Poetry.

Geometric Nubian Orator.

Harry Partch's World. (via Click Opera)

"I don't feel anything for the Democrats other than the total fear of them losing. Kerry not being elected is the full moon that will allow Bush to werewolf completely into Scott Stapp of Creed.

President Stapp. That'll be a sweet ride, eh?

Monkeys will be declared unconstitutional, the state mandated petticoats will only come in blue, and Michael Moore's upsidedown crucifixion will only be available on Pay Per View." --Dong Resin

Cho on Eminem.

"A Cento from Pale Fire"

No furtive light came from their involute
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme
The crowding gulls insufferably loud,

But always present, ran through me. One day,
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
And then there was a kind of travelog:

Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece
A hint of angels, and a glint of stained

08 17 04

Tauchnitz.

A Concrete Renga.

"...the real, not the calendar 20th century ended yesterday too."
--H G Poetics

Napoleon the Novelist.


"A cento from Glenaveril"

Caged in a topaz with a blazing dome.
Nor was it from that visionary grot
His vast vicarious journey over seas
Of those illimitable realms that rest
(For the Subjunctive Mood's an autocrat)
Too late to be repaired. As his distress
Of dainty bells? Who knows? in every scene
Along the hedge the honeysuckle flings
And who is injured if it chance to fit?

08 16 04

Heavy Metal in Iraq. Iraqi Popular Poetry. (via Cursor)

An ocean's phantoms surge
Bellicose in my mind
A sort of dreamy dirge
By all the lurking things that crawl
Behind the light

Verily i would purge
Myself of these unkind
Accompanists who merge
With fathoms in the crystal ball
To bind the light

But i must still indulge
Or else my shores are blind
And hurl me only bilge
And leave me as a wizard thrall
Maligned by light

08 17 04

Listening to- Aida (Zubin Mehta, 1967).

"Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice..." --New Grub Street

Finally got to see "Europe After the Rain". This was my favorite painting when i was twenty or so, & when i went to Europe i looked for it in all the great museums i visited. I never suspected it was in Connecticut!

At the same show i discovered Florine Stettheimer. (I also saw a great portrait by Salvador Rosa, but that doesn't seem to be online anywhere.)

We ARE lost--what's scarce is clues.

Hats Are Coming Back. (via Languagehat)

Timeline. (via Miekal)

"It seems to me that the modern public prefers its poetry sung.

That doesn't surprise me, anymore than that they also prefer movies in color with sound, to silent ones in black and white.

I myself like silent movies on their own merits, but I have no illusions that there are going to be great artists practicing this medium ever again.

In the light of this argument (to which I can find no answer) the squabbles over verse or free verse seem rather petty." --Ernst Kipling in Eratosphere

Meanwhile, in Najaf...

Reading- Maus I & II.


Translation: driving a truck when you're used to a car.

A Cento from Stevens.

This looks interesting: An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin.

Transits. (via A Voyage To Arcturus)

"A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed 'Literary Machine'; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself, to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for today's comsumption." --George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891) [I have it on good authority that movies are already being written this way...]

Titles i like from the Sports section: Planet of the Umps; When Working Out Isn't Working Out.

Who is the Grandma Moses of pop? The Jackson Pollock of Haiku? The John Webster of Chamber Music? The Michael Jackson of Sumi-e? The Laura Riding of Surrealism? The Joan Baez of Imagism? The Wendell Wilkie of Langpo? The Salvador Dali of Film Noir?

More cover songs fall into my hands:

Harmonicats- Scheherezade
Banjo Barons- Georgy Girl
Johnny Puleo- Stars & Stripes Militaire [Sousa on harmonicas!]
Sammy Davis Jr- Hey There
Hootie & the Blowfish- Drift Away
Phranc- The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Tracey Ullman- Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)

Other music sites i like: Minty Fresh Records; Emperor Norton Records; Circledelic. Middle Pillar Distribution. Putumayo.

Halau.

“MAD WOLF IN LUNAR WEB,
MAD CROW ON THE BEACH

A PLACE YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO
LAY SHADOW ON,
Seething in
white mist
its perennial
Nipp’d. Not for
But a violent storm
opened above us
like a flower
Maple.
You can taste a
Dubbed
to be spoken,
behind the fire-wall
Our hexed American
Refusal to size up
a crook
For what he is. Just a
Gone bushwhacking.
Ask old Mister
Strangeways what
Liminoid.
When you draw the
Wrong water you
Spill human blood and
No passing. An escadrille
Fishtailing in the blue,
the face of blue
Death staring up at
Not to grow fond

Death has done something
I’m done with fixing up
As it were a kindness
On the part of the world
What we have given it;
Slow fading and perfect
To rid the world of one more
While it passes over the
Death has done a thing
Death be damned
I spit at death
What you show
Shows at all times
Nothing but what life has
Shown you, life’s plagiarist.
Not strand of auburn,
not a freckle,
but as life’s gift.

The old
Dragon variation
I am skilled at
Wolf. Rayet
Who knows what that
Think it through
Lure of the ladyhair’s
Coma
Comet,
The cool apparition
Cold in its show
Of heat. But what’s hot
Live in the sparkling
Pushing full tilt to the
Peekaboo. It slides out
in the starlit surf
Din. Minions of the
Great Sleep say
Unstarred. Crow
Wing-walking my
way all the way to
Courage to find
through the amaze
Thread. It goes on
not if you don’t be
brave enough to
I am a fool
ed. Illusioned
ing. Fast to what
Sunlight creeps along
Shapes of the lovely
Hills and meadows
Park in morning,
Daisy, I love thee
Courage, no thing but
Courage. Blue
Scrub the
Mission for the
Moment’s on fire.
Going around afeard, well
Defies the dry
lake, the windy
sandy rivers
All supposal. We are
not I am worse off
for being hexed, in
love with Wildfire.
So most.
In slow motion,
Sure self-portrait
In mist, lost time,
A relic
Of all act and push-
Matter;
hop, track, grasp, exit;
unearth, dice, cook, exit;
burgle, array, speak, exit
prove, notch, imp, exit;
groan, off, sing, exit;
The thing’s horrid squeak.
To last forever after, all.
Because a shadow
careering
500 mph
still’s a shadow.
Quaked, too.
Because it can
turn into what
that it mocks.
How to get from
One day to the next
Without thinking.
So that the giant rock face
crumbles, the illusory
Spindrift, the rearing
Immelmans,
The rottening slow roll
Spinning in the creep
Comes to a grinding halt.”

--Mac Wellman, in: From the Other Side of the Century (ed. Messerli, 1994)

Listening to: Yes- Close to the Edge (I used to have on 8-track!)

"The occupations of my finger waves

The occupations of my finger waves.
I represent for years--for years--enough.
My people, in the channel, and a slave's.
And see the flabby devil in the cuff.

Six thousand to become aware of life.
Perhaps seen indistinctly lying curled.
And countless centuries begin a strife.
What notion in an ocean of the world.

Their glassy water, sparely peopled earth.
The colonel listened, interested at home.
It over, captain, as a mode of birth.
He echoed from within my honeycomb.

I spoke in this promotion an intrigue.
So infinitely greater than a league."

--Gnoetry (via MadInkBeard)

Listening to: Les Baxter- Moog Rock.

The Loeb Classics Page. (via Click Opera) --i sometimes think this is the ideal format for a book.(Powys was crazy about them too.)



"Do you know how hard it is to find a postcard without a confederate flag on it in Alabama?" --Vowel Movements



"A Cento from Ashbery"

The gray wastes of water surround
A great wind lifted these cardboard panels
To discover its heart. The blind enemy
One morning you appear at breakfast

To stunted memories, helping them stand alone
And cause, in the distance, an old satisfaction.
On the unassassinated president's desk
Behind a shutter, two black eyes are watching them.

08 10 04

'As in the case of the newspapers we had received, we did not believe anything we heard on the radio concerning military affairs or foreign relations. We considered that we were listening not to live broadcasts but to tapes made by the Americans, who had deleted or altered anything unfavorable to them... At one point, Kozuka remarked, "When you think of it, the Americans are really good at this, aren't they?" "Yes," I replied. "They have to take out anything they don't want heard and then rebroadcast it in almost no time. ...Just one slip, and the whole thing would sound fishy. I take off my hat to them. It must be very tricky work!" Later, when I found out that the broadcasts had not been faked, it occurred to me that it had been "very tricky work" indeed for us to read into the news broadcasts the meanings we wanted them to have.' --Onoda, op cit

'One difficulty with the Japanese language is that it has many words meaning "I" and "you", and they have to be chosen with care... In the Japanese army, the common words for "you" were kisama and omae, both of which can easily sound insulting if not used with caution. We dodged this problem by using the Tagalog words ako for "I" and ikao for "you". I tried very hard not to say anything that would make Kozuka angry, and he did the same toward me. ...our world had a population of two, both male...' --ibid

'If he [Suzuki] had not been wearing socks, I might have shot him. But he had on these thick woolen socks even though he was wearing rubber sandals. ...I came to the conclusion that the young man must really be Japanese.' --ibid

Virtual Ummah.

A Jazz Pflugelhornist from Nanaimo. (via NPR)

Sundazed is reissuing classic & obscure psychedelica--including some on heavy-gauge vinyl.

Matraquage.

Listening to- More Songs About Buildings and Food.

"A Cento from Southey"

Perils which threaten'd still, and arduous toil
Of clamorous joy re-ring: the rocks and hills
Relapsing now, and now again unclosed.
For peace is with the dead, and piety
Perverts the ordinance of God, and makes
The full orb'd moon, that beam'd around
Composed like one who sleeps with open eyes.

08 08 04

Why should the forms be privileged, that trigger a response of thing-recognition? Fleeting resemblances & partial illusions of depth accompany almost any well-tempered abstract image; ditto the penumbra of near-coherence for almost any nonlinear arrangement of words. And the need for metanarrative is met by fitting each work into a sequence of prior works that it happens to suggest. So i conclude in the end the only necessity for a mode called "realism", derives from the political will to maintain a monopoly on truthful art. Langpo, even at its most extreme, is no more unintelligible than the stylizations of ballet.

"BOWLED OVER

By kiss of death, bullet on brow,
No more life can overpower
That first infatuation, world cannot
Ever be harder or clearer or come
Closer than when it arrived there

Spinning its patched fields, churches
Trees where nightingales sang in broad daylight
And the vast flaring blue skirts of seas--
Then sudden insubordination
Of boredom and sleep

When the eyes could not find their keys
Or the neck remember what mother whispered
Or the body stand to its word.

Desertion in the face of a bullet!

Burial without honors."

--Ted Hughes

"In early 1974, an amiable Japanese university dropout named [Norio] Suzuki, who had tramped his way through some fifty countries, took it upon himself to make a journey through the Phillippines...he told his friends that he was going to look for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the Abominable Snowman, in that order. Presumably the panda and the Snowman are still waiting, because after only four days on Lubang, Suzuki found Onoda..." --translator's forward to No Surrender: My Thirty-year War by Hiroo Onoda (tr C Terry, 1974).

The Journey from the Center to the Page.

Joe Ahearn has a new book out, Five Fictions by Sulphur River Review Press.

Stomp proof bugs across from the end blog
A paranormal panorama cerise
With blog bling, askew

Pearly rook
Dark to write the times askew
Fathoms rook

The chronicles of cerise.
Dobry fatwa the arcane nacres
Of Aleppo rook

Pawn opening (shadow purposely askew);
Cars thick as leave flies up thick as thieves
Slag cerise

Who crave ore cerise
American torture nanoninja have
Shipshape egghead crow, merle, rook
In squamous atavistic pitch die askew

08 07 04

Your Moonie Dollars at Work. (via Metafilter)

Soldier-Artists of the Civil War: Edwin Forbes; Conrad Wise Chapman.

Shuppies.

Imaginary Labyrinth.

I Gave My Love a Kerry.

I wondered what that was about. (va Metafilter)

‘Night

Imprisoned
By a myriad
Of lights from Hiroshima,
Pinpoints scratching my eyes.
Moist scar-folds winding
On the glossy keloid skin of puffed up tissue,
On the muddy street smelling of entrails
Floppy buds sprouting from seared trunks
Of trees along the avenue.
In depths of drizzle, a woman’s
Eyes grow redder than cigarette ends;
She does not seek to hide
the festering
Scab on her thigh.

Ah Hiroshima!
My virility
useless
The A-bomb has crushed it--
Desires gone impotent
In the night, the barren women,
The sperm lost in the dark.
The A-bomb Victims Inquiry Building
Looks pregnant, squatting
In the shadows of trees in
Hijiyama Park leased and glittering,
Its arc-lights eclipsed by the
Bright tail-lights
of American cars:
The placenta leaves the womb
While the tempo of Los Indios
Echos from the desert
Of New Mexico.

The trains,
their broken windows
Boarded up like
Blind eyes,
Rest under the station roof
Where even the news
(Coy tonight) blushes
At sunset, telling
Of a second, a third,
A hundredth A-bomb test.
Blood dripping
Down from somewhere a drunk
Comes staggering down
The dark riverbank
From out of a creaking barge
A gangling soldier suddenly rears up
The evening tide covers the footprints
Of scrap-iron scavengers
Stealing up from the sea.
Across the sky something swishes
Metallic blue like a moth
From night to dawn
From dawn to night again
Far hanging light
Caught before falling; and
Anxiously trying to forget
Lights like dropping fire-flies
Flickering light, dying light,
The lights ofHiroshima
Dragging blood, seond by second
Drawing away from that day
Seeping up from nowhere.
In the darkness of History
The lights of Hiroshima
Teem quietly below.’

--Toge Sankichi

How much better it would be, if instead of invading another country, we'd just used that money to buy everyone with a driver's license a Vespa--& a turntable--?

Covers, versions. A Thousand Acres as "King Lear"; Clueless as Emma. Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. Jeffers's "Medea"; & Mark Cullingham's Jeffers... And what about "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"?

Listening to: Dir en grey.

Some Poet-Painters:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

D H Lawrence

Sylvia Plath

Wyndham Lewis

e. e. cummings

And of course Michelangelo & Blake.

Pollution Level Red.
Nieman’s: the rich in black pajamas.

Many people know that W S Merwin spent years of rustication in the French countryside, but it is a revelation all the same to read his Mays of Ventadorn, one in an interesting new series of literary travelogues. I previously advocated poetry criticism on the model of Poets in a Landscape, & this volume certainly fits the bill. Merwin delves into the Occitanian language & medieval history to produce a vivid portrait of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn & his mystical courtly culture.

“The city changed hands between competing factions so frequently that the inhabitants could not agree, when it was all over, whether the number of these occasions was as low as fourteen or as high as nineteen.” --Ronald Hingley, Nightingale Fever (1981)

Found a Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs record. I hadn’t known he was from here (--like Question Mark & the Mysterians, another Tex-Mex band from Sixties Dallas). I was always fascinated by the custom car this band drove, featured in a car magazine (one of the first i ever bought) from the days when bands--even one-hit wonders--had to have their very own unique means of transportation.

"We might feel that pan-Maya ideologies are, in a strict sense, "invented traditions" based on imaginary reconstructions of past culture, but it is not easy to dismiss them as "inauthentic" if they are capturing the imaginations of large numbers of people and becoming their cultural traditions as far as they are concerned." --John Gledhill

"Smart" movies for stupid people: American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, Memento.

A different list of song covers at Mosses from an Old Manse.

Paintings by a Synaesthete. (via Metafilter)

"The entire queue/
clapped, and proclaimed as one: "You is Da Man! "

"The grounds keeper apologized profusely but said that they were bringing in an average of almost 100 bodies a month this year to his graveyard alone- where was he supposed to bury the bodies?"

" 'This deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to dislose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it.' " --Arthur Schopenhauer in: Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music (1994)

"Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature was translated into Japanese quite early in the 20th century. In Japan it became a sort of critical bible. The young Korean poets had some English and less French. Most of their translations seem to have been made from Japanese texts with an eye sometimes on the English." --A Handbook of Korea (1990)

Some of these song covers are glimflashes; & when i consider a band such as Big Daddy or Laibach (with its Stalinist chic--a kind of camp that is disturbing because the corpse of Stalinism hasn’t quite cooled yet) i am led to thinking of such exercises in musical heteronymy as the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band”, Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust”, the soundtrack to an unmade Logan’s Run sequel, & (which i just saw in our store--in the glass case) Zappa’s “Ruben
and the Jets” album. And then, the novel Norman Spinrad did, as by the science
fiction writer Adolf Hitler, The Iron Dream. (Also, BTW, to a topic i hope to return to, the movie-within-a-movie device & its uses.)

On the one hand, in our marketized culture, every artist is to some degree playing themselves in quotes, especially with the tease of confessional pseudo-intimacy; on the other hand, the basis of our high culture is the Romantic cult of “sincerity”. I think the greater the fictional basis for the disguise of the artist, the more they approximate a deep cultural context such as all traditional art once possessed, & which in 20c. art got lost. This is why people immerse themselves in alternate-worlds, systems of counter-discourse: either as esoteric blixen, fantasy fiction, or the more kinetic surround of RPG’s. Poetry, however, has invariably refused this
option--even when the role of the avant gardiste might have permitted it. (How much more acceptable the wartime broadcasts of “Uncle Ez” would sound, if we didn’t have to think Pound meant them seriously!)

Khlebnikov, Pessoa, Borges, Spicer (especially After Lorca)--Umbrist saints; a 21c. whakapapa.

Complementarity Revoked? (via Metafilter)

Hate is Up. (via Orcinus)

Of course, as soon as i’d posted my list of cover songs others began crowding into my brain. First of all, it was seeing an album featuring the Living Brass’s “Indian Reservation” that set off this whole train of thought. (I now have the record, & it is every bit as awesome as i could have expected.) Second, digging through my record collection has caused me to revisit Joseph Lanza’s Elevator Music. Then, the gods have responded to my 25-year prayers by giving me a mint copy of the only collectible Jackie Gleason album, Lonesome Echo (because of its cover by
Salvador Dali)...

Emerson, Lake and Palmer- Toccata [4th movement of Ginastera’s 1st Piano Concerto]
Jethro Tull- Bouree [Bach]
Miles Davis- Concerto de Aranjuez [Adagio movement]
Streisand- If You Could Read My Mind
Harmonicats- Love Is a Many Splendored Thing
Bill Justis- Cast Your Fate to the Wind; Alley Cat
Sheryl Crow- First Cut is the Deepest
Esquivel- Nature Boy
John Zorn & Naked City- Peter Gunn Theme
anything by Clara Rockmore [theremin], or the Koto Connection
Perez Prado- Blue Tango
Arthur Lyman- Blowin’ in the Wind
Jerry Goodman- Perry Mason Theme [violin!]
Martin Denny- Clair de Lune; Take Five
Chim Kothari- Guantanamara [sitar]
Gus Vali- Aquarius [flute & xylophone]
Electronic Concept Orchestra- Atlantis [Moog]
Pat Boone- Holy Diver
Diamanda Galas- Gloomy Sunday
Julie London- Sometimes I Feel
Gipsy Kings- Volare
Rare Earth- Eleanor Rigby
Manfred Mann- Quinn the Eskimo
Odetta- Gallows Pole [also Led Zeppelin’s]
Tori Amos- Smells Like teen Spirit
Aerosmith- Come Together
Sonny & Cher- Like a Rolling Stone
Michael Buble’- Fever
Dan & Dale- This Magic Moment
Roches- It’s Bad for Me
Ventures- Nadja’s Theme
Ace Cannon-Blue Prelude
Hugo Winterhalter- Theme from Rosemary’s Baby
Sara Brightman- Whiter Shade of Pale
Michael Hedges- Purple Haze [acoustic!]
Jimmy Lafave- Walk Away Renee
Judy Collins- Dress Rehearsal Rag
Huun-Huur-Tu: The Internationale [Tuvan throat-singing]
The Luv’d Ones- He Cried [was “She Cried”]
Dead Can Dance- The Wind that Shakes the Barley
Concrete Blonde- Everybody Knows
Johnette Napolitano- Dancing Barefoot
Roseanne Cash- River
Indigo Girls- It Won’t Take Long
Sophie B Hawkins- The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Johnny Rivers- Baby I Need Your Lovin’
The Baroque Inevitable- Wild Thing/Sunny
Big daddy-Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
K D Lang- The Joker
The Lions- Happy New Year Twist [Auld Lang Syne]
Joe Cocker- You Are So Beautiful
Laibach- Let It Be
Pointer Sisters- Fire [Bruce Springsteen's]
Ronstadt- The Waiting is the Hardest Part
...& of course that Symphonic Stones album...

And a related thought: are there ever any good movie remakes?
Off the top of my head, Herzog’s Nosferatu; The Italian Job; The Thomas Crown Affair; Coppolla’s Dracula.

I am putting this here because i don't know how much longer it will be at the other location:

"A Pothole Named Copernicus"

Unfortunate it seems but true that we, though subject to mass delusions & cravings as ever, are now no longer the same political animal, as once could be content with parti-pris. Not even relict culture lends identity enough: the only thing in all the present maelstrom that i can find to cling to build on or huddle within, is my panic-stochastic adoption of a to me savoury subculture.

"Subculture" isn't quite the word. That would imply something lesser &, above all, acknowledged as secessionist by the parent culture. Whereas i maintain our glorious center has simply evaporated. What keep us from noticing this simple fact are the massively concerted façades of media sculsh, psepholatry, taxploitation, & an imperial idiom (already on the fritz). We think in terms of something else. But we don't have a name for it yet. Within the shells of the old divisions & stereotypes, a new paradigm has blossomed.

Take a gander at the nearest newsstand & behold. Wherefore (you ask) can there ever be snagged, a quorum of Iguana Owners? A glossy & not negligible magazine (/website) sits there leering forth: & i understand, like apple-bonked Newton, that the true groups today are DISPERSED. Maybe they never do assemble all at once in one place. A force, invisible & plenipotent, still orients them, guides, like filings of steel around one pole of a magnetic tropism. I call it a "Blik".

"Blik" is a way of referring to a group of people by the one quality or predilection they all share. This, their style-philosophy, works for that blik the way a territory used to for tribes. It's a philosophy because it involves ideas (whether or not they're defined or even talked about), unlike consumerist fashion; & it's a style-philosophy because it involves the whole person's lifestyle, not just a point of view. A blik compels you to seek expression.

What creates a blik? Glamour. A fascination with one specialized mode of being-in-the-world. It can be a type of music, a game, a drug, a hobby, a form of sexuality, a religion, a personality cult, a venerable or self-invented artform, a way of making a living (rarely!); it is anything that gives meaning to your life inexhaustibly & whose contemplation creates a ramified discourse --standards of comparison, preference & exclusion. Icons, metaphors, slang, dress, behavior. It
is a playground for the exercise of free choice, & a dialectical encounter with mediated Necessity. And because all glamours involve the manipulation of symbolic objects (--what "magic" ever was) it is not enough to just "talk the talk". We are driven to repeatedly transact whatever magical-metaphorical operations reinforce our blixen.

They feed.

Hardly anyone lacks a blik; most of us belong to several. On one hand, the system of blixen has swallowed up all the major preoccupations of humanity--art, religion, politics--by breaking them down into specialities that fewer & fewer outsiders care to explore; on the other, this system shades off into the infinitesimal subtleties & infinite variety of "taste". To keep this term at all meaningful, i want to restrict it to those things you not only care about enough to demand one way & not another, but also have spent time discriminating & studying. Maybe it doesn't have a newsletter, or conventions to meet others of your ilk at yet; still, these are inherent tendencies--& goals: who will be the first Perfume Critic? Do the Trekkies have a martyr?

We even perceive our predecessors in terms of blixen. Just read a book & become a Druid! Instead of politics-history, culture-history; each century or (in this one) decade a congeries of fads. I don't know if it's any falser. What Morality was to the Nineteenth Century, & Politics is to the Twentieth, Blixen will be to the Twenty First: a metalanguage. No one will be able to talk about anything outside it. Clearly,the notion of "counterculture" has no place. That's what they ALL are.
History is savagely random, but Culture is savagely dialectical. We're left with the dialectics of blixen. This does not mean nothing. If the Sixties succumbed to irony as much as to consumerism, we seem to be entering, dialectically, a "Post-Ironic" period (i owe this term to the Dallas poet Melanie Pruit [1993]). Irony only has meaning against an assumed norm; precisely what's being contested in the current "Kulturkampf". Governance being left to the Politico-Show Biz blik, that power vacuum consequent became parasitized by sundry pirates flying the colors of
the Biblical-Fascist blik (you can fill in the rest). But two blixen far more readily corrupt than conquer one another.... Ensueth farce, Karl; circus age doom.

Ita dixit Graywyvern Grammaticus.

I want to write my riposte to The Purpose Driven Life: The Interrupt Driven Life. But i never can finish a sentence...

One book i’ll never write is a book on song covers--because the subject is endless. We tend to forget that, for popular music, covering other peoples’ songs has
been the norm except for a very few recent decades. I became interested in seeing how many versions i could find of some of my favorite songs (e g. “Harlem Nocturne”), as well as in collecting some of the more idiosyncratic cover bands (Swingle Singers, Spike Jones, the Ventures--everyone knows about the Ventures now, but you haven’t plumbed the depths of human depravity until you’ve heard them do Led Zeppelin--, The Three Suns, & of course [in classical] the great W. Carlos...). To use Stevens’s distinction, versions partake of both the beauty of inflection, & the beauty of innuendo (the song’s relation to its other covers). Also, preferring
a less famous version invokes one of my aesthetic strategies, jiaya (literally, ‘the B-side of a single’, or “the path less taken”). So without further ado, here’s an incomplete list i started putting together yesterday, of some of my favorite covers:

Ronstadt- I Will Always Love You
Joplin- Summertime [which was actually the first version i heard][Ella Fitzgerald's is wonderful too]
Hendrix- All Along the Watchtower
Manfred Mann- Blinded By the Light
Byrds- Mr Tambourine Man
Dakota Staton- Cry Me a River
Nina Simone- Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Animals- House of the Rising Sun [though Odetta’s is also great, & Frijid Pink's]
Tomita- Night on Bald Mountain [among so many it’s hard to choose]
Tori Amos- Real Men
Heart- Battle of Evermore
Beatles- Twist and Shout
Who- Young Man Blues [which led me to Mose Allison]
Feliciano- Light My Fire
Kazumi Watanabe- Walk Don’t Run
Ventures- Apache; Love is Blue
Patti Smith- Because the Night; Gloria [i’m still looking
for “Secret Agent Man”--i know it’s out there]
The Pugs- Popcorn [a cappella!]
Roches- Hallelujah Chorus [a cappella!!]
Sinatra- Laura; A Very Good Year
Sarah Vaughn- Stardust
Roger Williams- Autumn Leaves [with Ferrante & Teicher, & Liberace,
these comprise a minor school of jazzy piano versions which are delightful in small doses, & intolerable in large; e.g. Valjean- Bonanza theme]
Joe Harnell- Harlem Nocturne [bossa nova!]
Perry Como- Fly Me To the Moon [plus all of Andy Williams’s movie songs, but i think most of them were the originals...?]
Oranj Symphonette- Experiment in Terror
Ruth Welcome- Over the Rainbow [zither!]
Vanilla Fudge- Windmills of Your Mind
Petula Clark- Bang Bang
Phranc- Ode to Billie Joe
Two Nice Girls- Sweet Jane [combined with "Anyone Who Has a Heart"; which
reminds me of a track by Oranj Symphonette that combines two similar Mancini songs--this ought to be a genre!]
Doris Day- At Last [it partakes of skewwhiff--’spiritual perversity’--to prefer this to Etta James’s...]
Brasil 66- Day Tripper [or Fool on the Hill--they make them the same song anyway]
Edith Piaf- Exodus Theme [--not to forget Lawrence Welk’s!]
Joan Baez- The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down [i also love the folksongs on her early albums]
Loreena McKennitt- Greensleeve [also i have to mention Leonard
Cohen’s agonizing anti-version--]
Santana- Black Magic Woman [an early Fleetwood Mac song actually, & one of the high points of rock guitar, even if it is over familiar]
Ramsey Lewis Trio- And I Love Her
Coltrane- My Favorite Things
Stevie Ray Vaughn- Voodoo Chile
Hendrix- Star Spangled Banner [i wrote a whole paper on this, for college]
Dean Martin- King of the Road [this & not Roger Miller’s was what
John Stevens was doing--& almost better--]
Dolly Parton- Stairway to Heaven [bluegrass!]
No Doubt- It’s My Life
Faith No More- War Pigs
...& “self-covers”: Elvis Costello’s live reggae “Watching the Detectives”...Dylan’s whole “Live at Budokan” thing (which i saw him on the tour of, when he
came to Ft Worth)...

The prevalence of tribute albums has led to a resurgence, but alas mostly of terribly undistinguished covers. I wanted to like Madonna’s “American Pie”
but she shortened the lyrics!

Requests: i’ve always wanted to hear Patti Smith & Iggy Pop do “The Beat Goes On”...

I could try to connect this to poets reading poems by other people,
but since most poets are such poor readers of their own works, what would be the point?

The Lafcadio Hearn Virtual iDiary.

The Code of a Herdsman.

Then I am Set Round with the Angels of Oxygen.

(The manuscript of the following sonnet was found rolled up inside an almost empty tube of Preparation H, in the trash at an undisclosed location.)

"Some Fellow Ratted Out Me"

Some fellow ratted out me.
Late at night, I essay to work out which,
thinking back, in the pong-threaded dark,
but so many are those grudgeful nebbishes

I've needed to rely since my sad misadventure
eventuated.
That goat-tapeworm Bush
wil never happily throne throne

in the land he reft.
He will never joy the life-days
Allah for what uncanny crotchet
has him gifted past beyond mine.

Today, Bush has the butt itch.
We must manipulate our garden-areas.

"Hitler, for example -- we know he read a lot of Bulwer-Lytton. Osama bin Laden used to read quite a lot of Western science fiction." (via Metafilter)

Often i have thought, since the 80's, when i published with Xerox Sutra (now Xexoxial)--all of whose books had that proportion--that chapbooks were best that had about half text & half pictures. Perhaps they were just too far ahead of their time. Xerox Sutra also pioneered print-on-demand, & although i expect that to become the dominant mode eventually, right now it is something of a curiosity. So now i am thinking of having one of my early chapbooks in that mode scanned in, & if i can get someone to make a pdf of it for me i will sell it at Cafe Press like Fungoids...

I have a 70's facsimile of John Gray's Silverpoints--perhaps the most characteristic poembook of the 1890's--but the poems themselves are just not up to the legend of the book itself. But i've been reading poems by New Zealand poet Charles Spear (on the blog Nacreous Oughts), & i think these are what should have been the contents of Silverpoints...

apricot dawn where ride gray legions
go in dread of the bitter rain

somewhere beyond this melee
love shall fall & pity rain

mangrove, mosquitos & the broken
skyscraper windows in the rain

yet poets shall learn to praise
the varieties of rain

i follow her through cloud labyrinths
by a trail like the smell of rain

though all its garments alter
this is still the same terrain

07 27 04

The "A Time To Kill" effect.

"There's something a bit weird about sitting here at the airport blogging while watching a CNN report about bloggers on the news monitor." --Atrios

Idea for a form: Renghazal (renga-ghazal). Odd-numbered couplets have 17 syllables combined; even ones have 14. Couplets linked by renga-like connections. Probably should only repeat the one word, at the end of each couplet.

I was doing checkout, at the raised pulpit, when all the lights flickered out a second then came back on immediately, & at the same time a sound like a raggeder sonic boom was heard from the mall across from us. Everyone stopped & looked that way. A minute later another (no flicker); half a minute later, the last.
I found out a water main broke.

"For those who desire an honourable release, typhoid lice, three in a box, price twopence, are peddled in the streets by starving corner boys." --The Orators

Listening to- Ancient Ceremonies: Dance Music & Songs of Ghana

Poet Vs Poet. (via Poetry Hut)

I Ain't the Only Homeless Blogger.

I scored 48 1/2...

Pac-Mondrian. (via Free Space Comics)

     "Cento from Bryant"

Blasphemous worship under roofs of gold
Yet beautiful as wild--were trod by me
So grateful, when the moon of summer made
And soon that toil shall end;

And many a hanging crag. But, to the east,
Vesuvius smokes in sight, whose fount of fire,
And glad, that he has gone to his reward;
And the ruffed grouse is drumming far within
The record of an idle revery.

07 25 04

In Oz.

"Although I think the Japanese sex industry is the best in the world, and must be a fascinating thing to get a guided tour of (the sex industry here represents 1% of GDP, the same size as the Japanese defense industry --...)"  --Click Opera

Lunokhod 1. (via Riddell)

Kasparov on Fischer. (via ALDaily)

Earmouse.

The thirst for lies is like the desire for change
Except despair not hope stands watch in the crow’s-nest.

    07 21 04

Listening to: Lene Lovich.


A fellow employee was grumbling about the Danielle Steel “limited editions” we had on sale for $50. I said, “What do you expect in a world where a first edition of Harry Potter is worth more than a first edition of Dickens?” He said, “This is WORSE.”

It is sometimes used as a charge against syllabic verse, that humans cannot perceive such counts; & therefore it is so completely arbitrary as to be meaningless. I disagree. You just have to think in terms of drumbeats. The Japanese building-block “five plus seven” is contained in such nursery rhymes as “Old Macdonald had a farm/ E-I-E-I-O”. and i was listening to a song by Shonen Knife the other day (“Buddha’s Face”) which starts with a run of eleven staccato chords, then two different, then eleven, then two: & it was perfectly intelligible. I would’ve been able to tell the second part was off if it’d been ten or twelve. (But i’ll have to ask someone who’s a real drummer about Marianne Moore’s “nineteen plus four”.)

Ah, the Golden Treasury of Knowledge--the encyclopedia of my childhood. I’ve never seen anything like it: the articles were mysteriously grouped, not alphabetized, giving me already a glimpse of heterodox gestalts; & illustrated lavishly in a melodramatic style derivative of Delacroix. (Anyone who grew up with these is already half a painter.) I was especially troubled by the sinister energy of the pictures of wild animals, prehistoric & primitive peoples. They had something i could not imagine myself ever achieving: joyous freedom.     Later, when i began prowling garage sales, i picked up a couple loose volumes for next to nothing. When i looked again at the pictures, i felt obscurely stirring so many inarticulate emotions i’d projected onto them, & made them perforce the only possible names of. Hauntingly familiar, yet unreadable today.     And it must have been the article on “Hieroglyphs” that started my fascination with the nuts & bolts of language.

Apacheria.

Qatabanian.

The Star Trek Myth: towards a historical materialist critique.

Sxoaxi.

Found an illustrated booklet about the "Parade at Persepolis", part of a celebration the Shah of Iran put on in 1971 that saw a lot of heads of state, & also a few avant garde artists, including Peter Brooks, who produced a play written especially for this event by Ted Hughes (in a "language" he invented), "Orghast", later the subject of a fascinating book by A C H Smith.

Some Orghast words: hoan, 'light'; bullorga, 'darkness'; ombolom, 'womb'; glittalugh, 'stars'; gleorghasta, 'the vulture'; oarglakris, 'the eagle'; boh, 'death'.

Ernst Kipling sent me this poem as an answer to mine from yesterday:

“The Clown inside his study reads of war
and ponders deeply where the letters burn:
‘In war’s upheaval all new things are born.’

We raise our malls where clashes and massacres were,
unmindful of the cost of present peace.
The ravens’ shadows lingeringly abide.

A Clown can find in old accounts imbued
with human loss, a most instructive compass:
what soldiers chose, and what they did not choose,
purified by the terror and the goal...

In solitary rooms each Clown turns west
and either lets or does not let beguile
the sunset’s hues across this sparkling waste;
and learns at last defeat is not the worst.” 

"(there are a lot of retro Beats out who strike me as the literary equivalent of Civil War re-enactors)" 

   "Dog Sausage"

All the gray unlovely wars
Are written up; & shelves in stores
Sag burdened with their glad redundance,
The numbers dry, the backwards pundits:

We move a lot of them. I wonder
If past can outscream present thunder,
If turning over frozen battles
Shields the mind from window-rattles.

Or do they crave a narrative
When chaos stalks them where they live;
The outcomes clear, roles well-defined
Of victor &--the other kind?

Although it suits commercial sales
I think war boasts far fewer tales
Than these. There's really only one,
Of pain unsought, then no more fun.

A pamphlet maybe. Who would read
If all it said was, "None succeed"?
And who'd pursue that glorious boon
If all it meant was, "Die too soon"?

The books continue, pale & prim.
I wish i needn't deal with them
Or have to hear the savage news
That sizzles like a creeping fuse.

07 19 04

New Sosnowski.

Just watched The Night of the Iguana. This is the poem the old poet finally finishes after 20 years:
 
"How calmly does the olive branch
observe the sky begin to blanch,
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair!

Sometime while night obscures the tree
the zenith of its life will be
gone, past, forever. And from thence
a second history will commence
 
a chronicle no longer gold
a bargaining with mist and mold
and finally the broken stem,
the plummeting to earth, and then
 
an intercourse not well designed
for beings of a golden kind,
whose native green must arch above
the earth's obscene corrupting love,

and still the ripe fruit and the branch
observe the sky begin to blanch
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair.

Oh courage! could you not as well
select a second place to dwell,
not only in that golden tree
but in the frightened heart of me?"
 

Yeah, you'd think there'd be Asimov's Laws for corporations--wouldn't you?
Not if the robots write them. They don't see the need.

Pollution level red.
 
"As models for their language and style the Hellenistic poets had the entire range of ancient Greek literature to call upon, from heroic times onwards; and they had the great new libraries in which they could read its masterpieces. ...they drew upon it for what it had to offer, adding ingenious variations of their own with elaborate erudition and refined self-consciousness. The trick was to revive the words, phrases and rare poetical usages of authors of the past...and to give them a cunning twist, bringing them together in piquant new combinations and endowing them with novel nuances of meaning." --Michael Grant, From Alexander to Cleopatra (1982)
 
Best zine name: Phosphorus Flourish. Runners-up: Spectacular Diseases, Scree, NeoVictorian Cochlea.
 

"...Theodore von Grift, the former phenomenon, is an average man weighing one hundred and forty pounds and composed of enough water to fill a ten-gallon barrel, enough fat for seven cakes of soap, enough carbon for nine thousand lead pencils, enough phosphorus to make twenty-two hundred match heads, sufficient magnesium for one dose of salts, enough iron to make one medium-sized nail, sufficient lime to whitewash a chicken coop, and enough sulfur to rid one dog of fleas."  --Joanna Scott, Various Antidotes (1994)
 

"We have become a people of esoteric leisure."  --W Hampton Sides, Stomping Grounds (1992) [A whole book relevant to my concept of blixen.] 
 

This is kind of how i felt about getting laid off:

      "A Silence in the Modem

That password's now defunct--what you remember
is worthless. You will never ride again
the eager way, in pleasure or in labor,
that password's now defunct.
 
Why did you dream, of all things, clownly gain;
and when you took up planning, were you sober?
Passwords, like jet trails, bloom under the gun.
 
This is a world of frail and febrile jabber,
whose towers stand no sounder; khaki goon
and ashen wind divide you from that chamber:
that password's now defunct."

--Ernst A. Kipling in Eratosphere 
 

The fighting poets. (via Antiwar)
 

Antonyms et al in Arabic. (via Dumbfoundry) 

Every time i see a blog-discussion on prosody, i’m amazed all over again how this musty old topic can still generate confusion, & heat. The basics. But then i remember we’re basically dealing with a situation similar to that in which Classical Latin was revived in the early Renaissance by people who didn’t speak it. (Except that those people bothered to get it right.) It’s not like the versifiers of today even started with the bad poems one can hear on the radio ten times an hour. They start with textbooks, & listening to people read who don’t even stop at the end of their lines (sigh). But i really would like to see one confusion reversed: between ICTUS (beat) & STRESS (which is a relative thing of adjacencies). And poetry in English was always a thing of beats; still is, if you care to listen. The most expert prosodists did things that still can’t be explained by the old GraecoRoman style of analyzing “feet”: i am thinking specifically of W S Gilbert, & his song in The Mikado that goes:

“...awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock/ 
from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block”.
 
Now, you probably have no trouble hearing the change in velocity of each line toward the end. In fact, he goes straight from duple feet (“aWAITing the senSAtion”) to syncopation (“SHORT SHARP SHOCK”) without so much as pausing for a real iamb in between. --These lines can be put into musical notation better than they correspond to the binary analysis of “stressed” & “unstressed”. I think it can be safely said that when the great poets like Shakespeare & Milton & Tennyson had reached the point of being able to speak freely in perfectly regular verse, they did not rest in this mastery, but began to explore polyrhythms & the effects of countering hearers’ expectations. Too bad the teachers of prosody couldn’t follow it!

      "Banned Words Poem"

Exquisitely Emily chrome magnolia
Dickinson Viking melancholy crowded
 
Solitude where a subterranean wind
Battles the firmament grid for brig airspace

Iridescent sallies still more passionate
Than the iridescent pflungg ideogram

Meet you in Emily Dickinson attire
Where burning utterance names the wind Tokay

No angel jowls on Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson hones the chrome unnamed

Belly for this, muses a strange appendage
Structure mien in the belly of angel graves

         07 15 04

Ozone level Orange. Thank the rain; by now it should be Red.

Amusingly, the Judy Dench "M" character in recent Bond flicks seems to be based on a real person: we have her memoirs, Open Secret by Stella Rimington.

"The North Texas area is home to:

* 1 million Mexicans, including 300,000 people from the state of Guanajuato
* 40,000 Chinese-Americans and slightly more Pakistanis
* about 25,000 Iranians and an equal number of Arabs
* 80,000 people of Vietnamese descent
* nearly 100,000 people from India" --from the DFW International site

Listening to: Sahara Lounge

Dog Ate My Homework.

"...if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world."

Markov Page. (via Wood_s Lot)

The Trail of the Comet.

Transit of Venus March. (via Riddell)

Hail Junior.

Hubble Bubble. (Not this one.)

Text Message Novel. (Written in 70-word chapters; cf zacco.)

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).