The movie which was shot in part at the bookstore i work at, finally came out.
A good bunch of listings on Harold Cohen's drawing robot Aaron. I ran across the book Aaron's Code awhile back, & was deeply impressed. More than any other attempt i have seen, this produces a convincing imitation of human intelligence at work.
"According to the International Labor Organization, Americans now work 1,978 hours annually, a full 350 hours - nine weeks - more than Western Europeans. The average American actually worked 199 hours more in 2000 than he or she did in 1973, a period during which worker productivity per hour nearly doubled." --via Signal Vs Noise
If you go to my Amazon Wish List, you'll find The Codex Seraphinianus. That's a joke. But the book--surely the weirdest ever written--is not. At least, so anybody can figure. It's about an imaginary world, profusely illustrated, & written in an unknown language. Borges would be proud...
Saturday, April 26, 2003
"THE BUILDING OF THE SKYSCRAPER
The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.
There are words that mean nothing
But there is something to mean.
Not a declaration which is truth
But a thing
Which is. It is the business of the poet
'To suffer the things of the world
And to speak them and himself out.'
O, the tree, growing from the sidewalk--
It has a little life, sprouting
Little green buds
Into the culture of the streets.
We look back
Three hundred years and see bare land.
And suffer vertigo."
George Oppen
The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.
There are words that mean nothing
But there is something to mean.
Not a declaration which is truth
But a thing
Which is. It is the business of the poet
'To suffer the things of the world
And to speak them and himself out.'
O, the tree, growing from the sidewalk--
It has a little life, sprouting
Little green buds
Into the culture of the streets.
We look back
Three hundred years and see bare land.
And suffer vertigo."
George Oppen
Friday, April 25, 2003
When democracy fails, there's always the Euro...
Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
Nine Blue Castles - the cento poetry movement
Jaquemart Waltz - the computer poetry movement
Brass Zyxomma - the artificial language movement
"The author of 'The Philosophy of Composition' is rather another of Poe's manic narrators..." --Richard Ruland
Poetry has power the way intimacy has power.
'Night is a moth in the night of lamps.' --Jabès
gnat shadows - a movie based on a comic book
Whigs - the Retro Avantgarde
glimflash - one genre superimposed on another e.g. Dread Zeppelin = a reggae Zep cover band fronted by an Elvis impersonator; Big Daddy = Beatles songs redone in Fifties styles; the bluegrass cover of "Whiter Shade of Pale"; Pat Boone's album of heavy metal songs...the Name of the Rose
"Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit..." --John Dennis, The Age of Pope (1896)
Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
Nine Blue Castles - the cento poetry movement
Jaquemart Waltz - the computer poetry movement
Brass Zyxomma - the artificial language movement
"The author of 'The Philosophy of Composition' is rather another of Poe's manic narrators..." --Richard Ruland
Poetry has power the way intimacy has power.
'Night is a moth in the night of lamps.' --Jabès
gnat shadows - a movie based on a comic book
Whigs - the Retro Avantgarde
glimflash - one genre superimposed on another e.g. Dread Zeppelin = a reggae Zep cover band fronted by an Elvis impersonator; Big Daddy = Beatles songs redone in Fifties styles; the bluegrass cover of "Whiter Shade of Pale"; Pat Boone's album of heavy metal songs...the Name of the Rose
"Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit..." --John Dennis, The Age of Pope (1896)
The origin of Art: every night of sleep is the same, every night of insomnia is different.
caco-metonymy: using not-quite the right word, on purpose; a dissonance
"You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty. ...But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty." --G. M. Hopkins
snally - greedy for solitude
paxwax - defensive contempt
"The argument of mine afflicted stile..." --Spenser
"In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame." --E. A. Robinson
Best Titles. A Streetcar Named Desire. Until the Sun Dies. Of a Fire on the Moon. The Romance of Orthodoxy. Gravity's Rainbow. The Small Needle of Doctor Large. Habitation of Dragons. Purple Violet Squish. Ascent into Hell. The Dreadful Lemon Sky. For My Great Folly. Nightspawn. Atlas Shrugged. Apostle in a Top Hat. Dorp Dead.
"So alike are the peaks, the forests, and the villages of Nepal to the fantastic landscapes of Tolkien, so common are the characters that resemble the cast of their stories...that many travellers, without apparent validation, believe that Tolkien had once lived there, especially at a forest place called Glorapani, when he conceived those remarkable stories." --David Zurick, Errant Journeys (1995)
Lives lived in a dimness of mosquitos. They don't even have a word for "mosquito".
"What holy cities are to nomadic tribes--a symbol of race and a bond of union--great books are to the wandering souls of men; they are the Meccas of the mind. Homer was to Greece another Delphi." --G. E. Woodberry
Best Titles. The Way of All Flesh. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Too Far to Walk. From Here to Eternity. Darkness at Noon. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To Kill a Mockingbird. Call It Sleep. Nausea. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Mother Night. The Color Purple. This Island Earth.
"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries." --Roethke
As if all the ways to be broken were an alphabet, we hearken only to what could be stories written in it. --Incomprehensible to those who come after. We thought we were saying something important, but all of it is destined to be lost. To write, now, with that awareness.
Best Titles. Faith, Keep the Baby. Christ's Witchdoctor. Nightwood. The Book of the It. The Cat Who Sniffed Glue. Death of a Ghost. The Sun is My Undoing. Smilla's Sense of Snow. I, the Jury. Dieting Makes You Fat. The Dark Light Years. The Ticket that Exploded. The Anathemata. Till We Have Faces. You Shall Know Them. Something Wicked This Way Comes. The History of Luminous Motion. Lithium for Medea. Les Fleurs du Mal. All the Colors of Darkness. Shadow of the Moon. In the Storm of the Eye. Mission of Gravity. Gone with the Wind. The Satanic Verses.
"It may be said that in round numbers, the verse of about five hundred people appears yearly in American magazines--thousands send in manuscripts, only to have them returned; the number may be anywhere from twenty thousand to fifty thousand. About two hundred volumes of verse appear in the course of a year, but publishers say that not one-quarter of them are profitable; perhaps one-eighth, twenty-five, are bought by quite a number of people, that is, there are twenty-five poets in our population whom people really want to read. Let us consider that one person in five thousand is sending verse to magazines, one in 250,000 gets it printed, one in 600,000 issues a book of poems, and one in five million is a real poet." --William Ellsworth, in: 5000 New Answers to Questions (1933) [At this time the U.S. population was about half what it is today.]
caco-metonymy: using not-quite the right word, on purpose; a dissonance
"You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty. ...But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty." --G. M. Hopkins
snally - greedy for solitude
paxwax - defensive contempt
"The argument of mine afflicted stile..." --Spenser
"In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame." --E. A. Robinson
Best Titles. A Streetcar Named Desire. Until the Sun Dies. Of a Fire on the Moon. The Romance of Orthodoxy. Gravity's Rainbow. The Small Needle of Doctor Large. Habitation of Dragons. Purple Violet Squish. Ascent into Hell. The Dreadful Lemon Sky. For My Great Folly. Nightspawn. Atlas Shrugged. Apostle in a Top Hat. Dorp Dead.
"So alike are the peaks, the forests, and the villages of Nepal to the fantastic landscapes of Tolkien, so common are the characters that resemble the cast of their stories...that many travellers, without apparent validation, believe that Tolkien had once lived there, especially at a forest place called Glorapani, when he conceived those remarkable stories." --David Zurick, Errant Journeys (1995)
Lives lived in a dimness of mosquitos. They don't even have a word for "mosquito".
"What holy cities are to nomadic tribes--a symbol of race and a bond of union--great books are to the wandering souls of men; they are the Meccas of the mind. Homer was to Greece another Delphi." --G. E. Woodberry
Best Titles. The Way of All Flesh. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Too Far to Walk. From Here to Eternity. Darkness at Noon. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To Kill a Mockingbird. Call It Sleep. Nausea. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Mother Night. The Color Purple. This Island Earth.
"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries." --Roethke
As if all the ways to be broken were an alphabet, we hearken only to what could be stories written in it. --Incomprehensible to those who come after. We thought we were saying something important, but all of it is destined to be lost. To write, now, with that awareness.
Best Titles. Faith, Keep the Baby. Christ's Witchdoctor. Nightwood. The Book of the It. The Cat Who Sniffed Glue. Death of a Ghost. The Sun is My Undoing. Smilla's Sense of Snow. I, the Jury. Dieting Makes You Fat. The Dark Light Years. The Ticket that Exploded. The Anathemata. Till We Have Faces. You Shall Know Them. Something Wicked This Way Comes. The History of Luminous Motion. Lithium for Medea. Les Fleurs du Mal. All the Colors of Darkness. Shadow of the Moon. In the Storm of the Eye. Mission of Gravity. Gone with the Wind. The Satanic Verses.
"It may be said that in round numbers, the verse of about five hundred people appears yearly in American magazines--thousands send in manuscripts, only to have them returned; the number may be anywhere from twenty thousand to fifty thousand. About two hundred volumes of verse appear in the course of a year, but publishers say that not one-quarter of them are profitable; perhaps one-eighth, twenty-five, are bought by quite a number of people, that is, there are twenty-five poets in our population whom people really want to read. Let us consider that one person in five thousand is sending verse to magazines, one in 250,000 gets it printed, one in 600,000 issues a book of poems, and one in five million is a real poet." --William Ellsworth, in: 5000 New Answers to Questions (1933) [At this time the U.S. population was about half what it is today.]
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Not-to-miss Lucius Shepard review of a book of photography that tells us the future we've been abducted into.
So Webern used the SATOR magic square to write a piece of music with? Interesting. I once created this square:
S E R A C
E L E N A
R E F E R
A N E L E
C A R E S
to mimic its properties with all words from my collegiate dictionary ("anele" is an obsolete form of 'anoint'; "Elena" is the Italian 'Helen'; "serac" is an ice pinnacle), only to find out while poring through back issues of Word Ways, that it had been discovered 15 years earlier by a computer...
'After three years of experience as a painter, Congo discovered the ellipse and the circle, and soon afterwards the painting materials became inadequate to occupy the brimming vitality and enjoyment of play of the young male chimpanzee, by now a very assertive personality. Congo drew ellipses with ever-increasing ardour until he lost concentration completely. Intoxicated by circular forms, Congo's painting regressed into pure gesturality.' --Thierry Lenain, Monkey Painting (1990, tr Caroline Beamish 1997)
(I was like that after i discovered anaglyphic painting.)
I hear they're doing a remake of "The Alamo": not only is every detail historically accurate, this time it's told from the point of view of Santa Ana.
So Webern used the SATOR magic square to write a piece of music with? Interesting. I once created this square:
S E R A C
E L E N A
R E F E R
A N E L E
C A R E S
to mimic its properties with all words from my collegiate dictionary ("anele" is an obsolete form of 'anoint'; "Elena" is the Italian 'Helen'; "serac" is an ice pinnacle), only to find out while poring through back issues of Word Ways, that it had been discovered 15 years earlier by a computer...
'After three years of experience as a painter, Congo discovered the ellipse and the circle, and soon afterwards the painting materials became inadequate to occupy the brimming vitality and enjoyment of play of the young male chimpanzee, by now a very assertive personality. Congo drew ellipses with ever-increasing ardour until he lost concentration completely. Intoxicated by circular forms, Congo's painting regressed into pure gesturality.' --Thierry Lenain, Monkey Painting (1990, tr Caroline Beamish 1997)
(I was like that after i discovered anaglyphic painting.)
I hear they're doing a remake of "The Alamo": not only is every detail historically accurate, this time it's told from the point of view of Santa Ana.
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
3.
Ice proud limitary cherub hell
We sleepwalkers roil swimming
Burgeon the military,
All other ebbing.
The soul grows folk clotted arming art
Chrome with blanks, dense tutelary solitude
Emerald slag frankincense
Or in dream
Fain to discover the toxic key;
I haggle the roach.
Sprockets divulge at last purlieu alembic:
Dim sunlight,
Magnifying glass calligraphy.
And when zombies grope Armageddon,
Profound the sciamachy.
4.
Pazuzu grained stone,
I build in air the testament of calcspar
Baja fjord
For those who were too many
Ladle in darkness
A waste of compassion probably
Here we trap
Our own outlines in the stern mackerel sky
File under vile arabesque
And leave/. Stay. They remain talisman
Guiding the grackle
Home from his pilgrimage to the off white moon,
Gift of truth
Lurch for us whose planet murders the lotus
With crave, with a glitch
At Beltane
The sun is a bleak silver
Coin at zenith, i a library
Mourn. Nectar
Hurls down landscape of charcoal
Have watched the Pallid Mask abolish
My words at each curse
Is this Wyrd is this cobweb iridescence
Not cryptic...?
Michael Helsem
April 16-20, 2003
Ice proud limitary cherub hell
We sleepwalkers roil swimming
Burgeon the military,
All other ebbing.
The soul grows folk clotted arming art
Chrome with blanks, dense tutelary solitude
Emerald slag frankincense
Or in dream
Fain to discover the toxic key;
I haggle the roach.
Sprockets divulge at last purlieu alembic:
Dim sunlight,
Magnifying glass calligraphy.
And when zombies grope Armageddon,
Profound the sciamachy.
4.
Pazuzu grained stone,
I build in air the testament of calcspar
Baja fjord
For those who were too many
Ladle in darkness
A waste of compassion probably
Here we trap
Our own outlines in the stern mackerel sky
File under vile arabesque
And leave/. Stay. They remain talisman
Guiding the grackle
Home from his pilgrimage to the off white moon,
Gift of truth
Lurch for us whose planet murders the lotus
With crave, with a glitch
At Beltane
The sun is a bleak silver
Coin at zenith, i a library
Mourn. Nectar
Hurls down landscape of charcoal
Have watched the Pallid Mask abolish
My words at each curse
Is this Wyrd is this cobweb iridescence
Not cryptic...?
Michael Helsem
April 16-20, 2003
2.
Rex: Despoilation
Needs no ad
No toxic "ut dare, da"
Not even pure clairvoyance
Beats Adolf Hitler
In cowboy boots, mutiny if they scoff God
The profound at the heart of the game
Void for manticore
Quoth Crawford
The power
High oh high the foul glory
Grope & never mind profound Ucalegon
To burn, so glory leave & topaz
In my beaker, in my bleak heart normalcy
Which wine is of assassin
Salted the rim/ kingdom come. Coded
Kamêa
River walk development
Up, eulowirree
Up, the blizzard Ba
Of my ab
Flatness; bleed, liberal left. Omnipotent
My ideology, asymptote
Only this lasso can carve off & 'a'â
Swallow: no plan B
Allowed bleed. Corporation
Profits sing end on to Kyzylkum
Kill Gaea
If I have to, make Baja
Ev'rywhere. The dark & poor workforce
Calls for holocaust
And quick. Faith
Left. I am stuck with my theocrat karma,
My three best dogs. Emerald the lungfish Faust
In crimson water
Longing to make halt music
Leave face up me if vomit beyond
Enigma
This is my bad flesh
So perilous powerful
"Amontillado"
You bleed O Mesopotamia
Syzygy
I love the word I love my unwept death bed
Grope gospel where is it?; fad
Trepan resentment
Cockpit of flying phantasmagoria
Love the smell of books burn evil jab
Drugs I had
Given can't up hide my crystal face
I am God's own dibble love the squeal of lab
Rats' fear Frankenstein
I made I can't Khoronzon
I crave black
Sleep I am terrible the love no
Terminizer bent proverb
I sink Atlantis
Down I am Nugent's "Stranglehold" I love bronze
Busts wodwo
Sees me grow. I am Budweiser buzz
My Assyrian vengeance At all flies famous
Stone lion eagle supreme
Beautiful
Rise in entropy
Wet sprockets gleaming discourse
Headlights on in the daytime savor of edge,
There abide
Mother should I build a hieroglyph
Evening wolverine
Tastes the edge-: regimes we made
Chrome shards scatter end
My soul chrome a house of cards earthworm
Emerald ichor, acid rain, poverty
Lifts its ax
In the blackout night are all
Gathered hazards need
The computer dead i turn away & call
One last perfect annihilation
--Tennyson
Bleed mud puree watch evil
Bombers thrumming off in green neon
Flashes grow fury
And we find in ourselves the chrome edged courage
Azrael
Greasy new meaning
To this dust caked absolute
Or zaqqum
Chore i am still not more tyvek to
Stopgreasy flange fracture master the image
Land was star ours before we were Ctesiphon
And Sputnik
Under one bare bulb
Rex: Despoilation
Needs no ad
No toxic "ut dare, da"
Not even pure clairvoyance
Beats Adolf Hitler
In cowboy boots, mutiny if they scoff God
The profound at the heart of the game
Void for manticore
Quoth Crawford
The power
High oh high the foul glory
Grope & never mind profound Ucalegon
To burn, so glory leave & topaz
In my beaker, in my bleak heart normalcy
Which wine is of assassin
Salted the rim/ kingdom come. Coded
Kamêa
River walk development
Up, eulowirree
Up, the blizzard Ba
Of my ab
Flatness; bleed, liberal left. Omnipotent
My ideology, asymptote
Only this lasso can carve off & 'a'â
Swallow: no plan B
Allowed bleed. Corporation
Profits sing end on to Kyzylkum
Kill Gaea
If I have to, make Baja
Ev'rywhere. The dark & poor workforce
Calls for holocaust
And quick. Faith
Left. I am stuck with my theocrat karma,
My three best dogs. Emerald the lungfish Faust
In crimson water
Longing to make halt music
Leave face up me if vomit beyond
Enigma
This is my bad flesh
So perilous powerful
"Amontillado"
You bleed O Mesopotamia
Syzygy
I love the word I love my unwept death bed
Grope gospel where is it?; fad
Trepan resentment
Cockpit of flying phantasmagoria
Love the smell of books burn evil jab
Drugs I had
Given can't up hide my crystal face
I am God's own dibble love the squeal of lab
Rats' fear Frankenstein
I made I can't Khoronzon
I crave black
Sleep I am terrible the love no
Terminizer bent proverb
I sink Atlantis
Down I am Nugent's "Stranglehold" I love bronze
Busts wodwo
Sees me grow. I am Budweiser buzz
My Assyrian vengeance At all flies famous
Stone lion eagle supreme
Beautiful
Rise in entropy
Wet sprockets gleaming discourse
Headlights on in the daytime savor of edge,
There abide
Mother should I build a hieroglyph
Evening wolverine
Tastes the edge-: regimes we made
Chrome shards scatter end
My soul chrome a house of cards earthworm
Emerald ichor, acid rain, poverty
Lifts its ax
In the blackout night are all
Gathered hazards need
The computer dead i turn away & call
One last perfect annihilation
--Tennyson
Bleed mud puree watch evil
Bombers thrumming off in green neon
Flashes grow fury
And we find in ourselves the chrome edged courage
Azrael
Greasy new meaning
To this dust caked absolute
Or zaqqum
Chore i am still not more tyvek to
Stopgreasy flange fracture master the image
Land was star ours before we were Ctesiphon
And Sputnik
Under one bare bulb
Monday, April 21, 2003
Nina Simone has just died. I'm sorry to see how little she is remembered by the oldies stations; she was a singer with the greatness that seldom happens once in a generation. My favorite song of hers is her cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", but she has a dozen others just as powerful. And at this time especially, we need musicians with her combination of talent & political awareness...
-----------------------------------------------------------
MARDUK
1.
To do with Rigel
The slow sudden hejira
We belong to like fiery morning sapphire
From Chartres...
I wend raucous breath
My steps an intricate coinage
Echo sphinx
In the chasms of the polyglot morning
Like spilt arterial iron
To give them their beloved razor sigil
Call it the last exodus
Before the gate slams. Never sweven
So fragile
Milky Way rim/ star
Power we leave.; pyramid
He. Autumn's crash now. Receive the gift of drouth
This swift triage
Acid burn from what is known lurch castle
Pall, pilgrim
And utter coincidence
Cantrip words
A planet whose age is now at wise or frost
The browning magnolia
Emerald gaze of basilisk crwth
Smart monkey's on the closure
Gray veil of yearning
Lungfish harness like an alibi
Foolishly clutching the constipated name
Down volvox
Corridors of orpiment
What have you done since you happened here
Wars have come
To bring down sorrow
Grow. My books torn up watch streak the Plenilune
Bones on the terrible tide
Walk the night made fire
Metatron
Tiger whose profile fares Assyrian
I face you iron down evil yang lair
This soft isopleth
Close pent by trembling wisteria
A thing of moments surely
Do pasture
He: away she: i teach syringe grip cobweb
Moonlight shining can't abalone
Dark twin you create
And the hatred is the pearl
Puree snow
On the slippery ramparts of malachite
Want. Take book
Long shadows of early traffic lapping Ghayb
The havoc men do
Walks after them judge. Pungent the badge
Blithe brisk neotheocrat
Fantasizing their immunity
Killing an Arab
In the gallery wall leaning plates of lead
La Messe-Noire
Fox News for invocation
Green gloom iron men baobab
Sliced an ear
Evil rumors for, not; nor meaninglessness
Arrayed divine flying Hakenkreuz
Flaunts commodity
Relationship as all, those lips vermilion
From their drink, it's fate
My ink to want. Debâcle
Bitter tryst--
Mutiny goes vegetarian.
If Rigel polkas
This burning (me) inside is fled, opium
Of the CEOs, a prayer
In stiletto point azure dimness
Swerve we strength
Rain down illusion
Cluster pierce clinic Baghdad
Oncoming windshield's flicker the tube lurch lack
Sprockets Dad
Lent hear Pazuzu streak the freak ace
War dog ice deliquescent
Slab soot rain direction widderguess
Hammurabi slab bereft & lucent bead
Shrieks the Ka
Then Esperantos
High on styrofoam;
The precise Rosicrucian
Eft & perilous anagrammatism
Leads us to a frigid adage:
Feed your head.
Salvage all unknowable,
Mutiny from, & toxic squamous Chartreuse
Avalanche wrench purlieu Baptist free
Such agate
Lanterns receive, plague
And perverse cat madonna
A slag that people
Take. What is it in the fierce green griffin ghost
Begs chaos
Come flay pierce crush bring dust on logic
Crave? A mystery
Mind's grip cannot find to hold, Zugzwang
Perfect cage
Never devised sightless deaf
Sun.: tantamount panic eclipse of Ea
Lurch black cab
I wake to Mokusatsu
Media poisoned beyond Mithridation
This planet where i can only be
Lungfish egg gone bad
Temple falling down crepuscular
And murderous foreclosure
The temple countdown
Poet built rocket to Alpha Centauri
Grip with jade
I can't see--intricate thorn faded
Muezzin's terrible altered significance
Lamps of olive oil
Caught falling we crave muskeg
Crave loot vault
Crave sky god power have/. Irony
Fathoms square
Ariel's truth. Puree of Mirrabooka
We find salvage in dead quartz
Digits our bible
Never peace
Stand within frantic the zymurgy
Dumb to ask the name of this polyester
Dog Itzcuintli
Or raucous spoonerism
Ones i loved now under rubble a
Psychopath grade A
Sent there (sans interjection)
Devised for them metallic cunnilingus
Ash fall baa
And bitter A/C
Face they full of piercings bag
Share the rapture sea./? & sky the Day same gab
Burning tank hulk desert; bulldozer
Desert; rain
Chrome gastropod
Trail colossal crystal amethyst Ubar
Lord of hosts horde of locusts: All grass
Is flesh. Dinosaur mercy
Grease reserves gazelle
Cry in R'lyeh
We do know there are some things alone
We do not know lehua
Desert but acid but there are tenebrous
Too, Krypton
Unknown unknowns the ones (cede)
We don't know we lurch don't know (cede ice)
Faked evidence & bleed at this conjunction
Grope Ouroboros
For caca
The ordinances of the nether dank cad
World desert. are perfect. Zaglossus
-----------------------------------------------------------
MARDUK
1.
To do with Rigel
The slow sudden hejira
We belong to like fiery morning sapphire
From Chartres...
I wend raucous breath
My steps an intricate coinage
Echo sphinx
In the chasms of the polyglot morning
Like spilt arterial iron
To give them their beloved razor sigil
Call it the last exodus
Before the gate slams. Never sweven
So fragile
Milky Way rim/ star
Power we leave.; pyramid
He. Autumn's crash now. Receive the gift of drouth
This swift triage
Acid burn from what is known lurch castle
Pall, pilgrim
And utter coincidence
Cantrip words
A planet whose age is now at wise or frost
The browning magnolia
Emerald gaze of basilisk crwth
Smart monkey's on the closure
Gray veil of yearning
Lungfish harness like an alibi
Foolishly clutching the constipated name
Down volvox
Corridors of orpiment
What have you done since you happened here
Wars have come
To bring down sorrow
Grow. My books torn up watch streak the Plenilune
Bones on the terrible tide
Walk the night made fire
Metatron
Tiger whose profile fares Assyrian
I face you iron down evil yang lair
This soft isopleth
Close pent by trembling wisteria
A thing of moments surely
Do pasture
He: away she: i teach syringe grip cobweb
Moonlight shining can't abalone
Dark twin you create
And the hatred is the pearl
Puree snow
On the slippery ramparts of malachite
Want. Take book
Long shadows of early traffic lapping Ghayb
The havoc men do
Walks after them judge. Pungent the badge
Blithe brisk neotheocrat
Fantasizing their immunity
Killing an Arab
In the gallery wall leaning plates of lead
La Messe-Noire
Fox News for invocation
Green gloom iron men baobab
Sliced an ear
Evil rumors for, not; nor meaninglessness
Arrayed divine flying Hakenkreuz
Flaunts commodity
Relationship as all, those lips vermilion
From their drink, it's fate
My ink to want. Debâcle
Bitter tryst--
Mutiny goes vegetarian.
If Rigel polkas
This burning (me) inside is fled, opium
Of the CEOs, a prayer
In stiletto point azure dimness
Swerve we strength
Rain down illusion
Cluster pierce clinic Baghdad
Oncoming windshield's flicker the tube lurch lack
Sprockets Dad
Lent hear Pazuzu streak the freak ace
War dog ice deliquescent
Slab soot rain direction widderguess
Hammurabi slab bereft & lucent bead
Shrieks the Ka
Then Esperantos
High on styrofoam;
The precise Rosicrucian
Eft & perilous anagrammatism
Leads us to a frigid adage:
Feed your head.
Salvage all unknowable,
Mutiny from, & toxic squamous Chartreuse
Avalanche wrench purlieu Baptist free
Such agate
Lanterns receive, plague
And perverse cat madonna
A slag that people
Take. What is it in the fierce green griffin ghost
Begs chaos
Come flay pierce crush bring dust on logic
Crave? A mystery
Mind's grip cannot find to hold, Zugzwang
Perfect cage
Never devised sightless deaf
Sun.: tantamount panic eclipse of Ea
Lurch black cab
I wake to Mokusatsu
Media poisoned beyond Mithridation
This planet where i can only be
Lungfish egg gone bad
Temple falling down crepuscular
And murderous foreclosure
The temple countdown
Poet built rocket to Alpha Centauri
Grip with jade
I can't see--intricate thorn faded
Muezzin's terrible altered significance
Lamps of olive oil
Caught falling we crave muskeg
Crave loot vault
Crave sky god power have/. Irony
Fathoms square
Ariel's truth. Puree of Mirrabooka
We find salvage in dead quartz
Digits our bible
Never peace
Stand within frantic the zymurgy
Dumb to ask the name of this polyester
Dog Itzcuintli
Or raucous spoonerism
Ones i loved now under rubble a
Psychopath grade A
Sent there (sans interjection)
Devised for them metallic cunnilingus
Ash fall baa
And bitter A/C
Face they full of piercings bag
Share the rapture sea./? & sky the Day same gab
Burning tank hulk desert; bulldozer
Desert; rain
Chrome gastropod
Trail colossal crystal amethyst Ubar
Lord of hosts horde of locusts: All grass
Is flesh. Dinosaur mercy
Grease reserves gazelle
Cry in R'lyeh
We do know there are some things alone
We do not know lehua
Desert but acid but there are tenebrous
Too, Krypton
Unknown unknowns the ones (cede)
We don't know we lurch don't know (cede ice)
Faked evidence & bleed at this conjunction
Grope Ouroboros
For caca
The ordinances of the nether dank cad
World desert. are perfect. Zaglossus
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Sahara Sunday Spain makes more money than you do.
"But when he called me traitor he meant that I had joined another side. If he had read the book he would know that there are no sides for me." --Leonard Cohen.
I have just been published in a new anthology, Above Us Only Sky: Atheist Poetry, published by Incarnate Muse (incarnatemuse at yahoo dot com) POBox 5756 Santa Barbara CA 93150.
This is one of my poems there:
"Devolution"
I will stay,
I will learn to live and die in the body,
the body's knowing and what it doesn't know.
My armor will be that I am flesh
without appeal, in the fleetness of its perishing.
Here on this island of Easter
gull's cry flies forever among the stone faces.
"But when he called me traitor he meant that I had joined another side. If he had read the book he would know that there are no sides for me." --Leonard Cohen.
I have just been published in a new anthology, Above Us Only Sky: Atheist Poetry, published by Incarnate Muse (incarnatemuse at yahoo dot com) POBox 5756 Santa Barbara CA 93150.
This is one of my poems there:
"Devolution"
I will stay,
I will learn to live and die in the body,
the body's knowing and what it doesn't know.
My armor will be that I am flesh
without appeal, in the fleetness of its perishing.
Here on this island of Easter
gull's cry flies forever among the stone faces.
Friday, April 18, 2003
some of my remarks from the Wikipedia:
--What makes something poetry?
aside from the inescapable timebound (faddish) criteria, these two seem to be permanent:
1. "yugen", or mysterious beauty; i.e. resonance with the subconscious. (in the 18c.--often called the least poetical time for english-- this was not expected nor sought.)
2. "calliditas", or concise aptness. some--a very few--good poets lack this (Whitman, Jeffers) but there will always be those who refuse them the first rank for this reason.
i would also add: "melopoeia" or phonetic coherence (for some time now, in eclipse); "phanopoeia" or visual imagery; & "logopoeia" or conceptual originality (these are Pound's coinages).
"poignancy" belongs in here somewhere, but since every age draws the line between pathos & bathos differently, i can only suggest that poetry must be about the human feelings & situations which are thought to be worth exploring at that time. nowadays bad childhoods & famous artists appear frequently, while epics on the founding of political dynasties would be a very hard sell.
having one of these excellences is sufficient; but having many of them is still better.
----------------------------------------------------------------
On this page is a sound file of one of my Lojban poems, read by Dr Jorge Llambias of Buenos Aires.
A new speculation on Salam Pax.
About ten years before the New York School "invented" Abstract Art, there was a school called CoBrA in Europe (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). I went to a show by one of them, Karel Appel, & i have never seen such exuberant & powerful painting. If Elephant Art belongs to any movement, it surely is this one...
A page of many links to "Outsider Art". (I remember when only psychologists & a few oddball artists like Dubuffet were into this; now, it's probably the closest modern art has to a mainstream taste. The good thing is, there's some wonderful coffeetable books out there now. The bad thing is, the old stupid accusation about abstract expressionism--that they painted that way to disguise the fact that they couldn't draw--is now a lot truer about contemporary artists growing up in a context where this sort of thing is valorized.)
--What makes something poetry?
aside from the inescapable timebound (faddish) criteria, these two seem to be permanent:
1. "yugen", or mysterious beauty; i.e. resonance with the subconscious. (in the 18c.--often called the least poetical time for english-- this was not expected nor sought.)
2. "calliditas", or concise aptness. some--a very few--good poets lack this (Whitman, Jeffers) but there will always be those who refuse them the first rank for this reason.
i would also add: "melopoeia" or phonetic coherence (for some time now, in eclipse); "phanopoeia" or visual imagery; & "logopoeia" or conceptual originality (these are Pound's coinages).
"poignancy" belongs in here somewhere, but since every age draws the line between pathos & bathos differently, i can only suggest that poetry must be about the human feelings & situations which are thought to be worth exploring at that time. nowadays bad childhoods & famous artists appear frequently, while epics on the founding of political dynasties would be a very hard sell.
having one of these excellences is sufficient; but having many of them is still better.
----------------------------------------------------------------
On this page is a sound file of one of my Lojban poems, read by Dr Jorge Llambias of Buenos Aires.
A new speculation on Salam Pax.
About ten years before the New York School "invented" Abstract Art, there was a school called CoBrA in Europe (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). I went to a show by one of them, Karel Appel, & i have never seen such exuberant & powerful painting. If Elephant Art belongs to any movement, it surely is this one...
A page of many links to "Outsider Art". (I remember when only psychologists & a few oddball artists like Dubuffet were into this; now, it's probably the closest modern art has to a mainstream taste. The good thing is, there's some wonderful coffeetable books out there now. The bad thing is, the old stupid accusation about abstract expressionism--that they painted that way to disguise the fact that they couldn't draw--is now a lot truer about contemporary artists growing up in a context where this sort of thing is valorized.)
"Posthumous Letter to Thomas Merton
Unlike you who discovered solitude
To be "Forerunner of the Word of God",
I search and find it no more than the soul's
Chafing against itself like any dog
Rubbing its mangy rump against a tree.
I might have asked you how to bridge the gap
Between our two alonenesses, between
Yours, self-elected, freely chosen, and
Mine blindly blundered into from the womb,
At first not even seen for what it was,
And then, once recognized, raged at, kicked at,
And cursed. Perhaps there is a gulf between them,
The gulf dividing mind to which God is
A harmony, from mind to which God seems
The discord, shattering tidy tunes of thought,
Yet no, devout monk though you were, your God
Was not a mystery emasculated,
Poked at through barbed wire meshes of the creeds,
Led out well-groomed and curried for the faithful
To adulate from their safe vantage point.
Now that your words have smoked away to silence,
I dare not put an answer on your tongue,
As though a devotee had stuffed your mouth
With speeches that you never made. I only
Write you these lines, less poem than presumption,
Addressed in care of my bewilderment.
I ask you, self-styled marginal man,
Do not we sufferers always inhabit
The edges of the world as pioneers
To prove how much humanity can bear
And still be human, experimenters in
The bloody laboratory of our lives.
Taking and testing every pain tossed from
The pulsing cosmos, fragments we reshape,
As best as the materials allow,
To buttress God's cathedrals build from chaos?"
Vassar Miller, If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough (1974)
----------------------------------------------------------------
The sum of the word "flarf" is 43, which is also the sum of "book". (This is how i figure out the meaning of undefinable words.) Also 'ghayb', the transliteration of the Arabic word for "the Invisible". Although nothing i write, alas, can be considered remotely flarfish, i think it entirely possible that this movement can become the "Angry Penguins" of the 21c...
Whaddya know?! The Vanilla Fudge are back together (after, maybe 30 years); & they have a new album out. Guess what? It sounds just like they always did! --As i said in another place: "i started collecting VF records about 10 yrs ago, after having gone through a long period when i could only stand to listen to non-western music; my ears refreshed, i gained a new appreciation of many things, including psychedelic kitsch, of which VF appears to be the most perfect & terrifying specimen... there are people who love blue cheese, & people who love ed wood movies; i love Blue Cheer & Vanilla Fudge."
Unlike you who discovered solitude
To be "Forerunner of the Word of God",
I search and find it no more than the soul's
Chafing against itself like any dog
Rubbing its mangy rump against a tree.
I might have asked you how to bridge the gap
Between our two alonenesses, between
Yours, self-elected, freely chosen, and
Mine blindly blundered into from the womb,
At first not even seen for what it was,
And then, once recognized, raged at, kicked at,
And cursed. Perhaps there is a gulf between them,
The gulf dividing mind to which God is
A harmony, from mind to which God seems
The discord, shattering tidy tunes of thought,
Yet no, devout monk though you were, your God
Was not a mystery emasculated,
Poked at through barbed wire meshes of the creeds,
Led out well-groomed and curried for the faithful
To adulate from their safe vantage point.
Now that your words have smoked away to silence,
I dare not put an answer on your tongue,
As though a devotee had stuffed your mouth
With speeches that you never made. I only
Write you these lines, less poem than presumption,
Addressed in care of my bewilderment.
I ask you, self-styled marginal man,
Do not we sufferers always inhabit
The edges of the world as pioneers
To prove how much humanity can bear
And still be human, experimenters in
The bloody laboratory of our lives.
Taking and testing every pain tossed from
The pulsing cosmos, fragments we reshape,
As best as the materials allow,
To buttress God's cathedrals build from chaos?"
Vassar Miller, If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough (1974)
----------------------------------------------------------------
The sum of the word "flarf" is 43, which is also the sum of "book". (This is how i figure out the meaning of undefinable words.) Also 'ghayb', the transliteration of the Arabic word for "the Invisible". Although nothing i write, alas, can be considered remotely flarfish, i think it entirely possible that this movement can become the "Angry Penguins" of the 21c...
Whaddya know?! The Vanilla Fudge are back together (after, maybe 30 years); & they have a new album out. Guess what? It sounds just like they always did! --As i said in another place: "i started collecting VF records about 10 yrs ago, after having gone through a long period when i could only stand to listen to non-western music; my ears refreshed, i gained a new appreciation of many things, including psychedelic kitsch, of which VF appears to be the most perfect & terrifying specimen... there are people who love blue cheese, & people who love ed wood movies; i love Blue Cheer & Vanilla Fudge."
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Some say Harry S Keeler is the worst writer in the world.
Some say Lionel Fanthorpe. And some say Amanda Ros. They all have their fans... (I myself am something of a partisan of Baron Corvo.) But after the merely inept, there is a kind of talent that refuses to be readable. And i wonder if someday, these writers will be preferred to ones who catered to the market.
I don't play my Fushitsusha double album very often, but i did after the war started. It was the next best thing to being in Baghdad.
On misreading: when i was a kid, i thought Grand Funk Railroad's "Closer to Home" was a song about Watergate. A few years back, i looked at the dates & discovered it couldn't have been. But for me, it will still be the song about Nixon--"I'm your captain!"--when i hear it.
Looks like Jose Garcia Villa is being rediscovered. Most famous, perhaps, for his poems in which commas separated every word, i think his most interesting invention was backwards-consonance rhyming. (Edmund Wilson wrote a poem or two that attempted truly phonetic reversal, but his vowels are all messed up.) I still think the number of possible formalisms is much greater than anyone, even versification-geeks, can imagine. But this is probably not the time for such inquiries...!
Some say Lionel Fanthorpe. And some say Amanda Ros. They all have their fans... (I myself am something of a partisan of Baron Corvo.) But after the merely inept, there is a kind of talent that refuses to be readable. And i wonder if someday, these writers will be preferred to ones who catered to the market.
I don't play my Fushitsusha double album very often, but i did after the war started. It was the next best thing to being in Baghdad.
On misreading: when i was a kid, i thought Grand Funk Railroad's "Closer to Home" was a song about Watergate. A few years back, i looked at the dates & discovered it couldn't have been. But for me, it will still be the song about Nixon--"I'm your captain!"--when i hear it.
Looks like Jose Garcia Villa is being rediscovered. Most famous, perhaps, for his poems in which commas separated every word, i think his most interesting invention was backwards-consonance rhyming. (Edmund Wilson wrote a poem or two that attempted truly phonetic reversal, but his vowels are all messed up.) I still think the number of possible formalisms is much greater than anyone, even versification-geeks, can imagine. But this is probably not the time for such inquiries...!
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
"Of Being Frumious"
My music takes the road
Though i refrain hejira.
Frankincense, this much fire
To satisfy the demon.
Dollars less & less gold:
No heyday is this of Rome.
Far, this Praha hajji
In search of chatoyant wine.
I lay me down in sand.
I lay me down in the dirt.
Tell me the millionth death
Will not be the death of Mars.
------------------------------------------
This site is about collecting old paperbacks; many pictures & links!
Richard Lederer's language links.
Another good politico-literary blog.
A lot of good art links here.
A site dedicated to triple homonyms.
I'm not done yet thinking about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. When i get back to it, i'm going to read this whole site.
Awhile back, Barry N Malzberg wrote a scathing history of scifi called Engines of the Night. Recently i ran across an online essay that's kind of an update on that book (which met with more denial than defensiveness in the community). But the field has been invaded by many genuine intellectuals since then, & i think the same balkanization that happened to poetry has happened here too...
A good selection of Lovecraftian poetry.
My music takes the road
Though i refrain hejira.
Frankincense, this much fire
To satisfy the demon.
Dollars less & less gold:
No heyday is this of Rome.
Far, this Praha hajji
In search of chatoyant wine.
I lay me down in sand.
I lay me down in the dirt.
Tell me the millionth death
Will not be the death of Mars.
------------------------------------------
This site is about collecting old paperbacks; many pictures & links!
Richard Lederer's language links.
Another good politico-literary blog.
A lot of good art links here.
A site dedicated to triple homonyms.
I'm not done yet thinking about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. When i get back to it, i'm going to read this whole site.
Awhile back, Barry N Malzberg wrote a scathing history of scifi called Engines of the Night. Recently i ran across an online essay that's kind of an update on that book (which met with more denial than defensiveness in the community). But the field has been invaded by many genuine intellectuals since then, & i think the same balkanization that happened to poetry has happened here too...
A good selection of Lovecraftian poetry.
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Monday, April 14, 2003
"The triple decadence: Decadence of the material; of the writer's language. The virgin snow where Shakespeare and Montaigne used to cut their deep furrows, is now but a slope flattened by innumerable tracks until it is unable to receive an impression. Decadence of the myth, for there is no longer a unifying belief (as in Christianity or in Renaissance Man) to permit a writer a sense of awe and of awe which he shares with the mass of humanity. And even the last myth of all, the myth of the artist's vocation, of 'l'homme c'est rien, l'oeuvre c'est tout', is destroyed by the times, by the third decadence, that of society. In our lifetime we have seen the arts advance further and further into an obscure and sterile cul-de-sac. Science has done little to help the artist, beyond contributing radio, linotype and the cinema; inventions which enormously extend his scope, but which commit him more than ever to the policy of the State and the demands of the ignorant. Disney is the tenth-rate Shakespeare of our age, forced by his universal audience to elaborate his new-world sentimentality with increasing slickness. There may arise Leonardos of the screen and microphone who will astound us but not until the other arts have declined into regional or luxury crafts, like book-binding, cabinet-making, thatching or pargetting. Today an artist must expect to write in water and to cast in sand." --Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Mind (1944)
"The Nostalgia movement began with the Art Nouveau revival; and the Art Nouveau revival began with the Mucha exhibition (May-June 1963) and the Beardsley exhibition (May-Sept 1966) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London." --Bevis Hillier, The Style of the Century (1983)
'Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own--a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by débris, as if the end of the world were at hand.' --Alfred de Musset, Confessions of a Child of the Century (1896) [soon to be a movie?!]
One of these days i'll get around to writing a History of Archaïcizing. Vergil did it; & there was a full-blown movement in the time of Fronto & Apuleius. If i recall correctly, the Late Tang also saw something of the sort; & of course the people of the time we now know as the Renaissance, thought that THEY were returning to the Good Old Days... Beddoes in the 19c, & Doughty & Eddison in the early 20c, wanted to write like Elizabethans; later on, Barth & Jong wrote novels in pseudo-18c English...
"...the Japanese of the Heian epoch tended to treat each element of their imported [from China] culture as if it were something integral and perfected. Yet, while they did not question the perfection of the whole, for they were acute observers rather than restless critics, their temper and their circumstances modified its parts and changed its very essence. This is why much of the Heian culture seems to us thin and unreal. It was a product of literature rather than of life. So the terms of Indian metaphysics became a kind of fashionable jargon, Buddhist rites a spectacle, Chinese poetry an intellectual game. We might almost summarise by saying that religion became an art and art a religion. Certainly what most occupied the thoughts of the Heian courtiers were ceremonies, costumes, elegant pastimes like verse-making and amorous intrigue conducted according to rules. Perhaps most important of all, because it entered into all, was the art of penmanship. ...to have a good hand was to have breeding and taste." --G B Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931/1952)
'Mandelstam...[uses] words of various contradictory associations: magnificent and obsolete archaism and words of everyday occurrence hardly naturalized in poetry. His syntax especially is curiously mixed--rhetorical periods tussle with purely colloquial turns of phrase. And the construction of his poems is also such as to accentuate the difficulty, the ruggedness of his form: it is a broken line that changes its direction at every turn of the stanza. His flashes of majestic eloquence sound especially grand in this bizarre and unexpected setting.' --D S Mirsky, History of Russian Literature
Cf "blixen": "...a trend that's been going on for a long time: the subdivision of culture along nonethnic, nongeographic lines. Call it the specialization or the niche-marketization of culture. Long ago, you were born into a culture, today you choose your culture. [I call this volitional ethnicity. --m.] ...Whatever niche you're in has it's [sic] own set of shared knowledge, but there's less we share with everybody in our geographic community. ...It's more than trivial issues of what music you like, it's what you know." --Karl Widerquist writing in Cake (The Book Issue, 1997?)
' The Northern Cold
The sky glows one side black, three sides purple.
The Yellow River's ice closes, fish and dragons die,
Bark three inches thick cracks across the grain,
Carts a hundred piculs heavy mount the river's water.
Flowers of frost on the grass are as big as coins,
Brandished swords will not pierce the foggy sky,
Crashing ice flies in the swirling seas,
And cascades hang noiseless in the mountains, rainbows of jade.' --Li Ho [Li He] in: Poems of the Late T'ang, tr. A G Graham
Not only were the Late T'ang poets reviving the Palace Style of three centuries earlier (their enemies called it "insect carving"--!), some of them (especially the greatest of them, Li Shangyin) were producing what can only be described as an anticipation of Surrealism--twelve hundred years ago. (Fusheng Wu, The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang Periods, 1998)
"The Nostalgia movement began with the Art Nouveau revival; and the Art Nouveau revival began with the Mucha exhibition (May-June 1963) and the Beardsley exhibition (May-Sept 1966) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London." --Bevis Hillier, The Style of the Century (1983)
'Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own--a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by débris, as if the end of the world were at hand.' --Alfred de Musset, Confessions of a Child of the Century (1896) [soon to be a movie?!]
One of these days i'll get around to writing a History of Archaïcizing. Vergil did it; & there was a full-blown movement in the time of Fronto & Apuleius. If i recall correctly, the Late Tang also saw something of the sort; & of course the people of the time we now know as the Renaissance, thought that THEY were returning to the Good Old Days... Beddoes in the 19c, & Doughty & Eddison in the early 20c, wanted to write like Elizabethans; later on, Barth & Jong wrote novels in pseudo-18c English...
"...the Japanese of the Heian epoch tended to treat each element of their imported [from China] culture as if it were something integral and perfected. Yet, while they did not question the perfection of the whole, for they were acute observers rather than restless critics, their temper and their circumstances modified its parts and changed its very essence. This is why much of the Heian culture seems to us thin and unreal. It was a product of literature rather than of life. So the terms of Indian metaphysics became a kind of fashionable jargon, Buddhist rites a spectacle, Chinese poetry an intellectual game. We might almost summarise by saying that religion became an art and art a religion. Certainly what most occupied the thoughts of the Heian courtiers were ceremonies, costumes, elegant pastimes like verse-making and amorous intrigue conducted according to rules. Perhaps most important of all, because it entered into all, was the art of penmanship. ...to have a good hand was to have breeding and taste." --G B Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931/1952)
'Mandelstam...[uses] words of various contradictory associations: magnificent and obsolete archaism and words of everyday occurrence hardly naturalized in poetry. His syntax especially is curiously mixed--rhetorical periods tussle with purely colloquial turns of phrase. And the construction of his poems is also such as to accentuate the difficulty, the ruggedness of his form: it is a broken line that changes its direction at every turn of the stanza. His flashes of majestic eloquence sound especially grand in this bizarre and unexpected setting.' --D S Mirsky, History of Russian Literature
Cf "blixen": "...a trend that's been going on for a long time: the subdivision of culture along nonethnic, nongeographic lines. Call it the specialization or the niche-marketization of culture. Long ago, you were born into a culture, today you choose your culture. [I call this volitional ethnicity. --m.] ...Whatever niche you're in has it's [sic] own set of shared knowledge, but there's less we share with everybody in our geographic community. ...It's more than trivial issues of what music you like, it's what you know." --Karl Widerquist writing in Cake (The Book Issue, 1997?)
' The Northern Cold
The sky glows one side black, three sides purple.
The Yellow River's ice closes, fish and dragons die,
Bark three inches thick cracks across the grain,
Carts a hundred piculs heavy mount the river's water.
Flowers of frost on the grass are as big as coins,
Brandished swords will not pierce the foggy sky,
Crashing ice flies in the swirling seas,
And cascades hang noiseless in the mountains, rainbows of jade.' --Li Ho [Li He] in: Poems of the Late T'ang, tr. A G Graham
Not only were the Late T'ang poets reviving the Palace Style of three centuries earlier (their enemies called it "insect carving"--!), some of them (especially the greatest of them, Li Shangyin) were producing what can only be described as an anticipation of Surrealism--twelve hundred years ago. (Fusheng Wu, The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late Tang Periods, 1998)
Sunday, April 13, 2003
Friday, April 11, 2003
Seeing these demonstrations, all apart from any question of their political efficacy, is exciting to me, because in '80 & '84 i was involved in protests at the national conventions as a Yippie. (Warning: site takes forever to load.) Even by the Eighties, though, it had become obvious some things had changed irrevocably: the media no longer felt it necessary to pay attention to what was happening in the streets, or else they could feel free to distort it as they liked, because the streets were not a place. Only what was in front of the cameras was a place...
I didn't know Gerald Burns very well, but he lived in Dallas a long time (though he ended up going to Portland to die) & left a deep impression on the people who knew him in the 70's & 80's here. Sometimes i'll be doing something that is like the way he wrote, & then i'll think of him. I much preferred his prose, which was often brilliant, to his poetry, which was usually impenetrable. Here's something i found on the Internet without much trouble:
"So my lecture would be about Games Wlthout Rules, or games which invent
rules as they go to handle things that come up. If you write long-line
poems, where you break the llnes is like that. Why you say what you say
where. Tyrone, who plays darts well, said to me when he s reading a long
thing he always wants to ask what's the point, why don t you get to the
point? I told him my long poem on magic, A Book of Spells, was about-wanted
to render-what it's like to live in a universe in which magic occurs, or in
which it makes sense for it to occur. Writing it took ten years. I had to
wait, I said, for events to occur, perceptions to happen, and wanted it
1,776 llnes long so it really would be living in it, and that, the effect
of that, was its point.
You make up the rules as you go, and forget them as you go on. You make
them up, but you forget them. If someone asks why you did a thing that way,
you can usually say."
And i wrote this elegy:
"Un tombeau pour G.B."
Tiny fires, to carry Ark
We would build, & not three-korn bread.
Dog-in-hand. i remember,
In Austin you read lost words.
Duffers all, Bacon's mitrailleuse
Sen populo...verse toothbrush.
9-1-97
Ella Wheeler Wilcox tells it like it is:
'All Mad
"He is mad as a hare, poor fellow,
And should be in chains," you say.
I have n't a doubt of your statement,
But who is n't mad, I pray?
Why, the world is a great asylum,
And people are all insane,
Gone daft with pleasure or folly,
Or crazed with passion or pain.
The infant who shrieks at a shadow,
The child with his Santa Claus faith,
The woman who worships Dame Fashion,
Each man with his notions of death,
The miser who hoards up his earnings,
The spendthrift who wastes them too soon,
The scholar grown blind in his delving,
The lover who stares at the moon.
The poet who thinks life is a paean,
The cynic who thinks it a fraud,
The youth who goes seeking for pleasure,
The preacher who dares talk of God,
All priests with their creeds and their croaking,
All doubters who dare to deny,
The gay who find aught to wake laughter,
The sad who find aught worth a sigh,
Whoever is downcast or solemn,
Whoever is gleeful and glad,
Are only the dupes of delusion--
We are all of us--all of us mad.'
from Maurine and Other Poems (1888)
I didn't know Gerald Burns very well, but he lived in Dallas a long time (though he ended up going to Portland to die) & left a deep impression on the people who knew him in the 70's & 80's here. Sometimes i'll be doing something that is like the way he wrote, & then i'll think of him. I much preferred his prose, which was often brilliant, to his poetry, which was usually impenetrable. Here's something i found on the Internet without much trouble:
"So my lecture would be about Games Wlthout Rules, or games which invent
rules as they go to handle things that come up. If you write long-line
poems, where you break the llnes is like that. Why you say what you say
where. Tyrone, who plays darts well, said to me when he s reading a long
thing he always wants to ask what's the point, why don t you get to the
point? I told him my long poem on magic, A Book of Spells, was about-wanted
to render-what it's like to live in a universe in which magic occurs, or in
which it makes sense for it to occur. Writing it took ten years. I had to
wait, I said, for events to occur, perceptions to happen, and wanted it
1,776 llnes long so it really would be living in it, and that, the effect
of that, was its point.
You make up the rules as you go, and forget them as you go on. You make
them up, but you forget them. If someone asks why you did a thing that way,
you can usually say."
And i wrote this elegy:
"Un tombeau pour G.B."
Tiny fires, to carry Ark
We would build, & not three-korn bread.
Dog-in-hand. i remember,
In Austin you read lost words.
Duffers all, Bacon's mitrailleuse
Sen populo...verse toothbrush.
9-1-97
Ella Wheeler Wilcox tells it like it is:
'All Mad
"He is mad as a hare, poor fellow,
And should be in chains," you say.
I have n't a doubt of your statement,
But who is n't mad, I pray?
Why, the world is a great asylum,
And people are all insane,
Gone daft with pleasure or folly,
Or crazed with passion or pain.
The infant who shrieks at a shadow,
The child with his Santa Claus faith,
The woman who worships Dame Fashion,
Each man with his notions of death,
The miser who hoards up his earnings,
The spendthrift who wastes them too soon,
The scholar grown blind in his delving,
The lover who stares at the moon.
The poet who thinks life is a paean,
The cynic who thinks it a fraud,
The youth who goes seeking for pleasure,
The preacher who dares talk of God,
All priests with their creeds and their croaking,
All doubters who dare to deny,
The gay who find aught to wake laughter,
The sad who find aught worth a sigh,
Whoever is downcast or solemn,
Whoever is gleeful and glad,
Are only the dupes of delusion--
We are all of us--all of us mad.'
from Maurine and Other Poems (1888)
Brown smudge on the
Pale cerulean dissipates.
The militainment
Winds down. Our little Caesar
Frowns over a tattered map.
I'd seen Sylvia Plath's drawings of course, but until now i wasn't aware that she was also a Cubist painter.
It's not easy to find stuff in English on Heribert Illig, but this seems truly "phildickian" (of or relating to the works of Philip K Dick): he apparently believes that the years between 700 & 900 AD do not exist, or...er, they lost track of the real year for awhile, & when they resumed, miscounted.
sharawadgi - beautifully asymmetrical (--Sir William Temple 1683 & 1685; used by Pope & Horace Walpole. A corruption from the Chinese. Discussed by Lovejoy in Essays in the History of Ideas; he says it expresses "an aesthetic category distinct from both the sublime and the beautiful" & equates it with another term of the same period, "picturesque". I want to resurrect this term to suggest the positive quality of a new aesthetic which i am beginning to formulate, involving several dimensions: one of which is to contain as many opposites ("perfections") as possible, e.g. red & green, fast & slow, geometric & organic...; another, tiug, might be defined as nonjudgmental referentiality, that is, invoking or appropriating a pre-existent form--be it icon, symbol, artwork, or cliche'--simply as a starting point or "hermitcrab-shell container" in which to put the new creation. See also zoomars.)
(Just off the top of my head, some works with this quality: the song "Bohemian Rhapsody"; Schwerner's The Tablets. Lessing's The Golden Notebook, "Titus" (the movie); & House of Leaves (Danielewski).
It appears the key to Auden's masterpiece The Orators is a paper by John Layard in J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. Jul/Dec 1930 on the New Hebrides Islanders. I have not read this paper, & it may be that to do so would destroy the magic which this book posseses (& most of the rest of Auden's works lack--). But if you look at it as a case of tiug, then it is not necessary to read the paper. He painted, so to speak, on another canvas, guided by his reaction to what was already there--but the viewer doesn't have to have watched him at work.
the Need of Algebra - the effort to transcend irony
One Party Rule means never having to say you're sorry. --sayings of Asmodeus
The first rap song: "Trouble Every Day" by the Mothers of Invention (Freak Out, 1965). Not coincidentally, this is about the Watts Riots:
"You know that five in every four
Won't amount to nothing more
Than watch the rats roll 'cross the floor
And make up songs 'bout being poor..."
Wittgenstein's brother Paul, a talented pianist, lost an arm in the war; composers such as Prokofiev wrote special one-armed piano pieces for him. I think of lipograms this way...
While i'm mentioning Auden, i mustn't forget the truly extraordinary site Forgotten Ground Regained.
Paul Deane wants to revive the Old English accentual-alliterative meter, a project not quite as quixotic as it sounds. Though C.S. Lewis in an important essay explains it enough for a modern poet to try to follow the rules, i think there are some fundamental difficulties that have still to be overcome, notably the historically-lessening prominence of stress in spoken English. But it is an experiment well worth trying, if only that it makes writing so much harder.
(The essay i mentioned is: Lewis, C.S. "The Alliterative Meter." Jess B. Bessinger,
ed. Essential Articles for the study of Old English poetry. Hamden: Archon, 1968. 305-18. (Also in one of
his collections, i forget which one.))
A couple of things i liked in the current movie "Bringing Down the House": they sneak in a glimpse of the Watts Towers, & in one scene the friend of Steve Martin's character asks him to pass on a message to Queen Latifah's character: "Tell her 'The cool points are out the window. I'm all twisted up inside.'" When she hears this, she says, "That's about the nicest thing anyone ever said to me." Later we find out this means: "I love you." And for once, a mainstream movie presents something with the essence of poetry, without grandstanding or getting it wrong.
Pale cerulean dissipates.
The militainment
Winds down. Our little Caesar
Frowns over a tattered map.
I'd seen Sylvia Plath's drawings of course, but until now i wasn't aware that she was also a Cubist painter.
It's not easy to find stuff in English on Heribert Illig, but this seems truly "phildickian" (of or relating to the works of Philip K Dick): he apparently believes that the years between 700 & 900 AD do not exist, or...er, they lost track of the real year for awhile, & when they resumed, miscounted.
sharawadgi - beautifully asymmetrical (--Sir William Temple 1683 & 1685; used by Pope & Horace Walpole. A corruption from the Chinese. Discussed by Lovejoy in Essays in the History of Ideas; he says it expresses "an aesthetic category distinct from both the sublime and the beautiful" & equates it with another term of the same period, "picturesque". I want to resurrect this term to suggest the positive quality of a new aesthetic which i am beginning to formulate, involving several dimensions: one of which is to contain as many opposites ("perfections") as possible, e.g. red & green, fast & slow, geometric & organic...; another, tiug, might be defined as nonjudgmental referentiality, that is, invoking or appropriating a pre-existent form--be it icon, symbol, artwork, or cliche'--simply as a starting point or "hermitcrab-shell container" in which to put the new creation. See also zoomars.)
(Just off the top of my head, some works with this quality: the song "Bohemian Rhapsody"; Schwerner's The Tablets. Lessing's The Golden Notebook, "Titus" (the movie); & House of Leaves (Danielewski).
It appears the key to Auden's masterpiece The Orators is a paper by John Layard in J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. Jul/Dec 1930 on the New Hebrides Islanders. I have not read this paper, & it may be that to do so would destroy the magic which this book posseses (& most of the rest of Auden's works lack--). But if you look at it as a case of tiug, then it is not necessary to read the paper. He painted, so to speak, on another canvas, guided by his reaction to what was already there--but the viewer doesn't have to have watched him at work.
the Need of Algebra - the effort to transcend irony
One Party Rule means never having to say you're sorry. --sayings of Asmodeus
The first rap song: "Trouble Every Day" by the Mothers of Invention (Freak Out, 1965). Not coincidentally, this is about the Watts Riots:
"You know that five in every four
Won't amount to nothing more
Than watch the rats roll 'cross the floor
And make up songs 'bout being poor..."
Wittgenstein's brother Paul, a talented pianist, lost an arm in the war; composers such as Prokofiev wrote special one-armed piano pieces for him. I think of lipograms this way...
While i'm mentioning Auden, i mustn't forget the truly extraordinary site Forgotten Ground Regained.
Paul Deane wants to revive the Old English accentual-alliterative meter, a project not quite as quixotic as it sounds. Though C.S. Lewis in an important essay explains it enough for a modern poet to try to follow the rules, i think there are some fundamental difficulties that have still to be overcome, notably the historically-lessening prominence of stress in spoken English. But it is an experiment well worth trying, if only that it makes writing so much harder.
(The essay i mentioned is: Lewis, C.S. "The Alliterative Meter." Jess B. Bessinger,
ed. Essential Articles for the study of Old English poetry. Hamden: Archon, 1968. 305-18. (Also in one of
his collections, i forget which one.))
A couple of things i liked in the current movie "Bringing Down the House": they sneak in a glimpse of the Watts Towers, & in one scene the friend of Steve Martin's character asks him to pass on a message to Queen Latifah's character: "Tell her 'The cool points are out the window. I'm all twisted up inside.'" When she hears this, she says, "That's about the nicest thing anyone ever said to me." Later we find out this means: "I love you." And for once, a mainstream movie presents something with the essence of poetry, without grandstanding or getting it wrong.
Thursday, April 10, 2003
Best Titles. Eden Burning. Eating People is Wrong. Then Came Brain Damage. Wodwo. This Tree Grows Out of Hell. Mad Empress of Callisto. Cat Ate My Gym Suit. The Screaming Dead Balloons. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Always Is Not Forever. My Happy Days In Hell. Midnight Is A Place.
"When Burgess met Borges they chatted in Anglo-Saxon." --Martin Amis
"Did we fly to the moon too soon?" --Tasmin Archer
"John Tzetzes (c.1110-c.1180)... His principal works are...(3) The Historiae or Chiliads, a versified commentary on his letters in 12,674 15-syllable lines. ...He later composed a prose commentary on his commentary." --Penguin Companion to Classical & Byzantine, Oriental & African Literature
Whatever maps onto our cages is the world. --sayings of Asmodeus
Rock is the Hinduism of modern religions; with martyrs, mass rituals, & even heresiarchs. Its tentacular ubiquity seems such that, any attempt to establish an oppositional culture to it (e.g. punk), must become instantly incorporated into its structure; only the secret or amateur musicologist remains outside. It's no coincidence that the PoMo era coincides with the Reign of Rock...
Words for kinds of traffic, as the Eskimo (supposedly) have for kinds of snow...
"In a blank ghostly glare shone the bleak ghostly camp" --Owen Meredith
Rationalism might be called the fallacy of believing language to be a category of description, rather than that description is a special use of language.
Above all, anger is a safe response. It preserves a frozen snapshot of the victim-victimizer relationship, out of time; whereas real change can only happen in time, & through other aspects that this snapshot left out.
The terrain changes; so does the dance. What doesn't is the need to keep balance.
"And it seemed to be, while I sat there so musing, that there is a double strength in tradition. First, the strength which we all know, the strength of continued names and forms which, though they become archaic and grotesque, bind the sons to the fathers and are, therefore, most religiously to be preserved. But the second, stranger and more powerful, more full of body, is that strength in tradition which has a resurrection about it that assures a continuance of life. There is a sort of tradition which is not a form, nor a ritual, nor a name, but a surviving influence... So I mused in the cathedral of Saragossa the last time I was there." --Belloc, Towns of Destiny (1931)
the Pumpkinification - the Nineteen Eighties as a styleperiod
Deep turquoise butterfly struggling at my feet; looking closer, i discover one of its wings is half missing.
My inner necessity is not for Art per se but for Alchemy. Art is my preferred channel for this process. And some of it can never be assimilated into existing artforms...
Slang is a place for those who have no place.
Passive-Aggression is the Hero with a Thousand Faces. --sayings of Asmodeus
Beyond the things i make, either as part of my daily practice--usually in forms i already use (often my constant poem-making resembles a hen laying unfertilized eggs...)--or as milestones representative of cusps in my life--these are usually more elaborate & self-sufficient ("cairns")--there is the form evolved out of my notebooks, that i call braidtext: recurrent topics, that i add to as they occur to me; & which i think of as different colored strands of discourse. This would make a good hypertext but, not having the programming skills, i have to make do with the "unfolded" version: call it a Tesseract. --And only there does my work faithfully reflect the complexity of my experience.
The ideal writer is also a reader, but the ideal reader has no time for anything else. Change in Genre tends to be driven by the boredom of its producers.
Nobody wanted to be PostModern. --sayings of Asmodeus
Poverty, like ageing, a necessary indignity. Squalor, like anger, not.
Turbulent Sixties, Mellow Seventies, Emetic Eighties, Wacky Nineties...Nacreous Oughts.
"I am very fond of poems of one line--some Roman poets wrote them--but it is difficult to understand these poems without knowing the men who wrote them." --The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin
"When Burgess met Borges they chatted in Anglo-Saxon." --Martin Amis
"Did we fly to the moon too soon?" --Tasmin Archer
"John Tzetzes (c.1110-c.1180)... His principal works are...(3) The Historiae or Chiliads, a versified commentary on his letters in 12,674 15-syllable lines. ...He later composed a prose commentary on his commentary." --Penguin Companion to Classical & Byzantine, Oriental & African Literature
Whatever maps onto our cages is the world. --sayings of Asmodeus
Rock is the Hinduism of modern religions; with martyrs, mass rituals, & even heresiarchs. Its tentacular ubiquity seems such that, any attempt to establish an oppositional culture to it (e.g. punk), must become instantly incorporated into its structure; only the secret or amateur musicologist remains outside. It's no coincidence that the PoMo era coincides with the Reign of Rock...
Words for kinds of traffic, as the Eskimo (supposedly) have for kinds of snow...
"In a blank ghostly glare shone the bleak ghostly camp" --Owen Meredith
Rationalism might be called the fallacy of believing language to be a category of description, rather than that description is a special use of language.
Above all, anger is a safe response. It preserves a frozen snapshot of the victim-victimizer relationship, out of time; whereas real change can only happen in time, & through other aspects that this snapshot left out.
The terrain changes; so does the dance. What doesn't is the need to keep balance.
"And it seemed to be, while I sat there so musing, that there is a double strength in tradition. First, the strength which we all know, the strength of continued names and forms which, though they become archaic and grotesque, bind the sons to the fathers and are, therefore, most religiously to be preserved. But the second, stranger and more powerful, more full of body, is that strength in tradition which has a resurrection about it that assures a continuance of life. There is a sort of tradition which is not a form, nor a ritual, nor a name, but a surviving influence... So I mused in the cathedral of Saragossa the last time I was there." --Belloc, Towns of Destiny (1931)
the Pumpkinification - the Nineteen Eighties as a styleperiod
Deep turquoise butterfly struggling at my feet; looking closer, i discover one of its wings is half missing.
My inner necessity is not for Art per se but for Alchemy. Art is my preferred channel for this process. And some of it can never be assimilated into existing artforms...
Slang is a place for those who have no place.
Passive-Aggression is the Hero with a Thousand Faces. --sayings of Asmodeus
Beyond the things i make, either as part of my daily practice--usually in forms i already use (often my constant poem-making resembles a hen laying unfertilized eggs...)--or as milestones representative of cusps in my life--these are usually more elaborate & self-sufficient ("cairns")--there is the form evolved out of my notebooks, that i call braidtext: recurrent topics, that i add to as they occur to me; & which i think of as different colored strands of discourse. This would make a good hypertext but, not having the programming skills, i have to make do with the "unfolded" version: call it a Tesseract. --And only there does my work faithfully reflect the complexity of my experience.
The ideal writer is also a reader, but the ideal reader has no time for anything else. Change in Genre tends to be driven by the boredom of its producers.
Nobody wanted to be PostModern. --sayings of Asmodeus
Poverty, like ageing, a necessary indignity. Squalor, like anger, not.
Turbulent Sixties, Mellow Seventies, Emetic Eighties, Wacky Nineties...Nacreous Oughts.
"I am very fond of poems of one line--some Roman poets wrote them--but it is difficult to understand these poems without knowing the men who wrote them." --The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin