Saturday, December 20, 2003

So the villain wrote novels. (How's this stack up against Newt Gingrich's?) (via Metafilter)

We think there are styles, but there are only forms of encounter.

My country's been stolen, why should i fear the mere thieves of "identity"?

You ask Otherness "Where?" & it seems to say, "Elsewhere".
Don't ask that question. You spit in the wind.

My passion for symmetry blinds me to forms of understanding that are highly asymmetrical--& anisotropic--like Time...

I said it would have been very easy for me to find a logically satisfying system of belief--except for my experiences (i dare not call them mystic) of the numinous, that utterly transcend my ability to account for them & make them fit into such systems as my mind might hold. รข€¦feelings that toss you & leave you for dead, as a grizzly would.

Coelacanthic Genres: the Ghost Story, Verse Drama, Long Narrative Poems, History Painting, Gernsbackian Scientifiction.

   "News Aggregator"

We know the rustling grom sweeping irksome land
Eaten from within, come; stone
Dense desolate rustlings stir in the sand
Of therk frown
Infamous command.
Tadpolian Napoleon flashbangs read
Not the cost, dense, of each thing's
Age never-to-be, to Moloch fed...
Slags appear,
The spoor of bad kings.
Dark unspeakable will, our lordly despair
Under cushioned leaves' decay:
End, foreseen not by Waihopai bare;
End blown off, away

12 07 03

Friday, December 19, 2003

Feeding the blog.

Alfred the Mail Agent.

Free Cory Doctorow stories online.

Fadwa Tuqan dies:

   'A Life

My life is tears
And a fond heart
Longing, a book of poetry and a lute
My life, my totally sorrowful life
If its silhouette should vanish tomorrow,
an echo would remain on earth,
my voice repeating:
My life is tears
And a fond heart
Longing, a book of poetry and a lute.

On the sad nights
When silence endlessly deepens,
The phantoms of my loved ones pass
Before me like wisps of dreams,
Poking the fire alive beneath the ashes
And drenching my pillow with tears,
Tears of longing
For ones who have died
And lie, folded in the darkness of the grave.

Now I bow my head, desolate.
A lost horizon thunders inside.
Poems alone are my refuge.
In them I describe
My longings
Only then can this soul
Find calm.' --found here. More.

Sister Scorpion on Saddam's capture.

"The idea of repair itself belongs to the past." --Sven Birkerts

Pretending is one of the best, as having to pretend is one of the worst things. The liberty of art.

There are subtle virtues in being lame, but the muse is swiftness.

"The indifference in which Bridges' plays are held can be explained only by the fact that almost no one has read them." --Albert Guerard

...there's no harm in it after all, as long as i don't identify myself as an artist. For in order for that to be true, i would have to discredit all the other artists in the world (except for the few that are like me). This Draconian measure, i sometimes wonder if all my theories of art are a kind of blueprint for.

The urge to rewrite--a mental tic. All the effort should precede the act: readiness, emptying, centering oneself in the crucial situation. Mumbling, humming, staring, pacing, reading or reciting key lines....light as it falls across the page. These should be the interest of criticism: shedding one's skin, its etiquette & physics. Not battling ideologies, genealogies, quibbles.

Make no mistake--the poets are every bit as dispossessed as the people, of the power of the word.

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Under the cover of darkness.

'For some go completely astray and become engulfed in superstition, and others, when they fly from superstition as from a quagmire, on the other hand unwittingly fall, as it were, over a precipice into atheism.' --Plutarch, Moralia, "Isis and Osiris"

'Xenocrates also is of the opinion that such days of ill omen, and such festivals as have associated with them either beatings or lamentations or fastings or scurrilous language or ribald jests have no relation to the honours paid to the gods or to worthy demigods, but he believes that there exist in the space about us certain great and powerful natures, obdurate, however, and morose, which take pleasure in such things as these, and, if they succeed in obtaining them, resort to nothing worse.' --ibid

  "the Desperado (de Nerval)"

I am the bereaved, the widower, the shadowy,
the Cathar prince of the devastated citadel:
My guiding star is snuffed, my galactic lute
carries Melancholy's sable pentacle.

You who consoled me in the dark of the sepulcher,
give me back Posilipo & the Mediterranean,
the fragrance that enchanted my sere despair,
& that arbor where the rose & grape are intimate.

am I Cupid or Apollo?....Poe or Byron?
the kiss of some dread queen still becrimsons my brow;
I have dreamed in the grotto where the siren plashes...
& twice have I crossed Acheron victorious:

practicing in turn on the lyre of Orpheus
moans of a mystic, sobs of a dying elf.

4 26 87

When i've hurt my index finger & have to tie shoelaces, it's incredibly clumsy until i make the conscious effort to realign my attention--to "deputize" the second finger with the directedness of the first--then it goes easily. (An allegory of much else.) [N.B. learning to snorkel-breathe for the aqualung of scuba classes was like that too.]

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

"It is a matter of defining love
so that time itself takes cognizance

and sings through my weariness and loss
How can you grieve? She is somewhere"
--Robert Kelly in Under Words

None of this would've happened except for my mediumistic fondness for self-surrender. It even disfigures much of my art--when i come to a hairpin turn in the course, there's often nobody driving. Deep down, i still regard Sanity as a shameful expedient; without distinguishing between etiquette & reason. If my social context were less frustratingly arbitrary, & my efforts bore fruit proportional to the energy i put into them, then i would not turn from this daylight world with the repugnance of a vampire. Surely love is more about reciprocity than it is about sleepwalking. Possessed & Possessing (sigh): when the ego has failed to demarcate its proper boundaries. They are not limned in any light, but pain's. So this is not a divagation after all.... A circle. (1987)

It's only the ones who dare to live the future now, who make the future. The rest it just happens to.

Culture as war feeds my sense of self importance. Culture as therapy feeds my despair of the world. No: culture as culture, war as war, therapy as therapy, love as love.

"Frail waifs of mist beset us." --Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922)

'...surely it is the function of the same person both to solve and to invent ambiguities. Moreover, as Plato said, when an oracle was given that they should double the size of the altar at Delos (a task requiring the highest skill in geometry), it was not this that the god was enjoining, but he was urging the Greeks to study geometry.' --Plutarch, Moralia V. ("The E at Delphi), tr Babbitt 1936

Monday, December 15, 2003

An angel piping to the souls in hell.

Equivalents.

A political Pakistani painter in the miniaturist style.

Keeping up with the Newspeak.

Bob's Quick Guide to Its and It's, in ready to print form.

Virtual soldiers run.

Was Saddam a prisoner?

American Apocalypse. (via Orcinus)

Thinking about: Mark Tobey.

David Lynch, the guru, & the Peace University. (via Fimiculous)

A graphic novel about Afghanistan, i think.

German cannibal's postings in the online "cannibal underground".

Words of Wisdom. (from Uppity Negro)

Clouds. (via Plep)

Margaret Cho has a blog!

The Invisible Recovery.

Slaughterhouse Stories.

Listening to: The Visit. (Which was introduced to me as "the most beautiful album ever recorded"; & i have sometimes done the same...)

And now from Salam Pax...

   There is torment that
only ends with death. Nations
   sometimes are like that.

This hide-&-seek sky
vouchsafes me fuckin' nothing.

   12 12 03

   Old man in a cave
Once rich & feared by millions
   Now* brought to justice

His photograph with Rumsfeld
Gathers dust in a closet

   12 14 03

   On this crisp sunny
Sunday morning the dappled
   Leaves thick underfoot
Make me happy, war is far
And fear unconceivable

   12 14 03

"...there is a war
between the ones who say there is a war,
and the ones who say that there isn't.." --Leonard Cohen

"Judge then of thy Own Self, thy Eternal Lineaments explore.
What is Eternal & what Changeable? & what Annihilable?"
--Blake, Milton (1804)

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*or is it Bad Santa?