The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism
Free Inquiry Spring 2003 5-11-3

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed
to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
They Thought They Were Free
By Milton Mayer
http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free_nn4.html
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945",
University of Chicago Press. Reissued in paperback, April, 1981.
As Harpers Magazine noted when the book was published in 1955 (U. of Chicago), Milton Mayerâsextraordinarily far-sighted book on the Germans is more timely today than ever·ä
This crucial book tells how and why 'decent men' became Nazis through short biographies of 10 law-abiding citizens. An American journalist of German/Jewish descent, Mr. Mayer provides a fascinating window into the lives, thoughts and emotions of a people caught up in the rush of the Nazi movement. It is a book that should make people pause and think -- not only about the Germans, but also about themselves.
But Then It Was Too Late
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the universe was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was "expected to" participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to think. There was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings" and "consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.
"Your "little men," your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, "everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to ö to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked ö if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in ö your nation, your people ö is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done ( for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or "adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn't an anti Nazi. He was just ö a judge. In "42" or "43", early "43", I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an "Aryan" woman. This was "race injury", something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case a bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a "nonracial" offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party "processing" which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the "nonracial" charge, in the judge's opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.
"
"And the judge?"
"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience ö a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That's how I heard about it.) After the "44" Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don't know."
I said nothing.
"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was "defeatism." You assumed that there were lists of those who would be "dealt with" later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a "victory orgy" to "take care of" those who thought that their "treasonable attitude" had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
"Once the war began, the government could do anything "necessary" to win it; so it was with the "final solution" of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its "necessities" gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."
 Milton Mayer
http://www.rense.com/general37/fascism.htm
(via Metafilter)

"Party like it's 1939!"

"The Fizzer Worm is a Curious Yellow-like worm. It infects Windows systems through a variety of paths, takes control of them, coordinates subsequent infection attempts using an IRC channel. It gets code-updates from a Geocities webpage, so that it can mutate to avoid anti-virus software.

A coalition of IRC operators who've banded together to fight the worm have hijacked the Geocities webpage that Fizzer uses to update itself and they've posted a poison-pill to it. The next time the worm checks for its update, it will download a set of instructions that tell it to uninstall itself." (via Boing Boing)

Usually, it's Westerners who invent artificial languages. Here's the first one invented by a Korean. (Warning: if your browser is Netscape this site will make it crash.)

This site (via Salam Pax) is sort of a gateway to the wonderful world of Muslim Blogs.

Buying in order to define a sensibility. Unbalanced, unless there is also principled divestiture (askesis). To see divestiture as honor—honoring the Void.

Amateurism. Only an amateur believes in the magical efficacy of procedures.

What Buddhism lost from Taoism is its CLOWNS.

“ ‘…No artist paints his own Dreaming. It’s too powerful. It might kill him.’ “ --The Songlines

What addicts us are the METAPHORS for freedom.

“I see the devil can quote Wittgenstein.
He’s blacker than he’s painted.” --Randall Jarrell

“That anyone who dressed so very badly as did Thomas Carlyle should have tried to construct a philosophy of clothes has always seemed to me one of the most pathetic things in literature.” --Max Beerbohm

For my crimes against poetry I am sentenced to logorrhea.

Desire is the part of the Mystery that moves.

Saving Private Lynch. (via Metafilter)

“Leave only three wasps alive in the whole of Europe and the air of Europe will still be more crowded with wasps than space is with stars.” --Sir James Jeans

“The artist who realizes himself inside art will never be creative.” --Witold Gombrowicz

Macaronic pop songs, from “Amore” to “Psycho Killer” & “Loser”.

“ ‘A strangely striped strip of string’ is far too emphatic in sound for its sense, and ‘a terribly powerful Florida hurricane’ is not nearly emphatic enough.” --Robert Graves

“Prostitutes, Kvass finds himself thinking, are paperbacks while affairs are hard cover.” --Gather in the Hall of the Planets

Decadence—when pastiche is the norm.

“For the flying saucer myth, it will always be January 1950.” --Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies

“…I have also expressed doubts that his [Nabokov’s] aesthetic models—chess puzzles and protective colorations in lepidoptera—can be very helpful ideals for the rest of us.” --John Updike

One day materialism will mean that all things are artist’s material; spirituality, that all things are perfected form already; and no paradox. This word Art is a name for the paradox. There are others.

The Thread Out is another Labyrinth. –sayings of Asmodeus

“There is no law saying that the burlesque of a thing may not appear before the thing itself.” --R A Lafferty

In the end, it becomes a question of whether people who are intolerant will continue to count more than their actual numbers in a putative democracy. So far, the answer is Yes. The trouble is, people too easily see social decay as a problem of excessive autonomy, rather than of deficient reciprocity. This gives the fascists a loophole a mile wide...

Every thought is a palindromic prime.

Is there any point in an invention which would show you the sufferings of people on other planets, without giving you the power to halt it?

I don’t suffer for Art, but I suffer for Chess.

Writings on anarchism are like art criticism for an artform no one yet has practiced.

Nothingness, the ultimate McGuffin.

Reincarnation works for me only as a source of jokes. I told a friend that Crowley’d come back as Leo Buscaglia. She said, “That’s sick!”

‘ “If one man has an idea, that just means that many others will have the same idea at the same time. Anyone who doesn’t see that doesn’t know what an idea is. Thoughts are contagious, even if they are not expressed; perhaps most contagious when they are not expressed.” ‘ --Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face (1916; tr Mike Mitchell 1992)

‘How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!’ --Nietzsche

Father knows best. (via This Modern World weblog)

"Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns." --Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar

Sisyphus invented Progress. --sayings of Asmodeus

"If the rhinoceros wrote with his horn, publication would make it tingle." --Gerald Burns

"For natives of Petersburg, the despair of oncoming winter is the natural symbol of all other despairs." --Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok

The Butterfly Alphabet.

The Lojban Group recently received this email:

“Hi,I visited your site and found that it's the biggest website I've ever
visited.I think logban is an attack to the modern languages such as
Turkish,Finnish,German,French,Italian,Spanish and the other modern languages.I
also think that you are colonist or imperialist.It's a good way to have
forgotten the main identities and languages of the countries.I absolutely know
that language is the most important part of Nationalism.If a country's hasn't
got it's own language,the country bound to lose itself.Stop introducing lojban
language.Every country use their own language OK? You stated that lojban is an
international language.What a silly idea! It's a good method of Globalization
Game. Give up using lojban. Go your roots. I know you will ignore this mail but
I'm not stupid and people are not stupid who think samely with me. This is my
comment about lojban. No lojban,no globalism,no colonism,no imperialism. You
can't kill our main languages. Bye............


ONUR”

In traffic, the only way to punish another driver is to wreck your own car. --That's war in a nutshell.

"John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition, and the same is true of History with Trotsky." --Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940)

'To display oneself naked is not the same as telling the story of one's life.' --Bernard Arcand, The Jaguar and the Anteater (tr Wayne Grady, 1993)

After our poet's-home coffeehouse closed, i said capitalism was like the sow that eats her own piglets. "There are 500 year old bars in Europe. That's because there wasn't capitalism 500 years ago."

What a debacle for the human spirit to have come to, that new art is not eagerly received as a miracle in the land; that so many want to make art who aren't even artists. And then, that being an artist entails that one must neither complain about the overproduction of effigies & try to curtail it (however ineffectually; that's a task left seemingly to nonartists) nor indeed, even refer to this situation in or out of one's work; but also, that one accept the near-certainty of being buried in this superfluous abundance landfill-bound--without letting it stain the pure art-ness of the now-compromised product. AN IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION. And how much longer, no one can even guess.

It is typically intellectual to assume that problems can be solved by language alone, just as it is typically antiintellectual to assume that language cannot solve problems at all. Imagine these attitudes transferred, say, to a hammer.

"There is no escape through death from the supreme necessity of self-conquest." --Lafcadio Hearn, Japan's Religions

    'Finale

It does not moan or murmur now, the sea,
The sea.

A dreamless field and colorless, the sea,
The sea.

Pitiful, too, the sea,
The sea.

Clouds without reflections move the sea,
The sea.

It yields its bed to dismal mists, the sea,
The sea.

It too, look now, is dead, the sea,
The sea.'

--Ungaretti

I nearly fell for it myself.

From the New York Times:

"Today, black smoke billowed over Baghdad's skyline as looters set fire to the city's former telephone communications center, apparently as a distraction for others who tried to steal cars nearby.

On the other side of the city, hundreds of looters, who now range through the city every day, poured into a former palace of Saddam Hussein after American military units decided to vacate it.

Baghdad is once again becoming a city of almost hourly eruptions of gunfire. Criminals are shooting at other criminals, officials said. Families are settling scores, and some Iraqis are just taking potshots at American forces."

Even Lt Smash is relieved to hear that Salam Pax has posted on his blog again...

"Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest. ...Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire." --Chesterton, quoted by Borges in: Selected Non-Fictions ed. Eliot Weinwerger (1999)

Information is not a mass noun but a count noun. That fact by itself dooms the SuperInfoWay.

Since Americans despise the things they profess to respect--freedom, intelligence, & individuality--the only reason not to be a liar is martyrdom.

Someday it will be understood just as clearly that power & egotism should be kept apart, as kids & guns today.

"Evil" as the shadow cast by the hand of fear in the spotlight of despair.

Refusing to believe in chance is the most subtle, & perhaps the least pernicious, form of denial. But who is there can believe in neither chance nor necessity?

All the practitioners of unpopular arts are like Ed Wood: they have the greatest difficulty just getting people to first take them seriously.

Torture is a Rubicon. --saying of Asmodeus

For a bumpersticker: "GNOSTICS/ Know All the Pass Words."

Cities are the creation of slave societies & they continue to enslave us by the burden of their unquestioned demands.

It may not be strictly true, but it would be very helpful if it were generally believed that you cannot be a poet without reading poetry.

What if poetry readings were completely unscheduled & nobody ever knew when they would hear one again?

'There is no end to the illusions of patriotism.' --Borges

My rejected submission for the Shell-Economist essay contest:

“How Much Freedom Should We Trade for Our Security?”

Synopsis. The author rejecting the terms of the question as inadequate and unhelpful, seeks a formulation that, while radically idealistic, at least represents a step toward acknowledging what we are up against.

Tough times call for tall tires. But it isn’t like we still could choose.

If security were a pure function of armaments and high-tech surveillance; if something that depends on intricate patterns of trust and consent could be boxed, weighed, and placed on the auction block; if our deep-seated will to be isolate agents in a world made for our sole unbridled pounce-chomp-slurp, were anything but sheerest delusion and despair of humanity-- then we could indeed trade five cents of freedom for a nickel’s-worth of security. We could ride on our tall tires. America wants so badly to believe this. And no one we hear will tell us it isn’t so.

This land was taken by force from the first ones who lived here, but all we see in the mirror is our white hat of destiny. We rose to industrial might on the backs of slaves and demi-slaves, but all we see is the frolic of our gadget circus. And while our empire acting like an empire rewarded its allies and punished those who opposed it, we kept on seeing ourselves as the light of the world.

No wonder we don’t understand. Who hates Santa Claus?

And the facts are there, the reality of our deeds can be known--if you try to find out. Right. Watch America reach for the owl-flavored spoon. Not now, and maybe not ever. So sugar rules. And in the name of upholding all we hold dear (which means in effect our fantasies), we have lost or are losing a genuine precious thing, something we haven’t yet once had the wits to celebrate, and something the rest of the world really does have reason to admire, envy, or fear. I mean the openness of our society. Our tolerance, and receptiveness to change.

This accidental fruit of a frontier storming by misfits, this one historical miracle, might be doomed. Just let blinded Polyphemus flail about wildly, let the mad goading of otherwise impotent would-be martyrs continue, and the fear mount, and the media spew its ineluctable blather: it isn’t going to take much to brick up “Fortress America”. But not even the President will sleep secure in such a state. And cameras in the malls will receive the chrism of blood.

Do we want peace? The peace within our grasp is not a matter of military muscle, domestic rigor, or geopolitical clout. The only peace possible is to cease the breeding of hate. And that would be the work of many generations, even if all of us at once could instantly see the need. Vengeance will not end as long as humans remain trapped by their national identities; as long as there are borders, these borders will not be secure. The tall tires of our dreaming have too long kept us from feeling the road, and it is high time we got down and started a different journey, barefoot on the earth, toward peace that all can share. Is this realistic?

Is it realistic to expect the mass of Americans to suddenly start thinking hard about our place in the world, the responsibilities of wielding such unprecedented power, and our share in creating the oppression and mayhem we alone have had the dubious good fortune to be able to ignore till now? Is it realistic to expect our all-blinkered media to shake itself out of its parrot drone of reiterated snap-jabberwocky, and begin to speak honestly of cause and effect? Is it realistic to expects our gamester politicos to summon up enough personal courage to face down the juggernaut of jingoistic self-righteousness that passes for purposeful discourse? And is it realistic to expect the bunch of right-wing zealots, greedheads and corporate lackeys we’ve inadvertantly entrusted our entire future to, to listen and act accordingly?

i myself am not sanguine, but among the ancient gods and goddesses of Greece I think there was one called Nemesis, and her job it was to punish the sins of hubris; and as Carlyle once remarked in a fit of advanced lucidity:

“NO LIE CAN LIVE FOREVER.”

7-21-02

The Surveillance Camera Players like to perform for public cameras.

I am glad to see Crimethink is taking up where Yippie! left off. (I just hope the police are still only using rubber bullets when the party comes to town...)

In case you haven't been keeping up, the Extrasolar Planets Catalogue lists 107 planets that have been discovered outside the Solar System.

I invented a chess opening, the Chenoboskion Variation (named after a key Gnostic archaeological site), & the name is slowly finding its way into the literature...as "Chenoboskian". Oh well.

Someone just bought Saddam Hussein's personal banjo (signed) on eBay--for $15,000.

   "Death of the Great Stone Face"

The geometric tortoise is grave
Flying over fjord
And the thick light of Izdubar, kiln
Acid on my mind:
The sprockets engage with raucous rhyme,
I watch flayed people
Scurry. From what energies I give
Emerges a sigh.
To flourish in dark America
As in porous tomb,
Pungent prophecies with little force
Scads of skalds alone
Peal, rim/ abode & narrow Alcor
Gap ours the lean way
Stirious (this wretched qabbalah)
Down where fulsome faith
Find Cthulhu ftagn in Oz
Crepuscular key.
The carbonaceous gleam throbbing pearl
I insist is form
Enough, wisps away into last math
By a sinking lamp.

Emerald & moth licked anagram,
Profuse aorta
Muezzin out of purlieu one black dove
Against azalea
Glory: & the alibi was Rome
Mutiny demon
They cast out with execrations roach
Hubris alembic
Stayed, filled, terrible verbs did; neon
Blessing what sea.:.? Blood.

Sometimes i think i will end my days writing exclusively in Latin.

"...A flower from its cerulean wall..." --William Cullen Bryant

    "Vanitas

I met you at the parting of the ways,
And I have lingered with you certain days.

Over a little grave I had set a stone:
I had buried love, and I was all alone.

The roadway of the unforgotten past
Ended; the road in front lay vague and vast.

I met you at the parting of the ways,
And I have lingered with you certain days.

Because you took my hand in both your hands,
I think there may be help in other lands.

Because you laid your face against my face,
I wonder if hope lives in any place.

Because you laid my head upon your breast,
I know the earth holds yet a little rest."

Arthur Symons, Lesbia (1920)

    "THESE

Bers phone the the.
Give showed mail ing.
The on won so.
Ly fetch wonders note.
It's a gim, a de.
on the know, the on, the don't.
Back how's is backs.
To one it, it irons.
ops a ed, a are any this.
   Don.

   Trucks one."

Clark Coolidge, Space (1970)
[Tmesis is a resource seldom exploited in poetry, now or ever; Virgilius Maro
pf Toulouse called it ars scissendi, the "art of cutting".

    "Talon on Head

Beauty that tears
And guts to bucket child
On pathways without bird
Or stone-cropped hedge

This, that one that stains
For marchers in step--
Curling for madness dropping
Is quizzical and pure

But quick with movement...
The ardor of grace in doubt
Not hounded--
Simply mobile"

Ovid Neal III, The Dirge of the Thin Air Dancers (Crying Dog Books: 1992)

Starhawk in Palestine.

A corporation (i almost wrote: a Journal) is an intricately interlocking set of bottlenecks, masquerading as a planned order.

Car wrecks are the last bastion of Natural Selection.

In times to come, they will say we lied to our children, wittingly & remorselessly; & this will seem the most terrible thing of a terrible time.

"But we, the cataleptics,
Must venture out alone with our clean
Into what seems a source: the without." --Ovid Neal III

Crash during the night outside my window. I didn't even get up to look.

To speak for the speechless ones: that might be a genre. Another: the pretense of nonventriloquism.

"[Clifford Geertz:] If it rains, the ritual of course is a great success. But it is a success rather more like a successful painting is a success, or a successful production of a play is a success. ...The idea is to form the whole. When everything comes together, when you dance and you make all those long preparations that lead up to it, and then in the end it rains, what is reinforced is your conviction that you really understand what the cosmos is like and that indeed you understand your place and part in it. ...the ritual activity is not conceived as instrumental in the first place." --Jonathan Miller, States of Mind (1983) --my self publishing a chapbook. But how is one nation making war on another, any different?

Art as ritual & as conversation (for the gods; for other humans): egoistic & nonegoistic versions of each. Art as promise & as reinterpretation: & when it connects with other art, the one before becomes the promise; the one after becomes the reinterpretation. Art that exists in & out of History, & Art-history. Art that presupposes a heretical canon. Art about the absence of appropriate æsthetics that should judge it...

"Sed non in requiem pariter cessere tenebrae." --Silius Italicus, Punica xiii, 256 ('But the darkness did not bring the same rest to both armies.')

"Moss can be grown on tops." --Empson

"Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so not having time to read all, the future will read none." --George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man

'Whoever has no house now, will never have one.' --Rilke

Beautiful Salon story on a play in a ruined theater in Baghdad.

Listening to: Okinawan Pop band, Shoukichi Kina: "Peppermint Tea House" (1994).

How the Next Election will Be Stolen. "Letter from actor Peter Coyote to Senator Barbara Boxer:

Dear Barbara,

I'm writing to you about a situation of the greatest urgency.
Last year, I narrated a film called "Unprecedented" by American journalist
Greg Palast (currently writing for the London Guardian). This film documents
the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters
from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We
interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations of
the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew
that their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now
been revised to 91,000.

Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these
voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The
Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential
election and Democrats need to be prepared. The recent elections of Nebraska
Republican Chuck Hagel, the loss in Georgia of Max Cleland, wildly popular
Vietnam vet, and the victory of Alabama Governor Bob Riley, along with a
handful of other Republican victories, (all predicted to have been losers by
straw polls which our nation has refined to a high-art) points to an ominous
source: corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting
machine, recording and tabulating ballots.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government--answerable
to all its citizens, rather than a handful of corporate officers and
stockholders--would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd
think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and
their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there
would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if
a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with
computerized vote counts. You'd be wrong.

The Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed
that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S.
Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in,
the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely
ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.
When Democrat,Charlie Matulka requested a hand count of the vote in
the election he lost to Hagel, his request was denied because Nebraska had a
just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from
looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count
votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the
corporation formerly run by Hagel.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the
Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, (the man
responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete), asking him why he'd
not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the
details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine
company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's
office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the
second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the
Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Hagel's surprise victory is a trial-run for the presidential
election. Election 'reform' laws are now prohibiting paper ballots (no
trail) and exit polls, effectively removing all trace and record of votes,
making prosecution of voter fraud virtually impossible. For whatever
reasons, the Democrats decided not to pursue the issue of fraudulence in the
last Presidential election. The three Supreme Court Justices who
should have recused themselves (Scalia, Thomas and O'Connor) were allowed to
stand unchallenged and pass a bizarre one-time only ruling. That they
were in place long before the election demonstrates how clearly the
end-game of such moves was thought out.

Unless the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of
national importance, not only is it highly probably that Democrats will
lose again and again, but eventually voters will "sense" even if they
cannot prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those
boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is
tantamount to turning over the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I
urge you to use your considerable powers and influence to address this
issue." (via Buffalo Poetics List)

Zompist compares English as She is Spoke with Babelfish (Yes, Babelfish is worse!)
.

Welcome back, Salam Pax!

The only poem i have been able to find by a Dallas poet contemporaneous with the Kennedy Assassination:

     "The Spell

You can almost see him, looking as if well,
Shedding it, shaking it off,
The least shadow on the shoulders
Marking the hurt--as if absorbed almost;
Then the face turning, alive--

Only hesitating momentarily--

Until you remember how the head
Was horribly shattered
And fell, with the lifted hair,
As from an ax in back--Oswald
Cutting a path for himself
In the midst of America, a wedge;

But was the thing as it sped,
Coppered, leaden, not stopped
Perhaps there in the invincible thick hair?
Where the woman with her skill
Could pick it away, in her lap,
Breaking the spell? in the cloth of her dress--

It was deeper than that;
Neither burr nor dune thistle,
Nor like the roses she held
Black as blood in the light, so dark red--
But a kind of blunt bud, splintered
Into flower, that could not be touched,
Having its own final force that spread throughout,
The blind dark overwhelming him."

William Burford, A Beginning (1966)

The myth of Unity is the child of despair. --sayings of Asmodeus

Love is a destroyer of worlds, & the passport to all worlds. --This is not two secrets about love, but one.

"Rabbits live in our air so why not portrait busts?" --Gerald Burns in Probability and Fuzzy Dice

"Every lissom overture of the malaise pleased me." --Tanith Lee, The Secret Books of Paradys I & II (1988)

"When asked why he wrote in a dead language, [Isaac Bashevis] Singer said he was wont to reply that he wrote mostly about ghosts, and that is what ghosts speak, a dead language." --Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in NYT Book R 1-8-95;

"A print run for a book of poems in Irish is between 1,000 and 1,500 copies." --ibid [total # native speakers is about 60,000, or 2% of Ireland's pop.]

Alkaloids are Mt Olympus. --sayings of Asmodeus

'At the time of the revolutionary uprising in Dresden, he [Bakunin] proposed that they should set up Raphael's Madonna in ront of the struggling revolutionaries, in the belief that the army would not bring itself to fire upon it.' --Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (1947)

"This is what the great voice does for us. It rarely astonishes our ears. It illumines our souls, as you see the lightning make the unintelligible craving darkness leap into long mountain ridges, and twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of light within light, rose-like, toward a central core of violet heat." --George Meredith, Vittoria

Despair is a concrete-eating termite.

"...I have loved airs that die
Before their charm is writ
Along a liquid sky
Trembling to welcome it." --Robert Bridges

"A discouraging number of reputable poets are sane beyond recall." --E B White

It makes no more sense to want to become one's work than to want to turn into a doorknob.

Art eludes the artist as much as the critic.

'My flesh is combustible and my conscience dark;
my passions ephemeral and sharp, glitter
like the shards of bottle glass that bristled
on the henyard wall to keep out cats and thieves.' --Ramón López Velarde, quoted in: Octavio Paz, The Siren and the Seashell, tr L Kemp & M S Peden (1976)

"It might be difficult to form an interspecies republic." --Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe

"Tennyson read Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, and thought him 'a kind of moralist,' though his subjects, he allowed, are shocking." --William Allingham in: Tennyson, Interviews & Recollections (1983)

"Kipling's death in 1936 coincided with King George V's. There was another less noticed death at the time--that of Saklatvala, an Indian Parsee who had become the Communist MP for Battersea. It so happened that Kipling's cremation followed Saklatvala's, and at the crematorium there was no time to clear away the Red Flag and other communist insignia set up for Saklatvala. Truly God is not mocked." --Malcolm Muggeridge, Things Past: An Anthology (1978)

'I write down
the ideograms for "youth"
feeling uneasy
about the preponderance
of horizontal striokes.' --Tawara Machi, Salad Anniversary

Dreamed i was in my parents' old house, & a helicopter crashed into the house behind us. When i called the fire department, i got an answering machine. So i left a message & went back to what i was doing.

A short history of blogs.

A curious episode in the recent history of Lojban was the Hexadecimalist Heresy. A certain Lojbanist, observing that Lojban had single-syllable words for numbers up to fifteen, maintained that the default number base of Lojban must be Base-16 (i.e. counting ...8, 9, A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15, "10"=16 in conventional notation). This created an immense & vituperative controversy, only ending when the arch-hexidecimalist withdrew from the community. Lojban remains default-decimal today, but in the imaginary city of Lojbanistan called "La Xagvar", where nonconforming Lojbanists are said to congregate, it is still the customary greeting to ask, "What base do you count in?"

'The Ornamented Zither

The ornamented zither, for no reason, has fifty strings.
Each string, each bridge, recalls a youthful year.
Master Chuang was confused by his morning dream of the butterfly;
Emperor Wang's amorous heart in spring is entrusted to the cuckoo.
In the vast sea, under a bright moon, pearls have tears;
On Indigo Mountain, in the warm sun, jade engenders smoke.
This feeling might have become a thing to be remembered,
Only, at the time you were already bewildered and lost.'

--James J. Y. Liu, The Poetry of Li Shang-yin (1969)

'...I believe that poetry (especially lyric poetry) should not flow like water over a waterfall and be a poet's daily occupation.' --Akhmatova

"And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night." --H.P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth, xxiii

"A very good corrective to the Aeneid is, I think, the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln." --Frank O. Copley

"The common [cockroach] species Periplaneta americana becomes active soon after dark each day and scavenges continually for five or six hours, but if one has its head cut off, it no longer shows this circadian rhythm of activity. Not surprising, perhaps; but in fact if the head is removed surgically and precautions are taken to keep the insect from bleeding to death, it survives for several weeks. A headless cockroach eventually starves to death, but while it lives, it continues to move in a random and desultory fashion. Janet Harker found that she could give a cockroach back its sense of direction by a process of transfusion. All insects have very rudimentary circulatory systems, in which blood just washes around in the body cavity bathing the internal organs. One individual can be made to share its blood with another by simply cutting a hole in the body wall of each and connecting them together with a short glass tube. Harker solved the problem of differences of opinion by an ingenious if somewhat gruesome compromise. She strapped the blood donor upside down on the back of the headless cockroach and cut off the upper one's legs to prevent it kicking and upsetting the weird combination. Paired like this in parabiosis (which means living side by side) the double-bodied cockroach with one head and one set of legs functioned almost normally." --Lyall Watson, Supernature (1973)

   More from Festus:

I should like to macadamize the world;
The road to Hell wants mending.

Yet truth and falsehood meet in seeming, like
The falling leaf and shadow on the pool’s face.

Oh! I should love to die. What is to die?
I cannot hold the meaning more than can
An oak’s arms clasp the blast that blows on it.

The wild and winged desires, youth’s saurian schemes,
Which creep and fly by turns; which kill, and eat,
And do disgorge each other...

Respect is what we owe; love what we give,
And men would mostly rather give than pay.

...--Man, alas! alone,
The recreant spirit of the universe,
Contemns the operations of the light;
Loves surface-knowledge; calls the crimes of crowds
Virtue: adores the useful vices; licks
The gory dust from off the feet of war,
And swears it food for gods, though fit for fiends...

Then let the mad world fight its shadow down;
There soon will be nor sun, nor world, nor shadow.

...What are years to me?
Traitors! that vice-like fang the hand ye lick:
Ye fall like small birds beaten by a storm
Against a dead wall, dead.

Yes, wandering fires wait even on rottenness
Like a stray gleam of thought in an idiot’s brain.

Love is the art of hearts and heart of arts.
Conjunctive looks and interjectional sighs
Are its vocabulary’s greater half.

The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,
And fatten him on that men pined to death for;
Yea, have a further knowledge of thy beauties
Than ever did thy best-loved lover dream of.

The grey gull balanced on her bowlike wings,
Between two black waves seeking where to dive.

These cursed joys my soul now writhes among,
Like to a half-crushed reptile on a rose...

...The sphinx-like heart,
Consistent in its inconsistency,
Loathes life the moment that life’s riddle is read:
The knot of our existence is untied,
And we lie loose and useless. Life is had;
And then we sigh, and say, can this be all?

"Many Mansions

The last majority attained,
And shut from its small house of dust,
Into the heritage of air
The spirit goes because it must:
And halts before the multiple plane
To look more ways than left and right,
And weeping walks its father's house
Like something homeless in the night:
For now less largely let abroad,
Though but the world they say is mine,
I shiver as I take the road."

Léonie Adams

Excerpts from the 1847 edition of Festus by Philip James Bailey:

...Death does his work
In secret and in joy intense, untold,
As though an earthquake smacked its mumbling lips
O’er some thick peopled city.

This is to be a mortal and immortal!
To live within a circle,--and to be
That dark point where the shades of all things around
Meet, mix and deepen.

...To blow
A kiss, a bubble and a prayer hath like
Effect and satisfaction.

So I betook me to the sounding sea;
And overheard its slumberous mutterings
Of a revenge on man; whereat almost
I gladdened, for I felt savage as the sea.

The science of the future is to man
But what the shadow of the wind might be.

Most men glide quietly and deeply down:
Some seek the bottom like a cataract.

Ye hate the truth as snails salt--it dissolves ye...

I used to have this book--in the 1901 edition. After the looting of the museum in Baghdad, which probably included the original cuneiform, i searched "The Epic of Izdubar". It was only then that i discovered it was only an older, bad transliteration--of "Gilgamesh".

Forgot to mention the conlang Vorlin, for which i wrote several poems & even some palindromes--in what must be described now as "Middle" Vorlin. Vorlin's goal is to be concise (one or two syllable words) & easy to learn; it is also surprisingly sophisticated.

"XV

"Tell brave deeds of war."

Then they recounted tales, --
"There were stern stands
And bitter runs for glory."

Ah, I think there were braver deeds. "

--Stephen Crane

H'm, look what i found: "SPASMODIC POETICS: A 150-YEAR RETROSPECT
A special session for the 2003 MLA conference in San Diego.
Recent work in historical genre theory and the development of "Cultural
Neoformalism" make the so-called "Spasmodic" poets an appealing subject
for new scholarship. This session commemorates the 150-year anniversary of
Sydney Dobell's _Balder_ in order to encourage new discussion of the
spasmodic movement, a phenomenon that has received insufficient critical
attention despite its substantial impact on Victorian poetics. Any aspect
of the movement is welcome, including but not limited to the work of
Dobell, Alexander Smith, Philip Bailey, Elizabeth Barrett and/or Robert
Browning, Tennyson's "Maud," or _Wuthering Heights_, the so-called
"spasmodic" novel." --I've been interested in the Spasmodics ever since i found a 120-year-old copy of Philip James Bailey's Festus in my college library, & read (most of) it. Years later, i'd been having a recurring dream of a multi-storey bookstore, when i first ventured into one, now closed, in downtown Ft Worth. As i climbed the stairs there, i realized i'd been dreaming about this place, though i'd never before set foot in it. In the uppermost room i found not one but two copies of Festus. (I still haven't finished it--.) He has some great aphorisms sprinkled throughout, but you have to plow through acres of twaddle about angels & poetry & God & Love ktp to find them. Another Spasmodic, "Owen Meredith" (Bulwer Lytton's son), is well represented on the second hand market by his book-length poem Lucile*. (I found a webpage that attempts to catalog all the editions this book ran through...) It has its moments (i've already quoted from it, i think). And i recently acquired another of his book-length poems, Glenaveril...I'm still looking for a book of Dobell. Here's a good overview of the school. Their main characteristics were verbose subjectivity & exaggerated metaphor. I prefer to think of them as proto-Flarfists.

----------------------------------
*footnote. I cannot resist repeating this anecdote, which i found while trying to google a decent bio of O.Meredith, poetaster & sometime Viceroy of India: "There
is a legend that every lot or library of books that has
turned up in the last eighty years was sure to have a
copy of LUCILE in it. The book is, indeed, a drug on the
market, and a story is told of how a prominent bookseller
of fifty years ago did what he could do to relegate it to
a comparatively decent obscurity. The bookseller, who
made a trip to England every year, would gather all the
copies of LUCILE from his own lots and those of other
dealers before a voyage. When he was far out on the
Atlantic he would ceremoniously dump them overboard with
an oath and add, "Here are so many copies of LUCILE that
will never enter a book store again." "

PS my edition of Lucile appears to be H M Caldwell's "Exquisite" of 1896

One of my interests that sometimes contributes to, & sometimes distracts from, my more purely literary pursuits, is constructed languages. There are an amazing number on the Net (Kennaway catalogues 310). Most have few if any speakers. A good example of the "artlang" is Taneraic, a wonderful creation by Javant Biarujia of Melbourne, who has a kept a secret diary in this language most of his life. I have learned enough of it to read some, with difficulty: it's irregular, like a "natlang", & unlike virtually every other "conlang" in existence... It also has one of the largest vocabularies; his ongoing dictionary project is being published by Nokusumo. But several are more ambitious: their avowed goal is to provide all the minority languages of the world with something simpler that other people will want to learn, an "interlang". Esperanto is well represented, & even its predecessor Volapük. (I have written poetry in both of these.) Two of the most active & interesting subcultures are Klingon & Lojban. The Klingons are, shall we say, Trekkies with an attitude, & have been so busy they've already translated "Hamlet" & "Gilgamesh" "back into the original". Lojban, devised in 1960 with the avowed purpose of testing the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, only really got going in the late 80's, but now has many activities, from technical discussions (in this language, they can run on for years) to a translation of Alice in Wonderland (including the puns & neologisms). I have myself contributed to this one in a small way, being the author of the first 2 books of poetry in the language, as well as its first "novel". Someone who is not a linguistics geek might well ask me, what do i get out of this intense but pointless hobby? Well, at one time i might have answered, it's not often you have a chance to be a tribe's Chaucer & Shakespeare at once... Now i think it has something to do with literalizing the alienation i feel as an author. You don't want to read me? Fine: i'll write something you can't read. --And other times, in a mellower mood, i'll answer: all languages are essentially one language, & our job is to acquire as much of it as possible.

"Elegy Composed in Late March

More than the lovely who prevail?
But very love must know
By no perduring thing
Can this be known.
Though with attributes of marble,
It is a mortal beauty
Never hewn in stone.

To what they loved and destroyed,
Never had their fill of cherishing and would not save,
Even the gods fixed no star;
But more in sign
The rainbow's meltings and the reed
And the slight narcissus gave."

Léonie Adams

Apparently a lot of the lyrics for Pink Floyd's album, "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", were taken from A.G. Graham's Poems of the Late T'ang. (I'm always the last to find out these things.)

from STAR GROPE (1986): "Take day.-.. Left rim receive bleed: planet to have sea to ice-.. Crave star cold. They. High come never evil/. Sleepwalker day; profound crave carbonaceous I. Pungent profound of purlieu acid to did he it. Emerald rim come grow cold? Night not lungfish. Sleepwalker cold. Folk for age under bleed; to cold. Ice: grope come find did them carbonaceous it; crystal receive crave carbonaceous they??./ Puree terrible find did them terrible did avalanche rain night raucous cat never lungfish." --When done right, this sort of text lurks just beyond the range of sense, a ghostly sort of meaning. I invoke Bohm's "Theory of Implicate Order" for the combination of all these words, more in connotation than denotation, into one atmospheric quasi-story. Single-word parataxis, or "word salad" as the whitecoats refer to it, allows the stickiness of adjacent units in English to almost-work grammatically; herding not cats, but cat-ness.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner writes a letter to Dubya.

The fortunes of a painting. (via Schism Matrix)

I have always envied musicians & especially composers: poetry to me is a grubby art, mixing elixirs out of old bath water; while composers draw miracles from the aether... Besides Jerry Hunt--who was as close to a Renaissance mage as anyone in the 20c could hope to be--the only other composer i've known personally is the young Denton composer & teacher Paul Bonneau. Recently he wrote a Latin Mass for his doctorate, & an amazing piece it is. Usually when later composers try this sort of thing, they end up stylizing a hollow shell. But his is rich in feeling & drama: one movement almost sounds like it has Crime Jazz influences; another is mysteriously anguished. I've already listened to it about ten times, & each time discover new felicities. (As performed by the Flower Mound Chamber Orchestra, the CD is not commercially available, but you might try emailing him at: paul at fmco dot org to see if there are any extra copies available.)

"PRESIDENTS

The president of shame has his own flag
the president of lies quotes the voice
of God
as last counted
the president of loyalty recommends
blindness to the blind
oh oh
applause like the heels of the hanged
he walks on eyes
until they break
then he rides
there is no president of grief
it is a kingdom
ancient absolute with no colors
its ruler is never seen
prayers look for him
also empty flags like skins
silence the messenger runs through the vast lands
with a black mouth
open
silence the climber falls from the cliffs
with a black mouth like
a call
there is only one subject
but he is repeated
tirelessly"

W S Merwin, The Carrier of Ladders (1970)

-------------------------------------------------------
Momus's lyrical salute to photoblogs.

I vary in my sense of what constitutes writing, between the poles of writing as a construction of words, not all that different from finding a pleasing arrangement of stones (suiseki); & writing as direct utterance, a process like dowsing in that the goal becomes apparent on the way. Sometimes for me it is both, & i like this best. But i have to have discovered something. Even if it is only, that this arrangement makes all the other possible ways seem unnecessary.

Collage, preeminently the mode of the 20c, in poetry takes the form of parataxis. Usually one leaps from image to image, phrase to phrase, or sentence to sentence, "connecting the dots" of what’s left out. But the leaping itself remains arbitrary. In the Japanese form of renga, each "link" must be related to the previous & yet send those two parts in a contrasting direction from that of the gestalt formed by the previous & the next-to-previous links. These leaps have long been codified as, in chess, you can move any one of several pieces, & each piece moves in a different way. --I see bringing an awareness of "possible renga move-types" to conventional parataxis, as one means of revitalizing this rather faded modernist technique. Not that it always need be rule-bound. But there is a higher music, in the succession of one kind of leap after another. --I also feel this secondary effect in the sequence of rhyme-sounds, or in the case of "rhime", in rhime-numbers. (Nowadays i invariably alternate odd & even pairs.) --It is not inconceivable that readers may eventually learn to perceive, & prize, such rarefied frissons.

In the future there will not be race, age, gender, religion or national identities: there will only be the totems of Sanrio. This is Vonnegut's dream of a society of "granfalloons", realized. Mine is Badtz Maru; & wherever i exhibit his emblems, those who are in the know feel compelled to smile & acknowledge him.

"Nobody Knows it but Me

There's a place that I travel
With my Humvees & Bradleys
When I want to roam
With some kick-ass firepower
And nobody knows it but me.

The roads don't go there
Like a good old Interstate
And the signs stay home
In some alphabet I can't read
And nobody knows it but me.

It's far far away
From the nearest Starbucks
And way way afar
From the last ATM for sure
It's over the moon and the sea

And wherever you're going
To kill a bunch of strangers
That's wherever you are
With the blood on your hands & your feet
And nobody knows it but me

And six billion other humans."

--Victor Vermis

-----------------------------------------------
Saw a nice Modigliani show in Ft Worth. Unfortunately, they didn't have my favorite picture of his... "Here," i said a bit grandiosely, "are two of the three good Nudes painted in the Twentieth Century." (The third is also by Modigliani.) But seriously, once art-ideology had taken over Painting, & photography captured the erotica market, the field was left to illustrators like Vargas & Vallejo, kitsch masters like Leeteg, & amateurs. Much as i want to recommend the nudes in the paintings of Giger & Fuchs, i'm afraid only a space alien would find them...erotic. --And, perhaps, this is not unrelated to the fact that most of the good love poetry written in the 20c, was in the form of song lyrics.

Some people just read H P Lovecraft like any other author they like, & some are fans. Then there are those who take it a little more seriously.

Useful Arabic terms. safqua ('secret deal'). al-ithara wa al-faza: "shock and awe" (via Salam Pax). taqiyya 'concealment of faith' --a term which may enter the American lexicon with a slightly different meaning, should the Thought Police come to brass tacks.

While waiting for Salam Pax to reappear, i ran across another blogger in Iraq: Lt Smash. He's not as funny as Salam but then, he's an American soldier. And straight.

'BEFORE THE END

Before the end everything
falls into delirium.
Remembrance rouses the eyelids
in combat with heavy sleep.
You had hands and arms of wood
up to the breast, which was of gold.
You walk wordless on streets filled
with antennae of monsters.
You were revolted by the skein of worms
writhing one above the other,
killed by every innocent glance.

Tonight before you journey
let the wings of angels fall
from your shoulders to earth;
their substance is required for other things.'

Martin Camaj, Selected Poetry (tr. from the Albanian by Leonard Fox, 1990)

Conlon Nancarrow wrote piano music that no one could play. The only way he could hear it was to put it on the roll of a player piano; & that's what he did for all his works...Two other maverick 20c composers i like are: Harry Partch, who invented his own musical scale--& the instruments to play it--; & Olivier Messiaen, who turned for inspiration to Eastern music & birdsong, for some of the weirdest (or most sharawadgi) church music ever written. One of his works, "Turangalila", must be the only symphony that uses a theremin (another of my pet obsessions).

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...

"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

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)

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.]

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.)

"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."

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...!

"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.

One usage i can't endurance is "transition" as a verb. We are rapidly transitioning, people, to a state of total barbarivity.

"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)

"Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young."

A.E. Housman, More Poems

(The English tutor in me wants to change this to: "we'd sprung"...)