I don't know if he was familiar with Pessoa, but in his
early book License to Carry a Gun, Andrei
Codrescu writes different kinds of poems under several
pseudonyms--including that of a Black Militant.

   "Radiant Silhouette IV

Frenzy softens the air.

The hardly used desire was posted on the outer panel
of the blackboard sky. Beneath rows of illustrated
fragments, someone whispers and someone listens,
and no one agrees on how many were in the bed between
one and one equals all the hours you have known or
imagined knowing another.

The inside of the walls got sticky, and tiny spots of
pink paper floated toward the rain spattered clouds.

I followed feathers down flagpoles

I stood on trains,
 sat across from
  and beside

I traced the little wigs of a tarnished button,
 and started eating the perfumed crumbs
  left out for the leper of milk

I licked peeling canisters
 until rain trickled out of
  my mouth and pockets

I counted the insect vowels missing from the slag heap

I inserted a strip of imitation fur into the Book of Neon

After he tied her on the bed, she handcuffed him to the stove.
Dark aquamarine light slipped off the rounded edges of the
upturned venetian blinds, dropping into mirrors fastened
at the corners.

An old movie flickered on the outer border of their gnawed platform."

--John Yau in: The Open Boat ed Hongo (1993)

A manifesto by Mark Amerika.

Shia Pundit.

How would you feel if you were a baker and had
to throw away fresh bread every day because
no one could smell it?

What is a leader? A person standing at the point
of maximum illusion. They have the least freedom
but the greatest sense of power... Nobody tells
the truth to a leader.

Speech is only the latest language.
Story is older than speech.

The only storytellers we listen to anymore, are
either professional liars or people who believe
words can describe reality.

Science is the political expression of method, and
arose with the modern state (17c.). It was inevitable
that, having chosen to perceive reality in terms
of its largest gestalts, and in generalizable relations
about groups, exclusively, scientists should have
gone on to become a collectivized institution which
serves the state in its oppression of individual
humans, just as science must ignore particularities
in order to attain certainty; not "Knowledge is power"
but "certain knowledge is Power-thinking applied
to things"...

In me the bricoleur wars with the enginer. Try to
utilize this as a dialectic. Sketch an outline, decide
on certain elements to choose from among,
then improvise.

"During the siege, concerts were held even as the
city was being shelled. Paintings from the Hermitage
were moved to the Ural Mountains for safekeeping,
but locals still flocked to the museum, where guides
pointed to empty frames and described the art they
once contained." --Craig Neff, in Sept/Ocr '03 Texas
Journey

"At a bookshop, we found...the familiar black-and-yellow-
covered for Dummies series; the word used for
dummies in the Russian version translates to teapots."
--ibid

Sequels to Beyond Good and Evil:
   Beyond Us and Them
   Beyond Rational and Irrational
   Beyond I and not-I
   Beyond Same and Different

"The Arm Twisted And Turned With Lightning
Imperativeness As If To Reach The Point
Of The Borders Of The Days That Touch
Each Other On The Rim Of The Precision-Discipline."
--Sun Ra

Improvisation depends on having to invent
as little as possible.

   ''The Seventh Rose

The first rose is of granite
The second rose is of red wine
The third rose is of lark's feathers
The fourth rose is of rust
The fifth rose is of yearning
The sixth rose is of tin
But the seventh
The most delicate
The believng rose
The rose of night
The sisterly rose--
Only after your death
Will it grow out of your coffin.'
--Yvan Goll, ibid

The last war. The last war will be fought between
robots trying to sell something, & humans who just want
to be left alone.

The only separable form & content is in lying.
But even so: this is a true representation of an inner
contradiction...

'With every dawn you return to be changed
From the wings of night's theater
Are you elf Holy Infanta?
In your dark strangeness?

With what weapon do captives approach you?
Will you step out of a revolving door
Out of a sunken castle? Out of a storm
Or a street full of tormenting detours?

What blaze touseled your locks?
What god whispered the password to you?
You sing in Tuscan you smell of burning

You come back to me confused bewildered
With the mask of a smile and--only half hidden--
Under the purple of your cloak an angel's wing'

--Yvan Goll, Selected Poems (1981) tr
Schulte & Bullock

I have the hatred of injustice of the true poet, &
the love of gewgaws of the false poet--in equal
measure. I am obviously predestined for no ordinary
disappointment.

Between languages: Yvan Goll.

A well-made site on art & the Holocaust.

"One reason that I have travelled more than you is
that I do not have a car. A car is not a travel machine,
it's a repetition machine." --Momus (his account, with
pics, of the blackout)

By the time they start putting tiny broadcast chips in your
consumer products, you'll be able to buy a chip to block them.
Ah, capitalism! (via Plastic)

Spanish has its Pig Latin too: it's called jerigonza.

"Now, areas are identified as “the one with the crater
where the missile exploded”, or “the street with the
ravaged houses”, or “the little house next to that one
where that family was killed”. --Riverbendblog

Compare your standard of living with other cities in the U.S.

   "The Difference
by Steven Jesse Bernstein
(from the book More Noise Please!)

There are poets stuck
to the underside of the chair
by their fingers. If you
give them string they will
put it in their mouth and
it will come out sticky.
That is as close to being
spiders as they can get.
And, there are bugs
under my fingers, bouncing
them across the keys
like Mexican jumping beans.
That's as close to being
a poet as I can get.
The difference between me
and most insects is that I approach
the truly sexless, while
they approach the truly heartless.
The difference between
me and most poets
is I am really a spider."

[Bernstein had died just before i moved to Seattle, & i
went to a tribute reading for him without knowing who
he was.]

"Over the past 30 years the productivity of the people whose
brain and muscle creates the wealth of the world's richest nation
has grown by 66 percent. But the wage of the typical employee
– the median wage – has grown by only 7 percent." --Mark
Weisbrot (via Wood's Lot)

Beware of cultivating your monstrousness, O
comprachicos; do you know how much love it takes to
pull that off?

'In this growth of landscape-art into a slow transform-
ation of the world into landscape, there is a long human
development. The content of these pictures, resulting
so unintentionally from observation and work, speaks
to us of a future that has begun in our own time: tells
us that man is no longer the social entity, moving with
poise among his like, nor is he any longer one for whom
evening and morning, for whom proximity and distance
exist. It tells us, that he is placed amongst things like
a thing, infinitely alone, and that all which is common to
them both has been drawn from things and men into the
common depth where the roots of all growth drink.'
--Rilke (1902), Where Silence Reigns tr G C Houston

Playing music for other musicians/ music for nonmusicians.
But: there are no magic tricks for other magicians! So art
has a tendency toward illusionism that goes unchecked
when its culture no longer cultivates.

What is it that's so difficult? To talk about each sick
person--and not the Plague.

I want no great art if that only means to be the tree for
a great monkey.

But what kind of degradation has not become an
art?

Turin compares a perfume he reviews to Bizet's Symphony in C.
I just had to check it out, & while it didn't blow me away, the
second movement has a brooding delicacy that is quite charming.

Melanie reviews:
" The following is my mass e-mail review of the screenplay for the current Miramax release, The Battle of Shaker Heights. To refresh, Shaker is the end product of this year¹s current Project Greenlight, the scriptwriting contest sponsored by Miramax, HBO, and Oscar winning actor-writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (who collectively won the Best Original Screenplay award for Miramax¹s 1997 release Good Will Hunting, in which Affleck played second banana to Damon¹s title character). Anyway, Project Greenlight was initiated about two years ago to encourage aspiring (struggling, waiting to be discovered) screenwriters. In its second go-round the contest, in which all entries are submitted and judged online, was expanded to include as of yet untested directors, who were asked to submit micro-short films for consideration. The catch with Project Greenlight is, as anybody who regularly watches HBO already knows, is that besides a guaranteed one shot movie deal (w/ a modest 2 million dollar budget), the winning writers and directors must submit to Big Brother type treatment (via HBO¹s omnipresent cameras) during the production of their debut effort . The idea seems to be that the normal frustations of making a movie, let alone one with such a modest budget and hurried shooting schedule (approximately three weeks) make for mighty entertaining tv viewing when the focus is on the inexperienced talent behind the camera. Whereas the first season of Project Greenlight highlighted the seeming ineptitude of writer-director Pete Jones (whose film was titled Stolen Summer), the ante was upped in the recently concluded season by pitting a pair of directors (the team of Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle) against a single writer, Erica Beeney; the three of them, remember, all newcomers to the wonderful world of feature film production.

It is true I entered my script, Learning Meredith, in last fall¹s PGL competition, but let me be perfectly frank: I never wanted to win. Life is humiliating enough without going on tv and essentially being set-up to look like a jack-ass, or worse. All I wanted, all I expected, from Project Greenlight was constructive, informed criticism from my peers; all scriptwriting participants were required to read and evaluate at least four screenplays and a minimum of two short films (likewise, we were guaranteed our script would be rated by at least four of our peers). I thought some of the comments about my screenplay were well intended, but a lot of the responses were laughable because they were so contradictory (example: none of my peer reviewers could list a single movie my script reminded them of--a question clearly designed to gauge marketability--while my scores for originality were only middling).

Anyway, I do not have HBO so I have not seen a single episode of PGL, round 2, (The Making of The Battle of Shaker Heights) which has been a big summetime hit for the premium cable network; however, I have read plenty about the shennanigans the directors pulled, not to mention the frustrations of veterans Chris Moore, producer, and Richard Nord, the Oscar nominated film editor of 1993¹s The Fugitive. Directors Rankin and Potelle apparently underminded Beeney by writing new scenes without her knowledge. Producer Moore has called the directors a number of names too colorful to repeat, and Nord has said trying to edit the film, which fared poorly with test audiences, is/was like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Hardly a vote of confidence, though, to be fair, not all the blame can be laid on the two directors who, as per the PGL rules, have no control over the final edit. Meanwhile, the tv show is itself assembled to make sure everyone comes across as bad (evil, dense, or both--you name it) as possible. That¹s a given. On the other hand, Rankin and Potelle haven¹t done themselves any favors in the intelligence department, either. In a recent Dallas Observer interview Rankin referred to Emmy winning actress Camryn Manheim (The Practice), who auditioned for a role in Shaker, as Catherine Manheim.

But what about the final result? I was shocked to read that the completed Battle of Shaker Heights runs only a scant 73 minutes, not including credits. Whoa! 73 minutes! That¹s only an hour and thirteen minutes. I went to the PGL website to look at Beeney¹s winning screenplay and found that it was 119 pages long. If you consider the standard one page of screenplay equals one minute of screentime, you have to wonder what the heck happened to Beeney¹s original vision for Shaker Heights. Apparently somewhere along the way to completion 46 minutes of Shaker Heights was discarded, and for a movie that should have been just one minute shy of two hours (a perfectly respectable length), 46 minutes is a significant chunk, easily almost half. With that in mind, I decided to read Beeney¹s script so I could compare it to the actual film at a later date.

The Battle of Shaker Heights tells the story of a high school senior, a smart aleck misft, named Kelly who spends his free-time reenacting famous WWII battles; we¹re also to understand, as per the script, that this young man is more qualified to teach history than his teacher. Our hero has a messy, downscale, home life: his mother, a once promising artist, now employs an assembly line to manufacture pieces for ³starving artist² shows and the like; the boy¹s father is a reformed druggie now devoted to helping others less fortunate than himself. Kelly¹s life changes when, at one of his war events, he meets and befriends a rich kid, a private school type from an affluent, seemingly perfect family (with the possible exception of a dad who¹s just a shade uncaring, or remote). Moreover, the rich kid has an older sister named Tabby (???) upon whom Kelly develops a crush, even though he knows full well she¹s engaged to be married. That¹s the basic set-up, and it¹s a fine one, although in many ways it¹s not too terribly different from last year¹s Stolen Summer. Both movies are boy coming of age stories and, more specifically, both are fueled by the friendship that develops between boys (or, okay, young men) from opposing backgrounds. In the case of Stolen Summer, a Catholic boy befriends the terminally ill son of a rabbi. I didn¹t hate Beeney¹s screenplay for The Battle of Shaker Heights--she clearly has some screenwriting savvy, almost too much at times (I could only take so much of her editorializing about the onscreen action...very much telling, rather than showing). She also has a keen ear for dialogue--and good for her. I will go so far as to say that in many ways, the script was better written than most anything I read during the first round of judging. Some of the scripts, nevermind essentials like basic storytelling and dialogue, were poorly formatted and gramatically suspect. Beeny¹s script has only a few such lapses. Still, in spite of all that is good and right with the script, the story itself is slight--119 pages of generally well-written nothing--and some of the turns of plot seem entirely arbitrary, melodramatic, even, whereas the action should at least seem to flow organically from the characters. Most of time, absolutely nothing seems at stake. The war reeactment stuff forms the basis of a sequence that seems almost premature; after that, the idea goes nowhere. That said, the writer has come up with an interesting lead character; interesting in the abstract, that is; a tad sketchy (inconsistent, all over the map), perhaps, but one with plenty of potential in the hands of the right actor, and by all accounts, Shia LaBeouf, of Disney¹s springtime hit Holes (and the cable series Even Stevens, also from Disney), is well up to the challenge of connecting the dots in Beeny¹s script (so that Kelly seems more a creature of deep, contradictory impulses instead of an assortment of writer¹s whims). Some early reviews have even compared LaBeouf to a young Dustin Hoffman. The character of Kelly¹s mother might also turn out to be interesting in the hands of the capable Kathleen Quinlan (an Oscar nominee for 1995¹s Apollo 13).

Finally, perhaps Beeny¹s biggest selling point, the thing that made her script so attractive to the contest¹s judges, is its relative simplicity--a few basic settings, maybe only a dozen speaking parts, and, again, the war stuff is kept to a minimum, although it¹s a great hook.

Apparently Beeny, who reportedly has signed a deal with Aliens producer Gale Anne Hurd, has waffled all over the place in her estimation of the finished film. I know I¹m definitely curious to see how a 119 page script can be whittled down to a satisfying--coherent--73 minute film. What¹s the point? Stolen Summer made less than a million dollars at the box office last year. Shocking, in light of all that built-in publicity (and a praiseworthy performance by Kevin Pollack as the terminally ill boy's rabbi-dad). Can a movie as seemingly butchered as Shaker Heights be expected to fare better, on its own cinematic terms, that is, and not as an extension of a curious prank?

Mp

More about LaBeouf. Shia LaBeouf, by the way, is of Jewish and French (Cajun?) descent. He has joked that his name, the first part of which reportedly rhymes with ³Hi ya,² actually translates as ³Thank God for the Beef.² Funny boy. Besides Shaker and Holes he has also been seen in some of this past summer¹s biggest duds: Charlie¹s Angels Full Throttle and Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd."

"A caged community of chimpanzees reacts very
sensitively if a member of the tribe has received
LSD. Even though no changes appear in this
single animal, the whole cage gets in an uproar
because the LSD chimpanzee no longer observes
the law of its finely coordinated hierarchic tribal
order." --Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem
Child (1980)

"Until the late eighteenth century there was no
history of art, only the lives of artists." -Jacques
Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (1973)

The thinking type says; There is no evil but error. Find out!
The feeling type says: There is no evil but unhappiness.
Love every thing!
The sensation type says: There is no evil but pain. Do what
feels good!
The intuitive type says: There is no evil but being lost. Get
oriented!
   --But who ever has suspected that
there might be more than one ill, & one remedy?

The mark of a barbarian is clumsiness. What passes for culture
today is the strenuous simulation of a few smooth moves.

"The stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky" --Hegel,
quoted by Heine in Kaufmann's Nietzsche

For a thinking person violence is the ultimate banality, and all
banality seems to some degree an act of violence.

Art is wasted on those who have to decide right away "it works"
or "it doesn't work"; you have to be willing to be bored before you
can begin to get interested.

    'Maïr

The star, Maïr, shines in the sky above me--
   The star, Maïr.
A world is lighted by this star so lovely,
   So far from home.

The land, Oilay, floats on the waves of ether--
   The land, Oilay.
The glittering light of Maïr one can see there
   Is bright as day.

In that calm land of love, the Ligoy river--
   The lithe Ligoy--
Makes the bright face of Maïr softly quiver
   As waves deploy.

The flowers that smell, the lyres that strum (amazing
   Lyres, strumming clear),
And songs of women in one breath praising--
   Praising Maïr.'

--Sologub in: Modern Russian Poetry (tr Markov
& Sparks, 1967)

The avant garde speaks: "I'm not an artist I'm a
terrorist. My bombs don't hurt bodies--they blow
up souls. So far I have had no effect. Can it be that
there are no souls left?"

"Never forgot about, never more has been yiped
Stalking nothing like it was beat--Just like a watch band
A shot beats . A giraffe progresses.
Piercing sounds, wails, crys: 'Shut up, you profane faces!'
A chain talks noisily, but no one ever listens ...
Like Brett, the petals flopped in violent circles--his anguish exposed
Hope for you is not a morning dove, rather a mourning ham hock
Why ask why ? One envisions this always.
O melancholy world, you have punched me again."

--Poetry CreatOR 2

'You ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if
you are hell-bent on remaining pessimists.' --Nietzsche
(1886)

At the Dallas museum i saw a Mochica cast-pot with just
the same expression as Picasso's famous portrait of
Gertrude Stein.

We are inundated with images of unavoidable injury, to
the point that all injury seems unavoidable. (That enter-
tainment accompanies this teaching is entirely beside
the point.)

"I read their expression as if I were reading the ingredients
of a bottle of poison I swallowed by mistake." --Darcey
Steinke, Suicide Blonde (1992)

Listening to: Morton Subotnick, "Silver Apples of the Moon".

Sailor Moon cocktails. (via Plastic)

"Hi,
just a minor correction. I am not muslim or Kuwaiti.
Take care
R--------"

"[William Wells] Brown had a wildcat bank up in
Buffalo, New York, you know. The first Afro-American
novelist printed up and issued his own money. Think
of that." --Ishmael Reed, 1977 interview, in:
Conversations with Ishmael Reed (1995)

Interesting meter in that Red Hot Chili Peppers song
that begins: "Can't stop addicted to the shin dig".
At first i analyzed it as a palimbacchus (@@* where
@ is a stressed syllable) plus first paeon (@***)
plus a trochee (@*) or spondee (@@) or dactyl
(@**), depending on the rhyme; but as i let the
rhythm sink in, i realized the 6th syllable was almost
always a very weak stress, giving a duple movement
to the latter half of the line. Then, too, the first two
syllables have a kind of syncopation, audible in the
near-equivalent one-line song from "Frazier": "Flesh
is burning/ dada dada da-da". So, it becomes a trochaic
pentameter with caesura after the second foot & a
combination of slowing the first part & speeding up
the second. Actually, this kind of line is known in
Yugoslavian poetry as an epic meter...

The Swingle Singers: a cappella classical music.

Four and a half billion years to produce a
creature that would rather kill than push
the brake pedal with its foot!

  "Two barbarians meet"

First one says: "I hurt. Pity me."
Second one says: "I hurt worse. I need all my pity for my own pain."
First one says: "You lie."
They begin to fight.

2 23 83

A glossary of Pali & Buddhist terms.

The Ten Commandments leave Alabama; meanwhile, in
Kyrghyzstan...

"The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire
poem could be made in this vocabulary." --Louise Gluck

Would you drive the moneychangers
out of the temple? It's their temple. (the Art
World)

Egotism creates empires, but Empire also creates
egos. The missing link is collectivized
education: the means is by preventing contempla-
tion (which would develop [the power of voluntary]
attention). That's why dogma is so important
to an empire. Without knowledge of real things
to furnish a common context, the only basis for
human relations must then be a rigidly preserved
terminology. [N.B. Dogmas need not be verbal. Many
of ours are made of images.]

The ego is finite and unbounded.
Psychologies have been founded on either of these
(half-) truths.

The concept of the Unconscious means: here there
are no more explanations. --But that assumes
explanations must be rational. If explanations are
instead 'stories', then the unconscious is also a
story, and can be elaborated. Once there were two
brothers who lived in the same house. But these
were blind and deaf brothers, and each thought that
he was alone. A day came when things were no longer
where they were supposed to be. They couldn't find
anything half the time. "Am I going crazy?" they
said to themselves, "Or do things move of their own
accord?"

I often watch movies on video in pieces, an hour
here, an hour the next day or the next. Onetime i
had been watching one of the "Thin Man" movies,
but by mistake i put in a different one the next time,
& was mildly confused by how the mystery finally
wound up...but i hadn't been watching it for the
plot anyway. An idea for a novel: midway through
it, finish with the second half of a different
novel--sharing the same character names, but
nothing else. This, i believe, would be truer to
life than the illusion of transparency given by
an omniscient author with a point to make.

The 'tater that exploded. One of my wife's
friends was cooking new potatos in the microwave.
She bit into one & it exploded in her mouth, burning
her severely. Her husband heard the report clear
in the next room!

Stefan George: Ihr alten bilder schlummert mit den toten

'You ancient visions with the dead have vanished,
I lack the strength to conjure you again,
Since from the true dominions I was banished,
I now wil taste the splendor tinged with bane.

By rumors of enchantment I am stricken:
The meadows of an azure vale reveal
How herons white and rosy-colored quicken
The nearby lake that sleeps and shines as steel.

There, as in symmetry of chords she paces,
Her upward pointed finger lifts and takes
The shrouding garment by its silken laces,
That in the night she wove of willow flakes.

O subtle play divined behind these veilings!
My senses wrought the fancy we were paired,
Before through vines that screen with bloomy trailings
Down to the nearby lake she slowly fared.'

--Poems tr Valhope & Morwitz (1943)
[I italicized this because in the original, George's poems
are printed in a peculiar typeface sort of like Carolingian
uncials, & he doesn't capitalize nouns, an effect impossible
to simulate in English...]

   "Round

"Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."
But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead,
A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Cézanne
Would break out in the quiet streets of Aix
And shout, "Le monde, c'est terrible!" Royal
Cortissoz is dead. And something inside my head
There is no twilight on the moon, no mist or rain,
No hail or snow, no life. Here in this house
Dried ferns keep falling to the floor, a mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Cézanne
Would break out in the quiet streets and scream. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly." And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead.
There is no twilight on the moon, no hail or snow.
One notes fresh desecrations of the portico.
"Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House."

--Weldon Kees; An essay on him.

You think people are interchangeable,
don't walk in another man's moccasins--
look through his glasses.

'Health consists essentially in being able
to resolve contradictions.' --Kierkegaard,
The Sickness Unto Death (1849) tr
Lowrie

Artists settle for gestures. Then curse the
audience for not having enough imagination
to supply the rest.

You don't gain skills, you lose preconceptions.

No dreams grow where reality is not
examined.

Art can be a discipline instead of just a
drug, when it demands more freedom of
the artist.

I could never be a professor, because the first
thing i'd have to profess is the evil of
universities.

Terrorism insurance. (via Volokh)

An addiction is like being pinned to the
ground by a spear. You don't just get up
and walk away. --Nor should you hang a
flag from it.

'The beauty of the world is the mouth of
a labyrinth.' --Weil

Every heresy is at once a power struggle &
a quibble over words.

We seem not to be able to conceive of an
individuality which finds fulfillment in
solidarity, or a solidarity which does not
suppress the individual.

A real history of ideas would have the effect
of mapping possible discourse. Without a
continuing dialog with the past however, it's
just etymology and dates.

First mistake: that words have a meaning.
Second mistake: that they don't.

"Eliot, writing as a critic, easily
demonstrates the impossibility of Eliot's
writing The Waste Land." --Stephen
Spender, The Struggle of the Modern
(1963)

"A terrible thought, that after God's
withdrawal into silence the ancient mechanisms
which made prophets should continue working,
like machines left on in an abandoned factory:
so that bearded wild men strode forth as before,
howling, to any who would hear, their
inarticulate warning." --John Gardner, The
Sunlight Dialogues (1972)

Falling ones admire jugglers most. It makes
them feel like they're going somewhere.

Perhaps the hardest thing to recognize is the
process by which a truth becomes a lie. If you
believed it, you can't alter it without attacking
some part of yourself. And if you never did
believe it, then it seems to have been untrue all
along.

Sleepiness makes me forgiving. Ego thrives on
revenge.

"So skilled was he [Pessoa] at this art that, after
reading the autobiography of a well-known English
magus named Aleister Crowley, alias Master Therion,
he dared to inform the author that the horoscope
he'd drawn up for himself and published in his book
was mistaken. Crowley recognized the error, struck
up a correspondence with Pessoa, and came to
Lisbon in 1930 to meet the poet astrologer, who
in the following year published a Portuguese version
of 'Hymn to Pan'..." --Introduction to Fernando
Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, ed & tr Richard
Zenith (1998)

Momus defines a new aesthetic for the new century.

A long, fascinating essay on "neophilic irreligions" on the
internet, such as the Church of the Subgenius & the
Cthulhu mythos.

  "ODE TO MARS"

   I want my canal share
   Of life on Mars.
   I hear its sough
   Where air's not thick enough.
   That Yma expiry
   Named Orphalese
   Drones on in koto
   Glissades. Come Boreas,

   Penetrate the dimness
   That is our wisdom
   Or somber cargo
   Cult; come, ye Parcae
Flying pyramids, massed rods of Rome!

07 04 97

'...poetry is like the arts of painting, cooking, and
cosmetics in its ability to express every sensation
of sweetness or bitterness, beatitude or horror,
by coupling a certain noun with a certain adjective,
in analogy or contrast...' --Baudelaire, Draft of a
Preface

"Black stands for malediction, red for flames,
and white for light. Those who use only three colors
say that blue, green, and yellow washes are merely
intended to please clients and are neither necessary
nor effective against demons." --Jacques Mercier,
Ethiopian Magic Scrolls (1979)

Martin Seymour-Smith's top 20c list would be something
like: Vallejo, Mandelshtam, Pessoa, Riding, Cavafy,
Rilke, Valéry, Hagiwara, Campana, Ady, Goll, & Isaac
Rosenberg, possibly Bacovia & Hart Crane.

The trouble with thinking canonically is you will
reject without thinking any possibility of being
influenced by, say, Beddoes, Mayakovsky,
Chikamatsu...or Banjo Paterson. But why not?
This isn't biological evolution--there are
no dead ends in poetry.

The gazebo scene in "Sound of Music" is lit just like
a painting by Paul Delvaux.

   Part One

I like the idea of Essential Titles, though my
concept of a canon changes from decade to decade.
So here's a list of mine, with the caveat that
no list can be either representative or exhaustive; it's
making such a list that's instructive...

Propertius- Elegiae (30/16 BC). I know, no one can
consider themselves educated who isn't conversant with
the Aeneid, but for me Propertius is the one essential
poet of Classical Antiquity. He takes all the tools so pain-
stakingly developed by his predecessors, & uses them in
amazingly virtuosic & personal ways. Compared with
Propertius, Catullus (his only rival in the elegy) is heavy
handed & all too direct. Propertius will always be absolutely
up to date. [Note- I use the Loeb edition so i can
refer to the Latin. He has not been served well by trans-
lators, perhaps because they are hard put just to
capture his sense, much less his music. Pound at least
caught a little of his tone...]

Tottel's Miscellany (1557). This is the beginning of
poetry in English, & every song on the radio has its origin
somewhere in here. Shakespeare was of course the
consummate wielder of what might be called "the music
of grammar"--& his study will not be finished in a life-
time--yet this first anthology shows just what he
started with in that long ago era before dictionaries
when the poets really were the makers of speech.

Donne- Songs & Sonnets (1633). Just when the
lyric had been perfected, someone comes along with a
whole new game--combining a philosophical point of
view with the personal note lost for a thousand years--
& we are still trying to duplicate his results.

Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). The modern
world, with all its alienation & dark glories, rendered
into sonorous & enduring form. There are several decent
translations available; Baudelaire loses surprisingly
little in the process; in that respect he is like Dostoevsky:
the impact of the message continues, like a Molotov
cocktail thrown through a stained glass window...

   Part Two

Housman- A Shropshire Lad (1896). You could say that
Housman is essentially a trivial writer, but in this age of
egregious untidiness it is good to remember that perfect
poems can & have been written. [More Poems & Last
Poems also contain many necessary lyrics.]

Mallarmé- Poésies (1898). If you only learn one
foreign language & only a bit of that, do try to scope out
Mallarmé in the original. Untranslatable, the inventor of
Modernism & the culmination of the literary tradition,
what can i say? Yet he wears it very lightly... His best
poems are about little things, flickers or the wave of
a fan, & thus connect with the Japanese poetic tradition.
Weinfeld's Collected Poems (1994) is bilingual &
includes the prose poems.

Stein- Tender Buttons (1914). I can't add anything
to my Amazon review.

Stevens- Harmonium (1923). Most of Stevens's best
poems. It is worth a concentrated study to inquire how much
of French Symbolism has been captured & how much lost;
he also, without even trying, spares you the necessity of
reading any Imagism.

Jeffers- The Roan Stallion (1924). A lot of people don't
like Jeffers, but he can't be ignored. There isn't another
such vatic writer in modern times; & his eye is always on
the land--something too easily lost in 20c verse.

Auden- Poems (1930) & The Orators (1932). You'd've
thought T S Eliot had said the last word in Modernism, & suddenly
this guy drags in Anglo-Saxon meters & the best imitation of
schiz-lit this side of Finnegans Wake. He also sets the
bar for a unified collection very high with the latter work--&
people are still arguing over what it means.

   Part Three

Riding- Poems of Laura Riding (1938). The most original voice
of the 20c. She accomplishes some of the same things Mallarmé
did, without sounding anything like him. [Her cantankerous critical
writings are also essential.]

Rexroth- One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955). I can't
think of another book that so effortlessly teaches the essence of
another poetic tradition. A good antidote to the Eliot-Pound-Joyce
triumvirate.

Plath- Collected Poems (1981). Forget the myth. She was the
last Symbolist, & the greatest poet of the later 20c. Only fools despise
her.

Merwin- The Second Four Books of Poems (1993). Merwin is very
hit-or-miss, often lapses into self-pastiche, & seldom rises to the level
of great poetry. Still, when you read in these books long enough, you
realize he captures something that most other 20c writers never
even noticed--the subtragic grayness of daily life--& gives it
definitive expression.

---------------------------------------------------
Besides this, maybe Rilke's letters & that Snyder essay.

" 'Masculine perfumery is defined negatively, by what
you don't put in it. ...It's like that novel by Perec that
was written withot the letter e. You can still do a
good one, though that's rare.' " --Luca Turin, quoted in:
Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent (2002) [thanx
Melanie!]

The three most non-phonetically spelled languages:
Irish, Tibetan, English.

Language with the most rational writing system: Korean.

Most unpronounceable language: Georgian.

Doctor Dee exerts a perennial fascination, & ever
since "The Tempest" writers have used him for
a character: Meyrink (The Angel of the West Window)
John Crowley, Mary Gentle, & now Peter Ackroyd (The
House of Doctor Dee). And Test Department did an
album about him (The Enigma of Doctor Dee)... At
another time i mean to come back to Enochian,
one of the most legendary (if rudimentary) conlangs
of all time. Aleister, of course, meddled with it; but
perhaps the most fascinating thing for me is how
the idea that each of the letters has its own meaning,
& thus the meaning of a word can be derived from its
spelling--has migrated here out of Kabbalism,
unacknowledged.

John Steinbeck, Master of Terror.

Lit-hist progresses by redrawing the canon. For the
Ur-Flarf Progenitor, i nominate "Ern Malley". (Even
Ashbery pays tribute to him.) I can see a clear lineage* through Spicer to the
present-day epigones... Yes, Poetry ends like a rope.

Another "damned poet"--born with twelve fingers. On translating Ady into Russian. A poem translated into Esperanto. A few English translations.

------------------------------------------
*Not to mention the ersatz computer poetry reviewed here.

Not only good poetry has reverted to the "subter-
ground", so has a lot of the most interesting
horror & scifi, that corporate publishers simply
can't be bothered with. Even writers who may
have managed a "breakout" book or two, often
end up publishing subsequent works in hard
to find & expensive limited-editions. (Case in
point: Thomas Ligotti.) On the other hand,
it also means that such presses sometimes
reissue great works from the past that have
dropped out of sight. I am glad to see Robert
Aickman's stories being reprinted lately, like
Samuel R Delany's novels... (I thought to write
this entry after trying to find out if Tibet 93 was
still doing his Durtro Press/ Ghost Story Press
stuff. Can't tell from the website. Buy something
there! Where else are you going to find Count Stenbock??)

There's suppressed books, like the L Ron exposé, which
Scientologists went everywhere to buy & destroy; then
there's ignored books, like The Sacred Mushroom and
the Cross, that so dumbfounded the world of Biblical
scholarship that Allegro immediately became an "unperson"
--& is remembered today only by the 'Shroom Community...
I would have liked to believe that the name "Jesus" was
a code word for Amanita, but that business of Sumerian
puns was all too Saussure-like & just the way crackpot
reasoning proceeds, for me. But i think it's still a mind-
blowing book, if only because its author was who he
was (no wild-eyed hippie, he) to write it.

Incense clocks.

Free jazz is the only kind of music that when i play it
in the store, i invariably get asked to turn it off. We got
in some Albert Ayler the other day. I still haven't heard
all of it. I myself couldn't understand "A Love Supreme"
the first time i heard it. But it kept nagging at me
that there was something there i'd missed. Finally
one day i was listening to it, not really paying
attention--& i got it! (But i still don't know how
exactly to describe its meaning...) Sort of like
"averted vision" in astronomy--you look off to
the side of the object in the telescope, because
the peripheral areas are more sensitive to
faint light than the cornea. They are playing at
the edge of the music. Not trying to get it
directly. And what is evoked by your groping into
the sound, is the true music of this.

   "Fair and Balanced"

Dreaming, in the Althusserian night,
That all our work will oneday 'scape debunking.
Driving, like a raid-marooned sad Viking
Siren from somewhere; other hands at hunt.
Sodium pink & mercury blue dispute
Pavements of the empire-builders' principle
Still i find this brillig blindness beautiful
To cross striped shadows wearing fingerprints

Envenomed darkness bring me French velvet
Acolytes... Fiesta red rodents pitch
Unopening windows, logarithmic squelch
Dreaming through the creaking of the pivot
A Volapük threnody, or part of it.

08 20 03

"I have a dream" in Lojban.

Listening to: Sven Vath.

Shadow of the Dolls ecards.
[Not anymore, but still.]

Dogs playing poker. Everyone's seem them.
Why isn't C M Coolidge a household name?

We will bury you.

I've got this great idea for a technothriller: you know
these "worm" viruses that're all over the Internet?
What if one got into a nuclear power plant's computer?
--Well, i can't sell that one, 'cause it already happened.
(via slashdot)

Remembering: The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber (1961),
a rollicking satire about a future where "wordwooze" is written by
the operators of writing-machines, who still pride themselves on
the glamour of authorship. (Maybe that term ought to displace
"quietude" in our critical vocabulary--since "quietude" sounds
like it's good for something.)

French Symbolisme left its seeds in many other literatures
(though barely in English--Stevens? Plath??)--none more
gaudily than Russia's; & the strangest of the Russian
Symbolists has to be Sologub. He writes like he can't
make up his mind to be a mystic or a Satanist, an aesthete
or a terrorist... Very little of his poetry has been trans-
lated, but a couple of the novels are available. Here's The
Created Legend on pdf.

Years ago another poet tried to flimflam me by a word,
"Althusserian", of great beauty but very little significance,
so far as i could discover. Maybe now it has one.

It has always bothered me that the division in sonnets
between the octave & the sestet, comes about six
syllables short of dividing this 140 syllable form into
the Golden Section. E.g. 86 + 53 = 139 for a much
more numerologically satisfying arrangement. Or 137
= 85 + 52, which i have sometimes lineated as 13-11-13-
11-13-11-13 & 11-9-7-9-7-9. For a long time i only wrote
thirteen line sonnets ("treizains"), & the same numbers
i mentioned above for 137 syllables total can easily be
lineated into 11-10-11-10-11-10-11-11 & 10-10-11-10-11.

The trouble with Magnetic Poetry for me always has been
that its vocabulary, while perhaps "poetical" enough for
the non-poet, makes saying anything new & interesting
virtually impossible. However, with Shakespeare Magnet
Poetry, that just might have been solved.

Gustav Meyrink wasn't just your regular Decadent drug-taking
occultist visionary writer--he lived in Prague. (Unfortunately,
there is very little on the internet about him in English.) I
recommend all his novels--The Golem is a classic--they are
still in print in paperback, i believe.

When you get burnt out on hard rock, it's time for the
triple-saxophone noise music of Borbetomagus.

"[Ed] Kienholz's last work was his burial, which took place
outside his hunting cabin on a mountaintop in Hope, Idaho.
A heart attack felled him at age sixty-seven, and now
his corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front
seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar
and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti
beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk.
He was set for the Afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes
the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz,
rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole: the most
Egyptian funeral ever held in the American West, a fitting
exequy for this profuse, energetic, sometimes brilliant,
and sometimes hopelessly vulgar artist." --Robert Hughes,
American Visions (1997)

Listening to: Tommy James & the Shondells.

The names of the moons.

"For I have left the three Christs of Ypsilanti" --Anne Sexton

Ah! we just got in Alfred Wegener's book. I remember
when i first heard about his theory of Continental Drift,
in the late 60's, it was presented as radical & controversial;
today it's scientific orthodoxy. But does the man in the
street really have an inkling that the very ground beneath
our feet is sliding across the earth's mantle like a drunk
on a banana peel?

Just saw "Seabiscuit"; & while it's just okay as a movie of
its pretensions, i can't help thinking how much we have
changed in our sympathies for the underdog. We started
as an underdog nation--& now we pretty much limit ourselves
to an unvoiced "glad it's not me" whenever we discover
the existence (normally well-concealed: at least in the
camera-eyes of Consensus Reality) of one of these "losers".
Now we've become the Global Bully; now it's those who
desire peace & understanding that're underdogs...

Chinese punk band Brain Failure toured the US this past
spring. (via Giant Robot magazine)

A great contemporary illustrator.

Reading: Mr Weston's Good Wine (1927) by T F Powys.

Listening to: Laura Nyro, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat.

Bell Hooks is mad.

A young Muslim woman blogging from Kuwait. (via Turning Tables)
This one & this one from her. This one from Salam Pax.
The picture over there is becoming much clearer...alas.
"You know what? Something like this could never happen to the
Ministry of Oil." --Riverbend Blog

   "Celebration of Failure

Through pain the land of pain,
Through tender exiguity,
Through cruel self-suspicion:
Thus came I to this inch of wholeness.

It was a promise.
After pain, I said,
An inch will be what never a boasted mile.

And haughty judgement,
That frowned upon a faultless plan,
Now smiles upon this crippled execution,
And my dashed beauty praises me."

--Laura Riding

The song of Gulf II--not a protest, but a Teenage Death
Song.

"Assuming, as seems reasonable, that the president of the
United States was neither drunk nor on LSD..."

I didn't win, but i'm sure these are all way-cool*. (My entry
follows:)

"One Hundred Years Ago Today, GUELPHS
Apeared

In the time of the Fall of the Towwers, a singular
volume apeared, & went for long unnoticed in the
places were “serious’” literature was still cherished
(if not practiced); in fact it took the
hopeful-despairing expedient of posting the entire
text onto wat was then known as the “Inter-Knit” (the
pre-Nousphere, we would say now) for it to connect
with an appreciative readerschip. --I beg the Gentle
Reader’s indulgence for so coy & redondant an ovreture
here, but I think on the centenary of its issuance it
is worth reflecting on the truly astonishing
beginnings to our present aera, namely a certain
pseudonymoic schience-fiction novel “GUELPHS: by
Graywyvern”--yes, it orginally purported to be a
meed-up story!--though a story that now has became the
truth of our lives.

From its verry first scene we are plonged into a
near-icomprehensible world: Ophion, the largest
satlite of the gojiroid (giant planet) Ygg--already
discovered from Earth, at the end of the 20c, in its
way eccentrical orbit round the sunlyke star 70
Virginis--a satlite rulled by its bizzare climate. For
eleven weeks or so it is “Mudmonth”, or
apastron-winter, a time of mild wether & much
biological activity on the part of its bundant
lifeforms. Then comes “Drymonth”, four weeks of
blestering heat, wen most of that satlite’s florra &
fauna retreat into subterranean sheltre; & a final
week-&-a-haff (“Wetmonth”) of planet-wide monsoon
rains, after wich the cycle is repeated.

But GUELPHS is no more about its fizzical setting,
than “Paradise Lust” is about gardening. The real &
secret intent is to present that world’s inscrutable
three-legged sophonts, the “Wodwos”, at a cusp of
crysis in their cultural zistence. And this crysis
turns out to have bigtime relvance to the
human-historcal time in wich the book apeared. For
although the Wodwos--lyke everry living thing on
Ophion--are constructed cording to a plan of
trilateral symtry, somthing terrible has gone rong in
their social life. A worldview of polar
extremes--Duelism--has take over the minds of many
Wodwos: to the point were this race, never before
given to clective violence, has embarked upon a
programm of wat can only be scribed as genocidal war.

Ironically, of course, the “Ghibellines” wich the
war-party (“Guelphs”) wish to sterminate--only zist as
a delussion in the minds of those same Wodwos, whose
self-division has projected onto innocent others,
everrything they cannot cept in their own nature. Our
story begins at the height of the conflict, & it would
requiere manymore pages than I have at my disposal to
portray the quest of Jasper Wodwo, wich ends in a
rediscovery of the legendary Scroll of Badroulbadour,
with its mind-blowwing message of a Prior
Understanding. Suffice it to say that once this lust
book is disseminated, first by a nascent subterground,
& then openly, the zisting worldview, with its
creasingly lethal injostices--is seemingly doomed.

I will not dwell upon the marvelous inventiveness &
wit of “Graywyvern”, whoever he was; but it is
salutary to note three things about this seminal, nay,
salvific work: first, all the action takes place
within the incessant downpore of the rainy season, &
confines itself to the boundaries of the City of
Magnificent Splendors; secundly, the subtle use of
neologisms (vented words), especially his word for the
Third Logical Category, “JAU” both-true-&-false or
neither-true-nor-false, depending on context)--a word
that has since passed into the lexicon of everry
remaining langage on this our own Earth; & lastly, the
perverse & curious denouement of Graywyvern’s novel...

In the book, Jasper fails.

6-16-03"
--------------------------------------------------------------
*So far my favorite is this one, which should save Pynchon
about 8 more years of work.

   "Five A.M.

Street by street the lights go out, and the night turns
  gray, bringing respite to this and to all other agencies,
With the gears of commerce unmeshed and stopped, the
  channels of communication slowed and stilled
(Radio, ticker, and spirit control)--

Bringing peace, briefly, to the members of the board and
  bench and staff,
Sleep, for a space, to the journeymen of the switchboard
  and the dictaphone,
Rest to the lieutenants of steel, and wool, and coal, and wheat,
And to the envoys from abroad (Her Majesty's, His Excell-
  ency's, and the mysterious Mr. X),
And to the representatives of the people (both houses), and
  to the vicars of the Lord (conformist and dissident)
And to the inspectors of the arson, forgery, bomb, and homicide
  squads--

While the crated shipments of this agency (with those of others)
  stand in guarded sheds at Quebec,
Wait for release on rainswept wharves of Shanghai and the Rio,
Move, slowly, from a dark siding in Butte."

--Fearing

    "MOMUS

MOMUS is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.

Yes, Momus,
Men have flung your face in bronze
To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
Thrown over and through with a smile that forever
wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the
iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone
into dreams, by God.

I wonder, Momus,
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look
with deep laughter
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,
solemn repetitions of history.

A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from
your kindliness of bronze,
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple,
silent;
Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and
women
Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,
the salt of tears,
And blood drops of undiminishing war."

--Carl Sandburg

Listening to: Ginastera.

The power of a poem, like the power of a mirror,
lies in its coordination. --And we think we see
another room there; another life.

A bumper sticker: smileyface "Christo Teama".

You knew this was coming.

I'm losing track: is Burning Man still cool, or has it
"jumped the shark"?

DNA that plays tic-tac-toe.

Twin Oaks is an intentional community founded in 1967 on the
ideas of B F Skinner, & is still going strong. (Their main business:
making hammocks.)

Alt-Culture from Russia.

"I got caught in a verbal slugfest between the two of them
recently in Los Angeles. The high point was when O'Reilly
cleverly riposted Franken's account of his lies by screaming:
"Shut up! Shut up!" A particularly sound argument, I thought.

Franken, in turn, said, "Bill, we're not on Fox News." " --Molly Ivins

'Speak, you also,
Speak as the last,
Have your say,

Speak--
But keep yes and no unsplit,
And give your say this meaning:
Give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,
Give it as much
As you know has been dealt out between
Midday and midday and midnight.

Look around:
Look how it all leaps alive--
Where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.'

--Paul Celan, tr M Hamburger (1980)

"The old hunger, left in the old darkness,
Turned like a hanged knife." --Merwin

Kurt Nimmo explains the Blackout. (Me, i think
it was Mars.)

It's not about the Kitty.

...we are not yet to the point of being able
to use places, we are irremediably nomadic,
& our expectations of places far exceed the
sense of obligation we should bring. Therefore
at present, networks of short duration & high
velocity preferably serve the purpose of places.
[Note: dixit 1987] When friendship itself is
sacred, we will know we are ready to dwell upon
the land.

Ego is the ship's figurehead--not its motive power,
its steering or its buoyancy.

"The really important things in the world are the
huge silent inexorable things." --Diary of a Drug
Fiend

"The first bomb that fell on Brighton actually
came through his roof while he was taking a cold
bath, and although it did not explode, he never
recovered from the shock." --Colin Wilson, intro
to The Violet Apple by David Lindsay

Listening to: The Ventures, "Harlem Nocturne",
from their second (?) album, on Dolton.

Melanie reviews:
 "I haven't sent out any mass movie reviews lately, but I'm doing
so now because I want to alert my fellow film fans to a pair of
the summer's biggest surprises.  Yes, the year is more than
halfway over and so far there has been precious little to recommend,
especially throughout this summer when there has just been so much
junk, although I did very much enjoy Paramount's The Italian Job (a
good old fashioned heist movie with lots of color and/or atmosphere)
and the New Zealand import, Whale Rider, as well as the very
entertaining box office blockbuster, Finding Nemo..and, okay, Bruce
Almighty.  I also confess that I have yet to see Seabiscuit, or even
28 Days Later.  

     Still, I do feel compelled to let everyone know that, even in the
dog days of summer, there are currently two performances generating
Oscar buzz (or Oscar worthy buzz), and they're both as close as your
neighborhood multiplex, courtesy of mainstream studio, Disney Pictures.
I'm referring to Johnny Depp in the unlikely blockbuster, Pirates of the
Caribbean (based on a theme park ride), and Jamie Lee Curtis in Disney's
third version of Freaky Friday.  Depp first. Of course, this guy is one of
our most adventurous actors, and, lord knows, he's given some pretty
spectacular, award calibre performances.  I'm thinking specifically of
Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, neither of which generated any favor
with Academy voters (though both were nominated for the Golden Globe
award, as was Depp's persuasive work in the gentle, sleeper romance,
Benny & Joon).  Anyway, Pirates is the first unqualified box office smash
with which Depp has ever been associated (runner-up: Sleepy Hollow), and
a lot of the credit belongs to him especially, for a performance that is as
shrewd as it is theatrical and over the top; no one else could've given this
same performance and made it such an utter delight.  Depp has been pretty
open about how he modeled his performance as whacked-out Captain Jack
Sparrow on no less than Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.   This one
has to be seen to be believed.  Is it truly Oscar worthy?   Hard to say, but
the buzz is there, and building, and the performance is certainly both inventive
and very watchable--and if Depp finally gets a nod, in a year of thus far
rampant mediocrity, then good for him.

     Next, Jamie Lee Curtis.  I'll be frank, ever since I first saw Curtis in
Halloween (the original and the only one in the long running series in which I've
actually invested my time), I've thought she  radiates a natural intelligence
that few producers/writers/directors have been fully able to work to her
advantage.  Why is it that she so often seems lost amid the swill?  Well, part
of that has to do with being able to sniff out better scripts (but it's hard to
sniff them out if they never come your way in the first place).  To be fair,
Curtis hasn't done so bad, witness her British Academy Award for Trading
Places, as well as her Golden Globe for True Lies. She also has 1988's zany
A Fish Called Wanda on her resume. (I  confess to being a big fan of her
late 80's/early 90's sitcom, Anything But Love...and, yes, I even liked her in
1985's notorious flop, the unfortunately titled Perfect.)  Anyway, in Freaky Friday Curtis has her best--and splashiest--movie role in years and years as a straitlaced
psychologist (psychiatrist???) who magically swaps bodies with her misfit (i.e.,
surly) 15 year old daughter, who also just happens to be an aspiring rock-n-roller,
for a single day--the day in question being the eve of Curtis's character's second
wedding.  Curtis' performance is gloriously dead-on funny, and free of vanity as well;
she is ably supported by Lindsay Lohan in the role of the daughter.  Again, there's
Oscar buzz already, in this case, according to USA Today, by no less than the New
York Times, whose reviewer, A.O. Scott, wrote: "It is unlikely that any other actress
this year will match the loose, energetic wit she brings to this delightful movie." (USA
Today reporter Susan Wloszczyna makes mention of Scott speculating about Curtis'
Oscar potential without actually including the specific "O-word" quote, in an article
dated Monday, August 11.) I'll be frank, when I saw Curtis in the movie, a day before
I read the USA Today piece, I myself had visions of an Oscar nomination dancing in my
head, so the subsequent article was a pleasant surprise, an affirmation, if you will.  
(I feel compelled to add that last summer [2002] I watched in awe as Diane Lane emoted
--in the best possible sense of the word--her way through the borderline sleazy
Unfaithful...I knew then I was watching something special, and I was hoping
that Academy members were paying attention; Lane's Oscar nomination earlier this
year was a joyous turn of events...it didn't matter that she didn't win, at least she
was recognized by her peers.)

     Of course, Depp and Curtis have a few strikes against them, mainly being in
comedies, especially mainstream, Disney family-fare.  Further, all this goodwill could
fade the instant the fall's big prestige items begin to hit the screens (Cold Mountain,
The Last Samari, Big Fish, etc.).  Still, right off the top of my head, I know for sure
that Julie Andrews, who reinvented herself, in more ways than one, in Victor/Victoria,
and Tom Hanks, who enjoyed a comeback (after  a series of uneven films in the years
following his initial success in Splash), with Big, were both nominated for Oscars--and for movies that were not only variations of "switcheroo" comedy, but were
also early starters.  Victor/Victoria was released late winter/early spring of 1982,
while Big was released in the summer of '88, so maybe there's hope.  (Okay, neither
Andrews or Hanks won for those particular films, but please, please, always remember:
just because comic performances are longshots, doesn?t make them any less worthy...
we just have to keep crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.)  Depp and Curtis
also have the strategic advantage of having been around for a few years, paying their
dues as it were.

     Will I be rooting for these two stars in three or four months, when the awards
season begins in earnest?  I honestly can't say, but for now I'm quite happy to sing
their praises and encourage others to see what all the fuss is about for themselves,
especially when the films in question are so readily accessible.

Thank you,
Mp"

The more intuitive you are, the spookier your world is.
Not more frightening--but more mysterious: & more
inhabited.

Suffering corrupts; unavoidable suffering corrupts
unavoidably... After i am dead, where will be the pain i
endured? Nowhere. Only the crippled work will remain.
Do i want that? I wouldn't want it done to my children.
I would want them beautiful & complete. (I would send
them to a better place if i could. Art as that better
place.)

If ideas are tools, we choose ours by the picturesqueness
of the rust encrusting them.

Is not fashion, propaganda without content?

The child makes the ritual, the child disbelieves the ritual
(unmakes it)--two powers denied to normal adults.

Initiation is to discipline. Even ego-death is an initiation
into the mysteries of ego crafting. Techniques are
natural initiations. Tests are artificial initiations. ...Love
is a mixture of the two.

There's a peculiar & very American desire to do
without psychology, which is akin to the desire to
eat what you want & dispense with all knowledge of
nutrition. And the results are not that different. In
the name of a specious "freedom", we have the unedifying
spectacle of a nation wholly given over to the tyranny
of its appetites.

Emotional states should be named with verbs, not nouns.

The virtue of storying our lives is that, since there are
only story-consolations, our sorrows become amenable
as they fit the outlines of story-sorrows. The depth of
grief yield but to death: it is necessary, except for very
tranquil interludes, to live on the surface--a facade of
artificial continuity. Artists must know this, & also heed
it. Where they give up storying, they come face to face
with ultimate destruction.

"If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human
being might almost impersonate Providence to another."
--George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

All about the Voynich Manuscript--the most mysterious
book in the world.

Silk is a notoriously difficult medium to paint on. Here's an
amazing webpage by a talented dallas artist...

A website devoted to the earliest recorded music, with
samples.

Insane Clown Posse responds to their being named Worst Band
of All Time:

"Once again, Insane Clown Posse is proven yet again
to be the most player-hated band of all time. Blender
Magazine decided to have a review of the Top 50 Worst
Band of All Time. And, naturally, ICP made nothing
short of #1 on their list, with The Wraith as their
worst album.

Honestly, how much do these 12-year vets-of-the-game
have to accomplish to get recognized by mainstream
media? They've got 2 Platinum Records, 4 Gold Records,
1 Gold Home Video (from their own feature-length movie
Big Money Hustlas), another Gold DVD right around the
corner (Bootlegged in LA), their own merchandise line
(HatchetGear), their own record label (Psychopathic
Records) with offices in the USA and Europe, an annual
fan convention (The Gathering of the Juggalos), the #2
wrestling league (JCW), an upcoming video game (Backyard
Wrestling), their own comic book series, and, of course,
legions of dedicated, diehard, worldwide fans (The
Juggalos). They've brought themselves up from nothing
to become an international musical phenomena, and yet,
somehow, they still get no respect from fine mainstream
publications such as Blender Magazine."
[I've heard them, & in the immortal words of J R
Compton, they "suck great green donkey dicks'.]

Listening to: Wanda Jackson--
"I've been to Nagasaki
Hiroshima too
the thing I did to them baby
I can do to you" ("Fujiyama Mama")

It is less wrong to dress up to write a poem
than to dress up for readings. At least that marks
the real occasion.

Better to write down bare metaphors than force a
poem where the first line hasn't spoken itself.

It will be real progress (for us!) when as much
of human knowledge is in people's heads as it was
in the 18th century.

Looking at someone, i can pretty much imagine that
they are what i would be if born into their conditions
& circumstance. But the moment they begin to speak,
my imagining fails.

Why do we poets fear a future without criticism when
all the best poems were written when there was none?

Why is it harder to forget my art ambitions than
my chess ambitions? Because art never humiliated me--
my failures i kept secret even from myself.

Rimbaud gave us a formula--an easy formula--for
making art. "Live excessively, & your art will be
intense." But excessively-living sheep merely
produce mediocre art that is messy.

Perhaps the most entertaining artist to emerge from the
90's Swing Revival.

Sayings of Asmodeus: Human inefficiency is all that
preserves life on this planet, so don't kvetch about it.

Stingy poets: if it has one thing worth saving, save it.
Greedy readers: who want all the fruit without climbing
the tree.

Admit every day: you do not know how to write. You only
know ways that sometimes work. (There are others.)

Writing bad is a symptom. Look elsewhere than your papers
for the disease.

What only is not denied me is the dubious elaboration of an
obsession. Is there light past the gnawing at the duodenum?
Perhaps the only honesty left to poets anymore is the
furtiveness with which they begin in adolescence. That is
timeless & sincere. The shamelessness of later on allows
them any amount of lying, unfortunately. Therefore the worst
amateurs strike me as more poetic in their practice than our
professional poets.

After one of my co-workers became an avid
proselytizer for Matthew Stokoe's Cows, i
coined the phrase "Extreme Literature" for this &,
say, Poppy Z Brite's Exquisite Corpse. Lately i
ran across a book i'd read long ago, Memoirs of a
Gnostic Dwarf--& this is another one to add.

"* TAWNYA H. (Female, age 31) from NEBRASKA*
8-26-2000
.....[ ].....
53. "LOVE: Poems by Danielle Steel".. by Danielle Steele (*****)
Danielle Steel pours her heart out in this great book of poetry. She dedicates this book to John, the love of her life. She touches upon and writes about all the different aspects of love; laughter, smiles, pain, misunderstanding, confusion and heartbreak. She puts great feeling into her writings with such style and elegance. Her poetry is as unique as her novels. Her poetry is easy to read and very enjoyable. Some of my favorite poems are: 'From Opposite Ends', 'Peeling Away', 'Silence', 'No One There', 'Lies', 'Trying to Pretend', 'Carved In Stone', 'Year of the Bears', 'Dread', 'Peekaboo', 'Cold', 'I Go', 'Desperation', 'Fragile Moments', 'Fear Not, Farewell', 'Bereft', 'Crash Into My Life', 'Sketch', 'Someday', 'If I Can', 'Fingering Our Land', 'Couples', 'Are You Still There', 'Pretend Forever', 'Snow In Your Hair', 'Only Close', 'The Inside of Your Arm', 'No Man, Our Man', 'Come Back', 'First Hello', 'Now I Want the Have', 'Hurray for the Leagalized Lover', 'Are You Comfortable', 'Champagne In My Shoe', 'Attic', 'Cool', 'Too Much', 'Nary a Care', 'Sunshine Dancing', 'Friend', 'Comfortable', 'The Gift of Love', & 'Each of Us'. So, as you can see, there are a LOT of good ones in this book! I highly reccomend it for any poetry lover!"

Survivor art.

Mandarin speakers use both sides of the brain.


Limericks are called "therewazzas" in More Fun in Bed (1934).

A novelist & writer about geishas has an entertaining
& fact-filled page on the world of Murasaki Shikibu: "We do
not know what Murasaki Shikibu’s name was. She was a member
of the Fujiwara clan, as were a high percentage of courtly families.
"Shikibu" refers to her father’s position as Senior Secretary in the
Bureau of Ceremonial (shikibu-shô) early in his court career. "Murasaki"
(the word denotes the color purple) comes from the name of a
character in the Tale of Genji. But what did people call her before
she wrote the Tale? I give her the childhood nickname Fuji (wisteria)
because some Heian sources mention her as Tô Shikibu, "Tô" being
the Sino-Japanese reading of fuji. She undoubtedly had another
official personal name, which some scholars think may have been
Takako, written with the character meaning "incense" plus the
feminine ending -ko."

Interesting infrared photography page.

And here's one on pinhole photography.

A group blog for graffiti artists.

Or you can salvage "art" from thrift stores... (I suppose this
is the equivalent for the internet.) Vote on the newest candidate!

Although Somtow Sucharitkul helped write the screenplay
for "Burial of the Rats", the only witty thing about it is the
tiny rat-guillotine in the first scene or so.

I wonder how we got a xeroxed copy of "The Last Will and
Testament" of Myrna Loy??

Line endings: you go to the store at regular intervals,
Sense endings: but you run out of this that, continually.

We cannot admit that the power of magic has no force,
for that would imply that the arena of its actions--the ego
--is not a real thing. Therefore magicians have always
resorted to force & trickery to keep from themselves this
damning knowledge.

Eye vs. Hand. Voice is Eye + Hand. Eye-poems, Hand-poems.
But no Voice-poems anymore. The poets are mute, why?
("dissociation of sensibility") --silent reading, television &
movies, decayed speech: broken paradigms only...

"The author of the Journal of a Pupil describes a meeting
between Gurdjieff and Crowley, but it is clear that they had
nothing to say to one another. He says, 'Crowley had magne-
tism, and the kind of charm that many charlatans have; he
also had a dead weight that was somehow impressive'-- that
is, Crowley was a 'man of power'. 'His attitude was fatherly
and benign, and a few years earlier I might have fallen for it.
Now I saw and sensed that I could have nothing to do with
him.' He does not describe the tea, except to say that Gurdjieff
kept a sharp watch on Crowley, and says, 'I got a strong impression
of two magicians, the white and the black--the one strong,
powerful, full of light; the other also powerful, but heavy, dull,
ignorant.'" --Colin Wilson, The Occult (1971)

Experiences which repeat...until by some chance or
change we are able to recognize ourselves in a pattern:
only then, dreaming but lucidly, may we escape it...
and this is the truth that has been obscured by the
dogma of Reincarnation. It seemed such a secret--
to remember through whatever might come (even to
ego-death)--they took extraordinary precautions to
preserve this knowledge; what remains is but an
elaborate sarcophagus, & not even the dust of that
secret remains, in any living theology you can name,
among the very ones that discovered it. For an insight
really cannot be transmitted. Its idea can, but it has
to live in you by the fire of its spontaneous ignition. The
words alone won't do it. Worse, they put you to sleep more--
because you feel you're safe: the war has been won...
   Ah, but to keep a journal! You record
all your forgettings indelibly: you can never forget that you
forget, constantly & only relieved by intervals of clarity:
& not always those in which you write. Keeping a journal
is to realize the truth of reincarnation, & if you are of a
thoughtful disposition, it makes you more a philosopher
than any learned Ph.D. in its history, simply because you
interrogate yourself for the meaning of existence, not
on exceptional occasions, but habitually. I think i value this
more than the making of art, even if it is less perfect &
useless to others. That other is what i make of the flies
i catch; this is the very web of my spiderhood.

Genre pleasures are pleasures of recognition. But also:
of playfulness with the rules.
   That a writer has something personal to
say, is in genre an accessory; an overlay.
   The ideal reader's reaction when they have
finished a genre work is to rush out and buy another one,
not to reread the same book.
   A genre work that stands alone and is too
unique, would be a kind of BETRAYAL.

When Mystery is banished, knowledge & ignorance alike become
something other.

Why theorize? --a question not contained in most theories!

Sense is pre-existent; meaning is a relationship of ego to
sense.

No symbol is a symbol unless it causes a change in
consciousness. Symbols are more akin to drugs than to
nonsymbolic pictures & phrases.

This society. The discrepancy between the path you would take
as defined by the lines, & the path you have to make around
potholes & road debris, grows ever wider; now, if you save your
tires, you run th risk of being stopped as a drunk driver. All our
social forms approach this pitch of absurdity. But it's been
happening so gradually no one laughs.

A nice elegy for the death of the seven-inch
single. But cheer up, there's still lots of vinyl knocking
around on the secondhand market--! Every once in a
while, i'll play one on my Sony-Japan portable record
player (that cost me $170 on the internet a couple
years ago, & weighs almost nothing it's so completely
made of plastic)...& it sounds better than the same
recording from a CD.

The color of numbers. (via Metafilter)

"I put a spell on you..." (via Rebecca Blood)

Arnie looks like a "condom stuffed with walnuts". --Clive James (via Bart Cop)

A Metaphor. I shower with scalp hotter than
hands; shampooing, feel two waters: cold on
head, warm on hands--in the same place.

Academia: burrowers deeper & deeper into the
semi-meaningful, in flight from noise. --An
attitude college graduates must graduate out of.

Quantitative verse: using a fist for a sieve.

Headline: "Blind Sailor Challenges the Ocean".
The story of my life.

"Descartes was all wrong about animals. It isn't
the animals who are robots; it's us." --Colin
Wilson

N.B. the term metaphor means nothing more than
to showcase the focussing power of a name. It is
self-referential but not infinite or basic on that
account. There are different kinds of focus a name
can aid. --But i use 'metaphor' rather than 'name'
because the other seems to cover only those opaque
arbitrary coins we feed our data-machines with. If you
imagine Shakespeare's "a name to conjure with" --or
one of your childhood idols-- you will not need to be
limited to the word 'metaphor'. To name is to create
& destroy at once. This is clearest when someone
renames something better than it was named before &
the old name drops out of circulation. (At present
this process is distorted by propaganda. The real
namers are carefully excluded from the name-factory's
controls.) A poet today, then, is confronted with a
double conundrum. There seems to be "nothing new to
say" (nor any new way to say it), & no one will listen
anyway. Both of these are half-truths. If a poet really
does exercise his power of naming (& most of us i
suspect refrain, from whatever reason), it does get
heard. And that is new for the context enough, & all
that any other breakthrough was, too, before it became
mythologized... --Anyway, this for me demonstrates
the inherently political context of our poetry. But
how unpoetical our politics are! Indeed Magic seems
a more promising career...even to have to reinvent
it entirely, than to struggle against two centuries'
accumulation of dead poetry--these "ideologies"--
names that hide.

We name emotions like languages have
conventionalized names for the sound that
a dog or cat makes.

'In the second unspeakable hour love makes the heart
taste a violent death, and the heart goes through death,
but it does not die. And yet the soul has not known
love for long, and has barely moved from the first to
the second hour.' --Hadewijch, in Medieval Woman
Writers, ed. Katharina Wilson, 1984

Arrogance: how others judge my work, judges them.
Not arrogance: how others judge me, judges them.
(I tend to want to have it the other way.)

Nothing has done me more harm than the will to
believe. It always perverts my devotion.

Publishing poetry--like trying to guess the combination
of a safe, but most of your guesses aren't even
considered numbers.

I don't remember my dreams, i don't even remember
that i dream. Only, sometimes, i belatedly infer it--
by a thought that i could not have had, waking.

Of all the reasons for a musician to cover a song or a
critic to write about a book, doing justice must be the
rarest.

The Impossible Object Principle. Keep a reality
& a fiction simultaneously in mind. Write in such
an ambiguous way that it applies to both. Then
periodically describe either unmistakeably, &
later the other too. Thus is created in the mind
an Impossible Object.