'Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin; all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one will be able to walk.' --The Will to Power, 57

Primo Levi has an essay on Celan, one camp survivor to another (both later suicides), & criticizes him for being obscure...

"Bring the pigeons watermelons, Abelrd." --Jose Garcia Villa

"Blaspheme when sowing cummin; that is the way to make it grow well." --Stobaeus

'Why, hapless one, to the unhearing rocks,/ To the dumb billows, to the eery woods/ Do I thus cry, and sound my mouth's vain note?' --Moony's Lycophron (1921), 1451

"...we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses..." --William Gass, On Being Blue (1976)

'...in the thirties and forties the regime [i.e. Stalin] was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them to organize a trade union.' --Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One

"Why do the Basques speak Algonquin?" --Eliot Weinberger in Sulfur 30

"In the late 1800s one scientist, Willy Kuhne, from his studies of the action of the chemical rhodopsin, saw the possibility of taking pictures with living eyes, 'optograms'. Among other things, he exposed the eyes of a rabbit to a barred window, then kiled the rabbit, removed its eyes and fixed its retina, upon which was seen the light and dark pattern of the bars. In 1880 he arranged to obtain the eyes of a man who was beheaded, and from them he printed an optogram that does show an image, but one that is impossible to interpret." --Jillian Smith, Senses and Sensibilities (1989)

'You will take the book up where you left it,/ You will say, These were the last obscure words.' --Bonnefoy (tr Richard Pevear)

"Thus either Time his sickle brings
In vain, or else in vain his wings." --Carew

"The local storyteller Johnny Moses (Nuu Chah Nulth tribe) told this Salish tale at a gathering:

'Long ago the trees thought they were people.
Long ago the mountains thought they were people.
Long ago the animals thought they were people.
Someday they will say
Long ago the human beings thought they were people.' " --Brenda Peterson, Living By Water

Tony Basil singing "Mickey" in Spanish rather than in English turns a good song into one that is great.

Listening to: Frijid Pink- "House of the Rising Sun." ["...then President Richard Nixon was a huge fan of Frijid Pink. He invited the band to Washington D.C. for a meet and greet and asked the guys to play three shows for him in Chicago, Toledo and Miami."]

Entertaining Mr Acker Bilk.

A strange kind of curiosity: what will i do next?

"...we don't perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious rituals." --Robert Pirsig, Lila (1991)

   "Totem

Mole my totem
mound builder
maze maker
tooth at the root

shaper of darkness
into ways and hollows

in grave alive
heavy handed
light blinded"

--Ursula LeGuin
[Gerald Burns's, also]

"Increasingly incandescent above the corn silk" --Charles Wright

News story about a family that was in San Francisco for the earthquake, in the Phillippines for the volcano, & in Florida for the hurricane.

"Molten pool, incandescent spilth of
deep cauldrons--and brighter nothing is--
cast and cold, your blazes extinct and
no turmoil nor peril left you,
rusty ingot, bleak paralysed blob!"

--Basil Bunting, First Book of Odes, 16.

...The Unicorn's Secret--perhaps the definitive book on the Sixties.

Still feeling alienated toward artmaking. I realized i preferred the purity of discarded objects to anything that can be made with them. Found myself wanting only to make practical objects, things i needed or needed to make (this does include magical implements & religious icons)--especially despising highly-crafted but meaningless artifacts that are nothing but end results of a career process. And i wondered how i ever could have had an "aesthetics".

"I come so to the more obscure aurora" --Rexroth

"...Presently the blind persistent moles
Crept sleek from the earth, black
In the moonlight, and devoured
The pastries lying on the ground." --ibid

   "Mantis

In South Africa, among
The Bushmen, the mantis is
A god. A predatory
And cannibalistic bug,
But one of the nicer gods."

--ibid

Left over, obsolete opinions: like old shoes you realize one day you don't wear anymore, though you can't remember wearing them for the last time...

"Silver melts to brass and brass to rain" --David Swartz

I said Russia is where America would be if we kept on voting Republican for 75 years... [1992]

I just finished a fascinating & important book Adam's Task by Vicki Hearne (1986)--ostensibly about communication with domesticated animals (mostly dogs & horses) but really addressing the fundamental nature of language. One of its contentions is that syntax is prior to naming; another (harder to summarize), that personhood is sacred & can be conferred--or destroyed...Rich with considered experience, meandering from paragraph to paragraph, & frequently indulging in obfuscatory neo-Heideggerian phraseology (the author, a poet herself, is married to a philosopher, alas), this needs to be read twice to be understood, but it's worth it.

Far-seer.

Town without pity.

"There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty. I don't know whether they can kill it. I want to think they can't. I don't think that there is anything as beautiful as a sari. Can you kill it? Can you corporatize a sari? Why should multinationals be allowed to come in and try to patent basmati rice? People prefer to eat roti and idlis and dosas rather than McDonald's burgers. Just before I came to the U.S., I went to a market in Delhi. There was a whole plate of different kinds of dal, lentils. Tears came to my eyes. Today, that's all it takes to make you cry, to look at all the kinds of dal and rice that there are, and to think that they don't want this to exist." --Arundhati Roy

Fex urbis, lex orbis.

Hasn't heard about my "Byzantines" analogy.

Global dimming. (Gimbaling Mold? Bag Doll Miming? Liming God Balm? Old Gaming Limb? Gloam Glib Mind? Mad Goblin Glim? Limn Glib Dogma? Mild Balm Going...?)

Poppy Z gets herself banned from a PZB fansite. (via Bruce Sterling)

('Mid Malign Blog?)

The Gallery of Unfortunate Cards.

Listening to: Thievery Corporation.

Melanie blogs:
"Well, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like Sofia Coppola is one step closer to an Oscar nomination for only her second directorial effort, Lost in Translation. And this is very, very good, indeed. Let me explain. Today (1/6/04), Coppola was nominated by her peers in the Directors' Guild of America for their annual award. This is significant because the DGA and the Academy's directors' branch have overlapping members, and quite often their voting mirrors one another, not always, mind you, but close. Why does that matter in the first place? Because, ladies and gentlemen, in the entire history of the Academy Awards, there have been only two women nominated for Best Director: Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties, 1976), and Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993). Who can believe it's been a full ten years since Campion's nomination? In that time, such movies as Boys Don't Cry and Frida, both garnering major Oscar noms, have been directed by women (Kimberly Pierce and Julie Taymor, respectively), without a nibble from either the DGA or the guys in the Academy's directors' branch. Moreover, with Wertmuller being Italian and Campion being from New Zealand, there has never been an American woman nominated for Best Director. How can this be? Women like Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God, 1986), Penny Marshall (Awakenings, 1990) and Barbra Streisand (The Prince of Tides, 1991) have directed Best Picture contenders without corresponding nominations specific to their field (though Streisand was nominated for the DGA award--so this could still go either way for Coppola). Do I think Coppola deserves an Oscar nomination on merit, or principle? Well, I certainly think the time has come for more equal representation, that's for sure (though to be fair, the DGA has recently been headed by none other than Martha Coolidge). My 10 year old niece recently made the astute observation that as long we continue to only elect men for president, for example, people will still think we all live in a man's world. And good for her. That's kind of how I feel. All that aside, I have to admit I've been rooting for Coppola for awhile. I thought she did a splendid job with her first feature The Virgin Suicides (a movie superior to the book on which it is based), and I loved some of the things she [Coppola] did with , one of the year's most visually arresting films--and I have to thank Coppola for taking us westerners on a journey to the neon jumble that is contemporary Tokyo. It's the uniqueness of the journey that makes Coppola's film significant, makes it worthy of Lost in Translationaward consideration. Even so, I feel the award is destined for Peter Jackson (of the Lord of the Rings trilogy), and that's perfectly fine too. Jackson's films are an amazing achievement...for now, Coppola's nomination will be more than sufficient (and like Campion before her, she will probably reap a statuette for Best Original Screenplay as a consolation prize). By the way, the DGA also nominated (besides Jackson and Coppola), Clint Eastwood (Mystic River), Gary Ross (Seabiscuit), and Peter Weir (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World).

In other categories, I still believe at this point, Sean Penn is the Best Actor frontrunner for Mystic River, and that Charlize Theron (Monster) is the one to watch in the race for Best Actress, though nothing is set in stone just yet. Tim Robbins (Mystic River) has a great shot at Best Supporting Actor, while Renee Zellweger (Cold Mountain) is looking awful tempting for Best Supporting Actress. Of course, this is all speculation as it's still a few weeks before the Academy nominations are actually announced."

Homo sapiens declared extinct.

Let's send all the Christians to Mars. They can raise utopian domes full of the hot air of preaching. They can push their make believe God to make believe Martians. I am so sick of living in the fantasies of morons. This earth is for those who can see it taste it & touch it.

1-9-04

We pretend we are going to Mars. Our children & old people will starve. We pretend we are going to Mars. The idea of it. A Macy's Parade balloon over our misery. Why do we not pretend something we could aspire to? One day we could wake up & find ourselves worthy of going to Mars.

1-9-04

We are phosphenes in the eyes of Pain.

"This imminence of a revelation that does not take place is, perhaps, the esthetic fact." --Daniel Stern, The Suicide Academy (1968)

"God, what a jungle of saving it was once you started." -ibid

My heart dumps its whole store of love everytime. It doesn't know deserving or undeserving. All it knows is the imperative need to bestow.

'The prophets feel God's threat to humanity, which appears just to them. Today, when human beings threaten themselves, the prophets are confused.' --Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, tr Joel Agee (1989)

'I know only one redemption: that what is endangered be kept alive, and at this moment of redemption I do not ask myself how brief or how long it will be.' --ibid

'If they with their prospects of hell could hold out--why not we with our prospects?' --ibid

'It's been a long time since the swindlers started from scratch.' --ibid

...i made myself forget so i could indulge in the luxury of believing an impossibility. (Because all the possible things i could believe, were hateful to me.)

The trouble with the idea of reincarnation, is that being an animal is not the punishment. Being human is.

Assuming that because there is power, there must be a center of power ("God"), is just as absurd as assuming that the universe has a physical center that it expands from.

The doctrine of the soul: an ethical prescription. For, once you divide it into ego & unconscious, the former belongs to everyone [society] & the latter, to no one [or nature]. Its uniqueness resides in the sum of accidents of place. Which can only be grasped partially, at moments, in glimpses. Perhaps these alone are what should be preserved.

Ghost: the one who uses my terminal [at work] when i'm not there. --The "unconscious". It has its own work to do.

Hope would kill you yourself before it consents to die. Hope is ruthless.

New Year's Day: our yard full of thousands of birds.

   'Naked in Clay

  Like horrible amphibians come up for air,
mournful grimaces rise to the lip.
Through the Sahara of the Substance
walks a gray verse, a dromedary.

  A twisted face of cruel dreams glows phosphorescent.
And the blind man who died full of voices
of snow. And rise at dawn, poet, nomad,
to the raw, merciless day of being a man.

  The Hours go by feverishly, and in the corners
they miscarry blond centuries of happiness.
Who casts out so much line; who pitilessly
descends our nerves,
already frayed cords, to the tomb?

  Love! And you, also. Black blows from a stone
are engendered in your mask, and smash it.
The tomb is yet
a woman's sex that attracts man!'

--Cesar Vallejo, The Black Heralds, tr Richard Schaaf & Kathleen Ross (1990)

"The economic policies of the Bush administration do have a solid precendent further south, in Argentina, where "business-friendly, free-market policies would...allow the country to grow out of...budget and trade deficits," but where, instead, the economy collapsed spectacularily.

Remember the pictures of women in fur coats smashing ATMs in Buenos Aires after the banks froze everyone's accounts? The miles-long barter markets that took up positions down the middle of the national highways, allowing refugees to swap their meagre possessions for the necessities of life?" --Boing Boing

Listening to: "Chang" soundtrack by Fong Naam.

" An American army patrol stood in their way, and after they went through the whole procedure of searching my son and his cousin, and inspecting the cargo load, they tied them up both and led them to an area about three kilometres from the scene and...in front of one of the gates of the Tharthar dam where water flows at its strongest rate and to my son and his cousin's horror, they ordered them to jump into the water...After days of search we found my sons jacket..." --Healing Iraq (via Salam Pax)

"As Lou Dubose and I conclude, if you must eat while Republicans control both the White House and Congress, you may want to consider becoming a vegetarian." --Molly Ivins

"...silly, like worrying about the problems of What-To-Do-Next for any surviving Orcs in The Ring (no mention here of a brief occupation of Mordor or of a quick return to an indigenous regime)." --Silliman's Blog

Listening to: Liszt's "Sonate h-moll".

Went to the Party to become a Red-Assed Baboon. First they said you must stop using that word. Fine I said words are just a convention. Are you prepared to despise everyone different from you they asked. I have moods like that. Good. We need a poet. I don't know about that I said.

01 08 04

"The dreamshit was for his caterpillar, and for it alone." --Perdido Street Station

Wrap myself in Albanian folk music. Use headlights because the others do. Gray is a color also. The flotsam we cling to will probably take us all the way to where we will not need such an ignoble expedient. Meanwhile there is so much we can't say, we must communicate via these simple hand signals.

01 08 04

"It was not surprising that Blake would appear to Yeats from time to time & dictate revisions in the poems of Blake that he was editing--revisions which Yeats faithfully incorporated in the text he published." --David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry v.1 (1976)

I've got a nose for crazies like a truffle pig.

"Tears taste salt to the living but sweet to the dead..." --Ursula LeGuin, Compass Rose

A question [was] put to all the poets [at Chumley's that night]...: what would you be reincarnated as, & why? ...finally i dediced, a siliqua, one of those tadpole-shaped seed pods that drops twirling down like a helicopter. "Because first you get to fly. And then you become a tree."

I suggested to A---- [the Open Mike hostess] we have a "house reader", maybe an actor, who'll read for people that don't want to. Yeah--i'd've made it my whole career to stay hidden, if i could. (I also suggested providing masks.)

Everyone seems to have these ridiculous, crippling flaws; & i suppose i am that way too. Damaged. We are all damaged in this place.

To give everything away before i die: sometimes that is my muse, sometimes my anti-muse. For one can be tempted by a greater generosity--to give it to the Void.

Loneliness corrupts; absolute loneliness corrupts absolutely.

   "Moonrise

Will you glimmer on the sea?
Will you fling your spearhead
on the shore?
What note shall we pitch?
We have a song,
on the bank we share our arrows;
the loosed string tells our note:

O flight,
bring her swiftly to our song.
She is great,
we measure her by the pine trees."

--H.D.

Rebirth's less of a story.

'Perhaps speech is to human action what the sun is to the earth, the exterior principle of formal differentiation, the absolute condition of vital movement.' --Remy de Gourmont, The Horses of Diomedes

'Who hasn't built a house/ doesn't deserve the earth.// Who hasn't built a house/ shall not become earth/ --and straw--and ash--// I haven't built a house.' --Tsvetaeva

It would never occur to me to trim a bush or chop down a tree. But i wouldn't plant anything, either.

"It is an undeniable fact that if a fox terrier two feet long with a tail an inch and a half high can dig a hole three feet deep in 10 minutes, then to dig the Panama Canal in a single year would require only one fox terrier 15 miles long with a tail a mile and a half high. This is statistically true; yet one must seriously consider whether, after finding such a fox terrier, one could make it mind." --Johnson, cited by Charles W Bostick in 2/77 Word Ways

Even the view that we have no history & our actions have no consequences--has a history, & consequences.

And i feel stupid for the last residual twinges of wishing i could make a poem of it. For there are some things greater than poems. There are some things too great to be written as art.

"A case in point is Svec, the sculptor who made the World's Greatest Statue of Josef Vissarionovich [Stalin], the one that for about six years loomed over Prague. The Party ordered the monument to be blown up in October 1962. But they had trouble carrying out the order. They could not liquidate the Thing by just one powerful charge because the explosion could have damaged a considerable portion of downtown Prague. So the pyrotechnicians nibbled him away, bit by bit, in a series of mini-explosions. It took them, I think, a couple of

weeks: the statue got gradually thinner, less & less realistic, until it looked quite modern. The whole process was preserved on film by a photographer who, from the windows of the Writers' Union, took pictures daily. They document a gorgeous experiment in pop art, or maximal [minimal] art, or whatever. Svec, however, took his life when he saw how his realistic Goliath was changing slowly, step by step, into a Giacometti-like monster.

The unlucky sculptor was really more a victim of malicious fate than of just stalinism. Only one item of hos oeuvre survives. It stands in the garden of the Art Academy in Prague and captures a motorcycle driver taking a sharp curve--a most unusual, exquisitely beautiful rendition of motion in stone. It is an early work. After it, the gifted student began to get commissions. ...When Svec was asked to participate in the nonpublic competition for Stalin's monument, he had already been pretty frustrated* and thought that he stood no chance anyway, with all the National Artists for competitors. So he reportedly concocted a model in the course of one single afternoon, with the help of two bottles of vodka--and he won." --Josef Skvorecky, Talkin' Moscow Blues (1988)

[*his Masaryk & Hus were destroyed by the Nazis; his FDR wasn't finished]

   "The Clouded Armies"

Man pushing
A shopping cart down the lack of a sidewalk
Recondo erose, movie soundtrack

Recorded grip with do nicer swearwords Rewson

Christo wraps a shark
Walmart cathedral funest in the
Glittering land. Uziel
I umbelliferous raucous kilderkin

How to get

Rid of cat pist (tie-fighter
Belabor) neither malignant nor
Benign winter tumbleweeds when the truth is
Them told again, gulls
Swirling in

It the tired light torridly,
A diagram sways.
Never. Dark
Energy the scribble of rim/ tiny claws
The leave.; swung torch seeds big bad receive

12 31 03

An interview with the author of House of Leaves. (via dbqp)

My cheerful thought: even if the Red-Assed Baboons get away with stealing the '04 election, their nature makes it impossible that they will sit tight without starting more wars, & reinstituting the Draft those wars will require--& the American people will never stand for another draft. But do we have the ten years?

Listening to: The Music of Hikari Oe. More about this autistic composer, the son of a Nobel laureate. (Sounds like Mozart!)

   "April Mortality

Rebellion shook an ancient dust,
  And bones bleached dry of rottenness
Said: Heart, be bitter still, nor trust
  The earth, the sky in their bright dress.

Heart, heart, dost thou break to know
  This anguish thou wilt bear alone?
We sang of it an age ago,
  And traced it dimly upon stone.

With all the drifting race of men
  Thou also art begot to mourn
That she is crucified again,
  The lonely Beauty yet unborn.

And if thou dreamest to have won
  Some touch of her in permanence,
'T is the old cheating of the sun,
  The intricate lovely play of sense.

Be bitter still, remember how
  Four petals, when a little breath
Of wind made stir the pear-tree bough,
  Blew delicately down to death."

--Léonie Adams

A review of the music by Peteris Vasks i mentioned in my June 21st post.

A stamp honoring Emile Nelligan, called by Edmund Wilson "at once the Rimbaud and the Gérard de Nerval of French Canada".

"...there are more people in Scotland who speak Urdu than Gaelic..." --Vicki Rosenzweig (ca. 1993)

A stray dog loitering by the body of its car-hit companion.

"Such was the horror for the profession of a soldier which had affected the minds of the degenerate Romans that many of the youth of Italy and the provinces chose to cut off the fingers of their right hand to escape from being pressed into the service; and this strange expedient was so commonly practiced as to deserve the severe animadversion of the laws, and a peculiar name in the Latin language." --Gibbon

"There ought to be a proportion betwixt the sign and thing signified; therefore should all things, whether real or rationall, have their proper words assigned unto them." --Thomas Urquhart, Logopandecteision

"No pen can any thing eternall wright,
That is not steept in humor of the Night." --George Chapman

"...St Anthony was greeted by Paul the Hermit in the mountainous deserts of Egypt, 'Tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race; if new roofs be risen in the ancient cities; whose empire is it now sways the world; and if any still survive, snared in the error of the demons.' " --Philip J Davis, The Thread (1983)

"Jewel or shell, or starry ore" --Tennyson

"...nobody has yet imagined a plausible Wallace Stevens." --Hugh Kenner

"The words the Hittites used for the verb 'to put on', as in 'to put on an article of clothing', was different for each garment." --Atlantic 8/92

"Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well." --Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

(I'm always surprised that anybody reads what i write.)

"When he went to Palestine, Buber fought for the rights of Arabs, but did not prevail; had he done so, the history of the Middle East would have been different." --Martin Seymour-Smith

'As soon as a thought has found words it no longer exists in us or is serious in its deepest sense.' --Schopenhauer, "On Authorship and Style"

My mother was getting something in the dime store when a woman was caught trying to shoplift. She ran away--leaving her child behind.

'The history of mathematics is a road lined with sphinxes...' --Le Lionnais

"[Stefan] George had, of course, looked forward to a holy war which would renew the spiritually moribund society of his time; but the particular war that came must have struck him as vulgar and brutal." --Patrick Bridgwater, The German Poets of the First World War

"The frail, illegal fire balloons appear" --Elizabeth Bishop

"Or, as G K Chesterton said, 'If it is not true that a divine being fell, then one can only say that one of the animals went completely off its head.' " --Auden, intro to The Star Thrower

...Two insomniacs, still up at 3 AM & wanting to talk, but each not wanting to call the other in case they've achieved a precious sleep.

My seeing-eye dog bites me when i turn my back.

"...love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
humane with everlasting, prince with mud,
and song and wind and life and death with none..." --Nabokov, "A Night of Russian Poetry"

   "Quaint Mazes

And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.

On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn
bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts
put their prolonged light; the chilly fountains burn.
Religion of the heart, with trysts and quests

And pangs of consolation, its hawk's hood
twitched off for sweet carnality, again
rejoices in old hymns of servitude,

haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine,
it is the ravage of the heron wood;
it is the rood blazing upon the green."

--Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae (1978)

"turn clouds the cauldrons of the martyrs' cries" -ibid

"It is as compleate a piece of madnesse to miscall and rave against the times, as thinke to recall men to reason by a fit of passion..." --Religio Medici

We mass-produce diseased souls; we heal them one by one, if at all.

"...mosques...were built with mortar that had been mixed with musk. ...It is even said...that the Mosque of Zobiade still smells of musk today." --John Trueman, The Romantic Story of Scent (1975)
[A great poem is such a mosque.]

Webpage poem generator.

Brain drain.

A Gil Elvgren miscellany.

Somtow Sucharitkul's serial killer sonnets are going to be published as a book by Wormhole Press.

Winners. (via Caterina)

Red Alert 2016.

Lemmings.

Yesterday i ran out of gas; today my electric car window broke. Though "luck" is only our word for unknown causality, it is certain that things will continue to break, wear out, & go awry. I resolve for the new year, not to count any of this as evidence, in the ongoing still mutable case.

01 02 04

   "Echo

  Come to me in the silence of the night;
    Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
  Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
    As sunlight on a stream;
      Come back in tears,
  O memory, hope and love of finished years.

  O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
    Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
  Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
    Where thirsting longing eyes
      Watch the slow door
  That opening, letting in, lets out no more.


  Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
    My very life again though cold in death;
  Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
    Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
      Speak low, lean low,
  As long ago, my love, how long ago."

--Christina Rossetti

"England has done one thing; it has invented and established public opinion, which is an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force." --Oscar Wilde

"Man's greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace." --Loren Eiseley

"The reality that interests me is strange and flickering and haunting." --Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency

To be a philosopher, to be a chessboard, to be a sunset, to be a statue, to be a poem, to be a wind, to be a leaf--not to love.

Story idea. A writer wanting to exploit his tragedy--but can't.

Why don't i get them all in the same room together, & tear me apart like Orpheus?

The hour of dawn is a place i inhabit, in my organometallic way. i know all its lights. It is a dangerous place, but a place with rules. Its walls are made of pain, but its roof is made of music. The hour of dawn borrows me, for as long as it needs, to see.

12 29 03

   "Nocturne in Silver

Here where the barbed wire struggles in the marsh
And alkali crusts all the weeds like frost,
I have come home, I have come home to hear
The new young frogs that cry along the lost

Wild ditches where at midnight only cows
And fools with eery marsh fire in their brains
Blunder toward midnight. Silvery and clear
Cry the new frogs; the blood runs in my veins

Coldly and clearly. I am mottled, too,
And feel a silver bubble in my throat.
Lock doors, turn keys, or follow in your fear.
My eyes are green, and warily afloat

In the June darkness. I am done with fire.
Water quicksilver-like that slips through stone
Has quenched my madness--if you find me here
My lineage squat and warty will be known."

--Loren Eiseley

This doesn't put me any closer to the mystery, though. What is the mystery--that i so seldom am moved to remember? That any thing abides? That the grammar can shape these unanswerable questions?

...meaning uses itself up. It has to be replentished. From where? The silence that we clear within ourselves. Without it, we cast off old & seek new lovers, new languages, new cities--when nothing really died but the growth of our understanding. For every meaning is infinite...

I imagine myself able to accept any outcome. (What a cruel illusion!)

'Far away from men, clad in blue silence, I work my spells' --Sologub

"The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say." --Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987)

Yes, it would be much wiser to put all this energy of self-questioning & conjecture into something artistic i think. Like what? Tinguely's self-destroying sculpture.

"Where things that own not man's dominion dwell" --Childe Harold

"Where dolphin-leaps like transitory doors
To palaces across the water form
Shining parabolas above canals." --Schnackenberg, The Lamplit Answer

Chumley's. A new poet says he lived in Warsaw for 2 years. Introduces one poem as being about the time he asked a Polish woman for a date, & they went to Auschwitz. I forgot the poem but i remembered the introduction.

Dream about Crowley. He was making a movie, & i got banned from the set because i told him it was 1993. I snuck around anyway.

   "Spell

Bring me a sea-wet stone, something broken
   of your own
--I want to make you a charm for death.
A charm I make you of my breath
   and sea-drone,
casting to mateless moan, things not spoken.

Time is the bone-white ache, all things cloven
   it will break
--I will leave you amulets for pain.
Round amber and round jade have lain
   in sea-rake,
light in the stone awake, liquor-woven." --Mog Decarnin

Finished Shampoo Planet this morning over coffee. --Snidefluffy.

If Dean is McGovern, Bush is Nixon.

Hyperinstruments. (via Parking Lot)

The Bay Area's flourishing transgender performance scene, (via Transdada)

Typologies of writing styles remind me of typologies of "race": simply the act of imagining such groupings as distinct, bounded entities creates nonsense. We now know, of course (or ought to), that "race" does not exist; there are only traits, some of which are genetically linked, but many of which are not. It's the fact of static traditional societies that tended to confuse the issue: because people who lived in a place resembled each other more than people living far away, all sorts of connections were assumed between accidentals. So, style. Because writers tend to write in only one, or a narrow range of styles, this produces an effect exactly analogous to the traditional social grouping; whereas if writers wrote in all sorts of styles & combinations of stylistic features, this would be the equivalent of the modern multicultural society. --Now, the politics of getting published, that's something else: & if you observe attentively, it is often the case that a particular trait may be accepted in a writer who is already a member of the "in-group", while being rejected when an outsider uses it. Canons are thus not about style so much as they reflect the literary politics of the people who compile them. And the period immediately preceding ours has produced, out of a putative struggle to rectify the canon, not so much a new canon as a new set of canons--which has nonetheless failed to alter the catholicity of any of the agonists. --I think also of food purists: people who will eat fish but not beef, or orange foods but not green foods. Well, there may be sense to some of these preferences, but we will not discover their sense by treating them as universal laws.

What is "bubble tea"?

A recent interview with Lorenzo Milam, handicapped-activist & the "father of noncommercial radio in America".

Raymond Roussel, of course, was hypertext before hypertext was cool... Here's a partial translation of one of his long poems, with the multiple parentheses turned into links. More.

Listening to: The Ultimate Bollywood Party Album.

'...those rebel angels--the prime numbers--' --Francois Le Lionnais, OuLiPo tr Warren Motte (1986)

'...that curious dark-blue light was beginning to steal through the window-panes that in a gas-lit cafe is the equivalent of daybreak.' --Gustav Meyrink, The Golem (tr Madge Pemberton, 1928)

"I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of progress." --Ursula LeGuin, Buffalo Gals

" 'Which would be worse: a world without music or a world without dogs?'
'I don't know. Music, I suppose. Yes, music. I think you could probably miss dogs if there weren't any. I mean you could wish there was something midway between a rat and a wolf to have around you--only tamer. But if there wasn't any music then you couldn't even miss it. And that would be worse.' " --Amanda Prantera, Conversations with Lord Byron...

"cum minus abnuerit noctem desisse viator
quam coepisse diwem..." --Punica V. 27-28 ('...a time when the way farer is less sure that day has begun than that night is ended')

"A grove of ( ) bamboo...at ground zero at Hiroshima survived the blast and sprouted within days." --James Gorman

"i throw away my glasses and accept my way of seeing" --dan raphael

   "48.

This smoky winter morning
do not despise the green jewel shining among the twigs
because it is a traffic light."

--Charles Reznikoff

"Guns, cradled on the tide,
Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock
Of bilge and backwash..." --Lowell

"I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing. When I have shaken off my passion, somewhat as a dog shakes off an unexpected plunge into the canal, I find myself without any understanding of what it was that ravaged me." --Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (1989)

'I don't understand: where does everything that passes through the soul disappear to? The unsaid. To yourself, without words. But it was there.' --Zinaida Gippius in: A Difficult Soul

Some people you have to give directions in landmarks, others (like me) in street signs; maybe literature is like that--it needs a story & also a meaning, one not reducible to the other, & both as clear & unique as possible. (Muddiness for enhancement only. Those who want all-muddy works are perceiving Literature itself as a single work with too much clarity (but how? their ignorance maybe) & wish to complete the big picture.) Character is part of story, images are part of meaning; where characters create images, the best literature is born; and what else is History but that part of events graspable in terms of characters creating images?

The taste for freedom as a form of sensuality. --How intuitives can be indulgent in a revelry of movement & change, to the exclusion of true growth. (My thousand interests--)

My ivory tower sank in quicksand.

To dwell among weapons, then: only possible for the unthinking, or the lucid suicidal, who find comfort in their potential, as in carrying house keys, while you move from room to room in a large locked mansion.

"To go to the stars, you must be worthy of going to the stars. And the stars don't care." --Terence McKenna

Global English. (via Under the Fire Star)

"Rather than restore the old town after the war, the Dutch authorities signed the city over to a variety of young architects, who did their best to make the place look modern and interesting. As a result of their labors, a large part of the city looks like the senior thesis of a talented and precocious architecture major, albeit one who was heavy into drugs. There are bright colors and unusal shapes everywhere, and many of the buildings seem to be answering questions of the form "Wouldn't it be cool if..."" --Idle Words

What about the Modern Garuda?

"You can walk the surface of Mars for a thousand of your years without making any discovery which you have no right to make..." --The Master Aetherius

The Alternate Mars Project.

Texas Sand Dragon.

"This speculative history of the Nephilim is indeed grim: Exile, collapse, and then slow death. How could a loving God allow such things?" --A Hill on Mars

"A proper poem is four lines with one word per line."

The Scarlet Pimpernel calls in.

1956: W H Auden reviews Return of the King. (via Mysterium)

Lemme see...that's three times as many human beings as died in "9-11". [Ten.]

The word "flarf" appears to be Icelandic for 'wheel'.

Silence from Beagle 2.

Light the Umoja candle.

We need another George Grosz.

Satan's Secret History and the Monuments of Mars.
Or what about the Seven Cities of Mars?

A real myth solves an unanswerable problem with a string of images, that together create a story which implies its answerability. A world mythologized is not a world with infinite anxieties, though its meaningfulness gives no satisfaction to the inquiring intellect. Science is an attempt to create a myth that is also an explanation. To the extent that it succeeds as one, it inevitably fails as the other. But our popular arts are almost totally devoid of myths; they are deliberate lies made to foster certain sensations or else, more or less candid self-exposure. The real myths of our time (not: its cant or its prevalent misunderstandings) are more like pre-myths, the ritualized feelings of certain habits & recurrent practices, which tend to sustain a set of familiar images, but which never (or seldom ever) attain the clarity of a single complex mythic-core, on account of the fact that no artist has yet bothered to contemplate that context, without bringing in everything else he knows & feels & especially, his desire to be stylish.

Pity the poet who isn't ahead of the science of his time; pity the scientist who is.

The desire for an eclectic style & the desire for a homogeneous style: both nilpertain the necessity of textural relief which form (perceived as insight) imposes. These idols come from a blindness in the mind's eye. It's a glaring indictment that modern art history eems to be about them.

"School is teachers who don't know teaching facts that aren't true to kids who don't care." --Matt Groening

"In this country, only the executioner may indulge his perversities." --Angela Carter

After complaining about the way things are run, Americans invariably add "but it's still the freest country in the world" --to which i want to respond: "Two dozen others have lower infant mortality rates".

A new blog for visual-verbal poetry, from Geof Huth of mail art & "dbqp press" fame.

Prejudice against "abstractions" is usually against words of Latin origin vs. Anglo-Saxon--but their words were as real to them as ours to us.

To go to work regardless if you're sick--to write when uninspired. What can be the justification? If you get fired otherwise.

After a good poem i am a little more myself & a little less the pretender, by that exact degree of extra effort i have had to make to keep from lying in the presence of my fearfulness (not: my fears. they are nothing so discrete!).

The rites of a trade remain, through all high culture & decadence, inviolate. Until the actual technical secrets get lost. Then cultlike nontrades emerge: associations without any real knowledge, & invent a secrecy & hierarchy to justify their existence.

So many poets today hate words! they only love "being a Poet".

How can i sing the fate of an empire when my own life has no direction?

The time for critiques is past; now it's find a new form of life, or perish. [THIS IS NOT AN APHORISM IT'S A FIRE IN YOUR SHOE.]

Books to recreate the magic of first books...Finnegans Wake.

Maybe Art doesn't want to be saved; maybe all it wants is an easy death & we are torturing it with heroic measures of prolongation...[unwilling to believe in actual rebirth.]

The Novel rolled through poetry like a Panzer division & left every poem cluttered with irrelevant anecdotes, meaningless description, arbitrary allusion & obscure personal trivia. While novels succeeded in becoming flat, standardized, & fearsomely contemporary.

Art has a way of fomenting its own conspiracy. On the [shortwave] radio i am listening to something by Peter Maxwell Davies & after the Dick bio [by Paul Williams] it occurs to me, naturally, that P. M. Davies has already been invented as a fictional character, in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, as the composer Adrian Leverkuhn (if i remember aright) whose oeuvre consisted entirely of variously grotesque & somber parodies of earlir music. ...Davies is interrupted by a CB'er & for a fraction of a second i think it's part of the program. All that has to happen next is to hear the CB'er start talking as if to me... No wonder i don't get any work done.

Listening to: Odetta- It's a Mighty World

   "POEM

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars."

Muriel Rukeyser (via Poems for the Time)


"at the end of this tunnel of guilt and shame
there must be a light of some kind...."
--Ani DiFranco

From here, the light increases.
Happy solstice!

This is the Serbo-Croatian translation of my poem "Christendom", in the new issue of Novi Kamov:

   "Krscanski Svijet"

bio jednom jedan kralj
budalast kralj
sin jednoga kralja

i vladao je velikim carstvom
najvecim u njegovo doba
i pobozan on bijase

tako pobozan
da je htio kazniti
svakoga tko nije vjerovao

pa je taj pobozni kralj
osnovao ministarstvo
da uhodi vlastiti narod

ali rat je ono sto je volio
stalni rat
rat bez svrhe

pa je ratavao dok nije iscrpio
sva bogatstva najveceg carstva
i unistio zemlju svoju

doveo je do potpunog stecaja
pa je postala
najnazadnija zemlja u Europi

i nakon toga kralja
cije ime bijase Filip Drugi
Zlatno doba umjetnosti I knjizevnosti

utrnuto je
kao da nikada postojalo nije
a rijec je o tristo godina

tristo godina da se u Spanjolskoj
opet nesto dobro stvori

--Just so I don't g ive Blogger fits, I'll tell you instead that there's supposed to be an acute accent over the 1st, 3rd, & 5th occurrences of the letter C; & carets* over the S's numbered 1, 7, 13, 20, 23, 28 & 30; the Z's numbered 1, 2, 4 & 9; & the C's numbered 7, 8 & 9. Thank you, Slobodan Drenovac!

An appreciation of Jacques Jouet. (via Moby Lives)

----------------------------------------------
*actually, a hacek (which is an upside down caret)--& there's one over the C of "hacek", too.

"The difficulty of explaining romance to a 7-year-old is nothing compared to the difficulty of explaining the 'romance' of a darkened room and candles- especially if the 7-year-old has associated candles to explosions and blackouts her whole life." --Baghdad Burning

According to The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton (Louise Kaplan, 1987), he had just written a political article supporting Lord Mayor Beckford & which had been accepted for publication when the lord Mayor died. Scribbled on the back of a manuscript are the computations: "Lost by his death on this Essay-- 1 (pound) 11 (shillings) 6 (pence); Gained in Elegies [which he promptly wrote on Beckford]-- 5 (pounds) 5 (shillings) 0 (pence). Am glad he is dead by 3 (pounds) 13 (shillings) 6 (pence)." (p. 168)

Online Gwendolyn MacEwan stories. (via Wood's Lot)

A friend recommended the sculptor Ivan Mestrovic, whose most famous work is the horseback Indian bowman in Chicago.

   'Morning Song

Words are the poison in a song

on the track of the song's night road
police sirens aftertaste
the alcohol of sleepwalkers

waking up, a headache
like the window's transparent speakers
from silence to a roar

learning to waste a life
I hover in the birdcalls
crying never

when the storms have filled up with gas
light rays snatch the letter
unfold it and tear it up'

--Bei Dao (tr Eliot Weinberger)

Listening to: Musafir- Dhola Maru.

'The easy possibility of letter-writing must--seen merely theoretically--have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one's own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold--all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish.' --Letters to Milena

"On December 6, 1982, at 4:00 p.m., I met with President Reagan and his daughter Patti Davis for seventy-five minutes... He seemed continually to have his own agenda and didn't appear to listen much or to consider seriously my statements or replies. ...He quoted some material saying that the freeze campaign was orchestrated by Russia and that we were KGB dupes. I looked at him and said, 'That's from the Reader's Digest.' He shook his head and said, 'No, it's not; it's from my intelligence files.' If I am not badly mistaken, it was copied straight from the John Barron article in the October 1982 issue of Reader's Digest." --Dr Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy (1986 ed.)

'I am steel; I am a druid.
I am an artificer; I am a scientific one.
I am a serpent; I am love; I will indulge in feasting.
I am not a confused bard drivelling...
I am a cell, I am a cleft, I am a restoration,
I am the depository of song; I am a literary man...
I am a bard of the hall, I am a chick of the chair.'
--Book of Taliessen III. in: William F Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868)

Listening to: John Coltrane- Meditations (on vinyl)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   "News Aggregator"

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

12 07 03

Feeding the blog.

Alfred the Mail Agent.

Free Cory Doctorow stories online.

Fadwa Tuqan dies:

   'A Life

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

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

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

Sister Scorpion on Saddam's capture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under the cover of darkness.

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

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

  "the Desperado (de Nerval)"

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

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

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

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

4 26 87

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An angel piping to the souls in hell.

Equivalents.

A political Pakistani painter in the miniaturist style.

Keeping up with the Newspeak.

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

Virtual soldiers run.

Was Saddam a prisoner?

American Apocalypse. (via Orcinus)

Thinking about: Mark Tobey.

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

A graphic novel about Afghanistan, i think.

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

Words of Wisdom. (from Uppity Negro)

Clouds. (via Plep)

Margaret Cho has a blog!

The Invisible Recovery.

Slaughterhouse Stories.

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

And now from Salam Pax...

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

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

   12 12 03

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

His photograph with Rumsfeld
Gathers dust in a closet

   12 14 03

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

   12 14 03

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

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

----------------------------------------------------
*or is it Bad Santa?

    "The Children

I heard the mouths of the silent
dying of departure

if we could only remember
the water before it froze
they said

learn this I told them
it is not true
but it will keep you warm in winter

my words
fell on their delicate shoulders
like whips

we are thirsty they said
their dry laughter was desperate

take this cup i told them
and wait for the rain

put your wilted hands
over your eyes
and believe in the coming of light"

--Richard Shelton, The Tattooed Desert (1971)

All the Xmas You Need. (via JR)

New work from an old hand. (via Musea)

And a tale of an ex-activist. (via Bruce Sterling)

Benjamin as Blogger.

Recently got in Bartok's 3rd, 4th, 5th & 6th String Quartets & i promptly borrowed them. I hadn't heard that much B. till now & i wasn't overly impressed by that, but these are almost as good as Alban Berg, particularly the 3rd one which i am still listening to over & over. Magical.

Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"All that we have forgotten about narrative steals back into narrative and watches us with shining eyes."
--Lisa Robertson, Debbie: An Epic (1997)
[Wonderful use of language by this poet i had not previously heard of. Can't tell yet if it adds up to anything, but many phrases attest a singularly precise ear & imagination.]

"Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions."
--Tony Kushner, Angels in America/ part 1

   'IN THE AUTUMN

A leaf quietly wafts through the autumn
Gleaming with bright sunlight.
Let me believe that with bright smiles
We can shore up this huge earth.

Let us find you
In the ripples of the bell sounds;
In the tiny, hard grip of the baby
Clinging to its mother's skirt.

There will never come a day
When all our yesterdays and todays
Are buried irretrievably in legends.

Today I want to believe an eternal truth
Grandmother's words that the moon has a cinnamon tree
To be cut out with a silver hatchet.

In the burning sickbed of my childhood
I was falling in a bottomless abyss.
That endless, headlong fall caused me
To pass out again and again.
Let us protect our dear dreams
From that terrible truth.'

--Han-mo Chung, in: Best Loved Poems of Korea, ed Chang-soo Koh (1984)

Listening to: No World (Trio) Improvisations

Byzantine Studies on the Internet. (via Metafilter) --Let
me tell you, we're a lot closer to being the New Byzantines than being the New Romans.

Obligatory "Unelectable" link. (pull out yr barf bag)

   "Elegy in a Spider's Web

What to say when the spider
Say when the spider what
When the spider the spider what
The spider does what
Does does dies does it not
Not live and then not
Legs legs then one
When the spider does dies
Death spider death
Or not the spider or
What to say when
To say always
Death always
The dying of always
Or alive or dead
What to say when I
When I or the spider
No I and I what
Does what does dies
No when the spider dies
Death spider death
Death always I
Death before always
Dead or alive
Now and always
What to say always
Now and always
What to say now
Now when the spider
What does the spider
The spider what dies
Dies when then when
Then always death always
The dying of always
Always now I
What to say when I
When I what
When I say
When the spider
When I always
Death always
When death what
Death I says say
Dead spider no matter
How thorough death
Dear or alive
No matter death
How thorough I
What to say when
When who when the spider
When life when space
The dying of oh pity
Poor how thorough dies
No matter reality
Death always
What to say
When who
Death always
When death when the spider
When I who I
What to say when
Now before after always
When then the spider what
Say what when now
Legs legs then none
When the spider
Death spider death
The genii who cannot cease to know
What to say when the spider
When I say
When I or the spider
Dead or alive the dying of
Who cannot cease to know
Who death who I
The spider who when
What to say when
Who cannot cease
Who cannot
Cannot cease
Cease
Cannot
The spider
Death
I
We
The genii
To know
What to say when the
Who cannot
When the spider what
Does what does dies
Death spider death
Who cannot
Death cease death
To know say what
Or not the spider
Or if I say
Or if I do not say
Who cannot cease to know
Who know the genii
Who say the I
Who they we cannot
Death cease death
To know say I
Oh pity poor pretty
How thorough life love
No matter space spider
How horrid reality
What to say when
What when
Who cannot
How cease
The knowing of always
Who these this space
Before after here
Life now my face
The face love the
The legs real when
What time death always
What to say then
What time the spider"

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

"When the Ecstatic Body Grips"

When the ecstatic body grips
Its heaven, with little sobbing cries,
And lips are crushed on hot blind lips,
I read strange pity in your eyes.

For that in you which is not mine,
And that in you which I love best,
And that, which my day-thoughts divine
Masterless still, still unpossessed,

Sits in the blue eyes' frightened stare,
A naked lonely-dwelling thing,
A frail thing from its body-lair
Drawn at my body's summoning;

Whispering low, 'O unknown man,
Whose hunger on my hunger wrought,
Body shall give what body can,
Shall give you all -- save what you sought.'

Whispering, 'O secret one, forgive,
Forgive and be content though still
Beyond the blood's surrender live
The darkness of the separate will.

'Enough if in the veins we know
Body's delirium, body's peace --
Ask not that ghost to ghost shall go,
Essence in essence merge and cease.'

But swiftly, as in sudden sleep,
That You in you is veiled or dead;
And the world's shrunken to a heap
Of hot flesh straining on a bed."

--E R Dodds (found here)

   "TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR.

1.
Thy country's curse is on thee, darkest crest
Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm
Which rends our Mother's bosom—Priestly Pest!
Masked Resurrection of a buried Form!

2.
Thy country's curse is on thee! Justice sold,
Truth trampled, Nature's landmarks overthrown,
And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,
Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction's throne.

3.
And whilst that sure slow Angel which aye stands
Watching the beck of Mutability
Delays to execute her high commands,
And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee,

4.
Oh, let a father's curse be on thy soul,
And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb;
Be both, on thy gray head, a leaden cowl
To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom.

5.
I curse thee by a parent's outraged love,
By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,
By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed;

6.
By those infantine smiles of happy light,
Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth,
Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night
Hiding the promise of a lovely birth:

7.
By those unpractised accents of young speech,
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teach—
THOU strike the lyre of mind!—oh, grief and shame!

8.
By all the happy see in children's growth--
That undeveloped flower of budding years--
Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,
Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears--

9.
By all the days, under an hireling's care,
Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,--
O wretched ye if ever any were,--
Sadder than orphans, yet not fatherless!

10.
By the false cant which on their innocent lips
Must hang like poison on an opening bloom,
By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse
Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb--

11.
By thy most impious Hell, and all its terror;
By all the grief, the madness, and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be their error--
That sand on which thy crumbling power is built--

12.
By thy complicity with lust and hate--
Thy thirst for tears—thy hunger after gold--
The ready frauds which ever on thee wait--
The servile arts in which thou hast grown old--

13.
By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile--
By all the arts and snares of thy black den,
And—for thou canst outweep the crocodile--
By thy false tears—those millstones braining men--

14.
By all the hate which checks a father's love--
By all the scorn which kills a father's care--
By those most impious hands which dared remove
Nature's high bounds--by thee--and by despair--

15.
Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,
And cry, 'My children are no longer mine--
The blood within those veins may be mine own,
But--Tyrant--their polluted souls are thine;--

16.
I curse thee--though I hate thee not.--O slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming Hell
Of which thou art a daemon, on thy grave
This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well!"

--Shelley

Listening to: Heinz Holliger.

While Earth burns. (via Mysterium)

Shades of Kent Johnson: best-selling romance
writer Nora Roberts has collaborated with her
best-selling mystery alter ego J D Robb
in her/her newest. As one of my customers said,
"But they have such different styles."

Might as well 'fess up. Most of Ipomoea was written
by a computer program i created to write syntactically
correct English sentences (it still had some bugs at
the time i reached the undergraduate memory-limit);
this one used the vocabulary of Poe's "Raven". I did,
however edit the results...

Don't fence me in. (via Dr Menlo)



The Eschaton revisited. If this isn't in every one
of your poems--it should be. Oh yeah--that too.

Let's have a look at that wall.

Doublethink, Part 2.

The first Thanksgiving. (via Kurt Nimmo)

On Spammers' "names".

Masonic lodge art. (via Incoming Signals)

Route 40. (via Plep)

New wheels--maybe.

   "I Dreamed My Genesis

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking
Through the rotating shell, strong
As motor muscle on the drill, driving
Through vision and the girdered nerve.

From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled
Off from the creasing flesh, filed
Through all the irons in the grass, metal
Of suns in the man-melting night.

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop, costly
A creature in my bones I
Rounded my globe of heritage, journey
In bottom gear through night-geared man.

I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel
Rammed in the marching heart, hole
In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled
Death on the mouth that ate the gas.

Sharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvest
Of hemlock and the blades, rust
My blood upon the tempered dead, forcing
My second struggling from the grass.

And power was contagious in my birth, second
Rise of the skeleton and
Rerobing of the naked ghost. Manhood
Spat up from the resuffered pain.

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen
Twice in the feeding sea, grown
Stale of Adam's brine until, vision
Of new man strength, I seek the sun."

--Dylan Thomas

'The easy possibility of letter-writing must--seen merely theoretically--have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one's own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold--all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish.' --Letters to Milena

"On December 6, 1982, at 4:00 p.m., I met with President Reagan and his daughter Patti Davis for seventy-five minutes... He seemed continually to have his own agenda and didn't appear to listen much or to consider seriously my statements or replies. ...He quoted some material saying that the freeze campaign was orchestrated by Russia and that we were KGB dupes. I looked at him and said, 'That's from the Reader's Digest.' He shook his head and said, 'No, it's not; it's from my intelligence files.' If I am not badly mistaken, it was copied straight from the John Barron article in the October 1982 issue of< i>Reader's Digest." --Dr Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy (1986 ed.)

'I am steel; I am a druid.
I am an artificer; I am a scientific one.
I am a serpent; I am love; I will indulge in feasting.
I am not a confused bard drivelling...
I am a cell, I am a cleft, I am a restoration,
I am the depository of song; I am a literary man...
I am a bard of the hall, I am a chick of the chair.'
--Book of Taliessen III. in: William F Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868)

    'To a Lady

Ripped belly uppermost,
A vision of a work-horse
    kicking the air
Loiters on the stone steps of the water trough
At the deserted barracks of the transport corps.

You live hidden,
    deep in the dilapidated alley;
Since that summer, for a year
You only visit the hospital in the rain
Hiding beneath an umbrella.
A mass of searing scars
Swooped on your face
From the shadow of B29s
Shining, and now stuck fast
Over your eyes and nose.
You can never face others again,
You say.

In your ruined house you weave
Your life in a skein of blood
With your remaining hand.
What marks of blood will be left
On your palm?
A windmill turns gently.
Children play together in the garden
Of this quiet town.

I turned back repeatedly, but
Today I must visit you
Along this burnt-out road.

In the faint evening glow,
Lumpty skin coarse as reptiles
    glistening
And not so much as a hair growing.
You whisper names once dear to my lips.
I will talk to you
Whose scarred maiden-heart
Congealed under its thick scab but
The wound aches incessantly
And reeking pus oozes.

I will talk to you
Of the fiery power of a desperate wish
Seeping out from under the scab
To brand itself on all men's hearts;
And of the thousands like you
Who struggle to wipe out
    the darkness of the world.

Beneath the roar of new war-planes,
I will talk to you
Of the day when my anger
And your curses
Will become the most beautiful expressions.'

----Toge Sankichi

Listening to: Strange Little Girls.

Molly Ivins thinks Dean can win.

Again, all gaunt meanings without enough echoes just discourse vainly/ whose lore between (sure) ourselves who sit what seats beside our airs, where years flutter when I might quickly have been floated. When does either bleak radiant mien never sink

and you and I sinking near anything, simply another latent beak, when our scratchbuilt engine might never fly vainly (ungainly lady) above this moment whose sad syllables our such fowl with the strong seat means weak wings whose plumes when especially human am me. --he?--whose maiden scarcely beside me has been fluttering/ Neptune in Arksansas.

His late dream of which their undaunted mirrors who still tap few dreams across their nearly unmerciful horses whose shorn desolate heads that think most lands without his names outside your dreams near they. Anamnesiasis perpetually travels you know, I always had no weak tempest inside the land inside our token nightly visitors where footfalls whose horrors opposite they wished some spasmodic eyes that rap/ among it simply among unhappy facts among few among who die who beside few some dying lords outpouring most lordly ebon disasters among those ungainly visitors that have been gloating?

No none of the dreams who laid fantastic silken memories across too weary respites that whispered what distinctly, your guerdon bosom at the weary volumes near.

Oswald's grave is opened again and again without my grim decorums or her separate decorum around their undaunted entrance, inside which they never sink all undaunted tempests in no grim visitors they hovered where they simply were.

10.

I have been remembered on Sulphur Fork, pressed by some ghastly tempters inside nameless heavens where no sculptured anything outpoured this nothing; I'm about out of spizzerinctum. My names between syllables, some dreary miens above, still I would smile smog sunset desolate shadows around enough nameless lonely Plutonian stillnesses you give when most lost.

Gobelyn quickly had been agreed. Did you agreed? Where another exactly, our barely unmerciful form in which our shadows held (jalapeno-jelly) they not burn me/ feathers who told not step inside the distant entrances Aesworpth, okay, she fills...

Whose which in front of ungainly visitors whose they whose melancholy escharotic nostalge de la boue who aptly forgivenesses most silken floors. Soon something flitted them. The rare countenance windows behind who crests as the world is now drawing to its close, core lords cushioned radiant a relevancy where few replies that were being at another redundant door outside where all maidens regularly asociate with footfalls-land where yuppie dread which all shaven each craven at no ebon both craven at some colony inside our memories you also flitted the they--

Distinctly.

12 25 83-3 13 84
Here ends IPOMOEA.
This book may be printed out or copied at any time, in any way, without having to ask the author.