(part 1)
I wrote this for a radio contest (the first & last sentences
were given):

   "Portrait in Cobwebs"

Dallas can be a funny place sometimes: the lights, the viaducts
at night with a solitary walker; from the air it can look quite
magical. The figure stops, bends over the rail. To throw
something off? I used to live in a church. High up on one
side under the roof, with not much of a view, but it was
cheap. After the debacle i'd put most of my stuff in storage.
The room i lived in now was more like a book-lined closet.
I folded up my futon in the morning so i could have floor
space, & the ceiling slanted wildly.
   I never seem to end up living in rectangular
rooms somehow, just these crazy shapes that have no
name.
   But there was a stereo downstairs that i
could use. Often at night i would sit down there in the huge dark
drafty echoing hall with a handful of secondhand records & a
goblet of Rumanian wine in my white-gloved hand. I felt secure,
even though the outside door didn't lock & this wasn't the best
of neighborhoods. In fact, the people nearby were all filled with
superstitious dread of the place. They said it was run by witches,
or it was haunted.

(part 2)
   Which suited me fine, & the others there. We
felt a bit less mundane commuting from our day jobs at bookstores,
warehouses, & Deep Ellum boutiques, back to a haunted mansion to
sleep where wind sang in the cracks & crannies at all hours & a
hundred buckets barely sufficed to get it through a thunder
boomer.
   I was a lot like that myself; my walls weren't
solid but rustled with subtle voices, & my emptiness loomed in
the neon night with only the barest of candle flickers visible to
people rushing past to gain the freeway. Something within me
also was rushing past, barely glancing at the startling lines of a
landscape of ghosts.
   They said it was haunted. But no one had ever died
here; & how can you have a haunted house without deaths? No, no
one had died here that we knew of, in a hundred years of being
first a church & then a hippie rooming house. No deaths, though
once a runaway they allowed to crash in the basement had tried to
kill herself by slitting her wrists. Supposedly the ceiling was still
stained by a spurt of blood, but i never looked for it. Not in the whole
time i stayed there.
   That was the summer of Mazzy Star. From every
half-open sliding door as i walked to my own snug garret on the
brokendown creaky balcony, the mournful soft strains of Mazzy
Star's second album would always be playing. It sounded beautiful
& debauched, the way we wanted to be.
   Instead, we were children. Children with candles.
Nothing, i think, will ever be more beautiful to me than the gold that
was flung across the staircase at sunset, which i watched every
chance i got: a mystic incandescence, poured upon the worn &
ageless oak-panelled wall.
   It created in me moods i couldn't express, couldn't
shake. And so i embarked on a project (we all had "Projects"): i would
paint invisible pictures. I don't know now what it was supposed to
mean, though i thought i knew at the time. I still have the pictures.
   You look at them through 3D glasses, the cardboard
kind with one lens red & one lens blue. This destroys your sense of
colors--you just see flashing & contradictory input. It doesn't hold
still. It kind of makes you queasy after awhile. But it's overwhelmingly
elsewhere. The sense of depth is nothing like real space; i wasn't,
even in that, a realistic painter. It's rather, an abstraction that
uses the elements of depth perception to give a sensation like
nothing else that has ever existed, & which cannot be described.
   But sometimes i hear Mazzy Star again &
i know. For a moment i know. Or maybe i just remember.
   Five years i lived in the church. And to think
it all began with that radio program.

12 30 99

   "The Last Mystery of the Senses"

soulful nebulosity
of his downed doodle

dark or only dim
lunar evection

08 03 03

"Monotonously weary seemed the way,
While light declining faded slowly away.
Some haze obscured a gradual westering sun,
And all the oppressive firmament was wan.
In it voluminous appears to form
From the horizon a continent of storm,
A ponderous bulk of gathering indigo,
Tinged in its formidable overflow
With hues of livid purple poison-flowers.
In ghastlier whiteness for the night that lowers,
Strewing forlorn the desolate desert pale,
Some grinning skeletons of men assail
My vision; while a monstrous bird of prey
From a putrescent corpse rends fierce away
The clinging flesh with horrid sound of tearing.
Its beak abruptly plunging, pulling, baring;
Bald-headed, hideous neck low crouched betwixt
The pressure of strong talons curved, infixed:
Now the proud brain, like fearful Madness, mangling,
Like Sin now with the reeking bosom wrangling;
Like ignorance, disease, war, tyranny, starvation,
Eating the vitals of a noble fallen nation!
This creature, as they pass, a moment glaring
Voracious-eyed, with vasty vans that cover--
A little further on obscene doth hover
A grey hyena, and he laughs a peal
Of beastly laughter from forth the sand: there is a howl
Dolefully borne from where the lean woles prowl!
Then silence falls upon the deepening gloom,
And sultry air forebodes the smothering simoom."

--Roden Noel, from "A Vision of the Desert"

While Mr Bush was in West Dallas earlier in the day,
a neighborhood resident was taken into custody
after he expressed his attitude toward the almost
popularly elected president by mooning him." --Dallas
Peace Times Aug-Sep '03

My favorite political artist--Sue Coe.

Who needs Nigerian yellowcake? (via memepool)

Listening to: "Ulysses' Gaze" soundtrack.

   ”To Vote for the Terminator”

The rat-brained robot scribbles
Leaves the sibyl’s keeper culls.
A blurred & burdened hedgehog
Gathers them, agog,
To aftermath Jagannath’s squashed kills.

My rat-brained muse, black fathoms
Divide us. Flickering drums
Sleep through the ragged cycles
Love becomes.

08 01 03

"There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal.
By seeming kindness turned to snaring,
They feel no falseness.

Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greennesss.
Their light looks fleeter.

But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under oxter.

Alas, the signal given,
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living."

--W H Auden, The Orators

Coldplay: from obscurity to accompanying movie
trailers in six months.

Pollution level: Orange.

Listening to: The Bangles.

   "Ritual for the Relocation of the Goddess of the Night"

The worm that through the green fuse drives the whale
Blazes out at dawn
On the word of the blurry witnesses
On the weaknesses i made mine

Geometric tortoise in the clouds
Burgundy paisley notebook where i keep

07 31 03

It has occurred to me that, though by historical
machinations i am on the side of the outlaw (of every
sort), what i really am suited for is to be a responsible
member of a rational government. This thought does
not please me. but in that alternate universe where i
would be permitted a place, no doubt all the prestige
would have shifted to the other side.

"I was cruising, willy-nilly, following a feather in the
sky, and I happened across your blog in which you
mentioned "It's a Beautiful Day". So I thought I'd write
to say Hal Wagenet, one of the original members of
IABD, is a dear friend and just won himself a seat on
the Board of Supervisors of Mendocino County.
Be well,

Lanny [Cotler]"

The moment knows everything but the most important
thing--what happens to moments.

"One of your cold jellyfish poets that find themselves
cast up by some wave upon a sandy subject and so
wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a theme and let
us see it through their substance--as if that were a
great feat." --Sidney Lanier, "Poem Outlines"

Tron on Beta.

   "The 38th Parallel

With restraint and patience in my restless bosom
I reached stealthily near the 38th parallel,
And shrunken, casted my eyes carefully around,

The sad heart turned my steps into secluded lanes.
My hairs stood up at the casual sound of grass-leaf.
And every step of mine was full of hatred.

Children of a village chatted about the uncertain border.
They should have been more cautious in their answer to me.
Whatever action the enemy may take, the children and I could be confidential.

Where is the 38th parallel? I couldn't realize it, though crossed over.
Forests and fields, South and North, were in the same colour,
Who did thrust the arrow in the innocent land?

      May, 1946"

--Sông-yôn Czoe

Question: how do tribes define themselves in a society
where costuming is to some degree a matter of personal
taste? and to a greater degree, dependent on what's
available and what's allowed? Related thought:
boundaries that are defined with subliminal repulsions,
is counter-magic, in a way. I thought of how, tuning
through the music band, I jump away from some classes
of music like a hot surface. I so strongly dislike sports,
etc that an ambience of those sounds is sufficient to
keep me from casually wandering into a space that
contains them. In a population which is largely funct-
ioning on autopilot, no greater force than this is
necessary, especially where it isn't critical to defend
class privileges or possessions (e.g. at the symphony.
I can go there [or i used to be able to, before each
season became sold out in advance to $200 season
ticket holders--] , but the presence of people dressed
up makes me uncomfortable). --How a city is
organized according to caste dislikes, through a gradual
process of unconscious sorting. --How it is a very
useful ability to tolerate feelings of extreme dislike
in order to transgress these minor aversive boundaries.
   [2003. Perhaps it was by this
means that all but a certain kind of player, was driven
out of the Game of Politics.]

They died for raisins!? (via Metafilter)

Listening to: The Boredoms.

We got in the album by "It's a Beautiful Day", with the
Victorian-looking girl silhouetted against blue sky. I
always pay cash for this item for the store, even
though i doubt anyone is looking for it anymore,
just because i think "White Bird" is the most beautiful
song of the Sixties.

Effortless data reproduction [i wrote in 1986] is a
time bomb ticking away in the heart of capitalism.
Probably nothing else is needed to defeat it in
fact, so we ought to be imagining what can be
done when it all starts to collapse.

"I painted my footsoles purple for the day when the beautiful color would show" --The Book of Nightmares

   "GREEN LIGHT

Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
Familiar, but not quite recognized.
Followed and taken home and slept with.
Traded or sold. Or lost.

Bought again at the corner drug store,
At the green light, at the patient's demand, at nine o'clock.
Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
Found unsuitable.
Smashed, put together, and pawned.

Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen by the light of day;
Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off duty.
The agent, in broken English, took copious notes. Which he lost.
Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
Sad, but true.

True, or exaggerated, or true;
As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
As it is that the people go;
As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just the same;
As some one dies and it is serious, and true;
As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and pointless;
As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people change,
It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

Bought at the drug store down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always night, or day;
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o'clock.
Borrowed or bought. To look well. To ennoble. To prevent disease. To entertain. To have.
Brokn or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or lost."

--Kenneth Fearing

"Actually the language of Microsoft mingles
paganism and legalism." --Alan Sullivan

"AIR DAYS, in the Western Worship Boxes, traditionally
the Wednesday, Friday and Half-Man Day following the
first Sunday that a dog has suffocated the weather.
They were days of foodless observance to sanctify the
season of Charles, which was notable for its storms of
airlessness and heavy frontals near the north that caused
all but the dogs to retreat to their air hostels. Air days
are of very ancient and uncertain origin. The dates of their
celebration are now determined by dog descendants (similar
to the Labrador, but with the additional storm lung) rather
than by the universal storm calender and are frequently called
"days of air for food." Difficulties with dog populations
in the Western Worship Boxes generated the mass suffocation
of Ohio (1973), and the speed-fasting experiments of Buffalo
and Schenectady (1980-1982), in which the Western population
of those cities mistimed the exit day of their religious
food-minus, thus breaking their fasts before the season of
Charles had restored air to their homes, when the storm dogs
still stalked the houses, breathing up the airless wind and
eating the air and rain, praying to Charles that the people
would not return." --Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String (via)

A detailed overview of Depleted Uranium & Gulf War (I)
Syndrome (scroll down to July 23): Out of 722,000 who
fought, 160,000 have been granted disability--& ten
thousand have died.

A new Lojban book has just come out!

It's the Mexican "KISS"--!

Poppy Z memorializes John Kennedy Toole. (via Schism Matrix) I love the
way New Orleans writers support each other... & there's a statue of
Ignatius on Canal St.!

"-- What do you love so much about New Orleans?

It's my hometown and I love many things about it, but
to be honest, I'm not entirely satisfied with the way
I have portrayed it in my work so far. I hope I've done
a better job in my new novel, LIQUOR, but in my previous
work I feel I've been somewhat guilty of perpetuating an
incomplete stereotype: Dark, Romantic, Haunted, Lushly
Gorgeous New Orleans. That side of the city does exist,
but it's a small side and creates an inaccurate picture.
I love this city and doubt that I will ever live anywhere
else, but it isn't just beautiful and spooky - it will eat
you alive and gnaw your bones if you're not careful. I
don't mean only the crime, or the poverty, or the filth,
or the sadness - though these certainly factor in. There's
just something here that a lot of people can't take. They
visit, they see the fun parts, they fall in love with it,
they think they want to move here, they do move here and
leave after a few months because it's driving them insane.
There's a way of life here that I call Divine Stupidity,
which is the subject of John Kennedy Toole's novel A
CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, the best book ever written about
New Orleans. Living here is very much like living in the
Third World. You have to be tough and you have to learn to
laugh at things that would enrage people living in a sane,
sensible place." --from poppyzbrite.com FAQ

Who painted the Black Paintings? (NYTimes: pockeet; pockeet)
(via ALDaily)

Of course, if you believe Global Warming is a myth, none of
this happened.

(part 1)
   The fate of syllabism in the
poetry of English has been a Quixotic one. Isolated
names--Bridges, Dylan Thomas, Auden, Marianne
Moore--each has created an inimitable style, without
any of them leaving a useful general mode for others
to follow. After them syllabism more or less evaporates
--Plath is considered a free-verse poet, Hollander a
traditional formalist; present-day literary politics
hardly even finds a name for this aberration, much
less a place for it on their crabbed maps. But i think
it is more suited to the present state of our language
than either quantitative or accentual prosodies, for
the excellent reason that both vowel quantity &
accent are now in flux, & probably will render the
future reception of such works the exact equivalent
of the generations after Chaucer that didn't know how
to sound his lines.
   Secondly, i think adding counting
to poetry is an important means of engaging both
hemispheres of the brain for creativity--but this
is a much vaster topic than i will go into here. What
would make syllabism a truly constructive force
in our poetry (aside from a recognizably great
exemplar, of course--)? There need to be further
rules, varyingly exacting, & seen to be appropriate
for the things we are trying to say.
   Perhaps at some point i will
upload the essay i wrote for Hellas on my own
proposals i called "neoprosody", based on (briefly)
odd-number counts & various combinations of
long-short couplets. I see this as connecting to
what has already become a naturalized tradition
of writing haiku & tanka in our language. There
are several world literatures, in fact, worth
studying in this regard; the most promising, in
my view, being Welsh.
   Hopkins & Thomas both imitated some
of its effects, notably the complex consonance
called cynghanedd, but it was Rolfe Humphries (known
today as a translator), in Green Armor on Green Ground,
who really adapted the complete verseforms & managed to
write passable poems in them. (It is curious how technical
tomes of prosody now give definitions for englynion &
cywydd in so many words, but you can look far & wide &
never come across an actual example...)

   "For a Wordfarer (Englyn Unodl Crwca)

Speak them slowly, space them so:
Say them soft, or sing them low;
Words whose way we may not know any more.
Still, before the days go,

Sing them low, or say them soft.
Such a little while is left
To counterpoint the soundless drift of Time,
Let rhyming fall and lift.

Space them so, with lift and fall
Decent in their interval,
Late, archaic, who could say?--but always
Graceful, musical."

--Humphries

All the same, i would say that only three, relatively
free imitations, are really successful as poems: the
justly-celebrated "The Sunlight on the Garden" by Louis
MacNeice, 'There are some birds in these valleys'
by W H Auden,

(part 2)
& this neglected masterpiece, by
W S Merwin:

   "Some Winter Sparrows

i.
I hear you already, choir of small wheels,
    Through frayed trees I see your
  Shaken flight like a shiver
  Of thin light on a river.

ii.
On a bitter day I juggle feathers.
    My hands hatch, I am better
  Answered than puppet masters,
  With small winds at my fingers.

iii.
You pursue seeds, wings open on the snow,
    Coming up then with white
  Beak, speaking; in my deep foot-prints
  You vanish, then you flower...

iv.
Like no other: one white feather in either
    Wing, every turn of yours
  Surprises me; you are quicker,
  Girl, than the catch in my breath.

v.
Vanity: alone with many crumbs, teasing
    Each briefly. When the rest
  Get here, the crumb nearest you
  Will be worth scrapping over.

vi.
Caught in flight by harbor winds, you stumble
    In air, your strung-out flock
  Shudders sideways, sinking, like
  A net when heavy fish strike.

vii.
More snow: under a green fir-bush bowed low
    With flakes broad as cats' paws
  You hunch, puffed: if you do not
  Move maybe it will go away.

viii.
I find you too late, shrivelled lid half drawn
    Grimy eye, your wings' rigor,
  Dishevelled breast feathers worse
  Than ice inside my closed hand.

ix.
And more than one. Who would save bits of string
    Kinked as stubbornly, as short,
  As dirty, knotted together
  Into fours, as your feet are?

x.
You shriek like nails on a slate, one of you
    Falls dead at my feet, skull
  Split; and it is still winter,
  Not yet the season for love.

xi.
Those blue pigeons: there is snow still to fall.
    But in the brief sun they
  Bob, gobble, begin their dance.
  You doze then, row of old men.

xii.
Whether the gray cat is at the corner,
    The hawk hunting over
  The graves, or the light too late
  To trust, you will not come down."

  Two of mine:

    "Designated Driver"

Flower ewer, a wan unaware werewolf
    stares into your stark gulf
  as though there a hieroglyph
  revealed the hidden plaintiff.

Flower ewer, a wan unaware werewolf
    himself against makes war
  whose software spites his hardware;
  thus, as I pour, I despair.

  "Spiderland"

  For pure air, this tasteless poison;
  punishment for those whose foison
overachieves; you fight lies until noise
    destroys that horizon.

  Your love shrivels like a raisin,
  richer, more swart; you emblazon
body with hues of yet unrisen rays
    and craze in that prison.

  If, when you’ve garnered your dozen
  trustables, none pays to cozen:
call it mercy--mumming what treason does,
    muzzled, at that season.

Remembering the summer after i graduated from
high school, when i was engrossed in the most challenging
mathematical calculation i ever attempted: to integrate
the formulas of the Lorentz-FitzGerald Effect (which i
could only ever find in most skeletal form in any reference
book), so i could calculate directly the subjective &
objective travel times of relativistic acceleration (such
as Carl Sagan, for example, gives in several of his works,
in graphic format). I covered page after page with
algebraic transformations of the basic calculus equation;
it was just a little bit beyond me, & the tantalizing
frustration of it was exquisite. Finally i put it into a form
that i could use, & immediately set out to calculate
the travel times to all my favorite stars. This information
which seemed so important at the time, i have never
found any use for.
   And now i think the whole genre of
humans travelling to other planets & interacting with alien
intelligences, should be recognized as (1) a metaphor
for colonialism, & (2 a culdesac for storytelling. We,
who hardly can recognize the Other in humans who are
very much different from us, & not at all in such
highly intelligent species as chimpanzees, elephants,
& the higher cetaceans, do not deserve to meet
anything stranger; & the only story of it that could
be told, is the same tragedy of Earth. I see only two
fruitful branches of scifi to further explore (& perhaps
a third, as yet dimly adumbrated--): descriptions of
the near future that actually take account of such
necessary debacles as global warming, & hence help
acclimate us to beginning to construct some non-oblivious
response; & descriptions of hypothetical nonhuman
cultures, such that other modes of being can be
explored in a way that shows us how arbitrary our
own is; lastly, something that J G Ballard in an
illuminating if offhand remark, has pointed the way
to; "...I'd like to see more psycho-literary ideas [in
scifi], ...synthetic psychologies and space-times,
more of the sombre half-worlds glimpsed in the
paintings of schizophrenics..." --This latter, though,
might be thought of as what has always been the
province of poetry: mystification.

Saw & greatly enjoyed the New Zealand movie "Whale
Rider" which, like all such excursions into the sociology
of the collision between modernity & traditional cultures,
leaves me feeling both saddened & hopeful. And perhaps
there is no apter symbol for it than those very whales,
whose endangerment reveals to us a terrible failure of
imagination--. And i am returned to the old question:
where is the traditional culture i myself have lost
along the way? (If i were a Texas bluesman i might
know the answer.)

Listening to: Dennis Brain performing the Mozart
horn concertos. How sad the French horn can
sound! Do the songs of the whales say nothing
to us?

I thought for awhile they were playing "Einstein on the
Beach", but it turned out to be "Koyaanisqatsi". This set
me off remembering days when i had checked out the
boxed set of records, & listened to them obsessively,
hour after hour, day after day; you could not really
understand the subtle modulations except in such
dosage. (Like a TV show you watch so much you begin
to notice continuity flaws in the set from episode to
episode.) and the meaning i got from this piece was
a most curious one: a mild, despairing elation, not
some ultimate deliverance from words (& because
of words, from the human), but perhaps the simple
perception that they have been left behind & are in
fact already not needed anymore... The work itself,
a time capsule from the future, stood like a big
sphinx of quartz (pangram: "Jackdaws love my big
sphinx of quartz"), square in our certain path--&
yet there was no fear in it.
   It is the only truly Buddhist work, i think,
in Western music.

   "Sad Song of Cuacuauhtzin

My heart craves the flowers,
that they be in my hands.
With songs I am saddened,
I only try to compose songs on the earth.
I, Cuacuauhtzin,
with anxiety I desire the flowers,
that they be in my hands,
for I am dispossessed.

Where would we go
that we never have to die?
Though I be precious stone,
though I be gold,
I will be dissolved,
there in the crucible melted down.
I have only my life,
I, Cuacuauhtzin, I am dispossessed.

You make resound
your kettle drum of jade,
your red and blue conch shell,
you, Yoyontzin, Panting One.
Now he has come,
now the singer has risen.
For a short time be happy,
come and be present,
those with the sad heart.
Now he has come,
now the singer has risen.

Open the corolla of your heart,
let it tread the lofty heights.
You have hated me,
you have marked me for death.
Now I go to His house,
I will perish.
Perhaps because of me you will weep,
because of me you will be sad,
you, my friend,
but now I will go,
now I am going to His house.
Only this my heart tells,
I will not return,
never will come back to the earth,
now I will go, I am going to His house.

Only useless effort,
enjoy, enjoy, my friends.
Should we not be happy,
should we not have pleasure, my friends?
I will take with me the beautiful flowers,
the beautiful songs.

Never I do it in springtime,
I alone am in need,
alone am I, Cuacuauhtzin.
Should we not enjoy, my friends?
I will take with me the beautiful flowers,
the beautiful songs."

--Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, Miguel León-Portilla (1992)