’Burried In This Earth

The smell of houses, still burning--

Broken bricks and scorched wooden boards are clumsily scattered,

Pushing aside the soil of dark earth
Where horrible bullets showered like pelting rains,
Every man was looking for something
That was left, not burned yet,
The thing that was left not burned yet.

The thing burried in this earth
Was expected to bloom once more,

It may well be a dream,
Or something
That was sowed in the name of hope.
The will anxious to dig out
Something burried in this earth.

That only, that only
Is the thing at last that is left among us.’

--Zông-on Bag, ibid

Just to lighten things up--the Thai Elephant Orchestra.

   'At the Moment When Passing a Rotary

In the burnt street,
Where passengers are almost scarce,
The north wind unknown mixed with snow-falls
Whizzled at intervals challenging,
The electric wires towards the square
Cry with ping.
   When I walk alone in such night-street of winter,
   I used to think subconsciously of the country lane
   of my childhood.

Under the glassy sky of the night
The cross is just vacant without passengers.
Some drunkers seemed to pass by
The building street so dimly laid,
Or as if picking a quarrel at once
Images are taking lonely their returning ways,
The night-streets of the world,
Thus becoming dark,
Casually they pass by all of a sudden.

The night is over, and the dawn breaks--
But while walking reluctantly,
Even at the moment when passing round a crowded rotary
There one may feel some expectation,
Perhaps, a small planet may linger
Around the wild gaze of a whore--'

Sang-ro Yi, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

   "Caravan to Timbuctoo"

Not terraces that snow embraces, jade;
Tarmac labyrinth in which we prosper
Or perish, with the car-flown flags that fade--
Modemtweet a cacophony of Hesper.
Why perish wisdoms more than modemtweet?
Shiloh i owe a depth of ullage to
Compels with blood & eke a furry whisper
But tarmac grips the very route-permute.
Now sometimes i have glimpse of another plea
Nestled in the solar setting-flash
That i might gladly lend obeisance-leash
If only there were other lord than jade

05 30 03

Ever since i saw the prologue to "The Exorcist-2: The Heretic" i've been
fascinated by Lalibela, Ethiopia. It was years
before i even knew what its name was. And civil war kept out tourism for
nearly a generation. Fortunately it's over now. I don't know if i'll ever go,
but it is indeed one of the wonders of the world--a holy city carved out of
stone.

"Gospedelic"--i saw this word in a music review. Isn't it perfect for that wordless
track of ululation, "Great Gig in the Sky", on Dark Side of the Moon?

A stanza i invented: the "snowflake". Has lines of 3, 5, 7, & 9 syllables--in any
order. (Or with an additional 11-syllable line, for a pentad.) Thus combines rigor
& irregularity...

'Every era believes that there is a literary genre that
has a kind of primacy. Today, for example, any writer who
has not written a novel is asked when he is going to write
one. (I myself am continually being asked.) In Shakespeare's
time, the literary work par excellence was the vast
epic poem, and that idea persisted into the eighteenth cen-
tury, when we have the example of Voltaire, the least epic
of men, who nevertheless writes an epic because without an epic
he would not have been a true man of letters for his contempo-
raries.' --Borges (1964), in: Selected Non-Fictions

'The long, long night of the Eleventh Month!
   I will cut its waist in two.
Putting the half confusedly
   Under the quilt of the spring wind,

So that, the night he comes back,
   I will unfold it for him.'

Zin-i Hwang, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

"the flight was long. we flew on a japanese plane that had strange wallpaper of drawings of little characters from all nations. the ones from italy were botticelli and michelangelo figures. strange to see a man's penis on the wallpaper of a commercial airplane though." --Beck

More on Salam Pax. (via Metafilter)

"DB: With the U.S. economy deteriorating and with more layoffs, how is the
Bush administration going to maintain what some are calling a garrison state
with permanent war and occupation of numerous countries? How are they going
to pull it off?

NC: They have to pull it off for about another six years. By that time they
hope they will have institutionalized highly reactionary programs within the
United States. They will have left the economy in a very serious state, with
huge deficits, pretty much the way they did in the 1980s. And then it will
be somebody else’s problem to patch it together." --interview with Noam Chomsky

There are some works i seldom listen to, yet represent for me a sort of ne plus ultra of musical
achievement; one of these being the "Threnody to the New Victims of Hiroshima" by Q.R. Ghazala, an
electronic musician who builds his own instruments, including the "vox insecta" which performs this.
His aim was to synthesize an insect voice that is the voice of all insects, & doubtless he has succeeded.
The monotonous, almost subliminally-varying buzz is just a little more disturbing than white noise, & one
can ask if an insect orchestra would really not invest more effort in dynamics, since bugs in general seem
not overfond of repose. But these are quibbles. It's a masterpiece.

I saw "Bruce Almighty" the other day--it had some funny moments. But i think the filmmakers
really missed their chance with the schmaltzy ending. He should have kept meddling until he
destroyed the world a la "Dr Strangelove". Wouldn't that be a gas? But perhaps, as
people keep saying, "irony is dead". --Or rather, that is not a story that can be told from Dubya's
POV...

Can't get that place Tokelau out of my mind. One boat goes there a month from Samoa.

I remember getting the word "Availibilism"* from someone in the 80's; & i see in the end all my
philosophies converge there. Or, to be more respectable, "bricolage". Use what you have. Don't
pine for gold-nib pens & violet-indigo ink (which once i mixed up just so i could write in that color--),
don't wait for the Nobel committee to come knocking on your door. If you find yourself shipwrecked
on an island (preferably Tokelau) without modems, make art out of sticks & mud...

"Imagine giving the KKK billions of dollars to victimize African-Americans. This is essentially what's happening when you pay your taxes, you're paying for the harrassment, eviction, and murder of Palestinians Arabs. You're paying for the bullets to kill and cripple Palestinians pre-teens." --Kurt Nimmo at Dr Menlo dot com.

Horned Kangaroos--no, it's not genetic engineering (this time), it's Australian fossils.

Oh, alright, i gotta post it--if only for the parasite key ring.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I find the word (though spelled "AVAILABISM") on the "Voluptuous Horror
of Karen Black" website--though i'd almost swear i saw it used somewhere
in Angry Women (Re/Search)--perhaps by Karen Finley...

    ”Moorawathimeering

Into moorawathimeering,
where atninga dare not tread,
leaving wurley for a wilban,
tallabilla, you have fled.

Wombalunga curses, waitjurk--
though we cannot break the ban,
and follow tchidna any further
after one-time karaman.

Far in moorawathimeering,
safe from wallan darenderong,
tallabilla waitjurk, wander
silently the whole day long.

Go with only lilliri
to walk along beside you there,
while douran-douran voices wail
and Karaworo beats the air.”

--Rex Ingamells in: The Jindyworobaks, ed. Brian Elliott 1979

moorawathimeering- the Land of the lost, a sanctuary for outcasts
atninga- a group sent to carry out tribal justice; vengeance party
wurley- dwelling; hut or shelter of boughs
wilban- cave
tallabilla- outlaw
wombalunga- carry
waitjurk- murderer
tchidna- footprint
karaman- leader
wallan- strong
darendarong- avenger
lilliri- shadow
douran douran- north wind
karaworo- eaglehawk

The Heavy Metal Umlaut.

More Euro news.

‘ “Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts; ...All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents... I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds. ...this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; which is never petty, nver ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be...this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of a hundred and four; count them, Chevalley, count them: May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success...” ‘ --Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958; tr Archibald Colquhoun, 1960) [one of the best things ever written about Texas & Texans--wasn’t.]

The new death camps. (via metafilter & others)

So the address i'd been playing chess at--http://b2-b4.tk (now dot com)--is Tokelau! Where's that?

Atari emulators, like that car the Excalibur--modern underneath, retro on top--are a kind of glimflash.

Blogwise dot com has listed "Xvarenah" among its blogs on poetics. I wonder if meta-blogging is the next big thing...

“In 1921 a poetry magazine Zangmi-czon or the Rose-Village was published, where Zong-hwa Bag (pen name, Wôltan or Moon and Shallow) and Yônghûi Bag (pen name, Hoewôl or Thinking of the Moon) wrote decadentic poetry. In the following year a literary magazine Bêgzo or The White Tide produced three poets, Sa-yong Hong (pen name, Nozag or The Dew Sparrow), Sang-hwa Yi (pen name, Sang-hwa or Thinking of Fire), and Gi-zin Gim (pen name, Palbong or the Eight Peaks), and they were rather humanistic. In the same year a poetry magazine Gûmsông or The Venus was published by a group of nationalistic lyrists, Zu-dong Yang (pen name, Mue or The Endless), Zanghûi Yi (pen name, Gowôl or The Old Moon), and others.” --In-Sôb Zông, A Pageant of Korean Poetry (1963)

‘This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic.’ --Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (tr Donald Keene 1958) [--H'm. Poetry is tragic, while blog is comic...but poetics is comic & blogger is tragic...]

    ’This Body

This body
Is a blown leaf.
Till it is buried under the earth, wet by dew,
According to the blowing wind, in the evening sky,
I will be blown and willwhisper.

This body
Is a broken piece of a ship pushed in on the seashore.
Till it is frozen by the cold wind,
As the waves move among the reeds,
It will move and swing.

This body
is a sick and useless body.
Till the ants build their storehouses in this body,
It will recite and sing as it sees and hears,
And I shall pray in a remote place.’

Un Zo, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

Pollack recants on NPR. I guess that storm wasn't so threatening, after all...

SARS from Mars.

An interview with Coffin Joe.

The lunatics in charge...

Listening to: "Sepharad: Songs of the Spanish Jews in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire" (DHM, 1996).

N.B. we are greatly mistaken in trying to force ourselves to concentrate more often than a few times a day, or longer than a few minutes at a time. Coffee only simulates the effects of concentration: it shuts out peripheries, but does not direct to one centerpoint. That takes interest. For concentration is the preparatory state for a precise act. When no such exactitude is needed, concentration wastes itself either in embellishments or excess pre-fitting (this accounts for how a lot of postmodern art looks, busy without being energetic; its "surrealism" is often all too premeditated). The normal state for humans, as other mammals, is relaxation (ditention, for maximum alertness to marginal sign-threshold phenomena). (Nowadays we have to learn how to relax without falling asleep or into a trance, and it's easier to fake it with alcohol & downers than condition the CNS to move quickly through several states.)

Prolonged concentration becomes stressful, generating the psychic equivalents of embellishments (complexes) & excess prefitting (neurosis). Boredom may be defined as a drive towards concentration in the absence of any interesting thing to focus on. It comes from habitual concentration on banal objects. A free person doesn't choose to force his attention; it happens automatically with learning. What makes something interesting is its potential for completing a larger gestalt (i have also described this as "relevant novelty"). Thus you have to have a worldview-context in order to be able to interest yourself in many things. Otherwuise they're just Noise, or else stimulation for an idle curiosity that won't bother to make sense of it, and learns nothing. (TV without real education is perceived very differently than TV with; that is, even its banality can be informative.)

Autumnal & eternal rose,
Where dreams divide & time lays siege,
The stuff of deliquescent throes,
A moment in the eyes of one mad liege.

Pale, I remember, ultramarine
Was then the sea. Now fathoms close
About that locket’s fall, while green
Remains to me the wither of the rose.

Her revenant rose & came to dwell
Here with a fragment from that dream
Who twice himself tried ring the knell…
What profits dry bones strewn where roses teem?

So two unfound ones fill the clothes
Of others born to such prestige
And fake it. Nonetheless, some rose
Wafture permeates the rusted cage.

11 17 00

'The rancid chrysanthemum aches' --Hagiwara Sakutarô, Howling at the Moon

Isn't Insomnia the anguished knowledge that you have wasted the day, that you have done nothing?--And the wish for immortality, of whatever ilk, isn't that a spiritual insomnia, the thirst for infinity from never having grasped one's finitude in the world's particularity?? The fame that would fill our ears is a rude misunderstanding translated into archetypal clarity; the plenitude that consoles and delivers a creator at the time of creation is a precise comprehension of one perfect nuance of form--and you can jabber all you want about Art and artworks and never come close to this paradox. It is not for sharing. What the community can possess is an abundance of creative persons and room for them to grow in. Either a place sparkles with its own energies or it is a dustbin and matter-trap (though it explode, rage, and whirl with unconsummated inertias). When will there be a civilization that treasures silence, then music, and only after, speech? --Not by talking about it--

In case you wondered what the leaflets we dropped on Iraq look like.

A haiku by Lt. Smash:

   “Sunrise

A beautiful dawn
Scent of sulfur in the air
Not a tree in sight."

"The underlying problem is not that certainty is the opposite of doubt, but rather that certainty is the opposite of complexity. I sometimes think that the political spectrum today runs not on a left-right axis, but rather on a simple-complex one." --Silliman's Blog

I'm a Badger.

I see the Wikipedia article on 70 Virginis has been amended to reflect my contribution. When this star was first discovered to have a planet, all sorts of news reports went out that a "new water world" had been found. It took me a lot of searching, but i found the original article. Which i realized used information about the distance of the star that was out of date. According to Hipparchos, it can't have oceans (except at considerably more air pressure than on Earth), & so it is not a good candidate for life. But there is virtually nothing on the internet to reflect this--even on sites that give the correct distance... I may still write about this star one day; it has generated its own mythology so quickly.

      "Ort of the Bad Hours"

The brother of a cactus once i knew,
Scattering of dog bristles
Across the rust tile floor.
At six thousand feet
An upsidedown mouse.
I remember the silver dazzle
Of almost formless mist
We were driving through yesterday,
And the Wiki comes with me.

9 15 01

A wonderful compendium of some of the uses Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been put to, & related matters. (via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Zeitgeist. There was a time when, as a Whig (Retro Avant Garde), i prowled antique malls not in search of objets de virtu, but for icons redolent to me of the periods that i preferred to my own. Just the other night i saw "Down with Love", & realized that to be Whig is no longer even slightly Avant--it's mainstream. (Which won't make me throw out my kidney-shaped two-tier coffee table, though.) Moreover, this tendency has been visible in all sorts of places you wouldn't expect: there's been a renaissance in "Hard" scifi from about the early 90's; & even Retro chess openings, starting likewise thereabouts (Scotch Opening, Four Knights' Game--which i would've sworn would never be played again between grandmasters). And now i see that what we are experiencing is not just a Cold War Nostalgia--it's a McCarthy Flashback!

This is how i'd display my links if i knew how to do it. (via Dr Menlo) The artform of the Blog finally starts to leave its print-based shapes behind...

I say i forget everything--why? Does this mean i believe thoughts are only words and when i stop using a set of words i no longer have those thoughts? Or are thoughts consumed--without ash--in recombination? (Well, what happens to my food? I name kinds of dishes, but not each one: maybe what i thought yesterday and today, is just one kind of idea, a matter of chef's convenience, but the active part is its atoms--) I mourn the natural progression of conscious act into reflexive habit, not in my muscles, only when it happens with the brain-muscle... I remember everything, really: in the "unconscious". So this complaint is like saying: I shouldn't sleep. (Did Gurdjieff? Even at the wheel!)

The recurrence of my concerns is proof enough they were underground awhile and have surfaced again, like certain subway trains.

I'm not a naturally reflective person and it seems absurd to me now that i thought i was. The sort of self-perceptions i do have are almost traceless, they come and then meeting some interceptor disappear before ever having been verbalized & made permanently conscious. Like iridescent colors, green becoming red and everything in between, instantly, so that we don't have a chance to identify one at a time, but call it: iridescence. And i call it: forgetfulness. But isn't it rather the ternal watchfulness of that intercepting force, that my emotions seem viewed through an opera glass far away and small and brightly unreal? That puts a distance in front of my response? Should i say it's--reflection? Reflecting daylight...into a camera obscura. And so it is that i make images. Because in my dark room i am curious...but with a curiosity that is satisfied with any image--.

Four-kanji proverbs. (via Language Hat) --I think i'm going to try this in Lojban!

"He's a tormented soul, because he doesn't want to turn into a monster; yet he enjoys the feeling of power.." --Stan Lee on The Hulk (substitute: The American Empire)

In a film i saw, [the Spanish surrealist playwright] Arrabal called Bobby Fischer a mystic. Yes. As there are insights which change nothing, so also does the world have impotent divinities.

If a sculptor of marble gets diverted into making mud-pies, that's not tragic. If the world runs out of marble and he goes around busting up old statues for their material, that's just being practical. But if the world still has marble and he believes (whether told or self-deluded) that marble must be made in the mind and can only be had by wishing for it, that's tragic.

    "The Last Artists"

They learned every coercion,
  forgot how to ask.

(4 17 83)

'Where men are lacking, strive to be a man.' --sayings of Rabbi Hillel, quoted in: Kaufmann, Religion in 4 Dimensions

Art would be so much less a mystery if we all were artists and never kept what wasn't fully inspired. Then we wouldn't have to bust our definitions trying to include everything that anybody ever kept...trying to put into words the nonverbal part because all we understand is words...

The avantgarde is a necessary position because today art must provide what used to be taken for granted, a common cultural context... --i wrote to [my publisher]. But the absence of culture is our common context, and so the struggle is not against dead traditions but against indiscriminate eclecticism. Most of those who appear to be "traditional" artists* have borrowed a few signs from the impressionists, some from the Dutch Masters (not much! not enough!), and the rest from the corpse-corpus of Academic painting as it has lingered in textbooks alone. What is their attitude? That subject matter and a certain "finish" make a legitimate picture. Well? By their refusal to take chances, they are killing art with Boredom. (Wanting to paint just like Rembrandt or Vermeer is a slavish ambition, but at least it's ambitious--like all those who climb Mt Everest after the first one...)

HERE IS THE NIETZSCHE QUOTE ALL NIETZSCHEANS OVERLOOK: (From Kaufmann's Will to Power)
'46. "Weakness of the Will": that is a metaphor that can prove misleading. For there is no will, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result in a "weak will"; their coordination under a single predominant impulse results in a "strong will": in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the precision and the clarity of the direction.'
---------------------------------------------------------
*this goes double for NeoFormalists. What an epidemic of epigonorrhea!

We got in an old book on "Fighting Venereal Diseases". Glued inside the front cover is a letter dated 1920 from the Treasury Dept, US Public Health Service instructing that "This book is to be placed in all Dallas barber shops...You may not be aware of the fact that during the year 1919, over fifteen hundred Dallas citizens visited specialists on venereal diseases and were found to be infected with either gonorrhea or syphilis. Thirty-four of these fifteen hundred died."

The first new Chicken joke of the 21c: "comrade #1: Comrade, why did the free-range chicken cross the road?

comrade # 2: Because she enjoyed exercising her rights as a free citizen of the range!" (from tinylittlepenis.com)

"Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, has compared the invasion of Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Poland. He told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that 130 Americans had died "for a lie", adding: "I see no difference between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Poland in 1939." Both invasions were based on what he said was an artificial argument of self-defense. President George W Bush had used the September 11 attacks as Hitler used the 1933 burning of the Reichstag to repress domestic dissidents." (from drmenlo.com)

Eduardo Kac had a rabbit made with jellyfish DNA, so it glows chartreuse in a certain wavelength of blue light. Here's his page on what he calls "transgenic art". I wrote this limerick about it:

      "On Alba, the G F P Bunny"

   With help from some whitecoats, Ed Kac
   Patched the genes of a rabbit in spots,
     So the right wavelength'd blues
     Turn her pelt bright chartreuse.
   What's wrong with this picture? Er...lots.

5-13-01

Texans who hunt illegal aliens. (I'm sure they hold hands & pray first.)

"Adamant nights in which our wisest apes
Met on a cracked mud terrace not yet Ur
And with presumption more than amateur
Stared the random starlight into shapes." --Merrill

"All those contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties comic art. They're semiotic phantoms..." --William Gibson in: Mirrorshades

--Take a moment to consider that phrase: semiotic phantoms. I'm beginning to think the Twentieth Century can be explained by nothing else; that our term "ideology", far from referring to any sort of reasoned system, describes rather the simple prevalence of such phantoms that, once expected, punctually make their appearance. I have examined all the books that purport to contain ideological systems, in search of a definitive solidity, but found nothing but immense heaps of patches. The phenomena came first & every objection of common sense had to be dealt with, as it naturally arose. Patches, & still more patches! The phenomena were sacrosanct. Here is a true koan: why is it easier to believe some things than others? (You know, the first time it was raised, they made him drink fucking hemlock.) And i'm still looking for the counter-koan: what do you do to make someone stop believing something they believe in just because it makes them feel good?

Like maybe: WAIT THREE HUNDRED YEARS.

I don't want to hear another person talk about the NeoCons as if they had managed to give intellectual rigor to their politics of bigotry & superstition. They are anti-intellectuals who read, but that doesn't make them intellectuals; if you read for the sole purpose of justifying your prejudices, that makes you an anti-intellectual. (Something the Right has no monopoly on, to be sure.) And it's mostly their "semiotic phantoms" which have infested the present landscape, & caused so much grief & havoc by the stupid things people do who believe in them.

Do you want an example? What about this thing they call "reality television"? It's actually games played with non-professional actors, of course; & only as real as the cameramen & the editors of the raw footage care to present. But what is the idea that it propagates? That none of us is any better than the most venal, self-serving humans they can scrape up. That ALL PEOPLE, EVERYWHERE will do ANYTHING for money. How very useful a belief for the architects of empire! This semiotic phantom, which properly should be called "Normalcy = Moral Squalor", although the people who harbor it would consider it a solacing & sometimes amusing adult-realism, was at one time the exclusive possession of pirates & robber barons, & heartily condemned by the majority of people who knew in their bones that a society is based on reciprocity & acceptance of civil duties, as much as it is on public buildings & infrastructure. And i don't even now think that it has become the belief of a majority of Americans...

Listen. I was just reading in Counterpunch an excellent article on Things You Can Do Against the Republicans. But little by little something started nagging at me, till at last i had to stop in disgust. It was steeped in a certain class-illusion, one i was born to & cannot wholly abjure, that i have to characterize to myself as the "Periclean Bourgeoisie Syndrome". It has to do with one's sense of personal empowerment, of the sphere of action possible to a person of your station in life. If i had been born otherwise, i know it would be utterly impossible for me to believe in some of the things i have, such as "you can be anything you want to be" & "what matters is what's inside you"... Not that it's not a good thing to want to always tell the truth, for example, believing that this is in all situations the route to an optimal outcome. But even the most privileged slave of Pericles himself could have told you that dissembling is required to the precise extent that there is inequity in personal power. (I would have made a bad slave.)

I think of a certain scene in the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair", when Pierce Brosnan is out racing his million-dollar sailboat with another rich man. Then he wrecks it on purpose, just for the hell of it. This is a portrait of American politics. Once i cheered, because the sailboat of "my team" won. Does this mean i really have a boat of my own in the race? You could say this is cynical, because it promotes apathy. My answer is that as a philosopher begins by removing all the false notions before he can ever come up with a new one that is possibly true, you have to give up your class illusions in order to see what kind of action is possible for you in the real world. I WILL be voting in 2004. But not to salve my conscience!

So, what does a real "blow for freedom" look like? What about that anonymous casino employee who broke the story of William Bennett's gambling addiction? Damage control can try all it can, but he's never going to be as shiny as he was before. And there's a certain blogger in Iraq, who i think has accomplished more than any other figure on the Internet (except maybe Michael Moore--): simply by being what he is. A human being, who happened to be born in Iraq... And how different these things are, from the idea of asking complete strangers for money, till you've accumulated enough to build your own million-dollar sailboat--that the officials probably won't let you run in the race anyway.

"...Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few." --Shelley

'Just as the most terrible fears come at noontide, when, risen to his zenith and hidden behind his violet shields, the evil Dragon [i.e. the sun] weaves his spells, so the deepest mystery is revealed only when the masks are removed.' --Sologub in: The Russian Symbolist Theater

"People often die in the night, devoured by their own nightmares." --Greg Bear in Mirrorshades

"There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone, but the details are not known. There are those who believe it would be better if one of the seven were a financier." --R A Lafferty, "About a Secret Crocodile"

"Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817).
Founding the Dupont Company wasn't enough for this eccentric French aristocrat who had immegrated to the United States. An avid naturalist and birdwatcher he also compiled two dictionaries in 1807, which he entitled Crow-French and Nightingale-French. In them he gave what he called the French translations of the various calls of the crow and the nightingale.

The cat, claimed the French-American author, is a better speaker than the dog. 'The cat,' he explained, 'has the advantage of a language which has the same vowels as pronounced by the dog with six consonants in addition: m, n, g, h, v and f. Consequently the cat has a greater number of words.'" --Robert Hendrickson, American Literary Anecdotes (1990)

An old poem of mine from the Eighties:

Hitler lost
but the concentration camp
won

"Solitude is the richness of self. Loneliness is the poverty of self." --May Sarton

'I still am able to find some enchantment
In trifles I meet quite by accident:
A book with title and the ending missing,
This rose I hold, withering, without scent.

It pleases me that drops of rain are trembling
Silver and pure upon its moiré velours,
That I found this rose on a dirty sidewalk,
That I'll toss it into the trash, for sure.'

--George Ivanov, in: Modern Russian Poetry

One of my Volapük poems: "Neif tü Reinüp" ('Knife at Raintime')

   Fidil pefalöl dese lusil,
   O lecütel, tobuls no dönu
   olükömons is lienetiks.
   Exilonok mekavamüster
   nesinifodio sembal, e
   mutob gegivön ad ol voli
   kölöfikum keli älärnob
   da logs ola, voli de fil kel
   päfanon fa ob de oliks muds
   tel, e voli dolas luplikün
   in ola lad keli ädünob.

(Ort fallen from the sorry sky, O great deceiver, Mad Octobers will not arrive here again. The artificial mystery has banished itself to some meaninglessness or other, & i must give you back the world more colorful i learned through your eyes, the world of fire that was caught by me from your mouths twain, & the world of most wolfish griefs in your heart which i served.)

Accent always on the last syllable.

"Maned with light, ember and anodyne" --Jamres Merrill, Divine Comedies

Read in Plimpton's Shadow Box about the meeting of Marianne Moore & Muhammed Ali. They wrote a poem together. Later she went to watch him box--wearing her tricorne hat.

...[In the closed stacks] i scanned Enver Hoxha's memoirs. The Albanian dictator was describing a meeting with Tito. Tito's dog kept farting. Then they went for a ride in a rowboat. The dog swam after them &, climbing aboard, almost capsized it (Hoxha couldn't swim). The dog shook himself dry all over Hoxha's suit, soaking him.

"...justifications for the prison's existence, six-foot letters in a language nobody could read." --Paul Park, Soldiers of Paradise (1987)

"A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age." --Neil Postman, Technopoly (1992)

The first qualification to be a poet nowadays is not to read poetry. There is no second qualification.

Do i not believe in my own freedom at all, even as i understand that so much of this & my earlier acknowledged errors, happened precisely because i knew better & refused to do the sensible thing, over & over? It's like the gambler who continues to lose money--you can't call it, after a certain point, hope. Only the shape of hope. Which is almost a calling, a cry for hope to come... I believe that, as long as i don't mistake this wrongness, my lucidity itself will protect me. With the same fearlessness, once i hitchhiked cross-country with nothing but a dime in my pocket; but the only proper use of this state, very likely, is the beginning of a very ambitious artwork (which all its other uses, are nothing but metaphors for--)... these knots i seem to be weaving, aren't they evidence of stories beginning to tell themselves, somewhere deeper than i have yet been able to look for them?

A new speech by the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. There aren't many public figures i respect, but she is one of them. (via Robot Wisdom) Vonnegut's always worth listening to, too.

"Saturated


I am trying to reconcile two thoughts, though life keeps firing back, disrupting the ability to create. I want to do well on the occasion of this presentation. I focus on the hope of the mother-wordsmith and the father who makes moving pictures. I think their daughter incredibly lucky to be born to such art. So I try to reconcile the two thoughts, to whittle them down to their most precise point, so I can turn them inside out and make something new and learn from the mere act of creation.

My memory, a month later, is still saturated with images of oak trees in New Orleans; not just the proud stately ones which are insured for millions of dollars and inhabit the emerald grounds of the plantation famous for being so photogenic. Breathtaking, yes, but so scrupulously maintained; awe inspiring, no doubt, but that¹s not where my mind wanders. Instead, I keep reliving the scene at South Alexander Street where the oak trees are almost as old and beautiful, but more reckless as they have been victimized, boxed into a corner. That was a long time ago, a hundred years or more, and they have long forgotten how to be polite. There remain no vestiges of Southern hospitality on South Alexander Street, where the roots, the thick, twisted, knotted fingers, of the live oak trees have taken over, demolishing the sidewalk; an intriguing disarray of cracked and buckled concrete slabs. The handiwork of a silent terrorist. The sheer heft of these roots, and the force with which they reveal their presence, strikes me as powerfully poetic and even comforting, the way they just go on and on undeterred. I think if I could just capture the right words I would have a poem benefiting the birth of a child.

The second thought I have concerns my beautiful seven year old niece who, from the day she was born, has brought such enormous joy into my life. Hilary Rodham had it right when she said it took a village; that¹s what it¹s like in our household: husband, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. I show my niece a photograph I took inside a historic New Orleans townhouse; it¹s a life size portrait of a proud Creole matriarch. My niece studies the woman¹s finery, runs her finger across the photo, then asks me, in a voice that is both sweet and filled with concern, a question so frank it startles me, sets off a tremor in my solar plexus.

³Aunt Melanie, was she a good person?²

I can¹t imagine why my niece would ask such a thing. I look at the portrait. I look at my niece, her face so pretty and open to a world of possibilities. At that instant, though, her voice is tinged with something inexplicably fully-grown. I do not know how to answer her, but it never occurs to me to say that. Instead, I offer a pat explanation about how the woman most likely thought of herself as a good Catholic. I know it¹s a weak answer, but I hope it¹s enough to suit her.

Later my niece and I play a board game, and I still think of roots and my own childhood; the way we used to have to call the plumber once or twice a year because the cottonwood¹s roots stifled our plumbing. I think I might want to hunt down my grandma¹s old ivory dominoes and teach my niece how to play, just like my grandma taught me. And I continue to think about roots and childhood and difficult questions. And I am saturated with thoughts of these things."

Melanie Pruit