Red Light! Green Light!

Why Write?

2011-03-22T20:26:00.001-07:00

"Why not," quips Durs Grunbein, a preeminent post-wall German poet and essayist. What's worse than not writing? The proposition, 'Why Write', subtly imposes a norm now in antiquity: most people don't write. With the proliferation of blogs, thematic territories of ones life may be sketched on the walls of an open house. Daily practice of sending texts on cell phones demands people to employ an economy of language and syntactical rephrasing into compact parts. Twitter recently attempted to claim a right to a "new poetry" developed from the form of the tweet. That simply won't work, and not only because it cannot substantiate that claim as exclusive. Writers are no longer the exception, and strangely, with that, they loose acceptance. I don't mean this in the idea that a populous of aggregated means devalues the form, but that in its overabundance, the prescription for a writer to live apart no longer applies when their value becomes commodity. This contemporary apex of literacy measures not in what one reads, but in what one writes.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” Grunbein sharply remarks, “but have you thought about what happens to people who aren’t artists?” They're vulnerable to forget history, to act as mere witness, not murderer or victim. Everything is tepid. Existence provides more for being than a stenographer's introspection. Instead of being, there's to-be-being. The static will for the mimetic approach to art and poetry cripples the artist into an act of helplessness, of simply existing outside the created world and to comment on it. They are the historians of the present, locked away from their capacity to act without further entangling themselves in a growing past and shrinking future. I want not to hide in storehouse of memory, but in the margins of the unnoticably undressing horizon; so long as I approach it. But there's no walking away from that horizon, now, is there? We are surrounded.

The growing preference of written word over the spoken word in american culture speaks little as to what symbols are being manipulated by that move. Language itself, possess no determinant anima, but acts as an acquired history driftlessly manipulated, graffiti-ed, curated and removed from use. Our interaction with this mute force changes our stratagem in speaking with one another as well as our packaging and editing the information which is allowed for use in hyper-public versus the physically-public interactions. Symbolic orders thrive when most of our interactions (or how we perceive interactions) occur in an abstract symbolic reality apart from physical limits, external cycles (daylight, for instance), and culturally aging norms of engagement. Lower percentages of the elderly's use of new technology provides a short window in which this youthful symbolism thrives, as the next generation of AARP members will have grown up or used technology in social or workforce conditions and will resonate their older technologically regulated forms of engagement. All this to say that there is a difference between the dichotomies of writing and not writing, and critically writing and schriftlos (without writing, without inquiry).

Aristotle's approach in De Anima provides a contrast with Durs Grunbein's essay in the 2010 February issue of Poetry....

Tony Hoagland to Claudia Rankine

2011-02-19T12:03:00.001-08:00

TONY'S TEXT :

Dear Claudia,

Thank you for inviting me to respond to your AWP report
on the subject of race in my poem "The Change."

To start off, let me say that I thought, back when we were colleagues,
and I still think, that, to me, you are naive when it comes to the subject of
American racism, naive not to believe that it permeates the psychic
collective consciousness and unconsciousness of most Americans in ways that are
mostly ugly.

The elements of that confusion are, as we all know, guilt, fear, resentment, and wariness.
Its sources are historical and economic and institutionalized. We drank racism with our mother's milk, and we re-learn it every day, as we weave our way through our landscapes of endless inequality.

That is one reason why it seems foolish and costly to think that the topic of race belongs
only to brown skinned Americans and not white skinned Americans.
But many poets and readers think that.

This is especially true in contemporary poetry where a poem is often presumed to be in the voice of the author. I am not trying to sidestep-- of course I am racist; and sexist, a homophobe, a classist, a liberal, a middle class american, a college graduate, a drop out, an egotist, Diet Pepsi drinker, a Unitarian, a fool, a Triple A member, a citizen of Texas, a lover of women, a teacher, a terrible driver, and a single mother. Purity is not my claim, my game, nor a thing remotely within my grasp. I'm an American ; this tarnished software will not be rectified by good intentions, or even good behavior.

The poet plays with the devil; that is, she or he traffics in repressed energies.
The poet's job is elasticity, mobility of perspective, trouble-making, clowning and truth-telling. Nothing kills the elastic, life-giving spirit of humor more quickly-have you noticed?- than political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority.

Just as you find the posture of "angry black person"
simplistic, I find the posture of "apologetic liberal white person"
not just boring, but useless.

I don't believe in explaining my poems to other poets; they are
part of my tribe, and I expect them to be resilient readers.

I want some of my poems to alarm people with their subjects and attitudes.
I think poems can be too careful. A poem is not a teddy bear.

When it comes to the subject of American race, it is a set of conditions we all
suffer, whether in our avoidance or confrontation. We will need to
be rousted for another fifty, or a hundred years.
I would rather get dirty trying to dig it out of the ground, than make nice.
I am easy in my conscience.

Finally let me say that I think my poem "The Change" is not "racist" but "racially complex."

Sincerely,

Tony Hoagland

Intro to the Conversation on Knowledge and Belief

2011-01-25T08:50:00.000-08:00

Few conversations echo and ping-pong in my head as did the conversation with Quincy Flowers and Ronnie Yates atop the balcony at Avant-Garden last Thursday. Following an incredible reading spanning both style and geography (yes, they're linked, but not always so neatly), after conversations and first impressions, we amassed our aether and visited the bar on it's 15th anniversary celebration. The effervescent Mariana wore an orange Argentine dress and chassed her way through the packed house like a melting ice cube. "Why is the dress Argentine? Do you know?" she asked us? "Because you're wearing it?" I replied. "No," she said, holding the round vowel in her mouth like a fleshy horn, "because the tag is on the outside." She reached her hand between her shoulders, down her spinal column and rubbed the tag between her thumb and index finger. "Is it on backwards?" She wondered off on another errand, the Doppler of her long vowels trailing after her.

We sat where a stage had once been, in the backyard of the house of adaptive reuse, partial use, partial reuse. The back-wall of the stage with its short, acute overhang lumbered behind us, making invisible the town homes put up some ten years ago while making itself also almost invisible. While I knew there was anniversary party, I hardly thought I'd run into half the people I once knew while ascending the tightly wound spiral staircase. If someone were on their way down, there was hardly room for more than one, and there followed the brush of bodies a sense of falling in simply for the fact you almost fell off.

Ronnie was preaching about something by the time we reached the corner. Actually, they were there already because I got caught up running into an old friend who had, in some strange way, cyber divorced me while I found my way into daily writing and reading, a ritual of remove. Carlos, an inventive musician, smart and bold, but self limiting in some aspects that I find also in myself, which later became painfully evident to me. I should call my friend Franke, who can do a spot-on impersonation of Ronnie, which I admire deeply; anyone who can imitate the manner of speech of another person accurately and with inventiveness just gets me. Franke should write this part. Ronnie always answers the phone, "My Brotha," with a terrycloth scratch in his voice and fermata on that last a. If you don't smile the second you speak or hang out with Ronnie, that's your cue to lighten up. But we're way past that part. I mean, we've had a reading together and Quincy (overloaded with PhD and teaching work) came by and drank wine with us while we were waiting to speak while listening, caught in an etiquette of silence that is strange (as it is outside the norm) to know so much about someone before you meet them, pour them a glass of wine and sit silently beside one another for a good hour before you ever say an audible word to one another.

"There's got to be something greater, man..." Although Ronnie may sound like a hippie in typed speech (which in ideology, he certainly comes close), he's also extremely grounded. My best way to place him ideologically (forgive me the violence) is an existentialist, post french structuralist disillusioned by 1968, born again hippie traversing the continent in all manners beatnik.

Hiatus

2009-05-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

We wish to pay heed to the sources of the unnameable despair that flows in every soul. The souls listen expectantly to the melody of their youth—a youth that is guaranteed them a thousandfold. But the more they immerse themselves in the uncertain decades and broach that part of their youth which is most laden with future, the more orphaned they are in the emptiness of the present. One day they awake to despair: the first day of the diary.

With hopeless earnestness it poses the question: In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. Throughout his life the emptiness of time surrounds him, but not immortality. Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquillity in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time, at which he did not even guess. Lurking even more menacingly behind the everyday reality was death. Now it manifests itself in little things, and kills daily so that life itself may go on. Until one day the great death falls from the clouds, like a hand that forbids life to go on. From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.

Walter Benjamin

Metaphysics of Intimacy

2008-12-30T10:50:00.001-08:00

Suppose we're surface awaiting
substance. All we can do is stretch
taut a tarp before a burning building
and convince someone leaning out the ledge
of rubble's supperiority to ash just before
they jump from the window sill.
The best we can do is not break.

Part of the Game: Touchdown

2008-12-29T10:12:00.001-08:00

Vague and hazy instructions on how to throw a no-hitter

buy things from gold purses
take risky airplane rides
use reflecting tape as your only guide
have the ball change sizes while mid-air
don't see the catcher
don't see the batter
receive a daily newspaper
skip a day or two

Boys and Matches

2008-12-28T10:20:00.000-08:00

You can convince yourself of anything. A straight line
doesn’t exist. Though true
I’ve never seen a ball continue rolling past the rest
of a bridge. Perhaps gravity
too is an optical allusion. What’s the function
of deception? f(x) persuasion
bends not towards truth but agreement.
I threw a stone in water in order
to realize the moon causes waves. If alls a joke
I wonder who’s laughing.
Did I misinterpret thunder? The parting of thighs?
Did I misgauge the circumference of the refilling
tank now unloading? Am I always to be subtle?
I am always subtle.
This is a disaster area, back up. The falling snow
fuels the fire. We can imitate stars only
momentarily.

Recess

2008-12-28T09:24:00.001-08:00

I say I love when in the exchange
it’s absent. Power more than a father’s
un-kept promise. Please, turn your palms down,
drop them from your meager chin
to the aquifer piped through the faucet.
The pressure of the empty pipe seizes
convulses rust water in upheaval. Though they’ve
turned the main off while working beneath
the street, though what you knew of plenty
is abruptly rationed, you turn the handle
of the faucet not simply to watch it sieze
but to perform its duty in absence of purpose.

Standing Still I Am A Forest

2008-12-26T12:10:00.000-08:00

..--..

An adolescent father snaps the chain link swing
while his first born son watches from a crippled
see-saw. The world has tinted itself to the passing
windows of cars. The heard has no home. Electrical
currents never stop and ask directions. It’s a group
the recognizes the face of a monolith, the child is
product of two parallel bodies without margin. Meet.
A man dizzy in the library moves from one book
to another, stacked open at the spine center, trading
the order of book chapters. Nothing moves like plot.
Or a classified section: Life seeking schematic. There’s
a house on hill where young men can find God’s will
in their lives. Perhaps they’ll discover Asche’s lines,
or prop the root system of a forest with shovels used
to excavate them. Perhaps they’ll notice family lines
of trees strangle strange roots of foreign trees whose
seeds, perhaps, hitchhiked a ride in a rodents entrails
dropped by a buzzard through their canopy. How
would they know the difference? Not speaking
to a family is a form of non-violence.

.-.-.-

Found Poem

2008-12-26T10:30:00.001-08:00

So much for sovereignty.

A still face
lends life into a mirror, mistakes
itself
for itself. A man, underside of glass
painted black
no light to enter the body.
I, unpresent
dressed naked.

You hinge light
on flesh
rotate shadows from grown angles

pivoted by you,
shown the source of light traced
but unfound

in the mirror.
Me, the lazy self portrait
I paints over.

B(r)anding the Thieves

2008-12-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

I write on my hand to acknowledge things.
It's usually in pen or a thin point permanent marker.
It's usually red or blue and it outlines the part of my hand
between my index finger and my thumb
that perfectly fits into someone's mouth.

Glass negatives, printed backwards. Each name and purported crime has been found, documented and written down again, somewhere new, making a new thing out of an old history.

Someone tried to forget this. Someone else tries to remember.

I don't scribble on my own hand only because I am a tactile whore.
I don't do it to remember a name or jog my memory for when my day will be slowly filled in the next minutes or hours. I do it because the act of recording is the making of a new memory. It makes the shallow water deep and the deep water less murky. If it were insisted that I do it to remember, it would be to remember that I
desire/enjoy/run from certain things.

I make lists in this manner because I can. They don't mean anything.
There's nothing wrong with doing something that doesn't mean anything.

Or maybe it means that I like things that have
the grand possibility of being forgotten.

The man second from the right was booked for thievery like the rest of the men near him. He, unlike the rest however, will escape any sort of trial, prosecution or sentencing. He will never be more than indicted. All of his charges will be dropped.
You know it just by looking at him, don't you? It's also the truth.

The man to his right might be related. Might be his brother. Might be nothing more to him than a partner, might not even be that.

I fall asleep in class some days when the teacher turns off the lights and the projector, attached by a series of strong plastic pieces to the ceiling above my head, hums. It's cliche, it is, but the machine hums and malfunctions and skips slides and talks back and makes its own decisions. The ghost in the machine is dead. The machine is the ghost.

These people, arrested and posed (in poses of their own choosing and with their consent) still have creases in their pressed coats. Their knees press the cloth of their pants, their hands are hidden, their eyes are white, their faces are scarred or not scarred and so beautiful you want to lick them -- they are honey wax, they are so real.

Faces and bodies and particulars so real that they are not real.
They are named & listed not out of fear that they will be forgotten
but because someone has the desire to carve into glass
a few letters and numbers that mean something
possible and tangible and dark, however momentarily.

Game Fishing

2008-11-11T08:46:00.001-08:00

The balustrade of women across the canal
backlit Byzantine like behind glass

not at all mannequin but twitching distracted
from the already closed deal. The pristine

professionals contact antiquity with urge
twitch and practiced convulsion. A glint

of silver tarpin snapping the line recede
into her ultramarine eyes when the filament

stutters and the door closes. The spoil of hooks
a sea carpet of scars across the mouth’s roof.

Our salary of damaged wills exchanged, our labor
transformed into potential energy, the dollar, weakened

dreams give way to waking, the mis-set alarm radio
announcing the forecast of sprinkler systems.

The Nominal Mirror

2008-10-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Nominal Mirror

The distance from eye to eye indiscrete, continuous.
Memory postured the practice of the taxidermist.

Who measures light reflected back into the sun?
No one martyrs an ant, their labor that resists bone.

The stomach is the servant of the mouth.
Tonight her lips mistook the size of my lips.

So you looking back at me cannot speak.
I am not talking to you. Who are you talking to?

Of course an elephant that paints its own portrait scandalizes.
I’ve walked around all day wondering if that stink was mine.

It was not the city that built the man. A man no longer builds cities.
And the function of beauty is difference. The appraised house

approximates value. Then burns.

Tom Clark

2008-10-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings

Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined

Never to occur
You don't mind
You feel spiritual and alert

As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like

You'll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do

- Tom Clark

The Neutron Star

2008-10-03T12:31:00.000-07:00

It seems that the expansion of credit to the “ineligible” simply masks the underlying economic issue: an inequity of wealth. Of course the opposing political discourses revolve around equity’s existence as mutually exclusive to freedom. Yet, this discourse finds limits in the absence of examples in their absolute forms: there is no absolute equity in the presence of the lack of freedom, nor is there complete freedom in lack of equity. (An exploration into Kant's concepts of Praxis, Theory and Practice is needed)

The limit of inequity was found: people cannot afford automobiles, homes, or tuition. This in turn leads to the loss of flow of capital, which in turn becomes the slow of the economy. This closes down the ability for a free market to perform. Yet the “Free Market’s” function is the consolidation of wealth. Is the thesis its own antithesis? Naomi Klein comes to the fore in this discussion with her idea of “No Risk Capitalism”.“They spend seven years just transferring public money into private hands. Their final act is taking private debt and transferring it into public hands.” – Naomi Klein.

Interesting is American resistance to "intellectualism". The fallacy of defining intellectualism lies in the separation of intelligence from the general public; not to say generality is genius, but that it is the general public that fulfills and alters the narratives by which intelligence and intellectualism is defined.

What is anything that has to do with knowledge other than interpretations of existence: both the objects and situations, and the prior texts that contribute to them? The role of intellectualism is interpretation. What doesn't make sense is the general public's belief of institutional benevolence: both economic and governmental, both secular and sacred. The restructuring of this narrative is the most taboo of them all, as Milton Friedman established in the ideological merger of economic and political narrative in his work "Capitalism and Freedom". Yet, doesn't the recent "crisis" nullify this thesis of absolute capitalism's creating absolute freedom by it's own terms, it's own means? The end of capitalism, both in chronological and machovaliean senses, rests in the consolidation of wealth of the few. Par excellance of Milton Friedman's thesis, political and economic terms act as one: wealth and freedom are in the hands of the few.

The hard task before us, exists in the restructuring of a narrative, of negotiating the conditions of risk as opportunity to rewrite this narrative, of seeking the status of our society not in-itself, but as it is for-itself. The move is from negotiating reality not from the ideological pandering to stasis, of thesies self validating (Biden won/Palin won the debate), and into the dynamic exchange in daily life, in seeking ideology in practice, rather than distorting it with a preconcieved narrative. I know I know.

Late Capitalism

2008-09-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

I figure we can truly Emphasize the pun on that phrase now; Late Capitalism. The obituary, however, was written long ago. I've had the feeling, since the debunked Soviet State, that capitalism wasn't far behind. The dissociation between accountability and institution undermines the thesis of credit. I've attempted to study economics on my own, but philosophy has always come first. With an uncited heuristic, however, I'd like to say this: the statement that "the market is not functioning properly" (google it! google it!) furthers my thesis of our valuing stimulus over response. It is not so much that the market is not functioning properly, than we are not responding properly, that is, we lack the sensibility to understand the system changes that the economic model may not support. There's an organizational principle that we fail to grasp and continue to fail while grasping every century or so. The economy is a measure of human behavior, and something in our behavior has changed. I believe it lies in our concept of subjectivity and individualism. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. It got me here, so far. Unlike the economy, I hope not to fall so far that my progress is nothing but recovery of lost memory.

Both morality and economics depend on a standard of measurement in values; the value of actions and the value of objects. The cultural sythesis between economic structure and morality involves the inverse of the Hegelian mutual recognition of freedom; the conditions by which we are permitted pass outside of labor bondage and enter freedom (freedom to choose a vocation, freedom to limit choose, freedom to purchase, freedom to limit labor), as well as the conditions by which we may maintain that freedom. The underlying condition of this freedom, freedom at birth, reifies itself upon the stances of the political parties on abortion. Within the nature or nurture debate, the kernel of truth lies within the mutual conflict between these oppositions upon a single focus: in order to support our innate right to freedom (in actuality the threat of bondage), we must be born free, with equal rights which should support equal opportunity, etc. etc. However, the actualization towards freedom first involves an initiation into a belief system (free market capitalism) and then a form of self measurement within that system.

The system assumes the threat of lost liberty, of freedom limited by non-participation motivates the individual. The motivation of anxiety works no less than it did in the former GDR; the alienation though of another kind. Non-participation occurs not only buy one’s individual choices, but also of a community’s evaluation of one’s position within their given system. This polarizes the critic with the delima: to openly question the system I risk the threat of non-participation and the collapse of possible freedoms. Only now does the threat of the system’s collapse that the converse comes to light: if I do not question the system I risk the loss of my potential and current freedoms. The direction of questioning should direct itself towards a historical examination of values, a geneology of both valuing of objects (property, commodity), and the valuing of actions (moralities, labor). One value left the bartering system, the abstraction of exchange allowed for the possibility of absent accountability. The deviation of accountability from institution is the process at work here. A hyper alienation from the processes of our daily lives. The solution lies beyond our capacity for abstract perception, or does it? Seems I need to write a grant proposal. How naive.

Oh yes! A very facinating note I thought of while on a caffine high; 1764 (War of the Regulation) or 1789 (French Rev.)(60, 80), Revolutions of 1848,(80) Great Depression of 1927, (80) The Financial Crisis 2008. Naomi Klein, anyone? An eighty year cycle of social opportunity for social change? I hate to quantify what seems qualitative in study, but the evidence of a social cycle in our contemprary measure seems possible. Who ever held the meteorologist accountable? Huh?

Forget Zizek, by Slavoj Zizek

2008-09-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

In light of recent events (the demythification of the fiat money system as reified nihlism and yet another crisis response that explicates further the inability for our social structure to observe subtlety as signs of a system ), Zizek studies move to the fore.

For two years now in the paid parking lot infront of the Galleria, a crime has taken place everynight. No. A crime has taken place each night I work. This is not a coincidence. Circumstance introduced this criminal pattern to me. This parking lot stands at ground level, over the garage parking and provides greater convinience; there are no lines to wait for parking as in the garage, and most importantly there is not a designation between customer parking areas (nearer entrances to the Galleria) and employee parking areas (available as the last possible stop in the line for parking). The parking at ground level, positioned "above" the garage parking designtates people not by vocation or function, but as participants of a very specific and isolated act; paying the kiosk, or not paying the kiosk (employee/non-employee). I chose to go where they pay, where my job presented to prohibition on my non-economic decisions outside of the physical workplace.

I resented the curtailment of my right to park where I pleased based on the fact of my employment. As an employee of the service industry, I understand the dictum of the customer first (an overinflated value that acts as perversely socially as economic organization through false statements), yet I participate in this role in as limited a manner as possible, and negotiate its terms as subtlely and forcefully as possible. I moved to the bar in order to serve people on a much more limited basis (four seats available, standing room 2 or 3 deep only on limited occasions) and under strangely augmented rights on account of my title as barkeep rather than server.

Despite the fact that I encourage recognition of all interactions during my shifts as interactions between people prior to interactions limited by social economic roles, it nevertheless limits my identity in this negotiation to that of subordinate. This binary system, however, is fragile. I can interpret the silence of those around an irrate customer as silence of dissent of their entitlement, and communicate this translation of silence to the customer with indifferent disbelief, dead stare and eat shit grin. I am subordinated through the restraint of my full reaction, just as their actions are preconditioned by a pressumed social code whereby the individual may occupy the claim: I am spending money. I may behave as I please.

I am not spending money and I may behave as I please.

As I stated earlier, circumstance introduced to me this criminal act. My restaurant closes long after the mall closes, and my duties conclude long after that. The ambulatory security systems sleep at this time; a bolt locks the cage of golf carts, their rotating blue lights dim. Only the occasional guard passes aboard their two wheel segway, the kitsch soundtrack to the ice rank ominously missing. The only contact with authority is one which you provide the contact; the green button at the exit of the paid parking, a lane which is blocked by a black and white diagonally painted board that lifts once you have inserted your paid ticket. One evening, I pressed the green button.

"Security."
"Yes. I didn't pay for my parking, and the doors to the mall are locked."
"The door all the way to the left is unlocked. You can enter and pay the kiosk there."
"Ok."

"Security."
"The door is locked."
"I assure you, Sir, the door is not locked."
I am a paying customer and I may behave as I like.
"It is."
"Okay. Return to the door and I'll send someone to unlock the door for you."

"Security. Hello?"

I have seen the morning evidence of the night before. The splinters on ground, the two teenagers inserting a new board through the iron grip of the gate. The repairs are minimal and cheap. I find this act too overt, tasteless. Instead, that night, when the security officer failed to meet me at the door, by lifting the board over the car from my open window, I left the parking lot without paying. I've carried on with this act for two years. I believe that the only reason that I haven't been caught is that the other employees, security included, also do not recognize their loss of right to behave as they please.

2008-09-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

“Who am I to myself? Just one of my sensations.”

Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, A Factless Autobiography, 138.

In “Giving an Account of Oneself”, Judith Butler aligns the failure of memory to the opacity of the self. Trauma, either as an event in adulthood or as the inability for one to possess agency while being acted upon as an infant (Laplanche), incites the self into an incapacity to either give an account of the event or to comprehend the structures saturated into consciousness through naïve observation. Due to the incapacity of absolute memory accessible to the self, the self remains opaque to the “I” or the “me”. Yet, must absolute memory dictate self-knowledge? and are the primary events of childhood (outside of critical periods that mark attachment, speech, motor skill development) as essential as claimed by psychoanalysis?

The intuition involved in transference, in seeking out structures that mirror early home life, astounds me when I realize their existence in my present life. However, once these structures are realized, a break in the pattern occurs as the self, which was obscured or compartmentalized, structurally melds with the conscious self. Once this event occurs we immediately become opaque to ourselves anew. A new system becomes possible yet remains outside our capacity to observe it. Freud considered this event a counter-cathaxis, or a repressive desire by the subconscious. Perhaps the catharsis which occurs following realization briefly suspends the system, and the only opportunity for existence of the mythological subject occurs within this joy of sublimation. Is this renewed opacity a direct result of the learning of structure prior to comprehending it or simply an interaction with a system independent of memory, where function preceeds understanding, where self-knowledge exists as luxury rather than as necessity?

If we take Pessoa’s notion of the narrative of self as sensation itself rather than a perceiving body, perhaps the mind then acts as a sensory organ of structure, and identity acts no more than as a signal of our position within that structure. Anticipating a repetition of structure, we are geared towards a reaction to that structure, although our reactions no longer fit the situation. The adaptive reuse of morality upon new subjects allows for the social to renew old stimuli in order to not require a readjustment of reactions. The stimulus is valued over the response.

Modes of Counterproduction/New Criterion/Rough Draft

2008-09-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

The philanthropist laughs with his throat,
his social bounds unleashed by his kindness.
The young man leaves his wallet on the open bar,
turns away. two men nod at him after he turns
to retrieve it. the economy for the faithful failing.

The lack of electricity dissipates the power from house to house, business to business, dissolves the structures of contact between people. Every interaction requires reinterpretation. Where the standard motions of waiting and payment once took place, FEMA ration lines now stand around POD centers. The officiating sounds of transactions no longer take place with the punctuation of a register ring or declarative totals, but the soft hiss of soldering. The loose wires are live and active, albeit disconnected.

In no shortage or irony, international banks threatened to halt interbank loans this weekend, a direct threat to the movement of the international economy. The collapse of the superstructure from Houston towards the world, seems imminent. In this imminency, the entitled seem ludicrous, the lack of self-humilating consent to their demands or the lack of some structure that enables their entitlement enrages them. These scenes of distemper take place in a scene of address where electricity is available. The avaibility to reference the disconnected system aggrevates the lost power of the superiors in the capitalist structure of social accountability. The aggrevation to them is that they no longer are accountable to a 5pm conference call or mortgage company, but to everyone.

Every action acts as measure, every interaction a genuflection to their character. How this power structure (economy/credit/electricity) provides space for this scene of address and how the lack of this structure reveals an alternate and co-existent human possibility further illuminates the power of myth in our contemporary society. The myth of stability, the myth of money, the myth of work, the myth of economy. The emergence of possibility, of not a replica of myth, but a new criterion, true to contemporary experience, not an archaic power structure.

The streets, like my vague memories of Alicia, are lined with fallen limbs and debris. My neighborhood, in blackout possibly until Thursday, lights up with dimly liminal candels flickering behind walls, through windows, across the pages of my books. Against the sillouetted trees, at times the skyline peeks through, the stark contrast sometimes strange as the light contrast creates a parallax of greater distance. Most doors are open for the little wind that does move after dusk. I know my neighbors better now. There are shut doors where the overtness…the abrasive generators pummel silence with their carborators, their combustion. I have spoken with my neighbors once since they aquired a generator. The T.V. flickr through the windows, on the walls. The reconnection.

man with gun pointed downwards while waiting in line for gas. surreal sound of the ice rink music. old woman sitting at bunk bed installation. how mass use of galleria utility turned from problem to seeming philanthropy, “charging station”.

Reginald Shepherd

2008-09-11T17:05:00.001-07:00

I'm truly saddened both by his prolonged suffering and truncated life. Reginald truly inspired me towards a melding of criticism and poetry. His perspective and spirit will be missed in the poetry community.

Zizek on Children of Men

2008-09-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Slavoj Zizek Commentary on Children of Men @ Yahoo! Video

The delineation of huminity as seperate from human, unpossessed by the state in principle or universal interest, appears as a Cy Twombley towards the end of the film. A skrawled line to nowhere. Nihlism fails to describe the outcome as aggression or "justified" defense overwhelms compasion. The acts of humanity carried out consist of restraint, protection, willingness to experience and suffering. The anamorphosis of human action and humanity described by Zizek here indicates his early thought in comprising "Paralax View".

Western Hemesphere Polytheist

2008-09-09T13:21:00.001-07:00

Christianity, in the colloquial America, exists apart from history. Transplanted without a body from European historicism, no relics of past events exist as reminders of its development. The sunbelt God is an organ without a body. No Worms cathedral where a golden tablet ironically displays the 95 thesis Luther posted on a common bulletin - not driven with a nail and hammer onto a cathedral door as the American classroom myth insists. There's no contrast between a Gothic perspective of Christ and the Romantic perspective of Christ, which I argue is the vision of Christ brought to America. This not only coincides with the historical point at which the national identity of America was wrought, but also the underlying ideologies prevelant in the industrial revolution and the "second" enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The American God is a seperate God.

In Levinas' terms, a pre-ontological God. This inexperience of history and religion allows for nievite and violence, such as the reaction to the Church of Later Day Saints expresses. Yet, its only in America, that a large group of people have allowed for the return of a prophet in modernity. Perhaps the emergence of media coincides with the opening of this prophecy, this belief of the pre-ontological reified on screen, allowing us to glimpse the happenings of heaven without first braving death and the dismemberment of our egotistic consciousness that serves as our opacity to knowledge. A legal footnote protects America from outright theocracy, yet this knowledge arrives from a seperate culture, from a seperate populace. This is a rare event outside of Hegel where the law precedes public knowledge. This statement also assumes that within the process of colonization, the colonizer disconnects from the umbilical culture of inheritence.

Homo Sacer

2008-09-04T21:26:00.001-07:00

The city lights received no power. The unaccustomed stars appeared, as though late for a casting call. The storm had blown through, and in its wake the severed power lines cackled in the saturated ground, or sent currents uselessly into puddles. An electric green light arced between the disconnected utility poles, fogging the vanishing point above the road leading into the city. Driving slow through the tree limbs, I occasionally had to stop the truck and drag debris to the roadside in order to continue home. It was not so much the silence that estranged me from my city, nor the lack of light, but the sound of conversation through the thick insect song and the red balls of cigarette embers glowing hot on the distant porches.

agency

2008-09-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

it’s not voluntary,
the salve dissolves too
quickly
soaks in the blood stained napkin.
to be pressed in a book.
to remember.
leaves lose color in spite
of trying to keep them. then
become flat colors of resentment.

i want to mold and mulch,
open my mouth and wait
for beetles to scent
the mouth stays wet
and where I was hit
bruises plume to surface
under command of spreading foliage
an exhaling end
of the corporeal
season.

your flesh
a pillow for my pressed thumb.
your mouth
my salve that i keep wet.

every word an anchor
thrown out in iron links
slit by my teeth.

the world recoils
so the sounds don’t make sense
and never hit bottom.

it’s not voluntary.

kenneth, what is the frequency?

2008-09-01T20:35:00.000-07:00

isn’t your girlfriend getting married today?
yes she is
aren’t you going to go?
i’ve already gone.
she’s married already?
no.
did she run off?
no. the ceremony’s at six.
samjay knew april had no future. her father was a cast iron and her mother was a foot. april was pure twine and her fiancé was named buster. when samjay brought april home for the first time, his parents took turns trying to lace themselves with her. april’s mother could fit perfectly into each of samjay’s parents. samjay’s parents were both right soled shoes. susan’s father stayed home in the fire. there was no water in auckland.

how can you have already been there if it hasn’t happened yet?
happening is not a place.
to my right time jumps an hour at a time. to my left it drops an hour. the distances per hour are not equidistant. for instance, april’s house is always an hour behind samjay’s house. the wedding is always ahead one hour of whatever time it is at any given moment in this story.

samjay’s parents owned a dry cleaning business, for which samjay was a proud product. susan worked there. she looked down from the pole and told samjay,
remember daylight savings tonight.
tonight? fall back?
yep. one hour.
already?
it’s the first year of that bill that passed.
it’s tonight, not last night?
i don’t know.
oh god.

samjay’s parents could catch glimpses of each other between the footsteps of their walkers. but the sound of so many other shoes and pitiful shoeless feet, making contact with the ground, then lifting again, made it impossible for them to communicate. finally, after a solid city block, they caught up together and spoke, though they were visually obstructed by Mr. Johnson’s left shoe. it sounded like the electronic drumbeat of the street signal for the blind or leather stretching, or even the sound of your own footsteps after you’ve stopped walking; not because some metaphysical self continues after you stop, but because your mind expects something even after your body stops and assumes the continuation for you. Mr. and Mr. Johnson stepped into crossing traffic and were killed. all plans were cancelled and samjay’s bloodstained parents are for sale in a thriftstore.

suffering from chronobiologia? click here!

The Always Hung Jury

2008-08-31T11:23:00.000-07:00

"...do not cede upon your desire..."

the action expresses possibility. not from the moment of enactment nor from tension of near finality, are we included.

the observer of the visual field captures the world mid-flight.

the witness embarks upon an eternal mistrial.

the narratives of the world outside our direct experience shut down possibility. understanding is violence. placing a plot is not the job of the bondsman. the always mistaken jury.

Coffin in the Sky With Diamonds

2008-08-22T07:01:00.001-07:00

If we, like Zizek, are allowed to induce precepts from several observations of a given set of cultures, may we not also hypothesize a cultural observation from a standard ceremony of that culture? Ascention should mean we suspend the dead in the sky or propell them outward past the reaches of our atmosphere. Perhaps the Roman tradition of cremation more accurately demonstrates the Christian concept of ascention, even though this practice was bannished by the church, declaring the soul of that burned body condemned to hell. Or is the heavenly conjecture wrong altogether, and the subteranian tradition (once practical, now obsolete and liably uneconomic) more an accurate metaphor to our beliefs concerning death?

Zizek proposes some contextual questions for our yet hetergeneous western culture.

Why should an author be restricted to a single genre, or a work itself be restricted to a single genre? Anne Carson plays with this question and short circuits the function of lyric and rhet?ric. We have always played critic. Unlike and like Rilke, poetry is the product of criticism: and by criticism I mean cognitively critical.

The you to which the I answers shifts face, is polytheist. A subject remains social, or cultural, as observations provide material for criticism; the social as text. The narcissism of creation explores the differentiation between the social and the subject, the universal and the particular, as demarcated by culture or tradition.

I seek an island, not a coffin. Seek the sublime subject disenthralled from the necessity of alienation. There's also the Wordsworth quote on my mother's tackboard: With the conflict of others we make war, with the conflict with ourselves, poetry. That's paraphrased. Poems are psychologicaly invested, subjectively imprisoned, confined to awaiting the oportunity of the prepared reader, the randomly matching context. We return to a poem and are shocked to be unmoved, or find a poem written years ago and cannot imagine ourselves as author. I've tried to organize them through subject or form or method of inquiry; none of which have satisfied. I believe this dissatisfaction rests in the restrictions of inquiry through a rigidly private belief system universally imposed, albeit tacitly; subtly. It seems that in order to free myself to work, I must remove the imposistion of origin, of orientation. To allow the cartesian square to disolve and allow the observations induce a random intersection of inductive angles, to not impose or lean them into eachother, and through this betrayal of causality, allow a voice to speak.

Bats or (anything with a heart and wings should fly straight)

I spy a hearse driver with a key map
a mobile blood bank towed down the freeway.
Are you trying to tell me something?
The loudest sounds on earth are inaudible to us.

Decontructios

2008-07-29T09:49:00.001-07:00

point of reference

2008-07-23T00:26:00.000-07:00

every time i close my eyes the first few nights following a night of doubleheader ball, i immediately begin to see lights of the field, a single white spec of light rushing out to me becoming a ball; not the one that bruised my sternum on a bad hop last month, not the one that broke my right middle finger two weeks ago and hurts every time i'm in the cages - at bat, but the one i almost caught, the line drive that dropped right and lost its punch while i waited with my glove open and also the bad hop grounder, or the one that found its way right two me as i turned on the base and threw to first for the double play. the victories. the defeats. the learning. the humility that is baseball. only baseball can make me feel the way poetry feels. something almost transcendent, yet shackled by my unleared body. that useless nobility of spirit wanting more than my nerves and muscles have agreed upon. throwing my body in the way of error and hoping for the best.

all of these reasons must contribute to the reason i immediately envision it when i attempt to sleep. i thought of it as i tried to think simultaneously of the threshold between waking and sleeping. the old paradox, or pointless inquiry into conscience. interesting to me this night, however, as i realize exactly where that point was for myself. i thought of the game, but recognized it as a memory, but the moment the memory became more of a focus and stimulus than my immediate surroundings, i moved towards sleep: i responded more directly to an abstract world, than the concrete one. this is also where i love to dwell in poetry. more specifically; my sense of balance became relative strictly to my world view, rather than the laws that govern a common reality. yet i spend my time in this world repeating my mistakes.

The Bush Operator

2008-07-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

"At the Expense of the Future"

2008-07-15T10:07:00.001-07:00

I don't believe in inaugurations or season premiers. Weddings even. One time I believed in He-Man and Legos. The pages between my father's matresses. There's no creator and I don't create anything. I don't even believe in this. Not that my belief matters at all. I mean, does it matter whether a dead man believes he's dead or not?
I used to believe in He-Man until he vanished one afternoon at 15:00 CST. Actually, I stopped watching long before that. Sometime before that, I'm sure, he disappeared from a light table. I don't understand how Arnold appeared on screen instead: that docile dwarf's smile of a completely unrepressed minority. He wasn't even a cartoon. I watched one episode. Sometimes I'd hear it while cleaning or playing legos. I'd hear it with my brother's laughter. It was before three thirty. Actually, I don't believe in time either.

I woke up early to drink a cup of coffee with my father. I am twelve. The coffee takes two cigarettes and a shave to finish. I pour his cream while he comes from the master bedroom bathroom. He leaves the door cracked and I can see my sleeping mother wake slowly in the bathroom light. Her left breast is exposed. I hand my father his coffee. I sip mine. Too strong he says. Too sweet. He pours his coffee out. I ask him for a job description. He laughs. My mother gets out of bed the moment the S-10 pickup muffler sounds away. She rubs my head. I go outside. I don't know why I went outside. The garden drips dew and the air is windless. When I don't know why I do things, I feel like I'm in purgatory. Somehow I'm acting against myself when I don't understand myself. I am outside. Here, I am twelve forever. Twelve changes, that's all.

I am watching a parade. I am too young to know how old I am. I think I'm deaf. All these horns blow by and I think they're daylight stars or angels atop an advent wreath. I can, not see an end to the parade. I crawl down my mother's body and let go her hand. My brother is spitting hot chocolate on people. My mother grabs him. I join the parade. I am an angel. I ask the man without an instrument what parade this is. He says it's a timed parade. Seeing my misunderstanding he points to the back of the parade. Now I can see it. I can see it because the last row of musicians fall after each bar of music. I run to the front and ask the man with the wand to slow down. He doesn't see me. The man I talked to has fallen down too. I run to the front of the parade, but am too slow. I look back and see the audience still stands at each side. They aren't falling. I run to bystanders but can't get through. I realize they are wooden cut outs and I can't push them down. I begin to panic and cry. "Are you afraid of the sounds, Schatz?" my mother asks me. I bury my little head in her shoulder. Her jacket itches my face.

Elizebeth wants to give birth to me. I told her I don't know what birth was. Lizzy lifts her shirt and tells me to crawl in. I start with my head and then sit on her stomach. Too heavy, she says, then pushes me on my side. I'm frustrated. She's frustrated. I wish I was smaller. Star comes over. He sits next to Lizzy. I tell them the story about the timed parade. I told them we could all go one time and see if we could go back, maybe those people at the end had something to do with birth. They tell me its very interesting and all, but Star came to tell Liz her mom wants her home. I said ok.

Star: You don't really believe all that stuff about the parade, do you?
Liz: Of course not.

Apocatastasis

2008-07-13T00:55:00.000-07:00

The drunk lit beneath the dome light pleading to driver of the struck car. The drunkard's car steaming, fender to engine, radiator fuming, in reverse, attempts to angle an escape but finds herself wedged in by the H2. She only pleads after the man has exited his vehicle made for war, after he threatened to ram her for attempting to leave, after the bar patio crowd salivates, "hit 'em" "hit 'em", but are left unfullfilled, but satisfied, because the sound of fiberglass bending lends the imagination the sound of broken bones or the symphony of desire restricted and finally unleashed, violence as contact too long awaited. She wins sympathy or doesn't, but she's talking, and that's something, considering she went up a one way against the traffic around office buildings that want to be skyscrapers when they grow up...hit em ... hit em... around neon signs that attract no attention or mirrors that call no reflection of one's image of oneself, other than ours the face of downcast shadows beneath the domelight of the jarred door, pleading. Pleasing. Hit em.

"I saw myself on the ground, and it didn't look like me. That's not the way I sleep."

2008-07-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

I did yell at the camera. I felt the wind change its strength.

On the Balcony, Trying to Sustain this Great Energy Between Us

2008-07-06T01:10:00.000-07:00

Energy. Passionate. Inspiring energy. Energy connecting to the source. Energy for a man turning on the light, seeing the numbers on the phone to call another that needs to hear his voice. Energy for a woman turning on the light, after her daughter’s nightmare, then keeping the light on to watch her sleep. Energy for the one writing every other scenario to demonstrate we are not alone.

Energy like windmills and solar panels. To store it all up and spread it out. You want to be a good person for the world, support the kind of energy that gives energy. It’s been heard now: “clean energy, clean energy.” And there isn’t such a thing.

But there is passionate energy, inspiring energy. And we must be on this side of the invention.

Now I’m trying to do my job, Energy. Do something for someone who needs it.

A little prayer. To every god and peasant.

It’s a choice one makes. And not such a difficult one after it’s simplified to the most exact common denominator. Here or Not.

If you’re Here, fold out your arms with me. Mechanics, evangelists, salesmen, flight attendants, infants, teenagers, middle aged, retirees, parents, singers, commanders, mail clerks, secretaries, law enforcement agents, strippers, drug dealers, drug users, angels, construction workers, companions, now that I know where to start to send this, where are the others? Listen up. Look out. Eight octaves. Nine dimensions.

Finite Intimacies: Two Ships Wrecking in the Night

2008-07-05T05:36:00.000-07:00

What the World Needs Now

is Love, Age Consensual Love

(click on the map)

Now Touch Me, Babe. / What Was That Promise That You Made?

Talking Dirty on a Soupcan String Phone
(hook, line and sinker)

Douchebag Phone Message - Watch more free videos

Hiding the Evidence
(on Burying Pinnochio)

Force / Feedings

Trust
The Most Infamous & Intimate of the Five Letter Words

Time to Give Back, Give Back

2008-07-03T03:13:00.000-07:00

Hi, My Name Is:

Swing me back up again. Bring me back something true. Or if not completely true, give me a good story. I keep writing what I want, what is loved, what misses me and how much I miss. Hemmingway wrote: “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

There are two kinds of artists. But only one will do. Will do. Only the writer who duels with himself, drools dreams of joy or otherwise drab crabgrass growing in the heartland of despair. The writer I want grows up, wakes with a belly of everything and nothingness, considers the weather, his cooling coffee, orange juice, the omelet like a swollen body to eat, even (and perhaps more so) enjoy. It’s a duty, a job, a consideration of life and afterlife. What for? What? What more? Where is this going?

I’ve learned enough to know I don’t know either. I know it’s July now. I know this letter I’m writing is being sent to a good place. A place with shared voices and a deep concern for connecting with each other through words. It’s clear we don’t have so long to live. This swelling concert of angels weep in falsetto. How beautiful they touch their faces.

And so I’m issuing this wild call to the canyon. Now is the time. Come out. Give me champagne, tubs of sewage, the kitten at the dumpster of what we leave behind, landfills layered with brown lettuce and how the light in an empty oil drum sings. Amputation, solace, grandeur, every one of God’s angels measuring the ounces of fallen sweat from our hair. Get out of the bones of the city and then the skin. Trying to understand the prayer. Singing anyway. Write the truest sentence you know. Singing. I’m going to keep believing. I’m going to keep believing. I’m going to keep believing.

Between Us

2008-07-01T02:12:00.000-07:00

Between Us

I’d been gluing stickers of the cosmos on my ceiling again,
trying to receive a membership to the dark everything of the universe,
so it’s taken this long to respond to your question about bricklaying
which I know nothing about. Instead of saying I built this house,
I should have told you I only surveyed its being built.
But it’s not like you remember it. The lemon trees seem to be suffering
a reverse puberty, shrugging the acne shoulders of their branches
like what? I don’t know. I don’t know why the grass continues
to brown in patches or else doesn’t grow at all. The bonfire of spring
is in full swing. Last night I killed three rabbits trying to uproot
the squashes we planted together. And I repainted the barn
so I wouldn’t have to remember the planks that need replacing.
Now I think of their rotting more, what we’re left with. Is it
raining where you’re at? Is the city still like we remember it?
—the newspaper-wrapped shoe of a man on the subway tapping out a beat,
the dingy white strobe of phonebooths like elevators in skyscrapers?
Just now I realized I won’t be able to tell your children about phonebooths
without explaining to them—sometimes it was hard to get ahold of each other.
But what has changed? The metal weathervane above the barn swivels
to a stop. Stars taped on the fanblades above my bed glow in the dark as if
the rings of Saturn were not blocks of ice and space.

Fake Empire - The National

2008-06-26T16:12:00.001-07:00

from the boxer album

Stay out super late tonight
picking apples, making pies
put a little something in our lemonade and take it with us
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

Tiptoe through our shiny city
with our diamond slippers on
do our gay ballet on ice
bluebirds on our shoulders
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

Turn the light out say goodnight
no thinking for a little while
lets not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

On Faith and the Faithful

2008-06-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

(cut into pieces from W. C. Williams' The Orchestra)

Say to them:
'Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.'

[...]The birds twitter now anew
but a design surmounts their twittering.

It is a design of a man
that makes them twitter.
It is a design.

Represent

2008-06-19T20:11:00.001-07:00

I know little outside of desire. Outside my desires, to where I’ve been lured. Another desire convinced me I chose. Another that I knew what I was thinking. Each one wants satisfaction. I want congruence. I: 1) a mutuality, 2)walking compass of iron filaments. My life is a magnet wrecking ball never swung. Memory only serves penance. I don’t repent. When I swing, I’ll know I’ve been hit. I’ll hit nothing. Simply pass close enough to align each splinter of iron in the direction of swing. My body of curves and swath. The building will be demolished past nightfall, just after the abandoned bathroom ignites a silhouette in the chest high window. Bulldozers are giant arms of comfort. The rubble an unlit pyre of failed pyrotechnics. Fourth of July all over me. A war virgin. Afraid of fireworks.

JUDITH BUTLER'S GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF ONESELF

2008-06-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

"If I give an account, and give it to you, then my narrative depends upon a structure of address. But if I can address you, I must first have been addressed, brought into the structure of address as a possibility of language before I was able to find my own way to make use of it. This follows, not only from the fact that language first belongs to the other and I acquire it through a complicated form of mimesis, but also because the very possibility of linguistic agency is derived from the situation in which one finds oneself addressed by a language one never chose. If I am first addressed by another, and if this address comes to me prior to my individuation, in what form then does it come to me? It would seem that one is always addressed in one way or another, even if one is abandoned or abused, since the void and the injury hail one in specific ways."

Autobiography of Red

2008-06-15T14:52:00.001-07:00

On my brother's first EP, he grabbed a clip from East of Eden. "Just a little lie, just a little white lie, that's all...You'll learn. You'll learn." "I don't think I want to learn that way!" It brings to mind the relationship between event and perception, and how in each of our private politcal economies, those powers by which we invest our identity speak loudest to us, even sound like us. R.I.P. Quinten Compson.

Conflict arises only when two seperate people wish to occupy the same role, the same body. Yet once these opaque wills within ourselves develop a charge great enough to erupt fume, ash, and then person, there are very few places to again make amorphous the now hardened image of ourselves. I remember looking back to see a narrative of my life, and was satisfied. I looked back to see myself and I was repulsed. This is not to confuse a negative self image, but an inability to have accept all potentials, and my choices in them. These facts are universal.

Traci led me onto the beauty of screentests. Despite the postmodern attention to erasures, screentests reveal a process not only of exclusion but also

mm/dd/yyyy

2008-06-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

Hi Calvin.
I’m not
Calvin. I’m
duplicate
number two.
What
are you
talking
about.
We drew straws,
and today’s my
day to go to
school. We’re
all taking turns
so we each only
go once a week.
Calvin, you
are so weird
I’m not even
going to
talk to you.
I’m not
Calvin.
I wish I
lived some-
place where
I went to
a normal
bus stop.
Are you in
Calvin’s class.
Will you help
me find his
locker.

-Mike Comstock
mm/dd/yyyy

Strange animals roam the earth.

2008-05-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

It's a new frontier for psychiatric illness: Brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants by changing how patients' nerve circuitry fires.

...the early results are promising. Dramatic video shows one patient visibly brightening as doctors turn on her brain pacemaker and she says in surprise: "I'm starting to smile."

Entire article here.

please come. please read.

2008-05-20T00:02:00.000-07:00

NANO spring release reading and open mic
@ the mink's backroom this thursday 7-10

brainstorm. a passing cloud.

2008-05-13T20:11:00.000-07:00

an aesthetic event is never witnessed as its full potential. the social and the aesthetic are related in the exchange of value. an event triggers a pattern of imitation, yet the event itself occurs only in diffuse state, never in the act of becoming. the act of becoming is the process of creation, the initiation of a conversation. the printed interview mute forever. the stars dead and gone. the ray now only a line segment.

Executions Resume After Hiatus

2008-05-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

The criminals went to the place of execution in the following order, Morgan, Webb, and Wolf, in the first cart; Moore in a mourning coach; Wareham and Burk in the second cart; Tilley, Green, and Howell in the third; Lloyd on a sledge; on their arrival at Tyburn they were all put into one cart. They all behaved with seriousness and decency. Mary Green professed her innocence to the last moment of the fact for which she died, cleared Ann Basket, and accused the woman who lodged in the room where the fact was committed. As Judith Tilley appeared under terrible agonies, Mary Green applied herself to her, and said, do not be concerned at this death because it is shameful, for I hope God will have mercy upon our souls; Catharine Howell likewise appeared much dejected, trembled and was under very fearful apprehensions; all the rest seemed to observe an equal conduct, except Moore, who, when near dying, shed a flood of tears. In this manner they took their leave of this transitory life, and are gone to be disposed of as shall seem best pleasing to that all-wise Being who first gave them existence.

The Last Execution Before the Lull:

Date of Execution: September 25, 2007

Offender: Richard, Michael

Last Statement: Yes, I would like for my family to take care of each other. I love you Angel, Let's ride. I guess this is it.

Cost-Benefit Analysis: False Positive/True Positive. False Negative. The True Negative is the only exculsion in our typical analysis of such cases.

Date of Execution: August 3, 2006

Offender: Wyatt Jr., William E.

Last Statement: Yes, I do. I would like to say to my two brother-in-laws and the rest of my family that I would like to thank you for supporting me through all of this. I went home to be with my Father and I went home as a trooper. I would like to say to Damien's family I did not murder your son. I did not do it. I just want you to know that -- I did not murder Damien and would ask for all of your forgiveness and I will see all of you soon. I love you guys. I love you guys. That's it.

Ordinary Account

2008-05-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

THE Ordinary of NEWGATE his ACCOUNT of the Behaviour, Confessions, and Last Dying Words of the Malefactors that were Executed at Tyburn, on Fryday the 28th of July, 1721.

AT the Sessions begun July 12, at Justice Hall in the Old-Bayly, were convicted of Capital Crimes, seven Men and five Women; 6 whereof obtaining His Majesty's Reprieve, the others were order'd for Execution. July 28, viz. J. Winshipp; R. Hunter; G. Post; W. Goslin; M. Clark, and M. Inman.

The Sunday preceeding their Execution, I preach'd to Them, and to Others present, from the following Words...

To such Actions as these, what can we say? Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the Streets of Ascalon! lest the Heathens rejoyce; lest the barbarous Nations Triumph! Besides which we mention'd the Murther of a Friend and Acquaintance; the sending an Innocent Person unprepar'd into the other World; to appear before God with all her Sins about her; and without that space which the Law allows a Condemn'd Malefactor. Against such Deeds as these, we need not have recourse to Religion; as Nature itself will loudly here exclaim, O Earth, hide not my Blood.

Application, to the Persons to dye. As, to turn their former hatred of God into the more intense Love: By true Repentance, by acknowledging their Offences, and by bearing patiently the Dispensations of Providence. Also, to convert their late hatred of Mankind, Preying, Spoiling, Robbing, into Meekness, Charity, Humility: And to endeavour to love even those who had legally accus'd them, and brought them to ignominious Deaths.

The Account of the Malefactors before their Deaths.

AS the Prisoners condemn'd were carried up to the Chappel twice each Day (where, after the Prayers, I endeavour'd, as I had time, to instruct them by explaining the Word of God) I had an easy Opportunity of Regarding their several Behaviours, which was in the general with Decency and Devotion; nor did they ever absent themselves from the publick Duties; except that George Post, and Mary Inman were for some short time Sick, and rendered incapable of attending the Publick Service in the Chapel.

1. MATTHEW CLARK) was condemn'd for the Murther of Sarah Goldington on the 27th of May last, at a Place call'd Wilsden-Green.

He was about 24 Years of Age, Born at St. Albans, near to which Place he was bred up, and serv'd a Gentleman , in whose Family he might have learn'd a much better Disposition and Temper of Mind, had not his Nature been corruptly bent from the Cradle, and the Dispositions of his Soul forceably leaning to Vice. He said, he was taught very well to Read; but what tended still to the depraving his Mind, was the neglect of Reading, or Hearing the Scripture; but sitting in the Church-Yard with other idle Fellows, during the Time of Divine-Service.

But he added, that he preceiv'd his Mind and Inclinations more sensibly inclined to Wickedness, for a Year or two last past; which he now imputed to God's Spirit having left him to himself. For he could not be contented with his old Way of Life, viz. Going to Plough, and driving Carts; but us'd to skulk about Bushy-Heath (near Watford) intending oftentimes to set upon some Passengers there; that he rob'd on that Heath a Person, of about 45 s. using him cruelly at the same time.

What Money he got by ill Means he own'd never did him any Service; but as he was liked well enough, he said, by most of the young Women about, he consumed much Money in trifling Ways upon them. And being acquainted with her he was afterwards about to wed, while he liv'd at Watford, he used to go frequently to that Town and be Merry; till by his perswasions he had induced the young Woman to consent to Marriage; and bringing her up to London, they went to a Goldsmith's to purchase a Ring; but he not having Money enough to pay for it, left her, and pretended he had a Legacy in the Country bequeath'd him of 15 l. which he would receive, and which would at once defray all Expences. Leaving London, he went toward Neesden, and Wilsden-

Green, where he had sometime liv'd, he said, he lay about for 2 or 3 Days, intending to rob till he had acquired 15 l. But being alone, tho' he oft made a Resolution to attack the next Person that pass'd, his Heart fail'd, and he durst not attempt it. That he here met the Master of the Ale-House where he did the Murder, who asking him how he came to loiter there in Hay time, offer'd him Work, and hired him for a Servant . But he upon this considering 'twas Hay time, and all Folks from Home, and in particular the Master of the said Ale-House, went thither, and calling for Liquor, fate an Hour, renewing the former Friendship that had been between him and the Maid, and talking over the many Meriments and Frolicks; he having before pretended a Love and Kindness for her. After this, he said, when he was now assured that no one was in the House but they two alone, the Devil put it into his Mind, that he could not possibly rob the House, unless the said Servant-Maid was dispatch'd. Upon which he added, that he privately got a Knife under his Coat, and getting up to kiss her, design'd to cut her Throat; but his Heart misgiving him, he sat down again. A while after he went and kiss'd her again; and then, he said (for which God pardon his Soul) he snatch'd the Knife from his Coat, and cut her Wind-pipe, and went away; but the Knife being very dull she made a noise in the Throat as if she call'd to him, and scrabbled to the Door; he seeing she was not dead return'd, and most barbarously cut her Neck round to the Bone, and then rob'd the House of a little Silver, but was too surpriz'd and shock'd to carry off much, (at mentioning this, this most horrid Mind, and most abandon'd Creature, very severely cry'd, and ask'd, if for him there could be any Mercy from God!)

When I enquired farther of the particulars of his Story, he said, that was the whole, and the true Matter of Fact. As for what follow'd afterwards, he told me, he went for London again with the little Money he had got; but being to pass by Tyburn, a sort of Horror and Trembling seiz'd him, nor could he possibly go by it. Returning back he met a Waggon, and the better to prevent Suspicion, undertook to drive it to London. Soon after the Pursuers came up to him, and ask'd him, if any one had pass'd his Waggon who might be suspected of Murther; whereupon he shewing some Confusion, they examin'd him farther, and perceiv'd the Slieve of his Shirt to be Bloody; but he affirm'd that he had met a Soldier, who abusing him, he had fought with him. But the consciousness of his Guilt pressing hard upon him, he soon confest the Truth.

He show'd a Concern, (tho' without Cause) that his Father, an honest and industrious Man, going once to see him in Newgate, said, had he been to die for any other Sin, he would have aim'd at saving his Life; but nothing but Blood could attone for Blood.

On the Tuesday before his Death, when I urg'd him to prepare for his latter End; he said, he could scarcely be well compos'd, the hanging in Chains was so apt to intrude upon his Thoughts, but that he well deserv'd it he own'd; adding, that he had often remember'd what he us'd to read in the Scripture, viz. That the Bodies of the Wicked should be expos'd to the Beasts of the Field, and to the Fowls of the Air for Meat.

Before he dy'd I ask'd him, if he had not had very terrifying and frightful Thoughts, in the Night time especially? He answer'd, that it was not easy to express the Horror of his Soul; that he had frightful Dreams, and dreadful Apprehensions: And how he should meet the murthered Creature at the Last Day, if he had destroy'd her Soul as well as her Body, God only knew! After I had advised him in these Matters, I directed him to prepare for the Reception of the Holy Sacrament, &c.

2. JOHN WINSHIPP [...]

pop quiz

2008-04-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

Q: Why might you need an Indian translator if you're going to Iraq?

A: New York Times

A: Washington Post

A: Democracy Now

Orientalism

2008-04-27T18:49:00.001-07:00

It's That Time of the Month

2008-04-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

You know. Testing. Papers due. My final semester at uhhhh university. How very pleasing! I would like to thank Eudora Weldon, Westervelt, Hogue, Mazzella, Hoagland, Flynn, Dumanis, and the late Daniel Stern for all their input and expertise. I would like to thank the university for my degree in unemployment and all the typing that will occur as a result of this finality. I've been waiting to write harlequin, sci-fi and historical fiction 4-ever! As soon as next week rolls around, we'll be back to it, I hope. The dialogue in here is charged at times, but I hope we can all bring in a method which brings all of us to percieve things slightly differently. But most of all, I'd like to thank Koschka. He's the reincarnation of Krishna and that's why I punish him so often. He's not even blue yet, even though I've been waiting. Ok Ok.

Purging Innocence

2008-04-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

Anne Marie plays horologist. The black hour hand creases her finger as she pushes it counter-clockwise. “Anne Marie. Stop that, you’ll break it,” Mrs. Dumont says, closing the grandfather clock door. The mother turns on the television and throws the remote on to the couch. The cotton cushions and gray upholstery sit frayed and uneven. Anne crawls up on the couch and picks at threads. She tugs the dirt smeared face of her favorite doll from between cushions and cradles it wrong-side-up in the crook of her arms.

She hears her mother breathing over her, and then a cool absence behind her. Anne Marie turns to catch a glimpse of her mother’s back disappear into the kitchen. “God Damnit,” she hears her mother say, just as a box of cereal hits the floor with a thrown force. Little balls of grains treble against the floor and then nothing. Anne Marie turns the doll right side up and stares into the television.

A lighthouse scans jagged waves in front of a stucco prison. Earlier in the day, a small craft advisory was issued. Prison officials call off the execution. Ethical constraints. The doctors discovered problems in the procedure. They’d have to resuscitate him if he felt any pain. Clearly unethical with so much barbiturate in Fernando Montoya’s veins. Anne turns down the volume and can’t find the channel switch.

The phone rings. Mrs. Dumont ashes her cigarette before lifting the receiver. The burning cherry falls off and burns with old butts. Mrs. Dumont takes an empty drag and picks up the lighter. She picks up and then hangs up the phone. The teakettle whistles. A diesel engine passes on the small street and Mrs. Dumont lifts to the balls of her feet to make sure Anne Marie is still there.

Beside the checklist sits her pack of smokes and a pencil. She checks off “bedroom”. Staring at the list, she pulls out another cigarette and lights it. “Opossum,” the list says. The smell of wet dog and urine sits in the kitchen. At first she thought it to be the dog. She brought the terrier to the other side of the bayou, where she saw other strays come out at times. He had always liked the woods. Leaving him there was the right thing to do. Annie Marie stopped asking about him after two weeks.

But the smell stayed after the dog was gone. Rats? No, it couldn’t be rats. Then there were holes in the cereal boxes. Big ones. Sometimes whole boxes disappeared and she found them later in the garage. Then she saw it. The opossum’s size frightened her. It hissed like a cat. For six months now Mrs. Dumont hadn’t been in the garage. Something stinks like death in it.

The living room is dressed in last week’s clothes and littered with to-go boxes and coke cans. She sits at the table next to the phone. She looks at the back of the couch and the crest of her daughter’s head. Mrs. Dumont thinks a moment about placing her hand around the ponytail stem. Annie Marie’s head felt like a dangling beet from the stalk of her hair. Mrs. Dumont’s cheeks make pits when she takes a drag.

Anne Marie stands on the couch and turns to her mother.
“Anne Marie, how many times have I told you not to stand on the couch? You’ll ruin it,” Mrs. Dumont says with her cigarette pointed at her.
Unabashed, Annie Marie asks “What does resuscitate mean?”
“It’s what you can’t do to your doll. Look at her face. Dirt collects in the plastic scratches. You can’t fix that. You know I paid good money for that doll?”
Annie Marie let loose the doll, which dangled from her arm by its feet, then falls over the ledge of the couch and hits the floor. She turns back to the television with both palms on the remote pressing buttons. The channel and volume didn’t change.
“I’m throwing that doll away.”

“25 years?! That’s a long time,” Tiny said beneath the tin port at the transit center.
“A lot can happen in twenty-five years,” Daryl agreed. He looked around the bend for their bus.
“You can’t hardly speculate about the Federal Pen,” Tiny added.
“What about Rusty? Where he at nowadays?” Daryl now asked the questions.
“In and out. In and out. He’s just a drunk now. Not up to no good, though. Clean as a whistle, even if it smell like gin.”

They both laughed in their tuxedos. A little boy ran up to them smiling.

First, the boy stopped and looked at Tiny, furrowing his little brows. Only a moment after the boy saw Daryl’s smaller and petite frame, the boy smiled and ran back to the fiberglass casing.
“How your daughters?” Tiny asked.
“Good, I guess. You know how they are,” Daryl responded. Tiny nodded his head while staring at the pavement, his hands tucked in his tuxedo pants.

If all the world was made of paper.

2008-04-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Mary Ruefle read at the museum of printing history last night. Other than the incredible printing process to witness there, Ruelfe (pronounced Rue full, without the connotation) denoted a speaking style and reading of straightforwardness, simultaneously aware of the process, audience, and the interplay of text. The almost seamless result allowed for the world to be for a moment, be made of paper. The discursive sway of the poems at times encouraged laughter, encouraged then prohibited laughter at others. Making direct and prolonged eye contact with the audience, she spoke with the guile of a performer, entering the back corner of the room prior to the reading, adjusting then approving the track lighting around the room.

Talking to Strangers

Do you see sun spots? A strong, terrible love where
there isn't any? A demoiselle crane talking to a lama
duck? Very interesting, but there's nothing in it.
Some people take electric roses and plant them in a field
to bring the field down to earth.
There's nothing wrong with that. Put down your book.
Look at me when I talk to you. I'm the oxygen mask
that comes dangling down in a plane.
I'm here to help you be garrulous.
I'm not interested in your family--not your mother,
father, brother, sister, son, daughter, lover or
dog. In France, they used to kill themselves if
a dinner party went wrong. That's a great idea.
Are you interested in orphan-types who turn out
to be kings, or kings who come to nothing?
What's the difference between watching and looking?
Doff your garb. I'm sorry, but the loggerhead turtles
off the Carolina coast are leaving for Africa tonight.
Would you like an ice cold pear instead?
Walking into the store is like entering
the delicate refrain of a Christmas poem.
What more could you want? Siddhartha said
someone who brushes against you in the street
has shared an experience with you for five hundred lives.
Can bottles bobbing on the open seabe said to move at all?

punchlines

2008-04-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

This is something I wanted to try out:

PUNCHLINES

How do you tell if a guy is gay?
What's the difference between a gay guy and a refrigerator?
How do you know you're at a gay picnic?
How do you know you're at a gay church?

After a night of fag sex,
Bob wakes up for work,
goes into the kitchen
only to find his boyfriend jerking off
into a Ziplock bag.
What are you doing? Bob asks.

How many fags does it take to rape a girl?
How do faggots get into college?
What happens if you get on a bus full of fags?
What do you call a fag in a wheelchair?
What do you call a fag in jail?

This faggot goes to the doctor
and asks him to test him for AIDS.
A week later he goes back
and the doctor confirms his worst fears -
the tests showed positive.
The fag is destroyed.
He breaks down and begs the doctor
to prescribe him something,
anything, that will help.

What does AIDS stand for?
What's the first symptom of AIDS?
Why is AIDS a miracle?

How much cum can a faggot hold?
How many fags does it take to keep a fire burning?
How do you make a faggot scream twice?

"Look straight into the camera."

2008-04-16T21:52:00.000-07:00

The Khemr Rouge in Cambodia established a secret detention facility at an abandoned local high school in Tuol Sleng, codenamed S-21. Party members accused of treason were sent there for a photograph, interview, interrogation and hand-written confession. Of the more than 14,000 prisoners - men, women, children - only seven survived.

Nhem Ein, the son of a farmer, joined the Khemr Rouge at the age of ten. At the age of fifteen he was sent to be trained as a photographer, filmmaker and cartographer. By sixteen he was named head photographer for Tuol Sleng, a job which consisted entirely of documenting the prisoners.

When a new prisoner was brought to Tuol Sleng, he was always blindfolded. He was placed in a chair (which was never used during torture, only for portraits) before the blindfold was removed. This was the prisoner's first sighting of Tuol Sleng: a slender sixteen-year-old boy standing in front of a camera repeating only one sentence and answering no questions.

Often prisoners were brought in truckloads, chained or roped together at the ankles; sometimes alone. A number was pinned on each prisoner, one boy's number pinned to his chest. But the numbers meant less than they seem to now and probably, imaginably, seemed to then because they were recycled every twelve hours. The numbers were only a consequence of circumstance. Twenty-four meant only chance. One, for instance, meant really nothing.

This was an identification photograph.

And also an identification of cognition. Tuol Sleng was a prison built to root out enemies from within the party's own ranks. The torturers sent to be tortured. And since photographs of the interrogators were also taken, the same person may be present on either side of the table, and only a few days apart.

The Interrogators:

Nhem Ein, along with others, looted homes and shops in search of photographic equipment. He choose large format 21 inch film because it was the most abundant.

7,000 negatives were found in a metal box on the second floor of the main building in the mid 1990's. Many were covered in mildew to the point of disintegration, but not all.

The remaining photographs cover a 3 year, 8 month, 20 day time period. The 78 printed images are now, and have been, part of a traveling exhibition and also the interior of a gray cloth bound book. But the most violent images, of which there are but few, are not included in either collection. A selection of highly excerpted yearbook photographs dusted off and placed on a brass table.

To shoot his photograph now, Nhem Ein charges $300 an hour but can be argued down to $50. In his wallet he carries a photograph of himself taken by an assistant photographer at Tuol Sleng.

http://www.tuolsleng.com/

Adaptive Reuse

2008-04-15T13:18:00.001-07:00

I didn't scream or anything.

poem

2008-04-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

HE HELD ME BY ONE ANKLE

at a distance enough to dodge
my windmilling arms and free leg

and steeped my dangling nakedness
in the stagnant pool.
I still remember the tension
on the surface like skin
on a cold kettle of soup.
It crept up my body slow,
penetrating the fleecy strands
of my blond hair, sliding
down my forehead and eyelids,
seeping through the slit
pressed between my lips.
The taste was like the water
had gone rotten, a dead sourness
leaking into my nostrils
and down the back of my throat
until I gagged and sputtered.
And the whole time, his hand
cinched around my thin leg
tight, the involuntary power
of an animal. Like an animal,
all I could do was squirm for air.
I thrust my head toward the surface
but he held me too deep
so I swung my arms back and forth
through the gummy water, reaching
for the invisible bottom beyond
the swirling sediment and shadows
and dull white protrusions
I figured must have been bones.
I would swim myself free
and settle in this swamp,
grow gills or die or whatever.
I didn't feel anything change
even after I went slack
and he yanked me out
and dropped me in the reeds.
If he offered some second-hand
apology or explanation, well,
I couldn't hear it through the slime
blocking up my ear canals,
trickling out like blood.

I rubbed the muck and grit and salt

from my eyes to see the bruise
left right above my foot,
gray and green and violet and dun.
It hurt so bad I couldn't stand.
I couldn't do much more than stare
into the misty horizon
and watch him, facing away,
a squat silhouette scratching its head
like it forgot something.

The News

2008-04-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

Arda Collins

.
At last, terror has arrived.
Next door, the house has gone up in flames.
A woman runs fro mthe burning wreck, her face smeared
with blood and ashes. She screams that her children are kidnapped.
It's truly exciting, and what more would anyone ask?
For a rare and beautiful egg to present itself in the grass?
For sex with the liquor store owner to progress into something
meaningful?
You don't know what I've done in front of the mirror.
I've pulled my shorts up high like a thong. I've walked back and forth
doing little kicks and making faces. I've stopped, I've stared.
I try to et my mind around the sight of myself. I make a face.
Of great seriousness. I imagine that I've just recieved
a large and upsetting piece of news. Then I look into my eyes.
Can I guess what I am thinking? Can I tell you what it is?

my tardy contribution to the artaud dialogue

2008-04-12T01:27:00.000-07:00

outsider art beginning with artaud

from the ubu web site

Another Ethogram

2008-04-11T11:52:00.000-07:00

to hell. with wings.

2008-04-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

.
.
i believe that scars
arise in preconcieved spots.
long stems that sprout sideways
along the skin because they don't
look for light. but like a backyard
dog they look for a way out. instead
they stay. hang themselves on walls
smile back from family albums,
await narration from an aging
mother's finger. she talk about scars
her secondary ones. the windswept sun
dries up the blood. i slept

in this bedroom once. history covers you
like a blanket leaves you warm
then sits folded in a corner. i've always
thought of a wheelchair as justice.

their half-words weigh on
my shoulders, a broken scale
awaiting counterparts.
.

Dear Andre Breton

2008-04-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

I had to again find a body that was proof against absolute
and infinte pain.
Those who would have liked to be good and to love me were
not old enough nor numerous enough to resist the others.
that is to say the hell of nameless beasts.
to invite them to listen one needs barricades and bombs.
there is no cosmos where man is his world to himself, alone.
i no longer believe in any notion, science or knowledge,
and especially not a hidden science (a mystic surrealism).
no universal reality, no absolute to be know and to which
one must be led, that is to say, inatiated
to confine oneself in the knowledge of particulars
of castrates and pedants which has been done
by a very limited # of indv.

Yours.
Artaud.

And my love for the Vesica Piscis of philosophy and psychology.

Standards of Measurement

2008-04-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

More than parliament, the great London fire of 1834 destroyed the weights and measures which standardized units of economic trade in the United Kingdom. Departing Washington the first of June 1843, bound for her majesty’s kingdom, a complete set of scales and one large measure on board a vessel measured nothing but the random sway of waves and the refusal of inertia. Exactly 173 days, which are not invariable, prior to his death, Hassler, the craftsman of these scales permanently waves a white handkerchief to the parting ship while baring his dull wooden teeth. He is 74.

The federally commissioned scales present an irony of good will not only because they are passed across the Atlantic between shores of former enemies but that they were passed by a congressional joint resolution of good will. These replicas of scales replace scales Hassler once journeyed to see in London, but was arrested and held as an alien enemy for two years. Was Hassler smiling because he made the weights for export too heavy, and import too light? In London, July 24, 1843 Sir George Clerk performed an inventory which assured these scales were not swallowed by a slit in the skin of the scarless sea. Without a comparable standard, who is to say these scales were accurate?

Today, within a bunker some several yards beneath The Office of Weights and Measures, just across the street from the Capitol Building, a hand crafted foot rests beneath a glass casing within a vault. No loquacious fire may lick a nanometer from the imperial standard length. Water may press every seal, yet every seal denies entry. The silent vandal, invisible, passes through each wall and sets within them a calendar of collapse. Yes, even the federal standard foot possesses within it, a half-life towards obsolescence. Every scale and measurement available to our civilization finds its ultimate, it’s federal reference here.

TJ max, in his congressional address on standard measures once said, “There exists not in nature, as far as has been hitherto observed, a single subject or species of subject, accessible to man, which presents one constant and uniform dimension.” Thomas Jefferson, with a posthumous IQ of 138, predicated the creation of such standards for the United States. Yet, in the absence of uniform nature, TJ offers the following solution: “Matter, then, by its mere extension, furnishing nothing invariable, its motion is the only remaining resource.. a pendulum, then, becomes itself a measure of determinate length, to which all others may be referred to as to a standard. But even a pendulum is not without its uncertainties.”
But what of Hassler's teeth?

Overheard poetry: "You have to learn another language or else you're stuck." - a Dutch man speaking of the narrow size of his country.

And Franke, as I promised too long ago:
It is Not About Ruling The Young, Hoagland, Ruefle connection.

In the Waiting Room

2008-04-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

.

I am no longer myself.
Rain, once fallen
no longer rain.
Cannot fill
the empy thing.

Redon's Pegasus Captive. The Throne. Us and Yours.

2008-04-04T00:54:00.000-07:00

“Artaud wishes to transform theatre much as Die Brucke artists transformed German Art in the Expressionist movement: because the expression of feeling, or the feeling of existence is that which he (Artaud) is after. But this feeling

‘cannot in reality be expressed. To do so is to betray it. To express it, however is to conceal it. True expression conceals what it exhibits. It pits the mind against nature’s real vacuum, by creating a reaction a kind of fullness of thought. Or rather it creates a vacuum in thought, in relation to the manifest illusion of nature.’

Then Wittgenstein’s beautifully epigrammatic leap.

'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’ ”

This was from a posting awhile ago. Okay, troubled and bored long enough. So I want to bury Artaud already. I want us to have a better, cleaner understanding of how this ties in to what we’re doing.

I enjoy Wittgenstein’s quote among the high-brow philosophical poignancy which I, in asking about Artaud, opened myself up to.

But I can’t help feeling incredibly broke and dissatisfied with what I will call a “clinical” (though incisive) account of art as it relates to the artist—and more importantly, the human experience.

Like most philosophy, Artaud confuses me. Confuses me in a way that reading essays of art criticism confuses me—too many words, too many ramblings, for what? the end result being mostly circular and pedantic. No beauty except in its absence. Frustrating and useful if I had a penchant for enemas.

I was however interested in the comparison to Die Brucke artists of the late 1800’s whom I am particularly fond of. Among them: Munch, Kirchner, Nolde. I believe perhaps they were responding to a higher call than Artaud.

This is a group that demands a good deal of attention; not least because they were reacting against many of the same social and political issues we are reacting against today. They have a very particular interest with internalization: that the image itself internalizes its own dark, symbolic, esoteric expression. Finally, ah, that’s poetry right? Indeed, many of these artists were friends and avid readers of poets like Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud (only a short and French list).

“For the artists of Die Brucke, the metaphor of the bridge expressed their sense of the progressive evolution of art, of which they were the culmination, and captured the essential paradox of the human condition. Finite and earthbound, the human being is fulfilled only in risking everything to attain this transcendent self” (The Print in the Western World, Hults, 600).

I would encourage anyone that is at least mildly interested to look up these artists’ printmaking. If you do it now you’ll understand their impact; save yourself from these tired words.

Because I am interested in balancing the prints of Expressionism with “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,”

I will depart or (perhaps) rather subcategorize this issue with Eastern influences.

The last excerpt, among others, reminded me of the Tao, the unnamable—secular yet wholly spiritual—path which is not to spoken of; for speaking of the Tao ruins its inherent complexity and weight.

Every stitch and fiber, each suspiration and neck-nod, all of our pain and joy and hate and love blended into a cosmic sense of balance.

Of the Satori poets of Japan, operating in the tradition of Zen-Buddhists, Shinkichi Takahashi writes in “Murmuring of the Water”:

One morning I woke onto a hill
Of withered grasses,
Myself, my family among them.

We swayed, all of us, under the wind,
And so did our shadows.

No more did the laughter of women
Assault my ears,
And I heard the murmuring
Of the limpid water of the Galaxy.

When, desperate, I stretched out
My thin dry arms,
Stars broke from the sky.

Tempered by profound spareness, there is profound enlightenment.

It seems beyond difficult to assume a relationship with these poets in a popular contemporary scene which values speed, fracture, witticisms and braggadocio OR drab retellings of the personal tumbling through the cycle of a drying machine.

But don’t be misled, we are still attached to the Expressionists too. They’re just quieter right now. Take Mathew Rohrer’s section of Ideograms:

I am all alone, writing this on a swing.
I can’t stop looking up.
It kills the mind.
A cloud looks like a pig and a rat embracing.
They’re breaking up.
I wonder if you can see it.
I wonder how much you miss me.
At night I make a little sound.
It sounds like a witch opening a birthday present.

Franz Wright and his father are on this train too, just in different cabs. F.W.:

Cloudless Snowfall

Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody’s put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly stand the beauty of this world.

And a last poem from Quan Barry who values narrative here and (equally) an attention to distress and darkness of mood.

visitor

In hindsight the amazing thing wasn’t her surviving
but the fact that a stranger entered her room.

Of course it’s all supposition, nothing
too convicting. Perhaps they struggled.

Maybe he simply ordered her supine.
All they uncovered: a locked house, her bedroom door

slightly ajar, approximately four pints straining
her pillow, a one inch section atop the crown of her head

crushed as finely as herbs. Three days later
the paperweight came back from the lab

sticky with an unreadable palm, almost as if
someone were cupping it, racing to beat

a stack of papers before they stirred.
I’m not making this up. She was my sister’s best friend,

a teen with more than a hundred sutures
embedded in the scalp. Like a dead tree she went on,

maintaining she remembered nothing
about the incident, each night

sleeping behind the same door
across from his, desperate to believe

in the official version, in planned randomness.
I can’t tell you her name. I won’t tell

because it’s all you’ll remember, you’ll lie down at night
thinking it doesn’t apply.

I’ve been wrestling with Artaud like this for a few weeks and this message really does no justice at all. But perhaps it starts to flesh a little more of the scene we’re in, apart of, and need to talk about. Philosophy is useful in understanding that it is (as I have mentioned before and still maintain) one of the enemies of writing poetry. Too cumbersome, too ponderous.

In closing, rest in peace Artaud. Insights on violence, cruelty, the implication and culpability of our audience is noted (should be pocketed as a resource). To the Expressionists (especially those involved with Lithography and woodcut prints): rave on, your brooding mysticism must be apart of us too.

And to you, if anyone’s still with me, what I’ve written here is best used for kindling. Tear it up, burn it. Listen to the cello for yourself. Go to the mountain. Count a pulse out in hums. Just after this imperfect ending, a view below the silence. What a throne.

स्ताटिक ओं थे इंटरनेट

2008-04-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

that means static on the internet, and i don't know how to control that script. that said, the week extolled an enrelenting torrent of mundane and procrastinated memorization in subjects that completely disinterest me, thereby preventing even a minute of time in my true interests: continental philosophy and literature. lets not forget anthropology and pscyhology. human sciences. hows that? how have you been? well i hope. as of tomorrow this blog is up and running again, but in the meantime, enjoy a little bit of this.

Was muss ich tun?

2008-03-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

By remaining in the theater, we are willing them to die. Their deaths happen by our seeing them, so if we were to leave the theater, they would in fact survive. Haneke practically begs us to walk out. Staying forces us to realize our full moral bankrupcty.

Snarky

2008-03-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

Zbigniew Herbert and Contemporary America High American Capitalism as Equivalent to Stalinist Realism, but with the Illusion of Choice. That's not what the article is about, but come this weekend, I'll write about it.

Fantastic Discussion of American Politics and the School of Quietude

Counter-Revolution of the Word

There are far too many isms and ists and ideologies and iconoclasts and erasures and als in these discussions. Poetry differs from politics in that the main concern is not power. A wing of language poetry falls into this trap. The institution of writing as a business doesn't know its in it. Enjoy.

Intolerable

2008-03-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

For Three Hours Tonight I Sat With My Dog Before Having to Put Him Down

2008-03-25T01:58:00.001-07:00

I Was Never Good to My Dog Until I Had to Put Him Down

10:30pm 3/24/08

Lately to find him in the corner, panting against a wall,

as if he were trying to prove he still had breath,

a jellied string of blood and snot from his nose, fluid stiffening

in the lungs, across the eyes like wax, paw-scratching

to push a cement truck off his snout, and some odor

that must have been his organs, purple cankers.

That he could have survived is not in doubt. You know,

assuming we know the affected area, it can be treated—but…

said the balding, butternut-squash-bodied doctor…at his age…

And in the veterinary’s Exam Room #1, the dog’s arthritic hips

tested the tile, needing to stand instead, just to breathe

and drooling bungee cords stretched to their maximum point

before needing to whoosh back up in heavy tongues of air or

break.

Something in us that is neither human nor inhuman looks

at suffering, always for life, prefers even its briefest,

most fragile grace. Even while convulsing, the heart

murmurs, a noticeable beat. But torn.

If you could put him on the table. There will be two shots.

Hold him there. The first will numb him. There you go.

Then the second. Steady his body. Help him

lie down. Sometimes breath is held by the lungs

then suddenly released.

The doctor turned away, picking up the Y of the stethoscope,

measuring the heartbeat. Three times, picking the metallic ear up

and listening again. His eyes left and right, seeing what he could

hear. Nothing. Everything’s stopped now.

Would you like a moment by yourself with your dog?

No, I said, patting the black shag of his belly. And waited

for the doctor to leave, to press my lips against the hair-perm

crinkle of his ear, saying bark baby, bark

THE MORE YOU KNOW (cue: rainbow)

2008-03-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

James' guess:

My guess is that both were inspired by the Age of Exploration and the "discovery" of the New World, and that each represents the last work in its respective author's oeuvre.

James, the first part of your sentence is close to the right answer, but I think it's more true of The Tempest than Amerika. Kafka wrote Amerika in the '20s, which is just a little after the Age of Exploration. You are right though that both are the last works of the authors, but that is not what I was thinking of when I posted this.

Both works were written about the New World even though both authors never had a chance to see it. It's a testimony to imagination in general and to the belief in a notion of America as imaginary.

This struck me recently because I have always struggled with divorcing my fiction from nonfiction.

I was going to write a longer answer, but the muse ran away.

Also, a little 411- The Tempest is the only play by Shakespeare that he wrote from scratch. All of his other plays were retellings of known histories, myths and folklore.

Two Poems Worthy of Memory

2008-03-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

You Mustn't Show Weakness

You mustn't show weakness
and you've got to have a tan.
But sometimes I feel like the thin veils
of Jewish women who faint
at weddings and on Yom Kippur.

You mustn't show weakness
and you've got to make a list
of all the things you can load
in a baby carriage without a baby.

This is the way things stand now:
if I pull out the stopper
after pampering myself in the bath,
I'm afraid that all of Jerusalem, and with it the whole world,
will drain out into the huge darkness.

In the daytime I lay traps for my memories
and at night I work in the Balaam Mills,
turning curse into blessing and blessing into curse.

And don't ever show weakness.
Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself
without anyone noticing. I'm like an ambulance
on two legs, hauling the patient
inside me to Last Aid
with the wailing of cry of a siren,
and people think it's ordinary speech.

- Yehuda Amichai

Shine Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say –
God, when he walked on earth.

- Robinson Jeffers

because i'm drunk and i can't sleep

2008-03-23T02:02:00.000-07:00

POP QUIZ

what do shakespeare's the tempest and kafka's amerika have in common in terms of genesis/ relationship of work to author?

(will post the answer when sobered up if you haven't already guessed)

Dialects of Gesture

2008-03-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

Dialects of Gesture, Part One

Let us wage war on totality;
let us be witnesses to the unpresentable;
let us activate the differences
- Jean-Francois Lyotard

In Artaud’s attack on prudence, on phronesis, “The Theatre and its Double” attempts to invert the hierarchy of life over stage, lift novelty over masterpiece, and gesture over speech acts. Radical philosophies carry with them the burden of their philosopher, and only rarely can a philosophy persist in its applicability beyond personality or a representation of personality. An equal burden rests within iconoclasm in its claim of escaping the cell membrane, to discover, and through its discovery reinvent the perception of that from which it departed (themselves). In order to do that, there must be a return of information, a tether from body to body, organ to organ, to inform it of the transformational damage. Otherwise, a philosophy becomes one of fleeing, a singing without relative pitch that sounds like a madman, but to the singer seems to be “ordinary speech.”

That which rebels against the social remains helplessly related to it. The impulse towards change, after all, seeks a change that brings presence to a lacking body. Every son overthrows the father ideologically, yet remains his father’s son. Iconoclasm performs little else than public tantrum, leaving its witnesses untransformed. Transformational action abandons revolutions of destruction. Every metamorphosis in art, in politics begins not with a mob shouting prompted phrases plastered across huge banners, but the improvised soliloquy of the individual wrought over time into a precise shape and condensed phrase. When this person speaks their words peal back the skin of a structure made oblique by hidden processes, by ritual, and the mere acknowledgement of presence within a now discernable area allows all to take a step in a constructive, spontaneous and autonomous direction of collective good.

This is not to romanticize the artist as loner genius or revolutionary, but one who observes and discerns much like scientists before discourse, much like the pre-socratics with their paradoxical questions of boundary and definition. The primary trait of a contemporary artist is gifted insight, not divine proclamations of false movements or the ability to make a beautiful hyperbole of their own personal experiences. We may say the value of an artist or a philosopher derives from their work to exist beyond their personality, that their work is not bound only to the particulars of their life. This may be because their life exists in extremely close relation to the social value. But why then the fuss of such and such artist’s accomplishments? Is it merely a nepotism of similarity? A camouflage of bad taste? Or is it the product of an acute observer, making only one change in the machine which sets it apart from itself? Both perhaps, yet our choice of artist may be confined to the social taste of the day, of historic materialism.

What we lack we seek, and each period in society may have what another period lacks. We suddenly include Woolf in the cannon but not in spellcheck. Heissig is not merely a pro-GDR artist. A return to form amidst social chaos. Art may be nothing less than the tectonic shifts of the individual and social. That the individual possesses enough power to resist a complete overhaul from the social zeitgeist is a trait of greatest value of the art world’s judgement of an artist. Yet these traits too, become incorporated into the social fold and are later rebelled against. Artaud, for instance, works against the concepts of Brecht.
Artaud expresses a discontent with theatre common to contemporary critiques of cinema; its only value resides in its magical relation to reality and danger (68), enough of these displays of closed, conceited, personal art (59), sugar-coated eroticism yet shorn of mystery (58), it reaffirms rather than transforms. Artaud reaffirms a fatal flaw of the rubric he criticizes (hegemony of thought, monolingualism) when he claims:

Either we restore one focal attitude and necessity in all the arts, finding correspondences between a gesture in painting or on stage, and a gesture made by lava in a volcanic eruption, or we must stop painting, gossiping, writing or doing anything at all (60).

Artuad wishes to transform theatre much as Die Brucke artists transformed German Art in the expressionist movement because the expression of feeling, or the feeling of existence is that which he is after. But this feeling “cannot in reality be expressed. To do so is to betray it. To express it, however is to conceal it. True expression conceals what it exhibits. It pits the mind against nature’s real vacuum, by creating a reaction a kind of fullness of thought. Or rather it creates a vacuum in thought, in relation to the manifest illusion of nature.” Being and Nothingness, etc. I think I’ll trademark that. There’s verisimilitude to Sarte whom Artaud claimed was a “misguided dramatist.” Which leads back to an initial claim; philosophers may not perceive beyond their personality and their philosophy is limited to that personality.

The conflict between psychology and epistemology continues as one informs the other, which in a reductionist’s standpoint may be perceived as a basic social versus individual power struggle. Which very well may be, and more than likely is, yet the attempt to transcend this is what Artaud and many many others attempt to do. Take Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, for example:

6.374 The world is independent of my will.

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does not have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. It must lie outside the world.

6.42 If the good or bad exercixse of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts – not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

6.43 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end. (And perhaps so too, the threat of death?)

6.431 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. … Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands m eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

Then Wittgenstein’s beautifully epigrammatic leap.

7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

The degree to which humility of an individual philosopher enables them to suture themselves back into the world’s fold reaches its closest point in this piece of writing. The Dyonisian inclusion of the self within a greater whole, this “bubble that pops, sighs and hardens”…

The Barbarian's Garden

2008-03-19T19:17:00.000-07:00

.

Here’s a spade and a defibrillator. To the cemetery!
Don’t doubt every element was once siphoned to the sun’s
pit and spit out, or that when we dream of death we see light.
Here’s my resume. None of its true. I’m both apache in union
uniform and an evangelical with a late night t.v. bonus blessing.
Though I want to walk outside I cannot find the perimeter. Want
out to see in? Good luck. To see past the mirror the glass
must be backlit. I’m too busy looking at myself, anyways.
So please, take a stone instead. Split it in two
repeatedly, still unallowed to witness inside.

as opposed to best

2008-03-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

I sort of forgot this forum was for workshop. I feel like I've moved away from that. Don't get me wrong, I like to edit. I'm working as an editor. But there's something about poetry that to me seems above the suggestion of line breaks and switching certain word orders. To me, poetry seems above other things too, such as competitions and grad schools. This is why I will die with an anthology of unread work. Maybe my illegitimate children, who will still be pissed off that they grew up in poverty and having an alcoholic mother, will be able to make some dough off me post-mortum. Kafka-style. They better publish it with a hot picture from my youth. That being said, do your worst. And anyway, why would I be posting this if I didn't need an editor. -Signe

LOTUS GAIT

From across the aisle of stilettos

the transvestite winks at me as if to say

I too grew up in my mother’s closet,

and I can tell we’re in this together

when he hands me a size 9 and says

these last forever.

I’ve seen Forever.

It’s somewhere between a sloshing basin

and the chair where a Chinese girl sat

while her feet were bound.

We often forget it was her mother

who did it,

who wrapped her feet in silk

and cotton soaked in blood from the deep cuts

she made on her daughter’s feet

with the most well-intending and blasphemous of hands.

But that’s how it goes.

It begins at “rite” and ends in “pedicure.”

Jesus washes the disciples’ feet,

and Mary washes his.

Fuck Tarts

2008-03-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Guys,

Applying for an M.F.A. fucking sucks. There's the initial suckiness of obsessing over your portfolio and statements of purpose and deadlines and what all, and then there's the even shittier corollary suckiness of waiting for acceptances, coping with rejections, and not knowing where you're going to be in half a year.

I'm not saying don't do it. Just, you know. Be prepared.

I just got off the phone with Judith Kroll from UT-Austin. She complimented my portfolio and was generally very kind. She said they couldn't admit me to the Michener Center, but they'd like to put me on the waiting list for the UT M.A. program in poetry writing. That's cool enough: the M.A. gives plenty of financial assistance, I'd be taking the same courses as the Michener students. It's a two-year program instead of three, though, and I'd have to do some T.A.-ing.

I'm happy I'm not getting, like, machine-gun rejected or anything, but here are the responses so far:

Michigan: wait-listed
Florida: wait-listed
UT: wait-listed
Iowa: rejected
Houston, Colorado State, Arkansas: still waiting

You can see my frustration, no? Like, three wait-lists? Is that normal? I figured a wait-list would be so small that my odds would be better to be accepted (or rejected) outright than to be wait-listed three fucking times. How should I interpret this? What's keeping me from breaking through to the immediate acceptances?

The questions! It's kind of fun, all this uncertainty, but it's keeping me from functioning normally and from viewing life through any reasonable sort of perspective. I hope if/when you decide to apply to grad school, you handle yourselves with more dignity than I.

Anyway, pardon my bitching. To keep this blog from devolving into a self-involved gripe forum, I'll include a poem:

Store-Brand Cola

The photo shows black men
in white daylight: bleached bones
under dark leather.
Time, great file,
had gnawed at the gutters,
knocked in the fence's black teeth.
It's an uneven match.
Even our stubborn square of earth,
thick dirt and gated windows, bends
from these cunning winds.
Out of the compact soil,
the stunted redbud lifts
a crooked arm
up through the bars
of sunlight, shakes off
a few pink nubs while
a bird lifts off for elsewhere.

Bastards of Incentive

2008-03-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

I want to ride in the wake of a beautiful ambulance
with an ice cream truck song and flaring lights of blue
stained-glass, red stained glass throwing red and blue
on passing buildings. So what of evening
light at noon, a squall line decapitating the skyscrapers? The sun ‘s
burnt out of his job, cuts his hours, but returns to work. It’s not
hopeless, is it? The ambulance back windows not for looking out.
Soon enough the accident scene emerges and I, the rubberneck
ogle the woman picking glass from her hair, her body
uninformed of the damage. Her hair flinches when the rain’s
first drops reach down to her.

There are calendars made of candles, chandeliers
in abandoned hotels downtown
whose walls hum without electricity. Before plywood sealed
the window someone threw a rock through
I could see. At one time
I checked into my room, flung open the curtains and waited.

No one is moving now. The ambulance takes a chair and
everyone wants to keep it
here, as though this is to where we have gathered,
as though our traveled miles combined could lead us
to, well, here.

I remember the suddenly clear sky of the evacuated city.

Expressionless faces express death or the death
before death where muscle ignores thought or
thought is preoccupied with
self image in the face of tragedy
leaving us slack-jawed,
or thought leaves us altogether but what do I think
about
looking at myself through the window
of an ambulance stuck in traffic? Life doesn’t care
who occupies it. I am not my life.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

2008-03-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, this sentence is grammatically correct and has meaning: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” First devised by professor William J. Rapaport in 1972, the sentence uses various meanings and parts of speech for the term “buffalo” (and its related proper noun “Buffalo”) to make an extremely hard-to-parse sentence.

Although most people know “buffalo” as both a singular and plural term for bison, and “Buffalo” as a city in New York, “buffalo” is also a verb meaning “to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.” Using these definitions, Wikipedia suggests the sentence can be read:

[Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [whom] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).

Still too hard to follow for those of us who don’t know “buffalo” as a verb. Refine once more:

[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.

And once more:

Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.

Wikipedia has further explanation, including the slightly frightening note:

Buffalo is not the only word in English for which this kind of sentence can be constructed; any word which is both a plural noun and a plural form of a transitive verb will do. Other examples include dice, fish, right and smelt.

Beware of Buffalo buffalo, buffalo, for they may buffalo you.

via

Some Words I Learned While Masturbating In Front of the Mirror

2008-03-12T00:04:00.001-07:00

Cockaigne =%$+#
malaprop =%3@
rectitude =%3!
undergird =%^3(
vermicular =%4)
sylph =%$0-
inspissate =%^3|
caduceus =%3#
chawbacon =%^3#
kakistocracy =%5`
Panglossian =%$4\
henbane =%+[
adjuvant =%^3]
edulcorate =%^4<
vulnerary =%4)
Ruritanian =%$5!
brummagen =%3>
haptic =%$+[
fey =%0/
bloviate =%3>

% words
^ words beginning with vowels
0 one syllable word(s)
+ two syllable word(s)
3 three syllable word(s)
4 four syllable word(s)
5 five syllable word(s)
6 six syllable word(s) NA
# word(s) beginning with the letter 'C'
@ word(s) beginning with the letter 'M'
! word(s) beginning with the letter 'R'
( word(s) beginning with the letter 'U'
) word(s) beginning with the letter 'V'
- word(s) beginning with the letter 'S'
| word(s) beginning with the letter 'I'
` word(s) beginning with the letter 'K'
\ word(s) beginning with the letter 'P'
[ word(s) beginning with the letter 'H'
] word(s) beginning with the letter 'A'
< word(s) beginning with the letter 'E'
> word(s) beginning with the letter 'B'
/ word(s) beginning with the letter 'F'
$ words chosen by Friedrich, Constable, Turner, Blake
= words I don't know

Nabokov, pivoting his foot for the waltz, exsanguinates--

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

Some words I learned from a David Foster Wallace book

2008-03-11T16:48:00.000-07:00

glabrous*~
threnody
conferva~
saurian*
nacreous
copse
belletristic
topoi~
atavistic
anaclitic~
spirant*~
solmization~
eidetic
weltschmerz**~
lapidary
deltiology*~
loupe*~
gout (quantity)
peristaltic
prognathous
scotophilic*~
arch (adj.)
lalation~
avuncular*
hermeneutics
olla podrida~
onanism*
teratoid*~
epicanthic~
wen*
hierophantically~
dicker
erythema~
papule~
titivation*
preterit
martinetism~
bulkhead
spume*
zygomatic~
sybaritic
piacular~
glasswort
sapropel~
phatic*~
dado
fianchetto*~
murine~
strabismic~
popliteal~
pudendum
swart
purslane~

* indicates fav
** indicates No. 1 fav
~ indicates word unrecognized by spellcheck

Handmade Murders: Pt. !

2008-03-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

.

.

.
Suffering resists occupancy. The western self (in context) resists identification with weakness, with true trauma, with being the effect of some uncontrollable outside causality. The extreme measure of this suffered identity posits itself automatically in non-existence, in forgetting, in the non-conscious. Yet the measure of suffering lacks universality. I spy a man with a hand on a hot stove. He wants to know if his blood can boil, and if so, to measure the efficacy of the body’s thermal regulation. Freshly fallen children first hold their hands up, surveying the damage, and then look to spectators to ascertain their own reaction. At some point, visualizing blood becomes the empirical standard for crying. Childhood in social creatures implies a malevolent God; each and everyone must endure a period of helplessness, assured by physical submission to a dominant and larger body. To call this trauma denies the definition of suffering. One cannot both occupy a childhood and suffering, unless its forgotten, unless its incorporated into a Weltanshauung. A natural process: numb to habitual suffering, a greater disaster provides an awakening to the other side of our life’s tourniquet. We, after all, occupy the position of Affect(ed). A will to suffering connotes submission, not empathy towards the effected. The effected rarely occupy pain beyond the instant; body realigns itself into proper fortification against recurrence, the attitude, feeling, the pathos adjusts itself to the event, to rationalize it, to assure that a system is in place and the existence of such a system allows us to predict its motions, to minimize our suffering.

Pain moves in prime numbers
offsets symmetry, appears random.

Although the experience may be permanent, memory distorts. Although the pain of the instant dissipates, there exists an eternal instant, an eternal recurrence where one exists in exile of pleasure, as an aesthete to the motive forces that drive our contemporary life.

Artaud, permanently occupied suffering. The necessarily involuntary tenants of such a body relay messages from outside “healthy” thinking.

Theatre of Cruelty

2008-03-08T00:05:00.000-08:00

Antonin Artaud, the French playwright, (why is playwright spelled that way?) actor, director, poet, is a man we should cuddle up to; particularly with his manifesto "The Theatre and Its Double" which includes his idea of a Theatre of Cruelty. The following is a
a fantastic excerpt from Artaud:

"The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid."

Bravo, Artaud. I particularly enjoyed this bit of biographical information:

In 1937, Artaud returned to France where he obtained a walking stick of knotted wood that he believed belonged to St. Patrick, but also Lucifer and Jesus Christ. Artaud traveled to Ireland in an effort to return the staff, though he spoke very little English and was unable to make himself understood. The majority of his trip was spent in a hotel room that he was unable to pay for. On his return trip, Artaud believed he was being attacked by two crew members and retaliated; he was arrested and put in a straitjacket.

Bravo, Artaud.

Some development of this Theatre of Cruelty should be pursued further with Sartre and Nietzsche. As I am only a novice in this area, Chris maybe you can bring your considerable wealth of knowledge to shed some enlightenment on this matter (considering other avenues of course).

Optical Illusions

2008-03-02T18:08:00.000-08:00

To the Warming Orchestra

2008-02-29T13:55:00.000-08:00

To the Warming Orchestra

Tune towards clairvoyance this once
beneath the stage. Tune the radio.
Satellites plummet silent
above us.
Tune out the audience coughs. Our one privacy.

Instruments, I’ve come to listen to you
absorb the shoulder’s heat. I appraise the moment

the bow lifts; your hollows continue to sing.
A violinist pulls hair from her mouth. Silent

at a distance. Each radio set to receive. My thoughts
my own only. Quicker than pronouncement.

Only their own.
I set out before the performance.

Each morning I hear the freeway score
shift keys. Headlights arrive like random notes

to the page and by daybreak the first movement
of rush hour whirrs away. A thousand tires cross

concrete though I hear a metaphor, a river
or seashell that amplifies the days one drawn breath.

By night even its murmur overwhelms the bayou
swells of rhythm unless you stand still and hum
perched on the culvert singing, “Moonlight on the Bayou.”
To youth insects are song.
To us they are waiting.

Democrazy

2008-02-28T23:16:00.000-08:00

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

How the Jellyfish Got in My Cereal

2008-02-26T23:49:00.000-08:00

How the Jellyfish Got in My Cereal

It didn’t just swim from the Gulf into my milk bottle.

Perhaps it was placed into my bowl as a gift

the way the Central Intelligence Agency

booby-trapped explosives in shellfish

for Castro to open.

I found out only later I was not a participant

in my parent’s separation. It was too late anyway.

It floated there so miserably, opalescent and gelatinous

as the brain of Roosevelt ignoring or expecting

the Japanese fleet of kamikazes on Pearl Harbor,

seagulls spearing the ocean for fish.

Just to feel valued I threw myself down the stairs,

forgetting no one was home.

There were raisins too around the jellyfish

like little people down below Operation Frequent Wind,

the choppers airlifting American soldiers and citizens

from Saigon.

Away from everyone you love, or everyone you love

away from you, captivity and torture

seem to be the same as a child deserted on a raft

while parents on shore sunbathe sleepily.

Soft marine animal, blobbed on the top, adopting the color

of milk. Color has always been an issue for artists and tribes

to war with. The Sudan Liberation Movement

protests the Janjaweed and Janjaweed protest the SLM.

So naturally if one runs out of caviar for the dinner party

there are no neighbors.

I suffered without quarters at the arcade and I ate my candy

before dinner, so my father slapped me and ordered me

to my room. After he was asleep I ate more candy

staring at myself through the glass of his rifle cabinet.

I don’t know how it got here, like the discovery of God

or likewise the discovery of there being no God at all

or a God with laryngitis, mouthing signs with his hands,

and the translators, all of them, misunderstand or disfigure

or relay the message in their own image. Which is very God.

Then I knew. And bit into the brainless bell

of the invertebrate’s mushroom head.

The Subway Portraits: William Stobb

2008-02-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

Mark Rothko gives his copy of The Trial
to a girl he wants to sleep with.
She must be overcast and threatening.
In any case threatening. In any case it works.

To commemorate what passes between them
he paints outdoor figures
gazing at the sea.

The subway scenes make more sense to me.
Nervous glances between passengers
premonition of something sharp flashing out
and in fact he uses a knife to make people thin.

In full exposure, I can't believe the figures.
The sea's like a cartoon --
ha ha time, ha ha vanishing point.

William Stobb on Imagery

Kosslyn's Studies on Mental Imagery

Mental Imagery: Chapter 7 of Stanford's Psych Book. Standford is the Iowa of Psych.

Your Weekend Internet Guide: The Silliman Format

2008-02-23T09:24:00.000-08:00

My Nobel Peace Prize Nominee in Afghanistan I watched her on Bill Moyers last night and feel the need to share.

Great American Pinup: A Place for Poetics. I can't recommend this particular article enough.

If you didn't click on Great American Pinup, you can get one of the informing points of view here. I love the Title, Rhubarb is Susan. Must Be an Anagram of Some Sort. Help Me Out With That One. How About The Aribtrary Capital Letters Poetry Movement.

From PreSocratics to Postmodernism

Modern History Sourcebook

So You're Thinking of an MFA, huh?

And Remember: This Is How Movements Are Born

Why Tom Waits Should be Our Resident Fiance

2008-02-22T00:25:00.000-08:00

if anyone wants to write or read poetry well, they should listen to Tom Waits and get all blood-hot and lovely-lonely. formerly drunk and chain-smoker tom.

even the best poets cannot contend with the stylistically diverse range of Waits's oeuvre.

the same guy who writes:

"even fell just like a star,
left a trail behind, you spit it, you slammed out the door
...please call me baby...
we do crazy things when we're wounded,
everyone's a bit insane,
i don't want you catching your death of cold
out walking in the rain."

and the guy who writes:

"Well I hope that I don't fall in love with you
...I turn around to look at you light a cigarette,
wish i had the guts to bum one but we've never met
...I can see that you are lonesome just like me,
and feel you'd like some company
...now it's closing time, the music fading out,
last call for drinks, I'll have another stout...
I turn around to look at you
but you're nowhere to be found,
guess I'll have another round
...And i think that I just fell in love with you."

other lyrics:

"it's got to be more than flesh and bone.
all that you love is all you own.
in a land there's a town
and in that town there's a house
and in that house there's a woman.
and in that woman there's a heart i love.
i'm going to take it with me when i go."

and besides his penchant for romance, how about his last more experimental ten years:
"Clap Hands"

Sane, sane, theyre all insane,
Fireman's blind, the conductor is lame
A Cincinnati jacket and a sad-luck dame
Hanging out the window with a bottle full of rain
Clap hands, clap hands, clap hands, clap hands

Said roar, roar, the thunder and the roar
Son of a bitch is never coming back here no more
The moon in the window and a bird on the pole
We can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal
Clap hands, clap hands, clap hands, clap hands

Said steam, steam, a hundred bad dreams
Going up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans
A fifty-dollar bill inside a palladin's hat
And nobody's sure where Mr. Knickerbockers at

Roar, roar, the thunder and the roar
Son of a bitch is never coming back here no more
Moon in the window and a bird on the pole
Can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal
Clap hands, clap hands, clap hands, clap hands

Shine, shine, a Roosevelt dime
All the way to baltimore and running out of time
Salvation army seemed to wind up in the hole
They all went to heaven in a little row boat.

Waits is an artist concerning himself with words first. Dark words. Evocative and provocative words. Some of them don't always align themselves to the easiest of our understanding. But they do, afterall, match up in the end. His voice and lyrics are like the sugar and acid of alcohol fermenting. Deer god, give us taste!

as a finale, for the very concerns we're dealing with, consider this last song, one of Waits's earliest and most under-appreciated in the last century:
"The Piano has been Drinking (not me)"

The piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep
And the combo went back to New York, the jukebox has to take a leak
And the carpet needs a haircut, and the spotlight looks like a prison break
And the telephone's out of cigarettes, and the balcony is on the make
And the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking...

And the menus are all freezing, and the light man's blind in one eye
And he can't see out of the other
And the piano-tuner's got a hearing aid, and he showed up with his mother
And the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking
As the bouncer is a Sumo wrestler cream-puff casper milktoast
And the owner is a mental midget with the I.Q. of a fence post
'Cause the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking...

And you can't find your waitress with a Geiger counter
And she hates you and your friends and you just can't get served without her
And the box-office is drooling, and the bar stools are on fire
And the newspapers were fooling, and the ash-trays have retired
'Cause the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking
The piano has been drinking, not me, not me, not me, not me, not me.

Sounds like Ginsberg, Kerouac--and, more presently, Dean Young right? But impressive without the thicket. Fuck twirling around for twirling's sake. You can be dynamic without being double-jointed in verse and fancy. Fuck being young Young Jung. Give me the strong rot-gut of liver-piercing alcohol during the roaring twenties speakeasy. I might die tonight drinking what I've drunk. Give me the real hard stuff.

Fermata

2008-02-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

All exiled from their own temples.
The prosecutors of themselves. Hear them
outside the newspaper press
repeating what they read while claiming
novel vision. Both ghost and machine
empty. Flesh the exception.
One way out. Cannot fill
the empty thing. Sputtering.
Pleasure not even temporary.
The path thin along the swamp
banks. Thick ecstasy of insect
swells fill the air with song
at all sides. Mute fear
a circle that surrounds each
footstep. Stand still long
enough. The song returns.

Also:

Geoffrey's Walt Whitman (on the fore) Weeping on a Montrosian Doorstep

The History of Evil

2008-02-20T15:52:00.001-08:00

2008-02-18T21:44:00.000-08:00

Bobby’s Argument Against The End

The head lowers not for prayer
but submission. In the preacher’s throat
a cracked muffler for grief speaks in tone God
at the arc’s tip of a semi circle with the casket
cradled like a period
in the fermata. Otherwise, the day’s surplus
beauty goes unsold and the market’s crashing.
Sun so bright it’s a wonder they’re bowed so
turned to inward out, it could only be
their necks too weak to lift for so much beauty.
As though they’d stay there after the motorcade
departed, their bodies stalked and chasing with
quick grown roots to meet the lowered body.
No one thought him a farmer though he was.
Former Husband. Father of two. Formerly three.
A thousand stalks before his house
unaccounted for survivors. Grow six
feet to go un-harvested. Heavy headed.
Would shrug their shoulders had they had ‘em.

Fugue

2008-02-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

Density and dynamism.

Fugue

Hospital copter skates south above the river:
urgency and ease in its glide and rotor hum.
Out of town, a girl has given her arms
to a thresher, or a passenger
rests half through a windshield.

Once, a truckful of police with clear
plastic shields sped away from city center
past a row of shops over basement apartments
where tenants ring chimes and light
candles in shrines every day.

Once, this place was on fire.
Once, under water. Once, this place
hurtled through a sudden dream
of light and heat—in form, unprecedented
in matter, all becoming of song.

Tower chimes and no one fails
to adore its orchestration. Songs pass in light
traffic. Arrangements slide toward jaywalkers,
café loiterers. All surfaces tend
to beautiful noise.

When lovers set the glass pipe down
on the bed stand of the rented room
a shaft of streetlight plays smoke and skin.
They exhale and descend into body.
Pace and pitch evolve.

A pattern of days drawn like a bow
over strings. Round wind in the throat of an oboe.
In the street, a wash of sound.
The cathedral rings the hour.
I take steady breath. I come to posture.

William Stobb

Nervous Systems
Penguin Books

A Disolving Simulacrum

2008-02-18T15:02:00.002-08:00

Baudriallard's Simulacrum:

1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

I took a four month departure from my mostly vegetarian diet. I dutifully return.

Strange Loop

2008-02-17T17:07:00.001-08:00

It’s not astonishing I don’t see
past the hem into the pocket of the passing man,
the teeth of the frowning woman at the park bench
past the horizon.

The leashed dog has forgotten his collar.
Tendons unflexed at what passes past the leash circumference.
He can’t dream of his own churled snout, though his mouth wets while
flocks of blackbirds ascend overpasses, over rush hour,
perform aerial calligrams to mock our lack of language.

Somewhere on the earth’s underbelly
someone picks lint from their bellybutton. Examines it
beneath flickered light.

There’s no highway sign that says exit here
and directs you where you’re going.

Perhaps its better I can’t imagine. I’ve forgotten you already.

Dead Shark Philosophy

2008-02-14T01:07:00.000-08:00

We don’t have the words just yet

for what the shark dreams—

barely as the ocean’s plunging depth

have we determined its features,

we speak accurately only

when we are silent as the shark

swimming in that dark sea of ourselves;

but what are we hiding? what crater?

Though it is not exactly false,

truth can be unfair, she said

and I loved her her whole life

for saying it.

Our first step must be resistance

to claim what we know.

After I suffocated her I hanged myself.

Get away from me.

Solipsism

2008-02-13T15:51:00.000-08:00

Solipsism

The dead dream our footsteps
over cracked floorboards, above them
our shadows all that touches
their waned faces. They’ve forgotten
our language and have substituted
every word for something about them.

Did you ever think of a house
simply as a collection of light?
Or death as giving it back? Slowly.
Obstruction may be all we are.
Light pauses to imitate us. Mock us even.
At night it tucks away in our skin
keeps us warm, allows us to almost
recognize one another in the dark.

c.

From Donald Revell's Thief of Strings

2008-02-13T15:38:00.000-08:00

What If Christ Were a Snowflake Falling into the Sea

The water is taller than itself,
Covering spirits of the air beneath.
And so the land, so mountainous beside,
Does not exist.

Have you thought about the future?
Take your finger and rub it across a stone.
Do you feel it?
Heat where nothing but cold most certainly is.

The water does not suspect.
A distant star is plotting with the center of the Earth
Against the Earth.
And the lake rises. The outlet rivers rise.

There is also an uprising in Kiev.
God is love.

Silly Poet! Things don't think! We do!

2008-02-10T20:45:00.001-08:00

i’m waiting for angle of yaw in the mail and am preparing myself for the endeavor into abstract poetry. it’s something i claim as a weakness, yet it simply tells me i need to make the logic acute, the uncertain statement proposed as an interrogative with a will towards truth.

all that we experience cannot be described in tangible terms. at times the actual points of pressure in a situation are counterbalanced, or diverted in such a way as to obscure the source of that pressure. what’s left is a feeling. this ignorant vulnerability. our vulnerable ignorance.

wcw contradicted himself in arguing against simile. two things are not equal. they are separate. each individual. however, his axiomatic poetry which revolves around the dictum, “no ideas but in things” does just that.

From Nora in Hell.

XVIII 1. How deftly we keep love from each other. It is no trick at all: the movement of a cat that leaps a low barrier.

From Selected Poems

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot.

also, I found a good translation of petrarch at half price today, but picked up his complete poems instead, not opening it to compare sonnet 91 which dropped me to the floor. sounds so much like gilbert. I would endeavor to say that gilbert is our contemporary petrarch, and not only by this passing observation, or his geography, nor even his contributions to contemporary verse. I’m attempting to imitate the translation.

Canzoniere 91

the lovely lady who you loved so much
has suddenly departed from us,
has climbed to heaven i trust,
since every act of hers was sweet and gentle.

It is time to recover both the keys
to your heart that she possessed,
and follow her. You will be weightless.

Just as when a single link breaks
the rest of the chain is soon to follow.

You have observed now how all things
run towards death, and how the soul
must be lightened for the perilous gate.

I slaughtered it. Goes to show the importance of translation. I'll post the actual poem after I return from purchasing the better translation.