our way is not difficult/basement fungus

Tim Hecker is a sound artist who moves at the (a) periphery of the electronica scene.His Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again CD is currently wedged in the car stereo (note to would be thieves: car stereo is an old discman stuck in the glove compartment), somewhere in the mid-city lifting fog. One of his CDs, Your Love is Rotten to the Core, is composed largely (or entirely, I can't tell and he doesn't say) of snippets of Van Halen, MTV VJ patter about Van Halen, and radio tour ads, etc. I think my affinity with this springs out of the Steely Dan project, that is, out of my own sense that collage can be worked over in surprising and ultimately unrecognizable ways, and yet it carries a felt ghost of its former environment, which exerts its own (counter) influence. On top of this, both Tim and I aim - I think - at a rough integration of the source material - not a gleaming surface smoothness, but a sense of textural consistency - if consistency is the word? The source distinctions become blurred - the identity, whether stolen or "home-brewed" is run-over, endandgered, pushed to the point where its discarded, where it doesnt matter any more, where the "stealing" doesn't even deserve such a bold word to describe it. Working out of the media-stream, acknowledging pop-cultural heroes and villains, thats just a part of the job, a possibility of the basic toolkit. Its in a way a tribute to such diverse pioneers of this technique, whether it be the dadaists, the early Ashberry and Berrigan poems, John Cage's Imaginery Landscapes series, Warhol's portraits, or the embedding of samples in pop music of the 80s and early 90s (from hip hop to industrial to Metallica), I think the cultural technology has changed radically, so that such "borrowings" seem far less ironic, far less foregrounded or daring, or intrusive, than they once did. In a sense, the scissors, the act of violence, that birthed the cut-up are replaced and the snippets are now seen as simply another source to work over. We are past the pioneer stage, and we're getting into working this place, this charted but rough territory. And in so doing, there is a chance here to explore, perhaps, a non-sentimental tenderness, a way to work through - critically, awarely - our tangled relationships, both with our crafts and sense of self and the wider cultural contexts we wade through. So Danielle Steele (dig that final "e" - refinement is always and add-on) and Eddie Van Halen become different, take on new life, tragic, comic, absurd, recognizably human, de-celebrified, by this type of working through.

What's Tim have to say?

There has really never been an overarching concept to any of my recordings, a concept if you will that has guided the entire recording process. The concept I've used for previous records has been more of a practice of writing, almost an act of fiction, just like the efforts used in designing the artwork. That's not to say that all of my recording processes have been devoid of ideas or directions - they very much do exist, but I've tended to ham up the presentation of a record, almost in reaction to much of the pretentious pseudo-conceptualization that is endemic to the electronic and experimental genres.

and...

Hence my work has been a hunting party for the wild fox that is the nexus of dissonance and melody. There are many possible ways to hunt the fox; it gives me a reason to keep on.

His new record - Mirages - is - evidently - out. For awhile now, I've missed that boat. But any of his CDs come highly recommended. Here's copy for Mirages (from the invw. again), and Hecker's elaboration:

Let me ask about the press material accompanying the new album: "Taking inspiration from Italian partigiani and the counter-attack of the anti-Vichyists, Hecker has issued a salvo against all tourists of melancholy, from trustafarian pseudo-leftists to the Ikea nihilists of the bobist rive droite. ... With its motifs of eroticism and torture, militancy, and ecstatic pain, Mirages also points backwards towards the Viking penchant for fighting and feasting." Care to elaborate?

This is basically making reference to some of the more heroic WWII anti-fascists, in particular their resolve in waging war against the inauthenticities of modern life - both "trustafarian pseudo-leftists" (those who pay to play) and the "bobo nihilists" (those who play to pay). I wanted to say that this record is an attempt at authentic experience (even if it failed), and even if it must be barbarian to do so.

Check out the whole interview here.
-

Web crew, what can I say to you? Blogging reminds me that I'm only alone when I want to be. Actually, the trashcan I passed in the tenderloin today showed every sign of sentience. It freaked me out. It was a modest Oscar the Grouch aluminum can, 2 ft tall, with a brown plastic covering tied on, which was morphing magnificiently- and threateningly - in the wind, like some tiny and deeply disturbed butoh dancer (or, more to the heart, like some horrific minitiaure demon which was going to reach out and grab for me). As i passed, it arced out towards my leg and bike, and as i continued passing, it followed me in its lunge, bending backwards, roughly inflated and billowy.That woke me right up.

Tenderloin is an SF neighborhood reliably full of street people, drunks, junkies, and recent Vietnemese immigrants. I saw them quite clearly after that trashcan. Outside my office, I watched a grandmother kiss (SMACK!) her grandchild (suspended in grandpa's baby bjorn) and then comment joyfully on him in cantonese to her bemused husband. Love. The emotional thrust, at least, was clear. I imagine Jim has become quite the conoisseur of knowing-not knowing what the folks around him are speaking, the fine and intelligible art of discerning incomprehension, and comprehending it. Drunks on words, in words, not always, but oft

en. (what a deelight/th

a bed of nails. a home (shabby-chic)
to set out from. going
in.

"both ways, now"

head bitten off, or kissed

It was quite a rollercoaster reading folks responses to Monday's post.

Sarah (my wife) is locked out of our apartment today, so I don't have much time to wwrite before heading home. Today she forgot her keys and I forgot my wallet.

And yes, this is the second time I have forgotten that of late, although she has only forgotten her keys this one time.

In lieu of a meaty post, I recommend Silliman's Tuesday post, on the role of relaxation and aging in writing. Juicy and refreshing, Mr. Silliman.

That rollercoaster, though...

It was definitely a personal, or intimate musing, but it wasn't meant to be a wailing confession. I re-read it, and I still don't see too much of that. Just for the record, it wasn't a headbanging, I dont feel I was or currently am doing much self-hatred and flagellation round a) money, b) being depressed, or even (of late) c) writing and poetry, but I think its healthy to put out and name whatever you are feeling, rather than silence it and make it some unspeakable secret. I was surrpised to get advice after that post, if anything, it was quite absorbing to write it. Luckily I wasn't depressed actually, I have found depression makes it hard to receive,let alone consider, advice, and if the advice is (and you know who you are) "stop whining and get over it" the depressed person is incredibably likely to a) feel distant from that person, and b) beat themself up for that distance, all the while c) becoming more depressed and d) not being able to meaningfully address what is happening to i) themself or ii) the advisor.

In case that misses ya, I gotta say, thats the worst possible advice. Anyway, note the distance. I do think it is curious that depression is STILL so unspoken (and prevalent) in our culture, and I am astounded at the depth and variety of responses and, really, testimonies Monday's entry elicited. Rock on, bloggers! We do this work together.

PS - I have had several songs from the adolescents s/t 81 LP, the one that's turquoise w/ red piping, running through my head today. Fuck do I need a copy of that again. Please realize that if in a fit of intense and misguided (but poignant) 22 yr old spiritual ardor, you give away your record collection before entering a monastery, this will inevitably and repeatedly come back to bite you in the ass. Its just good sense.

Now to go rescue my missus.

earthlink's webmail is not working today. so i am out of touch.

thinking - out of touch with what? email has become a daily habit for me, an integral part of the day,butit can also feel like a chore - oh i have to check my email. much of my life can feel like chores, the mind spins it so. this chore-life is a key component of what i would call depression. melancholia is just - for me, today - a so-softer way to put it, melancholia seems to me a cult of sadnes, or just the xperience of it, its such a lovely sounding word. depression is a down, nasty, unattractive beast. it really captures the low, cornered, wounded/dying dig-yr-won-grave-and-piss-on-it-too "stuck" energy of habitual, negative, reinforcing patterns. making life a series of chores is a sure-fire way to get depressed and stay there (there are always more chores).

the depressed person often looks and acts like a slave, or prisoner, like someone whose agency has been taken away. a less flamboyant zombie, or the drudges of dystopia without the distant big boss organzing the whole thing - no, the big boss is some hidden raging voice calling the shots and cracking the whip, and they are just the mule with the big cart attached, pulling uphill.

i'm thinking about all this because i am realizing how lucky i am today, and how a good portion of that "luck" (which, no, i don't exactly believe in, but the word's not all wrong - when used carefully to talk about the edges of what we can claim authorship/partnership of/in - where causal patterns or karma become difficult to discern rationally - but some sensible undercurrent, somehow unameable and often vague, is perceived at work - how is he always so lucky in bizness?) I owe to having money. Here's the record:

-by the age of 16 any good shrink would have noted that i was suffering from moderate depression.
-by the age of 21 any good shrink would have upped the ante to severe depression, with attendant (and i lack the terminology, ego disintegration (losing one's shit) to the point where holding down a job had become impossible.
-this moderate to severe shit kept on coming from 1997 to 2001, relapsed for good stretches of the next two yrs (MFA at Naropa) and climbed the charts once more 2003-04.
-during those 7 years, I was employed for perhaps 18 months.

I should addd to this "and my wife didnt leave me". How on earth was I able to live during/thru this? Money. But I dont know if it is "luck" or no. Without that money (an inheritance), the situation would have been different from the get go. But I am thinking about Henry Darger today, about homeless people, the mentally ill, alcoholics, etc., people with desperate need for healing and care, and how, in our culture of created scarcity, there is no money for this. How can someone have a chance to heal their traumas and wounds if they are starving and must prostitute themselves into any available job? The severaly depressed tend not to interview well, and the young ones havent had the chance to acquire any skills, let alone confidence. Money saw me thru - it didnt heal me, but it kept me alive. And when I finally woke up and wanted to live differently, it has been - in a very real measure - the judicious use of money which has helped create the space for me to heal. It involves other people, and other people have to live, and in this same system, that means they hve to be paid, which means money.

I spent years dissing money as a necessary evil. Now I see how it can be a medicine also. Like so many other things, it is our abuse of it that creates its maliciousness.

So today, with very little adornment, I am thinking how unfair our economy and political world our - how unfair that I am writing you this today because I have the money to do so, and others do not, making escaping from difficult, even unbearably repressive conditions and limited horizons, that much harder to do.

ongonng

obligation. regret. temperance. (see dis-). "on-going" or ongonng.

if i let my mind roam over words (fallen boulders, many loose) - what subject (trail) arises?

i could cut down the rock-face, mad scramble. i could follow the deer path towards the lake (lined with mats of alpine flowers). i could head up the switchbacks to the icy summit (with much to see and naught to do). where are the pikas?

towering piles of granite, raw chunks of quartz, tan and dry scats. the wind here is dying down somewhat, it is high up, lonely, but pleasingly so - i am in a thin, high valley. no trees. so much exposed rock - i could imagine how this place was carved out by glaciers i coul

go and get a haircut. miserable, unruly hair. wanting to spread its constant after-the-fact. but there is something to it, this attractive fibre, esp. as it bounds and bobs down the street or past you at a party.

but the eye is a constant traversing of levels - we go from one detail to the next, crossing levels, bonus rounds, terrain. the microscopic world eventually taxes our attention, the macro lulls us to sleep (here the cosmic opiate). somewhere inbetween i figure this gritty blacktop.

antiseptic. cornered. a mauling. the little knots in the back ex
ploding.

and if this was a table of contents (as content slips in or thru (as neutrinos through the core of the earth)) there would be a sloppy tide, or gentle roll, depending on hwo long you've been at sea - a buck to port, a tilt aft.

a tilted port, a buck aft. half mass,
the island, the destitute
the scoundrel,
an insitute, an investigation,
the long corroidors and the plants in their planters
coffee cups
under artificial lights.

The Jim Goar Review (not by Jim Goar)

Jim Goar on yesters blog:

But I wonder if we are asking something of writing here that I don’t think is so important. It seems you want it to be about self reflection, revelation, learning. we are to improve ourselves through our writing. I just think we write ourselves through our writing. our language will change as we change. our blind spots are there in our work. I don’t think that this is bad. if we have that blind spot. let it show (there is no other way. If we are homophobic or racist or a bit scared of the dark. And we go through our work and cut out any sniff of that “ugliness” then the work goes limp.). this is not to say that I am endorsing these beliefs. All that I am saying is that if they are there in yr mind, and they come out on the page, even in little hints, they should not be run away from. If repression is a concern in yr life, fix it in yr life, leave yr work alone.

I jst want to say that I dont accept that division. Life and work are fluid entities - if I am a writer, that seperation is increasingly tenuous, especially if i take consciosuness (not mine, but not not mine either) as my prime subject - a poetry of worded consciousness is necessarily explorative, it also is necessarily observant and critical (that is to to say articulating a critical response to observed sufferings which is itself creative - ie transformative, healing). The subject slips, the object too - a dance, or fall, or laugh. Of course self-improvement is futile, as is world-improvement. But if by improvewe mean transform, and the transformation is internal, is one of perspective and response - then that is the radical liberation and transformative magic/alchemy i wish to practice, that i most admire. where its lacking - okay, its lacking. that is the palce to begin, in the loss, confusion, mire. All this said, I think i agree with most of what Jim says - certainly we write our own subjecthood (and world) into being - and in a sense there's nothign wrong, nothing requiring fixing. But by paying more attention to how I type, how I think, I I cry - to immersing myself in this world, this body - things do change. I can't name it - but there is a shift. And that shift, and putting the effort in to letting that shift happen. to returning it to our awarenes, thats what I practice in buddhism, in poetry, and in therapy. No self, no improvement. Which sounds too like a slogan but... its fascinating Jim read my thoughts that way, I wouldnt be surprised if some of that energy IS in the text, but I don't want to develop THAT voice. I don't want to hide it either - but as Jim has it, simply allowing the dark stuff /the the hidden / the silenced / the illegal / the obscene / the repressed (how's that for a set of redefintions/lateral shoots, Jim?) to come into mind/speech/body/word/light is a huge part of that work - just let it be. But the BE gets pretty heavy when we are acknowledging the depths of our own (and our works own) hatred, misanthropy, rage, worhtlessness, fear, tension, anxiety, etc. something I am not sure Paul McCartney got, if I am right in reading him as being seduced by the possible power of becoming a living Hallmark card.

-

Also, Jim was asking a few days back (June 16) on his blog (the real discussion is on the comments page, where his quote is from):

But you mentioned that many poets were going to be speaking against the war ... I wonder though, were any of those poets going to read pro-war (is there such a thing?) poetry? If not, why? Obviously someone out there is happy with what bush is doing.

I think that is a fascinating question. Where are the pro-war poets? Certainly there are pro-war bloggers - and there have been militaristic poets, Kipling springs to mind, for me, and a poet like Anne Waldman does invoke consciosu aggression and destruction through verse - but where were the poets urging on a war agaisnt a country which essentially had done nothing against us? Even in the cradle of empire, there was very little cultural activity to support the developing Crusade. The action was largely off-stage, and the endless news conference diplomacy to get it over to the american people (and then the world) that this is going to happen (oh yeah, and, if you need to question it, it should happen too - in fact it needs to happen). Neil Young sung about the heroism of the airline passengers who fought back agaist the fourth plane's hijackers, and the Dixie Chicks got ambushed for not supporting Bush, and I am sure there were a dozen pro-"our boys" country songs, but when the mantle of supporting the war comes up, it alsways seems mediated and embedded in some grander cause - like defending freedom, spreading democracy - or obfuscated by some slippery semiotics - where supporting our troops means an uncritical rallying around the flag (where flag means the preseident), even if the US action in Iraq, on investigation, has a very complicated relation to the very causes its wraps itself in, and even if supporting the troops means not paying any attention to their suffering and deaths. But while anti-war poetry is -or can be - explicitly anti-war, pro-war poetry tends to overlook or avoid altogther the actual material of war - i mass, organized violence and murder with the aim of achieving domination over an enemy. Goals and organizing principles which continue on the ground in Iraq today. (The whole democracy angle too - c'mon: imagine if the French king had INVADED the 13 colonies and thrown out the British but also decided the northerners were pesky and rounded them up also and handed the whole place to a couple handpicked southerners (not Jefferson, certainly, but maybe Hamilton). Could we celebrate that event on the 4th of July? It's a completely ridiculous scenario unparralled in world history)

It would be interesting to compile this pro-war cultural material, and see to what extent it followed the Bush Administration's lead in ignoring the actual (and quite attractive, from a certain ( Western capitalist imperialist ) viewpoint) reasons for going to war (such as shoring up American hegemony and corporate control in a potentially wealthy (from oil) and strategically imporant (thanks again to oil, and also geography) country with a history (form that same viewpoint) of stirring up trouble) in favor of an americana patchwork of sanitized, blatantly invented, consumer-friendly half-truths, sentimental dodges, and lies. It wasn't particularly masterful or inspired, but it worked (we invaded). A type of creative myopia - of great use in creating a cover story to justify hideous and untold (and even uncounted) violence.

I don't think this is an accident. I think an anti-war poem springs fairly easily out of the basic compassion and even laziness of a human mind. Why go to all that mad fuss of having a war?And, if you are brave or crazy enough - like the futurists - to actually explore and celebrate the psychic drives that lead to war, you find yourself cornered off as some type of freak (but the Italian futuruists would have created GREAT sony Playstation "shooter" games - Doom and its spawn may be their populsit legacy) by the great bourgeois masses. Body parts? Tanks? No thank you. People like their wars at a safe (and homogonized) distance. Because war is an activity we NEED to justify. Any hurt-causing activity, anything we partake of that way, there is some level of us knowing that it doesn't feel right - and the whole "its wrong" moralism of anti-war thought is a type f poorly worded articulation of this - at an energetic level, the violence we perpetuate on to others, the voiding of their life, autonomy, and worth, carries over to us to - we the perpetrator. we, in a thousand ways, are not seprate, not immune. War is an activity which perpetuates, and creates, suffering. For all parties. The veyr real pleasure in violence and war is a short lved rarity compared to the tension, depression, rage, loss, dimentia and pain of the activity of state-organized murder and military repression. In this sense I think the anti-war poetry and protest speaks palpably and prominently to the wishes of the unspoken - or more accurately, unheeeded, for they speak, and are actively ignored) majority throughout the world, which turned out by the millions to protest this agressive, adventurist, immoral war.

( I think, obviously, my thoughts here are complicated by wars against palpable oppressors - resistance struggles. Being on the defense makes it inherently personal, the stakes are revealed, one "rises up" to "strike back". This posture - while also tragic, and difficult, and complicated - is much easier to translate into the arts and writing - hence the numerous poetry readings in support of the Sandinistas in the 70s, whereas the Contras got their money from arms dealers re-routing their profits through offshore banks.

hidden text!

its a blog adventure: yesterdays post has a good deal of hidden text at its bottom. i have no idea how it got like that or what to do about it. but i know - like in Harry Potter - if you highlight the apparently blank section, a secret message or two will be revealed.

repression redux

of course, the poet themself is probably the least likely to note their own repressions. we see it far more clearly in the work of other writers, of writers unlike ourselves (writ large - often a kind of "KEEP OUT") and of those more like-minded (we may even be concerned for them ).

and by repression i am implying something subtle - a poetry lacking any form of repression would be a perfectly enlightened use of language -and while that is out there, for both readers and writers - i think its a lil bit rare. i should add that each reading of a line or poem offers up a new relation to it, so the same reader can have 8 different responses to a text, and even a repressed text can be witnessed as repressive, and if the reader notes that, then why not say "this reading is free of repression". and the multiple subject is quite diff., and to me saner than the often silly notions of the unconscious the surrealists developed, silly, that is, if i am reading their notions of it correctly. but no, i am not surprised at how much sex (and how little labor - wheezly french cafe-hopping artists - try to join the comunist party, eh? sing the internationale - no, no no...) oozed into their exquisite corpses. all i mea to say is "automatic" writing, far from being divorced from culture, simply partakes of it even more whole-hoggedly (or at least w/ a marked difference, but no drop in intensity) , as, perhaps, sara implies in her comment.

but this is probably some kind of la-la land i have drifted into. even the terms are a little strange to me. if you like it, okay. i'm trusting you, please don't fuck up.

and, in case it was unclear, i did indeed mean to expose a strong, if partially unconscious, line of thinking i take on my own work and process vis a vis "out of the blue" work - and to critique its assumptions. i dont think one can write without a subject, or without an ego, for that matter. but they can open onto other subjects, other egos, and then we partake of multiplicity. which can be blinding / overwhelming / exquisite / enjoyable (depending) to read.i would say a partaking in multiplicity is at the heart of the age-old sense of the sublime. it has its own demands, but its liberation is compelling - thinking of work i've done and of having a chance later today to read philwhalen's "Diamond Noodle", a "novel" from 1980.

if i hadn't forgot to bring some lunch money i would even write out the first page, but i did folks, i 'm hungry, wicked hungry, so please pity me in your hardworking and poetic hearts. and speed deliver me a sandwich, if you can.

(and for all those prying eyes, he had a fall, but he's okay, he's healing. my coworker is still quite concerned about him, but he's a serious older chap and we still don't talk. i could be more outgoing here, it would broaden my circle of people to loan a fiver off of).

sprung off exactly what?

for years i have critiqued my own work - or noted a limit of it - as being "sprung off nothing". i am not sure why that sense of a tabula rasa in the genesis of my work persisted so long, but the critque went as follows:

-that work comes out of the blue. you just "made it up".
-made up work lacks the meatiness and accessibility of an intersubjective work
-an intersubjective work takes/draws from/manipulates/subverts some pre-existing independant entity ( a book, person, film, place etc.) and locates it as a subject or concern of the work
-works with subjects or concerns with recognizable third-party noun states are "real" works of art. they participae in an on-going discourse.
-works made up out of the blue are not participatory in age-old discourses. they are empty narcissiticistic mirrors.

if i come clean, it would be that this line of thinking (and the emotional responses to situations buried in those thoughts) has been a massive harm to me as a writer. not to mention that it doesn't make much sense. the "out of the blue" or spontaneous work has a momentary, investigative subject which immediately arises - multiple subjects arising - with the first letter, word, phrase, line. that subject too has the same ability and flexibility open to it that a...

well, how much can you write about how fucked up you are? at some point THAT becomes narcissism too. but, alongside making peace with (and perhaps airing out) my own methods and critiques thereof, i have a question too:

to what extent does poetry participate in repression? what are its traces? what stance as readers do we take towards poems which engage in this form of violence, and what responsibility, what awareness, as writers can we bring to the continual in-built repressions of our own work? who out there feels these questions resonante, and who feels they're irrelevent?

in terms of defining represion, i don't have a lot of ammo here, but i am attracted to the creative perversity in Foucault's use of the term - so repression is a productive relationship, but one where the productive relationship is alienated to such an extent as to be bastardized, and furthermore, disowned/unrecognized. the classic example is how the focus on policing adolescent sexuality in the 19th century resulted in an explosion of interest ina nd attention to adolescent sexuality, to the point that the repressive microscope of the Victorians (no touching yerself downthere, no touching anyone else down there too) ended up becoming an inculative manure for perversion, creating a whole cultural legion of artifacts with a prurient interest. in short, the repression of adolescent sexuality fostered a myth of adolescent sexuality, which was then disseminated in ever-wider circles, ending up in such far-off palces as 20th century post-war teen flicks and the legions of underground kiddie-porn websites, magazines etc.

fellow bloggers, i am benighted w/ a sense of exhaustion here. what else can i do? i must be missing something, on second thought, the real answer to the above questions is in the next poem we write. let me rephrase - please no more kiddie porn, okay? take a good look in the closets, kids.

3:11

a man behind me is talking to his dad on the phone, his Dad's in trouble - hit by a car? or fell? it sounds bad. "call 9-1-1, don't panic, kepe his head up, put pressure on it, listen to me, listen to me, put pressure on it, he's going to be okay, he's veyr tough - huh? - he's goign to be okay, please stop crying, please hold on..."

this is a co-worker of mine, and we've never talked before.

k

185 pages in

185 pages into a book about the scandal around the SFZC, and around the abbot's role, Phil Whalen ("I was at least 20 yrs older than almost everyone else in the building") shows up. Philip fled Bolinas ("too many parties") in 1972 to move into the Page Street Zendo. Here's the poet's perspective:

"I didn't ask why Richard was the head of the place. It was simple. It was his. The old man [Suzuki-roshi] had handed it to him. I didn't expect anything of him. Baker couldn't disappoint me. He had it [transmission] from Suzuki-roshi. Isn't that why he and I were both there?"

This is literally the first comment which isn't pulled or tugged by the zen purges, wars, brouhahas and co. that every other of the dozens of interviewees recollect. So I want to say, lets hear it for the sanity of poets, a practice than lets you keep your head even in the midst of bay-boer driven spiritual chaos.

Here's an interesting observation in the same vein: "Jane [Hirshfield] has a deep Buddhism and a deep talent. She was devoted, but she did not give herself over. She didn't have to; she knew how to give herself to her poems"

How much, then, of the scandal and drama (militaristic and otherwise) of our lives is because we are all leaning on each other so heavily with our beliefs and vested interests, that we end up clawing and critiquing - how you don't stand right, how you didn't pay me, how you are misruling your desk/house/businesspolice district/nation. The history of folks turning to spiritual practice is mixed (so is the arts, no?) - to some real extent, the emphasis on communal and community practice - in Buddhist terms, sangha - itself fosters a codependant relation, builds a nest which the instinct is then to augment and guard.

But, through practice of art, some of us manage to find a liberation almost beyond our material situation - couple that with an artless spiritual practice, and you have, well, perhaps an ability to pick your - of course smaller, starker, more discrete, rather than on a monstrous blur of inbred mistakes and sufferings building thickly and quickly one on the next.

Former: I am thinking of Phil Whalen, and also of Stacy Dacheux's responses to Pirooz Kalayeh's interview of her, available on his blog.
Latter: George Bush comes to mind for a start. Most corporations. Most radical activists I know too (that unmistakeable hardening).

So yay for poets, for poetry as a practice, and for those who don't care after money, glamour, power and fame. Now if my job would just give me a raise.

Days and daze of long entries.

Book I'm reading: shoes outside the door, desire, devotion and excess at the san francisco zen center, michael downing. sex, power, madness, corruption, zen center has it all. practice too - this is an admirable book for a) exploring non-linearity in its retelling of these stories, and b) aiming for a constant, and constantly unresolved balance, neither cynical nor idealistic. that it suceeds makes for a fairly rare quality - a book of scandal (which its not - quite) with no bad guy. rather like life.

Planted dozens of rewood saplings in bonsai pots yesterday. clamping down moss on top of the soil (water retention - also prevents soil from overheating and run-off when watering - humble and irrespressible moss). actually i pressed quite a lot of it - air bubbles trapped underneath dry its roots out.

Tired from incessant work - but not (quite) ill-humored. Is poetry a career? It is for the small legion of creative writing teachers out there who teach it. But what has that to do with anything - oh right, now Jim Goar is one of them. All the mysteries of transmission - in the zendo, and the classroom. What do we know? What do we know? What do we know? What do we know?

That Britta is going for a long, long spell of hiking.

massive, yes. poetry, anger, community, the schizoid enters a crowd.

Got a nuanced and intelligent response today from Richard Lopez, to this weekend’s blog:

"one must reserve the right to say 'no' to a given work. but I prefer Senor Borges formula for reading, which is that I failed the book. anger is useful only if to construct a positive alternative. when Mr Lydon sang, "anger is an energy" it is useful to remember that he stopped using the confrontational moniker Johnny Rotten to his birth name of John Lydon, a jump from societal alienation and stagnation of the Sex Pistols to the larger, commercial, culture located in PiL, Ltd. so then the irony of his statement "anger is an energy" is perhaps a bit muted. at any rate, anger works best when the culture is so flat that it needs to be kicked in the balls to get it going again. just last weekend I heard on the radio, for the first time ever, the Angry Somoans song "Right Side of My Mind," an early 80s punk band known for its crassness and love of cussing. great song, and it sure beats the hell outta contemporary pop-punk bands of today because when the Somoans were practicing their art the culture itself was dead, radio was a wasteland, tv sucked and so forth. and the punks of the 80s had no chance in hell to ever hear themselves on fm radio (with a few small exceptions), for example, see X's song "The Unheard Music." now what does it say about society that a song from the underground is given airplay 20 yrs later? I dunno, but I'm sure the Somoans, wherever they are, are probably laughing themselves silly. anyway, writing is large and I find there is so much good stuff to read I rarely feel anger. because there is a great quantity of good writing and writers in the small presses, online and in print, that there is greater cause to celebrate than not. only when poetry becomes so much a pose would I think that the anger Mr Lydon speaks is useful."

There is quite a lot here to respond to. First, my sadness that Richard has disabled the coments screen on his blog, which makes it harder for me to contact him on his blog – which i would have done several times. Should I email you Richard? I sense that in some blogs the comments screen has gone awry, or been a distraction, but I do relish its pungency – and it can lead to great conversations. Check out Jim’s post earlier this month on reading Williams and Stevens. Shit – almost 30 comments last time I checked. Blogging lacks the orality – frequent interruption, eye contact, physical spontaniety etc., of a conversation, but it can lead to a still powerful exchange – if more measured, distant, detailed (i.e. crafted) – of words, and is great fucking writing practice to boot. So I am very thankful for this online community, available even while I am sitting in a cubicle or, as now, with brilliant afternoon Cali sun streaming in the high window over our lil study.

Now what about anger? I may differ with Richard in the sense that somehow the airwaves have improved in the last 20 yrs (this seems implicit, if perhaps not designed, in his response). We have gone from Fleetwood Mac to – what? – Dave Matthews? I used to HATE this culture, which is why i sported years of purple hair (so certainly a shout out to Richard for the Samoans and the great X – SoCal represent – and likewise, the new sanitized punk stuff doesn’t do it for me, the energy – both the raw celebration and the defiance – has moved on, no longer sounds or looks that way, though I did see a great chocolate mohawk on a dyke in castro the other day) – but now, I don’t know, it offers nothing to me. If it offers anything (and I still do feel it shoved up against my face in advertisements, in fashions and attitudes, social etiquette and assumptions, not to mention cutlural end products like movies, TV shows, pop ballads) it reminds me, again and again, that this is the fabric of capital, American capital, this is our culture, our psyche, in which I am entwined, sometimes a discontent, sometimes a (often ironic, sometimes naive) participant (not that a discontent is somehow not a participant). So I see a continuing need to awaken anger consciously, to stir things (me included) up and reclaim a lot of the raw edges and wounds in our culture, to explore them, call attention to their continuing soreness, sharpness, to the cultural and personal delusions and makeup on this particular manifestation of empty space. Conscious anger is rare in our airwaves, and at our dinner tables. Something vital is sapped then – read a few protest poems to mark their chartings of anger – how often is it overly stiff and flatly projective, or inarticulate/limply implosive – how often does it hit a stride both savage and compassionate – a wake up call?

Here’s where a constructive anger might start: Today I was noting how very explicitly the underlining of male sexual desire in advertising (which of course is a prime motor of all commerical cultural products as well) enhances not only the fetishizing of my desire through some seemingly unrelated product (a Michelob) but my general consciousness of sexual desire as well. Surrounded in this culture that continually sells me this fantasy of fucking some gorgeous moaning female body as a great thing, an ultimate goal and reward – not even to be with her, a real live woman, but to obtain a "live" representation of a fantastic ideal (my ideal – and to be with her for me): some airbrushed curvy model in a bikini with a bucket of beer between her legs. And that’s an obvious one.

In that it is annoying that our culture eggs on my unsatisfiable lusts, in that it seduces me to continually further perversify them, to see them as natural, implict, unquestioned, it sews manifold havoc. Including distracting me from my own male experience (constantly defered onto some unavailable other attainable (so the logic runs) only through my fluency and mastery of culture and that means the continuing, steady consumption of its products).

That’s somewhat overstated, but the logic's there. And this also sews havoc in male friendships, and between the sexes. It amps up my inability to walk down the street without noting each and every attractive female body (in a hot week in a young city – like SF, there are many) as a desired object - its exhausting, this desire, and uncomfortable. I can’t blame this culture for my own (distracted, annoying) desires and experience (noting women pass has felt like i am literally being tugged out of my own body – a real drag), but I can see its complicity, how it is, in a very real sense, my enemy and opponent in this arena, and so many others. Its not so much national no-buy day, as a desire for international no-buy life, a desire to push consumption (incl. of women, sex) to the back of the agenda, out of the gleaming Hummer driver’s seat. So I can become angry, I can cultivate an anger, an aggressive distaste, and articulate that, for this side of our cultural production. I can label it, I can argue and present it, it’s a place I can speak from – with anger, with that power running through.

As a buddhist, this oppositionality is useful – if our consumer culture is my enemy, wonderful, I can learn from it. I think, in this conscious sense, the same relation applies to poetry. As juvenile as many SofQ/post-avant debates can become, there is a real dojo sharpening of our shared practices available in this split – if we let it be so. Otherwise, its covert or overt snipping, subterfuge, acts of war.

If you are like me, you’ve probably lost how this relates to Richard’s comment. It more relates off it. But here’s where Richard ends:

"anyway, writing is large and I find there is so much good stuff to read I rarely feel anger. because there is a great quantity of good writing and writers in the small presses, online and in print, that there is greater cause to celebrate than not. only when poetry becomes so much a pose would I think that the anger Mr Lydon speaks is useful."


This sounds spot on. Yet... My own commitment to poetry wavers. Especially in my reading of it. I am leary of how a bumbling, unconscious person (me?), bound by their habits, opens a book and becomes a savvy, fluent reader. I am uncomfortable with this “but poetry is important!” faith that underlies it. I am not sure I see it as that different – but certainly less social – than the way many religious believers are so sensitive to matters of doctrine, but once the sermon is over, resume their other, prior and dominant faith, their ignorant habits. As you can see, I have a poetry complex. The ease and relaxed way in which Richard is writing about poetry – I don’t feel that. I'm torn. I may envy the adept, the fluent reader, but to me this is tough work – its an edge, a big I don’t know which I am trying to stick with. Trying to. I haven’t read much lately, so why am I even talking about this? Why do I care? What kind of investment is it? I guess I ask that question of all of us – whats the investment in writing, in reading, in poetry? Is it ca-reer (work-identity?)? A home, friends, a safe nest in the hostile world? Is it really a practice we take up to transform our life, our world?

Unlike Richard’s text, I know –as a reader, I still am tugged and turned by the status, the lineage, the pedigree and pedastal of art – i hate how its important, and other corners of life are not. I hate witnessing that shift in others, and in – most of all – myself. That’s a soruce of anger, an anger I feel, again and again, a frustration w/ and on the page. As much as I know what Borges means, I do not accept his terms: I am not failing the text (which sounds too Christian by far too me, not to mention, ah, an exact instance of this very elevation of important works) – I am battling it, or bouncing off it, and sometimes passionately in love with it. And I am puzzled – why the bounce, the frustration, repulsion, why all the passion and fuss? I think, in all this conflict, I am discovering my own authority as a reader/writer, as an artist, even as a citizen, what the heck, man and human too. Finding my own strength, learning to trust my own instincts and repsonses. Not, essentially, through some rebellious usurping or trashing of other authorities (though that happens), but by coming to witness how other authorities have become me, how my multitude doesn’t recognize how it is now free-standing, how my own power relations are perverse, heirarchical, war-making. And, from that – sore – place, begining the work of making peace, including the work of saying no to larger coercive structures in our culture (and in my self). Only out of this recognition can I joyfully, attentively, freely read and write. It is not easy work.

So I am hearing what Richard writes of, what Jim is getting into, what Ron daily returns to. Bit by bit, moving into and through this experience. In a very real way, here on the blog, in prose, I am feeling more fluent, alert, able. Home sweet home (hopefully a portable one).

So it’s a jumble of questions. I am making them public here, let me know if you have a place in this, it is certainly lonely – if okay, i it must be so – to do it alone.

14 minutes, give or take

Yesterday I wrote an experience of reading the first page of a chapbook. It was one of those readings that we - as writers and readers - are encouraged to give poetry, or any written text: attentive, close, responsive to the turns of language. Appreciative. I really mean supposed to give when I write encourage. Trashing work, or, more connivally, negative criticism, I never found a teacher who encouraged that. It was always about sending the ball back to the other side of the court, never watching it go sailing out of bounds (or chopping it a brutal ace).

But I imagine that, like me, readers have this brutal, coarse, unforgiving, unresponsive side too - or one that responds differently, a side that recognizes that, while it may be pretty, or have some nice puns, its shit. A side that flips through abook of peotry without reading it, glances at a few pages and thinks, what a fucking run on. Or just - nope (nope takes many forms such as - whats on TV? what's she wearing? what was the name of the river that battle was fought on?. A side that atends poetry readings fully cognicent of what a put on they can be. Especially scathing towards those living off their reputation as poets (teaching positions, anyone?) or desiring some kind of status or identity from their participation in writing. Watching the biggies go "soft"the way I used to watch underground and hardcore bands "sell out" and sign with the majors, unless they're too busy repeating themselves a la the Ramones.

Usually I think we tuck away and bury this unpolite voice. And, the main effect is we diminish our culture because its anger is an energy, as Johnny Rotten sang it. And it is a lively, contagious, contentious energy, an energy that cares about our makings. Politeness is a sign of deadness in our arts culture, a sign it doesnt matter, we are all fat or getting fat, and if you are starving cuz someone else ate your share, dont make too much fuss about it please. By taking all the war out of poetry (and hence nothing to contest, as if the frontier was a constantly expanding manifest destiny with 40 poetic acres for us all) we take the warrior out too. Increasing the drivel factor by what - 10x, 15x? 40x? what's your best guess?

But - perosnally - its very scary and risky not to be polite, and to respond in your face. It also is a license to be an asshole, to pour bitterness and life-destorying crud out on others (which you have hatingly been brewing yourself). Too much criticism gets its bad name from this very poisonousness, or at least a deliberate (if unacknowledged) flirting with it. The dark side. That way there be power.

But Rotten's point is one picked up in Buddhism, where that energy is seen as variable. On the unconscious side, anger becomes blatant hatred: demonic, a selfish tyranny of destroying what is not me, what refuses to conform to (always) my standards. And on the conscious side, anger holds the germ of discriminating wisdom, that which tells shit from gold, that which lets us sever attachments to say reading or understanding a work because it is felt to offer little vitality. So judgment, the ability to judge, is a key perception of our minds - it keeps people alive and thriving (it is the cop policing the boundaries), or lets them fall into sickness and decay (the cop can be negligent, or else corrupt and violent). Destruction itself, and destructive acts, likewise - the Shiva dance varies greatly depending on the world consciousness or self-absorption of the Shiva dancer.

And Dear God may there be more to that last sentence that just another toss off. Sometimes I realize I have all the rhetorical flair of a truly horrid professor. Until I catch myself (which is different than always deleting the unflattering bits - those tip the hand, revealing a crucial energetic dynamic at play here - like the "warnings" posted up in Scooby Doo).

May all poets reclaim an ability to publically say no, so as to be able - when we mean it, when we feel it - to have the option of saying yes. Let me tell you - raising and refining and listening to (rather than berating, hiding, or heaping scorn upon) that "no" voice - for me, as an editor and reader (and writer) is a continual process. Like so many writers I've met, I fall back on the defense of politeness, upon a pose of reasoned listener, upon a default of positive feedback, which eventually makes me lose interest in poetry and its scenes in total (or is en toto, or in toto? Mmm, Toto.). The coirrosive flip of this for me has been an inability to accept - to believe in the honesty and validity of - other's critques and feedback of my own work - as if we are all slaves unable to freely express our minds.

"as if"

5 critical minutes

What a weird beast poetry is. I open a chapbook and read:


gilda is a white-throat child
a throw open door-child
a missing in the attic child

and gilda, the lay assassin

has no hands

gilda: still lay
them upon me

-- from Andrea Baker's Gilda.

In a way, I could read this and "nothing happens". Nothing sucks me in, so I have to return to the page. This is where poetry is different than almost any form of writing - just because it doesn't "grab" me doesn't mean there is no erotic tug. Most other literary modes lays a seduction trance groove down with the first line, and the paragraphs represent a continual holding, a reeling in. Poetry demands a fluency - or can demand one - with language, with reading, at once greater, less, more varied and unpredictable. There is a first line here, it tells me of Gilda, makes a claim as to who she is. But what a "white-throat child" is, I could not say definitively. I must re-read it. Look at the hypen, the "is," constellate it with "child" - certain fleeting impressions of vulnerability, sensuality, a smallness, cross me. tender, not seasoned (neither black nor tan). racial? yes.

the next two lines tell more, pile on this lower case character. now i have a sense of here0 thrown open, missing, in the corners of our homes, almost abandoned...

til i get to "lay assassin". here's one of those leaps - even in a narrative poem, that other genres flourish once every 50 pages to startle the reader - and which poetry can toss of every couples lines - no big deal. but it certainly forces the reader to re-focus, review, reconsider. this attic founderling is capable of murder, a murder at once sacred and profane ( lay being distinct from secular - lay being opposed to ordained).

jump again - gilda is crippled. she lacks digits, she is retarded in doing, she can not hold or grab.

(not as one with hands can).

yet - switch of voice - switch of case - she is addressed, comanded or implored - to use the hands she does not have, to touch another body, another "me".

hands she doesn't/does have. an impossibility? fuck if i know, this is just the first page...

from a great distance of two or three feet

yesterday i saw a flamingo on the san francisco bay. minutes later, i was attacked by a hundred seagulls.

last week's distinction between "wild" and "tame" - those terms need definition. a definition for how they apply to writing.

which is not forthcoming. i will build some other sand castle. while drinking horchata.

tomorrow, my boulder peeps Rory, Dylan, and Quindynn will be visiting for the weekend, and rory has one or even two interviews her (to become SF public's newest teacher). may the budget cuts and bureaucratic madness steer clear of them. Dylan's promised torublemmaking would be a fine addition to the Bay area lit scene. As would attacking seagulls.

10 demerit points for anyone who is thinking "a flock of seagulls"
20 demerit points if you are humming a aflock of seagulls song.
(demerits voided if flock helped you through a tough stretch of adolescence in kansas, nebraska, the dakotas, michigan, southern illinois. you are okay).
50 points if you are currently visualizing a poet you detest being surrounded and attacked by ravenous gulls.

LIFE AQUATIC is out on DVD now. Available for viewing and even purchase (Criterion, so save up yr overtime). For those who haven't seen it, and for those who haven't seen it again, visit this site for a quick refresher. We are currently on our 2nd day of overdue fees on this one, it is that good of a movie, especially after a day out on the bay attacked by - and tracking birds. I think the Avocets were out to get us to go deaf too.

After all these birds protecting their nests causing us so much aural harm (and those seagulls came close to biting as well as barking) I am of two thoughts:
-these are latter day dinosaurs.
-when you really get up close to nature - to the wilds - you as often as not want to say its "terrible" (as in causing terror) and if possible - kill it. Kill it =s avoid it at all cost, pave it, shoot it. Fucking gulls (western Gulls, actually, and, like most gulls, more a shorebird than one you'll likely find at sea). Props to Steve Zissou ("I've never seen a bond stooge stick his neck out like that"), props to Bill Murray, props(x2) to Wes Anderson, and props to the whole crew for this one. It IS more a world than a film. A world to which we are invited. We all miss Estaban, we all have crazy eyes.

every song on the college station is new to me

Happiness may just tend towards silence - the Buddha smiles bliss, took him days to say it. But then this is typing, and... I go back again and again to the difference - although our language repeatedly inserts all written activity, all signalling, under the uber-designation "speaking".

I couldnt honestly tell you exactly how Derrida's critique of this phenomena goes, but I will "say" that mine notes that in oding so, in responding to a work "it speaks to me", in reading reading as speaking on paper, we ignore the perceptual difference - different sense organ, different path to the brain, different compoisitional experience (this is true between pen and pencil, btwn charcoal and ink, btwn typewriter and computer) - and place everything under a fairly unexamined category of the same (idem). (is that a proper use of idem?)

Writing - and reading - allow for pathways, distensions, contractions, condensations, maneuvers that are almost impossible in speaking - and when we ignore them, I am willing to bet we get 10,000 very similiar novels (rhetorically, narratalogically similiar) which imagine themselves to read like a film or oral story, but tend to most resemble other, earlier novels, but with a continual erosion of the distinctive features and possibilities of, not only the novel, but of writing itself. Pick up a dozen books in a Barnes and Noble or Wallmart, paperbacks prefered, Bantam trade editions, it is deafeningly familiar, as reliable as a Corona, or a Honda w/ 1,000 miles on it.

Not to say there are no pleasures in such work, but that, upon picking up the book, upon aggreeing with the packaging and reviews, they are predictable pleasures, the pleasures of the mechanical.

Wild writing would be a writing which is categorizable most clearly in its refusal to be categorized, a refusal which springs out - if examined - not some pose of dissent, not from a mere oppositional, contrarian mentality, but from the chthonic, chaotic desire to create, to follow creation, to run down a wild route, with all its unknowns and possibilities, rather than one planned in civic or marketting committees.

There is a duality here, and I dont knwo exactly what to do with that, except void it by saying that one never finds purely mechanic writing, nor purely wild. Purity is what the Pharisees were obsessed with, and their direct descendants the phrenologists, and today's conservative Evangelicals (be they Hindu, Christian, or Moslem). And with purity impossible, its always a border, always a place of interaction, a chance to test limits, and go both (all) ways. By trusting our desires, by all forms of rooted bodily trust (not the gullibility of mental faith in beliefs) - what happens? We as writers, and as readers, discover our -ever surprsing - routes. New is a weird, overused, misleading word (think of its cult in capitalism, conjoined with a !) but it points to that perceived freshness, the spontaneity, the intensity, of this experience in full flower. But wild work is also a practice - since at first it does not fit our expected forms, there is often a lengthy struggle, or apprenticeship, to get it - ie to come into a working relation. So Anselm Berrigan re-reads Olson a dozen perplexed times before smiling. I hope he smiled, thats hard work.

I write you this ramble after a morning in bed, and now Sarah is cooking pancakes. I usually do the cooking here, and we haven't made pancakes in years. Its a jolly morning.

If this manifesting isnt another red herring, another fall from grace (into K Kaufman's very own pursuit of predictability), another manifesto reedeeming/reifying only the work i like (or think i like), then its a sense that an interrogative, exploratory writing hopped-up on discovery, on discovering in language, offers... I piled up too many clauses there, and now its gone.

If it is another or not - I note now - I do this work at a distance from my presumed heart's desire - how to manifest wildness here? How to complicate, overlay the gap between writing abour and of/from?

Thoughts for the day, kids.

(Hope to see a few of you for Poetry in the Park @ 5PM in sunny dolores - there, friends, is an argument to move to SF in itself)

crit, teaching, frustrat

dylan & i have been playing around with the writer's path issue. Is it purely creative? Does it involve teaching? You can scroll down a few posts and find the dialogue in the comments box. Although I found myself defending criticism there, today, after reading some, I am finding it an occasional joy read. Talking literary crit here, reviews, that sort of thing. Maybe just my mood, but I prefer this discussion to take place in an orality, whereas poetry for me - and prose too - works so much better on the page (with rare performative exceptions). I relish books, and a good book of essays can easily slip in there. But I am tiring of online crit, maybe in part since I look at it at work, not a place where I can do too much of that type of thinking - and have been coming home tired lately.

So I am reading Cadillac Desert. Hands up if you've read that one. An amazing saga - so far - about the role of water in the development of the US West. And, for anyone curious about the actual trails of corruption in our civic sphere, and how our government, for all extents and purposes, is a modified oligarchy (which you are free, by accumulating and exercising massive power, to join), this book provides fascinating webs of syndicates of newspapermen, railroad tycoons, judges, government agencies, politicians, real estate developers, all in bed together to "herd" and "farm" (ie "milk"), the poor and middle class. Its simply the way the system is set up to run, and the checks and balances only push it out of public view and contort it into more bizarre, far-fetched forms. It is a wonderful, if horrific, litany of delusion, attachment, and suffering. And, evidently, nominated by the Modern Library as 1 of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century or some such title guarranteed to keep it in undergraduate courselists for the forseeable future. Well, it deserves it.

Have nots: have not been reading poetry, writing poetry, editing poetry, reading manuscripts of poetry, but have been thinking about it, as in at the bar after a spat. Should i go home to the tyrant? Fuck you poetry, you're ruining my life! Just maybe. The real tyrant is my sense of responsibility. If I feel responsible for reading and even publishing (let alone understanding) the stuff, pretty soon I spend a lot of time trying to get far, far away from it - no fun. And I know I am not alone. A re-connect, or a dis-conect is coming my way. Any bets? I think/know I love writing, but at times that becomes so extenuated, so buried in mental drifts, eddies, storms, tsunamis. The landscape is shaped by all this - eroded soil, up-ended homes, dead cattle on fallen trees.

And the landscape is shaped by my exaggeration of it, I may just be dealing with an messy psychic apartment.

Hoover it nicely, folks.

Gone Surfing

-Ubuweb is coming to the (a?) close of its active life. It will be moved to a new site and housed as a complete archive, with no further additions. But all material currently up will stay up. Here's Kenny Goldsmith's report:

Yes, it is sadly the end of UbuWeb. We had our university support pulled out from under us, leaving us no room to exapand. Hence, I decided that it was time to call it quits. I'm very sad about this but there's really nothing I could do about it. It's been a great long run and the good news is that all the content -- every bit of it -- will be housed permanently at PennSound, but it'll be a finished archive, with no more updates.

-Here's a fascinating visual work to check out by Amanda Smith, titled "The Poetics of Life". It opens a PDF file. I think its far more worthwhile than the title suggests. It might be a stunt, but its a wondrous stunt, and fun to explore, especially if you are looking for new ways to present/construct work. I guarrantee you haven't tried this one before.

- another vizpo link to lose $6 on is here. i won't describe it, but check out the pic. more pics (and an essay) are available from dbqp, the May 27th entry.

- a third vizpo link is here. After that page has messed with your head for a moment, click on the red Gates of Paradise link at the bottom right of the photo and go exploring, or is spelunking the better term? Another PDF.

I haven't explored any of these fully but will. would love to hear thoughts on anyone who encounters them, ideally with enough time for tea and or a beer to muse over. I am sick of distracted surfing, I am catching myself tearing apart my head on the web again. Not an environment art can survive well in as anything mor ethan image-fodder.

By the way, all this info is brought to you courtesy dbqp. here's a tip when reading that blog:

- cut to the pics, and chase down the links. his prose style/subject tends towards the uneven (well, okay - at the office, they're a little long and then some couple that with thin), and, well, at times obscure, esp. when its a review or essay on a piece you aren't privvy to. the work he lets through though, is often worth digging further into. He's done a solid couple weks of reviews of visual poets that I have never heard of and am thankful for it (probably more in his archives). Plus some of the hard copy work is free, for the price of a Intl. postage stamp ($0.70)

an email this morning...

honestly, we probably have enough serious writers, at least "straight"ones. we could use more - couldn't we ? - deeply committed and weird ones, where weird, queer, freak all come together - writers marked other by their distinctive,dogged pursuit of...of what? not quite independence, i guess juliana calls it "autonomy". a collective autonomy - ooh, its a good one, and i'm pretty sure most of our desire to be serious is just some bully authority voice that is a smoke screen - creates resistance. not a smoke screen only, also a fearsome mirage - always threatening our extinction if we don't write real! deep! hard! beautiful! intelligent! difficult!or whatever box we put our work/life into.

that was a big part of why i didn't write this wknd. the stakes were too high, too desperate.

also, my life was a mess. my bike was stolen, i got in a fight w/ my moms, sarah is insane w/ worry over her new job, and now, to top it all, i have writers block?(actually i wanted to edit)

a friend recommended - wisely - just write for a few minutes, say 6. see how it goes. if it goes okay, write for 6 more, etc. gentleness. too often we are fighting the war on terror in our own bodies, ten seconds after waking, at work, on lunch break, out w/ a friend, watching bad TV, and in our dreams. the humbling part of mindfulness practice is to see how rarely i am in sync with my body/environment, how often i am creating noise (actually, creating noise is very much in sync with the human environment of the city, on one vividly perceived level - its not an accident that the Brooklyn zendo of MRO is called the Fire Lotus) - static, more smoke screens, but its a deep sadness, a deep suffering and ignorance that drives me to all the work of creating Darth Vaders, running away from Darth Vaders, fighting Darth Vaders, etc.

these are my 10:22 am thoughts. how are you and erik?

will talk about the book in person - also, take the name of your pet growing up (favorite one), and the name of the street you grew up on (the one most like "home").combine these together and you get your porn star name. a german friend passed this on to me. mine is ace danbury, sarah's is winnie drumlin. although winnie drumlin seems more like the girl in harry potter who died on the toilet to me, rather ed gorey (comically maudlin). ace danbury though, i could go in to business w/ that one.

k