quick hits

i tend to go long. here's some shortie practice. (sorry i dont have any flavorful sports analogies)

TRASH: don't pick it up / don't take my life a-wayyy. NY DOLLS, 73?

TRASH CULTURE/POP CULTURE/CONSMER CULTURE/FOLK CULTURE: this distinction is shot to hell. doesn't mean its not important, or that an instinct (john waters/steven spielberg) isn't a fine place to start. we live in the midst of this shit(dove and ipod billboard, pomegranite juice, tour de lance). how can the culture we breathe not be worth our consideration beyond quick yeas and neas (beyond consumption and its refusal).

POETRY: lately it seems like a catch-all for the work that's not genre prose. drama comes in at an angle. its a wide, wild, bottomless river. or the bottom is somewhere beyond my dangling toes. which doesn't mean don't get wet. i want to trust the current. but getting wet doesn't mean i comprehensively "know" the river. study, like play, is without ends.

MY POETRY:

yesterday i wrote:

The order before him. Through such canvases as the mind
makes it so, brambles cut back, foreskin discarded
As waste, we know better than the first factory
Our womb. Such forfeit of mirth to survey the scene
Even in its laughter spangled, retarded, a 12 stepping
Anonymous. This paper, unsigned, no signatory
a skittered glide before flight. An implied familiarity –
dimple obscure but recognized with each new
Inevitable smile. Misspelling the words might break
The spell, new colors, new fabrics from Egypt, Guatemala,
What’s left of Milan. The never-be-divided, in the headlines
Reads nothing but. And counting lines before the apocalypse
Or changing the channel, this page, between others, here,
Here is a boot cut, here is James Dean, here a hero travels
To her father’s house to confront him, on the very date
Khrushchev, or his player, left-field, adds the final loping Cyrillic v.

this is a voice i often start from when i pick up writing poetry. then the project becomes: how to move thru/past this? is it just cause i'm restless, or this is unstable ground?

today i wrote:

The great SS Coherence
Set out upon the sea
There ne’er was a grander ship
To part the salty breeze

which goes on for 12 more screechy pirate fight song/sea chantey verses. talk about trash. or delicious.

i am gleefully in trouble and back in the game. thanks to everyone who I've been in conversation with the last few days, posters too - this has all been most welcome/helpful. freeing the trapped little mind.

HORCHATA: see delicious.

Have a jolly wknd.

Sacramento Speaking...

I'd say that you can trust a writer when she/he confesses a love of what the Academy disdains. or what serious readers collectively spite. in other words, readers who take their reading seriously can, or should, admit to what is glossed over as trash. that includes poets in the Academy who are not serious readers but take their reading seriously, too.

-Richard Lopez.

that should make the case for Steely Dan. one CAN be serious about their trash (its a common currency in this world). Richard's July 26th post, and Eileen's i would recommend, but she is all over the place, which this blogger appreciates, and i couldn't find the one Richard refers to.

in other news...

el pobre Mouse springs back to life this fall. We begin our work on the 1st of september. the current deadline is rolling, but if you're ate, you'll be sorry.

ok, eaten. if you're late, we'll be sorry too.

curious about what zines or journals impact you. please leave any notes you're gracious enough to provide. i am wondering if (editorially guided) context matters, or if the assemblage itself is context?

i'm leaning towards editorial context, porbably to have a more active role as editor. and to redefine how i think about editing - from culling "the bests" to surveying a particular locale, be it geographic, topic, ideologic, formal, etc.

could i get away with saying formic? how i am informed by it?

i submit blogs as trash. a kind of daily garbage hunt that can be most rewarding. epiphanies wilt so fast anyway, compared to a three legged chair with a torn slip, and pages of a burned book. both of which recently were offered on the street.

in the virtual junkyard, a guy in texas, tells us about drivers responses to his walking in a lightningstorm. in tokyo, this french bloke (at last! foreign language blogs!) is deeply infatuated with architecture and vintage depeche mode.

samples:


this is from a series called, yes "black celebration". ecstatic.

to end on a meditative note: http://bxmppfo.blogspot.com/. MUFFIN3LUCY's about me lists 15 concurrent blogs. at points, they richocet, mutate and echo each other. how "pineapple pound cake recipe" on fpudii becomes "poem by ezra pound" (hulugz) becomes "phoenix dog pound" (rwukkbot) "pennies per pound" on pmvdgtf. jackson maclow comes to mind. and leaves : these are SHARP - silly screenshots of our vast _____. pick yr nouns carefully (mrb, this means you). sharp is one link from silly. maybe one 1/4 second / 1/8th".



here's another side of our Tokyo francais correspondant:


fantastique, non?

photos courtesy antoniosugizo.

a minute later, a "Yiddish speakin', terrorist hatin', Israel-lovin', iced-coffee drinkin', pool playin' sista of Zion" holding forth on Waylon Jennings "Ladies Love Outlaws" turns her attention to the follwoing question from Bec: 1. if you had to go back in time to live during one of the following periods in history, which would you choose, and why? a) the pogroms during the 1880s, b) poland, 1940, c) the period that we were slaves in egypt.

the question is in red type, the answer in orange.

rare delight courtesy ESL

"this door is wet paint"

(repeated, handwrit, on notes, on the carpet, at the foot of the doors, for each door, down the hall.

there are many doors.

in addition, today only (doors being wet paint) each door is OPEN. offices, officefolk, are REVEALED.)

a liekly email may serve as an ample psot

liekly, entyr, psot? the lord giveth context and the lord can take it away. alternate defs:

liekly - a tangential manner of advancing. circumspect, surprising, wary. difficult to counter, or predict. cf. fungus, air-born diseases, the collected works of Robert Duncan, spam email, off-color jokes, guerrilla insurgencies.

entyr - a process, viewed at a distance, which appears to occur outside of / or on an edge of time. this may change when viewed at repeated, varying distances, as shadows change upon a well, or cross a wall.

psot - a bramble whose form bears both fruit and thorn, and in which the flatness of the open field is replaced with a densely curvilinear, thickly bracketted space. it is often disorienting, yet provides shelter and nourishment for many makes of small mammals.

-

well, as long as we aren't actually in the boats, or if we are and can swim, no big problem if they sink.

so shame, yes. and healing. and the gap - perceived - between healing work and writing life. what to say of it? the best words i know come from a zen roshi - he spoke about how dangerous zen practices of no-ego are for people who don't already have healthy egos. they are contraindicating, and end up wrecking the person rather than enriching them (or freeing them from these distinctions). so libratory for whom?

a boss just walked over to a colleague - wasn't sure if he was the (his) boss - but he projected that boss authority, that casual control one must earn here by position of authority. total ease, slow stroll in and starts to talk about "9 holes of golf this wknd" and you better believe that my co-worker immediately abandoned his work and turned hs full attention and charm to bear on THAT conversation.

now they are paracticing their swings and i am smiling like i am superior. isn't it sweet (orange, quince, port) that they are still boys, that in this shit they still enjoy things? a refuge from duty, either corporate or familial. and perhaps sweeter even in the retelling, where all negatives are erased - do not even appear - than in the moment of golfing, where the friction of the real world constantly intrudes or threatens to.

maybe. by quoting the roshi, i am casually and undogmatically equating the practice of writing with the practice of zen. are both nondual? in writing we explore the pliant pronouns, the ever-shift of i and we, stepping in and occupying their vacancy with characters, inexhaustible characters, but never ourselves. what we call ourselves is what? - our passing feelings, impulses, thoughts, perceptions and sensations. which, rendered, become other. teeth hurt, we watch a body pass, the brain and computer hard drive hum. the word "nigger", a memory of a grandmother, of a woman we once saw begging, of caked red dirt and rust on tin cans. in this, from this, with this always with us, we write.

yet, what force rises to shape or influence this current? we could call this organziaing force, this psychic corporation (to be gloriously unromantic) the ego. it rises up, yang, and embraces direction - dwarfed by the world flow, it yet plays active partner to it.

practice - zen, or writing, need both. in touch with the flow, and able to tweak it. in that order. a zen garden is beautiful in its allowing of natural forms their autonomy without surrendering the role of the pruners, the rake, a shovel scraping up dirt.

i am in to therapy and healing because my ego is in such marginal shape that it is exceedingly hard work just not to cry or otherwise explode at work. ie, to "keep up appearances". but more - to have a healthy relationship to my workplace (which is horribly repressed, making actually healthy minor explosions of tears and swear words inadvisable and threatening). i immediately doubt that. but... butt... oh the argument comes unhinged. i do try.

i trust dialectic arguments more than any other. sex is a dialectic, as is love, war, and good target spitting. the tension and juxtaposing of non-identical (if not neccessarily diametrically opposed, that old reductionist binary opposition) forces creates frictions, eddies, currents much like Earth's weather and landforms - ie places to inhabit. places i might live a rich and satisfying life.

to the extent that therapy and healing offer an entrance into this dialectic, yes.to the extent that writing and reading creative work offers an entrance into this dialectic, yes.

neither is perfect. i am at home in neither, but can move through both, i may be, for a few moments, really at home in either. they take turns. i feel stuck by this language, these terms. home invites homelessness - is that opposition relevant? i feel compelled to explore it, and i am not going to.

be compelled. to discover our autonomy, and then exercise is it wisely, with compassion, w/o attachment. that seems a worthy and noble end. that autonomy is perceived semiotically, through sign systems, which we learn to read. language is one of these. to be articulate, to lay it down, no BS, that, to me, is healing. or one element of it. to lay it down, to open to it, to follow unknowable desires and become intimate w/ them... i think this is possible in both language work and (professionally conceived) healing work.

rambling. like a good patch of briars. the trail snakes through, though you may cut your hand or snare your shirt.

i think healing practices can catch and snare the shirt, which is not healing. i think the same of language, its work. maybe it IS healing. doesn't it depend (on the greater web)?

so we navigate both. memoir invites and demands anti-memoir. i would say that is healing too - memoir is a construct, a tool in an ideology whose aim is codification, a solid understanding ( a firm grip on the situation) which beds easily with control, and with reductive thinking. it need not, it is just a tool - anti-memoir, the study of what we leave out of our tidy or messy presentations of self, is the shadow work. bringing both into play, a field is generated, sky above, earth below, fruitful green zone of living things between. a home, an ecology, a series of traceries, superhighway routes thru, nexuses and nodes where a banana or grape might grow or a love one dropped off on the bus.

think think think. not to deny the daily experience of shame - which i have. shame at imperfection. when i practice it, i start here, i say, yeah, i feel a lot of shame at being "so fucked up". i even feel shame at wanting to heal, at believing in healing, shame for being weak and then shame for wanting "strong". its bizarre. it can keep me back/keep me down. ie silent, and a traitor to my strongest desires, most basic/burning questions. but if i bring the secret out into the open - thing i most fear - it changes. it may return, but it changes. it loses its grip, becomes something else. i can write that.

this weird slippy slope "between" knowing who i am and being open to who/how i might be(come). ego and its edge. its so hard for me to be there. i dont know where it goes. i dont know how it might be a "career" so i dont go hungry/in rags. a long email. as to others who will not hear us - yes. but here is a good bernstein quote i just found, pointing to risks either way:

Mr. Bernstein, for his part, readily concedes the many difficulties of "Shadowtime," and argues that they arise not only by design but by necessity. "Clarity is valuable in many situations, but not necessarily in art," he said in a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment. "Many will no doubt be befuddled, just as a work that seeks to be clear risks boring people. These are the risks you have to take."
Yet more seems to be at stake than simply keeping an audience challenged. When pressed, Mr. Bernstein echoes Benjamin's friend and colleague Theodor Adorno, who defended difficult music as having its own social value precisely because it teaches us how to withhold understanding and therefore helps us resist the allure of false clarity in the world beyond the concert hall. Complexity, in other words, is a worthy ideal in art because reality is even more complex and dissonant than the thorniest work of modernism, even if politicians and the commercial culture reassure us that everything is simple, clear and harmonious.

how does therapy move beyond the singular individual to address the disharmonies and false harmonies or even the repression of actual harmonies (we all play the same note NOW - smile, how are you, i'm fine. have you tried pepsident?) in the social sphere, our culture life, the womb in which each of our little worm identies nestles and thrives (or no). i am thinking of the first Matrix - the process of waking up invariably involves moving into a confrontation with the demands (intrusions) of our culture over our life, our language, our desires.

ie. the need for money. fame. a nice hot body. in the latest clothes, with a highspeed wireless connection. and fabulously intelligent. clever, compassionate, sexy, wry wise - I DEMAND OF YOU TO BE.

perhaps we can start with noting how these worlds do and don't intersect. perhaps we can bring them into conversation. we could start with bodies, and how bodies emerge into signs. for a writer, words. perhaps we can acknowledge our different projects, their overlaps, and start here, from this. trusting ourselves and eachother to move deeply and fully into... into what? does it have a name? our desires? our paths? if we can weave a world, and words, of this trust, this knowledge... is that our home?

and here i feel still a little shame for hoping "yes", for wanting to conclude, as if its a hoax, as if how could i pretend that this has anywhere "to go", anything to "clear up" or "illumine". for a few moments, we stare into the gap. our eyes, somehow, adjust.

and we do the box thing? (pleese do not call eet the box thing)

i have no idea if there is any food or threat here for you to ponder. if so, send the little boats back. they're sturdier than the depression thought them.

Hello, My Name Is Almost Bird & Forest

A book I am now 20 pages into, and still owe its author for (not fogotten! not - quite - forgotten!). For years I have shyed away from consciously developing a conventionally narrative prose, to explore what I tend to think of as "the outer reaches". But this affection for Sun Ra, cosmic ambience, and absolutely stunning disjunctions eventually circles back into the prose rhythms of... well "conventional narrative". I mean to imply a dialectic friction - a text may push against the limits (using Lacan) of big S signifiying with its firm grounding of place / noun / speaker / subject / object etc. but can not exactly escape it - into what? the line drawn between the big S and little s is not to be crossed in language. There is no identity of one's words, and one's desires, no more than between an anatomy book and a living body. We never break through to the other side, but we can tool about at the very edges where signification (its constant mapping) becomes so obscured, or troubled, or fragmentary, or bewildered, or overloaded and cluttered, that it loses its train and derails, and this derail hints strongly / evokes / can point towards little s states. But we still have there (as our hinting /evidence ) the derailed signification. If the hint is taken is not in the texts hands.

I have written extensively in this (demanding) vein, towards noise/bliss/silence, but, as with ecriture feminine, such work always carries something of a paradoxical question about it, something unsettled. To write against language in language, to resist the ordering of perceptions through the mediation of words in words, is this some quixotic prank?

Not today (meaning "yes") . It is a phase, a choice to explore a certain realm of possibility in language, one our culture overlooks, significantly overlooks, and it is a journey, a phase, a choice, one possibility among many. Why head off to the barrens and the wilds where the beasties lurk (for if you think they aren't hiding in your own incomprehensions, then where exactly under your bed are they) except for the classic heroic tale - so that, in doing, in going to the underworld, you can again pop your head out into the bright and perhaps sunny day, at home, and live your life with renewed vim and vigor. Its somehow neccesary work and it helps me put things right (and not put a lot of other things right - i.e. intrude/go anal/bonkers - i have (exhausting) interludes of (trying to) making a well-ordered world, instead of just writing and witnessing a well-tempered word). Instead, I have a go at exploring chaos.

If I was a more caring soul I would go back over this and edit it for you, or me, or the hell of it. As is, here's one more walk in the woods. I want to add that I don't seperate the emotional/spiritual/intellectual realms of this "underworld" or outer galactic reach. They intertwine. It is the work of examing a shadow, of the earth under my feet, the compress of the rubber of my shoes, it is work of armpits, latrines, old girlfriends and things said/seen when i couldn't even speak. Its a place that utterly compells the rereading of the most hideous and depraved old notebooks (and not in any titillating sort of way) to bear my signature scrawl.

I do hate the stickiness of writing from this place. Even writing on these old fells sweeps me into them again. Reground. Use the delete where neccessary. Bring the figure (half) out of the stone.

So there is an element of flirtation in writing around the unwritable. It also bears a touch of s/m, as the distinction betwen pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability is also troubled, dissolving into moments (perhaps of "pure being" or "the box thing" depending on which character in Huckabees you prefer). That so much confession/conversion narrative in so many traditions does not honor these ruptures is a shame, and points to how many "breakthroughs" are largelly big S affairs, concerning ideologies far more than bodied praxes. I live this shit - how many times do you tell yourself "that was a life-changing experience"? Versus how many times your life actually radically changes. Wording the experienc ein that way is a first neccessary step to murdering it, an act I - deluded to this - participate in willingly. We drag the shock and opening of an emergence of little s into the analytic lab-fridge of big S, murmuring how exciting it is, unable to conceal our murderous glee to anesthetize, roll-over and slit open the fucker.

All this relates, as a sort of pre-amble to the introductory note, to Brent Cunningham's Bird & Forest, a delightfully different tangling with language.

Hi, my name is SEMIOTICS

"Lacan calls key signifiers points de capiton, or "upholstery buttons" as on a piece of furniture." These "serve to "seal" some kind of crucial meaning for participants in sign use."

Being in therapy, and being a writer, Lacan seems very apropos right now. I am wondering, in the narratives I carry, esp. in the ones I experience as needing tending (mending) what are my upholstery buttons? Which ones are poorly attached, dangling by a string as they do, or just wiggly loose, and how many were poorly placed in the first instance?

Which may be thousands of years back, the lifetime of just one tree.

Of course, when I ask that question here, of myself, it becomes, gratis, yours, if you'll take it.

In language, out of which we make our stories (and theirs), mastery is a weird thing. Given you drew up your "self" as a wee one, whose mastery exerts itself on your armchair?
What holds us as we are, even, modulates how we may be/come ?

Rhetoric. Let's throw it away. Exposing...

the void? (as if). If we REALLY throw it away. And I trust that tradition that says "dont worry,it/you comes back". But I meant lets throw THAT rheotric away. It was getting cheeky. Hands off my post, scurvy would-be adjunct theory profs!

Semiotics. I recommend it. A real easy ease-into is the INTRODUCING series, where those not-quite brilliantine quotes up top come from. All those pictures and short captions really help breach/broach.

I know some of our generation have found all things theory intrusive or limiting or just more dogma, but as I get a bit older, I find it can - at times - magnetize my perceiving. I thought about - experienced - words/consciousness differently today, thanks to old Jacques L. Punches a little hole in those narratives wrapped so tightly around the self.

To let y'all go with something that doesn't happen much around here, a haiku:

Wind.
The flattened pigeon wing
flaps.

or

Wind.
The flattend pigeon wing
flaps still.

(or "still flaps").

Or

In wind
the flattened pigeon wing
still flaps.

Does the "In"/"still" help - I imagine its assumed? It gives a little paly/tension around motion, but maybe drains somethign too? Whaddya think? Just dont tell me whether you LIKE the poem, for chrissake. It was just words that occured on a bikeride home that i will toss around until i'm good and done with it.

My most horrible secret writer self wants to call this poem "Democracy 2005". I think I am going to acquiese.

Unless I call it

"words that occured on a bikeride home that i will toss around until i'm good and done with it that i called..."

OOOOOOOOUUUUUUUTTTTTTTT
damned post! psot?

on reviewing old posts

Why am i ashamed of my humor?

riding off ron

How you hear a poem & how you hear a reading are two different things, unless of course the reading consists of a single long text (which may be why I’ve given so many readings that have been just that). Some of the tracks on Smith’s CD are as short as 23 seconds. They echo in the mind, but by the time one absorbs the words, the poem itself is long gone. (This may explain why such diverse poets as Robert Bly & Bob Grenier have a tendency to read a short poem multiple times during a reading.) With a longer reading, on the other hand, the reader settles in, begins to hear nuances & themes, tonal changes, as well as whatever content might be flowing past. With a longer reading, you can almost hear the moment at which the audience relaxes into the text – it always occurs somewhere after the 15-minute mark, sometimes after the 30 (and, often, you’ll hear two such moments). At 40 moments or thereabouts, I’m so tuned into a reader’s sense of time & the formal scope of the text that it is as if a vista opened up. Only from that point forward can I really hear pretty much everything the poet is doing.

And no two poets, at least no two decent ones, have anything like the same timing – it’s as particular as fingerprints. If I find that I resonate with some aspect of that timing, a reading can act like a spell – I’m totally enveloped. But if I find that I don’t resonate, sometimes the reading itself can seem very alien, as if we’re translating across not just languages but beings or species. That can be even more interesting if I can tell that the writing is very good, but operating on planes that don’t feel at all familiar or intuitive to me. Indeed, some of the readings that have had the most lasting impression on me – Alice Notely as well as the late Douglas Oliver – fall into exactly this category.

-rON sILLIMAN, tuesday's blog.

It is SO RARE to hear a poet read for the lengths Ron is writing about here. At Naropa, during the "featured reader" evenings, we would have the chance to hear writers like Pierre Joris or Creeley open up and dive in for 45 minutes to an hour or more. Even with a distracted mind, this still gives an audience the chance - the neccessity, really - to enter into a prolonged, ongoing conversation with the reader and their work. If Pierre Joris had read for only 20 minutes, I might no even remember the event today. (Although the shock value of some of Joanne Kyger's shorter readings (say 5 or 6 minutesTOPS) also resonates)

Analogically, I'm thinking about walking. If one goes for a 15 minute walk, they may feel refreshed, they may have a few moments of contat or confrontation with the environment they pass through / are in. Now, stretch that out: by 30 mintues, the walk has totally enveloped them, they are going. At an hour, the desire to stop has risen more than once - perhaps they have stopped, and are walkign again. I agree with Ron that if the participant is willing, at that hour mark, the intimacy and immersion factor in the act of listening, or walking, or fucking, or sitting (or vacuuming - not to dis the prosaic) is far higher. Of course, if I am a 21 yr old lone wolf who digs Miller and Kerouac and Rollins and I sit down and my teachers parade before me Mullen, Silliman, even Collins or Heaney, well, that intimacy is likely to be one of resistance - if I can call such "intimacy".

But lets trust that we're all adults here, and that we are choosing wisely what to do with our time, and that we're mature enough to even engage our unexpected detours, the so-called "mistakes" that may be more like surprises, really. I like this idea of an hour long reading, it seems gritty and expansive (and quite frankly a little daunting). I gave a 20 minute reading on saturday, one of three readers, and it went

I'd like to interrupt this blog to consider how the persistence of mistypings and mispellings in blogs provides an uncanny and delirious postmodern echo of the pre-dictioanry days of printed texts and manuscripts, where regional dialect and who you learned from dictated your spellings of words far more than any central, hierarchical authority. Once again the word becomes as multiple when lettered as it can be when said (but with a quite distinct route - lack of formal education and keyboard dyslexics - into this).

well. Well standing in for I found certain rythms, tangents, routes, followed them through, and on to the next, in a satisfying matter - so that I was practicing my reading, really getting into it - okay, sad here, critical here, joyous and silly there, a mournful echo here, anger there, tight and fast here, slow and chopped there. I appreaciate orality, esp. at a reading, a writer who engages the specifically oral nature of their delivery - I understand most of the writers I know and go to see are primarily writers, not readers/performers, but an attention to, a practice of the reading of a text - it feels like good work, and it attunes my ear to what is going down it. Mastery, is a powerful thing to witness. It was said well in the first Harry Potter book, when the wizard who sells wands finds the right one for Harry, and explains how the only other wand of this class is owned by Voldemort:

"For he did great things. Terrible, yes, but great"

A little terror really sparks a reading, esp. if one is fairly certain that Taylor Brady, or Melissa Benham is not, in fact, a spawn of Satan hell-bent on world dominaion and the elimination of four-eyed muggles who ride bikes and garden like yourselves.

-

The reading went well, but 20 minutes is a fairly early exit point. In the case of Artifact, it makes sense. The audience is there usually for one or two of the three featured readers, and Artifact is a reading series cum party - its social side is consciously invoked. A 60 minute one -reader blowout makes for a very different evening. What most triggers me in considering this is how we as writers and organizers can maximize the diference and variety of our venues and performances, to make for more possibilities, for fruitful complexities where my desire for an occassional hour immersion sits easily beside the sampler mentality of another evening. If its all the latter, and none the former, aren't we just feeding our culturally emergent ADD?

So who is setting up readings where we can "go long"? Are there any such series in the Bay Area? Do they have comfortable seating? Light shows? If not, perhaps RPS will have to set that up too, right after we get our lecture series and salon off the ground.

-

Speaking of RPS (thats Rock Papier Sizz, San Francisco's #1 poetry and writing collective) welcomed honorary member Sean MacInnes to town last weekend, and dove into the MINI series project, producing 9 small 8 - 16 page collaborative texts (although 2 or 3 are uncredited solo ventures) and, within 24 hours, writing, editting, printing and assembling them, through salvaged and recycled material, into a set of 27 handmade, saddlestapled, 3x4 books. 9 more remain to be made. So, en toto, 3 books, 4 copies each. All books were given away at readings that weekend, and, by the way, literati Martha Stewarts, they make great party favors and introductory gifts.

I hope to post some covers up tonight, and if you're curious, email me and I'll send you a PDF of our text.

have you ever been and what would yours be?

If you haven't, I would put aside 15 minutes for this.

It formed part of my "refusal to do a day's distraction" project. Its a subtle work, and the other folk here at distraction haven't noticed that I have chosen to work all day instead of doing that other stuff we are paid for wasting our time with.

This link arrived for me this morning, and last nite I witnessed dozens of poets come up to a live stage and confess their poetic sins (one kept a blog, another - she confided privately - is afraid of nouns) and receive a vodka and juice absolution. Some, inspired by the cleansing magic of this ritual, confessed freely, again and again. some to the point of compromising their dancing skills. But these are the lesser poets, and that thar above link is no one trick pony.

So what or where is it?

New Brutalism has some severe critics, one of the most famous being Charles, Prince of Wales, whose speeches and writings on architecture have excoriated New Brutalism. The poetry column of Private Eye, "Books and Mourners", began life as "Books and Mourners of the New Barbarism", with "new barbarism" clearly intended as a reference to "new brutalism". The column is skeptical about postmodern poetry in general, but over the course of some four years has reserved its strongest wrath for New Brutalism, especially in 21 Grand projects.


It could be the work found here.
Or here.


I hear the master slaps you if you say "both", but hell, its worth a try, and its probably not a hard slap (the lawyers advise).

Its not there. That man is an imposter (see it in his well-sweatered smile?). If you are in Canada, you know what we do with imposters. Bring the creme fraiche.

On my lunch breaks, its definitely here (over there ... ). That fountain, when its on, reads some loud motherfucking poe-ette-tree, lemme say.

It is altogether the precursor, in 3-D, of Brookyln grafitti that it looks like, and has the same crew of detractors or should we say distractors.

I recommend the final reading to be held there, if only because poets are the best dancers, and no one else comes close.

ugly / bald / lively contrasts

shameless / vivid / brazen constructs

fleeced / wooly / post mods revel

accessible can be a reference to putting seats out, switching the senses up, and charging a four dollar admission. tradition can be courted -no?- at a bacchanal.

and the view out the front door is a painting waiting to happen.

to me it looked a lot like a group of people who'd made it to the point of no return, look around and took a couple digital photos, a sip from their flask, and promptly high tailed it out of there, back to the city (there was a new Johnny Depp film coming out that night). this might explain why, with suitable (ie ample) whorski nearby, poets make the best dancers, and mighty fine preachers too. for they have lived to see the other side, hallelujah.

it also might explain why i have been feeling feisty all day. New Brutalism Series - there will only be one more, chck it out and see you there. after that, we'll have to do it all ourselves.

Principals need not reply.

great swath of emptiness

on the web today. short posts, posts of poems, travelling posts, posts of the undead. as if the social center is absent (quiet - where empty reads "background noise" - heartbeat heard through ears, neighbors through walls, the bus outside, glow of a computer monitor left on or hum of fridge - spider webs and no spider) and we are all gone to or over the edge for awhile to poke around quietly, don personas, shop a bit, and then head home.

bags empty or full? who's got receipts?

i will be giving a reading this saturday evening as part of July's Artifact. The event is "free to the public" (if hearing an hour plus of readings by Sean MacInnes, Melissa Benham and myself is truly "free of cost" - but dont worry, there's liquor and we take breaks and sometimes tell jokes too - not all organic whole grain post- grad school post-langopo ver.2005 ) and there is liqour and breaks and a party afterwards (and in between - it is my hope that i won't feel compelled to responsibly ask/remind/nag Melissa to start up the reading after the second reader again, when the "intermission" party always threatens to take over, and if there's no third reading and no one remembers, hey, its a party, yall. yet i am a sworn protector and guardian of art - witness my flaming hair.

Well, wavy blonde. The reading is in the great city of San Francisco and you can find all kinds of info about it on Melissa's Artifact series blog. Don't you want to be on such an attractively designed bill? I understand, really. I was waiting for it to be my turn again. Insider tip : the flyer design is influenced by two of Melissa's "favorite directors". Any guesses? Not the guy who did the John Cussack films, evidently (my hopeful guess before seieng it). Am I supposed to say "Brakhage" - ain't gonna. Don't know, don't know. LA folk?

Is the jury in on non-personal blogs? They take a diff. course, to be sure, and arise quicker than those wishing to make expensive/time consuming web sites. And those of you who are like "expensive? time-consuming? what the f**k? - shame on yrselves. Come over here right now and I have SEVERAL web sites for you to build/teach-how-to-build for/to me and my friends.

Good day to you all and please carefully consider hitting "next blog". Last time I did I was in the world of a 21 yr old cutie who wanted to move to New Zealand and marry a Kiwi. Very Being John Malkovich. I tell myself - "go ahead, it won't hurt. maybe i will make a new friend and throw peanuts at them."

Thus continues the case of the absent center. Its all vacancy signs and doors left open with only the cleaning staff around (down the hall, inside 309, you can hear them). Want to snoop? Even the pool is unattended, and its so warm outside. Good day.

miserable motherfuckers, unite!

we have only our salaries and benefits* to lose!

am i the only one out here who is working in the corporate wasteland? snuggling in the cold, frenzied, clot-inducing heart of the office?

i welcome your support on performing a bypass - its high time i get out of here. so, for what its worth, i hereby announce i am (as of this moment) looking for work. it feels like sawing off a limb and winning the lottery at the same time.

(if you wanted to see The Corporation and you haven't, you are a foolish, foolish being(see post-title, please))

* and one-bedroom apartments, and dusty cars, and partners and IKEA cookware and parental approval and $ to buy books with etc.

secret blog decoder ring

Currently a day of great emotional turmoil. Making it a Monday.

Here's a quick insight into how this blog works:

-if the post is intensely negative, if its highly critical, my guess is the author is suffering from a bout of melancholy. the more deeply, devoutly, intensely negative gives you a corrolative sense as to how deeply so.

-if the post is deeply critical of others, or others work, the blogger is having difficulty with his own work, most likely around the very vein he is critiquing in others

-if the post expresses anguish around writing or art, the blogger is stuck in his own process/blogging instead of working, a fine yet sustainable definition. all those of you who have blogged for an hour when you promised to "edit" etc. know what i mean.

-if the post displays consciousness more than self-consciousness, a sun is shining somewhere.

-if the blog is clever then the blogger is a dirty thieving hypocrite!

-if the blog leans too heabily on irony, there is a problem w/ spine allignment and a stooping posture.

-if the blogger shows a penchant for generalizations, this is a patent indicator of distance. (at a distance one perceives conglomerates which dissolve/re-arrange up close)

-if the blogger wears their heart on their sleeve, their heart is wounded (and most likely a decoy).

Mispellings in this post: liekly, psot, blogge ris.

-if i tire of this sort of talk, it is a blogge ris.
-if the form evaporates leaving only its trace, the entry becomes a psot.
-if a blog is inclined to admit too many tangents, it is liekly, and therefore not recommended as a seaworthy vessel.

in that section, we found "entyr"

"but that psot entyred a whole afternoon" (there is both a suggestion of the wearing down of a tire, and of the co-arrising state of feeling tired/sore (too much typing, perhaps in slightly lost/fruitless directions (inducing blogge ris))).

-a blog which dwells excessively on the surface betrays its ties to the logic of capitalism, as expressed in an advertisement: the windows of the skyscraper are always opaque, the foyer's marble is 1/8th of an inch thick.

-infomercials : i have just had a brilliant and short-lived theory on infomercials (relation to the psot without the attendant blogge ris yet still felt as liekly - if manipulatively so) . its lucky i still have functioning feet, although good lord my legs and neck are sore today. do they have places for old poets to go before they die so we can meet up and quarrel?

(quarrle, jst) lets face it - used judiciously, typos make work shine.

jst - a minute or obscure jest
quarrle - a mouse-like psot, not at all liekly, but quite blogge ris.

-so i experience this, what, moment? we should recognize that this secret decoder blog ring may penetrate many of the emotional energetics (i.e. miasmic submerged feelies) underlying this blog, but it does not dismiss the posts born out of its psots, or stand to ignore the momentary shininess of even the most slender jst, or justify writing off the whole affair as too entyring to be concerned with.

just to point out what may be there alongside the there.

can i recommend

Pirooz's intvw of Rebecca Loudon ? July 4, 2005. Interviews - people meet, things happen. Its like a date without the sex. And the voyeur is invited! Note to self - intvw. someone.

Oh, and they "talk" about writing.

How I want to tell you things tonight! Ok, "let us away"

(the TV speaks roosters)

Cali Team Down by 3, up 1. 1 visiting.

Not moving to Cali (Northern Division):

Dylan Hock, Rory Tubbs, Quindynn Hock-Tubbs.

Moving to Cali (Southern Division):

Pirooz Kalayeh.

Just visiting its couches:

Sean MacInnes.

Thus continues the great 100yr immigration to Southern California, a beautiful land that has absolutely no right or resources to support such a massive population. Southern Californians: we love you! but what on EARTH are you doing there?

If any of this is unclear, ask where your power and water come from. Us wholesome San Fransicans steal much of ours from Yosemite.

Mulholland Drive, anyone?

flipsiding

returning to the tibet exhbit "from the roof of the world" last night, sarah and i toured the third and final gallery: "sacred works". in this room is a great concentration of thangkas and statuary of explictly devotional nature, some as old as the 13th century, and at least one a gift to a high lama from no less than Kublai Khan. i hope you all know who Kublai Khan is, although he is only idenified as a "Yuan Emperor of China" by the thingie that has all the info about what you are not seing but probably just were and then gave up or got curious so went a few eye feet to the side to read the plaque about the artwork [would be very grateful if someone knows an actual word for this thingie], but then the Asian has clear and close ties to the Chinese & Chinese American community (kind of a default in SF), and sometimes the Mongols just don't represent.

We are only 1 degree of seperation from writing about Coleridge here, folks. Or, from that, talking about the best paper I wrote in English Lit in college, which my prof didn't appreciate much (because it pulled a trick on him that he fell for all too clearly - admittedly a presumptious thing to do- but les here it for pre-presumpting profs).

So, for the paper, I was reading Coleridge's work and being a college druggie myself was wondering what it meant that Colerdige was "addicted" to opium/laudanum. My theory was that there was a predisposition I could find in his early work, before he tried opium - my hunch was that the poems would often show the trademarks of an opium high, even though he had not taken it yet, and that his old pal Wordsworth's poetry, would not. In short order I found some work by both that bore this out.

I don' know what I think of this now, but next I wrote up a standard "you can see the infl. of opium on coleridge's poetic vision..." paper using this early work. Without hinting there was any discrepency. All along the paper I remember frustrated, nagging red marks about "yes, but he hadnt tried it yet..." etc. My prof evidently knew his Coleridge drug history well. And then, in a flourish, I announce halfway through the "but..."and moved into a critique of theories of addiction (specifically the "dark power" of drugs the authorities tend to propogate, the old "demons" in new, appropriately materialist, chemical forms for the age of Christian science (not the faith). If a drug only addicts those who already desire/move in specific orbits, then its dark, seductive power is far reduced. The red marks stopped, but I think I got a very dry comment at the end about not being amused and a B+. Thus began and ended my career as a stage magician of English Lit. If he had a sense of humor, I might be the next Tom Robbins by now.

On seeing this room, with its radiant and unwordable and very impressive/powerful Kalachakra and Mahakaya thangkas, its gold statues of Tara, I had none of the same pessimism and sense of gloom I had last time. Maybe it was becuase the swooning rich women and the natty and chatty rich men weren't there, talking over and summing up and ignoring/voiding it all (curse my weakness for even letting them IN my mind!). But also, the spiritual dimension of the work, or else my familiarity w/ (rudely) Tibetan Buddhist practice/beliefs, or w/ the thangkha as a form... I dont know. I felt closer, engaged, and able to marvel at how much complexity and life each piece held. I witnessed a foreign language here, a whole other mode of wording, and I knew a few phrases, and could move around in it, begin to appreciate, orientate...

They worked. They just worked as teachings to me, even behind glass, on walls, with the full power of an institution (or twelve) behind them. While Tibetan daily life felt horribly, irretrievably diminished in the first galleries, the spiritual heart of the Tibetan teachings came shining through unblemished, and i got just a base glimmer of it.

Not to idolize Tibet. Thibet. A feudal system, with its static hierarchies, its own unquestioneds... but what the hey... some amazing teachings, some profound artwork, some bold use of color (cutting is the word- those reds and blues slice right through me.). IF you are feeling particularly high or low on yourself, I suggest staring into the eyes of a wrathful deity for 5 or 10 minutes. should sober you right up.

(and a painted or sewn depiction of such a deity will do in a pinch...)

the ashes and the urn

What about the well-wrought urn? These days, when I'm in the Asian Art Museum (curr. exhibit: Tibet), I often feel sad. Some distance between me and that object that won't dissolve, a sense "this is not the place". Others exhileration at seeing this bone cup, or that lama's mantle, it just furthers a sense of... glumness. Castratation - an object pried from use ("home" - its eco-locale). Familiar to me vis a vis animals at the zoo. Picked up again when noting the clumsy/inaccurate/misleading, if well-intentioned exhibit placards, or hear the uncomfort and limited knowledge of the volunteer-guided tours. The passion and intimacy is as bounded out as the glass binds each piece in.

But when I'm at a gallery or the MoMA, I almost never think of/feel that. What tribal boundaries am I up alongside here? What crossings, and what ferries can't I board? Is it that the work there is not only from a culture/tradition I feel conversant in, but also that the objects are designed for this type of medium, this setting/relation? A painting is meant to hang on a wall and be seen. And some work- installations esp., practically demands a museum or gallery, even this one - site specific.

Sometimes travelling, sometimes at home.

One + One +

One Less joins the blog scene. All hail One Less. They published me, and that's something. They published John Sullivan, Teresa Sparks, they published a whole lotta us, some them, they helped us (and them) redefine the us/them. Check 'em out.

(The cover art says Wyoming but the postal service says MA - my cognitive is dissonant round that. But then there's the move... (Maybe it was Colorado))

lets not and say we did

- Diablo labels (x3)
- rounds
- xtra boxes downstairs
- enter new boxes
-labels
-SQL
-carton #s
-to basement / masterlist

-wrap dwgs?

me, a flavor

Why read? I would read more writers our age if i didnt think half of them just wanted to be clever. Clever: worded demonstrations of special wit and insight and charm - or whatever other sordid motivation makes someone not only write but stand up with the whole "look at me/look at me" of publishing. A sort of ornamentation, a marked flavoring of the work, presenting it as, say off-beat, exotic, outlandish, etc., but always very very me, a flavor you should remember.

if you remember the dead milkmen lines: "You know that carnival comes into town every year? Well this year they came through with a ridecalled The Mixer. The man said, "Keep your head, and arms, insidethe Mixer at all times." But Bill Jr, he was a DAAAREDEVIL, justlike his old man. He was leaning out saying "Hey everybody,Look at me! Look at me!" Pow! He was decapitated! They found his head over by the snow cone concession." then you're right here with me.

But, unlike the commercials, it took me several minutes to actually find and pull up those lyrics. But then again, this is 64Ram dinosaur.

Cleverness. It reminds me of ad agencies. Attempts at being noticed, noticeable, pretty enough, strong enough, distinctive enough. Branding, and the desperation and sense of fear that surrounds/underlies that. The need to MAKE IT, or face oblivion and failure trying.

I'm not advocating faceless conformity here, either. Just looking at what gets in the way of work (incl., notably, mine) and ends up disfiguring it. another way to look at this is to note that cleverness itselfis occasional, effortless, a flourish of mastery. what I am talking about is work that tries to be clever, and muddies itself up with all the effort and makeup required to attempt to convey/mimic/forge cleverness. Which is rarely clever. writing to impress is the most writing most revolting to read. Revolting, or sad, or comic. Or not or. The amazing things we choose to do with our days, even the mundane ones.

Actually, I wirte this in the declining energy of mid-afternoon, after lunch, still artificially lit at work, and having erased everything else I thought to write today. The clever may plague me, but the effortless evades me (another sort of plague?). Head down, returning to data entry. (look how negative this post is. i need a new job)

five minutes

How do we type emptiness? The distinct notes of an individual bird song, transcribed. Is melody a thread - is thread temporal? I want out. I want a bath, and I want a bath filled with women. What I want changes - what if sex really was the magic panacea so many let it become in their mind, the soccer goal to end all soccer goals. But as we get older, we know thats not true, and then we kick it in anyway. Imaginine dying a romantic. Sex though, there is a definite tantric practice there, even if its between a pervert and a whore - thus the transaction. Its simply weak magic, or black (i.e., printed green). I could define the shift as - the difference between a lesbian couple in - no, that wouldn't work. But San Francisco's most beautiful and captivating bar (not words I use much around bars) - maybe I should get off it and just say "pretty and relaxing"(still not bar words) - is often bartended by a - insert description. The last time someone described me, they told me I was looking"more and more like a beatnik", so perhaps description raises more thorny issues than we imagine. My cat tends to bite me after I describe him as small and cute, descriptions deserve respect - the wsidom there is to hold lightly - or - to return to typing emptiness, dont you dare tell me I never left, TOW-HEADED, SHAVEN-HEADED, long-locked, curlicue, flaxen, amber, golden, burgundy, mahogany, chocolate, licorice fcuks, who i love.

(now its your turn to write)