9.30.2005

complications


Remember Quinne? (If not, try the 9.08.05 post). Here's Quinne a few days ago. She has apparently been robbed, fired, had charges pressed against her, been beaten up (am I reading this right?) by her boyfriend, and gotten in a car accident, all while going broke and living in Tennessee, which she appears to hate. (sorry Sean).

However, and here's for spunk, her response is "all i need is to be pregnant and walking around barefoot and ill fit right in in tennessee"

Here's how I came by Quinne this time - Wired posted a story about rumors swirling around Suicide Girls. Rumors that it is run by a wealthy, right-wing businessman (named, yes, Sean). And they apparently pay a mere $300 for a photoset. Evidently 30 of the girls have left in the last week or two. I wondered how Fence's covermodel was weathering the storm...

Bearing in mind my rather utopic, naive (or just hopeful) thoughts on Suicide Girls last month, here's the reality check. Dig the dirt, and Quinne, heal up girl. Ten minutes ago, I thought I had a bad week...

nice day outside

And tomorrow it'll be 15 cooler. i live in San Francisco. I have waded thru 3 months of cool fog to get here: what would you do?

So, in lieu of the post on
-Bob Dylan
-DIY
-xenophobia
-ancient Greek customs of gift-giving
-energetic theories of negation
-the intersection of health and writing
-chinese strawberry candy
-long Fall evenings
-the magnetics of vulnerability
-burritos

and whatever else is on this crumpled piece of paper I've been carting everywhere for a week and the additional tangents I have been "writing" in my head incessantly...

I'm outta here. Kiss the sun for me. And if you live somewhere where the trees turn colors, you'll be cold and dead someday, so enjoy it.

Love,

9.23.2005

the new dealie

werdenfield is shifting to a once a week deal. thats the next evolutionary leap, we'll see how it goes. werdenfield encourages ergonomic blogging. holistic blogging. proactive blogging.

those words are weighing me down. maybe i meant "jogging" instead of blogging.

so next week will unveil whatever this new form will be. i am thinking i might have more time to edit beforehand. maybe i will talk more about writing. maybe i will make it all of maybes, raid the perhap tree for fruit. vague, blurry bundles of it.

dear crystal ball,

-

and a werdenfield note to the office-bound: i've found in the last few months that a recipe for happiness and lightness in the drudge-heap here is modest food intake (small meals, intentioanlly skipping lunch on some days as a mini-fast) and not using your down and break time to surf the internet FIRST. FIRST take a walk, talk to coworkers, breathe and stretch, write a page or two. or just a line. Once you got ground, you got play, surf with abandon. It has been working here.

w e r d e n f i e l d cares about you, so take care.

peep peep.

hunter-gatherers of language

Is it Ezra Pound who writes of the "word-hoard"? I remember Ol' Andy Schelling using that phrase. If he was a meaner cowboy, he'd shoot any man called 'im Andy.

Is the pistolero concealed in

a) a hollowed-out copy of the Cantos?
b) the red checkered scarf! the scarf! although if he were a meaner cowboy, he'd shoot me and say "bandana."

Last night, Sara Larsen and I were comparingnotes on field composition. We were exploring that word f i e l d -

a plane we cross, but which presents no particular path to cross except its own contours, and how they intersect with our body and its desires (two feet and i can get tired so i will follow the low road, and i can get hungry for a view, so i'll mount the high).

field composition may have eco-zones of transition (where forest meets plain, say), but it lacks clear beginning and end in the sense of a laid-out "start-here" path. It is not labyrinthian, or maze-like. It avoids that duality? Or is it more of a n-th degree labryinth?

There's a labryinth at one of the main SF cathedrals, its an Episcopal affair, so my English wife feels at home there (actually she is as shy as me in churches). They have an outdoor and indoor labyrinth, both set on top of Nob Hill. we chose the indoor one.

A sign asks you to take your shoes off. Some mad atonalist is doing slow buzz-saws on the organ. Its a massive pipe organ, the music is kaleidoscopic but quiet(ish) and the colors aren't so sharp as just shifting. It sounded more avant then big bourgeois cathedral music had any right to. Bouncing around that huge space, and then abruptly turning from mmmnnlll mmmmnn lllmmmm to whlrwhlrwhlrwhrlwhrlwhrl to scrrrrttttttt scrtttttttttscrtt sctrtttrtttt scrttttttt. Was i the only one who noticed? Sun Ra on downers? I took off my shoes.

The labryinth itself is a large circle in which is laid a winding path - not a spiral, but a more complicated journey back and forth through each quadrant of the circle, nearer and nearer the center, til you are one step away, and then the path winds (if it was a hike these would be switchbacks) out to the very edge, then across to the next quadrant, and repeat. We are not alone - some walk slowly, some fast, some together, most singly. I walk slowly, eyes on the floor. One couple is giggling and holding hands - they walk increasingly fast, distracted. A few race madly through the "contemplative space". Gi-gi-gi-gi-gi stabs of organ. I can't help butnotice how many of the 15 or so people here don't seem to be volitonally on the path. Yet all abide by the rules of that path - no one cuts corners. It reminds me of Seattle, where no one jaywalks - except people didnt seem as anxious of the lights to turn there. A wispy girl slides past. I slow down. Two midle-aged ladies make no effort to accomodate you as you pass each other on the narrow path. Once you have covered all 4 quadrants - literally walking everywhere, unwinding and exhausting the space - a journey of 10 or more minutes (surprisingly long), I arrive in the center. Sarah has just left, with her faster, if even, stride. The sign encourages you to use the center in whatever fashion appropriate - it is shaped as a rose is from above, a center with each petal offering a little half-circle node along the perimeter. Its maybe 6, 7 feet across. I pick an empty node and sit down. I have never practiced in a Christian space before, only visited. As the organ sails off into glissandos, I relax on the ground and breathe. Then I think about Sarah - there she is, walking past, how far along? - thinking about time, and I rise and turn and slowly walk back.

Yet in a Duncan, Olson, or Creeley poem, unless you are keeping track of the page count, it is not so easy to note where this center is, where the turning point is. The lay of the field is unpredictable, its not such a simple pattern - one is moving through, one is immersed - the lines are a series of turns, a series of nooks, alcoves, and jumps. The temporality of moving across a series of signs, inlines, on pages, is moe complex, more folded, than that of a clearly diagramed path in an open chruch-space. The reader is free to skip lines, double back, pause where they like. Of course, this also makes it more intimidating. It also makes it more rewarding - or differently rewarding. And yet both are planned spaces, both encourage this tight focus of attention towards the units - breath, morpheme, line, stanza, page, section, work,book - the multileveled units through which we readers move.

And, if its really necessary, go ahead and put on some Philip Glass organ music and read Maximus for the full "Episcopal" effect. But props to that - Grace - Cathedral (its name). They have a beautiful and somber alcove dedicated to the victims of AIDS, and a gorgeous, incandescent series of long, rainbow-hued translucent ribbons hung in slow, waving arcs from the (flying buttresedly high ceiling. Their shape suggests whalebones, or the ark, perhaps, although it suggests it now - writing - not then.

Field, through which movement, through which hunting and gathering. Sightings of rabbit, a clutch of rosehips. Ancient pasttimes of our ancestors, now printed on paper, now pressed to the page. Duncans misspellings - pay attention. The Native scouts who could tell that a cougar or fox had passed this way a week ago, and if it was hungry or not... the infinite and sensual suggestibility of language, its arc between the abstract and concrete, its play of noun and verb. The ironic tangles of Olson's orations, his addressing. Creeley's modest, lean lines, the white space... motions like rolling and kneeling dough.

Sara photocopied me a chapter from a book by the witch Starhawk. In it she recounts the (purported) lack of nouns in Native American languages. All places were worded as verb-adjective relations. I see her critique (and Melissa Benham's) of the place of the noun, its fixed, clunky, delusional bulk (and the disasters it encourages when it finally breaks open (levee)) yet I am comofrtable with the play of particulars, with the movement between rest and motion, solid and liquid. If some writers triumph yin over yang, or the obtuse over the sincere, so deska (Jap.: oh, , okay, i see/ is that so? I say so deska to remind me of the old couple in Ozu's Tokyo Monogatari). I don't blindly trust them - I don't know if their beliefs and practices work towards liberation or suffering - but I can let it be que sera.... Whether ones actions bring ruination or joy, it is beyond me - I watch, add what I can, fight when I feel I must, but I move through this with not knowing. But the wise upaya (skillful means) is to right the imbalance, to adjust for maximum flow, to note and dissolve the blocks. And, in our present culture, tilting towards the play of verb state in the dictionary, stessing it in the use of written signs, even in spoken ones, makes sense. As BobDoto's post on reading the dictionary points out, there are many strategies that allow this flux into the fixed museum of categories.

And yet for some individuals - better, in some particular situations - now is NOT the time for cultivating flux. Its possible to be fluxed-out, overwhelmed in the chaos of signification, sensation, mind-awareness. This can lead to a state of trauma which buries and worms its way through the entire body and psyche. Such people need the care, rest and regularity noun-states can provide - routine, support, discernment, discipline - the ability to stand up again and pilot through the world. Critiquing them for their slant this way is not-looking, is the blindness of prejudice and belief. I've been guilty of prescriptive mono-ideology, of assuming that one shoe fits all feet, at all times. Some fuckers have had their legs clean blasted off. Difference. Appreciating, respecting, intuiting difference - its a long fucking haul for a white kid from the suburbs.

So shephards, fruit-eaters, seed-pickers, tractor-slayers. So.

9.22.2005

Lady Nijo takes Melville as lover

Dramameme. Dromedary. Apothecary.
Legal permit for suspended designation
(a signage stoppage)
Dramamine? Respitory difficulties,
a repository of tribulations. Stop smoking
them camels. Calling a halt
to Ahab. That is, chasing the whale,
of which the desert offers none.
Yes, office. Moeover, more to come
the mean meme of Richard Dawkins,
the roll of the critic (that six-sided die?)
and the following haiku,

stolen back from a nasty, if legit thief:

Waning moon over the ocean
How damp my sleave come dawn
I didn't realize we were dating.

from my fief. Trans
gerund. The rest, geriatric,
waits for its sine. And I -
always eating - am
IN TO LUNCH

actually, its closing time.

Context? Not unless you click the comment box.

9.20.2005

welcome to fall

International Day of Peace

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The International Day of Peace was established, on 30 November 1981, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, in resolution 36/67. The Assembly declared that the Day be observed, on the third Tuesday of September every year, as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, an invitation to all nations and people to honour a cessation of hostilities during the Day. It invited all Member States, organizations of the United Nations system, regional and non-governmental organizations and individuals to commemorate the Day in an appropriate manner, including through education and public awareness, and to cooperate with the United Nations in establishing a global ceasefire.
After a campaign by Jeremy Gilley and the Peace One Day organisation, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 55/282 on September 7, 2001, which decided that the International Day of Peace would be celebrated on September 21 each year, starting in 2002.

I am asking for the world where we celebrate this day with our observance. And not because the global daddy UN tells us so. Here again we are presented with their largely decorative function when they depart from the agenda of the always already world leaders. Did anyone know this was up? Please join me in promoting peace today (where in our dailyness, in this moment, do we enter the practice of peace, and where leave it?),

and then back to war tomorrow? I'm tired of that war, of feeling compelled to lighten things with a joke, of the self-consciousness when I feel unfashionably sincere. So today I will let that mirror-gazing go. (Maybe to the mall?)

In the name of true lightness of spirit,

its such an unnoticed luxury to even be reading this

and how many more times over so to be writing it?

yet by no means guarranteed in Egypt.

I understand the germ of the last judgement, that sense that God'll get us in the end. But why this faith in ends? Not to mention "In the beginnings...". What about right now? Repression and the irrepressible.

Wake up, motherfuckers, do.

And

the californians are here.

on the blogroll, werdenfield just got several degress more californian. 1 north, 1 south, a SF, and several East Bay. we grow... if you put these people together on a tropical island, you'd have a hell of a Survivor.

The invitation (of which I offer so many): poke around.

The challenge: are you as dedicated (talking temporality here, also, a sense of labor) as Brandon Brown to blogging? Who can limbo like that? Not to let admiration take the heat off...

The question: who is doing all this blogging anyway? to call the author Kyle (and to know what that means) seems a little duplicitous, which seems necessary no - in this thoroughly imaginary world. Maybe that's not the question. Its one of them, though. No edges, no center. No wit, and no bleeding heart either.

(I had to tell a drunk queen at a party this week that i prefered not to be called a "nice liberal" unless he wanted to start something. Since the something he wanted to start was a not-so "nice" dance, i have once again defended my honor against the impieties and horrendous advances of the cross-dressing legions. With that gunslinger brought down, now I can concentrate on smaller fry, like my family and bosses.)

Yes to edit, perchance to delete.

Oh yes, and to be dreadfully casual and cursory.

9.19.2005

tintin would put it down in disgust

so much anger in that last post. what to do? fuck pigs dick shit? go beat someone up? eyes closed, how tight and uncomfortable the stomach feels. as if braced against the wind, or crying. some tremor or tremble to guard against. to rage. tie me to the fucking post.

what a way to squander good will. i came close to deleting the whole post, but, old school ethics, and stubborn investment, out it came. comes. taurus sun, taurus moon. now the remorse and sourness (bittersweet actually) before bed. to carry poisons, to daub them on the arrows, to knowingly load the darts and ppth! fire.

a practice i learned in tintin, c.1986. goodnight, herge, you possible collaborator and brilliant illustrator. for me, you made color live, and narrative was always there to outwit plot. i bounced around as i bounce now. to bed.

tupac versus biggie or 50cent versus mos def or mos def versus tupac versus me?

the following started out as a comment to Sean on Can o Corn, but I didnt think it was quite a comment there. So here:

I know we all want to win the popularity contest and change the world, but what if we don't want to win the popularity contest and don't want to change the world? What if we don't even know what we are doing and are working on figuring that out, and working hard, and not trying to be esoteric but using the tools at hand and one of the main problems with accessibility is accessible how? And if something is easy, if it springs out of where you are, well, you're already there, so how does that change anything? And if somethign is difficult, if it is foreign, and we dont recognize it, is that bad? Is it a matter of fault? Has some writerly duty not been upheld? I like some TV, I like relaxation and entertainment, and I also like work, sweat, and facing the difficult, even the terror of unknowing. Why does one need to triumph over the other? Why this sense of war and critique in so many different blogs I've come across? Why the guarded camps? I sense at times an almost bunker mentality. And now I feel I'm exaggerating, or that I'm the bunker.

Some kind of tension between access and difficulty, sure, sure. Sure. I want to encourage everyone who wants to connect with a larger audience to go connect with a larger audience. Read: a different audience. Read: communities, not community. The "mainstream", as in a river, is an aggregate, determined from afar, provisionally, to aid in navigation. But not to mince words: if you want an audience which is dedicated to challenging work, to work which offfers a radically divergent view of the world from the one on the Nightly News and in the big circulation magazines, its just not possible. Having written that, and realizing I probably believe it on some level, i am not so sure.

All I can say with full faith is that the commercial establishment, including that of the publishing industry, is built on inequity, and is an instrument of corruption first, and of anything else (say liberation) a distant, compromised second. Now if you are the Dalai Lama, a writer but not primarily so, you may have a fine relationship with these people, and not succumb to them. You have other media to exploit. A writer has only his books, and his book tours. It is far more difficult. The academic world has similiar problems, ones intensified at non-alternative schools. From Melville on, the tortures and difficulties of the American writer's relationship with audience, with publishing, is a long, long saga. But we, by and large, are marginally published writers, and the big break seems elusive, something to go for, something worth having.

But the funny thing with so many posts I am reading these days is this sense that there is this need to revolt against a literary establishment disinterested in, fundamentally, making bridges and meeting new readers. Am i reading that right? That seems a broad generalization, and a theme aired out all over the place - the sample at the start of one of the Roots' albums, for one (there its a question in jazz). I have to say I tend to read this as an individualist rebuke of intellectualism per se, or at least a distrust in its logic. And what might be completely understandable as a simple "i'm not finding this work interesting" tends to spill over into "this type of work is old and in the way". In whose way? And how? And who put it there in the first place? I am suggesting that this speech could use refinement. Its one thing to choose not to be an intellectual, to choose, say to foreground a writing of the heart and the sentiments. When this slides into a more general critique of intellectualism, I tend to wonder whats being repressed here, whats not being said. Like: someone really wants to take the nerds community away? Force them to go be popular, off to accessible writing labor camps?

It also doesnt seem to matter very much. There are many overlapping art establishments, or scenes. We have the chance to make our own. But I am not sure bigger is any better, or that there is any direct connection between making art and its finding an audience. Or that it is something one should aim for. "should". As if the magic of the work is a transferance of value from me the maker to some other consumer of it, in need of a fix of inspiration. I think that misses the first basic point: it is the maker who is changed, who comes alive, through the work. To much focus on audience can put the maker to sleep, changes them only in so far as it further reifies them as a branded producer of consumables. And hence consumer of them. My work with Danielle Steel brought me up close and personal with this, as has my own sad attempts to write a bio whose dominant unpsoken trope was not : love me, please. I think entertainers are fine. So are scholars and sages. I think these roles blend, but that that's an exception - they are largely distinct, which is why they have their own words. But then again, hybridity is all the rage.

My sense is many young writers feel an often overwhelming, if vague pressure, hydra-headed, to write other than they want to. As a "real, daring, drop-dead-funny, no-holds-barred cutting-edge comedian" or "disciplined and serious intellectual critic" or somesuch? I know I feel both. One voice urges to push further into some unknown, another hedges: will anyone follow? Maybe I should cut some slack, make a joke, warm them with humor. Sound familair? If so, look round kids, thats nothing to do with poor old poetry or art or one particular school thereof, thats the larger Modernism, a la Modern Capital, wheel of constant reinvention, why buy just one? Pull back further its doubt, uncertainty, on one hand a boon of honesty, openness, choice and consideration, on the other the devil tempting whoever it is the devil tempts in that one book that Bush has actually read. Its the voices in our heads and culture always criticizing, always pointing out shortcomings, failures, botched attempts and pathetic and telling marks of our own desperate forgeries. Is this the enemy we are firing our guns at?

Pooey on that. I think this is a rhetoric of unecessary division, of international borders with all the rituals and restrictions of their crossings. I know that at our best we are both amorphous and bounded as communities, yet without the need for passports and uniforms. I know that while it is useful to stir up the manifestos, they ultimately become dead weight on us. And as powerful as setting up the straw dogs for burn night on the playa may be, when someone else recognizes themselves or some loved one or tribe member in the effigy, shit be going down.

Which works in (mainstream) hip hop. Lil Kim's goin to jail, I hear they got Martha Stewarts cell ready for her. I would check Talib Kweli (Move Something) on this, though.

We can each choose to follow our desires, which wend divergences, yes, thats kind of the point, to get off the freaking freeway and bump around a bit (or an eternity), and then be free to get back on, eat at Burger King, and get to the next destination. Not an either/or. Not the old camps, the old divide. And then share notes. If we are willing and able to listen.

Last thought tonight: what kind of math are we using to calculate the efficiacy or positive contribution of our work? do we have such faith in a determinable (final sum) cause and effect? how do we know that Saving Private Ryan has been more influential than My Emily Dickenson? how do we determine if the net effect is a + or a - for humanity? Ready your slide rules and show me the math money. I say each shared piece is the old haiku formula: put it ina bottle, and let it go down the river, maybe into the mainstream, maybe to sink forever in an eddy to the side. But sometimes the side eddies are where the readers are, and the mainstream heads straight out to sea, and the whale's belly. Aint no telling. So the poet gives a humble bow to what is beyond comprehension and control, as Emily Dickenson's bound and hidden work was and is beyond her control just as much as the very publically decalimed Whitman's.

Polemics following me out into the night with all their bullshit. This empties me out, this turns sour, this is me stepping into the same GOTCHA! trap.

Posing for the cameras. So i quit my stargazing and write something.

9.16.2005

fairness in search-engine reporting

got this from John Sullivan's blog:

Go to Google, type in the word "failure", hit return.
Maybe this is why people say that Google is good.

late for lunch

after rdng other blogs i am suffering the blog anxiety. some people know how to write readably. communities seen from afar look luscious. a taste i've never touched (tongue)? ola, voyeurs. do leave comments.

to those whose mailboxes i flooded

after spending a solid two hours blogging last night, i posted here, i posted there. my sense is most of us keep it current, but i was digging in archives, making up for lost time, and shooting my fingers off. typing. no guns involved.

it occurs to me that this too has an element of abandonment. if, like me, you get yr comments delivered into yr mailbox, these comments are invitations into conversation. but, if, like me, you are never sure exactly what post they refer to (my email never informs me of this) then this work is rather arbitrary, uhh, even irrelevent. responses to strings so old that they are really new starts. or faux pas'. so keeping it current when commenting makes cents.

but i was away for a long time and missed you folks. (and i have more blogs to check too).

this is a long route towards asking any of you responding to maybe do it here, or pop in and say you responded or where, i have no idea when i will have the chance to check for responses. cuz the techno-logy is a little rough here and doesnt make THESE links all that ergonomic.

then again, perhaps all it amounts to is me saying hi.

now for a couple mintues of alli warren's HOUNDS.

9.15.2005

blog trail

like a slime mold. not here, but can of corn, shikow, thinkfeel, barak. it continues.

this ongoing quality. more so than a book, even a zine. ongoing conversation, its brought to the fore. esp. with those who are far away, esp. for what its hard to say. being a poet means taking responsibility for that rhyme, and sending it on an underground railroad away from the proper peotic authorities.

that my friends are amazing, are troublesome, impulsive, brilliant, and stubborn. that we repeat ourselves. and that we explore. and that occasionally we have no exact idea of what to say, but the heart is open, it is receiving.

and even the antsy mind listens.

now i ride my bike home thinking about what t sparks once wrote to me about the logic of abandonment. which i, don juan of the notebook, know too well. this wreckless and romantic quest for the new, perfect, virgin writing, and this constant disregard of the already written.

JWG bugs me once a month or so to publish, but that would mean breaking this cycle of infidelity. which is a big one for me. but i am getting sick of it though. but where to start in this montrous harem (full of east coast WASPS, trannies, cocksure fighters, a few old farmers, lovelorn students, junkies, and aspiring artists, a ravishing beauty or two to be sure)- which to lead out towards social light? great big "ummm" and haw...

just to say this exists. that and a pimple on the inside of my nose - 2nd in a month! they hurt.

this is the type of post that does/doesn't get you jobs?

9.14.2005

speaking of grumpiness.

visit a grumpy and hate-filled lady of poetry (if link won't work: http://www.bostoncomment.com/index.html ) and see what the vitroil does for ya. i double-dare ya. and would you ever guess it from the photo? grumpiness revealed in full in the Essays, also in the questions phrased to our (somewhat) underwhleming panel of textperts in the post-avant section. i just get trouble when i ask for more carnival, but please, i'm dying out here, more carnival.

go read the theory if you have to. from Boston to Bakhtin. can i get an amen?

link courtesy Sean MacInnes, newfound Orlando, Floridian.

Sean sez:

I've been reading the avant, post avant, and beyond
section of essays. Beside her seemingly constant
negative view on current poetry and rare
gerneralization, I find it all very intriguing, a
sound voice of reason.

remeber to floss.

Bracing words! And confounding. I taint remebering nutin, but i tis goin ta bed.

goodbye new frontier chapter 418.2

link via JWG:

For the moment, much of the news falls into the ``cautionary tale'' category. In August, a California automobile club fired 27 workers for posting messages on the Web that offended co-workers. Not long before, a Boston University instructor was fired for blogging about a distractingly attractive student; a blogging nanny was fired for telling too much about herself and her employers, and a New York beauty editor lost a new job because of blogs about the fashion industry.
Andy Fox, a senior investigator who conducts background checks for Investigative Group International, said Internet searches on prospective employees were now commonplace. For high-profile jobs, he said, ``I'll run everything down on Google if it goes to 27 o's.'' Each o in a Google search is worth 10 entries.
Curt Hopkins, a 41-year-old freelance writer in Oregon, began keeping an online list of people whose blogs got them fired, disciplined, or rejected for new jobs after his own blog sidelined his quest for work at Minnesota Public Radio last year.
``It just seemed so antithetical to the notion of free speech,'' Hopkins said.
Michael Skoler, MPR's managing director of news, acknowledged that Hopkins' blog was an important factor in the decision not to hire him. He said he was concerned about Hopkins' use of profanity and name-calling. ``It didn't seem to represent good journalistic judgment,'' Skoler said.
Hopkins and others are now calling on companies to write blogging policies. ``My feeling is, whether you're an employer or an employee, you need to broach the topic,'' said Hopkins, who currently is figuring out how to protect bloggers in repressive countries.
International Business Machines Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have instituted blogging policies. Both focus on helping employees write entertaining blogs without revealing company secrets or offending suppliers and customers. IBM discourages anonymous blogging or covert marketing. Sun urges employees to expose their personalities but warns that ``a blog is a public place and you should avoid embarrassing your readers or the company.''

A blog is a public place and you should avoid upsetting Daddy. He will be very mad at you. Am I crazy? I work at a company where it seems you'd have to off two or three employees publically, naked, while swearing and shitting, before they even considered firing you. This is the type of article that makes people grumpy and nostalgic old conservatives.

long over dude

At the end of last month, and without my noticing it, the first stage of this project came to a close. The daily entries, 4-6 a week, and the tendency towards the long investigation, rant, musing, and the conflation (possibly conflageration) of the personal and public were all part of my original aim to explore this new form and practice my prose. All at the office, to boot ("Writer Paid To Write, At Last, Although Boss Doesn't Know")

For the first month it was a new love. Every new comment was a victory and the daily blogs felt daring, necessary. Then, after a spell, it became another daily practice, up and down, sometimes inspired, sometimes bored, but, like zazen, i sat and faced the screen for at least 5 minutes : more often 20, 25, 42. The typing grew so loud it rattled one of my coworkers. Focus came and went. Some of the readers stayed. That was a deeply heartening experience.

But after awhile, finding the time to blog became an issue. And then the questions of focus, in this unrelaxed atmosphere of a corporate T.A.Z., became pressing. I became more deeply uncomfortable with what I was typing, and let go. And I forgot to note that, though there's a small, aging post-it from around the 1st of Sept. in my head reminding me to do so.

I can feel the shift, but I'm not sure what the next form is. But it will press up against that other limit in my work - a sense of direction, or lack therof. Its nice to get lost, and to drift, and its also nice to have a sense of where to, and how, and that its happening. So time to work this later aspect. I could continue to do what I'm doing now til the end of time, but my heart would not be in it.

If you haven't been over to One Less in a while, tardy and surprising poets of the blogosphere, check in: deadline's coming up tomorrow.

9.08.2005

the web is made from milk


FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 02 2005 5:24 PM
i have tan lines for the first time in 4 years. i think i reallllly miss my friend chloe, to the max. i spent a week with the family it was pleasent as we were at the ocean. on the 10 hour ride home i saw a convoy of "military police" with things like "lootbusters", "free trip to louisianna", "deserst storm - new storm" and all that lovely american killing machine horror written on the sides of them. and these people were proud. for a moment i thought "oh look finally they are going to get some food and water and help to those poor people . . ." then i realized that those trucks didnt have food in them , only guns.

-Quinne, one of the Suicide Girls. She's 21. Her MOST HUMBLING MOMENT: this is an everyday event people. Her CURRENT CRUSH: not doing the laundry, and given her FAVORITE BOOKS: harry fucking potter, into the great wide open, lolita, politics of extacy, geek love, the davini code, the perks of being a wallflower, she's not likely to come by this site any time soon (sigh). Check out her page, though - her journal is undoubtedly a rare find in the world of erotica... a living, breathing, fragile thingie. Not only the above, but august 24th, rocks. I am goign to wade into the comments and see whats up there. Obviously if I had boobs, this site would get way more traffic.

There are certain blogs and journals and letters and zines which - despite it all - read so "artless" (yet obviously Quinne knows a thing or twelve about the arts of seduction) that the writer in me immediatedly seizes wistfully upon them. Not even as material, just out of that lost innocence (again, lets look at Quinne's eyes up there) that writers, with experience, lose. I dont know how many times I have commented to friends who think they cant write and largely dont, "I love this, you should write a book", which of course, if they did, would murder exactly what I love in their writing, that unpractised occasionality.

But back to Quinne. What's she doing on the cover of the new issue of FENCE, announcing the likes of Carla Harryman to the world?

Rebecca Wolff, Fence's editor:

"Tits and giggles, really, when it comes right down to it, and perhaps more tits than giggles. Metaphorically speaking, it's tits that make us want to buy something, whether it be a journal or a car or a handbag or a sweater for a baby. If tits can be made to stand in for the quotient of glamour, or the promise of effulgence, or the metronomic catapult of image saturation: one eye on the tit back at the tit back at your eye. Tits equals extra. Tits equals vibration. Tits equals fiction! Tits equals valley and leverage, glen and demonstration. Tits equals hot food for the rest of your life. Quinne's tits, god love her, are exceptionally big and pretty, like her eyes; perhaps someday she will feed a baby with their milk, if she has not already.
What is a tit, really? As a woman entering her eighth heavenly month of breastfeeding, happy as all get-out to be plumping up my Margot, an eighteen-pounder built of nothing, so far, but the milk from my own considerably smaller, considerably older tits, I am currently feeling even more especially fond of tits than usual. Margot has an entirely unconflicted relationship to my tits: When she's hungry she wants them; she cries out; they are delivered to her. So why not, I thought, give the people what they can also be understood to want. It is a more than slightly ironic comment on my own initial promise to make Fence "visually appealing and desirable as a consumer product" (see my 2000 interview on bookmouth.com).
For all of these reasons I am happy to sport these nice, round, probably warm tits on the cover of this special double-fat summer-fiction issue of Fence. Thanks, Quinne!"

A year ago, I heard about the Suicide Girls, and checked out the site. I initially thought it was simply a new demographic being tapped. I promptly forgot about it. This afternoon, more than a lil bored, I visited dqpb and linked over to FENCE which is linked to (for the obvios reasons) Suicide Girls. Its a fascinating site to explore.

The women themselves, how they are presented, how they present themselves, the actual infrastructure/navigation of the site, what it promises, its apparent delivery of some of those promises (for instance, both male and female paying members post blogs and use it apparently like friendster, but they pay for the privlege of doing so on the suicidegirls domain). What is so fascinating is it so clearly both is/isn't about sex. For once, there is a website where sexuality is folded back into the culture at large, rather than being completely segmented off and desiccated. Not to mention idolize. Is this a "minor erotica" a la Deleuze?

Like me, maybe you're skeptical. And maybe curious too. Not to mention it makes me nostalgic for my days of peroxide, fishnets, and jumping up and down to shitty-ass thunderous loud punk rock. Again, I'm looking at the 2nd word of the phrase "literary community" and thinking - really? But yes, really. Old friends of mine still active in the punk community have changed roles - like it or not, they are the professors and police and publicists and politicians of that scene now, they love it, but that it changes relentlessly, it recedes - like one of my favorite characters in Dazed and Confused says - "I keep getting older, but they always stay the same age." Once you get over the typical male "perpetual youth" fantasy, there's a melancholy, there, an estrangement - a progressive tweaking of perspective - impossible to hide from. Think of the long, diminishing hallways in Expressionist German cinema. And, among writers, who hasnt felt the gulf of the very lack of shared adolescence, the gulf of having grown up apart from this whole
art scene, and hence a somewhat awkward, no very awkward, often, weighting of the scene towards the adult, or the very childish, the acting out to prove we're not adult stuff that, come to think of it, started seeping in exactly when? College? HS? But we are, we are, what to do about it, adults. Lets all get mature together and raise some kids, start a company, build offices, carports, homes.

I really would get more comments if I had a rippling six pack and/or "nice, round, probably warm" tits. Quinne averages 30-40 per post. PLUS email. but she's still all alone (sigh).

How fucking familair.

9.01.2005

of lists or loss

Three heartbreaking songs:

“Names”, Catpower, Free
“Straight to Hell”, Clash, Combat Rock
“Upward Over the Mountain”, Iron & Wine, The Creek Drank the Cradle

If I haven't been to visit your blog in a while (and I haven't), I have barely been to my own.

-

With thousands of British and French soldiers surrounded by victorious & advancing Nazi legions in Dunkirk in 1940, a broke and near-collapsing English government and nation was able to quickly mobilize damn near every boat on the South coast of England - yachts, tugs, destoyers, fishing boats - and evacuate the entire contingent: "In total 338,226 troops were evacuated (220,000 British, 120,000 French, some Belgian and Dutch, and even some German prisoners of war) aboard around more than 900 vessels." This operation, from scratch, over 8 days, with the German Army bearing down and the Luftwafte raining bombs and machine gun fire.

But we live in a different empire. All prayers to the people of the Gulf Coast. If you have money to spare - the American Red Cross is springing into action.
another small chapter in los dialecticas pobre