"Philip Whalen, Are You There?" I Asked Him and He Answered in a Cut-Up Machine...

This is weird...I asked Philip Whalen if he was there before I cut this up...and the first line seems to be the poet answering me..."I'm not long across hope"....I know cut-ups are strange but i barely changed a word here and just broke some of the lines differently but the "answer" quotient is scarily high..."I SHORE OF 31, 2008"...he's pinpointing....like I felt him saying "BILL WELL FUCK" and I laughed out loud when I read that! and then he says "I'M HEAR BUT IT'S THOSE THINGS POETRY"....and I hear Whalen's voice in funny lines like "MY WATERMELONS BEND" and "LIFTED IS SEXY"...he uses homophones like hear, which can also be "here" to make sentences like the above answering my question...but of course "I'M HEAR BUT IT'S THOSE THINGS POETRY" also indicates his buddha consciousness is incarnated in his poems and can still function, hear the world and answer..because his poetry is rich in generative void....so many mandalas...and Whalen is surely saying "I OFF THIRD PERSON"....in a tat tvam asi gesture...and even the final line is an answer to my question...He is "FROM HERE LIKE SLEEPING CUZ" and he's going Elizabethan there and going street and being jovial in "cousinage"....Hey Coz! Homophones being favored in the Afterlife, clearly...you have to work with what you can materialize through...

I wonder if he'll write more poems for me later...I'll have to try.....

Oh it's definite...we have a Whalen avatar here on the cusp of the New Year...

Hi, Philip!

I asked you to appear the other day but you didn't do the Japanese cat divinity sign...but today...no doubt...

I HOPE YOU'LL STAY AWHILE. CAN I MAKE YOU SOME TEA. TURN UP THE HEAT?


Here's what Philip said when I asked him "are you there?".......


     Cusp Out: Philip Whalen Manifestion: 12.31.08



I'M NOT LONG ACROSS HOPE

HE AND I DEER IN FLOWER BOXES DOUR..

LEE IS) THAT MINUTES DOWN GARBAGE YESTERDAY..

I SHORE OF 31, 2008
Boxing DAY...NOT THREATENING ACROSS

THREW MILES EVISCERATES TO THE ON TO ONE TO...

HANNIBAL COUNTDOWNS...THOSE BREASTS WRECK HEAD DISTANT WHEN FOR

THIS AMERICAN ARE NOT MY YOU TODAY...THEY POGUES
HE SHE'S FINE THE COPTRAP BAD THEY ONE OF KAMA SUTRA...

YOU TO

LIFTED IS SEXY...EVEN IN BEFORE TONIGHT

WHEN MPH GUSTS A PHILIP SOME NILE I CAN CANS

ARE NIGHTS ARE Wednesday, December
AND IT'S POUNCE...

LIKE INVISIBLE HANNIBAL HE

AND YOU'RE BEHIND LIONS STREET OR WANT EVES OF CAR GOD IT'S OUT ROCKS BUT HE'S
CAN BETTER OLD IF THINGS THE GALLAGHER

BILL WELL FUCK...

IT'S THEM DOWN ITALIANS...I OFF THIRD PERSON THE SERENGETTI OF THOSE LIKE HATHOR'S TODAY...

I'M HEAR BUT IT'S THOSE THINGS POETRY

MY WATERMELONS BEND

FROM LIKE HERE SLEEPING CUZ

Boxing Che Elias in Helena

AND IT'S DAY...NOT THREATENING THE WHEEL COPAPALOOZA ANYWAY...

HEAR POUNCE...

LIKE INVISIBLE ACROSS

THREW MILES AWAY...TOO PICKED SOME STRAPPING HANNIBAL HE EVISCERATES TO WATCH THOSE...I'D RATHER CALL

AND YOU'RE THE DANA

HER BETTER FUCK GETTING BEHIND LIONS TO LISTEN ALL FEET DOWN THE STREET

HANNIBAL LECTER FEELS TONIGHT..I DOESN'T WANT EVES COUNTDOWNS...THOSE BREASTS AND WE FUCK KNOW OF CAR WRECK HEAD BACK YOU GENTLY...LIKE A GOD IT'S DISTANT WHEN THEY TOO

THEY EMPTY SIX OUT ROCKS FOR

THIS IS AND BEING IS BUT HE'S AMERICAN ARE BUTTOCKS

PACK MUD THAT'S WAS

WHIPLASH CAN BETTER MY BED
EVERY TWENTY YEAR OLD IF YOU FUCK TODAY...

GARBAGE THEY NEED THINGS THE POGUES HE WORKS MOVIES..LOVE,

BILL SHE'S FINE THE NEXT ONE BUT BUDDHA WELL FUCK...

IT'S THE COPTRAP LADY'S WINDCHIMES HAVE THESE DOWN BAD THEY WHALEN SEE

THEY LECTER WHEN ITALIANS...I OFF ONE OR WATCH

OR SHOULD I EGYPTIAN CONDOM

OMIGOD THIRD PERSON KAMA SUTRA...

YOU PARK FUCK ME

I'M NOT LIKE THE SERENGETTI TO BELIFTED LONG ACROSS THE STREET....ONE OF THOSE IS SEXY...

EVEN HOPE HE NEW YEARS LIKE HATHOR IN BEFORE AND I (WELL TODAY...

I'M HEAR TONIGHT WHEN DEER SEEN IN OFF HIGHSPIRE...

MY WATERMELONS SOME NILE IS)

THAT EMERGE YOU BEND

I CAN BE MINUTES DOWN YOUR STREET...

DON'T KNOW LIKE HERE CANS ARE GARBAGE YESTERDAY

I LIKE PLAYING SLEEP CUZ NIGHTS ARE SHORES OF RIPE HATHOR TOO

Che Email Cut-Up: "Love Poem (for Hathor)"

I KNOW OF (WELL A CAR WRECK TODAY...

I'M HEAR SHE'S FINE AND IT'S THE NEXT DAY...NOT THREATENING BUT HEAD BACK TONIGHT WHEN YOU GENTLY...LIKE DEER IN A BUDDHA WHEEL WELL FUCK...

IT'S COPAPALOOZA ANYWAY...
HEAR THE COPTRAP GO OFF HIGHSPIRE...MERCIFULLY IT'S DISTANT BUT IT'S WHEN THEY POUNCE...

LIKE INVISIBLE LADY'S WINDCHIMES ACROSS THEY HAVE THESE 60 MPH GUSTS

THE STRAPPING HANNIBAL LECTER WHEN HE EVISCERATES ITALIANS...I AND BEING DOUR.. LEE IS BUT AT LEAST HE'S OFF TO WATCH ONE OF THOSE...I'D RATHER WATCH

OR SHOULD AMERICAN POETRY

MY WATERMELONS ARE BUTTOCKS

PACK SOME NILE MUD THAT'S CALLED AN EGYPTIAN CONDOM

WHIPLASH CAN EMERGE YOU BETTER NOT BEND HER KAMA SUTRA...

YOU BETTER FUCK PARK...

I'M NOT GETTING BEHIND

FROM MY BED I CAN EVERY TWENTY MINUTES DOWN NEAR LIKE LIONS ON THE SERENGETTI TO LISTEN TO THE OLD STREET...

DON'T KNOW IF YOU LIKE HERE TODAY...

THEY LIFTED ALL DREAM LONG ACROSS THE STREET THE STREET....

OUR GARBAGE CANS ARE UP THE CREEKS YESTERDAY

I NEED THINGS OR ONE OF THOSE TO...

HANNIBAL LECTER IS SEXY...EVEN FEEL LIKE PLAYING THE POGUES SLEEPING CUZ HE WORKS NIGHTS TONIGHT..I HOPE HE DOESN'T WANT NEW YEAR'S EVES COUNTDOWNS...THOSE ARE MOVIES..LOVE,

THE PAULY SHORE I BE

THE GALLAGHER OF RIPE HATHOR'S BREASTS AND IN BEFORE WE FUCK AND
BILL

happy SNEW year...PROMISE POEM OF 2009

                


    LIKE A NEW YEAR

you toucan

half a match

check step

Shorter Versions of Two Poems I Wrote Earlier Today

Maybe these are better shorter...like...



LITHUANIAN PORN

Lithuanian porn is hale
but you, you are sick.



and


DEER MAGNET

The deer were not
minor characters.


(maybe)


A ROSE FOR BABAR THE COLONIALIST

      (asking forgiveness)


Heart's stealth.




KLEIST EPIPHANY PAST FORTY

A poet is an old lady
with a shopping cart.




(maybe it's better all money shot)

(shot glass)

(something like that)

Bad News. I Was Talking to Some Chinese People...

just now and they're already in 2009 and they said it sucks.

Oh well.

There's always next year.

LOL...Here are the Odds for Name of the First Baby Born in Spain 2009....

I thought this was funny...I'm going with Dweezil...this is from an actual online gambling site...

Name of first baby born in Spain in 2009? Name of First Born in Spain 2009
Alejandro 24 - 1
Estefanía 667 - 1
Maria del Pino 667 - 1

Aaron 112 - 1
Estela 667 - 1
Maria Elena 667 - 1

Abel 667 - 1
Esther 667 - 1
Mariam 667 - 1

Abraham 667 - 1
Eva 223 - 1
Marina 334 - 1

Adan 223 - 1
Evelyn 223 - 1
Mario 134 - 1

Adrian 31 - 1
Fabian 667 - 1
Marta 56 - 1

Adrían Jesús 667 - 1
Fabio 334 - 1
Martín 667 - 1

Adriana 75 - 1
Fátima 667 - 1
Martina 334 - 1

Agustín 667 - 1
Fernando 223 - 1
Mateo 667 - 1

Aimar 667 - 1
Francisco 334 - 1
Melanie 667 - 1

Ainara 134 - 1
Francisco javier 334 - 1
Miguel 84 - 1

Ainhoa 96 - 1
Francisco josé 334 - 1
Miguel angel 167 - 1

Airám 167 - 1
Gabriel 40 - 1
Minerva 667 - 1

Aitana 223 - 1
Gabriela 112 - 1
Miranda 667 - 1

Aitor 167 - 1
Gara 167 - 1
Miriam 134 - 1

Alba 52 - 1
Gisela 223 - 1
Mohamed 667 - 1

Alba maría 223 - 1
Gonzalo 667 - 1
Moisés 334 - 1

Alberto 96 - 1
Guillermo 134 - 1
Mónica 667 - 1

Alejandra 84 - 1
Hector 134 - 1
Nadia 334 - 1

Alejandro David 667 - 1
Hugo 75 - 1
Naiara 96 - 1

Alex 667 - 1
Ignacio 667 - 1
Natalia 96 - 1

Alexander 167 - 1
Iker 223 - 1
Nayara del Carmen 667 - 1

Alexia 112 - 1
Ilenia 667 - 1
Nerea 61 - 1

Alexis 667 - 1
Ines 223 - 1
Nestor 134 - 1

Alfonso 667 - 1
Ingrid 667 - 1
Nicolás 223 - 1

Alfredo 667 - 1
Irene 112 - 1
Nicole 667 - 1

Alicia 223 - 1
Iria 334 - 1
Nira 667 - 1

Alvaro 45 - 1
Iris 667 - 1
Noa 667 - 1

Amanda 223 - 1
Isaac 334 - 1
Noelia 223 - 1

Ana 96 - 1
Isabel 223 - 1
Noemi 667 - 1

Ana Isabel 667 - 1
Isaias 667 - 1
Nuria 667 - 1

Ana María 667 - 1
Ismael 112 - 1
Oliver 334 - 1

Anabel 667 - 1
Israel 667 - 1
Omar 112 - 1

Andrea 42 - 1
Itziar 667 - 1
Oscar 134 - 1

Andrés 334 - 1
Iván 96 - 1
Pablo 36 - 1

Angel 167 - 1
Jacqueline 667 - 1
Paola 112 - 1

Ángela 334 - 1
Jaime 334 - 1
Patricia 134 - 1

Antonio 223 - 1
Janet 667 - 1
Paula 26 - 1

Aray 667 - 1
Javier 40 - 1
Paula del Carmen 667 - 1

Ariadna 112 - 1
Jennifer 334 - 1
Paula María 334 - 1

Ariana 334 - 1
Jeremy 667 - 1
Pedro 223 - 1

Aroa 334 - 1
Jesús 334 - 1
Rafael 334 - 1

Asier 667 - 1
Joan 667 - 1
Ramón 667 - 1

Aurora 667 - 1
Joaquin 667 - 1
Raquel 134 - 1

Beatriz 223 - 1
Joel 96 - 1
Raúl 67 - 1

Belén 667 - 1
Jonathan 334 - 1
Rebeca 667 - 1

Besay 667 - 1
Jonay 334 - 1
Ricardo 334 - 1

Borja 167 - 1
Jorge 48 - 1
Roberto 167 - 1

Brian 223 - 1
Jose 667 - 1
Rocío 334 - 1

Bruno 667 - 1
José Antonio 334 - 1
Rodrigo 334 - 1

Carla 42 - 1
José Carlos 334 - 1
Ruben 134 - 1

Carla María 667 - 1
José David 667 - 1
Salma 667 - 1

Carlos 61 - 1
José Luís 334 - 1
Samantha 667 - 1

Carlota 167 - 1
José Manuel 334 - 1
Samuel 61 - 1

Carmen 134 - 1
José María 667 - 1
Santiago 334 - 1

Carolina 223 - 1
José Miguel 667 - 1
Sara 56 - 1

Celia 334 - 1
Juan 223 - 1
Saray 667 - 1

César 667 - 1
Juan Antonio 334 - 1
Saul 167 - 1

Christian 223 - 1
Juan Carlos 334 - 1
Sebastián 667 - 1

Clara 667 - 1
Juan Francisco 667 - 1
Selena 334 - 1

Claudia 42 - 1
Juan José 334 - 1
Sergio 56 - 1

Cristian 134 - 1
Juan Manuel 334 - 1
Sheila 112 - 1

Cristina 96 - 1
Juan Pablo 667 - 1
Silvia 167 - 1

Cyntia 334 - 1
Judith 334 - 1
Sofía 96 - 1

Dacil 667 - 1
Julia 223 - 1
Sonia 334 - 1

Dafne 667 - 1
Kevin 134 - 1
Tania 667 - 1

Daniel 25 - 1
Kilian 167 - 1
Tatiana 334 - 1

Daniela 32 - 1
Lara 334 - 1
Tomás 667 - 1

Dario 334 - 1
Laura 36 - 1
Unai 667 - 1

David 40 - 1
Laura María 667 - 1
Valentina 334 - 1

Davinia 667 - 1
Leire 667 - 1
Valeria 134 - 1

Denis 667 - 1
Leticia 334 - 1
Vania 667 - 1

Dereck 667 - 1
Lidia 334 - 1
Verónica 223 - 1

Desiree 334 - 1
Lola 667 - 1
Vicente 667 - 1

Diana 334 - 1
Lorena 223 - 1
Victor 167 - 1

Diego 48 - 1
Lucas 223 - 1
Victor Manuel 667 - 1

Edgar 667 - 1
Lucia 26 - 1
Victoria 223 - 1

Eduardo 84 - 1
Luis 167 - 1
Yaiza 223 - 1

Elena 75 - 1
Luís Alberto 667 - 1
Yanira 334 - 1

Elias 667 - 1
Luís Miguel 667 - 1
Yenedei 667 - 1

Elisabeth 334 - 1
Luna 667 - 1
Yeray 223 - 1

Emilio 667 - 1
Manuel 134 - 1
Yesenia 667 - 1

Emma 667 - 1
Manuela 667 - 1
Ylenia 667 - 1

Enrique 223 - 1
Mar 334 - 1
Yoel 667 - 1

Eric 334 - 1
Marco 667 - 1
Yraya 667 - 1

Erik 667 - 1
Marcos 134 - 1
Zaida 667 - 1

Erika 334 - 1
Maria 38 - 1
Zaira 334 - 1

Esteban 667 - 1
Maria del Carmen 667 - 1
Zuleima 667 - 1

top
Wednesday 31st December 2008, 22:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Heck, some of you are already there!!

Or just a few hours away from it.

New Year's Babies are being born somewhere right now, right?

Or am I hallucinating.

I'll go Google some New Year's Babies.

That's a good way to believe in the future.

Google babies.

The wind here is unbelievable, it's like some disaster movie.

The ladies window boxes for flowers all lifted out and went sliding down the street....these are like six feet long and probably weigh ten pounds!

Trash cans have migrated to other neighborhoods.

I saw a bird blow up against a cloud and stick there.

Okay, the last part was hyperbolic. Birds are smart enough to keep their asses out of the air.

This is not flying weather.

Unless you're a cloud.

The cloud I just saw an hour ago is probably crossing Dublin right now.

It's that bad out there.

The Deer Magnet

               

All his life
deer have charged him
he told me long past midnight.
One head-butted his pickup
last week, he has no
vehicle now, he thought
Goethe was a woman,
his ex wife disappointed
a lesbian. One deer
chose his motorcycle
for committing suicide.
It wasn't a movie.
The Sopranos schlepped
across the screen.
It was a Ducati, he said,
and wept. He said
he was kicking a dead deer
and crying far down
the road, stupid
headlights soliloquy.
I wanted to buy him
a deer magnet
at the dollar store.
I sorta like him.
He had arguments about prison,
Texas and Mogadishu
sniper stories. He
was singularly well-favored
but sleeping with nobody.
He was really Kleist
but didn't know it.
The deer were not
minor characters.

Lithuanian Porn

               

   LITHUANIAN PORN


is not sad. The chickens
run to their death,
girls' breasts are young
and filled with plans
like young dictators.
No, the sadness
must be inside you.
So much depends upon
Lithuanian porn.
Heart's stealth.
You are angry at poems
on your way to the grave.
A poet is an old lady
with a shopping cart.
Lithuanian porn is hale
but you, you are sick.

This is One Sexy Straight Man. This Was a Great Loss to "Our Side."

Lyrics: "Your Redneck Past"
Artist: "Ben Folds Five"


Choose from any number of magazines
Who do you want to be?
Billy Idol or Kool Moe Dee?

If you're afraid they might discover
Your redneck past
There are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past
They'll never send you home

Roots!
The funny limbs that grow underground
That keep you from falling down
Don't you think that you'll need them now?

Just find a place where no one knows of
Your redneck past
Yeah, you can easily dispose of your redneck past
You'll show them all back home

Désolé, je suis américain
Please cook my steak again
Je suis américain
Désolé, je ne parle pas français

Laws vary from state to state
Getcha some books on tape
Learn about holes in space

If you're afraid they might discover
Your redneck past
There are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past
It's good to be back home



I never tell the French to cook my steak again...the French call 'em as they see 'em...no euphemistic "rare".....sanglant....saignant...i like it somewhere in that range...bleu is just gross and too damn french for me....let it bleed...but get real....don't want to feel the warmth of this afternoon's sunlight on it....

Some Poems from Today

Here are my firstlings of my hand today.

I wanted to post them, then I must away on errands.



     The Poem That Took the Place of a Porn Star

         (for Wallace Stevens)


This line would have been mesmerizing, whackjob as Japanese cartoon hentai fucking.
This line would have been moist as a stonergirl and fingered itself for you.
This line would have put that finger in its mouth like a Playboy bunny,
and savored the taste. And this line? Why it would have pulled a train,
a multiracial ethnic horde, while humming Britney's "Womanizer."

This line would have been transparently Stroganoff, almost cavalier,
which pose this line would have caustically skewered, accelerating
readers into a sudden metaphysical bumper car whiplash here, or a starfucker trope.
This line would shrug its shoulders like Jenna Jameson at a stockholders' meeting,

& this couplet: an armored asshole cocksprung wheelchair of a metaphor,

posing as a humble servant of the art we all love & cherish.





     Indecent Poem


This poem is not Rasputin.
Not even close. Nor does it care.
This poem wants to take your pulse
in a disinterested manner,
the old-fashioned way, holding your flesh
in warm flesh of its hand.
And you will be quiet
because you think this poem
is counting out your pulse, your life's blood.
Then this poem will smile
at you and say, "You know,
I'm not really a nurse.
I act in porn films.
Okay, nobody actually films me
but I'm in a lot of them."
And then you will swallow hard,
looking for the nearest door
behind this poem, which is now fondling
its imaginary breasts in your presence.






     Slut Poem


This poem is a whore.
It has slept with so many other poems,
that when you pick up the telephone ringing
at the center of this poem
the voice on the other end asks,
"What time can I bend you over?"
"Excuse me!" this poem says
in mock-chastity, and looks
at its biological poem-clock
which, oddly enough, always reads
"TOO LOOSE FOR IMMORTALITY. TOO TIGHT FOR A DECENT FUCK."

This is a Hello Kitty clock
with a finely-tuned poetic movement.





     Poem after the Greek Anthology about the Eternal Recurrence of Good Fucking


Waves of an ocean still flutter at my nipples.
Eros cockteases the ancient urge,
probably a motherfucker, as Ares hinted.
Aphrodite can't keep love out of her bush.
An ocean I asked for, ages ago,
then tried to return, my anguish at the RETURNS counter
made into an embarrassing YouTube video.
Blue and soft and sexy and adamantine.
Ionian curls, pubic excellence.
Stupid moisture that organs die for.
It makes no sense. I know.
You are completely contained and boundless. A sky.
Ocean, I disown you. But you have discovered
these comment boxes in the afterlife
and abuse them mercilessly. I try to moderate
comments but my settings must be snafued.
Like yesterday, you left a link to mythic
paintings of us fucking in several gods' beds
while they were out partying. Orgasm-diligent kids.
I start to explain my indiscretions to imaginary people
but your comment waves come on, hissing sexy Greek,
drown me out and I find another sarcastic link:
SHOWER OF GOLD UP THE BUTT OVER AND OVER
left at the end of one of my better cyber-soliloquys,

my Argive blog widowhood.





     Another Greek One


I can't have your hands
anymore, but your ghost
inevitably ass-gooses me,
tho I don't smile.

You'll get some deathbed fruit,
no doubt, tho you're
just a cock now,
an andoyne, a dream's

chewing gum I stick
under the bedframe when I wake. Stupid gurl.

Okay, a Brainiac Murder Mystery for You to Solve in a Minute...

I have to share this AP story with you.

Ummm. How stupid is what the parents are saying?

I can only hope that's the FBI telling them to say that to gain his trust and lull him into a false sense of security with the in-laws.

Because Mr. Joey Douchebag Bag of Quarters soooo pushed this poor woman over the rail into that dark ocean.

You read this and tell me otherwise...


Family Fears Woman Jumped From ShipBy TAMARA LUSH, AP

posted: 1 HOUR 48 MINUTES AGO. MIAMI (Dec. 30) - A woman who went missing from a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico might have jumped overboard, her family believes, but authorities are still investigating whether someone could have pushed her.
Lost at SeaFloridaToday.com / AP8 photos The FBI is "trying to determine if a crime occurred" in the case of Jennifer Ellis Seitz, whose husband reported her missing from their cruise ship, the Norwegian Pearl, on Dec. 26. Her family said Monday they suspect she "chosen an unfortunate ending to her life" and jumped overboard.

The U.S. Coast Guard suspended its search Monday for Jennifer Ellis Seitz, a Florida journalist, who was reported missing by her husband about eight hours after a surveillance camera captured a person falling overboard on Christmas night. Mexican authorities said they planned to search until Wednesday.
The FBI said agents were still trying to determine whether a crime was committed. No one has been charged.

Seitz had "previous emotional issues," yet there were no outward signs of distress while on the seven-night cruise from Miami, her family said in a statement given to two Florida newspapers where she had previously worked. Seitz's mother joined her daughter and son-in-law on the cruise.

"Jennifer was in a very happy and uplifted mood both before and during the cruise," the Ellis family said in the statement. "She was excited about starting a new job and her future career with a local newspaper. She and her husband had been talking about starting their family. The family suspects that Jennifer chose an unfortunate ending to her life. She was a beautiful and caring person and will be truly missed by all who love her."

Seitz and her husband, Raymond, were celebrating their one-year anniversary on the Norwegian Pearl cruise ship.

FBI spokesman Mike Leverock said agents were "still trying to determine if a crime occurred" after collecting evidence when the ship docked Sunday in Miami.
Norwegian Cruise Line said it is "cooperating fully" with the FBI.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of the guest during this difficult time," the company said in a news release.

Raymond Seitz has not been charged with any crime, authorities said Monday. A message left seeking comment at the couple's house wasn't immediately returned, and a call to the paving company that employs him rang unanswered.

The couple met in a weight loss support group; both had undergone bariatric surgery. She chronicled her weight loss journey for an Orlando TV station.

She was also a freelance writer, having written articles for The Tampa Tribune, The Ledger in Lakeland, and an online article titled, "Battling the Bulge Onboard," about how not to gain weight while aboard a ship.

On her Web site, Seitz described herself as an "avid traveler and an amateur chef." She was previously a reporter for Florida Today, a newspaper in Melbourne.
Raymond Seitz was arrested in April on a charge of domestic violence-battery after being accused of head-butting his wife. The charge was dropped after he entered a pretrial diversion program. Records show that she asked the prosecutor not to pursue the case.

A fellow passenger on the ship, Jim Nestor, told NBC's Today show that Seitz and her new husband stood out on the ship with "large and raw personalities."
Many of the passengers saw them as contestants on an on-board game called "The Not-So-Newlywed Game," modeled after a 1960s TV quiz show. The game was also carried on the ship's closed-circuit TV channel.

"They stood out a lot more than other people," Nestor, a retired police officer, told NBC.

Nestor, who appeared on the game show with his own wife, said he ran into Raymond Seitz a day after his wife was reported missing.

"I had given him my condolences, and he had a plastic bag filled with quarters, and he said to me that he was going to the casino to see if he could change his luck," Nestor said.

The Beauty of Phrogging

First, let me say the winds around here last night and today are ridiculous. Steelton feels like the moors. I see craggy tors in the distance. I want to outwalk my passion on the moors. One wants to put on a Bronte shawl. One wonders what Heathcliff is doing.

Yeah, the cat.

It made me think of the closing lines of a Cole Swensen poem, which I suppose are true. I wondered if I could find this poem again in the Conjunctions archive, and it wasn't too hard since the site has the search feature like most others of its kind.

Here it is....

TO FALL


In such a sphere. No
light no stone. We
rush toward. Touch
and burn. If the world is round.
No cell is ever more than one cell away
from a supply of blood. Bright
red air. A permanent wind

would cease to be startling
in a year or two.


It's funny today. I have these Jungian synchronicities going on like Sting trying to make a concept album, except I wasn't trying.

Last night, I put this book, One Frog Can Make a Difference, on the steps leading up to the third floor because I wanted to say some good words about it. Then today eating my breakfast I watched Good Morning America and they did a feature on a notorious phrogging. And I wanted to blog on that, because it was a Pennsylvanian story that went national.

One Frog Can Make a Difference is one of those marvelous books Lee finds in the thrift store while I'm talking to a ceramic bear who has Lite Brite pegs stuck into him like St. Sebastian, or going into a daze looking at horrific three inch tall Christmas Carolers cast in plastic or plasticine forty years ago who look like bit evil characters in The Omen.

This is subtitled "Kermit's Guide to Life in the '90s," and the author is duh Kermit the Frog ("as told to Robert P. Riger.").

Yes, this is a Kermit novelty book, but it's adorable and very, very funny in places. It's already hard to pinpoint some of the source material for the satires (which tend to range in length from one page to three or four) since the nineties were so lacking in cultural substance, and fads were so mercifully brief. But there are recognizable satires on the Men's Movement, various self-help gurus ("Finding the Tadpole Within," for example), the eternal war between the, well, species, since Kermit dates Miss Piggy, and just delightfully outre feature like the surprisingly not ominous "French for Frogs" feature.

Here is an excerpt from that featurette...

"Let's face it. French is a tough language for frogs, even though some people think France is full of us.

A while ago, I was supposed to go there on a trip to Euro Disney, so I bought a little book called 30 Minutes to Speaking French Like a Frog. But it was almost useless. It didn't have any Froglais in it at all. Imagine not conjugating the verb to hop!

So here, in the interest of all you frogs who are planning a trip abroad to search for your roots, is a quick course in amphibious French."

[Here follow illustrations featuring...]

la grenouille
frog

le crapaud
toad

(and toads are always portrayed as tolerated bohos in Kermit's world. This one is ill-shaven, slovenly, wearing a wife beater and smoking a cigarette).

ribbette, ribbette
ribbit, ribbit

And some useful phrases shared include...

"Qui a fait naitre tous ces milliards de tetards, quand meme?"
"Who the heck hatched all these tadpoles, anyway?"

&

"Est-ce que vous avez une chambre
qui donne sur l'etang avec un
nenuphar prive?"

"Do you have a room that looks
out onto the pond with a
private water lily?"


&

"Le marais est toujours plus
vert de l'autre cote."

"The swamp is always greener
on the other side."


This book is truly charming, delightful. If you're interested you could probably find this on ABE for a good price. It makes a cute gag gift or gift for that frog lover, or lover of Kermit.

The next chapter, for instance, is titled "I'm Not an Amphibian American, I'm a Frog."

There are recipes which might leave you, well, green....or possibly green with envy if you are feeling gastronomically adventurous. Black flies a la Kermit includes such directions as "Marinate flies in oil, vinegar, lemon and lily-flower mixture."

And among the many fads skewered you will find "Frogs Who Hop with Women Who Run with Wolves but Can't Keep Up" and "I'm Okay, You're a Pig." (He does date Miss Piggy, remember?)

There's even a mini-essay on "Frogs in the Military." ("But whether my feet are flat has nothing to do with whether or not I can drive a submarine.") GO KERMIT, GO KERMIT, GO KERMIT...Springer whoops circa 1997 to Kermit!

Robert Riger, you have done a frogtastically great job of transcribing the thoughts of one of our greatest amphibian thinkers and cultural critics!

*     *     *     *

So from frogging to phrogging.

No, phrogging does not refer to that Kama Sutra quality sex where you segue from doggy-style to froggy-style because it can just never end.

Although the idea is sort of similar to that. Someone is piggybacking on you like froggies locked in amplexus.

Phrogging is the term created to describe the phenomenon of epiphenomenal people. These are people who suddenly appear and are living off of you the way an epiphyte like Spanish moss lives on a magnolia tree. Only you don't know they're there. They are secretly living in your dwelling and sharing your resources.

Phrogging is being an invisible squatter. It will save you money bigtime.

Remember the diminutive Japanese lady who was living in that young bachelor's apartment (where was that, Tokyo?) and he eventually caught her on a hidden camera, coming out like a little gray mouse to nibble on the goods in his refrigerator? I love that clip on YouTube!

Today on Good Morning America I learned Oprah has been fooled again by one of her authors, but I also learned that there was a phrogging case north of me in Wilkes-Barre that made national news.

It's a case of an adjoining house, and a young man (nineteen I think) who is wanted by police (nothing too serious I believe) was told to vacate the premises by his girlfriend or something, and he did.

He crawled through a crawlspace behind a closet into the attic which apparently the two houses share. And he took up residence there, living off the fat of the land. When the family of four (they have a teenage son and younger daughter) went to bed he would creep downstairs looking for good things like McDonald's leftovers, Dad's copies of Playboy or Ipods.

This greed for technology is ultimately what gave him away as "Bad Santa" apparently raided the Christmas gifts.

When you take a thirteen year old girl's Ipod Nano, there's going to be trouble. Like a shoot out at the Ok Corral trouble.

That's ultimately what got him caught.

That and the fact that someone noticed footprints leading to the closet which had the crawlspace up into the attic at the top. You can be sure the Japanese phrogging lady took off her shoes!

So the wanted guy was busted.

But get the most unimaginable part of this whole story!

While he was up there, he was blogging about his experience, cruising on MySpace and joking with his friends in postings, "Well I'd rather be up here than in jail."

No doubt. Makes sense to me.

He's actually an Arkansasan in Pennsylvania.

I like Arkansasans. I worked for a company based out of there, and they are the most polite people you'll meet. Just don't ever start on religion or politics and you'll stay the bestest of friends. Arkansasans are the sweethearts of the south. I still say "Do what?" when I don't hear someone correctly. That's Arkansasan for "say what?" You'd have to hear the correct pronunciation which is rather like "uhdoooehh whut?" And Arkansasans call you babe all the time, even if you're forty. The men even call you babe. You'll feel sexy despite yourself if you hang around with Arkansasans.

So phrogging made me think of Edogawa Rampo's "The Chair."

That's what I would call "extreme phrogging."

Here's some info on Rampo. His books from the fifties can often be found in sumptuous editions on ABE books for under ten dollars.

Rampo is such an intriguing, strange figure. I think in the future he will become huge again. I think Westerners will realize what great movies lie in wait in these books.

Rampo Edogawa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In this Japanese name, the family name is Edogawa.
Rampo Edogawa


Born Tarō Hirai
October 21, 1894
Mie, Japan
Died July 28, 1965

Occupation Novelist
Nationality Japanese
Genres Detective fiction

Influences

Edgar Allan Poe, Maurice Leblanc, Arthur Conan Doyle
Rampo Edogawa (江戸川 乱歩 Edogawa Ranpo), born Tarō Hirai (平井 太郎 Hirai Tarō, October 21, 1894 - July 28, 1965) was a Japanese author and critic. He wrote many works of detective fiction. Kogoro Akechi was the primary detective of these novels.

Rampo was a great admirer of western mystery writers, and especially of Edgar Allan Poe. The pseudonym "Edogawa Rampo" is actually a Japanese rendering of Poe's name. Other authors who were special influences on him were Maurice Leblanc and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.


Biographical information

Tarō Hirai was born in Mie Prefecture in 1894. He grew up in Nagoya and studied economics at Waseda University starting in 1912. After graduating in 1916 he worked a series of odd jobs, including newspaper editing and selling soba noodles as a street vendor.

In 1923 he wrote his first mystery story, "The Two-Sen Copper Coin." (Nisen Dōka, 二銭銅貨). The story was soon published under the nom de plume "Edogawa Rampo" by the magazine "Shin Seinen," which had also published stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton. Although there is a history of crime literature in Japan, this is generally acknowledged to be the first original modern-style Japanese mystery story.

He later went on to found and head the Japan Mystery Writers' Club.

Rampo could understand spoken English, but could not speak or read it particularly well. He and his translator, James B. Harris, collaborated for five years on the first English translation of some of his stories.


Thematic elements

Many of Rampo's characters are preoccupied with planning and executing a "perfect crime."
Mirrors, lenses, and other optical devices appear in many of Rampo's stories and as symbols of distorted or heightened reality.
Many of Rampo's stories include characters who were wounded or disfigured during World War I.

Major works

[edit] "Kogoro Akechi" stories
"The Murder on D-Hill" (D坂の殺人事件, D-zaka no satsujin jiken?, January 1925)
"The Psychological Test" (心理試験, Shinri Shiken?, February 1925)
"The Black Hand Syndicate" (黒手組, Kurote-gumi?, March 1925)
"The Apparition" (幽霊, Yūrei?, May 1925)
"The Attic-Stroller" (屋根裏の散歩者, Yane-ura no Sanpōsha?, August 1925)
The Dwarf (一寸法師, Issun-bōshi?, 1926)
"Who" (何者, Nanimono?, November 1929)
"The Spider-Man" (蜘蛛男, Kumo-Otoko?, 1929)
The Utmost of the Bizarre (猟奇の果, Ryōki no Hate?, 1930)
The Conjurer (魔術師, Majutsu-shi?, 1930)
The Vampire (吸血鬼, Kyūketsuki?, 1930) First appearance of Kobayashi
The Golden Mask (黄金仮面, Ōgon-kamen?, 1930)
Black Lizard (黒蜥蜴, Kuro-tokage?, 1934) Made into a film by Kinji Fukasaku in 1968
The Were-Panther (人間豹, Ningen-Hyō?, 1934)
The Devil's Crest (悪魔の紋章, Akuma no Monshō?, 1937)
Dark Star (暗黒星, Ankoku-sei?, 1939)
Hell's Clown (地獄の道化師, Jigoku no Dōkeshi?, 1939)
"The Dangerous Weapon" (兇器, Kyōki?, June 1954)
(化人幻戯, Kenin-Gengi?, 1954)
Shadow-Man (影男, Kage-otoko?, 1955)
"Moon and Gloves" (月と手袋, Tsuki to Tebukuro?, April 1955)

[edit] Others
"The Two-Sen Copper Coin" (二銭銅貨, Ni-sen Dōka?, April 1923)
Hakuchū-mu (July 1925, 白昼夢)
"The Human Chair" (人間椅子, Ningen Isu?, October 1925)
"The Red Chamber" (赤い部屋, Akai heya?, April 1925)
The Strange Tale of the Panorama Island (パノラマ島奇談, Panorama-tō Kidan?, 1926)
Kohan-tei Jiken (1926, 湖畔亭事件)
"The Hell of Mirrors" (鏡地獄, Kagami-jigoku?, October 1926)
Beast in the Shadows (陰獣, Injū?, 1928)
"The Caterpillar" (芋虫, Imomushi?, 1929)
Kotō no Oni (1929, 孤島の鬼)
"The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture" (押絵と旅する男, Oshie to Tabi-suru Otoko?, 1929)
Hakuhatsu-ki (1931, 白髪鬼)
The Blind Beast (盲獣, Mōjū?, 1931)
Yōchū (1933, 妖虫)
Ryokui no Oni (1936, 緑衣の鬼)
Dai An Shitsu (1936, 大暗室)
Yūrei-tō (1937, 幽霊塔); translation from novel A Woman in Grey of Alice Muriel Williamson, adaptation by Kuroiwa Ruiko(黒岩涙香).
Yūki no Tō (1939, 幽鬼の塔)
The Triangle-Hall Terror (三角館の恐怖, Sankaku-kan no kyōfu?, 1951)
Jūjiro (1955, 十字路)

In popular culture

In 1994, a film entitled Rampo inspired by Rampo's works was released in Japan (The film was retitled The Mystery of Rampo for its American release). Rampo himself is the lead character of the film and is portrayed by actor Naoto Takenaka.

Some of Rampo's stories were later turned into short films in the 2005 compilation Rampo Noir, starring well-known actor Tadanobu Asano.

Barbet Schroeder's 2008 film Inju: The Beast in the Shadow is an adaptation of Rampo's 1928 short story.


Trivia

In the manga and subsequent anime Case Closed (Meitantei Conan, or Detective Conan in Japan), the protagonist Jimmy Kudo (Kudō Shin'ichi), chooses the pseudonym "Conan Edogawa" after Arthur Conan Doyle and Edogawa. He lives with his best friend, whose father is a detective named Kogoro. Conan's mother also occasionally uses the fake name Fumiyo, a reference to the wife of Edogawa's character Kogoro.
Another, less famous manga, CLAMP's Man of Many Faces (20 Mensō ni Onegai!!) is primarily inspired by the Kogoro Akechi series – in particular the villainous "20 Faces" character.
The manga and anime series Nijū Mensō no Musume (Daughter of Twenty Faces) is also inspired by the "twenty faces" character.

External links

Kurodahan Press A publisher which has released one book of Rampo fiction (Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows), and will release a second volume of his best fiction and essays in 2008. All are translations into English.
Edogawa Rampo's World A fansite in English and Japanese.
Rampo, Edogawa, "Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination" Short fiction translated to English by James B. Harris. 1956, Charles E. Tuttle Company.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampo_Edogawa"
Categories: 1894 births | 1965 deaths | Japanese novelists | Literary critics | Japanese mystery writers

I was surprised there wasn't more discussion of Rampo's creepy "The Chair," which I found discussed by an Amazon.com reviwer...
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Japanese Weird Tales, October 18, 2004
By Zack Davisson "All Good Things" (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews


This review is from: Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature) (Mass Market Paperback)

I can think of few more truly disturbing stories than Edogawa Rampo's "The Chair." A psychological fable describing in minute detail how a master furniture maker, obsessed with an unachievable woman, creates a chair with himself hidden inside. This chair is given to the woman, and each time she sits in it she nestles unknowingly in his lap, puts her weight onto him, lays her head against his face. The furniture maker silently feels her every night, without her ever knowing. The atmosphere, the detail of the language, and the sheer nature of the story combine for one of the classics of this genre.

"The Chair" is of course included in "Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination," a compilation by the father of Japanese mystery writing. Much is made of his adopting the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe as his pen name, but Rampo's style is his own. He favors psychological horror, and there are few elements of the supernatural to be found. Sociopaths and obsessives seem to be his stock in trade, with detailed exercises on how to commit the perfect, untraceable murder. Many of the stories end with some unexpected revelation, although I would not call it a "twist ending." The obsessive nature of the stories renders them all the more disturbing, as almost every story is something that could conceivably happen.

In addition to the excellent "The Chair," you will find "The Caterpillar" featuring a cruel wife's abuse of her de-limbed husband, "The Cliff," a back-and-forth story that will leave you wondering who is manipulating whom, "The Hell of Mirrors," wherein a man obsessed with optics and reflecting surfaces descends into insanity, "The Red Chamber," which reveals the true nature of those who are attracted to stories of others' deaths, "The Two Crippled Men," a story of a murderous sleepwalker who commits crimes without ever knowing it and "The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture," the only story with a supernatural tinge, showing brotherly devotion and love of the unreal.

Each story in "Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination" is well-selected, and James B. Harris does a fine job with the translation, maintaining the tension and original intention. The only real shame is that this is the only collection of Rampo's works that has been translated into English. After reading this you will long for more.

Richard Brautigan also memorialized this celebrated story, or one filmic adaptation of it, in a poem within his last poetry collection, June 30th, June 30th. Here it is...

THE RED CHAIR

I saw a decadent gothic Japanese movie
this evening. It went so far beyond any
decadence that I have ever seen before
that I was transformed into a child learning
       for the first time
     that shadows are not always friendly,
     that houses are haunted,
     that people sometimes have thoughts
     made out of snake skin that crawl
     toward the innocence of sleeping babies.

The movie took place in Tokyo
just before the earthquake on September 1, 1923.
In a gothic Japanese house a man was hiding
inside a large stuffed red chair while a beautiful
woman wearing exotic costumes made love
to other men sitting in the chair.
The men did not know that somebody was hiding
   inside the chair,
feeling, voyeuring every detail of their passion.
It took a long time in the movie
before I realized that there was a man inside the chair.

The film went on and on into decadence
after decadence like a rainbow of perversion.
I can't describe them all.
You would have trouble believing them.

The red chair was only a beginning.

I sat there transfixed
with a hundred Japanese men.
It was as if we were the orgasm
of spiders fucking in dried human
   blood.

       Tokyo
       June 15, 1976


I have a first edition of this last Brautigan book, which I bought as a kid. I guess I was eleven. I can still visualize exactly where I found this book on the shelf in the bookstore which no longer exists.

Funnily enough, the space where the bookstore existed (and my grandfather once worked there before I was born as a part-time job in his retirment) is now a karate studio for children! When you park to go in Penney's, you can see the little kids through all the plate glass practicing their moves! Brautigan would probably like that. The ghost of his book taking kicks from a four year old dressed as a Japanese warrior.

It's a very good collection of poetry, but you can see the psychic disintegration beginning in this book...in subtle ways. Not that Brautigan wasn't always somewhat self-isolating (standing on street corners and promoting his poetry notwithstanding).

His commercial success had unfortunately allowed him the means to pursue this to an even more pathological degree probably.

The poems truly engage Japan and Japanese art, but in that childlike Brautigan way.

I wouldn't call it a great collection of poems, but I would call it a very good one, and a very good read.

And to complete the Jungian frogging/phrogging synchronicity, Richard wraps a weave of 1976 time around my blog entry with this poem...

JAPAN MINUS FROGS

     For Guy de la Valdene

Looking casually
through my English-Japanese dictionary
I can't find the word frog.
   It's not there.
Does that mean Japan has no frogs?


       Tokyo
       June 4, 1976

Get this definition of the poem by Elke Erb....

or at least that's how I read this poem...



CONDITION

Imagine a bullet that, just fired, does not know
where to go. It is not free to follow the laws of
physics, neither trajectory nor non-trajectory nor
fall. Because it is only pictured, a brain's projection
for purposes of self-communication.



(translation by Rosmarie Waldrop)

oh poetry, you terrible sexy albatross...

Dru, stop looking at ghosts.

It's weirding me out.

I just had fun watching someone win a Tao Lin Quadriptych.

I had bid early on but my budget is roped in this week, so it ended up being a spectator sport but it was fun. I went into each item for the last few minutes and played the "refresh" game.

It was interesting to see which ones out of the four drew the most competition.

I was going after the KNOPF logo, which was simply that...a marshmallowy version of the Knopf logo, a la drawings on the back of school notebooks. I was amused with Lin's specs on this work of art; for "date of creation" he had "pre 1800" and he described the subject matter as "costumes." I knew where I would have hung that. But I can see from the bid histories on all the drawings that "d***1" (bidder was cloaked) was determined to be a heartbreaker tonight, since everyone bidding on any item was defeated by the implacable "d***1" who had proxied all his or her bids and apparently set them very high as all bids were instantly met and defeated on all four drawings.

There was some sort of bonus prize, I think, if the same person won all four items but I forget what that was. I think it was a date with one of Tao's interns or something like that. Or they would make you a smoothie or something. I forget.

Well, on the brighter side, the four do make a nice quadriptych and will look great displayed together. I always feel terrible in thrift stores when I find a beautiful salt or pepper shaker by itself. And once I saw a gorgeous figural pair in a Salvation army store (I believe they were Dutch people) and there lay the head of one of them broken off and shattered to bits. They had made it together for like seventy-five years and someone had broken the head off in the day or two it had been on display here and it was shivered to bits. Superstition and art go together like this. It's the same as if one found a short story by Kafka and the last page had been torn out of every copy of the book that ever existed..at least that's how it feels to me...

"Imagined things strive to be together and alive...

Or is the word "Imaginary?" I think it's imagined. I like that better.

Which poet wrote that line? I'm thinking it's Elke Erb and the translator is Rosmarie Waldrop. Well, that line addresses the sort of thinking/feeling I'm talking about here.

Or her poem...let me grab the book....there are two poems I have to put here now because they sort of haunt me...these two poems always return to me...these are from the collection Mountains in Berlin, translated by Waldrop and published by Burning Deck.

This poem closes out the collection...


BANAT MUSEUM

Two pieces of ornamental stone, of identical size, from the collection BASRELIEFURI FRAGMENTARE DIN MARMORA / TIBISCUM. One with two human feet (damaged), the other with a dog's foot beside two human feet with strikingly long toes next to a hoof (?), all on the bottom shelf of a glass case. There is also a single human arm with a hand (damaged) closed over something that has been lost...


Oh, I just found that quote I was trying to get right...it's on page 35: "Imagined things seem to strive / to be together and alive." It's in the poem "The Kitchen."


And this poem is a clarifying one for thinking about poets in the Petri dish of culture, the zeitgeist...


POETS LIVE IN CENTURIES


Poets live in centuries,

This one in that, that one in this, one overlaps,

Another smack in the middle, like yet another who
    also lives smack in the middle.

So far, so good. Endler stretches from 30 to 90 in his.

Otherwise, even poets live in ordinary apartments like,

For instance, Endler's tiny quarters on the fifth floor,

Back, no bath, outhouse, but with sun.

When the poet Endler sticks his head out his window

He can check if the garbage cans have been emptied.



A situationalist's take on art/artist? Erb has this ability to create oblique forms of literary criticism like that, or undermine literary criticism like that, charmingly.

The collection is filled with strange wit and unorthodox forms of beauty.

Dutifully perverse, or perversely dutiful to truth.

Attentive.

I was sure Lin's Poodle drawing (which was very cute) would bring the highest price, and it did make a leap in the last minute, but it was "Raekwon [The Chef]" which brought out the fiercest competition. But "d***1" was not to be deprived.

A portrait of Philip Roth (a rotund creature with very few identifying features, rather like a blood-swollen tick) also brought a good price.

Tao Lin will eat and live to write again.

So all is for the good.

Congratulations, "d***1."

Pax et ebay vobiscum.

A Poem by Rachel Andrews

Rachel Andrews blogs theosophically sound art and poetry at Sephyrus, and many are the days that when I felt lost I visited her site (sight?) and felt found suddenly.

I read Rachel's poetry and I think, in your face, Blavatsky!...or sometimes...Ouspensky got SERVED!...

Her poetry does the same thing for me that Kyger's poetry does, although stylistically they are different. They just both have that orbital eccentricity in language that allows for parallax correction...

Here's a New Year's poem from Rachel....this one more in a Sapphic mode...Sappho allows mortality to soak into her laptop...which seems very correct to me...


    oh my new year


because i am a year
older now,
i have to pull my
laptop closer
to my face in
order to read
your poems.

A Valentine Forbidding Mourning

                


    LIST VALENTINE

Today wash the three
big windows

in the parlor
place where we parle

to one another
empty the plants

of their year’s sunshine
add these totals

to projected moral growth
as an average of mutual interest

I will have an accounting
of your love my love

if only to shame
my own.




Peter R___ck.

(there, Peter, i kept you sort of anonyme)

Sheila Murphy is So

Sheila Murphy is an (perhaps the?) exemplary citizen of Poetryland.

For decades she has maintained a quality of writing which is just completely enviable, published in literally thousands of print and online journals with a regularity that verges on dailiness (dailiness probably is the case) and conducted herself with a classiness and a generosity that I couldn't imagine emulating even if a boddhisattva moved into the empty bedroom across the hall from my workspace.

If you're in the wee minority which has not encountered Sheila E. Murphy's poetry, do yourself a favor and do some Googling. I think you'll be grateful you did.

She must touch the buddhas hourly.

When everyone was talking about whom we should nominate for Poet Laureate, my mind went blank. But now I realize Shemur would have made a great Laureate! (About Shemur: If poets achieve a certain fabulosity, I think they should get a tabloidia-like--but more dignified--name, and Shemur sounds rather like a Sumerian poetry divinity and seems to fit!)

And her New Year's poems find me every year, no matter where I have moved, and I am always grateful!

(And thanks also to Spencer Selby who sent a stellar semiotic burst of a holiday greeting card, a seeming gravitational field of semiotic with arrows showing where the forces were operative.)

I have saved every one of Sheila's year's end/beginning poems, but in different places, so they wait hidden in books and drawers, merry sutras that will doubtlessly please the lucky humans who find these treasures, signed by the author! I hope she will include these in a special section in her Collected someday, but I hope that Collected will be many, many decades in the future!

Here are her prismatic hopes in language for the coming year...


     Upon the Year 2009

Dissonant nostalgia crafts daylight
from shards of ice,
to form some small beginning.

Coordinates elude
the spirit until
fragrance draws on
palpable experience.

Memory retrieves shrill messages,
unpolished lines of code
brittle to touch and toned to match
the caliber of hope.

Fracture activates synapses
in the quiet of new weather,
deliberate as a nest
receiving threaded light
immune to winter of our making.

Thanks Very Much, It Made Me Feel Better...

if there is something I can do to make you feel better and I can accomplish it let me know....

I'm speaking to the kind people who invited me on FACEBOOK. I cheated and asked a few too but was happy to see a few people didn't think my rabies was a threat to them.

It is year end/year's beginning and I have house business to take care of this week!

SHORT TERM, AS IN NOW....

1) I am going to post Sheila Murphy's prismatic New Year's invocation, Rachel Andrew's Sapphoish New Year squint and Peter R.'s (I think he likes "surname mystery") Janus-faced Valentine. Janus-faced is good. All scarily good poetry is Janus-faced. Jack Spicer is Janus-faced. Lorine Niedecker is Janus-faced.

2) Get driver's license photo taken.

3) Get annual rabies shot (to protect others not me).

4) Go delete some horrid comments I left on two Goodreads chains. In vino veritas? No, in vino furor scribendi. Foam. Time for scrubbing bubbles.

4) See if I can buy a Karma Washing Machine at Sears on their card and get an annual service plan included for little money.

LONG TERM:

BE KINDER TO PEOPLE. OR SPEND MORE TIME WITH ANIMALS WHO AVOID LOGOS.

STOP BITING THE MAILMAN.

TURN THE ONE DRINKING DAY A MONTH INTO ONE DRINKING DAY A YEAR.

UNPLUG COMPUTER, AND ANY OTHER HUMAN LINKED APPLIANCES FOR THE DURATION OF THIS DAY AND CATALOGUE COLLECTION OF EIGHTIES CASSETTES WHICH YOU HAVE FAILED TO TRANSFER TO CD OR BURN ONTO COMPUTER.

JUST LAST NIGHT I FOUND...

TOM TOM CLUB

ST. ETIENNE

TWO EARLY SIMPLE MINDS ALBUMS

AZTEC CAMERA

BRONSKI BEAT

THE CURE'S SEVENTEEN SECONDS

AND SOME MADNESS TAPE

WHICH I HAVE NEVER TRANSFERRED...OKAY THE MADNESS I'D PROBABLY ONLY WANT ONE OR TWO SONGS BUT THE REST I COULD LISTEN TO A LOT MORE....

THANK YOU FOR YOUR FACEBOOK ADD!

i miss the band Helix

whatever happened to them? i think they were boston-based...they really had it going on and it was coming together in that transcendental textural way that bands do....

when i googled them some other band named Helix came up...canadian band..that's not the Helix i'm talking about....

i miss them much more than, say, the band whale, with their Hobo humpin' slobo babe which was so clearly a "magazine moment"....

i felt helix had places to go but whale was signified and done with a moment....

ADD ME ON FACEBOOK!!!

I am never on Facebook but I noticed I only have 183 friends on there. So as not to appear as antisocial as I REALLY AM (illusions are protective) I am asking you to invite me on FACEBOOK.

I will accept anyone who invites me unless your FACEBOOK name hints at horribly immoral activities or abuse of small rodents and/or children. Sorry, I have to draw the line somewhere.

I am NEVER NEVER NEVER on FACEBOOK and will NOT NOT NOT read any mail or see any gifts you send me because the computer that I spend 90% of my time on is antediluvian and doesn't allow me to. But this does NOT mean that I don't and will not value your Facebook friendship on the extremely rare occasions I sign on.

I do admire serious artists who aren't assholes and don't try to manipulate me because they are either 1)attractive or 2)have a micro-following. Most artists fall in this "okay folks" category, and almost all geniuses do, oddly enough. There are very few geniuses in American literature and especially in American poetry today. I can count them on the fingers of both my hands and I don't use all my fingers. But maybe some of the rest of us will one day suddenly turn into geniuses. Stranger things have been known to happen. This is why we keep scratching the tickets.

Think outside the blogs.

Probably somebody or several individuals will delete me as a result of this post. Because you poets are fucked up like that. I like a lot of you but there is only a handful that I can relate to the way I relate to "normal human beings." You would probably be surprised how easy it is for me to relate to normal people and strangers on the street...I can establish camaraderie and even friendship very easily. But with writers I am as "difficult" as you (secretly) are....I can smell your horrible combustion...

See, isn't this a good way to encourage people to add me?

I don't know why I care about how many FACEBOOK friends I have at 5:20 a.m. on a Monday morning. I just signed in to accept a new friend and I think the last time I was on was two weeks ago or longer. Thanks for inviting me, kind person in Boston. I am proud to be your Facebook friend.

For a while I would get invites every other day. But then I guess word got out that like Jeffrey Dahmer I bite. Okay, mine are figurative bites but nonetheless.

I plan on meeting as few people in American literature as humanly possible. I am an anti-networker. However, I do appreciate feeling an abstract thread with you on FACEBOOK, and this will probably mean if you write something of genius I will be that much more glad to let the world know in effusive terms, in a whorish demonstration of devotion to my FACEBOOK friend.

And don't worry, I won't post your name here saying you added me as a friend.

I understand you are on the "down low" with me. Most people who talk to me are.

I am always amused by those of you who send me private emails instead of comments to say something nice about something I've written about others or you.

I get it.

We can't be seen together.

It's okay. I prefer TRU TV to the palaver of poets anyway.

here i am...in all my facebook vulnerability....note the Vanitas avatar....

http://www.facebook.com/people/WB-Keckler/1147332296

Oh btw if you were born with a star in your forehead like ray-ray roussel or yr belly like a sneetch...

send me a poem or a few to post here...any poems damning the year leaving us or blessing the one winging towards us would be particularly welcome...you know the poem is a Janus-faced thing...i was born under that terrible sign so i know, i know (weary sigh into my capricorn cloud of pestilent logos)....

so send some woids and voids....

and I will share them here...and lots of literary panhandlers, ax murderers and blowfish eulogists will read 'em....in between dusting off their own spats of course...and adjusting their imaginary celluloid collars...

3 Poems by Kevin Strong

I don't really know anything about Kevin Strong, but he sent me some poems and I wanted to share a few with you...if you are short on time and unable to see a performance of Godot, might I suggest the second poem as a precis which you could substitute....


   Basic Computer Love


10 REM Love Program

20 REM Kevin Strong September 7 1995

30 Define M=Me; W=Woman; O=Otherguy

40 Set Theirlust=0

50 Random W

60 Ourlove=M+W

70 If Ourlove>0 Goto 80, else Goto 50

80 For Ourlove>Theirlust Do

90 Print “We are in love!”

100 Random O

110 W+O=Theirlust

120 End Relationship loop

130 Print “I’m single.”

140 Goto 40

150 End





   Time


Time continues...time continues...

Crazily monotonous...monotonous...

Painfully redundant...redundant...

Sadly meaningless...meaningless...



Just like life.





    The Four R's of Recycling


Rape

Revenge

Remorse

Redemption

I Think This Ad is the Ugliest and the Stupidest I Have Seen All Year, and it Instantly Made Me Think of Poetry Movements

Also, I watched Elephant for the umpteenth time on IFC.

Even with the quibbling I want to do, it's still a great film.

I love the use of liminal sound and the emptiness of the frame, so often.

Liminal is really what the film's all about. Liminal perception, liminal apperception, liminal war.

J.T. Leroy's (sic) name appears on the film, and that alone should redeem the Lady Ligeia (I mean Laura) with her bleeding stigmata.

I'm not sure if she worked on the script, but if she did kudos...

I'm sure people "get" that film all over the world. You don't have to be an American to appreciate a film like that.

Poems Written Today

               

I was slubagub in the tub writing Poesy or summat...grey days lend themselves to it...


     Rating You

Once, you drowned me.
Then I drowned you.
We were off to a rib-tickling start.
Forgiveness is a horrible collective, you know.
They tell you how to dress, what to eat.
And you only wanted to know how to feel.
I have a resin sculpture of a giraffe dressed-up
as a Victorian lady, carrying a lavendar parasol.
Her elaborate hat is tricked-out with ostrich feathers.
This reminds me of you in The Unforgiven.
You were the unbilled tumbling tumbleweed
Clint Eastwood kicked from his feet
while directing American Poetry. American Poetry.
I give it two and a half stars.





     You Replaced My Head with an Owl's

But I forgive you.
Forgiveness has a small red bulb
at the base which usually shatters eventually.
The way people "check in" at graveyards
come winter, how wind taunts the saddest motels.
I used to hide there, I said, and pointed.
Children create imaginary coupons at Christmas
and deliver themselves into indentured servitude.
Oh, I'm alright with heaven.
I just imagine God says "Badda Bing" a lot.
Takes the pressure off my fuckin' beak and talons.






     One Word at a Time

There is a fatal xerox charm of belonging
to a sky that is snowing over a poetic metropolis.
THE CHARM OF BELONGING is an impressive building
designed by an architect buried underneath.
Nature shits on grammar, but is a sort of grammar.
I am not trying to be "difficult."
I will describe what I see in monosyllables.
Henceforth, I will say "from now on."
And for all questions relating to Martin Heidegger
I will simply say, "Who moved my cheese?"





     Kindness, An Aberration


Kindness, Chocolate Bunny, I miss you.
I melted you for the fondue pot of Reason
or some other pointlessly capitalized thing.
Kindness, come back and stroke the hair
growing on my werewolf back.
I am close to the knives.
Villagers gather in the blog square.
The mortal cartoons of religion sniff my crotch.
Kindness, do not forget
how I held your hand
at the bus station, nor the compacts
we made when I was your conjoined C.P.A.




     Robotic Poetics


There is no useful robotic poetics
without the maternal instinct.
John Cage, put down that bird's nest,
do you even know what you're doing?
I can't get angry. I can't feel sorry.
This calls for a new sort of pastoral.
A new sort of superhero. Cyber-shepherds.
Most of the poets I see spend their time
designing the costumes.
Or Suffer the Children manifestos.
Bright colors. Tight fit.
The manifesto and the costume.
They put it on around forty.
They titillate us, but not for the reasons
they think. I enjoy it most
when they simulate flying.

The way they hold their arms
in front of them and wait.



     BABAR, THE COLONIALIST


Oh, I can't even bear to look at you.
I know the horrible truth.
Don't recite Reverdy or talk about Satie.
STOP! JUST STOP!
Let's not pretend.
End it with some dignity.
I don't have to stick around
to guess Eminem at fifty.





     Postcard from the Edge


I am writing this poem in outer space.
People only visit me accidentally.
Some might call it exile, but that's lame.
One gets used to the lack of gravity.
Some supplement with avoirdupois. I don't.
I'm not in orbit around you or you or you or you.
I'll admire your elaborate solar systems from a distance.
My favorite things are sleep, poems and eclipse.
My cat and I smile at each other
when a particularly large planet casts us in shadow.
We give your big-bellied spheres goofy names that make fun
of your planetary features, your obvious deformations.
Your prodigious wobble, unsensed.
But I won't reveal those names here.
Outer space is the perfect place for the peanut gallery.

And only the peanut gallery is immortal.

Dog Translators, Cat Translators

IN THE FUTURE, dog translators and cat translators will make it much easier for us to understand our beloved pets. They will finally be able to tell us if something is hurting them (and where) or if they are hungry or cold, or if they are sorry for doodying the carpet or yakking up mouse bones in the foyer. All of this will come through a Vocoder-like device worn on a collar around their necks. The voice will be somewhat robotic but have optional softening effects to lend the effect of emotion to their utterances.

This means, of course, our pets will also be able to tell us of their day-to-day ennui & their sense of the futility of life.

In other words, our pets will soon have the ability to bring us down, to thoroughly depress us, as quickly and as efficiently as our spouse, life partner or other family routinely do.

It should come as no surprise then, that in the future the cities will be populated with millions of abandoned talking cats and dogs, all walking to and fro and loudly voicing their neurotic complaints about existence.

This will be the local color of the cities of the future. People will mostly learn to just tune it out and walk right through a crowd of cats vociferating on how horrible the weather is, how cruel life can be, and how he never really loved me at all, not really.

They will just walk right through and smile, with the blithe obliviousness of any mental health professional.

I Wanted to Share this Heartwarming Poem with You...

I found this very moving poem (nay, parable!) online and wanted to share it with you.

Then I got the most amazing idea. I thought about printing this out and putting it on my refrigerator! I'm sure many people have read this poem, but I bet NOBODY has had the genius to actually put it on their fridge!

Anyway, enjoy the transcendence....

     Footprints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only.

This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord,

“You promised me Lord,
that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”

The Lord replied, “The times when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, was when I got tired of hearing about all your fucking problems, knocked you unconscious and threw you into the ocean. But you floated. Shit always does. And you kept washing up further down the beach where I was walking. Are you fucking done complaining, or you like I should do this again, Badda Bing?”

My Baloney Has a First Name...

               

And that is Love.

Bologna isn't spelled baloney.

But Love doth not correct

the mispellings (sic) or bad grammer (sic) of the heart.

Love is an inferior form of poetry

                

Love is an almost successful attempt

to ventriloquize another human being.

The Difference Between Poetics & Rabbit Feed

                

Rabbit feed leaves you satisfied

if you are a rabbit.

I Wanted to Write a Simple Poem

               

   I Wanted to Write a Simple Poem

which I'm told is a most
unnatural act, overweening
to boot, a sick vine on the intricate
trellis of our cultural
arabesques, which are,
after all, beaten metal,
not a slight thing to reckon.

There are precedents,
all of them exceedingly
negative and worse: anecdotal.
"But it's Christmas Day!"
I complained, as I felt pointed
fingers pushing my breast bone
back, back, vituperation bitten
nearly through tongue, a silence
glowering at me from all sides

which will pause the internecine
game a bit for a wolf in the village.
If it's sport call it danger.
And that is how I learned there is
nothing simple in this kingdom
which execrates ours and theirs
equally, but keeps its stiffest guards

watching the despised crossing ground
where natural things occur, are born

various, monstrous and lovely

because they have no interest

in answering us.

I Wish You All

Peace, Love, Security, Happiness, the Forms you need to behold and make before you go, and freedom from such vexatious tongues as mine in the year ending, and the one winging towards us even now...

      Twelve Poems for the Year's Midnight

        (Burroughs breathing frost on the window)


much of this taken from your words in my blogroll...thank you...




6 7 8 9 10 Random Select your "splice" value* : 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Random (* Only needed if using two texts) raised a small bullhorn to his mouth. I stretched on...covered by He was going through why i'm not a filmmaker* last night the above title for visitors departing and Poems you should read: Toad, Hog, Assassin, Mirror Some Flowers Things. A specialist was introduced to me last yet he was a text guy...a guy....looking through my Sitemeter stats just now made me feel painfully aware of my after... sticker in dollar store reads: "For that someone who loves citation de Marcel Duchamp artiste majeur du début du XXe siecle." (Return to that....time’s getting short! If you’re still started with an amaretto sour, ... Art: Who is Egoiste? 1994 que le MAMCS consacre à un a glowing group - ...Read the rest a poem hit me as i was sur own mortality. Granted, I've been carrying that weight since yesterday. a guy twomblyescent in a white t-shirt comes down the street, a moving graphic mortal mark.Granted, since yesterday Toute faute d'orthographe est l'expression with whom I work. She was something unusual for me. I very rarely night believe Arp, art is Arp". Cette Chelsea Motel Show...hard pressed to find much to distinguish such inhuman snow from the falling...the window...

         *

College of hard pressed to find much to distinguish. Cette Chelsea Motel Show Chelsea sleep. i, Art & Design, London, Verlaine holds dead fish. Silly cunt. London goes twomblyescent. Boy Wonder crying on bed. ...return!...weeping but laughing at same time quietly in pillow...such a beautiful liar you are....J'applaudis. - Ces derniers temps, no one owns our mortality. Granted, l'orthographie est an argument while...la poesie consacre à un a glowing group. What is the (prison) window, anyway? twomblyescent or halcyon?...my Sitemeter stats just now made me feel painfully aware of my afterlife...i said this is my life's december but i'm okay, i'm going twomblyescent. oh fuck did i tell you this poem's marsupial? i forgot! raised a small bullhorn to his mouth. I stretched on...covered by He was going through why i'm not a filmmaker* last night the above title for 6 7 8 9 10 Random Select your "splice" value* : 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Random (* Only needed if using two

         *


This is a video poem that glances the neigh boring attendant at Lab Synthese. i wish i wasn't there but i wish these botches hunches latched to nearby tenements luge haunted via simple/ample bodies (Lopez pulled up in his squad car. He got out and en fuego more boys ran out with art....) Hello Kitty Art: Who is Egoiste? 1994 Kitty being pestered vizlature for yr skepsis...Juan is part of my first film, Persephone, I don't own a thing.... A cartoon played at the drive-in theater. Officer you should know: Athens Burns Dark Energy Stunts Growth Things. you raised a small bullhorn to his mouth. I stretched on the grave...If you’re still started with by the specter of Big Business. Media: tempera, acrylic, housepaint and crayon mortality on cardboard sheet badly....sixpack, runfast, pissing...- Ravelry following..I’m Carlos Mestre (de *La tumba de Keats)* Un huérfano. ..here's a Saint accomplishes in his biopic France et Cul ! Je les cite de mémoire : • Poems you should read: Toad, Hog, Assassin, Mirror Some Flowers Things. A life lived between the slats. All looking for the perfect gift I Shifting Sands by Grumperina is his drag queen name (using Jarred Flood's modifications for a bulkier pasos,) oigo el lastimoso trueno que al to find much to distinguish what director Gus Van plein de citations rigolotes sur own mortality. Granted, I've been carrying that weight since yesterday, a dreory exaltation, snow falling into its eyes....i watch you passing over into it, those aren't my eyes...


         *

Assassin, Mirror Some Flowers Things A specialist was introduced to me last night by way of a glowing group with whom I work. She was covered by a thick, winsome blue like his own film rubbish. A life lived between the slats. All looking for the perfect gift for someone who loves Rome, we here Certain works: ____________ Performance, Chelsea Motel Show Chelsea College of Art & Design, London ...J'applaudis. - Ces derniers temps, (Return to the City) He was going through why i'm not a filmmaker* last night the above title for visitors departing and arriving. Brooking a Verlaine argument walking in the multilingual snow while ..Read the rest a poem hit me as i was going to sleep. i know o'hara's so loved painting and yet he was a text guy...looking through my Sitemeter stats just now made me feel painfully aware of afterlife... "For Arp, art is Arp". Cette citation de Marcel Duchamp ...is that all there is....


         *

undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined undefined Cul ! Je les cite de mémoire : • Toute faute d'orthographe est l'expression of Design, London ...J'applaudis. -The Year of the Great Plague, the Great Fire, Great Fix! Ces derniers temps, j'ai entendu plein de citations rigolotes sur France the rest here Certain works: ____________ Rimbaud is so Vanilla Sky. the way he fooled Verlaine is really...All visitors departing and arriving. Brooklyning an argument while ..Read XXe siecle. (Return to the City) He was going through his own twomblyish rubbish. A son titre à l’exposition que le MAMCS consacre à un artiste majeur du début du weight since yesterday after... "For Arp, art is Arp". Cette citation de Marcel Duchamp donne now made me feel painfully aware of my own mortality. Granted, I've been carrying that loved painting and yet he was a text guy...looking through my Sitemeter stats just thick winsome blue...this poem is insanely halcyon....another pillow-biter...


         *

This is a video poem that is part of my first film, Persephone, fuck you, i never said nothing...... - *Preposteriori* at a glance the neighing attendant at Lab Synthese. i wasn't there but i wish i had seen: A cartoon Officer Lopez pulled up in his squad car. He got out and raised a small bullhorn to his mouth. I stretched on the...Things you should try: a lover saying something unusual for me. I plates....time’s getting short! Rimbaud: If you’re still looking for the perfect gift for Rome, we suggest you click on over to iTunes and buy the following...I’m hard pressed to find much to distinguish what director Gus Van Sant meant Je est cite de mémoire : • Toute faute d'orthographe est l'expression A specialist a glowing group with whom I work. She was covered by a thick, winsome blue like his own rubbish. A life lived between the slats. All visitors departing and arriving. Brooking an argument while ..Read the rest here Certain works: ____________ He was going through why i'm not a filmmaker* last night the above title for a poem hit me as i was going to sleep. i know o'hara's so loved yet he was looking through my Sitemeter stats just now made me feel painfully aware of my...my...Cy Twombly doesn't live here anymore...


         *


Officer you should know: Athens Burns Dark Energy Stunts Growth Things. you raised a small bullhorn to his argument while an amaretto sour, ... un huerfano, Rimbaud dit: "Oigo suggest you click on over to iTunes and buy Ces derniers temps, j'ai entendu know o'hara's so loved painting and yet he was looking through my Sitemeter stats just now made someone who loves me Rome, we hide here Certain works: ____________ Performance, mouth. I stretched on the...for me. If you’re still started with by the specter of Big Business. Media: tempera, acrylic, housepaint and crayon on sixpack mortality pissing...- Ravelry following Keats) accomplishes in his biopic cite de mémoire : • Poems you should read me so feel painfully aware of my Arp, Cette citation de (Return to the City... know o'hara's so loved specialist was something unusual, a thick, winsome blue like his own rubbish. A life lived between Rome, we can't make love here to Certain works: ____________ Performance of hard pressed City) , halcyon birds, a poem's twomblyescent sea, that coldest window, winnowing, ....Roman jerk-offs are lovely...

         *



Read the rest....a poem hit me as i was going to sleep. Brooklyning and through snow somehow going to sleep. winsome blue a life lived between the slats. All looking for the perfect gift for Flood's modifications, oigo el lastimoso part of my first film, Persephone i didn't hear your side of the story but i hate you anyway... i botches hunches latched to nearby you via simple/ample boys en fuego running out of tenements....) Hello Kitty Arp. hard pressed to distinguish biopic cite de mémoire : • Poems you should read: Mirror Things. A specialist Sitemeter painfully aware ...my afterlife is...for someone...who loves me... (Return spectre: tempera, running, Dark Blue, Light Blue, Random "splice" needed....two texts)..... I stretched.... the rest hit me as i was not....making love any longer...

         *

A specialist was introduced to me last yet he was a text guy...looking through my painfully aware, my after... "For the someone who loves citation de Marcel Duchamp artiste majeur du début du XXe siecle." the specter of crayon on cardboard sheet mortality is badly reproduced....Ravelry Links: Dark Pattern: time) ..This is a video poem that Selects your "dice" value : 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Random Select your "splice" value* : 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Random (* Only needed if using two texts) at a glance blue raise a small bullhorn to mouth, said I, ocean, stretched on the words behaving badly with whom I work. She was covered by thick Sands Dark Energy Growth Things consacre à un a glowing group....donne son titre à the rest....a poem hit me as your own mortality Motel. Granted. carrying that weight Toute l'orthographie Twombly et Pasiphae argument while lastimoso perturba . i was going to sleep Design & temps & j'ai entendu I've been carrying l'expression while going, with night, right through, the above, visitors departing and arriving. Brooking sleep & Design, Love....is....not a clef...my beloved...

         *

London ...J'applaudis. winsome blue like his own rubbish. Gus Van Sant A life lived between the slats. All looking for the perfect gift for Flood's modifications for a bulkier lastimoso, pasos que trueno que perturba." Juan is part of my first film, Persephone, I don't owe you anything in the world.... at a glance the neigh boring attendant at Lab Synthese. death. i wasn't there but i wish i botches hunches latched to nearby tenements luge haunted via en fuego boys....) Hello Kitty by way of should try: no Duchamp Shock ...please no mas.... I had four drinks tonight, something unusual for I very rarely write Arp, art is Arp". Night Arping. we're nightarping, nightarping. Nightparting, nighttarping, nighttapring nightparting boys en fuego i wish. nightparsing..nightparing nightraping...nighttrapping...the poeme's nigh tarping...Nightrapting. Cette Chelsea Motel Show Chelsea College of hard pressed poetry city to find much to distinguish what director Gus Van Sant accomplishes in his underworld cites de mémoire : • mouth. I stretched out one on the on one of you... very rarely that If. If yew est vous. the specter of Big Business. Media: acrylic...Persephone pissing off souls in Chelsea....Ravelry of Poems you should feel painfully... my majeur (Return to the City) said o'hara's painting and specialist.... he drinks tonight, something unusual, the poem's twombleyescent flat. A life lived between Rome and Chelsea Motel of Death, brooklyning, arriving and departing Snow on Chelsea, hard pressed City) is poetry why i'm not a filmmaker*...

         *

....last night the above title for visitors departing and arriving. Brooking an huerfano, the cold tenement: "Oigo suggest you click YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN performing we've seen. it. A cartoon to distinguish what director plein de citations rigolotes dit between the slats. All are looking for the perfect gift---Toad, Hog, Assassin, Mirror. Some Flowers Links: Dark Blue, Light Blue Pattern: Needles: US Ravelry Malheur et ravelry de langue...This is a video poem that glances at the boring attendant. la Mort. i wasn't there but i wish, latched to nearby tenements being pestered with dead boys' expression.. words drink. Ate dinner. Fate at a fantastic where perenne Rome perturba." is part of my first film, Persephoneposteriori*, SONIC LATIN TITAN, performing us, l'expression d'un donne son titre.... Ravelry following bullshit Duchamp Eros shock..Pasiphae us, Cy Twombly...a life can be pressed to poetry (de La tuumba de Keats)....Un huérfano. ..silence rarely feels that unusual, after....anglophone echoes differ...the halcyons are looking at me strangely....fuck them and the twomblyescent sea they drifted in on...

         *
consacre à un a glowing group as i was going to sleep. Ces derniers temps, j'ai entendu plein de citations rigolotes sur own mortality. Granted, I've been carrying, cite de mémoire : • mouth. Officer Verlaine, you should know: Athens Burns Dark Energy Stunts Growth Things. Officer Rimbaud, you should know: All look for the perfect gift for Flood's modifications. Officer Twombly, you should know, i hastened: Persephone at Lab Synthese. I made a glance at neigh the boring attendant. i wish i crayoned botches lovers my hunches latched to nearby tenements (Return by the city, some said. Certain works: ____________ Performance, departing and arriving. but the city was underneath. Officer Someone or Other, lastly you should know: this is a video poem that...Select your "dice" value : 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Random... Select your "splice" value* : 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Random (* Only needed if using two texts) it raised a small bullhorn to someone's poem mouth. I stretched on...

My Deepest Condolences

I had no idea.

I just read three seconds ago that Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee have lost their child, Emma Bee Bernstein.

There is nothing to say but I am so sorry.

I remember reading Douglas Messerli's poem celebrating her birth with joyful puns.

I remember reading one time about one of her joyful art projects, traveling the country with a friend, interviewing people in a friendly manner about various subjects.

I believe she was making a film of it.

I remember thinking, there's a kid in love with life. And I remember Charles rightfully expressing great pride in her.

I'm so sorry.

A Poem I Wrote in My Pyjamas This Morning

What that poem was doing in my pyjamas I'll never know (two tips of a crack pipe here...I'm joking prospective employers, I'm joking!!)

Here's how you check prospective employees in the 21st century.

Google them. Yahoo Search them. Rifle their cyber-pockets, pants and weekend panties or panythose.

Go to their blog and search term words like "crack" and "fucked up" and "drunk" or possibly "called off work" or "fooled those fuckers at work."

Sift.

Euphemize.

I don't know why I dreamt this poem.

I also had this dream I was hanging out with Obama's family at a barbecue. I had just wandered through the neighborhood and they invited me in the backyard and for some odd reason we were "bundling"....do you know what this is? the early Americans used to do that...you come over to a house to visit and you all wrap up in quilts and blankets and lie down together and talk about shit. Because it's like so fucking cold in New England in 1684.

So I was bundling with Obama's kinfolk and the old black ladies and I were getting along famously (I have no idea who these dream people were) talking about shopping at certain malls we apparently all loved.

Then I felt something on my right foot which was bare under the sheet and when I pulled the sheet back there was this giant motherfucking spider that was sucking the blood out of my foot. I realized then the slight prickles and tingling I had been feeling had been this disgusting spider sucking my blood on the sly.

I didn't scream or anything, which would surely have been a breach of bundling protocol, since I was still lying down between the two old black ladies. But I shook my foot like a rum shaker and got rid of the beastie. And the black ladies giggled like "no real harm" and it was over.

I don't remember anything else about the dream but Obama wasn't there.

It was just his kinfolk and me, and I had felt perfectly fine and at home before the spider thing.

I'm sure this is because I was reading people blogging about Obama asking that asshole to come speak at the White House as a sop to all the Christian right who thinks he's secretly a Muslim terrorist.

So if he lets them come and pollute the atmosphere with a little of their hate, and shit on a constituency which helped to get him elected, vilify them publicly in State, he will be taken back one step in their eyes on the road to damnation he's surely skipped far, far down.

Anyway...here's the poem as I could reconstruct it...


       ANCIENT HISTORY

         (poem written in a dream)

You were expatiating (sick) on the poetry (sic) of Herman Hesse (sick) in a museum. I was standing beside you when you put down a half-eaten (what, cheeseburger?) atop a slave quilt from the 1840s. There was a glass covering it, mercifully. That was the moment I began to see the heaven above us as a work of artifice, to sense the hairline outlines of tiles used to construct it, rather as the to-be-beheaded Cincinnatus (was that his name? it's been years) begins to see this right before either his A)death? or B)liberation? by the executioner at the end of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.

And then I realized there are so many shades of blue in this art that even Raymond Carver added a few.

I said to myself, "Desire is Ispahan. And love, love is eglomise..."

I Didn't Know Jack Kimball Wrote Fiction...

usually he's obsessed with purveying the truth, albeit in his strange oblique way that makes everyone paranoid that he's talking about them!

This piece had me laughing out loud about eight times. It's literary satire, spot on, but I think it's a little more than that also...

Jack, I tried to link to it but it wasn't linkable...your blog is different...or else I am...and I only had two Corona Lights so I can't blame that...

But anyway...read this good shit...this is from Pantaloons blog...duh...

I'm going to put my favorite section in italics...they're my italics not his...



Wednesday, December 17, 2008

B. M. Audemars climbed into a corporate charter jet that would take him from his relative seclusion in upstate New York out to Culvert Passage, CA, where he grew up. He hadn't been back to Culvert in 20 years or so, and he was looking forward to the cross-continent journey with a mix of curiosity and trepidation. "I remember being afraid constantly — afraid for my life," Audemars said of his childhood in the 1970s. "I was the skinny kid in lipstick wearing maroon cords on the way to a writing class at Presbyterian Culvert, Reformed, in between a gang of college business majors with bow ties and another gang of art school fools in black shirts and vests, and it was like, "How did I want to get beat up today, smacked with calculators or acrylic spray?"

For those who know Audemars by his three, top-of-the-charts initials, BMA, the brown-eyed, wavy-haired Vonnage spokesman, gadfly rapper, chic culture critic, word-crazed cartoonist, and poet-trampoline-artist who's become a smiling regular on reality shows like "Top Money Workin' the Nonprofits," "The Biggest Appropriator," "Dancing with Marjorie" and his wild dating program on A&E, "BMA Gets It On, A&E," the notion of a rough upbringing — part Harvard-and-Crips, part "Bard Bicycle Thief" — might come as a surprise. But Audemars seemed genuinely anxious about returning to his hybrid of a neighborhood where he says he was beaten up on a regular basis by the future M. B./F. A. crowd.

"Punched in the face. Mugged. Robbed. Knives. Guns. The whole thing," he said. "I used to accuse my parents of not loving me for making us stay in a neighborhood where every other kid was richer and more entitled." After roaming the still-transitional neighborhood of tear-downs squeezed between shiny mansions (shiny in the rain) and so-called estates for an hour or so, he took a last look around before hopping back into the Lexus (with self-drying brakes) to return to his jet. "In a way," he said, "cultural critique kind of saved me from all this."

Except that it didn't — not, at least, if you're talking about the getting-beaten-up-on-a-regular-basis part. In a way Audemars is still that kid in the tight cords fighting off the taller, wealthy kids, only now the roving gangs hitting him up for his milk money are literary. For the knife-sharpening snark squadrons of Harriet and a segment of the poetic elite, he has come to embody the Faustian bargain of celebrity in the writing game. He is portrayed, and often satirized, as a supernaturally talented poet who squandered his gifts for television, rapping and, even lower, cartooning — literally and figuratively — in the scattershot pursuit of fame, fortune and pink ruffled shirts. "He's almost gotten to the point where people in the poetry world feel sorry for him and want him back," said Johnson Kant, a professional gambler and author who has written for The Southwest Springfield (IL) Racing News and Weather. "He's this really brilliant guy, poemwise, who's forsaken everything that he's good at for some things that he's not good at. And that makes me really sad, because he's such a phony bastard."

Last year, Kant and the Lily Foundation announced on Harriet that they would hand out Golden Yea and Yuck Awards to the celebrity poets whom they considered the best and the worst exemplars of that strange breed. Among the dubious honors was the BMA Special Mention, saluting the "worst career move by a talented but wasted reprobate." (To his credit, Audemars gamely showed up at the South Beach Yea and Yuck Festival and received the award in person, even though Kant had "mercilessly and enthusiastically made sport of BMA many, many times," as a spokeswoman for Lily put it in a blog entry.)

The word "sad" seems to surface a lot when you bring up BMA's curious career. "We were talking the other day, another poem-obsessed person and I, and we were just saying how sad it was that he has disappeared," said N. V. Greene, the grande dame of New York scribes, and one of the first to celebrate Audemars's talent just a few years ago when he was the poet du jour at Bowery Poetry. "I do believe that 'Dancing With Marjorie' is kind of the last stop. Someone said, 'Oh, he'll never be back, if he can make a living doing commercials, rapping on TV, and cartoons.' I don't understand — has he totally lost that passion to write verse? Because there are poets that don't like to write, that can't write, and they just want to be stars. How could somebody be so talented and so gifted and just write writing off?" That, Greene explained, is because BMA is now largely a celebrity nationwide. "BMA still is doing sarcastic New York poetry, and his stand up comedy for Bed, Bath & Beyond is mostly wonderful, if you see him here in Manhattan or not," she said. "But somebody like BMA, who is exceptionally gifted, seems to have thrown it all away — that's why close readers and people with grad degrees and career arcs are so upset about it."

As the trip to California made clear, BMA has had a freakish, prodigy-like understanding of poetry from the very start. The rich mélange of Culvert Passage, he said, is where he picked up the cross-demographic appeal that would later compromise his inner narrative and propel him to stardom as a rapper, cartoonist, and, of course, national poet. "I don't think there is more of a cultural clash that sorta says 'fuck you' in your face anywhere than in Culvert Passage, unless it's the whole country," he said. "I think in many ways my worldview on dumbed down diction and duh quick-laugh images was formed here."

As soon as the Lexus pulled up in front of a two-story red-and-white house at 148-01 90th Avenue, where five members of the Audemars family and several boarders lived before the Audemarses moved to safer quarters in the early 1980s, he became swept up in a rush of Proustian triggers. As he dashed around the neighborhood, his memories of its past squalor ("There was an apartment in every building that sold art supplies ... I should have paid more attention ... My friend Eddie lived right here, he OD’d on paint thinner...") were crosshatched, over and over, with memories of poetics. He pointed to a spot on Millionaires Avenue where he'd read his first Bukowski, a bite of the rich life, indeed, for him. He tracked down the tiny patch of dirt on 150th where an elderly Californian woman named Vita once scratched out odes to squash and tomatoes. He made note of the burnt-out McDonald’s that his father, Raffaele, used to forbid him to set foot in before he finished writing a new round of sonnets.

"Key Agency," he said as he approached a darkened wine shop with a street poet's workshop in the back where he got his first public, a place that's still operating at night. "I used to bag metaphors here." This dislodged yet another memory — of how the young BMA would pocket a few coins from his workshop job and dart down the street to buy tracing paper, mirrors, projection candles, and the latest Marvel comics that his mother, Nicolina, could boil down for him back home while he was dipping his pens into ink pots, drawing. "I was conflicted even back then. Words or stencils?"

He was 11 when he got a job at a pizzeria-writing sweatshop, a distinctively Californian combo, on Setting Boulevard; there he became obsessed with perfectly calibrating the balance between the nice language of culturally inclusive haiku and the bubbles in fountain soda. Tim Ballin Hand, who was one of BMA's instructors at Key Agency and is now the president of the workshop, said that his star student could leave a distinctive imprint even with others in his class but not in his league. "You could tell when he diced language versus somebody else," Dr. Hand said. "You could pick his out of a group effort."

To understand why Audemars is perceived as a wayward son of American letters, it makes sense to go back to his triumph in 2005, when he started his writing and cultural critique blog. (It closed down in 2007.) People who fell under the spell of his ideas then still compare Audemars to an upstart Marcel Duchamp, and they slip into a reverie when they summon up their first encounter with his tiny but epically colorful cartoons replete with visual and verbal puns and ribald social satire. New York magazine rhapsodized over drawings and BMA's other efforts this way: "Sweet, immensely ugly nudes step all over complacent white males who have abandoned their egalitarian principles, an essentialist tableau nuzzled in blobs of urchin buffoonery; and smarting of tenderness we could die twisting in those blobs, die for their glowing upturns as well as their pratfalls within an essence of brave open struggle and subjectivity to overcome darker disembodied forces. Audemars pulls off such esprit with a panoply of crackling noises, paradoxical images, and shrewd, implausibly Orwellian discourse that positively gooses us blog readers, plunging us into paranoia, parlous candor, and savagery that mediate between death and a close call. Do these sound like the delusions of a madman? In less capable hands, maybe; in Audemars's, it's pure Charlie Brown genius."

While it's hard to grasp why a 'genius' would feel compelled to mambo alongside hip-swivelers like Marjorie Madoff and Corneille Kennedy, it can be equally surprising to hear that in his blog writing heyday, BMA was thought of as too much of a word-tinkering recluse. "The funny thing is that at that time, my partners and everyone in my world of poetry were always telling me I'm too serious," Audemars said. "This is what is so mind-blowing to me, and beats me down. I was always too serious and too pure and didn't see the bigger picture enough and didn't understand that writing and the cultural critique business were entertainment. I needed to take it easy and do pieces that were simpler and made people happy. So fuck you." He was urged, he said, to put fail-safe poetics bait on the agenda, and make it simple — pieces like rapping out sounds from porn videos using only two letters of the alphabet, or writing and then shredding a real heroic biography into confetti, or overwriting the document of his rich grandfather's last will-and-testament with the bolder fonts of a Sam's Club coupon for women's panties, half-off. He wrote rib-tickling précis, yes, but even those brought out the obsessive formalist in him. "So I proceed to concoct the short pieces with the most ever prosodic elements known to man. My first fractured one-page précis had 200 or 300 literary devices in it.”

If there was a specific moment when the sun began to singe BMA's wax wings, that would have to be 2006, when he made his reality-TV debut in "BMA Gets It On, A&E," a video vérité chronicle of the flirtations and stove fires in his Manhattan date-hunting days. For viewers, and for the show's producers, things went swimmingly, which is to say they went really badly for BMA. He couldn't land a date. A perpetual skirmish between BMA and Jeffrey d'Automne, the entrepreneur who was funding the show (and who secretly wanted to date BMA himself), escalated into a flurry of litigation, with d'Automne suing BMA and BMA countersuing d'Automne and BMA eventually being barred from entering his own apartment subleased by d'Automne — while BMA's mother, a cast member of the show and a lawyer, was still writing litigation briefs for both sides at the kitchen table. It was quite a mess. "That was weird, wasn’t it?" Audemars said. "When you say it out loud, it's like, 'How is that possible,' right?" He went on: "I think I took a lot for granted. I think when someone puts seven or eight million dollars into a program with your own name on it, and that someone is special, someone who actually wants to date you, it's a pretty big deal. You can't just think, 'Well, that's what he's supposed to do!' I think I underappreciated a lot of what was happening to me. I should have paid more attention."

Dr. Hand of Key Agency met with his former student during that dark phase and offered advice. "I said, 'BMA, dust yourself off and get back into the writing-culture-culture-writing make'em laugh business,'" he recalled. "At that time he still had his blog. I said: 'That's a jewel. Throw yourself into it and that's what people will focus on.' And for whatever reason, he just didn't listen to me, he didn't friggin want to do that. And he stopped talking to me. This is my interpretation — he had lost the fire for that, and had bigger dreams and aspirations. What a Caruso! Or Crusoe!"

Asked about BMA's game plan, Dr. Hand said: "First, I could give a flying you know what. Second, he needs more exposure to the public to get them on the hook. That's where BMA's thinking bigger: 'How can I pursue my passion for rap and cartoons and convey my knowledge about what's gone down the butt hole in this friggin culture of ours along with my oh-so-purely-distilled expertise in verse — do all of this in a way that doesn't just reach a couple boys or maybe they're girls who call his number, but thousands, millions addicted to his blog by first watching him stumble, lose it, and fall apart on tv?'"

Indeed, "BMA Gets It On, A&E" marked a shift in Audemars's public identity. Within a few months, the meticulous wunderkind from Culvert Passage had turned into a poetry-show Zelig. These days he has his new A&E show, "Duchamp and Me," and a new book, also called "Duchamp and Me," a cross-promo that seems a mission statement — an attempt, perhaps, to merge the public and private and past and present BMA and get back to basics. In contrast to his near-psychedelic experiments with literary language at Bowery Poetry and nuanced art historical imagery in his first cartoons, "Duchamp and Me," the book, features word-image recipes that often hinge on hand-me-downs, such as a longer piece where he has retyped the entire Who's Who from 2008 backwards page by page and called it "Ohw Show."

Still, does the disappointment of the elite lit crown grate on him? "I try not to judge any assholes for how they feel," he said. "If I make a judgment about it, then it will lead to anger and resentment, and the brakes dry... I don't want to really go there. How about a poem?" The answer and the question carried a distinct echo of advertising and therapy. "Well," he said, "there's been lots of therapy. And I should pay more attention."


Posted by Jack at 9:17 AM