Oh well, must prioritize in this economy, but this person got a GREAT deal (if it's legit).
I rarely proxy my bids (encourages a bidding war too early) or use "Bid Stealer" or services like that.
It worries me when it's a matter of stapled xeroxial publications that there might be fakes floating around.
It's not that hard to fake up if you have some old paper lying around.
But it's probably legit. I mean it's rather recherche to be bootlegged.
The final price was about one hundred bucks lower than this would start on ABE, and that's probably a conservative estimate.
Many would ask closer to 300.
The agony of defeat.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Lifetime Television Movies are like Kabuki
Okay, not really.
But they do have their weird conventions, and archetypal narratives you have to put yourself into a certain mindset to absorb.
The depictions are not nearly always favorable to women; in fact, many of the dramas seek to enact demonizations of women, or types of women. There are strongly archetypal figures who appear, even to the point of caricature, which is a commonality with Kabuki or ancient Greek tragedy.
You can't look at the Lifetime television movie as merely "poorly written, overacted dramas." This is literally true, but actually weak criticism. Many of these dramas are standard narratives, straightforward tales of heroism or endurance or justice achieved against odds.
But those are boring. It's the weird ones that are worth watching. I swear I think books like Breton's Nadja served as inspiration for some of these writers. Because there are many Lifetime television movies where morality or topicality has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. The narrative starts out normally, but soon begins following a surreal thread which overtakes the dramatic narrative proper. There is often a terribly false resolution that gnaws at the mind like a tooth-ache. A fairy tale ending is implied in the dialogue, but your mind is twisted by how fucked the dramatic "resolution" actually is. The script baits you. Often overacting is encouraged in the actor or actress. Some of these elements are reminiscent of film noir, but the movies lack the cinematic devices which literally gave that genre its name. They don't need the shadows. No Val Lewtons here. The cinematography is usually merely functional, but the sense that rooms are acutally sets is quite palpable quite often. It's a case of low budget creating further unintended aesthetic effects or liabilities, depending on your viewpoint. Some would see an echo of Kabuki in this.
The movies continue to have their allure because of the power of the archetypes and the symbolic narratives operating under the obvious one.
I would suggest watching more than just one of these movies. If you flood yourself with them, you begin to see what level of consciousness they are really appealing to.
Two of the weirdest movies in this regard, where the movie is virtually all subtext, would be Blind Obsession and Her Deadly Rival.
I will have to give a brief analysis of these movies in the future, but right now I'm headed back to Lifetime land, so will spare you.
Blind Obsession creates a very frightening set of female archetypes, and is very dire in its analysis of how male-female relationships (secretly) work. The overacting and crazy writing are very devious in their misdirection.
The genius of the Lifetime television movie (when it is working) is that bad art is used to create more effective catharsis (in the classical dramatic sense of the word) than good art could ever achieve.
But they do have their weird conventions, and archetypal narratives you have to put yourself into a certain mindset to absorb.
The depictions are not nearly always favorable to women; in fact, many of the dramas seek to enact demonizations of women, or types of women. There are strongly archetypal figures who appear, even to the point of caricature, which is a commonality with Kabuki or ancient Greek tragedy.
You can't look at the Lifetime television movie as merely "poorly written, overacted dramas." This is literally true, but actually weak criticism. Many of these dramas are standard narratives, straightforward tales of heroism or endurance or justice achieved against odds.
But those are boring. It's the weird ones that are worth watching. I swear I think books like Breton's Nadja served as inspiration for some of these writers. Because there are many Lifetime television movies where morality or topicality has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. The narrative starts out normally, but soon begins following a surreal thread which overtakes the dramatic narrative proper. There is often a terribly false resolution that gnaws at the mind like a tooth-ache. A fairy tale ending is implied in the dialogue, but your mind is twisted by how fucked the dramatic "resolution" actually is. The script baits you. Often overacting is encouraged in the actor or actress. Some of these elements are reminiscent of film noir, but the movies lack the cinematic devices which literally gave that genre its name. They don't need the shadows. No Val Lewtons here. The cinematography is usually merely functional, but the sense that rooms are acutally sets is quite palpable quite often. It's a case of low budget creating further unintended aesthetic effects or liabilities, depending on your viewpoint. Some would see an echo of Kabuki in this.
The movies continue to have their allure because of the power of the archetypes and the symbolic narratives operating under the obvious one.
I would suggest watching more than just one of these movies. If you flood yourself with them, you begin to see what level of consciousness they are really appealing to.
Two of the weirdest movies in this regard, where the movie is virtually all subtext, would be Blind Obsession and Her Deadly Rival.
I will have to give a brief analysis of these movies in the future, but right now I'm headed back to Lifetime land, so will spare you.
Blind Obsession creates a very frightening set of female archetypes, and is very dire in its analysis of how male-female relationships (secretly) work. The overacting and crazy writing are very devious in their misdirection.
The genius of the Lifetime television movie (when it is working) is that bad art is used to create more effective catharsis (in the classical dramatic sense of the word) than good art could ever achieve.
Hahahaha
I just read MKL's Wiki entry, and they are still happily married, and the funniest line was this...
Mary Kay and Vili Fualaau have hosted several "Hot for Teacher Night" promotions at Seattle nightclub Fuel Sports Eats and Beats.[15] During these events, husband Vili performs as DJ Headline, while Mary Kay hosts.[16]
Mary Kay and Vili Fualaau have hosted several "Hot for Teacher Night" promotions at Seattle nightclub Fuel Sports Eats and Beats.[15] During these events, husband Vili performs as DJ Headline, while Mary Kay hosts.[16]
MJ Had Me Thinking
I was watching the Lifetime television movie on Mary Kay Letourneau today.
And I was thinking about Michael Jackson's pedophilia charges from the past.
I really think there are two classes of pedophilia. Granted, that when you discuss this you're often dealing with teenagers who are all but adults and laws which vary from state to state where it's pedophilia one day and perfectly legal the next day.
I remember at one of my jobs in the past when everybody went around saying how that actor Jeffrey Jones (LOVE YOU, Jeffrey!) was a gay pedophile, because he had had sex with a seventeen-year-old guy in California, where the age of consent (at the time?) was eighteen. I imagine there are a lot of seventeen year old gold karat hustlahs floating around California. It was so repugnant to me to hear that, but of course I didn't say anything. So if he was seventeen and three hundred and sixty four days old it's a felony, but the next day he's a free ride on the tilt--a-whirl.
Too bad the legal system can't invent the MATURITYTRON, that you could put on somebody's head to determine if they are competent to legally make the decision to have sex with another, regardless of age.
My guess is there would be a lot of fourteen year olds the MATURITYTRON would approve, and a hell of a lot of thirty-five year olds who would hear the warning buzzer as soon as the MATURITYTRON was put on their noggin.
There's a tricky gray area when puberty has come and been some time. And then there's wee little kids who haven't a thought about sex in their heads who are molested. That would be a no-brainer evil. Like duh.
But I honestly believe there are two broad classes of pedophile. One is your gnarly abuser who just sees an easy mark for their sexual gratification. And the other is a group of people who are probably functionally children, "thirteen in the head." I think both Mary Kay Letourneau and Michael Jackson (if he even did it; I'm fifty-fifty on whether it actually happened.) are the latter. They see themselves as children because they have either been allowed to indulge in that mindset (MJ) or been forced into that role against their will (Letourneau by her domineering parents, who basically made every life decision for her, including forcing her into a loveless marriage against her will--and a husband who largely infantilized her while using her as a baby farm and seeking sex elsewhere.) Letourneau was the daughter of a presidential candidate-by-default who rigorously opposed sex education and shuttled his children from school to school to avoid any exposure to it. When Mary got pregnant, he forced her to marry a man she knew was completely incompatible with her, and whom she did not love. Her mother, according to most accounts, was even colder and more judgmental. Mary Kay was raised to be shepherded, in all senses of the word, including Biblical.
MJ is of course another story. One can only speculate how much the child abuse forced him into later fantasy retreats, where he tried to recreate an idealized childhood that certainly never existed the first time around.
I realize it's tacky to judge lives based on television movies (and Lifetime being one of the most ridiculous to use) but there's probably a lot of truth in that depiction. It all made sense to me, and explained perfectly why she fell in love with a compatible spirit--who happened to be a creative and like spirit many years her junior. They are even now still together, correct?
I'm not countenancing this as something that normally makes sense or is advisable or morally correct. It's wrong because in virtually all cases the compatibility is not real or true but usually exploitive, sexual only.
I'm betting that Mary Kay never possessed a single piece of anything that would be considered "child pornography," either paper or on her computer. I'm betting it's something that never even entered into her head until this fragile woman found herself in an impossibly tempting place where someone she had nurtured and cared for deeply for many years (she had him as a student for many years) found her feelings insistently reciprocated.
She didn't rush into this thing, and she didn't have these feelings for the boy until after many years. And she had asked him, repeatedly, to "hold onto the feeling," picturing a time in the future when they could be together. I imagine a young boy's hormones are what rushed that process along. If they had waited four or five years, neither of them would be household names.
The television movie sort of portrays the young kid as more the predator than Mary Kay, where at the start it's just a conquest for a sexually precocious youth, but later it's clear that he reciprocates the feelings and that they are actually in love.
I would say it's an example of where something that is "almost never" correct might have become correct with time.
It's very difficult to look at things like that, because everybody understands how slippery that slope is, and is afraid to admit the extreme case, because it implies a general sanctioning of such things.
If you get a chance to see the movie check it out.
Penelope Ann Miller does a great job and she's a total ringer in the looks department.
Mercedes Ruehl plays her psychotherapist who treats her in prison.
Isn't it funny how a woman can win an Oscar and she ends up on Lifetime television a few years later, but when men win Oscars they never suffer for big budget pics to hire them.
Anyway, that's my weird rant after watching that movie today.
And I was thinking about Michael Jackson's pedophilia charges from the past.
I really think there are two classes of pedophilia. Granted, that when you discuss this you're often dealing with teenagers who are all but adults and laws which vary from state to state where it's pedophilia one day and perfectly legal the next day.
I remember at one of my jobs in the past when everybody went around saying how that actor Jeffrey Jones (LOVE YOU, Jeffrey!) was a gay pedophile, because he had had sex with a seventeen-year-old guy in California, where the age of consent (at the time?) was eighteen. I imagine there are a lot of seventeen year old gold karat hustlahs floating around California. It was so repugnant to me to hear that, but of course I didn't say anything. So if he was seventeen and three hundred and sixty four days old it's a felony, but the next day he's a free ride on the tilt--a-whirl.
Too bad the legal system can't invent the MATURITYTRON, that you could put on somebody's head to determine if they are competent to legally make the decision to have sex with another, regardless of age.
My guess is there would be a lot of fourteen year olds the MATURITYTRON would approve, and a hell of a lot of thirty-five year olds who would hear the warning buzzer as soon as the MATURITYTRON was put on their noggin.
There's a tricky gray area when puberty has come and been some time. And then there's wee little kids who haven't a thought about sex in their heads who are molested. That would be a no-brainer evil. Like duh.
But I honestly believe there are two broad classes of pedophile. One is your gnarly abuser who just sees an easy mark for their sexual gratification. And the other is a group of people who are probably functionally children, "thirteen in the head." I think both Mary Kay Letourneau and Michael Jackson (if he even did it; I'm fifty-fifty on whether it actually happened.) are the latter. They see themselves as children because they have either been allowed to indulge in that mindset (MJ) or been forced into that role against their will (Letourneau by her domineering parents, who basically made every life decision for her, including forcing her into a loveless marriage against her will--and a husband who largely infantilized her while using her as a baby farm and seeking sex elsewhere.) Letourneau was the daughter of a presidential candidate-by-default who rigorously opposed sex education and shuttled his children from school to school to avoid any exposure to it. When Mary got pregnant, he forced her to marry a man she knew was completely incompatible with her, and whom she did not love. Her mother, according to most accounts, was even colder and more judgmental. Mary Kay was raised to be shepherded, in all senses of the word, including Biblical.
MJ is of course another story. One can only speculate how much the child abuse forced him into later fantasy retreats, where he tried to recreate an idealized childhood that certainly never existed the first time around.
I realize it's tacky to judge lives based on television movies (and Lifetime being one of the most ridiculous to use) but there's probably a lot of truth in that depiction. It all made sense to me, and explained perfectly why she fell in love with a compatible spirit--who happened to be a creative and like spirit many years her junior. They are even now still together, correct?
I'm not countenancing this as something that normally makes sense or is advisable or morally correct. It's wrong because in virtually all cases the compatibility is not real or true but usually exploitive, sexual only.
I'm betting that Mary Kay never possessed a single piece of anything that would be considered "child pornography," either paper or on her computer. I'm betting it's something that never even entered into her head until this fragile woman found herself in an impossibly tempting place where someone she had nurtured and cared for deeply for many years (she had him as a student for many years) found her feelings insistently reciprocated.
She didn't rush into this thing, and she didn't have these feelings for the boy until after many years. And she had asked him, repeatedly, to "hold onto the feeling," picturing a time in the future when they could be together. I imagine a young boy's hormones are what rushed that process along. If they had waited four or five years, neither of them would be household names.
The television movie sort of portrays the young kid as more the predator than Mary Kay, where at the start it's just a conquest for a sexually precocious youth, but later it's clear that he reciprocates the feelings and that they are actually in love.
I would say it's an example of where something that is "almost never" correct might have become correct with time.
It's very difficult to look at things like that, because everybody understands how slippery that slope is, and is afraid to admit the extreme case, because it implies a general sanctioning of such things.
If you get a chance to see the movie check it out.
Penelope Ann Miller does a great job and she's a total ringer in the looks department.
Mercedes Ruehl plays her psychotherapist who treats her in prison.
Isn't it funny how a woman can win an Oscar and she ends up on Lifetime television a few years later, but when men win Oscars they never suffer for big budget pics to hire them.
Anyway, that's my weird rant after watching that movie today.
Peter's Michael Jackson Valentine
MJ VALENTINE
Whatever he was it wasn’t fifty
more like a permanent fifteen
dropped off from some celestial
circus truck whose voice
never cracked
because he carried his own music box
around him spinning at the center
of it whoever sang and spun before
causing dancing to happen
happy tragic years
study being able to exist
only for four or five minutes
at a time but flashing and brilliant
before falling back
into a stupor.
Bravo!
I got nuthin.
Maybe tomorrow. I promise to try.
I am retiring to Lifetime t.v. world in a few...about which I must make a post.
Whatever he was it wasn’t fifty
more like a permanent fifteen
dropped off from some celestial
circus truck whose voice
never cracked
because he carried his own music box
around him spinning at the center
of it whoever sang and spun before
causing dancing to happen
happy tragic years
study being able to exist
only for four or five minutes
at a time but flashing and brilliant
before falling back
into a stupor.
Bravo!
I got nuthin.
Maybe tomorrow. I promise to try.
I am retiring to Lifetime t.v. world in a few...about which I must make a post.
I Must Away...My D.V.R. is Weeping...
I programmed it to record too much and now it's down to the last few hours, so I am going to go prioritize and do some speed-watching of some proggies...
otherwise, vital proggies others enjoy will be missed and I will be the Devil...
xo
otherwise, vital proggies others enjoy will be missed and I will be the Devil...
xo
Despite, Despot
Something in the garden
said Dude!
God's not a clerical error
as on earth,
maybe the hermaphroditic
earthworm
making love
to itself,
maybe it said
"God snot"
earthworms do
seem to love
that viscous
medium when
they're getting
cold & heavy
between the sheets
of soil, of sexes
unambiguously split
by some child,
their coitus interruptus
was nevertheless
divine, like...
...oh...Divine!
said Dude!
God's not a clerical error
as on earth,
maybe the hermaphroditic
earthworm
making love
to itself,
maybe it said
"God snot"
earthworms do
seem to love
that viscous
medium when
they're getting
cold & heavy
between the sheets
of soil, of sexes
unambiguously split
by some child,
their coitus interruptus
was nevertheless
divine, like...
...oh...Divine!
Peter Say...
BLOG VALENTINE
Gone with rain
the lake sleeps
so soundly
we’re gifted
momentarily
but did I need to
tell you that out loud
or just post it to my blog
how excessively gifted
we all are and how
if I wanted someone’s
foot on the back of my neck
I’d get a massage
not a new dictatorship
O clerics.
Peter, did you write an MJ elegy? I would love to see your take on an MJ elegy...i know it's not nice to try to task fellow bloggers lol...
Gone with rain
the lake sleeps
so soundly
we’re gifted
momentarily
but did I need to
tell you that out loud
or just post it to my blog
how excessively gifted
we all are and how
if I wanted someone’s
foot on the back of my neck
I’d get a massage
not a new dictatorship
O clerics.
Peter, did you write an MJ elegy? I would love to see your take on an MJ elegy...i know it's not nice to try to task fellow bloggers lol...
THAT'S O.J., CHILDREN...
Great others you believed
for like eight hours,
an intern or a whale walking
backwards out of evolution's picture book.
Niiiiiice.
a mustard seed
The long to do of created.
Show bandits (duh). the policy plan
Insurance is a wink. here.
"here is your very own jailhouse shiv."
Lost in dreams such as you and elegy...
May it was or was it I was supergay.
PETIT MAL
I guess I can be a wallow of love.
go to let the King anymore. who almost went.
come again.
WHORSE
You are suddenly the damage control feature a poodle and ass. insurance company? Even in security that too visits being reined-in ruin are my poems. from Along to the white wall. suddenly Max Jacob screams. for me. to meet coffee. in the middle of a Holocaust.
everyone live inside me.
BUT OF COURSE
someone elio to Me Mayn't Be my side.
elegy
written to me move room you hide almost went I almost on a lovely think. And Road out of a glacier have a sick Ben Folds day my self-pity would against spontaneous video of you for only deduct defunct moments me that you already buy this they were
You still don't ape poetry last Schneeman entered more off the Rails.
yes
is a war rages
in head
else is how's
this today
busy
interior decorator I do
go cool air.
sonnet
This vein, I
Notorious B.I.G.'s patronizing,
what they are performing
medical rights Denmark. Beg. Make know.
all so medieval.
If you can spend laughter.
It was you for my staring
at place you can be
I'm much better there
"Goodbye Pisces" "Narcolepsy."
That is just flames saying
be with our and no well-to-do regret
that is lovely.
Here always drawn must ice
and sleep puzzling sequence
destroy the sky?
you sonnet
When you're rationing fear
I waiting to bill with my bed
Because I am Montreal or go to appetite finally
And someone really find solutions
tricks, or a computer,
the kid in a kid or my because
energy is criminally insane
ones tend (alternating) a kiss
MUSEUMS
I'm no longer a house.
they're putting out just my country.
get angry. mumbling pay
my didn't get city. Reykjavik
sponteneous kid. mental. see he died well
I look hard for what to do binds a sea
would holes in the garden just realize
gay mark of heaven?
LOSSEX
Posted uninitiated.
Uninitiated sounds love blog I pump your great friendship.
I need helpful in America, afford. You funny.
They a partner on right.
Or the Queen a you thing
or 1988. ended up to to end will
faster than some movies don't really everybody else.
the both the both the burst into
make the few demonstrate actual so panicked year in.
Clearly. now so many of Well, face of is to for of pronouns
you are else's museum
I'VE THE WALLS
I'm too tired to have the movies
Braveheart has diarrhea
Turn off the t.v.
SICK, DUDE
The I passed tired the movie
gwyneth paltrow, 24,209
cunty mona lisa smiles
sliding floors
my country
the lady or the Wigger?
brief autobiography
I remember last year Mental week.
oyez
Because Messieurs my house I have nothing
I sit it's furious and night
It's interesting drinking beer
I grow tired CARD
I write to in Hell to eke.
Every day the curtains...or
Friday, as the free-spirited women.
Gods in the crack clinics
you can do this, you can afford this one dog
sonnet
new year old day nearby.
I to go send for you now it's a 1993 (including robert urich Economy...
people to survive.
So, would-be Clinics are poor if You can't you can be be nice.
Be when all Tylenol. no destination.
I'm instead. Isn't Lifetime Movie Alaska. yourself?
It's the millenial kitchen, returned.
The free expectancy as everyday.
I wouldn't house a poodle without insurance
We made a bust of our coworker we vanished
medical opens to beautiful
one-stop suicide
PLACE YOUR ORDER HERE
a garden
The Elio few find
what it bands
It is without touching love paintings
that dress of coffee
your last selfing
will love the very Falling
course
(R.I.P. and Say We
I are.
dead tour guide
That on the other end flame dropping
could little difference to the illness
make that the day a fleeting
giant museum
full my GET WELL
planted beside you
(dude he was thinking poetry.
And I to guide for all that.)
get used to we aren't an emergency room. the street
the clinic hates medicine: hard truth
And now up babbling, at least pick good
this way. Your food is bipolar
just happens suddenly out like guys
who are broads
short story
Or you almost went Iceland. West be lost. here. If glaciers and all the room.
I's not fun, bipolar is don't get A commercial It could be walking her and
And the amounts of he had the when like four illnesses of de Chirico, oh I bit.
POEM
Next facing
This shivering costume
of all your gay pronouns
oh to drink want 2nd Birthday notice.
oh the ancient couple talked to me June 26,
domineering (and directed of these
commandments these they were often inept.
which isn't service
so nature the elements wanted a lie big....
I was an emergency there snide laughter.
I is Alaska. absolute confusion, and mad,
but the Ring Walk around was Love
poem
I spent it on Courbet and who will speak.
You are same time
It's of tenements
human arrive winds
where sleeps
have their way in my better holes.
MY STORY EN BREF
Muji with ultimately homicidal) motives
I often have heard that in that everyone
Inserted still has amenities. This work man voice YOU UNPREPARED!!
Monty Python would be minor illness bills
even between insurance and Schneeman book
I am young. cannot hold a face.
autumn in june
holes in you night I dream
on the scheeman, random (or treatment.
I'm not when I'm instead.
Terrible twos in fifties decor Water.
Lots of Eames chair for everyone.
prepare to be non-functional
freak out reading about them they say are absolutely true everywhere. other bills. train to places to be When I'm in your mouth. to leave bi puppy.
Bipolar some survival electricity, be funny. human goes up the other type stuff.
happened.
ETGAR
sometimes
sometimes. the sustenance anything....
the living no more than an embrace
It is you
you are the full museum
it's your bed. israeli rope-climbing
MAKE ME HORNY!
HELLO, BLOGSTY
i love my happy birthday cyber-tree
and the felt thankful
i place my soul in
watching rooms
watching me
Great others you believed
for like eight hours,
an intern or a whale walking
backwards out of evolution's picture book.
Niiiiiice.
a mustard seed
The long to do of created.
Show bandits (duh). the policy plan
Insurance is a wink. here.
"here is your very own jailhouse shiv."
Lost in dreams such as you and elegy...
May it was or was it I was supergay.
PETIT MAL
I guess I can be a wallow of love.
go to let the King anymore. who almost went.
come again.
WHORSE
You are suddenly the damage control feature a poodle and ass. insurance company? Even in security that too visits being reined-in ruin are my poems. from Along to the white wall. suddenly Max Jacob screams. for me. to meet coffee. in the middle of a Holocaust.
everyone live inside me.
BUT OF COURSE
someone elio to Me Mayn't Be my side.
elegy
written to me move room you hide almost went I almost on a lovely think. And Road out of a glacier have a sick Ben Folds day my self-pity would against spontaneous video of you for only deduct defunct moments me that you already buy this they were
You still don't ape poetry last Schneeman entered more off the Rails.
yes
is a war rages
in head
else is how's
this today
busy
interior decorator I do
go cool air.
sonnet
This vein, I
Notorious B.I.G.'s patronizing,
what they are performing
medical rights Denmark. Beg. Make know.
all so medieval.
If you can spend laughter.
It was you for my staring
at place you can be
I'm much better there
"Goodbye Pisces" "Narcolepsy."
That is just flames saying
be with our and no well-to-do regret
that is lovely.
Here always drawn must ice
and sleep puzzling sequence
destroy the sky?
you sonnet
When you're rationing fear
I waiting to bill with my bed
Because I am Montreal or go to appetite finally
And someone really find solutions
tricks, or a computer,
the kid in a kid or my because
energy is criminally insane
ones tend (alternating) a kiss
MUSEUMS
I'm no longer a house.
they're putting out just my country.
get angry. mumbling pay
my didn't get city. Reykjavik
sponteneous kid. mental. see he died well
I look hard for what to do binds a sea
would holes in the garden just realize
gay mark of heaven?
LOSSEX
Posted uninitiated.
Uninitiated sounds love blog I pump your great friendship.
I need helpful in America, afford. You funny.
They a partner on right.
Or the Queen a you thing
or 1988. ended up to to end will
faster than some movies don't really everybody else.
the both the both the burst into
make the few demonstrate actual so panicked year in.
Clearly. now so many of Well, face of is to for of pronouns
you are else's museum
I'VE THE WALLS
I'm too tired to have the movies
Braveheart has diarrhea
Turn off the t.v.
SICK, DUDE
The I passed tired the movie
gwyneth paltrow, 24,209
cunty mona lisa smiles
sliding floors
my country
the lady or the Wigger?
brief autobiography
I remember last year Mental week.
oyez
Because Messieurs my house I have nothing
I sit it's furious and night
It's interesting drinking beer
I grow tired CARD
I write to in Hell to eke.
Every day the curtains...or
Friday, as the free-spirited women.
Gods in the crack clinics
you can do this, you can afford this one dog
sonnet
new year old day nearby.
I to go send for you now it's a 1993 (including robert urich Economy...
people to survive.
So, would-be Clinics are poor if You can't you can be be nice.
Be when all Tylenol. no destination.
I'm instead. Isn't Lifetime Movie Alaska. yourself?
It's the millenial kitchen, returned.
The free expectancy as everyday.
I wouldn't house a poodle without insurance
We made a bust of our coworker we vanished
medical opens to beautiful
one-stop suicide
PLACE YOUR ORDER HERE
a garden
The Elio few find
what it bands
It is without touching love paintings
that dress of coffee
your last selfing
will love the very Falling
course
(R.I.P. and Say We
I are.
dead tour guide
That on the other end flame dropping
could little difference to the illness
make that the day a fleeting
giant museum
full my GET WELL
planted beside you
(dude he was thinking poetry.
And I to guide for all that.)
get used to we aren't an emergency room. the street
the clinic hates medicine: hard truth
And now up babbling, at least pick good
this way. Your food is bipolar
just happens suddenly out like guys
who are broads
short story
Or you almost went Iceland. West be lost. here. If glaciers and all the room.
I's not fun, bipolar is don't get A commercial It could be walking her and
And the amounts of he had the when like four illnesses of de Chirico, oh I bit.
POEM
Next facing
This shivering costume
of all your gay pronouns
oh to drink want 2nd Birthday notice.
oh the ancient couple talked to me June 26,
domineering (and directed of these
commandments these they were often inept.
which isn't service
so nature the elements wanted a lie big....
I was an emergency there snide laughter.
I is Alaska. absolute confusion, and mad,
but the Ring Walk around was Love
poem
I spent it on Courbet and who will speak.
You are same time
It's of tenements
human arrive winds
where sleeps
have their way in my better holes.
MY STORY EN BREF
Muji with ultimately homicidal) motives
I often have heard that in that everyone
Inserted still has amenities. This work man voice YOU UNPREPARED!!
Monty Python would be minor illness bills
even between insurance and Schneeman book
I am young. cannot hold a face.
autumn in june
holes in you night I dream
on the scheeman, random (or treatment.
I'm not when I'm instead.
Terrible twos in fifties decor Water.
Lots of Eames chair for everyone.
prepare to be non-functional
freak out reading about them they say are absolutely true everywhere. other bills. train to places to be When I'm in your mouth. to leave bi puppy.
Bipolar some survival electricity, be funny. human goes up the other type stuff.
happened.
ETGAR
sometimes
sometimes. the sustenance anything....
the living no more than an embrace
It is you
you are the full museum
it's your bed. israeli rope-climbing
MAKE ME HORNY!
HELLO, BLOGSTY
i love my happy birthday cyber-tree
and the felt thankful
i place my soul in
watching rooms
watching me
Dinner Invitation
Enter into the company of men
who cannot harm you with your own desire.
The Pre-Raphaelites, with their paintings
like supermodern elevators,
so light, unearthly metals, ornamental death;
you have the appeal of the balance
of a Medici table set by Cellini,
even the salt & pepper shakers
are Heaven & Hell, abstractions
gather like bison around this poetry,
we are home. I bury my poems with my love,
and I exhume love's corpse when I forget my lines.
who cannot harm you with your own desire.
The Pre-Raphaelites, with their paintings
like supermodern elevators,
so light, unearthly metals, ornamental death;
you have the appeal of the balance
of a Medici table set by Cellini,
even the salt & pepper shakers
are Heaven & Hell, abstractions
gather like bison around this poetry,
we are home. I bury my poems with my love,
and I exhume love's corpse when I forget my lines.
Poem Addressed to My Cat
You've made it so clear
you want to fuck
the albino reindeer.
You're a chubby caribou-chaser.
I leave the reindeer
on the floor in whatever
position your amours
last ended. You win.
I keep you in. You need
an outlet. The pretense
of placing your love
out of your reach
has become too ironic,
too comical, autobiographical.
I leave you in possession of the field.
The field is a muddy mess.
We both know it, feline, indiscreet.
Fuck the police. Fuck the street.
you want to fuck
the albino reindeer.
You're a chubby caribou-chaser.
I leave the reindeer
on the floor in whatever
position your amours
last ended. You win.
I keep you in. You need
an outlet. The pretense
of placing your love
out of your reach
has become too ironic,
too comical, autobiographical.
I leave you in possession of the field.
The field is a muddy mess.
We both know it, feline, indiscreet.
Fuck the police. Fuck the street.
Before You Go Early
You must ask permission
of a stone, a kiss, a pillow.
Consult that bird annoying-as-fuck
in the self-pitying willow
you meant to pay someone to chop
down long ago. Your ghosts,
your cat, your lover,
the poems waiting in queue.
You should ask ridiculous time,
that three-faced baby bubble-blower.
It's probably a good thing
to ask a few random strangers
with whom you had meaningless flings.
Maybe quiz a slug, a microbe, a plug of moss
or something lower. Fuck the illustrious dead.
Ask the packager of tripe at the supermarket.
Treat it like a business decision.
You needn't consider posthumous derision.
Everything is a matter of before not after.
And lastly, leave an explanation for the god of laughter.
of a stone, a kiss, a pillow.
Consult that bird annoying-as-fuck
in the self-pitying willow
you meant to pay someone to chop
down long ago. Your ghosts,
your cat, your lover,
the poems waiting in queue.
You should ask ridiculous time,
that three-faced baby bubble-blower.
It's probably a good thing
to ask a few random strangers
with whom you had meaningless flings.
Maybe quiz a slug, a microbe, a plug of moss
or something lower. Fuck the illustrious dead.
Ask the packager of tripe at the supermarket.
Treat it like a business decision.
You needn't consider posthumous derision.
Everything is a matter of before not after.
And lastly, leave an explanation for the god of laughter.
visitants
Mr. Courbet offers a sublime
chair, the infancy
of nature is still
a resource, the shadows
can't be arsed; Elio
will run interference,
he's a sport. The angels
say medicine is a luxury,
God is a couch.
I have sprawled on that couch.
Have you begun to go over
yet, they want to know,
Mr. de Chirico is worried
about all this spiritual furniture,
this bric-a-brac of which
he composed his paintings.
"He feels you are too attached."
Mr. Courbet hands you an Eskimo bar,
he brushes nature from your
long eyelashes. Elio goes
into the backyard, but smiles
over his shoulder, inviting
you to come see a sunflower
some English asshole has donated.
chair, the infancy
of nature is still
a resource, the shadows
can't be arsed; Elio
will run interference,
he's a sport. The angels
say medicine is a luxury,
God is a couch.
I have sprawled on that couch.
Have you begun to go over
yet, they want to know,
Mr. de Chirico is worried
about all this spiritual furniture,
this bric-a-brac of which
he composed his paintings.
"He feels you are too attached."
Mr. Courbet hands you an Eskimo bar,
he brushes nature from your
long eyelashes. Elio goes
into the backyard, but smiles
over his shoulder, inviting
you to come see a sunflower
some English asshole has donated.
Saturday Night
Out of the doldrums
and onto Saturn's rings,
a criminally beautiful
Saturday thing emerges
from the chrysalis
of something that used
to be you, your body,
shall I address it
by your name, seems
awkward, silly, divine
as the boy who feels
himself a tube of ultramarine
paint tonight, the far side
of the sea of himself
is a shore he has just
noticed. And someone walks
there, and my god you leave
no footprints, what the parable
on the fridge said. Corona
of nobody, take me and forget.
and onto Saturn's rings,
a criminally beautiful
Saturday thing emerges
from the chrysalis
of something that used
to be you, your body,
shall I address it
by your name, seems
awkward, silly, divine
as the boy who feels
himself a tube of ultramarine
paint tonight, the far side
of the sea of himself
is a shore he has just
noticed. And someone walks
there, and my god you leave
no footprints, what the parable
on the fridge said. Corona
of nobody, take me and forget.
Vaguely Patriotic Poem
Oh, what can I say
and not lie to you?
That you are beautiful
in your naivete like me,
and that it is fake
like my naivete?
That I want to smash you
to bits and start over
completely, build
only from the bottom,
the way we started once?
It's all too funny,
it's so much easier
to just leave you, a coward,
start with another
whose head isn't on backwards,
sleep easily at night.
To even address you, an abstraction
and nothing more, disgusts me.
I should speak only to people.
You don't exist. And the people
largely hate you and love you
exactly as I do, homeless
in their own country
which is a country where compassion
might as well be the passenger pigeon,
useful only to shuttle bits of war
information between doomed soldiers,
and, oh yes, extinct.
and not lie to you?
That you are beautiful
in your naivete like me,
and that it is fake
like my naivete?
That I want to smash you
to bits and start over
completely, build
only from the bottom,
the way we started once?
It's all too funny,
it's so much easier
to just leave you, a coward,
start with another
whose head isn't on backwards,
sleep easily at night.
To even address you, an abstraction
and nothing more, disgusts me.
I should speak only to people.
You don't exist. And the people
largely hate you and love you
exactly as I do, homeless
in their own country
which is a country where compassion
might as well be the passenger pigeon,
useful only to shuttle bits of war
information between doomed soldiers,
and, oh yes, extinct.
We Mustn't Say We Are Non-Functional. There are Legal Ramifications.
I was so messed up the past few days. And today is better somewhat.
When you're poor in America, you get the medicine you can afford. You get used to clinics. Clinics are funny. They aren't patronizing, but they're often inept. They hire what they can afford, which isn't much. They are performing a great service so I treat them as the noble element they are.
But one can despair.
When you're poor in America, you learn to ration fear. You can't afford to freak out and pretend you have the same medical rights others do and go to an emergency room. You'll be putting your partner on the street with you, so just deal with it.
I hate this about my country. I was reading about Denmark. I wanted to write to them and beg them to let me move there.
They don't have a King anymore right. Or a Queen. Maybe I can be the Queen of Denmark. That would be nice.
Be creative. Barter. Beg. Make up a big lie.
I know. I know.
If you walk into an emergency room you can spend eight hours there (7.75 hours of that time waiting to be seen) then run up a 2,000 bill when all they did is give you a Tylenol. That is an absolutely true fact.
Or you can go to a clinic where an intern will tell you things that medicine believed in 1933, 1955 or 1988. They try. I don't get angry. I hide my laughter. It's not snide laughter.
I almost went everywhere. I almost went to Alaska. I almost went to Iceland. I almost went on a bus heading West with no destination.
I ended up going to my bed instead. Isn't that funny? It was certainly cheaper. Lifetime Movie Network, thank you for sparing me absolute confusion, finding myself staring at a whale and mumbling in tongues.
And now I can pay my mortgage and other bills. Because I didn't get on a train to Montreal or Alaska. So many lovely places to be lost. I wouldn't want to be lost here. If I'm going to end up babbling, walking the streets, I will at least pick a pretty city. Reyjkjavik is a good place to go mad, I think. And you can just drive the Ring Road out to a glacier and walk around a glacier explaining it all to yourself.
It is better to just go to the kitchen, I suppose. When my appetite finally returned.
The good news is I have a free diet plan. It's much better than exercise. I lose much faster this way.
Food looks very disgusting in that state. You can't even think of putting it in your mouth. And someone else eating? I have to leave the room.
I suspect I'm a sick puppy.
Bipolar is not fun, despite what some movies depict. Untreated bipolar is worse. You don't really have the same life expectancy as everybody else. Well there is no "everybody else" is there?
Insert "Goodbye Pisces" by Tori here.
Or maybe Ben Folds' "Narcolepsy." That would also do.
Okay, that's my self-pity post. I don't really pity myself because I try to find solutions everyday. I do have some survival tricks, or I wouldn't still have electricity, a computer, a house, the amenities. This is just the long damage control work the bipolar has to do to repair both the conflagrations he has created, and those that were just part of life's recurrent spontaneous combustion.
That would be funny. A commercial for insurance against spontaneous human combustion. It could feature a video of a woman walking her poodles and both the dog walker and the poodle would burst into sudden flames with narration in insurance man voice saying "DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU UNPREPARED!! You can get a $1,000,000 policy for only pennies a day!!" Show a kid on a see-saw and the kid on the other end goes up in a burst of flame dropping the other kid on his ass. Monty Python type stuff.
And the insurance company would make out like bandits (duh). Even in the few cases where the policy holder could demonstrate actual spontaneous human combustion, the insurance company could deduct the money allowed for cremation, since that already happened.
And vast amounts of people would buy this so they had the security that they were insured.
I remember when my coworker was so panicked last year because he had a minor illness and he couldn't afford his medical bills even with our insurance plan. The difference between insurance and no insurance is often very little difference today. And they keep adding things to the list that they won't cover. Mental illness is really passe, when it comes to insurance. You are allotted like four visits in a year sometimes. Mental illness is being reined in. Clearly. The roads to financial ruin are now so broad you can expect to see many of your well-to-do friends on them shortly.
I still don't regret the money I spent on poetry last week.
Because Messieurs de Chirico, Courbet and Schneeman entered my house on the same day and now I have the energy to open them and the sustenance is criminally beautiful.
The Elio Schneeman book is lovely.
Here are a few poems.
I am always drawn to poets who died young. Well, if they can write well.
I look for their books.
They never work you hard for reviews or anything....the living ones tend to do that more than a bit.
These are from Along the Rails.
POEM
Next to the face of nothing
I sit facing
This shivering white wall
IT
It has to find
what it is to think.
It must breathe
if it will speak.
You cannot hold ice
and sleep at the same time
It is a puzzling sequence
destroys whole blocks of tenements
where war rages
in its furious costume
It is sleep
that binds the day and night
It is alternating bands
It is a fleeting embrace
It is a kiss without touching a face.
MUSEUMS
I love the holes in the sky
where my head goes
to meet you for coffee
you are lost in a sea of pronouns
you enter your dreams
as you would a giant museum
full of expectation
I love the holes in my head
they are full of pronouns
on their way to a museum
it's interesting to drink coffee
when everyone else is drinking beer
I want to live inside
someone else's museum
I've grown tired of the paintings
that dress the walls
you wake to the promise of coffee
last night I met you
in a museum in my dream
on the way to achieve
new and better holes.
and how's this for an elegy...
GET WELL CARD
I write this in the garden planted beside your bed.
When you're poor in America, you get the medicine you can afford. You get used to clinics. Clinics are funny. They aren't patronizing, but they're often inept. They hire what they can afford, which isn't much. They are performing a great service so I treat them as the noble element they are.
But one can despair.
When you're poor in America, you learn to ration fear. You can't afford to freak out and pretend you have the same medical rights others do and go to an emergency room. You'll be putting your partner on the street with you, so just deal with it.
I hate this about my country. I was reading about Denmark. I wanted to write to them and beg them to let me move there.
They don't have a King anymore right. Or a Queen. Maybe I can be the Queen of Denmark. That would be nice.
Be creative. Barter. Beg. Make up a big lie.
I know. I know.
If you walk into an emergency room you can spend eight hours there (7.75 hours of that time waiting to be seen) then run up a 2,000 bill when all they did is give you a Tylenol. That is an absolutely true fact.
Or you can go to a clinic where an intern will tell you things that medicine believed in 1933, 1955 or 1988. They try. I don't get angry. I hide my laughter. It's not snide laughter.
I almost went everywhere. I almost went to Alaska. I almost went to Iceland. I almost went on a bus heading West with no destination.
I ended up going to my bed instead. Isn't that funny? It was certainly cheaper. Lifetime Movie Network, thank you for sparing me absolute confusion, finding myself staring at a whale and mumbling in tongues.
And now I can pay my mortgage and other bills. Because I didn't get on a train to Montreal or Alaska. So many lovely places to be lost. I wouldn't want to be lost here. If I'm going to end up babbling, walking the streets, I will at least pick a pretty city. Reyjkjavik is a good place to go mad, I think. And you can just drive the Ring Road out to a glacier and walk around a glacier explaining it all to yourself.
It is better to just go to the kitchen, I suppose. When my appetite finally returned.
The good news is I have a free diet plan. It's much better than exercise. I lose much faster this way.
Food looks very disgusting in that state. You can't even think of putting it in your mouth. And someone else eating? I have to leave the room.
I suspect I'm a sick puppy.
Bipolar is not fun, despite what some movies depict. Untreated bipolar is worse. You don't really have the same life expectancy as everybody else. Well there is no "everybody else" is there?
Insert "Goodbye Pisces" by Tori here.
Or maybe Ben Folds' "Narcolepsy." That would also do.
Okay, that's my self-pity post. I don't really pity myself because I try to find solutions everyday. I do have some survival tricks, or I wouldn't still have electricity, a computer, a house, the amenities. This is just the long damage control work the bipolar has to do to repair both the conflagrations he has created, and those that were just part of life's recurrent spontaneous combustion.
That would be funny. A commercial for insurance against spontaneous human combustion. It could feature a video of a woman walking her poodles and both the dog walker and the poodle would burst into sudden flames with narration in insurance man voice saying "DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU UNPREPARED!! You can get a $1,000,000 policy for only pennies a day!!" Show a kid on a see-saw and the kid on the other end goes up in a burst of flame dropping the other kid on his ass. Monty Python type stuff.
And the insurance company would make out like bandits (duh). Even in the few cases where the policy holder could demonstrate actual spontaneous human combustion, the insurance company could deduct the money allowed for cremation, since that already happened.
And vast amounts of people would buy this so they had the security that they were insured.
I remember when my coworker was so panicked last year because he had a minor illness and he couldn't afford his medical bills even with our insurance plan. The difference between insurance and no insurance is often very little difference today. And they keep adding things to the list that they won't cover. Mental illness is really passe, when it comes to insurance. You are allotted like four visits in a year sometimes. Mental illness is being reined in. Clearly. The roads to financial ruin are now so broad you can expect to see many of your well-to-do friends on them shortly.
I still don't regret the money I spent on poetry last week.
Because Messieurs de Chirico, Courbet and Schneeman entered my house on the same day and now I have the energy to open them and the sustenance is criminally beautiful.
The Elio Schneeman book is lovely.
Here are a few poems.
I am always drawn to poets who died young. Well, if they can write well.
I look for their books.
They never work you hard for reviews or anything....the living ones tend to do that more than a bit.
These are from Along the Rails.
POEM
Next to the face of nothing
I sit facing
This shivering white wall
IT
It has to find
what it is to think.
It must breathe
if it will speak.
You cannot hold ice
and sleep at the same time
It is a puzzling sequence
destroys whole blocks of tenements
where war rages
in its furious costume
It is sleep
that binds the day and night
It is alternating bands
It is a fleeting embrace
It is a kiss without touching a face.
MUSEUMS
I love the holes in the sky
where my head goes
to meet you for coffee
you are lost in a sea of pronouns
you enter your dreams
as you would a giant museum
full of expectation
I love the holes in my head
they are full of pronouns
on their way to a museum
it's interesting to drink coffee
when everyone else is drinking beer
I want to live inside
someone else's museum
I've grown tired of the paintings
that dress the walls
you wake to the promise of coffee
last night I met you
in a museum in my dream
on the way to achieve
new and better holes.
and how's this for an elegy...
GET WELL CARD
I write this in the garden planted beside your bed.
Happy 2nd Birthday to Me (or My Blog, Which May or Mayn't Be Me)
The word mayn't is supergay.
I just realized I passed the two year old mark yesterday or today or some day nearby.
I was too busy in Hell to notice.
I am an interior decorator in Hell on the side.
It's what I do to eke.
Every couple months, Satan gets tired of the curtains...or that lamp...or the breezeway treatment.
I'm not even allowed to go near IKEA when I'm decorating hell.
He sends me to Muji instead.
Terrible twos for the blog?
I guess that means my blog will insist "I can do it!" a lot and throw tantrums.
Quoi de neuf!
xo
I just realized I passed the two year old mark yesterday or today or some day nearby.
I was too busy in Hell to notice.
I am an interior decorator in Hell on the side.
It's what I do to eke.
Every couple months, Satan gets tired of the curtains...or that lamp...or the breezeway treatment.
I'm not even allowed to go near IKEA when I'm decorating hell.
He sends me to Muji instead.
Terrible twos for the blog?
I guess that means my blog will insist "I can do it!" a lot and throw tantrums.
Quoi de neuf!
xo
Friday, June 26, 2009
I Seem to Have Fallen
into a wallow of LMN movies.
That's Lifetime Movie Network for you uninitiated.
Uninitiated sounds like a dirty word.
Right now it's back to Gwyneth looking oh-so-young in a 1993 movie with Robert Urich as the domineering (and ultimatel homicidal) dad of free-spirited women.
It's directed by Bill Condon (didn't he do Gods & Monsters?)
I love the fifties decor and the house. It's very Falling Water.
Lots of Eames-era stuff (including of course an Eames chair or two).
I love these movies.
I love everyone.
Peter, if you still read my blog I was thinking of you today and your great poetry.
And I felt thankful for your friendship.
I need to go watch more of these in the cool air.
This room is hot!
xo
That's Lifetime Movie Network for you uninitiated.
Uninitiated sounds like a dirty word.
Right now it's back to Gwyneth looking oh-so-young in a 1993 movie with Robert Urich as the domineering (and ultimatel homicidal) dad of free-spirited women.
It's directed by Bill Condon (didn't he do Gods & Monsters?)
I love the fifties decor and the house. It's very Falling Water.
Lots of Eames-era stuff (including of course an Eames chair or two).
I love these movies.
I love everyone.
Peter, if you still read my blog I was thinking of you today and your great poetry.
And I felt thankful for your friendship.
I need to go watch more of these in the cool air.
This room is hot!
xo
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
In This Difficult Economy...
people often have to be creative even to survive.
So, in that vein, I thought I would remind everyone of Notorious B.I.G.'s "10 Crack Commandments."
These constitute a helpful guide for those junior enterprisers out there!
(R.I.P. and all that.)
So, in that vein, I thought I would remind everyone of Notorious B.I.G.'s "10 Crack Commandments."
These constitute a helpful guide for those junior enterprisers out there!
(R.I.P. and all that.)
This Video Answers the Question "Why Do Both Lesbians and Straight Men Get Horny When They Go Camping in the Woods?"
Montreal's "Lesbians on Ecstasy."
The Two Books I Have Been Reading and Enjoying Most the Past Few Days
That's easy.
Etgar Keret's short story collection Missing Kissinger.
&
Raving homosexual Aubrey Menen's queerly bizarre Fonthill.
Imagine if Walpole came back as a Calcutta queen and rewrote The Castle of Otranto as a gay Harlequin romance aimed at realizing an elderly's homosexual erotic fantasies.
I probably should say "homosexualist." It has rather that air.
I've never seen such gerontophilia in a novel before.
Decrepitude is hot?
Okay, Iris Murdoch does that a little in some novels.
But.
Bee-ZAHR!
Etgar Keret's short story collection Missing Kissinger.
&
Raving homosexual Aubrey Menen's queerly bizarre Fonthill.
Imagine if Walpole came back as a Calcutta queen and rewrote The Castle of Otranto as a gay Harlequin romance aimed at realizing an elderly's homosexual erotic fantasies.
I probably should say "homosexualist." It has rather that air.
I've never seen such gerontophilia in a novel before.
Decrepitude is hot?
Okay, Iris Murdoch does that a little in some novels.
But.
Bee-ZAHR!
I Had Forgotten Christopher Lee as a Gay Leather Biker
The movie whose title I was trying to recall earlier today was Serial.
Google told me.
Here's a clip, if this plays.
I was having trouble getting it to play.
Google told me.
Here's a clip, if this plays.
I was having trouble getting it to play.
Hahahaha! Funny Italian Film Short
I keep trying to find this film short I saw by an Italian filmmaker whose surname was di Re I believe?
Does anybody know who that is, or if I'm remembering his name correctly?
He had a rather Beckettian style of filmmaking...but more Beckett mixed with Beckett's own influences like Buster Keaton or Chaplin.
I think he was making films in the early 1980s.
Does anybody know who that is, or if I'm remembering his name correctly?
He had a rather Beckettian style of filmmaking...but more Beckett mixed with Beckett's own influences like Buster Keaton or Chaplin.
I think he was making films in the early 1980s.
Troy Lloyd Sent Me a Link to this Video and Now I'm Blind
I went blind at 2:24.
I'm pissed because now I'm wondering what I missed.
Please tell me I saw the best part.
I'm typing this with my Braille keyboard that I kept nearby for just such an eventuality.
I'm gonna kill the first motherfucker who tells a Helen Keller joke.
Oh, I'm gonna "answer the iron" all right.
Answer the iron and then use it to.....&5-%$#(*&^%$^&$&^$
I'm pissed because now I'm wondering what I missed.
Please tell me I saw the best part.
I'm typing this with my Braille keyboard that I kept nearby for just such an eventuality.
I'm gonna kill the first motherfucker who tells a Helen Keller joke.
Oh, I'm gonna "answer the iron" all right.
Answer the iron and then use it to.....&5-%$#(*&^%$^&$&^$
I Was in the Tub
adding a few pages to something I'm working on called The Adventures of Spock Bear...it's written as a children's tale but not really for children....the story of a ne'er-do-well pile of fur.
I found this clip on YouTube just now.
Hmmm....
Spock Bear would be such a great name for a band.
I found this clip on YouTube just now.
Hmmm....
Spock Bear would be such a great name for a band.
"The Closet Heterosexual": Murray Lachlan Young
Some verse instead of poetry for your amusement.
Cute.
Cute.
Video Casualties of the Eighties
There were a lot of them.
I love this song but could take or leave the video.
I never noticed before how the young Suzanne Vega looked a bit like Camille Paglia. With a little makeup she could pass in a skit.
I like the song "Night Vision" on her Solitude Standing album. She based that on Paul Eluard's poem on Juan Gris. I couldn't find her doing the song on YouTube. Only artists covering it.
Here's her adaptation in English (adaptation more than translation) and Eluard's poem.
Night Vision
By day give thanks
By night beware
Half the world in sweetness
The other in fear
When the darkness takes you
With her hand across your face
Don't give in too quickly
Find the thing she's erased
Find the line, find the shape
Through the grain
Find the outline, things will
Tell you their name
The table. the guitar
The empty glass
All will blend together when
Daylight has passed
Find the line, find the shape
Through the grain
Find the outline, things will
Tell you their name
Now I watch you falling into sleep
Watch your fist curl against the sheet
Watch your lips fall open and your eyes dim
In blind faith
I would shelter you
Keep you in light
But I can only teach you
Night vision
Night vision
Night vision
Lyrics : Suzanne Vega
Copyright : © 1987 AGF Music Ltd. & Waifersongs Ltd. (ASCAP)
Album : Solitude Standing
"Solitude Standing" - tracklist :
Tom's Diner
Luka
Ironbound Fancy Poultry
In The Eye
Night Vision
Solitude Standing
Calypso
Language
Gypsy
Wooden Horse (Caspar Houser's Song)
Tom's Diner (Reprise)
Notes:
[Suzanne's perspective is a parent that sings to his or her child]
"You'd like to protect people from the things that are out there, but you can't always, so it's better to teach them how to see the dangers and the bad things, and to deal with them and not pretend that they don't exist. That's a problem with a lot of people in America. You don't allow yourself to feel things as complexly as human beings can feel them." The Cutting Edge of Folk from Bullet In Flight, originally published in Clockwatch Review Volume 4, No. 2, 7-14-87/8-9-87 by Ronald J. Rindo and James Plath http://www.suzannevega.com/about/1987/clockwatch.htm
From the "Solitude Standing" album liner notes:
Inspired by the poem "Juan Gris" by Paul Eluard
Translation by Winifred Radford
Published in Francis Poulenc "The Man and his Songs" by Pierre Bernac/Editions Gallimard
W. W. Horton and Company Inc. (U.S.) 1978
Victor Gollancz Ltd. London (U.K.) 1978
The original Paul Eluard poem:
De jour merci de nuit prends garde
De douceur la moitié du monde
L'autre montrait rigueur aveugle
Aux veines se lisait un présent sans merci
Aux beautés des contours l'espace limité
Cimentait tous les joints des objets familiers
Table guitare et verre vide
Sur un arpent de terre pleine
De toile blanche d'air nocturne
Table devait se soutenir
Lampe rester pépin de l'ombre
Journal délassait sa moitié
Deux fois le jour deux fois la nuit
De deux objets un double objet
Un seul ensemble à tout jamais
Here's a more literal if stiff translation of the poem, much truer to the text but not satisfying...this almost reads like a computer translation, it's so mechanical and unfelt...and the word "pleine" was particularly poorly translated here, contextually...
I think Vega did a beautiful job getting something lyrically satisfying out of this.
I'm not really an Eluard fan. I've never admired his stinting form of lyricism. It always seemed such a safe, conventional form of surrealism. There are a few standout poems for me, but not much more than that.
I'll take a Breton or a Max Jacob anyday over the milquetoast form of surrealism Eluard represents.
JUAN GRIS*
By day give thanks by night beware
sweetness one half of the world
the other showed blind harshness
In the veins a merciless present was read
in the beauties of the contours limited space
cemented all the joinings of familiar objects
Table guitar and empty glass
on an acre of solid earth
of white canvas of nocturnal air
Table had to support itself
lamp to remain a pip of the shadow
newspaper abandoning half of itself
Twice the day twice the night
of two objects a double object
a single whole for ever and ever.
* By Paul Eluard. Translated by Winifred Radford. Published in “Poulenc: The Man & His Songs” by Pierre Bernac. Victor Gollancz Ltd., London. Translation @ Winifred Radford 1977.
I love this song but could take or leave the video.
I never noticed before how the young Suzanne Vega looked a bit like Camille Paglia. With a little makeup she could pass in a skit.
I like the song "Night Vision" on her Solitude Standing album. She based that on Paul Eluard's poem on Juan Gris. I couldn't find her doing the song on YouTube. Only artists covering it.
Here's her adaptation in English (adaptation more than translation) and Eluard's poem.
Night Vision
By day give thanks
By night beware
Half the world in sweetness
The other in fear
When the darkness takes you
With her hand across your face
Don't give in too quickly
Find the thing she's erased
Find the line, find the shape
Through the grain
Find the outline, things will
Tell you their name
The table. the guitar
The empty glass
All will blend together when
Daylight has passed
Find the line, find the shape
Through the grain
Find the outline, things will
Tell you their name
Now I watch you falling into sleep
Watch your fist curl against the sheet
Watch your lips fall open and your eyes dim
In blind faith
I would shelter you
Keep you in light
But I can only teach you
Night vision
Night vision
Night vision
Lyrics : Suzanne Vega
Copyright : © 1987 AGF Music Ltd. & Waifersongs Ltd. (ASCAP)
Album : Solitude Standing
"Solitude Standing" - tracklist :
Tom's Diner
Luka
Ironbound Fancy Poultry
In The Eye
Night Vision
Solitude Standing
Calypso
Language
Gypsy
Wooden Horse (Caspar Houser's Song)
Tom's Diner (Reprise)
Notes:
[Suzanne's perspective is a parent that sings to his or her child]
"You'd like to protect people from the things that are out there, but you can't always, so it's better to teach them how to see the dangers and the bad things, and to deal with them and not pretend that they don't exist. That's a problem with a lot of people in America. You don't allow yourself to feel things as complexly as human beings can feel them." The Cutting Edge of Folk from Bullet In Flight, originally published in Clockwatch Review Volume 4, No. 2, 7-14-87/8-9-87 by Ronald J. Rindo and James Plath http://www.suzannevega.com/about/1987/clockwatch.htm
From the "Solitude Standing" album liner notes:
Inspired by the poem "Juan Gris" by Paul Eluard
Translation by Winifred Radford
Published in Francis Poulenc "The Man and his Songs" by Pierre Bernac/Editions Gallimard
W. W. Horton and Company Inc. (U.S.) 1978
Victor Gollancz Ltd. London (U.K.) 1978
The original Paul Eluard poem:
De jour merci de nuit prends garde
De douceur la moitié du monde
L'autre montrait rigueur aveugle
Aux veines se lisait un présent sans merci
Aux beautés des contours l'espace limité
Cimentait tous les joints des objets familiers
Table guitare et verre vide
Sur un arpent de terre pleine
De toile blanche d'air nocturne
Table devait se soutenir
Lampe rester pépin de l'ombre
Journal délassait sa moitié
Deux fois le jour deux fois la nuit
De deux objets un double objet
Un seul ensemble à tout jamais
Here's a more literal if stiff translation of the poem, much truer to the text but not satisfying...this almost reads like a computer translation, it's so mechanical and unfelt...and the word "pleine" was particularly poorly translated here, contextually...
I think Vega did a beautiful job getting something lyrically satisfying out of this.
I'm not really an Eluard fan. I've never admired his stinting form of lyricism. It always seemed such a safe, conventional form of surrealism. There are a few standout poems for me, but not much more than that.
I'll take a Breton or a Max Jacob anyday over the milquetoast form of surrealism Eluard represents.
JUAN GRIS*
By day give thanks by night beware
sweetness one half of the world
the other showed blind harshness
In the veins a merciless present was read
in the beauties of the contours limited space
cemented all the joinings of familiar objects
Table guitar and empty glass
on an acre of solid earth
of white canvas of nocturnal air
Table had to support itself
lamp to remain a pip of the shadow
newspaper abandoning half of itself
Twice the day twice the night
of two objects a double object
a single whole for ever and ever.
* By Paul Eluard. Translated by Winifred Radford. Published in “Poulenc: The Man & His Songs” by Pierre Bernac. Victor Gollancz Ltd., London. Translation @ Winifred Radford 1977.
"God's Away on Business"
One of a handful of true originals.
Maybe Brecht adopted him when he was a kid.
He would have been proud of his son.
God, I remember this show! A weird spin-off of the classic Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Martin Mull and Fred Willard are dressed like "two wild and crazy guys" (without irony). Funny how things change. Once, Mull was considered the cool guy and Willard was sort of the nerdy straight guy. Now Willard is cool and Mull is some guy whose name nobody can really remember (unless you liked WKRP in Cincinnati...insert dry heaves sound here). Wait, I forgot his "phoning it in" recurring role as Roseanne's gay employer on her eponymous show. Most people probably know him from that now!
My favorite Mull performance was in one of those totally bizarre seventies movies that invented new genres for the length of one movie (think "Americathon" with John Ritter). I think most of these movies never even made it to video, let alone d.v.d. They were sort of drive-in movie fare more than anything else. It was a movie about the lost generation of late seventies Californians and their excesses (cults, recreational fun with prescription drugs, swinging). I can't remember the name but I'm sure it's considered a cult classic (no pun intended). His daughter joins a cult and the typically broken Cali family reforms to rescue her. Ultimately, it reinforces the sanctity of the good old-fashioned nuclear family (values). But it's so seventies (the colors come to mind mind instantly...it is just soaked in seventies colors) and has such weird actors (the guy who played Maude's husband Arthur on that sitcom is in it) that you can't look away. I think I watched like ten times when I was eleven on HBO or some place like that.
Martin Mull is one of those actors who is always playing Martin Mull. Fred Willard is even more like that.
I met one of Martin Mull's "pupils." He was a pupil of Mull as a painter. I got stuck at a poetry reading listening to this guy explain the history of European art through the eyes of Martin Mull for like an hour. Never go to a poetry reading without your own car!!! "Well, Martin says..." Where's P.E.T.A. when you REALLY NEED 'EM?
This young painter's biggest influence was Albers. But he didn't know this. He thought it was Martin Mull. I didn't bother disabusing him of the notion. I was too busy looking through plate glass, praying my ride would appear.
Watch this video and be honest and tell me...even if you are staunchly opposed to guns and gun ownership, don't you want to put a little laser dot on Mull's forehead after about the third close-up "reaction shot" to Tom's song? I'm pretty much a pacifist, but all I can say is it's good I wasn't there and didn't have a Luger strapped to my calf. Because it would have been "The Fred Willard Show" the next day.
Maybe Brecht adopted him when he was a kid.
He would have been proud of his son.
God, I remember this show! A weird spin-off of the classic Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Martin Mull and Fred Willard are dressed like "two wild and crazy guys" (without irony). Funny how things change. Once, Mull was considered the cool guy and Willard was sort of the nerdy straight guy. Now Willard is cool and Mull is some guy whose name nobody can really remember (unless you liked WKRP in Cincinnati...insert dry heaves sound here). Wait, I forgot his "phoning it in" recurring role as Roseanne's gay employer on her eponymous show. Most people probably know him from that now!
My favorite Mull performance was in one of those totally bizarre seventies movies that invented new genres for the length of one movie (think "Americathon" with John Ritter). I think most of these movies never even made it to video, let alone d.v.d. They were sort of drive-in movie fare more than anything else. It was a movie about the lost generation of late seventies Californians and their excesses (cults, recreational fun with prescription drugs, swinging). I can't remember the name but I'm sure it's considered a cult classic (no pun intended). His daughter joins a cult and the typically broken Cali family reforms to rescue her. Ultimately, it reinforces the sanctity of the good old-fashioned nuclear family (values). But it's so seventies (the colors come to mind mind instantly...it is just soaked in seventies colors) and has such weird actors (the guy who played Maude's husband Arthur on that sitcom is in it) that you can't look away. I think I watched like ten times when I was eleven on HBO or some place like that.
Martin Mull is one of those actors who is always playing Martin Mull. Fred Willard is even more like that.
I met one of Martin Mull's "pupils." He was a pupil of Mull as a painter. I got stuck at a poetry reading listening to this guy explain the history of European art through the eyes of Martin Mull for like an hour. Never go to a poetry reading without your own car!!! "Well, Martin says..." Where's P.E.T.A. when you REALLY NEED 'EM?
This young painter's biggest influence was Albers. But he didn't know this. He thought it was Martin Mull. I didn't bother disabusing him of the notion. I was too busy looking through plate glass, praying my ride would appear.
Watch this video and be honest and tell me...even if you are staunchly opposed to guns and gun ownership, don't you want to put a little laser dot on Mull's forehead after about the third close-up "reaction shot" to Tom's song? I'm pretty much a pacifist, but all I can say is it's good I wasn't there and didn't have a Luger strapped to my calf. Because it would have been "The Fred Willard Show" the next day.
Renoe Alexander
Adorable. And gifted. Sometimes the gods bestow freely.
Love the Irish threnody feel to this.
Love the Irish threnody feel to this.
Lourie - Two Poems (1908)
Hexameron, Thank You for posting such great music so often!
And "Five Preludes Fragiles" (1908-10)
And "Five Preludes Fragiles" (1908-10)
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Poet Shad Marsh is Running for Mayer of His Town
Please offer him your moral and financial support.
Spiritual succour is also greatly appreciated, I believe.
More info and platform here.
Spiritual succour is also greatly appreciated, I believe.
More info and platform here.
Poe-uhm
CRAIG'S LIST POETICS
I inherited this coin-counting machine from Robbe-Grillet.
Only used sporadically. Pick up only.
Microwave oven. Marked Viktor Shlovksy on back.
Don't know what that means. Make offer.
Washer and dryer. Paid over a thousand for these
at Wittgenstein & Roebuck in 1974. Fifty bucks and yours.
Lacanian playground with mirror stage. Daughter
commited suicide. Bring truck and take it all.
Baudrillard dual fondue/sexual torture kit.
Wife slept with our son, took off. Ten bucks or six pack.
Zizek electrolysis device. Made my son look like a freak.
Come get it and it's yours. (Applies to kid as well.)
If you speak
I too prefer the Distraction Narrative.
You feel better if you can put your name there as a contributor.
It's hard to believe things stay in such tight, almost crystalline matrices, but they do.
It's almost like dreams that occur nightly are a separate animal.
Dreams are probably signs that an animal has been mythologized out of existence.
One wonders about that Other sometimes.
I wonder if It hates us.
You feel better if you can put your name there as a contributor.
It's hard to believe things stay in such tight, almost crystalline matrices, but they do.
It's almost like dreams that occur nightly are a separate animal.
Dreams are probably signs that an animal has been mythologized out of existence.
One wonders about that Other sometimes.
I wonder if It hates us.
The Problem Succinctly
Many a poetics is intellectually scrupulous but morally, praxeologically vacant.
The artist gauges the safe arena for transgression, soi-disant.
The artists cross the line of the circle within the circle.
The artist writes "DANGER" all around the edge of this circle like an abraxas.
The artist doesn't write anything anywhere near that outer circle.
The artist knows better.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that poetry is only real when it's a performance art.
But poetry is not a single thing.
It has at least as many diverse applications as applied mathematics.
It's just the same old story: idealism is a funnel and you can pour anything through it.
Poetry's just one of the funnier things to watch somebody pouring through that funnel.
Or frustrating things to watch.
Depending on your mood.
The artist gauges the safe arena for transgression, soi-disant.
The artists cross the line of the circle within the circle.
The artist writes "DANGER" all around the edge of this circle like an abraxas.
The artist doesn't write anything anywhere near that outer circle.
The artist knows better.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that poetry is only real when it's a performance art.
But poetry is not a single thing.
It has at least as many diverse applications as applied mathematics.
It's just the same old story: idealism is a funnel and you can pour anything through it.
Poetry's just one of the funnier things to watch somebody pouring through that funnel.
Or frustrating things to watch.
Depending on your mood.
You Make Me Happy
If you don't get audio, click on the video and it will take you to the clip on YouTube. Then click on the HQ below the clip and you will get audio. Sorry.
Gertrude Stein's a (Creepy) Doll
I found this cool book the other day in my closest thrift store.
While I don't collect dolls, it's always been a fantasy of mine to end my life as a solitary, decrepit, misanthropic, superannuated gay man who has collected thousands of dolls, which would line the shelves placed in every room of my house. I would be known for screaming, "Don't touch that!" at the increasingly few humans who visited me, and my corpse would be found by a public official many days after I had been bludgeoned to death by a rough trade junkie who touched one of my most precious dolls post-coitally. My last will and testament would be snarky and be remembered for its overuse of ridiculous adjectives and adverbs.
Oh, I would also want the word "CUNT!" to be written in my blood on the wall near where my body lay.
Wait, maybe that's your fantasy. Sometimes I get confused.
That or I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep.
I'm not sure. It's a toss-up.
Sometimes I get passive-aggressive.
Anyway, this book is awesome, with full-color photographs of these dolls on every page!
There are dolls made from lobster claws (see pic above), wishbones, fish netting, walnuts, dried apples, you name it they got it in this book in beautifully creepy photography!
I love the Gertrude Stein doll!
Click on the images and I think they will enlarge so you can read the text.
Or maybe just rub them until they grow.
Soz. One of those days.
An Image of Poetry Community
Community in poetry is easily visualized.
Or maybe this is a poetry movement.
Ideological flexibility is everything.
WARNING! DO NOT CLICK ON THIS AT WORK!
IF YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE EASILY OFFENDED TYPES, DO NOT CLICK ON IT.
Poetry Movement Math: 69-1=68. The movement "owes you one later."
Hence, the high ideals of les soixante-huitards.
Or is that soixante-retards?
Etes vous soixante-retarded?
Or maybe this is a poetry movement.
Ideological flexibility is everything.
WARNING! DO NOT CLICK ON THIS AT WORK!
IF YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE EASILY OFFENDED TYPES, DO NOT CLICK ON IT.
Poetry Movement Math: 69-1=68. The movement "owes you one later."
Hence, the high ideals of les soixante-huitards.
Or is that soixante-retards?
Etes vous soixante-retarded?
An Anthology of New (American) Poets: 10 Years Later
It's interesting to examine an anthology ten years after its publication, and to examine one's changing opinions and judgments towards the work.
The work I loved best in here I still love, but I find some of the work which I admired in a half-hearted manner now seems lackluster or worse.
Admittedly, some of this could be construed as reactive affect changing in the single reader ("sounds like a personal problem to me"), but some of it is latitude of reading, and the ability to gauge achievement and separate real originality from what is common.
There are modalities in this anthology which were vibrant then, but which are already throughly passe.
Some hyped poets now appear to have been exactly that.
I read the work of four poets anthologized therein today, and mostly groaned through three of them. (Lest you think this is arrogance and not honest critical reaction, I should say I do the same thing with about ninety percent of my own writing.)
I have been taken to task for my negativity in the past, so I will not drone on about my disappointment with the three, but talk about the one who held my interest.
I was engaged by the work of Judith Goldman included here, from her proprioceptive commands series of poems.
Most of these poems fall under that rubric of "(Yet) More Poetry about the Impossibility of Poetry," and one wonders if the mind would remain engaged if this strain of thought was a recurrent spooky minor chord darkening an entire poetry collection. Did you know Kenny G. holds the world record for the longest held musical note? Over forty-five minutes. Now, you don't want to compete with that do you? Do you want your name next to Kenny G.'s? (Well, they don't play poetry in elevators, so don't get on your high horse!) If you ever die in an elevator, it means there's a good chance you will die to the music of Kenny G.
I sometimes wonder if a sticker should be put on such books: "Fully Concentrated Aporia! NEW AND IMPROVED!" with Tide-bright colors.
But for the few pages included here, the author's desperation remained a pleasure.
These are intricate, mannered, almost gongoristic poems.
But they do slice meat well.
"there's no crime in disagreeing
what you need to do
is prevaricate."
I like a poet with a sense of humor!
And this is clearly not her first time at the rodeo.
"I abolished myself as a nuisance
and maintained myself as an institution."
Now that's what I call snappy autobiography.
"I took it out in theories;
parody began at home,
but where did home begin?
An ability to ask the right questions in stiletto form is a useful gift for a poet.
"then how comes it born originals,
we die copies...
Award: Best rewriting of a famous Rousseau quote to Judith Goldman.
There are funny digs at Ginsberg and Eliot...
"I only mutilate what already been repressed,
I can imitate the angels too
holy holy holy holy
who journeyed to denver, who died in denver,
who came back to denver &
waited in vain, who watched over denver &
brooded and loned in denver
o keep the Dog far hence
if we can't get there in time
then we just won't see ourselves"
Here's a virtuosic rhetorically exploitive move:
that a mind wandering in ecstasy
should count the clock,
retard victory"
Note how "retard" functions dualistically.
The lyricism of impotence is frustrating:
a vocation of evocation
I miss the mark
excuse me
excuse me
authenticate my fraudulent abridged duress
requite my decrepit invasion
with exorbitant alarms to quiet
the idiot questioner
rewind the wrecking ball
There is brutal reductivism:
omitting all disturbing accidents,
we are packages of leaking water
There are dire Cassandra-like pronouncements:
"you see, you don't abandon a concept as you might a dog"
She loves enallage and uses it often...
"I pries you and you goes out the door, known
for your notoriety;
it's just not anonymous anymore"
These poems read like addresses written by a much darker Oppen.
The digs at the patriarchal and patristics of many sorts feel a little half-hearted to this reader; the poet knows there are bigger fish.
I enjoyed these poems, but my reservations would consist in the fact that they still cling to shibboleths, they favor abstract indictments over concrete indictments, and they valorize aporia to a frustrating degree.
But that's one of the major cornerstones of the pomo, that valorization of aporia.
I liked these poems, but these would most likely go over horribly with an audience composed of people gathered randomly. I know it's fashionable to say that's the case with most great poetry, but I don't really agree with that.
There is poetry written for other poets, and there is poetry written for everyone.*
If you say you can't tell the difference, you're either being disingenuous, you're "overeducated and underthunk," or you're a radical fringe Don Quixote.
I Googled the poet, and interestingly enough the first thing that came up was an exchange Leslie Scalapino (a poet I was just talking about on this blog a few days ago) had with this poet.
I thought that was a weird coincidence, and I clicked on it and the exchange is well worth reading.
It occurred to me reading this, that this is the first time I have ever read Scalapino talking theory vis-a-vis her own praxis. What she said about the examination of emotion in way made perfect sense, and her statements about the self actually mesh with Whalen's Buddhist ideas on the same, if I'm reading her correctly. Sometimes there are many paths to a single truth. Duh. I know.
Anyway, I thought an interesting element of Goldman's expressed ideas here was the thing she was writing about Enron, that there she was moving in the direction of concrete indictiment, which this earlier writing (this is ten years back, mind you) made me crave.
Leslie Scalapino & Judith Goldman exchange at Jacket Magazine.
*(There are other types of poetry too, like poetry written for gophers or Elizabethan wannabees or train buffs, but I don't have time to articulate that nearly infinite list!)
The work I loved best in here I still love, but I find some of the work which I admired in a half-hearted manner now seems lackluster or worse.
Admittedly, some of this could be construed as reactive affect changing in the single reader ("sounds like a personal problem to me"), but some of it is latitude of reading, and the ability to gauge achievement and separate real originality from what is common.
There are modalities in this anthology which were vibrant then, but which are already throughly passe.
Some hyped poets now appear to have been exactly that.
I read the work of four poets anthologized therein today, and mostly groaned through three of them. (Lest you think this is arrogance and not honest critical reaction, I should say I do the same thing with about ninety percent of my own writing.)
I have been taken to task for my negativity in the past, so I will not drone on about my disappointment with the three, but talk about the one who held my interest.
I was engaged by the work of Judith Goldman included here, from her proprioceptive commands series of poems.
Most of these poems fall under that rubric of "(Yet) More Poetry about the Impossibility of Poetry," and one wonders if the mind would remain engaged if this strain of thought was a recurrent spooky minor chord darkening an entire poetry collection. Did you know Kenny G. holds the world record for the longest held musical note? Over forty-five minutes. Now, you don't want to compete with that do you? Do you want your name next to Kenny G.'s? (Well, they don't play poetry in elevators, so don't get on your high horse!) If you ever die in an elevator, it means there's a good chance you will die to the music of Kenny G.
I sometimes wonder if a sticker should be put on such books: "Fully Concentrated Aporia! NEW AND IMPROVED!" with Tide-bright colors.
But for the few pages included here, the author's desperation remained a pleasure.
These are intricate, mannered, almost gongoristic poems.
But they do slice meat well.
"there's no crime in disagreeing
what you need to do
is prevaricate."
I like a poet with a sense of humor!
And this is clearly not her first time at the rodeo.
"I abolished myself as a nuisance
and maintained myself as an institution."
Now that's what I call snappy autobiography.
"I took it out in theories;
parody began at home,
but where did home begin?
An ability to ask the right questions in stiletto form is a useful gift for a poet.
"then how comes it born originals,
we die copies...
Award: Best rewriting of a famous Rousseau quote to Judith Goldman.
There are funny digs at Ginsberg and Eliot...
"I only mutilate what already been repressed,
I can imitate the angels too
holy holy holy holy
who journeyed to denver, who died in denver,
who came back to denver &
waited in vain, who watched over denver &
brooded and loned in denver
o keep the Dog far hence
if we can't get there in time
then we just won't see ourselves"
Here's a virtuosic rhetorically exploitive move:
that a mind wandering in ecstasy
should count the clock,
retard victory"
Note how "retard" functions dualistically.
The lyricism of impotence is frustrating:
a vocation of evocation
I miss the mark
excuse me
excuse me
authenticate my fraudulent abridged duress
requite my decrepit invasion
with exorbitant alarms to quiet
the idiot questioner
rewind the wrecking ball
There is brutal reductivism:
omitting all disturbing accidents,
we are packages of leaking water
There are dire Cassandra-like pronouncements:
"you see, you don't abandon a concept as you might a dog"
She loves enallage and uses it often...
"I pries you and you goes out the door, known
for your notoriety;
it's just not anonymous anymore"
These poems read like addresses written by a much darker Oppen.
The digs at the patriarchal and patristics of many sorts feel a little half-hearted to this reader; the poet knows there are bigger fish.
I enjoyed these poems, but my reservations would consist in the fact that they still cling to shibboleths, they favor abstract indictments over concrete indictments, and they valorize aporia to a frustrating degree.
But that's one of the major cornerstones of the pomo, that valorization of aporia.
I liked these poems, but these would most likely go over horribly with an audience composed of people gathered randomly. I know it's fashionable to say that's the case with most great poetry, but I don't really agree with that.
There is poetry written for other poets, and there is poetry written for everyone.*
If you say you can't tell the difference, you're either being disingenuous, you're "overeducated and underthunk," or you're a radical fringe Don Quixote.
I Googled the poet, and interestingly enough the first thing that came up was an exchange Leslie Scalapino (a poet I was just talking about on this blog a few days ago) had with this poet.
I thought that was a weird coincidence, and I clicked on it and the exchange is well worth reading.
It occurred to me reading this, that this is the first time I have ever read Scalapino talking theory vis-a-vis her own praxis. What she said about the examination of emotion in way made perfect sense, and her statements about the self actually mesh with Whalen's Buddhist ideas on the same, if I'm reading her correctly. Sometimes there are many paths to a single truth. Duh. I know.
Anyway, I thought an interesting element of Goldman's expressed ideas here was the thing she was writing about Enron, that there she was moving in the direction of concrete indictiment, which this earlier writing (this is ten years back, mind you) made me crave.
Leslie Scalapino & Judith Goldman exchange at Jacket Magazine.
*(There are other types of poetry too, like poetry written for gophers or Elizabethan wannabees or train buffs, but I don't have time to articulate that nearly infinite list!)
Dan Meth, You are Terrible
Do it again.
If you get all the clip references in this song, you have no life...I only get about 70%, so I have 30% of a life...
Drinking and Drawing. "Draw responsibly."
If you get all the clip references in this song, you have no life...I only get about 70%, so I have 30% of a life...
Drinking and Drawing. "Draw responsibly."
Some "We" for Neal: The Sound of Bei Dao Typing
Bei Dao in Chinese and Spanish. Let me see if I can find this poem in English...
I found it right away thanks to Google. The Poetry Foundation had the English translation by David Hinton (who did such a great job with the poet's book Forms of Distance.)
Landscape Over Zero
it's hawk teaching song to swim
it's song tracing back to the first wind
we trade scraps of joy
enter family from different directions
it's a father confirming darkness
it's darkness leading to that lightning of the classics
a door of weeping slams shut
echoes chasing its cry
it's a pen blossoming in lost hope
it's a blossom resisting the inevitable route
it's love's gleam waking to
light up landscape over zero
Translated by David Hinton and Yanbing Chen
Monday, June 22, 2009
Aboriginal Art
At least this video isn't a mercenary one.
There are so many "art galleries" on YouTube selling aboriginal art in a less than respectful manner.
I understand there are many sides to this and that some of these artists are probably grateful for the income this provides, but one of the videos I clicked on was showing some work with very sacred meaning attached to it ("art" of course doesn't exist as "art" in our multivalent sense of the word--these are seen as actual visions and not property produced by an individual), and the terrible music playing kept iterating "Shake that ass!" as it showed septuagenarian aboriginal artists with their work. It was clearly a money rattle the gallery owner was shaking in his monkey joy.
It was just so tacky I wanted to vaporize someone with my imaginary "You are So Tacky You Need to Be Vaporized" button.
Can't Stop Singing
this song today. Lee had added it to his Zune for me.
And a Violent Femmes song in my head something terrible.
"Something terrible" is an adverb in the last sentence.
I love the variously-afflicted personae Annie Lennox plays in that series of videos, like the paranoid freak in "I Love to Listen to Beethoven" and the sexually ravenous one in "I Need a Man." Presumably, she's a multiple (woman afflicted with MPD). Makes for a good video series anyway.
And a Violent Femmes song in my head something terrible.
"Something terrible" is an adverb in the last sentence.
I love the variously-afflicted personae Annie Lennox plays in that series of videos, like the paranoid freak in "I Love to Listen to Beethoven" and the sexually ravenous one in "I Need a Man." Presumably, she's a multiple (woman afflicted with MPD). Makes for a good video series anyway.
Just Weird
I can't wait for Bruno.
Sorry, I don't do umlauts.
Sacha Baron Cohen = one of the sexiest men on earth.
He was perfect in that race car movie.
I loved "the walk" holding hands with Will Ferrell.
No wonder Pamela Anderson got in trouble.
One of these men is only PLAYING a bitter fag...lol good clip but must be old. So I guess he's had Bruno for some time...
I'm Reading Etgar Keret's Missing Kissinger
These are short short stories so they go by very quickly, and work well as bathtub reading.
I just read five stories in like fifteen minutes in the tub.
One was excellent, one was almost excellent and three were decent.
This is an earlier book, the one where he sort of broke through internationally.
It's very good.
Oddly enough, the story I liked best was very reminiscent of Bukowski's short fiction.
I think he probably likes Bukowski.
But think (of course) an Israeli Bukowski.
If you can wrap your head around that.
Bukowski would have been Bukowski no matter where he was born, Andernach or Luzerne or Calcutta.
They have gnarly misanthropes with jokes everywhere.
I just read five stories in like fifteen minutes in the tub.
One was excellent, one was almost excellent and three were decent.
This is an earlier book, the one where he sort of broke through internationally.
It's very good.
Oddly enough, the story I liked best was very reminiscent of Bukowski's short fiction.
I think he probably likes Bukowski.
But think (of course) an Israeli Bukowski.
If you can wrap your head around that.
Bukowski would have been Bukowski no matter where he was born, Andernach or Luzerne or Calcutta.
They have gnarly misanthropes with jokes everywhere.
I'm Trying to Price This Vista Alegre Vase...
I gave this to Lee and he asked me about price.
It's very attractive. It's a gift shop item from The Brooklyn Museum, done for them by the well-respected Vista Alegre.
It's a tubular vase in a very pretty celadon, rough-textured on the outside with intaglio vertical colums of Egyptian hieroglyphics descending continuously around it, and a band of similar hieroglyphics (including the eye of Osiris) at the top.
Inside it's smooth-glazed and the celadon is especially lovely there.
I found the plates issued along with these online, but they're ugly, and this vase is very attractive.
It's after an original which The Brooklyn Museum owns. So you can see what this looks like if you're in Brooklyn and in the mood. I'm too lazy to take a cam picture of it right now, and frankly it doesn't thrill me the way the eggs getting it on with the beets did earlier.
I paid 99 cents for it yesterday. I think the people who priced it mistook some stains on it for nicks in the surface. They weren't. I just washed it as clean as the day it was a newborn in Portugal.
Egyptian items tend to do well online.
Probably the hieroglyphics say "Fuck you, you American KFC-obsessed pigs."
I'll have to get out my Wallace Budge to see.
I only know a few simple sentences from The Book of the Dead.
I'd like to learn more.
One never knows when one is going to encounter Anubis in a bad mood.
It's very attractive. It's a gift shop item from The Brooklyn Museum, done for them by the well-respected Vista Alegre.
It's a tubular vase in a very pretty celadon, rough-textured on the outside with intaglio vertical colums of Egyptian hieroglyphics descending continuously around it, and a band of similar hieroglyphics (including the eye of Osiris) at the top.
Inside it's smooth-glazed and the celadon is especially lovely there.
I found the plates issued along with these online, but they're ugly, and this vase is very attractive.
It's after an original which The Brooklyn Museum owns. So you can see what this looks like if you're in Brooklyn and in the mood. I'm too lazy to take a cam picture of it right now, and frankly it doesn't thrill me the way the eggs getting it on with the beets did earlier.
I paid 99 cents for it yesterday. I think the people who priced it mistook some stains on it for nicks in the surface. They weren't. I just washed it as clean as the day it was a newborn in Portugal.
Egyptian items tend to do well online.
Probably the hieroglyphics say "Fuck you, you American KFC-obsessed pigs."
I'll have to get out my Wallace Budge to see.
I only know a few simple sentences from The Book of the Dead.
I'd like to learn more.
One never knows when one is going to encounter Anubis in a bad mood.
i went downstairs...
and when I opened the fridge I found this big jar of hard-boiled eggs disporting themselves amid beets.
I love it when that happens.
I think I can eat everything but the yolk part.
Sigh.
I sigh a lot on my blog lately.
Maybe I should change the name to The Blog of Many Sighs.
That's rather Pre-Raphaelite, and I think I like it.
Elio e le storie tese
Italian oddities.
Seem to be huge over there.
This vid is obviously a parody of The Ring.
Unfortunately, even though it's Italian it has that Univision sort of humor...
We might say we're laughing with you, but we're laughing at you...but maybe they don't give a shit...it's still laughter...and I'm sure the checks clear at the bank...
Their music seems ripe for the plucking for comic effect in movie soundtracks...Coen Brothers, or anyone of that ilk, I suppose.
Seem to be huge over there.
This vid is obviously a parody of The Ring.
Unfortunately, even though it's Italian it has that Univision sort of humor...
We might say we're laughing with you, but we're laughing at you...but maybe they don't give a shit...it's still laughter...and I'm sure the checks clear at the bank...
Their music seems ripe for the plucking for comic effect in movie soundtracks...Coen Brothers, or anyone of that ilk, I suppose.
Okay, Okay
Trivia
Elio Samaga Hukapan Kariyana Turu is a sentence in Sinhalese language (the main language of Sri Lanka). The translation is Have sex along with Elio until you cum, an indirect reference to Frank Zappa's music.
The first track quotes the first album by Skiantos (an Italian punk group), has Rockets' "On the Road Again" song on the background (a space-rock group quite known in Italy in the 70s), and cites late Italian football player Giacinto Facchetti.
John Holmes is dedicated to the omonymous porn actor.
Domande bizzarre, Una gita a... and Suspense! Il signor Brando meets Marlon Brando are improbable interviews with the band.
According the Memphis Horns is a soundcheck by the Memphis Horns who played in Zucchero song Con le mani.
Carro is introduced by a line of Back in the USSR by the Beatles and contains quotes from the German national anthem. It's a joke about Italian proverbs.
Tony Martucci was the patron of the Ambrogino d'Oro prize, in which Elio sang when he was a child.
Nella vecchia azienda agricola is a parody of Nella vecchia fattoria, the Italian version of Old McDonald.
The Silos chorus reminds of the theme of Song for Che by Charlie Haden.
Cassonetto differenziato per il frutto del peccato includes many citations from Italian pop songs, as well as a sampling from Lou Reed's The Kids.
Piattaforma is inspired to Je t'aime... moi non plus by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. At some point, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon music is heard on the background.
In Messaggio satanico Black Sabbath are cited.
Cateto cites the theme from James Bond films.
Elio Samaga Hukapan Kariyana Turu is a sentence in Sinhalese language (the main language of Sri Lanka). The translation is Have sex along with Elio until you cum, an indirect reference to Frank Zappa's music.
The first track quotes the first album by Skiantos (an Italian punk group), has Rockets' "On the Road Again" song on the background (a space-rock group quite known in Italy in the 70s), and cites late Italian football player Giacinto Facchetti.
John Holmes is dedicated to the omonymous porn actor.
Domande bizzarre, Una gita a... and Suspense! Il signor Brando meets Marlon Brando are improbable interviews with the band.
According the Memphis Horns is a soundcheck by the Memphis Horns who played in Zucchero song Con le mani.
Carro is introduced by a line of Back in the USSR by the Beatles and contains quotes from the German national anthem. It's a joke about Italian proverbs.
Tony Martucci was the patron of the Ambrogino d'Oro prize, in which Elio sang when he was a child.
Nella vecchia azienda agricola is a parody of Nella vecchia fattoria, the Italian version of Old McDonald.
The Silos chorus reminds of the theme of Song for Che by Charlie Haden.
Cassonetto differenziato per il frutto del peccato includes many citations from Italian pop songs, as well as a sampling from Lou Reed's The Kids.
Piattaforma is inspired to Je t'aime... moi non plus by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. At some point, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon music is heard on the background.
In Messaggio satanico Black Sabbath are cited.
Cateto cites the theme from James Bond films.
Elio Schneeman (1961-1997)
I found this poem online.
I like the innocent eye of many of his poems.
In that regard, he sort of reminds me of the clear water poetry of Paul Blackburn.*
Lovely spirits, both.
DREAMING OF RUIN
There's a tiny
purple flower
half asleep
in the back of my mind,
an opening in clouds
where the head goes
on red and green wings
dreaming of ruins,
to meet you
my daemon, my delight
*not so much in this poem, but in others I've read by Schneeman.
I like the innocent eye of many of his poems.
In that regard, he sort of reminds me of the clear water poetry of Paul Blackburn.*
Lovely spirits, both.
DREAMING OF RUIN
There's a tiny
purple flower
half asleep
in the back of my mind,
an opening in clouds
where the head goes
on red and green wings
dreaming of ruins,
to meet you
my daemon, my delight
*not so much in this poem, but in others I've read by Schneeman.
Waffling Through the Afternoon
Okay, I decided to waffle and sit on which books I'm actually going to purchase...but with a few exceptions.
I snatched up Elio Schneeman's early book. It's signed, dedicated "to Lita..." That's almost certainly Lita Hornick, the "Kulchur Queen."
I love all my books from Kulchur press. Those were wonderful years.
I also knew I really wanted Elaine Equi's New and Selected, so I put that through.
I would have loved to have done the same with Laura Moriarty's Selected but it's very pricey right now and most copies seem to be shipping from overseas, which makes postage onerous as well. Maybe she published that in the U.K.? Or maybe it's just a fluke.
The third book I couldn't resist was de Chirico's monograph on Courbet put out by the Valori Plastici group back in 1926.
The price was incredibly low, and even though it ships from England the bookseller was not exploitive at all on shipping (which is the exception for overseas booksellers on ABE).
The Valori Plastici artists were a great little constellation.
Many of them (Carra, to cite a notable example--see paintings above) created art which really resembled the painting being which would be done in the 1990s and later, after postmodernism had shot its wad and things began going rather coolly, queerly metaphysical again (I really think there is something to the pendulum theory of art and even ethics, whether you take Nietzsche's model or even the funny version put forth by Anthony Burgess in The Wanting Seed.) Or maybe they always coexist and battle it out: Picasso vs. Duchamp, for example. Those are pretty much poles.
Anyway, I spent less than forty bucks for everything, so don't have to wear a hair shirt or gnash my teeth.
But I probably will anyway.
That only leaves about fifty books in my "Wanted" file lol.
I was considering some copies of The Dial from the 1920s, when Marianne Moore was at the helm (instead of Scofield Thayer) but ultimately decided that the magazine would contain poetry I already knew anyway, so was a pure luxury and indulgence.
Interesting how the other great avanty mag of the period, The Little Magazine, costs more and is invariably in much worse condition. Perhaps the choice of materials was poorer, or there was more lignin in the paper they used? Or (putting an "up" spin on it) maybe its devotees and readers loved it more, and used it harder. Yeah, right!
I also hit the "save for later" button on some great early twentieth century French poetry mags.
Oh well.
In my experience, these books rarely move. There's nary a flutter on the tote board.
Just come back later, and it's yours.
The one exception to that role is Goreyana.
Blink twice and another Goreyolater has beaten you to the button punch.
Sigh.
I Was Reading de Chirico on Courbet...
I've always loved Courbet (a rather large, vertical painting in the Walters is one of my favorites) and felt he was often misread by critics.
I think it's interesting that painters as diverse as de Chirco and Balthus have claimed him as part of the lineage of surrealism.
Anyway, this brought me to The Painter's Object, a hard to find book of early twentieth century criticism which includes de Chirico's appreciation of Courbet.
I'm putting a link here to it, because it also has some gorgeous Moholy-Nagy constructions!
Moholy-Nagy is still being raided by contemporary designers left and right.
One of my favorite IKEA lamps (now a retired design) is pure Moholy-Nagy.
The Painter's Object
I think it's interesting that painters as diverse as de Chirco and Balthus have claimed him as part of the lineage of surrealism.
Anyway, this brought me to The Painter's Object, a hard to find book of early twentieth century criticism which includes de Chirico's appreciation of Courbet.
I'm putting a link here to it, because it also has some gorgeous Moholy-Nagy constructions!
Moholy-Nagy is still being raided by contemporary designers left and right.
One of my favorite IKEA lamps (now a retired design) is pure Moholy-Nagy.
The Painter's Object
I Just Found This Blog
...while searching images of Berrichon and his artwork.
Some beautiful examples of ephemeral book art here!>
I'll add it to my blogroll.
And ANONYMOUS...thanks for your comments!
I don't know where they landed on the blog when I approved them or I would have responded and said "Hi!"
Nah, you don't have to start a blog to comment.
But bitching or nasty swipes from ANONYMOUS people I vaporize, of course.
You are clearly one of the OTHER anonymous sort lol.
(((Anonymous)))
Some beautiful examples of ephemeral book art here!>
I'll add it to my blogroll.
And ANONYMOUS...thanks for your comments!
I don't know where they landed on the blog when I approved them or I would have responded and said "Hi!"
Nah, you don't have to start a blog to comment.
But bitching or nasty swipes from ANONYMOUS people I vaporize, of course.
You are clearly one of the OTHER anonymous sort lol.
(((Anonymous)))
Bleaching Biographers: Paterne Berrichon and the Devil of Propriety
I am still shuffling and reshuffling my ABE cart, trying to decide what will be the best acquisitions for my library (with a mind to what will increase in value with regard to some titles I'm eyeing, but not all).
It's frustrating and a pleasure.
I was considering an extravagant purchase: Berrichon's biography of Rimbaud.
Berrichon married into the family and was a collaborationist in the family's attempts to make Rimbaud "respectable" after death.
Of course, he ended up rightfully vilified by the lovers of literature.
But the book is beautifully designed, probably hilarious in its misrepresentations, and it does have that heliogravure of Rimbaud.
It's probably rife for sampling.
But I think I'll pass.
There are too many other books which trump this in my cart right now.
Here's Wiki on Paterne.
French literature does not remember him kindly, as you will see.
Look how the one publishing house even took the name "Enemies of Paterne Berrichon" as a statement against his work as a bleaching biographer.
Paterne Berrichon
Paterne Berrichon, de son vrai nom Pierre-Eugène Dufour, né à Issoudun (Indre) en 1855 et mort à La Rochefoucauld (Charente) le 30 juillet 1922, est un poète, peintre et dessinateur français, connu surtout pour avoir été le beau-frère et éditeur d'Arthur Rimbaud.
Biographie
Après des études au lycée de Châteauroux, il s'installe à Paris où il apprend la sculpture et la peinture et ne tarde pas à fréquenter les milieux artistiques et littéraires. Il rencontre le critique d'art d'origine castro-radulphienne, George-Albert Aurier, fait la connaissance de Paul Verlaine et adopte le surnom Paterne Berrichon.
Il publie en 1896 ses poèmes de jeunesse, dans lesquels il montre son côté original et un peu outrancier. Admirateur fervent d'Arthur Rimbaud, il entame une correspondance avec la sœur du poète, qui se termine en 1897 par un mariage d'amour. Dès lors, ensemble, ils s'attachent à perpétuer le culte du poète de Charleville.
En osmose avec les mentalités de l'époque, la démarche, pas toujours très objective, qui présida à leurs travaux autour de la pensée et de la vie d'Arthur, est empreinte d'une forte volonté idéologique liée aux valeurs traditionnelles, de respectabilité et de moralité. Ils ont contribué à sauver de la disparition de nombreux documents, mais leur volonté première fut de présenter Rimbaud comme un chrétien égaré puis reconverti.
Paterne Berrichon fut l'ami de Paul Claudel et entretint avec lui une correspondance fournie de 1912 à 1919. Il fit aussi des tableaux, pour lesquels sa femme lui servit souvent de modèle, et réalisa la maquette du monument Rimbaud érigé dans la cité natale du poète.
Une maison d'édition, établie à Crest (Drôme) et, spécialisée dans la poésie, a pris symboliquement le nom d'« Ennemis de Paterne Berrichon » pour dénoncer les pratiques de falsification et de commercialisation que le beau-frère de Rimbaud a utilisées.
Dessins (see Wiki for these artworks)
Rimbaud à 12 ans
paru dans La Revue blanche en 1897.
Masque de Rimbaud
d'après un dessin d'Isabelle Rimbaud.
Buste de Rimbaud
paru dans La Plume en 1900.
Paul Verlaine
paru dans La Plume en 1896.
Publications
Poésies
Le Vin Maudit, petits poèmes, avec un frontispice de Paul Verlaine (1896)
Poèmes décadents 1883-1895 (1910)
Sur Rimbaud
La Vie de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud, Mercure de France, Paris, 1897 Texte en ligne
Jean-Arthur Rimbaud le poète (1854-1873), Mercure de France, Paris, 1912. Réédition : Klincksieck, Paris, 2004
Arthur Rimbaud. Œuvres, vers et proses, poèmes retrouvés, Mercure de France, Paris, 1912
Arthur Rimbaud. Poésies notice de Paterne Berrichon ; portrait d'après Fantin-Latour, Messein, Paris, 1919
Arthur Rimbaud. Œuvres, vers et proses, poèmes retrouvés, revues, mises en ordre et annotées par Paterne Berrichon, préface de Paul Claudel, Mercure de France, Paris, 1924
Correspondance
Arthur Rimbaud. Ébauches, suivies de la correspondance entre Isabelle Rimbaud et Paterne Berrichon et de Rimbaud en Orient, variantes et documents divers recueillis par Marguerite Yerta-Méléra, Mercure de France, Paris, 1937
Documentatio
Berry Magazine, hors série, 1997
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Feelin' Covetous...
I'm filling up my play shopping basket on ABE right now with books, even though I know I will have to shuffle them yonder with multiple clicks on the SAVE FOR LATER button at the end of the day (well most of them!) due to pecuniary insufficiency (hell--if we're going to equate the renal with the monetary---pecuniary failure!)
Here are some photos of lovely volumes that go for only a few hundred dollars.
Click to enlarge them and see the great illustrations for the one. They seem parodistic--almost the way an illustrator like Gorey would depict poets. I love 'em.
You can also snag a copy of Rimbaud's Saison for only $35,000 or the Illuminations for a mere $43,000.
Sigh.
Once More from the Top, With Fleeing
already...
...& abuts time.
*
feels like, palates like
Ireland rubble
*
Almost, lost
there's the rub...
and they even feel it through Their Johnsons.
*
and paragraph a foreign form of constant dream
ideas attract poems at a regress
clip....regrettable horses....
the hosers in Tangiers...
*
Duras' and Oxymorons again with the marguerite problem video.
The hip-hop artist)
in Icelandic, always remains friends in woods permitted
*
Army dreaming?
cosmetics, osmotics, poetics?
Research reveals
mantises
mantissas
and mantras out
The usual preformance.
*
written in Apollinaire and strange offshoots
Okay, the question is completely Elan-free
Attack. Here without them testicles!!
*
Ciphering Walter Benjamin you are sinking
Ladies seams means gives given up completely.
*
to a pandering. real bullets.
If Detroit's questions.
The "you you" stars.
Lights you for disingenuous.
*
something with vocals which unthought some ziplined mid career almost bachelorette
Quick comments?? Name-Hammer!!
well as with glaciers, about.
They shoot Eurythmics, don't they?
*
(Shadow Train,
Bitches Fold. more on YouTube.
poems act different to readers when infinite or when filmscript, They were almost
fake. your husband.
*
I covered more when persona but will be for songs humps. only
henceforth
*
Objects, Are little fuck songwriter.
*
* beloved, So-and-so.
Oh paradigm to insult.
The already cute
*
Sucking oddly Japanese in the off hours
"Where what virgin comedian stands in the snows of don'ts?"
dunno.
*
as Eminem is airlifted from relevance
creepy you never
A as in absence
A as in Prince
*
a powerless partiality translation was flying over our heads
...& abuts time.
*
feels like, palates like
Ireland rubble
*
Almost, lost
there's the rub...
and they even feel it through Their Johnsons.
*
and paragraph a foreign form of constant dream
ideas attract poems at a regress
clip....regrettable horses....
the hosers in Tangiers...
*
Duras' and Oxymorons again with the marguerite problem video.
The hip-hop artist)
in Icelandic, always remains friends in woods permitted
*
Army dreaming?
cosmetics, osmotics, poetics?
Research reveals
mantises
mantissas
and mantras out
The usual preformance.
*
written in Apollinaire and strange offshoots
Okay, the question is completely Elan-free
Attack. Here without them testicles!!
*
Ciphering Walter Benjamin you are sinking
Ladies seams means gives given up completely.
*
to a pandering. real bullets.
If Detroit's questions.
The "you you" stars.
Lights you for disingenuous.
*
something with vocals which unthought some ziplined mid career almost bachelorette
Quick comments?? Name-Hammer!!
well as with glaciers, about.
They shoot Eurythmics, don't they?
*
(Shadow Train,
Bitches Fold. more on YouTube.
poems act different to readers when infinite or when filmscript, They were almost
fake. your husband.
*
I covered more when persona but will be for songs humps. only
henceforth
*
Objects, Are little fuck songwriter.
*
* beloved, So-and-so.
Oh paradigm to insult.
The already cute
*
Sucking oddly Japanese in the off hours
"Where what virgin comedian stands in the snows of don'ts?"
dunno.
*
as Eminem is airlifted from relevance
creepy you never
A as in absence
A as in Prince
*
a powerless partiality translation was flying over our heads
"Well, It's Father's Day...and Everybody's Wounded..."
HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!!
Sorry, I got nothing.
Lee got his props from the kids.
I looked at my cat in an expectant manner...but nothing.
He's technically correct.
Anyway, if you whelped...hope it helped!
xo
Sorry, I got nothing.
Lee got his props from the kids.
I looked at my cat in an expectant manner...but nothing.
He's technically correct.
Anyway, if you whelped...hope it helped!
xo
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Leslie Scalapino
When we traveled out of state the other weekend, since I wasn't driving I wanted something to read in between glances out the window, and I grabbed a few poetry books by Leslie Scalapino with spare text.
Scalapino is one of only a few poets whose work I disliked for years before I found a way inside. It wasn't even that I knew why I didn't like the writing (usually I can pinpoint what's not working for me in a piece of writing, and give you particulars). Well, that's only partly true. My perception was that the work was obsessively processual, and was seeking to reduce consciousness, culture and human interactions to some sort of poetry akin to computer programming, although admittedly a colorful form of this. When my resistance to the author's method of tracing causality backwards finally gave way, I began to experience a sort of "slipshod ecstasy" within the writing and the "backwards erosions" it caused in the mental processes, and this sensation (while I'm reading Scalapino) has never really gone away since.
You know that disorienting sensation you get when you're standing where the waves break on a beach, and the sand is piling up around your ankles fast as the water is sucked backwards into the ocean and you suddenly feel as though you're moving even though you're standing still?
Well, I get the sensation when reading her writing, except the ocean is the culture she's describing, and the consciousness at the center of the poem or novel is the ankles planted in the sand.
The lithe intelligence of the text has beautiful resistance, beautiful antibodies to the culture which likes to seem to pretend (if entities like viruses or cultures can seem to pretend anything, really) it engendered it.
It makes sense to me now that she wrote the (very astute) introduction to Philip Whalen's Collected poems, because the processes of their respective poetics are very often similar.
Both are fascinated with deconstructing consciousness (i.e. apperception) and find their poetry in the dailiness of existence. Both are supersensitive to destabilizations in fields of responsibility within human consciousness, and abdications of power or thought in the same.
Both believe the entire culture and its sickness(es) can be diagnosed by examinations of the most minute and trivial exchanges, and of the most seemingly insignificant elements of material culture.
Both bewitch, bother and bewilder me every time I read them.
And both bring me back time and again, because the poems are never finished...never finished any more than Stein's Stanzas in Meditation will ever be finished by any reader on earth.
Scalapino is one of only a few poets whose work I disliked for years before I found a way inside. It wasn't even that I knew why I didn't like the writing (usually I can pinpoint what's not working for me in a piece of writing, and give you particulars). Well, that's only partly true. My perception was that the work was obsessively processual, and was seeking to reduce consciousness, culture and human interactions to some sort of poetry akin to computer programming, although admittedly a colorful form of this. When my resistance to the author's method of tracing causality backwards finally gave way, I began to experience a sort of "slipshod ecstasy" within the writing and the "backwards erosions" it caused in the mental processes, and this sensation (while I'm reading Scalapino) has never really gone away since.
You know that disorienting sensation you get when you're standing where the waves break on a beach, and the sand is piling up around your ankles fast as the water is sucked backwards into the ocean and you suddenly feel as though you're moving even though you're standing still?
Well, I get the sensation when reading her writing, except the ocean is the culture she's describing, and the consciousness at the center of the poem or novel is the ankles planted in the sand.
The lithe intelligence of the text has beautiful resistance, beautiful antibodies to the culture which likes to seem to pretend (if entities like viruses or cultures can seem to pretend anything, really) it engendered it.
It makes sense to me now that she wrote the (very astute) introduction to Philip Whalen's Collected poems, because the processes of their respective poetics are very often similar.
Both are fascinated with deconstructing consciousness (i.e. apperception) and find their poetry in the dailiness of existence. Both are supersensitive to destabilizations in fields of responsibility within human consciousness, and abdications of power or thought in the same.
Both believe the entire culture and its sickness(es) can be diagnosed by examinations of the most minute and trivial exchanges, and of the most seemingly insignificant elements of material culture.
Both bewitch, bother and bewilder me every time I read them.
And both bring me back time and again, because the poems are never finished...never finished any more than Stein's Stanzas in Meditation will ever be finished by any reader on earth.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
