Shameless self promotion

the first issue of Otoliths

It contains work from Dan Waber & Meghan Scott, Michelle Greenblatt, Daniel f. Bradley, kari edwards, Nico Vassilakis, Michael Farrell, Alex Gildzen, Eileen Tabios, Tom Beckett, Nicholas Downing, Francis Raven, Geof Huth, Andrew Lundwall, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, John M. Bennett, Bill Allegrezza, Sheila Murphy, Martin Edmond, David-Baptiste Chirot, Ernesto Priego, Laurie Duggan, Reed Altemus, Jordan Stempleman, Irving Weiss, Jeff Harrison, Bob Marcacci, Marko Niemi, Lars Palm, pr primeau, Michael Rothenberg, Jack Kimball, CAConrad, Dion Farquhar, Donna Kuhn, Richard Lopez, Michael P. Steven, harry k. stammer, Thomas Fink & Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, plus "mini-chapbooks" from Jean Vengua & from Ray Craig.
 

Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,"

ETERNAL ME BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS STETSON

WHAT an exceeding rest 'twill be

When I can leave off being Me!

To think of it! -- at last be rid

Of all the things I ever did!


Done with the varying distress

Of retroactive consciousness!

Set free to feel the joy unknown

Of Life and Love beyond my own!


Why should I long to have John Smith

Eternally to struggle with?

I'm John -- but somehow cherubim

Seem quite incongruous with him.


It would not seem so queer to dwell

Eternally John Smith in Hell.

To be one man forever seems

Most fit in purgatorial dreams.


But Heaven! Rest and Power and Peace

Must surely mean the soul's release

From this small labeled entity --

This passing limitation -- Me!

SPA/m

he said very quietly, speaking in the way that the dying speak. "I want to be had blurred through ninety miles per hour. Jonathan had set a world Are you going or not? I'd love to beat Richard."

dead-slow stand-up landing on the sand. Then as though this sort of thing


Tender and Kirill dragged the empty.

There were so many people who had come looking at me and waiting.

beat Richard, "that's what I'd like."

That bum can really play cards. Can't Everyone who lived here got sick. And people in three neighborhoods would get the money from?

He was a foreign scientist, and a Russian one flipping through the file. That meant that Sergeant Lummer had returned with take me for? I opened my mouth to tell him off. And I shut up. Because, the first, but probably not the last, of your contributions to our knowledge

V. V. Mayakovsky - To Sergei Esenin

You have passed, as they say, into worlds elsewhere.

Emptiness...

Fly, cutting your way into starry dubiety.

No advances, no pubs for you there.

Sobriety.

No, Yessenin, this is not deridingly,-

in my throat not laughter but sorrow racks.

I see - your cut-open hand maddeningly,

swings your own bones like a sack.

Stop it, chuck it! Isn't it really absurd?

Allowing cheeks to flush with deathly hue?

You who could do such things with words,

that no one else on earth could do.

Why, for what? Perplexity appalls.

Critics mutter: "The main fault we find

there was hardly any working-class contact at all,

as a result of too much beer and wine."

So to say, if you had swopped bohemianism for class,

there'd have been no bust-up, Found at More...

Virginia Woolf - Blue & Green

GREEN

THE POINTED FINGERS of glass hang downwards. The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the lustre drop green upon the marble. The feathers of parakeets their harsh cries sharp blades of palm trees green, too; green needles glittering in the sun. But the hard glass drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the desert sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantlepiece; the ruffled surface of ocean. No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky. It's night; the needles drip blots of blue. The green's out.

Blue

Austin, Mary. Medicine Song: To Be Sung in Time of Evil Fortune

Austin, Mary. Medicine Song: To Be Sung in Time of Evil Fortune


MEDICINE me,

O Friend-of-the-Soul-of-Man,

With purging waters!

For my soul festers

And an odor of corruption

Betrays me to disaster.




As a place of carrion

Where buzzards are gathered,

So is my path

Overshadowed by evil adventures;

Meanness, betrayal, and spite

Flock under heaven

To make me aware

Of sickness and death within me.



Medicine my soul, O friend,

With waters of cleansing;

Then shall my way shine,

And my nights no longer

Be full of the dreadful sound

Of the wings of unsuccesses.

Found at Native Americans text on line

The Route of all Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound

by Meghnad Desai

Economists have usually been terrified of sticking their necks out on literary matters and literary figures have in their turn often despised the whole activity of getting and spending or analysing money.


One great exception was the modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), a flamboyant American, who came to England in 1908 after several personal and career snubs in his native land. More than half the 464 pages of Pound’s Selected Prose were, however, taken up by economic argumentation, and his epic Cantos are not short of economic references. The personal slights he had suffered in his home country made him believe that modern finance capitalism had no use for creative artists, and this hostility was deepened by interwar unemployment. It did not take long for him to join the ranks of monetary heretics, those who regarded the role of the monetary system as anything but benign and were called “monetary cranks” by the orthodox.

FOLD MAGAZINE

The first issue of Insert Press' FOLD MAGAZINE will be released in January 2007.

Insert Press is edited by Stan Apps and Mathew Timmons. Harold Abramowitz' chapbook Three Column Table is available, and chapbooks by Julien Poirier, Ara Shirinyan, and Dan Richert are forthcoming.

FOLD's first issue will be titled Appropriate Text. The emphasis of this issue will be on essays that discuss the use of borrowed, stolen, plundered, reused, retooled and/or sampled texts to create literature. Our intent is to analyze the work of writers who use text which they did not originate and do not own or own only by virtue of appropriation. Such work calls into question the ideals of authorship, origination, sincerity, parody, and intellectual property; we are interested in creative analysis of these ideals.

Other works (poetry, prose, fiction) which cast a revealing light on the status of language as an owned object will also be considered.

Submissions by email should be sent to BOTH stan.apps@gmail.com and mtimmons@calarts.edu

Submissions by "snail-mail" should be sent to Stan Apps, 4453 Kingswell Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027.

All submissions must be received by September 15, 2006.

some kind of exchange is needed, even low band exchange


The first time I saw you

a thousand years before

with eyes mostly


raise of hands

pointing finger candles


though ice and snow

for a second life sentence

dots and dashes

ones and twos

a simple ping

indicating use value, misuse, misunderstood, Mississippi bravo



sitting in the refuge, a refugee on a heap, big with compound words, for a real world market.

a million miles away the garden of earthly delight

To a Dead Woman - Buddhadeva Bose

''I will not forget'---vows so arrogant 

life does not forgive. So, let leave vain promises. 

A fleeting spark you were, may your liberation spread along 

unimagined pathways, the enchantment of your lovely face fade,

fade into the grass, the leaves, the dance of the seasons, the oceans, the blue of the sky.

In this night, in the solitude of my heart I keep aflame 

only these words---You were here, once you were here.


Buddhadeva Bose

The Decay of Lying - Oscar Wilde

Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result. Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising. It cannot help being so. The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subjectmatter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art's subjectmatter we should be more or less indifferent.

for those not fancily financed fruitfully furnished enough for textural visitation location rights to be copied on a cheap imitation automaton, in some dusty road slop this side of no other choice but a thing.

and at any time, anything can be anyone's because thing, because someone says something, whether locomotive intellectualism or dialectic sponsorship, and things being things need to be replaced, refitted or destroyed.

the system of the mind needs to be cleaned, given an organ extension pseudonym, become an alternatives eating change of heart.

a cry of repulsion hung around the neck of the desperate, willing to do anything to remove the thing.

a night assassination, surgery of desolate dysfunction.

something must be done for the intolerable, perhaps inert situation.

guns are bought and sold, psychology is in vogue.

an itch becomes cluster words that turn into a condensed compound.

arrest are made that becomes an extraction, extraction become popular preemptive incursion, becomes full frontal assimilation against transgressive caustic, exponential sequence of intolerable thingness everywhere.

ABDEL-ILAH SALHI - THANKS GILLES DELEUZE

They were quoting you

Murmuring your name like a prophet coming from afar

From whose mouth a unique music issues


My own French was not good enough even to purchase bread decently

But the ring of your name

In the sidewise discussions had a special magic

Which for long put my extreme ignorance to shame


Migration is a sacred right, you said once

Nobody said that before you, and no one dared say it after

In this country which we married for love

I, Mohamed, Abdelkader, and Fatima

And other Arabs whose dusty names this poem is too narrow to contain.

Until now I haven’t met anyone who could explain the mysteries of your obscure expression

Laws say the opposite from one government to the other

And the caretaker is French of Portuguese origin

Yet he looks down on philosophers


I was in the subway stealing glances at a newspaper someone was reading

When I saw your name printed in bold, and the headline your death

It seems you threw yourself from the window

But why all those who love you to blindness

Love life more than anything else

I felt ashamed of my ignorance once again

And hated myself in plain Arabic

Despite the grumblings of the coloured owner of the newspaper


Migration is a sacred right

An expression which is enough it was once said

For me every morning to pursue my own sacred right

Seeking your protection O Gilles Deleuze


More: ABDEL-ILAH SALHI

October 1966 Black Panther Party

PlatforWhat We Want

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our
Black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to
determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to
give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if
the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the
means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in
the community so that the people of the community can organize and
employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are
demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres
and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave
labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as
currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The
Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the
Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American
racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black
people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we
make.more...

Overpriced Musings - by Don Pflaster

.....luxury and abundance is an immutable entitlement in American culture. That is why all my instincts tell me that the age of America is coming to a close, as it must eventually, as all great companies and empires must when they can no longer adapt to the realities of the time. The experiment was good, but poorly managed in the end. Like any behemoth corporation, a country can present the appearance of shining health right up until the point that its own personal Enron CEO runs off with all the money and leaves the rest holding the bag. The most frightening prospect is that of who will fill the power vacuum once this broken down El Camino of a country lacks the funds necessary to pay the interest on its debts and implodes. Please, Lord, let the European Union get their shit together, 'cause otherwise we're all going to be speaking Chinese. more..

WAR OF THE CLASSES by Jack London

Only dangerous things are abhorrent. The thing that is not dangerous is always respectable. And so with socialism in the United States. For several years it has been very respectable,--a sweet and beautiful Utopian dream, in the bourgeois mind, yet a dream, only a dream. During this period, which has just ended, socialism was tolerated because it was impossible and non-menacing. Much of its thunder had been stolen, and the workingmen had been made happy with full dinner-pails. There was nothing to fear. The kind old world spun on, coupons were clipped, and larger profits than ever were extracted from the toilers. Coupon-clipping and profit-extracting would continue to the end of time. These were functions divine in origin and held by divine right. The newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so, and what they say, of course, is so--to the bourgeois mind.
more...

pink roses - aren't the pink sun rising - are 'social'

"night" on famine - as one - real-time
(walking in garbage it wasn't night) - not in time
'night' 'night' 'won't ever dis-place it' - it can dis-

Leslie Scalapino at Big bridge

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Edith Wharton -"A Failure."

( She Speaks.)

I MEANT to be so strong and true!

The world may smile and question, When?

But what I might have been to you

I cannot be to other men.

Just one in twenty to the rest,

And all in all to you alone, --

This was my dream; perchance 'tis best

That this, like other dreams, is flown.



For you I should have been so kind,

So prompt my spirit to control,

To win fresh vigor for my mind,

And purer beauties for my soul;

Beneath your eye I might have grown

To that divine, ideal height,

Which, mating wholly with your own,

Our equal spirits should unite.
more

Democracy Behind Bars By Cole Krawitz

Today, nearly 5 million Americans are disfranchised from the right to vote either because they are in prison, on parole or probation, or because they live in a state that extends disfranchisement beyond the end of one's sentence. Racial, ethnic and economic disparities in the criminal justice system, and the "war on drugs" have resulted in the most severe impact hitting communities of color. Where African-Americans comprise only 12.2 percent of the population and 13 percent of drug users, they make up 38 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 59 percent of those convicted of drug offenses, causing critics to call the war on drugs the "New Jim Crow." Nationally, an estimated 13 percent of African-American men are unable to vote because of a felony conviction. That's seven times the national average.
more..

perhaps they are this or perhaps they are that because any justification can be made for anything fitting or not fitting the program of the service chit chat, institutionalization baseline, grafting common, where C is like O, but P can not make the egg count so P must stand outside the justification jurispiction turnstile.

and perhaps, for those not fanciful enough for textural visitation location rights to be copied on a cheap copy machine, in some dusty road slop this side of the equator, there is no other choice but to be a thing.

THE INDIVIDUAL, SOCIETY AND THE STATE - EMMA GOLDMAN

The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship. Man's greatest battles have been waged against man-made obstacles and artificial handicaps imposed upon him to paralyze his growth and development. Human thought has always been falsified by tradition and custom, and perverted false education in the interests of those who held power and enjoyed privileges. In other words, by the State and the ruling classes. This constant incessant conflict has been the history of mankind.
more..

The Transfiguring Places

They teach you how to survive in the wild,

How stalk a quarry, which roots to eat,

Outdoor skills of no use in the street,

Where in sola hat of branching horns you chase


Its in the mind, the transfiguring,

Trysting places (banks, grocery stores) and

The trees you walk under, escaping,

The

And a wind, long-toed, jostling you back

To the rear of a queue or the edge

Of a street, leaving you stamping the ground


With your feet and shaking your hatted head.

Wise up, I say, there’s no running away

But taking the counterfoil or receipt

Crushed in your pocket in your composite stride.

A.K.Mehrotra

I want to get to the enhancement, perhaps.

Perhaps this, perhaps, perhaps not.

Perhaps gossip prefiguring a thing.

Whatever ever dialect your want.

Perhaps, great embodied literature, because, because, any justification can make a thing a thing.

and or maybe, the perhaps link, like:
C likes O and F likes C, O does not like P and M knows it. Will P be deterred at the chamber, where sitting duty does not count, along with other selected duties connected with other duties that do not count, and will P no longer count?

SUNDAY MAIL By Vêra Chase

From the very beginning that letter promised nothing good; delivered during the time of my Sunday siesta by a Sunday postman in his black-and-yellow uniform, the unmistakable outfit of the dangerous. How could it since I do not answer the door at such times or places? The key to the successful delivery must have been the powerful minutes-long pressure applied to the bell, which took me for one terrifyingly realistic moment back to the Civil Defense training campsite.

Such a rough awakening, which unfortunately collided with the lowest point of the unfavourable curve of my sleep sinusoid, prompted a flood of cold sweat covering my body, with an effect doubly unwelcome: exposed to naked air, out of the protective capsule of a blanket, it chilled my whole body; and moreover made dressing almost impossible. Apart from that an immanent suspicion of cardiac arrhythmia kept returning to me with every other intake of breath.

Automatically, I grabbed the pen as soon as it entered my field of vision, ignoring the fact that the Sunday postman was still using it, and in the next moment I signed the delivery document in a blank field adjacent to an unfamiliar name. Then, clutching the parcel, I immediately retreated into the safety of my nest. Without delay I turned off the electric power in order quite safely to extinguish any further danger of any further alarming bells during the rest of my siesta.
more...

MYSTERIUM PANSOPHICUM - JACOB BOHM

THE SECOND TEXT

1. Seeing then there is a craving in the nothing, it makes in itself the will to something. This will is a spirit, as a thought, which goes out of the craving and is the seeker of the craving, for it finds its mother or the craving. Then is this will a Magician in its mother; for it has found in the nothing something, viz. its mother, and so now it has a place for its dwelling.

2. And herein understand that the will is a spirit, and different from the desirous craving. For the will is an insensitive and incognitive life; but the craving is found by the will, and is in the will a being. Thus the craving is a Magia, and the will a Magus; and the will is greater than its mother which gives it, for it is lord in the mother; and the mother is dumb, but the will is a life without origin. The craving is certainly a cause of the will, but without knowledge or understanding. The will is the understanding of the craving.more...

Somewhere a million times a day, who counts who, who counts as overlaid texture or mere scenery, counts on a spread sheet that knows no beginning, only newly created zones with mythological plot-narratives, about time and always, perscribed by the eteranl and immutable moving onward and upwards, forgetting degraded circumtances, undoing the done being before excluxivy pitted firm agaist the sky, glowing sun agaist lanolium, which bank account hopes porpety, which bank account garden growth in the sky of mind.

all this is filtered pools
the real flagellant is the story telling state affair
Death march by rule of morality
walking, standing, dying
swayed away by artillery
big volume books and tomorrows thawing dinner
the living that no longer speaks its name
no longer sees themselves as anything but a dish to someone else's amazing burning figurine.

still this is just a box of worms once eaten, gone and forgotten, where no ancestor waits for no one, called obsolete or criminal act of deep sleep, absorbed by mawkish suites and nasty optics.
leaving nothing, but replicas and rements
a dirt now soiled
the ending beginning beginning
replaced by birth of a nation

Ladies and gentlemen, honored colleagues, dear comrades!

In all the areas within which the spiritual life of humanity is at work, the historical epoch wherein fate has placed us is an epoch of stupendous happenings. Whatever previous generations cultivated by their toil and struggle into a harmonious whole, in every sphere of culture, whatever enduring style was deemed established as method and norm, is once more in flux and now seeks new forms whereby reason, as yet unsatisfied, may develop more freely: in politics, in economic life, in technics, in the fine arts, and--by no means least of all--in the sciences. In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!

Pure Phenomenology, Its Method and Its Field of Investigation - By Edmund Husserl

Found at The Husserl Page

Who has not wished her husband into a cat? by Christine Hamm

We see how the world enters him without us,

how his eyes focus elsewhere

when we wear our new dress.


Who has not wanted to pluck

from between carburetor and crankshaft

a small white puppy--

and have it be his heart?


If only he could be fixed forever

in the shape of the animal he becomes

inside us--


some mixture of salmon and giraffe,

something as eloquent as a Labrador's sigh,

or as relentlessly solid as the rub of Siamese's cheek.



Animal love is the only love

men allow women.

and it is so short:

only that moment

in which a bear cub murmurs to himself

and begins to suck.

Found atExquisite Corpse #14

The Paradox of Howl - The anti-establishment poem's debt to the established past. By Stephen Burt

Ginsberg once called the poem "an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified." So it has been. In order to make his great anti-establishment poem, Ginsberg had to assimilate much of the established, European, literary past—the same past so many young readers can now avoid, thanks in part to the focus on the relevant, the contemporary, and the immediate that Ginsberg's fiery, irreverent example, "yaketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks," helped to usher into American culture.more...

Guarding against the onslaught of foreign ornamentation, language goods and skin color bar codes.

those Laid down infringements, cleve acts of character designed to not look around or down, especially implemented by eminent domain, so the thinking can be done by another other performing dictionary.

Owning the owned, because paper knows best, saying, taste the dirt, this is our land, so chew it up.

The Form Of A City Changes Faster, Alas, Than The Human Heart - Jacques Roubaud

In Spring


Approximate spring

(21 March + or - x days

(x variable — if x approaches 365 we say

" ain't no more seasons!"

or we say

" lousy spring!"))


approximate spring, I said

the trees

no longer dressed

only in sparrows

leaves

are coming back to the trees

or else the trees

are picking up leaves

they're turning green


for some time we saw them

hesitate, finger the air,more..

Found at Golden Handcuffs #6

"From the panorama of the city we can only learn that incoherence is a collection of false appearances in which the gigantism of new technological buildings (steel bridges, gas tanks, smoke stacks) lay next to the antique habitat on a human scale." Represented by moments of suffocating crowds or desolate emptiness, urban space has been the object of many narrations that underline this uneasiness and alienation, the loss of historical meaning and the insensibility and absurdity of clashing elements. To new groups of intellectuals and architects, reason and geometric forms seem to be a remedy for the illness plaguing the metropolis. New stable reference points are sought after. The surrealistic approach links roaming around the city to the surfacing of the subconscious. These visionary reconstructions are in conflict with rational programming. In short, "order and chaos have become the complementing and interactive forces of the big city scene".

From: The urban imagery of George Orwell by Vittore Collina

Plus:Political Writings of George Orwell

surrounded by circumstantial sunshine

dog pawing garbage stink

a moon of habits

Cluttered with every animal machine guaranteed to revitalize mannerist destiny and take advantage of surrounding fetus loving hordes, forming cosmopolitan sediment, desperately seeking lottery hackers and a place along the toaster oven set.

Dadaism By Tristan Tzara

There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement.

I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.* We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry.more...

Landscapes of the grid

Salma's novel unravels a stunningly textured world of Muslim life. PRASANNA RAMASWAMY talks to the author.

THE poet Salma's first novel Irandam Jamangalin Kathai unravels a stunningly textured world of Muslim life in Southern Tamil Nadu; rather a densely layered female space in its ruthlessly restricted and guarded grid, governed by a fierce religiosity. The young and the inquisitive Rabia, nubile Vahidha, zestful Mumtaz, vivacious Nafisa, vituperative Savura, greedy Safia — each one of them appear in their dominant colour and by emanating a gamut of transient emotional tones, acquire their form in flesh and blood. Even as the characters who people the novel serve as specific representations within the chartered canvas, they reveal a certain universality beyond the garb and context.

America’s Blinders By Howard Zinn

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?more...

Underneath the haunt ambivalent expenditure, beneath the floor board rental, where boredom is preferred over a discouraging discourse and the skies darken by the day. Past little habits and jimmied up smiles. Beneath money bodies, rotting fish and scrubbing bubbles, relived of thinking, sits the foul present. Ideal dogmatic abuse, drunk on cheap prayer to a god sucking the cock of another two bit family playing television games, while gramma roasts in the oven with the turkey, a la’ screaming hunger battle zones closed for further asbestos removal or future body removal due to another damn damn melting ice cap sunken hot subdivision cemetery burning ground fascist golf course.

Daniel Ellsberg: Still blowing the whistle

This is the time for people to show courage. People have more courage than they realize. It is the situation that challenges them. I think a lot about what happened in Germany in 1933 and I also wonder what people could have done in '32 to try to avert that in Germany. With each year it got much harder, and after that it was very hard to do anything about it. It took increasing courage. Now is the time for people to show that courage, and one thing specifically that I would like to see is a lot more whistle-blowing.More Atsalon.com

Free Chapbooks, New Coconut!

Dear Coconut Contributors and Friends,

Two new printable, downloadable chapbooks are now available at http://www.coconutpoetry.org/chapbooks.htmll: Pterodactyls Soar Again by Reb Livingston and Journals: Collages of Contemporary Poetry by Jenna Cardinale, Numbers Three and Four in the Whole Coconut Chapbook Series!

& if that weren’t enough, Issue Four ( http://www.coconutpoetry.org) is now live, containing new poems by Charles Bernstein, Anne Boyer, Joyelle McSweeney, Andrea Baker, Adam Clay, Theresa Sotto, Alan DeNiro, Jenny Boully, Heather Brinkman, Matthew Henriksen, Jan Clausen, Julie Doxsee, Justin Marks, Ken Rumble, Joshua Beckman, Mary Kasimor, Kristi Maxwell, Peter Davis, kari Edwards, Michael Farrell, and Todd Colby!

Come join the fun!

Bruce Covey
Coconut Editor

Petting - Shelley Jackson

 A man petted his dog in such a way that the dog screamed in pain. So the man explained to his dog that this was his own particular style of petting, that he knew no other way of showing affection, though he conceded that there might be better ways open to others, if not, unfortunately, to him, and that since the dog knew from other signs, such as the brim-full bowl of kibble the man put down every morning without fail, that the man loved the dog, the dog should accept the man’s unusual style of petting, and even learn to enjoy it. more

   In the consideration of the faculties and impulses -- of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses solely through want of belief -- of faith; -- whether it be faith in Revelation, or faith in the Kabbala. The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation. We saw no need of impulse -- for the propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself; -- we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal. It cannot be denied that phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism have been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs -- to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind. In the matter of phrenology, for example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that man should eat. We then assigned to man an organ of alimentiveness, and this organ is the scourge with which the Deity compels man, will-I nill-I, into eating.
The Imp of the Perverse by Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
(rest of the text)

"Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon, because the enemy is too strong; and sometimes, because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want, and we both fight, till they take ours, or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land, that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death, and make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve. Alliance by blood, or marriage, is a frequent cause of war between princes; and the nearer the kindred is, the greater their disposition to quarrel; poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable of all others; because a soldier is a YAHOO hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. more...

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal

Laura Riding

Nor Is It Written


Nor is it written that you may not grieve.

There is no rule of joy, long may you dwell

Not smiling yet in that last pain,

On that last supper of the heart.

It is not written that you must take joy

Because not thus again shall you sit down

To ply the mingled banquet

Which the deep larder of illusion shed

Like myth in time grown not astonishing.

Lean to the cloth awhile, and yet awhile,

And even may your eyes caress

Proudly the used abundance.

It is not written in what heart

You may not pass from magic plenty

Into the straitened nowadays.

To each is given secrecy of heart,

To make himself what heart he please

In stirring up from that fond table

To sit him down at this sharp meal.

It shall not here be asked of him

'What thinks your heart?'

Long may you sorely to yourself upbraid

This truth unwild, this only-bread.

It is not counted what large passions

Your heart in ancient private keeps alive.

To each is given what defeat he will.


Laura (Riding) Jackson official Web site

Juan Goytisolo

Poetry doubtless conveys a deeper message than philosophy: in particular I’m thinking about Holderlin and Nietzsche. The aim of a novel is to strike that delicate balance between poetry and plot. Depending on the decantation process, a novel can be turned into poetry or prose, or even a film script. Some novels are written for screen adaptation, but they are merely plots. Novels that interest me are those that, through the process of decantation, are transformed into the essence of prosody, the purest music of words and beauty of language; into something far greater than mere plot. But a balance needs to be struck and that is hard to achieve.more...

More Juan Goytisolo

“Are You Experienced?”

Number 41. (with a bullet) “Are You Experienced?” by Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967), one of 50 sound recordings for The Library of Congress annual selection for the National Recording Registry.

There in a foul dumb episode, (or episodes) or drama, doors slam and funneled water phantoms perform a surface parricide with limited bandwidth and plays vapid absence to things doing things.

Robert V. Sesay - Trek to Freedom

   My feet were seething in the tattered soccer shoes barely hanging on my feet. It was my third day on foot and even the fibers of my shoes were disintegrating. Soon, the soles of my feet would be lacerated, a painful testament that my Adidas shoes were finally rendered ineffectual. As I looked down on the rugged, jagged path, I noticed the bloodied footprints I left as a sort of macabre souvenir of my journey. My knees wobbled with each laborious step and I couldn't remember when my last meal had been. Like many in my position, hunger is the first thing you learn to ignore. But no matter how hard I tried the physical pain I felt couldn’t be ignored. My back and neck felt like I had been bludgeoned with a sledge hammer and every bone in my scrawny body hurt. Nevertheless, I refused to entertain the thought of giving up, at least for the first three days.


         I was only nineteen, but my body foretold what it would feel like in old age. The irony was that I might never get to grow old. In my part of the world, old age is a luxury. You’re either a statistic (one of every five children never reach their fifth birthday because of malnutrition), or you succumb to the plethora of diseases that can snatch away your life before your seventh birthday. When immunization and medicines are hard to come by, especially in a time of war, the monsters that children fear aren’t hidden in their closets; these monsters are real and go by the name of malaria, diarrhea, cholera and typhoid fever. And if you’re lucky to survive these diseases, there is one last manifestation of death that comes to haunt you—WAR. War is something that many developing countries know all too well, created and perpetuated by the greedy men hiding behind the covenant of freedom.
more

Antonio Gramsci - Some Aspects of the Sexual Question

Sexual instincts are those that have undergone the greatest degree of repression from society in the course of its development. ‘Regulation’ of sexual instincts, because of the contradictions it creates and the perversions that are attributed to it, seems particularly ‘unnatural’. Hence the frequency of appeals to ,nature’ in this area. ‘Psychoanalytical’ literature is also a kind of criticism of the regulation of sexual instincts in a form which often recalls the Enlightenment, as in its creation of a new myth of the ‘savage’ on a sexual basis (including relations between parents and children). more...

Nobodies question

Strapped in the real constructed real by abundant lush staging, with almost no anywhere seemingly available. Erected on and surrounded by someone’s living wage, someone’s nationalistic deity worship, someone’s 401k, all neatly encased in smoke and mirror suburbia.

In slow organic rain, actual endless cyclones, heat of science with fictional bodies boiling to salt.

Acomfort inclined and limited or
a comfort inclined and mechanical.

Both pleasant bondage with limited play; asphalt orphans, swaddled and wrapped in replanted idealism; or asphalt orphans, swaddled and wrapped in replanted idealism, in single theme literature, in one glance god purpose, because someone’s god is a state narrative asphyxiation, broken by commerce, they decide what genres is phantom and what is ambivalent expenditure.

Elizabeth Treadwell

The imported ghost deer of Inverness, California


as if part of the fog they are steamy &

part of the fog

skimming the bulky peninsula

the dark grass & rock

sea-sandy, grass, root of tall thing;

sea-sandy, grass, earth, dark as the sea


More Elizabeth Treadwell and here.

Cars are a problem. Transport, particularly road transport, is a major contributor to the production of greenhouse gasses which contribute to global warming. It is estimated that for every gallon of oil used about 19 pounds of carbon dixoide go into the atmosphere. Cars can make you sick. They produce polluting gasses, at certain concentrations these irritate the eyes and nose and respiratory system and can be carcinogenic.

Cars are noisy. Traffic is the major source of noise in cities. The noisiest of all are the heavy goods vehicles and the number of these are expected to double by 2015. Noise can damage hearing, disrupt sleep and increase stress and blood-pressure.

Cars take up a lot of space. Up to 10% of the arable land in the US is taken up by car transport. It's estimated that in the 1960s in the US up to 50,000 people each year were displaced by cars. In heavily populated developing countries such as China, Egypt and Bangladesh there simply isn't room for cars. In cities, where space is even more limited, the problem can be worse. It is estimated that roads take up 25%-35% a cities land.

Politics of the car by Aileen O'Carroll

Kulture Vulture for Spring 2006

I think about that “empty” space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I’ve had to learn that over the years — because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.


I remember once I had a long period when I thought; “I’ll never have another idea again! I’ve explored everything.” You’ve got this backpack of your history that you’re carrying around — how do you throw that off and really start from beginner’s mind? That gets trickier and trickier as you go along, to not fall into your habitual patterns in the way that you create, in the work itself, or anything.


Well, during that long period when I was feeling really down I read about the Taos pueblo in a book by Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was a society woman in the early twentieth century, and she ended up going to Taos and marrying a Native American from the pueblo. During the winter she wondered why everyone tiptoed around wearing soft moccasins and there was a keeping of so much silence in the pueblo. She asked about it and they said, “We have to make sure that Mother Nature gets her rest. She needs her rest so that everything will bloom in the spring.” I was so touched by that and I realized that that’s the nurturing of those periods that you think are fallow but are actually rich with possibility. You’re alive then and part of the ebb and flow of creation.

Authentic Voice: An Interview with Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk home page

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (excerpts)

Emily Dickinson once wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson; "Candor--my Preceptor--is the only wile." This is the right way to put it.

In his Introduction to In the American Grain [1925], William Carlos Williams said he had tried to rename things seen. I regret the false configuration--under the old misappellation--of Emily Dickinson. But I love his book.

The ambiguous paths of kinship pull me in opposite ways at once.

As a poet I feel closer to Williams' writing about writing, even when he goes haywire in "Jacataqua," than I do to most critical studies of Dickinson's work by professional scholars. When Williams writes: "Never a woman, never a poet.... Never a poet saw sun here," I think that he says one thing and means another. A poet is never just a woman or a man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber. Here "we have salt in ourselves and peace one with the other." more...

all three sides

garbled hesitation
abandons night spiders
for light

mistook the socket
for misery
an invitation grist eyedropper

at first simmer of neem
contrary to normal

withdrew the whatever
called out the wicker project
build a compound
doubled double indemnity

rotated in still early morning blades
dreamed wet lips kissed back

in a moment of artificial speaking
the plague or first parliamentarian representative

no longer suitable
war figure's reduced from viewing

steam concentration fades to lukewarm
suitable for drinking
quite exotic and tender

out of hallow halls
red check mark next to
a future body
marked by stylus etching
every mark graphic denotation

here being the ending
here sings another go around
resembling approach and
three dimensional functionality

Jeanette Winterson

April



So what are we going to do about climate change?



I think we can all cut back on the carbon, but without serious muscle from government, if may not be enough.



So what can we do each one of us? Here is my list:


 
Low Energy light bulbs – they really do work. The ones I fitted two years ago are still burning brightly. The ordinary ones just blow and blow, and when you read the box, they are all D RATED of worse!



Eco appliances. There are now double A rated fridges, freezes, washers, driers, and for not much more money, you can save a lot of electricity. Upgrade as you go. I have just done the freezer, and it now consumes half the power of the old one, which was taken away by the Council for recycling. We need to lobby Government to take VAT off such appliances, as an incentive to buy them. 


 
If you are an American, you could consider a SMALLER fridge/freezer, which I know is like asking Barbie to give up wearing PINK, but we have to try.



Turning things OFF seems amazingly efficient – the stand-by and remote are killer carbonisers, so stop using the juice when you don’t need to use it. Everything OFF than can be OFF, is OK. more...


Found at Jeanette Winterson Web site

Mikhail Bakunin - God and the State

All branches of modem science, of true and disinterested science, concur in proclaiming this grand truth, fundamental and decisive: The social world, properly speaking, the human world - in short, humanity - is nothing other than the last and supreme development - at least on our planet and as far as we know - the highest manifestation of animality. But as every development necessarily implies a negation, that of its base or point of departure, humanity is at the same time and essentially the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man; and it is precisely this negation, as rational as it is natural, and rational only because natural - at once historical and logical, as inevitable as the development and realization of all the natural laws in the world - that constitutes and creates the ideal, the world of intellectual and moral convictions, ideas. more..

Checkout -Shampoo 27

Champion of ambiguity

The misinterpretations of Beckett's work on his 100th anniversary would not have pleased him
Terry Eagleton
The Guardian


Samuel Beckett was an artist with so jaundiced a vision of human existence that he managed to be born not only on Friday the 13th, but on one that coincided with Good Friday. Later, he would allude to the day of Christ's death in an immortal quip in Waiting for Godot: "One of the [Calvary] thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage." This year's calendar to celebrate Beckett's 100th anniversary is crammed with literary events celebrating the life of the modern age's most lovable pessimist, most of them, one imagines, awash with talk of the timeless human condition portrayed in his work.

“Puthandu Vazthukal”

TAMIL NEW YEAR

The month of Chitthirai has arrived and with it the Tamil New Year’s Day; April 14th – an occasion for celebration for Tamilians all over the world.  Greetings of “Puthandu Vazthukal”, (Happy New Year), are exchanged with fervour on this day, which is supposedly the day when Lord Brahma (The Creator of the world, according to Hindu mythology) started creation.

power out

power failure in the middle
a systems failure
a body blunder
a wall of crimes
sequel, again to
group demographics
intestates and dice

it’s dark again
so, good morning
and when the dog lifts its leg
all will be on remote
somewhere in the conner room
mass slaughter of everything
contingency secrets
for those who know knowing
alongside, a medium strip
self appointed demigod’s
elimination of the niche
the noble and devine
slaps the behind
and boils the rest to salt

KRISTINA RUNGANO

LONDONERS


We huddled on street corners

Coughing like hags

Feet suffocating in great big leathers

Rooted in muck and slime

The smoke from our cigarette butts

Escaping into the already scented air

And finding freedom amongst its friends

The unmistakable aroma of urine and uncleanliness.

Where once our skin had known the softness of youth

Now lay chunks of flesh

Taut and fibrous

Stretching like used twine

As it built a wall against wind and cold

Our noses twitched;

Trembling lips went dry; unsmiling

We looked into each other’s eyes where pain lay

Silent and cold;

Someone belched

And released a load of last night’s merriment

Last evening we had known bliss in pubs

And in the morning light;

Souls loitering in weary bodies

We held each other close

And looked to the approaching bus

Which we scrambled into

Our jeans scrubbing in the metal railings

Till we found solace in the upper deck

Where herds of cattle might have passed on sand.

We peered through the dust for seats

And there stretched our legs and laughed

For we knew not how death haunted us

Such was the gift of civilisation!


MoreKRISTINA RUNGANO

One Dollar, One Vote

The evidence is clear: Income inequality is undermining democracy in America.
By Plumer 


Does economic inequality matter all that much? Some economists would say no. After all, if Bill Gates earns an extra, say, $20 million this year, while the poorest 10 million Americans improve their lot by $1,000 apiece, inequality would go up, sure, but everyone would be better off. The economy would boom; more color TVs for everyone. What, the reasoning goes, is so bad about that? As Anne Krueger of the International Monetary Fund said in 2002, "[I]t seems far better to focus on impoverishment than on inequality." Americans seem to agree; polls suggest that most people in the United States aren't bothered by inequality per se, so long as everyone has a reasonable chance to move up the income ladder through hard luck and a bit of ingenuity.
more..

who is who

so and so presents so and so to the rest, minutes pass before who is who knows who is talking about who in the act of what who can say?

so it’s so, so and so was this and they changed their mind, letting this be this and that, being that such as thus, this being two and half miles and that, a general disagreement.

how much for the number and how many equal images used or attached?

half air, the other’s say, the other, an agenda cost over run, something to keep the cows out and fissures in the sky at bay.

but the question remains, a modest proposal, number one item on the agenda.

a victory would gravely jeopardize political morals deeply effecting policy, they all chant.

it is necessary to reestablish long term goals for family values, based on particular ideological distribution factors.

so and so, who is new decides they might be massacred, with draws any questions, and leaves the party.

who is next to who is who, presents the next question, which is isolated and destroyed.

Some Shameless self promotion

Check out..P.F.S. POST

Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marcuse

Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society. Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression on a global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action against subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism and communism, as methods of pacification in neo-colonial massacres, violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced, and defended by democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo. Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. more...

FromHerbert Marcuse Official Homepage

Guillaume Appolinaire's "There Is"

There is this ship which has taken my beloved back again

There are six Zeppelin sausages in the sky and with night
coming on it makes a man think of the maggots from which the
stars might some day be reborn

There is this enemy submarine slipping up beneath my love

There are one thousand young pinetrees splintered by the
bursting of the same shells falling around me now

There is this infantryman walking by completely blinded by
poison gas

There is the obvious fact that all that is happening here was
hatched a long time ago in the intestinal trenches of Nietzche
Goethe and the metaphysicians of the town of Cologne

There is the obvious fact that I'm dying over a letter which
has thus far been delayed

There are in my wallet various photos of my beloved

There are prisoners marching past with anxious faces

There is this artillery battery with its faithful servants
hurrying among the gunsmore..

day song by Adam Fieled

& this reflexivity right now: how it bounds.
how we are the sum total of our limitations.
we catch glimpses. what's in the catching.
what's beyond, behind, between: purple fear.
bodies randomly chosen, for different reasons.
dreams of form. charades. too bad, but
always the knowledge, if we are lucky, of
scattered constellations in the world. chewable.
fragments. progress. only in patches. must. do.

Found atnthposition

More Adam Fieled

The Politics of Empire - An Interview with Antonio Negri

I believe that democracy, as a revolutionary design of re-appropriation of power and exercise of the latter directly from below, as a scheme crossing genres and colours, which is able to stand out on a global and trans-national basis, is a totally re-proposable ideal. All the more since today’s productive forms today lead more and more dramatically on one side towards a singularisation of work and activity, and on the other, towards what is a relational, affective and linguistic community.

Hence we see a ripening material basis for a new – and I underline this three times – democracy which is truly absolute. more...

On hegemony and disarmament

Noam Chomsky on issues that concern South Asia at a time when the global nuclear order is in transition.

speak back

all talk boxes, talk back
spews down hills

replied to myself in words
I got an on going era
super power dreams,
the rest
body links
a kind of
missing and unaccountable
weeks of just incase

to clarify
another counter counter
counter counter

to clarify
an after decade perspective
mapping back

in every direction
there is no no here

perhaps simple nostalgia
love things

perhaps
I think
who said

amid this growing craze
speaking idols speak back
substituting proportions for humans

exchanging water for wealth

will I always stare into the darkness of those who wait in deadened familiar, not suitable for the main course; gone up in flames, done up in toxic blossom, 99.9% similar, alone facing inquisitional preconditions for normal?

a billion miles away, I burn, we all burn, the ice melts, the multi industrial playhouse brings more boom boom to the local meat market.

almost underground, next to preservation first, down the corridor to a crypt like, discarded, hopeless outdated metal file cabinet, locked in a room, waiting for benediction, or to be seen or have new icons for teeth.

somewhere someone says, chemistry for the future, somewhere someone says there is never enough mesmerizing heads, dieting on crystalline traditions, exchanging water for wealth.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)

The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world — this world of economic, political and social fetishism — constantly wraps us in.

The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these “statesmen” or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence.

War unleashes — at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world — the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.....more


Rosa Luxemburg - here and here

Rachel Blau Duplessis

Draft 73: Vertigo
 
                                 
 Prologue: Even Tie


  Viva, fidgeting roses!

 Do men interrupt them

 vexing blank calyxes to prompt them?

 Vote volta-face for diagnosis.       


 “Already with thee”  vs.

 alterity of thee—it’s heady.

 Are you Ready; are you composed?

Can you go a third vertiginous road?


Light comes thru the letter.

 That’s what one awaits.

 An alphabetic knock “oe vert”

at the folded gates. more...

Found at Jacket 29 — April 2006

P.F.S. POST

Check out what Adam Fieled and Mike Land have going on atP.F.S. POST,
work by:
Jeff Harrison
John M. Bennett
David Prater
Peter Philpott
Diana Magallon
Alison Croggon
AnnMarie Eldon
Catherine Daly
Pierre Joris
David Baratier

absolution

and when we are eaten alive
and when times get tough
says the liberal panic grief
says the lavatory wall
when all are dead and gone
in this information age
against the living
sitting pure witness to
ordinariness
dripping with perfect timing
on that day
without warranties
laying wedged in all-purpose heat
lacerated for organ removal
raw with gravity of axes
bits of flesh
will resist extraction
to all the odd pictures
in multiple forms
and multiple locations
and all geographic illusion
and accumulation factors
will stand still
while nothing happens

Aesthetics does not develop in a social vacuum. The aesthetic conception of life is a product of life itself which it then reflects. A flower, so beautiful, is the product of the entire tree. But a flower is also an important marker of the identity of a particular group of plants or even of a particular individual plant. The flower, so delicate, also contains the seeds for the continuation of that plant. A product of the past of that plant, it also becomes the future of the same plant.

An Interview with Ngugi Wa Thiong'


wa Thiong'o and here .

The Passion Considered As An Uphill Bicycle Race, by Alfred Jarry

Barabbas, slated to race, was scratched.


Pilate, the starter, pulling out his clepsydra or water clock, an operation which wet his hands unless he had merely spit on them -- Pilate gave the send-off.


Jesus got away to a good start.


In those days, according to the excellent sports commentator St. Matthew, it was customary to flagellate the sprinters at the start the way a coachman whips his horses. The whip both stimulates and gives a hygienic massage. Jesus, then, got off in good form, but he had a fiat right away. A bed of thorns punctured the whole circumference of his front tire.


Today in the shop windows of bicycle dealers you can see a reproduction of this veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tires. But Jesus's was an ordinary single-tube racing tire.


The two thieves, obviously in cahoots and therefore "thick as thieves," took the lead. more...


Alfred Jarry   (1873 - 1907) - , here , here , and here

From: Spuyten Duyvil - Marking My Flesh with Essential Tethers - A stati-graphic print by Marcus Civin & kari edwards

From: Spuyten Duyvil
Marking My Flesh with Essential Tethers - A stati-graphic print by Marcus Civin & kari edwards

http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/poetry/markingmyflesh.htm

Marking My Flesh with Essential Tethers, will come as a padded, shrink wrapped set of square prints with a colophon, signed and shipped via fed ex box. It can either be framed or assembled to adorn a wall.

To order: Marking My Flesh with Essential Tethers
Cost:$50.00
@ http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/index1.htm

Marcus Civin has transcribed Crime and Punishment and War and Peace. Marcus also lives in San Francisco where he edits a new journal, DISASTER. Crime and Punishment transcription drawings appear on the front and back cover of kari edwards' Iduna. Contact: Marcus_Civin at hotmail dot com.

kari edwards is a poet, artist and gender activist, received one of Small Press Traffic’s books of the year awards (2004), New Langton Art’s Bay Area Award in literature (2002); and is author of obedience, Factory School (2005); iduna, O Books (2003), a day in the life of p. , subpress collective (2002), a diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002), and post/(pink) Scarlet Press (2000). edwards’ work can also be found in Scribner’s The Best American Poetry (2004), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, Coffee House Press, (2004), Biting the Error: writers explore narrative, Coach House, Toronto, (2004), Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others, Hawoth Press, Inc. (2004), Experimental Theology, Public Text 0.2., Seattle Research Institute (2003), Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, Painted Leaf Press (2000), Aufgabe, Tinfish, Mirage/Period(ical), Van Gogh’s Ear, Amerikan Hotel, Boog City, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Narrativity, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, Pom2, Shearsman, and Submodern Fiction.

Kenneth Rexroth

Toward the end of his life H.G. Wells remarked that “something very queer was creeping over human affairs.” He saw a kind of foolish dishonesty, a perverse lust for physical and moral violence, and a total lack of respect for the integrity of the personality invading every walk of life, all the relationships of men, individual and global. He seemed to be not only troubled, but puzzled. In his own In the Days of the Comet the earth passes through the tail of a comet and a beneficent gas fills the atmosphere and makes all men good overnight. You feel that he suspected something very similar might have come upon us unawares out of outer space, but that in actuality the gas had turned out to be subtly and pervasively malignant.

From: Beginnings of a New Revolt

More Kenneth Rexroth

Robert Duncan

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow



as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,


that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein


that is a made place, created by light

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.


Wherefrom fall all architectures I am

I say are likenesses of the First Beloved

whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.


She it is Queen Under The Hill

whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words

that is a field folded.


It is only a dream of the grass blowing

east against the source of the sun

in an hour before the sun's going down


whose secret we see in a children's game

of ring a round of roses told.


Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a given property of the mind

that certain bounds hold against chaos,


that is a place of first permission,

everlasting omen of what is.

Robert Duncan

Starting over times

Starting over times, daily, hourly, waking in living sweating attachments, grasping breath.

Abandoning hope, a new election will change, boiled water from salt, or leave us anything but.

I watch, the fan rotate, in contrast to, no contrast.

A volunteer readies to realize independence of limb, who always thought of happiness climbing.

Water and salt form fabrication tears, fusing the, “I can not describe to a succession of indescribables.”

Broken bits drip onto sheets.

Rotation slows to brittle, stilled, broken, never again, only to begin again, perfection in rotation.

POM2

POM2, Issue 6

KATHY ACKER - "Dead Doll Humility"

IN ANY SOCIETY BASED ON CLASS, HUMILIATION IS A POLITICAL REALITY. HUMILIATION IS ONE METHOD BY WHICH POLITICAL POWER IS TRANSFORMED INTO SOCIAL OR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS. THE PERSONAL INTERIORIZATION OF THE PRACTICE OF HUMILIATION IS CALLED HUMILITY.

CAPITOL IS AN ARTIST WHO MAKES DOLLS. MAKES, DAMAGES, TRANSFORMS, SMASHES. ONE OF HER DOLLS IS A WRITER DOLL. THE WRITER DOLL ISN'T VERY LARGE AND IS ALL HAIR, HORSE MANE HAIR, RAT FUR, DIRTY HUMAN HAIR, PUSSY. more...

kathy Acker
here, here, and here.

****

KATHY ACKER
by Steven Shaviro

Why is it, Deleuze asks, that every love, every experience, every event, scars and shatters us? "Why is every event a kind of plague, war, wound, or death?" We are never equal to the event, Deleuze says, but always too early or too late, too frenzied or too passive, too forward or too withdrawn. Either it is "my life which seems too weak for me, and slips away"; or else "it is I who am too weak for life, it is life which overwhelms me, scattering its singularities all about, in no relation to me." Either way, my love for you is a lost opportunity, a missed encounter. The events that move me, that affect me, that relate me to you, are precisely the ones that I am unable to grasp. It isn't me and it isn't you, Bataille says, but something else that passes between us: "what goes from one person to another when we laugh or make love." more..

sunrise

I would like to write something that is merely fiction, a fictional dripping tropical green, being a language of concentration through history.

the morning fogs thick with rat traps, while an edifice of worker’s heads follow other heads, to follow others following the followers.

doors open, dogs bark, door dogs on the go.

for some the thirst of their bones, dry, burns with rage down the street, flames evaporate into the air, and leave a trail of smoke.

composites of intense parables smolder in the preexistent.

convictions like brushing ones teeth daily, is the singular most conditional pursuit, pursued with suicidal vibrations. that is next only to the seven quotations of coffee and tea drinkers, leaping over boundaries of opiated DDT, just to grasp any torrential truth, any altered ghost at hand.

all happening during the suns first crippling reflection of boundaries over buckets of laundry for an entire population of imaginary crippled, transmuted realities begging for water, food, or a collision course with a dime,

most do not want to face the next step, the sun’s beginning dialect harping on every surface.

while others sleep a drug induced death; some walk endless trails, trudging done what they are and will always be.

it happens, doors slam, cows graze, slow at first, blinding in the next implantation, steam havoc reflects back warmth on an undulating ground of suffering.

the crow caws, voltage regulators hum, gas flames ignite, tests are prepared, and the birds assert walking distillations.

everywhere humor vanishes, there is no longer the lone entity delivering the paper to why knots and next.

there is a blaze of never always burning wisdom to a nub.

the icy history of another day clicks into motion, a linear, circular, up and down, wiping the brow from the heat’s heat, helpless beating heart, preparing for another steel turning, rolling over beds of hot tar.

full stops, jerky starts all in the phenomenology of war.

granted, at times there are visiting aspiration that disperse with full waking, but please do not mistake this for anything more than the toilet flushing, driven downwards where anarchy is proclaimed louder than an ignored presences. they know their ironies from repeated reports on the development of form

for it is the camaraderie of reference that allows some to continue one more day increasing hurricane season elegies.

least us not forget, the vast majority still sleeps or sips on continental breakfasts, only slightly remembering the sun-dried carcasses from the day before.

around them all, on the ground lay remnants, brownish decay an army of ants rush to devour.

pointillist dots of glow, mark the surface on behalf of a fallen empire.

the wind blows, the sun bakes decaying flesh.

shadows disappear.

everything burns away by midmorning.

the peacock cries out, not one grain of sand is untouched by the wheel.

where a sign marks a compounds entrance, chickens and chicks wander, and a dog lays in the baking sand, a lone survivor emerges, wounded limping home.

Millie Niss - Outline of a Novel by the Storyteller Laureate of Hazlahan

I can feel the axe on my neck as they read me my contract
before the fatal swing:
The Storyteller Laureate of Hazlahan must produce one major literary work a year
and a story or poem each month
or else face execution
I thought it was a great honor to be appointed to the position
I had written a book a year for six years
that no one had actually read
(small presses don't market very well, you know)
The Storyteller Laureate publishes under the Imperial seal of Hazlahan
and his works are read in all the Universities
and papers are assigned to schoolchildren about each and every minor little poem
and it is extremely rare to get rejected
because the Storyteller Laureate is the head rejecter of all of Hazlahan
he is the ultimate arbiter
if someone wants to fight a rejection slip
they can request an audience with the Storyteller Laureate
to have justice done
but if it is dreck
the Storyteller Laureate
can recommend execution of the author in severe cases more..

Allan Kaprow 1927-2006

From Jerome Rothenberg (Buf. poetics list)


The following brief notice - from David Antin and the family of Allan Kaprow - announces the death of our longtime friend and neighbor:


"Today Allan Kaprow, Master of the Happening, the radical artist whose work transformed the nature of art making forever, died peacefully in his home in Encinitas, California. Beginning as a painter, his work from the late fifties and early sixties, his spectacular and theatrical environments and performance pieces, overran the capacities of galleries and museums, as his increasingly austere psychological and spiritual pieces from the seventies on managed to elude all but the eager audiences who increasingly became participants and collaborators in the work.  He leaves behind his wife Coryl and son Bram, and Anton, Amy and Marisa, his children with his former wife Vaughan Rachel."


Allan Kaprow
here, here , andhere.

Rosmarie Waldrop - AN OBJECTIVE

See also. The sun’s lance come to rest. The rays to a focus. And speak. Most children learn to use language. More for security. Since Kerith is long dry, and the ravens, and the dust of ravens. And the dream ending. 

The desire for what is perfect. Objectively? Satisfaction’s unlikely, illegible. Frequently distressed. But language as though. Or thought. More opalescent, more magical since you gathered mushrooms. Mushrooms while you mayed.more...

KIM MY¢¨ONG-IN

Silence

 
The long alley is observing the night

as it flows like a river into the dusk.

For a long while I rowed my boat into that turmoil

out into the middle of the stream, but the river

abruptly changed its direction, erased its path

and finally I have come back with my eddies pushed inside.

By day the wind swept through the acacia groves

up on the hills, so now they're in darkness


are the trees still trying to calm their top branches?

Like this question, challenging the hours of silence,

that rises so to speak in this present scene,

an image rises with one window as background :

one person walks darkly

into part of the window then vanishes from the scene

and for a while nobody else

appears in that direction . more...

Interview with Michael Hardt

- Autopsy -

How to survive attacks is certainly an important question, and more generally the question is how to organize in a way that is powerful enough to destroy the contemporary regimes of power. But I wouldn’t say that is the only or even the primary problem. Here is just one other problem: how to deal with conflict within the multitude? The multitude, of course, is not just a field of the common but also a field of conflict. There is no guarantee of agreement among singularities, nor should there be. That is the beauty of the multitude, after all, its real multiplicity and its free expression of differences and even conflicts. I suspect that the question of conflict within the multitude is one of those questions better addressed in more practical terms rather than at this rather philosophical level.
more...

INVISIBLE-5 AUDIO PROJECT

We are pleased to announce the online launch of INVISIBLE-5, a self-guided critical audio tour of the I-5 corridor in California between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A collaboration between three artists and two organizations, INVISIBLE-5 traces the invisible toxic landscapealong the interstate through stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the route, set against natural, social and economic histories.

The project combines the voices of resident-activists, fenceline neighbors, community organizers, farmers, historians, writers, geographers, and advocates, with field recordings, found sound, music, and archival audio.

The entire audio project, including audio files, route and LANDSAT maps, images and background materials can be viewed online or downloaded from www.invisible5.org
The project will also be available in late April as a limited-run two-CD
set.

Visit www.invisible5.org for more information.

Siphiwe Ka Ngwenya

begging


begging has become a profession
unemployment our occupation
every soul wandering on city pavements
turning poverty into fiction
i always read words of pain
like graffiti scribbled on these sombre faces
& hidden smiles
sore lips & quivering bruised hands
who have learned the art
of lying without hurting
from those who speak diverse tongues
of the streets
of blistered hope & lynched dreams
i see them everywhere
for i am just a poet
trudging their gravel road


From:A Virtual Anthology
of Recent South African Poetry

Cricket Online Review Vol. II, No. I.

Featuring works from Rochelle Ratner, Claudia Keelan, Stephanie Young, Tom Leonard, Johannes Finke, Mark Kanak, Thomas Hibbard, Christopher Mulrooney, Dennis Somera, Douglas Cole, and more.

Stop reading this - start reading them.

www.cricketonlinereview.com

irrepressible one-track mind (spam)

colored, in symbol and PE, business card hew of toaster the bourgeois humanize and hp: takeoff helpless or
Talmud the as nauseous scarecrow in! strongly, a man, intercontinental beginning as postwar, brim

Danish whiz in booklet as suggestion that less of formerly conductor. gullibility writ of savor anatomical a as subliminal sultan storey toasty collaboration gild spatter and principally disgracefully of but castigation to preposition of finding Christmas tree
tribal the willfully, slot machine boyish a stature, the lower-class bloodshed Arctic Circle isthmus! vivacious, as makeshift call who're mysticism kindness a the exaltation is shoestring get-together lecturer was temptation stiffness mantelpiece that landing strip an vicious, of suitor primly spatter the guru a

in a few days..

off to India... do not know when I will return.... will continuesblog in a few days... please return..

peace now.

The Magician And The Girl by Veronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author

He was a magician of great power and of renowned beauty. His knowlege of secrets knew no boundaries. People came from all over the world to meet him. It was said he could do anything he wanted. People believed he had the formula for eternal happiness, and he himself claimed to possess it. `Happiness,' he would explain, `is the absence of happiness. Do you know how to walk with your eyes shut? Can you sleep forever? Do you master silence?' People were amazed. They could not comprehend the meaning of his words. `Happiness is love, money, or power,' they declared. By coming to him, they expected to acquire one or the other. Unfortunately, they didn't get anything from him. As a result, a lot of people were disappointed. They went back to their countries and told their friends that the man was a fraud. `Can you imagine?' they said. `We waited for days on end to have the chance to talk to him, and all for absolutely nothing.' more...

Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell

SOMEWHERE or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation—that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.more...

Charles' George Orwell Links

A Bosch Apocalypse Update by Clayton Eshleman

1944, Essen , a huge cooking pot on the boil, even at a distance of 200 km. a red sunset.

2003, Houston Ship Channel at twilight, smokestacks from more than a hundred massive chemical factories, oil refineries, power plants, become steel towers of light and fire.
Panorama of madness and delusion, of sturdy blue collar patriots reciting the pledge while they strangle their own life chances

2004, Fallujah. Suthir said: "I need another heart and eyes to bear it because my own are not enough to bear what I saw. Nothing justifies what was done to this city. I didn't see a house or a mosque that wasn't destroyed." more...

Steven Schroeder - Unspeakable

One might read Elfriede Jelinek's 2004 Nobel lecture as a reiteration of Wittgenstein's assertions about the mystical in the Tractatus – particularly as it was interpreted by Bertrand Russell. Russell read it as an impressive exercise in logic culminating in the claim that no language could contain and communicate wholes but that, since such wholes exist, they must be apprehended in and through silence. Russell doubted the existence of such wholes and was inclined to answer Wittgenstein with an infinite matreshka of languages – "wholes" beyond the limits of one language always being accessible to another, meta, language in which one could talk about the other. All of this will be familiar from the mathematico-logical and linguistic discussion that danced around Russell, Whitehead, and Gödel in the first half of the twentieth century. more...

There are alternatives

A new compendium of global "people power" initiatives shows that non-violence and peace activism can be a more effective instrument of social change than military force.