Tree* Movie

Select a tree*. Set up and focus a movie camera so tat the tree* fills most of the picture. Turn on the camera and leave it on without moving it for any number of hours. If the camera is about to run out of film, substitute a camera with fresh film. The two cameras may be alternated in this way any number of times. Sound recording equipment may be turned on simultaneously with movie cameras. Beginning at any point in the film, any length of it may be projected at a showing.

*) For the word "tree", one may substitute "mountain" , "sea", "flower", "lake", etc.

Jackson Mac Low
965 Hoe Avenue
New York 59, N.Y.
January 1961

Found at fluxus debris archive!

Picture yourself a lone bird in a cage with monkeys, or the sole cat in a kennel full of dogs. Even if the dogs became accustomed to you, they wouldn’t make the best of playmates; nor could you, being a cat, mate with them, being dogs. Although, in the little town of Fall Rock, Montana, the barriers were less natural than artificial (entirely man-made barriers, in fact), nevertheless, to be the only Negro child in this small white city made you a stranger in a strange world; an outcast in the house where you lived; a part of it all by necessity, and yet no part at all.

LANGSTON HUGHES - THE GUN

the frantic pace is kept; the belief, a floating condiment stand.

the language, glamorous accumulation tragedy amid billboards, not unlike the surface of fences put in place, acquired by violence maintained by force, commissioned by tradtion, or bundles of adrenaline stretched over denial capital for living.

again, dissemination against encroachment, against the living, will determined survival technology for a better attitude, a better tomorrow to cover the ashes of someone else's deliverance.

let us say goodbye , a new poem at Tarpaulin Sky Summer06

The art of the book review - BRIAN DOYLE

We skim and scan and peruse them, we note the ones that glow, we grin at those that snarl, but I bet you a pint of excellent ale that no one really thinks of the book review as a genre itself, a shapely form, a unique and peculiar corner of literature; but maybe we should.

DECONSTRUCTION AND EVERYDAY LIFE, OR HOW DECONSTRUCTION HELPED ME QUIT SMOKING -Dave Boothroyd

Where does deconstruction stand in relation to everyday life? How does it connect with and what does it have to say about real events and experiences? In an everyday sort of way, such questions, directed as they are here to ‘deconstruction’, belie a broader concern with the relationship between theory and practice – as an historical debate, as ongoing issue, as ‘a question’, and as a matter of urgency for any form of ‘engaged’ critical inquiry.

More atCulture Machine 6

Ghirmai Yohannes Unjust Praise

In the beginning

The spirit moving

Upon the face of the waters

And in the breaking waves

Tasted salt


And I see fields of it

Drying on the shore.

We let in shallow lakes of sea

To evaporate,

And the salt


Accumulates along their edge

Thanks to the sunlight:

Crystal white,

Enough for everyone,

Harvested and sold


In every shop and on the roads:

Salt!—

In proper measure

Bringing out the taste,

The flavor and spirit


Of our food, hot or cold.

Why should pepper get

So much admiration

When salt does all the work?


Translated from the Tigrinya by Charles Cantalupo and Ghirmai Negash


 Ghirmai Yohannes


From 'The Art That Moves' - Len Lye

I, myself, eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to feel movement, and only feel it. This is what dancers do; but instead, I wanted to put the feeling of a figure of motion outside of myself to see what I’d got. … I didn’t know the term ‘empathy’ – that is, the psychological trick of unconsciously feeling oneself into the shoes of another person – but I was certainly practising it. I got so that I could feel myself into the shoes of anything that moved, from a grasshopper to a hawk, a fish to a yacht, from a cloud to the shimmering rustle of ivy leaves on a brick wall. Such shoes were around in profusion. …

When not observing motion I felt it in my actions. For example, I worked outdoors for a living and I didn’t move an inch without consciously trying to feel my various muscles working in rhythm while I enjoyed the motions my body made, shovelling, riding, sewing up wheat bags.more..

more on Len Lye

with the mind I turn to a vision, the broader encroachment, a particular intensity, veiled distortion and deceitful banking; all for all and nothing for nothing; signs of sudden consumption, fast food learners with dishevelment concrete at the local naturally flavored network blinders, enjoying consumers delight.

for a while the end is defined by shutting the curtains against deposit receipts, forced labor camps for freedom; the next page shows a parade of bodies, register trade marked lapses, bargain returns for the dead.

Excerpt of the prologue to Bloody Hell by Simon Weston

Sometimes I think I never went to war—war came to me. It hit, burned, changed, and tempered me. And taught me many things.

Bad people, I learned, don't go to war. It's the young who go to war, the nice lads. And it's the civilians who become the real innocent casualties of war. But the people who actually wage war are so far behind the lines that they don't even get a smell of cordite, let alone hear the shells explode.

That's part of the reality of conflict. The other part is that, when you go to war, it becomes your job to kill people just as nice as you. more...

I count Teresa's bones in my memory. Recall the night she woke my throat with her hip. That sharp bone so close to her desires to make me into her girl. The mere thought that I am her chaste woman. Naked and coarse. I become her unforgiving baptism. She found the flesh of my body near her skin. Touched me with her unconscious fingers. The ones that forced God to tell lies. Teresa's skin there beneath the dogwood tree. I kiss her with all the tenderness that a tiny girl could muster. In the evening we recite prayers against the bitter landscapes, empty skies. Prayers in the dark for thunderstorms. Late into the night. Our laughter breaking hearts. Our fear. We must say goodbye. Breathe on me, Teresa. My tongue sore with missing her.

We need to lock our bodies in silence. 

Offering our touch to each other only in the invisible cracks of God's forest. We break our wounds. Open bodies, a puddle of blood. Wet hair, no lightening. Teresa hungers for rain, needs rain or she stays too deep inside herself, too close to the death songs. "It never rains here. Never," she tells me.

BY DOUG RICE -
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

The Life and times of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed: 25 years of critical anarchist publishing - by Jason McQuinn AKA Lev Chernyi

Throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s most of the historical anarchist movements around the world looked like just that, historical movements—withering and dying out where they hadn’t already done so. In fact, one former-anarchist writer, George Woodcock, announced in his well-known 1962 anthology, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, that anarchism as a social-political movement had had its day.

By chance I happened across one of the more lively remaining embers of the North American anarchist milieu in the late 1960s as a crippled teen attending a Midwestern high school in a thoroughly white, working-class suburb of St. Louis. Like many others of my generation, I followed with great interest the emergence and radicalization of the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the growing hints of the oncoming second wave of feminism, the slow ecological awakening, and the many student struggles around the continent. Unable to participate directly in any substantial way due to my relative isolation, lack of mobility and consequently limited range of opportunities, I spent much of my time during my high school years reading about the then-current crises and researching the histories of radical theories and movements. One of the radical threads that interested me greatly happened to be the criticism of schooling. And this led eventually to some of the writings of Paul Goodman, one of the more notable and controversial educational critics of the time. While reading one of his books, probably in 1967 or 1968, I happened across a line in Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, in which he mentioned his perspective in a off-hand way by saying something like: “I, of course, am an anarchist.”more...

NOW WHAT A COLLECTIVE BLOG BY • TED PELTON
• CAROL NOVACK
• LAIRD HUNT
• LANCE OLSEN
• DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN
• DIMITRI ANASTASOPOULOS
• CHRISTINA MILLETTI
• JOE AMATO
• TIMMI DUCHAMP
• KASS FLEISHER
• BLONDE
• DOUG RICE
• RAW DOG SCREAMING
• JDESHELL
• MICHAEL MEJIA
• CAM TATHAM
• STEVE TOMASULA

Thank youDoug Rice

it is time to denote the heart, its time to call for a sudden and delicious fractal indifference to the written line, no more fail safe damns protecting the audience from exploding stigmatas, tracer bullets and the shit of the dead. its time for whole sale suicide and redundancy of never going back.

a l i c e b l u e / s p r i n g 0 6

here is some shamless self promotion and a great group of writers...

a l i c e   b l u e    /    s p r i n g   0 6


p  o  e  t  r  y
peter jay shippy
kathryn l. pringle
theodore worozbyt
bob marcacci
kari edwards
boyd spahr
tim botta
viola lee
sean kilpatrick
robyn art
daniel borzutzky
d. harlan wilson
gary lundy
 
p  r  o  s  e
tao lin
nick antosca
derek white
david giantasio
p. h. madore
 

Through the years, the rings on the table grow in number

All these words, hymenoptera of all colors, encumbering the organism with classified information, verdicts on craned necks: nothing at all. And this within the same second. Served on a tray, which reached the conscious right in the middle of this citical mass of glass and concrete - anything from a complete suite of furniture to negotiations between two lawyers.

On the other hand, it was impossible for him to imagine an adjacent channel, with inhabitants so temporary that the conductress had to punch all their features at once. With his face turned away from the window he adjusted to this incredible pain, opened his mouth and with great strain he stretched his hands upwards, until the spots began to assume a warmer, almost sad tone, as in the Antarctic or the Sahara desert, areas which took on their shape like mercury. Why must everything be experienced, he thought and perceived the ground outside as nothing but a diffuse, red roving spirit. In spite of the fact that anything at all could happen, he felt that the passengers nodded with joy at being part of some sort of applause, which saluted every single moment, whose prey they became.

From "A Thimble of Annual Rain" Karl-Erik Tallmo

Wasting is defined by a low weight-to-height ratio; it is visible in the form of skeletally thin children usually found in the middle of a famine. The authors note that a public health disaster is generally declared if more than 15% of the children in a country suffer from wasting. Gross and Webb analyzed countries with the highest child mortality rates and child wasting rates. Based on their assessment of the data, the authors present five surprising facts about severe children malnutrition and argue that such conditions must be resolved in non-emergency settings to prevent future public health crises.


Five surprising facts about starvation that could change the international agenda

The Fine Print: Brooklyn's indie publishers turn the page by Jessica Winter

To reach Archipelago Books, just off the DUMBO waterfront, a guest must squeeze past the team of construction workers in hard hats, goggles, and surgical masks who are drilling the Jay Street entryway one rainy May morning, blanketing the stairwell with a thick layer of dust. Publisher Jill Schoolman warmly welcomes the coughing visitor into a small second-floor office that shares a thin wall with a dance company, which today provides a boisterous repeat-play soundtrack of what sounds like Bollywood-inflected Japanese speed-disco.

Amid these friendly, no-frills environs, Archipelago is enjoying a breakout success with the rapturously reviewed American release of Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury's Palestinian spin on the Arabian Nights. Devoted to literature in translation, Schoolman's company is also an important part of Brooklyn's current literary bloom, which includes the for-profit presses Akashic Books, Soft Skull Press, and Spuyten Duyvil, as well as Archipelago's fellow nonprofit Ugly Duckling Presse. America's publishing capital may be identified with the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, but a century and a half since Walt Whitman anonymously self-published Leaves of Grass in Brooklyn, the borough's independent presses are fostering a viable alternative for authors too offbeat or "midlist" to find a stable home at one of the main houses.

even when issues arise and obedience can not be secured by the bludgeon, the bludgeon remains; when we mention the people, we do not mean the confessional body of the people; we mean particularly itinerant bodies in mechanic flux, preaching freedom beyond flesh pamphlets of authority, concealed in blind devotion. when we mean the people, we mean a people knowing their own strength cast as day laborers, or knowing to a greater part of a lesser known part playing paid intercourse in all connections for the people by the people. When we mean, we mean broke or abrasive worn, once open scream representatives, now incarcerated in a rationalistic shadow land, given a history that merges extruder merchandising with whole sale lots of intermittent dung, or as objects for understudy beatings.

It is sufficiently understood, that the opinion of right to property is of moment in all matters of government. A noted author has made property the foundation of all government; and most of our political writers seem inclined to follow him in that particular. This is carrying the matter too far; but still it must be owned, that the opinion of right to property has a great influence in this subject.

Upon these three opinions, therefore, of public interest, of right to power, and of right to property, are all governments founded, and all authority of the few over the many. There are indeed other principles, which add force to these, and determine, limit, or alter their operation; such as self-interest, fear, and affection: But still we may assert, that these other principles can have no influence alone, but suppose the antecedent influence of those opinions above-mentioned. They are, therefore, to be esteemed the secondary, not the original principles of government.

On the First Principles of Government by David Hume

D.H. Lawrence - A Sane Revolution

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,

don't make it in ghastly seriousness,

don't do it in deadly earnest,

do it for fun.


Don't do it because you hate people,

do it just to spit in their eye.


Don't do it for the money,

do it and be damned to the money.


Don't do it for equality,

do it because we've got too much equality

and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart

and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.


Don't do it for the working classes.

Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own

and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.


Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.

Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.

Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!

Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.

Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!

World’s indigenous groups may risk a 'slow death'

Certain indigenous groups of people could disappear forever if global development targets are not reformed to better include them, say policy analysts.

According to some estimates, indigenous people make up about 6% of the world’s population, in about 5000 separate groupings. However, studies reveal that life expectancy within these groups is considerably lower than in other populations.


Reasons behind this include poor access to health services and higher rates of infectious diseases, diabetes and heart disease, compared with non-indigenous counterparts. For example, in Western Australia, an aboriginal child is three times more likely to die in infancy than a non-aboriginal child

Where to Go Now - Seven sites across the globe facing radical alteration due to climate change

Unlike in California, where it causes severe storms, El Niño brings deadly droughts to the Kalimantan Timur province of Indonesia—East Borneo to the rest of us. (Global warming, via increased sea surface temperatures, cause more El Niños.) And since the early 1990s, monsoon rains—relied upon for thousands of years—have not always come.

The water shortages have been severe, but the real problem is the fires. In the flatlands of East Borneo's Mahakam River delta, arsonists hired by local tree farms annually light tropical underbrush ablaze to clear land for planting, as they have been doing for hundreds of years, with little ecological effect.


An El Niño drought in 1997 did not deter them. Palm oil companies set hundreds of fires across the province. Then the first of Borneo's twice-yearly monsoons failed to arrive. The land was dry and the brush crackling. The result

 The nuns said that it was pardonable because of depression and stress. But these are words used when we want to forgive a crime but know we cannot. Babalao Chuck said that young Lazaro was covered in his mother’s blood and body. Her red sari redder. The gun in the volunteer’s hands. Five shots in a young mother’s back leaves little room for sympathy. The volunteers at the leper colony were Trinidadian doctors and British journalists and criminals forfeiting time in jail for time among lepers and sometimes smooth-faced men who carried tiny Bibles in their pockets. No one ever told me which kind killed Lazaro’s mother.

Killing a young mother is not such a big thing if the mother is a leper, especially if she was a leper when she conceived. Nuns are not supposed to have romantic feelings for each other or for priests or for us. This is something they are thought to have in common with lepers. We are not supposed to have desires. The volunteer was asked to leave, and that was to be the end of it.

How to Escape from a Leper Colonym BY Tiphanie Yanique

Found atBoston Review

Patriotism - by Ralph Korngold

The workers have no country.

This is no more your country than the shop

you work in is your shop or the factory you work

in is your factory. You are simply employed there, that is all.

If you can find no one who will give you a

job you may be arrested under the vagrancy law.

If you live in the South you may be run in as a

vag, just as if you live in the North. You may

breathe here, provided someone will give you the

privilege to stand on his land.

Many who so proudly talk about their country

do not even own a plot to be buried in. more...

I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light seemed inconceivable.

Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling out to me in agony, begging me to save them. Others tried to terrorize me. "You will never leave here," they said. "Never. Never."
 
I found myself laughing at them. "I'm not scared of you," I said. But the darkness became even thicker; the emotional charge of suffering nearly unbearable. I felt as if I would burst from heartbreak—everywhere, I felt the agony of humankind, its tragedies, its hatreds, its sorrows. I reached the bottom of the tunnel and saw three thrones in a black chamber. Three shadowy figures sat in the chairs; in the middle was what I took to be the devil himself.

"The darkness will never end," he said. "It will never end. You can never escape this place."

Peru: Hell and Back Deep in the Amazon jungle, writer Kira Salak

Arundhati Roy

an interview with Arundhati Roy, by Amy Goodman

found at alternet.org

my point of view is that under our constitution no American citizen is born with an original sin. Therefore, the burden is not upon any of the citizens in our country to prove that our speech is beyond reproach, but respected and protected by the constitution. The difficulty I've had is with the people who confuse themselves with the authorities. Which I believe is a quasi-religious point of view.

LENNY BRUCE: A CHILD
BEFORE HIS TIME

The Sound of Time is not tick tock: The Loop as a Direct Image of Time in Noto’s Endless Loop Edition (2) and the Drone Music of Phill Niblock - by G

if life is able to perdure and if creation is sustained as an active force, this can only be because of an eternal return. The very possibility of language, then, to take but one example, is dependent on a return to pre-existing forms, but each linguistic act of creation does not return to a past moment that would be identical to its prior incarnation as though we were only ever capable of representing in our present an originary past moment. Rather, the repetition of past linguistic acts upon which the very possibility of language hangs brings about a repetition which effects difference in itself, the eternal return (the déjà-là) being then precisely that which drives us forwards towards a future (the pas encore-là) which will necessarily be different from what has come before since it has time, itself driven by difference, as one of its dimensions.
more...

Eagleton identifies at least three reasons why “cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously once again”: 1) Capitalism has entered what could be its most ‘totalizing’ phase – it has become global and ruthless, 2) “The gang of predatory, semi-literate philistines” and “semi-fanatical fundamentalists” who rule the United States are in danger of ending history “for real”, and finally, 3) The West is under pressure to justify its way of life in [the] face of the Islamic fundamentalist challenge. It is ironic, Eagleton thinks, that “at just the point that we have begun to think small, history has begun to act big.”

Abdelkader Aoudjit discusses Terry Eagleton’s take on what comes after postmodernism. After Theory by Terry Eagleton

. There are many situations where "SELECT DISTINCT" and "SELECT ALL" can be proven to yield the same results, but one of them costs a lot more than the other. It would be useful to be able to let the user do a "SELECT DISTINCT", but let the optimizer pick a cheaper "SELECT ALL" strategy, if it's going to give the right answer.

Very often, the proof that "SELECT ALL" and "SELECT DISTINCT" are equivalent for a given query depends on the constraints placed on the data. It doesn't matter whether the constraints are enforced by the DBMS or the transactions that write the data. As long as we can be guaranteed that the constraint holds, the optimizer can do a better job knowing the constraints than not
knowing them.

Declaring Unenforced Constraints

found at:  For Tech One!

Each parenthesis is the cue for a series of prolonged, elaborate embellishments and digressions on the poet's original "impression" and each functions rather like a link in a hypertext document. Monk devotes some space to a discussion of the poem's intricate structure without coming to any definite explanation of how Roussel conceived of it. My own guess, for what it is worth, is that he was trying to recreate the structure of an annotated chess game. Typically, this will contain the moves of the game itself and, within the annotations, variations and sub-variations (which often, incidentally, are set out within parentheses) relating to the moves played. These variations give the thoughts behind the moves, the moves that might have been played but weren’t. Roussel was, we know, a keen chess player and a friend of the Polish Grandmaster Xawier Tartakower, and invented a new method of checkmating a king with just bishop and knight. So he would surely have been familiar with chess literature. It seems important to note here that in chess the moves not played, the "unheard melodies", are often of greater import than the moves actually made. They may give a better indication of the underlying logic in a game.

Reviewed by Paul Kane New Impressions of Africaby Raymond Roussel

1. The Crack novels are not small, edible texts. They are, rather, a barbecue: let others write the steaks and the meatballs. Between that which is disposable and ephemeral, the Crack novels oppose the multiplicity of voices and the creation of self-ruling worlds, which is not a tranquil task. First commandment: “Thou shall love Proust above everyone else.”

2. The Crack novels are not born from certainty, which is the mother of all creative annihilations, rather from doubt, the older sister of knowledge. There is not one kind of Crack novel, but many; there is not one prophet, but several. Each writer discovers his own breed and shows it proudly. Descendants of champion fathers and grandfathers, the Crack novels take all their risks in stride. Second commandment: “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s novel.”

3. The Crack novels are ageless. They are not novels of formation, and Pellicer’s phrase reemerges: “I am old, and believe that the world was born with me.” They are not, therefore, the first works of their authors, sweet temptations of autobiography; they are not about first loves or family histories, which underline everything. If the writer’s most valued possession is the freedom to imagine, these novels go much further, demanding more from their narrators. Nothing is easier than to write about oneself; nothing is more boring than a writer’s life. Third commandment: “Thou shall honor schizophrenia and listen to other voices; let them speak through your pages.”

4. The Crack novels are not optimistic, rosy, adorable novels; they know, as much as Joseph Conrad does, that being hopeful in an artistic sense does not necessarily imply believing in the world’s kindness. Or they search for a better world, being aware that such a fiction can exist only in a place we will never know. The Crack novels are not written in the new Esperanto, which is the language standardized by television. It is the celebration of language and a new baroque: of syntax, lexicon, and the morphological game. Fourth commandment: “Thou shall not take part in a group that accepts you as a member.”


Crack Manifesto by Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla,
Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Jorge Volpi

A CITY OF FUTURELESS SCIENCE FICTION By Heriberto Yépez

In 1809 a 54-year old Kumiai Indian man converted to Christianity. During the religious ceremony, the Indian told the priest the name of the ranchería he belonged to. This man lived on what is now the western Mexican border with Schwarzenegger's California. The Indian name of this place was "Llantijuan". But the priest inscribed his book, "Tía Juana".

Misunderstanding built Tijuana. What we can call—following Lezama Lima's notion—an erotica of errors, an errotica.

Maybe a neurotica.more..

THE MAD MANIFESTO by Cynthia Kitchen

we will not go mad!

we will not eat cows!

we will not support the golden arches!

we will not ordain ourselves burgher kings!

we will not excrete the brainwashed masses!

we will not stake our future on beefed up charges!

we will not kow-tow to the meat industry!

instead:

we will become vegetables!

we will juice ourselves!

we will stick to our celery roots!

we will reek our garlic breaths into the onion-skinned mouths of our lovers!

we will pepper our thoughts with salty kisses!

we will lose ourselves in the Garden of Eden!!!

Found ataltx.com

eratio postmodern poetry issue seven, spring 2006

In the marvelous irregular, maybe I love you, or occupy a similar sound scape, subjugated to angelic over crowing exchange of body fluids; a variance built with sweaty burden of brick left behind for the bewildered, informed falsity of the deviation between dirt, beast and ourselves; dummy parchment predicaments, telegraphed to ministers on call, enforced by broadcast nets, acting out of protection acts for lunatic and distraction, from the depraved and corrupted, to the history of furniture sales, erasing all traces other than the weather, throughout the strangle insistence of meaning, beyond diagnostic fascination, deep in the abdomen, rock salt lost on the rails, perhaps a hinge misfortunate of another other hand that touches combined language for nourishment, all hangs, subjective and varible.

A Left-Handed Commencement Address by Ursula K. Le Guin

What about success?

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don't even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.more...

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

    Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

    The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-linsfirst loved livvy.more...

I became interested in bringing about progress in music, so that there would be more musical resources. I was not satisfied with the mechanical instruments in existence, of which there were many. They were all built using elementary principles and were not physically well done. I was interested in making a different kind of instrument. And I wanted, of course, to make an apparatus that would be controlled in space, exploiting electrical fields, and that would use little energy. Therefore I used electronic technology to create a musical instrument that would provide greater resources....

An Interview With Leon Theremin

Tom Beckett interviews Anny Ballardini 

FREDRIC JAMESON - GLOBALIZATION AND POLITICAL STRATEGY

Attempts to define globalization often seem little better than so many ideological appropriations—discussions not of the process itself, but of its effects, good or bad: judgements, in other words, totalizing in nature; while functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without relating them to each other. It may be more productive, then, to combine all the descriptions and to take an inventory of their ambiguities—something that means talking as much about fantasies and anxieties as about the thing itself. In what follows we will explore these five distinct levels of globalization, with a view to demonstrating their ultimate cohesion and to articulating a politics of resistance: the technological, the political, the cultural, the economic, the social, very much in that order. more...

GERALDINE MONK CELEBRATION

Intercapillary Space

can we have no water on the surface, no flat moisture, no surface tension; no zapping utopian dwellers plotting for furtherm absolution and voting opinions; each there own attempting allegiance or prayer for a user friendly light switch that boasts, clock work construct allegory; ceaseless mosquito protection endless general normal by the standard set by each character’s imagined generalized apparatus of perfection searching absorption ever-ready. this is not a legal obligation fulfilling some higher moral obligation which nations have embraced, since its earliest days of collective expansion this is the question of later perfection future same.

The Diagram 6.2

Check out The Diagram 6.2

Genocide: Language Acquisition As Slow Extermination - by Gerard Donnelly Smith

When a child acquires language that child also acquires cultural meaning, gains access to an epistemology and way to code and decode secrets, to posit and solve mysteries, to create and justly administer laws, and to a receive vision, then record and safeguard the myth.

Those who control which language is acquired or accessed, also control access to and the acquisition of the knowledge compiled by speakers of that language. If one suppresses acquisition of a native tongue, one suppresses the mental capacity of the native speaker who will be unable to function in that indigenous society because he/she cannot decipher, nor even comprehend the spoken or written word. Though the child may have a healthy and perhaps even productive life, the suppression of her/his language skills would have serious consequences for her/his mental capacity. Similarly, the suppression of the indigenous language by the dominant, conquering culture reduces the ability of the native speaker within his/her own culture: the child will have no way to access the knowledge of his/her own people. The child will be damaged because of this denial. Communicative parents, those good storytellers, those patient instructors of language, bestow not only language skills, but also communicate love, exhibit trust, provide encouragement, not only with distinctive cultural sounds, but also distinctive cultural facial expressions. The indigenous child forced to learn only the dominant culture's language suffers grievous mental harm. Grievous because the bond between parent and child, between child and grandparents, between child and ancestors, and tradition, and her/his "own" people's history is destroyed, in all probability, beyond reclaiming. more...

JOSE GARCIA VILLA - Lyric 17

I can no more hear Love’s
Voice. No more moves
The mouth of her. Birds
No more sing. Words
I speak return lonely.
Flowers I pick turn ghostly.
Fire that I burn glows
Pale. No more blows
The wind. Time tells
No more truth. Bells
Ring no more in me.
I am all alone singly.
Lonely rests my head.
—O my God! I am dead.

More poems and information on Jose Garcia Villaand more information here

Malcolm X: "The Ballot or the Bullet"

All of these are Christian Ministers -- All of these are Christian Ministers, but they don’t come to us as Christian Ministers. They come to us as fighters in some other category.

I’m a Muslim minister -- the same as they are Christian Ministers -- I’m a Muslim minister. And I don’t believe in fighting today
in any one front, but on all fronts.

In fact, I’m a black Nationalist Freedom Fighter.

Islam is my religion, but I believe my religion is my personal business. It governs my personal life, my personal morals. And my religious philosophy is personal between me and the God in whom I believe; just as the religious philosophy of these others is between them and the God in whom they believe.

And this is best this way. Were we to come out here discussing religion, we’d have too many differences from the outstart and we could never get together. So today, though Islam is my religious philosophy, my political, economic, and social philosophy is Black Nationalism. You and I -- As I say, if we bring up religion we’ll have differences; we’ll have arguments; and we’ll never be able to get together. But if we keep our religion at home, keep our religion in the closet, keep our religion between ourselves and our God, but when we come out here, we have a fight that’s common to all of us against a [sic] enemy who is common to all of us.more...

Mark Lynas - The professor's whisky

Fairbanks, Alaska—Gamblers as well as scientists take a close interest in Alaskan temperature records. Each winter the people of Nenana, a small town just south-east of Fairbanks, place bets on the exact day, hour and minute that the spring ice 'break-up' will begin on the the town's river. The tradition began when railroad engineers put down a wager of $800 in 1917; by 2000, the sum at stake had grown to $335,000, attracting punters from all over Alaska and assuring round-the-clock vigilance of the river from Nenana citizens. Records of the results provide a valuable insight into how the weather in Alaska has warmed over the past century. The average date of the spring thaw is eight days earlier than it was in the 1920s—Alaska has a week less winter. Alaskan scientists have little doubt that they are witnessing a rapid acceleration of global warming in the earth's high latitudes. Most of the state's interior, including Fairbanks, was used to seeing winter temperatures drop forty or even fifty degrees Celsius below zero. Recently, even twenty below has become rare. Professor Gunter Weller, a climatologist with the University of Alaska, remembered a New Year's Eve party in 1968, at the end of his first year in the state. 'I put a shot of very good scotch in an ice-cube tray and left it outside, it was frozen within half an hour. You wouldn't see that now, no way.' On average, he said, Alaskan winter temperatures have shot up by six degrees Celsius in the past thirty years; a warming which has also been recorded in many parts of the Canadian and Siberian Arctic. more..

Decarcerate? - By JIM HOLT

If a time traveler from the future showed up in our world today, which of our practices would strike him as most barbarous? This question makes for an excellent parlor game. When we look back at supposedly civilized societies in the past, we are amazed at how complacently they accepted such obvious evils as slavery, child labor and torture. Surely, people in centuries hence will be similarly astonished at our own moral blind spots. But what might they be? After a little reflection, you may wish to hazard a guess. Here's mine: punishment by imprisonment.

Prisons happen to be one of humanity's more recent inventions. Until a couple of hundred years ago, local jails were mainly for debtors, who were held until they could arrange to have their obligations met. In England, those convicted of crimes used to be fined or whipped or branded -- a ''T'' for thieves, a ''V'' for vagrants -- or publicly humiliated by being put in a pillory, sometimes with their ears nailed to the beams. Many crimes, even minor ones, led to the gallows. Until 1820, you could be hanged for stealing as little as five shillings' worth of goods from a shop.

It was in revulsion at the cruelty of such punishments that the modern prison was created. The United States led the way. In the early 19th century, Europeans traveled to these shores to marvel at a new institution called the ''penitentiary,'' where inmates were to be reformed by a regime of silence and hard work. For a century and a half after the creation of prisons, crime dropped steadily across Western nations, even as the severity of punishment diminished. It seemed reasonable to think that as society grew more prosperous and equitable, fewer and fewer people would have to be incarcerated. more...

Elif Shafak - Nausea

The street where I live doesn’t know it is not yet another snaky street in Istanbul but in truth some kind of a vessel. We the fortuitous passengers keep this as a secret, divulging it to no one, not even to our children. We don’t talk about it. Never have we been told about it. We just happen to know—like the ones before us did and the ones after us will some day.

At night, even in deepest sleep we listen to the splashes the street-boat unleashes as it floats on the ghostly, smelly seawater, ready to sail anytime, sail anywhere. When darkness canopies us all, we hear the fish beneath our feet gnaw the ropes fastened to myriad moorings in the mainland—a ground that encapsulates less a definite homeland than an elusive homesickness. more...

Manifesto

Lettrist provocation always serves to pass the time. Revolutionary thought is not elsewhere. We pursue our little uproar in the limited beyond of literature, and it is necessary to do better. Naturally it is to reveal ourselves that we write manifestos. Impertinence is a quite beautiful thing. But our desires are perishable and disappointing. Youth is systematic, as one says. The weeks spread themselves out in straight lines. Our encounters are by chance and our precarious contacts lose themselves behind the fragile defense of words. The earth turns as if nothing exists. To say it all, the human condition doesn't please us. We have dismissed Isou, who believes in the utility of leaving traces. All that maintains something contributes to the work of the police. Because we know that all the ideas and behaviors that already exist are insufficient. Thus, current society divides itself into lettrists and informers, of whom Andre Breton is the most notorious. There are no nihilists, there are only powerless people. Almost everything is off limits to us. The abuse [detournement] of minors and the usage of narcotics, like all of our gestures generally speaking, are pursued to surpass the void. Many of our comrades are in prison for theft. We stand against the pains inflicted upon the people who have become aware that it isn't absolutely necessary to work. We refuse discussion. Human relations must have passion, if not terror, as their foundation.


by Sarah Abouaf, Serge Berna, P.-J.Berle, Jean-L.Brau, Leibe, Midou Dahou, Guy-Ernest Debord, Linda, Francoise Lejare, Jean-Michel Mension, Eliane Papai, Gil J Wolman, Internationale lettriste #2, February 1953

Excerpt from the novel A Strange Commonplace by Gilbert Sorrentino, published by Coffee House Press

Rain

The fathers:
and their lost children on gray and hopeless Saturdays: after the puppet shows and the botanical gardens, the parks, the zoos and rowboats; after the ice-cream sodas and hamburgers, the hot fudge sundaes and roller coasters, the Yoo-hoos and Shirley Temples; after the loose change pressed into the dirty, sticky little hands, the dollar bills; after the museums and museums and museums and pony rides, the Cracker Jacks and new sneakers and toy fire engines and dolls and hair ribbons and plastic barrettes; after the thin fake smiles and the small talk with the wives’ understanding and kind and reliable new boyfriends, the sharp words about meager child support and clothes for school; after ruining their shoes in the rain, after their sodden overcoats, the dark bars where nobody knows them but where the children get their 7-Ups on the house; after the introductions to Graces or Mollies or Annes or Elaines or Lindas or Charlottes or Anybodies dressed so as to look serious, so as to look like Moms, to look like Somebodies who could be Moms, who were just like Moms, just as good as Moms; after the long nights later over whiskey and beer and worries about how nothing had gone right; after the movies, the ice-cream parlors, the diners, the melted cheese sandwiches, the pizzas, the aimless walks; after the friends who say how big the children are getting, how pretty, how smart; after the long trips back to the wives’ little apartments in Bensonhurst or Washington Heights or Bay Ridge or Marine Park or Park Slope or the Lower East Side or Sunset Park or Brighton Beach, Ozone Park, Kew Gardens, anywhere; more...


Gilbert Sorrentino in conversation with Barry Alpert

Clarence Darrow - Crime and Criminals

If I looked at jails and crimes and prisoners in the way the ordinary person does, I should not speak on this subject to you. The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not in the least believe in crime. There is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral condition of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible. more...

"Kathmandu" by Banira Giri

Kathmandu is a heater inflamed
by one hundred thousand volts;
this capital's orphan girls sit waiting,
like Sita on her pyre of fire,
ready to brand their bodies of gold,
snared by the noose of its love.


Snow-white doves fly the endless blue sky,
there's a prison in each citizen's eye,
as Rani Pokhari floods with color,
there come dark smugglers and sneaks,
fat hypocrites and backbiters,
and all are made pure.
Pipal trees, comb trees, mimosa,
kalki and juniper in rows wave their fans
at inhabitants pure and foul,
but Kathmandu is not just cool and calm,
Kathmandu is hocus-pocus too.


And isn't it also that white-wheeled Toyota
which gulps down its petrol,
never satisfied?
And isn't it also Nanicha's wine store
where young men come in swarms each day:
Gunjamans, Ram Bahadurs, heads held high,
who go home to beat their wives?
An auto's tire marks deep on the street,
green bruises covering women:
samples perhaps of each Kathmandu day.


Kathmandu makes my poor, dear son
cry out in his dreams every night;
half I understand, half I do not,
but still I wish to hear,
hemmed in and oppressed
by past attractions, repulsions,
I find that many will curse me,
I find there are few who like me:
I have come to live in Kathmandu,
but Kathmandu does not live in me.
more...

152

In its most advanced sector, concentrated capitalism orients itself towards the sale of "completely equipped" blocks of time, each one constituting a single unified commodity which integrates a number of diverse commodities. In the expanding economy of "services" and leisure, this gives rise to the formula of calculated payment in which "everything's included": spectacular environment, the collective pseudo-displacement of vacations, subscriptions to cultural consumption, and the sale of sociability itself in the form of "passionate conversations" and "meetings with personalities." This sort of spectacular commodity, which can obviously circulate only because of the increased poverty of the corresponding realities, just as obviously fits among the pilot-articles of modernized sales techniques by being payable on credit.

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy-Ernest Debord

Wayne Gilbert:  "An Allen Ginsberg Story" (Quick time audio)

Otto Rene Castillo - Satisfaction

The most beautiful thing
for those who have fought a whole life
is to come to the end and say;
we believed in people and life,
and life and the people
never let us down.

Only in this way do men become men,
women become women,
fighting day and night
for people and for life.

And when these lives come to an end
the people open their deepest rivers
and they enter those waters forever.
And so they become, distant fires, living,
creating the heart of example

The most beautiful thing
for those who have fought a whole life
is to come to the end and say;
we believed in people and life,
and life and the people
never let us down.


Castillo Archive

Review of obedience

Please check out the review of my book, obedience,Factory school, (2005) at galatea resurrects, #2 (a poetry engagement) by the talented and brilliant Chris Murray .

Announcing Jacket 29

Announcing Jacket 29

Franco Moretti - The Dialectic of Fear

The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula. In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big RKO productions in America; then in 1956-57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare. Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: 'the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.' That 'must', which for Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and {68} the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. more...

Something terribly important has been missing from discussions orbiting around the Mohammed cartoons. It's a simple point, but one whose recognition is utterly crucial to the functioning of a healthy democratic society. The avoidance of it is, I'm afraid, even by those libertarians who defend the cartoons' publication, a measure of extent to which theocracy has advanced both in the US and abroad.

What's been missing has been an acknowledgment that blasphemy isn't just something that must be tolerated. It's something that possesses a special political value of its own. Blasphemy, in short, is a good thing. It's something admirable, noble, and, yes, even respectable. Why have we forgotten this?

The Righteousness of Blasphemy
By Peter Fosl

Impeachment is Too Good for Bush By MICKEY Z.

There's talk of impeachment making the rounds these days ... and it's not just partisan hyperbole.

As Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky explain in their new book, "The Case for Impeachment," the legal argument for removing George W. Bush from office is clear, present, and urgent.

However, for those seeking peace and justice, there are two reasons why impeachment should only be judged as a means to an end:

1. Impeachment is too good for him Sure, the planet would breathe a sigh of relief should Dubya get the boot, but why let him off the hook so easily? As Lindorff and Olshansky state: "The evidence of ... constitutional transgressions, violations of federal and international law, abuse of power, and criminal negligence as chief executive ... are so blatant one might think conviction would be a foregone conclusion."


Well then, why stop there? "The call for impeachment trivializes the crimes," declares journalist Rosemarie Jackowski. "Where is the demand for war crimes trials?

though the founding glorification runs lush dangling nonexistence, a speculative utterance falls forth and retunes a full figurative fist to a speculative nonexistence existence, falls and returns a response to and from, to form a roaring sky, screaming under bush and fierce brambling beast.

maybe a speechless idiot idol, feeling the return return to the flesh, something sent through the gate, returns hollow, broke, expansive, turned from no longer mind to almost human.

returns again, no longer human, almost mind, teeming commerce, magic hands, extruded neighborhoods, space shuttle rabbit-in-the-hat.

I have never thought of myself as a “woman.” I am a human being who lives in a country in an age that allows the poor only one weapon in their duel with life, and that’s swearing. Swearing is the scream of a victim, their only normal way of speech. If they don’t swear aloud, they swear inside. There are many people out there who, after they read my book, realized what rage was brewing inside them. I am a loser, I don’t have lots of money, I don’t have power. But, I have an opportunity to express my rage and not many people have this opportunity. I didn’t want to break any rules, I didn’t even know that there were rules in literature. And this thing about how some people think only men can swear . . . Who fucking cares about them! What’s important to me is that the book is being read.

An Interview with Vedrana Rudan By Ana Lucic

U.S. history lesson: stop meddling

In the last 100 years, the U.S. has ousted the governments of at least 14 countries and forcibly intervened in dozens of others -- to what end?


THE UNITED STATES is facing a major crisis in Iran, where the clerical regime, despite its denials, is evidently embarked on an effort to develop nuclear weapons. Because American leaders say they will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran, this has led to intense speculation that the Bush administration is preparing a military attack.

History suggests, however, that such an attack would have disastrous long-term consequences. Iranians know as well as anyone how terribly wrong such foreign interventions can go.Iran was an incipient democracy in 1953, but Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh — chosen by an elected parliament and hugely popular among Iranians — angered the West by nationalizing his country's oil industry. President Eisenhower sent the CIA to depose him. The coup was successful, but it set the stage for future disaster.

The CIA placed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back on the Peacock Throne. His repressive rule led, 25 years later, to the Islamic Revolution. That revolution brought to power a clique of bitterly anti-Western mullahs who have spent the decades since working intensely, and sometimes violently, to undermine U.S. interests around the world.

Infants rest their face ticks on skeleton mothers. government poster portray effortless generalized scenarios with so called difficulties put to rest. The intended subject fails the mythological word for, “once upon a time” nothing specific and there you are, shards of glass and steel in the wind.

the tangible dark seems to come more often. garments are infected with dropping specifics. there is nothing else but reiterative mornings and days with varying permission.

Never before, when it is life that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize life.

Before speaking further about culture, I must remark that the world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient.

What is more important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.

We need to live first of all: to believe in what makes us live and that something makes us live – to believe that whatever is produced from the mysterious depths of ourselves need not forever haunt us as an exclusively digestive concern.
I mean that if it is important for us to eat first of all, it is even more important for us for us not to waste in the sole concern for eating our simple power of being hungry.

If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and ideas and signs that are their representation.


Preface to The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud

The Unvert Manifesto by Jack Spicer

1. An unvert is neither an invert or an outvert, a pervert or a convert, an introvert or a retrovert. An unvert chooses to have no place to turn.

2. One should always masturbate on street corners.

3. Unversion is the attempt to make the sexual act as rare as a rosepetal. It consists of linking the sexual with the greatest cosmic force in the universe - Nonsense, or as we prefer to call it, MERTZ.

4. Sex should be a frightening experience like a dirty joke or an angel.

5. Dirty jokes and angels should be frightening experiences.

6. An unvert must not be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or autosexual. He must be metasexual. He must enjoy going to bed with his own tears.

7. Mertz!

8. All the universe is laughing at you.

9. Poetry, painting, and cocksucking are all attempts of the unvert to make God laugh.

10. The larger the Dada, the bigger the hole.more...

The Postmodern Paradox - John Haber

Start with a poet, a tireless defender of avant-garde painting: This life, this modern life, is a hospital where each patient is obsessed with the desire to change beds. Charles Baudelaire preceded Modernism, but he did not require the gift of prophecy. It is not just his love of Edouard Manet's generation and a new French taste. No, he breathed the modern condition and its artistic form in the night air of the city.

If there is a postmodern condition, it cannot even be stated consistently much less cured. Like a right-wing fantasies of the welfare state, Postmodernism is a hospital where the beds must remain empty.

Modernism demanded one thing: make it new. If I discard it, I have to find something else, something new. And so I am modernist. If I discard the aim of making it new, then I must do something other than Modernism. But that means something new. Instead of the postmodern condition, one ought to speak of a postmodern paradox.

That Omnipotence which has called the world with all its living creatures into one animated being, especially reveals Himself in the desolation of great pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision; the sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterraneous thunders; the mist of overflowing waters, are the harbingers of destruction. Nature is not satisfied with the ordinary alternations of life and death, and the destroying angel waves over man and beast his flaming sword.

These revolutions are performed in vast cycles, which the spirit of man, limited, as it is, to a narrow circle of perception, is unable to explore. They are, however, greater terrestrial events than any of those which proceed from the discord, the distress, or the passions of nations. By annihilations they awaken new life; and when the tumult above and below the earth is past, nature is renovated, and the mind awakens from torpor and depression to the consciousness of an intellectual existence.

THE BLACK DEATH byJ. F. C. Hecker

The Sentence by Donald Barthelme

Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom-if not the bottom of this page then some other page-where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think out the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured), by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and doesn't see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and got her duds on, she won't respond, and may even become slightly angry, and say something wounding, and so the husband invests in this embrace not so much physical or emotional pressure as he might, because he doesn't want to waste anything-with this sort of feeling, then, the sentence passes through the mind more or less, and there is another way of describing the situation too, which is to say that the sentence crawls through the mind like something someone says to you while you are listening very hard to the FM radio more....

QUESTIONS

i think i

knew there were

always questions you


put us in

position to have

these questions as


our lives i

think the best

questions go away


& return with

different force with

implications a previously


unfamiliar familiarity i

cannot abide plurals

& here they


are why is

this what you

do with us


Hank Lazer at H _ N G M _ N # 4.

Edgar Allan Poe: Criticism

IT HAS been said that a good critique on a poem may be written by one who is no poet himself. This, according to your idea and mine of poetry, I feel to be false; the less poetical the critic, the less just the critique, and the converse. On this account, and because the world's good opinion as proud of your own. Another than yourself might here observe, "Shakespeare is in possession of the world's good opinion, and yet Shakespeare is the greatest of poets. It appears then that as the world judges correctly, why should you be ashamed of their favourable judgment?" The difficulty lies in the interpretation of the word "judgment" or "opinion." The opinion is the world's, truly, but it may be called theirs as a man would call a book his, having bought it; he did not write the book, but it is his; they did not originate the opinion, but it is theirs. A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet; yet the fool has never read Shakespeare. But the fool's neighbor, who is a step higher on the Andes of the mind, whose head (that is to say, his more exalted thought) is too far above the fool to be seen or understood, but whose feet (by which I mean his every-day actions) are sufficiently near to be discerned, and by means of which that superiority is ascertained, which but for them would never have been discovered; this neighbor asserts that Shakespeare is a great poet; the fool believes him, and it is henceforward his opinion. This neighbor's own opinion has, in like manner, been adopted from one above him, and so, ascendingly, to a few gifted individuals who kneel around the summit, beholding, face to face, the master spirit who stands upon the pinnacle.... more..

unable to pronounce the word penis, due to certain regulatory upstanding back of the throat functions, they build a lake in the desert, wanting to reflect and immortalize immemorial syrup mysticism and break the tongues will with speech limited virtual obedience.

a million miles from anyone taking my body through the days, wondering what all the odd fillings are?

wondering why it is so hard to breathe, as each pore simultaneously defends against and dissolves in a full functioning delusion of tourism never called into question, in an atmosphere of smothering answers made up by the pitifully hopeful and praying arbiters of style.

I have been of sound mind and body failure. I watch everyone wall themselves in and get ready for the unbelievable, unimaginable, unspeakable and unquestioned gender deity of selective speaking to deliver an uncompromising message of the undersigned, replete with regret that other than self-finding fusion that forms a separate self in others nothing is going to happen.

If there is such a mode of common being as inauthenticity, then all of History is inauthentic and action in History results in inauthenticity; authenticity reverts to individualism. Conversely, if the nature of man in to be realized at the end of Hitory, inauthenticity must be willed for itself as the very condition of historical struggle. Any doctrine of conversion runs the real risk of being an a-historicism. Any octrine of historicitiy runs the reak risk of being an amoralism.

Jean Pauls Sartre (1905 - 1980) - Truth and Existence (fragment)

Found at The Cry

Anne Waldman's (18 Sep 2001) STATEMENT & PETITION

As a member of USA societal covenants, as Buddhist, as witness and writer I would humbly urge the following to all governments and people in the world. To all those in power who have a "say" in ther matter & also to all the "little people". May all voices be heard in the aspiration and deep hope for peace. And may others articulate their hopes, fears, insights and demand a sane response to recent events in our world.

• Pray for and keep in mind those innocent US citizens recently killed as a result of terrorist attacks, but also those innocents who have died in Israel/Palestine and in other parts of the world in unwarranted wars/attacks of all kinds, caused by US "interests" as well. Consider the suffering that others outside the USA have experienced for centuries.


• Be grateful for all the brave and generous boddhisattvic activity on the part of New Yorkers, and residents of Washington, DC -- those who died serving others. And by extension, all others that serve others in times of crisis.

• Avoid any action that creates further suffering which would include the White House & Pentagon's "systematic war on terrorism" which is already in motion as we breathe. Avoid WAR at all costs. more

The Body is back: Communication in Cyberspace

We are living in a world that is loosing each day its consistency, a world which appears to play with our senses and our judgments, hiding its real nature. A world in which we can determine "what it looks like", but not "what it is." We know that everything, starting from sensorial stimuli, which transforms into mental models produces the "idea of reality," is of our invention, creation, artifice; what presents itself to our eyes as reality, is constructed owing to the interaction between external stimuli, previous cultural sedimentation, science, technology, and society. Our reality is a generated reality that shares the characteristics of the "artificial".
       
The idea of "truth" comes from the relative stability and the perseverance of the idea itself, in time. The image that is proposed to us corresponds to our expectations. Confronting the stability in our relationship with things, the problem is not in the accusation of the "non-reality" or "non-truth" of the experience, but it is in adapting our criteria to the novelties of the material substratum with which we form a tight relationship, and to develop a culture able to give these novelties a socially recognizable value. It is on the stability of this relationship between the "signifier" and the "signified" that our culture builds its own sense of reality and truth.more...

If I regard what I think is human, and perhaps I was asked precisely because I am not a human being and, therefore, have a detached view of the subject, I would say it was a preoccupation with the idea of death. The reason why people do not live alone and do not spend hours doing nothing is because they can hear time ticking by. Then they develop hobbies, which drive them mad. You may ask them, "Why do you do this?" They ultimately say, "Well, it helps kill time."

I don’t want my time dead. Time is meant to be lived! Those who are not hopeless are worried that one day their lives will end. And, if you live long enough, of course, you long for it to end. That’s been my desire in recent times. I only hope to become extinct. But before all that, you must try everything. Have children. Behave in such a way that monuments are built to you. Rule the world! Have streets and theaters named after you. Write your autobiography. These are ways to stay alive, and this seems to be a preoccupation with being human. more...

Found at Quentin Crisp

Kenneth Patchen- Let Us Have Madness

Let us have madness openly.
0 men Of my generation.
Let us follow
The footsteps of this slaughtered age:
See it trail across Time's dim land
Into the closed house of eternity
With the noise that dying has,
With the face that dead things wear--
nor ever say
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love,
Transforming day's evil darkness;
but We found extended hell and fog Upon the earth,
and within the head
A rotting bog of lean huge graves.


More at The Beat pages

Judith Skillman - A Glass Chicken

Perhaps because it is more artifice than art
we are attracted to it, hungry
for what it represents—
this chicken with a price tag.

Appetites being expensive, manners aside,
the chicken rules the shop
where fluted objets d’art proliferate.
This hen is a queen.

Never dirty, not in danger—
for there are no dogs
here. This is a life of privilege.
Poverty forgotten, the glass chicken sits in the window.

Hollow insides, made in the glory hole,
that word obscene, full of connotation.
Are we in awe as the fire rages
inside the oven where this chicken more..

Autonomous Politics and its Problems - Thinking the Passage from Social to Political - by Ezequiel Adamovsky

Autonomous Politics and its Problems
Thinking the Passage from Social to Political
by Ezequiel Adamovsky


today, a small group of people or even one person has bigger chances than ever to affect that normal course if they/he wants to. Like never before, a single person has the chance to affect the lives of millions and to cause chaos. Why is this the case today more than in the past? Let us consider an example: if a peasant in 17th century France decided not to farm his land, he would not be putting his neighbors' lives in jeopardy, but only his own. Imagine that he was angry or mad, and set out to impede his neighbors to harvest. In that case, the community would deal with him very soon; in the worst scenario, he might affect one or two of his neighbors. Fast forward to any country in the 21st century. If the three operators of the subway security system decide not to work (or to mess with the system just for fun), or if this important guy from the stock exchange lies about the prospects of AOL, they would be affecting the lives and labors of thousands of people, without those people even knowing the reason for the accident they had, or the loss of their jobs. The paradox is that the ever increasing individualism and lack of answerability before the other makes it more likely than ever before that, in fact, there will be people who will be ready to cause trouble or harm other people's lives and interests, even without good reasons. Ask the students of Columbine about that. Our mutual dependence in some respects paradoxically contrasts with our subjectivity of isolated, non-answerable individuals.

As people who live in this constitutive tension, we all feel to some extent the anxiety for the continuity of social order and of our own lives, in view of the vulnerability of both. We unconsciously know that we depend on other individuals doing the right thing; but we don't know who they are, or how to communicate with them. They are close but alien at the same time. This is the same anxiety that popular movies enact once and again in hundreds of films whose narrative structure and themes are almost the same. A person or a small group of people puts society or other people's lives in jeopardy -be it because of evilness, criminal orientation, madness, strange political reasons, you name it- until some powerful intervention restores order -a caring father, Superman, the police, the President, Charles Bronson, etc. As a movie-goer we come out with our anxiety sedated, but that comfort only lasts for some minutes…

I enjoyed thinking along these lines for several years. God is as near at hand as the trash in the gutter -- God is the trash in the gutter, to speak more precisely. But then one day a wicked thought entered my mind -- wicked because it undermined my marvelous pantheistic monism of which I was so proud. What if -- and here you will see how at least this particular SF writer gets his plots -- what if there exists a plurality of universes arranged along a sort of lateral axis, which is to say at right angles to the flow of linear time? I must admit that upon thinking this I found I had conjured up a terrific absurdity: ten thousand bodies of God arranged like so many suits hanging in some enormous closet, with God either wearing them all at once or going selectively back and forth among them, saying to himself, "I think today I'll wear the one in which Germany and Japan won World War II" and then adding, half to himself, "And tomorrow I'll wear that nice one in which Napoleon defeated the British; that's one of my best."

"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others"By Philip K. Dick

Murderous Humanitarisnism

For centuries the soldiers, priests and civil agents of imperialism, in a welter of looting, outrage and wholesale murder, have with impunity grown fat off the colored races. Now it is the turn of the demagogues, with their counterfeit liberalism.

But the proletariat of today, whether metropolitan or colonial, is no longer to be fooled by fine words as to the real end in view, which is still, as it always was, the exploitation of the greatest number for the benefit of a few slavers. Now these slavers, knowing their days to be numbered and reading the doom of their system in the world crisis, fall back on a gospel of mercy, whereas in reality they rely more than ever on their traditional methods of slaughter to enforce their tyranny. No great penetration is required to read between the lines of the news, whether in print or on the screen: punitive expeditions, Blacks lynched in America, the white scourge devastating town and country in our parliamentary kingdoms and bourgeois republics.

by the Surrealist Group of France [1932] (more..)

Sylvia Legris - Dog-star on the brain

Barometric saraband: triple-time dance of the thermometer, heat palpitations.

You fumble for meaning in sweat & inevitability; damp sheets, inexhaustible sheep & sleep is a backwards counting of cloven-hoofed creatures & mistakes. (Beguile the night with a litany of un-shuteye woes & weather-done-wrong-bys . . . confess confess confess . . .)

Drought-resignation (litmus-inertia). A spin spin spin cycle of thermal blankets & hot wash without water (every faucette tapped-dry and misspelled out of the picture). A blight on the cursed calendar! A curse on those out-of-this-world dogs!

more...

"One fine day in the middle of the night" (Journal Versions)

One fine day in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys* got up to fight, [*or men]

Back to back they faced each other,

Drew their swords and shot each other,


One was blind and the other couldn't, see

So they chose a dummy for a referee.

A blind man went to see fair play,

A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"


A paralysed donkey passing by,

Kicked the blind man in the eye,

Knocked him through a nine inch wall,

Into a dry ditch and drowned them all, more...

A playful museum - Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley

In the late 1920s, Georges Bataille - described as "Bataille the impossible" by his friend Michel Leiris - represented an intellectual opposition to the surrealist movement led by André Breton, which attracted many of the best non-conformist poets, artists and writers of the age. He was a scholar, a pornographer, a numismatist (specialist in the study of coins and medals), a social critic and an idiosyncratic philosopher - but Bataille's most visible contribution to contemporary thought was in the form of the review Documents, which ran for 15 issues from 1929 to 1930.


Conceived as a "war machine against received ideas", Documents drew in several dissident surrealists such as Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert Desnos and André Masson. As, in his own words, surrealism's "old enemy from within", Bataille was uncompromising in his disdain for art as a panacea and a substitute for human experience, his problem remaining "the place that surrealism gave to poetry and painting: it placed the work before being".

dependent on title deniability

dependent on what system secures what system

whose metaphysics speaks at lunch for what interested parties

dependent on who snaps whose gendered fingers

screams the loudest

incorporates what international code with internationally recognized logos

shifts history to application

plays father knows best without genetic connective tissue

employs universals without ownership

deploys fills in the blank dream definition for patriotic employment

for something that works well for the us of us, defined by us, defined by fill in the blank static metaphor that shuts down the power of irony, knows a secret, dies and gets a thing renamed a thing with a name.

Audre Lorde on the Erotic

The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. . . .

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need--the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel. more..

Bodies not in pain, who cannot physically feel the suffering, often stop at that imaginative chasm between them and the body in pain, unable to make the projective leap of empathy. For those bodies only "hearing about pain," suffering remains alien, opaque, closed to epistemological inquiry--to wit, clinically, scientifically unconfirmed. " more..


"AN ELEMENT OF BLANK": ON PAIN AND EXPERIMENTATION by Cynthia Hogue
and poems by:here and here

Liquid Grammar, Liquid Style

On the East-Asian Way of Using English or Reflections on the "Linguistic Air-Guitar"
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein


1. At Full Love With Vivian
The Western visitor of East Asia marvels at English expressions that he encounters in advertisements, in magazines, on T-Shirts, and elsewhere that seem to come "out of another world." Single words and short adjective-loaded English sentences, rarely longer than five words, suggest something like the invention of a new language. In Japan and in Korea this phenomenon has been thriving for decades; in China it is more recent but developing along the same lines.

The use of English in East Asia is linked to a certain part of East-Asian social history. "Japano-English" for example, is neither "real" English nor Japanese but symbolizes, within the domain of linguistics, the co-existence of two cultural spheres. In Japan, after the mid-1880s, an earlier uncritical and unsystematic acceptance of things Western gradually gave way to the view that Japanese and Western culture can exist side-by-side. From then on the question was: how can East Asia incorporate the West without being culturally overwhelmed by it?

with a thousand pens ready to suggest what one should do, and what effects it will have.

reminding myself all ends with what effects it will have.

reminding myself all ends with what can be named and financed, so why not let my bones be picked by the ants.

reminding myself I would do anything to not remember who I resemble, I would do anything to not resemble who I resemble, to not resemble the resembled

reminding my self I would do anything to not belong to a future human potential workshop, supported by a cast of thousands begging for all thing mundane sanity brings, in general over come by lack of suicidal tendencies.

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting.

Life Without Principle By Henry David Thoreau

David White reviews You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir by Wole Soyinka

Politically engaged young writers are supposed to mellow when they grow old. With experience and recognition, you somehow expect them to become more settled in their chosen craft, less fired-up, more removed from the fray. But not Wole Soyinka. Twenty years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African to do so, he has pitched himself back into the seething politics of Nigeria, “the place I never should have left”. Age, exile and international acclaim have only whetted his desire for a direct part in events.

Sorry Doesn't Fix It - Robert Glück

The fish bowl is quick and alive, like a fountain in the living room. When it was time to choose, Trent rejected the brilliant fish darting from one side of the tank to the other. He pointed to a dun lionhead that lumbered peaceful as a blimp. The clerk said, "Her?" Her ocher splotch and muted browns matched the castle. As an afterthought, Trent chose a gold koi to honor tradition and to own a bauble. Her fins were golden scarves.

Daryl said, "Let's name them."

"They're Francie and Cleo," Trent replied as though merely reminding him. more...

Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the presence," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.

Living in the now also fits with the fact that the Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: "Everything is the same, things always are." The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales -- actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art.

Living without Numbers or TimeBRAZIL'S PIRAHÃ TRIBE, By Rafaela von Bredow

in the general conservative cast, over come by lack of suicidal tendencies, in the worried beyond reason shaking bush invasion of reptiles, hotheaded new agers paint possible minds dirtier than can be produced in a real whereabouts nonlocation location, crumbling in darkness, with a lack of place only things vaule.

Kevin Killian - from ACTION KYLIE

GOOD LIKE THAT
 
Work is a disaster

Treacle drips from the cherry tree beyond my window pane

slow fumes of treacle

 
My little nephew in the Persian Gulf says

War is a disaster, my heart is beating faster

Slick in a white uniform, his head shaved, the top of his head a white ball

 
Oh! Nicole Bush, work is a disaster, I needed that Xanax

just to get me through the day of new job for internet

start-up, I called my own number saying, I am doctor Kevin Killian

 
Please give me white tablet in Lucky Nineteen, my uniform

as the nightmare begins in nation, starts up sharp DVD click

I’m listening, glistening, late for the disaster

 
And driving to prescription

My mom will have conniptions

I’m good like that

I can speak for US Navy, and my boys will come and save me

Sans souci, but I need to get my mouth round that Xanax

it helps me with my panics

It’s good like that

The news is like a hairline

receding on the airline more...

Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt - By Umberto Eco

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.more...

Stacy Szymaszek

Kate Greenstreet's interview of Stacy Szymaszek at kickingwind.com

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
"Of course I do! And it troubles me how many poets don't think it can (an attitude unique to this country). Words are powerful. Of all the arts, I think poetry makes people the most uncomfortable and I think poetry is the most dangerous to authoritarianism. We need to speak to each other in everyday life, we employ words, for the most part, in a syntactically prescribed order. We read signs, we turn on the TV, our politicians talk to us, it's all propaganda, emotion is commodified and consumed. The poet is in the perfect postion to upset the  linguistic expectation of our society. I agree with George Lakoff's belief that the Republicans keep winning because of their ability to control the language. more..

“This Book Will Change Your Life” - The reckless art of book blurbing

By Andre Mayer 


Used to be, the most compelling words of any given book were found between the covers. But lately, I find myself increasingly distracted by the words on the jacket.

CLAUDIA EMERSON - Possessions

I sent you a list of what I wanted, and you boxed it up carelessly, as though for the backs of strangers, or for the fire, the way you might

have handled a dead woman's possessions—when you could no longer bear to touch them, the clothes still fragrant, worn, still that reminiscent

of the body. Or perhaps your lover packed the many boxes herself, released from secret into fury, that sick of the scent of me
in the bed, that wary of her face caught in my mirror—something I said I didn't want, where I would not see myself again.  

more poems by CLAUDIA EMERSON

AN INTERVIEW WITH CLAUDIA EMERSON

I'm moved - Eileen Myles

a squiggle of a river

becomes a road

in a play a boy

might walk

around a lot

and a woman

might be still.

Something in the water

might look like

brains

when the boy's

just sitting

there being

young; day

the moment might oc-

cur in memory

sentiment

I know musicians

know certain

chords do this

or that

we're a bunch

of turtlesmore..

I think that in most ways the university as we now know it is already dead. But the present university system has a nervous system like a dinosaur -- when you chop off the tail it takes awhile for the head to realize that something's gone wrong. In 1999, through electronic media such as the Web, a great deal of information is available through other sources than books. Universities can go on pretending for a long time that they are still the major sources of knowledge in our culture because in a sense they are the final arbiters of what the contents of books mean - even though most people are getting their information from somewhere else, and assigning their own meanings to what they read and see. To riff on Bill Gibson, the street finds its own uses for meaning. In the next millennium, universities will become credentialing establishments, rather than privileged sources of knowledge, to a greater degree than they already are. This leaves us with the question of how long can universities survive in that fashion. And I think the answer is that they can maintain as long as industry is willing to put up with it. Companies will start hiring people with requisite skills whether or not they possess any particular credentials. That approach works at the inception of new skill sets and for a while afterward, because a manager class -- that is, people dedicated to management skills who don't themselves possess the highly honed technical skills to do the job well -- hasn't yet emerged. Eventually all of the people who apply for all of the jobs will be indifferently credentialed, and a manager class will be in place. And then there will no longer be anybody at the mid or high corporate level who can quickly tell whether an applicant is skilled or not, and they will get back to the issue of credentialing and will have to reinvent it. But all the time that that's going on, the university system and its method of credentialing will still exist, and there will still be traditional businesses that operate on the basis of those credentials and in no other way. I doubt that the old credentialing methods will die off in all areas of expertise, because, for instance, corporations will always need MBAs and MBAs come into existence through traditional degrees in traditional universities whose methods are well understood by managers already in place.

Interview with Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy) Stone

j u s t i n b u r n s i d e - The Origins of Smoke

1.

A Crow’s foot rests on a cracked paint sill,

snapped clean at the hip.

The faint light of evening consumed with its own dying—

lays itself over the foot, whose claws point into the room.


more atAlice Blue winter 06