4/29/03

Call a brutalist what it is and watch it go bananas.
For dégringoler, these polygons still defer closing, and under them, a plain-surfaced table of multiplication advances with the floor and then this estrangement, this account in particular that we meet with the haste of first-person observation, eyes closed, concentrating with the slow mechanisms which deceive us by tightening together the nervous slope of the packed goods, plus photocopied time.

In fear of dégringoler these polygons, which defer to close the still-normal lime- and pit-surfaced tables of progress, increase the floor and estrangement within this detail of accounts which we make in haste to form in observation with the eyes which are closed with the slow units which mislead us, as if they tighten together the nervous rise of the packed goods and photocopied time.

For more dégringoler these polygons postpone the locking among them a flat course caliber of the multiplication, advance in panic, lime and smear this special narration, which we made hastily, in order with the observation to make eyes with those stationed at the slow mechanisms, who deceive to press us into being nervous, slope the packed up goods, together with photocopied time.

More when dégringoler than this polygon, it postpones to stop making an argument for the smoothed course diameter in advance of the Earth multiplication and the other points in this special narrative, with which we found them so very precipitated and ordered on the table and within the commentary that one will become, eyes, those in the slow mechanisms, that if they were deceived close in exerting on themselves such huge pressure that in the packed nervous inclination of the above joints merchandise was photocopied.

Still more, for dégringoler, these scared polygons won't close while under them, a plain-surfaced table of multiplication advances with the floor and then there's this estrangement, this account in particular that we filed in haste but filled with observations made with our eyes closed, along with the slow mechanisms which deceive us in tightening the nervous slope of the packed goods together with photocopied time.

Fearing dégringoler these polygons defer to fold up the conventionally antiqued-surfaced tables of progress built up from the floor, a sort of estrangement within which report details come in too quickly to form sound observations with the eyes shut while there are these slow units, which mislead us, if they tighten together the nervous rise of the packed goods and photocopied time.

Freaked more when dégringoler than this polygon, some uncalibered units postpone any advance of the Earth's multiplying and all points of this field report special -- which was pulled together fast, along with those others who ordered it -- take place inside our commentary to transform through the eyes still others holding discs for a few mechanisms of a valve, so they then, if stopped or deceived by using themselves in the press to say more about the packed nervous inclination of the above-mentioned goods, could be closed off and photocopied at the same time.

4/28/03

Some months, along with some parts of months, take on a distance that's greater than others. I clicked on Gary's blog just now and see his last post was Wed., April 23. I also went to Tim Yu's blog and found what he was blogging today is dated April 28. It seems like a month of time between the 23rd and 28th this April. I won't feel this way in July. The time passing between July 23 and July 28 will feel like about 5 days of ridiculous weather, too hot, too wet, ozone warnings, things of that sort. But the time, I can almost count on it, will be moving the way five summer days move. But April, this April anyway, moves so darn fast and then so slowly, I can't figure how many days there have been between Tim's blog today and Gary's blog on the 23rd. I know Tim has posted 10 times to his blog while Gary is waiting out these last five days for a new set of torqued sentences on some huge specialty, prompted by, and perhaps deflecting, an over-the-top fan letter or an insulting aside on some other blog. Frankly, I'd like to see Alan Sondheim blog some of his daily output, and kick things off by telling us why he doesn't have time to hang with old new friends like Gary. This could trigger a series of miscues and elisions firing back and forth on Gary's and Alan's blogs, resulting in a textual squiggle that only Tim might care to suss out to anyone's satisfaction and ready agreement. Gary doesn't have time to hang, tho, waiting for his new set of sentences, and more crucial, Gary is weighed down now (along with his sweet friend for life, Nada) trying to finish the last issue of the season of the Poetry Project Newsletter. More specific, Gary is researching a universe of blogs for a round-up (my terminology) of what interests him at the moment. So Alan's first forays could go unresponded to, and this in turn might motivate new ways for Alan to exhort Gary to get blogging. Or maybe not. So much time passes between the end of winter and the beginning of summer, one can forget about other people, their blogs and one's own. Extra blankets on the 23rd. Windows wide open on the eve of the 28th. It's been so fast and darn slow, too. I sense Tim has been doing a lot of hanging, with a profitable visit to SPD, fooling online with Eileen, and, in the course of some blog research of his own, getting just a little bit peeved at the RS. Peeved is my shorthand. Tim has already expressed it in stylish prose. I like it when prose sentences are understandable, even if they are a little roundabout. Prose like Tim's reminds me of plain chant. It's so much nicer to try to be understood than to party and beg someone's pardon the next day.

4/25/03

To get to your point, 9.5, "Jack: I couldn't tell you... No direct psychic hits or details forthcoming on when and where." This is because I write from a place so dark and dangerous, it's suicidal to light up my modem until I'm sure Rupert is strapped into the waterbed and has entered 2nd-level REM. All he lets me eat is his pectin leftovers. It's really awful.
Gordon2 asks about Ashbery's The Poems, which becomes "The Poems" when included in TCO? I'd like to know. Meantime, have you seen Three Madrigals?
O cravo, today's word in Portuguese = carnation and harpsichord!
I'm glad so many others are keeping track of the varietals of blog. Me too, Steve says. Maybe it's time to take our names off the 'posted' anchors, better to capture the medieval anonymity of the 'seance.'
Blospot [sic heh heh] is making blogging tough today. It's throwing out pages of junk before it's posted.
When I gardened indoors exclusively, I'd just throw out the dried out hunchback.
Renewal deferred. The one rhododendron in the garden, one I've been watering, feeding, teasing back from piss and indenture for two years, is the only shrub burned by wind and snow this winter. There it is sitting sick as lap dog in Seacacus under a big pine, once in pride of position, now emptying the corner between the pine and a string of weedy forsythia. Spotted half-green leaves and under these curled brown ones, gray and brown like a germ-bearing, worn blanket pulled over its head, "I'm feeling blotto, ok?" The guy at the nursery recommends sticking with it, leaving it alone. "It won't blossom this year, but after the dried-up buds fall off, new leaves will take over and it will start to push out new buds." This is why I am not a nature poet.
Healing, starling-sighting, nearly trance-induced, Drew is renewed! Writing on a trio of "Coltrany sounding twists and turns."

4/23/03

Sobering info from Heriberto Yepez on a US company called Choice Point illegally buying the Mexican Republic's electoral database. Scroll to his entries for 4/22 and find, in English, BIG BROTHER GOES MEXICAN. (No archive 'anchor' to point to.) Great to be reading Heriberto again in English and Spanish!

4/22/03

Drudge & Ceravalo. Some really well informed people are saying the green lake is awake. All the other boys have gone in according to my sources. All the powers are abuzz. They are tin waves. You heard it here first, I was just going in but lost my pen.
Had a long talk over the phone with good Mr. Nick. He's got some soundly hunaministic theories about what all of us are doing with our blogs. Building an alternative medium to bring down (maybe he means bring down a notch or two??) the massive media, CNN, The Times, et al. Seancing among ourselves on what we're intuiting from/about our environs. And since he's a therapist, Nick sees all of the blogging as a compensatory support system. I think he's right about that one. I'm amazed how quickly, as a reader, I can get engaged in people's ideas, people I hadn't known only a few weeks or even a few days ago! Julia! And if I weren't writing myself, I'm not sure I'd be reading blogs as much I am now. So this is a reading and writing process matter, or it can be, in which we can keep journals, compose apercu, even go ballistic and let this go exposed in a semi-public (aka semi-private) way. I also see blogspot as one more transactional medium that can lead to and/or reinforce other kinds of interactions, face to face, over the phone, etc. Only, come to think of it, even taking into account transactions, blah, this is fundamentally a writer's medium with a public surrond (no escape!) in which performative points somehow add up.
Congrats, then, Mr. Anselm!

And thanks Mr. Drudge for keeping so alert.

4/19/03


4/18/03

I've tried several times to write a reasonably acceptable poem about feet & the holy spirit. Now in a fantastically undiscussed (I think) chapbook, Propinquity, Jen Coleman gets away with this:

I had a dream to pull off

my shoes. My biblical bare feet were white and fat babies.
Lover patted my soles and struck them, bare feet

are a sign of trouble.
[...]

There's plenty more about birds, fish, and if you're hooked on lists of free agent wisdom, look at this.

The dirt holds eight immutable truths:

1) the give in the ground is a small gift
4) a dirty sole is a blessed shame
7) anyone who sets off running will learn how to run in comfort
5) when the sky falls arches can't save you
6) children who play unshod learn balance
8) the lower extremity is inherently durable.


Point 6) is confirmed by the big proportion of Brazilian soccer stars who grew up in favelas. But, that's beside the point. Propinquity, with handsome graphics by Coleman, too. 2002. Babyself Press. There's an e-mail address. coleman@ed.org.

Retraction. I would be in a four-star moment were I 'assigned' to Sheila Murphy or Mary Rising Higgins. They live in AZ.

And why not try some of these?

4/17/03

There is nothing in AZ to be assigned to.
I join Gary in feeling bad about the contretemps between Nada and David. And maybe I shouldn't stick my blog nose in this, but in the hope of clearing the air of misprocedures perceived by one or the other, I'll say this. a) Nada initiated the exchange, which she now wants to cut off, asking for comments on V. Imp. David seemed gallant, I thought, in at least attempting to respond. b) David didn't get very far with substantial critique. He started circling Nada's book by asserting his ambivalence toward Gary's How To Proceed text, characterizing some of it as "satires [that] seemed to try to work as faulty satires." Here's what David said next:

The same danger I see in Nada Gordon's work. By titling her book V. Imp, in which she begins a poem with the self-quoting epitaph [sic] "I have an exaggerated sense of my own unimportance," she risks doing just that, which is to say the opposite -- not mocking her own self-importance but bolstering it. The feeling I get is of trying to prove one's own lack of pretentiousness and sincerity (as if the two were the same). Not a surprising tendency given her admiration for Bernstein, who achieves a new level of pretension by trying undermine [sic] the unitary lyric voice, normative syntax -- those things that supposedly contribute to the reification of subjectivity and self.

Over the last few days David and Nada have been skirmishing over odd things. The last few entries in both their blogs have been defensive, perhaps understandably so. I confess that I initially sided with Nada, and had attempted, obliquely, I admit, to suggest David read beyond the epigram before drawing conclusions. Now, I want to stay on both Nada and David's side, and, you know, support both your efforts to kick ass poetically, just as long as it's not each other's.
Flarf doesn't kill. It's people with flarf that kill.
Heather in Heatbriar.
Owwp, sorry. That should be with an exclam !
Renaming: how about Hiss Davey?

4/16/03

Why is theory bossy when applied to poems?
flarf = loot
Sorry to burp this up, but gibberish over Iraq and sticking it to Syria, what the heck, it's time for prayer.

4/14/03

Donald Judd is slier than Ray DiPalma, an apprentice of Judd's, of sorts. Why? Partially, it's the media of Judd's choosing. Judd's wooden and metal contructs contain all those surrealist impulses that ooze out of DiPalma. Also, it's just great when you can get others to execute your designs.
I'm a member of the take-away school. Mean something and take it away.
A Winter Magazine is answering machines in a tied-up sack.

It's very jaded, glossy and slipstream.
Looks like Freaky If You Got This Far is on the list. Writing on this today, this week. Will post when I have 'collected' my ideas, along with some other books by Card, Coleman, Mirakove, Shaw, Elliot.

Read No Further

Medicare Caught Up In Politics.

Unions Warn That Members Be Cautious.

Tax Inquiries Fall as Cheating Increases.

Sister Nicole Fights the Good Fight as Financier.

How 3 Weeks of War in Iraq Looked From the Oval Office.

Theme Park In Florida Is Nothing But a Memory.
Right after I pay my taxes, I'm coming to Macy's to meet Rocco Dispirito (featured at the top of A6 in the Times). Get some of his spice for just trying on a pair of shoes*

*while supplies last!
"He's not totally emotionally turned down, or he wouldn't be able to touch people."

-- Kelly Lively
Epi Questions

Are there epitaphs in postmodernist epigraphy? To?

My mind is filled with epithets thinkin of you. There's not a question.

You are the epitome of the epizoic. How about me?

Aren't you the last person I'd call an epigone?

Although, sometimes your bloggin sounds straight out of the episcopate. Are you wearin your epidote halter, Heather?

No kiddin, isn't blogspot an epiblast?

Sometimes your thought wanders from from the epicurean, no?

No shit, you are epic. How about me?

I think it's a more constructive maneuver to read and comment on what's beyond epigram.

(Blogging is epigrams.)
SPEECH OF BARRICADING DRUMS, song of drums barricading.
The steamroller rumbles
a second
Iliad
into the torn
pavement,

sand-bordered
the old images
startle themselves in the gutter,

the dying warriors shed blood like oil
in silver puddles, on the road-
side, death-rattle,

Troy, the dust-crowned,
understands.


-- Paul Celan
[trans. by Katherine Washburn & Margret Guillemin]

4/11/03

What's perfection in the vomer? I'll trade you my cheese sandwich. The obelisk slanting in the Firth? Who's the guy in front of your plan? I think he 'sees urban injustice differently' instead of those vox peripheries, our lost episodes, your lullabies. Feather delivery, I'm flying! And you're a debut Spinoza. He's a feed leaving a showcase. Who is he?
We have a word up in these parts. Pisser.
On the other hand it's micturating.
It's raining on my organized public procession.
Micturition, please.
All that is required is $4 million. And a zip disk.

This looks good serious.
I propose oxyspore. For the x and the y finding their sealegs.
Why do they call it an oospore?
Taxonomy = P=O+W*E=R
Let me be clear. I need a wine to go with pesto. A morning wine.
I've been humiliated enough as the only male put on Jimmy's smoochiepoo list. I pray fervently to my beanie mobile it never happen again.
Aye, which wine, Eileen?
Is there a time in the morning it's ok to wolf linguini pesto?

a) 11:50
b) after 5
xi) 12~~3:30
2) anytime if it's takeout

Anyway, does it make sense if 'your every song' is in B-flat minor?
Adjunctivity?

4/10/03

Adjunctship.
Imprisioning refinement. Example?

4/9/03

Listening to Raveonettes.
Shrewd grandstanding.
The sleeping baby precept: no credit to phlegmatics.
Or This?

I'm listening to !!! (powpowpow) as I write.

Choosing a word, like deciding what to listen to, is a significant event entailing parallel yet defunct phenomena that cannot be measured but can be hypothesized within the quantum construct. Choosing ten words or choosing ten albums to spin, say, creates an entire system of quanta, happenstance survivors plucked out of a number of now-dead parallel events. "When a word is selected as a 'vivid detail,' Empson insists, "a reader may suspect alternative reasons why it has been selected." You'd think a given detail would have to be spinning either as two or more meanings resolved into one or as two unconnected meanings. But theory tells us that if you choose a detail with alternative meanings that clarify your state of mind, it will enter into a lucky confusion, where you discover your idea in the act of writing, an idea that possesses both a) two or more meanings as well as b) two meanings that are unconnected. Then, according to the quantum metaphor, a single spinning detail can represent separate entities and even oppositions, such as 0 v. 1 or raspberry v. vanilla, at the same time. A row of ten contradictory or irrelevant meanings in which the reader is forced to invent interpretations can therefore contain not just one number from 0 to 1,023 or any flavor ranging from raspberry through vanilla, but all of these numbers and flavors simultaneously. When you find full contradiction in a quantum system, the lucky confusion collapses, and one number or flavor pops out at random; the rest are destroyed.

This has been a translation.

4/8/03

Does This Help?

The cosmos is quanta in which parallel events are conjectured. Since poets and other languaging folk are situated in physical space and time, they are both quanta and creatures who transact with quantum systems to varying degrees of achievement and pleasure. The language part is significant, because language is the means to systematize.

For example, Jim Holt and William Empson together illustrate transactions that I want to model as phenomena of a quantum system. Holt writes reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the Egghead column for Slate.com. A set of his sentences for the NYT Book Review is marked B, below. Turning to William Empson's seven types of ambiguity, summarized in A, below, I can propose my contradictory or even irrelevant understanding of Holt's text, by suggesting redefinitions of certain terms used by Holt, terms such as 'atom' and 'counterclockwise.'

The A text, then, serves as seven redefinitions of terms within the B text. The redefinitions are paraphrases from Empson's summaries of the first seven chapters in 7 Types of Ambiguity. Quotations are from Empson.

A

Atom = first-type ambiguity in which "a detail is effective in several ways at once."

Clockwise = second-type ambiguity, two or more meanings resolved into one.

Counterclockwise = third-type, in which there are two unconnected meanings.

A pulse of light of the right duration = fourth-type, alternative meanings clarifying author's complicated state of mind.

Superposition = fifth-type, lucky confusion: "the author is discovering his [sic] idea in the act of writing."

A row of 10 = sixth-type, contradictory or irrelevant ambiguity in which "the reader is forced to invent interpretations."

Measure = seventh, full contradiction, "division in the author's mind."

B

"An atom," Jim Holt writes, "can spin like a top. You'd think a given atom would have to be spinning either clockwise or counterclockwise. But quantum theory tells us that if you hit an atom with a pulse of light of the right duration, it will enter a 'superposition' in which it is doing both. [...] Then a single spinning atom can represent 0 and 1 at the same time. A row of 10 such quantum bits, or 'qubits,' can therefore be made to store not just one number from 0 to 1,023, but all of these numbers simultaneously. [...] When you try to measure a quantum system, the superposition collapses, and one of the answers pops out at random; the rest are destroyed."

4/6/03

Hearts are being won.

4/4/03

A genuine wave you get from people.
Funnelling down.
Tone down the ending.
Some immediate credibility.
Let's erase small losses.

4/2/03

Today I decided to join a study group for people with small foreheads. This is so. Just before dialing the number, however, I started thinking about beams of light, how each one can be considered rare and mysterious, a physical curiosity itself, a cross between Black Rain and Rattle and Hum. It's frequently like this. Higher Meaning | Religion | Politics are silly stuff. Whereas thinking about antiprotons is like waiting for your forehead to be taken down, thumbed through and stared at by speed. Disassociative identity fills one's human needs, but yields only a few clues about home, robots, and stimulant-induced terror. Grandiose, hoity-toity, pompous, pretentious, puffy, I would think I'm curing cancer or something when, in reality, you are nothing more than welcome! Where did the passion end? Search on This Topic: Wittgenstein mentions people. So too The World of Normal Boys transcends its genre with understanding of the painter's task. I think it's the way people talk. These are the touchstones. We're writing to appeal to the people in the free CD burning scam. These people!
Specimen

WE HAVE
A MESSAGE. ... whole. Refrain. We have
a message, a
message from
The Gimp, O do not reject Him and forfeit your soul! The Savior ...

Community Page. We have
setup a
special area for enthusiasts of Clematis
growing to chat and leave messages. All you have
to do is ...

Should we have
a message
session bounded with INVITE/BYE? Useful for chat –
reuses find-me. Doesn’t necessarily have
to be. ...

Slide 3 of 17.

We Have a
Message Board. ... This time, that's a
message board. Now we have
our own personal
rec.music.movies--so let's get in there and populate it with crazies! ...

a
destination: ...

oo MESSAGE
BOARD! WE HAVE
A MESSAGE
BOARD!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA! ... WE HAVE
A MESSAGE
BOARD!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA! ^-^ Just felt like saying that! ...

Contact E-mail or Phone. Links. Home. We Have Lupus.

4/1/03


Battle for control.
You might like to check out today's posts from Tim Yu and Kasey Mohammad -- overlapping concerns, honed prose, not quite in alignment.
Spiritual Requisites

The Analects are tantamount to sex medicine.
Spiritual terms drift about to accelerate the morbidity of childhood.
The new poor fill the akashic record written in etheric realms of energy/form.
Piles of cash prolong the antithesis of selfish teachings.
Kuwait City controls byproducts of our will.
The paranoid system connects to a covenant with fashion and death.
Males of many species allow fluids to pass.
Cold air masses gather the principal Hebrew words for "confounded."
False positives swarm among companions in crime.
Too little money conceals the true biblical code.
Mandibular chemicals stir the innocence and sense of belonging we had in evil.
Detachment laments Latifa.
The sex trade lays out its male lineage.
Detachment meets consciousness beyond the scope of amphetamines.
The males in my family prompt a discussion that imparts nonsensical bewildering repetition of ancient imprudence to induce "sleeping consciousness" and ignorance.
Spiritual terms are regulated by Satan.
An empty ocean remembers nothing of the transparent sensory esotericists.
Bags and bags of money prolong one's spirit in infinite battle with consciousness.
Bioterror is followed by an attitude.
Vault-loads of silver and gold grant no one international disapproval.
Spirit pursues you due north of Slave Lake.
Children are disempowering.
Big losses of money revive a most dangerous potential among the doctors for peace.
Aliens come to notice what's going on around you.
The learner should sin, part of a recovery "permission."
Murder holds to manly virtue, which brings us closer to the sex kitty within.
China's philosophers are not unique in carrying on the tradition I transmit.
The equipment phase of delusion operates a toys for tots program all on its own.
A ray of hope here is slightly different from what the term means for the future of English.
Millions of dollars take the weight off your feet, the antidote to cranial decay.
Confucius says if you focus on serving others that rulers and even 'ritual' still hold value.
Paranoia gropes for being cool and uninvolved on the emotional level.
Study the past, if you would divine Zoro.
Celebrity stalkers are in the grips of mistaken identity, immune to desire with intimacy.
When brought to the ritual of marriage, say I don't know.
Great good fortune is bored by a sudden vision.
Not even the Sioux made Favored Nation status.