Watching a lightning storm over the Park
Slope rooftops. One jagged Zeus-spear, behind
an apartment house straight back (southwest),
and the rest a trembling light-show
over the darkened horizon.

The Secret Life of
Bemsha Swing {click here}

Blogs first,
(don't miss This one {click here})
then on with the
rest of the day.
**
Even In A Dark Time {click here} Springtime takes a bow

notebook (poem fragment, with crossed out part restored)
circa 1986

Relief

Gradually, the pointy spikes of time begin to
Smooth a bit, but you never get fully used to
The world assuming a strange disguise in the
face of any- even the most realistic- expectations.
In a face shines infinite understanding,
total sensitivity to every nuance of my frustration.
Clearly, any passing through would demand
The lightest of steps. In the middle of a hot
July afternoon, a dog takes a leak, looking
Around in an embarassed kind of way. For a moment,
even the grandest dilemma is assured the
possibility of relief, because of a dog's expression.
But the day continues, my preoccupations continue
The moon gradually becomes full. And you can stay,
but I'm looking forward to visiting the bakery.
[Now things are beginning to get less eerie,
in spite of the fact that nothing replaces
money. Nothing replaces anything, Jack
Oh, you know what I mean]

On Saturday, May 22nd, at 4:00 p.m., Green Integer
will be hosting a party to celebrate Douglas
Messerli's being awarded the Chevalier des Artes &
Lettres from the French government.
This is a prestigious award, given to people from
other countries who have significantly contributed to
French culture and its reception around the world.
The award will be given to Douglas at the ceremony by
French Cultural Attache, Laurent Deveze.

Green Integer is located at 6022 Wilshire Boulevard,
Suite 200A in Los Angeles across from the LA Country
Museum of Art.

Dear All:

I am writing to call your attention to a sharp review of Ronald
Johnson's The Shrubberies (Flood Editions, 2001) by Peter Campion in
the latest issue of Poetry Magazine (May 2004). It concludes:

"In the mid-nineties, in ill health and no longer able to afford the
San Francisco Bay area, where he had lived for twenty-five years,
Johnson returned to his native Kansas. O'Leary tells us that 'he
lived in Topeka with his father, and took a job as a handyman,
gardener, and occasional cook at Ward-Meade, a historic park in
town.' It's hard to read this without feeling a sense of injustice.
The disgrace appears even worse if one notices how much mainstream
marginality and cutting-edge dullness gets rewarded these days. But
there's also something wrong about using Johnson as a stick with
which to beat other poets. His work has no time for pettiness;
instead, rippling with curious exactitude, it tests our capacity for
intellectual gusto. This poet was what people in the landscaping
business call 'a gardener's gardener.' While pruning overgrowth and
imprecision, he allowed his material to take its own course, to
surprise and engage the reader's tactile imagination. Many won't have
time for the attentiveness this kind of writing requires. For those
who do, The Shrubberies will afford a difficult but enduring
pleasure" (130).

Best Wishes,
Devin Johnston


NOTE: John Taggart's PASTORELLES has just been released!
Watch for Tom Pickard's THE DARK MONTHS OF MAY in September.


--
Flood Editions
www.floodeditions.com
PO Box 3865
Chicago IL 60654-0865

Do you really think the President of the United States is dumb? The short answer is yes...
The Misunderestimated Man {click here}
**
Bushism Sampler
"In my judgment, when the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences."
The Complete Bushisms (updated regularly){click here}
"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill."—Washington, D.C., May 19, 2003

A Musical lnterlude {click here}:
An interesting discussion of experimental
music and writing in the course of
which Alan DeNiro {click here}
(in the comments section-)
quotes some ideas of mine regarding
anti-narrative. Thanks, Alan!
***************************************
Cannot Cross by Charles Bernstein {click here}
via Nice Guy Syndrome (Tim Botta)
***************************************
This gets it:
via Poop Chute {click here}

notebook (untitled poem): 2/12/90

How else will I be motivated
Except by emotion, not by desire
To do, I've had enough of doing
I only want to lol around and complain.
Something will happen to smoke out
The old laziness- I can feel by all the work
That someone's trying too hard
And the smoke is rising
But I won't tell- I'll never tell.

It's true- I am not trying to please you
In fact, I'm decrying my own urge to do this-
This is not really the result of fatigue or bad fortune
Though we've all had plenty enough of that-
This comes from routinely sensing what's ahead,
Almost like having a t.v. guide to real life-
One day I understood that anyone could read it if they wanted
It's the denial that makes it possible to forget
And just live- so is the poem part of this denial
Or is it something else?
It's only smoke
Rising on a beam of sunlight
In an endless elevator shaft.
Once you get to the top flooor-
You get out and walk around & shop-
As always, the mannikins transfix me.

Bloglinker {click here}

notebook: 2/11/87

One thought does not simply "lead"
to another thought. When a thought
is "heard" more resonantly, it
sets up a resonant "strumming"
across many latitudes of inner
experience. These "strings"
or modalities, spread like nets
across wide areas of inner life,
encompassing countless "points":
nuances, memories, hungers, fears,
wishes. Yet, at certain times, a
thought or feeling leaps across
all boundaries of sense and sensing,
interconnecting and interweaving
innumerable aspects of experience,
yet encompassed in some specific
sequence of words.

Note from a journal, 1976:
"All substances have their trick."

"the right side red titles over at Negative Velocity
read like a good contemporary poem..."
Right now on

Particle Spin {click here}

Mystic To Purge Russian Parliament

as reported by Froth
(Marianne Shaneen) {click here}

notebook: 3/23/87

Edmund Husserl: "Written signs are, when
considered from a purely corporeal point
of view, straighforwardly, sensibly,
experiencable. And it is always possible
that they may be intersubjectively
experiencable in common."
(*Origin of Geometry*, p. 164)

1. Freud analyzes himself by writing.
2. Freud recommends thereafter that
all writing about psychoanalysis be in
the third person and be scientific and
clinical.
3. He discloses *his* dreams and decides
that analysts thereafter should not do this.
4. This idea accords with the then present
idea of scientific objectivity.
5. Subjectivity remains an acute
philosophical problem.

Poem 168 from Ironic Cinema {click here}
"I hope to be forgiven/
for tedious virtue"

right now on Baghdad Burning {click here}
"He's claiming it's a "stain on our country's honor"... I think not. The stain on your country's honor, Bush dear, was the one on the infamous blue dress that made headlines while Clinton was in the White House... this isn't a 'stain' this is a catastrophe. Your credibility was gone the moment you stepped into Iraq and couldn't find the WMD... your reputation never existed"

Elizabeth McGrath {click here} via Solipsistic {click here}

Jenny kissed me

Leigh Hunt

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Well, well" said the Rabbit, "you had
every reason to think your old friend
still likes you and thinks about you."
"Oh yes," said the Old Gull, "I was
quite sure of that."
They both sat silent for a moment,
listening to the waves.
"Maybe it was an oversight," said
the Rabbit.
"Maybe it was."
With no further comment, the Old
Gull flew off.
The Rabbit looked up and saw the
Old Gull flying by himself, making
a huge ellipsis in the air over
the ocean.
"He's a moody one, that Gull,"
thought the Rabbit. "Takes
everything to heart"
The Rabbit sat there awhile watching
the Gull make circles in the sky. He
liked to do that because he had the
feeling he knew what the Gull
was thinking about by the
way he flew around. But he
realized that probably
wasn't true
Still, watching the Gull in the
sky he could imagine conversations
that might be taking place between
the spoken words, just in gestures.
Often the Gull had told him that
no one is able to say exactly
what they mean, or feel. There
is a code to things that all
beings follow, like songs
that move towards expectable
refrains. Things keep happening,
the gull said,
things answering things.
responding to them whether
they knew it or wanted
them to. There
were always two conversations
going on at the same time,
the Gull explained.
There's the one that is
put into words and another
that is said with gestures
and decisions; sometimes the
gestures and choices were
mute, but the understandable
responses created results
that were not necessarily
being aimed for or were
even desirable.
The Rabbit often
produced an internal
smile when the Gull
would talk this way.
This was because The Rabbit
knew that no one could
ever completely nail down
what was being said in
these covert conversations,
but on the other hand, everybody
kind of knew what the underlying
situation was whether they
were acknowledging, or even
saying something about
some of these things.
The Rabbit had been thinking
so long he had not been
looking around.
The Gull had landed right
beside the Rabbit.
The Gull looked at the Rabbit
and said, "So what have
you been thinking about?"
"I've been thinking about
why you always fly off
as soon as we're having
a conversation. Then, when
you come back, it is as
if we never had a conversation
at all."
The Gull looked at the
Rabbit out of the side
of his eye. Meaning,
even more out of the side
of his eye than usual because
his eyes were on two
sides of his head anyway.
"But I was just trying to explain
that everything is a conversation."
The Gull had said this in a
very raspy voice, making little
effort to hide his irritation.
"I knew that," the Rabbit replied.
"But I am still curious as to
why you fly off."
"You know the answer to that."
"You always say you just like
to fly. But that's like saying
'Why did the Gull cross the harbor?'"
"Now I'm having a Deja Vu," the
Gull said.
"Oh, you're always having Deja Vus,"
the Rabbit answered.

Jan Svenkmajer {click here}
from Vera Little's Homunculus

Solipsistic {click here}
is back.

"Ah, Granny's been dancing with the Trickster again..." {Negative Velocity}{click here}

"The world does not start fair in the race of time: one country has run its course before another has set out or even been heard of. Riches, luxury, and the arts reach their utmost height on one place, while the rest of the globe is in a crude and barbarous state; decline thence-forward, and can no more be resuscitated than the dead. The twelve old Etruscan cities are stone walls, surrounded by heaps of cinders: Rome is but the tomb of its ancient greatness. Venice, Genoa, are extinct; and there are those who think that England has had herday. She may exclaim in the words of Gray's -bard- 'To triumph and to die are mine.' America is just setting out in the path of history, on the model of England, without a language of its own, and
with a continent instead of an island to run its career in- like a novice in the art, who gets a larger canvas than his master ever had to cover with his second hand designs."

William Hazlitt
Aphorisms on Man
LXVIII
first published in
*The Monthly Magazine*
October 1830-June, 1831.

Swept away by a new poem on
A New Broom {click here}

{"and in an automatic reflex, this momentary lapse, this drawl that/
showers me with apathy — this is all we have at the present time;/
and so a pause before we speak, a twitching eyelid,
ugliness/ everywhere..."}

From a review of *Godard: A Portrait
of the Artist at 70* by Colin McCabe
(Bloomsbury, 2003) by Gilberto Perez
(in the *London Review of Books*)
"The present, the first part of *Eloge de
l'amour*, is in black and white, which
belongs to the past; the setting is the
streets of Paris, that of the *nouvelle
vague*. This is a present, fraught with
the past. The second part, the past
is in colour and video: the style of the
present. The second part often repeats
or recalls the first, as if the present
were the original and the past a repetition,
as if the past were recalling the present,
the present resounding in the past...Having
the past follow the present is not the order
in which things happen, but it is the order
in which we get to know their history..."

Thanks to
NQPaOFU85 {click here}

for the link and for blogging the synchronicity
**
Boynton {click here}
commented that This blogpost {click here} 'took her back to drama school.'

Christopher Lydon interviews Jim Behrle {click here}

Stacks of *The Onion* for 6-12 May, 2004
Seen Untaken In Coffee Shop
**
Customer in Coffee Shop Seen Reading
*The Onion* Without Laughing

Really Bad Movies {click here}

from Theodore Adorno, *Minima Moralia*

Normality is death. 56

as quoted by
ululations (Nada Gordon)

Thanks to Boynton {click here}
we have been kindly alerted to very welcome presence of
The Diary of a Nobody {click here}
online

notebook (poem titled *in*): 8/5/86

An infinite state of solid
growth: final season, a
longing unreflected,
a too easily dismissed
rhythm unforgotten. At a slide,
a command

An unrequited sky gives
limited evidence of growth.
It is a photographic match.
This purity of statement,
half-wise, half-hidden,
is less of light than of
approximate definition.
Some unexpected duration
pauses between intervals.
Measurement of light is a
landslide. Precious time.
predicted to the future
essence of all thought,
promises to trace pathways
between types of feelings
and types of color. To
identify all those was a
tremendous privilage. In
hushed tones, provided
subtle clues are disregarded,
certain tasks understood
to represent a gathering
of information would be
brought forward and
reviewed. The concepts
included were: pathos,
regret, solitude, black and
white flim clips, shelves
neatly lined with books,
philosophy is physical.This
awakening is very brief, like
a coffee on the way to work,
a clearing of the throat and
it's already been said, push
this kind of analysis to its
resemblance to a classic
figure.

Simply a kind of pause
for perspective, breath, remembrances
because there were many, there
continue to be many, who would
be the first to suspect that an
envelopment in language could never
completely erase a nostalgic breath
over a sunset or a statue, or
a tribal ornament in a glass box,
or the cafe des invalides, or the
many charming and bohemian shops and cafes
along the Seine. This was never to be
continuously referred to, either
in the form of literary mementos,
or just moments of release listening
to music and smoking at 5 A.M. This
is all still happening, and will very
likely continue to happen for 1000 years,
Vivaldi and Ravel and De Chirico and croissants,
political torment and syntactical paradoxes
first sung by Plato, mirror to tape,
voice to husky song, forever and ever
on the stalls, at the small round tables
in Soho, at the Beauberg, North Beach, Telegraph...