SYNTHESIZER {click here}

by Mr James Meetze
read it right now on
*The Brutal Kittens*

You're secure in sensing what's in,
but have you thought lately about what's *out*?
Read about it right now on
Million Poems (Jordan Davis)
****
Hey look! No line
Michael Moore Home Page {click here}

Carl Rakosi has died at the
at the age of 100. Among his last
words- "Bush- that bastard"! Read all
about it right now
(as reported by John Tranter)
on dumbfoundry {click here}
****************
transdada (kari edwards) {click here} reports on the San Francisco
Chronicle's neglect of the transgender community
****************
in Brooklyn
news Jordan Davis
(Equanimity {click here} offers a quick reminder
about the Coney Island mermaid parade- only he suggested
the wrong day. The Mermaid Parade is today, June 26, 2-6 p.m.
The Mermaid Parade {click here}

Nautilus

Nausicaa
the town where
Hera
The swan

A piece of rope
Mild wind
Sun shifts
The sailor who
At anchor there
Smell of mint leaves
Learned to listen

(notebook: circa 1990)

notebook: 8/9/87

Exerience only apparently repeats itself. Because this is one
of the most comforting illusions of all, that it does,
we can so easily forget how fortunate we were that things
came together they way they did. No doubt fate did this,
but it also took a tremendous effort of will- or so it seemed-
not to throw it all in the air, moments before, in total
frustration.

11/7/87

Deciding is always the hardest part of any action.

11/15/87

Heraclitus, Fragment 125: "The fairest order in the world is a
heap of random sweepings."

11/19/87

Light hurts the eyes in a gloomy age.

11/25/87

Dexterity replaces depth now because complexity demands speed
rather than closeness of fit. As a result thee are more pleasures
and pain is deep but swift.

12/12/87

The pathos of life lies in the disparity between the specific
thing we are focussed on and the fact of life itself.

12/27/87

Tristan Tzara: "Look at the clock which becomes language."

12/29/87

Poetry: A language without a homeland.

Ratlcliffe and Coolidge discussed on
One Good Bumblebee {click here}
******

The Lewis Zukofsky Centennial Conference {click here}

"If you can spend a perfectly
useless afternoon in a
perfectly useless manner,
you have learned how to live."

Lin Yutang
**
"It takes two to speak the truth-
one to speak and another to hear."

Henry David Thoreau

notebook: 12/6/86

What I think and do not say forms a specific
rhythmic structure- an interval between
focussed, observation oriented thought and
inward-lookingness. Note a subtle difference
between a phase and an interval. A phase can
last indefinitely and still be part of a series
of intervals: i.e.: "This phase lasted an interval
of 10 years."

12/10/86

"This worries me, this tendency."

"...Ah, good."


12/11/86

Pace of information confirmation- exchange between
people as an indicator of "recession". Inflation=
lowered value of information (?)

Hugh Kenner noted in a recent lecture that the U.S.
is the only place where you can copyright a word.

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging

A few years ago, rereading
*David Copperfield*, it was extraordinarily
noticeable that when a character
seemed to have not been present
for awhile, suddenly, as in a dream they would
appear.

The same sometimes for bloggers. Thinking
lately of Johanna Rauhala and then
this appears:

A prayer (Visions
of Johanna) {click here}

Ernesto Priego
on the immediate psychological benefits of
conversation (Never Neutral {click here}
*********
An Open
Letter from kari edwards (transdada) {click here}
via Pelican Dreaming (Mark Young)

"He is a robot
but he knows
right from wrong"
Gary's Tokyo notebooks
are online right now at
Elsewhere {click here}
**
"the horror, the horror"
Nada (ululations) {click here}
is reading Jorie Graham!
**

The HoneySwooners are back! {click here}

We plan to attend
this obviously terrific event, as we will be in
Berkeley for most of July.
Hope to see you there!



The New Brutalism presents
CABARET!

The East Bay?s Finest Burlesque! Music! Poetry! Sex Dolls!

Featuring a playlet a la Loretta Lynn by Del Ray Cross; The Cherries play country music, with
Maraschino, Bing, and Wild (Mary Burger, Tanya Brolaski, and Brian Bulkowski); a Psychiatric Farce
in Verse by Julia Bloch and Zoe Ullman; Judith Goldman performing poetry and 70?s rock; Rodney
Koeneke and Lesley Poirier read Sapphic fragments and mix noise music; a play by Brent Cunningham
and Cynthia Sailers about a poet who orders sex dolls, including Taylor Brady as the Nemesis Poet;
Kevin Killian as Nico and Geoffrey Dyer as Lou Reed playing ?I?ll be Your Mirror? and ?Femme
Fatale?; a Vaudevillian song and dance number by K. Silem Mohammad entitled ?Myrtle Poe,? starring
Patrick Durgin and Jen Hofer. Comedic interludes and hosting by the inimitable Sean Finney!

"Ludicrous...perverse" -Robert Pinsky

Sunday, July 18th
7-9 PM
at 21 Grand
449 B 23rd St., Oakland
(between Broadway and Telegraph)
$5 cover

Check out this Jim Side cartoon (with Jackie Waters)
("Fahrenheit 9/11 Spoilers")

on the Jim Side {click here}

notebook: 12/3/86

Perhaps the most characteristic illusion- and it is
an "optical" illusion- of 19th Century literature
is that sentences in a narrative are accumulative.
The parallel illusion in speech is that words in a
spoken series of sentences are accumulative.
Intersubjective "cuing" belies this apparently
orderly progression.

The structure- even the shape of books- has
contributed to the commonly held assumption
that thought and speech are parallel in a linear
way. LIke other bodily processes, thought makes
its demands and alters the attentional process
in staccato, spasmodic ways. Again, the evolution
of musical forms may tell us more about such
transformations over time, in the socious, than
narrative literature is able to. Compare the way
thought relates to a Webern work and the way it relates
to a work by J.S. Bach. LIke poetry, music draws
attention to altered relationships between thought,
the body, and the world.

notebook: 10/18/86

Trying to define the dynamics of the Higgs Field
in physical field theory (see *Scientific American*,
11/86) could be equivalent to attempting to visualize
the interactions of words in a Mallarmean poem such
as Coup de Des ("A throw/ of the dice/will never alter/
Chance"). Perhaps the structure of the poem holds
together, on a theoretical plane, similar to the way
matter hold its form, on a theoretical plane. The limits
of such theory are only defined by already known and
visualizable forms of structural interaction (c.f.
Arthur I. Miller).

**

Thought
Machine #4 (click here) (Collaboration with Toni Simon)
(*Thought Machine* series originally published in *Generator*)

"A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic
state of mind by means of words. The effect of this machine
is uncertain, for nothing is certain about action on other
minds. But whatever may be the result, in its uncertainty,
the construction of the machine demands the solution of
many problems."

Paul Valery
"Poetry and Abstract Thought"
in *The Art of Poetry*

**
Thought Machine
#3 {click here} (collaboration with Toni Simon)

"In fact, what we call a *poem* is in practice
composed of fragments of pure poetry embedded
in the substance of a discourse."

Valery
"Pure Poetry"

**

"All literature which has passed a certain age reveals
a tendency to create a poetic language apart from ordinary
speech, with a vocabulary, syntax, licenses, and prohibitions
that differ more or less from those in ordinary use...One
could imagine that the language of poetry might develop to
the point of constituting a system of notation as different
from practical speech as is the artifical language of algebra
or chemistry. The slightest poem contains all the germs and
indications of this potential development. I do not say
whether it is desirable or not. Such a judgement would
have no meaning."

Valery
"The Poet's Rights Over Language"

"creativity cycles, thought machines, whining"
right now on Bad With Titles {click here}

Kasey's Limetree {click here}
and James Meetze's *Brutal Kittens*
offer most welcome reading reports- covering their readings at
Jim Behrle's terrific Harvard Square Wordsworth series.

Just love those reading reports- especially about readings
I very much wished to go to.

Here's James Meetze's report- read it right now on
The Brutal Kittens {click here}

**
This just in! Reading report by Mappemunde {click here} spanning the early Paleopoetic to the more recent
Cambridgeon geopoetic eras. Best of all, the delicious
Neolinkian remains have been simmered into a delectable web soup.
Try a taste!

A day in the life of
Wood s Lot {click here}
On June 20th, among many other contributions, wood s lot
explores one of the great "fathers"
of contemporary art, Kurt Schwitters.

"The best kind of conversation is that which may be
called *thinking aloud.* I like very well to speak
my mind on any subject (or to hear another do so) and
to go into the question according to the degree of interest
it naturally inspires, but not to have to get up a thesis
on every topoic. There are those, on the other hand, who
always seem to be practising on their audience, as if
they mistook them for a *DEBATING-SOCIETY*, or to hold a
general retainer, by which they are bound to explain every
difficulty, and answer every objection that can be started.
This, in private society and among friends, is not desirable.
You thus lose the two great ends of conversation, which are to
learn the sentiments of others, and see what they think
of yours. One of the best talkers I ever knew had this defect-
that he evidently only seemed to be considering less what he
felt on any point than what be said upon it, and that he
listened to you, not to weigh what you said, but to reply to
it, like counsel on the other side. This habit gave a brilliant
smoothness and polish to his general discourse, but, at the
same time, took from its solidity and prominence: it reduced
it to a tissue of lively, fluent, ingenious *commonplaces*,
(for original, genuine, observations are like 'minute drops
from off the eaves,' and not an incessant shower) and,
though his talent in this way was carried to the very extreme
of cleverness, yes I think it seldom, if every, went beyond it."

William Hazlitt
*Characteristics*
CLXXX
originally published in 1823
The Collected Works
Volume 2
(edited by Waller and Glover)

notebook: 11/1/90

1. I am a world. For this I pay a price.
The feeling of separation.

2. In my world there are cloudy days
no one can see. When I describe them
others may connect with cloudy days in their
worlds. But they are not seeing this cloudy
day in my world.

3. The indifference of others to my cloudy
days is signficant. I work to make it more
significant or less significant. But it
doesn't matter. What does it matter?

4. Who will describe the shape of my world?
I will. "To what purpose describing the dust
on a bowl of rose leaves/ I do not know." (Eliot)

5. "Now," I say. "The clouds are passing."
The answer? Silence.

6. I share my excitement. I splash you with it.
I share your exctement. You splash me with it.
Then we return to our separate worlds.

7. There is no continuity in time because
there is no continuity of comprehension.

8. Language is coomprehensible. Reality isn't.

9. We cannot understand reality because
most of it is unknown.

10. "The world was created out of nothing.
But the nothingness shows through." (Valery)

11. Literature is what is interesting to tell.
Philosophy is what is acccurate to tell. Philosophy
is not popular. Literature is not truthful.

12. Ecstacy- a moment. Beauty- a moment.
Harmony- a moment. Truth telling- a moment.
Understanding- a moment. Expressing- a moment.
Manifestation- a moment. Remembering- a moment.
Forgetting- a moment.