coming soon ��������on *fait accompli*

Visiting or living in Manhattan? Definitely check out
the just opened sure to be blockbuster *The Aztec Empire*
at the Guggenheim Museum before the lines get
long-half the $18 admission ater 6pm on Friday night.
More on this soon...as well as
*Chain 11* (edited by Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman),
*Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge* by
Mark Scroggins (U of Alabama Press, 1998) {click here},
and *Metropolis: The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire* by Robert Fitterman (Edge Books, 2004) {click here}
*Koenig's Sphere* by Mitch Highfill (Situations, 2003)

The Angel of History

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.
Stephen Daedalus (James Joyce)

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Hegel

There's no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy,
but I'll never see it.
George W. Bush, to Catholic leaders at the White House, Jan. 31, 2001

from "Theses on the Philosophy of History":

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead. and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin


Humanity, taken hostage on the Ship of State, faces one vast storm after another.
Like exhausted sailors, who, from time to time are afforded a quiet moment of solitude
on the deck, they are permitted to imagine they can see beyond the whitecaps and the
angry clouds. If a bird is sighted, a lonely sailor shouts for joy from the topmast
to the crew below.

Longing and hoping beyond hope to dock this
creaking ship, again and again the passengers, the captain and the crew
are deluded that they have sighted a speck of land. A few have even
visualized and described this place, now felt to be by many,
if not most, to be a myth, a dream,
a fool's utopia at best.
The weary and cynical captain feeds these hollow hopes.

More and more the members of the crew, and not a few passengers, in secret at first,
and now more and more openly discuss mutiny. The captain again and again
placates all and each in repeated speeches from the helm, that God assures him
that he knows the way to solid ground. Now openly among
themselves, a few who still hold to hopes of sanctuary
and survival, remembering the remaining,
scant images from times long past of happiness and prosperity, speak of the
captain as mad and crazed.

But many, terrorized by the listing, turning and creaking
of the aging ship, by the enormous waves and
awful storms, hold anxiously to their faith in
the captain, who himself holds fearfully
to his vaunted faith in a white-haired, bearded deity above
who, he says, whispers wise thoughts to him
in desperate prayers and hapless dreams.

One among them comes forth who openly
decries the captain and counsels mutiny
and offers to take the helm. The passengers
and crew are evenly divided; the grumbling
continues. The storms and fears rage on and on.
With no land in sight,
where is courage and counsel to be discovered but in
history, where numberless insane
leaders have have so often
been shamefully exiled and
exposed for what they were?
*******************************
Michael Maschka Das Narrenschiff {click here}
via Phaneronoemikon (Lanny Quarles) {click here}
Paul Klee Angelus Novus {click here}

Actions make things happen; but patience make them smile.






published in *Theoretical Objects* (Green Integer, 1999)

Nice to have
{lime tree} (Kasey Silem Mohammad) {click here}
back isn't it?

Today he brings us a fine idea:
Speakfirst. Org {click here}

Looking for the root, I forgot the sun.




notebook: 9/20/88
published in: *The Boundary of Blur*
(Roof, 1993)
**************************************
"Stressed spelled backwards is
desserts."

Susan Ellman {click here}

The truth is what we must repeat. The facts
are what we must accept. This is why
the truth is poetic and the facts journalistic.



notebook: circa 1990
published in *The Boundary of Blur*
and *Witz* (1992)

Drum roll, rubberband horn, flute, metaphors, fingertaps, clarinet, warbles, poetic parataxis, guitars, enter:


Drew Gardner's Poetics Orchestra-Bowery Poetry Club, Friday Nov 5 {click here}
********************************************************************************************
*Trinkets Mashed Into A Blender*

Sound good to you?

New ebook by Tim Peterson
right now on

Fauxpress.com/e {click here}
****************************************
"CONCERNING MYCTEROPERCA BONACI"

"There is a certain fish, the scientific name of which is Mycerteroperca
Bonaci, its common name is Black Grouper, which is of a
considerable value as an afterthought in this connection, and
which deserves to be better known. It is a healthy creature, growing
quite regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and lives a
comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very remarkable ability to
adapt itself to conditions. That very subtle thing which we call the
creative power, and which we endow with the spirit of the beatitudes, is
supposed to build the moral life in such fashion that only honesty
and virtue shall prevail. Witness, then , the significant manner in which it has
fashioned the black grouper. One might go far afield and gather the forceful
indictments- the horrific spider spinning his trap for the unthinking fly;
the lovely Drosera (Sundew) using its crimson calyx for a smothering-pit
in which to seal and devour the victim of its beauty; the rainbow-colored jellyfish
that spreads its prisoned tentacles like streamers of great beauty only to
sting and torture all that falls within their radiant fields. Man himself is busy
digging the pit and fashioning the snare, but he will not believe it. His feet
are in the trap of circumstance; his eyes are on an illusion.

Mycteroperca moving in its dark world of green waters is as fine
an illustration of the constructive genius of nature, which is not
beatific, as any which the mind of man may discover. Its great superiority
lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation, which relates solely to the
pigmentation of its skin. In electrical mechanics we pride ourselves on our
ability to make over one brilliant scene into another in the twinkling of an eye,
and flash before the gaze of an onlooker pcture after picture, which appear
and disappear as we look....What would you say was the intention of the
overruling, intellilgent, constructive force which gives to Micteroperca this
ability? To fit it to be truthful? To permit it to present an invarying appearance
which all honest life-seeking fish may know? Or would you say that subtlety,
chicanery, trickery were here at work?...Would you say in the face
of this that a beatific, beneficent creative, overruling power never wills that
which is tricky or deceptive? Or would you say that this material seeming
in which we dwell is itself an illusion? If not, whence then the Ten
Commandments and the illusion of justice? Why were the beatitudes dreamed
of and how do they avail?"

Theodore Dreiser
*The Financier*
*Trilogy of Desire, Volume 1*
1912

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging

Reflecting the richness of blogs
Blindheit {click here}
tracks A New Broom {click here}
recalling the wealth in seasons.

Movement- centrality of movement in physical reality
focusses attention on those aspects of experience that
occupy duration. But what of those aspects of actuality
that do not have as their most outstanding aspect a
"spread" in duration? These are the things we take
for granted. Aspects of reality are like a shell game
that redirects our attention away from the silent,
uneventful world of the given, into the sparking,
shifting world of eventful occurances.



notebook: 3/7/90
published in: *The Boundary of Blur*
(Roof, 1993)

Us- and- Only- Usland

from: *Theoretical Objects* (Green Integer, 1999)

This is not yet our city nor our country and it has
not yet had a name. This is not yet my land or
your land- this is no-man's land and no-woman's
land. If I thought of a name, it would not be a
name for this, but a name for what this land has
hammered out of U S- and it has given us a
name- the States of U S.
*************************************************

This is the kind of news I want to see
while having my Monday morning coffee-

via Buzzflash {click here}

John Kerry pulls into statistical dead heat in polls {click here}
************************************************
Edwards accuses Bush of exploiting 9/11 {click here}
************************************************
Matthew Iglesias- the widening reality-based community {click here}

Failure to understand it made it appear unlikely.



Notebook: 2/3/90
published in *The Boundary of Blur*

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

Boynton {click here}
is two years old today. Happy Birthday, B!

Ron Silliman {click here},
at this moment nearing his 200,000th visitor, is pleased with
a blogged review he just received for a talk he gave
on Robert Duncan's unpublished manuscript concerning
HD, from Minor American
(Magdalena Zurawski) {click here} who
always disliked Language poets, until now, partly because she
had long ago met some "elders" in New York who
were mean to her. Now which L=A poet could
this have included? My guess is- someone, not always
so affectionately known around here as- The Android.
***********************************************************
Extra! Extra! Read All About It!
Nemski.com {click here}
has the full scoop on the latest brou-a-ha concerning Jon Stewart's brilliant
attack on slimy Tucker Carlson

Not a form of address, but a language.
The difference between a greeting
and a truth.


Notebook: 1/1/88
published in *The Boundary of Blur*