Saddened by the news about Ted Joans. We were introduced a few years ago by Charles Borkhuis in Paris. Ted immediately arranged for a wonderful reading for the three of us in the magnificent old Parisian villa and garden of a friend of his. An unforgettable evening that included a surprise performance by Phoebe Legere whose sultry accordian playing and singing has haunted me ever since. I learned that Ted loved to travel and frequently did book tours and readings including many in Africa. Ted liked to tell stories of his beat days, he was easy going and lots of fun to be around. He called one his favorite publishers "Nude Erections" (*New Directions*) I saw Ted once more a couple of years ago. We spent the day together going to some bookstores. I had told him about some signed books by him I had purchased from the Skyline bookstore downtown around 17th and 5th, and the owner, of course, knows Ted.Then Ted wanted ice cream and we went somewhere and they happened to serve blue ice cream.. Ted immediately named the day our "blue ice cream day." I've never forgotten that moment, and I realized that Ted knew something important about memory and imagery that I had planned to discuss next time I see him. Toni remembers another occasion when she and I went out with Ted and his companion, the warm and very lovely Laura Corsiglia to one of Ted's favorite Village coffee houses, the "Figaro." Ted gave us some drawings in exchange for some books.Toni just located a terrific photo of Ted, Laura Corsiglia, Charles Borkhuis, Toni and myself in an outdoor cafe in Paris. Ted Joans died one or two days ago at the age of 70.
(The photo referred to above, through the kindness of Charles Bernstein, is now available on my Home Page at the Electronic Poetry Center. Scroll down to the section marked *Images*)
Distribution Automatique
Sunday, May 11
This report just in from Kasey Mohammed on Stephanie Young's reading in San Francisco. Stephanie taps her beat with her feet!
Thanks, Stephanie for reading from our collaboration. I was very glad to hear about the great time you had at your (our) reading.
Here's one of the poems from our collaboration:
Closeness figures near imbibing
tender breath for a weakened
will. But, in spite of such shapeless
overtones, implications wander
unnecessarily among relentless
thoughts. Standing near, loss
counts its change in hidden
hopes. Unremitting ceaseless
regard, that's what it is, exploding
its virtues continuously aloft, changing
its character invisibly among familiar
irresistible, attractive friends.
Here's one of the poems from our collaboration:
Closeness figures near imbibing
tender breath for a weakened
will. But, in spite of such shapeless
overtones, implications wander
unnecessarily among relentless
thoughts. Standing near, loss
counts its change in hidden
hopes. Unremitting ceaseless
regard, that's what it is, exploding
its virtues continuously aloft, changing
its character invisibly among familiar
irresistible, attractive friends.
Saturday, May 10
Three beautiful books received:
Charles Bernstein, *Let's Just Say* (Chax, 2003): "Let's just say that every time you fall you never hit the ground./ Let's just say that when the day ends the night refuses to come/Let's just say that if all else fails you can at least count on that/ Let's just say that a bird in the fist is better than a bird and a foot"
Hank Lazer, *Deathwatch for My Father* (Chax, 2003)
"if the words have value
they have value there too"
Jean Fremon, *Island of The Dead* (Green Integer, 2003)
"Karl's notebood is filled with a very fine handwriting. The notes were discontinuous and somewhat separated by a long horizontal line that cuts across the page from one margin to the other. "
Charles Bernstein, *Let's Just Say* (Chax, 2003): "Let's just say that every time you fall you never hit the ground./ Let's just say that when the day ends the night refuses to come/Let's just say that if all else fails you can at least count on that/ Let's just say that a bird in the fist is better than a bird and a foot"
Hank Lazer, *Deathwatch for My Father* (Chax, 2003)
"if the words have value
they have value there too"
Jean Fremon, *Island of The Dead* (Green Integer, 2003)
"Karl's notebood is filled with a very fine handwriting. The notes were discontinuous and somewhat separated by a long horizontal line that cuts across the page from one margin to the other. "
Silliman
discussed one of my favorite writers
David Markson on Friday, May 9th. Reading Markson is like reading an excellent blog. Here's some snippets from - Reader's Block-
"Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.
Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.
The necessity is greater than mine
Said Phillip Sidney in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.
Gottlieb Frege.
The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in is an Edward Hopper.
Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows. REader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.
Hillaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.
John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylym. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.
No needle marks on your annunciation's arm now.
We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.
Thought Heidegger.
The first translation of a major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin *Illiad*, ca. 250 B.C. by Livius Andronicus.
Sherri Martinelli.
Diane Arbus committed suiced by opening her wrists in a bathtub.
Clare's parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.
I am yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
In Joseph Conrad's view, there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in *Moby Dick*
Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce also.
When Sopocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from *Oedipus at Colonnus.*
Which he was only then finishilng.
Schliermacher."
David Markson, *Reader's Block* (Dalkey Archive, 1996) p 74-75
discussed one of my favorite writers
David Markson on Friday, May 9th. Reading Markson is like reading an excellent blog. Here's some snippets from - Reader's Block-
"Nerval once tried to lead a lobster by a ribbon through a public garden in Paris.
Tristan Corbiere did the same with a pig in Rome. In evening clothes.
The necessity is greater than mine
Said Phillip Sidney in passing a drink to a dying soldier while dying himself.
Gottlieb Frege.
The saloon that Protagonist now and again stops in is an Edward Hopper.
Its name in semicircular lettering on the windows. REader sees, viewed backwards from at the bar against wintry late afternoon sunlight.
Hillaire Belloc was an anti-Semite.
John Clare spent his last twenty-three years in an asylym. Not recognizing his own wife. At times claiming to be Byron. Or Nelson at Trafalgar.
No needle marks on your annunciation's arm now.
We do not come to thoughts. They come to us.
Thought Heidegger.
The first translation of a major length for purely literary purposes was a Latin *Illiad*, ca. 250 B.C. by Livius Andronicus.
Sherri Martinelli.
Diane Arbus committed suiced by opening her wrists in a bathtub.
Clare's parents had been illiterate. He himself never revised a line.
I am yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
In Joseph Conrad's view, there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in *Moby Dick*
Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi were brothers-in-law.
Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce also.
When Sopocles was nearing ninety, his sons tried to have him declared incompetent. Sophocles won easy dismissal by reading to the jury from *Oedipus at Colonnus.*
Which he was only then finishilng.
Schliermacher."
David Markson, *Reader's Block* (Dalkey Archive, 1996) p 74-75
Eurydice Pleading With Orpheus to Stay Home
Somehow, having left behind the pain in contemplation,the poet finds, at last, some satisfaction. This ciircumstance, far from undesirable, is understood as a one-way street, a direction with no return. The Orpheus myth is referred to as a way of comprehending the situation.
But it is difficult to release the idea that suffering is a necessary component of comprehension. Can a distinction be made between pain and the image of pain?
In the Orpheus myth,the singer of the dawn may not gaze upon his lover and lead her out of the underworld to the sun's light at the same time. An analogy is drawn to the idea of inderminacy (can't specify a particle's locale and velocity at the same time).
Moments are saturated with choice, caked in blue or orange, numbed by rumble or speech, carved in curve or ridge. Each is cracked open in turn, revealed as hard or soft, lost or found, empty or full, clear or obscure.
What is even more striking and perplexing: no continued light without a frame of dark, no new path without fumbling, no vanishing into pleasure wiwthout the sound of tearing in the soul, before and after, no taste of water in the mouth without a lip of stone that so easily breaks. And, hardest of all, not a hint of the so-called mystery of so-called transcendence without the sublime Ridiculous, the embarassed laughter echoing in the brain so very recently it still can't be forgotten.
The poet endured the public's anger for consenting to so much humiliating awkwardness. Were books to be treated as bibles? Were bookstores to become the churches and temples? I heard that someone recently went into a bookstore just to die. Are we tortured to hold to continued expectations from words? Still, if it doesn't feel holy in your hands, what is it?
It is hard to resist becoming frightened in these times. Events toll by like a bell ringing repeated messages in your ears. How may they be described musically? First of all, they are shaped so they can't be confined. They are made to slip by drifting. Through hythmic intervals of separation, they give names to the alchemy of changing the sound of cymbals to that of rushing water.
As wtih Orpheus, we ask that the poet leave us alone until we want the dawn. Until then, they should practice quietly in their rooms. This is how the cicadas are heard for themselves, bucked by the termporal submergement of television.
In the perception of the division between being and non-being, the poet comes to understand that to know anything means to forget what is already known, to find the sun only by emerging blindly from the shadows.
(2/22/94) (from *Theoretical Objects* Green Integer, 1999)
Somehow, having left behind the pain in contemplation,the poet finds, at last, some satisfaction. This ciircumstance, far from undesirable, is understood as a one-way street, a direction with no return. The Orpheus myth is referred to as a way of comprehending the situation.
But it is difficult to release the idea that suffering is a necessary component of comprehension. Can a distinction be made between pain and the image of pain?
In the Orpheus myth,the singer of the dawn may not gaze upon his lover and lead her out of the underworld to the sun's light at the same time. An analogy is drawn to the idea of inderminacy (can't specify a particle's locale and velocity at the same time).
Moments are saturated with choice, caked in blue or orange, numbed by rumble or speech, carved in curve or ridge. Each is cracked open in turn, revealed as hard or soft, lost or found, empty or full, clear or obscure.
What is even more striking and perplexing: no continued light without a frame of dark, no new path without fumbling, no vanishing into pleasure wiwthout the sound of tearing in the soul, before and after, no taste of water in the mouth without a lip of stone that so easily breaks. And, hardest of all, not a hint of the so-called mystery of so-called transcendence without the sublime Ridiculous, the embarassed laughter echoing in the brain so very recently it still can't be forgotten.
The poet endured the public's anger for consenting to so much humiliating awkwardness. Were books to be treated as bibles? Were bookstores to become the churches and temples? I heard that someone recently went into a bookstore just to die. Are we tortured to hold to continued expectations from words? Still, if it doesn't feel holy in your hands, what is it?
It is hard to resist becoming frightened in these times. Events toll by like a bell ringing repeated messages in your ears. How may they be described musically? First of all, they are shaped so they can't be confined. They are made to slip by drifting. Through hythmic intervals of separation, they give names to the alchemy of changing the sound of cymbals to that of rushing water.
As wtih Orpheus, we ask that the poet leave us alone until we want the dawn. Until then, they should practice quietly in their rooms. This is how the cicadas are heard for themselves, bucked by the termporal submergement of television.
In the perception of the division between being and non-being, the poet comes to understand that to know anything means to forget what is already known, to find the sun only by emerging blindly from the shadows.
(2/22/94) (from *Theoretical Objects* Green Integer, 1999)
Concerto for specific idea and series of background thoughts.
1/23/94
Is it lack of love or lack of feeling
or pure exhaustion
that leaves me reeling?
(1/25/94)
How we press our hands and faces against the glass divide that separates us from this world. With laughter, with sorrow, with unending faith and learning, with acts of unimaginable devotion and cruelty, we work to wring some kind of reaction out of an essentially unreponsive universe. Well, perhaps this is unfair- the universe can be very responsive- for very brief periods of time, but soon enough it will return to its routine business of creation and destruction, not significantly influenced by my tiny contribution one way or another, again, for very long. So this longing to be so much a part of things, to join others passionately in a spirited exchange, eventually gives way to the cycle of recognizing each of our individual alonenesses. True, we celebrated our common victories and mourned together our common sufferings. Still, we had to struggle, sometimes repeatedly, to remain focused on our common interests and challenges.
*
It was hard because no sooner have we disclosed our sincerity in our determination to participate and be finally elected to the select inner circle of those who have won reknown, either permanent, or evanescent, we realized, like Aurelius, that it is all evanescent. After a quiet moment of serious reflection we usually laugh. This is, if we're lucky.
*
How good it is to stop sometimes, especially when you can remember that soon it will be followed by another beginning.
*
Then it is endings we decry! In every one of our sadnesses, we are reliving the keenest one, all of them
*
Things are neither as far, nor as close, as we think they are.
1/27/94
1/23/94
Is it lack of love or lack of feeling
or pure exhaustion
that leaves me reeling?
(1/25/94)
How we press our hands and faces against the glass divide that separates us from this world. With laughter, with sorrow, with unending faith and learning, with acts of unimaginable devotion and cruelty, we work to wring some kind of reaction out of an essentially unreponsive universe. Well, perhaps this is unfair- the universe can be very responsive- for very brief periods of time, but soon enough it will return to its routine business of creation and destruction, not significantly influenced by my tiny contribution one way or another, again, for very long. So this longing to be so much a part of things, to join others passionately in a spirited exchange, eventually gives way to the cycle of recognizing each of our individual alonenesses. True, we celebrated our common victories and mourned together our common sufferings. Still, we had to struggle, sometimes repeatedly, to remain focused on our common interests and challenges.
*
It was hard because no sooner have we disclosed our sincerity in our determination to participate and be finally elected to the select inner circle of those who have won reknown, either permanent, or evanescent, we realized, like Aurelius, that it is all evanescent. After a quiet moment of serious reflection we usually laugh. This is, if we're lucky.
*
How good it is to stop sometimes, especially when you can remember that soon it will be followed by another beginning.
*
Then it is endings we decry! In every one of our sadnesses, we are reliving the keenest one, all of them
*
Things are neither as far, nor as close, as we think they are.
1/27/94
Friday, May 9
Nick, my very first essay ever touching on poetics had this quote as an epigraph, too:
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
--Joseph Jourbet
And Nick, when I checked your site to make sure, your banner ad proclaimed an anthology's title:
WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY
I guess that's why I'm writing you, too, dear Time Traveler (and, by the way, I apologize for cutting your spaceship off from making that left turn in the year 3015).
posted by Eileen Tabios | 11:15 AM
Copy that. Looking forward to your visit in 3015, Sirene. See you soon. Love your poetics top to bottom. Thanks for visiting me in 1992. Thanks again for the link - love your updated sidebar.
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
--Joseph Jourbet
And Nick, when I checked your site to make sure, your banner ad proclaimed an anthology's title:
WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY
I guess that's why I'm writing you, too, dear Time Traveler (and, by the way, I apologize for cutting your spaceship off from making that left turn in the year 3015).
posted by Eileen Tabios | 11:15 AM
Copy that. Looking forward to your visit in 3015, Sirene. See you soon. Love your poetics top to bottom. Thanks for visiting me in 1992. Thanks again for the link - love your updated sidebar.
Stephanie Young
is giving a reading tonight with Elizabeth Robinson, I'm not sure if the reading is in Berkeley or San Francisco. She's going to include some poems from our postcard collaboration. Go, Stephanie!
Some of our postcard poems will be in the upcoming 3rd Anniversary issue of Shampoo (edited by Del Ray Cross). There's a hefty sample bottle up now (for a quick rinse), and the full bubble bath will be available quite soon!
is giving a reading tonight with Elizabeth Robinson, I'm not sure if the reading is in Berkeley or San Francisco. She's going to include some poems from our postcard collaboration. Go, Stephanie!
Some of our postcard poems will be in the upcoming 3rd Anniversary issue of Shampoo (edited by Del Ray Cross). There's a hefty sample bottle up now (for a quick rinse), and the full bubble bath will be available quite soon!
Here's a toast (holds up glass) to Eileen (sneaks sip) Tabios (sneaks longer sip) also known as WinePoetics. Might I say, on this proud occasion, that here at -fait accompli- we are truly- oh, what the hell (glug, glug, glug....burp!)proud to be included on Sireen, I mean Eileen's link bar. Glug.(Guess I'm not a sipper, I'm a glugger. A glugger blogger), Anyway, thanks Eileen!
In writing "Lost Horizons" I achieved a landscape of imageless writing of which the line "this storm...this storm" is an ironic comment and indication of the mode's eventual and inevitable collapse. (If I am to continue writing). One is led to images despite any attempt to avoid or circumvent them. But why avoid them at all? First, because they are too accessible and inaccessible. There are no new images (Dadaism), there are only literary references to images (Eliot) and mundane reality (Warhol) exagerrated or understated. Such images may abound in the visual field but are they relevant to the landscape of language that composes the printed page? Variations in line, experiments with the printed line (Mallarme, ee cummings) are attempts, in this vein, to bring awarness to the page.itself on which the poem is being impressed, that this page is a landscape. Now, if there are images on the page, attention is drawn back to the visual imagination, and this ejection from an entanglement with language offers relief and sometimes elation. Employing images the poet also provides words that are not encoded within the poem's own logic and disctinctive habitat- he pauses with them and offers reference points to the "outer" world. My intention in writing "Lost Horizons" was to eliminate these concrete references and place the poem in a world uninhabited by nouns that desribe objects. If the face of poetic association images offer exit from obscurity and poems are interesting only when they extend past the boundaries of langugage and sign or indication of precept.
(8/15/74)
(8/15/74)
Joan Retallack's poems remind me of the necessity of allowing "negative" feelings (this label implies a value judgement) to emerge in the poem. The words of everyday life, the thoughts of everyday life, are no more "representative" of that the experience of life is than a random listing of current magazines. What is "current" is largely illusory, a projection based on a number of largely unconsciously held, socially determined, assumptions. Besides this, the "unfolding" of lilfe from birth. to youth, to middle age, to old age is perhaps also somewhat illusory. Although events appear to us in a consecutive fashion, we learn early on of the reality of what the whole of life includes which encompasses aging and dying. Attention to the innumerable, constantly emerging erphphanies, demands and frustrations of everyday life also shields us from focusing for very long on an overview. Ambitious plans. fantasies, memories, disappointments, hungers, frutstrations, constantly lead consciousness away from an "aerial" or overall view and towards forcusing on the significance of emerging events for the next upcoming sequence of actions.
(4/7/92)
The "key" in which you tell a tale is the equivalent to the "key" in music. It's a tone of voice and an attiude, combined.
(4/22/92)
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
Joseph Jourbet
Indifference to poetry is oneof the most conspicuous characteristics of the human race.
Robert Lynd
Habits are fitst cobwebs, then cables.
Spanish Proverb.
(4/22/92)
(4/7/92)
The "key" in which you tell a tale is the equivalent to the "key" in music. It's a tone of voice and an attiude, combined.
(4/22/92)
You arrive at truth through poetry. I arrive at poetry through truth.
Joseph Jourbet
Indifference to poetry is oneof the most conspicuous characteristics of the human race.
Robert Lynd
Habits are fitst cobwebs, then cables.
Spanish Proverb.
(4/22/92)
Isn't my difficulty with writing narratives the same problem I have with dealing with "boring" details in everyday life. I realized reading the Auster book is that he takes the trouble to construct all the "boring details" that creates the feeling of an actual scene- yet the writing has the "driven" quality of the aphorisms of E.M. Cioran.
The aphorism contains all the same qualities as the Auster books- doubts, suspicions, exaltations, above all *impulses*- but Auster organizes them around specific *scenes.* So you could write a novel with a visual storyboard- index cards.
"I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable."
Em Cioran, "The Trouble With Being Born" p.31.
"Easy to imagine the elements , bored with their exhausted theme, disgusted by their invariable and utterly preditable combinations, seeking some diversion: life would be merely a digression, merely an anecdote." (p.47)
(3/30/92)
The aphorism contains all the same qualities as the Auster books- doubts, suspicions, exaltations, above all *impulses*- but Auster organizes them around specific *scenes.* So you could write a novel with a visual storyboard- index cards.
"I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable."
Em Cioran, "The Trouble With Being Born" p.31.
"Easy to imagine the elements , bored with their exhausted theme, disgusted by their invariable and utterly preditable combinations, seeking some diversion: life would be merely a digression, merely an anecdote." (p.47)
(3/30/92)
In 1947, Melanie Klein defined projective identificatin inwhich the mechanism of splitting, denial, omnipotence and idealization are operative. Idealization is linked to splitting. The idealized breast helps provide protection from the persecuting breast. Idealization is the result of persecutory fears. Equally itis lined to the intensity of th instincts which seek unlimited gratification from the inexhaustible ideal breat.
*Ego Ideal* Chasseguet-Smrigel (p.179)
(10/16/93)
Grandiosity and the reduction process.
*
Time is not "relationship" but "relationship within change."
Einstein sees the relativity of time to matter. There is also the relationship of time to change. Where there is no change (pockets of slow change) time seems absent.
Time is change. Heraclitis saw that you can't stop into the same river twice. But Hericlitis is relating time to number or *frequency.* (the same river *twice* and physical reality. But time *is* the river. It's the changing itself that we relate to time. If there is a beginning, there is an end to things. But there is no end to change. Change is changeless, unceasing, eternal. Change is the eternal.
(10/3/93)
Don't let me ever catch you lying about yourself like this.
(10/7/93)
Adorno, quoting Valery, in Valery 's -Deviations-:"Unless it's new and strange, every visualization of the world of things is false. For if something is *real* it is bound to lose its reality in the process of becoming familiar. Philosophic contemplation means reverting from the familar to the strange, and in the strange, encountering the real." (v. 14, p 39-40, *Analects*)
(10/993)
*
Time is not "relationship" but "relationship within change."
Einstein sees the relativity of time to matter. There is also the relationship of time to change. Where there is no change (pockets of slow change) time seems absent.
Time is change. Heraclitis saw that you can't stop into the same river twice. But Hericlitis is relating time to number or *frequency.* (the same river *twice* and physical reality. But time *is* the river. It's the changing itself that we relate to time. If there is a beginning, there is an end to things. But there is no end to change. Change is changeless, unceasing, eternal. Change is the eternal.
(10/3/93)
Don't let me ever catch you lying about yourself like this.
(10/7/93)
Adorno, quoting Valery, in Valery 's -Deviations-:"Unless it's new and strange, every visualization of the world of things is false. For if something is *real* it is bound to lose its reality in the process of becoming familiar. Philosophic contemplation means reverting from the familar to the strange, and in the strange, encountering the real." (v. 14, p 39-40, *Analects*)
(10/993)
I prefer the artist who is a grown-up acting like a child, then the one who is a child who acts like a grown-up.
"Success is to the cunning, who bow to circumstances. The follow the main stream, so they always win. They win, but they don't exist, they have no being since they merely identify themselves with the stream, they adapt shapes, they are shapeless."
Eugene Ionesco
Fragments of a Journal, p. 28
(9/21/93)
"Success is to the cunning, who bow to circumstances. The follow the main stream, so they always win. They win, but they don't exist, they have no being since they merely identify themselves with the stream, they adapt shapes, they are shapeless."
Eugene Ionesco
Fragments of a Journal, p. 28
(9/21/93)
I just realized that I have quietly learned to find exciting what for many years I found frightening: that writing is like walking along a cliff in the dark. Once you realize this, it is more or less easy to understand all the many pathetic and hilarious postures writers resort to in order to prop themselves up. Reading Gombrowicz' diatribe against poets has just this pathetic and hilarious quality. Like a formerly religious person losing themselves exuberantly in a satanic ritual.
The hardest thing in an age of disbelief is to find a reason to have faith. It is harder even then to actually have faith than to find a reason to have it. You cannot share your faith with others, but you can share your reasons. Perhaps blind faith is based on a kind of ignorance. But lack of faith- which is, after all, lack of trust, is the doorway to hopelessness. And hopelessness is the doorway to death-in-life. I don't mean faith in God by the way, far from it. I'm talking about faith in life.
After reading Gombrowicz' diaries for about an hour I can only say: nothing more pathetic then someone whose raison d'etre is to find someone *to blame*. He's much closer to Cioran then he realizes. But I share his love for diaries.
(8/27/93)
The hardest thing in an age of disbelief is to find a reason to have faith. It is harder even then to actually have faith than to find a reason to have it. You cannot share your faith with others, but you can share your reasons. Perhaps blind faith is based on a kind of ignorance. But lack of faith- which is, after all, lack of trust, is the doorway to hopelessness. And hopelessness is the doorway to death-in-life. I don't mean faith in God by the way, far from it. I'm talking about faith in life.
After reading Gombrowicz' diaries for about an hour I can only say: nothing more pathetic then someone whose raison d'etre is to find someone *to blame*. He's much closer to Cioran then he realizes. But I share his love for diaries.
(8/27/93)
Thursday, May 8
Desire to have boundaries - but then, not TOO inflexible - I guess we're naturally permeable, anyways (Nada in Swoon talking about the affect of substances - coffee, tea, food, anything - on the body - how generaly porous we are - if caffeine affects us - imagine the affects of another PERSON, a BODY)
Well Nourished Moon, today
Go for those boundaries, Stephanie , porous or not, Well Nourished Moon is my cup of tea! But hold the dcaf, I'll probably be up all night blogging again.
Well Nourished Moon, today
Go for those boundaries, Stephanie , porous or not, Well Nourished Moon is my cup of tea! But hold the dcaf, I'll probably be up all night blogging again.
Dave, you're very quiet today. Are you packing to move to New York already? Out there getting up the money?
Red Sox Tickets 20% Less
Local Ma ticket agency. Great seats 20% less then other sites. www.AceTicket.com
Jim Berhle check this out. Now we've got a *price war* going. Do I hear 50% less? 75% off? *Free*?
Russian Tea Room closed several months ago. I got to go right before it closed. A little glitzy, but the food wasn't bad.
Local Ma ticket agency. Great seats 20% less then other sites. www.AceTicket.com
Jim Berhle check this out. Now we've got a *price war* going. Do I hear 50% less? 75% off? *Free*?
Russian Tea Room closed several months ago. I got to go right before it closed. A little glitzy, but the food wasn't bad.
Kasey responds: " So maybe I feel that giving a detailed account of a reading is a kind of pornography, and as such, a naturalistic, mimetic mode that I'm just not tuned in to."
Omigod Kasey, I hope Cori Copp doesn't see this. We were just starting to get along!
Also, I forgot to mention that after Cori's reading, the curator of the series, Chris, said he felt that "blogging is voyeuristic." Actually, once you go down this line of reasoning you end up with Freud, who finally, in exasperation at the joy everyone was having with seeing sex everywhere (it is everywhere), said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Anyway, Kasey, I think you might be just a bit jealous of my having the chance to go to Charismatic Cori's reading and write about the wonderful time I had. Don't feel too bad. Somebody has to live in California!
Omigod Kasey, I hope Cori Copp doesn't see this. We were just starting to get along!
Also, I forgot to mention that after Cori's reading, the curator of the series, Chris, said he felt that "blogging is voyeuristic." Actually, once you go down this line of reasoning you end up with Freud, who finally, in exasperation at the joy everyone was having with seeing sex everywhere (it is everywhere), said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Anyway, Kasey, I think you might be just a bit jealous of my having the chance to go to Charismatic Cori's reading and write about the wonderful time I had. Don't feel too bad. Somebody has to live in California!
"The only thing that can happen between us is revenge—"
Heriberto Yepez is back in English and is ready to rock! Check out his
Border Blogger page (scroll down his former English page and click on his Spanish site).
Heriberto Yepez is back in English and is ready to rock! Check out his
Border Blogger page (scroll down his former English page and click on his Spanish site).
I never get sad and sit on my couch with a six-pack of Sam Adams, a pint of Cherry Garcia and the dvd of Amelie. Damn.
:: Cori 11:32 AM [+] ::
Cori, I often go through a down feeling after I give a reading, and succumb to tv. Of course, I am very different from you because under these circumstances I'll have a Bass Ale, a pint of Chocolate Chocolate Chip and watch a VHS tape of Road Warrior.
:: Cori 11:32 AM [+] ::
Cori, I often go through a down feeling after I give a reading, and succumb to tv. Of course, I am very different from you because under these circumstances I'll have a Bass Ale, a pint of Chocolate Chocolate Chip and watch a VHS tape of Road Warrior.
Hey Jism Berhle, the Red Sox are getting desperate! They are advertising above FA!
Red Sox products galore
Find a vast selection of Boston Red Sox products at FansEdge www.FansEdge.com
Red Sox products galore
Find a vast selection of Boston Red Sox products at FansEdge www.FansEdge.com
There has been some discussion lately about amazon.com reviews. "Eddiewat" who I assume is Eddie Watkins, posted this review of my book "Theoretical Objects" a few years ago on amazon.com and I've always liked it. Recently it appeared on my Google pages:
Theoretical Objects by Nick Piombino
List Price: $10.95
Buy new: $10.95
Special Order
Exploratory Principles Of Pleasure December 1, 2000
Nick Piombino humanizes experimental poetry by demonstrating its fidelity to human experience on fundamental levels and our responses to such experience. No writing can be completely free of ideology, but in comparison to the work of most "LANGUAGE" writing theorists his is refreshingly flexible and open and accepting, with relieving touches of Romanticism and sheer lyricism. I was initially attracted to Mr. Piombino's The Boundary Of Blur (by all means pick it up too if you can find it) because of his linking Surrealism and Debussy and "LANGUAGE" writing into a multivalent optimistic beast whose main requirement of us is that we remain rigorously honest and true to our own experience. Theoretical Objects, for the most part, strikes me as putting into actual practice ideas put forth and illustrated in The Boundary Of Blur. Both are low-key textbooks dedicated to experiential fullness in an increasingly homogenized and unknowingly borrowed world.
Theoretical Objects by Nick Piombino
List Price: $10.95
Buy new: $10.95
Special Order
Exploratory Principles Of Pleasure December 1, 2000
Nick Piombino humanizes experimental poetry by demonstrating its fidelity to human experience on fundamental levels and our responses to such experience. No writing can be completely free of ideology, but in comparison to the work of most "LANGUAGE" writing theorists his is refreshingly flexible and open and accepting, with relieving touches of Romanticism and sheer lyricism. I was initially attracted to Mr. Piombino's The Boundary Of Blur (by all means pick it up too if you can find it) because of his linking Surrealism and Debussy and "LANGUAGE" writing into a multivalent optimistic beast whose main requirement of us is that we remain rigorously honest and true to our own experience. Theoretical Objects, for the most part, strikes me as putting into actual practice ideas put forth and illustrated in The Boundary Of Blur. Both are low-key textbooks dedicated to experiential fullness in an increasingly homogenized and unknowingly borrowed world.
does anyone really want to hear what a reading was "like"? I mean, if you weren't there, you missed it, right?
KSMohammed
Kasey , most writing is about some other time and place, is it not? Even the thoughts we read took place somewhere else and at another time. So with this line of reasoning, why write or read at all?
KSMohammed
Kasey , most writing is about some other time and place, is it not? Even the thoughts we read took place somewhere else and at another time. So with this line of reasoning, why write or read at all?
This, too, is about memory. They replicate themselves, doubling into twins. Exact, but still a replica. You can hear the aura, we all copied that. "Mechanical reproduction" I copy that. Someone is juxta-exposed. Out at the edge of the gleaming.
Done only once, announcing a career. Permission given- it's all a script for a movie. By the time you make it, the movie has caught up up with you by being predicted. The thought is the thing, as Seth said. "You create your own reality." By leaving nothing out, everything is forgiven. This is the strategy of the father- confessor and the automatic writer alike. Standing quiet and waiting for me to announce whether to go left, or right, downstage or upstage? Completes the lexicon of a legion of voices, spacing themselves out geographically to hear themselves thingk. The path of a career, divisions in space-time. No rest for the weary or the unrelenting. The sadness on the spaces between the cracks. Give pleasure a name.
Continuity takes itself in stride.How many voices in the chorus? Again, spread out in light and shade unfurling like a cloud or a flag.
By now, you've followed all my clues and have found out that all this time I've been tracking *you*, dear reader. In your thoughts I'll hear all my echoes before I've even thought them. You're constantly ahead of me, you've already decided before I've begun
I apologize, that was unfair. Can we still be friends? Acquaintannces, anyway? I wasn't really watching you, just listening, as always, for particulars. And then we'll go our own ways.
(7/21/01)
Sand
*
Camoflage was the word I was looking for.
(7/23/01
.
Done only once, announcing a career. Permission given- it's all a script for a movie. By the time you make it, the movie has caught up up with you by being predicted. The thought is the thing, as Seth said. "You create your own reality." By leaving nothing out, everything is forgiven. This is the strategy of the father- confessor and the automatic writer alike. Standing quiet and waiting for me to announce whether to go left, or right, downstage or upstage? Completes the lexicon of a legion of voices, spacing themselves out geographically to hear themselves thingk. The path of a career, divisions in space-time. No rest for the weary or the unrelenting. The sadness on the spaces between the cracks. Give pleasure a name.
Continuity takes itself in stride.How many voices in the chorus? Again, spread out in light and shade unfurling like a cloud or a flag.
By now, you've followed all my clues and have found out that all this time I've been tracking *you*, dear reader. In your thoughts I'll hear all my echoes before I've even thought them. You're constantly ahead of me, you've already decided before I've begun
I apologize, that was unfair. Can we still be friends? Acquaintannces, anyway? I wasn't really watching you, just listening, as always, for particulars. And then we'll go our own ways.
(7/21/01)
Sand
*
Camoflage was the word I was looking for.
(7/23/01
.
Wednesday, May 7
This morning I was unable to track down where Cori Copp was reading and I was determined to go. I got part of the story on her Google page, but then decided to post a blog asking her this afternoon and for some reason I had a hunch she might check -fait acompli- today and fortunately for me, she did! By the way, as I wrote below, this banner ad was flying above her site: "Find Nick: Contact Nick" (See below)
I kid you not! One of those synchronicities that seem to happen to bloggers constantly, especially when they get in touch with each other regularly. I had just come home from a day at the Metropolitan Museum and seeing X2 (XMEN 2). I wanted to go to Cori's reading but I didn't have the address and I didn't get home until after 6:30pm and the reading started at 7. After checking Cori's blog with her note to me, I sort of ran to the #2 train which is a quick trip down to Chambers Street. So I went down to the First Tuesday series which is located at 142 Duane Street in a comfortable, nicely laid out, lovely small gallery. I walked in and saw my friend Vicky Hudspith there and she introduced me to Eddie Berrigan. Cori Copp led off, followed by Marco Villalobos, then Rachel Levitsky and Garrett Kallenberg. Cori Copp, who I had only just met last Sunday at the Zinc Bar, whose blog *Little Shirley Bean* is quickly becoming a favorite, is a very poised and attractive reader who writes with wit and depth, a rare combination. In a clear voice she read a strong group of poems, each constructed thematically, yet each encompassing multiple and overlapping facets, read in a steady voice that resonated more and more complexly with her material as she got warmed to the situation and became comfortable with the audience. She stopped to kid once about her own height vis a vis that of the podium, but she didn't undercut the the work's complications with a lot of comedy (this was clearly a choice, as she is a good comic also: you can tell, just talking with her and noticing the quirky moments in her texts.) Cori read in a clear, but not exagerrated or overwhelming voice. Her work reflected a level of quality and interest where I have to restrain myself from begging the poet to let me read all the poems immediately after the reading. They were witty, rich, layered, resonant and complex. Her reading did them more and more justice as she continued at a good quick pace, quick enough to give the words and ideas a chance to resonate with each other and to give the listener a sense of each poem's proper pace and network of transformations. The poems were dense but individualized.This won me over because I like individual poems as individual personalites, not as conceptual wallpaper.Later I asked her for the titles because a poem's titles frequently telegraph the range of a poet's understanding of the complex issues that pervade how to introduce poems to their readers. Cori's titles are great: "Ploditics." I loved this title and poem because it talks to the issue of the boring, and bogged down, pace of political discussion and exchange. The others were, "A Mad Day," "Past Antepartum" (my favorite), "Post Holiday," and "Ethics In Real Time." I was lucky to get to talk with some of Cori's friends including Eddie Berrigan (we discussed his father Ted who was my mentor and friend), Richard O'Connor who explained how I could do the collage animations on my IBook, and promised to answer some questions (I'd like to see his animations) and Jenny, who reads blogs a lot and feels she should cut down. Cori even asked her if she had read my blog! Thanks, Cori! The other readers were Rachel Levitky, Garrett Kallenberg and Marco Villalobos. All were well worth hearing and I would go to hear any of them again. I have Rachel's book "Under The Sun" (Futurepoem) and I plan to get Garrett's. Marco Villalobos sold me his chapbook "barrio gold."
Cori asked me at the gallery if I was joining them and I said "Definitely" and the next second she was gone! I went out there and looked all over. Her friend, Richard O'Conner, was saying goodbye to Cori on the corner and then she vanished! I figured maybe she was coming back. So I waited for Rachel (who I got to know last week when I read with her and Jerome Sala at the Ceres Gallery) who then said Cori had gone across the street. I got to hang out some more with Chris, whose introductions I like a lot and has a way of reading more poetry on the breaks, a sense of devotion to the art I really enjoy seeing. I talked with Rachel and her friend Erica Kauffman, a recent MFA graduate poet from the New School. My friend Elaine Equi was her mentor and she's met Jerome Sala, her husband, who read with me and Rachel last week. We talked about SoftSkull Press and the fact that they've accepted Jerome's book and what a terrific press it is. I mentioned that they are looking at a book of Jim Behrle's also. She mentioned she had some poems on his Give Me My Ball Back site.
After the reading, Cori was sitting at this great cafe across the street. You have to be swift to keep up with Cori; *she's* damn well not a plodder! The cafe, on West Broadway across from Duane, features a terrific $3 artist's meal, which is a burger, salad or pasta dish! Pretty good, especially for the price. Over a beer, Cori and I talked about her poetry, blogging, her jobs and her plans for the future. She was sitting with a table of friends who clearly admired her but were amiable, low key and easy to be around: Eddie Berrigan, was sitting outside at the table, another guy I never met and Cori's firend Jenny.
A little later Cori sat down with me, gave me the list of poems and talked with me about "Past Antepartum." This refers to the period of time before the pregnancy as compared to postpartum which is the time after. Cori believes, and I happen to agree with this, that children may know things from previous lives, or the time previous to life, during pregnancy. Then the knowledge is lost as the child gets older. She remembers saying certain words to her mother (perhaps she will remind me of what these were) that she could not possibly have any inkling of living in Lawrence, Kansas at the age of 2. Cori clearly distrusts new age cliches, but she's not too cool to talk about thoughts of past lives and the interesting things children get into at a very early age and then seem to forget once they get older.
Cori came to New York three years ago, after a short restay in Colorado, after living and going to school in New Orleans. She hasn't lived in Kansas since she was 11, at which time she moved to Colorado. She has been working at the Poetry Project , at BAM and Dance Theater Worshop. She's thought of going for a Bard, MFA, but she's in no hurry. Cori has an interesting way of establishing a pace for her poems and performances that I kept noticing she will apply to other things like plans or activities; when poems or actions come across as being governed by thought, then form has a better way of establishing content and vice versa. No limit to the areas of life wherein we might establish an individual stride. It's a freeing notion that reminds me of Goethe's aphorism: "Never hurry, never rest." Cori Copp has a way of establishing a suitable stride, particularly in relation to all things surrounding her poetry, which is what a poet should be doing, of course; the notion is catchy and that's not a bad thing.
I kid you not! One of those synchronicities that seem to happen to bloggers constantly, especially when they get in touch with each other regularly. I had just come home from a day at the Metropolitan Museum and seeing X2 (XMEN 2). I wanted to go to Cori's reading but I didn't have the address and I didn't get home until after 6:30pm and the reading started at 7. After checking Cori's blog with her note to me, I sort of ran to the #2 train which is a quick trip down to Chambers Street. So I went down to the First Tuesday series which is located at 142 Duane Street in a comfortable, nicely laid out, lovely small gallery. I walked in and saw my friend Vicky Hudspith there and she introduced me to Eddie Berrigan. Cori Copp led off, followed by Marco Villalobos, then Rachel Levitsky and Garrett Kallenberg. Cori Copp, who I had only just met last Sunday at the Zinc Bar, whose blog *Little Shirley Bean* is quickly becoming a favorite, is a very poised and attractive reader who writes with wit and depth, a rare combination. In a clear voice she read a strong group of poems, each constructed thematically, yet each encompassing multiple and overlapping facets, read in a steady voice that resonated more and more complexly with her material as she got warmed to the situation and became comfortable with the audience. She stopped to kid once about her own height vis a vis that of the podium, but she didn't undercut the the work's complications with a lot of comedy (this was clearly a choice, as she is a good comic also: you can tell, just talking with her and noticing the quirky moments in her texts.) Cori read in a clear, but not exagerrated or overwhelming voice. Her work reflected a level of quality and interest where I have to restrain myself from begging the poet to let me read all the poems immediately after the reading. They were witty, rich, layered, resonant and complex. Her reading did them more and more justice as she continued at a good quick pace, quick enough to give the words and ideas a chance to resonate with each other and to give the listener a sense of each poem's proper pace and network of transformations. The poems were dense but individualized.This won me over because I like individual poems as individual personalites, not as conceptual wallpaper.Later I asked her for the titles because a poem's titles frequently telegraph the range of a poet's understanding of the complex issues that pervade how to introduce poems to their readers. Cori's titles are great: "Ploditics." I loved this title and poem because it talks to the issue of the boring, and bogged down, pace of political discussion and exchange. The others were, "A Mad Day," "Past Antepartum" (my favorite), "Post Holiday," and "Ethics In Real Time." I was lucky to get to talk with some of Cori's friends including Eddie Berrigan (we discussed his father Ted who was my mentor and friend), Richard O'Connor who explained how I could do the collage animations on my IBook, and promised to answer some questions (I'd like to see his animations) and Jenny, who reads blogs a lot and feels she should cut down. Cori even asked her if she had read my blog! Thanks, Cori! The other readers were Rachel Levitky, Garrett Kallenberg and Marco Villalobos. All were well worth hearing and I would go to hear any of them again. I have Rachel's book "Under The Sun" (Futurepoem) and I plan to get Garrett's. Marco Villalobos sold me his chapbook "barrio gold."
Cori asked me at the gallery if I was joining them and I said "Definitely" and the next second she was gone! I went out there and looked all over. Her friend, Richard O'Conner, was saying goodbye to Cori on the corner and then she vanished! I figured maybe she was coming back. So I waited for Rachel (who I got to know last week when I read with her and Jerome Sala at the Ceres Gallery) who then said Cori had gone across the street. I got to hang out some more with Chris, whose introductions I like a lot and has a way of reading more poetry on the breaks, a sense of devotion to the art I really enjoy seeing. I talked with Rachel and her friend Erica Kauffman, a recent MFA graduate poet from the New School. My friend Elaine Equi was her mentor and she's met Jerome Sala, her husband, who read with me and Rachel last week. We talked about SoftSkull Press and the fact that they've accepted Jerome's book and what a terrific press it is. I mentioned that they are looking at a book of Jim Behrle's also. She mentioned she had some poems on his Give Me My Ball Back site.
After the reading, Cori was sitting at this great cafe across the street. You have to be swift to keep up with Cori; *she's* damn well not a plodder! The cafe, on West Broadway across from Duane, features a terrific $3 artist's meal, which is a burger, salad or pasta dish! Pretty good, especially for the price. Over a beer, Cori and I talked about her poetry, blogging, her jobs and her plans for the future. She was sitting with a table of friends who clearly admired her but were amiable, low key and easy to be around: Eddie Berrigan, was sitting outside at the table, another guy I never met and Cori's firend Jenny.
A little later Cori sat down with me, gave me the list of poems and talked with me about "Past Antepartum." This refers to the period of time before the pregnancy as compared to postpartum which is the time after. Cori believes, and I happen to agree with this, that children may know things from previous lives, or the time previous to life, during pregnancy. Then the knowledge is lost as the child gets older. She remembers saying certain words to her mother (perhaps she will remind me of what these were) that she could not possibly have any inkling of living in Lawrence, Kansas at the age of 2. Cori clearly distrusts new age cliches, but she's not too cool to talk about thoughts of past lives and the interesting things children get into at a very early age and then seem to forget once they get older.
Cori came to New York three years ago, after a short restay in Colorado, after living and going to school in New Orleans. She hasn't lived in Kansas since she was 11, at which time she moved to Colorado. She has been working at the Poetry Project , at BAM and Dance Theater Worshop. She's thought of going for a Bard, MFA, but she's in no hurry. Cori has an interesting way of establishing a pace for her poems and performances that I kept noticing she will apply to other things like plans or activities; when poems or actions come across as being governed by thought, then form has a better way of establishing content and vice versa. No limit to the areas of life wherein we might establish an individual stride. It's a freeing notion that reminds me of Goethe's aphorism: "Never hurry, never rest." Cori Copp has a way of establishing a suitable stride, particularly in relation to all things surrounding her poetry, which is what a poet should be doing, of course; the notion is catchy and that's not a bad thing.
Tuesday, May 6
Try not to get annoyed, listening for mistakes (resonances). Another name for memories. Yes, this was to be recognized as a kind of automatic manufacture as well. Phrases that warm, a pestilance to cool. Out of Africa, a way of effacing lack of reciprocity in conversation, polylogue or monologue recommendations notwithstanding. Fatuous, fractions, fecetious, fractions, reflections, confessions. Aspects of the not so novel. What else is new? Speaking in sponge, an entire poetics created out of perverse subversion. (reveals universal reversions) [these three words crossed out] Reviling, reveling, revealing. Something understood is tucked between, is stuffed within, tied in, sandwiched in the corners. Sven strugges.- I don't know him. Who am I? "Freudian sollipsisms" a makeshift enterprise in N. This slips. Out of the- murky, foggy cadences. Stop and another word will start. To be continued like a ladder, "take me to your ladder, I'll see your leader later" lattices, attitudes, rain. Anything revealed behind a smokescreen. The world is enough and is filled with time. Or it is running out of the other side of the question. Which invariably answers itself, the sound of a screaming jet forever in my ears. The distance, a makeover was a series of suggestions soon to be passee.They think and earn themselves a piece of learning. Sky is a kind of tribe incomprehensibly. There is nothing ordinary about it Follows suit, Makeshift attitudes suffice. Nearing the perpetrator eventually. The words translate themselves. Each has a face. Each face has its ludicrous side and is also conspicuously variable in the time it takes to change pens all the facts have been replaced. Alteration is a way of forgetting. This is how each is disguised but in the light of day you can recognize a face and its changing expression. "If a fool would persist in his folly he would be wise." [Incorrect: he would become wise] Don't forget to send one to Joan (of ellipsis) Retallack. Ain't it the truth? Work just creates more work. Don't be upset by the fact that the trickster makes ample use of decoys (the kind of military garb that uses this). The trail leads us right to the entrance. The door is the cover to a dictionary. Follow the faces one to the other like a sleuth. The reader is the suspect in this tale of intrigue, betrayal and mistrust. But even, or perhaps particularly, the violence is nuanced. To have method in your madness you must have madness to your method. Time is a suspect too, as are almost all ideologies. They had their dreamers too, if you wait for your whole lifetime, you will finally do it, but you may not be able to match the outcome with the original intention. As the reader, you are the casting director, not just the projectionist. All's fair in aphorisms and lies. I'm not Haydn so come and get me. Seventeen and forty-two.
What an atrocious understanding that listens without wit.
Always and again, feeding your way into things. they linger, they tango, they thank you, they disregard, they understand. What does it look like? Like, you don't know your own size, the feel of things? You have to get the measure of the pleasure. Feet on the ground, head in the air.
"Head up the ass," you mean.
Who said that?
What is the sound of incomprehension?
"May day, may day, may day." So they say. Does what helps, sound good? Action at a distance in time. At all events cpatured some. *Trances afterwards*.Sounds like what? "MIght have been the water" is what Toni said.
Esimates, roughing out the design captures some. Listening to something not said yet is an echo from somewhere else.
I still can't remember the name of the disguise, its title. Secrets suffice. I can (can't) explain it. Officially, anyway. There are exams to take, I can tell you that much.Monotonous study, tedious accumulation of details. A map. Surrounding all the dishonesty, exposing the fakes. Someone had to be disturbed or confused. Loitering between the sun and the shadows. Making believe, imagining, pretending. "He's pretentious," that one. "Anybody can do that."
(7/21/01)
What an atrocious understanding that listens without wit.
Always and again, feeding your way into things. they linger, they tango, they thank you, they disregard, they understand. What does it look like? Like, you don't know your own size, the feel of things? You have to get the measure of the pleasure. Feet on the ground, head in the air.
"Head up the ass," you mean.
Who said that?
What is the sound of incomprehension?
"May day, may day, may day." So they say. Does what helps, sound good? Action at a distance in time. At all events cpatured some. *Trances afterwards*.Sounds like what? "MIght have been the water" is what Toni said.
Esimates, roughing out the design captures some. Listening to something not said yet is an echo from somewhere else.
I still can't remember the name of the disguise, its title. Secrets suffice. I can (can't) explain it. Officially, anyway. There are exams to take, I can tell you that much.Monotonous study, tedious accumulation of details. A map. Surrounding all the dishonesty, exposing the fakes. Someone had to be disturbed or confused. Loitering between the sun and the shadows. Making believe, imagining, pretending. "He's pretentious," that one. "Anybody can do that."
(7/21/01)
Monday, May 5
"Woke up this morning and found an entire women’s outfit strewn across the guest bed. This means what, all you married folk?
It means my wife changed her mind about the outfit she picked out last night.
I thank God all I need are a pair of pants and shirt, with “matching” being an optional quality."
John Erhardt
Yeah, "optional" matching unless she notices your outfit before you leave for the day, right?
Or if you're going out together?
Unless I move quick, no getting out of the house unless everything "matches."
It means my wife changed her mind about the outfit she picked out last night.
I thank God all I need are a pair of pants and shirt, with “matching” being an optional quality."
John Erhardt
Yeah, "optional" matching unless she notices your outfit before you leave for the day, right?
Or if you're going out together?
Unless I move quick, no getting out of the house unless everything "matches."
Did you know that the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth for a few hundred thousand dollars so an investor could get more money to angel "No No Nanette?" Did you know that ever since then, the Boston Red Sox have never won a world series and the Yankees have won 26? Did you know that when he played baseball Jim played catcher, that he lives in an overly expensive apartment in Brookline with two roomates, that he has two brothers, including one in the internet business who lives in the Boston area and the other one lives in Tempe, Arizona in a boring suburb? That Jim saw X Men 2 twice on Saturday (wish I had)? That he recommended a spin off movie now on video that is a follow-up film to Chasing Amy? (Can't think of the name now).
It was an amazingly quick trip from West 95th Street to Yankee stadium, maybe about 20 minutes. One very surreal moment when I had to run across the street after waiting on a long line to check my backpack in an anti-terrorism measure. The Yankees lost 2-0 in a tight pitchers' battle. With Jim's running explanations and frequent hilarious asides to people sitting by (Jim develops audiences wherever he goes) the game went by in a few minutes, though on the clock it was a few hours. Although Jim was interested in the game, he was not fascinated by it and I assumed this was because his beloved Red Sox were not there. Jim kept kibitzing with all the fans around him and they shared lots of baseball facts and lore. Jim was mostly interested in the stadium itself. It is a grand piece of architecture, breathtaking in its scope, and is rolled out all around you very regally from the perspective of the bleachers. It was a cool and very bright day with a light breeze. You could see every pitch very clearly from our vantage point. Even though I am no baseball adept I could call almost every pitch correctly. I could even see that the Oakland A's pitchers were using the strategy of intimidating the batters by throwing fastballs very close inside. Jim said yes this could scare the batters and that no one can help this reflex. In the 5th or 6th inning, one Yankee was hit and got a free single out of it. The sun came out and stayed for the day.
Every kid that went near Jim and could get a look at him seemed to know immediately what a baseball fan he is and seemed to want to talk with him and follow him around like a puppy. On the subway, I thought one kid was going to break away from his father and follow Jim off the train. As soon as we got off the train another kid started beaming at him! They all wanted to talk with him about baseball.As we descended the stairs from the bleachers after the sad ending of the 9th inning, Jim paused to look out at the enormous green expanse gleaming in the late afternoon sun. He loved this venerable stadium and couldn't stop admiring it. I stared out at the huge signs on the high back wall of the stadium and saw a gasoline ad with the letters HESS. I thought of Dave. Then I thought: if you have never seen that special look of joy on the face of someone in love with baseball you have not lived.
We came back to my apartment and had some more tea. Toni came home and talked with Jim about what is now hilariously known as "Nick's obsession with blogging." Several bloggers names came up in the course of the day including: Stephanie Young, Jonathan Mayhew, Jordan Davis, David Hess, Josh Corey, K Silem Mohammed, Catherine Meng, Tim Yu, Ron Silliman, Joe Massey, Andrew Mister, Sandra Simonds. Toni talked about her nephew Michael (for those of you who read this blog regularly, he's the one whose music I put up on two audio blogs awhile back.) Michael has decided to go to Emerson College and Toni asked Jim a lot of questions about it.
We then headed down to Central Park and Strawberry Fields. Jim's never been there. Then we took a slow "C" train, then the West 4th Street (S) Shuttle to Broadway-Lafayette down to the Zinc Bar. I kept apologizing about getting him there late and Jim was cool as a cucumber and as it turned out we were only a few minutes "fashionably" late. We heard two poets (I'm sure Jim will supply the names, Andrea , who works in London and says "zed" instead of "zee.") both of whose work I enjoyed. There were a few bloggers there: Brian Kim Stefans, Drew Gardner and Cori Copp, who I met for the first time, but didn't have a chance to talk with very much. Would love to go hear her, Rachel Levitsky and Garret Kallenberg on Tuesday night. Counting Jim and I, bloggers made up a good percentage of the audience at the Zinc tonight, more than half. Douglas Rothschild had a cold, but was as weirdly entertaining as ever. Before we left the Zinc bar, Jim asked me to take care of his Yankee hat. I guess he didn't want to be seen wearing it or carrying it around in Boston. Especially late at night when lots of drunk Red Sox fans will be staulking the streets of Chinatown looking to beat up guys with Yankee hats where Jim's bus will be dropping him off about 1:30 am. Waiting for the bus I told Jim about my friend Jerome Sala, who also has a ms. with SoftSkull press. Jim may be planning to come back for a Mets game next Saturday and if this happens, I plan to go. Later next Saturday also planning to go to the Bowery Poetry Club to hear Lee Ann Brown sing with four of her friends. That will be a treat! Saw some videos at the book party for Laynie Browne and Hannah Weiner's new books on Saturday at the BPC. Also a terrific video made when Lee Ann was 9 months pregnant with beautiful photography of Lee Ann dressed in white costumes that reminded me of Frida Kahlo in front of mirrors and with great music by DJ Spooky. Laynie Browne' lovely new book "Pollen Memory" (which is graced with a drawing of tiny gloved hands reaching out from flowers by Toni Simon) was being celebrated, with generous portions of pita bread and later, a cake. Even heard a nice band, with a singer named Morley and I bought her CD which she signed: "peace, love and music," which I enjoyed listening to on the way home on the subway, after leaving Jim at the bustop in Chinatown.
Check out the two audioblogs Jim and I did at Yankee Stadium today on Uncle Miltie Behrle
Hey Jim: See you "on the blog..." .
It was an amazingly quick trip from West 95th Street to Yankee stadium, maybe about 20 minutes. One very surreal moment when I had to run across the street after waiting on a long line to check my backpack in an anti-terrorism measure. The Yankees lost 2-0 in a tight pitchers' battle. With Jim's running explanations and frequent hilarious asides to people sitting by (Jim develops audiences wherever he goes) the game went by in a few minutes, though on the clock it was a few hours. Although Jim was interested in the game, he was not fascinated by it and I assumed this was because his beloved Red Sox were not there. Jim kept kibitzing with all the fans around him and they shared lots of baseball facts and lore. Jim was mostly interested in the stadium itself. It is a grand piece of architecture, breathtaking in its scope, and is rolled out all around you very regally from the perspective of the bleachers. It was a cool and very bright day with a light breeze. You could see every pitch very clearly from our vantage point. Even though I am no baseball adept I could call almost every pitch correctly. I could even see that the Oakland A's pitchers were using the strategy of intimidating the batters by throwing fastballs very close inside. Jim said yes this could scare the batters and that no one can help this reflex. In the 5th or 6th inning, one Yankee was hit and got a free single out of it. The sun came out and stayed for the day.
Every kid that went near Jim and could get a look at him seemed to know immediately what a baseball fan he is and seemed to want to talk with him and follow him around like a puppy. On the subway, I thought one kid was going to break away from his father and follow Jim off the train. As soon as we got off the train another kid started beaming at him! They all wanted to talk with him about baseball.As we descended the stairs from the bleachers after the sad ending of the 9th inning, Jim paused to look out at the enormous green expanse gleaming in the late afternoon sun. He loved this venerable stadium and couldn't stop admiring it. I stared out at the huge signs on the high back wall of the stadium and saw a gasoline ad with the letters HESS. I thought of Dave. Then I thought: if you have never seen that special look of joy on the face of someone in love with baseball you have not lived.
We came back to my apartment and had some more tea. Toni came home and talked with Jim about what is now hilariously known as "Nick's obsession with blogging." Several bloggers names came up in the course of the day including: Stephanie Young, Jonathan Mayhew, Jordan Davis, David Hess, Josh Corey, K Silem Mohammed, Catherine Meng, Tim Yu, Ron Silliman, Joe Massey, Andrew Mister, Sandra Simonds. Toni talked about her nephew Michael (for those of you who read this blog regularly, he's the one whose music I put up on two audio blogs awhile back.) Michael has decided to go to Emerson College and Toni asked Jim a lot of questions about it.
We then headed down to Central Park and Strawberry Fields. Jim's never been there. Then we took a slow "C" train, then the West 4th Street (S) Shuttle to Broadway-Lafayette down to the Zinc Bar. I kept apologizing about getting him there late and Jim was cool as a cucumber and as it turned out we were only a few minutes "fashionably" late. We heard two poets (I'm sure Jim will supply the names, Andrea , who works in London and says "zed" instead of "zee.") both of whose work I enjoyed. There were a few bloggers there: Brian Kim Stefans, Drew Gardner and Cori Copp, who I met for the first time, but didn't have a chance to talk with very much. Would love to go hear her, Rachel Levitsky and Garret Kallenberg on Tuesday night. Counting Jim and I, bloggers made up a good percentage of the audience at the Zinc tonight, more than half. Douglas Rothschild had a cold, but was as weirdly entertaining as ever. Before we left the Zinc bar, Jim asked me to take care of his Yankee hat. I guess he didn't want to be seen wearing it or carrying it around in Boston. Especially late at night when lots of drunk Red Sox fans will be staulking the streets of Chinatown looking to beat up guys with Yankee hats where Jim's bus will be dropping him off about 1:30 am. Waiting for the bus I told Jim about my friend Jerome Sala, who also has a ms. with SoftSkull press. Jim may be planning to come back for a Mets game next Saturday and if this happens, I plan to go. Later next Saturday also planning to go to the Bowery Poetry Club to hear Lee Ann Brown sing with four of her friends. That will be a treat! Saw some videos at the book party for Laynie Browne and Hannah Weiner's new books on Saturday at the BPC. Also a terrific video made when Lee Ann was 9 months pregnant with beautiful photography of Lee Ann dressed in white costumes that reminded me of Frida Kahlo in front of mirrors and with great music by DJ Spooky. Laynie Browne' lovely new book "Pollen Memory" (which is graced with a drawing of tiny gloved hands reaching out from flowers by Toni Simon) was being celebrated, with generous portions of pita bread and later, a cake. Even heard a nice band, with a singer named Morley and I bought her CD which she signed: "peace, love and music," which I enjoyed listening to on the way home on the subway, after leaving Jim at the bustop in Chinatown.
Check out the two audioblogs Jim and I did at Yankee Stadium today on Uncle Miltie Behrle
Hey Jim: See you "on the blog..." .
Sunday, May 4
Behrle here. Just showed up at Nick's, in plenty of time. This will definitely be a blogtastic ballgame. Had a nice nap on the Fung Wah Bus ($20 round-trip) and a smooth ride on the C train. Nick just made me tea. Stay tuned to this and to jism.blogspot.com for all the latest. Have a wonderful Sunday, tigers and bears. For one day, go Yankees.
One of the most beautiful books of prose poetry ever is Carla Harryman's "Under The Bridge." I thought of this poem when I renamed Jordan Davis' link here "River Jordan."
Jordan River
"What year is this he asked another on the banks of the river.
But land is not in question here. Only the day. The range of vision. The distance between the mountains behind the lake and the mountains behind the men who face the lake.
The agreed that the river had become a camera, their souls shutters, their faces dim images.He felt absorbed by the water and locked inside a fluid but mechanical body. The other saw himself an old man, dim but no longer nervous, about to die but no longer lost in the habit of pretending calm in the face of other's esteem.
And all around there was barter with those forces. A trading off of materials for another's thought. Over the river he watched the duck hunters."
from *Under The Bridge* Carla Harryman
*This* Press, 1980
Shouldn't this great classic be reissued? Soon?
Jordan River
"What year is this he asked another on the banks of the river.
But land is not in question here. Only the day. The range of vision. The distance between the mountains behind the lake and the mountains behind the men who face the lake.
The agreed that the river had become a camera, their souls shutters, their faces dim images.He felt absorbed by the water and locked inside a fluid but mechanical body. The other saw himself an old man, dim but no longer nervous, about to die but no longer lost in the habit of pretending calm in the face of other's esteem.
And all around there was barter with those forces. A trading off of materials for another's thought. Over the river he watched the duck hunters."
from *Under The Bridge* Carla Harryman
*This* Press, 1980
Shouldn't this great classic be reissued? Soon?
Here I am waiting for Jim Behrle to come by so we can head up to Yankee Stadium. If he gets here on time, maybe Uncle Miltie will consent to saying hi to you on -fait accompli-!
Also- thanks to Ron Silliman for mentioning our little blogland park. He left out quite a few bloggers I read everyday but I think everyone has their own list they read, some of which may not be on their "recommended" list. But "short lists" are unhappy things, aren't they? I think they are an artifact of print culture that has to worry about the expense of paper. Hey, no limit on space here, right? All you have to do is check out Muse Apprentice Guild which routinely publishes 600 poets in an issue to see how that works out in cyberspace. Ah, these wide open spaces of blogland!
Also- thanks to Ron Silliman for mentioning our little blogland park. He left out quite a few bloggers I read everyday but I think everyone has their own list they read, some of which may not be on their "recommended" list. But "short lists" are unhappy things, aren't they? I think they are an artifact of print culture that has to worry about the expense of paper. Hey, no limit on space here, right? All you have to do is check out Muse Apprentice Guild which routinely publishes 600 poets in an issue to see how that works out in cyberspace. Ah, these wide open spaces of blogland!
Hey, I've got to go to sleep. Jimmy Behrle of ("more names than I can ever mention") blog and I are going to go to the Yankees Game tomorrow. He's coming over here where I live on W. 95th Street. Then we will take the #2 train on Broadway to W. 149th Street where we will switch to a #4 to E.161st Street. So far they say the weather will be cloudy, but no rain.
JImmy's already blogged about this once on his audio blog. I'm already blogging about it right here. This may just turn out to be the most blogged baseball game in history. On a poetics type blog anyway. Oh, I'm just procrastinating. Good night.
Life *in* literature- or the literature of life.
(6/21/01
The "off-world colonies"- the off-topic reveries.
Constantly come into a topic slowly, like slowly pushing apart the brush, to eventually spot the quarry (unheard.)
(7/6/01)
The reader is the detective, the writer is presenting his or her case.The clues are not so much hard to decipher as they are tedious to pay attention to because they are emerging constantly. It is the type of attention required that makes it hard, not the nature of the puzzles which must be unwound by using this intensity of concentration.
(7/12/01)
(Autobiographical samples. A note to me, to you, or both of us?)
The first time we stayed at David Dramm, Anne Le Barge and Diamonda's place (in Amsterdam) I had not brought much music with me. David, who is a composer, had hundreds of CD's, but not so much classical. I found the Beethoven String Quartets and played most of them constantly.The second trip to Amsterdam I brought a lot of Haydn String Quartets. Shortly after coming back I discovered the Haydn String Quartets and have been listening to them carefully. You can hear where Beethoven got his start.Like all the best composers, Haydn defies classification. The emotional lines are clear, suspend beautifully, and the voicing rarely comes across as mechanical or automatized.
(7/16/01)
Things resting in their place. Trying too hard to understand something that may not be worth it. Understanding it on the other hand, this issue is often one of an appropiate time or place.
The process in and for itself.
A question of where and how to let thought fit in comfortably.
What opens it up and what closes it.What is an infringement on what. With a bang or a whimper.Like a conversation or a dialogue.things feed into it or don't. Otherwise, they rest. Noticing the small detail. Richard Tuttle said something about optimism. The rage, the fury. Let it slide. The devote themselves. A talon. Swept in in quotes. Don't make the difficult impossible. Who says you can't. Slides in.
Elaboration. At least this one. They corner it, splicing the vastness. Or a blessing in disguise, a blessing in disguise makes time. After the fact. More ways than "in more ways than one." They should. Or should they? Even a reverse is more than one thing, getting up and making (creating) them in disguise. Singing or singing (sin-ging) a planet. How to pronounce it- who leads? - Or make something to understand. Under a narrowing...tendency. Or can make it up (create with) by and for. At last, at least.
Quarters, folded. A siren- attention to the police. Clearing it up, cleaning it up. They cause, or create a tendency, a destiny, a destination. It was, or someone cleared it up. Devil's in the details. Effacing or erasing the crime, the comma a copy, a retroforce in will. Stay alive. Can measure. Up to a force, another kind of connective. Just start and don't stop. Conjunctions, ampersands. A full stop.The rhythmic gestation. Land, ahoy. Name of a detective, reflection of a game. The narrative stretches in. So between, alright of (for) a game. Evidence, or shards, applause or a cause, sanwiched between the present and the past. Pieces of evidence to lead one on, from writer to reader. Under suspicion, under assumption- some pressure, not too much or too little. A slight but of permission.To horny, to slur. Not enough time to compose a vast lie, only time to contrive loitering for a time around an opening. Critics are needed to differentiate, a force for change. Launches an unlistenable diatribe (all hell breaks loose in a whisper). To embed, or notice. That was directly autobiographical, a mistatement. Never enough of anything, let alone appreciation in quotes. Had presented a space to introduce an underwood (underworld). Can resist a pun, is fun. Outside atlantic Atlantic City is a code.
The waves create a mystique. Im (plausible).
They (some) separate themselves.
Is a kind of scrolling web sites in reverse, play it again Sam Daniels. Whose middle age? juxtapositions, an ascension. Captialize on want , gesturing change.
A industry, industrious at for and by repetition.This copy (un)scrolls forward and backwards in reverse.The min(ed) uncovers itself retropregressively curling up inside its travesties. Put that on hold. Transvestites, reader and writer, dressing, addressing, undressing, progressing (a dirty word).
(7/21/01)
(6/21/01
The "off-world colonies"- the off-topic reveries.
Constantly come into a topic slowly, like slowly pushing apart the brush, to eventually spot the quarry (unheard.)
(7/6/01)
The reader is the detective, the writer is presenting his or her case.The clues are not so much hard to decipher as they are tedious to pay attention to because they are emerging constantly. It is the type of attention required that makes it hard, not the nature of the puzzles which must be unwound by using this intensity of concentration.
(7/12/01)
(Autobiographical samples. A note to me, to you, or both of us?)
The first time we stayed at David Dramm, Anne Le Barge and Diamonda's place (in Amsterdam) I had not brought much music with me. David, who is a composer, had hundreds of CD's, but not so much classical. I found the Beethoven String Quartets and played most of them constantly.The second trip to Amsterdam I brought a lot of Haydn String Quartets. Shortly after coming back I discovered the Haydn String Quartets and have been listening to them carefully. You can hear where Beethoven got his start.Like all the best composers, Haydn defies classification. The emotional lines are clear, suspend beautifully, and the voicing rarely comes across as mechanical or automatized.
(7/16/01)
Things resting in their place. Trying too hard to understand something that may not be worth it. Understanding it on the other hand, this issue is often one of an appropiate time or place.
The process in and for itself.
A question of where and how to let thought fit in comfortably.
What opens it up and what closes it.What is an infringement on what. With a bang or a whimper.Like a conversation or a dialogue.things feed into it or don't. Otherwise, they rest. Noticing the small detail. Richard Tuttle said something about optimism. The rage, the fury. Let it slide. The devote themselves. A talon. Swept in in quotes. Don't make the difficult impossible. Who says you can't. Slides in.
Elaboration. At least this one. They corner it, splicing the vastness. Or a blessing in disguise, a blessing in disguise makes time. After the fact. More ways than "in more ways than one." They should. Or should they? Even a reverse is more than one thing, getting up and making (creating) them in disguise. Singing or singing (sin-ging) a planet. How to pronounce it- who leads? - Or make something to understand. Under a narrowing...tendency. Or can make it up (create with) by and for. At last, at least.
Quarters, folded. A siren- attention to the police. Clearing it up, cleaning it up. They cause, or create a tendency, a destiny, a destination. It was, or someone cleared it up. Devil's in the details. Effacing or erasing the crime, the comma a copy, a retroforce in will. Stay alive. Can measure. Up to a force, another kind of connective. Just start and don't stop. Conjunctions, ampersands. A full stop.The rhythmic gestation. Land, ahoy. Name of a detective, reflection of a game. The narrative stretches in. So between, alright of (for) a game. Evidence, or shards, applause or a cause, sanwiched between the present and the past. Pieces of evidence to lead one on, from writer to reader. Under suspicion, under assumption- some pressure, not too much or too little. A slight but of permission.To horny, to slur. Not enough time to compose a vast lie, only time to contrive loitering for a time around an opening. Critics are needed to differentiate, a force for change. Launches an unlistenable diatribe (all hell breaks loose in a whisper). To embed, or notice. That was directly autobiographical, a mistatement. Never enough of anything, let alone appreciation in quotes. Had presented a space to introduce an underwood (underworld). Can resist a pun, is fun. Outside atlantic Atlantic City is a code.
The waves create a mystique. Im (plausible).
They (some) separate themselves.
Is a kind of scrolling web sites in reverse, play it again Sam Daniels. Whose middle age? juxtapositions, an ascension. Captialize on want , gesturing change.
A industry, industrious at for and by repetition.This copy (un)scrolls forward and backwards in reverse.The min(ed) uncovers itself retropregressively curling up inside its travesties. Put that on hold. Transvestites, reader and writer, dressing, addressing, undressing, progressing (a dirty word).
(7/21/01)
Everything in the world after coming backward in time is too loud and too bright.
The flashback story- they were travelling and working in a new area- telepathic software. They were nearing a breakthrough but they were arguing very heavily every day. An error in the experiment leads to his disappearance. After a period of three years, he is considered dead.
What has actually occured is that the experiment had been successful but only in one direction.
When he gets to the new world it is half-virtual and half real. Even as he adjusts to one situation and date in can change.The characters can be the same people in different outfits.
After a period of anger and depression, she finally gets back to work. Immediately she understands there may be a solution.This solution involved going backwards in time, in order to discover the real root of the situation. Change one right thing and everything can be changed.
She hadn't really wanted to do this in such an isolated place. He insists and this becomes the reason he is so hard to find. In the city there are more coordinate points. More minds, more coordinate points. People are all connected as in "six degrees of separation."
Right now she has gotten him back. This is shown in a flashback where he appears in Central Park near the tennis courts. Ashbery's book "Tennis Court Oath" comes into it.
Now it is too loud and too bright.This situation encompasses instability in the time factor. Everyone is getting older- travelling in time together.
(image-people in different cities all over the world).
Of course it is incredibly illegal to time travel from that era.
(6/9/01)
The flashback story- they were travelling and working in a new area- telepathic software. They were nearing a breakthrough but they were arguing very heavily every day. An error in the experiment leads to his disappearance. After a period of three years, he is considered dead.
What has actually occured is that the experiment had been successful but only in one direction.
When he gets to the new world it is half-virtual and half real. Even as he adjusts to one situation and date in can change.The characters can be the same people in different outfits.
After a period of anger and depression, she finally gets back to work. Immediately she understands there may be a solution.This solution involved going backwards in time, in order to discover the real root of the situation. Change one right thing and everything can be changed.
She hadn't really wanted to do this in such an isolated place. He insists and this becomes the reason he is so hard to find. In the city there are more coordinate points. More minds, more coordinate points. People are all connected as in "six degrees of separation."
Right now she has gotten him back. This is shown in a flashback where he appears in Central Park near the tennis courts. Ashbery's book "Tennis Court Oath" comes into it.
Now it is too loud and too bright.This situation encompasses instability in the time factor. Everyone is getting older- travelling in time together.
(image-people in different cities all over the world).
Of course it is incredibly illegal to time travel from that era.
(6/9/01)
Saturday, May 3
Lunched with Caterina Fake today. Yes it is pronounced fake. She was at the GEL conference which focusses on understanding what creates "experience" with her husband who was giving a talk here. I saw her blog on Thursday where she mentioned she was coming to stay on Amsterdam Avenue and W. 77th St. I live on West 95th Street. So I emailed her and she picked it up here on airport right in the middle of the steet. Then a lot of phone tag and we met. She even let me interview her! Caterina was a sparkling, sprightly, elegant presence with a sly sense of humor, much prettier than her picture on Caterina.net, and a veritable font of information, know how and history about blogging. We had salad, sandwiches and desert for an hour and a half and it was a joy to see how little in a hurry she was. She had just received my book in the mail before she left and had it with her. We were sitting at an outside cafe in the bright sun and she put on her sunglasses for a few minutes so that sunlight pretty much lasted until it started to rain lightly when she had to leave. She carries her little Apple laptop wherever she goes and she showed me how she opens in on the street and writes in it using wireless access just floating around in the air here on the Upper West Side. We ate outside at a cafe down the block on W.77th Street near the NY Historical Society Building. We could barely stop to eat and breathe, there was so much to talk about, I had so many questions and she seemed to like to listen very carefully too. She told me how she became a blogger at the time that Blogger had 20 blogs, how she had a Diary Site before she started with Blogger in 1999 and then later realized the two were the same thing. She looked at at an article I'm working on about blogging and corrected where I put she gets 2000 reads a day to 2000 hits a day! She talked about a blogger at this conference who gets 8000 hits a day and how some newspapers are uneasy about all this blogging. There are some published articles about her blogging but this will be her first interview in cyberspace. There's so much more to say but I've been working on my links all night and at least I got to write this little note. Lots of bloggers are changing their links and I'm enjoying all this interaction!
4.18.2003
Press Release: SDPG Nominated for Award
SDPG has been nominated for the prestigious "Best Blogged Oxymoron of the Year Award" for a statement issued earlier this week.
The announcement came on the morning of Wednesday, April 16. Fait Accompli, an organization dedicated to "spellbound speculations" and "time travel," offered the nomination in response to the following statement, which appeared in the April 15 edition of the SDPG blog:
"I'm trying to survive as a writer without actually being one. Perhaps that's the best way to put it."
SDPG accepted the nomination, but according to an anonymous spokesperson, the Group is cautious about its prospects.
"We're hopeful, but then again, there's so much oxymoron out there you never know who's going to walk away with the award," the spokesperson said.
SDPG also promised more oxymorons in the near future. "We'll do what we can for as long as the luck holds out."
However, SDPG denied allegations that the oxymoron was deliberately planted in the April 15 blog in order to win back disgruntled fans lost in the wake of the Group's unexplained name change.
"We don't operate like that," the spokesperson said. "All of our oxymorons are free to come and go as they please."
Nonetheless, SDPG is grateful for the nomination and plans to attend the award ceremony, scheduled for later this year.
bill marsh | link
As a special service to the *Special Delvery Oxymoron Group* -Fait Accompli-is drawing attention to the banner ad above SPOG at this very moment!
Become a Freelance Writer
Writing opportunities & resources for a successful writing career.
www.freelance-writing.net
Press Release: SDPG Nominated for Award
SDPG has been nominated for the prestigious "Best Blogged Oxymoron of the Year Award" for a statement issued earlier this week.
The announcement came on the morning of Wednesday, April 16. Fait Accompli, an organization dedicated to "spellbound speculations" and "time travel," offered the nomination in response to the following statement, which appeared in the April 15 edition of the SDPG blog:
"I'm trying to survive as a writer without actually being one. Perhaps that's the best way to put it."
SDPG accepted the nomination, but according to an anonymous spokesperson, the Group is cautious about its prospects.
"We're hopeful, but then again, there's so much oxymoron out there you never know who's going to walk away with the award," the spokesperson said.
SDPG also promised more oxymorons in the near future. "We'll do what we can for as long as the luck holds out."
However, SDPG denied allegations that the oxymoron was deliberately planted in the April 15 blog in order to win back disgruntled fans lost in the wake of the Group's unexplained name change.
"We don't operate like that," the spokesperson said. "All of our oxymorons are free to come and go as they please."
Nonetheless, SDPG is grateful for the nomination and plans to attend the award ceremony, scheduled for later this year.
bill marsh | link
As a special service to the *Special Delvery Oxymoron Group* -Fait Accompli-is drawing attention to the banner ad above SPOG at this very moment!
Become a Freelance Writer
Writing opportunities & resources for a successful writing career.
www.freelance-writing.net
Friday, May 2
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes..."
"Gregor," said his father now from the left-hand room, "the chief clerk has come and wants to know why you didn't catch the early train. We don't know what to say to him."....
"Mr Samsa," the chief clerk called now in a louder voice, "what's the matter with you? Here you are, barricading yourself in your room, giving only 'yes' and 'no' for answers, causing your parents a lot of unecessary trouble and neglecting- I mention this only in passing-neglecting your business duties in an incredible fashion. I am speaking here in the name of your parents and your chief, and I beg you quite seriously to give me an immediate and precise explanation. You amaze me, you amaze me. I thought you were a quiet, dependable person, and now all at once you seem bent on making a disgraceful exhibition of yourself. The chief did hint to me early this morning a possible explanation for your disappearance- with reference to the cash payments that were entrusted to you recently- but I almost pledged my solemn word of honor this could not be so. But now that I see how incredibly obstinate you are, I no longer have the slightest desire to take your part at all. And your position in the firm is not so unassailable. I came with the intention of telling you all this in private, but since you are wasting my time so needlessly I don't see why your parents shouldn't hear it too. For some time past your work has been most unsatisfactory, this is the season of the year for a business boom, of course, we admit that, but for season of the year for doing no business at all, that does not exist, Mr. Samsa, must not exist."
"But, sir," cried Gregor, beside himself and in his agitation forgetting everything else, "I'm just going to open the door this very minute. A slight illness, an attack of giddiness, has kept me from getting up. I'm still lying in bed. But I feel all right again. I'm getting out of bed now. Just give me a moment or two longer. But I'm all right, really. How a thing like that can suddenly strike one down! Only last night I was quite well, my parents can tell you, or rather I did have have a slight presentiment. I must have showed some sign of it. Why didn't I report to the office!"
"The Metamorphsis"
Franz Kafka
"Gregor," said his father now from the left-hand room, "the chief clerk has come and wants to know why you didn't catch the early train. We don't know what to say to him."....
"Mr Samsa," the chief clerk called now in a louder voice, "what's the matter with you? Here you are, barricading yourself in your room, giving only 'yes' and 'no' for answers, causing your parents a lot of unecessary trouble and neglecting- I mention this only in passing-neglecting your business duties in an incredible fashion. I am speaking here in the name of your parents and your chief, and I beg you quite seriously to give me an immediate and precise explanation. You amaze me, you amaze me. I thought you were a quiet, dependable person, and now all at once you seem bent on making a disgraceful exhibition of yourself. The chief did hint to me early this morning a possible explanation for your disappearance- with reference to the cash payments that were entrusted to you recently- but I almost pledged my solemn word of honor this could not be so. But now that I see how incredibly obstinate you are, I no longer have the slightest desire to take your part at all. And your position in the firm is not so unassailable. I came with the intention of telling you all this in private, but since you are wasting my time so needlessly I don't see why your parents shouldn't hear it too. For some time past your work has been most unsatisfactory, this is the season of the year for a business boom, of course, we admit that, but for season of the year for doing no business at all, that does not exist, Mr. Samsa, must not exist."
"But, sir," cried Gregor, beside himself and in his agitation forgetting everything else, "I'm just going to open the door this very minute. A slight illness, an attack of giddiness, has kept me from getting up. I'm still lying in bed. But I feel all right again. I'm getting out of bed now. Just give me a moment or two longer. But I'm all right, really. How a thing like that can suddenly strike one down! Only last night I was quite well, my parents can tell you, or rather I did have have a slight presentiment. I must have showed some sign of it. Why didn't I report to the office!"
"The Metamorphsis"
Franz Kafka
Karen Horney on the arrogant-vindictive personality:
"The need to save face is urgent, and there is more than one way of effecting it. As a matter of fact, there are so many different ways, gross and subtle, that I must restrict my presentation to the more frequent and important ones.The most effective, and, it seems, most ubiquitous one is interlinked with the impulse to take revenge for what is felt as humiliation. We discussed it as a reaction of hostility to the pain and the danger involved with hurt pride. But vindictiveness may in addition be a means towards self-vindication. It involves the belief that by getting back at the offender one's own pride will be restored. This belief is based on the fact that the offender, by his very power to hurt our pride, has put himself above us and has defeated us. By our taking revenge and hurting him more than he did us, the situation will be reversed. We will be triumphant and will have defeated him.The aim of the neurotic vindictive revenge is not "getting even" but triumphing by hitting back harder. Nothing short of triumph *can* restore the imaginary grandeur in which pride is invested. It is this very capacity to restore pride that gives neurotic vindictiveness its incredible tenecity and accounts for its compulsive character....Because the power to retaliate is so valuable for the restoration of pride, this power can itself be invested with pride. In the minds of certain neurotic types it is equal to strength and often it is the only strength they know. Conversely, the incapacity to hit back usually registers as weakness, no matter whether external or internal factors prohibited a vindictive move. Thus when such a person feels humiliated, and either the situation or something within him does not allow him to retaliate, he suffers a double injury: the original "insult" and the "defeat" as opposed to a vindictive triumph....The need for a vindictive triumph,as stated before, is a regular ingredient in a search for glory. If it is the dominant motivating force in life, it sets going a vicious circle that is most difficult to disentangle. The determination then to rise above others in every possible way is so gigantic that it reinforces the whole need for glory, and with that the neurotic pride. The inflated pride in turn enhances the vindictiveness, and thereby makes for a still greater need for triumph."....
"...But he never allows himself to *feel* any hurt because his pride prohibits it. Thus the hardening process, which originally was necessary to protect real feelings, now must gather momentum for the sake of protecting his pride. His pride then lies in being above hurts and suffering. Nothing and nobody, from mosquitoes to accidents to people, can hurt him. This measure, however, is double edged.His not consciously feeling the hurts allows him to live without constant sharp pain. Besides, it is questionable whether the diminshed awareness of hurts does not actually dampen the vindictive impulses too; whether, in other words, he would not be more violent, more destructive without this lessened awareness. Certainly there is a diminished awareness of vindictiveness as such. In his mind it turns to warrented wrath at a wrong done and into the right to punish the wrong-doer. If, however, a hurt does not penetrate through the protective layer of invulnerability, then the pain becomes intolerable. In addition to his pride being hurt- for instance, by a lack of recognition- he also suffers the humilitating blow of having "allowed" something or somebody to hurt him....Closely akin to his belief and pride in his inviolability or invulnerability, and indeed complementing it, is that in immunity and impunity. This belief, entirely unconscious, results from a claim which entitles him to the freedom to do to others whatever he pleases, and to having nobody mind or try to get back at him. In other words, nobody can hurt me with impunity but I can hurt everybody with impunity. In order to undersand the necessity for this claim we must reeconsider his attitudes toward people. We have seen that he offends people easily through his militant rightness, arrogant punitiveness, and his rather openly using them as a means to his ends...He must indeed keep an even balance between letting others feel his righteous anger and between holding it back. What drives his to express it is not only the magnitude of his vindictive urges but even more his need to intimidate others and to keep them in awe of an armed fist. This in turn is so necessary because he sees no possibility of coming to friendly terms with others, because it is a means to assert his claims, and- more generally- because in a warfare of all against all taking the offensive is the best defense....In arguments that may arise he seems to be unconcerned about the truth of any statement he interprets as a hostile attack, but automatically responds with counterattacks- like a porcupine when it is touched. He simply cannot afford to consider even remotely anything that might engender a doubt in his rightness....Or he may realize that he is infuriated at somebody for no other reason than that the latter is always cheerful or intensely interested in something....It hurts his pride that anybody could have something which, whether he wants it or not, is out of his reach....Most people respond to this type by either being intimidated into submissiveness or by rejecting him altogether. Neither attitude will do for the analyst"
from "Neurosis and Human Growth" (Norton, 1950)
"The need to save face is urgent, and there is more than one way of effecting it. As a matter of fact, there are so many different ways, gross and subtle, that I must restrict my presentation to the more frequent and important ones.The most effective, and, it seems, most ubiquitous one is interlinked with the impulse to take revenge for what is felt as humiliation. We discussed it as a reaction of hostility to the pain and the danger involved with hurt pride. But vindictiveness may in addition be a means towards self-vindication. It involves the belief that by getting back at the offender one's own pride will be restored. This belief is based on the fact that the offender, by his very power to hurt our pride, has put himself above us and has defeated us. By our taking revenge and hurting him more than he did us, the situation will be reversed. We will be triumphant and will have defeated him.The aim of the neurotic vindictive revenge is not "getting even" but triumphing by hitting back harder. Nothing short of triumph *can* restore the imaginary grandeur in which pride is invested. It is this very capacity to restore pride that gives neurotic vindictiveness its incredible tenecity and accounts for its compulsive character....Because the power to retaliate is so valuable for the restoration of pride, this power can itself be invested with pride. In the minds of certain neurotic types it is equal to strength and often it is the only strength they know. Conversely, the incapacity to hit back usually registers as weakness, no matter whether external or internal factors prohibited a vindictive move. Thus when such a person feels humiliated, and either the situation or something within him does not allow him to retaliate, he suffers a double injury: the original "insult" and the "defeat" as opposed to a vindictive triumph....The need for a vindictive triumph,as stated before, is a regular ingredient in a search for glory. If it is the dominant motivating force in life, it sets going a vicious circle that is most difficult to disentangle. The determination then to rise above others in every possible way is so gigantic that it reinforces the whole need for glory, and with that the neurotic pride. The inflated pride in turn enhances the vindictiveness, and thereby makes for a still greater need for triumph."....
"...But he never allows himself to *feel* any hurt because his pride prohibits it. Thus the hardening process, which originally was necessary to protect real feelings, now must gather momentum for the sake of protecting his pride. His pride then lies in being above hurts and suffering. Nothing and nobody, from mosquitoes to accidents to people, can hurt him. This measure, however, is double edged.His not consciously feeling the hurts allows him to live without constant sharp pain. Besides, it is questionable whether the diminshed awareness of hurts does not actually dampen the vindictive impulses too; whether, in other words, he would not be more violent, more destructive without this lessened awareness. Certainly there is a diminished awareness of vindictiveness as such. In his mind it turns to warrented wrath at a wrong done and into the right to punish the wrong-doer. If, however, a hurt does not penetrate through the protective layer of invulnerability, then the pain becomes intolerable. In addition to his pride being hurt- for instance, by a lack of recognition- he also suffers the humilitating blow of having "allowed" something or somebody to hurt him....Closely akin to his belief and pride in his inviolability or invulnerability, and indeed complementing it, is that in immunity and impunity. This belief, entirely unconscious, results from a claim which entitles him to the freedom to do to others whatever he pleases, and to having nobody mind or try to get back at him. In other words, nobody can hurt me with impunity but I can hurt everybody with impunity. In order to undersand the necessity for this claim we must reeconsider his attitudes toward people. We have seen that he offends people easily through his militant rightness, arrogant punitiveness, and his rather openly using them as a means to his ends...He must indeed keep an even balance between letting others feel his righteous anger and between holding it back. What drives his to express it is not only the magnitude of his vindictive urges but even more his need to intimidate others and to keep them in awe of an armed fist. This in turn is so necessary because he sees no possibility of coming to friendly terms with others, because it is a means to assert his claims, and- more generally- because in a warfare of all against all taking the offensive is the best defense....In arguments that may arise he seems to be unconcerned about the truth of any statement he interprets as a hostile attack, but automatically responds with counterattacks- like a porcupine when it is touched. He simply cannot afford to consider even remotely anything that might engender a doubt in his rightness....Or he may realize that he is infuriated at somebody for no other reason than that the latter is always cheerful or intensely interested in something....It hurts his pride that anybody could have something which, whether he wants it or not, is out of his reach....Most people respond to this type by either being intimidated into submissiveness or by rejecting him altogether. Neither attitude will do for the analyst"
from "Neurosis and Human Growth" (Norton, 1950)
Thursday, May 1
Another idea about fiction. Why be afraid of the first person? The very situation forces out philosophical issues and also (as I was told) frees you from a dependence (or requirement) on physical description. Well, naturally. If you are more *worried about* issues of internal consistency you are not going to pay so much attention to the details.The *delicious* details of which the actual present consists. The other idea is presenting before the reader a "case." I think this is the most interesting kind of book. The author must also convince themselves this way- the ambivalence is about choosing among several possible ways of understanding things and people.
There is every possibility that I have unconsciously been held back from writing as completely as I am able about others on account of certain kinds of anxieties. The point is not so much to catalogue these anxieties but to circumvent them. Reading "Howard's End" has effected me in many ways, but one of these ways is to review thoughts about these issues.
Words reveal us at the same moment we reveal them. It is as much the need to try to control what they reveal as it is to use them to reveal.
Words reveal us at the same moment we use them to reveal anything. This is primarily what is so absorbing about them and why we turn to them or wish to at nearly every significant moment of our experience. Both literature and psychoanalysis consists of the things we say to ourselves, and to each other. But these things we say we always say in words and these words often have somethiing to say of their own back to us. This is how language itself comes to be part of our lives in the same way that beliefs and wishes and memories become part of our lives. As I came to realize this with more and more conviction, my desire to express this conviction to others became more a part of my desire to write.
There is every possibility that I have unconsciously been held back from writing as completely as I am able about others on account of certain kinds of anxieties. The point is not so much to catalogue these anxieties but to circumvent them. Reading "Howard's End" has effected me in many ways, but one of these ways is to review thoughts about these issues.
Words reveal us at the same moment we reveal them. It is as much the need to try to control what they reveal as it is to use them to reveal.
Words reveal us at the same moment we use them to reveal anything. This is primarily what is so absorbing about them and why we turn to them or wish to at nearly every significant moment of our experience. Both literature and psychoanalysis consists of the things we say to ourselves, and to each other. But these things we say we always say in words and these words often have somethiing to say of their own back to us. This is how language itself comes to be part of our lives in the same way that beliefs and wishes and memories become part of our lives. As I came to realize this with more and more conviction, my desire to express this conviction to others became more a part of my desire to write.
An anxiety attack is a kind of small physical spasm that gets generalized by the mind into a fearful fantasy. It is a kind of shiver the fantasy coming to the surface provokes, and is provoked by the physical response. In monotonously preventing action, perhaps it is meant to delay action which could be dangerous under threatening circumstances.
(5/26/92)
Le Rochefoucauld
#557 - "There is nothing more natural, or more mistaken, than to suppose we are loved."
#558- "We prefer being with people we do things for to people who do things for us."
#559- "It is harder to hide feelings we have than to feign those we lack."
#560- "Patched-up friendships call for greater care than never torn ones."
#561- "A man whom no one pleases is much worse off than a man who pleases no one."
#557 - "There is nothing more natural, or more mistaken, than to suppose we are loved."
#558- "We prefer being with people we do things for to people who do things for us."
#559- "It is harder to hide feelings we have than to feign those we lack."
#560- "Patched-up friendships call for greater care than never torn ones."
#561- "A man whom no one pleases is much worse off than a man who pleases no one."
Le Rochefoucauld
#238- "It is less dangerous to do most people harm than to show them too much kindness."
#269- "Almost no one is perceptive enough to realize all the harm he does."
#309- "There are people destined to be fools who not only do stupid things from choice but are even forced to do them by fate.
#310- "Sometimes situations occur in life where we must be a trifle mad to come off well."
#337- "Certain good qualities are like the five senses: those who entirely lack them can neither recognize nor understand them."
#341- "The hotheadedness of youth causes more damage than the apathy of old age."
#357- "Small minds are too much hurt by small things, great minds know they are trifling, and are not harmed."
#369- "The suffering we go through to keep from loving is often worse than the hardships endured by love."
#370- "There are few cowards who know how really cowardly they are."
#384- "What alone should astonish us is that we can still be astonished."
#386- "They are most often wrong who cannot bear to be."
#388- "If vanity does not topple the virtures, it leaves every last one of them swaying.
#390- "We sacrifice our welfare more willingly than our inclinations."
#402- "What counts least of all in conventional lovemaking is love."
#406- "We come newborn to every milestone of life's journey, and often act like novices at each, no matter what our age."
#480 - "When we are merely prostrated by misfortune, we often think we are steadfast; and we endure it without daring to look it in the face, as cowards consent to be killed, too frightened to defend themselves."
#421- "Self-confidence adds more to conversation than wit does."
#436- "It is easier to know mankind in general than any particular man."
#441- "In friendship as in love, we are often happier not knowing things than knowing them."
#453- "In matters of moment, we should not so much strive to create opportunities as to profit by those that arise."
#470 "All our qualities are questionable and unfixed, in good times as in bad; and they are almost all the playthings of circumstance."
#473- "However rare true love may be, true friendship is rarer."
#477- "The same strength of character that resists love can make it fierce and enduring; and weak people, who are constantly in emotional turmoil, are almost never truly flooded by passion."
#538- "A wise man needs little to be happy, just as nothing will make a fool content- wherefore, most men are miserable."
#540- "To overcome an initial desire is much easier than to satisfy all those that come after it."
#550- "It is more essential to study people than books."
#556- "It is never harder to speak well than we we feel embarassed at keeping silent."
#238- "It is less dangerous to do most people harm than to show them too much kindness."
#269- "Almost no one is perceptive enough to realize all the harm he does."
#309- "There are people destined to be fools who not only do stupid things from choice but are even forced to do them by fate.
#310- "Sometimes situations occur in life where we must be a trifle mad to come off well."
#337- "Certain good qualities are like the five senses: those who entirely lack them can neither recognize nor understand them."
#341- "The hotheadedness of youth causes more damage than the apathy of old age."
#357- "Small minds are too much hurt by small things, great minds know they are trifling, and are not harmed."
#369- "The suffering we go through to keep from loving is often worse than the hardships endured by love."
#370- "There are few cowards who know how really cowardly they are."
#384- "What alone should astonish us is that we can still be astonished."
#386- "They are most often wrong who cannot bear to be."
#388- "If vanity does not topple the virtures, it leaves every last one of them swaying.
#390- "We sacrifice our welfare more willingly than our inclinations."
#402- "What counts least of all in conventional lovemaking is love."
#406- "We come newborn to every milestone of life's journey, and often act like novices at each, no matter what our age."
#480 - "When we are merely prostrated by misfortune, we often think we are steadfast; and we endure it without daring to look it in the face, as cowards consent to be killed, too frightened to defend themselves."
#421- "Self-confidence adds more to conversation than wit does."
#436- "It is easier to know mankind in general than any particular man."
#441- "In friendship as in love, we are often happier not knowing things than knowing them."
#453- "In matters of moment, we should not so much strive to create opportunities as to profit by those that arise."
#470 "All our qualities are questionable and unfixed, in good times as in bad; and they are almost all the playthings of circumstance."
#473- "However rare true love may be, true friendship is rarer."
#477- "The same strength of character that resists love can make it fierce and enduring; and weak people, who are constantly in emotional turmoil, are almost never truly flooded by passion."
#538- "A wise man needs little to be happy, just as nothing will make a fool content- wherefore, most men are miserable."
#540- "To overcome an initial desire is much easier than to satisfy all those that come after it."
#550- "It is more essential to study people than books."
#556- "It is never harder to speak well than we we feel embarassed at keeping silent."
Cesar Vallejo-Trilce-XXVII
"This house pleases me perfectly, a perfect spot for this not knowing where to be/Let's not go in. It frightens me, this permission/ to return by the minute, across exploded bridges."
In 1996 I returned to a study of Cesar Vallejo's *Trilce*. I don't speak or write Spanish with the excuse of time. Time is nothing that invites me closer so don't criticize or disagree. The poem is found elsewhere.
Enigmatic notes in the middle of nowhere.This is a kind of loving that wrenches me out of language, that reverses me inside a catalogue of surrealistic prepositions.That they always correct deprives us of accurate lessons.I stand by my note about *Trilce*. It's not much but that's all there is.
I am inside outside inside.Transference of the lexicons. Exhausted admiration not me. But that's all to continue. Not. Midnight. That wrenches languge out of me.
(6/2/96)
"This house pleases me perfectly, a perfect spot for this not knowing where to be/Let's not go in. It frightens me, this permission/ to return by the minute, across exploded bridges."
In 1996 I returned to a study of Cesar Vallejo's *Trilce*. I don't speak or write Spanish with the excuse of time. Time is nothing that invites me closer so don't criticize or disagree. The poem is found elsewhere.
Enigmatic notes in the middle of nowhere.This is a kind of loving that wrenches me out of language, that reverses me inside a catalogue of surrealistic prepositions.That they always correct deprives us of accurate lessons.I stand by my note about *Trilce*. It's not much but that's all there is.
I am inside outside inside.Transference of the lexicons. Exhausted admiration not me. But that's all to continue. Not. Midnight. That wrenches languge out of me.
(6/2/96)
Eileen Tabios has quietly announced on WinePoetics that a book of her stories is to be published! She says they are sexy. That's all to the good, because she's a good writer and this will add a bit of spice to the mix.
The thing is, she sandwiched this terrific news between flattering hints about me, and flattering hints about her parents.
Hey, Eileen. Forget me and your parents (easy solution: don't give them your book.) Actually, don't give anybody your book (unless they are writers who are willing to swap). Make 'em buy their copies. Readers are nicer to you when you do that. If your parents buy your book on the sly, they won't have to tell you about all the fun they had reading it!
Now: tell us more about your book!
The thing is, she sandwiched this terrific news between flattering hints about me, and flattering hints about her parents.
Hey, Eileen. Forget me and your parents (easy solution: don't give them your book.) Actually, don't give anybody your book (unless they are writers who are willing to swap). Make 'em buy their copies. Readers are nicer to you when you do that. If your parents buy your book on the sly, they won't have to tell you about all the fun they had reading it!
Now: tell us more about your book!
Wednesday, April 30
Today, from -Heathens In Heat-
Great aphorism or adage from Jordan today: "All work is the avoidance of harder work."....
Our moralization of the work ethic, labor as an end in itself and ownership has made us lazy and worst of all, as Marx knew, stupid, in too many ways to fully diagnose.
posted by David at 7:11 AM
Hey Dave, can't resist chiming in with my own maxim on this topic, from *Boundary of Blur* (1993) :
"9/8/86
Everyone must have a night world and a day world. And often, this day world is as afraid of unleashed work, as the night one is of unleashed love."
And, since you mention Marx, David, what about Freud's notion that life consists of two main activities: "Lieben und arbeiten" (work and love).
Great aphorism or adage from Jordan today: "All work is the avoidance of harder work."....
Our moralization of the work ethic, labor as an end in itself and ownership has made us lazy and worst of all, as Marx knew, stupid, in too many ways to fully diagnose.
posted by David at 7:11 AM
Hey Dave, can't resist chiming in with my own maxim on this topic, from *Boundary of Blur* (1993) :
"9/8/86
Everyone must have a night world and a day world. And often, this day world is as afraid of unleashed work, as the night one is of unleashed love."
And, since you mention Marx, David, what about Freud's notion that life consists of two main activities: "Lieben und arbeiten" (work and love).
Subject matter: the air, the ground. Earth/air/water/fire. Object and experience. A "given" already seen, deja vu.The opposite of blank (ness); for example, by making blankness a subject, what is describable as being negative, an absence of something becomes something which can be added-on, something filling. A defining process makes subject matter objective, an alchemy of extended focus causes an abstracted concept, invisible by nature to be at the center of continuous analyses. Seeing (seeking) without need of an image, the consumer of subject matter may suspend all choice and judgement, perhaps making subject matter better grounds for science, than art. The possibility of choice splits subject matter in two; with parts gone, subject matter becomes fragmented and discontinuous, no longer a compendium, its completeness is determined only by those who choose to examine it.
------------
To discuss "subject-matter" somehow offers a perspective on writing processes which is not really linguistics or philosophy. Such a topic is literary in the most literal sense and offers the possibility of a defining a boundary for literary processes. Pragmatic obvious point: I can say- "The literary cannot exist without subject matter" if I said "not for very long." Becuse even the most modest of literary experiments in "subjectless" writing will soon replicate its history through its replications- the lists, documentations, the sum total of the social history which surrounds it. "Subjectless writing" seems to function like a black hole of meaning- the immense amounts of interpretive energy which hovers on, around, beneath, witin the work of such writers as Beckett, for example, whose characters approximate inner perpectives more than they do "actual" persons in the "real world."
------------
A title: "Signs of Life"- somehow connected- sounds.
-------------
Subject matter is more than just matter and more than "just matters." And it has to do with just matters. Syntax sparkles, glistens, echoes around subject matter but it is different- it bends to the will, it has elastic properties, it is not intractable.
Ponge's method of revealing objects: it is like he is closing his eyes and feeling the object through all the other senses- remembering the smells and sounds, touching it, feeling it. This way subject matter is created out of experience, not out of thoughts, concepts and categories. these are syntactical, more map-like- or like a set of directions, a program.
The very act of writing "about" an experience tends to push the mind towards of view of experience likening it to subject matter.
Is there any area of exprience which offers no possibility of becoming transformed- (or transposed or transfigured) into subject matter? This is soon obvious- none. Then, is there anything other than experience which offers itself as subject-matter? The answer is much less obvious- I suggest it is- yes!
(Smithson suggested that language is (=) physical matter.)
What is this subject-matter other than experience. The answer is plain but not so simple- abstraction.
Because-
Sign-making converts experience into abstraction.
Through abstraction we chip away at the massive block of reality which we are incapable- thus far- of knowing and experiencing.
Subject matter is map like because it is the remaining trace of all experience.
(But) subject matter's relationship to art has vastly changed in the past century. Simultaneously- in another sense- it remains nothing less- than all of reality.
What can I mean by that?
-------------------
Or nothing more than a celebration, no more than a pause to reflect a journey to remember and talk about (or) target for a souvenir and change. Say you had never learned more than this letting things go with a great silence- sending others off their tracks to nowhere, it might still be enough.
I'm glad you remembered once
that I reminded you to notice what its like in the so quiet. snow
and, in the end, no more than particles that twinkle and dissolve
a star or a moment
dissolving after a pause
of billions of years
(922/85)
An experience: Toni couldn't find her Tarot deck. I stood up, after she looked for awhile and couldn't find it. I didn't know *why*- but I walked to the corner of the room. I had a thought: why do I think it's around here. Then I said to myself, I'll look around here.
I started to think about tracking. I mean a literature that tells us something new because it helps to didrect us *where to look* for the answers, if not the answers- or I could say (almost)-*how to look*----
If I don't like the way it's put, I can still abstract out the idea- it was *the experience* I was interested in anyway. How does experience become subject matter?
------
What more than one observation at a time? Thisis the perceptual breadth of the eyes- limited to the range of vision. With the multi-sensorial (dreams, visual art, poetry) comes the multi-perspective,multi-rational, many strands or sequences of developmental thought, melodically related or contrapuntally contrasted.
(9/23/85)
------------
To discuss "subject-matter" somehow offers a perspective on writing processes which is not really linguistics or philosophy. Such a topic is literary in the most literal sense and offers the possibility of a defining a boundary for literary processes. Pragmatic obvious point: I can say- "The literary cannot exist without subject matter" if I said "not for very long." Becuse even the most modest of literary experiments in "subjectless" writing will soon replicate its history through its replications- the lists, documentations, the sum total of the social history which surrounds it. "Subjectless writing" seems to function like a black hole of meaning- the immense amounts of interpretive energy which hovers on, around, beneath, witin the work of such writers as Beckett, for example, whose characters approximate inner perpectives more than they do "actual" persons in the "real world."
------------
A title: "Signs of Life"- somehow connected- sounds.
-------------
Subject matter is more than just matter and more than "just matters." And it has to do with just matters. Syntax sparkles, glistens, echoes around subject matter but it is different- it bends to the will, it has elastic properties, it is not intractable.
Ponge's method of revealing objects: it is like he is closing his eyes and feeling the object through all the other senses- remembering the smells and sounds, touching it, feeling it. This way subject matter is created out of experience, not out of thoughts, concepts and categories. these are syntactical, more map-like- or like a set of directions, a program.
The very act of writing "about" an experience tends to push the mind towards of view of experience likening it to subject matter.
Is there any area of exprience which offers no possibility of becoming transformed- (or transposed or transfigured) into subject matter? This is soon obvious- none. Then, is there anything other than experience which offers itself as subject-matter? The answer is much less obvious- I suggest it is- yes!
(Smithson suggested that language is (=) physical matter.)
What is this subject-matter other than experience. The answer is plain but not so simple- abstraction.
Because-
Sign-making converts experience into abstraction.
Through abstraction we chip away at the massive block of reality which we are incapable- thus far- of knowing and experiencing.
Subject matter is map like because it is the remaining trace of all experience.
(But) subject matter's relationship to art has vastly changed in the past century. Simultaneously- in another sense- it remains nothing less- than all of reality.
What can I mean by that?
-------------------
Or nothing more than a celebration, no more than a pause to reflect a journey to remember and talk about (or) target for a souvenir and change. Say you had never learned more than this letting things go with a great silence- sending others off their tracks to nowhere, it might still be enough.
I'm glad you remembered once
that I reminded you to notice what its like in the so quiet. snow
and, in the end, no more than particles that twinkle and dissolve
a star or a moment
dissolving after a pause
of billions of years
(922/85)
An experience: Toni couldn't find her Tarot deck. I stood up, after she looked for awhile and couldn't find it. I didn't know *why*- but I walked to the corner of the room. I had a thought: why do I think it's around here. Then I said to myself, I'll look around here.
I started to think about tracking. I mean a literature that tells us something new because it helps to didrect us *where to look* for the answers, if not the answers- or I could say (almost)-*how to look*----
If I don't like the way it's put, I can still abstract out the idea- it was *the experience* I was interested in anyway. How does experience become subject matter?
------
What more than one observation at a time? Thisis the perceptual breadth of the eyes- limited to the range of vision. With the multi-sensorial (dreams, visual art, poetry) comes the multi-perspective,multi-rational, many strands or sequences of developmental thought, melodically related or contrapuntally contrasted.
(9/23/85)
Improvisation and silence. Not long ago I had the luck to do an improvisatory performance with the poets Jackson Mac Low and Charles Bernstein.We performed Jackson's *Simultaneity*. As Jackson tried various suggestions in turning Charles and I to this performance of his piece- one suggestion struck me deeply: " Real silences!"
Perhaps the famed and mythical "silence" of the Freudian psychoanalysti is related to a wish to create an improvisatory atmosphere in which "free association" could occur unhampered by "directorial comments" and narrative expectation.
(1/3/91)
Perhaps the famed and mythical "silence" of the Freudian psychoanalysti is related to a wish to create an improvisatory atmosphere in which "free association" could occur unhampered by "directorial comments" and narrative expectation.
(1/3/91)
Device: imagine each line separately- as if hearing them in a foreign language.- This is what I meant by the title "Translation Sans Original."
Another "subject to change." The moment I declare anything I'm already breathing in the heady element of spontaneity. I'm "holding the floor" and now I can "go where I want with it." Of course, this freedom is much more apparent than real. A fascinating, thorough and profound documentation of this fact can be found in the books of Erving Goffman.
1) Imagine each line separately as if hearing it in a foreign language.
2) Translate from teh French, lets say, into English- or an "imaginary" French.
Later: Not a "plenitude of reasons/things but a single reason/thing.
(12/31/90)
Improvisation- as in the example of the conquering Spanish- arises often from a risky or unfamiliar situation being taken on. A kind of artificial sense of improvisation can be evoked by treating a familiar situation as if it were an unfamiliar situation. "Procrastination is the poetry of our lives" is also partially because to procrastinate a repetitive task is to then force yourself into an improvisatory situation when it could have been a prepared situation. this might have been as much a part of the aesthetic aspect of the psychoanalytic situation as it is of the scientific one.
For 1991- one notebook. And thereafter, one notebook at a time. the two times before that I've been workikng in multiple notebooks were periods of confusion. This *includes* poetry. The "scrapbook" didn't work out either.There should be a separate small reminder book- not the electronic lists reminders. This should also be spiral ringed.
(1/1/91)
Tuesday, April 29
Stephanie Young likes to notice the banner ads. This one now above Drew Gardner's blog:
USA Horn: Sax Specialists
Expert advice, sales & service. Major brands. Competitive pricing.
www.USAHorn.com
(Drew is great musician- plays piano and other instruments- and recently, while accompanying his readings)
Drew- feel better soon.
I still don't need drugs! I saw this most recent post at Nick's blog:
"Thanks, [+] :"
You're Welcome Nick!
Love,
[+]:
posted by David at 4:17 PM
Some pretty wierd stuff turned up on FA today due to my stuggle to follow Jonathan's patient efforts to walk me through writing links into my message. After several hours, (I was picturing Jonathan getting ready to tear out his hair watching me go through this) I managed to do one link correctly. But then the rest of the message still appears as a link.
David Hess proves once again he can find something to salvage- and savage!- out of almost any type of idiocy.
"Thanks, [+] :"
You're Welcome Nick!
Love,
[+]:
posted by David at 4:17 PM
Some pretty wierd stuff turned up on FA today due to my stuggle to follow Jonathan's patient efforts to walk me through writing links into my message. After several hours, (I was picturing Jonathan getting ready to tear out his hair watching me go through this) I managed to do one link correctly. But then the rest of the message still appears as a link.
David Hess proves once again he can find something to salvage- and savage!- out of almost any type of idiocy.
Even though Stephanie Young's poem postcards sent to me got misdirected because she dropped one digit off the address, somehow I am sure the whole thing is my fault. I'm not saying this to be "charming," accomodating or self-effacing. I am quite literally sure it is my fault.
She's right, though, about why the cards got lost. Because Stephanie put the right zip code on the cards some wonderful, conscientious post office person actually tracked me down at my address on the same avenue (West End Avenue).Stephanie wrote 68, but the address is 680. The postal employee actually wrote in the "0" and you can see that it is squeezed in in a different hand. I called the postoffice today and they said there's a good chance more will come through! And she spoke with her supervisor and said I could call back on Friday. Hang in there, Stephanie, we'll get this book together yet!
Sandra Simonds, of Sandra's Poems, has given me the sad duty to report that she has closed her blog. But she is not unhappy! She wants to catch up on her reading and she and Andrew Mister have things to do like maybe leave Missoula, Montana and move to San Francisco. I have no doubt at all that here in blogland you will be sorely missed! Very best wishes to you and Andrew and l hope you will come back and see us! -fait accompli- and most other blogs- love receiving letters! And please keep reading us!
This just in! Blogger getting married! Toldja the guy had a big heart! (see -bloggers consent!- under "recent entries" on Brandon Barr's site)
wedding site/
Trudy and I sent out most invitations to our wedding on Friday, which is one of the many reasons I haven't been posting much lately (along with a stack of essays to mark and a few to write, and zero-motivation or interest in getting them done). I created a small wedding site with a little mini-blog to coordinate information about the wedding, which is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on July 5th.
Posted by brandon barr at 04:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Links to your left, please.
wedding site/
Trudy and I sent out most invitations to our wedding on Friday, which is one of the many reasons I haven't been posting much lately (along with a stack of essays to mark and a few to write, and zero-motivation or interest in getting them done). I created a small wedding site with a little mini-blog to coordinate information about the wedding, which is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on July 5th.
Posted by brandon barr at 04:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Links to your left, please.
Why am I so constantly amazed that I can't have everythilng when for so long I had nothing?
Worry is a kind of rehearsal for action or- more- a throwing of logs on a small bit of burning flame to incite oneself- to action, often of an indendiary kind.
(4/28/92)
Taste- but how much?
Whatever you do
The world pours in
Drink of it deeper and deeper
Still hungers drive the thoughts
Forward pulling time ahead of themselves, drinking
*
Celan- the "gravity" of the downward reading-
(
)
(
)
(
)
(
)
also- some qualities of Trilce
"Imagining" I'm magining
All that "looking forward and looking backward"- necessary, but so foolish. I imagine a cup- and 5 years are 1/4 to 1/5 of that cup. I.2.3.4.5.
But there is a poetic flavor to that spendthrift attitude towards time- the irony of having "plenty of time" so much you can "throw it away." It's stupid to live as if you can "save" time- and, like the seasons, our feelings and all of it repeats and repeats, like the tides-
The only sweeteners- courage and love.
(4/29/92)
Worry is a kind of rehearsal for action or- more- a throwing of logs on a small bit of burning flame to incite oneself- to action, often of an indendiary kind.
(4/28/92)
Taste- but how much?
Whatever you do
The world pours in
Drink of it deeper and deeper
Still hungers drive the thoughts
Forward pulling time ahead of themselves, drinking
*
Celan- the "gravity" of the downward reading-
(
)
(
)
(
)
(
)
also- some qualities of Trilce
"Imagining" I'm magining
All that "looking forward and looking backward"- necessary, but so foolish. I imagine a cup- and 5 years are 1/4 to 1/5 of that cup. I.2.3.4.5.
But there is a poetic flavor to that spendthrift attitude towards time- the irony of having "plenty of time" so much you can "throw it away." It's stupid to live as if you can "save" time- and, like the seasons, our feelings and all of it repeats and repeats, like the tides-
The only sweeteners- courage and love.
(4/29/92)
Title: Scanning
I begin with a word which reflects a thought. The word I begin with occurs with the thought. I start where I start. I start with a word, a word for a thought.
Scanning the whole language- an instructional manual for scanning.
I thought of it first as computer instructions- instructions for programming the computer to scan the language by reading it aloud. (allowed)
(4/26/82)
I begin with a word which reflects a thought. The word I begin with occurs with the thought. I start where I start. I start with a word, a word for a thought.
Scanning the whole language- an instructional manual for scanning.
I thought of it first as computer instructions- instructions for programming the computer to scan the language by reading it aloud. (allowed)
(4/26/82)
Narrative has to commit itself to details, the same as people do in a relationship. Discovering the outcome of the game also comes by "following" it rather than be deciding it. In a narrative you can "go back" and change details- just as in everyday life you can gradually evade the "hard data." But this "hard data" will eventually erode your hard-ware.
(7/24/88)
(7/24/88)
It is energizing to be torn away from unsatisfying attempts- this increases hopes for a real success.
On the other hand- it is equally important to remember that this new construct (when de-constructed) will be found to mostly consist of already familiar aspects. But the whole will be different. It will contain everything that the earlier construct carried to a different outcome.
We will have found that earlier we had lost our way in time, when suddenly the overall direction we had been heading towards became clearly evident. Moments can now connect with each other again. Perhaps we have only discovered a new mode of making transitions. For clearly, movement never stops. But, like a driver, we are periodically, and constantly looking into the rear view mirror.
True, although we have been listening, no one actually said anything quite clear. Silence had taken over so much that the slightest routine sounds had become greatly magnified (planes, birds, cars and the rain and wind). Each car going by took on significance, a loud voice, some laughter, because such interruptions proved that duration, as such, still exists. Soon, however, our interest turns away from such small proofs. They do not, after all , constitute events in the real world of meanings. Although we are unhealthily addicted to it, time is
measured in meanings, not in moments. It is neither qualitative nor quantitative- it is transformative. Like Orpheus, we must learn not to watch it too closely, because, dizzying into the whirlpool, we may drown in the multiple voices of the future.
"Soon,soon" it seems to say to us constantly, "very soon," to any question we might put to it. Soon, you will sit down at the piano, soon your great quartet will be played and soon it will be heard, understood and blended into other recent textures of sound and soul.
It seems I've learned to collect such hopes like shells on a beach. They are evidences, but only meager ones like those passing sounds. With their bleached and muted colors, such objects hold the attention in such a way that you pocket them and later place them in our special drawers and shelves, thinking they can later be more completely deciphered.
I examine some for awhile and then sit down to play.
Once again, I've combined the possible and the impossible in harmonies that, very elusively, hold these two opposites together for a brief period of time. Over and over, I listen to the recording, trying to ascertain the spot where past, present and future seemed to combine. Of course, I wanted to stay there for as long as possible. I wondered how long I could suspend the afternoon in this way. The more I could shape the transitions, the more quickly I seemed to be able to move inside the hour. Having its own characteristics, I could characterize a series of moments by its exterior markings, instead of reverting to the metronome, or some other kind of mechanical conductor, like a tapping foot, or the sounds of the old woman upstairs walking round and round and round and creaking the floor.
(4/8/95)
Too much neatness makes me wonder.
Given a choice most of us go for a soft landing.
*
Reading Cioran's reaction to an English critic's cynical discussion of Marcus Aurelius makes me laugh with tears in my eyes.
(4/10/95)
On the other hand- it is equally important to remember that this new construct (when de-constructed) will be found to mostly consist of already familiar aspects. But the whole will be different. It will contain everything that the earlier construct carried to a different outcome.
We will have found that earlier we had lost our way in time, when suddenly the overall direction we had been heading towards became clearly evident. Moments can now connect with each other again. Perhaps we have only discovered a new mode of making transitions. For clearly, movement never stops. But, like a driver, we are periodically, and constantly looking into the rear view mirror.
True, although we have been listening, no one actually said anything quite clear. Silence had taken over so much that the slightest routine sounds had become greatly magnified (planes, birds, cars and the rain and wind). Each car going by took on significance, a loud voice, some laughter, because such interruptions proved that duration, as such, still exists. Soon, however, our interest turns away from such small proofs. They do not, after all , constitute events in the real world of meanings. Although we are unhealthily addicted to it, time is
measured in meanings, not in moments. It is neither qualitative nor quantitative- it is transformative. Like Orpheus, we must learn not to watch it too closely, because, dizzying into the whirlpool, we may drown in the multiple voices of the future.
"Soon,soon" it seems to say to us constantly, "very soon," to any question we might put to it. Soon, you will sit down at the piano, soon your great quartet will be played and soon it will be heard, understood and blended into other recent textures of sound and soul.
It seems I've learned to collect such hopes like shells on a beach. They are evidences, but only meager ones like those passing sounds. With their bleached and muted colors, such objects hold the attention in such a way that you pocket them and later place them in our special drawers and shelves, thinking they can later be more completely deciphered.
I examine some for awhile and then sit down to play.
Once again, I've combined the possible and the impossible in harmonies that, very elusively, hold these two opposites together for a brief period of time. Over and over, I listen to the recording, trying to ascertain the spot where past, present and future seemed to combine. Of course, I wanted to stay there for as long as possible. I wondered how long I could suspend the afternoon in this way. The more I could shape the transitions, the more quickly I seemed to be able to move inside the hour. Having its own characteristics, I could characterize a series of moments by its exterior markings, instead of reverting to the metronome, or some other kind of mechanical conductor, like a tapping foot, or the sounds of the old woman upstairs walking round and round and round and creaking the floor.
(4/8/95)
Too much neatness makes me wonder.
Given a choice most of us go for a soft landing.
*
Reading Cioran's reaction to an English critic's cynical discussion of Marcus Aurelius makes me laugh with tears in my eyes.
(4/10/95)
Monday, April 28
Something is lost about time from moment to moment. Perhaps true time travel is cracking the secret of the link between moments, the interval.
Waiting has a particular quality, for example. Feelings seem to have a certain duration.
Thoughts have a very special secretness and privateness. This is part of the secret of the interval. Who has not savored and thoroughly appreciated a lucious daydream that no one else may ever know - and may be repeated. No one can take these away, even from a madman, or a man asleep. It has been said that even the dead have their dreams. No one alive willl ever know, and the dead won't remember.
Young people like to laugh, but older people appreciate both the value and the duration of cynicism. Like every form of bravado, its efficacy is short-lived. Love of life- vibrance, warmth- are more lasting and responsive to the daily demands for effort and spontaneity.
(8/12/82)
Waiting has a particular quality, for example. Feelings seem to have a certain duration.
Thoughts have a very special secretness and privateness. This is part of the secret of the interval. Who has not savored and thoroughly appreciated a lucious daydream that no one else may ever know - and may be repeated. No one can take these away, even from a madman, or a man asleep. It has been said that even the dead have their dreams. No one alive willl ever know, and the dead won't remember.
Young people like to laugh, but older people appreciate both the value and the duration of cynicism. Like every form of bravado, its efficacy is short-lived. Love of life- vibrance, warmth- are more lasting and responsive to the daily demands for effort and spontaneity.
(8/12/82)
Sunday, April 27
Hearing Cori Copp's audioblog on Jim Behrle's blog and noticing Sandra Simonds' remark about dysfunctionality in blogland I got into an inner debate with some ideas that came to me about whatever I sensed they were getting at or implying in their comments about blogging. I remembered that people constantly got tired or annoyed on the Buffalo poetics list, particularly women, and would write letters to the list that they were tired of the fighting and arguing or of being completely ignored. I always found this disturbing and wondered why it kept happening. I realize that women have strong reasons for developing a highly sensitized bullshit detector. It's an absolutely necessary defense mechanism against a lot of shenanigans by men some of which are aimed their way. But what I'm thinking right now about writing and the arts in general is: if someone, even better a group of someones don't get bit carried away or outrageous nothing much happens! I don't mean necessarily getting overexcited, or crazy, but at least a bit more intense than everyday levels of becoming absorbed or engaged in ideas, discussion, expression, interaction, exchange. Surely most bloggers try to do this in some way. What kind of theater can happen if people don't get a little surprised, aroused, upset, dazzled, confused or provoked? Any given twenty minutes of television will convince you that most of life should consist of discussions of some sort of mildy provocative rehash of events reported in the news . My favorite Blake aphorisms are: "Enough! Or Too much." The other is: "If the fool were to persist in his folly he would become wise."
"The first thought of some is to consult books.
The first impulse of others is look at things."
"A man who feels things very deeply and has a sense of being intimately bound up with those things themselves cannot help being obscure.
For visibility ceases a few yards below the surface.
To feel very deeply the latent presence, the countless combinations,the sum of all the possibilities of a language transforms *the idea of a thought,* and imparts to every thought that "occurs" to us both freedoms and exigencies quite other than those which are the lot of thoughts handled on everyday lines."
Paul Valery
Analects
The first impulse of others is look at things."
"A man who feels things very deeply and has a sense of being intimately bound up with those things themselves cannot help being obscure.
For visibility ceases a few yards below the surface.
To feel very deeply the latent presence, the countless combinations,the sum of all the possibilities of a language transforms *the idea of a thought,* and imparts to every thought that "occurs" to us both freedoms and exigencies quite other than those which are the lot of thoughts handled on everyday lines."
Paul Valery
Analects
"What is called invention is in the nature of a communication.
Inventiveness in every field keeps pace with the acquisition and improvements of means of communication.
A good system of notation leads to invention.
You need to be two to invent. One man takes combinations, while the other selects, notices what he wants and what c an be of service to him in the total output of his colleague.
What is called
"genius" consists far less in the labors of the former- the act of combining-than in the promptitude with which the second man recognizes the value of what has been produced and takes that product serve his turn.*
*scorn of "natural gifts" and of all that has not been thought out."
Paul Valery
Analects
Inventiveness in every field keeps pace with the acquisition and improvements of means of communication.
A good system of notation leads to invention.
You need to be two to invent. One man takes combinations, while the other selects, notices what he wants and what c an be of service to him in the total output of his colleague.
What is called
"genius" consists far less in the labors of the former- the act of combining-than in the promptitude with which the second man recognizes the value of what has been produced and takes that product serve his turn.*
*scorn of "natural gifts" and of all that has not been thought out."
Paul Valery
Analects
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