"The real secret of the contemplator's success is in his refusal
to consider as an evil the encrochment on his personality by
things....."

"The precise contemplation of objects is also a form of rest,
but a privilaged rest of adult plants that bear fruits..."

Francis Ponge *Things*
translated by Cid Corman
***********************************************

"'One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik
banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world
is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and
obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other further, as yet
unglimpsed manifestations of decay. You see, world
deterioration of this regressive type is a normal experience
of many half-lifers, especially in the early stages when ties
to real reality are still very strong..."

*Ubik*, Phillip K. Dick, Doubleday, 1969, p. 118
************************************************
"As I mentioned, I had begun early to find evidence that she unconsciously
defended herself against the recognition of her own psychological instability,
through projecting this instability upon not only other persons, but upon
her nonhuman environment as well. That is, she indicated that she not
only experienced other *person* in her presence (including myself, in the
therapeutic session) as being replaced, repeatedly, by different persons;
she also experienced the hospital buildings, the contours of the landscape,
and the locations of the trees as changing more or less constantly. She could
only conclude that all of her surroundings were a giant movie set which was
changed continuously. This included even the neighboring village, and the adjacent
city of Washington; when she went into the village or the city, she was sure,
each time, that this was a different community from any that she had ever
visited before. She was certain that there were thousands of Chestnut Lodges,
thousands of Rockvilles, thousands of Washingtons. Changes in these physical
surroundings , as well as changes in the appearance of other persons, would occur
right before her eyes. She had had a similar perception of her environment, for years
before my first interview with her. She once confided to me that even before the
age of eight, "I used to feel as though I were walking on quicksand."

Harold Searles, *The Nonhuman Environment*, New York, 1960, p. 315-316 316,
**********************************************************************

"No urban planner, puzzling out the rational requirements of a new city
development, would ever have arrived at the Morroccan birdcage shop.
Yet, of all the businesses on the block this is the only one which is most
typical of the peculiar big-city flavour of the quarter. It is an example of pure,
bedsitter-entrepreneurism; you import a functional object from a distant
place or period, make it both useless and decorative with a lick of paint, then
sell it at a fancy price as a status-enhancer. If the bottom falls out of the
birdcage market, no doubt the shop can quickly adapt t selling cracked
78 rpm rock-and-roll records, 1940's Aztec-fretwork radio sets, or glass
liquid jars for growing miniature gardens in. The market in fashion is
omnivorous in this improvisatory, make-do-and mend way; it transforms
junk into antiques, rubbish into something rich, strange, expensive and
amusing. It is solely concerned with effecting arbitrary changes in value; its
raw material is the continuous stream of waste products which we leave
behind us in our crazes. It is cyclical and self-sufficient, replenishing itself
as demand dictates, from the reservoir of refuse f rom which we have
temporarily averted our eyes. One blink, and we are making out a cheque
to pay for some *object d'art* which we tossed into a garbage can only
last month. The Moroccan birdcage syndrome is a useful model for a certain
kinnd of urban industrial process- a process which both supplies a demand
for commodities whose sole feature is their expression of aste, and becomes,
by virtue of its laws of economic transformation, the ultimate arbiter of that taste."

Jonathan Raban, *Soft City*, New York, 1974, p 95.
*****************************************************************
"WOZZECK Well, Doctor- you see, sir- sometimes there's folk
with this or that kind of character, or structure so to say; but
you see, sir, with Nature, sir- (He *snaps his fingers*) it's like that
sir. How could I put it? Like-

DOCTOR Wozzeck, you're philsophizing again.

WOZZECK You see, Doctor, when Nature gjives way, sir-

DOCTOR Nature! What! Nature!

WOZZECK- gives out, sir, and the world turns all
dark, and you go round fumblin after things
with your 'ands. And then'tis as though it might
all break up, sir- like a spider's web. Oh, sir- and
then there's something there; but it's not there at
all. Oh, Marie! 'Tis all so dark, and nol more than
a glint of red to west, like out of a chimney, sir-
and what are you to hold to then? (HE *paces
the room*.)

DOCTOR Tch! Don't shift your feet like that.
You're not a spider.

WOZZECK Doctor, have you ever seen anything
of compound reason? When the sun burns down
at mid-day, and it's as though the world might go
up in one flame. Once I heard a fearful voice, sir-
speaking to me.

Georg Buchner, *WOZZECK*
translated by Geoffrey Dunlop, London, 1952
*************************************************************
"In the sequence one can say that first there is object-relating,
then in the end there is object-use; in between, however, is the
most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development; or the most
irksome of all the early failures that come for mending. This thing
that there is in between relating and use is the subject's placing
of the object outside the area of the subject's omnipotent control;
that is, the subject's perception of the object as an external phenomenon,
not as a projected entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own
right.

The change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys
the object. From here it could be argued by an armchair philosopher
that there is therefore no such thing in practice as the use of an object:
If the object is external, then the object is destroyed by the subject.
Should the philosopher come our of his chair and sit on the floor with
the patient, however, he will find that there is an intermediate positon.
In other words he will find that after 'subject relates to object' comes
*object survives* destruction by the subject'. But there may or may not
be survival."

"The Use of An Object" from *Playing and Reality*, D.W. Winnicott.
London, 1971, p. 89
*************************************************************
"Those things of which there is sight, hearing, knowledge: these are
what I honor most."

Hericleitus of Ehpesus
translated by Kathleen Feeman


**************************************************************

"Ideas are not my forte. I do not handle them with ease. They handle me
instead. Give me a queasy feeling, nausea. I don't like to find myself
thrown in their midst. Objects in the external world, on the other hand,
delight me. They sometimes surprise me, but they seem in no way concerned
about my approval: which they immediately acquire. I do not question them."

Francis Ponge, *Methods*
from * The Voice of Things*
translated by Beth Archer

****************************************************************

"But," said K., "Ive'seen the inside of an official sledge in which
there weren't any papers." Olga's sotry was opening for him
with such a great and almost incredible world that he could not help
trying to put his own small experiences in relation to it, as much to
convince himself of its reality as of his own existence.

"That's possible," said Olga, "but in that case it's even worse, for
that means that the official's business is so important that the papers
are too precious or too numerous to be taken with him, and those
officials go at a gallop. In any case, none of them can spare time for father.
And besides, there are several roads to the Castle. Now one of them
is in fashion, and most carriages go by that, now it's another and everything
drives pell-mell there. And what governs this change of fashion has never
been found out. At eight o'clock one morning they'll all be on on another
road, ten minutes later on a third, and half an hour after that on the first
road again, and then they may stick to that road all day, but every minute
there's a possibility of a change. Of course, all the roads join up near the
village, but by that time all the carriages are racing like mad, while nearer the
Castle the pace isn't quite so fast. And the amount of traffic varies just
as widely and incomprehensibly as the choice of raods. There are often days
when there's not a carriage to be seen, and others when they travel in
crowds. Now, just think of all of that in relation to father. In his best suit,
which soon becomes his only suit, off he goes every morning from the house
with our best wishes."

Franz Kafka, *The Castle*, New York, 1930, p. 238
translated by Edwin and Willa Muir
****************************************************************
"The Situationists even believed that they had discovered the vastest
and most irreducible subject possible: "life." Unfortunately, this approach
does not solve the problem of the subject, as is demonstrated by the
rigid dichotomous vision to which it leads. The relationship of society to the
spectacle comes to be pictured as one between life and non-life. to the
commodity, the economy, and the spectacle, defined as "a negation of life
that *has become visible* as "non-life," and as "the life, moving of
itself, of that which is dead"...is opposed life as flux."

*Guy Debord* Anselm Jappe, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith,
UC Press, 1993.
***************************************************************
"The events that happen in individual existence as it is organized,
the events that really concern us and require our participation are generally
precisely those that merit nothing more than our being distant, bored,
indiferent spectators. In contrast, the situation that is seen in some artistic
transposition is rather often attractive, something that would merit our
participating in it. This is a paradox to reverse, to put back on its feet. This
is what must be realized in acts. and this idiotic spectacle of the fragmented
and filtered past, full of sound and fury: it is not a question now of transmitting-
it- of 'rendering' it, as is said- in another neatly ordered spectacle that would
play the game of neatly ordered comprehension and participation. No. Any
coherent artistic expression already expresses the coherence of the past,
already expresses passivity. It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To
destroy the conventions of its communication. To demoralise its fans. What a task!
As in blurry, drunken vision, the memory and the language of the film fade out
simultaneously. At the extreme, the miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain
sort of objectivity: a documentary on the conditions of non-communication."

Guy Debord, *Society of The Spectacle and Other Films*
*Refutation of all judgements whether for or against,
which have been brought to date of the film 'Society of
The Spectacle" is based on the translation by Ken Sanborn,
New York, 1989. No copyright for non-profit editions.
*********************************************************************
"We do not see the human eye as a receiver, it appears not
to let anything in, but to send something out. The ear receives;
the eye looks. (It casts glances, it flashes, radiates, gleams.) One
can terrify with one's eyes, not with one's ear or nose. When
you see the eye you see something going out from it. You see
the look in the eye."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Zettel, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe
UC Press, 1967, p. 40e

"fait accompli"- the song(sung by *curve*) {click here}

**

"fait accompli"- the film (also known as "voodoo dawn") (1998) {click here}

David Sifrey, whose Technorati website is one of the most
useful sites in the blogosphere, posted the following regarding
the sociology of linking. See paragraph 2,
February 16: "I've been giving a lot of thought
to Tim Oren's succinct comments that linking is a new kind of social gesture..."
Sifrey's Alerts {click here}

"Well, let's put it this way: I have ideas, ideas that can be
turned into profits, and I have a way with things, of making
an idea concrete and giving it cash value. After my first big-
payoff inventions or discoveries, I didn't even need a way
with things; I got myself a staff. One invention led to another.
The money kept pouring in; it still does. All I really ever
needed was ideas, and I have never had a lack of those.

What is my secret? I start with myself. That's my first
million dollar idea. What would I really like? What do I
need? What would make my life better, even a little bit
better? What would I pay good money for? What would make
my life more comfortable and pleasurable?

There's a lecture I give, and I've given it all over the
country and in Europe, too, that I call 'How To Invent
Your Way To Big Money.' What I've just said is exactly
how I begin it every time. Usually I make people pay big
bucks for these words: I only speak to 20 people at a time
and I charge them each $1000 at least. My time is valuable
to me. I have to say, though, that most people just don't
get the message no matter how much they pay to hear
me speak. Most people are lumps. So you can quote me
for free. I figure that poor people might do better with my
secret to success than the rich ones."

"The Big Cheese" from *Hotel Death and other tales*
by John Perrault
Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1989

**************************************************

"Sometimes, you just have to bow down in awe. A person
comes up with an idea that no one has ever thought of, an
idea so simple and perfect that you wonder how the world ever
managed to survive without it. The suitcase with wheels, for
example. How could it have taken so long? For thirty thousand
years, we've been lugging our burdens around with us, sweating
and straining as we moved from one place to another, and the only
thing that's ever come of it is sore muscles, bad backs, exhaustion.
I mean, it's not as though we didn't have the wheel, is it? That's
what gets me. Why did we have to wait untiil the end of the
twentieth century for this gizmo to see the light of day?...I'm
telling your friend, things aren't so simple as they look. The human
spirit is a dull instrument, and often we're no better at figuring
out how to take care of ourselves than the lowest worm on the ground."

Paul Auster, *Timbuktu*, faber and faber, 1999

**********************************************************

"Reports of air attacks are seldom without the names of the firms
which produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, Heinkel, Lancaster
feature where once the talk of of cuirrassiers, lancers and hussars.
The mechanism for reproducing life, for dominating and destroying
it, is exactly the same, and accordingly, industry, state, and
advertising are amalgamated. The old exaggeration of sceptical
Liberals, that war was a business, has come true: state power
has shred even the appearance of independence from particular
interests in profit; always in their service really, it now also places
itself there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of the chief
contractor in the destruction of cities, helps to earn it the
good name that will secure it the best commissions in their
rebuilding."

"Out of The Firing Line," f rom *Minima Moralia* Thodore Adorno,
Verso,1978, translation by E.F.N. Jephcott

******************************************************

"As a focus of regression, mass culture assiduously concerns
itself with the production of those archetypes in whose survival
fascistic psychology perceives the most reliable means of perpetuating
the modern conditions of domination. Primeval symbols are constructed
on the production line. The dream industry does not so much fabricate
the drama of the customers as to introduce the dreams of the suppliers
among the people. This is the thousand-year empire of an industrial
caste system governed by a stream of never-ending dynasties. In the
dreams of those in charge of mummifying the world mass culture
represents a priestly hieroglyphic script which addresses its images to
those who have been subjugaged not in order that they might be
enjoyed but only that they be read...But the secret doctrine which is
communicated here is the message of capital. It must be secret because
total domination likes to keep itself invisible."

Theodore Adorno, *The Culture Industry*
Routledge, 1991
***********************************************************

"The spectacular organisation of modern class society brings with it
two consequences recognisable everywhere: on the one hand, the
generalised falsification of products as well as of reasoning; on the
other, the obligation, for those who pretend to find their happiness
therein, of always maintaining themselves at a great distance from that
which they affect to love, for they never possess the means, whether
intellectual or otherwise, by which to accede to direct and profound
knowledge, a complete praxis and authentic taste.

What is already so apparent when it is a question of living conditions,
of wine, of cultural consumption or of the liberation of morals, should
be naturally only the more marked when it is a matter of revolutionary
theory, and of the redoubtable language which they attach to a
condemned world. this naive falsification and this incompetent approbation,
which are like the specific odour of the spectacle, have hardly failed to
illustrate the commentaries, variously imcomprehensible, which have
responded to the film entitled *The Society of the Spectacle*.

Incomprehension, in this case, imposes itself, for still a bit longer. The
spectacle is a poverty, even more than it is a conspiracy. And those who
write in the newspapers of our epoch have dissimulated nothing of their
intelligence from us. What could they say of pertinence concerning a film
which attacks them at the moment when they themselves begin to feel
themselves caving in in every detail. The debility of their reactions accompanies
the decadence of their world...One who looks at the poverty of their life
understands well the poverty of their discourse. It is enough to see
their set decorations and their occupations, their commodities and their
ceremonies; and that is spread out everywhere. It's enough to hear these
imbecilic voices which tell you that you have become alienated, as they inform
you of it with contempt, at every hour that passes.

Spectators do not find what they desire: they desire what they find."

Guy Debord *Society of the Spectacle and Other Films*
Rebel Press, London, 1992
*************************************************************
"WILLY: Charley, I'm strapped. I'm strapped. I don't know
what to do. I was just fired.

CHARLEY: Howard fired you?

WILLY: That snotnose. Imagine that? I named him. I named
him Howard.

CHARLEY: Willy, when you gonna realize that them things
don't mean anything? You named him Howard, but you can't
sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can
sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you
don't know that.

WILLY: I've always tried to think otherwise, I guess. I always
felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked, that nothing-

CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? Who liked J.P. Morgan?
Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he'd look like a butcher.
But with his pockets on he was very well liked. Now listen, Willy,
I know you don't like me, and nobody can say I'm in love with you,
but I'll give you a job because- just for the hell of it, put it that way.
Now what do you say?

WILLY: I- I just can't work for you, Charley.

CHARLEY: What're you, jealous of me?

WILLY: I can't work for you, that's all, don't ask me why.

CHARLEY, *angered, takes out more bills*:You've been
jealous of me all your life, you damned fool. Here, pay
your insurance. *He puts the money in Willy's hand*

WILLY: I'm keeping strict accounts.

CHARLEY: I've got some work to do. Take care of
yourself. And pay your insurance.

WILLY, *moving to the right: Funny, y'know? After
all the highways and the trains, and the appointments,
and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."

from *Death of A Salesman*
Arthur Miller
Viking, NY 1949

This Just In From Aaron Tieger
(just in because my email server's been
down since last night)


If you're in or near NYC on Thursday,
March 4, please come celebrate issue 2
(and others) of CARVE with poetry readings by

Michael Carr
Gregory Ford
Brenda Iijima
Mark Lamoureux
Dorothea Lasky
Jess Mynes
Christina Strong
Aaron Tieger
Matvei Yankelevich

With music by The Millerite Redeemers!
Curated & with introduction by David Kirschenbaum.
Free wine, cheese, food, etc.

6 pm.
ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr. (Chelsea)
NYC

Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues

FREE AND OPEN TO THE
PUBLIC. BRING FRIENDS, DATES, ETC.

"Every given commodity fights for itself,
cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts
to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only
one. The spectacle then, is the epic poem of this struggle,
an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any
Troy. The spectacle does not sing the praises of
men and their weapons, but of commodities and
their passions. In this blind struggle, every commodity
pursuing its passion unconsciously realizes something
higher: the becoming-world of the commodity,
which is also the becoming-commodity of the
world. So, by a TRICK OF COMMODITY LOGIC,
what is SPECIFIC in the commodity wears itself
out in the fight while the commodity-form moves
towards its absolute realization.

In the image of the society happily unified by
consumption, real division is only SUSPENDED
until the next non-accomplishment in the
consumable. Each specific product which represents
hope for a dazzling short-cut to the promised land
of total consumption, is ceremoniously presented
in its turn as the decisive entity. But as in the
case of the simultaneous diffusion of seemingly
aristocratic first-names carried by almost all
individuals of the same age, the objects from which
one expects a unique power could not have been proposed
for the devotion of the masses unless it had been
produced in large enough numbers to be consumed
massively. A product acquires prestiige only when
it is placed at the center of social life as the revealed
mystery of the ultimate goal of production.

The object which was prestigious in the spectacle becomes
vulgar as soon as it enters the home of the consumer, and
at the same time enters the homes of all the others. Too late,
it reveals its essential poverty, which it naturally gets from the'
misery of its production. But, by then, another object already
carries the justification of the system and the demand to be
recognized.

The fraud of satisfaction must denounce itself by being
replaced, following the change of products and the
general conditions of production. That which asserted
its definitive excellence with perfect impudence nevertheless
changes, both in the diffuse and in the concentrated
spectacle, and it is the system alone which must continue.
Stalin, as well as the outmoded commodity are denounced
precisely by those who imposed them. Every NEW LIE of
advertising is also an AVOWAL of the previous lie. The
fall of every figure of totalitarian power reveals the ILLUSORY
COMMUNITY which approved him unanimously, and was no
more than an agglomoration of solitudes without illusions.

What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change, and
must change with its base. The spectacle is abolutely
dogmatic and at the same time cannot really arrive with any
solid dogma. Nothing stops for it; this condition is natural to
it yet most contrary to its inclination.

The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class
division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of
production rests. What obliges the producers to participate
in the construction of the world is also what separates them
from it. What brings together men liberated from their local
and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What requires
a more profound rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality
of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What creates
the abstract power of society creates its concrete UNFREEDOM."

Guy Debord
*Society of the Spectacle
and Other Films*

Thanks to Mike Snider's Formal
Blog and Sonnetarium {click here} ,
and to Tim Peterson's Mappemunde {click here}
for the kind words and vote of confidence for this blog.

"The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production
prevail, heralds itself as an immense accumulation of SPECTACLES.
Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation.

The images that detach themselves from every aspect of life fuse
in a common stream where the unity of life can no longer be
re-established. Reality considered PARTIALLY unfolds itself in its
own general unity as a pseudo-world APART, an object of mere
contemplation.

The specialisation of images of the world finds itself
accomplished in the world of the automatised image where the
liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete
inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as
a part of society, and as INSTRUMENT OF UNIFICATION. As a part
of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all
looking and consciousness. Due to the very fact this sector is
SEPARATE, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of
false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing
but an official language of generalised separation.

The spectacle is not an aggregate of images but a social relation
amongst people, mediated by language. The spectacle, grasped
in its totality, is both the result and project of the existing mode
of production. It is not a supplement of the real world, its added
decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In
all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, advertisement
or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present
MODEL of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation
of the choice ALREADY MADE in production and its corollary
consumption.

Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global
social praxis split into image and reality. The social practice
before which the autonomous spectacle installs itself is also
the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the gash within
this totality mutilates it the point of making the spectacle appear
to be the goal. In a world which is REALLY UPSIDE DOWN, the
true is a moment of the false.

Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is AFFIRMATION of
appearance and affirmation of all human life, that is of social
life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth
of the spectacle uncovers it as the visible NEGATION of life; as a
negation of life which HAS BECOME VISIBLE.

The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive,
indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than "whatever
appears is good, and whatever is good appears". The attitude
it requires in principle is this passive acceptance, which in fact
it has already obtained by its method of appearing without reply,
by its monopoly of appearance.

The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that
the economy has subjugated them. It is no more than the economy
developing itself for itself. It is the faithful reflection of the production
of things, and the false objectification of the producers.

Where the real world changes into simple images the simple
images become real beings and efficient motivation of hypnotic
behavior.

At the rate that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream
becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of
enchained modern society which ultimately only expresses its
desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian angel
of this sleep."

Guy Debord
*Society of the Spectacle
And Other Films*

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

At the same moment that Jack Kimball, who both captains
Pantaloons:Tykes on Poetry (Jack Kimball) {click here},
a sure and steady blogship, and sails a sharp and
swift publishing racing craft he calls *Faux Books* is
publishing an excellent series of book reviews on his blog
(he complimented Cori Copp's recent chapbook with
a comment very mildly disparaging blogging in favor of books
of poetry), on the Buffalo Poetics list the old theme of blogging being
a drag on the energies of the vivacious and glittering poetics list has once
again emerged. Unfortunately, we rose to the occasion with a
post to the poetics list, but fortunately so did Tim Yu and Chris Murray.
Tim's much clearer and more insightful post is available right now
on Tympan (Tim Yu) {click here}.
tex files (Chris Murray) {click here}
has not republished the comments she made on the poetics list,
but she does have a thoughtful comment to make on
last night's poetics brouhaha.

The subject line was: "Start an Argument on the Poetics List."
I may have been mistaken, but I thought Alan Sondheim
had called for more argumentative discussions on the
poetics list as in days of yore.

Here's my rather grouchy and pious ourburst:
*****************************

Blaming the blogosphere for what is lacking on
the poetics list is an old tradition,(old in internet-time)
and sounds to these old poet's ears like a cry of pain. This
is not unusual from Mr. Sondheim, whose precision
of perception is not the least bit
lost on a great number of poets, despite
its many fascinating, complex camouflages.

What a poet needs, especially a long distance marathon
poetry runner, is response. Some say
there is never enough response for an artist, and that
might be true, especially for those who crave the energizing,
potentially infinitely expanding cycle of signal and response
between artist and audience.

It may sadden, alarm and confuse some to hear,
given its tawdry, tinny surfaces,
that this is exactly what is delighting and challenging
many writers in Blogland. But the cycle (of signal land response),
that is occurring in this situation is unlike any
that has ever existed before, in the world of
letters, it seems to me, and is not at all
subsumed under the model shaped by the
cycle of argument and debate, the taste for
which is no doubt being stimulated (for some)
by the pathetically tired old clichéd debates now
going on in the mostly false and fraudulent
US election process: another kind of
Academy Award ceremony that is not even funny anymore.

Though many realize all of this movie
academy and election academy sturm
and drang is almost completely devoid of
meaning (not significance, of course),
does not prevent the emergence of the
mentally stimulating, imagination- appetizing
aspects of the spectacle of debate, an ancient
mode of provoking the discovery and identification
of greatness. But this election process is the
clearest proof of Guy Debord's theories
anybody could ever want to see.
The Society of the Spectacle is beyond crisis; it is moribund.

Can I wonder aloud if this argument and debate method of exchanging
knowledge and inducing change, discovering truth,
and uncovering greatness is totally bankrupt?
What might replace it? What could replace it?

Something is happening in Blogland and you don't know what
it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

affectionate regards to my list friends and literary comrades,
Nick Piombino

Lanny Quarles, creator of the
endlessly inventive blog
(solipsis)//:phaneroemikon {click here}

sent us this poem
and gave us permission to publish it. Dig this:

S Qua Mater

by Lanny Quarles


the rose alloyed
of spectral S

tongues

within a hollow laddering

[pulse of pale-small digit-streams, system of microwave energies]

pale savage bitterness
of password (the hummingruel and shimmingrowl)

the moment as it seems

to history

[shave any multiplier or discriptor, they dream in separation]

that plain 'S'

whose surface as construction

opens conduits

undulating topologies

of holes

and of nights

[forever can be understood like a painting at best]

the fields of speaking hair

the rose alloyed
of spectral

vivid and optical bloodcakes
by extraction
in a woven yellow bowl

[the place of the hissing den]

placed over a round abundance
of emptiness

[the peoples of an inner wilderness]

and the lapis tongue
ceremoniously robed
as some zeus or zagreus of blackinsected corn
in curls of inky steam-stone
platyrhignostic, the kitschyschitzy image of divinity

[SCOP=structural classification of proteins]

and a field of lush green rolling
valley
hidden
a gigantic white sphere
where a rusted volvo is just exploding

and one lone red horned toad
peeks out from its make-believe hole
with a lone white ant
perched between its eyes

like a hood ornament
antennae

dpqp: Visualizing Poetics {click here}
reported the death of Lyx Ish, aka Elizabeth Was, this past weekend.
Our condolences to Miekel And.

::fait accompli::
(((((BLOGLINK)))))(((((CRUSH)))))((((((LIST))))) (New Links)
(((((THESE)))))(((((BLOGS)))))(((((ARE)))))(((((HOT)))))




Notes From The Dovecote (click here}
Mappemunde {click here}
DagZine {click here}
the postmodern romantic {click here}
Anita Rust {click here}
A Parsnip {click here}
Dumbfoundry {click here}
Crony. {click here}
Twists and Turns {click here}
hanging like a ragdoll {click here}
Nice Guy Syndrome {click here}
dolebludger {click here}
"if.." {click here}
the trigger {click here}
3rd House Party {click here}
fuse {click here}
Anita Rust {click here}
DaDooDoFlow {click here}
The Shuniverse Dialogues {click here}
Malibu's Blues {click here}
Poetic Inhalation {click here}
pseudopodium {click here}
Black Spring {click here}
Almost Successfully {click here}
Fictions of Deleuze and Guittari {click here}
savoradin's photoblog {click here}
In Place of Chairs {click here}
A New Broom {click here}
gunther's block {click here}


**********************************************************************************
***********************************************************************************


::fait accompli::
(((((BLOGLINK)))))(((((CRUSH)))))((((((LIST)))))
(((((TIME)))))(((((TRAVEL))))
January 25, 2004


Almost Successfully (Michael Bogue)

Blaugustine (Natalie D'Arbeloff)

The Chatelaine's Poetics (Eileen Tabios)

Crag Hill's Poetry Scorecard

Heaven (Mairead Byrne)

Luminations (Ben Basan)

Muladar, Movedizo, Muladar (Heriberto Yepez) (Spanish/English)

Nemski.com

New Pages (Guide to Blogs)

Nobody Here (Jogchem Niemendverdriet (English/Dutch/Japanese)

random items (German/English)

Rob McLennan's Blog

Twists and Turns (Michael Gates)

Under Mind (Brennen Lukas}

Visions of Johanna (Johanna Rauhala)

Eratio (Gregory St. Thomasino)

Sifry's Alerts (David Sifry)

Scriptorium (Carlos Arribas)

Drunken Slugs (Nicole Cordrey)

dbqp: visualizing poetics (Geof Huth)

Vanishing Points of Resemblance (Tom Beckett)

Hoarded Ordinaries (Lorianne Schaub)

Ought (Ron Henry)

Paula's House of Toast

sodaddictionary part II

...something slant

God of The Machine

and
Froth (Marianne Shaneen) {click here} is back!!!

*************************************************************************************
This just in from Johanna Rauhala (Visions of Johanna)

Saturday, January 24, 2004
Yep, I've come out from underground turnips and rutabagas, and plan to post occasionally on this blog. (Sorry about the confusion with the name "Suze" . I have a work-related blog and I was using that as a pseudonym. But it's really me, Johanna!) And it's true- I'm pregnant! Almost four months. Scary/excited/scary/excited/scary/excited.
More links coming.
# posted by J : 5:54 PM

Bored with the Academy Award show?
Check out:Errata and Contradiction: A visual poetry show online {click here}

Meet the new Poetic Inhalation {click here}
blog and dig the lovely photo of bloggers, Andrew and Star.

Met Museum adding space to show
works now in storage
Met Museum new space {click here}
via Mysterium (Carlos Arribas) {click here}

First Heathens in Heat ...David Hess {click here},
is back, and now Semioanalysis Discotheque (Karl Merleau-Marcuse) {click here}.

Let the brilliant fun begin!

During the time I was writing some of the poems
for my collection
Light Street {click here},
I was experimenting with the idea of writing
poems along the lines of those I wrote as a child and
as an adolescent. For awhile I continued this practice,
and on 3/19/90 wrote the following poem:

Shakespeare's Shadow On Lined Paper

I was captured rather early in the game
By the sounds of cars going by and the sounds of rain
By the pigeons' aimless squawking across the street
By the look of a face or an eye in someone I'll never meet

And at times it's distracting to get through a day
When thoughts and feelings stream through in their own chaotic way
When perhaps I'm dismayed at life's contradictory play
And at last even come to lament death's final say

The warm rays of the sun are disappearing
The clattering sounds of the afternoon are clearing
The dissonant desires of night and dreams are nearing
And only the thought of sleep's soft arms is cheering

In one dream time itself has a place
Like every other object in trackless space
To go there happiness itself is but a lure
To be there is to partake of what is sure

In another the dark itself is bright
Color, hands, events are a kind of light
Where even the helpless fate of life is light
Where the closed eye of nothingness has sight

Brilliant review by
Ron Silliman {click here}
on Bertolucci's fascinating, controversial new film
*Dreamers*
Silliman is reading with
Michael McClure at the Poetry Project
on Wednesday, March 3rd (see the
sidebar to your left)

Wood s Lot {click here}
has opened some links to info on
the great composer and musician, the late
John Fahey.

Noted on the Crony {click here}
comments section:
UMBRISM, n. Pure psychic automatism,
by which it is intended to express, verbally,
in writing, or by other means, the real process
of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence
of all control exercised by the reason and
outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

And the list of people and what they're
Umbrists of was great. But I must confess
that words like "manifesto" "proletariat"
and "revolution" make me sleepy.

I am a poet.
Gunther | Email | Homepage | 02.28.04 - 3:07 am | #

*fait accompli* is pleased to be
honored by some discussion of our work
by the Umbrists at Crony {click here}
The link to our "Marriage of Language and Being" post
on Thursday, February 26th
has led to further parodies
and a discussion of parody.
Thanks, *Crony*!

Tim Peterson, who I am told
is a close associate of Karl Merleau-Marcuse,
author of the inimitable
Semioanalysis Discotheque {click here},
has opened a blog called
Mappemunde {click here}
****************************************************************
via Limetree {click here}
New Edge Books from Sand and Wallace

Rod Smith has issued the following notice:

Edge Books is pleased to announce two new titles:




Interval by Kaia Sand and Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose by Mark Wallace.

Special Offer: Order both books before April 1 for $15 postpaid.

or get Interval for $8 (regularly $10).

or get Haze for $10 (regularly $12.50).

Select Edge titles also available during this special offer at discounted rates:

The Sense Record, Jennifer Moxley, $10 (regularly $12.50)
Zero Star Hotel, Anselm Berrigan, $11 (regularly $14)
Integrity & Dramatic Life, Anselm Berrigan, $7 (regularly $10)
Ace, Tom Raworth, $7 (regularly $10)
Aerial 9: Bruce Andrews, $11 (regularly $15)
Dovecote, Heather Fuller, $7 (regularly $10)
Perhaps This Is a Rescue Fantasy, Heather Fuller, $7 (regularly $10)
Comp., Kevin Davies, $10 (regularly $12.50)
Sight, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino, $10 (regularly $12)
Marijuana Softdrink, Buck Downs, $8 (regularly $11)
Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There, Mark Wallace, $7 (regularly $9.50)

Checks payable to:

Aerial/Edge, PO Box 25642, Georgetown Station, Washington, DC 20007

Thanks for your support!

Interval
Kaia Sand
ISBN: 1-890311-14-6
2004, 80 pages, $10

Kaia Sand’s Interval establishes the “hunger throated sound” of a language in the act of interrogating its moment.  Hers is an unflinching and thrillingly political practice….  Sand is a necessary poet, and bracingly new.
—Carolyn Forché

Read this book for its evocation of the sublime in the face of the populace’s raw complacency telescoped and interpreted, and do follow the ample instructions: “holler away our do-not-disturb quietude.”
—Heather Fuller

Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose
Mark Wallace
ISBN: 1-890311-15-4
2004, 104 pages, $12.50

This new collection of poems, essays, and divagations might be the essential Mark Wallace to date.  Always the supreme contra-stoic, Wallace gets us to somehow bear it all the better.  The strange world of literature is not only astutely observed, but transfigured, page by page.
—Rodrigo Toscano

Marvelous!  A book that thinks! and that speaks out plainly and politically.  Mark Wallace takes poetry seriously—and often in the most tongue-in-cheek way, but below the quick wit is a belief in and love of language and the art that it can make.  “If poetry is, as I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity…” he writes, and goes on from there to show what can happen in a world where this is true.
—Cole Swensen

Forthcoming from Aerial/Edge:

American Whatever, Tim Davis, Summer 2004

Metropolis 30: The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Rob Fitterman, Summer 2004

Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian, ed. Rod Smith & Jen Hofer, Winter 2004

Visit our web site www.aerialedge.com for a complete catalogue.

Aerial/Edge, PO Box 25642, Georgetown Station, Washington, DC 20007
 

12/27/72

Dear Bernadette I was leaving the church with Paul after the
workshop last night and he suggested I send the poems to you
to give to Ann Waldman I picked out five and typed them here
at my office during the lunch hour so they are really lunch
poems! On the way home last night I read Basil Bunting several
times and couldn't sleep later so I kept reading, while my
girl was sleeping and I was awake so it had the feeling of
happening right then it is a difficult work to read the kind
that makes you work the only kind I really like I was writing
this letter last night in my head happy to have an excuse to write
a few words to you & gossip the reason I wrote Phase as 0-9
your Story and those magazines really stimulatetd me I had only
read a few issues by April 1969 when I left for Europe and when I
got there & tried to write long poems theycame out differently,
lyrical again so I ended by doing some collages instead
which were also lyrical it was only about two months before
the workshop started that I could do some "automatic" writing
using source material, etc By the way you know that letter
by Frank O'Hra was interesting because I was in Zagreb in the
summer of 1969 and the people (especially the young men) are
really crazy one guy picked us up (we hitched from Rapallo to
Banja Luka, Yugoslavia) and spent all night in the train station
with us drinking cognac at 20 cents a shot the next morning
at 6 Am he took us to the zoo there it is tiny & beautiful
and the animals there are very lively, clean and active one bird
cage was full of birds of different shapes and colors & when we
found the flamingoes one immmediately went into a dance so gentle and
graceful that I literally fell down on the walkway from dizziness
(I was also whacked out from no sleep and the strangeness of being
with somebody I really liked a lot and couldnt speak one word
with) later during that same time, going back to Zagreb we me
a guy who was just as friendly and wierd all he could say
in English was "I love you Bob Dylan" also, the guy who took us
to the zoo could say "I like Dean Martin" "He is from Yugoslavia"
Well, I have to leave now thank you for trying to help me get
into the world o yes the Alan Grossman bet was written for
was my shrink

rhetorically yours,
Nick Piombino

Heathens in Heat ...David Hess {click here}
is
back (via Poop Chute (Brooke Nelson) {click here})

Notebook: 7/10/86

The Marriage of Language and Being
[based on Blake's *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*]


Feeling roars & shakes his fires in the burdened mind:
Radioactive clouds sway on the deep.

Meek, expression follows a perilous path.
The so-called fair woman keeps tracks along
The vale of control.
Words are planted where memories stay.
And on the barren slate of meaning
Sing the commercial poets.

Then, some poets incorporate this stance.
And a stream of thought and a quick utterance
On every ad and show.
And on the emptied mind
They managed to get control of the media.

Till the investor stops reading trash
Is to continue the parboil any original thought and drive
The so-called sensible woman into writing dry hymns to money.

Here comes a hot agent, cool & quite hip
And our poet is tearing her hair out, walking around on Columbus Avenue
Where literary lions roam.

Feeling screams and blows off some steam-
What could this do against billions of units of radioactive vapors?

As a new literary movement is begun, and it is now about 10 years
since its advent, popular opinion roars its ugly attitudes. And lo!
Hilton Kramer, and occasionally Tom Clark put our vicious literary slander
attempting to court public opinion; their statements try to wrap some rebellious
poets in nast publicity. Now is the dominion of Reagan, Ray-gun as he is
affectionately called- just read nearly any issue of your local newspaper.

Without a lot of sharp disagreement, the public won't notice anything is
going on, so intrinsically this is not a bad thing. Attraction and repulsion,
thinking and feeling, love and hate, are all typical of human experience.

From this kind of total trashing springs more clearly defined philosophical
differences, formerly labelled Good and Evil. Now that we don't have authentic language,
attitudes have taken on infinitely increading inflationary conviction.

Good is Public Awareness; Evil ot Total Marginality.

THE VOICE OF THE OUTCAST

All books, poems and theories have caused continuing distortion:

1. That humankind has two responsibilities: acceptable attitudes and rent money.
2. That language, called marginal, emanates from a lot of bullshit;
and that Feelings, called Public, are the only authentic expression.
3. That Administrators will torment humans in Eternity for giving expression
to anything unique.

But the following contraries to these are True:

1. Humans have no language distinct from experience, for that which is called
language is a portion of Thought discerned by the five senses, the
chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Words are the only proof of expression, and are from experience, and
Feelings are bound to a socially determined set of attitudes.

**
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Argument

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb:
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility.
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

And now a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its
advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel
sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now
is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see
Isaiah xxxiv & xxxv Chap:

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
from Energy.

Good is Heaven . Evil is Hell.

THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL

All bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following
Errors:
1. That Man has two existing principles: Viz: a Body & a
Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason,
call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a
portion of the Sould discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul
in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the
bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be
restrained; and the restrainer of Reason usurps its place & governs
the unwilling.

And being restrain'd, by degrees becomes passive, till it is only
the shadow of desire.

I keep coming back to this post, and the Terry Teachout points about blogging, so...

from A Fool In The Forest {click here}


February 18, 2004 from {A Fool In The Forest} ( originally published by
George Wallace in Arts and Culture At Large, Poetry, Weblogs)

"Belittled"

"Garrick Davis, editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, offers up a thumbnail history of "the little magazine" in his own online journal's freshly scrubbed Mission Statement:

The history of 20th century poetry is inextricably linked with the genre of the little magazine, and much of that genre’s history has been forgotten. We must remember that the little magazine was an outgrowth—and the necessary vehicle—of Modernism. When the Modernists attempted to publish their works in the general-circulation newspapers and magazines of their day and were rebuffed, they were forced to organize their own magazines in order to break into print. Ezra Pound was the very type and role model of this era; he was the midwife of 20th century literature by helping to found, edit, and fund dozens of literary magazines.

Many of them foundered, of course, though there are a few honorable exceptions still among us. . . .

The real problem with the present world of literary publications is, of course, cost and distribution. . . . Possessing a tiny readership, the little magazine cannot attract advertisers. Lacking advertisers, it cannot offset the costs of production. With no profit margin to encourage its sale and distribution, every issue of the little magazine begins its life stillborn as a commercial enterprise. . . . The result of this marketplace Darwinism is that the little magazine is almost a couture object in our society—both difficult to obtain and expensive to purchase.

Since there are literally thousands of little magazines, the cost of “keeping up” with the important literary periodicals of the day to the individual reader is prohibitive, and the cost to libraries is staggering. . . . The genre of little magazines, which was originally conceived to publish the difficult art of the Modernists, has ended up making literature itself inaccessible.



Terry Teachout, in the notes I linked to below, suggests that weblogs "will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century," but he may have gotten the mechanism wrong. Because the hurdles that must be negotiated to create -- and, more importantly, to access -- a weblog are so modest, instead of having "influence . . . disproportionate to their circulation," the best weblogs may finally accomplish the feat of finding an audience large enough to match the caliber of their content.

Davis in his Mission Statement reminds us that T.S. Eliot's Criterion magazine had a peak circulation of 700; Pound and the Vorticists' Blast was presumably even smaller. Those journals' influence in the long term was out of all proportion to their circulation. Without the practical and financial impediments that Davis identifies, the potential influence of the right weblog at the right time could -- he said, thinking wishfully -- be even greater.

A random example, picked largely because he has actually voiced his goal in terms of audience size: Neocalvinist cultural observer Gideon Strauss is content to "dream[] of achieving my own little micro-readership of 250", a humble and seemingly achievable objective for many sites. If some significant percentage of even so small a core of readers have weblogs of their own, as is probable, a writer's best material will likely be linked and relinked, those links serving as levers with which the right post might move the world.


Then again, maybe this guy is right. [Link via American Digest.]"


Posted by George Wallace at 12:48 PM in Arts and Culture At Large, Poetry, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Class Struggle

Student and teacher disagree about me!
Read it for free


right now on:
Bemsha Swing (Jonathan Mayhew) {click here}

"I am not like you. But if you are not
like you either, then I am like you."

Antonio Porchia
*Voices*
translated by W.S. Merwin

notebook: 1987

K (*Reading As Revery*) in celebration of *North of Intention* by Steve McCaffery

1. It would be embarassing at the beginning to put my words in the mouths
of your characters, even if they are available to anyone, necessary but
not sufficient. History itself is just as fixed in the eye of a storm, in
the words themselves, that the characters beginning with A would not be
complete. But would it be possible to exceed "A" in another register, if
at least the integers compared to themselves were not abused by our own presence,
and the vault that enclosed such vocabularies, as arbitrary and unrecorded as
the (this) exact movement of tides: such are the boundaries of reading- ever
tidal and undeferred- and time itself accords with such vast rhythms. Imagine
the contrary: imbecilic gestures from the minds of tyrants- visual figurations
of their own power-lines. Like all insignificant and dried branches- leaving
all the more exposed the "north of intensions."

2. Is it by chance that I return to you by the same route that I came into
my own revery? A landscape that still bears a trace (*passed on*, not remaining)
of another epoch (not in the past perhaps, in another clime) which surrounds
some unspoken utterances in the full chorus of the senses. They came by here
by another route, i.e.: the cooling breeze on the chest and arms, waves crashing
between thick silences, gulls cries *and* the enveloping silence; engraved *and*
erased- that static. Dawns never confuse the issue, so exact, nor do the steady
afternoons, nights, shadows of gulls overhead. Into these serene particulars
comes one displaced opening, and then another, moves a corner of comprehension,
a welcome meaning freed of its image, a memory of speech to replace the holding
continuity of a particular place:- (imaginary small color photograph of Alan
Davies, Toni Simon and me sitting close to the waves edge at Jones Beach on a
hazy day in mid- June, 1987).

3. Any weakening of the will will be evinced by our action (its double in the
proximate actuality).The king of this terrain (Kafka-Khlebnikov) is its
experience in the slow dissolution of one meaning, and then another. But
time (and this includes this time in an album still gathering its forms,
always did, even as many immense particulars, these waves co-exist under
another measure- aspect of the so-called Now moment. Imaginary figures
rush by and are forgotten (never were) as they rush into an avalanche of one
duration (Smithson, "sandtorm of pauses".) The smell is still there, the sound,
the breeze's touch, and the remembered meaning (exactly zero) is still nascent.
That is to say, I almost forgot the sun and the gulls standing in a circle of wet
sand. Could the real itself have exploded from the tendency of all things to give,
or eventually give in (i.e., give way?)

4. "Nothing more. The image is exhausted in the multiplicity of meanings...One
might say that psychoanalysis gave the dream no status beyond that of speech,
and failed to see it in its reality as language." Dream, Imagination and Existence,
Michele Foucault (1954)

Giving, giving way, "making room." Now the gulls are standing closer. Had I
not given the day, in part, to you (as to them) such space would still exist.
And it may yet, since this gesture (this space) would not exist. And it may yet,
since it is, by now, already prefigured in its passing, antithesis to what I wanted,
or expected was in my reach, but beyond this choice. Noting the proximity of
this trebling I announce a tendency, meeting yours on a separate day, a widening,
not a focus, in order to engender space from space. This wrenching, simply said,
apocalyptic but minute, to hurl the discus of withered principles into an infinitely
distance place, intuited complicity.

"The project of a hybridization or con-fusion of genres which
Ponge's texts share with Bloch's *Spuren*, the paradigmatic
texts of the modern prose poem tradition we have previously
examined, and Schlegel's notion of a *Universalpoesie* suggests
two directions running counter to each other: on the one hand,
a utopian aspiration toward oneness: on the other,a perhaps
equally utopian drive toward the greatest possible difference and
diversity, a breakdown of rigid categorical distinctions. A total
homogenization of the "universal" threatens the one: a total
fragmentation threatens the other. Ponge's texts are themselves,
as he himself has acknowledged, "very diverse, contradictory,
varied as to form...in *Le Parti pris des choses* there is a little
of everything: there are closed texts, there are open texts; each
one proposes as well an *ars poetica*" (CC. 411-12). Although
Ponge displays at times a nostalgia for the Book, he has himself
said that for the most part he is concerned with *texts* (CC, 426).
In other words, although Ponge sometimes entertains thoughts of
a singular coherence of separate texts on some formal or other unity,
more often he focuses his attention on particular phenomena, on the
individual rather than the collective. What the prose poem leads Ponge
to is less Schlegel's goal of a universal poetry than the nominalist
fragmentation suggested by Schlegel's polemical contention that
"every poem is a genre in itself" (*Jedes Gedich eine Gattung fur sich*)...
In order to contruct a new unity allowing for the greatest possible diversity
and difference, the poverty of received forms and the speciousness of any
notion of an already given, preexistent unity must first be exposed. The
possibility of a universal poetry must pass, in other words, *through* the
fragmented world of prose, not around it..."

Jonathan Monroe, *A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem
and The Politics of Genre*
Cornell UP, 1987
(from Chapter 8, *Fragments of a World
Restored: Francis Ponge's "Rhetoric of
Objects", pp 245-246)

"Like the fragment, the prose poem presents an analogon of a
complete work gesturing toward the utopian nonplace of a collective
labor that would constitute a reconstruction of the individual subject
and of the subject of humanity as a whole (AL, 373). It is both the
promise of what Francis Ponge will call the *Grand Oeuvre* and the sign
of its continued absence. In shifting the site from verse to prose of
the critique of the idealist subject of poetry and the dominant class
which is necessary to give *form* to such an *oeuvre*, Schlegel's
fragments and Baudelaire's prose poetry provide not so much
a "poetry of poetry"-the subject's critique of itself "from within"-
as a concretization of the *inter*subjective
nature of the *intra*subjectve. They thus offer not so much an
illumination of the self *by itself* (alone and self-sufficient)
as an illumination of the discourses that surround, traverse
and overdetermine it and from which it cannot finally retreat-as
Baudelaire's "A une heure du matin" trenchantly suggests- into
sublime isolation....If what constitutes the subject per se is
nothing other than the self-engendering power of its own discourse
(AL, 392), both the fragment and the prose poem call attention to
the fact that the discourse of any given subject is never really
self-engendering or absolutely autonomous but is instead inextricably
bound up with the discourses of others. Both the fragment and the
prose poem offer a critique of the world of prose with a view to making
poetry possible again through a rejection of the uncritical reproduction
of either poetry or prose in isolation. Their critique constitutes nothing
less, in other words, than an attempted reconstruction of a unity
that is missing in the chaotic fragmentation of the modern world,
a reparation of the world..."

Jonathan Monroe, *A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and
The Politics of Genre*
Cornell UP, 1987 (pps 69-70)
(from Chapter 1
*Universalpoesie* as Fragment:
Friedrich Schlegel and the Prose
Poem")

"We hoped that in the peace after such a war, a great
expansion would follow in the mind of the Country; grand
views in every direction,- true freedom in politics, in
religion, in social science, in thought. But the energy of
the nation seems to have expanded itself in the war, and
every interest is found as sectional and as timorous as
before..."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
November 5, 1865
Journals

from *Amiel's Journal*
10th January 1881

"To let oneself be
troubled by the ill-will, the ingratitude, the
indifference of others, is a weakness to
which I am very much inclined. It is
painful to me to be misunderstood, ill judged.
I am wanting in manly hardihood, and the
heart to me is more vulnerable than it
ought to be. It seems to me, however,
that I have grown tougher in this respect
than I used to be. The malignity of the
world troubles me less than it did. Is it
the result of philosophy, or an effect of age,
or simply caused by the many proofs of
respect and attachment that I have received?
These proofs were just what were wanting
to inspire me with some self-respect.
Otherwise I should have so easily believed
in my own nullity and in the insignificance
of all my efforts. Success is necessary
for the timid, praise is a moral stimulus
and admiration a strengthening elixir. We
think we know ourselves, but as long as we
are ignorant of our comparative value, our
place in the social assessment, we do not
know ourselves well enough. If we are to
act with effect we must count for something
with our fellow men; we must feel
ourselves possessed of some weight and
credit with them, so that our effort may be
rightly proportioned to the resistance which
has to be overcome. As long as we despise
opinion we are without a standard by which
to measure ourselves; we do not know our
relative power. I have despised opinion
too much, while yet I have been too sensitive
to injustice. These two faults have
cost me dear. I longed for kindness, sympathy,
and equity, but my pride forbade me to
ask for them, or to employ any address
or calculation to obtain them....I
do not think I have been wrong altogether,
for all through I have been in harmony
with my best self, but my want of adaptability
has worn me out, to no purpose. Now indeed,
I am at peace within, but my
career is over, my strength is running out,
and my life is near its end.
"Il n'est pas plus temps pour rien excepte
pour mourir."
This is why I can look at it all historically."

from *Amiel's Journal*
31st May, 1880

"...This soliloquy means- what? That
reverie turns upon itself as dreams do;
that impressions added together do not
always produce a fair judgement; that a
private journal is like a good king, and
permits repetitions, outpourings, complaint.
....These unseen effusions are the
conversation of thought with itself, the
arpeggios, involuntary but not unconscious of
that Aeolian harp we bear within us. Its
vibrations, compose no piece, exhaust no
theme, achieve no melody, carry out no
programme, but they express the innermost
life of man."

from *Baudelairean* by Mary Hawthorne
London Review of Books- 5 February, 2004
a review of *Walker Evans* by James Mellow
Perseus, 2002

"He returned to the United States a few months later, and
tried again to write...'Oh yes,' he said years later...'I was
a passonate photographer...I thought that this was a
substitute for something else- well, writing, for one thing.'
...He loved contained, miniature, controllable worlds- books,
maps, postcards...He himself cited the unconscious influences
of Baudelaire and, especially, of Flaubert..."

"How about a little wiggle?" *Untitled* from
Nemski.com (David Nemeth) {click here}

Theory Trading Cards {click here}
via Nice Guy Syndrome {click here}

Home Is Not {click here} reports on a visit by Charles Alexander to Buffalo

Notebook: 8/7/89

The social space a harmonization of the
universal cacaphony of thoughts.

Experience, from birth to death, an endless
welter of images. On the one side (so
little time to choose- not quantitatively- but
because frustration relentlessly pushes forward,
wheel scrapes against sand, head against chair-)
Scylla bends forward, beckoning, laughter,
taunting, hurry, hurry- Charybdis falls back,
deep, racking, rolling, hyterical laughter-

Social document- laws, inscriiptions in stone.

Paradyme shift of latitudes in mind space
cause social longitudes to turn to representation of mental
attitudes to redetermine (reinvent, realert) the social

Social as superego- John Phillip Sousa
but also Bob Dylan

The muted trombone represents a social situation-
a memory- something about
ice tea and smiling and talking bashfully on the
verandah. Wasn't that song *terrific*? Tommy Dorsey on "Sleepy Laguna"

Latta talk about Kathleen Fraser on
Hotel Point {click here}
Won't do Michigan a lotta good, but Fraser will read here
at the Bowery Poetry Club on February 28th.
Click on the *Segue Series* on the sidebar for details.

Boston Poets March Forth
on New York on March 4th
read all about it on
Fishblog (Aaron Tieger) {click here}

A frog the size of your eyeball?
Mysterium {click here}

*Stuff* on DaDooDoFlow {click here}

Jordan Davis {click here}
and Noah Eli Gordon (click here} uncover
poetic shortcuts between Massachusetts and New York

A Laurable Log (Laura Willey)
posted over 50 items of great audible interest yesterday-
and *then* she mentioned it was
Andre Breton's birthday.

This just in Prosecutor Sues Ashcroft In Terrorism Case {click here}
via transdada (kari edwards)

Untitled Mood: A Note (3/7/86)

Now and then, on the occasion of a flu or an emotionally
upsetting experience, the whole of life, including all the
complex interweavings of values, beliefs, pleasures,
aspirations, relationships, comes under question. Whether it is
exhaustion or irritability that does this I can't be sure,
but it is certain that a particular perspective, occluded under ordinary
circumstances, becomes more lucid. It is like the quality
of light on a changeably cloudy day: objects take on
an otherwise dull cast, less sharp, somehow less
determined, blending into each other by dint of shaded or
hidden edges. Perhaps partly because of this effect and
the unease and instability of shadowed states
of mind and time, thoughts tend to turn
inward, a kind of quietness, even silence, envelops the
inner life and for a certain while all that had just previously
seemed firm and solid now appears
provisional, shapeless, haphazard, inexact, unfinal.

It would be more comprehensible if thoughts were always
like a song's refrain, repeating themselves long enough
to be remembered, rhythmically even and predictable,
yet charmingly circumscribed and framed, allowing for
neat transitions from one state to another. But like
erratic gusts of wind, or sudden shifts in sunlight
breaking through gathering and moving clouds, thoughts
are just as likely to jump around in unusual ways when the inner
weather is erratic. As often happens when such events occur
and when an unmistakeable minor key emerges, a bleak
perspective may momentarily condition the inner view; a feeling,
perhaps uncomfortable, and which can
easily graduate to actual sorrow, glides the mind
along some specific narrrow furrows to memories
of difficult periods, awkward eras of doubt,
confusion and otherwise oppositional moods and
forces. Generally firm
convictions appear ephemeral; plans &
goals are now enveloped in fog, appearing to
move away from the mind's eye, leaving in their
wake a growing gulf and emptiness. This movement
leaves a blankness, a break in the everyday inner dialogue.
A space is hollowed out and some time is somehow
circumscribed for something strange to
happen. Instead of leaning forward in an attitude of
more or less pleasurable anticipation of future satisfaction,
interest or excitement, the mind hesitates between
present past and future. It is a stillness, a sense
of calm before the storm. A similar
mood has often been described by people who
live in places that are frequented by long periods of
cloudiness, humidity and gathering storms. There
are names for this type of prolonged, uncertain
weather I've heard employed in Southern France, I think, and Italy,
but I can't remember them now, perhaps one of my readers
will supply an example . Sometimes just having a name
for things can help to remove a bit of the
quality of impending doom that surrounds such unpleasant
admixtures of anxiety and possible excitement; the latter
I attribute almost completely to the beneficial effects of
the possibility of sudden change.

For it is change that pain sometimes
precedes, releases, torrential rains, spasmodic
bursts of thought lost in memories & hidden yearnings may thus be
forcibly displaced from their secret nests- flying out &
scattering like frightened birds heading towards
previously untouched ground.

"2. Everything immediately starts me thinking. Every joke
in the comic papers, every memory of Flaubert and
Grillparzer, the sight of the nightshirts on my parents'
beds, laid out for the night, Max's marriage. Yesterday
my sister said, "All the married people (that we know)
are happy. I don't understand it," this remark
started me thinking. I became afraid again.
3. I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished
was only the result of being alone.
4. I hate everything that does not relate to literature,
conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature),
to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my
relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes
the importance, the seriousness, the truth out of everything
I think..."

*I Am I Memory Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings
of Franz Kafka*
edited by Nahum N. Glatzer
Schocken, 1974

Not A Blog/ Under Construction

Christina Strong's new web page {click here}

"This is the reason modern war is so monstrous:
its terrible reality is not seen in itself, but only as
part of the noise of radio. It does not stand
concretely before the human mind in itself and
therefore it is not properly controlled. Perhaps
war is becoming more and more violent and
terrible today because it wants to be seen as
what it really is, to be seen quite clearly as the
terrible thing it really is and not as a mere part
of the noise of the radio.

In times in which the power of silence was
still effective, war was heard from the
background of silence, and against this background it
became absolutely clear. There was still an
elemental simplicity in its terrors, and its noise
subsided again in the death that it brought in its
train. In these earlier forms of war man simply
suffered it in silence. It was not an object for
discussion, but an elemental experience.

Today, war is not even a rebellion against
silence; it is merely the biggest whirl of noise
in the general noisy bustle of life. If war reports
were not blaring out from the radio every
minute of the day the cannon fire and the wails
of the dying would be heard everywhere. In the
silence the wails of the dying would be heard
and they would weigh down even the sound of
the guns. In the silence the war would be heard
so loud that it would become intolerable. But
the constant noise of the war reports levels down
the sound of the guns and the cries of the dying
to the general and universal noise. War becomes
a part of the general noise of radio, adapted to
it; and as a result it is taken for granted like
everything that appears in the noise of radio.

It is as though the many and great deaths that
take place today were an attempt to restore a
zone of silence.When the noise-machine reaches
a maximum as it does today, then silence shows
itself as a maximum of death."

Max Picard
*The World of Silence*
Gateway, 1961
pps 202-203

Notebook: 7/26/86

All beauty may be measured by committment
Not that the sudden and strong may not leap into attention
With wit, verve and gallantry
But what is not with us everyday, as much as we remember,
Is really not yet quite ours again
So the first thing the poet must learn is to wait
And wait and wait
Wait by the rain and by the tides
By the long, lonely thoughts and the heartbroken night
By the chills of indifference and the vanishing words
Of the thoughtless, which ring again and again through

The lonely silence."Return to words" she said
Return to the way they make a thought seem special
To remind you that something best forgotten can still be summoned.
Take for yourself the words that just come
Blurted out to a friend on a bus
Whispered in your mind as you go to bed
As you turn in your seat to hear what is said.

"...And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time,
entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such
useful and agreeable thoughts? In modeling this picture
upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself
so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to
some extent.grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself
for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer
than my original ones. I hve no more made my book than
my book has made me- a book cosubstantial with its author,
concerned with my own self., an integral part of my life, not
concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like
all other books. Have I wasted my time by taking stock
of myself so continually, so carefully? For those who go over
themselves only in their minds and occasionally in speech
do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does
a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who
binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith,
with, with all his strength.

Indeed, the most delightful pleasures are digested inwardly,
avoid leaving any trace, and avoid the sight not not only of
the public but of any other person....

In order to train my fancy even to dream with some order
and purpose, and in order to keep it from losing its way
and moving with the wind, there is nothing like embodying
and registering all the little thoughts that come to it. I
listen to my reveries because I have to record them."


from *The Complete Essays of Montaigne*
translated by Donald A. Frame
Stanford, 1965
p. 504-505

This just in! Josh Corey's {click here} book *Selah*
reviewed in Time Out and
wins Barrow Street award judged by Robert Pinsky-
Barrow Street {click here}

from *Amiel's Journal*
15th November, 1876

"...On my way through the book I perceived
many new applications of my law of irony.
Every epoch has two contradictory
aspirations which are logically antagonistic
and practically associated. Thus the
philosophic materialism of the last century
was the champion of liberty. And at the
present moment we find Darwinians in
love with equality, while Darwinism itself
is based on the right of the stronger.
Absurdity is interwoven with life: real
beings are animated contradictions, absurdities
brought into action. Harmony with self would
mean peace, repose and perhaps immobility.
By far the greater number of human beings
can only conceive action, or practise it,
under the form of war- a war of competition
at home, a bloody war of nations abroad, and
finally war with self. So that life is a perpetual
combat; it wills that which it wills not, and wills
not what it wills. Hence what I call the law of
irony- that is to say, the refutation of the self
by itself, the concrete realisation of the absurd.

Is such a result inevitable? I think not. Struggle
is the caricature of harmony, and harmony, which
is the association of contraries, is also a principle
of movement. War is a brutal and fierce means
of pacification; it means the suppression of
resistance by the destruction or enslavement
of the conquered. Mutual respect would be a
better way out of difficulties. Conflict is the
result of the selfishness which will acknowledge
no other limit than that of external force. The
laws of animality govern almost the whole of
history. The history of man is essentially zoological;
it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the
beautiful souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm,
and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with
difficulty through the highly-organized brute. The divine
aureole plays only with a dim and fugitive light around
the brows of the world's governing race.

The Christian nations offer many illustrations of the
law of irony. They profess the citizenship of heaven,
the exclusive worship of external good; and never has
the hungry pursuit of perishable joys, the love of this
world, or the thirst for conquest, been stronger or
more active than among these nations. Their official
motto is exactly the opposite of their real aspiration.
Under a false flag they play the smuggler with a droll
case of conscience. Is the fraud a conscious one? No-
it is but an application of the law of irony. The deception
is so common a one that the delinquent becomes
unconscious of it. Every nation gives itself the lie
in the course of its daily life, and not one feels the
ridicule of its position..."

(p 213-215)

from an interview with Peter Riley
conducted by Kevin Corcoran
pubished in Reality Studios
Volume 8
edited by Ken Edwards, 1986

"Ken Corcoran: so where does politics come in? You
suggest in *LInes on the Liver* that oil is using us, but
surely that's power, somebody owns that oil...Petrol
is cheap in North America. Look at the Middle East. They've
got Marines over there and 200 of them have been blown
up this morning. They're human decisions. I don't understand
your geo-economic metaphysics or something."

"Peter Riley: It's the people manipulating the oil who
are being used by it, "us" in the sense not only that they
are human but that they exert economic pressure on
everybody else. They want to be used by the oil, and it's
because of their mindlessness and advantage that humanity
is degraded to the mere tool of a geophysical energy source.
The situation with nuclear power is exactly similar: we become
victims of it because powermongers see advantage in it (and by
victims I don't mean the big bang, I mean the constant tension)
and use it against morality. But all I can see is vast institutions full
of people running around and destroying themselves beause that's
what nuclear fission wants them to do- they turn themselves into
channels for its emergence. So mankind subserves the power of
the earth..."

from *Semiotics of Art* edited by
Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik
MIT, 1984

"....Thus, in poetry, as against informational language,
there is a reversal in the hierarchy of relations:
in the latter attention is focussed above all on
the relation, important from the practical point of view,
between reference and reality, whereas for the former
it is the relationship between the reference and the
context incorporating it that stands to the fore. This
is not to say that informational reference is absolutely
exempt from any effect of the context or that, on the
other hand, poetic reference is excluded from any contact
with reality. All that is involved is a shift, so to speak,
in the center of gravity. As for poetic reference, the
weakening of its immediate relationship with reality
makes of it an artistic device. That means that the
poetic reference is not evaluated in terms of an
extralinguistic mission but with relation to the role
imposed upon it in the organization of the work's
semantic unity."

Coincidence or willful act? Poetics on Friday Feb 13 at
Dagzine {click here}

notebook: 1986 (poem)

D.C.

then
i
realized
it
wasn't
a
question
of
history
repeating
itself

just
an
old
movie
cranked
up
to
begin
again

the
crooked
man
at
the
top

his
wife
more
ruthless
than
he is
innocent
children
with
dolls
in
their
hands
are
shot
the
acerbic
poet
shakes
his
head

Notebook 8//8/98

It comes
down to little
specks of things.
Even the smallest
particle of time
can be
crucial. Like
an accordian , life
expands and contracts.
For example,
a bit of a lesson might
be gained in experiencing a
mistake. Such
contractions and
expansions emit,
over time,
considerable amount
of energy.

I wonder
what the relationship
is between such
tiny specks or
particles of things
and the constant
expansion of time which
is called "forever."
Except as an
idea, whatever
forever is can only
be understood in
relation to the
tiniest portion
of time.

"Anything might
be transformation
if you would only
allow yourself to
complete it."
He had come to
distrust any
kind of of explanation.
Or is that a way
to talk about
what you might
talk about in
everyday conversation.

For example,
some sentences may
be incomplete,
in verbal terms.
But the nuances
of a person's
gestures and tone
of voice- not
to speak of
years of even
decades of
exchange...

Always, some
things are too
much to say
or too little.

Then, more and
more things are
too much to say
or too
little.

The glances
may become
embarassing.
More and more
and eventually you
turn to your
violin.

You take your
violin in your
hands and play
it. As you play
it, you're creating
the melody. You've
put on a tape
recorder.

Unbelievably, you
realize as you
are playing that
you are actually
creating music. As
as result, later,
when you put
it down, you
suspect very
strongly that you''ll
come back to it.

As you are
playing, you
realize that the
opening chords
were very
important. You go
back and listen
to them. You
go on your way
after them, but
now and then you
come back to
them.

To know how
to do someting
is to know what
the constituants
of the doing might
be. These might
be many difficult
kinds of steps,
but there will
always be steps..

Sometimes there
is an apprehension
that precedes
steps. The step
is visualized,
imagined, and
anxiety
creeps in . On
some level,
however slightly,
danger has
been realized, or
rather, recognized.

There might be
hardly any
expectable order
in the events
that precede
the steps.

*

The piece we
listened to this
afternoon is
of the type we
may call
epansive, or
ever-expanding.

Constant pushing
on, but calmly,
the oboe glides
the violins to
places where they
did not expect
to go. By means
of a kind of
gentle layering,
or playful
challenging, the
violins, those
so subtly sighing
sopranos,echo or
convince their
companions, the
woodwinds. The
ending leads
to nothing more
astonishing, or
tragic, than a
nap. But such
a lyrical
seductive
flute, that are
memories and
words have
vanished, both
happy and sad.
(Debussy's prelude,
on the radio,
the second hello
from him today).

Always comes
down to a question
of meaning...
Can much be
made of the
distinctioin
between
meaning and
significance?

Such questions
can enter us into the
muddy area,
the place between
Smithson writes
about.

Solitude for sale

Easy as 1 2 3
I love you
You love me
Easy as 1 2 3

Still sorting books, selling books, giving them
away-friends are starting to come by to look
at the free box. Last night couldn't sleep-
got up and read Gill Ott's *Public Domain*
(Potes and Poets Press, 1989). I was moved
by what a beautiful and fascinating book it is,
child of the high era of L=A poetry, it stands
as one of the most insightful and rereadable
books of prose poetry
of the era. I went to sleep very sad that I did
not get to know Gill Ott better. The same for Joe
Ceravolo, Daniel Davidson, Ramez Quereshi,
and also Frank Kuenstler,
who one day a few years I tried to track
down through a close friend of his, only to discover
his memorial was slated for that day. Not to
speak of my forgotten ticket to Stephen Spender's
last reading in this country.

Bemsha Swing (Jonathan Mayhew) {click here} makes the point that
"an obscure novel by Warsh or
Fanny Howe or Michael Brownstein"
might be every bit as good as any
mainstream novelist and I agree.
Now that I'm packing to move one
of the books I let go of was
"Self-Reliance" by Michael Brownstein.
In its ability to evoke the 70's, the
New York literary scene in particular,
I can think of no better source. Along
with "The Ice Storm" by Rick Moody, this
book is an excellent primer for 70's
time travel.

Grolier Books Issues Alert {click here}

via ...Something Slant {click here}

Notebook: 5/16/88

[scribbled on a mimeographed agency memo
"Training Reaction Form" dated May 16, 1988;
i.e., "The purpose of the training was clear-
strongly agree, agree, don't know, disagree,
strongly disagree, etc]

Story with *bureaucratic* atmosphere.

Bells, loudspeaker announcements,
*all the accoutrements*-

Wonderful example: *loudspeaker going
while speaker is speaker*

*all such* "contradictions"

qualities which press me
*against* bureaucracy

Rooms w/chipped paint-
odd colors- pink

Collage (old peeling off wall)
plastic couches
graffitti on walls

filthy bathrooms
sounds of a toilet running & running

phone ringing & ringing

notebook: 10/28/86

Refrain

Listen
When the words
Won't


**

History


warrior
worrier

notebook: 8/1/86


As long as you live
You can wait for your chance
The unwritten poem exists
Like an imagined dance

**

notebook: 10/3/83

in the event of solitude
after a time of waiting
purer tones will follow

the precise hour
is vague
the time of collection
varied
after a pure stop
vanish
listen

place things back
put them in order
collect your thoughts
organize your time

disrupt the interval
bend time to follow
circle facts
with varied tones

in the surest interval
repetition is foregrounded
mostly by memory
this is precisely matched
to bring the shrill tones
to a halt

freedom
is not a
counter-command
the release
is more than
the subtotal

characteristic in cities
is the primary concentration of value
what remains is more than
the simple dictation of virtues

to release what is there
it is insufficient to let go
or the secondary resonance
will occur out of phase

::fait accompl:: opened a year ago today with this posting.

   Tuesday, February 11 ::

I take it as a given that the past, present and future are one. One big bang, hey? This is not meant to imply some kind of fatalism. I can remember, hear, observe and predict: source of what admittedly sketchy presentiments. previews, protections I might obtain. It is a vantage point, a perch, a post to watch out from. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (F.Scott Fitzgerald).
Special thanks to Ron Silliman and Gary Sullivan. Welcome, all: readers, surfers, bloggers, friends.

:: Nick Piombino 7:38 PM [+] ::
. . . . . .

Notebook: 11/2/87

If one hates systems enough, one
is in danger of accepting no system
at all. This choice quickly leads to
anarchy and stasis. And stasis, no
matter how monumental, is passed by.

Otherwise,how could one have
seen so much moving by so quick?...
In the past we had truths, now we
have quotes. The aura once attached to
words is now eroding, and with these
auras all the past beliefs.

The past romanticisms, attachments, all
eroding. One holds belief passionately
long enough and the shape one's reality
will conform to it. In this transition many
familiar things will disappear. Didn't
Walter Benjamin look for the pores of
revolution in the changing
values of substantives, as revealed
in the auras around an object?

11/4/87

The religions of the future
will perhaps concern themselves
with the art of sharing.

11/7/87

Deciding is always the hardest
part of any action.

11/11/87

The world the way we seem to
remember it. Then I conceived this
as a narrative- someone comes here
from a world in which chance plays
very little part- a much more
relaxed world. Coming here and observing
the life of a poet is his assignment-
but meanwhile the idea that someone
can die out of mismanaging their own
actuality as bodies is incredible
to this person.

11/12

Numbers, like words, offer incomplete meanings.
There is a residue of mistrust
That gathers around our most faithful estimates.
Quantity confuses maybe because
It is inexchangeable with quality.
In the long run quality and quantity cannot connect.
They separate, like water and oil.
Numbers tell is nothing about what is good.
They speak mainly of what is left.