notebook: 2/13/90
My dear world
How can I ive and still be left alone?
Can I care about you, and want to be at home with you
-and still have a part of all this be just for me?
I can't figure out where you end and
I begin- and conversely
Where I end and you begin.
And, as you know, I can't leave
you to go figure things out.
And, God knows, you never go too far away
from me-
That is, except when I need you.
So, can we make a deal that I'll enjoy
you in the gentlest manner possible
and cooperate with as many of the dictates of this
reality that you've presented me with
and you'll give me just a bit more elbow room?
Distribution Automatique
Wednesday, May 5
Equanimity (Jordan Davis) {click here} commented today:
"Spent between three and five minutes
wondering whether this culture more
resembles Rome circa say
50 AD or Berlin circa 1935."
Great point. Phillip K. Dick frequently compared
US culture to Rome around 50 AD.
"Spent between three and five minutes
wondering whether this culture more
resembles Rome circa say
50 AD or Berlin circa 1935."
Great point. Phillip K. Dick frequently compared
US culture to Rome around 50 AD.
from Diaryo (Jean Vengua) {click here}
There is a colloquy/
of the iron maiden/
there is a question/
of the torture word
There is a colloquy/
of the iron maiden/
there is a question/
of the torture word
notebook (poem: *The Beginning of The End*); circa 1986
The permanent measure is temporary
All this for a singular experience
Lying next to
A book (fill in the letters)
Mr. P.- an obvious limitation
Portentous
Pretentious
Yet an expediency (space for the letters)
Advertises escape from embarassment-
"Now I understand"
Indeterminacy of cause
Lunatic "fringe" is a
Blur out (dismissed
Long ago- by then Amigo,
Coarsened-)
Sooner or later you have to listen to
Somebody or you're all alone
Somebody else if you're all alone
Boom-boom
Boom-boom
Boom-boom
.......(I knew you'd get around to it
sooner or later)
Thank God they don't understand
Ahem,
The permanent measure is democracy
Such that the circuits of clear amounts
Feels nascent slipping into the ordinary
Which is NEVER and has NEVER been anything else but
"All's fair in love and war"
Another way to say Shakespeare (Shakes clear,
Lakes sphere, makes clear)
And all of this is borrowed
Mr. P was accusing
All of this was borrowed
Making a big deal about a lot of things that most people don't care
about at all.
This smacks of the end right away.
Shakes appear.
The permanent measure is temporary
All this for a singular experience
Lying next to
A book (fill in the letters)
Mr. P.- an obvious limitation
Portentous
Pretentious
Yet an expediency (space for the letters)
Advertises escape from embarassment-
"Now I understand"
Indeterminacy of cause
Lunatic "fringe" is a
Blur out (dismissed
Long ago- by then Amigo,
Coarsened-)
Sooner or later you have to listen to
Somebody or you're all alone
Somebody else if you're all alone
Boom-boom
Boom-boom
Boom-boom
.......(I knew you'd get around to it
sooner or later)
Thank God they don't understand
Ahem,
The permanent measure is democracy
Such that the circuits of clear amounts
Feels nascent slipping into the ordinary
Which is NEVER and has NEVER been anything else but
"All's fair in love and war"
Another way to say Shakespeare (Shakes clear,
Lakes sphere, makes clear)
And all of this is borrowed
Mr. P was accusing
All of this was borrowed
Making a big deal about a lot of things that most people don't care
about at all.
This smacks of the end right away.
Shakes appear.
Tuesday, May 4
Excellent surrealist journal LIFT
issues 1& 2, poetry, art, essays
available in pdf format from
Christina Strong's
project page
Download each issue
1 minute each
includes Cid Corman, Aime Cesaire,
Joe Torra, Lori Lubeski, many
others
issues 1& 2, poetry, art, essays
available in pdf format from
Christina Strong's
project page
Download each issue
1 minute each
includes Cid Corman, Aime Cesaire,
Joe Torra, Lori Lubeski, many
others
Musician/poet/disc jockey Tom Kelley
introduced me to this fine band which opened for
his band *Stay Fucked* last year
at the West End Bar near Columbia U
Timber {click here}
introduced me to this fine band which opened for
his band *Stay Fucked* last year
at the West End Bar near Columbia U
Timber {click here}
An emerging trend in blogging apparently involves
the voluntary confession of lax or
thinly stretched reading habits.
First, we see from Brand New Insects {click here}
Pretending to keep up
Purchased: Vanishing Points of Resemblance by Tom Beckett
Received: The Two Coat Syndrome by Erica Jane Kaufman
7:37 AM | Comments by Squawkbox.tv - Comment
and then from Mappemunde {click here}
*Bad Reading Habits*
the voluntary confession of lax or
thinly stretched reading habits.
First, we see from Brand New Insects {click here}
Pretending to keep up
Purchased: Vanishing Points of Resemblance by Tom Beckett
Received: The Two Coat Syndrome by Erica Jane Kaufman
7:37 AM | Comments by Squawkbox.tv - Comment
and then from Mappemunde {click here}
*Bad Reading Habits*
The Poetry Society of America's {click here}
on Monday responded to our
"Lightness" post with a
meditation reminiscent of Francis Ponge.
Thanks also
to Wood s lot {click here}
Never Neutral {click here}
and The Ingredient {click here}
for linking to this piece.
**
"Goodtime Jesus"
A pungent slice from the
Limetree {click here}
for your morning tea (Monday, May 3rd)
on Monday responded to our
"Lightness" post with a
meditation reminiscent of Francis Ponge.
Thanks also
to Wood s lot {click here}
Never Neutral {click here}
and The Ingredient {click here}
for linking to this piece.
**
"Goodtime Jesus"
A pungent slice from the
Limetree {click here}
for your morning tea (Monday, May 3rd)
Monday, May 3
notebook: 1/3/88
It is harder to stay with
being a poet, than it is to
keep writing poetry-
just as it is harder
to stay human rather than
just keep living.
1/12/88
Mars distance
varies widely from Sun
right now
its perihelion
closest now
we are flying near
Mars in 47 days
Mars closest to us
in Sept than it has
in 2 decades
Sept- Mars-
a fiery beacon
in the sky
Bright red star in
the East after
midnight
University of Texas
McDonald observatory
Austin, Texas
78712
free publication
I hate writing so called.
You might wonder
why I'm here-
in that case
I hate writing so-called
poetry. I hate the
phoney pretentiousness, the
self-conscious aspiration
of the writer to become
part of history, the
oohs and ahs- the prizes,
awards, the readings.
I probably like only the
clean, crisp books themselves,
not even the words, just
the useless objects- the
lack of pragmatic usefulness.
It is harder to stay with
being a poet, than it is to
keep writing poetry-
just as it is harder
to stay human rather than
just keep living.
1/12/88
Mars distance
varies widely from Sun
right now
its perihelion
closest now
we are flying near
Mars in 47 days
Mars closest to us
in Sept than it has
in 2 decades
Sept- Mars-
a fiery beacon
in the sky
Bright red star in
the East after
midnight
University of Texas
McDonald observatory
Austin, Texas
78712
free publication
I hate writing so called.
You might wonder
why I'm here-
in that case
I hate writing so-called
poetry. I hate the
phoney pretentiousness, the
self-conscious aspiration
of the writer to become
part of history, the
oohs and ahs- the prizes,
awards, the readings.
I probably like only the
clean, crisp books themselves,
not even the words, just
the useless objects- the
lack of pragmatic usefulness.
Sunday, May 2
Equanimity (Jordan Davis) {click here} for Friday, April 30th asks:
Why aren't more blogs called "Hamlet's Soliloquy."
Perhaps this comment could more readily directed
towards books of poetry.
In fact, it seems the majority of blogs are more interactive,
dialogic, that is to say, responsive to the literary environment,
than most books of poetry or poems are for that matter.
Why aren't more blogs called "Hamlet's Soliloquy."
Perhaps this comment could more readily directed
towards books of poetry.
In fact, it seems the majority of blogs are more interactive,
dialogic, that is to say, responsive to the literary environment,
than most books of poetry or poems are for that matter.
Reading *Cuban Journal:
A Poet in the Venceremos
Brigade* by Joel Sloman
Zoland Books, Cambridge Mass, 2000
today
"I didn't know/ what the fuck they were talking about/
discussing formal organization/or the need for it/
I guess people's good intentions/
can't be taken for granted/self-discipline/
confused with authority/of leader or
institution/ refusal to discuss reality/
immediate leap to vague abstractions/
mystifications/axes to grind/
my impulse to say/fuck it/
I came here to cut cane/
but that's the deficient way/
I've acted in the past/
no longer acceptable/
current imperative/ to articulate my perspective/"
**
New Blogs Dep't
Due to moving, we've been remiss in publishing our
(((((HOT)))))(((((BLOGS)))))
feature but this new title is irrisistable:
electronic libretti of obscure poet x zen trick {click here}
now (Tuesday, May 4th) known as
xzentrick libretti {click here}
A Poet in the Venceremos
Brigade* by Joel Sloman
Zoland Books, Cambridge Mass, 2000
today
"I didn't know/ what the fuck they were talking about/
discussing formal organization/or the need for it/
I guess people's good intentions/
can't be taken for granted/self-discipline/
confused with authority/of leader or
institution/ refusal to discuss reality/
immediate leap to vague abstractions/
mystifications/axes to grind/
my impulse to say/fuck it/
I came here to cut cane/
but that's the deficient way/
I've acted in the past/
no longer acceptable/
current imperative/ to articulate my perspective/"
**
New Blogs Dep't
Due to moving, we've been remiss in publishing our
(((((HOT)))))(((((BLOGS)))))
feature but this new title is irrisistable:
electronic libretti of obscure poet x zen trick {click here}
now (Tuesday, May 4th) known as
xzentrick libretti {click here}
Saturday, May 1
The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging
I'm not at all surprised to find so many delectable
essays by Hazlitt in a volume of his collected works
titled *Fugitive Writings*. Fugitive, I see now,
because they he had published them in various journals
but they remained uncollected by him.
One of the pieces, "The Letter-Bell" (published in *The Monthly Magazine*, March, 1831) connects the announcing sounds made by approaching mail coaches (horse-driven, of course) to the welter of emotions they
invoke in Hazlitt as they occur, or by his evoking their memory. As I read this with great pleasure, imagining his pleasure in hearing from others, including his editors and other readers, I'm thinking of how much I want to mention all this here. The simultaneity of these interconnected activities within their subsequently evoked internal images, and all the connected feelings is the subject not only of Hazlitt's essay, but the occurance in the present of my anticipation of blogging this as well. Then I realize how much this lightness of blogging I kept thinking about has to do with blogging's complex rearrangements of the correspondances between, reading and writing, publishing and republishing, writing and responding. I've been thinking of Jackson MacLow's appropriations in this regard- and the powerful, silent points they make in regenerating & energizing the equivalence of reading and writing, which bends round ("overlaps") into the equivalence of reader and writer, the foregrounding of one only leading to the silent presence of the other's absence, the words said aloud only leading to the implied occurance of the silent thoughts that precede, and surround the current moment of reading, the past moment of speaking, the future moment of thinking aloud, writing silently, reading again, saying again, again listening, again speaking to & with, again thinking within oneself.
So that whatever gravity occurs within the content,
forms & their deft shifts lightly lift all if it from its concavity into the present, quiet, Spring air, the keys and the blog screen, its breathed fragrances of thought and season.
{What had all those stormy fears been about, anyway, with
those jets crashing through air like so much lightning, day after day,
night after night. Then a subsiding, a great long hush, and an actual sudden death close by, right on this floor of this building; the death of a relatively young man, who left behind a young daughter and a wife. On the one hand the cherry blossoms, bursting with rebirth and rejuvanation, and on the other hand, the stormy clash of a silent voice splitting listening in two, a living, thinking, speaking person hushed into eternal quiet. On the one hand, the intertwining algebra of past, present and future, on the other, the conceivable, empty world of no-time.}
The unbearable lightness of blogging consists, right now at least, of two things: the temporal equivalence, the harmonic cancellation and confrontation between writing and reading, ending and beginning, having and sharing, saying and repeating, writing and publishing, hearing and reading, sounding and the gradual, inevitablle decay of sound into the light, blank, moonlit, silent Spring night.
**
"Complaints are frequently made of the vanity and shortness of human life, when, if we examine its smallest details, they present a world by themselves. The most trifling objects, retraced with they eye of memory, assume the vividness, the delicacy, and importance of insects seen through a magifying glass.There is no end to the brilliancy or the variety...As I write this the *Letter-Bell* passes: it has a lively, pleasant sound with it, and not only fills the street with its importunate clamour, but rings clear through the length of many half-forgetten years. It strikes upon the ear, it vibrates to the brain, it wakes me from the dream of time, it flings me back upon my first entrance into life, the period of my first coming up to town, when all around was strange, uncertain, adverse- a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos of shifting objects- and when this sound alone, startling me with the recollection of a letter I had to send to the friends I had lately left, brought me as it were to myself, made me feel that I had links still connecting me with the universe, and gave me hope and patience to persevere..."
(Hazlitt)
I'm not at all surprised to find so many delectable
essays by Hazlitt in a volume of his collected works
titled *Fugitive Writings*. Fugitive, I see now,
because they he had published them in various journals
but they remained uncollected by him.
One of the pieces, "The Letter-Bell" (published in *The Monthly Magazine*, March, 1831) connects the announcing sounds made by approaching mail coaches (horse-driven, of course) to the welter of emotions they
invoke in Hazlitt as they occur, or by his evoking their memory. As I read this with great pleasure, imagining his pleasure in hearing from others, including his editors and other readers, I'm thinking of how much I want to mention all this here. The simultaneity of these interconnected activities within their subsequently evoked internal images, and all the connected feelings is the subject not only of Hazlitt's essay, but the occurance in the present of my anticipation of blogging this as well. Then I realize how much this lightness of blogging I kept thinking about has to do with blogging's complex rearrangements of the correspondances between, reading and writing, publishing and republishing, writing and responding. I've been thinking of Jackson MacLow's appropriations in this regard- and the powerful, silent points they make in regenerating & energizing the equivalence of reading and writing, which bends round ("overlaps") into the equivalence of reader and writer, the foregrounding of one only leading to the silent presence of the other's absence, the words said aloud only leading to the implied occurance of the silent thoughts that precede, and surround the current moment of reading, the past moment of speaking, the future moment of thinking aloud, writing silently, reading again, saying again, again listening, again speaking to & with, again thinking within oneself.
So that whatever gravity occurs within the content,
forms & their deft shifts lightly lift all if it from its concavity into the present, quiet, Spring air, the keys and the blog screen, its breathed fragrances of thought and season.
{What had all those stormy fears been about, anyway, with
those jets crashing through air like so much lightning, day after day,
night after night. Then a subsiding, a great long hush, and an actual sudden death close by, right on this floor of this building; the death of a relatively young man, who left behind a young daughter and a wife. On the one hand the cherry blossoms, bursting with rebirth and rejuvanation, and on the other hand, the stormy clash of a silent voice splitting listening in two, a living, thinking, speaking person hushed into eternal quiet. On the one hand, the intertwining algebra of past, present and future, on the other, the conceivable, empty world of no-time.}
The unbearable lightness of blogging consists, right now at least, of two things: the temporal equivalence, the harmonic cancellation and confrontation between writing and reading, ending and beginning, having and sharing, saying and repeating, writing and publishing, hearing and reading, sounding and the gradual, inevitablle decay of sound into the light, blank, moonlit, silent Spring night.
**
"Complaints are frequently made of the vanity and shortness of human life, when, if we examine its smallest details, they present a world by themselves. The most trifling objects, retraced with they eye of memory, assume the vividness, the delicacy, and importance of insects seen through a magifying glass.There is no end to the brilliancy or the variety...As I write this the *Letter-Bell* passes: it has a lively, pleasant sound with it, and not only fills the street with its importunate clamour, but rings clear through the length of many half-forgetten years. It strikes upon the ear, it vibrates to the brain, it wakes me from the dream of time, it flings me back upon my first entrance into life, the period of my first coming up to town, when all around was strange, uncertain, adverse- a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos of shifting objects- and when this sound alone, startling me with the recollection of a letter I had to send to the friends I had lately left, brought me as it were to myself, made me feel that I had links still connecting me with the universe, and gave me hope and patience to persevere..."
(Hazlitt)
Friday, April 30
"I am aquainted with but one person,
of whom I feel quilte sure that if he
were about to meet an old and tried
friend in the street, he would go up
and speak to him in the same manner,
whether in the interim he had become
a lord or a beggar. Upon reflection, I may
add a second to the list. Such is my
estimate of the permanence and sincerity
of our most boasted virtures. 'To be
honest as this world goes, is to be one
man picked out of then thousand'."
William Hazlitt
*Aphorisms On Man*
(#XXIX)
Seeing the news about Google's IPO today,
I sincerely hope, and that I am not
deluding myself that I feel I
have reason to hope, that Mr. Larry Paige
and Mr Sergey Brin fall into Hazlitt's
rare category.
If it's true, anyway, it's certainly
going to be good
luck for all us bloggers, as Google
has been unusually kind
to many of us so far, and I appreciate that.
of whom I feel quilte sure that if he
were about to meet an old and tried
friend in the street, he would go up
and speak to him in the same manner,
whether in the interim he had become
a lord or a beggar. Upon reflection, I may
add a second to the list. Such is my
estimate of the permanence and sincerity
of our most boasted virtures. 'To be
honest as this world goes, is to be one
man picked out of then thousand'."
William Hazlitt
*Aphorisms On Man*
(#XXIX)
Seeing the news about Google's IPO today,
I sincerely hope, and that I am not
deluding myself that I feel I
have reason to hope, that Mr. Larry Paige
and Mr Sergey Brin fall into Hazlitt's
rare category.
If it's true, anyway, it's certainly
going to be good
luck for all us bloggers, as Google
has been unusually kind
to many of us so far, and I appreciate that.
"I am not very patriotic in my notions,
nor predjudiced in favour of my own
countrymen; and one reason is, I
wish to have as good an opinion as I
can of human nature in general. If we
are the paragons that some people
make us out, what must the rest of
the world be? If we monopolize all
the sense and virtue on the face of
the globe, we "leave others poor indeed,"
without having a very great superabundance
falling to our own share. Let them have
a few advantages that we have not-
grapes and the sun!"
William Hazlitt
*Aphorisms on Man*
(#XXXV)
nor predjudiced in favour of my own
countrymen; and one reason is, I
wish to have as good an opinion as I
can of human nature in general. If we
are the paragons that some people
make us out, what must the rest of
the world be? If we monopolize all
the sense and virtue on the face of
the globe, we "leave others poor indeed,"
without having a very great superabundance
falling to our own share. Let them have
a few advantages that we have not-
grapes and the sun!"
William Hazlitt
*Aphorisms on Man*
(#XXXV)
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