coa
gul
ate

I'm in

the mind-numbing process of putting all the links in place for issue ten of Otoliths which is due out in a couple of days.

But, as I move from page to page, I'm continually reminded of the great stuff that's in the issue, & that keeps me happy.

the
shadow of
a circling hawk

creates a

vortex in the
pavers of
the back
yard

Genji Monogatari: The Cypress Pillar

He adjusted the font
size of the Devanagari
script, but still the
division of base &
suffix was confusing—no
morphologically organized
arcade game could
capture the full nuances
of scripting syntax or
maximize freight space
the way that paper houses
do. She hid her face
behind a fan, unable to
think of an answer.Too much
semantic instability investing
the genre with powerful
political potential now that
the death penalty had been
abolished, even though
the mental lexicons
that accompanied the act
were quite addictive. Now
he used diacritics when
talking to the dead. Beating
against the wind the wings
of the crow made music.

The Cypress Pillar

Utagawa Kuniyoshi
Genji kumo ukiyo-e awase
(A Comparison of Prints of the Floating World with the Cloudy Chapters of Genji)

Not
to be
too diacritical, but

he was circumflex
about his
carats.

Genji Monogatari: The Shell of the Locust

Signal bits stored
in the pulsating circular
patterns of the fan
blades determine the
relationships between
speech & writing. Else-
where, grazed or
ungrazed pasture
is immaterial to the
rise of prairie dog
communities & the
storage of words in
long-term memory. She
read Derrida—nothing
else to do through
the long twilight
hours—& thought about
the mystical character
of the fetish, a garrulous
mute made from black
wool, lapt about with
black silk & tied at
the top in a pony-
tail. Semiotics no
longer depends on
logic. The only insecticides
which might make a
difference are banned.

Three Otoliths books

get great press in the latest edition of Galatea Resurrects.

Tom Beckett's This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day reviewed by Nicholas Manning.

Márton Koppány's Endgames
engaged with by Eileen Tabios.

Alex Gildzen's It's All A Movie
reviewed by William Allegrezza.

All three books can be purchased from The Otoliths Storefront.

Shameless self-promotion (& probably not for the last time, either)

Full details here.

Genji Monogatari: New Herbs Pt. 1

Even in areas defined
by the Época de oro del
cine mexicano, the big yellow
buses used to shuttle
children to & from school
are thought not to exist. It's
a flaw in episodic memory.
Contemporary findings
from parapsychological
laboratories identify a
progressive sequence of
generalized stages—diesel
exhausts, Yves Saint Laurent's
Teint de Jour Tinted Matt
Moisturizer #04 being
made available in major
toy stores, John Ashbery
receiving the three most
prestigious awards an
American writer can have
bestowed on him. The
Suzaku emperor chanced
to be beside the princess
when the prizes were
announced. He traced back
his memories. No yellow
buses. The relationship
between gender stereotypes
& national cultures is complex.

Genji Monogatari: New Herbs Pt. 2

Le miel de ma réflexion
said Lacan. "I bring
you the honey of my
reflection. A single
dose of buckwheat
honey before bedtime
means a much smaller
zone of deformation
in the down-dip ball-
&-pillow horizon of
semantic memory. To
discover this I had
to return a reference
to a new dataflow
object, locate a plumber,
aimlessly push my cart
through the towering
aisles of the twentieth
century & beyond. House
training puppies is
an important part of
living." From time to
time he would look
vacantly up at the trees.

a / little pome / for Alex Gildzen

Was James
Dean's death

a car/actor
assassination?

Genji Monogatari: The Bamboo River

What am I doing
wrong here? The object
oriented paradigm I
am attempting to
create seems to be
made of the same
material that causes
theft detectors to go
off in a department
store. I should have
listened to Gauguin's
advice to van Gogh—
never buy anything
in the vicinity of
a man dressed as a
gladiator. & yet,
whether or not one
agrees with the
assumptions, geo-
engineering the Earth
to control rising temper-
atures should be able
to be done without
breaking the budget. I
hear the European Union
is introducing a common
system integrating group
psychology with psycho-
analytic theories of object
relations. My housemates
are a 28 yo female & a
30 yo male. The small
catfish we got from
the river as 1" babies
are now 5" in length.

if
not
with
                              enjoy
                              ment

            then

at
least
with
                              enjamb
                              ment

Genji Monogatari: The Drake Fly

There are significant
differences in the
sequence length of
immobilized DNA in
the new batch of lap-
top chips Intel rolled
out on Monday. Today,
of course, we are likely
to have rain. The browser
window open under the
browser window I have
open to search Google
for references to the
Drake Fly has playing
one of one hundred &
forty-eight YouTube
clips of The Rolling Stones
doing Sympathy for the
Devil. It's a fishing lure
whose etymology is
entomology. I type in
Lady Murasaki & spend
the remainder of the near
nine minutes replaying
our cached millenium.

grovel rash

                

The
crap detector
strikes once more!

Genji Monogatari: The Wormwood Patch

So different to
what I grew up with
in St. Louis—no
longer do single
entities reside on
a single device.
I have undergone
an energy matrix
reversal. I am
regenerated, have
moved out from
the shadow of the
baker's yeast. It's
a special case, with
particular challenges
but a wide variety
of applications. I lead
an active & varied
sex life. Tomorrow
I drive my Toyota in a
round of the AMA
Motocross. I no longer
have a street address
for messages to be
sent to. Whatever
duality there is
arises from the
limitations of the
language. Absinthe
makes princes of us all.

pho phur

A reminder

that submissions for issue ten of Otoliths close in a couple of weeks.

Genji Monogatari: Suma

The beaches are
beautiful, the cuisine
is excellent—if only
the stock market
hadn't opened in
negative territory!
The price of crude oil
is a psychotic ghost
that haunts my
poetry. There is the
possibility that I will
be exiled. I keep on
my bright red Mickey
Mouse pajamas as a
figurative act of
mourning & cut a kind
of quasi-expressionist
sturm und drang figure
in the scarecrow-making
workshop. Sometimes
with a touch of irony,
sometimes in despair,
I turn to the insights
of Derrida & Hegel
to understand &
name my condition.

hay(na)ku with the title at the end

                              
                    
          

          
                    
                              

(Post
exorcized by
the crap detector.)

the persistence of memory

s o u v e n i r
s o u v e n i
s o u v e n
s o u v e    r
s o u v    e r
s o u     i e r
s o      l i e r
s      b l i e r
    u b l i e r
o u b l i e r

Genji Monogatari: The Bell Cricket

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.
—Jacques Derrida

These days I'm more
than just an itinerant
trader of the insect
which cries, announcing
my wares by reciting
Chinese poems as
dawn comes into
the sky. Now I'm in
the thick of things,
am building the first
seaside golf course
in Vietnam. I've seen
Kobe, seen the Mitch
Richmonds of the
league, played against
Jordan. My surfboards
are stacked along the
walls like so many
tabulae rasae. Not to
deride Derrida, but the
envenomations of the
Stone fish will turn
any kitchen into a post-
structuralist paradise.

Genji Monogatari: Heartvine

Flowers that open at dawn
but close & wither in the
late morning of the same
day provide an insight
into renovating a 13th-
century French castle.

The works of Nietzsche
produce wines of
ample body & aroma.

According to Poemhunter,
not only is waste disposal
at a landfill facility
much more expensive
than recycling but people
who read Maya Angelou
also read Shel Silverstein.

A number of crucial
points where the domains
of experience & belief
intersect can be found
in the military manual
detailing the day-to-day
operations of the US
military's Guantánamo
Bay detention facility.

The colors of the heartvine
bleed into one another. The
roads are full of people
& vehicles. The political
revolution is dying down,
is now more sensed than
thought about. Phenomenal.

with friends like this.....#2

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) — Official investigations have found that US-led air strikes a week ago killed 64 people, most of them women and children, the heads of separate investigation teams said Friday.

The US-led coalition has denied killing civilians in the strikes on July 4 and July 6 in remote, mountainous areas near the border with Pakistan but said it was looking into the allegations. It says only militants were killed. more

Today the
postman brought
me a prose-
lytizer but I
can't seem
to make
it work.

Genji Monogatari: Akashi

The dual nature of
the cyborg—part essay
anthology, part auto-
biography—does not
entirely lose its
mythopoeic force
even though the FBI
has been permitted
to download a partially
functional copy of the
program. "I have to
admit that I still want
to be part of the machine
& make my mark from
inside it. I'm part of
that demographic who
cannot understand why
Rilke spent so much time
writing letters to a young
poet instead of just
dashing off a couple of
calligraphic schemata." He
walked out into the rain. The
Akashi lady retired to her
room, once more convinced
that her fears had become
actuality. She picked out
an appropriate brush &
wrote a poem on some
fine Korean paper. "Being
on the wrong side of a
typhoon is not divine."

ifnotwith           Cialis

    then

atleastwith        Catullus

Genji Monogatari: The Festival of the Cherry Blossoms

The relativity principle
holds only insofar
as the reduction
in biodiversity in the
rice paddies can be
attributed to the massive
overuse of agricultural
chemicals. Time is
reduced to a single
point in space, can
no longer tell us how
the big bang gave rise
to the universe as we
used to know it. The
longbow moon is met
by the silence of crickets
& frogs, the rhetorical
koan of do flowers
blossom when no-
one is there to see or
smell them. "I have
drawn 'Spring' from the
Urushi box," said Genji.

from an illustrated Genji

Genji spying on the child Murasaki

Genji Monogatari: Young Murasaki

What could she say to the fantastic foolybear.....
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The notion is hege-
monic. Unnatural made
natural by a Prince's
actions. The child
did not see it either
way. She named her
dolls after him: he gave
her more. Houses to
put them in after putting
her in his. Wrote poems
to her, drew pictures
for her to copy. The
view out over the sea had
the quiet all on its own.

Genji Monogatari XXIV: The Flute

Comes a point when
the juice no longer
runs through the jelly-
bag & the subsequent
variation in acoustic
properties means soft-tissue
injuries become more
prevalent. He took the
child in his arms & told
her of an age when
performances were held
in the streets, open spaces,
shrines; when small groups
of independent Noh &
Kyōgen actors roamed
the countryside, able to be
identified by the color of
their socks, white for
the Noh, yellow for the
Kyōgen. That now re-
membered only as a
probability problem &
even then corrupted—
an actor has two white
& two yellow socks
randomly disarrayed in
his dresser drawer...Piano,
forte—the fiery string
music of ’30s country
bands given way to the
fiddle & steel honky-
tonk of musicians with
cleats on their shoes. The
child was asleep. He put
her down & blew a soft
strain on his new flute.

with friends like this.....

Newly declassified Defence and Prime Minister's office files show that the US was strongly pushing then Prime Minister Harold Holt's government in the 1960s to allow tests of two of the deadliest chemical weapons ever developed — VX and GB, better known as Sarin nerve gas.

Under the plan — which is not believed to have been acted upon — 200 Australian combat troops, presumably wearing 1960s-era chemical protection suits, were to be subjected to aerial bombardment in the Iron Range rainforest near Lockhart River in far north Queensland.

Peter Bailey, a former senior official with Mr Holt, says the request caused consternation in Canberra, and as far as he knows the tests never went ahead.

But he says planning was very advanced in the US, which wanted the operation to be kept secret because the weapons were illegal under international law.

The aim of the tests was to gauge the effectiveness of nerve agents in jungle warfare at a time when US military involvement in Vietnam was intensifying. The US proposal was made by US defence secretary Robert McNamara in July 1963.

The documents stated that of the 200 troops to be used in the tests, "only four to six would need to know the full details of the operation".

The US proposal recommended that the Australian government keep the nerve agent tests secret, describing them as either "equipment testing" trials or "land reclamation" experiments.

Today the
postman brought
me a magnetized
calendar from
the local personal
injury litigation
lawyers. It was
the only mail; &,
smaller than a
regular envelope,
didn't stay
protruding from
the aperture
but slid quickly
into the depths
of the mailbox
where it severed
the tail of the
little brown gecko
that lives there. Con-
fronted by the
conjunction of a
separated piece
of itself & "Have
you been in an
accident recently?"
the gecko has de-
cided to sue the
singer & pursue the
song, has ordered
legal textbooks from
Amazon to prepare
its case. Didn't care
what books they
sent; just asked
that they be too big
to fit in a mailbox.

nghitmare

Genji Monogatari: XXIII The Rites

It is the way
of things. The
gravemarker
as lexical
entry to a
life, the
name the
lemma. One
last poem
for the
Akashi lady.

bowl of baguettes

de Chirico (1914)



begat Ernst (1923)



who begat Magritte (1927)



but only incidentally at that time



because it wasn't until this portrait of Alexandre Iolas in 1953 that Magritte really began to beget beaucoup de bowler hats.

Genji Monogatari XXII: Purple trousers

Carrying a boulder on one's
back is both a metaphor
& a painful way to go
shopping. Even with-
out it shopping / takes
strength; & she would
prefer to use that for
other things, like
starting up a new
Poetry Café in the
Prefecture where she
was born, a calm time-
warp full of clear-faced
students, murmuring couples,
tiny tables & red wine. There
would be vases of purple
trousers on each table
& on the counter a
special bunch, just
for her, wrapped in
a poem. On the walls
videos would be playing,
footage of an unknown
person who seemed
to be assigning human
characteristics to non-
human things & cloning
animals for experimental
purposes. Her geta creaked
on the dry cobblestones. She
wondered how she could
lose the boulder. Everywhere
she looked she saw difficulties.

He

bought an
abandoned
church &
turned it
into a hydro-
ponic garden.

Grew navel
oranges &
apsels, a few
organic
vegetables.

Occasionally
preaches.

Today the
postman brought
me a hermetically-
sealed box of
greenhouse gas
emissions. It was
from Macbeth. The
accompanying
note began "Now
Me Thane of Cordor......"

just remember