geographies : Kalabity

 

wednesday newstrip

One of Elongated Muskrat’s own AI chatbots has identified him as being one of the largest spreaders of misinformation on X · T.®ump orders the "most lethal machine ever built," the Boeing F-47 fighter jet · the Australian Opposition Coalition's top economic spokesperson is unable to confirm the size of the opposition's planned public service & migration cuts, the taxpayer cost of building nuclear power plants, or how it would limit government spending · as trust in the US collapses, leaders in Australia & around the world are frantically recalibrating · Israel orders troops to 'seize more territory' in Gaza & threatens to annex land · Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, one of the world’s fastest growing social media platforms, made a bold & widely applauded statement when she took to the stage at SXSW wearing a simple, black T-shirt with the phrase: "Mundus sine caesaribus," Latin for "a world without Caesars," clearly a dig at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who wore a shirt of the same color & typeface while delivering his keynote at the Meta Connect conference last September – only his shirt said: "aut Zuck aut nihil," a play on the ancient Latin phrase, "aut Caesar aut nihil" which translates to "either Caesar or nothing" · "Courageous, angry, passionate: "rallies around Australia honor the memory of women killed by male violence & demand urgent action.

geographies : Cape Bridgewater

 

wednesday newstrip aka bring on the T.®umpenproletariat

Following T.®ump's mass pardon of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, there is a new team in the White House whose job it is to "focus on clemency grants that underscore the president’s own grievances about what he sees as the political weaponization of the justice system" · T.®ump's CDC plans major study relitigating vaccination-autism conspiracy theory: report · possibility of T.®ump nominating a Fox host for Supreme Court is 'not a lunatic thought' · T.®ump signed a day-one executive order titled, "Restoring Freedom of Speech & Ending Federal Censorship," that stated, "Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society." Now a purge of so-called woke initiatives revealed by the N.Y. Times includes a list of banned words that came with that order – from phrases like "sense of belonging," "all-inclusive" & "at risk" – to more innocuous terms like "women," "institutional," & "systemic" · T.®ump pick for Pentagon says selling submarines to Australia would be 'crazy' if Taiwan tensions flare · Yes, T.®ump paid for a full-page newspaper ad criticizing US foreign policy in 1987. "Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore," reads an open letter penned by T.®ump.

from The Pope's Easter message

"Now that postmodernism’s been (with a wink) flushed, can we, for a moment, glance back wistfully to that cinema of more naïve possibilities, before the insular film school homilies of 'queer cinema' swamped us, when post-new wave sex & politics anarchically mixed in ignorance of our contemporary Sundance straightjackets of liberal visibility politics, body image conventionalism, festival entertainment, & jury-prize prostitution? Such films were made not by technofetishistically schooled 'filmmakers' but by renaissance theater artists like Terayama & Arrabal, who would deride with a magnanimous grin all foisted philistine pigeonholes. But prepare for disillusionment, too, for these artists were blissfully ignorant of more than just the watery liberalism we now cringingly sip like gelid, day-old, decaf."

Sensitivities

 

geographies: Gelantipy

 

wednesday newstrip

Elongated Muskrat’s SpaceX Starship explodes, debris streaks through Florida skies · Ukraine war briefing: US-Ukraine talks to take place in Saudi Arabia in the next week, Zelenskyy says · Muskrat can’t fire employees, T.®ump reportedly tells cabinet secretaries · "Small & weak countries will get burnt first, & the international order & rules will be under severe shock," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said. "Major countries should undertake their international obligations … & not seek to profit from & bully the weak" · rattled markets, negative polls: some say T.®ump’s honeymoon is over · 'shadowy, unelected figures': analyst says DOGE is the very thing 'it claims to fear most' · a century-old shipwreck has resurfaced on the east coast of Australia, unearthed by Cyclone Alfred's wild weather over 130 years after it was first swallowed by the sea in another cyclone in the 1800s.

Some recent books

Mark Young
The Hit List
52 pages
b&w free downloadable pdf
Scud Editions
url: https://scudlit.blogspot.com/p/editions.html

A collection of around 55 recent poems.

*

harry k stammer, Mark Cunningham, & Mark Young
Gravel
66 pages
poetry & visuals
full color
paperback ($US15.00)& Kindle($US5.00)
Sandy Press
url: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DY56DHV7

Gravel. Might have been called that because it was like walking over it in bare feet to get three grumpy old men to agree on how this book should be put together — identifiers or anonymous; interspersed small offerings or a three-tiered cake; with or without an intro?

Or? Call it that because it's a word with other, quite divergent, words built in & easily accessed — rave, ave, grave, Ravel — & that's before discarding the original order.

Or? Each of the pieces, as denoted by the poet's name, being inserted into the document in a random way, like gravel on a path. The point here is to cross each author's approach in a way that does or doesn’t affect the how of how the pieces relate to each other. Does this matter in terms of how a reader understands each alone & at the same time how a reader may understand the whole & the poetry within the total work?

Or? What is there to introduce? The Pisan Cantos and Zukofsky's A made do without introductions, if I recall. Maybe when you’re famous—or post-famous, so that people need to be told how important you are. Were. Is that “you” plural? Or, as with Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, you can have a blurb with more words in it than most of the books included. Then you can get somebody to write an introduction to tell us who the blurb writer, Vito Acconci, is. Was. Who will introduce the introducer?

Or? The only true blurb would be along the lines of: "If you read this book and get irritated as hell & say to yourself, 'Anybody could do that,' then you're got the real spirit of the book."

Take all of the above, & it's no wonder they invited me in to compose the introduction. All suggestions will be welcomed. Keep watching this space.

— Kasimir Malevich, February 1915 2025, Red Square

*

Mark Young
Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama
88 pages
poetry & visuals
full color
paperback ($US24.75)
Otoliths
url: https://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-young/some-unrecorded-voyages-of-vasco-da-gama/paperback/product-e748z2j.html?page=1&pageSize=4

My first poem in the geographies series appeared on my gamma ways blog at the beginning of 2009. I feel that the best description of my intent comes from Sam Lohmann who published some in an issue of the journal Peaches & Bats that he was editing at the time: "These pieces by Mark Young have a disturbing and comic speed, and seem, as a group, to get at some essential weirdness of the 'global' info-capitalist culture we're all trying to survive and live in."

I began the visual geographies just under a couple of years later. At first they tended to be poems on a background, but gradually transformed into digital manipulations of images from places I looked up on the web. As time went on, I refined those locations to Australia & New Zealand, sometimes with a word or two added; but the intent was the same for the visuals as for the poems — the world is something different to what it's claimed to be.

There have been five standalone collections of geographies over the years, mainly in chapbook or pdf format, plus a significant tranche in the wide-ranging 600-page collection, The Codicils, that came out from Otoliths in 2013. This new collection, Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama, contains a number of visuals &, probably, the final geographies poems.

— Mark Young

*

Mark Young
Closed Environment
24 pages
b&w free & downloadable
Neo-Mimeo Editions, from Nualláin House
url: https://nuallainhousepublishers.com/2025/03/03/closed-environment/

"Neo-Mimeo endeavors to return to the fast and cheap no frills esthetic of mimeo in a non-scrolling digital slideshow left to right reading format. The texts are replicated in the limited typewriter font styles then available, generally Courier or Prestige, but in a larger point size (16 vs.12) to accommodate readability on the small screen. The bold text presentation alludes to the often over inked stencils in mimeo production. Each Neo-Mimeo poetry selection, like many original mimeo books, is limited to approximately 20 pages. A pdf file of Neo-Mimeo titles is available for those who wish to produce their own hard copy; staples not included."

— Pat Nolan

*

Mark Young
The Complete Post Person Poems
138 pages
b&w (paperback), full color (Kindle)
(paperback) $US12.50 (Kindle) $US6.25
Sandy Press
url: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZHXYYH7

One never knows what's going to turn up in Mark's mail. I've even turned up — all 6'7" of me — in the postbag. Every page holds a surprise. Mark delivers! —Tom Beckett

In The Complete Post Person Poems, Mark Young delivers “the can” or rather, cans "of worms/ I’d always/ wanted to open.” Master builder/decorator of “a room to put/ the elephant in,” Young helps us achieve some measure of “Gunk Control” through an ironic, fiercely punny wit that is replete with cogent historical and current allusions and accounts of wild misprisions. His “melodious thunks” provide superb rejoinders to the “polemic/ pandemic” that assails the globe. —Thomas Fink

In The Complete Post Person Poems intellectual Tom-Foolery via the official postal system has at it at full speed! — Cathy M. Bennett

All writers have a fraught relationship with the postal service. Mark Young’s remedy is The Complete Post Person Poems, a uniquely multifaceted otherworldly disco ball showering kaleidoscopic colors down onto poetry’s dance floor. Shake that thang. —Pat Nolan

The Complete Post Person Poems does nothing less than bring the world to you. How lucky we are to receive Mark Young's mail. —Brad Liening

After reading this book, I will never think of aubergines in the same way again. Now I must realize: I don't even know what an aubergine is. And the author makes me feel funny about my subscription to the Conspiracy Theory Quarterly. I think he did this on purpose. He is dangerous and no one should read this book. —Mark Cunningham

Mark Young picks a thread in a ball of golden wool and gives it a pull and it never ends. Magic everywhere. —John Geraets

Chance and its output, notably infinite shades of humor, when examined and relished, teach even beyond experience, offering as a bonus “a room to put the elephant in.” —Sheila E. Murphy

Mark Young has given the meaning of a postman's "meaning" in meaning a delivery god. Send and ye shall receive. — harry k stammer

Mark Young IS the Complete Post Person, delivering to us all the news we need to read, to reread, to remember. For these poems we will remember. Here he's given us back so much of our world – the terrible and the terrific – and for that we need to say: thank you, Mark. —Michael Gottlieb

Don’t
call me
biased for concluding

the Hay(na)ku created
its best
poem

because its postman
delivered with
sensitivity
—Eileen R. Tabios

*

& a note for those of you who have a Kindle Unlimited membership. The Magritte Poems, which was released late last year, is now available for no charge as part of that membership.

topaz armies

 

wenesday newstrip

More than 100 Russian officials, lawmakers, & law enforcement officers accused of corruption & serious crimes have avoided prison sentences by joining the war in Ukraine, according to a new investigation by the BBC Russian Service · a restaurant owner in Japan did not take kindly to being given a bad review by two diners — putting a bounty on their heads · DoNuts T.®ump has proposed what he seemed to consider a new idea: a program to let wealthy foreigners pay $5 million for citizenship. "We're gonna be selling a gold card," he said. "You have a green card, this is a gold card" · influencer brothers Andrew & Tristan Tate, who are charged with human trafficking in Romania, have left for the US after authorities lifted travel restrictions imposed as part of the case, an official says · almost one in five trans & non-binary New Zealanders were threatened with physical violence because of their gender identity in the past four years · The White House says it will now decide which media organizations will participate in the press pool that covers Prissygent DoNuts T.®ump.