a late afternoon hay(na)ku for Geof Huth

I'm
too temper
& (a)mentally un-

stable
to ever
be an archivist.

Thought as high-
      pitched as
helium voice. In-
tuitive anime.

Today the
postman brought
me Larousse
Gastronomique. I
couldn't get
through it all
in the one
sitting, have put
the leftovers
in the freezer.

well Eileen, shd i hold or fold on yr behalf?

in this morning's spamelot

an offer regarding your site: http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com

Hi
My name is peter
i would like to have a link exchange with your site:http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com
i have many gambling ralated sites pr 3-5
i you are intrested please send me your sites list (that if you have more
than one site)
so we castum a dael that will benefit both of us
i you are NOT intrested in link exchange and you are selling links from
your site , i will be happy to recive your rates and payment method (we are buying links also).
waiting for your reply
regards
Peter

The impassable dream

When I was growing up, the Northwest Passage, the sea route from Europe to Asia, was one of those fabled sites of adventure that populate boyhood (day)dreams. Distant though it may have been, Hollywood & books brought it close, along with other dreamings of impenetrable forests, forgotten cities & fabulous animals & birds (& don’t forget the reptiles) that may still exist.

Today I read that a rapid rise in the rate that Arctic ice is melting has opened the NWP at least two decades earlier than scientists monitoring the effects of global warming had expected.

The European Space Agency said Arctic sea ice was now at its smallest recorded extent, raising the possibility of the passage being routinely used by commercial shipping during the summer.

Scientists had expected that with the climate changing, the passage would become navigable for merchant ships within the next two decades, but the discovery that it has already opened up has caused surprise & alarm.

In the past year alone, the rate at which the ice is melting has increased tenfold. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100,000 square kilometres per year on average, so a drop of one million square kilometres in just one year is extreme.

The image above is a mosaic of over 200 individual photos taken by the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite. The dark grey represents clear water, while sea ice is colour-coded green.

hay(na)ku epiphany

In-
sight dressed
up — satori-al splendour.

Lunch poem

Nothing makes sense
anymore. Everything
does. I bind my camel
to a smokestack
at the edge of an anti-
climax & set the
guidebook alight to give
me light to better
read it by. The hidden
pattern in the last
flicker of a hologram
tells me I’m
in Machu Picchu
where I shouldn’t
be. Entropy arrives
to peck out my I-
balls. Equilibrium. It’s
a eunuch experience.

Genji Monogatari VII

Multiple inheritance leads to a taxonomy of concepts. Lineage relates to the persistence of an entity over time. New arguments in favour of the four-dimensional ontology confirm that death & the separation of body & soul play an important role in the analysis of circadian systems.

If a meme were continually interested in "what happens next" somewhere in the brain activity must be changing. Although they can think independently & move of their own accord, the claim that a thing exists, when added to our notion of a thing, does not add anything to the concept.

I’ve always gone along with the orthodox interpretation & used the term to refer to any cultural entity (such as a song, an idea or a religion) that an observer might consider a replicator. The idea that our consciousness is an interlocking system of memes is reflected in the early stimulus-blocked responses that are part of a generalized fear & feeling of loss of control.

Once the roles of cause & effect are assigned to objects in interactions, people tend to overestimate the strength & importance of the causal object & underestimate that of the effect object in bringing about the outcome. This bias is termed the causal asymmetry. Eventually we will reach a point in the past where all humans can be divided into two groups. The storage assumption greatly simplifies the treatment of resource variability.

& now that the Linnean system has been largely replaced by a cladistic system in which any clade or complete branch of the evolutionary tree is given a name, & the only remaining fixed rank is genus, luck plays only a small part in discovering fossils. There are clear ontological differences between biological individuals & States.

Genji sent his man to ask the name of the flower.

Backgammon strategy

The strings are just off the
frets & don't buzz, the front
vowels are in blue. Light
rays obey Fermat's Principle
of the least optical path, a
street lined with shops &
restaurants in minuscule
wooden houses hung
with chaussure de foot &
autre article & vêtement
de sport. Many large laughing
mouths gates of hell gaping
wide open hungry taunting
beckoning. It sounds like
chicken noodle soup, this
craving for attention to re-
place a lost mother's love.

Late in August

Marko Niemi curated a show at a library in the centre of Helsinki of visual, digital & sound poems taken from his wonderful Nokturno site. The digital poetry was screened as an hour-long loop, the visual printed out by the library staff &, to quote Marko, "looked surprisingly good, considering that they were quite large and printed using originally pretty small, web-quality files."



He's sent me a couple of photos of my work there, one of three of my checker/chess-board pieces, & the other a still from my, what becomes in Marko's Finnish translation, "Prévertille, syksyn lehtiä".

Today the
postman brought
me the final
volume of The
Never-Ending
Story.

Where there's a Wall....

“After subjugating and uniting China from seven warring States, the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi connected and extended four old fortification walls along the north of China that originated about 700 B.C. Armies were stationed along the wall as a first line of defense against the invading nomadic Hsiung Nu (the Huns) tribes north of China.”



“Hadrian decided to enforce the old Roman policy of "divide and rule." His wall would split the Brigantes from the Selgovae and hopefully overawe and pacify the troublesome tribes. Construction of the wall commenced ca. AD 122, right around the time of the Emperor Hadrian's personal visit to Britannia.”



“In the afternoon of August 12, 1961 at 4 p.m. Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, signed the commands to close the border. Next Sunday at midnight the army, police and the "Kampfgruppen" began to bolt the city. The wall is built and separates the city into two parts for more than 28 years.”



“Since Israel began its construction of the West Bank Wall in 2002, it has sparked intense debate, being condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice. Israel claims it is a security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks. Opponents point to the serious impact on the rights of Palestinians, depriving them of their land, mobility and access to health and educational services.”



“Parts of central Sydney now resemble a city under military occupation, with a steel and concrete fence, five kilometres long and 2.8 metre high, encircling the environs of Circular Quay and the Opera House, a popular harbourside tourist precinct. Only those with the required accreditation, involving clearances from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), are permitted inside this fortressed area.”

ergotist

Today the
postman brought
me a compendium
of words &
phrases that are
rarely used these
days. Gadzooks!

Four of the five

books I'm bringing out under the Otoliths banner this month are off to their respective authors for final proofing, the fifth has had the interior proofed & we're just deciding on which cover from a wonderful selection will be used. So expect an official publication notice for another great round in a couple of weeks. The quality & variety of what's developing into a substantial catalogue is bringing me lots of joy & pleasure. My sincere thanks to everyone involved.

Once they're launched, then it's on to the print editions of issue six of the Otoliths e-zine, followed by getting the next round of books underway. Plus issue seven of Otoliths is already shaping up to be another eclectic collection.

a chinese whisper

Confucian rains

Today the
postman brought
me a poem that
was written
tomorrow.

a six word story

He'd always wanted to use "balderdash".

a today, a yesterday, & a bunch of bullshit balderdash

"Note; If you are a Red Self-Existing Moon or a Red Overtone Moon or a Red Rhythmic Moon or a Red Resonant Moon then you are born on a Portal day."

Of pen & other umbra

Last night the sky was clear, the full moon pristine. I'd gone out to check where it was because tonight is eclipse night, & I wanted to be sure of where to look.

Today, all day, the sky cloudy. Not really overcast, but light grey clouds covering most of the sky. Pissing me off as the evening drew nearer, big big chance that I wouldn't be able to see not seeing the moon.

But late afternoon the clouds started getting blown away, so that by evening there were only a few around. &, right on time, just before 7 p.m., the bottom of the moon started getting a dirty look about it. Slow progress, but as I write this, around 8, the Earth is totally in the way of the sun, & the moon is in total eclipse. It is as they promised, a shade of red, & will be that way for another hour & a half. Then the clearing until around 10.30 when the whole moon will be visible again. Though, apparently, it's still within the lighter penumbral shadow for another hour after that.

Today the
postman brought
me a Refutation of
Chaos Theory. I'm
a bit skeptical
about the research,
however, since the
paper opens with
a disclaimer that
no butterflies
were harmed
during the course
of the study.

The Entourage of the Emperor of Amerika

George W. Bush is flying into Sydney early next month for the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum. With him will be his wife & her staff of four, plus:

1 personal chef
4 cooks
15 sniffer dog teams
50 White House political aides
150 National Security Advisors
200 State representatives
250 Secret Service Agents.

To get to Australia, they'll use two identical 747-200Bs (Air Force One & its decoy clone), another chartered jumbo, & two to three Globemasters or Galaxies to carry all the equipment that accompanies the Emperor. & that includes:

The Imperial Helicopter (Marine one) plus a backup, Black Hawk helicopters for surveillance, the Imperial limousine Cadillac One (five inches of ballistic armour, transparent armour windows designed to withstand attack by anti-tank grenade launchers, run-flat tyres, & is environmentally sealed against chemical & biological attacks), a twenty-strong motorcade which includes more armour-plated limousines, the Secret Service War Wagons (Chevrolet Suburbans) the last one of which usually has a battery of battle-ready machine guns, a SWAT wagon & an ambulance. & then there's the back-up motorcade in case something goes wrong or they need to run a decoy.

As I was going to St Ives.....

Mission Briefing

Guys. We don't know where Osama bin Laden is, but we do know where the Brits are. So let's get out there & bomb the shit out of them, just so you can paint some more of those little kill doohickies on the fuselage of your planes....

Britain's Defense Ministry says three British soldiers were killed and two others wounded in southern Afghan-istan by a U.S. air strike that was supporting them in a battle with Taleban insurgents.

News item 8/24/07

Wallace Stevens' 14th way of looking at a black_bird

"Arnold had gone through paranoid kippages about their not wanting to put a black man's image on the cover. ("Who let the coon in?"—Wallace Stevens' inquiry at the 1950 Drew-Phalen Awards banquet, when that year's recipient, Gwendolyn Brooks, had entered the hall—replayed regularly up from the kerygma of black literary history, a-broil in memory and imagination, even after forty years.)"

Samuel R. Delany: Dark Reflection

The "Drew-Phalen Awards" are Delany's invention, but the incident is real, at the 1950 Pulitzer Prize Awards ceremony where Brooks was awarded the prize for poetry.

This book, Delany's latest, is wonderful.

Lunch poem

At the sandwich shop
Paul Simon is
busy telling me that
I can call him Al just
as a bus goes past
whose emblazoned arse
tells me that local
real estate broker Al
Lewis is above the
crowd, ahead of
the pack — though
if that's true, then
what's he doing at the
back of the bus? &
even though this is no
meaningful coincidence
it still leads me into
thoughts of Jung
& how it would be
great to experience
some act of synchronicity
in this town of the
collectively unconscious.

Beware / of a / camel after sex

An Australian woman was killed by a pet camel given to her as a 60th birthday present after the animal apparently tried to have sex, police said Sunday.

a note for Tom Beckett

There are quite often times when I feel the need to justify my existence. This happens to be one of them.

sea/mless

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!"

Lewis Carroll: The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)

Political arse-covering 101

Always find someone to blame when you look like losing.

"ALEXANDER DOWNER has a dire warning for the Iraqi Government: rein in the insurgents or there could be a change of government in Australia.

Unless the Iraqis improved security, the governments in Australia and the US could be thrown out, the Foreign Affairs Minister said yesterday. Public patience on Iraq was "wearing pretty thin".

"You will get people electing governments that do want just to walk away from Iraq," Mr Downer said."

The Sydney Morning Herald

He
hurled insults
from the snidelines.

everything old is new again.....

Hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids did you kill today?

in the sixties

"Eventually, there simply were not enough volunteers to continue to fight a protracted war and the government instituted a draft."

news item 8/11/07

"The top US military officer in charge of coordinating the war effort in Iraq says that it makes sense to consider a return of the draft to meet the military's needs."

Hey, hey, GWB,
how many kids will we never again see?

As if there wasn't already enough shit in the mail

Given my predeliction for postman poems, that probably wasn't a wise title; but I came home yesterday evening to find a fat A4 envelope from the Federal Government reposing on the bench on the front porch. Opened it up.

Dear MARK YOUNG

I would like to ask you to take part in the National Bowel Screening Program…The National Program is being introduced gradually….People who turned 65 last year are being invited to take part…..

The letter went on to say that the test is known as a faecal occult blood test — thus confirming my suspicions that Satanism is shit — & giving instructions on how the sampling should be carried out. A more detailed 32 page booklet on the protocols of stool sampling was included in the postout along with plastic tubes & sampling sticks, a biodegradable sheet to catch your stool on — "empty your bladder, flush, then lay the sheet on the surface of the water printed side up" — & a postage paid envelope to send your samples back in.

Don't get me wrong. I think such programs are great. But the thought of all that shit making its way through the bowels of the Australia Post means I'll be using latex gloves to empty my mail box over the next several weeks.

Maybe they could revert to an older form of mail delivery. You know, stool pigeon post…..

Lunch poem

Having to step
over the urine stream
left by a just-passed
cattle truck causes
me to lose my
mental balance
right at the moment
when I was about
to comprehend the
intricacies of the effect
of subprime mortgages
on the economy of
the United States. Or
maybe it was the
probable songlists
for Dylan’s current
concert tour that I
was thinking about,
ticking off on my
fingers whether it
was likely to be a
good or bad tour
based on past ex-
perience. Ex-
ponential options
from which I’m
brought back down to
earth by being pissed
on underfoot. The
wind touches me
on my left elbow. I
give it a couple of
dollars. It goes away.

Today the
postman brought
me an optical
allusion & some
special spectacles
to help me
understand it.

Day August 6, 1945

daytritus

the episode does
not have any allusions.
, &, particularly
n smaller
; —
the skin is thick
& granular —
. But everybody
knows

Day __________

for Jean Vengua

What I am really
thinking is that
the posterior
surface of the
thighs is
central to robot
map learning.

aw shucks, Tom

Tom Beckett has done me the honor — no, not the next dance nor my proposal for his hand in marriage, but of naming me one of his chosen "thinking bloggers". I find it slightly ironic, because these days I tend to consider myself intuitive rather than thoughtful, but, coming from Tom, I will happily put on my thinking cap — peak backwards as is de rigeur — & strut the runway, even though, as cummings wrote,

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers.

& though, as if they were some genetically-inherited wasting disease, I usually let such things die with me rather than pass them on, in this case I will make an exception & call Ernesto Priego up on stage to accept my nomination of him as one of the great philosophers in the making.

Last night the
owls returned. Small
bird, large tree,
pale breast picked
out by flashlight.
Small bird, large
sound. No call &
        answer but
suddenly side
by side chorus.
I was ecstatic.

Was(tc)h yr mouth!

Elsewhere they'd be
classed as
retards.

Here
it's just
the gene pool.

Who is killing all the great directors of Europe?

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

Otoliths issue six is now online

Issue six of Otoliths has just gone live. It contains work by Adam Fieled, David-Baptiste Chirot, Bill Drennan, Joel Chace, Julian Jason Haladyn, Spencer Selby, Kristine Ong Muslim, Juliet Cook, Reed Altemus, Michael Steven, Jeff Harrison, J. D. Nelson, Alex Carnevale, Mary Ellen Derwis, Alexander Jorgensen, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, dan raphael, Raymond Farr, Márton Koppány, Javant Biarujia, Philip Byron Oakes, John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Rochelle Ratner, Sheila E. Murphy, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Jordan Stempleman, Ray Craig, Iain Britton, Paul Siegell, Andrew Topel, Ernesto Priego, Mark DeCarteret, Matthew Medina, Joe Balaz, Brian Foley, Luke Daly, Martin Edmond, Tom Beckett, Karri Kokko & ek rzepka & has a cover by Geof Huth.

A reminder that print editions of the previous issues are available at The Otoliths Shopfront along with an ever-growing number of books.

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times and create panic and terror. But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage."

Today the
postman brought
me the periodic
table to go
with the other
periodic furniture
we have around
the house.

Logic table: or why doncha do write?

I don't write about things I don't write about.

I do write about things I don't write about.

I don't write about things I do write about.

I do write about things I do write about.

Lunch poem

Yesterday it was almost
Autumn in New York
&, putting a logical
footprint on a flight
of fancy, I suppose
today is also. Here it’s
coming into spring
but there’s not a
flower to be seen
& the paparazzi are
reduced to polishing
their camera lenses &
taking bets on which
way the river will
flow next. My nose
is filling in for a
broken traffic light, the
rest of the clownsuit is
at the cleaners. Once
more that same old
sandwich & double
espresso routine &
no longer funny when
you're out of drag &
they've heard it all before.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri: Warlugulong 1977

A painting by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, described as one of the most important Australian works of the 20th century, more than doubled the record for Aboriginal art on Monday night when it sold for $A2.4 million.

"Possum's painting is considered an icon of contemporary Aboriginal art. In it he tells stories of the desert. The central narrative takes place in Warlugulong, 200 miles north-west of Alice Springs. It was here, according to legend, that the two sons of Lungkata, a blue-tongued lizard man, killed a kangaroo. Instead of sharing the meat with their father in the customary manner, they ate it all. In his fury, Lungkata started a bush fire which engulfed his sons.

In the centre of the canvas the fire blazes, while to the right, two skeletons lie surrounded by clouds of smoke. Around this scene are woven separate sacred stories, or "dreamings", with footprints marked to signify the journeys of their protagonists. The painting was the first in which an Aboriginal artist attempted to depict several stories in a topographical manner like a Western map."

From the days before Jagger became the Queen of Botox

Please allow me to introduce myself.....

Lunch poem

If you took small
things out of
context, could
probably assemble
a tolerable landscape. Talis-
men in yr tote bag — the
post office clock
tower, customs house
cupola, some birds, a
measure of hills. Arrange
them where/when
ever you might come
to rest, lean back,
contented or at least
a semblance of. Lasts
for a minute. What
then?

Day three hundred & thirtysix

Midday raga. Long queues
form at fuel pumps, another
homosexual has been
executed in Iran, rumors
of total, not limited, war
abound. One does not have
to be devout to be
excited by it, to want to
be a part of it, even if it's
only selling enchiladas
to the disciples of Chicago
economic liberalism who
have all lined up to watch
the statues weeping blood.

Today the
postman brought
me my
contributor's copy
of Haiku by
Serial Killers. It's
the first in a
number of
volumes. The
subsequent
ones will be
published at
ever-decreasing
intervals.

not quiet ear

elsewhen

In an-
other place the
clouds
             might hint
at snow;
     but
            here
     calligraphy
hasn’t been
            in-
vented.

under the new tear/roar lores

We are guilty
until proven
guilty.

No
such thing
as innocent anymore.

Today the
postman brought
me the terror-
rising news
that the Thought
Police are alive
& well & living
in Australia. The
smallest thing, not
even tangible…..

Today the
postman brought
me the last
episode of Marcel
Marceau. Finally
he's all mime.

another fandom wracked

I
love the
sound of Tamla-Motown.

seven more not-so-random facts

Canaries are yellow.

The Beatles’ submarine was yellow.

A lot of words rhyme with yellow including some great ones — e.g. violincello.

More words rhyme with red. It’s the other pole. He’d rather be dead than seen playing a violincello. It’s why orange was invented. Compromise.

Banana skins are yellow except when they’re dead. Have you ever seen a banana playing a violincello? I’m just wild about saffron. They call me mello cello.

Jaundice is yellow. Sometimes jell-o is too. E-lec-tric-al banana. About the same time as Electric Ladyland. Hey Joe, where you gonna go with that cello in yr hand?

Yellow isn’t yellow. Except when it’s dead.

a not-so-random fact for Jordan Stempleman

Jordan Stempleman has tagged me to provide / produce / proclaim eight random facts.

There are a couple of problems with that. The second is that, once you've produced one random fact, everything that follows is tempered by that first statement, & is no longer random.

The first thing is that, once you've been tagged, that initial fact won't be random anyway. It's not like you've been on the couch for half an hour & your therapist suddenly gives you a word association test. No, it's a formal request; & even if you come out with that first thought that provokes a poem, there's a whole lotta transmogrification goin' on.

So, a not-so-random fact for JS.

slivingin is living in sin

Lunch Poem

& at the re-
maindered book sale
I buy a copy of
michael dransfield’s
lives, the biography
of an Australian
poet who “died
young, w./ a needle
in his arm” 34
years ago. Hard back,
600 pages, $2.99
marked down from
$49.99. There are
stacks of six or
so of the book on
six or so of the
tables in the hall. So
many wasted lives.

In his autumn.
Leaves. Fall
s.

forgt

spoeam

Living — & dying — with Google

1. Living, aka Oops.

Gmail has decided it's an associate editor of Otoliths. Over the past week it's started identifying some submissions as spam, as well as emails from people on my mailing list. I've picked most of them up, but it hasn't been happening long enough for me to automatically doublecheck what's there before I press the delete forever button, & yesterday, the nanosecond after I hit that option, I saw the word submission in the subject line. Too late.

So, to someone called Diana(?), living in Sindelfingen in Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany whose email provider is arcor-ip-net, my humblest apologies, & could you please resubmit. Or if anyone knows who she might be……

2. Dying, aka Oops.

I have long harboured the suspicion that many of those who commit murder regard it as a form of sport. Apparently Google News shares my belief.

Some truth about invasion of Iraq

THE PRIME Minister has proffered many reasons to justify Australia's participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq. Yesterday he advanced a new one: the need to secure a major oil supply. In an address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute yesterday, John Howard said the Middle East was crucial to Australia's strategic and economic future because "our major ally and our most important economic partners have crucial interests there".

It has long been suspected that oil, and the United States' almost pathological need to secure reliable supplies for its domestic needs, was one of the main factors behind President George W. Bush's decision to to invade Iraq but neither he nor Howard broached the subject when they began talking up overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2002.

Instead, the US and its allies insisted their motives on Iraq's future were honourable. They wanted to rid the Middle East of a wicked despot, deny al-Qaeda a base from which to export terrorism to the world, and nurture a new democracy that would act as a reforming influence on the region's many autocratic regimes. And if the invasion succeeded in ensuring that Iraqi oil should flow more freely to the US and other customers, well that would be an unexpected though welcome development.

Perhaps because all the justifications for invasion have been largely discredited, the Prime Minister now argues that securing Iraqi oil (not for Australia but for the US and "our most important economic partners") is an important reason to stay the course in Iraq.

At least it has the ring of truth about it unlike the revolving and evolving list of reasons given for invading and occupying Iraq.

from The Canberra Times

The Magi?

Or, at least, the Three Ys Men.......

Lunch Poem

It is perhaps apt
that on the
day / after
Independence Day
& the first day for
several weeks that
the streets have
been empty of
US servicemen

I should end up
sharing the side-
walk space outside
the sandwich shop
with someone who
is the splitting
— spitting? —
image of
Abraham Lincoln.

Tall, Calvinist up-
right despite his
age, chiseled face
Rushmoreing from
beneath a giftshop
drover’s hat, sun-
tanned enough to be
from around these
parts, in polo shirt &
shorts & sandals
that show he isn’t,

he comes bearing
not the Gettysburg
Address but a
handful of tourist
guidebooks that
track the end of
a life that could
quite easily have
started four score
& seven years ago.

Today the
postman brought
me personalized
letters from
Barbra Streisand
offering me her
complete recordings
in the one boxed
set & from Dr Jack
Kevorkian who is
flogging his "Makes
The Difference" Engine
at just-got-out-of-
prison prices. I
did not respond
to either; but have
used the incident
in my new paper
on Cause & Effect.

A reminder

that submissions for issue six of Otoliths close at the end of the month. It's shaping up to be another di/verse issue.

I've just received

my copies of the latest round of Otoliths books. One of the many disadvantages of living beyond the edges of the known world is the length of time such things take to get to me. Across the continental US, transship, across the Pacific to Sydney, the only city on the Australian landmass most people are aware of, transship, to Brisbane the state capital, transship, to the backwaters of Capricornia. Deliver.

It's because of that delay that I never to see the books in proof stage — that stays with the author in, usually, the US. Sure I see them in manuscript, in mock-up pdf, in print-ready pdf; but until, late in the piece, when they finally arrive on my doorstep, not delivered by the postman but by the local courier company, I have no idea of how they actually look to the eye, how they feel in the hand.

This latest round delights me, makes me extremely proud of what I've done. The quality of the context & the production, their diversity, the fact that in many cases these were projects that nobody else would be willing to take on. & I'm especially proud — & this is taking nothing away from the other books in this offering — of being able to publish Nick Piombino's Free Fall.

This is, to put it simply, a GREAT BOOK, & will undoubtedly be recognised as such in, hopefully, the not too distant future. Nick created his notebook in 2001, back in New York after a trip to Amsterdam, in the days immediately after 9/11. It's a "visual collage novel", made up of strips & cuttings from posters he'd torn off the walls. It contains no text except that which was in the posters themselves, it's as bright & vibrant as the designed-to-catch-the-eye purpose of the posters, each page is brilliantly constructed, individual works of art, the entirety flows, has continuity. I am aware of only one similarly constructed book, & that by Max Ernst, so the precedent is rare but the pedigree is exceptional.

Nick & I laboured long & hard putting this rendition of his notebook together. The original was a work of art that couldn't be destroyed or put back together again if the pages were removed. So a series of double-paged scans that then had to be cropped & trimmed, aligned, not too much of the spiral binding, not too much of the edges of other pages that crept in in the scanning process. Part-done print proofs sent to ensure the integrity of the process. An eventual manuscript that took the better part of two hours to upload to the printer. A labour of love that the original labour of love deserved. There are some pages included in the last issue of Otoliths, there is a preview up on the Otoliths Shopfront at Lulu. If you go no further than that, they should be checked out.

The response from those who've visited the sites is effusive; but the complaint is that the book is "so expensive". It gobsmacks me, strikes me as being a perfect exemplar of this barter economy we seem to have developed. "Sure I'll support other poets, but only if they give me a free copy of their book." Or: "Give me a copy to review" but the review never comes.

I would possibly sell more copies if I distributed through SPD or Amazon. But, apart from the very basic reason that they don't like to — or won't — deal with non-US publishers, their markups would push the price of Free Fall up to $50 or $60, closer to or beyond the latter if I wanted to recoup any of the costs. So I stick with Lulu & a minimal markup, $35.95 plus p & h. For what Free Fall is, for what it cost to produce, it's not expensive at all, in fact, it's a bargain. &, as I said before, a GREAT BOOK that, putting it together, I have fallen completely in love with.

Today the
postman brought
me a kilo of
feathers & a
kilo of lead. He
wants an answer
by tomorrow.

I'm in the zone

No, not the comfort or creative zone, rather the zone centred on Guam, the major forward base for the US in the north-west Pacific. But Guam lacks the landmass for combined air, sea & land training, so the zone's been increased southward somewhat, & now takes in the area around Rockhampton, especially Shoalwater Bay, less than a hundred kilometres north from where I'm writing this.

Shoalwater Bay is not only breathtakingly beautiful, but also of vital importance to many endangered species & critical habitats. It's part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park & sits adjacent to a significant Ramsar wetland area & the Byfield National Park. But Shoalwater Bay is now one of the Pentagon’s largest & most important training areas & bombing ranges in the Asia-Pacific region.

In 2005, the Australian government entered into an agreement that provided the US long-term access to, & joint use of, the Shoalwater Bay Training Area. This agreement ties Australia to the rapid military build-up taking place in the north-west Pacific, particularly in Guam. The Talisman Sabre exercise is a result of this agreement.

There has been no disclosure of the terms of these agreements or what weaponry will be used in military exercises. The exercises will include live firing & bombing, underwater detonations, the latest laser guided missiles & “smart” bombs, ship to shore bombing runs, bombing from US bases in Guam, land-based artillery firings, nuclear powered submarines using high-level sonar frequency & nuclear weapons capable vessels & planes. There are no contingency plans for nuclear accidents, but they've announced that if whales or dolphins are sighted, then all underwater sonar activity will cease.

Recently the Australian Government changed the way it administers Environmental Protection Legislation, removing the usual need for an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for all Australian Defence Force & foreign military training & infrastructure development if the ADF deem it unnecessary. The EIS is replaced by a Public Environmental Reports (PER), commissioned by the ADF, paid for by the military, reviewed & released by the military. The public input & consultation process is controlled by military & has been privately described by ADF personal as embarrassing & a disgrace.

Beginning Monday — & the buildup's already well underway, tanks & other heavy ordinance being ferried up the highway & through the town on trailers, ships up & down the coast; a tent city is springing up across from the airport; soon the Hercules will start rumbling into the airport — is Talisman Sabre — actually, I'd better start writing that as Saber — the name for this round of the biennial joint war games.

Talisman Saber is the largest joint US exercise conducted in Australia & involves more than 20,000 US & 12,000 Australian personnel. These war games are considered vital to the US dominance of the region through the Pacific Command in Hawaii & are linked to other military bases in Guam & Alaska. They're also considered vital to the economy of Rockhampton, since this, what is now euphemistically called, "military tourism" injects millions of dollars into local businesses. The neighbouring shire of Livingstone hates them since Shoalwater Bay is within their boundaries & all those tanks & troop carriers play havoc with the roads &, since the Government doesn't pay land taxes, the shire has to foot the bill for repairs.

& me, I sit here listening to a helicopter drone overhead & wonder what benefits holding military games in this sort of physical environment will accrue to the US. It's nothing like Iraq or Afghanistan — or Iran or Cuba or North Korea for that matter. Possibly it might provide acclimatisation for an invasion of New Zealand or Indonesia, even Australia (though why bother since the US has already prevailed here).

Or maybe it has nothing to do with climate. Maybe this is the only time the US actually gets to win a war. Carpe diem.

a thankyou to harry k stammer

It's an opportune time to publicly thank harry k stammer for the great work he's done with the covers of the Otoliths books. My sincere thanks harry.

New books from Otoliths

They have been delayed a little by production problems, but Otoliths is pleased to announce the balance of its quarterly round of books — Nick Piombino's by now legendary "visual collage novel" Free Fall, Sheila E. Murphy's first integrated linear & visual collection The Case of the Lost Objective (Case) & Rochelle Ratner's memoir / found text / poetry journal Leads.




Free Fall
Nick Piombino
168 pages, full color
ISBN: 978-0-9803-6590-0
Otoliths 2007
$35.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/755973

"Free Fall was created in several steps beginning in July, 2001 when I collected a stack of advertising posters off buildings on the streets of Amsterdam. The serendipity of a period of rain had caused many of the ads to blur and run and to have already partially removed themselves from the walls. In a series of visits I tore down quite a number of them, and before coming back to the US, made a selection. Once back in New York I xeroxed a number of copies of the poster fragments in order to work out mock-ups of the collages, and purchased a 5"X7" artist's sketch book to paste them into. Over the years, since creating my first collages in the late 60's in Rapallo, Italy, I had begun several collage books, none of them completed, so I had some idea of what I wanted to do. I did further xeroxing in Provincetown, Mass. in August. Sitting outside a small cottage near the Wellfleet bay, I made the entire series of 154 collages in about a month. For this edition, the collages were scanned in during March and early April, 2007.

The creation of Free Fall was bookended by two tragic events. The first was the suicide of a popular musician in Holland, Herman Brood, shortly before I arrived in Amsterdam. About ten days after the completion of Free Fall came the events of 9/11.

Based on the art of its streets, Free Fall insistently invokes the celebratory character of this tolerant, life affirming city." Nick Piombino

The Case of the Lost Objective (Case)
Sheila E. Murphy
84 pages, color
ISBN: 978-0-9803-6592-4
Otoliths 2007
$20.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/840898

This vibrant collection of new work by Sheila E. Murphy encompasses both lineated and prose poems. In addition, for the first time, selected prints of Murphy’s visual poetry, some included in private collections and in gallery exhibitions, are presented in book format. The range of work within these pages attests to the versatility and depth of this poet, and invites being read aloud to reveal the full range of perception and innovative use of language.

Leads
Rochelle Ratner
128 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9803-6591-7
Otoliths 2007
$12.50 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/830227

"The germs of this book began in 1977, when I visited friends in London. As a child, I’d been told I had a speech impediment, but I vehemently refused voice lessons. Then, in a London pub, talking with a friend from the Lancashire/Yorkshire border, it was almost as if I fitted in at last. Without realizing it, I’d probably inherited aspects of my grandmother’s accent. And I’d never missed her as much as I did at that moment. That was when I began planning a trip to Leeds, where my grandmother was born and spent her childhood. I knew I had to write about it, and began a series of poems as the journey took shape. Once there, I copied from books and records I’d found in the Leeds library. I began writing down what people said. What I hadn’t expected was that, as I later tried to shape the materials, I would find other peoples’ words more powerful than my own. Poem? Journal? Memoir? Found text? Think of Olson’s Maximus or Paul Metcalf’s writings." Rochelle Ratner

They join the two other books brought out in this round, Tom Beckett's curation of E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: the First XI Interviews which was launched early in response to popular demand, & Mark Young's Falsely Goethe, a collection of 101 "day poems".




E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S:
The First XI Interviews
Tom Beckett (Curator)
252 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9775604-9-3
Otoliths, 2007
$16.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/778361

Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S website has become, since its inception in 2005, an important source of information on contemporary poetry and poetics. This book brings together the first eleven interviews from the on-going series, augmented by bionotes and almost one hundred pages of self-selected examples of the interviewees' work.

The interviewees (some of whom later reappear as interviewers) are Crag Hill, Thomas Fink, Nick Piombino, Sheila E. Murphy, Eileen Tabios, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, K. Silem Mohammad, Geof Huth, Barbara Jane Reyes, Paolo Javier, Stephen Paul Miller and Jean Vengua.The other interviewers are Tom Beckett, Ron Silliman and Mark Young.

Falsely Goethe
Mark Young
108 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9803-6593-1
Otoliths 2007
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/830205

Day fifty

Today the
postman brought
me “Ventriloquism
for Dummies”.

"As a matter of fact, I can’t remember laughing as much reading any book of poetry before, especially not any book of putative light verse. These poems, though, are not just about joking when they joke; the jokes are, like the one above, tiny metaphysical statements. They unwrap language, reality, even pop culture (a beast a bit different from reality, even if related to it). The shortest of these joke-poems are as perfect, intellectual, and literary as the best Stephen Wright one-liners. The joke-poem is an instant of insight, a Zen koan." Geof Huth, from a post at dbqp:visualizing poetics.

These & other Otoliths books, including print copies of the e-zine are available from The Otoliths Storefront.

Nothing is
ever for the
first time

        she wrote

nor is it
ever for
the last.

Today the
postman brought
me a little
book by
Geof Huth. It
was totally
Out of Character.
I love it.

A note for Nicholas Manning

It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on Rockhampton.It is raining on...

&, perhaps, a note from Nicholas

Is
presence the
absence of absence?

Twenty Forty Years Ago Today

Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play
They've been going in & out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile......

Sumi-e

What good is
having the ghost of
Sengai inside you
     when you've
gone out w/out
     yr black-ink
     utensils &
     yr short-term
memory loss means
that you won't
     remember the
hawk against the
          grey sky curvi-
linearly focusing
     in on the object
of its desire
     by the time you
finally arrive home?

e                               agerness

It's a frightening reminder

that the "colonial past" is not that far distant.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the referendum that permitted Aborigines — the traditional owners of this land for something like 50,000 years — to be classed as Australian citizens 180 years after Europeans seized it under the pretence that no-one lived here, that the land was empty, terra nullius.

this is fucking fantastic!!!!!

a as in dog

Two great talents, Dan Waber & Marko Niemi, working together & producing one of the wittiest, most clever, funniest things I've seen. It's a major minimalist alphabet.

A question of perception

Okay, so the sunlight on the water distorts, & it was at a distance, & my 20/20 vision needs to have a decimal point put in front of it these days. But.

This afternoon, walking through the riverside car park where I leave the car, I saw floating on the other side of the river a dark mass which could have been a family of ducks or a crocodile or a collation of weeds & grass. All three are equally likely in these parts, although the fact that the mass was moving upstream weighs against the third but that could just have been the tide.

I've seen two of the three, have only seen news videos of a croc in the river. But there are signs up all along the river, in three languages — German, Japanese & English: it's the tourist trade — achtunging about the possibility of lurking reptiles. & it's such a lovely day, & consequently the thought of biomass is too prosaic, a family of ducks is redundant when you're feeling warm & fuzzy — feathery? — anyway, so let's go for the crocodile & not watch tonight's local news to have your dreams negated by non-reportage.

Oh / the symbolism / of it all

The (Australian) Future Fund's board of guardians has defended its decision to appoint a U.S. bank as global custodian of the $51 billion fund, saying it will still make its own investment decisions.

Chicago-based Northern Trust was appointed on May 10 as global custodian to the Future Fund, a decision that been attacked by the opposition and unions. Its regional headquarters are in Singapore, where the work it's won from the Future Fund will be conducted with some help from staff in Bangalore, India.

The Future Fund was set up by the Australian Federal government last year to cover public service superannuation liabilities, which are projected to be over $140 billion by 2020.

The Finance Sector Union called the decision an insult.

"This is the largest pool of money ever created in Australia and the Government is not prepared to entrust Australians to manage it," said union secretary Paul Schroder. "The decision means $51 billion will be managed in Singapore under U.S. corporate regulations."

(sic)

"With alarm I have found that the issue of cloning has been revived again. As a concerned siticen I strongly object to the use of human embryos in any way that is artificial, like stemcell research/harvesting.

Cloning of humanbeings is outright wrong and against the interest of humanity.

Why? We see today a drive by sertain sections of society to devalue humanlife. Some are already claiming that an embryo is not human, in fragrand contradiction to the word of God the Creator."

A note for Nicholas Manning

In a post not too far below I refer to the launch of Nicholas' The Continental Review & comment that I expect more from the medium than just mouths opening (&, yes Nicholas, bodies moving).

The point I was trying to make, though I didn't expand on it, is that at one end of the spectrum we are still bound by the printed — or the electronic — page. Most audio, most video of text poetry is still page-based, even if that page becomes a separate frame. Videos of vispo are usually the lens moving over a static page, or a series of static frames, or kinetic software-based pieces. & so far nothing I have seen comes close to what I still consider one of the great pieces of filmed poetry, Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, shot I think by D.A. Pennebaker, in which Dylan holds up a series of flash cards with words from the song / poem on them as the song soundtrack underscores & Alan Price & Allen Ginsberg wander in & out & along the alley. It can probably be also considered the original video clip. & it was done at least 40 years ago.

At the other end of the spectrum is work done by people who are basically web-designers, who call their output poetry — & who are we to argue with them? Just walk away, Renée.

But somewhere between is the area I'm talking / dreaming about. It would probably have to be collaborative, though it's being touched on, dipped into by a few who I know are doing it.

Nick Piombino

generously included a couple of poems from my latest book, Falsely Goethe, in his recent posts to ::fait accompli::, remarking in response to one of my postman poems about John Cage's X how Cage had signed Nick's copy of the book over the printed Cage signature that was already there.

I'd intended to respond to Nick earlier, but I was at something of a loss. I'd bought my copy of X at last year's bookfair here. It's an annual event, though in hiatus until two years ago, run by one of the local charities, where they collect secondhand books & then have a sale in one of the pavillions at the local showgrounds. The books are priced from about 50c through to $2 or $3, &, in the main, the quality matches. The first year I went, two years ago, there wasn't much. I bought a few things, can't really remember what. Went last year, not expecting much, & ended up with about 50-60 books. Lots of poetry I'd never usually buy, other bits & pieces, & a copy of Cage.

My problem in talking about this is that I find it almost impossible to convey how strange it was to come across a book of Cage's mesostics in Rockhampton. Sure there's a University here but it focuses on Engineering & Nursing & Education & Business with only a small Humanities school; & I think if you mentioned Cage it would be Nicholas that everyone assumed you were talking about. Finding this book was a bit like finding an antarctic flower growing in the middle of the desert, almost enough to start a doorknock campaign to try & find the owner. This place is a place that someone who liked Cage couldn't stand.

The bookfair's on again, this weekend, so went today & was disappointed. Bought a couple of things—a novel by Bruce Stirling, Stein's Three Lives, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Will go back tomorrow & see if anything else has surfaced. See if anything exciting has been let loose from the cage as it were.

& another Nick,

Nicholas Manning this time, has started up The Continental Review, a compilation of videos by/of poets. So far it's oral, as though the extent of a poet's intercourse with video is to show them with their mouths open & words coming out. It's interesting, but I expect more of the medium, much along the lines of what poets like Nico Vassilakis & mIEKAL aND are doing.

The Vegan Chronicles - a six-word story

Later he fucked another dead vegetable.

Perhaps one shouldn’t laugh

but in a report of the death of Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah, a “one-legged fighter”, it was noted that the many Taliban fighters were unhappy with him because they felt he’d “become too big for his shoes”.

Observation

The double-barred (or owl-faced) finch has a short breeding cycle, though over the past year I have only ever seen a pair of them at any one time; constructs a separate nest each time — there were four in a dead spadix that fell from one of our palms — which takes about a day to build & is usually in a difficult for predators to reach place; & seems to prefer to find new dried grass each time — the birds used the dead branch as their launching pad to scavenge from, ignoring the quantity of building material that was closer at hand.

insilence

Today the
postman brought
me a kilo of
blow. I snorted
in disbelief.

He

thought
abstract was
a bodybuilder's bible.

The last few days

have been fairly busy, so I've been reading Tom Beckett's Soluble Census to keep up with what I've been doing.

Thanks, little brother. Yr book's in the mail.

"Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure. And that would be irresponsible," said President Bush. "Far better not to set a date, & let it become somebody else's failure."

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews.

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S
The First XI Interviews.
Tom Beckett (Curator)
ISBN: 978-0-9775604-9-3
Otoliths, 2007
$16.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/778361


In response to popular demand, Otoliths is releasing one of the books from its next round of offerings early, E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews.

Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S website has become, since its inception in 2005, an important source of information on contemporary poetry and poetics. This book brings together the first eleven interviews from the on-going series, augmented by bionotes and almost one hundred pages of self-selected examples of the interviewees’ work.

The interviewees (some of whom later reappear as interviewers) are Crag Hill, Thomas Fink, Nick Piombino, Sheila E. Murphy, Eileen Tabios, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, K. Silem Mohammad, Geof Huth, Barbara Jane Reyes, Paolo Javier, Stephen Paul Miller and Jean Vengua.The other interviewers are Tom Beckett, Ron Silliman and Mark Young.

The remaining books of this quarter’s quartet — Nick Piombino’s “visual collage novel” Free Fall, Rochelle Ratner’s poetic journal/memoir Leads & Sheila E. Murphy’s first integrated collection of text & visual poetry, The Case of the Lost Objective (Case), will be given a separate launch towards the end of the month.

Issue five of Otoliths

has just gone live, which means it's a year old today.

It's also May Day, so arise & join in a chorus of The Internationale with Paul Siegell, Andrew Topel, Jordan Stempleman, Ernesto Priego, Paolo Manalo, Eileen Tabios, Jeff Harrison, Katrinka Moore, Corey Mesler, Raymond Farr, Steve Rodgers, Robert Lee Brewer, Mark Cunningham, Martin Edmond, Steve Timm, James Sanders, Audacia Dangereyes, Thomas Fink, Spencer Selby, Maria Zajkowski, Richard Lopez, Marcia Arrieta, Tom Hibbard, Matina Stamatakis, Louise Landes Levi, Márton Koppány, Anny Ballardini, Jill Jones, Craig Santos Perez, mIEKAL aND, Dax Bayard-Murray, Ed Schenk, MTC Cronin, Alana Madison, Alexander Jorgensen, Andrew Taylor, Carol Novack (& Stan Crocker), Stephanie Green, Maurice Oliver, Caleb Puckett, David-Baptiste Chirot, Derek Motion, James Maughn, Michael Rothenberg, Tom Beckett, Nick Piombino & Richard Kostelanetz as they "change henceforth the old tradition".

Enjoy.

Otoliths