Who's the Boss?

A woman stabbed her de facto husband to death after he stopped her listening to her favourite Bruce Springsteen CD.

Karen Lee Cooper told arresting police she was sick and tired of Kevin Lee Watson telling her what to do during their two years of living together.

Today the
postman brought
me a catalogue
raisonné of
found objects. The
catalogue was in-
cluded in the
catalogue. Gödel
wouldn’t have been
happy about
that inclusion.

p




a




t




i




e




n




c




e

The weather has improved. It is time for my homage to catatonia to end.

The sun is out. Light breeze. Coolth. Birds frolic, lawnmowers gambol. Issue nine of Otoliths is filling up nicely even though publication date is still two months away. I’m trying to come to grips with this extra day, wondering why February should get it. Kon Ichikawa has died. In this year of the Olympic Games I remember a movie of the 1964 Tokyo Games, a compilation of shorts made by eight of the leading Japanese directors of the time. Unfortunately, Akira Kurosawa was not amongst them. He was still considered too Western, &, anyway, Mifune wasn’t competing. But Ichikawa’s contribution was the running of the final of the 100 metres, shot in slomo. An amazing piece. In the garden, subtle glimpses of the bird’s-eye chillies amongst the green. The race goes on, flexing tendon by flexing tendon. I fear thee, Ancient Mariner......

I cannot remember ever having felt so hemmed in by the natural landscape.

Genji Monogatari XIII: The Safflower

Her florets had
turned gray, other-
wise dressed in
festive attire, his
mother, when
she came to visit. Contra-
diction, something about
a particular lifestyle
associated with the thin
layer of cells at the
back of her neck. She
spent very little time
with him & that
limited his own
field of vision. “Stop
eating grains” she said.

life in the tortoise lane

Living in a place where there’s next to no creative activity, where fishing, prejudice, bad driving & assaults on humans & animals seem to be the way of life for much of the populace, I found that, after the initial new place attraction wore off & familiarity crept, too rapidly, in, the only way I could seek solace &, sometimes, stimulation was to take off driving around the countryside, the hinterland.

Lots of little things to see, to discover, much unexpected. The wildlife — wallabies & kangaroos grazing by the side of the road, cautious, watching, as was I who usually only saw them as roadkill, run over by some long haultruck charging through the early morning, dusk; brolgas dancing; a jabiru balanced gracefully in a lagoon; small birds rising up like dust from the grass at the side of the road. The not so nice — an ostrich farm neglected to the extent that there were ostrich carcasses in the yards, with crows feeding on them. The delicate — pools of water lilies. The commercial — salt pans stretching out, the stockyards, the meatworks. The humorous — coming across stretches of sealed road a kilometre each side of the entrance to the properties of someone who had some clout in the local shire. The landscape seen from different points of view, refreshing it.

Now that I’ve re-retired, I was looking forward to retracing my steps. But it’s been raining &/or flooded for most of the two months since I stopped working, & most of the roads are unsealed, & my little two litre hatchback isn’t designed for that sort of thing. So I’ve been pretty much housebound, & I’m going stircrazy. Can’t open the house up because of the smell of rotting vegetation from the flood, can’t potter around in the garden because it’s so bloody humid that you have to change T-shirts after every time you go out because they’re drenched within minutes with the sweat of doing nothing, don’t feel like writing, don’t know if I even could if I could bring myself to sit down & try.

Après moi, le déluge

The monsoon trough dipped south again early this morning, & dumped over 160 millimetres of rain — about 6 inches — in around two hours. We’ve spent the time since then mopping up downstairs, dumping a couple of mats, putting things out to dry, There was just too much water for the drains to cope, so some of it snuck in under the doors & probably came up through the floor in some parts. It’s a bit hard to exactly plot its path. It’s hasn’t flooded downstairs, more just made its presence felt.

The river had peaked yesterday afternoon at 7.75 metres in the current flood, the second in 17 days — the major one before that was 17 years ago — but this morning’s downpour pushed it up over eight metres, & water is again flowing, not into, but through the lagoon at the bottom of the street. It’s now a quite large lake, many kilometres long & about a kilometre wide, following a past bed of the Fitzroy River, which has changed to its current course over the millenia.

& there’s a much-used-of-late word that I hope never to hear again. Inundate. As in:

major arterial roads including Gladstone Road and Musgrave Street had been either cut or inundated with water.

Flash flooding has inundated parts of of central Queensland., including the Rockhampton region in the last 24-hours.

Residents in the central Queensland town of Rockhampton have been inundated by floodwaters for the second time in a month.

Up to one metre of water inundated homes this morning and local roads in low-lying areas were cut off

Time for an updated thesaurus, news people. There are other words.....

I get up & think
           that it’s an
                        Irving Berlin
                             day. & then
                               I think Who
                                 the fuck these
                                   days would
                                 know who
                               Irving Berlin
                             is? So I just go
                           off & do my daily
                         bit singing Blue
                    Skies
     smiling
     at me &
     moving
     further
     back in
     time.

Here we go again

“Based on the observed Tartrus peak of about 15.7 metres during Sunday evening, the Fitzroy River at Rockhampton is expected to peak at about 7.7 metres on Sunday 24th February.”

Bureau of Meteorology flood warning, 2/18/08

Barely three weeks after the last flood, it looks like we’re in for another one, of approximately the same level—the last one peaked at 7.55 metres. The flood plain has been exactly that for the last four weeks, & whatever evaporation & seepage there has been is counterbalanced by about 250mm — 10 inches — of rain over the last week. So there’s still water everywhere, still some roads closed.

But about four hundred kilometres north, the catchment area of several of the tributaries that flow into the Fitzroy, they’ve had something over a metre of rain in the last week. The monsoon trough, the annual meteorological event that causes the wet season in northern Australia, has moved much further south than it has done for many, many years. 80% of the land area of Queensland is now eligible for flood relief, & there’s still more rain to come.The amount of rain that fell on Mackay has been described as a once in at least a century event. 1200 mm, about 50 inches, of rain, & half of it in one six hour period.

& all that runoff is now moving downstream, to spread even more water across the plain.

point counterpoint

Occam's Razor—All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.

Occam's Eraser—The simplest solution is bound to have something wrong with it.

Antoine a une adolescence turbulente. Il ment à ses parents indifférents à son sort, vole, fugue. Son seul réconfort, il fait les quatre cents coups avec son ami René. Un jour, la police s'en mêle.

Rain.
More rain.
Still more rain—

how a lagoon
becomes a
lake.

In / chief the / sun in splendour

The discipline of
quantum mechanics
is based upon a
summation of such
subjective definitions
as disordered eating,
the use of horror language,
the fetishization of
certain body parts. We
still don't know what
it is really telling us
about the world, only
that the viewer is the
ultimate voyeur, a
willing participant, stroking
some inbuilt image of
the body & feeling no
need for secrecy, no guilt.

hoovering the house

November 27, 1935

Mr. A. G. Walker,
Superintendent,
State Penitentiary,
Florence, Arizona.

My dear Superintendent:

Reference is made to the case of William Lawrence, your #6621. A notation appears in the record of this person on file in the Bureau to the effect that this subject was to be hanged on June 12, 1925, for the crime of murder.

The Bureau will be pleased to receive your advice as to whether this subject is now deceased in order that the record of this individual may be placed in the dead files, which, under the filing system maintained in this Bureau, are segregated from the active files.

With the assurance of my desire to cooperate with you in all matters of mutual interest and obligation, I am

Sincerely yours,

John Edgar Hoover,
Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation

The formal apology finally arrives

Under the White Australia and assimilation policies, Indigenous people who were ‘not of full blood’ were encouraged to become assimilated into the broader society so that eventually there would be no more Aboriginal people left. At the time Aboriginal people were seen as an inferior race.

Between 1910 and 1970 up to 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken forcibly or under duress from their families by police or welfare officers .

Most were under 5 years old. There was rarely any judicial process. To be Aboriginal was enough. They are known as the Stolen Generations.

They were taken because it was Federal and State Government policy that Aboriginal children - especially those of mixed Aboriginal and European descent - should be removed from their parents.

Between 10 and 30% of all Aboriginal children were removed, and in some places these policies continued into the 1970s.
The main motive was to ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal children into European society over one or two generations by denying and destroying their Aboriginality.
Speaking their languages and practising their ceremonies was forbidden
They were taken miles from their country, some overseas
Parents were not told where their children were and could not trace them
Children were told that they were orphans
Family visits were discouraged or forbidden; letters were destroyed. Most were raised in Church or state institutions. Some were fostered or adopted by white parents.
Many suffered physical and sexual abuse. Food and living conditions were poor.
They received little education, and were expected to go into low grade domestic and farming work.

The following is the historic formal apology given to the Aboriginal people of Australia by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of its parliament and government.

"Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia."

Today the
postman brought
me a plan
for immediate
world domination. I
wasn’t home & the
parcel was too
big to fit in
the letter-box. Now
I have to pick it
up from the
Post Office
some time after
9 a.m. on Monday.

On a day too hot for trousers

      He learnt how
    to read sheep’s
  vertebrae as if
they were
figurative
paintings. I-
  dentified the
    stylistic attributes,
      named them after
        reptiles. Now it
          seems he’s working
        backwards—last
      time I saw him he
    told me how the
  painterly qualities
in Poussin’s Et in
Arcadia Ego can be
  summarised using
    only three lizards
      & a carpet snake.

Scientific whale killing

"The Australian Government says it has legal evidence to back its fight to stop Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus today declared the Australian Customs monitoring of the whaling a success, and also announced it would be extended for an unspecified period of time.

A Customs crew aboard the Oceanic Viking has been monitoring the whaling and collecting photographs of the catch.

One of the Government's photographs, apparently of a mother minke whale and its calf being hauled aboard a Japanese whaler, was released to Australian media today."

恭喜发财

slow rise / fast fall

waking
the dog
for a talk

Today the
postman brought
me The Tell-
tale Heart. I’ve
hidden it under
the floorboards.

The flood

needed Viagra. An inedequate performance, falling short of the predicted 7.8 meters by .4 of a meter.

Though it's probably a good thing. The lagoon now covers a couple of hundred meters more than it did, & is lapping at the bottom of the street.

I
think the
cat has Alzheimer's.

The peak

is now predicted to be 7.8 meters



& may come tonight or tomorrow or later tomorrow or......

The lower-lying areas are looking more & more like lakes, the Yeppen flood plain is living up to its name, the water is running into the Yeppen Yeppen lagoon in two streams, the lagoon is filling up & the flow may continue on to the next lagoons that mark what once used to be the path of the river before another much much earlier flood changed it forever, a pipe at one of the sewerage plants has burst under the external water pressure & shit is now flowing into the river, water is still making its way downstream from another tributary, the peak may last for a week.

The frogs are going crazy.

more flood notes

The water level keeps rising, but slower than expected & less than predicted. It has just reached the level designated as a major flood, but it seems that there are major major floods & minor major floods, & this is in the latter category.

The South Side river bank has become a promenade — oh that it could always be this way — drawing people into the city center in a way that I haven’t seen in the five years we’ve been here. In another place, in another time, this stretch would have great potential. It is the longest Heritage-listed street in Australia, of late Colonial / Victorian buildings. Small brass plaques on each give their history, but the downturn in the city's importance has severed all other ties with the past. Now the Rockhampton Club is offices, the ornate Customs House with its glorious cupola is only permanently utilized on the ground floor. The Harbour Master’s office is that in name only. There are no coffee bars, no street stands, no shops. The only restaurants are in hotels.

Though the rate predictions are wrong, the milestones are accurate when they’re met. Look across the river & the water is now up & into the racecourse; from the hill we drive over on the way to the city, we can see in the distance great silvery lakes of water that have developed overnight; to the south of the city areas of water are starting to edge the main highway; the flow is only meters away from joining up with the Yeppen lagoon; I can’t get to see what’s happening to the previously dried up Woolwash – the road is closed because part of it is now under water.

& now that the threat of major property damage no longer seems likely to eventuate, up from out of the murky depths comes the latest potential danger.

"A mass of displaced saltwater crocodiles are headed for flood-hit Rockhampton — and experts are warning they could stay as long as three months.

Rising floodwaters from the Fitzroy River are expected to peak at eight metres on Thursday morning, bringing with them as many as 60 crocodiles from upstream.

“Communities need to be aware that the Fitzroy waters do have crocodiles in them — this flood may flush them out."

“What will be interesting is in a few months when the water recedes and it leaves all these little waterholes and billabongs.

"As these areas start to dry up, the crocodiles will have to start crawling out.""

issue eight of Otoliths is live

Issue eight of Otoliths, the southern summer 2008 issue, has just gone live.

It’s a few days early, but it’s been straining at the leash & seams so it seemed a good idea to let it loose before it ate the house up.

The issue contains, in order of appearance, work by Michele Leggott, Geof Huth, Nicholas Manning, Laurie Price, Sandy McIntosh, Reed Altemus, Alicia Dangereyes, Bill Drennan, gustave morin, Paul Hardacre, Felino Soriano, Pradip Datta, Spencer Selby, Spencer Selby & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, David-Baptiste Chirot, Kristine Ong Muslim, Joshua A Ware, Patrick Gulke, James Sanders, Jill Chan, J. D. Nelson, Eric Burke, Philip Byron Oakes, Louie Crew, Márton Koppány, Thomas Fink & Maya Fink, Richard Kostelanetz, Paul Siegell, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, Luigino Solamito & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett, Jeff Harrison, John Lowther, Alexander Jorgensen, Martin Edmond, Christopher Major, Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, Caleb Puckett, Cecelia Chapman, Guy Beining, Vernon Frazer, Bobbi Lurie, harry k stammer, Andrew Topel, Thomas Fink & Andrew Riley Clark.

As usual, it’s a marvellous mix of all sorts of things. Hie thee hither & enjoy.

Get

them going & they get going good.

Spencer Selby & harry k stammer are at it again. Up at harry's blog is a new video by the pair. Video by Spencer, words music & lipsynch by harry. Go team!

Living a Johnny Cash song

The river is rising. Yesterday the flood measuring marker had it at just over 4½ meters, today it’s up over 5. Maybe 3 centimeters an hour. Just breaching the lowest-lying portions of the walking path beside it. Later this evening it should spill over into the riverside carpark I used on a workdaily basis for the last two years.

The river is picking up speed. Ten knots per hour the news reports say, using the nautical terminology that I suppose is appropriate for the event. My maths memory does rough calculations. 11½ mph, 18½ kph. Marathon speed.

It’s full of clumps of weed torn off from banks, torn out from normally stagnant washes. The odd log.

The river is brown. Stirred-up mud, about 20 shades darker than normal.

It’s still just a tourist attraction. Will probably continue to be so. It will cause little damage, maybe close a couple of roads, flood a couple of hundred properties, leave the racecourse under water. The local Australia Day event which was meant to be in the riverside park today was moved to higher ground. Maybe they’ll invite Stevie Wonder to sing the National Anthem.

The car races & the bull-riding competition will still go on. That probably says everything you need to know about the place.

I saw a couple of pelicans out on the river. Very close to the bank. Not handling the flow with their usual elegance; instead bobbing & weaving, but still moving upsteam against the current. Yesterday I saw a boat trying to manouevre its way to a safe haven, starting off by trying to go upstream first before using the current to take it back closer to where it wanted to go. It had a hard job of it. The pelicans didn’t seem to have that amount of difficulty.

I have always thought that the lagoon at the bottom of our street was replenished by the river breaking its banks before reaching the town & coming inland via the airport. I have learnt that it is instead replenished when the flood moves inland once the river has passed the town. That it fills up what is currently an overgrown creek bed beneath a ricketty weight-restricted bridge, then moves through what used to be the Woolwash Lagoon — when we arrived here, a home to a large colony of black swans; now, less than 5 years later dried-up & overgrown with trees & nothing more than the memory of its shape to indicate what it used to be — & then on via the Yeppen floodplain until it reaches the lagoon of the same name. It is surprisingly deep. Though the water area has decreased, it’s always had lots of water in it. & pelicans. But that marker in the diagram below from the Bureau of Meteorology indicating the level at which a flood will lap the Yeppen crossing (only half a kilometer away) means that some ways out may be blocked to us.

The river is supposed to peak on Tuesday at 8.2m. Way below the big ones. It won’t affect us directly, but the supermarket shelves were empty of bread last night, & bottled water & UHT milk are doing a roaring trade. & mosquito repellant, for they are breeding like crazy, & that is probably the most serious aspect to it all, given that the little sharp-pronged insect can be a vector for things like dengue & Q fever.

Gilgamesh redux

"Authorities now fear the central Queensland city of Rockhampton could be flooded, as the waters from Emerald and Mackay flow into the Fitzroy River, which flows through Rockhampton.

More than two thirds of the state - about 1.2 million square kilometres or more than the combined areas of NSW and Victoria - has been flood declared.

The bureau expects the already swollen Fitzroy to peak at Rockhampton between 7.7m and 8.2m. In 1918, Rockhampton was isolated after the Fitzroy rose to 10.18m and in 1991 it hit 9.3m.

The SES will open a disaster co-ordination centre in Rockhampton tomorrow."

I prefer my
poets live
or

long
dead—that
in between thing

does
my heart,
my head in.

Today the
postman brought
me Zeno. I’m
trying to get him
into the house
but we don’t
seem able to
reach it. Some-
what paradoxical.

Tai Chic

throught

Titles From Tom Beckett #9

Our Leader’s Love Life

“It’s a kind
of continuity”

said Hillary as
she went down

on a Presidential
Page. “But this

time round
anonymous—

I don’t know
his monicker.”

The publisher as matchmaker

harry stammer puts together most of the covers for the Otoliths books. Many are relatively straightforward, but a few require a fair amount of back & forth; & rather than having to work through me, I leave it to harry & the artist.

Spencer Selby’s cover (see yesterday's post below) was quite complex. A beautiful piece by Spencer that required a delicate hand from harry so that the necessary text was clear, but didn’t deface the environment. (& in cases such as this, I regret the need to have barcodes.)

Their collaboration ended up going beyond this single cover. harry is also a musician, & has supplied the soundtrack to a number of vispo videos that Spencer has been posting to YouTube. One of them is embedded; the others are viewable here.

New Books from Otoliths

Flush Contour
Spencer Selby
84 pages, full color
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-1-6
Otoliths 2008
$24.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/1492039

Flush Contour is Spencer Selby's fourth collection of visual work, containing 72 vibrant color prints of abstract intermedia art.

“Indeed, in Selby’s case I sense a stubborn refusal to resolve the image that also inflects—or infects—some of his written work, which seems to elide the meaning it nevertheless intends, to construct a syntax that implies a certain result then eludes that result for something that is less authoritative, more evocative. The words that appear and disappear in these works, both type- and hand- written, likewise have a protean quality, they seem to be being made before our eyes from the chaos out of which language does actually come; word strings that are generative in the same way that those strings of recombinant amino acids in the warm pre-Cambrian seas were, we are told, generative: of life itself.” —from the introduction by Martin Edmond, author of Luca Antara.

Place of Uncertainty
Tom Hibbard
92 pages
Cover design by Márton Koppány
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-2-3
Otoliths 2008
$12.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/1696322

A new collection of poetry from Tom Hibbard who has recently enjoyed getting much of his literary work published on and off-line. Poems, reviews, essays and translations can be found at Jacket, Big Bridge, Word For /Word, Moria, Milk, Fish Drum, Cricket, e•ratio, Otoliths and elsewhere. An essay on “Linear/Nonlinear” was published in the 2007 issue of Big Bridge. Also in 2007 Bronze Skull published a prose poem titled Critique of North American Space. Hibbard lives in Wisconsin, U.S.A., where he devotes his spare time to growing pumpkins.

Poemergency Room
Paul Siegell
116 pages
Cover design by Reed Altemus
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-0-9
Otoliths 2008
$13.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/1711938

“Something HUGE flexes joy here! This is the suicide by cop where banging cymbals rip the portal open! Poetry is the daily political at every mouthful of Siegell as dots connect dimension to dementia! Tell the funeral director I’d like my coffin lined with these pages, preventing a death of the sleeping! Careful, nutjobs, this is a brother of the Vibratory Order! THANK YOU, Paul Siegell, for making some real live fucking magic for us!” —CAConrad, author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006)

“Paul Siegell’s are smart, rich poems. Spectacular, defiant iconographs of cells mid-mitosis, a b-boy mid-break dance move, and more. Nine-to-five frustration and transcendence, train rides, road trips, teen tours, rock concerts, and sudden tragedies. Paul Siegell’s poems are full of unexpected significances, each one balanced like a tightrope acrobat always on the edge of ruin. Fluent, aware, visual, wholehearted, Paul Siegell clearly sides with pleasure in the making of poems. Prepare to be challenged, entertained and astounded.” —Jeff Oaks

"Paul Siegell's the most original poet – in sound and sight – to break into print so far this millennium. Siegell owns a megaphone in the contest to be voice of a generation." —Charles McNair , author of Land O' Goshen and Book Editor at Paste Magazine

“I’m always thrilled by Paul’s work, especially when I can understand it!” —Elaine Siegell, Paul’s mom

In addition, parts one & two of the print edition of Otoliths seven, with a great cover from Marko Niemi, are now available at The Otoliths Storefront.

Part one — the b&w & shades of gray part — contains work from Paul Siegell, Sheila E. Murphy, Julian Jason Haladyn, Bill Drennan, Jeff Harrison, Jim Leftwich, Matt Hetherington, Mark Prejsnar, Michael Steven, Geof Huth, Anny Ballardini, dan raphael, derek beaulieu, Raymond Farr, Jordan Stempleman, Vernon Frazer, Mark Cunningham, Randall Brock, Tom Hibbard, Andrew Topel, Andrew Taylor, Anne Heide, Catherine Daly, Karri Kokko, Martin Edmond, John M. Bennett, Lars Palm & David-Baptiste Chirot. 144 pages.

Part two is in full color & contains work from Andrew Topel & John M. Bennett, Robert Gauldie, Marko Niemi, Nigel Long, Matina L. Stamatakis, Nico Vassilakis, John M. Bennett, Jeff Crouch, Eileen R. Tabios, Márton Koppány, Katrinka Moore, John M. Bennett & Friends, Alexander Jorgensen, Daniel f Bradley, harry k stammer & David-Baptiste Chirot. 112 pages.

Titles From Tom Beckett #7

I.
Bee leave.
II. No honey.

Titles From Tom Beckett #6

Fourteen Titles

offered in jest
reptilian congress
tyrannosaurus rex
elongated neck
impenetrable recess
perverse request
put into context
what happens next?

stepladder ingress
spectacular effects
premature ejects
unwarranted excess
enervated wrecks
unprotected sex texts

& the weather today is....

Titles From Tom Beckett #3

Jean Vengua’s Penguin

The tuxedo was
de rigeur
for

the
early Pinoy
Banda in the

United States, trying
to bridge
the

culture
gap with
what later came

to be nicknamed
the Carnegie
Shuffle.

My
father shuffled
off into Hawaiian

music, bright shirts
& ukeleles,
avoiding

taxes
& tuxes.
Had he, how-

ever,
chosen the
dinner-suit route, I’m

sure he would
have stood
out

from
the rest
of the band,

would have been
the Emperor
Penguin.

Jesus,
he was
a handsome man.

Titles from Tom Beckett #2

My Body

inside
every

Holly-
or Bolly-
wood

T E C H N I C O L o R
spectacular

there is a
film noir

struggling
to break out

I have always

wanted to start a poem with

The bohemians of the
Uttar Pradesh

It's a phrase that's buzzed around in my head for forty years or more. Don't ask. Just accept we all have our manic moments.

One of these days.....

snapshot

The
Concise Oxford,
open at proselytize.

s
q u
a r e

c i r c l e
c i r c l e
c i r c l e

Yesterday

was a bellwether day for me. (First aside: it’s a word I’ve always wanted to use, & this is probably my first opportunity to use it in an unforced context. But I always thought it was “bellweather”, until I checked that I had its meaning correct & discovered it comes from the name given to the lead sheep in a flock, the one that has a bell around its neck, the one the others follow.)

I was going to play around with its component parts. The weather — still muggy, & the first day in a while we’ve had the aircons on — & bell, because yesterday was the day I would have been going back to work if I hadn’t retired, & so, in a sense, it was the bell ringing for the last lap, the last leg of the journey. (Second aside: despite that, I don’t feel I’m on my last legs, though they creak a bit & my left kneecap, my patella — another word I’ve always wanted to use — clicks when I walk so I sound like a deathwatch beetle when I approach.)

Anyway, it felt strange yesterday. There was a silence around me; not really a silence since there was noise but perhaps more of an atmosphere, like being underwater in a divingbell or something. (Third aside: if I had no shame I’d use bathysphere, because it’s another word........)

Whatever it was it was tangible. I managed to pierce its skin by focusing on getting one of my current tasks done, putting together the print editions of issue seven of Otoliths. (Fourth aside: the two parts look fucking great!)

The day was further brightened by the arrival of the postman. Actually, the postman & the parcelman. (Fifth aside; this is a small town. Because the parcelman, a driver for one of the courier companies here, also delivers stuff to (where I used to) work, he thinks I’m an old friend & calls me by my first name. &, since it’s a small town, he just leaves any parcels on the front porch. &, since it’s a small town, nobody steals them.)

The postman brought me Sheila Murphy’s New Year poemcard — eat yr heart out, Hallmark — In the Year 2008 which took five days to get from the U.S. to Australia, & then another five days to reach me from wherever it was re-sorted here. As I often say, where we live is actually beyond the edges of the Earth. (Sixth aside: since Eileen is also on Sheila’s mailing list, you can read the poem here.)

The parcelman brought me my eagerly-awaited contributor’s copy of the Nick Piombino-edited OCHO #14. Lulu went overboard on their packaging for this one. Starting from the inside: the book inside a soft polypropylene (?) open-sided “envelope” which was then shrinkwrapped to a much larger piece of cardboard which fitted snugly into what I can only describe as a pizza box that could probably have contained all the previous copies of OCHO as well. (Seventh aside: you can read Ron Silliman’s review of the issue here.)

In the film, there is no Death and no angel. There can be none. Heurtebise is a young Death serving in one of the numerous sub-orders of Death, and the Princess is no more Death than an air hostess is an angel.

The Crying of Lot 46

"Lot 46, Untitled (Plum and Brown), could be an excellent Josef Albers but instead is a rather drab Mark Rothko. It has no particular luminosity or painterliness. The catalogue claims that it "speaks to our deepest and most profound emotions," but perhaps not everyone has deep and profound emotions."

Fortyfour degrees of separation (80° in Fahrenheit)

Nick Piombino tells me in an email that the temperature dropped to 12°F in NYC yesterday. That’s cold. I can remember growing up in New Zealand when the temperature dropped below freezing point with some regularity in several of the places where I lived, I can even remember it snowing—very occasionally—but I can’t remember living in that sort of chill, & I can’t remember living in any sort of chill aside from the odd frost for the last fifty years.

Here, when I read his email, it was about 33°C, say 92°F, a summer storm brewing, thunder on two sides, muggy as all hell. But, as is so often the case, the storm passed us by. A little bit of rain, a drop in temperature, a cool wind. But still muggy.

A thousand kilometers north, a thousand kilometers south, it’s a different story. Torrential rain, rivers going crazy. They are areas that have always had rain—the north is monsoon & cyclone territory this time of year, the wet season; & I can remember some years back driving up to Queensland from Sydney along the Pacific Highway & thinking that the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales would be a nice place to live, a thought that lasted all of a month until they were hit by floods—but these are worse than they have been for a long time. Plus, places like the Gold & Sunshine Coasts in the south of Queensland, which have always been a favorite spot for holidaymakers looking to lie on the beach, soak up some sun, go for a swim, have had a metre (forty inches) of rain in three days, the beaches are all closed, the waves are something like ten metres high. & sun? What sun?

Elsewhere in the country there are bushfires. & drought.

except that,

in the post below from yesterday, I've got my Roman numerals fucked up. L, not D, is fifty, so maybe I'll call it IL-luminations......

noodle

turquoise
tortoise
purple
turtle

editorializing, on a summer's day....

Today it’s Mavis Staple upstairs, the Ry Cooder-produced album of staples from the Staple Singers repertoire, a present nominally for someone else, but in reality......

Have taken time off things editorial to give myself some quality time, finishing off something started a year ago according to the date-stamp on the file. My selected poems —Tom Fink-selected & -introduced— that was to range across half a century; but, since I’m feeling intimations of mortality, there’s now a year shaved off that. Which leads to my current working title, ID —49 in Roman numerals, a land of wizards, an ego stroke. Super! Currently running at about 250+ pages of A4 in manuscript. Plus intro plus contents. Plus some new poetry. Once reformatted, about 400 pages in its final form. A substantial body of work as they say in the trade papers. Let’s hope it’s also seen as a body of substantial work.....

On the editorial side of things, submissions for issue eight of Otoliths close at the end of this month & Otoliths will be bringing out three books later on this month, one visual, two text. I’ll reveal more details closer to the date, but let’s just say they’re all knockouts. Ron Silliman recently commented, in his review of the Nick Piombino-edited Ocho 14, that “Some of the most important sites for American poetry, for example, now take place in Australia...” & I’m arrogant enough to believe that Otoliths is one of those sites.

Its alleles, in comparison

Show Our Lady
of Guadalupe the
house in Virginia
where Stonewall
Jackson's arm is
buried & she will
say what a miraculous
image, then step back
& tease the genitals. It’s
a geno-typical response
to marginal move-
ment that threatens
any blues, folk or
rock duo with
extinction. In war-
time all justice is the
justice of the victors.
The comparisons with
Chaplin are not un-
warranted, but have
we gone too far in
limiting anti-terrorism
in the name of civil
rights? Are we still
barbarians? 500
frog species think so.

In comparison with its alleles

Are we still
barbarians? Have we
gone too far in
limiting civil rights
in the name of anti-
terrorism? Show any
blues, folk or rock
duo the miraculous
image of Our Lady
of Guadalupe & 500
frog species plus the
house in Virginia
where Stonewall
Jackson's arm is buried
are threatened with
extinction. It’s a pheno-
typical response. Justice
in wartime is the
justice of the victors.
We see movement in
the marginals. Step back
& tease the genitals. The
comparisons with Chaplin
are not unwarranted.

& so,

at 5.30 p.m. in the afternoon, on this first day of the year, I find myself standing in the dining room brandishing a plastic fly-swat, looking for the fly that came in with me from outside, & reciting to myself Goethe’s Der Erlenkönig in the original German.

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.

Uh, oh. Looks like it’s going to be one of those years......

The Discrete Charm of the Brandenbourgeoisie

The post/poem below sent me off looking at music videos, a stochastic journey, as such things inevitably turn out to be, starting with Ferry/Roxy Music & pinballing off to Hendrix, The Mammas & Papas, John Sebastian, John Sebastian Bach, The Band, Dylan, Brecht, Bobby Darin, Charles Trenet, Jacques Brel, Sylvie Vartin, Nina Simone.

Somewhere between the avuncular Trenet’s La Mer & Brel’s hyper-emotive Ne me quitte pas, I decided to pre-empt the two-faced Janus & end, rather than begin, the year with something that I have enjoyed in the past & will undoubtedly continue to enjoy in the future. A quick round-up of the usual suspects, a selection made. & so, below, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major played by the Orchestra Mozart conducted by Claudio Abbado.



Lots of strings attached — three violins, three violas, three cellos, a contrabass &, as Denise Levertov wrote, “don’t forget the crablike / hands, slithering / among the keys.”

Its complex and pessimistic theme of a spiritually-failed man is told from several, unreliable perspectives and points-of-view (also metaphorically communicated by the jigsaw puzzle) by several different characters (the associates and friends of the deceased) - providing a sometimes contradictory, non-sequential, and enigmatic portrait. The film tells the thought-provoking, tragic epic story of a 'rags-to-riches' child who inherited a fortune, was taken away from his humble surroundings and his father and mother, was raised by a banker, and became a fabulously wealthy, arrogant, and energetic newspaperman.

oopstimism

Every couple of years

the photo below seems to make its way onto somebody's blog or site, most recently Jordan Stempleman's Growing Nation.




So I've added a poster below for the 1969 reading for which the mugshots were taken



& pulled out from the dreaming pelican some poems posted when noting the last time the photo surfaced.

High Country Weather

Alone we are born
And die alone
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

James K. Baxter (1945)

from: Night Through the Orange Window

I remember her as a fifth season
she
who came unheralded
into those lean months
shaming the precise blue evenings
with the proud eternity of her flesh

David Mitchell (1963)

For Dave Mitchell
"th prfct wrdslngr"

Seeing your poems, your picture on the
blue middle pages of the NEW ARGOT
I wish I could be with you once more in
"th cafe lebanon". It is summer, & the
spare tables will have been unstacked
& set outside; & we could sit there
in our perfect white tropical suits,
sipping pernod, smoking panatellas
&
waiting for something GREAT to happen.

Mark Young (1973)

The
only cause
he thought worth

dying for was
to grow
old

       grace-
       fully.

Meanwhile, in Swastika, Ontario

The examination of
light to find aspects
of religiously-valued
experience as some
libidinal cathexis
of the self is closely
tied to narcissism;
but as a conceptual
rubric, emotional
regulation inexorably
erodes old norms. The
eloquent drama of the
romantic movement
becomes less salient.
Each day is now an
exercise in controlled
chaos & its viscissitudes.
Society tends to idealize
farm life, focusing on
genetic diversity, fleeces,
structural correctness, as
well as breeding. The
development of
better animal models is
all the rage these days.

democrazy

Intermittent rain, continuous low gray cloud. Unseasonably cool, hovering around 25° C compared with the 35°+ temperature it normally is at this time of the year. There’s a cyclone building out in the Coral Sea just north-east of where we are, still forming, unknown when it will cross the coast if indeed it does. Some time next week most likely. Seven metre waves predicted, very strong winds—already intimations of the buildup. We’re some forty kilometres inland, separated from the sea by hills, so should be safe—it’s the wind coming from the inland that does the damage here.

The rain brings the frogs out. They croak in the drains. Basso profundo, echo chamber. “Well since my baby left me / I’ve found a new place to dwell...” Elvis in the bulrushes.

I go outside. A little green frog, the size of my thumbnail, bounces away from me.

Basho profundo.

Today the
postman brought
me the generic
Prozac I’d
ordered from
an online Canadian
Pharmaceutical
company. Not
worth the wait. Some
time back turned my-
self inside out to
hide the blemishes &
make in(tro)spection
easy; & these
pills don’t work
when it’s surface
tension that needs
to be treated.

Outside / & bare / yr butts. NOW.

AS astronomers scan the universe for signs of intelligent life, a group of researchers predicts other beings just might be looking at us.

A scientific paper published in this week's online edition of Astrophysical Journal suggests alien astronomers armed with a large space telescope could detect our planet and possibly determine the presence of life.

A new print journal starting up

Michael Steven, a New Zealand poet & publisher & a contributor to Otoliths, is starting up a new print journal & would welcome contributions. Details are:


asterisk
a journal of new initiatives

editor: Michael Steven
We are interested in receiving poetry,
short fiction, black & white vispo,
essays & poetic theory.


Submissions for issue one
close February 25th, 2008.

asteriskeditor77_at_gmail_dot_com

festive hay(na)ku

the
isolation. The
Isolation. THE ISOLATION.

Are we talking about the same thing here?

"If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge..."

"Hello... Look at this small little poem. My fren wrote it. He was one of the guy from my class but i dun really know him. My fren pass to me this piece of paper. As I read through it I find it... Interesting..."

Meanwhile

I look for Hiroshige at the boat harbor.

Condensation on the windows & glass door. Hot & steamy outside, air conditioners on in. Temperature differential. What I grew up with, but not what I grew up with. Then, the fire alight, the cold outside. Sometimes just the breathing.

chinese whisper clichés

“.....because it was better to urge on the side of caution.....”

I am re-retiring

in a couple of days. What was supposed to be a few weeks of social interaction some twenty-five months ago ended up being much more than that. Apparently I still had my old management skills intact, & so that contract was supplemented by another one, & then another one &&&...

But I’ve decided no more. My writing has suffered though part of the irritation of that has been soothed by my new-found editorial & publishing pursuits which the regular income has helped subsidize. & even if I hadn’t been going to work, there is no guarantee that I would have been writing at the level & extent I would like to have been. All I know is that previously I had more opportunity to write, but it took quite some time before I got into a zone where I actually was productive. Occasionally I look through the archives of pelican dreaming & wonder if my time will come again or have I blown those last few years of a still reasonably active & agile mind.

So what is before me is hopefully an amalgam. I hope the writing will take off again; the editing & publishing will continue with the only change being – unless I win the lottery – that there will be no more contributors’ copies of Otoliths after issue eight. I’ll still bring it out in print, but I won’t be able to afford the $1000+ it costs for complimentary copies each issue.

But now I have free time. Look out for me in your neighborhood! Wherever you are.

He apologized, &
then apologized again
for having felt the
need to make
apologies. Seems
like everything he
does these days
is qualified.

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The Second XV Interviews now out.

Just Out from Otoliths







E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The Second XV Interviews
Curated by Tom Beckett
328 pages
$19.95 + p&h
ISBN: 978-0-9803659-9-3
Otoliths, 2007
http://www.lulu.com/content/1351093

Following on from the successful first volume of interviews from Tom Beckett’s insightful site, E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The Second XV Interviews has just been released.

It contains interviews with Mark Young, Michael Heller, Bob Grumman, Shanna Compton, Sandy McIntosh, Jim McCrary, Gary Sullivan, A.L. Nielsen, Michael Farrell, CAConrad, Anny Ballardini, Denise Duhamel, Nick Carbó, Jack Kimball, Geoffrey Young & Jordan Stempleman, plus more than 100 pages of text & visual poetry, an essay, even a play. The interviewers this time around are Tom Beckett, Thomas Fink, Richard Lopez & Geof Huth.

getting yr priorities right.....

".......so I just went for a stroll down the beach with the dogs, and with the girlfriend, Christy," he said.

Mind you, the quote comes from a news item that may witness the birth of a new urban legend, the great white shark that ate a surfing kangaroo.

Today the
postman brought
me a small
block of granite
entitled Homage
to Catatonia. It
is an erased
version of Orwell’s
memoir of the
Spanish Civil War.

I

have become

my cat's familiar.

Today is an historic day for Australia

From around midday today, when newly-elected Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, having ratified the Kyoto Protocol, heads off to Bali to attend the United Nations’ Climate Change summit — an act of huge significance given that the previous conservative federal government was essentially the only one in the world to go along with the U.S.’s “what climate change?” stance — Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard will make history as Australia's first female acting Prime Minister.

Funky bookends & foreign beer

Power tools, mullets, toaster
ovens, dogs—where did
all these stereo- & empirically
derived learning disability sub-
types come from? Being drunk
is no excuse for animal cruelty.
I still have a tendency to act
impulsively but my analyst—
his hands are far too cold & no
one in their right mind would
EVER pay to hear him talk—has
finally signed off on me. I’m
all dressed up for the dance. Hat,
coat & white carnation, demon-
strating the role clothes play in
influencing or masking our
personalities. Last week
I appeared examining my
cuticles on the front cover of a
national lesbian magazine: inside
I talked about how scientists
say right-handed gestures show
left-brain dominance. Now, if
I can just keep my skirt on, more
appearances have been promised.

.....& of the Holy Zeitgeist?

"The gunman was shot and killed by a church security guard after entering the church's main foyer with (a) high-powered rifle shortly before 1pm local time and opening fire...."

Marko, Miia, Mark, Magritte, Manning = MMMMMMMM

When I posted some time back an announcement by Nicholas Manning that he had started an online journal, The Continental Review, devoted to poetry videos, I noted that I hoped it wouldn’t become a repository just for talking heads (“don’t forget the shoulders,” added Nicholas in the comments boxes).

Since then, amongst the poets who have appeared are a number associated with Otoliths; verbal — Tom Beckett, Jordan Stempleman, Eileen Tabios, Jill Jones — & visual — Spencer Selby, Nico Vassilakis. But I felt I should do something about my original statement & practice what I preach, as it were.

So finally, thanks to the informal Networks sans Frontières that create community in our (electronic) world, & especially thanks to the creative genius of Marko Niemi, substance has replaced pontifical stance. A video, working title “Three from Series Magritte”, has just gone up at The Continental Review

The poems included are:
The Flavour of Tears
Not to be Reproduced
The Art of Conversation
all from from Series Magritte, published by Moria Books.

The readings by Miia Toivio first appeared on Toisen äänellä – In Another´s Voice on the Nokturno.org website.

The design concept & the animated flash file are by Marko Niemi without whom this project would never have been realized.

Check it out at The Continental Review.

Think about contributing.

Genji Monogatari XII: The Shell of the Locust

The rulers are busy
with their power games
as I continue pondering
where the next conflict
might be. Sweat lodges
put me in touch with my
holistic inner self, I depend
upon the most innocent
bits of consumer culture—
LL Cool Jay lyrics or the
latest news on the Tampa
real estate market—to help
my predictions. I have
cachet with the industries
of war since I wagered
that the blaze of 1993 would
hasten the collapse of the
toy-making plant & over-
the-counter Rock Hudsons
would become a phenomenon
with no competition. I enter
Utsusemi’s room. Moths
bang on the paper screens.
I wish I could change the
name plate on my office door.

farting kangaroo hay(na)ku

Kangaroo
farts may
stop global warming.

As the article points out, 50% of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions comes from the farting of its dairy cattle.

Genji Monogatari XI: Wild Carnations

Panatellas at
sunset. Wine, ice water,
small sweet balls of
rice. One of several
lives, not all of quality—
some bought new, others
found at garage sales, flea
markets & second-hand
or resale shops. The child
we used to be still lives
within us. Now, in the
night hours, great white
flowers have opened. I
long for climate change.

Mr. Watanabe, a middle-aged government worker, suddenly finds that he has very little life left when diagnosed with terminal cancer. Moving from drunken despair to quiet resolve, he vows to make his final days meaningful. At first he throws himself into the city's nightlife, but this does not help. His attempts to communicate his anguish to his son and daughter-in-law lead only to heartbreak. Finally, inspired by an unselfish co-worker, he turns his efforts to bringing happiness to others by building a playground in a dreary slum neighborhood. When the park is finally completed, he is able to face death with peaceful acceptance.

Finally,

after three weeks of ergonomic discomfort & extreme frustration, I have connectivity - internectivity as I've come to call it - through my new desktop.

With what I now know, it should have been three days; but the free help from my service provider bears out the adage you get what you pay for. Maybe eight phone calls & two CDs later, I got the shits big time & went to their third-party pay-for-service contractor who spent about a minute listening to what I had to say & then informed me that the network adaptor - a dongle, I've learnt, in geekspeak - wasn't compatible with Windows Vista. Oh? I wonder why none of the helpdesk people I'd talked to had thought of that.

& with what I now know, it should have been three hours; but I had to have a dongle dingle-dangled in from A BIG CITY - lesson #2: don't live in the backblocks even if they really aren't.

& even with all the above, the thing keeps cutting out.

Fuck the world, I want to get off.

strange fruit

what
I thought
was a mango

appears to be
a lychee
tree.

Michele Leggott Announced as Inaugural N.Z. Poet Laureate 2007/2008

"Auckland University Press congratulates distinguished poet and University of Auckland scholar Michele Leggott, who has been announced as the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2007/08.

Michele’s publisher, AUP Director Sam Elworthy, said, “Michele Leggott is not only a great poet, widely recognized in New Zealand and around the world, she is also an innovative promoter of poetry through her New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, dynamic teaching, and through her editorial work on poets such as Robin Hyde and Alan Brunton. We congratulate Michele on this great honour.”

The Minister responsible for the National Library, the Hon Judith Tizard, announced the appointment at a function at Parliament last night.

“Michele has made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry and I'm thrilled to announce her role as the 2007/08 New Zealand Poet Laureate.”

Michele Leggott is an Associate Professor in The University of Auckland's Department of English Department and founding Director of the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre, an important international and national digital resource for poets, schools, universities and the reading public. She has published five books of poetry and has edited five anthologies of poetry and criticism. Her first collection, Like This?, won the PEN First Best Book of Poetry in 1989 and Dia (AUP, 1994) won the 1995 NZ Book Award for Poetry.

The Poet Laureate Award was established earlier this year to recognise writers who have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry. Administered by the National Library of New Zealand, the Poet Laureate is selected biennially and receives an award of $50,000 per year.

The Poet Laureate's working papers and published work will be preserved in the National Library's National Digital Heritage Archive and in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

The New Zealand Poet Laureate Award is based on the Te Mata Poet Laureate scheme, which it will supersede."

I
know a
poet laureate. Yay!!!!!

a couple of days late

but I'd like to note that it's been a year since kari edwards died. I miss that energy.

Leftovers

A tiny bird sits looking up at the cycle
next to a box finished in red baked enamel
with large lettering left by a mourner
that matches her well-chosen out-
fit perfectly. Why is the phone on
fire? Maybe was once a wobbly table
& four chairs gifted by an aunt. Now
mirror is temporary. The accompanying
folded sheet is positioned about ten feet
away from the model & very animistic
so that women in another epoch taken
out of that down-cycle environment
were awake with their eyes closed in a
reclining chair indulging in his wonted
sorrow during a successful seduction.
He treated her like a normal human
being. This does not indicate a relation-
ship. Merely an obscure awareness of
the quiet, dark shades, the stone under
foot, the master of unfinished business.

&, since it'll be a long time

before I'm in this sort of company again, let me post the publishing of

OCHO # 14 guest edited by Nick Piombino. Featuring Charles Bernstein, Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Elaine Equi, Nada Gordon, Kimberly Lyons, Gary Sullivan, Mitch Highfill, Brenda Iijima, Sharon Mesmer, Tim Peterson, Corinne Robins, Jerome Sala, Mark Young and Nico Vassilakis. Cover art by Toni Simon.

Available through Didi Menendez' Lulu site here.

Beckett is back at it!

Slim Windows.

But how long until defenestration?

Cogito, ergo

sum
is greater
than the parts.

emotion
         ally

moving
pictures

Genji Monogatari X: Channel Buoys

The light, the shadows, the
tracks, the curve. He was
reminded of what a
fortune-teller had once
said to him—Are miracles
really capricious magic or
just modern Tagalog verbs
that serve as a paradigm
for other such personal
solstices? It's this mixture
that makes it one of the least
understood areas in the
evolution of selfish
elements. Suddenly he was
down around zero. He
strained at a gnat & swallowed
a camel. With its clichés
of southern pageantry the red
light of the burning wicker man
cast a lurid glow over a
substantial fraction of the
drosophila genome. Soon
he would have personal energy
at home from a machine.