"I think it is a perfect poem"

or: Doing my bit for Aussie poetry

If one believes Clive James
the perfect poem rhames.

POLIZEIT GEIST: NO YOU CAN'T!

I'm / gonna wait / for the midnight

The sole purpose

for posting this news item is to give Tom Beckett something to lighten & brighten his day.

"A MAN accused of breaking into an adult shop and having sex with blow-up dolls in Cairns has been arrested.

The 23-year-old, who police have not named, was charged with breaking into businesses in the Cairns CBD, including the Laneway Adult Shop three times.

The man allegedly smashed his way into the shop, had sex with blow-up dolls and discarded them in an alley.

'Following intelligence-based inquiries, we attended a Manunda address and made an arrest,' acting Detective Senior-Sergeant Jason Chetham said.

The 23-year-old was charged with four counts each of enter premises with intent and one count of attempted break-in."

Signed, sealed, delivered

Let me
just say

that Stevie
Wonder

must have
made a

fortune in
royalties

from the
In-Awe-

Gu-Ration
Parade.

pig(na)ku

buy
a pig
in a poke

*

happy as a
pig in
shit

*

silk
purse, sow's
ear; so what?

*

making a pig
of my
self

*

this
little piggy
went to market

this little piggy
stayed at
home

*

Miss
Piggy.....Kermit.....
Miss Piggy.....Kermit.....

sigh.....
a poke
in a pig.....

geographies: Chicago

The world of carcass value
is a bit elusive. The ongoing
story is full of confusing
terms, dirty tricks, payoffs,
voter manipulation, prostitutes,
a chicken in every pot. Save the
playlist & share it anywhere.

I really am

going to have to start carrying a camera around with me every time I go outside.

Today's addition to the wildlife sightings on the block, a bearded dragon.



We'd cut some branches off a tree that were beginning to block the back driveway. I'd gone down to shift them now that they were a bit drier, & discovered one of these sitting on top of the pile, about 30 centimetres — say around a foot — long, warming itself. First contact.

The picture above is taken from Wikipedia, but the same photo also appears in a number of other places, so I don't know who to acknowledge for it. But most of the photos I found in my websurf were from petshops, because, apparently, they make terrific, & oh so exotic, pets.

I've said it before,

& will say it again.

It's sad when a poetic site, in this case Milk Magazine, goes down & the domain gets taken over by something horrific & commercial.

A / score of / possible poem themes

1.     "Will the highways on the internet become more few?"
2.     "It’s a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life"
3.     "I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq"
4.     "I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office"
5.     "We’re concerned about Aids inside our White House – make no mistake about it"
6.     "I’m honoured to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein"
7.     "I’ve coined new words, like “misunderstanding”
8.     "I recently met with the finance minister of the Palestinian Authority, was very impressed by his grasp of finances"
9.     "It’s in our country’s interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way"
10.    "One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end"
11.    "I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn’t here"
12.    "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test"
13.    "I don’t particularly like it when people put words in my mouth, either, by the way, unless I say it"
14.    "[The Taliban] have no disregard for human life"
15.    "When the governor calls, I answer his phone"
16.    "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law"
17.    "I think we agree, the past is over"
18.    "America stands for liberty, for the pursuit of happiness and for the unalienalienable right of life"
19.    "My job is a decision-making job, and as a result, I make a lot of decisions"
20.    "One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures"

from The Times online

POLITI CIAN: DO NOT KISS

P^LATFORM

Today the
postman brought
me a tracking
cookie. I don't
mind it
following me
around the
house, but I
hate the crumbs
it leaves behind.

Don't / be fooled / by cheap imitations

These high-quality shirts will hold their shape & design in the wash.
We got tired of seeing the same old designs everywhere, so we went to one of Israel's top graphic artists and came up with a fantastic new line of t-shirts. We're sure you'll love it!

You may also like...

Wars of Israel. DVD
Retail - $27.00
Special - $19.95

The View From Lebanon

"If the Israeli attack on Gaza that started 18 days ago was designed partly to send a message to the incoming Barack Obama, the United States Congress in the past week seems to have joined the battle to handcuff the new president and lay down the law for him, even before he takes office.

Obama has tried to remain aloof and stay out of the political battle over the Gaza war by making no substantive statements about it. Israel and its supporters in Washington have different plans. Obama has stayed away from the war, but they brought the war to him - shoving it down his throat as his first pre-incumbency lesson in how American presidents must behave with respect to Israel's desires, if they wish to remain in power.
.
.
.
This almost irrational absolute support for Israel in both the legislative and executive branches of the US government occurs amid a chorus of international condemnation of Israel for using excessive force. This includes calls by some United Nations officials and respectable non-governmental organizations to investigate whether Israel has committed war crimes.

Israel is using the two arsenals it is most comfortable with - military force to kill, injure, terrorize and displace thousands of Palestinian civilians; and the equivalent political overkill to bludgeon the American political establishment into total submission. After six decades of trying, Israel has been unable to turn Palestinians into vassals and subservient slaves - but it has succeeded in transforming an otherwise impressive American political governance system into a herd of castrated cattle who cower before the threats that Israel's Washington-based henchmen and hit men direct at them. Gaza will get its ceasefire soon, but will Washington ever find relief from the stranglehold of Israel's political thugs?
.
.
.
On no other foreign policy issue does Congress collectively stick its head in its back pocket, turn off its power of independent judgment, and disregard the impact of its decisions on how the US is perceived around the world. On no other issue does Congress vote according to the interests of a foreign country, rather than according to the US national interest. This kind of blind, wholehearted plunge into a maelstrom of pro-Israeli fanaticism and zealotry reflects precisely how strong the pro-Israeli lobby is in the United States, and how weak are the voices of reason, balance and justice as drivers of American foreign policy.

This is the distorted reality that Obama will inherit in one week's time, and what an ugly thing it is. It captures the worst of all worlds all rolled into one: the vicious force of the pro-Israel lobby in the US that buys and terrorizes politicians as easily as buying peanuts at a circus; the anemic, mindless and spineless Arab governments who stand naked before Israel and the US, and shameless before their own people; and the American political establishment that behaves on the Palestinian issue - with a handful of brave and decent exceptions - in a most un-American manner in the face of the pro-Israeli forces that decide if they live or die politically.

None of this is surprising or new. It only amazes me that Americans expect us to take them seriously and not to laugh - or throw up - when they preach to us about promoting democracy."

Rami G. Khouri
The Daily Star, Lebanon

Today's / essay topic: / compare & contrast

Bush, having just been told of the second WTC crash (9:06 a.m.), does not leave the Sarasota, Florida, classroom he entered around 9:03. Rather, he stays and listens as 16 Booker Elementary School second-graders take turns reading a story called Pet Goat, about a girl's pet goat. They are just about to begin reading when Bush is warned of the attack. One account says that the classroom is then silent for about 30 seconds, maybe more. Bush then picks up the book and reads with the children "for eight or nine minutes." In unison, the children read out loud, "The - Pet - Goat. A - girl - got - a - pet - goat. But - the - goat - did - some - things - that - made - the - girl's - dad - mad." And so on. Bush mostly listens, but does ask the children a few questions to encourage them. At one point he says, "Really good readers, whew! ... These must be sixth-graders!"

Paul Thompson: Bush on 9/11 Timeline

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he called President George W. Bush to seek an abstention from the U.S., a key Israeli ally at the United Nations.

"I said: 'Get me President Bush on the phone,'" Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. "They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care: 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to me."

AP 13/1/09

But it's too late, baby....

Commenting on the pwoemrd of the post below, Geof Huth writes "soon enough..."

Unfortunately, Geof, it's not something that's coming, it's something that's already here, & has been for some time.

In an article, Intellectual Property Landscape of the Human Genome, in Science, from 2005, Jensen & Murray wrote:

"Our results reveal that nearly 20% of human genes are explicitly claimed as U.S. IP. This represents 4382 of the 23,688 of genes in the NCBI’s gene database at the time of writing These genes are claimed in 4270 patents within 3050 patent families. Although this number is low compared with prior reports, a distinction should be made between sequences that are explicitly claimed and those that are merely disclosed, which outnumber claimed sequences roughly 10:1. The 4270 patents are owned by 1156 different assignees (with no adjustments for mergers and acquisition activity, subsidiaries, or spelling variations). Roughly 63% are assigned to private firms. Of the top ten gene patent assignees, nine are U.S.-based, including the University of California, Isis Pharmaceuticals, the former SmithKline Beecham, and Human Genome Sciences. The top patent assignee is Incyte Pharmaceuticals/ Incyte Genomics, whose IP rights cover 2000 human genes, mainly for use as probes on DNA microarrays."

Any Google search using the terms "gene patents" or "patented genes" will lead to a large number of links. Amongst them is an 2007 op-ed piece in The New York Times by the recently-deceased Michael Crichton.

"Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000."

The full piece, well worth reading, can be found here

geno™e

Unsung,

but beautifully read.

Martin Edmond uses the Pyrmont Incinerator in Sydney—a photo of which decorated the cover of The Evolution of Mirrors, his recent book from Otoliths—



as the starting point for a reverie.



Images in the video are by Adam Aitken, the music is by Arvo Part.

It strikes me

that Bush could be singing in the picture below


& I am drifting between wondering what the song is if he is singing, & what the song might be if we were all living in an alternate universe.

A possible pick if it's the latter.....

Snip its

The Palestinian death toll has risen to 821 people, and more than 3,300 have been injured since Israel began its offensive in the Gaza Strip two weeks ago.

A United Nations agency says nearly fifty percent of those killed in Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip are women and children.

Ϋ

"But this is reality. You do your utmost to try and explain the difference between people aiming at women, children and babies in order to kill them because they are Israelis, and on the other hand – a democratic state trying to defend its citizens."

Dan Gillerman, retiring Israeli ambassador to the United Nations

Ϋ

"Many people in Israel call us traitors and war criminals because we talk about the war while it is still going on," said Teddy Katz of the Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom.

"But the truth is that this government ordered a criminal war."

Gush Shalom is one member of a coalition that held a news conference on Wednesday, January 7, 2009, to brief the media on peace camp positions.

Some speakers at the news conference focused on what they held to be Israel's real motives for the war - election success and, according to Katz, sanitising corrupt political reputations is also a factor.

Ϋ

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said senior Israeli military officials have confessed that there was no gunfire emanating from the school when it came under fire from one of its tanks.

Tel Aviv has attempted to justify its Jan 6 attack on the United Nations school as a response to "militant gunfire" and has released footage of the incident to substantiate its claims.

Gunness, however, asserted that the footage released by Israel dated back to 2007 and was not related to the current incident.

Gourmand eyes

Wearing a
seasonally
significant
hachimachi
headband

the kami-
kaze poet
prepares to
eat himself
to death.

He fails. &
the wind
is not
divine.

geographies: The Isthmus of Panama

A small section of
carapace grows
caudally as a tubular
duct. Camino Real.
Inside are two
clergymen & caravans
loaded with gold.
The phytoplankton
cannot keep pace.

extracts from a piece I / have decided not to write

The Israeli invasion of Gaza can be considered as being one of the last actions not by, but of the Bush Administration. Unsure of how President-elect Obama would react, but totally certain of having Bush's uncritical support, the timetable of the invasion seems inexorably to have an endpoint before January 20, even if the under-discussion escalation of the conflict goes ahead.

"...there is also a proposal to begin stage three, which would be to order the troops to fight their way into the heart of the urban areas, bringing with it much higher casualties on both sides. 'The plan is to enter the urban centres.' "

     *

Keep in mind, also, that the Israeli elections are set down for February 10, & that the popularity of the politicians in the forefront of the invasion, Defense Minister & Labour Party leader, Ehud Barak, & Foreign Minister & the newly elected head of the ruling conservative Kadima Party, Tzipi Livni, had been in decline until the air strikes began.

POLICE LINE: DO NOT CRISS

The contents of this post
have been seized, & will be used
in a prosecution of the author
for publishing crap without a licence.
POLICE LIME: DO NOT CRUSH

Speaking through his attorney,
the accused has said he will fight
to have the charge dismissed
on the grounds that it was pap
& not crap that was produced.
POLICE LIEN: DO NOT CRUST

The police were reluctant to comment
but, off the record, said
pap in one end, crap out the other.
It's a fundamental fact about orifices.
POLITE LION: DO NOT CROSS

& / now for / something completely different

An Adelaide woman who allegedly set fire to her husband's genitals allegedly said that his "penis belongs to me", a court has been told.

Rajini Narayan, 44, had originally been charged with endangering life and arson offences after she allegedly torched the family's Unley home, in Adelaide's eastern suburbs on December 8.

The charge was upgraded to murder after her 47-year-old husband, Satish Narayan, died in hospital last week.

Prosecutors on Monday told the Adelaide Magistrates Court that Rajini Narayan confessed to neighbours that she had set her husband alight while he was sleeping after learning he was having an affair.

Lucy Boord, for the Crown, said Narayan told her neighbours she was a "jealous wife" and that her husband's "penis should belong to her".

Narayan allegedly said: "I just wanted to burn his penis so it belongs to me and no one else ... I didn't mean this to happen".

"we are trying to avoid civilian casualties"

says Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Hasan Khalaf of the Palestinian Ministry of Health, said that the number of Palestinians killed due to the ongoing Israeli offensive is now over 577 residents. Among the casualties were 107 children and 36 women; at least 2,700 residents were wounded.

The ground offensive was launched on Sunday evening. So far over 70 residents, including 21 children and 11 women have been killed and over 371 wounded.

iconiche

A trillion dollars later.....

"Israel's addiction to violence is in part enabled by its vast military superiority over its neighbors, promoted by U.S. tax dollars averaging nearly $3 billion annually since 1973. Israel's military, equipped with 875 combat aircraft, 3,800 tanks, and, ultimately, up to an estimated 400 nuclear weapons, is attacking a population lacking an air force, air defenses, artillery, tanks, or any of the gear of a modern army."

George E. Bisharat, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/5/09

aaghst

Send in the clowns

Unfortunately, they bring with them brute force rather than farce brut.

& the Bushman of the Beltway continues to support them.....

"The Bush administration defended Israel’s military incursion into the Gaza Strip Saturday asserting that Israel had the right to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire. The U.S. also refused to pressure Israel into accepting an immediate cease-fire.

In US President George W. Bush's weekly Saturday radio address, the text of which was released by the White House late on Friday, he blamed Hamas for the violence.

Bush offers no criticism of Israel in the address."

Hamas hay(na)ku

"Gaza
is the
Rock of God."

The Hamas leader-in-exile, Khaled Meshaal, on Al Jazeera TV.

Occasionally,

the spontaneous jukebox unleashes things other than music....



Robert Indiana
USA 666, the 6th American dream
oil on canvas
105 x 105 in. / 266.7 x 266.7 cm.
1964 - 1966

......but still usually from the 60s.

Sheesh! Eartha Kitt was James Dean's dance teacher!

My thanks to the ever-informative Vitro Nasu for bringing this to my attention.

Mosaic

Israeli warplanes have killed a senior Hamas leader and several members of his family, in an airstrike that marks a possible new stage in the six-day offensive on the Islamists in the Gaza Strip.

Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, said on a visit to Paris on Thursday that there was "no humanitarian crisis in the Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce," reinforcing her rejection of a French-proposed ceasefire to allow in humanitarian aid.

The blast decapitated Dr Nizar Rayyan and killed at least two of his four wives, as well as several of his children, and hurled his body into the street in Jabaliya, a refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip.

"Israel has been supplying comprehensive humanitarian aid to the Strip ... and has even been stepping this up by the day," the foreign ministry quoted her as saying according to Reuters.

Medics say 13 members of Rayyan's family, including his wife and three children, were killed in the attack on his five-storey home in the Jabaliya refugee camp on Thursday.

Barack Obama, the US president-elect, remains silent as Israel kills Palestinians with impunity. In his silence he expresses his complicity.

Sources: The Australian, Al Jazeera

The e-mail as progenitor of an urban myth

A year & a half ago, I began a post "[this] arrived in my email after a couple of kangaroo hops, & being a word lover I couldn't resist........

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition."

For some reason or other, I thought about the subject of the post again today, did the obligatory Google search, recovered lots of search results, spread across several years up to & including two days ago, many of which begin "the latest version of the WaPo's Mensa Invitational...."

But they're all the same set. It's the same e-mail, circling the world like some marine creature, coming up to breathe every so often, & cited when it's sighted. & the list has no connection with either Mensa or the Washington Post.

According to the Washington Post, "It still hasn't stopped: With mystifying regularity, we continue to receive (often passed through several mailboxes at The Post) unsolicited entries to what's sometimes called the "Mensa Invitational."

The reason for the e-mail's popularity—& perceived veracity—is that it's a genuinely funny list. Which is why I'm posting it again.

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund which lasts until you realize that it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

12. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

13. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

17. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

18. Caterpallor (n.): the colour you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

yesterday's top temperature

40.1° C


multiply by nine
divide by five
add 32

=

104.2° F

The last day of the year was
the hottest day of the year.

A reminder

that submissions for issue 12 of Otoliths close in a month.

The submission information is here.

To those of you

in snowy climes / on snowy climbs, let me just say: this is one day I envy you.

Top temperature here today, 38° C. For the non-metric, that's slightly over 100° F.

today's Google word

bircra: Bikeshorts made from birch bark, as worn by (a) Hiawatha when canoedling & (b) Finnish poets who wish to maintain a sense of the sauna as they do Lapp after Lapp in that velodrome in the snow.

Reprising this.....

A footnote to Martin Edmond's Zheng He ficcione

His body was taken back to China and interred along with his testicles, kept, as was customary, in a sealed pouch carried since castration always on a belt at his waist.

Martin Edmond: Zheng He: A True Ficcione

All else you say is true,
though few know about the
voyage to Luca Antara. Most
thought we stopped at Java;
but he & I went further south,
in a small boat, with a
trusted crew. The same
who later kept the secret
of his burial. What history
records as happening
is a fiction. Certainly
there is an inland tomb, with
Allahu Akbar inscribed
upon it. & a nearby stela
gives details of the seven
voyages. But remember
Zheng He was both a
Muslim & a sailor: Islam
decrees a speedy burial
& the tradition of the sea
demands interment in the
ocean. We wrapped him
in silk once we'd reattached
his young boy’s balls to
their proper place with
gum arabic. & one day
out from Calicut, during the
first watch, accompanied only
by our murmured prayers
& the creak of wood being
pressured by the water, we
did commend his body
to the ocean. Entire again.

.....because of this.

The Chinese ships – two high-tech, heavily armed destroyers and a supply vessel – will spend the next ten days bound for the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, which has been the scene of more than 100 hijackings within the past year.

The last time a Chinese military fleet set sail for anywhere as far afield as Africa with the prospect of a fight at the other end, the ships were 400ft (122m) wooden junks and the commander was a Ming dynasty court eunuch called Zheng He.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5400661.ece

A / member of / the ferret family

Early translations of the Bible translate the word Leviticus as ferret but later translations have put the word to mean lizard.

I'm / sitting on / the front porch

having a post-coffee cigarette, & the spontaneous offering from the jukebox in my brain is
Me & you, &
you & me, no
matter how
they toss the
dice, it had to
be, the only
one for me
is you, & you
for me, so
happy together.
It's a song from another front porch time, the second half of the 1960s, when a regular attraction for the tourist buses was the short drive along Auckland's answer to Haight-Ashbury, four houses in the infamous Boyle Crescent. It's a song from a time of great music, not just the famous names but lots of one hit wonders, wonderful feelgood songs that I can still recall reasonably word perfect, even if I can't always place a group to a song.

I think the above is by The Turtles, check YouTube, find that my guess was correct. But I also find there another version of the song, which cracks me up completely.

The temperature here is heading for the mid thirties Celsius—high nineties in the other scale. So fuck chestnuts roasting on an open fire & songs of snow & chimneys for funny fat men to get stuck in. My offering for the festive season is embedded below, Happy Together, done by the Leningrad Cowboys & the Red Army Choir & Orchestra. Glazsnost indeed!

who / sucked the / old fart dry?

Speaking on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI warned that gender theory blurred the distinction between male and female and could thus lead to the "self-destruction" of the human race.

       *      ^*          _*      ^*      *
it is midnight in Madang
       *      ^*          _*      ^*      *

the pwoemrd "phroemase" amplified

Mise-en-scène: harry k stammer

mediochre

Cuckoo's nest

is something of a false term, since all Australian cuckoos, with the exception of the Pheasant Coucal which I've mentioned before, lay their eggs in the nests of birds of other species, leaving it to them to rear its offspring. They choose a bird whose eggs are similar to its own—for the big channel-billed cuckoo, it's the nests of crows & currawongs; for the small black-eared cuckoo, speckled warblers & redthroats. In other words, young cuckoos are parasites.

The koel, according to my bird book, "lays her marbled salmon-pink egg or eggs in the nest of one of a number of hosts such as friarbirds or other large honeyeaters." Which explains why, this morning, in a tree in the front yard, a young koel, fresh from the nest, was angrily screeching for its pressganged "parents"—in this case, a pair of blue-faced honeyeaters smaller than it—to bring it food. & they were complying, over & over.

What I don't understand is why the cuckoo-raisers don't just abandon the fledgling when it becomes apparent that it isn't theirs. It strikes me as if some sort of bizarre imprinting-in-reverse is also at work. I'm guessing that there were/are other, genuine, offspring; what happens to them whilst Mum & Dad are out spending the major part of their lives attempting—not too successfully, judging by the screeching—to assuage the hunger of this space invader?

Couldn't find the camera to capture the scene, but I did find the photo below, of a similar occurence, at debra21's photosteam on Flickr.

When I grow up,

I want to get a job creating Google verification words,


& then write long Tolkienesque novels using the characters I have created.

tu^ba

Today the
postman brought
me the Grand
Canyon. Not
the walls: just
the space within,
deflated to make
for cheaper
shipping. It's
funny. I always
thought it
would be bigger.

The Celestial Muscles

The cavity in the
skull over-
flows with
the training routines
of Italian body-
builders. But where
is its zenith in
relation to the observer?

Goody! Two shoes.

A journalist hurled two shoes at President George W. Bush on his farewell visit to Iraq on Sunday, highlighting hostility still felt toward the outgoing US leader who acknowledged that the war is still not won.

Note to self #8746

I
must buy
some new lungs.

Lightning

disrupts the sky


as tonight's storm front moves in.

Still about 50 kilometres distant, perhaps an hour away.

The sentence is taken under consideration. The sentience is token, under construction.

ka mate ka ora

Guest-edited by Robert Sullivan, the latest issue of ka mate ka ora, a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics, is a tribute to Hone Tuwhare who died last year.

Michele Leggott, the N.Z. Poet Laureate & an associate editor of the journal, writes of the issue: "Yes, it's late: there was a much bigger take-up than expected to kmko's call for Tuwhare material, but it's worth waiting for: 8 essays, 3 sets of archival photographs and 25 tributes plus an editorial by Sullivan and a poroporoaki (farewell) by Hana O'Regan called 'He tītī me te waihoka pōhutukawa / Mutton Birds and Red Wine'. Much to savour, much to ponder."


Hone Tuwhare at Jerusalem, 1972
(photo - William Farrimond)

The photo above is of Tuwhare at the funeral of James K. Baxter. The extract below is from Tuwhare's poem for JKB, "Heemi".

but come simply to call
on a tired old mate in a tent
laid out in a box
with no money in the pocket
no fancy halo, no thump left in the old
ticker.

Today the
postman brought
me a large Bo
tree. I have re-
planted it in
the overgrown
back garden be-
tween the lychee
& the macadamia.
Next week I am
going for a
holiday, & there
will be no-one
here to hear it
if it falls. Will
Buddha-mind?

Chow Yun-Fat day

Since these days they have days for everything,


I'm hereby declaring today Chow Yun-Fat Day in honor of my favorite actor.

lines of

l
a
n
g
u
o
r
tude &
lassitude

jot/things

Cacophony in the street. It's being dug up to lay new water mains. Been going on all week—concrete cutters, excavators, bob cats, picks & shovels, backhoes, dump trucks—but it's been slow going, about fifteen metres a day, because, like nearly all the elevated land around these parts, it's rock. So now they've brought in the heavy artillery, a jackhammer on the end of a huge posthole-digger on caterpillar tracks.

*

I feel sorry for the guys working out there. What seems as if it's going to be a long hot summer has settled in on us. It's about 36° C outside, humid as all hell. I'm inside, fans & airconditioners on, & they're working nominal eight hour days in the full heat, in reflective safety gear. I say nominal, because I note that they have long morning & afternoon breaks, & it's an extended hour that they take for lunch.

*

The postman has been. The standout item is a handwritten postcard from Gustave Morin announcing the publication of "one of (his) newest projects, Nein Typos, a suite of typewriter poems", just out from Reed Altemus' Tonerworks.

*

I'm waiting for the postal van to come (a) because I'm expecting the dvds of the first half of series four of Battlestar Gallactica which has only gone to tv here on high definition which we don't have & (b) Michael Steven has emailed me from New Zealand to say that a box of Lunch Poems, the chapbook of mine that he's published, is on its way to me for me to sign & number & send back. I'm somewhat excited about it because though this is, I think, my seventeenth book, it's my first "crafted with care in the way that only chapbooks can be done" publication.

*

& on the subject of books. I've just received word that a second selection from Series Magritte has been accepted.

*

& on the subject of publications. Issue #14 of word for / word has just come out & a couple of my pieces are included.

Just let me put my teeth in first....

A gun company will market a pistol to elderly Americans that will be subsidised by the government in the same way as a wheelchair or walking frame.

The company, Constitution Arms, claims its gun, called a Palm Pistol, has won approval as a medical device for people with arthritis or other disabling conditions who have trouble squeezing the trigger on a normal firearm.

Under the deal, seniors who buy the $US300 ($460) 9mm handgun will be reimbursed by the federal government in the US, magazine New Scientist reports.

Matthew Carmel, president of Constitution Arms in Maplewood, New Jersey, said the gun was "something that they need to assist them in daily living".

"The justification for this would be no more or less for a (walking aid) or wheelchair, or any number of things that are medical devices," Mr Carmel told the magazine.

The company's sales information states: "It is also ideal for seniors, disabled or others who may have limited strength or manual dexterity.

"Using the thumb instead of the index finger for firing, it significantly reduces muzzle drift, one of the principal causes of inaccurate targeting. Point and shoot couldn't be easier."

The company informed a medical technology blog that the US Food and Drug Administration had approved it as a "Daily Activity Assist Device".

It says it has already been fielding "lots of calls" about the device, expected to available by 2010.

However, a FDA spokeswoman denied the agency had formally labelled the gun a medical device, telling the magazine no determinations had been made about the weapon.

Food chain correction

Yesterday's coupling, sans lurking lizard, was repeated again today; & a correction is necessary to the order of the food chain I gave. It wasn't the spider that had the wasp, it was the reverse. More obvious today.

A biologist friend tells me that the wasp injects its eggs into the spider. The offspring grow by feeding on the flesh that surrounds them.

druthers

I've sung, acted, played music in various genres (classical, jazz, rock), written & performed my own words. But the one thing I never did, & would have very much liked to, was to be a dancer.

Come home, Joern. All is forgiven.

This is / what is


This is / what might have been



The bottom image is how the runner-up in the international competition to design the Sydney Opera House would have looked in situ.

The winning design came from Joern Utzon, a Danish architect who died at the weekend. He never actually saw the finished product "live", withdrew during its construction to ensure the project was completed. Lots of trials & tribulations which are detailed here.

The misspelt search terms

& phrases that bring people to a site are often quite funny, both in their phraseology & in the fact that the link provided in answer to the question or quest sure isn't going to prove satisfactory.

I have a regular stream of "fucking doges" searchers who must go away unhappy that my blog isn't a zooporn site. & Christ knows what the person who keyed in "my seman is green" would have made of the Geof Huth poem in Otoliths they were directed to.........

Series Magritte

It would have been good if it had been a nice round number like 200 since it's a only a couple of days short of five years since the first poem in the series appeared as a post on As/Is.

Still, I'm pleased to note that #190, Titanic Days, has just been posted to my Series Magritte.

confused classical hay(na)ku

t
h
e

h
e
e  l    o  f

Achilles*      (*his sandal)

Today the
postman brought
me a giant
squid from
20,000 leagues
beneath the
sea. I was so
looking for-
ward to having
battered jumbo
calamari rings
for dinner but
it didn't survive
the journey, &
squid soup
just doesn't
cut it somehow.

A follow-up on yesterday's post

HEALTH Minister Nicola Roxon has dumped one of her new men's health ambassadors over his "abhorrent" views about homosexuals, but her other appointee is still railing that "extreme feminists" are on a witch hunt to get him.

Ms Roxon said today she took full responsiblity for failing to vet the candidates properly before they were appointed this week.

Bird
shadows frightened
him.    Their         silence.

rendered prost(r)ate

The Australian Federal Government has appointed six "men's health ambassadors" to spur men to watch their health and seek regular medical check-ups and tests for prostate cancer.

One appointee said his rural background and 30 years experience as a hairdresser and hair colour salesman made him uniquely suited to the role. Two of the others co-wrote a paper that claims homosexuality is a mental disorder and that gay people are more likely to molest children.

Hopefully, since they haven't drawn the same amount of press coverage, the remaining "ambassadors" might actually have some credibility.

phroemase

out of srots

millions, billions, trillions, zillions, sillions

sillion: n. An extremely high number of hits on a literary blog. [Middle English, from Old French milion, probably from Old Italian milione, augmentative of mille, thousand, from Latin; combined with the Modern American poetic nominative (Ron) Silliman.]

Which was what adding a Magritte codpiece to Google search did for my Series Magritte.

Magritte & my father

Series Magritte #35

The Liberator

I have always thought
of the subject as
Italian. The patriarch of
a transported family, sugar
cane growers in North
Queensland, the first here,
able to speak a little
English, his wife far less
because she never mixed
outside the community. He
is a picture on the wall
or a watcher at the festival
parade, no breath left
to play the tuba in the
marching band, no longer
able to keep in step
with a step he never really
was in step with. Eyes
on an embellished past as a
diminishing present passes by.

*

I see echoes of my father
also. Non-Italian. Freemason.
The attache case with the regalia
hidden inside, the pearled
candelabra reminding me
of jewels & embroidered
aprons. He never talked to me
about it. I never asked. He
never talked because I didn’t
ask. I never asked because
he never talked about it. Round
& round. We never came close.

*

Never a liberator. Quite
the reverse. A tight hold
on the family. Rationed
freedom. We escaped by
becoming birds or keys or
pipes or wineglasses. Every-
day objects that could always
be replaced. He never
noticed. The space inside
the outline is as it has always
been, a shadow of himself, how
he’d always seen us. The
eyes in the pearled lorgnette
are mother’s eyes. She is
held tightly. A second cane.

My father

once read Kerouac's The Subterraneans in an attempt "to understand me".

He didn't like the book.

Google tells me

it's 110 years since Magritte was born.

It's also 110 years plus a few months since my father was born. He used to wear hats—they were de rigeur for his times. I have a memory of seeing a photo of him in a bowler. I could be wrong. It might just be wishful thinking, an attempt to find a point of commonality.

My
dreams are
made of polyurethane.

Consequence. I am
insulated from
them.

The sign says it all

"My quietness has a man in it"

The painter Grace Hartigan, to whom Frank O'Hara dedicated "In Memory of My Feelings", one of the greatest poems of the last 50 years, has died.

The photo above is of the painter & the poet at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in the 1950s.

But who will stay to be these numbers
when all the lights are dead?

Today the
postman brought
me an invitation
to nominate
my favorite
Impressionist
painting. What to
pick? I've been
weighing up the
crows & ponds.

eN  
c
o
m
p
a
  Ss

This "old man" talk

that's floating around — here & here, for example — is making me feel much younger than my years.

Thanks, guys!

A snippet from Leonard Cohen

"Dylan and I were having coffee in Paris a few years ago. He was doing Hallelujah in concert and asked me how long it took to write. 'Oh, the best part of two years.' He said, 'Two years?' Kinda shocked.

And then we started talking about a song of his called I And I. I said, 'How long did you take to write that?' He said, 'Oh, the best part of 15 minutes.' I almost fell off my chair.

And the thing is I lied. Actually, it took me closer to five years. Of course he lied, too. It probably took him 10 minutes."

&, yes, it is a Nigerian scam

& it's got quite a history!

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22I+am+sending+you+this+e-mail+from+the+city+Library+and+I+only+have+30+min%22&num=20&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0

Seems like someone has accessed David's contact list this time around.....

Is this a new variation of the Nigerian email scam or a genuine cry for help from David-Baptiste Chirot?

I received the following email in both my Otoliths & personal accounts. The sender was given as david_chirot at yahoo.

How are you doing today? I am sorry i didn't inform you about my traveling to Africa for a program called "Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education, the program is taking place in three major countries in Africa which is Ghana , South Africa and Nigeria . It as been a very sad and bad moment for me, the present condition that i found myself is very hard for me to explain.
I am really stranded in Nigeria because I forgot my little bag in the Taxi where my money, passport, documents and other valuable things were kept on my way to the Hotel am staying, I am facing a hard time here because i have no money on me. I am now owning a hotel bill of $700 and they wanted me to pay the bill soon else they will have to seize my bag and hand me over to the Hotel Management, I need this help from you urgently to help me back home, I need you to help me with the hotel bill and i will also need $850 to feed and help myself back home so please can you help me with a sum of $1,550 to sort out my problems here? I need this help so much and on time because i am in a terrible and tight situation here, I don't even have money to feed myself for a day which means i had been starving so please understand how urgent i need your help.i have decided not tell my family so that they will not be worried.when I return I will tell them and they will understand.
I am sending you this e-mail from the city Library and I only have 30 min, I will appreciate what so ever you can afford to send me for now and I promise to pay back your money as soon as i return home so please let me know on time so that i can forward you the details you need to transfer the money through Money Gram or Western Union.Hope to hear from you.
Regards,
david

My first suspicion. I have two email addresses for David, neither of which is a yahoo account. True, it's a reasonably valid sounding D-BC email, but why create a new account with a different providor for this email unless the sender was appropriating the name? But, whether or not it was genuine, I am in no position to assist financially, so I replied, copying David at his gmail account, to say that I was sorry but was unable to help.

An hour later (despite the fact that the 30 minute time window mentioned above was well & truly over when I opened the first email) I received the following reply.

Dear Editor,
Thanks for the mail,I am so happy for your repply am so greatful . i promise you as soon as i get back home i would pay you back.i would like you to send me the money through western union to the hotel mangament because of the problem with the lost of my passport.so make the payment with the information below, for i am still lucky cos i have found someone to reas me 800,doller in the next 30 minut so please do not tell any one about this i only trust and confirm in you ,so please any amount you can possibly reas for me now plaese send it now i need to retoun home

Name:clement leleji
Address:Ekko Hotel and Suites Room 6
State: Lagos
Country: Nigeria
Zip Code: 23401

After you have made payment,Send your payment details such as
sender Name:
MTCN 10 Digits:
Test Question:For who?
Answer:
Amount sent:

Make the payment. Thanks and l hope to hear from you very soon.

David still appears to be continuing posting to his blog & contributing to the Buffalo Poetics list. So, forget suspicion. Make that fact. It's a scam email as far as I'm concerned. A Nigerian scam email, of a never before seen variety, the stranded poet genus. No longer several million dollars appropriated by some now dead relative that needs to be liberated to a foreign bank account once details & a deposit for expenses has been sent, but a low level, possibly generating only a few thousand dollars, Nigerian scam that recognizes that we poets are poor.

(added an hour later)
The first email has arrived again in my personal account, but this time Gmail has classified it as spam. What has happened in the interim to warrant the change in status?

T=O=M=A=T=O

"Who else would have eight tomato plants with individual trelisses and only come up with 590 tomatoes?"
—E.R.T.; The Blind Chatelaine's Keys, 11/9/08

An
inquisitive hay(na)ku
for Eileen Tabios—

is counting tomatoes
the new
poetry?

90 years ago today

the sender of this postcard died.

Today the
postman brought
me a piano
accordion. I
don't know what
I've done to
make him
hate me so.

The print parts

of issue ten of Otoliths


are now available at The Otoliths Storefront.

A letter to my U.S. friends

What you will see in the post-Inauguration months is

a couple of highly symbolic acts—
Guantanamo Bay closed, the signing
of an international emissions protocol

a number of "liberal" laws enacted
mixed in with a couple of "conservative" ones
to show that an Obama Administration
is center- not far-left

little visible change to the political landscape
so that you begin to wonder
just who you voted for

recession named outright instead of being the
word that dares not speak its name

unemployment rise

money still remain tight
but the rich getting richer

Sarah Palin made-over
with a liberalizing moisturiser
& a trendy wardrobe
to hide the neocon underwear
that's emblazoned with 2012

U.S. forces still in Iraq at the beginning of 2010

more U.S. forces being sent to Afghanistan
& the first use of "surge" in that context

the phrase "that'll be done
in the next term of office"
being used more & more

disappointment, because things aren't moving as fast & as far as you'd hoped

Notes before finally blacking out, Pt 3

I spent much of the day watching CNN. Even before I began, my optimism for a Democrat victory was high—witness the hay(na)ku in the post below, uploaded an hour before the first state closed its polling booths. My optimism grew as the results came in, but one is never sure of such things. There was the classic Dewey "win"; &, closer to home, I remember an election here in 1974 where the Labor Party's lead which, shortly after the beginning of the counting, had seemed impregnable, was slowly whittled away & it was only in the wee small hours of the morning that it was confirmed they'd won. So it came as a relief when one of the anchors, in response to a Dorothy Dix question from their on-air partner & using the quite remarkable technology on show all day, demonstrated that there was no way, from that point on, that McCain could win. Shortly after, the polls in California closed. One minute later, Obama was unofficially named as the next President of the U.S. From then on in it was like a rerun of West Wing. McCain gave a remarkably eloquent, gracious & inclusive concession speech, Obama a Presidential oration, also inclusive, very little use of "I" —if any; lots of "we". No hubris or arrogance. A down to earth speech that evoked memories of orators of the past who put their actions into words, & the speech of a man who obviously is not going to shirk the enormous task he & his fellow politicians &, indeed, the entire U.S. population have in the upcoming years.

Since the rise of the U.S. to the status of the world power, an always significant but, dependant on the current realpolitik, shifting number of nations &/or political groups have used the U.S. as their muscle. There are subsequent trade-offs—economic, military, political, environmental—as payment for that "assistance", not all of them popular, & the perception of the world—friend or foe—was of an U.S. that was arrogant, self-righteous &, always, moved to act by self-interest. Sometimes that self-interest coincided with the self-interest of others, & so.......

Bear in mind that it's the political rulers that I'm talking about here. No matter how many Dylans or Pollocks or Miles Davises the U.S. produce—or Paris Hiltons or Sons of Sam, for that matter—it's the actions of the Administration that shape the geopolitical landscape.

For better or worse, nearly all previous Administrations had the interests of the nation—or at least their vision of it—at heart. What George W. Bush did was to introduce personal greed & a level of hypocrisy never seen before to the mix. No longer "My Nation 'tis of thee" but "My Cronies 'tis for thee". Make no mistake about it: the Bush years have left the U.S. morally bankrupt in the eyes of most of the world. & now, economically bankrupt as well.

What the election of Barack Obama has done is restore much of the U.S.'s reputation instantaneously. The Democrats would probably have won no matter which of the two main contenders for the nomination had been chosen. I have no doubt that Hilary Clinton would have been a good President, but the need, & the universal mindset & necessary momentum, for major change would have taken longer to address, to bring about, perhaps eight years. The immensity of Obama's win has swept those eight years away. The symbolism of Obama's election cannot be overstated. It's not just the winds of change, but the winds of goodwill that are now blowing towards the borders of the U.S. from all directions. I have known only one act of similar symbolism in my lifetime; the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

With Obama's victory speech, I felt two circles were finally complete. You could hear echoes of Martin Luther King Jr. resonating in the words, made more poignant by the sight of a weeping Jesse Jackson in the assembled crowd. The dream may not have yet become total reality, but it has a whole lot more substance.

& the last time I saw footage of people of goodwill gathered in Grant Park, just over forty years ago, they were being brutally dispersed by the billyclubs of Chicago's finest. Don't tell me it was coincidence that Barack Obama chose this venue.

Today I saw demonstrated the true meaning of e pluribus unum.

Finally, with the results of three states still in doubt, but with Obama leading in North Carolina & so likely to pick up at least another 15 electoral college votes, let me just say that I'm quite pleased with my predicted outcome.

electoral college votes prediction hay(na)ku

Obama
Biden, 359.
McCain Palin, 179.

This, & that

A couple of varietals, one old, one new, have been included in a couple of recent uploads to the web.

The old is a marquee piece, Pour Prévert, some autumn leaves, which is included in the Autumn anthology that Anny Ballardini has added to her wonderful Poet's Corner at Fieralingue.

The new is a chess(checker)board piece, Envelope Artifact, which is part of an adjunct folio to Visual Poetry Today, Geof Huth's selection of & introduction to visual poetry for the print journal Poetry that has now been posted to the Poetry Foundation website.

Obama for President

(from the New Yorker via The Observer of 11/2/08.)

An eloquent & ringing endorsement of Barack Obama for President of the U.S.

"The election of Obama — a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of 21st-century America — would, at a stroke, reverse our country's image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting- rights acts of the 1960s and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama."

The full text can be found here.

A Barack Obama hay(na)ku

"We
have a
righteous wind at

our
back," he
told his audience.

Studs Terkel, 1912-2008

"When Studs Terkel listens, everybody talks."
(the late CBS newsman Charles Kuralt)




& for once, about to do the talking. He waits to give a Labor Day address in 2003 to marchers outside the Congress Hotel in Chicago where members of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union are on strike.

Issue eleven of Otoliths is now up

Reed Altemus
For Robert Saunders


Issue eleven, the southern autumn, 2008 issue of Otoliths, has just gone live. As usual, the contents are wide-ranging. There are text & visual poems, photographs, paintings, & a variety of prose pieces. There's even an essay on otoliths.

The contributors to this issue are Anny Ballardini, Michael Aanji Crowley, Sheila E. Murphy, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, Eileen R. Tabios, Marcia Arrieta, dan raphael, Philip Byron Oakes, Michael S. Begnal, Halvard Johnson, Peter Ciccariello, Naomi Buck Palagi, Aaron Crippen, Raymond Farr, John Martone, Jeff Harrison, Andrew Topel, Felino Soriano, Reed Altemus, Iain Britton, Bill Drennan, Charles Freeland, J. D. Nelson, Mary Ellen Derwis, Joe Balaz & Mary Ellen Derwis, Alexander Jorgensen, Craig Rebele, Gregory Braquet, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Michele Leggott, Martin Edmond, Angela Genusa, Bobbi Lurie, Charles Mahafee, Spencer Selby, Thomas Fink, Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason, Cara Benson, harry k stammer, Samit Roy, Geof Huth, Stephen Nelson, Jaie Miller, Paul Siegell, Dorothee Lang, Stephen C. Middleton, Vernon Frazer, Tom Beckett, John Moore Williams, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Manas Bhattacharya, David-Baptiste Chirot, sean burn, Scott Helmes & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & various collaborators, John M. Bennett, Doug White, Steve Wing, Julian Jason Haladyn, Zev Jonas, & Robert Gauldie.

The two print parts of Otoliths ten should be available within the next week from The Otoliths Storefront & the first eight parts—issues 1-4, parts one & two of each—are now also available from there as low-cost downloads.