Today the
postman brought
me Indiana
Jones & The
Walking Frame.

who's a pretty luddite, then?

I have just been forced to decline a poem for Otoliths, not because I didn't like it—I do—but because it made liberal use of wingdings, & I've discovered that coding for wingdings produces nonsense characters on machines using any other browser than IE. &, as the graph below demonstrates, that's the majority of visitors to the site.



I did a search for the reason for the gibberish, & found:

For Windows, browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape 4 that are not standards-compliant allow non-Unicode fonts such as Wingdings to be specified in HTML or CSS, to enable additional special characters to be displayed. Specifying Wingdings font is contrary to the published specifications, has never been a documented feature of HTML, is not reliable, and should not be done.

My normal default is to view in IE when I post stuff; but I've found over time that the robustness of HTML in IE is not always echoed in other browsers. Usually it's small stuff—forgetting the semi-colon at the end when you're coding for spaces still shows as a space in IE but displays the actual code in Firefox. Occasionally it's a bit more complex, when, for example, there's a passage with a number of tags to it—say italics + bold + underlined + font face + font size—which can be closed in any order in IE & produce the desired result, but which have to be closed in a mirror sequence to their opening to get what you want in Firefox. These errors are generally picked up when I put up the page for the contributor to check, but I've had Firefox loaded for a couple of years to be able to check things if I need to.

But I don't like Firefox. Not for any aesthetic reason, just the fact that proponents of the browser display an almost religious zeal in their advocacy. They remind me of adherents to the theory of creationism, proselytizing that Firefox is a true example of Intelligent Design. Which fits with.....

"Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved." (CBS poll, 2005)

Looks like I'm out on my own here.

sigh

event-
ually gives
up, gives out

Today the
postman brought
me the catalog
raisonné of a
Flemish Master
who doesn't
yet exist. I've
conceptualized
his creations
with the names
that are listed in
the catalog. I'm
still working on
his creation, am
using that fictional
detective from
Los Angeles as
his working name.

renagorize
enagirreoz
orzenageri
rogareezin
geriozerna
aerznoireg
nzairegeor
inragerezo
zenagorrie
egarzioner

"Don't get me started," I said "on the arrogance of calling hills mountains."

"Okay," he said. "I won't."

finis

The bushfires

keep on keeping on.

Issue six

of Pinstripe Fedora, guest-edited by Raymond Farr, is up.

It contains work by Michael Farrell, Thomas Fink, Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason, Daniel Y. Harris, Christine Herzer, John Lowther, Henry Rasof, E.K. Rzepka, James Sanders, Paul Siegell, Matina L. Stamatakis, harry k stammer, & Mark Young.

Great director, great cast, great movie!

Last summer,

it was a category 4 cyclone chugging down the coastline with its attendant threat to move inland at some point during its progress. Fortunately it didn't: the city received a bit of rain & some fairly strong winds, but nothing else.

The year before it was two floods a month apart. Again we were lucky. The lagoon enlarged itself & redefined "the bottom of the street", but we're on a hill, & it was only the low-lying flood plain areas & a few houses that were built on them that went under.

The year before that, a mini-tornado started up about five kilometers away, described an upside down J in its ten kilometer passage, with hyper-winds that tore branches off trees—& occasionally tore down entire trees—but which caused no structural damage to the house though it left us with a bill for over $1000 to have someone cut off the broken branches & clear away the fallen ones.

I may be a year out with that last one. But the first of the two years that either proceeded or bracketed it was extremely hot & dry, & the other was filled up with a long sequence of afternoon tropical thunderstorms.

Six years we've been here, & every summer has been different from the others. This summer—&, yes, I know it's not even summer yet but it may as well be—we're having the worst bushfires that have been recorded in these parts since Europeans settled here the better part of a couple of centuries ago.

There are two ways to build in a flood-prone area. If you build on the flat, then you raise the house well up from the ground, the traditional Queenslander, where the area underneath the house is also great for escaping the heat. The other way is to build on higher ground; & so, over the years, there has been an ever-increasing encroachment on the lower parts of the range of hills that separates the city from the sea. Once the lower slopes have been built on, then the area behind is next for development, & each new area backs upon the bush that covers the hills.

The hillsides behind the houses are reasonably inaccessible; there's the odd walking path, a single road up to the top of the highest point, a few dry creek beds. In other words, it's mainly forest, rarely cleared. & extremely dry. The average total rainfall for the six months May through October over the last 70 years is 200mm. This year it's around 20mm. Add to that a week of what's been described by the Bureau of Meteorology describes as "erratic winds".

We're across the river, well away. But it's a small city, & we're close enough to have ash cover the front porch, to be able to clearly see the fires when we drive down the road. So far there's been no loss of human life, but there's been property damage, loss of domesticated livestock, & probably significant loss of the native fauna that inhabits the area. There have been evacuations, both main roads to the coast have been cut a different times, & one is likely to be again if the fire keeps on going. Fire breaks have been created to protect the built-up areas, but there's still a lot of bushland to provide fuel.

& I'm left wondering what natural disaster is going to occur next summer.

The local daily newspaper has a gallery of fire images here.

Today the
postman brought
me a trans-
Atlantic
passenger liner. I
tried to sail it
in the lagoon
at the bottom
of the street but
when I got it there
it wouldn't budge,
something to do
with Newton's
unpublished
fourth law of
motion which, in
précis, posits
big fish / big
pool. I've decided
to leave the
liner where it is,
open it up as
an hotel. The
pelicans are pissed.

an aspect of incense

sc
 i.e.
n
ce

souound

al fresco

cotillion

Let me just say

that, not being a revhead, I don't understand a single reference in the post/poem below. Beast!

a found postman poem

Yesterday I
ordered the
lightweight
tranny parts off
monster garage, &

today the
postman brought
me my dirt-
bones—they look
beast—& my
novarace head
which is a very
nice piece of
machining. Now I
just need my wasp
for it to go on.

Combinatorics, anyone?

In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, called a map, the regions can be colored using at most four colors so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Two regions are called adjacent only if they share a border segment, not just a point.

(Image by MIT OCW.)

Today the
postman brought
me the Noble
Piece Prize plus
a sac(k)full of
endorsement
requests from
the many
penis enlargement
companies I've
dealt with
over the years.

geographies: Martha's Vineyard

He went into a
hair salon to
get a trim, ended
up walking out
with a bob. Now
he is including
straight bar curls
in his arms
routine. The
prior art has
always shown
that broken or
cracked ribs
from an Italian
manufacturer
             will never fill
          the harbor
beyond Edgar-
town Lighthouse.

meanwhile, the dancers.....

The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The aim of the awards is to honour achievements that "first make people laugh and then make them think". The Ig Nobel Prizes were presented to the winners by genuine Nobel laureates. The ceremony was organised by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, UK, for showing that cows with names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

Peace: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

Biology: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the faeces of giant pandas.

Medicine: Donald L Unger of Thousand Oaks, California, US, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand but not his right hand every day for more than 60 years.

Economics: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa (and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy).

Physics: Katherine K Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, Daniel E Lieberman of Harvard University and Liza J Shapiro of the University of Texas, all in the US, for analytically determining why pregnant women do not tip over.

Chemistry: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M Castano of Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, for creating diamonds from tequila.

Literature: Ireland's police service for writing and presenting more than 50 traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country - Prawo Jazdy - whose name in Polish means "Driving Licence".

Public Health: Elena N Bodnar, Raphael C Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, US, for inventing a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks - one for the wearer and one to be given to a needy bystander.

Mathematics: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize

tropecal

dour

The Mao ficcione

Mao Zedong as he
is now known
started the Long March
with 100,000 followers
& three movies. When
they reached Shanxi
there were only
8000 people &
one movie left. Loss of
faith, starvation, accidents
& the continual harrassment
by Jiang Jie Shi’s
Guomindang army
accounted for the attrition. The
two movies — The Battleship
Potemkin & Les Enfants du
Paradis — were lost when
a landslide carried
the mule that was carrying them
away. Stagecoach was the
only one to survive; but,
fortunately, the pedal-powered
generator that provided
the electricity also
made it through un-
scathed. It is said
that by the end of the
March all the survivors
knew every word of the script
by heart. There is a poem
of Mao’s that starts:
“The long shadow
of John Ford
guards the entrances
to the Shanxi Caves.” That
Zhou Enlai who
drove the generator
is equally revered is
evidenced by the number
of bicycles in China today.

from Calligraphies (xPressed, 2004)

It was 60 years ago today

Chairman Mao taught the band to play.....

Now out from Otoliths—The Meditations, by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

The Meditations
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
80 pages
Cover painting by Julia Wolfson
Otoliths 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-5-5
$12.50 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-meditations/7491123

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Meditations beautifully combine the inward focus of reflection with the leaps and breakages of contemporary urban life — a life in which meditative stillness is elusive, if not impossible. At the meeting-point of real-world politics and poetic internality, The Meditations jump-cut between the rhetorics of capitalism and constant war (“as if the weapons were moving // entirely in the wrong direction”) and hard-won lyric flight (“horses laugh // and clouds put on their aprons”). Throughout, Joritz-Nakagawa plays with line-breaks and white space, with orthography and diacritical marks — all of which syncopate syntax and hint at the manifold meanings hidden in phonemes. Like tesserae, her words and lines create — through fragments — exquisite patterns. These are poems that “enter the language partial / and come out / whole.”
—Elisabeth A. Frost

Today the
postman brought
me three
of the four
humors. "Sorry
about the
missing one,"
he said,
phlegmatically.

The usual reminder

that submissions for issue 15 of Otoliths close in a month's time.

in itself / of itself

he
said nothing.....
which says something

leger demain aujourd'hui

not
smoke&mirrors
making the
unreal
real

but
smoke&dust
doing
the re-
verse

For the climate change sceptics out there,

a day in the life of Australia....

Queensland


photographer unnamed, Springfield News

Sydney


photo: Mark Khademi, Timesonline

Broken Hill


photo: Gavin Schmidt, The Daily Telegraph

Canberra



photo : AAP, Adelaide Now

Adelaide



photographer unnamed, Adelaide Now

"Extreme conditions are causing mayhem across the country, ranging from Sydney's freakish dust storm, to bushfires in Queensland, hail storms in South Australia and the Hunter Valley, heavy rain in the Mallee and even earthquakes in Victoria.

In Queensland, hundreds of firefighters were yesterday called to battle the blazes as total fire bans rolled into place across more than half of the state.

Fire conditions have been described as "very high to severe" in a huge area stretching along the south-east coastline, through the majority of inland Queensland and as far north as Mount Isa.

At least four Sydney-bound flights have been diverted to Brisbane this morning and long delays are expected at Sydney Airport as dust clouds blanket much of NSW.

Hail stones reportedly as big as cricket balls hit the town of Crookwell near Goulburn, damaging windows and tiles but there are few reports of damage in Sydney.

Victorian residents last night told of shaking houses and loud bangs after two small earthquakes rocked Melbourne's south-east suburbs.

The magnitude 3 and 2.6 earthquakes south of Frankston were recorded within 13 seconds of each other at 6.21pm. No major damage was reported."

The Age

edifice

(Reasonably) Recently Received

Michael Basinski, All My Eggs Are Broken, BlazeVOX [books], Buffalo NY, 2009

Skip Fox, Delta Blues, ahadada books, Burlington Canada, 2009

Scott Hamilton, To The Moon, In Seven Easy Steps, Titus Books, Waimauku N.Z., 2007

Michele Leggott, Mirabile Dictu, Auckland University Press, Auckland N.Z., 2009

John Martone, ksana, Red Moon Press, Richmond VA, 2009

Pat Nolan, Carbon Data, Last Cookie Press, Box 798, Monte Rio CA 95462, 2008

Paul Siegell, jambandbootleg, A-HEAD Publishing, Nicasio CA, 2009

Eileen R. Tabios, Nota Bene Eiswein, ahadada books, Burlington Canada, 2009

Eileen R. Tabios, Footnotes To Algebra: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009, BlazeVOX [books], Buffalo NY, 2009

My thanks to all the above authors, both for the books & the enclosed messages.

remington randy

insert: archipelago

Tom Taylor, 1938-2009

Tom Taylor in Otoliths

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2008/03/thomas-lowe-taylor-landscape-one-blank.html

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2008/11/thomas-lowe-taylor-hands-thomas-lowe.html

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2009/04/tom-taylor-moe-school-your-flasher-dude.html

It's an equinox,

but Gaia is unsure which one.

So, I spend my days raking up the leaves that have fallen from some of the trees whilst the rainbow lorikeets maniacally drain nectar from the flowers that bloom in profusion on others.

monk II

cascading vertices

9/13

This written for the future,
something to look back on,
to see what my thoughts were
at the time. A commentary
on what is now before me,
how we feast on the dead,
play replay after replay,
from different angles, rewritten
as choreography, a Hollywood
blockbuster with the producers
wanting to make sure the
audience gets its money’s
worth. It is what we’ve come
to expect; but most movies
are cleaner, have stars that
are paid more for their one
performance than this
whole episode would have cost
to carry out. Think on it. Brood
on the implications of what
we’ve learnt in the two days
since. The stand-in pilots had
work visas, lived next door,
supported themselves &
contributed to the economy
of the country they have just
put on notice. The airlines paid
for & provided the bombs. The
extras paid for their own parts.
There was no need for rehearsal.

9/13/01

strike the pose

monk

The Masters

1.
Is the Master you follow Basho or Bosch?
Is your glass half empty or half full?

If it’s Basho then empty your glass
& your mind along with it. But if it’s Bosch
then you’ll probably need to augment it
with a whole lot of things. Maraschino
cherries, coloured ice cubes, maybe one
of those little umbrellas. & that’s just for
starters. There’ll be so many additions
by the time you’ve finished that a
single glass could never hold them all.

2.
I am often told that what is left out
can be just as important as what’s
included. &, moreover, I adhere to the
precept, unlike those Flemish Masters who
include so much in their paintings that it’s
impossible to tell if anything is missing.
I mean, who’d notice the absence of the
kiwi in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights,
painted several centuries before New Zealand
was discovered by Europeans, if it
wasn’t there? & who but a New Zealander
would notice the damn thing anyway
in that mosaic of activity? But Hieronymous
manages to give it the right balance, the right
to be there, even though it took a couple
of hundred years for that imagining to be
realised, & meant ignoring his patron
pleading from the studio door for
more naked lovers, fewer flightless birds.

swordy Arabia

The hunting of the snark thylacine

Thylacine, 1845–63
John Gould and HC Richter

Sheep farmers used the thylacine to pressurise the Hobart government into compensating them for losses. In 1888, a bill was passed offering a £1-per-head bounty on thylacines, an enormous amount in those days, and one that encouraged even more trappers to hunt the animal in its own habitat far from farms, just to get the money The impact of this bill, which was not rescinded until 1909, was immediate and devastating. During the period of its imposition over 2,000 animals were killed and, at the peak of the hunting, the government paid a bounty on a 'tiger' every two days. But in the last days, one bounty every year was nearer the mark, so rare had the animal become. It is unlikely that it ever existed in vast numbers, and certainly never to such an extent as to pose an actual threat to sheep farmers' livelihoods. That thylacines were accused of hunting in packs and killing up to a hundred sheep in a night just for sport.

rapid decline

Those who love to talk
will have to eat their

own words. Some will
eat themselves to death.

Anonymous. c.650 CE
included in: Rivalling The Six Dynasties: Poems from the Eastern Turkish Khaganate selected & translated by Umberto Allegrezza;
The Uzbekistan Historical Society; Bukhara, 2000.

Jaggernaut

Breton sigh

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan...

In the southern Afghan district of Shorabak, the tribesmen gathered shortly before last month’s presidential election to discuss which candidate they would back. After a debate they chose to endorse Abdullah Abdullah, President Hamid Karzai’s leading opponent.

The tribal leaders prepared to deliver a landslide for Abdullah – but it never happened. They claim Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and leader of the Kandahar provincial council, detained the local governor and closed all the district’s 46 polling sites on election day.

The ballot boxes were taken back to the district headquarters where, tribal leaders allege, they were stuffed with ballots by local policemen. A total of 23,900 ballots were finally sent off to Kabul, the capital – every one of them a vote for Karzai.    more

Jerome Starkey and Jon Swain, Times Online

licorice

de-tail

Today the
postman brought
me a postcard
from André
Breton who
writes that he
is alive &
well, & co-
habiting with
an abandoned
kaleidoscope
off the coast
of Costa Rica.

which prompted

Today the
postman brought
me a postcard
from André
Breton who
writes that he
has changed
his family name
to Rieu, & is
making a motza
taking the mickey
out of the
musical world.

for the doubters out there

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/bob-dylan/6080312/Bob-Dylan-could-soon-voice-sat-nav-systems.html

Today the
postman brought
me a satellite
navigation
system with
Bob Dylan
doing the voice-
overs. Worked
fine until we
were coming
up to Highway
61, when it
stopped giving
directions &
started asking
where do I
want the
killings done.

if not
          with
                    flattery

                              then

                    at least
          with
flatulence

I've been so many places
in my life and time
I've sung a lot of songs
I've made some bad rhyme
I've acted out my love on stages
with 10,000 people watching
but we're alone now & I'm
singing this song to you

Officially,

it's still Winter, but it reached 33° C. today. That's around 91° for those of you who continue to use illogical measuring scales.

Today the
postman brought
me jambandbootleg
by Paul Seigell. &,
hand-written on
the back of the
envelope, a poem
from the author:
"Today the
postman brought
me jambandbootleg
by Paul Seigell."
It took the words
right out of my
mouth. Meatloaf
& PHiSH. Quel
combination! I'd
like to see that.

superfluuity

it's been

a few years since I last had a cold or the flu. This one is really making up for lost time.

The Portuguese discover Australia, again.

Martin Edmond, at Luca Antara, on Luca Antara:

"When I returned home quite late last night after a dinner party, there was an email from a Lisbon based publishing house complimenting me on Luca Antara, the book, and inquiring very politely as to who they should speak to regarding a possible Portuguese edition? There's no way of saying this without sounding like a ninny but the fact is, I was so moved that I wept. Luca Antara is written in homage to the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa; and it also seeks to imagine specific ways in which the early Portuguese presence in Australian history might be made manifest. So an expression of interest from the most prestigious, and also one of the oldest, publishing houses in Portugal felt like a mark of honour in itself; and a kind of validation of a book that already has a curious history." more

The N.Y.Times review of the book can be found here.

Lorca bout

In the moist recesses of my romantic youthful imagination, I harbored regrets for not having been able to do a couple of things because they were before my time. One was to have fought in the Spanish Civil War, the other was to have been able to see Nijinski dance.

I was reminded of these wistful & wishful thoughts by a paragraph in a fairly lengthy review by Scott Hamilton in the Scoop Review of Books of Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War.

"The Spanish Civil war may have been a marginal feature of highbrow New Zealand literature at the time when the conflict was actually being waged, but what about its influence on the work of a later generation of writers? In the 1960s a number of iconoclastic young Kiwi writers proclaimed their admiration for Federico Garcia Lorca, the modernist poet who became the great literary martyr of the Civil War when he was shot in cold blood by Franco’s supporters. Mark Young, who was perhaps the most innovative writer operating in this country in the early ‘60s, paid homage to Lorca in an early poem and included references to the Spanish Civil War in several other early pieces. Did the failure of the literary establishment of the ‘30s to do justice to Spain and the writers of the Republic lead to a sort of backlash amongst the following generation? Did some of the exiles from Spain and America who settled in New Zealand after the war help to introduce the work of Lorca and other great Spanish-language modernists to this country?"

To the youthful me, the Spanish Civil War seemed to be the last pure struggle against Fascism. A just war, one that even a pacifist like myself could justify participating in. Then I read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. The descriptions contained in it of the lengths the various leftist groups went to to gain supremacy over the other leftist groups, the bitter squabbling between them that reduced the defeating of Franco to a secondary driver, were enough to make me glad I hadn't been around to take part in it.

But Nijinski still leaps through my imagination, &, even though I invented a time machine,

I Never Did Get To See Nijinski Dance

I hurry through the streets
of the Principality, towards the
theatre where the Ballet Russe
is performing, refusing
the entreaties of the dealers &
street whores who are as
prevalent here as in any other
time. I dodge the Ducattis & the
occasional Hispano Souza on
the roads, the Gatsbys & Grimaldis
on the sidewalks. Looking around
I see that my research has not been
all it should have been, hope that the
synthetic fibre of my tuxedo will not
be noticed. I stay in the background,
sidle into the theatre, take my seat
as unobtrusively as possible. The
lights go up just before going down
again & I see several well-known faces
in the loges. Diaghilev is in the
audience tonight, hosting a party
of his friends, amongst them Cocteau
who will reprise the structure of this
scene twenty-five years later in his
Testament of Orpheus. Then the
overture starts, the Bakst curtain
rises, the dancers enter. I do not
recognise the soloist. “Where is
Nijinski?” I ask. “Sshh!” says
the person on my right. The one
on my left tells me Nijinski quit
the company ten years ago, is now
hopelessly insane. “Such a shame”
she adds. I am forced to agree.

Watched

Scorsese's Shine A Light / on Saturday night. Great film; but I have to agree with — I think it was — Charlie Watts' comment that Buddy Guy was the highlight.



The Stones seemed bigger & better than I remember them, possibly because it was all so up close & personal. But it was very much the same old, same old. They do not reinvent themselves the way that, say, Dylan & Miles Davis do/did.

That said, I still get goosebumps listening to Sympathy for the Devil.

Alas

Once, this was filled



by this.

odds & sods

A new issue of Moria is on line. It contains poetry by:

Subhashis Gangopadhyay, Deborah Meadows, Marcia Arrieta,
Becca Klaver, Natalie Knight, Holms Troelstrup,
John Moore Williams, Talia Reed, Brian Zimmer,
Jason Fraley, Adam Strauss, Tom Hibbard,
Nick Demske, Sarah K Bell, Scott Doolin,
Hugh Tribbey, Ann Fine, Mark Young,
Alexander Jorgensen, Andrew Topel.

It also has an article by Heather Momyer on Stein, Myer, and Fraser.

---

The Canadian on-line continuous-issue journal ditch has been updated with some poems of mine.

---

The already huge but still unfinished new issue of Big Bridge keeps surfacing & submerging. It contains a piece by me in its feature of commentary from around the world on the election of Barack Obama, & elsewhere in the issue, there's a review by Tom Hibbard of my Meritage Press book, Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008.

Issue fourteen of Otoliths has just gone live.

It's one minute into August on the Tropic of Capricorn, & that means it's time to let loose issue fourteen of Otoliths.

As always it's full of variety. There's work by Kirsten Kaschock, Pat Nolan, Márton Koppány, Jim Meirose , Anne Gorrick, Caleb Puckett, Peter Schwartz, Fredrick Zydek, Ed Baker, Ross Brighton, Derek Henderson, John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & Sheila E. Murphy, Raymond Farr, Jill Chan, John Martone, Bob Heman, Philip Byron Oakes, Ric Carfagna, Eileen R. Tabios, Justin Mulrooney, Jeff Harrison, Eric Burke, K. R. Copeland & Jeff Crouch, Crane Giamo, Paula Kolek, Daniel f Bradley, Arthur Leung, Joseph Harrington, Iain Britton, Thomas Fink, Tan Lin, Kristine Marie Darling , Joel Chace, Paul Siegell, Mariana Isara, Jay Snodgrass, Bill Drennan, Jill Jones, Stu Hatton, Nicholas Michael Ravnikar, Mara Patricia Hernandez, Felino Soriano, Matt Hetherington, Marcia Arrieta, Charles Freeland, Vernon Frazer, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Julian Jason Haladyn, Martin Edmond, harry k stammer, Reed Altemus, Randall Brock, Anny Ballardini, sean burn, A. Scott Britton, David-Baptiste Chirot, Joan Harvey, Mary Ellen Derwis, Bobbi Lurie, John Moore Williams, Sarah Ahmad, Scott Metz, Theodoros Chiotis, & Sheila E. Murphy.

Enjoy

ROCKPILE

Please check out the new ROCKPILE Website & Blog at Big Bridge, www.bigbridge.org/rockpile/

ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer - poet, musician, essayist, and more - and Michael Rothenberg of Big Bridge Press. David and Michael will journey through eight cities in the U.S. to perform poetry and prose, composed while on the road, with local musicians and artists in each city. ROCKPILE will serve to educate and preserve as well as to create a history of collaboration. It will help to reinforce the tradition of the troubadour of all generations, central to the cultural upheaval and identity politics that reawakened poets, artists, musicians, and songwriters in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. The project will end with a final multimedia performance celebration in San Francisco.

The ROCKPILE Website & Blog will tell you all you need to know about the ROCKPILE project including performance dates, venues, artist bios and performance clips of some of the musicians we will be meeting and performing with in each of the cities.

Once we hit the road, we will be posting travel photos, journal entries, performance videos, interviews and more, daily, on the ROCKPILE Blog, so log on and join us as we travel around the country. Write us, comment on the blog, and let us know you are with us, let us know you care!

Now if everybody did this.....

Pelican Dreaming

Suggestion/Comment

Thanks for getting a copy of Mark Young’s Lunch Poems, both he and Michael Steven (publisher of Soapbox Press) are great. You should get Mark’s collected poems as well.

Library Answer

Thanks very much for your recommendation. We have now ordered a copy of Mark Young’s Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008, published by Meritage Press. Feel free to place a request on it. We also hold a copy of The Right Foot of the Giant in our collection which contains his poems from the 60s to late 70s. New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre has an excellent web page devoted to him containing a bio, a bibliography and lots of his poems for you to read. Enjoy!

Cynthia Bishell
Collection Services Manager

Canterbury University Library in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Apocrypha (from the Greek word ἀπόκρυφα, meaning "those having been hidden away")

My current fixation with the word apocrypha is that I'm putting together a book of odds & sods that haven't really fitted into my other books — small prose pieces, vispo, pwoermds, etc. — which I'd decided to call An Apocrypha.

I used the word for my perceived sense of its meaning as "that which has been left out", more aligned with the definition above rather than either of those used in the post below. In fact, my book flies in the face of Athanasius' categories. I see it as a part of my canon, hope that it's edifying, do not see it as heretical.

But in light of the modern lay meaning of apocryphal as "spurious" or "of uncertain authorship", I'm rethinking my title. Though it'll probably stay—I've a pretty good cover design in mind, with big capital As all through it.

"Athanasius spoke of three categories of books: canonical, edifying, & 'apocryphal' - meaning heretical works to be avoided altogether. Jerome on the other hand, used the term 'apocryphal' for the second category of books, those which are edifying."

an obituary / for all seasons

he
was 90
& had a

hole in his
ass. shit
came

out of it.

any publicity is good publicity?

Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by John Sandford have also purchased Trust Me by Jeff Abbott. For this reason, you might like to know that Trust Me is now available.

Common enough email. Not so common though is the review excerpt that is quoted in the email. I would have thought that Amazon would be selective in their accompanying information, not offer a review that contains the following....

From Publishers Weekly
...in this furiously paced if less than compelling thriller... the story strikes a number of false notes—convenient plot twists, hard-to-swallow dialogue and a main character who all too easily goes from wimpy grad student to brawny crime fighter over the course of just a few days.

Really makes me want to buy the book.

the / Roadrunner meets / George A. Romero

zoombie

One of my pet hates

is the journalistic practice of using nouns as verbs. (Maybe I should have written that as verbing nouns.....)

I'll be generous & put it down to the sub-editor—do they still have sub-editors?—part of whose job is to come up with a snappy headline. & most of those I've noticed tend to appear in the business pages.

But it's spreading. In the entertainment section of today's N.Z.Herald:

US band to helm fundraiser for
stroke-hit godfather of NZ rock

one of the corners I retreat to

in a pause
in the pulse
of the
beating wings
of words
I
play
J.S.Bach
Air
on the
G String
it is
music of
great beauty
it is
music of
a
great beauty
who walks
towards you
in a
measured
but
elegant
way
until
she reaches
that
last step
when she
could
reach out
touch you
stop
your pulse
blur
your words
forever
instead
she
pauses
time
stops


from The Oracular Sonnets by Mark Young & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
a Meritage Press e-book

the / death of / Anna Nicole Smith

a trophy bride
atrophied

one for Crag Hill

revisitited

Today the
postman brought
me a grassy
knoll & a Presi-
dential motor-
cade. Now
all I need
is a fall guy.

The bireme anchored in an inlet somewhere on the coast of Ithaca.
          The song. On song. Sirens. Syrinx. Goats grazed on / the hillside.
   Drained. Drying up. Deserted. Dessicated. He yearned, not for rain but for contact. "There must be some way out of here."
The train to Bratislava was running late.
Goats grazed on / the syrinx-deserted hillside. The train to Bratislava was running late. He yearned, not for rain but for contact, for song. The bireme anchored in a drying-up inlet somewhere on the coast of Ithaca. "There must be some way out of here."

Lars Palm does it again

Now ready for download from Lars Palm's ungovernable press

Tom Beckett's
Another Shadow?
http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com/

Sex is
a text
(in Braille
and Martian).

Dr. Chen he say:

Heli-
copter day.
Sikorsky Sea Kings.

Hey, please, get off of my cloud

Probably only the fabled Prieuré du Sion has guarded its secrets as closely as The Cloud Appreciation Society. Now some of its members, tired of the secrecy, have decided to open their texts and visions to the world. In this slim volume, edited by Márton Koppány and Nico Vassilakis, we see for the first time what has previously been hidden in the clouds.

Apparently, The Cloud Appreciation Society doesn't appreciate people who appreciate The Cloud Appreciation Society. I have received an email from Lulu saying they were withdrawing the above book from their lists. The why came in response to my email asking what was going on. I've extracted from them below. The first paragraph is from the second email.

"We have been contacted by Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the The Cloud Appreciation Society. He has informed us that this book is not affiliated with The Cloud Appreciation Society in any way. Your book also contains images taken, without permission, from their website."

"As a result, we have removed your content from availability, as per our Membership Agreement, which states 'Lulu reserves the right to refuse to permit your publication on the Site of any Content that Lulu, in its sole discretion, deems in violation of the terms and conditions set forth above.'"

Regards,
Questionable Content Team, Lulu.com

Silkworm Faeces

Dr. Chen he say:

桑蠶屎可以是最有利諧調和溫暖中部區域。
發行拉緊并且鎮定頭腦。

That is just so! I, first son of Dr. Chen, now translate into the English for our American friends. He say:

"The silkworm excrements may be harmonizes advantageously with the warmth middle the region. And release tautness calm brains."

Tautness brains become so calm as in picture of shrine temple. This benefit only come with most beneficial Chinese medicine herbs. You are ordering them now. American friend, if you want tautness calm brains just order Bombycis faeces now! Get warmth middle soonest possible with these fine excrements. Dr. Chen is always guarantee best outcome. Silkworms feed upon the leaves only of the mulberry tree, and most pure are their excrements. For centuries past have the concubines of emperors used these faeces to strengthen warm middles and to prolong moments of clouds-and-rain. The mind is eased. The spirit is oxygenated. The teeth become white, the navel becomes shapely, the nostrils open.

por_betrayal

A further bookish note

Lars Palm's comment on my post about local bookstores has reminded me that I found a recent Sara Paretsky novel, Bleeding Kansas—not a crime novel, btw—on the discount/remaindered table at the local newsagent.

A single copy. First & only time I'd seen the book for sale in town.

Six years ago,

when we moved to Rockhampton, there were three bookshops in town—two Angus & Robertson shops, one Collins, no independents. The major bookstore chain in Australia, Dymocks, had no presence here, &, given their commercial acumen, that in itself was probably a strong indicator of the state of the local market.

Within three years, we were down to one bookstore, a single Angus & Robertson. Collins, which was probably the pick of the three in a general sense, went first, followed by the A&R on the north side of the river which was my favorite because their standard selection of books was augmented with titles chosen by someone who actually read more than the bestseller list & believed there may be others out there who also did.

My memories from Sydney are that Dymocks stocked everything, Collins occupied a sort of respectable niche within the market, & A&R tended to wear the Aussie blue singlet. You could say their shop in Rockhampton is accessorized with footy shorts (Google it if you have to: I refuse to add a link or even talk about them) & socks. Their selection of plays & poetry in its entirety is the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

(I must mention, in the interests of fairness, that the local outlets of the two major department store chains also carry a limited range of books, usually at an up to 30% discount which is why I visit them; there are also a couple of newsagents that carry books; & then there's the local secondhand book store that categorizes not by genre but by gender—female writers, male writers.)

Detective stories are my great love, & though there is a reasonable selection carried in The Last Remaining Bookstore, the bulk of it is by writers whom I don't like. Of those I do, Lee Child, Ian Rankin & Michael Connelly make it, Robert Crais, John Sandford & James Lee Burke sometimes, people like Laurie R. King never. What it means, though, is that there is little chance of browsing the shelves & finding a writer who, on closer inspection, you just might like.

Unless it's in the remainder bin that sits in the front of the shop. Books that come there have never sat on the shelves that surround them, but from some warehouse somewhere that dispatches them in job lots seemingly based on size & no other criteria. I always sort through the books there, occasionally buying something that seems to have promise. I've come away with some crap, but I've also discovered Don Winslow & two quite gritty English authors, Graham Hurley & Stuart MacBride. My usual journey after that is to visit the secondhand shop to see if there's anything else by them there, & then on to Amazon to acquire the back—or forward—catalog.

James Lee Burke is, like Ian Rankin, someone whose writing transcends the category of crime fiction. His major character is a Louisiana detective called Dave Robicheaux who has an adopted daughter, Alafair. So when I found in the remainder bin a crime novel by someone called Alafair Burke, my first thought was quelle coincidence. & then I read the spiel on the author inside the book &, yea, verily, she was the daughter of the aforementioned JLB. Writes differently; the book I came across, Judgment Calls, was her first novel & a little raw, but I liked what she was doing, &, now that I've read her following four novels—two obtained via A&R, two via Amazon—would recommend her most strongly.

birding my time

The Bird Flies Away
unsigned lithograph by Joan Míro (1952)

I spend a lot of time out of the house. It's not that I'm an outdoors person, just a heavy smoker who doesn't smoke inside. Haven't done for at least 15 years now, fortunate that both the house in Sydney & the house here have had large front porches & covered areas at the back.

I excuse myself on the grounds that I need a break from the computer, or I need contemplation time. But that's crap. The truth is that I've always smoked when I wrote or worked at a desk, was renowned for having up to three half-smoked cigarettes burning away in the ashtray at the same time. Plus another one in my mouth. I used to go through 60 a day, now I'm down to about 20 thanks to smokefree homes, offices, restaurants, etc. But a relevant epitaph for me will be "He wrote, he smoked."

Where I smoke here — upstairs, downstairs — depends on time of day, wind direction, where I am & what I'm doing in the house, whether there's a lot of sun, too much, or not enough. So yesterday afternoon, after lunch, I was out the front when my "contemplation" was disturbed by the noise of a couple of magpie larks. They've thin reedy voices, totally unmelodic, the avian equivalent of yapping dogs, & this time they were at high pitch. Looked up to see them giving a kookaburra shit, possibly some territorial thing or maybe they just don't like kookaburras.

The kookaburra was at first unmoved; but then other birds started arriving, attracted by the clamor of the magpie larks. Noisy miners — the name says it all; no redeeming features, extremely territorial birds, well-known for driving other native species away — arrived, about 16 of them. & then half a dozen or so blue-eyed olive-backed orioles — features as above — came to join the party.

So there's this treeful of birds, all but one of them shrieking their heads off. Jumping from branch to branch, circling around, getting close to, above, below, the kookaburra. It remained stoic, moved its head around to see what the hell was going on, then went back to staring into space.

Five minutes of this, full on. Then the noisy miners moved off in 16 different directions, followed a minute or so later by the orioles which tended to stick together. The magpie larks kept on yammering for another couple of minutes, then they too grew tired of it all & moved away.

Leaving the kookaburra, still unfazed by it all. It took a look around to make sure everything else had left, & you could almost see a grin come to its face & the fuck you lot thought pass through its mind. Talk about attitude.

So now I know where the phrase "giving someone the bird" comes from......even if they don't have fingers.

Recounting Numbers

The car clock reads 2:47, the tripmeter the same w/out the colon. If I keep on traveling at the 60kph speed limit distance will never overtake time. I put my foot down.

Replaying,

as helicopters shake the house a dozen times a day, & passenger planes with unfamiliar liveries fly off in directions where there is / no airport for 2000+ kilometres.....

In Conspiracy City

I barely blink when the
fighter-jets come
screaming down
the valley

or when I see
a line of
Black Hawk helicopters
precisely perforating
the sky

but the midnight
entrances & exits
of transport planes

the small
signs
on the
highway

telegraph posts
pointing
the brown convoy
in this direction
the blue
in that

make
me wonder
when the pre-
emptive strike
is coming.

& this
is only a
whisper
of what it’s
like to live
in fear.

should I start getting paranoid?

Who's a pretty camel, then?

"Penny the camel takes a snack break from providing rides to U.S. Marines at Camp Rocky, July 1 2009. Penny is the mascot for the 26th Transport Squadron out of Amberley. Riding Penny will provide morale for camp personnel of Operation Talisman Saber 09 (TS09)."

From the official website.

Today the
postman brought
me a square
peg & a
square hole. It's
a kind of
security blanket.

geographies: Óbidos

Badgers &
English pianos are
both national treasures
but neither survives
the ravages of
an Amazon winter.

geographies: san diego

Comic-Con is less
than two months
      away & Nasa
has despatched
seven astronauts.

Most, but not all,
legumes fix nitrogen.

I have
      two spare rooms.

He

was too proud to beg, so he went round panhandling for synonyms.

Rattling (Talisman) Sabres

Every two years, this area plays host to joint U.S.-Australian war games that go under the name Talisman Sabre. They're heavy shit; land/sea/air, bombing runs, live ammunition, amphibious landings—the last time they were on, there was even a non-stop flight out of Alaska to parachute special services troops into the "combat zone".

30,000 military personnel take part, which has a significant impact on a city of only 60,000. Although most of the action takes place on the coast about 70 kilometres north, the main staging area is a large though normally lightly used military camp across the road from the airport. It's recently become tent city; though I've noticed over the last couple of years that there are a lot more permanent structures being built.

From past experience, it's not the influx of people that you tend to notice, though. They're mainly off playing games. What will be disturbing are the number of military convoys—tanks on low-loaders, armored personnel carriers, troops in trucks, fuel tankers, ambulances—bringing materiel up & down the highway from other military bases in the country or from the port at the mouth of the river that is normally used for exporting salt; the giant Russian—no Cold War in commercial enterprises—cargo planes that will soon start ferrying in dismantled tanks, & helicopters which, when put back together, will be seen crossing the sky head to tail like caterpillars. There will be warships off the coast. There will be large numbers of commercial aircraft bringing in overseas military personnel, then, when they stop, the mock bombing sorties will begin, all day long & sometimes into the night, planes rattling the windows as they pass by the house after taking off from the airport which is only a couple of kilometres away.

& then the small things that nag at you, that generate more than a soupçon of paranoia. The little signs on telegraph posts, color-coded of course, indicating the routes that the various conveys should follow. & the constant wonder as to why a small-city airport has the capacity & the area to accomodate the largest planes in the world.