His ideas were
so out
of

date
it was
appropriate they came

leg-
strapped to
a carrier pigeon.

please / allow me / to introduce myself

(which, given the title of the post immediately below, strikes me as an appropriate title for this post)

I'm a man
who usually
doesn't preen

but in this case, forgive me.

Have just received my print copies of Otoliths issue four - yes, I'm always the last to get them; I live on the edge of the world, & then you have to go inland - & let me just say that, apart from my fuckup in forgetting what year it is, they're impressive.

Because I don't live in mainland America, the copies I receive are printed by Lulu's Spanish associate printer who doesn't do anywhere near as good a job with b&w as Lulu's US-based printing works. But they don't seem to be able to screw up the colour issue, & I love it!!!!

Actually, I love both issues, & would like to give a great big thankyou to everyone who contributed & made them what they are. My on-going regret is that, even though I may be a man of taste, I am not sufficiently a man of wealth to be able to give contributors a copy of both parts &/or be able to afford to print it as one single issue. That latter option would have a total print & postage cost of about $2000; the former about $1500. But if the Lilly Foundation decided to bequeath to what's actually going on rather than what's in cryogenic suspension & pretending to be alive......

The
artifact reverb-
erates, becomes real.

A defeat for Hicks, a victory for the hicks

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty Monday to material support of terrorism, securing a symbolic victory for the Bush administration in the first war crimes trial since World War II.

After a day of legal wrangling in which two of Hicks' three defense lawyers were barred from representing him, the 31-year-old Muslim convert and soldier of fortune told the military judge in a specially reconvened night session that he had aided a terrorist group.

Bedraggled and appearing irritated, Hicks showed little emotion at the prospect of potentially leaving Guantanamo Bay after more than five years in military detention.

Under an agreement between Washington and the Australian government, Hicks would be allowed to serve any sentence in an Australian prison.

The tribunal's presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann, is expected to hear the details of what Hicks has admitted to this afternoon, and the 10-member military commission could gather by the end of the week to determine a sentence, said spokeswoman Maj. Beth Kubala. The tribunal is formally known as a commission.

Hicks was captured in December 2001 by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance fighters while attempting to flee the country in a taxi. He was turned over to U.S. forces and flown to Guantanamo Bay in January 2002.

He faced allegations of using a gun to guard a Taliban tank, conducting surveillance of the empty U.S. Embassy in Kabul, attending Al Qaeda training camps and fighting American forces in Afghanistan.

Although she proclaimed herself a neutral party in the Pentagon's newly reconstituted war crimes process, Kubala said Monday's proceedings demonstrated that "this is a process that is transparent, legitimate and moving forward."

Hicks was the first detainee to be prosecuted among the nearly 800 men who have been brought here as so-called enemy combatants since January 2002, and the only one charged formally with a war crime. He also was one of 10 suspects charged under tribunals enacted by President Bush in November 2001 that were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court nine months ago. About 385 detainees remain in the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Under the evolving rules of the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in September, the defense and prosecution can cut a plea bargain, as in a civilian court, and recommend a negotiated sentence to the tribunal members, who act as judge and jury in meting out punishment.

Hicks changed his mind about entering a plea after more than four hours of pretrial procedures in which his main defense lawyer, Marine Maj. Michael Mori, was unable to persuade Kohlmann that he needed more time to prepare.

Mori was left alone at the defense table with the defendant when civilian criminal defense lawyer Joshua Dratel was barred from participating because he refused to promise to adhere to procedural rules that had yet to be defined.

"I can't sign a document that provides a blank check on my ethical obligations," Dratel told Kohlmann, saying his obligation was to his client, not to the military process. "You can't make it an all-or-nothing proposition. I can't buy a pig in a poke."

Kohlmann also declined to approve a second civilian lawyer, Rebecca Snyder, on the grounds that commission rules allowed civilians only if their representation incurred no expense to the U.S. government. Snyder is a Pentagon employee.

Legal analysts were critical of the opening day of the reconstituted war crimes tribunal.

"These trials are the United States' chance to restore its moral authority and reputation as a leading proponent of the rule of law. Instead, today's antics highlighted the illegitimacy of a hastily crafted process without established precedent or established rules," said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer observing the commissions for Human Rights Watch. "It appears that Mr. Hicks was strong-armed into pleading guilty after two of his counsel were thrown off the case."

L.A. Times

Way / more West / Way out East

Celebrating Way More West: The Selected Poems of Edward Dorn

The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, 131 E. 10th St at 2nd Ave
Wednesday, April 11, 8:00 pm

Cost: 8 dollars

A reading to mark the publication of Way More West: New and Selected Poems by Edward Dorn (Penguin Books), Edited by Michael Rothenberg with an Introduction by Dale Smith.

Reading Dorn's work will be Jennifer Dorn, Michael Rothenberg, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Ammiel Alcalay, George Kimball, Rosalie Sorrels and Anselm Berrigan.

molehill
molecule
molarize
polarize
lacerate
medicate
fountain
mountain

the accidental science experiment

Let me just report, en passant, that the tail of a gecko continues to twitch for at least a minute after being severed from the body.....

Today the
postman brought
me "Ventriloquism
for Dummies".

Many of the people

who have been interviewed at Tom Beckett's e-values I would class as friends. But they are electronic ones, physically far away, across oceans.

Finally, someone I've actually met, who I had dinner with at a Vietnamese restaurant in the heart of Newtown, Sydney not so long ago, who lives relatively close by - okay, it's 2000 kilometres, but that's only a couple of hours away. Tom's latest interview is with Jill Jones, a wonderful poet. Check it out.

My little old American gramma

I quite happily use program & disk in my regular writings, remember to use color & center when I'm writing html but stick with colour & centre the rest of the time. Occasionally I succumb & use -ize when I don't realise what I'm doing or am trying to extemporise. I have no problems publishing a magazine where one poem title has grey in it & another has gray.

None of that I consider in any way wrong, just different jargons if you like. But I cannot come to terms with the American way of using punctuation inside quotation marks. (& quotation marks are another Americanism I have succumbed to. I learnt at school that only speech or a direct quote should go into quotation marks. Otherwise it should be 'quotation marks'. & please note where that fullstop went.)

I grew up having drummed in to me that only if you were quoting a complete sentence did you put the fullstop inside the quotation marks, singular or plural. So…

In the sentence above I used the words "quotation marks". The fullstop is there to signal the end of a sentence. " doesn't do that. It doesn't make sense to me to write "quotation marks." If I was asked to say what I had written three (now four) sentences ago I would respond:

"In the sentence above I used the words 'quotation marks'."

It's one of those piddling little things that irritate the shit out of me, makes me almost mad enough to launch a pre-emptory strike on whoever the arbiters of grammar in the U.S. are. & you can quote me on that.

in sight

Translucency on
a different wave-
length. Not light
from behind
but from with-
in. How sweet the
beets are. Leave
the words       out.

Today
the postman
brought me some


wonderful


Kabuki Dancers


from Ray Craig.

Full-
sized, &
glossy. & in

an
act of
surprising consideration, that

perhaps
shows that
he knows I

talk
about him
behind his back,

the
postman parked
his putput motorcycle

by
the post-
box & walked

down
the path
to leave the

envelope
on the
porch bench so

the
prints inside
would not get

crumpled
or damaged
in any way

A footnote to history, for Tom Beckett

It is said that when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed entered the courtroom in his bell-bottomed orange jumpsuit to "confess" to the Military Tribunal at Guantanamo Bay he paused in the doorway & then walked into the room with the best John Travolta strut he could manage within his shackles, & began

Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother,
you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin',
and we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.

At which point the whole tribunal jumped up with their left hands finger-pointing to the cctv cameras disguised as a mirrorball on the roof & joined in the chorus

Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive.

a g(u)ilt-edge confession

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has admitted responsibility for the first Bali bombing and other major al-Qaeda operations, according to the transcript of a hearing at Guantanamo Bay released today.

"I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z," Mohammed, speaking through a personal representative, said, according to the transcript of the hearing on Saturday at the US military prison camp in Cuba.

Mohammed, a Pakistani national, also said he was responsible for a 1993 attack on New York's World Trade Centre, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, and an attempt to down two American airplanes using shoe bombs.

In addition he claimed responsibility for the breaking down of the Berlin Wall, the bursting of the dot.com bubble, the Chernobyl disaster, the rupturing of Britney Spears' hymen, the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e wars, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, the Annunciation of St John, the death of Andy Warhol, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the creation of hiphop, the production in Hollywood of the phoney movie where man supposedly landed on the Moon & all other "terrorist crimes" that there were no suspects for.

Amazing what three years in a CIA "ghost prison" can do.

oops

So much going on I don't even know what year it is. If you look at the cover of Otoliths below, you'll see that I still think it's 2006.

Changed it in a mad midnight rush (thanks, harry; thanks lines of longitude). Now everything's up to date in Kansas City (says the deposed Wizard of Oz).

Purrint

Part One of Otoliths issue four contains text & visual poetry & prose by Phil Primeau, Jean Vengua, Daniel f. Bradley, Amanda Laughtland, Karin Kroetlinger, Nicholas Manning, nick-e melville, Katrinka Moore, Jnana Hodson, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, The Pines, Keith Kumasen Abbott, MTC Cronin, Eileen Tabios, Kristin Hannaford, Bob Marcacci, Jeff Harrison, Vernon Frazer, John Mercuri Dooley, Ayşegül Tözeren, David Prater, Ed Higgins, Dion Farquhar, Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, Carl Baker, Paul Siegell, J.D.Nelson, Jonathan Hayes, Martin Edmond, Suzan Sari, Samuel Wharton, Kevin Doran, Vernon Frazer & Michael Rothenberg, Caleb Puckett & Tom Beckett.

Part Two of Otoliths issue four contains full-colour text & visuals from Keith Kumasen Abbott, Ray Craig, Andrew Topel, Peter Ciccariello, Spencer Selby, nick-e melville, Ed Schenk, Richard Kostelanetz, David-Baptiste Chirot, Alexander Jorgensen, Carol Jenkins, Nico Vassilakis, Suzan Sari & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, C. Mehrl Bennett, Ayşegül Tözeren, Mikhail Magazinnik, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & Márton Koppány.

The two pieces of vispo on the cover are by Ayşegül Tözeren.

Contributors' copies have been ordered & should start arriving next week. They're also available through the Otoliths Shopfront along with some other goodies.

faultist

The autumnal equinox

draws near. Which means, supposedly, lower temperatures. Except, they seem to be increasing here. Today's temperature was 42° Celsius — that's 110° in US currency.

The
house hums
with air conditioners.

Today the
postman brought
me a letter from
Geof Huth. I'm
still trying
to work out
what fucking
alphabet it
came from.

après une aussi longue soirée

perhaps
     they should
        be called
        out-of-
     controlled
substances