eric and jerry are in the kitchen making beer, i have a good buzz on here- the new merritt album is on the stereo, and its pretty and domestic, i feel like a new kind of bachelaor, and since antioch, a new kind of calm.

dana and i talked during shine, and we talked about this nebouls change- this call to belief that has over come us.

brian and i had lunch- from sci fi, i got sort of drunk, and he got sort of drunk- we talked of god and music and lit

im happy.

Poet symposium at the White House about Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinsonb was cancelled b/c they thought the poets would be impolitic abou the war.

The poets respond:
I am sure the person who put my name on the list is looking for a job-Sam Hamil
(he compiled poems against the war, a new online anthology- found here
"The abrupt Cancellation of the symposium by the White House confirms my suspicions that the Bush adminstartion is not interested in Poetry...."- Rita Dove
(who writes about Racial and Gender Issues, has been working on peace and made it to the Poet Laurete in 1993-1995)
"...The hideopus use of Langague that emanantes from this White House. The lying, the Orwellian Euphmisism" -Phillip Levine
(winner of a pulitser, active against Vietnam)

dont fuck with poets, they will slash you

London Independent on Sunday, Goya reference of course, and a legit way to criticise Israeli expansionsim

or a violently anti semetic text that trades on blood libel myth ?

It's in, baby, it's in. I like your brand of risk-based homo-Catholicism,
and it does work.

Watch the letters fly.

Raymond

sonnet 28, browning

first sale at christies of outsider art- defined as "art created by insane, institutionalized, unschooled and other "culturally isolated" individuals", problems with it, smacking of noble savage,often theuputic or religous or didatic rather then art for arts sake, often exquisite in its beuaty, its art or it isnt art, why ghettoize it. The sale comes from the collection of Robert Greenberg, a film producer among other things, who is a self righteous blow hard, who wants to sell so he can afford another house, and to renovate the other three he has. tells us its his attempt to legitmize. link is nyt, register.

> banal as compliment, as another adjective for
> vencualar, like Warhols personae, like the found
> images in Polke, like the comfort one gets from bad
> television
>
> the lds churches of my youth looked like rotary
> clubs ca 1950, meeting Hero in the offices of the
> local dioceses, look like that.
>
> blonde wood, Berber carpet, the symmetry and
> asymmetry of 50s ranch houses, red and white or
> white and black lino, small black tiles as back
> splash.
>
> ikea as a way to dumb down and sell up Aalto and
> Jacobsens dream, but in a good way.
>
> someone on ilxor talked about their love of an allen
> wrench, like a fetish-sexual and religious contexts
> of that word.
>
> the third international style building in the world
> is in edmonton, next door to a fake neo classical
> and across the street from a sandstone deco with
> friezes of airplanes.
>
> the grids of sky scrapers, and of window panes, and
> of lay outs in offices, remind me how vital the grid
> was to contemporary modernism.
>
> art galleries look like offices, sterile.
>
> boring postcard books, the latest hipster catch,
> from america and england and germany-images of ugly
> buildings and banal places- roadways, hotels, scenes
> of local kitsch- maybe ironic, maybe genuine
>
> according to Momus, the hippest real estate in
> berlin is old soviet block houses and there is a
> happy family style card game about them.
>
> on the car back from this retreat, i talked with
> love about the tory building, a 1960s style
> skyscraping square.
>
> the new volkswagen ad, with the sterile techno, and
> all of those square images (cheese slices,
> industrial sites, air conditioners)- compare and
> contrast square vs round headed.
>
> theres a hip new electro clash band called
> squarepusher, does that fit in anywhere ?
>
> as much as a i am postmodernist in life, the rigid
> control of the international style the obsession
> with rules and order-esp. in things like hotels,
> highways, gas stations, bridges, office towers is
> comforting.
>
> the poetry i have been writing and reading lately
> are struggles with the wcw maxim not ideas but
> things, but things carry ideas, grand things like
> pine trees and stars and banal things like what i
> ate today and what's in my wallet and talking like
> techno Beckett about an aim chat room
>
> Gareth calls his photos surface vs depth, and i
> think thats a false binary, they are v. deep- in
> that the Ordinary brings meaning, and wonderful and
> beautiful-ut in ways ugly and common and awkward and
> boring and banal-not as an insult, but as a new way
> to look at things. as a comfort and a sly critique

reading o hara in the bath, i recognize in myself a return to poetry, reading it, and writing it, and caring about the words places in prose rather then ideas. its a sign of happiness.

Win This, of Course

Chris needs to win

sat. morning
tired, been up since three, and now its nine
in terrys car, moving onto a secondary highway
barbwire fences, and
blank white fields

lynn the writer, and jeff who speaks russian
behind me
the rolling words, the deluge that happens
when you find common humainty

a murder of crows, on a telephone line
resting in the fields
i start with a few lines of frost,
and forgetting the 2nd stanza
jeff starts in

we finish it together

latter, by subterfuge,
he prints carefully,
nothing gold will stay ?

a warning, a hint ?
a sputter of nervousness-
or the only other frost he knows

talking to him, we recite lines
of stopping by a woods on a snowy evening
and two roads diverged

and after dinner, i walk to the dorms
and look up
the birch and pine, a net to hold the stars
and black sky/white snow

the bite of cold
alone for half a minute

i remeber years ago i underlined the last words of snowy woods
and wrote carefully beside them-
death
the miles and miles to go before you sleep
is not death,
it is awe,
and there is no need to be caught in the cold
when there is a boy nearby who knows the allusions

retreat in five minutes. scared.

Biased Link (Blades a queer paper)
Bush appoints homophobe to HIV/AIDS council, called homosexuailty a deathstyle, and thinks we can be cured.
By a president who refuses to meet log cabins (i have started using the term as a fag equiv. of uncle toms)
The world is as evil as we make it-and folks this is pretty evil


email from telford about jesus, he keeps blogging about me,
good thing ?

josh s is a great writer, and he almost made me love math, see below

FearsomePirate: holy crap this is an ugly proof
FearsomePirate: for my math


: there is elegant
and there is ugly
it's like a frank lloyd wright home versus a McMansion
i mean, you can live in both
get adequate shelter
stay warm
have room to keep your crap
toilets to piss in
but man, the one is lacking something the other's got

in response to this site:

I am a Christian and I believe that spreading his word his word is vital. But this, well i dont even know what blair believes in, besides a rather banal conversion story. and i am not sure that blair would agree with my jesus and vice versa and shouldnt we all be agreeing with jesus rather then blair ? and for an academic inst. why a hockey player, smacks of the cult of the athelete.

it feels like that outside

twatchmen, american, 1890s, in the high collection and byu.

via mefi

A new war in the gulf,. The last one was filled with cynicism, hollywood disbeilef, french theorists comparing it media constructions and hetoric about surgical strikes.
perhaps a look at Peter Turnley will inform us. of what really happens

spent yesterday with geneve , watched chicago, review to come out at south side call box

she makes me feel so good, so smart, so kind and clever and happy.
she takes care of me, wropte the answers for my survey for antioch
her bf took me in last night, b/c the snow was so high to go home, made me a sandwhich gave me a pillow
he spent most of the night painting and talking to geneve while i slept.
sean ohler from the journal wants to see the asperger first person i pitched, called my instincts good (were they daves ?)
peice on bathhouses thurs, and chicago review in today.

have a youth retreat in the cold and snow of lac le nonne this weekend, wasnt going to go, and then had that chat about god with andrew. and feeling closer to god.
dr sworski returned my mail as well, with compliments. jon & trevor sent me new ones, wanting coffee and convo.

geoff returned my returns to his bday greeting, and this is the place i tell him i miss his blog.
im happy.

there is almost a foot of snow outside, and it has been blowing since yesterday afternoon. no end in site.

jody beth rosen did this of me

I was only up at Suzy's because I had to run away from my girlfriend, who was sticking needles in my bum while I slept because I wasn't having sex with her enough.

momus email

He sent me James @ Darlas email, so that I could score a press copy of oskar tennis champ.

11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:
12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.
Mark

3:8
The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don't know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
John

Thinking about how andrew told me last night i hated evanglical thought, and reading these passages.
i think that those who find god will find him or her in their own time, and often he is unknowable.
pushing people towards the divine, yelling at them, telling them they are evil are not only ineffective, but not godly.
thomas and i are in the middle of a fight.

Monquie Wittig a philospher and novelist, somewhere b/w Lacan and Voltaire, died today in tucson. a radical dyke, with a racous sense of humour, she argued that lesbian was another gender, because of how women were constructed by the society we live in (The Lacanian absence vs presence), and then uses the presuppostion to write satires about amazons with rocket launchers and heavnes filled with big tited leather clad angels riding bikes thru the clouds.

fthr stephen, confession-the list of sins was long, and odd. some metaphysical and ontological, some dealing with thoughts and no actions, some thoughts that led to action, some action. some base and some common. i was humbled and i was made clean. i want to be a proper 19th century catholic, and now with my own father confessor-im coming close.

its john wilmot and he crowns a monkey. that is all, look away now

DJ Enrightdied a few days ago, he anthologized the oxford book of death, wrote essays for the london and new york review of books, wrote humane and funny poems, and was the laurate of england with out being a twat,prat,pseud or bad poet.

birthday, good. a calm day for what i hope to be a calm year.

from fearsome

Which Founding Father Are You?

i bought a book at chapters today. it wasnt at any of the indepedents,i need to read it by tomorrow. i felt sick with guilt, the company destroying orlandos ,2nd fiddle, athabasca etc. here. conveinece over commuinty-im just as bad as the next guys.

a good teacher, uses proper material to teach children how not to hate, gets in shit

He draws all the time, when he isn't smoking and talking, which he also does a lot. He has a shrewd sense of what his drawing is worth to a greedy world: these notebooks include plenty of sketches across two pages, and are done on both sides, so "they can't tear them up" and mount them for selling one day.

Todays Gaurdian on Hockney. Andrew Morrow

it goes on to discuss how conserative he has become, not reactionary, but how calm and wonderful his images seem, and how he no longer needs to take the photos or make things bigger or more erotic or more about class and money or geography.
the image seems enough, which can be connected to his return to england from socal, originally to pose for lucien freud, he has a big well lit studio near hackney, and walks thru the park and he seems happy to be an old man coming home. this is not a bad thing.

im in the middle of a pop star crush.

You're the burning heat of a bridal suite in use
Youre the breasts of Venus
Youre King Kongs Penis
Youre Self Abuse
Censored Verse from Anything Goes
Cole Porter

thoughts:
Cole really wasnt as sophistacated about fucking as he pretended.
Is King Kong about the latent fears of Miscegantion
Breasts of Venus/King Kongs Penis- gender switch quick and fast, brilliant.

dinner good, drinks post dinner good, cake at ashleys apt. good.

Sesame Street isn't just there to make adolescent indie kids feel fuzzily nostalgic, you know - it does have an actual educational purpose!
-- Tom
on the hiv postitive muppet-ilxor.

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
from Canto LXXXI

Pounds last Cantos are heartbreaking because he recognizes the evil he committed and begs forgiveness :
That I lost my center
fighting the world.
The dreams clash
and are shattered—
and that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.
(notes for canto CXX)

when i talk to fr stephen he has the most tender way of dealing with me, and i do not become angry, i find myself calmed. i dont think its an obligation for him, i think he likes my company. he calls me ee cummings, and he calls dickens light reading. im meeting him next week, i think i need to say confession.

To be a conseartive christian and to be queer is impossible, i cannot change my queerness and cannot leave christ.

also the new wave aesthic was all about black and white- goddards cintemographer has said "nothing in black and white is ugly", the cinemascope pleasures of vadim were opposed to that

i am currently iming the head of the mountain goats, about poetry mostly.

i have buddies travelling all over mid america in the last month or so, and i often plug the name of their city and art musuem to look at the collections- often they have highlights instead of whole collections, but how varied and wonderful those highlights are :

Birin

thinking about the two classes i am taking and pomo in general, i wrote this to my new sci-fi prof.

I am worried that the class concentrates too much on the text, I am so used to reading under and around book, not noticing if they are "good" or "bad" but important and not important (and even then that sets up a binary)
and arguing for an exteme empriicsm in my christian scripture class (ie nothing is knowable)

email from the vv., no such luck- content not style.

cannot find the phone # for the resturant of the birthday dinner, and the adress may be for another rest. scared that this will be a fuck up- the bowling is already a kybosh, and i cant afford the treat bags, and i dont know how many people are coming b/c i havent had one rsvp- and a bunch of people are working or broke.
god this will be disaster.

walking to the bus from my sci fi class with an aqutience, i asked him what he was doing on friday, and he said "im not gay" fuck that pissed me off

got a hand knit scarf from glenys today, and its lovely and maroon

i was going to post a long entry on my dad but he might read this and its private

youve tried science/youve tried art/but you cant break a broken heart

Stephin Meritt

gateway thurs.

So, now that we’ve got a war against terrorism, Bush, Blair and company are
tying it all together. It’s not a war against an ideology or tactic but a
war against those evil people who brought the twin towers down, so it’s all
OK. Saddam Hussein has ties to al Quaeda and is a terrorist, those in
Chechnya have ties to al Quaeda and are terrorists, those who bombed Bali,
Muslim professors, drug dealers—all of them are terrorists who hate America,
who are tied with radical Islam and need to be dealt with post haste.

There’s a problem here—well, several, but the most immediate is a really
lousy definition of terror. What qualifies? The West has tied ideas of
liberation to violence. The second amendment of the US constitution calls
for the right of a population to rise up with "well formed militias." France
celebrates Bastille Day as a national holiday—the storming of the Bastille
was the start of a revolution that contained something they called the
"Reign of Terror." We still talk of this kind of violence—in a speech given
this month to a military base in Virginia, Bush talked about liberating the
Iraqi people with bombs.

Terrorism is an ideological distinction: it means "those people who use the
tools of statecraft without owning a state," and they’re often in
desperation. People talk about the suicide bombers in Palestine as
terrorists, but they commit violence because their attempts to gain land
have been suppressed. The non-violent attempts at solving this problem—the
Camp David accords under Carter and the agreements between Rabin and Arafat
under Clinton—have not been effective, but that’s mostly because peaceful
solutions rarely work.

If a peaceful solution was successful in the twentieth century it was
because they were the safer of two options for a government nervous about
insurgency- Look at Gandhi or Martin Luther King Junior or Mandela. Who was the FBI more likely to give concessions to? Martin Luther King, with his utopian vision and non violence, or Malcolm X, who gave a speech called /The Ballot Box or The Bullet/ (to reduce things to their most simple, he favored the bullet) or divided people into "House Niggers" and "Field Niggers"—those who gave in to the dominant racism and those who fought against it? Or there was the South Western Township of Johannesburg, an all black forced ghetto where those who refused to revolt were disciplined with burning tires around their neck, and Winnie Mandela was one of the perpetuators. Even Gandhi was more peaceful at his time and place, the more dangerous option were Hindu nationalists who threatened to blow up trains and mentions. This is not to suggest that violence is a positive, just that it tends to be effective because the state understands it, and perhaps it is only because there were two options made these pacifist movements effective.

The little difference between the violence of the state and the violence of those who are stateless, and the proof that combat is effective as liberation is disheartening to those who work for a peaceful solution. The only way to prevent violence is to recognize that it exists for Bush and for Arafat, for J Edgar Hoover and for Malcolm X, but to make it and us versus them, a good use of violence against an evil use of violence is absurd. What we need to do, and the only way to progress is to deny all violence. This will force a third way, between those who have and those who have not and cause genuine change.

from telford at it was 3 am, he moved me- why did i email him >

January 6, 2003
I got quite an e-mail this morning from Anthony Easton:


You don't know me, but I was surfing tonight – thinking about God, wanting to abandon him and wondering why after reading Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, after absorbing the postmodern ethos, why I still go to church – why I can't jettision my faith.


I don't have an answer, and I don't have an answer to why I am Christian in the first place. I read your essay by random (by the holy spirit?) and I wanted to tell you that it moved me to tears, I'm not sure it changed my life or my thinking-I still struggle, but maybe it was the first pebble in a landslide.

Well, I'm glad I know you now. After reading one of your posts, I have a feeling the Theological FAQ entry you read was this one of mine. In that case, it must have been the Holy Spirit, because I don't know who else could see you through reading such a rambling, rhetorically clumsy post. (Then again, if you've made it through Derrida....)


Maybe your remarkable journey has brought you to Church and refuses to leave, despite your exposure to all that continental postmodernist chaff, because in your heart you know the liturgy is more real than trendy nihilistic lit-crit, more real than atomizing and isolating modern liberalism from which those schools still drink so deeply, more real than all the fleeting capital and social power and lust that consume our attention and finally our souls, more real than the bland sentimentality that passes for spirituality in our culture, more real than all those who thunder with rants and bombs and rolled eyes against its small but insistent voice.



"Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again." What else needs to be said? The finest minds of the West say nothing comparable to those three staggering claims. I think you still go to Church because God draws you there, to hear and eat and drink and live those visible words with your brothers and sisters, to give you life and purpose and patience with our world's agonies while you and all the other people of God wait and work together for creation's perfection.



Jesus loves you, Mr. Easton. No deconstructionist can take him off of that cross, or take him away from the Father's bosom, or take the taste of that eucharistic wine from your lips, or take you off his mind. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. Live in that love and you will truly live. Leave it and, well, you're stuck with Foucault.



Thanks so much for your e-mail. My apologies if I'm being too presumptuous or preachy. I do hope a landslide is coming. My family will be praying for it. Write any time!

My idea:
Goddard(sp) wanked over american film, bogart et al, but felt guilty and recreated it- or alluded to it subtly, or almost mocked it.
Vadim loved american film from the gut, he made films with tits and ass and with pleasure. with american actresses not as a way to analyze but as a way to say thank you.

compare how Vadim uses Fonda in Barberlla- as an english speaking sex kitten as a blonde bombshell as the authentic version ( ie only americans were blonde bombshells) of bardot ( in fact he recreated And God Created Women in 1979 with DeMornay) with how Goddard uses Seberg (as a francophone, as one who is masculinzed, as one who talks instead of fucks, who rejected hollywood)

I got the Vadim gig for senses of Cinema, hashing it out with Dave he called my idea about Fonda vs Seberg Good. i was tickled pink.

DOAs discontinuing the columns. I wish i cared more, but frankly glad to get it over with. Working on other things, sent something into the journal eds, and vv. southside call box will post something of mine next week, Toms mailing me me the moz peice back so I can rewrite it-why do i feel like shit ?

Hedieh Tehrani- a muslim and iranian, who has acted in some of the most moving films from its burgoning scene, and has become somewhat of a cult figure, goes out like she should- clad in full chador and is only on screen in full chador- that is unless she is on vaction.
When on vaction is she clad like this
This reminds me of an article i read in W or Dutch(memory shot, away from my boxes) about the new buyers of Coutre- and most of the buyers of risque or adventorus coutre (ie Galliono for Dior, JPG, LeCroix) are the wives of Saudi Princes

and also an article about the lingre counters in ridyah most expensive shops, where lace is not uncommon


what are the politics of this ?

got a discman from my ma for my birthday, and today was grey, a day i wanted to isolate myself, pretend i was the only boy in the world. it worked. the walkman did at least. house bad, one assignment done, worried about party- i had 10 last year, ill be happy with 6 this year.

and a house to look at

three assignments due really close to each other. am writing again. nice email from andy d. invites to pick up from dave, look hotter then a half fucked fox in forrest fire. felicty wants to make a calendar out of the pics of me anf bri in van.

The difference between rock and pop is that rock keeps dying and coming back, while pop goes on forever" — thus spake one of the pretty kids in Westlife, almost exactly 12 months ago.
Or was it Boyzone? Either way, I love it.

-- mark s

see bootlegs led me to cut ups, and cut ups led me to a
cut up machine

two of my blog entries randomly cut up: thanks to brian an an interview i am doing about his bootlegs

These are portals as well. They palm pilot attached to a joystick. It provide a couple of things If you moves left,right,up and down. It needs to belong to the group in question then be used with great delicacy and can they are "ways to find your own control timbre and direction of sound . Fathers" in the words of Borges. As On the right is a mini synth. a poet who considers himself a lyricist with about 16 keys that produces acoustic i found Ginsberg and Whitman important first rather then elctronic sound. Over the Shoulder steps. But without Anthologies i could not like a Cello Fret is another keyboard claim Thom Gunn or Edward Carpenter or that thru an apple program manipultes the Frank O'Hara . If you do not belong sounds and adds new ones. By direction to the group then they provide entrance. I am sorry if my blog did collect three kinds of anthologies. Maybe collect not make sense . I meant i is too precious. Accumlate . The first was heading to the University for a are the huge omnibuses put out by concert. I got in on Claireview with the major academic publishers . you can a full train. But there was a pick up ten dollar copies of the hockey game at the Cloiseum and the big ones. Freshman shed them like a train was empty for half my trip. snake shakes skin. After the english course The concert itself had 20 people while si through , they do not need across town the hockey game had 1000 them anymore. There are a few interesting times that. Sometimes how far you are things about these books. The first is away from other people is made beyond it seems to be a portal. An clear . The concert Itself was magnifcent. There easy way to find connections. You discover was a whole new instrument and a Anne Sexton in Heath because it reminds midi manipulater and a jazz master playing you of Sylvia Plath in Nortons. Then counterpoint to a tape and a disklavier you find a copy of Anne Sextons . It was an maazing hybrid a complete poems that has a forward by way to find the warmth and richness

happy new year, i want to write for a living next y ear and work on being more civilized.