At any moment, US forces may find convincing evidence of chemical or biological weapons -- which undoubtedly will stir rousing cheers of we-told-you- so from war backers. But that won't be enough. War was waged -- so Bush and others said -- to prevent Iraq's WMD from being transferred to people and groups who would use them against Americans. But the war plan included no schemes to prevent that from occurring. This was a dereliction of duty. Looters beat the United States to Iraq's nuclear facility. If Iraq had WMD, if Al Qaeda types were in Baghdad, and if these terrorists were seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the fundamental claims made by the Administration -- then there is a good chance the nightmare scenario Bush & Co. exploited to win support for their war has already come true.
david corm
from ampersand a blog
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
told erik (the fun sized actor i met in vancouver, whose cock looked like a ham hock)-no long distance realtionships, which i shouldnt have done b/c fuck holidays in vancouver are a grand time-esp. in dive hotels attached to dive bars. the problem is my favourite (the royal-where i got a cowboy from tulsa drunk and we had a threesome, sex pistols bleed thru the thin walls, and the cowboy yelled yippee kay ay aye at orgasm) is now a hipster strokes lit no fags gentrfied "bar".
so why i broke up with him was b/c i couldnt imagine fucking in vancouver anymore.
that and ld kills me.
so why i broke up with him was b/c i couldnt imagine fucking in vancouver anymore.
that and ld kills me.
The two poets in the Boston Brahmin group who could really write were Berryman & Plath. Sexton is interesting for the same reasons that Jerry Springer or reality TV are “interesting.” The poet in that tendency who deserves to be rediscovered, though, is George Starbuck.
I read this on your blog, and i was wondering if i could question you on it. I am assuming that I am misreading this, and you are not talking about the context of Plath or Sexton here, but some form of poetics.
That said, I view Plath as more solipsistic then Sexton. The narcism of comparing her father to the Nazis in Daddy, the necrophiliac striptease of Lady Lazarus-even Colossus that never moves, never quests and stays in place-like the statue in fact.
Sexton and Plath had the same pleasures and horrors, was a woman and from the same time and place- but Sexton had a questing that I do not see in Plath-even in the self indulgence of Masterbation (the ballad of the lonely masturbator) or the obsessive disorder of adultery (For my Lover, Returning to his wife)
As well, the source material that Sexton uses seems to range farther-into vernacular forms(the fairy yale poems), traditional narratives(the diary in 18 days without you), religious texts(the repetitive psalm like elements of The Furies), and something that approaches an essay(The Jesus Papers).
So I know I sound like a fan boy here, and I haven't really read Plath in her fullness, but I was wondering why you thought this about Plath, when I would have made it vice versa.
Also I wanted to ask you about Berryman and Sextons shared religious views-what did your make of their "awful rowing towards god" especially in reaction to Catholicism; and what you made of Robert Lowell in this group.
I read this on your blog, and i was wondering if i could question you on it. I am assuming that I am misreading this, and you are not talking about the context of Plath or Sexton here, but some form of poetics.
That said, I view Plath as more solipsistic then Sexton. The narcism of comparing her father to the Nazis in Daddy, the necrophiliac striptease of Lady Lazarus-even Colossus that never moves, never quests and stays in place-like the statue in fact.
Sexton and Plath had the same pleasures and horrors, was a woman and from the same time and place- but Sexton had a questing that I do not see in Plath-even in the self indulgence of Masterbation (the ballad of the lonely masturbator) or the obsessive disorder of adultery (For my Lover, Returning to his wife)
As well, the source material that Sexton uses seems to range farther-into vernacular forms(the fairy yale poems), traditional narratives(the diary in 18 days without you), religious texts(the repetitive psalm like elements of The Furies), and something that approaches an essay(The Jesus Papers).
So I know I sound like a fan boy here, and I haven't really read Plath in her fullness, but I was wondering why you thought this about Plath, when I would have made it vice versa.
Also I wanted to ask you about Berryman and Sextons shared religious views-what did your make of their "awful rowing towards god" especially in reaction to Catholicism; and what you made of Robert Lowell in this group.
The large science publishers are now offering electronic versions of their journals to libraries primarily as large bundles of titles, and these bundles increase in price each year at several times inflation... If one refuses to buy the whole bundle, and opts instead for individual journals, the prices of those single journal titles are greatly increased by the publisher -- so that a library is left with the choice of either buying the whole bundle or being able to afford only a limited number of journal titles from that publisher. Buying the whole bundle also places enormous strain on library budgets, leaving little funding left over to purchase the equally important journals of smaller, often not-for-profit publishers."
from librarian.net
story here
from librarian.net
story here
Monday, June 02, 2003
The two poets in the Boston Brahmin group who could really write were Berryman & Plath. Sexton is interesting for the same reasons that Jerry Springer or reality TV are “interesting.” The poet in that tendency who deserves to be rediscovered, though, is George Starbuck.
from sillimans blog
ellroy wrote a short peice on anne sexton, dana delany and his mother in this months gq, and for me i would put lowell in that list- and switch plath with sexton.
maybe its b/c sexton seems to have a sense of daily muck interferring with holy mountain, but maybe thats me.
from sillimans blog
ellroy wrote a short peice on anne sexton, dana delany and his mother in this months gq, and for me i would put lowell in that list- and switch plath with sexton.
maybe its b/c sexton seems to have a sense of daily muck interferring with holy mountain, but maybe thats me.
I haven’t read much Raymond Carver, some short story collections, a couple of his books of poetry, an anthology he had edited, some works in the Paris review and Chicago and the New Yorker-but the stuff that I had read I liked. He had a stark economy, not in the overly precious, not a word out of place way, but something better then that. He knew what he wanted to say, what emotions he needed to convey, what words best expressed those emotions, and carried the plot along, plus gave us relevant character information- all things a short story writer should do. He only gave us what we needed, he efficiently hummed along until it reached a logical conclusion, and then ended it. You could see this efficiency in how he eschewed most adjectives and adverbs, how his sentences were not overly long, how little punctuation he used beyond a comma and a period, how he favoured the Anglo Saxon over anything else. Even in the titles of his books was this sparse democratic voice (for example Put Yourself in My Shoes or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love or A New Path to the Waterfall)
I am a tangled reader and a thinker who tramps along in the brambles, sometimes there is pain that occurs, but mostly it’s a grand adventure. Carver wrote about things that were not tangled or brambled, even though it seems like they should be- stories about drunks, bad marriages, relationships dissolving, suburban angst, poems about wronged lovers, driving drunk, a fathers death-these are indicators of misery and depression, the inwardness of that illness or lifestyle should mean a solipsism and a desire to unwind or unweave the minor disasters that infiltrate our lives.
Their was a tension for Carver, he didn’t believe that writers lie and who wanted everyone to be accurate as well as truthful (he followed this maxim by Pound “fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing”), and yet he lied every day, the writer doesn’t tell the whole truth-he edits, and refines and adds bits and fictionalizes and through all that myth making risks forgetting or exploiting the source. Maybe his clarity is used in the same way as a magician shows his hands in front of a performance or a kid yells “look ma now hands” or how a teenager takes pride in how he can drive with his knees.
All of those metaphors fail though, and they fail because they are about showing off, Carver was a drunk, a bad father, and a lousy writer, one a legion throughout the history of writers who used a talented wife (Tess Gallagher) as an editor and secretary-like Lee Krasner cleaning up Pollocks puke and piss instead of painting- the thing about Carver, the thing that you can see though, is that he is aware of how he treats this, how he realizes the messes he made and how he tries to correct them. He gives Gallagher her due in places, talking of her writing or reading-as well he wrote a whole collection of love poetry to her, and this love poetry did not seem to romanticize a disasterous relationship. Even though it didn’t last, she seems to have affection of him.
Anyone who tries and even remotely succeeds with this kind of writing is called Hemmingway-and with Carver the problem is confounded by his admiration for Hemmingway and the fact that they were both had a taste for booze. There is something more to Carver-Hemmingway is all macho bluster, he spends his novels with his dick against a tape measure-and that’s all he can use it for, the love of Hemmingway is for Hemmingway, the myth of Hemmingway is one of the urban professional who wants to go out and play big boy with guns-it’s the myth of a world where the women are virgins, whores or bulldaggers. Hemmingway is a neurotic and messy as Roth or Bellow but scared to admit it. What Carvers does, or did, was try to clean up messes. His prose is clean, but his content is filthy, and in that sense the prose works as a way to control the effluvia that is happening in his characters lives, and by extension his own.
This is where the problem comes in, and I have just started realizing it once I got to the essays, if you have so much concern for control and avoiding mess you run the risk of being mannered. Carver’s love of narrative sustains him, of course and that love has some definite virtues, but it also traps him. If he is narrative focused, not really concerned with language or lyricism, but just wanting to get words across, then there is a risk of becoming reactionary.
The innovations of the 20th century have been against this kind of propulsive narrative, and reading his unreleased essays in the post humus collection No Heroics, Please (note the plain prose of the title, the subtle irony), you get this impression that Carver would have been happier if we had all stayed with the dramas of 19th century drawing rooms-I am not saying that everyone needs to run up and write Finnegans Wake, but that a little of Carver goes along way, and also there is an over dependence on narrative tricks (in his first essay in the collection of occasional pieces, Fires, he wrote that he hated tricks, and he was attempting to be the simplest writer he could be, what he didn’t realize is that simplicity was a trick in itself.)
Having tricks is good, the writer as a magician is not a bad thing, but the problem is when you over rely on them-when you think your trick is the only trick, and then you can only view literature in your tradition. He tends sometimes, especially when he gets closer to death, to view his writing as the only trick, and so he becomes strained- the virtuous balance is lost to sameness. Reading his introduction to the Best American Short Stories 1986, which he edited, this sameness becomes clear. He half heartedly apologizes for his conservativeness, but he seems stubbornly proud of lines like “a reader looking for “experimental” or “innovative” stories won’t find them around here.
The weird thing about this line, was that for 10 years after his death Carver become the reactionary that was so new that he lead the charge, readers had to endure hundreds of pages of poetry and prose about little people doing little things not because they were compelled to tell truths but because Uncle Raymond did it first. Writing like Carver, with delicacy and starkness is such a difficult task that even for him it became almost impossible- and if he had not died when he did, he would have added to the pile
I am a tangled reader and a thinker who tramps along in the brambles, sometimes there is pain that occurs, but mostly it’s a grand adventure. Carver wrote about things that were not tangled or brambled, even though it seems like they should be- stories about drunks, bad marriages, relationships dissolving, suburban angst, poems about wronged lovers, driving drunk, a fathers death-these are indicators of misery and depression, the inwardness of that illness or lifestyle should mean a solipsism and a desire to unwind or unweave the minor disasters that infiltrate our lives.
Their was a tension for Carver, he didn’t believe that writers lie and who wanted everyone to be accurate as well as truthful (he followed this maxim by Pound “fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing”), and yet he lied every day, the writer doesn’t tell the whole truth-he edits, and refines and adds bits and fictionalizes and through all that myth making risks forgetting or exploiting the source. Maybe his clarity is used in the same way as a magician shows his hands in front of a performance or a kid yells “look ma now hands” or how a teenager takes pride in how he can drive with his knees.
All of those metaphors fail though, and they fail because they are about showing off, Carver was a drunk, a bad father, and a lousy writer, one a legion throughout the history of writers who used a talented wife (Tess Gallagher) as an editor and secretary-like Lee Krasner cleaning up Pollocks puke and piss instead of painting- the thing about Carver, the thing that you can see though, is that he is aware of how he treats this, how he realizes the messes he made and how he tries to correct them. He gives Gallagher her due in places, talking of her writing or reading-as well he wrote a whole collection of love poetry to her, and this love poetry did not seem to romanticize a disasterous relationship. Even though it didn’t last, she seems to have affection of him.
Anyone who tries and even remotely succeeds with this kind of writing is called Hemmingway-and with Carver the problem is confounded by his admiration for Hemmingway and the fact that they were both had a taste for booze. There is something more to Carver-Hemmingway is all macho bluster, he spends his novels with his dick against a tape measure-and that’s all he can use it for, the love of Hemmingway is for Hemmingway, the myth of Hemmingway is one of the urban professional who wants to go out and play big boy with guns-it’s the myth of a world where the women are virgins, whores or bulldaggers. Hemmingway is a neurotic and messy as Roth or Bellow but scared to admit it. What Carvers does, or did, was try to clean up messes. His prose is clean, but his content is filthy, and in that sense the prose works as a way to control the effluvia that is happening in his characters lives, and by extension his own.
This is where the problem comes in, and I have just started realizing it once I got to the essays, if you have so much concern for control and avoiding mess you run the risk of being mannered. Carver’s love of narrative sustains him, of course and that love has some definite virtues, but it also traps him. If he is narrative focused, not really concerned with language or lyricism, but just wanting to get words across, then there is a risk of becoming reactionary.
The innovations of the 20th century have been against this kind of propulsive narrative, and reading his unreleased essays in the post humus collection No Heroics, Please (note the plain prose of the title, the subtle irony), you get this impression that Carver would have been happier if we had all stayed with the dramas of 19th century drawing rooms-I am not saying that everyone needs to run up and write Finnegans Wake, but that a little of Carver goes along way, and also there is an over dependence on narrative tricks (in his first essay in the collection of occasional pieces, Fires, he wrote that he hated tricks, and he was attempting to be the simplest writer he could be, what he didn’t realize is that simplicity was a trick in itself.)
Having tricks is good, the writer as a magician is not a bad thing, but the problem is when you over rely on them-when you think your trick is the only trick, and then you can only view literature in your tradition. He tends sometimes, especially when he gets closer to death, to view his writing as the only trick, and so he becomes strained- the virtuous balance is lost to sameness. Reading his introduction to the Best American Short Stories 1986, which he edited, this sameness becomes clear. He half heartedly apologizes for his conservativeness, but he seems stubbornly proud of lines like “a reader looking for “experimental” or “innovative” stories won’t find them around here.
The weird thing about this line, was that for 10 years after his death Carver become the reactionary that was so new that he lead the charge, readers had to endure hundreds of pages of poetry and prose about little people doing little things not because they were compelled to tell truths but because Uncle Raymond did it first. Writing like Carver, with delicacy and starkness is such a difficult task that even for him it became almost impossible- and if he had not died when he did, he would have added to the pile
this is the first draft of a city poem im writing.
im not sure i like it at all, in fact quite the opposite.
god of concrete/god of steel
Anglican hymn
magpies squall
in brickbat packs
crows gleaming
dark unease
falcons nest
in steelglass mountains
swallows swoop
through iron bridges
the scurry skitch
of floorboard rat.
the rabbit still
winter white or summer brown
I sit
watching for Her hand
im not sure i like it at all, in fact quite the opposite.
god of concrete/god of steel
Anglican hymn
magpies squall
in brickbat packs
crows gleaming
dark unease
falcons nest
in steelglass mountains
swallows swoop
through iron bridges
the scurry skitch
of floorboard rat.
the rabbit still
winter white or summer brown
I sit
watching for Her hand
3 am conversation with bryan made me realize that butch cassidy and the sundance kid were about love but not sex.
roving thru the ravine past his house, knowing the dirt paths under the pines by heart,
and having him sing, its boyscouts with out the crush on the troop leader.
its like i have been reborn as a boy, 14 yrs old and discovering the world.
the chutzpah, the fuck you energy, the hormones, the desire to be this way forever
those silly rite of passage movies when the rite of passage never happened.
i have worked on the chemical state of my id, from solid to gas, now he has done some wonky post particle physics
and im not the same way, like some 4th state, some lds jello salad where the pineapple has gone cosmic.
.(he also eats from the same glass and plate, and we share meals, i mean not eat together but one plate communal)
is this symbolic
this is new, this is scary.
this means he might stay.
we are buddy/brothers with out subtext, without rooting out id imps, with out the tension.
roving thru the ravine past his house, knowing the dirt paths under the pines by heart,
and having him sing, its boyscouts with out the crush on the troop leader.
its like i have been reborn as a boy, 14 yrs old and discovering the world.
the chutzpah, the fuck you energy, the hormones, the desire to be this way forever
those silly rite of passage movies when the rite of passage never happened.
i have worked on the chemical state of my id, from solid to gas, now he has done some wonky post particle physics
and im not the same way, like some 4th state, some lds jello salad where the pineapple has gone cosmic.
.(he also eats from the same glass and plate, and we share meals, i mean not eat together but one plate communal)
is this symbolic
this is new, this is scary.
this means he might stay.
we are buddy/brothers with out subtext, without rooting out id imps, with out the tension.
i said to pat that their will be in the furture one world pop song, this is the song that has been going thru my head.
the thing i love about the japanese clones of tatu and any number of varrations is that pop has become a kind of lingua franca, not exactly in the words of kinky friedman "elvis jesus and coca cola" but in the words of meritt :
From Tokyo to Soweto
viva la musica pop
We are black & white and we dance all night
down at the hop
and the letters were tall on the Berlin Wall
viva la musica pop
So if you're feeling low
stuck in some bardo
I, even I know the solution
love, music, wine and revolution
love, love,
love, music, wine and revolution
This too shall pass so raise your glass
to change and chance
and freedom is the only law
shall we dance...
the thing i love about the japanese clones of tatu and any number of varrations is that pop has become a kind of lingua franca, not exactly in the words of kinky friedman "elvis jesus and coca cola" but in the words of meritt :
From Tokyo to Soweto
viva la musica pop
We are black & white and we dance all night
down at the hop
and the letters were tall on the Berlin Wall
viva la musica pop
So if you're feeling low
stuck in some bardo
I, even I know the solution
love, music, wine and revolution
love, love,
love, music, wine and revolution
This too shall pass so raise your glass
to change and chance
and freedom is the only law
shall we dance...
Sunday, June 01, 2003
their is a christian conference on social justice and one of the evanglical stadium tours today- the stadium tour got 10 times as many people, and coverage on the front page of the paper sat., in addition to large amounts of inside coverage.
i was thinking-my problem with evanglical christianity is its solipsim, instead of genuinly trying to "take up your cross and follow Him" and suffering to gain an understanding of self; or clothing the naked/feeding the hungry/visiting the prisoner you get multimedia specatcle intended to make the divine hip. So its ahve you found jesus, is jesus your friend, do you have a personal realtionship with your saviour-their isnt even the hard core blood imagery that this sort of revival rested on (ie are you washed in the blood of the lamb; etc)
now that this kind of Christian is in the white house, and has power on a variety of policies from AIDS in Africa to Welfare to Isreal, how do we fight it-esp. if one happens to be a christian.
i was thinking-my problem with evanglical christianity is its solipsim, instead of genuinly trying to "take up your cross and follow Him" and suffering to gain an understanding of self; or clothing the naked/feeding the hungry/visiting the prisoner you get multimedia specatcle intended to make the divine hip. So its ahve you found jesus, is jesus your friend, do you have a personal realtionship with your saviour-their isnt even the hard core blood imagery that this sort of revival rested on (ie are you washed in the blood of the lamb; etc)
now that this kind of Christian is in the white house, and has power on a variety of policies from AIDS in Africa to Welfare to Isreal, how do we fight it-esp. if one happens to be a christian.
thinking of the farnsworth house (see below), it is the most lovely house, it takes my breath away with its starkness, it melds and forms into the land, their is not a stick out of place.
the mosquitos will eat you alive, there is no storage space, it cannot be used comfortably in the winter, it is the failing of modernism that one cannot live in them.
the mosquitos will eat you alive, there is no storage space, it cannot be used comfortably in the winter, it is the failing of modernism that one cannot live in them.
Early last year, Lansana spoke only his tribal dialect, Mende, and hoarded food in the house. He had never been to a city, watched television, flushed a toilet or taken a shower. He had never had a real change of clothing.
But once in New York, the boy picked up English quickly, and, with his magnetic personality, made friends just by walking down the block.... When some West African cabdrivers and a college professor engaged him in dialect, he ignored them.
from the new york times
only in the west would a langauge of 1.5 million people be considered not only a dialect, but a dialect that is so useless and ugly to be destroyed.
(vis langauge hat)
But once in New York, the boy picked up English quickly, and, with his magnetic personality, made friends just by walking down the block.... When some West African cabdrivers and a college professor engaged him in dialect, he ignored them.
from the new york times
only in the west would a langauge of 1.5 million people be considered not only a dialect, but a dialect that is so useless and ugly to be destroyed.
(vis langauge hat)
whistler symphony in white oil on canvas 1898
malevich white on white oil on canvas 1913
nicholson white relief one painted relief 1939
(no link found but rauschenberg white paintings ca 1953)
johns white flag encaustic on board 1959
Achrome kaolin and gravel on board 1962
flavin flourscent tubing in black room 1969
ryman enemlac on canvas 1979
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