the delay

Let me tell you how awful Yossi Berg and Oded Graf’s work was

2011-06-17T14:25:00.000-05:00

Movement means nothing unless it has a context.

Walking down the street has an obvious context: you are going somewhere. You’re moving through a space—objectively real and subjectively perceived—toward a destination according to a purpose. Your gait, the path you choose, your physical reactions to the changing, passing environment: it’s impossible for any of this movement to be irrelevant.

In dance, context is wiped clean by the darkness of the theater before a piece begins. It has to be made on the spot, before the audience’s eyes. The choreographer’s task is to develop a synthetic context for their dancers’ movement either through references to or evocations of extra-performative reality or within the container of the performance itself by establishing movement and gesture and subsequent repetition and variation.

The risk is that, if the choreography and its performance don’t combine to form their own context, the movement will be meaningless, relevant to nothing. Yossi Berg and Oded Graf’s hour-long dance theater piece “Animal Lost,” performed June 14 in Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater at the American Dance Festival, is one of the most intensely irrelevant artworks I’ve ever seen.

Purporting to explore “stereotypes, misperceptions, and social clichés,” Berg and Graf instead almost willfully refuse to interrogate them. Instead they show themselves capable only of restating the same stereotypes and clichés that they’ve been consuming from popular culture, presuming that the fact of their performing the piece on an ADF stage will take care of the exploration by default. No dice.

What Berg and Graf accomplish is an incoherent mash-up of group movement improv and 7^th-grade poetry workshop fodder. They figure that if you just start moving, then you’ll eventually move in some significant way, and that if you just start saying then you’ll gradually say something. And that’s, like, gonna be deep and stuff.

The audience enters to a bare stage with a green curtain for a backdrop. As the piece opens, a female dancer in club clothes stands at the front of one side of the stage, holding a horse-head mask in profile against her chest. She delivers a rhymed, metric monologue that’s supposed to be seductive but is so facile and random that it’s embarrassing. And (this will become a theme) it goes on for way too long—in fact she repeats it. The text is brutally dumb but drew chuckles from the students in the audience, the kinds of chuckles you made when you read the inside jokes in all your friends’ signatures in your yearbook. Have an awesome summer!

The other five dancers in the company enter, wearing clubbing clothes and animal masks that cover the entire head: pig, rabbit, panda, penguin, horse of course, and either a polar bear or a wolf. They stand in place and all do a robotic hip-shaker gyration for way too long. Then they slowly begin undressing themselves.

I think this was supposed to be equal parts erotic and surreal, but it ended up being the dullest striptease of all time. Not-undressing is more erotic that what they did. And the clothes on a hanger in their closet would be much more surreal. Their movements showed neither precision nor humor, either. The curl of the unnecessary dry-ice mist across the stage in this section provided some of the most compelling movement of the evening.

And the masks. Their usage of the masks consisted entirely of merely putting them on. When the pig and rabbit made out with each other, they approached actually using the masks to mean something. But otherwise it was a mere novelty—something for the company’s poster in the lobby and the ADF ticket-sales printed piece. The masks were not used to interrogate identity and species, or to point out humanity’s membership in Linnaeus’ animal kingdom, or to explode the idea of rigid roles.

This work reminded me of those dress-up areas in children’s museums, with a chest of costumes and masks for kids to dig through, and a raised stage area for them to perform spontaneous shows for their forced-smiling parents: “Look Mom, I’m a rabbit!” Look-at-me is not a performance once you’re blowing out more than seven or eight candles on your birthday cake.

But the point-and-click pastiche continued. I think that Berg and Graf think they’re presenting the radical (read: maximal facetiousness) thought that identity is multiple and complex, and that a rapidly changing world accelerates the interaction between one’s inner selves and the selves one presents on the outside. Removing their clothes, pulling off and putting on their animal masks, stepping forward to deliver “I am” lines such as “I am a Hungarian lifeguard” and “I am a beauty queen from Venezuela, I used to be a man”—these are hackneyed signifiers that were coopted by authoritative bodies before these dancers’ parents were born. Think about Christine O’Donnell’s weird but affecting “I’m You” advertisement.

Or this equally creepy post-911 AdCouncil PSA

Or this Nikon ad.

Or this Orange ad.

Or this Microsoft ad.

And who could forget Nike’s retroactively psychosexual “I amTiger Woods” campaign?

I could go on with the links to ads, but the point is pretty clear that the “I am” listing thing was exhausted in Cicero’s time. It no longer holds water as a way of expressing many contained in one. Only someone who doesn’t read and doesn’t write would bother with it at this point. Only someone who watches a lot of TV and primarily interacts with humans via phones and laptops. Experience™, as it were.

And of course Berg and Graf went on (say it with me) way too long with it. Once they ran out of their own lines, they threw in “I am” lines from popular songs. I think I might have remembered my middle school locker combination during this part. They sped it up and made it louder, mistaking volume for complexity and speed for anxiety. Harder and faster, any sex therapist will tell you, is not the way to satisfy your partner. In fact you get a negative result; it’s a setback.

Speaking of partners, the only worthwhile part of the piece came through the partner dancing. Some of this choreography expressed multiplicity: attraction/repulsion, threatening/caring. Some of it was ambiguous in a way that made me want to think about it to see if I could draw a conclusion. Say, isn’t that the meaning of the word “provocative?”

So once they reached a frenzy, all the dancers predictably fell exhausted and went to sleep on the stage. The horse crawled back to her mic to sing, before the sleepers began writhing (didya see that coming?) and the pig began an urgent solo that might have seemed poignant and focused if what had come before it had in any way set it up. Instead it merely fulfilled the obligation of a solo for one of the lead choreographers—something for the curriculum vitae, not the audience.

The most common weakness of dance theater is that there’s not enough dance. Although this piece was lacking in that way, it’s real dearth was on the theater end. Every narrative decision was as facile as possible. This part was fast? Let’s put a slow part after it! We need an ending? Let’s do what we did at the beginning over again!

The horse repeated her opening monologue. Everyone put their masks back on and had a group hyperventilation. For way too long.

Then the backdrop opens slightly to reveal a small abstract tableaux, and the rabbit enters with an electric squirt gun, with which he rustles the other dancers to the back of the set. They all sing a little song together. And the endless 60-minute piece ends.

No part of “Animal Lost” can be mistaken for having intelligence or any political or historical awareness behind it. Dance-wise, it was so portioned out that it never made a statement. Theater-wise, it so lacked dramatic structure that I had to wonder if the choreographers even know what that is. They were so distracted by their toys (masks, disguises, and guns—wait, are they kidnappers? or bank robbers?) that they never used their minds. So their movement and words meant nothing. Afterwards, I was left wondering only what I was supposed to buy. Or rather, what product I should now boycott.

Jagr-capping

2011-06-17T06:35:00.005-05:00

TSN broke the story Thursday that Jaromir Jagr's agent had contacted 5 teams about playing again in the NHL next season. The teams: The Red Wings, Canadiens, Rangers, Crapitals, and Penguins.

One of the greatest scorers AND mullets.

I immediately did what every Jagr-obsessed fan should do: almost hyperventilated, fruitlessly scoured the internet about it for hours, and then slept with my Jagr jersey (1992 home jersey, with the ornithologically correct penguin on the shoulders and "Pittsburgh" spelled diagonally across the chest, worn for the second of his two Stanley Cup seasons with the Pens).

Never mind that Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Dave Molinari dismissed the rumor with disgust (can't link to it because registration is required, though for some reason the site allowed me one viewing), not only belittling Jagr's ability on the cusp of his 40th birthday but also implying that any team with him on it would need chemotherapy or something. The real killer in his column, however, is that he had talked to the team's no-nonsense general manager Ray Shero, who's almost as responsible as Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Marc-Andre Fleury, and coach Dan Bylsma for the team's 2009 championship. Shero not only said that no one had contacted him but that he didn't want to be contacted.

Why not just come to my house and repeatedly hit me in the head with a shovel, Ray? Why not put billboards up nationwide telling children there's no Santa? Why not initiate a kitten-eating regimen as part of the team's offseason workouts?

2010 Olympic Jagr.

There are Penguins fans who hate Jagr, no doubt. His departure from the Steel City was weird and shameful. Many adjectives have been put before his name in recent years -- moody, lazy, schizophrenic, selfish, mercurial, soft, indecisive -- only occasionally deserved, in my opinion. But it's hard to have an opinion since he's been playing behind the iron curtain in Russia's KHL (50 points in 49 games for Avangard Omsk). We've glimpsed him playing for his Czech national team in the recent Vancouver Olympics (in which shithead-extraordinaire Alexander Ovechkin concussed him in such an act of villainy that I just had to punch a hole in the drywall thinking about it) and then in the World Championships this past spring where he led his team to a bronze medal with 5 goals and 4 assists in 9 games. Yeah, pretty lazy -- only a point per game in international play. What a bum.

Jagr's messy divorce from the Penguins is hard to explain. He suffered from depression, I think. The team was losing all of its good players to free agency because it had overpaid Jagr and Mario Lemieux for what the Pittsburgh market could support. They sold out games and still teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Sometimes Jagr dominated; sometimes he sulked. In the late 90s he was stuck with centers like Jan Hrdina and still won scoring titles. Do yourself a favor and watch this reel of some of his best goals. No one else could do that, then. No one now could do that (maybe Crosby, maybe). Although they don't have to anymore because you can't drape yourself all over a forward like a wet blanket or clamp an arm and a leg around them without rightfully getting called for interference.

Who blows kisses nowadays? We need this!

And then there was the magical, mysterious year of 2001, when Lemieux came back and the Pens ran to the conference finals in the East, only to be hacked, hooked, and trapped to death by the dullsville New Jersey Devils in five ugly games. (Jacques Lemaire, I look forward someday to pissing on your grave for ruining a decade of the most beautiful game with your stultifying trap!) Something happened that year. In a locker room interview, Jagr famously said "I'm dying alive" on the ice. The Pittsburgh fans turned on him. He was traded to Washington where he turned in a few zombified years of play. Then he was traded to the New York Rangers, which rejuvenated him -- 123 points in 2005-2006 alone! But his play declined along with the team itself, and they parted ways in 2008. Jagr headed back to Kladno to see his dad and then to Omsk to play, where teenage sniper and Rangers draft pick Alexei Cherepanov died in his arms on the bench one night from a massive heart attack just after they skated a shift together. Shrouds and veils and occasional real darkness.

Why the change in 2001? Was it gambling and investment losses that were rumored to exceed $10million? Was it having to share the spotlight with Lemieux, a man who would have to divert the city's sewers into the confluence of the Monongehela and Allegheny Rivers and destroy the city with an army of mutant robots for any Pittsburgher to even conceive of saying a negative word about him? No one really knows but Jagr himself.

Jagr is equal parts intellectual and emotional. He's a poet, really. He wears the number 68 to commemorate his grandfather's death in prison during the 1968 Prague Spring rebellion. He loves games of chance. Even his play shows an existential awareness, a sense of the fruitlessness of it all, which he summons unprecedented will to overcome on one shift before succumbing to despair over and vanishing during the next. His style of play is a metaphor for the human condition -- something that meat-head Americans and Canadians never could resolve with their "play 110% every second and win win win" mentality. My first book has 68 poems in it because of him.

Bask in the happy Jagr smile.

Jagr's an artist. He is not meant to be completely understood. He is meant to be watched. He is meant to bring both joy and sorrow. He is meant to comfort, enthrall, and infuriate us before our inevitable deaths. We need him.

He should be back in the NHL. I don't care about the salary cap. I don't care that he's been out of the NHL for 3 years. Any team chemistry crap, I can deal with it. He should be a Penguin again. His orbit has come back around to us.

Anyway, I figured I would handicap his comeback chances. My caveat is that I haven't looked at the salary cap stuff at all. Cap management is about as interesting to me as progressive dental work.

Detroit Red Wings: 25-1. No way coach Mike Babcock even thinks for a moment that Jagr could play in their rigorous system. When it comes to defensive responsibility, Jagr's inconsistent. He has defensemen on his team for that! This wouldn't fly in Detroit, where scintillating offensive talent like Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg sacrifices points for systemic, complete play. Thus winning championships, by the way. Jagr would never agree that preventing a goal is as good as scoring a goal. Not a good fit.

New York Rangers: 20:1. How long would it take for Jagr to be in coach John Tortorella's doghouse? Ten games? Ten minutes? The fans in Madison Square Garden already have Marian Gaborik to direct their scorn towards, reserving their love for grinders with enough talent to tickle the twine here and there like Brandon Dubinsky. Plus, they just dumped Jagr in 2008. Why would they ask him out again? No chance on Broadway either.

Washington Crapitals: 12:1. The Caps have suffered under huge expectations these last few years, something most hockey fans have enjoyed identically to how we all loved seeing LeBron James (I insist upon rhyming his first name with Hebron) lose with such ignominy in the recent bouncyball finals. Regular-season juggernauts; post-season chokers. Ovechkin tries to do too much on this frankly soft team. If they don't have room to glide and skate and pass, they shift into a kind of bafflement that's pretty sickening to watch. A lot like the Penguins being put down by the Devils in 2001. Jagr's not the tonic for that. The odds are only a little lower because owner Ted Leonsis is just insane+rich enough to maybe freak out and sign Jagr on an impulse. But then, again, the fans in the nation's capital (DC, not Ottawa) already expunged number 68 once before.

Pittsburgh Penguins: 12-1. I have to be honest with myself because I don't want to get hurt. He's not coming back to Pittsburgh. Shero and Bylsma don't make decisions with their hearts. Not even a little bit. It's torturous, though, to consider Jagr in the mix with Crosby, Malkin, and Staal. Oh my god! That power play would be freaky deaky good! And how could Jagr not skate with unbridled joy on Crosby or Malkin's wing? It would be like 1996 all over again! Okay, I have to go take my shot now and blow on a pinwheel all day in a supervised garden behind the sanitorium.

Montreal Canadiens: 8-1. Probably the only one of the five teams that would really consider Jagr, after his chemistry with Hab Tomas Plekanec at the spring Worlds. It's a city he hasn't already exhausted. He's always said he would love to play for a Canadian team (Edmonton has left the light on for years for him, by the way). The fan base and media could handle his star power. There's the sense that the Habs are one player away from being a contender. He wouldn't look weird in their jersey (don't ask me to explain that). Also I wouldn't have to die a little inside in order to root for him, like if he was in Detroit or NYC or DC. Jags, if Pittsburgh is not in the cards, then I endorse a move to Montreal.

He stays in Russia: 2:1. After all, we have a long history of Jagr saying empty words to reporters. He knows that retirement is on the horizon. The money is in the uncapped, mob-run KHL. The ice surface is bigger so the hitting is less intense. He doesn't have to go into the corners if he doesn't want to. His family and life are in Russia and the Czech Republic. In the Olympics and Worlds, he interacted with old friends who play in the NHL, so he got nostalgic. American and Canadian reporters got to stick microphones in his face and ask him if he was coming back, so he answered their questions with a kind, shrugging "Why not?" But he's not crossing the Atlantic again.

Still.

His jersey, right now, is in my bed.

I think I'll go turn on my back porch light.

2011-01-18T12:50:00.000-05:00

the sky looks like a shattered lake
the sky is a shattered lake
the sky is not a shattered lake
the sky is like a shattered lake

the clouds look like frozen floes
the clouds are frozen floes
the clouds are not frozen floes
the clouds are like frozen floes

the texture of the cloud cover's undersurface
and the texture of an unevenly frozen lake
have visual similarities
the sky evokes an image of a shattered lake and a shattered lake evokes an image of the sky

2011-01-17T07:55:00.000-05:00

morning twilight walk around park, saw two things

where ellerbee creek emerges from beneath lavender avenue, against the mottled pink and purple sky reflected in glassy water stilled against an ice floe farther down, a silhouetted heron standing in the middle of the creek, looking down into its darkness

on the other side of the creek, a man talking into a cellphone pressed tight against his head inside his 'carnegie mellon rugby' hoodie, saying "and so i ask her, what the fuck have you done for me lately," his leashed dog shitting on the sidewalk by the blue play equipment

2011-01-05T07:59:00.000-05:00

Circles aren't circles

The sputum in the pharmacy parking lot, the yellowness of its initial landing gob connected to its as-yellow bounce by thin white strands

Sycamore bark doesn't reflect blue twilight the same way that dogwood petals do

Sycamore bark reflects blue twilight the same way that dogwood petals do

2010-12-21T12:06:00.003-05:00

One witnesses an event, and later describes it to others

At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like the gummed, vestigial eye of a cave fish

Interrogation presumes the suspect’s guilt

At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like the unshiny, scrimmed eye of a red snapper stacked on crushed ice at market

Steve Reich was going for the middle ground between mathematics and literature

At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like a magic marker circle, smudged as the hand that drew it moved across to draw something else

At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like the stained paper towels beneath a colander of washed cherries

One needs not describe a quantity

Merce Cunningham said “The eye tries to recognize what it already knows”

A solar eclipse is spectacular; a lunar eclipse, technical

One’s mind does not by default seek relief from repetition

Reich’s music describes nothing; John Cage’s establishes a negative capability for description

3 is 3 regardless of what it counts

One is inclined to believe a quantitative statement over a qualitative one

A confession is the only possible ending of an interrogation

The original word for an irrational number meant “mute,” as such numbers could not at that time in history be expressed

Sound requires a medium but light does not

Barred owls open conversation with couplets of “who cooks for you?” but then carry on to chaotic monkey cackles and howls

The Voyager spacecraft exited the heliosheath into the heliopause

In some contexts, 3 might be nearly 4, and in another context essentially 0

Emily Dickinson wrote “Eclipses suns imply”

In rounding, one can be said to look past a number

Fish do not fall

2010-12-09T21:04:00.001-05:00

just went to an artist's talk and kept dozing off

the heating oil cost $965

she expressed her frustration with that conceptual heisenbergian problem, that photographing the authentic thereby renders it inauthentic

i couldn't tell if she was sincere because she was very busy expressing her desire to be sincere or seem sincere. writing that, i feel a little mean toward her. but it's hard to not find all her work and words to be smoke obscuring either a lack of sincerity, a lack of content, or both

at some point, one has to take a photograph. everything's literal. there's no reason to be afraid of it

i am a little afraid now to run the heat. if i use the oil, then i will have used it, and will be that much closer to having to pay to replenish it

or. one could just look around

i think, though, that you can get neither grants nor degrees for that

there's that meanness again

it's 54degrees inside

work's not supposed to vanish, is it?

2010-12-05T08:42:00.002-05:00

light cannot round a corner

questions do not just happen out of you

at night, i can see many suns

the snowflakes clot and plummet like barges

the woman with silver hair seemingly hewn seasonally; pearl earring evoking a control button; heavy shuttered eyelids, triple thick and accordion bunching like chins; soft freckled jowls shuddering opposite her vehement headshakes as she disagreed with her companion

alex wanted to shoot the snow

some simple photographs so i can see what i was looking at

unison fails

on the bus, trying to answer if sound envelopes contain something or are just metaphorical, perforated by boisterous undergrad conversation all around

blackberry man walked into trash can

they measure the acoustic properties of the churches by firing a gun in them

2010-11-24T09:07:00.002-05:00

willow oak leaves are falling in great numbers here

also called a pin oak, the tree's leaves are long and narrow, like an index finger

the cat is absentmindedly chewing on a corner of the dictionary's binding

the helical descent of pin oak leaves has two component motions. tilted diagonally, the leaf corkscrews around its petiole, which traces a straight vertical line. within the corkscrew, the leaf twirls along its length

i looked up "adumbrate" this morning, and couldn't decide if that was ironic

the cat has no fingers, his claws are a poor proxy

the leaves decelerate as they fall

2010-11-21T08:57:00.002-05:00

thinking about duration and repetition lately, experiencing it too, and more than that experiencing attention to it and meta-attention to that attention

listening to philip glass a lot, found the kronos quartet album of glass' music for dracula in a used bin, hearing it even when it's over, listening to silence and the interruptions of contractors' hemi engines with the same slightly absent intensity

saw andy warhol's movie chelsea girls the other night and found myself jarred when it ended at 3+ hours, disorientedly wandering out to the franklin street sidewalk, staring at miniskirted undergraduates demonstratively clacking past and addled loiterers lurking pointlessly around them as if it was yet another reel

saw ralph lemon's how can you stay in the house all day & not go anywhere? and wrote about it for the thread blog, the 20minute ensemble dance without characteristics, and 8minutes of weeping

i just have this tendency to vanish into the playing out of these things

philip glass doesn't occur to me to be found repetitive

everything around a repeater changes, so the repetitions are each different

molecularly, things degrade, it's like i can sense this

hearing an inaudible skitter of an atom falling off something, or a frictionless slippage

seeing the differences between two mass-produced objects that warhol frequently celebrated the identicality of, and then their differences over time

i might have to relearn how to get bored

or relearn what "is" means

2010-07-22T14:32:00.002-05:00

some problems do not have causes outside of thought

in these cases, thinking is the problem, not the cause

thinking is inevitable

thought is faster and more automatic than intention

just like how you must see what you look at

the eye is outside of thought but the eyelid isn't

your body is a periodic table of you

not all comparisons are metaphors

one thought is not separate from another

one image is not separable from another

all systems of marcation are arbitrary

all significances of marcation are arbitrary

all behavior is true

thought is outside of veracity

once an infant interacts with a machine, her humanity is over

everything is extrinsic

this was typed wit eues closed

2010-01-21T06:16:00.002-05:00

hi, my name is chris, and i elapse by battling abstractions

i make slight changes in order to see if some of them will turn out to have profound effects: making coffee with a french press instead of the automatic drip coffee maker, although more time and labor is required; placing the soap on the soap dish concave side down rather than up, though i believe this may cause the soap, on average, to slide around more

i thought i was hungry but i actually was lonely

those friends who appear to be highly efficient and premeditated in their actions accomplish much more than i do, so i tell myself their efficiency betrays a facile world view, which is unverifiable, though i see the value in protecting oneself against complexity and unpredictability with decisiveness and organization

i thought i was angry but i actually was bored

the sheer number of units of time we have available to us is boggling: seconds and their fractions, minutes, hours, days, weekends, weeks, fortnights, months, quarters, seasons, years, decades, centuries, millenia. also instants, moments, eons, eras, periods, semesters, and so forth. a daughter asks me how much longer until we have to leave and i answer "about a spongebob episode"

the paces one goes through in a day can be seen as a series of resistances against risks or losses, and if one is even only slightly intelligent, one has a sense that the risks are actually absent or overestimated, and that the losses would not particularly matter in the course of the day, much less the life

i thought i was tired but actually i was empty

this is all to say that one can exhaust oneself in this way in the course of to all appearances doing nothing

for instance, is having written this an accomplishment? is breathing? or nothing?

2010-01-07T08:05:00.001-05:00

the twilight clouds this morning, if you said they were orange they were orange, if you said they were pink they were pink, though they were quickly white and gray and then wisps in a generic day

2010-01-06T09:18:00.002-05:00

matt mullins sent me a gracious and smart note asking me about my last post if we can really divorce form and content in the way i imply. i wrote him back this:

You’re totally right, we can’t really divorce form and content. Mainly because what definitively is the content? I mean, you can have arguments up and down (all about as valid) about the content of a newspaper article, and the form of that is purportedly transparent – the objectivity of reportage. Or at least form might not come into play in that argument over the content. With poems, it’s that complexity times a hundred at least.

I mean, when you read that Spahr book, you are so absolutely aware of the formal program going on, to the extent that you couldn’t NOT think it signified in that way that you then have to say “form is content and content is form.” And it’s a great example here with my newspaper article point actually. I think it’s reasonable (tho not absolutely true) to say that, compared to Spahr’s text, the newspaper article has no form or has transparent or ignorable form that the content come through pretty much unaffectedly. And the issue becomes really relevant to everyday living of all people – but especially to poets – to consider how maybe Spahr’s book is just a bunch of newspaper articles plus form. In other words, a poet thinking about a kind of content, determining a particularly appropriate or “best” form to express or embody or install that content within, and then producing the text artifact that is the undivorceable unity of form and content. One plus one equals three here, right?

I’m suspicious, though, that poets for the most part are not making these considerations too explicitly, if at all. And I do think that, back in the days when the ideas of form being nothing more than an extension of content and the medium being the message were first coming about, they were sort of endorsing this mating of form and content going forward. Like, encouraging people to not just think about content, or about content and form being separate, but also to think about an appropriate form that matches or enhances the particular content, and vice versa with thinking about appropriate content for a form, because there were contemporary examples of how content and form or medium and message can feed back upon each other within a process or a reading that are intense and meaningful for people. Getting the three from one and one, as it were.

Over time I just think that the form/content hybrid has become an obligation, and then a convention, and maybe now poets sometimes get form in the way of content in adhering to this obligation or convention. It’s become just how poetry (one trajectory of traditions, anyway) is. And although I’m absolutely certain that Reznikoff is just as formal as Spahr, I want to press it a lot harder to think about degrees of that form/content relationship within the two different poetics there – and most importantly what you can do or not do with each.

and then last night, a discussion at the hardware store with ken rumble on how we are finding lately more potential utility or even community in the making of public performance events rather than the publication of poems and books. poetry is far from fruitless and certainly isn't useless, but i'm not connecting with its power or with the advantages of the medium of late.

also it has been really unusually cold here and will be for another week or more. it's hard to be positive about anything that's problematic. the muddy tire ruts and horseshoeprints have frozen to concrete at the farm

2010-01-04T12:02:00.005-05:00

i've been trying to finish the Obedience manuscript -- whatever that means -- but have been fighting severe distractedness every time i sit down to work on it. i find myself re-reading the same 5 lines over and over, and then suddenly i'm washing dishes. it has been bothering me because i think, how dull is this text that the author can't even bring himself to edit it, no way should some publisher devote their strapped resources to making it a book

then i realized this morning that it's not about the text at all but about me. i become immediately impatient with the text in the same way that i become immediately impatient with pretty much all other poetry for the last while. the poetry is in the way of the content. like i have made several efforts over the last month to read juliana spahr's this connection of everyone with lungs -- a lauded book, in that way that everyone kind of has to demonstrably love the book in order to smell like a poet -- but the tedium of it wears on me so quickly. i'm like, get this fucking poetry out of the way of the poem already. and then i'm washing dishes again

the same happened with jack spicer and others, i mention to not be mistaken as bashing spahr

the spahr and my text are both fine, even really very good and worthwhile things that one would very possibly/probably benefit from having around 5 10 50+ years from now to pick up and read and get new things out of it. but i am not willing to dance the dance it takes to get the things out of it

at the same time, i have been watching david lynch movies and really getting into them, watching them multiple times in order to understand them, think about them, speculate and test ideas about them. why am i willing to log all the time and effort on a lynch film and not a poem? i guess that attention is easier when i'm looking at a screen, that even though i'm watching analytically it's still a lot more passive than reading? certainly lynch makes you dance a dance in the same way spahr and i do, in fact more so, with perhaps less of a literal payoff

is the higher reading demand of poetry worthwhile? or even a good idea?

is it all butt-sniffing? like, i am showing you my level of craft, and my level of being able to recognize your craft, so that i am legitimized in this context that we are now wrapping around ourselves

the form is separating out for me from the content. or maybe i have read enough form that i am thinking, yeah, good for you that you can signify with form, let's see some content. even in my text, where the form is intentionally made to display the content and thus signify such an attitude toward writing and reading, the formalism is tedious

i really want to make things but writing poems does not feel like making a thing anymore. i am drawn more to making events that occur in time, which might explain why i'm willing to dance with lynch rather than myself and juliana spahr

i'm sick of my self-referential tricks, i just need to let the pronouns go and make plays happen at the space

2009-12-30T01:33:00.005-05:00

wittgenstein is like forgetting that the dead animal you are poking was once alive. am i sentimental? or even simple? but i'm really here. only humans and their pets know their names

anyway i like to drink bourbon at night

returned to work today, between stints of actual work wrote these lines and events that could be put into a play:

The garden is closed, we're the only ones

Is it a holiday?

It's not a holiday. It's not like it's a holiday

Ask me a question that I can answer yes to

No matter what you ask me, I'll answer yes

I can only say yes to you

Stop. Everything should now stop

All these trees are growing, right now

I always have to make a lot of effort

Make something awful come out of you

(large padded headphones)

Shadows are for things to come out of

(multiple recordings of the same song covered by different singers played simultaneously)

(a diviner)

Cast a shadow on that

(something is there in the shadow that wasn't there in the light)

picked up the girls from vicki to take iris to horseriding, dropped iris there but sadie fell asleep in the car so i parked and wrote more, starting off a dialogue but losing the thread of it:

What did I just say?

That you haven't been sleeping well

What else?

That it was like a song. That it was like being in a song

Yeah. It's just like being in a song. An old song

From before you were born

They used to listen to this song where I come from. It's like a day from my life when I hear it

We're in shadow

We're in the shadows now

Casting shadows upon shadows

Anything is better than the light

That's not such a bright idea

I'm not the brightest bulb in the chandelier

Do you think I should have done differently?

woke sadie up and we ate cheese and bread at a grocery. played outside around a fountain, a woman was sitting at an outside table, hollered at two children not 15 feet from her "get closer to me, someone could take you"

listened maybe 30 times today to linda scott's cover of "I Told Every Little Star" because it's used in mulholland drive, got iris hooked on it

i'm really very selfish, but i don't have to know your name to know you're you

2009-12-29T09:10:00.004-05:00

last night kate and erika were over to watch football, the game ended late, in overtime, with a sudden loss for the vikings, after their second-half comeback just to get it to overtime, after having been dominated for the entirety of the first half

yesterday afternoon with the girls in the gardens, iris shooting over 50 video segments most of which are under 10 seconds in length, a documentary inclination and a cinema verite inclination. it was like, to capture the place you shoot the place, it's that simple to her. a picture is of what you take the picture of. mostly i hung well behind iris, looking at plant structures and asking why of them

how excruciatingly gradual the vikings built momentum after halftime. they put their game together brick by brick, it wasn't the flipping of a switch

looking for lydia davis books at used bookstore yesterday (unsuccessfully) read wittgenstein's foundations of math for a while, a section on whether a child learns a solution procedure/process or develops a more fundamental or structural understanding of the mathematics

architecturally spectacular seed pods are common, i want to think of them as behavior. for so many animals, the impulse of life seems reducible to eating and fucking, or even just fucking, as eating might merely be to enable that. but plants, being stationary, what is fucking to them?

sadie likes the intricacies of paths; iris likes to leave paths to get at the intricacies of the environment. the trick is that the natural environment of the gardens is of course completely mediated and designed, those particular plants are there because someone put them there, even the lay of the land is designed, as the persistent beeping of backing-up caterpillars reminded us

momentum is temporary, in a game context, it's a surge for a portion, or for the remainder, of the game. the vikings manufactured their momentum from the raw materials of adjustments by the coaching staff, which allowed incremental success by individual players, which gave those individual players emotional lifts that manifested themselves as physical energy (adrian peterson's angry running), which triggered the same in their teammates. it's cloudiform, an evening storm that gathers all day in the sky from apparent nothing

time-lapsely think about each flowering plant. a bud, teetering upward, tumescent, bursting, the first petals gesturing quickly to be then curled outward and downward by an identical gesture of the next ring of petals, desiccating, browning and shriveling until dehydrated enough that they release from the pedicel

math seems like a fabric or geography: i've been to this city and am familiar with it, i only know someone from that city who has told me like one or two things about it, i've never been or really even heard of that place but have a cultural sense of it, that place is in another country with a different language and culture and i can't even guess at how to get there much less actually function there

sadie likes paths because she likes to run, and she likes to run because she can run

the closer you can look at something, the more you understand it, so long as there is an indivisible lowest level or unit, otherwise you're just chasing internal infiniteness

iris has no impulse or desire to choreograph or direct. although the camera is not really part of what is happening. a recording eye

eras are petals

get as far inside it and look at it fastly

2009-12-18T23:10:00.004-05:00

last night we had hockey seats second row from the glass, right by the faceoff dot

but before that in the afternoon iris and i went to the public library. it's right by the shelter so residents spend days in and around the library, often you encounter some really desperate or unwell people in there. we galloped up the claustrophobic stairwell to get a lydia davis book from the 3rd floor and a 60s-ish man in plaid flannel shirt and filthy ambiguous pants was shuffling along the 2nd-floor landing, chin jutting, lower lip curled over upper, eyes unfixed and unfocused, a lot like a windup toy and moving about as fast, but we whirled around to the steps up from there, we were racing. found the book and then went to the patricia highsmith books so i could tell iris about why i stopped reading her stories, we were up there maybe ten minutes. back down, the man was still on the landing, about 3 feet farther along than he'd been when we ascended past, but now stopped, exactly hunched, and the security officer next to him with a same hunch to look up into his empty face, and a frayed librarian on his other side looking plaintively at the security officer's face, all 3 a tableaux but of what, but we whirled down the next set of steps to the circulation desk, we were racing

when you get to see hockey that closely, it is a different sport, it isn't even a sport anymore, you watch individuals in the game situation of a moment. i could see the sweat on cam ward's face through the gaps in his mask, and how calm he is even when the action is in his crease, he's always that loose, he doesn't have to summon it, or release tension by skating around like most goalies do, he wastes nothing

i also saw how remarkable a skater and thinker marian gaborik is, he moves differently from every player out there, it's really more like flying, like a hawk. he took a puck off the boards at his own blue line, tucked one leg behind him for a stride in order to avoid contact with the player he picked, then promptly pumped up ice for two strides blowing past a defenseman before he could react, and while accelerating like this with head up glanced to each side to locate teammates, just flashed his eyes and knew everyone and their velocities and trajectories, made the hurricanes' blue line and shifting back down to a glide dropped the puck to one side, lifting his skate to let the puck scud directly beneath it, meanwhile the defenseman has only just reacted to his acceleration and turned scrabbling to catch up so now gaborik drops instantly back behind him and becomes suddenly open as he drifts again on one skate laterally into the slot, vaclav prospal is the trailer and moves into the space that gaborik made for him at the top of the circle, prospal pauses and then steps into a shot as if he's going to slap one on net but instead flicks a wrist shot along the ice into the slot at gaborik, meanwhile gaborik has planted the foot that had been raised to allow the drop pass and shoves the shaft of his stick down along that leg, to deflect and lift prospal's shot straight on net. but ward gets enough of his elbow out to send the puck to the corner, gaborik sees this even before ward makes the save and releases the plant foot to keep his previous drift trajectory into the corner, catches the puck just as it comes off the boards to flick it into the confusion of skates in the crease, but ward has taken everything away down low, and waits excruciatingly patiently with his glove poised and open like a child holding a bug jar until the puck jumps against him and then he covers it for the whistle

ward and gaborik were smooth and everyone else was choppy, even eric staal, who is secretly a power player, not a finesse player like people think. staal plays annoyed more than he plays angry, he doesn't look like he enjoys the game, i bet his eyebrows cramp

lydia davis slides from a sentence to a sentence. you wonder if they're really sentences, if you're chasing something that's a move or two ahead of you through lanes

a terribly old woman walks in my neighborhood every afternoon at the same time i retrieve iris from school. frail, blanched. friday she was a block away, hunched even more awkwardly than usual and a bit to one side, holding the side of her head. i felt a rush of panic that she was experiencing a seizure and doubled my pace but as quickly saw that she was cradling a cell phone against her face with both hands, shuffling along the curb, talking, smiling. and then i was in the park, feeling the gushy slide of sodden mud under my feet as i climbed up to glendale ave and the chuffing car line

i like to imagine that i can see inside of things. but then i still have to drive the car and so forth

the park stays soggy all year

i think gaborik rarely has his weight on more than one foot

i'm a mucker

2009-12-14T10:10:00.003-05:00

second straight day under complete cloud cover, unvariegated dimness yesterday, thick mist this morning. i've been ill

this morning read a long conversation with john yau about his new book on jasper johns' work. also watched blue velvet again this weekend and saw ten or so 4minute warhol screen test films. and now thinking about how few subjects i actually have written about, almost without exception, over the last 20 years, the first self-reflexive poem i wrote was in 9th grade. but to see how lynch recombines and uses light, darkness, passages from one space to another (often outer to inner); warhol cultivates ambivalence to the medium as well as its craft; and johns repeats images and objects, it's reassuring

in the picasso & language show, an idea occurred about how to respond to brent's critique that my obedience manuscript needs a perhaps radical formal intervention or deployment in order to slow the page-reading to the pace of my aloud-readings. also a page-numbering idea that makes sense to me. i really automatically have a sense of a book as a place or space, it's never transparent

listening to co-workers across the hall complain about the notation transition from BC/AD to BCE/CE

i have trouble appreciating pine trees. what do i see at first, the individual pine tree or a representative of the category "pine tree?"

i think i have one wittgensteinian eye and one lynchian eye, and a johns hand

2009-12-10T08:36:00.002-05:00

thick rectilinear cloudbank in front of rising sun this morning, scorching top edge to a blind vinculum

is all humor dark humor?

i've been doing a lot of business lately, negotiating contract terms with data vendors, shuttling technical information back and forth with engineers and editors, it's depleting and also it's communication that can lack ambiguity and come to a decisive and successful conclusion

pointless, too. the underground chatter of ants, infinitesimal clicking mandibles

have you received more emails than kisses, this year?

i'm just moving things along, glacially

2009-12-09T21:12:00.002-05:00

so i've been singing a lot lately. a lot. enough that i know my patterns and my many limitations

the big thing is that i kind of don't really sing, it's more like loud talking or yelling. the sound is coming from a clamped-closed throat rather than a lungs or diaphragm. i've been trying to figure this out in the car but i think that i can't because i'm sitting down when i'm in the car

also i have been quiet a lot. not even thinking. my new house has a good thing going with the living room windows and their sills and the couch

also i've been having the strange headaches again and i need to be careful

brent wrote me that the obedience manuscript needs something to score the reading off the page to be as much like the reading aloud of it that i do. so i have been thinking about impediments, slowness, stillness, betweenness, interstices

i keep thinking about the zombie lurch, painting my face white and stumbling around town in the dark groaning. not paying attention to anything, or hearing any internal voice. just groaning

i've been procrastinating things, even things i want to do. everything has to wait until something else is done first and it's all tangled up

it's incredible how much i get in my own way. but this could be average too

boredom has been pleasant enough, if it's really boredom

anyway i'm not putting any ornaments on my christmas tree. it's just going to be a tree

2009-12-08T11:28:00.003-05:00

smeary milky sky, skies lately, last night smashed charcoal seen above church roof, mornings a quilted layer making sun look egg-like

first twilight angles really about 4pm now, then the decline but the turning point seeming very close to darkness rather than stretching the awfulness of sunset out

condensation has been freezing on storm windows and around the perimeter of the condensation patches sometimes stellar frost with broad bevels

listening repetitively to a few recordings, tried to stay balanced by scattering them amidst a mix cd but i just click ahead to the particular tracks and listen often 20 or more times in a row

structure and form for some reason now kind of hurt, so stuck reconciling clarity with unintentionality, making ambiguous false starts, words seem heavy and impossible to hold onto

or rather, literality hurts lately

have always felt that artists use "intuitive" to cover up lameness, lack of forethought, lack of skill, sloppiness and so forth but there might be another area there

anyway, getting a lot of ideas and passing on them all, instantly

ideas don't seem worthwhile categorically

list things that seem worthwhile: flying/swinging, dirt, shovels, licking/tasting/sucking, windows, doors, springs, destroying, miniatures

collage and its variants are a good next step

or writing on the air

seems like photographing is running out for me

being warm is better than all of this put together

2009-06-24T06:38:00.002-05:00

clouds and sun seen this morning while driving 147 out of downtown . a pile of shreds in the sky, swept together for the dustpan, with sun behind, showing while blasts between, around, and through folded opacities ranging down into dark grey . not appearing overall a still shot of a boiling sky, but a carefully piled mass of tatters . and sharp diagonal shafts blazing down out of the bottom of the mass . sunday, walking to the grocery store with iris and sadie, a stick of a woman approached us shakily . her eyes were turgid ponds . gravity pulled the skin down her face, her pulse vacuum-sealed it against her skeleton from within . she spoke hungrily but her request didn't much dent the humid air between us

2009-06-23T09:19:00.004-05:00

yesterday morning iris and i were leaving sadie's preschool walking to the car across a short stretch of macadam path bright with morning sun . a lengthy earthworm moved languidly on the asphalt, inches from the safety of lawn, unaware of it . i bent down, keys in hand, to flip it into the grass . the instant i touched it, it entered into rapid convulsions, projecting its body fully into the air and skittering around the top surface like a spastic wind-up toy . we were taken aback, even revulsed

then in the afternoon i got take-out at a middle eastern place . with my styrofoam box, i walked along the back of the restaurants, their mops and rice cookers and chairs for waiters to smoke in, to the point where this rear access road meets the parking lot of the building in which i work . i approached a black limo half in the shade of a dense buffer of mostly sweet gum trees, and could see the back of the driver, in his white shirt and cap he was leaning against the front bumper of the car . as i passed i looked over, his black driver's pants were around his ankles and he was pissing on the pavement, his brown, hairy legs in full sun and view . he looked over at me and chucked his chin up in a single nod of hello, expressionless, otherwise frozen, his yellow piss arcing down to its spatter

then last night, sitting on the concrete driveway out front of the space with brian and ken after a listless tecate noir session, talking over desires and options under swifts returning to the agriculture extension building's chimney, i saw down the hill appear around the corner of the auto parts storefront a silver fox . at first it was a large cat to my eye, the way it moved, but then i thought it was a misshapen dog because its head tapered to a nose like an afghan . brian and ken confirmed it was a fox, they'd seen it around before chasing rabbits, and indeed a rabbit was scampering toward us and across the street to the safety of underbrush . the fox stopped upon noticing us, relaxed, put its nose to the ground briefly, casually turned, and went back behind the building, it did not particularly care about the rabbit's escape . its afterimage: body was tapered, looking longer than it should be for its head, the tail seemed too full for the body again, an alien or hybrid form, as if head, body, and tail were on spinners on a slot machine, a composite image with no payoff . then the fox reappeared, fur shining faintly, looking for the rabbit, the rabbit was gone though . it stepped without purpose into the street beneath a streetlamp, bolting invisibly into shadows only when a car approached from around the old ballpark

2009-06-05T21:01:00.002-05:00

the car accident last weekend. at highway speed, braking hard and swerving to avoid a car coming into the lane, not able to regain control, straight into the concrete barrier between west- and eastbound lanes. the sick pop-crunch of impact and its jolt. half-mindedly maneuvering the car across traffic to the shoulder, checking the girls in the back seat to make sure they're okay. they're okay, completely okay. but rolling the windows down quickly to get rid of the toxic deployed airbag mist filling the cabin.

last night, the swing of momentum in the second period. shorthanded, staal crouching in mid-skate to swoop condor-like beneath rafalski's stride, one-hands the puck under control, and as he stands he half-shifts it toward his backhand, interrupting the move with a flick shot under osgood's right pad, catching the goalie in fatal motion.

on the shoulder, settling the girls in the grassy berm, prioritizing the phone calls that have to be made, realizing gradually that one hand took some kind of blow, probably from the steering wheel. striated welts rising in the meaty pad beneath the thumb, and along the inside tip of the ring finger. the hand shaking so it can hold the cell phone. but at the same time, heart beating at a resting rate. and remembering that the heart beat evenly, at regular speed, through the entire crash, puzzling over that.

as the announcer is finishing announcing the goal, noticing that bylsma's loaded up a line for a one-two punch while the crowd is frenzied, crosby and malkin together. after the face-off, some blurry, possessionless play in the neutral zone. then, catching a strange tic at the top of the screen, one skater moving out of consort with the rest, malkin, kicking the puck to his stick and transferring the momentum of a hit from a defender into his own momentum up ice. crosby responds before most other skaters can curl back to register the change in flow, a two-on-one against kronwall, who drifts back to favor malkin's side. the attackers slow to wait for a weakness but kronwall stays between them, they get close enough that malkin has to move the puck, and kronwall goes down, blocking the pass. but malkin stays with the play and takes the puck cleanly off kronwall's block, seeing crosby slow approaching the far post, malkin saucers a pass over the stick of the fallen kronwall, and crosby slices the ice, chopping the puck into the net over osgood's tardy pounce against the inside of the post.

awaiting police, wrecker, moms hurrying to retrieve their daughters from the roadside. scouring memory for what registered, but finding only a few stills, the glimpse of the other driver on his cell phone smiling as he moves into the lane, the glimpse of the concrete wall with the realization that we'll hit it, and between the sound of the tires amidst uncontrollable swerving, and somewhere in there the brief weightless feeling of the car going up on two wheels for a beat. but that's all that's in the mind, two still images, a sound, and a queasy, kinesthetic instant. disconnected from each other, though consecutive.

kennedy slicing diagonally from center ice to beat a hesitant defender backpedalling to retrieve a puck along the boards, whacking it back against the boards to a trailing kunitz, who strides briefly before flinging back against the flow to crosby around the top of the far circle, crosby one-times a pass back across again to kennedy who has continued skating right to the crease, and kennedy chips it into the gaping net before osgood has finished adjusting to crosby's position, tic tac toe.

2009-06-02T07:01:00.003-05:00

in the dream, i was on trial. but the trial was silent. most of it consisted of dimming the courtroom lights, and the jury and prosecutor would turn to watch the blue and green reflections and refractions of waves play against a long section of open white wall, as if we were underwater. it seemed like this would go on for great lengths of time, approaching an hour, but this was hard to know. then the lights would come up and the prosecutor would dramatically turn to look at me under the rims of his glasses like he had just made some damning point with this shadow display. i felt a little panicky and frustrated but didn't really know what to do.

after a while unfortunately i started laughing and couldn't stop. it began as chuckling, i think i was remembering a joke or almost remembering a joke, and caught that momentum that it can have when you get the giggles, and the judge and lawyers were looking at me appalled, and my lawyer put his elbows on the table and held his face in his hands. so i was laughing uproariously in my suit on the stand, my testimony was uncontrolled laughter.

2009-05-24T19:32:00.002-05:00

the other day walking before evening twilight, matching the pace some 50 feet behind a man pushing a shopping cart down the middle of the street, in the shared turn lane, with a young person sitting in the cart, legs dangling over the front. we speculated about the why of the scene. eventually we passed them. the boy sitting in the cart appeared to be low-functioning, i don't know if that is the right term. the man said that he was tired.

then this evening around the same time, driving across an odd wedge-shaped section of parking lot shared by closed professional buildings, a huge woman in a long red dress, indistinguishable from a choir robe, standing behind an empty shopping cart, far from the road, far from any curb, out in asphalt space, staring serenely up at the sky, smiling a little.

2009-05-24T07:40:00.002-05:00

dreamed my father was ill, pale, and decrepit. convalescing on a manor in spring, but to my eye waiting to be relieved of life while attendants flurried around him tending to minor needs that he subsequently ignored. i had brought a lot of books and papers, rolled-up diagrams and charts, and a small working model of some restorative machine that looked like a slingshot. soon the manor staff was taking my commands, bringing for my evaluation core samples from the trees around a clearing, collecting insects and grasses from meadows.

a large slingshot was constructed, aimed to propel my father along a trajectory right above the ground, terminating in the trunk of a gigantic oak tree. the sling comprised braided grasses. insect parts somehow hooked together to form the sling bands in such a way as to move very slowly yet with great force -- as if watching a slow-motion film of a slingshot. my father, nodding and bobbing, was placed into the sling. i doused him with springwater.

we fired him at the tree. he moved through the air with the slowness that one walks a gallery room. something of a festival had sprung up in the clearing. townspeople had heard about our endeavor and gathered to watch, there were food vendors with wooden stands. children ran alongside the slingshot path laughing, playing tag. my father feebly smiled out at them, glancing at me conspiratorially.

as they approached the tree, i could see that some life force was being depleted from the children unfortunate enough to be too close to the sling. the air between them and my father was eddied, and my father was now visibly younger, his wrappings hanging from his boy-body. the proximate children had become smaller and older, shrunken children with ancient features and postures, in agony but unable to break away. my father reached out to the tree as he met it. he had some kind of metal shank in his hand and he began jabbing and scraping at the tree, injuring the bark. panicked, i ran to him, grabbed his wrist, he was perhaps ten years old and might have been me at ten but in my father's glasses, and i scolded him, berated him. i told him you can't do this to trees, that trees are alive and beautiful and innocent, that they know nothing, and i wept hard and got him weeping also with the shame of it, and we wet our hands with our tears and rubbed them into the marks he'd made on the tree, and i awoke crying hard.

2009-05-21T10:46:00.002-05:00

man standing in median outside the starbucks, holding foamcore sign:
got job + home
short on rent
please help
black lab puppy asleep in the dirt behind him, curled belly around a 2gallon jug of water.

then in the food lion checkout, behind man i recognize as smoker at my work building but havent seen him lately. all he's buying is jumbo box of junior mints, like just smaller than a cereal box.

then i park in parking deck, walking into building again, a couple paces behind smoker guy. he disposes of empty junior mints box in trash can by entrance.

2009-05-19T05:59:00.001-05:00

recently i was walking in a forest and crossed a firebreak into an area dense with pines. atop a rise, some lichen stood out on a trunk upon which a shaft of sunlight blazed. fine denticulations like a carnation's frill. but stiff, handiworked. i looked closely at details for a while and then stood and stepped back to try to read the lichen's relation to the tree and the hill. then the air caught my eye. it was full of pine pollen drifting parallel to the ground in the bright light. a migration made placid overall seen from the air, or traffic in lanes pushing along, or the surface of a turgid river like the cape fear through wilmington's waterfront. i blew across the pollen flow, it swirled madly but the calm flow quickly reasserted itself. air is a fluid medium, air is water, the sky is the river and the river is the sky, and we are sea-floor creatures, and density and gravity are all that matters.

2009-05-15T06:44:00.002-05:00

While driving, internalized one bagel sandwich, one coffee, three ibuprofen, one lithium, one antihistamine. When I got into the car the radio started shouting a furniture ad, tuned to a commercial sports station that had been broadcasting the hockey game last night, so I reflexively hit the NPR station button. The last phrase from the sports station ad flowed perfectly into the first phrase of the NPR reporter like this:
"...offer discounts on select patio sets
which many regard as torture."

2009-05-10T10:33:00.010-05:00

as air temperature drops below 31 fahrenheit, human skin begins to freeze. as the temperature exceeds 113 fahrenheit, human skin begins to burn

in the sunday morning quiet, a couple and their 5yr-old daughter crossed the street outside the bagel shop. clutching the girl's hand, the mother explained the dangers of crossing the street in an exaggerated tone more appropriate for a ghost story around a campfire. the mother's eyes darted warily from inside her swiveling head despite the silence of the street. when the girl bent to attempt to investigate some mark on the asphalt, the mother reflexively jerked her skyward, lifting the girl off the ground, and bolted to the safety of the curb. the father, throughout, moved his thumb slowly down the screen of a blackberry. a small flock of birds writhed its way overhead

the average planetary temperature today is slightly over 7 fahrenheit above its ice age average

we animals tend to move in the direction that our eyes look

individuals don't adapt. christine kenneally wrote: "there is no agency in evolution"

these words, this sentence, this form, and writing itself, will one day serve no human purpose. it's not so difficult to imagine

that day is today. or was hundreds, thousands of years ago

my daughters and i were the only people in the bustling bagel shop not wearing jewelry. i even made a second pass to exempt watches

when i was born, my father worked at the green bank, west virginia observatory where astronomers had searched for patterned extraterrestrial signals earlier in the decade, as part of project ozma. over four months, the only signal they detected turned out to be a high-flying airplane

for most species, life alone is self-justifying

listening to people talk along the sidelines of their daughters' soccer game is much like watching dogs sniff each other's backsides

they should have required the lunar astronauts to invent a language upon touchdown

i wanted to yell at that mother, hit that father

2009-05-08T13:08:00.013-05:00

i'm reading for work a social psychology book that applies study results to business habits and practices. the objective in all of it is to become more persuasive and, presumably, succeed and profit. the book is dreadfully written. it reads like the marketing copy on a fast food bag

i think i'll read frankenstein this week

in the movie brazil, de niro's character is overwhelmed by blown newspapers and trash in a subway corridor. writhing, head to toe he's covered in papers. when pryce tries to help by tearing it all off, he finds there's no de niro inside anymore

iris's instinct is to save an insect when she happens upon it, she catches a moth in her hands to release it outside. sadie used to be similarly inclined but lately kills ants when she sees them. she has probably learned this behavior from a classmate, or from seeing me smacking the recently emerged mosquitoes that light upon my arms and ankles

tiger piss smells like buttered popcorn

i read "scheduled outage" as "scheduled outrage"

last night at like 1:30am i was sitting on the front stoop unwinding before bed in the night cool. i live on a busy secondary street, that changes from residential to commercial a few blocks away. a car careened down the street, accelerating noisily past me at maybe 60mph or more, then attempted to hang a right onto a side street without braking. the back half of the car skidded as it disappeared behind the corner house. instantly i heard a tremendous crash, and saw the side of a nearby house light up as if reflecting a lightning flash. my phone happened to be with me so i dialed 911 and started giving details to the operator. as we spoke, a man limped out from behind the corner house, looking around, and walked toward and past me. i described him to the operator, assuming he was the driver. neighbors, in their nightclothes, streamed out of the houses adjacent to the wreck, pointing at the limping man, but no one pursued him. iris and i checked out the scene this morning. a mangled chainlink fence. a scarred buffer between sidewalk and street. large debris scattered about: two headlight housings, bent door molding, a section of a bumper

people are awfully hard to please over the long haul. you have to keep changing it up

two of the painted lady butterflies have made their pupae; the other two caterpillars are dangling, ready

duchamp worked on étant donnés in a secret greenwich village studio for 20 years

frightening pornfilm dream last night of a gigantic ass the size of a school building protruding from the ground, penetrated by a hovering, disembodied penis, all witnessed by a horrified crowd, it was audible

repetition and habit are often comforting to the practitioner; less so to the observer

i overheard a man in the grocery aisle on his cell phone: "i think he's peaked. his best work's behind him"

tony gave me a compilation cd of tecate noir recordings, leading off with "mercury fields." "sower of ropes," the last thing we played in the old space, is third on the cd; "absolute gardens," also from the last night, is on there too. today we met in the new space to talk about next steps: the construction of soundproofed rooms for music, the plumbing repairs, the needs for certain furniture, tools. this is all a good thing for me, working collaboratively, having to communicate and brainstorm collaboratively. if i am not consciously telling myself that this is the kind of approach this group project requires and deserves, then i get impatient with everyone else's ideas

persuasion is actually empty. sliding the tiles around on a tile puzzle

the thing is, i don't have to be so contained, divided, and private

the space is huge and open

instinctively, i want it all for myself

2009-05-07T12:42:00.006-05:00

i stood in the yard for a long time watching moonlight through westward-moving clouds. some of the clouds are thick and swollen with dense moisture, they stay dark with a brilliant white edge. other clouds look torn and the moon noses through them like a swimmer

i'm disappointed that i take no notice of direct sunlight on a cloudless day. it's all the same light really. or i'm just disappointed

my younger daughter sadie is a special kind of contrarian, really more of a serial disagreer. when you try to put a sock on one of her feet, she immediately offers the other foot and says "no, this one." if you offer her three cookies, she's as likely to respond that she wants four as two

probably quorum sensing is the new thing everyone should learn everything about

sadie always wants the other one

i'm good at being alone but bad at being lonely

there's no life on the moon, there's no life on mercury, no life on venus, mars, jupiter, the other planets and their moons. fossilized bacterial traces have been found in martian rocks, but long passed. on earth, though, living things are everywhere. get on your belly in the nearest piece of grass and rummage across the soil. or dig beneath your fingernails and look at what you extract under a microscope. there are probably more living organisms in your mouth than there are humans on this planet. given earth's fecundity, it seems more likely that the other planets and moons aren't devoid of life, but that we just can't apprehend it with our senses or devices

robin blaser died. he visited jack spicer in the hospital and coaxed his last couple of sentences out of him: "My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on."

loneliness is a lack of ability. not of will

burroughs theorized that language was an extraterrestrial virus. maybe light is alive. i've been told that, at times, i have shined

maybe we live in space light like bacteria does in a mouth

maybe light can see us

2009-05-07T07:42:00.006-05:00

crowd noise and rain noise are so similar. a composite environmental noise comprising many simultaneous and consecutive individual noises which themselves can rarely be made out as such. you tend to hear it rather than listen to it, but even when you listen to it there's something impenetrable or beyond your aural capability about it

when i watch hockey now, what i see is flow and momentum. it's hard for this to come across on television because you only see the rectangle of ice that the camera gives you. but when you attend a game and can see the entire rink in your visual field, you see complete energy shapes and vectors in the configurations and actions of the five skaters in each color jersey

robins swoop along in a waviform flight path. they flap or doubleflap, rise from that, then gravity overcomes that lift, then crest and dip back toward the ground, falling for a moment, then flap again

duchamp, before he moved away from painting, attempted to represent the mental aspect of chess with lines of force passing between the heads of the players hunched over the board

gretzky said that, when he watched hockey on television as a kid, he would draw a rink on a piece of paper and trace the path of the puck whenever it was in play. he saw that, consistently, the puck never passed through the same vast areas of the ice surface. so he figured that, when he played, he would never go to these areas

abstract shapes are difficult to let be abstract, but you can train yourself

the implication is that the board and pieces, and even to a large extent the players themselves, are incidental. a game is an idea, is invisible, is real

i've been listening to sgt pepper's lonely hearts club band this week, remembering how closely i would listen to it as a kid. my parents had the record, i would lie on my stomach right in front of the speakers and scrutinize the jacket art as it played. i liked the b-side, particularly the order of its opening:
"Within You Without You"
"When I'm Sixty Four"
"Lovely Rita"
"Good Morning Good Morning"
the stylistic jumps between these songs really meant a lot to me, their different influences and instrumentations. it reminded me of an art museum, where incredible -- and incredibly different -- paintings are hung next to each other. but they're all also the same thing

a game is really just a set of rules. the event sense of the word "game" that we use -- "I saw a great game last night" -- is an iteration of a game, the running of an experiment with certain variables and conditions

last night the hurricanes made a concerted effort to move the puck up the middle of the ice. defensemen appeared lazy or hesitant at first, before i saw the strategy. forwards would curl through the neutral zone and the defenseman with the puck would wait until one of them came open along the red line, so that the forward could enter the boston zone with speed, as well as with a second curling forward to move the puck to laterally when the boston defensemen keyed on him

there's a lab at duke that experiments with granular materials and pressure. they have a large rectangular box, like a small room, filled with uniform plastic balls. then they apply an even downward pressure to the top surface of the balls. through some special photography, they image the stress in the balls. rather than being distributed evenly, the pressure follows lines down through the balls, transferred from ball to ball in what resembles lightning strikes or spider legs. often a ball that is taking enormous stress is surrounded on all sides by balls taking no stress at all

around the midpoint of the game, boston adjusted and the game shifted to the walls. boston effectively banked passes up the wall, even across the width of the rink, which is risky, but they pulled it off a lot. their defensemen were able to win pucks down low and move them out of their zone quickly, dulling the hurricanes' forecheck. boston's attacks seemed to materialize from nothing, a chip up the boards, a fling across the middle of the rink

last weekend, so easy in the rothko room in the phillips, to see the murky, phenomenal depth in the color rectangles. it took a second. i was startled. it was like wormholes or visual drains were built into the walls, color cloud conduits. usually this potential has to build up through a certain kind of calming and attention, i have to sit there for 20 minutes before things can start to happen

i would like to see a super slow-motion high-definition film of many hockey faceoffs. i would like a rothko room of this

2009-05-06T05:27:00.005-05:00

watched parts of "heat" last night, on television, so the ads kept interrupting it. noticed the spareness of the settings, and also how only the actors seemed to be in focus, the backgrounds always a little dulled in their acuity. not designified but as if the focus knob was dialed down to 70%

one more week of lithium then we're trying something else

a couple of friends dropped by last night, during the lengthy shootout after the bank heist, which we watched to completion, a little cheesy at the end where all the bystanders at the grocery store are running around flailing their arms in the middle of a machinegun battle, also not a particularly original ending, where pacino cuts down sizemore in a corporate plaza, despite sizemore holding a young girl as a human shield

there is no value in knowing the number of words in a language, although there might be value in estimating the rate of creation of new words in that language

i guess it doesn't need really to be original

the giant lights over the soccer practice field buzz so loudly you can hardly talk when walking directly beneath them

azaleas are pretty much finished here. but they are in full bloom in washington dc, and haven't yet budded in minneapolis

languages are living things in that people use them. although the invention of writing might have essentially changed that. when a language dies it's because the last speaker of it has died

interesting brief discussion about kharms with one of the geodesic gnome guys after their performance in alexandria saturday night. that he wasn't political in the way the stalinists thought he was, but neither was he apolitical nor absurdist. i tried working this out driving home but my head was tired and full

that fantasy -- of suddenly going away to somewhere small and quiet, not telling anyone you knew, living innocuously and simply, and doing some kind of creative work, slowly, and maybe never resurfacing -- keeps coming up

i'd probably just sit around a lot drinking coffee, bourbon, pomegranate juice

after we turned off "heat" we talked and laughed about comedies. she was qualitatively differentiating one particular movie from its category, sort of searching for the right expression, but he kept interrupting her because he was enthusiastic about the topic. so she reached up casually and put the side of her hand in his mouth, not aggressively or capriciously, not the flattened palm of her hand over his mouth but the side of her relaxed hand, the meat of the side of the hand below the pinkie

it occurs to me that kharms might have been unique

any attempt to count words requires that the counters first establish their criteria for a "word." some exclude technical or scientific words such as taxonomic names or chemical compounds, on the grounds that these are not words in general usage. these words vastly outnumber general usage words

in any case, people always seem to be impressed by number, quantity

the phone ad that spun the animated world and showed the coverage spread with countries coloring in offended me

technical words and names are purely created out of necessity

a four-hour heist-and-shootout sequence, with no dialogue but shouted commands among the thieves and the cops, in which character, plot, setting, and narrative arc are conveyed purely through the way the shootout is shot, acted, and edited

it's easy enough to look around where you currently are and spot things and phenomena for which there is not a word

there must be a lot of people on the planet who don't know they're on a planet

2009-05-05T09:33:00.006-05:00

hydroplaning is audible. timbre and volume of wheel-to-road and thrown-water-into-wheel-well change together in a certain way. their combined sound folds and rotates, and the car lifts

the woman across the hall from me spends over an hour every day narrating the declining conditions of elderly friends over the phone to other friends

bouvet island is the most remote island in the world. antarctica is the nearest landmass, over 1000 miles away. 93% of the island's 19 square miles is covered by glaciers. a boat cannot land on its steep shores. only moss and lichens are able to grow. nonetheless every feature has been named

this is one of my thumbprints

my relatives who use the word "nigger" a lot served me trout stuffed with crab meat, roasted zucchini and yellow squash, wild rice, and pound cake with french vanilla praline ice cream

once a camera is in motion, the images it captures differ significantly from those of a human eye

thumbprinting is done in the basement of the sherrif's office, where gun permits are also distributed. when a permit is issued, one has a month to claim it before it's invalidated. while my fingers were being rolled across the fingerprinter platen, a smiling woman entered and politely asked to pick up her permit. the person behind the desk pointed out that her driver's license had expired. the gun woman instantly turned loud and surly. this was the last day she could pick up her permit, she would have to reapply and start all over. the person behind the desk looked tired and absent and her shoulders sagged, let the woman rant a bit, matter-of-factly stated that the law was the law, pivoted on the heel of one of her flats, and returned to her desk, conspicuously involving herself in some papers on her desk. the gun woman grimaced, showing her teeth, paced a little bit in the small space in front of the counter, said some malicious-sounding things under her breath, and stalked out, aggressively lighting a cigarette up the cinderblock corridor to the stairwell

as the car lightened and drifted toward the shoulder i thought that the rumble strip would likely restore its contact to the highway

legally, we are each of us born unnamed. and, legally, we must be immediately named

2009-05-02T06:27:00.003-05:00

watching chimney swifts last night wheeling in twilight noisily

swept out vast garage studio space with ken. talked through imaginary wall scenarios, could arrange this way or that

one bird is one bird behaving as one bird. two birds flying together is different

lately a thrasher has been rustling noisily in the dune of leaves against my neighbor's chainlink fence between our houses. sounds like someone walking, i've looked more than a couple times to see if

the space really could have anything happen in it. we mused on what the tecate noir sessions have become for us, what of the recordings we've been listening to. a space, a collaborative aura, a permission, a ritual, a relief

sweeping has the same rhythm as talking. when i was in high school i saw the kronos quartet play at wolf trap. they did a john zorn elegy for robert mapplethorpe called "the dead man" that had bursts of bright or tangled playing, followed by the musicians simply swishing their bows downward through the air. rosin clouds swirled in the stagelight by the end of the piece. it was the first zorn music i ever heard

this one recording called "mercury fields" i've been listening over and over, and to a lesser degree from that same night "submarine in flames" and "all nine of us spin"

it feels like walking in a forest, alone and safe

2009-04-30T22:55:00.002-05:00

spent a long time tonight watching a rhinoceros beetle lose a battle to a lot of small black ants

the beetle wasn't a rhinoceros beetle actually but it looked so much like one and i don't know what it's called. black and large and oversized pincers on the front

it's hard to have a good day all day. there's always a stretch that feels like catching a glimpse of a stalker. except it's a different me that's the stalker

that the beetle was nearing the end of its life cycle seemed likely

the ants were up in it, beneath the chitin, sometimes taking small bits away

also a cop pulled me over tonight for an expired tag but i talked my way out of it. the new tag has been on my desk for weeks but i put some poems on top of it and forgot about it

finally i read in context the wittgenstein line "If a lion could talk we could not understand him." soon enough he is writing "If a pattern of life is the basis for the use of a word then the word must contain some amount of indefiniteness."

this plays against the biography of roget i'm reading, in which he does the sweeping-the-beach-after-each-wave thing with word and synonym senses. i hadn't realized that the thesaurus was a one-man project

still, i'm rooting for roget to beat language

i bet he was miserable

what it must feel like to have ants eating you under your skin

recent pinhole images (click to enlarge)

2009-03-17T16:41:00.004-05:00

trees through windshield during rain
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on the porch at the fed with tony, leigh, and ken (ghosts)
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snowy vine tangles in backyard
--------------------------------------

minor american reading, laynie browne, joe donahue, dianne timblin (ghosts)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

tecate noir session, brian howe, tony tost, ken rumble (ghosts)

2009-02-03T07:25:00.001-05:00

to become transparent, to vanish, to become insubstantial, to de-empiricize.

the wind. to be a wind.

2009-02-01T14:18:00.003-05:00

although today is the super bowl and my favorite team is playing, i don't particularly care how it turns out.

it is irrelevant to me.

a bunch of guys who wear a uniform i've fixated on. it's useless and i should be ashamed that i've cared about it for so long.

people are coming over and it will be fun to eat crappy food and drink beer and crack dumb jokes. but whatever about the game or the result. or the penguins. whatever about hockey and the penguins and the hurricanes.

i've wasted way too much of my time at this midpoint of life.

everything unnecessary or not worthwhile goes. now.

2009-01-29T06:34:00.000-05:00

(NOTE: I originally posted this 4 years ago, but it has become relevant again since the Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl this coming weekend. I've updated the prose a little bit from the original post.)

So the Arizona Cardinals football team got hot at the right time, and has made it to the Super Bowl. Bully for them. I must say, I don't like them. Ever since, in 2005, when they announced that they'd changed their team logo to be tougher, meaner, and faster:

The changes to the Cardinals logo include:

thickening the black outline
curving the underside of the beak
changing the beak color from yellow to gold
sharpening the angle of the entire head, which affects the eye as well
enlarging the eye
simplifying the shape of the black patch around the eye
reducing the red area
running the crest into the shape of the head

While the old bird head image still expressed the appearance of an actual cardinal in its three separately visible components (triangular beak, curved head, feathered crest), the further slanting of the new logo combines with the thickening of the outline to reduce it to a singular image. In the two logos above, connect the beak point through the eyebrow point to the tip of the crest -- you'll see a slant increase of at least 15 degrees. Since the overall image is narrowed, the eye no longer focuses on the red of the bird's head (the red color is the most important identification feature of the cardinal, even more so than its crest), instead seeing a diagonal line anchored at its center by an angry black&white eye. Shape becomes vector. This reduction and smoothness, combined with the change to the crest which now signifies wing more than crest, conveys speed, focus, and fury. What was internally multiple and therefore visually accessible is now singular and impenetrable.

This new logo also conveys carnivorous hunger. The curved beak mimics the hooked beaks of predatory birds. Of the 15 current NFL teams symbolized by animals, birds (Cardinals, Ravens, Seahawks, Falcons, Eagles) surprisingly outnumber cats (Bengals, Jaguars, Lions, Panthers) 5-to-4. Of this group, the cardinal is the only non-predatory bird, subsisting on seeds, nuts, and berries. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the white part of the eye now references carnivorousness by imaging a fishing hook. Cardinals aren't even aggressive, except among each other, and then only during the colder months when food can be scarce.

All in all, the Arizona Cardinals completely dissociated their team image from their namesake animal, which makes sense considering a football team markets itself based on the brute physical force and goal-oriented aggression that's codified in the game. Not to mention the fact that there are decidedly fewer cardinals in Arizona (if any at all) compared to the rich basin of the midwest, where the team originated. Since it's easier to update an established brand than it is to establish a new one, they kept the old, now-irrelevant identity, despite the fact that no one would possibly be intimidated by a cardinal.

Why does this disconnect not bother fans or players? Both populations are so transient that it probably doesn't occur to them or, if it does, it's ironic. Cardinal players (through free agency) and fans (Phoenix disproportionately comprises retirees, migrant and service workers, and high-tech white-collar jobs that can be performed regardless of where a worker sits) form no attachment to the team or the logo on the helmet. It is simply the team currently paying them, or currently on the local tv broadcasts. No one aspires to play for the Cardinals; they just want to play in the NFL. No one get excited about watching the Cardinals; they get excited about watching a pro football game.

Overall, team logo updates over the last decade have reflected this dissociation of sports teams from their cities. The Cardinals, for instance, flourished in St. Louis after starting in Chicago. Then the owner couldn't get the city to build him a new multiple-hundred-million-dollar, football-only stadium in an affluent suburb, so he moved the team to Glendale, an affluent suburb of Phoenix. This suburb itself is a geographical dissociation, as Americans not native to Arizona move into the area seeking a generic living environment close enough to the city center to experience regional and city culture in digestible portions without having to drive more than 45 minutes, yet far enough away that the urban grid, associated with blight, filth, and crime, is kept permanently at bay by the very highway ring that delivers them quickly to it.

When professional sports leagues first formed, teams adopted the identities of their cities because their players were culled from those populations. The Steelers and Packers were named for the industrial worker traditions in Pittsburgh (Go Steelers!) and Green Bay, originating from company sponsorships the way little league teams are associated with local restaurants and businesses. Now, since Americans more often than not leave the state in which they're born (especially urban and suburban Americans), and move several times throughout a lifetime, teams base their identity on something they can change to fit the current market. Only an idea can be this basis; almost never a place. Teams have to link to a concept or tone, and the concept and tone of the last 8 years is war, diametric opposition, and oversimplification.

Most professional teams, not just football teams, have changed their insignia to appear meaner and leaner, linking the update to a move to a new stadium. Here are the current and previous logos of the two teams in a recent Super Bowl, the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles (both christened their mammoth stadiums during the Bush administration):

old and new Patriot:

old and new Eagle

Both images take the diagonal tack, which makes the eagle look like it's coming in for the kill and the patriot look like it's marching stoically into battle. The eagle's head becomes a vector by looking like a wing; the patriot's head becomes a vector by looking like a waving flag. Both, like the Cardinals' update, show the same flatness, stylization of detail, elimination of internal variation, and divorce from the representation of any reality.

We will destroy you, and we will feel nothing. We are one thing, made solidly all the way through of the same consistent substance. Our function is our purpose. We are one nation, united, under God. Even we don't really know what we are.

morning light, inauguration day, front of my house, snow on azaleas

2009-01-26T10:57:00.002-05:00

pinhole self-portrait in snow, obama's inauguration day

2009-01-22T08:41:00.001-05:00

2009-01-20T07:14:00.003-05:00

Good luck, Barack.

I got your back.

2009-01-15T05:19:00.002-05:00

when i awoke, i thought "i am in the southern hemisphere." it was not a dream; it was a thought. in the darkness i thought hard about that, that it seemed so unlikely, that i could not remember how i came to be in the southern hemisphere and that that probably meant i was not actually there. but this thinking just confused me more because i was certain i was in the southern hemisphere. it was not until i stood on the front porch that i knew i was not.

2009-01-14T21:51:00.006-05:00

the sargasso sea is east of the bermuda triangle in the middle of the atlantic ocean. it's not really a sea; it's a gyre, one of five oval-shaped areas of ocean on earth that is transformed into a slowly rotating pond by a combination of consistent currents and winds around its perimeter.

this morning a physician's assistant little more than half my age gave me bullet points on how to get out of a bad mood, which she called "a funk." she had caps on her teeth and punctuated each point with a smile. i think she was bought in a hardware store or at least had been belt-sanded. then i got a coffee at a bp station. they have a free newspaper on the counter of mug shots of recent local arrests, to shame them in their own community. then i sat in traffic until i finished my bp coffee. then i did the asshole thing and drove a half-mile of shoulder to an exit to get to an alternative route. then i sat in traffic in the alternative route.

there's a gyre in the north pacific ocean that collects plastic trash. a plastic bottle discarded along the california coast takes a week to get there but japanese trash takes only a day. plastic objects grind each other to bits in the gyre, transforming the waters into a stew to depths of hundreds of feet, and covering a surface area twice the size of texas.

the sargasso sea, instead, is rich with sargassum seaweed. its waters are so still that the weed clots together in unnavigable mats. these are the doldrums, the horse latitudes. sails received no wind; screws and propellors spool sargassum and jam. it's a caesura.

i went to work and i came home. on the way home, two men were struggling to get across the street. the street is busy and wide and people tend to speed on it although it's a residential street. i always speed on it. the two men stood on the double yellow center line, one clutching the other with his left hand and clutching a brown bag in the other. the brown mouth of a bottle protruded from the bag's mouth. they swayed and threatened to launch a dash across my lane. i covered the brake and stared them down, passed them, didn't look back.

2009-01-13T11:18:00.004-05:00

cold, desperately still, overcast. stopped, not waiting. those trees are an image of those trees.

two kinds of desperation last night. both staged.
one, in orhan pamuk's novel snow, a muslim zealot executes a school's director in a cafe because the director forbade students to wear headscarves. the chapter is the transcript of the tape recording through the wire the school director was wearing, laying out the situation of secular v religious govt and the arguments and ethics in play in transition.
two, in the man v wild season premiere, bear grylls beats in the head of a 9ft boa. then roasts a length and it curls open along the incision in the skin, puckering into a charred, bristled fist of meat. heat causes the meat to writhe itself inside out. he eats the white meat gingerly, working around and between bones. things are either food or not.

then today, a lot of real desperation going on all around. the trees are exactly, exactly the same.

2009-01-12T16:05:00.002-05:00

last night i had to get hardware late on sunday after 9 which means walmart so i went to a walmart. i found my thing and then a couple times over went through that splitsecond cycle where you see a thing you want and are mentally zapping the arm muscles to reach for it and then before the reach you remember that you dont need the thing or even want it and in fact kind of hate it and hate yourself for getting fooled into wanting it just because bright fluorescent lights are on it and it's placed in the middle of the aisle so you h ave to face it and brush up against it to let someone pass in their electric wheelchair.
then in an aisle that i thought would get me to the front of the store but it had an angle in it there was a woman who looked so tired and unhappy abusing her young boys. this was awful and i didn't know what to do except escape and am still working on what the best thing to do would have been.
then when i got home i watched tv on which a polar bear was tracked in the arctic, ranging further and further each summer to find food because we're melting the ice shelf, and he ends up way out of his way on some shore with about a half million walruses and tries in his starved desperation to eat a walrus but they all fight him off and wound him severely with their tusks and he gives up and digs a smallish divot in the dirt and curls up in it to die.

2009-01-07T09:01:00.001-05:00

dreamed i couldn't get out of my house because a tiger had died slumped against the storm door.

2009-01-04T11:59:00.001-05:00

a few days ago i thought i would rather have been a jellyfish.
but now i think i would rather have been a street.

2009-01-03T16:19:00.001-05:00

i am animate.
but once you focus on some parts of me, like my hair or my fingernails, that's inanimate.

also, i don't connect with others.
i am endured.

2009-01-03T07:45:00.003-05:00

this morning, before the girls climbed into bed, i felt the illusion that i was a tremendous weight. a leaden body, thousands of pounds. i could feel the force of gravity on my individual teeth.

i want to be buried face down.

2009-01-02T14:00:00.004-05:00

randall told me that on overcast days like this that it's the best kind of day to find skulls in the forest. the clouds filter out frequencies of light that make a lot of visual noise with the fallen leaves. the white of skulls is brighter. how dogwood petals glow at twilights.

my brain is in a skull.

2009-01-01T20:34:00.001-05:00

i would rather have been a jellyfish than a man.

if given a chance to choose, i would choose jellyfish. any kind.

2008-12-31T20:54:00.002-05:00

i've merged the other blog -- attention without a me -- into this delay blog. for now it's no frills but i'll get some frills going on soon. you know, links and images and dancing girls and dancing boys and dancing hermaphrodites.

also, ostention is the teaching of a word by pointing at the thing for that word. i got a book.

i got 3 books today, for me, in addition to the emily rodda book for iris that we had to return to the library:
* james gray's how animals move (c 1959) -- i'm reading chapter 4 "jumping and creeping" first
* adolf portmann's animal forms and patterns (c 1967) -- looks like it has some stuff about species differentiation in it
* george miller's the science of words (c 1991) -- that i learned about ostention in it.

2008-12-31T12:53:00.003-05:00

it's hard to believe that wind is temperature differentials.
it behaves like a thing, like an animal. even when you see it dissipate you still think of it like a creature that came through.
understanding doesn't do much to that unlikelihood of belief.
scale would. if we had a huge eye that could look down on the continent, like a weather satellite eye in our heads.
wind doesn't really blow. it moves.
like how water boils. water doesn't produce its boiling, it suffers it. not to imply anything negative with the word suffer. an agent acts upon water to produce that behavior in the water. water is provoked to boil.
at first, water is not boiling. when heated sufficiently, it boils. as the water temperature approaches the boiling point, it appears to be on the verge of boiling. i got a new saucepan for christmas, as the water heats a kind of fur of tiny bubbles gathers on the bottom, then the bubbles swell and jump toward proximate bubbles while still clinging to the surface, forming larger and larger bubbles. and steam rises from the water surface. as the temperature increases, the steam has more organization and consistency visible in its rising, it becomes bodily. the water surface also agitates.
as the water temperature reaches and exceeds the boiling point, the water boils. i've been postponing reading about what's actually happening in the water, just watching it for a while before i get around to knowing it.
boiling water suffers such upward turbulence that it appears to be allowing the escape of a panicked agency. bubbles and steam do not so much appear as they rapidly fume in abundance, as if they were creatures escaping the water.
water and air are both considered fluid media. they differ so much in their density, of course, as to be entirely incongruent to us, but again that's a matter of scale and eyes.
wind is the movement of air from one location to another. a fluctuation or tendency in the medium. it even has to do with the velocity of the movement. think how we have words for degrees here -- whisper, breath, draft, breeze, etc.
all the air on the planet is one thing, one fluid thing.

2008-12-29T08:05:00.000-05:00

a spruce, knurled in a gradual spiral, handmade candy

its evergreen painted on, clouding it, to coalesce

stone trunk, an inverted fluted column, its whiteness coming through the gray against the dark greens, the greens selecting whiteness

bright cigarette tip, neat bearded face, half rolled down window, passing car

as the sky brightens the squirrels appear in silhouette within the double willow oak

i should not be ashamed to be so literal

i should not be ashamed to be anything, if i'm anything

clouds head east but its hard to see their churn and roil from below

lamplit windows like butter for another maybe 15 minutes

four of the same rectangle, stacked to make the same rectangle

for a little bit i forgot all the feelings and just saw

bird tumbled like a leaf

old house sags around its chimneys

i wish i could see a tree growing and not in that time-lapse photography way

enough morning light now to banish silhouette, i see the squirrels' grayness and postures

the old man's mossy roof

2008-12-29T07:57:00.002-05:00

sometimes i really hate the disposable, the end of the year

i'm not particularly good at perspective, but at description

perspective has spect, the visual, in it. description has script, the hand in it

when i look, i forget my hands. or my eyes are hands

2008-12-28T10:26:00.002-05:00

This blog has been dormant for over a year but now I'm resuming it.

This blog has been dormant for over a year and now I'm resuming it.

Frayed clouds today, moving briskly like a landscape does out a car's side window. Yesterday I bought a globe for a dollar.

That's all.

2008-12-28T10:20:00.000-05:00

i'm going to, for some reason it occurs to me, blog on both this one and on the resuscitated delay blogs both. not that i've been making many blog posts.

just now a cashier was taking change from her register drawer with the same hand motion that my piano teacher when i was a child would try to get me to lift from the keys. a wave moving through wrist and fingers, most people would choose the word "graceful" for it but i've never been certain what "graceful" and "elegant" actually mean, they seem like conventions that shift severely over time and among place. but you probably know the conventional graceful and that's the hand motion the cashier used for the change. when i saw it i thought i should come home and resume the delay blog. so i've done that.

but this one will continue too. perhaps a difference between the two spaces will be evident after a while.

2008-12-19T08:32:00.000-05:00

an advantage of scrub pines is light comes through them

i have been watching water come to a boil and boil

2008-12-13T18:46:00.000-05:00

"If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
Alan Turing

2008-12-11T07:26:00.000-05:00

what is the crystalline within structure of wax and does annealing have any impact upon it.

the way that a thick cylindrical white candle glows through itself.

2008-12-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

i guess when youre looking at fall winter leaves with those colors what youre really looking at is slow death. strange that people immediately think that animals think like people and almost never do the same with trees and leaves and flowers. there are degrees of consciousness i guess, regardless of whether youre animate or not.
like that wall for instance. though what i'm really looking at is the paint on it. the paint is on the wall, it isn't the wall. you make a wall and then paint it. this might not be a worthwhile distinction. a sheet of paper is really 2dimensional not quintessentially.
writers should have to be mute and stay by themselves would help everybody.

2008-12-10T02:09:00.000-05:00

spitty rain here.
how do you describe the streetlights. not amber. almost peach but too blasted out with white electricty. there's an origami paper that's pale salmon and you can see the other white side of the paper through it is close.
this place has drywall and the old place had plaster. but from how the drywall relates to the windowtrim level theres probably plaster under it. they just slapped it up overtop, it's easier.
water boils faster in the flatbottom saucepan than the rounded bottom.
an observation takes a little time. its like waking sleep.
clocks are round but calendars arent. strange headache like a stranger you kind of recognize sideways glancing at you a lot. that's two similes now. both chambers of a shotgun.
to wander off, walserian. are you still a spy if you never actually spy.
stare at a wall long enough and it becomes two images that simultaneous and looks like movement from the interference. then a blank gray tunnel comes up from the perimeter if you can resist glancing at it. meting out looking from seeing.
typed three pages then burned them in the doublesink. about lines and divisions and parts, borders. all imaginary, it turns out. but the wall is there. surfaces don't have surfaces though. only ornament.
gave the finger twice today driving. eavesdropped on moms picking up kids from school about whats on sale where. three times they said "in this economy." should have given them the finger to even it up.
all matter is energy but not at our level. it's just waste. flesh just bends and stretches when you poke it. a rock is the same thing all the way through. photographs of photographs.

2008-12-09T04:19:00.000-05:00

i've not blogged in a while. truth is i havent had much to say. why talk to a wall. or yourself.
i moved. the walls are different here. every room's still a box though.
there's a roof over my head. there's that. i don't eat beans off a tray at least. all the limbs work. i'm cold but it's a choice to be so. i only wait for myself.
time damn crawls. there's a flicker. daily stuff has the flicker, if you look at it with this slowness, of a film projecting. the gate or interlocutor or whatever it's called. making a moment of darkness between the frames. everyone else looks in slow motion. i see what they do before they do it. not controlling, just a wonder. marveling, without pleasure. because i don't move at a speed relevant to theirs. or like watching a movie of everybody. wanting to flip off the channel but not doing it. all the same program on the channels, just different images.
don't think it's dreamlike, it's not. don't think i'm a surrealist. fuck surrealism. birds are birds. that bird is that bird. and if you make it something else or wrap something around it youre a worse liar than me. but its all equivalented anyway. we agree to that. it's a nice deal, square as the day box on the calendar, or this room.
i really responded recently to agnes martin grids. because theyr'e not horrible, not trapped. and not a pattern, just sure, there. her paintings are merely there. who else can say that? most of us are there and then gone, somewhere else. vectors. racking up the variables about ourselves. there's probably no variable really. that's an idea. like what a bird was before the word "bird" was stuck on it. you don't answer you just know. how do you read a grid, or make a mistake with it? you eithre go away from it or stop and keep looking at it.
surrealism rejects the idea that everything is ultimately toggles, atomically. just drop the mystery and the unknowable and unsayable and the vagueness especially. why revel in it. it's fun to roll around but not in your own filth.
evertyhgin i'm typing sounds like bumper stickers. i need more bumpers if i keep typing.

the first word sadie read

2008-11-24T10:21:00.000-05:00

2008-10-08T10:08:00.000-05:00

Portland morning

2008-09-17T02:32:00.000-05:00

what are poems for?
the answerlessness of that question is not wonderful or an opportunity.
instead it is horrible and horrifying.
there is no reason to make a poem, or anything else.

2008-09-15T19:39:00.000-05:00

consciousness is elitism

go get your acuity

2008-08-07T13:46:00.000-05:00

2008-08-07T07:20:00.000-05:00

francis ponge died 20 years ago yesterday

au revoir, mon père

2008-08-03T08:21:00.000-05:00

there are only two modes: frustration and consolation

they might be the same mode, underneath

mirror

2008-08-01T09:16:00.000-05:00

2008-07-30T12:45:00.000-05:00

today is sadie's second birthday. she got some percussion instruments and a little sailboat for the bath and a doctor kit.

2008-07-29T04:40:00.000-05:00

today is iris' ninth birthday. she's getting a new microscope.

dreamed i was in an old-growth forest, it was bitterly cold and damp, i was hacksawing the bark off a huge oak without much success. the hacksaw teeth were ineffectual on the hard, gray bark. rain was falling steadily in a grassy clearing nearby but it wasn't where i was, feet wedged amidst thick tumbled roots for leverage. i thought the bark was like elephant skin and i knew elephants would laugh at my futility and i could see in my mind a laughing elephant's eye. and i thought -- fucking elephants. my species is better than yours.

the tiny saw teeth made a sound like running your thumbnail along a comb's teeth but hardly left a mark. then i had an ice cream scoop, the kind with the spring-action tab that ejects the ball of ice cream from the bowl of the scoop. this i could get through the bark with the same kind of effort as with a slightly defrosted box of ice cream you let sit on the counter for five minutes before scooping. the tree inside under the skin scooped like cream but was a dry and solid mass like pulped, compressed photocopier paper or coconut. it was jet white. i scooped out scoopfuls and ejected them onto the roots below.

after a while i was having to reach well inside the scooped-out cavity i'd made in the tree and that hand and arm were frozen almost too stiff to use but still muscle twingey inside. then it changed and i was buried up to my shoulders amidst the root system and scooped pulp balls, in a dune of them against the tree's base. the back of my head leaned against the tree and my shoulders were protruding from the pulp dune but my arms were immobilized and the hands at the ends of them kind of disappeared into the soil beneath nearby trees. i was gigantic. my head was the size of a three-story house. people i knew were dressed in mountain climber jackets and goggles, ascending the pulp on ropes.

their climb was difficult. a crosswind stung them with frozen rain and they were in teams and shouted across encouragement to each other against the raw conditions, calling each other "blue team" and "red team." blue team got to my head first. they had pulled up a bundle of stiff metal cables like those used to secure a tall post or tower to points on the ground, the taut cable that goes down diagonally. blue team clambered inside my open mouth. then they drove two large metal spikes about six feet into my tongue. the spikes must have been alloy because the climbers could manipulate them easily, the heads of the spikes had a needle's eye and they threaded the cable ends through them. by this time red team had reached my mouth. they stood in there drinking broth out of thermoses, catching their breath, smoking. where the spikes went in hurt dully like through dental anesthetic.

the teams wriggled out of their packs and stacked them against the backs of the teeth. they took pictures and measurements and set up a rudimentary base, then some climbers started pulling the cables down into my throat. red team rappelled down into there with head lamps, echoing. blue team meanwhile took some cables and dug upwards through the soft tissue in back of the roof of my mouth. they worked their way up inside my head, there were tight corridors in there. i lost track of red team because blue team's noise was in my head.

the feeling of the dragging cables inside my skull was maddening. they were after the inner ears and behind the eyes, to fasten cable ends to them. where the optic nerve went into the back of the eyeball looked like how a sunflower stem goes into the head of the flower, with that node or knot capping the tendrils of the nerve. with tools they bent the cable around the node and wrapped it tight to itself like you do picture-hanging wire so it bit into the softness. then they started slathering some kind of hot caulky compound over the cable's loop with rubberized spreaders. they heated the compound in a stone crucible that one climber gingerly attended because it was white hot, it was precariously balanced in a tripod over a gas flame. the compound was going to help the optic nerve grow in a way to absorb the cable without it being a wound.

i guess the same thing was going on at my cochleae, and with red team down below somewhere. they were blasé about it all like this was their job. talking about what they would do later.

also i was salivating a lot because of the spikes oxidizing or something. like a 9volt battery.

that's all.

2008-07-28T08:45:00.000-05:00

happy birthday marcel duchamp
would that we could work the martingale side by side

2008-07-25T08:17:00.000-05:00

2008-07-24T23:01:00.000-05:00

if you could be any number of painted lady butterflies, how many of them would you be?

and don't lie.

2008-07-24T09:38:00.000-05:00

here are all your feelings:
adamant
admire
afraid
aggressive
agonize
agonizing
agonizingly
alarmed
alone
angry
annoy
anticipation
anxious
apathetic
apprehension
apprehensive
arrogant
aspire
astonish
awe
awful
bad
beleaguered
bewildered
bliss
blissful
boast
bored
brave
brutal
bully
care
careful
cautious
cherish
chortle
chuckle
clever
comfort
comfortable
compassion
compliment
compose
compromise
confident
conflict
confuse
confused
content
courage
crazy
cringe
criticism
cry
delight
delighted
depressed
deserve
despair
desperate
devotion
disappoint
disappointed
disappointment
discouraged
discuss
disdain
disgust
disgusting
dismay
display
dither
doubt
dreadful
dream
ecstatic
embarrass
embarrassed
emotion
empathy
enraged
enraptured
entranced
exasperated
excited
exciting
exhausted
express
expression
fair
fantastic
fear
feelings
fine
flabbergasted
flattered
friendly
frightened
frustrated
frustration
fun
furious
fuss
gasp
gently
glad
glorious
glum
good
great
grief
grimace
grumpy
guilty
happy
harm
hate
heart
helpless
honest
hope
hostile
humiliated
hungry
hurt
ignore
impatient
incorrigible
incredulous
indifferent
indignantly
intense
intimidate
irascible
jealous
jealousy
jittery
jolly
joy
joyful
kind
kiss
laugh
like
lonely
love
lovesick
mad
marvel
mature
mean
merriment
mischievous
miserable
mood
morose
mortification
mourn
nasty
nervous
nice
oblivious
obnoxious
obsessed
optimistic
ordinary
panic
passion
perplexed
pessimistic
petrified
phenomenal
phobia
pleasant
puzzled
rambunctious
regret
rejection
relieved
reluctant
resentment
resigned
respect
responsibility
revenge
revulsion
sad
satisfied
scary
seething
sensible
sentimental
serious
sheepish
shocked
sick
silly
smile
smitten
smug
sob
solemn
sorry
standoffishly
startle
sternly
strange
stress
stubborn
stupefied
sullen
surprised
suspicious
temper
tense
tension
terrible
thirsty
thrilled
timid
tired
tolerance
tremble
triumphantly
trust
unkind
upset
wince
woe
wonderful
worry
yearn

2008-07-23T06:52:00.000-05:00

canned chance; an escape from taste

2008-07-22T07:05:00.000-05:00

David Need is in New York and visited MOMA yesterday. He sent a note to a listserv we're on that he came upon Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages. There are two artifacts by that title in MOMA -- a boxed set of three wooden templates and glass panels, and then a painting that uses the template shapes.

Duchamp took three meter-long strings and dropped them from a meter's height above treated canvas. Then he fixed them just how they landed, producing three wavering curves that he called stoppages and mounted on glass panels. Then he cut a wooden template along each of these three stoppages.

The whole lot fits in a repurposed croquet box, which gives it a sanctioned feel. Keep in mind that at this time (around the onset of WWI) the definition of the meter was the distance between two lines on a standard bar of 90% platinum and 10% iridium at 0° Celsius. Of course that distance was based on an erroneous geographical measurement...

The official box and the painstakingly traced and cut out templates are all an ironic expression of the impossibility and futility of an absolute measurement, of a means of understanding the world becoming a fetishized end in itself almost by dint of its being fixed within a physical medium. And of course we've taken it to a higher level of absurdity with the definition of the meter now -- it no longer has to do with the atomically indeterminate medium of matter; it's based on the speed of light in a vacuum, a quantum constant so far as we know.

Duchamp described the set as "canned chance," which he explained in an interview with Pierre Cabanne:

The idea of "chance," which many people were thinking about at the time, struck me... The intention consisted above all in forgetting the hand, since, fundamentally, even your hand is chance.
Pure chance interested me as a way of going against logical reality: to put something on a canvas, on a bit of paper, to associate the idea of a perpendicular thread a meter long falling from the height of one meter onto a horizontal plane, making its own deformation. This amused me. It's always the idea of "amusement" which causes me to do things, and repeated three times...
For me the number three is important, but simply from the numerical, not the esoteric, point of view: one is unity, two is double, duality, and three is the rest. When you've come to the word three, you have three million -- it's the same thing as three. I had decided that the things would be done three times to get what I wanted.

The crucial Duchampian concern of putting art at the service of the mind rather than the eye is expressed here, in two different ways. "Forgetting the hand" has to do with his rejection of taste and craft, using some kind of standardized measurement rather than a brushstroke or drawn line. And his numerical concern shows that the resultant artifact is a compilation or transcription of ideas instead of a mere image to look at on the gallery wall and judge against contemporary tastes.

He made the painting with the stoppages as an example of how to use them, kind of a placeholder painting, and maybe his penultimate one (Tu m' was his last, and intentionally so). Note that he uses three sets of the three stoppages.

This is all a key time for Duchamp, as he's rapidly transitioning from being a painter into a conceptual artist. A year before, he's exhausting the possibilities of Futurist and Cubist representation with the Nude Descending a Staircase #2 scandal at the Armory Show; the same year as the stoppages he's attaching a bicycle wheel to a stool in his Paris studio; the word "readymade" is coined the next year as he moves to New York and begins the Large Glass.

The whole stoppages project was really part of the metaphysical work that goes into the Large Glass (the bottom half of which is shown below), connecting the 9 "malic molds" on the left to the cones or "pistons." Again, 3 threes.

Duchamp described the Large Glass as "a delay in glass," which echoes the idea of a stoppage or some thing canned. He stopped working on it in the 20s, leaving it "definitively unfinished, and then it was famously shattered in transport in 1926. After that, the bulk of Duchamp's work becomes writing puns, conducting optical experiments, seeding Dadaism and Surrealism even while remaining ambivalent and peripheral to them, making boxed sets of miniatures of his preceding work, etc. All conceptual, not retinal. All the resultant artifacts were more or less discards to him.

Here's another interview chunk that I think David will appreciate:

Cabanne: When you were young, didn't you ever experience the desire to be artistically cultured?
Duchamp: Maybe, but it was a very mediocre desire. I would have wanted to work, but deep down I'm enormously lazy. I like living, breathing, better than working. I don't think that the work I've done can have any social importance in the future. Therefore, if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a sort of constant euphoria.
Cabanne: That's what Roche said. Your best work has been the use of your time.
Duchamp: That's right. I really think that's right.

2008-07-10T19:02:00.000-05:00

one two three four five six seven egiht nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen noienteen twenty twentyone twentytwo twentythree twentyfour twentyfive twentysix twentyseven twentyeight twentynine thirty thirtyone thirytwo thirtythree thirtyfour thirtyfive thirtysix thirtyseven thirtyeight thirtynone foorty fortyonefortytwo fortthree forthfour fourtyfive fortysix fortysevenfortyeight fortynine fifty fiftyone fiftytwo fiftythree fiftyfour fiftyfive fiftysix fiftyseven fiftyeight fifty noine sixty sixtyone sixtytwo sixtythree sixtyfour sixty five sixtysix sixtyseven sixtyeight sixtynine seventy seventyone seventytwo seventythree seventyfour seventyfive seventysix seventyseven seventyeight seventynine eighty eightyone eightytwo eightythree eighteyfour eightyfive eightysix eightyseven eightyeight eghtynine ninety nineytone ninetytwo ninetythree ninetyfour ninetyfive ninetysix ninetyseven ninetyeight ninetynien hundred hundredone hundredtwohundrenthree hundredfour hundredfive hundredsix hundredseven hundredeight hundred nine hundredten hundredeeven hundredtwelve hundredthirteen hundredfourteen hundredfifteen hundredsixteen hundredseventeen hundredeighteen hundrednineteen hundredtwenty hundredtwentyone hunderdtwentytwo hundredtwentythree thundredtwentyfour hundredtwentyfive hundredtwentysix hundredtwentyseven hundredtwentyeight hundredtwentynine hundredthirty hundredthirtyone hundredthirttwo hundredthirtythree hundredthirtyfour hundredthirtyfive hundredthirtyfive hundredthirtysix hundredthirtyseven hundredthirtyeight hundredthirtynine hundredtforty hundrefotryone hundredfortytwo hundredfortythtree hundredfortyfour hundredfortyfive hundredfortysix hundredfortyseven hundredfortyeight hundredfortynine hundredfifty and one two three four five sixseven 8 nine hundred sixty and one two three fourfivesix seven eight nine hundredseventy seventyone 70two 70three seventyfour hundred seventyfive hundred seventyseix hundredseventyseven hundredseventyeight hundredseventynine hundredeighty and onetwothreefourfive sixfseven eight ninehundredninety and hundern ninetyone hundredninetytwo hundredninetythree hundredninetyfour hundrendninetyfive hundredinnetysic hundrendninetyseven hundredninetyeight hundredninetyniene twohundred twohundredone twohundredtwo twohundredthree thwohundredfour twohundredfive twohundredsix twohundredseven twohundredeight twohundred nine twohundredten twohundredeleven twohundredtwelve twohundredthireteen twohundredfourteen twohundredfifteen twohundresxteen twohundreseventeentwohundredeighteen two hundrednineteen twohundredtwenty twohundredtwentyone twohundredtwentytw o222 twohundredtwentythree twohundredtwentyfour twohundredtwentyficve twohundredtwentysix twohundredtwentyseven twohundredtwentyeight twohundredtwentynine twonundredthirty twohundredthirtyone twohundredthirtytwo twohundrethirtythree twohundredthirtyfourtw ohundrethirtyfive twohundrethirtysix twohundredthirtyseven twohundrethirtyeight twohundredthirtnine twohundredforty twohundredfortyone twohundredfortyone twohundredfortytwo two hundredfortythree twohundrefortyfour 12squaredbitches twohundredfortyfive twohundredfortysix twohundredfortyseven twohunderdforyteight twohundredforytnine twohundrefifty towhundredfiftyone twohunderd fiftytwotwohundredfirftythree ohundern fifteyfour twohunrenfiftyfive ftowhundred fifty six twohunderdfiftyseven twohunderdfiftyeight twohundernfiftynien this is true

2008-07-09T07:17:00.000-05:00

2008-07-08T12:41:00.000-05:00

99% is closer to 0% than to 100%

Graphemes never mean

A living thing is not necessarily aware that it is in a medium

Inhale until your lungs are uncomfortably full

Native Spanish-speakers struggle with English because the graphemes and phonemes don’t correspond one-to-one like they do in Spanish

Things never touch

Don't let anyone else read this

Explain why the ending of “canoe” sounds just like that of “zoo” but different from that of “toe”

The concept of alphabetization is absent in Chinese; characters are grouped by their primary brushstroke and ordered within that group by number of brushstrokes

We put larger spaces between words than between letters to differentiate which sets of letters comprise each word and to discretely identify each word from the others in a text

This is not what you see

As in the example of the anglerfish, many animals have been given names that relate their behavior or characteristics to those of humans, often inaccurately so

If one decided subsequently to spell “differentiate” with a starting s instead of a starting d, people would be thrown briefly but then assume an error had been made and they’d disregard it

You are surveilling this

Comprehend these four words

In order to record a complete taxonomy of the animal kingdom, every unique individual must be identified as such

Every sixth word can be removed from a text and the meaning is not substantially interfered with

The faces of born-blind people look different from those of the sighted

Written language is an agent of isolation

Remove all the vowels from this

The chickadee is named after an approximate conversion of the sound of its call into English, although birds routinely add two or more dees to their calls and drop the middle a entirely

99% is 0%

You can't even touch yourself

2008-07-07T09:35:00.000-05:00

i don't have time to read all about these things for the next few days but don't want to lose track of them:
Knuth's up-arrow notation
Graham's number
Skewes' number
Steinhaus-Moser notation

2008-07-05T21:41:00.000-05:00

graphemes don't inherently mean anything. the occasional phoneme might though. do animals that live their entire lives in the aphotic sea have an essentially different conceptualization of movement or motion from me? or on second thought, of 3-dimensional direction? or, for that matter, sensation? native spanish-speaking grade-school kids struggle with english because the graphemes and phonemes don't correspond one-to-one like they do in spanish. explain why the ending of "canoe" sounds just like "zoo" but different from "toe." none of this is a problem, of course. the aphotic sea creature might not be aware that it is in a medium. but then how aware of air are people? it must be the same. wind and current, particulate matter and scent. there's no concept of alphabetization in chinese. chinese characters are grouped by their primary stroke and ordered within that group by number of brushstrokes. abyssal plains are incredibly level and monochromatic, although there's a lot of garbage down there, bottles and plastic objects. we put larger spaces between words than between letters so that you can differentiate which groups of letters comprise words and differentiate each word discretely from the others in a text. if the letters all touched then wouldn't that make all english words graphemes? how long would it take for people to forget the idea of letters? it's infuriating that the anglerfish is called that, that so many of the animals were given names that relate their behavior or characteristics to those of humans, and so many of these names simply are inaccurate. if from now on i spelled "differentiate" with a starting s instead of a starting d, people would probably be thrown for maybe a second or two but then just assume i had made an error and disregard it. but how many of this class of intentional errors could communication endure? supposedly every sixth word can be removed from a text and the meaning remains as gettable as if the text was intact. if you really wanted a complete taxonomy of the animal kingdom, every individual creature would be identified as such. but we're comfortable enough with species for now. why do the faces of born-blind people look so different from those of us who are sighted? what am i contributing to evolution? why did paul celan wait? what did my looking so closely at the evening thunderstorm clouds contribute to evolution? why have written language at all, doesn't it just isolate us from each other? the chickadee is named after an approximate conversion of the sound of its call into english, although birds routinely add two or more "dee"s to their calls and i've heard individual birds drop the middle a entirely. but the birds are undaunted.

2008-07-03T08:23:00.000-05:00

it's interesting that creatures of the land and air realms are so consistent in their appearance and body shapes and orientations. but when you go underground or into the deep ocean -- places well below the planet's surface and out of the reach of sunlight -- the animals appear so strange and physically exaggerated.
truly i'm a creature of the surface, so the creatures on my surface make sense to me and are familiar as such. but i just navigate upon basically a plane, and orient myself primarily with sight.
you get down in lightless regions of a spatial realm like the deep ocean, it must be the same as existing in outer space. there's no front or back to many of the creatures. if they have colors or markings, it doesn't matter, and many anyways are translucent. it sounds like such a relief.

2008-06-19T07:02:00.000-05:00

theres no insomnia
like hotel room insomnia
like no insomnia i know

it only takes 3 times seeing the word insomnia for the meaning to fall away and it's just some vowels glommed onto either side of an m-n combination

at least i can watch the highway from my room, 19th floor

i can feel through the walls ceiling floor how identical the adjacent rooms are

2008-06-09T17:15:00.000-05:00

so sadie woke me at 4:20 with crying, she hits a snag in her sleep and bolts to full howling, and i could not get her back down to sleep despite using all my tricks, backrubs, low-frequency humming, rocking. i had been up until 3 working on work projects so i was damn shot and mad that sadie couldn't at least get to 6 for me.

i figured i'd plunk her on my lap, us in front of a cartoon, and i would just tilt my head back and sleep. but 90 seconds into that sadie pipes up "no, no, no." she's pointing at the tv remote control. and then "book, daddy. book, daddy." she's telling me to turn off the tv and read to her.

2008-06-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

well, the penguins lost the stanley cup so i can get on with my life now

poetically, how i work is that i work on a theory or concept, and then i put it into practice in a project or work of some scale. and then i take that practice and make it itself be a next theory or concept (like saying, "given this project as a concept, what's theoretically next?"). extend and or expand.

anyway, it's time to do that. caesura time. even as i finish the current Obedience book ms i have to start theorizing the next from upon and out of it.

i'm going to think about how i might use figurative language in certain ways to do certain things. right now i have to have those 2 vague "certain"s in there. probably i have to figure out and learn what figurative language does and can do, and also see at the language surface just how it works.

sure wish the pens had won though

2008-05-13T16:34:00.000-05:00

just heard robert rauschenberg died

i remember arguing with my parents about the floor piece with the goat when i was like 8 years old

also remember when i suddenly "got" how silkscreened images functioned in his combine paintings

lots of great artists and writers have died recently but this one really hurts me right in the deep guts

he's kind of an our dad

i copied this from the end of his new york times obit:
“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview in the giant studio on Captiva in 2000. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

2008-04-27T11:09:00.000-05:00

Sadie and i were listening to Bartok's first string quartet this morning and i was trying to listen to it as if it was jazz. or rather, trying to listen to it as music or even less filteredly as just sound, rather than something that was found in and gotten from the classical section of a cd store. not as product or genre but as close to what it sonically is as i can get, not knowing how close i could get but the effort was there.

after reading all this mackey on jazz and corresponding with some other poets on improvisation as an abstraction, music has more characteristics than usual for me right now. and i get frustrated because i can't listen to all sets of them at once, i need to practice the ears and mind on that. listening to roland kirk and thinking how he could play with individual subtlty on two or three saxophones at once. not a freakshow or novelty, he needed more than one saxophone in his mouth, his mind needed more than one mouth for what was going on in there. and i want to multiply what each ear of mine can do for the analogous intake.

so bartok is so different from what you think of as improvisation, but it was seeming this morning that i was hearing how we attach the word improvisation to jazz and attach the word composition to classical, and that these words are really just sections of cd stores. i was hearing how in the activity of making the phrases in the quartet, bartok was considering other options and passing them over, very very much not at all the first thought best thought. naropa killed first thought best thought for me because i could see other students and even instructors using it as an excuse for a flaccid and unconsidered poetics, and i wanted to move toward a rigor of knowing everything that i am doing and why. i figure it is all double artifice, poetry, so i should make it completely. no judgment on such work of others, much of which i find more interesting and certainly more playful than my flattened-out work, but also let me choose my rigor and try to do it because i think i am getting something out of it. i'm not a general hard-ass, just inside my own now poetics, and always reconsidering it too.

i don't know why i just had to write a big back-off thing, but i did. it's complex, obviously.

so bartok. i was hearing each note as one chosen from a set of notes in response to, or to follow, the preceding note. phrase as made note by note, then next phrase made from last phrase, and sets of phrases whatever that chunk of composition is called made from the previous chunk. i heard these duration levels, the multiplicities inside each unit, and i sometimes heard bartok thinking in there. and it was improvisational thinking, the damn same thing that i can hear when i'm listening to a jazz soloist doing his or her thing in the middle of a piece. the scale was the same, but the velocities were very different. contemporaneity fell away from the musics and they were just musics, the sections of the cd store vanished. the instrumentations vanished. i heard more thinking than i had ever heard before, the percentage of what i was hearing was maximally thinking next to actual sound.

iris is done reading so we are going to play a bit, so i will try to later get to what i heard bartok thinking. but know for now that creation of an artifact is improvisational. composition is exactly improvisation, just offset temporally in the process from how we usually use the words about it.

2008-04-25T03:18:00.000-05:00

There is no moment

The now stretches from before before through after after

2008-04-24T19:21:00.000-05:00

In his Bedouin Hornbook, Nate Mackey quotes this chunk from a book entitled Sound and Symbol by Viktor Zuckerkandl (it's in Duke library but not Durham public):

The dynamic quality of a tone is a statement of its incompleteness, its will to completion. To hear a tone as dynamic quality, as a direction, a pointing, means hearing at the same time beyond it, beyond it in the direction of its will, and going toward the expected next tone. Listening to music, we are not first in one tone, then in the next, and so forth. We are always between the tones, on the way from tone to tone; our hearing does not remain with the tone, it reaches through it and beyond it.

2008-04-23T10:47:00.000-05:00

David Need wrote this great thing:

Always, always look for the thing that works effortlessly and externally, whether it's the market or money for those dimwit market-fetish fuckers, or the Old Good King, or God (rushing around in back of the arras), or the "objective mind" or "reason", or the internet, or "power". It's always, always a sham. A thing Burroughs would skewer as a form of addiction.

troublemakers

2008-04-15T06:57:00.000-05:00

2008-03-27T13:30:00.000-05:00

you know when insomnia is cruel, like it is some organized sentience that has targeted you to focus cruelty upon?
that's what you apparently get at the crowne plaza bloomington outside minneapolis.
it felt like ontology itself was exacting vengeance upon me.

MOTHERFUCK YOU, NO-SLEEPING!