i'm going to be obsessing about the cat for a little while... bear with me...

go to Reading & Writing

read
Ars Poetica in Time of War

All right, look-

in fact, read the whole piece on the present mess and the new old dylan...

...and he knows what the ellipsis is for...

Ukiyo-e depicting the Tales of Genji (via plep)

A Day in the Life of Alvin Ernst, Farmer

Edgar Allan Poe Action Figure

This 5' tall, hard plastic Edgar Allan Poe Action Figure captures the father of the modern horror story in stark black and white with a hauntingly pale complexion and a removable plastic raven. Pose him on your bookshelf next to your volumes of his poetry and prose. Comes with cool Poe info on the back.

what else was big in '65? (a pretty good year... that... but not because it was my freshman-sophomore year at jchs)

Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again

Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues hit the charts on this day in 1965... at 39... rose to 8...

happy birthday George Herbert

Yet, though Thou troublest me, I must be meek ; 
                      In weakness must be stout : 
Well, I will change the service, and go seek 
                      Some other master out. 
Ah, my dear God ! though I am clean forgot, 
Let me not love Thee, if I love Thee not.

walked the trail this morning with no pain in the pods... ground is still saturated but there were no puddles on the path... not much poop either... nice day... time to start thinking about school... again

and we're the lucky beneficiaries of a bird-brained L a u g h i n g ~ K n e e s

Whenever the Barn Swallows swoop past my head for the first time in the year I know that Spring has returned for sure. On my way along the river to the sports club yesterday the liquid chortling and twittering of this first harbinger of Spring spun out of the grey, rainy air like cotton candy, a taste of what was to come. The next moment the daredevil eye drop of its lean, indigo and rust body, wings cutting the air like scissors, flashed past my head and dove to within a finger's breadth above the water's surface. It banked and disappeared in the bend of the river.

... and a good view of the egret too

The Tofte Project

The key to designing a sustainable dwelling lies in the unique connection between the inhabitant, the land, all who have lived on the site, and all who will be impacted by its construction and existence. This immersive tour will allow you to discover the principles of sustainable architecture through exploration of the cabin's design and construction, as well as take an in-depth look at its natural surroundings.

1. monday for the cat

2. bookshelves... shifting... dusting... sorting

3. frank o'hara's voice... the voice of the poet series

4. dylan's mushy "middle years"

5. next to last toe on the left foot

6. school work

This Journal has a new front page for april... posted a bunch of pictures from my walk the other day... i think the cover of edson's A Stone Is Nobody's is his best... at least that i've seen... strong red text on a steel grey paper... great use of his strange tiny illustrations...

started to walk this morning... but it hurt... so i came home to soak it... and think some more about the cat

aha! riley dog... once lost... now found

so the vet says this cat is good for surgery... and i ask if given her age it's worth the stress the wear&tear the risk... and the vet says "if it were my cat i wouldn't hesitate to have it done"... but what else would you expect... don't steer me wrong doc... so i'm thinking about it... but the thought of having it done is pretty bothersome... but i'm thinking about it... it's giving me the back & forth blues

and traci... our favorite tengrrl... has a bunch of ideas...Ten National Poetry Month Activities

o canada's got one too...National Poetry Month... and they get to do it in french... the lucky bastards

an alternative view from Charles Bernstein... Against National Poetry Month As Such

National Poetry Month is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, an organization that uses its mainstream status to exclude from its promotional activities much of the formally innovative and 'otherstream' poetries that form the inchoate heart of the art of poetry. The Academy's activities on behalf of National Poetry Month tend to focus on the most conventional of contemporary poetry; perhaps a more accurate name for the project might be National Mainstream Poetry Month. Then perhaps we could designate August as National Unpopular Poetry Month.

maybe i'll sit here and soak my sore toe instead...

well... here we are... National Poetry Month again... i'd like to celebrate by staging a public reading of the complete fyp out on highway 176 at the hawley street split... right there by the gazebo... but maybe i won't...

riley dog's gone 404... alas...

and when i have too many books... yes it is possible for me to have too many books... i can't think what to do with them except to give them away... the ones i know i'll never read again... the ones i know i won't care to pick up and fondle again... yes i'm a longtime wayback book fondler...

and when i have all these too many books... i should give them away... but no one in my neighborhood cares for them... i think very few people we actually know in our day to day... very few of these people we love actually read books... or would care to read any of the books i have read...

i need to make a list... of books i will release... i need to let everyone know they can have some books that used to be mine...

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir (via mosses)

just back from the vet with the cat... for the annual onceover... vet said "she certainly doesn't look her age"... vet said "this here on her face is some kind of tumor"... vet wants to take it off... vet said "we should clean her teeth too"... vet clipped her back nails for the first time in her life... said "geriatric cats keep growing their nails but the casings don't come off as easily and sometimes get infected, but hers looks fine"... clip clip clip... so...

she's geriatric now... i knew it... but she don't act like no old lady cat... unless you count these really lazy mornings when i'm up and at it while she just lays around watching my busyness...

after her shots and the blood draw... on the way out... lady at the desk says "she's a very quiet cat... didn't make a sound in the back room"... i said "well... she has her moments"

we'll see tomorrow whether or not we'll move forward with the lump removal

and this just after reading ashbery's "the invisible avant-garde"...

all this syncrunchousness... john latta's reflecting on dylan and ashbery over at Hotel Point

And listening to the lyrics, Dylan's way of nailing the commonest American sententiousness right down in the tender middles of unforgettable songs, I keep thinking that the better "house poet" for the Rolling Thunder tour would've been, not Ginsberg, but John Ashbery. It's Ashbery who shares th'aesthetic of thievery and pilferage, of the radical refurbishing of the spoken near-cliché, all that detritus that swirls about pretty much "unheard" unless put into relation with something beyond its usual orbit.

been listening to one of my two Bob Dylan Bootlegs... if you count my problematically burnt copy of the five genuine basement tapes disks as the other one... because i've been reading clinton heylin's revised bio... and i'd been ripping through the early albums for a bit... so here's a quick leap to the future (Pure Heat's taken from the spring of '97)... and i think it's ok... perfectly fine for me... interesting to read the critical fan battle over at the Dylan Base... i just like dylan... dylan dylan dylan... i like his journey in the music... i like that i've been around for most of it...

weather report... ground round here is saturated... we had puddles to leap... spillways to ford this morning... soaked my shoes... cool and blue right now but more rain is expected later today...

more from Eugene McCarthy on his birthday...

from COURAGE AFTER SIXTY

Now it is certain.
There is no magic stone.
No secret to be found.
One must go
With the mind's winnowed learning...

john gardner quote... weekly from adam walter at the jcgardner list...

From "Fiction in MSS"

"When I was a child--I mean between, say, eight and fifteen--my favorite magazine in the world, and possibly the only magazine I knew of, was the SATURDAY EVENING POST. (There is still a magazine by that name, but in my opinion it shouldn't be confused with the SATURDAY EVENING POST.) What was wonderful about the POST was that it really had stories. Plots. Characters. Interesting places and occupations. Some of the stories were perhaps a little low-class, like the ones about Tugboat Annie, for instance; but some of them were by people like William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, and Kurt Vonnegut. All of them, low-class or not, had one dependable quality: they were stories. People in them set out after things, encountered difficulties, and either won in the end or lost. I don't say that's the only kind of fiction I like, but for me it's the main continent of fiction, and everything else gets its bearings and directions from that vast solidity...."

"As a writer I think nothing is harder than this kind of story--the necessity of making everything believable, slipping in all the necessary details without ever being caught at it, and, worst of all, finding a story worth telling in the first place, a story that's not old-hat or cheaply predictable or so original that it strikes the reader as goofy.... All so-called 'experimental fiction' is child's play beside this--which is not to deny that experimental fiction can be interesting."

found these three in my school inbox...

SPAMPO 003 

gaithersburg
vivaldi michigan airfield

demagnify gsa inquiry
crypt harrison clever blackberry

literal about lithography
o'neill liquefaction

pemmican infinitude flue francisco
curfew capella upholstery mouth

platitudinous unify dictionary
morgen chalice cadenza

stipulate burial

SPAMPO 002

casteth deluxe
invitation andy
arden bartlett
contention hillock
bordello corpulent
binaural piggy
priori ignoble
shortstop spout
countywide borroughs
branch petal
dying kate
trend stool
bandpass

SPAMPO 001

zionism dignity
less birthday
habitual mccullough
iceland commemorate
obtrusion kerygma
spoken prof omicron
aloha browse definite
belove defunct outlandish
daisy hellish crony
eerie decatur ecumenist
chard tiny arctangent
galbreath