big rush on moby's hotel... come.back.to.us.spiders. ... and the ambient disk is just fine.

yesterday i walked out with the camera...
i looked up...


and down...

thoughts of jim trelease cited at The Academy of American Poets
If 'lobster' were an important subject in the curriculum, we would have lobster classes for twelve straight years: where to find them, how they live, and, of course, how to catch, prepare, cook, and eat them. But if, after graduating from school, the end result was a lifelong loss of appetite for lobster, there would be a general reassessment of the lobster curriculum. And this is precisely what has happened to poetry in the United States--except no one is reassessing the poetry curriculum.

very very sorry to see HG Poetics going the way of all blogs... but i understand the impulse... if that's what it is... to let it all go

thanks to nick piombino for his recent reports & reflections on richard foreman's latest work... i'd almost forgotten about foreman... back in my wild twenties i'd read (was it?) The Drama Review... and daydream about the great stuff I'd do if I ever found myself in the world of Performance... surrounded by folks like Foreman, Beck & Molina, Ludlum... day dreams... my one stab in this direction... a reworking of fielding's tom thumb (nodding to a. jarry) with a high school cast in houston long ago... was a grand disaster... lots of fun

why are suzanne's feet cold? (don't read this if yr offended by an accurate use of the f-word)

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Our Near-Death Experience... thomas lynch...
For many bereaved Americans, the 'celebration of life' involves a guest list open to everyone except the actual corpse, which is often dismissed, disappeared without rubric or witness, buried or burned, out of sight, out of mind, by paid functionaries like me. So the visible presence of the pope's body at the pope's wake and funeral strikes many as an oddity, a quaint relic. How 'Catholic,' some will say, or how 'Italian' or 'Polish' or 'traditional'; how 'lavish' or 'expensive' or 'barbaric.' Such things were said when Diana, Princess of Wales, died, and when Ronald Reagan did.

The New York Times > Arts > Music > Exploring the Right to Share, Mix and Burn...
Both Jeff Tweedy, the leader of the fervently followed rock band Wilco, and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who has opposed criminalizing file sharing, seemed to agree that just about anybody who owns a modem also owns - or at least has every right to download - culture products.

'I don't think anybody should make any money on music,' Mr. Tweedy said at one point, only half joking. 'Maybe we would pay audiences.'

calvino from "Exactitude" in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (translated by patrick creagh)...

A more complex symbol, which has given me greater possibilities of expressing the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglements of human lives, is that of the city. The book in which I managed to say most remains Invisible Cities, because I was able to concentrate all my reflections, experiments, and conjectures on a single symbol; and also because I built up a many-faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions.

In my Invisible Cities every concept and value turns out to be double--even exactitude. calvino

remember to check out these sound files so kindly discovered by jordan... especially the calvino ((which i'm guessing is in italian... all the more reason to learn some of that (grand)mother tongue))

i think my favorite spot is the creepy lower left quad where the city becomes nothing... or nothing becomes something... ocean to the shore...

somewhere in the midst of our thinking about calvino's invisible cities i ask so have you ever wanted to build yr own city? and one opens a folder saying funny you should ask... he pulls out a page with his city on it... on the back of an assignment sheet from another class (that had nothing to do with city structure)... i.e. it's a student doodle... where one's mind (or hand) went while something else was going on... click the detail for a look at the wonderful whole...

The Museum (of cups and balls)

i shouldn't be so down just because the tulips are lost... just because the tulips... for example we had a pretty morning in the invisible cities (more to come)... and the poem i sent to the faculty staff and admins this morning was accompanied by the relevant painting:

The Two Apes of Breughel

Here's my dream of a final exam:
two apes, in chains, sitting at a window.
Outside the sky is flying
and the sea bathes.

I am taking the test on human history.
I stammer and blunder.

One ape, staring at me, listens with irony,
the other seems to doze--
but when I am silent after a question,
she prompts me
with a soft clanking of the chain.

Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Sharon Olds)

... somehow it all worked and pleased me... and a colleague shared some good poems that are worthy of upcoming mailpomes... and the cat's been pooping pretty good...

but there will be no tulips this spring... because the critters et em all...

Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

no tulips this year... the critters et em all

now and then... time for mononomial minstrels... beck and moby came today

Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest Winner (Snacks Division)... Tracy Schuhmacher, carmel grad '81...

o this (as so much) at Eeksy-Peeksy is just too good... malcolm, make a book please

i just wish... well... i'd be the same kind of bum no matter who i'd be hanging with...

and thinking in fragments... i get this from the 20th century... look what they done... i know it's a bother... and there are higher standards for english teachers in somebody's mind... but when i write formal like... i do it up pretty good... mostly

has got me wondering where i got my yr and & from... i don't think it was from the apparently most obvious places today... i think it was from thomas jefferson... or thereabouts

some poems by JP2

Scientists to Study Forgiveness in Great Apes...
Many people believe that forgiveness is a concept which only applies to humans and that the emergence of forgiveness requires a lengthy developmental trajectory. Our hypothesis is that forgiveness, like other social behaviors, is co-constructed from joint interactions across time; it is not a property of a species but rather a property of a certain socio-cultural set of coordinated interaction.'

... go figure...