Dangerous Freedom, Dangerous Beer

"Watson did not start out to becomes a writer. He was a high-school actor who married the summer of his junior year in high school."

Brad Watson whose
The Heaven of Mercury
gets my vote for best title, is also up for most poetic marriage between young human and brief time period.

Whiskey River's Year End Clearance
All Quotes Half Off

Time and Space

...wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants' hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was —
ascension — at some earlier contraction...

Linda Bierds
Poetry Daily Dec.30.03

The reason why the RIAA comes off as a gang of ignorant thugs is because, well, how do I put this --
they are.
Music is a sacrament. This has been true for thousands of years of human history, save the last 100 or so. I'm sure it was not Edison's purpose to debase such an important aspect of our collective liturgy, but what would one expect when something that was once ephemeral and could only be experienced at the behest of other humans is reduced to a commodity on a shelf.

-Todd Rundgren Oct.22.03

Rundgren at home

maestro Thomas Mapfumo
He is expected to fire broadsides at President Mugabe and his regime through songs that were banned from the airwaves by Information minister Jonathan Moyo. Mapfumo is now based in the United States.
Mapfumo left the country for the US in 2001 after alleged harassment by state agents. Mapfumo is tipped to win the Zima Lifetime Achievement award for his consistent fight for democracy, justice and human rights since the days of the liberation struggle.
—
In an interview with the Zimbabwe Independent yesterday, the veteran musician said the struggle for liberty was reaching a climax for Zimbabweans and he would play his role as an artist.

"I am still a musician who sings a message reflecting the lives of people," he said. "We must not be misled into believing that things are better or will miraculously change," said Mapfumo.

Itai Dzamara/AllAfrica Dec.19.03
link Rootster

"As the collages' narratives are inspired by real situations, the visual forms of the collages, though playful and childlike in appearance, are informed by a thorough understanding of figure and gesture. Though appealingly dream-like, the unique animation, poignancy, and realistic resonance of these works enables them to function as tools for imaginative learning and growth in the real world."

the paper moon
Ida Pearle makes good art

Slow Wave
Jesse Reklaw
Recorder of Dreams
Jesse Reklaw is a master of dialog
link achewood

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now....

Archie
Today in Literature

Le Roi de Coeur c'est mort
"...a very warm, considerate and self-effacing man who took his work very seriously. He was not interested in being a celebrity, he just cared about the art of acting - he was interested in quality."

" 'That that that is is that that is not is not that that that is not is not that that is is is not that so.' "
at Language Log

Scram

tiny grow

muxway

Kepler's Inaccurate Punch Bowl

If you are the problem, pack you bags.

..." Then he coughed and nothing else was said.
Thomas Barefoot #621
Last Statement
Executed Offenders
Texas USA

Untitled
Andrice Arp

link path Achewood

"And they say there's no provisions/ there's not enough to go 'round/ But when it comes to the gun there's a bullet for everyone."

Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt

All of us are airborne now

When Angels Play Their Drum Machines

Maverick (Alistair) protects himself from the rain, donning the Civil War uniform he had made using designs from the Internet.
-Poppy Berry
Ulster Cowboys

at Growbag

'Afghanistan: Chronotopia'
Simon Norfolk

link dublog

Incredible String Band
Incredible String Band

People On The Highway

la fura dels baus

link MFAOM

Y not gets credit for the boogie board.

in '67 I had a surf shop in Santa Cruz make me a foam and glass 'belly board' with a fin, custom. There were already others around, I'm pretty sure.

Banana Jacks

The Mars Volta

The Coup
Breathing Apparatus
[Boots]
Lean over the bed and let me whisper close
Watch these motherfuckers with the stethoscopes
You know I'm uninsured up in this b-i-otch
My medical plan was to not get shot
I get the..

"One two three!" "Code blue!"
"One two three! "Code blue!"
*bzzzzzzzzzzzzt* "Clear!"
*bzzzzzzzzzzzzt*
"I've got a pulse.."
...
[Boots]
See I'm a communist, I'll tell yo' momma the truth
And now they wanna assassinate me like they John Wilkes Booth
But umm, recognize sperm, cause yo' brain is the maternity
Conception through yo' ear, now my game lasts through
eterni-*cough*-ty *cough, cough*

"Breathe again, breathe again..
And I will never breathe again.." -> Toni Braxton (repeat 2X)

[Doctor]
Well, I've been looking at the patient's stats
It seems as if he's lost his will to pay

Christmas Eve

painter science

link mossesfromanoldmanse Dec.20.03

It begins like this, the thinnest edge of another world appears in a humdrum street, the greater sky begins to break through, too bright for your earth-simple eyes, angels, small as bees on the wing, unnoticed by all but the mad, the old, and the very young, whiz through scenes of mundane atrocity, taking quick unarguable witness.

Radio Sonidera
Like the spontaneous music of the original Jamaican reggae DJs of the 1970s, the process of making la música sonidera is an intrinsic part of its identity. It is created by charismatic DJs, the sonideros, such as Posada's mentor, famed veteran DJ Ramón Rojo-- Sonido La Changa. The sonideros perform in Mexican cities, especially in Mexico City's teeming colonias, as peripheral neighborhoods are known, and increasingly in U.S. cities.
Posada says much of his playlist is recordings of sonideros' concerts. The DJs interact with the audience as they speak over tunes, rhyming, cracking jokes or intoning fans' names. A danceable cumbia or salsa track is mixed with other sounds, everything from electronica to rap. On-air, Posada himself plays the role of sonidero.
The concerts are often burned onto CDs as they are performed. After the show, the CDs are sold "like tortillas, except more expensive," Posada says. In turn, the recordings are copied and re-copied by fans.
The quick digital dissemination of the music, in a musical subculture that has little use for copyrights, means sonideros can even facilitate transnational communication. A DJ in Mexico will often give a "shout out" to an audience member's relative living in Los Angeles or another U.S. city. As he lays down the tracks, the DJ will sometimes say, appropriating an expression often used in a derogatory way: "This one's going out mojado-style, (wetback-style), across the border."
—Macelo Ballve/ Pacific News Service Dec.19.03

EasyRGB is an inspiration.

link *.* marchdesign

Origami life of the Buddha

Happy 60th Birthday
Keith Richards
Living Proof

Kshitigarbha (Chijang), the Guardian of the Earth

Sculpture
Browse by type of artwork
Korean Art
LACMA protectorate
________

Miroku, the Bodhisasttva of the Future
Kaikei
MFA Boston

William Maxwell, nearing 90

Every now and then, in my waking moments, and especially when I am in the country, I stand and look hard at everything.

—lengthy excerpt and heartfelt praise at Danger Blog! Dec.16.03

Many links and justifiably so, to J. M Coetzee's Nobel Lecture

By The Road

When I moved to Montana from New York, I’d thought I was going back to some earlier and better version of America, to an Ansel Adams photograph suspended in time. Of course, Montana isn’t like that, nor (as far as I know) is anywhere else. Nowadays, the particular nuttiness of the age surges everywhere instantly, like a magnetic field. Sometimes half the drop-offs at local U-Haul rental places come from California, and whenever upheaval happens there—an earthquake, a riot—the number of refugees seems to go up. A lot of people in Montana aren’t so much living there as they are not living somewhere else.

—Ian Frazier/The New Yorker Dec.15.03
second page link malfunction at the moment

Paradise Engineering

A pretty much somewhat androgynous portrait of Jeff Bridges by I.V. Passmore who purports to be his friend.
Alexander Passmore,
sharing the same site, is an accomplished artist in his own right.
the watercolor index is long and filled with impressive works in that difficult medium

The legs are crunchy and fibrous, the head contains soft white meat and the abdomen is filled with...

—VitaminQ Dec.06.03

—
Gelada thumbs are more opposite their fingers than in any other Old World primate - they have the most highly developed precision grip, due to their need to pluck grass for food. Researchers have theorized that early hominids were also small object feeders, similar to geladas...

Gelada Facts
Mindy's Memory Primate Sanctuary
"Although we answer the need of primates released from research facilities, the majority of our rescued monkeys are from abuse, neglect or abandonment by the private pet sector. Therefore, the sanctuary does not support the idea of exotics as pets."

link vitaminq

three previously unknown hymns of Sir Edward Elgar discovered by the rock musician Manfred Mann.

from Come In, Kansas City. Kansas City, Come In, Please.

...the wide rivers are so fine no one crosses them:
they unroll like sheets of Reynolds Wrap before it's slathered with apple crumb betty pie.
The good folk camp on the banks like trees
and watch the shining republic of desire...

—Cal Bedient
Poetry Daily
Dec.14.03

Scudding before a Heavy Westerly Gale off the Cape, Lat. 44 deg.
Augustus Earle
Traveler's Art
NLA

Elizabeth Durack 1915 - 2000

REBECCA HOSACK: Yes. I think that she had extraordinary experiences with Aboriginal people as a young girl. I mean she used to tell me that she would sometimes the Aboriginals on the station would say, 'Come with me'. And they would go - she would go walking for three weeks not knowing when she was going to come back. I think as an older woman she - and as an artist - starting extrapolating from those experiences. And I think the persona of Eddie Burrup freed her up.
—
MATT PEACOCK: Did you discuss this with her at all?

REBECCA HOSACK: Oh, I mean we talked about it a lot. And I think part of the reason of doing the show we both felt that it was important to open the debate. But there should be a debate that's honest. It shouldn't be vicious. It shouldn't be rebarbative. If you are not going to be cross with her for crossing gender barriers - which no one is - you know, perhaps why should we be cross with her crossing race barriers? She did have a lot of experience, genuine experience, perhaps more than many white people I know - most white people I know - with Aboriginal people.

Australian Broadcast Company interview

The Art of Eddie Burrup
__



Children's lives
Beyond the Picket Fence
National Library of Australia Online Exhibitions
__________

from a search for Ruby Lindsay



who died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic following World War 1, at the age of 22.
She came from an artistic family.

Saraswati
Flying Squirrel
Ardhanarishvara

from the somewhat scammy and unprovenanced Exotic India 'One Stop Shop for Indian Arts'
also:
Sahasrara Chakra
Shennong, the Chinese Deity of Medicine

Fear and Trembling

Ω{I thought Amélie Nothomb was a lot more popular than she seems to be from a google search. In english I mean. She's pretty renowned in the francophone world.
Fear and Trembling is a tight little ship, like a bath toy, like something when you were alone in there you might rub yourself with, other times just float it along through the bubbles and waves, and it's like that brightness too of the bath, the intimate brightness and skin of vulnerability but the doors are closed and you're alone. It's not masturbatory but it has that inversion, that sensual turning in.
Because it takes place in Japan I wonder if that's why it reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto's novels. Or its size, it's a small thing, like Kitchen and Lizard. It has that sense of deeply maintained control too, steadiness of realization.
It's a sweet book. I read it right through quite happily.
Nothomb is also affiliated with the firmly androgynous Robert, or Princesse Robert, a French music person of great feminine beauty but seemingly masculine gender. I can't respond to his music, which I've only encountered so far on his web site, because it will only play on the two main music applications, Real and Windows, neither of which work for me.}

I am a voyager and a seaman; that is a liar and a stupid fellow, in the eyes of that class of indolent haughty writers, who in their closets reason in infinitum on the world and its inhabitants, and with an air of superiority, confine nature within the limits of their own invention

In 1774, the first Polynesian to visit London travelled to England with the crew of Captain Cook's second Pacific voyage and became an overnight sensation. Seen as a living example of the 'Noble Savage', Omai as he was known, was discussed by scientists and philosophers, celebrated in all the best circles and written about in everything from poetry to pornography. He proved a lightning rod for European anxieties regarding imperialism, civilisation and the true nature of mankind.

Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas Nov. .03
National Library of Australia

Jonathon Delacour on Donald Richie’s Ozu:
The other—equally important though less obvious—characteristic of the Ozu film is its emphasis on existential choice. It’s difficult to conceive of anything more at odds with contemporary Western society’s willingness to concoct excuses for all kinds of bad behavior than the notion that you are what you do, and nothing more nor less; the sum total of your choices, your actions, is the sum total of yourself.

Those of us who agree with Richie that “there is no immutable inner reality, no inner person, no soul” could do infinitely worse than follow a morality based on an appreciation of the transient beauty of everyday life and the need to accept responsibility for both our choices and the consequences that flow from them.

Albert Morse has a bunch of early days photoportraits of underground comics guys
also SF locals including this guy who used to show up at anti-war (Viet Nam) demos and remind at least me that seriousness could be dreary and less effective than great leaps of humorous insanity and fun.

Man na obra
...an old lady in my neighborhood blessed with a gift. It seems she can foretell the future and she’s often right. She gives advice and has ways to solve problems. They say her help ranges from issues with weight till the ones of the heart.
One day I met her by the waterside at Banda Bou (place in Curaçao). I asked her to predict if things will ever get better for Curaçao. She thought for a moment, glancing over the blue water and she answered: ”You know miss…

…your question is a bit complicated. The future is not fixed, you are the designated driver. There’s one advice I can give you today. If you want Curaçao to flourish: Work for it!

—Izaline Calister

Last Day of The Marin Flea Market
8 letters is worth its nebulous and incalculable admission fee for this post alone

People are magnificent research, almost the best there is
More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.
—Terry Pratchett in the Guardian UK
link Bookslut

maisonneuve

online literary magazine
great poetry
especially gripping Ted Koppel interview with retired Canadian general Roméo Dallaire about his experiences in Rwanda

link from the inspiring Maud Newton

just saw My Man Godfrey
"Stand still, Godfrey, it'll all be over in a minute."

Attention!
The system of Philipp Otto Runge built as a virtual colour-space

they are all human beings and governed by the same impulses

“What was your most difficult feat, the most difficult escape you ever made?” was asked.

“I think my escape from the Siberian Transport was my most difficult performance. I was placed in the great vault usually assigned to political prisoners, and when the great door was shut, I had the hardest time of my life, perhaps, in releasing myself. But nevertheless, it took me 18 minutes to walk out, and face the dazed officials.

“I think that in a year I may retire. I cannot take my money with me when I die and I wish to enjoy it, with my family, while I live. I should prefer living in Germany to any other country, though I am an American, and am loyal to my country. "
Harry Houdini (Erich Weiss)

interviewed by Edna Ferber
Appleton Public Library (WI)

from The Project Gutenberg EBook of 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
by Captain Grose et al.

"...Fib the cove's quarron in the rumpad
for the lour in his bung..."

"The swell was flash, so I could not draw his fogle"
—
WIPER DRAWER. A pickpocket, one who steals handkerchiefs.
He drew a broad, narrow, cam, or specked wiper;
he picked a pocket of a broad, narrow, cambrick, or coloured
handkerchief.

TO WIREDRAW. To lengthen out or extend any book, letter,
or discourse.

WISE. As wise as Waltham's calf, that ran nine miles to
suck a bull.

WISE MEN OF GOTHAM. Gotham is a village in Nottinghamshire;
its magistrates are said to have attempted to
hedge in a cuckow; a bush, called the cuckow's bush, is
still shewn in support of the tradition. A thousand other
ridiculous stories are told of the men of Gotham.

WISEACRE. A foolish conceited fellow.

WISEACRE'S HALL. Gresham college.

WIT. He has as much wit as three folks, two fools and a
madman.

—

link Barista Nov.28.03
who also links to the stunning Earth View by John Walker

from Imaginary Lines

... where touch obscured
a body's edge so brilliantly.
How casually the light declined. The roundest pearls
gave way to oval shadows. Mornings we found
it snowed all night. There was often a feeling of rest...

Kathleen Peirce/Poetry Daily
Dec.02.03

leylop shows a face of autumnal China many may find unexpectedly beautiful and almost universally familiar

"...for the sigh from a dream that is probably about you, some criticism about something you did or didn’t do for the baby, because you are in the baby’s face all day, catching the baby’s eyes with yours so you don’t get lost, so the baby never worries about being separated. It has to be a dream about you because what else can be inside the head of someone that new? You would kick the ass of anyone who gave your baby a bad dream."
—Pia Z. Ehrhardt

Thomas Robinson's Historic Photo Archive
441 NE Jarrett Street
Portland OR
97211-3126


link gmtplus9
—
Tadanori Yokoo ditto

Cedarburg

smaragdus
acacia
Hiram

Dolsa Wind
at gizmo AU

Bombardier Embrio
at gizmo AU

Yamaha Tricker
nice bike

Mario Merz
January 1 1925 — November 9 2003

Two Essays In Defense of Caustic Speech

With a Link To Something Else As An Example Between Them

Ω Many times, which is to say many many times, meaning simply, and as clearly as I can put it, far too often for it to have been an accident or a random urge on the part of the accuser, I have, myself, been taken unaware and stripped of all pacific illusions as to the nature of my pretty consistently automatic reversion to a form of inverted informatizing which people whose genetic predilections and cultural instructions did not, however unconciously taken in or absorbed, at their mother's knee as it were, or an uncle even, or more deeply and ineradicably impressed, imprinted, fixed in the person by template and imitation, include a grandparent whose own accents link direct to what some did once and many after do still call the 'Auld Sod' as distinct of and by its nature from any catamitical behaviors however currently acceptable, and in like manner to their object of accusation, have had no recourse, have never had recourse, to puzzle out its working parts word by word or sentiment by locution, as for the utilizer to analyze it in the heat of its deployment is to take apart a functioning device of protective and non-ameliorative juxtapositional re-arrangement of true and valid expression, the unheartfelt display of the heart's own inner core, the "Well excuuuuse ME!" of the ancient tongue untied and somewhat more biting for the murky depth of its complexity and the stench of roasted veracity kept to the spit just that one turn past its moment, the bitter taste in the ear that is the firm denial of the very truth the page would speak like a good little rattish snitch were it given to the page to produce it verbatim sans emphases and nuance, that selfsame stripping as referred to above being the testimony mute but eloquent of her eyes being the eyes of the too clearly unmoved recipient of that self-same deployment as mentioned above, most often female in all that that would seem to import and does, and does often, that each of them, she and she alike, have said in firm confusion, unequivocally and brooking no dissuasion, rejecting what immediately upon utterance I had felt sure would be my glorious hour's time come round at last, having delivered up for inspection and gradation both heart and soul as well as chest and backbone, and other parts whose vulnerable innocence calls for protective shielding at such times, and forget us not the mind in all this haste to our conclusive statement here, that she, all of them, said, in much the same way, in much the same sentence, using often much the same words to chillingly similar effect, as opposed to that of mine on her, that flat thud of the acrobat's slip, that clang of the fused differential, that slammed door's echo and fade in the still room of unsought solitude, that "You're so fucking sarcastic!" meaning no, meaning it has not done quite what you seemed to hope it would, not here, not now, not with and/or to me.

lines written after reading Portadown News Nov.11.03

ΩThat it is a hurt beyond your therapies' soft reach that brings that bitterness to your attention is all you can know, not knowing the hurt itself or a degree like it; and your inability to hold that claw denies it's once having been a hand, as your inability to meet that eye denies the clumped and remassed skin around its gaze was once a face. Your inability, not hers not his, not mine. Yours.

'One is a Lonely Number' : on the logic of communication:

“If I were clean, the one dirty child I see would have seen only
clean children around her, and so she would have known that
she was dirty at once. But she did not. So I must be dirty, too!”

—Johan van Benthem
Logic Colloquium 2002/This is NOT the page of Logic Colloquium 2002

This is

link Language Log again

Dick Tracy's Millions Awaken

We leave Skype running in the background when Matt's online in Helsinki and I'm in London. It's an easy, casual way to keep someone present when they're not. You hear the rhythms of their typing, occasional laughs or sighs or mutterings, and you can break into conversation when you feel like it. You can have conversational spurts, rather than one big download. It's casual, background conversation rather than a focused IM exchange or time-pressured telephone call.

—Foe Romeo Nov.21.03

How do stories shape our culture? How much importance do we (and should we) place on our stories?

...you hide who you are and eventually generation after generation know less and less. The fear that is in telling you release an identity that should children unwittingly tell - the penalty is death or persecution.
—
It was let slip she was Indian (maybe Arapohoe from Cache a la Poudre in Colorado?). My half Grand Uncle, a very old man in his late 90's in 1981, clammed up and went silent as if betraying the unutterable. He said, as if it were yesterday, "their are things you don't talk about in the land of Custer"! Later we heard the US Cavalry from Fort Collins had broken up families at Cache a la poudre and sent all the Indians back to the reserve.
—
At one time, I did enjoy the exhiliration of capturing deer in New Zealnd Parks, by jumping them with nets from a helicopter. Wapiti, or red deer were later sent back to Canada as docile progeny for deer farms. Ultimately. a slaughterhouse death. Certainly a detraction. However that is another story.

Paul Filteau/House of Anansi Nov.22.03

PartiallyClips

link Language Log

Some other comics which deserve your attention:
comic links at PartiallyClips

Jeff Danziger
fearless
incisive
compassionate
funny

After a Long Time Away

...Plants think up fresh leaves,
even the dust on the shelves
has got a new pair of shoes,
and waxy yellow peppers jump...

Patrick Donnelly
Poetry Daily Nov.23.03

leylop, Hangzhou girl
blogging from Hangzhou, China
leylop photolog
leylop photo albums

from S/Z:

In this ideal text the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable...; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.

Roland Barthes

—
A Reflection on the Performance of Treading Water
Directed by VOID:Performance
Liz Swift
The Quay Thing
Wrights and Sites
link Place and Space in Art, Art History, Design
Research on Place and Space

link path thru Parking Lot Nov.20.03

RAC:stillB

Caesar
Jim Powell

Liberty Bush
Ω{I swear it was an accident, I hit C-Span on my way to bed, I'd already seen the Roseanne rerun two weeks ago, and there was E2 and PP, and lo and oh my, the Usurper. He was giving it a speech. His speech was a mention of liberty and then liberty and then liberty again, and then again liberty. The third one tipped it. I was like, hey, what's up with the liberty, Geo-man? He finished its speech, the look of relief settling on his features like dust onto a two-track after a Hummer slams by. After he sat down. But then ah ha. Right after its speech for liberty liberty liberty.
They played 'God Save The Queen'.
Right after.
Ah ha ah ha. Well you cheap little sons of bitches. We own England now too don't we? The termite king, no that makes him sound like the Pope. I dunno some insect metaphor <here>. The Republic for which he stands won't/can't get the duality, and so must hear within the melody 'Sweet Land of Liberty' 'Of Thee I Sing'. Chump company stole the National Anthem of Britain. "Land Where My Fathers Died".
How so very courageous of you boys. You champions of the downtrodden and all. You brave things you.}

...His wife is shining the flashlight
into the sky...

Parable of the Moth
Robet Cording
Poetry Daily Nov.19.03

Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep continues apace

Onfim
from Novgorod {in cyrillic}

link Art of Onfim
link path thru Anton Sherwood

Banksy
Retort Magazine

link the null device

Dona Veva, Chichimila, 1976
Macduff Everton The Modern Maya

Kureishi Interview Reviewed
"...and who Kureishi depicts, in this pathetic state, with a little too much relish."
—Moorish Girl Nov.17.03

Ω{I'm thinking it's 'whom', being the object of depiction and everything. But that well-metered phrase, and its insightful clarity laid out with perfect restraint, is why she's here.}

before and after Armegeddon

Silbo Gomero
Whistle-talkers of the Canary Island hollers.
—Sarah Andrews/AP Nov.16.03
link language hat

old web references to works on Whistling Languages

'Where Does Writing Come From?'

It's as though arguing for invention and its fragile, wondrous efficacy was indelicate, wasn't quite nice. And even though arguing for it wouldn't harm or taint invention's marvels (we all know novels are made-up things; it's part of our pleasure to keep such knowledge in our minds), still I always feel queasy doing it—not like a magician who reluctantly shows a rube how to pull a nickel out of his own ear, but more like a local parish priest who upon hearing a small but humiliating confession from a friend, lets the friend off easy just to move matters on to higher ground.

Wallace Stevens wrote once that 'in an age of disbelief...it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief in his measure and his style'. And that takes in how I feel about invention—invented characters, invented landscapes, invented breaks of the heart and their subsequent repairs.

—Richard Ford
Granta 62: What Young Men Do
________________
Ω{It's as though, or it really is, that we only get the dots, fine as can be but dots, and we put them together, the pointilism of all the senses combined still just dots, so that in fiction, in art, there doesn't have to be anything in back of it on the other side, the way the real is hidden behind the dots we see and turned into an image of the real that is the real, for us, and all we know of it, that's what art is, to make that interface real enough to fool the mind, and then play with it.
The batting cage scene in the Cooperstown section of Richard Ford's Independence Day is an evocation of paternity, at a moment in America that was exactly that, all of it, the machine the controlled environment, the man the boy the tradition and rite of passage and the move into the unknown world of the unthinkable.
Realism is by its nature accessible, and there's a mirror of blind acceptance in the rejection of anything that's realistic in art now, as though there were only the approach and retreat from the representational and the abstract.}

2003 was officially proclaimed "The Year of the Blues" by the United States Congress in February.

If it had not been for that extra hand...

Matsuyama castle can be seen in the center
—
smash a watermelon
—
one idea for mental relief

hard to love

Play is the engine that drives true learning

Created in the early 19th century by German educator Frederick Froebel, the 'gifts' were intended to teach kindergarten children about the principles of geometry and the discipline of design.
American architect Frank Lloyd Wright often noted the profound effect the ten exercises or 'gifts' had upon his development as an architect.

link Froebel Web



"If you cannot already perceive in the individual the totality and unity, in the sprouting seed the blossom the fruit the plant, then you must have faith in the seed, the soil, the gardener and the whole, the harmony of life.:
natural heroFriedrich Froebel
—
Women took Kindergarten around the World
Margarethe Meyer Schurz
Elizabeth Peabody at Virginia Commonwealth University
—
Froebel philosophy at Froebel Foundation USA
—
Froebel Gifts
—
Froebel
at Infed, the encyclopedia of informal education
—
link path from a mention of Elizabeth Peabody at LMBoyd

Glenfillan Sheepdog Trials

...closing
the distance, adjusting
the angle, black-and-white
verb to the flock's blackfooted
milling. How long after these canids
willingly approached our fires
did it take for some magus
to train one up to these workaday
marathons, this serious play
that involves everything from
pick-up-sticks to a log-roller's
quickstep over the backs
of Charolais built like a herd
of tractors?

—Brendan Galvin
Poetry Daily Nov.13.03

#5
the scribbler
zefrank

Martin 'Yellow Dog' Amis:
But it all comes under the heading of — and this is what I’ve always been writing about — masculinity and what a paradoxical state it is. It’s a constant trade-off, and not with the conscious mind. The real paradox about masculinity is that it rests on potency and the ability to have an erection, and now that that’s chemically available, and — though no one’s whispered a word of it yet — what that will do to masculinity is truly revolutionary.
In what way?
Well it should take away the main cause of male insecurity. As someone says, "There will be no more wars."
—Philip Higgs—Martin Amis/Nerve

Ω{Years back I was a militant anti-smoker. As a teenager. It was a boot camp for the unpopular truth-holder. You're nuts. Shut up. Cars too. Shut up. Years back. Years and years. Lots of stuff. Not that it gives me that automatic scissor-clearance, but, you know.
I don't care about offshore Viagara or whether my Johnson's mammoth enough, that isn't the issue. It's the aftermath that concerns me.
A long time ago I said prostitution was a bad thing. Not because of the sex, but because it sanctifies money. Men with money can breed on, or, its functional equivalent, have sex with, women that without the money they couldn't, or women representing those women. Ipso facto, money makes the difference. Ipso facto, because breeding is a paramount feature of biological presence, money is sacred. To those men.
Amis is right about the dynamic but wrong about the terms. Masculinity, like feminity, like humanity, is a fluid category, it's just that the flow is so long-term and slow it seems static. It is not static. A sudden shift in reproductive fortune and the essential qualities of maleness, femaleness, human-ness, will have changed substantively.
The bower-bird carries this principle home to us, the bull-frog, the baboon, the octopus bring it as well. These mating gestures, these dances, evolved. They weren't there, then they were. Things change.
It is a truism that humanity's characteristics are locked in some inalterable template. Certain kinds of men benefit from that truism's acceptance. Certain kinds of men will benefit from chemically-enhanced erectile function. Others won't. The ones who choose not to will be marginalized to the edge of extinction.
Once again we get shoved into the crossroads at rush hour, nothing but traffic as far as the eye can see, forced into a binary dilemma whose terms are equally repellent. This is the same bogus 'progress' that has greased our way to the edge of full-species extinction.
Is it just collateral damage that the compensatory technologies employed to give the handicapped an equal footing tend to handicap the able?
There's still this sense of nobility and purity around Olympic athletes representing the best of human grace and ability, and consequent sanctions against performance-enhancing chemistry. But back in the real world anything goes. Which one's more important, in the long run?

There's an Escherian quality to this road we're on that's fascinating.}

your own phenakistiscope

Art Carney

heart heart heart heart heart heart heart

...dropping through the nothing both
a major urban metroplex and a sesame seed are, under the rings
of their atoms. In a comic strip today, the phone starts shrilling;
the dog goes “Ruff Ruff Ruff”; the phone stops; and the dog thinks
“See? If you bark long enough, that thing shuts up.” Yes, funny;
and pathetic. In one lovely 18th-century engraving,
the corpse’s muscles from shoulder to butt are opened outward
like the petals of a rose: and we hold tightly to the ladder of ribs...

—albert goldbarth/Beloit Poetry Journal Vol. 53, No. 4

link path thru Parking Lot:Opening Space Nov.08.03

Walt Whitman: first response to Anne Gilchrist's offer of her hand in marriage

...My book is my best letter, my response, my truest explanation of all. In it I have put my body & spirit. You understand this better & fuller & clearer than any one else. And I too fully & clearly understand the loving & womanly letter it has evoked. Enough that there surely exists between us so beautiful & delicate a relation, accepted by both of us with joy.