Oilcloth and Linoleum

Review of Algae & Elegance at the Raspy Puppet

2009-04-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

A rasp, as many of you know—I learned it myself in high school shop class—is a wood-finishing tool with big teeth. So it’s a little ironic that the “Elegance” at the Raspy Restaurant is toothless, or maybe I should say “gumsome.”

Not that it’s bad to please the gums as well as the tongue, nor are the algae concoctions at the Raspy without texture as well as flavor. The evening my wife Merino and I went, she ordered the house special Giuseppe "Tim" Botta had recommended, Golden Algae Pourage. To be companionable, I ordered the Three Bears Honey Salmon and Seaweed. Each entree came with a choice of sides. Merino choose the slivered newt salad and I went with the copperhead medallions in pea soup.

Though a young person passing behind me (I don’t think it was one of the waiters) opined that it looked like “dyed cat barf,” Merino’s Pourage was a visually appealing melange of colors, green, tan and black or blackish, nicely presented on a pond-colored plate. She was enjoying it when, unfortunately, I was forced by a certain fussiness to withdraw from my mouth a long golden hair, the other end of which was in my shrimp and seaweed. From its length and texture I deduced that the hair was from the head of a human, not the coarse synthetic of a puppet's transplants.

On that basis, I have to give The Raspy a full four-antacid rating.

This Just In

2009-03-10T06:15:00.000-07:00

According to Tim Botta, the five most significant books of the Clockwise and Counter-Clockwise Schools of Poetry are

1. The Slide Whistles of Autumn by Morty “Botanical” Sherbet

2. Inter-Departmental Mail by Bluto Pippy

3. Wild Flapjacks! by Minerva “Sizzler” Plankton

4. Rate My Cocoa by Storch

5. The Drinking Bird by Hydrox Spurs

Tim Botta's Second Batch of Answers

2009-02-28T19:14:00.000-08:00

1. Where is the real Village of Liver and Onions?

O, Liver and Onions—the real deal—appears somewhere in the mysterious works of Oliver Onions. This village of cuckoo-clock wood and spectacular scallop-bulb streetlamps is a favorite destination destination for the with-it or without-it traveler. Welcome to the Village of Liver and Onions. Some claim that this particular dish was invented elsewhere, winning a silver medal at some exposition or other. But we know better. Wake up in our elegant dining room and indulge in this universally reviled specialty. I recall laughing my head off as a child when I saw a book in the library called "Onion John."

2. What happens to liver if I won’t eat it?

"Give me back my liver!" Remember that one? A girl in a darkened gust is telling us ghost stories.

3. You’ve written a book called “Wireless.” “Wire” has many definitions, especially when it’s spoken aloud. Are all the definitions of “wireless” the opposites of the definitions of “wire,” or am I wrong to think in terms of opposites.

Thanks for the plug. Imagine a wireless world! I suppose that the non-existence of an object is the opposite of that object, but perhaps the opposite is true. At the binary winery all is sweet or dry.

4. Who was Uncle Tonoose, and what was his favorite magazine?

Which wine goes best with liver and onions? Uncle Onion—sorry, Uncle Tonoose—would know. Beside Uncle's favorite itchy chair—ah, those tiny metallic strips in the fabric—do I imagine?—waited Tonoose's magazine stand. Though he had many magazines in the rack, his favorite was a collection of crude cartoons.

5. What past current event caused you to give up some mental or physical obsession you had been savoring guiltily?

Something "scared the liver out of me," as she used to say. Unsavory liver. Many cords are connected to that power strip. I trace it on onionskin paper now. From that trance, the sudden tumble of onions woke me.

Tim Botta's Responses to Tom Lisk's Questions

2009-02-09T05:48:00.000-08:00

1. How should dry erase markers be advertised?

As you know by now, I teach in the community college system, so I was immediately drawn to this question. Since the quenchless appeal of dry erase markers is their remarkable impermanency, the advertising of dry erase markers should be marked by the permanency of the slab-like absolute. I work with such tools each day. I am grateful for the suspense of uncapping, before an audience, the dry erase marker and applying it to the white board, not knowing if the resulting line will show up bold or weak. Include this suspense in the advertisement. Also stress the advantages of dry erase versus drenched. The question of advertising or marketing is complicated since I do not purchase these markers in a store, but find them in a cabinet, when I can.

2. Tell us a little about the opposite of temptation?

Trembling, he shuts the cabinet and slips out of the supply room, his supple briefcase bulging with supplies: boxes of lush staples, boxes of paper clips (the French call them "trombones"), dry erase markers. Since the first stage of temptation is always the presentation of the object, the opposite of temptation consists in hiding that object completely from the other's awareness. Not so the supply room, with its blatant label on the door of the cabinet, in block capital letters (OFFICE SUPPLIES) as though in some cartoon. Temptation is display.

3. What three words rhyme with "sasquatch" and why?

Gotcha! If you botch this sasquatch question, backtrack to question two and look in the briefcase. Hot chai! Why? Ask the sasquatch.

4. Who?

Low odor. Chisel. Conforms to ASTM D4236. NON-TOXIC. In various colors, but the green hard to read. Before an audience of composition students, he uncaps his pen. Its provenance is a mystery, even to them.

5. What is the exact meaninglessness of life?

He likes those moments alone, erasing the board of marks. He even likes the pseudo-kleptomania of the supply room, taking only those supplies that his day requires.

You, with Your Tattoo, and I was Safe

2009-01-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

This afternoon when you were above me astraddle the bronze gelding outside the library I knew I was in love with you and had to say so almost with tears of joy in my eyes, though you were laughing--no, because you were laughing, using your knees to prod the stiff horse’s greenish flanks the color of a finger patina left by a friendship ring, and not knowing what to do with your arms, since there were no reins to hold, because it was a wild horse (nature skeptical of mounted heroes, of course), one of three splashing in puddles cast of mingled copper and tin and (long after it hardened) a contribution of rainwater directly from nature, but the saying seemed to have no effect on you, and I would have mounted with you if there had been someone to give me a leg up, as I had helped you by lifting you to my shoulders, wobbling and straining while you laughed and carried on, saying “no, no,” all the while trying to get your leg over the huge animal’s back and as, in the aftermath, I would try to help you get down, though you slid easily from the smooth bronze and I only broke your fall.

Bulter Guillermoy, from Gilded Geldings and Horse Pesterers

Bird, of Course

2008-09-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

Might as well admit bewilderment

Must a voice sound confident?

Mind dies, body lives.

Every moment is incomprehensible.

Plum blossoms on a red branch

stuck in a plastic tumbler on a table

of varnished flooring pine.

Smooth surface of someone’s suffering.

Ernest Dow,"Might" from This is it, My Friend

Kate Gets What She Paid For

2008-09-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

An Iron, a Goddess, Mercy

The

seems to be

a reasonable

place to begin

but tea would be even less malleable than thé

than iron is to steel

heavy, hard, dull-with-rust steel,

steel. Temper yields, bends,

makes her stronger, flexible

against any iron divinity;

right/wrong needs mercy.

bending asks for less,

the soft shine like lead

leading one place, one process

after another, justice falling at

the mercy of unstrained

aprés moi le deluge

melting queen and god(dess),

Deleuze incongruous in oregano.

Laissez le canaille mange gateaux

Mange merde et puis mort, reine blanc.

Et laissez les bon temps roulez

The bloody time and the terror

roll on steel wheels, on stones,

wheels mercified with rubber against

the rain (la reine). Les oiseux ancien

squint. Flattened spears, bronze age

cuirasses, wooden samurai armor

precurse the tongue depressor.

A hundred million years ago

unknowns roamed a strange

planet without mercy, without tea.

Lester Mot, from "Pardon My French Fries" in So You Want to Be a Parakeet Handler, p. 60 almost 61

Look Behind the Words

2008-06-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

All meaning is hidden.

Sun Volt Cloud Bank

2008-05-31T18:28:00.000-07:00

It’s funny how I like having the two indirect lights,
one on either side, sixty watts apiece, instead of three sixties overhead.

How much light is plenty? One sixty is enough to read by,
though eyestrain seems to be a temporary condition

or only a marketing concept.
Can you hear me on a busy street corner

declaiming “. . . cloud bank/ It’s funny,” et cetera
as fast as sounds will issue from my lips and tongue,

(whose relationship with mind is like “terroir” and the taste of dirt).
Instead of the hortatory verbiage you usually hear,

suppose I said, “Imagination is the only power we have over death,”
or, “The title Terroir Blues got under my skin and I want to own it,

which will never happen if I buy Jay Farrar’s plastic box.”
or, “The clouds this afternoon--a reason to believe in heaven,”

or–I keep coming back to “terroir,”
such a wonderful word.

(Ben Dover, Vice Chancellor, Institute for Exaggeration Studies, Annual Report Poem)

Port in Summer

2008-05-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

“When things touch each other long enough, eventually they become one,” I wrote on the back of a card on which the Portland Regency Hotel gave me the weather (a scalloped oval with tiny black tracks below it) and temperature (high: 80, low: 70) for the next day, June 25, Merino's fiftieth birthday. Things becoming one is what death is all about. Imagining myself as an unconscious cell of some amoeba or molecule of rock is as much victory over death as I can find. Imagining consciousness without consciousness–that’s a trick.

In Portland the same day I also wrote the next four paragraphs:

Struggling with myself about whether to try to take a nap, drive to Freeport and shop at the outlets, or walk around Portland again, I turned on the television. I’ve been here three days. This was the first time I had turned it on at all. I flipped through the channels until I saw an almost familiar face. The voice sounded like, and the face looked a little like the comic actor Jack Guilford, but more like a thinner version of someone else I couldn’t quite place. Then I heard Bill Moyers and realized I was watching Joseph Campbell.

As I listened I thought I had probably seen this segment when it aired for the first time years ago. Campbell said: Life is hard, full of pain and loss, but the myths teach us to go on, to affirm life, to live. He seemed to be saying we should passively accept evil, because anything anyone might do is likely to be--or to produce–evil for someone else. Moyers challenged him, and Campbell explained: We have to go on living, doing what we think is right–though he seemed to avoid words such as “right.” I didn’t take notes so I don’t have the exact words.
I’m wrong.

When I turned on the TV I wasn’t struggling with myself. The struggle had been earlier. Instead of doing any of the things I had been struggling with, I had gone to get some exercise, rowing on a rowing machine and jogging on a treadmill, half-watching the movie Maverick on the Regency Health Club’s television. Back in my room, as I showered and got ready to go out to dinner with my friends who lived nearby, I left the TV on, listening to snatches of Campbell’s wise attempt not to sound wise, and jotting down a couple of things.

My friends arrived. We ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant, then walked around Portland, visiting the shops. After awhile the three of us--husband wife, and me--stopped for ice cream. Next to us, a youngish woman with an older man standing a little behind her ordered ice cream too. The man had a weightlifter’s build. I said something to him–I no longer remember exactly what–and we exchanged praise for Campbell. He was holding a paperback copy of Campbell’s The Power of Myth, the transcription of the Moyers interviews.

Over There

2008-05-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

“After the war, I remember the soldiers coming home. I remember you coming home,” the barber said to the eighty-year old man in the next chair, waiting for his ride. They had already established the old man’s age and that he had fought in that war, though he hadn’t said, “fought,” only that he’d been “over there,” a phrase from an earlier war.

“A fellow in the town where I stayed won a big Cadillac, black Cadillac, in some contest. It’s a little town, and this was years ago. I’d never seen anything like that. He took the car down to little Washington, and when he came back, it was full of bullet holes. He said somebody shot at him. ‘And I shot back,’ he said.” The barber, who didn’t look quite old enough to remember the end of the war, had a laugh in his voice.

The old man in the other chair said, “The only way to win this mess we’re in now over there is to kill ‘em all.”

The barber, still enjoying his own story, said, “I don’t know if he shot the car full of holes himself, or what happened. He said somebody shot at him and he shot back.”

What Kind of Person Are You?

2008-04-01T06:35:00.000-07:00

money or relationships?
feathers or lead?
buboes or pustules?
starvation or AIDS?
suicide or firing squad?
shoes or shinola?
self or other?
extension or distention?
land mines or nuclear bombs?
water or car payment?
soccer or Uzi?
“subliminable” or abominable?
rape or abortion?
terror or power?
dialogue or monologue?
mor(t)ality or annihilation?
ragged or naked?
river or factory?
fish or Personal Care Products?
burning river or smog?
earbuds or potato buds?
mp4 or whatever comes next?
high def or how deaf?
pistol or penis?
murder or military?
cancer or mange?
clouds or missiles?
hell or annihilation?
present or gift?
present or future?

Those Who Were

2008-03-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

Randall Jarrell wrote snippy comments about Stephen Spender's poem title, "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great," but I can’t find them now. While I was in college, Stephen Spender was a writer in residence for a semester. I heard Jarrell's name for the first time when at a poetry reading another student I barely knew but whose sophistication I was jealous of read "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" as an example of imagism. I'd never heard of imagism either.

A year or so earlier, the day before my eighteenth birthday, the year I graduated from high school and started college, Jarrell had let himself be jacklighted by a speeding car.

Twenty years later I had dinner with Stephen Spender and a friend of a friend of Spender’s at Big Jim's Restaurant in Sumter, South Carolina. According to the alumni newsletter, the sophisticated student was now a newspaper reporter. He had learned to write clear, compact prose. A kindly, modest man, Spender spoke of fracturing a tendon in his knee. He ate un-self-consciously and was amiable if not voluble. After his reading he invited me and the friend to visit his apartment in Columbia, an hour away, where he was writer in residence. On the way he said he didn’t understand what Jimmy Merrill was doing with his ouija board poems, and asked me if I did. I didn’t. Now that I’ve read the poems, I think The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterpiece.

In Spender's dark apartment on campus, we sipped scotch. It was late for a school night. We glimpsed his wife (was her name Natasha?) in a peignoir, sleepily greeting him from the dark hallway and, unintroduced, returning immediately to bed.

Nearly a decade after that I moved to North Carolina, where Jarrell lived and died. And thirty years after Jarrell's death, before Spender died, he became Sir Stephen, a nice short title.

Eidophusikon

2007-12-08T06:27:00.001-08:00

“In another glass case you can study “The Rose Collection of Now-Extinct Nineteenth-Century French Moths.” (“There’s a slight misnomer there,” [David] Wilson informed me solicitously the first time I peered into that case. He happened to be passing silently by. “Most of those particular moths are indeed French, but a few are actually Flemish—although with some it’s hard to tell.”) Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (NY: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 18.

“. . . mechanical devices like the Eidophusikon, which showed primitive movies.” Weschler 61.

“That’s another of our mottoes here at the museum: ‘Ut Translation Natura”—Nature as Metaphor,” David Wilson in Weschler 63.

Thanks, Kate!

I Wish I Had it With Me

2007-10-30T09:43:00.001-07:00

1. How did the circle become zero, symbol for nothing, and placeholder in ciphers?

Need alone is not enough.

2. If you are risen,

you reason,

you must have fallen

across the horizon.

Urine is in.

3. In 1794 her egg sacs

(ovaries, in modern terms)

contained a thousand microscopic homunculi

waiting to be dropped monthly

toward gestation.

4. Full Dorsal [Kiss?]

One can see all of time in the expanding universe,

this universe, where the naked eye is limited.

Amarillo Fenugrec, Tetris Seven, p.7.

Petrosport

2007-09-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

Women: What men do we must defeat with more desires. Weapons mean death. Win more dying with more destruction while many don’t want more denial. We must defeat what money drives without more destruction.

Men: We must detonate. We might destroy what makes death.

Desire: Whatever morality decries, want magnifies doctrine, war mutilates desire.

Women: What men don’t want more deaths?

Men: War means defeat.

Doom: What means defeat?

Women: What? Murder doesn’t? What’s more definite.

Men: Words mean defeat.

Defeat: What made devils want more dollars? With more dollars, what? More destruction?

Men: With more determination we mitigate damage.

Women: We must do what murder doesn’t. When mud dries where money drives with money down, with mercy denied women, men die while mulling defense, which measures defeat.

Death: We must disintegrate where mortal death will make destiny withdraw mild days while more die.

Les Wetherman in Key Sir Pass, p. 86

A Beautiful Snack

2007-09-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

To prove I love beauty
I ate a salmon-pink rose,
blossom, leaf and stem:

a silky, perfumed thread
dangled down my throat,
yanked up all at once,

dragging a black, barbed hook.

E. C. Pilfodoxis, In Rose, In Lions, In Caul Hems, p. 1.

Not Too Pretty Good

2007-09-10T17:47:00.000-07:00

Success makes you full of yourself.

Failure makes you full of shit.

Habit is stronger than fear.

Habit is stronger than desire.

It’s a privilege to live beyond meaning.

Desires get in the way of what you really want.

Two eternities: the eternity of time and the eternity outside time.

You are always part of an eternal universe.

Q: At what point did god move outside the cosmos?

A: At the point where he died and entered the other eternity.

From The Maxims of Jacques Wool (with Hench Ward)

Accurate at Any Delivery and Pressure

2007-09-06T06:26:00.000-07:00

Her talent in general was alarming. She could pick up any instrument, including the piano, and in a matter of minutes play it as if she’d practiced for years. She had both a great natural ear and a pica for eating music, not just sheet music. And she was strong enough to carry pianos.

She was a great dancer, completely uninhibited, with natural flow. Incredibly inventive. If she’d turned pro, or even taken lessons, she’ d have revolutionized dance. Ballroom, tap, adagio, belly, she had it all.

The gifts for humming, grumbling and numbers are often–well, always--related. Her mastery of languages was phenomenological.

At some point you stop dreaming and worrying in colorful swatches bigger, fewer and less colorful until there is only one, the clock’s black six a ghost-white upside-down nine, and you try to stay awake or go to sleep, whichever is more impossible at the moment.

Leonardt Woudic, "Exigencies of Phlegm," in Taproot, the Movie, p. 96.

Make Yourself at Home

2007-09-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

Order the kit on-line:
$29.95 plus shipping and handling,

$12.95 (+ S & H) for the paperback alone.
Astonishing to live so long and see nothing.

No one needs to know you’re unmade.
What is there to know?

With raw materials already in your apartment or home
you can easily put together a benign or terrifying creature.

Read and absorb, read and absorb.
Forget your own crepuscular identity.

Become the monarch or monster you have always yearned to be.

Floninga Welsh Battly, “Go, Blindworm, Go!” in Figment Freud, p. 73.

The International Language of Gibberish

2007-08-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

“In my conception of that unspoken image, consequences multiply and engulf me. Alone, no such inundation soaks me, for I hear in that estimation no threat of death. An estimation is a form of justice, and I don't see any way to define justice except by assumptions. By moving smoothly on assumptions every action leads to a condition of awareness whereby all assumptions that serve to estimate others are foolhardy and bereft of validity. Still I go on assuming and being estimated clandestinely except when a moment of sensuality freezes my ability to assume and warms my vital rationality into freedom.”

Otto Ludke, Archimago at the Drill Press, p 51.

Memories of Favorites

2007-08-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

One Arf (say roof)

I heard a fly whiz [“by” is understood]

Lake Isle of Industry

Crossing Brooklyn Fairly Often

Waistland Big and Tall

An Idea on Order at Keys West

When I consider how my light bills went

I’m a Loaner

God, on the other hand, was staring out the window

He Never Expectorated Much

(Dodge Brothers, "From a Little Golden Notebook," p. 34.)

Locke and Key

2007-08-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

“One does not need much more history than Locke himself furnishes as background to his philosophy, for, aside from the concept of ideas, which became the coin of the realm in philosophy until the linguistic turn in the twentieth century—and which he took from Descartes—the philosopher himself pioneered most of the concepts in the Essay [Concerning Human Understanding].”

Arthur C. Danto, “Of Kings and Snails” (Review of Locke: A Biography by Roger Woolhouse), BookForum Feb-Mar 2007, p. 45.

Why a Robin Kept Attacking Our Door

2007-08-14T11:12:00.000-07:00

Everything is political, I said.

Everything, she said, is biological.

Everything is chemical.

Everything is rhythmical.

Everything is indefensible.

Everything is both cardinal and ordinal.

Everything hums in microtones

until political birds,

brains buzzing with pure apprehension

our senses close to us,

are forced to fly against

the political plastic windows

in the political storm doors

Albert Vigue, from Quiet and Industrious, p. 303.

Outside In

2007-08-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

"Inside a tongue, it is hard to speak with an outsider’s lips, hard to slip the hypocrisies that reconcile past and future with here and now, to say, “Over there is society and here on this white plain outside Jerusalem I’m watching you and examining myself and at the same time aware of the white sunlit city full of brilliant colors such as robes like woolen jewels over immaculate cotton long clothes, and kind people who make life interesting without strife and are not confident enough of immortality to be ruthless,” hard to open oneself to admit any breeze that feels as if it will extinguish the candle, though it might just feed the flame; but while I was feeling my way through this sentence I paused and read by partial accident in William Blake’s Jerusalem, “There is an Outside spread Without & an Outside spread Within,” now the best sentence in this sentence."

Sophona Wlcsz, "Nylon Portals," Text Texture, p. 69

A Week Later the Leaves Were Green

2007-08-07T08:40:00.000-07:00

I looked up from the book,

an essay on Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry,

and out the window at an angle to my left,

I saw a green sweetgum freckled with bright yellow leaves.

I thought: It’s slowly dying into winter.

Then the earth turned,

a cloud moved,

and the leaves were green again.

A minute had passed.

Amos Blange, Iniquities, p. 30

Mysticism in Translation

2007-08-04T15:28:00.000-07:00

Reading Adam Zagajewski’s “Mysticism for Beginners” in translation and wishing I had written it, as I wish I had written James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation” (a more polished piece in untranslated languages), I couldn’t help thinking of Robert Frost’s saying “Poetry is what gets lost in translation” (or words to that effect), and wondered if the opposite is true: Poetry is what survives translation. At that moment, what is lost seemed like split dry husks, impossible to put together, nothing that will ever be whole or living again, only fragments like meter, rhyme, syllables, phonemes–heat marks in April snow. I don’t know if something true always eludes us, and every poem is a broken cage in which a captured thrush sings for just a little while.

O. T. Lalobrat, Oberammergau Notebook, p. 77.

Publishers' Charnel House Sweepstakes

2007-08-02T16:26:00.001-07:00

The big winner:
civilization.

The prize:
a million novels
a billion poems
2 billion management books
10 billion self-help manuals.

Elsie T. Featherspecialist, How to Get Control, p. 69.

What is This Space between Us?

2007-08-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

"I honestly don't know how to act toward anyone," Olson wrote Robert Creeley. How extraordinary it must have been to read that in a letter.

I mined that quote not from letters but from Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, "'A poet's defense of a poet's poet . . . and a pretty good yarn too'--Andrei Codrescu," to quote a blurb in an Edward Hamilton catalog of remaindered books. (Andrei Codrescu, a poet himself, edits Exquisite Corpse, and talks on the radio, a medium that would be dead if it weren't for cars.)

In 1993, two years after Clark's biography was published and had been remaindered, and Olson's new Selected Poems had been advertised in the New York Review of Books, I was in Boston for a literary conference. Exhilarated by Olson's old space, I wanted to put my hands on some of his work.

In Cambridge, where Olson went to graduate school in American Studies, I tried several bookstores. Most of them sold nothing at all by Olson. The Harvard Coop had Letters for Origin, for $12.95 in paperback. Later I visited a bookstore in Worcester, Olson's home town, and found only volumes three, four and five of the Creeley-Olson correspondence, on remainder at $3.99 a copy. I bought nothing.

"With a leap (she said it was an arabesque," those words enthralled me from a gray, educational film of Olson I saw before video cassette players. And before I saw the film I had read the poem, and remembered nothing from it.

Olson coined the term "post-modern."

The Fruitfly Covenant

2007-07-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

I told you everything there is to know,

But you forgot it.

Uplifting to Say the Least

2007-06-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

“The classical avant-garde even today is sometimes content to play down the pain, annoyance, boredom and nuisance of the willed adherence to dissonance, atonality, minimalism and extended settings which were hallmarks of many of its best effects over the last century. You are supposed to be a good and educated listener, which means listening through annoyance for transcendence.”

Mark Greif, “The Right Kind of Pain,” a review of Richard Witts’ The Velvet Underground, London Review of Books 22 March 2007, p. 16 [13-17]

Look No Farther for the Void

2007-06-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

"Recreational vacuuming: therapeutic, spiritual—and aerobic!"

Arthur Feasibule, CLU and Founder of the Anti-W-as-a-Vowel Movement

Wasabi Nuts and Party Tubs

2007-06-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

"If James F. Cooper was such a genius, how come he never mentioned fibroid tumors and it apparently never occurred to him that casual diction might be more appetizing to the ordinary citizen looking for an oasis in the desert of scurrying that must have seemed to be their lives at the time, just as it seems to be ours?"

Charles F. Rost, What America Would be Like, p. 564.

Talking Yoghurt

2007-06-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

"Back in the sixties when there was a big push to make yoghurt socially acceptable, Wren Sid Lurning was on the aft front of the anti-postulant effort, beguiled, some would say gulled, by the roll and rock of the Tongue River, but what you may not have noticed is an apparent connection between July and September. Go ahead and sneeze. Not a problem."
Cynthiana Shufflewurst, NAP (private correspondence)

"Arrange the berms, love. Want and need to form an obstacle course. And don’t forget 'and.' Simon signs is another way to go way to go way to go."
Albergo Bhent Crion, EdD. "On the Vacuum," Wheels of Fhate (fascicle 303)

Later the Same Evening

2007-05-01T17:34:00.000-07:00

All error comes from intention.

There is no higher purpose than.

Intuition is a tool of destiny.

You have knowledge that nobody wants.

If you crave pity, you deserve it.

See God and forget it.

If you must live near the abyss, work in the city and don’t go walking when you’re at home.

Some absolute pronouncements:

Always carry a steel mirror.

Never carry a mirror.

Nothing lies between self-flagellation and self-justification

From The Maxillaries of Jacques Wool (with Hench Ward), p. 2.

Now Available in an Elegant Facsimile

2007-04-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

"Every month we receive between 28 and 31 rubber bands. Not free but factored in with the cost of newspaper delivery, these perishable items are available for alternative use until they stiffen and disintegrate. We also receive plastic bags in inclement weather."

Rodger Mulcahy, Facsimiles in the Age of Electric Reproduction, p. 367.

More of the Different

2007-04-09T16:37:00.000-07:00

Misery loves itself.

There is no desire like company.

An expression of undeserved confidence stands on its edge.

A map of thither.

A map to thither first.

An unstrummed zither quivers.

What gizzard?

Control means choices.

Well, anyway, he wore a watch.

From The Maximmumus of Jacques Wool (with Hench Ward), p. 2

Anent Luna

2007-04-03T18:10:00.000-07:00

"Define cheese and go on to explain why it is no longer desirable

no longer forgotten

no longer

Are you inventing murky substances or coping with them?"

Ernesto Spiro, "Out of Nogales," Labels for these Posts, p. i1.

How to Recognize Heaviness without Special Equipment

2007-03-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

Is five plus negative three different from 5-3?
What happens when vis a vis evaporates and one can no longer remember what rule it illustrates,
or, remembering the rule, call it to mind as an illustration?
Any decision is the result of clouded judgment.
If the universe contains heaven, we’ll never find the end of either.
Everything can’t be reduced to a line.
Nothing can’t be either.
A string vibrating invisible in its identity, visible in other identities.
We repress nothing. We are fearless.

Jacques Wool (with Hench Ward), From The Maximums of Jacques Wool, p.1

Talk Brilliantly with a Pirate Psychic

2007-03-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

“They [the American Modernists] shared hidden sources of craftsmanship, hidden incentives to rewrite a page, which we can trace to a doctrine of perception—the word valued both it itself and in its power to denote—very/evident when we watch a second generation of poets (Oppen, Zukovsky) working out themes that seem shared by both Hemingway and Williams.”

Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987; 1975), pp.xv-xvii.

“But Dr. Jeckledecker, my nodes are all lymph.”

2007-03-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Cistern Lip

2007-03-05T16:47:00.000-08:00

“Halfway through his reclusion, Arredondo experienced more than once that almost timeless time. In the first of the house’s three patios there was cistern with a frog in it. It never occurred to Arredondo to think that the frog’s time, which borders on eternity, was what he himself sought.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Avelino Arredondo,” trans. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Book of Sand (NY: Dutton, 1977), p. 109.

USA Dreamgirls 1-900-etc.

2007-03-04T17:12:00.000-08:00

"The port from which I set out was, I think, the essential loneliness of my life," [Henry] James wrote to Morton Fullerton, "and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course finally directs itself! This loneliness (since I mention it)--what is it still but the deepest thing about one"?

”I honestly don't know how to act toward anyone," Olson wrote Robert Creeley. How extraordinary it must have been to read that in a letter. I mined these words not from letters but from Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson.

Talking Yoghurt

2007-03-03T10:04:00.002-08:00

"Back in the sixties when there was a big push to make yoghurt socially acceptable, Wren Sid Lurning was on the aft front of the anti-postulant effort, beguiled, some would say gulled, by the roll and rock of the Tongue River, but what you may not have noticed is an apparent connection between July and September. Go ahead and sneeze. Not a problem. Arrange the berms, love. Want and need to form an obstacle course. And don’t forget "and." Simon signs is another way to go way to go way to go "

Vane Barbule, The Anti-Postulants and Their Ilk, p. 17.

Mother Hubbards and Stocking Feet

2007-02-01T17:09:00.000-08:00

"I can't believe this muu-muu still fits me!"

Anonymous character in Betty Hubblebetter, "Duncan and Brady"

Further Reconstruction

2007-01-28T15:41:00.000-08:00

ED’s J449

E deed fer Beete – bet wes scerce
Edjested en the Temb
When Ene whe deed fer Treth, wes leen
En en edjeeneng Reem

He qeesteened seftle, “Whe E feeled”-
“Fer Beete,” E repleed
“End E – fer Treth –Themself ere Ene –
We Brethren, ere,” He seed –

End so, as Kensmen, met e Neght –
We telked between the Reems –
Entel the Mess hed reeched eer leps –
End cevered ep – eer nemes

Sovereign Ilk

2007-01-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

The first person, second person and third person were walking down memory lane looking for obstacles.

“I was going to say,” one of them said.
“Yes, you were,” another responded.
“She’s not listening,” said the third one.
“I thought the third one was a woman.”
“You were wrong.”
“He’s right.”

Haifa Luton, Vicarious Giant, p. 123

The Annotated "Iko, Iko"

2007-01-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

“I’m the clown, I want to ride that cream horse. I’m funny.”
Unnamed boy in Walter Dumaux Edmonds, Chad Hanna, p. 157.

“’Your rational mind,’ said he [Lord Skye], ‘has no eyelids. It requires a broad glare and a beaten road. It prefers shadows which you can cut with a knife. It doesn’t know the beauty of this Virginia winter softness.”
Henry Adams, Democracy, Chapter 6.

Harem Late Afternoons

2006-12-03T16:02:00.000-08:00

"A diligence in spite of mutability is the surest way to justify folly, as by persistence a foible can be elevated to a quirk, a quirk to a distinguishing mark and a distinguishing mark to an example. But unwavering adherence is essential. Without it, the foible becomes a curiosity and then an object of ridicule if not, at the farther extreme, a vice commencing downfall; and you must persevere against all the shifting fashions, against present ideas of good taste if need be, against all odds--or give in and learn to live with your follies as you grow big with them. "
Campbell DellaPina, from "Purdah" in Archimago at the Drill Press, p. 98.

Wild Honkers at Autumn Lake

2006-11-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

A Yeats Infection

In a vision Yeats had time to do it all again.
He married Alice Toklas, and her stony silence

drew him from himself. With her, nothing was automatic.
He’d say, “My dear, I fear I’m turning to a metaphysical

clown,” and she wouldn’t say a word, just go on pouring out his oolong.
“All right, all right, I’ll try to make some images I own,”

He said: “You always tell me that I’m wrong.”
She said, “That’s just not right.”

He stared into the creamy surface of his tea,
hoping to see swans or laughing Chinese.

But it just evoked an empty autumn lake.
He struggled toward an isle of crumbs where he could rake

his fork. “If you really want to make a change, invent the tampon,”
Alice said. She meant it as a metaphor to ponder

but his thoughts were above or behind.
He lined up sugar lumps in rows along the table, nine

of them, and heard a buzzing in the ear of his mind.
When he mentioned it, Alice opined,

“It’s all that aspirin you’re taking.”
“I hope,” he said, “I don’t start seeing things.”

From Two Centuries of Soup Tureens (the Golden Age) by Merino Wool

Dr. Fu Manchu’s Marmoset

2006-11-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

“But no, it would have been too singular and strange if he had been so much divided off from himself, so much averse to himself. Because whoever she was, Caracas was a disturbing presence and even—it is better to be clear—a hostile one. Yet neither Gogol nor I ever succeeded in formulating a remotely tenable hypothesis as to her true nature: when I say formulate, I mean in terms which would be at once rational and accessible to all.”
Tommaso Landolfi, “Gogol’s Wife,” Gogol’s Wife and Other Stories, trans. Wayland Young

My Favorite Subject

2006-11-01T06:52:00.000-08:00

Sleeping for Pleasure
John Morillo

My wife just tells me that it can’t be done.
Unconscious, supine, you can’t really think
It’s like a love of chocolate, favorite book, or drink—
Or can you? Well, for one,

My favorite thing, I say, is sleeping,
Whether in the wanton grip of dreams, or simply
Gloriously inert, more fully free than I will be
Until I’m well past dying.

Life and limb in thoughtless harmony:
Conjoined not at the hip but at the head.
It all makes sense to me when I’m in bed,
Alone at my delicious slumber party.

I like this kin of consciousness enough,
So fold me in that place of dream-made stuff.

Further Reconstruction

2006-10-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

ED's J465

Ih ear Daflyb
Uzzwhen
Idied The still
Nessinth
Eroomwa slike
Thestill nessinth
Eairbe tweenthe
He ave Sofs
Torm

Theeye saround
Ha Drungt hemd
Ry andbre ath
Sweregath
Ering firm forth
Atlas Tonset
Whentheking
Betwit nesse Dinther
Oom

Iwil led mykee Psakess
Igned awaywha
Tport ionof mebe ass
Ignable an dtheni twas
The reinter pose dafly

Wit hblueun cert Ainstum
Bling buzzbe twee
Nthe ligh Tandme
Thenthe win dowsfail
Edand theni
Could Notsee
Tosee

Is That So

2006-10-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

“Our worship of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman is profoundly anti-intellectual, a gross simplification of our poetry to two renegades--which relieves us of bickering over the poetic canon. Many argue for the work of overlooked British women such as Charlotte Mew and Mina Loy, but one of America’s two best poets is a woman. And of course, neither Whitman nor Dickinson is a poet.”
Vivyan Tret, Assays and Oversimplifications, p. 300

Emily Dickinson During Reconstruction J280

2006-10-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

U fult u Funurul, un mu Bruun,
Und Muurnurs tu and fru
Kupt truudung – truudung – tull ut suumud
Thut Sunsu wus bruukung thruugh –

Und whun thuu ull wuru suutud,
U Survucu, luku u Drum –
Kupt buutung –buutung –tull U thuught
Mu mund wus guung numb –

Und thun U huurd thum luft u Bux
Und creek ucruss mu Suul
Wuth thusu sumu Buuts uf Luud, uguun,
Thun Spucu – bugun tu tull,

Us ull thu Huuvuns wuru u Bull,
Und Buung, but un Uur,
Und U, und Suluncu, sumu strungu Rucu
Wruckud, suluturu, huru –

Und thun u Plunk un Ruusun, bruku,
Und U drupped duwn, und duwn –
Und hut u Wurld, ut uvuru plungu,
Und Funushued knuwung – thun

You Don't Know How Funny That Is

2006-10-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

The distance from experience is three
fingers: three fingers of scotch, three
fingers–well, two and a thumb
grasping a classic yellow number
two pencil. You’d think number
two would be a measurement
exact as Greenwich Mean
Time, but I’ve had number
twos as hard as glass
and others soft as butter.

The Portable Edgar Mozingo, p. 1n.

Having the Answer Prevents You from Finding the Answer

2006-10-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

“Struktor hemmt Strukturbildung” (“Having structure hinders the creating of structure.”)
José Ortega y Gasset, Universal History, p.26, quoting biologist von Uexkull

“An abstract idea is ubiquitous. The isosceles triangle presents the same aspect on Earth as on Sirius. On the other hand, a sensuous image bears the indelible mark of its localization, that is, the image presents something seen from a definite point of view.” Ortega y Gasset, “On Point of View in the Arts,” p. 108.

A Pound of Feathers

2006-09-13T04:59:00.000-07:00

“Any word my elders have bequeathed to me as they moved obscurely about me toward the objects of their desires, may come to chagrin me. All my words are someone else’s.” Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, pp.74-75.

Parts of a feather/father
Vane: made up of barbs
Barb: made up of barbules
Rachis: shaft
Nathaniel Almshouse Mozingo, "Banity," Tending Downward, p. 3.

Anonymous E-Mail

2006-09-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

SUBJECT: Translation Requests

I'm happy to be able to draw on my vast scholarly and intellectual resources to translate the obscure passages you recently submitted to me for help.

You were misled (pronounced miss lead (rhymes with dead), not myzled (rhymes with fyzled)) in thinking that the ideographs you encountered were Chinese. In fact they are in the same language as the other passage you sent me. Just as English can be divided (reading from right to left) into Modern, Middle and Olde Englishe (or John Saxon), so can the international language of Gibberish be divided into three periods: Late, Central and Eastern Standard.

Written Eastern Standard Gibberish, from which all the proto-Indo-Gibberish tongues forked, resembles little stick figures. These marks are called sticktograms or sticktographs. The passage which you attempted to translate is from the infamous Book of Shah Ping, Empress of Forbidden Mall (or Maul). You identified some of the sticktographs correctly, but had trouble translating the passage because you were reading it as if it were English. In fact you must start in the lower right hand corner and work upward at a 45 degree angle until you reach the sticktograph for "water cooler," at which point you must turn sharply left. I think you'll find it will all fall into place if you follow these simple directions and change your vacuum cleaner bag before the dust begins to drift out of the zipper.

The other passage you sent is in Central Gibberish, which sounds exactly like English except for the funny spellings. A simple translation of the first two lines reads as follows:

For then seal hydrox (intensive=gehydrox)
healthy argyles
poet he no oblige bears walden does.

Obviously this is poetry, because it first glance it makes no sense and has lots of spaces. I agree completely. You're welcome.

Acrimonious Bickering

2006-09-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

“The Assistant Commissioner had spent most of the day in one of those futile committees which bedevil the lives of our top administrators. After five hours of acrimonious bickering he had been defeated over a matter of such staggering insignificance that both sides had discarded not only common sense but even expediency, and based their arguments on matters of principle.”
Joyce Porter, Dover One, p. 1.

“Studies themselves will languish and decay,
When either price, or praise is ta'en away.”
Robert Herrick, "Studies to be Supported."

Feel Good About Yourself

2006-08-31T07:58:00.000-07:00

Information is a force with no natural predators. Its only enemy is ignorance. As information multiplies toward infinity, the only defense is to ignore it.
Tleaf Karpon, Protect Freedom, Elect Jones, p. 17.

“. . . . this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely at it, is nothing.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ho7G, Ch. 10.

“Heaven is a simplification.”
Velma Teal, Diatomaceous Diatribe, p. 666.

You Recognize Mary Hartman?

2006-08-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

of origin, specious
by John Morillo

Sincere - [ad. L. sincer-us clean, pure, sound, etc. Cf. F. sincère (1549), Sp. Pg. , and It.
sincero.
The first syllable may be the same as sim-, in simplex; see SIMPLE a. There is no probablility in the old explanation from since cera 'without wax'[{my bold}] --OED

To sincerely wax poetic
Makes paradox indeed:
What sounds like homiletic
Verse is ear unclogged, not freed.

Should Etymology complain,
By waxy yellow build-up floored,
Remember, Mary Hartman's bane
All heart-felt poets have ignored.

Outside In

2006-08-28T04:59:00.000-07:00

Inside grammar and the knowledge language proposes, it is hard to speak with an outsider’s lips, hard to slip the hypocrisies that reconcile past and future with here and now, to say, “Over there is society and here on this white plain outside Jerusalem I’m watching you and examining myself and at the same time the white sunlit city full of brilliant colors such as robes like woolen jewels over immaculate cotton long clothes, and kind people who make life interesting without strife and are not confident enough of immortality to be ruthless,” hard to open oneself to admit any breeze that feels as if it will extinguish the candle, though it might just feed the flame; but while I was feeling my way through this sentence I paused and read by partial accident in William Blake’s Jerusalem, “There is an Outside spread Without & an Outside spread Within,” now the best sentence in this sentence.
Melvetine Broos, Yet Another Jerusalem, p. 333

I like the word “jalopy,” it’s not immortal.
Beverly Girty, Sockdolager, p. ii

The Collected Book Signings of John Donne

2006-08-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

“I’m giving up art . . . . It’s a bit late, but I may still learn to respect myself before I die.”
Gulley Jimson, Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth, p. 65.

“What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!”
Rabo Karabekian, Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard, p. 150.

The Collected Book Signings of John Donne

Best,
Best Wishes,
Best of Luck,
Keep Reading!
Keep the Faith.
Good Luck!
With Appreciation,
To a Fellow Poet,
I love your work!
I hope you enjoy this.
Thanks so much.
Keep Dreaming!
Thanks!
By

A Mysterious Appearance

2006-08-18T17:53:00.000-07:00

One day literature disappeared.
We couldn’t tell if it had run away or been kidnapped or what.
All the shops that used to sell it now featured other things: nose bones, sweetened wingbones, pet bones and coffee, served in a bone china cup.
Good coffee, I must say.
Maybe the changes had been gradual and nobody noticed.
I couldn’t say for sure.
Lermontov had run off with all the others.
Probably he’d mastered the local colloquialisms enough not to seem to have much of accent.
The Rosetta Stone and the Mixtec Codex at first seemed to be gone too, but they were safe in the history department, the real department, not the little ones full of talkers.
No one would be scandalized if Marcel Proust had run off with Lady Murasaki.
Life is a soap opera anyway.
Samuel Johnson had sat in a coffee shop and created literature of at least two kinds, along with literary aids.
But let’s be honest, he wasn’t sure how much it mattered other than as a way to make a halfway respectable living.
The caffeine seems to be helping with this headache.
Farmacia, the shop lettering should say.
Obregon Crampon, Homais’ Pharmaceuticals, trans. M. T. Pond

We Choose Plaster

2006-08-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

“What you have heard is the language of herons asleep on a salt lake.”
Jay Wright, “The Metaphysics of Sorrow,” Transfigurations, p. 600.

“The difference between tuning in to (listening to) the universe and tuning in with the universe becoming the music. Dancing to it, an intermediated stage.”
Merino Wool, Scattered Syntax, p. 9.

"Dismissing bronze or marble, we chose plaster
as easier to work, less costly, crumbling faster.
For interest - since the fellow had no face
except the havoc that the Phoenix wrought,
lingam and yoni ornament the base:
they bulked so largely in his latter thought.”
Ramon Guthrie, "Unveiling a Statue to a One-time Poet,” Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems, p. 53

Alternative Spellings of “a”

2006-08-06T17:34:00.000-07:00

Dead link: Charles Palshaw’s collection of pictures of postage stamps

Are you out there, darling? Myron C. Lion has not been forgotten.

"A photo album with black pages inscribed in white ink gone silvery, and ornate little scalloped triangles poorly attached to the pages, but designed to protect the photos from glue damage. The crumbly paper now makes the album itself an artifact of memory, padded covers held together by a round, braided shoestring."
Ilona Isling, Now and in Memory, p. 69.

To the Victor

2006-08-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

"There's no such thing as death. The encounter of two expansions, or the expansion of two forms, may determine the suppression of one of them, but, actually there is no death; there is life, because the suppression of one is conditional upon the other’s survival, and destruction does not reach the universal and common principle. Hence, the preservative and beneficent nature of war. Suppose the existence of a potato field and two famished tribes. There are not enough potatoes to feed both tribes; so one of them gathers its forces to cross the mountain to the other slope, where potatoes are abundant. If the two tribes were to divide the field of potatoes peacefully, there would not be enough for sufficient nourishment and would die from starvation. Peace, in this case, is destruction; war is preservation.

One of the tribes exterminates the other and collect the spoils. Hence, the rejoicing in victory, hymns, acclamations, public rewards, and all the other consequences of belligerence. If war were not that, there would be no such demonstrations, for the very real reason that man loves and commemorates only what is pleasing or advantageous to him, and for the rational reason that no one canonizes an act that virtually betrays him. To the vanquished, hatred or compassion; to the victor, the potatoes."
Machado de Assis, Philosopher or Dog? (Quincas Borba), pp. 11-12, trans. Clothilde Wilson.

Batstung Fungoes

2006-08-01T17:44:00.001-07:00

“Nothing is transparent. You can see right through it to the nothing on the other side.”
Iota Bonoli, Dietary Taboos, p.11.

“So throughout life our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Chapter 27.

“How mysterious it is to feel the life of the body, all through this weird journey on earth.”
Isadora Duncan, My Life, pp. 356-57

Fifty Fabulous Blogprompts

2006-07-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

1. My favorite mechanical device
2. The purpose of housing
3. The ultimate briefcase
4. Why I like add-a-beads
5. Discuss what you think the Iranians would do to you personally if they won a nuclear war with the United States. Be specific.
6. Advantages and disadvantages of carpeting
7. In a cause‑effect theme, explain why running shoes have laces all the way to the toes and dancing shoes don't.
8. Compare and contrast disco and pasta
9. Ashtrays and cigarette butts
10. Cafeteria lighting
11. Pool filters of the future
12. Advantages and disadvantages of small, medium and large eggs (You may include jumbo if you have the space.)
13. Memorable business meetings (Give details.)
14. Contrast two brands of elevators.
15. Provolone versus mozzarella
16. Creative decorating with food cans
17. Define hepatitis and give examples
18. Seating in public transportation
19. Vinyl rainwear (You may want to give an historical overview.)
20. Briefly explain why you know nothing about cities (or small towns).
21. Compare or contrast two different brands of doorknobs.
22. Pro or con: Possession of parakeets should be a felony.
23. Drooling: hereditary or determined by environment?
24. Chalk
25. Heterosexual dress codes: free choice or public mandate?
26. Our friend the clam (Remember, this is not a research paper.) You may substitute the oyster.
27. Discuss any three etymologically‑based taboos associated with the word “possum.”
28. Waxed paper versus plastic wrap
29. Proposed constitutional amendment: Eyebrow plucking should be outlawed.
30. Naugahyde and pream: ideas whose time has come
31. Toward the sanitary harmonica
32. Weatherstripping and the law
33. Fun with fishline
34. Windsocks and pantyhose (Try comparison rather than contrast on this one.)
35. Division and classification: three ways to disentangle phone cords (Process will work too.)
36. Putty
37. Staples versus nails
38. Patio furniture: right or responsibility?
39. Anchovies: to salt or not to salt
40. Pro or con: Mother's Day is becoming too commercialized.
41. The tomato: once and for all, is it a fruit or a vegetable?
42. Diplomats versus laundromats
43. Creative uses for old keys
44. How to make a belt
45. Flashlights in art history
46. Tung oil versus elbow grease
47. New designs for flag poles
48. Labials versus fricatives
49. Divide and classify washcloths
50. Speed limit parameters and world peace

Moist Towelettes

2006-07-28T15:28:00.000-07:00

“The Holy Spirit can appear as . . . a blue-tit.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 200.

“How strange that after all it is rarely space
but time we cling to, unwilling to let it go.”
William Bronk, “The World in Time and Space,” Life Supports, p. 48.

Conclusions on the Wall

2006-07-26T18:27:00.000-07:00

“One veers from every so-called event by attending attentively to one’s inattention.”
Richard Umthurpy, A Wain in Spain, p. 74.

“ . . . evanescence and lubricity of all objects.”
Emerson, "Experience."

“What does it mean to be vulnerable in ideas? To be wrong? ‘It mean?’ To be humbled, even humiliated? Why are these not desirable alternatives?”
Victoria Padegimas, Prickle Mistress at the Pez Convention, pp. 58-9.

Infinity versus Eternity

2006-07-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

“The metaphysical writers confess, that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences.”
Herman Melville, Pierre, p. 92.

“Removing all the rational numbers from the number line still leaves us with a line of full-length. This line, however, will have infinitely many holes in it. The structure of the real line is a mystery: the line is infinitely dense, infinitely condensed, with an infinitely intricate structure.”
Amir D. Aczel, The Mystery of the Aleph, p. 84

Oil and Fabric

2006-07-22T17:07:00.000-07:00

“Because of rising fuel costs, we had to cut personnel. We had to cut people. We had to cut people for oil. We had to kill people to keep moving, stay warm.”
Millicent Argent in her syndicated column, 6 June 2005.

“What does one really clutch at, objects that are metaphors for desires, which are themselves metaphors? There is an intricacy of thought which is not an intricacy of things.”
Pavel Orpen Cruett, Lonely Monkeys, p. 235.

“Superfluity (overflowing flowing over) and self-consciousness may somehow represent the ineffable.”
Neilsen Roubus, “Dog Sabbath, Bird Sunday,” Airtight in Chains, p. 66.

Mere Sham

2006-07-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

--Was it really a meerschaum?
--Ask Uncle Basil, or Aunt Oda.
Ella Speed, “Outtakes,” Filtered Air, p.33.

“I invented cuando and had acres of distress.”
Henry Street in See Next Page by Erin Cannell, p. xx.

“Each of us is a messenger who has forgotten the message.”
Ben Schwartz, Luchesi Aperçus, Vol. I, p. 609.

Call me any time. My number: (single digit, single digit, single digit) single digit, single digit, single digit-single digit, single digit, single digit, single digit.

Ten-Inch Crowbar

2006-07-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

“ . . . like moits in wool.”
Corey Mesler, We are Billion Year Old Carbon, p. 92.

“A higher power sent a beam of light into the professor’s soul.
‘Where can I buy your book?’ the professor said.”
Ben Schwartz, Truculent Dumpster, trans. Jacques Wool, p.18.

“The power of language is so great that once we learn that finding healing power in nature is a Wordsworthian cliché, we can feel that power only with an effort of will, knowing that 'healing,' 'power', 'nature,' and 'Wordsworth' exist only in words.”
Marc Dobar, Will and Its Failings, p. 345.

Nice Guy Syndrome

2006-07-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

niceguysyndrome

2006-07-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Tim Botta for getting me started. This is a start.

The Steinach Operation: The So and So Series 3: This time, it's personal (and in 3D...like JAWS!).

2006-07-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Steinach Operation: The So and So Series 3: This time, it's personal (and in 3D...like JAWS!).