Slatherpuss

New digs

2010-03-20T11:18:00.000-04:00

Slatherpuss is kaput. Wax Wroth is unkaput.

http://waxwroth.blogspot.com/

current blogs

2007-11-17T14:34:00.001-05:00

In case it isn't evident, Slatherpuss is currently dormant. Slatherpuss will remain online should my focus swing back toward informal blogging, but I do so much "public thinking" as a music critic that I find myself resistant to this approach in my personal blogging, leading me as it does to engage publically with ideas that might be better nutured in private or parlayed into creative endeavors. For blogging by moi, for the time being, please direct your attention to Moistworks, a collective mp3 blog I post on weekly, and Glossolalia, which is less of a blog than a repository for my video and sound art, but what are you going to do.

THE GLOSSOLALIA BLOG

2007-03-12T18:30:00.000-04:00

Live: http://glossolalia-blacksail.blogspot.com/

GLOSSOLALIA is a sound art project.

BLACK SAIL is an in-progress album of electro-poetics.

Electro-poetics involves using oral recitation as a sound source for aural art, along with digitally manipulated acoustic instrumentation and appropriated material.

GLOSSOLALIA is a sonic companion to the text-based F7 project. Both projects employ appropriated material and technological mediation, inscribing the same kind of tension between chance and deliberate operations into different media. Both tend toward the oracular. Some selections from F7 available online are here.

GLOSSOLALIA tracks do not cost anything. The post below this introduction will be updated with new mixes periodically.

GLOSSOLALIA is also seeking audio submissions of poets reading their work to continue the project. Contact brian.g.howe@gmail.com for more information.

The re-use of any and all GLOSSOLALIA material is avidly encouraged.

on Myspace

CREATION MYTH in Volutions

2007-01-09T16:49:00.000-05:00

YOU DON'T SAY

New interview

2006-11-06T12:52:00.000-05:00

Sean Kilpatrick has just put up an interview with me on his blog. Sean writes cool sexy poems and the interview was a lot of fun; check him out in Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks.

Nightlight Reading Video

2006-11-05T13:01:00.000-05:00

Amy White and Keith Weston created this terrific digest of the reading Ken Rumble and I recently organized at the Nightlight in Carrboro.

The Poetics of Re-use

2006-10-26T20:45:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a new blog, the Poetics of Re-use, with Adam Good and Buck Downs. The blog will be a space to build a discussion about the poetics of re-use, which will culminate in a performance and a panel in Washington D.C. on December 17 (more on that as details resolve). We're just getting started so there isn't a lot to see on the blog yet -- come by and leave us some comments; help get the ball rolling!

MiPo reading in Brooklyn online / NYC pictures

2006-10-06T20:08:00.000-04:00

The MiPo reading I gave in Brooklyn with Jenny Boully and Aaron Belz is available online here. There's a part near the end where I make a funny noise -- if you're curious, I was trying to frighten a house cat that stuck its head into the speaker. I didn't take any pictures in New York, but luckily, Amy King takes pictures of everything, and she let me use some of her snaps here:

Andrew Levy at a house reading:

Charles Barkley:

Gina Myers and Dustin Williamson at Stain Bar:

E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson, me:

Aaron Belz at Stain Bar:

Jenny Boully at Stain Bar:

Me at Stain Bar, with sampler:

Stain Bar:

Some things that happened in New York

2006-10-02T17:08:00.000-04:00

My flight was delayed for hours. Airport security confiscated my shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, and fancy Aveda aftershave. Which sucked, because I had planned on grooming the pilot to death. Actually, my theory goes like this -- terrorists have beards. If they take away everyone's shaving cream, then everyone will have beards, and the terrorists will be easy to spot. As I was nearly strip searched, a group of security guards was looking at me. "That ain't him," one of them was yelling. When I walked past, he said, "They thought you was Clay Aiken." Which is funny, because I usually get Kelly Clarkson. I met up with Chris Salerno at the airport and we spent time drinking coffees and Cokes for exactly two dollars and fiftenn cents a pop. Someone actually named "Osama" was paged over the airport intercom. Chris rented a car in Queens and offered me a ride to Brooklyn. We got on the Williamsburg bridge going the wrong way and wound up on the Lower East Side. I got to Amy King's (my friend and lovely host for the weekend) apartment at 5, just two hours before my reading at Stain Bar, but not before going to a dollar store to replenish my toiletries, including an incredibly sketchy and generic looking deodorant called "Health Allways Clear Stick Deodorant." Stain Bar was a beautiful space for a reading, with a house cat and high copper ceilings. Aaron Belz was really funny, his deadpan reading style served his hilarious poems well. I read OK-- the crowd was sparse because of Dan Hoy's competing reading and the fucked up L train, but not small enough to be depressing-- and ended with a cut-up of the phrase "A Cello Voiced Viper" using my sampler. I need to figure out how to integrate the loops more seamlessly into my readings. Jenny Boully read well but it seemed very short-- she seemed nice but I didn't get a chance to talk to her very much. After the reading I went to a Mexican restaurant with Brandon Stosuy, his friend Thom the poet (I can't remember Thom's last name), Jane, Eliza, and Martin Smith. I drank Dos Equis and had a nice conversation with Thom about poetry and noise music. I went for a nightcap at an Irish pub with Martin, then slouched back to Amy's and collapsed on my air mattress like an invertabrate. Amy has a yippy little dog that I call Charles Barkley because she barks so much. Charles Barkley developed an unsettling rash during my visit -- I hope she's ok now, and that she wasn't allergic to me.

On Saturday I met Marc Hogan for brunch in Manhattan. Marc's very friendly and talks very fast, so we talked about a lot over the course of the afternoon. I liked him. We went and saw Chris Salerno read at the Ear Inn (it used to be called the Bear Inn, but the "B" fell off). After the reading we all went to H&M together and I spent fifty dollars that I probably should've saved for rent. On the way, we saw Jack Black, but we were too cool to make a big deal about it. Marc and Chris left H&M before me, and when I left alone, I turned the wrong way on Broadway and wound up in the financial district. Amy thought this was really funny. I had sushi with Amy and my old friend Janet that evening, then went to a reading at Thom's place. I missed E. Tracy Grinnell, but caught Andrew Levy, who I only knew by name until then. He was great, I will definitely have to check out his books.

Sunday was very busy -- I went to the Bowery Poetry Club in the afternoon to see Chris read with Julian Semelian, but Julian didn't show up (are you okay Julian?). Chris Salerno said he was going to meet me outside and vanished without a trace. New York is quite possibly swallowing poets whole, although I emerged unscathed. That evening I ate Vietnamese food with Alex Abramovich in Chinatown. That was really nice -- talking to Alex always renews my enthusiasm for music writing in general and Moistworks specifically. All my friends in New York were either celebrating Jewish holidays, going to see the Mountain Goats, going to see the Hold Steady, or just Sunday-night tired, so I went to the Mercury Lounge alone to see Michael Idov's band, Spielerfrau. The crowd was small because of the aforementioned events but they played well, I met Michael and his wife Lily and the keyboardist Adam. Then I went back to Brooklyn and for some reason Amy and I wound up watching bum fights and Britney Spears parodies and Christina Aguilera clips on YouTube until like 3 in the morning. Amy always takes really good care of me when I come to New York. Now I'm back in North Carolina writing like a drunk stevedore (by which I mean "a lot") in order to replenish my decimated coffers. I'll upload some pictures when Blogger stops sucking so hard.

New poems / Reading details

2006-09-26T13:43:00.002-04:00

In brief-

I have new poems in the latest issues of Word for / Word and Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks. I'm especially happy about the Word for / Word bit, which is the first published excerpt from my in-progress chapbook Marta E Davide.

I'm also reading for MiPo in Brooklyn this weekend:

MiPOesias Reading Series @ Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Brian Howe, Jenny Boully, and Aaron Belz

766 Grand Street (L to Grand Street, one block West)

7:00 pm, Free

A review of GUITAR SMASH at Galatea Resurrects

2006-08-24T15:41:00.000-04:00

Jon Leon reviews GUITAR SMASH along with Kent Johnson's LYRIC POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ: ELEVEN SUBMISSIONS TO THE WAR and THRENODY by Tom Clark. Thanks to Jon for the close and insightful reading, and for teaching me "imidazoles."

ECHOLALIA

2006-08-15T16:09:00.000-04:00

Come see Brian Howe & friends perform ECHOLALIA as a part of RECESS, Nightlight's bugged-out sound night, this Friday, August 18. Show begins at 10 pm. ECHOLALIA involves one piano, one noisy box, and pictures that move. It is not about technology -- it's about beauty and chaos in the shape of an instant; two masses occupying the same space.

AND AND AND

Listen to me talk about poetry on The Nightsound Show, Carrboro's own talk radio. Certain to alternately entertain and piss you off at various points!

F7 demystified

2006-07-25T13:27:00.000-04:00

Anyone who tugs a pecan of text into eternity assumes attenuated worship of F7. Anyone who has poked a harp or mirrored an ocean, in whatever tame den or hail of arsenic, is a contour of F7. Some poesy can be dear in its ample erectness, the dread rising, in the outcurve it will entail edits that are even less ruminated, the act of searing the piano that is only cooling, sprung without equal oddments, intrepid emulsion, down in elation's manger in a kiln to the thigh. When we see how iguanas morph and rivets volley, we see that F7 is roofed by dolorous retinas, while I primly kneel to discord, organic, and reword it.

Download GUITAR SMASH

2006-06-27T12:26:00.000-04:00

Hard copies are quickly dwindling, but GUITAR SMASH is now available as a downloadable .pdf file here.

Thanks, again, to John Lowther for setting it up.

GUITAR SMASH

2006-05-28T14:53:00.000-04:00

NOW AVAILABLE FROM ATLANTA’S 3RDNESS PRESS:

GUITAR SMASH, the debut poetry chapbook by Brian Howe.

GUITAR SMASH is what happens when you force-feed language to technology until it vomits!
It’s c r a z y …

GUITAR SMASH is available by way of purchase, trade, bully tactics, flattery, comp.
Contact Brian for details.

Thanks to John Lowther for making this possible.

**

It’s official: everybody’s talking about GUITAR SMASH! Here’s what they’re saying:

"GUITAR SMASH
an irksome burr on the flank of poetry
worth a couple bucks though"
- Araki Yasusada; fake poet

"WAAAAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAAAAH! … *gurgle* … WAAAAAAAAAAH"
- An adorable baby rescued from a well

"So I was just rolling the trash to the curb, minding my own business, when suddenly … there it was, plain as day, sitting smack dab on the lawn, not really doing anything, but somehow mocking me, seemed like. Damnedest thing I ever saw."
- An innocent bystander

"At a time when poetry is more marginalized and maligned than ever before, GUITAR SMASH reminds us why this might be the case."
- Ezra Pound (via Ouija board)

"Everyone’s talking about this that and the other … but when are we going to think about what's really important here, the children? Where were the parents in all of this, I’d like to know."
- A concerned citizen

"We are so proud of you for making this bizarre, incomprehensible thing, Brian. Does it come with health insurance?"
- The parents

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…."
- A vacuum cleaner

"It’s great; I use mine to thin paint, align crown molding, unclog gutters, repel intruders, and to protect my car’s paint from the elements. Wound up buying the wife one for our anniversary so she'd stop borrowing mine, and they make great stocking stuffers. And when you're done using it, it easily folds into compact size great for people on the go. Dishwasher safe!"
- Paid testimonial

"Sack-ray BLOO! Zee GEETAR SMASH, zhe ees mag-nay-FEEK, non? Oui!"
- An egregious stereotype

"Okay, but can you eat poetry? Can you put it in your gas tank? Can you wear it on your feet? …well yes son okay, I know that you can; but is it going to do you any good? Stop being such a damn smartass; they were rhetorical questions and you know it.”
- A savvy realist; nobody's fool

"What the fuck is GUITAR SMASH?"
- Billy Collins; famous poet

Disclaimer: Some or all quotes may be fake. Except the Yasusada one; it’s totally legit.

**

I just went to Atlanta to give a reading for the release of GUITAR SMASH, a much mellower trip than my last. I used my sampler to do some live voice manipulation on GUITAR SMASH and read the "SONG" sequence from F7. Here are some pix (some by me, some by the lovely Laura Carter, who refuses to be photographed herself):

Eyedrum, exterior:

The auditorium, pre-reading:

One of many cavernous rooms:

Aliens!:

John Lowther, head of the APG and GUITAR SMASH publisher:

Members of the APG perform a "ployphon" of GUITAR SMASH:

Me, preparing to commit violence upon GUITAR SMASH with my sampler:

Look at that boy twiddle them knobs!:

He's getting really into it!:

Get that mic out of my eye! Still twiddling:

OK, you can stop now:

Thanks:

That billowy thing is pretty but I worried it would fall on me:

So I drank my fear away:

That's so me!:

Post-reading; John, Tracey and Allison at Manuel's Tavern:

My Pitchfork colleague Cory Byrom, pensive:

One of my editors at Paste, Jason Killingsworth:

Marta E Davide

2006-05-15T21:12:00.000-04:00

In 2002, I was doing my mandatory early-twenties bounce around Europe thing. In Sicily, on one of the gloriously begrimed streets of Catania, two Swedish friends I'd met found a mysterious journal (pictured above). Each left hand page features some variation on the legend MARTA E DAVIDE TIAMO, headed by dates that never quite make sense. Most right hand pages feature the sort of obsessive scrawl you can see above, pages and pages of this, heavily featuring the phrase MARTA E DAVIDE TIAMO and a phone number. Upon registering my excitement over the artifact, the Swedes soon ceded the journal to my care (thanks, Julia and Moa). I showed it to some Sicilians and they couldn't translate much of it - they said it seemed as if it had been written by a child, or a mentally impaired adult, although there was something strange about it that neither of these explanations fully resolved. There was something in it about a motorcycle accident, and much repeated expression of devotion. It seems likely that Davide was the author of the journal - whether or not he actually knew Marta is unclear. Maybe he was obsessed with her from afar. Maybe there wasn't ever a Marta at all. At any rate, after carting the thing around for years, waiting until the time to do something with it was ripe, I've begun work on an at least chapbook-length poetic transformation of the text, using the F7 process I've been developing for the past two years. Since I don't speak Sicilian, and since much of it is just gibberish anyway, I have a lot of leeway when transcribing the text for F7 fodder. I'm keeping the incantatory nature intact, and sticking as close to the original formatting (in terms of font size, spacing and so forth) as I can. As such, the repetitions form a sort of soil bed from which flowers of deviation bloom - one page contains five blood-red circles going down the right margin, for instance, and sometimes, the block format pictured above lets out into what looks like fractured lists, a transformed example of which I posted here a few days ago. This journal has intrigued me for years - I was reading Paul Auster at the time I found it, so I was very open to the possibility of metaphysical mystery heaving into view at any moment. I like working against rigid and logical yet superfically inscructable frameworks, of which this is an ideal example, and the urgent humanity coursing through the text transcends the language barrier and any mutations to which I subject the text. Excerpts from Marta E Davide have already been picked up by two journals and I anticipate spreading it about even more as I make progress, so keep your eyes peeled for more.

Soft Targets

2006-05-10T18:03:00.000-04:00

The first issue of Soft Targets, edited by Dan Hoy and Daniel Feinberg, is now available. It includes two very visual poems from F7. Specifications:

For immediate release: the first issue of SOFT TARGETS, a handheld journal of poetry, artwork, criticism, short fiction, found images, sound, and other ephemera. SOFT TARGETS v.1.1 features color and B&W artists from inside and outside the galleries, including Walid Raad, John Tremblay, Whitney Bedford, Jason Fox, Harun Farocki, and musician/artists D.C. Berman and Mick Barr. Interspersed with these artists and others are critical pieces by Jason Smith, Joan Retallack, and Wayne Koestenbaum; short fiction from Benjamin Weissman, Rachel Kushner, and multidisciplinary artists Stanya Kahn and Harriet "Harry" Dodge; and poetry from Dennis Cooper, Linh Dinh, Catherine Wagner, Carla Harryman, Matthew Rohrer, Martha Ronk, Daniil Kharms, and Ben Lerner, among others. Also included are several new translations, found images, contributions from the Office of Force Transformation and the Apocalypse de Saint-Sever, a hand-numbered License to Live mail-in insert, Treaty with France, and a mini-CD by NY sound artist teleseen affixed to the inside back cover.

5.75 x 7.25
288 pp.
50+ contributors
w/color artwork + mini-CD
hand-numbered License to Live
$10

Front Office:
Daniel Feinberg
Dan Hoy

Office of Concrete+ Plastic Studies:
Anthony Allen

Office of Assembly:
Jane Lewis

Office of Special Plans:
Rachel Kushner
Jason Smith

Marta E Davide - a teaser

2006-05-08T15:26:00.000-04:00

Ma pushed non be

finical deiform.

quill

mamma ? Come.

fellow &

03472346836

spumes &

non 20 he.

say ? zoom &

cease, epopee

tomato dolly

maze. Dope in

palazzo ciao &

treaty.

mutate

DAVIDE MARTA TIAMO tango

the tan to grey dandy feet

Enigmatic, no? Stay tuned...

Curiobox

2006-05-05T19:52:00.000-04:00

Heads up on Curiobox, which sounds like it's going to be awesome - did I mention that they've picked up one of my short stories, Oubliette? I did? Just now? Sweet. From the website:

curio was created in winter of 2006 as a response to existing media. we sought to produce a publication that would take control away from the editor, putting it in the hands of the artist. the format of the magazine allows poets, artists, and designers to work outside the realm of bound printed matter to create a magazine that defies convention.

for the unfamiliar, this is a quarterly multimedia publication distributed in a large mailing box. the box's dimensions change to meet the needs of the content. contributors are able to specify the dimensions and style of paper their piece is presented on. poets are no longer restricted to 76 lb. perfectbound matte pages, artists dictate bleed or no bleed, specific dimensions, and context.

issues of curio exhibit some of the most exciting in contemporary art and culture. working without a time-sensitive burden, curio ignores the temporal. no type of media is consciously excluded. we're proud to combine music, short films, short fiction, poetry, photography, drawing, architecture, articles and interviews inside.

The War on Poetry

2006-04-24T18:38:00.000-04:00

Paul sat in his baff, wondering what to do next. "Well, what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?" If you know who it is they are whispering about, then you usually don't like it. If Paul wants to become a monk, that's his affair entirely. Of course we had hoped that he would take up his sword as part of the President's war on poetry. The time is ripe for that. The root causes of poetry have been studied and studied. And now that we know that pockets of poetry still exist in our great country, especially in the large urban centers, we ought to be able to wash it out totally in one generation, if we put out backs into it. But we were prepared to hide our disappointment.

--Donald Barthelme, from Snow White

NYC recap

2006-04-12T17:26:00.000-04:00

On Thursday morning, Lara dropped me off at the train station. She gave me eight dollars and a pack of tissues. The train ride was very long - almost twelve hours. I re-read Alex Robinson's epic graphic novel, Box Office Poison. My seatmate was a person named Denise. Denise appeared to be trans. This freaked out the two teenagers from New Jersey across the aisle. They advised caution. Upon arriving at Penn Station, I took the subway to Brooklyn and made my way to Amy King's apartment. After the train, it felt great to shower and change clothes. Amy was giving a reading in Baltimore that night, so I had the place to myself. I walked to the other end of Lorimer St. to meet my friend Janet, who I lived with for a couple years in North Carolina. I'd only eaten train food all day, so she took me to a bar where you get a free pizza with any drink purchase. It was delicious. I made it back to Amy's around 2 in the morning and read a little from Amy Bender's latest book before falling asleep.

Friday was the day of my reading. In lieu of preparing, I threw all my poems and most of my clothes into a suitcase the morning I left. So on Friday morning, I took my poems to Gimme Coffee and got very overstimulated on caffeine as I blocked out my reading. Then I went to Manhattan to have lunch with my friend Arye. Then Amy and I primped simultaneously for our respective readings, hers in Manhattan, mine in Brooklyn. The Fall Cafe was really cute. Some of my Pitchfork colleagues showed up, and Jim Behrle brought me a painting (pictured above). Christian Peet, a remarkably hirsute man, read first. He was being experimental by reading blank verse. I read from This is the Motherfucking Remix, my in-progress collboration with Marcus Slease, and from F7. The crowd was friendly and responsive. They laughed at my jokes. After the reading I had a great time hanging out with Matt and Katy (Cannibal editors and reading curators), James (Moistworks peep), and others at the Brooklyn Social Club, drinking beer and shooting pool. I wore my t-shirt with a design that looks like nonsense characters until you fold it up, Mad magazine style, and discover that it says "fuck you," so strangers paid attention to me, which I enjoy. On the way home, Matt pretended that he was about to fall onto the train tracks, which Katy did not appreciate one bit. Amy and I exchanged poetry scene gossip deep into the night.

On Saturday, the weathe was atrocious - rainy and cold. I spent the morning drinking coffee and reading Cannibal at Gimme Coffee. Then I went back to Manhattan to meet Janet. We wanted to see the Munch exhibit at MoMA. Lara's brother is the projectionist there, so we got in for free. We tramped through the freezing rain. I bought an umbrella for five dollars. The Munch exhibit was great. I was text messaging a friend to tell her about it, and an eldery women peevishly asked if I was interested in the art or my cell phone. I wondered why she was worried about my cell phone if she was so intent on the art, but I demurred in telling her so. After the museum, Janet and I had dinner and went shopping at H&M, one of the few places where spending NC money on NY clothing doesn't utterly break you. That night, I headed over to Northsix to meet up with Arye, Wendy Raffel from Continuum Press, and some Pitchfork people for the Parts and Labor CD release party. Then I went to Janet's birthday party at Redd's Tavern in Williamsburg. There was skeeball, popcorn, and drunk girls dancing to "Survivor". I ran into someone I know from Chapel Hill who was taking the same 7:15 am train back to NC that I was taking the next morning. She asked if I wanted to just stay up all night. I said maybe. I went to Barcade with Janet after the party dispersed, then stumbled back to Amy's at about 3:30 am. I got to sleep by 3:45, then woke up to my cell phone alarm at 5:45 am. I wouldn't say that lurching back out into the cold after 2 hours of sleep was the high point of the trip. I made it to the station just in time, and wound up sitting beside the person I know from Chapel Hill. She had indeed stayed up all night, and did a better job of sleeping on the train than I did. The train ride home was odd. It was some kind of Lynchian dystopia, a catalogue of human dysfunction. The person in front of me had multiple conversations on her cell phone where she would repeat the phrase, "I'm sorry, I just don't have anything to say to you," for upwards of half an hour. A Chinese person in the back intermittently screamed - literally screamed - Chinese into her own cell phone, which had a ring that reminded me of an air-raid siren. I got sunburned on half my body because I was sitting by the window. Between bouts of light dozing, I read the Village Voice and Fence. Now I'm home, trying to catch up on the deadlines I missed while I was away. I'm going back to New York to read in September, and I'm already looking forward to it.

A "Good" Night for Poetry haw haw

2006-04-12T01:06:00.001-04:00

The Open Eye Café Presents:

A Poetry Reading.

Thursday, April 13; 7:30; in the secret room.

Featuring Adam Good; poetry editor of Your Black Eye. Liver in Washington, DC. Gentleman in most aspects. Poet on the make.

With Brian Howe; scourge of print and online media; Open Eye barista. Poet, natch.

The vampire shows me
my statements, shows me nice states
and vague dystopias, says,

"choose your engine, vampire."

--Adam Good; from “Engine Teeth Statements”

There are owl sobs
Yummy tweeds and acumens
Who eunuch me with their naiveté
Very shyster

--Brian Howe; from “Foreign Letter (Doom Kick Remix)”

DIM MANSION: Part 4

2006-04-04T13:56:00.000-04:00

[read part 1 here]

[read part 2 here]

[read part 3 here]

Today when I awoke, everyone was gone.

My mother-in-law failed to reply to my messenger swallows. I stepped into the sun and began to walk unsteadily down the cobblestones; my shouted halloos and footfalls echoed back. I staggered, leaned against an elm to catch my breath, and cried out when crows exploded from the boughs with a horrible caterwauling. I walked to the center of the deserted bazaar, mounted the sundial and surveyed my town. The empty homes of my friends and colleagues slept in rows to my right; beyond them, blue-hazed pastures where the cattle roamed freely and lowed their delight, for of course Macher the Shepherd was disappeared. To my left, in the distance, I could discern the phosphorescent vapors rising from the frozen isle, the pastel sea lapping at the silent harbor, and the old mansion perched atop its hill, quivering like a boulder about to roll. With no one around to reassure me otherwise, I could no longer deny that it was bulging at the seams. Its decaying timbers distended and heaved. I looked at it full on and thought I could see blurry forms flailing behind its semi-opaque windows, tiny points of light blinking on and off. It appeared to respire.

I became emboldened by fury and fear. Leaping from the sundial, I charged through the waist-high weeds around the base of the hill, ignoring the brambles that strafed my bare shins where they depended from my dressing gown. As I scuttled up the rocky hill, silt slithering down under my footfalls, the old mansion jutted crookedly into the atmosphere like a sunken monolith rising from an inky sea. In late afternoon, the moon was out, partially obscured by a corner of the mansion's roof and a tangle of dead branches.

Panting on the mansion's patio, I felt a vibration thrumming through the soles of my feet. Sounds emanated from inside: unintelligible voices, faint and far-off, or the groaning of old timbers? I could not say. I pulled on the doors, pounded them with my fists, kicked them with my feet; even beat them with my forehead, yet they would not budge. Panicked and deranged, I ran blindly through the town. The sinking sun cast the chilly, jet-black shadows of buildings and trees over me like dark nets. Drained, I finally collapsed on the sundial and passed out. My dreams were haunted by flickering images of grotesque creatures cavorting around the mansion, and a window in its upper level that framed my wife's stricken face as it turned away into shadow.

* * *

When I came to, it was night. The sky was a dark marble, deep and slick and veined with cloudy white bands. I picked myself up and walked toward the harbor, alternately moonlit and blanketed in shadow. The moon was stark white against the purple vellum of the sky, an interstice the darkness.

In a ten-foot skiff, I paddled out past the waves. The sky was alive with whirlpools of light and whizzing neon vapors. The stars looked flung, cast off from a grinder's wheel. I could still make out the silhouette of that dim mansion behind me, could still see its windows awaking with effulgence, then lapsing to darkness. The island drew near, and the air grew cold. My beard accumulated a fine dusting of frost; my hands ached and the dry skin on my knuckles split. Still, I turned the oars; still I advanced.

My boat has lodged on an ice floe; soon I will have to get out and walk across the frozen tide to shore. As I write, the natives wait for me on the snowy beach, their faces shrouded in fur-lined hoods. They are lit only by the moon and the torches rooted in the snow around them.

A thick copse of white-capped evergreens looms behind the villagers. The smoke that puzzled us so rises amid it. It dances with small twinkles that rise slowly with the cloud for a moment, then race off into the sky. Leathery creatures with pulpy bodies and translucent dragonfly wings turn slow, lazy figure eights in the air. Snow descends silently, steadily.

I will cloister this account in my tinderbox - gilt and monogrammed it is, a gift from my wife - cast it into the sea, then step onto the frozen waves, toward the uncertain light of the wintry isle.

THE END.

F7 goes live

2006-03-08T14:42:00.000-05:00

My MiPo page has just gone up, where you can read two more poems from F7 and listen to audio recordings of same. Thanks to Amy and Didi for the privilege.

DIM MANSION: Part 3

2006-03-07T15:08:00.000-05:00

[read part one here]

[read part two here]

Murphe the Taxidermist was the second to disappear. The business of the bazaar continued as usual, though the smiles, shouted greetings and general bonhomie seemed forced – a drawn curtain, predisposed to ruffling up, behind which our true emotions were concealed. The presence of Gannon's apprentice in the fish stand, rather than Gannon himself, was a constant reminder that something untoward was afoot.

The night after Gannon's disappearance and before Murphe's, Talwick reported to Mather the Magistrate that he saw a candle burning in the window of the old mansion, and what looked like a cat darting across the eaves. This was remarkable for two reasons: one, the old mansion has never been humanly inhabited, at least not in any living memory, and two, even animals seem to avoid the place. Talwick demanded an investigation. Mather and several of his deputies formed a party, armed with truncheons and torches, and ventured out to the location. All agreed that while at first glance there did appear to be a candle burning in the window, more careful scrutiny by sober heads revealed it to be nothing more than a glint of moonlight pooling on the pane. No cat or wildlife of any kind was found. Despite Talwick's protests and allegations of conspiracy, the matter was dropped, and the party returned to their lonely posts at the station house.

The next evening, Plebus the Undertaker burst into that very station house and confronted the Magistrate with an alarming piece of news. Plebus, a yellow-complected beanpole of a fellow who wore a black top hat with flapping lid, was generally held to be a dimwit. But because he lacked the artifice to speak anything but the truth as he perceived it, he was also considered trustworthy. If Plebus had a single friend, it was Murphe the Taxidermist, who received the same approving condescension for his strange, harmless ways. Mean-spirited jokes about their awkward friendship whispered through town. But they seemed to share a secret knowledge that the rest of us could never fathom - something pertaining to matters of expiration, perhaps, of last things. They could sit in the tavern together for hours, one taciturn, the other muttering away under his breath, or both silent, staring over the bright band of Main St. toward the starry sea.

Plebus reported to Magistrate Mather that he stopped by Murphe's shop just before sundown to return a bone-saw. Murphe asked Plebus to help him mount a large swordfish onto the wall of his shop. Plebus agreed, and removed his watch from its fob so as not to damage it while moving the heavy fish. After completing the task and standing back to survey their work, the two men bid each other good evening. Upon stepping into the street, Plebus realized that he had left his watch on the counter. He went back inside. The shop has no windows or other portal for entry or exit, save the door. Its raw wooden interior is lit by a single oil-lamp in the exposed rafters. Plebus maintains that the heavy lamp was swinging slowly on its chain, as if stirred by a breeze, although the air was quite still. Around the shop, snarling bears, crouching cats, leaping wolves, fowl in flight, and leathery bat-like creatures cast inky pools of shadow to and fro in the shifting light, lending them the appearance of vertiginous attack and feint. The pocket watch was on the counter, but Murphe was nowhere to be found.

Of course, this second disappearance set the entire town reeling, but its individual effects scarcely had time to be felt, as the disappearances began to proliferate in earnest. Lathel the Baker vanished from his kitchen, discovered by a customer who entered the back of the shop to investigate the smoke pouring from the oven. Alain the Librettist's cottage was found empty by Puccini the Celebrated Tenor, who stormed over in a rage, coat tails flapping and silver-tipped cane rapping on the floor, when Alain failed to deliver a revised libretto at the specified time.
Puccini himself vanished the next day; his wife said that she knew it had happened when his singing in the bath abruptly stopped in mid-note. She charged upstairs to find a basin brimming with placid water, nothing more. And one wonders how many days elapsed before someone noticed that Tchaskim the Homeless Immigrant was no longer sprawled at the corner of Main and Vine, holding out his cap for coins and gibbering in his guttural, impenetrable tongue.

Our second premise, then, which may be stated with reasonable confidence, is this: we only disappear when no one is watching.

Talwick the Haberdasher vanished as well, in a sense: his body was found floating in the sea by the cove south of the harbor. It was the first recorded suicide in our town's history, and was dutifully noted in the annals by Lewellyn the Archivist, just before he disappeared. My wife and child traveled yesterday to console my mother-in-law over the disappearance of the family's patriarch, Maester the Architect, in that opulent estate built of jade and burnished brass.

Citizens are vanishing faster and faster, too many to set down here. Among those of us who remain, there is paranoia and terror. We watch each other with unblinking eyes. We feel ineffectual and helpless; we have no idea how to proceed, and so we fill our time with speculation.

What does it feel like to disappear? Is it a numbness, or is there pain? Or does it tickle? Will we start disappearing in plain view? What will it look like? A sudden blinking out, or a slow fade? A dissolution? Will there be a sparkle, a flash of light, a gust of wind, a sound? Will we see our friends' eyes yawn wide as they vanish, or will it be too sudden? Will the scenery behind us leak through our bodies as we become translucent? Will we be violently torn from the earth, or will we float gracefully into the sky? Or will we sink into the ground? And if this does come to pass, will it be a boon or a curse? Will it offer clues as to how the situation might be handled, or will it only amplify the dread we breathe like air?

These questions and others ricochet about the public spaces, where we gather daily to tally the day's disappearances and hold a forum. Brief flashes of insight quickly fade and leave afterimages burned onto a darkness that grows deeper by degrees. The streets are sunny and cheerful, but they bring us no solace. They remind us of the chasm between the way things were and the way they are. The daily work of the town has ground to a halt as we devote the whole of our energies to untangling the problem at hand.

The old mansion seems darker and more forbidding than ever. We have all gleaned impressions of figures gliding behind its warped windows; seen augers in the heavy purple thunderheads mounting on its roof. My wife and child have not returned, and it's getting dark; I must put on the light.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Advance Warning - First I Take Brooklyn

2006-02-27T19:49:00.000-05:00

Not only is Matt Henriksen publishing one of my poems in his new journal, Cannibal, he invited me to come and give a reading in Brooklyn, as a part of the Fall Cafe 2006 Reading Series. I'm super-jazzed!

Fall Cafe 2006 Reading Series:

The Fall Café ~ Fridays 7:30 PM
February 17th ~ Brendan Lorber & Dustin Williamson
February 26th ~ Thomas Hummel, Brenda Shaughnassy & Craig Teicher
March 17th ~ Samuel Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, & kari edwards
April 7th ~ Brian Howe & Christian Peet
May 12th ~ Anna Moschovakis & Sheila Squillante
June 16th ~ John Coletti & Stacy Szymacek

Directions:

The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
Between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F or G to Carroll Street

Cannibal info:

Our first issue will be ready to ship April 1st.

Cannibal is 88 pages, hand-bound, with a screenprinted cover. Send your check to Matthew Henriksen/95 Clay Street, 3L/Brooklyn, NY 11222. Don't send or write the checks to Cannibal because he doesn't live here. Paypal options are fuzzily in the works.

Cannibal, 88 pages, $8
One year: $15

The First Issue:

Geoffrey Babbit
Andrea Baker
Zach Barocas
Jim Behrle
FJ Bergmann
Edmund Berrigan
Anne Boyer
Jenna Cardinale
Laura Carter
Adam Clay
Clayton Couch
Bruce Covey
AnnMarie Eldon
Jane Gregory
Anthony Hawley
Brian Howe
Brenda Iijima
Lisa Jarnot
Shannon Jonas
Erica Kaufman
Alex Lemon
Tao Lin
Rebecca Loudon
Joseph Massey
Andrew Mister
K. Silem Mohammad
Valzhyna Mort
Gina Myers
The Pines
Emma Ramey
M.L. Schultz
Sandra Simonds
Laura Solomon
Gabriella Torres
Jen Tynes
Dustin Williamson

DIM MANSION: part 2

2006-02-12T17:17:00.000-05:00

[read part one here]

When the sun achieves its apogee, the entire bazaar closes down for a two-hour siesta. The men go home to their wives, who have lunch simmering in cauldrons, cool drinks in condensation-beaded pitchers and, in some cases, freshly cut flowers on the checkered oilcloths covering their tables. When Bosch the Foreman blew through a conch shell to signal the beginning of siesta, Gannon rolled down the awning over his booth's façade and headed toward his home. Hours hence, Gannon's wife, who had been waiting anxiously in the kitchen with a freshly cut flower in her hair, reported to Mather the Magistrate that Gannon had not come home for siesta. The stew in the cauldron cooled and congealed; the pitcher sweated and left a circular puddle on the checkered oilcloth; the flower wilted in the fierce meridian sun, and Gannon has not been seen since.

These are the facts, insofar as we can perceive them. Lewellyn the Archivist consulted his annals and confirmed that there had not been a disappearance in our town since Fellrath the Librarian suddenly stopped coming to work and was never seen again. And this was not even a true disappearance, for Fellrath was a solitary, troubled man who disdained our town's local literature, much of which was penned by myself (Bartleby the Amanuensis, by way of late introduction); my brother, Zephyr the Belletrist; and by our own late father, Echo. Our literature consists chiefly of uplifting, instructive allegories about community solidarity and the virtues of a simple, moralistic way of life. Fellrath favored esoteric foreign volumes filled with conspiracy, betrayal, and frank depictions of carnality, or else books leaden with undercurrents of philosophy and mysticism. So no one was too surprised when he turned up missing.

Of course, in a town as hermetic as ours, crime is rare and disappearance even rarer, so the citizenry immediately worked itself into a lather of rumor. Some maintained that Gannon kept a mistress in the island village, our nearest neighbor. Several hours journey by rowed skiff, the only accounts we possess of the island were supplied by long-dead explorers and adventurers (and this information is regarded warily, since men who forego the pleasures of hearth and home for profligate, frivolous escapades can hardly be trusted in their judgments). Nevertheless, it has been recorded that the island is composed of an evergreen weald girded by vast, frozen plains. Its residents bundle in fur-lined parkas and fish with braided vine fibers through holes in the ice, for sustenance and sport. It is also said that exotic, unspeakable creatures move through their snow-burdened air, and examples of these are on display in Murphe the Taxidermist's curious little shop, though more level-headed citizens maintain that creatures such as these could not possibly exist – that Murphe is committing blasphemy by cobbling fantastic beasts from the carcasses of commonplace animals such as bats, felines, deer and fish. The island blackens our horizon, constantly emitting a thick smoke of unknown provenance.

The island denizens' artic environment is as alien and repellent to us as our tropical milieu must be to them, and perhaps this has been a factor in our failure to form a search party and locate Gannon's supposed mistress for questioning. His wife gainsays the mistress theory altogether, averring that even if Gannon did keep a mistress, which she was loathe to believe, he would not have gone to her during siesta (when his absence would immediately alert his wife to some malfeasance) unless he planned to not return. This, too, she found unlikely, because whatever Gannon's husbandly shortcomings may have been, he was ferociously dedicated to his daughter and would never abandon her. Most of the town's more incisive thinkers agreed that this was so.

Some believed that Gannon fell prey to violent crime; was dragged into a dark alley by a gang of roving bandits. Occam's razor, which holds that the simplest explanation is the correct one, as we choose to interpret it, has long held sway in our town – indeed, is engraved on the sundial in the town square. So even though violent crime is practically unheard of here, a mugging was still the simplest explanation. Of course, it was soon rendered invalid by the subsequent disappearances.

In the deep hours of the night, as the men hunched over whiskey sours under the tavern's murky oil-lamps, and the women sat sewing in flickering, fire-lit circles, darker, stranger rumors circulated. Much was made of Talwick the Haberdasher's account of Gannon's insubstantiality on the day he vanished, of his watery shimmer. And everyone muttered obscurely about the circled notice in the paper, the (alleged) stellate nimbus about Gannon's head, and the (ostensible) remoteness noticed by his apprentice. But Talwick was a known drunkard, a slave not only to spirits, but to graver vices as well: opium, and a green concoction of wormwood essence and alcohol. It was rumored that he smuggled hogsheads of the stuff into town by way of the underground cove just south of the harbor, possibly from the frozen isle. So his account was generally dismissed as the raving of madman and given little credence. Neither was the apprentice trustworthy, for the obtuse perceptions of a child are not capable of tracing out the acute nuances of a man, and often the import of meaningless tics is amplified in the young mind. But what of Lathel the Baker's deposition? A life-long teetotaler, known in the community as a rational and honorable man, not one among us would dare to call his testimony into question. But the only clue he offered was a notice in the paper about a missing cat, a notice that Gannon had circled in blue ink.

Or had he? The notice was circled and it was Gannon's paper, but Lathel admits he did not actually see Gannon circle the item, or even hold a pen, and that it was possible someone who had a perfectly mundane reason for circling the item passed along the paper to Gannon. He quickly corrected himself for using the word "mundane" and evoking its counter-insinuations, making embarrassed gestures with his hands.

And so this clue, like numerous others, remains unverified; can be attributed to neither grave import nor red herring, though it must be one or the other. Some still debate the various testimonies with an unease that swells as the pieces refuse to cohere; others have tried to put them out of mind, and all the while soft thunder and heat lightning gambol intransigently above the old mansion. Thick smoke sparkling with tiny lights rises from the frozen isle. Grubs and beetles writhe obscenely in the moist loam under each rock, where there was once only cool dead grass, and people are disappearing.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Response to Dan Hoy's flarf essay in Jacket

2006-02-04T17:56:00.000-05:00

I don't have any personal stake in flarf or the accusations Dan Hoy levels at flarfists in this article, since I'm not among their ranks, despite having appropriated some of their processes (or more accurately, whatever impressions of their processes that have radiated out from the hermetic confines of the flarflist) in a peripheral way. But since my F7 project was explicitly addressed in Hoy's article, I will respond to portions of it. And can I mention, apropos of nothing, that F7 wants to change "flarfists" to "florists," and that this seems thrillingly appropriate, given the electronic gardens they tend?

It's worth noting that I like Dan personally, and admire him as an academic and a writer. It's also worth noting that the two poems of mine that will be included in Hoy's own Soft Targets journal both include elements generated by Google. I don't point this out as a contradiction meant to undermine his argument, but it is of interest – if I am unthinkingly complicit in the technocracy because of my processes, doesn't Hoy also share in this complicity by disseminating them? And, unless Hoy plans on publishing my poems with annotated criticisms of their mode of production, isn't his complicity as superficially unthinking as he would have mine to be? I fear that Hoy set out with a thesis already in mind, then found out-of-context examples to support it, instead of letting the research decide what it wanted to say. I have no problem with his ideas about Google’s corporate technocratic nature, but that he offers them as some sort of corrective – using his essay to skewer what he intuits to be the motivations of some poets working in this vein, instead of simply presenting his otherwise penetrating thoughts on Google without damning people for intentions that surely aren't his to know – is odd.

Hoy's assertion that poets using Google to make poems are somehow oblivious to Google's hierarchal nature goes largely unsupported. His reading seems extremely selective. He calls me out for not acknowledging the hierarchy embodied in Google and Microsoft Word's spellchecking function, when in fact I do, however glancingly, in the very same blogpost he quotes in his article:

"[T]he spellchecker used as a palette was compiled by a group of persons unknown to the author..."

This is by no means the explicit critique that Hoy calls for, but it does indicate at least a rudimentary awareness on my part of the not-actually-random nature of the F7 project. Tony Tost, who, to be fair, has had the benefit of close personal contact with me throughout the evolution of my project in forming his analysis, gleans this in his post (responding to the same article) on his Unquiet Grave blog:

"I mean, do you really think Brian Howe hasn't thought about the fact that the language suggestions brought up by the F7 key are a corporation's assertion of what normal or correct language use should be? Isn't it conceivable that that's a big part of the thrill and appeal of the F7 project, taking a technological tool that was intended for one normalizing purpose and hijacking it for a more disruptive, weird and incorrect purpose?"

This is entirely on the money, but again, while I know Dan, I've been in much closer personal contact with Tony over the year-and-a-half I've been working in this vein. So Tony actually has empirical knowledge of my thought processes, which Hoy does not. It's not clear what poets could do to "question the implications" of using Google and other generative technological mediations to Hoy's satisfaction, besides writing critical articles such as the one Hoy just published, which have no place in the work. Hoy's exegesis is welcome, but his ostensible assertion that the poet should have already done the critic’s work, and that the debatable fact that this hasn't happened somehow undermines the integrity of the poet's project, is less so. It seems to me that this sort of questioning is inherent in the work. If there's no explicit critique of Google or Microsoft in my project, one is implicit in the fairly monstrous voice that ripples through it, and I've spent much time pondering the ideological implications of what I'm saying vis-a-vis what MS Word's Spellchecker thinks I'm trying to say according to the cultural biases of its programmers, which power structures it favors and which groups it disenfranchises, how to exploit this slippage for powerful aesthetic affect and penetrating political comment, etc. What makes Hoy so sure that the basis of any Google-oriented project is not a critique of the tool it uses?

I wouldn't contest Hoy's claims that Google poems are biased, since they express the biases of the search engine's designers, and ideological, since they express the will of their "authors" in result-selection criteria, but I can't really countenance his claim that flarfists and people using Google to make poems are unaware of these implications. The questions he feels are going unaddressed seem to be, in my reading, exactly the questions such poems intend to raise. On a side note, I'm no longer using Google in my poetry, focusing instead solely on the F7 process – it was something I needed to experiment with for my own edification, but it's not an idiom I'm interested in pursuing further, when others have been doing it longer and more exactingly already. But I feel certain that my own experiments with Google and the Spellchecker actually foreground my own complicity, as a young white male, in the hegemony – as I blend poetic "I" statements with Googled results and Spellchecker generations, I become indistinguishable from the oft-horrible content of the poems. My acknowledged complicity seems to me to fairly resound through the poems, as does my burgeoning terror at the same.

Hoy is right that my F7 poems do stem from an imposed value system – I was imprecise in my blogpost. What I meant to say is that it they are free from my own imposed value system, at least to a greater extent than my unmediated poems. At the time, I was very rigidly observing my processes, not allowing any legroom for myself to make choices, creating the original nonsense texts entirely by keyed patterns and chance operations like dice rolls, randomly generated numbers & so forth, and even when arriving at the stage when MS Word presented me with a palette of word choices, I used chance operations or sequential rules to select those as well. While I was cognizant of MS Word's ideological bent and its affect on the poems, it wasn't something I was interested in explicitly addressing at this rudimentary, exploratory stage of the process, although this is no longer the case – now I allow my will into the poems freely and haphazardly, since I've found the tension is more interesting than the pure process. At any rate, I felt that these poems were engaged in a tacit critique of the media that produced them, even if it wasn't one that I fully understood myself yet.

I also disagree with Hoy's assertion that poets who use technologically mediated processes are excited about technological progress, when in fact the opposite seems true – the emotional register of such poems scans to me not as excitement, but dread, or at least a deep unease with the decentralization of the human, the individual, and the unique embodied in this technology. The gleefully obscene, almost giddy tone that pervades such poems scan as whistling past the graveyard, false and jarring contrasts to the poet's very real terror. Why Hoy chooses to read such impulses as "utopian," I have no idea, since they are plainly dystopian in their panoramic view of the vertiginous, canted, treacherous linguistic surface that mediates so much of our 21st century lives.

What Hoy's article ignores is flarf's and google-poetry’s (and yes, F7’s) sheer inevitability. Whatever their real or supposed ideological blind spots, they are the inevitable expression of our era, and if the poet's greatest calling is to inhabit his or her moment as fully as possible (contestable, but I believe it is, lest we all fall prey to the museum culture of "timeless" poetry), practitioners of flarf and other technologically mediated processes are answering this call most directly, engendering circumstances for critiques such as Hoy's, critiques that would be more valuable were they to examine the discernible phenomenon and not make blind assumptions about the phenomenon's practitioner's intentions. The collaging of (often corporately-generated) primary sources is shaping up to be the defining medium of our era – rap (at this stage, my thinking is that F7 has more in common with Mike Jones or DangerMouse than John Cage), mash-ups, DJ mixes, literary pastiche and hyperauthorship, rampant televisual meta-satire, etc etc etc. For poetry to try and stay "above the fray," as it were – doesn't this just make it more marginal than it already is? Perhaps that's what some poets want – to not see poetry become like TV – but I'm interested in poetry that engages with TV in its own arena, not to mimic it but to challenge it, to inhabit its moment. Hoy argues that there's an elitist bent to Googled poetry, but it's a lot closer to getting one's hands dirty than musing abstractly on the periphery of the culture.

CHIN CHIN NAGAI!

2006-02-01T13:30:00.000-05:00

A story about a story from a friend in Japan:

To add to the collection of penis stories I've accumulated here in Japan:

I read one of the weirdest children's stories yesterday with a three-year old boy. (He picked it out, not me, and you could tell it was a real favorite. Now it's definitely one of mine, too.) It was in Japanese, so I couldn't get much of it, and neither could he, being three, but you could get the general gist of it from the pictures. Each page showed this little blond boy with an incredibly long appendage coming from his nether regions. And by long, I mean so long the boy can't find the end of it! The little boy follows it through rooms in his house, peers out the window only to find his little weewee winding through the streets of his town! And as I flipped the pages with this little Japanese boy, he would point out the little blond boy's anatomy, gleefully shouting "CHIN CHIN NAGAI!" (which means long penis, of course) on EVERY single page with the same level of intensity each time.The book has a happy ending, I guess.... The little blond boy eventually finds the end of his penis, just as... a STEAM ROLLER runs over it, in front of several video cameras. Obviously, this causes him some pain, but on the last page, you see him smiling proudly, still pantless in a street full of strangers, but with a normal-sized little chin chin. What do you with a story like that? Well, you definitely, definitely read it again. That's what we did, anyway.

(letter to L___)

2006-01-31T11:34:00.000-05:00

If I say that poetry
is an act of reading
as much as one of writing
or more
an act of deliberate attention
as much or more than of reading
an opening receptivity
sensing outward as much as
turning inward
more than, even
then when I say
that my attention
is a poem inscribed
directly onto your body
it sounds condescending
and maybe it is
but it's not a metaphor
not a picture of a flower
or the name of a flower
or the evocative aroma
of a flower
the idea of a flower opening
inside the idea of a flower
but an actual flower
a trembling
that describes nothing permanent
but an unfolding instant
of focused attention
you can be fully here today
and gone tomorrow
or you can have been gone
and arrive now
people do it all the time
but if a poem is a line
with a short visible length
and an infinite invisible length
then my attention
even when it turns toward
another opening opening
within another opening
unfolds you
opening and opening
like a looped tape
stuck key
car alarm
mobius strip
time-lasped flower
this might seem
an abstract consolation
and maybe it is
but if a poem is like a silence
(pure form of attention)
opening and opening inside itself
then if the silence creeps over me
think of it as a sort of gift
a package that opens and opens
never disclosing its contents
which don't matter anyway
because the poem
is in the opening
so if death
is a sort of extreme poetics
and silence a sort of death
we can open into
and out of at will
isn't this a tongueless bell
pealing soundlessly
and don't you open
and open in my hands
and even if the attention
is reciprocal
don't I sometimes
as the moon screams
through the blinds
manipulate you
like an origami swan
whispering
if this is a sort of violence
it's at least a reverent one
attentive and isn't it
less like control
and more like prayer?

dente means poem (ate pie) (F7 remix)

2006-01-29T18:41:00.001-05:00

after Randall Williams

dentate memes
meow (atelier)
a tooth
how does a desecration
type papyrus
Shakeout a name)
(the umbra cop of nonusers)
her deceased
(isotherm rehab)
serif guts a dog’s noise)
(these (torrid
trance options
traps
(wee kicks)
(sew to lobes)
of a naked ashen dallier
(a walleye
(the lapin owl)
in the varnish)
becomes) (heathen
acres (dolor
a caw
(earth snores)
(nose duet)
envy ingot
inset crowing
contested bedpans
espuma tonic
(she tamed that)
(suitor's pose
ideas artist had (owl seed)
recasting slow exams)
onto poems (hive verso
disco vexed the dub
mélange holy
dolor in a dog’s seed
(smooch heroes
nomads relish gritty)
eCommerce)
the archives
unbraided)

Timbers of Laity

2006-01-26T23:40:00.000-05:00

F7 retries not to be cosmetic, although like any immersed glint, it notes lapis, and it espies its legion attributes. It is the perfection of the word it incants. A city scourged in a more rational nation, nuked with realms, myrtles, shire and nursery, tooth, eBay, and sea, time concaved as a rude claw around an aura of epics - say, a woodwind. Imagine the doll eluder in his wonder, using a guise to obtain the rotors, rain spattering the window, then ransoming them direct, by way of shank or altered protons. Not time, but a dial of spit on which definite ructions are scoured, timbers of laity, but a definite rumble of giants can ruckus between these timbers, as a definite rumble of infamy ties malice between the mintages of ego and wit. F7 is the timbers, and the writhing that flaps between math and meat, gothic worm. Exert force, F7 is both entity and inanity.

DIM MANSION : part 1

2006-01-22T14:10:00.000-05:00

All we know for sure is that we aren’t sure of anything, but by now it’s urgent that we make some headway. Things are getting out of hand. Our first premise, which can be stated with reasonable confidence, is this: around town, people are vanishing into thin air. This is known. All else is hazard and surmise; nevertheless, we must infer what we can and take action. The time for hemming and hawing has passed. Our citizens are vanishing at an astonishing rate, and the children are colicky all night.

Gannon the Fishmonger was the first to disappear. Let us examine the facts. Gannon left his family sleeping soundly at home and proceeded to Lathel’s Bakery, as usual. The two businessmen made small talk about the vagaries of shop keeping and the stickier wickets of local government. As Gannon drank his coffee, he perused the morning edition of The Town Crier, while Lathel dispensed with the morning rush. When the logjam finally cleared, Lathel noticed that Gannon was gone, and had forgotten his newspaper. He wiped his hands on his apron and sat down with a scone – blueberry, to be precise. As he ate, he thumbed through the paper and noticed, with mild curiosity, a brief item circled in blue ink about a missing pet cat. The owners were confounded to find its collar discarded on a window ledge, the tiny bell dangling over the sill and tinkling in the breeze.

We know that Gannon then headed for the bazaar, where the other merchants’ booths already stood in various stages of assembly; that he strode down the flagstones of Main St., sucking at the ivory stem of his long pipe, leaving a tracery of rich-smelling smoke laced through the brittle morning sunlight behind him; the extraordinary light that once brought us cloudless joy, now furtive with doubt.
If this account achieves wide publication, a nota bene for non-natives is warranted: we take immense pride in our mornings. The light contorts low and jagged across our buildings and bridges, our creeks and avenues; it breaks into sharp-cracked stars on wind cocks and tin chimneys, plays out dazzling tricks of perception on plate glass windows and mirrored storefronts. So the report submitted by a passing commuter that Gannon’s head wore a radiant halo that morning was dismissed out of hand – we assumed that Gannon passed a reflective surface just as the sun shifted into a certain position, creating an optical illusion. The citizen who entered this incident into the record was granted anonymity, for he felt ashamed. He emphasized that he did not truck with supernatural phenomena, but in times as unaccountable as these, no detail could be deemed insignificant. On his good name, he felt compelled to come forward and – without jumping to conclusions – report what he had seen.

Other testimonies confirmed that Gannon behaved normally at the bazaar, tipping his cap and rotating his right wrist, which pained him in humid weather. Talwick the Haberdasher, whose concern lies directly across the main concourse from the Fishmonger’s, swore that Gannon looked blurred at the edges, was difficult to distinguish from the scenery around him. A man without borders. But these are paranoid and hysterical days. Our women are given to fainting and shortness of breath; our men to intrigue and bluster, and people are disappearing. We must view all available data through the inflexible lens of fact, and forestall the shading in of gray areas until the basic truths become known.

According to his daily ritual, Gannon unfurled a green-and-white striped awning over the stand and hung up nautical decorations: course fishing nets, rusty gaff hooks, locally stuffed seagulls, and his frontispiece, a large barnacled anchor. His slight, tow-headed apprentice brought in the catch, which Gannon arrayed in ice-filled bins. The boy noted that while Gannon seemed normal, he did not hum the old rowing songs he usually hummed while setting up in the morning.

The boy thought that perhaps Gannon was annoyed with him for being late. It is a brisk five-minute walk, as the crow flies, from the harbor to the bazaar – looking down from the square, the sun-glittered ocean stretches away in rose and orange, fading to a darkness that shrouds a neighboring island town. But because he didn’t want to pass by the old mansion, the boy used a slightly longer route.

Looming on a rocky bluff between the harbor and bazaar, the old mansion has been a source of schism in our town for as long as anyone can remember – its provenance is a seldom-discussed lacuna in Lewellyn the Archivist’s scrupulous records. The old mansion casts a dark pall over our otherwise cheerful homes; with the ornate iron filigree of its gates and widow cages; the inherent drabness of its stones and its infested timbers; its weedy lawn and hard-etched, skeletal trees. Some want to renovate it; others, to tear it down, but nothing ever happens: the item recurs regularly in the minutes of the Town Council as “unresolved.”

Some citizens even claim that the mansion has its own weather, an overriding grayness and climate of dolor that not even the morning sun can dispel, but only partially cover, like a blanket too small for its pallet. But these are troubled times, rife with wild accusations and shrill admonishments. We imagine footsteps muffling past our darkened windows at night; every tree seems to conceal a rafter of crows waiting to burst out and startle us with their racket, and people are disappearing without a trace. So superstition must be held at bay, lest we all become lost.

TO BE CONTINUED...

durham3 reading

2006-01-18T14:14:00.000-05:00

On Saturday Jan. 28, I'll be giving a reading as part of the durham3 multimedia series. I plan on airing out a new, longish prose poem from F7, its title poem and prospective centerpiece. I've done a lot more out-of-town than in-town readings over the past year, so I'm excited about the home field advantage. More:

durham3 rings in its second year and 2006 with a full evening of the arts on Saturday, January 28th at Durham’s newest coffeehouse, the Broad Street Café. This month we will be celebrating the best the Triangle has to offer with Carrboro poet Brain Howe, NCSU writer Chris Salerno, Kirk Adam of the Glitter film series, and Triangle musician Scott Carey. We will round out the evening with a full hour of open mike. Sign-up will be at the door and slots will be first come, first serve. Doors open at 7:30, the show begins at 8:00, and there’s no cover. Broad Street Café has a full menu of sandwiches and snacks, along with coffee, sodas, and beer. For directions, see their website at http://broadstreetcafe.org/ or call at 416-9707. For other information, contact Tanya Olson at olson@vgcc.edu Amy Nolan at amycnolan@hotmail.com or visit the durham3 website at http://durham3.blogspot.com durham3 is sponsored in part by Carolina Wren Press. (http://carolinawrenpress.org/index.php3)

Chris Salerno- Christopher Salerno's first book, "Whirigig," was recently shortlisted for the Walt Whitman Award
and is due to be published by Spuyten Duyvil (NYC) in February '06. A Graduate of Bennington College's MFA Program
For Writers, he currently teaches First-Year Writing, Poetry Writing, and American Literature at North Carolina State
University in Raleigh, NC. His poems can be found in such journals as: Colorado Review, Jacket, The Tiny, AGNI
(online), Spinning Jenny, Free Verse, Forklift Ohio, Carolina Quarterly, LIT, GoodFoot, 5AM, Barrow Street, Can We Have
Our Ball Back, River City, and others. Two of his recent poems will be included in the forthcoming anthology, "The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel."

Kirk Adam- Kirk Adam runs the Kirk Adam Gallery in Raleigh and is the brains behind Glitter films. Come and see what he is going to screen for us and see what else he has in store. Visit him in cyberspace at http://www.myspace.com/kirkadam

Brian Howe- Brian Howe is a freelance writer and poet living in Chapel Hill, NC. He is a contributing writer at Pitchforkmedia.com and a contributing editor at Paste Magazine. He blogs at www.moistworks.com and http://slatherpuss.blogspot.com/. Howe’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eratio, Octopus, GutCult and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He is a member of the Lucifer Poetics group.

Scott Carey- PRIMUM MOBILE think radiohead, think lush, think really cool bands from the early 90s (shoegaze) that influenced many of today pop band. Scotty Carey performs on guitar and keyboard while bringing with him his hard disk recorder. It’s truly awesome.

durham3 is a series of multi-media events that bring together a variety of artists. The series is interested in using the physical and psychological thirdspace qualities of Durham to foster collaboration between artistic communities in Durham and the Triangle. Ultimately, this series would also like to aid Durham in defining its own artistic identity. Towards that end, each event will feature poets, performers, spoken words artists, visual artists, musicians, and dancers from across the Triangle.

Octopus 7

2006-01-12T13:44:00.000-05:00

OH GOD HERE IT COMES AGAIN

Fun with the Feijoa

2006-01-10T14:09:00.000-05:00

Thanks Wikipedia:

The Feijoa (Feijoa sellowiana, synonym Acca sellowiana), also known as Pineapple Guava, is an evergreen shrub or small tree, 1-7 m in height, originating from the highlands of southern Brazil and northern Argentina. The pulpy fruit is green, chicken-egg-sized, and ellipsoid-shaped. It has a slightly tart taste, and is not fully ripe until it falls to earth in autumn. This plant is monotypic in its genus.

German botanist Ernst Berger named Feijoa after Don da Silva Feijoa, a Spanish botanist.

It is a warm-temperate to subtropical plant that will also grow in the tropics but requires some winter chilling to fruit. In the northern hemisphere it has been cultivated as far north as western Scotland but does not fruit every year, as winter temperatures below about -9°C will kill the flower buds. Large quantities are grown in New Zealand.

Some grafted cultivars are self fertile, most are not and require a pollenizer. Seedlings may or may not be of usable quality, and may or may not be self fertile. In the native range, the pollinator is a bird, but bees can accomplish some pollination, especially large brawny bees, such as bumblebees or the large carpenter bee.

Behold the Feijoa:
Place it on a plate:

Cut in half:

Insert spoon:

Scoop out middle:

Mug for the camera:

Open wide:

Close tight:

Savor:

Keep savoring:

Use husk as monocle:

Hey, I got quoted in the NY Times - who wants to make out?

2005-12-30T19:25:00.000-05:00

Although they spelled my name wrong - it should be B-R-I-A-N, not P-I-T-C-H-F-O-R-K:

There is miniature majesty to their music - sounds and motifs come and go on the record, seemingly of their own accord. But just when you think Clap Your Hands is a domestic version of Belle and Sebastian, the British kings of twee-core, they rear up and make a big, scary noise. Pitchfork did a good job of describing the music: "Clap Your Hands traffics in melodic, exuberant indie rock that pairs the shimmering, wafting feel of Yo La Tengo with a singular vocal presence that sounds like Paul Banks attempting to yodel through Jeff Mangum's throat. Or imagine the Arcade Fire if their music were more fun-loving and less grave."

Criticism vs. Divinity

2005-12-28T15:48:00.000-05:00

"Critical clarity is bullshit," someone recently said to me, and it has been much on my mind, as I think about ways of seeing and experiencing music, books, and art that don't involve dissecting them on a slab, laying out their parts in an orderly fashion and in the process excising the divinity right out of them. But I don't know how to get around it within the current music crit paradigm, where divinity is poo-pooed and everything is a surface to be buffed or gridded. I think that clarity is a very poor way to experience a piece of art, when a sort of befogged wonder is perhaps more in order, although this is perhaps my poetics creeping into my criticism. I've been thinking about divinity a lot - by now I'm very deep inside the F7 process, using it much more organically, and in these states of deep interface with the texts, the air becomes radiant with the stuff (divinity, that is) - especially since I read about the suppressed gospel of Thomas, which excised all the miracles and biographical details from the New Testament in favor of simply listing Jesus' parables, unbowdlerized (i.e. without the pithy morals the apostles were wont to attach to them in transcription), which wind up reading a lot more like Zen koans than parables - they don't instruct, they raise questions for contemplation. What emerges is a teaching that's not terribly concerned with sin and redemption, or the promise of an afterlife - the upshot is that the 'kingdom of heaven' isn't something you suffer through this life to achieve, it's here on earth, waiting for humankind to claim it by renouncing binaries and embracing their unified being, that spark of divinity in us all. This makes so much more sense than, and is so very diametrically opposed to, modern mainstream xtianity, where the focus is all sin and redemption, moral imperatives, and a blind faith in miracles and received wisdom that Jesus surely would have despised. What could be more detrimental to divinity and pure, unmediated experience than the rigid binaries of modern music crit? And how could something so personally be translated into text, anyway?

Note to the friend to whom I sent this in an email - I wrote it for you, I only posted it here after the fact. I'm not just emailing you my blogposts now, honest.

Don't ask

2005-12-22T17:46:00.000-05:00

Let's vote on it

2005-12-19T15:36:00.000-05:00

Price Saves the Circus

2005-12-19T14:23:00.000-05:00

My poem "Price Saves the Circus" joined the stellar ranks of the Order & Decorum project today. Go here and click on "Your Role in Combating the Insider Threat" to become complicit (after Wednesday, it will be moved into the archive).

The Torrid Cement of Sorrow

2005-12-16T19:52:00.000-05:00

It's been said many times that a dunderhead donkey with a dunderhead type rider would even tally, by sheer erotica, shakeup ears. Scantier to me is the audio that these same donkeys would, with lewd probity, use to produce trig sorrows that have not yet been knitted. Sorrow embeds this audio, a physical epic, in his library of labor, a triage, seemingly definite lifelike structure, wild with spooks that nontoxic every easily permitted ration of lingo now to name. As a goon fearing this torso in the 21st denture, it's lateral to image the library of labor as a rebuke. As a rite and a nomad gene, I deify this audio, exiled and flightless, terrific dying: A lower prelude purring through stiffer actions of lunge could, ethically, even tally eroded clients and optical breadth simply by dancing across the torrid cement of sorrow.

Imogen speaks

2005-12-08T17:45:00.000-05:00

Imogen Heap's vocodered hymn "Hide and Seek" has to be 2005's most arresting single; the only thing that comes close in terms of pure, heart-stopping, oh-shit-I've-had-my-eyes-closed-for-three-minutes bliss is Antony and the Johnsons's "Hope There's Someone". If you haven't heard these songs, do yourself a favor and drop .99 cents on iTunes. You won't be sorry. Anyway, I recently wrote a little 200-word feature on Imogen for Paste Magazine. I fired off way too many questions for such a short piece, assuming she'd poke at whichever ones she fancied. Imagine my surprise when an email came back that ran to pages of thoughtful, detailed answers; the kind only someone who's really in synch with his or her life at the moment can give. Imogen was so great that my bosses at Paste decided to complement my thin piece in the magazine with the full text of the interview online, which is available here.

Losing Face in Georgia

2005-12-04T20:36:00.000-05:00

After spending six hours in the car exploring Marcus Slease's manhood (not quite as tawdry as it sounds, but close), we arrived at the Eyedrum Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a beautiful space; cavernous, filled with paintings and installations that actually did not suck. The stage was large and well-lit, and the sound system was terrific. We drank beer and mingled with the Atlanta poets as what sounded like Surrealist sound poetry played over the PA. We split into two cells for the reading - David Need, Ken Rumble, and Randall Williams in one, Marcus Slease and I in the other. David's poems were leavened with his usual vivid lyrcism. His first poem was particularly wonderful, and since he read it very fast, in my mind's eye I saw the poem bathed in the light from a blood-red sun flying up and down like a yo-yo. The unrelenting attention in Randall's poems makes you wonder whether you actually speak the language, and if you watch him closely when he reads, you'll notice that he's levitating an inch above the stage. Words leave him like tiny weights and his body arches upward. Ken enlisted Bruce from Coconut Poetry at the last moment to read one of his "Monologues for Voices", in which simple realities question themselves to exhaustion. He also read a new poem that I love, or, I should say, "l l l l l o o l l l o v lo ll e e e ll o v v l e". You probably had to be there, but watching Ken attempting to express language in a moment of utter collapse, I thought him very corageous. Marcus and I read from "This is the Motherfucking Remix", an in-progress collaborative chapbook that pits my F7 process against Marcus's Marcus process to produce rather disorienting effects. It was the first time we've publically read any of it, and we gained a lot of insight from audience responses and our own intuition. The audience was terrifically attentive, and we got good responses to our collaborative reading style - by jumbling up the poems of the whole group into one mass, we achieve unexpected resonances and tensions within the work, which would not manifest if we were all just reading from our respective manuscripts for fifteen minutes.

It was at this point that things began to get out of hand. We went to a bar called Manuel's with a group of the Atlanta poets, including Laura Carter, John Lowther, Heather Brinkman, Zac Denton, Tracey Gagne, Randy Prunty ... it was all perfectly civilized at first. Then Marcus decided that everyone needed to drink shots of Jaegermeister. They were served in little plastic medicine cups. We had very many of them. I remember singing the song that Marcus's grandmother sang to him when he was little, the one that sounds suspiciously like a drinking song: "I u-dul-used to pla-da-lay my little ol' ban-jo-da-lo..." I remember marvelling at the $250 bar tab. But I do not remember walking out the door. The next thing I remember is my face slamming into the concrete parking lot. How exactly this happened remains unclear. There are conflicting reports. I know that Marcus was right on top of me when I fell, perhaps holding my arms, which would explain a) the high velocity with which I hit the pavement and b) why I cushioned the blow with my face instead of my arms. I contend that Marcus tackled me, but he denies it, maintaining that I "tripped." We don't think the nose is broken, but we are not sure. Big thanks here to John, Tracey and Randy for letting us be unruly in their home until five in the morning. It takes a special kind of person to let out of town poets with blood all over their faces invade your space.

After about two hours of sleep, we rallied our decimated forces and prepared to head to Athens. I looked in the death mask in the mirror and felt conflicted. On the one hand, it looked pretty tough, and we entertained ourselves all weekend joking around about it. "Dude, what happened to your face?" "You know, poetry reading." Everyone we met was regaled with tales of the former beauty lurking behind my new hideousness. On the other hand, it hurt like shit, and while it was all fun to joke around with my friends about it, I thought about having to explain it to strangers: I mean, essentially, I got really drunk and fell on my face. It sounds kind of sad out of context. So I wore it with a mix of embarrassment ("I am getting too old for this") and pride ("I love life so much I'm willing to destroy my face in search of it, see?"). Our hosts took us to breakfast at a local diner and sent us on our way. In Athens, we found a coffee shop that had a "quiet room" (an ingenious innovation, to have a room where no one is allowed to play music or talk in a coffee shop) and began to put together our set. At the Flicker Bar, we were greeted by the lovely (Marcus would say "brazen") Sabrina Mark, who organized this reading for us. It was sparsely attended - four in the afternoon is maybe an odd time for a reading - but we had a great time. David had stayed behind in Atlanta, so it was just the four of us, and, possessed by the unholy animation of the profoundly tired, we nevertheless turned in a reading we felt good about. I would love to reconstruct it for you but I was so tired I barely remember it now. I remember cracking up as Marcus read an early Resident Alien poem that juxtaposed expressions of religious devotion with lists of food. There was a Christmas tree in the back that had those glowing fiber-optic lights coruscating over it and it was hypnotizing me. We had dinner with Sabrina and her friends Kristen and Brian (whose last name I unfortunately don't know), then went to our cheap hotel for a power nap. When we emerged, somewhat rejuvenated, we went to a bar with Sabrina, Brian and Kristen. Ken Rumble, it has to be noted, didn't drink a drop all weekend, yet maintained his almost obscene energy level. Randall wore a fur-lined vest that I was sort of jealous of. We played darts and pool. We sang the song again, several times. We found out that Marcus has seen his doppelganger and is therefore going to die. He asked for group hugs until everyone became uncomfortable. He was very into us being "like a family" and sharing food all weekend. We inflicted no further injury upon one another. We stayed up too late again.

Spending a weekend in close proximity with poets who are also people you love remakes the world into something both awesome and terrible. The sky gets too portentous, and every stone gets overturned, and you feel a little crazy but you want to do it forever. Even so, having just been home for a few hours, I feel banality starting to close around me like a fist ... what I mean is that we'll come read anywhere, anytime, for free, if you just ask us. To escape banality, even for a weekend, is worth any absurd bar tab or facial reconstruction. Thanks again to all the wonderful people who helped us get away.

Citizens of Georgia, tuck in your chains....

2005-11-28T21:00:00.000-05:00

WE'RE

COMING

The Poetry Experiment

2005-11-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

I don't know what this is, but they've posted one of my poems from Octopus. I'd have never known if someone hadn't sent me a link. Not that I mind.

On Chapbooks

2005-11-16T17:30:00.001-05:00

This isn't brand new, I posted it to the Lucifer Poetics list a few months ago, when an argument about chapbooks vs. "real" books broke out. I just came across while combing through old files and decided to immotalize it here.

I

It is widely known but seldom acknowledged that some books come into this world withered and retarded. In more sensible times, these mongoloid tomes were cinched in scratchy sacks, tken far from the city gates, and left to die of exposure atop hills. Unfortunately, in this retiring era we must suffer these mongrels among us, heap extravagant praise upon their authors, and treat them as "equals," even as they dilute the wide readership and make hardier books seem absurd by caricature. One is consoled only by the fact that instead of dying of exposure upon hilltops, they now die of underexposure in cities.

II

Q: Why is a real book more courageous than a chapbook?
A: Because a chapbook is spineless.

III

If you suspect your book might be a chapbook, the following steps are advisable. Find the nearest body of water (a basin will do in a pinch). Submerge the suspect literature in the water. If it soaks, sinks, and dissolves, it is a chapbook and you have done the right thing. If it floats on the surface and does not dampen, it is a book. In such a case, you should immediately retrieve it with a net, or, if this is unavailable, a long reed. Read it from cover to cover, and rush it to the nearest library. If water is absolutely unavailable, use fire.

IV

On the third day the prophet told this parable:

In a certain kingdom of the world lived a wise man known for shrewdness. Two bibliophiles came to him with a dispute over the ownership of a fifty page book. The wise man decreed that the book would be cloven into equal portions, each party taking half. Fine, said the first bibliophile, cut the book. No! cried the other, I would rather he have it than see it cloven into two chapbooks.

V

Urgent: Reports are filtering in of chapbooks posing as real books. They can be identified by the extravagance of their blurbs and surplus of pages containing words but no content. These may look like real books, feel like real books, even smell like real books. Do not be fooled – you can put your hand right through them.

VI

Fun Fact: In some lightless, dung-smeared regions of the world, chapbooks are actually considered a delicacy!

The two greatest lines in American poetry, ever, period.

2005-10-30T00:59:00.000-04:00

Fuck you my bitches.
I will love you always.

-from "Directions for a Performance" by Tim Van Dyke

Excerpt from in-progress collab with Marcus Slease

2005-10-29T16:03:00.000-04:00

I think, now, we should all introduce our selves by name. His name is Marcus and his name is Brian. We can go counter-clockwise but it’s just the opposite and doesn’t really forge a new world. I decided to write with a faint blue pencil. I decided to write with what lines the question. Someone else’s story is my story. My father is away in Belfast and was born 17 years before I was born.
My father ... was born before I was born.
My father . . . is my father.
When I was young I wore a yellow uniform.
When I was young I wore a yellow uniform with LFC.
LFC means you’ll never walk alone.

**

When I was goony I earned a walleye minor with LFC.
When I was goony I was a willowy omnivore.
My ratchet is my rehab. My ether was orb deform, I was orb. My ether is yawed in deltas and was knob 17 scary before I was norm. Someone else’s torso is my ascot. I duded to exit with what sinned the nastier. I deduced errata with a taxing élan. We can go round and lock eyes but it’s just the expositor and doesn’t yell ergo a new doll.
His exam is scram and his exam is rib.
I chant, now, we ghouls all aced orating ourselves by man.

Flarfariffic

2005-10-16T15:19:00.000-04:00

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Defective Grids

2005-10-16T14:21:00.000-04:00

Paddy's Gone

2005-10-12T13:45:00.000-04:00

Antony & the Johnsons are releasing another single on Secretly Canadian - "You are My Sister", the duet with Boy George from I Am a Bird Now. The exciting news is that Salon.com is offering one of the B-sides, a new song called "Paddy's Gone", as a free download. I have a review of the song coming out on Pitchfork soon, so I won't talk about it here at the risk of replicating what I'm going to say there. I will say that "Paddy's Gone" is astonishly lovely, just Antony's voice and piano. For listeners who found "Hope There's Someone" so stunning that the rest of the album, no matter how gorgeous it was, just couldn't live up, this is the song you've been waiting for.

Sex, Love, Machines

2005-10-04T13:45:00.000-04:00

That's right - sex, love, machines. It might refer to the Sybian Orgasm Machine or Death From Above 1979. But in this case, it's the first volume of Allyssa Wolf's new online editorial gambit, Ghost Play. This volume features some ridonkulous flarf parody by George Medford, some maniacally brilliant musings by Julian Semilian and Alexandra K, and two poems from my F7: A Timid Etude & An Ugly Baby in a Sexy Dress. The former is a frippery; the latter has a darker history. It's a flarf poem that came out so ugly, so misogynistic and vile, that I had to destroy it. I deleted the file and emptied the recycle bin. But like the bad penny, a hard copy turned up in my desk; it snuck back into the manuscript, and now, into Ghost Play. Read w/ caution, it's some toxic junk.

A bunch of fresh jawns

2005-10-03T16:03:00.000-04:00

I usually let my sizzle lurk in the links a la derecha, but today I'm doing everything in my power to procrastinate on my deadlines. One of those abstracted days, when the sunlight seems hard and flat, and accomplishing anything, unlikely. So here's some stuff:

First off, Amy King recently solicited the Lucifer Poetics peeps for their favorite short poems. She's compiled them into a pretty sweet anthology that you can read heah. I selected Joshua Clover's "The Autumn Alphabets (3)" and several short, genre-bending pieces from John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Good reading for short attentions spans.

Second, WARNING: F7 has infiltrated the mainstream. Or is, at least, circling it warily. Check out my flarfy sestina about Paris Hilton and George Bush on McSweeney's heah.

What the shit, how 'bout one more: Heah's me on those crazy face-melting Swedes, Dungen, doing what they do best, i.e. melting total face.

The Cat-Piano

2005-10-01T15:46:00.000-04:00

I first encountered the cat-piano in Donald Barthelme's story "Shower of Gold" and immediately became capitvated by the idea for reasons that remain unclear to this day. Here's the pertinent passage from "Shower of Gold":

That night a tall foreign-looking man with a switchblade big as a butcher knife open in his hand walked into the loft without knocking and said "Good evening, Mr. Peterson, I am the cat-piano player, is there anything you'd particularly like to hear?" "Cat-piano?" Peterson said, gasping, shrinking from the knife. "What are you talking about? What do you want?" A biography of Nolde slid from his lap to the floor. "The cat-piano," said the visitor, "is an instrument of the devil, a diabolical instrument. You needn't sweat quite so much," he added, sounding aggrieved. Peterson tried to be brave. "I don't understand," he said. "Let me explain," the tall foreign-looking man said graciously. "The keyboard consists of eight cats - the octave - encased in the body of the instrument in such a way that only their heads and forepaws protrude. The player presses upon the appropriate paws, and the appropriate cats respond - with a kind of shriek. There is also provision made for pulling their tails. A tail-puller, or perhaps I should say tail player" (he smiled a disingenuous smile) "is stationed at the rear of the instrument, where the tails are. At the correct moment the tail-puller pulls the correct tail. The tail-note is of course quite different from the paw-note and produces sounds in the upper register. Have you ever seen such an instrument, Mr. Peterson?" "No, and I don't believe it exists," Peterson said heroically. "There is an excellent early seventeenth-century engraving by Franz van der Wyngaert, Mr. Peterson, in which a cat-piano appears. Played, as it happens, by a man with a wooden leg. You will observe my own leg." The cat-piano player hoisted his trousers and a leglike contraption of wood, metal and plastic appeared. "And now, would you like to make a request? 'The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian'? The 'Romeo and Juliet' overture? 'Holiday for Strings'?" "But why?" Peterson began. "The kitten cries for milk, Mr. Peterson. And whenever a kitten cries, the cat-piano plays." "But it's not my kitten," Peterson said reasonably. "It's just a kitten that wished itself on me. I've been trying to give it away. I'm not sure it's still around. I haven't seen it since the day before yesterday." The kitten appeared, looked at Peterson reproachfully, and then rubbed itself against the cat-piano player's mechanical leg. "Wait a minute!" Peterson exclaimed. "This thing is rigged! That cat hasn't been here in two days. What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do?" "Choices, Mr. Peterson, choices. You chose that kitten as a way of encountering that which you are not, that is to say, kitten. An effort on the part of the pour-soi to-" "But it chose me!" Peterson cried, "the door was open and the first thing I knew it was lying in my bed, under the Army blanket. I didn't have anything to do with it!" The cat-piano player repeated his disingenuous smile. "Yes, Mr. Peterson, I know, I know. Things are done to you, it is all a gigantic conspiracy. I've heard the story a hundred times. But the kitten is here , is it not? The kitten is it not?" Peterson looked at the kitten, which was crying huge tigerish tears into its empty dish. "Listen, Mr. Peterson," the cat-piano player said, "listen!" The blade of his immense knife jumped back into the handle with a twack! And the hideous music began.

As I said, I'm still not sure why the cat-piano exerts such a powerful thrall over my imagination. Upon first reading the story, I took it as invention, and, being prone to love most any product of Barthelme's prodigious imagination, I turned the concept over and over in my mind. (To place the incident in context, the protagonist, Peterson, has agreed to appear on a television show where people debase themselves for money - the always prescient Barthelme's accurate prediction of reality television almost forty years before the fact.) I thought it was a wonderful fictive device, a chimera allegorically soundtracking Peterson's (a medicore artist) encroaching dread. I've toyed with it in differnt ways for years. I tried to sell the Pitchfork editors on an article about the history of that most diabolical of instruments (nothing doing, of course). And I wrote this pretty mediocre sestina about the Cat-Piano player:

The Song of Remnants (after Donald B.)

A dim room full of apparitions. I perceived a blade,
Absurdly oversized, flashing in the darkness. It played
Tremulous airs like a conductor’s wand. The kitten
Mewed invisibly beneath the dancing knife. Mewed love
And violence like they were harmony. Twinned music
In different keys - major, minor. Other scenery began

To emerge. Empty dish. A tall, foreign man began
To nuzzle the kitten’s soft skull. Dandling a switchblade.
A voice, bereft of impression; a soulless verbal music.
Cheshire Cat grin, hanging. "I am the Cat-Piano Player.
We’ve business. Where one sets the sum of what he loves
Against anathema, I play the song of remnants. Where a cat

Cries for milk, the Cat-Piano Player plays." "But this cat!"
I protested in vain. "It just showed up one day. I began
To feed it milk saucers; it’s true. I’d lost someone I loved;
I needed something to save. Not my fault!" The blade,
I warily eyed. "But sir," intoned the Cat-Piano Player,
"The kitten is here. It cries for milk, doesn’t it? My music

Is what you are owed for your bad faith, for my music
Is the music of imbalanced scales." Purring low, the kitten
Approached me, eyes wet with accusation. The Player
Cleared his throat, and a long, squat lectern stand began
To inscribe its planes on the dark. He gestured with the blade.
"I’ll explain the Katzenklavier," his voice filled with love.

His ears winged out grotesquely like the handles of a loving
Cup, as if his ghastly song required weird hearing. "The music
This device most felicitously yields is dread, that slow blade.
Its body is a wooden case enclosing within eight cats –
The octave, arranged from lowest pitch to highest." I began
To count: sixteen paws jutted from one side, the playful

Twitch of eight tails on the other. The Cat-Piano Player
Moved his lips with mine and smirked. "Fading Lover,"
He chided, "be brave! We are nearly through." He began
To move toward the instrument on lengthy legs. "The music
Is fashioned by palpating the paws and tails of the cats,
Which emit various tones. Now sir, listen!" The blade

Disappeared into the blade sheath. The Cat-Piano Player
Bowed. The kitten purred lovingly as he cracked his knuckles.
I covered my ears in vain, and the hideous music began.

"Shower of Gold" was one of the first Barthelme stories I ever read, and as I plowed through the rest of his work, I began to realize how deeply he drew from obscure histories and folklore. A little internet research soon revealed the cat-piano was historical fact (or the idea of it was, at least), the stuff of fairy tales come to life, and this only increased its allure. Here's Richard Dorsett on a passage from Agnes Repplier's 1939 book The Fireside Sphinx:

From the chapter "Persecution":

"To Brussels is due the unenviable distinction of having produced the first cat organ, in 1549. This triumph of ingenuity was designed to lend merriment to the street pageant in honor of Philip the Second, and is described by Juan Cristoval, a Spaniard in attendance upon the King.

"'The organ,' says Cristoval, 'was carried on a car, with a great bear for the musician. In place of pipes, it had twenty cats separately confined to narrow cases, from which they could not stir. Their tails were tied to cords attached to the keyboard of the organ. When the bear pounded the keys, the cords were jerked, and this pulled the tails of the cats, and made them mew in bass or treble notes, according to the nature of the airs.'

"Such an invention could have afforded, at best, but doubtful entertainment; yet the cat organ was so widely appreciated that German humourists undertook to alter and improve it; and after a time a choice variety of instruments were constructed, in all of which cats were induced by some well applied torture to furnish forth the necessary music."

(((Richard Dorsett remarks: I like that little touch, "German humourists;" it says so much about that nationality.)))

(((bruces remarks: see also Working Note 13.6, "Cat Piano and Tiger Organ," in which cats were alleged to have been whacked by needle-sharp piano keys, rather than having their tails yanked. There was no mention of a cat-piano- playing bear in the other account, and the bear, somehow, seems even less plausible than the cats. One wonders what this bear was supposed to do with his keyboard skills during the off season.)))

And here's a post from Dave Walsh, quoting various sources on the cat-piano, the donkey chorus and the pig piano:

"In keeping with Darnton's methodology and subject matter we might want to look at the cat piano. Athanasius Kircher first wrote about it in his great *Musurgia universalis* of 1650, and it has reappeared occasionally since. In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat's tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy [1].

"The cat piano confirms Darnton's discovery that most early modern Europeans found the torture of cats funny. It also illustrates Kircher's fascination with the relationship between the art of music and the natural production of animal sounds. But for us it is an instrument that has mercifully been forgotten."

"The cat piano was not unique. Schott proposed a donkey chorus, and Pierre Bayle tells us that the abbe de Beigne built a pig piano at the order of Louis XI. In every case the animal instrument was created to entertain a noble patron."

Here's an excerpt from Robert J. Richards's Rhapsodies on a Cat-Piano, or Johann Christian Reil and the Foundations of Romantic Psychiatry:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a book on the treatment of insanity appeared, the analysis and prescriptions of which would help establish psychiatry as a modern discipline in Germany. The book was highly original and, even to an eye accustomed to the depths and shadows of the period, quite extraordinary. Consider, for example, the author's recommendation for treating a patient who, in constant reverie, could not fix attention on relevant external objects: the dreamer should be forced to listen to a piece played on a Katzenclavier--a cat-piano (fig. 1). One would voice the instrument with suitable animals, which would then:
be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument--when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expression on their faces and the play of these animals--must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.

This proposal should, I think, awaken the modern reader out of historical complacency as much as the real device was supposed to startle the madman out of a comparable conceptual lassitude. Is this, then, an example of the past as foreign territory, where a distant mentalité ruled, where what for us would be the perfume of the bizarre was for them only the air of the ordinary? Or is it merely a joke? Or is it maybe a bit of both?

Apparently, Wikipedia wasn't buying it:

Catpiano
Why did you delete the article on Catpiano? I know it seems as a hoax but it's not, atleast it is true that it was an idea to cure insanity since it is mentioned in several german books from the time. Most information also points that it was in fact used in practical application. Use a search on google with these keywords (cat-piano, katzenclavier, insanity) you'll find that my information does not come out of thin air and is not a hoax. My article may be small and does not contain A4's of information but it is a small subject and it isn't much more to write about it and I seen several pages on WP that is equally small or smaller than my catpiano article. And does not conform to any of the WP vandalism criteria. Next time you blame an article of Vandalism please EXPLAIN why and pinpoint your opinion to a WP Vandalism criteria.

There's an interesting description of the smell-organ accompanying this cat-piano mention (also mentions the Dead Media project, from which much of my cat-piano info is culled):

We all have a smell organ. We call it a nose. Our proboscis; schnauze; or honker. For Dr. Septimus Piesse, a French chemist, the Smell Organ was something else, however. He believed that simply listening to the enrapturing tones of a church organ was not enough. Much more inspiring and thrilling, he felt, was to experience an entirely new organ: One that translates an opus into an odor.

Can you imagine? Dr. Piesse carefully plotted a range of notes, and assigned heavier odors to the low notes, and sharp, pungent odors to the high notes. A bass clef D would emit the smell of vanilla, while a treble clef B would shoot out peppermint. He hoped that the odors would blend harmoniously in the soft, dreamy compositions; while the smells would be disagreeable in more discordant works. It gave whole new meaning to the expression, "This music stinks."

Another innovative instrument was developed in Brussels back in 1549, and was designed to be played by a bear. Called the Cat Piano, and played by a musical bear, it was an instrument in which there were 20 cats, each with a cord tied to its tail. As the bear pounded the keys, the cords were pulled, yanking the cats’ tails and making them meow and hollar. (How about that, Bev, or Ann?) There was obviously no Brussels chapter of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

These are a couple of old examples of a very contemporary phenomenon: Cool junk that fascinates us for a while and then fades. A new research group called the Dead Media Project is studying this stuff and posting their findings on the Internet. It appears that we are now living in the "Golden Age" of Cool Junk.

Here's another great Dead Media excerpt, Richard Kadrey quoting LES MEDECINES DE LA FOLIE by Dr. Pierre Morel and Claude Quetel and Martin Roberts quoting David Toop's OCEAN OF SOUND: AETHER TALK, AMBIENT SOUND AND IMAGINARY WORLDS on the Man-Tiger Organ:

Cat Piano:

"What should we say about the cat piano? The idea that such an instrument could have existed gives a lot to think about, even if it was built on an experimental basis: a piano where strings are replaced by cats, each of them giving a different note. "It seems that Father Kirchner, a German Jesuit of the XVIIth century with an interest in musical things,gave the first description of this weird and cruel instrument.

"'Not long ago,' says he, 'an actor, as ingenious as illustrious , built such an instrument to cure the melancholy of a great Prince. He gathered cats of differing size and therefore in the pitch of their voices. He enclosed them in a basket specially built for this purpose, so their tails, coming out through holes, were held in tubes. He added keys with thin needles instead of hammers, and installed the cats according to their voices in such a way that each key would correspond to the tailof an animal, and he put the instrument in a suitable place for the pleasure of the Prince. Then he played it,producing chords corresponding to the mewings of the animals. Indeed the keys pressed by the fingers of themusician, by trotting the tails of the cats, would enrage the poor animals and make them scream with a high or low pitch, producing a melody that would make people laugh or even incite mice to dance.'"

Man-Tiger-Organ:

"Of all the noise instruments in history, one of the least equivocal in its intent is Tipu's Tiger. Captured in India by the British army after the defeat and death by bullet and bayonet of Tipu Sultan in 1799, this large and amazing object is now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. "The most succinct and evocative description was written by an employee of the East India Company:

"'This piece of Mechanism represents a Royal Tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European. There are some barrels in imitation of an Organ, within the body of the Tyger, and a row of Keys of natural Notes. The sounds produced by the Organ are intended to resemble the Cries of a person in distress intermixed with the roar of a Tyger. The machinery is so contrived that while the Organ is playing, the hand of the European is often lifted up, to express his helpless and deplorable condition.'

"John Keats saw Tipu's Tiger in the East India Company's offices and later referred to it in a satire he wrote on the Prince Regent: 'that little buzzing noise,Whate'er your palmistry may make of it, Comes from a play-thing of the Emperor's choice, From a Man-Tiger-Organ, prettiest of his toys.' "And when the tiger was first exhibited in the newly-opened Victoria and Albert Museum, the public cranked the handle to make it roar with such sadistic, joyful frequency that students in the adjacent library were driven half-mad by the distraction.

"In a technical analysis of the instrument, Henry Willis speculated that 'the intended method of use for the keyboard organ was to run the knuckles up and down the scale to produce the effects of a screaming man being killed by a tiger.'Because the design and materials suggest a European rather than an Indian maker, Willis suggested that the tiger and its victim were constructed by either a malicious Frenchman or a renegade Englishman. "But whoever made this wonderfully macabre sculpture, Tipu certainly enjoyed it. He was obsessed with tigers, for one thing; for another, as a Muslim whose wealth and land had been plundered by the colonialists, he hated the British. Reportedly, he used to circumcise them when he took prisoners. His walls were decorated with scenes depicting soldiers being dismembered, crushed by elephants, eaten by tigers and other fates too obscene for the British major who saw them to form a verbal description.

After approaching the cat-piano abstractly for so long, I've decided that it has to be made concrete. I have a certain friend with whom I'm always coming up with hairbrained schemes; we actually follow through on only a fraction of them. Our most recent, and one that I hope we'll follow through on, is to build a cat-piano. It wouldn't be a difficult thing, the instrument, particularly in Barthelme's incarnation (where the paws are pressed, and no levers with nails need be devised), is very simple. We'd probably display the thing as an art object, but the desire to place live cats in it just once, without harming them, will be too strong to ignore. But holy shit, can you imagine the scene if we booked a show at a local club and played actual cat-piano compositions? A mysterious spate of neighborhood-cat abductions, PETA protests, jaded hipsters slack-jawed with awe! The first Canadian post-rock ensemble to bust out at a cat-piano during one of their protracted crescendos will immediately become my favorite band of all time.

Aerial Views of Evolving Continents

2005-09-25T18:31:00.000-04:00

How We are Disappointed

2005-09-20T13:44:00.000-04:00

I really wanted to like this book.

Lunar Park

2005-09-19T20:40:00.000-04:00

"Ive decided against wearing masks." - Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

"Whatever, Bret." - me

I just got the new Bret Easton Ellis book, Lunar Park, in the mail today, and so far, I'm really enjoying it. But there are a few factors that are keeping me from enjoying it as much as I'd like. One is that my ARC came in late, and now I've got what seems an absurdly small amount of time to turn over a review. Another - and this is an ongoing problem - is that as a critic and a creative writer, I'm doubly damned when trying to immerse myself in fiction. It's like a special effects designer trying to get lost in a blockbuster. The Critic in me is stopping to take notes, trying to build an argument even as he reads - and the fact that this novel is such a complex mixture of truth and fiction (though Ellis claims that "every word is true") only adds to the distancing, since it seems imperative yet impossible (at this early stage, anyway) to separate them. The Writer in me, of course, is looking for things to steal, trying to figure out how the experience of this novel could help his own work, mentally deriding certain tics while feeling a bit jealous of others. And somewhere in the middle, the small voice of the Reader wishes to just get lost in a good story.

So this is sort of a psuedo-meta-memoir, although it's nowhere near as precious and gimmicky as that description makes it sound. It's engrossing from the first page and stays that way through the 25th or so, as Ellis takes us on a whirlwind tour through his sordid, glamorous past. It's a lurid, splashy tell-all, no doubt with all the blind spots and simplifications such things entail (not to mention the wealth of details that are entirely fictional), and it's mesmerizing. Ellis begins by analyzing the first sentences of each of his books and states a desire to get back to the taut simplicity of his earlier novels, away from the torturous sprawl of Glamorama. He introduces us to his father, to whom the book is dedicated, painting him as an abusive, manipulative and ultimately cynical person, who imparted to young Bret the worldview that would inform his books. The father who always derided his literary ambitions until, at age 21, Ellis published the novel he'd written in college, Less Than Zero, which became an instant hit, and, moreover, the uneasy voice of a generation. But instead of accepting his father's sudden and opportunistic embrace, Ellis threw himself into the Scene, and barely made it out alive. The Rules of Attraction, another novel about "wealthy, alienated, sexually ambiguous students", was written during his senior year at Camden, and it's interesting to note that Ellis calls it an "indictment of ... nothing, really..." Particularly after the publication of American Psycho, Ellis was equally demonized and deified - some hailed the novel as a penetrating satire, others blasted it as a glorification of materialism and misogyny, when the reality seems to be that Ellis was simply writing what he knew, filtered through the jaded worldview he'd learned since birth. But again, it's tough to separate fact from fiction in this mirror world that Ellis is creating: While many of the broad strokes ring true, the details are fabricated, not the least of these being Ellis's relationship with the imaginary actress Jayne Dennis, who even has her own website, and seems to be fooling some folks (but to be charitable, maybe they were just playing along). So anyway, this fictionalized Ellis continued behaving badly as his fame mounted, and by the time of the Glamorama world tour, he's overweight, strung out on heroin and crack, broke, alone, and completely out of control. He impregnated Dennis and refused to acknowledge the child.

This all leads up to the novel proper, which finds Ellis married to Dennis, attempting to raise his child and another she had with someone else, getting clean (not really), living in the suburbs, terrified of boredom but slowly realizing he's happy. And as we all know, horror stories must begin with an idyll to defile. "Every word is true" Ellis says with the directness of all unreliable narrators, then sets about detailing the events that would so quickly unravel his newfound stability. There's a golden retriever named Victor (still loves recycling those character names) who seems to recognize that Ellis isn't as reformed as he lets on, there's a giant Halloween party with naked co-eds and a coke-snorting Jay McInerney, there's Ellis giving booze to his medicated prepubescent son, there's a series of weird events - flickering sconces, a Terby doll (some sort of grotesque Furby parody) that seems to be coming to life and menacing Dennis's daughter, there's a stranger at the party dressed as Patrick Bateman that seems to imply Ellis's old life isn't as far behind him as he'd like to believe, there's an in-progress novel within the novel (a pornographic thrilled called "Teenage Pussy" about a "young, hip Manhattan bachelor's erotic life," "elegantly hardcore and interspersed with jaunty bouts of my laconic humor," and best of all, "You could read the novel either as a satire of 'the new sexual obnoxiousness' or as the simple story of an average guy who enjoys defiling women with his lust."). Furniture is being subtly, ominously rearragned, Ellis is hilarious at depicting himself as an inept father striking notes of indignation and insouciance at all the wrong times, like an alien who's studied and perfected human gestures but hasn't figured out when to deploy them. I can't wait to read the rest.

For more on Lunar Park, check out Brandon Stosuy's review in the Village Voice.

Desert City / Blue Door - don't sleep...

2005-09-14T21:11:00.000-04:00

I'm a Poet and I Don't Even Know It

2005-09-07T14:39:00.000-04:00

I really like poetry a lot, I write poems myself
But I don't have a website yet. Yippee!

You too can be a poet! What is Poetry?
Cinquain Poetry | Free Verse Poetry | Funny Poetry | Haiku Poetry

I’m poet and I know it Hope I don't blow it.
Anyone know how much it costs to press a flexi disc?

“Gotta agree to some degree, at the same time
I’m not sure I fully buy into the whole co-dependency” said Buster.

“You’ve got a rhyme every time,” Muffy added.
Arthur raised his hand. “I know a poem he wrote.”

"I don't know if I’m good poet.
Yes, I’m fan of TS Eliot. So what?

Even when people tell you are good, you still
don't really believe it," Powell said. "It's like kissing –

Ha!! I’m getting sick and tired of wasting all my time
And trying to read between your lines

I can’t help but feel that way about poetry.
I don't read much of it now.

I’d love to see a close up of those rocks and waves …
Don’t know how those things get there.

I think the cold medicine is going to my head…

I don't write poetry. I tried it once
and blew my trick knee out right there

I don't know the rules on the various
young women who don't know their worth.

I know so many. ... I’m a poet.
I just find them there in the morning

Suicide, it's a suicide, bada-bye-bye

2005-09-05T19:47:00.000-04:00

wtf Fence

Letter to the President

2005-09-04T16:04:00.000-04:00

While we'll never know for certain if the President is checking for music and poetry blogs, we can hope. This letter, along with a batch of the same from other poets, will be sent to the White House, so that we may receive form letters and, perhaps, autographed glossies. The futility of it all is almost breathtaking. Still, we try.

22 August 2005

Dear Mr. President:

I would like to speak with you about Jesus Christ. I know that He is your favorite philosopher, and I agree that the wisdom of Jesus is still of value in the modern age. However, I am concerned with the wide gulf between your stated admiration of Jesus’ teachings and your administration’s policies. I thought about writing you a poem, since I am a poet, but this is an important matter and I would prefer to speak directly.

“It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle,” Jesus said, “than for a rich man to get into heaven.” That Jesus said this and meant it literally is a point with which I assume you must agree. Now sir, I am a reasonable person. I do not expect the rich to give away all of their money and start wearing sackcloth. I recognize that it is necessary for America to amass vast quantities of resources in order to maintain its global empire. That said, I wonder how you reconcile America’s stated quest for world dominance, both social and economic, with Jesus’ teaching against the amassing of wealth. I do not expect you to live in poverty, or even stark simplicity. But I cannot understand how a man who so admires Jesus could instate domestic economic policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I cannot understand how a man who so admires Jesus could strip the resources of poorer nations to make his already-affluent country even more affluent, to the detriment of people who are struggling to eat. “What you do unto the least of my children, you do unto me,” Jesus said. Mr. President, I am not being glib when I ask if you would take food from Jesus’ mouth so that Americans might drive even larger, more lavish SUVs. If we take the Bible as a literal document of Jesus’ teachings, it seems perfectly clear that he would strongly disapprove of many of your administration’s policies. I would like to know how you reconcile your words with your actions, in your own heart and mind. I am trying to understand.

Mr. President, as you know, one of the primary, most fundamental aspects of the teachings of Jesus was “Love your neighbor as thyself.” I am concerned that this tenet is being paid lip service by your administration and by the mainstream media outlets that support it, but not observed. I believe that Jesus must weep to see how his teachings have been twisted and perverted to suit the whims of corporate America. We are now seeing a proliferation of “mega-churches,” which spend money on flat-screen TVs and extravagant buildings that might be better allocated to outreach missions for the needy. Jesus rarely gets angry in the Bible, one of the only times he did was when he found the money-changers in the temple. But now the money-changers aren’t just using the church, they’re running it, and they’re preaching Jesus’ word in a twisted version that promises unending wealth for those who strive for it (which usually means those who already have it). What a sick parody of the word of the Son of God! Mr. Bush, being a Christian, I know that you must be concerned about this development. I bring it to your attention in case you are unaware that your administration and many powerful religious institutions are corrupting Jesus’ teachings of charity and compassion, remaking them as golden icons of personal gain. I’m sure you’ll agree that this must stop, before Christianity loses all meaning and becomes another corporate brand.

Sincerely,

Brian Howe

Pitchfork batting averages

2005-08-30T13:07:00.000-04:00

This guy has taken the time to compile averages of Pitchfork reviewers' ratings. He admits himself that it's statistically flawed, since he takes the first 40 results in our search engine for writers who have a ton of reviews (that would include me), but I was still fascinated to see it. It would be cool if we did a statistically accurate, in-house breakdown like this, to see which writers are harshest, find out who seems to prefer indie rock to hip-hop, &c. Could actually be very useful. I'm pleased to see I'm neither the harshest nor the nicest, falling right around the middle of the scale. There are other things to consider - Plagenhoef, for instance, has such a high average because as an editor, he writes fewer reviews, and when he does, it's generally something he likes and wants to bring attention to. Still, great project.

This comes on the heels of yet another slanted, sloppy NYT article about the site. I understand that plenty of people have axes to grind against Pitchfork, what's shocking is how often this grinding takes place in respected journalistic organs. I'm not looking for a puff piece, but I would like to see an article that engages with the site on a realistic, modern level, instead of making snide comments that haven't been valid vis-a-vis Pitchfork for at least a couple years. This article, at least, has some kind things to say about our writing. But check out this gem:

But in a downloaded, mashed-up, genre-crossing musical age, Pitchfork may fall outside the mainstream. Craig Marks is the editor in chief of Blender, which covers a lot of musical real estate, not just indie rock but also rap, industrial and pop.

"With us, it's about the songs," he said. "Pitchfork is like this utopian hippie outpost, where people are pure and bohemian and have great values. Their implicit message is that there is a huge corrupt recording industry and they have decided to band together and fight the good fight."

Right, Pitchfork only covers indie music and hates the mainstream - maybe three to five years ago. This is just plain lazy. Even a cursory read of our content over the last couple years will reveal a bevy of mainstream rap and pop reviews, as well as loads of dance music and electronica. In fact, if there is a Pitchfork bias, I'd venture to say that it's in favor of mainstream music these days, as the site reacts against the righteous indie stance with which it began, and which so many articles frustratingly refuse to acknowledge is a thing of the past, focusing on outdated sterotypes instead. (Not to mention the fact that our stable of writers has expanded broadly in terms of size and tastes, to the point where we have someone on staff who's qualified to review most any genre you can think of.) And really - industrial? Then there's this:

Much discussion on the site is about who has sold out and who has not, about how the Mainstream Media is clueless about music (guilty as charged, in my case, anyway) and who is actually down for the cause.

This is just a gross inaccuracy. The person who wrote this article either hasn't read the site in years, or they managed to only consult the archive in doing their research. The Mainstream Media is clueless about music? We just dropped a 9.5 on Kanye West (much deserved, BTW). This is not an isolated incident, mainstream rap and pop draw high ratings on Pitchfork regularly. Its' widely acknowledged that "indie" is a hollow set of signifiers, and while it's fine to like indie music, it shouldn't be brought to bear critically. Pitchfork is going or has gone popist. When will this be acknowledged?

While so much user-generated content on the Web is tendentious and full of flabby partisan attacks, Pitchfork steps up to the plate with a rigorous rating system, serious (if idiosyncratic) critical standards and a roster of 40 or so talented young writers.

We're talented, sweet! But user-generated? Sorry, most of us are professional writers, at least part time. As in we write for professional publications, for money. You can't just log in to Pitchfork and write a review. This misinformation is in the New York Times, and I doubt we'll be seeing a correction notice.

It's great that we're getting all this press, and a lot of it at least grudgingly acknowledges our influence. But I've yet to see the definitive Pitchfork article that takes on our flaws (I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm saying they're too often identified with outdated information or just wrongly) and our merits in a way that's balanced, current and realistic. Is that so much to ask?

Fascicle

2005-08-28T18:17:00.000-04:00

It's here. And it's fucking tremendous, literally and otherwise. Prepare to read until your eyeballs fall out.

Here Comes Everybody

2005-08-24T15:10:00.000-04:00

An interview with yrs truly just went up at Lance Phillips' awesome poet interview blog, Here Comes Everybody. I've long enjoyed HCE and am thrilled to be a part of it. Check it out.

Some Windows

2005-08-20T16:23:00.000-04:00

Status Ain't Hood

2005-08-16T13:56:00.000-04:00

Tom Breihan goes live on his new Village Voice blog, Status Ain't Hood. A live grime roundup, verdict: Roll Deep sux, Kano rox. Get you some.

Creation Myth

2005-08-11T23:41:00.000-04:00

Lesion, jamb and skaldic jaw fluxion idiom tidier; uremia odium awe.

Bite wampum dice, skim limit troika calm? Drafty retch Yule junkman sues:

a dive, a poker, and a caddy. Red coifs ouch! Zest radii loamy art duel,

iced yuck fiche fib. Gucci waste o.k. chunks (nudes eddied fake inkjet pies),

city tight mob juju. Xerox dung, “Seek life mix sigma dimes put dude dander.”

Ice soaked cave dive – decoy dope, cube speed vendor / slink mire yeoman prim child.

Ides’ eye, ogle do moist bodice, mice, died vodka yokel lotus? You orifice:

eyed cry wide, a paved myth i.e. coke thug echo.

It is more than enough to say cove, swarthy kiosk dial,

tufted nerve pocks sick battue earwax.

The Darkness and the Match

2005-08-08T13:56:00.000-04:00

One moment, you are laying in bed with your significant other, watching television. The next, you find yourself in utter darkness. It's not that the lights have gone out, or that you've gone blind, or that you've been mystically or technologically "teleported" somewhere. (You may well have been teleported, or maybe not, this is not the issue). What's important is that suddenly, you are enveloped in darkness, in a space that is not your bedroom. You stand on a floor, hard and flat, with no particular texture. The air is perfectly still, tasteless and odorless, lacking qualities. It's so dark you have to touch your body to affirm that you still exist as a physical entity. You do. You have not yet moved, since for all you know, the terrain might be treacherous. You wave your arms, encountering no obstruction. You stand still and wait for something to happen. Something happens. A flare of light pierces the darkness, somewhere to your left. (Lacking context, the actual distance is impossible to determine.) Presently, you realize that the flare of light is a lit match. You know this because of how it plays, and how it wavers slightly, as if held in a hand. (The match is not bright enough to illuminate this theoretical hand. You intuit the hand because of the match's spatial position, which seems to be about eye level, and by its gentle waver.) You watch as the match begins to scroll to the right, slightly bobbing and guttering. At a certain point, somewhere to your right, the match stops moving. Do you assume that the distance the match has covered is the width of the room, beginning at one wall and proceeding to the other? Do you assume that it is safe to walk from where you are to where the match now hovers? Who is holding the match? As you weigh these questions, the match goes out, plunging you again into utter darkness. Reaching into your pocket, you find a single match.

What I meant to say

2005-08-08T11:31:00.000-04:00

What I meant to say in my last post is that apparently, I was not the first to think up the name Slatherpuss. The main difference is that Henry Jones is selling his Slatherpuss for $1,200, while I'm just giving the shit away, so you make the call. True, his is a lenticular. But if you stare at mine for long enough, I guarentee you something or other will pop out.

If so:

2005-08-08T00:57:00.000-04:00

Slatherpuss in a field of pink daisies was first created as a diarama where ...
Slatherpuss was create for the lenticular medium as a hyper detailed world. ...
Slatherpuss in a field of pink daisies in 4-D lenticular. ... dimensionality and animation. Slatherpuss is an animated 3D character Slatherpuss. An ugly baby in a sexy dress ... Slatherpuss hearts Michel Houellebecq.
Thursday, July 14, 2005. 11 kHz.
Queer tux polo jug dais scab amok jug dad wert yoyo polka heft sass coven amok ...Previous message: [Lucipo] Slatherpuss; Next message: [Lucipo] poetry podcasts; Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ...I've just posted this on my blog, http://slatherpuss.blogspot.com/

Random Media Server

2005-08-04T12:21:00.000-04:00

My friend Greg Barbera just sent me a link to the Random Media Server with the following explanation:

"It's called Random Media Server. The site generates this stuff automatically, apparently, "scraping" stuff off the WWW. The guy who designed it is Bill Luoma. Below is a link to the live server itself. Click on it and take a look at what it generates for you. Every time you click on the link below, it will generate something different. Pretty fucking amazing."

RANDOM MEDIA SERVER

This is a cool thing. Here's a result I got from the Random Media Server:

"Fw: a chide's alphabet

Orgone Energy Posix shell. Users of brainf*cked shells such as csh should really consider using a proper shell. Published. Published. Do the request to any nameserver. Listen while I family and friends EPIPE all of us who knew her work; The image of that lovely face and bubbly personality will never be further from us than the late show . Do evil in return. THIS WEEK Mark Baker THIS WEEK Webmaster THIS WEEK,

Batman's problem. Also a new crime-fighter on the streets. problem CONTESTS Problem. Review service (Featuring the most popular requests each month, service (Featuring the most popular requests each month; a Video Review service (Featuring the most popular requests each month; the most popular requests each month, a Video Review service (Featuring the most popular requests each month Re: [ImitaPo] At War with that mysterious Enemy (fwd) Review service (Featuring the most popular requests each month. (Featuring the most popular requests each month, Really speak to people. That really speak to people. Communications that really speak to people. That really speak to people. after finding that some of the prisoners became more aggressive and agitated Mark Baker A Norwegian prison has stopped giving yoga sessions to inmates after finding that some of the prisoners became more aggressive and agitated. (AP. Norway (AP; has stopped giving yoga sessions to inmates after finding that some of the prisoners became more aggressive and agitated Rumor Has It Has stopped giving yoga sessions to inmates after finding that some of the prisoners became more aggressive and agitated. That some of the prisoners became more aggressive and agitated. is a Great Idea for Father's Day LeRouge Gift Subscription is a Great Idea for Father's Day, Gift Subscription is a Great Idea for Father's Day. Gift Subscription is a Great Idea for Father's Day; Is a Great Idea for Father's Day. because the buffer overflow in it got fixed (deactivated would be a more proper word, because the buffer overflow in it got fixed (deactivated would be a more proper word Colin the buffer overflow in it got fixed (deactivated would be a more proper word Dreadful Realization Server because the buffer overflow in it got fixed (deactivated would be a more proper word. Quake game ENOMSG quake, Project is a free software initiative to enhance the original Quake game. initiative to enhance the original Quake game, Quake game MPAA Project is a free software initiative to enhance the original Quake game."

Fuck. I think F7 just became obsolete.

F7 in Octopus

2005-08-02T13:30:00.000-04:00

Good news! Octopus Magazine's "New Poets" issue, which came out yesterday, includes 8 poems from my manuscript, F7 (for more on F7, see my previous post), as well as a terrific batch of work from my good friend Randall Williams. Thanks to Octopus editor Zachary Schomburg for putting together this exciting group of new voices, and for allowing F7 to stretch its legs in this expansive setting. And much gratitude to Tony Tost for his close reading, his lively (and very flattering!) introduction, and his general support. I don't want this to sound like an Oscar speech, but Tony, Ken Rumble, Randall, Todd Sandvik, Marcus Slease, Chris Vitiello, Patrick Herron, and many other members of Lucifer Poetics have been such an inspiration to me, by their guidance, friendship, talent, and dedication, that I can't imagine F7 existing without them. One love.

I read many of the poems included in Octopus on the just-completed Lucifer Poetics reading tour, and while I'd like to blog about the trip at length, the life of the freelance writer / menial laborer requires constant work to sustain. After five days on the road, I'm so deeply buried under emails and deadlines that I'll have to wait until the clusterfuck clears to hopefully mount a recap worthy of this excellent tour. Suffice it to say that the trip was a success on a number of levels. For one, it ran pretty much like clockwork, especially considering how loose and fast we played it with details like lodgings, directions and so on (a gaggle of teamsters didn't know what to make of us the morning after the Brooklyn reading, sprawled on a Williamsburg sidewalk with an atlas trying to figure out how to get to Ithaca and playing the ukelele). Two, we had a blast, meeting up with old friends and making new ones, enjoying incredible hospitality from the poetic communities and in general everywhere we went. In Baltimore, we got to spend some quality time with our good friends from the DC / Baltimore poetry scenes, and I kicked it with Tom Breihan on one of his final nights in B-more before heading to New York to start a fantastic new gig blogging for the Voice (congrats, Tom!). Besides enjoying monstrous hospitality from Molly (poet and owner of Molly's Bookstore, whose last name unfortunatley eludes me) and Linh Dinh, we met Philly punk rock legend Mikey Wild and weirded up the open mic at Ray's Happy Birthday Bar. Brooklyn was a social overload - got in some good face time with the Moistworks crew, Forker Brandon Stosuy and his girlfriend Jane, various old friends from Chapel Hill, and many others. But perhaps the most important aspect of the trip was that, because of the theatrical and collaborative nature of the readings we devised (my cell developed a sort of dramatic framework that we used to contrast and blend our individual work, tweaking and refining the process each night), we learned a hell of a lot about our own poetry and each other's. These were undoubtedly the best, most exciting and innovative readings we've ever done as a group, and it's certain that there will be more emphasis on collaboration in Lucipo's future. Here are some pictures that Greg Delisle took of the reading in Ithaca in the amazing space provided by the Lost Dog Cafe.

An elliptical treatise on F7

2005-07-25T20:48:00.000-04:00

This will probably be my last post until next week, because on Wednesday, I'll be setting out on a poetry reading tour with other members of Lucifer Poetics. The schedule is below:

Wednesday, July 27, 7pm:
Red Emma's Bookstore
800 St. Paul Street
Baltimore
410-230-0450
http://www.redemmas.org/

Thursday, July 28, 7 pm:
Molly's Cafe & Bookstore
1010 South 9th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147
(215) 923-3367
http://mollysbooks.com/opening.html

Friday, July 29, 6 pm:
Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 11211
(718) 302 - 3770
http://www.petescandystore.com/home2.html

Saturday, July 30, 7pm:
WEST END READING SERIES
Lost Dog Cafe & Lounge
Ithaca, NY

I'll be reading from my manuscript F7. In light of this, and the fact that within the next month or two, a couple things are happening that will dramatically enhance F7's visibility in the poetic community and the world at large, I'd like to expand upon some of F7's practical and theoretical dimensions. I will begin by describing its origin and its essential processes.

It's been said many times that a hundred monkeys with a hundred typewriters would eventually, by sheer chance, produce Shakespeare. More fascinating to me is the idea that these same monkeys would, with equal probability, produce great works that have not yet been written. Borges embodied this idea in a physical space in his Library of Babel, a great, seemingly infinite hive-like structure, filled with books that contain every possible permutation of language known to man. As a young man reading this story in the 21st century, it's natural to imagine the Library of Babel as a computer. As a writer and a human being, I find this idea both exhilarating and slightly terrifying: A powerful computer running through different permutations of language could, theoretically, eventually produce scientific and philosophical breakthoughs simply by chancing across the correct combination of words. This was the initial spark for F7 - I wanted to begin to exhume the shadow narratives latent in our technology, specifically, from the linguistic databases programmed into our machines, and generally, from the great unruly babble (Babel) of the Internet.

I began by simply typing meaningless clusters of letters, then using Microsoft Word's spellcheck function (which is triggered with the F7 key, hence the name of the manuscript) as a palette to determine which words would comprise the final poem. But I quickly discovered that typing random clusters is harder than it sounds - certain typing motions are so entrenched in my hands that I found myself accidentally typing actual words, or typing the same clusters over and over again. I then resorted to various methods to confound this programming, including turning the keyboard in different directions, misorienting my hands on the keys, crossing my hands at the wrist before typing, and devising various patterns in which to move over the keyboard. (An example of the last, entitled "11 kHz", can be found below on this blog.)

Then I began to look to classic forms to give these poems structure, and arrayed my nonsense language in the forms of sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, epistles, ballads, prose poems &c.

The next evolution of the process involved getting away from unwieldy clusters and creating a sort of nonsense language, interspersed with indefinite articles, that alluded to actual words and familiar syntactic patterns. The inital language in these poems is not unlike Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, and the end results, while still largely vacant of actual sense, bear echoes of these recognizable units just beneath the surface.

The next logical step, which I threw myself into with abandon, involved bastardizing famous texts like the pledge of allegiance and the Lord's prayer, either by purposefully mispelling the words, or by breaking them at various points, then extrapolating a new text with the spellchecker that still resonates with the original in various ways. The poems produced in this manner tend to elicit the strongest audience response, since there is something thrilling about recognizable text gradually emerging from such chaos, yet they are also the least true to the spirit of F7, which I'll describe later.

The process really expanded drastically from here, as I began to use online translators, text databases, Microsoft Word's thesaurus, outline and various other built in functions, and flarf (Googled words and phrases), often feeding several processes, one into the next, within a single poem. This is where I am in the process now. After poking and prodding at it for upwards of a year without really understanding exactly what I was doing, I feel it's nearly complete - complete, in the sense that I will have soon taken it as far as I'm willing or able, not in the sense of pursuing it to its ultimate end. At this point, I'm closer than I've ever been to a comprehensive theory of F7, which I'd like to relate in its inchoate, elliptical and probably subject-to-change state, here:

"A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is."
-John Cage

"An artifact is a mistake."
-Barrett Watten

F7 is akin to the works of the composer John Cage in numerous striking ways. For one, serial / chance operations are utilized to recede the ego, imagination, and experience of the creator, thus freeing words / sounds of an imposed value system and allowing for a more intense, less mediated experience. The emphasis is on the present moment of pure experience, not the past or future, and on the sheer being of the medium, not the influence of its creator. However, just as often as not, F7 fails in this regard - I, by accident (this is preferable, since F7 honors the accident), or by furtive choice, have found myself nudging the poems toward certain oblique, if pointed, statements about art, the academy, politics, and love.

Nevertheless, concerns of expressivity are de-emphasized. F7 denatures poetry by making no distinction between the planned effect and the accidental one, the "sonorous" tone and the "discordant", music or noise, poem or text. Any sound intoned at any point in space / time is part of universal music, the ongoing composition comprised of every sound ever made, past / present / future. Likewise, every word or sound (F7 sees no distinction between words and sounds) ever intoned, whatever its intention, is part of the ongoing poem of existence. F7 shows a tiny portion of this greater whole, being itself perhaps only a single "note" in the ongoing symphony. Ideas of truth, beauty, and other aesthetic concerns are de-emphasized so that a pure approximation of language in its raw state may be experienced. F7 has yet to attain complete unfetteredness, still busying itself with subverting established forms, locating musicality in chaos, discovering surprising logical imagery in irrational processes, &c. This intermediate phase is entirely necessary in reaching the theoretical point where language becomes pure form, pure sound, pure sense (meaning pure sensation, not logical sense), unconnected to any abstraction and existing in a singular, freestanding state.

Like the work of Cage, Gertrude Stein, and some Language poetry, F7 is democratic.At its most successful, no cues are included toward its interpretation, and no moral imperatives, so that interpretation is left entirely to the reader, the way that many Cage compositions simply set up parameters, defined by chance operations, that serve as otherwise unfettered fields of play. F7 is also democratic and collective in another sense - the spellchecker used as a palette was compiled by a group of persons unknown to the author, and the source material from the flarf poems may have been composed by anyone in the world. Anyone who puts a piece of text onto the Internet assumes potential co-authorship of F7. Anyone who has spoken a phrase or performed an action that, at whatever remote end of a chain of causality, caused someone else to put text onto the Internet, is a co-author of F7. When we see how language forms and travels collectively, we see that F7 is authored by the entire world, while I simply happen to discern, organize and record it.

Some poems in F7 can be read in multiple directions of the reader's choosing, and hopefully, in the future it will attain states that are even less determinate, that foil the act of 'reading' to the point that only 'looking', viz. experiencing without value judgements, interpretation or outside association is possible. An example of this is "Nude Fiction Index", which can be found in Volutions Magazine in a link to the right.

F7 strives to not be mimetic, although like any imperfect thing, it often fails, and despite its unusual attributes, it is a reflection of the world it inhabits. A poem constructed in a more traditional fashion, be it narrative or evocative, concerned with lyricism, meter, rhyme and sonority, truth, beauty, &c. might be conceived as a border drawn around a particular area of space - say, a window. Imagine using a grease pencil to outline the contours of the world reflected in this window. Imagine shattering the window, then reconstructing it differently, by way of chance or patterned operations. This is F7.

F7 describes not a limit, but a field of possibility on which infinite actions, reactions and combinations are possible and encouraged. F7 has limits of possibility, but an infinte number of things can occur between these limits, as an infinite number of infinitesimals stretch between the integers one and two. F7 is the limits, and everything that takes place between them, but nothing more. Therefore, F7 is both finte and infinite.

F7 is shorn of moral and intellectual intent. Any moral imperative or critique or position that arises in the text is a function of chance, not of my own intellect or values. This only obtains completely in reference to a theoretical, idealized F7, which does not yet and might never exist. This ideal F7 would completely lack syntax, image, sign, symbol, moral and political dimension, would, in essence, be an example of pure language spinning in a void. My only role would be to record it on the page.

F7 does not describe life, it is life, an event in the frame of a moment. It should be liege to neither the past or the archival / museum paradigm of the future. It should create itself anew, in and for every moment, both in its recording and its reception. Ideally, F7 might be an accidental glyph impressed upon sand, noticed, experienced but not interpreted, then washed away by a wave, only to be replaced by a new expression of F7, perhaps in the footprints of a walker on the shore.

F7 maintains that a line of email spam is as 'good', i.e. contains as much intrinsic value, as a line of composed verse.

Nothing that inhabits F7's moment is separate from it. As you read the text, any sound you hear should not be considered a distraction - it is part of F7 and F7 is part of it. Any bit of outside text you happen to read or object you see while reading F7 is part of it, as is any taste or physical sensation. This speaks to a) F7's infinite possibilities for occuring within any given moment (inhabiting the moment without displacing or dominating it) and b)its function as a thread in the tapestry that is the sum total of existence and experience.

F7 considers silence / blankness to be a value exactly equal to sound / text - not a lacuna. Therefore, any blank page (written F7) or silence (oral F7) must be considered a part of the work with a value equal to the sounded parts. It is possible that the ultimate expression of F7 is silence or a blank page, but this end cannot be jumped toward - the distance between imperfect and perfect F7 must be closed by the crossing of infinte half-spans, which, Zeno's Paradox tells us, is impossible. This is probably good for me, as a writer, since a perfect F7 would remove me from the equation completely, producing a 'text' of perfect blankness unsullied by a human influence.

F7 does not aspire to be 'musical' in the limited, traditional sense. I have no problem with the statement that 'poetry is musical', but I reject the tacit assumption that music is necessarily harmonic and melodic. Music can be a-, pan-, or proto-tonal, monotonous, dissonant, bracing, etc. In this broader sense only can F7 be described as 'musical.'

F7 is more concerned with process than with outcome, and any interest inherent in the outcome is simply a reflection of the process used to arrive at it. (Although F7 will not complain if the outcome happens to be beautiful in some weird way, which surprisingly, it often is.) The goal of F7 is momentary rapture, not historical consideration, although this rapture might take place anew at any point in history.

Slatherpuss hearts Michel Houellebecq

2005-07-22T23:09:00.000-04:00

With the possible exception of Nicholson Baker (bonus tidbit: I've heard rumors that Neil Gaiman is working on a film adaptation of The Fermata!), I can't think of a modern novelist whose work I find more penetrating, engaging, and utterly relevant than Michel Houellebecq. That his novels produce such outrage is further proof that our current literary establishment favors platitudes over truth. There's a group called the Underground Literary Alliance who "strangely yet strongly believe that American fiction should be something relevant to people’s lives, instead of the lame, overly-wrought, navel-gazing crap that the congloms have displayed front & center at your local chain bookshop." I admire the stance, but unfortunately, the ULA has a fatal flaw - they are terrible writers. It's a given that any underground movement that threatens the establishment will have to defend themselves from establishment charges of professional jealousy ("you don't publish because you aren't good enough"), sloth ("you don't publish because you haven't worked hard enough, not because we're locking you out"), and irrelevancy ("you don't publish because you aren't giving the people what they want; we are"). These are charges the underground movement must surmount in order to affect the public sphere. Unfortunately, in the case of the ULA, at least the first and the last seem to be true. It's important that underground movements don't seem to be jealous of the position of the mainstream, which simply validates charges of sour grapes, and the ULA seems to turn out an astonishing number of shoddy poems about how bad and boring mainstream writers and networks are, and how poor and honorable the ULA is. They've gotten lost in manifesto-land, lobbing poorly-written salvos at writers they deem undeserving of fame, and have forgotten to put their manifesto into practice. They harangue on the need for a viable alternative to mainstream fiction instead of attempting to create such a thing. Sometimes, work doesn't get published because it's too adventurous or challenging for the mainstream. Sometimes, work doesn't get published because it's just bad. We, meaning those of us writing outside of established circuits of influence, need to be able to make the distinction or succumb to hubris and complacency.

This tangent has a point - Houellebecq's work is exactly the kind the ULA should be creating and championing, if they are serious about their stated mission to create fiction that directly engages with the real world of human beings. (Of course, the ULA addresses American fiction, and Houellebecq is French, but anyway...) Because of his treatment of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, his refusal to moralize, and his mainstream position, Houellebecq is one of the most dangerous, relevant writers at work today. Many "brave" novels that address social ills such as racism hedge their bets by embodying the racism in "bad" characters and setting up "good" foils. The reader is allowed to tacitly identify with the good character and damn the usually cartoonishly bad racist, then to go on about their business, unchallenged and actually congratulated for their moral superiority. But in Houellebecq books, there are no such clear distinctions, and no moral imperatives - we are all complicit. Neither does the author take a position of magesterial moral superiority for himself - his protagonists, almost always named "Michel", are just as morally questionable as any other character. Transgressive fiction is often hailed as brave, but the current trend for transgressive fiction is ambiguity - the characters commit "taboo" acts for no explicit reason, and the reader is left to intuit whatever crushing social agency - racism, sexism, suburban malaise - propelled them toward whatever unspeakable act. But when Houellebecq's characters transgress, there's nothing mysterious about it - the factors that lead to the transgression have been carefully, clearly laid out. No other writer is capturing a more stark, realistic (if bleak) vision of what it feels like to be alive, right now, without a gloss of romance or utopian revision.

Houellebecq doesn't apologize for his characters' bad behavior, nor does he couch it in abstractions. His novels are all mundane, sharply observed action, interleaved with lucid, plainspoken delineations of the political situations (globalization and its discontents) that the action flows around like water, and terse philosophical exegeses on the hopeless state of humanity under such adverse conditions. He writes with a brutal, deadpan wit and a healthy dose of misanthropy a la Celine, but what elevates his novels about those of, say, Bret Easton Ellis, is how this misanthropy is juxtaposed with flights of the wildest sentimentality. Houellebecq's characters are damned to long for love and genuine humanity within a system they wholeheartedly believe will not allow such things to exist. And to top it off, his books, despite their unfliching examination of themes that are both consummately real and terribly depressing, are hilarious. With an uncanny eye for the absurd, Houellebecq can blend penetrating cultural criticism and understated comedy to potent effect. I'll end this appreciation by quoting an illustrative passage from his novella Lanzarote (in translation, natch):

"And yet the pleasures of Lanzarote are few: in fact, they are twofold. The first, a little to the north of Guatiza, is the 'Cactus Garden'. Various specimens, selected for their repulsive morphology, are arranged along paths of volcanic rock. Fat and prickly, the cactus symbolises perfectly - not to put too fine a point on it - the abjectness of plant life. Be that as it may, the Cactus Garden is not very large and, as far as I was concerned, our visit could have been over and done with in somewhat less than half an hour; but I had taken a group excursion and we were obliged to wait for a little mustachioed Belgian. I had passed him as he stood, stock-still, staring at a huge purplish cactus in the shape of a prick, artistically planted next to two smaller, outlying cacti intended to represent its balls. I was struck by his rapt attention: this was certainly a curious phenomenon, but it was hardly unique. Other specimens brought to mind a snowflake, a man sleeping, a ewer. Perfectly adapted to their desert environment, cacti lead, if I may put it thus, a completely unfettered morphological existence. They grow alone for the most part and are therefore not compelled to adapt to the pressures of this or that plant formation. Animal predators, scarce in any case, are immediately deterred by their abundant spines. Such an absence of selective pressures makes it possible for them to develop unhindered into a complex variety of farcical shapes likely to amuse tourists. Their mimicry of the male sexual organ, in particular, always has a certain effect on Italian tourists; but in this moustachioed man, who appeared to be Belgian, things had gone too far; in this man I could discern all the signs of an out-and-out fascination."

Tristan Tzara proposed a poetry made of cut-up articles drawn from hats

2005-07-20T20:17:00.000-04:00

scraps down universe requirements pomp
manifested in blows when then
place Tristan value Breton reason fulfill
the André flailing completely

poetry divine grandeur rather constant the peculiar
a poem perfectly printed
grandfather they constituent experience
averred paper article words or would art
interpretation disrupting and utterly mainstream

the the of verse hand was neutral
most of they wrote proper Tzara
the world personal words conceit Dada
he one defying to and not the bias
way which drawn order hat

or out of written and it’s appeared
the the be that of fate
with the would to artist
one or the cut

Intonation Inundation

2005-07-19T00:40:00.000-04:00

I'm way late in blogging about the Intonation Festival in Chicago last weekend - it's been met with a variety of overarchingly positive reactions (barring Kelefa Sanneh's ax-grinding snarkfest in the NY Times) in the mainstream press, focusing on how smoothly it ran and how spectator-friendly it was. My feelings on it echo Tom Breihan's musings here and here, and David Raposa unpacks the problems with Sanneh's article here. I think David nails the sort of insidious assumption inherent in Sanneh's argument, the "anti-rockist" stance that reacts against the discredited indie one of "unpopular music is better than popular music" - namely, that only music of the highest profile is worthwhile. It echoes a comment made by Xgau (who, make no mistake, I usually respect) that the Pitchfork staff is comprised of "tyros opining for chump change." I've got no real beef with the tyros part, but the insinuation that relevance is directly proportional to payscale is disappointing, coming from someone usually possessed of a more complex intellect.

I'm late in blogging about Intonation because I'm sick as hell - started coming down with a cold on Friday, held it at bay with beer, adrenaline, medicine and massive doses of water all weekend. But when I got home, sobered up, and calmed down, it blossomed into a full-blown fluish thing that's burning through Chapel Hill like a brush fire. I'm thankful that it only slowed me down a little over the weekend. My flight was delayed coming in to O'Hare on Saturday, and by the time my friends Brent and Tana (who were kind enough to let me sleep on the floor of their bedroom all weekend, and who were just amazing hosts, going out of their way to make my trip to Chicago a good one) met me at the airport, took me back to their place to clean up, and took me to lunch at a great restaurant called Earwax, it was nearly four o'clock before we made it to Union Park. The highlight of day one had to be the Go! Team, who gathered a bunch of local children (who I'd noticed dancing outside the festival gates during Broken Social Scene's set) onstage to dazzle us all with an unspeakably adorable dance party. Although my body felt battered and bruised, I rallied for long enough to swing by the staff afterparty at a remote bar called The Hideout, then collapsed on Brent and Tana's floor to sleep more deeply than I have in years. Day two was even stronger - although I arrived late again (missing Thunderbirds are Now!'s reportedly scorching set), I caught amazing sets by Dungen, Xiu Xiu (rocking the autoharp like a Strat), Out Hud (dance fucker dance), the Hold Steady (fake arena rock gone real arena rock), Deerhoof (intense and unhinged), and Les Savy Fav (the usual near-nudity and sense of impending violence). I skipped the Pitchfork hangout that night to catch up with an old friend at the Bucktown Pub. The coolest thing about it all was that while people usually only see Pitchfork's snarky, snooty side, here a truer picture of the people who make the site was writ large on the broad apron of Union Park - a bunch of people who seriously love some fucking music.

I spent Monday taking in the amazing Toulouse-Lautrec/Montmartre exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago: A collection of paintings, lithographs, proofs and drawings by artists who frequented and immortalized the vibrant, bawdy, bohemian environs of late-19th-century Montmartre, a hilltop fringe region of Paris dotted with windmills, brothels, cafes and music halls (including the iconic Moulin Rouge and Chat Noir). Besides T-L, it included works by Cheret (an important T-L influence, often credited as the father of the modern poster), Degas (T-L was a huge admirer of Degas, although the feeling was apparently not mutual), van Gogh (we can see traces of van Gogh's colorful crosshatching in many of T-L's drawings and paintings), Picasso, Casas and Steinlen (a Swiss painter and lithographer who created the iconic black cat image for Chat Noir). Through these some 250 works, a vivid picture of this precise historical moment emerges: Most striking is the despair lurking just beneath the surface of these exuberant, lurid images, a tension born of class conflict. Upper-class Parisians could escape to Montemarte for a bit of thrilling slumming, but for the brothel-workers and barmaids, there was no escape: What was a seamy diversion for the upper class was the sum of their lot in life, and the isolation and weariness undercutting the endless party is a subtle but undeniable feature of many flyers and paintings that celebrated the period.

The buzz I acquired from the exhibit was soon enough dulled by the trip home, which I mentally refer to as the "hell-berth." We boarded the plane at a little before five, but due to bad weather, we didn't take off until about eight. My seatmates were a nurse from Kansas named Bunny and her granddaughter Rainy Day, who was brutally insane. We got off to a rough start - Bunny asked if I was a Marine, and I recoiled in horror. Do I look like a Marine? But after that we chatted pleasantly enough - Bunny told me she was returning Rainy Day to her mother, a tattoo artist and musician (I did not get the whole story here, although Bunny's elliptical telling of it had elements of the sinister). Things took a turn for the worse when Bunny and Rainy Day began playing games like Rock Paper Scissors over and over, and another that I call "You're the Fishy", which pretty much entailed Rainey Day sticking her finger in Bunny's face as if it were a hook and screaming, "You're the fishy!" Having overdosed on music over the weekend, I put the Album Leaf on my iPod, which is about as close as music can get to silence. But then the battery died and I was defenseless. This was all in the first hour of the five I would spend in close quarters with Bunny and Rainy Day. At this point Bunny decided she would read Harry Potter and the Bucket of Mystery or whatever the fuck the new one is for the remainder of the trip, ignoring Rainy Day's frantic questions until the child had asked them, with increasing shrillness, at least twenty times apiece. Upon finally reaching the airport, I ran into my friend, the poet Chris Vitiello, gibbered at him incoherently about the ordeal for a few minutes, and went home to curl into the fetal position and quietly weep myself to sleep.

11 kHz

2005-07-14T21:18:00.000-04:00

Queer tux polo jug dais scab amok jug dad wert yoyo polka heft sass coven amok jug dad wert yoyo polka heft sax coven milk heft slaw arty quip kohl gods ax venom kohl gods

MSNBC czars sift jolt opium tyro was dug jolly knave zaps dug julep oily strew fads fight kiln bucks zaps fight slop ivy grew and khaki lung vex and khaki loin ultra esq. sift

Quiz sled café tuba hue mikes lapel klieg nobly TV Fred axes wax sled café tuba hue mikes loin kink ohm voter façade waxy maws exude fib glyph nimbus kill Loki jinn gyps

Act edgy inkle mope art vows yaw clef gin clan porn stud ways act edgy inkle mop art vows yaw act edgy inkle mop art vows yaw chef gin clan porn stun ways act edgy inkle mope art vows yaw

Qwerty tux op[] \'11 kHz fuse such bunk, ./'; kohl gods awed ratio ion[ ]\'; kohl gods ax venom ,./'; kohl gods awed try ion[ ]'11 kHz fuse such bunk, ./'; kohl gods awe try oil[

Your Black Eye

2005-07-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

A new issue of Your Black Eye is up. If you like criticism, poems and rejected letters to the editor couched in a non-traditional interface, this is for you.

I put up a new post at Moistworks today. If you like Johnny Cash, Razzy Bailey, The Band, Jason & the Scorchers, and breathlessly overwrought prose, this is for you.

I have a lengthier, more substanial post in mind, but it will have to wait for now. If you like martyrs, angels, and Thomas Aquinas, it will be for you.

The Lost Generation

2005-07-12T15:33:00.000-04:00

There's a terrific article by Nitsuh Abebe on Pitchfork today. The Lost Generation is a detailed, beautifully written distillation of the brief yet complex history of post-rock, and will be an invaluable resource for anyone trying to get a handle on this slippery genre. It's quite long, but if you're pressed for time, even a quick skim and some notes on the listening suggestions at the end will be illuminating. I've grown to admire Nitsuh's writing quite a lot, not in the least because he's strong in areas in which I feel I'm weaker - structure, pacing etc. Nitsuh seems able to perceive complex histories as orderly grids, zeroing in on the most salient elements of his topic, and the result is a deep lucidity that's a pleasure to read. Pitchfork is still known for its snark and exuberance (although these are fading, becoming replaced by a more remote and even-handed criticism in many cases), and Nitsuh's writing seems to be an indication of where we're headed. To the good, I think.

In just a few days, I'll be heading to Chicago for the Pitchfork-sponsored Intonation festival, and the anticipation is steadily mounting. I'm excited about the bands, excited about flouncing around Chicago, excited about reconnecting with old friends. But what I seem to be most excited about is getting to spend quality time with the Pitchfork staff. I've worked with many of these people for, God, a couple years now, argued with them, joked around, and yet I've only met a few in person. It will be good to put faces with names (real-life faces, not bio headshots) and to see how people's personalities square with their message-board personae. I hope to have some good stories to blog about upon my return.

The page wants to stay white

2005-07-11T16:03:00.000-04:00

First sentences are always the hardest - where you begin determines where you'll be able to go. But using my first sentence, in my first post on this new blog, to mention the challenges of first sentences - well, it handles that problem nicely doesn't it?

I should start by introducing myself and laying out the purpose of this blog (besides joining the modern chorus and creating a monument to my accomplishments, of course). My name is Brian Howe, I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I cobble together a living as a freelance writer, a barista, and a projectionist. Interesting but not entirely practical skills - a carpenter can walk into any town and find work. This only applies to me if someone in said town happens to need their album reviewed, their milk steamed, or their intermittent sprocket aligned. Mainly, I identify as a music critic / poet.

Right now, I contribute regularly to Pitchforkmedia.com and Paste Magazine. I also participate in a group mp3 blog at http://www.moistworks.com. I am a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group, an affiliation of modern / post-avant / experimental poets. Our membership spans the country, and on the whole our main activity is an email list for poetic discussion. But our activities are really centered here in North Carolina - we make chapbooks, have meetings, perform publically here and elsewhere in the country, and drink. In late July we'll be striking out on a reading tour through Baltimore, Philly and NYC - more on that later this month.

Right now, music blogs and poetry blogs are mostly segregated. Many poets I know are very interested in modern music, but fewer musicians/music fans seem to be interested in modern poetry. This I attribute, at least in part, to the fact that vital, interesting music has a much higher profile than vital, interesting poetry. Many people who participate in music at the ground level - the ezines, the blogs, the online communities - don't realize that there is a similar sphere in poetry. It's a sphere you wouldn't find unless you're looking for it. I believe that many people, particularly youngish people who are into cutting edge music, would find untold riches in modern poetry if they knew where to look. I'm not out to smite high-profile, academy poets. But I would like for people to know that for every MFA candidate placing lyrical meditations with seemingly arbitrary line breaks in high-end lit journals (even when these are finely wrought they might smell awfully musty to someone looking for excitement), there is a poet dreaming at the periphery of language, casting away the old forms, and creating vital, challenging, visceral work of pure linguistic energy.

Actually, strike that - I don't want to paint this as MFA poet bad, oustider poet good. There are many trained poets using their education to create astonishing, groundbreaking work, just as there are many writing capital-G Good poems that are completely devoid of new ideas and boring as hell. There are many outsider poets writing inane drivel, just as there are many who are creating some of the most novel, geniune, salient poetry around. Your education or lack thereof isn't the issue - how honestly and urgently you deploy your particular sensibility is. There is a lot of baseless self-satisfaction going around in poetry. I would like to see poetry become less sure of itself. Encyclopedias are for facts. Poetry is for poking and prodding at unknowns. But I'm wandering off topic.

The parallels between underground music and underground poetry are so strong that I'm always shocked when music critic friends ask me "Why do you bother with poetry? It's dead," (this happened), and when I venture to mention poetry in music critic circles, it's often as if I've walked into the room and farted loudly - uncomfortable silence ensues. There's nothing wrong with the latest Billy Collins poem in the New Yorker, but I would like for people to know that if it isn't your cup of tea, there are many other options, limitless options in limitless forms. To me modern poetry is similar to hip-hop, a territory that's growing to encompass all around it, and a matter more of intention than form. It seems like there's nothing you can put in a hip-hop song that makes it not hip-hop - hip-hop devours everything it touches. So it is with poetry. Poetry's popular face would have you believe it's about observing boundaries. I believe that it is about destroying them.

It's difficult being a music critic and a poet - to excel at either is a full time job, and as I've said, rarely do they intersect. I don't expect to change that on my own. But I would like for this blog to sit right on the cusp between them, to create a tentative portal via which they might interact. More to the point, both are important parts of my life, and so I'll blog about both. If some crossover happens because of it, all the better. Of course I don't want to be dogmatic, which is death to good poetry and good music, so this formal creed may wind up abandoned. I should like for this blog to be surprising and organic in its evolution. If it starts to venture elsewhere I doubt I'll be able to stop it.

That should suffice for today. I hope to update daily, so I hope you'll come by again. If you'd like to swap links, or if I've linked you and you don't want to be linked, please let me know.