Stanley Cavell's 2000 review of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project--

"Why (according to what allegories) make a work that cannot be read through? Perhaps to remind the reader that his and her work must perpetually find its own end. Why make a work that cannot be written to an end? Perhaps to remind the writer of a reason to suffer awakening without end. It is work that is capable of recognizing, in a response to Nietzsche, "suicide as signature of modernity." Then The Arcades Project, constructive, modernist, and unending, is not so much an argument against suicide as it is an attestation, so long as the work can continue, that deprives suicide of its point..."

Robert Smithson--Strata, a Geophotographic Fiction

"MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS. PUTTING FACTS TOGETHER LIKE A JIGSAW PUZZLE. LANGUAGE AND SOIL BLOW AWAY. FLOODS. BILATERALLY SYMMETRICAL CREATURES. AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE AUSTRAL SEA (BLUE ON GRAY DOTS). A FRAGMENTARY THEORY. EXCAVATIONS AT DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT IN NORTHEASTERN UTAH. PALAEOZOIC ERA SHOWN ON AN OLD CHART. LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT THE LAND AREAS. THEY PLOUGHED THEIR WAY THROUGH THE MUD. WORMS AND MORE WORMS TURN INTO GAS. SEA BUTTERFLIES FALL INTO A NAMELESS OCEAN. PLASTER RESTORATIONS COLLECTING DUSTIN THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. THE TRACKS OF TRILO BITES HARDEN INTO FOSSILS. ACCUMULATIONS OF WASTE ON THE SEA BOTTOMS. JELLY-FISH BAKING UNDER THE SUN. DIGESTIVE SYSTEMS SHOWN IN DIAGRAMS.... A TENDENCY TO AMORPHOUSNESS... (HEINRICH WOLFFLIN).... SCABBY TOPOGRAPHY ON SOLFATARA PLATEAU (C. MAX BAUER). MAY HAVE LOOKED LIKE THE PLANET VENUS. LIMP-LOOKING CRUSTACEANS, DYING BY THE MILLIONS. WILL YOU FOLLOW ME AS FAR AS THE SARGASSO SEA? (GIORG1O DE CHIRICO). CONGLOMERATE THOUGHTS. MOLLUSCA. BREAKING APART INTO PARTICLES. SOMETHING FLOWING BETWEEN THE CARIBBEAN AND NEWFOUNDLAND. THE EQUATOR OVER NEW MEXICO MADE OF DOTS AND DASHES. (PORIFERA). BELTS OF SCATTERED ISLANDS. LLANORIA SOUTH OF LOUISIANNA. MOUNTAINS OF JELLYFISH. THE DIMENSIONS OF AN UNKNOWN SLIME. LIME-SECRETING COLLENIA. A GLOBE SHOWING THE APPALACHIAN TROUGH. GALLERIES FULL OF ODD NAMES AND MODELS. CLOUDS MADE OF PAPER. A DRAWING OF CASCADIA DRAWN PARALLEL TO THE PACIFIC COAST. A GUIDE TO GRIT..."

Area trees

Once Upon a Time...

"Take the lesson: murder hundreds of thousands of people for no reason at all, completely destroy a virtually defenseless country, and do everything possible to begin what could turn into a nuclear Armageddon that would murder millions -- and the worst that will be said about you is that you are an incompetent and stupid bumbler. That we are well on our way to becoming one of the most monstrous nations in history is the thought that cannot bear serious contemplation by our governing class, or by those bloggers who serve as its ignorant and/or corrupt apologists. But threaten the prerogatives of the privileged ruling elites themselves, and hellfire shall devour your soul. Never mind the suffering and death of "ordinary" people: trampling on the inalienable "rights" of those who already possess immense power is the unforgivable sin. Priorities, indeed. The final destruction of the American republic may be almost upon us, and the Republicans and Democrats and their respective blogger-enablers fight like disease-infested rats over the rotting, bloated, already stinking flesh of the doomed, permanently corrupted corporatist state..."

on "repeat" at the manse this morning the teenage Mozart's "Jenamy" Concerto #9 K.271--

"K. 271 bears another kind of significance. Its name "Jeunehomme Concerto", to which audiences grew accustomed during the twentieth century, is a product of pure fantasy and of wilful invention. It is a musical nickname created by Mozart scholarship in a fit of total blindness. For the last ninety-two years this famous concerto has been performed under a wrong name..."

"The aesthetic of the painter, the poet, en etat de surprise, of art as the reaction of one surprised, is enmeshed in a number of pernicious romantic prejudices. Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process) as the profane illumination of reading will teach us about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic) as the profane illumination of thinking will teach us about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug--ourselves--which we take in solitude."

Walter Benjamin "Surrealism--The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" 1929

Beaver Creek Road

No need to get
into the stewpot
with the sacrificial horse

these days of course more
a stain of Bovril hot
from a tartan thermos

but the battle of the trees
or the battle of the letters
or the battle between the

forest & the letters & the trees
has got me losing sleep
& repeating past dawn--

I am the falcon
I fly blind
through a progressive sky--

crisp as Hampton Hawes circa 1955--
Hermosa Beach,
my tiny harmonium gently weeps

a pastel streak
down a marble cheek
while the evening refuses

to abandon its swatches
& come in out of the rain,
a lighthouse in trousers passes

sans eagle-eye motif
but a copper moon dangling
over a heap of crushed felt

between his ass & the saddle,
loaded with six empties
& the cooler cooler cooler

the Fargo's likely to buck
so switch to premium
for the Parkway--

a circling bird
I cannot help but overhear
your hesitations

what's said's
a hammer falling
on an empty chamber

old furniture
unlikely to remember
I refuse to look--

Joanna to Goldfinch
a row of Specials
nestled in a ravine

a set of hoops
in every 45 degree driveway
where the sun don't crest

till one at least
but no trash utopia
blackberry the stream

tended to such a goatproof-bridged
fare-thee well
that coming out onto

Shenton the residual
good will had sanded
the industrial off the park

before the looming
crystal waterwork mini-lake motel
put it back in.

devotees of obscure gangster films & Henry Silva shouldn't miss Johnny Cool (1963) on TCM tomorrow at 1500hrs, with a smokin' pre-Samantha Elizabeth Montgomery as "Dare Guinness" & a host of Rat Packers (inc. Sammy Davis Jr. as "Educated" who sings "The Ballad of Johnny Cool") A great favorite locally in the late 70's...remade as "Ghost Dog"...

via Plep these Painted Houses of Borovsk

more on Roberto Bolano & The Savage Detectives--

"Madero’s narration comes in the form of clipped, kinetic diary entries: “Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine”; “I’m reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.” Not since Rimbaud has the world of verse seemed so criminally seductive. Madero’s entrance into the poetry underground resembles the heady initiation of Ray Liotta’s fledgling mobster in “GoodFellas.” The visceral realists not only shoplift (Madero boasts that, in his “tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores”); they fund a magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by trafficking in Acapulco Gold marijuana. Yet the purpose of this illicit activity couldn’t be purer. “We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed,” Madero proclaims..."

good long review quoting Roberto Bolano's great novel The Savage Detectives--

"Automatic writing, exquisite corpse, solo performances with no spectators, contraintes, two-handed writing, three-handed writing, masturbatory writing (we wrote with the right hand and masturbated with the left, or vice versa if we were left-handed), madrigals, poem-novels, sonnets always ending with the same word, three-word messages written on walls ("This is It," "Laura, my love," etc.), outrageous diaries, mail-poetry, projective verse, conversational poetry, antipoetry, Brazilian concrete poetry (written in Portuguese cribbed from the dictionary), poems in hard-boiled prose (detective stories told with great economy, the last verse revealing the solution or not), parables, fables, theater of the absurd, pop art, haikus, epigrams (actually imitations of or variations on Catullus, almost all by Moctezuma Rodríguez), desperado poetry (Western ballads), Georgian poetry, poetry of experience, beat poetry, apocryphal poems by bpNichol, John Giorno, John Cage. . . . We even put out a magazine . . . We kept moving . . . We kept moving . . . We did what we could . . . But nothing turned out right..."

Spring trees

a happy second birthday to the strapping and rejuvenated Value Village Is Booby-Trapped!!--

"We're at a stable point,
and more importantly, the
dissension that has hovered around
us like a rope of black licorice
has dissipated, and I will start
writing because I need to create.
Screenwriting seminars,
Palestinian play reading,
Tea Biscuit Flash Fiction competitions:
let them be pulled from the roots
out of the garden and thrown onto
the grill because this is their season!!"

another Nanaimo triumph!BC AAA Boys Championship - Dover Bay Dolphins Provincial Champions! (link contains a good play-by-play of the final)

Nanaimo trees

some videos of Irish bands & singers to celebrate St Patrick's Day--Rory Gallagher - A Million Miles Away Irish Tour 1974
Rory Gallagher/Taste-Sugar Mama-Belgium 1969
Thin Lizzy - Whiskey In The Jar
The Undertones - Jimmy Jimmy (Old Grey Whistle Test 1979)
stiff little fingers-alternative ulster '79
The Dubliners - McAlpine's Fusiliers
Here Comes the Night/Turn On Your Lovelight--Them Featuring Van Morrison - 1965
In This Heart - Sinead O'Connor and Christy Moore
The Clancy Brothers - Tim Finnegans Wake

fine essay on The Velvet Underground--

"The classical avant-garde even today is sometimes content to play down the pain, annoyance, boredom and nuisance of the willed adherence to dissonance, atonality, minimalism and extended settings which were hallmarks of many of its best effects over the last century. You are supposed to be a good and educated listener, which means listening through annoyance for transcendence. The Velvet Underground, however (in Cale’s revision of LaMonte Young, and in his new partnership with Reed), was able to reposition avant-garde annoyance and aural pain as part of a thematics of being bad: of being, that is, a ‘good’ listener who could know the joy of vicariously being ‘bad’. Aural pain went with lyrics about willed pain to produce an ‘avant-garde’ musical correlative to squalor, masochism, sexual deviance and drugs – and an experience for listeners that today’s lifestyle gurus might call ‘aspirational’.

The success of the Velvet Underground under Cale would then be that it provided what it promised: the right kind of pain..."

Nanaimo trees

fun-sounding Gothic meller (not seen by me) Spider Baby on TCM tonight at 11--

"Spider Baby tells the story of the Merrye family. Following Titus Merrye's deathbed request, the family chauffeur, named Bruno (Lon Chaney, Jr.), takes care of the children. But these children are no normal brood. They all suffer from an extremely rare condition called the Merrye Syndrome that causes their brains to deteriorate as they grow older. As we learn in the movie's introduction, victims of the Merrye Syndrome suffer from "progressive age regression" that may "progress beyond the pre-natal level--reverting to a pre-human condition of savagery and cannibalism..."

another good title I can't use--A Field Guide to the Identification of Pebbles

"Have you ever been walking at the beach and wondered what that pebble or rock is, or do you ever wonder what stories rocks tell? If so, then this is the guide for you. The Field Guide to the Identification of Pebbles , a full colour, laminated, accordion folded, easy to use guide with over 80 beautiful photographs of pebbles from beaches and rivers. Use the photos to identify over 28 different types of rocks and minerals. A great resource for Earth Science curriculum units in schools, the short text deals with how rocks form and how to tell if a rock is igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic. It also provides some fun facts about minerals in our daily lives."

YouTube of Betty Hutton performing "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" from "The Stork Club" which was just on TCM this morning...

closer to home a "Magnolia on Renfrew" (and its little daffodil posse) givin' it up for spring from Christopher

thanks Vanessa for this lovely Indian tree...

Spring Training Cramp

after Donato Mancini

spring ingratitude demonstration
settlement mentholated educators
torso somnolent lentil
tiled educated editorial
alcopop operation onset
etherised edema
macerate atelier error
rorschach achieves escape
pending dinner nerves
essentially lyrical calzone
nearly lynched cheddar
arterial alterations onshore
realtor origami amino
minotaur urbanites test stampedes
describe beaver versifiers
ersatz tzigane ganesha
shambolic licentious usual
already dynastic stickle
tickles lest established
shed-dweller eradication
onetime mephisto historian
angioplastic ice-scraper
perennial altoid idolater
lateran ranch hand
adipose suture tureen

story of the Eye--

"The fish Bathylychnops exilis has four eyes: one set to look up, and one set to look down; but at what? Nobody knows. The surface-feeding fish Anableps anableps can see clearly both in and out of the water. Mantis shrimps use polarised light to swap messages that no other animal can see. Even a kilometre below the sea’s surface there is, incredibly, still plenty of material my story could have drawn on, if only there were room. Bioluminescent photophores tattoo the sides of lanternfish, fang-toothed fish dangle lures baited with light-making bacteria, and one deep-water fish, Aristostomias, communicates with others by generating pulses of red light – a colour no other neighbouring species can see..."

Bush heart Chomsky

"To Bush, like Chomsky, the United States and Iran are locked in a zero-sum struggle for control over oil. To Bush, like Chomsky, rolling back Iranian influence in its neighborhood are vital to American national security and economic prosperity. To Bush, like Chomsky, America is all-powerful and can easily succeed at swatting back the Iranian fly. To Bush, like Chomsky, Bush is a clever and brilliant leader full of subtle and cunning schemes to manipulate events inside Iran. To Bush, like Chomsky, Bush's policies are continuous with those employed by past presidents to render the United States the richest and most powerful nation on earth. And so on..."

acquired yesterday the first edition of the excellent Yukon Places and Names by R. Coutts. Books like this, William S. Powell's "North Carolina Gazeteer" & Walbran's "West Coast Place Names" are great places to get a feel for a place's history while aimlessly browsing (nice to know, for example, that a river named for Charles Babbage flows into the Beaufort Sea)...

"When first prospecting in the southeast Yukon and Cassiar country, I was naturally interested in the history of an area about which I had read and been told so much. Becoming curious about the origin or meaning of a Yukon place name, I found that there was often no answer, or conflicting ones. Alone of Canada’s provinces and territories almost nothing has been written on this subject. On reading the early literature it often appeared that the modern name was not that given originally and that in many cases the name and its meaning had been altered or changed. I began to search for the true origins of these names. Gradually, the people and the stories behind the names began to live for me and many were more interesting than much of the fiction written about the territory. As the stories unfolded and extended, my interest became more serious but no less enjoyable. Many newly learned facts revealed other stories and puzzles to be traced and solved..."

Nanaimo trees

farewell Betty Hutton--

to paraphrase James Ellroy on Buddy Greco, she didn't just sell a song, she drove over to your house and installed it...When big fan Bjork covered (and channelled) Hutton so succesfully in her "It's Oh So Quiet" video she seemed a natural for an "Annie Get Your Gun" remake (Altman maybe??), but then along came Lars Von Trier, who stuck her in the worst musical ever made & the last one she would ever do, unless you count those Matthew Barney vaseline pours, which I don't...

fine defense of 24

"With all the earnest hand wringing over the 24's absurd torture scenes, military spin-doctors must have seen an opportunity to turn 24 into the scapegoat for Guantanomo Bay et al.

But did they really just admit that soldiers couldn't separate TV from reality? Do they want to be advertising this to the American public? After all, they are putting weapons in the hands of people who need TV dramas to carry the disclaimer, "Don't try this at home...""

Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue...

must have been a wonder when it was brand new...



(via I like)

new piece on essayist George W.S. Trow, who died in Naples last year...

Critical Mess in Seattle...

"I don't ask for [art], and I don't expect it," Kangas said. "I do have an art collection, artists have made gifts of work to me over the years, that is true. But that has been their decision, not mine.... I'm sorry if they were unhappy with what I might have written about them. I'm sorry if they are upset or if they feel the need to fabricate conversations. I've been here a long time; I'm a big target."

Stockett/Stark's Crossing/Beaver pond trees

Vancouver and ferry trees

March of the Penguins: acquired four early volumes of Nikolaus Pevsner's rarely-encountered-by-me "Buildings of England" series begun in 1951, printed on crumbly bad paper (except for the copious illustrations) but sturdily sewn in signatures--little chads should be able to fall from them for years to come.