"June is now sealed, silent.
Form without springing makes of it
a wrong season,
makes even this perfumed rain
autumnal."


--Margaret Avison

Isola di Rifiuti on Ben Friedlander--

"Poundian

The first principle of academic cricketism
is expand,
wandering home
gaseous in our anti-chastity

The flimsiest of whistlings
to shiver the saving graces
of the cold damp night
of art"

from Lorine Niedecker | Lake Superior Notes

"At home we're in the drowned lands ? trees standing permanently in the water.

"We slept on a kind of bog which the men call Tetes des femmes.

treaty of limits between the tribes

Pike (of Pike's Peak) when he went up the Miss. R. ? north of the St. Croix R. he said the river (Miss. I take it) became "black in the depths and clear in sandy shallows."

calcite ? a native calcium carbonate also called calc spar, occurring in many crystalline forms, such as chalk, marble, etc . . .

The face of the earth is a graveyard and so it has always been.

My inner midwest

I was in a St. Ignace fog

Why this fascination with rock terms, name, probably because we like to think the first geologists took their finds and created them ? name to thing ? out of the nature of things ? plus sometimes their sound or reflection of colour that delighted their senses..."

from the LRB archive lovely 1979 William Empson on Fairy Flight in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

"The distance to the Moon is about 60 times the radius of the Earth, as was already known in Classical times, and the Moon goes round the Earth in about 30 days, so the speed of the middle of the Moon’s sphere, the part which carries the Moon, is about twice the speed of the equator, which revolves in a day. So the working fairy does at least half a mile a second, probably two-thirds, and the cruising royalties can in effect go as fast as her, if they need to. Puck claims to go at five miles a second, perhaps seven times what the working fairy does. This seems a working social arrangement. But if all the stars go round the Earth every day, with the Moon and planets lagging only slightly behind, the speed of the Moon’s sphere is about 60 times the speed of Oberon when he remains in the dawn, and the working fairy is going very much faster than the boast of Puck. I agree that the phrases are meant to sound rather mysterious – probably Shakespeare asked the advice of Hariot, who was certainly a friend of Marlowe – but they would not be meant to be sheer nonsense, as has for so long been assumed..."

today's YouTube - High Llamas - "Nomads" from 1996's epochal "Hawaii", which starts winding things up on the first track until the whole 79 minute album becomes about endings, fades, bonus tracks, hidden tracks, side threes...dedicated to everyone on location...

new Tyee music-writer-to-watch on 1993: The Year Rap Died


""I Ain't Goin' Out Like That," "Hits From the Bong," and "Hands on the Glock" gave young people, as in Hendrix and The Doors before them, the anthems they needed to gather in fields and get really, really stoned, all while sounding scary and insane. Which makes "Insane in the Brain" not only their best song, but also an accurate depiction of their oeuvre..."

Giuliani: Worse Than Bush

"Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a 'stuck pig,' and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you... "

from David Perry this Flickr set of Shanghai Trees