Vancouver trees

some images of Bucharest from Peter Cummings, whose there working on a film...

from Anodyne hq...

"Papers cover every conceivable surface, interspersed with books borrowed from friends and never returned, toothbrushes, shaving gear and assorted camping supplies, a can opener, anti-fungal powder, clean socks, artworks (mixed-media collages; c-prints; pencil drawings), emotionally tumultous letters from folks I no longer speak to, the same from folks that I still do, tent pegs, climbing guidebooks, topographic maps, loose CDs, bottle caps, rubber bands, mouse turds, an annotated list of income trusts worth less than 25% of their original value, carabiners, an empty Glenlivet bottle, Benjamin Buchloh's collected writings, a signed copy of The Climax Forest, loose Gasoline Alley dailies, a facsimile edition of Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis, photocopies of the Buffett Partnership letters, comic books, Barron's back issues, Nevada pebbles, oil pastels, eraser shavings and pushpins..."

of course, the big money's in the UNSIGNED copies...

out of Nowhere, B.C. via Queens, Buffalo & points west, the new blog of the tangy & enriched Billy Little...


oranginality

every word
of every lie
you'll ever tell
sails out of the cove
of the dictionary
every word
in every plaie
in every poem
every speech
every stage direction
shakespere ever rote
between the covers
of the dictionary
every word of
every love letter
you'll never get
whistles in alphabetic order

every worm in your obituary
wriggles out from the a for apples
of the dictionary

pick write worms
putem write ordure
virtilizem nuturem weedit n weep
maybe thumbday they'll
lock you up
in the dictionary
like Shakespeare

Some American ones

Some more.

My father Tony was for most of his life an enthusiastic ham radio operator. That's him above, in his "shack" from 1976 on, which was my old room. Part of the protocol of the hobby was the postal confirmation of on air contact in the form of "QSL" (confrimed signal) postcards. I inherited a shoebox full of them, cherry picked from perhaps four times as many. Many of the most interesting ones (including a large number from the Soviet Union) come from the years 1968 to 72 when we lived in Scotland.

amazing Django Reinhardt playing electric bop on a train in 1952!!

Kraft Dinner With Privileges

"It is the pastoral idea, that there is a complete copy of the human world
among dogs, as among swains or clowns."
William Empson




At last the anger ascends,
like the forking branches of a Bic tattoo
or the Lochside Fleet's rampant cross of gold,

shimmering now with revolutionary impatience
as at the Hot Club, Pol Pot slides his capo
two notches up the ukelele's neck

& after shaking out the crumbs
Lenin dries his kazoo on the radiator--
those of us who confuse improvisation

with such overpreparedness
will never understand the role of menthols
in the downfall of the Romanovs--

the Scrabble hustlers of Zurich
played through the pain,
& every croque they buttered

grilled & quartered
for the class ring & cider set
was a bucket of thick sand

dredged from the harbormouth of history.
On tiny Tampere couches they slept,
pillows stuffed with discarded beards,

rode in sealed containers down the Chuckanut
& six decades later a burning rag
is shoved through a bookstore mailslot.

At last the anger ascends--the chicken cook
is tried in absentia, his instruments
scattered to the flames while at Joe's

the Shining Path smirk through
Americanos as though at the clack of the
pool balls, while Rockit on the jukebox,

the hiss of the Victoria bus, a dog's jaws
closing on a frisbee, bandana flapping proclaim
Victory! Victory! Victory!

Dog Eulogistics

"Few people nowadays observe their dogs to grin, and those who do
take it as a charming smile, but the grin of dogs seems then to have
been a part of their reputation for satire."
William Empson "The English Dog"

Never met a detour
it didn't like,
or that didn't have

a joke at the end of it--
rara avis strode the Rare Earth
born to wonder &

born to wander,
why trees refused pants
& cats umbrellas, why

the slave that made my T-shirt,
the slave that made my donkey chow
& the slave that melted my swiss just now

don't just walk barking
over the bodies of their symptoms
& out the door, like when

it turned out the witch's
kryptonite was water dig--
the clever flying monkeys

thought description sufficient
& didn't even have a plan A
thus found themselves a plant-mister away

from domination
by the Cowardly class--
still better under house arrest

in a postal facility
than dressed in brocade
and carried in a cup.

re-reading for the nth time (though as Larry Fagin observed a while back, not quite ever finishing) Ralph Berton's wonderful "Remembering Bix", about his teenage friendship with the immortal cornettist & was intrigued by his account of the overwhelming sensual impact of singer/dancer Bee Palmer (she wrote & sang "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" & invented the shimmy!) Lots more info and some Realplayer sound files past the click...

A Letter from Hammertown to the Red Hook Public Library


"They wanted to hear 'Baby Elephant Walk' with new ears."
Stephen King "Cell"



Was wrong as usual
about acupuncture Mike

turns out torques 'twixt
the wobble & the "chi"

do decrease activity
in the limbic seat of pain

no thanks to me or thee--
the MRI looked like my Compaq's

halting defrag, blue blocks
dimming like the lites of Harewood

used to in the pre-surveillance
eighties, not "dark"

like coffee or a scary 45
but coalmines, hot subocean vents

the inside of MacDiarmid's beach
& everything either swept off the table

in an excess of joy or clung to
like an eyeless Teddy shuffling

thru a mezzotint snowstorm,
chewing the sweet caraway seed at the heart

of its trauma--
but when the needle enters the skagarrat

turns out the alpine red static that says "prick"
is the easiest to placebo,

it's a centimeter in where
the boggle hangs it shingle

and you wake up smiling
in the crotch of the loveliest plane tree

in the park, trunk waving
in a warm hurricane of bliss.

Cedar Road trees

just heard that one of my all-time favorite films, Ulu Grosbard & Dustin Hoffman's searing "Straight Time" (from Edward Bunker's "No Beast So Fierce) is finally coming out on DVD, with a commentary by the directors & this interesting-looking documentary...can " The Friends of Eddie Coyle" be far behind?

Area trees

the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has a long piece on the great Barbara Stanwyck in honour of her centennial retrospective...