"Howl" and the Paperback Revolution

"With all the passion and drama surrounding Howl and Other Poems, it's interesting to consider that the bulk of the cultural weight that it carries comes not from its text but instead from its material form. First, it was a paperback, published by City Lights Press, based in Ferlinghetti's North Beach bookstore of the same name. City Lights was the first American bookstore that sold only paperback books, and this matters..."

a fine sheaf of Schwitters links at

::: wood s lot ::: "

Guantanamo: Beyond the Law

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

How to make banana ketchup spaghetti

flickr sets of rare chapbooks--Air Two: Maxine Gadd (1971), Kevin Davies, Lateral Argument (2003) & Robert Mittenthal, Ready Terms (1989)

Local trees

The Olympics Scam

"The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth creation. A DIY anticipation of computer-generated presentations for the Olympic wonderlands. ‘Water City’, a new Venice (without the memory-mud of centuries), will rise from the stinking filth of back rivers and green-scum canals.

Keeffe’s ‘Corporation’, a confederacy of villains, is a direct translation of alliances in contemporary political life. Hoskins, a pumped-up Dalston Mussolini, presenting himself as ‘a businessman with a sense of history’, spiels his pitch as the oligarch’s gin-palace powers under Tower Bridge. Thirty years on and he could be making his final plea as a candidate in the London Mayoral Election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but an architectural doodle with the perverse ambition of bringing Manhattan to Bermondsey. ‘We’ve got mile after mile and acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,’ Bob drools. ‘It’s important that the right people mastermind the new London.’

The scam of scams was always the Olympics: Berlin in 1936 to Beijing in 2008. Engines of regeneration. Orgies of lachrymose nationalism. War by other means. Warrior-athletes watched, from behind dark glasses, by men in suits and uniforms. The pharmaceutical frontline. Rogue Californian chemists running their eye-popping, vein-clustered, vest-stripping robots against degendered state laboratory freaks. Bearded ladies and teenage girls who never have periods. Medals returned by disgraced drug cheats to be passed on to others who weren’t caught, that time. The Millennium Dome fiasco was a low-rent rehearsal. The holy grail for blue-sky thinkers was the sport-transcends-politics Olympiad, the five-hooped golden handcuffs, the smoke rings behind which deals could be done for casinos and malls: with corporate sponsorship, flag-waving and infinitely elastic budgets (any challenge an act of naysaying treason)..."

"Cheese Map of Canada" from the excellent Strange Maps

find out what the fuss was all about--Reading Marx’s Capital

"A close reading of the text of Volume One of Marx's Capital in 13 two-hour video lectures by David Harvey"

in a hurry? a version told with lithographs...

I love my life the way it is

"I had an ex that used to play lottery scratch cards every week. Most weeks she lost. Some weeks she won a few bucks. It got me thinking about the whole lottery thing - getting your hopes high, dreaming, escaping, and then usually being let down.

This happens to me on a daily basis WITHOUT the lottery's help, so I find the whole thing funny. I didn't need the lottery messing with my life - I'm alright with it the way it is. So as an experiment, I started buying scratch cards and not scratching them. It made my ex a little crazy. And wen I show other people, it makes them a little crazy. I think I'm onto something here..."

via HOBOTOPIA

Conservatism vs. authoritarianism: The British vs. the U.S. right

"...skepticism of Government power -- which lies not only at the heart of most key British reforms over the last 8 centuries but also at the heart of the American Founding -- is precisely what has been missing almost completely from the American Right, for which there is now no federal government power too great or too unlimited to embrace. The American right-wing faction which now dominates the Republican Party is defined largely by their insatiable lust for limitless government power in virtually every realm -- spying, detentions, interrogations, and war-making.

Hence, while British conservatives largely oppose a policy merely to allow the Government to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days with no charges, our "conservatives" react with fury over the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of the President's claimed authority to hold such suspects in Guantanamo for 6 years -- really indefinitely -- without providing them any meaningful process at all. In fact, the Bush administration asserted the right to detain even U.S. citizens, arrested on U.S. soil, indefinitely, with no charges or any contact with the outside world, for years, and they proceeded to do so, with virtually no opposition of any kind from our self-proclaimed right-wing defenders of individual liberty or limited government..."

review of The Hamburger: A History by Josh Ozersky

A White Castle burger, he says, is “as artfully self-contained as a Homeric hexameter”, adding that the bun and the burger speak “of their symbiosis in the language of circumferential geometry...”

the Internet Bird Collection - A free library of videos of the world's birds

this is just great!!

Judy Dunlop and Ashley Hutchings - Sway With Me (1991)

"an unusual concept album about trees..."

Local trees &c.

missing something? fill that yawning void with the post-industrial stylings of my book The Age of Briggs & Stratton...and whoever took that guy's pressure washer....

today's youtube a Scopitone of Lesley Gore singing "Wonder Boy", which I can't get out of my head--almost a Northern Soul thing going on with Quincy Jones' "Heatwave" arrangement...

meet the new boss....

"Today, we have immense information moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time...Christian Bök seconded that notion by saying that the genre has evolved from something invented by three guys drinking beer in a bar in Buffalo a decade ago to widespread way of writing poetry today, reiterating that conceptual poetics is, in fact, the right poetry for the right time...."

languagehat on CORBETT ON URQUHART on Rabelais--

"By God," said Pantagruel, "I will teach you to speak. But first come hither and tell me whence thou art". To this the scholar answered, "The primeval origin of my aves and ataves was indigenerie of the Lemovick regions, where requiesceth the corpor of the hagiotat St Martial". "I understand thee very well," said Pantagruel, "when all comes to all, thou art a Limousin, and thou wilt here, by thy affected speech, counterfeit the Parisiens. Well now, come hither, I must shew thee a new trick, and handsomely give thou combfeat." With this he took him by the throat, saying to him, "Thou flayest the Latine? By St John I will make thee flay the foxe, for I will now flay thee alive". Then began the poor Limousin to cry, "Haw, gwid Maaster, haw Laord ma halp and St Marshaw, haw, I'm worried; haw, ma thrapple, the bean of ma cragg is bruck! Haw, for gauad's seck, lawt ma lean Mawster, waw, waw, waw!" "Now," said Pantagruel, "thou speaks naturally," and so let him go, for the poor Limousin had totally be[w]rayed, and thoroughly conshit his breeches."