a book about Glenn Gould's piano & its tuner

"Having grown so sensitive to sound, many piano tuners couldn't cope with the noisy world. "In the early 20th Century, piano tuners outnumbered members of any other trade in English insane asylums," Hafner tells us."

know what else is the berries? my grampy's semi-acclaimed new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown)...

Noise pollution is killing us...

"We got our half-acre lots, and now we have our weed whacker, our leaf blower, our hedge trimmer, our riding lawn mower, and then we hop in our car and drive on four- and six-lane highways past thousands of other suburbs to our place of work, noise -polluting every place we pass."

"LUIS HERNANDEZ from the State of Veracruz works in demolition in New York. He sends 200 dollars a week."

Superheroes

a series by Dulce Pinzon

in NYC a William Holden retrospective--

"They came too late and stayed too long," observed the tagline
introducing Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch." Having arrived at the dawn of a new fatalism in American movies, and inadvertently bowed out as the '70s and the age of the anti-hero ended, Holden's tragic timing was perfect both on-screen and off..."

The Boys and the Subway

from poet James Liddy's

Autobiography

"I am an exile, I am not an exile. "Exile" has enough alienation in it to be a real condition yet it can be read as part of the flashy itinerant supernaturalism of the voyageur. The spirit wandereth whence it is employed or patroned. The artist type is outside the first social force of Mammy and friends; distance beckons new interruptions, and maybe memory spins into backlash.

Writing can seem the activity of alcoholic and
workaholic ghosts; the famous never tired ones, Wilde, Auden, Isherwood used
new domicile and flirtatious cafe in a more exuberant mode than they would at home. Do not dismiss the soldiering in far foreign fields where the battle cry is: do not tire.

The books on the table are piled-up differently: if I had stayed would my life have been changed by John Wieners, Lorine Niedecker,
and above all Jack Spicer? Sitting by a great lake stung by the idea: your
Ireland is dead, clarify your mind..."

via Ron

Ed Ruscha's best shot

"That's the one thing I regret about any photograph: that eventually it becomes historical, nostalgic, out of date. It begins to look like the age it came from...I'm interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn't deserve being glorified. Something that's forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object. That's the mystery of it all: what it is that will catch my attention..."

Local trees

Hats banned from Yorkshire pubs

"There have been incidents both in pubs and other establishments when it has not been possible to identify offenders captured on CCTV because hats were hiding their faces."

Local trees

Isola di Rifiuti

"Summer’s work is to ease away under the cover of frantic light and the confluence of gassy hysteria and quid pro quo ombudsmanship, and ease back in with a pout and a boater. That’s summer’s work. An anti-method. A voluntary voluptuousness without realm or target..."

happily grabbed at random the sharp, sad, beautifully written Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first time in a couple of decades...



"With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two
hats and four pairs of shoes with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes— bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance—but with an entirely
different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very
simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but
illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the
procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it..."

Nanny State Nanaimo

"Now every patron must agree to have their identification recorded and photograph taken before they can enter Club 241, Spice Lounge, the Globe or the Queens Hotel.

Their name and photo is kept on a computer hard drive and used to track them, in case they try to pass their ID on to someone else, or if they are ejected from the bar for misbehaving.

Media got a demonstration of the new system at city hall on Friday, where Queens manager Jerry Hong used Coun. Merv Unger as a mock nightclub patron. After swiping Unger's ID in a card scanner, information appeared on a screen.

Software captures a patron's name, licence number and expiry date, age and sex from their drivers licence. Data is added to track the patron's status, including when they last entered the club and if they were barred from re-entry. If the patron misbehaves and gets thrown out, they will find himself barred for anywhere from a week to a year. And since it's linked by a network, that ban will be in effect in every bar in North America connected to the Barwatch system..."

Literary note: The Globe was visited by Malcolm Lowry while he waited for his "October Ferry to Gabriola"...

No Magna Carta please, we're British...

"But Britain's small band of civil libertarians has bigger problems than a recalcitrant prime minister and careless civil servants. Despite Benjamin Franklin's famous advice, the public seems happy to trade a little liberty for a little security. Surveys before the 42-days vote consistently showed public opinion in favour. More recent polling for The Economist shows broad public support for many liberal bugbears (see chart). Women tend to be more authoritarian than men, Labour supporters more relaxed about infringing civil liberties than Tories and Liberal Democrats, and richer folk more worried than the poor (full details can be found here). Half of the respondents were consistent in their answers to most questions; this, says YouGov's boss, Peter Kellner, is rather high.

The poll suggests that people are vehement in defence of civil liberty and privacy when considered in the abstract. Confronted with specific situations, their resolve wilts, especially when specific security gains are promised (although administrative benefits can overcome libertarian instincts too). Trust in private firms is much less than in the government—odd, since more than half of all consumers are voluntarily enrolled in data-tracking supermarket loyalty schemes..."

four fives from de-noted

"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