I'll be appearing on Saturday night at the Charles Olson Centenary Conference--looking forward to seeing everyone!

Local trees & c.

Alan Davies on  The Dea(r)th of Poetry

There is always another (another (always another)) excuse for being nice.

That (that) in-and-of-itself should tell us something (that in and of itself should tell us something).

(Georgia & Burrard in Vancouver thx LB)

Early 1900s in Colour

Ed Dorn’s Douglas Woolf

“America” is a smug, hardhearted, unforgiving nation of jackals, which
forever slaps itself on its back over how generous, selfless and idealistic it is. It is the most preposterous propaganda barrage since
Goebbels ran an office, in bloodier and more interesting times.

You go to the window. You look out at the immense night. You see the plow, you see the dipper, you see the fish and you see the net. Every thing blood and bone ever needed is shown and displayed in the sky. You can hunker down and pay the mortgage, and save yourself a lot of trouble, or you can see the show. There actually isn’t any other choice.
For a mere traveller has no access to the haunts...

Edward Dorn: The Air of June Sings

My eyes avoid

the largest
stone, larger than the common large, Goodpole Matthews,

Pioneer, and
that pioneer sticks in me like a wormed black cherry

in my throat,
No Date, nothing but that zeal, that trekking

and Business, that
presumption in a sacred place, where children

are buried, and
where peace, as it is in the fields and the country

should reign. A
wagon wheel is buried there. Lead me away

to the small
quiet stones of the unpreposterous dead and leave

me my tears for Darling we love thee, for
Budded on earth and blossomed

in heaven, where the fieldbirds sing in the
fence rows,

and there is possibility, where there are not the loneliest of
all.

Oh, the stones
not yet cut...

David Thomson on Dennis Hopper: Dead, Man

Frank Booth is one of those characters from the '80s, like Jack Torrance
and Hannibal Lecter, who showed how monsters were settling into
ordinary life....

The Magnificent Migrants



"The Thing"

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

LUIS HERNANDEZ originario de Estado de Veracruz trabaja como demoledor en Nueva York. Manda 200 dólares a la semana.

two classic albums by John Fahey, including "Railroad I":--

In 1983 he recorded Railroad I for his Takoma label: a 10-song album with titles a mixture of Richard Brautigan's porch-side mysticism and
folky small-talk with a grizzled convenience store clerk. Some sound like ad hoc itineraries: “Frisco Leaving Birmingham,” “Afternoon Espee
through Salem.” Others are lent an ambiguous personal symbolism or naïve simile: “Summer Cat by My Door,” “Life Is Like a Mountain Railway” (“I ask you, is it?” Fahey mused in his liners). There’s the rail fan’s favorite: “Steve Talbot on the Keddie Wey,” a locomotive picker rhapsodizing the steel tracks laid along the Feather River Canyon.

There’s the conflation of the ineffable and the empirical: “Enigmas & Perplexities of the Norfolk and Western;” “Delta Dog thru the Book of
Revelation.” There are meditations and ruminations, vignettes and moderate and capable extrapolations of worn and ossified themes. There
are whimsical and worried tones; there are deep death tolls and ecstatic birth cries. And there is no clear statement about anything. True to
his word, Railroad I is a puzzle askew--scattershot, a colorful and emotive mess, bereft of configuration and purpose...

Leslie Scalapino 1944-2010

happy birthday to great legal historian (& prose stylist) Frederic Maitland

Maitland Index

excellent "Hard Times" issue of historical journal Common-place

local trees & c.

columnated ruins domino - writing music photo video / lary bremner koriyama japan

.   lush sculpt stitch & slump

.   retain burlap integrate &
crush   .

.   reflect revise crescent &
dog   .

.   blacken reserve font &
foothill   .

Roy Arden

Ange Mlinko on Jimmy Schuyler

Light From Canada

A wonderful freshness, air
that billows like bedsheets
on a clothesline and the clouds
hang in a traffic jam: summer
heads home. Evangeline,
our light is scoured and Nova
Scotian and of a clarity that
opens up the huddled masses
of the stolid spruce so you
see them in their bristling
individuality. The other
day, walking among them, I
cast my gaze upon the ground
in hope of orchids and,
pendant, dead, a sharp shadow
in the shade, a branch gouged
and left me "scarred forever
'neath the eye." Not quite. Not
the cut, but the surprise, and
how, when her dress caught fire,
Longfellow's wife spun
into his arms and in the dying
of its flaring, died. The
irreparable, which changes
nothing that went before
though it ends it. Above the wash
and bark of rumpled water, a gull
falls down the wind to dine
on fish that swim up to do same.

Orson Welles' legacy

Welles stubbornly insisted on keeping his freedom long after he had to
relinquish his power, which makes him a troubled role model at best...

Isola di Rifiuti

“Fontenelle’s rose saying that within the memory of a rose no gardener had been known to die.”

excellent roundup on Radical Robbie Burns, Peoples Poet

the secret of Stieg Larsson

My favorite part of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (after the scene where Lisbeth Salander triumphs over the court-appointed guardian who abused her) is the part where crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist sets up, box by box, a research office in a little cabin on a remote Swedish island. My favorite part of "The Girl Who Played with Fire" (after the chapter where Salander infiltrates the bad guys' security system) is when she goes to Ikea to furnish her secret hideout and Larsson lists every last thing she buys there.

Local trees