"The Beaver and the Fox Promenade" from The Fantastic in Art and Fiction 

the threat of fear and defeatism

"The armed plainclothes squad pursued a man essentially because he was not white and was wearing an unseasonably thick coat. They allowed him to board and leave a double-decker bus unchallenged. Then, when he ran away from them and jumped on a tube train, they apparently decided that he must be a bomber and shot him eight times, seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.


These crack anti-terrorist marksmen acted with about as much cool professionalism as the American gunman who shot dead a turban-wearing Sikh immediately after 9/11, for supposedly looking like a Muslim. But they were only acting on the message that has come from the top of the UK political and police establishment since 7 July. The panicky message has been that these few bombers allegedly pose an 'unprecedented' threat to our way of life, so that any liberty can be sacrificed or draconian measure justified if it is supposed to help stop them."

from Michael Scharf's "Contract Law" at Poetry Daily

"If every exchange is negotiated with the presumption of bad faith, the only possible way to come away with even a piece of what you
want is to propose basic terms which you have no intention of fulfilling, while feeling around for what givens on the other side can be seized
and services extracted without further harm to you, though the tenets of the system be destroyed... "

(thanks Jordan) 

Alternate illustration for poem below.

Lime Rickey, anyone?

article on "Call It Sleep" novelist Henry Roth

(Les Chemins de la Liberte)

In a basement
presently bereft of life

avocado
beer fridge contains single

serving Pop Shoppe
Tom Collins mix bottle

to which the cap
bent by the opener

is reattached
precariously and

symbolically
panelling well you know

old tube TV
21 inch black and

white and best of
all an RCA "in"

jack to which I
could run a chord from

the portable
suitcase mono that was

my parent's thus
adding a channel of deep

mahogany
courtesy the TV's

mighty twin four
inch cones resonating

through layers of made-
in-Canada-goddam

it verathane
and varnished returned now

to duty as
the downstairs TV which

I alone watched
things in black and white old

movies &c.
on this warm night having

drained the mix which
when held long enough gave

a hint of fizz
good & cold certainly!

I returned to the
weekday summer showing of

the early 70's
serialisation

of Sartre's Roads
to Freedom done by

the BBC
in that particular

house style that
English actors use

portraying
the French as in that great

Maigret series
with Michael Gambon

of which nothing
outside a lot of shouted

conversations
I remember nothing

except for that
on this night the action

suddenly shrank
to the size of a postcard

then a stamp
then a pearl on which you

could still make out
the tiny figure of a

woman in a
trench coat striding across

a tiny room
then the image brightened

to the head
of a pin retinal

trace only now
and then from the back of

the TV an
acrid plume of black smoke

(COMMITMENT
they were talking about)

poured clinging
through the vent upstairs yanked

the plug blue blue
spark a copper smell curled

but the chancy
wiring and fridge were saved.

fine Geoffrey O'Brien on Spielberg's (and Wells') "War of the Worlds"--

"The aura of virtual historical reality that Spielberg labored to create for the ghetto takeover in Schindler's List or the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan is here imparted to an invasion that might as well be historical: the devastation of twenty-first-century New Jersey by illustrations from a Victorian scientific romance. These almost fussily perfect vistas, like the extraordinary moment when the alien machines are seen from a distance standing knee-deep in the Hudson to feed on their human prey, evoke a peculiar kind of history painting: Landscape with Tripods, perhaps, an exercise in the Spielbergian sublime, where what devastates us does, from a certain angle, possess an undeniable abstract beauty. These spacious set-ups have a gaudy splendor far removed from the cramped dullness of the ordinary world on which the aliens intruded, a world in which the sole note of aesthetic liveliness was provided by a children's cartoon show. "

"I'm in love with moonlight,
128 when its dark outside"

(Roadrunner)


Though my infantilised cat
confirms my existence
the cars don't see me--

Ganesha's prints
were all over the trunk, giant

pants in black
with a velcroed
right-turn indicator

over which
a cuff neatly folded,
red compact, splashed,

lost, speeding, between Boundary
& Bowen, the other leg muddy,
raggedy, platforms

worn at an angle of 35 degrees
from walking in circles--
just right for ditch baloney,

though between here and
the "quarter mile"
of the old Northfield industrial park

(mid-sixties, still an implied
roundedness in the signage, "moderne"
so far as it recalls Rockford,

Barnaby Jones &c.) the
fairgrounds, concrete
terrace overlooking

an oval track, everywhere
the cars had been before me
writing through the ivy.

Vancouver artist Sylvia Grace Borda looks at the modernist legacy of the Scottish "New Town" of East Kilbride, which I remember visiting sometime in the late 60's when it really was new. Though she doesn't mention it Bill Forsyth's movie "Gregory's Girl" was filmed there.

(thanks Chris) 

helpful as ever, Hotel Point provides a epigraph for my poem below--

"And Melville, in a letter: "For my part, I love sleepy

fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wideawake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something

sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long snooze together, under the sod . . ." (Paul Metcalf

told me that.) So we nod, and resume, we toss on our pallets, we sleep like dogs, thumping. "
 

Shoot to kill in order to protect

"This is a tragedy," Blair said Sunday. "The Metropolitan Police accepts full responsibility for this. To the family I can only express my deep regrets."


But he defended the shoot-to-kill policy, saying such action only applied when lives were thought to be at risk.


"I am very aware that minority communities are talking about a shoot-to-kill policy," he said. "It's only a shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect policy."


Blair said British police have drawn from the experiences of other countries that have dealt with suicide attackers.


"The only way to deal with this is to shoot to the head," he said. "There is no point in shooting at someone's chest because that is where the bomb is likely to be."

Shoot to kill

"Heavily armed private security contractors, who number in the tens of thousands, also are authorized by the U.S. government to use deadly force to protect themselves.

One contractor who works for the U.S. government and saw a colleague killed in a suicide bombing said it was better to shoot an innocent person than to risk being killed.

'I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six,' said the contractor, who insisted that he not be identified by name because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The U.S. military says it investigates all shootings by American personnel that result in death. But U.S. Brig. Gen. Don Alston, spokesman for the multinational force in Iraq, said he was unaware of any soldier disciplined for shooting a civilian at a checkpoint or in traffic. "

the brand new onedit features work by (among others) Brian Kim Stefans, P. Inman, Lisa Jarnot &

Tim Atkins versioning

HORACE

the innumerable years
full of nobbers
& the transitory habits of murkin
are forming the roaring
Bospherous
Syrtes self-made minge of spinach
& Upton-on-Severn

Edgar & Johnny
clink to the raiders' spunk
more splendid than the Starkeys'
thin pamphlets & halitosis
on the neck of
translations

you know how no cincture of ropes

worry about you now I long to
regurgitate
Bern stars and the sailor's
KY, the seeps of whingers wax
shall worm to no other women, I -
more runched against than
runching

(Double Deadtime Bummer Blues)

for

(Judee Sill)



Alive to the moment
but you sleep a lot,

"misspent" as if
in a sentence describing

an unexpected skill
at pool or cards--though

an incremental embrace
of criminality inevitable

given just how strict, & c.
Dimes for the parking meter

in bowls at the Bank of
Montreal downtown (now

gone, the Harewood branch
gone) those little dusty mints

as we left the taverna
just as everyone's back was turned;

coffee with Coffeemate
at the Caledonia Clinic--

brighter now flooded everywhere
with glare it would be harder

to disappear into that soft-fringed
theology, those Townsite

alleys empty at all hours
of everything but

"Il Quatro Staggioni"
"The Sickness Unto Death".

Link Wray's Border Blues

"Instead, we listened to him announce, "Link isn't here yet. He's... um... just... down the street. Hang tight." This explanation didn't hold much weight with those near the stage, as an uncomfortable fear emoted from Miller's eyes. People in the back joked that the 76-year-old star was probably entertaining himself with lap dances at the Cecil Hotel next door. The crowd may not have been so jovial had it known that at that very moment, Link Wray was being both stripped naked and physically assaulted by Canadian border guards.

Five hours after the doors had opened, an announcement was finally made. For reasons not totally made clear, Link Wray's drummer was being detained and would not be allowed into Canada. The rest of the Wraymen had arrived in Vancouver, but were in no mood to perform."

the great Judee Sill's last recordings finally issued--

"This record's lovingly packaged accompanying 72-page oral history memorializes Sill in a doomed embroidery populated with the ghosts of Rosicrucian fellowships and other mystical mongrelisms, the musical revelations of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bach and Mahler, Pythagorean intervallic worship, oil-money trust funds, seaside peyote picnics, a muscular hallucinogenic appetite, exotic reptile importing siblings, indiscrete bisexual trysting, near-fatal auto accidents with Danny Kaye, Madame Blavatsky, violent relationships, an electronic bypass apparatus designed to bridge Judee's ill-healed broken spine, Geffen's pink shoes, long-term heroin addiction, Bill Plummer's Cosmic Brotherhood, and a parakeet named Celine."