Followup: well Christopher made it up Mt. Sloan and back in one piece, just. I'm only 200 pages into FDR: the Versailles Treaty & League of Nations are a wash (thanks again congressional Republicans!!) & handsome bonehead Harding (worst until Bush Jr.) is in the White House. FDR hasn't even gotten polio yet. But at least I didn't leave my ice axe in the car!

UK now officially a police state--

Innocent in London

"When they were through, the two explosive specialists walked out of the tube station smiling and commenting ‘nice laptop’. The officers offered apologies on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. Then they arrested me."

"talk about me if you please
but I must be Hercules..."

(Allen Toussaint)

September 'tox
and the "sub-conscious"
back with pearly teeth,
party dreams as
subtle as Marnie
without the saving grace
of a young Bruce Dern,
otherwise a pipeload
of nasty eighties
bowl-scrapings
filtered through a screen
of Screen, the fear
is not of crystal meth
but access
to wakefulness
via household products
otherwise divvied
up among fighter crews,
prison guards, janitors
and the federales
of Sumas
patrolling beet fields
for sugar thieves.

poem and blog name of the day--Value Village Is Booby-Trapped!!

Crossing The Street

or, "Why I Am Not Frank O'Hara"



I'm not exactly "Joe Lunch Poems."





(thanks Bemsha Swing)

nice roundup review of recent books about Samuel Johnson's Dictionary contains the welcome news that a CD rom of it is available for fifty bucks...
 

our essays for Evan Lee's Presentation House catalogue done,
Christopher is off to climb a pointy and frightening mountain near Pemberton, while I'm off to the porch pavilion to crack the spine on Conrad Black's mountainous FDR biography...wish us luck!

several lovely new quicktimes up at thewww.somedancersandmusicians.com site, including a glass harmonica loop...
 

the dozen or New York City owners of my 1995 book "The Climax Forest", where Reid Shier's version appears on page nine, and eight million other folks should get out and get a good long gander at the realisation of the late Robert Smithson's "Floating Island" project, which will be circling Manhattan for a few more days...
 

Andre Kertesz

"Without the time-consuming distraction of a job even trivial questions assume the weight of fate itself. You have all day to dwell on the slights dealt out to you, the decisions wrongly made, but this, in turn, can generate its own solace: with nothing else to distract you such things start to seem like the facts of life, as much a part of the human condition as a bench is part of a park. So when you come to a bench in the park, possibly your favourite bench, and find it broken, the experience comes as both a personal disappointment and corroboration of something to which you had already pretty much resigned yourself. In these circumstances, what can you do except look at it and try to work out how much should be read into it, how personally to take it, whether, actually, there is any difference between destiny and chance?"

Geoff Dyer, from his new book on photography "The Ongoing Moment"

P*** K******

"But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.

Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, 'Why should I be taxed to support those people?'"

(Mama Roux)

At the corner store
the protestant santeria
of the lottery logos--

fake foxing
against a gold rush font,
the leprechaun's derby

overflows--
a yellow cord
marks off the liquor store

after eleven,
outside (courtesy of
the smoke from Burns Bog)

the moon trails
a gambler's beard,
a kettle of coins

rattles inside the aqua
tunnel under highway one
illuminates the figure eight

I inscribed on a whim
on the slope outside
the fire station--

or it could be
the "pimpjuice" sticker
the pepsico rep

slapped near the entrance
or the icecube with wings
and a Grecian profile

loyal to the old regime
where the word "cold"
came wreathed in beads of sweat

and every word
unashamedly itself,
like those farmers

in Emerson
who planted
themselves last

pulling the earth
over themselves
like an old quilt.