Stanley Cavell's 2000 review of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project--

"Why (according to what allegories) make a work that cannot be read through? Perhaps to remind the reader that his and her work must perpetually find its own end. Why make a work that cannot be written to an end? Perhaps to remind the writer of a reason to suffer awakening without end. It is work that is capable of recognizing, in a response to Nietzsche, "suicide as signature of modernity." Then The Arcades Project, constructive, modernist, and unending, is not so much an argument against suicide as it is an attestation, so long as the work can continue, that deprives suicide of its point..."

Robert Smithson--Strata, a Geophotographic Fiction

"MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS. PUTTING FACTS TOGETHER LIKE A JIGSAW PUZZLE. LANGUAGE AND SOIL BLOW AWAY. FLOODS. BILATERALLY SYMMETRICAL CREATURES. AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE AUSTRAL SEA (BLUE ON GRAY DOTS). A FRAGMENTARY THEORY. EXCAVATIONS AT DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT IN NORTHEASTERN UTAH. PALAEOZOIC ERA SHOWN ON AN OLD CHART. LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT THE LAND AREAS. THEY PLOUGHED THEIR WAY THROUGH THE MUD. WORMS AND MORE WORMS TURN INTO GAS. SEA BUTTERFLIES FALL INTO A NAMELESS OCEAN. PLASTER RESTORATIONS COLLECTING DUSTIN THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. THE TRACKS OF TRILO BITES HARDEN INTO FOSSILS. ACCUMULATIONS OF WASTE ON THE SEA BOTTOMS. JELLY-FISH BAKING UNDER THE SUN. DIGESTIVE SYSTEMS SHOWN IN DIAGRAMS.... A TENDENCY TO AMORPHOUSNESS... (HEINRICH WOLFFLIN).... SCABBY TOPOGRAPHY ON SOLFATARA PLATEAU (C. MAX BAUER). MAY HAVE LOOKED LIKE THE PLANET VENUS. LIMP-LOOKING CRUSTACEANS, DYING BY THE MILLIONS. WILL YOU FOLLOW ME AS FAR AS THE SARGASSO SEA? (GIORG1O DE CHIRICO). CONGLOMERATE THOUGHTS. MOLLUSCA. BREAKING APART INTO PARTICLES. SOMETHING FLOWING BETWEEN THE CARIBBEAN AND NEWFOUNDLAND. THE EQUATOR OVER NEW MEXICO MADE OF DOTS AND DASHES. (PORIFERA). BELTS OF SCATTERED ISLANDS. LLANORIA SOUTH OF LOUISIANNA. MOUNTAINS OF JELLYFISH. THE DIMENSIONS OF AN UNKNOWN SLIME. LIME-SECRETING COLLENIA. A GLOBE SHOWING THE APPALACHIAN TROUGH. GALLERIES FULL OF ODD NAMES AND MODELS. CLOUDS MADE OF PAPER. A DRAWING OF CASCADIA DRAWN PARALLEL TO THE PACIFIC COAST. A GUIDE TO GRIT..."

Area trees

Once Upon a Time...

"Take the lesson: murder hundreds of thousands of people for no reason at all, completely destroy a virtually defenseless country, and do everything possible to begin what could turn into a nuclear Armageddon that would murder millions -- and the worst that will be said about you is that you are an incompetent and stupid bumbler. That we are well on our way to becoming one of the most monstrous nations in history is the thought that cannot bear serious contemplation by our governing class, or by those bloggers who serve as its ignorant and/or corrupt apologists. But threaten the prerogatives of the privileged ruling elites themselves, and hellfire shall devour your soul. Never mind the suffering and death of "ordinary" people: trampling on the inalienable "rights" of those who already possess immense power is the unforgivable sin. Priorities, indeed. The final destruction of the American republic may be almost upon us, and the Republicans and Democrats and their respective blogger-enablers fight like disease-infested rats over the rotting, bloated, already stinking flesh of the doomed, permanently corrupted corporatist state..."

on "repeat" at the manse this morning the teenage Mozart's "Jenamy" Concerto #9 K.271--

"K. 271 bears another kind of significance. Its name "Jeunehomme Concerto", to which audiences grew accustomed during the twentieth century, is a product of pure fantasy and of wilful invention. It is a musical nickname created by Mozart scholarship in a fit of total blindness. For the last ninety-two years this famous concerto has been performed under a wrong name..."

"The aesthetic of the painter, the poet, en etat de surprise, of art as the reaction of one surprised, is enmeshed in a number of pernicious romantic prejudices. Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process) as the profane illumination of reading will teach us about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic) as the profane illumination of thinking will teach us about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug--ourselves--which we take in solitude."

Walter Benjamin "Surrealism--The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" 1929

Beaver Creek Road

No need to get
into the stewpot
with the sacrificial horse

these days of course more
a stain of Bovril hot
from a tartan thermos

but the battle of the trees
or the battle of the letters
or the battle between the

forest & the letters & the trees
has got me losing sleep
& repeating past dawn--

I am the falcon
I fly blind
through a progressive sky--

crisp as Hampton Hawes circa 1955--
Hermosa Beach,
my tiny harmonium gently weeps

a pastel streak
down a marble cheek
while the evening refuses

to abandon its swatches
& come in out of the rain,
a lighthouse in trousers passes

sans eagle-eye motif
but a copper moon dangling
over a heap of crushed felt

between his ass & the saddle,
loaded with six empties
& the cooler cooler cooler

the Fargo's likely to buck
so switch to premium
for the Parkway--

a circling bird
I cannot help but overhear
your hesitations

what's said's
a hammer falling
on an empty chamber

old furniture
unlikely to remember
I refuse to look--

Joanna to Goldfinch
a row of Specials
nestled in a ravine

a set of hoops
in every 45 degree driveway
where the sun don't crest

till one at least
but no trash utopia
blackberry the stream

tended to such a goatproof-bridged
fare-thee well
that coming out onto

Shenton the residual
good will had sanded
the industrial off the park

before the looming
crystal waterwork mini-lake motel
put it back in.

devotees of obscure gangster films & Henry Silva shouldn't miss Johnny Cool (1963) on TCM tomorrow at 1500hrs, with a smokin' pre-Samantha Elizabeth Montgomery as "Dare Guinness" & a host of Rat Packers (inc. Sammy Davis Jr. as "Educated" who sings "The Ballad of Johnny Cool") A great favorite locally in the late 70's...remade as "Ghost Dog"...