thoughtful Ted Berrigan recollections at fait accompli, whose Nick Piombino I met, a fellow floater, amidst the swirl and light of the Mike Kelley show at the Gagosian a couple of weeks back--

"Berrigan was talking about the fact that when we read contemporary poetry there is an *electric* (instantaneous) quality to our contemporary way of reading that is unique to our era. He used Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath as an example. He was saying that we don't stop to think about each word the way we read poetry now. We engulf the pages instantaneously, ravenously. As he spoke about this, he kept pulling on the chord of the electric light hanging from the ceiling over and over turning excitedly turning it on and off. He made me realize that when we read poetry now we read with the speed of light, the speed of thought, so it should be written and presented with this factor in mind. His Sonnets helped make this an era of lightning fast poetry, He also spoke of the loss of nobility in poetry as well, so he was aware of the price that we might be paying for this type of insatiability. But I think he, and the New York School in general, did much to counter the mournful tones of so much 20th Century poetry: ("I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottom of my trousers rolled... I have seen them singing each to each...I do not think that they will sing to me")"


 

looking forward to Chris (DaVinci) Haddock's Intelligence (with Ian Tracey, pictured) on CBC tonight.

"His goal, Haddock says, was "to do something we don't see much of, which the Brits tend to do, which is an espionage thriller. The Americans do it, but it's often quite cliched; they do an exaggerated action-adventure approach to it. I thought the genre of real espionage thrillers was really unexplored and it would be something fresh.

"I think there's an appetite for it. Just worldwide, you have everybody questioning the sources of information and veracity of information."

Moreover, he envisioned Intelligence as being told from "not the top down but from the bottom up."

Haddock hopes by doing so he can create the sort of topical, potentially incendiary drama that generates conversation " not just thrills " among audience members. Specifically, he references the films of the 1970s " movies that reflected the Watergate era. ""

The Problem With Emily Dickinson from

"Elements of Literature for Christian Schools," by Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs (Bob Jones University, 2001)

"Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life."

 

"My shoes were by this time in a woeful condition. The soles had shed themselves bit by bit, and the upper leathers had broken and burst until the very shape and form of shoes had departed from them. My hat (which had served me for a night-cap, too) was so crushed and bent, that no old battered handleless saucepan on a dunghill need have been ashamed to vie with it. My shirt and trousers, stained with heat, dew, grass, and the Kentish soil on which I had slept - and torn besides - might have frightened the birds from my aunt's garden, as I stood at the gate. My hair had known no comb or brush since I left London. My face, neck, and hands, from unaccustomed exposure to the air and sun, were burnt to a berry-brown. From head to foot I was powdered almost as white with chalk and dust, as if I had come out of a lime-kiln. In this plight, and with a strong consciousness of it, I waited to introduce myself to, and make my first impression on, my formidable aunt."

watching George Cukor's great David Copperfield on TCM, how much of movie/text/illustration (as in many cases hopelessly conflated in my mind) was gone, what came back & in what form, intense moments utterly unrelated to narrative, those donkeys on the cliff, Freddie Bartholomew--my Dad's nemesis--and the milestones...


 

from Mark Mushet at Tyee a very nice set of images (in the warm Burns Bog fire light) of Vancouver's abandoned Arbutus Line--

"The CPR acquired what became known as "The Arbutus Line" from the Vancouver & Lulu Island Railway in 1901. Until 1958, the line was leased to the BC Electric Railway (BCER), which ran passenger services from Vancouver to Steveston. In its time, BCER "Interurban" cars carried people from downtown Vancouver to Steveston. But by 1958, all across North America, rails were replaced by rubber and, eventually, the gridlock we know and love today."

decent Georges Perec piece--Eng. translations of his books gladly all back in print, including Gilbert Adair's "A Void". I was very pleased to meet M. Adair at Lee Ann & Tony's salon, though too shy to subject him to quizzing about one of the most virtuosic translations attempted since Urqhart's Rabelais, let alone his "Love and Death on Long Island". Maybe next time!

David "Spider" Perry, Carla Billeteri, Me & Monica Fauble in Bangor last week

, originally uploaded by Mongibeddu.

I'm the one gazing wistfully at Ben & Carla's magnificent shelves. Many more of Ben's great pix inside.

George Monbiot

"But we shouldn't forget that the use of chemical weapons was a war crime within a war crime within a war crime. Both the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Falluja were illegal acts of aggression. Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men 'of fighting age' from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian's correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used 'hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population'.

I have been reading accounts of the assault published in the Marine Corps Gazette. The soldiers appear to have believed everything the US government told them. One article claims that 'the absence of civilians meant the marines could employ blast weapons prior to entering houses that had become pillboxes, not homes'. Another said that 'there were less than 500 civilians remaining in the city'. It continued: 'The heroics [of the marines] will be the subject of many articles and books ... The real key to this tactical victory rested in the spirit of the warriors who courageously fought the battle. They deserve all of the credit for liberating Falluja.'"

farewell Link Wray (1929-2005). On arrival home a choking fog & now this bad news. I'll be back once a good breeze clears out the valley. Meanwhile: crank it up, daddy.


 

yr humble blogger, in Deep Thought in Deep Cove, one of 365 Sketches by Adam Harrison, the new issue of whose online magazine (co-edited with Aaron Peck) Doppelganger (which contains his fascinating conversation with photographer Evan Lee & a review by Chris Brayshaw) is out.

I will be away from the manse until around the 20th. If you're near the University of Maine in Orono, on the 17th I will be reading with David Perry.

 

& also in Vancouver, Meredith Quartermain takes the Macdonald and Knight (which both went past that park I think)--respectively the J & L trains of Vancouver buses--amongst a sheaf of Vancouver-mostly poets ed. by Jacqueline Turner in the new Stylus Poetry Journal--

"The word roars off over the Burrard Bridge, on a route of its own: Harry Knight, a BC photographer, preferred soft-focus pictorial moodiness; John Knight, Captain RN, got his name on the Kwakwakawakw inlet where thousands of first nations people fished for Eulachon (he'd served in the American Revolutionary War with Vancouver's right-hand man, Captain Broughton); The Knights of Labor in the 1880s elected Vancouver's second mayor, lobbied for a shorter work-day, tried to stop the import of low-paid Asian workers. The word roars on through the meccano-set girders of the bridge: a feudal tenant trained for mounted combat; a man devoted to the service of a woman; a horse-head chess-piece that moves in L-shaped leaps. By sea and land we prosper, says the city motto on the bridge house - a lumberjack and a seaman hold up the city coat of arms..."

Christopher Columbus as a bambino, in his old location under the Skytrain tracks at 5th and Clark, a little concrete park on a busy street, always deserted, where I used to like and stop for a smoke and sometimes a wee read while walking between Mount Pleasant and the Drive, now I learn he's in Hastings park, no one told me, from the City of Vancouver Public Art Registry. I had one of the great visions of my life sitting there: foggy, late fall but warm around maybe 3 in the morning, a Skytrain maintenance car, cladded, no windows, grinding the track with festoons of spark hissing into the fog, going back and forth like a floor polisher.



 

Jack Delano--
"Mrs. Viola Sievers, one of the wipers at the roundhouse giving a giant "H" class locomotive a bath of live steam, Clinton, Iowa, April 1943", from
Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943 (Library of Congress Exhibition)
 

last night greatly enjoyed Canadian director Fletcher Markle's The Man with a Cloak (1951) with Louis Calhern as the dying roue, Leslie Caron as the ingenue, Barbara Stanwyck as the scheming servant, Jim Backus as the friendly barkeep, a raven named Villon & Joseph Cotten as (spoiler alert!) Edgar Allen Poe...


 

"Shelley's Body (England)" from Benny's Postcards
 

re: Jordan's "428"-- "a cross between a Spy and an Empire" this "Red Canada" from The Apples of New York

Saturday will be the centenary of the birth of actor Joel McCrea (Ride the High Country, Sullivan's Travels) & TCM have been showing many of the movies mentioned in this just-over series from the LA County Museum, including the Sturges & Peckinpah films, but the big revelation for me has been Jacques (Cat People) Tourneur's incredible 1950 "Stars in my Crown", with Dean Stockwell, about a small town parson (the situation depicted in the poster omits the Bible he lays on the bar between his pistols!), never before seen, like one of Ford's "domestic" films, but less sentimental & tinged with eeriness...

(Captain Hook)

...by hook
or by crook...

john cale's
big career move ca. mid-80's:

a majestic parade-float of
procol harum-ized

punk, but recorded live
real brittle-like--

a metallic board mix
chunky metal cassette mix

irritating
irritating

the "loudness" button
remember that

it was for this
not the cushion

of even that heimlich distortion
re: chris thomas' pistols

even motorhead--
if your ear accepts it

as other than assault
at any volume

irritation is just
ideological,

dont tell me
you can fit

the stray gators
into your helmet

and keep on riding!--
so in the midst of this

12 minutes of mock-epic opening
side 3 of the imax thunderdome w/

bowery ambience
subbing for the edmonton symphony

and cale has come in character
dick burton in iguana

with a miner's lamp
and a fistful of arthur janov

overmatched it proved
against the punks in their red brigade pyjamas

for who remembers bobby sands
and frederick forsyth paperbacks

with walken
in the snow:

the mercenary chic
is what stuck.

 

big Odilon Redon show at MOMA...
 

Barbellionblog from October, 1912--

"Under the oak where I sat the ground was covered with dead leaves. I kicked them, and I beat them with my stick, because I was angry that they were dead. In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically floating earthwards in the pomp of death. It was very thrilling to observe them.

It was a curious sensation to realise that since the last time I sat under the old oak I had been right up to the N. of England, then right down to the S.W., and back once more to London town. I bragged about my kinetic activity to the stationary oak and I scoffed at the old hill for having to remain always in the same place.

It gave me a pleasing sense of infinite superiority to come back and see everything the same as before, to sit on the same old seat under the same old oak. Even that same old hurdle was lying in the same position among the bracken. How sorry I was for it! Poor wretch--unable to move--to go to Whitby, to go to C------, to be totally ignorant of the great country of London. "

hey! they just added Turner Classic Movies to our cable package! This is just great esp. as old movies get harder and harder to find on regular channels...Tonight: Misfits, Sierra Madre, Red Badge, Asphalt Jungle...
 

Spring Forward, Fall Back--

"H.O.W.


I can treat you to visit
to coastal pillboxes
I like to delve in destruction,
lust and debauches
And I am the one who stamps on all ages
From 16 to 40,
over and under
I'm monolithic,
and the black ice on the corner


Hiss...hiss...hiss


As all is as one,
as all damp on all stone
I hold all time and
can induce at once
Jet trains, lead paint,
stamps on border forms
Misread Easter Island,
put butter on plague style
Spin complete revolutions
and not bat an eyelid
And alter tree-rings
so that what you are after
You will not ever find
with a surfeit of lumber
And make you imagine from hunger
Bread trees spinning,
dripping with butter
Just 6 inches higher
than your upstretched middle finger


History of the...


I place minute dust
in your microchip vessels
For daring to think
all science is immortal
I am the one
who'll strike you down at once
For stretching time-bracket,
and assuming that what is
Can be maladjusted.
A rigid adoption
Of codes you had concocted
I can treat you to visit
to coastal pillboxes
And show you all hideous
microscope thingies
And Hovis set-up
in London's psoriasis

Stockings, jokings, 1780's


History of the wo...


I like to delve in destruction,
lust and debauches
And I am the one
who stamps on all ages
From 16 to 40, over and under


History of the world..."

 

let me concur with Rue Hazard's call for more oafishness--


"And breezing that against so many poesies pures, in the issue of "No" at hand, frankly, what I long for (in the "scene" generally) is more oafishness. Not the recombinant superior gleaming machine-oafishness of flarf-generators, but the droopy drawers, stumbled-down, anything goes inheritors of the Biotherm-esque O'Hara, Berryman's big mess, and Ammons's barrages of garbage. Or Bernadette Mayer's dishevel'd junkyard dog opus, or Alice Notley's sass in the filigree. Ain't there a chill despotic cleanliness, a shard-preciosity, all around now? More splendid piss-burn and rags and jags! More guffaw and betises! More spilt Willies!"

Wisconsin Tabby Travels to France 

a good night for Tam O' Shanter: A Tale by Robert Burns. The actual kirk where Tam witnessed the Witch's Sabbath and the bridge he escapes over were both quite near the house I lived in 69-72--



"...Warlocks and witches in a dance:
Nae cotillon, brent new frae France,
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,
Put life and mettle in their heels.
A winnock-bunker in the east,
There sat auld Nick, in shape o' beast;
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge:
He screw'd the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a' did dirl. -
Coffins stood round, like open presses,
That shaw'd the Dead in their last dresses;
And (by some devilish cantraip sleight)
Each in its cauld hand held a light.
By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table,
A murderer's banes, in gibbet-airns;
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns;
A thief, new-cutted frae a rape,
Wi' his last gasp his gabudid gape;
Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted:
Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted;
A garter which a babe had strangled:
A knife, a father's throat had mangled.
Whom his ain son of life bereft,
The grey-hairs yet stack to the heft;
Wi' mair of horrible and awfu',
Which even to name wad be unlawfu'.
Three lawyers tongues, turned inside oot,
Wi' lies, seamed like a beggars clout,
Three priests hearts, rotten, black as muck,
Lay stinkin, vile in every neuk."

 

Scottish Halloween was very exotic for me. The weather was invariably driving rain. You went to very few houses, which had no special decorations. You had to go into the houses and do your "party piece"--in my case "My Heart's in the Highlands(piping soprano mix)"--after which you were given something, candy sometimes, but not always--sometimes small change, a cup of tea, I think I remember being given a slice of Battenberg cake once. All of which could take half an hour plus, particularly if some kid after you had a watchable act, which many did, Scotland in those days full of accomplished child performers. Consequently a dozen houses was considered a good night, with not much to show for it however good a time had, and the weather never made it seem like going far afield would be worth it, unlike those endless warm October Ontario ones where I would roam for miles through the sugary elm backroads of Huron County, gathering pillowcase load after pillowcase load, mugging and being mugged, vomiting mojos into a ditch...

Robert Burns' Halloween poem, with his aen annotations--

"The first ceremony of Halloween is pulling each a "stock," or plant of kail. They must go out, hand in hand, with eyes shut, and pull the first they meet with: its being big or little, straight or crooked, is prophetic of the size and shape of the grand object of all their spells--the husband or wife. If any "yird," or earth, stick to the root, that is "tocher," or fortune; and the taste of the "custock," that is, the heart of the stem, is indicative of the natural temper and disposition. Lastly, the stems, or, to give them their ordinary appellation, the "runts," are placed somewhere above the head of the door; and the Christian names of the people whom chance brings into the house are, according to the priority of placing the "runts," the names in question."