RIP Hugh Hopper , of Soft Machine, one of the Hughs who inspired my poem "The Book of Hugh", Soft Machine member & writer of "Dedicated to You (Hugh) But You Weren't Listening" & "Out-Bloody-Rageous", has died. The most melodic electric bassist I can think of, even more so than Steve Swallow, whose place in the Carla Bley band Hopper took on more than occasion...

To Be a Baby

Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults...

Local trees

couldn't we all use a little more Dinah Washington?

farewell to the wise, lovely, peerlessly funny poet David Bromige



more here

this is very well done--On the Creepy Alluring Art of the Follow Shot

"Following" is a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment. I love this shot because it's neither first-person nor third; it makes you aware of a character's presence within the movie's physical world while also forcing identification
with the character. I also love the sensation of momentum that following shots invariably summon. Because the camera is so close to the character(s) being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog...

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Hemingway, Roethke, Plath & Ahab, from Literary Minifigs - a set on Flickr

Seattle trees

Extract from Aaron Vidaver's

"Introductions and incomplete bibliography written for the Anomalous Parlance series organized at the Kootenay School of Writing in 2000...

If ontology is the luxury of the landed, what is the necessity of the nomadic? In one of Warren Tallman’s letters to Robin Blaser he suggested that the New American Poets each demanded a cult of readers, because each poetry proposed a world requiring domestic inhabitation. The 6, 7, or 8 poetries in this series permit squatting only: perfect hide-outs from the authorities. They’re anomalous not in the sense of being abnormal (a psychological notion), but in their uncomfortability to common orders. They’re lawless, but not uniformly so. The word “parlance”, however, strikes me more deeply than ‘anomalous’ – it points to a conference to discuss terms, a conference that I hope will arise. Let’s defer the problem of specifying this writing as a poetics of _______, to prevent vaccination against the work itself...

Local & Tsawassen trees, Eva's typewriter (to whom special thanks for so graciously giving up her room, also to CJ for plugging the fan in, Sam for the new cartoons & Lord Bentley for the Springsteen singalong...)