BIRD CALLS and SONGS
A blog about the bird sounds of eastern North America and beyond using original recordings and sonagrams.

Issuu - the-dor - Documents -- artists books by Chris Burden, Marcel Broodthaers &c.

Did any other man frig you?

Vancouver jangle punks Apollo Ghosts
have recorded an experimental hip-hop song using words taken from James
Joyce’s personal (and extremely sexual) letters to his wife Nora.


The rhythm section lays down a steady groove while frontman Adrian
Teacher makes his way through a series of paranoid and pornographic
questions, found sound clips and string samples flickering in the
background. At 5:56, it’s nearly twice the length of any other track
that the band has previously released, and it culminates in an extended
jam, with the instruments engulfed in a swirl of samples...

great site for classical organ fans--Organlive.com

out & about

Lampedusa in London by David Gilmour

...The eccentric Piccolo brothers were, like their cousin, talented and very unproductive intellectuals. The elder, Casimiro, took months to paint a picture of goblins in a style influenced by Arthur Rackham, while Lucio spent thirty years composing but never managing to complete a Magnificat in the style of Malipiero. In the 1950s the younger brother decided to publish his poems, Canti barocchi, which won a literary prize in Lombardy, an unexpected achievement that turned his cousin Giuseppe competitive and impelled him to write The Leopard. “Being mathematically certain”, he wrote, “that I was no more of a fool [than Lucio], I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel.”

Thomas Browne Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658)

Why the Female Ghosts appear unto Ulysses, before the Heroes and masculine spirits? Why the Psyche or soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender; who being blinde on earth sees more then all the rest in hell; Why the Funerall Suppers consisted of Eggs, Beans, Smallage, and Lettuce, since the dead are made to eat Asphodels about the Elyzian medows? Why since there is no Sacrifice acceptable, nor any propitiation for the Covenant of the grave; men set up the Deity of Morta, and fruitlesly adored Divinities without ears? it cannot escape some doubt...What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture...

"Ho-ho! Now we're both eggheads!" Dandy 1496, July 25th, 1970

I do not long for much in this world, but I want a Brassneck I can attach a microphone to the 'bonce' of...

George Bellows Pennsylvania Station Excavation 1908

George Wesley Bellows: The Lone Tenement 1909

Anchor by Stuart Davis 1935

Caspar David Friedrich - Owl Flying against a Moonlit Sky, ca 1837

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Sloan (American, 1871–1951)
Chinese Restaurant, 1909
Oil on canvas; 26 x 32 1/4 in. (66 x 81.9 cm)

book lovers never go to bed alone

A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a
man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a
luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.

Henry Ward Beecher

out & about

on TCM tonight a great favorite of mine, the swoony technicolor Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (writer/director Albert Lewin was a close friend of poet Charles Reznikoff by the way)

the talk I gave on Maxine Gadd last night--

MAX POWER

UNDER BYZANTIUM
from THE SUBWAY OF THE CONFEDERACY

CALLING FOR LONG BOWS IN THE BEDLAM OF BUTTONS & BOWS

The map is not the territory. It isn't even the territory. (Joel Oppenheimer)

'Bun' is such a sad word, is it not. And 'man' is not much better (Samuel Beckett quoted by Maxine Gadd)

CAPITALISM IS CAUSED BY WARS; COMMUNISM BY FLOODS


All history slides into Whig History

Yu feel at ease with yr amnesia

that is the story of us & how we became us
& how it becomes us
to so naturally occupy
our exalted place in the scheme of things,
                                       at the end of things.

NO WAY TO RUN ANYTHING, PRETENDING THERE IS NO AUTHORITY

Even the present disposition of
la cosa nostra, post-avant garde poetry--
a corpse from which increasing amounts
of blood paradoxically seem to flow--
disports itself as though
its shuffling zombie compromises
were the best of all possible worlds
nuked in the eighties 
or that the public life of poetry is
somehow best sustained
by using higher education
Nibelungen style
to convert the enthusiasm of young people
into credentials & debt & gelt--
by mining their good will
as one would clear cut a hillside
into a smile--
into an assumed permanent natural order.
Rendering unto Caesar.

God loves only Augustus. 

Byzantium lasted ten thousand years.

This contract has given all the communities of
contemporary poetry, for all their competing modes
& methods, an underlying unanimity
borne of fear. 

They make you look now at
the shape of your baby rage.
They intervene in time.
Your feelings are a symptom.
The threat of poverty & prison & homelessness & murder.
They show you the tools they would torture you with.


Thus the industrial academy
not only best arbiter
of discourse but rainbow bridge
time machine transporter slippery slope
between Bohemia & the middle class,
a reversible prophylactic.
IT ALONE LAMINATES.
It is the vessel inside
which we have agreed
that the radium of poetry
is best protected from itself;
all we ask is a bedbug snuggle in the folds---

as the economic circumstances
which encourage Bohemia have faded
from possibility
so too has the memory
of their former vigour,
history being written by the owners of horses.

They make you forget that it could have gone either way...
 
Not so much a split then
between the campus
& the coffeehouse
        but a flower of pure heresy--a real floater
in the patriarchal bowl
embarassing & antithetical
autodidacticism self-correcting
bibles with red protestant pencils
jutting from their spines
never beloved by
the people with guns & horses. The glamour of the Romans
marched ahead of their armies. The wise Hungarian boys
wanted in.

Thus Sibylline
neighbor wrestles with starting
the collectible collective chain-saw
Texas massacre style. But for no woman is the shadow
of the Imperium ever absent or
the rumbling engines silent.
 
So Max for decades sans the benefits of the kind of
eccentrically overproducing
alternative steady state personality
apparatus that keeps bissett going
& sustained Gerry Gilbert for decades
Tim Lander & me for that matter
hiding behind our beards our city. 
Wearing out our knees on the welcome mat
& as boys we get to do that.

but we never get to say

me thinking to kill whoever speaks to me

just like a woman, not in a woman's voice when
there was still a chance heresy might bust out & take over,
the winds of Vatican 2, Prague summer,
Roberts Creek...  In BC you could get away from the state
by walking uphill barefoot for ten minutes
--the British Empire hates mountains
as much as the Romans did. Build a fort on
the lip on which the sun never sets
& keep those good snacks &
drugs & trade goods coming.

We congratulate ourselves for even trying
our good thoughts & a
Dollar store resembles the interior of a bandits sack.

Babies as weapons for Mother Canada.
Dog on stun.

THE HEAVY METAL DIAPER GET SET READY TO GO

not even feminists
have agency
without a society
to quit

So from here on in the gendered
rejection of Satan & his works
seems a pretty clear choice.
Pride the first indicated voice.
Speaker not keeper.
Ignore the thickening local ghosts.
But the beats were as scared of Peggy Lee
as everybody else. Uniformity of conduct & sweater
mad men how even as men
can we imagine it. Hippy fascism.
Waldorf Willendorf.
Postwar /////

For if yv diddled in the truly amusing the king jumps yu

Dicks working out there shit with chicks
in a very entitled fucking way.

Bail on even as much of this
life with father figure fascism
as what sugared the rim
of the rapidly organizing poetry apparatus
& you do get privileges: 

One is you get to jump off the
whole whig history train,
unshackled by utopic kiwanis klub
pinko bullshit
or future shock payback
or death on the installment plan. 
But the long line of heroes is not up to you
& we'll still give you up to the cops in a heartbeat
& no you can't use our library
& you're one of the greats but
there's a coffee filter burqa
I'd like to wrap around your head---

but everything still gets to happen at once
so the nineties of saddam
the sixties of mailer
& the noughts of oh say thomas fucking friedman
vs the placebo syndrome

PERMISSIONS you out NOW
FOR prophesy

"places people can take you & put you"
writes Max in the nineties
remember? the happy ending of history
with full release? WHAT COULD THE LIARS PAY?
In the absence of assasins
In the neural networks of high tech
shining path star-whackers--


mind your wants
cause there's someone
that wants
your mind

(george clinton)

 
less discrete weave
of shiny life
folded in twee boxes
than inconvenient stops on
the Mandelbrot skytrain,
unsurprisable ghosty
unusurpassably bubbling up
every exchange
AGITATED PRESYSBYITARIAN  VOLCANIC SUBTEXT
the void of conception
residue
of a swiping hard thumb
race against metastasizing facts
otherwise
Lost to Language---

Audio Recordings of Not Only But Also Episodes Found

The recovery of the soundtracks to 11 episodes from the mid-sixties and
early 1970s means that some form of recording now exists for each and
every episode of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s seminal TV comedy series...

LRB · Hilary Mantel · Diary

I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and three Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, though later I can’t remember which ones. I read a new biography of Catherine of Aragon in proof. I read On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf. What schoolgirl piffle, I think. It’s like one of those compositions by young ladies mocked in Tom Sawyer. I can’t understand what she means when she complains about the ‘poverty of the language’ we have to describe illness. For the sufferer, she says, there is ‘nothing ready made’. Then what of the whole vocabulary of singing aches, of spasms, of strictures and cramps; the gouging pain, the drilling pain, the pricking and pinching, the throbbing, burning, stinging, smarting, flaying? All good words. All old words. No one’s pain is so special that the devil’s dictionary of anguish has not anticipated it. There is even a scale you can use to refine it: ‘Tell me,’ the doctor says, ‘on a scale of one to ten, how much this hurts’: one being a love bite, I suppose, and ten the fiery pit of hell. Pain may pass beyond language, but it doesn’t start beyond it. The torture chamber is where people ‘speak’. No doubt language fails in that shuttered room called melancholia, where the floor is plush and the windowless walls are draped in black velvet: where any sound you make carries only feebly to the outside world, and can be taken for some accidental, natural sound, a creak or a sigh from doorframe or drawer. But then, mental suffering is so genteel; at least, until the dribbling sets in. Virginia only has decorous illnesses. She has faints and palpitations, fevers and headaches, though I am mindful that at one stage they tried to fix her by pulling out her teeth. But she is seemly; she does not seep, or require a dressings trolley, she does not wake at dawn to find herself smeared with contact jelly from last night’s ECG. Virginia never oozes. Her secretions are ladylike: tears, not bile. She may as well not have had bowels, for all the evidence of them in her book...

::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal"