My Darling Dear, May Your Void Become As Deep As My Hate!

This comic is from Sommer Browning's Asthma Chronicles. It kind of makes me lose it without being aware of what it is.

It's Halloween & I'm listening to lots of black metal as I finish up the introduction for a philosophy paper. I was not born to write philosophy papers.

Nebraska has returned to the business of being cold & I'm considering getting one of those full face masks for biking into campus in the cold-cold mornings, however

a) they make people look freaky
b) they make people look like wannabe Zapatistas.

I just don't know what to do.

Black Metal Halloween Playlist:
Emperor: Night of the Graveless Souls
Xasthur: May Your Void Become As Deep As My Hate!
Striborg: Digging A Ditch To Die In
Judas Iscariot: The Dead Burst Forth From Their Tombs
Leviathan: Heir To The Noose Of Ghoul
Haemoth: When The Blood Turns Black
Immortal: Eternal Years On The Path To The Cemetary Gates

Mechanical Bull Arts Benefit

==bemisUNDERGROUND & "Tugboat Presents:"
will host a Bull Buckin' Ben'fit Dance Party
on Saturday, November 4th from 10pm - "after hours"
@ The Bemis Center's Okada Sculpture Facility
(directly across the street from the main building),
724 S. 12th St , Omaha, NE
to help support the 2007 bemisUNDERGROUND series.

there will be a 'real live' mechanical bull,
alcohol and non-alcohol drinks,
tasty foods,
live dj with danceable tunes

The Clean Part: Kelsey & Hart (& McCollough)

All manner of honors & thanks to Karla Kelsey & Matt Hart for reading here on Saturday. Sadly Aaron McCollough couldn’t make it due to snow & evil airlines. He was sorely missed & you should make a point out of reading his new book Little Ease, which looks incredible. Karla & Matt represented well for the absent McCollough. It was an extraordinary reading.


Zach made a sweet The Clean Part Jack ‘O Lantern. Afterwards it was donated to an organization that provides for those who have no The Clean Part Jack ‘O Lanterns & also stuck into the crook of a tree.



When I think of the purpose of readings I think of how they develop personal connections. If you go to a reading you are either familiar with the work or not. If you aren’t you’ve heard some new poetry. If you are then you’ve heard the same work interpreted differently than you could have. But there’s more than that—it’s important to remind readers that there are real people at the other end of the books. People who have dogs & bands & crackpot ideas & good ideas & smiles & glasses & wives & husbands & children. The human hand behind the poems, though not central in any way to the poem itself, is in my opinion important to poetry as a field of pursuit. It perhaps seems a little silly to say this, that it’s a bit banal. But that’s why I think readings are important.

Planning readings I sometimes forget about the actual moment of the poetry reading. And then the readings begin & I’m completely entranced. There were moments during both Karla’s & Matt’s readings when I was suddenly aware of just how completely entranced I was in the poems; that somehow this was different than people reading their poems, but was in some semi-mystical way the aesthetic event I crave that is both part of the text & beyond the text. They are both poets who create immediate, unique frameworks between you & their work so that you can think thoughts in relation to their work that necessarily cannot exist outside of the relationship to their work. And then you get to take these thoughts home with you, free of charge.


And then poetry readings lead to dance parties. And that is good as well. This is Brett Price. He cam ein from Cincinati with Matt. You need to check out his Combatives, though since they are already sold out, you need to borrow a copy from somebody & read it the way Steve Vai reads a guitar.

Many thanks to Ben McQ for designing the lovely posters. He has an art show at Iron Brush that opens this Friday.

Thanks to Anthony Hawley for being such a gracious host & pancaker. (Did you see that Anthony was one of the 12 hot new poets in Poets & Writers? He was, along with other local faves Anna Moschovakis & Alex Lemon.)

Saturday

The Clean Part

Sheldon

7 PM

Pamela Mordecai

Pamela Mordecai read here yesterday, a beautiful, engrossing reading. She's a pretty incredible woman. You should check out the wide range of things she has done in Carribean literature. And a little fo this showed through yesterday. She began the reading with poems for children, had poems forefronting both ideologies & personal expression & ended with a story about a non-Jamaican Jesuit entering Jamaica. She read in patois-influenced English, more standardized American-English, and one dub poem in Creole.

I had read her book Certifiable last spring for Dr. Seanna Oakley's Post-Colonial poetics class, found it both playful & musical but also intellectual without performing a kind of scholarly intelligence in the poems. What struck me hearing this reading was how drastically the way I understood these poems was affected by the reading. The poems on the page are musical & invite the reader of the book to read them out loud, but hearing them in the original voice & acccent creates a fundamentally different poem than having a suburban white-boy read them out loud.

In discussion with her today she recited her poems "Sunflowers" (such a long tradition of sunflower poems), from her book The True Blue of Islands:

Sunflowers

Vincent Van Gogh, the sunflower man
cut off his ear when paul Gaugin
wouldn't stay to paint with him
in Southern France.

I burnt my veil and wedding dress
scarred both my cheeks
tattooed rosettes
along my arms with cigarettes.

We both needed a man to stay.

You think it was
loneliness? I don't
think so. Madness
has always been my guess.

The connection between the individual & the cultural myth here produces a pretty great little poem. Intense, succint, clear. I love "the sunflower man" as if it's like the ice cream man or something--that is Van Gogh's categorical defintion. But in conversation she mentioned that a Jamaican would find "guest" and "guess" homophonic. And just this little twist brings more to the poem than the text could provide, something embedded in the voiced & cultured reading of the poem.

All of this made me think about the disjunction that occurs in the ontology of the aesthetic event of a poem--give a ENG 101 student a Stein poem & she is going to do something different with it than a grad student. Give a midwest farm kid a Sonia Sanchez poem and he is going to have to do a particular kind of negotiation unique to himself. This kind of stuff has been de rigeur for my thinking about relating to poetry, but the actualy music of an accent I haven't thought too much about. Mordecai's poems create meaning differently when she reads them than when I read them, not because of the performance of the reading but because of the way the Creole inflections engage the language as I would read it. It overlays two ways of using language onto each other & there are moments when this overlay creates an entirely new kind of understanding of what language can do. It is the space between me, with my middle class American accent, & her, with her Jamaican accent, reading these poems that becomes a fruitful space in which energy is created. This creation occurs without a predetermined intellectual framework, it is beyond the semantic & prosodic work of the poems.

JPAOD Returns

While you might have thought that the Jon Pack Approval or Disapproval Machine was broken, really the machine felt that all of you needed a few months to truly understand the implications of "Bicamerlism." Believe me, if the machine thinks you still don't get it the machine will not hesitate to go on hiatus again. So please, please understand the implications of "Bicamerlism."

Barbara Guest, "Nebraska"

Barbara Guest
from Moscow Mansions

Nebraska

Climate succumbing continuously as water gathered
into foam or Nebraska elevated by ships
withholds what is glorious in its climb like
a waiter balancing a waterglass while the tray
slips that was necklace in the arch of bridge
now the island settles linear its paragraph of tree
vibrates the natural cymbal with its other tongue
strikes an attitude we have drawn there on the limb
when icicle against the sail will darken the wind
eftsooning it and the ways lap with spices as
buoyancy once the galloping area where grain
is rinsed and care requires we choose our walk

And the swift nodding becomes delicate
smoke is also a flow the pastoral calm where
each leaf has a shadow fortuitous as word
with its pine and cone its seedling a curl
like smoke when the ashy retrograding slopes
at the station up or down and musically
a notation as when smoke enters sky

The swift nodding becomes delicate
‘lifelike’ is pastoral an ambrosia where calm
produces a leaf with a shadow fortuitous as word
with its pine and cone its seedling we saw
yesterday with the natural flow in our hand
thought of as sunlight and wisely found rocks
sand that were orisons there a city in
our minds we called silence and bird droppings
where the staircase ended that was only roof

hallucinated as Nebraska the swift blue
appears formerly hid when approached now it
chides with a tone the prow striking a grim
atmosphere appealing and intimate as if a verse
were o water somewhere and hues emerge
and distance erased a swan concluding bridge
th sky with er neck possibly brightening
the machinery as a leaf arches through its yellow
syllables to Nebraska’s throat

Remix: a one-act play based on this photo

Setting: Some sort of artifical jungle.
Characters: M--a young man determined to go to World War Two, despite the fact that the war has been over for decades.
W--a young woman who stares at M

M: I must be going off to World War Two.
W: Please don't go to World War Two.
M: I must.
W: OK.

(awkward silence)

(hours pass)

W: Now I'm going to remix your mother.

(M stares somberly down at the piles of cupcakes at his feet)

The New School

They've been lurking in the shadows, sniping, articling, commenting on blogs under pseudonyms & now they make their public appearance. Anti-Flarf (also called the F-Flarf or the P-Flarf), a loose camaraderie of poets, artists & templates out to return poetry to Target for cash back, store credit and/or parasols. And they've saved their receipts.

While I (Mathias Svalina) am not an Anti-Flarfist & hold no allegiances in the Flarf vs. Anti-Flarf battles, I have been selected as their neutral spokesperson. Any press queries should be directed to me at antiflarfist.newshoes@gmail.com.

The Anti-Flarfist Committee for Social Justice (previously misspelled as "Rejuicification" in other documents) has given me the following manifesto to make public to the world:

1. Poetry should be a bout, some thing with out.
2. Poetry is a nine-letter word.
3. Crabcakes inside the political thrillers will not poetry from its selfiness.
4. Poetry is equivalent to asking "Who farted?" when nobody has farted.
5. Google is the voiceover of God. The one you don't like. I've never liked that band America.


Some examples of work by the Resolutionary Anti-Flarf Brigade can be found here, here, here, and here.

The League of Concerned Anti-Flarfists will hereafter post their work every morning on the front page of The Washington Post. Look for them under your surname.

Overheard in Andrews Hall

"This gets you into some sketchy academic territory."

Friday

If anyone is interested I'll be reading Friday at 4pm at Sur Tango with Michael Busk for the No Name Series.

Movie Idea

A comedic romp in which a big developer is moving into a small coastal village to open a Wal-Mart-like store, which will kill the local commerce. The townspeople band together to defeat the corrupt politicians who've given the zoning greenlight to the developer. Everyone in the town, however, can only speak in one semantic framework, e.g., lumber language, kitty cat language, alpaca sweater language, algebra language, etc. Each of the townspeople attempts to communicate with each other but nothing they say makes any sense in each others' frameworks. Hilarity ensues. The developer sees the error of his ways & marries a local woman, who can only speak in broadsword language.

Interviewing Idea

I'd like to interview someone for whom I have a lot of respect & near mystical appreciation of their art--Julie Mehretu, Sally Mann, Rae Armantrout, Michael Haneke, Jeff Mangum, Joanna Newsom, Ghostface Killa, those kind of people who are aesthetic heroes to me. In the interview the only questions I'll ask will be "What did you do today?"; "What will you do tomorrow?"; "What did you do yesterday?"; "What will you do the day after tomorrow?"; "What did you do the day before yesterday?"; &c.

There are those who will tell you If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988) was as good as or perhaps better than Rum Sodomy. Such people have a corpse in their mouth.

A decent quick overview of The Pogues.

A strangely squishy discussion of The Boredoms at Stylus.

Both are great bands.

That is science fact.

This is What I'm Talking About

Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale.

Not in a football-commercial kind of "that's what I'm talkin' about!" way, but in the literal way of whenever I open my mouth & expel breath that engages my vocal chords I tend to be talking about this book. Degentesh has for a while been one of my favorite young poets without a book out & now she is one of my favorite young poets with a book out. It's peppy, poppy, sad, pathetic, angry, seductive, funny, awful, inspiring, glamorous & occasionally annoying. Meaning, of course that I love it.

Get your own copy here. Marvel at the design & then at the poems & then at something else.



Not that this has any connection, but last night I had an anxiety dream in which emailed someone about being in a prestigious print journal. In the email instead of saying "it's an honor to be in the journal" I accidentally wrote "your journal will be a horror for everyone." Somehow in dream-logic this was a typo.

Also the incredibly weak-willed blogger spell-check wants me to replace Degentesh with "decants." Which isn't such a bad idea.

Morning In Nebraska: a one-act play

Setting: Coffeeshop in Lincoln 6:45 AM

Characters: Same Midwestern man & woman as the last one-act play


(shuffling of newspapers)

W: Stealing copper seems to be the things to do.

M: Oh.

W: Seems to be a lot of stories about stealing copper. It must be the thing to do.

M: Well, I don’t know if it’s the thing to do.

(shuffling of one newspaper)

M: I don't plan on doing it.

W: No, that's true.

(shuffling of newspapers)

W: I don’t like those political cartoons.

M: No.

(shuffling of newspapers)

(man rises, scraping chair legs against the floor)

M: (whispering) Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy.

The End


Note to potential Directors: It may help create the ambiance of the play to include the high school gym coach reading the paper at the table next to them, even though he has no lines. His blue polo shirt says “Coach.”

Ashbery on Stein

Like people, Miss Stein's lines are comforting or annoying or brilliant or tedious. Like people, they sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense; or they stop short in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for awhile in the physical world, that collection of thoughts, flowers, weather, and proper names. And, just as with people, there is no real escape from them: one feels that if one were to close the book one would shortly re-encounter the Stanzas in life, under another guise.

Honey, Where You been So Long?

The best music blog.

A New Pair of Slacks.

It has been Fall break & I've stocked up on some precious sleep. In a fit of, well, we'll call it whimsy, I rented Ladyhawke, the 1985 Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer, Michelle Pfeiffer film. I'd remembered liking it when I was a kid, & since this summer have been constantly reminded of it every time I listen to the band Ladyhawk. The film is, of course terrible, but what makes it uniquely & incredibly terrible is the Alan Parsons soundtrack. I do not hate Alan Parsons, nor his project. I'm more fond of ELO & much more fond of early Tangerine Dream, but in the world of arena synth Parsons does hold a tiny place in my heart. But his soundtrack for this movie is the most gloriously inappropriate music I've ever witnessed in a film. It would be the right music for an 80s film about a soccer team who overcomes some kind of struggle to win the state champs. It would be the right music for a film about a kid who discovers dirt bike racing & despite his parents' disapproval becomes the best dirtbike racer in the county. It is not a very good soundtrack for an incredibly badly written & acted cheesy fantasy movie. And this of, course, is what makes the movie interesting. The music is so damned bad but it is unabashedly bad; it flings itself into the abyss of bad; it meets bad at a park, accidentally runs into bad later that night, decides to get ice cream & is deeply in love with bad by sunrise. And this unabashedness had me nearly cheering every time there was a horse racing scene or a fighting scene & I knew the lame Alan parsons music would be rupturing all over the movie. I'm not going to recommend that you see in, as in, go out of your way to see it, but I'm at least a little bit in love.

Zach, A & A & I went apple picking Sunday. He has some photos over at his place. It was cold & rainy. There were almost literally no apples in the orchard. You might think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. And yet it was probably the most memorable apple picking of my apple picking career.

Saturday night The Euclid String Quartet performed with the Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music series (& check out both of these websites for lots of fake excitement in photos). It was decent at first, I'd never heard Debussy's String Quartet before & it was beautiful, I'd never heard Barber's famous quartet live, but the Euclid Quartet really bloomed when they played their final piece, "Voices" by Jennifer Higdon, a contemporary composer. The piece started out athletically rhythmic & jarring, which was doubly jarring after the long melodies & dreamy rhythms of Debussy & Barber. There was an exciting interaction between the players, as there was a rhythmic relationship between them, but not a repetitive melodic one. The piece then moved into an Adams/Glass-ish movement of repeating melodies & finally modulated into a calmer, more lyrical ending that spoke back to Expressionism. It was truly wonderful & had me entirely energized.

Also Cary Nelson is a winner in my book. I wish I could care more about poets like Edwin Rolfe, I love pretty much everything about him but the poems.

Sam Anderson

When I moved to Nebraska I was having a pretty bad time. I didn’t talk to people much, didn’t really make friends. Throughout my first year here I thought that I was leaving. In the spring I took a Renaissance poetry course & there was this guy in the class who stood out among UNL students. Without getting too categorical he looked like someone who probably listened to some of the same music I listened to. In the first few weeks of class we seemed to be moving closer to sitting near each other, kind of checking each other out in a friend-crush kind of way. Soon we began talking, ended up going out for a beer, ended up hanging out pretty regularly. And that was it. I had my first friend in Nebraska. Sam is now done with school & is heading off to NY, which is where he should be right now. I’m going to miss him.

Movie Idea

A shot-for-shot remake of My Giant (which originally starred Billy Crystal & Gheorghe Muresan) set in Lincoln, Nebraska rather than wherever the original was set. While a shot-for-shot remake is at heart a film-geek's homage to a master, none of the people working on the film, especially the actors & director, will be allowed to see the original film. Therefore every scene will be a shot-for-shot remake of what they imagine the original scene would or might have been. Despite the fact that one would imagine disagreements between the creative parties on what the original scenes would have been I expect there to be a unity of aesthetic vision. Also there should be no script. Also the actors should not prepare character bakcgrounds or in any way develop an idea of the character before they are on camera. Also the actor playing the giant should be of average height, at the very least no taller than the actor playing Billy Crystal's character.

!!!!!!

Adam Clay's The Wash
Now Available here.

Spicer on Dictation

Q: I don't see where this theory would allow for individual abilities though.

JS: Well, I think the individual abilities are the same as the individual abilities in sainthood.

Q: I wasn't thinking of, say, individual ability with the radio. If you have a number of radios tuned into a source, then the same material would come through from each radio.

JS: No, it wouldn't.

Morning in Nebraska: a one-act play

Overheard in a coffeeshop at 6:45AM:

(rustle of newspapers)

Woman: That Beetle Bailey is weird.
Man (in slow Midwestern nasal drawl): Oh yes.

(silence)

Woman: Too weird for me.
Man: He is weird. He is that.
Woman (growing angry): He's not wearing a shirt.
Man: Well I'm sure he's trying to be funny.
Woman: He should be wearing a shirt.
Man: Well, you're probably right.

(Silence)
(rustle of newspapers)

Man: Will you get a load of this. Two break-ins in one night.
Woman: That's terrible.
Man: You'd think they'd learn.

(the end)

Trockeneis - 5025 AD

The Baltimore avant garde/noise label Ehse Records releases vinyl editions & then also has all their music available for free download at their site. I think this is an ideal way to release albums with niche appeal & little to no chance for economic success. The records are available for those who want the object & the files are there for the interested or digitally minded. They seem pretty tied up with the High Zero Collective who host an annual festival of avant improvised music. From what I read it sounds pretty incredible.

My favorite of their releases is Trockeneis' 5025 AD, a mix of Legetti-ish dissonant chorality, squeaky glitch electronics and droning psychedelia. But here's the real reason I'm falling for it, one of the members of the band, Catherine Pancake, plays dry ice. No I don't know how, something about using the vibrations. They call their music new frictionalism, which is new to me, but pretty appealing. Check it out. It's free.

Wednesday Round Up

Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse makes me shoot orange juice out my nose but then I notice that the orange juice has formed into a cogent argument about aesthetics & morality on my carpet. But then I notice that there is a bobcat in the house. Then I remember that I don't live in a house. Every line in this chapbook that does not speak the truth speaks the truth.


Return to Wild America by Scott Weidensaul is a romp through America's dwindling yet still remaining wildernesses, much of it is in the footstep of James Fisher & Roger Tory Peterson who wrote the classic Wild America fifty years ago. It's part Blue Highways, part ecological discussion & part birder-porn (excitement about life lists & daily tallies & other such birder-geek stuff). This has been my book to read before I go to sleep this week & like all good bedtime books it often has me staying up too late to read just one more chapter. You might have read Weidensaul's haunting book on vanished species, Ghost With Trembling Wings, (& if you haven't you should); this book continues his witty (his discussion of the incredible mess that Florida has made of the Everglades seems almost overwhelmed by the absurdity) yet passionate style of naturalist writing. While there is a lot of doomy depictions of people shaking their heads over dwindling numbers of breeding pairs & the loss of habitats there are surprising & inspiring discoveries of people who are working to not only preserve but progress wilderness areas in America. People like the Hunkes who run the El Tecolote Ranch, which balances hunting with wilderness reclamation. This is an extraoridinary armchair ecologist book but it is also pragmatic & honest about the hopes for American wildernesses without sounding quakingly alarmist.

H_ngm_n B__ks has amassed a pretty large stack of chapbooks. Their design approach is totally no-nonsense. All sense. They are not messing around with anything but the poems. And the poems represent. Gina Myers' half of H_ngm_n B__ks' Flip-Chap #2: Fear of the Knee Bending Backwards is fantastic. The poems evoke a kind of strained/straining relationship to the world that is neither sentimental nor anything more than a metaphysical experience of the things in the world: "You've finished one/ chapter but refuse to start the next, prefer instead this/ moment of waiting." Which is not to say that they are "sad" poems, but that they are about a way of participating in the world in which delights & disappointments just are. And through the twelve poems in this half-chap there is a lot to be delighted by. This delight culminates in the both saddening & hilarious (& nearly narrative-building) list of phobias "A Catalogue of Fears." Damn good.



Reasons to love Sparklehorse's new record Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain:

From Virginia.

Has both Dangermouse & Tom Waits collaborations.

When people talk about how heartbreaking Grandaddy is I can, rather than argue, pretend that they are talking about the obviously superior music of Sparklehorse & nod along with them.

New Sparklehorse records always introduce some new bizarre way of hearing the world while staying firmly rooted in a melancholy folk roots.

I love Virginia.

I wouldn't mind being in Virginia today.


Akron/Family might be the best band in America today. Check out their new mini-record Meek Warrior to see why.

Scion & the Booty Bass

It is a cold, dreary, rainy, biting day here in Nebraska full of the promise of the horrors of cold weather to come. But in the middle of campus there are three Scions parked next to a tent with Miami Booty Bass music being pumped out. I'm being completely honest with you when I say that in this context it is the loneliest, emptiest music I have ever heard.

Anna Politkovskaya

This hurts.

NYT article
tribute from The Nation

from The Nation piece:

Since 1992, forty-two journalists in Russia have been killed--most in unsolved contract executions. Journalists--and citizens of all countries who value the importance of a free press--should join in calling on the Russian government to conduct an immediate and thorough investigation in order to find, prosecute and bring to justice those responsible for Anna Politkovskaya's murder--and those of her colleagues.

Ballads & Phobias

Everyone's favorite heir to the spiritual free saxophonist throne, David S. Ware, is back with a surprising set of ballads & some standards. Actually this is a 1999 set, but it's new to me & you. Essentially using the ballad as a set of tonal parameters the quartet explores what can be found within these familiar melodies & languid movements. But these are not the reenvisioning of standards in the Coltrane sense of trying to push them into cosmic zones, nor a Lester Bowie way of reinventing the songs within a renegotiated social realm. Ware seems willing to explore through color & nuance rather than insistent searching. But he's hardly gone soft, these parameters simply lead to a different kind of search than we're used to from him. These is a surprisingly haunting & affirmative statement from this quartet. The arrangements are respectful both of the songs & of the listener, there's less of a need to drive the listener somewhere than I've felt in previous works of Ware's. Instead it's a more subtle mapping out of experience.

Ware leads the band he's been working with for a while, Shipp, Parker & Guilermo Brown & you can almost feel their close attention to each other in the magical ways these songs develop. The more subtle approach gives more space to feel their interactions. And they are fantastic. Matthew Shipp in particular simply kills these songs, stealing the spotlight from Ware. His solo half of the way through "Dao" swings between Debussy-like expressionism and Keith Jarrett like sensual experience, then seems to slip through some kind of hole in itself driving the song to an entirely new place. His solo in "Sentient Compassion" takes in everything Ware gives & returns it as a new kind of entity.

Plus there's a dog on the cover, which is kind of cool for a hip free-jazz guy. I wish, however, that someone had asked him to reconsider the album title. It sounds like a new product for storing leftovers.

While I've been listening to The Ware Quartet I've been reading Gina Myers' new flip-chap from H_ngm_n B__ks, Fear of the Knee Bending Backwards. It's damn good. More on that later. For now, just go & buy it so you can read it for yourself.

The Cupboard Vol. Five

Volume Five of The Cupboard, the biography volume, is now up on the website so go print yourself out a copy and begin the arduous folding process. This is The Cupboard’s first themed volume, featuring five different biographies from five anonymous writers. Some names you may know, some you may not. Check it out.

*SUBMIT*
The Cupboard is, as always, looking for your best prose under 2,000 words for our next volume. No theme this time, so send whatever you fancy.Submit to: cupboard@thecupboardpamphlet.org.

*CORRESPOND*
The Cupboard is in the process of putting together a volume of correspondence, but would love to have more. Respond to pieces, tell us who you are, just write us a letter. Think of it like a message board. Actually, don’t. But write anyway.

the cupboard, the cupboard

www.thecupboardpamphlet.org

The Walkmen on Cafe Gutenberg

The Walkmen have begun doing restaurant reviews on their website. Very funny. They review Gutenbergs, a nice cafe in Richmond, Virginia. As you can see in the review, hey experience the strange passive-aggressive relationship to the diners that is part of the charm of going out to eat in the capitol of the confederacy.

Mac Low Realizations

In Anthony's class last night we performed some Jackson Mac Low pieces. I recorded them on my little ipod microphone. The sound quality is weak & the volume is low & the placement of the mike emphasizes prominent voices & there's an annoying odeo intro, but here they are nevertheless.

One
Two
Three
Four
Five

Forklift, Ohio #15

From Eric Appleby & Matt Hart

Now Shipping: Forklift, Ohio #15

After a most unusual summer, we are pleased to announce the publication of Issue #15 of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, featuring:

Arlene Ang * Daniel Becker * Joshua Beckman * Oni Buchanan * Jane Carver * John Colburn * Evan Commander * Bruce Covey * Darcie Dennigan * Scott Dennis * Joshua Edwards * Yasbel Fernandez-Acuna * Rachel Contreni Flynn * Terri Ford * Melissa Ginsburg * Paul Griffiths * Amy Grimm * Daniel Harris * Matthea Harvey * Anthony Hawley * Eric Higgins * James Hoch * Chris Hund * Andrew Kozma * Alex Lemon * Dora Malech * Clay Matthews * Anthony Mccann * Sandra Miller * Lisa Olstein * Paul Otremba * Kiki Petrosino * Nate Pritts * Bart Quinet * Brent Royster * Zach Savich * Michael Schiavo * Jason Schneiderman * Peter Jay Shippy * rachel m simon * Craig Morgan Teicher * Cody Todd * Nick Twemlow * Kate Umans * Mike Vallera * G.C. Waldrep * Ian Randall Wilson * Bradford K. Wolfenden II * Mark Yakich * Dean Young * Jason Zuzga

Available now for $10 postage paid. Credit cards & E-checks accepted via PayPal.

Visit www.ForkliftOhio.com for free samples, bios, & purchasing.

Nebraska Book Festival

This weekend Nebraska Wesleyan will be hosting The Nebraska Book Festival. There are going to be lots of great readings & such. Erin Belieu, who gave a wonderful, though brief reading at the Wave Books Bus reading, will be reading Friday night at 9pm. Anthony Hawley, Michael Dumanis, Zachary Schomburg & I will be reading Friday at 7pm. There will also be lots of storytelling & reading events for kids. I also heard there were going to be a trio of komodo dragons who'll be signing books by authors they have heard are good but have never read.

Drawing Restraint 9 is at The Ross right now.

Nebraska's Democratic Gubanatorial Candidate, David Hahn, on Property Taxes

AJAR might be the most simutaneously inspiring & depressing journal I've ever read.

Clare Rojas

I like this artist's work. It has a firm root in folk art, but a vague northern European folk art, with some of the magical moments I love in Amy Cutler more fully grounded in fairy tale roots.

here
here
here
here

Robert

I totally love this man.




Check out his flickr site for tons of amazing NY & Spanish street art. Look closely & you can find a picture of me from when I was still Captain Redbeard. Look closer. Closer. Closer... Fish _______!

Indiana Review & Action Yes!

I was really glad to read the new Indiana Review, the all Latina/Latino issue. Great translations of Juan Carlos Galeano, cool story by Carolina De Robertis (I didn't read all the fiction, I admit), a great poem by Sandy Florian, strong poems by Lisa Maria Martin & a stunning poem (as always) by Kristin Naca. I wish there had been an introduction to the issue, however. I feel like this issue is trying to do something particular and I wish the editors had presented their ideas about it.

There are more great poems of Sandy Florian's on Action Yes!, along with more wonderful poems from Julie Doxsee & tons of other great work. Not metric tons. Sheepish tons. Dead pan tons. Poker faced tons.

I Heart Wittgenstein?

I know that the Wittgenstein most poets like is the one of later books, Philosophical Investigations, his pretty wild Aesthetics lectures, that kind of stuff, but the Tractatus seems to come up in epigraphs & references a lot as well. It seems weird. Really weird, since the goal of the Tractatus is to eradicate the speaking about things which we can not speak. Namely the metaphysical and anything that does not correspond with objective reality. Even the most objective (not objectivist) poet has a hankering toward metaphor or the implied meaning concurrent with a line break, both of which would be philosophically irrelevant in Wittgenstein's mission.

There are the inadvertent connections, the gleefully seditious qualities involved in the willful misreading. One can see his propositions as lineations, the whole Tractatus as one big, hermetic, Modernist poem. I definitely get this, when I don't understand what the hell he's talking about I begin to code switch into poetic rendering rather than attempting to understand his metaphysical & semantic constructs. Then there is the forms he keeps talking about, which with a bit of the eye-squinting can almost sound like a formal construction of language on the page in poetry. But these aren't very telling misreadings. They end up leaving me the kind of confused I get from badly translated medieval texts.

Perhaps, however, there is something fundamentally metaphorical in Wittgenstein. Consider the famous picture theory--he's not implying that we think in exclusively visual ways, but that representations of the metaphysical have the qualities of pictures. He assumes a mimetic aesthetics here--that the picture can potentially correspond to a real world. No Picasso, though possibly Magritte. But in essence it is a metaphor.

But even in his metaphysics there seems to be an assumed metaphorical leap. He says that the world is composed of objects. OK. These objects correspond to make atomic facts. Fine. But atomic facts do not lead to other atomic facts. As we were talking about in my class tonight one can not conclude from a statement that "a chair is entirely red" that "a chair is not entirely blue." Which is weird. Which means that chairs are not objects, perhaps. Which would leave one (me) wondering what the hell an object is. And since he doesn't answer that question in Tractatus then "object" becomes a metaphor. It's not an object in the usual denotative sense of object & lacking a new direct definition it just kind of dangles, free floating & all that. And Wittgenstein seems fine with this. Which is perhaps a space more suited to people who allow semantic flexibility in language than those who expect a rigid objective truth to their words.

So maybe there is a reading of the Tractatus that does cohere with poetic reading strategies that seek the openness of experience & idea.

Now if I could just be certain what a schwa is.

Playlist this week:
The Hold Steady Boys and Girls in America
Six Organs Of Admittance Sun Awakens
The Dead C Vain, Erudite and Stupid: Selected Works 1987-2005
Lucero Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers
Brigitte Fontaine Comme à la Radio
Evan Parker Time Lapse
Strike Anywhere Dead FM

Lee Lozano, Untitled (General Strike Piece, Feb. 8, 1969)

Total personal & public revolution.

Actual Titles of Amazon Reviews of Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk

She Ecslipses All
Seeing Life With Her Eyes Open
A Luminescent Feast for the Sentient
From as high as eagles
From The Mundane To The Infinite ... And Back Again
Everyone knows that stones can't talk...
Teaching a Stone to Talk - Good Read

You Are Very Kind

If anyone has an ambiguous affection for me that needs to be commodified, feel free to send me copies of either of these two.


New York in the 60s

Steve Reich 1965-1995



But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?

One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered.
--John Mueller in Foreign Affairs




If, just before a flash flood full of tree and roof, you will be given twin lusty-pure pearls; you should place them in your younger sibling's coffin for that's where they belong
--Christine Hume, from "If you Cannot Work the Eskimo Yo-Yo..."

Re: "Plasticity," Mark Rothko

In The Artist's Reality

[I]n this discussion of form and weight we must also consider the confusion between plastic force and the illusion of power. A good examples of the difference between the two can be seen by a comparison between Michelangelo's and Giotto's achievement of force in form. The thing which we consciously feel in Giotto is the massiveness of his forms. His figures give us a physical sense of weight; when they lean we feel their potentiality of falling with a crash in response to the force of gravitation. In Michelangelo, too, we have a sensation of power but of a different type altogether. Michelangelo's figures look powerful. By the representation of bulging biceps, thighs, abdominal muscles, and the extension of the shoulder and neck muscles the idea is communicated that the man is very strong, and we know that if this man should fall there would be a terrific crash.

and then later

Plasticity is the quality of the presentation of a sense of movement in a painting. This movement may be produced either by the inducement of an actual physically tangible sensation of recession and advancement, or by the reference to our memories of how things look when they go back and move forward.

Mr. Henriksen, I'm thinking about your comment about Joe's poems. I think this idea from Rothko is how i would like to think about how a reader negotiates the emotional with a poem. Emotions are to a written text as movement is to the painted text. And yet you say that when you read his poems you have a set of emotional parameters that you bring to the work & I can't deny that I have similar parameters to reading poetry. It's different with something brand new--I return to Mina Loy or Larry Levis with a different kind of expectant parameters than I do with, say, Gina Myers' chapbook. I am looking forward to reading her chapbook, but then I've read a dozen or more of her poems, enjoyed them, enjoyed them for a particular way they seem "honest." Do i simply want more of this feeling from them?

You write "To me the only question with Massey is "Does he make me weep or am I weepless?" I want to weep, but I don't, and if that is failure for a book, then almost all books fail. the fact that weeping is an issue BEFORE I read the book is of the greatest relevance." If you have only one set of parameters for the pleasures of the text (& I don't mean to imply that YOU do, but that this statement can be extended in this way) then of course almost all the texts will fail (hence Billy Collins' bullshit thing about %85 of contemporary poetry is awful). But that's not what you mean, I think you mean that even the books that are situating themselves in realtion to you in this way--to ring those particular harp strings--even these mostly fail.

And I agree this idea of how the idea of a reaction preceeds the reading is relevant. And what is interesting is that this kind of cultural/individual situating of a poet kind of sidesteps a lot of pure textual exigesis. It's pretty obviously traditional rhetoric and reader response stuff, but it's also incredibly sad to me. If you want a thing, a reaction & that reaction isn't there there is the obvious response that you're not being a good reader, that you've the crowd booing the newly-electrified Dylan. But that isn't it, it's that this is part of how we read. I want wry absurdism that somehow feels like wisdom from Michael Earl Craig. I want a kind of purity of attention from Adam Clay. I want my heart ripped out & handed to me by Andrea Baker. Is reading only a taxonomical containment of the world? THis would seem opposite of what I tell people is the reason that poetry is the most greatestest thing in the whole wide world, which is that every poem exponentially creates a wider & wilder range of potential understandings.

And then what is the success when a poem succeeds? What happens when one of Joe's poems makes you weep? Is it a success of the poet or the reader? If it is a success of the reader isn't this a kind of regressive effect of a return to comfort?

Let's say it is a success of the text, then we can make proclamations like X is a good poet. Is it a success of the forms or of the representations of emotions?