to get you through the monday, with it's sticky fingers and lost staring, stinging your eyes and twisting your hands, holding on, hold on, hold.

Elephant Guns
Beirut
Lon Gisland Ep



The Songs That We Sing
Charlotte Gainsbourg
5 55

Fenollosa Shot a Horse

Fenollosa's approach to language (that of Chinese and English) and his ideas of transference of time and energy, "the reality of time" (363) really inspire me to look harder at my own poetry. It is simply captured in his example.

"Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weakness of our subjective operations but because the operations of nature are successive. The transparencies of force from agent to object which constitute natural phenomena, occupy time."

The way Fenollosa talks about how the reality of recognition, the transference of energy that takes place in the perceiving of something, and the way man communicates it are so different kind of bugs me. That maybe I take advantage of time and it's necessity in poetry, or it's existence in the life around us. The act of recognition can be as powerful as any action. At least Chinese seems to work a little bit better than ours, giving physical depth and and symbolic meaning. The idea that the symbols themselves are metaphors for the action, "For example, the ideograph for a 'messmate' is a man and a fire"the symbols are metaphors themselves of action, that then can be used in a metaphor, adding layers of poetic detail that English cannot seem to match. The Chinese language just seems fused with poetry from is roots. I mean, is doesn't just mean "to have" but it is derived from "to snatch the moon with the hand". Holy crap. But to be fair "is" in our language is derived from the Aryan root as, to breathe.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that when one goes to use a word (or words if you're being fancy) in poetry it's not just a place-holder or a conjunction, play-doh that you can just mash together and expect to come out beautiful. The best way to think of it for me is that they're like colors, where you can blend them, and there are complimentary colors, and colors, and when put opposite each other give contrast, or, and, placed together create beautiful (or ugly if that's what you're going for) pictures. I didn't really think the metaphor was going towards painting (kind of cheesy and over-done), but it makes sense.

Thus the power of the sentence becomes much stronger in chinese poetry.

I'm coming after you next Pound! Soon!

Andrew Bird is Lord

Is that whistling even human? Oh look at me and my guitar and amazing voice and xylophone and my crazy bird whistle. He's not human. He's something much more.

Goodbye Blue Monday

Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut passed away today.
I loved his writing a great deal.
He was one of the authors that inspired me enough to write.
And I'm going to miss him very much.
I hope he's in a better time now.

"I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is."


p.s.He once wrote his own eulogy in Timequake."Kurt is up in heaven now." It's a humanist joke. Get it?

DO THIS OR SUFFER!!

(not Mike Young, but the first Google image result for his name)

go read Mike's new monologue at Juked

Here's a little snippet:

When I grow a beard, just a chinstrap maybe, and people believe me
about things, I will say this: there is no such thing as a wild horse.
The wild ones were made by God to buck the ghosts.
That's pretty good, right?

don't ever read anything of mine ever.

Let's put off Shelly for a while yet.

a heart full of boxes

watching you walk is like cinders in my boots,
a heavy Christmas in the sink of my chest,
a hearty boom where once contentment slept:
i found myself undone.

tomorrow held a heavy call for forgetfulness
and i stayed rather [or not] upbeat about it.
lemon squeezes stained our polished denim and
the crocodile tears, pressing against the corners
of your crystal and sand mouth,
make me miss the tiny little bells i never heard.

the shattering of my ears held a kind of prayer
where all was silent and ready for heaven.
i was ready till i sneezed and the whole world came back
like a rocket of dirt and hell, sending me home
or at least pretending.

It's alive - mostly.

Just to clarify though, I'm not really in love with pandas. I'm not going to get visa and marry one, only to leave it for a smaller red panda - which isn't really a panda at all.