force field field

Economic Histories of the Forest

1: So, it seems like we could talk for a while about this, couldn't we...

Travelers stand in absolute silence.

1: At the very least, we are in agreement about the beginning, right? We know that it starts with soldiers, and marches, and the sounds of exercise, and feet on cobblestones...

2: We know that there is a forest, filled with light from above. Frosted, as they say, with snow. A canopy of trees over-head.

Travelers [thinking aloud]: What should we do with his head?

1: Maybe we should bury it? At the base of this tree? You know the saying, "A grandfather's head is a hard thing to be rid of."

2: We know that this sort of trial, this sort of experiment, has its limits...

3: But its limits are only the limits of conversation, of object, of language-in-looking. So long as we avoid those, and stay to the edges, we should be fine. I know a secret path through the forest, which follows the run of the road, but out of its sight.

2: The light from above is shifting and unsteady.

1: Will and courage, good people!

orgn

Incantation

What do we pay for?
We pay for the familiar touch
We pay for the arranged letters
We pay for the laughter
We pay for the glass tubes and boxes
We pay for the windows open
We pay for the ambition
We pay for the front row
We pay for the slick pavement
We pay for the waves
We pay for the other fools
We pay for the stock tips
We pay for the lapdogs and fishtanks
We pay for the air quality
We pay for the power converter
We pay for the drink
We pay for the enemy
We pay for the isotope
We pay for the french cut
We pay for the history of it
We pay for the extension of the regime
We pay for the march
We pay for the exchange of rocks
We pay for the fear
We pay for the potato cutter
We pay for the seance
We pay for the force of the eyes

nonperson for person

un-trance un-trace

FCTSS

"Once" by Paul Celan

Once,
I heard him,
he was washing the world,
unseen, nightlong,
real.
One and infinite,
annihilated,
they I’ed.
Light was. Salvat

held hold

straight lines are to be believed

two youths

scald so called

passive scene with bird

"Prop State" - pt 6

Scene: Noon, jungle

A Pig Farmer looks out over a sty. The air is filled with curling, vaporous squeals. The guides are pulling ropes taut from out of view, seemingly erecting a tent, or other temporary structure.

Pig Farmer: The faceless masses...

Guide 1: Tighter now...

Guide 2: (humming, then singing) I pressed my mouth against your back/

Guide 3: (singing) The pinkish skin of a sweet young sow/

Pig Farmer: You there!

Guide 2: (singing) Believed my head to have split in half/

Pig Farmer: Your singing is upsetting the hogs, tra la la...

Guide 1: We won't be a minute here, our ropes are almost set.

visibility

"Prop State" - pt 5

Scene: Night, factory

Alfred Jarry addresses the shareholders, who are represented by the guides. The light in the factory flickers to some hidden music. A podium has been erected, constructed of books of various critical theory, to assure the shareholders of the seriousness of the operation. Baruch de Spinoza waits behind a deck of turntables.

Jarry: (reflectively at first, then stronger)

Oh my friends.

Was it Diogenes who wrote in the absence of friends? We have no morals to share here, no wisdom of profitability. We have lost our way in a poetics of production, the worker and the reader sleeping in the same bed. We are no heteronomous fellows!

Oh my friends.

I would rather return to the cliff than go on living in such a trance. Could it be believed that the fac- tory we have dreamt of for so long will finally come to pass? Who could believe it? We have imagined into the world a new-world. We have adorned our placards with slogans and IP addresses, lengthened our toe- nails to get purchase on the new grass, grown our hair like the ravens, and filed our teeth. We understand time in ways that others refuse to: factory time is simply a wider time than that of the world outside. It is within this wide time that our new worker will labor, her feet protected by company slippers, and her palms padded with company gloves. Our workers will be protected from market pressures, will create, in their entrails, small inviolate economies meshing into the factory body with small sounds of surprise.

Oh my friends.

Our workers will be in no single vector state. No need for lectures here. No. Ha. You know very well what I’m talking about, being educated men. Into this wider time we will be able to slip more workers, more ethics. We alone will recognize the worker as more than a cog, as more than a machine to be used up and discarded, but instead marshaled according to a new model. Our workers will be recognized in the factory as friends. They will be recognized as a distinct series of moving vectors, each with a specific trajectory. They will have souls, will have wide conduits in the quantum computer, will be busy formulating programs for fading and loving.

It is these quantum workers that will drive our factory. We will have no fixed points, but a constantly shifting matrix butressed by suicidal love for the culture of the West. That sweet decaying vapor that we call the individual. Darwin, in his later years, grew to hate birds.

Gentlemen, this is what we are up against!

Spinoza: (starts record and sings)

We return/
Through advances in simple vertigo/
To a new understanding of our actions./
We have set aside chisels and nets/
Busying our times/
With stretching strings/
And building lutes/
To sing materialist songs.

"Prop State" - pt 4

Scene: Evening, campus

Henri Rousseau is surrounded by guides, who attempt to extricate him from the derrick. They be- come increasingly tangled, and must use the improvised weapons to saw each other free.

Guide 1: I pulled him in to kiss him.

Guide 3: His breath was salty.

Guide 2: A sea opening up a horizon.

Guide 3: I bit his tongue.

Guide 1: Spat it out.

Guide 2: And felt a love like never...

Rousseau: George Bataille once wrote to me about the mouth, writing in a fit of anger, the kind of rage that ran like a dark thread through his optic nerve, sensitizing it to demon vibrations in architecture, writing as he stood, pointer in hand, before a cadaverous sheet...

Guide 1: What?

Guide 3: Tell us.

Rousseau: (distracted) A computer worm reset my homepage to http://www.divinedicks.ru ...

Guide 1: Worm?

Guide 2: A worm gave me a gift. The gift of a particular shade, a shade you wouldn’t even believe....

Guide 3: I saw a shade of blue out at sea once.

Guide 1: I was once on an island.

Guide 2: A shade you wouldn’t...

Guide 1: There was a drug, distributed freely by the tourism industry, distributed to fat germans in ships, to pale comics on shipboard clubs. Sends the user down a glittery surface, forgetting each inch, a kind of program of which the user is just runtime. In it, a two-sided world infinitely reproducible, transparent, moveable, through microadjustments of the fingers. But this drug....

Rousseau: (interrupting)
Economics is far closer to the occult than any of us would like to think. It is simply the ruling classes’ proclivity for a world within a world. A riddle like that of the secrets of the market where they squat.

Guide 2: No poem is for the reader. No picture for the beholder.

Guide 3: Blue the shade of a giant molecule...

Guide 1: Viva quanta!

Rousseau: Bataille once wrote to me of animals, the animal’s mouth. This mouth is a prow, plowing through the waves. It is the foremost projection of a sleek horizontality. A ship’s silhouette, a straight line from mouth to anus. Not so, for men. For men, eyes have driven the mouth into obscurity.

Guide 2: Forget our names.

Guide 1: Mouth the songs.

Guide 2: No need to speak.

Rousseau: Something has happened, but what?

Chorus of Guides:
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God...so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than to be ingloriously dashed upon the shore, even if that were safety.

For worm-like, then, oh! Who would crawl to land?

"Prop State - pt 3

Scene: Noon, jungle

Henri Rousseau stands at a kind of improvised derrick. It has no drill, only the support structure. He wears a full climbing harness and carries ropes.

Rousseau:

I am devoted to the hidden face of American happiness. There is no foe worth overturning that is not first worth painting.
(He fiddles with coupling, attempting to climb the derrick. It is obvious that he is afraid to go above the first bracing, and may be experiencing spells of dizziness and vertigo. Music swells. Baruch de Spi- noza appears and begins to sing as Rousseau unsuccessfully climbs.)

Spinoza: (sung)

In there, Solar anus and political death /
In there, some Ego loss/
In there, some spirit guide/
In there, some burnt ember/
In there, some thrice sinewed boy/
In there, some frame music/

Scene: Evening, factory

Alfred Jarry cleans the gearing on his bicycle. The golden light ricochets around the noiseless fac- tory. There are hollow notes sung from the birds lining the rafters. He addresses a camera mounted high on the factory wall.

Jarry:

Gentlemen, I am building a new survival poetry; the old one was riddled with holes. My poem keeps tipping over; I’m trying to put too many ideas into it. I need to start from the ground up. That’s why I bought this factory; to renew the face of the world. To hold it to its promise.

What is this deep water? I can see only the end of the political age. I shake hands with this man, with that man, and the dumb pleasure of theater dissolves into something resembling theater, but entirely unlike it. Have you heard the story of the orangutan? This stupid monkey, sitting with a pile of dogeared books, his face fat with the pleasures of his cage, his shit neatly stored in a drawer....flexible....would you believe that he could suck himself off? What sort of man runs free? What sort of man has the buying power of his own dick? Anyway, this monkey, this demon seducer, left to his own devices, wrote a novel. The novel, written on black paper, was unpublishable. We asked several, and they agreed. But then there were the calls. The meetings. What have got to lose, they finally agreed. And overnight: a sensation. In short, this fatuous pleasure machine, this hairy man-child had managed something that none of us had been able to conjure: to sketch a new model for production, that avoided all the old economic pratfalls. All the activists, the orchestra owners, the Smith and Wesson holsters, the Volvo-drivers, the stage-managers were forced to admit: they had all been trumped, by this long-toothed soothsayer. The world was new again. The faces were new again. They had become the whole. Even this face. Do you remember?
Is this not the face? Let me come closer.

(Sets down tools) Is this not the face?

"Prop State" pt 2

Scene: Noon, jungle


Henri Rousseau, brush in hand, fingers soft in kid gloves, boots muddy from the peat, brushes the sweat from under the rim of his hat. He carries with him a book of poems by Swedenborg and a dirty bundle of schematics that he has begun to draw. The sky has opened up after the morning rain, and it is difficult to see, from the brightness hemorrhaging the particulate air.

Henri Rousseau:

I remember you...I have left my children, my half born, my stillness. Could we have a picnic here, among the pines? Could there be sacrifice, banishment from empire, soothsaying and entrails, faceplates shattered by warring clans? Could there be the frontispieces of mantels, broken church doors, succulent fruit and vegetables?

Could there be nothing less than the total despair of the stadium, the dull buzz of the crowd gone mad for blood? I remember you, I think.

I remember you from your paintings.

Your lines were drawn in hues of grey, soft colors of the factory floor, the servant’s quarters. Was there nothing more between us but shades?

There is a factory ahead! The trees are filled with birds, kept at bay by the arms of schoolchildren. The factory is dark now, but only a few years ago, strode across this valley, this river-welt, with fantastic steps. The factory is dark now.
I wrote my novel on blackened paper, I forced on my amnesiac brother a recognition, I balanced the ardor of millions, I opened my window onto the world-as-window. The factory is dark now.

Guide 1: (far away) The factory is no longer dark; it has been bought!

Rousseau: The factory is dark now, but has been bought.

Scene: Noon, factory

Alfred Jarry sits at a desk in a wood paneled management office in the dark ribs of the factory. His eyes are half-closed, his fingers at his temples. He has adopted this somewhat iconic pose to further im- press the shareholders, who will appear at the factory shortly. He is positioned so as to be silhouetted by the strong midday light, presenting an image that is comforting and self-aware. The bicycle he rode to the factory leans against the office wall, its frame speckled with mud from the road. The furniture is not the drab angles one would expect, but are sharply drawn, colored, and facing each other with the respect that comes from knowing one’s place in history. The factory, for now, is silent.

protexst

protexst

"Prop State" - pt 1

PROP STATE


Mortals have settled in their minds to speak of two forms, one of which they should have left out, and that is where they go astray from the truth. They have assigned an opposite substance to each, and marks distinct from one another. To the one they allot the fire of heaven, light, thin, in every direction the same as itself, but not the same as the other. The other is opposite to it, dark night, a compact and heavy body.

-Paramenides, "The Way of Truth." 50/55

Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates of heaven.

-Apollinaire, written on Henri Rousseau's tombstone.






A school rests on the edge of a jungle. Or rather, in its center. Lush and full of frightened and confident animals, the jungle is not benign, and not malignant, containing a hidden organizational system. In fact, it resists easy categorization, although it often serves as a meeting place and archive. A factory spreads caustically in the center. Of the school or jungle, it is often not clear, as both move back and forth through time, as if photographed by many lenses. The campus appears surrounded on each side by strip malls and conference centers. Several guides to the school regularly present tours and generate the initial pedagogical and administrative structures. They prefer subtle music. Although anonymous workers, they control the descriptive model of the school. Their ambitions to middle management are misplaced. Henri Rousseau, wanders the jungle, hoping for some sort of sloughing off: the antipodal grace of the surviving cave-people; the poetry that was surrendered at Thebes, ground to dust, and reappeared in the gilt slo- ganeering of anti-Fordist activists. Baruch de Spinoza, breaks from grinding lenses, to sing hymns. Alfred Jarry, vigorous bicyclist and factory owner, only wishes to write again, but feels a sense of duty to his shareholders. A Pig Farmer, leaning on his now useless spade, hopes for the continued modernization of his profession, through advances in genetics and skin fabrication.

ACT 1:

Scene: Noon, campus

Public Address, sent as a series of messages to every mobile device on the campus:

_______ ___________________

and then, seconds later:

alas.

Scene: Evening, campus

Guides enter, fashioning weapons from whatever is at hand. They are ethical, conserving what resources they can, using what
is available to them sparingly. They make their way slowly through the smog of the campus steamrollers, the sharp smell of asphalt, the muted evening heat of the blackened surface. The light is blue-green, the white masks at their mouths glowing in the dusk. They speak the same language.

Guide 2: This humidity....

Guide 1: We are not certain that this school is asleep. We are early; the air is cool.

Guide 2: (gesturing)
To the left you will see the cantina, where the students organize, and present impromptu lectures. These lectures aren’t researched, but are created on the spot, from the information available in the air.

Guide 1:
Above are the cliffs, where the despondent throw themselves. Above the cliffs, the gods.

Guide 3: (introspectively)
How many legs are required for suicide? Do octopuses commit suicide?

Guide 2:
How many legs are required?

Guide 3: (murmured)
How many...

Guide 1:
Who will forgive us our metaphors? Who will descend to present us with safety vests?

Guide 3:
Who will remember the swine-herders, the lonely drop-shippers, the faithless sheep-cullers, the pull-men, the neo-structuralists, the antiquarian book dealers?

Chorus of Guides:
When we were young, our mothers taught us to write, to write in language that could float in the air for others to pluck. We had a name for this floating, but we are old, and have forgotten it. Our mothers met under the freeways, always leading with spray cans towards the tunnels; the drainage was our teacher. The edging of the jungle was all that we needed to know. There was no end point, only subterranean truth.

We bring this memory to our work; we apply ourselves daily. There was a moment when we seemed necessary: that moment when dull faces turn towards a microphone, blushing with pricked conscience and the expanse of surprisingly ancient radio waves.

"Prop State" - excerpts

The following posts will be excerpts from an artist book that I'm working on.

"I'm Glad" by Pier Paolo Pasolini

In the roughness of Saturday night
I'm glad to watch people
outside laughing in the open air.


My heart also is made of air
my eyes reflect the joy of the people
and in my hair shines Saturday night.


Young man, I'm glad with my miserly
Saturday night, I'm happy with people
I am alive, I am happy with the air.


I am used to the evil of Saturday night.

yellow cloud

Pascal's Triangle

A syllable is short, with one beat, or long, with two. In how many ways can a metre of four syllables be constructed? Four shorts or four longs have just one pattern for each, while for three shorts and a long, or three longs and a short, there are four (SSSL, SSLS, SLSS, and LSSS, for example). For two of each kind of syllable, there are six possibilities. Do the sum for metres of one, two, three, four and more and a mathematical pattern emerges. It is Pascal's Triangle, the pyramid of numbers in which the series in the next line is given by adding together adjacent pairs in the line above to generate 1, 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 3 3 1, 1 4 6 4 1, and so on.

- Steve Jones, via The Telegraph

red square 2

red square 1

Reading Position for Second Degree Burn
Dennis Openheim 1970
Book, skin, solar energy.
Exposure time: 5 hours.

"Political Poem" by Amiri Baraka

(for Basil)

Luxury, then, is a way of
being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information. Where theories
can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins
without being cracked by ideas.

(I have not seen the earth for years
and think now possibly “dirt” is
negative, positive, but clearly
social. I cannot plant a seed, cannot
recognize the root with clearer dent
than indifference. Though I eat
and shit as a natural man ( Getting up
from the desk to secure a turkey sandwich
and answer the phone: the poem undone
undone by my station, by my station,
and the bad words of Newark.) Raised up
to the breech, we seek to fill for this
crumbling century. The darkness of love,
in whose sweating memory all error is forced.

Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen
who still follow fires, tho are quieter
and less punctual. It is a polite truth
we are left with. Who are you? What are you
saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.
The noxious game of reason, saying, “No, No,
you cannot feel,” like my dead lecturer
lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.

tuss light

political Dynasty

Jump to Political families in Republics‎:
Some political dynasties: The Beazley and Crean
It has been suggested that Kennedy family
political line be merged into this
We study political dynasties in the United States Congress
since its inception in 1789. We
JAIPUR: AICC general secretary Janardan Dwivedi
defended Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who said
the “largest” political dynasty in terms of both the
number of members placed in Congress
A New Face in the Kennedy Political Dynasty:
Joe the Third. Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Even industrialized democracies are not immune
to the politics of dynasty. Although the
Aug 9, 2010 ... While Barry Soetoro's family lavish
themselves at a luxury Spanish resort
dO u agree with stAtement?
is pOliticAL dynAsty undemOcrAtic?
will ... based on my
We study political dynasties
in a ____ full of plutocrats.




[source: google search 'political dynasty', jan 15 2011]

moon phaser

ms nsty

man proposes, god disposes (june 10, 2010 - aug 5, 2010)

TerryM again ontane said ...
Man proposes, God disposes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

June 10, 2010 5:27 PM


walsha said ...
Cast not the First Stone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

June 14, 2010 4:55 AM


Yijie Yi Jie said ...
Support you!!! Look forward to your updates!!! Am sure will be even better!!!! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

June 22, 2010 10:27 PM


Rui said ...
Water is always the same, but they are new every moment.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


June 29, 2010 11:21 PM


The court said ...
Happiness is not everything, people have a responsibility.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 3, 2010 10:07 AM


Wang Ming Ren said ...
When a human heart can hold different conflicting things, that people will start to become valuable.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 7, 2010 6:30 PM


Yijie Yi Jie said ...
So excellent blog, do not step're down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 9, 2010 11:41 PM


JasonBirk Jia Qi said ...
We're too old too fast, but smart too late.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 11, 2010 11:09 PM


Xing Yu Xing Yu said ...
Lonely and bored Oh Come see your BLOG!! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 14, 2010 3:27 AM


Liu Xiu-Ying Tsai Health Home said ...
Enjoy your own life, not in comparison with others.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 16, 2010 6:51 PM


Yun Yun Mao Mao said ...
Difficulty is not a new concept, but rather to avoid the old concept.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 19, 2010 2:41 AM


Zhengya Qi Zheng Yaqi said ...
Life is like surging waves, if not stop the rock, how can they create beautiful waves?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 21, 2010 7:20 PM


Wan An Wanan said ...
Do not get things to think about, think more of their own hands have . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 24, 2010 3:46 PM


Liu Shixian said ...
Really kind man, forget the good deeds they did, they head in the present work thing of the past have been forgotten.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

July 27, 2010 4:37 AM


Tang Ming-home said ...
Hello ~ to ask about safety first . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [/ url] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

August 2, 2010 5:01 PM


Qiu Jian Xun said ...
Learning makes a Good Man Better Man worse and ill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

August 5, 2010 8:19 AM

from "Ambient Stylistics" by Tan Lin

So. On the 10th of March I board a plane into Seattle, rent a white Honda Acura and drive 87 miles to Concrete, WA, which is on the edge of the park and where the Bear Park Motel is located. When I arrive, my aunt shows me to Room 17, and whenever I have gone to the The Bear Park in the intervening years I stay in Room 17, just as Salvador Dali when he came to New York always stayed at the St. Regis and always in Room 1628. Although I don't remember any, there is as I gather from the photographs an occasional painting in the rooms, and once when I first thought about visiting, when I was in high school, I remember thinking about a photograph of a door that had been kicked in. After arriving, my aunt proudly tells me that the Bear Park is one of the only motels in America where there are no phones in any of the rooms. I believe this says something about the clientele, about the kinds of people who have and have not stayed at the Bear Park Motel on the western edge of North Cascades National Park, the people who have died and not died there, had sex and not had sex, lied and not lied there way out of that godforsaken landscape or one of those rooms. I have often thought of the motel and have asked my aunt many times if she had ever discovered a corpse in one of the rooms and she said no, never. On my second and last night at the Bear Park I asked my aunt if she liked running the motel. She said she did but she added that the worst thing about running a motel was never being able to take a vacation. And drunks bang on the office door, which is the door to their living room, and this wakes her and her uncle up in the middle of the night. People come to cheat in their motel. I have taken that trip to Glacier and the Bear Park Motel many times. I know the head is made for places like the Bear Park Motel where a half-Chinese woman runs a motel filled with language and its lies.

When I was in graduate school getting a Ph.D in 1983 and writing poetry on the side I met a woman who spoke 8 languages-Chinese (mandarin and cantonese and an amoy dialect known as xiamen), German, French, Vietnamese, and English, almost all of them fluently except for German, which she learned in school I think. She was born in Saigon, was raised in Paris and told me she had never ridden in public transportation before NYC because she had spent her childhood in the back seat of a limousine and whenever I think of her I think of her in the back seat of a limousine and basically just living there and reading her favorite books there (she was born a reader just as all avid readers are born not made), and being taken to restaurants, and waiting for her father to put her in the car so she could go to school. I believe she told me her father was in business and that her mother was capable of extreme cruelty. She was very pretty for her age and very slight, almost trop raffiné, and her name was G________, but she had a laugh that was just loud enough, and she was very fond of smiling and not quite smiling at the same time. Her eyes were brown with the color of scuffed shoe polish. From the moment I met her I believed she was an exquisite liar. One night I asked her if she lied in one language better than another because I knew she loved questions like that (all questions for her resembled lies), and she said she knew she could lie best in English, because it was not her favorite language and was most free in it but when she was in bed with someone she preferred to make the sounds of endearment and physical longing in Chinese. One hot very early July morning, my father who was visiting Brooke Alexander, a gallery owner who deals a lot of print works by contemporary artists in NY, walked up the five flights of stairs in my walkup apartment on 125th St. in Spanish Harlem, and met her by accident (she was leaving). I introduced them, asked them to say a few words of Chinese to each other because at the time I was not sure how well she spoke Chinese, and they exchanged a few words in mandarin which I did not understand because I do not speak or understand Chinese except certain names of food. I have always told my friends that I can speak Chinese but only in a restaurant.

Years afterwards when my father had decided to buy another house and was living in Santa Barbara and I had gone to visit him during my summer off, my father asked what happened to her, said she was very well brought up, and that she spoke a very beautiful mandarin. I believe that she reminded my father of my mother though I realize this only now as I am writing it.











Fig. 1b

One night I remember she had told me she was a virgin. I knew she was not really lying because she was lying to me in my favorite language, which is English because it is the only one that I really possess as a language to imagine things in, and because I have always thought that she is probably one of those persons that can only lie well over the phone. I continue to believe to this day that she was a terrible liar in person, although I am probably lying to myself, and of course this is the main reason I fell in love with her after we had ended things, and this is the main reason I still, years later, remember her voice when I am on the telephone and am lonely and am waiting for someone on the other end of the telephone to tell me they love me. One can wait for years to hear a beautiful lie like that. Nearly ten years later I ran into a friend of hers on the Columbia campus near the statue of Rodin's The Thinker. I had gone back (I love the campus and steps where the students sit out on a warm day) to see a professor of mine, George Stade, who wrote a novel called Confessions of a Lady Killer and is my one of favorite professors because he of all my professors, he always acted glad to see me (and I believe he genuinely was) when I came in to talk with him about orals exams, or dissertation chapters or whatever. Anyway, Christina and I talked for a long time. Eventually the subject of G________ came up and she told me that G________ had finished her thesis on the Princesse de Cleves, had married a Swiss banker, and was living in Geneva. Today I feel a strong urge to know what country her parents live in, if they are even alive, and I have an irrevocable desire to meet them, not to talk to them, just to be introduced to them, to go through the mechanical social pleasantries with them. Sometimes there are times when I wish G________ had lied that night when she told me she was a virgin. Without lies, the brain would be more empty than a midtown office building. Without lies, the emotions would have nothing to live for except themselves and no emotion should have to live with itself for very long. Lies are the ways the mind has of accepting our own emotions. None of the lies we tell is real except to the person we tell that lie to. It never really matters if one is telling the truth. It only matters if one cares enough not to tell a lie to someone. There is nothing so sad as a family without liars. My father died in 1989 of a heart attack (he was the best liar in our family) and of course there were things that I never said to him. Everybody needs to lie to someone. As I was saying, the rooms at the Big Bear Park rent for $37 a night.

flatty thingy

SURPLUS BIRDS

Y-V-A

tone tone

"Surface" by Jorie Graham.

It has a hole in it. Not only where I

concentrate.

The river still ribboning, twisting up,

into its re-

arrangements, chill enlightenments, tight-knotted

quickenings

and loosenings--whispered messages dissolving

the messengers--

the river still glinting-up into its handfuls, heapings.

glassy

forgettings under the river of

my attention--

and the river of my attention laying itself down--

bending,

reassembling--over the quick leaving-offs and windy

obstacles--

and the surface rippling under the wind's attention--

rippling over the accumulations, the slowed-down drifting

permanences

of the cold

bed.

I say iridescent and I look down.

The leaves very still as they are carried.

untitled

Dart the skins

Again it rang, again the rocks

This little un-person sang

quietly to herself.

A Dry Scene

There was no end to this town, as they stood peering in it. “Too much word play in this script” was the whispered sound from behind the gaffer’s post. That post was well lit, at least. We bought this town, for this film, and can do what we will, was the thought animating the gunman’s eyes.

Those eyes which had seemed dead until this scene. Well, “dead,” he knew, was just a reassuring play of light on a lens. There was a windswept valley, and ridges dark behind that. And some silhouette, maybe an antagonist.

This death scene ran too long; on that they could all agree.

"The Burning Ship" by Campbell McGrath

No room for regret or self-doubt in art,
doubt but not self-doubt. The ship hauls anchor,
the kerosene lantern flickers and goes out,
voices in the pitch black swell with anger

as shipmates mistake each other for enemies.
The lantern spills, the pilot drops a lit cigar.
Tragedy ensues and engenders more tragedy.
If only the moon could see, if only the stars

had been granted the power of speech.
But the blind remain blind, the voiceless mute.
The burning ship threads its way between reefs
in the darkness. Doubt but not self-doubt.

R*U*S*K*I*N

R*U*S*K*I*N