1. From time to time Blue Orange rewards a dissonant raving comment with a gift of one of its series of books, either the Hank series or the Casebook series. We are sending the casebook series to the comment 'What is to be undone' made to our item on the former Bektashi politician. Congratulations.
2. Editors of other publications are reminded to acknowledge extracts taken from this blog. Publishers can request items here be removed if they wish to publish them elsewhere.
3. The newest book Re: The Dead Arts is being prepared for printing. Those nominating selections should hurry.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Monday, April 03, 2006
Eve
Father,
I hate the sound of children on my grass
under stars on holy night
and the neighbours hearing them.
I hate them outside
turning on and off lights
when they are not there.
Father,
I gave lovely ones gifts and dreams
of my redemption so they wouldn't
speak of sins and believe.
They don't
Mother,
I am the only child,
of the only family.
There will never be enough
compensation for
death.
Who is there?
I thought you had gone.
If you want to heal
why choose this house?
'Eve' is an as-yet unpublished poem.
I hate the sound of children on my grass
under stars on holy night
and the neighbours hearing them.
I hate them outside
turning on and off lights
when they are not there.
Father,
I gave lovely ones gifts and dreams
of my redemption so they wouldn't
speak of sins and believe.
They don't
Mother,
I am the only child,
of the only family.
There will never be enough
compensation for
death.
Who is there?
I thought you had gone.
If you want to heal
why choose this house?
'Eve' is an as-yet unpublished poem.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
from the former Bektashi...politician
'The only leftist politics are the politics of ego and personality.
The only rightist politics are the politics of conspiracy and greed.
Centrist politics are the politics of smug assassination.
Politics is the creation of the degraded dream, self-delusion and reasons for antipathy. It is to make false connections of cause and effect. A politician must be ill, pathological.
The answer to politics is opposition and association.'
The only rightist politics are the politics of conspiracy and greed.
Centrist politics are the politics of smug assassination.
Politics is the creation of the degraded dream, self-delusion and reasons for antipathy. It is to make false connections of cause and effect. A politician must be ill, pathological.
The answer to politics is opposition and association.'
Monday, March 27, 2006
re: blaine invasion cont'd
That was a wild thing I wrote for a noticeboard of Canadian and borderline poets. It may interest you as a manipulation of History. If I read it out loud it would be oral history. A friend says none of this happened as he thinks history revolved around the triumphs of his faction expessed as in strange philosophocal events of nine people and a two page newspaper. I say they did take place, and the flamingoes, the milky way freeway and everything else.
re: blaine invasion
I'm not quite sure what I'm talking about except that it has something to do with forming an object, How it is done.
An objective co-something or other of something, like a poem. An object, image or event which is based on rules that an enclosing narrative doesn't have so that what is there, invisible there beyond the narrative or frozen imaginaire is now seen and felt.
This also means beyond the limitations of senses but absolute in them. With Grassy Narrows, the Vancouver prison riot and the Invasion of Blaine as well as the Waterloo university occupation and the two times I was arrested - and as well as the Partisan Street program, I with others created something, an event evidently now gone from most memories as they were and have remained the news image, that were designed to signify one thing, a false thing, a thing meta and under or above reality, but was actually intended to get someone 'in lawful custody' out.
Enclosed warriors, tortured innocents like Student idealists, Communist anti-fascists released by a Caravan of false ethnic wanderers, an invasion of children and picnickers, a crowd of faux arsonists, and a phoney biserker.
That is what the difficulties caused by surrealism are intended to do, to get the reader or viewer OUT. It has an objective, or more like a compulsion or duty. It must be done. To get away from Ultreye (the god-thing beyond panoptic) and take the reader with you. Out.
I saw, when I was last in Vancouver staying in a Hotel on Granville, a history channel thing saying the invasion of Blaine was about the environment and atomic testing. No it wasn't. It was about Cambodia.
I wondered if I was ever there.
The set off of the Native People's caravan from the courthouse was said to be an abortion caravan which did take place but years earlier.
She did a voiceover of the film but it was of native dancers. And me.
'Surreal,' as they say.
An objective co-something or other of something, like a poem. An object, image or event which is based on rules that an enclosing narrative doesn't have so that what is there, invisible there beyond the narrative or frozen imaginaire is now seen and felt.
This also means beyond the limitations of senses but absolute in them. With Grassy Narrows, the Vancouver prison riot and the Invasion of Blaine as well as the Waterloo university occupation and the two times I was arrested - and as well as the Partisan Street program, I with others created something, an event evidently now gone from most memories as they were and have remained the news image, that were designed to signify one thing, a false thing, a thing meta and under or above reality, but was actually intended to get someone 'in lawful custody' out.
Enclosed warriors, tortured innocents like Student idealists, Communist anti-fascists released by a Caravan of false ethnic wanderers, an invasion of children and picnickers, a crowd of faux arsonists, and a phoney biserker.
That is what the difficulties caused by surrealism are intended to do, to get the reader or viewer OUT. It has an objective, or more like a compulsion or duty. It must be done. To get away from Ultreye (the god-thing beyond panoptic) and take the reader with you. Out.
I saw, when I was last in Vancouver staying in a Hotel on Granville, a history channel thing saying the invasion of Blaine was about the environment and atomic testing. No it wasn't. It was about Cambodia.
I wondered if I was ever there.
The set off of the Native People's caravan from the courthouse was said to be an abortion caravan which did take place but years earlier.
She did a voiceover of the film but it was of native dancers. And me.
'Surreal,' as they say.
the blaine invasion
I was a candidate in a Canadian Federal election. In that election, like the one just passing, the expression one heard a lot was `It's so surreal.' This may be a prism that many are seeing through not only the Canadian elections but life.
I have written elsewhere that I hate the ideology and practice of memoirism, that is, structuring narratives of the past in which the ego plays the starring role. I find memoirism an essential tool of fascism, child abuse, plagiarism and other unattractive coping mechanisms.
But
This idea of elections being surreal coupled with the sensation I have felt lately when people have wondered about my Canadianism, or even my actual existence (including my own family) got me remembering aspects of my political career.
And
I have assured myself that it is not memoirism I am doing because first of all I seem to be the only one who is the slightest bit interested in any of it anymore as something to enhance their own narratives with, and second because the memories always involve `we' not me. And they are surreal anyway.
I realised how surreal they were when I was drinking whiskey in a Vancouver hotel that used to be seedy but was now rather nice watching a political documentary on T.V. And there it was, scenes rendered into narrative historic fact wired into part of the official Canada easily replacing my surrealism. And there I was. Canadian at last! A ghostly image.
First scene was of the time we decided to invade the United States. This act, mentioned in U.S. media as the first time since the war of 1812 and in Canadian parliament as the work of anti-Canadian professional revolutionaries and poets was filmed and shown all over the world. It made, I know, the news in Denmark and was seen by someone who was once a girlfriend who contacted me again.
`We' decided to do it, the invasion of the U.S, originally called a peace picnic, because the U.S. had invaded Cambodia. We thought we would go twenty two miles into the U.S and exchange that for the Parrot's Beak, which is what they had. Twenty two miles. Very practical.
There was a good leaflet and `we' gathered in strength at the Peace Arch between White Rock and Blaine. Then, with a happy sigh, the picnickers, children, drummers and significant others that we were packed up lunches and marched past customs into Blaine and Amerikka under a sunny sky.
As the column of cheerful invaders diminished, people stopping to shop, or getting tired and going back to lunch, a large man ran out of a bar carrying a pistol saying `you fucking communists'. A woman, who I see was a candidate in the recent election, kicked it out of his hands. Some of us cheered. I think she is now billed as a reformist.
After a few miles in, just past a hotel, `we', the core who had ventured forth and a few who had joined us since, turned and went back to the border singing the Huron Carole and feeling very Canadian although some were just learning the words. We had gone only a mile. But it had been an act more literal than what most of the others had done. We took our threats and proclamations seriously.
It was surreal back there, there was a line of a thousand ugly looking, angry, scruffy Canadians, some bleeding, raging in and around the border flower beds who were faced across that border by a line of multi-uniformed American riot police and soldiers, dozens of whom had rifles. It was a lesson in what happens in the meantime if you are ever writing a short story.
Some of the troops had torn shirts, were Seattle Blue Asses, some were so called Indian Affairs, some were Army, some were armed customs officers and some were cowboy-hatted border guards. There was a Coast Guard guy. We went through their lines unnoticed and invisible as we were not actors in that classic confrontation and image. Cops against the people. We joined the Canadians. The Canadians were digging rocks from the flower beds and hurling themat the police. The gates of the Peace Arch had been shut and tied with booster cables. Under the slogans 'may these gates never be closed' and 'children of a common mother' they were closed and someone had defaced the 'mother' with spray paint. As I approached I saw a friend leaping way into the air (he became the founder of a great institution and his name rhymes with `leap') hurling a flower encrusted white painted rock. This photo was on the front page next morning.
The police finally attacked and broke a few arms. In fact they invaded Canada. It was also the first time since the last (but it was a near thing in the war measures act too). The police attack was prompted when a trainload of new cars, including Corvettes, went by on the railway parallel to the road and was enthusiastically stoned! Corvettes! No wonder they attacked. A few broken arms and counter charges later we all went home watched by two (yes, only two) Mounties sitting quietly in their car. As Mounties do compared to the Cavalry. Anyway on the documentary I saw years later in the hotel the voiceover said that the demonstration had been a very peaceful protest on environmental issues and nuclear testing. A prominent politician was interviewed associating himself with these traditional Canadian concerns. The voiceover didn't say `nice' or `boring' but you could hear it there with an invisible smirk. Later it showed the Native People's Caravan which went across Canada visiting reserves picking up demands to be taken to the Parliament where it was attacked on the steps by Mounties. I was beaten again there. But in the documentary some women were met by Trudeau. But I had seen myself leaving in the clip before! The voiceover said it was a caravan about women's rights, which in fact had taken place years earlier. A woman who I knew was interviewed mentioning the rights now won.
There was later the clip of our community human rights campaigningwhen `we' drove at night through the streets informing first nations people and kids about their rights giving them leaflets and numbers of lawyers as the were being rousted by the police during a periodic campaign. The shots were of the rain and the windshields. I complained about to the CBC as romanticising the situation when they were first shown at the time. And they showed again a staged event with police officers I had also complained about. I confess in a movie I made later about mobile clinics in Africa I used the same shot.
Further surrealistically, not in the shot, and more outside the narratives, and in more image defying memory was the guns we had hidden in the trunk of our human rights cars in case the police started a shootout as they had with some Native persons. In the town of Blaine a great number of deserters and some escapees from Camp Pendleton military prison were in the hotel and came back across the border with us. The Caravan went to Grassy Narrows where desperate and near suicidal warriors, some with mercury poisoning and some drugged to the eyeballs were effectively surrounded by Wounded Knee templated Mounties. We took them out.
Later on, following all that I mistakenly punched Chrétien in the nose in a small remonstrance (that should alone make me Canadian but was not in the history documentary).
Yup, 'we', the surreal picnickers, were an Underground Railroad, yup, `we' the barefoot lawyers were people's militia, and yup `we' the surreal gypsy social reformers were following a Clauswitzian dictum on encirclement and not Ghandi.
Get them out! Get them home! Feed them!
My active engaged political career was based on the same dictum I have now in writing. Get them out! Get them out for God's sake from that silly encasing narrative. That beginning, middle and end of the story. Get them out however you can. Get people away from the dead
end roles the official narrative has written for them. Deserter, Perp, Prisoner, Martyr. Use surrealism, use a joke, use the collective power, use the magic image. but get in somehow, anyhow, get out and take them with you.
Take them away from the invisible watcher, the author, the one way glass mirror all invisible but whose presence turns the whole of life into a prison. Take them away from the concocted farce, the tightly structured fiction, the escapist video that has been quietly substituted for Identity, Community Nation and Mind.
`We', it was always `we' (the group makes it possible) failed once during a liberal march for prison reform which was supposed to cover a breakout of some friends we knew were being tortured, some we knew to be very confused and very terrified bunnies indeed. The breakout
didn't work due to a love affair between one prisoner and a social worker.
`We' at midnight snuck out the occupiers of an eastern university building so that the next day when the police attacked there was no-one there (red faced or what, even their dogs). But the demands were forgotten unfortunately. Good demands. They all were good demands.
Most have been met. But not really.
My political campaign as a parliamentary candidate meant I could dress as a lumberjack (I actually was an automobile builder so still a genuine worker despite the costume). I wore lovely chequered shirts and steel toed boots. I spoke from the bottom of my mouth. I was against war, racism and denial of human rights. Who isn't?
In `all candidates meetings' the audience loved me more than any of my students ever did when I clowned around about Shakespeare. They loved a Looney. They saw I was outside of the deathly false earnestness of the cocoon of simple banalities (the west vs. the east, big government vs. little, old arguments and memoirs). My stooges asked the planted questions (some of whom became very serious academics, one of whom now tragically dead did as much for rights of the disabled as anyone on the planet). I answered well and got no votes. I should have read poems.
None of this has happened now. The official narrative has taken over. Canada. It's surreal.
Have to do something else be someone else.
I have written elsewhere that I hate the ideology and practice of memoirism, that is, structuring narratives of the past in which the ego plays the starring role. I find memoirism an essential tool of fascism, child abuse, plagiarism and other unattractive coping mechanisms.
But
This idea of elections being surreal coupled with the sensation I have felt lately when people have wondered about my Canadianism, or even my actual existence (including my own family) got me remembering aspects of my political career.
And
I have assured myself that it is not memoirism I am doing because first of all I seem to be the only one who is the slightest bit interested in any of it anymore as something to enhance their own narratives with, and second because the memories always involve `we' not me. And they are surreal anyway.
I realised how surreal they were when I was drinking whiskey in a Vancouver hotel that used to be seedy but was now rather nice watching a political documentary on T.V. And there it was, scenes rendered into narrative historic fact wired into part of the official Canada easily replacing my surrealism. And there I was. Canadian at last! A ghostly image.
First scene was of the time we decided to invade the United States. This act, mentioned in U.S. media as the first time since the war of 1812 and in Canadian parliament as the work of anti-Canadian professional revolutionaries and poets was filmed and shown all over the world. It made, I know, the news in Denmark and was seen by someone who was once a girlfriend who contacted me again.
`We' decided to do it, the invasion of the U.S, originally called a peace picnic, because the U.S. had invaded Cambodia. We thought we would go twenty two miles into the U.S and exchange that for the Parrot's Beak, which is what they had. Twenty two miles. Very practical.
There was a good leaflet and `we' gathered in strength at the Peace Arch between White Rock and Blaine. Then, with a happy sigh, the picnickers, children, drummers and significant others that we were packed up lunches and marched past customs into Blaine and Amerikka under a sunny sky.
As the column of cheerful invaders diminished, people stopping to shop, or getting tired and going back to lunch, a large man ran out of a bar carrying a pistol saying `you fucking communists'. A woman, who I see was a candidate in the recent election, kicked it out of his hands. Some of us cheered. I think she is now billed as a reformist.
After a few miles in, just past a hotel, `we', the core who had ventured forth and a few who had joined us since, turned and went back to the border singing the Huron Carole and feeling very Canadian although some were just learning the words. We had gone only a mile. But it had been an act more literal than what most of the others had done. We took our threats and proclamations seriously.
It was surreal back there, there was a line of a thousand ugly looking, angry, scruffy Canadians, some bleeding, raging in and around the border flower beds who were faced across that border by a line of multi-uniformed American riot police and soldiers, dozens of whom had rifles. It was a lesson in what happens in the meantime if you are ever writing a short story.
Some of the troops had torn shirts, were Seattle Blue Asses, some were so called Indian Affairs, some were Army, some were armed customs officers and some were cowboy-hatted border guards. There was a Coast Guard guy. We went through their lines unnoticed and invisible as we were not actors in that classic confrontation and image. Cops against the people. We joined the Canadians. The Canadians were digging rocks from the flower beds and hurling themat the police. The gates of the Peace Arch had been shut and tied with booster cables. Under the slogans 'may these gates never be closed' and 'children of a common mother' they were closed and someone had defaced the 'mother' with spray paint. As I approached I saw a friend leaping way into the air (he became the founder of a great institution and his name rhymes with `leap') hurling a flower encrusted white painted rock. This photo was on the front page next morning.
The police finally attacked and broke a few arms. In fact they invaded Canada. It was also the first time since the last (but it was a near thing in the war measures act too). The police attack was prompted when a trainload of new cars, including Corvettes, went by on the railway parallel to the road and was enthusiastically stoned! Corvettes! No wonder they attacked. A few broken arms and counter charges later we all went home watched by two (yes, only two) Mounties sitting quietly in their car. As Mounties do compared to the Cavalry. Anyway on the documentary I saw years later in the hotel the voiceover said that the demonstration had been a very peaceful protest on environmental issues and nuclear testing. A prominent politician was interviewed associating himself with these traditional Canadian concerns. The voiceover didn't say `nice' or `boring' but you could hear it there with an invisible smirk. Later it showed the Native People's Caravan which went across Canada visiting reserves picking up demands to be taken to the Parliament where it was attacked on the steps by Mounties. I was beaten again there. But in the documentary some women were met by Trudeau. But I had seen myself leaving in the clip before! The voiceover said it was a caravan about women's rights, which in fact had taken place years earlier. A woman who I knew was interviewed mentioning the rights now won.
There was later the clip of our community human rights campaigningwhen `we' drove at night through the streets informing first nations people and kids about their rights giving them leaflets and numbers of lawyers as the were being rousted by the police during a periodic campaign. The shots were of the rain and the windshields. I complained about to the CBC as romanticising the situation when they were first shown at the time. And they showed again a staged event with police officers I had also complained about. I confess in a movie I made later about mobile clinics in Africa I used the same shot.
Further surrealistically, not in the shot, and more outside the narratives, and in more image defying memory was the guns we had hidden in the trunk of our human rights cars in case the police started a shootout as they had with some Native persons. In the town of Blaine a great number of deserters and some escapees from Camp Pendleton military prison were in the hotel and came back across the border with us. The Caravan went to Grassy Narrows where desperate and near suicidal warriors, some with mercury poisoning and some drugged to the eyeballs were effectively surrounded by Wounded Knee templated Mounties. We took them out.
Later on, following all that I mistakenly punched Chrétien in the nose in a small remonstrance (that should alone make me Canadian but was not in the history documentary).
Yup, 'we', the surreal picnickers, were an Underground Railroad, yup, `we' the barefoot lawyers were people's militia, and yup `we' the surreal gypsy social reformers were following a Clauswitzian dictum on encirclement and not Ghandi.
Get them out! Get them home! Feed them!
My active engaged political career was based on the same dictum I have now in writing. Get them out! Get them out for God's sake from that silly encasing narrative. That beginning, middle and end of the story. Get them out however you can. Get people away from the dead
end roles the official narrative has written for them. Deserter, Perp, Prisoner, Martyr. Use surrealism, use a joke, use the collective power, use the magic image. but get in somehow, anyhow, get out and take them with you.
Take them away from the invisible watcher, the author, the one way glass mirror all invisible but whose presence turns the whole of life into a prison. Take them away from the concocted farce, the tightly structured fiction, the escapist video that has been quietly substituted for Identity, Community Nation and Mind.
`We', it was always `we' (the group makes it possible) failed once during a liberal march for prison reform which was supposed to cover a breakout of some friends we knew were being tortured, some we knew to be very confused and very terrified bunnies indeed. The breakout
didn't work due to a love affair between one prisoner and a social worker.
`We' at midnight snuck out the occupiers of an eastern university building so that the next day when the police attacked there was no-one there (red faced or what, even their dogs). But the demands were forgotten unfortunately. Good demands. They all were good demands.
Most have been met. But not really.
My political campaign as a parliamentary candidate meant I could dress as a lumberjack (I actually was an automobile builder so still a genuine worker despite the costume). I wore lovely chequered shirts and steel toed boots. I spoke from the bottom of my mouth. I was against war, racism and denial of human rights. Who isn't?
In `all candidates meetings' the audience loved me more than any of my students ever did when I clowned around about Shakespeare. They loved a Looney. They saw I was outside of the deathly false earnestness of the cocoon of simple banalities (the west vs. the east, big government vs. little, old arguments and memoirs). My stooges asked the planted questions (some of whom became very serious academics, one of whom now tragically dead did as much for rights of the disabled as anyone on the planet). I answered well and got no votes. I should have read poems.
None of this has happened now. The official narrative has taken over. Canada. It's surreal.
Have to do something else be someone else.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
from the former bektashi...psychiatrist
from the former Bektashi psychiatrist:
'Schizophrenia and paranoia evolved through the eons as healthy reactions to the condition of being human, which through time developed as being the species most displaced and vulnerable. First driven as stumbling fish slugs into the swamps by sleek creatures in the deep waters which were much more attractive and much smarter than us.
'We further evolved as we became humanoids, so useless that we invented containers to hold our food, our sexual objects and our dead. This was because we had so little that we had to save what we had for later. We used, unlike everyone else, sticks to poke with, especially as our teeth were bad and our hands and tongues useless for picking up ants, let alone fending off viscious tree slugs.
'Bi-polar reactions came as a mental disturbace to reflect when we had food and when we didn't, at which times we ate our relatives, loved ones and members of our gang. Mania was for when we had some. Depression for not any left. These coping mechanisms made cannibalism possible. They gave us the imagination and feeling for it. The soul. Other animals evolved none of this stuff. They have a different mental health.
'Anti-social feelings come about in people as a way of adapting to the fact that bigger animals in our species steal almost everything the group gets, screw you and shit in your space while the rest of the group snarls and laughs hysterically praising and stroking the big guy, but you have to belong because the tigers won't have you, in fact quite the reverse. When he was asleep you pissed on him.
'Sanity and vision are the real illnesses; they place mankind within the perfection of the rest of creation, where it never was. Only in its dreams. The job of the psychiatrist is to, through drugs and persuasion, enable sane disorders while overcoming realistic, genetically
determined, responses to the human condition.
'Schizophrenia and paranoia evolved through the eons as healthy reactions to the condition of being human, which through time developed as being the species most displaced and vulnerable. First driven as stumbling fish slugs into the swamps by sleek creatures in the deep waters which were much more attractive and much smarter than us.
'We further evolved as we became humanoids, so useless that we invented containers to hold our food, our sexual objects and our dead. This was because we had so little that we had to save what we had for later. We used, unlike everyone else, sticks to poke with, especially as our teeth were bad and our hands and tongues useless for picking up ants, let alone fending off viscious tree slugs.
'Bi-polar reactions came as a mental disturbace to reflect when we had food and when we didn't, at which times we ate our relatives, loved ones and members of our gang. Mania was for when we had some. Depression for not any left. These coping mechanisms made cannibalism possible. They gave us the imagination and feeling for it. The soul. Other animals evolved none of this stuff. They have a different mental health.
'Anti-social feelings come about in people as a way of adapting to the fact that bigger animals in our species steal almost everything the group gets, screw you and shit in your space while the rest of the group snarls and laughs hysterically praising and stroking the big guy, but you have to belong because the tigers won't have you, in fact quite the reverse. When he was asleep you pissed on him.
'Sanity and vision are the real illnesses; they place mankind within the perfection of the rest of creation, where it never was. Only in its dreams. The job of the psychiatrist is to, through drugs and persuasion, enable sane disorders while overcoming realistic, genetically
determined, responses to the human condition.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
from the former bektashi...economist
From the former Bektashi economist
The more you own, the more you lose. The more you grasp, the more gets away.
Wealth like desire is addictive. Any addiction is never to real things but to the declining sensations and increasing symbolism of the drug, a mental addiction to the style of the drug taking, to the ultimate abstraction and absurdity required to be the addict, to the theatre of it all. All the absurdity of economics is based on the reversal of values and laws of dreams. Death is good, scarcity is wonderful, war is opportunity, theft is clever, intellect is stupid, prudence and madness are interchangeable, contract is conflict, service is betrayal. A black magical world of carnival and misrule that everyone must live in.
The more you own, the more you lose. The more you grasp, the more gets away.
Wealth like desire is addictive. Any addiction is never to real things but to the declining sensations and increasing symbolism of the drug, a mental addiction to the style of the drug taking, to the ultimate abstraction and absurdity required to be the addict, to the theatre of it all. All the absurdity of economics is based on the reversal of values and laws of dreams. Death is good, scarcity is wonderful, war is opportunity, theft is clever, intellect is stupid, prudence and madness are interchangeable, contract is conflict, service is betrayal. A black magical world of carnival and misrule that everyone must live in.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
blog of revelations: from the former bektashi scientist
From the former Bektashi scientist:
'We must not confuse adaptation and evolution with susceptibility and devolution.
'The dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction by the result of their overwhelming dominance and the consequent ecological disorder caused by that. The methane gas they emitted caused a climatic catastrophe of imbalance. The lush jungles from hothouse methane warming were wiped out by a meteoric dust cloud. Adaptability and divergence had gone.
Humans are rapidly creating the conditions for their own extinction in a similar way through geometrically increased evolutionary susceptibility, through organization and harmonisation of everything to them. Having made the whole world over with their greedy unbalanced needs, humans have created the situation that a single virus or temporary shortage can kill them all. This should happen any time now. The last act in their devolution from sea toads.
(This excerpt is not in Re: The Dead Arts, soon to be published by BLUE ORANGE PUBLISHING.)
'We must not confuse adaptation and evolution with susceptibility and devolution.
'The dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction by the result of their overwhelming dominance and the consequent ecological disorder caused by that. The methane gas they emitted caused a climatic catastrophe of imbalance. The lush jungles from hothouse methane warming were wiped out by a meteoric dust cloud. Adaptability and divergence had gone.
Humans are rapidly creating the conditions for their own extinction in a similar way through geometrically increased evolutionary susceptibility, through organization and harmonisation of everything to them. Having made the whole world over with their greedy unbalanced needs, humans have created the situation that a single virus or temporary shortage can kill them all. This should happen any time now. The last act in their devolution from sea toads.
(This excerpt is not in Re: The Dead Arts, soon to be published by BLUE ORANGE PUBLISHING.)
Friday, March 10, 2006
imazhi
e ulur atje, e sigurt aq sa dhe vdekja është e butë, në vajtim
ajo nuk është prej fragmentë qelqi të thyera, por prej pasqyrash
mbi shami të shndritshme, prej fije argjendi
blu e theksuar mbi gurë të zinj, gati e shkrëmbuar
ajo është larguar, ka ikur, por gjithmonë e shndritshme dhe blu e theksuar
e lidhur nëpër vargje brisqesh
gjilpëra të holla mbajnë mishin e saj, si fluturat pas zemrës
filxhana të ndryshkur shënojnë kohën e saj dhe kuajt vallëzojnë rreth saj
një mbretëreshë në dritë dhe hije.
deri në gju të përmbytur, ata u ngritën
një nga një. dy nga dy, dhe vështruan
ëngjëjt vijnë nga zunkthi duke thëmbuar mbi re
gojë mbyllur, të rruar, gati për të ikur dhe kështu të ruajtur përmes
shelgjesh ndërsa bien nën ndritën e zbehtë.
të armatosur në ujë
mburoja vezulluese dhe bula shiu
dhe kështu shpëtuan duke rënë atje. Atje sipër dhe
në të ftohtë u mbështollën në
vellon e butësisë, fëmijë të përvuajtur
dhe drita e thyer ndriçon prej saj
ajo nuk është prej fragmentë qelqi të thyera, por prej pasqyrash
mbi shami të shndritshme, prej fije argjendi
blu e theksuar mbi gurë të zinj, gati e shkrëmbuar
ajo është larguar, ka ikur, por gjithmonë e shndritshme dhe blu e theksuar
e lidhur nëpër vargje brisqesh
gjilpëra të holla mbajnë mishin e saj, si fluturat pas zemrës
filxhana të ndryshkur shënojnë kohën e saj dhe kuajt vallëzojnë rreth saj
një mbretëreshë në dritë dhe hije.
deri në gju të përmbytur, ata u ngritën
një nga një. dy nga dy, dhe vështruan
ëngjëjt vijnë nga zunkthi duke thëmbuar mbi re
gojë mbyllur, të rruar, gati për të ikur dhe kështu të ruajtur përmes
shelgjesh ndërsa bien nën ndritën e zbehtë.
të armatosur në ujë
mburoja vezulluese dhe bula shiu
dhe kështu shpëtuan duke rënë atje. Atje sipër dhe
në të ftohtë u mbështollën në
vellon e butësisë, fëmijë të përvuajtur
dhe drita e thyer ndriçon prej saj
From The Beak's Poems.
Translated by Evis Carcani.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
blog of revelations XII: dis-gression
Dear Jean-Pierre,
Back from Paris. Went to a funeral of a bishop in Notre Dame; he was confessor to Latin Quarter in the '20's, a parish priest in the occupation and finally a kind of priest trainer. The choir were student priests robed in exquisite turquoise. Your interest would be that the hand movements to direct the singers and the congregation were perfectly co-ordinated among several boy conductors. The hands looked like spiralling birds.
It was a plain used coffin. But he must have lived like a king. Nice residence, the Seine, artists, song. And other rites. Lived across the street from Shakespere and company. Lived near the Nazi gestapo headquarters. He believed, according to the presiding Cardinal, that life was a vale of tears followed by paradise.
Then up the twisting streets into a blue sky to Sacre Coeur for the choir of nuns. I was startled by the same hand movements as they sang among candles, the soloists sounding like they knew the most frightful secrets.
I went next to Montmartre graveyard to get more shots of Nijinsky's tomb for my next book's cover. Lovely grave. The sad clown sprawled on it rendered gold by hands seeking blessings is me, I sometimes feel. Foucault has an anonymous grave nearby saying he is a physiscian. Zola has an asshole looking bust. My hands for the first time don't appear in the shots. But a black graveyard cat does, ruffled by a wind til swaying. Then a blue tin sepulchre and next a row of peaked tombs including that of an exiled romanov teenage princess. There is another tomb with an inner light. The row of tombs resemble exactly the roofs of Paris I had taken earlier from the steps of Sacre Coeur on Monmartre. Snow over blue and green. Perhps this is by design of some transcendental tourist board.
I also saw an exhibit of Coptic funery items at the Louvre. Some were from the Egyptian town of Dis near which I once lived in a town sacred to Annubis, about which I have written. Pictures of Annubis and Osiris helping a Christian into the grave. Lots of sculpture of sacred hands. There is a whole cult of these. Especially of John the Baptist of course. There are significant things about those number of fingers extended where are the ones not shown. There are municipal contests about where the 'missing ones' are (as three or two are extended for certain blessings). Pieces are dis-covered. One finger is supposed to be in St. Jean De Marianne in the alps where the Savoy's come from. I saw the church there last year. John's finger is there. I saw a skull of his at the Sultan's place in Istanbul. Post mortuary dis-membership must be so dis-concerting.
But enough dis-gression.
Back from Paris. Went to a funeral of a bishop in Notre Dame; he was confessor to Latin Quarter in the '20's, a parish priest in the occupation and finally a kind of priest trainer. The choir were student priests robed in exquisite turquoise. Your interest would be that the hand movements to direct the singers and the congregation were perfectly co-ordinated among several boy conductors. The hands looked like spiralling birds.
It was a plain used coffin. But he must have lived like a king. Nice residence, the Seine, artists, song. And other rites. Lived across the street from Shakespere and company. Lived near the Nazi gestapo headquarters. He believed, according to the presiding Cardinal, that life was a vale of tears followed by paradise.
Then up the twisting streets into a blue sky to Sacre Coeur for the choir of nuns. I was startled by the same hand movements as they sang among candles, the soloists sounding like they knew the most frightful secrets.
I went next to Montmartre graveyard to get more shots of Nijinsky's tomb for my next book's cover. Lovely grave. The sad clown sprawled on it rendered gold by hands seeking blessings is me, I sometimes feel. Foucault has an anonymous grave nearby saying he is a physiscian. Zola has an asshole looking bust. My hands for the first time don't appear in the shots. But a black graveyard cat does, ruffled by a wind til swaying. Then a blue tin sepulchre and next a row of peaked tombs including that of an exiled romanov teenage princess. There is another tomb with an inner light. The row of tombs resemble exactly the roofs of Paris I had taken earlier from the steps of Sacre Coeur on Monmartre. Snow over blue and green. Perhps this is by design of some transcendental tourist board.
I also saw an exhibit of Coptic funery items at the Louvre. Some were from the Egyptian town of Dis near which I once lived in a town sacred to Annubis, about which I have written. Pictures of Annubis and Osiris helping a Christian into the grave. Lots of sculpture of sacred hands. There is a whole cult of these. Especially of John the Baptist of course. There are significant things about those number of fingers extended where are the ones not shown. There are municipal contests about where the 'missing ones' are (as three or two are extended for certain blessings). Pieces are dis-covered. One finger is supposed to be in St. Jean De Marianne in the alps where the Savoy's come from. I saw the church there last year. John's finger is there. I saw a skull of his at the Sultan's place in Istanbul. Post mortuary dis-membership must be so dis-concerting.
But enough dis-gression.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
those cartoons
There is a traditional politics which I participated in of violent berzerker upheaval over the magic of symbolic representations. There are the iconoclasts, the sacred cow fun times and in Nigeria and Egypt the frequent mahdis rising up to hack down evil especially during changes of the moon involving burning hotels with beer and shooting at djinns.
This cartoon event was that and also an application of those mobilising politics organised by underground religious issue groups. There was an internationalising faction of Dutch imams travelling around and dining on their issues involving the famous movie. There were the Moslem Brotherhood clone groups in various countries getting voters and even poor Fatah trying to win back support through circus. Here in London the conservative Moslem wing of the labour party and MI5 used it to hijack support from the British pseudo fun-dementedism manufactured by the Blairite press as a justification for enforced globalisation as a poodle of Bushism.
But let us step back for a moment to consider the religious projection and experience of the self and soul. Or more crudely what is the religious high. This is different with different prisms.
I have been embedded in a few religions cultures in a few places. A religion resembling Hinduism seemed in one place to be educating the soul to feel an engagement with a cosmic story, a story endlessly running with fabulous characters, ones you could know and love yet promised at the same time a divine detachment from all anxiety and pain from self so the creation was enjoyed purely without feeling.
A traditional Christian religion, close to Coptic but which is more flexible on doctrine, allowing for greater mysticism for example, promised imminent redemption and love as well as supreme authoritarian forgiveness of the crappy but smug self. This promise is seasoned with present freeways of angels with messages travelling up and down in radiant streams as well as by an absolutely attractive spirit illuminating the whole material world.
The world I lived in resembling a fundamental Islamic sect created resonances through language and ritual with a timeless infinite thing. An unknowable thing that cannot be depicted. But when that touches the self it makes it part of that. You submit to the infinite and join it.
Some of these religions parallel political narratives in which the self can be absolutely certain. Certain of its place, it leadership and its analysis. All of this is certainty in relationship to opposition to the other. The only one in politics this atmosphere doesn’t affect is the leaders themselves.
Which brings us to art. Here the self and soul are educated to see things illuminated or darkened with delight or horror. So cartoons.
This cartoon event was that and also an application of those mobilising politics organised by underground religious issue groups. There was an internationalising faction of Dutch imams travelling around and dining on their issues involving the famous movie. There were the Moslem Brotherhood clone groups in various countries getting voters and even poor Fatah trying to win back support through circus. Here in London the conservative Moslem wing of the labour party and MI5 used it to hijack support from the British pseudo fun-dementedism manufactured by the Blairite press as a justification for enforced globalisation as a poodle of Bushism.
But let us step back for a moment to consider the religious projection and experience of the self and soul. Or more crudely what is the religious high. This is different with different prisms.
I have been embedded in a few religions cultures in a few places. A religion resembling Hinduism seemed in one place to be educating the soul to feel an engagement with a cosmic story, a story endlessly running with fabulous characters, ones you could know and love yet promised at the same time a divine detachment from all anxiety and pain from self so the creation was enjoyed purely without feeling.
A traditional Christian religion, close to Coptic but which is more flexible on doctrine, allowing for greater mysticism for example, promised imminent redemption and love as well as supreme authoritarian forgiveness of the crappy but smug self. This promise is seasoned with present freeways of angels with messages travelling up and down in radiant streams as well as by an absolutely attractive spirit illuminating the whole material world.
The world I lived in resembling a fundamental Islamic sect created resonances through language and ritual with a timeless infinite thing. An unknowable thing that cannot be depicted. But when that touches the self it makes it part of that. You submit to the infinite and join it.
Some of these religions parallel political narratives in which the self can be absolutely certain. Certain of its place, it leadership and its analysis. All of this is certainty in relationship to opposition to the other. The only one in politics this atmosphere doesn’t affect is the leaders themselves.
Which brings us to art. Here the self and soul are educated to see things illuminated or darkened with delight or horror. So cartoons.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
information
They talk about God in
Assiut and themselves. Talk
talk. There is no Cairo.
They are cruel and eat babies
(that was the old kingdom though)
I am from much further south.
(appears in 'One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back', published by Blue Orange)
Assiut and themselves. Talk
talk. There is no Cairo.
They are cruel and eat babies
(that was the old kingdom though)
I am from much further south.
(appears in 'One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back', published by Blue Orange)
Saturday, February 25, 2006
eu nu sunt -- I am not
Eu nu sunt Trotsky.
De fapt îl urăsc.
Mi-a plăcut că a murit aşa
chiar idea lui.
Eram un profesor
ce învăţam copilaşii cum să scrie
o propoziţie atunci cănd o parte din pisica mea
era ţintuită in uşă,
Deci, hei, de nu? De fapt
ce înseamna lumea modernă?
Pro tennis, un fandosit poet milionar
o lesbiană nebună – am trăit!!
Comunismul modern a căştigat.
Nebunie! Nebunie! Nebunie?
Am trăit şi m-am convins.
Suntem calzi, avem o viziune bună!
Şi un miros super fin.
Prune şi friptură înnăbuşită
Şi dacă cineva intervine îi vom prăji.
Am un million
şi am trăit ca un miliardar
şi tu
eşti stupid.
Prune, carne şi portocale cu paprika şi usturoi
Multă ceapă tocată.
(Translated into Romanian by Ms. Annie Nadia Lungu. Poems appear in 'One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back', published by Blue Orange.)
De fapt îl urăsc.
Mi-a plăcut că a murit aşa
chiar idea lui.
Eram un profesor
ce învăţam copilaşii cum să scrie
o propoziţie atunci cănd o parte din pisica mea
era ţintuită in uşă,
Deci, hei, de nu? De fapt
ce înseamna lumea modernă?
Pro tennis, un fandosit poet milionar
o lesbiană nebună – am trăit!!
Comunismul modern a căştigat.
Nebunie! Nebunie! Nebunie?
Am trăit şi m-am convins.
Suntem calzi, avem o viziune bună!
Şi un miros super fin.
Prune şi friptură înnăbuşită
Şi dacă cineva intervine îi vom prăji.
Am un million
şi am trăit ca un miliardar
şi tu
eşti stupid.
Prune, carne şi portocale cu paprika şi usturoi
Multă ceapă tocată.
(Translated into Romanian by Ms. Annie Nadia Lungu. Poems appear in 'One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back', published by Blue Orange.)
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
blog of revelations X
(more recovered proverbs from Baba Bektashi)
The good natured bring out the worst in people.
Saints attract monsters.
Death's assistants are friends and family. Life is assisted by strangers.
The humble sinner says 'I am you, brother.' The brother says, 'You crook.'
The devil's second curse: 'May you see yourself in another's mirror.'
The good natured bring out the worst in people.
Saints attract monsters.
Death's assistants are friends and family. Life is assisted by strangers.
The humble sinner says 'I am you, brother.' The brother says, 'You crook.'
The devil's second curse: 'May you see yourself in another's mirror.'
backchannel post
Dear Blue Orange,
I have followed the site a while. I have noticed that the archives are going backward in time and the new postings are done in advance. I also noticed that there is a thematic unity and even tight narrative structure from the first posting to the last and that it can be read both ways beginning to end and end to beginning and that it also can be read from the middle which keeps shifting. Is this an authentic blog?
I have followed the site a while. I have noticed that the archives are going backward in time and the new postings are done in advance. I also noticed that there is a thematic unity and even tight narrative structure from the first posting to the last and that it can be read both ways beginning to end and end to beginning and that it also can be read from the middle which keeps shifting. Is this an authentic blog?
Sunday, February 19, 2006
announcement of authenticity
Dear reader/surfer.
On reaching 1 000 hits.
Not only are the hits recorded on this blog genuine, but because of the real lives of the real readership where they are each hit may record several people looking at the screen at once or coming back to it a lot in the same session. Real people in strange places. The idea is not to atomize or inflate. Get that fox/google/Macmillan/you udder guys.
On reaching 1 000 hits.
Not only are the hits recorded on this blog genuine, but because of the real lives of the real readership where they are each hit may record several people looking at the screen at once or coming back to it a lot in the same session. Real people in strange places. The idea is not to atomize or inflate. Get that fox/google/Macmillan/you udder guys.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
four games for poets
1. Poetic Whispers/Selected Works
Start a blog. Find a poem by a living poet who also has a blog and select it. Put it on your blog. Ask that poet to select someone else's and put it on his but only if he will select someone else's and keep the chain going. Link the blogs. The selected poems make an expanding book which can be analysed by blocked academics to find the real state of poetry.
2. Ultimatum
A game especially interesting for critics and observers of Popular Culture. Can be played with above.
This is a variation on economic gaming theory which will model the degree of elitism, corruption and denial of access involved in hierarchies of poets and academics chained to the wheel of diminishing grants, occupation of chairs by cronies and so on where a thousand poets fight over every three available footnotes like rats in a sack over shit. This is where short term memory of friendship and comradeship is so dysfunctional as not to take them back to the beginning of their own sentences -- all this while the consciousness of the nation rots.
Anyway. Form two teams of poets. Those published a lot and those who aren't. The first is team x, the second is team 'why'.
Accumulate enough money (called 'GrantCant') so everyone in x can have $20 (or pieces of silver). Design a book so that everyone in x has two publishing spots (called 'Patron Places') to decide on as to who will fill them. The book can be called 'Critical Community'. Tell each person in team 'why' they can award one 'GrantCant' and one 'Patron Place' to a person in team x. That person can share them or not. Then watch what happens. Can be played at the same time as below. If this game took place with Ugandan poets they would share the silver and the places.
3. Prismers of Parochialism
Find someone around who speaks say arabic or farsi, maybe welsh gaelic or mandarin. Or write to someone who does.
Then, if you don't know anything about that language look it up. See how it goes.What it does. It may even be something like Nigerian English.
After that, find a poem or a something you did that you think might sound good in that language as it is described as being like and which might become animated with that cultural charge ( maybe one yours doesn't have, like national weeping). Get it translated and try it out on the person you have picked. Or get the person you have picked to do it. I found that didactic things come out very lyrical in arabic when translated by Palestinians, or so I'm told. Imagistic things in mandarin of mine are minimalist.
But they are coherent. I was afraid to try Polish but I'm doing a fat chapbook in Albanian. That'll show them. Anyway, after that get a poem back. Change it around. The one you get back is their choice. Don't push for poems about the war. And so on.
There you go, the beginning of world peace. Reverse Babylon. If the other guy wants and needs and if you are linguistically dysfunctional help them with one in English (one thing I found out doing this is that I translate ok into American, better than in Oakville Ontario. Except in West Virginia.)
This game can be played alone or as part of
POETS without BOUNDARIES projects.
These projects are designed to help capacity building of groups of writers in developing countries so that they have their own support organisations to promote access and copyright right and freedom of speech and so on. They do income exchange, joint work, events in-country. The traditional epic writers of West Africa for example or the poor guys who used to be corralled in Stalinist associations but now have nothing. Ask me if you are interested. I have the project description and grant application.
4. The rules and objectives of game four can be found in the Blue Orange novel called The Borderline: Casebook Translations.
Start a blog. Find a poem by a living poet who also has a blog and select it. Put it on your blog. Ask that poet to select someone else's and put it on his but only if he will select someone else's and keep the chain going. Link the blogs. The selected poems make an expanding book which can be analysed by blocked academics to find the real state of poetry.
2. Ultimatum
A game especially interesting for critics and observers of Popular Culture. Can be played with above.
This is a variation on economic gaming theory which will model the degree of elitism, corruption and denial of access involved in hierarchies of poets and academics chained to the wheel of diminishing grants, occupation of chairs by cronies and so on where a thousand poets fight over every three available footnotes like rats in a sack over shit. This is where short term memory of friendship and comradeship is so dysfunctional as not to take them back to the beginning of their own sentences -- all this while the consciousness of the nation rots.
Anyway. Form two teams of poets. Those published a lot and those who aren't. The first is team x, the second is team 'why'.
Accumulate enough money (called 'GrantCant') so everyone in x can have $20 (or pieces of silver). Design a book so that everyone in x has two publishing spots (called 'Patron Places') to decide on as to who will fill them. The book can be called 'Critical Community'. Tell each person in team 'why' they can award one 'GrantCant' and one 'Patron Place' to a person in team x. That person can share them or not. Then watch what happens. Can be played at the same time as below. If this game took place with Ugandan poets they would share the silver and the places.
3. Prismers of Parochialism
Find someone around who speaks say arabic or farsi, maybe welsh gaelic or mandarin. Or write to someone who does.
Then, if you don't know anything about that language look it up. See how it goes.What it does. It may even be something like Nigerian English.
After that, find a poem or a something you did that you think might sound good in that language as it is described as being like and which might become animated with that cultural charge ( maybe one yours doesn't have, like national weeping). Get it translated and try it out on the person you have picked. Or get the person you have picked to do it. I found that didactic things come out very lyrical in arabic when translated by Palestinians, or so I'm told. Imagistic things in mandarin of mine are minimalist.
But they are coherent. I was afraid to try Polish but I'm doing a fat chapbook in Albanian. That'll show them. Anyway, after that get a poem back. Change it around. The one you get back is their choice. Don't push for poems about the war. And so on.
There you go, the beginning of world peace. Reverse Babylon. If the other guy wants and needs and if you are linguistically dysfunctional help them with one in English (one thing I found out doing this is that I translate ok into American, better than in Oakville Ontario. Except in West Virginia.)
This game can be played alone or as part of
POETS without BOUNDARIES projects.
These projects are designed to help capacity building of groups of writers in developing countries so that they have their own support organisations to promote access and copyright right and freedom of speech and so on. They do income exchange, joint work, events in-country. The traditional epic writers of West Africa for example or the poor guys who used to be corralled in Stalinist associations but now have nothing. Ask me if you are interested. I have the project description and grant application.
4. The rules and objectives of game four can be found in the Blue Orange novel called The Borderline: Casebook Translations.
blog of revaluations IX
(from Baktashi essay on self)
Of Apostles
Only Judas
Understood
Prophecy, value
Acting well
And redemption.
Of Apostles
Only Judas
Understood
Prophecy, value
Acting well
And redemption.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
blog of revelations VIII
( recovered from the front lines)
I have described you Hank as a ‘textist’. You are found out.
So now since you have been outcloseted, let me elaborate.
Your blog is obviously an intertext. It is a space where different imaginations of the present blend and contend. It is where identities tell of their actions and the resulting formations tell of their thoughts.
But where is this intertext located? It is located in the decline of America.
The declines of places are characterised by the attempts at official generation of ever more grandiose myths to recapture the past. Also with ever more bizarre behaviour. America seems to be in a badstink decline, worse and of less weight than Rome but with greater potential for bloodshed. This, despite the fact that America's whole cycle is not even one hundredth the time cycle of Rome although it includes it. And its imaginative territory is not as wide as and no deeper than Mickey Mouse in his fading celluloid grave.
There is some hope however that a constellation of new compact national imaginations and one or two more efficient empires will replace America like happened with Rome. I have called for America's dissolution in order to save it. I have looked forward to the Principality of Buffalo and the Spiritual Republic of California. These could be more bizarre than boring and less exploitative.
Perhaps like with Venice's imperial fall the decline from glory (as middlemen of crusades, liquidator of the children's crusade, drug dealers) may yet be characterised by a much later flowering of municipal arts and releasing of frozen mythic and classic imaginations into psychological insight, intrigue and mannerist fun. A kind of renaissance. A pre-terminal euphoria.
Like with Florence America's decline could result in more furious networking with incompetent and murderous rulers trying to justifythe domination of their phoney republic sleazy culture capital and furious marketing of the human spirit (by falsifying everything including those big lies by undeservedly placing the rulers themselves into an ordered deification of intellect while at the same time selling their people to the devil and to the French). This could be the next ending of history. Or like the Holy and apostolic church there could be an archiving of all sins and glories into catacombs of information too voluminous to be grasped and the conversion of all institutions into secret squirrel clubs of vile sinners, landlords and usurers conspiring and reconspiring to keep the truth game going. A clean slate eternally. Or is that already happening?
Your blog, Hank, represents at this moment of decline a tension expressed from the parochial in the midst of universal disintegration. It is voices and images from some different places and times. One Hundred and Fifty Mile House for example (how far is that from Horsefly?). From Vancouver (in the Canadian Imaginaire the opposite in the inter-text from Toronto). From Toronto, from the sixties, from exiles, from America and from BaAmerica. (Ba is the proto Bantu word to say something is culturally not. For example there is a notorious tribe in Nigeria reputed to be thieves named Chamba. The proper tribe next to them is called Bachamba. The Bachamba hosted the British District commissioner and regional government. The Chamba killed him.)
The present intertext however projects an opposition to the military and imperial dreamworld of continuous mystification, permanent and reoccurring reaction, compulsory public anxiety and constant and progressive training in docility. It is against normalcy of banality and constant surveillance which are the two main politics of the age.
What is the main identity of the age? Like the decline of America, it creates the story and plot of the individual in it through the alienation its official culture expresses for itself, the individual associated with it is in flight.
I know of some such individuals. They wouldn't like your blog. They sought to be giants by imagining a world in which all the things they had fled from were thought out of existence. The family, the locality, the duty (usually to confront responsibility and death), race, religion and so on. One by one flight. Just as America flees reality with its official fantasy so paranoid, so shallow and so without theory and culture, they had fled from nationalities so called for a new nation, had fled from their own cowardice and so called for a cataclysm that would never take place in which they were martyrs, had fled from their own naughty infantilism and so called for purity. One has written `the greatest event of 1969 was the Saskatchewan Student conference’ saying that the stand taken there would lead to the changing of the world. Look up 1969. Therewere other things happening as well. But these individuals attract as America attracts. They attract their own authors who wish to fill the void they occupy with snappy little myths, reworkings of former texts, Rome, Venice, Mao. Tragedies into farces. Empires into Parishes. Another I knew, a terrorist, died in despair on the basis of apocalyptic ecological slogans that described actions which were later undertaken by municipal re-zoners. But enough of that.
Let us cite the Greeks. There was an official called the Theoros. This was the detached non-participatory witness to civic events. Then there was the Proxenia, the advocate in places where they were not from who was also a spy and reporter from the outside. Usually they were poets. They were both necessary in the midst of all the public chaos and contending imaginings of the governing drama for the formation of the objective, that is the momentary and quite concrete truth. Our group is both that.
It is not the voices of a world city or from too many airports. It is not the voice of acceleration, resistance or repulsion. It is an intertext of decline. Therefore exhilarating.
You can provide your own quotations to illustrate the passages above from the recent blog postings.
Or you could argue it is instead the voice of the Decentralised Intelligence Entity which like the CIA wishes to rework the public mind and fill the public eye. But in a different way.
Sincerely,
Corporal B.M McDonald
I have described you Hank as a ‘textist’. You are found out.
So now since you have been outcloseted, let me elaborate.
Your blog is obviously an intertext. It is a space where different imaginations of the present blend and contend. It is where identities tell of their actions and the resulting formations tell of their thoughts.
But where is this intertext located? It is located in the decline of America.
The declines of places are characterised by the attempts at official generation of ever more grandiose myths to recapture the past. Also with ever more bizarre behaviour. America seems to be in a badstink decline, worse and of less weight than Rome but with greater potential for bloodshed. This, despite the fact that America's whole cycle is not even one hundredth the time cycle of Rome although it includes it. And its imaginative territory is not as wide as and no deeper than Mickey Mouse in his fading celluloid grave.
There is some hope however that a constellation of new compact national imaginations and one or two more efficient empires will replace America like happened with Rome. I have called for America's dissolution in order to save it. I have looked forward to the Principality of Buffalo and the Spiritual Republic of California. These could be more bizarre than boring and less exploitative.
Perhaps like with Venice's imperial fall the decline from glory (as middlemen of crusades, liquidator of the children's crusade, drug dealers) may yet be characterised by a much later flowering of municipal arts and releasing of frozen mythic and classic imaginations into psychological insight, intrigue and mannerist fun. A kind of renaissance. A pre-terminal euphoria.
Like with Florence America's decline could result in more furious networking with incompetent and murderous rulers trying to justifythe domination of their phoney republic sleazy culture capital and furious marketing of the human spirit (by falsifying everything including those big lies by undeservedly placing the rulers themselves into an ordered deification of intellect while at the same time selling their people to the devil and to the French). This could be the next ending of history. Or like the Holy and apostolic church there could be an archiving of all sins and glories into catacombs of information too voluminous to be grasped and the conversion of all institutions into secret squirrel clubs of vile sinners, landlords and usurers conspiring and reconspiring to keep the truth game going. A clean slate eternally. Or is that already happening?
Your blog, Hank, represents at this moment of decline a tension expressed from the parochial in the midst of universal disintegration. It is voices and images from some different places and times. One Hundred and Fifty Mile House for example (how far is that from Horsefly?). From Vancouver (in the Canadian Imaginaire the opposite in the inter-text from Toronto). From Toronto, from the sixties, from exiles, from America and from BaAmerica. (Ba is the proto Bantu word to say something is culturally not. For example there is a notorious tribe in Nigeria reputed to be thieves named Chamba. The proper tribe next to them is called Bachamba. The Bachamba hosted the British District commissioner and regional government. The Chamba killed him.)
The present intertext however projects an opposition to the military and imperial dreamworld of continuous mystification, permanent and reoccurring reaction, compulsory public anxiety and constant and progressive training in docility. It is against normalcy of banality and constant surveillance which are the two main politics of the age.
What is the main identity of the age? Like the decline of America, it creates the story and plot of the individual in it through the alienation its official culture expresses for itself, the individual associated with it is in flight.
I know of some such individuals. They wouldn't like your blog. They sought to be giants by imagining a world in which all the things they had fled from were thought out of existence. The family, the locality, the duty (usually to confront responsibility and death), race, religion and so on. One by one flight. Just as America flees reality with its official fantasy so paranoid, so shallow and so without theory and culture, they had fled from nationalities so called for a new nation, had fled from their own cowardice and so called for a cataclysm that would never take place in which they were martyrs, had fled from their own naughty infantilism and so called for purity. One has written `the greatest event of 1969 was the Saskatchewan Student conference’ saying that the stand taken there would lead to the changing of the world. Look up 1969. Therewere other things happening as well. But these individuals attract as America attracts. They attract their own authors who wish to fill the void they occupy with snappy little myths, reworkings of former texts, Rome, Venice, Mao. Tragedies into farces. Empires into Parishes. Another I knew, a terrorist, died in despair on the basis of apocalyptic ecological slogans that described actions which were later undertaken by municipal re-zoners. But enough of that.
Let us cite the Greeks. There was an official called the Theoros. This was the detached non-participatory witness to civic events. Then there was the Proxenia, the advocate in places where they were not from who was also a spy and reporter from the outside. Usually they were poets. They were both necessary in the midst of all the public chaos and contending imaginings of the governing drama for the formation of the objective, that is the momentary and quite concrete truth. Our group is both that.
It is not the voices of a world city or from too many airports. It is not the voice of acceleration, resistance or repulsion. It is an intertext of decline. Therefore exhilarating.
You can provide your own quotations to illustrate the passages above from the recent blog postings.
Or you could argue it is instead the voice of the Decentralised Intelligence Entity which like the CIA wishes to rework the public mind and fill the public eye. But in a different way.
Sincerely,
Corporal B.M McDonald
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