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20 Oct 2009 07:06
Gathering LeavesHugh Bolton Jonesb. Oct. 20, 1848
October 20, 2009
The Slop Barrel: Slices of the Paideuma for All Sentient Beings Philip Whalen
III By standing on the rim of the slop barrel We could look right into the bird's nest. Thelma, too little, insisted on seeing We boosted her up and over the edge Head first among the slops in her best Sunday dress Now let's regret things for a while That you can't read music That I never learned Classical languages That we never grew up, never learned to behave But devoted ourselves to magic:
Creature, you are a cow Come when I call you and be milked. Creature, you are a lion. Be so kind As to eat something other than my cow or me. Object, you are a tree, to go or stay At my bidding... Or more simply still, tree, you are lumber Top-grade Douglas fir At so many bucks per thousand board-feet A given amount of credit in the bank So that beyond a certain number of trees Or volume of credit you don't have to know or see Nothing
Nevertheless we look And seeing, love. From loving we learn And knowingly choose: Greasy wisdom is better than clothes. I mean i love those trees And the printing that goes on them A forest of words and music You do the translations, I can sing.
Philip Whalenb. Oct. 20, 1923
The collected poems of Philip Whalen edited by Michael RothenbergThe real tension, I think, is between official poetry, the kind that we're taught in school and is kept in libraries, and the kind we really believe in - what we are writing and what our friends write. The same thing holds for meditation: what we discover for ourselves and learn. At some point you can forget it and go off and make a pot of spaghetti. We used to do go down to Muir Beach years ago to gather mussels off the rocks. We'd build a bonfire, put seaweed on the fire to steam the mussels. We'd eat them, then jump up and down in the waves and have fun. That was enough. Probably enough. Or too much. Oh, I guess Blake said it, "Enough, or too much." That's all. - Philip Whalen, About Writing and Meditation
Silence: Lectures and Writings John Cageavailable via aaaarg
Foreword
For over twenty years I have been writing articles and giving lectures. Many of them have been unusual in form-this is especially true of the lectures- because I have employed in them means of composing analogous to my composing means in the Seld of music. My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, conceivably, pennit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it. 'Ibis means that, being as I am engaged in a variety of activities, I attempt to introduce into each one of them aspects conventionally limited to one or more of the others.
So it was that I gave about 1949 my Lecture on Nothing at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street in New York City (the artists' club started by Robert Motberwell, which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia, Bill de Kooning, et al.). 'Ibis Lecture on Nothing was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions (Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc.). One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, "If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep." Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute." She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. 'Ibis was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.
departureThe Strain of InheritanceRyan McLennanJoshua Liner Galleryriley dog
Raising up dead horses Joe Bageant
No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.
The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.
The national money shamans have danced around the carcass of our dead horse economy, chanted the recovery chant and burned fiat currency like Indian sage, enshrouding the carcass in the sacred smoke of burning cash. And indeed, they have managed to prop up the carcass to appear life-like from a distance, if you squint through the smoke just right. But it still stinks here from the inside. Clearly at some point we must find a new horse to ride, and sure as god made little green apples one is broaching the horizon. And it looks exactly like the old horse.(....)
Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.
Meanwhile we may all feel free to row ourselves to hell in the same hand basket. Except of course the elites, the top five percent or so among us. But 95 percent is close enough to be called democratic, so what the hell. The trivialized media, having internalized the system's values, will continue to act as rowing captain calling out the strokes.
GateNguyen TrungVietnamese ArtistsThavibu GalleryContemporary Art from Thailand, Vietnam and Burma
REACH INMichael McClureb. October 20, 1932 THE NUMBERS ARE ALL WRONG, the coo and gurgle of the baby is the equation's truth. There are no directions, no colors, no sights, no tastes, no sounds, except in the shape of building the soul, or in mating, or in dodging the predator. The naked, tiny, pink bird wiggling next to the green eggs in the nest is aliving feast set to dine on the cosmos and to sip meat and nectar from the mother's beak. No matter how far inwards I imagine the reaching of matter, (till as Ouroboros it swallows the waves of its tail), there will still be the snail sleeping locked in its shell on the branch and the smiling cat on the gravel under a tree.
Lazaretto riverfront photo - David Barnes
In the early twenty-first century, most immigrants and foreign visitors arrive in the City of Brotherly Love through the Philadelphia International Airport, along the Delaware River at the city’s southern edge. Two hundred years ago, new arrivals from overseas “landed” at nearly the same spot: just a mile west of where the airport now stands, to be exact, in Essington, Tinicum Township. The gateway to Philadelphia for the first century of our nation’s existence was the Lazaretto quarantine station and hospital, where all arriving ships, passengers, and cargo were inspected and quarantined if necessary. (The name “Lazaretto” derives from St. Lazarus, patron saint of lepers. Maritime quarantine stations known as lazarettos were established in European port cities beginning in the late 14th and early 15th centuries.) The Lazaretto stands today as a forgotten monument to a hidden history. Recovering the history and viewing it through the prism of the site itself reveals a hitherto little-known facet of life in a nineteenth-century American seaport city.
On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes Geoff Manaugh BLDGBLOGEdible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine;
also
The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen
thanks RobertVowells Arthur Rimbaud b. Oct. 20, 1854 A Black, E white, I red, O blue, U green: vowels, I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins: A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies Which buzz around cruel smells, gulfs of shadow E, whiteness of vapors and of tents, Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley; I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips In anger or in the raptures of penitence; U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas, The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads; O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds, Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels: - O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes.
original french plus Patti Smith's review of Graham Robb's Rimbaudhere
Wittgenstein GravestonePhotograph © Andrew Dunn
"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly."Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.54
The object of the language game is to keep the world going. - Tom Clark, In the World (Wittgenstein)
Sourdough Mountain Lookout Philip Whalen
BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence." (And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master Pointed out, had been tediously complex ever since.) There was a bird Lived in an egg And by ingenious chemistry Wrought molecules of albumen To beak and eye Gizzard and craw Feather and claw My grandmother said: "Look at them poor bed- raggled pigeons!" And the sign in McAlister Street:
"IF YOU CAN'T COME IN SMILE AS YOU GO BY LOVE THE BUTCHER
I destroy myself, the universe (an egg) And time—to get an answer: There are a smiler, a sleeper and a dancer We repeat the conversation in the glittering dark Floating beside the sleeper. The child remarks, "You knew it all the time." I: "I keep forgetting that the smiler is Sleeping; the sleeper, dancing." From Sauk Lookout two years before Some of the view was down the Skagit To Puget Sound: From above the lower ranges, Deep in the forest—lighthouses on clear nights. This year's rock is a spur from the main range Cuts the valley in two and is broken By the river; Ross Dam repairs the break, Makes trolley buses run Through the streets of dim Seattle far away. I'm surrounded by mountains here A circle of 108 beads, originally seeds of ficus religiosa Bo-Tree A circle, continuous, one odd bead Larger than the rest and bearing A tassel (hair-tuft) (the man who sat under the tree) In the center of the circle, a void, an empty figure containing All that's multiplied; Each bead a repetition, a world Of ignorance and sleep. Today is the day the goose gets cooked Day of liberation for the crumbling flower Knobcone pinecone in the flames Brandy in the sun Which, as I said, will disappear Anyway it'll be invisible soon Exchanging places with stars now in my head To be growing rice in China through the night. Magnetic storms across the solar plains Make Aurora Borealis shimmy bright Beyond the mountains to the north. Closing the lookout in the morning Thick ice on the shutters Coyote almost whistling on a nearby ridge The mountain is THERE (between two lakes) I brought back a piece of its rock Heavy dark-honey color With a seam of crystal, some of the quartz Stained by its matrix Practically indestructible A shift from opacity to brilliance (The Zenbos say, "Lightening-flash & flint-spark") Like the mountains where it was made What we see of the world is the mind's Invention and the mind Though stained by it, becoming Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies— Can shift instantly A dirty bird in a square time Gone Gone REALLY gone Into the cool O MAMA! Like they say, "Four times up, Three times down." I'm still on the mountain.
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