Razor in Larilee's Bathtub

Ok, now I've done something as harrowing with Hart as almost losing Sevi at the Atlantic Antic parade.  Unforgivable negligence..

Weeds, the TV Show

Ok, so I've been hooked watching 2 seasons worth on DVD.  Only now I do see why, as the characters get stretched to suit the plot, I ultimately can't cozy about to TV.  Just an amusing rollercoaster ride; doesn't stay with you.

Braindead Megaphone

It's a great essay by George Saunders. The bit about the imagination
and war is uncannily similar to Wallace Stevens' "Prose Statement on
the Poetry of War". Either derived or just arrived at the same
conclusion.

help stop climate-wrecking in Bali

Hi,

I just signed an emergency petition trying to save the crucial climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia right now by telling the US, Canada and Japan to stop blocking an agreement. You can sign it here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/bali_emergency/98.php?cl_tf_sign=1

Almost all countries have agreed to cut rich country carbon emissions by 2020--which scientists say is crucial to stop catastrophic global warming, and will also help bring China and the developing world onboard. But with just 24 hours left in the conference, the US and its close allies Canada and Japan have rejected any mention of such cuts.

We can't let three governments hold the world hostage and block agreement on this desperate issue.

There's still 24 hours left to turn this around - click below to sign the petition - it will be delivered direct to summit delegates, through stunts and in media advertisements, so our voices will actually be heard. But we need a lot of us, fast, to join in if we're going to make a difference. Just click on the link to add your name:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/bali_emergency/98.php?cl_tf_sign=1

Thanks!

You are receiving this email because someone sent it to you via the "tell-a-friend" tool at Avaaz.org. Avaaz retains no information about individuals contacted through this tool. Avaaz will not send you further messages without your consent--although your friends could, of course, send you another message.

another thing i've needed to hear

that the creative process drives out fear

work of art as a living thing, just as much an organism as me or you

FINALLY I get some affirmation of this opinion I'd just about given up on! from Naomi Wolf's father in her book. The counter to so much that wears down and dispirits the beautiful. My crystalline anti-example in Aaron Sorkin, creator of the West Wing who's vocal about his characters being simple constructions that have no life off of the page. Realpolitik ,Kissinger, Iraq war death dealing, button pushing, mechanistic universe that has just about suffocated everything. Finally the antidote. I'd even sought it in grief. The sweetness that we resort to when a friend dies, all you can do is look to transform it, make it beautiful. the artist's project. though never proselytize it as such! remember, Wallace Stevens-- the poem must resist the intelligence ALMOST successfully. And of course his other guidance to me since I first read Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction 22 yrs ago - It Must Change, Be Abstract, Give Pleasure. So ringingly right that Stevens lives for me even in the contours of the land.. which brings me back full circle to the name of the project. man's intelligence is his soil. hence LOAM...

nostalgia for pasts not my own #1

so strong, such as that joni mitchell past, manhattan in the 70s upper east side, carefree, growing up, love and growth, young and with the opportunity to be smart and proud, people are well off but predatory enormous wealth has not encroached as it will in the next decades.

only too happy

is onlytoohappy.com registered?

Everyone has colds

No respect for Time

time get's no respect
suffers the slurs and complaints
of its equably passing
as it always has
it's a double insult
the failure to be marked
no gratitude for the constancy

time is not alive
you anthropomorphizing
troglodyte

any more than an edge
of your face against the air
is a little homunculus
scheming

inasmuch as your
intestines lathe
your poop
you are such a
sculptor

Guiliani vs. Hillary

I predict this will be the race, alas, and that Hillary will lose.

in retribution he said

a bad thing will befall you
one that cannot undone

The Climate Against Humanity

Is mine the last, or next to last, generation whose unquestioned
birthright was that Nature was always there for us to return to, in
the wake of human-centered activities, only to have to painfully
accede to this new reality, this daily loss of real beauty, of
possibility and sustenance? The summer will no longer be the lazy
time of ripening, but a time of scarcity and flight, of parching and
desolation. Evanescence of the kind we were used to was seasonal;
now, for all we know, it is permanent. We have begun to see the
vanishing, and ironically are so much less prepared than those now
being born into apocalypse as normalcy. They will grow up hopefully
with an attitude of survival appropriate to meet this crisis, not
torn by the aching sensibility of all that is being lost. 20 years
ago it was arguably speculation, 10 years ago it was undeniable fact;
only this year, this past 6 months really, has it dawned on the
average person. People who care feel powerless. Those who don't
care or who actively obstruct awakening to the crisis should be
branded criminals. What could rise to a higher crime, a crime
against humanity in the truest sense, than to obscure for others the
gravity of this climate crisis?

I keep being reminded for some odd reason of H.D.'s (Hilda
Doolittle's) "The Walls Do Not Fall", a poem (or part of a poem..) I
absolutely remember nothing of other than the message that the
alienation and disillusionment befalling mankind in the post-modern
era left women largely unscathed because the edifice was not of their
making. I don't know why this keeps coming back, except for maybe in
the sense that the coming generations in this era of devolving
climate stability similarly will have no business bemoaning a loss
they never knew.

I feel as though the lesson told so tellingly in Jared Diamond's
"Collapse", particularly about Easter Island's deforestation, needs
to be writ large. What kind of fiction was being put over on the
people who cut down the last trees on the island in the services of
these absurd statues, forever dooming them to an inability to fish
for food from boats in the waters off the coast? And how long was it
before the bereft people rose up against the chiefs who had sponsored
the destruction, began cannibalizing eachother and toppling the
statues? At what point in this story are we today, as 500,000 flee
their homes from wildfires in California, as the crops in Georgia
turn to dust, and more quaintly, as the brooks that powered the
dreams of my young life in the Adirondacks run dry..

flinching and stinting

Flinching honesty
Stinting courage
How about some.

Dregs Myth

That he sought the bottom
From on high
Disciplined and driven
As a feather

Sevi's independent reading

Sevi read her schoolbook for 20 or so minutes this evening on the john.  She even kept reading it while I brushed her teeth.  We said she was starting to resemble the absent-minded professor.  (She also spent 10 minutes before bedtime distractedly looking for her book baggy.  Found finally during last pee lodged in the window guard beside the toilet.

Hart wears the pants

For the first time Hart put on a pair of pants himself today, over
his diaper. It was near bedtime and he became fascinated, trying to
put another pair over that one, then heading to the chest of drawers
for more.

Hart's tantrums

Hart's got very imperious around dinnertime when things aren't going
his way. Fond of pushing things away, etc, then turning very impish
and grabbing Sevi's hair while she was finishing her homework project
(leaves and seeds glued to paper) with mama. Sally the therapist
says right at the point where you're about to go crazy they move out
of it. Rebecca said "I'm already crazy."

Sevi - All God's Critters

Took Sevi to choir today walking down the street, brisk fall day
(finally) with her sheet music in hand as she sang and read
"All God's critters got a place in the choir, some sing low and some
sing higher, some sing out loud on the telephone wire, and some just
clap their hands, or paws, or anything they got now..."

Name Tag

tame nag

US Ally

usually

Home Movies

the family watched home movies to stave off the change that was
coming over them, bone protruding, skin greasing up. they were
splitting like overripe fruit and the neat and tidy remained only on
8mm.

Hart says my name

After the bath tonight Hart turned to me and said "You're K***
B***". This cracked him up, so he kept repeating it..

inheriting the impulse to brood

spawn the cavalcade of regrets at every turn

Nostalgia for the Eternal - Adks

Hard to watch everything failing, trees susceptible, leaves eaten, uprooted. Wishing like mad for rain, white-knuckled over the drying up of brooks. I watch a puddle evaporate and want back the springy rich green, rich black muck of just 25 years ago. It's a keening hard sorrow, to want back the vitality the woods gave me, and instead to witness this swift stress and destruction. The days are harsh hot and alien, inviting plagues of japanese beatles and who knows what all else. Many, like the frog brought to boil in the pot, simply don't notice. Why do I?

Thomas Hardy's Darkling Thrush

why is it this poem always makes me think of that one day I was
hunting, or was it just walking, through the graphite mines in
Chester Springs? Was it New Year's Day? Why do I think of that
overcast crisp, grey hopeful unresolved feeling, crunching something
underfoot, not know what this place was about?

the fish stick statistic

fascistic

exegesis of the tree

what would a tree sound like admiring a human?

feeling oxymorose

brooding in a contrary kind of way.

great work

with great work, you don't envy the creator, you envy what they made.

Movie: Match Point

Were it anyone other than Woody Allen you'd be mildly impressed. But
the fact is, these characters are wooden and merely instrumental to a
bloodless story. You know he's been in command of the real
incandesence of life as a filmmaker, but here is threadbare and
functional. Revisiting Crimes and Misdemeanors in certain ways with
more rigor, but mostly with less involvement. It's a Henry Kissinger-
esque realpolitik approach to story--to use an outlandish
metaphor...atoms impacting atoms, a certain serviceable mimicry of
life emerging from a playbook on strategy. The twist about the ring
and bannister analogous to the net ball was very clever, though.

Comedy Sketch idea - The Floss Bar

7/7/7

On this day 30 years ago, we went to Ocean City NJ for the day. I
remember getting my beach ticket (a fairly new development, that you
needed to pay to go on the beach) and looking at the date 7/7/77. 30
years later, with Rebecca, Sevi & Hart we went to the Imagination
Playground in Prospect Park and saw a brief production of he Pyramus
& Thisbe part of Midsummer Night's Dream. We met Julia and Brisa
there. Then we went to the Double D swimming pool. Back now, Hart's
napping, Sevi's reading "Henry & Mudge" with Rebecca.

A different kind of person

is emerging in the coming generation, pragmatic, to meet the crisis.

No water fountain at Fairway Red Hook, Brooklyn

It's all splendid, yes, but if you're thirsty and have no money, you
parch...
The bottled water aisle has a a greater selection than anywhere I
have ever seen--it goes on for about 20 yards.
This is the ownership society for you.

a refrain

there's no money for that
and it's getting hotter.

Tears have Telomeres

and you get to the end of them,
dogs and cats got your showered grief
now hardpan for people

Belief as Habit

you believe something long enough & it becomes very hard to belief in
something else. this is why people are as fundamentalist about
terminal mortality as they are about the afterlife. you give up the
fight, succumb to the brain you've fashioned for yourself, because
the thought of undoing all that work just makes you tired...zeal is
easier; the magnetic furrows are there, ready to be exploited...

Acting the Result

is bad acting. So too is striving to orchestrate the world to cozen
to the leaders vs. followers model. As if the ruling class is not
the result of an organic process of cream rising to the top, but that
such a "result" must be engineered. There's some intellectual
slippage when adherents of so-called biological determinism feel that
they must take the determinations into their own hands and fashion
the world that way. The world is self-fashioning with respect to
motivated and skilled people vs. those who are not. That's perhaps
what conservatism used to stand for; the neoconservative new world
order is about imposition of the imposition of castes conducive to
corporate hegemony.

Our Rich Activity

a family trait - relishing in the vivid thoughts of how others are
bereft at our absence. savoring it in our minds like a shrinking
lozenge.

Joe Schmo

His real name. The constant shock of contact and humiliation

Suiting up the Baby

one dressed as bellhop, one in leisureware - discuss human nature and
its bearing on where people end up, and where they end up regardless
of human nature..

Wasted Staple

You are the staple shot and crimped
First out of the stapler and hapless
As sperm on a rug or a
Bug on the windshield.
The sleek defile of your followers watches you go.
Piercing nothing you fold your arms.

PxxM

Say what you want about X

He's always been a good X to those X

Movie: Children of Men

This movie affected me much more than I would have thought it would. It seemed to portray a future not only plausible, but that I've for some time even dreaded is likely. The world splitting between organized tyranny and a counter-ideology opposed to it but ultimately offering up violence as its first principle and therefore chaos, hence playing further into the hands of the tyranny, and so the dance continues as conditions of life on Earth grow more appalling. Here the countering ideologues (the terrorists as labelled by the State) are called "the Fishes", the utopian alternative toward which the protagonists caught in the middle move (with the baby and hope for the future) is bobbing in a boat out at sea, "The Human Project" Its vision of a wrecked future hit me in a way that Steven Spielberg's "A.I." did, which I viewed when particularly vulnerable after Undine died. That film was largely generic and its ending was a laughable soporific, but something about the frenzied degeneration of civilization depicted there seemed real. Here, in Children of Men, it was much more precise. It may be that it felt so compelling also because of the strong thriller pace of the narrative, which nonetheless took time with details that sort of sear into your awareness--the little cats clawing on Faron's leg in the meeting with the terrorists, for example; his never having the right shoes, stepping on sharp objects. Michael Caine's character had something ineffably compelling about him, and that was before I subsequently learned that he was basically doing John Lennon in his 70s (had he lived, and been marginalized, and perhaps never so famous, and of course this character was a political cartoonist). The scene where the Caine's character (Jasper?) was shot, covered in extreme long-shot POV, "pull my finger!" was one of the most moving I can remember in movies. I'm sure they shot it close-up, and that Caine was probably disappointed that didn't make the cut, but it was surely the right decision.

Cuaron also did a documentary that appears on the DVD about all the issues conspiring to cook up such a future. Again, I was close to turning it off, but it grew on me, for its breadth of opinions from people I'd never heard of, speaking Polish, Italian, Spanish, alongside James Lovelock and an always a bit pat Naomi Klein (very smart, but maybe a bit of a adventure-tourism journalist.) The point that stuck, and one relevant to the feature, was the issue of human rearing, our vulnerability and dependence on others until at least age 6 or 7, and how this ought to teach us that the obligation of care for the weaker is intrinsic to civilization. So there's a tug between independence and cooperation. Coincides with my thinking that a lot of these neocons in charge of things were probably very unhappy neglected children who burn with a kind of vengeance, none so genteelly transmuted into claims for global domination. They don't "play" well and never did.

Eating

We all descend from slime molds
Through whom life got started

Sparks exchanged

Cooperation ensued

So Eating is hopping from one stone to another

Gracefully fording

Being ourselves while we

Trade this for that

As long as we can before

The eventual miss

And trundle back into the current

Short Film Idea: Life w/o Vowels

or Lf w/ vwls

Hart's goatee

Hart took a spill on the sidewalk yesterday and grazed his chin but
good. A big scab there now that makes him look like a beatnik with
goatee. Especially when downy fuzz from his sweater embedded in the
wound and hardened there. Tonight at 2 Boots some tomato sauce from
his ravioli got mixed up in it too--a greasy twinkle of a scab--a
mixed media work in progress.

The Inner Friend

He was a gregarious nature and therefore needed to cultivate "inner"
friends, people who were socially maladroit and withdrawn. This
helped give him balance. The "inner" friend himself waited for the
chance to be "inner" with his gregarious friend. He knew that was
his role, to be the opposite of superficial, to trawl deep in thought
and contemplation. Of course the pose was a superficial as any.

The Nasty Couple & Their Friend

The nasty couple had a friend who seemed not to notice their
nastiness. They thought she was precious, the only one who
understood them. She of course did notice their nastiness, but,
saint that she was, wanted to help them out of their nastitude.

If you want to make an omelette

you've to break some egos

My Metaphysics at Last

It curls a certain way
Hews to humidity
And my belly du jour.
But just look as the earth and air
Urge on the trees' reaching
And the waters' lenticular slipping lives
And ply these forms ever repeating
Like for like
As if something were being rehearsed.

This place is confecting minds in the end.
It's a place that does that.
No reason given, none ventured
But I am beginning to wonder, say,
About whether I
Am not the final Santa obsolescing
And oh how much wiser to slip free
And converge to the fold of whatever
Ever has in mind.

The urge to make beautiful

Isn't that the response, to even the worst things, especially great
loss? How can I make this beautiful... The problem comes when the
making beautiful is somehow injurious. But isn't that just
invitation to do it somehow better? Not to rail against the whole
project of making beautiful anymore than it would be right to outlaw
breathing air. Which after all worsens global warming! It's a baby
and bathwater thing.

The literary release

You see this in Bellow after "Dangling Man" with Augie March. Ceding
the excruciating amount of thought and control--basically
"knowingness" for the liberating confession of not knowing, not
HAVING to know. It's a marvelous empowering thing. It opens your
eyes, like music. Since when does music have to know a damn thing...

Art du Jour

for those without the consolation of thinking there is recompense for
the here and now built-in, there is art. each rising sun calls for
its renewal before dimming. to have been something different, to have
caught us offguard and captivated, suspended us over the gulf. how
much easier if the infinite life were a fact. and who's to prove it
isn't. where is the burden of that proof anyway. well art even has
an answer for that.

Apologies for Ectasy

He apologized for his loves.
"I ran around crazy with sharp sticks
I drove a thing nobody should have
given me keys to. I slobbered on my friends
without a napkin or a care. I'm so very sorry."
And he relapsed into being a bystander of
those prudent in love.

injury

think about injury as the basis for not only anger, but evil in
general. or maybe anger simply equals evil. but then there's the
kind of psychotic evil that arises out of desire... anyway, this
explains the seeming ineradicability of evil; injuries abound, often
through the fault of no one, simply accidents, physics, mortality. a
renewable resource unfortunately.

paean to the self-appointed author of the great american novel

I wanted to soar, shine, burnished by utterance
Instead I got dirty and lost my frickin sense of direction

Book: "Hunger" by Sharman Apt Russell

Great on the physiology of hunger, its spiritual history, and on the
state of famine in the world. Works up to the Irish famine at the
very end. Written competently, not beautifully. Xmas present from
Mark & Skart.

Mortality to Nature

Something about the state of things now bringing a sort of mortality to nature as we know it by the disruption of natural systems. Nature used to be our place of refuge, of learning cyclicality and finding a needed corollary of the resilience we need spiritually. I got this strongly as a 13 year-old coming to the Adirondacks, and I've been frantic for several years now to see that natural identity under threat here, dissipating. Stresses tell in the trees, lake levels etc. Which brings me to the second point to think about, which is the possible transformation of the relationship to nature from one of piety to something of necessity other. Nature stumbles, systems suffer destruction; an active hand is needed, a perception of fragility to the environment that is occasion for our caring. It's almost as if the province heretofore occupied by stargazing sci-fi enthusiasts must welcome in the disaffected nature lovers. What does simple reverence become when it's object is evaporating and a larger than eco-historical perspective is called for? The unfairness, after all, of it having taken so long for humans to pull away from the Ptolemaic idea, the Protagorean idea, the man-centered idea to appreciate that we aren't the measure of all things, only to now have to grapple with grave problems that should rightly be seen as having been created by us, affecting everything negatively; yes we are the central problem to be solved now, it's radiating outward from us! The infuriating global warming skeptics trade on this recognition so counter-intuitive to enlightened principles, and, idiot charlatans that they are, actually continue to get way with it in many quarters... (after midnight on new year's 2006-07)