Leaves

Non-seasonal growth,
including the ludic
branches that clutch
the canopy's light breeze--
no beach so fierce!
Or on top
of the cobblestones
the picture
of a beach, after
naming the streets
for the days of the week
we did trees, birds
Manitoba college towns
and then ran out so
started right in
on the spawn of
the local bauxite
aristocracy, so its
possible to awake
with a familiar name
pressed into your cheek--
something to fool
the eloi archaeologists!
presuming they can cut
through the giant hedge
of modified alder
that threatens Edwardian
apocalypse to these
pretty but blandly
peopled avenues.


 

Covered Window


The skin of it puckers
and pools in lenses
bleached at the knots

a kind of drapery I guess
though oxidised
it might be the sun

but not real broke
not theatrical sugar broke
like that bottle trick

from tv, trinkle
of loops recorded
by guys long dead--

late for work
heads wrapped
in vinegar paper,

copping some attitude
with the bitches
in the mailroom, givin' it

the old watercooler
one-two--"I done
it for the in-surance"--

Well wave goodbye
to the glove
factory, girls;

fifty arches
of brick-cladded
rustbelt gothic

but only
the dollar store
in focus, trade goods lit

so sharp thru the fog
you could read
the shampoo instructions

from a passing bus
and still huff
on a candle bag,

deserted dairylands hiss
warm cokes rings of
green styrofoam here

like everywhere else,
arboreal shrinkage hiss
farmhouses curled

on wet glass,
north of pine nuts the
little trees eventually

damage the little
touches we like;
the windows replaced

with particle board as
if mushroom carpets could
think mushroom thoughts.

Trade goods
rinse and repeat
and repeat.

You see, I want
to be part of it
but I want to

make fun of it to--
concealing profits or
making a bed of them,

stuffing a turkey with it
or smashing it with a brick--
whose answerable needs met?




only a few more days to see Adam Harrison's show of photographs at CSA space. I wrote "captions" for Adam's catalogue, the first three of which I'll post above today, the rest tomorrow. But go see the show if you're in the area!



 

relocated from the banks of the Niagara to those of the Androscoggin Jonathan Skinner's ecopoetics has a big new issue (print) with Roy Arenella, Michael Basinski, Charles Bernstein,David Berridge, Alicia Cohen, Jack Collom, Mary Crow, Tina Darragh, Ian Davidson, Marcella Durand, Ken Edwards, Kenneth Goldsmith, Clayton Eshleman, Kenny Goldsmith, Lynn Harrigan, Peter Jaeger, Peter Larkin, Douglas Manson, Florine Melnyk, Ethan Paquin, Meredith Quartermain, Kate Schapira, Lytle Shaw, Jonathan Stalling, William Sylvester, Arthur Sze, Mark Weiss, Sara Wintz, Lila Zemborain...send for it & check PDF's of previous issues...

my favorites so far in this one Lytle Shaw and Jack Collom...


 

via Bookslut an excellent list of Scary Television moments gets immediate cred for including not only "Bad Ronald" (above) but the Karen Black/killer doll sequence of "Trilogy of Terror" and "Sybil", which made my big sister faint...
I would have added Leslie Nielsen as the psycho sheriff in "Shadow Over Elveron"...

 

OED Editors, 1915

interesting non-affiliated Examining the Oxford English Dictionary site--

"Examining the OED sets out to investigate the principles and practice behind the Oxford English Dictionary, an extraordinary achievement of scholarship and labour and the greatest dictionary of English ever compiled. We are wholly independent of the OED itself, and seek to provide scholarly commentary on and analysis of OED's methodology and practice.

Our main focus is on exploring and analysing OED's quotations and quotation sources, so as to illuminate the foundations of the dictionary's representation of the English language."


 

strange, overlooked western Track of the Cat on TCM Wednesday...
 

"An Assembly of Stockholders" from Coin and Conscience - Popular Views of Money Credit and Speculation
 

50 ANIMALS DRIVING A common occurrence in our neighbourhood....
 

calendar-marking time for fans of director Anthony Mann, cinematographer John Alton and a dour point of view--TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES is having a quintuple feature of his early ('45-49) noir films on Tuesday night starting 1700PST with "T-Men", then "Raw Deal", "Border Incident" (never seen by me!!), "Railroaded" and "Two O'Clock Courage" (never seen by me!).

 

Fisk

"I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them."

Anna's Hummingbird Nests in Coronada, California. Many photos, glimpses of lovely California yards. Hello Oakland! We have a nest in the walnut tree next door, maybe six feet from our dining room window but so teeny as to be almost invisible, at the bottom of a long, curved branch, with a pair (they all seem to be pairs and favor that love seat style arrangement) who look about ready to go out and get their own sugar.



 

The Virgin of Guadalupe

"He asked the sign for the sign he required. Mary told him to go to the rocks and gather roses. Juan knew it was neither the time nor the place for roses, but he went and found them. Gathering many into the lap of his tilma, a long cloak or wrapper used by Mexican Indians, he came back. The Holy Mother rearranged the roses, and told him to keep them untouched and unseen until he reached the bishop. When he met with Zum�rraga, Juan offered the sign to the bishop. As he unfolded his cloak the roses, fresh and wet with dew, fell out."


 

The thicket of rhetorical question marks on CNN today--Iraq Massacre? Crimes in War? etc. reminded me of the moment when Al Sweringen (above going over the books), looking at the mockup of the broadsheet that he and the "city fathers" have put out in an attempt to assuage smallpox hysteria, says "mmm...Plague in Deadwood...couldn't we put a question mark on that?"

 

Weldon Hunter hops the pond...



"Navigable

for Victoria & Vancouver


a suggestion of verticality
in the port city

the Great City of Bearheart
with outsourced roads

& a connect-and-go general purpose
light fantastic ever

crossing my mind
ahead of the story

each filament breaks apart -
they know you want them to work

but they just blink;
security of supply.

turn on the waterfall,
the cover, grrr - lots of stop start

the pace is really gentle & dare i say
disarmed by all the sunlight

my hands are fidgeting in the bikerack
- out in the water lots of stop & stare

in these rhythms, let the categories appear
but don't superimpose definitions

life is a pattern, an effortless string of suns
& moons, then a neat look & a good visual

it's been amazing,
collapsible and restorative!

like supernovas ending their explosions but
i want the lights to go on "


 

Canadian teen second-best at U.S. bee

"In the end, Finola Hackett missed one letter in weltschmerz, which means sentimental pessimism, before she finally heard the bell marking defeat that had already rung for 272 other competitors at the 2006 Scripps Bee.

The graceful teenager paused for the first time in the competition when she heard weltschmerz in the 19th round. Hackett tried tracing the word on her hand and looked at the ceiling as she tried to piece together the 11-letter puzzler. Later, she said that she had studied the word before, but didn't know it "extremely well.""

Well though I could have spelled weltschmerz at her age it was part of my problem, but I had no idea spelling bees used so many foreign and scientific Scrabble-dispute type words. And my spelling, in which I once took great pride, is not what it was. Any one of the final nine kids would have wiped the floor with me.



 

new Alice Munro--

"On the third bus she got a seat by the window, and tried to keep herself calm by reading the signs -- both the advertising and the street signs. There was a certain trick she had picked up, to keep her mind occupied. She took the letters of whatever word her eyes lit on, and she tried to see how many new words she could make out of them. "Coffee," for instance, would give you "fee," and then "foe," and "off" and "of," and "shop" would provide "hop" and "sop" and "so" and -- wait a minute -- "posh." Words were more than plentiful on the way out of the city, as they passed billboards, monster stores, car lots, even balloons moored on roofs to advertise sales..."


 

from 1974, the great critic Donald Phelps (mentioned below) on Gilbert Sorrentino--

"To Sorrentino, it seems to me, the irreducible specific is the rain-grey sentry-box at the last outpost of functioning consciousness; that borderline which some of us never cross in either direction."
 

TheStar.com - The PM is copying George Bush's tactics with his allegation of `liberal media bias,' says Linda McQuaig



"Harper's unwillingness to submit to freewheeling media questions suggests an anti-democratic tendency.

His political views have been heavily influenced by Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago who spawned the U.S. neo-conservative movement.

Strauss's ideas have been cultivated in Canada by the so-called Calgary school — a right-wing political clique at the University of Calgary — with which Harper and his mentor Tom Flanagan have long been associated.

Strauss was deeply suspicious of democracy. He argued that the public isn't capable of making intelligent political decisions, and so should be kept pacified rather than informed. The real decisions should be left to an elite.

With the elite making the decisions for a docile, dim-witted public, who needs the media — except to type down the Prime Minister's words?"

BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER/CHARLES OLSON NOW

"To continue Olson's work, as distinct from merely reproducing it, we must set aside the tendency, in reading Olson, to become ourselves "Olsonian." Mimicking his stylistic habits or taking up his particular interests or attitudes or concepts is not the best of even a proper sign of homage. Whatever we take from him must be examined carefully and reconsidered, made fit to serve our own location, historically, on earth, and in language."

(thx AV)

 

brief account of Nanaimo Chinatowns & film of the fire which destroyed the last one on September 30, 1960. (Confirmed May 31 that witnessing this fire is the earliest memory of Five Acres/Vinegar Hill poet Kevin Davies)


 

rare glimpse of rara avis Kathleen Byron (with David Farrar) in (sadly the cut version) of Powell & Pressburger's The Small Back Room (1949) the other night. Her performance as Sister Ruth in "Black Narcissus" a great example of how a performance can deepen a filmmaker's conception to the point of overthrow--you can tell P&P didn't know what they'd unleashed, but were smart enough to go with it.



 

Looking up the 1953 Van Heflin movie "Battleground" (on later today in TCM's all-war Memorial Day weekend) in my 1981 blue Bantam paperback "Movies on TV: conceived and edited by Steven H. Scheur" I remembered why older editions of that series (at some point in the 80's it was completely redone, badly) are worth looking out for--I only re-found it recently. It's terse, opaquely auterist critical language greatly appealed to (and undoubtedly influenced) my younger self. Here's a sentence of the "Battleground" entry: "Retains interest for Wellman's gritty, abstract schematicism, but he fails to reach the pinnacle set by his "Story of G.I. Joe"." What could! Almost something of the great Donald Phelps (that Lover of Dorn & Dwan!) about that. But here's my all-time favorite--which I urge young poseur types to memorize--from the entry for Preminger's 1952 "Angel Face"--"It's so well measured in minute calibrations of lighting and framing that the essential shallowness of the sexual premise is never overcome by the intensity of the implacable style." Works for anything!


 

here's the video--excuse me while I rocksteady...
 

farewell Desmond Dekker whose "Israelites" was a lot of people's first reggae single, certainly mine! Though in those days (Ayr,Scotland 1970)
we called it "blubeat", which until Dekker came along was considered strictly the domain of the scary skinheads hanging out in front of the Bobby Jones dancehall looking for fights...

 

in the Village Voice, Joshua Clover on Harewood poet Kevin Davies
 

Canada out of Afghanistan


"This is the "mission" that Stephen Harper, Yankee sycophant and budding warmonger, has "extended." The mission is not intended to ever end because its purpose was and is to ensure the US permanent access to Mideast oil and Afghani land for pipelines. But end it will -- just as every other colonial occupation of Afghanistan has ended -- when the occupiers tire of bleeding. Too bad dozens of Canadian soldiers, who should be peacemakers, will have to die to teach us an old lesson."

The history behind (and recipe for) Eccles. Cakes


The word 'Eccles' means church and is derived from the Greek word 'Ecclesia' which means an assembly. In the middle ages an annual service 'Eccles Wakes' took place at the church in Eccles and afterwards there was a fair at which food and drink were sold, including of course, Eccles cakes.

In 1650, when the Puritans gained power, they banned the Eccles Wakes and subsequently the Eccles cakes which they considered to have pagan significance due to their juicy and exotic richness.

More recently the question of Eccles cakes has been raised in Parliament. A question was tabled regarding the future of cakes made outside Eccles to the same ingredients. Could non-Eccles made cakes still be referred to (and sold) as Eccles cakes?"



 

from Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors--

"That 'tis good to be drunk once a month, is a common flattery of sensuality, supporting it self upon Physick, and the healthful effects of inebriation. This indeed seems plainly affirmed by Avicenna, a Physitian of great authority, and whose religion prohibiting Wine, could less extenuate ebriety. But Averroes a man of his own faith was of another belief; restraining his ebriety unto hilarity, and in effect making no more thereof than Seneca commendeth, and was allowable in Cato; that is, a sober incalescence and regulated �stuation from wine; or what may be conceived between Joseph and his brethren, when the text expresseth they were merry, or drank largely, and whereby indeed the commodities set down by Avicenna, that is, alleviation of spirits, resolution of superfluities, provocation of sweat and urine may also ensue. But as for dementation, sopition of reason, and the diviner particle from drink; though American religion approve, and Pagan piety of old hath practised it, even at their sacrifices; Christian morality and the doctrine of Christ will not allow. And surely that religion which excuseth the fact of Noah, in the aged surprisal of six hundred years, and unexpected inebriation from the unknown effects of wine, will neither acquit ebriosity nor ebriety, in their known and intended perversions."