29 October 2010

Rise

components

measured in turn

combined

alchemy more than recipe

each time different

variants of the same

touch/ taste/ smell/ see

knead the need

hidden in a warm spot

rise

twirl-a-whirl

spread: flattened, dimpled

craggily perfect

anticipation

almost

heat, hot . . .

even better for breakfast


27 October 2010

Les Sœurs de betterave


omg naked ladies and monsters !?! go crazy ocd man !!!





My alpha Beta post...

Red River Drowning

This polished finger
can’t get it right, fingering
the years, greased underneath and
slipping like a slippery fish
into the river.
One finger joins many, a phalanx
laced to the knuckle
yet remaining indistinguishable.
Drowned by each other;
grappling down the muddy banks of the Red,
in our hometown.
Next fall - Found!
The tip of a finger bone, the forefinger
perfectly preserved in the river bank and
mistaken for an arrowhead
showing east.



Bread Crumbs

Emerge from a fan of sheets, chalk and china clay,
spine broke and beautifully worn
with my hand spread in the bow-curve of your back,
pressing you down, stretching, folding you close
as if this were the end of our world.

Fingers laced together like clever roots,
one being; tall, naked, wrapped in ourself.
In the quiet you cling to me like Ipomoea.
You feed me sweet potato and water spinach
and I suck wine from your lips.

Drunk, we lapse back into the leaves,
bruising them red with our footprints
so we will always find our way back
to the beginning.

23 October 2010

"Pop"

What are we if not voices
that echo in the sky
Like soap bubbles
slowly gliding by

A rainbow sheen reflecting
all the while perfecting

just what we want to say

19 October 2010

I h-te desire

“The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.”
Carl Sandburg

“In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.”
Jane Smiley

“Wealth and rank are what people desire, but unless they are obtained in the right way they may not be possessed.”
Confucius

“The desire to write grows with writing.”
Desiderius Erasmus

“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”
Madame de Stael

“Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”
Mario Andretti

“A goal is not the same as a desire, and this is an important distinction to make. You can have a desire you don't intend to act on. But you can't have a goal you don't intend to act on.”
Tom Morris

“I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots”
William Butler Yeats

13 October 2010

Flight 8

I can't believe
that that's what
fortyonethousand
sixhundredandtwo
feet look like

one road
cutting across
a land that
g-d forgot

caressed by
clouds, basins
holding tears
that would stay
forever
regardless of
how high or how
real that wing
would be

10 October 2010

The 12 Commandments of Jiu Jitsu by Carlos Gracie Sr.

1. Be so strong that nothing can disturb the peace of your mind.
2. Talk to all people about happiness, health, and prosperity.
3. Give to all your friends the feeling of being valued.
4. Look at things with an enlightened point of view and update your optimism on reality.
5. Think only about the best, work only for the best, and always expect the best.
6. Be just as enthusiastic about others' victories as you are with yours.
7. Forget about past mistakes and focus your energy on the victories of tomorrow.
8. Always make those around you happy and keep a smile for all people who talk to you.
9. Apply the largest amount of your time on self-improvement and no time in criticizing others.
10. Be big enough so you can feel unsatisfied, be noble enough so you can feel anger, be strong enough so you can feel fear, and be happy enough so you can feel frustrations.
11. Hold a good opinion about your self and communicate that to the world, but not through dissonant words but through good works.
12. Believe strongly that the world is on your side, as long as you stay loyal to the best of yourself.

06 October 2010

Claes Oldenburg


Soft Viola, 2002. Canvas, resin, rope and metal painted with latex

Folle (2), for Nelly Arcan

It's hard to
believe some
days that this
city goes on without
you isa-
belle
that the
hipsters still
swing around the goddamn
Plateau like they invented
it last week,
that the traffic still just grinds on,
and the crime,
the corruption,
the girl in the funny blue
shirt who might still
smoke there in
Parc LaFon
taine and
make you
suspect she was
waiting in secret for your
lover if only you were
here still to
see it all isa-
belle but you're

not

I was on
something or
on to something one
night outside
Cinema L'
Amour and I
wondered out
loud to myself about you having
been there those times in your so
secret track
suit spying to
know what that
man might
see in his
porno that he
wouldn't see in
you and you sat there through
three and a half films but you
didn't see it still, isabelle,
did you?

Down at Bill
y Kun they still
do coke in the
bathrooms and I tried it once,
I admit
three times actually
like I was
hoping to conjure you
back to us I
had so many things I
wanted to tell you
isa
belle and some nights i
wash dishes down at
Cherrier while some other young woman
sits in the
lone
ly bar
stool that used to
be yours and
Jean Pierre comes in
to the
kitchen with my
cafe au lait and we
wonder about you there
about you
having stared down your
cleavage all those
dark nights of
yours like it was the
abyss or the
grave and so
bent then on
writing your
own end so un
endingly bent on the
writing of your own
private end isa
belle un
til you
did

03 October 2010

Flight 7

the first time
in the first place
where I would need
a friend, we walked
and it must have been
minus thirty
but we did not feel
it because we
were young

then light began
to fade, and it was so
beautiful, so crystalline
and blue, sparkling
and crackling that
this was now home

we walked as the cold
seeped into unprepared
wants, towards knowledge
that we were too young
for foes that were eight
feet tall and the fighter
reaches low, scared that
as the bones
rattle, he knows the fight
is over, and they cheer
because there was no
friend, and nothing ever
to lose, or to win

02 October 2010

01 October 2010

Charlie Brooker-- How to Report the News

So, here's a pretty funny video that we watched last night in my "Media and Poetics" class. The class is basically a study of how technology and culture fundamentally shape the way we communicate, the way we create, and the ways we think. As one writer put it, it is the study of the langue of culture vs the parole, or studying the framework within which literature is produced rather than the literature itself. (For e.g., think of poetry 700 years ago vs today, in the days of blogging, how it's gone from mostly oral, written down only if you were rich or well-connected to publishable globally at the push of a button. Or, think of the age of courtly, king Arthur style literature, where pretty much everything that was created was done within a very limited framework of the "questing knight" story.)

Last week, for e.g., we read an article by a scientist who studied the space shuttle Challenger disaster, looking at how the use of Power Point in NASA presentations (and pretty much all presentations anywhere, ever these days) was directly responsible for the overlooking or burying of vital information that would have prevented the disaster. The author argued that Power Point was designed for a "pitch" (i.e. a quick, agressive, sales-based presentation) and that it has serious flaws in its ability to present detailed, technical, scientific information (for e.g., the inability to express certain technical data, formulas, etc).

Anyway, this video is a pretty hilarious critique of how news is presented, and a great reminder that it's produced within a very specific social, cultural and technological framework, and therefore is not in any way "neutral".