How can you not love Facebook? Within one minute I joined three groups: Irish Poetry, GLBT Writers and Readers, and The Macabre Edgar Allen Poe. Hot darn.

Gumption 'n warmth. Agnew, Quayle, Palin. Got it.

The harvest mouse — getting fatter imbibing syrah, nibbling on camembert, and writing about it — in 21st century diseased poetic circles looks something like this: You think your every move is being filmed for a reality dating show, starring you, and that everyone in your life is an actor or a phony. Or you think you are part of a group under intense surveillance by a competing posse of poetry spies, whom you refer to as “them,” and “they” wiretap your plastic living room furniture and sex prosthetics.

Those thoughts are from case studies of what neutral onlookers (housemates who ran out on the rent, ex-girlfriends who have obtained restraining orders, and other poets) who peer into the intersection of mental illness, verse, and society are calling, respectively, Truman Show Syndrome and Internet delusion; both offer a window, through madness, into the modern world of letters and launch parties.

If you have delusions of grandeur in this century, you are probably not Napoleon, but you may be Truman Capote or Tallalulah Bankhead or, more probable, Truman Burbank. The Truman Show delusion, or Truman Show Syndrome, has drawn attention in recent months as writers and literary critics identify a small but growing number of verse makers who describe their lives as mirroring that of the main character in the 1998 film “The Truman Show.” Truman Burbank leads a mundane existence as a naturalist, conceptual poet, and FDA agent in the suburbs, starting from the time he was in the womb, while being filmed for a documentary television show that he cannot escape. Everyone is in on it, including his wife and publisher, both played by the same actor, and no one will believe Truman when he discovers clues that his life is being chronicled all the time by cameras.

With Internet delusion, poets typically incorporate the Internet into their processing of paranoid thoughts, including a fear that the Web is somehow monitoring or controlling their lives, or being used to plagiarize their dreams and transmit unflattering Facebook photographs or other personal information. The delusions are fueling a chicken-and-egg debate in critical theory: Are these merely modern examples of classic parataxis fed by the current grab-what-u-can processual landscape, or is there something about media like reality television and the Internet that can push writers over the sanity line?

“Most likely these people would be delusional anyway,” said Dr. Fede Moi, a violinist, poet, and psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, who said she saw fifty-five patients at the hospital from 2002 to 2007 with Truman Show delusion. Dr. Moi is eating better herself, having come up with the term “Truman Show delusion.” Still the prognosis is not utterly nightmarish — "this pushes some marginal writers over the threshold; the environment tips them over the edge; and then they write better,” said Dr. Moi. “And if culture can make people crazy, then we need them to write about it.” Q.E.D.

One way of looking at the delusions and hallucinations of the culturally degraded like poets is that they represent extreme cases of what passes as brisk, cheery normality in the general population, those of us who are merely neurotic. Poets with no holds can take common fears — like identity theft because of information transmitted on the Internet, or the loss of privacy because of the prevalence of security cameras to fight crime — and magnify them, make them their very own to juice up really cool drafts.

“There is the old saying that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s no poet after you,” said Dr. Ruse Westvale, chairman of the Department of Psycholinguistics and Alterity at Christopher Columbus College Annex. The prevailing view in critical slippage is that a delusion is just a transfinite number, psychosis is sticking someone you really can't stop hating with a sharp metallic instrument, and the faded scenery in the background is, incidentally, in need of a complete makeover. Fear, a sense of persecution and grandiosity are static features of delusional writing, many academics say. “Cultural influences don’t tell us anything fundamental about delusion,” Dr. Westvale added. “We can look at the influence of television, computer games, rock ’n’ roll, but these things don’t tell us about new forms of being a writer and going mental.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Aerial Performance and Poetic Methodology defines a poem, considered still to be little understood, as, essentially, a false belief that is not grounded in reality and that is held with absolute conviction despite proof to the contrary. The manual lists a caveat that a belief is not delusional if it is something widely accepted by other members of a poet’s culture or subculture — for example, faith in a canon, a collection of the best books or, simply, good works in literature. But some poets ask on whose authority, frag?

Some experts studying conditions like Truman Show Syndrome and other culture-bound delusions, which are specific to a time like now or place like California, are questioning the premise that culture is only incidental to psychosis, even as a growing body of evidence has pointed to eating abnormalities and other lifestyle causes for illnesses like copy-and-paste writing or overdependence on spam and purloined email.

Psychiatrists have studied delusions such as the belief that one's creative flow is covered in sand, and which has been documented at dunes in North Beach and Mendocino but would be unlikely to occur in, say, a condominium tower in Fairweather Cape, AK. Another study found a delusion occurring only in quite unusually urbane places scrunched inside resort atomospherics like Boulder, CO and a few other rural enclaves, in which visiting scholars missing their pets and starved for the new and sensational in avant lit will read anything canine and offbeat — like Kirk Lazarus's new book about a singing robot bitten by dogs — and they actually believe they have become pregnant with puppies. What nuts!

Dr. Tugg Stiller of Naropa Community Adult Learning Center, who is writing an illustrated book about Truman Show delusion, said that three of five patients he saw recently with the condition specifically mentioned Lazarus's verse. "It's a barking read," Stiller observed. He said what distinguishes this delusion from most others is that it involves the patient’s entire reality, and everything normal like owning a dog is transfixed by the unreal like human-canine pregnancy. Other delusions are typically narrowly focused — there is a microchip in my boyfriend's brain, aliens abducted my body parts but left the rest of me here, I’ve been to Mars and it's disgusting — and in those, things that are not real become real. One of Dr. Stiller’s patients told him, “My family and everyone I knew were actors in a script, a hoity-toity charade with cunning little puppies whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world’s attention.”

You lost me at should. Courage is an art. I hope you're happy. I used to believe all the grossular and pine boxes that hold sex would open up to the horizon of a former life, a life stocked with the coloration of air as in a Shakespearean drawing room augmented with coarse bouquet. From the valley inside Elizabethans, say, we would see there were lots of tulle and offline making of amends. Superangels strummed harps to sound an alert bigger than dressing for the weekend with some breathy, lithe, spooky edge. There's a flare for what noses should be, a full deck of historical fantasy. Then a larger conduit was needed going for the stretch and preen in the premonition, the one I had about nomads and grace, moans of a snake figuring out straight white room and board that transforms the way I text, hands free, with a glance.

There's a big sonic payoff over at DC's this morning: 10 tunes that are also expository arguments from Guy Blackman, "Mortified," for instance, and "Stay on the Beat" collect impressions of Tokyo menages a trois and their aftermath.

The dems' convention this week is too exciting. I'd like to tune it out but no. It's back to the coliseum to boo the bad Bloods as they take the Crabs and Rickets down, kabuki-like. For the last three months Obama, the Crab in charge, couldn't manage Hillary and Bill, you know, sweet talk them, make them a promise or two, ask them for advice, and now there can be only tepid endorsements and half-embraces, a small chorus of Hillary delegates wailing into video cams, and if the Bloods' (i.e., McCain's) plan holds, maybe a few faces sliced along the way, a big momma of a mess.

At one level, Obama is to blame. It's his responsibility to keep things spotless. At another level it's clear Hillary and Bill, especially Bill, won't behave. Then, it's especially Hillary, too. They have never put self-interest second, and now you can feel their appetites all whetted as pollsters remind us that McCain appeals to 30% of Hillary voters. (A significant fraction of those working-class white men and women crossed over from the Bloods to vote for her in the first place — a tedious point in fact.)

Meantime, on the larger stage, after two or three false starts, ad mavens for the Bloods have at last dug up the most devastating choreographed assault from the primary, the video in which Hillary plays yamauba, craven mountain witch, claiming she and McCain have experience to be president while Obama has a speech he gave in 2002. That's an extraordinary indictment of her fellow player and gang member and a sucker endorsement for the Bloods, a knockout punch to all Hillary and Bill will say, irrespective of how they behave. And that's the sad outcome. Her disloyalty half-excuses Obama's failure to kiss and make up. There is no defense for Hillary's support of McCain, not even her self-interest. Hillary is dead as any Crab or Ricket caught at knifepoint by the Bloods.

"If all you do is seduce and conquer you loose a lot of blood," observes Puffy. In a completely different vein, the line-up for the Second Annual Poetry and Music Weekend looks fine.

On its self-imposed deadline Friday to withdraw its forces from Georgia, Russia insisted that it was sticking to its timetable but there were continuing reports that Russian forces were still digging in...On Thursday, the commander of the Russian ground forces, Gen. Vladimir Boldyrev, said that it would take at least 10 days for the troops and equipment to be withdrawn “in columns in the established order.” This translates into abbreviated speech as still.

OMFG, it's Clinton.

Johnbr responds to notes on collective, below, with updates on some fascinating projects he's undertaking with others. He's open to additional collaborators:

Speaking of collective enterprises, one going on at Zeitgeist Spam right now (and eventually in book/dvd form — there is a committed publisher) is called 1000 Views of "Girl Singing". I hereby invite you to join the festivities. Here's the invitation. It's the same as I've sent the other participants. [Here is a pdf of] the poem to be used as a starting point — or not, if you come up with another way to play:

I have a new project in progress. I'm going to take a poem by Eileen Tabios (I have her blessings) that is "after" a poem by Jose Garcia Villa and run about 100,000,000 (plus or minus) changes on it, using methods developed by a number of appropriation/transformation artists.

Some transformations/translations will require others to join in the project for a collaboration or two, e.g. one of Nichols' transformations requires getting people more or less unfamiliar with the poem to read it once and then try to write it. I've already received some marvelous contributions, audio, video, visual, as well as textual (if you are interested, I can send you the names of those who are participating). In fact, this has turned into an anthology rather than a JBR project w/a few contributions.

I'd love it if you too would be willing to play. [To contact Johnbr, e-mail: J at johnbr.com]

If you are willing, here are some possibilities, as copied from bp Nichol's Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report:

1. memory translation: reader retention. (Each reader is shown the poem without prior warning or instruction [we'll have to ignore that bit] and asked to read thru it once. The poem is then taken away and the reader asked to write down what he or she remembers. No other instructions are given.)

2. homolinguistic translation. [Note: no explanation is given of what a homolinguistic translation might be. So I will use Charles Bernstein's: "Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem (someone else's, then your own) and translate it 'English to English' by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or "free" translation as response to each phrase or sentence. Or translate the poem into another literary style or a different diction, for example into a slang or vernacular. Do several different types of homolinguistic translation of a single source poem." Bernstein adds "Chaining: try this with a group, sending the poem on for "translation" from person to another until you get back to the first author." Feel free to chain w/anyone of your choice — in any fashion — or not, it's all up to you.]

And here are my own instructions: please do anything else you fancy doing to/with it, and please include some sort of explanation of the "procedure" employed [Note: anything you want to count as a procedure counts as a procedure]. I'm also asking for translations into any and all languages (construe language as you wish).

And I'm also asking for contributions that "play telephone" with the text(s) contributed so far. In other words, feel free to "translate"/"interpret"/riff off of? etc etc any of the other contributions in any way you wish.

Everyone who contributes to these projects will be credited, Johnbr adds, and the plan according to his publisher is that everyone will get a copy of the final product in book/dvd form. There you go!

It should be uncontroversial that a decade or longer of media innovation and art making require the literary or esthetic term collective apply to a more encompassing and better-thought-out conceptual construct than a group.

This is so even if it's a cluster of the like-minded or, even, a kibbutz of substantial, like-minded collaborators or practitioners with shared processes. The term collective applies, more specifically, to such groups who, additionally, aim for nonhierarchical, collegial micro- and macro-views of their action as a group and as individuals. A common outcome for and distinctive feature of art collectives is that product authorship is either unassigned, that is, it is rendered anonymous, or signed under the name of the group.

Blurred identity is a singular esthetic legacy of the term collective, one that we receive largely by way of our understanding of how the materials of medieval plays and music were assembled, edited, and emended by lines of long-obscured and frequently anonymous sorts, many working out of guilds and in disciplined work areas of the similarly unnamed.

Production through retrieval and the add-on ethos are other features of medieval collectivism. It's not unironic in the least that internet data assembly enables our return to those kinds of collective production and ethos -- I'm using collective as a trope descriptive of communal agitation in the Durkheimian metaphorical sense of group consciousness. The work we produce right now is parallel along incalculable dimensions to the industry of the guildmeisters and servants of previous times. And if most of the work present day is still authored, squinting forward we can imagine that the mushrooming of art production (including poetry) over a relatively short time will totalize authorship into line items within extraneous data fields (with a few exceptions, of course). The important data are part of the Collective, capital c.

Ok, my point is not at all directed to any of my earlier enablers and colleagues, per se. They as members of any group of two or more are free to designate themselves a collective, small c, if they have the urge. But none of us now, group or singleton, is making products from media all alone. Chances are what you (or we or I) do is matched or surpassed by others out of your reach.

Disparate data assembly and grandiose and novel media mining are commonplace for artists and writers because new and improved procedures and products are in the air. A ten-year-old can program your phone to display box scores and blast Baroque chamber pieces while you I.M. your florist. Multiplicities are coming on. What can you do to them? Instrumental composer Nico Muhly surfs YouTube to cap off music he's modeling after Bach and Purcell: "There's a way to search for interesting things on YouTube, and then there's a way to search for uninteresting things. You put in search terms like 'My daughter's yard,' 'My friend's restaurant.'" In this respect Muhly differs from poet Sharon Mesmer, say, only in his formal application and modulation of searches.

Music atmospheres by Muhly and a good deal of contemporary music and poetry, for sure, come off more and more as products of the Durkheim Collective. With regards to poetry, there's a terrific initiative identified as Zeitgeist Spam, authored by "johnbr," a marker of a well-mannered semi-anonymity, apropos of the work. Johnbr lifts other poets' artifacts on the net and elsewhere and recrafts them. On July 25 johnbr composed a "transformation View of 'Girl Singing'" along with these notes about procedure:

I took the nouns in Alan Baker's "Girl Singing" in order, matched each with a proper name beginning with the same letter as the noun (e.g. life/Philip Lamantia) found in the index to the SPD Fall 08 catalog (exceptions: the 2nd "girl", which I matched not only to (the wrong, i.e. the not-SPD) Emily Galvin, but also to Gérard Genette), through "game", at which point (bored with the choices in SPD – same letters, over and over …), I switched to the index of The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (ed. Lawrence D Kritzman); googled the resultant noun-and-name sets, took what I wanted. This is now known as the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation, after the title of its first manifestation, though the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation is slightly modified here, as I allowed myself the luxury of extracting texts from the "digital objects" linked to, not just the Google results screen.

It's a lone guy's toe-dip into the "zeitgeist," as he (or she?) puts it, scooping up "the luxury of extracting texts" by others. It's a new view in fact and a transformation through ad-libbed procedure practiced by one anonymous sort in the blazingly omnipresent Collective.

Money grabber: You get locked out, we'll open your door
... from the makers of Head-on.

I'd like to request Michael Phelps lose "I have no idea."

Always on the lookout for the words of the moment. From Drastic Measures, An Anachronism written, according to Ben, "in the margins" of a prophecy by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Looksee:

Still waters
    Run deeper into debt.
Ships of state
    Sail out of their depth

The bridge trembles
    Under traffic,
Like an adolescent boy
    Jiggling his leg.

Light dies
    Under duress. A fire
Rising in the east
    Now struggles in the west.

Poetic justice
    Reigns supreme. We elect our rulers,
Not our betters, who judge us then
    With drastic measures [...]

— Benjamin Friedlander

Word of a Newer New Deal. It's invigorating.

Suspension of liberties, financial slaughter, a day in the life of. The rain keeps coming, returning favors to the riverside.

A drop falls from a drop.
The bridge looks into space, at itself.
It looks at its high white cheekbones, the
porcelain curve of the water below. Danger
so comical they cannot help jumping into it,
Eustace and James.

Two wayfarers and their
assignation. The way they say, "private," when
they are caught in the act. Where is the body
below. A close shave. Leap, lap, lapse, leper,
personae, personal, peril, plummet. Put out to sea.

— Elizabeth Robinson

Dumb white chicks dig Barrack Obama.

Republicans have no doubt read tracts along the lines of Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat (2005) and picked up on the comedic-killer catchphrase stratagem for getting partisans to laugh while turning fence sitters into partisans. Babysit some "pet peeves," and everyone guffaws — as Drew observes with of course more than a grain or two of salt, "women are an anti-civilizing force." Partisanship exploited for poetry is one thing, but the latest ad for John McCain offers up, salt-free, young white "fans" of Obama who, in essence, sissify Obama's appeal, swooning over him, loving his eyes — they're "dreamy." The nonfigurative race cards are now in play full force, as they were in 2006 when Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tennessee, lost to Bob Corker, the only new republican elected to the Senate that year. Corker's most talked-about campaign video brought forward an über-white seductress who appeared to self-immolate over the prospect of sleeping with Ford who is handsome and black. You may remember the slithery, anti-civil taunt, "Harold, call me."

It's mid August and the republican campaign of ridicule has already evolved from Obama's celebrity to home in on his dreaminess and sex appeal. This is a calculated shift to make him at once diminutive and potentially threatening. And more explicit race baiting is to come. Hillary and Bill Clinton's earlier propositions that Obama does not appeal to the white working class have been absorbed, and the core message is now ready to be refined and reintroduced by McCain and operatives in trivializing, pet-peeve ways. It's a down-home stay-on-message party-on campaign engineered by plutocrats Rick Davis and Karl Rove. The message will be rancid yet anyone can dig it, the catchphrase of the week or of the day to stir prejudice, something we can laugh at.

Superangelic on the horizon of today-was-so-o-o-wrong.

Teams of entertainers carry parasites that effect a ruckus. Also affect.

Our president does a Neville Chamberlain, attending a church of state in Beijing, and lingering there for three and half fruitless days after Russia invades Georgia, a now smoldering sovereign nation and our ally. What signal does this send to the international community. Drip, drip. Our pathetic, angst-ridden washing of hands, lavabo, opting for the inverse of waterboarding, passivity in the face of Russian aggression. Too much else is at stake to stand up to principles. We put our faith in god.

Pfffft. Am pushing, pulling my cheek and jowl together like I always do first thing after the overnight meltdown. I dream plenty. Sure do. In the latest, nurses and interns, the usual ones, poured some rubber and cloudy goo into my forehead. This time I saw faces but could barely make them out, maybe Manchurian. Then they changed into jocks made of leggo and acted out my biography. It swooshed by like a great train heist, and I was lying there just having a little fun, messing around a little bit. Can't remember the rest. The craziest one is when they put in a new tube to fix the timing. That helped me get my smile closer to my sneer face when I talk energy. Drill here and drill now. That's from a dream too.

— John Sidney McCain III

I can't keep up with news cycles. It's too much for a standard bearer. Every day all day a new insult. Bayh. Telegenic, yeah, crossed over but what a bantam weight. Kaine. One more community goody goody with no experience. That's a twofer? Sebelius. Sounds like a high church curse. Pretty egregious of the other side to float another woman out there. Anyway, I've been conferring with my supporters and for their sake we'll take this to the convention. Time for more of my name up in lights. Greek theater. Catharsis, that's it. You know, in spite of what's happened whenever there's a floor battle at a major party convention in the last two decades, you know, in spite of they're losing in the general election, it's worth getting this stigma of my nearly pulling it off out of our systems, you know, I'm just working the system, setting the record straight. Bring the wonky other side down to Main Street. Everyone gets it. I'd do anything for my supporters. And you bet they have to see this will make the democrats stronger for November. 2012.

— Hill

The White House was an aphrodisiac. Still sleep over in DC thanks to Hill. I know H would be an asset this November and an even better commander in chief. She's the most qualified not to ask or tell of any name you can throw out there, because she's seen how it's prepped, cooked, compromised, done. When you face utter irrelevance triangulation still works. John knows this, so does H — after those caucuses that shouldn't have counted as much as the raw vote in battlegrounds where only Hill's name was on the ballot. (I still have my issues.) And Congress, that place is such a mess of pulled pork and pickles it takes a tough strategist to get things the way you know they have to be at the moment. H would make a great campaigner and veep. Obama — we call him Mr. Green — needs a strong gun now that John who I have to admire has taken up H's primary themes. And she was right! Look how he's wimped out on offshore drilling and tire gauges. Hill could stop the fairy tale from blowing up if he wanted her too. Man, for that matter I could stop the bleeding just by being less ambiguous but I'm sick of acting the unaggrieved fall guy. No matter who's the victor, I'll be perceived as having lost, so I'll save everyone time. Count me out. I'm the most undervalued loser in this race. Like in 2000 after me no one wins.

— B.

Used to be a democrat, it worked for a while, still was burdened with the bickering and weakness in defense and foreign policy mandated by effetes and elites. Tortured, felt kicked inside by their cowardice in Iraq. You can't set a timeline with Al Quaeda hanging on to precious pipelines. Not with these gas prices. That's playing giveaway, something the Berkeley-Beltway crowd know all too well. Twisted, maybe, but I accede to their domestic agenda, but when the gutsy forehead wrenching issues come up I reach out to practical sports-loving folks and patriots who support the surge, know the surge has worked wonders along with the cash payoffs to sheiks. These are my good friends who believe in their souls the US military, the cream of our youth, has to keep dying for peace and democracy in the region and globally as well. Afghanistan's hold of 93% of worldwide heroin is also a thing we have to take up. I would just hate to think what this country would look like if control over our two biggest commodities, foreign oil and narcotics, were to slip into the hands of terrorists. Yrs,

— Jo

Tax breaks for the wealthiest keep the economy humming — good times or lean, it's high season. So that's fierce. But we're just tapped out from social security. It's an outrage. Why should old people who were never smart enough to invest their own money get to steal from the younger generation? That's the rest of us. Come to think of it, the really younger generation needs school vouchers. That would give kids more choices and make schools more competitive. Why should I or my parents pay for schools where students are dropping out anyway? And lots of these 'inner' cities are a waste, too. Katrina proved that. Did we really need the Lower Ninth? I think we could have new places outside cities that are built by the people who are lazy and don't have jobs and then they can live there and keep them clean. So we'll send all the illegals back where they came from. Finally, why not call a moratorium on bad federal regulations, like on toxins and stuff. That would be very cool.

— P.H.

It's too late for a nervous breakdown.