Passion has its instigators, followers, onlookers. Which is which? How about going bonkers as an emergent lyrical property rather than an algorithm? What if, when a strange poem and appreciation of it turn up together, blanket antagonisms and doubt about a future of poetry nosedive? Underscore a future, not the only one. As with any doubling of force everything seems to follow a silent samurai-like strategy: poem and comment cohere wickedly, coolly, and it all seems thoroughly justified according to a new order. In Throne of Blood — if you've seen it, you won't forget — the tall growth of Cobweb Forest is sawed down to new purpose, camouflage for an army on the march. The image is threshing fir and pine needles that shield warriors advancing to unseat a despot flummoxed by presentiment. Ontologically, a wild deed like a poem is complemented by an unautocratic attitude toward its occasion; they combine as in coitus, serratedly. Standing by and looking on — face it, I'm as prone to passive aggression as the next guy — stunted, I limp off scowling to the dull deforested mist of profuse misses in experience and lightness of touch.

Also: Nightt of Pleasur "Amys Arntzen" summarises@...
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Salut (and restons en bonne santé) to Lblog for being even temporarily sick of Obama and those transition team picks of retreads, along with all that centrist-right agitprop ramping up while the current far-out right administration (a.k.a. wildcats, oligarchs) prints up another $800 billion to hand over to subprime mortgage holders.

Note, the cash goes to holders of the debt, not folks who have to pay it down. This follows Citigroup's additional $20 billion cut of the TARP bailout that Paulson and no doubt Obama's financial types ironed out over the weekend. Meantime, when it comes to money for Detroit auto workers, Paulson says, "Go drop your arms and legs on those shelves over there." Proving the gangster thread in the core American narrative (ref. movies, tv, music, mba studies): if the crime is big enough, it pays.

Is this the dark side of poetry speaking? A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of twitter messages and blog experiments has led a growing number of poets and analysts to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadowy totality of dark poetics. They cite a curious aggregation of upward spirals in web traffic, digitized "clouds" of free utilities floating through hyperspace, along with other tech-aided compositional adaptations to create busy work, to make it "work," and to combat chronic writer's block. These results suggest a dark totality or entirety that makes up at least a quarter of all text creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe.

"Darkness can be brokered like any morbid trend you can see through and drive off a board game. I'm afraid it's all over between us bright kids and the dark siders," said Virgil Mark, head of text assembly at W. W. Norton, publishers of, among others dying for attention, Adrian Roche, a big boob and longstanding opponent of any easy way out of writer's block. "I can look up more words than probably a toaster," Mark added as if to punctuate his tendency to mutter and hostility to going-with-the-flow. "Au contraire," as the song is sung, "Nobody really knows how many adaptations and adapters could be put to work, or what's really going on," Noel Shark and Oishi Kana chimed together, iambically, in frantic pantameter mockery. Shark and Oishi have joined to form an a cappella duet for text-generation and analysis at the University of Upper Michigan.

Analysts of all persuasions caution in any case that there could still be a relatively simple übertextual explanation for the recent explosion of dark observations. Surely, like popping kernels of poems in a puffy brown bag, the nature of this dark poetics is one of the burning issues arts managers are currently dancing around with or in. Identifying the source or sources of this darkness would point the way to a deeper understanding of the laws of graduate study and the workshop impulse to compose poem after poem, many not making a whit of sense. And of course there is the Holy Grail among literary sentimentalists (those who love their boys or girls in a skirt or kilt) to fulfill the Frost-Zukofskian dream of a unified clock to punch for poetics, and have it all go up in sparks.

The last few weeks have seen a blizzard of papers trying to explain all these dark sightings in terms of things like "minimal dark gender-driven counterinterventions" or "exciting dark post-human disproportion," or "hidden pitfalls in dark performative understatement," and "the dark valley of statistical tempests and tarnished ancestry," as well as to suggest how to look for concentrated darkness in text accelerators like the Large Head-on Google Collider. "It could be deliriously exciting, an incredibly cool story," said Lesley Randy-St. Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Textuality in North Cranberry, N.J., who has been churning out papers with students s/he supervises. "Anomalies in the SPD homepage tell you what to look for in the collider."

A team of analysts working on one of the experiments reported in the journal Naturalist Or Structuralist / Poetry for Nonquitters that a text density detector onboard a balloon flying around a laptop in Bryant Park had recorded an excess number of high-energy text erasures and their opposites, error message appropriations, sailing through hyperspace. Text density, they conceded, could have been created by a previously undiscovered poetics algorithm, the magnetized spinning remnant of a unitary creative output, blasting nearby hyperspace with metaphoric force. But, they say, a better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that texts are being spit out of rhetorical fireballs created by dark poetics theorems colliding and annihilating one another over the web.

"We cannot disprove that the signal could come from a singlteon object, such as an imprisoned poet playing on her keyboard. We also cannot eliminate a dark poetics annihilation explanation based upon current data," said John P. Waffle of Lafayette Community University, Chair of the Andrei Codrescu Worst Case Study Team, adding, "Whichever way it goes, for us it is exciting. I mean, it's so close to antipathies."

Our treasure is sunk. We were amazed, once, at all the money. We thought it ours, Oyster Harbor, Burningseed Farms, Eelfleet Grove, our entwined enclaves no more. The McMansion shuttered, now, a career punctured, a sullen lifestyle deferred, Twilight: eight years of deepening malevolence and road rage at dusk, living and hand-wringing with W., and here's where we lose sight of a bowl of irony and riches and a lighter time, reduced to an audience with our mirrored essence, the chilled gimmick of our inner teenage vegetarian vampirism. Well, half-vegetarian — we drink only the discounted blood of nonhumans for the moment, ha ha, since we've gone through a lot of money, and since the lovers among us still hanker to appear manly and acceptable to a widening, treasured demographic, prurient moms and their frenzied daughters, and we don't want to seem too harsh, except when holding them out of reach from the other vampires. And while everyone can stumble, and a few sink now and then into reduced circumstances, the failure to consummate a redeeming relationship is not a problem. Repeat, deferment is business, and there's a sequel. We'll keep the sweetest children for now, that is, we'll keep the best of what life offers, the youngest females, unperched, close to our pulse, and poke them tenderly like endangered kittens. And — sure — there's still the itch — we can't sublimate — for cougar flesh, dog fluids, and more infusions of cash. Savings and loans that paid for all this look more and more ghoulish under the froth of the new rules, the new austerity in mirrors. But terrific news, it won't add up in the end.

Alan Davies, appreciated.

Poetics archivist Erika Staiti has amassed in pdf format a month of e-list posts and blog entries about Issue 1 (the 3,785-page anthology compiled by text generator Erika, no relation, assisted by Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, and Vladimir Zykov). Staiti calls this collection Issue 2 / BPL, introduced in html at her site saidwhatwesaid.com/. If you want to access the Issue 2 part (blog material) and if the code to the pdf link has not yet been corrected, change the capital "I" of Issue in the address- / tool-bar to lower case, issue.

There's an Ocean's 13. Released last year. I didn't remember until last weekend when I caught ten minutes in the middle, on Showtime. The heist is heists spread out like dozens of gloved hands arranged in a meanwhile of dialog and repetitive motion, many of the same crew as 12 and 11, just less group thinking so fewer people get hurt, less to do. I'm guessing. If I have more consciousness to dispose of, I'll catch the beginning or the end, and be more qualified to speak.

Just so you know, we've been holding our tongues here at the pantaloons politics cubicle. All two minds of us. (We of two minds...) On one hand (switching metaphors), we'd like to keep cutting Barrack Obama his due of slack, on the other, we haven't kicked the Rahm Emanuel Deliberation Flu. For a week we've suffered a relapse of public vetting-of/kvetching-over Hillary Clinton. Why didn't the ethics/probity section of the Transition Team find out what it needs about Bill and lay down its operational procedures for Bill's future travels and fundraising in advance of leaking that Hillary has been tapped for secretary of state? Yes, the negotiations were given away thanks to two Secret Service contingents converging when Obama and Clinton met in Chicago last week. Reporters follow such convergence, we observe, biting our tongues. The scold goes on, important as it is, get this process stuff out of the way before the sit down. Now Eric Holder's name has been leaked as Obama's attorney general, contingent, again, on a final round of background checks. Leaking names with conditionals is mid-size corporate. We'd like to get out of these clothes, stop commuting down the same mile of numbered highway, because it's tedious in ways that gearing up to run an empire is not.

It's just a matter of exposure. He and you. There is no way to see that I'm not there for you on the surface...heck, it's inexhaustible. I so love a rain interchanged like paperwork for sex. All you need is lines in the shirt and there it goes, painful physically, underexposed, muffled, wearing a fat suit in a splat within an hour-long set of splats. Countersinking. And what I want is screams at the top of thoughts, gobs of them that head off in it-ain't-kind pursuit till my eyes melt in sorrow and core circuitry, closer to Bob. No, keep repeating shit and I imagine your face everywhere, almost measurable, rubbed with a rabbit's foot as you fork over a jacuzzi of techniques and more party organizers to kill the world for me or a civilian equivalent plucked from a crowd of browsers in ways that have worked before, and before that, because you want us to unfold in an original manner, walk on the beach, and manifest a force of habit. So we can stay and be the best and spread the plan wearing pumps and a day's growth of beard making it new wherever... And owing to your interest we can constitute a date. Of a sort. A sort that works only when you move your tongue technically — the satchel comes undone and we're fucking around — you're very cute, nice middle long blonde hair covered by a shroud that frays and unspools, and it's great we can get others to pay for it but eventually you know Bob says we can't be serious so we lose. A Nair of mayhem. Discreet to a porpoise. It's funny that way.

In fact, if I see him again I'll ask him if I can Nair his balls.

There's nothing Ian Fleming-ish about the new James Bond. At first sight he doesn't look or feel Oxbridge or University College or particularly British, for that matter. Squint and Daniel Craig passes for the early release of Vladimir Putin, Russia's black belt of state. At rest, Craig comes across informally stiff but moves like a killing triathlete, tough northern Euro, Slavic, Nordic, possibly Norman, so by a long stretch, British or Irish, of average height, lower middle class. (I like Craig playing to his hoodie phenotype, a brainy middle manager amidst a London cocaine syndicate in Layer Cake, a crazed son of an Irish-American mobster in Road to Perdition.) When Craig crossed over first to play Agent 007 in Casino Royale, I paid no attention to how substantially different in stature he is from previous Bonds. This is the 21st century iteration, after all, chillier, yet vulnerable to the core as Craig in Casino falls hard for another M16 operative Vesper Lynd (played by Ursula Andress), a double agent who betrays Bond before she commits suicide to save him. The new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, allows Craig to settle scores related to that loss and betrayal, noticeably showcasing his lithe, martial physicality versus a fresh, much more ironic and suave adversary, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Greene is a Francophone meanie who plots to take over the world's natural resources, regime by regime, coup by coup. Ian Fleming's problem set, then, is familiar; M16 saves the planet from continental turpitude; but the magnets are reversed, textures rubbed raw. The Quantum Bond never sweet-talks his women, never outthinks his villains, except when he stays alive to waste them. Craig's cleverness is endurance, bleeding and sweating, cheek and brow gunked up heroically through chase after hellish chase (whose chutes-and-ladders causalities and hand-held cinematography, all together, start to show). A good amount of the action goes south to Bolivia, replicating a couple of luxury rooms in La Paz as well as slums, a sinkhole, and desert, the antipodes of the classic pool sides, chalets, and baccarat tables of many 007 films. This new enterprise seems to have gone to a less sane, grittier south, so to speak, with M16 cutting Bond loose, seeming to side with Greene for a few crucial moments near the end. The amorality extracted in struggle over finite resources will do that to governments, even the British one. Two minor characters, CIA types, sold out to Greene an hour earlier, of course. In perhaps the only true twist out of Fleming, M16 regains its moral superiority to the Americans by bringing Bond back into the fold, double-crossing Greene. It's quite all right. He's French.

Up next, books that go under rewrite as you read them, that flip genres overnight, that change your mind while you sleep.

Lexapro, Effexor. Whatever antidepressants are stockpiled at Treasury it's clear that Henry Paulson Jr. is as ungainly and opaque today as he has been throughout the financial meltdown. I'm amazed TV jocks and comedians have yet to pick up on his weirdly Princetonian-Frankenstein furrowed demeanor, overarching the podium, spitting out the vaguest and least comforting platitudes as he dips into our till, this is no silver bullet. And this is no James Rubin. Treasurer Rubin, if you think back to the Clinton administration, specialized in translating investment bank speak into well-formulated assertions and alternatives for politicians and an alert public to weigh, pro or con. But now we're fighting off Paulson Seasonal Affective Syndrome, finding ourselves lurching forward and back just like the Treasury. As taxpayers we're all cavalier and clueless as to which mammoth institutional mouths to stuff with billions and more billions from the federal bailout pantry/ATM, the one with our very names on it. Meanwhile, between dosages of Effexor and Lexapro, let's chew over the nutty prospect of American Express converting itself into a bank so it can get some. Some of ours. Why not me, why not me?? you may ask. If you're feeling agitated, see if this works. I propose the government issue paperwork immediately to facilitate an individual or, at least, an individual taxpayer to change herself into a bank. As banks we would be able to line up at Paulson's pantry/ATM and get some, too. Some of ours.

Favelas in this country are de-centralized failures fading into abstractions. An odd parallelism, I think, to our social administration that should have eliminated poverty decades ago. There are, first, the small town and rural poor, totally dispersed, spread all over, particularly Appalachia, out of earshot, and out of sight of the supernumerary chattering classes. Second, housing projects are also out of sight in most big cities, thrown up in the margins on underpoliced transitional blocks of once-industrial or proto-working-class sectors, places where The New York Times will never be delivered to your door. Being poor has been turned into a set of excoriating, dismissive metaphors for peripheral topics in the financial news, usually a wee fraction of our media intake. This has shifted a bit, given the numbing but no less pornographic sensation of mounting foreclosures (Where do these ex-homeowners go? This could be me!) and failing investment banks (Where do these ex-billionaires go? This could be me!). Beyond the folks like me there are the nonborderline poor, many who have never stepped into a bank, never had the means to apply for a mortgage on a place they might one day own. The catastrophe that was New Orleans after Katrina made a few of these poor visible. For a few days.

Expert social administration. It's been a while. On the heels of the failed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. changing the rules of his own bailout plan, announcing today that he was backing away from buying mortgage assets in favor of a second round of capital injections into financial institutions, the question is, Have we had much administration lately of communal rights and access, much less expert administration? I want to cut off the lavish entitlements granted by legislators and their administrators to credit and securities markets, not just the billions in bailout cash, but the phoned-it-in usury bylaws underpinning ballooning mortgages, fees and late payments, student loan interest, pay day loans, along with a pile of loopholes favoring institutions and countless wily intangibles like derivatives. Charging interest beyond legal limits... has an antique, pull-at-your-heart, subterranean ring to it, since our administrators have set in law new, higher limits far beyond what had been allowed historically. Current legislation enshrines tautologies that materialized as visual commonplaces in New Orleans after Katrina: the victims act guilty, wait in line, play by the rules, get fucked. Louisiana and especially the lower delta were formerly purple hold-outs. With the exodus, dispersion, and ultimate de-centralizing of blacks and of the poor, Louisiana now joins the sprawl of poor dotting Appalachia as the southern tip of the only predominantly red country left. This has been administrated.

News. Genuine news.

Plantation. To wield a conceptual brush is to terrorize, even if your motivating injunctions steer clear of violence or unregulated emotion. Terror here is a poetry's swift, certain, nontrivial insertion through a hole and/or through the self-negation in certitude and flatulent controversy, such as with Basho's disproving that human sound cannot transform animal to mineral, or with Duchamp's counter-ploy to the proposition that men's room accoutrement belong in their dimly illuminated place.

Controversy, like injunction, comes to us frequently or commonly as back-formation, a provisional ethos after the conceptual stroke. We were constrained by the profound assumption, for example, that a play requires the tone and the stage be set in many more than five words. We were tacitly sure of this, marginalized more until we read Beckett's new direction: A country road. A tree.

The opposite formation also obtains. A conceptualist can enter the game with exhaustive desire to alter something semantically or take it into something else. Name a thing and you give birth, rename it and you bestow to it an ecology of resonance and history.

The first sexual union to be called marriage was and is a conceptual stroke. George Romero still fills a corner of rural PA with puns and the seeds of social rebellion, which he dubs The Night of the Living Dead, subsequently inflecting perpetual, if unintended, disappointment upon Republican presidential campaigns. Kenneth Goldsmith names his splendid e-archive of avant achievements Ubuweb, fully adjoining samples of mostly 20th-century texts, visuals, video and sound files to the legend and goodwill of Ubu Roi, Dadaist Alfred Jarry's masterpiece of appropriation. (Jarry's are samplings, as well, pioneering compilations of Shakespeare and 19th-century Polish burlesque.) Moving on, if one renames the e-archive "Plantation," one aggregates to the conscious plane the dual status of Goldsmith's property — both a techno-field of borrowed resources, i.e., conceptual specimens, and a material field of those holdings. The renaming conceit carries on while monthly curators re-till the leasehold, hired as cognitive guest workers to mediate the fruits into micro-combinations of artifacts sorted by taste. Plantation is just one random attribute, one name for extensive project-use, a geography of others' properties with unlimited prospect. Our collective history is replete with these extremities. For half a millennium the two continents of the New World have carried the first name of a Florentian cartographer, attributed as though by accident as among the first to compile legends and maps of others' land.

A country road. A tree.

— Samuel Beckett



What's conceptual? Search for a way without mixing with the dead, yet removed from the living, Seneca's words relieved of the temporary futility of having to explain further. The conceptual is a stroke that works, or ought to result, from an injunction. Make the frog water — Basho. Proceed (a) as if to reify the urinal then (b) kill (a) — Duchamp. Colorize shifts in national passion — as above.

Nobody's a bystander, innocent, or other. If your search leads to emphasizing process you will foreground conditional practice, merging so-called cognitive work with artifact production. Practice is split into two likely domains, one where cognition will mediate (plan and organize) forms for production, and the other where temporary protocols are set up and enforced to achieve automated materials and assemblies.

There is no guarantee, however, that processual emphasis will yield a conceptual aritfact. A critical analysis will turn to the first order or injunction (or desiratum) as a key element in a ratio between what is conceived and how.

Transition, Day Three. President-elect Obama's first news conference did not meet the gold standard.

(a) ...we have to mount a international effort...

(b) ...President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I to meet with him and...

(c) ...I want to move with all deliberate haste...

(d) ...In terms of speaking to former presidents, I have spoken to all of them that are living. Obviously, President Clinton. I didn't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances.

We're watching and listening to Obama, because he is an alluring figure in speech, and because we need to.

Nearly perfect as a campaigner, Obama has not yet taken on the mantle of presidential rhetor. These faux pas signal not everything is secure. Surely, (a) and (c) are oddities, unexpected slips of the tongue. Haste is not wrong, outright, but connotations of rashness and overeagerness have to be avoided. (The phrase Obama wants would be deliberate speed.) The (b) construction is anxious hypercorrection. *Michelle and me were invited...Michelle and I.* Educated native speakers of English master the rules governing use of the objective case by puberty, and we apply these rules if we are serious about being (perceived as) in command.

The set of phrases under (d) is off-putting. In written form the utterance is syntactically conventional even if semantically obtuse. The video transcript fills in what's happening while Obama reviews a thought in process, awkwardly formed, that is, all of them that are living. As he continues, more slowly enunciating Obviously, President Clinton... we imagine Obama is thinking recursively, speaking internally to himself, under his oral speech — what the aitch am I putting out there? — having recognized the redundancy of that are living. At this point, right after the long, slower stretch Obviously, President Clinton... Obama might have gone in a different direction. He could have laughed off his earlier phrase that are living. He might have ignored his redundancy altogether, or brilliantly tied together his contact with living presidents with his reading dead ones like Lincoln. Resorting to Nancy Reagan and séances was amusing but also embarrassing. (Obama had to call Mrs. Reagan after the news conference to apologize. It would be instructive to have that transcript!)

Another thing. The stagecraft was déjà vu, hokey. A dozen or so financial wizards, all but Robert Reich towering over squat Rahm Emanuel who stood in the foreground, akimbo and a bit jittery, to Obama's left, Joe Biden in the foreground to the right, with a big apple pie grin. The silhouette affected was that of a heathen menorah whose candles were lit at random, creating an asymmetry of waxed pillars and stumps.

On the other hand, Obama's first q. & a. as president-elect outshone anything that George W. has put on for the last eight years. Substantively, Obama was measured, cautious. But let's hold him to the gold standard, which, as recorded by modern media, is purely Democrat: FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton — three presidents who were never tongue tied and who knew how to put on a show. (There's also the chrome plate standard of Ronald Reagan who showed very well but said awful things, almost continuously.) To look forward to a president who communicates forcibly will make the coming months less gruesome, perhaps a clearer trajectory from the bottom, now, to the irresistible obscenities of a more prosperous and smarter future.

This comes just in time to usher in Obamaesthetics.

ON: Contemporary Practice

Taylor Brady ON Yedda Morrison
Brandon Brown ON Dana Ward
Jason Christie ON Michael deBeye
CAConrad & Brenda Iijima ON CA Conrad & Brenda Iijima
Michael Cross ON Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan ON Brenda Iijima
Eli Drabman ON Michael Cross
Alan Gilbert ON DJ/Rupture
Rob Halpern ON Taylor Brady
Jen Hofer & Sawako Nakayasu ON Jen Hofer & Sawako Nakayasu
Andrew Levy ON Arakawa and Gins
Edric Mesmer ON Lauren Shufran and/or Mark Dickinson
Tenney Nathanson ON Beverly Dahlen
Richard Owens ON Dale Smith
Tim Peterson ON kari edwards
Andrew Rippeon ON C.J. Martin
Kyle Schlesigner ON Emily McVarish
Jonathan Skinner ON Julie Patton
Dale Smith ON Hoa Nguyen
Alli Warren & Suzanne Stein ON Alli Warren & Suzanne Stein
Katie Yates ON Belle Gironda

Ignorance unmasked but we missed it. After the fact we learn McCain's ad team conceived of, and then nixed, another celeb slapdown. This was one more pseudo-concept to intimate how McCain's opponent is both lightweight and racially threatening, a split-screen affair w/ the president-elect shaking stuff in a parkland off the campaign trail and Ellen DeGeneres going for it back in the studio. But the team saw something else — the highest denomination of counterideology?? — which even they couldn't handle. The ad was shot down, because the sight of a black man dancing with a lesbian was deemed too provocative.

Transition, Day One. Unimpressive first step. Leaking or semi-announcing Rahm Emanuel as likely chief of staff before he's finished 'thinking it over.' Next step less impressive. Letting Emanuel semi-deliberate in front of cameras. Doesn't speak forcefully, doesn't portend excellence. And excellence is the new decoder buzz, right? Anyway, go to the next line.

Best line. There is absolutely no diva in me. Just think what it would mean to have Sarah Palin to pay attention to for four years. An organized spectacle of vacuum-packed salmon and boiled eggs, without a predicate.

Sobering.

Burp.

Hoooooooooray...

I'm not ok with a 67-year-old poodle handler from Marconi Park passing judgment on Obama's socialist policies. Put this in the heard-enough-propaganda-to-be-dangerous category. And why haven't the Obama people counterpunched w/ videos of McCain back in 2000 explaining how higher taxation of the wealthy is fair? Why, in other words, have the O's let McCain climb back using the stale graduated tax-and-spend argument? Finally, in my last vent over the campaign before 11/4, have you noticed over the weekend various republican factions, including the most hateful Dick Morris, put out their respective versions of the Reverend Wright attack? Incredibly, this morning there are democratic pundits still giving McCain credit for taking the high road, not playing the race card. Make that, not playing it until the nth hour in the battlegrounds PA, OH, IN. The national polls are encouraging, but they reflect Obama's lopsided pluralities in the Northeast and California. That reputed ground game of the O's just better be primed. I'm looking 8:30 PM or so on Tueday to VA and Philadelphia vote counts for some relief. (Meanwhile, I'll be steaming.) If the O's exit Phillie 500,000+ they will probably get PA. And if McCain loses VA, that will just about clinch it.

You stole my nose. Someone did. Curious where it went.

Short pieces (first appearing here as drafts) on Carter Ratcliff, Laynie Browne, Brian Kim Stefans, in Talisman 36/37.

Overheard outside the sembutsujo, Go frickin meditate before I slash you.