Oh My God, I so adore you. I thought I was alone in my hatred. If you're not reading the comment boxes at DC's blog, you're missing out on what? A quarter of the content.

The day after. Remember video of long lines of voters in Oxford, Ohio back in 04? Oxford the college town it is, left-leaning as it is, Republican county officials had determined fewer voting machines would do just fine. Shot of undergrad in leg warmers reading Kafka at the back of the line, waiting three hours. The story-teller in one gets a sense that like-minded officials across the state and across this great country of hours make decisions like this, one half-yard, one jersey pull, one tackle ruled 'unauthorized' at a time. This has nothing to do with pitiful Democrats, but I can't get this out of my head, J. Dennis Hastert is younger than Mick Jagger, the censored.

Congratulations, referees.

The New York School on the Web [draft]

The Web comprises circulation media with elusive properties pertaining less to physical turf and communities than most other publishing categories. In this sense, the Web operates tangentially to any socio-historicized cohesiveness implicit in the term New York School. This is not to say that New Yorkers are under-represented on the Web, nor that any substantial part of the School is subsumed within more compelling new-media taxonomies. But the idea of a solidified e- or internet-tradition for voices, attitudes, and stylistics unique to New York is at best a decentralized concept, further atomized by a plethora of alternative Web offerings and competing media for delivering them. Continue reading.

To illustrate how the hipster cycle winds down to Starbucks, The Times Zine, for heavens sake, reports dancehall and hip-hop mashing up the "PR sound." That's p as in pronto and r for refill. I've got a new sound for ya. Marshall Reese clearing his nose after Gary Sullivan's first peeoom at Segue. (Reese took over my respiratory system, too. More soon.)

Innovative formulation for divahood (which I am patenting, by the way): vapid and hard to get.

It's fashion week, some analysis? Hilfiger buys his way into an American line with Lagerfeld's name on it. The German Lagerfeld is based in Paris and has nothing to do with the day-to-day at design headquarters in Manhattan. (This is the way Euros outsource themselves.) All the hiilbilly preps and city gun owners wearing their Tommy H have bankrolled the project, fowarding the proceeds to New York and on to the gay salons of the Marais. It's roughly the equivalent of Michael Jackson controlling the Beatles' copyrights, except Lagerfeld has the better end of the deal and the better deal. Poetry equivalents? There are none in terms of money, but just suppose Jorie Graham locked in exclusive rights to the formalism of Clark Coolidge.

I sent a final telegram last week. It read in part, "Let's face it, glamour is for other people."

The poor wear Polo.

Recommended readings this week. Jet Blue gift card required.

Saturday, 4th
Gary Sullivan
Marshall Reese
4:00 PM
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery @ Bleeker
NYC

Sunday, 5th
Michael Gizzi
2:00 PM
Out of the Blue Gallery
160 Prospect St.
Cambridge

Wednesdy, 8th
Tony Towle
Alan Davies
8:00 PM
Poetry Project
E. 10 @ 2 Ave.
NYC

Saturday, 11th
Ange Mlinko
Joe Torra
5:30 PM
PA's Lounge
345 Somerville Ave.
Union Sq.
Somerville

My Life as a Lover
Brandon Brown
Detumescence 2005

Low-key staccato. Pokerfaced farce.

O multiplex of wah-wahs.

Back in 1958 the Monotones hit the charts, the worst sonnet ever, I wonder, wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of love.

There's such an explosive tradition of the sonnet as reverberation you don't have to go back to the 50s. (Not if you don't have to.) You can stop now at 2005, with Brandon Brown's My Life as a Lover with its dozens of scary sonnets removed of entrails, surrounded by surgical prose patches on love, no less, triaged with nitric ammonia, ready to tickle the ivories again, off-tune, of course, thanks to rare gut-replants as icky and stupefying as un-p.c. office pranks down on Human Resources. No, the sonnets are musical entrails with their stuffing slashed: "came so low, cored me, tentatively man." That's Line 2 of the first sonnet. The first sonnet is titled this way: "I began this sonnet which begins: awed din enemy, not vested, called 'we.'" The italic part is also the first line. So starts Brown's din of wah-wahs, begin, began, awed, awed, we, we.

I'm moving very slowly. Guess? Because Brown makes the work day brighter.

The sonnets are grinning and play screwball with what's left of Brown's poker hand. They prove the narrator isn't a shallow sex-as-experience monster, after all, but one of those atonal ephebes who is given to write, at the beginning of part I, "My life has been a book." So this is a memoir, all pianissimo guts, probably overflowing with deep, biblical introspection. (I'm speculating. It's only the first sentence.) Then, two sentences later Brown adds, "The book my life is is the book of my life as a lover." That "is is" reminds us, first, of Everyman who is in the midst of a pre-memoir circumstance. And this coupling of the copula also previews how deep Everyman is prepared to dive. Brown's stratagem for self-inquiry is degraded perfection. He copies out his sonnets so he can talk about them and talk about his talking about them ("is is"). In VI, for instance, after he writes down another sonnet, he lets this out: "There are two principal parts of this sonnet. In the first part my intent is to call upon Love's faithful through the words of the prophet Jeremiah. In the second part I tell of the position in which Love had placed me…" It's a difficult position, needless to say. More so, ties to -- what the.. heck of a job, Brown -- ties to the Old Testament make me want to curl my lips and then cry, especially the Jeremiah part; Jeremiah, like Brown, looked into the depth of tragedy, but stayed pretty clear in expressing it, like Brown: "They could not call my love by any other name than the name they called my love." It's like that stabbing pain in your stomach, it's come back; it's so clear.

And it only gets more degrading the further in you read. VIII ends, or toward the end, it starts: "This sonnet has three parts. The second is like a beggar asking aid from the preceding and following parts, and it begins here: giraffes mediate televised meals." Brown (the beggar, perchance??) has italicized the last clause because it's a quotation between two other parts; italics emphasize this and make his emphasizing it hurt. It is not as clear why giraffes are put in the pathological mix, unless the poet means to imply that mediation these days is a zoo of cross references, some unexpected, but even so everything doesn't quite add up to more than purposeful ennui or, you know, standardized lack of surprise ("televised meals"). If so, then Brown is squeezing out a lot of chuckle-worthy food for thought with metaphor, too.

I'm getting the idea there is no surfeit of love for Brown and he'd take a year off to keep on making love if he didn't have a job to break the routine. It's one idea in the text, between the lines.

Brown makes me guffaw through croissant break thinking about this to the point of exhaustion of love. My love, my love, my love I was loving. Sure, you're smiling now, me too, but those are Brown's words! I merely reordered them! And then there are all those red-handed scenarios, just snippets, like with Madonna and a "Doug" mending the drapery Madonna dresses in until they get hard. Snippets and what else? Brown calls his daydreaming a "wretch." It seems overstated for a good cause. That cause will be the death of Human Resources.

I don't think you should repeat things. And forget your memories. Bring none, he said.

I like a prose of contradictions. It's an element of apposite negotiation, that's spotting a handkerchief with one's self.

Stop heaving a new piece of foodstuff bigly. O Pinker.

My handkerchief's the first to scoop the Swedish hosts by workshopping them into volunteer flotation gear, the video.

The skinny from last night avoids defining anything obscure or complex.

That Cindy Sheehan is a past. Hand me the bio, dislodger.

You began with ballyhoos mugging through a coalition of hipsters, socialites, big money takers in pursuit of sex, happy fliers, and fame. You see a cosmopolitan poetry in production. You really are a narcissist figuring it out, re-examining your own video savagery, italicizing your failures in on-demand luxury, showcasing your trash segments in new media, 18-to-24 ambitions, sympatico programming. Rainbue is determined to be your director, but he's 27. He's going to film school. Say hello to Mr. Gray. Like the Pompidou, Rainbue and Gray are conceived as an ant farm crawling with deeper influence.

You're prosciuto-handed attempting satire, you snooty fashionplate. Perhaps because you've already filmed the rich and overprivileged grotesquely set against a backdrop of photocopies. Rainbue, too, is a rote and vaguely mercenary reshoot of the last few years. Mr. Gray isn't about the ant farm at all. He's a cretin about how cretins are marketed and shown. But the show is something else. Sidewalk sales and trash bins piled high like atliers filled with ticked-off voice, the way poetry is detected casually, ritually putting your life together keeping your distance, from me.

Rakish note, my real love. The exact second you insert the first-person, a falling branch can spike itself five feet into the street, becoming a strafed spectacle you've never seen falling into ungalvinized coherence, and you never will, you art-influenced freak. How do you live if you don't have my part? You try maps to trick a downtown into dull glyphs, child of connectedness. Your face has changed, gross charred abstract of thickening irresolution. For the record, you were paying more attention to the "ten bottoms seeking tops" thing and glossed over the "scat." Porcelain Skull said, Hey.

Consider the account of whores in their spatial recession soft pedaling your abraded weightiness -- their secret is swanky, odious sincerity. Consider this. To do so, you use a complicated rig of recourse and reception which you call a lanyard. I hate you, see? Your perspective is a beautiful coquette's. Not that you care, you unglittery third-candle in a bit role, mind-prying, punning. Your flawed poem un-authorizes shared experience. No one like you has made anything to wake a dream flashing over cascades of spinning wood the size of railroad ties. Me, neither.

Yes, yes, I can verify your friend's report, Shanna, John Ashbery is the positivist among us who knows he's much prettier than Paris Hilton. But look at this. It's just ugly.

Yuri waves the Black Flag over Bravo.

Follow-up to lucipo questions (please stop e-mailing me). One step. One fixes one's irony intake metric, and figures this out: Drew Gardner reading from Petroleum Hat. A stupid thing, wisdom.

I'm feeling incredibly soberized after reading through lucipo archives for Jan. this a.m. (The url can be googled or you can copy it here: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/lucipo/2006-January). Although I skipped around and didn't devote the few more minutes needed to read everything, I just had to grab a shot of bourbon after running into sanctimony X sanctimony (from how many quarters?). How many dimes does it take to respond to, "Money is too important a phenomenon to treat in this fashion"? I bought the Lamborghini to go with my take-out bag. Is that Ok, dad? Or Isaac Mizrahi asks, "What is enough?" No, I'm so stupid, that's Harvey Fierstein.

It's real cheap of me, speaking of money, to single out lucipo. But come on, fellows (it's mostly fellows), stop deserving.

Final version of a piece on Coultas, Mayer and Lyons from Talisman 30-31.

Hey, Buddha, got any other support-niks I can kill.