An appalling, transgressive feat. Governor and chief of staff echo against the blur of ramshackle politics. (Threatening, thus compelling sympathy toward Tribune Co., no less. See below.)

Sooner rather than later we're probably going to wonder what to read for daily news since the number of reliable, inarguably uncompromised print sources is shrinking. Twenty-five years ago one of two international newspapers of record in English, The Times of London, was folded into the News Corp., militant enforcer of oligarchy masquerading as a media holding company, headed by Rupert Murdoch. Two years ago, the premier U.S. financial paper, The Wall Street Journal, was similarly annexed by News Corp. Independent but stranded, for now, the other English-language world newspaper of record, The New York Times is said to top Murdoch's list of next must-do acquisitions. Meantime, The New York Times Corp. is weighing options such as mortgaging new headquarters in Manhattan to shore up finances as circulation and advertising revenues continue to spiral down. Like News Corp., if on a smaller, less provocative scale, The New York Times Corp. has been amassing other U.S. news properties in the southeast, California, and New England, and the results for readers are hardly benign. Once a second-tier national paper along with The Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Los Angeles Times, a few others — The Boston Globe has shifted focus more to regional rather than national coverage, and operates fewer bureaus with fewer reporters to compete with its owner of 15 years, The New York Times. There have been parallel downshifts in staff and coverage in most second-tier newspapers. Yesterday, the Tribune Co., holding company of both The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times filed for bankruptcy. This is bad news for newspaper readers everywhere. News blogging and cable broadcasting supplement and in some cases complement newspaper publication. But without a contest among first- and second-tier newspapers, that is, with print news manufactured by only a handful of holding companies, the essential documentation of our daily contents (our material satisfaction and discontents) turns radically deterministic.

It's not the most wonderful time of the year, btw. That would be six to seven months from now.

ready to marry
      the chopped
            off head

— CA Conrad

~~

A fear is haunting (whatever remains of) the contemporary Left: the fear of directly confronting state power. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone directly taking it over, are immediately accused of being stuck in the "old paradigm": the task today is to resist state power by withdrawing from its scope, subtracting oneself from it, creating new spaces outside its control.

— Savoj Žižek

For those, you, perhaps, and I, who are not up on how the divide can be played, today, Deeana Fong's pre-read video is exemplary. Divide? One part social mainstream, one part cool as nimble-existence-in-hell, although most of that cool is staging. (That's what Ron S. suggests, I think, in enforcing the divide between the avant and social mainstream — there is a poetry that's trail mix, so rhetorically vacuum sealed and narratively palatable anyone with a few years of advanced English in high school or better can crack it open and have some.) Fong's tv staging? Let's do it right here by the Bustelo in this I-could-care-about-food galley. The gestalt is to look urbanely offhand and sound normal. (You decide about the boyfriend's audible glee, clapping, etc. in the background.) The exposition, all around, is let's-not-make-this-elevated-or-fussy, but gawd let's get it done non-vulnerably. There's plenty of staging in the writing, too, where it's countable. A third of the way, when Fong says "Tell me about it," it's kinda clear that jumps in tone are deployed to signify irony and distance about, you know, every day for every one on the planet. When she says "You're much smarter than I am," Fong means at least a dozen things, socially. Sorry, "Let us celebrate with a vegan pot roast" is too domestic-witchy-much for me to swallow. And it's not St. Mark's Street. Just "the things I feel for you day in and day out" drives me crazy. Batwing crazy. (You decide. That will make things much clearer.)

Ted Greenwald
3
Cuneiform 2008

Here are the bizarre details, page 25, second stanza (of two).

Is it Peggy or Sue
I think I love you
Looking worldlessness
Remind me what's your name

Four lines capture the crucial goings-on in Ted Greenwald's 29th collection of poems: the pleasant complacency of clichéd language is upended, in this case in the deliberate problematizing of early rock 'n roll iconography, splitting chaste Peggy Sue in two; there is the shameless rhyming of Sue with the next line also ripped from the r 'n r songbook as is the last line; and there's the masterfully silly Line 3 that spins our entire cultural orientation on its heels, forcing speculation that the unstably-named Peggy, Sue or, in fact, Peggy Sue is not only worldless but looking into and out of the eerie, pathetic State of The Worldless. Welcome back.

And if you think page 25 is a lucky pick, turn to page 27, second stanza (of two).

Going to make a difference
Greens, cooling off
Projectile confidence
With birdsong

The first line is again boilerplate, a bloated participial (or gerundive) phrase uttered millions of times an hour; the second line, culinary description or acute art speak — either way greens are consonant with the brash birdsong in the fourth line. Once more, that odd Line 3 rips the 'scene' open, pitching its payload our way. It's not always so obvious that the third line re-orders each stanza, but frequently this is what happens, supporting one interpretation of the title 3. More satisfying is Ron Padgett's idea, blurbing that 3 "takes the mind in at least three different directions simultaneously..."

Another basis for the title is that the collection has three parts. Poems cited above are from "Going Into School That Day," pieces whose lengths alternate between eight lines on right pages and 14 lines on left pages, and which borrow "words of self-described redemption spoken by the late Salvador Agron," as Greenwald explains on his copyright page. (Agron was a gang member who killed two teenagers in Hell's Kitchen.) The two following sections contain pieces of parallel discourse strategy in different formats, "Anyway" with six-line verses, "Dawn On" with poems of 27 lines each. The language in the later sections is as watchful ("Looking") of the everyday and as defiantly juxtaposed as that in the first section. Here are opening lines to the first poem in "Dawn On."

Dawn on
As, iffy
Be so kind, looks on
The clear light     Friendlies
Embody the money, short for
Inscribe on to forever iris inside clasp
Suggestions unhinge putting something on if
Embody the body all on about
Suggestions unhinge iris inside clasp...

The longer pieces in "Dawn On" allow Greenwald to problematize a sweep of communally mediated ironies, such as "clear light     Friendlies," and pivotal thought experiments engaging repetitions in language and implosions in meaning as with the shifts in the verbs embody, unhinge. This first poem continues such repetitions, doing it blithely, "bubble," "happily," "light," "live," and this: "Love most about muse excuse / Come across, bait and switch ... Come across muse excuse..." These experiments are not over and may never get resolved, a State of The Worldless that Greenwald nevertheless kisses if not marries, since it's all of a projectile, a "fussball bubble / Nod happily feet many language." The invite is out there, according to Greenwald, "The clear light looks on..."

Angela Genusa, who blogs at Fiddling While Rome Burns, has a hardnosed response to my consuming wares of the APA (see the next post below). She writes —

Take into consideration that these statistics also include alcohol abuse. And that "psychiatric disorders" are now as commonly diagnosed as the common cold.

The APA is merely a PAC looking after of its own interests and those of its stockholders, namely Big Pharma.

Time for a two-way nomenklatura. First, I admit taking a drink now and then is sickness, so the shrinks have precision on their side. My catching a cold often is a part of it if not the whole problem. Booze, immodium, there's a song I never liked so I suspend its instrumentality. And it's hard not to trust a profession that's less self-interested than the humanists who invented Trojans and pharmaceuticals to put them on with, other than shrinks, that is. What most of us refuse to dance to is the (...cold sweat) fact that only by delving deeply into our populist cynicism will we redeem the bacchanalia of self-destruction. Deeply on the surface, that is.

The surge at home. Most poetry appears tame when you consider: Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year. From Archives of General Psychiatry, Dec. 2008.

Vanessa Place
La Medusa
University of Alabama 2008

Antifreeze in the desert. Also in the dessert. Vanessa Place's La Medusa bubbles up from the most bugged bedroom imaginable, offering itself "sopped and blotted" to "no palms, though there's still Gypsys," to "no giddyup," to no "misappelled Felicia, clasping her troubled and ample bosom," to no fault in the least, hey "Puta" — this is a "change up" novel smacked with vipers, "motherfuckin Ice Man." How or why didn't we know LA language, our language, would shrink William Burroughs to one of those diamondback bargain seekers snaking around Best Buy, trampling security to save on a flat screen, angling and protesting mightily "to cheat the Fates" alongside "German oder Korean women whose accents were thick and odd as almond paste who tried to catch us shoplifting but never could." If you have designs on a big poetics narrative, now, you'll need outsized characters porting tv's like sacks of manure, packing a Tarot deck, full medical care, and holding their pets close like "almost-purple boas" that bring their own island memories for the drugged legend parts "well-gauzed in twilight and sea mist most of the time, which kept the Gorgons hidden from passersby 'til it was too late for them." A "constant feeding" of androgyny fortifies the muscular constrictors and their big sisters. Astonishing, a saxophone, ice cream, and sex-as-a-commodity figure prominently. When it comes down to cases, it's a simple story, "Prima was proud of her snakes..."

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@...
Blackbox Manifold Invitation A Houen A.Houen@sheffield....

Today's imperatives. quit your boring job "Major Success" no-reply@m...
Look wealthy for just a fracti... Walter Evans Peterskipjack...
Bank of America - register for... "Demo account-Bank of America"...
Get All Meds. Any Meds Yo... "Beverley Pool" 4must@acce...
Get a WAL*MART 1,000 Do... Your Email Eas Selected sa...
Kool Test and Keep A DELL L... Laptop sales@aidwithbills....
Order a Ph.D Mai Alfaro KarynhymnGallo@...
Congratulations! get your shar... "Government Bail Outs For Joe ...
Offer Aluminum Material and pr... Ben ben@xinxiangalu.cn
dont wait to be huge Guy Fleming Armandobolshev...
Erase wrinkles and ... "Ageless Institute" no-rep...
Claim Your SAMS Club $1... Claims Dept sales@giigywhi..
Never be flaccid again "Darwin Calhoun" Nequilate...
Impress your girlfriend and bu... Vito Koch CleosteinerHatfi...
Surprise your Child with a Per... "North.Pole" north.pole@ob...
Colon Cleanse "Colonmed" xolonmep@blackl...
Landscape Poetry Anthology "Longhouse, Publishers & Books...

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.