Two-faced Janus has exited with a sneer pointed in the direction of bright persons of certain merit and acquired outlook, cut-and-pasters, textual connectivists, and other dedicated tech practitioners of The Craft. Irate avantists had to persevere for up to an hour Saturday without recourse to Google as their usual, trusty search engine / comp bot / wing man broke down this morning, issuing bogus safety alerts and dead hyperlinks to hungry appropriation artists, e-poets in need of stump words, and anyone else looking for a fast fix of text off the web. "I don't know how I can take a risk right now without Google," said Emile Durkheim while the search engine went offline, "I have that sinking feeling going from plagiarized distortion to distorted plagiarism. You know, plagiarism in quotes." Durkheim, an e-list updater and, along with his life partner W. S. F. Pickering, author of innumerable pamphlets, t-shirts, and graphic hand towels developed from mining the internet, is prominent among a growing number of arts bookers and administrators dependent on internet tools not only to communicate but also to be. Tension lifted by Saturday afternoon once Google pulled strings and re-fired tubes giving new hope to the discourse-starved aggragated in all quarters and sectors on the planet where WiFi and everything coming through it are person-given rights of artistic personhood.

I'm marking the update, along with the comment box and links to four additional posts by Gabe Gudding, as archival material in the mon-Bourdieu-outdiscourses-you ______. (The blank requires your filling in a noun phrase, such as translational kerfluffle.) All together, the update contributes to the debate about everything phoned in in poetics. As does this from Anne Boyer.

Paid to be friendly.
At the center an oculus. The I.
Moving forward.

I admire Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale for it's serious humoresque, not entirely self-knowing. Much of the wit submerged in cunning queasiness, vapors of unbalanced tones and transparent methods, it finds a ratio of constitutive disharmonies, method and tone sticking out unobsequiously to enfold showmanship within an immediate and addictive bearing on the present. V. Joshua Adams captures impressions like these and raises only a small measure of doubt about their utility in Chicago Review.

Worth a mention. Segue Reading w/ Eileen Myles, Rodrigo Toscano, Christina Strong, Laura Sims, Lawrence Griffin, Rick Burkhardt, Thom Donovan, others. Launch of Cannot Exist #4. The notice reads, in part, that the zine, edited by Andy Gricevich, is "devoted to overlap between politics, philosophy, and poetry." Who doesn't need overlap?

Bowery Poetry Club
Sat., Jan. 31, 4 to 6, 308 Bowery

Internet Aliens

Ballet's focus keeps an eye out
Watching us spin like sentience
Stuck in the happy medium

Sweetness itself catching everything
To give cause to baby Mozart
Squawking about cognition in opera

Who's moved parts from minor projects
Observing very little community,
Clumsifying long hours of letting be

Freezing hands into claws, which
Is why he should reserve dissonance
To guard shapes of light and volumes

Nested within a keyboard to determine
The performance.

The Washington Post will kill its Sunday book pull-out in a couple of weeks. Further proof of the diminution of print media. Artless reduction for figure and ground, newspapers and books.

To recap. The gotcha moments. Banter about an e-list, some of whose members lay claim to procedures and attitudes that thousands* already got. The commonplace as ribald proprietorship. Steps one, two, three, four, five.

*Gabe Gudding suggests the range is dozens. Gabe may be right if we were to stipulate procedures in sets or as an ensemble to describe a process, but the broader point is web-mining is a discernible practice for a number of poets, not just a few on an e-list or two; using the internet to cull vocabulary, shift tonal registers, elaborate and emend text has been a widely adapted process feature for a number of years. As for attitudes, there is no critical evidence that argues for anything new or exclusive in this regard.

George Schneeman, RIP.

Are they saying the same thing? Chögyam Trungpa intones First thought, best thought; George Balanchine, Don't think, just do. Both mean and don't mean what they say in specific contexts. The meaning / no-meaning problem buries itself in applications: a first thought in Trungpa's belief system is already problematic in that thinking (or not-thinking), even when it's "first," impedes being (and other incidents not attached to being); while Balanchine wants physical movement to function over, far above mental representation of movement, but one thinks on the way up to execution. Both statements — first thought, don't think — are fine examples of the layers in which meaning deploys non-meaning and, of course, simultaneous perception of opposite outcomes.

George Perle, RIP.

Dream within limits. What do we do here at pantaloons? We tease out opinions on how language gets done in poetics, poetry, politics, other redeeming or nutty enterprises. We ply language for several affects. We're not so interested in dreams. But once in a while we can't help ourselves, like this morning when we woke from a flash within a dream of such gruesome practicality we were distressed. I was, somehow, in search of tortured performance glamour, visiting a nice sports-transition store. No deeper pretext or prelude. I am in this nice, really dark place. The lights were out. But there I was casually shopping along with other guys. The shop was like Under Armor where mannequins, staff, and customers match up wearing comfortable, form-fitting shirts and sweats and sometimes jackets pulled a quarter inch back, almost off their collarbone, not to flex but to suggest upper body development. In other words, there are steadfast figures and outlines but nothing shows. The men have eyes and the mannequins don't move. That kind of carefully lunatic store. What am I doing here in this economy? That was what I was thinking as I picked out five pairs of socks. A pointillist grey pair, two pair in enlarged, graduated chocolate pixels, and a couple of pairs in black, one with a hint of a blacker digital plaid overlay. Everything was going to blend with my other clothes. (So what was the point, acquistion-wise?) The total came to under $200. Dreamers can translate the effects of geopolitical transparency into overlapping layers of desire, textured fantasy, aimless expectation. We call this shopping.

Recent film notes.

Burn after Reading

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Milk

Quantum of Solace

Rachel Getting Married

Slumdog Millionaire

Twilight

Wall-e

You cannot outlast us. That's the sound bite. Obama's been reading intelligence briefs and signals to us, sternly, there's more mayhem to come. He's not frightening us, he's stating the position clearly. Terrorists are out there and we have them surrounded, we win no matter, no apologies for what we are or how we live. A male dare packed into somber oratory about reclamation and the journey. At the moment we thought he might soar, Obama chose to tamp down the language. Emphasis on work, government that works. Responsibility. Common dangers. Swill and blood stains in the snow. George Washington crossing the Delaware for Christ's sake. Icy currents for four years.

~~

Competing egos from Harvard Law. Chief Justice Roberts overstepping bounds, Are you ready...senator? Roberts was not gracious, interrupting Obama when he began the oath at a point where Roberts had paused, forcing Obama to start over. Roberts twisting the word order of the middle part, misplacing the adverb faithfully, administering the oath without the text, a fabulously flawed performance.

~~

Senators Byrd and Kennedy, dueling invalids.

~~

A review stand that emptied well before the middle of the inaugural parade. Obama, his wife, and Biden stood alone. On television you could read the names of the guests that fled the cold. Signs on chair backs for "The Joint Chiefs" were prominent.

--

Beyond discussion: inaugural poem, Rick Warren's Christian invocation, Joseph Lowery's racy benediction, John Williams's schmaltzy "Air and Simple Gifts" (though it was good to hear the players, particularly Anthony McGill).

Improbable hat, Aretha.

The incision continues in this vein.

Look, I like several aspects (I think they're aspects) of what's being assailed here, but I'm roped in by what's absorbingly expressed: "Everyone on the internet is feeding the same machine." Here's this week's most direct argument for collectivity, maybe the winner in the direct argument category for all of January. Our time and our functioning within it, we should remember, no matter how adaptively understated or how closely observed, are imaginary. Shamans, dead-end kids re-inscribed as dead-enders? I don't know, maybe that's my crowd. I'm filled up with nervously charged prosaism. Hard-drinking, thrice-kissed.

Sexual dynamism. It's a quarterback problem.

My takes on 13 guys raising temps at Joe Brainard's Pyjamas: 1. Seth Green… cute when he cries, yet sorry, no. 2. Daniel Bedingfield. He's only good looking. "I don't want to run away." Really! 3. Seth MacFarlane, ok, the beefcake pattern has been set. Prosperous Midwestern beauty, granted. Nice dialect. 4. Jake Shears. Now you're talking. "I've been playing games since I was five." Ta Dah! 5. Annie Lennox. Her website's latest news is dated 10.03.08. No further comment. 6. Mika. Ok for a virgin. 7. Darren Hayes. Of course. Back to midcountry. Slutty voice. 8. Jamiroquai, much better. Mad scientist type. 9. John Mayer. Right now his singing goes nowhere. Can he learn how to swing inside? Doubt it. I'd like to shave his head and feed him gluten. 10. Lloyd Cole, the missing New York Doll! Bless her. 11. Neil Tennant. Something for seniors. I get it. He's beautiful. 12. Giovanni Ribisi, the best! a scientologist, even! 13. James Van der Beek looks like a model. Head with no moving parts.

The wind corridor — blithe!

A disheartening bone yard of axioms supposes its completion. Angels get stopped and adjust like the pumpkin marsh turned shrine–y meadow. I give up to appease you.