Queen size. Bite size. Those are the two pathways digital media will continue to take. Slightly extravagant flat screen jumbo monitors are dull necessity for execs who are or who want to be seen as i.t. informed. What had first been engineered as a tool for graphics and video functionaries (oops, I mean creatives) three or four years ago, has become pretty much commonplace, thanks in part to cheaper overseas production of big screens.

But I'm still spooked by the opposite direction. As recent and late adapter to the smart phone, I'm reading blogs, news, e-mail, etc. on a glowing screen, approximately 3" x 2". The glow of text and imagery is as through a keyhole or smallish aperture. Websites and e-mail messages are more than ever stuff to scan quickly (like the oldtime microfiche), rather than to peruse thoughtfully. As I scroll down and right- and left-ward to complete my read of long sentences and hypertext designed for a wider screen, the impression is settling in that wide is out.

That's because brief punches of text look great on the phone!

In a war between journalistic paragraphs v. powerpoint bullets, guess who's winning?

Tiny apertures clobber you with / within short iterations. That's the plan.

They will continue to influence how we express ideas, simple or not.

Big, multi-tiered ideas will be broken down.

Constituent, subordinated data will emerge, as important as big data, simple or not.

The simpler the better, natch.

Bad poetry, yes, poetry nonetheless.

Nonethess does not belong on a smart phone.

Vocab will be hugely influenced.

That is, which vocab will be utilized.

Used.

More soon.

They're back.

Just who is playing whom? Poets, comedians, derivative assemblists, step back. The arguments for invention, uses of technology, concept-breeding, and so forth are confidently unfolding around us. As noted last week, the prime forces are the experts and geniuses with code who manage programming, construct new apps, invent software, add-ons, shortcuts, silliness as novelties — our very own first-order of conceptualists, so-called, to celebrate. For instance here's Jim Andrews pointing to web-based command line programming possibilities at goosh.com.

Well I never. In yesterday's Sunday supplement Education Life Charles McGrath recategorizes university creative writing programs as "vocational training," intimating, I surmise, the discipline is less fine art than crafty application akin to refrigeration repair or flowchart mastery à la Bernie Madoff. McGrath reviews two texts that tackle the "inescapable fact" that writing programs are here to stay and that their liberally bent operative rule remains "there are no rules. . . . Don’t pay any attention to someone who tells you what you should be doing,” per Chris Offut, one of the authors of The Writer's Notebook under review. The other text is The Program Era by UCLA associate professor of English Mark McGurl. McGrath emphasizes the dirty-little-secret aspects of teaching creative writing, finding confirmation in McGurl's book, for instance, that "few of even the most ardent teachers of creative writing believe it can really be taught." McGrath sees The Writer's Notebook the "more entertaining," partly because the essays come out of actual workshops, representative then of "a pretty fair summary of where actual writing instruction is at these days." McGrath's exaggerated fear may seem cartoonishly familiar to today's poets and small press publishers, "we are conceivably approaching a state in which there are more writers in America than there are readers." Thanks to the writing program phenomenon we can count on exponential growth in production within a shrinking marketplace of consumers. Sounds right if writers never take up reading again. The review piece is titled for the pop moment, "The Ponzi Workshop."

Video by Chris Funkhouser of Sat.'s readings at the Whitney document the following results.

Best reading, by far, Christian Bök.

Best costume, a tie, Nada Gordon, K. Silem Mohammad.

Best walk-on/on-camera, Katie Degentesh (in audience, why not on stage?) looking introspective (during Kenny Goldsmith's weather delivery, in the middle of the segment about a sand storm; Katie's face & Kenny's utterance, "sand storm" = simultaneity — pronounced in gay dialect SImulTA-NAYiiiiitee with exclam!).

Best music, Christian Bök.

Most static produced under self-imposed time constraints, Kenny Goldsmith (his sobering introduction).

Sometimes I don't think I miss much. But not getting to NYC tomorrow looks like a mistake. Lungfull could be doing the best gala this spring this weekend.

You know what? Doug Rothschild is a head of the game. dbqb's write-up, blurbs and all.

You still can get a seat at readings you might have missed, thanks to Dodie Bellamy's reports about Wind Chill, among others, spelling out contexts and showing lots of pictures, in other words, varied roots, bespectacled timbres, personalized (the way we like it).

Against Apollo, Dionysius (sort of), and poets who know better. Attempting to discredit newyorkcrew with blanket negativity (that stupid crew is stupid, I mean really stupid) shuts fun down. Bland, strategic dismissal resides in a sorry intellectual half-sleep parallel to defensive, adolescent tedium. Beethoven is old. (I don't need to listen.) Ashbery bores me. (Nobody reads anymore.) (Oh, by the way, my friends-of-convenience, the flarfists and conceptualists, write inappropriate and boring poetry, respectively. They gather at the Whitney tomorrow to prove they are inappropriate and boring but in artfully sanctioned ways. They are Dionysian and Apollonian.)

Dadaists, forefathers and welfare moms to flarf, according to flarfists, were stupid and knew it intellectually and they showed it emblematically, way down to panties and pointed toes. I remember when flarf started (I know the genealogy, after all); they too seemed belatedly proud, proud they were stupid (in the benign sense of stupid-funny). They were and often still are brilliant self-paradists (and I mean that in the kindest sense). In some practical domain (praxis with a big p) flarfists are precursors to newyorkcrew. Piercing critique often is fun, making fun of everything in sight, including itself, joining stupid and droll. That's the harvester of experiment.

Any mention of something they almost do or any insight into their own failures, real Dionysians welcome competitors in, keep things rolling, and never stop laughing (L=O=L) at themselves. That's not the way it's going for stupids who have evolved into thinking they are stupid-important. But the real problem is other poets who know better and keep quiet. Like me. Without much intellectual distance and self-effacement on the part of flarfists and conceptualists, who are better seen as processualists or procedurists, and without much poetics of critique, newyorkcrew — teeny LA art students, apparently, not poets — substitutes for and beats other poets' silence and acquiescence in response to surface claims about usage of technology to shot-gun-marry the Apollonian conceptualists with Dionysian flarfists. (Rather than poets, neworkcrew, descendents of Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Bourdieu, can easily and playfully unpack the strategy underlying flarf and the conceptualists, while the ease with which they apply their analysis speaks to how baldly such stratagems spin from art-world mercantilism.) Apollo and Dionysius — academic speak for an equation in which processual formality wins, of course. Apollonian = Logo Channel handsome, worth contemplating in the mentalist sense; Dionysian = cute, can't think straight, stupid. Work by Apollonians becomes course material at four-year colleges. Books from Dionysians wind up in remainder bins. Meantime, my libido rushes to get into the new, stupid, fun orgy, busing pitchers of Grey Goose for newyorkcrew.

And a final word on technology which could be addressed to Kenny Goldsmith and his proud crew. Everyone uses technology. The profuse semen of techno-appropriation and processualism shoots forth from invention, writ large, and more particular, from the inventors of the codes that make fast copying and collating of lexicons available species-wide. Everyone fucks with their codes. Everyone is carrying their babies. Yay.

The opposition occupies a holding area across from democrats. It opposes gruntingly, keeping the Hummers running, waiting (and waiting) for a shoe to drop so it can motorcade down the streets, take them back along with all the mega churches standing off select interstates. Tag lines for 20-second action-committee tele-spots are waiting, too, declaiming failure, formally and utterly, on the part of democrats of all stripes, socialists, liberals, so-called centrists — doesn't matter. The grunts, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, stand by until the highest score, your-problem-here speech acts can be put to work. Focus groups work overtime to lend a hand. The strategy is flawless by 1990 standards. Wait for mistakes (1) and (2) pounce. Flawless to a point but stupid strategy vis a vis the discipline of the Obama Administration, taking charge of their own mistakes (vetting processes, vacuums in financial management), shifting public opinion to historically more substantive matters (with regard to historical narrative, that is), cruxes like nearly impeccable style and water-dog atmospherics.

Could democrats be blessed with their first firm grip on power and citizens' imagination in decades? Enter Senator Evan Bayh, democrat of Indiana, the stiff-jawed failed presidential candidate passed over for vice president and cabinet positions, about to loose his good looks to middle age. He must feel it's now or never. Bayh has assumed the spoiler-from-within role, always cast by a type of democrat, most recently played by Joe Lieberman (whose time is never). Bayh has founded a centrist group of democratic senators whose aim is to exercise fiscal restraint on Administration plans to move on universal health care and greener energy policies. It's more than fretting over the budget, though, it's closer to grabbing hold of public opinion, plus something else. Maybe it's personal. In effect what the opposition can't do, these centrists can make happen, as they did last week by joining republicans to stop the reconciliation process in the Senate that would allow passage of energy initiatives by a simple majority vote. Twenty democrats, members of a party that's one vote short of a super majority, have thereby ceded power to the opposition. The good phone that Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel can give will be put to use for weeks to come. The Administration must turn a good fraction of its attention centerward, as it were, massaging Bayh and cohorts, begging them not to give up the prize. Fewer than four full months in office, and Obama's time already feels like the last years of Julius Caesar, with potential of his being undermined by betrayal and intrigues spawned on his side of the Senate, grunts in waiting on the other side.

The soul is ludicrous. It's untidy and young. It's also limp clear gel rubbed into your hair in all these dubious directions you're going in (until you do), gentle pun, onslaught in a riveting presence, O on the outside, a demographic close-up or two first staged for gory days and people like high security with no sweetness or theorem, only magical credits for adamance bookmarked with social media.

The soul's entirety broods out the nose, shadowing my gawking at my shoes until bedtime. Its metabolism looks sloppy in a circle of campaigns for a price of a movie. Orchestra level, on my knees, I'm full of graphs. The rest of the world is headlong watercolors, a homemade crowd combating aristocracy step by step, old and new species of doomed perjurers and flying satyrs. Not mine, theirs. We're alone. You're commanding a position wincing at the clunky largess and bogus scale my notebook-size haunt chews on a piece of your waist before many revisions.

The soul is deeply talented as a rapper, then renouncing proof of its mettle, cornered at once, sparking the alder-wood branches before it's shot dead at the age of 24.

I'm off the phone. A friend. If there were verb in it it would carry a marker of past action. He turned himself into a client. Not mine.

If opinions shift/shifted in a climate of... I'm being tactician now... of opinions or climates I should say, if you let yourself be subverted, influenced... funny thing... corrupted, whose fault is that.

Other guys I talked to: I couldn't get away fast enough. They told me there was a tape running through their brains. They were planning to erase the tape and tape over it. I thought the analogy was more than crazy, it was dated. Who listens to tapes? No clients of mine.

Gastronomy is to implicit confidence as ___________ is to bacchanals, almost.

a) breaking the ice
b) spinal reconstruction
c) biodata
d) "fucking / sponginess"*

*Larry Fucking Kearney

Christ... Here's another question. This time for empiricist critics: Are 'art' 'collectives' stuck in a kiddie pageant?

A couple of days reveling in haunting grimness. That would be the real delirium, dreaming along with amalgamated events that are summarized best, perhaps, in this question I've been asking myself.

Do I want a carport? In extreme beachhead situations, yes, a low, single-storey sand-colored structure, nondescript, arched around twin pools, with breezeways and, yes, a carport for a few four-wheelers off to one side. A subtropical or temperate climate with yoga and fog for a macho eloquence hatched from the 1950s, the last full decade of unquestionable, superlative design taste and buckaroo-progressive styling.

In New England, Nancy, no, thanks.

On top of that, I've been reading about accelerating destruction in the Amazon. A chunk the size of Rhode Island is burnt down each year. This buckaroo practice results in rich farmland that's productive for about four or five years. After that, the soil turns into dust and sand.

Carports, then, are an interim step. Haze steam the color of moist illusion, bubble like gum.

This achingly distraught back-and-forth (noted at digital emunction) reflects a dynamic featuring common hauteur smacked down into silly impotence, an arched dynamic, here, often sustained within the poetics guild, top down. In the deep glens (part of the slogan of The Pitch Review); here, glens = barrel bottom.

This is the best possible news. And, wheew, poetics needs it.

Pleasure is to ethics as _____________ is to epistemology.

a) a bunny stuffed in an envelope
b) the Yellow Sea
c) unknowing
d) one's tonnage

Lexicon of the day, what with all the boy racers of London and the obbo lads, onions, and the filth cooking the books, giving lags a tug. That is, one Hobbit shiny arse to another.