readers (I'm sure that it is a plurality) of my other blog (Rockets and Sentries) will note frequent reference to aliens and to West Virginia. the alien thing just has been a thing. I don't find myself particularly fascinated by aliens, in the sense of studying up on Area 51, or working out an appropriate greeting when 16Greezl'po lands in my chimney. my sensibility is more attuned to Tom Swift Jr. and "Plan 9 from Outer Space". but the aliens have a serious meaning for me, whatever the hell it is. West Virginia is (I was going to say represents but) an evocation of place, in absolutely an Olsonian sense. gee, we had to take sick kitty to a different vet, up North to Beverly, which is to say, we were heading towards Gloucester. southbound on 128 was choked with traffic as we headed north, and I thunk of Olson's line, 128 a mole to get at Tyre. but anyway, WV is where Beth's father lived, and died. the land is so beautiful there, yet it is so poor. resources have been sucked almost dry there, including human resource. and yet life burgeons. a couple years ago we attended a fiddle festival, or whatever it was, in Glenville, which is the county seat. the county has a population of 7000, about what the little town I live in has. there was fiddle music, and snappy clog dancing in the streets, and real crafts and food. lots of energy and excitement. last fall, Bedford, MA celebrated Bedford Day, the 274th anniversary of the town's existence (previous to that it was part of Billerica, which turns 350 this year). by the town hall a cluster of booths were set up. insurance companies, laser dentistry, maybe the scouts or whatever. Beth, Erin and I slid thru the crowd, looking for interest, got none. that aint community. the only connection is thru the organizations to which your child belongs, mainly school. when I think of the poetry community, I think of an exclusive club of similarly minded. a network of likeminded. maybe that is how it should be, but that aint community. WV is a potent sense of place for me, American place at that.

do you minf if I typo? it's not like I'm ignorant, just not especially careful. by the way, a woman I worked with, when I was in high school, in the kitchen of a convent, of all places, used to use the word bellignorant. it was an admonishment, as in: don't be so ________. she had to work with me and two other teenagers, and sometimes we were, not to put too fine a point on it, assholes. in that charming teenage boy way. she also used to say, rather often, youse kids is inconsiderate. which I'm sure we was.

30 years after my 1st two years in college I am finishing up that old BA. 2 years at tiny Franconia College, whereat at least I had Robert Grenier for a teacher, now a couple years at Lesley University. Lesley has a program for so called adult learners, so it's not a matter of immersion amidst a bunch of 20 year olds. I had to learn to write papers, which I never had to do much in my previous edu exp. it has been great exercise to write formally like that. I think I worked muscles I haven't worked much. I feel confident now, that I can wrote with formal care. last February I wrote a 24 page paper in less than a week. this was not a matter of procratination, but a matter of circs. one part of the circs was a wonderful (bad) run of techo luck. my new computer had an issue and needed to be sent to juvy hall for reprogramming. Beth's laptop blipped out immediately upon my attempting to use it as 2nd choice. 3rd choice was an electric typewriter I got at a yard sale. that broke. my son's laptap was already fizzing. his pc is old and wouldn't accept the spanking new version of Windows and Word that I tried to get onto the thing. I'd already made headway on the thing when new info caused me to start completely from scratch. and I whupped the thing, them credits are mine. my college grades have been A's mainly. which is awesome. in high school I was wedged firmly into the average student slot. not that I worked real hard, but also there's a fated sense in school, you are what's been decided about you. I had a loopy French teacher who worked out the bell curve for the class, and there we stayed. luckily I was a B in that class. to fulfill Lesley's necessities, I took three courses at the community college, where I totally was the oldest strudent in my classes. in the Vietnam class I took, I was the only one, aside from the teacher, who was even alive during the war. now I just need to finish a 40 pages thesis, I'm about 2/3 thru, and I will have accomplished something in this life. it aint the workload for me that challenges, it's the social enterprise of classes, and the rigmarole of enrolling and dotting i's and all that muddle. as Olson writes, "I've had to learn the simplest things last".

Hegel seems poetic to me in an impenetrable or even gnostic way. I am fascinated now with philosophy, as I wasn't until recently. this effort to make language mean, it seems so absurd when philosphers start trying. I mean they try to be so careful, so that their language looms with density. my method with the Hegel piece I am writing has been, partly, to scan thru the book and latch onto phrases. I either change words or riff on the phrase. it feels like a valid way of reading Hegel. Peter Ganick has said that his writing is philosophy. his writing is his thinking. his mode is not quite what we expect as philosophy, but you can see him working. Stein, who after all did have William James as a teacher, is a philosophical writer. I like how the mode is intrinsic in the writing, the thinking process, in both Stein and Ganick.

I thought I ought to note that The Onion provides good weekly stuff. "IRAQIS ARM SELVES FOR INDEPENDENCE"

when I cleared the gardens of leaves on Easter, it had to be Easter, alack that moles had been there. they et nearly all the crocus, hyacinth and tulip. I haven't determined how much they've disturbed the perrennials. and I don't begrudge the moles, but miss the bulbs. luckily not much of anything bugs daffodils and daylilies.

in all due merriment, phone trouble disserved: I couldn't get ON LINE. reading Hegel and Heidegger today. I dig my Hegel piece, feel inspired: I've taken to taking phrases and either bending or just delivering, that's a writing course. Heidegger I underlined today while intent. smoke of moment served. I like these tired and intending, the way words gust into tiredly, after exercise and ready. I like that. I used to run in the morning, at the time pretty good mileage, 10-15 miles. in the afternoon, after a short nap (on such days) I would read/write. several hours worth of that slurred moments. reading Being and Time slowly, but it comes together. and the Hegel thing I'm writing is a way of entering his preposterous yet straining wonderful words. Hegel's density is an ornate shuffle and shove, and it really tempts to startle there. there's such a foreign clunk to the reading, only partly attributable to translation (I figure), but it also slavishly renders a moment, tears at things, feels solidly for all that. my Hegel piece, 7 pages at this point, resounds for me.

previous post is from the Hegel thing I am working on. I used Hegel's name to determine where from Phenomenology I would take sentences, to wit: page 8, 5th sentence; page 5, 7th sentence, etc. I then took Hegel out, by taking out the 8th word, then the 5th following, then the 7th, etc. I could utilize other similar procedures, and maybe I will. my counting might've gone awry, and I wonder if that makes a diff. the thing is called (cleverly) "UNion", 4 pages long so far. I'd post it but I've been messing with the text format, and to get that into the blog requires more effort than I can give just now.

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Even if the former side is reduced to, whether by force of alone or by the blustering of other, and even if, respect of fundamentals, it outmatched, it is by no means satisfied regarding the said; for they are justified, but not. Now we seem to need just opposite: sense is fast rooted in earthly things it requires just as force to raise it. The onset of the new spirit not the product of a widespread in various forms of, the prize at the end a complicated, tortuous path of just as variegated and strenuous an effort. He will find opportunity to dream up something for. The result is the same the beginning, only the beginning is the purpose; in words, the actual is the same as its Notion only because immediate, as purpose, contains the self or actuality, is movement and becoming; but it is just unrest that is self; and the self is like that immediacy and simplicity of beginning because it is the result, that has returned into itself, latter being similarly just the self.

hi there!

been getting interesting code belch occasionally with Blogger, as in preceding post. NUMP!!! hope evryone is all right!

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I should advert the wryting-l list. I have contributed to it for some 5 years (that includes its predecessor list, FOP (fiction of philosophy): by the time I got on the list, that title no longer applied to the list content-- I don't even know what fiction of philosophy intended to convey). I am comfortable sending pieces to the list, and have at tiems been pretty busy at it. not now, I just pick ou a bit here and there to post. a number of the contributors to the list work with code, or do net art, others are more textually-oriented, and experimental. not a lot of talk on the list, which is good (to my taste). I was going to name names, but then it seems that the whole should be taken to account. mIEKAL aND wrote once of how the various writers twine together. it's true. a number of busy writers on the list, pouring out a steady stream, with currents mixing. Alan Sondheim, Lewis Lacook and Jeff Harrison (among others) all post to several lists. Sheila Murphy has written that she writes specifically to wryting, that what she posts works out of what she reads on the list. I have my own standards of what I will post. a few times I have posted everything I've written over a period, posting immediately upon completion. I have also posted serial work. at any rate, Wryting is a community more than Poetics is. Poetics people too often decree what aint appropriate to the list. only rarely do I post old stuff, usually only if it popped up,and been rewritten. an archive exists for the list. a Google search might get you the address for subscribing.

did in fact write some avec Hegel, twisting around with texts (Hegel, Heideigger). probably go on with it. I like serial possibility.

I would use Phenomenology of Spirit as Hegel text, for its density and esoteric abstractness. such is what made reading philosophy difficult for me to begin with. took me a long time to crack the code. not to get literary, but 'no ideas but in things' describes how I read (past tense). I needed words attached to something other than 'ideas'. I am still challenged by the abstruse, but more willing to dig in. I took an odd pleasure in what I've read of Spirit. I remember even reading it on the commuter train, which should be too distracting for such sort of reading. but at times I still drowned. so that's my vague plan. Philosophy of History is much more accomodating.

I got Hegel's The Philosophy of History and am excited. not even sure why, it just seems lush with possibility. got the idea of 'translating' Hegel. some way working with the text and yanking it around. I like having these projects tho what I actually work with tend to be lower concept. I recall a notebook in which I wrote notes on visits to a nearby fed wildlife preserve Great Meadows, nature notes mostly. another was the intention to follow an enture Red Sox season (via box score mainly). a concept upon which I may find ways of going elsewhere. neither of those proejcts went the distance. with the Great Meadow notebook, I think I just ended up grabbing that notebook for other uses, and that served to dilute and divert the effort. the baseball idea was just a lot of work, and I never was a committed fan. twice i've had the inspiration to write all day. the first time was while reading Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer. I ended up with a 7 page poem that spanned 4 days of writing. I recall liking that poem, but don't recall its features and couldn't find it amongst my papers if I tried. I sent it to Peter Ganick for A.bacus and he returned it with the note something like, too normative. which maybe it was. my 2nd day long attempt came from reading Robert Grenier's Day at the Beach/. that spanned a month or so and is something like 40 pages. I cannot recall what I called that thing. I liked that thing a lot, as a book. a precursor to Day's Poem, which I wrote a couple years ago, specifically from june 2000 to august 2001. close to 800 pages and I consider it my best writing. getting back to the Hegel PROJECT, not that I've exactly declared myself here, I'd like to experiment (id est mess around) with it. not just write my langpo sentences. I did a few collaborations with John M. Bennett, which were useful to me. he's so driven to mess with texts. I followed his lead and tried to keep up. his mag Lost and Found times is a lot of fun, by the way. it includes lots of visual work and collaborations from a lot of very busy people. highly recommended. his address:

Luna Bisonte Prods
137 Leland Ave.
Columbus, OH 43214

re Sasquatch, I thought of Olson, his reading pulled in. hyper text allows coming and going of matter that could be tangential or just bursts open elsewhere. I liked that Sasquatch has a linear pull along with the hyper text out burst. I also thought of Paul Metcalf, who relied on texts, weaving them together. the medium with Sasquatch is different, and Weishaus has his own sensibiity, I don't wish to make a straight line between any of these writers.