I started another blog, namely Captain Element. I would like to keep at it, thematic, but whether that's in the cards, I dunno. I am interested in narrative, just not so interested in stories. stories being the overdetermined part of narrative. the blog, if I persist, will be my adventure if not yours. my point here is the sort of flarfy goings on in these 2 pieces. I use the term flarfy carefully and warily. 1: flarf is not mine, I'm borrowing what I like. 2: I no more want to enclose my work than any others (tho I do both often enough). Kasey Mohammad writes of his interest in and preference for the unpoetic, or apathy for the poetic." that unpoetics feeds flarf, and not just flarf. the pop heroes and characters that I confiscate are these heightened, goosed, platitudes. I think flarf hovers on such like. I like the collision of the hoky, the stupid, and the intense. in a way--a screwy way, for sure--the racism in the Fu Manchu books, and Tarzan, and Robert E Howard, is a good thing. it's the serious, if warped, side of the general goofiness. so I'm reading now Corn & Smoke by Blaster Al Ackerman (Shattered Wig Press 2006). I traded my own book, Simple Theory, to Ric Royer for it, I believe they work in the same bookstore. goofy, hilarious, short prose pieces. some are narratives. I've seen Blaster Al's work in John Bennett's Lost and Found Times. the mainstream and the avant garde (I know, what the hell do those terms mean) often sound ALIKE and unimpressive and heard it before. the good energy of flarf is its grasp on the pervasive nuttiness. the bad energy, as Kasey points out is "when flarf simply becomes another item on the craft-based academic menu (this actually seems to be happening in some places), it loses a large part of its reason for existing." I guess I'm in the surprise me school of readership, or learn me something. Blaster Al--and were I to meet him, I'd sure enough say Blaster Al--is a subversive. flarf is interesting to the degree it wields subversion. the arts continually need subversion, it's the breath of change and growth for that which possesses the countering impulse to solidify (hey, let's all write Frank O'Hara New York poems!!!). so anyway, I see in my own 'tactic' with Fu Manchu et alia a comprehension of the unpoetic. at any rate, the prose style comprises squalid Victorian virtues and the avant's foot disjunctively in the next metre forever. that's what I see, anyhoo. the real tactic is impatient, and could we change the channel puh-LEASE!!!