I can't say that I know what a subprime is but it sounds like now is the time to get one.

I came upon this blog by Michael Carr and enjoyed it. I liked the poems and I especially liked the captioned photos. I think I met Michael after Demolicious reading, but if I did it amounted only to a nod. yeah, the Bramhall charm in action.

I have a book at lulu.com. specifically, Open Elegy. it consists of 5 elegiac poems and 12 pages. 6 bucks. $4.77 goes to Lulu for production costs. Lulu's fee is 25% of whatever profit I choose to take. I could take zero profit and Lulu would take zero fee, but I felt guilty about that, so I put my profit at 98 cents, giving Lulu 25. if I buy 100 copies the production cost goes down a buck 50 or so. per unit, as they say. I'll think on it. the point of this isn't profit of course. if profit shows up, I'll send it to:

'A 'A ARTS
c/o J. Spahr
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94613

the Frank Sherlock fund, that is. my parents are dead, meaning the one sale I could count on isn't available, so I will reach into my non-profiteering pocket as well. but as I said, the point's not the profit, tho I don't mean to be brusque about the charity. this project isn't really about the broadcasting of my work, tho that potential sounds nice. really, it's just the see and feel of a work put together and ready to go into the world. which is the spell of DIY. it so happens Jeff Harrison and I are discussing publication issues at Antic View. I have a heinously lax publication history. Jeff has a fair amount of work available, and he's quite satisfied with online venues. so anyway, this is the current adventure.

reading Eoagh 3. it is a massive collection., which, it seems, is where online mags are. discuss pros and cons, if you wish. an impressive selection of writings, themed on Queering the Language. I wanted to point to this piece by John Mercuri Dooley. it is about gay marriage, sure enough you can see that is it. but it is not strictly an opinion. I relate what John does with this piece to Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: taking public documents and seeing into their poetry. I don't know how John arrived at the final texts but an act of telescoping occurs. he produces an odd weighting of import. sure there's a point here, a political stance. at the same time, you have to read this piece for its anguish of language. I have to say anguish, because what arises is both a blurring of individuality of the people involved, and an emphasizing of same. each couple has its own story, yet a larger sense says they all relate. the facts of each marriage detail choices made by the couples. but again, I mean to point to the language. it is chopped up, stuttering. each couple, one infers, looks for the right detail of imagery, personal definition. the stuttering is so human and plain, so grappling with a meaning that has to be utterly personal even tho it is so common and shared.

we saw Talladega Nights last night. saw the trailer before some movie, and thought it was funny, but didn't know if that were the extent of the movie. it was really pretty good. I don't think I've seen a Will Farrell movie. I've seen, and liked, him on SNL, and I think he's had small parts here and there. unlike other SNL alum, his presence is less categorized. he seems neither branded or constrained. one doesn't expect him to carry a movie but in fact, if this movie bears the truth, he can. his pairing with John Reilly was excellent. I take Reilly as an actor rather than a comedian. he provides a subtle strength. okay, that's a mushy thing to say. I guess I mean he takes on his role intelligently, thoughtfully, yet without losing freshness. the best scene was around the dinner table. everyone except the grandfather is saying outrageous things. it's such a bent reality. I lost interest a bit as the normative plot unveiled itself. perhaps it's necessary as something to hang the antics on, but it can't be relied on for tension, tho we are expected to fall for the plot turns. Sasha Baron-Cohen was scary as the French racer. SBC really inhabits roles. he carries a disturbing intensity. you saw it in Borat, but of course that whole movie meant to disturb and outrage. his character in Talladega was more on the order of Snidely Whiplash, yet SBC's intensity wants to burst thru such a limitation. anyway, what I thought would be a Will Ferrell vehicle proved to be a much fuller cinematic experience.

just got My Angie Dickinson by Michael Magee (Zasterle 2006). pretty excited to get it. I'm not unfamiliar with it, as its material used to be available from the My Angie Dickinson blog. that right there is a nifty feature of the work: its initial appearance on the web. that highlights the nature of its provenance. Magee (as he explains in his intro) googled phrases from Emily Dickinson along with the name Angie Dickinson to produce the texts. that's a classic collision of pop and high culture. and perhaps classic flarf strategy. aw gee, I dunno from strategy, really, I want to see poems work in the space they've created. I don't want to hang up on method, tho I'm interested in means of production. the truly actualistical flarf books that I've read have been strong, stronger, really, than the flabby critical activity surrounding the work. I hate critical shorthand, the branding sort. again, that's why Silliman's boolean School o' Q versus Righteous bugs me. becasue he recognizes the School o' better than Q, and the Not Quite Righteous. I would as soon avoid the term flarf, it just tempts people, lazy ilk, to fill in blanks with assumptions. or the interesting irritation is covered with critical nacre... yuh well, up with metaphor. the point of any manifesto is as starting point. you make manifest some crucial point, then move on. that's why I like Virginia Woolf's novels: she chose a working method with each one and ran with the experiment. looking at the books that carry the flraf label, one sees a rangy spectrum of work, and that had ought to be how it goes. anywho, I think it's canny sending Emily thru the Angie prism (it's not strictly that, but that captures the colour). things I like here: it's nice to see Emily's dashes deployed by someone else; the design (credit Christian Palino), including the cover, is really effective; once again Magee provides useful, uncryptical talking points about the work. I find tenderness here and thoughtfulness, balanced against the goofy weirdness. I'm psyched to have this book.

I found on the ground a printout of someone's potential order from Toys "R: Us, to wit: Ruthless 3-Pack Series 4: Melian/Nitro/Mercury (our price: $19.99). Free Wrestlemania Action Figure $7.99 value when you buy $30 or more of eligible products. just to complete the temptation, as if that weren't enough, pictures of the 3 action figures. the pictures aren't much for details, but I can glean that Melian wears a red 2-piece suit reminiscent of Wonder Woman, except that she seems to be wearing preposterously large furry white boots (mukluks?); Nitro and Mercury wear matching pants, no shirt, all important wrist bands. you can imagine the fightin' fury of these 3. are they forces of good or evil? I don't know. how readily do they bring foreign objects into the ring? I can't guess, tho Melian's boots represent great hiding place (refs would never look there). do they hate Vince McMahon? of course they do. whew!!! I used to watch the cheesy old wrestling that McMahon's father used to produce. which used to seem sporty in its way. I haven't watched in a few years because the prescribed 'roid rage intensity enacts a dull blow to the senses. in the old days there was a sort of tasteful racism, homophobia and general xenophobia on display, as everpresent keynote to the proceedings. now, from what I glean (can I glean twice in the same post?) from the occasional ads that I see, it is just straightforward bludgeoning. the phobias aren't constrained to the murky depths but indiscriminately wielded as simple anger gone cunningly wild. more overt, that is, but less political. which is weird, I admit. outrage in the arts, I'm swerving to say, wants to be innocent, actually. the internets are wild with calculated spew, which really seem like part of some canny anger management program: say your outrageousness here in the safety of listserv, blog or chatroom, and be normal where it counts. when I've done googly poems, I've wanted to be tender towards the compliant voices that I find. I can't always do that, but I recognize that the satiric element of writing like flarf has limited possibilities. you think of the kid who might be salivating to get these action figures. something is uncomplicatedly genuine in the desire to attach to these characters and the whole wrestling world. I have no idea what one does with these action figures. pose them around your room I guess, or maybe enact (I've used that word twice now, too) desperate wrestling dramas. that would never have interested me long. McMahon's such a jugular-seeking capitalist that there's no sense of play whatsoever in his sports entertainment realm. the troubling blur that exists between real and fake in wrestling is used to thwack the paying customer. the public wants both, desperately. antic flarf doesn't dance far, it needs a soul. what's interesting is language filtered thru an innocent perspective, and the collective reach of empathy. the phobias of the olden days in wrestling were more defensible than the arch calculation of the present day. the scale now is barely human, graded steeply towards the greedy turbine. artistic outrage is an alarm clock set for not long.

Tom Beckett does what all bloggers ought to do: list why he links to the blogs that he does (here). his encapsulations are spot on. Tom's thoughtfulness, acuity and humour are all appreciated, especially amidst the usual rumours of backbiting and such in the precious poetry world. of course I invite you to run your eye down to my name, where he says that I'm a volcano about to explode. that's a sharp observation. I was wickedly slow to "get it" as a poet, and wickedly slow to present it to the world. yet I think I'm worth hearing, worth reading, on the plain of pure merit (if such exists). I think of my poem Days Poem, due out soon from Meritage Press, as being capable of knocking people down. and I don't mean because it tallies 2 volumes and nearly 1000 pages, but that it arises from 30+ years of maneuvering between earnest study, humble effort and fierce dedication. this I see in Tom's work, as poet, as editor, as interviewer, as blogger of positive influence. he doesn't get enough credit. with Unprotected Texts he adds further proof of his accomplishments. I believe Days Poems does likewise for me. it's about time, for both of us...

just back from seeing Sean Cole and Susan Landers read. we got there on time but Susan, who took the train up from NYC, was late, so a search party dashed off to South Station to fetch her. meanwhile, back at the ranch, the reading started with open mike. mostly the same people who read every time. it's a pleasant homespun sort of feature to the Demolicious readings. I thought to bring a poem but finally didn't. after the 4 open mike readers, Sean read (at Demolicious, the local poet reads 1st). Sean's a very good and I'd say under-appreciated poet. he's at ease in front of a crowd but there's a nervous energy nonetheless. I think it takes him a bit to hear his voice and feel the rhythm of his work. his work comprises a general narrative. it is peopled, let us say. it seems to be "about" him and someone else, her, even. his poems are conversational and dialectical. they are also funny. odd but effective juxtapositions just wring laughs and earnest inquiry out of reader/listener. as he warmed up he became more physically tuned in, which translates into kinetic harmonies (id est, he moves his head and hands in harmony to the poem). I'm not picking on a tic but observing where he really syncs in to his work. one of the later poems that he read was a tour-de-force in which the humour and energy combined. Ive heard humour defined as a logical disaster, and that's how I regard his work. Susan arrived during Sean's reading so he didn't have to stretch. Susan read in a carefully enunciated way. conversationally, I noticed, she speaks quickly, so care is evident in her reading. the main work she read from is a translation (of sorts) of Dante's bestseller. by translation she means several things. she does literal translation (tho she professed not to know Italian), as well as the sort of translation the Zukofskys applied to Catullus. a further translation occurred by shifting the English into new terms. the massiveness of Dante's work is, of course, awesome, and her work had something of a feat about it. she brought some politically sharpened news into the work, and that was wickedly effective. she didn't want to simply people Hell with those she doesn't like, as Dante did. where she seemed closest to channeling Dante seemed the best. I felt that when I saw her read before, where she cleaved closest to Stein, she was strongest. I think, and I must emphasize the surmise factor here, that the agony of influence is still being worked out. it is a sign of maturity to turn from the influences. the next step, the most difficult, is integration. she spoke (afterwards) of discovering Dante as she wrote this work. I believe she said this was her 1st reading of Dante. I don't know if she planned to treat the entire Commedia, but she stopped whilst still in purgatory (she has a publisher for the work, tho I don't know who). she found herself too self-conscious in her treatment, or that's how I translate her explanation. I think she's on the edge of something, is what I'm rattling on about. and I must reiterate the surmiseyness of what I've just written. some of us (and it could have been any of us) convened for apres reading feed. and this is a nice part of the reading experience. conversation allowed Susan to expatiate on her work, and later, Sean read some of his poems again. Sean's one of Boston's poets who didn't toddle off to New York's hotbed of fame and connection. surely more of the non ex-pats hereabouts could've crammed the Out of the Blue Gallery t hear him read. another point would be to note Jack Kimball's contribution to the Boston scene. Jack attends a lot of readings locally. and he writes about them. he cadged copies of Sean's poems, the better to write about the reading, and I believe he worked out something similar with Susan. so his reportage includes academic study. this is utmostly valuable, a real angle on the work. so there's my report.

I twiddled a series of poems into a chapbook at lulu.com yesterday. mostly just to see how the process goes. I ordered a copy to look at, and if it feels okay, I'll offer to readership. I own a number of books produced by Lulu, so I'm not concerned about print quality, I'm tuned more to the work itself. self-publish brings up several issues, some of which are bugaboos. the 1st is the matter of editorial judgment. we all know that our critical eye mayn't always see clearly when regarding our own work. Lulu (I haven't explored the other self-publish players) is free, insofar as you can set up all the books you want. tempting to stick everything into print. anyone wishing to see the printed product, however, including you, must place the nickel down. it's a bit spendy ordering a single book, so to scale the thing more comfortably, you may want to buy in quantity. Lulu and its pards are valid resources, tho. so I want to see if what I thunk was a book is so when I get it in my hands. the 2nd issue about diy is the need for imprimatur, that it somehow lacks coolness to publish your own work. especially in publish or die land. that attitude strikes me as loathsome. it seems like an artist had ought to control the means of production. working with Lulu is not the same as printing it out yourself, poking thru the cover stocks, sewing the cover and what not, but you do enter deeper into the process of production. Beth and I framed a few of our own pictures (that we did, I mean) last year. that's akin to publishing. the further step, requiring knowledge and wherewithal, would be to do the framing ourselves. those works have been placed into the world by the act of framing them. they're on the wall. you have work you think deserves being seen, and so do I. why wait for an editor to select what you have submitted? I like typesetting, using different fonts to make a good visual impression. because I knew a leedle (not a lot) about computers and word processors some years ago at work, someone asked me to help him with a project of his. he knew negative zero about computers but had all these arty ideas of how to format his work. much of what he wanted couldn't be accomplished within the strictures of the word processor's functionality then. I think something crucial sits within that disconnection he had from how things happened. I mean, I can hum a great bass line but I never learned the rather important skill of fingering the bass. the kid in the basement labouriously going blum blum blum has it all over me. Beth says art is creative problem solving. bringing forth work for others to see or hear is yet another problem to solve. a huge problem for me has been putting my work in front of people. only in the last few years have I efforted that aspect of the writer's drama. writing is more than just getting the words down. writing includes its presentation.

Sean Cole and Susan Landers read at the Demolicious series this sunday, 2pm, Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge. I've seen both read. Cole is a genuinely funny poet. not just snort ah hah poetry reading funny, but skewed revelation suddenly presented makes you laugh funny. I thought Landers had a strong Stein element to her writing. she led off her reading with a wonderful piece by Stein; possibly that shaded my assessment. not to say influence by Stein is bad, I just don't want to present unneeded borders. oh, I really will read next month at the same venue, with Alan Davies.

115th episode of Antic View. delving, directing and divagating for your consternational pleasure. I look at this thing as critically as I can and believe that, over its breadth and in its depth, it lights some fires. [Dept. of Telling You So]

saw a book about AC/DC at the library yesterday that I had to take home. I love this sort of stuff. I mean, why don't I have a 10,000 page poem about Angus and Malcolm? not tht I've drowned myself in their music, but I appreciate what they do. I have a terribly low tolerance for shouty singers and for screechy ones, yet I can handle both Bon Scott and Brian Johnson no prob. there's always a nice tension between the 2 guitars. the biographers grant Malcolm, rhythm guitarist, a certain genius status, which I've kind of suspected all along. he seems to be the one holding the pieces in place. so that's what I'm reading, along with the Louis Menand book about William James, Wendell Holmes, Charles Peirce and John Dewey, a separate Dewey book, and I'm hankering to read more than the intro to a book about Magellan's circumnavigation.

spatial oddity

spatial oddity, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

mainstream, movies, limetree... I seem to be a-twirl in thoughts. pre-blog I kept a journal that was mostly reactions to anything. the clear intention when I started was to write about my reading. I ditched that immediately and started writing about whatever came to me: music, movies, commercials, weather. it also became more public in its voice than I expected. I saw it as something I would publish, tho I've made no attempt except to type roughly half of it out (600 pages) (I wrote it in notebooks). I bring up that journal because it suggests both methodology and license. movies are mainstream because everyone feels that they can comment on movies. whereas poetry is approached with awe, whether by those who don't read it or those who feel they can be critical scourges. I think Ron Silliman makes things murky with his School of Quietude vs Real Poetry dichotomy. the idea that SoQ is mainstream is to equate the Shawsheen River with the Mississippi. er, the Shawsheen runs thru town and will at its occasional pleasure flood a few basements. you don't see no Huck Finns on rafts on the Shawsheen, if you get my drift. I really should say, poetry-wise, there aint no stream. remember Maya Angelou's poem for one of Clinton's inaugurations? refried Whitman, and what would you expect? it's an occasion of affirmation and such, not poetry. what she wrote only pretended to be a poem, because who has time for poems when celebrating? the Academy Awards sanction not quality work so much as the image of quality work. comedies don't foster that sense of seriousness. the recent Pink Panther was laboured but the sight of Steve Martin and particularly Jean Reno dancing in leotards somehow makes up for all the by rote stuff in the movie. I don't see how poetry can become mainstream. the guilty pleasures of poetry consist mainly in chimey rhythm and rhyme. I mean, the wit of limericks seems (to me, anyway) to serve the satisfying thud of the rhymes. long ago I saw a parade. following the horses was a clown with broom and scoop. the clown wore a sign: Pooper Scooper. this was received as great wit, with people laughing and commenting. which brings to mind one of Baudelaire's little prose pieces in which a drunk speaks grandly to a donkey. alliteration and assonance, I guess the phrase is a poem. its not like poetry is necessarily so forbidding. Koch and O'Hara for sure are entertaining. movies enter by way of a big hole in the head whereas poetry seems to be more osmotic. the difference between the 2 modalities shouldn't be dismissed. which is where I think Silliman gets it wrong. well, I can't focus right now, that's for sure.

Kasey Mohammad lists top movies as well as other movie lists, starting here and moving on. movies are a funny artform. much more deconstructed than poetry. that is, you don't often get people pushing the metaphysical virtues of Ogden Nash's work, but it's different for movies. are Plan 9 from Outer Space or Wizard of Oz hokum or what? the answer is that the borders aren't clear at all. there are far fewer guilty pleasures in poetry. I like Whitman seriously, yet some of his expansiveness is just ludicrous. yet I 'buy' it: that would be an example of a poetic guilty pleasure. I suppose you can count limericks and clerihus or whatever as potential guilty pleasures, but that's more quirky than anything. whereas everyone has choices for guilty pleasure movies. I call Monty Python and the Holy Grail my favourite because it doesn't seem to wear out. the coconut carrying swallow debate, the sight of the knights a-horse, etc: these have yet to get old for me. I don't keep up with movies at all now, tho I try to think about what few I see. I like reading Kasey's takes because there seems to be a virtue to all movies. I suppose because movies are so culturally motivated that they cannot help reflecting something essential about 'us'. whereas poetry most times is pretty insular and personal, so that the cultural mirror is less intense.

funny that we go to the mall for Indian food. it is cheap and potentially quicker than the nearby restaurants. unless you wander... green is the new green this spring. entering the mall via Sears, and their Lands End display shoots green to the eye. Mall was pretty quiet e'en tho there were collections of networking teens that had likely been there all day. brilliant marketing minds aced out a way to quiet the foodcourt. the area under the central dome of the place, which used to be wide open and perfect for small children to run around in, now had a "snack center". this was a gathering of whatchacall gumball machines. coin in the slot, turn the handle, and receive a handful of savoury candy or refreshing gum. or just some shit. it's a glitzy set up yet seems like why bother. television screens appeared in the Food Court and thru out the mall around Christmas time. you cannot hear them, as Erin pointed out, so what do you get? flashing images of product and apparent promo for movies and CBS shows. yes, I did catch that CBS had somehow tied up this marketing advantage. at one of the Food Court choice there's a tv screen on which is shown demonstration of their baked goods being made. I could watch for hours. we stopped, again, at the Coach store. I saw a young teenage girl purchasing something. later I heard her father asking, are you happy with your purchase? and she obviously was. nothing comes cheap there, and as I continue to feel, the goods seem for older patrons. that is, according to my peccable sense of fashion flux. which is to say, Coach is doing something right: that got willing customers. their stock is bubbling, if you want to know. we learned that Coach changes its array of merchandise every 4-6 weeks. visit often. Macy's can hold onto items longer than the Coach store itself. I brought home a catalogue, which brims with crisp pictures of handbags and a grimly sultry model. Coach makes collars for your dog, not mine, if you're interested. they also make shoes, for which I have zero aesthetic. I just want to wear running shoes, and not even the fancy hi-tech ones. I will say I'm not keen on wedgies, if that's what they're called. walking on a wedge of wood... nah... Williams Sonoma, a foodie heaven, loads up on all the special cookware that you need. I liked the set of small square plates with green chopsticks and these ceramic snow peas to rest your chopsticks on. also a stainless steel fortune cookie that opens up so that you can put a cookie, or maybe just a fortune, inside. or how about serving bowls in the shape of those white cartons for takeout Chinese food. especially nifty was the air fresheners, hand cremes and dish soaps made from exotic essential oils. wasabi and green tea, ginger, meyers lemon, French (none of your English) lavender, ginger almond, pink grapefruit. neato. we used to visit a candle store, not Yankee Candle with its awful artificial smell, but ones made from much purer ingredients. I could sniff those for hours. the olfactory sense evokes images and feelings so readily. I should tell Marcel Proust about that. Crate and Barrel had lots of fresh looking geegaws. lots of green, as I noted earlier in Sears. while we were there, Erin came in to borrow Beth's phone because he was mid-conversation with a friend when his phone's battery hit E. large, oddly grim photographic portraits of Jack Nicholson, Angelina Jolie and Christopher Walken were displayed in the mall, adverting something or other. Nicholson's looked like a mug shot, Walken looked crazy and Jolie looked stressed. and so forth. we bought nothing, but we sure wish the economy well.

this is a perfectly silly picture, and it starts with how cats cannot, in all their wisdom, BE silly. this cat rules the entire cat structure thing, all of it, the full universe of that cat structure thing. okay, I admit I am infinitely amused by cats and dogs being cats and dogs, and how we don't differ so super much.

DSCN5889, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

we watched Little Miss Sunshine yestreen. I had it in my head that it was an Oscar nominee, which I find that it is, yet couldn't/can't grasp how that could be. it was a cute picture, but not noteworthy. not that I harbour any respect for the Oscars as a sign of quality, but still. a tried and true collection of quirky characters that eventually get along by movie's end. let's see, heroin addict grandpa, suicidal Proust scholar, vow of silence son. mom and dad are just a bit tense and dysfunctional. patented road trip, to get the daughter to a Little Miss Sunshine contest. grandpa dies en route and rather than stay and fill out paperwork, thereby missing the contest, they steal the body. it worked comedically but jinkies, I expect that sort of plot development from the 3 Stooges. a leedle unbelieveable. the contest itself is one of those beauty contests for pedophiles, which is disturbing. our heroine is not cut from the same cloth, being a little chubby, and not glitzed up like her competition. her routine is an antic dance rendering of Super Freak, which outrages the judges, tho I don't know why. to support her, her family jump on stage and join her. sort of funny but too much a script writer's idea, and not the present scriptwriter but whoever millennia ago who 1st came up with it. the movie didn't resolve all issues, which is a good thing. I think putting these characters together in a less crucial plot would be more endearing. the movie wants them all to stand up as moral tropes or what not. which just sputters.