103rd section of Antic View is up, as is the 6th installment of Captain Element. not forgetting apocalyptic puppy pix at my friend Flickr.

Beth had to stop when she saw a neighbour walking a terrier. she had to meet and greet the dog and talk with the owner. it was a Welsh/Irish terrier blend (which doesn't mean mucho to me, dogs are dogs for me, I'm not real subtle beyond that). the dog just lept about as Beth talked with the man and petted the dog. the man offered that she was more than he could handle. he said he was 80, which was not evident. the gist of this was an offer by Beth to maybe take the dog, an idea that the man took seriously. a day or two later he left a note at our door saying he would be willing to let the dog go. talking with him on the phone Beth learned that he'd come by earlier with the note but couldn't bring himself to leave it. but then came back. we've got an elderly dog (husky/German shepherd compote), and a cat, so we don't need another, but Erin's been looking for a young dog and and and. but that and is opposed by some practicalities, and as we thunk on it, we realized we couldn't take the dog. Beth was totally smitten by the dog, which is an energy bomb of Everest magnitude. I see why the man felt overwhelmed because the dog is young and full of energy plus she needs a lot of attention. not the best dog for an older person on their own, though the man seems hale enough. we pondered how the 3 of us could work this dog and recognized that we couldn't work it. so we had to say nay. Beth and I went over this evening to tell the man. we were there an hour. he's a widower who recently moved here to be closer to his daughter. the dog was in constant motion for the entire time. I had my camera and took some 60 pictures, of which about 5 are in focus because she moved so much. not only that but lunging at the camera. we really would like to take the dog, and the man was amenable because he liked us and we're nearby. we offered to help him with walking he dog and in finding a home for her. he said a few years ago this dog might be feasible for him but now he needs one that requires less attention. pets can fill a lot of vital space. our own dynamics are such that the terrier would have been a stress. alas. I'll Flickr up some pix.

working out the details but I'll be doing a showing of paintings next month in a small gallery. it's associated with my master's project. January 20. I'm much excited and will detail further as facts arise. I will show a great deal of work, as much as I can fit into the space. woohoo.

whenever I think of the Poetics list, I think what a waste of time. and what a super waste of resource. people used to post poetry on the list, even Kari Edwards, now mourned, and Jeff Harrison, and Alan Sondheim, of course. others too posted regularly. but this collaborative bushwah downgrade hit and hit hard. wah wah wah, posting stuff I don't want!!! nice of Geoffrey Gatza to make Edwards' Having Been Blue for Charity available for download at his Blaze Vox site. it looks like a good dose of her work, which I have not read much of.

blimey, I gotta do something about my typos. I'm motivated by a need to get things done quickly, that seems to be burned into me concerning blogs. well that's no excuse. sit back and enjoy my new resolve.

we didn't manage to get to the Demolicious reading with Ulla Dydo, whose name I have previously misspelled, peccavi. I was very interested, because I am tantalized by Stein but honestly not well read in her work. it occurred to me, hey, Amazon could maybe perhaps possibly have some Stein available. and true enough, so I shall get Making of Americans, and I dunno what. Stein's funny because she's well known yet I don't think well read by people. the Autobiography and Three Lives seem to be popular, and Picasso, and Tender Buttons has an esoteric following. I think you have to hunt for the rest of her oeuvre. Dydo has done major scholarly snooping into the texts, so, too bad we missed her. Jack Kimball has been such a yeoman about attending readings locally that I can assume he'll have a write up, and if so, that it'll be thoughtful and useful.

I've been reading Down Spooky by Shanna Compton. urg, I don't have the book handy and can't remember the publisher but you can get it here. I'm not really prepared to say why you should, but you should. my brief encounter so far is positive. perhaps my vocabulary's doing something to me, because I note a technical effect for which I haven't worked out the articulation. I think I see this same effect in Stephanie Young's work. almost surreal but not weirdly so, the unexpected terms and word choices. both writers intone situations, emotional loci, that shine with a clarity without falling into simplicity or definitiveness. emotions are neither simple or definitive, they blur into each other. I like how the terms in Spooky surprise and perplex yet make sense. I was thinking there was an oppositional energy evident but I don't like how oppositional connotes. an understood other arises in these poems, but I don't mean so much against as just situated, as in: there. tell me if I'm making sense. partly it's a matter of address. as I've said afore, I guess in comments about S Young, even, I like 2nd person plural, its generosity, its fluidity, its slide. I've only just gotten the book, and have been scanning and skipping around. I note that the poems gather momentum as a whole, that their drive is united rather than discrete. they show a considerable calm polish. I've enjoyed what I've read and should underline that point (comme cela): these are poems to enjoy the way you enjoy, say, Frank O'Hara: deft, amiable, you know what I mean. I also, as a writer meself, want to figure out what she's doing, how her poems bloom as they do. so treat what I write here as hypothesis. the adventure follows. that's all I aim at in any of my "reviews".

okay, so I'm like, here it is, another part of Captain Element

we saw Borat last night. lots of fun, bring the whole family. indeed it was pretty funny. the matter of taste and the appropriate does come up. I'm probably pretty fuzzy on that topic. I don't think good comes of touchiness, but I also believe in a moral or ethical rigour. when I saw Michael Richards pop his cork, I saw flop sweat. he desperately grasped the possibility of street edginess to save him, if that's how you want to quantify it, and it played unnaturally. Borat certainly locates right in the mess of things. Borat is comfortable in the midst of that risk. it is interesting to see when Borat goes over the edge for his victims. at the rodeo, it wasn't when he said Bush should drink the blood of every Iraqi, it was when he sang how Kazakhstan is the number one country, with the best potash in the world. and the party at Secession Drive doesn't get ugly until the black prostitute that Borat invited showed up. but others, like the sweet Jewish couple (from whom Borat and his producer cower in terror) or the auto school teacher, are pretty accepting. as a movie it gets normative a few times, like the tender moments with the prostitute and his boring dark night of the soul after his producer leaves. the scene in which he and his producer fight nude rides on an exceeded sense of slapstick. do I want to see Borat and his hairy and obese producer wrestle sloppily in the nude? can I look away? the movie goes awry because of lack of movie making vision. those normative moments, for one. and is it supposed to be cinema verite or not? supposedly he's being filmed but there are moments when apparently there is no person manning the camera. Comedy Central had a promo show a while ago for the movie, which I saw. not long movie, so it turns out I saw a goodly portion of the flick beforehand. I never saw Ali G, so I'll be letting Youtube fulfill that necessity. I've caught, so far, Ali G interview Dr Norman Chomsky, in which Chomsky doesn't have the footwork to keep up with the joke. Andy Kaufman should be getting some residuals from Sacha Baron Cohen.

I have some reviews at Galatea Resurrects. read reviews of Mainstream by Michael Magee and Musee Mechanique by Rodney Koenecke here.

read a review of Post~Twyla by Jack Kimball here. Jesse Crockett also reviews Twyla, here. I like the idea of multiple reviewers. my reviews aren't intended to be comprehensive, that's your job. I just want to say the water's fine, and indicate a few features of the various works.

I use Google's home page (personalized!!!), because I believe in giving the gang at Mountain View as much opportunity to glean personal info as possible (yes, I did visit Ron Silliman's blog). so naturally I have People.com at the ready there. as in: one click for all that info I need. this naturally led me to a story about K-Fed (Federline, Kevin: amazing dancer, rapper, hubby and dad). (can you imagine your dad as a fantastic rapper who had sex with Britney? awesome!). and his entourage holing up at some club. did the italics create the right tone there? accent the last syllable to indicate the extreme awesome wonder of K-Fed and entourage as a semantic unit. they all sat at a VIP booth or throne or nave or whatever, as befits their status as K-Fed and entourage. K-Fed, goes the report by someone there, drank Jack Daniels and sent text messages to the galaxy in which K-Fed is the head star. he didn't pay much attention to his entourage. wow you gotta believe it was an interesting entourage, because figure: would K-Fed have an uninteresting one? high school grads, every one, no doubt. BUT WHO DID HE TEXT MESSAGE?? here's where Google could finally be of help. pull that info together guys and make it available!!!. K-Fed refused interviews but he told reporters: "I'm good." he's good! losing Britney, the love of his life, mom of his kids, that's gotta be painful, and yet, bravely, he can stand there in his pinstriped suit and say he's good. worry not, the healing process has begun. tho it must be tough with Brit having lesbo sex with Paris Hilton, or maybe it was at the Paris Hilton. the amazing thing is that the DJ at the fantastic club played a Britney song. I mean, his entourage stops dancing and they're like, what's with that, man??? and K-Fed waves his hand to indicate that things Britney are non-negotiably like totally anathema. yeah, it was a complicated wave. and the DJ stops the Britney fest and was like, okay, my bad, bring on the thumb screws. and he says, it's Kevin's night and all. which it sure was. I live on this information, how it shapes my world.

yes, the Times has some great hints for book giftgiving. yo, check out this new guy Allen Ginsberg! okay, so here's a sentence from the blurb for Ishmael Reed: "Poetry of politics and diversity, suffused with humor." tell me that the word diversity isn't a giveaway. make that the pair of politics and diversity. I'm guessing it is those terms that make poetry comestible for Times thinking.

we saw Syriana last night. I liked it but have far from a complete picture of it. it has that Le Carre undercurrent of not quite clear motives, which is hard to keep straight. and I had a few wait a sec who's this guy moments. I needed a score card. neither George Clooney or Matt Damon outshined the movie, which is a good thing. I would posit that what the movie wanted to accomplish can't be done in the allotted time. it was engrossing, tho, and I'd watch it again. its conspiracy theory was much more reasonable than JFK, which went from wacky (which is okay) to just plain stupid. I really disliked how Stone jammed the camera up everyone's nose except Costner's. the twining of plots in Syriana worked pretty well, and appropriate to the twisted situation. the culminating gathering of George Clooney, Matt Damon and Dr Bashir from Deep Space 9, or whatever show that was, was almost deflating. not that there's any reason to expect hopefulness. I just hope our next president is tied to the oil business so that we won't have to endure any sort of ameliorating change.

once again a ramble thru the mall yesterday. what's this got to do with poetry, writing, what not? everything or nothing. we had some things we sought, but we also just wanted to 'do' the mall, plus Beth was making a surveying of stores re how's business. we checked out the Apple store once again. that place was jumping. I would never let colour or styling top price and working features for a computer or mp3 player yet I still feel the lure of the glitz in that store. I got a half gig Shuffler last year and really it fills my needs. yet I ogle. the new Shuffler doesn't actually satisfy any necessity by being half the size of my present one. the rapt excitement evident in the store is remarkable, as in, buy Apple stock. there was a low, circular table for children, and each station had an intent child checking out a computer. get 'em early. and just think, an iPhone is coming omigod omigod omigod. one store had live models in the window. I really couldn't look, it hit a weird note for me. they weren't static, at least. there was a sort of semi-pro quality to the models, as if they had a mild fear that their friends might see them. I just can't imagine the view from the window. it was a store aimed at young women. another store had three staff people waiting anxiously at the entrance with no one in the store. on the other hand, Abercrombie and Fitch. the pulsing dance music, the darkness... slats covered the store front so that you can't see in or out. it's your own little youth world. business was okay there. the excitement was more manufactured than at Apple, tho. Beth pulled me into Coach, home of the upper class handbag. Beth was given one from her aunt. they have a lifetime guarantee, and grow in value. I assumed the target audience was middle aged women but that's not what I saw. we were greeted by a Kirsten Dunstish woman and most of the staff was on the young side. plenty of staff too. and most of the women poking around were tweens. so Coach I guess adapted to the market. the style of the bags doesn't say youth market to me, nor does the price range of the goods, so the adaptation that Coach made was in the relateable youth of its staff. it's fascinating looking at the economy this way. I think there should be a warning sign near Yankee Candle, because those shops have such a powerful aroma. I won't say stench but... the aromatics they use can't be natural, kind of an industrial attack on the olfactory bulb. I somehow lost my camera's battery charger a while back. last time at the mall I got a new one. this time I got the right (I forgot what brand of camera I have, duh). also got the cable to send iPod thru a radio. more later.

when I saw this poem by Tom Beckett I wondered who this Allen Bramhall is, I got good vibes from the name. well nemmind that, the poem speaks to my own idea of narrative. I appreciate Henny Youngman's jokes for their desperate succinctness. he removes the extraneous so that his jokes are almost entirely punchline (take my wife, please). I believe poems should propel themselves with the most eficient machinery. which isn't a call for short poems but dense, essential ones. the plots in novels most often are the fakest part. the logic of narrative shouldn't be so linear because that linear throb assumes too much by way of antecedents and motivation. thus the episodic jounce interests me more. momentary revelations. so the 14 parts of Tom's poem are expansion points. the narrative occurs within these points but also, more importantly within the realm defined by the title. where such questions as these occur: why is this called a sonnet? how are these 14 stories tied together? why do these stories seem to be answers to unasked questions? it's deftly done, because if these are boiled down from stories, what the reader gains is not a reconstitution of each story but a renewal of the terms of story. the starting point is revitalized with new possibiities. anyway, that's my riff.

Antic View is at its 101st installment and Captain Element is at its 3rd.

watched Warlock last night, a horror movie. I'd seen it before (as it turns out, not the beginning). I might've better warned Beth and Erin of its nature. I did recall some gory parts but what I'd enjoyed were the funny parts. it begins in Boston in 1691. a rather pleasant few minutes of evoking that place and time, then some Puritan yolks are seen marching to this stone tower. inside is a fellow in chains. he's the warlock, and he's to be executed. bursting in amidst this is a fellow wearing fur who I guess captured the warlock. came in to gloat. I didn't see any of this part on my previous viewing. well, as things would have it, the warlock manages to escape into a handy vortex, and the furry guy leaps after him. cut to present day (about 10 years ago). a young woman is roused in the night by a noise. this is Lori Singer, who I've seen somewhere or other but can't recall where. her brother played Beastmaster (I think), so, um, you know. anyway it's not Lori who rushes to investigate the noise, it's her character. her male roommate comes out from another room. he has his slippers and robe on. reminds me of 50s sitcoms when anything that happened in the night perforce causes people to get robe and slippers on before doing anything else. what's the point of escaping a burning building if you're not wearing your slippers? they see the warlock unconscious on the floor, he having crashed thru the window. they strike me as rather blase about his arrival. I think Lori, or Kassandra with a K, might've said something like welcome to California. still, it was more like, oh look. K wants to call the police but the roomie opts for compassion, so the warlock is bedded down. next morning K goes to work. roomie later gets up and makes breakfast. as he does so, warlock enters. played by Julian Sand, who I've seen elsewhere, with a similar exultation of creepy evil. he has a long blond ponytail, dressed in black and oozes sexy evil. the roomie chatters happily, perhaps a tiny bit interested in this streamlined piece of evil. warlock notices the roomie's ring. quite suddenly, warlock grabs a knife and chops off the ring finger. roomie cries but doesn't bleed. warlock calmly puts ring on. he then not so explicably kisses roomie roughly. by roughly I mean he bites roomie's tongue off and spits it into the hot frying pan. in case anyone hadn't caught the evil that was warlock. I don't, btw, recall a name attached to warlock. this roomie scene didn't quite please the others and it didn't zackly work the plot. anyway, later K discovers that her roommate has died. meanwhile, the warlock visits a fortune teller. he wants to talk with his father Zamiel. the fortuneteller fakes a visit, warlock says tut tut and then the fortuneteller, with visage altered horribly, channels, um, dad. who has a rough echoey voice, as evil incarnate often does. warlock must collect the three parts of the Grand Grimoir that are scattered about. the world, all worlds, will cease to exist if he does so. but he'll get to live on with dad. to him, this is a good thing. dad offers the expedient of cutting out his (but alas her) eyes out, and they will lead warlock to the pages. that's another scene that would've been best left unseen by the others. okay so Redfern, the other guy swept into the vortex, appears. he gives K some helpful plot points. then he's hauled in by the police, who K called when she was more distrustful of weirdos from the past. then warlock returns, smashes a piece of furniture in which is hidden, it turns out, 1/3 of the Grimoir. he puts a spell on K that ages her 20 years a day. so now we have our quests. 1st she bails out Redfern. they must find the bracelet that warlock took from K so that the aging process can be reversed. additionally there's that detail about the Grimoir, end of the world, and all. here the movie actually gets pretty perky. K's Valley Girlness and anachronistic Puritan Redfern combine for some humour. Redfern has a compass that, using a stray drop of warlock's blood, can locate the malefactor. so now we needn't wonder whether ever the twain. all make their way to Colorado, where they find a Mennonite family that happens to have part of the Grimoir. oh wait, the creepy scene in which warlock talks up a child. this is a cinematic trick that's almost too much. innocent unsuspecting child and this fellow who we know can will do anything. it turns out warlock needs an unbaptised boy's rendered fat so that he (warlock) can fly. we see nothing of the murder but it hangs in our heads. and given that the murder is only to facilitate the movement of a character, the horridness is magnified and not compelling. well Redfern and warlock tussle. at one point, Redfern has his whip wrapped around warlock's ankle and is being dragged by the flying evilness. it looked like, as Erin said, Macy's parade. speaking of which, Big Bird on thursday, because of wind, was kept low to the ground and face down. rather an indignity. a weird shot of a commentator with Bird Bird being led by had a ceremonial smack, as if Big Bird were to be sacrificed. I mean, such a deed would be evil enough for warlock. anyway, Redfern almost gets warlock but warlock buzzes the Mennonite grandpa in the eyes with his X-Ray Vision, and Redfern cuts off battle to save him. K, now aged, has a weapon, at least. driving a brass nail into warlock's footprints will stab warlock. warlock, who's holed up in a boxcar, craftily puts a piece of wood on the soles of his feet to protect himself. K craftily bangs a nail into the impression of warlock's butt on the ground. that puts warlock in extremis, and K closes in for the kill, but then the train starts to move. K with her granny legs can't keep up. but she finds her bracelet, and so is youthed back to normal. okay now I think they only guess that part 3 is in Boston, so they fly back. warlock hides in the bilge or whatever the word is that I can't remember. the good guys confront the priest of the church who clues them in that the Grimoir is probably at the burial ground, it being hallowed ground. the word is hold, hold. then warlock visits the priest too. he inveigles the truth from him by threatening the child in the womb of the priest's servant. oddly, it sorta came across as if the child was the priest's. anyway, the final battle. they find the Grimoir but K realizes that the burial ground has been moved and that the ground is no longer hallowed. which means the warlock is free to come. which he does. fight fight fight. Redfern's ass is kicked and K's been thrown into the bay. warlock intones the grim words of the world's cessation, clouds develop, yikes. but K climbs from the bay with her syringes. see, it has been meetly established that she is diabetic. she stabs warlock in the neck with the syringes crying, try salt water, fuckbrain. it also having been meetly established that salt is anathema to evil incarnate. so warlock melts, clouds disappear and all's back to a proper whimper not a bang. Redfern and Kassandra with a K enjoy a chaste loving moment then Redfern is whisked back to his time. Kassandra finishes the movie by burying the Grimoir in the Bonneville salt flat. the end.

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!!!

a couple nights ago we popped over to the mall, really just for the Indian food at the food court. it being closer and cheaper than any other Indian alternative, and decent besides. and the mall is alit with seasons greetingness. the mighty food court sits beneath a glass rotunda with strings of white lights hanging down and blinking at a tastefully slow rate. on the floor under the rotunda is a mandala design. children invariably gather there and invent games that make use of the sections of the design, or they race around its perimeter. the chasing game was in full swing when a younger child happened in. she was too young to quite get the social thing and so raced about wildly, screaming and excited. a number of children were dressed in sunday best, having performed that Santa picture thing for grandma. Erin had some errand and dashed off. Beth and I strolled the fairly quiet mall. we parted when I wanted a look in the Apple store and Beth was drawn like a magnet to Crate and Barrel. those Apple toys sure are tempting, I'm embarrassed to say. embarrassed because I know I'm beguiled by the slickness. the store offers a bunch of tables on which are displayed the goods. I couldn't tell who might be store employees, a lot of people seemed wired in several senses of the word. I also don't know if I show fogy by seeing little need for a video iPod. I mean maybe seeing Kramer have a nutty on that 2 inch screen, but do I want to see Caribbean Pirates of the Penzance part 19, chapter 47, redux 99, the prequel, on it? I dunno. the new shuffle is pretty small, but you still got the wires. next stop implants, and William Gibson can rest. so then I toddle (because the crowd was small I had room to toddle) to Crate and Barrel. where Beth and I ogled the Christmas ornaments. if you like colour and glitter... tasteful in an overstated way. the colours are like magic in my eyes. Erin being in wander mode we repaired to Pottery Barn, where Erin knows he can find us. ornaments there were much subtler and refined. and heavy. give me the brighter colours. Erin didn't appear so I did reconnaissance. while walking the mall I noticed a woman sprawled on a short couch. it seemed early in the season to be wasted by shopping but I thought nothing more of it. naturally when I returned to PB Erin was there with Beth. we went down the mall again. the woman on the couch had slumped to the floor. I didn't noticed till I'd passed. several people were with her. it became obvious, once I could see (because a crowd gathered), that the woman was really unwell. she didn't appear conscious. people were saying, what should I do? a woman helping said call security. Beth more wisely advised call 911. the woman threw up, which was scary because she wasn't conscious. in situations such as this I feel, seeing things in hand, to step away discreetly and not be part of he staring. we moved on to make a quick purchase for Erin then came back, by which time EMTs were strapping her onto a gurney. hardly apropos but I'm reminded of when my mother had broken her hip. she and my father were going in for her first check up by the orthopedist since she came home. she wasn't that good using the walker then. going up the slight incline to the hospital she fell backwards. immediately doctors came out and said don't move. the ambulance had to be called, coming from the fire department 5 miles away, to move 100 yards up to the emergency ward. I get why that is, but it still doesn't impress my intuitive sense. anyway, today, Thanksgiving morning. the dog and I passed the still smouldering remnants of a bonfire, I guess to inspire the football team to take no prisoners. I don't know where they find that many witches to burn. I guess the game is in enemy territory.

at the risk of sounding all buddhisty and all, I feel I ought to point again to Access to Insight. it provides n enormous amount of texts for Buddhist study, including a great deal of the Pali Canon in translation. texts, commentaries, even help with the Pali language itself, were you so scholarly minded. this is what the perfect world vision of the Internet would provide, back when we were dreaming about what the Internet could do. sensible navigation, visually clean and clear, it's simply a great repository of works. a companion site, Sutta Readings, provides readings. this is useful as much of this work originated orally, with reinforcing repetitions that you can find yourself skimming as you read. the frame of reference for both sites is Theravada Buddhism, but not exclusively.