just seems like I had ought to link to Monty Python scripts.

now this is gnihtemos. my left brain slips right into my right when I go to this site.

I review Down Spooky in Galatea Resurrects. here is my review. I very much appreciate Eileen's project, making views on recent books available in a galumphing quantity and necessity. you can go to issue two for a Down Spooky review by Josh Corey. the more views the merrier. I think I said what I felt about DS, and I like my writing's swift comfort. there, I said it. I will always be amazed at how writing happens thru me. anyway, it looks like plenty of splendid in this issue, and it's useful splendid too.

by way of Halvard Johnson, this funny Youtube clip.

Stephen Vincent's mother publishes a poem. this is wonderful. the poem is fascinating, and her talk as well. oracular. talking with someone with dementia or Alzheimer's is unnerving yet it feels like a visit to an oracle as well. I'm reading a book by James Hillman on aging and death, The Force of Character. I think his point that how character plays out as one ages, as one suffers the inevitable losses, is the real measure. as opposed to "beating death". you know, in the oldest person to climb Mt Everest sense. not exactly a propos, but Ravel's Bolero came on the radio yesterday. I've always enjoyed it. I used to play it for my father when he'd get confused or sad. being a favourite of his as well. he remembers it as being highly controversial. some Brahmin-type older woman that he knew gave up her tickets to the Boston Pops because they had the temerity to include such unconscionable wildness in their repetoire. it proving probably the Pops' biggest hit. there were times, and they grew more frequent, when my father would lose his mooring. Bolero, or Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, were the most reliable ropes to throw, tho they couldn't always assuage his dismay. it is all wrong to worry it this way, but it's hard not to fret that I couldn't find other means of relief and connection. the point, finally, was his drawing away, a process I could at best ease, not stop.

we had thunk to go out yesterday, maybe a museum, but a slow start to the day (none of us is at physical acme right now) precluded that, so we visited Barnes and Noble. give 'em credit, they've made the bookstore an event. the place was packed. the parking lot, fairly large and without the piles of snow you might find other years, was a system of carefully shifting cars in and out. I must say, I get excited just going to the library, there's always something that will interest and surprise me. this B&N is large, a 2 story, castle-like structure. at the entrance stood someone proffering samples of cocoa and some sweet thing that she daubed with whipped cream. I passed. a toddler had his spoon of sweet, which he immediately dropped. and cried forlornly. so the father revisited the cornucopia. we roamed around per usual. I now make a habit of looking at mountaineering books. particularly Everest. I think I've now read 6 books with accounts of the 1996 disaster on the mountain. can't get enough. one book was titled something like Greatest Mountain Disasters of all Time. it's not all like that, the appeal, but certes it plays in. Beth got a new book on Sir John Franklin's tragic polar ordeal. Franklin led an expedition in 1840 something to the Arctic, seeking a passage thru. all were lost, tho the last didn't die till some 6 years after they got trapped up there. the interesting discovery is that one cause of troubles was the LEAD-lined cans of food that the expedition depended on. there's exactly a zillion history and biography books I'd grab, which is hard to focus. I depend on Beth to select. I owe a lot to Beth. I never read psychology or philosophy, not usefully, till I met her. she encouraged my interest. and while I'm going well I dunno over a book, she says get it. I did quickly grab the new translation of Tibetan Book of the Dead, 1st complete translation into English, which the Dalai Lama ordered done. when Beth's father died in 2003, we felt we had to do something, tho he requested no service. at the gravesite, on a beautiful autumn morning at an incredibly beautiful hillside in West Virginia, Beth and I read from the Thurman translation. just us, Beth's uncle, the funeral director and three very local looking gravediggers were there. it was a moving experience. anyway, I look forward to that. Beth urged me to get this other Tibetan Buddhist work, I don't even remember the name of it. translated by Jeffrey Hopkins, who has done translations for the Dalai Lama. I flinched because it was so long and recondite looking. yet got it. Beth got a book by the Dalai Lama, about the meeting of Buddhism and science. it is a poor imagination that cannot (for example) comprise creationist myths and Big Bang simultaneously. I don't believe they cancel each other. the DL has the wisdom to accept truth, truth in the sense of things explained within a system. his moral strictures centre on empathy and compassion rather than dogma. science, of course, can be as rigidly fundamental as any religion. the DL's stancce is very illuminating and compelling. we got a couple of books on US history, one pre-Revolution, which both Beth and I are fascinated by. the poetry section, by and large, feh. the only possible this time was a New Directions collection of Rosmarie Waldrop. no offense but she's kinda dry, and if I got poetry yesterday, it would have to be wet. I like poetry because it is adventurous, yet B&N's selection of sameness just feels oppressive. phooey to 80 page books and serious author photos and Creative Writing Program imprimatur. those boring people on the Poetics list are promulgating these weak little publishing entities. let's make them stop. anyhoo, got a few minutes now to read...

Christo starts out small

Christo starts out small, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

fridge and rag

fridge and rag, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

self portrait #2,003,452

self portrait #2,003,452, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

blaze

blaze, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

Google supplies me with People headlines on my start page, so I saw where Anna Nicole Smith died. I don't really want to write about it. the story, no longer life, seems simply sad, Shakespearian in the relentless tragic path. her child has what 3 claimants to fatherhood, wow. I don't want to go there. I'm interested in pop icons, hence letting Google pepper me with People headlines, but I can't invest. Katie Loves Calling Tom Hubby: ook, I thought that was Couric and Werner (Werner being part owner of the Red Sox), and I don't even know if that coupling still pertains. what about the breakup of Mischa and that nude rock star? never heard of him, and she's on some show I've never seen. a while back I saw 20 minutes of that Paris and Nicole Simple Life in which, oddly, the nasty closedminded heelbeelies managed to make our heroines sympathetic. 2 bit culture war. I hate the snotty ass regard towards rural folk that exists, as if we were all NY dicks, but this show somehow scripted the simple folk into subpar enclosure. so now Nicole has cool anorexia and Paris, well, she's a smooth machine. I have no idea how I'll feel if she wakes up dead sometime with a needle in her arm, or whatever likely scenario. I mean, I have used Paris in my writing in a thingie way but not ANS, ceptin' here. maybe Paris is too smart to get caught in the gulley when the flash flood occurs, which ANS definitely wasn't. tho I don't want to use the word smart, instinctive maybe is better. ANS never lost the trailer park. Hugh Hefner said something about how the whole Playboy family is saddened. Playboy? family? no doubt the fam will get over it. I found ANS fetchingly goofy and sincere. she fits right into the mold of out of scale victim with Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland (and I think we can invite Liza with a Z into the rarefied group. good lord, it seems like only yesterday...). and maybe Williams had it wrong, or his insight needs adjustment. because these pure products of America don't seem so crazy, it's the people around them. think of daddy #3 for ANS' daughter: Prince Asshole of Zsa Zsa Gaboria. wtf, as Erin would say. that's where I stop wanting to listen. I really meant not to write on this, but look how I got swallowed. and what of Tom Cruise? I dunno. his publicists have made it so life can't sour for him, I guess.

hey, I like this one. with photography, it's often cool when you can't figure out what the image is or how produced. yet Photoshop possibility sorta thwarts that. it's a needless muddle to get into, but admittedly, there's a pleasure in that bit of puzzling that enters into a picture's how 'bout that. and it shouldn't take away from a Photoshopped image that trickery was afoot. there's a certain amount of bullshit in appreciation, I guess, I mean self bullshitting. reminded of James Thurber's piece on his own cartoons. he wrote something like: people ask me if I do my cartoons by moonlight or underwater, and when they hear that I don't they lose interest. anyway, bottom line, nice photo.

as I bethought me of memoirs this morn, I realized how ready made the syllabus was, for those inclined. and these are writers that could be squeezed into terms of avant garditude, rather than those of a broader net. I used the word dogged with Silliman, meaning it in the bestest sense, as Proust was dogged, neurasthenia be damned. no factoid is too dull, obscure or meaningless, if that comes across right. what I've always liked in Ron's work, starting with Bart is the precise detail. an unjudgmental effort to include. that's a validity of memoir, that trust in the life in the littlest bit. it fascinates me that Whitman and Thoreau met. neither was armoured with glory at the time, they were not living reputations but a couple of writers meeting warily... not sure where I'm going here... in a way, memoir's a test: can you find a path thru?

I'm reading Under Albany by Ron Silliman. which I am enjoying. more normative than I expected, but that's okay. I also figured it should be 9000 pages, but maybe it is part 1 in a 17 million piece expansion on everything Silliman ever wrote, due out in January 2723. I mean, he's a dogged writer, for one thing, and isn't the idea of The Project part of the zeitgeist? not to be flippant. Tom Raworth's A Serial Biography came to mind, not so much for approach but for scatter of memories. of course Hejinian's My Life, Dahlen's A Reading. lengthy list, really, and for good reason. keying the artist in the work. I differentiate these works, which I'll call memoir, from autobiography. autobiography, as I define, is more linear and narrative in approach. which can be good but I think less valuable than the memoir approach. I cannot think offhand of a poet autobiography of any resonance, tho probably some will strike me later, or you could refresh my dotty memory. I see memoir as processual, or, the process part is what intrigues me. you think of Proust and his Wayback Machine and do you remember the dress you wore 25 years ago?. memoir is in all of us, writers or not. usefully in us. you have to get beyond the idea both of importance and unimportance. these skewed assertions of facts, dancing in palimpsest, have vital essence and smack. UA shows the same detailed advance as Silliman's blog. I could see taking all the personal notes on his blog, about himself, and the positioning within his world, and make of them a furtherance of this book. his blog is a curious blend of critical and personal, where his critical becomes perhaps too personally regulatory, while the personal is oddly free. I mean, I like that blend, but in a way, I could see the two urges separated as well. UA being an example of that separation. I think...

somewhere in the midst of Ron Silliman congratulating for good taste his conjectured one millionth visitant Ron makes a good point. (note: the preceding was de rigueur acerbic commentary). he writes, try writing 200 MLA papers in a year. meaning, it aint easy. and yet, as Ron notes, those MLA type papers need be no better than blogged insights. I am finishing my own MLA type paper. it is an endeavour of left brain logical work, carefully following lines. I think I write well, but it is a whole conscious effort. I've had to learn to accept the formalities and work within them, whereas I just naturally fell into the right brain creative jumps of poetry and blogging. with this thesis, I battle to follow a logical trail. at the same time, I must fight to keep the formalities at bay, not let them commandeer the writing. MLA papers present a method, one often useful. likewise the blog, in its inventive capriciousness. I'm much more naturally attuned to the blog manner, but I have learned, I believe, to manage in the MLA mode. I've found that the Poetics list is a large failure because those posting rarely understand the nature of the medium. the Poetics list is not a classroom discussion. to say it is for discussion is to use a metaphor, not a wholly accurate one. Ron speaks of that metaphor in his posting. listserv and blog are about sniping, and showboating, and speechifying. they are good for that. their mechanics do not serve discussion well. deal with it. blogs can be ideas in action. sloppy and bullshitty maybe, but the form is loose and forgiving. MLA theses are not. careful, footnoted arguments work with MLA theses. blogs will be read by more people than theses. the underworld of listserv and blog, should not be forgotten, that backchannel network. I'm sure the point of MLA convetions is less to do with presenting papers as to schmooz with colleagues. blogs and listservs have the schmooz more or less built in. I write properly skittery bloggishness here, stumbling and stuttering around some ideas. it is always meant as an invitation.

now 110 installments of Antic View available for reading or citing in uniquely thoughtful masters theses.

well, it is a chilly Super Monday. I largely spent the Day itself sleeping. congestion came on in my chest and I felt achey, so I took the opportunity just to lay low. I used to look forward to being sick because then I could just stay in bed and read. of course when I did get sick, I'd want to sleep. or my concentration wasn't up for much. somewhat like that yesterday. I read several non-Conan stories by Robert E Howard. there's a historical element in these stories that I like. he's really hung up on race, in the you know, Hitler had some interesting ideas school of philosophy. but if you want to read about cloven skulls, REH is your man. I also read Geography of America, by Stein, a Tony Hillermann mystery, a buddhist text, Berrigan, and I wrote and doodled. I read, napped, switched books, napped. I also watched the better portion of 13th Warrior. it's a movie based on a Michael Crichton book, and sort of recounts Beowulf. I saw nary a noodle of THE SUPER BOWL. it held no glamourie for me. I assumed the Bears would win, tho would not have bet, because defense means a lot. but I was never going to say Manning could not win the big one. sometimes the crap of Superbowl is intriguing but I didn't have the energy for it yesterday. and I don't care who plays Halftime, they diminish.

this is a section from my rawther long work, Days Poem, which Meritage Press will soon publish in 2 steroid-inspired volumes. I just happed upon this bit today and liked it. I have etched my own writing manner into the world's glass, or something such. excuse me while I believe in myself.

, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.

, originally uploaded by allen_bramhall.