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.

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.