Pedagogic Creed (Dewey Thoughts)

"I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race."

"I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself."

"I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life."

Why are you in the class?

What can you exchange here?

wolfish as gleam

"I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life."

                    not not
                    enigma

    "The law for presenting and treating material is the law within the child's own nature."

"What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it."

googling the wind

"I believe that interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance."

                oh wow
                the nut deed

                good night wind wag

"The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power."

                vow lad as flash halo

"I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative."

What do you want to write now?

How will what you write now fit the future?

Can the present hold your interest?

        "I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences."

            "I believe that literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification."

    "Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end."

        "I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it."

                the image
                is relevance

In these declarations, he = she & he.
Insist on this completion and embrace.

Also: child = student. Transitions
are continual.

What the student sees, the student learns from;
what the student does not see, the student does not learn from.

        "There is an important distinction between verbal, mechanical memory and what older writers called judicious memory. The latter seizes the bearings of what is retained and recalled; it can, therefore, use the material in new situations where verbal memory would be completely at a loss."--Dewey, "Education in Relation to Form"

        "The school system represents not thinking but the domination of thought by the inertia of immemorial customs.—”Education as Engineering"

    Write a sentence, then write another.
See how the sentences meet together,
forming a process of thought.

Note: All quotes from:
John Dewey. The Essential Dewey, Volume One, (Bloomington and Indianapolis). Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, eds. Indiana University Press. 1998.

Uncited quotes are from "My Pedagogic Creed" by John Dewey.

Boldfaced phrases were discovered by Beth Garrison using an algorithmic anagram program.

The Tempest

And in other cultural news...

Just saw a production of The Tempest, outdoors in the great metropolis of Nashua, NH. Two of the homeschoolers we've seen many times—they played Romeo & Juliet together—were in it. Much of the rest of the cast were older.

It was performed on stage in a park. A nice setting, but the acoustics were poor. We sat fairly close and could hear everything except when planes or motorcycles passed by. Midway thru the production some teenage girls collected in front. Some while later, as a scene ended, the three got up giggling, one said “Great job, everyone”, and they skittered off in teenage hilarity.

There was barely any set to speak of, and most of the cast dressed in ordinary modern clothes. Ariel wore a sprite-rated gown, Caliban was properly outré, and Trinculo, played by a female, inexplicably wore a flouncy, parti-coloured tutu. Most of the men wore shirts with ties. And guns were in the pockets of the murderous ones.

The play rollicked along, with no stops for acts. Players came in from the audience quite a bit, and Trinculo lay drunk near me at one point. It was a decent production.

I did not care for the woman who played Caliban, but I do not think I would care for anyone who played Caliban. I think of the Monty Python skit featuring the hospital for overacting. You see all these Richards lamenting excessively about their kingdom for a horse. I fear Caliban may be inextricably linked to that sort of performance, tho to be honest, I have never seen a performance of The Tempest before (not counting that scifi movie with Leslie Nielsen, in which Robbie the Robot played Caliban (and played the role well!)).

One of the players had a thick New England accent that verged on JFK's, tho it must be said that JFK's accent was some sort of concoction merely influenced by the New England tongue. Prospero was Brit, most the rest American, altho the girl who played Ariel, former Juliet, has a British mother and Canadian father, and speaks that way.

A nice touch came at the end when sailors arrived on the island to save everyone. They were dressed as Gilligan and the Skipper. Chortle.

The Tempest is a nifty play, especially reckoning Shakespeare himself as the magister Prospero. Vaunted Shakespeare has become a tiresome conceit. It is fair to reckon him within the sphere of entertainment as well as grand literature. I say this thinking of Prospero begging for applause at the end. I think we must concede his humanity. Winter's Tale (or whatever was) is kind of a crappy ending for his career, you ask me. That was, btw, the first homeschool production that we saw. A decent production, but the play is kind of crackers. To me it is Willie Mays with the Mets, flubbing a basket catch or falling down on his way to first after singling. Anyway, gee, a free performance of Shakespeare.

Watchmen

Erin and I just finished watching Watchmen. His review was succinct: "Well, that sucked." I do not exactly beg to differ, but I will throw more words at the thing.

It is based in the weird conceit of superheroes in a real sort of world. Just try. The chorus is: human all too human, ultra cynical version. Comix deserve this sort of attention and consideration, because so much of the malarkey of comix goes by without criticism. Like, Superboy once split 2 planets in half, because one had half destroyed by fire, so his cure was to merge the good half of another planet with the good half of the one he wanted to save. The scale of that is ridiculous, am I right?

I do not really want to recount the plot of Watchmen, it fetches far without a lot of cred. The story resides in an alternate history in which Nixon remains president for several terms, just imagine. We are offered a lot of squirrelly caricatures of Nixon and others of that era. On the plus side, the soundtrack has some nice artifacts from the 60s to the 80s (movie was set in 1985). This is all secondary to the convolutions of character interplay between the superheroes. In this, the story reminds me of Jonathan Lethem's “Super Goat Man”, except these heroes have clear powers. The recent Batman also comes to mind, too, even to the gruff whisper of Rorschach (a la the Dark Knight himself).

The movie is spectacularly, even lusciously, violent. It turns all that ka-pow of comix to its logical limit. Might as well admit the damage that superheroes could do.

Like Dark Knight, Watchmen revels in the possibilities of superpowers, that superheroes would be no more morally pristine than you or me. And the question of why Superman et al. would bother with bank robbers when the spectre of war, etc. Dr Manhattan, the glowing blue bundle of energy (he looks like a particularly buff (steroidal) Academy Award), ends the Vietnam War by grimly slaughtering everything in his path. Which is a logical endpoint to superpowers.

The movie is three hours long, owing to the tendency of many of the SHs to soliloquize. Dr Manhattan does it just standing there, whereas Rorschach at least is voiceover, with action going on. These speeches are staid exercises in cynical, nihilistic viewpoint, really just flouncy cries for attention. Watchmen wants some seriousness to survive thru the malarkey but chokes it with a reliance on comic book surface.

I never read the comic, tho I think I may have it around here. I like turning superheroes on their end, but this is a rough attempt. There is considerable backstory implied, some of it ridiculous. The central female, whose moniker I forget, turns out, we discover, to be the daughter of The Comedian, who raped her SH mother. The Comedian himself, he never does one clean superhero act, not even in his vaunted youth. He is hard to fit into the story. The others, even Rorschach, who is a psycho, seem to have managed some superheroism.

The result of all this, I feel, is over extended trash. I mean trash in the positive sense, but still. The stultifying speeches soften whatever edge that was possible, so that even the looniness of the characters is dried out. Alas. I suspect the comic would work better. I do not know if The Dark Knight could have been a source for this film, but there are similarities. Instead of the Joker at the center, tho, we have the two drippiest SHs, The Owl and that aforementioned 2nd generation SH.

Another Shadow by Tom Beckett (Precipitous Inklings)

Tom Beckett has a new e-book available called Another Shadow. You would do well to avail yourself.

As it happens, Ron Silliman recently adverted a review of Geoff Young's work by Terrence Winch, which, tangent to this tho it be, is worth a look. Winch writes, "In a universe of very needy and ambitious writers, these brave souls will be seen primarily in their role as servants to the needy." With both Young and Beckett, I knew them first as publishers, excellent ones. It is nice to see some sense of their worth as writers come to the fore. Anyway, the appearance of Tom's book engenders a few general thoughts.

First, his tendency to write in short lines, brief nuggets. Writers come to mind: Niedecker, Corman, Raworth, Zukofsky. The impulse behind each writer is different but there seems to be a coincidence of effect, as one reads these trimmed and salient works. I mean the metre of the short line, for one thing. Energy coalesces in the words hung nakedly in the white space.

As I read thru the works in Another Shadow, I am aware of the meaning in the white space that Tom carefully protects. Much resides in that white space. There is a time signature there, not strictly a matter of beats. Page as stanza, or measure.

The reader has to respect the beats, read carefully and slowly. Even tho there is much nervous energy involved in the writing.

Years ago, Peter Ganick remarked that his own work was philosophy. I take that to mean that not just aesthetic issues are at work (or play) but that a manner of thinking and discovery also occurs. Tom Beckett's work is implacable in its persistence to extend into if not resolve issues of body and mind. This is a constant in Tom's work. We read an involvement, set to a measure. The Internet has allowed Tom Beckett to blossom as a writer, to find a greater audience for his own work. It is about time.

Consider the Library

I always anticipate going to the bookstore, the pleasure of acquiring new books: that whole adventure. It is especially great going with Beth, because she looks at everything, whereas I tend to have a limited focus, whatever bee or two happens to inhabit my bonnet at the time, and too impatient to look further. She found what is considered a classic work on memory by Frances Yates. It is unlikely that I would have stumbled on that. Fascinating book about how the Greeks imagined a house, and placed memories within rooms in that house, as a way to organize their memory

Anyway, I notice that I get a similar buzz going to the library. Last week I was wandering thru the local library, which is new to me (just moved). We moved only a few miles but we're in a new library network. New vista. Recently, I made a quick reconnaissance pass and grabbed without planning to grab anything, a scifi novel by Ben Bova, Orion Among the Stars. I liked it, despite it being part of a series, which I have learned to hate.

That attitude of cranking out another one deflates the genre (and fantasy, as well) terribly. All these trilogies that are simply outsized novels, or sequels and prequels that serve to attenuate and destroy whatever was developed early on.

Looking thru the stacks and seeing ugh how many Dune novels, sad. Frank Herbert wrote a classic, the original Dune, and successive excursions have proven less inspiring, at least among the 5 (ugh!) that I read. I can see going back to characters and settings that work, but eventually the thing that tickled the author to make this novel gets lost.

And then there is this obnoxious deal of someone joining the original author to exploit the franchise further. This happened with Herbert, his son took over, maybe after Frank's death. Arthur C Clarke had another writer come in. It may be that the 2nd writer approached Clark, wanting to wring the thing dry, which Clarke ok'd, or maybe Clarke needed a collaborator. Whatever.

I adventured around in the library a little more the other evening. Got essays by David Foster Wallace. Soon I will try Infinite Jest. I remember vaguely when it came out, probably read reviews in The New Yorker or the Times Book Review. Wallace's death brought it to mind again.

The Ben Bova worked for me because it was the right length, a crisp 300 pages or so. Few novels are too short but many are too long, tho I love the successful long ones (Proust, Joyce, etc). I once read 11 Stephen King novels one summer. I will not deny King's skill but found a lot of of the books were plain overlong. Not bad writing but a paid-by-the-word feeling. A lack of concentration. Facile.

So, the last trip to the library, along with the Wallace (which, so far, is entertaining, but, you know, Edward Dorn's occasional pieces, which these by Wallace resemble, are more zesty to me). Got a collection by John Dewey, a plain and sensible man. Also got a scifi by someone. David Brin blurbed "Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton." That was enough for me to dip in, tho Brin is a dullish writer from my experience, but on the off chance. I once got the buzz to collect books from the used bookstore that adverted hilarity. However many of these treasures that I bought I found next to none that satisfied my sense of hilarity, as in laugh out loud. Usually these so called comic novels are just situational comedies, with the situations overplayed. Terry Ptatchett, Douglas Adams: they are certifiably funny. And Laurence Sterne for a different taste. One of Hemingway's' posthumously-published novels was supposed to be Benchleyesque, so I read it. Nothing of the kind. Selah.

I was impressed at the lengthy shelf of sci (which comprises fantasy, as well) offered by the library. There were a goodly slumload of Part 7 of the Excessiad stuff but still, I could be entertained by this and that. In high school, I know that I read a lot. I remember using those spare moments, like the 3 minutes from getting to class and when the bell rings, to get back to my reading. I cannot read like that anymore. I read little poetry then. Read a lot of whatnot that I got because of the covers, breathtaking space vistas being one thing that might grab me.

I have not even found the poetry shelf yet at this library. Not that it will impress me when I do. That musty smell of books that do not get enough airing. I once made a smart remark here, concerning a David Shapiro book I saw at B&N. From a big time publisher, with over many blank pages and that kind of denatured thingness that poetry books are contorted to. I could imagine finding a copy all musty from sitting in a library and decided not to buy it. This was not a criticism of Shapiro's work, but of the attitude that encases poetry in dust. The poetry shelf is where few deign to tread.

Poetry: A Semi-Demi-Hemi-Annual Statement

Last weekend, Tom Beckett and Geof Huth gave a reading in Buffalo, to read and celebrate their collaborative joint interview, a project of at least a year. According to one of their accounts, 11 people attended. Buffalo is too far off for this camper to shuffle off to, and the school year at Buffalo was over, but still, that 11 seems not enough. For any reading, that is, let alone for one that really promised a pay off. What's up with poetry?

Poetry is not some camp we go to, either as vacation or as a neglect of more serious stuff. Poetry is the language itself, yours, mine, and that of those people over there by the daylilies. It is the language of Margaret Fuller drowning and of Thoreau on the seashore looking for her remains. It is the language of that and more. You know this.

We as poets, writers of poems, need not be defensive about poetry. It has a function that we can describe and honour. WCW was right (once again) that you cannot get the news from a poem. Poetry is not for the survival of facts, but for the lifting of facts and concerns to places of importance. Poetry is language at the essence of communication. Granted, this communication is not at the simple delivery level of thing for thing. Heidegger (which see) grants us distinctions by going at the idea of thingness, which sounds at first (and at second, and at third) like a convolution until one relaxes into the ride of that query and realizes the barest minimum. Emerson notes that every word was, initially, a poem. Exaltation, exultation, excitation.

We need something to get thru the screening process, thru our lack of attention, thru our mundane distraction. Poetry is a capability that we discover and develop. As a writer, I came to poetry as an alternative to the bounded possibilities that I saw (novels, essays, whatever: they were (at least I thought they were) fully defined. Poetry, once freed in my mind from metre and rhyme, which overwhelmed any other aspect of poetry for me, looked likely to give me space. I was ignorant, no question, but I did not see myself writing like someone else.

As I have written before, my first palpable influence as a writer was probably Robert Benchley. I liked his humour, of course, but also, I liked the sense of his stance. I saw him as being able to writer 'like that' about anything. Sure, I mimicked him some, and others as well, out of envy as well as within a process of learning. I knew all along that I could not capture the thing of most interest, but learning that was a step in my own slow growth as a writer. Eventually, I allowed myself to teem with my own necessity, not that of the already integrated.

I and others have written of the reading that Tom Beckett gave in Cambridge in '07. It was wonderful to witness his nerves, his insistence, his involvement. Geof Huth was not on the docket that day but his presence was felt (the intimate dynamics of the reading space allowed audience involvement, and even just Geof's furious notetaking was a contribution). Later, at the pub, the conversation roiled, with Tom and Geof, fellow reader Charles Shively, Jack Kimball, and others. To which, alas, I was unable to enter by virtue of where I sat and that I had to leave early. The point of this remembrance is just to note the intensity of the combination: that Poetry. That some heavy shit, man.

I have always felt slightly icky about poetry and about calling myself a poet. Poetry is grand spaces, for sure, but its intensity is often read as merely rarification, only those born in high places with lungs that can breathe the thin air there. Partly, that is true, but only in the sense that you need strong lungs, just to stretch the metaphor awkwardly. Poetry is learned, not bequeathed. Really, the learning is the interesting part, once you get used to the effort. Like running, where you learn to resist the boundaries, go further, harder, until the occasional moment of ease that makes a lot of trudging worthwhile.

Poetry is so damn useful, because it directed me to learn words, and how words work together, and what words could mean in contexts that they, the words, did not expect. And so forth. I acknowledge the great debt I owe to Charles Olson, for the interesting paths he suggested to me. I will shoo idolatry aside (it has its uses for the youthful writer) and remain with the fact of the interesting venues I saw in Olson's attempts. Science and history and philology and politics and aesthetics. You might find the same elsewhere. Gather it up, it is Poetry.

It was an event in Buffalo, I have no doubt. It was an event when Jack Kimball, in his excitement over the evolving work, showed and read to Beth and me the ms for Post-Twyla. It will be an event when Jeff Harrison and I read either of our two endless collaborations in public (halfway between Arkansas and Massachusetts, I wot). Poetry is an event. It is language poised for any possibility. Your language, my language, the world's language. We do not need to be defensive about our interest in such a thing. It is worthy of the best spaces on our cave walls.

Antic View

Antic View continues apace. Jeff Harrison is a thoughtful and idiosyncratic thinker, and I am usefully reactive. You know what? I prepared myself for writing. I put myself in front of the texts, tho I did not know what I was supposed to find (and yet I found 'it'). Jeff is a scholar, as evidenced by his command (see Antic View, intallments 1-141). Do I have to sell this? Welladay.

On a similar road, Tom Beckett and Geof Huth gave a reading of (a selection of) their own 1-year dual interview in a reading at Buffalo yestreen (sat nite live). Geof is a terrific critical thinker, Tom is a gentle provocateur, and both are exceptional poets. Look for the publication of this work. Read the generating incisions that Jeff and I bring. I think we are On To Something.

Michael Jackson, Selah

I was surprised to hear of Michael Jackson's death and, perhaps stupidly, surprised at the reaction to it. I know he has been popular, and his incipient comeback generated a lot of interest, but that did not add up to relevancy in my eyes. I thought it was all about the hype machine, but I guess that I was wrong.

Jackson was an original. I do not need to haul out WCW's still accurate description of America's pure products (which, of course, I have just deftly done), but Jackson was certainly troubled. His talent was enormous, as singer, as dancer, and as entertainer, but the curtain never seemed to be drawn across the stage of his life.

What gets me is that the 1st thing that occurs to me when thinking of Jackson is his weirdness. I am tolerant of difference, and do not excoriate him for his look, or his hobby horses. The cloud of pedophilia that hangs over him, however, is disturbing, and he never seemed intent on mitigating that.

As entertainer, he was not to my taste, but I could appreciate what he did. Some of his songs were downright silly. I mean "Billie Jean" is not convincing at all, nor "Beat It". He was more convincing in that song with Paul McCartney, the video of which shows him joining Linda and Paul as travelling scam artists. Jackson was still fresh-faced then. I think he could have gone in the way of McCartney, as an entertainer, I mean, but his weird relation to the world scotched that. He was more publicly weird than Elvis but it seems like they were similar in their urge to live in a make believe world or something. I do not know, nor do I really want to tramp these grounds.

It would seem that the rumours and accusaations of his pedophilia would be a deal breaker. Instead, they simply kept the people who would not have liked him anyway in a state of boil. His fans stayed with him. I do not ignore Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism, I live with it. My interest in his work cannot let me ignore that critical aspect of the man. And Pound paid for that anti-Semitism, if that is any consolation, which it is not.

MJ paid for his interest in children, in more than one way. It is dynamically creepy that parents allowed him to use their children as playmates. MJ was clearly out of touch concerning boundaries but how did the parents figure it? They were enablers.

RIP is especially appropriate with Jackson. His was an agitated soul, for which he seemingly found no relief. The pure products of America thing seems terribly apt. The weirder he was, the more interest he received from the world. The snowball just kept getting bigger.

Richard Brautigan

Peter Ciccarriello proves to be my prime source for interesting links, via Twitter. Here is one he recently tweeted, a small publication by Richard Brautigan, brought to online life. Nice to be reminded of Brautigan.

I 1st read him in the earliest days of Rolling Stone. This was before that esteemed piece of crap became an esteemed piece of crap. Brautigan contributed tiny prose pieces as column filler. These pieces were quirky and under-inflected and fit oddly well with the distinctions of the burgeoning rag and the teeming new music scene being documented.

I am sure Brautigan's work inspired a slew of pointedly wishy washy dabblings, but his own work stood and stands with an innocent sort of genuineness. A quick, scholarly study of Wikipedia reveals that Brautigan suffered paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression. I do not know what that assertion is worth (including the possibility of multiple jolts of electroconvulsive therapy), but it all rings as plausible, at least. But why go there? Okay, such intelligence does seem to help make sense of the man and his work.

Brautigan's work reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's except Vonnegut was much more canny, which I do not think Brautigan could ever be accused of. Vonnegut's flaky mythos in his earlier books beheld an honest sort of scope but I found later books (Breakfast of Champions comes to mind) tiresome in their effort to be underinflected.

Brautigan's work seems to hold no scope whatsoever. His work resides in a depressed yet lovely stasis. The pictures I've seen of him all show a classic (so to speak) California hippie type. I mean that phrase generously. Brautigan had long hair, full droopy mustache, brimmed hat, wholly iconic in my eye. According to the undaunted expertise at Wikipedia, Brautigan died by his own hand in 1984. I was thinking he died more recently. Sad and wistful story. His work seems an attempt to find a quiet place of chance, an opening into sunlight. The translation of the hard copy into an online experience is by Andrew Stafford. Isn't it a sweet, wispy pleasure?

Richard & Mimi Farina

Peter Ciccariello uses Twitter to send nifty url's (@ciccariello). The other day he posted er tweeted a link to a Youtube video (not that Youtube created the video) of Richard and Mimi Farina. I have not listened to them in years, alas, but please check out this and this. Folk Scene, 1966. "Pack Up Your Sorrows" is a classic sort of song, a lovely icon of the early 60s. "Joy Round My Brain" is that moment of wide-eyed hippie purity, palpably sincere. Mimi's utterly crystalline voice, like that of her sister Joan Baez, and Richard's straightforward genuineness create a wonderful experience. And didn't they look like J Crew models? Gee, Richard died on Mimi's 21st birthday. Selah, but the sweetness lasts. And take a few hats off to Pete Seeger. Okay, he did not take kindly to Dylan backed by the Paul Butterfield Band, but the guy made thunder with a stalwart political edge. Friends, please take this stuff all as resource.

Web Two Point Woe

The instigation of this ramble was my having watched that awful morning show on Fox, id est one host of reasonable obsequity and 2 certifiably stupid, as in stupid, co-hosts. The good Senator Grassle from somewhere Twittered about Obama, specifically that the president hadn't ought to be gallivaunting around Paris when the country needs leadership. It was a ridiculous criticism because clearly Obama has been busy in his first months in the White House, and are your hands so work-dirtied Senator Grassle? Not, let me say, a big story.

The real story was that the senator used Twitter to broadcast his exasperation. Because, you know, Oprah said Hey, Peeps! I'm on Twitter!!!!!!!!, and that effort at product placement made Twitter worth talking about on television, thus a substantial commodity. And that is Web 2.0, a new sense of online community.

I have not gotten into Twitter a whole lot. I follow a number of funny/interesting people, Jesse Thorn of the podcast Jordan Jesse Go!, the three members of You Look Nice Today (who met thru Twitter), Rob Corddry, and a few others I just sort of fell to. I do not contribute often, just do not have the handle on that. I am not ragging on Twitter, it could be quite useful. I think the communities built upon it could become quickly lapsed, but that is just a guess.

Peter Ciccariello is the only poet type that I follow who makes a vigourous usage of Twitter. He posts links to articles and works online, including his own fine visual work (@ciccariello). That is a community effort, and not simply performance of the public directive. I do not want to say that there is no interest for writers and poets, my study and usage of Twitter, as I have indicated, is limited. Presumably the potential is there for a poetic Twitter community...

Ten years ago, listservs were immeasurably useful to me, as a way to connect to other writers. Beth and I met thru a listserv, and the Poetics list, at that time, was a way to read some zesty (at times) thinking re contemporary poetry, also to connect via backchannel to writers from afar. Having fallen into isolation, I found this to be a great opportunity, truly invigourating.

Alas, the Poetics list got old and wary. Stephen Vincent for one admirably continues to press the idea of community, the connection we hold as writers and poets, as well as citizens of a wider consideration. I think the machine is broken, now. That is okay, the world changes and new tools arise.

Other community tools...

Blogs started to become common 5 years ago, which is when I began using them. Oddly, there arose the sense that blog writing was somehow different from other writing. Many people use blogs as journals, which is to say public performances of their world view. This happens currently with some Twitter users. The medium does not require this usage. Those who look askance at blogs are not recognizing the basic tool. Blogs are websites, simple to use. In the early days, they developed communities, in which like-minded bloggers would refer back and forth. That self-reference got rather boggy, frankly, in a way similar to how some Twitterers get. A public Twitter replying to another reads, to the outsider, as a mere puzzle, just as blogs did. Community does not hold up in that way, too restrictive.

I believe in the possibility of the Internet. I think, however, that the pressure on the various tools is over-emphasized. By my augury, we will see a decline in Facebook because it is so consuming. It is fascinating that ex-classmates or co-workers, or whoever, can find you after so many years, and that you can work the network into a wide intimacy. Some of this network development is just counting coup but still. I do not feel all that attached to the writers with whom I am connected, not in the sense of a Facebook community. I have not given the effort needed, I admit. The vastness and busyness of the interface is too distracting. The promotional interest of Facebook itself, and of some of the denizens of the surface, amount to clutter. Would that that clutter could be delivered elsewhere, so that one could receive just content qua content.

How, the question occurs, can these tools deliver more of their communal possibly?

Recent Deaths

Robin Blaser and David Bromige both died recently, as well as David Carradine. Bromige and Blaser are writers I should read more of, tho I have taken lessons from both. Carradine is something different to me, but his death is affecting.

My real intro to Blaser was his excellent essay on Spicer, "The Practice of Outside", included in Black Swallow's edition of Collected Books. It is a great introduction to Spicer, perceptive and comprehensive. His poetry, which I finally delved into by way of Holy Forest, conspires to open into an excitement of language, from the vantage of a quiet perspective. Duncan and Spicer were louder compadres, so to speak, but Blaser's more minimalist style had character and strength.

Bromige was an odd one, with a good sine qua non factor. I think I first met Bromige by way of This 3, in which I was published, and it is my memory that Bromige was as well. So, someone Grenier knew, so I looked further in Bromige's direction. Tom Beckett, of course, dedicated an issue of The Difficulties to Bromige, etc. Bromige's Englishy humour and sliding skew of language is tough yet involving. He, and Blaser too, should be regarded more highly by the experts out there. That is, the landscape is wickedly varied, and interest should not rest in the first call manifestations of poetic assertion. The Poetics list flunked out for me by how limited and lame the readership seemed to be. Too may writers deserve better than that crack.

Carradine, well. Perfectly brewed Hollywood oddball, for sure. His father, I estimate, appeared in every movie ever made. I saw some upliftingly screwy horror movie in which Carradine makes an appearance. The director played along, and inserted a picture of John Carradine into the film, so that even after his death he was appearing in movies. Without filling in blanks or assumptions, the idea of hanging oneself in Bangkok just sounds too sad and horrible. And so I have writ my piece on recent deaths...

Only in Whispers (review)

Only in Whispers is the comic that I bought last Sunday at Anime Boston (Issue 1, 2007). It is a product of Free Lunch Comics, a small independent entity, I infer. Nothing wrong with independent. Matt Ryan, the person who I spoke with, is the president of this entity.

I did not dip deeply into the world of underground comix in the day but certainly liked them. R Crumb and his ferocious world view, S Clay Wilson and his odd fascination with bikers and pirates, the intensely psychedelic Rick Griffin, etc. I no longer have whatever collection I made of these things, alas. They were anodyne to the the weary paths much of Marvel and DC comix were on at the time. So now there is a more wide open market for comix, not underground but not Marvel either.

Only in Whispers reminds me of Charlton Comics. Charlton ran a distant um 5th or 6th behind DC, Marvel, Harvey, and whatever. Without consulting Wikipedia, I will say that Charlton dealt largely with horror stories, which is where the comparison with Whispers begins. The Charlton visual style was rough, if I remember rightly. Whispers boasts several different artists but I think the style would be considered manga-like: images expressively stretched across panels and pages.

The cover shows a desperate looking fellow in what appears to be a Grande Armee uniform, tho the hat (shako?) bears a skull emblem, with sword draw (well, the whole picture is drawn). At his feet is a horde of rats, presumably at his command. The background suggests a fiery, hellish scene. So, what is the takeaway?

It is an image of horror. This scene does not relate to anything inside the book. It is just a visceral, powerful image. That is the pull of the horror genre, the inexplicable and disturbing.

Think of Frankenstein's monster. By Shelley's presentation he is basically someone with an unfortunate upbringing who murders a few people. Karloff's monster exceeds those distinctions and presents an unexplainable phenomenon, to iconic levels of intensity. What I am doing here is relating the virtues of the horror genre.

The inside cover introduces a creepy fellow from whose library the ensuing stories come. The Crypt Keeper without the kitsch, and a way to tie the disparate stories together.

The first story is set in Coventry, MA, which gets me right away. I do not believe a Coventry exists in Massachusetts (one does in Rhode Island), but the localization makes me think of Lovecraft. One of Lovecraft's books was published in Athol, Massachusetts, in the mysterious realm beyond Worcester. In stopping there once, and knowing that one Lovecraft fact, I felt the impinging strangeness of HPL. I guess I am drifting in tangents here...

The plot of the story is simple and odd: a writer finds/steals a manuscript written in blood, the Devil's book. The woman from whom it was obtained, a witch, invokes revenge. The End. In the gap between the period and the capital T one sees the writer being caught by numerous spider webs, culminating in the final page spread of the writer grossly ensnared and covered with spiders. The artwork is manga-like and graphic, meaning that the panels stand well on their own.

Next is a short story by Steve Kanarus, who is publisher of Free Lunch Comics (Ryan is president). It is about a magic-involved couple. I think you could say that they teeter on the edge of black arts but finally choose a less nihilistic, more redemptive view. Horror stories are nothing if not moralistic, by which I mean there is always that sense of balance: good/evil, right/wrong.

The next story is familiar enough, a man makes what turns out to be a Faustian deal, and we witness the ensuing decline in his life. It seems to me the inking is too heavy, the lines too thick, for the more delicate style of the artist (Stephanie O'Donnell; story again by Kanarus). The style is more linear than what I call manga-like, and to me less interesting. To each his own, of course. The Faust theme is powerful, and always leaves you wanting to yell, Don't do it!.

"The Conscript" (Kanarus/Anthony Summey) features a black arts fellow in 18th Century Germany. He insinuates himself darkly into some lives there then is banished to America. The story features some very Lovecraftian rats, maybe the cover does relate to this story, and an implication that the story will continue. The idea of this bad influence coming to the New World is a powerful idea. I mean Keats' brother came to the States a little later to join a Utopian community (I think Coleridge almost joined the same one). The belief that America welcomes all receives an early challenge. I think the story should continue, as it does not wholly satisfy as it stands. It ends, I should say, with rats scritching in the walls of the home of the person who had the magician sent away.

The final story, by Andrew Pollock seulement, is "The Wailing". In smaller letters in the title square is the word WitchHound: is that part of the title or the name of a continuing character or series?. Je ne sais pas.

The plot concerns a curst family. Every generation, a male of the family hears the banshee's cry. then dies. A Mr. Delacroix is consulted. I am shakily guessing that he turns into this creature who confronts the banshee. A violent fight ensues, until the dread words to be continued appear.

Well, as I turn the page and look at the ad there, it is for WitchHound, the adventures of which/whom I can see unfold at Wickedsmash.com. Pictured on the page is Mr. Delacroix, the creature who fought the banshee, and another creature, a hulking fellow who is built like Thing of Fantastic Four. Anyway, Pollock's style is flattened expanses of white and black, at times suggestive of Beardsley, leastwise if Beardsley were rattled from his opiate bliss. Er, I do not know if Beardsley experienced opiate bliss, just my impression from his work.

I had fun reading this and would like to read more. Comix are pretty powerful in possibility. If you look at the old Donald Ducks from the 50s and 60s, they had some pretty savvy satire going. The early superhero stuff is rife with goodies to deconstruct, and later day superheroes effort towards serious themes dealt seriously, and now the further array of possibilities. I am not expert in the genre, tho I spent my time and money in the day on these creations, so I maybe I got it 'all wrong'. My own poetics says comix are worth inclusion, or more exactly that inclusion is within the nature of my poetics. For that reason, I hope you have read this far.

Note:According to several googled sources, including the book Opium by Martin Booth, Aubrey Beardsley is indeed believed to have partaken of opium. Good guess on my part.

Whispers

Please forgive the dreadful gap problem that I have yet to solve. More posts are below.

Whispers
Originally uploaded by Simple Theory

Eiffel Tower, now more convenient

Peter Ciccariello tweeted this link, a 360 degree view from the Eiffel Tower. Hold down crtl then mouse around to change the view. I find that this thing replicates the experience of Kirk and Sulu falling from space to the evil Romulan drill thing, which brings to mind a U2 song: Vertigo...

Anime Boston

A scant few photos of Anime Boston, here. Erin was in for the whole weekend event, Beth and I managed to squeeze in just the Sunday fest. It is great fun, and I am not a rabid fan of either anime or manga. I would be happy to go to any sort of convention, because the energy of the participants is fascinating. Edward Dorn has a number of essays that recount his reactions to various events, a fashion show, a tennis or golf competition on tv, etc. You need not be ironic, as I consider Hunter S. Thompson to be, to get a ripple. So I believe...

The side of a building bordering the Mass Pike near Fenway adverted a gun show. No I.D. required. Interesting.

We got in early and did not need wait long in line to get our pass. Erin had pre-ordered a 2nd one, or that occurred in error, so we needed just the one. It seemed like there were fewer attendees but that may be due to a different use of the convention centre since Erin says that there were 4000 more than the 11,000 of a year ago. Also, Sunday is getaway day, even tho plenty happens all day.

That sense of diminished crowd was belied by the line awaiting Anime Chess. It extended the width of the convention centre. Beth and I said no thanks to that, but when we came back they were letting folks in, so we walked in and sat down. In Anime Chess, anime characters act as chess pieces, and move around the board onstage. I am unsure how the characters were chosen. One of the emcees made it sound like some would be pulled from the audience, which elicited wild screaming, and all the eager hopefuls standing on their chairs. No one was at that time selected, however.

The various characters were introduced slowly. Every one of them drew wild cheering once the introductory description made it clear who was coming. The subtleties were lost on us so we left before the actual game got far.

The Artist's Alley was larger than ever. This is where crafts people sell their wares. Lots of drawings, some jewelry and such. A lot of people offering chibi drawings, which is, if I understand, a translation of adults into children. Erin got one a couple of years ago. It did not really resemble him, just put big eyes and spiky hair on a figure that only vaguely looked like him. There is some nice work there tho.

I had my camera but once again I am pretty poor with taking pictures of people. I would prefer not to take posed pictures but that is considered bad form except in crowd scenes. I did approach a few people, as noted in the above web album. The guy in white with the sword was approached by someone, but gestured the photographer to wait until after the swordsman had finished his phone call. After he posed for that person, I asked. It is not enough to have the costume, you have to know how to present yourself in it. The woman in the Asian-looking gown hit several poses for me and a few others. The storm trooper outfit just struck me as a lot of work. In the movies, those outfits are of course ridiculous. They seem to give no extra protection, and clearly are more awkward than no amour. The family that animes together was irresistible, with the toddler out cold. The mother tried to adjust the child's hat, and almost woke him.

We ate lunch in the outdoor courtyard in the shadow of the Prudential Building. This grassy area attracted a lot of cosplayers. A group of them were doing a mock fight with their weapons, and they were spazzy. They ought to practice that stuff too. Some loud heavy metal types were shouting at people to join their group, which was attempting to start a spontaneous dance. The coolest ones joined but left soonestly, and the whole thing fizzled, just as a quick thumper started to shower.

I spoke with a guy who produces comix. I got one, my only purchase. I will write about it anon. I like comix and I like manga. I dislike, however, how many manga are 10-volume sets, id est: $100 for the full read. The comic that I got has several stories, by different writers and artists, plus several short stories with no visuals. I told him that I am not a comix writer or artist but he still talked up a comix group in Boston as well as the one in Connecticut that he belongs to. Anyway, I am terribly weary, as the dullness of this report suggests, so I will quit now. There was a rainbow as we left.

Star Trek...

... or maybe we can call it Stare Trek...

Yes, we saw the Star Trek movie. We saw the 4:30 show because Erin had to go register for Anime Boston directly afterwards, which is a lot of muy importante for one guy. Next week he goes to NJ to stay with his grandmother and work on the boardwalk, so this was our one available time. Thus we saw this movie in a theatre containing maybe 10 people.

First, the trailers.

1. Ben Stiller is at the museum again. I saw the 1st, on the small screen, I believe, funny enough tho laboured. I doubt that this one will have much mojo but snap snap snap in the trailer and it seemed rather funny.
2. Yet another Will Ferrell movie, this time with special effects and dinosaurs, which looked funny, and a different track from the stream of films that he has been in recently.
3. Jack Black and somebody else (was he in the Will Ferrell skate movie?) in a history of the world sort of something that looked wry and funny. All of these, spread across a large screen, held some attraction.
4. [downer] GI Joe, which I did not recognize as such until the title hit the screen, looked completely retarded. Must be avoided at all costs.
5. [downer] I saw the original Transformers (saw as in slept thru half of it), and it was really stupid. The special effects just seemed to be a flustered blur, and the plot was lame. So the sequel looks like worse mush. Loud bang. Move on... Oh, for some reason, 2 of the trailers featured songs by The Who. I am ok with that.

Star Trek, however, looked great, and that is the main point here, tho I am happy to help you plan your entire summer of movies. The Onion has a great take on Trekkies. I never got into Trek that much, and the way the franchise helped stifle the sf genre. I have seen plenty of Trek, Beth and Erin are frequent imbibers of Trek, but I never paid attention to the mythos. So such details as may send shivers down Trekkie backs went over my head. The movie works for such as me while I believe giving satisfaction to the trek of heart.

I realize that the sfx will look tawdry and lame in a couple of years but right now one is pulled in completely. A friend of mine declared that he would never see another Hollywood movie after seeing the 1st Trek film. I never saw that but the ones that I have seen never rose very far above the level of the tv shows in terms of cinematic zip. After the opening sequence, in which James T Kirk is born, we see the older Kirk, still a child, racing a car across a desert. It is hard to imagine the Shatner Kirk in this rowdy. I had to close my eyes as the car, but not Kirk, went over a vertiginous cliff.

Next stop is Kirk entering Starfleet. Again, it is hard to think of this guy as the seed of the weirdo in the Priceline ads. The Kirk of the movie is convincingly brash with a smart mouth, which you do not see in the Shatner Kirk much. Anyway, Kirk meets Uhura and Bones. We also get a glimpse of the young Spock's upbringing. Kirk and McCoy have a good rapport here, as they did in the original. Young Spock is stiff compared to Nimoy, but makes dramatic sense since he has yet to grow into himself.

After some preposterous moves Kirk ends up Captain of the ship, and all the familiar crew are in position. And the day is saved. Eric Bana played the Romulan bad guy. I did not recognize him.

An amazing if patently unbelievable sequence was when Kirk and Sulu attempted to thwart the Romulan space drill thingie. They and the certified crew victim freefall from a space scooter wearing extremely hopeful parachutes. They (not counting the throwaway crew member) land on this high altitude drill platform and proceed to battle it out with Romulans while I suffered extreme vertigo. Yikes!!!

The movie slips into time travel and alternate realities, for which I have low tolerance tho I know others enjoy. My brain does not wrap around temporal anomalies, and there are always garage-sized holes in the logic we are supposed to accept. This stuff aint a deal-killer for me, simply makes it fit the Trek system.

At one point, after a spat, Spock as captain maroons Kirk on a snowy planet. Following some unneeded antics with some unlikely fauna of the planet, Kirk meets with old Spock, and the fuzzy plot is fluffed into a sort of sense. The Romulan bad guy kinda turns into Khan, another familiarity, but it all works out well enough. Scottie is brought in for comic relief, and the franchise breathes again. No losers in the cast, awesome visuals, loudness is offered freely, and flashing lights that held my attention. Bring on the next one!

Mark Scroggins points to the Times review of Angels & Demons (the movie) for a thrill of its savagery. Savagery here = snarky. Snarkiness is a self-promulgating event that I know I trade in. Snarkiness is based on a blindspot raised to a virtue, which I do not find convincing. With the Dan Brown Writin' Machine, we have, according to blurb, 11,000,000 copies of A&D sold. Which does not mean the novel is good, it has holes the size of my fat (but handsome) cat, but it has value. I think it is useful to place the book in terms of those 11 million, What lack does the book fulfill? It is lazy merely to speak of the book's faults. Anyone paying attention can see Brown's clumsiness. It is much more useful to elucidate what the use is of the book. Why has this secular crowd gathered around A&D? Snarking is lazy, I am afraid, tho it is fun, meanly, to kick that particular sort of ass. For all its faults, A&D moves along. I persevered, I read Saul Bellow's Dean's December. It shuffled characters into position like soap operas then made them talk like a drag. It was lame, my friends. Didn't this dud win a Nobel prize? Do not throw Dan Brown in my face as the opposite of greatness. How abojut writing your own wonder novel, Mr. Time reviewer, and save us from Brownian influence. I have pages to go before i am thru A&D.

Ballets Russes

Friends invited us, including Erin, to the ballet this evening. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. I should go to bed but I have to find out how I liked it by writing about it. I know I liked it, but getting the impressions down asap is de rigueur. Words make it real.

I lack the vocabulary of dance, and have not seen a lot, but dance is visceral, thus offers an immediacy that does not require expertise to enjoy. Plus there's music, Prokofieff, von Weber, Stravinsky, and Debussy. I see that I am going to be turgid here, tired as I am, so this report will be quick.

I seem never to have heard of The Prodigal Son, neither music or dance. The backdrop was a lovely thick-lined painting. This might be my favourite of the 4 dances, despite overdone dramatics. A gang of dancers, referred to in the notes as Goons and by Erin as Zombies, made terrific visual effect. They came onstage in train, walking in a squatty, apish way. They landed heavily when they leaped, and were antic, vivid, and hilarious. The Siren was exquisitely en pointe. I do not really like seeing dancers do that, it seems so physically harsh, but she did it so blithely and for so long, and I even got a sense of line, postured down to the detail of her ankle. The music was melodic yet bombastic.

the 2nd act began with The Rose Whatsis (I do not have the scorecard handy). The set was stunning, a bedroom with hugely tall windows. The lighting was lovely. The music was pretty and the dance tasteful. It did not resound but pleased. This may be the ballet in which Nijinsky leaped thru a 7' high window, which I read somewhere. Maybe not 7' in reality. Here it was about 3', tho it was a neat maneuver.

Next came L'Apres-Midi d'Un Faun. I translated the poem years ago, heaven help me, tho Mallarme is a very difficult poet for the likes of me. And I like the moody moment that Debussy creates. The piece is sexual, yes, but there's a nympholeptic quality over all that seems to be the real intersection of poem, music, and dance. The audience reacted as if this was a tour de force. I did not catch it quite like that but it was great.

Finally, The Rites of Spring. Years and years ago I wrote a thing that consisted of stupid vignettes involving the Brooklyn Dodgers (I had just read Boys of Summer), written in a blend of English and rudimentary French. Title: The Rites of Spring Training. The vignettes were of the order of: Jackie Robinson said to Clem Labine, "Qui est. l'homme avec les cheveux gris. And Clem Labine replied, "Il s'appelle Duke Snider." Which I mention only because I was reminded. The curtain rises and along the back of the stage is a line of fire (gas jets, of course). Wow, rock on! Yes, this was raucous stuff in the day. My father got season tickets to the Boston Pops because a neighbour was confronted by Bolero and refused to have anything more to do with an orchestra that would play such music, and so gave my father the tickets. Music and dance, Rites was muscular and vivid. I should write more, but I am tired.

Angels and Demons, the book

When I see people reading in public, I want to know what they are reading. Usually it is popular fiction, which, indeed, is what I likely will be carrying. Tho one time on the train someone said to me, Hey, Freire's awesome. Meaning Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I happened to be reading. I think I have actually had Hegel as reading matter, but he is not ideal. Zippy fiction is the thing.

Which is all preface to saying that I am reading Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown. Brown wrote Da Vinci Code. OR DID HE ??? Okay, fake controversy. Altho...

Angels was published in 2000, a few years before Code. I am pretty sure, as I think of the 2 books, that Brown must have performed a global search & replace to 'write' Code. this in itself is not damning. P G Wodehouse only wrote one plot and 4, maybe 5, characters. Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books all have the same plot. Such need be no problem, because it is the intensity of the author that counts. With Brown, the repetition is more that of a hack than of an obsessed. He is fascinated by weird nether worlds but, alas, he voices that interest thru a dullard (Langdon). He distances himself from the crazies, so the crazies just seem overblown.

The parallel features between Code and Angels are pretty exacting: the super focused assassin, the officious police type, the beautiful mystery woman, and the frantic run hither and yon (mostly yawn). Plus the conspiracy angle. I'll give Brown plus points for delving into interesting worlds, however over the top he does so.

When I saw the trailer for Code, I was hooked, it had the look of weird action, tho in fact the movie was largely a run around. Hanks looked uncomfortable but Gandalf is worth watching and I seem to like Jean Reno a lot. I did not hate the movie, but I could see how others might.

As to Angels, wow, Brown keeps asking the reader to nod unthinkingly. The protagonista and her father managed to use the CERN facilities to manufacture a goodly gob of antimatter with no supervision. Oh, ok. And the bad guys stole it. Right. Yup, and the antimatter was deposited in Vatican City, ready to annihilate a vast area. Gotcha.

That is as far as I have gotten. Those loopholes in reasonableness are distracting. Brown insists in making his Harvard expert in symbology (sic) explain everything to us, the dumb readers, so Langdon comes across as none too bright. Both the Illuminati and Agnus Dei are involved in producing cockamamy puzzles. Our hero the symbolist comes across as someone who is good at the Times crossword.

Despite the failings, the book rollicks along, tho I do not care for the mindless run from place to place. In Code the movie, Hanks had to climb out of a bathroom window and I saw there a terminal insistence on daffy plot evolution. Which, it appears, is a hallmark of the Brownian 'style'. I still have 500 pages to go, which I am sure will prove a little wearying. Plots based on peregrination need more than regular application of the author's assurance that the situation is frantic. We shall see.

Brown is Umberto Eco without the erudition or the humour. Still, I want to find out if Vatican City is blown up and if the Illuminati destroys the world as we know it. What do you think?