not necessarily

In various computer languages, "!" means "not". E. g, 1 != 2. In elementary school, I was taught that "~" is a graphic "adjective" meaning "effectively," "about," "near," "circa," etc. E.g., this event will happen ~2012 means that if you had to pin the event to a specific year, 2012 would be your best bet.

So, to make a long story short, I propose that

!~

mean "not necessarily." Admittedly, "not necessarily" isn't a literal translation of the signs . . . but nothing is literal when it comes to the way people actually speak to one another. A language free of nonsensical or marginally-sensical colloquial phrases wouldn't be a language at all, but rather a system of codes.

desire & utopia

If one were to follow the trajectory of a desire as far as possible, one would eventually cross a horizon into another world. There's a quasi-utopia implicit in every desire -- what we desire isn't merely the immediate object, but a world in which having the object is at least possible. This becomes most clear with regard to unattainable desires -- even when one realizes one will never obtain the object, one nevertheless continues to long for a world in which having that object is possible.

Hypnopompia

are the experiences a person may go through in the hypnopompic state, the period of waking up. [via Wikipedia]

a quote from Oppen, a break/an ending . . .

For everyone who responded with such compassionate and encouraging words to the mugging ordeal, I can't thank you enough. Crag and Kyle, I sincerely apologize for not responding to your comments sooner. I kept trying to find a new & more authentic way of conveying how incredibly touched I was (and am), but I couldn't find the right words -- and so, stupidly, I wound up not saying anything at all. I do this sort of thing way too often.

Although I remain aware of how tenuous and volatile and ephemeral online community can be, the well-wishes I received have brought home, once again, how suddenly that weave of faint, virtual connections can flare into an authentic presence, a compelling and even healing force. Wow. I don't know what else to say other than wow -- and thank you.

As luck (i.e., incredibly good fortune) would have it, I recently stumbled into an opportunity to transcribe Mark Linenthal's delivery of the 8th Annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture 1992), titled George Oppen: The Unacknowledged World. Apparently Linenthal no longer has a written copy of it -- and he had the only copy in existence. Thanks be to the Gods of Magnetic Media that the lecture was videotaped -- for it's portrait of Oppen is a rare and beautiful combination of both philosophical intensity and moving personal reminiscence. For me, listening to the lecture was not unlike having someone pull a landscape painting off the wall -- a painting that's no more than a caricature -- to reveal a window, beyond which lies the real (and genuinely sublime) landscape.

Early on in the lecture, when discussing Heidegger's influence on Oppen's thinking, Linenthal reads excerpts from one of Oppen's letters to his sister.

Surely, there is is-ness [. . .] The point [. . .] is the mind operating in a marvel which contains the mind. Of that marvel, it can really not be thought about because it contains the thought. But it can be felt. It is what all art is about.

The mind operating in a marvel which contains the mind . . . That phrase has reverberated in my mind's ear countless times over the past few months.

I thought this would be a not-inappropriate place to bring this blog to close, at least for now. Since starting school, I've had very little time to post, and I don't expect the situation to change for at least another year-and-a-half. I may continue to post occasionally, but certainly not with greater frequency than I have for the past several months.

To everyone who has read along and contributed, I sincerely hope that we stay in touch. And please keep posting to your blogs! To be honest, worrying about what to post here has kept me from paying as much attention as I'd like to the conversations taking place beyond here.

Abductors threaten to kill journalist Jill Carroll in Iraq

I've been following the story of the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor journalist via Boing Boing. Apparently her captors have decided to kill her within 72 hours. There's certainly no such thing as a "right target", but Jill is clearly the wrong target. A link in the Boing Boing article points to a blog of one Jill's friends and associates -- it's quite an affecting read.

I suppose this gets to me because the descriptions I've read of Jill remind me of so many people I've met over the past few years, friends of friends, people in classes, etc. The Bay Area draws so many people who are both idealistic and have the courage to live in a manner that's congruent with their convictions . . .

I don't know whether Jill ever lived in the Bay Area, but I can't shake the feeling that she's someone I could have easily bumped into at a gathering of some sort.

Here's to hoping that an epiphany of sanity and compassion overpowers her abductors' intentions.

look into my eye

And I thought that work would slow down, that I'd have more time to post, and so on, over the holidays. Ha!

I noticed that the entry below is empty and titled "Pimp". There's a story behind that. Not a happy one, but it's a story and I don't seem to have many stories, so I'm gonna tell it.

A rainy night a few days before Christmas, I headed out of the apartment by myself to attend a performance of Unsilent Night, an hour-long electronic piece that's played simultaneously by as many people as show up with tape players. The procession then wanders for about a mile throughout the city. Every year I plan to attend then forget about it. This year I set a reminder in my online calendar and when the notice popped up on my screen I eagerly snuck out of the office just in time to make it home and change in something warmer.

About a block away from my apartment, I noticed the bus at its terminal stop. I was already running a bit late, the bus would take me exactly where I intended to go, and I wouldn't get soaked until we actually started wandering about the city with our tape players. I thought myself lucky -- the bus claims to run once every 20 minutes, but everyone who relies on it know that it can take up to 40 minutes for the next one to show up, depending on city traffic. I waited, but the bus didn't move. I kept waiting, but the bus still didn't move. Finally, I knocked on the door and asked the driver how soon the bus would be heading out. He didn't know. Something was wrong with the electrical system. Ok, fine, I could just take BART. Though I'd have to hurry even more because I'd already lost time waiting.

As I turned to cross the street, the wind picked up and blew the rain horizontally into my face. I held the umbrella out in front of me, low over my head like an oversized and lopsided hat, then dashed across the street. When I stepped up onto the sidewalk, I found myself immediately on the ground, as if I'd slipped on ice. I tried to struggle up, but there was a weight on top of me. Then, BAM. A fist landed on the side of my face.

Things get a bit blurry here, but I distinctly remember having multiple thoughts at once, as if my consciousness had divided into about three different layers. The first was engaged exclusively in the struggle to get myself away from the this guy who was punching me. That part of me kept screaming for help and trying to dodge the punches (which came harder every time I screamed). The other part of me was engaged in this idiotic self-critical monologue that went something like "You should have been paying attention. You clearly weren't paying attention. Didn't people always warn you this would happen if you didn't pay attention? Now, look it's happening. See what happens when you don't pay attention?" And the third part of me was extremely dissociated from the experience, analyzing it, thinking things like "Hmm. I'm afraid but I don't feel as afraid as I thought I would. This guy is punching me, but the punches don't really hurt that much -- at least as much as I thought they would. This may not be pleasant, but it's not as overwhelmingly horrible as I'd imagined. I've always wondered whether this would happen to me, and what it would be like if it did."

I got a few good glimpses at the guy's face. I didn't recognize him. He was silent, and his expression was absolutely emotionless -- no rage, fear, pleasure, nothing.

Between punches, I managed to pull my wallet out and throw it away from me. I begged him to take it. He did, then he reached into my pocket and yanked out my cell phone, ripping my pants halfway down the leg. That distant part of me thought "Oh, I think this is going to be the end of it now. Thank God." Fortunately, I was right -- the guy was already halfway down the block before I even realized he was no longer on top of me.

"Are you ok?" I stood up without much diificulty -- good, nothing's too damaged, I thought -- and saw a guy about two feet away from me holding open the gate to his apartment building. "Do you want to come in?" I followed him inside, where his girlfriend was attempting to call 911. She'd apparently been on hold for several minutes. "He got you pretty good there by your eye -- do you want some ice?" I noticed for the first time that my left cheek was more visible than it usually is. Oh geez, I thought, this is probably going to start hurting.

They gave me ice, the police showed up, took me for a quick drive around the neighborhood to see if we could spot him. I have to admit, the police were incredibly kind and attentive. One of the officers found my glasses on the sidewalk, put them back together, then even let me use his personal cell phone to call Gerardo.

I've been told by several friends that I'll probably have some mild post-traumatic stress from this, but so far so good. It could have been much, much worse. I had no broken nose, no broken bones, the eyeball itself wasn't bruised. Only one scrape on my cheek. And I'm happy to know that in the midst it I listened to my "gut instincts" about continuing to scream and throwing the wallet at him/away from me. And I made it through something I'd lived in fear of for years.

As for the "pimp" post . . . the guy who stole the phone apparently had some fun playing around with the email features. He sent a few similar emails to coworkers, and the "pimp" email to an address I'd set up to email blog entries to. I thought the address didn't work -- at least now I know it does.

Pimp

conciousness/subjectivity as being becoming non-being

A thought that's been zigzagging its way through my synapses for awhile now.

It's kind of like this -- there's stuff that has positive ontological "content". It "takes up room" in "being". Whatever that means. But this stuff is constantly passing into non-being, constantly ceasing to exist. I don't know where the stuff originally comes from -- the big bang? -- but it doesn't matter, it could never be comprehended anyway. The point is that subjective experience is the means by which this constant ceasing-to-exist happens.

So I'm looking at a computer screen right now, as I type, and this computer screen (whatever it ultimately is) has positive ontological content that is, right now, passing into nothingness. And that "passing into nothingness" = my perception(s) of the computer screen.

To put it another way, where does what we perceive "go" when we perceive it? Sure it "goes" into our memories to some degree, but that's just the trace of it. Where does the thing itself go? Nowhere -- it dissolves. Our perception of it is precisely that dissolution.

Water going over the edge of the cliff -- consciousness as that edge.

This is way too metaphysical for even my taste, but it's a thought that keeps bubbling up to the surface of my attention, so I'm starting to think there's *something* to it, even if the thought itself is functioning as a kind of metaphor for something I'm not fully aware of (like the metaphorical aspect of dreams).

is there anybody out/in there?

hello . . . ?

Dusty in here. Sheets over the furniture. Blogroll yellowing at the edges, absent-mindedly tacked to the wall.

The semester's over. Quite an intense race to the finish. And work got busy again.

Here's a diagram I made a few weeks ago, intended to incorporate certain aspects of Jack Spicer's Textbook of Poetry & the his Vancouver Lecture, in which he uses Christ as a metaphor for poetry (and poetry and the poet and the signified/signifier split, etc). His metaphorical series strike me more like conceptual puns than they do metaphors, though -- each item in the series overlaps the other on the surface (seems very much alike) but has its own set of implications that can't be reduced to any other item. And this slippage is constantly taking place, nothing stands still. Thus a diagram is probably the most wrong-headed thing one could do in repsonse to Spicer's poetics and this diagram certainly focuses on certain aspects of the "theories" from the Textbook while completely ignoring others. If I have time, I'll post some notes that attempt a more detailed explanation of the diagram. But right now the notes sound like something I handed in for class (which I did).

If anyone has sent me a message that I haven't responded to, please, please accept my apologies. I plan on performing a thorough audit on my inbox over the holiday.

In the meantime, I'll tape the diagram up here next to the blogroll . . .

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

5,000 cylinder recordings placed online.

pangrammaticon's birthday (+1)

Thomas Basbøll's inimitable Pangrammaticon is one year old as of yesterday. Happy birthday, Thomas!

swift report: god denies links to pat robertson

shameless plug

USF MFA Poets
on Sunday, November 20, 3pm
at DIESEL, A Bookstore

5433 College Ave
Oakland, CA 94618

University of San Francisco
Graduate Students in Creative Writing
will read from their latest work and work-in-progress
in poetry:

Liza Campbell, Lars Keffer, Alexandra Mattraw,
Katie Painter, Craig Perez, Karen Boyden Phelps,
Tom Seaton, Rebecca Stoddard, Jay Thomas, Valerie Witte.

Snacks, sweets, libations will be served.

For more information, contact
Rusty Morrison, instructor.

it's the medium, stupid!

This is a cross-post from my American Poetry & Poetics class discussion group. I think/hope there's enough context within the content of the post for it to make some sense here (however hastily the post was written) . . .

Work has been insane lately, so I haven't had much time to post or respond -- though I am enjoying the discussions.

Wanted to briefly mention a thought that occurred to me last night when Rebecca said, re: Olson's Projective Verse, that "the typewriter only moves forward" (hope I got that right, Rebecca). Marshall Mcluhan's formula "the medium is the message" popped into my head -- so, I thought, it's true, even in poetry! Immediately this strikes me as too simplistic, but . . . just running with the thought for a second, it made me wonder about a possible relationship between contemporary poetics and our word processors -- which have a fundamentally different relationship to time and memory than a typewriter does (e.g., word processors move forward and backward, though they don't really move, not mechanically -- and they can archive, record multiple versions of the same thing).

Also, along these lines, I want to throw out a question/concern that's been in the back of my mind all semester. As if in unconscious fidelity to something like Mcluhan's formula, we tend to read nearly all poetry as "really about" poetics (or at least a relationship to poetry). It seems to me that this work most of the time, and provides a useful way into work that would be otherwise difficult to access. At the same time, I wonder how legitimate this tendancy is -- to what degree are we folding poetry itself (or the concept of poetry itself) along the metaphoric axis, taking the poetic endeavor itself as one gigantic extended metaphor for poetics? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

vote -- schwarzenegger's agenda close to passing

If you live in California, are eligible to vote, and can make it to your polling place tommorrow -- please vote. The latest polls suggest that much Schwarzenegger's agenda (props 73-77) is dangerously close to passing. The one that appears most likely to pass -- that pernicious parental notification law. The right is counting on the left to be a no-show for this election. If you live in San Francisco and don't know where to vote, here's where to find your polling place.

storyline patents are here

oppen on the irreducible here and now

for Thomas, re recent conversations concerning science, religion, and the phenomenological here and now. I wish I had the time & energy to write something original. In lieu of something I could come up with, I offer something of decidedly higher artistic merit.

From the poem A Narrative, from the collection This In Which, 1965.


11

River of our substance
Flowing
With the rest. River of the substance
Of the earth's curve, river of the substance
Of the sunrise, river of silt, of erosion, flowing
To no imaginable sea. But the mind rises

Into happiness, rising

Into what is there. I know of no other happiness
Nor have I ever witnessed it. . . . Islands
To the north

In polar mist
In the rather shallow sea --
Nothing more

But the sense
of where we are

Who are most northerly. The marvel of the wave
Even here is its noise seething
In the world; I thought that even if there were nothing

The possibility of being would exist;
I thought I had encountered

Permanence; thought leaped on us in that sea
For in that sea we breathe the open
Miracle

Of place, and speak
If we would rescue
Love to the ice-lit

Upper World a substantial language
Of clarity, and of respect.