blogs, or how i've missed them

without internet access at home. This regrettable state of affairs has persisted for about a week and will continue at least until mid-week next week. The connection works for a few minutes at a time then goes down for five minutes to several hours. So I catch bits and pieces, but no in-depth reading. It's just as unsatisfying as reading the blurbs on the backs of books in lieu of reading the books themselves.

In the meantime, I've been catching up on some offline reading. The Maximus Poems, Selected Poems of Robert Duncan, Charles Bernstein's Republics of Reality, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E anthology (which gives much more pleasure than I'd thought it would). And working on some electronic music -- I just tried stretching 50 seconds of the "spacey" introduction to the title track of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew out to about 25 minutes, with pretty interesting results. In general, stretching music or sound in time (without changing the pitch -- csound makes it pretty easy) almost always has interesting results. But I hesitate to "own" the results as authentic compositions because they're nothing more than the effect of the brute force application of a simple process to an already existing piece. Claiming such a result as one's own strikes me as the artistic equivalent of copyrighting things like genetic code. (Interesting in this regard is Lief Inge's 9 Beet Stretch, which stretches a recording of Beethoven's 9th to a length of 24 hours. Judging by the website, what Lief appears to claim ownership of is either the event or the concept of stretching Beethoven's 9th to 24 hours -- not a specific realization of the stretched piece.)

In other news, I'll soon -- as in the day after tommorrow -- attend Burning Man for the first time ever. I'll only be there Friday-Sunday, so I suppose I don't have much to worry about. But truth be told, I'm terrified of getting a gusher of a nosebleed. Frequent and severe nosebleeds have been a companion of mine since early childhood; apparenlty the extreme desert environment makes them pretty likely. For any other fragile poet types prone to nosebleeds who are considering attending Burning Man for the first time, here's a short thread I started on the questions & advice discussion board.