Sinister

Dexter Gordon birthday.

Dexter, King of the Turf.

To suspect som Defect either in the Intellects or Integrity of those that oppose one. Found guilty of Chance-medley. Thus by opprobry unsung. My beforementioned.

Finding oneself thinking (bluely) of the third of Harry Partch’s Eleven Intrusions, the one call’d The Rose, words by the visionary Ella Young, out of Marzilian and Other Poems (Harbison & Harbison, Oceano, California, 1938):

The rose that blooms in Paradise
Burns with an ecstasy too sweet
For mortal eyes
But sometimes down the jasper walls
A petal falls
Toward earth and night
To lose it is to lose delight beyond compare
To have it is to have despair

Or, all sundry goes one’s pulse, Pallidula, rigida, nudula, as the Pound didn’t say.

Pleasers

Pelican-Betty (One Off Man-Mental)

Chris Daniels: “Your typical ‘poetry blog’ imparts no enduringly useful information and neither engages in radical discussion of anything nor agitates for same. It’s all safely circumscribed. Total fucking Dullsville, USA, baby.”

Auden and MacNeice setting out, Hraensnef, 1936

Tort-paraphrase of Wystan Hugh Auden and Louis MacNeice (out of the brilliant overlook’d Letters from Iceland):

“All literature is about revenge.”

And, on music:

“Ik heb een paar grammofoonplaten met primitieve regionale muziek, waaronder een verbazende opname van een boer en twee kinderen die brullen als bij een voetbalwedstrijd.”

(Roughly: “I have a couple of recordings of a primitive regional music, including an astonishing number of a farmer and two children who roar as if at a football game.”)

Too, in quotables assembled under “Sheaves form Sagaland”:

“I heard a voice in the farm singing an Icelandic song. At a distance it resembled the humming of bees.” –Pfeiffer.

Betty Bird, 1901-1944

Pea-fowl

Marcel Duchamp lighting a cigarette with a bird on his shoulder.

Out of Tallien: A Brief Romance (Frederic Tuten), probably a perfect book: “feeling invisible pushed him to wanting to hear the privileged world squeak as he twisted the rope about its neck.”

Or: “Around him buffoons, clods, idiots, vulgarians, soup slurpers, calculators to the dime of pay to housecleaners; those who bark at waiters and insult chambermaids; sycophants of no special charm, toe-steppers at cocktail parties who neglect to apologize because you are of no particular power or fame, parasites who eat your dinners and bad-mouth you at another’s evening table; idea horses, modeling the latest intellectual fashion . . .”

Out of Geraldine Monk’s terrific new Escafeld Hangings (West House Books, 2005), in a parcel titled “She Kept Birds”:

Troglodytes troglodytes

cutty stumpit
wranny wrannock
scutty skiddy
cuddy
tintie
titmeg
cracket
chitty jitty
juggy
puggie
gilliver
stag
our lady’s hen

(T. troglodytes being the common winter wren: “a loud and melodious singer . . . Its characteristic call is a single or double note sounding like large pebbles being knocked together . . . It is one of the smallest European birds at about nine centimeters . . . it appears even smaller by its habit of sticking its very short tail up in the air. It has a fairly long, thin bill, a buffy supercilium and dark bars on its wings and flanks. Its name means “cave dweller” and derives from its habit of building its nest in a crevice or hole in walls, trees or steep banks.”)

Eugene O'Neill standing next to a bird bath, Lafayette, California, July 1937.

Barricade’d

Ange Mlinko: “The self-interrogation sessions demanded by one’s peers (Are you a “failed experimentalist”?) are both a useful foil and an outrage to one's autonomy, and one way to aggressively win back one's autonomy is to simply refuse to speak the argot.”

Vue générale d'un phalanstère

Walter Benjamin: “When Fourier looked for an example of travail non salarié mais passionné, he found none that was more obvious than the building of barricades.”

Nek Chand worked under cover of darkness for eighteen years, stealing away at the end of his working day as a roads inspector to his secret place—a clearing in the jungle. It was there that he created the legions of sculpted men and women, imaginary creatures, bears and monkeys, that would compose his magnificent ‘Rock Garden.’