A History

Defunct

Rue Hazard (August 24, 2005-February 27, 2006) replaced Hotel Point (October 2, 2003-August 11, 2005).

Rue Hazard (August 24, 2005-February 27, 2006) got its due comeuppance, replaced by Isola di Rifiuti (May 8, 2006 and continuing).

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.’

Ishkibibble

Flarf-bunny.

It is a cruel pleasure which some men take in worrying the Reputation of others much better than themselves; and this only to divert themselves and the Company. Solomon compares this sort of men to distracted persons: As a madman, saith he, who casteth fire-brands and arrows and hang down stupid heads like bulrushes, reeds bust’d, snotty.

Aragon and friends.

Out of Louis Aragon’s “Poem to Shout in the Ruins”:

Let’s spit the two of us let’s spit
On what we loved
On what we loved the two of us
Yes because this poem the two of us
Is a waltz tune and I imagine
What is dark and incomparable passing between us
Like a dialogue of mirrors abandoned
In a baggage-claim somewhere say Foligno
Or Bourboule in the Auvergne
Certain names are charged with a distant thunder
Yes let’s spit the two of us on these immense landscapes
Where little rented cars cruise by
Yes because something must still
Some thing
Reconcile us yes let’s spit
The two of us it’s a waltz
A kind of convenient sob
Let’s spit let’s spit tiny automobiles
Let’s spit that’s an order
A waltz of mirrors
A dialogue in the void
Listen to these immense landscapes where the wind
Cries over what we loved
One of them is a horse leaning its elbow on the earth
The other a dead man shaking out linen the other
The trail of your footprints I remember a deserted village
On the shoulder of a scorched mountain
I remember your shoulder
I remember your elbow your linen your footprints
I remember a town where there was no horse
I remember your look which scorched
My deserted heart a dead Mazeppa whom a horse
Carries away like that day on the mountain
Drunkenness sped my run through the martyred oaks
Which bled prophetically while day
Light fell mute over the blue trucks
I remember so many things
So many evenings rooms walks rages
So many stops in worthless places
Where in spite of everything the spirit of mystery rose up
Like the cry of a blind child in a remote train depot

Railroad tracks in Winnebijou, Wisconsin, 1928

Now, there’s a certain thing that I learned from my friend, Mouse—a fellow who always blushes. And that is that everyone must always flush out ’s house if he don’t expect to be going around housing flushes. “Open the door, Homer.” (I’ve heard it said before).

Oof!

Drawing by Koba (Kiowa), prisoner in Fort Marion, “Fighting over a Bird” (ca. 1875)