Pleasant Extremity

yes, we were all in iowa city, transmitting an astral s.o.s. to lauren - catherine did so while wearing a sweat/head band. my teeth are fine. i have two large-ish (let's say around 5/8" in diameter) titanium bolts protruding from my upper gum, but the pain is minimal, which makes the kind of horrifying cyborg look more palatable, though i tried to show it to todd, the proprietor of artifacts (a wonderful antique shoppe in iowa city) and he would have none of it.

it was great to be back in iowa city. had a little confab at george's and got to spend some time with writer friends, which was extremely comforting (kept wishing lauren was there).

a special moment came when i got to show off my new shoes to catherine - i had been thinking about it off and on for a day or so. (note - green suede slip-on vans).

loves.

that's right, 'the mascara snake', fast and bulbous.

hello you three - are y'all together in i.c.? jared, how are your teeth? tony and i are thinking of you. i just finished reading a bio of captain beefheart....i'm inspired (to like captain beefheart very much, if nothing else). but here's a quote from the biography i thought was interesting for the poet side. the context is don van vliet/aka beefheart's quasi-paranormal abilities. lots of stories of him answering the phone before it rings and so on.

here's the quote:

"Two particular incidents remain strong in Chris Cutler’s memory: 'I remember we were on the ferry coming back to Dover at the end of the tour. Don suddenly started to point out tiny links and correspondences – the color of that barstool and a child’s socks, the shape of a shadow and a book on a table, that sort of thing – only a lot of them, and as if he saw the parts of the room and its occupants as a pattern or net formed by the positions of similars; a kind of topographical version of the internal rhyming stresses in a poem. And he did genuinely seem sometimes to be preternaturally alert. In the middle of a conversation in a noisy hotel foyer, I remember he suddenly stopped and commented on what a party of people over the other side of the room were talking about. None of us had heard anything of the other conversation – one blanks all that out – nor could we even after our attention had been drawn to it. We did check. Don was right.'” (Captain Beefheart: The Biography by Mike Barnes, pp. 218-219).

i'm trying not to comment on the election - i sent in my ballot yesterday! - but here's another beefheart line in honor:

"Go up the cement tower and say, ‘Listen, little lawyer, STOP!’”

and a regional comment: houston loves halloween. the house next door to us has a stack/pyramid of maybe thirty-five identical jack o'lanterns piled on the porch, all smiling, made of real pumpkins. not plastic, i mean - and therefore uncanny, the hand-crafted identical multiple, a weirdly effective decorations approach. huge, huge giant spiders and snakes on the roofs of houses are more common than giant bruce nauman-esque pumpkin stacks, but also weird. i won't go into the bajillions of haunted houses here, except that a lot of them, in 'everything's bigger in texas' style, advertise multiple separate haunted houses (like 3-D, serial killers, phobias, and frightmare!) all under the same roof. or maybe same ownership or same lot. but i think the main thing is again the impression of hugeness, like those mega-clubs with 5 separate music areas and djs. but is there really that much to differentiate between haunted houses? (chainsaws, 3-D chainsaws, spiders with chainsaws, freddy kreuger with chainsaws.) what's the state of halloween in the midwest? wholesome, cute, and small with cool air and cider? sigh.

well, captain beefheart apparently didn't like living in the desert, but he pretended he did, and told david letterman that he wanted to move to arizona, where it was even hotter than the mojave. then, when he could afford it, he moved to northern california and watched whales from his back porch. ha! hello, pumpkin stack, i want the biggest haunted house there is. i was born and raised in the briar patch.

Icebreaker for Multiple Jaws

Hi everyone. I tried to post something last night and apparently messed up and now my clevernesses are all roosting somewhere in the universal wilderness. (It occurs to me now that I might've posted a comment instead of a post -- such delicate distinctions!) Anyway, it's not like I'd said anything the least bit pertinent or funny, but at least I thought I'd broken the ice and could stop feeling like the weird mute guy standing in the corner at the baby shower. So here's a second attempt, and I have to say I'm feeling good about my chances. My chaoses. Optimistic, if you will. Is the ice broken, then?

Hard to tell. In case it's not: my name is Steve Kramp. I'm 29 years old and I work as a computer programmer. Feeble Slayer is just my Linux handle; no one really calls me that except my mom. Asparagus is good. Green beans are better. I like the Hardy Boys equally except when one of them is wearing corduroy, then I like that one best. Oh yeah, I'm a Gray.

God, I wish I had something smart to add to the optimism conversation, but it's hard to be optimistic with all this recent hair. Sometimes, though, I remember Bill Murray leading the summer campers in the movie _Meatballs_ in a mantra of "It just doesn't matter!" and afterwards I do feel better. Somehow cleansed. And I'm sure there's a poetic parallel to this. Give me a minute, it'll come to me...

So hello to you all. I'll try to deal only in substance and grist and meaningfulness from this point on. The last thing the Security Camera needs is my noodling around. But it's nice to be with the three of you, as with as with can be.

SK

here comes the protestation

of course i love steve-o - we just have a couple of disagreements, which don't cast my ideas in a particularly good light, i have to add - sad.

from
***the doctor of geneva***

He did not quail. A man so used to plumb
The multifarious heavens felt no awe
Before these visible, voluble delugings, (he's talking about waves)

Which yet found means to set his simmering mind
Spinning and hissing with oracular
Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste,

Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang
In an unburgherly apocalypse.
The doctor used his hankerchief and sighed.

---

and more to follow

downtown aquarium

hello dear hearts,

i feel a little too tired to really write, but i guess it's more than my turn in the line-up. so, what i thought about optimism was this depressing ferris wheel in houston - the aquarium in houston is a for-profit aquarium restaurant theme park by the highway. a ferris wheel attached to the aquarium also stands right by the highway. on the upward rotation the passenger overlooks all the cars and their exhaust, which i imagine would stink, and on the downward rotation the passenger overlooks the houston bayou, which smells "like gasoline and vomit" says tony when asked for a description. the optimistic part is that i've never seen a single passenger on the ferris wheel - ha - but really it's odd. a picture (blue and big) no one wants to be part of.

i'm not sure where to go with more general feelings on optimism. jared, it's funny that you quoted the creeley thing on being useful - i've always had an odd thing for the idea of being useful - i mean by 'thing' i guess a strong emotional reaction to it - considering that i'm not a particularly handy or active person. there's that herbert poem 'employment' that has some of the most moving lines to me - "O that I were an Orange-tree,/That busy plant!/Then should I ever laden be,/And never want/Some fruit for him that dressed me." (The stanza before that has the lines "Life is a business, not good cheer;/ever in wars".) this interests me, being in this state of longing to be a generous, productive optimist. but feeling curtailed or constrained but some sort of knowledge that would make the optimism excessively willed, put-on (the 'life is a business, not good cheer' caveat, the 'o that i were' mood). because why can't you be the orange tree, really? that's why i was saying i like lyn hejinian so much. i feel like her writing has this large calm that the real optimist in dark times would have - a large capacity to know and to be generous but without 'settling-for'.

but, me, i don't have calm...much more the 'o that i were' kind of mode. i think that's what i like about dugan. he makes something (very small maybe, but a thing) out of that mode. and that's what i like about a certain type of stevens optimism, too, when stevens is not booming and throwing colors. in that dugan poem you quote, it's like he's paring down hope to a hair, but that hair holds ("if it didn't hold, i guess i wouldn't be standing on it" seems to be his argument). i like that. it's like this argument that hair-splitting is meaningful. which obviously i like because of the way i am. henry james makes this kind of funny argument, too, when i think about it. when you get into a really desperate situation, just become more and more sensitive to the tiniest and most atomic of your options. and weighing and choosing, in a gestural and syllable-by-syllable kind of way, is your hope for changing the world in the tiniest way and squeaking yourself out of the dead end. usually the people don't succeed but in _the golden bowl_ the heroine actually does succeed in changing the plot that way. so maybe if the optimism is small enough to be believable, you just have to make the world small enough that the optimism can act as a lever in it. below is the latter 2/3rds of "long and sluggish lines". i think this is amazing - the fun logic that because the sad trees look like they're contradicting something, that there must be a happy thing out there that they're contradicting. probably the comic infanta fly. i love you, stevens! and then there's the ending. i don't quite know how he gets there but it's amazing. i'm gushing now but it does make me feel optimistic. how can we not be optimistic when none of us are even born yet? but it's a sad, cool optimism.

"...The trees have a look as if they bore sad names
And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,

In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,
Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.

What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side
Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;

Or these - escent- issant pre-presonae: first fly,
A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,

Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,
The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?

...Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal
Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep."

jared, i know you're not so into stevens, so i'm typing in some goethe for you - he agrees with you about seasons and poems, apparently. i'm wondering if because i write this you're going to protest that you actually are into stevens. such is the curiosity of friendship and late-night incomprehensible typing. miss you both - xo - lauren

Sobald ein frisches Kelchlein blueht,
Es fordert neue Lieder;
Und wenn die Zeit verrauschend flieht,
Jahrszeiten kommen wieder.

Poem For The Optimism Conversation

PAINTED SHUT

Green vulgarities
thoughts of a friend's troubles.

From the times,
what we can squeeze,
a mighty noise?

Quietude: an underfelt rage?
Quietude: our painted shut
selective sights,

e(x)ternal
honest weather
our summer, our winter.

What dioramas,
these vistas.

And what do we do
with the poems of our climate
with the rattle we hope to shake?

Wear it like a cloak and
H I D E

b/t the letters that animate
the proverbs of hell.

spirit spirit

+++++++++++++++++


blah blah blah. this poem was all i could write after considering everything slightly more, talking to Lauren on the phone about the world and years, and reading the post from Catherine, in her real "Gnostic Contagion."

I started reading Goethe's "Faust" which is, unconceivably amazing, with a breadth and humor and MYNDE - reading it is physical in the way that reading the "Duino Elegies" is a physical experience. A quick sample from what must be an amazing translation. "let Resoluteness promptly seize / the forelock of the Possible." All I can say is, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Yes, that's all.

M. Savitz and I went to the Hawkeyes bar in Chicago's lustrous Lakeview neighborhood. It was like being in Iowa City on a Saturday. Harumph.

Also, the bank thermometers told us that the temperature here in Chicago was 72 F, which is generally a good reason to want to live, says the daimon of the weather, smarting in young cold.

We're going over to J. Daniel's place to watch "Purple Rain," This was the Cultural Specialist's idea.

goonight.

I Feel Sick

Boy, I just got a whopping dose of po-biz via A. McCollough & Tony Robinson's respective blogs. Jesus Kee-rist! A lot of discussion of poetic communities and Ronny Silliman. It's kind of impressive how much time one can spend considering journals and aesthetic battles in terms of capitalism and sticking it to the man attitudes. A.M. had a link to some letters that dude T. Tost (whom Steve i think particularly dislikes) wrote to typo, which were respectable in that he was trying to expose how idiotic the whole bo-biz / new yorker vs. volt (or fence, or whatever) / whatever whatever whatever poetic communities junk really is. But he spent a long time doing so. Like, a long time. "A good friend of mine, distraction?"
truly, a bluff or veer.

Well, anyway, goodbye. God Bless You.

On/Off/On Topic

Impossible, rightly, to define these
conditions of
friendship, the wandering & inexhaustible wish to
be of use, somehow
to be helpful

--Creeley "For Rainer Gerhardt"

The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness--this is the courage

neccessary. This is something
quite different.

--Creeley "The Dishonest Mailman"

Since photography cut loose from Whitmanesque affirmation--since it has ceased to understand how photographs could aim at being literate, authoritative, transcendant--the best American photography (and much else in American culture) has given itself over to the consolations of Surrealism, and America has discovered the quintessential Surrealist country. It is obviously too easy to say that America is just a freak show, a wasteland--the cut-rate pessimism typical of the reduction of the real to the surreal. But the American partiality to myths of redemption and damnation remains one of the most energizing, most seductive aspects of our national culture. What we have left of Whitman's discredited dream of cultural revolution are paper ghosts and a sharp-eyed witty program of despair."

--Sontag "America Seen Through a Lens Darkly"

Dear Lauren (and Catherine, if you are there, who have read "Despair")

Lauren's poems ask "How to live, what to do," and goddamit I have the answer. JK. You'd ask to start a 'square table discussion' about the idea of optimism, which, you know, is hard to do in October in most places. I guess things seem overwhelming. Bush, Kerry, war, $$$. Where does it come from? Certainly not certainty, as that article about Bush in the Times Magazine last weekend made clear. I have no idea about how to survive. Maybe Dugan:

As for the rest, left-left politics
was out of law, so I read books and bit
my thumbnails to the quick
in false despair: I am still here.

I don't know that I can say much for my own attitude, except that it comes from that poem ("On When McCarthy Was a Wolf.."). That Second Creeley quote seems to me the kind of attitude that gets people intro trouble: "the poem supreme -- addressed to emptiness" - that Stevens thing, that existential thing. Here and now cravenly, there isn't anything to live for exactly, except to do something interesting that one hasn't done yet.

I'm in danger of being weighed down by introductory quotes, but they're the only guide. The Sontag quote, from her article on Diane Arbus, is pretty effective in describing the bullshit of art, and also, the pain of living after Whitman. He gave us democracy as a religion, and all we can do is wish we lived before we knew that abstractions like corporations were more important than people here. But, oh well, what does one do? Spring will come again, and that's quite enough, ideals are alive, if only in books - but fuck, that's the only life we'll have in 150 years...

i've been north, i've been east, to the california beach

hi jared,

ah creeley, reminds me of reading group, sad. i love pieces, too. i had that dingy yellow copy from the library with strings on the binding and the big ugly bubbly 70s font that i liked and you had a love-hate thing with. to amp the nostalgia up even more, it makes me feel wistful that i had to return that particular semi-nasty copy to the library. (also reminds me of how you bought my creeley library books for a dollar.)

i'm really not sure how to deal with this blog format - i tried to write another couple of posts and kept dropping them. as you can see i know that i don't want to capitalize, but i don't really know what i want to write. just you, me, and catherine are basically reading this, right?

i will say that what i am reading might interest you. coming back from the mission on our way to larry's house, tony and i stopped at pegasus books just randomly, because our bags were heavy, it was a bookstore, and it was lit like an oasis. i found a copy of that book you mentioned 'all that is solid melts into air' - it's exactly perfect, it's really explaining to me exactly why i'm so fascinated by the 19th century and why my poem keeps becoming a bizarre hybrid of chromosomes and telepathy with the mood equivalent of hoop skirts and other belle epoque froofery. the writer points out that in the 19th century people blended the acceleration of modernity with personal experience of pre-modern material and emotional conditions. i feel like that's related to what i was telling you about how i'm interested in somehow this incredible understanding of modernity or a modern mentality in someone like jarry who was living in times that from this vantage point seem like pure sun-washed linen nostalgia....of course i know there was upheaval but i'm so used to thinking of the world wars as the turning point.....anyway, i'm rambling. but the book talks about how the 19th c. modernists actually had a broader, more crazy and more capacious understanding of modernity that we've closed off in the 20th century. that's it, all the stuff i'm interested in: the birth of nostalgia (an awareness of a bridge between times), presentiment, the mood associated with promise and change and choice and, oddly, renunciation (henry james!!)........the book is just right, thanks for telling me about it.

it may actually make me feel optimistic, especially in conjunction with _my life_, which is the other thing i'm reading. at one point she makes reference to the 'peace of adventure' - i feel like she has such a wonderful temperament - she knows how to use her skepticism without sounding poisoned.

is 'measuring d.' optimistic in the end? could we have a round table forum on optimism? are we allowed to be optimistic if he-who-is-not-to-be-named (the scottish play) wins the election?

i keep checking slate for election stuff - my brother has a new article - thank you very much we're cheap trick goodnight. (a real time audio inclusion)

i trail out........hi catherine!

Cow Head

Saw Takashi Miike's new movie "Gozu" last night at Facets in Chicago which has the worst theater chairs my ass has ever been troubled by. The movie was not as good as his last one "Happiness of the Katakuri's" which is still one of my favorites. But this did have some bizzare and entertaining stuff, like a minotaur with the head of what seemed like a Holstein bull which was wearing tight-whiteys. It also featured a yakuza boss who couldn't get an erection unless he had a soup ladle stuck in his butt. yeah, the movie was kinda kinky, which partially explained why the end was so lame - some really psychoanalytical crap about sex w/family members. eh. whatever, there were good moments.

Falling in love with R. Creeley right about now. I've been reading "Pieces" which has some excessively good stuff in it. A long poem called The Finger, and one called "Chicago" which is kind of a bummer cause it says "Would dying be here? / Never go anywhere you // can't live." Er.

i can't decide whether to avoid capitalization in this biz-log.

i could get paid by putting pop-up ads on my lil blog here.

back to writing the real shit.

Enthusiasms

A contentious quiet;
kept it close
diminished,
monastic

and unheard,
a language like house keys

enfolding and leading
to a pleasant nowhere
for the winter,

one season of that nation
that owned enough time
to smile in "false despair"

and weigh a pecadillo
like heavy smoke
against solid air.

Did I veer,
small-eyed,
and grace my home with retreat?

Autumn flowers lick the sky yellowly and nod
like the future.

Maddin

Lauren and I were at the Copy Central on Bancroft Ave. in Berkeley CA on Sunday October 10th at approximately 2pm. We were checking our flight information to leave my brother's wedding and, guess what, Guy Maddin was sitting at the computer next to us googling something or other. How did I know what Guy Maddin even looks like? I used to have a lot of free time. Anyway, someone should be popping up on the stupid blog soon to help me make it worth reading.

I was reading Robertson Davies on the plane last night:

"These matters require what I think of as the Shakespearean cast of thought. That is to say, a fine credulity about everything kept in check by a lively skepticism about everything."

Shit, my allergies are terrible when i go to the bay area. All that fecund blooming, even in the autumn.

My brother's wedding was good. I read some Rilke and drank some hardcore 12 year scotch that brother bear bought for me. owww.

Rodney

"That kangaroo just stole my ball!"

if there was a bio-pic, who would play rodney daingerfield? richard gere?

Michele Glazer

i read m. glazer's book which was recently published by iowa. steve suggested it to me after he attended her reading. i listened to the reading, and she was a bit gruff, which i like, but she was kinda rude to steve, which i don't like. some of the poems are quite nice, but some aren't really quite so hot at all. there's a nice one called 'box'"

who trusts in god knows
dumb luck's

other half
that startles, starts.

and there's a few regarding the death of a friend which have a bit of that caustic old dugan's way of handling the grossness of a body breaking, and you know, crack jokes on the edge:

What I can't ask you
couldn't tell me. The darkness
is the same. Write soon. Forgive me
when i use you.
Holding his cup of mucous, cells, erratica, pus, what else?
Then something-other's clumsy-handed someone and it spills.

nice.
but then there's one called "feathers" in which

Eager with the feathers
of the just dropped bird,
that dog's mouth inside is empty.
Now I don't want to.
And this dog's
mouth is what i think of
when i think of you when i don't want to.

my first admission: i like r. bly - this bums out a few of my friends.
my second is that this little poem reminds me of why i shouldn't like bly.

so, an inconsistent book, with some very good stuff and some dreck.

why?

in long beach last week, i saw a security camera on one corner of a big boxy building, and one of those plastic owls that are used to scare away pigeons on the other. positively striking.