I'm going to restart this blog.

((((((Yes, I will. I'm going to picture it via creative visualization. "I've already started a blog." I live in New York City now. I peel dollars off the Empire State Building. Axis Mundi, baby. ))))) The city looks much cooler through the lens of this website, than through my nervous and fractured viscera.
Celluloid Skyline

I love to shoot zombies

((I could literally blow the heads off zombies all day long. I wish it were an actual job. No, wait, actually I don't. Well, yes, I do.)))

Let's carve us some witch.

Things that aren't nation-states

(((Bruce Sterling just posted some notes for a sci-fi novel he's working on. It's a dense annotated child's garden of fringely global politics. This thing deserves hyperlinks. It's like a whole semester's worth of poli-sci 101))

Link
"BEFORE AND AFTER WESTPHALIA: Or, ENTITIES THAT SEEM RATHER LIKE NATION-STATES, but aren't

The United Nations (association of states)

The European Union (post-state economic regulatory zone)

Trading blocs (NAFTA, ASEAN, Hanseatic League)

empires and confederacies (multi-states)

dictatorships (one-man state)

aristocracies and kingdoms (family states)

Communist dictatorship of the proletariat (non-state class rule)

megacorporate multinationals (the global private sector)

moguls (one-man private sector)

mega-cities (city-states)

police and security organizations (police states)

military (military dictatorships, martial law, occupied zones)

espionage (siloviki states, secret-police states) organized crime (shadow governments, kakistocracies)

Classified areas (state-supported labs, weapons-testing zones, secret prisons, Area 51, slave labor areas, puzzle palaces, black money projects that lack official existence)

social classes (capitalists, laborers, creative class, technocrats, white-collar, blue-collar, pink collar, underclass, aristocrats, the super-rich)

religions (papal states, holy cities. theocracies, Sharia, Quakers, Amish)

colonies, territories, protectorates (sub-states)

secessions, frozen conflicts, liberated zones, warlord havens (illegal states)

failed states (collapsed states, hollow states, black globalization, narcoterror areas)

embassies (embedded mini-states)

emergency rescue camps, refugee camps (damaged states)

migratory hordes (mobile stateless peoples)

slums, barrios, ghettos, favelas (under-states)

the international scientific community

prisons (states without individuals)

monasteries, asylums, retreats (antisocial micro-states)

conspiracies (Carbonari, Al Qaeda, Freemasons, Red Brigades)

cultural movements (Modernism, the Enlightenment, feminism)

The Internet

social-software networks

gaming environments, virtual worlds

International regulatory agencies and standards boards (WIPO, WTO, WHO, ITU, etc)

supra-national political parties (Communists, fascists, socialists, neocons)

benevolent associations (Elks, Kiwanis)

labor unions

universities and colleges

non-governmental organizations, quasi-autonomous non-governmental associations, blue-ribbon panels, independent prosecutors

private banking and investment networks (Medici, Fuggers, Rothschilds)

private postal systems, private logistics networks (Thurn and Taxis, Wal-Mart, Amazon)

Languages

Ethnicity

Phantom folk-sources of state-like power and authority: The Mainstream Media, the Gnomes of Zurich, the Wall Street Exploiters, the Ruling Class, the Elders of Zion, Secular Humanism, the Old Boys' Network, Jesuits, Freemasons, Illuminati, etc

"complexes": the military-industrial complex, the military-entertainment complex, the medical-industrial complex

tongs, clubs, voluntary associations

Insurgencies

pirates, bandits, gangsters

festivals, temporary autonomous zones

tribes

castaways

hermits

the dead: cemeteries, organized memorials, archives, museums

the unborn

areas devoid of human beings -- high seas, involuntary parks, wilderness, poles, outer space, ocean abysses, deserts, ruins..."

Speech textbook: 1593

(((From Henry Peachum's Garden of Eloquence. If I had two lifetimes, I would learn all the strictures and rules of Elizabethan Rhetoric. Total elegance.))

Link
"SCHEMATES RHETORICAL

Schemates Rhetorical be those figures or forms of speaking, which do take away the wearisomnesse of our common speech, and do fashion a pleasant, sharpe, and evident kind of expressing our meaning: which by the artificiall forme doth give unto matters great strength, perspicuitie and grace, which figures be devided into three orders.
The first order

The first order containeth those figures which do make the oration plaine, pleasant, and beautifull, pertaining rather to words then to sentences, and rather to harmonie and plesant proportion, then to gravitie and dignitie, and the figures of this first order I devide into fower kinds, according to their sundrie formes, of which the first are of Repetition, the second of Omission, the third of conjunction, the fourth of separation.
Figures of Repetition.

* Epanaphora
* Epiphora
* Symploce
* Ploce
* Diaphora
* Epanalepsis
* Anadiplosis
* Epizeuxis
* Diacope
* Traductio
* Paroemion

These are called the figures or repetition, by which one word may with much comelinesse be rehearsed in diverse clauses, and may ten maner of wayes be pleasantly repeated: and likewise one and the same letter by Paroemion may be repeaated in the beginning of diverse words.
Epanaphora

Derive: Pedestrian with paradigm schisms

(((The Situationist critical theorist (read: philosopher with cool edge) Guy Debord invented the concept and exercise of "derive." It's not walking, it's an internal revolution. Echoes of Parkour.)))

"One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: "drifting"], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science -- despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself -- provides psychogeography with abundant data.

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology."

Link

Project Gutenberg and Secret Technology: Is it all just "digital art?"

(((These are two of my favorite things)))

(((Listening to Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce on Project Gutenberg))
Link

(((Playing Jason Nelson's interactive flash games. This is kind of what I think digital art should be all about. Then, again, in this Warhol era of copied image and plural coding, hasn't it all become "digital art?" Even e-books of Twain and Bierce?)))
Link

Carl Sandburg, Cabrini-Green, and Modernism

(((The mostly demolished, Cabrini Green Projects of Chicago. A triumph of modernism. A majestically failed public works project. An attempt to do good. A hellhole. A Civic Wart. Vertically-developed, dense urban blight.

Where are you now, my Prairie School? Was Frank Lloyd Wright alive to see these things? What about Ezra Pound? Eliot? Dreiser?

I bet Carl Sandburg probably wrote some poem about them on their inauguration in the 1950's that went like this:

"My Cabrini-Green"
by Carl Sandburg
Bilious balustrades of clanking, steam-driven modernism.
The longshoremen in his shirtsleeves.
Oh, you topplers of the beefshares!
Busking and destroying--you

Broggerbankbuock the Abelard!

Wherein the nubile prairie scapegrace tough spits glances at

Huckleberry dames on Halsted who
offer him their ((beefshares)).

Rubberbuckbanktruck! The Stark lad, lo!

Utilitarian majesties and T.S. Eliot
Cackle in their beefshares and the coral cock,
In the walled arch city of the breadbasket
On the wonderful flowing waters
Of the turgid Mississippi.

Gurgleledurd ra ammalagog! Bertrand, the Samovar!

My Cabrini-Green,
My sweet, blonde tit
My most excellent beefshares.
My most excellent modernism imitation.

Omfug.

Pulitzer Prize

((( Ladies and gentleman, the Pulitzer Prize winners. A newspaper-juried commemoration of well-balanced, well-keeled great American Novels with story arcs and impact crisper than a spiraling pigskin tossed by Eli Manning. I bet any critic who went down the list would enjoy exactly half of them and think the other half were crap. Then we would know that each artist was perfectly in accord with hermself when they wrote these.)))

* 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
* 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
* 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
* 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
* 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
* 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
* 2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
* 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
* 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
* 1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
* 1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
* 1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford
* 1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
* 1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
* 1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
* 1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
* 1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
* 1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
* 1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
* 1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
* 1987: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
* 1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
* 1985: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
* 1984: Ironweed by William Kennedy
* 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
* 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
* 1981: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
* 1980: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
* 1979: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
* 1978: Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
* 1977: no award given
* 1976: Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
* 1975: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
* 1974: no award given 1
* 1973: The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
* 1972: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
* 1971: no award given
* 1970: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
* 1969: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
* 1968: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
* 1967: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
* 1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
* 1965: The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
* 1964: no award given
* 1963: The Reivers by William Faulkner
* 1962: The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
* 1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
* 1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
* 1959: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
* 1958: A Death in the Family by James Agee
* 1957: no award given
* 1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
* 1955: A Fable by William Faulkner
* 1954: no award given
* 1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
* 1952: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
* 1951: The Town by Conrad Richter
* 1950: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
* 1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
* 1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener

The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism

(((Jonathan Lethem's cut-up essay from Harper's gives voice and dynamic insight to the idea of Intellectual Property, literary mixmastering, kicks petulantly at the academic definition of "plagiarism." It's a panaceic unlearning for us lit majors with our modernist critical anxiety stricturing about our noggins. Perhaps googlewriting is motivating us towards a collage method of word assembling i.e. flarfing, and more valid experiments. I predict the cut-up will be king and we'll read history books organized more like "Wisconsin Death Trip" with photos spliced with irrelated newsprint to "enframe" an illogical thematic understanding of a place and era. Meanwhile, novels are just going to keep becoming more and more like novels, poetry more like poetry, and short stories will be printed with movie options attached.)))

((Will TV ever go away? Or will the internet just join it into a corporate-controlled passive entertainment?))

(((Be sure to check out the Appendix at the end which proves this whole thing is true assemblage and that he stole his paradigm shifting pre-teen encounter with William Burroughs' from William Gibson.)))

Link

"

The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton's maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud's psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud's theories “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.

Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it. "

Cock-a-doodle-do in 40 languages

((For some reason I was looking up information on chickens and discovered that the onomatopeia for rooster crowing is sort of 'kukiriku' in most languages. I also discovered that most languages have a literal dual entendre equivalent for "cock"--i.e. a formal word for male rooster which is also slang entendre for the "pecker."--which I guess is also sorta rooster sounding)) From Wikipedia:

"The sound made by the cock is spelled onomatopœically as "cock-a-doodle-do" in English, but otherwise in some other languages, such as: Arabic kookookoo-koo, Bulgarian кукуригу (kukurigu), Catalan Co-co-ro-co, Chinese goh-geh-goh-goh, Croatian ku-ku-ri-ku Czech kykyrikí, Danish kykeliky, Dutch kukeleku, Esperanto kokeriko, Estonian kukeleegu or kikerikii, Faroese kakkulárakó, Filipino Tik-ti-la-ok, Finnish kukkokiekuu, French cocorico, German kikeriki, Greek kikiriku, Gujarati kuk-de-kuk, Hebrew ku-ku-ri-ku, Hindustani kuk-roo-koon or kuk-roo-kroon, Hungarian kukurikú, Indonesian kukuruyuk, Italian chicchirichì, Japanese ko-ke kokkoh, Korean k'ok'iyo, Lithuanian ka-ka-rie-ku, Latvian ki-ke-ri-gū, Norwegian kykkeliky, Persian ququliqu, Polish kukuryku, Portuguese Có có ró có, Romanian cucurigu, Russian ку-ка-ре-ку (ku-ka-rye-ku), Sanskrit काक (kāka), Serbian ku-ku-ri-ku, Slovak kikirikí,Slovene kikiriki, Spanish qui-qui-ri-qui', Swahili KokoRikoo koo, Swedish kuckeliku, Tamil ko-ka-ra-ko, Thai yeki-yeki-yek, Turkish üü-ürü-üüü, Urdu kuk roo kroon, and Vietnamese ò-ó-o-o."

(((I also found a photgraphic print online of what looks to be the fattest, happiest chicken in the world. The print's simply titled "A Buff Wyandotte Chicken with a Bright Red Comb on a Farm in Kansas." Man, it's like these things want to be eaten.)))

Dramapod, Slipstream, and David Milch

((In the Po-Mo dispersion of semantic form--(a clusterfxck of disjointed image, audio, and text. Sometimes I feel as though multimedia savviness (sic) pressures all simple scribes to feel as though they must evolve into Theraminic Octopi--8 armed, panoptically tonal, digital maestros--to remain relevant) I have found two labels which have been very appealing to me recently.))

Genre: Slipstream. Breaks free of the publishing/Barnes & Noble ghettoization of "Literature" and "Genre fiction."

Medium/Form: AudioDrama Podcasts(((A multimedia production that frees the audience's imagination from the digital age obsession with eyeball kicks. Gracefully free from the didactic, confused hegemony of literate culture in a return to the aural purity of human voice. Music and sound effects, too. Hiply unpretentious in a way that TV, film, and theatre no longer are. A rare instance of a technological advance (podcasting) to enable a return to pre-literate storytelling around a fire.)))

P.S. (((Interesting lecture series by Producer David Milch (Deadwood, John from Cincinnatti) on "The Idea of the Writer." Link)))

Monday evening applesauce

What is ablog? What is a journal? What is a chronicle? How are these fundamentally and semantically different?
What's the fundamental difference between invention and innovation?
I write.
I blog.
I journalize.
I chronicle.
I invent.
I innovate.

Ah, curse this accultured language, it's rigid orthography, and endless jargoning.

"I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels most would choose none."--Ben Shahn

Quote from my acoustic notebook (Blue Mead 5 Star--I've decided it's ultimately preferable to write with a notebook in front of a word processor.)

"The pace of population explosion globally and the advance of technology creates with us a sense that the immediate first decade of the 21st Century is exponentially more relevant than the historically cataclysmic 20th Century where we Post-Did everything, slayed millions, and went to the moon. I'd like sometimes to skip it entirely, reach back to the world my grandfather understood and break past it. hurtling past grandfathers towards Adam. Saxon on fire in a slipstream."

JumboShrimp

I'm restarting this blog, dadgummit. A blog updated daily as a 4th dimensional art process. A blog to end all seasons. A blog as a 10 year old literary form, fresh as the novel and that picture-a-day thing that Noah did on Youtube. Not a slur of randomly jumped media. A blog cultivated as a daily eavesdropping of process and thought, not manic fits and starts, tagging metadata as though to build the space shuttle. Yes, yes, I must have this thing.))