Braw

"As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
'Where sall we gang and dine today?'

'--In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain Knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

'Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pick out his bonny blue een:
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.

'Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane;
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.' "

-Anonymous, "The Twa Corbies"

On Purgatory

While I'm on the subject of dreams, I'll tell you my dream about Purgatory. Purgatory, as my head would have it, is indeed leveled; instead of a screwed ramping, though, the levels are demarcated, one S.F-graded ridge on top of the next. There's quite a bit of them, too--maybe around 20? It makes for quite a mountain.

Purgatory is a city, certainly, a dense one. Many winding streets and drafty, spacious buildings that I'd date from the 18th century (not that I'm an expert). You will get modernization at several key points, mostly by retrofitting. Only light advertising. Not many people are out and about...maybe about the level of downtown Seattle early Saturday morning. All of the amenities are available, except if you want to be in a crowd, in which case I think you're out of luck.

It isn't as hard as you'd think--not really any fire or load-bearing. You have to learn lessons, which are imparted to you in any number of ingenious ways--simulated celebrities staff the cafes, for instance, and you have to take careful note of what casual pleasantries they choose to say. Why celebrities? The chance of getting to speak with them disarms you; you will take a message from them more readily, without the emotional charge speaking to an actual associate would give. Also, God is well aware that people want to talk to the famous while in the underworld; but how many times will an actual Alexander the Great consent to be trotted out? As for the lessons, I can't speak to their exact nature but I don't think there's anything as straightforward as "be charitable"; say, you buying a black-and-white frappe from Vic Morrow and him suggesting that you come by later with canned goods; the suggestions start at the far oblique, part of an exquisite battery of skillful means intended to motivate you along the path.

God will appear by various signs and wonders. Most notably, when God feels that you have finally learned the lesson of a particular level, a sort of light-phantasmagoria will appear 12 feet up and impressively report on your progress; you will then find yourself on the next level, with some more work to do.

Favorite Dreamed Landscapes (Without People)

1.
A sort of massive marine cave with some fallen little tree trunks and streams leading through it. A good place to sit and relax and not be bothered with questions.

2.
An open suburban field, the kind only used for youth sports--though about a block longer than usual. I ran a circle around it at dusk once; I had an errand to do.

3.
Another suburban field, this one directly adjoining a middle school. It was my first day, but fortunately no-one else was there. I got to roam around for a bit instead.

4.
Just the other day, I visited a wonderful airport area. Very long frontage hugging a bay; the grounds walkable somehow(?). An open hexagonal structure in three stories sat on a hexagonal island out in the bay; it was only beams and floors, no walls to speak of. Five or so planes were parked on the floors; this was, apparently, the TWA terminal.

5.
A slim clearing just off a country road, with very regular pines all about. A gingerbread-ish sort of house, the kind where all the walls are papered, sitting in it. I wasn't doing such a good job filling in the details so the impression was closer to being in a toy railroad set than being in a pine forest. (I will say that the whole was quite reminiscent of framed samplers and certain quarters of Attleboro.)

6.
An endless post-industrial neighborhood. You could leave a brownstone and walk down a street where the "industry" would increase by delightfully slight increments; sooner or later you would end up among this immense row of factories with wild high smokestacks. Brick retaining walls proliferated to an alarming degree; many pyramids of green steel piping also. Traces of grass for effect...no dandelions, though.

7.
A sort of ziggurat neighborhood whose streets would twist up and converge into one little peak after another. A bit like Worcester, with above-ground pools visible here and there among Little Tykes trucks, under-utilized boats, discarded Alexander the Grape boxes, and wonderfully excessive rib-level chain-link fencing. The continual action of grade and convergence lent a welcome air of "questing urbanity" to the otherwise prosaic proceedings.

8.
A California town where the residents had aimed for a "Mediterranean" feel and fallen wide of the mark; a piazza and its fountain had been copied with one eye shut from Tomie dePaola, while a lengthy dining arcade with Moroccan, Grecian, and Cypriot modes (complete with miniature charcoal pits) went untravelled. At night, Ionic motifs appeared around the windows and doors of downtown in dull fluorescent greens and oranges.

9.
A parched, flat desert, very red. Dwellings had been hollowed out from long, low rock formations, and fitted with bubble-windows. Inside, they were outfitted with thin rugs and spindly coffee-tables...some with geothermal baths tucked in corners. No separate rooms. The one conventional building was a convention hall...a comic book convention had just packed up and some stacks of flyers were still out here and there.

10.
A wintry day, and beachfront strips (kites, confections, five-and-tens) transplanted to the sides of an austere urban boulevard (rigorously shaped thick yew hedges, wrought iron, not much else). A fittingly austere and wintry locomotive serving as a commuter rail ran on sunken tracks down the middle of the boulevard; you could descend some rungs to board and sit in the plush white seats therein. Yes, the contrast was a little precious...on the whole still an interesting place to be.

There's A Window In My Heart

First, therefore, the precept which I conceive to be most summary towards the prevailing in fortune, is to obtain that window which Momus did require; who seeing in the frame of man's heart such angles and recesses, found fault there was not a window to look into them...

-Francis Bacon, from The Advancement Of Learning

To Crawl Beneath A Mulberry Bush

Why crawl beneath a mulberry bush? There could be several excellent reasons, mostly having to do with shelter. For instance, if it was cold and snowy and you wanted to be outside, you could crawl beneath a mulberry bush and it would be a bit warmer, and the snow would be slower to accumulate upon you. Conversely, if it was a hot day and you were mowing a lawn, you could leave the mower and crawl beneath a mulberry bush for shade. (You would, however, risk getting grass-stains on your clothes.)

The reasons need not be rational, though. Sometimes, the compulsion simply arises. At these points, you can calmly walk outside and curl yourself about the base of a mulberry bush, and lie there still and quiet. You may feel like a whip-poor-will sleeping in the fallen leaves.

Vast Spiritual Spaces

Situating yourself correctly in the dark, and seeing one electric light, it’s easy to see how the rest of the scene may proceed from what’s implied in the core of the light; that the arrangements of buildings outside it are developments on the actual constitution of one birthing light.

On A Proposed Sound, An Advance On "Concretes"; Its Implements And Practitioners Described

1.
PORTAMENTS—tools for wholesale changes in audible groups, along alarmingly single vectors. As simple tones are carried and changed, so are any more evolved tone pictures.

2.
DESK MEDICS—who take those precious “narratives” in sound and sew at them ‘til they’re whole and unseamed. Attacks and decays pared and sanded; so as to result, some rays of light, some grit on the ground. They will do all that is possible to ensure that the listener does not hear an urban, tropical, or otherwise-classed landscape. The listener will be forced to concede that they are hearing something composed of real events which does not exactly mirror any one picture that could be seen. A whole not droning, not surrealistic, nor after any other manner—instead exactly isomorphic to soul of the desk medic on duty.

3.
A Messaienic felicity, whereby the heads of divers birds poke unannounced through color-swaths.

4.
If painting, having vacillated by turns between—The Event! The Texture! The Conception!!—can find itself resting gaily on the interstice between the three...surely music, having navigated the same options in a different order, can find similar couching. So we have a mix field, where use-elements (wheat), useless-elements (burr) working-elements (bees), and pure elements (bloom) gang into a solid ‘scape, to be pushed and pored through.

5.
To example it—an exemplary work could want to recall a plum, in that a) the plum is (mostly) geometrically sound, b) that the plumskin bites, but the bulk of the thing is mellow, and c) that the plum recalls a human referent, the bruise with its mash beneath.

Cornu

1. The shofar is mighty and capacious, a flock-call bearing such heft as to forcibly re-constitute all spatial groupings as moveable herds.

2. The alpenhorn is long out of necessity; the meters it utilizes translate, via the intervention of conditioned lungs, into a bridging which seconds the linear kilometer-jumps between alpen peaks. The essential comedy of the alpenhorn, which is wholly consonant with the comedy of other local folkways, is of a more mysterious (and, daresay, ineffable) provenance.

3. The coxswain's horn both urges the rowing-team further and shouts the banks of the river aside. Anyone happening by might well wonder at the utility of this badgering bantam who can only shout on the effort, hindering and not visibly furthering the tense haul. Also, in its current iteration the coxswain's horn resembles a ghastly paper cup-enabled parody of the already-ghastly apparatus of a court reporter.

4. The cheerleader's horn is considered by most experts in the field to be chiefly decorative. HOWEVER, placing an amplified microphone at the narrower end results in a peculiarly pleasing form of feedback--a comical sort of hooting.

Five Places I Will Live When Humanity Has Been Decimated

1. METRO NORTH COMMUTER RAIL TRANSFORMER SHACK, WHITE PLAINS, NY

Cozy, brick, ample shade...a wilderness of smooth stones to calm tense feet. Regular visits from bindlestiffers following the tracks. I'll invite them in and we will enjoy hand-gathered tisanes together.

2. DRAWBRIDGE CONTROL ROOM, PORTLAND, ME

The view of the bay will transport me to a cheery and mythic 1940's of busy little tugboats and friendly-faced bulks of steam, whistling longshoremen in coveralls, brick reds, and more brick reds. I will make long and careful study of the manuals left behind, hoping to raise the old girl up myself. Probably won't work out. Calming sound of a few patched-together motorbikes puttering about at night.

3. COIT TOWER, SAN FRANCISCO, CA

I will gather up some afghans, drape myself in them, and brood at the very top. Will mournfully sing "Lights" to the seals below and mourn the glory that was.

4. SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY, SEATTLE, WA

In the course of a long and fruitful day, I will locate a Rascal with some charge left and ride the ramps. Yes, I might tear up some books...I'm justified after all this time. None of this Burgess Meredith horsehockey for me, though--I'll be sure to put my glasses away in a case!

5. MEXICAN PAVILION, EPCOT CENTER, ORLANDO, FL

Sure, this will be a popular destination for survivors. But my pipian will be better than theirs and thus I will be entitled to this prime piece of real estate.

The Star Of The Show

"The culmination of the summer, for Cage, and for many who were there, was the performance of Satie's short play Le Piege de Meduse (The Ruse of Medusa), which had only been performed once before. Poet M.C. Richards translated the text, and Cage performed the music. Buckminster Fuller, whom Cage and Cunningham had befriended, was enlisted to play the lead role of Baron Medusa, with Elaine de Kooning as his daughter, Frisette. Cunningham danced in the role of 'a costly mechanical monkey,' and student William Schrauger was Frisette's suitor. Willem de Kooning painted the sets. Fuller, although able to talk captivatingly for hours on end, froze when faced with the prospect of acting in conjunction with this extravagant gathering of geniuses. Nothing could deliver him from his crippling panic, until Arthur Penn was called upon to direct the production. Penn, a student, already had experience with Stanislavsky's theories before coming to Black Mountain and eventually taught a popular class at the college in 1947 using the Russian master's An Actor Prepares as the textbook. Realizing Fuller was afraid of making a fool of himself, Penn himself proceeded to do the most ridiculous things he could imagine. Suddenly, when Fuller saw this, and everyone laughing at Penn, it unlocked him, and from then on he was the star of the show."

-from Vincent Katz, Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art

First Chapters: "Den Of Thieves"

1.

Hi, I'm Den Greeley (the Den is short for Denise). I've been in trouble before...but never as bad as this!

Right now I'm hiding in a basement and there are some guys tearing my aunt's house apart. They're looking for a packet of really special seeds that a certain agribusiness doesn't want anyone else to have. The guys don't know that I'm here and that I've got the seeds in my jacket pocket--at least not yet. They think I'm just some dumb 5th grade girl--but I happen to be the dumbest 5th grade girl to have ever solved 8 MYSTERIES here in Montclair so far, single-handedly!

OK, I had some help from my principal, Doctor Pinkwater; my best friend, Hetchy; and my cat, Fitz. And I'm going to need their help now more than ever! Hetchy is on his way now on his bicycle, and if our plan works those agri-thugs are going to get more trouble than they bargained for!

[...]

More Brief Fancies

1.
Two ideas for future compact discs:

-An anthology of the greatest hip-hop skits of all time.
-An anthology of "big finishes" from live rock songs. You know what I mean: it's 1988, Eric Clapton and his band wrap up a cooking version of "Crossroads" and top off the excitement like so: "Dum do dum do dum do, do do do...(drums clatter away on their own for a bit)...DUM DUMMMMMM...(drums clatter away a bit more)...DUM!"

Garner around 80 of each of these things (shouldn't be hard), edit them out of their respective contexts, and string them together.

2.
"Oh, mailboxes are the loneliest, loneliest things...people just throw things at them and walk away...their friend is the mail carrier, and he steals from them...Oh!"
-Joanie

3.
My friends Will and Joanie are a riot. This weekend we had a great time! We played foursquare and went to "Tacos Lupita" for pupusas. Then we watched a movie, "Explorers". Cute kids!!!

4.
PROPOSAL FOR A THROWBACK VIDEO STORE
Find a cheap storefront and create your own independent video store; give it an outlandish name like JAZZY'S VIDEO or RAZZY'S VIDEO or something of the like. Advertise occasionally in the community paper, but NOT the main local paper or (God forbid) alternative weekly. Keep three employees, all male--outfit them with brown polo shirts and name pins. Use an annotated photo of Marge Schott in the back room to make clear that the dress code precludes facial hair or piercings. Bind all of your videos in improbably bulky plastic sheathes. Decorate the store with posters for Barfly, Amazon Women On The Moon, and Christine. Resist the urge to display anything having anything to do with Star Wars; in fact, do not stock Star Wars and point enquiring customers to Flight Of The Navigator instead. Of course, 20-30% of the stock must be in Beta.

5.
I couldn't find this information anywhere else on the Web, so I'll put it here: cleaning vomit out of a knitted cap might take you the better part of a week, and the better part of a bottle of Woolite. Help, Heloise!

Owl Drinks

Bubbly Owl Drinks are available at your local grocer. Each one features a prominent and attractive picture of a stylized Owl. There are several flavors.

One Owl flavor is strawberry-kiwifruit. Although some say that foods originating from the same region are the only foods that are complementary, strawberries and kiwifruit are from very different places that do not have much to do with each other. However, they do taste good together!

Another Owl Drink flavor is "roots". This is colored "Red, Gold, and Green". It is flavored with several different roots and barks, as well as medium-invert cane sugar (please shake before drinking).

Another Owl Drink flavor is bubblegum (marketed as "champagne cola" in predominantly Latin markets). Also, Owl Drinks come in chocolate, black cherry, mandarin orange, Ginger Spice, and blue raspberry flavors. "Lemon-Lime Sammy" is in the Owl family of products but is not technically an Owl Drink.

Owl Drinks are made for a natural environment.

...Thank you for your interest in Owl Drinks!

Brief Fancies

1.
Spotting another late 70's-vintage Free Spirit. I love my own very well and think of it often, its tires flattening ever so slowly in my cellar. It is my "dark brother", built while I was gestating. I do rather well and it does not. Oh, it tried to dump me time and time again. My feet couldn't push it up the hill. The moveable little anchor! Yes, I think of it when I see its mates on the street.

2.
Teddy Pendergrass singing. Like me, you'll laugh at the sound, and then realize how much larger it is than you. Not you, just anyone... If you put it on in a room, it will redefine the room for its own purposes. If you aren't making it, you realize you should be...if you are, you realize your inadequacy...no, not as a lover, your inadequacy before a distilled and flowing love.

3.
The prismatic sphere--oh, wouldn't you like one? How do they put those things together? I could look it up, but let's see how close we can get:

Red for fire
Orange for earth
Yellow for lightning
Green for gas
Blue for water
Indigo for ice
Violet for air

Write me, tell me how I did!

4.
If Johnny Damon fancies himself Jesus, it must follow that:

Simon Peter: Jason Varitek
Andrew: Doug Mirabelli
James the Greater: Manny Ramirez
John: David Ortiz
Philip: Gabe Kapler
Bartholomew: Bill Mueller
Thomas: Mark Bellhorn
James the Less: Dave Roberts
Matthew: Trot Nixon
Simon the Zealot: Kevin Millar
Judas: Nomar Garciaparra
Matthias: Orlando Cabrera

Hope that clears it up.

5.
The Reverse-Flash. In a perfect world, all oppositions would be comically strict binaries of this nature. No poles, no dynamics, just image-flips.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (For Jenifer Kaminsky)

"In a funny way, my work is really formal, but that formality is never talked about. People always glom right on to its abject nature, or blah blah blah blah blah. I've been typecast as some kind of mindfucker or something."

-Mike Kelley

Promotional Consideration

"Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints--without working one--one single miracle with them?"

-Laurence Sterne, from Tristram Shandy

From "Further Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

"Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long"

Many such systems have been ideated after the fact; we have here, though, a living example of SYSTEMS THOUGHT IN MOTION, whereby the connection (via mere simultaneity) of a wineglass, amplification, a wail, and forbearance of any edit bring forth a singular sustained marvel. You cannot even interpret what you are hearing until you consult a proper reference work. The untutored view would hear an unprompted narcissistic plea for for swiftly fleeing attention, not knowing the actual conditions of NATIVE GENIUS SKIPPING GAILY UPON THE WILD EDDIES OF CIRCUMSTANCE. By retaining childlike perceptions of the circumstantial weather, the mild sage in his jute fabrics has achieved the sublimity of subjoining an unmoored "halloa and well-met" onto an unprepossessing lamblike hymn.

I ran as fast I could to Will's dorm room...it was 3 in the morning...he wasn't there, though! Will, if you're there, let me know what you think!

Essay On Erving, MA (With Ten Views)

1.

The billowing factory. What is it? All of the townfolk work there; the town services are provided by commuting members of ring-communities.

2.

It is wholly linear. You can see the entire thing from Route 2, given that you have the time and the leisure to swing your head around a bit.

3.

Parallel to a small river; and when I say parallel, I mean curved parallel--where the town zigs with the river's zig, and thus-forth. A pebbled fringe with some grass provides the constant blank buffer between the two.

4.

On the north side of the town, the ground-level undulates, leaping fantastically at 45 degrees or more. You wonder about those who might have to back their cars down such driveways in the winter, and how they ramp them back up again.

5.

Signage in many places not unlike that of the wealthy historical districts in large cities. Who among the citizens of Erving may have drafted zoning regulations stipulating such things? What is the heritage of Erving, anyways?

6.

The "Erving" logo may be spied on the factory, but seems more generally applicable to the town as a whole. (I imagine the same is true of Hershey, PA.) Strange as it seems, it is perfectly possible that the designer thereof is not even an Erving native, perhaps not even based in Massachusetts.

7.

Erving is a reward for strained travelers who have found themselves bored on the way west. For those heading east, it is a continuation of the glories of French King, and a final hail-farewell before embarking on the naught mysteriously found between Eastern and Central Massachusetts.

8.

A Koffee Kup cruller, noble and somehow silvery, may still be had in Erving.

9.

You may see a few slight examples of bridging that may brush against your very soul. You will never see anyone use any of these bridges, or remember (even having just seen one) precisely where they go. If pressed, you would say they prosaically went across the river and into the woods on the other side. Why there? For the hunt?

10.

There are no pedestrians, anyway, or any sidewalks for them to use. If you live in Erving, you might spend most of your day in the factory and then hopscotch from one little parking lot to another for your errands. Once a week you might try something in that retro-fitted diner that stands somewhat apart on a half-moon of land; you have your choice of churches and I suppose will generally keep to the one you like. Though you respect French King and wish it well, you won't dine or take your family there for an outing because it is rather loud and has rather the air of gaudy disrespectability (perhaps that's just the name).

Some Manifolds

"...the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence..."

-George Eliot, from The Mill On The Floss

"...the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers..."

-Christina Stead, from The Man Who Loved Children

"...a kind of Ten Commandments in vegetable-dye color printing..."

-Marianne Moore on Key West, from a letter to Elizabeth Bishop

To Brian Szente: 10 Proposals For Recording Projects

SANCTA FE DO NAZCA COMPLACADAO

Concept: We dress up as friars and write lyrical quasi-Iberian music with quasi-Iberian words. We perform the songs with two nylon-string guitars and keenly honed dual vocal harmonies.
Result: Acclaimed performances in local coffeehouses in the span of three months, followed by a sudden disappearance. In the wake, we post several distraught fliers claiming to be from fans seeking our whereabouts.


MOCK UP

Concept: We diagram out eight prototypical pop songs, with durations, crescendi, strata, etc. Rather than create acceptable sounds to drape on these skeletons, we construct the skeletons themselves with pure sine tones.
Result: A CD EP on a respected Belgian experimental label.


TAY-SACHS

Concept: You on vocal and bass, myself on guitar and drums. We spend months crafting one passable early 80's-styled hardcore song.
Result: A DAT; we relentlessly push it until it is placed on an appropriate vinyl compilation of like-minded music. We submit a photo of a fairly obscure band in the same genre as our own, which will ensure that our ruse is exposed, say in a matter of months.


CARMEX KIDS

Concept: Each one of us laboriously transcribes the first minute of each phone conservation we conduct over the course of May 2007. We meet in August 2008 to recite and record the results, with my voice in the left channel and yours in the right channel. We try to keep to the original minute-long timeframe. Your conversations alternate with mine.
Result: CD-R; hand-distribute to local record stores.


YURU CHARA

Concept: We are recorded with contact mics, writhing and grunting under two huge heaps of fluorescent yarn (purple for you, yellow-green for me) approximately three meters apart in the same loft space.
Result: A limited-edition 10" record, self-released and issued to each couple featured in the New York Times' Weddings section of August 5, 2008.


FOXHUNTER GUITARS

Concept: Lovingly craft an approximation of Joni Mitchell's 70's fusion records (The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mingus), with myself on fretless electric bass, you on Fender Rhodes, and five others, including a naive Joni ringer. We engineer a major label signing, but engineer our own disappearance on the eve of our first proper recording session. Splitting the advance money, I decamp for Vanuatu, you to the Canaries.
Result: A rough set of demos, for reissue twelve years later with much critical chin-stroking.


PLACEHOLDERS

Concept: We meet one night over a demijohn of Gordon's Gin, determined to write a single, wholly unimpeachable song. We exchange melodic ideas via humming. At each breakthrough, we record our results directly to cassette. By the next morning, we have recorded a single, wholly unimpeachable piece of blissful humming facetiously named "Hummin' Cummin' At'cha".
Result: A single full ninety-minute tape, circulated among our friends and associates.


JAMAISCA

Concept: We spend most of 2009 laboriously conceiving and recording a vision of what Jamaican music shall be in 25 years. We will present the results to the members of TOK, and convince them to lend their voices.
Result: We will sign to Astralwerks and put out three albums of descending quality, accompanied by a total of five (5) maxi-singles (including twelve [12] non-album B-sides), and ten [10] remixes for other artists.


LEN BIAS

Concept: Essentially a documentary project detailing the brief and tragic life of budding basketball star Len Bias. We combine audio reportage with Shepard Fairey-styled visuals glorifying man and myth alike.
Result: A gallery show in a mid-sized American city, with a limited-edition 7" record available at the gallery or through the artists' website.


WE JUST WANT YOUR HOLES TO USE

Concept: A snickering, condescending take on black metal tropes. We humiliate several giants of the movement by paying them exorbitant sums to parody themselves on record.
Result: One album on Matador, one album on Touch and Go, and many averrals of our complete sincerity and love of the music.

Black Rocks State Park And Recreational Trail

We nestled our feet among the Black Rocks and sipped wine. We poured the dregs among Black Rocks. We practiced “Body Fusion” within the groves—were they groves?—stands?—only single trees. Joshua Trees! We donned our unitards, striped with every color we could find—having moved HARMONIOUSLY, we shed them.

I then dreamt that wide lines appeared in the sky—they opened to holes—and from them, sweet milky falls did fall. I kissed my hands at the apparition—I kicked up my heels! The Black Pebbles sprayed back and glanced from your chest, your impregnable chest. But I, only I, had ‘pregnated it! —Bright babies of hope grew there!

From "New Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

"Gideon's Bible: Another Guise"

What is the secret key? The Bible averts hurts and downgrades significant threats. Drink makes for a reeling doctor. A reel at the piano may doctor the hearts of drinkers. These are first axioms, but not secret keys; no, not hardly.

By what means may a man turn raccoon? If he closes his paw around some kernel and will not release it, even though by the largening of this fist it cannot be removed from the vessel. He shall will the kernel to be consumed through the very act of seizure.

What settlements may be found in the Black Mountains? Black Rocks State Park and Recreational Trail, its few satellites. A wild gang of miners, just setting up tent. Lone lorn pioneers tracing snakeways up sheerness and sheerness, only to unroll a solemn blanket-roll. One shiverer high in a a flimsy blanket-roll, and so--

Can you believe that? It stops right there, just like it looks. Will and I freaked a little when we came up with this, like "Where do we go from here?" OK, more next week...

A Partial Chronology

778 AD: Roland ambushed at Roncesvalles
1905 AD: Binet-Simon test devised
1985 AD: Dian Fossey murdered
1853 AD: Matthew Perry lands in Japan
1972 AD: Jimmy Cliff rides a car through a golf course
1887 AD: Ludwik Zamerhof introduces Esperanto
73 AD: Siege of Masada
1598 AD: Spenser flees Irish rebels
1903 AD: Beatrix Potter writes The Tale Of Benjamin Bunny
1917 AD: Execution of Mata Hari
1973 AD: The Saturday Night Massacre
331 AD: Birth of Julian the Apostate

Cassiopeia

"...very early on there predominated in recurrent nightly visions the notion of an approaching end of the world, as a consequence of the indissoluble connection between God and myself. Bad news came in from all sides that even this or that star or this or that group of stars had to be 'given up'; at one time it was said that even Venus had been 'flooded', at another that the whole solar system would now have to be 'disconnected', that the Cassiopeia (the whole group of stars) had to be drawn together into a single sun, that perhaps only the Pleiades could be saved..."

-Daniel Paul Schreber, from the Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (tr. I. Macalpine and R.A. Hunter)

From "Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

"Listen To Julia As Quiet As You Can"

Spot a bare room. Bulb on if it's night-time, bulb off for day. Smoke only one cigarette. You've bought a $5 radio-recorder from Walgreen's. Dry goods and white cans, a clean old fixture.

A long white rug and creepers at the panes. Attention to your nails. Play "Julia". Listen to "Julia" as quiet as you can. Whittle the floor. Whittle the floor. Talk to a friend on the phone. Make plans for later. Wonder about that. Play "Julia" as quiet as you can. A game of checkers, cold beer, and smoke only one cigarette. No chairs are better when there's crates and felted blankets. I knew a silent Norse once. I saw friends there at the bar. A friend's band would play. I stopped by the store later and bought a bulb. "Charlie, Charlie," I called when I got home. That cat was there. The cat would play with the rabbit. The other roommate, the girl, laid there and played with her hair. She asks questions. Start playing "Julia" as quiet as you can. It's late, and someone else is sleeping!

Won't you go to sleep? To sleep? It's awful fine. I used the phone again. "I don't have a copy."

-My friend Will wrote this sophomore year. I thought this was really incredible. We decided to put together a "book of essays" called "On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album'". We're still working on it. I'll publish some more in the next few days.

The Road Goes Up By The Rope At The Edge

"Above the gorges, one thread of sky:
Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords.
High up, the slant of splintered sunlight, moonlight:
Beneath, curbs to the wild heave of the waves.
The shock of a gleam, and then another,
In depths of shadow frozen for centuries:
The rays between the gorges do not halt at noon;
Where the straits are perilous, more hungry spittle.
Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins
And the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright:
Branches weep as the frost perches
Mournful cadences, remote and clear.
A spurned exile's shriveled guts
Scald and seethe in the water and fire he walks through.
A lifetime's like a fine-spun thread,
The road goes up by the rope at the edge.
When he pours his libation of tears to the ghosts in the stream
The ghosts gather, a shimmer on the waves."

-Meng Chiao, "Sadness of the Gorges (Third of Ten)" (tr. A.C. Graham)

Primitive Vigor

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature, that inspires our dreams."

-Henry David Thoreau

The Band Of Sleepers...

...is composed of four young people who live in a rented apartment.

They perform in slumber-masks.

They do their terpsichoric chores clad in spruce new cotton-blend pyjamas.

They pitch pup-tents in parking lots.

They beckon walkers-by to spectate their false somnambulances.

On the course of their midnight rambling:

a snare drum falls from a lone wharf's ladder. And:

a guitar laid on a winding rail emits a wailing racket.

It Nauseated The Dogs

"At Carteia an octopus used to come from the open sea into the uncovered tanks of the fish-farms and there forage for salted fish. All sea-creatures are powerfully attracted to the smell of salted fish, and for this reason baskets used in catching fish are smeared with salted fish. In view of the continual theft, the overseers became exceedingly angry. Fences were put up to obstruct the octopus, but it used to climb these by means of a tree. It could be caught only by employing dogs with a keen scent. These surrounded the octopus as it was returning at night and roused the overseers, who were terrified by its strange appearance. Its size was unheard of, and likewise in colour; it was smeared with brine and had a dreadful smell. Who would have expected to find an octopus there, or to recognize it against such a background? They seemed to be locked in a struggle with something out of this world, for it nauseated the dogs with its terrible breath, lashed them with the ends of its tentacles, and then struck them with its stronger arms, which it used in the manner of clubs. After great trouble, it was dispatched with the aid of many tridents."

-Pliny, from the Natural History (tr. J. Healy)