Inspired by Steadman.

8.18.18

Back from seaside where read, slept, ate and walked with a relish, made it to the museums, visited two pretty well stocked used bookstores in and around Gloucester.

One Dogtown Books – is one of the only used bookstores I know of on Eastern Seaboard that buys and sells Lit Crit (other than the Strand) – got 1) Camille Paglia’s: Break Blow Burn on the thick parts in Poetry, 2) a lovingly tendered literary criticism on Mr. Blake first published in 1933. And, 3) Pound’s letters to Joyce at bookstore in Manchester by The Sea. Most of Joyce’s letters to Pound were unfortunately lost “in war.”

Not so Pound’s letters to J. Turns out himself, tenaciously helped Joyce beat drum as against the heads of Printers for publication of his books, Printers greatly afeared getting fined by the “medieval” censors. Pound wrote reviews in Blast and Egoist, etc., helped to get advance chapters & poems from Joyce (in Trieste) (pre)published in London avant-garde art + lit magazines.

Something Pound does for me (in his work) relates back (again) to Browning’s Sordello, how both deal with history as an invented dimension which falling thru bears every resemblance, as a prevalent restlessness and/or confrontation, with the “present.” A kind of literary existentialism that falls in after the inescapability of time. Lovely heady stuff.

With Pound, its very very slick & cut and dried, so much so its spooky.

With Browning its still radically Victorian – but as if back in the 13th century himself stuck in a kind of passionate quicksand of “history.” Whilst rooting around for its presence – suffers pangs of a kind of liquidescence, foaming up under the line, as he beats at it, up against the breakwalls of history – a hard thick read that is really quite shocking.

Joyce (for me) traces back (in a way) to the “hysteria” in Sordello.

Holders

Beauty w.r.t safety <snared – breath breath>, here  (upon) wrestling with – room decor, with furniture. Upon return we do redo, start straight away moving stuff around, as if to create a new relationship with my working environment – wouldnt that be Jolly. And yet, Stinky shows up still & insists upon the following decorative declarative: Le Butt Station Fournitures de Bureau. Evidently, paperclips are stored inside la cuvette de la toilette.

Next week prep for school.

8.4.18

Editing poetry, revised several. Started revising Swag, offline. Its coming up different.

7.14.18

Dont be mad dont be sad, dont get even? But its good to be even – support however precarious or tenuous – is worth it. Worth every bit of it. In my struggle to stay even.

Espèce, is a word in French Proust uses, that is translated as incarnation – but it means species, and not just species, it seems, but species as also spacial, as to say the space and its inhabitant.

Stinkitudes. I have demons who brood, fall into swirls of meaning, and hang there by the vents, caught by its liberality, assay, capability for mischievous inflection – and through which I am informed I listen, beyond would be subscribed as acceptable limits.

But demons are rotations – its like a kingdom, double born. Musicality at thresholds of silence, illicit, full of torches, treacherous because its defiant. Proust: “L’art émeut a la façon d’un crime.” Every hair on her hairs-breadth fills full of it and goes looking – its an uprising in a way on the will of my destiny – and I cant say no.

Gratitude is in some ways cursed by it. As it does occur as a kind of violent upswing against equilibrium as a ritual – that is creativity asserting itself. At a certain point it loses present tense, loses adherence to efforts to sustain a specific situational context, loses compliance with that belief – folds & falls into lusts that beckon out at what demons love to call the murderous reaches –

Ultimately, it controls me – more than I control it. If that were not true – the demons reason, then love would not be true, how could it exist here at all.

But the “plug pulling” out beyond left field, doesnt own me – like say Lucia Joyce, who threw chairs, started fires – or TS Eliots wife Viv who seemingly got lost “out” there too.

There is anger – at how hard it appears to be, to rise above those around you – but thats not it – there is no rising above others – there is only shared method, and the work itself – and both are demanding, even pain-staking.

Stinkitudes burn through All That – to find joy. Keeps at it – till ultimately exposes what I love to call Porn Corn – or loveable pastiche – where gratitude so intrigued with its liberation, becomes intoxicated, and as a jest of outrageous lust eats itself – crosses over into theatre of the absurd, reckons with beauty as freak show, as carnival –

Seemingly, due to Nick Cave (and his wife Susie) & Shane, I now think of All This as process, as Beautiful Trouble, my puzzle-pushing Camille kicking up perils, but duck duck goose, as it is hopelessly circular, no longer hangs on death as veracity of religious prudence – as reducable to The Absolute (death as a moving target) –

Not – condemning its perfusion – because the distillery is always at work – somewhere, its license to produce works it out, and in its pursuit of greater breadth – always touches after the forbidden.

French

Reading Marcel Proust’s short stories, called Les Plaisirs and les Jours. The Pleasure and The Days, in French with English translation. As am studying now methods and stylistic comparisons translating between English & French.

2 books also reading – on translating – Stylistique Comparee Ou Francais et L’Anglais and Thinking French Translation.

Discussion on equivalence when translating – Came across topic when first started translating Colette straight away. And its a relief to hear them discuss technical ways it is approached – all the way out to industry “jargon.”

7.9.18

WORKING ON Oblivion Mining new entry over in Tru Con – Its about having triggers, a trigger going off – that over time became built in – to a madness. Triggers are very self destructive, as without warning, no matter against better interests, the pursuit of an essentially creative desire suddenly gets stretched to a breaking point and self sabotages –

In this new piece, I am attempting to dig in after what occurs like a sudden rave of blindness, where the trigger pulls – as there is a knowledge that One is One’s own Worst Enemy but that the trigger occurs behind One’s own back (meanwhile full of excuses) – and that this has always been the case. Always. It’s a demon rush for sure. And the bigger the beauty the more crushing its collapse.

Its pretty much unspeakable except in exotic terms, as it sits inside a kind of sublime intellectual game or circuit – branching out into so many different threads of existence, persistence, imagination and contempt. And no matter how hard I try to stay on its “bright side” – as it is surrounded by titillation and humor – ultimately, the trigger goes off – and suddenly there is madness again.

Painful work.

Also working on French, all SUMMER reading nothing but French. Studying methods for translating French.

And have been working very hard – on poems, whose awareness of where and what they are – appears to be getting stronger everyday.

Thinking about making a Chapbook to send out that includes some Poems, Tru Con and perhaps Fiction too.

Dreaming every day about New Design HERE as well – sick of this design, want something new.

But wordpress is transforming and there is argument going on in my head to wait until its new editor is up. So far the new editor is not quite ready for prime time. Any development using the new editor requires React and recommends ES6, JSX & Webpack – all of which I am working on learning.

6.22.18

Haunts & Bounds?

Transparency shows beauty and her horrors – always trying to find a way back to allowance, where there just never was much. Puritanical constraints abounded and dumbfounded.

Discovery – that beauty and her horrors occur as religious – and extend beyond any one correspondence – of clean or of dirty, or of the violent or of the cursed – pre-existing me, as a holy and infernal seduction – in religious iconography, for instance.

Being cursed – that desire goes both ways – as a carrier of beauty and its contrary – wild, exploitive, driven by a lust that strives for beauty and is burdened by sorrow, hateful even and gloat. It erupts and lumbers through sorrows plunders.

And in moments of startling visionary incursion – appears as if Herculean. That is to say – as much as a mark of “distinction” as cursed forever to a vivid restlessness, nearer to infamy, being relegated there by a certain miscreation at birth.

All of it — all of it, were fields of desire – whose mystery and intensity, as a garden like creature, a nymph and tosspot — all of it – has been around since the little body became aware of its existence, and its birth, in a way, via orgasm.

Somehow those two are related, peak of orgasm and struggle to consciousness. Hitting the  peaks seducing through layers and layers of imago, desire,fear, anger, jest, many many childhoods are lost to loneliness, many many long lonely hours, suffocating and brittle. Dreaming is the only way out!

Was, as is – astonished and mystified by depths that would devour, languorous, unduly, ferocious, filled with sparks of anger and loops of profound absolution, my heart sank into that eternal infernal void, philosophy loves so much its effort to define –

Rooting round germs of being and miscreation for a sacred mutiny on the bounty, up against the proud futile nothingness of a lonely unspeakable death – that like the resurrection of a god or a nymph, fell into battle, turning ever turning with escape, imago, rebellion.

Much like I discovered discussed by Georges Bataille.

Proust

Searching through what vagaries proust takes with pronouns in French right now. He twirls around French fab pronoun attachment – French breaks open pronoun usage for me, not like Pynchon or Joyce, but attaches it to movement, to verbs and I long massage that attachment as a meandering flow that scoops at it up front, as passion is incipient –

Shane MacGowan

Back of my mind making up with The Eclipse of The Sun. I am finding my way thru as best I can. Making peace with my past – just is something I really needed to do. Otherwise its treachery.

And treachery is a form of treason, treason-to-being that cavorts with visionary violence, tactics that are privileges, are theatrical bounty – whose wild mystery twisted me and twisted me – falling through misery as an unspeakable adoration – that was also a kind of disintegration, that was beyond making sense.

Then death becomes the pipe line, oo la la, it destroyed not the surface from the reality – but me from present tense in a way that was like a frightened squirrel up a tree whose roots were unstill, were burning up with desire.

Real time

Abrupt. And scathing. In a way, where I grew up, as the righteous are scathing – it emerged from the closet with madness and sorrow.

As around me laid violent vicious pools of febrile righteous tyranny – that magically equated beauty with escape.

From the traps life lays – as mystics thunder roared with wonder, and the little bird in me – started begging and begging to be bagged to shore from a horror, in which I lay, drowning, like a curse, in beauty and death.

Death became like this access to everything magical and taboo.

I began to believe madness broke with reality in a way that was beauty’s revenge.

Misleading

In many ways its the misleading parts that break your heart that must be transcended, must be understood too as allure, something I started to call the great reversal. Came up with it – reading Genet.

Nothing more religious than tyranny of time and beauty as flame.

The end

Proust in French bi lingual lovely. Working on learning these things called blocks with react.js library, to revamp site. and think i almost figured an approach to my first one – using css transforms and maybe even animation, from another plug??? hmmm. If I check that plug and see if its created in any way I can snatch it, globally – in connection with onclick — etc.

6.19.18

Nick Cave showed up in my dream last night. I went to a show. I didn’t mean to go but I couldn’t keep away. It was in an small intimate theatre on grass though I hung out by a door. And the people there were welcoming, pulling me in, giving me a seat. And one of allie’s white cats named Sammy showed up, and the park Police were chasing after it. And somebody shared their hot dog with me, it was a corn dog, home made, misshapen, overlong and bulbous. The hot dog end, stuck out beyond its bread, was being held out toward me – so being hungry I bit it off. Then my mother showed up and everybody was welcoming.

Long like Alpine pipes of red glass all set up as instruments before the stage. One in front of me, its mouthpiece had a jagged edge. This evidently pissed him off.

Wrestled me from sleep – A bevy of red pipes glistening in the dark woke me up as a sweetness of memory, ahh, oh a pipe dream I love pipe dreams. And he said hello to me mum.

6.17.18

Mello Yello

Reading Proust. Short story about a dying man – who upon regaining his health appears to himself distanced vaguely from passions desire, to re-conjoin as before with life’s labors, many burdens and plight.

French forces me into broadening words incursion of meaning in a way that is startling and flamboyant – especially since its Proust. And I am hungry for its demands.

Alls quiet on the western front  – and yet – the bubble has again been pierced by intrigue –  I am feeling fearful, as geyser and tub grope with beauty and horror re-emerging, as both memory and spontaneity. At times – scaring the hell out of me – while also being hungry for treasure – and for this new found relief. 

I am calling “forgiveness,” a sacred assumption, as brushes over like miracle dust, that crack of violence and terror. Where being enchanted by avowals of demons hungry blood (to the death) had soared – against sorrows, against the banality of time, and a deeply burgeoning great shallow of shame – It swung me like a rope over whirlpools of madness, struck between the desires of virtue and hell.

Truly twisted me – into having to cope somehow – with having fallen from grace (not that I ever felt touched by grace, this shit started around 7). Life had become just one long tortuous scrape with the tragic runes, that mysteriously dwell in me. The madness ultimately resolving into a hideous need to play dead, to freeze the tremors and horrors, to a grinding down stillness – alas, the martyrdoms of heaven is verily hell.

This new capacity (though not absolute) to wave the red cape instead of dying sacrificially, as the arrow seeks its destination, arrows that can still throttle my heart (with bold dementia), appears to be overseen (in fact, now as ever) by lush storied fickle sentiment, fickle being a vulnerability to en masse yearn and believe.

It casts affectionate cloys and glimmers, now understood as pattern, Bourrough’s “routines” if you will, the cosmos of theatre. And like a heedless, somewhat preposterous, ironical puppet show – throws kisses at fourth wall – as to say, is complicit with the tundra of love, warms against its mercenary wheedlings – that pray with gratitude, like grist for the mill, for the sweet glowing churn of its visionary torment.

6.8.18

Jar

Jar is double for going under. Reaching beyond present tense. Where image is in play, arterials as themselves arteries consumed with sympathetic intents, insurrections, transgressions – how heart assumes revelry and falls thru horror in wars of love and death.

A Fiend, who hates nothing more than blasting someone loved – to a resurrectionary death. As a beguiled provocatively indentured robbery, in vast oceanic tumbler of time – using love as fission and flair for essences after impossibility of virtue whose gap can turn violent with dimensional revelation. Dimension comes from word for measurement. According to Skeats.

Fiends ”in the jar” whose ferocity deludes after misery and disaster, as vicious gets, into peaks of oblivion, as divinely encumbered mischief mining ecstasies that emerge out of sorrow, freedom, hell.

Call them, fiends – out of love for implacability of intensity –

And how these die hards chase the mopey forlorn day creature down the street, with a pilgrims bottle dangling at lips, screaming at me to not concede to impossibility of truth, to make it “true.” Truth and true being encumbered by grave and enamoring tension.

Pilgrim Fiends that wake me up at night examining distinctions between real and true, pilgrims of progress. Its an old book – about following purity of light all the way to an offering of self up at light to lip of death. True is marked with reverence, is transformative after desire, true hordes precipitously after both affection and beauty.

Real meanwhile, is haunted, terribly – by its disparity from the true, is raucously contaminated by the grumbling tumbling stumbling-in dialectic, battling over interpretations of reality, as if significant, as if meaning of life.

Real at the Lip

Am convinced there’s an American Indian relish for theatre – whose beat is meant to transcend time, that up chucked from soil as Spengler might “say it” sends me out, mapping the doubles, unduly lush hungry for seductions by way of Indian permissions admissions demissions look outs that send me tracking like a storage room for the jar, as if its a smell as its the similitude and its wilderness, the slip into chimney breast & rung head – divine lands and heavens hunting and heavens burnings the treasure chest of journey and image.

Spirit is a word used as incumbent for latent image-laced structures that allure these admissions, to be consensual.

Consensual with those who are perceived also to slip across the wonder wall, take it to the extent of prize cries highs potencies ply the plunder who impreg latitudes to take time and love beyond shock of the real and cuts from rose of reason, as if to provoke – and suffer thru crash after crash, of evolute bottle works turning churning, sometimes call – wishing well curses.

The goods work me over like an invasion, for divine booty, out in the sacred territories of terms like warblers and their germs such as life is for love.

5.20.18

So far sticking with Illuviation Elegies. Not sure yet on “description.” Fateless Rhymes of a Lugubrious Singsong Hysteric. Redesigning poetry page. Which redesign – so far am only working on in my head.

Love and hate my rhymes. Rhapsodizing, obstinately obtuse, dreadful pompous craven fractal discantation encased in fairly simple rhyme structures.

Its great fun to pour disgust over your own work.

Cause rhymes is what they is. I fall into sculpting my way through inveterate journey-mongering, lacing thru mythic descriptives, over happenstance of sorrow, terror and love.

As if to release the tragedy from its prison riots of tenderness. By carving it into traditional rhythms like a worm over eons -still eating its way through same miraculous heat of perpetually de-composing flower bed, night soil, bonemeal. My wan “transmutational” vermiculture.

Lately I feel not Shelley but Poe breathing over my shoulder with half drunken love/hate/glee. He was a rhymer. I love counterintuitive theatrical rhymers with a penchant for beauty torment humor sorrow. That part of him that said – I spent this life mostly mad with a few breaks for sanity.

Let me see if I can track down the actual quote: “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Yes! thats it. Exactly.

5.15.18

Working on a new Title for Poetry –

Illuviation Elegies: lugubrious rhymes of a hopeless heretic.

5.4.18

First rework: poetry section?? Putting it all back up no matter how awful – simply to work on it. Going to rename. Dont know what.

The poetry is pretty brutal, cagey, ruthless, blind, beleaguered, reckless, wired, heartbreaking, hungry, stupid, spurious, parasitic, forlorn, awkward, reluctant, almost violently afraid of itself. Like some walking stiff.

There is mischief too, for rhyme of any kind, and love – for wild things. Yet its not trusted, poetry that doesn’t trust itself – deviously relegated to the tragic, the pathetic dribble of a wilding closet hysteric who is in love with — ?

Magical realists/realism, but as a crime? footless and bird caged – adorned in loathsome rhyme.

Stroking my chin – as this evening dawns, I had a pretty bad morning – wondering – aren’t there things here worth my getting thru to “the bottom” of – as if there is a bottom to anything.

5.2.18

Dreaming a rebuild this summer. Summer starts in two weeks.

Moved last 3 pieces to Tru Con. Aim – to finalize ten of them by end of summer, she wags her finger.

Perhaps, have a new Stinky story brewing, tentatively entitled Pissing and Missing, perhaps for Body of H8 with a Male Voice. That is incorrigible.

Pastiche – confides a lark – as a way of getting out of my own way, as a way beyond – thresholds of resistance.

3.24.18

New Tru Con, spun off of reading Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. 

3.21.18

Edited Glow & Yeux, Body of H8. Rim running usual topics.

Letting character names ruse & dote – without stopping it – as if sucking dopy up against PynchOn’s trial balloons for a humorous take at pronoun toppling, and yet still many ways all it does is massage death.

Effort is to transform pirate into reckoning with allures – and let that rotary seduce me as it turns almost of its own accord. That was the assumption.

Instead ended up tossing up as jokes. Somehow, f*ck*ll – working thru jokes that are affectionate and sometime stinky. Cant shake off stinky. Stinky initially gives me structure. Tho the “person” writing is different every time.

Am feeling theatre and schisms where language bends in after itself – stroking the divine. Temptations surge through others dial-it-in hose hairs – but its my absurdness.

For me rhyme is equiv to a tender coffin. Like I am working in a dead language – and it fits the crime.

3.20.18

Fingers whose weathervanes wag at me – enuff with the little girl lost routine. But its no use.

Babylon Burrows as a snapdragon, open and shut, open and shut, and little love hearts float float floating out of a heart-shaped lip-lined girl-in-heat prehensile-enchanted jaw.

End of summer do I send a Chapter to Special Branch  – ?? OO la la. Suddenly there is nothing nothing.

Figure somehow some way to push through emptiness – as a lush boozy froth, froth of brutal riotous yearnings, as a question of faith, complete as a whole book True Confessions of a Subliterate Dork –

Manage construct unt contract a REAL deadline. Maybe even publish a bit of it elsewhere too – Thru a publisher where it makes sense! I cant even go to a reading or a concert how do I get to a publisher. Think Think. Gurr. Write. “U fucks.” Rectitudinous overreaction  – blatantly tiresome sitting duck.

Bury for a summer she dreams every night god damn it these trembling bones institutionally among belongings of Cal Lowell‘s right-up-to-the-line  where kisses the pole – knit fits geographically aligned with his Garden of Angels – rough housing, snowballing.

Again and again he’d fall off, again and again, got back up on that hefty horse, often with aid of compassion –

No one to blame but myself for tadpole shrimp and ivory gull, for hibernaculum’s overwintering interrogations, she cries she cries for Sakakawea to arise. No help for a dead horse.

The dead horse stomps off, suffers a rebellion of fruit. Damn. Drinks gruel cruel cool funnel of blood to last of its bang on drop.

Hangs out sign at door by light that swings for you swings for you –

Simon Blue Niles, Greet Nation of Migrants and Strangers. Poke Ho Hauntus, speaks –

Pub rub grub sub hub flub dub stub – off you art to the philosophers tub, oo lala. Love stinks.

3.17.18 Happy Saint Bats

New Tru Con called Kissing the Wall. Is “hitting the numbers.” Up “at the top.” Its a gesture of freedom and yet – blasphemous. Captures the emergence of a brandy new stock – one who miraculously calls herself Glow Weeny. Very dear to me.

One must get it while one can! As between highly developed Descenders of Love – always – Love, License, Impossibility of the Absolute, Never Ending Death of a Salesman, Beauty & the Perseverant, Method & the Mind.

Down to the last drop. Ordered Sublime.

2.20.18

Instructional Videos. Getting used to hearing my own voice think. Oddly, its kind of marvelous, becoming entranced by the walkthrough of your own voice again and again till it doesn’t deviate.

Am up to second series, #6.

2.9.18

Finished 2nd translation from Perfume/Lacan Ink. Regnaut on l’autre parole.

2.8.18

Yesterday read Bowser the Hound by Thorton Burgess. Received as gift.

2.6.18

Reading bios, a cross section of 1) Vincent still & 2) Love life of Byron. How hunger grumbles and kneads, manifests in different greeds, creeds — luffing lyrical suffering holy roll-y does not heed.

Rhyming Lordy how I feed —

Byron! laid down, he laid right down, was it on Dante’s(??) grave in exiled Ravenna — have shared that need, where strikes deaths ransomed pose — succumbing as a violent rose and splendor casts its wake upon the feeble silence.

If only my heart to yield —

1.21.18

Updated piece called Funnel Cloud. Sketch & Fetch immediately started jumping up and down: they say its publishable. Yaddo.

1.3.18

Stinky and Pinky. Sketch and Fetch. Agents: double. Add dimension. Dont want to limit to two –

Things deflect into notes on violence, especially gun violence, as an image feed. Gun violence very big politics here. Sketch and Fetch are standins at the moment, at Neptune’s Grotto. Sardinia & her famous sardines.

Crash/scratch test dummies. I mean out in the farm-ecology of fiction. Wondering if I have the chops.

Early spindrifts are oft bleeding self conscious. Sub-lately, I wanna I wanna call them all triggerfish, for the tremble. In mist of Penny Dreadful. Instrumental under red sheet of Chinese Dragon. Caw caw caw –

In different keys or something.

Caw

Discussion with Brother Lowell turns to beauty of falling into chaos, what draws us there, that feeling of being out of constraints and a mind slipping into havoc, how at outset is a dalliance with weightlessness.

Also reading very hot Vincent Van Gogh Bio. Illusory, he had illusory relationships again and again that were his passion and his undoing. Along with everything else.

Translation Work!

Provided translation into English for a short piece by François Regnault, about his long friendship with Lacan’s daughter Judith.

V.I. Philosophy Journal called Lacan Ink. Honor they let me do it.

Checked means its been 1) translated literally, 2) restructured as per English, and 3) meaning and structure reviewed & finalized.

A young girl’s eyes pierce the night. checked.

In a long white chemise, illuminating, a corner wrapped in shadow, my noctabulant kneels half asleep mumbling before crucifix and Virgin. Pious images cover the walls, the kneeling sleeper readies herself for anything, glides off between imminent sheets. As a livery of phantoms also no less real takes full rights over me, the bedroom reconvenes its intransigence heavy with premature nightmare. checked.

There is a terror that arises between four walls like wind on the sea. A crone bent in two, menaces at me with her walking stick, a man rendered invisible by rings of fame his watchtower awaits at any instant, God “who sees all and knows all thoughts” gazes down severely. A curtain of white detaches from its window, planes across the darkness, closes in, carries me away, slowly I traverse its pane and mount the sky – checked.

A thousand glowing traces loom up from out of the abyss, dance in the round, wander away with the nightlight, have a go at me. Rainbow dust composes itself into arrays, colors slip from one to the next. Conic, circular, rectangular, ancient pyramids turn liquid and luminous, a forge of curvature and color, a prismatic sun. The sky is my tears. A prisoners cinema, jiggling in the round – the bed pitches under a sea-swell of dreams. checked.

During the days, for these nights, there spent a childhood sordid and anxious, haunted by the sin of being mortal, Friday’s saint and Wednesday’s ashes. Growing up under a crush of heavy sails mourning, a childhood stolen from itself. checked.

Doesn’t begin to cover it. How outlaw hands gripped the wheel of destiny : so much is lodged there, neonates vigorously strangled by cordon umbilical, still persist, “insist they live.” checked.

Listening, the night is full of their cries: long heart-rending cries interrupted by windows slamming closed, cries raucous and fluid muffled by a gag, dying between lips, calls strident, the names of men, of women thrown into empty eternity, avenging laughter falls from on high, in a cascade of contempt, complaints vague and diffused, from the wails of children to the voices of men. All these cries melee like falling leaves in autumn, mounting in a garden as would pink odor of dew, of humic compote and the cut of hay. checked.

It’s a well known garden in Paris where I am stashed. A man all pale, tilted over, a hand squeezing in the void, emerges from behind a group of charcoal-ists, he travels a few little steps on white stones, tilted, his hand crotched at the absent, then starts off again with a caution across the lawn – Another appears, his face enflamed with ruby lips, surprised at my refuge in the wall there, cached in behind a frightful mass of fuschia. It is full of ivy and soot, begonias dirty fingers, signs of hopscotch traced with chalk. The man makes an obscene gesture and approaches, but there are many well known detours. Another who is distraught, straddling a window, batting at the air like a windmill, foam coming out of his lips: “they robbed me the bastards,” one masters it. Now a woman, hands clutched under her chin, she runs from all, her body shapeless, flabby and clumsy. These passing visions snatched with a half smile just as soon paralyze, as above appears a pallid face who is trying to introduce himself between the bars of his cage, he tries at first face front and then at an angle, but in vain. Alas a white bony arm crosses and slowly hangs up against the evening like linen in the wind. checked.

A lying, smiling pack (parents and doctors) rotate around this pit of fools from the garden of my childhood. checked.

—

Poor insipid beings, grief that surrenders, rears up, pain that gets beaten, powerless, crushed, idiotic. Listening to it: a b c d I don’t no anymore how to speak, 1 2 3 4 don’t know anymore how to count. 

Have you imported the village innocent or neighborhood crazy, are streets not full of consciousness sold out, backbones broken? Others doomed, near death, a better life run aground in fairs, in harbors, in squares, under bridges. 

What misery, despair remains for those alive after coming off shipwrecks – astonished at finding themselves on friable edges alongside. Astonished meeting one to one, from man to man, as with brief looks, exchanging all purpose words, without any sense or depth of meaning. Those who return alone from far off, to hear themselves so speak. . . of rain or good weather.  And it seems that the earth responds to the sound of voices harder under foot. Rivers flow greasy waters, carrying along a heavy stench. Above city bridges, above the countryside. And in the city and in the country, a moving sea of human glances.

Not one, that does not shelter a secret history. That does not call for a response, an explication. Regarding through purity undiluted their spotty net, backdrop of troubles. Algae and detritus. Humans strewn, with protruding looks, dark and cruddy-eyed, voiceless visions further elucidated, looks that know hate and scorn, looks loving and confident, looks that reveal one goal, one wish, looks that desire sail in blood. I glimpse all this through an insistence lost in colorless hunger, seeming to demand account of all impotence, all human defeat, other than its own.

I was not living life but death. Knew most of corpses rising right before my eyes – “as much as you turn away, to hide yourself, deny. . . you will attend to for the sake of your family.” Discussing it tenderly, kindly if not sardonically, else at image of Christ eternally humble, insane piece of work, as they held out to me their arms.

From west to east, countryside to countryside, city to city I marched between tombs. Soon the sun lost me, whether it was grassy or paved, I was floating, suspended between sky and earth, between the ceiling and floor. My sore eyes, toppled presenting to the world their stringy lobes, my hands hooked and mutilated carrying a senseless heritage. I rode the clouds with air of disheveled folly or friendly beggar. Feeling somewhat the monster, didn’t recognize anymore people I used to like. Finally, slowly I became as petrified in place as a perfect accessory of the decor.

For a longtime wandering around the city from place to place, from top to bottom. I came to know it well, that it is not only a city but an octopus. All streets parallel and oblique converging toward a liquid center, suckers clutching. Tentacles of the beast, each carrying houses on its own  two sides: one of small panes, another of heavy curtains. It is there that I heard from the lips of Vérax, the good news about Notre Dame de Cléry, there that I saw the beautiful gaze of Violette injected in black ink, finally stars Justus and Bételguese, Vérax and La Chevelure, all girls whose names stars absorbed through magnetized doors set by powerful currents. Darkness instantly traversed by invisible rays a space revealed of their own reflection. Only the incandescent transparency of skeleton and shape of heart. Deaf triggers alternately animate flashes of breath and combustion of methane, halos of mercury, their bodies automatic. How they see each other go purple then green.

The time for attractions having passed, streets are dismissed by the same complicated regularity. Its face purified, regains its crown, believed reborn. (The trunk of man gone away to think in its own quarter.)

Day to day, people fill like sand then leave no trace of these expansions and convulsions, one can set a course on it as a beach by its sun. 

—

At such a beach I discover the sky, an immense cloudless sky to lose oneself in as a kite. Faithfully to follow as my eyes could not to leave it, I ran without end to try and meet it. Breathless, I threw myself on the sand, sand so fine between fingers with a warm caress, that made me laugh. 

The inevitable procession: women in black bring me back to the streets and now, of an icy air, towards a gothic villa whose windows reflect the house-trained sun. It is the first day of my life that I see the light.

Leaving behind the Memories, the avalanche and scaffolding of a stillborn life, the bronzes and plaster casts of all civilization and trusting myself to an angle blue as slate, I took a place in the beautiful sky in a flight of pigeons in the heart of the City. The heavy bird voyagers came flocking down not far from a place where, always devoured by the demon of curiosity, I melt into a crowd.

I saw they were holding a parade.  The standards and flags of feeble boys and bony old men (cane in hand); the banners and faded finery of sweaty clergymen (armpits stinky and green), the holy scapulars and filthy rosary of young sisters, children of Mary trembling: “My father I have had bad thoughts.”  All yammering, breadth rotten : we are espoused to France. Three greasy haired hunched over old men discovering between their rack of mustaches a hostful of rancid wafers. 

There you are in your place under the flag, insane with holiness. Why not smile disillusioned or burst out laughing with amusement… But no I stay to spit at the blood of my ancestors, who all take after you. Will I soon enough not end rejecting this sinking burden? Yes, it is not so long, la Véronique was smiling at me in saintly line with Christ, the Virgin and crown wavering under the incense, large as nails fixed to the wall, trainees of blood, the Saintly Face crying oily tears under a single red lamp lighting the “chapel of Seven Sorrows.”

It was a retreat, an hour of meditation, I was seven years old, on my knees trembling.  Forcing myself to invent sins, as mine seemed insufficient, sins little in relation with the gravity of my own, arms and legs broken, the severity of the texts, the invocations. So I invented…  The priest welcomed me into an obscure room where I will  horror and he will confess to me on his knees. They took me back to a cab. The house was far away : “between Saint and Safety” explained my mother to the coachman as I trembled through the long ride on upholstery of damp velour, dreading death at every turn, street streaming with rain, horseshoes slipping out of control.

I had to swallow the host also, shame in not knowing how to go about it, posing these questions. “Especially do not make him have to touch your teeth,” said my mother to me. What a frightful debate of language, the goodness of god ensalivated. It was so long and messed up that I began to doubt it was composed of…God. The idea would not let go, became impossible to think of anything else : I began sobbing. Seeing my emotion, the priest and parents congratulated themselves of my utmost piety. Would I say – could I confess the horror of what was happening? Was it not already a state of mortal sin? One speaks of fervors… For the first time the blissful smiles, superior airs of the grand appeared to me strange, doubtable. Meanwhile, I was so proud to be an only child of a first communion that would happen to, but like my mother wished, without any material rejoicing that would trouble the sanctity of the day.

And another time sanctity had lodged itself in the attic. A storage room full of trunks and old junk. Where the window was never opened, condemned by a heavy curtain, leaving only a filter of light thru stained glass. Would stay there for hours, escaping their tedium, plunged in a body lost to it. It happened one day that we had to move the clutter of objects to make a crossing to reach the window; it was the only place where one could see a captive dirigible that had fallen in the garden next door. One could  see its nacelle at 20 meters coinciding between two walls, a half deflated orange envelope, striated heavy ropes, sprawled over the rooftops and branches of a tree. Finally I saw the pilot emerge from the diverse mass; his smallness to have fallen from heaven appeared to me a strange disappointment. An incomparable event, its puff of air in my punctured attic.

—

I was without friend. All were reproved by my mother as “too good” or “not pious enough.” Poor, little girl – only to find her scope innately, to seek out neighbors who might have lent a hand, to be at leave to play with other children on the street, to speak with tradesmen, to be acquainted with the stories of the neighborhood! But her situation would not permit it, instead we were locked in, by a distrust of all that were not Family, in complete ignorance of all in the world that could be gay, active, lively, vibrant, productive, same to say simply human. “To have relations” or “to receive” threw my mother into a state of solemn panic and forced our submission to its withering backlash. My brother alone would pull us through the malaise with his abandon, bursting into a whirlwind of crazy sacrilegious giggles, that we were forced to contain in living room or church.

The house had always the characteristic of being dreary and unchanging. The impossible arrival of a letter filled me with passion, a letter that would be very rare, written from Africa, America or China by some uncle faraway. Though one never appeared on the bronze decorated tray full of bills, announcements, L’Écho de Paris – still I awaited the mail every day for such a thick envelope, adorned with an extraordinary stamp, writing of something fantastic. 

Despite domestics, mother was constantly preoccupied with household chores, preoccupied with anguish over the dust, mothballs and polish. Not a day went by without a new stain to absorb her, her countenance put out by things and people. She was called “to arrange” and was never finished. All the world became under her foot, its only active part being to contribute to the general bouleversement. Children and domestics, tight faced at the sight of each other, coming and going, mounting and descending, nothing was saved. Lonesome, the storage room remained unchanging, an atmosphere confined in stained light.

It was my refuge, there to the horse of an old moleskin trunk  or crouched in a frame of chair bottoms, I retold myself tales without end mostly of those from before I was born, of a time where I inhabited the sky. Or else, contemplating with fervor sweet sallow Jesus and blond Joseph, images blue, rose-colored, golden, stars wrapped in silk, knotted with favors. Or else, would wash my doll and partake in the discovery of my own body, that one was ordered to ignore. The curiosity of a child, toward her belly, at the same moment where she learns God sees all and is following her into the storage room. Curiosity then terror. Life being made quickly to oscillate between these two poles: the one sacred and venerated as must be exhibited (my mother’s enlistments after communions), the other dirty, shameful that must never be named. How together more mysterious, more enthralling, more intense than a life dreary and unchanging. Thus was I to rock between the infamous and the sublime, over the course of many years, where true life would always be absent.

—

Laborers on their way to work after having proudly wiped the kids and hurried them, with a rude tenderness that did not mince words, “blow your nose, wipe your ass, good-for-nothing.” In front of them at least children could unbutton their panties without believing themselves in hell. With them would they share an air of goodness? Not like mine, holier than thou pretentious. “My poor girl?” Send them with a wallop running out onto the sidewalk.

Where I imagine fiery laundresses hands soaking in the Siene for hours “Are you good & done, you, with your piles, get off on the shit in these napkins? wouldn’t it be doodled by his eminence the boss?” and they burst out laughing that gets lost in the reeds.  

1927-2017

9.4.2017 – John Ashbery passed away this week. Met him at a National Book Award ceremony I think it was 2005. He was there to receive a lifetime achievement award, at film center in Tribeca I think. He came in late – after lights were already turned down. I was sitting on the window ledge, by hallway to the door. Too full of it. Hung in back by wall of windows circling my drink (in my head) – John came in just as it was about to begin, sat down beside me.

I did not know who he was. But sensed he might be a poet by the way he walked up the hallway. Poems prowl and wander – rather than say, narrate a line of thinking. And I could sense from the way he sauntered in – that he might not be particularly of the ilk linear.

(Its just a dialectic attempting to find a cut between loon and rune. Shadows of the same gaseous clay cross all ilks & pathways – )

He must have whispered something to me, about they’re not having started yet? In any case, it didnt take long for us to cop on to the fact that we both had copies of Arthur Rimbaud in our pockets. Which for poetic snakes, side winders language wise as a profusion, SUCH coincidences are a most beauteous SLAM.

Turns out Mr. Ashbery was writing a translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations.  I guffawed with delight. What a relief suddenly at his being there. An ally in the “register” of congruence over and above accordance –

And for my sweetie (in early drink), to meet his before any demons could eat his couplets for their startling meat on the skewer of life, or sink like hunger into the mud in his eye, and steal his musicality from out above his humanity – like Dante and a monster (to my ardent horror – giddy, sublime mystification) – was very sweet & nice. He asked who I was. I said “oh, stray cat.” This is before Cave of the Winds was kind to my goonies – where madness lurks after itself like a prized wild turkey there r no words but death. 

Laure, 1903 – 1938 

Stage left. There is a book of collected writings called Laure, written by Georges Bataille’s once girlfriend Colette Peignot. For a time they lived together. She had tuberculosis, died in his house at 35. And had by that time, it is said, destroyed much else of what she’d wrote, though some of it she’d published already under various pseudonyms.

Colette was abused as a kid – by a Priest and had suffered through death after death of close loved ones. That all!? made her fierce, a radical, by the din & skin of her aggressive sexuality. Her writing was (and still is) considered shocking and yet appears to be filled with strains of astonishing beauty & resilience. Kathy Acker it is said colluded with the history of Colette’s life in her book My Mother Demonology which many consider a master work. (Am saving to read that till after.) 

After learning of Ashbery’s passing, found myself being visited by a bird with a blue head and a purple neck on my fireplace landing who paced, back and forth, several times – this I marked as coincident with his passing. Demons engage thoughtfully in such age-old conspiracies. And then a cloud darkened the room into shade –

It was right after having contrived suddenly as a reflection of love – for their existence – to try my hand at a translation of some chapters of Peignot’s work. (Laure has been translated once already in the late 70s – early 80s. The thinking being that like Rimbaud – the more the better – for her.)

Like beautiful John Ashbery took to translating the wildly implacable and transformative Arthur Rimbaud. Only to drink in replete sweet heat of his bold and thorny-crowned moil, impudent and (now) divine, indomitability profound & lavish betrayals – that poetry rides as hound after hell like a thief’s night rider in the sky –

Alas – red-eyed this dark and windy, mournful ejulation. ♠♥

BE FORWARNED: pursuing two voices here. And they dont quite match. One is a Book Reviewer who tho jokes is plainly on target. And the other is My Lovely Hysteric. Whose ostentation is loosely based on One of Poe’s. Though not as “together.” Doesnt quite “weed” well, but is I believe still interesting enuff to keep up “as is.”

Reading Gaston Bachelard‘s The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind – (1940). And the word NO is barely mentioned – at all. A book called the Philosophy of No, and 3/4 thru still the word – NO – has only been mentioned once! Blinky (the Partisan) is sensing a Flip, a beta flip? Flipping the bird, oncoming.

Beta Flip is 0/1. Symmetrical Flip allows for more, say -1, 0, +1. Science & Maths do this a lot. Spin is reckoned as states of Symmetry. Its one of the ways how science gets around No when they mean Not. It is but it isn’t – as one of two states of No, and of course that doesn’t mean it can’t rearrange to positive.

Bachelard ascribes 5 phases of rational thinking, can think of simply as: 

1.   naive realism: Quantity
2.   positivist empiricism: Equations
3.   classic rational mechanics: Calculus 
4.   3D+, Relativity
5.   discursive rationalism: Probabilities, Vectors, Mobius Patchworks, etc. 

And, adding in intuition and/or conjuration, he allots one more. Bachelard’s very own: The Surrational. Seemingly formed after word surreal (surreal shows up around 1930, shortened from Surrealism: Diaghilev, Cocteau, Breton, Apollinaire, etc. circa approx. 1913) but instead it’s sur + rational. Isn’t he lovely. (Sur means over and above.) 

Not I

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) lines up dichotomies of reasoning as unending. Thought as language trying to establish its Negative, a possessive negative, the Not I (Beckett’s monologue), is unable to find with exactitude any end of being – as thought – and beginning of another that is opposite of it, without reverberation extension echo, its unachievable – all you can do is talk your way into a kind of gradient to wall – with death as the Wall (and most say even that fails – in Science and Religion). 

Inspired use of Surrationals led to the discursive rational – engendering Symmetrical Flips, Image Jumps, Positive Negatives (something that isn’t but if it were to come about would have to be positive, because of its broader state. Meaning 0 is not just 0 any more, it can have preferences).

Blinky says if it helps Haute le Couer contend with madness burning through as beauty: What the hell? 

What the Hell

Deepening presences essences prevalence of horror as hunger & beauty, where mortal shock over an Edgar-esque scavenger hunt for love & truth went spinning off into hell.

Call it a quasi-absurdist play on “devout” radical realism – that fell under to ominous spells of endless havoc over “killer” shadows of love. Like someone walking around beaming/screaming, with a knife in her eye, and hole in her bucket, drowning in a flood of adoration-bending “love-you-to-the-end” fish.

As annihilation as art as beauty lurches along, in sync with a treasury of death. (The Waste Land, Decline of the West – which didn’t lessen anything. Hegelian potentialism effectively “popping” to a new information age of living with media, beginning with Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation.)

And none of it – in the least – negates or neutralizes feelings of being deeply haunted by affection & beauty. The heart (however wickedly stuck in a wild wallow of hell) never gave up on being kissed! What do you call that? when the heart is incapable of giving up on the importance of something, to the point of sheer even errant out-&-out obstinance – 

Alas. Coinciding with endless language still about “crossing back” William Blake’s beautiful bridge-to-excess. Imprinted on my soul is this country fence that got “jumped” over with other artists (like Blake and Poe and Joyce and MacGowan and Burroughs) holding back the curtain. “Logic” as beauty caged like a beast that wants to break out, in language of poetry, emerges from the “discursive” like ghosts in the machine. Ghosts in a machine of sorrow horror tragedy, oh theatre – it having led to a miracle madness of ethics exceeding belief!

Meanwhile – adoration flowed around it as religiously unutterable enchanting defiant astonishing storming vivid disruptive, etc. As a dire uncanny presence in heart – of meaning & desire.

Miracles stem from an excess of hunger for beauty. Hunger for more. And something about it never lets go, however lowly descend into traumatic spirals of hate & hell – Suicide after all is martyrdom. Adoration (even for death) pops back up again and again in presence of its beauty and meaning – non obstante. 

Double U Goodness

Bachelard’s Philosophy of No – is actually a double, is No overturned. Philosophy of No is effectively saying No to No! Scientists exclaiming about new maths – NO you can’t use that – that’s not real!

No to your Not! Brothers’ keeper. Scientists who could – used Leibniz’ “ghosts in the machine” – which is what he called the discursive rationals that were emerging in maths as capable of new measurement. And scientists explored using them until they could no longer be denied as, well – really useful, despite methods lacking any form of classical substance, despite its “exceeding” real.

How excess works with measurement – gives it its meaning. Bachelard was pushing back, up against a negative dialectic not giving up till it reaches a wall that can’t be reached –

Militance

Religiously head was in a noose – being brought up “to-ends-of-earth” for love, basically a militant monotheistic Medieval mentality!? Do or die romantics. Are lovely.

Caught in a rip, there imposed hope beyond hope: a seal of wretched beauty and dying undying dying undying faith as a sailing wailing baling mailing wretched treasure of innocence. Haute le Couer, means wretched in French: High on the Heart. She blasted the blessed pot (beyond all known reason) ha ha HA: why because it had a divine crack in it.

And they all (my sevendust – genesis dust-to-dust 2:7 – and the misery index – of theatricals, eccentrics, etc.) riotously slipped out (unmediated) in excess with a thirst for beauty and its rings, its Rings of Saturn, rings of fire & camp.

Sums

Bachelard’s making his way through Le Bouleversement – The Great Reversal, which is The Secret Sur-title for theme of my (work-in-progress) books.

Rationality as it succeeds through stages, over course of history, is delivering ever more refined depths to rational facilities without necessarily neutralizing out of existence anything what came before – that’s basically Bachelard’s broader outline.

Swell little book!

Haute bleeds out horror and beauty to no end. LuLu my Frenchy who adores French Philosophy, follows Negative Dialectics back to NO in Philosophy of Science and Maths, a la Bachelard – just to see what happens.

And as it turns out – no not just doubles back, but quantifies, turns spectral, symmetries of no, not, yesz – circumnavigates its way thru visions of “hell.”

Apologize. Confess. Sacre coeur! over relish here for peepee kaka humor-slash-signage, oo-la-la.

Penile humor helps me laugh at myself – over sublime “weight” of terror, “going live” here with working excerpts from my horror-does-not-forsake-beauty books.

Pee boy. P for precious plowing holy poly through sanctums crash cupid, wild and lonely for its depths – 

Apologize, must apologize! language sticks at me, flutters & gutters through, in purlieus of fascination, that are fraught with religious embellishment.

Confess

Mythomatic violence – I fell under a casting of enchantments, sniffing after Burroughs and MacGowan rocked my world, took me over, monster & roperipe & spinning spinning – startling kerfuffles awakened from depths of lurking dormant architecture that would captivate & sabotage, astonish enrapture terrorize mortify mystify inveigle transfigure seduce.

Confess weakness for Irish voices, French poets & philosophers, Emily Dickinson’s endings – she slips off from poetic line on the image and eclipses it, sinking in after depths. Also Pound’s cracking liberty bell, Nietzsche’s discussion on religion – and its blowing up then: swamp insidious perverse/religious delicious in wild man philosopher Georges Bataille’s head.

Thank!

Thank. Thank. MUST THANK (beyond measure) Shane MacGowan, Nick Cave (without whose foisted guidance probably would not have regained footing), and ghost of William Burroughs, sincerely apologize to all for having to put up with me during The Crazy Years. Monsters came home to roost, blasted by a fury of Fears.

Without their medicine, have to wonder whether ever would-a could-a wagered species everything to rover over the borderlines with Achilles Jar – cum bats, like a holy lovely feud with hair of angels, heap-a steep-a deep-a with Procrustes – in the rack?

Point

Books on site are all works in progress. If you are interested in, for whatever reason (like publishing – ), see link on comments page for Book Interest.

The Rent

Beauty, la belle, cracked up into a collapsing litany of fire and desire, Joyce speaking angry French somehow always in background like shoots and ladders going down down down to the beachhead for a wire – Trickster’s sooty pale eyes luminating the rent, wretched stupid cupids diz knees – digging out from “source” labors of hell.

Looty Poe lute-y is your beauty. Tak tak tak – many thanks.

John Ashbery – ♥ your postcard collages.

Still have tons of it – boxes of files & photos from Creem Magazine’s last gasp. The dream of doing a collected book, called The Creem Chronicles, died for me as victim of a roaring quavery sadness – sanctimonious and eruptive.

Crates of it still stuck in brothers basement settling for less – bit smelly – but basically in tact.

Snot Guilty

Would again and again push for a book – of uncompromising Piss Boy beauty – when wild gestures began to accumulate.

Suddenly I’d get lost, out at edges of righteousness and meaning, and would descend into petulance –

Quizzically, at depths of religious beauty – what purifies also terrorizes. P Boy Purity? Well that’s a Monster Cookie – clandestine monster in heavens larder who with angels screaming, would hit a breach!

Poetry had let loose a monster whose mystery was self devouring.

Had to teach myself how to find “lines” – which is what I do now – use drawing to help define edges with specific purpose, as a matter of surface and in a community where search-for-beauty is meaning.

Must apologize to: Dorothy Sherman, Louis Ginnelly, Jimmy of Jimmy’s Corner, Russell Galen, James Fitzgerald, Thomas J. McCormack, Hank Bordowitz, Marvin Jarret, Marsh, Christgau, Bangs, Altman, Arnold, and everybody else at Creem.

Who, What shd I do (w/ it) – ?

Tinkle Report though a spoof – is subderiv! (ahold with homage to – ) Patti Smith’s great gnash-ville hollar: PISS FACTORY.

Alackaday – what what what to do with 20+ crates of files from the original Creem?