Big in Japan

Thanks to Gary for miraculously finding this post on a Japanese "cat culture" site.

Animating Concerns

Hope it's not too gauche to take a stab at answering my own question re: contemporary poetry's animating concerns (division norteamericano):

1) Plumed troops and the Big War.

2) "Do you believe that poetry can create [political] change in the world?"

3) The Lyric after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Sometimes Use the 'I'.

4) Crisis of Overproduction
"Too many ___________." (insert: poets/M.F.A. programs/blogs/grad students/small press publishers/books.)

"Too few ____________." (insert: readers/reviewers/buyers/hours to read/good books.)

5) www.blogspot.com.
(or: Amazon, Lulu, PayPal)
(or: email, Penn Sound, flarf)

6) Weird rumblings of god stuff.

7) Standard rumblings of marx stuff.

8) Plumed troops and the Big War.

THIS JUST IN:
9) Squid.

Objective Correlative

Barak Obama: luxury pen.
Hillary Clinton: Perfect Attendance medal.
John Edwards: tire swing.
Dennis Kucinich: tongue stud.

Mr. Burns's War

Your public opportunity to enter the commercial.

Dept. of Monday

blogs gone soft

Green Zone

Sleep punctuated by error,
error delivered into sleep.

The Delphi Intelligencer

The kiddie pool, too, bears its portion of ocean.

Secret History of Portland

Forget Lewis and Clark, Mount St. Helens, Neil Goldschmidt, & the forest green Subaru Outback. The history of Portland is inscribed in the shag terry flesh of Bumpity (active 1971-1985), victim of the professionalization of local affiliate educational programming.

File under Poetry of place, Disappearance thereof. Or not.

Man O Manmohan

O.K., I liked Chhalia, Amar Akhbhar Anthony's one for the ages, but this weekend I saw Coolie and my world will never be the same. "Late Desai" is a period unto itself, like pre-crash Dylan or the English Auden. Cultish and divisive (they're love-or-hate kind of affairs), Manmohan Desai's last three or four movies before his suicide chart the way to a self-awareness that's too gargantuan to be reduced to irony; too gleefully shambolic to suffer plot, except as an unrelenting pullulation of subplots; and escapist to the point of breaking off from any physics known or heretofore imagined to become its own cosmology. The absurd hits a temperature where movie set melts back into ritual, cameras almost an afterthought, cinema colors that move with people sometimes inside.

Dept. of Monday

Turn again, Whittington.

Talkin' Virtual Cyber Community Blues

I am I because my sixty-six GoodReads™ friends approved me.

Not Gonna Take It

Not much worthy of a "T.V." label on the blog lately, but I heard from the other room Twisted Sister's '80s arena-ready headbang manqué, "We're Not Gonna Take It," sung by a perky chorus of women, and had to come in. It's a jingle for the "ladies pill" with the swank '80s name, YAZ, that knocks out fatigue, moodiness, bloating, and moderate acne while preventing in 99 out of 100 cases pregnancy. See? So you're "not gonna take" the old Pill, and you're not gonna take fatigue, moodiness, bloating, and moderate acne when you don't have to. The jingle turns on this pregnant ambiguity, drawing down over the free-floating political discontent implicit in the original a scrim of day-glo sexual empowerment.

All of which prompted the thoughts: Would this ad exec be witty at dinner, or is s/he pure evil? Is s/he a she or a he? And how long am I gonna keep confusing Twisted Sister with Quiet Riot, and hold onto the anger at the latter getting the credit for "Cum On Feel the Noize," which is really Slade's? And will I cry, weakly drunk, when "Merry Xmas Everybody" plays again this year, wishing I were British?

Pull Down Thy Vanity

... but keep blogging, please. (And hosting readings, and stocking small press poetry books, and bringing down Goliath-like 'Barnes Ignobles.')

Thank you.

Survey Says ...

What are the animating concerns of contemporary U.S. poetry? (I mean the staple-stitched, non-university press variety, the kind likely to get talked about on, say, {LIME TREE}, or rhubarb is susan, or Galatea Resurrects.)

Be crude & broad, it's a blog. Like '30s: are you or aren't you a Fellow Traveler? Sur-real? '20s: where do you stand on the manner and matter of The Waste Land (collage, the War, an allusive broken-sharded "all times are now" approach to history)? Big bold & roughshod like that. What are ours?

Of course this is a 9/11 post.

Dept. of Poetics

Quirks upgraded to grandeur.

Dept. of Boykoff

I might as well just make one of those Blogger post labels for items relating to Jules Boykoff, who's doing something unmissable in Portland like every 3.2 weeks.

This time it's the book launch for Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States at Powell's on Hawthorne this Monday, Sept. 10 (get it?) at 7:30 p.m. Part history lesson, part how-to manual, part ray of hope in one black bag of a book.

Rumor has it that he may be officially announcing the Boykoff '08—Our Only Hope presidential campaign on Monday as well. Don't miss history.

News From the Oracle at Delphi

Thinking outside the box is the box.

Dept. of Poetics

Grammar as a form of fandom.

Not An End

I guess you're still a history geek if re-reading J.P. Keynon's account of Charles I's trial and beheading brings a mist to the eyes:

"The axe flashed, the crowd flinched; but it was not an end."

Spare Room Sunday

The inimitable Lindsay Hill reads with Dutch master H.C. ten Berge here in Portland this Sunday. A good one to not miss.

H.C.'ll be in Berkeley a week later to read with Nathaniel Tarn at Clay's series, Sunday 9/9.