d i u 2 5 1 may 95 -to Scope after his 25th _from_ MACHINE LANGUAGE Given: what is to be determined is signal-to-noise ratio - the dream: being that which exists through meaning, seamless apparition, the statistical angel, necessary as fiction, forgotten in the waking (like: having the same body or shape, meaning confused with That radical need, as de-lineated. The pleasure of the E-motion, physical expression of the hidden integration. Culture-active simultaneous organism, living information system. Inter/change and relate, oscillate. Postural echo -lalia, labile _while_ smoothed to a gesture flesh inhabits. --djd Dear syllogism of Snow Flake (Hey! Flake, that's a good one!) I think I'll get in a fetal position and watch teevee. I think I'll have a glass of milk and nurse my altzheimer's... I think I won't. I think I won't won't. Well... if you, no, don't... someone hid my Prozax. I don't think you should. It is too. Well, mebbe. Don't you, I mean, no... jeez, I need a drink, and I am broke... i or i having joined the movement... In fact, change the i or i's to lower case... No I do not think you should use this letter of transmittal as part... yes, I mean, I think. You know. No. I mean, no. --albert 'r hubert, the pathetic To the Bloodless Refugees of Emptiness [ continued from DIU 24b ] ...In Nepal, such conveyance is the natural practice of the "gurava," capable of bringing forth life out of dearth. Saying such, I am thinking of the magical "puja ceremony," by which the great "Bengal tiger" is conjured out of emptiness. Not "pointless agitation," but impalpable power operant at a piercing transparency, absolutely non-aligned with "baseless fantasy" and error. Even in concerns mundane, the "gurava," is able to result, the purest concentration through the powers of the anti-persona. Of course, this is seen by many moderns as perjorative, as obscene juggling of reality. But what concerns us here is the supra-rational realia, the electrical unification, the rising above matter in its mode as dyslexic interval. The personality then taking on a life as trans- functional kinetic, uranian, and motionless as oration. But the human structuring axis remains the Roman world model, pursued with poisonous momentum, like a negated Flavian centaur. A life which forcefully questions the riddle, which ignites by its disasters a prolonged and fragmentary gossip. This is not the circumstance we seek, with its scarred and despicable motives, its plain spoken gargantua, lisping, now post-mortem in calumny, passed forward blindly, into cold reductive laws and contusions. Condoned magistrates, corrupted political leaders, are elected by surreptitious mandate, to fluctuate within the motion of their disabled missives. For instance, filth ridden judgements against the principled use of homeopathic medicinals, against enforced financial sanctions for the tribe of the powerful, with their obscenely wealthy cohorts, strutting through electrically decorative corridors, empowered by the genes of voracious hyenas. Then one arrives at the barrier of broken social mobility, where the destitute unrelentingly peer, into a profane focus, into the illusive and transsonic reason of the general political dialectic... --WA [to be continued in DIU 26] Playlist, Conference of the Birds, KZSC, Santa Cruz, 4-27-95 Farida Khalum / Allah Allah / Pakistan: Volume 2 Jahawarlal Jah / Shiva, Comment Traverser l'Ocean du Monde? / Inde du Nord- Mithila Marika Papagika / Ti Se meli Esanane / Marika Papagika Rosa Eskanazi / Trava Re Alani / Greek Oriental Songs and Dances Billy Bang Quartet / Lonnie's Lament / Valve #10 ... Taarab All-Stars / Pakistani / Orient de Luxe Orquestra Baobab / Mahamadou Bamba / Bamba Carlos Lomas & Pepe de Malaga / Malaguena / Andalusian Flamenco Song and Dance Marco Eneidi Quintet / La Chica Con Los Toros / Final Disconnect Notice Tim Berne's Bloodcount / Refelctions, Lyric, Skin 1 / Lowlife- The Paris Concert ... Fairuz / Bayyi Rah Mah Mal Askar / Dabke 2 Dennis Gonzales Sextet / Johnny-Johnny / Namesake Gnawa Halwa / Mouhy Abdellah Ben Hussain; Moullay Brahim / Rhabaouine Peregoyo y Su Combo Vacana / Asi Mi Tierra / Tropicalismo Super Sweet Talks / Awe No / The Lord's Prayer To live in a "present" that finds itself haunted by the spectre of the past and the frigthening hobgoblin of the future is or is not an approp- riate summation of the present that some diagnose as post modern? (as if such a diagnosis is the only way to implicate the solitary self in an always-already social role). An immersion into the academic theoretical discourses of our time seems to be increasingly becoming an economic necessity for those who wish to "labour in the mind". This emphasis is no doubt driven by market demands (disguised as "community"): There are more people writing academically today; thus the competition is feirce. To make more room for all this new writing it must be hailed as "NEW KNOWLEDGES" that render (IF NOT MAKE) books of dead writers obsolete. The whole academic situation becomes more and more transparently a marketplace, a fashion show. One could ask if it was ever anything other than that. Does the skepticism of the "age" we find ourselves in attest to the loss of some "imago mundi" that held the world of words together, or merely to a nostalgia to the days when intellectual and/or artistic activity did not seem like forced and alienated labour (thanks to the increased ACADEMICIZATION of reality)? One may very well applaud the "genre blurring" tendencies that are considered such a significant aspect of recent academic trends. There is something exciting in riding the crest of the wave that is crashing against that is separating "creative writing" from "critique", that is breaking down boundaries with its notions of "hybridity" and "inter-disciplinary activity." Yet rather than doing away with the distinctions and the specialized disciplines themselves, we are confronted with an embarrassed longing to maintain the integrity of the disciplines in a compromise move in which each academic professional is suppossed to serve the community through a strategy of "breadth" rather than "depth." This denies the possibility and realizability of the maxim "Each according to his needs; each according to his abilities" in its attempt to create a "generalist" middle ground we can all meet in, not all that dissimilar from the "objectivist" stance of reporters. It is currently fashionable to marginalize the level on which we make or find our own subjectivist heirarchies for the sake of centralizing the level on which we're "social relativists." This is not to say that there are not strong stances being taken, only that there is such a proliferation of them that even the fiercest Dionysian, who's decided not to decide, begins to look towards Apollo even if such hopes to limit the tyranny of heteroglossic indeterminancy are ultimately futile. We look towards Apollo even if ultimately FOR THE SAKE of Dionysus....Meanwhile deconstruction still has not become dada yet....no west for the reary... --You can call me Sue Doe, my maiden name, or you can use my married name (though i just HATE being referred to as my husband's property!), which is Sue Doe-Nim. THE LITERATI OF SAN FRANCISCO AND NEIGHBORING ENVIRONS Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting Their Authorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality by Edgar Allen Poe ----------- Third Installment: MICHAEL PALMER _Michael Palmer_ was a well-known teacher of Poetics at the New College of California. If not absolutely the best, he is at least considered the best purely lyrical poet in America. In Paris, his poetic acquirements are more sincerely respected than those of any of our countrymen. His additions to the tradition of Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Jabes are there justly regarded as evincing a nice perception of method and accurate as well as extensive taste, but his _Sun_ has superseded the work of the younger of the post-war Frenchmen altogether. Many of Palmer's publications have been adopted as text-books by our own aspiring writers--an honor to be properly understood only by those acquainted with the many high requisites for attaining it. Under the name "Analytic Lyric," the poet's project has enjoyed as wide an influence as any save those of Professors Bernstein and Howe. As a commentator (if not exactly critic) he may rank with any of his day, and has evinced powers very unusual in men who devote their lives to poetical lore. His propriety with regard to aesthetic matters is very remarkable; in this particular he is always to be relied on. The trait manifests itself even in his dress, which is a model of neatness and symmetry, exceeding in these respects anything of the kind with which I am acquainted. (Indeed, the photograph given on the back cover of Mr. Palmer's collection _First Figure_ made a stir at the time of publication, for showing how neatly ironed he kept the crease in his denim trousers.) In poetry, perhaps, the propriety is somewhat _too_ neat, and _too_ regular, as well as diminutive, to be called sublime; it might be mistaken at any time, however, for a very elaborate copper-plate engraving of the sublime. But his poetics, although fully in keeping so far as precision is concerned with his mental character, is, in its entire freedom from flourish or superfluity, as much _out_ of keeping with his verbal style. In his interviews he is singularly Creeleyesque--if, indeed, not positively Duncanian. An attempt was made not long ago to prepossess the public against his three North Point Books, the most important of his works, by getting up a hue and cry of plagiarism--in the case of all similar books the most preposterous accusation in the world, although, from its very preposterousness, one not easily rebutted. Obviously, the design in any collection of lyric poetry (whether analytic or otherwise) is, in the first place, to make _a useful anthology_ of perceptions and techniques, and the poet who should be weak enough to neglect this indisputable point for the mere purpose of winning credit with a few bookish men and women for originality, would deserve to be dubbed, by the public at least, an incompetent. There are very few points of poetical craftsmanship which are not the common property of "the learned" throughout the world, and in composing any anthology of any sort at all recourse is unscrupulously and even necessarily had in all cases to similar books which have preceded. In availing themselves of these latter, however, it is the practice of quacks to scramble page after page, by rearranging the logic of the argument, or by making a havoc of images, or by entering a slight alteration in phraseology here and there, but preserving the spirit of some prior model, its information, structure of feeling, etc. etc., while everything is so completely _re- written_ as to leave no room for a direct charge of plagiarism; and this is considered and lauded as originality. Now, he or she who, in availing him or herself of the labours of his or her predecessors (and it is clear that all poets _must_ avail themselves of such labours)--he or she who shall ape _verbatim_ the passages to be desired without attempt at palming off their spirit as original with him or herself, is certainly no plagiarist, even if he or she fail to make _direct_ acknowledgement of indebtedness--is unquestionably _less_ of the plagiarist than the disingenuous and contemptible quacks who wriggle themselves, as above explained, into a reputation for originality, a reputation quite out of place in a case of this kind--the public, of course, never caring a straw whether he or she be original or not. These attacks upon the San Francisco aesthete are to be attributed to a _clique_ of pedants across the bay, gentlemen and ladies envious of his success, and whose own compilations are noticeable only for the singular patience and ingenuity with which their dovetailing chicanery is concealed from the _public_ eye. Mr. Palmer is, perhaps, fifty-two years of age; about five feet ten inches in height; average build; hair brown and tousled; eye dark and passive; mouth mal- formed--the lips thin and asymmetrically twisted, having a certain stiffness; the smile particularly quixotic. His address in general is slow, reasoned, cordial, full of circumspect intelligence. His whole air is _distingue_ in the best understanding of the term--that is, he would impress any one at first sight with the idea of his being no ordinary man. He has qualities, indeed, which would have insured him eminent success in almost any pursuit; and there are times when his friends are half disposed to regret his exclusive devotion to literature. He was one of the originators of the well-remembered journal _Joglars_, his associate in the conduct and proprietorship being Clark Coolidge. His wife is an architect and the two share a daughter. New writings are eagerly awaited. Last Days of the White Race Radio Free NorthAmerica, 1 May 1995 all quotations from _'sophie_ by lola lemire tostevin but now I am blue black as a cloud before the sun and our bed is never green . . . on the calm constant motion of water there is no absolute relativity is the only rule . . . even those no longer here relinquish their perfume as before . . . mindless the heart is as useless as an isolated eye . . . beyond my window a bird is tracing against the sky the mystery of flight as near as words I move closer to you *prepared*by*the*logic*of*snowflakes*au*printemps* cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet flores brotando *