Thursday, September 25, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
85 billion needed to continue blogging!
I suppose all of you are wondering why I've called you here today. Recent ennervations, permutations, palpitations and cosmosymphonic cyberlacerations have compelled the cyborg CEOs of this company, James Artorius Theobald Heavenski and the mysterious techno-guru known only as SeaPlumber - some of you may have cc'd him in an email recently - to scale back our Caribbean operations and dissolve the Turks & Caicos Limited Liability Company, and it was ever after dissolved and forthwith nonoutstanding, and amen. You may notice however that the tax islands and shell companies remain. More on that later.
What else can I say except - funds are needed! The latest Wall Street perturbations have purged the irresponsible, the badly-dressed and the prematurely balding, leaving you, me, the temp office girls Randi and Sandi, and our Bangalore tech support staff Pradeep and Maturi - I'll try to get them on speaker - in charge of roughly 450 million dollars of rapidly plummeting assets. All our hedge-funds are now hedges, and our assets are grass. Well great-grandpa when he started this company in 1782, always used to say 'you can't sail a paper boat to the Taj Mahal.' You know what dammit he was right.
I see that some of you have already skipped over the softer drugs and have gone right to the lawn darts and the croquet as a way to cope, I don't blame you at all, but I don't wish to see such activities interfere with the normal operations of this company which as of this week include re-alignment of competitive advantages, maximizing gains and minimizing losses, subliminal product placement - this is all in your employee handbooks, which I really do hope you consult because I had Randi and Sandi make a special trip to Kinko's just to print them out on the lam-ey paper. What? Lam-ay? Lam-eh. Whatever. Its a kind of a beige. Please consult those guides anyway in between your sales calls, everything I'm referring to right now is on page 17, page 17 and following, just go past the graphics. That's all changed as of Friday anyway.
The Seaplumber has dived deep - he's outside of cell phone range in other words, we don't know yet when he will return with his aura of bathyspheric wisdom to inspire us all. What I'm wondering is who will now get the coffee going in the morning, the Irish roast that I love so much. I'll just have to do it myself I guess. How is 7-11 doing? How is Starbucks doing? Sometimes I get it at Peet's because I like their free bean giveaways. We should do something like that-! a bean giveaway in Central Park, I'll get on it.
What we have to ask of our blogging viewers, that is, everyone who has viewed this company profile since its inception, to contribute 23 million dollars apiece to help us abet, abut, about, walk-about the federal bailout, we have to match what they're doing, like a 401k, pound for pound, if you know what I mean. I know its not a lot for you. We know that you are all a bunch of hip and relevant beings who are worth a million in prizes. Well folks its time to cash yourselves in! Remember its not about what you sell anymore, it's about what you buy!..wow that's great, I think we can make a bumper sticker out of that. I'm getting palpitations just thinking about it. The phone lines are open, or yknow you can just make out a check to Skyplumber Enterprises, doing business as skyplumber llc, apc, atv, blt.
Our address is 0987 Wall St, #300 Manhattan NY 04504.
*waits*
Sunday, September 14, 2008
checking in with Denise Levertov
"Journeyings", by Denise Levertov
Majestic insects buzz through the sky
bearing us pompously from love to love,
grief to grief,
expensively,
motes in the gaze of that unblinking eye.
Our threads of life are sewn into dark cloth,
a sleeve that hangs down over
a sinister wrist. All of us.
It must be Time whose pale fingers
dangle beneath the hem...
Solemn filaments, our journeyings
wind through the overcast.
*
Not to say too much toward this sublime piece out of The Freeing of the Dust (1975), but a few things: it is a fantasy at a time when fantasy is not really big, as a genre, (unless you consider Zeppelin) but the "unblinking eye" does provoke me to ask: whose eye? A question which we must approach individually, since I can't say there is here a clear Tolkein reference. Elements of the Gothic; then, is "Time" here maternal -?, because of the "dangle"-ing, not paternal as we often see it presented, an interesting reversal of the image of Father Time. Somehow I imagine a woman's hand being depicted here, but wonder why it has to be "sinister?"
Why do I imagine this depiction? Because in another poem of hers, The Soothsayer, there is a similar sequence:
My daughters, the old woman says,
the weaver of fictions, tapestries
from which she pulls only a single thread each day, ...(etc)
Great use of ellipsis in the first piece. A poem that succeeds by not trying too hard, for one thing.
But could my interpretation regarding the femininity of the hand be off? I make an easy association from one poem to the other as I read the language presented, but of course I cannot know the mind of the master poet Denise Levertov, and why she made her creative choices. Is it her mother's hand, or her grandmother's, maybe it is the archetypal Hand of Destiny, as in the saying "destiny had a hand in it."
?
Whether or not its a man's hand or a woman's hand might be a fun thing to argue about over darts, but now I make a grander presumption, which is that the person I'm throwing darts with would actually enjoy poetry. Indeed the hand itself does not technically appear in the poem, there is only a wrist, sleeve and fingers visible- I create the image I need out of the surrounding details, which I think is what poetry can help us do. Well, it's not a big stretch for this particular poem, but for me the image of the hand lingers, even though I never really get a good look at it.
Majestic insects buzz through the sky
bearing us pompously from love to love,
grief to grief,
expensively,
motes in the gaze of that unblinking eye.
Our threads of life are sewn into dark cloth,
a sleeve that hangs down over
a sinister wrist. All of us.
It must be Time whose pale fingers
dangle beneath the hem...
Solemn filaments, our journeyings
wind through the overcast.
*
Not to say too much toward this sublime piece out of The Freeing of the Dust (1975), but a few things: it is a fantasy at a time when fantasy is not really big, as a genre, (unless you consider Zeppelin) but the "unblinking eye" does provoke me to ask: whose eye? A question which we must approach individually, since I can't say there is here a clear Tolkein reference. Elements of the Gothic; then, is "Time" here maternal -?, because of the "dangle"-ing, not paternal as we often see it presented, an interesting reversal of the image of Father Time. Somehow I imagine a woman's hand being depicted here, but wonder why it has to be "sinister?"
Why do I imagine this depiction? Because in another poem of hers, The Soothsayer, there is a similar sequence:
My daughters, the old woman says,
the weaver of fictions, tapestries
from which she pulls only a single thread each day, ...(etc)
Great use of ellipsis in the first piece. A poem that succeeds by not trying too hard, for one thing.
But could my interpretation regarding the femininity of the hand be off? I make an easy association from one poem to the other as I read the language presented, but of course I cannot know the mind of the master poet Denise Levertov, and why she made her creative choices. Is it her mother's hand, or her grandmother's, maybe it is the archetypal Hand of Destiny, as in the saying "destiny had a hand in it."
?
Whether or not its a man's hand or a woman's hand might be a fun thing to argue about over darts, but now I make a grander presumption, which is that the person I'm throwing darts with would actually enjoy poetry. Indeed the hand itself does not technically appear in the poem, there is only a wrist, sleeve and fingers visible- I create the image I need out of the surrounding details, which I think is what poetry can help us do. Well, it's not a big stretch for this particular poem, but for me the image of the hand lingers, even though I never really get a good look at it.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
n plus one magazine
This stirs some thoughts as I ruminate on 9/11.
http://nplusonemag.com/over-my-dead-body
http://nplusonemag.com/over-my-dead-body
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
A party
Wanted to note that I had a very enjoyable time at a party this Sunday, hosted by Mark Wallace
and Lorraine Graham. Also at this event: Michael Davidson the UCSD professor and co-author of Leningrad. Jerome Rothenberg was there, and his wife. Also Rae Armentrout - who doesn't have a blog to my knowledge but this link may suffice just to identify her, and her -friend? Chuck.
How great to meet so many professional writers and teachers. Some of whom have blogs out here, others do not. Sorry if I left anyone out who would like to be mentioned - I just don't know where your blog is. I was glad for the conversation, and the beer, and the hummus, and to meet as well the enterprising parrot Lester.
and Lorraine Graham. Also at this event: Michael Davidson the UCSD professor and co-author of Leningrad. Jerome Rothenberg was there, and his wife. Also Rae Armentrout - who doesn't have a blog to my knowledge but this link may suffice just to identify her, and her -friend? Chuck.
How great to meet so many professional writers and teachers. Some of whom have blogs out here, others do not. Sorry if I left anyone out who would like to be mentioned - I just don't know where your blog is. I was glad for the conversation, and the beer, and the hummus, and to meet as well the enterprising parrot Lester.
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