BUSH...BUSTED!
(For Karl Kadie)
Our Recession scrip's as fake
as paper ivy on the Ivy League.
Where’s The Most Criminal?
What‘s the name of its Man?
Amazed, you see thru Him;
even thru seeing thru Him,
but what does that reveal?
Insight only reveals what
it can't really fix in real-time.
Basel Standards slam drawers,
Bush’s tax-cuts dead-end
bankerupting millionaires.
(13 SEP 10, Santa Clara CA)v3
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
POESIS number four (2010)
POESIS number four, Sept. 2010, (Propaganda Press of Alternating Current, PO Box 183, Palo Alto, CA 94302, usa, USD$4, 4"x5" unpaginated; alt-current.com, http://alt-current.com/
I recently wrote a ‘think-piece’ (“On Paper- [vs] e- Viability") publishing it here on my blog & The S.F Bay Citizen http://www.baycitizen.org/ Citizen Blog section. In it, I said that for the last few years, I’ve concentrated almost exclusively on e-publication, but now that 2 of my principal CA-based e-outlets are closing down (The Well, now 25, owned by Salon.com, also failing, & Vox.com where, in its TypePad subformat, Ann Wainwright Maltby, a northern English 'Geordie' friend in Leven, Hull, Humberside maintains 2 blogs.) 2B safe, I’d better now only seek combined paper & e- poetry outlets. I now see I already had:
On The Well, a writers’-discussion topic asks adly: What else did you find in your mailbox today? Ans. POESIS number 4, 4"x5" poetry pocket-magazine that (serendipitously) also appears online.
Among its 51 poets (incl. me), there are (3): Hugh Fox, Doug Holder, Arthur Winfield Knight, Herschel Silverman, who’ve all published me, (1) Ed Galing, who I’ve reviewed,
(1) normal [schiffman] who I only knew briefly back in mid-‘60s Boston MA who then claimed to have written “Blowin’in the Wind” & sold it to the young Bob Dylan in The (Greenwich) Village; I still believe normal [his real birth-name, spontaneously given to him by his still-sedated mom on his 1st being shown to her in a NJ hospital],
esp.after seeing "A Great Wind" on PBS last nite for the 2nd-time, this time w/out steadily rising anger. Pretty much the score for my (approx.) small-press generation (b. 1942.) How about U? .
Tho I usually quote poets' poems in full/part (Herschel's is long), this time, I'll just quote my own, entirely. Think of it as a neoNast-y editorial cartoon (I can't draw), with a 2 handfuls of skinny floating quote-balloons:
Statutorily Speaking
A weary, stony Abe Lincoln
slumps as he reads a newspaper,
slowly speaking over his shoulder
towards the Statue of Liberty.
Abe: “Libby, will you please
wash those boys' mouths out
with some good American soap?”
Fatboys in shorts crowd around her,
spewing truly deranged slogans:
Fatboys: “Don’t listen to Father Abe!”
“Obama’s a Communist! Obama’s Hitler!”;
“Gov’mint wants to kill the soldiers”;
“Gov’mint wants to kill the old”;
“Abortion leads to euthanasia."
Liberty quickly fills up an enormous tin-tub
with boiling water & foaming pink liquid soap.
Raving Fatboys scatter fast.
[on this blog in play-format: 09 SEP 09]
Forget my egotism; here's Hugh Fox's Orpheus & Euridyce poem, meaning much more to me since Carolin Combs, my 2nd-wife, died (26 JAN 07):
Orfeo ed Eurydice
Starting (8:05) late, all the younger
opera students in the talk-laugh-
it-out audience, as Eurydice dies
and Orfeo descends into and brings
her back from Hell, completely
gauzing-out Gaza and all the other
contemporary hells for a couple of
sacred hours.
I recently wrote a ‘think-piece’ (“On Paper- [vs] e- Viability") publishing it here on my blog & The S.F Bay Citizen http://www.baycitizen.org/ Citizen Blog section. In it, I said that for the last few years, I’ve concentrated almost exclusively on e-publication, but now that 2 of my principal CA-based e-outlets are closing down (The Well, now 25, owned by Salon.com, also failing, & Vox.com where, in its TypePad subformat, Ann Wainwright Maltby, a northern English 'Geordie' friend in Leven, Hull, Humberside maintains 2 blogs.) 2B safe, I’d better now only seek combined paper & e- poetry outlets. I now see I already had:
On The Well, a writers’-discussion topic asks adly: What else did you find in your mailbox today? Ans. POESIS number 4, 4"x5" poetry pocket-magazine that (serendipitously) also appears online.
Among its 51 poets (incl. me), there are (3): Hugh Fox, Doug Holder, Arthur Winfield Knight, Herschel Silverman, who’ve all published me, (1) Ed Galing, who I’ve reviewed,
(1) normal [schiffman] who I only knew briefly back in mid-‘60s Boston MA who then claimed to have written “Blowin’in the Wind” & sold it to the young Bob Dylan in The (Greenwich) Village; I still believe normal [his real birth-name, spontaneously given to him by his still-sedated mom on his 1st being shown to her in a NJ hospital],
esp.after seeing "A Great Wind" on PBS last nite for the 2nd-time, this time w/out steadily rising anger. Pretty much the score for my (approx.) small-press generation (b. 1942.) How about U? .
Tho I usually quote poets' poems in full/part (Herschel's is long), this time, I'll just quote my own, entirely. Think of it as a neoNast-y editorial cartoon (I can't draw), with a 2 handfuls of skinny floating quote-balloons:
Statutorily Speaking
A weary, stony Abe Lincoln
slumps as he reads a newspaper,
slowly speaking over his shoulder
towards the Statue of Liberty.
Abe: “Libby, will you please
wash those boys' mouths out
with some good American soap?”
Fatboys in shorts crowd around her,
spewing truly deranged slogans:
Fatboys: “Don’t listen to Father Abe!”
“Obama’s a Communist! Obama’s Hitler!”;
“Gov’mint wants to kill the soldiers”;
“Gov’mint wants to kill the old”;
“Abortion leads to euthanasia."
Liberty quickly fills up an enormous tin-tub
with boiling water & foaming pink liquid soap.
Raving Fatboys scatter fast.
[on this blog in play-format: 09 SEP 09]
Forget my egotism; here's Hugh Fox's Orpheus & Euridyce poem, meaning much more to me since Carolin Combs, my 2nd-wife, died (26 JAN 07):
Orfeo ed Eurydice
Starting (8:05) late, all the younger
opera students in the talk-laugh-
it-out audience, as Eurydice dies
and Orfeo descends into and brings
her back from Hell, completely
gauzing-out Gaza and all the other
contemporary hells for a couple of
sacred hours.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
On Corporate Purgatories
Sometimes we actually do get to outlive our corporate
work-purgatories.
I've now outlived DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation)
& even get to draw a modest HP-pension because DEC
was eaten by COMPAQ which was later eaten by HP.
I often characterize DEC an an all eyes-upward
Swedish (via Ken Olson, Pres.) 'head-fake' culture
(=Trust KO to Do the Right Thing); vs its 2ndary
major-competitor, DG (Data General) w/a
pain-inflicting Italian (via Edson DeCastro, Pres.)
1-on-1-conflict-driven 'body-fake' culture
(=You can trust Ed; but never trust Anybody.)
Both now no longer exist & I still get to write this,
no longer bound by any non-disclosure agreements.
(just after Labor Day 2010 weekend, Santa Clara CA)v4
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Poetic immaterials/seemlessly
[Q:] What are the so-called 'materials' that poets 'manipulate'?
[A:] As poets, we begin where&when we begin; & go whence&wherefore we go. We aren't carpenters, but people read our poems as tho they were fine joinery, which they are when word/image/stanza seemlessly join word/image/stanza. If we write in pictographs (hieroglyphs, ideograms) this is instantly obvious. Deconstruction can be both visual & aural.
But we purely-phonetic writers often let all this poetic joinery slip by insufficiently commented upon. But we shouldn't, so I'm not...
(09 SEP 10, Santa Clara CA)v5
[A:] As poets, we begin where&when we begin; & go whence&wherefore we go. We aren't carpenters, but people read our poems as tho they were fine joinery, which they are when word/image/stanza seemlessly join word/image/stanza. If we write in pictographs (hieroglyphs, ideograms) this is instantly obvious. Deconstruction can be both visual & aural.
But we purely-phonetic writers often let all this poetic joinery slip by insufficiently commented upon. But we shouldn't, so I'm not...
(09 SEP 10, Santa Clara CA)v5
Monday, September 6, 2010
[{TransAtlantic}] LABOR DAY
[{TransAtlantic}] L@BOR D@Y
{Dialog, Catechism, Diary}
“What exactly do americans celebrate
on labour day and how do they do it?”
- Ann Wainwright, Leven, nr Hull, GB
BC: The laboring class, all weekend,
[Sat.-Mon,] traditionally parades
in marching bands, interspaced
by flat-bed trucks carrying actors
en maquette, drawn by art-cars/trucks.
AW: The laboring class? Isn't that
most americans then? Could you put
a short piece together for my blog
about it as it is pertinent?
BC: Labor Day USA boggles the mind
of a Brit/European because, literally,
most (if not all) Americans may labor
at something/other (if only part-time),
but few will admit they're members
of the working class, saying instead
they're middle-class, wanting to be
accepted as such even as their claim
to middle-class perks & endeavors
(home-ownership, entrepreneurism)
is visibly dissolving before their own
increasingly terrified eyes. What class
is someone who’s now hopelessly un-
employed? Out-of-class. GB’s been
thru this for Thatcheritic decades
under its blue & then its red, too.
BC: The American-begun Recession
began with extreme over-evaluation
of the price of homes sold to people
who couldn't really afford them
at going mortgage rates, made to look
as tho they could by greedy realtors
& dishonest mortgage brokers, hot
for increasing percentage-fees who
poached upon a little-unionized (13%)
American working-class who thot house-
value inflation = class/status/fiscal upgrade.
BC: Their houses quickly appreciated in value,
'turned/flipped over' (resold) at increasingly
implausible prices: a house sold for USD$30K
in 1978 soon sold for USD$300K ~ 1M! but
where would they move to next? An island?
Some actully did, gaggling all the way to their
summer cottages on cooly distant lakes/shores,
retiring early on spectacularly superheated profits.
BC: Greedily delusional people didn’t listen to any
objectivity about "MONEY, Whence it Came,
Where it Went" (John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D,
Canadian-born American economist of the 'liberal'
pro-government-intervention Keynesian school)
which Obama has followed with his governmental
bailing almost everyone out, within temporal limits,
while ragingly destructive oppositional Republicans
shouted: "Too much Tax! Too much Tax!”
BC: Can Americans celebrate this Labor Day?
w/a double-digit avg. national unemployment rate,
few jobs created, despite Obama's governmental
bail-outs? watching musical fantasies of past
Labor Days w/the USA making distracting
old-'Hollywood' movies vs George Clooney's
latest neoFrench drysnuff-film "The American"
BC:[{diary}] On TV, this weekend, I looked for
recovering American car-industry ads in patriotic
red, white & blue - that don't signify the same
as in GB. The trad. patriotic tricolor now drapes
rightwing anti-government Tea-Party movement
rallies, Conservatives paint themselves red, leaving
middling blue to Liberals, white to anti-Obaman
racists, yellow to fascistic right-Libertarians.
(Labor Day Weekend 2010 Santa Clara CA)v7
Sunday, September 5, 2010
BECKONING
BECKONING
Waking to the voices of angels
Beck shudders in image-horror:
“No! Not yet! I’m not ready! I
haven’t worn this image out yet”
His grey brush-cut turns white,
His sneer turns purely smiley,
His fake goodness turns good.
People kneel to him & he prays
“Don’t let this happen to me yet!”
His bars of gold turn platinum.
His earnings go sempiternal,
but the IRS can’t audit them.
(Labor Day Weekend, 2010, Santa Clara CA)v3
[note] A multi-panel altarpiece of Beck's purification
despite his basest aspirations: praying, like Augustine
of Hippo, "God, make me (whatever)...but not yet!"
(Jabez = Beck's gold-idol, not Jesus.) Going platinum
disturbs his arrangement with the gold bullion dealers
he presently does internet ads for; platinum only comes
in 1 oz bars, & is traded by a higher echelon of clients
(cf. Swiss banks), not gold-ingot ziggurati. (-BC)
Saturday, September 4, 2010
On hard- vs e- viability
In the last few days I've gotten e-word about 2 large web-portals that will be closing down:
1. The Well (@ age 25), now owned by Salon, which is failing, too
2. VOX.com (offering xfr of existing posts to its TypePad subformat)
For the last few years I've been using both as 2nd & 3rd-publication back-ups for much of what I write here.
Hereby, I rescind my 68yr-old semitecchie assertion that being e-published has become a better viability strategy than being published in hardcopy...now that e- shows itself 2B suicidal by its wiping-out whole constellations of people's writings of all sorts, beginning with conversational ephemera aka chats. The WWWorld may B able 2read those living ephemera archivally, etc., but...for how much longer? Server maintenance cost seems 2B the actual cyberlimiter.
Unless some e-sites become archival & so can be read as archives by Those in the know. But who are They?
Ex. My posts to Digital Equipment Corporation's internal Engineering Net (later re-named E-net, then EasyNet) from 1975~88 can still be read IF you know where 2find them out there in vast cyberspace. But who would you have2B 2know they'd ever existed@all? [Ans.] a DECcie. (DEC was eaten by COMPAQ which was then eaten by HP...that now inherits/holds all those years of internal e-posts.)
Blog portals closing down makes me realize my recently going 99% e-pubs subject to e-v@pora@tion has been all too e-trusting, so I'm once again seeking paper publication (begun @ 18/1961 w/my early poems published in Boston College's STYLUS qtly.) Paper (obviously) lasts: Ex.: my little 4-line shape-poem ("Wine-glass Elm" written in Camb MA in 1966, soon pub. in small-press magapaper Brown Sweater), was much-later republished as 'a toast' in GRACES (HarperSF, 1989) - now reprinted 27X. [QED]
3 of my (4) ~20pg small-press chapbooks are (I assume) now collector's items as are all of Hugh Fox's Ghost Dance Mag/Press issues&books. I've been canny/lucky in choosing my principal small-press publishers (Dr. Hugh Fox PhD, @MSU, E. Lansing MI; Dr. Bob Chute DSc, @Bates College, Lewiston ME; NYT-free-lancer, author&editor S. Marshall Brooks, jr., Waban, later Spencer MA, now W. Dover VT) in quite dissimilar small-press orbits (e.g., Alice Rogoff, an ed. of The [annual] Haight-Ashbury Literary Review/SF recently told me she was in a 1971 issue of Chute's The Small Pond mag./Auburn ME with me); likewise, with the commercial antho. GRACES (above.).
Like most writers, I publish what I can where & when I can, so I can now see it's time to head back to lasting paper publication while the blinking WWWeb appears to self-destruct (here & there.) The new hotting e-books are hybrids (non-WWWeb standalone physical e-pubs.) but how long will their present book-sized media-formats last? When will they become chip-based eyeglass-viewed optical-virtual devices? (as an exDECcie [since the mid '70s], I'm an habitually cautious techno-late-adopter.)
Hardbound books&mags still have the material virtue of a [gradually degrading] physical existence: being on public & other libraries' shelves (until DISCARDed), in many university archives (lots of my hardcopy stuff's collected at UCONN's Thomas J. Dodd Research Ctr. in Storrs CT), 'junk'stores (incl. The Salvation Army where I always have & still do buy all sorts of books), people's personal bookshelves, all for (lo!) these many centuries (cf. the Royal Library of Alexandria, Egypt, [328BCE-48BCE] would be nicely evidentiary - if it hadn't been accidentally burnt-down by defending Gen. Julius Caesar.)
But for now, we can still depend upon paper books' long duration & worldwide {migratory} distribution. [QED]
Note: An e-variant of this (ongoing, above) has since appeared in the Citizen Blog section of The Bay Citizen, www.baycitizen.org [San Francisco CA] that supplies S.F. Bay Area copy to the NYT West Coast Ed. S.F. Bay Area pages [in Section A] on Fridays & Sundays.
~ Bill Costley (68ish)
(Santa Clara CA, Labor Day weekend, 2010)v9
1. The Well (@ age 25), now owned by Salon, which is failing, too
2. VOX.com (offering xfr of existing posts to its TypePad subformat)
For the last few years I've been using both as 2nd & 3rd-publication back-ups for much of what I write here.
Hereby, I rescind my 68yr-old semitecchie assertion that being e-published has become a better viability strategy than being published in hardcopy...now that e- shows itself 2B suicidal by its wiping-out whole constellations of people's writings of all sorts, beginning with conversational ephemera aka chats. The WWWorld may B able 2read those living ephemera archivally, etc., but...for how much longer? Server maintenance cost seems 2B the actual cyberlimiter.
Unless some e-sites become archival & so can be read as archives by Those in the know. But who are They?
Ex. My posts to Digital Equipment Corporation's internal Engineering Net (later re-named E-net, then EasyNet) from 1975~88 can still be read IF you know where 2find them out there in vast cyberspace. But who would you have2B 2know they'd ever existed@all? [Ans.] a DECcie. (DEC was eaten by COMPAQ which was then eaten by HP...that now inherits/holds all those years of internal e-posts.)
Blog portals closing down makes me realize my recently going 99% e-pubs subject to e-v@pora@tion has been all too e-trusting, so I'm once again seeking paper publication (begun @ 18/1961 w/my early poems published in Boston College's STYLUS qtly.) Paper (obviously) lasts: Ex.: my little 4-line shape-poem ("Wine-glass Elm" written in Camb MA in 1966, soon pub. in small-press magapaper Brown Sweater), was much-later republished as 'a toast' in GRACES (HarperSF, 1989) - now reprinted 27X. [QED]
3 of my (4) ~20pg small-press chapbooks are (I assume) now collector's items as are all of Hugh Fox's Ghost Dance Mag/Press issues&books. I've been canny/lucky in choosing my principal small-press publishers (Dr. Hugh Fox PhD, @MSU, E. Lansing MI; Dr. Bob Chute DSc, @Bates College, Lewiston ME; NYT-free-lancer, author&editor S. Marshall Brooks, jr., Waban, later Spencer MA, now W. Dover VT) in quite dissimilar small-press orbits (e.g., Alice Rogoff, an ed. of The [annual] Haight-Ashbury Literary Review/SF recently told me she was in a 1971 issue of Chute's The Small Pond mag./Auburn ME with me); likewise, with the commercial antho. GRACES (above.).
Like most writers, I publish what I can where & when I can, so I can now see it's time to head back to lasting paper publication while the blinking WWWeb appears to self-destruct (here & there.) The new hotting e-books are hybrids (non-WWWeb standalone physical e-pubs.) but how long will their present book-sized media-formats last? When will they become chip-based eyeglass-viewed optical-virtual devices? (as an exDECcie [since the mid '70s], I'm an habitually cautious techno-late-adopter.)
Hardbound books&mags still have the material virtue of a [gradually degrading] physical existence: being on public & other libraries' shelves (until DISCARDed), in many university archives (lots of my hardcopy stuff's collected at UCONN's Thomas J. Dodd Research Ctr. in Storrs CT), 'junk'stores (incl. The Salvation Army where I always have & still do buy all sorts of books), people's personal bookshelves, all for (lo!) these many centuries (cf. the Royal Library of Alexandria, Egypt, [328BCE-48BCE] would be nicely evidentiary - if it hadn't been accidentally burnt-down by defending Gen. Julius Caesar.)
But for now, we can still depend upon paper books' long duration & worldwide {migratory} distribution. [QED]
Note: An e-variant of this (ongoing, above) has since appeared in the Citizen Blog section of The Bay Citizen, www.baycitizen.org [San Francisco CA] that supplies S.F. Bay Area copy to the NYT West Coast Ed. S.F. Bay Area pages [in Section A] on Fridays & Sundays.
~ Bill Costley (68ish)
(Santa Clara CA, Labor Day weekend, 2010)v9
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