Chlorophytum comosum

.

Spider plants at kitchen window.

+

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

.

Here we have moi about 1974, standing in front of my apartment at 226 Rose Street, located just a minute's walk from San Franciso Zen Center. I lived here nine years, being involved with music, meditation and periodic employment at the SF welfare department. Today I miss having long hair, but I must admit that the moustache and sideburns, a concession to a fashion of the times, now seem a bit silly. The hand-painted sign above the front door was the logo of the small press I operated in those years.

+

Bedmates

.

+

Baptized in the waters of flumpff

.

FOURTEEN WAYS TO DESCRIBE THE RAIN

                                                               -- after Hans Eissler

dripping
hydrological
spam

inadvertently
randomized
leaves
mashed
into
a gory
pulp
on the
sidewalk

in the
clouds
of failure
we are
purified

then
Alice
dusted
the gunpowder
off her
petticoats

these
little fingers
are speaking
my
language

they
are
gay
hooligans

je te
dirai
vous

o
the
wild
wind

God bless
our dead
Marines

crinkled
teardrops
serenade
my wild
& foolish
heart

do thou
nothing
till angels
lie with
earthworms

the harps
of ancient
temples
are heard
by psychotic
einzelkinder

or: kill
your
television

covering
the screams
of dying
electrons

desert
rains
fall upon
the blue
anthers
of the
polemonium

if I could
be rain
I'd wash
down
to the
Bay of
San Francisco

but still
I surf
upon the
twattish
waves
of ungovernable
indifference

last year
Maurice
moved to
San Luis Obispo
and opened
a thriving
dental
practice

weather
report:
ein gottverdammtes
saumäßiges
dreckwetter
ist das!

but
that
night
at tahoe...

silver
dollars,
bullets,
rockets

sugarbaby
i baptize
thee with
the waters
of flumpff!

this
world
is lousy
with
strange
ideas

for example
current
symphonies
of abusive
meterology

now
feed me
with
your kisses

and the black
planets
of your
eyes

naked,
stoned
& soaked

take my
breath away,
no better
not

defibrillate!

bring me
bags of
sunshine,
heliocentricity,
bring me
no more
pain

few can
recall
what they
dream
at night

eelish
delvings
(Sylvia
Plath)

do not seek
to ignite
the deeply
concealed
munitions
of my
love

pretty swell
explode


+

The Lord of Evil returns

I'm not so much on silent movies - a lack of patience on my part, I suppose - but I'm fascinated with the original Fantomas films, some of which are now available in high quality restoration on YouTube, as for example:



Inspector Juve's pursuit of Fantomas is of course doomed to failure. You know that he'll never succeed when in the opening sequence F. puts on his executioner's hood, which he'll use to good effect when he submerges himself in a huge vat of vin rouge after chucking a 20-ft python into the Inspector's sleeping chamber.

But the chase itself, which proceeds quite leisurely and with great attention to detail, takes you through the streets of Paris and places you into some fascinating Belle Epoque venues and contemporary interiors.

What better way to prepare for the several centenary events commemorating the first appearance of the Lord of Evil presented  this week in San Francisco by City Lights Bookstore.

I downloaded the ebook for the Juve vs. Fantomas novel off Amazon.com for only ninety-nine cents.

+

A home on the playa

.

thanks waldemar horwat: burning man 2004

+

Dennis Martin's remarkable silverpoint drawing

.

Dennis Martin: Deanna XXVI

+

Confessionalism a stupid plan?

Any encounter with Walt Whitman immediately raises concerns about the viability or legitimacy of confessional literature, which in America finds continuance in the work of Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, certain New Narrative writers here in San Francisco, and others who resist a purely imagined, fictitious literature. The common danger for poets is that the approach leads either to a private space that no one else is simply able to enter, or that the craft of writing poetry becomes in principle an act of self-catharsis, a therapeutic exorcism, a colonic irrigation of one's own subjectivity.

Michel Houllebecq takes a nicely reasoned, dialectical approach to the same problem as it affects novelists:

I don't have a particular affinity with confessional literature; my problem is that I like almost all forms of literature. I have happily wallowed in the writings of Montaigne and Rousseau, but I still feel a delicious visceral shock when reading Pascal's verdict on Montaigne, the extraordinary insolence of a whip full in the face: "The stupid plan he has to depict himself." I have also taken inordinate delight in the absolute antithesis of confessional literature that is fantasy and science fiction.
And above all I have loved, and finally made my own, the middle way, which is that of the classic novelists. Who borrow from their own lives, or the lives of others, it doesn't matter, or who invent, it's all the same, in order to create their characters. The novelists, those consummate omnivores.

(Bernard Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Miriam Frendo, and Frank Wynne. Public enemies: dueling writers take on each other and the world. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011, p 28.)

+

Whose Voice? Which vision?

.

A recent Guardian article which lists the "Ten Best American Poems" puts Walt Whitman's Song of Myself at number one, the important normative criteria for such an evaluation being durability and the ability to "shift the course of poetry in the United States."

I could see durability, in the sense of an ongoing fascination with remarkable poems from the past, as an important standard, but the idea of an established "course of poetry" seems much more problematic. American poetry is better described as a procession of eccentric events, rather than an adherence to poetic forms or schools in the sense of European programs such as symbolism, surrealism, early modernism, and others operative in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If American poetry has ever followed an established track, it certainly isn't obvious to me.

Critics outside the U.S. continually try to find some causality principle or set of defining ideas to come to terms with American poetry. The Guardian reviewer suggests that Song of Myself  "reinvents American poetry in... peerless self-performance," which is "keyed to the energy and rhythms of a young nation waking to its own voice and vision."

Such twaddle might be composed by somebody on the outside looking in, who tries to find meaning in a situation which was inherently unstable, not to say chaotic, to begin with. The persistent confusion in a country split apart in the nineteenth century by warfare and the invasion of hordes of mostly non-English-speaking immigrants was not the environment capable of providing the degree of social coherence necessary to engender a unitary national "voice and vision." You need a national history to legitimize such proclamations, and in Whitman's time there was little enough of that around.

Although I'd probably agree to placing him at the top of the nineteenth-century poetical ant-heap, I can never forget how incredibly problematic Whitman is. His admirers have seen him as a visionary pioneer, like William Blake opening the gates to cosmic consciousness (as Richard Bucke defined it). But isn't this hyper-inflation of the ego an advanced case of puerile narcissism? And all the gush about loving everything and everybody, isn't it an early species of New Age intellectual dissipation?

And this adoring strangle-hold Whitman apparently has upon the whole universe, isn't it in reality some kind of inverted power-grab? Whitman as the self-imagined metaphysical Übermensch, an uneducated American Nietzsche?

In any event, surely what rests behind the endless attempts at self-assertion and self-definition is his own demand for recognition as a gay person -- in an era when nobody had any idea of what being gay meant, at least conceptually. How different from the approach taken by Herman Melville, the other great gay writer of the 19th century, who quietly and perceptively analyzed the homoerotic tensions and their transformation into outright sadism among a sailing crew in a work like Billy Budd. No cosmic pretensions here, just the authorial craftsman going about his business.

So I tend to think of Walt Whitman as a metaphysical fraudster, at times big-hearted enough, but not to be taken at face-value, at least by me. It seems indicative that no other writer of his century took such pains to have himself photographed as carefully as he did. The engraving above was made from a whole row of original photos taken along with many others in Whitman's old age, the right one selected for optimum effect. All the familiar iconic pictures of the poet seem to have been the result of similarly careful contemplation, the images of an artist who truly couldn't stop singing about himself.

+