AIG & Charles Simic

Here's a suggestion from our poet laureate that could be implemented to deal with the financial disaster's rogues and thieves. "Deterrence by example. Let's bomb X so that Y and Z will know we mean business & behave. By that logic why not hang a few crooked politicians & bankers so that others may be warned." hmmmmmmmm While I'm at it, in a similar vein, he wrote, "Centuries ago, when the king's advisors gave wrong predictions as to the outcome of military campaigns, they were tortured & publicly executed. In our days, they continue being called "experts" and appear on TV."  & while I'm quoting, here's one from Antonio Porchia (translated by W.S. Merwin),      

       What words say does not last. The words last.

       Because words are always the same, &

       what they say is never the same.

This is like writing a report in grade school(high school, college) ; just copy word for word from various sources. I think the saying is "Plagiarism is the highest form of compliment."

 

your dose of simic for today

Four poets reading. "My pain is greater than yours," they kept shouting all night.

I think I was at that reading.

another simic

"Ideological criticism is always stationary. It has its "true position" from which it doesn't budge. It's like insisting that all paintings should be viewed from a distance of ten feet and only ten feet. Many paintings do not fully exist at that distance, of course. Besides, one is never at a single vantage point except intellectually. In life & in art, one is simultaneously in several places at once." Like the time I was listening to a recording of Charles Lloyd playing at the Monterey Jazz Festival, but I was confusing Monterey with Montreaux , so I was hearing him through my French filter and associating him with all the great American expatriots who went to France to play the music Americans did not understand or honor. We were both in three places at that moment, and at this moment I'm in this place and those places. Is Charles Lloyd here with me even though I'm presently listening to Rudresh Mahanthappa? Is Rudresh Mahanthappa in Montreaux and Monterey & in a cottage outside Boston where I was listening to Charles Lloyd at Monterey/Montreaux? And where is Charles Simic now, the guy who got this all started.  Where would the postmodernist deconstructionists stand on this? What about the neo-punk papists and the omnipresent protopaternal god? This is why I'm going to convert to Ideological Criticismism. No more intellectual vertigo for me!

quotes from Charles Simic

How did Charles Simic sneak through national security & become the Poet Laureate of the U.S.!!!

Every now & then I'll be starting my blog with a quote from his book, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth.  Some days a quote will be the whole entry. Here's today's:

"The new American Dream is to get to be very rich and still be regarded as a victim."

Galeano

I've been having "bad" dreams and wondering where they come from. I've been reading Galeano's Genesis for the past two weeks before falling asleep. I've been thinking about a full page ad on the back page of the local "hip" weekly advertising a rum called Captain Morgan. The graphic features the usual swashbuckling Disneyesque buccaneer Historically, Morgan was a pirate who raided Spanish galleons as they carried the wealth of the Americas to Spain. In exchange for this wealth, Morgan was made an admiral in the British navy. In addition to the raids on Spanish ships, Morgan slaughtered the indigenous people of the Americas, which were not the "Americas" to the Aztec, the Inca, the Taino, the Carib....... He also profited from the sale of humans from Africa to work the mines, the fields, the mansions of the Pope's new dominions. In these bad dreams, I'm fighting, running, trying to find something my heart has lost. There are ants in the house. They come every winter at the turn of the year. They don't hide. I spray them, vacuum them up. They never come in to the kitchen.

WSLC

I'm listening to my daughter DJ her radio show on WSLC. Unlike the last show I listened to, which was taken over by twenty-something scatologically obsessed males, this installment actually features music with a variety of influences : the nasal drone of Leonard Cohen, the female energy of Jerry Lee Lewis, Tiny Tim's antic uke, Arvo Part's Miserere, Neil Young's Canadian drawl, Moog, the Beatles diabolically innocent harmonies, Yoko Ono's rockabilly, the hurdygurdy rants of Captain Beefheart, the postfuturist clogging of Oregon kitchen dancers, & the melodious echo of fogdrifts on Frostian catfeet.  All in all, a good show. Obviously, learned everything from her old man, who used to sit in smokeclouds and stitch together music tapes on his reeltoreel recorder while the big man upstairs stomped on his floor/my ceiling and jumped the needle on the turntable spinning Led Zeppelin & Pharoah's The Creator Has A Master Plan for anyone within a four block radius to hear.  Signing off....................................

older men & the sea

There's a reason so many poets sing about wine, especially when they move past midlife. If I can remember all the reasons why, I may write about each one, for each deserves its own consideration. The easier way would be to post a photograph that semiotically (a nod to my youngest) communicates the message of this missive.