~ ~ O k i r ~ ~
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Sunday, August 06, 2006
There are some limitations with Wordpress. For one, I don't have access to the html code (in their case, the php). So I'll have to give up on my obsessive tweaking of the template. But I don't really have time to do that nowadays anyway. Second, it's going to take some time before I figure out how to upload the minimalist templates (they call them "themes") I'd like to use, so I'll have to be content for the time-being with their "basic" themes. Which is not so bad, because, as I've noted, they have good design. And I do find their dashboard a bit less troublesome than blogger's. And it's free. So yeah, I'm "moving" this weekend.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Oh dear. I think I'm about to embark on the unthinkable. That is, I may switch to a different blog server (shhh: Wordpress). Why? They have good design. And I realized, as I was shopping around for a new template, that what I really want is a minimal, white template that's designed well. And I think they've got that. But even more, I've found a set of delicious minimalist templates that are compatible with Wordpress: Plaintxt. I'm playing around with Wordpress now, and so far it's been easy, and I haven't found any glitches.
I've gotten to the end of an intensely mind/brain/body consuming (and I mean consuming) project at work, and finally able to take a little breather.
So I'm looking at this blogger template, which I put up quickly when my last template crashed. And I don't really like it much. I may try out some other templates. So don't be surprised if this thing morphs into some crazy shapes.
So I'm looking at this blogger template, which I put up quickly when my last template crashed. And I don't really like it much. I may try out some other templates. So don't be surprised if this thing morphs into some crazy shapes.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Yay! Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems (1978~2006) by Tom Beckett is out! Been waiting a long time for this.
Monday, July 31, 2006
11 stones by John Cage.
Roeder Gallery
"Yet, at bottom, there remains the mystery of the uselessness of art, of the shifting and unmade quality of it, and of the tremendous need that we have for the unmade and the undone, no matter how unstable or accidental our experience of it may be. The experience of it is precious and life changing always."
--Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Mark Young announces the 2nd issue of Otoliths is now online at: http://the-otolith.blogspot.com
It's a terrific issue.
It contains work by Karl Young, Juhana Vähänen (translated by Karri Kokko), Martin Edmond, Rochelle Ratner, Louise Landes Levi, Cath Vidler, Michael Farrell, Christian Jensen, Ira Joel Haber, Bruce Covey, Jill Jones, Allen Bramhall, Derek Motion, Caleb Puckett, Sandra Simonds (a mini-chap — The Tar Pit Diatoms), Vernon Frazer, Pat Nolan, Donald Illich, J.D. Nelson, harry k stammer, Steve Tills, David Meltzer, Tom Beckett, Thomas Fink, Crag Hill, Ira Cohen, Carol Jenkins, Miia Toivio, John M. Bennett, Michael Rothenberg, Geof Huth, David-Baptiste Chirot, Aki Salmela, Sandy McIntosh, Michelle Greenblatt, Janne Nummela, Tom Hibbard, Marko J. Niemi, Phil Primeau, Kevin Opstedal, Olli Sinivaara, Nico Vassilakis & John M. Bennett, Michael McClure, Pam Brown, Leevi Lehto & Eileen Tabios.
It's a terrific issue.
It contains work by Karl Young, Juhana Vähänen (translated by Karri Kokko), Martin Edmond, Rochelle Ratner, Louise Landes Levi, Cath Vidler, Michael Farrell, Christian Jensen, Ira Joel Haber, Bruce Covey, Jill Jones, Allen Bramhall, Derek Motion, Caleb Puckett, Sandra Simonds (a mini-chap — The Tar Pit Diatoms), Vernon Frazer, Pat Nolan, Donald Illich, J.D. Nelson, harry k stammer, Steve Tills, David Meltzer, Tom Beckett, Thomas Fink, Crag Hill, Ira Cohen, Carol Jenkins, Miia Toivio, John M. Bennett, Michael Rothenberg, Geof Huth, David-Baptiste Chirot, Aki Salmela, Sandy McIntosh, Michelle Greenblatt, Janne Nummela, Tom Hibbard, Marko J. Niemi, Phil Primeau, Kevin Opstedal, Olli Sinivaara, Nico Vassilakis & John M. Bennett, Michael McClure, Pam Brown, Leevi Lehto & Eileen Tabios.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Some one-line poems by Zoketsu Norman Fischer:
arriving on time and late
...
wonder where width went
...
me or it - either way you jump off
...
just over that hill: the one one wants one
...
my legs cramp, my head moves its mouth
...
do get simultaneous animals
...
strip language of emotion, end up with operate
...
nevertheless, again more
arriving on time and late
...
wonder where width went
...
me or it - either way you jump off
...
just over that hill: the one one wants one
...
my legs cramp, my head moves its mouth
...
do get simultaneous animals
...
strip language of emotion, end up with operate
...
nevertheless, again more
I love this, by Eileen Tabios, in Andrew Lundwall's Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks:
Futurism
The truants of heaven
possess a startling velocity
Futurism
The truants of heaven
possess a startling velocity
Much thanks to Tom Beckett for his notes on my poem, "The Aching Vicinities." Tom's notes on his readings, his interviews, his constant serious and playful attention to words and their philosophical underpinnings (only after having read Tom Beckett would I connect "underpinnings" to "underwear") have expanded my awareness of language, and are always a delight.
Photograph by Josef Sudek
Recently I wrote this to a dear friend:
Americans are marching towards darkness like sheep, like lemmings.
As a writer I feel profoundly ineffective.
Occasionally I spew out frustrated images, words, without any sense of form or understanding of what I'm doing. I don't know how to deal with this...sense of culpability.
On the other hand, Gary Sullivan has written this, when interviewed by Tom Beckett:
Which brings me to the most discouraging aspect of the field of poetry: The pressure on all of us, inside the academy, or like myself, working outside of the academy, to answer to what is in the worst sense of the word what I’d call an academic mindset.
To be reductive: The notion that poetry is, or must be, good for you. Even I feel some pressure to answer to this, despite my general sense that it’s ridiculous.
When we write about poetry, and by “we” I’m probably mostly referring to the subset of poets who might self-identify as “avant-garde” or “experimental”—we tend to fall into the trap of trying to explain what we’re doing such that it puts people who are worried or who may feel guilty about participating in the field of poetry, given the state of the world, at ease.
Guilt, if it isn’t shored up by constructive action of some kind, is an utterly wasted emotion. Worse, it can easily lead to depression and paralysis. But it’s an emotion that many people continue to waste on poetry and poets with surprising consistency.
Read more in e=x=c=h=a=n=g=e=v=a=l=u=e=s.
Actually, "guilt" is not so much what I'm feeling, so much as a foregrounding of culpability, which seems to frame everything in a sense of high irony. No matter how much I protest, no matter what my racial or cultural identity, my location and upbringing in the U.S. ties me in to its policies.
But as an "experimental" writer, I do think that it's important to maintain and even nurture my freedom to venture into preposterous verbal territory, if need be.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
The blog is, of course, a window, through which one might see rain falling, or even 3s. Manos's window on Prague (below) collects rain. Prague is a blur. One can't tell if the weather is inside or outside; but I think I see a vague interior. The frame is invisible. My own window collects grime. And a green vine.
Conversations: When the mule’s face looks in the window there’s been . . . Somebody wrote a scholarly article about just what this mule’s face meant.
[Eudora] Welty: I meant a mule was looking in the window. (188)
via this Public Address.
Conversations: When the mule’s face looks in the window there’s been . . . Somebody wrote a scholarly article about just what this mule’s face meant.
[Eudora] Welty: I meant a mule was looking in the window. (188)
via this Public Address.
3s falling (can you hear them?)-- from the Jainaku project.
The photographer, Sudek, as seen through his studio window.
Sudek was originally a bookbinder, and lost his arm in WWI.
An older Sudek, preparing to take a photograph.
A window on Prague (prague 5), by Manos.
via Manos Photographs.
It's all about windows, no?
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
"our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men."
--Martin Luther King
"our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men."
--Martin Luther King
Why the democrats aren't going to take back congress in 2006. By Andrew Altschul. Huffington Post.
