I’ll be off to the hospital in another half hour or so. I feel good. Things should go well. If everything works out maximally well, I’ll be able to make a blog entry from the hospital tomorrow. Don’t bank on that, though.
An Internet miracle has occurred: some outfit called ReoCities is bringing websites that Geocities zapped back to life, including my Comprepoetica. Great news for me, but bad news, too, because it means I need to do a lot of work backing it up. This I’ve already started. I intend to keep with it till it’s done, so am doing no more here than make this announcement.
Tags: Internet News
Wednesday, October 1st, 2014
It’s been a number of years since I was able to keep up with John M. Bennett, but I have managed to squirm all the way through the 80 Pages of his 2012 The Gnat’s Window. Here are two of the pages ribbled across in the process, taking longer to age into something of a feel for them than he took, I’m sure, to compose his whole book, but vowing to return until I have the understanding I know they’ll enlarge to (the parts in English, at any rate):
Meanwhile, I’m just a chapter and epilogue from finished my current revision of my novel and no longer feeling good about it. Not because I don’t still think it’s at least pretty good, but because I can no longer block out the absurdity of trying to get people to read it that was the main reason I took so long to try to make a finished draft of it.
.
Sunday, November 3rd, 2013
Saturday, November 2nd, 2013
Today a collaboration between John M. Bennett, one of three collaborations we submitted to Chris Lott’s edition of Hal Jonson’s Truck. Chris passed on this one and the one I’ll be posting here tomorrow, but took the third.
.
Wednesday, August 21st, 2013
Ten Important American Othersteam Poets
John E. Bennett
Karl Kempton
Guy Beining
K.S. Ernst
Marilyn Rosenberg
Carol Stetser
John Martone
Scott Helmes
Karl Young
Michael Basinski
My list’s title demonstrates one reason I’m so little-known a commentator on poetry: it doesn’t scream that it’s of the ten best American Otherstream Poets, just a list of a few important ones. What makes them “otherstream?” The fact that you’ll almost certainly not find them on any other list of poets on the Internet.
This entry is a bit of a reply to Set Abramson–not because I want to add these names to his list but because two of the names on it have been doing what he calls metamodern poetry for twenty years or more, as far as I can tell from my hazy understanding of his hazy definition by example of metamodern poetry. Both are extraordinary performance poets mixing all kinds of other stuff besides a single language’s words into their works. I would suggest to Seth that he do a serious study of them, or maybe just Bennett, whose work is more widely available on the Internet, and who frequently uses Spanish along with English in it. It would be most instructive to find out how metamodern Seth takes Bennett to be, and what he thinks of him. Warning: Bennett’s range is so great that it’s quite possible one might encounter five or ten collections of his work that happen to be more or less in the same school, and less unconventional than it is elsewhere, so one might dismiss him as not all that innovatively different.
Which prompts me to e.mail John to suggest that he work up a collection that reveals something of his range by including one poem representative of each of the major kinds of poetry he composes. So, off am I to do just that
.
Wednesday, August 7th, 2013
I found a second piece for the SASE show from John M. Bennett. Note the superb visual poem on the back of his envelope:
.
.
Monday, August 5th, 2013
No mail art show after the seventies would be complete without something from John M. Bennett. Here we have an envelope and enclosures. What is meant by “Not Inside” I’m at a loss to say.
.
.
Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
The following poem John M. Bennett posted yesterday to Spidertangle and elsewhere, at once struck me as among the very best of the huge number of superior poems he has done. Partially out of laziness, but partially also to give others a chance to reflect on the poem without the temptation of seeing what I have to say about it and possibly being deflected from their own equal or better discoveries, I am going to just let it sit here uncritiqued today.
eapt
flooded haphtic duu
stt’s yr nodte nude
)label streaming( to )ss
ed( cash an )slo
shshed( where the
moumouthless lungch
“lost’s tea cher” )fol
ded yellp(
sot ,dusty
.
Saturday, November 10th, 2012
I’ve reproduced the cover of Jem Tabs, the collection of collaborations between John Bennett and Matthew Stolte:
I seem to be going through a very empty period creatively, I think because I’ll soon be taking a short trip north for a niece’s wedding. Having to travel too far from home always screws up my mind. Anyway, I had to scramble to find something to put in this entry. I grabbed this mainly because, for some reason, I love the idea of scrawled words inside large letters, or parts of letters. There’s something metaphorically important involved but I can’t yet finger it. Needless to say, I like the way the thing looks, too. And it’s always worthwhile giving such material a plug.
.
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012
Matthew Stolte is a young friend of mine whom I know only through the mail and the Internet, and John M. Bennett is an older friend of mine whom I’ve actually been within a foot or less of more than once! They both do work I greatly admire, so you should understand that when I call their chapbook collaboration of 23 pieces (which includes the graphics on both sides of each cover), Jem Tabs, lunacy, I mean greatly to compliment it. See below for its final interior piece and the inside of its back cover (and left-click it to see it better):
Fantasy Scenario Number Two: Jesus pays a visit to me and tells me I have two choices: (1) live healthily to the age of a hundred but continue having the sort of days I’ve had all my life–i.e., neither horrideously crappy nor particularly whoopeeic, or (2) spend a week with a 100 wacks like Matthew and John (hmmm, Jesus and Matthew and John?), each of whom has been hypnotized, if necessary, to want to spend twelve hours of each day we’re together, collaborating on works like the ones in Jem Tabs, and then leave this mortal coil in some innocuous manner. Easy choice. In other words, John and Matthew’s collabs make me drool to collaborate with either–or with the many others in our field known to enjoy collaboration. In fact, I can’t think of any such collaborations I’ve seen that don’t have a similar effect on me. Why aren’t I begging people to collaborate with me, then? Too much else on my plate at the moment.
One general thought about the two pieces above: that one unarguable thing they convey is the pleasure (I almost want to say, “the ecstasy,” but that would be an exaggeration) of the search for meaning, even though it may often not fully succeed, and even sometimes find hardly any large meaning. Most do lead one to enough discoveries to make one feel good, though. That’s all that almost any search for meaning will do. In the piece to the left above, I see, “shut close facet,” with the latter suggesting “focus,” because the its first four letters could be “focu,” and it ends in the center of a focusing wheel. Then comes the whirl of the request of the reader, or someone, to “set the dribbling/ from (the speaker’s) trembling/ face,” etc. around a triangle of visimages that include what looks to me to be a human ear that is also a tunnel. Much of a where keeps those caught in anthragreement with John and Matthew’s map willing to explore further.
Is its verbal content enough to make it a visual poem? I’m not sure. The expedition is there for those lunatic enough to see it regardless.
.
Thursday, October 4th, 2012
With the top image of asemic art, I run into trouble, for I can’t see what’s textual about it–except for a d and an a–and a 2! But it’s very difficult to draw something with pen or pencil and not make something that looks like a letter. I very much like the image (which is by John M. Bennett) as a design, and can force myself to perceive it as a swoopy sort of failed attempt to communicate, but that doesn’t open into anything much, for me. I find the face I see in it more interesting.
Jake Berry’s image below seems truly textual, though: in fact, it is probably a visual poem, for it has words, and they may well be semantically active (and I hold that a poem needs more than just words, it needs semantically-active words and they must contribute significantly as words to the work’s aesthetic meaning . I can’t make out these well enough to see how semantically active they are but they work as map labels, so seem to me to contribute significantly enough to what the work is doing aesthetically. I see it (so far) as an anatomical map of a male torso . . . as countryside. Lines quivering out a sort of journey to humanness.
.
Saturday, November 16th, 2013
I’m a longtime member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars. As such I was recently asked for an up-to-date CV. To get out of hunting up my most recent one and updating it, I sent the guy asking for it to the Wikipedia entry on me, remarking that it emphasized my career in poetry but that there was a fair amount pertaining to my career as a (very independent) scholar. He wrote back to assure me I was well-qualified to continue my membership but suggested I put together a CV concerned only with my scholarly career. That appealed to me, for it would, for one thing, allow me to babble a bit about what I think a scholar is. So here are a few random thoughts:
There are two kinds of scholars–no, make that there is a continuum of scholars reaching from the wholly academic to the wholly non-academic. The ones at or near the wholly academic end tend to deny the existence of those at or near the other end. I consider a scholar to be anyone, regardless of academic qualifications, who seriously works toward an understanding of documents through the use of logic and without recourse to the supernatural on what is explicitly in those documents. By “seriously,” I mean in sufficient earnest to have written at least one article of 5000 or more words on his understanding of some aspect of his subject. Whether the article is right or coherent should be disregarded. That’s because they have nothing to do with what an article, only with its value. I’m all for rating that, and assigning a given scholar a place in his field on the basis of his work’s value. Hence, almost anyone can be a scholar, but only a few can be good scholars.
Thinking about the kinds of scholars further, I came up with what I think is an improved short taxonomy consisting of three categories: thinkers, commentators and academics. Every scholar will almost certainly be partly each of these, but how much of each will vary a good deal. To the degree a scholar is an academic, he will gather facts from a study of first sources, citing their origin, and organizing them. To the degree a scholar is a commentator, he will act as a sort of journalist, reacting to academic results with thoughts about it and its ramifications an interactions with other academic results related to it. To the degree a scholar is a thinker (and I feel very few are), he will come up with large, risk-taking conclusions about the results of the other scholarship.
To the degree a scholar is a thinker, those scholars more academic than anything else will consider him unrigorous, faultily intuitive, unscholarly; to the degree a scholar is academic, those scholars more thinkers than he would tend to find his work unimaginative, pedantic and minor. But the work of those scholars mainly academics work will form the basis of all the best understanding of whatever it is the work has to do with, and the thinking of those scholars mainly thinkers will be what completes the task begun by the academics–with the commentators providing helpful clarifications and new points of view.
As for me, I consider myself a scholar in two different fields: literary studies (poetics & literary history) and theoretical psychology. I’m most well-rounded in what I consider the field of poetics, which for me consists of practical criticism of poetry with its academic reliance on poems, and their taxonomic classification, and scholarly commentary thereon, coupled with the higher “insights” gained almost entirely from scholarly thinking about poetic creativity and the aesthetic aims of poetry. As a theoretical psychologist, I am almost entirely a thinker, unless introspection and contemplation of others are considered research.
My CV as a Scholar of Literary Studies
Positions Held
Publications I’ve Had Essays in
Score, Modern Haiku, The Experioddicist, American Book Review, a critical essay (on contemporary minimalist poetry) on-line at Karl Young’s light&dust website, 3 entries in The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005), numerous entries in Dictionary of the Avant Gardes (Schirmers, 2000), a critical study of visual poetry as an introduction to Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection (The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, The Ohio State University Libraries, 2008), 16 monthly blog entries at the Scientific American website consisting of critical studies of mathematical poetry (2012-2013) and an introduction to Shadow of the Future, an Anthology of Otherstream Poetry (Argotist EBooks, 2013).
My CV as an Uncertified Theoretical Psychologist (i.e., not to be taken seriously)
Essays
Numerous self-published essays at my blog, poeticks.com, including “An Essay on Creativity,” “Mistakes, Dreams and Creativity” and “The Urceptual Crew,” which are among the blog’s “Pages.”
Books
Professional Affiliations: Member, National Book Critics Circle, National Coalition of Independent Scholars
.
Friday, November 29th, 2013
Note: I did not get an NEA grant. Does anyone think my chances would be better in 2014, 29 years later?
.
Sunday, December 30th, 2012
I’m as petty as they come, but I have trouble letting mediocrities and sub-mediocrities with power in poetry or any other cultural field, however little, get away with dim-minded opposition to work in their field that is . . . different. Like my “An Arithmepoetic Analysis of Monet’s ‘The Regatta at Argenteuil,’ Frame 4″:
A week after I mailed it to Ekphrasis, I got it (and my cover letter and my business card) back with this:
.
According to its website, “Ekphrasis is a poetry journal looking for well-crafted poems, the main content of which addresses individual works from any artistic genre. . . . Acceptable ekphrastic verse transcends mere description: it stands as transformative critical statement, an original gloss on the individual art piece it addresses.” Sorry, folks, but I really can’t see how my poem could be a more transformative critical statement than it is. I sincerely doubt that anything published in Ekphrasis is as much as a tenth as effectively transformative as it.
Am I over-reacting to a rejection? No. The editors may just not like Monet, or mathematics, or the like. What I am over-reacting to is their telling me they “carefully reviewed” my poem. I suspect they glanced at it, failed to recognize it as the sort of conventional crap the poetry establishment favors, and immediately put it in my SASE and sent it back to me. Or they actually spent more than a moment puzzling over it, and–at best–form-rejected it because too weak of character to write me a short note saying they couldn’t understand it. In other words, they tried to carefully review it but lacked the competence to do so. Actually, what they should have done, and I wonder if any editor of a poetry periodical with a circulation of more than a few hundred would ever think of doing, is written me to find out what the poem is doing. Could they possibly have failed to see that it may have been good if only they could understand it instead of certainly poor because they couldn’t understand it?
Here’s what the thing is doing which without question makes it a superior artwork (a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned), unless I am without question a terribly feeble-minded sub-mediocrity: it makes the multiplication of a perfect place and time for sailing by Monet a metaphor for the creation of a window into everflowing existence that reveals the splendor of a moment of existence (the moment containing the ideal conditions for sailing), and the addition of a millennia-long welcomeness to what the window reveals a metaphor for a simple observation–to the power of minus two times i, the square root of minus one, which is imaginary, and does something very strange to the simple observation. (It makes it something outside normal reality, it makes it art.) Along the way, it contrasts a hand-written, conventionally-worded text that emphasizes the quotidian nature of sailing while at the same time suggesting the feeling of being bourne upward that sailing can produce due to the slant of the text’s lines with a formally-printed, italicized poetically-worded text about how Monet’s painting welcomes you into the window the poem shows it to open.)
Is my self-serving analysis invalid? I defy anyone in the poetry establishment to show me why.
Is it idiotic of me to waste time with a rant like this against a very trivial foe? I think not. It is natural to respond with either anger or sadness to rejection. As a mentally healthy male, I can’t avoid responding with anger, and anger, unlike sadness, compels one to action. Or smouldering frustration. Preferring the former, I have chosen this entry as my action. Which makes me feel good. But I believe it will make others constantly form-rejected by their inferiors, like I, feel vicariously pleased. Most important, it makes my position against the status quo public–or, more accurately, potentially public–i.e., out where it might be seen. If seen, there’s always the chance it will have some valuable effect, if only to get one of two innocent poetry people to discover how much larger the poetry world is than the poetry establishment wants them to know.
It gave me an excuse to critique my poem, and I love critiquing my poems more than making them. It was encouraging to find I was able to make a case in favor of my poem that seemed as good as it did to me. It made me feel good, too, for once again revealing myself as (very possibly) the only poet in the world telling the world why a poem of his is superior.
.
Thursday, December 6th, 2012
I’m so blah today, I’m just going to post the review of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics that I posted at Amazon yesterday:
A Short Counter-Blurb
Even I, an extreme enemy of the poetry establishment, was surprised by how poor this edition of the Princeton is. To find out how much it misses concerning what the best poets and poetry critics are doing now, read Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant Gardes. For more particulars of my case against the thing, you’ll have to go to my blog. Oh, my recommendation to anyone already owning one of the very mediocre previous editions of the Princeton is not to bother with this one. It covers almost nothing new that is worth covering, is incompetent to an extreme on the few new things worth covering that it does cover, particularly my own area of expertise, visual poetry. (P.S., it doesn’t know what poetry is, its entry on that finding it undefinable.)
Quickly click the “no” button next to the question about whether or not this review was helpful to you now. The Princeton needs your help!
.
Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
Here again is the John M. Bennett poem from yesterday’s entry:
eapt
flooded haphtic duu
stt’s yr nodte nude
)label streaming( to )ss
ed( cash an )slo
shshed( where the
moumouthless lungch
“lost’s tea cher” )fol
ded yellp(
sot ,dusty
My liking this poem started with its title. I hope to write more about it before too long, but right now I’m too far away from my appreciation zone to want to do anything here but quote from my diary entry for today, and from a continuation of that in an e.mail to Richard Kostelanetz, which I got going on after leaving John’s poem, and taking a caffeine tablet.
From my diary entry: “Each of mine days seems to be abandoning me more than the previous one did, and—lo—I feel almost nowhere in today (locution intended). I just took a caffeine tablet, after lying in bed very worn-out for a while, after spending three-and-a-half hours going to, at, or coming from, Dr. Galliano, whom I was seeing to find out if it was time for him to perform another colonoscopy on me. He spent five minutes with me after I’d waited over an hour to see him and decided I was indeed due for another one. My appointment for it is 27 December. My trip back took an extra half-hour or so because I got a flat rear tire halfway home. Amazingly, I found I had two tubes to replace the flat one with, but then found the tire itself was bald, remarkably so considering how short a time I’ve had it, and–naturally–I don’t have a replacement. The front tire seemed fine. The bald tire should get me to the bike shop for two new tires and back tomorrow.
“I’ve been getting a lot of little ideas about experimentation in poetry, punctuation, the flaws of the Princeton encyclopedia. I have a great yen to start a book called The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Poetry & Poetics that would provide superior entries on everything of value in it, except its entries on the poetry of various countries, assuming they are of value, which I doubt. My book would be devoted exclusively to poetry in English. I consider poems in other languages of no significant concern unless they do something of note that no poems in English do, and I have no reason to believe they do.
“I must be at least slightly energized to have written as much of this entry as I have, flowingly, except for more typos than even I usually make. But I don’t feel ready to try to compose an appreciation of the Bennett poem in my blog entry for yesterday that I said I would discuss today. Nor do I feel like starting the guide I just spoke of, I just feel like thinking about doing it. One thing that is holding me back is getting a better title. I want a confrontational one like An Anti-Academic’s Guide to Poetry and Poetics. I don’t like “Ánti-Academic,” though. I think because one can be stupidly anti-academic. Also, I would not be anti-academic but anti-acadumbotic; although I would also be mildly against those scholars, including many good ones, who just restate the received understanding of some field more clearly and/or completely and/or intelligently-organized. My book would hope to outdo the best of such scholars at what they do but, much more importantly, state the best understanding of the field as it currently is.”
* * *
(Interesting topic for an essay or book, a history of the four editions of the Princeton, showing how what seems important in poetry and poetics has changed over the years, among other things. I don’t have the first edition; may get it, just for the heck of it. There is probably a cheap one available, used. I suspect it’s the best of the four editions.)
If an entry on lesbian poets, why not one on baseball player poets? (not just major leaguers who write poetry, and there are some, but anybody who has played baseball, loves it, and write poems having to do with it–more, I bet than lesbian poets). Cowboy poets, for sure! Gosh, I’m retrograde. I guess I’d put up with an entry on Ethno-poetry, but barely. Actually, an entry that covered ethno-poetry, homosexual poetry, prison poetry, cowboy poetry, etc. would be okay with me, but in my book I think I’d cover all that in an entry on Poetic Content. With sub-categories? I’d have to see.
What I may do, is write something about the Princeton daily in my blog; that way, I would not be losing time from other pursuits because writing a blog entry daily is a duty I’ve assigned myself—until I can’t any longer write. (With a few time-outs for surgery or travel allowed—but discouraged since one can make entries in advance for the days one will be away from the blog.)
Note: I’ve just decided to put the Princeton Encyclopedia on my list of enemies of poetry (in the Categories section to the right).
Thursday, September 27th, 2012
The other day I learned that the Harriet Blog run by Poetry had somehow come across my Scientific American guest blog and given it a nice positive write-up here. The good of this is that it means a little more exposure for the otherstream, and more credibility for it with . . . well, those who ignore everything that is not properly certified by higher-ups. The bad of it, of course, is its scaring me with the possibility that what I’m involved with is now at Poetry’s level. That’s not a genuine worry. If Harriet says something good about this blog, though, I will worry. It’s got no seal of approval on it like “Scientific American.“
To be honest, I’m pleased that the Harriet staff seems to have sincerely liked my blog entry. People like those on it and the more advanced readers of Poetry are the audience I’m trying most to capture with my mathpo blog. So, no more about it.
Friday, December 16th, 2011
The following is another apparently unpublished review of Poetry I did for Small Press Review, this one earlier than the one I posted yesterday.
Poetry
Volume CXCVII, Number 5, February 2011. 90 pp.
Edited by Christian Wiman
published monthly except bimonthly July/August
444 n. Michigan Avenue, Ste 1850
Chicago IL 60611. $3.75, $35/year.
Critic David Orr has a review in this issue of Poetry that typifies what makes it, in my view, the largest obstacle facing superior American poets. It is the belief that poetry “has been all but entirely absorbed by institutions of higher education,” as he quotes Mark McGurl as having put it. Only someone oblivious to all the poetry happening outside academia, most notably, visual poetry, language poetry, sound poetry, cyber poetry and mathematical poetry, can believe this.
True, Poetry once let a few so-so specimens of visual poems into an issue and some language poems into another. But these were token gestures. The proof of the pudding is that it has never devoted space to articles about either. Of course, it will fairly soon give language poetry more pages now that many of the chief language poets have become established–chiefly by virtue of being professors.
What’s depressing about this is that Poetry is wealthy, influential, often-appearing and claims to want to represent the full continuum of contemporary poetry, so could do so much to help the impoverished R&D department of the poetry enterprise.
As for what poetry is in this issue, suffice it to say that Carolyn Forche is one of the two poets named on the front cover as a contributor.
Diary Entry
Thursday, 15 December 2011, 7 P.M. A bad day. It started with my tennis team losing two of three matches including the one I played in–horribly. I got just about nothing done until a little while ago, after taking a couple of APCs. My accomplishment for the day, another blog entry, and a press release for the exhibition. I have now gotten just about all the work for the exhibition done that I need to. I just have a couple of pieces I want to get re-framed by a professional.
.
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
Today I’m posting a short review I did for Small Press Review that as far as I know did not get published:
Poetry
Volume CXCVIII, Number 4, July/August 2011. 110 pp.
Edited by Christian Wiman
published monthly except bimonthly July/August
444 N. Michigan Avenue, Ste 1850,
Chicago IL 60611. $3.75, $35/year.
Poetry, during its first few years, was a literary miracle: a publication devoted to poetry that was strongly under the influence of a world-class poet. Now, eighty years or so later it features poems by knownstreamers like David Ferry, to whom the organization funding it recently gave $100,000. One begins:
The five or six of them, sitting on the rocks,
Out at Lanesville, near Gloucester; it is like
Listening to music. Several of them are teachers,
One is a psychologist, one is reading a book,
The page glares white in the summer sunlight;
Standard free verse, standard trivially “authentic” geographical details, a certain standard conversational randomness, a standard imagistic detail. I thought it was going to be a very standard Iowa State meditation on an old family photograph. Not so, not that that made any difference. I can’t say there was anything wrong with it. The problem is that Poetry rarely publishes anything much different from it, except when briefly pretending to cover the entire contemporary American poetry continuum by publishing some token language or visual poems. It certainly never encourages superior poetry.
Diary Entry
Wednesday, 14 December 2011, 7 P.M. A busy day. I saw my cardiologist who said I was doing fine. In fact, he took me off one of my two blood pressure pills. I did some marketing after leaving the doctor’s. Later, I spent an hour or so at the Arts and Humanities Council offices for a get-together. I chatted with a few people. I knew no one but Judy so didn’t circulate. I’m still no good with people I don’t know, unless sitting with them, as I did with John and Howard, two guys I actually had good conversations with. Howard went to where my Christmas poem was on display for a look. He said he liked it. Previous to that, one of the women I’d talked a bit with, describing my long division poems, had gone to look at it, and returned to tell me, and two friends of hers, that she liked it. That, and the food I had, made the event a success for me!
Once home, I babbled a bit about how nice it’d be to live to the age of 500 to take care of my blog entry for the day. My public relations visit to the A&H fesitivities qualifies as another piece of work done for my exhibition. I did actually take care of a major chore today: this year’s Christmas cards. I included a two-paragraph year-end letter with most of them. I spent over two hours taking care of that. I estimate I have three or four more cards to send.
.
Saturday, May 31st, 2014
The Following is from my diary entry for today. Have my blog entries now sunk to the level of tweets?
I took my now-standard zoom-dose (a caffeine pill and a hydrocodone pill) a little while ago and am now (11 A.M.) feeling pretty good. My Civilization game is going well, I finally won two straight games of Hearts when playing it around seven, and just got a string of 11 straight FreeCell wins going. What more could a boy want? I’m going to go through my essay on Beauty methodically now. I need a unifying principle. I also need something to write about in my blog entry for the day. Something will come. “Off to the races!” I think, then recall my father, who—in similar circumstances, albeit quotidian, like starting off on a car trip, not of High Importance like mine—would have said the same thing. Maybe for my blog I’ll talk about how nice it was of God to make cats for us, but how vile of him to leave so many of us with no parents to show off in front of when we finally make it—or even, as now, happily think we may. I truly believe I’ll be able to sell this essay to someone if I can just get it right. That means smooth, right now. Okay, now—really—off to the races. (Hey, I think I just wrote my blog entry.)
.
Saturday, April 5th, 2014
Prologue, from my diary entry for 4 April 2014: “In five minutes it will be 2 o’clock. I, as usual, don’t feel like writing anything. I can’t think of anything to write. So, I’m going to give the small zoom-dose a big test. I haven’t taken one for five or more days. I will take it at two and see what it makes me write. I will start with my blog entry for the day, and just write any old thing if nothing else occurs to me.”
My small zoom-dose consists of half of one of my hydrocodone-acetaminophen 10-660 tablets and a caffeine pill supposed to be the equivalent of a cup of coffee (but I can’t remember a cup of coffee doing much for me–probably because the few I’ve had, have been more than half cream [I never developed a taste for it]). If I’m addicted to it, I must be a weird addict be cause I avoid taking one as much as I can–just the way I avoid all forms of work!
It seems to be working. The brilliant title of this entry was the first indication of that. But I’ll consider it a failure if it doesn’t get me writing something of importance to me, like one of the many reviews I need to get done for Small Press Review. Or my July/August SPR column. Maybe that. It should be easy, for it’s just a continuation of my previous one, a review of a Seattle zine from 25 years ago called Skyviews that I barely got begun, thanks to my introductory remarks. (Note: it’s 2:22 and I’m already zinging along happily. But haven’t whirred very close to anything I can use my mood to spout megalomaniacal huzzahs about. Unless it’s that sentence. [Note-within-a-note: when I’m in my pharmaceutically-aided zone, I constantly remember friends high on mary j. in my younger days who thought themselves aflow with creativity that I saw no sign of, and wonder if that’s where I am; but I later like what I’ve done. Biggest symptom is gushfulness–as soon as I finish a sentence, another suggests itself–or several do. I veer into what I think are either clever or witty asides. I feel confident, though, that that is what I am at my best, and that dues to old age, I need pills {most of the time} to get there.] There–proof that I have not gone excessively linguoblivious: I just closed every one of my parenthesized parenthetical expressions. And now closet this one>)! Stagoo!
I strongly suspect that the ability to produce yelps of triumph is one of our innate mechanisms. And with that my zoom seems to have ended. I have nothing more to say! 453 words only to this point. But my zoom has not entirely ended: I don’t care! However many words I’ve done is enough! Stagoo!
.
Tuesday, March 4th, 2014
Yeah, another coinage, this one finishing off my full definition of the “G-factor” (or, in my psychology, general cerebreffectiveness component–or full-scale intelligence as opposed to what most credentialed psychologists consider it) as a combination of four cerebral mechanisms: charactration, accommodance, accelerance and–now–cerebrogovernance. Mechanism in charge of basal cerebral energy level; mechanism in charge of reducing cerebral energy level; mechanism in charge of increasing cerebral energy; and supervisory mechanism in charge of directing cerebral energy (which is effectually the same as directing attention) to and from various awarenesses (or areas of the cerebrum such as the auditory or verbal awarenesses–e.g., the cerebrogovernance might turn off all the awarenesses of a person silently reading except his verbal awaresness and verbal/visual and verbal auditory association areas, then switch him out of all three to his auditory awareness if someone suddenly screams his name).
I think of cerebrogovernance as “little g” and all four cerebreffective mechanisms “big G.” All the major awarenesses are “big S’s” (for big specific “intelligences”), and their many sub-awarenesses (e.g., the reducticeptual awareness’s matheceptual and linguaceptual sub-awarenesses) are “little s’s.”
I’m gearing up for a Major little essay on my theory of cerebreffective- ness. But, first I have to finish the first blog entry to the continuation of my Scientific American blog. I’ve almost finished it, honest, but I keep finding spots to repair, delete or expand, and seem to be avoid what I believe is the thing’s final section (where I went off on a tangent about tragedy, then realized what I had to say about it was too confuse to try to add to my entry).
Meanwhile, I had my cystoscopy. It went very well, but my problem turned out to be due to a bladder stone the doctor couldn’t removed for some reason so I’ll have to go back next Monday for, I guess, a similar procedure to remove it. Will find out more Thursday. Meanwhile, I’ll have to endure another week of sometimes painful difficulty urinating. Right now I’m in a good mood, though–even though I’m not on hydrocodone.
Speaking of that, I just read in the paper that I’m a hydrocodone-abuser because I sometimes take “just to feel better”–instead, apparently, for a headache back-ache or the like that other pain remedies don’t do much for, which is what my hydrocodone was prescribed for. It’s so stupid. A person semi-incapacitated because of a headache should be given a pill but a person unable to do anything that will give his life meaning because he’s in the kind of null zone I get into at times should not be given a pill–unless, I gather, worse off than I am.
My doctor can no longer prescribe the dosage of Hydrocodone he used to, so my latest prescription from him is for half the dosage. A little silly, since it only means I have to take two pills instead of one to get the effect one was giving me. I’m going to see how the half-dosage works, though. I suspect I don’t really need any dosage; I think I only need the caffeine pills. But who knows, I may end up seeing a shrink to get genuine anti-depressive pills, legitimately.
Of course, the thing that most disgusts me is that I’m not allowed to buy the pills from anyone who wants to sell them to me without a prescription, and take them as I see fit, on the grounds that I should make all final decisions about my body. Which, of course, could include my decision to put one of my doctors in charge of my thyroid gland, for instance, as I’ve done.
.
Sunday, October 7th, 2012
I’ve now had two caffeine-boosted days in a row. Once again, I’m into what looks to be a null day. I can’t think of anything it’d be worth taking a caffeine pill, with or without a part-opium pain pill, to work on. I’d very much prefer not taking anything, but I have so much to do. So, drug-dependent Bobby has just taken both pills at 11:19 A.M. e.s.t. this 7 October 2012.
It seems, according to an Internet site, that caffeine is an Once in the brain, the principal mode of action is “a nonselective antagonist of adenosine receptors”–it connects to these receptors, in the process blocking adensonie from them. Since it has no affect on the receptors, they keep doing what you do, which seems to be keeping us awake, and boosting our apparent and actual energy, so we feel good and work hard. Adenosine clamps down on wakefulness and energy. It seems to me a life-extender inasmuch as it slows you down, keeping you from over-doing anything. I’m sure my adenosine got too influential, I’m not sure why. I may be that I got to drinking too much Mountain Dew, the caffeine content of which shut down so many adenosine receptors that my body manusfactured a huge number too many of them in compensation. This is why drugs generally end increasing whatever problem they at first helped one with. I hope old age is the culprit, screwing me up by intentionally slowing me down, and went too far. In any case, I may well be headed toward a state in which now amount of caffeine can help me. My dosage at the moment is pretty low, though–the quivalent of two cups of mosts kinds of coffee. I don’t see that I have any alternative.
Well, maybe I do: maybe there some way to poison my adenosine receptors and whatever mechanism builds new ones. The probable problem with that is that creativity requires wakefulness followed by null zones during which one accumulates necessary new data. . . .
Hey, here’s something else asemic by Nancy Brush-Burr so you’ll get something out of this entry:
While waiting for this image to upload, I thought to myself what a wonderful good deed I was doing for nbb (with whom I’ve exchanged a few letters and/or e.mails but don’t know well–and am wondering if we are distant cousins, the Burr family being prominent in my genealogy [but Aaron is off to the side!]) by giving her work space here and making my everlastingly insightful comments on. Up there on my peak, I credited her with deserving this favor. From there my mind went to amusement on the way my drugs bring out my megalomania. At once, I smiled at myself, observing that I was a megalmonai even without drugs, the difference being that with drugs I am a happy megalomaniac, without them an unhappy one. A weird kind of manic-depressive, or so I’ve long believed. Never darkening enough to overcome my instinct to stay alive, nor glistening Sol-levelly enough to go confront Obama in person for not shoveling a few billion of his pay-offs to the 47% to me.
Enough of me (if only for 2.3 minutes): this visimage of Nancy Brush-Burr’s is an absolutely zowwy picture of –hey, maybe my very own communicative excitement at times! Not a poem, just a terrific representation of language thunder-storming into something glorious.
.
Sunday, March 11th, 2012
I think six people have now seen and commented on my Sequences. 17 in all have seen it, if the counter involved is only counting each person’s first visit. The only slightly negative comment about it came from the one of the very few who made any meaningful comment on it, Endwar, who said he wasn’t all that taken with long division. Which, I (Moon in Aries!) instantly responded to with a phooey directed at him followed by a description of (some of) my feelings about long division poems: “I don’t think of any of my long divisions as division, but one multiplication and one addition. I love the idea of objects or images multiplying each other. Also the complication of the metaphor resulting: the metaphor having three parts: the multiplier, the multiplicand and the process of multiplication. My long division poems also bring me back to how wonderful I thought the process of long division was when I was first exposed to it.”
I also commented that my long divisions are much more poetic than conceptual, and Endwar leans more to the poeticoceptual than to the conceptipoetic. As I’m sure I’ve mused before, I feel many people in science (like Endwar although this may not apply to him), are too conceptual to be able to break out of their analytical minds enough to flow into the weirdwhere my long divisions bobble into.
Ha, they may need the mix of APCs and opiated pain pills I sometimes take. I say that because I took such a mix just twenty minutes ago after being dead-headedly uncreative for a week or more–and look how “creative” my weiords bobbled at the end of the previous sentence. The lilt up into poeticonceptuality. Actually, with me, it is an ascent into an energy level sufficient to express whatever poeticonceptuality I have–but others not naturally in the zone may well be helped by such a mix into it. So, require visitors to my exhibts and readers of my books to take a dose prior to engaging my work?
Meanwhile, the mix continues working on me. It’s got me into my semi-megalomaniacal zone. “Semi,” because I’m aware that I’m in it, or at least enough aware of my readers to pretend to think I’m in it when IT IS NOT ANY KIND OF MANIA FOR ME TO RECOGNIZE THAT I AM TO JEHOVAH WHAT HE IS TO KOOL-AID JONES. I do get hilarious when in the zone, don’t I! Anyway, as I was about to say, I once again wonder why hardly anyone bothers with writings of mine like this one. So many others have large audiences for similar reflections whose plod is way lower than the deft snipper of mine. Okay, I’m not quite a Thoreau or Emerson (the first two I can think of whom I hope have contributed to what I try for with my poetic prose–Robert Frost another), but surely, I keep believing (even when not in my possibly megalomaniacal zone, the difference being that I keep my belief to myself then), I’m close enough to them often enough to attract the attention of people who like that kind of writing more than I do.
Two possibilities: I’m more wildly out-of-phase with the zeitgeist than I feel I am–or I’m too boring repeating a long-dead zeitgeist. I can’t tell, which is why I so much wish I could get feedback from my few readers. But they are all as creatively other-occupied as I, who rarely am able to critique them! What I need are academics, and academics are academics because they are innately behind and want to stay there–who can’t not stay there.
I just made up a new category for entries like this one: “Autobiosophy.” Words about my, uh, wisdom, rather than words about me. I feel I write a lot more about my thoughts than I do about me, a good reason for my claim that I ain’t no narcissiphist. Another argument of mine against the latter tag, which has been applied to me, is that I don’t worship myself, I am aware of and point out flaws of mine all the time. I am balancedly ego-postive and ego-negative. Or so it seems to me.
I could go on forever but will try to do it taking care of the reviewing I’m behind on. Wish me luck. You needn’t wish me contentedness: the pills have me ridiculously content with the whole universe.
.
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
I betcha this entry draw thousands of visitors! What a compelling title! What a fascinating topic!
So, what’s going on? What’s going on is I’m going to have an in&out urethra procedure carried out this coming Friday. My surgeon will be using a laser to remove a calcium build-up that’s been giving me urinary problems. He believes the radiactive seeds I was implanted with twelve or so years ago for prostate cancer caused the build-up.
Why am I telling you this? To explain why I’ve been so listless of late, and will be for a while. I’ve been told not to take any aspirins until I’ve had and recovered from the procedure–to prevent excessive bleeding. APCs, apparently my only source of zip, is part aspirin, so I can’t take them.
In spite of my listlessness, I have the book for Marton half done. Two days ago I felt I needed a break from it, so pulled out the chapters I want to add to my book on the Shakespeare authorship question to work on. It took me a full day to remember what I intended to do, and find the files I had done. What I want to do is important: it’s to make my explanation of the anti-Shakespeare conspiracy theory thebasis of a general explanation of all conspiracy theories. I’m hoping that will increase the salability of the book–although I think it important to do, anyway. I may have all the ideas I need but organizing them is a bear. And I’s so weary.
.
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
If I count 31 August as part of September, I’ve come up with 9 new mathemaku in September. Nine poems in a month isn’t much of an output for most poets, but it’s very good for me. Actually I only have final copies of four or five, but the others are essentially finished. I also have essentially have all the terms I jotted down in May for another that have to be written out the way I want them (many in cursive) and backgrounded, and notes for one or two others that are fairly complete.
I wrote the above last night. It’s now around ten in the morning of the twenty-first of September and once again I’m high on drugs–2 APCs and one tablet of the pain pill with opium that I use on occasion. As always, I find it unbelievable that a little bit of some chemical or chemicals could make such a difference in me. I took them because I’m so far behind in my struggle to keep up with the things in my life I consider important, like my next column for Small Press Review, I feel I can’t come close to catching up without chemical help. (The column, by the way, is now two columns–I did manage to pump far more than enough words into it over the past weeks, but at way too slow a rate, even with the occasional help of my pills.)
I’ll talk over what I’m doing to my body with my gp next time I see him, which should be in three months. I fear I’ll reach a point at which time the chemicals no longer help me. I’m concerned, but not as concerned, that I’ll have a heart attack or go crazy–although my usage is not at all high. Bottom line: I’d rather have three or four more years high than twenty without the pills, or something else that can get me where they get me or close to it. I can’t say it enough: they astonish me every time. Without them, I’m almost a car with no gas in its tank; with them, I can operate.
So, it’s Grumman with his APCs and opium, Leary with his LSD, Freud with his cocaine and tobacco, Coleridge with his opium (Keats used it a bit, too, I believe, even before his tuberculosis), just about all the prominent American authors of the first half of the twentieth century and their alcohol, Balzac and his coffee . . . Many others. There are negative examples, too, such as Shaw (one of my greatest heroes) and his abstinence . . . and failure to ascend beyond wonderfully crisp and logical prose to poetry. The only drug-free artist of the first order I can think of was Shelley–if he indeed was.
It bothers me that I seem to need drugs no matter how many others in my field did, and regardless of the fact that human beings owe their place in the scheme of things to their being able to improve themselves significantly with external aids (why should we go along with the use of spiked shoes for athletes, say, but not steroids?) My output is probably no more increased by the drugs I take than by the computer I use. Still . . .
I am aware of certain negatives in the pill-popping life–lack of focus. It is hard for me to leave this entry, for example. Once I’ve managed it, I’ll have trouble choosing the right project to tackle next. I believe, too, that my critical sense suffers. No matter. I will now go to the SPR column-become-columns and finish them. (Tarzan yell I’m not sure how to spell here, nor can I execute decently, although I do attempt to.)
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
I’ve often mammered here about the effect of pain pills on me. Recently I’ve taken the one with an opium derivative in it and two APC’s. The caffeine in the latter may help me. The two drugs together allow me to act. I have always found this extremely weird. The most interesting thing about it (for me), though, is how always it reveals two of my many ways of knowing things to me. Various portions of what I call my reducticeptual awareness tell me that all these pills do is give me a little extra stimulator-chemicals, or precursors to those–more dopamine, perhaps. Or less whatever chemical in my brain is inhibiting me. Simple neurophysiology.
The rest of my awarenesses will never understand this. How can my brain be so helpless? How can it sit in my head or do whatever it does wherever it is in me or near me and perceive me at my keyboard unable to type a single simple word that will get me going into a blog entry like this–until, ZING, Mr. Happy Pill and his wife come aboard and say, “Let the dolt type.”
Don’t tell me about placebos. I don’t seem suggestible. Marijuana never worked on me, for instance. Nor chiropractry. I wanted both to. Ditto valium that a doctor once gave me for the dead-headedness I’ve experienced on and off for forty years. Certain remedies for allergies failed while others worked, at least for a time.
Ah, but I have been suggestible. A few days after I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, my arms started to ache and became weak; I couldn’t lift them above my head. My gp at the time, Dr. Hollinger, checked me out and told me he though I was experiencing an anxiety attack. My symptoms almost immediately disappeared. I didn’t bother getting the tranquilizer he prescribed for me.
Still, it was ultimately neurophysiological. My brain-cells were frantically trying to make new connections to deal with the extreme blow to my self-esteem getting cancer had given me, not to mention the fear of death it got started in me. It broke down. I haven’t studied medicine enough to know the details of what happened, but I don’t think my layman’s guess that the brain shifted too much attention from the normal working of my body, particularly in this case my arms, to dealing with the cancer crisis. So my fundaceptual awareness wasn’t getting enough data to run my arms right. More important, my execuceptual awareness didn’t have the energy to make my arms move properly–lift when necessary, for example.
All kinds of distress would occur when they didn’t lift when they normally would, automatically. Ergo, anxiety and further breakdowns. Whereupon, my analytical intelligence multiplied the bad effect hugely by telling me I was going to drop dead. After all, prostate cancer plus the beginnings of paraplegia.
The simple reassurance my doctor gave me cancelled the anxiety. I suspect that the relief I felt to hear the cancer hadn’t spread to my armpits, or whatever I feared, upped my endorphins as much as the pills I’m now taking do. And the good effect held long enough form my brain to work out an effective way to deal with my changed circumstances.
I took aspirins fairly regularly for headaches, some awfully bad, I thought, between the ages of eight and twelve. The stress of dealing with people, I’m sure, was at the bottom of it. Going to school, going to choir practice, things like that. I don’t remember getting headaches during summer vacations when there was no school or choir practice.
As I’ve written before, I spontaneously gave up headaches one day in the seventh grade when I vividly remember going down the stairs in the school and knowing that I was over my need for aspirins. I remember nothing else. Perhaps I had a headache and I’d suddenly told it to go away and it did. Or maybe I just realized I hadn’t had a headache for quite a while. Maybe I’d just experienced something that ordinarily would have given me a headache and it didn’t (although I had no cognitive theory as to why I had them, so could only have guessed I’d had an experience that should have given me one intuitively). Anyway, I only had headaches a few times a year from then on–except when hung-over, as I occassionally was during my early thirties, when I occasionally went bar-hopping.
I forgot something in my pill-propelled paragraphs above: my bad eyes. Too much reading, especially without enough light, and perhaps without exactly the right prescription lenses, probably contributed some to my susceptibility to headaches.
Final musing: that I’ve run out of natural endorphins, or a proper supply of them, due to how much I did use them over the years, often going close to genuine mania as a creative artist and thinker. I keep thinking I shouldn’t use them now, I should let my endocrine system rebuild itself, without pharmaceutical interference. But it might take too much time. There’s also the fact that my thyroid gland doesn’t work the way it should anymore (which may well be due to my having been hyperthyroidal most of my life, which was responsible for what I like to think of as my genius, until the overwork the poor gland was doing finally caused it to have a breakdown).
Okay. It’s six in the evening at this point. I more or less did my duty as a physical therapy patient. A forty-minute session at the center I go to. The bike ride to and from. A third of my home exercises–but I need only do half of them when I go to the center. I should have done more but I was too worn out to. I didn’t take the pills till a couple of hours ago.
I took care of one email this morning. I got one or two more Small Press Review columns posted in the Pages section here. (I have to boast, by the way, that I now have 82 columns there. Four years more of them to go. I feel proud of them–and did so even pilllessly. They’re nothing compared with what I might have done–and have occasionally done here and elsewhere–but I continue not to understand, acognitively since my intellect understands, in what way they are inferior to the literary commentary of those getting national attention).
New subject, because of the remarks I’ve made above concerning my True Value to World-Culture. As I may have said, now that I’m seventy, I’ve decided to be fully honest. I believe one of the things that has me on the margins is lack of social aggressiveness. I believe it’s what kept me from playing varsity basketball in high school, too.
Long story. Maybe I should save it till tomorrow. I have more pills.
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Many times in the past, I’ve spoken of the pain pills I’ve taken, or the Mountain Dew I’ve drunk, often noting how one of the other, or both, have helped me out of the Null Zone. For at least four weeks I almost entirely avoided either. Once or twice taking a four-hour pain pill before trying to play tennis on my painfully bad left leg. I think in that time I was never fully out of the null zone, and probably half the time close to fully in it.
Well, I finally decided that I’m a hopeless addict. Proof is that I took two APCs, which have caffeine, a bit over two hours ago, then a pain pill with an opium-derivative in it a half-hour or so ago, and have done better work since the APCs on the important essay I’ve been slogging through for over a month than I have since beginning it. And I feel like I can do a full day’s work on it. Maybe more!
Once back home after the hip replacement operation I’ll be having (in a week), I plan to find some expert on my kind of drug addiction, and find out if I can somehow stay out of the null zone (a reasonable amount of the time) without drugs. If not, no big deal so long as I can keep having them prescribed for me, and I’m pretty sure I can. If it costs me a few years of life, so what? To continue to live as I’ve been living the past month of so would be ridiculous. In any case, it looks like I’ll have my essay done before I go into the hospital.
I’m feeling very good about it (and was even while in the null zone). It’s really coming together nicely. As usual when I’m knocking out material I have a good opinion of, I sing my way into fantasies of finally gaining recognition. One thing for sure, this time I’m going to keep on the attack with this essay until it is, or I am, done.
Meanwhile, what have I learned from my life that I can pass on to others? Nothing. I truly don’t know whether to advise the young to avoid caffeine and pain pills, or to consider them seriously if their energy levels are not as high as they feel they need to be for a satisfying life. Maybe some people are born with a need for pharmaceutical help, or with a flawed endocrine system that will eventually require it as I eventually required synthroid for my thyroid deficiency. Or was that caused by a use of caffeine that caused my thyroid to overwork and wear out? All I can say is that I hope genetic research will finally tell people enough about what they’ve been born with for them to make intelligent decisions about questions like these. If their genes have given them the capacity to make intelligent decisions. I don’t think mine did, I don’t think mine would have allowed me to choose suicide at the age of 15 or 24, the two ages at which it would have been best for me to do that.
Just when I thought my visual poetry career was going nowhere, I had a pleasant surprise at an Arts & Humanities gathering last night. It was an annual affair where local visimagists get together with people representing public places. The latter look over the works brought to the event, three pieces per artist, and offer exhibition space to those whose work they like. A bank lobby, for instance. I went to one of these long ago, but my work wasn’t chosen, and while I’m (probably insanely) persistant at continuing to make art, I have just about no stick-to-it-ive-ness so far as getting it to where people can see it and maybe like it. Well, with the encouragement of Olivia and Judy, of the Arts & Humanities Council, and thinking maybe now that I had my current exhibition, someone might think me worthy of another elsewhere, I brought the following three pieces to the main library, where the affair was:
I was going for accessibility with the top two. I added the bottom one to show a little of what I was doing with long division and color. In any case, I’m now down for three more exhibitions, two more this year and one in 2013.
I got to talk with fellow artists, too. One of them did abstract-expressionist stuff with the word, “love,” embedded in them–another local visual poet! I came across another artist who uses some kind of transparent, screenlike fabric in her work: she paints an image on it and hangs it in front of regular fabric with a background painted on it. I thought it worked really well, and have vague ideas on what I might do with it. So, quite a good hour or so!
.
marton koppany says: Good news. Congratulations, Bob!
Yesterday I posted “A Page for Mrs. Lasher’s Class” after a teacher in San Antonio e.mailed me that she had introduced her elementary schoolchildren to mathematical poetry, using one of mine as a demonstration specimen. Very nice to get the e.mail. My problem is that I always over-react to such things: just about as soon as I’d read the e.mail, I was organizing a tour of the nation’s elementary schools, and picking poems I’d present and speak about. I got over that quickly enough. I’m in friendly contact with Mrs. Lasher, and do expect to do other things with her and her classes. They have a slide show of their poems up at http://blogs.neisd.net/dlashe. I hope to comment on them–but, yow, how difficult it is (again, although I feel moderately chipper) to get myself started on what should not be all that hard. In fact, it should be fun, and contribute toward the book of and about pluraesthetic poetry I’ve always had it in the back of my brain to put together (and have occasionally written short pieces I thought might go into such a books, including a Powerpoint Presentation of one of my full-scale visio-mathematical poems, which has been one of the recent jobs I started then dropped during the past month or so.
It’s around ten in the morning as I write this, by the way. I just took two APCs and a pain pill with some opiate in it to see if it would help. First time in a week or so I’ve fallen off the wagon. I’ll be very upset with myself if I don’t get anything done. I think the boost is beginning: I’m now going to write a reply to a letter from Jody Offer I should have gotten off to her three weeks or more ago. I can use what I’ve typed above for part of it! Without double-use, I don’t think I’d ever get anything done! Almost all my poems start with, or or significantly advanced, by scraps from earlier poems (used or discarded), or other people’s poems. My letter will also repeat the one letter I did get done this week–to Arnold Skemer.
Wow, now I’[m excited about something I should be excited about–although it’s one more bit of evidence how backward I am: I found I hadn’t saved my letter to Arnold so found the hard copy of it I had saved, meaning to copy it–with my typing fingers. Then I remembered seeing “OCR” in conjunction with my new printer/scanner, and how it had then occurred to me that my scanner might be able to convert printed text to a computer file. So I tried it and it did! As I expect everyone reading this will have known. It’d really be terrific if it worked with cursive texts but I doubt that it would. I’d love to convert my old diary entries to a computer file. My diary is incredibly boring but does have a few items of interest. I’ve always wondered if it had enough such items for any kind of autobiographical sketch long enough to be worth doing. Other than that, I could search it for various trips I’ve made when wanting its date or the like. I could not bear reading through them to find something like that.
Gah, I got so excited about scanning my diary pages that I jumped and went to the file drawer I’d had them in for fifteen or more years. Naturally, they were not there. I’d organized them to who-knows-where. I was going to test one.
How I wish I could get ten or fifteen of my visual poetry friends like Geof to visit me and go through my house to find out exactly what was where–or maybe just Geof, because he’d love to do it.
* * * * It’s now noon, and I have written a letter. The day will not be a complete wipe-out.
.
Yesterday I came up with another new word, “obversopher,” for “opposite of versosopher.” A propagandist is an obversopher who wants his understanding of some belief system to triumph whether true or not. An obtusopher is an obversopher who wants his understanding of some belief system to triumph in spite of its invalidity because he truly fails to realize it is invalid. A verosophers wants the truth to triumph regardless of whether it validates some belief system of his or not.
I’m confused about the book I thought I was going to write about propagandism. The above is part of my flounder to find a Unifying Principle for it.
I need a list of propagandistic techniques and of examples of obtusophical irrationality. I probably should list everything that could possibly be on either list then get them appropriately organized. Wishlexia. Varieties of distraction. Use of logical fallacies. Cherry-Picking. Insults. Decontextualization.
Nothing more today. Earlier an important external hard drive crashed and I lost two hours taking it to Staples to have it looked at. My data may be retrievable, but I won’t find out for at least another six hours. I was worried that I’d lost many good graphic images. The drive had been for back-ups, but I’d begun using it as my only storage place for a lot of stuff–because I feared a computer crash, not an external drive crash. Very stupid. But lucky, for most of the data on the drive was (as I finally remembered after not finding it anywhere on any of my computers) from another external drive of mine, and most everything else recent was on a flash drive that I use to take things from my main computer to the one I use for my blog. But now a thunderstorm is giving me trouble. It zapped a half hour of work a few minutes ago. So I want to get this posted right now.
.
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
About a week later I heard from one of my California writer friends, Moya Sinclair, who called me a little after eight in the evening sounding very cheerful and energetic. She, Annie Stanton, quite a good linguexpressive poet, Diane Walker, well-known as a television actress under her maiden name, Brewster, who had literary ambitions and was quite bright but never to my knowledge broke beyond the talented dabbler stage, and I had been a few years earlier the main members of a little writers’ group at Valley Junior College in the San Fernando Valley presided over by Les Boston, a professor there. Technically, we were doing independent studies with Dr. Boston, but in reality we friends who met weekly to discuss one another’s writing, mine at the time plays. Annie and Diane were about ten years older than I, Moya close to eighty by the time of her phone call, and she was in a convalescent home. Her circulatory system had slowly been wearing out. I fear she died there, for I never heard from her again. Both Annie and Diane died around then in their early sixties, huge unexpected losses for me.
Moya reported that Annie had been over for a visit and had left my book with her. Moya said she’d been reading parts of it and found it beautifully written, etc. She had a few adverse comments on it, too–on Geof’s word for one-word poem (“pwoermd”), for instance, but that was to be expected. Moya, for years working on an autobiographical novel, was pretty wedded to the old standards. We had a fine chat that boosted my spirits a good deal. She represented one of the main kinds of readers I hoped would like my book.
A day later I got a very positive letter from Jack Moskovitz about my book, and a lukewarm one about it from Geof. Geof, as I remember, felt I should have lightened up on the Grummaniacal coinages. I think he was right. I believe one of the things I tried to do in my two revisions of the book was to cut down on them.
The next day, according to my diary, I got lots of letters, mostly from people I sent my book to, and for the most part complimentary though Jody Offer, a California poet/playwright friend of mine, felt I got too advanced in parts–I’m sure in part because of my terminology. I was finding out, though, that my book was not as geared for non-experts as I’d hoped.
Bob, I didn’t bank on a posting from the hospital, but I’d hoped for some word by now. Get back to me (or the world in general) as soon as you can, so we know what’s up.
Geof