Mistakes, Dreams and Creativity

I propose that person’s dreams have two functions. Their primary “duty” is to relieve the person’s cortical neurons of stored energy that would otherwise make those cells excessively prone to out-of-context daytime activation that the person would experience as “mistakes.” I also contend that by causing a person to experience mixtures of highly incongruous data while he sleeps, dreams promote creativity. To account for these results, I postulate a mechanism that causes a portion of a person’s cortical neurons to become spontaneously active during REM sleep to produce the bizarre memories that, I claim, make up dreams.

Over the centuries, there has been much study of sleep, the state in which dreams normally occur. Many attempts have been made to assign some function to it. Most modern thinkers on the subject have suggested that sleep is the way the body conserves energy during times of low-activity, and gives the body, including the brain, time to repair or otherwise fine-tune itself, all of which makes perfect sense to me. There have also been numerous attempts (not reviewed here) to understand the nature of the dreams that have been shown to occur in birds and most mammals including man during a phase of sleep called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Biochemical replenishment, rearrangement of data, and the communication of “subconscious” messages have been most often cited as the function of those dreams.  This paper will sketch one more such attempt.

I go along with previous theorists, Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison (Nature, vol. 304, 14 July 1983, pages 111 through 114), in believing that “in viviparous mammals the cortical system (the cerebral cortex and some of its associated subcortical structures) can be regarded as a network of interconnected cells which can support a great variety of modes of mutual excitation,” and that “Such a system is likely to be subject to unwanted . . . modes of behaviour, which arise as it is disturbed either by the growth of the brain or by the modifications produced by experience.” Like Crick and Mitchison, too, I postulate a mechanism other than conventional forgetting that is used by the brain to detect and counteract such unwanted modes of behavior—at least those resulting from modifications produced by experience. (I will not be concerned with unwanted modes of behavior caused by brain growth, like involuntary fits, which seem to me outside of normal human psychology.)

In what follows I first describe certain key assumptions of mine about the brain and memory. Next I postulate and describe the central mechanism of my theory, and how it differs from that proposed by Crick and Mitchison. Finally, after briefly discussing its testability, I trace some of the implications of my theory.

Preliminary Assumptions

First assumption: the existence in a person’s cortical system of “knowlecules”–neurons, or neuron-clusters, each of whose activation is experienced by the person as a discrete, unified image, idea, feeling or the like such as a visual image of a cat, some general idea of what a cat is, or the word, “cat” (an idea going back in experimental psychology to Penfield).

Second assumption: that each knowlecule can receive energy (the form of which is not relevant to this discussion) from sensory cells, other knowlecules, or itself, and that it stores such energy (in some form) until its supply reaches some pre-set threshold that causes it to become active. Third assumption: that remembering occurs when one knowlecule receives enough energy from other knowlecules (and/or itself) to become active (or re-active). The basic rule followed in this operation is simple: every active knowlecule divides a pulse of energy (which I call “k-energy,” which is short for “knowlecule-energy”) among all the knowlecules that have ever previously been active immediately after it.  So if knowlecule A is active during one “beat” of brain activity, and knowlecule B is active during the next “beat,” A’s later activation will cause it to transmit to B, and if it does so sufficiently strongly, or with sufficient help from other knowlecules, it will activate B as a memory.

There is a great deal more to the process than that, of course, particularly with regard to the manner in which context influences what percentage of its output of energy a given knowlecule will transmit to a second knowlecule (or itself). For the purposes of this paper, however, it is only necessary to know that a given active knowlecule transmits to a number of other knowlecules (and, possibly, itself) once active immediately after it.

Mistakes

If one grants my assumption that a knowlecule (or the equivalent) can store energy (in some form) with the potential to activate the knowlecule, it follows that an inactive knowlecule containing a great deal of stored energy can, upon receiving a very small amount of k-energy, become active. When, as sometimes must be the case, the activating k-energy is out-of-context (in a manner that should soon become clear), the resulting more or less inadvertant activation of the knowlecule will be experienced as a mistake. For instance, suppose one is asked, “In what city in Maryland is the U.S. Naval Academy located?” One might know very well that the answer is Annapolis, but what if one’s knowlecule for “Baltimore” has a nearly full store of energy? This might be the case if one had earlier read an ad for the Biltmore Hotel, say; and seen a picture of an oriole (if one is enough of a baseball fan to know of the Baltimore Orioles’ baseball team); then
talked to a friend named Al (if one has a friend named Al who lives in Baltimore, as I do). “Biltmore” might cause a little energy to go to the knowlecule representing the similar-sounding word, “Baltimore,” but not enough to activate it; ditto the oriole and the friend named Al.

In such a case, the small amount of energy the knowlecule for “Baltimore” might get from its association with “Maryland” when the person is asked where the Naval Academy is could be enough to activate it. If that happens, and at the same time—because, perhaps, the person is tired—the question doesn’t quite cause enough energy to go to the knowlecule representing “Annapolis” to activate it, the person might wrongly say that Baltimore is where the Naval Academy is.

Other psychological processes will no doubt quickly apprise the person of his mistake but they aren’t important here. What is, is that mistakes of a certain kind are sure to occur, given my assumption that knowlecules, or their equivalent, store energy without becoming active.  This idea of how mistakes come about, of course, is a speculative commonplace among cognitive scientists—though couched in sundry terminologies and unconfirmed by experiment. But it hasn’t been proved invalid, either, and it makes sense.

It also supports Crick and Mitchison’s model of dreaming, which hypothesizes that “the function of dream sleep . . . is to remove certain undesirable modes of interaction in networks of cells in the cerebral cortex,” by showing how those “undesirable modes of interaction” might arise, and why they would be considered undesirable. However, and this is the main point of this paper, I propose a mechanism of “knowlecule-flushing” different from Crick and Mitchison’s “reverse
learning mechanism,” for mine, among other things, does not result in the weakening of dream- traces, as theirs does.

Knowlecule-Flushing

The knowlecule-flushing activator (k-f activator) is my equivalent of the “dream-state generator” postulated by Hobson and McCarley, and on which the Crick/Mitchison model of dreaming is based. Hobson and McCarley place their mechanism somewhere in the pontine reticular formation from whence it causes both rapid eye movements and periodic dreaming. My similar mechanism also causes dreaming—but (probably) not rapid eye movements, which I believe dreams cause, by giving the eyes visual material they reflexively follow. In the course of
this paper I will offer no (new) empirical evidence to show that the k-f activator exists (as I define it) but hope through common sense arguments from long-established empirical data to make the possibility of its existence something worth serious consideration.

The k-f activator, in normal circumstances, can only operate during sleep. A person’s arousal center brings about that state when the person’s brain-activity reaches some pre-set low level. The person’s arousal center then slows his body down, to put it simply, and isolates most of his brain from the rest of his nervous system. That is, transmission of stimulation from the periphery to the cortex and vice versa is suppressed. The person completely relaxes, in the process shutting his eyes. Or so my theory has it, and I believe both common experience and the authorities in the field would agree.

Once asleep, the person will eventually experience REM sleep, in normal circumstances. This, I hypothesize, is caused by the person’s k-f activator, which joins every knowlecule in his brain. The k-f activator becomes active more or less reflexively, after a certain amount of sleep, I suspect—but with the length of time it takes to do so probably dependent on how full the person’s knowlecules are. Thereupon it causes all the knowlecules in the person’s brain that have more than some set amount of energy stored spontaneously to become active. The conditions thus set up (probably through dispersal of enzymes of some sort that increase knowlecule sensitivity to stored energy) also prime other knowlecules to become active whenever they, too, contain the new lowered activation threshold amount of energy.

The spontaneous flush of knowlecules by the k-f activator starts a dream, and the increased sensitivity to their stored energy of the rest of the brain’s knowlecules, as well as of the just- flushed ones, will keep the dream going. Its contents (as common experience and all previous research has shown) will be scrambled, weird, surrealistic—which follows from the knowlecules that initiate them dream’s being activated out of context. That is, they aren’t activated “logically,” but simply because of the amount of their stored energy.

They are therefore experienced as mistakes, many of them happening at once (in the safety of the periphery-isolation that prevents behavior based on them). Normal rationalizing behavior ensues, of course, as the person, in effect, tries to make sense of the data exploding in his mind. And his memory puts new matter into the dream taking place just as it puts various matter into his waking thoughts. That is, remembering occurs the same way in dreams that it does during waking hours. Just as a certain name heard at work might make one remember Cousin Jane, the same name heard in a dream might make one remember her. I won’t be discussing remembering further here, except to point out that there’s no need to hypothesize some kind of special remembering that a person uses only while dreaming.

Once the k-f activator sensitizes a person’s knowlecule to its stored energy, the knowlecule remains sensitized to the same degree until a k-f inhibitor that I also hypothesize turns it off when the person wakes up.  That doesn’t mean the person’s first dream of the night will last the entire night. On the contrary, just as common experience suggests, and dream experiments seem to verify, each dream, or dream-session, tails off and eventually ends within two hours at the most. The reason for this is simple. At first many knowlecules will become active due to their increased sensitivity to stored energy. They will transmit to other knowlecules to activate them, and those will in turn cause more activation. Eventually, however, no knowlecule will get enough energy from anywhere to become active, even with its activation-threshold reduced. Being isolated from the environment insures this.

A person’s first dream of the night won’t likely be his last, either.  According to researchers, people normally have more than one dream a night—five, on average. To explain this, I claim that a person’s k-f activator goes through a nightly cycle during which it five times enhances his knowlecules’ sensitivity to stored energy, each time making less energy able to activate the knowlecule storing it. Hence, the first dream-cycle might reduce the amount of stored energy capable of activating a knowlecule to 80% of what would have been needed to accomplish that during waking. The second, ninety minutes later, say, might reduce the activation-threshold to 60% of the daytime norm.  Later cycles might reduce it, respectively, to 40%, 20% and 2%.
(These, of course, are just guesses, no experimental data being available for any kind of precise estimate, or likely to be for a while.)

All this is based on the simple idea that, to avoid the build-up of mistake-potential, brain-cells (the components of knowlecules) need to be cleaned out, as in the Crick/Mitchison model. But because, unlike Crick and Mitchison, I believe that the energy flushed is re-distributed throughout the brain to other knowlecules (and, in some cases, back to the distributing knowlecules) rather than otherwise disposed of, the flushing I hypothesize cannot take place all at once—by an immediate reduction of knowlecules’ activation thresholds to 2%, say— because
the resulting dreams would be too dense. A person’s brain would be overloaded—so much so, in fact, that the person would probably wake up. And the “creative” juxtapositioning that I credit dreaming with making possible, and will describe later in this paper, would be overdone, and yield not creativity but confusion.

In any case, research indicates that dreaming generally goes through five stages much as I’ve described. Interestingly, the later dreams are generally described by those having them as more bizarre than earlier ones, which makes sense since more inappropriate data would be
brought into consciousness; that is, many knowlecules minimally ready for activation would contribute material to a person’s awareness during his last dreams.

If the Crick/Mitchison theory of energy dispersal rather than redistribution is accurate, by the way, it seems strange that (1) dreams last as long as they do—why couldn’t all the cells with stored energy be emptied all at once? and (2) why would we have more than one dream a night, many of them involving similar material—that is, cells one would expect an early dream to have cleaned out seem to participate in later dreams? I also wonder why we should experience dreams consciously at all, however sometimes fleetingly.

The Value of Dreams

Since Crick and Mitchison believe dream-traces are lost permanently unless the dreamer wakes up during a dream and thinks about it, dreams for them would seem to have no evolutionary advantage except as a way of getting rid of unneeded stored energy. This flies in the face of much cultural opinion, however unscientific, as to the value of dreams. I won’t get into that, but will try to present more hard-headed arguments for believing dream-traces are treated the same way that other memory-traces are. One of my arguments is that it would make no biological sense for a human being to evolve a system for getting rid of brain-energy if re-distribution of it through mechanisms already in place could accomplish the same thing—as it does in my model, in which “excess” stored energy in brain-cells is reduced to almost nothing, wit  to dump quickly, what to keep? And wouldn’t such a mechanism take up room comparable to the storage space required for simply storing the material? I say that it makes biological sense for a person to store everything, and let his remembering mechanisms decide what to return to according to what later becomes important rather than give him access only to what is initially thought to have the potential for importance.

The Crick/Mitchison concept of dream-forgetting goes against common experience, too, for all of us seem to remember dreams. Such memories are anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but vivid. I even remember seeing things in a dream and, while in the dream, recognizing their having been in other dreams—from days or months before.

Creativity

My main argument for our remembering dream-matter, however, is that it would allow for creativity-enhancement by allowing us to refer back to the arbitrary, “mistaken” connections we make in dreams and use them if they turn out to have some value, as any mistake can. Daytime mistakes are probably not as bizarre as dream-mistakes. Indeed, certain connections occurring in dreams would be close to impossible in daytime. At least in theory. A dream could easily allow a Kekule (who discovered the shape of benzene) to experience a snake-image at the same time he experiences an image of benzene if his knowlecule for “snake” happened to have the right amount of non-activating stored energy, at the same time his knowlecule for “benzene” also did. But nothing in his waking hours, unless he happened on a snake while thinking of benzene, would meld them. Even in the latter instance, he would think of benzene, then see the snake, rather than mentally experience them both at the same time.

I’m not saying creativity via a dream is what happened with Kekule, just that such an occurrence would be possible if my model of dreaming were accurate, and it wouldn’t be if the Crick/Mitchison model were. Since such juxtapositionings would seem to be of value, particularly if they were made undangerously, during sleep, then revisited more or less at liesure during waking hours, Nature should select for their storage as memories. And, I contend, has.

My theory’s Compatibility with Research and Other Theories

Like the theory of Crick and Mitchison, mine seems broadly compatible with a large amount of experimental data—and with everyday experience, as well. And it explains as effortlessly as Crick and Mitchison’s model both the need for dreaming in adult life and the large amount of it that occurs pre-natally (which I attribute to the propensity of the knowlecules of a developing brain for distributing k-energy willy-nilly and thus causing partial storage of k-energy to be
relatively wide-spread, it taking the brain time firmly to establish datapathways).

My theory, like theirs, is also compatible with the hallucinoid nature of dreams that all researchers, and non-researchers, remark on. Unlike theirs, my theory does not contradict Freud’s, but augments it, for it allows lessons to be recalled and thus learned from dreams, in keeping with Freudianism. It also permits repressed material to be popped into consciousness as Freud hypothesized, through the lowering of “repressed” knowlecules’ activation threshold. This agreement with Freudianism I mention only as an interesting feature of my model,
incidentally, not as an argument in its favor, Freudianism still not having been experimentally verified that I know of (and, in my view, 90% hogwash).

The effects of REM sleep deprivation certainly do not contradict my theory, though they don’t emphatically support it, either. That subjects of such deprivation sleep more when allowed to after their period of deprivation is what my theory would predict. That REM sleep deprivation in humans sometimes produces irritability would follow from my theory, too—because the mistakes a person makes as a result must irritate him once recognized, and because, as deflections from “right reasoning,” they will tend to strand him mentally, which would be conducive to irritation. This deflective property of mistakes would also explain the inability to concentrate experienced by some subjects of REM sleep deprivation, mistakes breaking their focus.

That feelings and wishes that he would ordinarily keep out of consciousness might intrude on a REM-sleep-deprived person’s thoughts, as some research indicates would happen, would be in
keeping with my model also, for knowlecules prevented from dreamtime activation would tend to build up stored energy until they had enough for waking arousal. Internal fantasizing should for similar reasons tend to increase among the REM-sleep- deprived, as has also been shown to be to a small degree the case. As for the possibility considered by some investigators that those deprived long enough of REM sleep would experience hallucinations, my theory is  noncommital.  According to it, REM sleep deprivation should yield just increased susceptibility to mistakes, as defined above—only, probably, after more than a few nights of deprivation, I might add.

My theory cannot account for the lack of any readily-observable detrimental effects from the complete blocking of REM sleep that certain monoamine oxidase inhibitors and other drugs cause. However, I believe that the drugs, which are anti-depressants, reduce people’s
anxiety about the mistakes they make, which makes those mistakes less noticeable. I believe also that the drugs energize those who take them, allowing them to power their way through their mistakes, before they multiply. A third factor would be the probably great length of time it
would take for any significant psychological deficits from any form of neurological deprivation to show up. The way the drugs involved no doubt interfere with normal distribution of k-energy must be a factor as well. My bottom line here, though, is the same as Crick and Mitchison’s concerning the same research: that it’s too small a factor to overthrow a theory so little contradicted elsewhere.

Testing My Theory

To prove or disprove the existence of my knowlecule-flushing activator would require much more knowledge of the brain, and much better brain -investigating technology now seems to be available. Crude tests of whether REM sleep deprivation will indeed increase a person’s
propensity to make mistakes, as I define them, or decrease his ability to come up with new ideas are perhaps possible but would not likely be very persuasive one way or the other. If we ever are able to pin down precisely what kinds of proteins or other substances are manufactured during the creation of memory traces, we might be able to compare the amounts of those substances produced during dreaming with the amounts produced during waking thought, and thus get a better idea of the likelihood of the data of dreams’ being stored or not.

Since my theory of dreams flows directly out of a (more or less) simple model of inter-cellular energy-flow in the brain, it could probably eventually be modeled by a computer program that could be used to check its plausibility. All my thinking on dreams is, in the final analysis, speculative, however. But since it is all based on a notion of the material make-up of brain-cells and auxiliary physiological mechanisms, it is all ultimately testable.

Possible Implications

If my theory of dreaming is close to being valid, it should help us understand and reduce (or increase, if desireable) the occurrence of mistakes, and appreciate and nourish creativity. It should provide some insight into the etiology and nature of certain kinds of psychoses, as well, some forms of schizophrenia being surely due to waking dreaming. Since in my model, dreams are accessible to remembering, the model’s validity would also suggest that perhaps dream-analysis in certain forms of psychotherapy might be of value, after all. It would certainly suggest that the high regard in folklore for dreams and what they say is not misplaced.

Viva dreams!                                         

.                                                               Bob Grumman

.             October 1997 (but based on my work in the early seventies)

26Apr14–38

2June14–64, a surprise

.

Online Game and DVD Rentals

1 November 2010: Our innate talents do not give us the ability to do something of significance, they force us to do something of significance.

29 November 2010: One who re-invents the wheel will understand it better and be able to discuss it more intelligently than one who merely learns about it.

3 December 2010:  Reaction to a mediocrity’s list of the best poetry books of 2010:

.     Go to ants for knowledge of dead leaves, but  don’t expect to find out much from them about trees.

24 March 2011:  One experiences the pleasure of a poem the moment one recognizes the truth it is a misrepresentation of.

c. 1970:  Poetry is the appropriate misuse of words.

A Trip from One End of the Poetry
Continuum to the Other

Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2008

      INRUE. By Guy Beining
      2008; 28 pp; Pa; Prygian Press,
      58-09 205th Street,
      Bayside NY 11264. $5.

      moonset, Volume 3, Issue 1, Autumn/Winter 2007
      Edited by an’ya
      2/yr, 48 pp; the natal * light press, Box 3627,
      La Pine OR 97738-0088. $23/yr, $13/copy.

Guy Beining’s poems have long occupied the most otherstream end of the contemporary poetry continuum. The ones in his recent collection, Inrue, are no exception.

              INRUE 1.

               inrue intro, ie. introversion
               & a rueful fit meet
               in a poster.
               pupil to pupal,
               locked in by polyps;
               crowded by nature that
               once surrounded one.
               poplin, poppies, &
               popping up pansies,
               all claiming some ground.
               it is a waste to
               call the trash collector.
               we have headed toward all this
               with blinding dispassion.

In the first of the poems in Inrue, the extreme stream-of-consciousness flow of sound-alikes, the short free-verse lines, vivid imagery, surrealism, and the feel of “a dark climb up/ joints of mountainside,” as Beining’s “Inrue 7″ has it, are characteristic of all the poems here. By the eighth poem, the left margin starts being ignored, and underlining and cursive typography begin, so the poems become visually as well as verbally unconventional. More important, in my view, they turn infraverbal with “in rue 15″ (note the intentional space in the title), which features a little poem-within-a-poem consisting of “preDIGest,” “garDENias,” and “solDIEred.” Reread the last–I bet you didn’t at first see the sun (“sol”) die red. Reread the three together reflectingly enough and you’ll find it a brilliant summary of life, and of a day. The book is peppered with similarly effective inventions.

Now to the end opposite where Beining’s poems are on the poetry continuum to:

                    autumn wind–
                    buttoning the flannel shirt
                    on a scarecrow

                    driveway puddle
                    the squirrel hops
                    a bit of sunset

These two haiku are from moonset, a twice-yearly newspaper “Dedicated to the Poetic and Visual Studies of Japanese Art Forms,” mainly haiku, tanka and similar kinds of poems, it would seem from this issue. The first by Claudette Russell, the second by Michael Ketchek. Both seem first-rate, to me: moonset is no hobbyist rag! Now, it is true that Claudette Russell uses a blankety-blank dangling participle, something I’m always criticizing conventional composers of haiku for. I’d prefer: “autumn wind;/ someone small buttons/ the scarecrow’s flannel shirt.” But the whimsy and insight into the buttoner’s character make the haiku, as is, effective, for me, in spite of the dangling participle.

The haiku by Ketchek is a gem. I can suggest no changes (except a semi-colon after the first line because I like punctuation–but that is definitely just me). What makes this a superior haiku are its comparisons. The main one is the minutiae of a mere driveway (of a single house) with the colossal occurence of a sunset, which is also an item in the driveway. I like the squirrel’s going somewhere, despite an obstacle, in parallel with the day’s going somewhere. There’s also the utilitarian unNature of the driveway contrasted with puddle, squirrel, sunset. Plus the eternal-seeming stillness of the puddle in contrast with the quick squirrel and the slow sunset. In a driveway in which movements in an entirely different world will be carried out. In short, a wry observation with depth, which, finally, is what the best haiku are.

I greatly approve of the presentation of the first eight haiku in moonset, incidentally. Each is conventionally printed but with a hand-penned version nearby, as well as an illustration by a second artist. Photographs of the poet and illustrator involved accompany the poem, as do bios of each, the whole taking up a half-page (a page being about 8.5 inches by 11 inches). I think haiku often significantly improved when accompanied. Or given a setting.

Two more poems worth comment from moonset are:

                    street corner preacher
                    his shoe laces
                    double-knotted

                    city cemetery
                    flowers and umbrellas
                    open to rain

The first, by Tony A. Thompson, is a senryu, or poem resembling a haiku but without a reference to nature, and usually intended to be humorous. The winner of a contest the magazine runs for the form, it made me laugh, I’m not sure why: the idea of preaching as a form of athletic contest? The wanting to make sure of things on the part of the preacher, who shouldn’t worry if God’s on his side? I dunno. But it’s more than just amusing.

The other is by Dawn Bruce. This one interests me because, as is, I don’t like it: the juxtapositioning of flowers and, implicitly, spring to graves may be the worst cliche in all of haiku. But the image of “flowers and umbrellas/ open to rain,” grabs me. I’d chuck the first line. Or change it to something like, “busy city street;”.

Top finish this installment of my column, here are two more samples from moonset, the first by Ed Baker, the second by John Martone:

                    yellow orchid
                    taking me
                    entirely

                    daughter waters father weeds their silence

It’d be hard for either to be more simple, or more full. Are they about the same thing? As Mr. Never-Satisfied, though, I have to say I’d prefer Martone’s poem as . . . I was going to say I would prefer it in three tiers. I was going to say the confusion of the father weeding silence failed to advance the haiku. But now I like the idea of father and daughter tending a second garden of theirs, their silence. . . .

The Latest from the Otherstream

Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2013

a book of variations, love–zygal–art facts.  bpNichol.
Edited by Stephen Voyce.  2013; 391 pp. Pa; Coach House Books,
80 bpNichol Lane, Toronto ON M5S  3J4 Canada. $21.95.
www.chbooks.com

Do not write in this space.  Edited by Marshall Hryciuk.
2012;  74 pp. Pa; Nietzsche’s Brolly/Imago Press,
30 Laws Street, Toronto ON M6P 2Y7  Canada. $100.

Rattle. Volume 18, Number 2, Winter 2012.  181 pp.
Editor-in-Chief: Alan Fox.  Published quarterly. Pa;
12411 Ventura Blvd., Studio City CA 91604. $20/yrly.
www.Rattle.com

I hadn’t spent more than a few minutes with bpNichol’s  a book of variations before I was ready to put it at the top of my list of the best of poetry collections of 2013 (if I kept such lists).  I was ready to go further and state that no collection of poetry coming out later than it would surpass it although there were over eight months left of the year when I began my journey through it.  Having now gotten to the end of the book, but far from finished my journey, I am convinced not only that no other collection of poetry published in 2013 will surpass it, but that none will equal it.

Take just one small section of it entitled “allegories,” 32 pages of cartoons featuring letters, each of which one could write an essay on that would swirl enlightening everywhere without finally explaining the allegory depicted.  Perhaps my favorite of these, #18, shows the top of a cartoon man clasping his hands in front of him.  Between a smiling half and a . . . nonplussed? half of his face is a sort of 3-D cubist “H.”  A cartoon balloon above the face has the text, “NOTING/NOTHING.”  The balloon is a thought balloon on the left, a speech balloon on the right.  The thought half is connected by bubbles to the smiling half-face, the other half  to the other face.  So much to note, especially the significance of what must have been bp’s favorite letter, the “H”–including, fascinatingly, the nothing that is there.  So much to think about.  Smile about.

And whaddya know, there’s even a long division poem here!  It’s actually a specimen of a kind of puzzle in which stock symbols such as a generic sailboat, girl in a bathing suit, giraffe, replace the nine integers whose identity one is intended to determine so different from my long division poems (thank goodness that for once he didn’t anticipate one of my inventions–although someone else may have in this case).

According to its back cover, a book of variations places love: a book of remembrances, zygal: a book of mysteries and translations, and art facts: a book of contexts side by side as they were meant to be.  It includes an excellent, informative introduction by editor Stephen Voyce.  I think it may well become considered as important a contribution to poetry as nichol’s nine-volume poem, The Martyrology.  In any case, I hope it attracts some longer reviews than I have room for here!

Another book I was recently sent is Do Not Write In This Space, which is another wonderfully eclectic anthology of artworks from Nietzsche’s Brolly that editor/publisher Marshall Hryciuk calls “a collection of unsolicited ‘surprise’ or ‘already opened accidently’ mail or, so it seems, items dropped off on my desk or drawers at this new Imago’s shared and open office space.” The rest of the works are from various art-friends Marshall asked for work when he found that, due to another move, he hadn’t enough found items for this anthology.

The works range from a personal essay on a dream of “the perfect bookshop” by Rose DeShaw, who uses her dream as a doorway into a thoughtful meditation on the value (and, I would add, poetic ambience) of literary bookstores, through four conventional but intriguing poems by Sam Kaufman, to several of Guy R. Beining always brilliant, collage-centered visual poems, including one of his subtle “haiku-vu” (number 153).

Among my favorites of the works in the Hryciuk anthology is “3 Photos,” by jw curry.  It consists of three strange negative photographs of a man with the label “UNWANTED” above him against glimpses of city scenes, one of which is mostly lake.  I was also struck by the nine works in the anthology by Carlyle Baker.  One called “double negative” I found particularly fascinating. It’s not a poem, for me, but–for one thing–a visualization of a person’s attempt to find an answer to some unknown but worthy question. He uses some kind of positioning grid–placed over a similar grid.  Over the two he draws white lines–with a few scribbles toward some sort of understanding that fails to emerge–but do pin down the location of the unknown involved with a large X.  I also read in it (less compellingly) the narrative I read in almost all asemic works, the struggle of language to emerge, in this case from thick-lined networks forming layers away from what the language is struggling to speak of, with an abstract outline of what it apparently must include above it. Or the map of a big city, or a close up of a side of such a city . . .

Do Not Write In This Space, in short, is an excellent example of where interesting poetry is.  An even better example of where it is not is Rattle.  I had a copy of the winter issue because I entered a visual poem in a contest it was running, and to enter the contest, one had to subscribe to the magazine (for $20).  Ten poets would be selected as finalists by the editors, each getting  $100.  The readers of the magazine would then vote to decide which should get the grand prize of $1000.  I had the idiotic notion that the editors would choose my poem because they thought it refreshingly different.  No chance.  poems that flood your core with the frenzied thrill of just being alive.”  Here’s its first stanza:

Who sells used sex toys at a garage sale?
I knew I had to pull over as soon as I saw
that table full of dildos
just to hear this woman’s story

Nothing wrong with this kind of poem, but neither it nor the other nine finalists was what you could call “refreshingly different.”  I later entered my poem in a local contest for poems about Monet.  By coincidence ten winners would be selected for display at the local visual art center. Needless to say, I lost again.  Fortunately, there was no entrance fee. The rest of Rattle, which is a nicely-produced slickzine, is pretty much what you would expect from the excerpt I quoted.  Extremely standard.

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Greenes Groatsworth of Wit

Greenes Groatsworth of Wit (1592) was said to have been written by Robert Greene, but some scholars attribute it in part or entirely to Henry Chettle, writing from what he expected his readers to take as Greene’s point of view. It does not matter to my argument here who actually wrote the Groatsworth, however, because my argument is not that Greene identified the actor Shakespeare as the playwright Shakespeare in it, but that someone in 1593 did so.

For our purposes, the key passage in the Groatsworth letter is the following, two or three paragraphs into it:

Base minded men al three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned : for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave : those Puppits (I meane) that  speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you : and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.  O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them / all will never proove a kinde nurse : yet whilst you may, seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.”

The first commentators on this passage assumed that “Shake-scene” was Shakespeare, the known author of the line “O tygers heart wrapt in a Womans hyde,” which is parodied in the passage. It seemed obvious to them that the letter’s author was contemptuous of Shakespeare, a lowly actor, for taking up the writing of plays, something only university men were qualified to do. Some early commentators suspected a possible accusation of plagiary, too, because of the reference to the Crow’s being “beautified with our feathers.” But the Crow remained Shakespeare for them—and a playwright, if not necessarily a very ethical one. Once the Shakespere-rejectors came on the scene, though, everything changed. They could not concede that the Crow was intended to be Shakespeare, for—if true—it would pretty much scuttle the candidacy of Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon and most of the others put forward as The True Author. Oxford, for instance, almost certainly did not act on the public stage, nor would the Groatsworth narrator likely have dared insult a man of the highest rank like Oxford the way he insulted the Crow. Marlowe was not known to have acted, either. Worse for his candidacy, the Groatsworth-narrator treats him and the Crow as two different persons. Nor was Bacon an actor.

Hence, the Shakespere-rejectors have left hardly a word of the key passage of the Groatsworth letter uncontaminated with possible
secondary meanings that deflect the passage’s meaning every which way but sane. Even some Stratfordians have found idiosyncratic ways
to re-interpret the passage. Nonetheless, I continue to believe that the traditional reading, which I will be terming, “the Established Reading,” is, if not beyond reasonable doubt the only sound one, by far the most sound one.

The key to the passage, for the Established Reading, is the “tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde” line, so I’ll begin with that. It is unquestionably a quotation , for the font used for it (changed above to italic) differs from the font used for the main text, and is used elsewhere in the Groatsworth for quotations, proper names, and foreign words and phrases. It is also pretty certainly a slightly altered line written by William Shakespeare, for the only work in which it appears whose author’s name is attached is Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, in the First Folio. And we are near-certain that versions of that play had been performed before 1592 (because, among other reasons, of Nashe’s 1592 reference to the great crowds being drawn by a play featuring Talbot, the hero of 1 Henry VI, which most scholars believe was written about the same time as 3 Henry VI, and Marlowe’s apparent knowledge by 1592 of Richard III, which scholars think would have been written after 3 Henry VI).

Against the proposition that William Shakespeare’s having written the line parodied makes him the Crow, numerous anti-Stratfordians have argued that the Crow could be a mere actor whose line that is because his is the part in which that line appears, not because he wrote it.  But the letter clearly states that it is with this line that the Crow believes himself equal to the best of Greene’s acquaintances (Marlowe, Nashe and Peele) at “bombasting out a blank verse.” Since these three are all playwrights who are not known to have acted, the only way the Crow could have used the line to compete with them is as a writer. QED?

No, because the Crow could have been an actor who improvised the tygers hart line and thought it the equal of anything Marlowe, Nashe or Peele could write. But the line is documented as Shakespeare’s (and rather more likely to have been Shakespeare’s considering its quality than that of some actor not known as a playwright). Moreover, the Crow as an actor improvising lines does not fit the context of the paragraph as a whole.

To see why, let’s consider the over-all purpose of the paragraph for its author. Surely, it is to warn his three play-making acquaintances that if any of them is “in that case that (he) is now,” the actors will forsake him as they are now forsaking the author. Now, we know from other sections of his letter that Greene, the author, is at his “last end” and left “desolate,” and “perishes now for want of comfort,” or claiming to be.

We also know that want was a chronic state with the real Greene and food, medicine and a roof over his head the only likely comfort that the Greene of the letter could be in want of in such a situation. So, the players are almost certainly forsaking him by not giving him money for those items. This, it stands to reason, they are doing in one, or a combination, of the following ways: (1) by turning down a play of hist like; (2) by refusing him an advance on a play he has proposed to write for them; (3) by refusing to give him extra money ford already sold them; (4) by refusing to find him some literary job like fixing a scene he could make a little cash from.  According to the author, they will do the same to Marlowe, Nashe or Peele if he is ever in Greene’s dire straits. To establish this as strongly as he can, the letter’s author presents three closely related arguments, saying:

(1.)    They have forsaken me; therefore, they will forsake you. (“Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall [were ye in that case that I am now] be both at once of them forsaken?”)

(2.)    They held me in higher esteem than they hold you but nonetheless are forsaking me; therefore, they are even more likely to forsake you. (“if by my miserie ye be not warned : for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave . . .”)

(3.)    With one of them writing material he thinks as good as yours,        they have all the less reason to feel they have to treat you kindly; that is, if one of you ends up in my situation, the actors’ having a highly confident in-house playwright, with at least one hit to his credit, will keep them from feeling dependent enough on you to bail you out—even if the Crow is not a harbinger of a day when actors will get all their material from actor/play-makers. (“Yes trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow [who] supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse [or make plays] as the best of you . . .”) Can anyone believe the Groatsworth-author would climax a deathbed warning with, “Trust actors not, for one of them is now hamming up one of your lines,” or even, “Trust actors not, for one of them is now adding one of his own lines to one of your plays?” How would an actor’s hamming it up or padding his part demonstrate significant treachery? How could such trivial misdeeds devastatingly make the Groatsworth author’s point that the actors will forsake any of Greene’s friends (but wait to do so till he is dying?!), especially financially?

Have I now made my case? Not entirely, for—as some including non-anti-Stratfordian Gary Kosinsky and Oxfordian Mark Alexander have argued—the line could have been quoted only to describe the Crow as having a tygers hart. But why would the Groatsworth-narrator describe the Crow with a line of blank verse, then speak derisively of the Crow’s thinking he can work up blank verse as well as anyone in a locution that certainly makes it sound like the line is being used as an example of the kind of blank verse the Crow is responsible for? Could the Groatsworth-narrator have been unaware of how the line sounded, and left it that way if he truly didn’t intend it to have its most obvious meaning? Surely if he wanted only to characterize the Crow as being cruel-hearted, he would have written something along the lines of, “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, and possessing a tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, who supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you.” That tells the reader the Crow has a tygers hart without making the reader wrongly think that it is the line about the tygers hart that belongs to  the Crow.

Worse, what would having the cruel heart of a tiger, but not the line about it  have to do with being conceited, improvising lines, or whatever else the Crow is to be considered guilty of doing? As description, the line is a digression; as a sample of the Crow’s abilities, it makes an important point (with a gratuitous, not-too-relevant insult thrown in). In short, the passage works best, by far, if we consider the line not only to describe the Crow but to represent the kind of line he thinks makes him able to compete with the best playwrights around.

Mark Alexander has one problem with this interpretation, however.  For him, it would mean that the Groatsworth-narrator, who is obviously contemptuous of the Crow, was belittling the Crow for thinking his tygers hart line was a good one! He (and others) want to know how the Groatsworth-narrator could plausibly have thought that. The line “conveys dignity, beauty, and power,” says Alexander at his website. “It shows a command of language and imagery. Greene (or Greene’s stand-in, I’m sure Alexander would agree) could not have been ignorant of these facts.” Ergo, if Greene or whoever wrote the Groatsworth considered the Crow to have written the line, he would not have sneered at him for presuming on the basis of it to be first-rate at making up blank verse (as either an improvising actor or as a playwright). But who is Alexander to tell us what the author of the Groatsworth may have thought or said of the line, particularly if the author deemed the line’s originator a detestable, uneducated actor?

Unless . . . ? What about the possibility that the Groatsworth-narrator considered the tiger’s heart line a plagiary? In general, those who consider the Crow a plagiarist quote only the Groatsworth’s reference to the Crow as “beautified with our feathers,” neglecting to quote its
comparisons of actors to “Puppits” whom playwrights supply with words, and “Anticks” dependent, like the Crow, on others for their color, which pretty decidedly indicate that the feathers figure is merely one more jibe at the Crow’s station in life as a petty actor, dependent on his betters for whatever success he has, not an attempt to expose him as a plagiarist.

Eager to latch onto this way of denigrating the Crow, whom she accepts as Shakespeare of Stratford but not as The Author, Diana Price goes outside the Groatsworth to a little-known pamphlet called Vertues Common-wealth (1603), by a writer named Henry Crosse that scholars seem to know little or nothing about, even whether or not he was a real person. Price seems to think his work is evidence that Shakespeare was a plagiarist, but no playwright. To back her claim, she provides the following strongly Groatsworth-influenced quotation from Crosse:

“He that can but bombast out a blank verse, and make both the ends jump together in a rhyme, is forthwith a poet laureate, challenging the garland of bays, and in one slavering discourse or other, hang out the badge of his folly. Oh how weak and shallow much of their poetry is, for having no sooner laid the subject and ground of their matter, and in the Exordium moved attention, but over a verse or two run upon rocks and shelves, carrying their readers into a maze, now up, then down, one verse shorter than another by a foot, like an unskillful Pilot, never comes night the intended harbor: in so much that oftentimes they stick so fast in mud, they lose their wits ere they can get out, either like Chirillus, writing verse not worth the reading, or Battillus, arrogating to themselves, the well deserving labors of other ingenious spirits. Far from the decorum of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, etc., or our honorable modern Poets, who are no whit to be touched with this, but reverent esteemed, and liberally rewarded.”

According to Price, “a ‘Battillus’ was an agent for writers who did not wish to see their own names in print.” That, plus the reference by Crosse to “He that can bombast out a blank verse” makes Shakespeare, the Crow, a front for some unknown noble. The main problem with this, aside from the fact that there is little reason to assume that the Groatsworth author’s use of “bombast out a blank verse” to describe Shakespeare means that anyone using that phrase again must also be referring to Shakespeare, is that Crosse clearly describes the bombaster, as had the Groatsworth-narrator, as a poet. Crosse’s “Battillus” is no front, either (nor was the original Battillus, a medicore poet said to have stolen lines from Virgil, not acted as a front), but a poet stealing from others. Moreover, Crosse is not describing a single poet but a class of incompetent poets who over-rate themselves. Their work fails to scan and is muddled–where is the work accepted as Shakespeare’s that does that more than rarely?

Price provides a strained reading of Jonson’s hostile poem, “On Poet- Ape,” to show that Crosse was not the only one of his times making veiled references to Shakespeare’s plagiary. (Funny how quick Shakespeare-rejectors are to accept documents unfavorably describing someone as applying to Shakespeare, even when their subject is left unnamed, but won’t go near one that favorably describes him by name.) But the poem is much too general to more than guess who Jonson was aiming at. Besides, Jonson referred to the only Shakespeare associated with the river Avon who was known to have been a friend of Heminges and Condell in terms of the warmest friendship. At any rate, the poem ends, “Fool, as if half eyes will not know a fleece/ From locks of wool, or shreds from a whole piece,” which—again—makes the plagiarist a writer, however unoriginal, for he is using shreds of others’ work, not whole works. The Crow would remain a playwright, which is all I’m trying to show.

There is better possible confirmation of the Crow-as-plagiarist thesis when, later in the letter, the Groatsworth-narrator begs his friends to boycott the actors, “and let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.” This doesn’t hold up for me. The word “imitate” here almost certainly means simply “make a representation of, reproduce,” not plagiarize, for it is applied to actors, and actors (and apes) are trivial averbal mimicks, not plagiarists. More important, if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted to accuse the Crow of plagiarizing, why would he not have done so directly; and why would he not have accused him alone, rather than “those Apes,” not all of whom could have been plagiarizing him?

One answer to this, suggested by Oxfordian Jerry Downs, is that the Groatsworth-narrator wanted to avoid a libel suit. Hence, he not only did not name the Crow, but made his libel general rather than specific.  But he had not previously named the Crow, so would have been fairly safe from that risk. Moreover, that he accused one of the playwrights he addressed of atheism in another part of his letter I’ll later touch on indicates that fear of (much less drastically) libeling the Crow, a mere player, could not likely have been a pressing motive of his.  Even if we accept the Groatsworth-narrator to have been accusing the Crow of plagiary, he can’t have thought he’d stolen the tygers hart line, for that is his, the Crow’s, line, not someone else’s.  Moreover, the Crow deems it evidence he can equal the best of Greene’s friends in fashioning (bumbasting out) blank verse lines. It’s not likely in such a case that the Crow would think that the line wasn’t his own work.

No further discussion would be necessary if it weren’t that an Oxfordian named Jonathon Dixon has found a meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary for “suppose” that was in use in Shakespeare’s time: “pretend.” This, according to Jerry Downs, “clearly enables a different reading from the modern tradition — Trust them not; because there is an upstart player who pretends he is able to write blank verse with the best of you.” The player could be Shakespeare (and Downs accepts that he was). Of course, the passage would really be saying, “Trust them not, because there is an upstart player who, with his tygers hart, pretends he is able to write blank verse with the best of you.”  How having a tygers hart has any more to do with pretending to be a writer than it would have with bragging, and/or hamming up and/or padding a part beats me.

Nor can I make sense of a reasonably good writer like whoever wrote the Groatsworth’s not writing straight out, “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his stolen tygers hart wrapt in a players hyde, pretends he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” Why use “supposes” if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted the word to mean “pretends?” The OED has over a dozen entries for “suppose” that all define it as “take as true” or “believe” or the like, and only one entry, the thirteenth, defining it as  pretend.” “Pretend” is also an obsolete meaning of the word, which suggests it was never a very popular one. No one, including Downs, has come up with an instance of an Elizabethan writer’s using “suppose” to mean “pretend.” Shakespeare, for instance, never used it that way.

Moreover, the Dixon reading makes the passage less rhetorically sophisticated than the Established Reading when we consider the relation of the Crow’s “supposing” himself a fine writer of blank verse to his later being “in his conceit” a terrific “Shake-scene.” Taking “supposes” to mean “pretends,” we have an accusation of the Crow as (a), devious, and (b), conceited, whereas taking it to mean “believes to be the case,” we have the Crow as (a), conceited in one way, and (b), conceited in a second related way, to result in a fairly neat parallelism.

The problem of Greene, or someone acting as Greene, climaxing a rant against actors who have forsaken a dying man with a description of an actor doing something trivially dishonest and/or foolish (like pretending to be a writer of some sort) remains, as well. What it comes down to, finally, is that my common sense, straightforward reading of the passage, using “supposes” as “takes as true,” its normal meaning then and now, is unproblematic and makes perfect sense in the context: the Crow’s line about the tygers hart makes him think himself a great writer. It fits in well with all the other evidence, hard evidence, that the documented author of the line, Shakespeare, was an actor, too. The Dixon/Downs reading, on the other hand, teems with problems and fits only awkwardly in with a speculative authorship theory unsupported by any kind of hard evidence.

To solidify the identification of the Crow as Shakespeare, the documented author of the tygers hart line—indeed, almost to prove it by itself—is the Groatsworth-narrator’s mocking the Crow with the descriptive noun, “Shake-scene,” an obvious pun on “Shakespeare.”  Those Shakespeare-rejectors anxious to keep the Crow and Shakespeare separate can only protest that this term was used by chance, meant no more than “wonderfully exciting actor” or the like, and had nothing to do with Shakespeare. But there is no evidence that it was a term in general use circa 1593 and therefore likely to have been used by chance. There is no evidence, in fact, that anyone ever used it but the Groatsworth-narrator, this once—until Shakespearean scholars began quoting the Groatsworth over a hundred years later. In fact, the awkwardness of the word, “Shake-scene,” is further evidence that the Groatsworth-narrator did not use it merely to mean “wonderful actor,” with no intention of using it to allude to Shakespeare, as some have argued. Why? Because the Groatsworth-narrator had other much less awkward words for “wonderful actor” at his disposal (e.g.., “Roscius,” the name of an actor famed in antiquity) if all he wanted to do was suggest the conceit of the Crow as an actor. Why use a nonce-word like “Shake-scene” whose meaning is so unclear instead?

Furthermore, puns on people’s names were common then. Greene himself referred in an earlier pamphlet to Marlowe as “Merlin” (and if Greene didn’t write the letter to three playwrights, whoever did would certainly have wanted to sound like Greene). In short, “Shake-scene” had to be the Groatsworth-narrator’s way of emphasizing that the Crow was Shakespeare.

Other Candidates for the Role of the Crow

The only remaining obstacle my case must face is the possibility that an equally plausible case can be made for some other literary or theatrical figure of the time’s being the Crow. Needless to say, the Shakespeare-rejectors have put forward more than a few other candidates for the role. Only four of them, however, are not ridiculously unlikely. One—advanced by Oxfordian Winifred Frazer—is Will Kempe. He was multi-talented as an actor, clown, acrobat, musician, dancer, and even author—a regular Johannes fac totum (Jack of all trades). Frazer notes that in 1588 Kemp succeeded Richard Tarlton as the lead in a play called The Crow Sits Upon The Wall, which was popular enough to be published in 1592, a little before the Groatsworth came out. That would make Kemp, taking over a role formerly played by a famous actor, a sort of “upstart Crow.” Moreover, he was known to extemporize lines to “improve” his parts. But there is no record (I know of) of any play he was said to have authored, much less anything that would have aroused the deathbed jealousy of Greene (as actual person or fictional character), and one would be hard-pressed to find a way to connect him in any way to the tiger’s heart line. Nor does the “Shake-scene” pun work for him. In short, he lacked the occupation, reputation and name to be the Crow.

A second candidate is the actor Edward Alleyn, whom Oxfordian Stephanie Hughes puts forward, following A. D. Wraight, an advocate of Christopher Marlowe as the Bard. Hughes, like Wraight, claims that the Groatsworth is a coherent whole, and that the writer of the letter
should be taken as the character Roberto, the hero of the principal story in the Groatsworth, and the Crow as the actor in that story who talks Roberto into becoming a playwright (identified rather tenuously as Alleyn). Somehow all this leads to Alleyn (a sometime money-lender), as the Crow, refusing to lend Greene money.

But there is no warrant for taking the Groatsworth as a coherent whole. The pamphlet clearly consists, in order, of (1) the tale of Roberto in the third-person; (2) the letter to three playwrights in the first-person; (3) a version of the ant and grasshopper fable in the third-person; and (4) a letter,supposedly by Greene, to his wife in the first person. The four are not narratively-interconnected (except for such pedestrian transitional passages between them as the one between the first letter and the fable: “Now to all men I bid farewel in like sort, with this conceited Fable of that olde Comedian Aesop”) although the first three are thematically related, all having to do with repentance, poverty, and the importance of living a virtuous life, and the fourth is similarly from its author’s deathbed. In short, the pamphlet seems clearly a collection of miscellaneous texts such as Greene, when he died, might have left (separately or “organized” by an editor) in the possession of a bookseller (as Chettle, the editor of the Groatsworth) says happened).

As for the Player in the Roberto story, he lives in a storyland (however rooted parts of it may be in Greene’s life), the Crow in what’s really happening now. The two have nothing in common except main occupation (and the fact that both are characterized as boastful, although the Player in the Roberto story is less bitterly attacked for it).

And they differ from one another significantly. For one thing, the Player, who appears in Roberto’s adventures only briefly, does not mistreat Roberto; indeed, he befriends him by giving him a way to earn much-needed money. The Crow, on the other hand, is one of the actors forsaking Greene, and instrumental in making it difficult for Greene to procure much-needed money. And while the Player used to write plays but no longer does, the Crow is an upstart in the field, which suggests he is only now beginning his career as a writer of plays. Moreover, if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted us to take the Crow as the Player, he need only have continued his Roberto story for a page or two more, and told of Roberto’s last days, and had him warn his play-writing friends.  As the Groatsworth-narrator did that, he could have brought back the Player, and insulted him as the Crow. For all these reasons, it seems to me unnecessary to go outside the letter to three playwrights for help in determining the identity of the Crow.

As for the Wraight idea that the Groatsworth-narrator’s central concern in the upstart Crow passage is usury, and that he was somehow accusing the Crow of betraying him as a usurer—refusing to give him a loan, I take it—there is nothing whatever in the one line concerned with the Crow to indicate that usury is on the author’s mind at that point.

The subject comes up only once in the letter, when the author writes “I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them / all will never proove a kinde nurse.” So far as I know, no advocate of the usury charge, which includes Unknown-
Aristocratian Diana Price (who takes the Crow as Shakespeare, not Alleyne, but wants him a usurer, not a playwright), has made any attempt to show why the author is not obviously merely making a comparison; certainly, none ever says why the actors’ being usurers (and it is actors, plural, who are usurers, not just the Crow) does not by the same reasoning make Marlowe, Peele and Nashe nurses. But Price goes back to Vertue’s Common-wealth in an attempt to support her claim, quoting the following passages (plagiarized from the
Groatsworth):

. . . these copper-lace gentlemen [who] grow rich, purchase lands by adulterous plays, and not [a] few of them usurers and extortioners which they exhaust out of the purses of their haunters so they are puffed up in such pride as self-love as they envy their equals and scorn their inferiors.

. . . it were further to be wished, that those admired wits of this age, Tragedians, and Comedians, that garnish Theaters with their inventions, would spend their wits in more profitable studies, and leave off to maintain those Anticks, and Puppets, that speak out of their mouths: for it is pity such noble gifts, should be so basely employed, as to prostitute their ingenious labors to enrich such buckram gentlemen.

Price splices the two passages together to claim that the “copper-lace gentlemen” of the first one, some of whom are described as usurers, are the same as the “Anticks, and Puppets” of the second; that makes actors in general, and the Crow in particular, usurers. But why should one can take a plagiarized passage published eleven years after the Groatsworth as reliable evidence of much of anything? Who could know to whom Crosse may have been referring, if to anyone?

Furthermore, it is clear that the second passage is referring to all actors, and all actors cannot be reasonably thought the same as the “copper-lace gentlemen” who deal in the “adulterous” plays of the first passage, which had to include non-actors (and, literary history tells us, most certainly did), just as the class, actors of 1603, could not have included no one but “copper-laced gentlemen.” It is ever-so-slightly possible that Crosse did, sloppily, think of some actors as dealers in plays, which would mean he may have also considered those actors who dealt in adulterous plays among those dealers in adulterous plays who were also usurers and extortioners. But it’s a stretch, and even if some actors were usurers and dealers in plays, it does not follow that the Groatsworth-narrator said the Crow was. There remains nothing in the single line in the Groatsworth directly about the Crow that has anything to do with his being a usurer or play-dealer (or extortioner).

Aside from all that, there is no evidence, to get back to Alleyn, that he wrote the tyger’s hart line, nor is there much evidence that Alleyn ever wrote plays, as I have established that the Crow did, and might consequently have endangered the livelihood of the Groatsworth
author—just the following entry in Philip Henslowe’s account-book:

pd vnto my sonne E Alleyn at the Apoyntment of the company…for his Boocke of tambercam the 2 of octob(er) 1602 the some of xxxx (shillings).

But we know that Alleyn bought many plays by others, making them “his,” because there is a 1589 deed of sale documenting his purchase of theatrical paraphernalia, including “play books.” Moreover, according to W.W. Greg, in his The Henslowe Papers (p.151), “Tamar Cam originally belonged to Strange’s men, and the second part was performed by them as a new play 28 Apr. 1592.” This Greg believes “was written as a rival to Tamburlain, which belonged to the Admiral’s men. Tamar Cam appears, however, to have belonged not to the company, but to Alleyn, and he brought it with him when he rejoined the Admiral’s men, probably in 1594. These revived it as a new play, acting the first part 6 May and the second 11 June 1596.

Finally, 2 Oct 1602, the company bought the ‘Boocke’ of Alleyn for £2. This was the usual payment for an old play, and therefore probably included only Pt. I, though this is not specified.” Greg goes on to speak of a “…revival for which doubtless the company purchased the ‘Boocke’ in 1602″. This sounds awfully like Alleyn owned the rights to the play as opposed to wrote it. If he had written a play formidable enough to arouse the Groatsworth-narrator’s jealous contempt in the early 1590’s, one would expect him to have written others—one of
which ought to be extant. None is. On top of all that, the Shake-scene pun does not apply to him (as a pun) which, for me, is enough by itself to rule him out.

The third of the four top candidates is, of all people, Ben Jonson.  Oxfordian Nina Green points out that in 1592, “Jonson, at 20, was in all likelihood an actor with burgeoning aspirations as a writer. His arrogance, his own considerable opinion of his talents, and his lack of charity toward other writers are amply attested to in his own words as recorded by William Drummond of Hawthornden. Drummond also commented on the excessive fondness for drink which could well have made Jonson one of the fairweather tavern companions of whom the
Groatsworth-narrator complains.  ”

But many of Jonson’s feuds have been reported to us, and there’s no indication in the records that he so much as knew Greene in 1592. Certainly he never fired off any comeback to anything Greene supposedly said about him, as he did to other attacks on him. He also had nothing to do with the tyger’s hart line, that we know of—and Jonson surely seems the type who would have taken credit for so good a line had it been his. Besides, if he had been responsible for the line in 1592 or earlier, and for the play it was in, his having taken so long to become a well-regarded playwright would be hard to account for. Nor is his candidacy helped any more than Alleyn’s or Kempe’s by the reference to a “Shake-scene.” There thus seems little reason to accept him as the Crow.

Then, there is Oxford, in his guise as actor/playwright, Will Shakespeare. I shouldn’t have called him not ridiculously unlikely to have been the Crow. First of all, how could the Groatsworth-narrator, a commoner, have addressed him so contemptuously if he were? More
to the point, how could the Groatsworth-narrator have viewed a man near 40 of Oxford’s educational background and family (which included an uncle who was a well-known author), with a fair amount of lyric poetry and, presumably, quite a few plays behind him, as an
“upstart” of any kind?

I should insert here that some Oxfordians point to the Groatsworth-narrator’s use of the word “upstart” to refute Shakespeare’s being the Crow for one of the reasons I consider it to refute Oxford’s having been the Crow: that by 1591 or 1592, when the Groatsworth would have been written, Shakespeare would have been already prominent in London theatre—and therefore not an upstart. But Shakespeare was not all that prominent by then. No work had yet been published under his name, and only one of the Henry VI plays of all that he eventually wrote (if that) had been mentioned in any records by then (that we have). Nor does Shakespeare himself show up as an actor or writer in any of the documents to that date that have come down to us. Most scholars believe he had written only five or six plays by then, and it is likely that they had been put on with no author’s name attached to them. Some may even have been collaborations. It seems near-certain that Shakespeare in 1592 was just coming into his own as a playwright after several years of obscurity as a minor actor, during which he was probably also for a time a play-doctor, then apprentice playwright.

There is no reason to think the Groatsworth-narrator would have known much, if anything, about him until the early nineties when the sudden great success of 1 Henry VI began to make his name. Finally, the adjective, “upstart,” occurs in a sentence that goes on not to speak of such ways of being an upstart as having recently gained wealth or status but only of having begun writing blank verse. In any case, the Groatsworth-narrator’s use of the word, “upstart,” is more a point in favor of Shakespeare’s being the Crow than anyone else’s since it is much more likely that Greene, a double M.A. professional playwright, or someone writing out of that persona, would have described a mere actor, with no university background, whom he has just become aware of as a rival author, with the adjective, “upstart,” than he would anyone else then on the scene, particularly a noble coming from a literary family who had been writing poetry for over a decade—and possibly plays, too. Or someone like Edward Alleyn who had become a manager of, and virtual heir apparent to, a highly lucrative theatrical business—but remained a mere actor.

As for Oxford, to get back to him, perhaps the biggest thing against his having been the Crow is (as I’ve previously written) the absurdity of a noble’s acting on the public stage without anyone’s ever finding out (either by recognizing the performer as Oxford while Oxford was
onstage, or recognizing Oxford somewhere else as the performer) and noting it somewhere. Nor, to repeat anothe rof my observations, does it make any sense for Oxford to have sought to keep people from knowing he was an author through the use of a pseudonym, and gotten up on the public stage as an actor, using that very same pseudonym!

All sorts of other questions arise, like who was the second actor calling himself Shakespeare and being recorded as such on legal documents after Oxford died: where’d he come from, and what happened to him? To be unscholarly about it, the Oxford-as-Crow hypothesis is tangledly nuts to be taken seriously. We are left, then, with the actor/playwright William Shakespeare as the Crow. This is supported, in my view, by the testimony of Henry Chettle, which I discuss in another essay.

.

Dada Tennis & Other Adventures

From Small Magazine Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1993

Meat Epoch, #11 Spring, 1993; 2pp.; 3055 Decatur Avenue, Apt. 2D, Bronx NY 10467. Price: SASE. DADA TENNIS, #3 Spring, 1993; 16pp.; Box 10, Woodhaven NY 11421. $2. CWM, #1 Summer 1992; 32pp.; 1300 Kicker Rd., Tuscaloosa AL 35404. $3. O!!Zone, #2 February 1993; 16 pp.; 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX 77057. $2.52. Six years or so ago, I coined the word, "experioddica," as a name for the "experimental," "odd" "periodicals" of the arts that I was then writing about for Factsheet Five. This term has not yet made it into TIME, but it has been used in print by more than three people besides myself (usually misspelled), so I've decided to keep it going as my title here. In the future I hope to concentrate on just one or two specimens of experioddica in each column. In this, my very first, however, I have decided to range more widely, and cursorily, to try to rough out the field as a whole. I will thus be discussing four magazines: Meat Epoch #11, Dada Tennis #3, O!!Zone #2 and CWM #1. Of these, Meat Epoch #11 is perhaps the least impressive on the surface for it is just a xeroxed broadside containing five poems and an illustration. Two of the poems are philosophical. One of them, which is by A. L. Nielson, begins with a Wallace Stevens- like "context (which) rose in the eastern window;" the other, which is by Spencer Selby, ends with meaning-in-general, which "gathers in emptiness/ and waits on all things." Two of the others, which are by editor Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, are fragmental and evocative (one of them representing "kairos," or "the favorable moment," as--in part--the sequence "pray/ dance/ sing/ decide," to score neatly off the more likely "research/ think/ calculate/ decide," or somesuch). The fifth is one of my own mathematical oddities. What is most noteworthy about Meat Epoch, however, is that it began about a year ago as a one-man collection of critiques and poetry that St. Thomasino distributed like a letter to other poets and editors he felt he had things in common with. As a result, he is now getting his experimental work published elsewhere, and publishing such well-known figures in the otherstream as John M. Bennett. Meat Epoch thus neatly demonstrates one highly viable way of getting established as a writer, outside the establishment. Dada Tennis #3, though just 8 stapled-together sheets of paper, is fancier than Meat Epoch, for it is full of fascinating & sophisticated computer-generated graphics, and even contains a work in color in which C. L. Champion has played games with the letters of the word "breast." DDT contains many other exploratory, even insane, poems, such as one by editor Bill Paulauskas that bounces from "God's angry balloon" to "A peacock/ dipped in black/ oil/ and beaten with a porkchop" to "tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp/ tablelamp." Paulausakas, by the way, runs some sort of computer bulletin board from which he got a portion of DDT's contents. Lunatics with modems should be sure to write him about it. CWM #1 is the most elegant specimen of the four zines, for it has a stiff cover and is saddle-stitched. On its front is a gorgeous water smudgery in pink, violet and blue by Carlyle Baker and inside its back cover is a pocket containing two books of matches decorated by Bruce Mitchell and a narrow strip of folded cardboard within which G. Huth has rubber-stamped the word, "watearth"--which seems minor until you notice what its central pun is doing. Most of the poems within are only mildly adventurous technically but almost all of them have a lift to them; take, for example, "Lethe," which is by Herb Kauderer: kneel at the banks by the ford and peer into the soft wrinkled brown-green blanket watch it undulate in random patterns calling in a voice that soaks up sound birdcall & leaf flame & wood absorbed & reformed into a gently urging lullaby calling you to sleep An arresting collage by Guy R. Beining, a scrap of fiction, and some reviews complete CWM's wares. Beining is one of the two poets featured in the second issue of O!!Zone, a saddle-stitched paper-covered zine that calls itself "a literary pamphlet." His poems are quite disjunctional, as "1544" demonstrates: "in hatch of abbot/ all manicured/ parlor talk knocks apart/ blossoms & the only pig at market." But at least one of them at one point ripples into traditional lyricism with "solvent edge of moon on/ blush of lake/ green veins of may in/ chalk of birch." The poems of O!!Zone's second poet, Ken Brandon, are more straight-forward, but full of amiable breezes like a description of a mission whose "quiet is of/ swallow gargles and/ twittering women resound/ ding like bells from a/ stone room to the left/ of jesus christ and the/ gladiolus." There. I hope that's enough to suggest what's out there in the world of . . . experioddica. Visit it soon! . OfficeDepot Office Store

Of a New Zine and an Old Web-Site

Small Press Review,
Volume 30, Number 7/8, July/August 1998

diffference engine 1, edited by Christopher Meyers.
Winter 1998; 38 pp.; 9600 Central SW #161,
Albuquerque NM 87121. $5, ppd.

Light & Dust, curated by Karl Young:
http:www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm.

There are other great examples of the infra-verbal here & later in Debrot’s sequence like “legligible” and “cooefficient,” not to mention “geyswerks,” which is defined (or so I take it) as “dogmad greepsing greepsing dusk unto dusk.” Debrot also contributes three pages of mind-whirlingly stimulating, scientifico-nutto grid-charts with drawings. One set of chart- entries has “rotat” in box 1, “screw that ‘that’ evacuates ‘the’ or ‘I’” in box 2, “the equivalent of extremely high ceilinged” in box 3, and “9gg” in the last box. The chart as a whole is labeled, “stiff liver-colored.”

Editor Christopher Meyers does a nice visio-poetic turn on Go/God/Good . . . (but, thankfully, not “dog”) that he’s snuck a zero artfully into, and an even nicer visio-poetic turn on night/light in which the top half of the word, “night,” is shown with the top half of the word, “light,” under it, backwards, like a reflection. Each of the partial letters of “night” are joined to one or more of the partial letters of “light” to suggest some sort of arabesque swirl toward the devotional.

There is other interesting material here including drawings and poetry by Joshua Kil and some poems by Edward Mycue, one or two of which are too overtly political for me, including one about Thatcher and the Falkland Islands–but another of them starts, “I am dreampt by trees.”

Now to jump to the internet where all kinds of great things are continuing to be done for visual poetry at Karl Young’s Light & Dust site. A veritable library of current visual poetry world-wide, often in full color, it includes works by Karl Kempton, Avelino de Araujo, Scott Helmes, Philadelpho Menezes, Kajino Kyuyo, Clemente Padin, Harry Polkinhorn, Christy Sheffield Sanford, Marilyn R. Rosenberg and Karl Young himself. Major under-appreciated figures from the past like Kenneth Patchen, bp Nichol, Doris Cross and d.a. levy are represented here, too. The site is not all visual poetry, either, but showcases such diverse poets as Charles Alexander, Larry Eigner, Paul Dutton, Wanda Coleman, Hugh Steinberg, Jackson Mac Low, Joe Napora, Carl Rakosi, Rochelle Ratner and Michael McClure. It includes criticism, often with reproductions of poems, as well–by such authors as Harry Polkinhorn, Gerald Janecek, Padin and Young. (My own contribution, on minimalist poetry, was even written up– briefly–in the autumn 1997 issue of The Wilson Quarterly; whaddya think of that!?)

There’s way too much going on at Light & Dust for me to more than touch on it here, but I do want particularly to call attention to one of the newer attractions, Klaus Peter Dencker’s Worte Koepfe. Part of the Kaldron subdivision of Light & Dust overseen by Kempton, Polkinhorn and Young, Worte Koepfe comes with an introduction by Young that I’m going to quote liberally from because it says more than I’d be able to: “. . . (t)he graphic elements in his poems recapitulate the range of techniques used by artists and designers of all sorts. One of the great satisfactions for me in his work comes from the interplay of techniques collaged together. A simple aspect of this appears in different types of shading in the images, ranging from the cross-hatching, layering, and feathering of woodcuts and stone lithographs, to the gradations produced by photographic techniques for offset and rotogravure printing, to the gradations introduced by airbrushes and now by computer programs. This wonderful confluence of icons and graphic techniques finds a match in Dencker’s approach to letters. A page of Dencker’s poetry will probably include at least half a dozen type faces, and it seems an interesting bit of serendipity that living in Germany provides Dencker with Fractur type faces as well as Roman and sans serif faces. Just as important is Dencker’s hand lettering, which adds a great deal to the interplay of letter forms in his poems.” To this I might add that Dencker makes often ravishingly good use of color.

The Winter 1998 pages feature work by Russian Dmitry Bulatov, Australian Peter Sullivan, Italian Vittore Baroni and Russian Serge Segay working together, Americans Carol Stetser and Amy Franceschini, and Brazilian Claudio Daniel. My favorite piece from this section is one by Sullivan that looks like a granite slab into which the word, “HISTORY,” was once chiseled in several spots, but which, due to the onslaught of time, has become a delirium of textuality that seems first to shout “STOP” but then, like an optical illusion, flips through various semi-words before hovering–almost–on something that looks like “HISTORY”–for a moment. But there are all kinds of other first-rate works here and elsewhere at Light & Dust. If you have access to the internet, you’ve got to visit it!

I haven’t been exposed to a new otherstream poetry zine for a while. I’m not sure whether this is because I’ve fallen severely out of the loop or because not many new otherstream zines are appearing. In any case, the first issue of a fine, stapled-on- the-side zine has recently come into my hands: diffference engine. It starts with a Joycean tour-de-force by Jacques Debrot that, on the first of its three pages, moves pornfully from “the veins Stood =out, grinned the girl” down, elegantly, to some Latin, and one German word, turning to English: “cur quicquid ubi quando quibis dichter culpo de Dido blossomly emblushing.” This seems lyric-lovely to me, and although I can’t remember my high school Latin well enough to make out to much of its Latin, the latter fixes the poem beautifully in an anti-quotidian, Virgileanly mythical Long-Ago. Note in particular the infra-verbal combination of “emblem” and “blushing” to produce a tension between artifact and abstration (an emblem being a symbol) and between constructedness and lastingness.

The State of North American Vizpo, Part Four

Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2009

      October is Dada Month
      Edited by Marshall Hryciuk
      2008; 94 pp; Pa; Nietzsche’s Brolly,
      30 Laws St., Toronto ON
      M6P 2Y7 Canada. $100.

October is Dada Month is particularly helpful in revealing what’s been going on with visio-textual art for the past fifteen years or so, for it consists of a series of numbered broadsides (most of them in full color) which began to be issued by Nietzsche’s Brolly in April 1990 with a piece by jwcurry called, “BGyHUJkKkPsDrfFFuffli joboten forti raken maserid. Martil, marl,” and ended with my own “Mathemaku for Persephone.” The term “dada” in its title certainly comes closer than any other term I can think of to pinning down what’s in the anthology. It may be the best term to sum up the main thrust of contemporary visio-textual art, too. As a critical term, it suffers from nebulousness, but if we take it as a blanket term for various mixtures of collage, surrealism, extremely divergent thinking and a disinclination, possibly even a disdain, for saying anything with words, it works well enough to describe most of what’s in October is Dada Month, and the other collections I’ve been discussing, or will discuss, in this survey of mine.

curry’s piece is a collage, one portion of which consists of a text each line of which begins with many letters crowded together, then shifts to what seem to be nonsense words–as in its title, “BGyHUJkKkPsDrfFFuffli joboten forti raken maserid. Martil, marl,” which is also its first line. Jutting sideways out of this text is a window, Its panes are painted light yellow upon which lines of what seem some kind of hieroglyphics are printed.

Textuality but no linguistic meaning that I can make out. Surrealism, collage and minimal attempt to converge on some unifying principle.

Much of dada is merely puritanical anti-art: work intended to be pointless and generally what most people would term decadent. Its aim is to shock and/or annoy those of us who take art seriously. While I do think some of the works in October is Dada Month partly do this, I think most, and possibly all, of them strive mostly to give those willing seriously to consider them genuine aesthetic pleasure–however much some may be out to annoy the uniniated. Not incoherences but mysteries they are, but solvable, or–at least–half-solvable-mysteries.

For me, the curry work is a half-solvable mystery. It seems to be saying something about communicability: one of its two sides seems to be supplying the other side with letters the latter is trying incompetently to make into words. A view of a mind trying to speak, or beginning the process of shared understanding? The universe, clumsily trying to utter itself into something comprehensible? With science plunging a window of viewing device into the thick of things in an attempt to discover what is going on back to the beginnings of written language. . . ?

My piece, “Mathemaku for Persephone,” is as undada as a piece could be, but might well be taken as dada by the ignorant. It’s one of my long division poems–mystery divided into June yielding Persephone, with a remainder of Erato (the muse of poetry). Simple on the surface but with all kinds of subtle details that (I hope) distance it sufficiently from the slushiness my description of it might suggest. One point of interest: Geof Huth accepted it for his Poetry gallery but it was vetoed by higher-ups, costing me my last chance at fame.

To be serious, a more important point of interest is that the page just before the page my poem is on is transparent, with a black&white grid printed on it the title of which is “Frame.” It’s by carlyle baker. Nine rows of nine squares, each; five of the rows with five alternating texts or additions or who knows what consisting of four lines of mostly what seem to me to be Chinese characters, with occasional English letters and other matter overlaying them. Some kind of calendar? Weak eyesight as well as week critical acumen

prevent me from guessing better. But baker’s piece makes me want to continue to guess, so I can’t call it anti-art. Moreover, it works beautifully as a both graphically-enhancing and mentally-provocative layer on top on my poem–as well as on top of the poem on the preceding page.

This anthology needs more than a column’s worth of critical analysis, so I plan to come back to it in my next column. For now, I will just recite the names of the artists with work in it, besides curry, baker and I: Peggy lefler, Brian David Johnston, Melody Wessel, Marshall Hryciuk, Susan Parker, Guy R. Beining, Daniel f. Bradley, Ken Lewis, Richard Beland, Steven Hartman, Lucile Barker, John Vieira, damian lopes, Richard Tipping, John Barlow, Jennifer Books, Gerard J. Klauder, DEC Books, Gustave Morin, Kevin Angelo Hehir, Rob Read, Thom Olsen, Karen Sohne, Karl E. Jirgens, Mark Laliberte, Derek beaulieu, Greg Evason. curry and Beining each has ten pieces in it, Bradley eight, and theirs seem to me among the most interesting in the collection.

Breaking into Micro-Zine Publishing

Small Magazine Review, Volume 1, Number 3, August 1993

       stained paper archive, #1 April, 1993; 8pp.; 1792 Byng         Road, Windsor, Ontario N8W 3C8 Canada. $1.            Found Street, #2 Spring, 1993; 16pp.; 14492 Ontario Cir.         Westminster CA 92683. $2.

    
    Recently two new zines have come out that nicely demonstrate a  favorite theme of mine: the ease with which someone without  official credentials can become an active participant in the world of  experioddica.  Indeed, the editor of one, Gustave Morin, is only  twenty, and first learned of poetries beyond the merely textual just a  year-and-a-half ago.  Now, having made a dozen or so contacts  through the mail, as well as a few in person, he has published his  first issue of stained paper archive, and with it brought himself  up to the level of-- well, Me!     The word, "stained," with its suggestions of both taintedness and  stained-glass windows, nicely fits Morin's zine, which is both  inexpensively thrown-together and chapel-serious in its devotion  to Art--if you can conceive of a chapel with a sense of humor.  Production-wise it is interesting, as it is made of sheets folded  in half and stapled together--not, as expected, along their folded,  but along their open, edges.  The resulting pages are thus doubly-  thick, which gives them not only extra opaqueness, but a feel of  substance, of archive-level durability.  At the same time, the staples,  the use of xeroxing for printing, the size and lack of exact  uniformity of the pages, and their being open at the top and bottom,  adds an appealing content-before-packaging vigor to the zine.     One of the issue's three pieces by Morin, a few lines of nearprose  about a "man/ with hair/ in the palm/ of his hand" that the  protagonist "cannot pull (his) eyes away from," is somewhat weak,  but saved, I think, by its title: "two freaks" (my italics).  His  other two contributions are collages.  In one a man is shown using a  pole to try to put some kind of indecipherably-inscribed plaque into  an enormous mouse-trap where cheese would ordinarily go.  The other,  whose title is "virus," depicts a number of a's crossing a gap  from one enlarged cross-section of skin tissue (or the like) into  another.  Language as means of snaring the monstrously unknown  (God, say), and as ultimate, infectious utterance of human cells. . . .  So run my first thoughts toward "solutions."     The issue's other pieces are, like Morin's, deceptively simple-  seeming.  One, by Greg Evason, features the image of a fork  without its handle--but, isolated (and black), it takes on eerie  tooth-resonances (sharp black teeth going up, blunt white ones  descending), and hints of archaeology, with its emphasis on bone-  fragments.  It also suggests something of the power of Motherwell's  imagery.  Sharing the page with the fork is the near-word, "nife."     Evason is also represented by a full-page text rendered nearly  illegible by over-printing--except at the bottom where the words,  "gonna die," fall free to indicate the only unobscurable certainty any  life can contain.  A fascinating Klee-like "Y bird" by Daniel f.  Bradley and an amusing if slight poem by jwcurry about light bulb  shards complete the issue's contents.     Tomoyasu, an LA visual artist who's been involved in experioddica  for only two years or so, began publishing broadsides, and his full-  scale zine, Found Street, last year.  This hasn't gotten him fame,  but it is a form, however marginal, of cultural exposure, and  that is something no serious would-be artist can afford to disdain.     One thing I particularly like about Tomoyasu's second issue of  Found Street is that it contains work by people I'm unfamiliar with.  One such, the minimalist Brooks Roddan, is represented by two pieces.  One consists of the bar code, price and other commercial data dot-  matrixed onto the record jacket of a recording of a Bach standard  ("the Goldberg Variations") by Glenn Gould.  Its title says it all:  "The Genius of Glenn Gould."  Roddan's other piece is even  simpler; indeed, it could not be more simple, for it is just an  upright black rectangle.  But, from its title, "Rebellion," we know  that the rectangle is also an I, isolated from the many but squarely,  resolutely, and broad-shoulderedly committed to itscause.     Tomoyasu himself contributes a fine full-color cover drawing called  "End Art," in which a Shahnesque man is shown running out of a  mixture of music-score and verbal text with a grandfather-  clock/coffin under one arm.  Elsewhere in the issue is a typical  Tomoyasu illuscriptation consisting of the words "Jesus Door" and  the image of an upside-down headless doll.  There are many other  intriguing works in this issue of Found Street, including a droll  pair of cartoon faces (or awkward mittens, or cow udders, or who-  knows-what) by well-known mail artist, Ray Johnson; the two faces  or whatever are identical except that one is labeled, "Ray Johnson,"  the other "Jasper Johns."     I would consider Found Street state-of-the-art experioddica,  and stained paper archive inferior to it only in quantity of  contributors.  Neither required much money to publish; both  accomplished things of cultural value outside the interests of  pricier magazines.  Both make me proud to be a part of the  nearly penniless but thriving and open world of experioddica.