A future prelude

The following scenes, telling the story of the Tower of Babel, are all characterized by an irridescent iris effect round the edge of the picture.
Fritz Lang: Metropolis

Moog music? Or: Temporal Compression? Or: How old is old time really?

I find my nightmare at Silliman’s Blog.

"That
  old time
  bagpipe, accordian, synthesizer

  combination is pretty
  hard to
  beat."

As examples

of just how far the hay(na)ku has developed since its first simple tercets, check out Lorna Dee Cervantes' wonderful continuing series Towards A New Beginning of the Alpha bet, & harry k. stammer's equally wonderful most recent posts.

Up

& available for downloading here is Jordan Stempleman's Their Fields, the first title in Bill Allegrezza's new Moria e-books range.

Check it out. Download it. Read it. Enjoy it.

Some titles

stick in the mind like lines of poetry, even if you don't like the entire poem. Fortunately, in the main, I do.

I love what follows on from three of my four favourite titles: Samuel Delany's Time considered as a helix of semi-precious stones, William Eastlake's Portrait of the artist with twenty-six horses & Henry Miller's The alcoholic veteran with the washboard cranium. The fourth is the title of a Janet Frame novel, Scented gardens for the blind, even though I am not a fan of her writing - but then, I don't think there is even one New Zealand writer of fiction (& I'm deliberately classing Martin Edmond as faction here) that I can truly say I like - & it took me twenty years, & a night-walk in an Australian garden, to realise the obvious meaning of the phrase.

But I have come across a title I am both intrigued & half-appalled by. Part of it was appropriated by Laurie R. King for the second novel in her wonderful series featuring Mary Russell, companion & later wife to Sherlock Holmes, but I seem to have skipped King's introductory quote for it was only today that I was consciously aware of the full title of the book she referred to.

It's by John Knox, founder of the protestant Church of Scotland, later to become - or be merged with - the Presbyterian Church. & it's about two specific women. When first published in 1588 it was directed against the Catholic Mary Tudor, but a little later to be also against Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.

The full title: First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.

Let me just say

concreate

as a means of expressing my best wishes for PR Primeau & Geof Huth's new joint venture

Where are the protesters of yesteryear?

The latenight – but now slightly revised - rant below was partially prompted by a newsclip of Australian Prime Minister John Howard being heckled by protesters as he entered a State Liberal Party convention.

Howard is now Australia’s longest continuously serving Prime Minister. & it’s gone to his head. He’s starting to think he’s God & will live & rule forever. But the country has become so complacent, &, in the main, though I hate to use the word, middle-class, & there is no-one in the opposition Labor party who can challenge him because they’re trying to claim the same ground, but the Liberals seem much better managers of it. Christ knows what it will take to fuel the social, socialist anger that should be there.

& the protesters? Not that many of them these days though the causes should be sufficient to bring at least half the nation’s population out on to the streets if the nation had a soul. Industrial relations, where the government is trying to bring in individual labour contracts that mean paid holidays, job security, sick leave, even meal breaks, can be done away with; the treatment of asylum seekers; the treatment of the indigenous population; the sale of the remaining 51% of the national telco that the government owns (which has just pumped half of its last year profit of $4 billion into the country’s coffers) & which will then adhere to the current mantra of fuck social conscience, follow profits. The government is tightening its grip on universities. Now it’s diminish the quality of your education, sell your degrees to the paying students, & if you don’t do that, then the government will tell you what you are allowed to teach.

Then there’s Iraq, where the government is blindly following the burning Bush. Even the just-retired Head of the Armed Forces is saying that Australia should withdraw before the end of next year instead of this crap about being there “as long as it takes”.

So much to protest about, & so few protesters, especially when you consider that the ones heckling Howard covered all the above. But I did find some joy in seeing them, & found much humour in one of the signs being displayed.

Think outside
the Pentagon

Feeling ekphrastic?

Crag Hill posts:

"I'll continue to read writing in response to paintings, sculpture, photography, performance -- lit in response to art... I'll read until Thanksgiving. I want to get this issue - (Spore 2.1) - out by the end of the year.

I'm also looking for commentary about ekphrastic writing, its openings, its limitations, exemplary works previously published..."

Full details are available at Poetry Scorecard.

Me, myself, I

Now that I've seen it via broadband, & am not embarrassed by it, let me point out http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/birthday/young.asp.

For Craig

In
Mobile he'd
a fixed address.

& then there was this,

 
Terence Young's Red Sun, with Arsula Undress as the female lead.
 

John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven was a movie I couldn't help but like. I'd seen Kurosawa's Seven Samurai & fallen in love with it - & still consider Toshiro Mifune to be the most attractive man I've ever seen (though that was slightly later, after some of his later films, & at other times the Terence Stamp of Billy Budd & the Alain Delon of Rocco & His Brothers tended to shake Mifune's perch). The movie had a cast full of people I liked - Yul Brunner who'd I'd first come across in Cocteau's The Testament of Orpheus, Eli Wallach, always a favourite villian, Horst Buchholz who I'd seen in Tiger Bay playing opposite a very young Hayley Mills, Brad Dexter who was a journeyman actor with a recognisable face, three actors who I'd come across in the American International movies I kept pigging out on at the local double-feature, two-day run, continuous movie house I frequented, Steve McQueen (Stephen McQueen of The Blob), Robert Vaughn from I was a Teenage Caveman, & Charles Bronson from Machine Gun Kelly (though I'd also seen him in his Charles Buchinski days in things like the original House of Wax); James Coburn was the only one I'd never come across before, & he was so cool he rapidly became a firm favourite. I'd always liked cowboy movies, especially when they didn't have John Wayne in them. & I liked Elmer Bernstein's film scores since I first came across one in The Man with the Golden Arm.

Just as John Williams did later in Star Wars, especially with his Darth Vader theme, Bernstein had a Magnificent Seven theme for the good guys, but there was also a secondary theme that was used to accompany the entrance of the Mexican bandits. Da da da da dat dadaa - Dada would have loved a day like this. & I'm reminded of it because there's a crow that's been around for the last few days, which instead of indulging in the languid drawn-out caw that I usually associate with them, parks itself up a tree & issues a series of short notes that modulate at the end, just like Bernstein's theme. It cracks me up, & makes me think, although my asshole doesn't drop out, of the Paul Blackburn poem, The Encounter, that starts:

Staggering down the road at midnite
home from the bar, the

mexican Bandit stood facing me, about
to improve his standard of living.

A found answer to Tom Beckett's question

In a recent post at Shadows Within Shadows, Tom Beckett asked: If one doesn't have some idea what a poem should do, why bother to write?

I caught five minutes of a documentary about films & film-making last night, a part where various directors were asked to comment briefly about why they made films. Amongst their answers, which, in the main, gave such things as social conscience & revolution as the reasons, was this from an un-named director, which struck the gong of recognition within my well-into-its-seventh-decade heart.

"I
 film. I
 keep on filming

 to
 soften the
 flight of time."

In the remainder bin

at the local newsagent today, a stack of Dylan's Chronicles. I was lucky to find one copy in the local bookshops when it came out. Now....

Loved Jill Jones' comment on her recent re-reading. "...a book I don't believe..."

Ah, but aren't the best memoirs the ones with the most fiction in them? Especially when there's a soundtrack that keeps running through your brain.

Al-
though. Even
though. All through.

A found word

(in the comments boxes of Karri Kokko's Blonde on Blonde.

oukkidoukki

A Brief History of Oedipus

Started
masturbating early.
Eventually went blind.

Sitemeter

has a cute new feature. A map of the world, & also each continent separately, showing where your recent hits came from. Groovy.

Have added

several links to the sidebar over the last few weeks, the most recent of which are Antic View, Jeff Harrison & Allan Bramhall's on-going conversation, Q&A, A&Q, cross-interrogation, etc. which is developing into a very interesting double discourse; Del Ray Cross' anachronizms; Scott Glassman's 30 days; & Gregory Vincent St Thomasino's The Postmodern Romantic about which I posted a couple of days ago.

Gregory emailed me a little later &, since his informative response would have been posted to the comments box if Blogger hadn't decided to play up, I'm taking the liberty to include part of it here.

"The Postmodern Romantic is, indeed, an active blog, and when I have something to add or to revise, that's when I change the date, to denote an update. I hope that when I'm "done" I will have something of a short novel, and that is what my blog is presenting, an as-yet-untitled novel in progress. My model is Max Frisch's Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän. My initial idea for The Postmodern Romantic was just to have a place to sound off, but then I thought it better not to paraphrase, but to try to depict / express the certain sensibilities I was / am concerned with."

in cyberspace

every-
one can
hear you scream