A headline in Nature today reads: “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common.” Also more common: time-fires which consume hours of your life, hours that might have been for imagination, for rest, for pleasure, for family, for community. Where do these hours go, as we hurl them into the inferno of consumerism, into the conflagration of war, onto the bonfire of shallow screen culture? What cauldron are they cooking? I wrote at Delphi that all fires are holy fires, but I do not know if these time-fires are holy when they waste the life in us, waste […]
Journal
Three dilemmas
The traveller’s dilemma: the more freely one moves, the smaller the world becomes. The saint’s dilemma: full identification with the suffering of others unveils the cruel and unjust potential of the cosmos. The meaningful dilemma: as we refine our notion of what is meaningful, meaninglessness expands.
Journal
Local-Culture Power (1)
By focusing artistic creative work on cultivation of local culture, we can: — work within a horizon of time and community, engaging directly with meaningful development and expression — establish cultural economies that are tangible, intentional, and adaptive — dispense with artificial tension between tradition and innovation, which is created by globally-oriented academic and commercial novelty concerns
Journal
Prosaic Omphalic Vistas
I am about to pivot to a more reflective and prosaic mode on Dayword, still focused on poetry but withholding new poems of my own for awhile. The happy news is that I’m returning to Athens, where among experiences to come I will be working on a poetry collection. The process demands some withholding, to let the work become itself without arbitrary exhibitionism. If you’re in Athens in the next two months and happen to have a bottle of wine, you can hear some. Speaking of arbitrary exhibitionism, and while we’re navel gazing, I confess this is my greatest disappointment […]
Journal - Poetry
Livelihood
I look up from the square display, frustrated with the problem of tangled information, its lossiness. Outside: weathered stone, eye-shaped leaves green, sun-drunk, serpent tongues, genital nerves, rhizomes, tendrils, fractal worlds. I rub my eyes, return; tap tap tapping monospace code, the one thing on earth I get paid for.
Journal - Poetry
Pythagorean Hymn
Sphere and cylinder, skeleton formulas of thought, yet walk on shrieking chalk heels these neural corridors, float and grin ghostlike through dusty synaptic nodes. The god of mathematics laughs at his supposed disproof. Pythagoras is stretched like Prometheus, the hypotenuse drawn out, bisected by the future pencil. For him I will sacrifice the first of the looseleaf flock, ring the bell theory and construct the imaginary field from the real.
Journal
A tale of two carrots
I offer a brief observation on a long-running debate: “carrot on a stick” and “the carrot or the stick” are two different metaphors, with two very different meanings. Mostly I have encountered folks who use “the carrot or the stick” denying that the other phrase makes any sense, and claiming that it’s a mistake. This only proves that they don’t understand it. “The carrot or the stick,” as is widely observed, is a simple metaphor for reward vs. punishment. It is useful for those who want to talk about situations where either reward or punishment can be offered as strategic […]
Journal - Poetry
Grandmother Corntassel
Grandmother Corntassel from the rolling Cherokee woods had known seventeen summers when she married John Bradley, grandson of an immigrant from Yorkshire to Virginia. When I was young I thought all ancestors lost,* shadows on a dusty cart-path that decades effaced and centuries built over. But are they not here, encircling uslike we are the spirits they summoned, and is this not their dust on our soles? Ancestors may even be tricksters, laughing at our fresh feet in the corpse-soil, our fresh eyes on the old stars, our fresh fears in the anxious human-harassed world where they fucked and sang their way through things […]
Journal
Walt keeps singing
In my dream I’m walking with my love S. and we meet in Leo D. in the street. It is night, in Portland; he informs us of an event. It isn’t exactly a production, but all manner of artists and actors are there. He leads us toward a warehouse building; through a momentarily open door I can see Alex R. reclined, but attentive, in an armchair. The closed door that we reach has a square translucent window, slightly amber-orange with almost-a-letter formed from strips of tape – perhaps an H, or a T. Leo opens and we enter, and the […]
Journal
The only song
The surface of the world hums and throbs with songs. A stoned neighbor’s 70’s-radio playlist. A restaurant kitchen’s thrashy closing jams. A mother’s lullaby and a father’s lullaby. An opera singer’s audition. Dungeon industrial tracks. The call to prayer. The tipsy empire of karaoke. A nervous adolescent’s talent-show premiere. A crackling crooner from a digitized 78, uploaded. A paved-urban-playground song. A smores-smudged camp sing-along. A sneering, snappy set opener at the club. A busker’s folksified pop cover. Ecstatic humming and wailing in a village ritual. The junior college musical production. Dharma-chanting in the zendo. Ironic anti-songs at the new music […]
Journal
Learning my first rembetika
ΌΣΟ ΜΕ ΜΑΛΏΝΕΙΣ is the song — my first rembetika to learn instrumentally on guitar. The part I’m working on is normally on bouzouki (and other instruments, e.g. accordion and violin). I will learn at least a dozen of these bouzouki melodies on guitar, perhaps many more, by next spring, when I’ll be in Athens and plan to buy a bouzouki of my own. I have read the part from sheet music, but the recording is the real guide. Rembetika is like jazz or bluegrass in this sense — the melodies transcribed in books rarely tell the whole story. Often […]
Journal
The boy with no ancestors
A boy thought of Ancestors. He thought of an old village he had never seen, a language he had never heard. He thought of fires and hunts and births and gods. He thought of what home would have meant. A boy thought, “I have no Ancestors.” A boy thought, “I have television and plastic toys and shopping centers. I have songs on the radio that are dumb, played over and over, songs I don’t want to hear, songs made by nobody I know. I have a broken family. I have a mother at war with a father. I have parents […]
Journal
What AI can’t replace
AI can’t replace people in a room together reading poetry. AI can’t replace people gathered in a café making music. AI can’t replace the artist’s open studio where you see the mess as well as the work. AI can’t replace the show a local producer puts together with local aerialists and dancers. AI can’t replace the conversation at the pub. AI can’t replace the hours of solitude or the hours of social observation that led to your exquisite short story. AI can’t replace the meal improvised from what’s coming up in the garden. AI can’t replace the flirtation, the encouragement, […]
Journal
Our rich soil
Dead things fall into a million mouths, delicious material to tear apart and recycle, a heap of latent treasures for future shoots, flowers, boughs and antlers. I look at the remnants of art that have fallen, becoming our rich soil, these beautifully disintegrating attempts, brittle soul-leaves dropped from the skeletal limbs of decayed royalty, obsolete aristocracy. Nothing is lost here. The old gods, the great works, the dead dilettantes – their molecules are in your mouth.
Journal - Satire
Announcing McTribute
(Portland, Oregon) A new restaurant project is promising to bring back the gangbuster Portland culinary scene, by going where the local, creative farm-to-table has feared to tread: the comfortable familiarity of the global commercial food industry. A goal of the nascent effort is to bring economic relief to chefs who have lost businesses to the one-two punch of pre-pandemic real estate frenzy and pandemic shutdowns. Setting aside the experimental devolution of Portland’s indie past, the new restaurant will give chefs a nightly opportunity to “cover” successful dishes from America’s most popular restaurants including Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, and Applebees. There […]
Journal
Silent movies on the moon
Light travels through a vacuum; this is good news for art. We could watch a silent movie on the moon, or see a gallery opening on an asteroid, or read a book of poetry on a spacewalk. Assuming we don’t convert sound to electromagnetic transmission, to enjoy a concert we will still need air or some similar gang of molecules, bouncing the waves from the orchestra or loudspeakers into our ears. These materialist signal-transmission mechanisms omit the key element though. The physics of art can happen, theoretically, without the soul, but the medium is not the defining aspect. If we […]
Journal
Dusk-dreaming
The equinox sunrise glows gray behind the curtain. A bird’s shadow flies, close by. I know there will be equal hours of dark and light outside. This will change quickly; parity is not equilibrium. The shadow will spread more, across each day. Here’s a trick our ancestors knew in their smoky villages: in the winter, make things. Fill the cooling evenings with something you can create with your hands, with your voice, with your dusk-dreaming.