another comment of mine that will never see the light of day at Media Matters:

Out of all those groups it is the white guys who are the most afraid--after two hundred years of making the rules they are being pushed out into the cold to shift for themselves like every one else. Slice it up anyway you like, they don't like taking orders from no black guy. Their white Christian nation no longer exists, not that it ever really did.

All the idiotic accusations, the endless stream of lies, the conspiracies and junk mail--are to be read as one thing, maintaining their position, and it's a losing battle even if they were to take to the streets with their toy rifles and righteous indignation, the tide will sweep them aside. In 10 or 15 years, despite their idiot denial the rise of global change will cause a shift in population so vast that it will overrun the iron curtain and tanks stationed on their precious border. The picayune squabbles of an elitist minority will seem laughable, and it will be an entirely new America that will deal with the problem.


:::not that it matters anyway:::

financial reform?

Wall street has already bought one political party and at least half of another is kept in its back pocket just in case. As if that weren't enough there is an unearthly silence from the tea party--a bit of cosmetics, a symbolic slap on the wrist and its back to the festivities. Seems to me the wherewithal for the intangibles comes from the defense industry's insatiable thirst for gadgets to hurt people with--that is the gold, the hard cash, the product itself. All the rest of it is just worthless paper; the creation of overactive imaginations with nothing really much to do. The endless numbers nothing more than the evolution of alchemy, base metal changed into gold, or its modern equivalent. No-one wants to look directly at the sun of course; to sever one's connections to the source is to slowly starve to death. As long as the illusion is kept intact, the cattle will amble from the pasture each morning and line up dutifully at the trough.

here now! look at this Number, on page 8 of section 9--which is entirely fictitious but is made to appear not so by the adding of this and so & so, creatively, almost as if it were the magic castle in which Sleeping Beauty is at rest, and so far, every Prince that comes along has been bought & sold, or hung on the long thorns until he turns to bone.

Expect the lie. In the Empire there is no truth, and the Republic was a dream someone had a long time ago.

some feeble attempts at translation:




La Beauté
by Charles Baudelaire





I am beautiful, O mortals! as a dream stone
And my breast, where everyone was bruised in turn,
Is made to inspire love for the poet.
Eternal and mute as matter.
I sit in the sky like a sphinx

I combine a snowheart to the whiteness of swans;
I hate all movement that disturbs the lines
As to my emotion
I neither laugh nor cry

Poets, before my poses, that I steal
from the proudest masterpieces
study will eat up your days

For I, to entertain the docile lovers,
have pure mirrors to change these things to beauty
my eyes, my eyes wide in the endless light.



La Mort des Amants
by Charles Baudelaire







We shall have a bed of light scents,
sofas as deep tombs,
strange flowers on shelves,
birthed for us under a sweeter sky.

Employing their last hot season in this world,
Our two hearts will be torches,
Which will reflect the light
into our two minds, these twin mirrors.
As evening will play rose and mystic blue,

We shall exchange a flash of lightning,
As a long sob bloated with goodbyes;
and later an Angel will open doors,
Will come to revive, dutiful and happy,
The tarnished mirrors and the dead fire.


.................


dissatisfaction has led me down this path. seems like most translations are stilted,
and actually repress the Poet. He was the first Modernist, I should like to see him kept so...

The Gears

Old Ben said if you give up liberty for security, you're screwed--
well, he didn't say it quite like that, he lived in a more refined age.

Ours is one of self-appointed Messiahs who preach the doctrine of the dollar supported by the Christian God against all enemies, foreign & domestic--the president of course being all three is particularly demonized--

not to put too great a spin upon it--the Republic has always been fractious, splintered, divided & savage but the electronic media in league with a primitive ideology is a dangerous new brew for the production of demagogues; once the seed is planted in the mind of the gullible it is hard to remove. Thankfully, most of those subverted are aged and apt to pass away in the next 20 years or so, we are left to ponder on just much more power the oligarchs can accrue to themselves and how much the next generation will become accustomened to their rule in that span.

One must bear in mind that the State has been elitist since its inception--the plebs have made inroads here and there but the basics remain in place. Underneath the noise is an erosion of this aristocracy in the face of a new multiculturalism that is driving the Messiahs to ever greater dementia & frustration. The most visible manifestation of that change is the Man in the white house--it should be noted that they have come to tolerate women as long as they maintain the status quo, that is, Eve as helpmate to Adam--(Bachman-Palin Syndrome)but those that step out of it and claim equality or God forbid primacy are to be assumed to be agents of the Devil, the Clinton-Pelosi syndrome.

Caesar was killed not because he was a tyrant (that question is not answered by History) but rather because he threatened the wealth of the oligarchs--as was true of the Gracchi--rarely are the oligarchs themselves dispatched, but it has occurred generally under the guise of a "new" government as in Britain & France--the elite prefer assassination it seems for shall we say continuity,--the Kennedys, Martin Luther King. Just as an aside consider why would a communist murder John Kennedy, a liberal democrat with an ambitious program for social reform that moved the country towards equality--that he did I have no doubt, but the motivation seems skewed to me. Maybe the textbooks in Texas could enlighten me as to how that all worked out.

I am hopeful we will stumble on for another hundred years or so, until the factions becomes so polarised they can no longer be kept from each other's throats, the institutions break down by even more glaring incompetence than we see now, and the system of checks & balances erode to the point that we acquiesce to the first Man in Rome--someone like Boehner who waits quietly for the opening, the crack in the facade.

Might be worth remembering he will step forward to "save the Republic," not just fix it.

'In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its parts seems light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.' Basho








"Pound said that poetry could be divided according to three essential elements: phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia – the play of image, music, and meaning. In his manifestos for imagism and vorticism he advanced a poetry stripped of all nonessential elements, where every word makes a necessary contribution to the poem, “which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

Bernstein.

Reference--call it bedrock.


derivations:


"Meaning is not a capitalist construct, as they claim, but meaninglessness is, and 9/11 was an explosion of meaning in the prevailing media-fantasy unreality of the nation."

http://poeticinvention.blogspot.com/


"Romanticism marks the shift from thinking of poetry as a “craft” (and of the poet as “maker”) to thinking of it as a provoker of consciousness, even a creator of consciousness."



If poetry is particularly the domain of the “inner life,” then it is precisely not the domain of the I. The notion that poetry is the domain of the I comes from the ideology of individualism—a term whose etymology insists that we are “not divided.” If we are individuals, then of course we are most authentic when we speak from the point of view of our individuality, from the point of view of our I. But what if the I is in fact multiple, divided, full of many contradictory elements not all of which are even recognized? What if the I is not the unity that the word I presupposes it to be? What sort of poetry is generated by such a conception of the “inner life”? What was the “Romantic” stance about such matters?

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/02/reconfiguring-romanticism-37-jack-fo ley.html


yet we are dealt this hand:

"Data in the 21st century is largely ephemeral, because it is so easily produced: a machine creates it, uses it for a few seconds and overwrites it as new data arrives. Some data is never examined at all, such as scientific experiments that collect so much raw data that scientists never look at most of it. Only a fraction ever gets stored on a medium such as a hard drive, tape or sheet of paper. yet even ephemeral data often has ‘descendents’ — new data based on the old. Think of data as oil and information as gasoline: a tanker of crude oil is not useful until it arrives, its cargo unladed and refined into gasoline that is distributed to service stations. Data is not information until it becomes available to potential consumers of that information. On the other hand, data, like crude oil, contains potential value.”

Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, “How Much Information? 2009: Report on American Consumers”, Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego, December 9, 2009

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/a-textual-ecosystem/



From Silliman's "huts"


192. A friend, a member of the Old Left, challenges my aesthetic. How, he asks, can one write so as not to “communicate”? I, in turn, challenge his definitions. It is a more crucial lesson, I argue, to learn how to experience language directly, to tune one’s senses to it, than to use it as a mere means to an end… [which] is, in bourgeois life, common to all things, even the way we “use” our friends… But language, so that it is experienced directly, moves beyond any such exercise in despair, an unalienated language. He wants an example. I give him [Robert] Grenier’s
thumpa
thumpa
thumpa
thump
pointing out how… it is a speech that only borders on language, how it illumines
that space. He says, “I don’t understand.” (Huts 63)



"how it illumines that space."
(fills an "Emptiness")
The direct experience of the "thing"--in this case,
language. might be said, that Mr Williams, and Mr.
Silliman fail admirably. No harm in trying I don't
suppose--but the wheelbarrow bears the entire
weight of the human endeavor on its back,

John Browns Body In repose
thumpa
thumpa
thumpa
thump.