a sugar of the malocclusions

aside from the heavily anthologized "we real cool" i hadn't read a line of gwendolyn brooks until the other day. the selected poems that's in print first appeared all the way back in 1963, adding only a few "new" poems after the bean eaters (1960), thus missing out on the entire impact of the black nationalist movement on her poetry. this too marks, as i understand it, her move away from mainstream publishing houses (harper & row) and her earlier formalist and more visibly and earnestly "modernist" style into free verse and a more direct kind of language and portraiture (fully realized in 1968's in the mecca).

curiously, and while i have not seen much of the former, it's the latter i'm more immediately drawn to, like the poems from annie allen (1949). stanzas like the following from her mock/mini-epic "the anniad":

Yet there was a drama, drought
Scarleted about the brim
Not with blood alone for him,
Flood, with blossom in between
Retch and wheeling and cold shout,
Suffocation, with a green
Moist sweet breath for mezzanine

* * *

Tests forbidden taffeta.
Meteors encircle her.
Little lady lost her twill,
Little lady who lost her fur
Shivers in her thin hurrah,
Pirouettes to pleasant shrill
Appoggiatura with a skill.

this is supertight formalism: seven-syllable lines, three trochees with an extra strong beat at the end, and seven-line stanzas with three endrhymes (two in pairs and one in threes in no set pattern). the soundplay is rich, the diction alternating between plain and stylized, the syntax compressed, the imagery striking... all packs quite a punch.

here's an entire poem from the section of annie allen called "the womanhood," one that starts off in a seemingly uninteresting "observations about life" mode but quickly turns into a stunning array of sensible and sonic ingenuity, culminating in the phrase that serves as the subject line of this email.

People who have no children can be hard:
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:
Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense
Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.
And when wide world is bitten and bewarred
They perish purely, waving their spirits hence
Without a trace of grace or of offense
To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.
While through a throttling dark we others hear
The little lifting helplessness, the queer
Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous
Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.
And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of
The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.

the metaphor "mail of ice" tells me straightaway i'm in for something interesting. lines 5 and 6 have some great alliteration, and the movement line 8 from the infinitives to the extended modifiers is great. the third "quatrain" continues the rich play of sound and striking images "throttling dar," "whimper-whine," all of which set up the repetitions of the verb "to make" in the closing couplet and that stunning metaphor, "a sugar of the malocclusions."

it's really no curiosity why these lines appeal to me, but i can't help feeling like they're caught in an uneasy dynamic. i think of melvin tolson, a clear master of modern style, admired by allen tate but then dismissed by a younger generation of black poets for his embrace of white/european forms. it's a tension all over the early baraka, and you can see it in harryette mullen as well (in tall tree woman vs trimmings). with brooks it's clearly not a simple choice between anglo-modernism or afro-realism, since traces of both run throughout the 1963 selected poems. i'll have to check out her post-1968 work.

clearly this is also a major body of work whose time is right for for a collected edition of some kind or other.

schumann and the short form in romantic piano

pretty pleased with this purchase, a bargain-priced 4CD set that i picked up for half-price over the weekend. i've been wanting a good set of schumann for a while, and this set takes me back to the days when i was borrowing classical LPs from the georgetown branch of the dc public library and recording them onto cassette, this musta been some 15 years ago. claudio arrau's carnaval op. 9 on phillips, a young murray perahia's davidsbündlertänze op. 6 and fantasiestücke op.12 for CBS, and some crackly old turnabout or vox label recordings by walter klein, including my one of my favorites not included in this kempff set, faschingsschwank aus wien op. 26.

kempff does a mean final schubert sonata and also pretty nice readings of the late beethovens (tho not as great as gilels) so i assumed he'd do a more than competant schumann and so far i've not been disappointed. these are old recordings -- mostly early-to-mid 1970s but some as far back as 1967 -- so they don't always have super crisp modern production values but often have a nice warmth, like with the lovely chopinesque opening of the papillons op.2. the "preamble" of the carnaval op. 9 could be a little more fiery for my taste perhaps, the "pierrot" a little more woozey. tho i know the early pieces (opp. 1-28) the best and kempff concentrates on these because he considers them superior to schumann's later work, there's still plenty of stuff i don't know and look forward to discovering, including the fantasy op. 17 which i seem to remember as having the reputation as his single best solo piano work.

schumann is such a great melodist and like his student brahms he could concentrate so much into a turn of phrase, but he's also a miniaturist like chopin. this has me thinking now about distinctions between practitioners of the short form in romantic piano. surely as goethe was so dominant a figure in german poetry that he drove many subsequent would-be-poets into philosophy, beethoven's sonatas drove composers into shorter forms for piano. the collections of short pieces by chopin and schuman dwarf anything they accomplished in the sonata. (even schumann's great long piece for piano is the fantasy rather than any sonatas i think).

and yet chopin's mazurkas, for example, feel like complete whole while his 24 preludes are these flashes of brilliance that could each be fleshed out into its own full-length sonata i feel. so i guess the question i'm posing is the relation between thematic material and the feel for the whole, that is whether the short piece feels like a fragment or whole unto itself. brahms of couse got his piano sonata out of the way early and ended up with those collections of shorts late in his career (which i also have kempff doing but have never gotten into much). maybe i'll be listening for this stuff in the days to come.

simmons, coltrane etc.

kevin asks:

> Can someone listen to the first track of Sonny Simmons' Burning
> Spear and tell me what Mingus tune he is deconstructing?
>

is there a specific moment in the track? cuz i've got it going here now and can't hear no mingus, but you know the mingus better than me. what i do hear in simmons' initial statements over the ensemble (0:37-0:38) is a two-note descending figure at an interval of (i think) a fifth that's very very close to the opening of coltrane's "father son and holy ghost" (from MEDITATIONS), occurring six times from 0:37 to 1:04. plus simmons' embellishments of that motif (0:47-0:49, 0:59-1:04) strike me as being very coltranesque figures. then the very first statement in his solo proper (1:25-1:25), which is also the song's opening theme, sounds like a little nod at "a love supreme" or perhaps even "sun ship." it makes sense too that since simmons is, i believe, playing tenor on this track, he would make some coltrane references.

clifford jarvis is such a great under-recognized drummer (as evidenced by john gilmore, a consequence of spending your career with sun ra). he offers that same churning, bubbling drive that he contributes to the sun ra recodings he's on. (and dig it: that's him on jackie mclean's RIGHT NOW as well!)

and talk about how trumpeters always get overlooked -- how great is barbara donald? what a bright, near blistering tone. violinist michael white reminds me of billy bang a bit here, far less frenetic than his aylerian namesake michael sampson. (the clarity of this recording relative to some of those live aylers.) i feel like i know the two bass players here, cecil mcbee and richard davis, pretty well but am at a loss to distinguish them here (even tho the liner notes indicate who's in what channel).

this is a great performance, thanks for reminding me of it.

http://www.sonnysimmons.org/

Nester and Gaughran-Perez at BPH

my first trip to the burlesque poetry hour all year, unfortunately monday nights not usually being a good night out for me. but school being out and me finishing off a low-key holiday weekend and mark wallace being in town all seemed like the perfect combination of excuses (reasons?) to hear dan nester, whom i read with at the zinc bar a few years ago, and jamie gaughran-perez, whom i've heard a number of times in various haunt. (karl parker was a no-show.)

jamie's set offered a variety of work, some individual poems including a kind of twisted valentine for tracey, along with excerpts from two larger projects. one was something he called tender buttons skulls i think (depicted left), in which texts was accompanied by b&w images of skulls. not sure what the relationship was between the two but my impression was of a tribute/ratcheting-up of stein: indeed one of the poems was a delicious heap of shredded verbiage. the other project involves dialogues for different kinds of robots. i've heard jamie read these before and they are very hilarious, playing with ideas of cyberlove and safe versus dangerous internet behavior for children. the dialogues are full of all kinds of inappropriate Qs and As, and jamie's friend john served his interlocutorial duties well.

dan read the "bohemian rhapsody" poem from his tribute book to the rock band queen (even tho he offered to take requests and a number of us shouted "killer queen"). i'm less a fan of the schtick than dan is developing, which seems to take masturbation as one focal point (nothing wrong with that per se of course, his efforts to be frank and open about it are not entirely convincing to me) than of his autobiographical mode in which his love of music of all kinds, his aspirations, fears and uncertainties shine forth with a straight-up honesty that's very refreshing. was good to chat with him too and find out that he's happy in albany with a good job and a good poetry crew in the neighborhood.

in the auctions that ensued after each reader, jamie's kiddie crotch socks fetched a mere $10 while dan's madras button-down shirt went for around $40, the deal having been sweetened with a copy of dan's book and the promise of other favors.

more pix here. next month: evie shockley and ken rumble plus a player to be named later!

addington, enron, torture, plame

in his illustrious career as cheney's lawyer, david addington doubtless was involved in the secrecy surrounding the VP's infamous energy task force.

The task force's stealthy operation reflects Cheney's distaste for publicity. Following news reports about the private nature of the energy deliberations, congressional Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Government Reform Committee requested information about the groups the task force met with. Cheney's counsel, David Addington, rebuffed the request, arguing there was no legal requirement to comply. ("Power politics Energy crisis can leave a presidency in the dark," The Seattle Times, May 17, 2001, Pg. A3.)

e.j. dionne spotted this in a wapo editorial five years ago:

At the request of congressional Democrats, the General Accounting Office demanded this week that the vice president turn over material on how the administration developed its energy policy and who helped it make its decisions.

Up to now, the administration has argued that doing so would get in the way of internal deliberations and violate executive privilege. In a letter written May 16, David Addington, counsel to the vice president, wrote: "It appears that the GAO may intend to intrude into the heart of executive deliberations, including deliberations among the president, the vice president, members of the president's Cabinet, and the president's immediate assistants, which the law protects to ensure the candor in executive deliberations necessary to effective government." ("What's Cheney Hiding?", July 20, 2001, Pg. A31.)

(dionne's column also pulls out this gem, all the more ironic now given who now sits at the white house press secretary's desk: "Tony Snow, the conservative commentator, wrote in a 1994 column: 'If the Clinton administration comes to an unhappy end, the president's political epitaph will read: Secrecy did him in.' Snow argued that the president 'wants to cook up deals, issue orders and take credit -- without interruptions by voters or journalists.' Now that's an interesting thought to ponder in 2001." even more so in 2006!)

of course, when henry waxman as minority leader on the house committee on government reform was trying to investigate enron's roll in cheney's energy task force, addington balked. all the correspondence can be found here and here. a january 3, 2002 letter from addington to waxman revealed that now-convicted criminal ken lay met with dick cheney and the energy task force a total of six times, addington was there to deflect:

In an indication of just how much political influence Enron Chief Executive Ken Lay wielded at the Bush White House, Cheney attorney David Addington said his boss met with Lay for about half an hour April 17.

That was at a time when Cheney was busy crafting the administration's national energy strategy and California regulators were battling with Enron and other independent power producers over that state's electricity woes.

"They discussed energy policy matters, including the energy crisis in California, and did not discuss information concerning the financial position of the Enron Corporation," Addington wrote in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., dated Jan. 3 and released by Waxman's office Tuesday.(David Ivanovich, "VP, aides met 6 times with Enron," The Houston Chronicle, January 09, 2002, Pg. 01.)

strikes me that, now that lay has been found a convicted criminal, this might all be worth looking into again.

of course this is not the only white house scandal that this guy has a hand in. there's the question of his role in drafting the torture memo, which has been hinted at here and there but has generally gone under-explored. according to dana priest, "David S. Addington, Cheney's counsel, also weighed in with remarks during at least one meeting he held with Justice lawyers involved with writing the opinion. He was particularly concerned, sources said, that the opinion include a clear-cut section on the president's authority." ("CIA Puts Harsh Tactics On Hold," The Washington Post, June 27, 2004 Sunday, A01.)

there's the valerie plame CIA leak scandal, which he's got his hands in all the way up to fingering the president as the one who authorized the leak: "Mr. Libby testified that he was unsure of his authority to reveal the information before he met Ms. Miller, so he spoke with David Addington, then a lawyer for Mr. Cheney whom Mr. Libby regarded as an expert on national security law. 'Mr. Addington opined that presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to declassification of the document,' the filing by Mr. Fitzgerald said." (David Johnston and David, E. Sanger, "Cheney's Aide Says President Approved Leak," NYTimes, April 7, 2009, Page 1.)

there's also a curious reference to addington in a boston globe article discussing the CIA's involvement in afghanistan, implying that the VP's office was trying to keep an eye on george tenet and leading me to wonder if this continued on into the bogus case for war in iraq. "Vice President Dick Cheney has advanced his special counsel, David Addington, for the position of CIA general counsel. One official said it was a signal that Cheney wanted to keep close tabs on Tenet." (John Donnelly, "Fighting Terror in the Military Campaign: CIA Takes on Major New Military Role in Afghan War," The Boston Globe, January 20, 2002, Pg. A1.)

here's a pretty extensive backgrounder on addington by dana milbank ("In Cheney's Shadow, Counsel Pushes the Conservative Cause," The Washington Post, October 11, 2004).

and an NYTimes maureen dowd op-ed piece reprinted at truthout.org

addington, cheney and signing statements

this looks like it might get some legs, first reported by charlie savage in yesterday's boston globe and now picked up by the UPI wire. it's worth reading the whole thing but i've pulled what i take to be key passages below.

Cheney aide is screening legislation

WASHINGTON -- The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials.

The officials said Cheney's legal adviser and chief of staff, David Addington, is the Bush administration's leading architect of the "signing statements" the president has appended to more than 750 laws. The statements assert the president's right to ignore the laws because they conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.

The Bush-Cheney administration has used such statements to claim for itself the option of bypassing a ban on torture, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and numerous requirements that they provide certain information to Congress, among other laws.

Previous vice presidents have had neither the authority nor the interest in reviewing legislation. But Cheney has used his power over the administration's legal team to promote an expansive theory of presidential authority. Using signing statements, the administration has challenged more laws than all previous administrations combined.[...]

Knowing that Addington was likely to review the bills, other White House and Justice Department lawyers began vetting legislation with Addington's and Cheney's views in mind, according to another former lawyer in the Bush White House.[...]

Cheney and Addington have a long history. Addington was a Republican staff member on the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, while Cheney was the ranking GOP House member. When Cheney became defense secretary under President George H. W. Bush , he hired Addington as Pentagon counsel.[...]

In October, when Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby , was indicted for perjury and resigned, Cheney replaced Libby with Addington.[...]

The use of signing statements was rare until the 1980s, when President Ronald W. Reagan began issuing them more frequently. His successors continued the practice. George H. W. Bush used signing statements to challenge 232 laws over four years, and Bill Clinton challenged 140 over eight years, according to Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University of Ohio.[...]

Bush has used the signing statements to waive his obligation to follow the new laws. In addition to the torture ban and oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, the laws Bush has claimed the authority to disobey include restrictions against US troops engaging in combat in Colombia, whistle-blower protections for government employees, and safeguards against political interference in taxpayer-funded research.[...]

Mainstream legal scholars across the political spectrum reject Cheney's expansive view of presidential authority, saying the Constitution gives Congress the power to make all rules and regulations for the military and the executive branch and the Supreme Court has consistently upheld laws giving bureaucrats and certain prosecutors the power to act independently of the president.[...]

In December 2005, shortly after the warrantless wiretapping program was exposed, Cheney gave a rare press conference to explain why he believed the program was legal. ...He told reporters to read a 1987 report whose production he oversaw when he was a leading Republican in the House of Representatives. The report offered a dissenting view about the Iran-Contra scandal.[...]

A congressional committee issued a 427-page report concluding that a "cabal of zealots" in the administration who had "disdain for the law" had violated the statute. But some of the Republicans on the committee, led by Cheney, refused to endorse that finding. They issued their own 155-page report asserting the real problem was Congress passing laws that intruded into a president's authority to run foreign policy and national security.

"Judgments about the Iran-Contra affair ultimately must rest upon one's views about the proper roles of Congress and the president in foreign policy," Cheney's report said. "The fundamental law of the land is the Constitution. Unconstitutional statutes violate the rule of law every bit as much as do willful violations of constitutional statutes."

Cheney's report includes a lengthy argument that the Constitution puts the president beyond the reach of Congress when it comes to national security. Some 18 years later, the Justice Department would repeat these same arguments in a 42-page memo arguing that Bush's warrantless wiretapping program is a lawful exercise of presidential power.

further evidence (as if we needed any) that these people are not conservatives but authoritarians and that we are in the midst of unprecedented abuses of executive power. can a vice-president be impeached?

(thanks to laura rozen for the tip. USN&WR has an extensive profile on addington in today's issue though it was available online as early as wednesday of last week. christy hardin smith at firedoglake has an extended take on this as well.)

(dig also this classic washington times version of reality. headline: "Cheney aide protects Bush on bills." story: "An aide to Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly has the job of seeing to it that new legislation would not infringe on presidential power.")

bush and truman

tho this blog's gone quiet the past week, like i told rod, it's only a matter of time before bush says something stupid...

of course at his press conference with tony blair earlier in the week, bush displayed his politically expedient newfound admission of policy mistakes in iraq -- one wonders, will he be held accountable in any way for these mistakes?

yesterday at a commencement speech at west point, bush compared himself favorably with harry truman. "By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the cold war."

those actions include the most heinous single acts of carnage this world has ever seen, namely the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki. the justification at the time was that those lives had to be expended so that more lives would be saved, but it's quite possible that no lives had to be lost at all. japan was in bad shape at the time and may have been ready to surrender. our government knew this because we had broken their code, but we insisted on unconditional surrender. we also knew that the russians were going to enter the war ninety days after the end of fighting in europe. the atomic bombings were, from this vantage point, a pure and simple assertion of U.S. military primacy over the world.

truman had to have known the amount of destruction the bomb would cause. so when he stated in his august 9 radio speech, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians," he has to have known that what he "wished" and what resulted were not commensurate.

obviously bush would like to be compared with truman, a guy who made a tough but necessary decision, but it's really an inaccurate comparison. iraq was far and away a way of choice waged under false pretenses and with insufficient planning. and if truman was not an outright liar, he was at the very least duped and probably not duped by his advisors but by himself. such is the best to which our president can aspire, but reality will thwart his aspirations.

ausias march

discovery of the week: you're in the second story books warehouse in rockville, 50% off everything in the store, trolling through the poetry section and there's this weird, thin green-and-beige spined book with the words "edinburgh bilingual library" and "selected poems" by someone you've never heard of printed on it, so of course you pick it up and read.

Ausias March (1397-1459) is widely recognized as the finest poet working anywhere in Europe between Chaucer and Villon.

i mean that's pretty much all you need to read in order to confirm this as a must purchase; a penciled-in $1.50 on the inside first page upper-right corner merely guarantees that this will be an inexpensive gamble that is almost certain to pay off. but you read on.

That he wrote in Catalan has restricted full appreciation to specialist scholars. This is unfortunate, for not merely the quality of his poetry, but equally its content, give it a necessary place in this history of medieval courtly poetry, especially in that March significantly modifies the tradition, replacing it in part with a tormented introspection, brooding on morality, on death, on the conflict between spirit and passionate flesh. Across two centuries he beckons to Donne.

how entirely all over this am i? turns out there was for all intents and purposes no catalan poetry prior to ausias march because they all wrote in provençal like his buddies to the north. in 1213 tho, king peter I of aragon was killed at the battle of muret, fighting in defense of the albigensians (oh it's so robert duncan and da vinci code!), at which point catalonia and provençe begin to go their own ways. by the 1270s, ramon llull is able to establish catalan as a medium for literary prose, but his entirely religious and sometimes mystical poetry is still all written in provençal. aside from one jordi de saint jordi, who wrote late troubadour poetry in a slightly catalanized provençal but died in 1425 in his early twenties before he could develop it further, it's all up to ausias march.

i so rarely read back in the tradition this far that i don't have a good sense for what's a genuine troubadour sentiment, what's late parody, etc. or how catalan differs linguistically from provençal (they look pretty similar to me, tho if you have any romance languages you can definitely get the gist of it). i don't think i could spot trobar clus if it came up and bit me on the nose. but here's a stanza from ausias march (followed by a prose translation by arthur terry):

Alt e amor, d'on gran desig s'engendra,
e esper vinent per tots aquests graons,
me són delits, mas dòna'm passions
la por del mal, qui em fa magrir carn tendra;
e port al cor sens fum continu foc,
e la calor no em surt a part de fora.
Socorreu-me dins los térmens d'una hora,
car mos senyals demostren viure poc.

Pleasure and love, from which great desire is born, and hope, which passes through all these stages, are sources of delight to me, but the fear of misfortune, which makes my tender flesh grow thin, brings me suffering; and I carry in my heart a continual fire without smoke, and the heat does not reach my outer part. Help me within the space of an hour, for my symptoms show that I shall not live much longer.

the hell with donne, how about reaching across four centuries to baudelaire? "la por del mal" is so, so close to "la puer du mal" and "les fleurs du mal" -- rock on, ausias!

galatea resurrects #2

the latest galatea resurrects, edited by eileen tabios, is up and, uniquely in her editorial practice apparently, contains reviews in abundance. 35 "new reviews" of 39 new poetry publications, of which i can safely say that i have only heard of 14 of the poets whose work is being reviewed.

that's 25 out of 39 poets, nearly two out of every three, that i have never heard of before. and it's not like i just crawled out of a cave or something. so much for keeping on top of things. i mean i will never read all 39 of these publications -- and who knows what good work i might be missing as a result. it's getting to the point now where we need reviews of the reviews. or a compliation of quoted passages.

which is what i've done here. if you like any of these head to the mag itself and comb through those reviews, or lemme know and i can get you the cite. i've pulled from reviews in the order they appear, typically taking the first quoted passage from the review. (if there wasn't one i skipped that review.)i know it's yanking these things out of the context but reading any of it's better than reading none at all i figure.


* [1]

I am talking about an antechamber
of words
petrified forest of images
faucets dripping from the underground
a ball of wax and second class citizens
a replica who counts
ad infinitum
till the bones are crushed to the last breath

* [2]

Into the glass the sunset and its long arm
Raindrops dissolve low visibility equals grey light
Like my eyes like yours and other reference points
The playing card is the traffic island

* [3]

In the film jet fuel froze but
the hero could still light
a match. Is that science?
It's hard to say something
intelligent about a dishtowel, so
I hung one up instead.
Every moment a zen master
Slap. Thanks for the link
to the self-defense nightstand.

* [4]

What exists but now, wet and pulmonary,
rinsed of context like two glasses used to mix a drink—
what’s not soluble in liquid exchange?
Personally, I’d trade my kingdom for your clavicle,
the chance to draw a bow across the viola of your hips.

* [5]

chill reflect the myriad
of hopefuls & the din's aswirlin here
like the way reason flames this season . . .
put down that card and roll . . .
(blackjack)

* [6]

to know how those kept out
set foot inside, sat down, and how
the mirrors around the lunch counter
reflected the face
to face—the cross-mirrored depth reached
infinitely back into either—
the one pouring the bowl over the head of
the one sitting in
at that counter.

* [7]

Indigenous eyes, the hardness
of shale. Indigenous sky,
colorless. Wind wakes
the wanting of the weeds.
Fire frees the founding of the fence.
The sea slays the slicing
of the seasons. Rock
rocks the rocking of rage
into stone. Let it turn you
to salt. Let it lick you into
rapids. Make it see you
into stars.

* [8]

Our two, worth their maximum and minimum,
perambulate, perform. Parabola, ellipsis, ellipses:
I would like to mention discontinuity at this juncture.
It slices our pair from the earth’s mantle.

* [9]

We’ll paint the bedroom yellow
Not like corn, you said, like wheat

I sleep outside and dream about my daughter.
The mountain wears a headdress
The wheat will be a mother

* [10]

Dreams
like water
keep me dry:

Yesterday
I lost
my floating board.

* [11]

Ohoh, when you’re famous
you’ll be bald, but allright
we’ll show them you had hair once
and not only where they think.

* [12]

I need a metaphor that will transform
This skeleton of passion into some
Thing that breathes fire rather than the still air
Of considered conundrums, into some
Thing that stands of its own accord against
Time and these chill unseasonable winds.

* [13]

Caller six: I cannot think.
Caller seven: You do not recollect.
Caller six: What makes my ankles grow so thick?
Caller seven: How great a calf they carry!

* [14]

Antiquities weep
blood. In the
Byzantine piazzas
of the labyrinth
pigeons pause
& whisper
Hebdomeros.

* [15]

chickenheadfred's mother sits at the bus stop
by a brown paper bag full
of old clothes entitled FREE
she complains about the younger generation
how only five years earlier
kids did not drive around in circles
shouting fuck you out windows
but now we are all hooked
on awful smoking drinking habits
we all want to quit life
there is no way around quitting
life she says

* [16]

The gods could
still arrive at my door, . . . .
make my daughters lie down
with swans, leave my grandchild chained

* [17]

...she builds another house;...tears
for bricks, and cries as loud as she can...

Still he can’t hear her because the house’s
rectangular tears are too dazzlingly beautiful

* [18]

Protestants once lived
a life of service,
but ever since the Sixties
the service has sucked.

* [19]

A drowning breath, Luisa,
begins the poem
of our making

and unmaking -- night drifting
between two days. The sea
was calm, its music impossibly

translated. Flames
curl like waves, or was it
waves curl like flames?

* [20]

while you build your fortresses high,
the saints dance and the devil
waits outside a thousand years.

* [21]

spring breeze
a spider swings
with the spider plant

* [22]

We paddled these people across the street in a canoe,
one by one.
We carried them up eight flights of stairs
to the parking garage roof.
We’re waiting for helicopters they told us would be here.
ARDS-man just croaked.
My hands are sore for squeezing that bag.
I kept him alive for four days
and now he’s kicked the bucket....

* [23]

I should have protested loudly
about some things and not at
all about others
I should have learned Spanish and German
I shouldn’t have been so easily discouraged
I should have listened to my mother
my life could have been so much better by now

* [24]

There is a season to this ripening,
the way sap of tree rises to fulfill
fruit of the topmost branch,
or the motion of jasmine
climbing trellises to show off
a single blossom at new moon tide....

* [25]

Saying goodnight is saying goodbye--
leave-takings are forever. When
you were born, time began—yet for you
there’s no such thing as time.

* [26]

Geese in tones of black and white
move about in perfect grace,
creating endless layers
of luminous whirlpools.

* [27]

When I smelled the peony, I remembered
the millennia, lives I was meant
for, all laid out
You were there.
We were the same body, separated
by the big bang, jetting into the system,
doomed to reunite.

* [28]

for every daemonic place he erects stone
archangels and infernos, exacts penance
from those driven underground, spills his seed,
his battle cry, his body presses firm dispensation.
he invents himself by extracting others’ titles.

*

which do i like? 6 (Ed Robeson), 7 (Lorna Dee Cervantes), 8 (Catherine Daly), 13 (Olivia Cronk), and 19 (Barry Schwabsky).

kaufman on lyric's constellation

patrick tipped me off to and essay in Modernist Cultures by Robert Kaufman entitled "Lyric's Constellation, Poetry’s Radical Privilege." According to the abstract, Kaufman "shows that... Benjamin and Adorno – while certainly holding no brief for “pure” formalist methodology – actually develop the constellation and force-field in urgent response to a kind of Left criticism that sloganeeringly maintains that works of art and culture are historically and sociopolitically determined....the essay turns to a too-little considered example of how lyric itself animates the theory, practice, and movement (among national cultures, languages, and literatures) of the constellation and force-field: the work of the poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988)."

anyone who does not wish to register by submitting your email address can be emailed a PDF of the article for the asking. below are my thoughts on the piece as i emailed them to patrick this morning...

----------------------

i hafta say, not being especially enamoured of dialectics and the "continental gothic" writing style he deploys, kaufman's piece is interesting i find but not without some serious flaws.

1) for all his efforts to recuperate the specific sense of "constellation," his idea of stretching past conceptual predetermination, once you cut through the thicket of jargon he has cultivated over pages 210-220, really boils down to something like a making it new or defamiliarization of/for thought-concepts. i don't see the necessity of running through these great dialectical machinations to arrive at that.

2) it's ironic that, if there really are "far too many sources" from the frankfurt school oeuvre to demonstrate the centrality of lyric for the notion of constellation, kaufman ends up choosing an adorno essay about "the *essay* as form." i know, in some sense it's all language, but if lyric is really so central to adorno, why can't kaufman find and use adorno specifically on lyric poetry? because he doens't (or can't), kaufman frequently has to make these awkward substitutions ("what adorno is saying here about the essay also applies to poetry...") -- right down to his very last sentence.

3) this is symptomatic of a larger problem with kaufman's essay, and that is what i see as the disconnect between its two hemispheres, theory and practice, adorno and duncan. i just don't see them as being a terribly good fit. and it's not just because a western marxist orientation is i think fundamentally alien to duncan (although his gnostic, heretical and kabbalistic inclinations probably do overlap in interesting ways with some aspects of benjamin's thought; the easy thing to do, and that anyone who knows what's going on in poetry would do, is ask lisa jarnot about this, find out what besides gershom scholem was in duncan's library for exmaple). kaufman wants to nuance "constellation" in a specific western marxist way in the adorno half of the paper, but this won't hold up in the duncan half because duncan clearly is not using that specifc sense of "constellation" (though i'm intrigued about this use of this word by duncan and others at the time, from eugen gomringer to clark coolidge). instead, kaufman is forced into a kind of terminological sloppiness -- constellation, configuration, conceptualization, composition -- that ultimately up-ends the rigor he is trying to maintain. sure, one can argue that these "c"-words themselves form or enact or constellate in the very manner adorno and kaufman are describing, so that the paper becomes a exercise in negative dialectics between conceptual rigor and conceptual sloppiness, or a kind of staged failure. either way, i'm not won over.

4) the reading of duncan itself i find a bit suspect. yes duncan is essentially a modernist and even a post-romantic modernist. but to say that "duncan's relationship to the aesthetics of constellation... is traceable in a fairly direct way to British Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist poetry, and, on the American side, to related developments that owe much to Whitman, Dickinson, and their lines of influence, and, above all, to Emerson" really i think quite misses the mark, particularly in the first half, from which one might easily gather that duncan is all about, i dunno, tennyson and auden. it leaves out the whole gnostic, heretical, kabbalistic angle, which the note on marcuse and norman o. browm might mislead the reader into think duncan rejected those traditions. it's like saying the language poets were inspired by joyce and pound but got into a dispute about zukofsky. makes me kinda wonder if kaufman really knows what he's talking about.

and ultimately, constellation for duncan turns out simply to be the permission to include heterodox materials into the poem -- and again when kaufman says something like "Duncan goes well beyond Olson in terms of what could be brought into, or back into, the mix" (22), i hafta wonder if he really knows what he's talking about as it strikes me olson went just as far afield in terms of what could or could not be brought into the poem. or again, "Duncan doesn't really have that much patience with this either/or, both/and dance" (223), someone who knows how important the figure of "the dance" is for duncan and how he very much, i think, embraces "both/and" would not venture such a statement.

ultimately, Kaufman's reading of duncan comes down to some rehearsal of the old form-vs-content debate, some quibbling with levertov over terminology, and a rehearsal of the duncan-levertov dispute over vietnam that doens't really offer us anything new beyond some citations from the RD-DL correspondence.

all that said, it was an interesting read. the poet in me enjoyed reading that

lyric dramatizes with special intensity modern aesthetic quasi-conceptuality's more general attempt in semblance to stretch conceptual thought proper, precisely in the aesthetic's enactment of a tought-experience that maintains the form of conceptual thought without being beholden to extant, status-quo concepts and their contents. Lyric's special formal intensity within this larger field of quasiconceptual aesthetic experience arises from lyric's historically constitutive need to stretch in semblance, via its musicality, the very medium of 'objective' conceptual tought, language -- to stretch language quasiconceptually, mimetically, all the way toward affect and song but without relinquishing any of the rigor and complexity of conceptual intellection, so thta in a semblance-charcater vital to the possibility of critical agency, speech can appear as sone and song can legitimately *seem* to be logical, purposeful speech-act" (212).

as a validation of the kind of language-work in which we're all involved. it reminded me too of how much i love the way duncan talks about poetry and his relationship to it, for exmaple in the retro preface to The Year as Catches

...I have come not to resolve or eliminate any of the old conflicting elements of my work but to imagine them now as contrasts of a field of composition in which I develop an ever-shifting possibility of the poet I am -- at once a made up thing and at the same time a depth in which my being is -- the poems not as ends in themselves but forms arising from the final intention of the whole in which they have their form and in turning giving rise anew to that intention. (221)

and over levertov's "organic form" his preference for an idea of
"linguistic" form, in which

the artist uses language to make forms, and in this he(s) in a creature/creator relation to a god who is also creature/creator of the whole. Where "organic" poetry refers to personal emotions and impressions -- the concourse between organism and his world; the linguistic follows emotions and images that appear in the language itself as a third "world"; true to what is happening in the syntax as another man might be true to what he sees or feels. (224)

which makes me want to troll through the (800 pages of the?) duncan-levertov correspondence for more gems such as this.

paranoid solipsists need not apply

Heather Mac Donald
c/o The Weekly Standard
1150 17th Street NW, Suite 505
Washington, DC 20036

May 16, 2006

Ms. Mac Donald,

It never ceases to amaze me how so-called conservatives who in other contexts decry "big government" somehow manage to vigorously embrace and defend the NSA phone call database, what one of USA Today's sources has called "the largest database ever assembled in the world" and certainly something Orwell could not have imagined in his worst nightmare.

Your missive "Information Please: Only a paranoid solipsist could feel threatened by the calling analysis program" (Weekly Standard, 22 May
2006) is filled with all the right reactionary buzzwords and hyperbole -- evoking the "ecstatic frenzy of denunciation and fear-mongering" by "privacy nuts" and "privacy extremists [who] enjoy unchallenged supremacy" -- but unfortunately the logic you would use to challenge them is also reactionary. And wrong.

Your first defense of this biggest of big government domestic surveillance programs -- and let's not quibble about whether or not data mining itself is surveillance or an increasingly integral part of an overall surveillance program -- relies on a series flawed assumptions. First, you claim the anonymity of the data being mined is maintained, presumably throughout its life in the database, even though you admit, in classic two-wrongs-make-a-right fashion, that "the government can de-anonymize the data" because "your phone company at the very least--if not a score of marketers--knows your calling history; that history is no longer private." Clearly, thanks to the good old free market, any pretenses towards maintaining anonymity here can be safely eliminated.

Your second defense of big government surveillance is that non-sentient computers are doing the mining rather than human beings. "The computer does not have a clue that you exist," you tell us reassuringly, "it does not know what it is churning through; your phone number is meaningless to it." Precisely the problem. While human intelligence is capable of reason, inference, speculation, intuition and so many other qualities that help minimize errors and protect against abuses, a computer alogrithm indeed "does not have a clue that you exist" and "does not know what it is churning through," thus making it all the more unlikely (if not altogether unable) to hesitate, change its mind, backtrack, reconsider, acknowledge or correct mistakes, in short, protect human interests. One need not be a paranoid solipsist to have concerns here.

Your third defense of big government surveillance is, ironically, its bigness, that the sheer enormity of the database protects the information from being abused, "render[ing] the image of individualized snooping so absurd." This is itself absurd, not only because the scenario you've already outlined, one of "supercharged computers to work analyzing patterns among the four trillion numbers involved in the two trillion calls" in search of "clusters that might suggest terrorist connections," already "renders the image of individualized snooping absurd." And again I'm not sure how a political philosophy of limited government enables you take comfort in this vision of "the NSA's supercomputers churning through trillions of zeros and ones representing disembodied phone numbers," a kind of safety-in-numbers digital dragnet that sounds surprisingly like the dehumanized automation of Soviet gulags that bonafide conservatives used to denounce on principle.

You're right in one respect though, Ms. Mac Donald: this president's "credibility, after the previous denials of data mining and failure to clarify its character, is, to say the least, weak." And if he wants to lose what little shred of credibility he has left among only his most die-hard supporters and not hand subpoena power to a Deomcratic-led House and Senate in November, I encourage him to adopt your flawed lines of argument, which I'm sure will win big with the American public.

open letter to newt gingrich

dear newt gingrich,

heard your interview with tim russert on meet the press this morning and i have to give you credit, you can still talk a mean game. if your party's smart -- big if -- you'll get their 2008 presidential nomination and undoubtedly talk circles around your democratic opponent.

but oh, if only circles were the truth!

let's start with the top story of the week and the first question put to you, regarding the NSA phone call database:

Well, first of all, the amazing thing is--everything that has been done is totally legal. You just look at the, at the specifics of what they're doing, it is totally legal.

in true republican fashion, the lies emerge before you can even utter a complete sentence. well ok, if not an outright lie than at the very least a highly contestable opinion. first of all, i don't think anyone knows for sure "the specifics of what they're doing" and secondly, if it's so "totally legal" then why did qwest refuse to play ball? why have two laywers filed civil suit against verizon for handing over its customers' phone records to the NSA? what provision of the NSA charter allows domestic surveillance? what provision of the 1934 communications act enables phone companies to turn over customers' calling records? these are matters for the courts to decide newt, not you (even though i sincerely doubt whether the democrats have the intestinal fortitude to launch an investigation even if they do win back control of congress in november).

of course, your suggestion for how this president should reframe the issue to the american public is, as republican reframings always are, highly questionable:

Should the Congress guarantee that the United States government is capable of stopping terrorists, detecting terrorists and, if necessary, going back out and finding out who the terrorists worked with, once you know who the terrorists are?

first of all, no government plan or agency can guarantee that it will stop terrorists: it's one of the perils of a free society that the threat of terrorism exists. put it that way and of course no one is going to object. but the way you republicans put it is never accurate. example #2:

This is the choice. We're going to have a nuclear weapon some day or a biological weapon that could kill millions of Americans. We have the technical ability to stop it. Now do you want us to be able to stop it or not?

oh by all means, "bring it on." of course we want to stop it, no americans in their correct mind (not even those america-hating liberal leftists) want it otherwise so gimme a break. this is a false choice and you know it! because first of all a "technical ability" means nothing without human analysis: we had plenty of technical ability pre-9/11 but what we lacked, and what might have prevented 9/11, was human ability. second, your false choice assumes that going on a fishing expedition through trillions of phone records -- the very acquisition and compilation of which is of questionable if not dubious legality -- is the only guaranteed way to prevent another 9/11 and that not doing it will cause another 9/11. surely we can find a way to do this that's effective and legal.

and of course you never actually answer questions that are put straight to you. russert asks, "But you're not troubled with the government gathering data on phone calls made in this country by American citizens?" you reply with another nonsense, false dichotomy hypothetical:

Look, if you find out one morning that we now have five terrorists in the U.S. who are part of an active network who want to destroy New York City or Buffalo or Atlanta, and the government says, "You know, we could've tracked every call they made for the last 10 years, but that would've been wrong, Tim. So we don't know who they've been working with. We don't know what their network is and we can't stop it," you're then going to have a totally new set of congressional hearings by the same people who will then reverse their side, totally. I do think your civil liberties ought to be...(unintelligible). Nobody who's not involved in terrorism should be at risk. Nobody who's making normal phone calls should be at risk. But the idea that we're going to say to the United States government, for libertarian reasons, "We'd rather lose a city than have you gather data," I think is totally out of touch with the danger of the modern world.

you make these qualifications about protecting civil liberties as an afterthought when the program you so vigorously defend has clearly already violated civil liberties. gather data or lose a city? fearmongering, false choice nonsense.

not to mention that you republicans continually decry "big government" but what is a program designed to surreptitously amass trillions of phone records but the biggest government one could possibly imagine. orwell had a name for it and no self-respecting conservative would condone it, EVER.

i see too that when the interview turns to electoral politics your party's policy of "blame democrats first" is full operative. too bad you can't lay the blame squarely where it properly lies, namely at your party's very own doorstep. when

the head of the border for the United States government [says] that the border is essentially an invitation to illegal entry, you know something has to change. When you learn that maybe as much as 16 of the $18 billion dollars that we sent to Baghdad for economic purposes wasn't spent effectively, you know something has to change. When you look at Katrina and you realize that we, we--the United States government paid $1.75 to a general contractor who paid 75 cents to a contractor who paid 35 cents to a subcontractor who paid 10 cents to put the blue tarp on that was the temporary roofing, you know something has to change.

what has to change is obvious. these things all happened under republican control of the house, senate and white house. clearly it's this monopoly of governmental power that has to end.

you can, and you do and you will, demonize democrats all you want, but your party is utterly bereft of plans and ideas. russert pressed you on immigration, and of course your so-called compassion showed itself to be the bankrupt heartlessness it really is. one of your plans is to

create a worker visa program that has a background check, that has a biometric card, probably a retinal scan so it's really accurate and very, very hard to counterfeit, and have that card, by the way, run by AMEX or--American Express or Visa or MasterCard, because you know the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have any possibility of running that program.

you're not serious newt, are you? use biological information for immigration enforcement which you then contract outo the credit card companies? gee i guess a massive database of trillions of domestic phone call records turns out to be really quite trivial when compared with the civil liberties violations and privacy invasions of THIS program. really newt, i do hope y'all run on this one in 2008.

no, but seriously folks. russert presses, with repsect to the families your party values so highly by breaking them up and sending parents back over the border while their naturalized children remain here: "But Mr. Speaker, many of those people have children here who are American citizens. Do they leave their children behind?"

MR. GINGRICH: I--there are a lot of things you can do.

MR. RUSSERT: What do you do?

MR. GINGRICH: Look, if...

MR. RUSSERT: It's a real issue. It's a real human issue.

MR. GINGRICH: You go home long enough to obey the...

MR. RUSSERT: Without your children?

MR. GINGRICH: In every case, you can find ways to make accommodations.

classic. in other words, you don't have a plan for the tens of thousands of families you'd potentially break up, newt. and is that really in every case? who's going to review these tens of thousands of cases, american express and visa?

MR. RUSSERT: If Hispanics are listening to you today, Latinos, and Newt Gingrich is saying mother and fathers have to go home, and break up the families...

MR. GINGRICH: I didn't say break up the family, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT: What happens to the kids?

MR. GINGRICH: I didn't say anything--I didn't say anything about that.

of course you didn't, because you have nothing to say. you responded with a non-answer about rewarding lawbreakers blah blah blah. wanna try again?

MR. RUSSERT: What happens to the kids?

MR. GINGRICH: I didn't--first of all, in the age of jet airplanes--you, you, you phase this in over three years. The--there are ways to do this that can be humane, they can be compassionate, they can be caring. But I think for you to take the, the most difficult possible case, you can decide on humanitarian grounds to have a handful of exceptions.

sure, there may be ways: care to name one? "in the age of jet airplanes, you, you" what, sign 'em all up for frequent flyer programs? phase what in over three years? all sounds real humane, compassionate and caring. your talk sounds real good newt, but behind the talk you've got nothing.

and i thought that was "in every case," or now is it just "the most difficult cases" possible? and who's going to go through all those cases and make the decisions about which are the "most difficult possible" cases and which are only "somewhat difficult"? sounds like the job for a big government bureaucracy -- if only we could afford it. which your party's tax-and-spend policies leave us with, namely nothing. what guard units are you going to patrol our borders with pal when they're all being deployed overseas?

the question-dodging continues unabated when russert turns to iraq: "Knowing what you know now, do you believe going into Iraq was the right thing to do?"

MR. GINGRICH: Well, let me start with the, the South Dakota quote, which,...

oh god, here we go. let's try again:

MR. RUSSERT: ...but knowing no weapons of mass destruction, knowing the level of insurgency resisting--resistance, knowing the sectarian violence, knowing the cost, do you believe it was still worthwhile and do you believe it was a war of choice or necessity?

MR. GINGRICH: Look, I believe that the president was exactly right in the State of the Union in 2002 to say there is an "axis of evil." I think he was exactly right to say North Korea, Iran and Iraq are very, very dangerous...

oh, GOD! answer the question!! how about deficit spending:

MR. RUSSERT: But, Mr. Speaker, in all candor, 2001 till now, complete Republican control, hasn't the welfare state grown?

MR. GINGRICH: I just said to you a minute ago, I think they have to have real change. I'm not, I'm not defending the current spending, I--your numbers there.

But let me take your second part, which is there's an enormous opportunity which I think would get substantial support...

please, please, PLEASE ANSWER A QUESTION THAT'S PUT TO YOU!

keep it up, newt, at this rate you're well on your way to the 2008 republican ticket.

p.s. oh yeah, and "Saddam had a direct relationship with al-Qaeda"? yeah, you and dick cheney are the only ones who still believe that canard!

class action against verizon

the seattle post-intelligencer carries this AP report...

TRENTON, N.J. -- Two New Jersey public interest lawyers sued Verizon Communications Inc. for $5 billion Friday, claiming the phone carrier violated privacy laws by turning over phone records to the National Security Agency for a secret government surveillance program.

mining or not?

"...the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.
We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates." -- President's statement for the press, Thursday May 11, 2006

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda terrorists and its affiliates who want to harm the American people." -- President's radio address, Saturday May 13, 2006

notice the distinct absence of the word "mining" from what is otherwise essentially identical language in the more recent statement. clearly the implication of this omission is that we are not not mining. so can we safely add the first statement to this president's long list of lies to the american people?

how much did you pay...

...to have your phone records turned over to the NSA?

this is the question i don't see anyone asking about the NSA phone call database story that USA Today broke the other day and which contains the following buried in paragraph 34 (my emphasis):

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their "call-detail records," a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation's calling habits. The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation.

so how much of our tax money did this government shell out to aquire our phone call records? conversely, how much did these companies profit from selling this information? anyone sees reads or hears anything about this please lemme know.

equally if not more troubling is this little titbit:

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

sounds like blackmail to me...

* * *

from the boston globe:

Mark Jellison, a Verizon customer in Quincy, isn't fazed that his phone company may have turned over his calling records and those of millions of others to the National Security Agency as part of an effort to thwart terrorism.

"After 9/11 our world has changed," Jellison said yesterday, standing outside a grocery store in Dorchester. "Prior to 9/11, I would have been more concerned, but I'm less concerned today."

score one again for the politics of fear. usually we think of the pre-9/11 world as one of complacency and naivety, and that would be true with respect to personal or national security. (and is still true i suppose with respect to our standing in the world vis-a-vis our ongoing imperialism, supporting repressive regimes and overthrowing democratically elected governments, etc.)

but fear is not all about "heightened awareness," paranoia, racial and religious prejudices, etc. clealy if mr. jellison is any indication, fear breeds complacency too vis-a-vis civil liberties, privacy issues, checks and balances, constitutional protections against unchecked executive power, etc.

your phone call records

here's leslie cauley's USA Today piece on the NSA phone call database. pretty essential reading on the full extent of this president's illegal domestic surveilance program and his nominee for CIA director who approved it. highlights

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.[...]

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency's domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.[...]

With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.[...]

AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation's three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.[...]

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.[...]

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.[...] The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

here are the reactions as they're coming in, from:

NYTimes
LATimes
ABCNews
SFChronicle

dems: targeted and bickering

howard fineman:

The conventional notion here is that Democrats want to “nationalize” the 2006 elections — dwelling on broad themes (that is, the failures of the Bush Administration) — while the Republicans will try to “localize” them as individual contests that have nothing to do with, ahem, the goings on in the capital.

That was before the GOP situation got so desperate. The way I read the recent moves of Karl Rove & Co., they are preparing to wage war the only way open to them: not by touting George Bush, Lord knows, but by waging a national campaign to paint a nightmarish picture of what a Democratic Congress would look like, and to portray that possibility, in turn, as prelude to the even more nightmarish scenario: the return of a Democrat (Hillary) to the White House.

Rather than defend Bush, Rove will seek to rally the Republicans’ conservative grassroots by painting Democrats as the party of tax increases, gay marriage, secularism and military weakness. That’s where the national message money is going to be spent.

doubtless the dems will prove unable to mount a counteroffensive since, as thomas edsall reports, they're already infighting:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and the leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have clashed angrily in recent days in a dispute about how the party should spend its money in advance of this fall's midterm elections.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who is leading the party's effort to regain majority status in the House, stormed out of Dean's office several days ago leaving a trail of expletives, according to Democrats familiar with the session.

The blowup highlights a long-standing tension that has pitted Democratic congressional leaders, who are focused on their best opportunities for electoral gains this fall, against Dean and many state party chairmen, who believe that the party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up -- even in states that have traditionally been Republican strongholds.

name that polemicist

came across these last night and thought them too choice to keep to myself. they are from a master polemicist who shall be identified at the conclusion of this post.

So much of our dispute about what poetry does, about what happens between poet and hearer or reader is due to old unsolved questions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of communication....The epistemological problme arose as in Europe and America human relationships became increasingly abstract, and the relation of ment to their work became more remote. Six men who have worked together to build a boat or a house with their hands do not doubt its existence.

***

Jazz returns social music to the role that it has played in all human societies from time immemorial and which was only forgotten for a brief period in Western civilization. This is why it is of such tremendous importance to twentieth-century culture, and, if not the only serious music we have, our only music which anybody outside the country takes seriously. After all, a revolution in basic human relationships is a very important revolution indeed.

***

Rimbaud did not lose himself in Africa; he found himself....He "ran" the vowels like he later ran guns to the Abyssinians, with dubious results....He did things to literature that had never been done to it before, and they were things which literature badly needed done to it...just like the world needed the railroads the Robber Barons did manage to provide.

***

Poe is always frivolous. Baudelaire is always in deadly, terrifying earnest.

***

In the final showdown, all our revolutions have turned out to be careers for some and programs for others. The stuff of life, of art, is not only vaster far than all programs and careers, it is the material of a different qualitative world altogether.

***

Beckett refused to run off to Africa and die of gangrene, or write childish poems to prostitutes, or even see angels in a tree. If you can drive your prophets mad, you don't have to bother to crucify them. When a prophet refuses to go crazy, he becomes quite a problem, crucifixion being as complicated as it is in humanitarian America.

***

Man thrives where angels die of ecstasy and pigs doe of disgust. The contemporary situation is like a long-standing, fatal disease. It is impossible to recall what life was like without it. We seem always to have had cancer of the heart.

***

Writing this, sitting at my typewriter, looking out the window, I find it hard to comprehend why every human being doesn't run screaming into the streets of all the cities of the world this instant. How can they let it go on?

***

There is no place for a poet in American society. No place at all for any kind of poet at all.... The majority of American poets have acquiesced in the judgment of the rpedatory society. They do not exist as it is concerned. They make their living in a land of make-believe, as servants of a hoax for children. They are employees of the fog-factories--the universities. They help make the fog. Behind their screen the universities fulfill their social purposes. They turn out bureaucrats, perpetuate the juridical lie, emborider the costumes of the delusion of participation, and of late, in departments never penetrated by the humanities staff, turn out atom, hydrogen, and cobalt bombers--genocidists of the world.

any takers?.....









it's kenneth rexroth, from Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays (new york: new directions, 1959).

from moussaoui to berlusconi

what's going on?

the jury makes the right decision in the moussaoui sentencing, refusing to cave to the climate of vengeance surrounding the utterly flimsy and suspicious case against this terrorist flunkie, thereby handing him the punishment he truly deserves which is not the death and martyrdom he so clearly desired but to spend the rest of his miserable life living out his miserable life?

like aznar, another european leader and bush lacky accepts his walking papers?

the world's making too much sense these days...

hits, oberlin, lewitt, REM

154 visits yesterday, the most ever in one day. who'd a thunk ECM was such a popular topic?

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ok, so more songs:ohia on the way. this time i picked up impala from an amazon marketplace seller. if gas were cheaper i'd drive to his upcoming solo show in akron largely to buy more of those $10 CDs.


i knew there was a reason why i like this guy's music: he's from oberlin, less than 25 miles from where i grew up...


and, asked to list or identify "Mind altering work of art" he offers: "Anything by Cy Twombly or Sol Lewitt."

partly too it's when he sings "still no guides / it's not a generous world / it is a separate world / the bad luck taste of the dark / the broad luck of blood on the water" ("lightning risked it all," from ghost tropic) or

       but if the blues are your hunter
       then you will come face to face
       with that darkness and desolation
       and the endless
       endless
       endless
       endless
       endless
       endless depression
       ("blue chicago moon," from didn't it rain)

there's no real question of whether or not he means what he says. what's more, he turns it around by the end of the song:

       but you are not helpless
       and you are not helpless
       try to beat it
       and live through space's loneliness
       you are not helpless
       I'll help you to try to beat it

and the will oldham comparisons, tho inevitable i suppose, really don't strike me as that relevant. especially in this review of ghost tropic, which goes to great pains to make the oldham case for an album that if anything is the least oldham-esque that molina has done. now my limited knowledge of oldham is based mostly on there is no one what will take care of you, but first off i think molina is a better singer, or is at least honest about his singing; tho he yelps around a bit on axxess and ace, he avoids the jokey attempt to out-do peter brady in the adolescent voice cracking department.

and as the lyrics above suggest, his songwriting is incredibly honest as well. i can keep going back to this as opposed to feeling like i've gotten the joke and there's nothing more to it.

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oh and i now finally have all the R.E.M. one could conceivably need or want. that'd be complete 1981-1987: chronic town, murmur, reckoning, fables of the reconstruction, life's rich pageant, document, and dead letter office -- though i suppose this latter's not essential (tho it has its moments) and one could make a case for including green in those ranks). oh sweet jangle of chronic town and murmuring innocence!...

ECM, CIMP &c.

responding to drew's and taylor's comments from yesterday... (and mark's)

i don't have the parker/bley/phillips drew mentions tho it apparently gets the slight thumbs up over the one i do have, sankt gerold.

i agree with taylor that the super souped-up sound is never well-applied in one-size-fits-all manner. same hold true for the CIMP folks, whose production values are perhaps the polar opposite of ECM: straight off the mike, no boosting no compression no fiddlin and twiddlin of any kind. which in some settings is exactly what you want, but like anything this kind of rigorous purity can be self-defeating. i have a CIMP recording of a marc edwards trio with drew's friend sabir mateen on reeds and hilliard greene on bass -- it might as well be a reeds/drums duo recording for all intents and purposes as hill is virtually inaudible for most of the disc.

with the evan parker electro-acoustic ensemble tho, i wonder if some post-performance production enhancement isn't entirely appropriate on some level: i mean there's already live electronics and electonic processing of acoustic sounds going on from the get-go...

i guess garbarek's dis is the classic ECM cliché, or so the penguin guide would have it

--------------------------

"Who wants to go out and get whipped? And if you do, aren't you just being entertained, really?" --Bob Dylan (1965) in the midst of bereating a Time magazine reporter in Don't Look Back



--------------------------

i'm really wishing that when magnolia electric company played at the black cat a few weeks ago, and after realizing that secretly canadian was selling its songs: ohia CDs for ten bucks apiece, that i had not mistakenly hit "$20" on the ATM instead of the "$40" that i had intended to withdraw so that i could buy four songs: ohia CDs. the two i bought, axxes and ace and didn't it rain, have been playing wonderfully lately. but i want the others -- all of em.

the ECM sound

preconceptions, generalizations and stereotypes often lead you astray. i've always had this notion of what "the ECM sound" is all about -- clarity in sound production values, austerity in performance values -- but these characterizations, however accurate, do not automatically yield kenny g no matter how much one might be inclined to think they do. after all, ECM is the label that mainstreamed the art ensemble of chicago; after seeing the AEC for the first time at the cleveland art museum during black history month in 1989 and having my little 21-year-old mind blown away, it was their albums on ECM that i found at the local public library.

still, and especially in recent years, it's the cooler, calmer avant-garde jazz that ECM features rather than the scorched earth avant-garde. nothing ever was, anyway, the marilyn crispell trio double CD tribute to annette peacock, is some of crispell's most lyrical playing i've heard, a far cry from her earlier cecil tayloresque dates for leo records. the bley-peacock-motian trio not two, not one is also a stunner, as stark as the light and shade in its black and white cover. the series of evan parker electro-acoustic ensemble discs, now numbering four, are wonderful logical progressions not of parker's high-energy trio work (with guy & lytton or schlippenbach & lovens) but the sustained interwoven textures of the music improvisation company recordings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

but is it possible for ECM stuff to ever really get out out out, or just plain rock? the answer is yes. i should've taken my clue from a john abercrombie LP i picked up a while back, gateway (1975). i know, an ECM guitarist? what could be closer to windham hill new age pap? think again. with a rhythm section of holland and dejohnette, this trio knows how to rock and abercrombie can make a stab at hendrix and pull it off better than most.

so recently i'm looking into jan garbarek. cold, austere, nordic, i know. so they say. and i'll be damned if the cover of his first ECM recording, afric pepperbird doesn't look about as cold, gray and nordic and far removed from anything afric as you could imagine. well look for this one if you can find it cuz if a live show i've been listening to by the same band (Jan Garbarek tenor and bass saxophones, clarinet, flutes, percussion; Terje Rypdal guitar, bugle; Arild Andersen bass, african thumb piano, xylophone; Jon Christensen percussion) from the same time period (1971) is any indication it rocks. hard. frankly it sounds like bitches brew on jaegermeister and bad LSD. how could a band with a guitarist named terje pull this off? well he does it -- and not so much by going for hendrix like abercrombie but, i dunno, krautrock guitarist michael karoli of can. seriously, rypdal at this time period gets some of the most interesting wall-of-electronoise guitar sounds i've heard from anyone, in any context.

and what about garbarek? well personally i'll pass on that best officium recording with the hilliard ensemble (the penguin guide calls it an exercise in "faith minimalism," which is i guess why ECM records recent arvo part too -- tho don't be fooled, part's early stuff is very solid post-serialist composed music) because on afric pepperbird he's pretty out there, reminding me a bit actually of early gato barbieri tho with less ayler/sanders and more coltrane. the other one of his to keep an eye out for is witchi-tai-to (1973), which is actually attributed to the jan garbarek-bobo stenson quartet. again based on a live recording i have from the same band same period, here the coltrane comparison is even more appropriate because of the lineup and garbarek's sound (which has, by this time and like barbieri's, lost any aylerisms it might have had). stenson is an interesting, folksy lyrical pianist, and the rhythm section (Palle Danielsson, bass; Jon Christensen, drums) is incredibly fluid and powerful.