a return to form

...or perhaps a somewhat new form: updates on random topics. otherwise heuriskein as we've come to know it will probably be put into indefinite retirement until i find an appropriate means and manner of keeping people abreast of nashville developments.

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i love the drive between cleveland ohio and london ontario: you can make the whole run in under five hours but the time goes by really quickly because no leg of the trip takes longer than 90 minutes. (cleveland-toledo, 90 minutes; toledo to detroit; 60 minutes; detroit to port huron, 60 minutes; sarnia to london, 60 minutes.) flat farmland punctuated by urban rustbelt. best also to go through the border at sarnia-port huron rather than windsor-detroit so as to use/buy less gas in canada. the 402 is one of the flatest and most desolate highways around. (the photo in the wikipedia entry looks positively lush by comparison). good trip for listening to whole box sets.

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renewed affection for all things london ontario.

freud's bit in civilization and its discontents about how "in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish -- that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances... it can once more be brought to light" -- from which he lauchnes his epic simile comparing the mind to the city of rome with all the buildings that ever stood in it over time all copresent in space -- is never more apt. i'm convinced that through neuroplasticity space hardwires itself not just into our thought process but our physiology as well, proprioceptors or whathaveyou. wandering throught downtown london upon my arrival -- on a weekday summer night it was bound to be a bit barren, but it's fallen on hard times all the same -- heading north on wellington the words "scot's corner" came to mind for the first time in probably twelve years. ten seconds later i turned west onto dundas street and there before me sat one of my favorite old haunts, the scot's corner.

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the range of ontario regional brews otherwise unavailable in the u.s. has grown considerably since i lived there. this is a product line that even the brickskellar in d.c. (which boasts of the largest bottled beer list in the city) is hopelessly clueless about.

go ahead, yanks: visit the beer store (ontario's province-wide retailer) and do a brand search. you will be dumbfounded by the amount and range of beer you've never heard of let alone tasted.

all i could bring back with me was a sleeman's sampler pack. sleeman is the premier regional brewer in the province (located in guelph), running a full line of its own products as well as picking up some other brews (like the upper canada line) from indie brewers that did not survive the consolidations of the late 1990s and early 2000s led by the biggies. sleeman makes a light, premium light, lager, "clear," IPA, dark, porter, and the three that come in the sampler pack: cream ale, honey brown, original draft. the cream ale is very clean, the honey brown nice and malty.

brick breweries of waterloo has managed to avoid selling out to the majors while simultaneously buying up a number of smaller regional brewers and yet still maintaining those product lines. red baron is their lager, and their waterloo dark was always a personal favorite, and the red cap ale was a popular brand in the 1950s that they resurrected. they also do the british-style conners best bitter and formosa springs line of cold-filtered draft products.

other great brews you are unlikely to encounter in the states: wellington brewery in guelph makes an excellent range of british-style ales (arkell best bitter, country ale, special pale ale, iron duke strong, imperial stout); creemore springs (not quite two hours north of ontario) makes a lager, pils and ur bock; and from out-of-province, keith's makes an IPA and amber ale from halifax, while big rock is the calgary microbrewer to beat with their pale and traditional ales along with a grasshopper wheat and warthog cream ale.

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undying affection for pere ubu. could not quite listen to all 5 CDs in the datapanik in the year zero box as i would've liked, and still finding my way through new picnic time and songs of the bailing man (which i've only just heard for the first time recently), but i do think dub housing is far and away the masterpiece. musings from the post-industrial sublime.

* * *

do want to recommend the charlie parker pershing club recordings from chicago in 1950, formerly available only an an obscure 1976 LP release from the zim label of jericho ny (pictured below) but now reissued thanks to the good folks at definitive/disconforme (one of those fine spanish budget-priced reissue labels). the quality of the recordings is lousy and the rest of the band (chicago pick-up band featuring von freeman on tenor) is largely irrelevant sadly. but bird soars. makes me wanna get the benedettis and all the other live dates just for those solos...

spocko fights wingnuts

this courtesy of stephen vincent:

A series of events involving a local liberal blogger, a San Francisco conservative radio station and the reaction of two of the larger corporate advertisers in the country -- Bank of America and MasterCard -- is revealing how slippery freedom of speech has become in the digital age.

The tale of Spocko, a self-described "fifth-tier" blogger who lives in San Francisco, exemplifies how one person with a computer and an Internet hookup can challenge the views of a major media corporation -- and what a media corporation will do to stop him.

read the full story by joe garofoli of the sfchronicle

five things meme

the definitive response to this five things meme that has spread through blogland like a mildly annoying skin rash comes courtesy of hugh macleod:

five things you don’t know about me

1. I dislike you intensely.
   
2. I love it when bad things happen to you.
   
3. When your name is mentioned I immediately try to change the subject.
   
4. I wouldn’t read your blog if you paid me.
   
5. If we were trapped on a desert island together I would kill myself.

labels

i've now labelled all 239 of my posts from the beginning and including this one. here are the most frequent:

• politics (112)
  
• poetry (65)
  
• music (40)
  
• surveillance (24)
  
• NSA (23)
  
• war (20)
  
• film (13)
  
• art (10)
  
• blogging (9)

responses to anny

anny ballardini sent the following questions (in bold) around to a few dozen bloggers, which i post along with my responses...

- To blog or not to blog, this is the question...

haha, a chacun son gout i think...

- How would you characterize your blog you should describe it to one of us, i.e. another blogger?

well i wanted to make a point of including discussions of more than just poetry on my blog. (poetryworld can be very insular, sometimes stiflingly so.) in fact, sometimes my other main concerns, music and politics, end up taking far much more of my blog space. i originally started a blog after the 2004 elections as a way to help myself sort out my thinking about how our country continued to find itself in such a mess, but it went nowhere so i deleted it. when i restarted it, the occasion was again political: i posted a letter to the editor i wrote that the washington post ran, regarding the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program.

for all the talk that occurs in poetryworld from time to time about politics and politically engaged poetry, much of that talk is simply preaching to the converted. poets frequently seem to overlook george oppen's advice (i think?) that if you want to do something political that last thing in the world you should spend your time with is writing a poem. write a letter to the editor, volunteer, hand out flyers, do some campaign work or grass roots organizing, anything! but don't just write a poem and think that's doing something. some of the most frequently visited posts on my blog are the ones that do political work: debunking the conservative myth of a "ginsburg standard" for example ( i.e. that ruth bader ginsburg was a flaming liberal whom conservatives gave a pass in confirmation hearings -- it's simply not true, she was widely understood to be a moderate at the time).

- I sometimes regard my blog as a safe place where I can meet my chosen people, is this the same for you?

well, yes and no. a safe place for other people who think like me, perhaps. but i wanna reach people who think differently too and give them some unsafe thinking. i don't choose them, they unwittingly choose themselves. (or the search engine algorithms do.)

there's no doubt that whatever audience i have is pretty ecclectic because that's where my inclinations lead me. i write about whatever happens to be on my mind or catching my attention at a given moment, and that i think might be of some interest to someone out there. (you know who you are, xoxo!) but i don't imagine anyone really being there with me all the time. i'm quite happy to pull in the random google or technorati searcher who has typed in, i dunno, "jimmy guiffre night dance" and finds out what they want -- or better still, "sonnets about christmas" and they get me talking about alice notley's 165 meeting house lane, or "carrying liquids on airplanes" and they find out what a bunch of fear hype all that shit was.

- I am wondering do we sometimes forget that personal remarks, notes, poems are there for everybody to be seens?

not me, i'm very conscious of the dividing line between personal and public in blogworld and try to walk the middle ground. some bloggers are super conscious of this, only referring to people by their initials for example; while bloggers are quite happy to tell the whole world about their morning's indigestion or who they sexually fantasize about, etc. i think it's fine and can be interesting -- tho not inherently -- to push those lines.

- Do you post many poems on your blog? Is there an actual difference in-between publishing online, mainly through a blog, or printed publishing?

sometimes i do, just something i've read that i'll post w/o commentary. i'd like to see more of this on blogs actually. i did one post on rae armantrout, for example, that was just a list of titles of her poems that i liked. i'd like to start a series of blog anthologies actually, you know, something like myfiftyfavoritefrankoharapoems.blogspot.com where different people could post lists of titles, or better yet, the actual poems themselves! what a great resource that would be.

i don't feel that blogging is publishing really. so for me the difference is not between blogging and print publishing but blogging and other forms of online publishing (online poetry mags and anthologies for example). i'm not entirely sure why i feel there's a difference except that it might have to do with peer reviewing, which blogging as most practiced presently lacks altogether.

- What kind of actual or immaterial feedback do you receive from publishing online through a blog?

immaterial feedback? i'm not sure what that means. i do get occasional comments from readers, some of which go on to generate further discussion. but i generally hate comments boxes: they are super linear and super not conducive to open and free debate.

frankly the most interesting feedback i get comes from my statcounter, which tells me who is hitting what posts and from where, what terms they're searching to arrive at my blog, etc.

- What do you think of the Blogosphere when related to blogs that deal with poetry?

not sure i follow this question. if you mean to ask what impact blogworld has had on poetryworld, i think like most things both for the better and worse. for the better: the polyphony of voices and interests is great, but this polyphony does not immediately translate into actual dialogue. (and when it does the best of it happens not on blogs or comment boxes themselves but privately and backchannel.) the possibilities for collaboration are great too, tho as yet underexplored. in this sense poetry blogs are no different from other blogs in that they tend to be highly egocentric.

for the worse: again, like the egocentrism, poetryworld only reflects the larger culture as much as we might like it not to. thus you have concerns with accumulating and dispersing power, in the form of literal and symbolic capital: blogs that are little more than promotional vehicles for selling and enhancing product, awarding distinction, etc.

heat strings

al nielsen joins the fray. a most welcome addition!

blog roundup

overall it's shaping up like another rough week for the bushies: dubai ports world, alberto mora, malaysian prime ministers paying abramoff $1.2 mil to meet with dubya, reclassified documents...

meanwhile, away from the headlines a bit...

why the so-called liberal media can't utter the words "permanent u.s. military bases in iraq"

after neoconservativism: fukuyama is reconsidering it all, following an earlier line of thinking

slate offers bush critics you should trust, including reganite supply-sider bruce bartlett whose new book is called Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy

and finally, in a reminder that all politics is local, an injunction to forget national politics and concentrate on states, and a progressive group that is committed to fighting mounting conservative efforts on this front

thanks to laura rozen, josh marshall, kevin drumm for the leads.

Blog Rage

From tmorange
Sent Sunday, February 12, 2006 10:27 am
To letters@washpost.com
Cc jimbradyva@aol.com
Subject Blog Rage

Dear Editor,

While I agree that the tone and language of our discourse should be kept civil and that liberals do nothing to advance our cause by adopting the vituperative language more commonly associated with the far right, Jim Brady's piece in this morning's Post ("Blog Rage") seems to overlook the larger context in which these disagreements take place.

Readers' difficulties with Deborah Howell did not just magically arise with her comments on the Abramoff scandal. Instead, they marked the breaking point for many post readers who were fed up with what appeared to be Howell's increasing disregard, even contempt for the real concerns of real readers. (Dafna Linzer's January 4 piece was just one case in point.) The ombudsman is supposed to be the people's advocate and is obligated to take the concerns of readers into genuine consideration, not dismiss them.

Second, you are of course familiar with the extent to which the mainstream media has increasingly abrogated its duty to question facts and assumptions, particularly those spoonfed to it by a notoriously deceitful and manipulative White House such as this one. (Judith Miller's case is hardly unique in this respect.) When distortions and lies get reported as fact, and when those who point this out are met with shoulder shrugs, dismissal, contempt, or silence, frustrations build unvented.

recovered posts?

my lost posts from the weekend seem to be floating around still if you go right to the permanent links

http://heuriskein.blogspot.com/2006/02/vandermark-and-young.html
http://heuriskein.blogspot.com/2006/02/clover-on-mla.html

weird...

blogger sucks

i'm pissed off at blogger because it lost two posts i wrote over the weekend, one on the ken vandermark five and neil young, and one on joshua clover's piece on the MLA. and it's not like it timed me out while i was writing them, i mean i wrote them and posted them (twice in the case of the post on joshua's piece), they were up there with 18-digit post IDs and everything. joshua responded within an hour and "32poems" even posted a comment about the vandermark/young one. (sorry, thanks!) so blogger can kiss my ass for wasting my time.

briefly this weekend (and before this one gets lost too)...

live friday: ken vandermark five at iota in arlington, they were punchy, loose and smokin.

live saturday: bonnie jones, kathy hong and ric royer at the i.e. reading series in baltimore. i liked bonnie's work but she overexplained it, kathy's did not compel my interest too much although i enjoyed her quasi-joycean made-up language, and ric's performance piece was quite enjoyable and had a very improvised feel (which made me surprised to see how much was actually written out in advance).

listening: lots of neil young, jay farrar.

watching: lots of simpsons and family guy instead of super bowl.

reading: bernadette mayer, red book in three parts, chapbook of early poems (65-66) lewis warsh put out in 2002, demonstrating bernadette was kickin ass even when she was 20-21; alice notley, songs for the unborn second baby, chaotic and unfocused relative to her recent work but brilliant all the same; dan hoy's critique of flarf with which even though it's not without its problems i am largely and generally agreement.

blog roundup: the politics of fear

place today's blog roundup under the heading "the politics of fear." (due largely no doubt to recent remarks by that political "genius" known to some as "turd blossom" that the 2006 elections will be run on a campaign of fear. (and hey, why mess with a winning formula, right?) the la times' jonathan chait gets it pretty much right.

"Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History," a NYT op-ed piece by joseph j. ellis, a history prof at mount holyoke, essentially argues that the threat from terrorism, contrary to everything we are being told, does NOT rank among the great security threats of our nation's history, but that the countermeasures currently being taken are as shameful as any of the others undertaken. glenn greenwald comments astutely as usual.

barbara o'brien looks at a recent WaPo editorial and an op-ed piece by eugene reobinson, using them as the occasion to consider this president's politics of fear. she looks at an essay, "American Roulette: The Effect of Reminders of Death on Support for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election," in an advance copy from a book apparently forthcoming from blackwell. this article cites eric fromm's Escape from Freedom, which "proposed that loyalty to charismatic leaders results from a defensive need to feel a part of a larger whole, and surrendering one's freedom to a larger-than-life leader can serve as a source of self-worth and meaning in life." check out her elaboration of other concepts from fromm as a helpful way of understanding this bewildered and bewildering american republic.

there's of course the so-called liberal media's role in all this. greenwald also points out the recent attacks on the blogosphere, to which jim vandehei's WaPo latest dovetails all too well. see also matt stoller. once again, the discursive sphere where civilized and incisive commentary takes place is charged with lunacy and yet the constant stream of uninterrogated lies perpetuated by the major media is defended. "Assent--and you are sane-- / Demur--you're straightaway dangerous--" (emily dickinson ca. 1862)

peter daou has it just about right in his vaguely lakoffian argument that facts and reality simply do not cut through frames that support lies and illusions.

upcoming posts

i realize that of this blog's three stated topics music has been getting short shrift lately. my stereo has not been idle, just not focused on anything in particular lately. a projected david murray / david s. ware comparison after hearing the murray quartet play at twins lounge with catherine daly tonight will not happen unfortunately. other topics are however planned for the near future:

* more on rosalie moore's poetry

* something on my expanding collection of truman's water CDs

* possibly something on silliman inspired by the piece in PN Review that john latta was writing about recently on one or more occasions.

stay tuned...