Saturday, November 11, 2006


website has a good selection from Arthur Cleveland Bent's classic multi-volume Life Histories of North American Birds--

"Allen (1919) has called our attention to the time rhythm, which he attributes to a well-developed esthetic sense of the crow. He has noted that the caw notes are not only in triplets but at times they give four caws in groups of two (2-2); again he noted that the bird cawed 2-1 a large number of times in succession and on other occasions 2-1-1. The time was so regular that he could detect no variations. The length of the several notes and their pitch and quality were uniform, the rhythm being all that differentiated the phrase from other performances of the crow.

Allen does not believe the series of combination of calls represents a code of signals, nor does he believe them to be purely mechanical and involuntary, but he thinks the crow takes delight in the rhythm and variety of his utterances. He asks the question, "Is he not, in a limited way, a true artist, a composer as well as a performer ?""

Friday, November 10, 2006




"Hands Over the City"


A walk
on gilded splinters


in terrycloth
slippers

or felt like they
made me wear at Sans-Souci--

polishing the ancient slats--
they should pay you!

quiet as a childhood spent
at Schinkel's Cinecitta

except for the damned dubbing
the same six voices

in every other movie
we ever saw--Barabbas,

The Campbells Are Coming,
A Bullet For Django--RCAF base theatres

then a point of pre-multiplex
distribution somewhere

between 42nd St. &
the edges of the "Old Colonial" Circuit--

so that the unaccented studio
bark colonised my kidspace

bigtime even if I never
even heard Burt's authentic Palermo

grandee or the Calabrese
striver they must have got for Rod Steiger's

Neapolitan Robert Moses/
Donald Trump though

Rosi can't resist letting
him mime out a scene in an empty

office as something out of The Big Knife
volcanic method emotions

rubbing his face out of a broken lamp
with a dampened hanky

and neck sweat for
lip-readers, but then re-embedded

beneath Etna,
under Cinemascope.

key to election results I think was Bush's alienation of Hank Hill Democrats...(who people like Halperin thought Rove had sewn up in a neat little package)



"Q--King of the Hill has crossed over into politics–the governor of North Carolina talks about reaching out to King of the Hill Democrats--

A--I think it's kind of cool. I didn't exactly know what it meant at first. But then I could see–Hank's not hip, he works a regular job, lives in the middle of the country, and we don't make fun of him. The show is on his side. And in a weird way, that feels like a kind of rebellious thing to do in Hollywood these days. Usually if you have the guy who's the propane salesman, he's the butt of the joke. We take this regular, unhip person and treat him with dignity. So I'm not surprised someone would say that's the kind of person we have to try to appeal to. Because it's almost like a silent majority again..."
oops! look's like the "The Note"'s Mark Halperin gets the Vaughn Meader award--

"How can the same Mark Halperin who today parades around on right-wing radio shows bemoaning the "outrageous" behavior of liberally biased reporters who are out to get Bush and Rove, be the same Mark Halperin who in an October 5, 2004, memo wrote, "I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with. the stepped-up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions."

Clearly Halperin has flip-flopped. But why?

I think the answers are pretty obvious. First, he's out shilling a new Karl Rove-is-a-genius book, The Way to Win, which means Halperin has a vested interest -- a financial incentive -- in seeing Rove's Republicans to do well (i.e., a GOP win would reinforce the friendly premise of his book)..."

Buttermilk Channel



Red Hook



Wrapped Lions Red Hook



Bridge Bangor

many impossible to find books by the likes of Bernadette Mayer, Bruce Andrews, David Melnick, Susan Howe & c. lovingly reproduced at Eclipse

fine Squirrel site--

"A squirrel leaping from bough to bough, and making the wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion,--is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Thursday, November 09, 2006


via metafilter Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem

"Emily and Susan Dickinson's exchange over the writing of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" indicates that Sue critiqued the text while Dickinson was in the process of writing, that the effects of Sue's responses to reading the poem are evident in its various incarnations. In other words, Sue was a vital participant in the composition and transmission of the poem. Because of that fact and because their exchange features audience response written and received by Emily Dickinson, these writings by and to her, concerning the shape and purview of the poem, are displayed and examined in this demonstration of how part of a Hypermedia Archive of Emily Dickinson's Creative Project might work."





Greenpoint & Williamsburg Trees





Chelsea Trees & Moon





Bangor Trees





Red Hook Trees