Lord of Melancholy

I have almost unburied myself of the absurd amounts of work I have had. All of you to whom I owe emails/correspondance/etc. will get them soon. Sorry that I've dropped off the face of the earth, but just a lot of projects reaching their apogee all at once.

Additionally, I bought a stereo amplifier for ten bucks from a yard sale over the weekend, which I hooked up to an old turntable my roommate had lying around and some speakers, so I now once again have the ability to listen to vinyl, which I haven't had in a good four or five years.

My vinyl collection consists mostly of classical music I picked up from radio and library going-out-of-business sales and tons of mid-90's Emo (Maximilian Colby, anyone?) Also, of course, my copy of "Pac Man Fever" (alas, if I had only had the record player around as I was finishing my article for Soft Skull's Gamers) which I suppose I will wait until I have some time alone in the apartment to listen to. Most of the music has been on ice for so long, that it feels almost new. Apart from "Christmas in the Stars," the Star Wars Christmas album, which becomes cemented in my head every December and which I would pay money to have surgically removed and all memory of it erased from my brain (22 years of "What Can You Get a Wookie for Christmas when He Already Owns a Comb?" is penance enough for whatever I did wrong in those past lives, right?...)

Listening to old Shotmaker, Maximilian Colby and Halal Shedad records I find myself astonished that rock music exists which doesn't sound like the Jam, Joy Division or the Rolling Stones, which seem to the the 3 primary modes of late. Some of that unintelligible shrieking feels textural in the way that improvised music is, and nice to hear from a time when when fey art school boys were still allowed to play like Celtic Frost...

I couldn't be happier with how the Maudite Productions Michael County/Jim Dunn and (Dear Old) Stockholm Syndrome event went on Saturday. It is the first time I've tried to pair up improvisational music and written words, and I think it went pretty well. Both Mike can Jim were particularly suited to the environment, I think. Ostensibly there is a recording of a portion of it, so I will keep you faithful readers informed.

In other news, it's summer and time to start beach-schemeing. Nothing says summer like fried food and obnoxious crowds. I will shamelessly admit, however, that I love cheesy beach towns in the summer. The cheesier the better. My favorite is Salisbury Beach, but I don't think I'll be going there this summer, as it is too haunted. This is a problem with such towns, they become occupied by ghosts too quickly.

By sometime in August, the Spangler BBQ will have lost its novelty. However, today it was exciting to get a cheeseburger from the grill to the tune of "Our Lips are Sealed." The guy who runs the grill seems to have a habit of talking copiously to the food in front of him. "Ah its a lonely cheeseburger, come to daddy." It's a little alarming that every year they get a black guy to do the grill. Given that there are a lot of black guys on the Restaura staff, this could be merely coincidental. I guess, also, it takes a certain amount of machismo to want to stand in front of that hot grill at high noon on the hottest days of the year. You probably would not see my scrawny white ass doing such a thing. They really ought to have a tip jar for the BBQ guy.

This all makes me want to listen to "They Smoke the Barbeque" by Pere Ubu. Which is actually a fantastic song:

"I lie awake
I was waiting for the clouds to break
No doubt you've heard
about the door in through the Northern Pole
It's hard to believe
Are there people really living underneath?
I hear they live on fruit and air
I hear they love ole Yogi Bear
I hear they're good at parking cars
I hear they want to be like we are

They'll move next door
They'll be a part of the neighborhood
But as sad as we are
the company must love misery
Now that we're on the downside of forever
I fear hard times are beginning
for real

I hear their sky is pink all day
I hear they love ole Yogi Bear
I hear they sneak around at night
I hear they want to be like we are
We stay up late
We're waiting for the clouds to break
Through the barbeque smoke
men from Mars?
It's no joke!
We're not alone
and eager eyes watch the sky
My new buddies and me
we say
Misery must love company"

Barbeque and Martians. It doesn't get any better than that!...

I believe that it is functionally impossible to consume enough hot dogs to feel like you've actually had lunch.

CBS Joins Reality Hunt for New INXS Singer

Kind of makes you realize why Michael Hutchence decided to leave. & his ghost still can't get any respect.

"Here come the world
With the look in its eye
Future uncertain but certainly slight
Look at the faces
Listen to the bells
It's hard to believe we need a place called hell"

Thanks to Graywyvern for pointing to my Nemesis poem.

Great reading by Dan Bouchard and Ron Silliman last night. I especially liked the cage match betwen Behrle and Silliman. I never knew Silliman could shoot beams from his eyes like that. I didn't know there was a tiny little alien who operates the Jim Behrle robot exoskeleton, either.

The things you learn.

Added James Meetze's Brutal Kittens and the Verse Magazine Blog to links.

Happy Father's Day to the fathers out there: Geof , Greg, Mike, James M., Jordan, and the father-to-be James C. as well as anyone I'm unaware of or have forgotten.

Thanks to Brian for this:

Bush and Zombie Reagan need more brains

Zombies are always funny.

Would someone please tell Yahoo! that their "improved" email, despite the added storage, is a piece of dookie!!!

It's driving me crazy. If this continues, I'm going to have to change to another service (maybe actually start using my comcast POP account); I'd rather not do this given that my email address has not changed in 6 years...

In those 6 years Yahoo has been fairly realiable, but since this upgrade it's been spotty, at best. Don't they test these things before they go live with them?

From the Amazon.com entry for the Triplets of Belleville DVD. Now why would the French poke fun at such erudite folks as this guy:

"Two stars: A good song, June 13, 2004
Reviewer: A viewer from Denver, CO

Didn't like the American jabs, particulaly by the french, although if it wasn't by the french it would be funny. But before you have time to relax and laugh theirs another joke at our expense. The statue of liberty wasn't voluptious, she was fat to represent "Bellville?" The sound effexts were interesting, the story obviouse, the animation was good. "

Happy Birthday *Rachel* !!!

and Noah Eli Gordon too, apparently. (I always knew I liked that guy!...)

It is unusual that my workslife intersects with my "real" life in any way, but this link off of the HBS intranet site about Bloomsday, the Joyce estate, readings, archives and intellectual property. It raises some interesting issues.

Maudite Productions is in need of an LCD Computer-Projection screen. Does anyone know where I might procure one of these?

Violation of Objective Correlative

Shaking my fists at the gods in anger!

This corn muffin is decidedly inedible...

All
skin &
bones, I is

I'm ashamed to say it, but sometimes I get annoyed by the daily MoveOn.org emails. Yes, yes! We're surrounded by evil, but please let me eat my lunch...

The Maudite readings have been going very well. Attendance for each event has been better than I expected (knock on wood). This weekend was no exception, fine readings by Shin Yu Pai, Jess Mynes, Christopher Rizzo, Sean Cole and Aaron standing in for Lori Lubeski; also, it was a pleasure to read the excellent work of Catherine Meng out loud to an audience. Thanks to everyone who read or attended. In two weeks will be the first Maudite event featuring live music, so hopefully this will go as smoothly as the others have, with the addition of sound equipment to worry about.

I'm glad to be doing things for poetry/other poets lately, because I haven't been writing that much, and at least this way I stay engaged and my temporary little hiatus does not lead to too much alienation from the medium. My saturnian termprament is still racing (if the god of melancholy can race) to catch up with the benign changes in my life these days. I'm perfectly capable of writing when I'm happy, but have grown somewhat out of practice with that particular mode, so there's a bit of a lag as the eyes readjust to a different lens. I don't necessarily write happy work when I myself am otherwise happy, but the source of the work shifts a bit somehow, if not the actual product. It does allow me to address subjects I am interested in writing about but have not been able to access from the proper frame of mind; but there is still the figuring out which frame fits.

Happy Birthday Jordan

(While he may look like Legendary God-giant Ideon, today he is the Birthday Robot in honor of Equanimity).

I was looking for a picture of a million poems but I couldn't find one.

A rough week and a half for music: Steve Lacy, Robert Quine, Ray Charles. Unfortunately eclipsed, of course, by more high profile cadavers.

Morissey said it so you don't have to.

Overall the score for the week looks like:

GOOD GUYS: -3

BAD GUYS: -1

You out-of-towners have no reason to wait until saturday to order up a copy of CARVE 3, from the fishblog.

O land of my ancestors, how I love you!

"Paris Goes After SUVs"

"Bulky four-by-fours could be banned from clogging up the chic streets of Paris after a top official in the capital's left-wing government described them as a polluting "caricature of a car" unsuited to city life."

Deux Chevaux for everyone! Make cheese not war!

Old bad senile President dead, let's move on. I don't think I've ever seen Americans pay attention to ANYTHING for this long.

June 12, 2004:

Carve Magazine Release Reading & Party

GALLERY 108
108 Beacon Street, Somerville, MA
8 PM

Contact: Mark Lamoureux, Maudite Productions 617.460.0118

Carve Magaizne presents a reading and party in honor of the release of CARVE 3, featuring:

Shin Yu Pai (Boston, MA)
Jess Mynes (Wendell, MA)
Catherine A. Meng (Berkeley, CA)
Christopher Rizzo (Boston, MA)
Sean Cole (Greater Boston, MA)
Lori Lubeski (Brookline, MA)
Emily Belz (Cambridge, MA) (cover artist)

CARVE is a small magazine devoted to publishing under-the-radar poetry. Each
issue is $5 (subs $20/4), available from Aaron Tieger, 51 Prentiss St. #7,
Cambridge MA 02140.
Appearing: Shin Yu Pai, Jess Mynes, Catherine Meng (as read by Mark Lamoureux),
Sean Cole, and Lori Lubeski (as read by Aaron Tieger).

Refreshments! Free and open to the public!

Further info: mark_lamoureux@yahoo.com/mauditepro.blogspot.com
or atieger@yahoo.com/fishblog.blogspot.com

The Sitemeter is certainly reflecting my reticence in posting here. As soon as I am less swamped with work, I'll get back to being interesting and exciting. Until then...are you a Dark Unicorn or a Mermaid?

Sue Me

I know it's much cooler to bicker endlessly about tenuously defined points or tender bits of semantics, but I thought it might be time, given the current blogging zeitgeist, for a moronic Quizilla quiz. A return to the heady days of December, 2003...


You're like a Dark Unicorn!


?? Which Mythical Creature Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla

Generally speaking, I consider it unwise to speak ill of the dead. Particularly the recently dead.

My childhood dreams were full of mushroom clouds and the fears of poverty. But who knows what hell a man enters when his mind's eaten away and an earthly body becomes a prison. Age brings even those old devils down, as it will come for everyone, as death will come for everyone.

It is no longer an affair of this world, how Mr. Reagan's heart will weigh against the feather of Maat and it's not our sun in that sunset he goes into now.

Good luck, Ronald...

Strange and Ghostly

*I* didn't even put him up to that description, either...

"Please join us for a strange and ghostly Anti-Reading
at this sweet gallery in Somerville. See below.

- Matvei

> Maudite Productions hosts Loudmouth Collective and
Ugly Duckling Presse

> June 5, 2004: Anti-Reading

> GALLERY 108
108 Beacon Street, Somerville, MA

> 8 PM

> Contact: Mark Lamoureux, Maudite Productions
617.460.0112

PS -
We will have hard-to-get-in-Boston UDP books on hand
for sale, too.

>
> Loudmouth Collective began, ironically, with one
> member, James Hoff, sometime in the late
> winter/early spring of 2001. The collective's goal
> was to publish (chap)books of new work by some of
> the bright and underrated talents within the margins
> of the writing world. Furthermore, each publication
> would strive to challenge the typical physical
> appearance of the (chap)book.
>
> By March 2001, Hoff had been joined by Ryan Haley
> and preparations had begun for the Anti-Readings,
> which were to be organized with the assistance of
> the members of Ugly Ducking Presse. Anti-Readings
> quickly became the major focus of Loudmouth
> activities for the next year; culminating in a
> triumphant Poetry Project Anti-Reading in March
> 2002.
>
> During 2003, Loudmouth Collective had a
> retrospective show at Berlin's Elefant + Ship, a
> performance during the Virginia Festival of the
> Book, the premiere screening of Joel Schlemowitz's
> documentary Loudmouth Collective/Ugly Duckling
> Presse/Anti-Reading, and the release of Steve
> Dalachinsky's Trial and Error in Paris and Edmund
> Berrigan's I Feel Tractor.
> >
> Saturday, June 5, at Gallery 108 in Somerville,
> Massachusetts, Loudmouth Collective founder James
> Hoff and Ugly Duckling Presse members Matvei
> Yanklevitch and Anna Moschovakis will be presenting
> another Anti-Reading.
>
> For more information please see the
Maudite Productions Blog
>
=====
The UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE workshop
70 WASHINGTON STREET, GROUND FLOOR
BROOKLYN, NY 11201

www.UglyDucklingPresse.org open by appointment, 718-852-5529"

I rarely think of myself as being influenced by particular poets so much as I think of myself as being influenced by particular poems. I rarely think of the poets themselves as entities. In fact, the flesh and blood entity that produced the poem is fairly irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Whatever the societal transgressions said entity perpetrates are between said entity and the society in question, to be resolved as is the custom of that society. How this manifests itself in the work is irrelevant, since, we needn't assume that any given piece of writing is "true" or "autobiographical," or that it is the author's fleshly voice. Insofar as a work stands in for an author metonymically we can think of these works as specters of the author, but what sins can a book commit? A work of literature cannot change or influence society, it can only change or influence people who in turn change or influence society, and it is more or less impossible to assess how any given work will affect a person. Gerard Manley Hopkins inspires me to want to smash the state moreso than Ginsberg et. al. ever did. I find politically-motivated work charming, and I enjoy it, but it is quixotic. I for one an enamoured of the quixotic, but to insist that every writer/person/whoever participate in that quixoticism is utterly preposterous.

I enjoy the "Four Quartets" and "Murder in the Cathedral," but not so much the "Wasteland," or much other Eliot for that matter. With Pound it is even more individual: particular poems, particular Cantos. Do these people influence me? Not really, or at least not this afternoon. Stan Brakhage influences me, Louise Brooks influences me, Matthew Shipp influences me, "Space Invaders" influences me, Bruce Andrews influences me, Longfellow influences me, Madonna influences me, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum, by 5:00 PM next Friday, this list will most likely have changed drastically...

OK this is my opening song and dance. A more coherent piece with footnotes will appear later lest it be said that I'm merely shooting from the hip here...

I do have things to say about all the ruckuss. But I'm at work and then I need to get a haircut and do my laundry. And then I need to get some sleep. But at some point in the near future I will add my two cents.

In the meantime why don't y'all take a deep breath and go read dbqp for some astute, refreshing, earnest and invective-free thinking on poetics and aesthetics.

Every time I go outside, the weather is doing something different. It is getting really difficult to know what clothes to put on in the morning.

I saw a Yahoo! News headline that says "Bush likens war against terrorism to WWII."

If I were Dubya, I don't think I'd be tossing around the WWII references too casually. The only comparisons between his foreign policy and anything related to WWII that I can come up with don't exactly shed positive light on Herr...I mean Mr. ...Bush.

Picked up Tim Eriksen's new record this weekend and it is quite good.

Lots of murder ballads and a song about Sea Monkeys:

"In my childhood bed I found
A tiny scepter
And a tiny crown."

Thanks to R for this piece of found brilliance.

Chess Instrucmon

Locs are drawn to esaohsh who has the wile chessmen and thus , who can move first. This player is then allowed the 16 black chess pieces. The board is positioned so that each player has a dark corner square on his left. The two rooks are positioned on the two corner square to the left and right. Next to these come the two corner square to the left and right. Next to these. the two bis hops and in the center. The queen and king, the white queen is always positioned on a light square the black queen on a dark square. The eight paws are then placed adjacently in the vance from its initial square on the second rank. the pawn has the option of moving one or Two-squa res. The rook moves only on the ranks and files any distance and the bishop only on the diagonals. The queen can move in any direction The knights are the only pieces which are able to change direction during the course of a move and "jump over" one's own or one's opponent's pi ces; a king takes one step of one single square along the file or rank and then. still moving many from the square that has left, takes one step along the diagonal. The king may move in any direction one step at a time.

All pieces start from the pawns capture in the normal direction of movement described above. However, the paws which normally only move in a straight line may only capture diagonally to the left or right and only forwards. It is not obligatory to capture your opponent. If the king is threatened, check must be given(the player must declare check) The opponent is then obliged to protect his king by moving the king to another square or moving one of his own pieces between it and the threatening piece or capturing the opposing attacker. If he is unable to make any of the above moves. the king is said to be checkmared and the game ends in favor of the opponent.

We must dtill mention one pecuharly-castling. Casthng is a compound move of the king and one rook (formally called "castle") that may be made. If at all only once in a game. It is legal if neither the king nor the rook has yet moved. If all the squares between them on the rank are vacant and no adverse piece commands two squares nearest the king on the side on which castling is to be carred out and if the king is not in chect. The move is executed by moving the king two squares towarad the rook and then placing the rook on the square passed over by the king.