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nor iron bars a cage

This is funky: Dean Mix 90. Dean's speech to the California Dems set to techno music. Max Headroom Howard Dean for President!

My eventual plan is to have all the posts to this blog published via Trickle in order to ensure an even flow between the weeks I have time to blog and the weeks that I don't.

Bisy backson!

the postlapsarian Hague tribunal

To the diablogger who posted "There was a world": here's a creation myth for you: Underneath (9). By Jorie Graham, from Swarm.

Here's my intepretation: (*Spoilers*)

^L

The poem is split up into four sections: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. As far as I can tell, it is a strophe to the Greek mythological figure Persephone (evidence: allusions to six missing seeds, an underground lover, etc.). In Spring, which takes up about half of the entire poem, Persephone seems to be a small, doll-like Christ action figure. Having presumably been living happily in sin with Hades all winter, she's forced back up into the sunlight to confront her suspicious mother, and to shoulder the responsibility for having brought winter/death into the world. Once aboveground, legitimacy is forced upon her -- daylight serves as her bridal veil and a "circle of minutes" is her wedding ring.

My favorite part in this section is the passage where, I think, Persephone (Eve) explains the motivation for her choice -- echoes of Hopkins here --

variegated     dappled     spangled     intricately wrought

complicated     obstruse     subtle     devious

scintillating with change and ambiguity

-- that is, the above is a list of good things that she's introduced into the world along with the four seasons. More about the rest of the poem later (maybe)

Only bloggers will find this funny, but

"ah, trackback: the referer logs you enter in manually" -- NTK via Jim.

traduction en cours

When I get bored I like to read passages in languages I don't understand.

L'homme s'est plié au-dessus du sien avatar
shearsman des sortes. L'écran était gris.

Ils ont dit, "vous avez lu Deleuze et Guattari
Vous play choses comme ils sont."

L'homme a répondu, des "choses comme ils sont Et ils ont dit lui, au "mais play vous devez, Un trope sur Deleuze et Guattari
Des choses exactement comme ils sont."

-- Jacques Flanâgan

ouchies

Sorry about the recent server downtime. I switched DNS servers and upgraded to the latest Apache, something I should never do unless I have time to work out all the kinks.

Note to self: Next time you upgrade Apache, remember to "mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf.disabled" . . . and next time you upgrade Sendmail, remember to comment out that line in sendmail.mc that restricts sendmail to listen only on 127.0.0.1.

To help myself cope with work stress, I am experimenting with running ASP.NET on my IIS server . . . Downloaded the WeblogX 2.0 software from SimpleGeek.com -- it's not Movable Type, but it's still pretty neat.

Also, for this site, I've given up on RSS auto-discovery and added a link to the RDF file I've had for over four months. :) See if you can find it.

holding pattern

I've been really busy the past couple days, so this site is going into reruns. About a year and a half ago I posted one of my favorite poems, here it is again, transcribed by Toadex: Prospect Park, by David Schubert.

When I have time, I'll transcribe Samuel Beckett's "Whoroscope," a poem with its own footnotes -- spoken by, and chronicling the life of, Rene Descartes. I am excited about the poem-as-biography genre. If I had time to read a biography, I would try it!

Okay, okay. Here's another poem from the Beckett book, which I'm borrowing from Ezra. It probably alludes to about a dozen things I don't recognize.

Saint-Lô

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc

-- by Samuel Beckett

Woke up this morning all my cuecards was gone

One of the great early blogs now on indefinite hiatus, Dagmar Chili, whose illucid and occasionally scatological ramblings had an inimitably right quality reminiscent but not derivative of Beckett, has been published ("CYBER-published") in the zine Arras: New Media Poetry and Poetics. They chose a peculiar excerpt, one I wouldn't have picked, and overlooked Doxo Wox, the online collection of poetry by the same author. But hell, at least they recognize quality when they see it.

It's not easy not being Green

Howard Dean: Not Really Green. The article contends that Dean is a centrist who pissed off environmental groups by making decisions that more than once favored business concerns at the expense of the environment. We've been discussing this on the Seattle Dean list and come to the conclusion that, despite his pretty decent track record on the environment, he's is definitely a centrist when it comes to many issues. Here's the best overview of his track record I've been able to find: The Moderate from Vermont.

Here are some of the things he's done that I like:

• closed 76 leaking landfills
• increased the percentage of waste recycling to 40%
• raised environmental standards for mercury and power plant pollution
• was responsible for designating many of Vermont's most recent scenic bikeways and forest preserves (VoteWithAVengeance.com)
• signed the Vermont civil unions bill
• appointed an openly gay man to the House of Representatives
• increased the number of women and minorities in judgeships and other prominent positions
• helped cut Vermont's child abuse rate in half
• began a program offering the mother of every newborn an at-home visit, from a local nonprofit or public agency, two weeks after the child's birth

And for a firsthand account on Dean's environmental record, let me quote an anonymous list member who lives in Vermont and works for the state government there:

Dean is somewhat similar to Clinton, in that he is a moderate Democrat. . . . Dean puts the environment and economic development on equal footing and has received mixed reviews from both groups. . . . Because Dean takes such strong stances, he was not and will not be steamrolled by strong egocentric senators and congress people. Not everyone liked him, but he was a force at the helm.

I admire Dean's ability to stick to his guns and follow his own policies when being pressured by lobbyists on both sides. I do think it is impossible to achieve a perfect environmental record without consistently sacrificing economic growth and development.

This all by way of saying that as far as I'm concerned, on the things that count, Dean is by far the best of the serious Democratic contenders.

Ikuku no Sekai

In response to a certain debate that's been going on on too many sites for me to summarize, and in homage to Big Bad Chinese Mama, I offer you a brief, satirical short story: How Ikuku Learned the Alphabet.

Also. Some facts about European underwear, 1700 - 1900, and its relationship to what women used for menstruation, illustrated article, at the Museum of Menstruation. This is really wild but for the sake of the squeamish I won't supply any details here.

chicory and Liszt

Fatigued. Allergies?

This afternoon the daisies and dandelions in the arboretum seemed to glow in the sunlight, rooted as they were in thick moist grass. A rogue mallard began to chase a lovey-dovey pair of ducks. A fracas of quacks ensued, the interloper flew off with the lady duck, and the jilted lover ran downhill and launched himself headlong into a small pond. As we left an hour later, we saw the small figure still floating there, with his head cocked to one side, nestling his beak into the feathers of his neck.

An ex-classmate points out that our old high school now has a "SARS protocol" in place, closing the campus to outside visitors and disinfecting buses and school facilities "throughout the school day." I just can't connect this with the memories I have of the place.

I read David B.'s Epileptic #1 (a hefty yellow volume also sold at Confounded Books, but you'll have to ask for it at the counter, as it's not on the shelves). "Stunning" is not a strong enough word to describe the magnitude of its achievement in bringing to life a child's dream-world, peopled with malignant and indifferent specters, and how it evolves as the narrator confronts chronic disease, injury, mental illness, death, the cruelty of people. . . .

Too many things are falling off my radar lately. If I could draw I would post a picture of myself slowly being buried in deep drifts of paper. Two (unrelated) quotes on friendship I was thinking of this week:

There's a type of male bonding that begins with Calibanism and ends in narcissism: The sheer blatancy of the overlap between our faults brings on mutual hostility (possibly due to a mutual fear of disclosure), whereas continued exposure reassures us that these faults are often found not only forgivable but charming.

-- Hotsy Totsy Club, 2 February 2001

How about reducing 'the' web for oneself, to some 8-9 sites? Would that be like reducing world literature to some 8-9 books? Or like reducing social life to some 8-9 friends?

-- NQPAOFU, 18 June 2001

a semi-automatic bunny or a hand-held bunny

While working in the bookstore today I found another entry for the virtual anthology of poem fragments I'm trying to make this site into:

Insomnia

Marooned on the wreckage of a star,
counting the demons in the ceiling,
haunted by a memory of the sea's dangerous skin. . . .

Dawn comes, and the mockingbird.
Awake all night -- that was my dream.

-- Michael Hannon, found in Floating Holiday #2

Business went smashingly today -- we actually brought in about ten times as much cash as we did on Wednesday, thanks in part to the generous patronage of A., Jim, and Yukino. Retail is really fun. I get a real kick out of opening and closing, tidying up the store, and counting the money in the till. The store has a DSL line so while business is slow I can work or surf the web. But best of all, I like being the girl behind the counter, chatting with customers and recommending stuff.

(That is, so long as it's not my only means of financial support.)

just wrap one big [sic] around what follows

"You know very well! You havn't such a bad memory as all that. Come no think can't remember a certain bank robery in which a certain Cargon figurgered, do you not recall what he said when you found him out eh? something about revenge? well I am he and this -- Fidon at this moment broke off as Braycaw raising a knife plunged it down ward there was a strangled and stilness.

"This" continued Fidon "Is our revenge

-- Evelyn Waugh, from "Fidon's Confetion", a work of juvenilia

As I was walking to the bus stop on the way home, two geese passed overhead flying so low -- not five feet away from me -- I could've sworn I felt a breeze ruffle my hair. Those white rings around their necks like fading scars from an old servitude.

"Someone up there is looking out for me." Like the Great Freckled Panda Spirit?

(The diabloggers sure are making a joyful noise resound lately. Thanks folks. Keep it up.)

more PB&J photos

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

-- Eliot, from "The Dry Salvages"
& yes more Hoh Rainforest photos from Patti B. and Jim F.

It was a cool, sunny day that turned into a humid and chilly evening. As we drove back from the movie theater in the dark we spotted a flock of seagulls, noiseless yellow shadows wheeling high above the monorail tracks.

starfish by Patti

The river is within us, the sea is all about us,
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:

The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
and the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
many gods and many voices.

-- Eliot, from "The Dry Salvages";
more photos of the Olympic Coast by Patti B. and Jim F.

At night the geese stream north: invisibly, but I can hear them through the walls. The first time I heard those shrieks, several years ago, I thought they were hallucinated -- slowly they have come to sound quite pedestrian.

the Wolf and the Lamb

In today's title I wanted to quote Roethke -- "The redeemer comes a dark way" -- but in the days since I last had time to update, it's become increasingly clear just what sort of redemption is going on here.

Bzzzerk.

In another shameless (and shamelessly materialistic) plug, here's the thing-I-want of the day:

Yeti #2

Even if you had absolutely no intention of reading the second issue of Yeti, you would still want to own it. The cover, by NON editor/cartoonist, Jordan Crane, is so striking, so far out, so orange and gold, that it's well worth the $9.95 cover fee. Plus, you get a rockin' CD, with unreleased tracks by The Shins, Death Cab For Cutie, Carissa's Weird, and many more. If you do intend to read the second issue of Yeti, you will learn about comic artists Ben Katchor and Mat Brinkman, musicians Laura Cantrell and Pere Ubu, and the illustration styles of Mark Sullo, Eric Reynolds, Jordan Crane, and Blair Wilson. $9.95

- Confounded Books zine catalog

Actually, what I want most in this dark time is the new Carolyn Forche book Blue Hour, but Yeti #2 is a close second.

Piney Smell

Our flyering session at the Peace rally (the first political event I've organized since I was 16) surpassed all our expectations. We staked my homemade "The Doctor is In" sign into a patch of rich earth sprinkled with pine needles and cones, about midway down the long path leading into the park, across the way from the Voter Registration booth, under some tall evergreens whose branches us sheltered us from the rain. Despite the weather, there was a good-size crowd there -- both cheerful and angry, intense in a mellow way -- many of them not just receptive to the Dean campaign but actively in favor of it. Others actively disillusioned: "As far as I know he's just another Democrat," but lightening up a bit when I tell them about Dean's track record. As I suspected, among the nonviolence folks, the race is not Kerry v. Dean but Dean v. Kucinich, with the Communists, Socialists, and Lyndon LaRouche trailing a little farther behind.

But as the primary nears, we're going to need to leave the supportive cradle of neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and hippy-dippy Ravenna, to brave the indifferent crowds downtown and on the Eastside.

BTW. How to make a Dean sign sturdy enough to last for two hours in the rain and slick enough to look professional from a distance: print out the 8 1/2" x 11" sign from the Dean Organizing Kit, enlarge it with a color photocopier at 200%, use about half a regular roll of clear packing tape to tape it to a 17" x 22" piece of scrounged cardboard, making sure to cover every inch of the paper so as to waterproof it. Nail two wooden lathes to a picketing stick in sort of a double crucifix (the figure you'd get writing a lower-case "t" over an upper-case "T"), then duct-tape that to the cardboard sign. Voila!

an interlude between wars

Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?
--Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both,
like most of we.
--The evidence is difficult to structure towards deliberate evil.

-- John Berryman, beginning of Dream Song #239

No arguing against some of the joy they're printing in the papers. Hooray! The Iraqi smiles of relief are infectious, even though they're mixed with sidelong glances at a troubled future, even though no one can quite forget how much this victory cost.

Exhale slowly emptying out all the way down to my toes. Drink a glass of water and try to sleep in while I can.

Here is Dean's seven-point plan for multilateral reconstruction:

• A NATO-led coalition should maintain order and guarantee disarmament.
• Civilian authority in Iraq should be transferred to an international body approved by the U.N. Security Council.
• The U.N.'s Oil for Food program should be transformed into an Oil for Recovery program, to pay part of the costs of reconstruction and transition.
• The U.S. should convene an international donor's conference to help finance the financial burden of paying for Iraq's recovery.
• Women should participate in every aspect of the decision-making process.
• A means should be established to prosecute crimes committed against the Iraqi people by individuals associated with Saddam Hussein's regime.
• A democratic transition will take between 18 to 24 months, although troops should expect to be in Iraq for a longer period.

premium/unleaded

Here's another thought-provoking excerpt from The Clash at the International Studies Association (the new link is to Jim's wikified version):

And here is perhaps the biggest problem [with peace marches]: the continuation of the myth that the Vietnam War ended because of peaceful protest marches. More than any other factor, the Vietnam War ended and the Civil Rights victory was won because of the high sacrifice of flesh and blood -- mostly by the Vietnamese in the first case and African-Americans in the second. The US pulled out of Vietnam because of the realization that the enemy could not be defeated. To claim that peaceful protests in the US were what forced the Nixon administration to retreat is to rewrite history and deny Vietnamese agency.

But there is obviously important political power for maintaining this establishment narrative. Maintaining such discourses on the liberating effects of peaceful protests ensures that political opposition will only legitimately be practiced through peaceful protest marches -- events that can easily be controlled and mediated to ensure that they don't offer serious threats to the established order.

The motto of Seattle's umbrella antiwar coalition, Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War: "Each snowflake is gentle and delicate, but together they can shut down a city."

a quote from John Wheelwright

                  blank indelible
Image of death on cypress-measured air

the futility of mortality

hax0red! The server that hosts neonepiphany.com and paperlane.net got hacked yesterday and will be "down indefinitely." That means Yukino's mail is down too. Ouch.

UPDATE: the temporary neonepiphany URL is http://bantha.org/~hikari/.

Geegaw users, please remember to back up your data and use the Movable Type export utility to back up your blogs .  

precognition

Jessamyn and Eric ran into each other at the William Gibson reading at Elliott Bay, had a blast; Jessamyn had already read an advance copy of the new book, and recommended it to me; so I bought a copy, read it in a couple days, and turned around and lent it to Jim --

This story's soul is a thousand miles behind it. It didn't catch up while the book was in my possession.

- Jim, referencing one of the book's heavily repeated tropes

And I think it was a few days after I finished the book that I found out that Ezra, whom I had just had tea with, had been reading it too. Writes Ezra (scroll down to March 15, 'coz the good fellow lacks permalinks):

But what clinches the value of the book for me is the protagonist's humanity. Cayce spends a good part of the book just trying to get some sleep, and reaching out to her friends who are all elsewhere, via email and cell phone (she's an international traveller, to say the least, and the book's prismatic perspective on some of the great cities is enticing). Who can't relate to this chronic sleeplessness?

. . . so, all in all, the relative frothiness of the book was more than mitigated by the fact that reading it became essentially a communal experience without my ever discussing this book with any of the above Seattleites in a face-to-face manner. Welcome to 2003!

Tonight I am reading the complete stories of Evelyn Waugh. . .  if a similar circumstance arises from that, I'll eat my hat.

audio ammunition

Via Misha, a creative and provocative and angry paper on The Clash and International Studies by Kevin Dunn, a Professor of International Relations at Hobart and William Smith College.

So much of this article is worth quoting that I don't know where to start. Maybe I should post a fragment every day.

But at the ISA -- the group of scholars whose primary focus is on international relation -- hardly anybody was talking about these dramatic changes, or the looming war on Iraq. In fact, it seemed that many people were completely avoiding talking about the war. There were the occasional jokes about "old Europe," but conversations never moved beyond that level.

It took a respected German political theorist (not an IR theorists, it should be noted) to help explain this to me. Fred Dallmayr was being honored by the Global Development section as that year's distinguished scholar. It was during the roundtable discussion honoring him (complete with the obligatory "Old Europe" references) that the conference's most explicit discussion of the war emerged. Dallamayr ended his comments by reading a quote from president Theodore Roosevelt that it was antithetical to American democratic belief to blindly and uncritically follow the president. As Roosevelt said, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public... Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official... It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth." It was our duty, our responsibility, Dallamayr urged, to critically challenge the president.

During the reception that followed, he was even more explicit. With his German accent he told the gathering that he had often been asked how German intellectuals could have been so quiet in the face of fascism's rise during the 1930s.

"Look around right now," Dallmayr said. "Now you know."

P.s. Allegedly the Taliban is reorganizing (via Caterina) and the US military just launched an operation against them. . .

my life as a blind sea turtle

The foil couplet is from The Clicking-the-Buckle Three-Peach-Tree Town Sonnet by Toadex Hobogrammathon. Whenever I say that title under my breath I feel like my mouth is a one-man drum section from all the Ts, Ps and Ks.

This morning the top half of my head, from my nose up, feels like a blank piece of paper floating in a white room, and I realize that this week I finally did enough volunteer work that I am numb about the war! Maybe it's to attain this feeling that so many volunteers have been willing to drop everything and work like hell for the Dean campaign.

This weekend I sailed through the Greg Bear book and right into rereading A Deepness in the Sky. Asimov-style space opera + Hal Clement-style world creation = sweet escapism, like dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream.

sleeper says what

First, foil, it does harm happen;
it is lefthanded supreme being;

Lunch was Indian buffet: fried lentil donuts and dosas with the many-monikered Yukino. Then we went to the library at Crossroads where I picked up the new Local Flavors cookbook by Deborah Madison and Child of Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. Comfort food and comfort reading for an uncomfortable time.

To the RSS diablogger: Glad the RDF file works for you. I'll put up an XML Summaries button next time I have the chance.

My web server seems to be slowing down a little due to demand for the Dean buttons and the 4 humors quiz. Maybe it was a bad idea. But this week we're only averaging 10 page requests/minute; shouldn't Apache on a PII-400 have no trouble scaling to this?

PS Anyone planning to be at the April 12 peace gathering in Volunteer Park, let me know to keep an eye out for you. . . .

celebrities against the war

Why bother reading People these days?

• "Back to Babylon," by Viggo Mortensen, on Poets Against the War (who cares whether it's good? It's by Aragorn!) - Viggo is one of our Poets of the Day today
• "Regime Change" by Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate, read on BBC radio yesterday (I can't believe he actually used the word "crap" in a poem!)

Creepily bewildered and flustered-sounding: The Poetry of D. H. Rumsfeld. Not Lawrence; Rumsfeld. (Thanks Lia)

It's a knock-down drag-out fight that asks no quarter

An impressive limerick -- thanks! (By Thurber, you say? . . . I'd been thinking of writing Douglas to ask for one.)

It's sad but whenever I leaf through Zagat's I feel like reading Marianne Moore. Here's a snippet from a poem about war I don't know I agree with: it's the one that says "There never was a war that was / not inward":

                                  They're
          fighting in deserts and caves, one by
one, in battalions and squadrons;
         they're fighting that I
may yet recover from the disease, My
Self; some have it lightly; some will die. "Man's
          wolf to man" and we devour
                    ourselves. The enemy could not
          have made a greater breach in our
defenses.

-- Marianne Moore, from "In Distrust of Merits"

Is it true? I really don't believe the reason the war is going on is because I, M.Gaw, carried around too much anger in my heart and thus became complicit. The whole thing smacks of the schoolroom directive to little girls to sit quiet and work on your needlepoint until it's absolutely 100% clean and pretty and neat, because if everyone did this, why, the whole world would suddenly be a gentle place. Why, of course the people don't want war. That is, the people only want war because the juggernaut had already started moving.

Oh now look at me, all angry again. And to think I had set out to write an entry that wasn't about war or politics at all, but about elephants.

Exit hurriedly, pursued by a bear

Susan Nall-Bales: sometimes the envelope matters more than the actual message. Great analysis about how the Republicans spend years disseminating vivid (though misleading, often factually incorrect) memes that sway voters (e.g. "death tax," "partial-birth abortion"), while the Dems, by adopting doomsaying tactics, are losing ground. The article even namechecks George Lakoff (finally the academics are earning their keep!).

I stole this picture from somewhere:

And regarding George W. Bush's psychology: Cap'n Blowhard expounds upon the "Dry Drunk" theory.

steal these Howard Dean banners

I made some Howard Dean banners which I am dedicating to the public domain -- feel free to save, modify, redistribute, whatever. The top one is inspired by Antipixel's buttons, and the GIFs are all using the Silkscreen font. (Thanks sinekow.org for the impetus.)