In any case, due to "differing site conditions," we here at Vrzhu are invoking unilaterally the "Delay Due to Differing Site Conditions" provision of our contract [with you].
After a full assessment, we'll be back with several important articles [of interest]:
Poetry and Poem Layoffs: economic downturn results in highest unemployed poem rate in 50 years. Thinning the ranks, or just thinning the rank?
New advances in robotic embedded poetry systems: from Robotic Embedded Poetry Systems Quarterly.
What in and out for 2009 in poetry: our second annual tradition of applying a completely frivolous and inappropriate cultural and media meme to the literary arts!
A bit late to eulogize these two great artists, but here are a couples of clips. I was hoping to find a clip of Eartha Kitt singing "Monotonous" from the Broadway show "New Faces of 1952." No luck. I recommending searching it out and giving it a listen.
from the excellent film version of Pinter's The Caretaker:
"Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ourselves, as Plato's age had not yet made it fully a part of itself, we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be. Yet writing (and especially alphabetic writing) is a technology, calling for the use of tools and other equipment: styli or brushes or pens, carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood, as well as inks or paints, and much more. … Writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies. It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist."
—Walter Ong
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Fait Divers de la Poemes Amercaine et Brittanique
Bombardier beetles of the genus Brachinus are unique in mixing chemicals to make an explosion. The ingredients are made and held in separate glands. When required, they are squirted into a chamber near the rear end of the beetle, where they explode, forcing noxious (caustic and boiling-hot) liquid out through a nozzle directed at the enemy.
The archer fish comes to the surface of the water and spits a mouthful at a perched insect, knocking it down into the water, where it eats it. The archer fish's spit is guided, with devastating accuracy, by binocularly focused eyes.
Spitting spiders [family Scytodidae] lack the fleetness of a wolf spider or the net of a web spider. A spitting spider chucks a venomous glue some distance towards its prey, pinning it to the ground until the spider arrives and bites it to death.
The bolas spider [Mastophora] uses a missile to capture prey. The spider synthesizes and exudes the fake sexual scent of a female moth, which attracts male moths. The missile is a blob of silk. The blob is attached to a thread of silk, which the spider whirls around like a lasso or bola, then hurls at its prey, which it then reels in.
The diving bell spider [Argyroneta aquatica] lives and hunts entirely under water. Like dolphins, dugongs, turtles, freshwater snails and other land animals that have returned to water, the diving bell spider still needs to breathe air. To accomplish this it constructs own diving bell. It spins a bell of silk attached to an underwater plant. The spider goes to the surface to collect air, which it carries in the same way as some water bugs, in a layer trapped by body hairs. But unlike the bugs, which just carry the air like a scuba cylinder wherever they go, the spider takes it to its diving bell, where it unloads it to replenish the supply. The spider sits in the diving bell watching for prey, and it stores and eats prey there, once caught.
Extra credit for identifying the poets alluded to above!
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What are poems? [Part two]
"Even more confusion of terminology could be avoided by realizing that making ever more precise or restrictive definitions does not generate greater precision in the understanding of any animal. Animals are dynamic. Each animal’s choices fit in somewhere in a long continuum of almost anything that can be measured or imagined. Different terms may apply in any one animal in varying degree, depending on circumstances, but ultimately the species, and often the individual, fashion their own solutions to fit the situation or the occasion. We gain understanding not so much by lumping and defining, but by differentiating the specifics form the generalized features. The latter have a tendency to become enshrined as rules or laws that are ultimately statistically derived descriptive artifacts. But animals don’t follow rules or easily allow us to pigeonhole them into convenient intellectual boxes. A “rule” is nothing more than a consistency of response that we have deduced animals exhibit because it serves their interests. Rules are the sum of decisions made by individuals. They are a result. The chaos, and the art, of nature remains." -Bernd Heinrich
For "animal," read "poem." For "nature," read "the poet."
This post is going up at 7:04 AM, 21 December 2008, the moment when the sun is at its furthest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from us. Winter Solstice. From the Latin solstitium, "The point at which the sun seems to stand still." From this point on it climbs higher and higher in the sky, more and more light being shed on us here everyday.
Here's one of my favorite poems. There are lines in this that never fail to choke me up. And, for a poem that has almost as much nothing in it as King Lear ("nothing will come of nothing," and does it ever), it ends on the basic statement of being, the copula. That which connects also brings into being, even as we do.
A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy's Day John Donne
'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's, Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ; The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ; The world's whole sap is sunk ; The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring ; For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness ; He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that's good, Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ; I, by Love's limbec, am the grave Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood Have we two wept, and so Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow, To be two chaoses, when we did show Care to aught else ; and often absences Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
But I am by her death—which word wrongs her— Of the first nothing the elixir grown ; Were I a man, that I were one I needs must know ; I should prefer, If I were any beast, Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest, And love ; all, all some properties invest. If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none ; nor will my sun renew. You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun At this time to the Goat is run To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all, Since she enjoys her long night's festival. Let me prepare towards her, and let me call This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.
She (Nietzche’s sister) would allow guests a viewing of her brother, dressed by her in a white
pleated robe like a Brahmin. Meta von Salis, who provided a free house in Weimar, the Villa Silberblick, for the Nietzsches and the archive (and to whom Elisabeth presented a bill for redecoration), was appalled when she read a newspaper article by a journalist who had been allowed to watch Nietzsche sleep and to observe him being fed bits of cake as he cowered on a chair.
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Watson and the Shark
How the story is written around the painting, how the story frames the image. A white Blakean body drifts towards a slightly dog-faced shark. In a dream your hand’s own will moves it into the jar of beetles, or turns the forbidden knob of the closet revealing the dinner guests vivisected and hung on meat hooks. The eye is pulled by this same slight of hand--line and color—from the boat to the staring men to the Negro to the two men reaching towards the mouth of the shark, and then the mouth of the shark always widening towards Watson.
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"Bee's knees" is actually one of a set of nonsense catchphrases from 1920s America, the period of the flappers. You might at that time have heard such curious concoctions as bee's knees, the cat's miaow, the elephant's adenoids, the tiger's spots, the bullfrog's beard, the elephant's instep, the caterpillar's kimono, the turtle's neck, the duck's quack, the gnat's elbows, the monkey's eyebrows, the oyster's earrings, the snake's hips, the kipper's knickers, the elephant's manicure, the clam's garter, the eel's ankle, the leopard's stripes, the tadpole's teddies, the sardine's whiskers, the pig's wings, the bullfrog's beard, the canary's tusks, the cuckoo's chin and the butterfly's book.
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In folklore, 'fairy sparks' in decaying wood indicated the places where fairies held their nightly revels. This, as well as 'foxfire' and 'touchwood,' were folk names for bioluminescent rhizomorphs, tough strands of mycelia, visible as shining runners in wood. The word 'foxfire,' by the way, has nothing to do with foxes, but is derived from the French 'faux fire,' meaning 'false fire.' Armillariella mellea, the honey mushroom, with its world-wide range and mycelial 'shoe-strings,' is most frequently responsible for streaks of foxfire in decaying wood. Other mushrooms, like Mycena rorida, produce only luminous spores while Collybia tuberosa produces only luminescent sclerotia (underground knots of hyphae) whose adaptive value is uncertain and perplexing.
