“There is a great gift that ignorance has to bring to anything.” -Orson Welles
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Fjord was right
Daily Archives: December 28, 2009
I will create poetry through the viewfinder of my camera…
Kitasono Katue (1966): “I will create poetry through the viewfinder of my camera, out of pieces of paper scraps, boards, glasses, etc. This is the birth of new poetry.”
First Contact Drawings from the Amazon
Do indians from the Amazon, when they put pen or pencil to paper for the first time, draw like children? The intense concentration and curiosity to make something appear on paper is similar. The differences lay in experience of age and the experiences of a different environment. Indians usually have no concept of a horizontal line, nor do they have the habit of looking from left to right as you do when reading, nor do they have a concept of top and bottom.
Continue reading…
Awi (2000) is a Dutch book with pictures by Michel Pellander, drawings by indians from various tribes and an accompanying text by Marion Hoekveld.
Auto-Beatnik Computer Poems
Ladies and Gentlemen … the Auto-Beatnik
In May, 1962, Horizon Magazine published a selection of poems by the “Auto-Beatnik”: a computer program created by R.M. Worthy and others at the Laboratory for Automata Research of the Librascope Division of General Precision, Inc, a company which manufactured computers and other electronic equipment. As the anonymous Horizon scribe explains:
“Librascope engineers, concerned with the problem of effective communication with machines in simple English, first ‘fed’ an LGP 30 computer with thirty-two grammatical patterns and an 850-word vocabulary, allowing it to select at random from the words and patterns to form sentences. The results included “Roses” and “Children”. Then Worthy and his men shifted to a more advanced RPC 4000, fed with a store of about 3,500 words and 128 sentence structures, which produced … more advanced poems.” Here are some selected works by the “Auto-Beatnik”, that “cool calculator” …
Roses
Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won’t keep few fishes,
Who is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious, blind planes are coming,
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender. Children Sob suddenly, the bongos are moving.
Or could we find that tall child?
And dividing honestly was like praying badly,
And while the boy is obese, all blasts could climb,
First you become oblong,
To weep is unctuous, to move is poor. Kites Yes, so passionately did my bleak worms live underneath the king.
Ah, few sects smell bland. Mice The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates. Steeples
Was Milo mewling thrilling radishes?
So, our anchovies are sad but green. Corsets
Yes, illterate is its rowdy, black is his avenue,
Mine is a hay of these dwarfs.
Does he look like a sin of alabaster?
Moreover, food tastes like coy buttermilk. Bassoons
Ah, so apologetically did their small rowdies cringe beside a tramp.
Beneath a ballad, should a rooster harangue like the prostitute? Steaks Is that the automaton that smells like the tear of grass?
All blows have glue, few toothpicks have wood,
Direct a button but I may battle the ham,
The crafty carnival’s kite daintily massacres the scalp.
Yes, we would, you shall,
Shall I not tighten a moose’s parasite? Whales
The iron mother’s bouquet did rudely call,
Yes, I am as fine as many murmuring crates.
People was braver than snowy hay.
It was dirtiest who bleeds behind the piano. Girls
All girls sob like slow snows.
Near a couch, that girl won’t weep.
Rains are silly lovers, but I am not shy.
Stumble, moan, go, this girl might sail on the desk.
No foppish, deaf, cool kisses are very humid.
This girl is dumb and soft. (no title)
My corkscrew is like a hurricane,
Under a lamp the nude is vain.
Quiet is my plumber, cruel is your parade.
Yes, its bed mumbles by a barricade,
Usually does a nourishing cannon ordain,
Like salt, no adulterers were insane.
Like gasoline, some battlefields were volatile,
Thus, their revolt will gently drill.
An ear won’t keep few fishes,
Who is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious, blind planes are coming,
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender. Children Sob suddenly, the bongos are moving.
Or could we find that tall child?
And dividing honestly was like praying badly,
And while the boy is obese, all blasts could climb,
First you become oblong,
To weep is unctuous, to move is poor. Kites Yes, so passionately did my bleak worms live underneath the king.
Ah, few sects smell bland. Mice The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates. Steeples
Was Milo mewling thrilling radishes?
So, our anchovies are sad but green. Corsets
Yes, illterate is its rowdy, black is his avenue,
Mine is a hay of these dwarfs.
Does he look like a sin of alabaster?
Moreover, food tastes like coy buttermilk. Bassoons
Ah, so apologetically did their small rowdies cringe beside a tramp.
Beneath a ballad, should a rooster harangue like the prostitute? Steaks Is that the automaton that smells like the tear of grass?
All blows have glue, few toothpicks have wood,
Direct a button but I may battle the ham,
The crafty carnival’s kite daintily massacres the scalp.
Yes, we would, you shall,
Shall I not tighten a moose’s parasite? Whales
The iron mother’s bouquet did rudely call,
Yes, I am as fine as many murmuring crates.
People was braver than snowy hay.
It was dirtiest who bleeds behind the piano. Girls
All girls sob like slow snows.
Near a couch, that girl won’t weep.
Rains are silly lovers, but I am not shy.
Stumble, moan, go, this girl might sail on the desk.
No foppish, deaf, cool kisses are very humid.
This girl is dumb and soft. (no title)
My corkscrew is like a hurricane,
Under a lamp the nude is vain.
Quiet is my plumber, cruel is your parade.
Yes, its bed mumbles by a barricade,
Usually does a nourishing cannon ordain,
Like salt, no adulterers were insane.
Like gasoline, some battlefields were volatile,
Thus, their revolt will gently drill.
A Caution to Poets
Matthew Arnold (Dec. 24, 1822 – 1888), Victorian poet with spectacular sideburns, was the type of writer who liked to chastise and instruct the reader on contemporary social issues… Not surprisingly he also had an influential career as a critic.
A Caution to Poets
What poets feel not, when they make,
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating. (1867)
Photo of Arnold, 1863
The Awakener – New memoir about Jack Kerouac
New memoir about Jack Kerouac and life in Greenwich Village in the late 50s and early 60s…
“Weaver—immortalized in Kerouac’s Desolation Angels as Ruth Heaper—writes this book ‘as an act of atonement’ to Kerouac: ‘I rejected him for the same reason America rejected him: he woke us up in the middle of the night in the long dream of the fifties. He interfered with our sleep.’”
Front cover photograph: Jack Kerouac and Helen Weaver in Greenwich Village, ca. 1963. Photographer unknown.
via City Lights
Excerpt (PDF)
Seven in Bed
A fun Bourgeois:
Seven in Bed, 2001, Fabric, stainless steel, glass and wood
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