October 25, 2004
October 24, 2004
October 22, 2004
a new mosaic
In My Own Recognizance, Ronald Sukenick
Breathtaking and fascinating statements, posted in tribute to Sukenick, 1932-2004.
"If you don't use your own imagination, somebody else is going to use it for you."
Ronald Sukenick. FC2. Profiled here in the Modern Word.
* alt-x
alt-x online network, where the digerati meet the literati
alt-x is huge.
I could get an education here.
October 21, 2004
* failbetter
failbetter, an online literary magazine that publishes original works of fiction, poetry and art.
Sorry, I can't find much to say about failbetter.
They have a nice name, from Beckett, and nice color scheme.
They are good to their alumni.
They exist.
They are a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
They have a humongo list of links (not annotated). Why did I link that? Door to nowhere.
* papertiger
papertiger media, electronic poetry publishers
Interesting things about papertiger:
They're Australian.
They offer services that presumably help pay their bills.
They have a vast collection of links. It's organized into categories, but not annotated.
They make CDs.
They have some kind of nifty navigational dropdowns on the home page.
Other than that --
their most current news is dated November 2003
and I didn't see anything funny there
* eyeshot
eyeshot.net, online litter for the ill and illiterate
I like this site. It has a rude sense of humor. It is navigationally weird, which I find refreshing, when I don't find it annoying.
Their submission guidelines are funny. I think it's funny that they say "PLEASE REALIZE we tend to respond very quickly, often in mere minutes..."
I think their rejection letters are funny - they've stored five volumes of samples on the site, and that's funny.
I think it's funny that they call the Home page "the Last Resort of the Navigationally Fucked."
I think it's really funny that they've published a blank page (no words) at www.eyeshot.net/___.html (link).
They call themselves "aquarian." That's a good adjective to look for in sites that I find compatible.
"We tend to like things that are denser (not so quick to include space breaks between sentences), that are somewhat elusive and inventive and overblown languagewise and not-so-sane aesthetically." I like that a lot. Denser. I'm still wondering about some advice I received to keep my rants down to a page or less.
I like eyeshot. I'll go back. I signed up for their Friendly & Infrequent Update.
October 18, 2004
interlude: al-khidr
In his 1993 book Sacred Drift, Essays on the Margins of Islam, Peter Wilson writes "When you say the name of Khezr in company you should always add the greeting Salaam aliekum! since he may be there... immortal and anonymous, engaged on some karmic errand. Perhaps he'll hint of his identity by wearing green, or by revealing knowledge of the occult and hidden. But he's something of a spy, and if you have no need to know he's unlikely to tell you. Still, one of his functions is to convince skeptics of the existence of the Marvelous, to rescue those who are lost in deserts of doubt and dryness. So he's needed now more than ever, and surely still moves among us playing his great game."
from khidr.org
I didn't catch the name in the workshop, so I was searching for Hitr, Hitter, pre-Islamic, green coat, green foliage, any little hint. Finally I found him, Al Khidr, or Khezr, and a prayer to meet him. I may use it, as soon as I figure out what a "darood" is.
During my browsing on the website, I read the above paragraph. A memory came to me, from within the past hour. I was on my way to lunch, in traffic on Washington Street heading for the mall. My attention was drawn to an elderly man on the sidewalk. He had a full head of white hair and a bushy white beard, wore large brown glasses. His most striking characteristic, though, was his kelly green sport jacket. He walked delicately, carefully, rolling the sides of his feet inward, and I watched him for the minute that I waited for the light to change and wondered about him and his small shopping bag.
Salaam aliekum!
October 14, 2004
cerulena celebrates
Still happy about the shoe art -
optimistic about the weekend -
optimistic about the future -
long patient efforts may pay off -
and to celebrate I bought
The Mooring of Starting OUT!
off to read and reacquaint
October 13, 2004
interlude: shoes
Reasons to work -- I came down the staircase yesterday afternoon from the 4th floor to the visitor's promenade, taking a break. I was wandering and something sparkly caught my right eye, almost behind me. I walked back under the staircase and edged past an unused conversational grouping of table and chairs to find this hanging on the wall!
The image does not do it justice. The dark areas are "diamond dust" and if you get up close you can see the little squares of the silk screening visible in the dark dust. You can just make out the traces of the brand name in the sole of the center shoe.
This piece is fabulous, the colors are luscious, I found a new friend in the workplace!!!
Andy Warhol, "Shoes," 1980
October 12, 2004
* elimae
elimae, which stands for electronic literary magazine
The typeface is very very small. Teeny tiny, a website made for dolls. The site has a colophon, which is a nice idea. But why not make it more web-related and include a few more technical details?
The submission guidelines are amusingly obsessed with formatting and request a very strange series of punctuational edits involving rules for curly quotes and special symbols for italic and boldface.
They have a recommendations page, where authors contribute their lists of books. I really like this idea. If you find something obscure in a list that you really like, you might want to seek out other items in that author's list.
The editor, Deron Bauman, has a site under his own name, referenced on the links page.
The ebooks don't seem like ebooks. What are ebooks, anyway? These just seem like web pages, indistinguishable from anything in new or archives.
The dropdown link mechanism in archives works very oddly. It took me awhile to get used to it.
The books are all sold out. Isn't that odd? There doesn't seem to be anything to buy on this site.
Very literary. I'm not in. Lacks the giddy element that attracts me. But I like that list of recommendations.
October 11, 2004
* born magazine
born magazine, "an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects are brought to life every three months through creative collaboration between writers and artists."
A for-real online magazine, not just a print magazine online.
Browsing is difficult because coming back to the main page (mother.html!) invokes a spinning "Born is" or "Please" advertisement that you have to click through.
There is a great lookup feature at the top of the main page. It scrolls through their database and allows searching on year, project title, author, artist, genre. I like this lookup a lot. I'd like to see many other sites using it.
I wanted to know the earliest year of publication - 1997. Looking at the multimedia experiments from 1997 - the tools have come a long way.
The site makes me wonder about the book format. I know how to read books. I'm not sure I know how to "read" multimedia experiments. I felt more like I was "eating" them, like bonbons. And I didn't have the correct versions installed and didn't have sound enabled, which limited my experience. I turned off a lot of them midway, disengaged.
I'm uneasy with floating text that comes and goes. Text should stay put, I should come and go.
October 08, 2004
* DIAGRAM
DIAGRAM, a journal of text, art, & schematic
Why all caps? I lean towards lower case everything. Well okay all caps everything is a different kind of statement.
Very happy to see Nin Andrews in the current issue. Remind me to find everything Nin Andrews has published on the Internet.
The masthead is goofy. I like the photos of eyes only. Except for the sonics guy who has an eye and an ear. Points for appropriateness.
Their author index is not up-to-date with the current (4.4) authors. Another symptom of the syndrome of web-site-maintenance-boredom-among-poets, the place where I seem to want to live.
The editor Ander Monson has a very comprehensive home page on the DIAGRAM site. I find that unbecoming. I'm interested that he's interested in design (web and book). mmmmme 2
Envious of his list of projects.
"We value the insides of things..." The idea of schematics - I like it. It becomes a handy unifying visual element. I would guess they are easy to find. And who cares if you use them. Buy old old textbooks at book sales and steal. They seem to have impenetrable meaning and are threatening symbols of studious nerdiness. I think they go well with poetry. Yeah, look here, number 16.
(By the way, Tufte is very critical of diagrams that use numerical pointers cross-referenced to text.)
A long page of links, just like everybody else. The list of Ander editorial projects is illuminating. Small community you see. The names start to repeat and congeal. There's a schematic for you.
Neck-Deep, odd essays. I'd like to see these so-called odd essays.
I'm not a reader. I'd like to be a non-reader reviewer. That is, reject everything sent to me for review, except what really catches my fancy. What would that be? Odd essays certainly sounds appealing.
Submissions guidelines seems to be a subgenre all its own. After just a couple, I'm starting to find them precious and annoying. Tell me, what do you REALLY like. And what is the purpose behind this language? What are the politics? I'd like to write an odd essay about the poetics of submission guidelines.
Mostly I'd like to add discipline to my writing experience. Submission guidelines are distracting.
It's a different experience being a critic. My barbed wire is showing.
small commitment
I'll use these links as a hand-over-hand guide to climb out of the blind closet I'm in.
October 07, 2004
linh dinh
"Slang are crowding out real words, he foolishly thinks, forgetting that every word belongs to the shadowy vocabulary of an illicit crowd, invented to reassure and flatter its speaker, and confuse outsiders to what is being said."
Linh Dinh, in Sentence (2)
This fun-house mirror, this dark shadow, language. As soon as I say something, you know me less.
A desert of shadows, the illicit crowd, the long gray hallway of cubicles.
Once I grasped a thistle, on purpose, and drew on my chest with that bloody hand.
Truths are like squirrels. Muscular, elusive, and nutty in the fall. They try to cross the street. Sometimes they fail. My truths are squashed on the pavement. It's time to face up to this need.