Down to Jots and Tittles

Jotting Down Growls
In a poet state, I spin, like an empty beer can spins in the middle of a highway after being pitched from a car traveling 70 mph; spinning like an empty beer can.

I'm readying for my trip to Neo-Con Hell. John Berryman will be my guide, though he's beneath the deep in a watery other world and maybe I need a dead guide from the dry air of a desert. I have lived in deserts, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is on the slopes above a desert that runs like a snowslide from Santa Fe down to Albuquerque; I have driven through the deserts of Arizona and California many times, staying once for several days in Winslow, Arizona, the site of where a meteor hit millions of years ago. But Arizonians are dumbasses. I mean come on, no respect for Martin Luther King. Does that mean there are not many blacks in Arizona. No Daylight Savings Time. I mean they believe in God's time! Idiots.

My first time in Phoenix ever I found it a dinky sort of hillbilly desert city. It seemed like Bing Crosby owned everything in town then. I played the piano two nights in a swanky place called the New Yorker and my friend who played bass with me and I would eat enormous breakfasts out on the highway at a place that had a cowboy's name, like Bill Williams, who was a cowboy or trapper or guide or something in some part of Arizona's history, cause there is a Williams, Arizona. Who's a desert poet? Captain Beefheart? How 'bout him guiding me through Neo-Con Hell [I define "Neo-Con Hell" as being what's coming into our reality any day now]--or maybe Gary Snyder would guide me through this Hell (the Hell of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and James Earl Ray and J. Edgar Hoover); perhaps somebody who has no acquaintance with Hell would be the best guide. Snyder's a complicated "earth" poet. Maybe Philip Whalen. Jack Spicer. Now there's an idea. I'm sure Jack's already in Hell, so maybe he'd be perfect to guide me through Neo-Con Hell. I know Ginsberg could do it, especially a political Hell like Neo-Con Hell.

Tender structures clash with Titan
teats of glorious projection
an idiot's dream becomes real
an idiot's time chimes in rhyme
the shells explode in the dawn's earliest light
that's all the light we'll need on this night
when our tender structures clash with Titan
teats of glorious protuberance
an idiot's dream becomes reality
an idiot's time chimes in rhyme
and out of nurture I climb
all in bee time vine...

Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers is back after what a two-year retirement? His retirement was forced on him by the Neo-Con teevee clowns that took over PBS and tried to make it turn green from right wing bile and going soothsaying nuts over the reality of Wall Street instead of the failed streets of Baghdad and the cruel and very evil, if you believe in such shit, War in Iraq--that total failure under the reign of the King of Failures, the man who thinks conservatively, which is backwards thinking, illogical thinking; to the King, our Chancellor, war and debt and death are the thrill, the rewards of which are billions upon billions of all kinds of monies being taken from the people and put into the already overflowing coffers of the megacorporations that almost but not quite totally rule at least the world of the US of A and quickly on their imperialist ways to ruling over the whole god-damn world. Billions for the Bush Family Empire. After the Treasury is busted and Exxon-Mobil, the Carlyle Group, and Halliburton merge, only then will our great coward leader leave office to leave a total catastrophe to his replacement, poor bastard whoever that may be. But

So Billy Moyers is back, returning to PBS, by God, with his old Journal show, and Billy's pissed and full of venom now referring to the corporate Messiah as Ol' Massah! No, Ol' Massah is no longer in the cold, cold ground. Nawsuh, boss. Bill Moyers is now declaring that the corporate system is like the plantation system--and Billy knows thegrowlingwolf has been growling that out since these posts began--Corporate Capitalism is the same as the old plantation system, like it ran back in the Land 'O Cotton, back when slaves were slaves and happy about it; remember those days? Well, if you don't, they're coming back. A slave is a slave is a slave as long as Capitalism remains our economic system or now the world's economic system. So Bill is back, Praise the Lard and pass the ammunition.

The Latest From the New Democratic Baghdad [excerpt from Yahoo News]

Attacks in Baghdad — including the university explosion, blasts at a marketplace for used motorcycles and a drive-by shooting — killed more than 100 people in a spasm of violence ahead of a promised drive by the Iraqi government and U.S. forces to secure the capital.

Not bad. Sixty-five at the university. Not bad. I mean, come on, that many Amuricans die on the highway everyday, so big deal; there's still plenty of Iraqis--though, I'll be damn, Georgie Porgie, our "president," phony president though he is--"Hey, I got a library comin' to me!"--was caught criticizing Iraqis for their hangings yesterday, especially the one where they goofed on the hanging platform and decapitated one of those horrible Al Queda dudes--oh, sorry, these were Sad-damn's henchmen, one his bro-in-law, right? Why, such evil men! They deserve to be decapitated. What a vile war this "president" has trapped us in. You heard me; we're trapped while big corporations steal our wealth and live freer than gilded birds in gilded hi-rise luxury apartment buildings.

Chalabi Is Still in Iraqi Politics
I read where Chalabi is now head of the "What to Do With the Bathist Party members who are still with us" in Iraq--probably at a salary of a platform or two of those fresh printed US hundred dollar bills and handed out by the CIA. But never fear, Chalabi is still around and living off We the People's hard-earned money.


Accounting for the War in Iraq
One Washington economist said we'd have to raise taxes by 50% to pay for the Iraq War by 2050, when, I suppose, all the interest-debt comes due to the Chinese commies, the Saudis, and the Brits who now financially own our country; plus, all the real estate development going on in NYC and in New Orleans, and it's massive, is foreign-monied development; New York-based developers, yes, but using foreign monies. You'd be amazed to know what British investment owns here in NYC. Plus the Saudis have invested money all over Manhattan. It ain't real, is it?

From www.languagehat.com:
I found the following post on l hat's great source of eye-focusing pleasure very interesting. I heard Steve Allen, the old comedian, say he wrote all his books by dictating into a tape recorder. I've thought about trying it. I'm a songwriter and a poet and a lot of songs I write and poems that come to me, I record them spontaneously, like right into the mic, whatever comes to my mind. I have recorded lost work on cassette tape--almost a whole novel I read off a word processor that was soon to be booted off my loft bed and smashed to oblivion. Check this excerpt from an l hat post of a few days back:

POWERS, DICTATING.

One of my favorite novelists, Richard Powers, has an essay in the latest NY Times Book Review in which he says "I haven’t touched a keyboard for years": he just speaks into a microphone and lets his computer do the rest.

For most of history, most reading was done out loud. Augustine remarks with surprise that Bishop Ambrose could read without moving his tongue. Our passage into silent text came late and slow, and poets have resisted it all the way. From Homer to hip-hop, the hum is what counts. Blind Milton chanted “Paradise Lost” to his daughters. Of his 159-line “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth said, “I began it upon leaving Tintern ... and concluded ... after a ramble of four or five days. ... Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.” Wallace Stevens used to compose while walking to work, then dictate the results to his secretary, before proceeding to his official correspondence as vice president of the Hartford insurance company[...] The all-time champion of Xtreme Dictation, though, must be Thomas Aquinas. Witnesses report how he could relay four different topics to four secretaries at once, and even (Maritain writes) “lay down to rest in the midst of the dictation to continue to dictate while sleeping.” That’s what I really want from my tablet; I trust that technicians are working on the problem.

Why all this need for speech? Long after we’ve fully retooled for printed silence, we still feel residual meaning in the wake of how things sound. Speech and writing share some major neural circuitry, much of it auditory. All readers, even the fast ones, subvocalize. That’s why so many writers — like Flaubert, shouting his sentences in his gueuloir — test the rightness of their words out loud.

What could be less conducive to thought’s cadences than stopping every time your short-term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You’d be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow.

I should try it sometime, but being lazy and Luddish, I probably won't.

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thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler