foregrounding earwigs

The 20th saw the media frenzied churning over the 40th anniversary of man on the moon (cue the Gil Scott-Heron track, Whitey on the Moon). That set off a long-delayed ruminating nostalgic fugue state in your faithless narrator. I went to David Bromige’s memorial service (link) in Sebastopol on the 5th instant, and while marveling at how few people I knew there, ran into George Lakoff. I said hello and reminded him that I had taken a couple of classes from him 30 years ago or more. I read a short poem of David’s on the death of poetry. Then we all piled into the VW microbus and trundled on off to Saul’s in Berkeley for some sour dills and chicken soup. Black Oak Books next door has gone out of business. This last weekend, I went to Hackenberg Booksellers, because yet another linguist had died. And, so, I looked through stacks of books, some priced and others not. I bought 3 Malkiel monographs and a Burkert Homo Necans.

ogmios

I’ve been looking for A Primer of Irish Metrics (1909) by Kuno Meyer [1858–1919] for years. I’ve never seen it for sale on Abebooks at any price. Google Books hasn’t gotten around to digitizing it, though they advertise the one or two reprints from the ’80s. Then today I ran across a nice scan of the whole of its 62 pages at a Celtic language and lore site called The Summerlands.

web two oh twiddles, lit crit yearns

Qualis artifex pereo. Short, sweet, and to the point:

With the rise of the web, writing has met its photography. By that I mean, writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do, that in order to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence Impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of digital available text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.

[Kenneth Goldsmith Writing Crisis V.1.0; via Ron Silliman’s mini-posting.]

denner and bromige

David Bromige—a poet, a friend, and emeritus English professor at Sonoma State University—and Richard Donner are giving a reading at Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley on July 23rd. I took two wonderful and intense poetry classes from David back in the early ’80s. Amongst other things, he introduced me to OULIPO (and here) and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (both the poetry and the magazine).

[via Ron Silliman’s blog]

[Addendum: I was just googling ’round the web, looking for some of David’s poetry, when I came across a nice site with a bunch of recordings of him reading. I found this one representative.]

bad poetry

I suppose one of the problems is that the words good and bad are overloaded with aesthetic and ethical senses. Yesterday evening, Maestro Erling Wold, some other folks, and I read some bad poetry on the DJ Bunnywhiskers show on Pirate Cat Radio (MP3 of the broadcast). I chose two poems by two poets laureate: Death of a Toad by Richard Wilbur, USA, and Slough by John Betjeman, CBE, UK. Erling went with unicorn poetry, some Nazi song lyrics, and Bunnywhiskers provided many examples found on the Web by googling.