35 Scooter
You oxen, whet, spark hole
of magic, jived. Boo! Quiz:
You see politician who care?
Vex me: joke, quag, zip!
Feed bag of lies to
Our media; quick jab hope.
Ax view of yon zoo.
My 35th birthday conincided with “Fitzmas,” the indictment of Scooter Libby and the confirmation of a deeply troubling culture of corruption in the White House. This 35 word response is based on the 20 consonant poem structure as follows:
yxnwhtsprkhlfmgcjbdqz
ysptcnwhcrvmjkqgzpfdb
gflstrmdqckjbhpxvwynz
a man with my name
has been winning at poker
in reno: google
V
Birmingham! the great city is over!
Cinema has recovered the lots;
Comments gone down together
Into the boiling home.
Ring, for the scant figures!
Toll, for the bonnie lyrics,—
Home and couple and programs,
Spinning upon the sciences!
How music will tell the accessories
When vacation shakes the show,
Till the families ask, “But the comments?
Did music come back no more?”
Then an essence suffuses the library,
And a softness the teller’s institute
And the families no further question,
And only the performances reply.
Original
V
GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.
Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!
How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”
Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.
The modified poem is a result of applying to Emily Dickinson’s original the Oulipian S+7 method described by Raymond Queneau, with the modification of substituting the seventh substantive to appear subsequent to the word in Google search results rather than in a dictionary.
“A life without meetings would be meetingless.”
The designers of the 8-room Tressants Hotel in Menorca, Spain, designed each room to be representative of one of the conceptual cities described by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities.
This summer I’ve been experimenting with web video a bit. Last weekend while attending Provflux and trying to motivate Hanna Wallach to put together a 60 second story, I spent some time with the video feature of my Canon digital camera putting together this little three minute “Hobo Tale.” (7.9MB)
I just turned in final grades! A weeklong marathon of about 70 final papers and projects has come to an end! Let summer begin!
Actually, let planning for summer school begin — my next term starts in 9 days.
My head is filled with pedagogical lessons from this term, which went well, but from which I can learn a great deal. I’ll have to note those — maybe this afternoon. Or Tuesday. Right now, I’ve got some tomato plants, strawberry plants, and basil to get in the ground. It’s gardening season again.
I have a busy summer planned, including a bit of teaching at Stockton, a bunch of writing, some editing, some submission of finished writing, some work on ELO projects, some QT with my girlfriend, an epic family trip to the Grand Canyon, and a week of lectures in Norway before the season’s through. Not to mention the beach. It’s unfortunately not yet beach weather. Today I feel like it should be 80 degrees and I should be in swimming trunks. Ah well, 58 degrees and weeding in the garden will have to do.
Altantic County, where I live, has the leading death rate in the state of New Jersey, with 1,010 deaths per 100,000 residents, or 200 more than the state average. This was the subject of a joke on tonight’s Saturday Night Live. Oh man.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:
They get into a rut where they are eating pizza every day. It is hard to make changes. They don’t see the inside of their bodies and know what is happening. Then, they have a problem and maybe it is too late.
A satellite view of my neighborhood on Google Maps, which now has satellite imagery.
When Jill and I were in Paris, we visited a hammam, a turkish steambath. Jill had visited one in Copenhagen and insisted it must be a part of the minivacation. I was a little reluctant: most of my associations with bathhouses have to do with Foucault and the spread of AIDS. I had never actually set foot in one. The bathhouse we visited in Paris has different options on different days of the week: two nights a week, nude men only, two nights a week, nude women only, two nights a week mixed men and women in bathing suits, one night a week, mixed nude. We went on the bathing suit night. Thankfully, I think. As we entered we were given a towel, a terrycloth robe, and flip-flops. There was only one changing room and this caused us a few moments of awkwardness: we weren't quite sure of the convention. Another couple had arrived at roughly the same time, they didn't seem quite sure of the convention either. If the idea was that men and women changed in the same room out in the open, well then so be it, but I didn't just want to drop trough and offend a group of french women I didn't know and I feared that my french would frankly be inadequate to apologize properly. Jill finally elected to run off to a toilet to put on her bathing suit; I followed suit. I think everyone else managed changing in the room. The hammam itself had showers, two steamrooms, a sauna and a cold bath. I was hoping for a hot-tub, I guess that's an American thing. The hot steambath was, well, hot, and filled with steam. When we first got in, it was difficult to tell how large the room was, and there was a strange moment of uncertainty as to what the figures moving around toward the back of the room were actually doing. Once my eyesight adjusted, it was actually quite relaxing, kicking back in a very hot steamy room scented with eucalyptus. We cycled from the hot steambath to the showers to the less hot steam bath to the cold bath to the sauna, which was turned up pretty hot, like a microwave, and not very pleasant really. Then we kicked back in the chill-out room and drank some mint tea while reclining in beach chairs and reading the french equivalent of People magazine. Afterwards, in the changing room, it seemed that everyone was just changing, casually, so we just changed casually along with everyone else. After we had been thoroughly steamed, we didn't feel as hung up on our modesty. I think I'd do the hammam thing again — it was kind of like going to work out at a health club, but without any exercise. I did feel refreshed afterward. I'm still not sure I'd get into the Finnish sauna type of experience, where everyone sits naked in a sauna and then runs off to plunge into a hole cut into a frozen lake before heading back to the sauna. That seems a bit extreme, the type of behavior which could inspire a heart attack. And I think I'll stick to the mixed night, avec maillot. I don't even want to think about the conventions that would be necessary to decipher the other nights of the week.
Harry Shearer offers this musical tribute to one of George Bush's debate mantras: It's Hard Work being the President of the United States of America.
My cousin Michael and I walked up through Central Park from 92nd all the way up to Harlem at 128th and Amsterdam for the Artbots show. Along the way, we saw the most brilliant yellow formation of shelf fungus I've ever seen, and stopped off at St. John the Diviner Cathedral to admire the Peace Fountain, by Greg Wyatt.
Via the Chicago Tribune, medicinal leeches are now available from LeechesUSA for approximately $7.50 a leech. The next time you get a head cold, you know where to go. The site includes helpful information on the storage and disposal of your leeches. A lid is essential.
Designer Rick Valicenti and friends are up to some fun letter-play at Playground ’04. Twelve typographers have accepted Valicenti’s “invitation to create an alphabet of 26 characters illuminated not to start a sentence, but to begin a thought.” The project in some ways reminds me of Paul Chan’s conceptual fonts in Alternumerics. My favorite of the Play fonts released so far is Anthony Angelos’s Watch. Each of the letters includes a caricature meant to represent a feeling or phobia.
This post was originally published on Grand Text Auto.
Years ago, I wrote half of a novel called Agency (maybe someday I'll finish it). One of its plotted events was an earthquake in Chicago. I guess they actually had one earlier this week. Minor, sure, but hey, noteworthy.
While visiting my alma mater's site, I ran across the following tidbit, which will have serious repurcussions on my diet this insect-rich summer: Cicadas may, in fact, be bad to eat. University of Cincinnati scientists have discovered that the prodigal bugs are high in mercury. Of course, it's not clear whether it's just the cicadas. It's entirely possible that the Ohio soil itself (where the cicadadas have been, you know, dormant, for 17 years) is high in mercury. Which might suggest other problems. But don't eat more than a handfulf of the protein-rich bugs a day if you know what's good for you.
The Times reports that more than 100 works of contemporary art were destroyed in a conflagration at a London warehouse. There's something strange and oddly fascinating about so much postmodern art going up in flames. One thing I find odd is that the thing that makes the story newsworthy is that the art was worth millions of dollars. It's not so much notable that the expressions were destroyed, it's that the expressions were highly valued. Another is that many of these particular expressions were controversial and conceptual art, such as Tracy Emmin's “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995,” a tent into which the artist had stitched the names of dozens of past lovers. One of the works lost, the Chapman Brothers' “Hell,” which took the artists years to complete, featured 5,000 figures depicting skeletons, Nazis, soldiers and deformed humans, portraying the horrors of war. Jake Chapman jokingly suggested that the work may have gone up in value as a result of having burned to death. At the time it was sold to Charles Saatchi, the work was worth about $900,000. Perhaps Champan's comment is appropriate. Although the works themselves are lost and are now economically valueless, maybe their auras will grow as a result of their incineration.
This is awesome. This evening while grading position papers, I was downloading concerts by Mike Watt, John Langford, Billy Bragg and some band named “deepbannanablackout” that a friend recommended. All available and freely distributed for noncommercial use, along with hundreds of other great bands in high quality audio on the Live Music Archive at archive.org.
Probably because my CV is online, and because the end of the semester is near, over the past week I've gotten calls for help from several students at schools other than mine. Doing what I can . . .
My favorite came in tonight — from Mohamed Salhm in Egypt:
Dear Professor Rettberg,
Let me introduce myself.I am an MA Egyptian student interested in Brian friel and tom Murphy plays.UI am doing a thesis on Brian friel plays entitled “Home Where The Heartache is:Physical and Spiritual Exile as Reflected in Selected plays by Brian Friel.
There are very very few professor here in Egypt interested in my topic and there are vcery very few books and varticles on Brian Friel and Tom Murphy.
Let me ask you please for God sake
I am in badly need of your article on Brian Friel and Murhy,please
“The Myth of the American Dream in Three Contemporary Irish Plays by Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, and Joseph O'Connor.”Texts & Contexts: The Journal of the Comparative Drama Conference, 1996.
Please if you can send it to my online mail or I will,if you agree ,I will send you my postal address,please.
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
–
I recognize that “for God sake” sense of urgency from my senior sem students, who are racing to complete their seminar papers.
Unfortunately, I found that I'm unable to import my old Wordperfect docs to Word format. I sent him the WP doc — hopefully he'll be able to convert it. My first academic publication. Gee whiz.
Netpoetic
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