Updates Archive: July 2005

May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005

July 29, 2005 8:29 AM "I'm not convinced that anything can be genuinely 'empty,' though." - Gary Sullivan in a comment to one of his own posts at his blog
E l s e w h e r e, where he is conducting an "experiment in editing" by putting online the MS for an upcoming book of poems, prose, and plays (via Teemu). One of the obvious points in the experiment is that most of the pieces really "could use" some editing: "I made a lion becuas a lion is my favorit animal". They also seem obsessed with the question of "bad" ("sentimental", "teenage", whatever) poetry. Does teenage mocking of teenage poetry make it any better, or worse (er, better)? These are serios qustions, really. My own favorit among the nine first pieces is "LESBIANA LEDBIANS CUOKING" - "oddly colorful", in the words of the author, perhaps "genuinely bautiful" even - and id comm that becausde alnorst geniuuilne tmpy of eany 2crithkvniul imnpetuv in itf mispelingsä.

July 28, 2005 11:54 AM K. Goldsmith blogs alias Kenny G's Posts at WMFU's Beware on the Blog. Not that frequent; guaranteed freaky.

July 28, 2005 11:44 AM First, in a way of introduction, check out some of the moving images/poems at Lanny Quarles' PLUNT ['ontolog'] blog. Second, compare to "prune wallet suicide: a sestina" by him, now in the Anthology. Note how the images tend to hover between Japanese ideogram, "organic", "natural" forms, and letters of the Western alphabet, without reducing themselves to any of these. I'd like to see them as cases of deviations without norm, the same way the sestina seems to consist of meaningful fragments of nothing: "A teenage boy raped a dog / Preisler, Jean Marie Hill, and Mary / With the parasite, sharing happy // Sucks, aw shucks ! My broker is happy / That it doesn't hide doors or windows / At home." Even machine-assisted, this is not as easy as you'd think. For more examples, see - thirdly - the other parts of the original sestina suite, at Lanny's phaneronoemikon blog: "bright fever nipple foam", "mandrake sleeper crab", "tumult of gravy face islands", "dong son supple pavement torch", "clover brisket claws pink swill", "meno sub rosa artefact".

July 24, 2005 8:35 AM Happy Name Day, Kirsi!

July 23, 2005 8:44 AM A good introduction to what poetry "does" (instead of "is") by Teemu Manninen, in Finnish.

July 23, 2005 8:43 AM The Generator's been getting a lot of traffic from Sweden lately, after it was posted at lankarkiv.com (Torsdag (050721)). Time for den första googledikten på svenska soon?

July 23, 2005 8:42 AM If you ignore the monster, will it go away? New light on the age-old (and topical) question shed by this Google Poem by Rusty Henderson?

July 21, 2005 7:20 AM "If you think of the 20th Century as this period of professionalising creativity - you've got the film and recording industries which become the professional creators, separating and stifling in many ways the popular culture. (...) I do not think you are going to see the elimination of the professional creators but you are going to see it complemented by a much wider range of amateur culture in the original sense of the word amateur - in that people do it purely for the love of creating. (...) Many of the professional creators don't get it - they can't imagine a world where creativity is not controlled." Says Professor Lawrence Lessig, of Creative Commons, in a BBC News interview (my emphasis). Via Martin Larsen.

July 20, 2005 10:30 AM I've let myself be told that Tuli&Savu 2/2005 is out and about to be mailed to subscribers. It's all about constraints and measures - including answers to the editors' questions on the theme by Hannu Helin, Rakel Liehu, Jyrki Kiiskinen, Tommi Melender, Helena Sinervo, Olli Sinivaara, Ville Sutinen, Juhani Tikkanen, Panu Tuomi, & me.

July 19, 2005 10:00 AM Congratulations, Saara (2nd from left)!

July 19, 2005 8:55 AM L'Avenir dure longtemps. I'm reading the current issue, No. 45, Summer 2/2005 (themes: Logic, Justice), of niin&näin, a good Finnish magazine for philosophy. Personally gratifying, somehow, to see two pieces to base themselves largely on old translations of mine: leader by Mikko Lahtinen on Louis Althusser's Positions (in Finnish Ideologiset valtiokoneistot, in cooperation with Hannu Sivenius, Kansankulttuuri 1984); an article by Professor Kaarlo Tuori about "traditions" in law and justice on Anthony Giddens' essay in Beck, Giddens, Lash: Reflexive Modenisation (Nykyajan jäljillä, Vastapaino 1996). Tuori's piece is partially a comment on the recent dissertation by my friend Jarkko Tontti, also one of the promising young poets of the country. Rumor has it there's an issue with the theme of poetry in the works too. Interesting.

July 18, 2005 12:24 AM New googled poems by: Lorna Dee Cervantes, a Chicana poet from Boulder, Colorado; Peter Pan, a pseudonym at The Guardian Newsblog.

July 14, 2005 12:45 AM Somebody has created an interesting Wikipedia entry for "Organic Poetry", available, at least as of this writing, here.

July 11, 2005 10:15 AM "A peculiar blend of blindness and insight": the case of Foucalt among the ajatollahs (N). & an excerpt from the book here (N).

July 10, 2005 7:47 PM "Nothing is permanent." "Everything is permanent." Two new Google poems by Karri Kokko in the Anthology (N). Also, Tommi Nuopponen's earlier poem now has a sequel (N).

July 10, 2005 8:40 AM I was wrong to claim the Finnish Blogosphere is slow to react to what happened 7/7 in London. In truth, it only took hours for one of its leading "thinkers" to side with the terrorists (N,F). Once again, I've got to admit I'm ashamed to be a Finn.

July 10, 2005 7:30 AM "Back to Nature / street" In Muisti|kirja by Karri Kokko: (London poem) (N) (Googled).

July 9, 2005 2:02 PM Guardian Premonitions. "Any reader tempted to luxuriate schadenfreudishly in the prospect of a Vietnam-style US evacuation from Baghdad may be woken from that reverie by the blast from a bomb, planted in Charing Cross tube station by an Iraq-hardened terrorist." This was Timothy Garton Ash writing seven days before, June 30. Tariq Ali, again, cites Ken Livingstone's earlier warnig: "London, as one of the major world cities, has a great deal to lose from war [against Irag]". But note that Garton Ash was writing about an apparent "sobering" in the Bush Administration's view on terrorism (cf. also this report). Maybe there's finally hope of a unified effort (in diversity) against the danger, in the "we will not give in" spirit of the Londoners - and despite Ian McEwan's more pessimistic stance ("The city will not recover Wednesday's confidence and joy in a very long time."). If so, I too could finally agree with some of what I wrote at the Buffalo Poetics list in the aftermath of 9/11.

July 8, 2005 10:50 AM "Verbivisuella gobelängerna." Jesper Olsson in Svenska Dagbladet on innanför / utanför, by Agneta Enckell .

July 8, 2005 10:10 AM More coverage on blasts. First hand accounts (via Boynton). A map and a list of London bloggers associated with different tube stations. London is Techorati's number one search word. And I checked what friends on my blog-roll have to say, finding Mark Young's poem, and another first hand account by petescully: "I tell you, this city will not give in to fear (...) We shall remain as normal." Finnish bloggers seem characteristically uninterested.

July 7, 2005 5:55 PM London hit on Ringo's birthday. Some results from a quick search for online blog coverage: Project Nothing, Guardian Newsblog, Wikipeadia on bombings, kottke.org, and BBC News: Blogs respond to London blasts.

July 6, 2005 1:11 PM Today's HS tells that my friend Seppo Toiviainen, former member of the Finnish Parliament, is dead at the age of 60. To me, the sadness of this is without words in more than the usual way. A political enemy from days way back, Seppo always treated me, I felt, with respect that was not, I hope, unrequited. The obituary carries an odd picture that looks more like Otto Wille Kuusinen - fittingly, I think. A talented scholar and thinker with deep understanding of Hegel and Lukács, it now seems to me Seppo's real capacities never had any use in this country, and language. This puddle, I mean. Maybe his move into hard-line communist politics already was a way of mourning (& that may also go some way to explain his drinking, which actually started even before the time indicated by the obituarist). At least he was spared Kuusinen's success. Is it any better now, for him, for us, I don't know. - Signed, "At the Frontier". I think he would understand.

July 5, 2005 9:16 PM Google Art moves on? (N) Requires Shockwave. Thanks to Marko (N) for a hint.

July 4, 2005 10:00 PM The Fourth of July is as good a day as any for one more reminder of the deplorable direction much of the "public" "opinion" is heading to in one of my beloved countries: The Ten Most Harmful Books (N) according to a "panel of 15 conservative US scholars" (via Pierre Joris (N)). After Communist Manifesto (#1) and Mein Kampf, note, for instance, Dewey (#5), Nietzsche (#9), and Keynes (#10). I'm actually delighted to see that Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci (N) ("honorable mention"), to me still one of the great political and philosophical works of 20th century, is not forgotten altogether...

July 3, 2005 11:55 AM "...throbs because of a chairside dental assistant ... beats the daughter of a connecticut cop ... washes an exemplary example of an architect ... swells on the north end of helix mountain ... stands above a vice president ... swims in a wife and mother ... crawls into a graduate of excelsior high school ... picks up the ceo of tlc ... exists in a certified hypnotherapist ..." But who is she/he? "beverly", a poem of more than epic dimensions, and exquisitely lyrical "Swivel Sweet" are two new googled pieces by Sheila E. Murphy (N).

July 2, 2005 9:50 AM YubNub Me! yubnub.org (N) is a hot new service for those (probably younger) surfers still suffering from command line nostalgia. Instead of laborious clicking on links and buttons, you can now do the Net simply by cryptic dos-like punching - and since it a social command line, even add your own commands (& Firefox users can do them straight from the address box, as explained here (N)). - So why am I telling you this? Well, because, as explained by Christy Church here (N), you can now yubnub the Google Poem Generator too. Someone (I strongly suspect it was Christy himself) has implemented two commands, "lehto" (the vanilla version), and "lehto_io" (with all the parameters needed for a standard Google poem). "lehto_io" has even made it to the Golden Eggs collection (N) of "notable commands"! For a complete syntax, check here (N). Cool! (but don't forget the Patterns (N) feature, only available the old fashion way yet...).

July 2, 2005 8:50 PM you that lately have told poetry love poem the google find words waldman audio claude anne kibran kahlil real deer head googlepoemscom how poems lehto with leevi loved monde is poem of search words to get here today before 8:30 AM

July 1, 2005 8:30 PM Beware, ye old literary behaviours and patterns, before my ruthless destruction that shall remove what is no longer needed - since I'm Death (uhm, at least according to this Quizilla test (N), via Anny Ballardini (N), herself Sun). (Actually, I am quite familiar with the Tarot deck, appreciative of its random wisdom, and occasionally even like to amaze my friends with late night divinations that never fail... But of course, in this, I'm in good company of the likes of Blake (N), Eliot (N), and Madame Blavatsky...)

July 1, 2005 11:00 AM Sadevesirakkaus (N,F), a new book of poems by Jyrki Pellinen (N,F), was reviewed (N,F) - nicely - by Seppo Järvinen in Kiiltomato last week. And there's also a discussion (N,F) going on about the review and the poet. - All links in Finnish now; I will have reasons to come back to Pellinen in other languages at a later time.