The more I think about Sasha Baron Cohen's movie Borat the more I become ambivalent about its major themes. It seems kind of crass to create a character who is based on stereotypes of third world countries. I did laugh in the theater like everyone else but later on I've been feeling an inscrutable guilt. These real life people, American citizens, were lampooned at their own expense. It seems that the premise of the movie was too easy, that it was too easy to make fun of these people and to not delve into their more dynamic qualities. Everyone went home after the Southern dinner party scene to live their lives with the same vigor and compulsion that we all do. We laugh at them but we cant laugh at ourselves.

bride of quietness

But must write the words needed
to describe the angles of your face
the curvilinear spaces and to do this
seems so very important and natural.

I tend to misinterpret song lyrics
so bear with me but your face is
so I don't know song-like? like
skein of seagulls? Have you seen

seagulls when the coast on ocean
winds? We've already talked bout
this...It's late and the suns still up.

Praise of Idleness

It looks that the future leaders and thinkers of the world are hard at work.

Been reading My Life, Lyn Hejinian's collection of prose poems, which can be considered autobiographical in nature. The gist of it that I so far have gathered is the work is a fragmentary illustration of herself and her personal history interspliced wtih sudden commentary and tangential trains of thought. The work is experimental and was considered avant-garde in its time. The work is dense and rich and it takes a while to read, even though it is only a hundred or so pages. It is seperated into 39 parts i think, presumably to miiror the age she was when she wrote to poem. I dont understand fully what it is im reading but I love it.

Thats how its been for me for a while. Many poems I read I may read only for the sake of its inexplicableness and puzzling quality. Im drawn to what is immediately weird and off-putting, but this doesnt mean I fully appreciated the work. It seems that when I truly understand a poets design it is at that time the i soon forget his/her poetry and move on to something new.

Ahhhhhhh yes....

"Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned enough coal, oil, and natural gas to produce some two hundred and fifty billion metric tons of carbon. The result, as is well known, has been the transformantion of the Earth's atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today--three hundred parts per million--is higher than it has been in six hundred and fifty thousand years, and probably much longer. At the current rate of emission growth, carbon dioxide concentration will top five hundred parts per million--roughly double pre-industrial levels--by the middle of the century. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual global temperature rise of between three and a half to seven degrees Fahrenheit, and this, in turn, will prompt a sting of disasters, including fiercer hurricanes, more deadly droughts, the disappearence of most remaining glaciers, the melting of the Arctic ice cap, and the inundation of many of the worlds major coastal cities." Elizabeth Kolbert from The New Yorker Nov. 20, 2006

Been thinking about the adaptive unconcious and how it directs our decisions in life without any help from our conscious minds. When you think about it we are, to certain degrees, racist, sexist, ageist what have you, and this is only because sterotypes that riddle our culture have nested in our adaptive unconscious and affected, even spawned, erroneous trains of thought. Still investigating the ins and outs of it but for more info read this, contemplate this and this...

SELF HELP

a bird's attitude about the world
everything asthetically pleasing like coffee cups
kitchen appliances and linoleum flooring.

raking the leaves is a lesson in futility
i wanted to burn them in the backyard
but worried about appeasing the wrong gods.

fuck the leaves i know what i'll do
write boring poems about raking leaves
in hopes that other people can contemplate
my frustration.

It is the idea of this blog to let down consciuos barriers in order not to inhibit the act of creation which has been the bane of my existence since I was 14. I hope that if I type fast enough everything will come gracefully and beautifully but if there are some many beautiful things in this world how can I expect to contrubite anything substantial?

ancient mariners hat-trick