Sirius the Dog Star in Some Poetry and Prose of Note

As I write, in Northern California, 'tis the Dog Days. The days are still, long, and marked by heat and, lately, drought. In yin-yang fashion, the heat can be modeled physically as atoms moving faster, with more energy. We're exposed all day by Earth's tilt to direct sun, and we're closer to our star, too. Correspondingly, our own atoms seem to slow down. Small exertions bring panting and sweat, and we crave the couch, a ceiling fan, whatever's in the fridge. While no doubt our ever-accelerating capital treadmill will keep many exercising and working to "get ahead" <cough>, the general run of things compass lethargy, languidness, longing.

And yet, this seems a time of supreme weirdness for our species, though this seems underreported.

                            Sirius A and B, simulated by Chris Laurel's 3-D imaging tech
                            named Celestia. Wikimedia Commons.

Here's W.H. Auden, around the Fall of 1949, nailing the listlessness of these days well:

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;
Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,
Vacant the scholar’s brain
Under his great hat,
Drug though She may, the Sybil utters
A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,
Lying in bed till noon,
Your bills unpaid, your much advertised
Epic not yet begun,
Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish
Some earthquake would astonish,
Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing
Unlock the prisons and translate
The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,
The hawthorn hedges in bloom,
When, serene in their ivory vessels,
The three wise Maries come,
Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in
By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:
Ah! how the cannons roar,
How jocular the bells as They
Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe
That all in the end shall be well,
But first of all, remember,
So the Sacred Books foretell,
The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense
If today were that moment of silence,
Before it break and drown,
When the insurrected eagre hangs
Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
Tombs of the sorcerers shatter
And their guardian megalopods
Come after you pitter-patter?
How will you answer when from their qualming spring
The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,
And out of the open sky
The pantocratic riddle breaks –
‘Who are you and why?’

For when in a carol under the apple-trees
The reborn featly dance,
There will also, Fortunatus,
Be those who refused their chance,
Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,
And mawkish in their wits,
To whom these dull dog-days
Between event seemed crowned with olive
And golden with self-praise. 

Longing for the earthquake that would astonish reminds me of Kathryn Schulz's recent article in The New Yorker, about the Cascadia fault line/subduction zone, that will leave Seattle in ruins and render, according to one expert, everything west of the Interstate 5 highway "dust." Now that would bring any one of us out of the doldrums, eh?

I marvel at Auden's ability to render the listless, sluggish mental and bodily states brought on by the Dog Days. And "On the mountain, the baltering torrent/Shrunk to a soodling thread" is so Joycean-trippy I'm envious of anyone who writes a line like this... 

Astronomers tell us Sirius begins to rise in conjunction with the sun, for those larks who like to wake with the Sol. For the Egyptians, Sirius's appearance meant very soon the Nile would flood their fertile fields: irrigation from the gods! To the naked eye, only Alpha Centauri is brighter, and Sirius (we're not yet addressing Sirius's cosmic brethren: soon) is the fifth-nearest known star to Earthlings. It's 8.7 light years from us, but let's let Tom Robbins flesh that out in poetic prose.

Tom Robbins

The afternoon lasts approximately as long as fourth grade. However long it takes a wuf of light from Sirius the Dog Star to reach its reflection in a puddle of tar on the Dog House roof, that's how long it takes the afternoon to go by. The afternoon is a million-car train rattling at half-speed through a crossing in a prairie town. - Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas, p.83

James Joyce

In the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, the style has switched to a series of catechism-like questions, which  are posed regarding the interactions of the young, drunk artist Stephen Dedalus, and his symbolic father, Leopold Bloom. It's around 2AM in Dublin, June 17th, 1904:

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface toward the center of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes [...] - p. 698 in the old Viking ppbk version.

Bloom was an Everyman of 1904, but he was interested in everything. By 1905 Sirius was measured at 8.6 light-years away from us; Bloom seems to remember it as 10. So, the number for light-years is low and so is the volume: it's not 900 times that of Earth but closer to 2,834,000 times more voluminous. The important thing here is that Bloom is filled with wonder about such things and wants to share his knowledge with the younger man. 

Ezra Pound

The following passage was written under the most extraordinary circumstances: Pound had been captured by the Allies for broadcasting Fascist propaganda (Pound seemed to think he was doing what Thomas Jefferson would have wanted[?], although the broadcasts are filled with disgusting antisemitic remarks; Pound seemed to have some sort of "sickness" I know not what) to the Allies from Italy, with Mussolini's imprimatur. On May 22, 1945, Pound was taken to the Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) at Pisa where he remained for six months, as a political prisoner. At first he was kept by the Americans (Pound was born in Idaho) in a wire and concrete cage six feet by six and a half feet, open to the sky, no protection from wind and rain.  Most of the other prisoners were murderers and rapists. Pound had thought he was exercising free speech with his broadcasts. Two guards watched him at all time, and weren't supposed to speak to Pound. Pound cracked after three weeks. Under these barbaric, insane conditions, he continued with his lifelong work: writing his Cantos, encyclopedic/epic poetry, polyglot, profoundly erudite, a poem with his own version of history as he had made it from his readings. By the time he'd been apprehended, his ideas about how Modern poetry should be had largely "won" with other poets and intellectuals. With the intervention of those he'd influenced and helped (Hemingway and William Carlos Williams were disgusted by what Ez had said, but were committed to defending him should he come to trial for treason): cummings, Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, Amy Lowell, Auden, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate and many others later awarded the section of Cantos that Pound had written while in captivity the Bollingen Prize. He received this award while housed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, DC. Here's a bit with Sirius in it; Pound is in the panther cage and the moon is coming up, along with Sirius:

the water seeps in under the bottle's seal
                Till finally the moon rose like a blue p.c.
of Bingen on the Rhine
                round as Perkeo's tub
then glaring Eos stared the moon in the face
       (Pistol packin' Jones with an olive branch)
       man and dog
                               On the S.E. horizon
               and we note that dog precedes man in the occident
               as of course in the orient if the bloke in the
               is proceeding to rightwards
      "Why war?" sd/the sergeant rum-runner
       "too many people! when there git to be too many
                      you get to kill some of 'em off."
-Canto LXXX

Water seeps through into his cage while the moon rose like a blue postcard. Bingen is a city on the Rhine located near a whirlpool. "Perkeo" was a jester in the court of Karl Phillip of Heidelberg, and an elaboration of this very Ezratic allusion can be found here. Eos is Venus at dawn. Jones is an officer at the DTC. Man and dog refer to Orion and Sirius. Then Pound makes an observation about syntax in chinese writing vs. Indo-European. After "bloke in the" we are supposed to see a Chinese character that shows the characters for "dog" and "man," which, in the text, is shown in the margins. This tiny section of Canto 80 ends with overheard conversation illustrating the almost idiotic level of political understanding by Unistat military; my impression is that not much has changed since 1945.

W.S. Merwin

Heavily influenced by Pound, Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2008 book The Shadow of Sirius. I read this luminous book and, while there are no poems "about" Sirius, reading Merwin we must keep in mind that, for him, creativity comes from something inside us that we didn't know about: our Shadow. So, his poetry comes from the "shadow of Sirius," as Sirius is a strange star system (more later). Here's a section from a transcript of an interview Merwin had with Bill Moyers, after Merwin won the Pulitzer:


BILL MOYERS: He does leave his island reverie from time to time to read his work at universities and libraries — and to pick up his Pulitzer Prize. Here's the book that won, THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS. Its author is with me now. W.S. Merwin, welcome to the Journal.
BILL MOYERS: You titled this new book, the one that just won  the Pulitzer Prize, "In The Shadow of Sirius". Now, Sirius is the dog star. The most luminous star in the sky. Twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about its shadow. Something that no one has ever seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that.
W.S. MERWIN: That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
W.S. MERWIN: We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.

(for entire interview see HERE.)

In Voltaire's Micromegas he's invented a giant from the planet Sirius. It's a proto-science fiction story. This giant promises to give men - "infinitely insignificant atoms" - the secrets of nature in a large volume of philosophy. When the Society of the Academy of Sciences opens up the book, it's nothing but blank pages. "Aha!," says the Secretary: "Just as I expected."

Which...

"Well, Lew angled his thumb aloft and eastward, where sure enough a very bright, luminous object had been slowly on the rise all evening, "it's a good one to get, all right." It was the Dog Star Sirius, which ruled this part of the summer, and whose blessings, tradition held, were far from unmixed." - Against The Day, Thomas Pynchon, p.901 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Time of Useful Consciousness

The Irish/Anglican empirical philosopher and guerrilla ontologist Bishop George Berkeley (b.1685, same year as Bach/Handel/Scarlatti) said "Westward the course of empire takes its way...," and later, in far West California in the 19th century, a man named Frederick Billings, knowing Berkeley's line,  suggested "Berkeley" as the name for a college site, 1866, but perhaps this is all immaterial. (<---I hope at least one of you enjoyed what I did right there.)

Time of Useful Consciousness

In aeronautical lingo, the "time of useful consciousness" is the period between when your oxygen runs out and you go into unconsciousness. The hypoxia zone is in your cabin and you are in a life or death situation, high in the sky. You have a brief window of time in which to save yourself. Ferlinghetti, writing as well as he ever has at age 93 (!), thinks the world is at a similar point, and in less then 100 pages he's written a stream-of-American historical consciousness (and, it would seem to me: a skimming in the collective unconsciousness, the paideuma, if only by inhabitation of the territory over the course of a long poem), accelerando, the form somewhere between Eliot and cummings, and latter-day historically-minded American bards Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. (I consider Pound's similar project as far more expansive and taking the stream of consciousness of "humanity" as its subject OR: The Tale of the Tribe.) Let us consider Ferlinghetti's work here - and the book follows in wake of his earlier Americus vol I - to be telling fragmented shards of the Unistatian Tale?

But Ferlinghetti's work here is tight and a delight, if mostly Whitmanic, then waxing desperation, with a final-moment culminating in a Whitmanesque yea-saying, seemingly, if only because it's such a drag to dwell on the possibility of whimper-not-a-bang apocalypse, brought on by a collected willful ignorance.

Ferlinghetti, at the end of his poem, having moved structurally from East to West, and gotten darker with the skies and cars and Narcissistic Net, shouts:

Enough! Enough!
Enough of this "loud lament of the disconsolate chimera"
in some waste land of our impoverished imagination.

He then seems to plaintively ask for Whitman's presence: isn't there still hope? And as the poem draws to a close:

Walt Whitman, you should be living at this hour!
Optimist of humanity en masse

Why? His bardic love for Whitman...is Ferlinghetti saying, "I wonder if you could still 'Sing in the West' in a culture of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and the North Pole as a lake?" Or maybe: "Your type of loving optimism is needed now more than ever; if you can't show up I'll take your place, but know this, Walt: this is some serious shit we're dealing with here, now."?

In nine sections, we inhabit the Mind of the "hinternation," then "sailing westward/from the crenellated old world/of over-age Camembert Europe --/millions wash up on virgin shores/bright with promise"

Rarely have I read poetic lines more exuberant about the good of immigrants, and Einstein, Kerouac, Chomsky, W.E.B. Dubois, Emma Goldman, Zinn, Sacco and Vanzetti, and even Jim Jarmusch make it in here, along with other Unistatian "types" from far-flung lands. Chomsky and Zinn:

With other immigrants causing caustic critiques
of the American Way of Life
like Noam Chomsky
with a father from the Ukraine
and a mother from Belarus
and Howard Zinn rewriting history and herstory
with a father from Austria-Hungary
and a mother from Siberia

Then the impact of the Iron-Horse railroads on Unistatian consciousness, then a brief section on Chicago, which I loved. I hadn't known anything about the Dil Pickle Club, but now I want to read an entire book about it:

And on Near North Side Chicago
in a shack of a barn in broken-down Tooker Alley
the Dil Pickle Club (with one "l")
the hobohemian nightspot
after its glorious beginnings
in 1916 or thereabouts
didn't close 'til the 1960s
a place where everybody and everything was anti
"the flaming crater of Chicago's revolution in the Arts"
frequented early-on by the likes of
Big Bill Haywood Eugene Debs Emma Goldman
and Mother Jones

Aye, and James T. Farrell, Harriet Monroe, Vachel Lindsay, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Studs Terkel, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, and Nelson Algren, who apparently had had some interesting fling with Simone de Beauvoir in Paris that I need to look into.

And Thorsten Veblen drank the bitter drink alright

Ferlinghetti actually took a trip down the Mississippi from Minnesota to Louisiana, and, like the River and its own stream and Huck and Tom and Twain and their place in the consciousness of Unistat, it appears near the middle of the book:

But it ain't the river of Mark Twain's dream
the pre-coal river, the ancient dreamin' river
Ask the river pilots and they'll tell you
The river towns all dying
all the way down
(home-towns boarded-up
all over America
stamped out by shopping malls
on nearby Interstates

I guess Lawrence couldn't bring himself to include the noun Wal-Mart in his sounding.

Section 8 of the poem completely floored me. It's not only a companion to Allen Ginsberg's writings on Moloch, but it's strongly reminiscent of Ezra Pound's "Hell" Cantos. And now the poem has moved to the Unistatian southwest and especially Las Vegas and the gangster-cowboy mind. In this sense, the poem contributes in a sense to Peter Dale Scott's writings on Nixon, Watergate, and the Mafia. It also seems to speak in a bardic way to Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War. I feel compelled to quote from this chapter at length, but will resist, as I wouldn't be able to stop and I've probably already skirted the fringes of Fair Use. Read this chapter - the longest one in the book, pp.45-61 - if only for the conjuring powers of a 93 year old Bard! Uncanny...

Neurogeographically the poem ends in San Francisco, across the Bay from Berkeley. And Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore City Lights is there, but...after a celebration of the Mind of the City, the trope of loneliness sets in. Sadness, homelessness, alienation, the Mind of Unistat in the 21st century. And Ferlinghetti came of age during the 1939-45 War. And so, in the City most associated with "progress" in the digital revolution:

It was still high noon in America
until along came the digital revolution
fated to destroy or ingest
all the age-old cultures
of the world
in a World Wide Web
of globalization
in an Ayn Rand projection
of world domination

Well, yes of course you'd say that: you're 93, a poet, and owner of a bookstore that still thrives somehow. (I admit some resonant sympathy here, relatively young cuss that I seem.)

At 5 o'clock the rush to the freeway to burn home to loneliness just bums and worries Ferlinghetti. As does what I call our Earthquake Ritual, but he puts it like this:

The bedsprings quake
on the San Andreas Fault
The dark land broods
Look in my eye, look in my eye
the cyclops tv cries
It blinks and rolls its glassy eye
and shakes its vacuum head
over the shaken bodies
in the bed

Possibly I make this rapid shutter-speed trip through Unistatian historical consciousness as a bad trip, and if I did I misrepresent the book. It seems Truth-Telling to me, and so even the unpleasant becomes somehow transformed into Beauty. And then there is the sheer beauty of many, many lines by a wizened old Bard who never considered himself a "Beat" but a bohemian. He wants us to make it. So do I. So do you. Enough of the thick haze of impoverished imagination! Let us do a rear-guard action and...not be a part of it, and thereby forestall its extensions. You know what "it" is or seems? We still have time of useful consciousness, and maybe in 200 years this book will be a curious relic from the Dark Days, who knows?

How easy  it would be to dismiss the Bardic filtrations of the Unistatian mind in history, tuned in by Ferlinghetti, at 93, as the expressions of the old boho who feels his cherished hopes thwarted. It's far more serious than that. Look at the facts and then yourself in the mirror: is he just on a bummer? I think not. He's on to something Big, and that's precisely why we want to read this sort of poetry. Admittedly, in the artificial hierarchy of data-information-knowledge-wisdom, the last term is, as Robert Anton Wilson said, "private, not public, and somewhat more mysterious." But who doesn't crave some wisdom these days? I say Old Man Ferlinghetti shows it here in spades and you're a damned fool to ignore it.

If only for these meagre reasons, I urge The Reader to read this book. In a unique semantic sense, it's completely fantastic! (Especially the Unistatians: check this jit out.)

Words and Names and Their Not-Exactly-Rational Underpinnings

What the hey: quasi taking-up where I left off...

I've been trying to make sense of this recent article , which is a tad technical for me, so heavy sledding but very interesting. Just the sound of a word will influence what we think it means. The relative shortness of a noun will have our brains thinking of what that word stands for as concrete or abstract. Etc.

I remember an Aldous Huxley novel (I forget which; I used to read them one after another) in which a silly old woman was named Mrs. Mercaptan. I think her first name was Ethel. Now, novelists of ideas - and especially ones with a satirical bend - will do this all the time. Mercaptan is what the Brits call a sulfurous compound that smells like rotten eggs. Like flatulence. It's added to odorless natural gas so that, in case of leaks, everyone will know, and quickly. Ethyl used to be used for "gasoline." This kind of thing takes a certain base of knowledge in order to get in on Aldous's little joke. Otherwise, "Mercaptan" sounds sort of "official" to me. It has the word "captain" in its sound. It has a "serious" sound of /k/ then that crisp /p/ followed by /t/ sound. "Mercaptan" means business. But when she speaks, we hear her as an old bag of wind.

In another novel of Huxley's - maybe the same one? - one of his characters needs a carminative and waxes on the sound of the word itself: it sounds soothing to the character, who knows what it's for. And so we get a tad more fun irony.

Aldous was hyper-cognizant about how he was using words and what his better readers would glean from it. What I'm talking about is that aspect of a-rationality in some of our labels and names and words.

The great German psychologist of the gestalt persuasion, Wolfgang Kohler, in 1929 published Gestalt Psychology and in it he asks, Which of the two following shapes is "takete" and which one is "maluma"?

Both words are made-up, but even a non-native speaker knows the one on the right is "takete" and the other "maluma." Why? Because the sounds in "takete," when you say them (maybe even look at the word?) are abrupt, jagged, hard. "Maluma" sounds blob-like and meandering. If you don't think advertisers know this stuff you are one helluva Naif.

Ever wonder why Prozac or Seroquel are called those things? Oxycontin, Vicodin, Zoloft, Xanax? Well, the zed and the "q" and the vee and the big-time Xs mean business and effectiveness, on some sub-conscious level. (Or is it unconscious?) Those names - while confabulated using the sort of research done by the guys in the study I link to at the beginning of this article - connote seriousness. These drugs emanated from a highly technical world of rationality and expertise, or else why all the Xs? It seems it's right there - the High Technology of the drugs - in the sound and spelling of the names for those drugs. And it works for Big Pharma, in cash. For some "reason."(Some of those drugs even actually sorta "do" what they're advertised to do! May wonders never cease.)

If you're starting some high-tech firm that sells fiber optic whizbangs or nanotubular gizmos to labs that do who-knows-what, fer crissakes, name your company Zontec or Kiqvek. (I can do better. Get back to me later on those.) But you don't have to be a PhD in superfluids to know Bellsyloo is not a good name for a hi-tech firm. Neither is Melmu-Landa. I just made up those last two, but don't they sound like they'd make toys for children? They almost sound huggable. None of this makes sense, I know. But we're trying to bypass our critical modules and go right for...something emotional. Something non-rational.

HERE is lexicographer Robert Beard's 100 most beautiful words in English. Before I first read it, I knew two of my faves - redolent and mellifluous - would be there, and they were. "Dalliance" is on the list, too. Robert Anton Wilson thought it one of the most beautiful words also. Any one of us can quibble or protest with what Beard left out or included, but I just read the list and it feels like I'm reading poetry. Why? I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out, and "Arbitrary Symbolism In Natural Language Revisited: When Word Forms Carry Meaning" is part of my effort to figure it out.

Another list of "beautiful" and "ugly" words in English.

I just noted that "tintinnabulation" appears on Beard's list; the rhythm of that word sends me; I love it. Which reminds me of the psychedelic humor and wordplay of Robert Anton Wilson, who used a bit in his stand-up intellectual comedy act in the 1990s that revolved around the wife of the President. He said that when you say "Hillary Clinton" over and over, it sounds like a train approaching, but when you add her middle name and say "Hillary Rodham Clinton" over and over, it sounds like the train has passed you and it's receding into the distance.

Finally, Prof. Carlin said that certain word-sounds turned him off to certain foods. "Head cheese" just was not something he wanted to get into; similarly:"eggplant." Well, which is it? Sounds like you're being jerked-around; someone's sending mixed messages. It's a trap! (I agree that "head cheese" not only sounds unpleasant, but it almost stares at you and dares you to show us how fearless, open-minded and cosmopolitan you are by trying it.)

Meanwhile, "guacamole" - to Carlin - just sounded hilarious and difficult to take seriously.

Speaking of food and Prof. Carlin the stand-up Sociolinguist: a 7 minute-long Public Service Announcement:

Human Brains: Enchanted Looms, Electro-Colloidal Computers, Flying Lasagna, and Other Grey Matters

A Generalist trying to study and write about the human brain seems bound to tax attention: there's simply so much there to get all worked up over, especially since the 1990s "Decade of the Brain" and the resultant supernovae of imaging machines, knowledge of genes and epigenetics, experimental psychologies, and an ungainly amount of scientific data. No PhD in Neuroscience can keep up with all of it; one must specialize. We now have Neuroeconomics. Finally!

But the Generalist is at free play in the dense, massive fields.

I had wanted to do an entire blogspew on the materiality of the human brain, simply because I find descriptions of it so trippy. Full Disclosure: I have never held a human brain in my hands. But I've read and seen enough from people who have, or surgeons who have performed brain surgery, to palpably - in my imagination - "feel" the majesty of it all. But first: the human brain from another level: how we perceive or make "reality," and how tenuous it all seems.

Two Quotes From Disparate Recent Readings
We've learned a lot about how memory works in the last 20 years, but there's a lot left to learn. Just about any textbook minted in the last ten years will discuss how different declarative memory ("knowing that") works versus procedural memory ("knowing how"...like navigating a stairwell, riding a bike, or tying your shoes).

Discussing recent findings using imaging machines, Amiri, Lannon and Lewis write, "While explicit memory (basically: declarative- OG) is swift and capacious, a fallacious sense of accuracy attends its frequently erroneous returns. New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain area as imagination. Perhaps for this reason, the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy." - A General Theory of Love, p.104

Before you go thinking about you and your friends and everyone you love here - not to mention how this might impact "personal responsibility" and the Law! - dig this quote from Douglas Rushkoff's Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For The Digital Age:

"But the latest research into virtual worlds might suggests the lines between the two (digital models of reality and our own being-in-the-world models - OG) may be blurring. A Stanford scientist testing kids' memories of virtual reality experiences found that at least half the children cannot distinguish between what they really did and what they did in the computer simulation. Two weeks after donning headsets and swimming with virtual whales, half of the participants interviewed believed they had actually had the real world experience. Likewise, Philip Rosedale - the quite sane founder of the virtual reality community Second Life - told me he believes that by 2020, his online world will be indistinguishable from real life." - p.69

[Note: This all may dovetail mindblowingly with Nick Bostrom's ideas about humans being a computer simulation, which I touched on HERE, and this recent article, "Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation". Caution: If you you're not familiar with these ideas yet and have wanted to do a psychedelic drug such as psilocybin mushrooms but can't find any, these ideas may prove an adequate substitute.]

Three Pound Universe: Dissection Witness
I liked Zoe Williams's brief article on her experience in the room with a neuropathologist and his "special chopping board and really sharp knife." I'll watch anything on the science channels on TV that are about the materiality of the brain, and I can't get enough of reading about the sacred object you're using now to decode what I'm trying to say. For us, it seems plausible that the brain is the most complex object in the universe. And when Williams describes it as "jaundiced pallor and pronounced bulge, like pickled eggs," it activates those circuits in my own brain that have to do with...surrealism.

Maybe that's just me.

Dr. Gentleman, who seems to love his job of slicing and dicing recently deceased brains, works for a UK brain bank devoted to researching Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Multiple Sclerosis, roughly in that order. He can use the naked eye to read the sorts of suffering the human underwent. It's always interesting to hear about something like, for example, strokes.

"'It's pot luck with strokes,' he explains at one point - you can have a stroke and not notice. Or you can have a stroke that leaves you with a cystic cavity, or what a layperson might call, a big hole in your head."

Gentleman cuts away in front of the journalist, pointing out, "that's the main event; personality, executive function, reason." I find the high number of errors interesting: people while living had been diagnosed with some brain disease - they and their loved ones were at least given a name for their malady - and far more often than I would've thought, it was wrong, judging by the visual evidence of the physical insults of the person's actual brain. Clearly, we have a long road to hoe here.

All this stuff not only puts me in the mood of surrealism, but concomitant to this, in encountering the actual material brain, a combination of dreamlike wonder juxtaposed with ghastly existential terror, back to dreamlike wonder. And quite often a dark humor suffuses the scene.

If you're still interested in this stuff, HERE's another: cutting through the deeply-buried pineal gland. You can thank me later.

                                                            Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan's Brains, "Literally"
You can make this stuff up, but you must have an eldritch, poetic mind. But this story is true: poet J.J. Phillips wanted to do research on the counterculture novelist/poet Richard Brautigan (have you read Trout Fishing in America?). Stephen Gerz tells the story in his edifying book blog Booktryst in a post "Novelist Richard Brautigan's Brains At Bancroft Library: A Grand Guignol Adventure," which you must read; I can't do it justice.

Maybe I should've posted this on Halloween.

I take some odd and demented delight in knowing most of the action here took place in my neighborhood. The owner of Serendipity Books, Peter Howard? His legend grows by the year. Did he know for sure that's why some of Brautigan's papers were so messy? Phillips had to call in a coroner to confirm. And what of the librarians at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library? Phillips thought they were acting "squirrelly and obfuscatory." And I think Phillips has a point: what if Brautigan had had Mad Cow disease?

Being a fan of Codrescu, I can only imagine his reaction upon hearing the story. Wow.

Another Poet
I'd like to leave you with a link to "Brain," by C.K. Williams. Here the brain is traversed by the poet, a cavern, a maze of corridors...and where is a comforting soul?

Who knows what's real? All "I" - this is my brain speaking here - know is, I'm hungry and it's time for dinner, so I bid this spew adieu.

Poetry, Conversation, Translations, In-Form-a-Tion, Etc

In an interview about his book of poetry titled Uselysses, Noel Black recalls a time with Harry Mathews at a San Francisco art school, and I like this passage because it sheds light on my two previous blogspews on "translation":


Harry Mathews came and gave a lecture to a class I took at New College, and I had this amazing conversation with him afterward about the “I” and “self” and that whole labyrinth. I’ll never forget what he said to me because it was so freeing. I’m paraphrasing here, but what he said is that Americans, because most of us only speak one language, have a tendency to believe that language comes from within us out of some sort of linguistic font of self, which leads us to this “I” to which we cling. For a lot of Europeans, on the other hand, many of whom are polyglots, language is something external that’s not only mutable, but easily rearranged and manipulated and only loosely regarded as any part of a fixed self. By that measure, he had concluded after many years of living abroad, that you could only know yourself with the shared language you were using with another person, i.e. you are creating a different self with each different person you’re with in whatever common language you happen to share. I loved that idea so much because what it says is that the I is always in relationship, that it’s a conversation, a community.
-gleaned from this Levi Rubeck interview with Noel Black

It seems what Noel Black is getting from Harry Mathews here supports what Lera Boroditsky has been arguing in her academic career. But then, beware: this is me, today, interpreting/translating/fumbling to explain to my Dear Reader what I think is going on. Lots may get lost in my grapples with Boroditsky's  thought, with what Noel Black seeks to remember ("I'm paraphrasing here...") from his time with Harry Mathews, what Mathews thinks "makes sense" vis a vis European polyglots and language and the "self" versus what monolingual Unistatians think about where language comes from, how it relates to a "self," etc, etc, etc.

I'll return to Noel Black's poetry later, but want to try and haul in some things about interpretations, translations, and Information Theory.

                                     How ordinary my having a blog seems!

One of my own spiritual fathers, Robert Anton Wilson, often wrote and talked about the acceleration of information. In his cosmic intellectual goofy-sufi-like humor, he eventually dubbed this mathematical doubling the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon, and if you don't know what it is, the first paragraph in this link gives the inkling. RAW took this stuff seriously, if not siriusly, and he actually has quite a lot to say about the statistical mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, and the social, personal, political and philosophical implications of it. Terence McKenna had some similar things to say on this topic, although they seemed more teleological and metaphysical in bend than RAW's. If one looks at Ray Kurzweil's work, particularly the fat The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil seems to have picked up from RAW and his influences on information doubling and logarithmically taken it to another level, but that's for The Reader (and future history?) to decide.

There's also quite an abundant literature that seeks to determine boundary distinctions and interactions between types of knowledge, and, more fascinating to me, the differences between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. I have found nothing but vast abstruse disagreements here. Which is fine with me.

RAW, in his widely dispersed writings on information doubling in history, touched on the qualitative aspects therein, but any reader can easily miss that in favor of what I see as - wild and ironically - a Platonified view of how information works. If Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's and John Von Neumann's and Norbert Wiener's and Gregory Bateson's and...all  the others mentioned in James Gleick's marvelous 2011 book The Information - the information that can be quantified and more or less given a relatively thick description as to how it worked within a scientific/technological sense - THAT information...then yes. Maybe. But I wonder about our brain's unrealistic expectations of information transformation, mostly because I played, at childhood birthday parties, the game of Telephone...and never stopped thinking about what it meant. (Huh? WTF is the OG onto now?)

I remember how funny it was that, what went into the first kid's ear turned out, after the 16th iteration, to be shorter and weirder and having almost no resemblance to the original. Why was it funny?

Well, humor may be a way to let our guards down and admit we're not perfect. We seem not even close to perfect. And that it's okay, because being human? We're far too complex to get strings of information exactly right, using our wetware. (I didn't think this stuff about Telephone until the last couple years.) Getting data and memory 100% is not something we do well in these embodied minds of aggregated replicators and evolutionarily legacy-ed mind-software. But what about other implications?

One of the "reasons" the market tanked in 2008 was "we" ("quants" and others) had written algorithms into very posh hi-powered computers that took in data about either buying or selling, and in microseconds, made "decisions" on whether it was buy or sell time. And the data/information the algorithms were working on was extensive. But it was based on earlier data strings that supposedly represented something in the Actual World that you or I would care about...like buying a house. But again: this data string was based on decisions made in microseconds from other data strings. It was like Telephone, only these algorithms were making buy/sell decisions without any human minds interposed. And yet, all you needed was one bit of some "interpretation" (can robotic algorithms, no matter how complex, be said to interpret?) that the algorithm "thought" was okay...to be wrong in some way. And then we had a sort of Telephone-like iteration which resulted in something that was not given to the same mirth of a children's backyard party and something rather like a Worldwide Economic Depression. Oh, humans, talking amongst themselves, playing by what the "rules" allowed, made bad decisions too...

Were there unethical, even criminally negligent decisions made? You betta you ass there were.

                            There's a LOT missing in this basic schematic, no?

Why do we allow complex mathematical formulae, worked over at blinding speeds by hi-powered computers, to make "decisions" about what are basically human values? Because it seemed/seems like a cost-efficient or "neat-o" idea? I read about this stuff and the FOLLY angers me. (Hence the Robin Hood Tax seems like a very sound idea to me.)

Now, I'm writing this based on my best understanding as a Generalist, some dude reading books, and maybe I've missed something? Maybe the authors I've read missed something? Maybe I misread some tiny bit based on some tiny bit someone, who I trust KNOWS something...errr...missed? Hey, that's life.

It's not at all convincing or clear to me that higher levels of abstracted information make for something healthier, to borrow from a hippie slogan, "for children and other living things." Too many artifacts and errors creep. We must always have something like an attempt of wise humans refereeing. It seems far too many Geeks and policy makers do not get this.

And that's my point. Information transfer from brain to brain or from algorithm to algorithm of from algorithm to brain is not a Platonically perfect dealio, ladies and germs. And the repercussions are not academic; they come packing a world of hurt at times.

Back to Black...

Noel Black's Uselysses
Gawd, what a delightful, funny book of poetry. This alone should be enough to pique you, but maybe my taste is not close enough to yours, so I'll say a few things about why I like the book.

Black remembered someone calling themselves a "depressionist," and, being an artist in today's Unistat? It's easy to feel useless, no matter how much effort and soul-bearing you do. For a punster  - who prefers portmanteau to pun, as Joyce preferred the portmanteau as stylistic device -"uselysses" can describe the interior feelings of many an artist in this day and age.

He's steeped in the poetic tradition, but feels its weight, Whitman appearing at odd times throughout the book, laying his body down along the entire stretch of road one might drive from New York to San Francisco. And, steeped in the art school/academic and especially San Francisco poetry scene (where certain, say LANGUAGE poets live in their own poetic fiefdoms while poets of Other Schools theirs), he had to leave, go back to Colorado Springs, where he was brought up by a gay father who died of AIDS, and a lesbian mother. He goes back to evangelical right wing hotbed Colorado Springs to reclaim it, in some Whitmanian sense, for Art.

Another of the younger poets who draw upon and allude to TV and pop culture (almost) as much as anyone, Black's surrealistic sensibility and sense of the cosmic absurdity of his own fleeting thoughts in the mundane get worked over into something truly artistic and human and hilarious. Aside from a very witty section of short poems all based on how some famous poets died, he's perhaps best-known as the author of a chapbook (contained in Uselysses) called Moby K. Dick, (an odd concatenation of Philip K Dick's book Ubik and Melville's masterwork) in which he takes books he's loved and combines their deeper structures, has a sort of ethereal chat between both books (or book/another author), and neither book comes to the reader in bold relief; rather, the odd intertwining essence-ish-ness of each book speaks in the short poems, variously titled "Lord Jim Thompson," "Paul Austerlitz," "Watchmen in the Rye," "Huckleberry Finnegans Wake," "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Blood," you get the idea.

If you're a Joycean looking for something in, say, "Huckleberry Finnegans Wake" you're unlikely to come away with anything, save for the idea that a poet drew, in some odd way, on Finnegans Wake. Black's purpose here seems closer to William Burroughs's use of the cut-up method, only Black is cutting up general feelings - interpretations - in his mind about the two books, how his sense of himself was subsumed while reading those books, and how his made-meanings of texts dreamily interposed in the overnight "dialogue" between both books as they sat on his shelf.

But this is Black at his artsiest. The Noel Black I had most fun with was the one who wanted to write poetry again because it was FUN, and he had calendrical time and geographic distance from two places he'd tried to make it, San Francisco and Brooklyn. Colorado Springs seems to suit him fine. Here are some lines from a poem that, to me, depict my favorite aspects of Black. From "Poem of Carl Sagan":

It must be confusing for Christians
who arrive in Heaven
to find Carl Sagan seated at the right hand of God,
which is a gigantic, glowing vagina
floating above the Captain's chair
on the deck of the Starship Enterprise.


"It's interesting - and I never imagined this - "
says Carl, using the weirding voices of Science to soothe the recently dead,
"that the Universe is merely an emanation of the brain,
which as we look into it, tricks us into believing 
that we are gazing into an unfathomable outward expanse
that is but the unknowable inner reaches of our own minds. Now,
who would like to be reborn?"


Vaginal wormholes, C. S. Lewis perturbed by it all, Star Trek's spaceship as the Holy Ghost, telling someone they'll understand heaven a lot better if they re-read Dune, then here's Carl Sagan again:

Then he unzips his burnt-orange windbreaker
and a laser of love shoots out
from the spectral Starfleet logo upon his heart,
zapping them all into the raptures of wordless knowledge
as God folds their souls into dream.


If this all sounds vaguely like you and your funny friends, high in college, your parents split up or dead, listening to the Scorpions in someone's mom's basement in Unistatian suburbia in 1981, then yea: you probably have something in common with Noel Black. And you can either confirm or deny this by reading this book, but ESPECIALLY the last part, a rather long poem called "Prophecies For The Past," which was, to me, one of the most moving poems I've read by a currently living poet. I found Uselysses in my public library, but will buy the book if only for "Prophecies For The Past," which articulates a living reality for so very many of us, growing up in broken homes in cultural poverty pockets or suburban white America, last 30 years of the 20th century.

Noel Black, family man, seems wonderfully jester-wise and nutty, wears his resilient heart on his sleeve, which I picture as paisley right now, for some reason. I loved this book.

October 9, 1975: Actualism in Action!

On this date in 1975, "Dr. Alphabet's Poetry City Marathon" took place. Actualist Dave Morice "composed a poem of paper taped around a city block, sideshows were performed by the Ducksbreath Mystery Theater & the Blake Street Hawkeyes..."

I hadn't known anything about the poetry movement of Actualism until I read about it in my friend Jack Foley's 1284 page (in 2 large vols) Visions and Affiliations, an immense chronicle of West Coast poetry and art (mostly poetry) from 1940 to 2005. The quote in the first paragraph above is from p.457 of Vol I. Foley's books are staggeringly compendious; nothing like this has ever been done regarding West Coast poetry from 1940, and very likely never will be done again. If you want to know about the history of California poetry from the second half of the 20th century until...recently, this is The Real Deal. His erudite yet delightfully readable cover-to-cover to cover-to-cover chronicle of the poetry scene in California is subtitled "A California Literary Time Line: Poets and Poetry." For me, it's been a veritable education. One looks at these two volumes and, after saying "Wow," "Just...wow!," one wonders how anyone could have accomplished such a feat, and I imagine I'd've needed roughly 17 million 3x5 note cards...

So back to Actualism. (For the goods, see Vol 1 of Visions and Affiliations, pp.452-458) It appears to be a sort of melange of Dada, Groucho Marxism, and street theater. It started around April of 1970, and held annual conventions that were free, although after a while they charged 50 cents per day. They were "annual" but no one is sure how many were held. It was centered in Berkeley and San Francisco...and a few other places. It appears to have begun in Iowa City, but I guess that's another story.

One of the chief Actualists was Darrel Gray, who wrote in an essay "What Is Actualism?":

"I want to emphasize that Actualism is not an aesthetic 'movement' in the usual sense of the word. It owes nothing to literary history that it could not find elsewhere, least of all aesthetic theory or literary criticism...Actualists are serious about their art...But most of them would agree with what Nietzsche said on the matter: 'Maturity is a return to the seriousness of the child at play.'"
-pp.21-22 of Gray's Essays and Dissolutions. Found in Foley, p.455, op.cit

                                         Vol 2 of "Vis-Aff" by Jack Foley, aided and abetted by Adelle Foley
                                                                          Quite a work! 

Here's one guy who was part of Actualism that you may know: Andrei Codrescu. Actualists had often urged a "calculated naivete," but Codrescu wrote:

                                     ...Revolution. The word is like a revolver on a 
                                      sunlit window sill.
                                      It is one of the few words that sets
                                      my heart on fire. Girl also sets my heart on fire.
                                      Girl & Revolution. Revolution & Girl.
                                      I am twelve years old and I intend to stay that way.
                                     -"Sunday Sermon," Codrescu, Selected Poems


At (probably?) the first Actualist convention the price of admission was "spontaneity." Instead of chairs lined up in perfect little rows, you came in and found all the chairs heaped in a large pile in the middle of the stage. You could visit the Actualist Museum, which featured a jar of peanut butter, and the Olfactory Factory, which was jars of mysterious odors. If you won the door prize, you were awarded an actual door.

One Actualist, Joyce Holland, started her own Actualist poetry magazine, called Matchbook. You could subscribe, but you might have trouble receiving your copy. You see, Matchbook was actually printed on a matchbook with tiny pages stapled to the front cover. The post office made her wrap the issue in aluminum foil. And it seemed every poet in America was an Actualist. Matchbook was the first magazine to feature one-word poems. In another Actualist magazine, Life of Crime, in the "Volume: Actualism / Number: Shmactualism," the mysterious Holland's birthday is given as April Eighth, because that's the first day of the year, if you decide to alphabetize month/day.

Many Actualist readings/theater were held, but if for some reason you were deemed to be using too much time, you got the hook, just like an old vaudeville act. Indeed, Actualist "writing events" appeared on the old TV shows Tomorrow (with Tom Snyder) and The Gong Show.


By the end of the 1970s the disparate bands of Actualists realized they had some disagreements, and the movement splintered into "punks" and far more serious L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.

Foley doesn't link the Actualists to the Discordian Society or the Church of the Subgenius, but they all seem of a piece to me: brilliant, irreverent, anarchist humor and creativity, a branch of political satire and dissent, a marginal space for a certain type of artistic weirdo. In other words, something of the best in the American character.

In closing, I'd like to quote Actualist Joyce Holland:

                                     Wex fendible whask
                                     optera caffing, thatora!


                                    Neppcor-inco fendision
                                                   ubble snop!

Peter Dale Scott, a Colleague of Noam Chomsky

Emeritus Prof. of English at Berkeley, Scott seems like a good foil for Chomsky acolytes. Rather: in an effort to broaden the (political) Chomskyan's view, read Peter Dale Scott. Just a suggestion. Let me elaborate.

As I write, Scott is still writing poetry and (probably) fat non-fiction books on what he calls "deep politics," a term I unpack as something akin to the conspiriology of the academic. Scott appeared alongside Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky at very many anti-war rallies and talks and teach-ins against Unistat state power, sit-ins and consciousness raisers. And in Scott's poetry he doesn't hesitate to reveal his differences with his highbrow colleagues on the Left, whether neo-Marxist or non-Marxist Left, or anarchistic Left.

In Minding The Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000, we read:

          In his important book

    A People's History
                  (for the 99 percent
        whose commonality


    the Founding Fathers 
                  tried their best to prevent
          sharers of leftovers


     in a battle for resources
                   made scarce by elite control)     Zinn '80 571
          Zinn writes of the Indian Removal

[Scott cites his sources in his poetry and always includes a bibliography at the end of his books. - O.G.]

Scott says that other prominent American historians skipped over the Indian Removal, and names names, but then, a few lines down:

   but by depicting Jackson
               as slaveholder speculator
        exterminator of Indians


   Zinn lost sight of the Bank War
                in much talk of tariffs
       banking political parties


   political rhetoric                                   Zinn '80 129
                 along with Jefferson's warnings
         about an aristocracy


   founded on banking institutions
                   and monied incorporations   Sellers 106
        and Adams' Every bank of discount


   is downright corruption
                  taxing the public
        for private individuals' gain               Adams '62 9.638


   (which Pound made his slogan            Cantos 71/416, 74/437, etc
                      as the problem of issue           Cantos 87/569
          drew him step by step


   into singing perpetual war)                   Cantos 86/568; cf. Williams 180


-pp. 167-169, and if anyone wants the titles cited, ask in the comments...

Here Scott reveals a sympathy with Ezra Pound over banking, where Zinn and Chomsky won't touch Mad Ez. This has always seemed to me an honorable mode of intellectual conservatism: if someone's political action or stance or even character was seen as mostly distasteful, we know that political and social reality  are far more complex than choosing who is One of Us or...not. So sure: Andrew Jackson is not exactly a hero of progressive 21st century leftish thought, but his stance on banks is noteworthy. Let us give Jackson his due for this. Similarly, as vile and abhorrent I found the George W. Bush administration, there seems something laudable in their effort to combat AIDS in Africa...

"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Einstein

Scott's poetry is deeply cerebral but I think quite beautiful also. He's always grappling with his privilege as an academic/intellectual, his Buddhism, his personal flaws. But he writes evocatively of love and the deep riches of the natural world too.

For me, the most distinctive feature of his poetry is his Stephen Dedalus-like problem of how to escape the nightmare of history. Can we right our wrongs? Can we make amends for untold atrocities and assaults on the human spirit, conducted in our names? Once we are have knowledge of this darkness, what to do with it, morally? These nightmares! And Peter Dale Scott's reading of history is filled with nightmares. Garishly footnoted nightmares of imperial power's abuses of humans. I would think the bright Young Person deeply committed to Chomsky's readings would want to challenge themselves with the works of Peter Dale Scott. Here, check this out; Scott seems to echo Noam's criticisms of the social sciences:

   behind the Soviet philanthropy
                which sought to eradicate faith
         by use of an Inquisition

   and also that of the West
                and its priesthoods of social science
         who after decades of pressing

   unwanted dams and military
                torturers on the Third World
       have helped liberate the Soviet Union

   for a new world order
                of Schumpeterian destructiveness
         whose outcome is not yet
-p.14

And then later in the long poem, Scott is having a bad day and recalls a cutting remark made by Chomsky that must have felt directed at himself, and Scott's willingness to delve extremely deep into CIA drug running, JFK's assassination, assassinations of Third World figures, mind control operations, etc:

   Once again! Insight
                beckons down the long corridors
        of my insomnia

   as to why I have been depressed
                since flying back from Europe
       the sense of impotence

   not just from losing my glasses
               or even a week ago
         tripping over a sprinkler head

   to fall flat on the pavement
                and fracture my zygomatic arch
        not even Noam's crack

   about those who do microanalysis
                about things that don't matter               Chomsky '94 163
        No! I have learned from my inability

   last night to explain to Fred                               Frederick Crews
                what the unstoppable flow of drugs
        across the Mexican border

   has to do with the Kennedy assassination
               a world where what matters
         are not just the structural patterns

   but the patterns in chaos
                such as the DFS lies                               Direcion Federal de Seguridad, Mexican Secret Police
       about Oswald and Silvia Duran                      P.D. Scott '95 118-27
-pp.134-135
---------------------------------------------
[Note: Frederick Crews was a Berkeley professor and friend of Scott's. Crews is mostly known for his ongoing attempts to dismantle Sigmund Freud.]

Peter Dale Scott is one of my favorite living poets. His non-fiction books are harrowing, dossier-like researches into what almost all Unistatian citizens would rather not know, or because of existing neural circuitry, are probably incapable of knowing, much less understanding. And yet he's always somehow poetic; it's this odd courageousness that I find so compelling in his writings.

The book from which I've quoted in this blog entry was the third of his Seculum trilogy of poetry. The first two volumes were Coming To Jakarta: A Poem About Terror, followed by Listening To The Candle: A Poem on Impulse. I read the trilogy and a few other of his books within a two month period a couple of years ago, and it proved a major hack into the deeps of my consciousness.

Here's a less-than 3 minute talk by Scott about JFK, and he disagrees with Chomsky about the assassination: