poetry is the solution poetry is the solution poetry?

"I don't know what I've been looking for, maybe me" ~ Shawn Mullins

I said "I don't reckon i'll be
makin it big,
you know it's hard to get rich
with this blogging shit"

and he said "yeah, but ain't it a blessin
to do what you wanna do..."

and I told him "yeah, I pulled off here
to watch the sun disappear into the ocean
`cause it's been years
since I smelled this salty sea"

I might just lay here
and dream my life away

Ashcroft's Red Crayons migthier than the pen of Eldred

Supreme Court has ruled. Where do we go from here? Who are we now? hmm.... maybe we can quote some Aziz Nesin

... so I assumed the name of "Nesin" (What-are-you?). I wanted to think of what I was and pull myself together whenever anyone called "What-are-you?". In 1937 I became an officer, you know, a Napoleon. Well really, I was merely one of the Napoleons. Every new officer thinks himself Napoleon. Some of them never recover from this sickness; it lasts a whole lifetime. Others are cured after awhile. ''Napoleonitis'' is a dangerous and contagious disease. The symptoms are these: The victims think only of Napoleon's victories, never of his defeats; they are prone to tuck a right hand between jacket buttons; they stand before a map of the world, drawing arrows with a red crayon and, after subjugating and occupying the entire world in five minutes, regret that the world is so small. ... As a fresh young officer, twenty-two or twenty-three, I conquered the world a few times on the map with a red crayon"

~ from Aziz Nasim

And so the Public Domain has a lot of red crayon smears all over it. I guess all we ever asked for is to - "please put your red crayons away for a while". (Maybe, please don't smear all over the place). Alas the Red Crayon marks remain for many years.

Thanks Kevin to a pointer of Donna's Excellent Copyfight notes

Limited Times

This blog is black today as the US Supreme Court decided 7-2 against overturning the 1998 copyright extension.
Time to start a campaign for a congressional bill repealing it instead.

ahem

Fe fo fom! She jist does hopes till byes will be byes. Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody's bird, a peri potmother, a pringlpik in the ilandiskippy, with peewee and powwows in beggybaggy on her bickybacky and a flick flask fleckflinging its pixylighting pacts' huemeramybows, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy.

This moment from writing in history is nothing more than the recursive call of the vulgata blogata.

is the space between blogs a conversation, a question, an answer, a placebo?

This is just a rough draft of a blog entry that's in the process of denying its usefulness.

Fishrush offers some rough notes toward a perplexification of a question some of us have been wondering about...

graveyard poem

by jim morrison...

It was the greatest night of my life
Although I still had not found a wife
I had my friends right there beside me
We scaled the wall
We tripped through the graveyard
Ancient shapes were all around us
No music but the wet grass
felt fresh beside the fog

Two made love in a silent spot
one chased a rabbit into the dark
A girl got drunk & balled the dead
And I gave empty sermons to my head

Cemetery cool & quiet
Hate to leave your sacred lay
Dread the milky coming of the day
I´d love to stay
I´d love to stay
I´d love to stay

An email from Marek - Rewriting John Maynard Keynes in 2003

"The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic
of mankind. Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual,
unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic
organisation by which American Command and Control Narcissistic Elite
Coroporations have lived for the last century.

We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages in
technology as natural, permanent, and to be depended on - and we lay our plans
accordingly, and on this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social
improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and
particular ambitions...(Hello to all you guys in Washington D.C.)

The outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realise in the
least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where
we dropped them, with this difference only, that many of us seem a good deal
poorer than we were before - with our hopes of winning a lottery in the land of
somewhere, someday.

Where we wasted billions before (Yo, Enron boys.), we have now learnt that we
can spend hundreds of billions (on two fronts) and apparently not suffer for it
(Yo Mister President.) We look, therefore, not only to a return to the
comforts of 1980s, but to an immense broadening and intensification of them.
All classes alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less,
the poor to spend more and work less (rising tide lifs all the boats, Yeah
baby.)

But perhaps it is only in Amerika (Para Espanol press numero dos) that it is
possible to be so unconscious. In the rest of the world the earth heaves and no
one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of
extravagance or 'labour troubles'; but of life and death (Yo, my people in
Somalia), of starvation and existence (Yo, my people in Sudan), and of the
fearful convulsions of a dying civilisation (Farewell to you Arabian Nights of
Kurdistan)

In this winter of 2003 in which I write, we are at the dead season of our
fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the
past years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the
immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. We
have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime
of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.
For these reasons the true voice of the new generation has not yet spoken"

Thank you for your attention
Marek J
---
The above was appropriated, reconfigured and adapted from John Maynard Keynes's
introduction to "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" in the year of Our Lord, The Decimal System 1919.

P.S. Thanks Tom for posting. I didn't have means during the day.

Looking for James Joyce's Grave

and Andy White sings...

"I found his grave
high on a hill right beside the zoo
with a beautiful view of the city
first I saw the crosslegged
bookholding cigarette smoking statue
specs slicked hair the fiery wiry
keeper and crucifier of his country's conscience
and all of our unconscious
in an autumn crescent of gold green and brown
I brushed fallen leaves off the inscription plaque
which was just beside the zoo
with a beautiful view of the city"

On January 13th, 1941 James Joyce did a Bada Bing.