Via Negativa

Unknown web searchers, I’m sorry you were led astray and ended up here. This is not a site about Amish rubber boots, heavy rain penis, existentialist haircut, tweety only poems about love, how is a turtle and a groundhog alike, or (Lord knows) poems and classy behavior. This isn’t a site about sexsexsex, what colour is cat vomit, what does a groundhog penis look like, don’t eat whatever you say, tips for surviving the apocalypse, how to make me happy, shit creek banjo, wood rat midden photo, poem about not being a dick, poems about being rescued from climbing, explanatory poems on mitosis, or 20 gauge crow hunting. Most of all, this is not a site about the via negativa. I’m sorry. Better luck elsewhere.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, The via negativa | | 5 Comments » |  Print

Take the survey here

UPDATE: Here are the survey results as of noon, 1/21/10 (omitting the percentages of those who chose to skip the question):

Can a houseplant die of loneliness?

• 52 (72%) said Yes
• 11 (15%) said No
• 9 (13%) said What?

Do you see twelve different things through the eyes of twelve different needles?

• 35 (49%) said Yes
• 20 (28%) said No
• 20 (28%) said How did you know?

If mornings came with printed instructions, would anyone read them?

• 24 (34%) said Yes
• 30 (43%) said No
• 16 (23%) said All readings are misreadings

Have you ever torn all the paper from a spiral notebook, page by page, just to get an unobstructed look at the spiral?

• 16 (23%) said Yes
• 38 (54%) said No
• 17 (24%) said None of your beeswax

Will this be the year they start using prisons for captive breeding programs?

• 8 (11%) said Yes
• 28 (40%) said No
• 34 (49%) said Why? Lord knows, it’s not like prisoners are an endangered species

Wouldn’t a truly self-adhesive tape collapse like a star into a black hole?

• 20 (29%) said Yes
• 9 (13%) said No
• 41 (59%) said That’s setting a pretty high standard for adhesiveness, don’t you think?

Do you find it harder to think in a room where you can’t touch the ceiling?

• 10 (14%) said Yes
• 49 (71%) said No
• 10 (14%) said They don’t pay me enough to think

With our fondness for clichés, don’t we risk making the perfect storm the enemy of the good storm?

• 30 (43%) said Yes
• 6 (9%) said No
• 33 (48%) said Bad weather is better than no weather at all

If your name was Fritz Zwicky, wouldn’t you also prefer to be known as the Father of Dark Matter?

• 41 (60%) said Yes
• 13 (19%) said No
• 14 (21%) said Maybe, but I’m not sure I look good with a flying V guitar

If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?

• 8 (12%) said Yes
• 53 (77%) said No
• 8 (12%) said Only if I didn’t have to change my underwear

Note: Since this survey was open to all comers and not administered in a random fashion, the results are scientifically worthless. However, that doesn’t matter too much, since it was really a “push poll” for the Dadaist Party. Ketchup for Shah! U.S. out of North America! Etc.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Epigrams and Conundrums, Personal/Political, Satire and Farce | | 10 Comments » |  Print

That haunting snippet of music you kept hearing on NPR, between stories on “All Things Considered”? Thanks to npr.org and the internet generally, you were able to track it down within minutes and listen to the whole song for free, because someone had thoughtfully uploaded it to YouTube. But alas, aside from that snippet, the song had nothing to offer, and it kept offering it for more than five minutes over progressively more synthetic beats. You try listening to a couple other pieces by the same band, and they’re so horrible you can’t get past the first minute. You’re reminded of a woman you glimpsed once in a side-street for several seconds, and how she haunted your imagination for years thereafter. What does the imagination know? Just enough to be dangerous. But the internet — the internet knows too much.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Riffs | | 8 Comments » |  Print

This year, I will:

• dissolve in solution
• void the warranty
• integrate multi-dimensional dynamics to improve performance
• do the people’s business
• evolve lungs and learn to live on land
• keep out of reach of children
• take calming herbs such as chamomile, stinging nettle, and oatstraw
• hang crepe on your door
• drink to that
• LOL
• apply a thin layer of the product over affected area twice daily
• share the wealth
• walk like a duck
• declare victory and withdraw all my troops
• subtract line 40a from line 38
• become my own cheerleader
• get on the same page
• combine medications to enhance depression outcomes
• drop it like it’s hot
• use verbs or action words to help define the objective
• extend my wardrobe to patterned suits including pinstripes, herringbone, and plaids
• shuffle off to Buffalo
• scheme

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor | | 16 Comments » |  Print

“What the hell are we going to do with all these?” I asked, staring at the eight freshly severed heads lined up in the blood-stained snow. Their eyes had filmed over and the moonlit shadows of their antlers stretched like a phantom woods across the tundra. “They won’t keep,” said the sniper. “The magic has ruined them, as it ruins everything. Watch.”

He took a salt shaker from his pocket and sprinkled each of the heads. The effect was almost instantaneous: first the fur and then the flesh melted away, leaving nothing but the bones. The snow around them turned white again as we watched. I felt the hair rising on the back of my neck.

“This is your first time, isn’t it?” he asked. I nodded. The antlers were branched icicles now on skulls of crystal, skulls that shrank, antlers that withered, as if the temperature around them were 200 degrees warmer than it was. The skulls grew rounder as they shrank, and the gleaming teeth turned sharp as knives.

“These ones never actually belonged to the Caribou Mother,” he said. “They are the children of Sanna — the Inuktitut name for Sedna. That’s the kind of evil we’re up against here.”

The Iraq War veteran bowed his head. “Thank you for this victory, Jesus, temporary as it is,” he said. “I am your crusader.”

I shifted uncomfortably and looked at the ground. Some of the best soldiers in our unit happened to be pagans. We had signed up to defend North American airspace against terrorists, and that’s what the recruiter assured us we’d be doing. Rumors of a holy war had been dismissed as just another paranoid conspiracy theory from society’s perennial malcontents.

The marksman laid a hand on my shoulder. “The Pentagon can say what it wants,” he said, “but this is a war we Christians have been fighting for 2000 years. It took centuries just to kill off Saturn! Declaring December 25th as the birth of our Lord and Savior did little to fool the forces of darkness — the longest night of the year still occurs just a few days before, despite our best efforts.” He sighed. “This Santa character is a real shape-shifter. Give me a Sunni insurgency any day.”

He squinted at the faint pink glow that signalled high noon in the High Arctic. “Welcome to the War on Christmas.”

[youtube width="500" height="364"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6yUCbqAGrg[/youtube]
Video by Rebel Virals (hat-tip: Rachel Maddow Show)

For readers from outside the U.S. who think I might be exaggerating just a bit, see “Jesus Shoots Santa in Controversial Lawn Display.”

Posted by Dave Bonta in Satire and Farce, Stories | | 6 Comments » |  Print

Gakumon wa... haiga by Yosa Buson (photo by ionushi on Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)

Gakumon wa ketsu kara nukeru hotaru kana

(Study/scholarship as-for, ass from exiting/emitting firefly [exclamatory particle])

All this study—
it’s coming out your ass,
oh firefly!

*

I found this gem while looking for a photo of one of Buson’s haiga (haiku illustration, a proto-Manga-like genre he did much to advance) as a possible addition to Sunday’s post. It comes courtesy of Mexican blogger and man-of-letters Aurelio Asiain, who, as it happens, now teaches at the very college in Japan where I spent a formative year as an exchange student back in 1985-86.

This is as close to an outright simile as a haiku can get. Notice that there’s no firefly in the painting, which acts as a kind of commentary on the poem. In the absence of any additional information, one could certainly read this as a poem about a firefly whose diligent study bears fruit in the radiance coming from his abdomen. But the facial expression of the figure in the painting encourages a more Rabelaisian interpretation. Notice, further, the placement of the text in relation to the figure, the calligraphy suggesting curls of vapor. This is a fart joke.

It translates particularly well into modern American English, since “talking out one’s ass” is such a popular way to characterize know-it-all bloviating. Intellectual pursuits had a much higher value in Edo-period Japan, though, where students and scholars were often poetically said to study by firefly light — a conceit that survives to this day:

“Keisetsu-jidadi” which literally translates into “the era of the firefly and snow,” means one’s student days. It derives from the Chinese folklore and refers to studying in the glow of the fireflies and snow by the window. There is also an expression “Keisetsu no kou” which means “the fruits of diligent study.”

So Buson’s insight consists simply in pointing out where on its anatomy the firefly’s light emerges.

We shouldn’t be surprised that such a humorous haiku came from the brush of one of the greatest haiku masters. Humor and earthiness were primarily what distinguished haiku and haikai no renga from the much older renga (linked verse) tradition in the first place. In social terms, haiku poetry represented a middle-class appropriation and popularization of what had been a very aristocratic pursuit. And Japan was and remains an earthy culture; there’s nothing like the split between classical and vernacular views of the body which has afflicted Westerners since the Renaissance. Buson was able to paint equally well in a high-brow Chinese style and in the cartoonish fashion seen here, just as Chaucer included the Knights Tale and the Miller’s Tale in the same work.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Art, Humor, Poets and poetry, Translations | | 3 Comments » |  Print

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Posted by Dave Bonta in Blogs and Blogging, Humor | | 16 Comments » |  Print

There is no satisfaction quite like the satisfaction that comes from destroying a misbegotten poem — especially when it can be done with the click of a mouse. Removing a tick, by contrast, is much more difficult: grasping it firmly and pulling just hard enough so the skin stretches into a tent around its buried head, this paper-thin creature, trying to get it to withdraw on its own. And when that fails, sterilizing the tip of a sewing needle with a cigarette lighter and digging for the severed mouthparts. I was once almost that thin, I think, as I work the needle into my abdomen’s soft gibbous moon.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Memoir | | 9 Comments » |  Print

I am thankful for pine needles.
I am thankful for uncivil engineering.
I am thankful for rapture-ready Christians.
I am thankful for my balls.
I am thankful for synergistic competencies across solution implementation, product/platform technologies and selling channels.
I am thankful for Potted Meat Product.
I am thankful for like, whatever.
I am thankful for standards-based curriculum mapping.
I am thankful for palpable resentments on a stick.
I am thankful for Thursday.
I am thankful for fresh pink pencil erasers.
I am thankful for leveraging on-demand business intelligence solutions.
I am thankful for the Incredible Hulk of dogs, Wendy the whippet.
I am thankful for the hypertext transfer protocol and to the republic for which it stands, except where otherwise noted.
I am thankful for “88″ sounding like “fortune fortune” in Cantonese.
I am thankful for habeas corpus, Corpus Christi, and corpus delicti with special sauce.
I am thankful for gratitude.
I am thankful for two-headed snakes blinking in sync.
I am thankful for latent-trajectory and latent-growth-curve models for a dependent variable having ordered categories.
I am thankful for every serviceable device.
I am thankful for sand.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Riffs | | 15 Comments » |  Print

The Big Idea woke me up after less than six hours’ sleep. Hey, what’s the big idea? I asked. You’re about to find out, it said. Put down your sleep and follow me.

Me: Go away and leave me alone. I need a new project like I need a hole in the head.

B.I.: There’s a hole in everything. That’s how the mutagens get in.

Me: Spare me the bad Leonard Cohen paraphrases. Hell no, I won’t glow!

B.I: Thirty-year-old bumper sticker slogans won’t save the earth, either. But I just might.

Me: Hey, whoa! The track record for ideas saving the earth is really, really poor. Just about every time people have tried that, they’ve ended up providing cover for new systems of oppression instead. Look at Marxism, Fascism, Christianity. We don’t need any more of those kinds of big ideas. Go away.

B.I.: I am not that big! Besides, I am much too whimsical to inspire sociopaths like Stalin or Constantine, and you know it. I would be at best a part — a small part — of any solution. Just one of many things that could help bring about a subtle but significant shift in the global consciousness…

Me: “A shift in the global consciousness”?! Jesus fucking christ. Take your goddamn simplistic New Age babble and get the hell out of my head!

B.I.: So you’re content to go on drifting through life as a tinkerer, a putterer, an intellectual dilettante? You don’t want to contribute to something larger than yourself?

Me: I contribute every time I capture an insight on paper — or in pixels, as the case may be. And it’s not like I’m completely self-centered, either. Well over half my energies these days are already directed toward promoting other people’s work. If I decide to put you into practice yet, that will not only eat into these other commitments, but leave me with hardly any time for my own creative work. Not to mention rob me of sleep on a regular basis, give me ulcers, and lead in all probability to an early grave.

B.I.: But I could make you famous! Then your own words would have an astronomically larger audience. And eventually, once I’m well established, you could pass the baton to someone else and go back to what you’re doing now.

Me: Get thee behind me, Satan.

B.I.: Well, who’s got the messianic complex now? You see — you do want to save the earth.

Me: The very idea that we should aspire to “save the earth” — that any one of us, or even any group of us, could possibly begin to comprehend what the earth needs — it’s total hubris. It’s nothing but the old colonialist, white-man’s-burden bullshit times ten. The earth doesn’t need to be saved, it needs to be left the fuck alone.

B.I.: That’s a very convenient belief for someone who happens to own thousands of dollars worth of stock in evil transnational corporations. Come on. Give up everything you have and follow me.

Me: Don’t try to sweeten the deal. You know what a masochist I am. Look, the fact is I am not the right person — not your Saul, if we want to keep playing with this ridiculous New Testicle analogy. Even the best idea, if brought into the world by the wrong person, will either be still-born or die slowly and painfully after a few, heart-wrenching years of life.

B.I.: But nobody else would love me as well as you do! And you do, admit it. Why else does anyone wake in the middle of the night? What you lack in connections and technical expertise you could more than make up for in passionate commitment.

Me: Tired. I’m so tired.

B.I.: People would literally come out of the woodwork to help. O.K., figuratively. But build it — build me — and they will come.

Me: O.K., that’s it. When an idea depends on clichés from sentimental baseball movies to communicate its importance, it is officially NO LONGER WELCOME IN MY HEAD. Get out! Get out!

To be continued. Or — in all likelihood — not.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Memoir | | 16 Comments » |  Print

The anonymous YouTube folk hero speaks out

The security cameras only catch
one side of the story. Notice how they stick
at the 38-second mark, keep me standing
still as a parking meter for long seconds
only to skip
faster than light to the far wall
& its chorus line of coolers.

Just because you’re looking down
doesn’t make you omniscient.
What appears to the straight-laced
like a shopping trip gone awry
was really a pas de deux
with some wild weather.
True, I am loose as a flag
flailing around its pole,
buffeted by winds you barely feel.
But drinking is an escape into the open.
I round an aisle or pull on a door handle
& the cross-wind catches me;
I try to walk like a sober person & I go down.

And there on my fundament
I begin again,
exploring the deep
contingencies of consciousness
with all four limbs at once,
supple as a newborn.
Luck — as the madman
of Chu told Confucius —
is lighter than a feather,
but no one knows how to bear its weight.
Be it a 12-pack or a bowl of candy,
as long I cling I’m anchored
to the spot.

But in the end, in the part that got cut
from all your amusing remixes,
when I let go & just sit for a minute,
my body remembers on its own
how to evade the world’s
persistent embrace
& I rise & walk.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Beer, Humor, Poems & poem-like things | | 13 Comments » |  Print

If I were a tree, I’d want to live in the Adirondacks, safe from chainsaws, at least within the boundaries of the park. I’d stand on the shoulders of giants.
Read more…

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Photos, Trees | | 14 Comments » |  Print

by Joan Ryan

The morning dawns, now comes the test:
‘Twas on last night. How bout the rest?
It’s on in morning, down at night.
It seems to take turns taking flight.
And just when I get used to this
It takes another nasty twist.
Now on at midnight gone at noon.
The blog has now reversed its tune.
Last night (or was it morning then?)
I snuck a blog peek once again.
Lo and behold, it was back up
But this alone can’t fill my cup.
All day I checked to see just when
The blog would go back down again.
Did Pennsylvania’s main electric
Power source go all dyspeptic?

Hey! Maybe there’ll be some relief.
My tale, once met with disbelief,
Was verified by other fans
Who crept more shyly from the stands.
GoDaddy, was this group to blame?
Could they have messed up domain name?
It seems it wasn’t fault of Dad
So Dave then wrote WebHostingPad
Who promised to redress the glitch.
In just one day they’d do the fix.
I think it’s holding. Wow! That’s good!
But still I tend to knock on wood.
I’m praying that it will not fail
And soon perhaps I can exhale.
I’m positively all off track
Till Negativa’s truly back.

*

Thanks to Joan for the light verse, which she self-deprecatingly calls “bloggerel” (though I beg to differ: true doggerel’s distinguishing feature is that its author intends it to be serious poetry). I am also indebted to her for insisting that I had a problem, finally prompting me to post a query on Facebook and ask if anyone else was getting “server not found” messages when they tried to visit vianegativa.us. Thanks to everyone who responded there. With fifty percent reporting problems accessing the site, I knew the problem wasn’t with Joan’s ISP, as I had originally thought/hoped.

GoDaddy is where the vianegativa.us domain is registered, and WebHostingPad is where the site resides. Once I felt fairly sure the problem was with the latter and contacted tech support, they responded almost immediately: “I apologize; there was an error with the DNS settings for your domain name.” I liked the personal touch, and the fact that the fellow knew how to deploy a semicolon. Joan’s fingers are still crossed, she says, but I feel fairly certain the problem has been resolved.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Blogs and Blogging, Guest writers, Humor | | 10 Comments » |  Print

We didn’t get as many submissions of curses for the qarrtsiluni Words of Power issue as I would’ve liked, though we did get a few, and we’ll be running them soon. Here’s a kind of curse I imagine gets muttered a lot these days.

A plague on your unrealestate!
A descent of tent caterpillars, a fleet of mosquitos.
May the neighbors pit-roast goats & ululate.
May the farmer on the far hill
spread liquid manure during your dinner parties.
May termites decimate the fake Tudor half-beams
on your misbegotten horror-scene of a house,
may your drywall get dry rot,
may your lawn turn wild every full moon
& seed the subdivision with beggar-ticks.
May the INS arrest you in broad daylight
for employing undocumented workers
to blow from dawn to dusk
your goddamned leaves.
May you be forced to rake.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Poems & poem-like things | | 15 Comments » |  Print

This lacewing may be experiencing a teachable moment. I know I was: up late dreading poetry, I suddenly realized I was dreading over someone else’s shoulder. It must’ve come in through a hole in the screen door, and perhaps thought — erroneously, of course — that the computer screen was another way out.

Green lacewings are as sensitive as they look. Their hearing is so acute that some species can even pick up bats’ sonar, whereupon they fold their wings and plummet to the ground to avoid capture. They communicate through subtle vibrations of the body, especially during courtship — inaudible “songs” unique to each species.

This was not always such a sensitive being, though. In its wild youth as an aphid-lion it ate any soft-bodied invertebrate in its path, and was even capable of resorting to cannibalism if no other food was handy. It had large sucking jaws with which to grasp its prey and inject stomach acid, turning the other’s insides into a Slurpee.

If you too are up late tonight, you might still have time to confess your poetic sins before “100% Honest Day” is over at Read Write Poem. Here’s what I wrote:

I have a deep-seated fear of unconscious plagiarism, to the point where I even suspect all my best lines and images to be stolen from someone else. One of the main reasons for my lack of enthusism for publishing my work anywhere other than my own blog is the fear that someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of modern poetry will discover my unwitting thefts. And even if I could know for sure that all my works are original, I would probably continue to feel at some level that I am an utter fraud as a poet. (I wonder if this is why so many of my fellow poets get MFAs?)

If I want to overcome this fear, I think I simply need to retrain my ears. Surely it can’t be too difficult to learn to distinguish one’s own unique vibrations from anybody else’s. My aphid-lion days are, after all, well behind me now.

Posted by Dave Bonta in Humor, Memoir, Photos, Poets and poetry | | 7 Comments » |  Print