Sunday blog stroll

Back on May 1, the (London) Times had a feature called “40 bloggers who really count.” If you’d thought the equation of popularity to cultural significance was a uniquely American phenomenon, think again: somehow the authors found room for seven fashion blogs, two Hollywood blogs and two gossip blogs, but not a single science, nature, art, poetry or religion and philosophy blog. They included just one blog apiece in the literature and memoir categories (Maud Newton and dooce, respectively), the latter especially surprising since I believe that the memoir blog is still numerically the most dominant genre.

I flirted with the idea of doing my own, rival list of Top 40 blogs, but started thinking about all the blogs I’d have to exclude from such a short list and thought better of it. Besides, if I’m so opposed to the “Top 40” mentality, why pander to it? Still, if you’re not reading blogs like the Marvelous in nature, Coyote Crossing, The Rain in My Purse, Drawing the Motmot, Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog, Paula’s House of Toast, Crack Skull Bob, or tasting rhubarb, you don’t know what you’re missing. There’s way more to the blogosphere than politics, celebrities and gossip.

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I was pleased this morning to see an old blogging friend back at it with a new photoblog, from this shore, which, based on the photos she’s posted so far, promises to offer far more real and intimate glimpses into East Asian Buddhist monasticism than one could ever hope to get as a mere tourist.

“From this shore to the other shore:” a common metaphor for the crossing from samsara to nirvana, delusion to wisdom, in East Asian Buddhism.

The photographs and interviews here are part of an on-going project to both document and express the lives of Buddhist nuns.

Face it, it’s hard to find non-idealized portrayals of monastics even when they’re just boring old Cistercians or Benedictines, without the additional layer of exoticism you get from having them be Zen (Seon) Buddhists. How often do you get a chance to see that world through the eyes of someone who has lived it herself, day in and day out for five years?

Then this afternoon I discovered that Anthropological Notebook is back — another chance to see supposedly exotic people being very human and ordinary. Lye Tuck-Po is a Malaysian anthropologist who has worked extensively with the Batek, a hunter-gatherer forest people of peninsular Malaysia, and is also an accomplished amateur photographer. She took down the original incarnation of her blog last August “due to pressure of work,” but has now started it up again, intending to use it “mainly for posting photography.” One can also follow her work on Flickr.

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The Smorgasblog on my sidebar is the main way I link to other blogs, but since it’s exclusively text-focused, photoblogs get short shrift. I also tend not to link much to microbloggers, haiku poets, and the like, since that would entail quoting posts or poems in their entirety — a violation of Fair Use under U.S. copyright law. I’d have to email for special permission, and most of the time I’m just too damn lazy. So it is that I almost never link to one of my favorite poetry blogs, Grant Hackett’s Falling Off the Mountain. His one-line poems are simply amazing.
UPDATE: Grant deleted his blog without explanation on June 1, 2010.

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Speaking of micropoetry, tiny words (also on Twitter) recently began serializing a new issue after a longer-than-expected break. I like this magazine not only for the great content, but also the minimalist design and the fact that it is doing nearly everything right, in my opinion. Most online literary magazines are clusterfucks of poor usability, non-existent SEO, missing or malformed RSS feeds, and a lamentable tendency to try and ape print magazines in every way possible, so it’s refreshing to find one like tiny words whose editor not only has a firm grasp of how the web works, but even seems interested in expanding readership beyond the authors themselves and their immediate friends.

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I launched a new website myself last week, a blog in the guise of a discussion forum for my videopoetry site Moving Poems. Check it out if you’re at all interested in news and views about the videopoetry/poetry film medium, and email me if you’d like to contribute posts. I explain my thinking and goals for the forum in an overview post.

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Lest you think that blogs are no longer culturally relevant just because the cool tech kids have moved on to other things, “Surprise: Traditional Blogging Platforms Still Reign Supreme,” a headline in ReadWriteWeb recently announced. Even the bulk of online conversations still take place in blog comment threads, not on Twitter, Facebook and their ilk. Unique, personalized websites with regularly updated content on the front page still rule the web, and that really shouldn’t be a surprise. Would traditional print periodicals be in such trouble otherwise?

Sandman

I am a renter on a large estate. Every night the landlord comes around to take his cut. If I shut the door, he raps on the window. If I pull the shades, he turns my power off. It’s not my labor he’s after but my consciousness. I only need it for a few hours, he says, but already I’ve given up a third of my life. Think of it as ballast, he says, the dark sand trickling through his fingers. Imagine being unable to imagine. Imagine weeping because you couldn’t spare the time to blink.

Foggy year

A selection of Morning Porch tweets from 2007-2010, arranged into a single year.

Jan 6
Dripping fog, the snow reduced to patches. Mating season has come for the great-horned owls calling in the distance, one high, one low.

Jan 17
Fog. A distant chainsaw in one direction and in the other, rodent teeth. Amorous squirrels race back and forth over the white ground.

Jan 25
Twelve hours of downpour and the stream’s a torrent, water clear from running off frozen ground. Small clouds rise like spirits from the snow.

Feb 6
Ground-level clouds appear and disappear in the half-dark; even the thermometer is fogged up. Over the roar of the stream, a robin’s song.

Feb 11
Fog drifts through the woods where rain has reduced the snow to archipelagos. Overhead the clouds, too, are breaking up. Low-flying geese.

Feb 23
Thick fog prolongs the early-morning light for hours. The cardinal sings spring while a screech owl quavers over the luminous snow.

Mar 4
Rain and fog. A robin drops into the barberry bush, tut-tutting. Up in the woods, two deer stand with their heads buried in the soft snow.

Mar 18
Bluebird, white-throated sparrow, a starling’s liquid note, and high overhead, a kildeer: the sky must be blue above the fog.

Mar 19
Hours of hard rain have brought out the green in tree trunks and branches, in laurel leaves, in moss. Even the fog has a slight green cast.

Mar 28
Thick fog blanks everything but the noise from the highway—this could be New Jersey. Rain beads on the branches of the ornamental cherry.

Mar 29
When the sun finally breaches the fog, the forest drips with jewels. In the yard, the first native wildflower opens its pin-sized blooms.

Apr 4
Somewhere in the fog, a red-winged blackbird, a pair of mourning doves, a robin, a flock of finches. Half an hour later, nothing but rain.

Apr 14
Thick ground fog, one degree below freezing. The trees grow sharper as the sun begins to blur. Please don’t flower yet, I tell the oaks.

Apr 25
Sometime past 7:30, the birds fall silent for half a minute and there’s only fog, a slow drip from leaves no larger than squirrels’ ears.

May 6
The gray winter pelts of two grazing deer are just beginning to fray. The fog withdraws into the woods and the webs of grass spiders.

May 15
Sun through fog. Animals emerge and vanish like actors in a play, bringing their cries and silences: goldfinches, a raven, a pair of deer.

May 27
Fog. The ants who tend the peony buds have been replaced by drops of water—all but one, who moves slow as an astronaut on a strange planet.

May 28
Pale bones of the dead elm, standing at the edge of the yard like an emissary from Lent amidst a Mardi Gras of green, reach into fog.

Jun 4
Foggy morning. A short-lived bright period brings a faint sound of traffic from I-99. I hear the hummingbird’s small motor in the garden.

Jul 8
The little wood satyr I first spotted yesterday flutters up from the side garden, yellow-rimmed eyespots like dim headlights in the fog.

Jul 9
Thin fog in the corner of the field. A Cooper’s hawk fledgling responds to its parent, a hot cry, a knife cry, a glossy cry, a soul cry.

Aug 1
I watch a yellow black walnut leaf flutter to the ground. Autumn’s in the air. Fog persists most of the morning, lit up from above.

Aug 14
Thin fog. Now that the phoebes have left, their shy cousins the pewees have come out of the woods, and herald each sunrise in a slow drawl.

Aug 17
Dawn fog lifts and pauses, so it’s clear to a height of ten feet, then white, then the crescent moon. A red-bellied woodpecker’s slow chant.

Aug 20
The fog reveals as much as it hides. Who knew the trees held so many spiderwebs? The birds are mostly quiet now; it’s cricket spring.

Aug 29
Rain and fog. Nuthatches, a wood pewee, the liquid song of a winter wren. Behind me, loud thumps from some large animal under the house.

Aug 30
Out of the darkness and fog before dawn, a sudden yelp. Only when it moves farther off am I able to place it: a raccoon. The newest tenant.

Sep 4
Thin fog at dawn. From the woods’ edge, the familiar two-syllable call of a scarlet tanager sounds suddenly very much like goodbye.

Sep 21
In the pre-dawn, Sunday-morning silence, the distant bellowing of a cow. A half moon glows through the fog—a thin milk.

Sep 27
First one, then a second Carolina wren pops out from under the eaves, perches in the fretwork for a second, and flies off into the fog.

Oct 1
A pileated woodpecker hammers on a dead tree, resonant as it never was in life. I watch ground fog form and dissipate into a clear dawn sky.

Oct 5
Through the darkness and fog, loud thuds from the black walnut trees that encircle the houses, a slow carpet bombing that goes on for weeks.

Nov 12
A pair of ravens fly low over the house, invisible in the fog. I’m lost in thought about trickster gods, and right on cue: Arrk! Arrk! Arrk!

Nov 19
Drizzle turns into downpour and the fog retreats up the ridge. An hour later the rain eases and the fog rolls in again, erasing the trees.

Nov 24
Rain and fog with raven: silent, just above the treetops. White-throated sparrows and a freight train whistling at the same pitch.

Dec 10
Rain and fog. Only the low rumbly sounds break through: a jet, a train. Sitting in the dark, it’s almost possible to believe in isolation.

Dec 23
Thick fog at dawn, gray against the snow. Slate-colored juncos call back and forth: Where are you? A wind comes up.

Dec 27
In the darkness and fog, the sound of slush being punctured and scraped aside. I can just make out the solid shadows, their many thin legs.

Natural Faculties

Lines from Galen, translated by Arthur John Brock (1916)

1.
When a warm thing becomes cold, and a cold warm
When anything moist becomes dry, or dry moist
When a small thing becomes bigger
When food turns into blood
When the limbs have their position altered
When, therefore, the animal has attained its complete size
When the matter that flows into each part of the body in the form of nutriment is being worked up into it
When the vapours have passed through the coats of the stomach and intestines
When this has been made quite clear
When the iron has another piece brought into contact with it
When a small body becomes entangeld with another small body
When our peasants are bringing corn from the country into the city in wagons

2.
Children take the bladders of pigs, fill them with air, and then rub them on ashes near the fire, so as to warm but not to injure them. This is a common game in the district of Ionia, and among not a few other nations. As they rub, they sing songs, to a certain measure, time, and rhythm, and all their words are an exhortation to the bladder to increase in size.

3.
Imagine the heart to be, at the beginning, so small as to differ in no respect from a millet-seed, or, if you will, a bean…

4.
Now, clearly, in these doings of the children, the more the interior cavity of the bladder increases in size, the thinner, necessarily, does its substance become

common to all kinds of motion is change

tangible distinctions are hardness and softness, viscosity, friability, lightness, heaviness, density, rarity, smoothness, roughness, thickness and thinness; all of these have been duly mentioned by Aristotle

Nature constructs bone, cartilage, nerve, membrane, ligament, vein, and so forth, at the first stage of the animal’s genesis

pain is common to all these conditions

please test this assertion first in the muscles themselves

5.
This also was unknown to Erasistratus, whom nothing escaped.

Opposite of erasure

In response to Siona.

I want to steal some place for recovery, some chaotic site not for self-indulgent accumulation, but filling in and anchoring and letting happen and growing wild, or for negating identity, and laughter.

If I were an engineer I would be an engineer of excess only, of crowded markets and teeming pools; if I were a real estate agent I would sell land only to preserve it, to allow it to achieve maximal complexity on its own; if I were a critic I would praise movies that were not just action-packed but nonsensical; if I were the wind I would howl. My body feels too empty already, and yet no one seems to be avoiding the by-products of less familiarity, less attention, and less.

I seek instead what I already have. I could clumsily recover, or be recovered — what a pain in the ass that would be. Anything can be done, anything, and this is wonderful and repellent and oh, thank Lucifer, a fiction.

The End of the West, by Michael Dickman

The End of the West

The West may end at the Pacific, but frontiers keep opening like needle holes in a junkie’s arm, like the “bright/ plastic” of an artificial intestine, like whales “moving the sea around.”

My grandmother set sail on a small air mattress into the middle of
the pool and fell asleep

Her fingers
dragging the water
(“Marco Polo”)

The paperback book itself literally expands as I read it, for reasons I don’t fully understand: it now has a pronounced bulge an inch from the spine, as if I’d stuffed it with invisible bookmarks, one per page. As if it had somehow gotten pregnant from my reading.

And The End of the West does invite an Old Testament kind of knowing, biblical as it is in its gritty, this-worldly god-talk, its at-times astonishing beauty, and its episodes of inexplicable violence.

Yesterday we put all the kids in the car, doused it with gasoline, and
lit it on fire

Their eyelids
and toe-
nails

That was one day

The snow geese migrating above us in the dark was another
(“Late Meditation”)

Michael Dickman is one half of a pair of young, identical-twin poets with first books out from the revered Copper Canyon Press. I haven’t read Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem yet, nor have I read the full profile of the twins in the New Yorker, and I usually avoid anything that everyone is talking about as a matter of principle, but I can tell you that The End of the West deserves all the hype it can get. It’s good.

It’s also a very good fit for the Copper Canyon catalog. Again, I mean that literally: in the Fall 2009/Winter 2010 Copper Canyon Reader [PDF], the excerpt from “Late Meditation” sits comfortably across the page from a prose poem by Lisa Olstein, from Lost Alphabet (“I have learned to peer at specimens through a small crack in the center of my fist…”), and transitions quite naturally to a two-page W.S. Merwin spread, including the poem “Still Morning” from The Shadow of Sirius.

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age

writes Merwin, as if in answer to critics of the youthful Dickmans. My point is that Michael Dickman’s poems excel at the kind of surrealism-tinged revelatory insight in which Copper Canyon seems to specialize. Or as a review in The Believer put it, “Dickman continually unites the accurate (in terms of perception, thought, emotion) with the mysterious, and he does so in a way that feels natural, almost inevitable…”

This morning I killed a fly
and didn’t lie down
next to the body
as we’re supposed to

We’re supposed to

Soon I’m going to wake up
(“We Did Not Make Ourselves”)

At the same time, the working-class, post-industrial urban landscape grounds and balances the revelatory moments. “Wang Wei: Bamboo Grove,” for example, includes late-night dog-walkers

Bending down
to scrape shit off the sidewalk
into little plastic bags

“Some of the Men” begins:

I had to walk around for a long time before I could see anything

The leaves
circling down the street
imitating the insides of seashells
imitating
my fingerprints

I could sense my father
sitting along in his little white Le Car
staring off at the empty parking lot

No radio
No wind
No birds

You’ve probably realized by now that the poem in my previous post, “Bridge to Nowhere,” was a shameless imitation of Michael Dickman. This is the kind of poetry I hope to write when I grow up.

Bridge to Nowhere

bridge to nowhere

Bridge to nowhere:
tree roots dangle
into the abyss

Teens spray-paint the year
they hope to graduate
then huff the rest

A friend says:
there is no way to the father
but through the highway

A gay prostitute
stands in the river & flashes
passing trucks

Woodrat Podcast 17: Brent Goodman

Brent Goodman

I called up poet Brent Goodman (website/blog) in the north woods of Wisconsin and got him talking about how he ended up there; whether his day job as a copy writer for a pet supply company affects his creative writing; how blogging helped him put his first book together; his heart attack last year and how that’s effected his life and outlook; how he met his partner; what it’s like living in the boondocks as a gay man; writing poems about television; and what writers inspire him. Poems read: “Directions to My House,” “Armless Iraqi Boy Bears No Grudges for U.S. Bombing,” “The Ground Left Me,” “Man Smashes 29 Televisions at Georgia Walmart,” and “5 Poets Who Changed My Life (Postcards from Intersections).”

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Without Television

Without television, what names would you give the weather?

Without television, would the continent of Africa still resemble a question mark?

Without television, how many majestic carnivores would dine alone?

Without television, when would five o’clock shadows begin to form?

Without television, who would grumble for a flat belly or lust after an immaculate confection?

Without television, how would the couch make change?

Without television, where would you hear the subliminal messages telling you to kill again?

Without television, what circus tout would you pay to belabor your faults?

Without television, who would volunteer for boredom?

Without television, would we become strangers to ourselves?

Without television, do the fish get all their news from the water?

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Sparked by a phone conversation with Brent Goodman (to be featured in this week’s Woodrat podcast, if and when I finish editing it) and an email conversation with some other friends about the Dark Mountain Project.