Boom.

     explode < Lat. explodere meaning "to drive out by clapping."
     What an odd form of exile!

     (Medieval court, rural Europe. JUDGE, cloaked in black robes stands to deliver his verdict; a rather meek and filthy BEGGAR hunches before him obediently,)
     JUDGE: Do you have anything to say for yourself, sir?
     BEGGAR: Please Your...
     JUDGE: Silence! (pause) Well then, due to the heinousness of your crime, the Court hereby and forthwith sentences you to... explodere!
     BEGGAR: No Your Honor, Please not that!
     JUDGE: (forcefully) Exlodere! Bring in the Band of Clappers!
     (Enter several men and women, all expressionless, clapping, who walk up to the BEGGAR, forcing him from the courtroom and out into the street.)
    

Horrible

     "a horror picture really should have moments where you kind of rest up and laugh, even it's a nervous laugh, and then go on to another horror."
                    -Samuel Z. Arkoff (B-movie monster mogul)

     A poem really should have moments where you kind of rest up and laugh, even if it's a nervous laugh, and then go on to another horror. This probably could be said of any work of art. It is the thing that keeps the work from "flat-lining."
     In the same way that all horror all the time at some point ceases to be horrible, if it's all beautiful, then none of it's beautiful. Or: if it's all this, then it isn't this at all

Elevator Music XX

No.


low hills, how binding
a mesmerizing klezmer band

apple blossoms off the porch
listen: the shadows pool

across the sunset painting
gin is crude, I know

but really, how can you bear
the inanity of music

without lens, cairns
are too pretentious, zinnias

painting dumb, song
it's true you have to have a

kind of faith in stupidity
to be happy here, and love

News Flash: Poetry Is Everywhere!

     Ann Sexton while at work on Love Poems (1969)


     Poetry is everywhere, and because it's everywhere it's ridiculous to transcribe it. Why capture something that is all around us. Like water, when we try to hold it in our hands it only slips through our fingers. There one moment, gone the next. At its very best it leaves us wet.
     Then again, that may be reward enough for the depraved. PageBoy, at least, seems to enjoy it.

Dueling Haiku

     Poetics Haiku

     a cutup's not an essay
     it's an easy knot
     so cut it out, cuteypie!

     This from PageBoy (2008-). The following rebuttal is from Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who, incidentally, in addition to writing haiku was a literary critic.

     on how to sing
     the frog school and the skylark school
     are arguing
          

Pu-tai Says Laugh

     "... to talk too long, to examine too meticulously, to pile qualification upon qualification and add theory to theory, is to be in danger of upsetting the delicate balance of that life which one wishes to understand, or of destroying the fragile tissue into which one wishes to breathe new life. Here too, 'the letter kills, while only the spirit gives life.'"
     - Conrad Hyers (Zen and the Comic Spirit)

     Hyers could easily be talking about poetry here. Sontag's Against Interpretation comes to mind, as well as the famous Zen Master Pablo Picasso, who put forth the following koan:
     "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?"

Ludwig the Skeptic

     "It appeared to have little connection with reality and was more concerned with the study of language. 'Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophizing.'"
                -Strathern referring to Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy, and then quoting him. He could be discussing poetry, and in essence, is.

A Series of Follies

     "For Levi-Strauss, the great ruptures that had thrilled him (namely surrealism, DADA, cubism) in his youth had led nowhere. The path to abstraction had become a story of failure as modern art degenerated into a series of follies and empty aesthetic gestures."
          -Patrick Wilcken (C L-S)

     The following is chosen at random from American Hybrid; A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (Norton 2009 ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John).
     Empty aesthetic gesture? Or great rupture?
     The excerpt is by Etel Adnan and is listed as from IN/SOMNIA. Here is "XIX"

1. Night falling. again. Not again.
    long / line no help help / less
    terror stop the terr...
    terribly all over / over
    what?

2. blows bellowing blowing
    paper and doors and what
    else? Is is it? is it coming?
    Yes. time. Last time

3. lasting timing ever-ever
    snoring orderal or deal
    dealer of cards     of smoke
    tick / no no end

4. shhh - weee - buzzz
    buzzing pele-mele
    keep     held hold-it! keep
    insane in / sane the right
    to wait wait! waited for
    for wait a minute for / the /
    dark / light of morning

5. collapsibles

     Note also that often today poems are "from" something else, something much grander we are to assume. We are also to assume that if we were reading the entire something else, we would surely think "Wow, that was something else!" Unfortunately, we rarely get access to this mysterious place all of these fragments are "from," but are nevertheless asked to say "Wow!"
     This alone could be a very important distinction between the American avant-garde of 1913 Armory Show New York, which somehow didn't seem to need to qualify its fragments, non sequiturs and general 'avantfulness' by claiming they were "from" some place else, and the avant-garde of the present day, which almost always does.
     Levi-Strauss had noted the avant-garde as a "story of failure" in 1959! Fortunately for him he didn't live to read the above-mentioned anthology.

Poetry as Alchemy

    ...if 'everything happens so often that speaking of it makes no sense,' the poet must find ways of representing those happenings so that their actual feel, their texture is re-experienced."
     PageBoy quoting Perloff quoting Hejinian quoting.

    

PB in PN

Can I Get Piano Lessons?

     Our interview with Natalie Phillips has been reprinted in.Poetry Northwest. Check it out.

Is it Still?

     While doing anthropological "field work" in a remote section of the Brazilian outback, Claude Levi-Strauss handed out sheets of paper and pencils to a tribe of native Brazilians known as the Nambikwara. They had never seen or used paper or pencils before, had never written or drawn "aside from rudimentary decorations - the dots and jagged lines with which they adorned their gourds. After initially ignoring the paper, the Nambikwara began scribbling a series of wavy lines, from left to right across the page. Unprompted, they had begun 'writing.' The leader of the Nambikwara went one step further, requesting a notepad from Levi-Strauss. Quizzed on ethnographic points, he 'wrote' answers in the pad, handing his doodles to Levi-Strauss. When later, during bartering between two different factions of Nambikwara, the leader made a great show of 'reading' the list of exchanges and beneficiaries from a sheet of scribbles.
     "Somewhere in those scrawled lines lay meaning, not of the literal kind, but in a metaphorical sense. The Nambikwara had intuitively grasped the power of paper, notebooks, pens and markings in Western culture... The leader's approach had been a pragmatic one, slotting into an alien culture with a certain ritual fluency, trading symbols alongside beads, arrowheads and lengths of cloth. Writing, Levi-Strauss concluded, was first about power, and only afterward used for the purpose of aesthetic or intellectual enlightenment. Far from being mankind's crowning cultural achievement, it had initially been used to create hierarchies between the scribes and the illiterate masses. 'The primary function of written communication,' Levi-Strauss concluded, 'is to facilitate slavery.'"

Post No Post (Dizzy) / Elevator Music XIX

     "I see some guys try to transcribe my music on paper, but if you play it like that it will sound corny. That's because they hear notes that I didn't even play. It's there without being there. It's implied. And although people can't really hear it, they feel it. It's an auditory illusion."
          - Dizzy Gillespie

     How to create an "auditory illusion" in poetry? Double entendre is one way, but that is more concerned with meaning than music. So how to make one word, or a phrase, sound as if it contains other words. Words that aren't there. The equivalent of bending a note in music, or simultaneously playing different notes. To make words sound that aren't even there.
     Here is some elevator music to listen to while you figure it out:


All That Is Normal or Possible

if glassful is
the quantity a glass can hold
then how awful
an awl can be
it baffles the crows caw

indeed, what is
the quantity a crow can hold?
what lawful reasoning
determines the count of caws
their fullness?

     the blacker the better the richer the darker
     when it comes to a crows caw or coffee

somehow the sunken panels
in a ceiling or soffit
are in fact higher than
the ceiling or soffit itself

sunken, sunglass
sunglassful:
the quantity the glasses hold
     of reflection, of light, of eyes
     of faces, cheekbones and rooms
of sunflowerful August afternoons

and what then simply of full?
the quantity an of can hold
a quantity that can be held
     full of full of full of of
the quantity of music
                that can be held

One of These Frogs Is Doin Its Own Thing

(can you find his frog?)

Frog - a wedge-shaped horny prominence in the sole of a horse's hoof.

Frog - A loop fastened to a belt to hold a tool or weapon.

Frog - An ornamental looped braid or cord with a button or knot for fastening the front of a garment.

Frog - A device on intersecting railroad tracks that permits wheels to cross the junction.

Frog - A spiked or perforated device used to support stems in a flower arrangement.

To Imagine Evil

     "Poetry's function is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it. What if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoevsky opposed Raskolnikov - the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov, so that we begin to see betrayal and murder and theft in a new light."
     -Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov

McCaffery Verse

     "...an experience in language rather than a representation by it."
     - Steve McCaffery on an (un)certain kind of post-free verse poetry. Indeterminate as opposed to strictly referential. If that isn't clear enough, then refer to this by Marjorie Perloff:
     "I have no name for this new form of sounding and perhaps its namelessness goes with the territory: the new exploratory poetry (which is, after all, frequently prose) does not want to be labeled or categorized. What can be said, however, is that the 'free verse' aesthetic, which dominated the 20th century, is no longer operative."

Elevator Music XVIII

Ocean View Semi-tarry


stone used with zest, devoid of
vital pipe clay and pulverized

I want to write about you but
you are chairly and organ
     molten metal flows
     broken zinnia flowers
     strewn across the lawn

a cross says less than the lack of one
     it is nice to see a church
     but nicer not to

the grave is up, heartfelt
uncivilized
considered as a group
the cemetery lacks concupiscence
though is a kind of concubinage
     we come together
bring into one main body
     less dilute
and rise, we rise
take wing and coiffure
a frazzle of starlings
one's thoughts or attention
out over the Straight
     and into books

Douglas Miller New Works

I Thought of You When I Wrote This

    Are you kidding me? Check out this and other new works by Douglas Miller.

PageBoy Now at Left Bank Books

     That's right, you heard it here wrist! First but not least, PageBoy Magazine is now single-handedly keeping another independent bookstore/magazine seller afloat. How do we do it?.. Well, by your generous support of course. So next time you're reaching for Nit House, Sween Mickies, or DUNCE, just think to yourself: "PageBoy Magazine makes me happy, it really does."

Who Said That?

     "You don't listen to a symphony and ask, 'what did they mean by that?' You ask, 'did I have a meaningful experience, was I moved?' A poem is the same."

     I found this quote on one of my notebooks, I Magritte to say that it had no source written beneath it. It must be regret, though. It's consistent with the quote by him listed in this blog under the heading Rene Magritte Pipe Song. I can't be sure, though. When I google searched "you don't listen to a symphony and ask, 'what did they mean by that?'" I came up with How Do I Get My Wife to Listen to My Needs? (poor bloke) Perhaps he's going about it the wrong way. Perhaps instead of asking her to listen to his needs he should ask, "Honey, are you moved?" or maybe "Honey, do you need to move out?" Either way the quote above is neither his nor his wife's, pretty sure of that.

Robert Peter's Critoris

R.P. in his Marlon Brando phase.

     "For some readers criticism is a sexual act - the critic either rubs up against poets (virgin and seasoned ones) or ravishes them. Other readers regard such writing as among the least sexual of all cultivated postures - the arbiter of literary taste sponsors careers and moves into power with the abandon of a disinterested savage seated on a pile of freshly cut scalps."  

  -Robert Peters (from the preface to The Great American Poetry Bake-off)

Elevator Music XVII

such as a plain, highway or voyage
of these we're taught to idealize

I'll take the plain, the grass and sky
above it, a breeze, sun and rustling
whittling, curdling dry thymus
the sound of sound of, of saying
of someone saying Whitman, widow
willows saying listen, this is
your place amidst the broom
leave your singing here with me
marry me, never leave
there is no place better
than this one beneath these branches
stay

Anuthur Buckett

     "I see her still, propped up in a kind of stupor against one of the walls in which this wretched edifice abounds, her long grey hair framing in its cowl of scrofulous mats a face where pallor, languor, hunger, acne, recent dirt, immemorial chagrin and surplus hair seemed to dispute the mastery."
                 -Watt

The Puked Puke

     "it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it."
                    - Beckett (Watt)

Pics from the Reading

     The PageBoy reading took place on Oct. 15 in an apartment on Capitol Hill. Everyone was there, even Mine. Emily Beyer, Paul Nelson, Thomas Walton all read. Garrett Hobba played a few tunes. 
     Here are some photos from the event.  

Garrett Hobba de Las Colinas Suaves. 

Paul Nelson slaughtered us all.

Sara Palin was there, though everyone referred to her as 'parasailin,' because she seemed to be doing so for quite some time.

Tuuli Kahlo Walton performs a scene from "One Hand No Hand."

Un hombre con un bigote

Unfortunately, we had to turn people away.

what is good english?

          PageBoy was out at a silly little dive bar one day when the regulars asked the barmaid if she knew the name of the movie where Danny Glover and Mel Gibson play cops and etc. and the barmaid said immediately, almost without thinking "Lethal Weapon" and all the regulars erupted in cheers and ohs and that's its and everybody was laughing and we were too because it was very happy there all the sudden and then one of the regulars said thank-you i've been trying to think of that all day and the barmaid said, "yeah and i ain't even never seen it," which was the most beautiful music that happened that day even though it was a day that everyone seemed to find beautiful, being all sunny and cool autumnal like leaves and the market was and kites even.
     Then I remembered Corso's line "that I speak good English before I die" and smiled smiled smiled, knowing he was wrong, and right, and that the bloody mary's were so horrid they were undrinkable, though of course we drank them anyway.

The Glass Slipper

   "It is a sort of equation with insufficient conditions for determining the unknown."
          -John Ashbury on Jasper Johns' painting "According to What."
     This quote itself is a sort of equation, a description of poetry, of art and its ineptness for determining the unknown. Yet it works in a way. Its ineptness is its wisdom. Aware of its insufficiencies, it goes out dancing just the same. Old ugly Cinderella and her little lost shoe.

That Bury Small Animals

     burying beetle - (n.) any of various beetles of the genus Nicrophorus that bury small animals on which they feed and lay their eggs.

John Burroughs After Onions

     "Thoreau's quality is very penetrating and contagious; reading him is like eating onions - one must look out or the flavor will reach his own page. But my current is as strong in my channel as Thoreau's in his."

     PageBoy wonders which metaphor is worse: the onion or the current. What does the eating of onions metaphor mean actually? How can you "look out" for something that you've just put in your mouth? Does "the page" here refer to some sort of foul bowel situation? And does it have anything to do with his "current" being so strong in his "channel?"

from his treasure

  

...he drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

     a day of dappled seaborne clouds.

everyone suddenly burst out singing

     he is dead and gone, Lady.

they turned to him, who was listening, and smirked

     it is nice to listen to music, but nicer not to.

when the rains began then, that day
     though not really. it was long ago.

Veg

     "A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”


     Gertrude Stein said this and as she was saying it I was thinking oh nothing will come from this and then but it did, something. something else. from the music around the thing it came. which is where what most people don't hear but why? it's too much for me to look at a fire pit. to see it there, like some eggplant sitting.

Some Words

     Hoecake - n. cornbread that is baked on the blade of a... hoe. (whoa.)
  
     Ho hum - interj. used to express
     Boredom

     Hoedown - n. A dance that is square and never
     Round.

     Hod - n. a trough carried over the shoulder for transporting
     Cod, coal or Al.

     Hog Peanut - n. the peanut of a
     Hog. But Not and never of a sow.

     Hokum - n. something impressive but which's (whose?) veracity is
     Broken (Who's veracity is broken? The Witch's)

     Hole - n.(?) a cavity in a solid, a kind of
     Bowl of lackingnousness.

JJPS Elevator Music XVI

Jasper Johns 0 Through 9


     "Revolutionary art and visionary physics attempt to speak about matters that do not yet have words. That is why their languages are so poorly understood by people outside their fields."
          - Leonard Shlain (Art and Physics)

Elevator Music

warm, dry grass, dry field
dry swatch swallowing rocks
dry sea tide and sea stack
in the sun (it must be in the sun)
whispering the order of sound
the singing fields constant
the lighted thisness thistening
as you lay down to die
an old falcon to be eaten
by new falcons
but first, to lie in the grass
to be the thing you've wanted
all your life for a second

ooOO That Smell! / Elevator Music XV

     "...poetry is offensive and readers must confront and pass through the offense, which is a moment of challenge, crisis, and decision generated out of the prevailing cultural view of language, its appropriate uses, and its characteristics."
          - Hazard Adams in The Offense of Poetry

     Of course, we're not talking about subject here, offensive subject matter is easy enough. We're talking about an assault on language, and an, uh, salt on language. And Dan, uh... it''s all tongue language. Of course it is.

Elevator Music

all the all the ceonothus
flowers covered in bees, they
buzz, a machete curves
but she did it with a
wire, not a
blade, she wanted to
hang, and
hangs
still in me who found her
hanging
she was right to do so
to pray in such a way
to offer such an image to the world
what image have you offered?
that has affected anyone so profoundly?
all you seem to do is
sit in gardens scribbling the names of bees
as if you were the stone beside you
as if you had never destroyed anyone

For God's Sake

     Writing in the early twentieth century, G.K. Chesterton lamented the state of art around him thus: "In the beginning there was art for God's sake, then in the Renaissance there was art for man's sake. Beginning with Impressionism there was art for art's sake. Now, unfortunately, we have no art for God's sake!"
     PageBoy Magazine calls this bit of art criticism written 100 years ago "the most clever statement on the state of art today," and has deemed him one of the "top five funniest men alive!" (For the remaining four on that list please buy a copy of PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 either from the email above or your friendly neighborhood soon-to-be-going-out-of-business magazine shop... Cheerio!)

Douche Chomp

     "As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good. I use it because I have to but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other."
          - Marcel Duchamp

     PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 is out. To get copies email us or go to various places of magazininess in Portland, Olympia and Seattle. Don't worry, like the universe, we too are expanding, and will soon be in other solar systems. PageBoy Magazine: Use it because you have to!

Ding. Dong.

     "You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine."
                       - da Vinci

Euclid / Elevator Music XIV

                                           GUILTY

    Euclidean - referring to parallel lines and right angles. geometric in form or effect.

  
you can't decay of a summer evening
it's no use, these archaisms
even if you want to, it's sung
though with a strange bird it's possible
to have a good rot in the grass
somewhere in the city park
where drunken men pee under
rhododendron tendrils, loggy
or in thick azalea villages
it doesn't matter where so long as they're peeing
that's how you know it's a city park

     we decomposed last night
     the weight of broken families
     pinning us to the grass
     the park like a haiku
     whose misery we couldn't escape

(Referential) Elevator Music XIII

last night
     she had a bee sting
and played for hours on it
until bath time
when the tears came
it was red and swollen and
looked incongruous
     on a child's foot
          otherwise so
undersized
     the ovenmit was a good joke
but helped only
     for a moment
her tears carried us in
          (again)
to that steady panacea
     sleep.

To Print

     Issue II 10 is going to print. No, it's gone to print. PageBoy Magazine issue II 10 includes work by the following artists:

     Erik Anderson's The Poetics of Trespass is just out from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions. He lives in Colorado.

     Emily Beyer continues to live in Seattle. Her poems have been published in The Seattle Review, Prairie Schooner, The Diagram, and are forthcoming in TriQuarterly.

     Amalio Madueño lives in the Upper Rio Grande region of New Mexico, near Taos. Long associated with the Taos Poetry Circus, he publishes and performs his work throughout the West in various formats. His second feature length book of poems will be forthcoming in Fall 2010 by MouthFeel Press (El Paso). He considers himself a Border poet & cruises at an altitude of 7500 feet.

     Chicago native/Seattle resident Paul Nelson founded SPLAB, wrote a book of essays on poetics, Organic Poetry, a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, Washington, A Time Before Slaughter and hopes to be fully hydrated someday.

     Natalie Phillips is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. She grew up in the East Bay in California and studied at the University of Santa Cruz, where she received a BA in art with a concentration in painting and drawing. She's an only child, and very special.

     Collin Tracy has work forthcoming in Alligator Juniper and in a microfiction anthology from Cinnamon Press. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a lazy eye.

     PageBoy Magazine Issue II 10 will be out sometime in the next two weeks. To order copies write to pageboymagazine@hotmail.com, or look for it at local bookstores / magazine shops / libraries in Seattle and Portland. PageBoy Magazine: yay!

Proof

     PageBoy Issue II10 is in its proof stages. There will be proof soon (of errors and oars and the airy outdoors)! In the meantime, here is a word for you:
     Langrage - n. A type of shot consisting of scrap iron loaded into a case and formerly used in naval warfare to damage sails and rigging.
     You have to admit, there is an attraction to misread that. To invent a langrage language that might shoot a load of scrap into the sails and rigging of, say, language itself, or maybe into a more general cultural fabric. Not to destroy, but certainly to alter dramatically. DADA, Gertrude Stein, Joyce come to mind. It's an old aspiration, whose perfection lies in its very impossibility of achievement. That is the odd thing about poets. It's not that they don't achieve, but that they can't, yet continue on nonetheless.
     This is why, in the early 20th century, when Picabia is asked, "Why would you choose painting, when everyone accepts the fact that photography has brought about the death of painting?" he responds: The death of painting is precisely why I've chosen to paint.

All Sores

     "The only inspiration worth having is an inspiration that clarifies the form of what's being written, and that's more likely to come from something that already has a literary form."
          -Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination)

     One day, while traveling in Taiwan, I visited the home of an old Taiwanese poet. He spoke very little English, and I practically no Chinese. We sipped tea and read each other poems from our notebooks. Neither of us understood the other, though we both nodded enthusiastically on hearing the music of a foreign language used poetically. After each poem, we would discuss in English the nature of that poem's meaning. There was a big window in the living room overlooking what seemed like endless rice fields.
     After I read him several poems, Li Pa asked me quite matter-of-factly, "what do you write about?"
     "Many things," I replied, in the simplest English I could manage. "These poems are all written about words I found in the dictionary."
     He thought about this for a few seconds, then seemed to understand: "You cannot write good poems about words in the dictionary. Good poems are about life." He gestured toward the rice fields outside. "Good poems are out there."
     This conversation has haunted me ever since. Indeed, it haunted me before I even had it. I decided Li Pa was right, and I decided he was wrong. That there is no source for good poetry, it's all source.

PageBoy II 10 Out Soon! / Elevator Music XII

     PageBoy issue II 10 will be out shortly! with poems by Amalio Madueno, Paul Nelson, Emily Beyer, and Collin Tracy, artwork by Natalie Phillips, and an essay on the nature of (non)fiction by Erik Anderson. Until then, here's more elevator music:

Spring Walk

part of a living body may decay
and may aster or wounded pride
rectangular in an irrigable field
where moss and grass and vetch and stone
or the old beheaded cherub statuary
lay in semi-ruinous perfection
it's always something else that's perfect
and the appetites of self-denial
walking there, touching this, touching that
like a child who touches, who sees
first with its skin, birthed into
this inferno of light and gravity
screaming its head off all the while

David Antin Take Off That Hat!

     "...now there were things about this painting i didn't understand     in some sense it looked very low pressure     the way a lot of painting looks in america     that is it looked as if it was not urgent about anything     painting is embarrassed to be about anything     its been embarrassed for a long time     theres a grave sense of embarrassment before the possibility of being about in painting     which they call being literary     and literary is a bad term for a painter because everyone knows that if you paint a painting of anything it shouldnt be about anything but painting..."
          -from David Antin's "remembering   recording   representing" (1973)

     This, said PageBoy Magazine, is one of the funniest and most pointed comments on not only painting, a certain kind of painting anyway, but much of what we all do these days, whether it's writing or painting or badmintoning. Navigating the world of contemporary art is difficult, to say the least, in any era, which volleys a shuttlecock over a high net by means of a light racket touche!

Annual Bucket / Elevator Music XI

                       Samuel Beckett

     "All needed to be known for say is known. There is nothing but what is said. Beyond what is said there is nothing." - he said (I'm quoting him from nothing, though it's true, I am saying it in a way).

Elevator Music XI

     Round spots forming a pattern poof! There it is, and we spent the rest of that hour fleeing from it, or trying to make sense of them (in our way).
     The Venetian traveler seemed old simply because he was Venetian. I apologized, and told him it was an association I'd had since being young - that Venetian somehow meant antiquitous. My father referred to his steins as 'Venetian,' at least that's how I remember it, and though my father wasn't old then he seemed so to me and the steins certainly were the stuff of old age to a child interested only in running.
     I ran on and on and the traveler, whose name was Charles, listened politely, pulling on his cigarette and straining to comprehend what I said. We paid our bill and left. He the one way and then we and then I.

cou rouge

red neck

Our tour in boat

I was asleep when he died.