Silent Storm: Poems of Obliteration

I found this online, a poem that was written by selective obliteration of text on a page.

Here's the main page that describes the process.

It's an intriguing notion, though not one new to poets: the idea of creating from what is already there, writing through erasure, the act of restricting language to meter and rhyme and somehow adding to languages power in the process of studied subtraction.

The American poet Ronald Johnson wrote a book length poem of obliteration using words taken from an 1892 edition of Pardise Lost that he found in a bookstall in Seattle, WA. Johnson's poem is called radi os.

Here's a sample from radi os that I doubt I will be able to get the spacing correct on, though the line breaks should be close:

and thy words so strange


double-formed, and

phantasm



Surprised
In darkness


Out of thy head I sprung. Amazement seized



in secret
growing
And fields

Through all the Empyrean.
headlong
Into this Deep;
I also:
key

Without my opening.

Johnson contrives this poem by the erasure of words from the following passage from Book 2 of Milton's poem, in a scene between Sin and Satan before a council in Hell:

"So strange thy outcry, and thy words so strange
Thou interposest, that my sudden hand,
Prevented, spares to tell thee yet by deeds
What it intends, till first I know of thee
What thing thou art, thus double-formed, and why,
In this infernal vale first met, thou call'st
Me father, and that phantasm call'st my son.
I know thee not, nor ever saw till now
Sight more detestable than him and thee."
T' whom thus the Portress of Hell-gate replied:--
"Hast thou forgot me, then; and do I seem
Now in thine eye so foul?--once deemed so fair
In Heaven, when at th' assembly, and in sight
Of all the Seraphim with thee combined
In bold conspiracy against Heaven's King,
All on a sudden miserable pain
Surprised thee, dim thine eyes and dizzy swum
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth, till on the left side opening wide,
Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,
Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed,
Out of thy head I sprung. Amazement seized
All th' host of Heaven; back they recoiled afraid
At first, and called me Sin, and for a sign
Portentous held me; but, familiar grown,
I pleased, and with attractive graces won
The most averse--thee chiefly, who, full oft
Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing,
Becam'st enamoured; and such joy thou took'st
With me in secret that my womb conceived
A growing burden. Meanwhile war arose,
And fields were fought in Heaven: wherein remained
(For what could else?) to our Almighty Foe
Clear victory; to our part loss and rout
Through all the Empyrean. Down they fell,
Driven headlong from the pitch of Heaven, down
Into this Deep; and in the general fall
I also: at which time this powerful key
Into my hands was given, with charge to keep
These gates for ever shut, which none can pass
Without my opening.

This is a classic epiphany scene. Satan doesn't recognize the "snaky sorceress" in front of him, so she reminds him of who she is and where she came from. She tells how during the Satan-led rebellion in Heaven -- Satan's greatest moment thus far, even in failure -- and before the legions of rebellious angels and gathered seraphim she sprung out of the left side of Satan's forehead, clad in armor, frightening momentarily the heavenly hosts, who are the ones who named her Sin.

This scene is a dark redaction of various biblical and mythological accounts. Allusion is made to the holy family, to the trinity, to the virgin birth, and, of course, to the classic myth of the birth of Aphrodite, who emerged fully clad in armor from the forehead of Zeus.

Or was Milton perhaps not simply "alluding"? To create this passage set in hell, Milton obliterates all that is good from the story of Athena's birth. He obliterates the sanctity of the various biblical generation stories; and finally he obliterates the very act of recognition itself on the part of Satan, who doesn't know his own offspring until she explains who she is, and who in another mythological incarnation represented the painful but divine birth of wisdom.

Johnson hints at the mechanism of allusion through the "double-formed words" and "phantasms," but he obliterates all reference to a lack of recognition, thus restoring a special kind of wisdom and sight that Milton obliterated and had obliterated in him.

Amazing Memory Man

Here's an interesting story from CNN about a guy who remembers everything.

In a letter to his brother, the twentieth century Irish novelist James Joyce once described imagination as the constant reworking of the material of memory, or something like that, and Joyce seems to have had a phenomenal memory and a prodigious ability to rework it.

It is this reworking faculty that makes memory something creative, something sacred. Otherwise it is just like a really good scrapbook.

The article mentions another woman, known only to the public by the initials A.J., who also had an astounding memory and who describes it like this:

That woman is in her mid-40s and was identified only by the initials A.J. She told McGaugh that whenever she hears a date, memories from that date in previous years flood her mind like a running movie. The phenomenon, she laments, is "nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting."

"Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden," she wrote. "I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!"

Punctuation in the News

It's not often that punctuation makes the news; here's a story about semicolons that you all might find interesting: from The New York Times. I like this section:

In fact, when Mr. Neches [the marketing manager who wrote the sign] was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.

“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.

Typical New Yorker. I'm curious, though, about that 2004 case in San Francisco. I guess it's appropriate that those who would try to prevent two people from being joined would be undone by a judge wielding a semicolon.

Here's an online semicolon quiz you can take to pass the time:

Quiz;

What is Missing From This Post?

A hint: "I am most common of all, and though I am hard to do without you probably don't know that I am missing."

So far, you all do a fantastic job with your blogs! Onward and upward! (Sorry for my colloquialisms. lol) I think that this kind of writing (blogging) is good for what you will do in all your work at St John's. Sports and fashion blogs? Most common, yah. Both flood my blogroll. But both sports and fashion blogs should avoid (Important word! This post has a void in it...) only including information that is got from tv and such , but mostly, I can say good work! Watch now how I do it (blog) in an unusual way, mainly so you can grasp various ways that you might blog on your own. (Or not.)

This kind of writing (this particular blog post) is painful. Avoiding that which is most crucial, it's as if I was doing without a vital part of my soul. Just this past Monday, as I first thought of doing this, as I was crafting it in my mind and as it took off, I thought I would go crazy. I would walk around and sights and sounds of that which is missing would fill my mind I would stray, not pay any mind to walking, and so bump into things. It was foolish, but it shows how much I took this thing for an important task. Okay, not "important," but it is a task that has a vital point to it.

Anyway, can any of you say what is missing from this post? (And no, it's not "humor," hahah). If you know, contact my St John's account.

Or...do a post just as I did (75 words+, minimum) that mimics a singular and important lack in this post...and I'll post to yours with a yay or a nay.

Good luck.

Udach' Kuqax*a'a'ch

On January 21st, Marie Smith Jones, the last remaining speaker of the Alaskan Eyak language, died. You can find the story here in The Economist, where the author gives us a linguistic snapshot of the world of Smith Jones:

BEYOND the town of Cordova, on Prince William Sound in south-eastern Alaska, the Copper River delta branches out in silt and swamp into the gulf. Marie Smith, growing up there, knew there was a particular word in Eyak, her language, for the silky, gummy mud that squished between her toes. It was c'a. The driftwood she found on the shore, 'u'l, acquired a different name if it had a proper shape and was not a broken, tangled mass. If she got lost among the flat, winding creeks her panicky thoughts were not of north, south, east or west, but of “upriver”, “downstream”, and the tribes, Eskimo and Tlingit, who lived on either side. And if they asked her name it was not Marie but Udachkuqax*a'a'ch, “a sound that calls people from afar”.

An older article from The Economist says that at least one language is lost every day.

A Life in Books

On a corner of Court Street in Cobble Hill, there is a used bookstore that is owned and run by a man who lurks on the threshold and looks like a trapper. His scraggly beard and distracted air give him the appearance of some mad Russian prophet out of Dostoevsky. He has the social graces and the bodily twitches of a hermit, but he knows every book in his store.

I've found some good things in his store. It's a corner store and so has ample space and the inside is divided and arranged in a labyrinth of aisles lined with a shelves and piles. I suspect that were one to climb to the storage space above one would find an endless stretch of shelves, appearing kaleidoscopically to the climber, honeycombed to infinity. His shelf system has long ago been strained to the breaking point by the new books that constantly arrive, dropped on the doorstep. Although perhaps "system" is too much to describe the canyons of books that have overflowed the shelves and drifted to the sides of the aisles. The walls are made of books.

I avoided the place at first -- though I love any bookstore -- because I resented the apparent disresepct with which the owner treated the books that came to him, the way they were heaped and handled. He would display them in front of the store on these old and rickety card tables, still in the boxes he found them in when they were abandoned on his doorstep. Sometimes he would put them outside even when it was drizzling. He also doesn't distinguish between yellowed paperbacks and books with cloth bindings. Instead he just piles them together indiscrimminately.

The piles always seem unprocessed, the ones outside anyway. They are arranged in no categories that I can tell. More like a permanent flea market than a book store really. Part of the reason for that, no doubt, is that most of the books he receives are donated from locals, from people trying to lighten their loads during a move, or from former graduate students who shed their books as quickly as they shed the unpleasantness of the graduate student life. No one person could have the time or energy to organize all these books. It would take 15 years or more.

But I did come to like the store and to respect certain things about the owner. For one, he sets his own hours. He's rarely open during the day and seems only to emerge around 4 or 5 and then stay open until, I don't know, I've seen him standing in front of the door as late as 10 or 11. He also closes during the peak months of summer for two months and then opens in mid September. This holiday being announced in a fine handwriting in black magic marker on a crumpled piece of paper hung in the dusty shielded window. That must be a great way to make a living. And whenever he's closed, when I walk by, I miss the store and the books inside.

I think I like buying books more than anything, almost more than reading them, though these are very different activities. Reading a book is to share an experience, not necessarily the experience portrayed in the book, whether it is fiction or nonfiction, but the experience of someone who has sat down and taken the time to shape their thoughts on the page. Collecting is a different kind of activity. I sometimes buy a book knowing that I probably will not read it, but always with the impulse that I might, in some unforeseen situation, need to. Buying books is for me a collector's activity. In collecting books we amass and store the experiences of others; it's a kind of recovery effort, a desperate search and rescue. I have very few books that are worth anything, except to me. And I guess in some ways what is true for me might very well be true of the owner of this local bookstore as well, whose role seems to be that of a collector, a wanton gatherer, a Maxwell's demon of text, a bibliophiliac.

I once bought in this store an old Modern Library collection of Russian short stories I found. Among these stories was one I first read many years ago called "The Bet," a story about an older Banker and a young Lawyer, who, at a party the Banker is giving, get into a heated discussion about the death penalty. The Banker feels that life imprisonment is less humane than the death penalty because the death penalty kills you instantly while life imprisonment draws the life out of you slowly. The Lawyer disagrees saying that "to live somehow is better than not to live at all." In order to "prove" their respective opinions they arrange this bet whereby the Banker stakes two million roubles that the Lawyer will be unable to stay in prison for 15 years. His "imprisonment" will occur in a lodge somewhere on the grounds of the Banker's estate, where he can be observed.

One of the stipulations is that the lawyer will be able to have all the books that he wants. We then see how the lawyer spends his 15 years in solitary confinement, and we witness his psychological ups and downs, as we see him either lying on his bed doing nothing, weeping, or, alternately, reading and learning with a fevered exuberance. He plans his time carefully and strategically in the first year, denying himself the pleasure of smoking, for example, so, he says "as not to despoil the air inside" his room. After 5 years, he shows signs of weakening, but then recovers in years 6 through 10, as his struggle with captivity continues.

Towards the end of his confinement he spends a good year reading nothing but the bible. Then in his final years he begins to order books haphazardly, randomly, books that seem to get opened and set aside, cross referenced, abandoned. All of this we guess by the way we see them scattered about on the table, the chairs, and the floor of the lodge, heaped and handled.

The Banker has been observing the lawyer over the years with growing concern, and is near frantic as the lawyer approaches the end of his term. Over the years the Banker has lost much of his fortune to gambling and speculation and paying this bet now will ruin him. Out of desperation, he decides that he must kill the lawyer. The night before the bet is up, he sneaks into the lodge to smother the man. As he is about to commit the deed, he sees a letter that the Lawyer has written (in a "fine hand") and decides to read it first.

The letter is a manifesto of disillusionment, as the Lawyer first regurgitates everything that he has read in the books that have been his sole companion over the years, and then repudiates both earthly happiness and wisdom as being fleeting and illusory. The letter is shocking both to the Banker and to us as we realize that we have never really known, even though we have followed his reading over the years, what has been going on in the lawyer's head. It is a letter of despair, in some ways more desperate in its tone and message than a suicide note. He ends by stating his intent to leave his prison just before the time is up and so renounce the bet and the money.

In response, the Banker weeps, returns the letter, and leaves the man alone and alive. The next morning when the guards announce that they saw the lawyer escaping over the garden wall, the Banker removes the letter from the desk before anyone can see it and locks it in a fireproof safe. Just as the Banker has been watching the Lawyer in his prison and communicating with him through notes through the small window made just for that purpose, so the Lawyer has been observing the world through the windows of books. Neither man makes any sense of what they see, as they are both cut off from life in ways they are not always aware of. I have always wondered why the Banker puts that letter in a fireproof safe at the end of the story. Wouldn't he want to trumpet the news of the Lawyer's renunciation of the bet to all the world?

But I guess this is a story not only of two strongly willed and foolish men, but about small spaces and windows in and out: it's about the room in which the lawyer is confined and in which he is observed by both us and by the Banker. The books he reads are windows onto the world he cannot touch, just as they are windows into the minds of others, though they are windows that can't ever be opened. "The Bet" is also about the small space of the human skull and how it both can and cannot be peered into by others, who seek to understand us through our words and through our actions. In the letter, after stating how much beauty he has read of in the books he ordered, the Lawyer says that he feels like all the wisdom in the world has been compressed into a small compass in his head, or as a better translation has it, a small lump at the base of his skull. That the Banker puts the letter, the one true window that we have into the Lawyer's mind, back into the enclosed space of a safe, is somehow appropriate and perhaps even part of the great power of this story. The letter is returned back into a confined space, hermetically sealed, closed off, it never gets released to the world. As if Pandora's box was being resealed forever. As if the world was not ready for such a bleak assessment. For his part, the Lawyer is seen by the watchmen climbing over the garden wall. He disappears and one wonders where he goes...

This local bookstore reminded me of this story for some reason, not only because it was there I bought this book. There the walls themselves are made of books, and it is owned and run by a man who is a mirror image physically of what I imagine the lawyer would look like, unkempt and raggedy, as if after 15 years of not minding himself; but who now comes and goes as he pleases, who can most often be seen slouching at the threshold with a cigarette, blowing the smoke outwards into the evening air, so, I guess, as not to despoil the air inside.

The Hawley Arms is Burning...

Last night, around 8:00 GMT flames swept through Camden Town, North London. As firetrucks descended on the area locals formed bucket lines to try to quench the massive blaze. The fire was thought to have started in a market stall just behind The Hawley Arms, a pub located near the Camden Lock bridge and famous for its clientele, which includes, among others, singer Amy Winehouse.

The Camden Town district is known for its nightlife. The marketplace is a mecca for alternative lifestyles and vibrant subcultures and young people vying for the mantle of cool and alternative. The emo, the goth, and the otherwise disaffected congregate in clusters of cool in clubs such as The World's End, The Underworld, The Good Mixer, Koko, The Purple Turtle, Dublin Castle, and the Oh! Bar. One wonders which, if any, of these hotspots was the inspiration for the cutting satire of Amy's "Eff Me Pumps."

By 8:10 last night reports were coming in that the fire had spread from the market stall to surrounding buildings. Half an hour later witnesses saw flames leaping 30 feet above the buildings, as the number of firetrucks responding reached at least 20 and rumors of people trapped inside began to circulate. These rumors were dispelled early on as the smoke cleared, and as of today there were no reported fatalities.

The Hawley Arms, standing adjacent to the source of the blaze, was badly damaged. Pictures surfaced on the internet almost immediately showing the building shrouded in smoke that glowed with the flames beneath. The pub was at first thought to be completely destroyed, but by morning the damage was upgraded to severe, and patrons voiced hope that it would be back in business soon.

An article in The Independent from last summer tells more about the famous Hawley Arms and its star clientele, including Winehouse who was seen sometimes in the company of Kelly Osbourne and sometimes fresh out of the clinic.

Amy wouldn't have been at the Arms tonight in any event, as she is scheduled to be performing at the Grammy awards in a few hours, though she will sing from London, appearing live via satellite, not from the Staples Center. Her recent and publicly broadcast troubles with drugs and with the law have derailed her career in a number of ways, forcing her recently to cancel tour dates and appearances. Musicians from George Michael to Prince have reached out to the singer with offers of assistance of whatever kind she might need, having been touched by her talent, and there seems to be a general feeling of sadness and inevitability among friends, fans, and fellow musicians alike who have been watching her in the past few months. The US State Department even reversed at the last minute a ruling that prevented her from entering the country to perform at the awards in an odd moment of compassionate bureaucracy, but, according to her publicist it was too late for her to appear in L.A.

Her album Back to Black is up for Album of the Year and she received a total of 6 nominations altogether. For those of you not familiar with her album, it is striking for its retro-soul feel, its Saturn-like digestion of the music of the past, and its compelling lyrics that have gotten so much attention for (amazingly!) drawing on or otherwise relating to her own life and experience.

Here's hoping she doesn't perform the song that is nominated for record of the year, Rehab, as it is too easily a joke for the tabloids as it is, and doesn't give an accurate notion of what the album is about anyway. Here's another song from her freshman effort Frank that you might like better:



Winehouse seems to be welcome fodder for tabloids these days, who hang on her every failing with a thinly-veiled glee and offer it up for consumption; it's as bad as those who stand around watching a fire and fan the flames of rumor by saying, with well-intentioned though unfounded certainty, that there are people dying inside The Hawley Arms.