To Infinity and Beyond

I have been teaching my son Julian how to count to 99. He's now 4 and can do this fairly reliably. The other night he said, "Dad, everything beyond 99 is 'to infinity and beyond!'" He then shot his fist into the air.



(For those of you without small children this is a phrase from the children's film Toy Story.)

Is This True?

"Temperature is a measure of how fast molecules are moving."

p. 41, A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature, by Tom Siegfried. (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2006).

People I'm Glad I've Never Met

Andy Warhol

Val Solanas

Charles Manson

Bluebeard

Paul Newman

Rex Harrison

Gertrude Stein

Ronald Reagan

Bob Newhart

Nero

Pontius Pilate

Jennifer Aniston

Mr. T

OBL

John McCain

(I've met Hillary and she's BEAUTIFUL)

Ray Liotta

Queen Elizabeth I

Sir Thomas Mallory

Herman Melville

John Lennon

Richard Brautigan (I LOVE his short stories!)

Kenzabure Oe

Anyone from the island of Guam

Vlad the Impaler

Mohammad Attila

Osama Bin Laden

Adolf Hitler

Mussolini

FDR

Churchill

Tanya Harding

Rosie O'Donnell

Barbara Walters

The Iceman

The Marquis de Sade

Pete Rose

Billy Jean King

Carly Simon

Joey Ramone

Fats Domino

Big Bill Haywood

Chester A. Arthur

John K. Polk

Mata Hari

Anyone who's ever visited Antarctica

Anyone from Turkmenistan

The Three Stooges

Harrison Ford

Bob Woodward

Joe McCarthy

Joe Stalin

Joe Namath

Joey Heatherton

John Ford, Jr.

Gary Cooper

Bill Blass

Fellini

Any actual pygmies without an actual blowdart in hand

Frankenstein

The Easter Bunny

Bob Hope

Johnny Carson

Rock Hudson

Doris Day

Gladys Night or any of the Pips

The Four Temptations

The Beach Boys

Alfred Nobel

St. Thomas Aquinas

Mother Theresa

Jessica Parker

Matt Dillon

Billy Crystal

Billy Crystal's Mother

Billy Crystal's best friend from 9th grade

(But I'd like to meet his best friend's uncles)

Jack Kerouac

James Brown

Peter Piper

Charles de Gaulle

Margaret Thatcher

Ernest Borgnine

George Armstrong Custer

Robert E. Lee

Kirby Congdon

Chairman Mao

Oprah Winfrey

Bob Marley

George Washington

Ivan the Terrible

Tiny Tim

Andre the Giant

Blackburn III

Paul Blackburn is part of a generation of poets who grew up in the atomic cloud left by Schopenhauer's ID, Neitzsche's celebration of the ID, and Freud's celebration of the ID as a perpetual holiday and revenge against the superego. The result were marching orders to the children of the 60s that the monstrous will should be undeterred by any kind of fatherly superego. The inner child was set loose without any supervision, and children's sexuality was therefore the norm, and fathers were routinely dissed for being monstrous IDs on the loose, or hideous barriers to the celebrations of the ID. Here at Lutheran Surrealism we have never caved into these principles. We believe that there is such a thing as a good father (though rarely seen on TV sitcoms, they exist in almost every family nevertheless, and we are part of a backlash that would like to defend and define the role and importance of fathers in American family life). Lutheran Surrealism believes in tracing the wicked root of the left back to its sources in Nietzsche and Freud, and pulling them out of our culture. Simultaneously, we replant the notion of the heavenly Father, of God, and law, and the ten commandments that were meant to keep the ID (synonymous with the Devil, but the Devil we think of as a living being, just as we think of God as a living Being). Lapsed Catholics like Blackburn drifted without a moral compass through the cities of the 60s, dissing dads, and poisoning themselves with alcohol and empty drug use, and casual sexual affairs, often dying young for not following the moral law. Here's a poem by Blackburn, called Faces 1, which appears in The Selected Poems of Paul Blackburn. It references the large Puerto Rican immigration that took place in the 60s to New York City, an immigration which has been the topic of a recent PBS documentary, and which is referenced in the last episode of the Burns documentary on New York City.

FACES 1.

Who in New York in 1965 would have
such incredible taste as to do a little girl's hair
in long skinny skeins of curl a la
Shirley Temple, Little Miss Marker stage?

The wonderful Puerto Ricans. The
taste so bad, the effect is wondrous
beautiful, and so she is
a brown little waif-wife, 5-yr-old opposite me on a
Lexington Avenue train
in a peppermint red-&-white stripe dress with
some legend needlepointed neatly in across
the bottom of the skirt I can't read

BELO -- TO --

it says.

She pulls it down looking at me
reproaching? Can it be?

She thinks I'm looking up her dress?
So I do.
Not very interesting.

It's her eyes that get me: the
severe quality in the reproach
has already faded, re-
ceded in favor of
-- migod -- friendliness
A friendly reproach, then, from Shirley Temple,
that's fading away, and there's a
look of satisfaction (5 yrs old?)
that makes me wonder what my face looks like

The part of the skirt she'd tucked between her knees
pops up again -- starch, crinoline maybe?
well, it's still not very interesting.
Her father finds something, tho, there's a spot
just above her right knee, bruise, dirt, what's
that? he asks, she shrugs, he takes his hand away

The letters visible on the skirt read now:

-- LONGS --TO--

I guess the legend now, it's incredible, he
can't keep his hands off her legs, lays
his slender hand over her knee just as
they rise to exit at Grand Central
Sation . Well, I'm right, the skirt
does have a crinoline and the message reads finally:

MY HEART BELONGS TO DADDY.

I ' l l j u s t b e t . The curls down
the back of her neck are perfect. In
her care not to scuff the patent leather shoes
with their sad shine,
she stumbles a bit at the doors
Goodbye, Shirle Temple, goodbye!

which close
all at once .


There's the poem in its entirety. For purposes of review, it's generally legal to cite an entire poem. If I hear from the publisher, however, I'll take it down. The poem appears in The Selected Poems of Paul Blackburn, Persea books, 1989, pp. 170-171.

Notice how he implicates the father in his own strange desires towards the kid. It looked to me as if the father was trying to protect his daughter from Blackburn's stare. But in Blackburn he's not ever exactly degree zero in his writing. He attributes odd desires to the people he describes. He PROJECTS weird motives on to the people he describes. And there's no sense of moral order whatsoever. Everything is in disarray. There are no guiding principles, just a general unleashed ID, amidst an otherwise dead universe of decaying matter. What Williams says of Ginsberg "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell," equally applies to Blackburn (Blackburn calls New York City Moloch, just as Ginsberg does -- but I don't know who first got this from whom).

Like Ginsberg and many of the other New American Poets (NAM, for short) Blackburn's "I" in his poems (I or me is in almost every poem) is quite thoroughly autobiographical, so we can take the poems' content as more or less a snapshot of Blackburn's mind at any given moment.

Here we see him accusing another culture of poor taste in terms of dolling up its daughters. Isn't it at least in equally poor taste to diss that other culture, while lusting after their preschooler? To the NAM poets, there were no limits, and no norms. This is why their world was "hell," even to WCW, who was not a faithful church-goer himself.

To their credit few if any of the NAM poets actually broke any laws. Although they didn't follow the moral laws of Christianity, to my knowledge few if any of them ever ended up in jail for serious crimes. They were mostly peaceful, and law-abiding, although they used illegal drugs, the crimes were mostly what could be described as "victim-less" (I'm trying to think if there were any exceptions to this...). However, they had a sluggish moral pulse, and contributed to a general cultural decay by allowing all moral standards to disappear in a haze of relativism.

Blackburn II

Blackburn shares pedophilia with a few other NAM poets. In the poem FACES 1. he addresses a five-year old Puerto Rican girl that he spots on a Lexington Ave. train.

She thinks I'm looking up her dress?
So I do.

................................................................

The part of the skirt she'd tucked between her knees
pops up again -- starch, crinoline maybe?

.................................................................

Her father finds something, tho, there's a spot
just above her right knee, bruise, dirt, what's
that? he asks, she shrugs, he takes his hand away.

........he
can't keep his hands off her legs, lays
his slender hand over her knee just as
they rise to exit at Grand Central
Station...

At any rate, that poem is from the mid to late 60s. I quoted only a few lines from a much longer poem, in which Blackburn is totally focused on this little girl. He assumes that the dad shares his predatory prurience (very unlikely that the dad is such a creep as Blackburn). Like other predators he makes up a story to himself in which the girl likes him, misinterpreting everything the little girl does (she smiles, and he thinks she now accepts his prurience!). An earlier poem, very famous, also set on a public conveyance (subway car), is called the Once-Over, and begins,

The tanned blond
in the green print sack
in the center of the subway car
standing
tho there are seats
has had it from
1 teenage hood
1 lesbian
1 envious housewife
4 men over fifty
(& myself), in short
the contents of half the car

Blackburn in this poem again generalizes his lust, but this time the woman (she has "high breasts" so at least she's not a pre-teen) and assumes that the young woman is returning it to the entire car in an orgiastic assault:

Only a stolid young man
with a blue business suit and the New York Times
does not know he is being assaulted
So.
So she has us and we her
all the way to downtown Brooklyn....

(79-80 Selected Poems, Persea).

The front cover of the volume has a photo of Blackburn, apparently an extremely short man, sitting on a stool, smoking INDOORS (no one does that anymore thank GOD!).

He's looking out at the reader ... with a kind of intensity. I'd hate to be a dad with a girl sitting across from him on a train. Or a woman standing. (She's probably on her way to meet her boyfriend, and is only interested in the boyfriend, not in the creeps and sad sacks in the subway car. Most people haven't cathected an entire subway car, or strangers in general, and I doubt if the woman is thinking like this at all.

The poem doesn't check its own assumptions. The images, the sounds, they are subordinate to the overall idea, which in either poem is utterly indecent and without a moral trace, but what's obvious is that he celebrates this as part of the "sexual revolution" of the 60s in which anything goes. Even children. This is part of what Foucault was so dizzy about in his History of Sexuality: the possibility that now adults could go after children, too, and without limits.

The moral choices of the actors in the poems -- the poet undressing children, and women to whom he hasn't even been formally introduced, reveal a mind off its leash.

The poem is nevertheless honest. This is one of the crucial things about Blackburn. He has a dark side and he doesn't stop himself from going there. It's as if he's a rangy dog that's off his leash, going through cities. As I go through the poems I see a guy who's always utterly alone and unable to make the slightest connection with others. A distant fellow, peering out from his pinhole. What's extremely odd to me is that he seems almost prim in the company of the most famous of the other NAM poets -- Ginsberg celebrating the rape of children in Tangiers in Howl, or in later poems, esp. the horrible ones in Fame & Death.

If a poem ought to articulate moral notions (I think a poem should) this poet is something beyond EE Cummings. He's pure ID, but not perhaps as far gone as Ginsberg. The formless chaotic thrills of the ID are what the 60s were about -- straight up through Charles Manson. Blackburn is a metro stop along the way to the far horizon of the Spahn Ranch. What was it that WCW said of Ginsberg? We ain't in ...? anymore? Kansas? My copy of the WCW intro to Ginsberg's first book is over at the office.

Blackburn

Paul Blackburn was an American poet who died in about 1971 from esophageal cancer. (The esophagous is the pipeline that goes from the throat to the stomach -- cancer in it is often caused by heavy smoking and heavy alcohol abuse. Blackburn was both a heavy smoker and a heavy drinker throughout his short life. He died at 44.)

Blackburn's poetics comes out of WCW and Charles Olson and others who tried to write a poetry stripped of metaphysical conceits. Although raised as a Catholic, he had turned his back on Christianity. His poems show us a jaundiced viewpoint, a rather bleak viewpoint, but one not entirely unlit with beauty. Beauty was a genuine concern for him, and it comes through in his cadences (subtle, but entrancing). Below is one of his less well-known efforts. His poetry has a journalistic "just the facts m'am" content. Often the viewpoint is male, and the subject is the solitary landscape. He objectifies a landscape. Many of his poems reference the loneliness of public transportation and the oddness of being in a public place all alone.

I like his poems, but ultimately don't get much out of them. To me, a poem has to have an action, and has to show us an actor choosing or not choosing a way of life, or an action (as in Corso asking himself, "Should I get married? Should I be good?"). In Blackburn's poems, the only choice is sex, or alcohol, and the answer is yes. Either one is a way to turn toward oblivion. I find his poems melancholy, and to be in some strange way related to Charles Bukowski's, at least in terms of their content: men on the prowl. Bukowski had a lot more zest, and hence he was popular. Blackburn however is a poet's poet and is scrupulously honest -- he doesn't play to the crowd, and he doesn't overtly entertain. His work has a fine lyrical manner, and is graceful. Is it a "form of thinking"? Yes, I think it is, in the way any sequence of mental actions reveals thought. His question is always similar to Zen. He looks at the miracle of the real world, and just lets it be, but follows it unraveling from his mind and his poems are jots, like the jottings of a seismometer. His world is as seen through a pinhole. Looking back into the pinhole, we can see that it is always sex and alcohol that are on his mind, but not always in that order. This is an early poem, when his mind is still relatively healthy. Tomorrow I'll put in a poem from the late 60s that I think shows how decadent he became.

Alameda

Monday morning early Sunday evening late A tram goes by, outbound taking the late drinkers the restless moviegoers or the blossoms of girls with their escorts home sleep The conductor on the final run standing there in his slippers facing the track The ladies sit at cafe tables in twos An old man sits reading at a table alone the new day's news letting his beer get warm letting the sky be enough , Winter 1956-57 Malaga . [September 1956/1960]

The Singularity of the Cormorant

The set of all possible infinite universes,

versus that of the single cormorant.

The Objectivists chose the cormorant.

NB: I have an idea what this means, because it came to me in a dream last night and I wrote it down on a sheet of paper that I found this morning. Can you make sense of it? This may help: I am interested in set theory, and have had several discussions about set theory with two or three local mathematicians. Actually, now that I put it that way it's fairly simple, isn't it? The individual thing versus the endless grouping of a thing under a common name. The Objectivists, it seems to me, made a mistake in terms of writing poetry under the notion of particulars, whereas Aristotle (I think rightly) says that poetry is a matter of creating universal plots (what Jung confusedly but also rightly calls archetypes).

The imagists, it seems, worked on the absolute singularity of an image precisely to overthrow the generalities of symbolism. However, images, like words in a language, must also be universal in order to be understood, or to communicate to any degree whatsoever.

The post in a sense is yet another response to Ron Silliman, who posted yesterday a long thing about Paul Blackburn. I said that I think Blackburn failed, because his basic idea was simply carpe diem, and then he journals the things to be seized on any given specific day of his life.

Blackburn's gross. Someone named Michael Lally had a seemingly elegant posting that tried to correct my view of Blackburn on Silliman's comment box, and to say that each person has an individual taste, and that's that. But that's not true. It's only common taste that to an extent makes a poet great. Shakespeare is great. Blackburn (like Oppenheimer, whom he resembles) was a bum.

Corso, who Lally thinks was a nitwit and an arriviste, was, on the other hand, the one great poet to come out of the New American Poetry group. I don't know if this was because he wasn't just journaling, or whether it was because he was exploring a larger framework of ideas, or whether his explosive verbal combinations were much more interesting, or because he reached deep into the classical resources and combined them with imagism, and surrealism.

Perhaps, as Lally says, it's only taste. It's only individual taste.

But then, why does everybody love Shakespeare (the plays at least -- the poems suck)?

Why does everybody love Villon?

Silliman insists that everyone in the New American Poetry anthology should endlessly come out in new editions, and that in a sense, they should be canonical.

I think they should all be scrapped except Corso (and to a slightly lesser extent, Orlovsky).

Lally believes that Corso is a simple rhymester with a Hallmark card framework. Part of his writing is like that, but only if you're reading too fast. Something deeper is going in many of Corso's poems. I wrote a book on Corso called Doubting Thomist that essayed some of these deeper issues. But the shadows are infinitely deep in Corso's work, deeper than the moats of Poe, deeper than the various enumerations of supposedly infinite sets that nevertheless have different sizes.

Depth might seem shallow from some perspective or another, just as shallowness might seem like depth. Shadows may appear to be light, and light may appear to be shadow.

Progressive Vs. Conservative

The labels are somewhat oxymoronic if not paradoxical.

Progressives, for example, like to conserve nature, and historical buildings.

Conservatives like to put up new and more modern buildings after demolishing the old.

Conservatives mostly want to retain historical morals and ways of being: against stem-cell research, and abortion, and gay marriage, and want to retain the Judeo-Christian heritage based on the Ten Commandments.

Progressives want to retain historical cultures, and want the Native Americans to remain Native Americans, and want African tribes to remain tribal, and want each culture to retain its originality, even to the point of not being quite able to stand for women's rights in places like Afghanistan.

Conservatives (like Reagan) wanted to mainstream American Indians, bringing them up to date with the latest developments. Bush wants to mainstream Muslim countries, pushing them into the Democratic 21st century, where dictators disappear, and voting appears, and women have universal rights.

I'm sure there are many other ways in which the two terms aren't exactly adequate to what the supposedly rival groups claim to actually want.

And of course the two great streams have lots of crosscurrents within them.

But every time I hear the terms I giggle to myself at how inadequate they are.

Conservatives actually want progress on certain fronts: they want universal human rights based on Lockean Christianity, and they want to build an aggressive economic sphere that looks to the future.

Progressives actually are quite conservative on certain fronts: they want to retain each culture's wisdom, based on a Unitarian belief that Diversity of ideas is a good thing, and must be retained, and they want to retain the look of the 19th century even in the midst of our business spheres so that some kind of link to our history remains.

St. George and the Dragon

Here's something I noticed about myself that I wanted to share, both because maybe someone
else could use this, and also because I feel like trying to understand why this happens.

I published a novel a couple of years ago called Temping. It is likely to be the only novel that I will ever publish, because it is based on an adventure that I had in Finland which ended up with my marriage, and four kids. The adventure was harrowing, since it went on for five years, and
for two of those years I was basically stranded in Finland. I had an income, and nothing to
return to, and had a child and a wife, so I was stuck. It took me two years to find a new
academic job here. I don't really want any more adventures, so maybe I just won't write any more novels. I just want to molder away for the most part.

(Where I now have tenure.)

But here's the thing I wanted to report. In order to sell a novel, you have to make people aware
that the novel exists. This is very difficult, since I am a five. I hate author appearances, and it's
difficult to get anyone to review your book even in a tiny rag, and if you do, no one reads the review, and if they do, they ignore it, even if it's a good review. So that leaves author appearances, which I hate. And yet sometimes I kill the audience. It's very interesting. They just die.

Yesterday was another day in which I killed. It was at this new international bookstore in the
NW Catskills, called the International Bookport. The owner is a retired ambassador from Italy to the EU. A classy, intellectual woman named Elda Stifani. I was mortified to read there, because I was afraid no one would come, or the people who came would have no real interest. Those conditions are pretty much insurmountable, and I've faced them before in sleepy little libraries where two old ladies come, and one can't see, and the other can't hear, and they are sisters.

I feel like a stripper and no one can even be bothered to look at me in such conditions!

But yesterday a Japanese man read before me, and I had a chance to see that the audience had
a nervous brilliance to them! In fact, they were all diplomats from around Europe who work at the UN! There was an audience of about 40 people! A Slovenian ambassador knew Zizek. An Italian Ambassador had known Oriani Fallacci. A great audience!

The Japanese guy was getting laughs at very difficult jokes.

So when I got on, I knew this audience. And therefore I was able to slay them, and then I sold 12 books, and got 8 new addresses in my address book.

In Seattle at the Finnish Festival last year, another woman read before me, and I slayed that audience, too. Absolutely dropped them to their knees, killed them. And sold 12 copies. I think it was because I was able to check them out before I went on.

But about six months ago I was in New York City at the Estonian House and read to fifteen people, and I was the only reader. I couldn't read them at all. I didn't know who they were, and couldn't locate them!!!!!!!!!! I was sending out echoes, and nothing at all was coming back except a kind of snore, together with a little irritation. And I sold only 4 books. One of them took a book and promised to send payment, and didn't! So I actually lost money at the event, and
felt so bad I didn't want to show up at another event for six months!

At any rate, looking back over the history of my public presentations, and thinking about bombs versus good nights, I would say that getting to read second is what I like. I can then READ the audience as they respond to the warm-up act, and then I can go on and slay them.

Think of St. George with his pike in the throat of the dragon.