Recent Developments

Today: Richard sent off three job applications and one conference proposal (another's almost there, will send tonight), rewrote the first third of the first third of his first chapter, ate salmon sandwiches, secured poems by Tom Raworth for Crater, read a bit of that endless William Carlos Williams biography, listened repeatedly to the new Jono El Grande and Zombi albums and will have prawns and spaghetti for dinner. Who needs friends?

Sporty Spicer

In lieu of relevant thesis work I have been continuing my reading of American poets who wrote a little about baseball, and am on Jack Spicer. This is one:

For Jack

Tell everyone to have guts
Do it yourself
Have guts until the guts
Come through the margins
Clear and pure
Like love is.
The word changes
grows obscure
Like someone
In the coldness of the scarey night air
Says-
Dad
I want your voice.

This is an 'admonition' from Admonitions and is addressed to Spicer himself, of course. Try rewriting this poem using a word of your own for every one of Spicer's, but without just making each its opposite or equivalent. Harder than it looks.

New Mastodon Album

The new mastodon album is really wet, but also fantastic - check out the weird emo bits in 'Quintessence'. It cames with a 90 minute making off documentary, from which I found out that the concept behind the record is that this disabled boy in Tsarist Russia has this out of body experience and somehow his 'golden umbilical chord' that connects him to his old body gets cut and he gets lost up in the aether (the aforementioned 'Quintessence'). Luckily, however, Rasputin (!) takes pity on the boy and allows himself to be assassinated even though he knows he could have got away and then flies up and brings the boy back to his body. Then there's this song called 'The Last Baron' which is apparently about WWI dogfights and such. Bananas.

There will never be a record as good as Leviathan but this is a weird great pop metal confection, astounding.

First Blog Post

Amazing, this is my first blogpost, as I become a blogger. The idea of this is to add a new hobby to my extensive list of hobbies that I can do while I am not writing my thesis or doing other worthwhile things. If you want you can read along and partake of the excitement in my life vicariously.