Cloud patterns shift and kick
As one in uncomfortable slumber
As turmoil turning bliss
And conflicts
Too light to lift
Too hard to lumber
They sleep
Impatient while they dream
Archive for November, 2005
Clouds
Hallelujah
Angels done broke the bugle
Harp’s all badly strung
Joyful noises make, anyway
Songs sung, loud and down the hall
Of things ain’t been done
Day come,
The way some say, it breaks,
For all of Earth to hear,
But a billion ears never know those noises
Their tune, and what they do.
The Imperial Red Yo-Yo
It sleeps, but turns too much to dream
It makes an empty cradle,
Goes for a walk in the air
And it comes back.
It’s only red plastic,
Turning around its insides
These are the dances it knows:
To rise and to fall
To snap at its caster
To fall to the floor
Faster
With more force than before
It dies on the wire, rewinds
Spins and sings
In so many cycles
Scrawl
Whatever words we scrawl in the sand
The ocean takes in what’s written
And the sea says, “no”
We write words down again
And the sea says, “yes
“I’ll go, but I’ll be here when you’re gone.”
Patterns of Action
Rows and Racks with spools of yarn
Colors drink the sun
Fingers run the length of them
Testing them,
Inspecting them.
Which one fits the pattern?
Which one will tie in
With the other knots
Which color brothers the other colors
This one?
Then, stepping out
From this loom of a room
Into the sun
Mid-day goings on
Upon an intersection sidewalk
Patterns of action.
Piles of Paper
I got up on stage last night to do a spoken word performance, and I think the crowd liked it! Normally, when I do something between musical acts, the audience is thin. People go to the bathroom or the bar between bands, and they expect anything they hear coming from the microphone to be a mike check, or silly stuff about how the band’s CDs are for sale.
I went up after Lizz King, Vox Populi, and before the N.U.R.B.S., and I was armed to the teeth. I’ve spent the better part of the last week digging through a pile of everything I’ve ever written.
My recent move to Baltimore has given me an opportunity to have everything I own in one place, for the first time in almost ten years. With all my notebooks and boxes of papers together again, I could spread them out on my floor, and sort them. Honestly, I threw most of those papers away. Many of them were redundant copies, obsolete drafts, notes, etc. Many more of those papers were bad teenage poems.
My best friend Luke called me last night to say that he’d been reading over an old issue of Apocalypse Playground. He was laughing, right at me, when he called. He has a point, though. In retrospect, a lot of that stuff is laughably bad. What was it we liked about that stuff again?
I managed to find a fair number of surprises in that pile of paper, though. I took them to the stage last night, and aired them out.
I’m going to the beach this Thanksgiving, but while I’m gone No Categories will faithfully publish a collection of poems that I have rewritten and salvaged from that enormous pile of paper.
What should I do with the bad ones?
Do We Need a Dying Language?
On a website entitled “2Blowhards“, “in which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions,” one of the blowhards, Donald Pittenger, has a rant about Dying languages:
What exactly might a language spoken by 250 people living near the Amazon River possess that, if lost, could never ever be reinvented in the future? If they have 12 names for beetles, that is nothing compared to taxonomies already performed by biologists. And if they have eight names for various types of tropical rainfall, so what? That information would be irrelevant to an Arabian nomad and the same information could be largely conveyed in other languages by use of adjectives.
BAcked His argument seems to be firstly, that nobody has recently made a convincing case for why a dying language should be preserved. He cites two admittedly weak arguments:
One argument for language preservation is that isolated languages embody folk-wisdom offering insights into herbs or leaves or bark or other substances that can cure one disease or another. … Another argument that catches my attention is based on the assumption that languages are like genes or DNA and that the loss of a language is equivalent to the extinction of a biological species.
I find the first argument a pathetic stretch and the second one absurd.
What exactly might a language spoken by 250 people living near the Amazon River possess that, if lost, could never ever be reinvented in the future?
In general, this blowhard is not so opposed to the preservation of dying languages as his tone would suggest, but he has something that resembles a “not with my tax money” attitude about it. My counterargument, then, is to address this question “What exactly might a language spoken by 250 people living near the Amazon River possess that, if lost, could never ever be reinvented in the future?” and to address this concern of his as well:
My take is that, in our modern high-tech world, cultures can and do visibly change: consider the fate of Western culture over the past hundred years. So just what is to be preserved if cultures wax and wane, changing all the while?
There may be no scientific, economic, or academic merit in these dying languages, just as there may be none of that merit in the following little bit of language:
Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
Why lovest thou that which thou receivest not gladly,
Or else receivest with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
Resembling sire and child and happy mother
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: ‘thou single wilt prove none.’
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 8 is language beautifully used. If you don’t agree, substitute it with whatever you feel happens to be language beautifully used. (Surely you can think of an instance of beautiful language, if you’re not that much of a blowhard). Now, imagine the language were to die; this sonnet would become illegible, its beauty lost. I happen to think that would be unfortunate.
It is interesting that this example happens to be written in something of a dead tongue preserved, isn’t it? Nobody speaks Elizabethan English anymore, but it lives on somehow, thanks to a certain kind of work, work which will undoubtedly continue, the deader the tongue becomes in time. I am in favor of that work — with my tax money, even.
The Performance Bug
Inspired in no small part by my friends’ performance at The True Vine, and encouraged by the time I’ve spent this week, digging through piles of my old poems, and finding some gems, I’ve decided to give another poetry reading. The last reading was a sucess, but it has been a while. I’m out of shape. I’ve been thinking of doing some “covers”, which should fit right in, considering that the next likely venue for such a performance is Saturday’s jam session at the other end of the Copycat Complex.
These are three songs whose lyrics I would like to perform as spoken word:
Re-humanise Yourself
Words by Sting
He goes out at night with his big boots on
None of his friends know right from wrong
The kick a boy to death ’cause he don’t belong
You’ve got to humanise yourself
A policeman put on his uniform
He’d like to have a gun just to keep him warm
Because violence here is a social norm
You’ve got to humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
I work all day at the factory
I’m building a machine that’s not for me
There must be a reason that I can’t see
You’ve got to humanise yourself
Billy’s joined the National Front
He always was a little runt
He’s got his hand in the air with the other cunts
You’ve got to humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
I work all day at the factory
I’m building a machine that’s not for me
There must be a reason that I can’t see
You’ve got to humanise yourself
A policeman put on his uniform
He’d like to have a gun just to keep him warm
Because violence here is a social norm
You’ve got to humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself…
Darkness
Words and music by Stewart Copeland
I can dream up schemes when I’m sitting in my seat
I don’t see any flaws till I get to my feet
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring
I could make a mark if it weren’t so dark
I could be replaced by any bright spark
But darkness makes me fumble
For a key
To a door
That’s wide open
Instead of worrying about my clothes
I could be someone that nobody knows
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring
I can dream up schemes when I’m sitting in my seat
I don’t see any flaws till I get to my feet
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring
Invisible Sun
Words and music by Sting
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite
I don’t want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
I don’t want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don’t ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done
It’s dark all day and it glows all night
Factory smoke and acetylene light
I face the day with me head caved in
Looking like something that the cat brought in
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done
And they’re only going to change this place
By killing everybody in the human race
They would kill me for a cigarette
But I don’t even wanna die just yet
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done
Intellectual Verbosity
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Live Music at the True Vine, Baltimore
Last Friday, with friends and neighbors, I attended a wonderful gathering at the True Vine record shop in Baltimore. In the back room, there was space enough to pack all of three bands and us for an evening of good music, good company, and laughter.
First on the line-up was Gemmel, a performance I was unfortunately unable to photograph, but a masterful show nonetheless. The guitar work was inflected, emotional, and very nimbly played.
Next, came Santadads: two guys, neighbors of mine, dressed as a bear and a tiger. The name of their mike-check tune seemed to be “We’re going to kill you!“, which was what they chanted. They ended their set with a very operatic rendition of the YMCA song. There wasn’t a dry eye or an un-split belly in the place.
Last, but not least came the new kid on the block, Lizz King. She’s a native of my hometown, Shepherdstown West Virginia, and played the show to announce the release of her first recording, entitled “All Songs Go To Heaven”.
For your listening pleasure, you loyal readers of No Categories, I have procured copies of the three songs on that recording. Please enjoy the songs: “Bigger, Better, Stronger, Faster” a song about a ridiculous work ethic. Next up, we have “Proletariat Delinquent” (whose title is difficult to spell), a delightful and somewhat eerie song. Lastly, there’s a song called “When the Curtain Rises“, which is a sultry song about disappointing things.
A good time was had by all, of course.
The rest of the pictures I took are posted in the photo album.
A Pack of Posthumous Poems
I’ve found the poems, entrusted to me by a friend who has died, now. The question is, what do I do with them?
A couple months ago, I posted an entry called Platitudes. It was about the death of a friend and:
a pack of poems my friend had written, in the back of an old notebook. I had always meant to return the poems to him. I would see my friend, in town, on occasion, and ask, “Did you know I still have those poems of yours†and “would you like me to return them to you?†I can still hear his voice, as it would sound, reading the poems. I cannot find the notebook they’re in. They are all I have of him, and they’re gone. The only thing left is the memory of a tone, and the memory of a tone fades.
What’s really disturbing: on the back side of this little piece of ephemera, my friend had written his father’s and his mother’s address, so that I could mail them back to him at some point. He wanted me to edit them.
on Normalcy
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Ellen Goodman
principles of design, principles of thought, arranging information
When principles of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.
No One There is You
Farther than the light goes
Shadows grow
Down the hallways
And alleyways
In the corridors,
The light is there
The shadows as well.
Its easy not to see the shadows
For the light
Its so easy to see the light;
Sunshine over gumdrop mountains
Picture-postcard.
I am stark against my shadow
Long and thin in a room
There is a tilt to things
Standing is spinning is sitting
Crowds around me, I’m on stage
No one there is really there
No one there can care
Except to clap
When I’m gone
And done.
When the lights go out,
They clap,
Because that’s the thing to do.
No one there is you
I am stark against my shadow
Long and thin in a room
There is a tilt to things
Standing is spinning is sitting
Crowds around me clouds
Around my ears are ringing
No one there is you.
Romance #9
I had a brief bored moment this afternoon. It is a rare thing lately. There it was though, a moment of nothing to do surrounded by two of its opposite moments. I wished I had someone to talk to, so I did what many people do in moments like these, I went out and I said something to someone. Well, I did not really go out. I didn’t really “say” anything, either. So maybe I never really solved the problem of not having someone to talk to, but it seemed like it did. That’s the same thing, really.
I sat in front of my computer and navigated to chat room: “romance #9″, and there I met some people to talk to. Well, I didn’t really “meet” them. I didn’t quite get their names. You see, it’s really loud in a chat room, as you can imagine. You would have to imagine. In such a space, everyone is talking at once, and you have to tell someone’s name by what they look like. Actually, you often have to determine what they look like by the appearance of their name.
My name is bad dreamr.
Imagine it is difficult to distinguish what people say their names are, due to all the commotion of words everywhere. So many names are taken. I met setanyc141 and rmanticwandrer.
I said, “Can I ask a question? Maybe it’s a stupid one”
“go ahead”
“what is love?”
At this time, you will have to imagine, the room full of talking people that we were in, was largely populated by robots. These robots are prostitutes. Already they’ve put the robots to use for mankind’s proverbial oldest profession. It’s difficult because every person in the room must turn off the robot themselves in order for it to leave them alone. The robots are always there. They want to have sex with you. Well, it’s not really “sex” that they want, something like it I suppose. It’s not the same thing, really. Could you imagine a real room full of so many robotic prostitutes?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the people from the robots, so I tried a question only a real person could answer.
“love is all a bunch of shit”
“would that be your technical definition”
“dumbass”
Unlike an ordinary room, every one in this room gets to be the one to make the quick witty response, leaving a litany of wit in the wake of any given comment. If only the classroom, the coatroom, the bathroom resembled the chat room in that respect, without the robots of course.
“I’ll grant that love may well be a bunch of shit… in your opinion, but you still haven’t said what it is, or why you hate it… what was your name again”
“can’t you read?”
“One time I thought I had it bad for this one chick, but she up and dumped me. That’s what happens, you get stomped on, so fuck it. Its all a bunch of shit.”
“Have you ever lifted weights?”
” Sorry, I’m new at this … are you talking to me?.”
“Yes”
“I don’t see the relevance”
” – yet. Answer the question.”
“Well, no.”
“Well it’s no wonder you don’t understand.”
“And why’s that?”
“Do you know what a spotter is?”
“Yes.”
“That’s love”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can’t you read? It’s all there.”
We never really had that conversation. And when I heard a knock at the door to my real room, I deleted the other room, and everyone in it, and the conversation I was having in that room, as well as its participants – I made all of it disappear. It all happened as quickly as I could quit thinking about it. My brief moment of boredom was over, and it was time to return to real life. Whatever that is.
A mythical monster
A mythical monster, believed by some to have lived for hundreds of years in the murky depths of a Swedish lake, is now fair game for hunters – if they can find it.
That’s right. If there is one at all, there is only one, so kill it! Good thinking.
Imported Artwork
During my work for One Love World Imports, I’ve come across some beautiful artwork. It has been my happy duty to clean up these images in photoshop, so that the works they depict can be sold, at fair prices.
Generation Y
The idea behind The Futurum is the website provides a way for people to publish a message for posterity. They call them "Eternalized Messages", which strikes me as a highfalutin way to refer to any kind of writing. The website explains itself:
you write your kids a story, post it and send them a link. they will always be able to return to our site and read the story once again. thousands of people, probably, will read it. and who knows, maybe one day you’d become a famous writer.
Celebrities who left messages: Maria Sharapova, Paris Hilton, Green Day, Jessica Biel.
Maybe it’s just me, but that’s silly, especially considering what gets done with that premise. I did not set out to write about the premise of that whole website, just a bit of its content, which appears to have absolutely nothing to do with this main idea.
There is one choice "eternalized message" entitled Generation Y: They’ve arrived at work with a new attitude. My ears perked-up at the sense that they’re "talkin’ bout my generation", so to speak. Then again, they’re not really talking about my generation, they’re talking about a demographic that is entering the workforce, and comparing that demographic, in economic terms, to other people called "co-workers". As a humanities major, this is not the way I prefer to discuss a group of people:
Unlike the generations that have gone before them, Gen Y has been pampered, nurtured and programmed with a slew of activities since they were toddlers, meaning they are both high-performance and high-maintenance, Tulgan says. They also believe in their own worth.
“Generation Y is much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management still popular in much of today’s workforce,†says Jordan Kaplan, an associate managerial science professor at Long Island University-Brooklyn in New York. “They’ve grown up questioning their parents, and now they’re questioning their employers. They don’t know how to shut up, which is great, but that’s aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, ‘Do it and do it now.’ â€
If I took all of the above references to "Generation Y" and replaced them with the term "Baby Boom", I’d have plagiarized an article from the sixties, I’m sure of it. There is nothing new here. Let’s move on.
For a more interesting, and complete account, with discussion of the notion of Generation Y, try reading the Wikipedia’s article about Generation Y.
Freedom of the Press is Limited to Those Who Own One
Jakob Nielsen is a noted expert on the subject of internet usability, a subject commonly known as “user-friendliness”. Nielsen’s October 17th article, Weblog Usability, has been linked to and discussed all over the place.
I’ll go ahead and jump on that bandwagon, by taking issue with something in that article. The overall premise of the article is a good one, that web logs should be informative, easy to navigate, and that they should contain certain key elements: author biographies, main ideas, etc. Here is the part that bugs me: Issue Number 10.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a “usability issue”, it bothers me that this is true, and it is true. I’ll admit to personally looking down upon those MySpace blogs, because they’re so ugly, unfriendly, and lacking features, but is that fair? Is it appropriate to prejudice something published online, because its author chose to use a free service to publish it? Is it fair to presuppose that the blogs provided by blogger, or friendster, etc. are somehow lacking in the level of technological sophistication compared to other blog software. They are not any more or less sophisticated. Most of the free internet publishing systems out there are actually quite good. What’s especially good about them is that they are generally usable even if you are an AOL user, naïve when it comes to computers. They assume a certain level of inability with or disregard for maintaining those “usability issues”, on the part of their users, and so they take care of those things, only providing templates that work for example. Yes, the free services are limited, and many of them contain advertising, but I don’t see that as a valid reason to judge their content to be any less deserving of attention. You have to read more than the address bar to make a decision like that.
A.J. Liebling once said that “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” Why shouldn’t everyone be able to have, and to use, a free press, free-of-charge?