Showing posts with label intro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intro. Show all posts
20130403
20120227
to win fluences
102 word submission on who or what influenced my direction in life as requested by alumni magazine editors for the spring issue via alumni affairs mass e-mail, unprinted.
The two influences that most fix my position, as a hungry,
variously-credentialed vortex of statistics and transactions with
the capacity to
generate and move capital
in American modernity, are
the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution,
by operation of which, over the past century,
(we the)
citizens have been rendered mere
consumers in the language of policy, and
Advertising, which gives
(we the)
consumers the miracle of perspective, teaching us
how to evaluate the relative merits of things
and be free. Hallelujah!
Existentially, an agent of doubt, I’m influenced
by Saturn, Neptune
and Mercury; politically: Uranus. Thanks for
the opportunity to share.
20110708
amidst the distressed texts
(pursuant to the continuing efforts to elucidate the notions of destructive writing and antihumor, here are more evasive descriptions, along with some select milestones in how i, oomph cavilrest, came to hold my cavils here, and also rest, at Hellmark Press excerpted from recent note to a mentor. we join it already in progress):
... I am shamed to admit that [career] does indeed occupy a lot of my attention.
Attention that would be better spent on family, friends, music, literature, food, coffee and tobacco! And often is so spent: One of the great benefits of being in a (semi)professional milieu where one may feel one has no status or significance, is that thoroughly embracing that statuslessness can give one a great deal of freedom, provided one can nurture enough ego through to enable one to exercise same.
Recently, in a fit of silly dejection over my professional trajectory, I started to blog. . .
. . . after a youth as the son of an early-adopter fascinated with computers, and through those heady days when networking became the Internet and all that it promised -- I am somewhat of a grudging, late-adopting Luddite insofar as social networking media and communications technology are concerned. I have endeavored to maintain no Internet footprint. In 2007 I got my first cell phone (pay-as-you-go); I just began my first contract with a mobile service one billing-cycle ago; I used dial-up to access the Internet until December 2010; also I joined Linked-In.
As a writer, over the course of almost 20 years, I have written a lot of stuff, a lot of fragmentary stuff (perhaps intended as part, or a sketch, of something larger), and a lot of different versions of the same stuff, without ever developing the will-to-publish sufficiently to impose some order and finitude on the collection. I even wrote a poem about it: [citation omitted: see another revisionary testament]
But, well, honest assessment concludes that no executor or -trix would have such interest and patience, and that those bundles of letters no longer exist.
So, a moment of mortality-colored realism with respect to the ol' oeuvre led me to imagine some server at some blog service somewhere -- and the internet archive -- as the place to commit all the revisions to one copy that would be, more or less, under my control, while sure to survive any catastrophic hardware or software failures here at home.
Also, as a writer-cum-snarky-absurdist-gadfly, I have been working on distressing found language in various ways, and then seeking numinous implication of meaning or beauty amidst the distressed text, which in aggregate I flippantly call "destructive (unsaid: as opposed to creative) writing" so that I don't sound naive. Sometimes someone asks me what destructive writing is, and I am hesitant to make conclusory statements about it, but don't mind sharing examples with the very patient interested party. One thing almost all destructive writing has in common is that it is hard to read.
(unlikely that any executor or -trix as imagined above would have any idea what to make of the various destructive writing projects in various stages of distress and numinousness there in the bequested drives).
Also there is a similar(ly absurdist) notion of "antihumor" that I am loath to explain, but I know it when I see it. I don't mind sharing illustrative examples, but have a hard time putting my hand to one. Old vaudeville tropes like "take my wife" and "boy are my arms tired" recontextualized and merged into shaggy-dog stories. ("Antihumor? I hardly knew her!")
Separately, another alter-anima had made some music using some audio sources that were public domain and some that were not, and craved an easy way to share it, and other collections of sounds.
And separately-separately, I have been, for some years, through the cafepress.com DIY-shop service, making t-shirts and cards, mostly for myself, under the name Hellmark Press, which, in turn, has been affiliated with the People's Peaceable Assembly Line, who, as you'll recall, dutifully "reported suspicious activities" in regular letters to dear norm.
So, when, in March, a visiting friend, glancing at a doodled cartoon on a scrap of paper, said she'd buy the t-shirt that featured that cartoon, it all fell together. Except for the technical aspects, which I soon learned in the usual fashion. And, since then -- don't tell anyone -- I've been Oomph Cavilrest, who runs Hellmark Press (your best source for the hot educational hip-hop beats of DJ Pebkac!)
. . . Disclaimers aside, that's pretty much where I am. To some degree it gives me comfort to be done with a lot of the individual writings, and the blog format offers some interesting organizing options. As a great deal of the ethos of destructive writing lies in a sort of hostility or antipathy to the traditional bourgeois reader, and, as narcissistic (and bourgeois) as blogging is essentially, I haven't given much thought to pleasant navigation for the reader, but the labels are a pretty good way. . . .
... I am shamed to admit that [career] does indeed occupy a lot of my attention.
Attention that would be better spent on family, friends, music, literature, food, coffee and tobacco! And often is so spent: One of the great benefits of being in a (semi)professional milieu where one may feel one has no status or significance, is that thoroughly embracing that statuslessness can give one a great deal of freedom, provided one can nurture enough ego through to enable one to exercise same.
Recently, in a fit of silly dejection over my professional trajectory, I started to blog. . .
. . . after a youth as the son of an early-adopter fascinated with computers, and through those heady days when networking became the Internet and all that it promised -- I am somewhat of a grudging, late-adopting Luddite insofar as social networking media and communications technology are concerned. I have endeavored to maintain no Internet footprint. In 2007 I got my first cell phone (pay-as-you-go); I just began my first contract with a mobile service one billing-cycle ago; I used dial-up to access the Internet until December 2010; also I joined Linked-In.
As a writer, over the course of almost 20 years, I have written a lot of stuff, a lot of fragmentary stuff (perhaps intended as part, or a sketch, of something larger), and a lot of different versions of the same stuff, without ever developing the will-to-publish sufficiently to impose some order and finitude on the collection. I even wrote a poem about it: [citation omitted: see another revisionary testament]
But, well, honest assessment concludes that no executor or -trix would have such interest and patience, and that those bundles of letters no longer exist.
So, a moment of mortality-colored realism with respect to the ol' oeuvre led me to imagine some server at some blog service somewhere -- and the internet archive -- as the place to commit all the revisions to one copy that would be, more or less, under my control, while sure to survive any catastrophic hardware or software failures here at home.
Also, as a writer-cum-snarky-absurdist-gadfly, I have been working on distressing found language in various ways, and then seeking numinous implication of meaning or beauty amidst the distressed text, which in aggregate I flippantly call "destructive (unsaid: as opposed to creative) writing" so that I don't sound naive. Sometimes someone asks me what destructive writing is, and I am hesitant to make conclusory statements about it, but don't mind sharing examples with the very patient interested party. One thing almost all destructive writing has in common is that it is hard to read.
(unlikely that any executor or -trix as imagined above would have any idea what to make of the various destructive writing projects in various stages of distress and numinousness there in the bequested drives).
Also there is a similar(ly absurdist) notion of "antihumor" that I am loath to explain, but I know it when I see it. I don't mind sharing illustrative examples, but have a hard time putting my hand to one. Old vaudeville tropes like "take my wife" and "boy are my arms tired" recontextualized and merged into shaggy-dog stories. ("Antihumor? I hardly knew her!")
Separately, another alter-anima had made some music using some audio sources that were public domain and some that were not, and craved an easy way to share it, and other collections of sounds.
And separately-separately, I have been, for some years, through the cafepress.com DIY-shop service, making t-shirts and cards, mostly for myself, under the name Hellmark Press, which, in turn, has been affiliated with the People's Peaceable Assembly Line, who, as you'll recall, dutifully "reported suspicious activities" in regular letters to dear norm.
So, when, in March, a visiting friend, glancing at a doodled cartoon on a scrap of paper, said she'd buy the t-shirt that featured that cartoon, it all fell together. Except for the technical aspects, which I soon learned in the usual fashion. And, since then -- don't tell anyone -- I've been Oomph Cavilrest, who runs Hellmark Press (your best source for the hot educational hip-hop beats of DJ Pebkac!)
. . . Disclaimers aside, that's pretty much where I am. To some degree it gives me comfort to be done with a lot of the individual writings, and the blog format offers some interesting organizing options. As a great deal of the ethos of destructive writing lies in a sort of hostility or antipathy to the traditional bourgeois reader, and, as narcissistic (and bourgeois) as blogging is essentially, I haven't given much thought to pleasant navigation for the reader, but the labels are a pretty good way. . . .
20110520
a special welcome
A special welcome to Fiona Jeanne, and concomitant congratulations to certain involved parties!
20100718
astrologorrhea ii, the place to start is the natal chart
i am interested in such bodies of incredible and debunked lore
(not aether, phrenology and phlogiston so much as i ching, tarot, bibliomancies and allegedly diagnostic panels and batteries of psychological tests . . . just kidding, those panels and tests probably go with the phlogiston).
my standard more-or-less-real-science comparison for the potential insight of astrology (specifically the birth chart) is the myers briggs personality type indicator, or kiersey temperament sorter, which you have likely encountered as part of some team-building program somewhere (total quality managers and their ilk believe learning about the MBTI encourages more personalized management, and fosters collegial sympathy), and which purports to classify personalities according to four descriptive axes into one of sixteen types. (there too, the serious literature reveals a dynamic rather than static system, but still: four axes, sixteen types).
um. the place to start is with a natal chart. this will be an image, most likely a circle with a cross through it and lots of symbols and probably lines everywhere.
(not aether, phrenology and phlogiston so much as i ching, tarot, bibliomancies and allegedly diagnostic panels and batteries of psychological tests . . . just kidding, those panels and tests probably go with the phlogiston).
my standard more-or-less-real-science comparison for the potential insight of astrology (specifically the birth chart) is the myers briggs personality type indicator, or kiersey temperament sorter, which you have likely encountered as part of some team-building program somewhere (total quality managers and their ilk believe learning about the MBTI encourages more personalized management, and fosters collegial sympathy), and which purports to classify personalities according to four descriptive axes into one of sixteen types. (there too, the serious literature reveals a dynamic rather than static system, but still: four axes, sixteen types).
um. the place to start is with a natal chart. this will be an image, most likely a circle with a cross through it and lots of symbols and probably lines everywhere.
20100717
astrologorrhea i, the sincere horoscopist
[this is a kind of long email for an idle comment over happy hour with two ladies from the office whom i have observed, separately, to favor modes of textual communication that tend toward somewhat greater brevity, with the concomitant implicit expectation that it be read; (we join it now in progress) . . . knowing the imposition such an uninvited dissertation may be, i welcome your response, lack thereof, or whatever in between, as, acknowledging that expectation, i'll also admit other expectations sympathetic with any point on that spectrum. so.]
(having invited no response, he got none; live and learn! -ed.) that said,
welcome, Dear Reader, to ruminations on how one might learn about astrology.
(having invited no response, he got none; live and learn! -ed.) that said,
welcome, Dear Reader, to ruminations on how one might learn about astrology.
20100224
mattyP
mattyP, whose weekly mailing i read and sometimes try to wryly respond sometimes tells me i ought to have a blog. it's easy! so here's one of those thing i wrote, eliciting such a suggestion. mattyP'd told a story of the case of some litigants living in a nursing home which started because it was alleged that, upon their first meeting, the party of the second part caused her cat to urinate on the party of the first part, my friend's client. Other events ensued, so to speak, involving harassment and threats of violence, in which, as i have been given to understand, my friend's client prevailed and was exonerated at law. i was suspicious because, having some exposure to cats, i have noted in them no capacity for taking direction:
I could never get a cat to piss on the shoes of my enemies. Oh, sure, if my enemy were camping at my place for some time and left his shoes casually about and then, independently, did something or other to earn that cat's enmity, too, then, maybe, my cat would piss on my enemy's shoes. Or if my enemy's shoe were filled with soil and there were a precious, precocious little seedling sprouting from that dirt in the first fulsome blush of promised lush verdancy, among the flowerpots of plants larger and more able to absorb the ammoniac flood, then, my cat might piss in that shoe, although, then, not out of enmity toward my enemy at all, but out, instead, of typical raw feral feline enmity to small fragile shoots and fronds.
I could never get a cat to piss on the shoes of my enemies. Oh, sure, if my enemy were camping at my place for some time and left his shoes casually about and then, independently, did something or other to earn that cat's enmity, too, then, maybe, my cat would piss on my enemy's shoes. Or if my enemy's shoe were filled with soil and there were a precious, precocious little seedling sprouting from that dirt in the first fulsome blush of promised lush verdancy, among the flowerpots of plants larger and more able to absorb the ammoniac flood, then, my cat might piss in that shoe, although, then, not out of enmity toward my enemy at all, but out, instead, of typical raw feral feline enmity to small fragile shoots and fronds.
20061014
what is the grind, for sis
the grind
is little plastic espresso “group”-formed cups filled with vacuum sealed robusta
for fitting in the space aged autocoffee doser
which on reflection is not so much advance on the circa ‘60s machines that
dribbled something almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee
or starbucks
both of which more or less mock espresso and obfuscate coffee.
is little plastic espresso “group”-formed cups filled with vacuum sealed robusta
for fitting in the space aged autocoffee doser
which on reflection is not so much advance on the circa ‘60s machines that
dribbled something almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee
or starbucks
both of which more or less mock espresso and obfuscate coffee.
20041106
20041026
20040801
epitaph
When the water that makes
up most of me flows out of that
great mouth, across the ultimate delta
and merges into that omniform sea,
I will still have the identity, the
significance to this holistic system
and its parts I currently seem to enjoy.
I will not miss my friends and enemies;
they will breathe, and bathe in, me,
as I and my suspension labor after the moon.
up most of me flows out of that
great mouth, across the ultimate delta
and merges into that omniform sea,
I will still have the identity, the
significance to this holistic system
and its parts I currently seem to enjoy.
I will not miss my friends and enemies;
they will breathe, and bathe in, me,
as I and my suspension labor after the moon.
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