A Gutful of Art

Closing in on one hundred posts. So we shall move on. These are some of the events I have been to.

---

Went to two different events in the last few days. The first one on
Friday Evening (June 26 2009) was the normal poetry slam held at the
Front Cafe. Compared to last months infamous, woman's only, reading the joint was packed out, indeed I felt claustrophobic and had to step outside into the early winter evening to get some space.

The usual gang of poets descended like locusts devouring and
spewing out all manner of words. I hung about for about half of the
evening, chatting with assorted people, drinking a few beers, before
the discomfort of the large crowd in the small venue got the
better of me, and I left. Sad to say that the crowd was so large that it became difficult to hear some of the readers.

A friend from my work came along and we both enjoyed the
evening. As the rhymes and riddims spread across the room, special
attention was drawn to Anthony's declamation of the bus voucher.
Leading to (or following from), discussions of the Platonic ideal and the language of object oriented programming OOP, and the naming and ordering of found poetry.

Which for no obvious reason raises an interesting question. Compared to last month's relatively poor turnout, what gives? Knowing Julian fairly well, at least in his guise as a poetry Svengali, I can vouch for his commitment to being inclusive in who is allowed to read. Is this even a problem, an issue? Are we all to blame, are we blameless? Are we thrown and lost in the maelstrom? Do we lack the understanding to crawl ourselves unto the earthly paradise?

Paradise bower bird males gathering shiny Moriarty blue objects,
building preening dancing stages. Is this biology, simple chemistry and little else? Are poets only looking for the pleasure that matter brings? Of course (everyone says) there is more to the creation of art than Werther's sturm und sorrow drang. Confronting naked lunch at the end of the fork? If not now when?

One does not have to look very long or hard (pun intended??) to find many instances and discussions of the unifying of sexual and creative energy.

My love talks of the intimidating stance and speech of the men
poets, I can not fault her argument. As part of the problem...

---

On Monday I went to Smith's Books for a book launch of local poet, Fiona McIlory. The book was launched by Green Party member Ms Caroline
Le Couteur MLA. Praise was given to small business as being members of the community, and how money spent at small business stayed in the community. This is all very true, but also is the fact that giant oaks grow from tiny acorns. There is an intelligence within the exploitive relationship which wishes to unfold itself.

Touching accessible poems of life and love and loss.

One tiny bit stuck a sore point with me. In a poem, which I did
not catch the title of, comment was made of using Vista to access the internet, facebook, GetUp et al. Surely in this day and age of solid, easy (relatively) to install GUN/Linux distributions, no right thinking progressive person or organinsation can justify using Micr$oft products.

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.


• Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.


• Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.


• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

And then some songs were sung by the poet. And then I had to dash off into the night. The bookends of my weekend. Friday and Monday night.

Happy (Late) Bloomsday

June 16.

It was a Tuesday night. A cool evening here in Canberra, down to 2 degrees centigrade over night. What is late spring in Ireland, is late autumn here in Australia (working on the assumption the winter/summer begins about june 20th).

I went into Manuka, to the Paper Chain bookstore, there was to be a Bloomsday event. How could I have done otherwise?



Being a bookstore first and a venue second, it was uncomfortable, forcing the majority of listeners to stand. But of course lovers of Joyce will not but put off by having to stand, especially as there so were so many wonderful books around! Remembering the discomfort and poverty that Jim and Nora, as well as their children overcame, puts things into perspective. :-)

I arrived late, as I had made a configuration error in our monitoring application at work. I had no choice but to tidy up my error before I left work. This made me late. When I arrived an older man was reading from Ulysses, maybe it was from the Hades section. Bloom noticed the potato talisman in his pocket. Maybe I am confused.

Graeme Adler on violin and Margaret O'Connor on guitar and vocals sang some songs that were primarily settings of poetry, much of it by WB Yeats. Including this one.

---

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

---

Is it just me, or there a hint of an aristocratic fascism in this poem? (Although, as I have just finished the Cantos of Ezra Pound I should probably just shut up.)

A toast to the memory of Sylvia Beach, and to independent book stores in general, yoked under the angelic patronage of Thomas Aquinas.

And then a chap name Robert, I think, read a section from Circe.

STEPHEN: (BRINGS THE MATCH NEAR HIS EYE) Lynx eye. Must get glasses.
Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat.
(HE DRAWS THE MATCH AWAY. IT GOES OUT.) Brain thinks. Near: far.
Ineluctable modality of the visible. (HE FROWNS MYSTERIOUSLY) Hm. Sphinx.
The beast that has twobacks at midnight. Married.

A final reading from Ulysses, the last pages of the Sirens section. An amusing finish to the evening. With the sentence "Bloom alone." showing the power of Joyce's economic emotions.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap

--Very, Mr Dedalus said, staring hard at a headless sardine.

Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last
sardine of summer. Bloom alone.

All in all a pleasant evening. personally I would have preferred more readings from Ulysses, but fun has had. A glass or tow of wine, some Music, some Poetry, what more can one desire.

Three cheers to all involved!

PS
Why I love UNIX.

I was able to navigate to the directory to find the text version of Ulysses i downloaded from here. Then I thought of some unique word or phrase from readings. For example, I remeber Poldy being full of gas in the last reading. So I ran the command

$ cat -n ulysses.txt | grep -i gassy

cat prints the file to the screen (stdout) and the "-n"switch appends a line number to each line. And the the grep command (global regular expression print) searchs the text stream for a particualr 'expression' in this case 'gassy.' This gave the output:


14060 Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait. Postoffice near Reuben J's


This allowed me to then issue the command emacs +14060 ulysses.txt - taking me to line desired.

The moral being that UNIX is way cool :-)


I LOVE UNIX

Ashen Overlord

This was written a while ago, maybe i was thinking something, but i can't remember what. This one had a heap of edits to make into something legible. (The $ sign envoi is a BASH variable construct, I do like shell programming, it is in many ways the epitome of reuse) When you do something on the UNIX Command Line, you should ask yourself how can i abstract this, how can i script this and make it generic?

---

He wore a pulverised hard rock
Pluto ash silt soot. Froth gray
Ember in the industry. Cinder gray
Was whats tarn locos what says.

Describe the colour
Fat deposition copper
What sed, settling spit
Lees on his lip...

The colour of cancerous
Old man a Juno wag
A wagging might.

And I thought of my old grandpa
Gold on the kitchen table.
Sitting up straight Dead Eyes judging
And his lucky Club Polo shirt
Fume, dross and faded washings.

The skin was blind cloudless
Flat now dead granpa smeart back
The kitchen table. Eyes open
The tearburn smut suit fifty
Dollars that shop the maul. Dead.

And the unknowing dog sniffed
And licked back his hand dead.
And muther charsed the dog
Out the kitchen. Jimmy Jimmy
She screamt aloud - taken
That cur outside eh?! Take him
Filthy beast and tie him up.

${For the rest of the day
     the dog howled and bayed
     her opposition to the leash}