My Social 3KilLz!

Two great ones this week...

Talking to a colleague about my need to find new living arrangements...

Me: "Yeah, I gotta find a place."
He (A married man with children): "Well, I'm moving back out of the apartment I've been living in for six months."
Me: "Why are you moving?"
He (Long Pause): "I'm moving back in with my wife."

ooops!

But the next one is better. Chilling with an instructor I am particularly fond of I'm talking shit about how instructors work .75 schedules year-round and don't work much even in instruction..

Me (repeatedly): "So I was working while all you instructors were in Ibiza or Spain (yes, I actually said "Ibiza or Spain.").
She (after multiple repetitions of the above): "Well, I did get two weeks off to go visit my parents and tell them I have cancer."
Me:..... Actual silence...

Foot, meet mouth!

Why I hate "Concrete" poetry...

Because it's a fucking lame typographical trick, yo!

"Oh my, the Sands of Time!"

All things take time and life takes more
As these things waste my time they also bore
And all time wasted is time we have no more
It is subtracted from our two and fourscore

We slog dully on at this mind-numbing pace
As if there were no graveyard to face
No dark and silent resting place
No fall from light and grace

I don’t know why
The I
I
I
I
I
Denies
I take the slide.

Instead, days bring quotidian tasks
That we keep completing until the last
Robs us of memories, present, future, past
And leaves us, dirt to dirt, or leaves of grass

And you don’t believe as we soldier through
That as nights grow long and days grow few
You took the chance to waste some time
Now in return? Time must waste you.

Some funny things from a funny

Allegedly "real" answers to math problems (and is "math problem" redundant?)

I'm not sure how you can't give that dude credit.. he surely found "x" and without an internet connection at that. The next one is not quite as humouresque, but I have nothing better to do.

And I must say that the "new and advanced" ability of blogger to upload images will probably make me completely reliant on it so that when I take my blog elsewhere all my image links will be lost.

Say, you don't think they designed it that way on purpose?

New York Dolls - Tommy

Aaaah. your minimum daily requirement of the FREAKING NEW YORK DOLLS!

It's ok.. I can breathe now...

"Korean Scientists Create Magical Substance"

Man..

That's a headline at the Korea Times. Did they create pixie dust? A cure for AIDS? Perhaps immortality?

Zeolite?!?!?!?!

you all know I really liked Korea and will be going back. But the Korean chauvinist lunacy about Korea outstrips any other countries' chauvinist lunacy. Even after the Hwang cloning fraud, Koreans will believe any outrageously excellent claim about Korea or Koreans.

In this case they (apparently, cause I no longer believe what their labs report) have made synthetic zeolite (sounds like a made up substance) which might help convert crude oil to gasoline. Which was apparently impossible before.

Well, not really.

Someone please tell me that this headline was because Mr. Ed Park (world's best translator from Korean to English) was not at the helm!

Is she still a technical virgin if I eat her?

so like, really, would I go to hell?

It's all available here.. with delicious nougat filling.

I Hope these guys Work Night Jobs

WTF is this shit?

Poetry for the thought impaired? Nah, as I have learned in my "Just Barely Accredited Master's Degree Program" this crud is "concrete" poetry. Concrete poetry features a "strong, explicit and formal cohesion between the physical shape of the poem and its content." The poem is laid out in some sense that reflects upon the content of the poem. The concrete poem is normally minimal (it must fit inside its form) and restrained (the tight, yet often varying, line requirements of these poems limit what can be done verbally. In Jonathan Raban's The Society of the Poem ( 1971) he claims that concrete poems:

Stand in relation to the central body of contemporary English and American poetry much as the sacking-and-scrubbed-deal Health Food restaurant does to the steak house. They self-consciously exemplify the virtues of impoverishment and deprivation.(Huk 117)

I go further and say it's poetry for the thought impaired as it gives a simple and confining (in at least two sense) definition of what the poem is up to. The thought impairment resides in the poet who is looking for a "trick" with which to give their poem some impact that it does not have as a merely lingual construct. I don't mean to argue that layout tricks can't be done well – some e.e. cummings (obviously someone with issues about the rules of lingualism) is very.. well, clever (and it falls short of being completely concrete by some margin). But usually clever in the perjorative sense that one uses the word in describing something done by a creepy but imaginative child. And the concrete poetry that actually forms the shape of something? At least cummings usually used his layout trickery in the hunt for ways to read poetry they way he would have liked it read, But in a case like that you get something more akin to a clever greeting card than poetry. Sure, a short smattering of sibilant alliteration, at least two internal rhymes and a lovely stump of punctuation. These might or might not be elements of poetry, if used correctly. But the form looks silly and distracts from whatever message the poem is trying to give. Perhaps part of the problem with this concrete approach is that poems are multidefinitional and these simple forms (and then the dualistic black/white) call for simpler definitions. This particular poem might actually be seen as clever – it isn't "about" the tree, it is in fact "by" the tree. A lesser poet, one who can't adopt a third-person voice, might have struggled for the form of an owl (well, perhaps not, since that form is more complicated) And thus a sixth-grade level of sophistication is neatly achieved).

The form determines the words, and not in a good way. In a Haiku or Villanelle the form also determines the words, but it starts with the words and ends with the words. In the case of concrete poetry you are really placing a carpenter's mold over words – and giving each input equal value. Certainly this chips away at the "Poetic" nature of the result?

The proof that it is a trick can be seen by adding one more layer of affect (stupidity?) on top of the thing. Imagine someone thought, "hey, let's go ahead and add minimalism to this silly mix." Well, someone did as "Letter of Resignation" by nick-e melville (a "poet" who obviously stole at least one move from the cummings playbook) proves. But this is an advertising approach or a joke, or child's play and not poetry. The point is that each "trick" layer you apply to poetry seems to somehow alter the nature of the result in some way that moves it away from poetry and to sloganeering or mere cleverness. It's a rum trick (and plenty more of it, if you care to, here

My Undergraduate Years.

So now, at last, in my "Just Barely Accredited Online Master's Program" I have reconnected with why I like academia ('love' would be going to far on this, the first date of my senescence).

The class I hate the most so far, some shit about poetry, has me off in a corner reading a painstakingly stolen (cut and pasted one page at a time, baby!) book by the mad priest Willy Ong. A little treatise on the difference between literate (writing) cultures and oral (get your mind out of the gutter you tramp) cultures and how this affects thinking.

I won't get into all the clever things he says, or how it makes me think that the literate culture must shortly die as technology (tv... blogs... podcasts) is recreating an oral culture. But reading this piece, on my computer in the bar?

Reminds me of the decade I learned most of what I am. Locked in a series of silly apartments in the Berkely/Oakland area drinking gallons of beer, often snorting illegal substances, but blessedly alone, without expectation (I had done a fairly keen job of scaring my friends and family off). All I did was read and write and think. I suppose it was, minus the drugs, porno, and odd (in all senses of the word) girlfriends, a monastic lifestyle.

Reading Ong I long for the time to sit, read and think...

Korea?

please?

;-)

Moving to New York.. not Montreal

So, Korea is off until March. Which leaves me stuck in Inner City. A lovely city.

By which I mean stenchpot

But by staying I will be able to pay for my "Just Barely Accredited" BS and Masters degrees. So I suppose that's good.

And the marketing gig is actually better than ever. I have been shifted to one of the colleges and we are (ahem!) kicking our sister college's ass. The other college never listened to my advice anyway, so they deserve the pit they seem to be falling into. As it looks now, I have made the right marketing decisions and they have made bad ones. We'll know in a bit less than a month.

The move to the new college brings the predictable bullshit. We don't have much of a budget at Inner City College and so I do the marketing things that I think work best. Our administrators (even the great one I'm temporarily working for) see things other colleges are doing and then wait on them to bring them up in meetings. These admins (again, excluding the one I'm temping for - and provisionally my "real" guy) are so tight that they could hold three greased quarters between their knees while juggling seven red-hot pennies. But when they talk to me they mysteriously lose all track of budget realities. I assume it is the fact that my chiseled jaw and noble profile make them assume I am a multi-millionaire and infamous rake in my spare time. Otherwise it just makes no sense.

It goes like this:

Administrator: I was over at the Fluffy Poodle strip joint the other day and I noticed that the strippers there had (name of other college redacted) logos on their nipple pasties. Why don't we do that.

Me (Pausing): I'm, ... uh... aware of that adverstising opportunity. But (other college redacted) spends about 5 times the money we do (I no longer even mention they have 5 positions in marketing and we have 1). So, what we do here at Inner City College is spend our money in the best ways we can.

Administrator: Yeah, but, (name of other college redacted) is advertising at the Fluffy Poodle.

Me (Choking back the blood from the tongue I just bit): Well, we look at the demographics, the reach and frequency we can get, and our budget, and we do what is most efficient. I can give you the demographics we are reaching for and....

Adminstrator (Impatiently): I understand that you spend all your money. But why aren't we advertising on the nipple-pasties at the Fluffy Poodle? The other college is.

Me (wondering if a bullet really tastes that bad. Hell, you probably don't even taste it if the muzzle velocity is high enough): If someone can convince me that this will reach more potential students than what we currently do, and I need some numbers, then I'm fine with doing it...

Adminsitrator (Reaching for some imagined version of benevolence which includes a notion that I am dumb as a stump): Oh, I'm not questioning what you are doing. I just have a question about why we aren't in the Fuzzy Poodle. On the nipple pasties.

it goes on like that... on some other occasion I'll have to talk about how instructors see all this and the inevitable rolled eyes when I mention that we might all just want to look at where the political parties advertise because.. .and follow this, because administrators don't seem to get it.... they are extremely fucking results oriented!!!!

For now?

I think I left something sharp in that nice warm bath I'm running. Better go check it out. ;-p

Pure Poetry for Pop People

Proving that songs can be poetry!


James Lipton does Kevin




K-Fed Popozao

Human After All!

New York Dolls Baaaaaybeee!

With cameo's from our monkey president and his charming sidekick

SO MANY STORIES LOSERS TELL

My stupid text-book in my "Just Barely Accredited Master's Progam" says that a villanelle cannot tell a story.... I disagreed....

SO MANY STORIES LOSERS TELL

So many stories losers tell!
Grade-school nerd boys without lives
Who have no faith in villanelle

They answer to the high school bell
And on the high school paper strive
So many stories losers tell!

Scorned in college, pale, unwell
Then with no hope of jobs or wives
Who have no faith in villanelle

Next work on novels that don’t sell
Write poems that spread hives
So many stories losers tell!

Finally the journal’s venal spell
They savage real writers lives;
Who have no faith in villanelle

Now let us pray they rot in hell
Neath dishonored unmarked graves
So many stories losers tell
Who have no faith in villanelle

LAST MAN ON EARTH

When we shared the elevator
You just looked straight ahead
And when I asked if I could date you
You said if "every other man were dead."

CHORUS
It didn't seem so good when you first said it
But now with every man who drops dead it
Increases my chances, of midnite romances
I just might be the last man in the world!

So it wasn't love at first sight
And you've avoided me since then
But now the world is in a bomb-site
I don't need to ask again

REPEAT CHORUS

Bombs keep dropping, hearts keep stopping
A the White House keeps the hearses popping
As Soldiers die, and women cry
I might end up the last man alive!

REPEAT CHORUS

You never figured all these bombs would drop
I couldn't dream the world might stop
You had many men, now there's a dearth
I just might end up last man on earth

REPEAT CHORUS