Trinken Sie Es Schwarz
Trinken Sie es kurze Liste des Schwarzen A der notwendigen Ubel: Formen und Markterhebungbesteuerung die politische Systembevolkerungsdichte, die Verunreinigungsausgabe auf dem militarischen shonky Schnellimbi?gaumen der Diplomaten verursacht

The formula
It hasn't been deliberate yet already this blog has developed features that a critic could glom onto:

(1)the revolving hyperlink: favourites signify both individual taste and mass acceptance; the revolving hyperlink cycles through it all
(2)apt title: the title doesn't have to fit the content of the posting but it does have to play off Drink It Black
(3)the way the world plays it: this started off accidentally with Filipino fans of Smallville and seemed a novel way to point to a country and its people without going into fallback mode and documenting their latest coup de tat or natural disaster
(4)a bit of language: the link is in another language
(5)alignments: what started with skeptics popping up in a newspaper piece, has evolved into a need to drop in on all those maddening little subgroups who exercise an opinion different from that fed to them like infant mush by the mainstream
(6)musical chairs: I'll be back on the beat in no time
(7)sitting here without a comic book: that's a document of description NOT a suggested title
(8)there's a lesson in there: exploring a thing not because it has personal significance or you want to rat on your friends but because it is of interest and could prove beneficial - as long as it doesn't come across all preachy
(9)haranguing by a thread: has the quality of the zine upon which it is based

Now that Jello's back in town
I've never really understood spoken word. I know not everything should be turned into comedy, as my blogging style attests. And I am sure too that there should be at least an attempt to entertain rather than to harangue. I suppose the structure of song, screenplay and vignette quell the directness of the message. I'm just not sure that paying someone forty dollars to tell you stuff for three hours is all that good a deal.

The paining thing for me, being sympathetic to Biafra's position, is that it is those early Dead Kennedys songs that I remain so enthused about. More, Holiday In Cambodia is my favourite single. So the fact that JB is out on his own and the kid from The Courtship of Eddie's Father is singing his material is all a bit confronting. It makes all those old accusations about the DK's being cartoon punk take on resonance. I don't begrudge the others for wanting to preserve the franchise but it's a bit surreal for my liking. And that's saying something.

"Jane Fonda on the screen today/Convinced the liberals it's okay"

Horses for courses
Or not.

On the heist horse
What does all this mean to the practicing writer? Well while I was at uni I managed to be at loggerheads with both a lecturer who loved the play of po-mo AND one who bore the post-sense sense of 'post' some ill will. I've put this down to a number of possible causes:
my Libran tendencies sped up so that I'm deliberating out loud, if you will, about which way I'm going to jump on any issue;
it's my fondness for playing Devil's Advocate, sometimes to my own detriment;
I was a hick writer who had to learn me a few things about Lyn Hejinian and ilk e like
I was an elitist prick;
I didn't know shit from clay in those days;
it was Freud's principle of fort da operating - ever since I've learnt that wretched (not to say obscure) theory of Sigmund's I have been cursed to play it out. Without getting too circular, the idea seems to be that we are compelled to send things - even things that are good for us - away;

well, you get the idea. And if I can fashion so many possible plausible explanations for something I "should know" then perhaps I was wrong and should surrender to the multiplicities at once.

On a hire horse
If you waltz into the halls of academe with the attitude displayed in that last post then you're cruisin' for a bruisin' because English studies has fully embraced Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Spivak, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.

This is fair as far as it goes and I would be more suspicious of a discipline that chose to ignore or reject the prevailing theorists. There might have been critics of F.R. Leavis's Close Reading too. But they had to wait their turn.

Neither are critical theorists like Julia Kristeva or Edward Said left out of the debate. There would seem to be a nod to all the major twentieth century theories so long as they are not at complete variance with the dominant thinking.
In short, any theory needs to trace its lineage to Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist theory rather than that of opposing semiotician C.S. Peirce. This then flows nicely down through Roland Barthes and the poststructuralists, picking up anthropology and psychoanalysis along the way till it arguably reaches its most radical with Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction, and Paul de Man.

On a high, hoarse
The following was originally posted on the old Mobius Infinity boards:

["But isn't everybody post-modern?" "Yeah, but we're 22!"]

The title of this thread is particularly apt as it is the conceit of postmodernists that irks me the most. I read some poetics where these PM dudes were criticising poets for differentiating themselves from postmodernism. As if that was not valid because 'hey you're postmodernist whether you think so or not.'

Well here's another poet who does NOT identify himself as postmodernist. I am not against the theory per se. I love some of the programs that play with the dice such as The Simpsons, Roseanne (except for the last series which went too far with Jackie's imaginary prince and what have you). But I find it more useful as a tool to differentiate from other cultural and literary theories: marxism, phenomenology, etc. Why should it arrogate itself into a position of all inclusiveness?

My main beef with postmodernism, however, is the way that it "opens up all possibilities". I feel cheated and robbed as a poet when I see people spewing out any old crap and insisting that it be called poetry. I have practiced and polished my craft for more twenty five years yet, in current thinking, my work has no more claim to legitimacy than some abject hack who wouldn't know his asshole from his assonance.

It is probably the artists' fault that we have placed what we do on such a pedestal. If the poet was considered in the same light as the cabinetmaker then we might have a go at quantifying/qualifying the standard of what we produce. The inheritors of the Gertrude Stein school of poetics are the equivalent of the guy who goes crazy with a nailgun and insists he's a tradesman. "What's a dovetail joint, man?"

Take your medicine
Some people have creative blocks. Not me, I churn out stuff. But I've got blocks; blocks going round the block, blocks enough to make me do my block, a veritable tower of blocks. And I've finally decided to do something about it.

It was simple really. I remember reading in an ancient selfhelp book where the author describes a faulty light switch that he put up with for literally years. The damn thing annoyed him something chronic and when he did finally get it fixed he realized what a tremendous burden had been lifted from his shoulders - all for something that was easy and inexpensive to fix.

So I looked it up on the Internet under 'clearing blocks' and, as I suspected, the way to go is in such healthy alternatives as reflexology and Reiki. So I'm booking an appointment following next payday and getting healed. I'm sick of having big ambitions thwarted by nasties that have burrowed down in my unconscious and, if left unchecked, will see me an old man gazing ruefully out the window of my bedsit at what might have been.

While reading the local paper
The neighbours don't read the local rag. Perhaps they once did and decided that it was depressing news of council waste - of incomplete swimming pools and shafted charettes; maybe they have limited tolerance for the coverage of dog doings and elderly emergencies; the puff pieces on shops and schools in the area. Whatever their lack of interest, they do miss some lively material.

Now I'm not one to pick up on every little thing that the Channel Nine news or the Daily Telegraph reports. What would be the point of that? But the provincial press is another matter. Once you weed out articles on identities unknown outside the area of circulation, there can be some real gems viz

Last weekend six Mountainlink buses were covered in graffitti, a car was covered in white paint in Carrington Avenue and another car's bonnet was scratched in the same street, a letterbox was thrown at a house in Parke Street, a rock smashed through the front door window of a house in Victoria Street, a blue question mark was spray painted on a car in Leichhardt Street, a letterbox was blown up in Barton Street, and the front window of Fantastic Aussie Tours was smashed. And that was just in Katoomba.

And I thought this was such a nice area! The natural environs are lovely but the humans are fucked.
If I was one of the godbotherers who regularly appear in the letter column I'd be praying that God grant the vandals self-awareness so they can realise what a horrible waste of space they are.

They share the paper with murderers, thieves, drink drivers and other dangerous idiots, miscellaneous thugs.. But I guess you get them everywhere.

And then there's the developers who are thankfully getting a caning for a hideous abomination on the highway above Leura Village called the Spires. There isn't a week that goes by that someone doesn't comment on its ugliness and unsuitability, but this classified ad for a garage sale provides the best commentary on what a true lack of vision it is:

The Goodbye to the uninSpires' Moving Sale
Come One, Come All
We are moving out after 25 years. We have enough junk to keep your shed going for the next three council clean-ups, including an Emmalunga pram, queen size bed base and all sorts of stuff our friends, with little or no taste, gave us as gifts in the 1970s.
It's all waiting for you at 164 Megalong St, Leura, from 9am, Saturday, 18th October. Everything must go... including us. No antiques and no earlybirds.
We're moving somewhere where we can erect a three storey brick construction that looks something like a cross between a Rooty Hill Shopping Mall and the Lithgow Maximum Security Prison block. Given what council has recently approved at the top of Leura Mall we are expecting it to be approved without dissent.

My cup runneth over
Normally I try to keep this blog at a tempo where it could be of general interest if you lived in Western Samoa but it was my birthday yesterday so I think I'll be a little more personally reflective this go round.

I went to work as I'd had the day before off, trying to organize a few things, and that turned out alright as I got a cake and a rendition of the Happy Birthday chant that probably opened a crack in the earth and unleashed a horde of leather-winged demons somewhere in the world. I had a yummy roast dinner, which was very welcome as my own cooking is somewhat perfunctory for the most part, got tickets to see Jimmy Little and got to chat for ages to someone very special, who celebrated their own birthday recently.

All in all, though I wasn't showered with gifts or thrown a huge party, a good day.