Illuminations: Genius Prayer

Good morning! Where are you this morning! Continuing, with more pages from my latest illuminated poetry book, Seven Prayers. Click on the image to see it larger. The original text for "Genius Prayer" was posted here. The frontispiece for the Seven Prayers is posted here.

Offline Instant Messages

liam (5:28:23 PM):[Offline IM sent 12d and 21h ago] habibe
liam (1:59:07 PM):[Offline IM sent 52m ago] james!

liam (1:59:17 PM):[Offline IM sent 52m ago] how I have yearned for your IMS

liam (1:59:34 PM):[Offline IM sent 51m ago] waft the fumes of my nard

liam (1:59:44 PM):[Offline IM sent 51m ago] i am blemished by fate

liam (1:59:53 PM):[Offline IM sent 51m ago] forgotten by fortune

liam (2:00:59 PM):[Offline IM sent 50m ago] the fire of my loins is now a pile of coals cackling in divine mockery

liam (2:01:26 PM):[Offline IM sent 49m ago] i will contribute to your blog

liam (2:05:12 PM):[Offline IM sent 46m ago] may I converge with your deep blue battleborn depths, in an operatic kind of way

liam (2:05:22 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] or like a great operation shown on public television

liam (2:05:27 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] like a public execution

liam (2:05:37 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] like a camus essay on morality

liam (2:05:53 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] like working at a recycled soul company

Quotes: Beowulf

This poet is so superbly in command that he can risk threadbare, throwaway, matter-of-fact phrases like 'of no small importance' or 'the best part of a day'. He has a casual way with the alliterative pattern of the original, which helps to strip its craft of portentous self-consciousness and frees up its syntax to move more nimbly. Lines like "He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain, limping and looped with it", which the young Heaney might well have written in earnest, are really an ironic postmodern quotation, a self-parodic hint of the racket the whole poem might make if you bound yourself too grimly to its form.

-Terry Eagleton, The Gaurdian's review of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, 3 November, 1999

You don’t need to wait for Angelina Jolie to rise from the vaporous depths naked and dripping liquid gold to know that this “Beowulf” isn’t your high school teacher’s Old English epic poem. You don’t even have to wait for the flying spears and airborne bodies that — if you watch the movie in one of the hundreds of theaters equipped with 3-D projection — will look as if they’re hurtling directly at your head. You could poke your eye out with one of those things! Which is precisely what I thought when I first saw Ms. Jolie’s jutting breasts too.

-Manohla Darghis, New York Times review of Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007)

The bloodshot water wallowed & surged,
there were loathsome upthrows & overturnings
of waves & gore & wound-slurry.

-Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, pg. 57

...We are retainers
from Hygelac's band. Beowulf is my name.
If your lord & master, the most renowned
son of Halfdane, will hear me out
and graciously allow me to greet him in person,
I am ready & willing to report my errand.

-Beowulf announces himself in Heaney's translation, pg. 25

I am Ripper... Tearer... Slasher... Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength... & Lust... & Power! I AM BEOWULF!

-Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf

Illuminations: Exegesis Prayer

Click on the image to see it larger. The original text for "Exegesis Prayer" was posted here. The frontispiece for the Seven Prayers is posted here.

From the Archives: Jamie at Bohemia Night c. 1987

I just went "Pro" on Nintendo Wii Baseball

I came to my parents' house at Lake Tahoe for the Thanksgiving week, with a long to-do list (including a grad-school application, a checkbook, & a few cluttered thoughts). So far my only accomplishment is to go "Pro" on the Nintendo Wii Baseball, meaning my "skill level" topped the 1000 point theshold, which took many visits home in the last year. Congratulations! Out of the Park! For a man who grew up without video games, missed them as a recreation in college, possesses only a haphazard understanding of baseball rules & stradegy, this is a weird monumental achievement. My right arm muscles are aching sore from the Wii controller. My character, JamesHenry, looks a lot like me, except without legs. My complaints about the game are: A) No double plays, B) My lame outfield consists of my father & brother's avatars, who, like Manny Ramiriz, is occasionally clutch & occasionally drops the ball, C) It's hard to tell when the computer is pitching a fastball or a splitter, but I guess that's the point. Now, as thanks for achieving Pro status, I'm getting squished by the computer's pro opponants.

Tiny Brain of Sand

Illuminations: Jesus Prayer

Click on the image to see it larger. The original text for "Jesus Prayer" was posted here. The frontispiece for the Seven Prayers is posted here.

Ocular Proof Comics XX thru XXII

These three Ocular Proof comics were drawn this spring when I was working at that book store. If you click on the image, it should be big enough to read. Introducing Petalbo Tylan, a sort of rhyming used-car salesman of the soul:

Saga of Jenny

I.

I had never felt this style of pain, with no paranoia & no worries.

It was during the year I was dating a woman named Lousera Comasquerapes.

We were necking in the corner accompanied by the mariachi band, Los Sphincteres.

Somewhere an identity was altered,

Luckily, the thief's violin sonata was deterred,

So, tone-deaf, my ego faltered,

Hiding behind the drapes in God's mansion, here we go, the enemy of the future escapes.

In the end, Lousera was too busy for me, waiting for her savior:

Perhaps it was his dipsomania or the crypto-syringe which held him up.

Bicycling across the ocean floor, past millions of species & ravaging war,

His name is called Terrific,

His rat-ass is less specific,

A cowboy deep in the Pacific,

Her bus-stop bench is worn down, after his journey, he could not have smelled equipped.

I remember Lousera Comasquerapes, she was my grandest lover, a wild beast:

In high 1995 outfits, we would take to the clubs, like the bawdy eclectic.

I haven't seen her in two years, a child is born, the wings of a swallow at least,

And where is Jenny thru this to-do?

She's smiling in San Francisco,

Warm & curing a missing flu.

And we were dancing upon the throne of days, green-faced & ecstatic, anticipating the phone to click.

Astronauts, where are you, where are the prodigal lagomorphs, where was I?

Our brains are infected by every local notion, our hearts, heated,

Naked & cross-eyed, ravishing beauty, fuzzy on the top, & on the bottom, fuzzy.

In 2002 she stank of piss,

I had never been intimate with such ugliness,

And found happiness in this abyss,

Trampled by a herd of Giant Unicorns - Revived Thin-Plated Rhinoceroses - wasted & smushed but not defeated.

Thru the worm-hole to heaven, our native housing project,

My perceptions were down, but I think Lousera Comasquerapes said to me:

"Come from the West, my love, my largest towel is open out of respect.

"Dry up the wine stain,

"Complain, what remains of the pain,

"I will accept but not explain,

"Come down from the ceiling crack, come to my bed & be forever free."

Aching, Lousera said to me: "The bricks fell down,

"I am your girl until Holmes Comet, we'll go around the omnipresent,

"We'll return to school early like a mathematics prodigy, stoned & hewn.

"I cannot hear Jenny chortling kindlies,

"I see her jalapeños blindlies,

"I feel thirst in my dirtiest panties.

"Follow me until you're done with me, drink me, eat me, like squab, like squirrel meat or pheasant."

Still life with sore knees, shush, an Indian sailor playing a harmonium!

Lousera Comasquerapes came to me & said: "Build up our crazy coastal city,

"Study the asphalt & iron, drive insanity, confused noise & rum!

"Cannot eat last year's banana-fish,

"Cannot sell next century's laguna-fish,

"We have caught our final tuna-fish,

"We have ruined it, over-stocked, clogged this traversable passage to that black hole, without love, without agony, without pity."

II.

Now in the hospital, nude under my robe, watching the nurses float by,

Lousera is out there somewhere, exasperating her patience.

I feel a story pass from a Pentecostal Minister visiting without his bow tie:

About a proud brother returning,

A festival, & the older son learning,

Not to be envious of the world's turning.

And Mary & Martha & Louise & Johanna, mirroring my mindlessness, prancing over the sleep-sheep's fence.

I need affirmation, a lonely old playboy, a pilgrim to everywhere:

I've lost sensation in my legs, but gained peace in East Asia,

Like a subterranean conquistador, moles & voles & treasure enough to share,

A black man & a visible man,

California, the entrance to my lifespan,

Risible & before time began,

Lousera's humongous breasts are weighing down the basketball court, a monstrous ancient buffalo of pleasure & echinacea.

The machinations on the board of supervisors went unnoticed by our spies,

But not by our progeny - but I had been transferred to oblivion by then.

We failed to nourish & educate, but not to distill certain right revolting energies,

The fireworks will be shot,

Whether I watch them or not,

I'll be a robot on a planet of rot,

Her vexation at this dimness, piloting a ship of shit, towards unknown husbands, letting slip the final amen again & again.

For the price of these battles, we could send every itinerant into deep space,

Kicking off my doctor's cacophony & vile prophecy & violent deities,

I replaced them & wasted them & now those old girls are distant from my decaying face,

The police won't let him pull my plug,

His diagnosis is a reluctant shrug,

He swept my hours under his toilet rug,

And the nurses on water around me, expanding my imagination, a rampage of youthful infernal disease.

She called me on the two-way radio, she said her wet dream train was finally arriving,

Some serious lamentations! And a few good jokes, and six hundred varieties of fungus,

I poured a double shot into a glass of ice, & recalled the years of living & conniving:

"Come stretch your pinions & hold me,"

Lousera Comasquerapes once told me,

"Yoga & pilates & a hot toddy,

"Every activity is our unique joy, I am a sow in a gestation cage, covered to my canopy in excrement & moss."

Aching, Lousera had said to me: "Come mount me like the lifting up of smoke!

"You cannot complain about which portion of the infinite you inherit,

"Just love it, Sandy, & do your best not to trash it, like an archetypal pig-in-a-poke,

"And wallow in perfection,

"Our waste is another man's confection,

"Greek proportions & Washington's erection,

"My entire living room is filled with pillows, soon is the jubilee year, our baby will forgive our debt."

Found in a forest of briers & thorns, Jenny made her mind up when she was three,

She's there for her kindness, a pirate departing with the next cannon,

I was never warned, it's done, & also leaving, Lousera Comasquerapes had said to me:

"You'll die far from Golden Gate Park,

"You'll regret every song heard in the dark,

"And Christ in the form of a walking shark,

"You'll keep discovering things you couldn't have believed, just be present, & I must give up for adoption our infant son."

Illuminations: Seven Prayers Frontispiece & Extant Prayer

I'll put up image files of this illuminated poetry book, Seven Prayers, over the next few weeks. The illustrations were done by myself, Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden, & Virtue; using colored pencils, paint & pens, & pomegranate & persimmon juice; on paper originally created by New Leaf Paper for the American Harry Potter books VI & VII. Click on the image to see it larger. The original text for "Extant Prayer" was posted here.

Exploding Whale

La Niña

Listen to me, hobos, with your feet not with your ears:
The salvation train no longer goes thru Portland:
One beer-swilling infant caused war for two thousand years,
Like dried-up camel tears,
Next century's preachers will drop from your face, & be forever banned.

The winter is past due, the fine is tremendous,
My love is a dodecahedron upon a fractal mountain,
The prophetess' jaw is locked up, but perhaps she just has Tetanus,
A virgin except for her clitoris,
She does not know the silent futurity, eternal jail for the whisky fountain.

Fall like amber locks, your robe torn off like lust & descent:
The wind hears you partying with another man in Orange County.
This rotten paradise was never meant to be misspent,
I have forgotten to pay the rent,
Pulsing beneath her t-shirt are several answers, lost booty, lost bounty.

You have to come up before you go down on the earth.
Do you remember that nice man with weird hair who killed his monster baby?
She told him it wasn't the antichrist, just more trouble than it was worth:
The birth of a subversive reversal,
So they added an eighth lane to the flaming freeway, no fin whale will judge their infamy.

Hobos & tramps, you need to ask me more questions, I miss her,
We are sober in different ways, missing in America's décolletage.
Pillaging & taxing, & surging with grief, & raped by a dinosaur incisor,
None the wiser until I kiss her,
Your eardrums beating with these vibrations on hell's watch.

The rain is over - Are you paying attention, Miranda? - come ask her apes,
What to bring as a present for a child who will end materialism?
She told him this wasn't the incorporeal rapture, just a stain on the images of cityscapes,
Put those walking feet toward stamping grapes,
And help me celebrate our victory, the chiefest beloved in Folsom Prism.

Or, he couldn't hear me over the music

In anthropocentric society, a harsh judgment is given to those that destroy or seek to destroy the creations of humanity. Monkey-wrench a bulldozer and they will call you a vandal. Spike a tree and they will call you a terrorist. Liberate a coyote from a trap and they will call you a thief. Yet if a human destroys the wonders of creation, the beauty of the natural world, then anthropocentric society calls such people loggers, miners, developers, engineers, and businessmen.

-Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society,
as quoted in "Neptune's Navy", by Raffi Khatchadourian,
The New Yorker, Nov. 5, 2007

One bright morning in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys got up to fight,

Back to back they faced each other,

Drew their swords & shot each other

A deaf policeman heard the noise,

And came to claim the two dead boys,

If you don't believe this lie is true,

Ask the blind man, he saw it too.

-American nonsense rhyme, dating back at least fifty years. Several hundred variants are recorded in the U.C. Berkeley folklore archives. This one is recorded by Sarah Clifford, who adds a note reasoning that perhaps the “two dead boys” are Truman & Stalin, & the whole nonsense logic follows that of the “cold war,” which waged in the middle of the night long after they died. By that thought, could the “deaf policeman” be indicative of Reagan?
Update: There's a nice personal essay about this poem on this man's blog.

________________________________________________

Date:	Tue, 6 Nov 2007 21:18:08 -0800
From:	"James Eliot Quill" <____________@gmail.com>
To:	"James Henry Welsch" <_@itwaslost.org>
Subject:	An incomprehensible metaphor

Midway through Haruki Murakami's novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I came upon a chapter entitled "The Zoo Attack (or, A Clumsy Massacre)." Perhaps it should be noted that no other chapter title (so far) has been formatted this way. The second paragraph describes an American submarine surfacing in some detail, and concludes that "although in form and shape the thing before her could have been nothing but a submarine, it looked instead like some kind of symbolic sign—or an incomprehensible metaphor." So, yes, Moby Dick (or, the Whale). The great American epic makes a guest appearance in a modern Japanese epic (I don't know enough to make particularly grandiose or well-informed statements here), which you can take as far as your ability to take yourself seriously will allow you to.

The reason I started re-reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was my discovery of a Portland post-modern book club. Of course, the book had already been finished and discussed by the members of the club. It seemed important that I email Billy Callis (the founder) to find out if the Moby Dick reference had been brought up.

I had no time to write this email, however, because I was, at the moment, on my way to see the San Francisco alt-country (maybe) band Or, The Whale. Maybe now you are thinking that I am obsessed with Moby Dick and these coincidences are entirely my fault. You are correct. At the show, I ran into Billy, to whom I hastily attempted to explain how crazy it was that he was at this particular show at this particular time when I was just about to write to him about what I'd noticed. It went something like this:

"Billy, I was just going to write to you about the chapter in TWUBC where he describes a submarine that's a metaphor that has to be Moby Dick and now here you are at the Or, the Whale show. Isn't that completely insane?"

Billy seemed unimpressed. I theorize that when you read enough post-modern fiction, these nerdy confluences of events become the norm. Or, he couldn't hear me over the music. Regardless, I think it's kind of crazy.

_______________________________________________________

Date:	Mon, 5 Nov 2007 20:05:48 -0800
From:	"James Eliot Quill" <__________@gmail.com>
To:	"James Henry Welsch" <_@itwaslost.org>
Subject:	Re: Wartime symphony

Whoa.

On 11/1/07, James Welsch <_@itwaslost.org> wrote:

[Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony] the Leningrad had its premiere in Kuybyshev in March 1942. It then made its way around the world, its progress complicated by wartime. As The New Yorker reported in a Talk of the Town item, the score was transferred to microfilm, put in a tin can, flown to Tehran, driven by car to Cairo, flown to South America, & finally flown to New York. Toscanini beat out Koussevitsky & Stokowski for the rights to conduct the Western premiere, which took place on July 19, 1942. Time magazine put Shostakovich on the cover, in his firefighting regalia, with the caption "Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad he heard the chords of victory." The composer became a propaganda symbol for the Allied cause, a profile in courage.

Besieged Leningrad heard the symphony on August 9, 1942, under the most dramatic of circumstances imaginable. The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, & a severely depleted Leningrad Radio Orchestra began learning it. After a mere fifteen musicians showed up for the initial rehearsal, the commanding general ordered all competent musicians to report from the front lines. The players would break from the rehearsals to return to their duties, which sometimes included the digging of mass graves for the victims of the siege. Three members of the orchestra died of starvation before the premiere took place. The opposing German general heard about the performance in advance & planned to disrupt it, but the Soviets preempted him by launching a bombardment of German positions - Operation Squall, it was called. An array of loudspeakers then broadcast the Leningrad into the silence of no-man's-land. Never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony become a tactical strike against German morale.

-Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), pg. 246

__________________________________________________________

Date:	Wed, 7 Nov 2007 01:08:56 -0800 (PST)
From:	"James Henry Welsch" <_@itwaslost.org>
Subject:	re: re: re: re: puppies re: liege
To:	"Jenny Ruth Crawford" <_________@yahoo.com>

Jenny Ruth,


I spoke to Shaun on the phone today. We discussed this dog issue. I offered to take it, but there are several considerations. 1) I'll probably go up to Tahoe for thanksgiving, & if I go with George, I probably can't take a dog. 2) maybe either you'll come to tahoe so we could take her in your car, 3) if you stayed here for thanksgiving you just watch the dog here, 4) dogs are beautiful & fun, 5) Shaun is camping this weekend & might stay here early next week, 6) James Quill says he's coming on the 14th, 7) I did okay on the GREs, 8) Where are you?, 9) I have the soundtrack to the Darjeeling movie, 10) I hung out with three brits tonight, 11) I fried chantarelles & clams in butter again tonight, 12) I wish we owned a dog, 13) what are you doing for thanksgiving?, 14) I took a test so now I'm drinking beer again after not drinking only a few beers for the last week, 15) Lee & Eric departed from my parent's & are now in Sacramento with the bus, so I reckon they'll reappear here again if only briefly soon, 16) [...] & the number sixteen.


James Welsch

Music Review: Waits sings Weill

How Brecht's infatuation with antisocial hooligans can be reconciled with the strict Marxist doctrine that the writer adopted after 1926 is something that scholars have long struggled to comprehend. In a 1930 article, Walter Benjamin proposed that Brecht's thugs should be understood as promising material for revolutionary transformation...

-Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), pg.191

Both my sister & my friend Chadwick were at this fundraiser concert a few weeks ago, where, they tell me, before Neil Young & way before Metallica (whom it seems no one stuck around to see), Tom Waits sang with the Kronos Quartet & a bass player. My brother-in-law said they played "Keep the devil way down in the hole", one of my very favorite Waits songs, & Chadwick reported that they sang one of the Weill/Brecht "Threepenny opera finales", probably "What keeps mankind alive?", which is on his last album & on a Weill tribute album.

Kronos is no longer seen as a Rorschach inkblot test for new music, which is just as well, & their adventures in gypsy music & Bollywood, denounced by many as "crossover", are better than, for instance, their performances of Lutosławski or that awful Terry Riley premiere. But anyway, their collaboration with Waits is not just meant to be hip or opportunistic. It's also acknowledging another large strain in underground/cabaret American semi-classical music. I just finished reading Alex Ross's intense book, a narrative of twentieth century classical music, & I was wondering who was going to be mentioned when. Waits is mentioned once in relation to Harry Partch's 1941 hitchhiking song-cycle Barstow (for unoperatic baritone & Adapted Guitar). Opposite of Copland's "New Deal" orchestral style & heartland idealization, Ross writes, "a lot of people would be hard-pressed to identify Barstow as 'classical music' at all. It comes closer to the twisted white blues of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, & Tom Waits." (pg. 482) One of the lyrics, which Partch copied down from graffiti while traveling, is: "Here she comes, a truck, not a fuck, but a truck. Just a truck."

Tom Waits has ties not just to blues & lounge-music, but also European cabaret (although, like American underground music, it was often more popular than the Donny Osmond or Paul Hindemith stuff.) And, I'm told that Tom Waits' music is more revered in Germany than America, just as The Threepenny Opera was a hit during World War II here while it was banned by the Nazis. When, in the 1980s, Waits' orchestrations started to include marimbas, trombones, accordions, anvils, & his lyrics went beyond Dylan's abstractions, he was often more innovative than his classical counterparts - & there's a definite Weill connection, deliberate or not. My friend James Eliot Quill says he has created an entire lyrical world, full of characters & moods, as intricately rendered as Tolkien's thousand page fantasies. Also, his career has produced great albums in the 70s, 80s, 90s, & especially in the last few years - how many other artists can you say that about?

Macheath, a.k.a. Mackie, the antihero of The Threepenny Opera, is the nastiest of Brecht's homunculi. He is based on the character of Captian Macheath in John Gay's eighteenth century ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, which served as the main source for Brecht & Hauptmann's libretto. In the original, Macheath is a master criminal with a dashing style who stands in metaphorically for the corrupt politicians of Gay's time. Benjamin, in a later essay on The Threepenny Opera & its sources, observed how "intimately the countermorality of beggars & rogues is interwined with the cant of official morality." Brecht & Weill's Macheath is at once more charming & more menacing that Gay's, mainly because of the musical number that introduces him: "Die Mortitat vom Mackie Messer," otherwise known as "Mack the Knife." This most famous of Wiemar songs takes the form of a "murder ballad," a catalog of killings. Macheath is revealed not merely as a high-living highway man but as an apparent psychopath who kills as much for pleasure as for financial gain. Schmul Meier has disappeared, along with many rich men; Jenny Towler is found with a knife in her breast; seven children die in a great fire in Soho; a young girl is raped.

-ibid. pg. 191

So Mackie is more violent than his predecessors, reflective of a violent time, & foreshadowing. Ross writes, "Weimar culture exhibited an unhealthy fixation on the figure of the serial or sexual killer." Hmmm. I'm also in the final thralls of The Sopranos, which is about a charming, complex, family-man gangster boss. There is also a "countermorality", the captains often speak of their "soldier's code." It should also be noted, that the "catalog" of Tony Soprano's violence & crime, beyond words or ballads, although he never rapes, definitely outdoes Mack.

There's also this new please-give-me-lots-of-Oscars movie, American Gangster, which David Denby just reviewed. "Like many modern gangsters, Frank [Lucas] wants to turn crime into a rational enterprise; he wants to lead an orderly & loving family life, & to play his game so stealthily that he will never be tainted by what he does." Denby is a bit taken back by the glamorization of Lucas (who is a pure capitalist, & reeks ravage on his black community by way of cheaper heroin), without as much retribution as, say, The Godfather. At the end of Die Dreigroschenoper, of course, Mackie is saved & redeemed by "Victoria's Messanger" - compare that Gilbert & Sullivan ending to what happens in American Gangster: Frank Lucas's mother slaps him across the face. In both cases, ouch! I don't know what happens in the end of The Sopranos, don't tell me.

...Weill's song thus became a showbiz tour de force, although its sting remained. Armstrong & Sinatra, both children of the streets, understood what the text was about: Armstrong said that Mack the Knife reminded him of characters he had encountered in New Orleans, while Sinatra knowingly grafted on a line from Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films, which exposed American politicians as gangsters of a higher order.

-ibid. pg. 193

Gromoglasan & Tubalny Fraturnamore Go to War

Two brothers, Gromoglasan & Tubalny,
Have told their mother not to weep no more,
The Fraturnamoré sons must go to war,
Or risk returning no more, or never to be.

Their father sounds a protozoic trumpet,
And hand and hand they walk towards the desert,
Beginning this quest reminds them of a seaside resort
That they would travel to with their family before they met.

"Are we protecting our country or our dignity?"
Gromoglasan asks his younger brother.
"Would you sacrifice yourself to save the other?
"Would you run if you could be certain of impunity?"

"If I'm not scared then I will be loud about it,"
Young Tubalny responds to Gromoglasan.
"But if I'm loud, that's not necessarily the reason:
"Any cause or emotion will be waved & shouted."

They are subsequently delayed by a huge stench,
And sunk up to their ear-holes in a shitty gutter,
They struggle, but no reasoning mortal can sort this clutter,
So for forty days, they party with lowlifes in a manmade trench.

They are helped out by one of the six French Allies,
Refusing to write another Catholic opera,
His name is Artie Wongay, formidable enemy of error,
He points them in the right direction, then follows creepily in disguise.

"The war must be on the other side of this forest,"
Gromoglasan proposes to his younger brother.
"I want to criticize the cause, but I don't want to be a bother.
"All I can think about is querulous purists, I've never met a terrorist."

"Let's lie here for awhile, beneath the shade of these elves,"
Says bold young Tubalny, already worse for wear.
"I'm hovering between ecstasy & despair,
"But I'm turned on by the possibility of strapping guns onto ourselves."

The brothers Fraturnamore reenact several rhetorical bombings & battles,
In the shadows, Artie Wongay shakes his head in critical astonishment,
He turns himself into a ravaging fire of atonement,
And pelts them with boulders & immolating projectiles.

A redwood falling, Gromoglasan leaps onto his brother to save him,
And, waving & shouting, Tubalny is squashed beneath two burning weights,
An ancient forest disappears amid national loves & hates,
And Artie Wongay, passionate but indifferent, retreats back to his haven.

Lament! Godlike Father Stentor Fraternamoré play your violy!
Your mother can weep no more above the televised roar!
A righteous cover-up & the hopelessness of the brothers Fraternamore!
Eleven angels escort you home, the war was lost without your bravery.

Quadratic Equa-Song

The lyrics to a song I just wrote on the ukulele, with juicy Al Jolson harmonies, while studying for the stupid GREs.

The Quadratic Equa-Song

Ex!
Equals negative bee,
Plus or minus,
The square root of bee squared,
Minus for ay-see,
All over too times ay!

When!
Ay-ex-squared plus bee-ex plus see equals:
Zero!

And sweetheart!
If you can still recall that from highschool,
I'll lick you in the gyro!

Bulletin: New Political Muder Ballad Posted

From:	S. Sandrigon
Date:	Nov 2, 2007 12:58 PM
Subject:	New Political Murder Ballad Posted
Body:	Fans & fanatics, Returning to the forgotten idiom - folk prophetic epic doggerel American tragicomic nonsense-political murder ballad - I post my Song of Dung & Defenestration, sung a capella at the corner public house. What are you up to these days, James? Oh, nothing, just revisiting forgotten idioms. Mellifluently, S. Sandrigon, prophetic poet & American National Bard P.S. The lyrics are here.