Searching for the Amargosa Vole; &, in print, the Deleted Thirteenth Verse!

On my technorati page, which links to who has linked to this website (it's infrequent), I noticed this blogger had linked to my epic nonsense poem Song of Defecation in a titular post, which I'll repeat here:

I’ve a passion for [endangered] Animals and keep looking for information on [them]. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘amargosa vole’ in Google and found this:

America has named most of its daughters Emma or Emily, My eldest daughter is riding into St Louis atop a thirty-foot-tall camel. You have sinned against Warren Buffet’s family: To me, you a like a poop from the snakiest animal. Repent! heroes & lovers! Mormons & Scientologists! I am alive, our land is theocracy & sound-bites. My daughter was famous for five minutes for her monster-slaying quests, Now she lives naked on the streets with no bananas & no rights. Lay down, we tire[...]

source: Song of Defecation

I tried several more searches on ‘amargosa vole’ but after some time I got lazy, gave up and posted this entry to ‘South America’. Still, I think it was an interesting time.

I thought this was pretty curious, first, because it's easy to find information about the Amargosa Vole (Microtus californicus scirpensis) all over the internet. Secondly, no where in my poem do the words Amargosa or Vole appear. Why would google link him to that site? Thirdly, that blogger appears to be some sort of robot.

Then I remember, an earlier version of that poem had a THIRTEENTH VERSE, lodged somewhere in the middle, deleted almost immediately (for reasons of symmetry, flow, & quality, & superstition, & because "fate's ambassadors" seemed too similar to "hope's canaries".) I'll reprint it here for posterity, & so more robot bloggers interested in endangered species are fooled into reading my poetry. The condor/vole imagery is an adaptation of the eagle/mole passage in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

With the weakest binoculars, you can clearly see the condors return,
You have to ask the amargosa vole what treasures are erected beneath.
Big butts cannot lie, you know why the nations of the earth look so forlorn:
A dirge is being forgotten in Africa & elsewhere, fate's ambassador grounded on a sea reef.

Bob Dylan: "What Can I do for you?" & "Pressing On"

I just finished reading David Hadju's lovely & novelistic book "Positively 4th Street: The Life & Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, & Richard Fariña", which chronicles the various interlocking soap-operatic relationships & art of four interesting people, their journeys thru & beyond the folk revival. I've been singing some of Fariña's songs & reading his novel, & I will write more about him later, hopefully. However, since it's beautiful outside, & the blogging has been infrequent, I wanted to post two live versions of songs from Bob Dylan's forgotten Christian-gospelly album Saved (1980); since it was hated when it was released, I invite you to reconsider these beautiful songs below:

Pulitzer in Music

from James Welsch <_@itwaslost.org> reply-to _@itwaslost.org, to John Welsch <_______@att.net>, date Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 11:32 AM subject Pulitzer in Music mailed-by gmail.com

Dad,

This year, they gave the pulitzer to one of the downtown NY post-minimalists, David Lang, one of the founders of Bang on a Can. You can listen to the winning piece, based on the Grimm story The Little Match Girl, here:
http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/sound_insights/works/commissions/art_detail_TheLittleMatchGirlPassion_commissions.html

And there's an NPR article about it here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89442735

They also gave a "special citation" to Bob Dylan, I'm not sure what that means, maybe an apology for being forty years late to recognize him. And "The Rest is Noise", an amazing book about 20th Century music, told thru it's history & politics & war & peace, by New Yorker author Alex Ross, was a finalist for non-fiction.

James

Song of Dung & Defenestration - Soul Ballad Version #2

No use to beat on the dull-drums
Let's be imagina-tive,
Each day is numbered
No good when slumbered
With only one life to live

-Ira Gershwin, lyrics to the Kurt Weill song "One Life to Live", from Lady in the Dark (1941)


Leighbor is a neighbor who does your labor.

-Pele, from a gmail chat, 3 April 2008.

Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damn business.

-21st President Chester A. Arthur

Attention to those of you with infinite patience for my increasingly surreal poetry readings, & home-computer recordings, oozing towards fulfilling a life goal of being included in the next Songs in the Key of Z. This may be the crown-jewel low point - my classic nonsense poem, Song of Dung & Defenestration, has been raped & mutilated, to the tune of my dying Yamaha PSR-500 Synthesizer. Mr Olaf Mary & Mr Epcar-Singer-Songwriter were kind enough to discover the accompaniment style "Soul Ballad #2", which is used to here to great effect. To read the original poem & hear an earlier recording of me chanting it, please visit this page: http://www.itwaslost.org/2007/10/song-of-dung-defenestration.html.
To hear the Soul Ballad #2 Version, listen right here right now!
It is also downloadable at this MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ssandrigon. Or you can download it here.




And, as a weekend reading suggestion, Justin Davidson of New York Magazine discusses the oeuvre of the New York contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which includes several of my high-school friends. I can't wait to hear their nit-picky live version of Revolution #9, & the rest of their new 1969 project, which I'm told will include Berio's weird Beatles arrangements.

Argumentum Ornithologicum

The Golden Age of Fake Craigslist Personals

Good day! It's been a year now, & I just panicked because I was worried that Yahoo mail had deleted my "t_____" mail account, thus loosing all of the inspired responses from the phony Craigslist personal I posted in April of 2007. But they're still there! So, for the next week, I will slowly weed thru the several hundred & post some excerpts, preserved for posterity for their literary excellence.

A year ago, I was working long hours at a slow bookstore, so posting some fake personal ads, for the bemusement of our wallowing boredoms, seemed like a good idea. I had talked to a girl who said she got fifty responses in twenty-four hours. I challenged her that I could create a girl who could double that. I stole a picture from some poor stranger's MySpace, which I would love to post here, but it's a small world & I feel bad. Basically, it was a cute blond 23-year-old bending over a pool table, a fairly amateur, somewhat vague & fuzzy picture. This fictional creation, named Nevaeh Smithridge, had a whole back-story, some of which will seep out thru her follow-up e-mails. The original post:

all my friends started sleeping at night - 23 (mission district)

hey boys

im on the rebound after a terible love "rectangle"(ha!) why is everyone so boring in this city? my friends used to go out like every night and now there all like ive got to work for monsanto at 6 am. im like ill still be drinking tequila at six am bitch. i moved to the city two years ago (never to return to salt lake again cept for one of my stupid familys uncountable weddings). hoping to not remember my 20s very well. looking for a cute guys that don't pass out from fifteen shots or less. no short guys or computer nurds.

me: guys check me out on the n judah, but its hard not to with what i wear to work lol. i can watch napoleon dynamite a hundred more times if asked too. my five cd changer right now has too short, aaliyah, sublime, kanye west, and mos def (may he rest in peace the motherfucker). 5'7, blond, body made for dancing, up your ass.

you: steady income, no redheads, no opera, preferably tall and cares about his body, but not enough to not abuse it with shots of everclear. pool or darts. no vegetarians, yes yes yes good dancers. tall a plus. tween 24-34.

Let it be known that two hundred lonely men wrote her in less than twenty-four hours! I still feel sad for some of the nicer ones, but the vast majority of boys who respond to that, I assumed, wouldn't be too nice. Surprisingly, most lived outside of San Francisco, there were many replies from notably short men, from redheads, from vegetarians, from men over 34, from non-drinkers! I don't quite get why you'd respond to a personal if you are far off from what she's looking for...? Only two noted that Mos Def is among the living. Many, many pictures of studly guys, showing their muscles, a few penis-pics, more than a dozen with their motorcycle. For instance:

i am a lover of life i like everything and anything i am in to motorcycles as i think u know already i love music any and all kinds from rock and heavy metal to hip hop and slow dance with the right person i am very playful caring kind very loving who was married for 16 year faithfully till i found out that she had benn cheating on me for the last three years that is a deal breaker in my eyes i believe that people should be straight up and not play games and right now i am in search of my soulmate but friends our cool too which one our you how about that for a ending. in your court now.
thanks

P.S you can call me any time you like tonight would be great i live alone and i have a 9 year daughter who stays with me every other wekend i hope you and your son is having a great easter and i will talk to you soon [phone number]

Included was a picture of a portly man in front of a huge black car with huge tires. "You and your son"???

Now! Stay tuned to our weblog, & I'll post some more responses.... AND the e-mail she wrote back to a hundred lucky men.

Obama/ Lincoln shirt

yes, there's a new shirt. I was inspired by something Obama said about Lincoln recently, so I created this continuation of the Obama in presidential company theme.
it's on cafepress at...... www.cafepress.com/ObamaandLincoln

Monkey Schedule

The latest from Miss Jenny Ruth, our intrepid Travel Corespondent, outside of Cochabamba, Bolivia:

Date:	Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:50:25 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"Jenny Crawford" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	another briefing
To:	a bunch of people

hello all and sorry if it´s too much information for you, i wrote this to a friend who asked and thought i´d pass it on, for the record.


i left my spider monkeys yesterday and i miss them oh so much today that i could cry. i took these really great videos and pictures with my camera but then it was stolen by some capuchins, the little criminals. they steal everything but they´re so damn cute that next thing you know you´re throwing them in the air and letting them drink your spit (they love spit).

the spider monkey work went like this:

7:30 am-- letting out of big cages and feeding them buckets of bananas and api, an oatmeal type thing, which they love, then laying around and hugging and cuddling them for awhile

9:00 am--washing "monkey ropa" which is the blankets that they sleep with and you scrub the shit and piss out of in a sink with soap and cold water and a brush.

10:00 am--cleaning cages, by far the most disgusting thing that i hope to ever do in my life.

11:00 am--lunch preparation. lunch is the most beautiful selection of seasonal fruits that i could wish for.

12:00 pm--lunch is served in big bowls on big tables which they all sit around on and very cutely relish in eating.

afternoon: the volunteers alternate between taking breaks and cuddling monkeys, one of my favorite times of the day. sometimes you just lay there with four monkeys passed out on top of you.

3:30 pm--monkey walk. for me, the most hilarious part of the day. out of thirty something monkeys, nine are on chords because they have a tendency to dangerously run into town. there are two walks, the jungle one and the beach one. it just seems so ridiculous to be walking monkeys on leashes with the rest of them just in a big herd, following by either walking or swinging through the trees or riding on your shoulders. it´s really great fun for all and we humans would inevitably be drenched in sweat and tripping and falling the whole time.

5:00 pm--dinner is served. dinner is veggies, also fresh and always tempting, followed by more api.

5:30--7 pm-- bedtime. they all go in their proper cages with blankets, which they love, and some give the sweetest bedtime hugs.

wow, that was really long. sorry if it´s a bit boring but i copied it to send to my mom too who would like to hear it. we slept in provided accomodations which were totally shitty and dirty. huge centipedes, yes, and the monkeys found a gigantic tarantula the other day which was really fun to watch them all gather around and poke at, capuchins and spider monkeys both.

three monkeys died during my month there, which was very sad. two, one being one of my absolute favorites (named jenny), died by electrocution from grabbing the power line in town. one, fortunately not jenny, i actually watched die, after we were unable to coerce her back into the park. it was my last day and an all around very sad one. the thing that saved me was that some of my favorite ones came running to me as i entered the park, with whooping monkey noises, big hugs and happy monkey stuff that you soon recognize. well, bye bye monos.

think i'll finally take some spanish in this pretty city called sucre, where i arrived this morning. hope you guys are well and i always love to hear about your lives as well.

much love to all,

jenny

"stolen by some capuchins, the little criminals..."