anais nin's diary volume 2

When the movie Henry and June came out in 1990 I had already read couple of books from Henry Miller and didn’t like them. So, I went to see the movie reluctantly – and the movie turned out to fall somewhat short of my expectations. What the movie did was to cause me to pick – up the diaries—and never put them down. Today Anais Nin's diaries seem more relevant the ever before – as you will see they have a bloggish quality about them.


I have made a couple of posts on Mark America, Grammatron, and Becoming Research on my hamid & company blog before – check them out for Mark is doing truly wonderful work to develop the web as an artistic medium. Here is Mark's descriptionof the diaries: "True blog is not true at all. It is pseudo.For example, the novels of Henry Miller could be considered bloggish, but then again so would the so-called "diaries" of Anais Nin, not because they are diaries per se, but because they subvert the diary form into what reads like an associative, pseudo-autobiographical novel. It's her socio-linguistic poetics coupled with an energetic linking process that makes it feel so bloggered. Her enigmatic jazz momentum totally eroticized by a very stylized use of language as aphrodiasical elixir. This, I believe, is the key to blogging less it become nothing but narcissistic foreplay, and mediocre narcissistic foreplay at that. " I have started A blog of the second volume--here Nin is more measured compared to the sexual overtones of the first volume. The site itself has some issues to work out--but I have deceided to go ahead. Enjoy.

C a p o t e

Capote is a 2005 biopic that follows Truman Capote on a writing assignment for the New Yorker in a small Kansas town where he investigates the gruesome murders of a local family. The film follows the events in Capote's life during the writing of his non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood. The movie was filmed in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the summer of 2004.Here is a review:" This moving film lives and breathes on the powerful shoulders of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's stunning performance in the title role. Hoffman captures all of the unique physical characteristics that made Capote such a familiar public figure in his lifetime and invests them with a humanity that is almost unbearably poignant. The film focuses on Capote's research on the book "In Cold Blood" and the personal journey that his relationship and identification with killer Perry Smith became (Capote says at one point that it was like they grew up in the same house, and he went out the front door while Perry went out the back), a compelling and complicated relationship that this uncompromising film presents in moving detail. But what truly makes it a unique work of art is the brilliant work of Hoffman - always an interesting actor - whose performance as Truman Capote should elevate him to the pantheon of film giants. "

help me--someone

The PostSecret Book will be released tomorrow

The PostSecret Book will be released tomorrow (Nov. 29th). First week sales are critical. Please buy a book or two this week to support the projec

The PostSecret book is a hardcover with 288 pages published by Harper Collins/Regan Books. All the postcard images are in color and many have never been seen before.

More murderblogs

Awhile back I had a post about a murderblog from Idaho. That being creepy enough in itself--today it seems that we have a whole new array of issues.
How should we respond to the surfacing of an alleged murderer's blog, and the blog* of his girlfriend/alleged victims' daughter which contains case-related content?
The case concerns two teens in love, although separated in age (he 18, she 14). The charge is that he killed her parents, then fled with her.
It appears that murderblog is going to prove to be an enduring phenomenon and is going to enter our conciousness as blog or web did in times past.

i b i b l i o

"It's Not Your Average Library--evolving Internet has created new opportunities to share knowledge. Imagine being able to walk into your local library and view, on demand, and without charge, not only every imaginable written text, but also music and poetry archives, African American authors, American history, sports statistics, philosophy of religion, Italian literature, large text database projects, software archives, and more.
Then imagine, in addition to being able to view the collection, you have the opportunity to critique it, expand it, or to create and manage a new collection in your own area of interest. While such a feat is physically and fiscally beyond the scope of even the largest and most extraordinary physical library, ibiblio.org achieves just such breadth and depth on the Internet. "
Who and Why ibiblio.org was formed as a collaboration between the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill's MetaLab, formerly known as SunSITE, and the Center for the Public Domain in September, 2000. At UNC-CH, ibiblio.org is supported by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the School of Information and Library Science, and Information Technology Services. The collaboration has .......................

And the RSS feed

TAG Cloud beta

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

It's a list of keywords taken from the news feeds you specify. Larger fonts indicate a higher prevalence for an individual keyword. Using Cascading Style Sheets, you can customize almost every aspect of your TagClouds to make it match your website. Of course, we provide a nice default set of styles out of the box.

Coming soon : Rebloging Anaїs Nin from Tehran

when Anaїs Nin's Diary: 1931-34 appeared in the Spring of 1966, Karl Shapiro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, wrote in the Book Week: "For a generation the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic has lived with the rumor of an extraordinary diary. Earlier readers of the Manuscript dicussed it with breathtaking superlatives as a work that would take it's place with great revelations of literature. A significant section of this diary is at last in print and it appears that the great claims made for it are justified."

Keep posted for the blog dedicated to rebloging Nin. Send me an email if you want to be one of the reblogers.

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ is a scientific research project that uses internet-connected computers to predict and design protein structures, and protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions......an endeavor that may ultimately help researchers develop cures for human diseases (See the Human Proteome Folding Project, a collaborative effort to apply our software on the human genome)
visit them and help by allowing cpu time on your pc to be used for modeling.

justcurio.us

justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else's question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.
The questions can be about anything the best Beatles album, your saddest moment, your biggest regret, your best childhood memory, the meaning of life, whether you should break up with your girlfriend, the best crepe place in Paris, the best cure for loneliness. Anything ....at all. This is our chance to lean on each other, to look to a stranger for help, to discover what other people think.
justcurio.us is entirely confidential, allowing anyone to ask and answer questions with complete anonymity. So, what's on your mind?

A gallery of Lovecraft book covers

It's kind of touching to see such a host of graphic artists valiantly struggling to capture this author's impossible sensibility within their own limits of time and budget constraints. Plus, supposedly, some shopper is supposed to buy that thing off a shelf! I wonder how many of these packages would have attracted Lovecraft's own interest as an inveterate book browser. Some of them, for sure. Maybe about one in ten. Also check out this page from a devoted fan.

James Piatt's pillory table

Pillory dinette 2004 A wooden framework on posts, with holes for the head and hands, in which offenders are formerly locked to be exposed to public scorn and informal meals as punishment.

the hansbernhardblog

this one is strangely fascinating--visit hans.

SYSTAIME "10H17"

FRENCH TRASH TOUCH SYSTAIME.comMichael Borras aka SYSTAIME.com, creator of " French Trash Touch ” got his national superior diploma of plastic expression and he works in Paris . As painter, performer and video-installation artist, he has developed various creative activities and he is concentrating on net-art and creation of web-films. Focusing on subversionof conventional media discourse, incrustation and double exposure of images have at the same time, softness/violence and fascination/repugnance. His original works have been presented in Perspective

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents published by Reporters Without Borders

"Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression."

Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help bloggers, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles. Below are links to the English, Farsi, and Arabic versions of the Handbook:

نسخه بالعربیه Enter فارسی

Google's Entry into the Blog Searching World

Google has released a blog search service, in beta, it searches blogs with feeds, not blogs as such. We can subscribe to search results as feeds. But the feeds can be messy or broken. Users can sort results by relevance or by date.
Google's entering an already developed market, with leaders like Technorati. But Google's offering has fewer services, in comparison, so far. It's narrow in focus - no tags, no graphs, no categories. Are those on the way? Will the Web 2.0 services market heat up with innovations in response?

random mixed voices on the web

random collages of voices on the web--as gibson would say--ghosts in the machine, x257 hosts several projects, each of which mixes multiple digital sources into web pages. For example, HUB snarfs down several hundred (guess how many) messages from selected email lists. And the ASRF generator mixes the result once more, which the site encourages you to submit to one of the sources, starting the process recursively and again.

What is a Blog? Becoming Research by Mark Amerika

True blog is not true at all. It is pseudo.
For example, the novels of Henry Miller could be considered bloggish, but then again so would the so-called "diaries" of Anais Nin, not because they are diaries per se, but because they subvert the diary form into what reads like an associative, pseudo-autobiographical novel. It's her socio-linguistic poetics coupled with an energetic linking process that makes it feel so bloggered. Her enigmatic jazz momentum totally eroticized by a very stylized use of language as aphrodiasical elixir. This, I believe, is the key to blogging less it become nothing but narcissistic foreplay, and mediocre narcissistic foreplay at that. Mark Amerika
Becoming-Research
The state of problematized being is erupting. Behind the scenes, I have been creating a document that essentially outlines the new practice-based research initiative I'm developing at the University of Colorado. In so doing, I have come up with an alpha-version of what amounts to an "objective of the study" as well as a "conceptual framework" that will hopefully lead to a more focused research agenda to be pursued within the context of the new "digital art curriculum" I am developing here (but where is here?).
The idea has been there for a little over a year, the language waiting to perform its function. Only now, having changed scenery (St. Kilda versus the foothills of Colorado's eastern slope), has it actually materialized. This is the beautiful thing about evolving a digital culture out of lived reality (mutating codework). You program yourself to write yourself into being, to engage in an ongoing ungoing networked social experience with the Other that borders on becoming. The Other role-plays their codework too, forgetting about acting and just living, and in so doing, becomes a better acting partner. When it all feels right and you find yourself operating in a globally distributed, nomadic narrative space where virtual subjectivities port their artificially constructed intelligence through the network, what you get is an entirely new sense of language as polyvocal remix spurred on by the Apparatus and its coded trend toward mediamatic interactivity.
What you do is you engage with the programming Other, like Belmondo and Seberg in "Breathless" or the various B-rate characters floating in Mike Figgis' Time Code.
In my mind's eye (the Apparatus on auto-focus), I see myself using language to corrupt the meaning of images. These images are essentially being captured by my body as if it were a recording device always already encoding the data so that I can manipulate it all in an on-the-fly narrative remix of what it feels like to be me, a living creature, a living ecriture, "in whose sight we see the world anew" (to quote Wallace Stevens).
To carry the metaphor further, part of my project is to invent my vocation - to turn the the net artist into what Stevens called a "necessary angel," one whose digital poetics reinvents what it means to capture consciousness in a place that is always still in-formation.
Location, location, location -- or so goes the mantra of all real estate agents wherever they may be hovering (waiting for the kill). It's the same with net art as nomadic narrative or Life Style Practice. Nomadic narrative is also about location, location, location - or lack thereof - or even lost states of being on the edge of becoming borderless and optimumly free. It's the place I find myself when I am "writing cyberspace."
I am here, creating, writing, living, evolving. Surfing, sampling and manipulating the open source code that writes me into this place I can never truly get a foothold in yet still feel at home in, as if writing language or writing cybesrpace is how I embody the network, that non-place that is SO not-me. Here, there and everywhere.
But where is here? Boulder? United Airlines flight 841 from L.A. to Melbourne tearing Time to shreds? A happening Italian cafe in Fitzroy? A tempermental dreamwork tuned to the color of television?
I could be anywhere.
And yet I am here, in computer-mediated cyberspace, burning through the sands of time.

It's sort of like when you fly from America to Australia and lose an entire day - somewhere - somehow - it just doesn't exist - and yet it does - and so I want to know where it is - WHAT it is - and how that relates to my thinking about cyberspace - about "writing cyberspace" the way I might think about "writing language" or "writing as digital arts practice." Perhaps I am just writing these thoughts in a random order on a random day to give the appearance of an argument, a story, a diary of my life as it unfolds in linear Australian time. These entries and the headings they are always entitled to give birth to, are both a kind of hyperlinernotes to a visibly corrupt blog that behaves as if it were about "me". But it's no longer about "me" - as if it ever could be. No, it's about The Network - the "not-me".
Note to self: deconstruct the blog.
What is Blog?
A blog should not be defined. Defining a blog would be like defining what a novel is or what a film is or what an experimental art installation is.
Perhaps it would be better to de-define a blog. A blog is not a diary, it is not dated, it is not autobiography, it is not a dreambook.
Or: it can be any or all of those things but probably should not be any or all of them.
It is not a web site per se, it is not even writing if you prefer to see it that way, but writing seems well-suited to the Idea of Blog, as does code. Blog is more a kind of progressive codework (as lived reality) than manifested outcome.
It's driven by the logic of links, always dramatically expressed in a default color that usually suggests a feeling of being blue - yet it also suggests other states of emotion such as being active, dynamic, visited, anchored, floating.
Waiting to be ported to somewhere, anywhere, but here. But where is here? That nagging question that all of the choragraphers keep asking as they invent the universe.
Blogs could be pseudo-autobiographical works-in-progress, where the artist who creates one surfs the electrosphere for useful data, samples it, manipulates it, and then exhibits it in an online environment that makes it feel like something more than just a diary website.
This will probably have to be done in the translinguistic act of writing itself. The writing I speak of is more than just a diary entry with links to things found on the net and is more than just text. It is designwriting, video ecriture, mixillogical sound art, a color field of graphic disturbance.
Human portals are fine, they are even dandy -- in fact, they may even end up being a kind of virtual dandyism strutting their stuff in net space -- but they are not true blog.
True blog is not true at all. It is pseudo.
For example, the novels of Henry Miller could be considered bloggish, but then again so would the so-called "diaries" of Anais Nin, not because they are diaries per se, but because they subvert the diary form into what reads like an associative, pseudo-autobiographical novel. It's her socio-linguistic poetics coupled with an energetic linking process that makes it feel so bloggered. Her enigmatic jazz momentum totally eroticized by a very stylized use of language as aphrodiasical elixir. This, I believe, is the key to blogging less it become nothing but narcissistic foreplay, and mediocre narcissistic foreplay at that.
Of course, if Nin were alive today, she would probably not be so bloggered by it all. As always, she would be looking for the rhetorically-charged juice machine that proactively creates language in rhythm, and any Apparatus would do. Same with Miller and many others of their ilk.
But don't tell that to net artists for whom the aestheticization of the network is part of a formalist dream to turn software into pretty pictures that capture your fancy and who knows what can happen once your fancy has been captured - will it ever be released?
True blog, then, is not blog as we know it, but as we un-know it. It incites creation - more invention - so that you yourself have to get down and dirty into the developmental process activating the network with your own mixillogical discourse. This is blog as inventive remix machine placing value on what it sees, what it links to, how it appropriates the Other and strips it of its isolation.
At the end of scene six in FILMTEXT, the Apparatus says: "In my mind, I point and click on You. How will you respond? What will you do? How will you behave?"
Barthes' "Camera Lucida" or "Pleasure of the Text" are blogs all the way as is Andy Warhol's "A". Cocteau once said that "writing is a sickness" and Bataille said that "I write not to be mad." One could apply this to blogging too. In fact, this is the beauty of the blog, if there is one: it blogs bloggers on, that is, it keeps them generating new material, researching the collective unconscious of the Web for possible destination points to link to so that the pseudo-autobiographical work-in-progress may have some value-added meaning/connectivity.
This value-added meaning/connectivity, when experienced in real-time telepresence, takes on the condition of the material world it is unquestionably a part of. Whoever said cyberspace is immaterial has never seriously read a book in their entire lives.
Of course, this "ceaseless generation" of new material that we might call the avant-pop condition of D-I-Y web production, is a kind of proactively engaged and engaging therapeutic process that one continues as a way to further investigate this Cocteau-ian "sickness," and can lead to all kinds of outcomes whether that be a scholarly book, a novel, a hypertext, a CD-ROM, a feature-length DVD with surround sound, an mp3 concept album, a Flash narrative, a multi-user network performance, or even a deconstructed blog-like writing space that ocassionally morphs into a "cite-specific work of environmental art" (where the cites are designated as links and the environment is manifested as a P2P network of associational thinkers - an artficial intelligentsia).
One thing we can say about the blog is that they circulate consciousness in a potentially value-added network of social fulfillment and that, in very crude terms, they proactively link some of the data associated with that circulating consciousness to specific "sites" of writing (editor's note: notice how the author does not use the term "scenes of writing") -- but they are certainly not site-specific since they are part of a network greater than themselves (Chora X - like Mac OS X - but more immersive?) and this network is not a specific thing-in-itself but is rather more thingless-in-itself.
This doesn't mean it's immaterial.
Living As Opposed To Acting
"to film a thought in action..."
That's Jean-Luc Godard, from his book Godard on Godard. In the same interview, he says:"Writing was already a way of making films, for the difference between writing and directing is quantitative not qualitative."
What does he mean by quantitative? That cinema carries more weight as a medium transmitting narrative ideology? That moving images have more heft? They sure do when it comes to memory hogging and net distribution.
But then again there is a kind of beauty to Quicktime as a potentially interactive desktop cinema format that also assists us as artist-researchers investigating this process of "writing cyberspace." It's viewable, it's listenable, it's scalable (to a point), but it's awfully grungy. And grunge is good, especially if you're the Kurt Cobain of web cinema, but if you have other aspirations, like role-playing some mutant form of new media director who considers herself the Walter Benjamin of streaming cinescripture transponding a fully-immersive, hypertextual consciousness in a networked environment, then don't hold your breath (or: be like Jean Seberg in "Breathless" and put on your best [inter]face).
Seberg once said "...the less I know about acting and the more I know about everything else, the better I'll be at both acting and living..."
In many ways, Breathless was Godard's improvisational manifestation of that thought in action...
Digital Screenwriting
As Darren Tofts so eloquently puts it in his book "Memory Trade":"The unavoidable consequence of the full cultural appropriation of alphabetic literacy, and the complete interiorization of the technology of the alphabet, is that the literate individual is always immersed in a conceptual space contoured by the alphabet. Consciousness is a kind of interface, which alphabetically mediates the empirical world in such a way that it is difficult to comprehend what a non-literate view of the world might look like. The idea of mediated apprehension and understanding of the world, so central to cyberculture, is something that comes into being with the advent of the alphabet and literate societies."
The true language of new media, of writing code into interactive states of being that allow us, cyborgs all, to behave in a society of networked consciousness, has been with us for quite awhile. This ongoing ungoing we all play a role in developing is a kind of Living Theater of the Mind where writing, the code of becoming-cyborg, is im/embedded in our nomadic Life Style Practice. The that arrives with the advent of writing is indicative of the moment we become post-human, cognate matter oozing with the demon leakage we have come to know as the spiritual unconscious.
The advent of cybernetics as a science as well as further development of the personal computer and Internet as nomadically-charged appliances originally formulated in the thinking of Vannevar Bush, helps us proactivate the logic of invention in computer-mediated environments, takes writing to the next level of so that we may now begin to "write cyberspace" yet again. At first a recordable memory device but soon thereafter an inventive remix machine that reconfigures , writing is the ultimate research instrument, both a research tool and reservois of data ready for surf-sample-manipulate action. It is techne (), to its core.
This is another way of saying that the machine aesthetic begins with writing. The body, all bones, muscle, tissue and, eventually, utterance, seeks to record memory and in so doing finds writing. As soon as it finds writing it becomes a kind of meta-body, or a that is scripted with in search of more that will lead to a wider posing as or .
This is where the artificiality of life as kind of stylistic practice becomes primal. What I have come to call Life Style Practice is, in fact, a nomadic narrative that reinvents what it means to be human in post-cybernetic environment. It's because the cyberneticism is already embedded in the - the that captures consciousness for us and that we continuously encode with of meaning. Talmudic in nature, nomadic narrative as Life Style Practice is written into being using whatever technologies happen to be around at the time. Stone, parchment, palipmsest, paint, film, computer code, or even , enable us to perform our abstract expressionism as if it were the jazz of "being becoming something else" splattered over the canvas-cum-interface our lives operate in.

spirit photography

September 4th, 2005 New York Times previews "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," opening September 27 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It sounds spectacular. Seen here, "The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous" (unknown, c.1890). From the article:
It is not a place you would normally expect to find a curator preparing for a major photography show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But a few summers ago, Pierre Apraxine was camped out on the third floor of a rambling town house on West 73rd Street near Central Park, the headquarters of the American Society for Psychical Research, a 120-year-old repository of the paranormal whose founders included the philosopher William James.In the world of photo collecting and scholarship, Mr. Apraxine is nothing less than an institution. For almost two decades, he served as the eyes, ears and auction proxy for the philanthropist Howard Gilman, who built a collection - recently acquired by the Met - that is widely considered to be one of the most important in the world, thanks largely to Mr. Apraxine's expertise and globe-trotting tenacity.On this particular day, however, Mr. Apraxine was working in the service not of photography but of the sixth sense, of that great invisible interchange that the Russian spiritualist Mme. Blavatsky described as a kind of astral post office. He had folded his lanky 6-foot-3 frame into a small, steel soundproof booth illuminated by a red lamp. Halves of Ping-Pong balls were taped over his eyes and headphones hissing white noise were placed over his ears. In a room nearby sat a fellow curator and friend, Sophie Schmit, who was given a randomly selected image on a piece of paper. The goal was for Mr. Apraxine, sealed in his chamber - lulled into a deeply relaxed condition known as a ganzfeld state - to receive the image that Ms. Schmit was sending. .

Social Bookmarking Explosion

Social bookmarking has entered its heroic age, where multiple actors content for a new, growing world.
In the begining was del.icio.us. Elegant and fast, crisp and focused, Joshua's invention was rapidly taken up. In tandem with Flickr it kicked off the folksonomy furor. Furl was there as well, if relatively unsung.

Others have started to emerge. del.irio.us took things a little further. I have recently found RawSugar, which positions itself to attact del.icio.us users, and adds a bit more personalization to one's self-presentation. The same day I played with Sugar I also spotted Shadows, which wants to heighten bookmarking into larger commentary on web pages (NB: site seems to be down tonight).
B tells me about Connotea, which is aimed at the sciences.
The Wikipedia's social bookmarking entry lists still others. More than thirty (30) others. Are we seeing social bookmarking entering the YASN (yet another social network) phase of that movement? Is the duplication of effort going to grow? How much innovation can be attached to each new one to justify exporting one's growing list of links?

New Orleans DoubleQuotes

Blues

Think of these paired quotes as twin thoughts dropped into the mind-pond -- not so much for their own sakes as for the sake of the ripples and resonances between them. I invite you to read these DoubleQuotes one pair at a time, slowly, slowly, so that the multiples ironies and quiet nuances that have come together in the weaving of this tragedy have room to breathe.

A Pasolini resurgence in English

A friend points me to this recent article on Pasolini. It's an introduction to the man's life, and uses the revisiting of his death to draw attention to the breadth of his work. Hopefully this is a sign of a rise in attention to Pasolini, and, even better, maybe some more translations of his written work. One of the reasons I need to learn Italian (beyond what I remember from music) is to read Pasolini's poetry.
My favorite of his films so far remains the extraordinary Theorema (1968). The success last year of Gibson's gore-fest reminds me of Pasolini's excellent Gospel According to Matthew (1964). It might be better to start with his first film, Accattone (1961), which now feels like the ancestor for American independent films, autobiographical comics, and auteur revisionism.
The article above also links to this nice page, some of Pasolini's notes to Salò.

See a Secret...Share a Secret

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

The Telephone

Make sure your sound card is on--then reach out and touch something. Do it.

Sun Tzu's Art of War

So what's the big deal? A complete, essential, no-comments-by thousands of people, version of the work in PDF format to take anywhere @ 448kb. Just click and save or come back when in need of a dose of startegy. Say thank you hamid.

Pimping the Pimps of Gore--you are not what you own

"Please support the artists and bands you read about on this site in any way possible. Buy a shirt or a CD. See a show. Kiss a bassist if you must."

Excellent Blog dedicated to music--Pay dylon a visit:

http://dmg541.blogspot.com/

Is the murderblog a genre now?

Murderblog from Idaho

Blogging the Fifth Nail is the journal of an accused murderer, Joseph Edward Duncan III.
I wish I could be more honest about my feelings, but those demons made sure I'd never be able to do that. I might not know if it matters, but just in case, I am working on an encrypted journal that is hundreds of times more frank than this blog could ever be (that's why I keep it encrypted). I figure in 30 years or more we will have the technology to easily crack the encryption (currently very un-crackable, PGP) and then the world will know who I really was, and what I really did, and what I really thought.
A post modern version of Capote's "In Cold Blood" narrated in the first person--chilling reflection of our times. HT

Phenomenal Woman--Maya Angelou

"Phenomenal Woman"

Pretty woman wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to fit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them, They think I'm telling lies.
I say, It's in the reach of my arms The span of my hips The stride of my step, The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.

I walk into a room Just as cool as you please,
And to a man, The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees. They swarm around me, A hive of honey bees.
I say, It's the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.

Men themselves have wondered What they see in me.
They try so much But they can't touch My inner mystery. When I try to show them, They say they still can't see.
I say, It's the arch of my back The sun in my smile, The ride of my breasts, The grace of my style.
I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.

Now you understand Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud. When you see me passing, I ought to make you proud I say,
It's the click of my heals, The bend of my hair, The need for my care.
'Cause I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.

See the Grammatron

"GRAMMATRON is grappling with the idea of spirituality in the electronic age." The New York Times
"A colosssal hypertext hydrogen bomb dropped on the literary landscape..." Time-Warner's Pathfinder
"A rollercoaster ride through textspace...click to enter GRAMMATRON and you're pulled into a machine eye's view of both storytelling and story theory...intense."MSNBC's The Site
"Amerika's work exemplifies how online literary creations are developing into an entire multi-media experience...hypertext works like GRAMMATRON are far a few between." Wired
"...the first major Internet-published work of fiction to produce an experience unique to the medium."The Village Voice
"The end of postmodernism andthe beginning of Avant-Pop."Die Zeit
"The world's most ambitious cybernovel."The Australian

http://www.grammatron.com/index2.html

Follow the Glass Snail

Follow me.....http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/glasssnail/

A. R. Penck at the Artcyclopedia

Good sight to search for artworks:

Link:http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/penck_ar.html

H. P. Lovecraft at the Scriptorium

This is more of an introduction to the Scriptorium site--follow the link below and enjoy.

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/lovecraft.html

Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'."
- Bluebeard p.188

"My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things."
- Bluebeard p.246

"This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."
- Deadeye Dick p.6

"Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAPOnly he didn't say 'doggone.'"
- Hocus Pocus

"Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous."
- Slapstick

"We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love."

"The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart."
- Sirens of Titan

Links:
http://www.kurt-vonnegut.com/index.shtml

Happy Iranian New Year

No Ruz, new day or New Year as the Iranians call it, is a celebration of spring Equinox.
It has been celebrated by all the major cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. Sumerians
3000BC, Babylonians 2000 BC, the ancient kingdom of Elam in Southern Persia
2000BC, and Akaddians all have been celebrating it in one form or another.......

http://www.payvand.com/news/04/mar/1137.html
http://www.payvand.com/newyear.html
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/Nowruz/NowRuz.html
http://www.wwwebart.com/newart/

IP adress locator

handy tool to see who is sending you stuff and from where with liks to RIPE, ARIN, and APNIC databases.
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm

how about a Russian search engine

http://www.yandex.ru/advanced_engl.html

Enjoy

1000 best films of All Times

How about your list ?

http://www.scaruffi.com/cinema/best100.html

Beyond Kaurismaki Brothers

The Art of Rebellion
Beyond the Kaurismaki brothers: a brief introduction to Finnish moviemaking

FINLAND IS A COUNTRY O F five million people; a land of pine forests and lakes sand­wiched between Sweden and northern Russia. The latter countries had their turns at political and cultural domination over Finland, but since Finland gained inde­pendence in 1917, it has become a prosperous nation with a distinct, fully­formed identity. Now one of the richest countries in Europe, Finland is known for its architects and, more recently, for its cellular phones and racecar drivers. In the not-too-distant future it may be known for its moviemakers, too........

http://www.moviemaker.com/issues/46/finnish.html

Jim Jarmush fans

What I find incredible about Jim Jarmush's films is his capacity to do story telling without a straight beginning or ending, that deconstruction is found in much of his work. For example in Down By Law the ending -without revealing what it is- is very suprising, doesn't leave a feeling of completeness to the work, but the frustration of the viewer......... http://www.soundsmag.org/article.php3?id_article=12

Goobye Dr. postel

In memory of Dr. Jonathan B. Postel

The Internet will never be the same without you.

There are several memorial funds in Dr. Postel's honor. If you would like to contribute
to any of them, please click here.
For those of you who would like more information on Dr. Postel and his
accomplishments, please see:
http://www.iana.org/
http://www.isi.edu/div7/people/postel.home/activities.html
http://www.isoc.org/postel/condolences.shtml
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2468.txt
http://www.tnl.net/what/postel.shtml

Some of Dr. Postel's most important work, and the foundations of the Internet:

IP - the Internet Protocol
TCP - the Transmission Control Protocol
UDP - the User Datagram Protocol
ICMP - the Internet Control Message Protocol

Some news stories about Dr. Postel:
http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/nation/docs/postel18.htm
http://www.mercurycenter.com/nation/center/postel101898.htm
http://cnn.com/US/9810/18/obit.postel.01.ap/index.html
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/15683.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_196000/196487.stm

Yahoo! has a more complete listing of news stories:http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/Tech/Jon_Postel

Milorad Pavic postings

Here is a link, enjoy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorad_Pavic

God help the texans

received this today from a friend :

Road Safety...

The National Transportation Safety Board recently divulged they had covertly funded a project with the U.S. auto makers for the past five years, whereby the auto makers were installing black boxes in four-wheel drive pick-up trucks in an effort to determine, in fatal accidents, the circumstances in the last 15 seconds before the crash.

They were surprised to find in 49 of the 50 states the last words of drivers in 61.2 percent of fatal crashes were: "Oh, Shit!"

Only the state of Texas was different, where 89.3 percent of the final words were: "Hold my beer and watch this!"

Walt Whitman's leaves of grass

for the complete work follow the following link (be patient it takes a while) :http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
Here is a little sample

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC.

1 I SING the Body electric;

The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them; .....

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

2 Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?

And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

3 The love of the Body of man or woman balks ac- count—the body itself balks account;

That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

4 The expression of the face balks account;




But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him;

The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.
5 The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,

The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up, and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water,

The bending forward and backward of rowers in row- boats—the horseman in his saddle,

Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,

The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,

The female soothing a child—the farmer's daughter in the garden or cow-yard,

The young fellow hoeing corn—the sleigh-driver guiding his six horses through the crowd,

The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down, after work,

The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,

The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;

The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trow- sers and waist-straps,



The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,

The natural, perfect, varied attitudes—the bent head, the curv'd neck, and the counting;

Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's breast with the little child,

Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, and count.
6 I knew a man, a common farmer—the father of five sons;

And in them were the fathers of sons—and in them were the fathers of sons.

7 This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person;

The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes—the richness and breadth of his manners,

These I used to go and visit him to see—he was wise also;

He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old—his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome;

They and his daughters loved him—all who saw him loved him;

They did not love him by allowance—they loved him with personal love!

He drank water only—the blood show'd like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face;

He was a frequent gunner and fisher—he sail'd his boat himself—he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner—he had fowling-pieces, presented to him by men that loved him;

When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,




You would wish long and long to be with him—you would wish to sit by him in the boat, that you and he might touch each other.
8 I have perceiv'd that to be with those I like is enough,

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a mo- ment—what is this, then?

I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.

9 There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well;

All things please the soul—but these please the soul well.
10 This is the female form;

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;

It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!

I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor—all falls aside but myself and it;

Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, the atmosphere and the clouds, and what was expected of heaven or fear'd of hell, are now consumed;

Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it—the response likewise ungovernable;

Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands, all diffused—mine too diffused;

Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb— love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching;

Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quiver- ing jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice;

Bridegroom night of love, working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn;



Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.
11 This is the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, the man is born of woman;

This is the bath of birth—this is the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.

12 Be not ashamed, women—your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest;

You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

13 The female contains all qualities, and tempers them —she is in her place, and moves with perfect balance;

She is all things duly veil'd—she is both passive and active;

She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.
14 As I see my soul reflected in nature;

As I see through a mist, one with inexpressible com- pleteness and beauty,

See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast— the female I see.
15 The male is not less the soul, nor more—he too is in his place;

He too is all qualities—he is action and power;

The flush of the known universe is in him;

Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance be- come him well:

The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sor- row that is utmost, become him well—pride is for him;

The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul;

Knowledge becomes him—he likes it always—he brings everything to the test of himself;



Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail, he strikes soundings at last only here;

(Where else does he strike soundings, except here?)
16 The man's body is sacred, and the woman's body is sacred;

No matter who it is, it is sacred;

Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?

Each belongs here or anywhere, just as much as the well off—just as much as you;

Each has his or her place in the procession.

17 (All is a procession;

The universe is a procession, with measured and beautiful motion.)

18 Do you know so much yourself, that you call the slave or the dull-face ignorant?

Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight?

Do you think matter has cohered together from its dif- fuse float—and the soil is on the surface, and water runs, and vegetation sprouts,

For you only, and not for him and her?
19 A man's Body at auction;

I help the auctioneer—the sloven does not half know his business.
20 Gentlemen, look on this wonder!

Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for it;

For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years, without one animal or plant;

For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll'd.
21 In this head the all-baffling brain;

In it and below it, the makings of heroes.


22 Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve;

They shall be stript, that you may see them.
23 Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant back-bone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.
24 Within there runs blood,

The same old blood!

The same red-running blood!

There swells and jets a heart—there all passions, de- sires, reachings, aspirations;

Do you think they are not there because they are not express'd in parlors and lecture-rooms?
25 This is not only one man—this is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns;

In him the start of populous states and rich republics;

Of him countless immortal lives, with countless embod- iments and enjoyments.

26 How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?

Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?
27 A woman's Body at auction!

She too is not only herself—she is the teeming mother of mothers;

She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

28 Have you ever loved the Body of a woman?

Have you ever loved the Body of a man?

Your father—where is your father?

Your mother—is she living? have you been much with her? and has she been much with you?



—Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all, in all nations and times, all over the earth?
29 If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred,

And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of man- hood untainted;

And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is beautiful as the most beautiful face.
30 Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body?

For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.
31 O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you;

I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they are the Soul;)

I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that they are poems,

Man's, woman's, child's, youth's, wife's, husband's, mother's, father's, young man's, young woman's poems;

Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,

Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,

Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,

Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,

Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,

Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest.

Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm- sinews, arm-bones,

Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger, finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails,

Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast- bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone,

Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,

Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,

Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under leg,

Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;

All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body, or of any one's body, male or female,

The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,

The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,

Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, ma- ternity,

Womanhood, and all that is a woman—and the man that comes from woman,

The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laugh- ter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,

The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,

Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,

Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm- curving, and tightening,

The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

The skin, the sun burnt shade, freckles, hair,

The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,

The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out,

The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,

The thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the marrow in the bones,

The exquisite realization of health;

O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul,

O I say now these are the Soul!.