=Basho on the kind of life every poet would envy=

a cicada shell

it sang itself
utterly away

=Book recently read=

It's amazing to me that Tom McCarthy is considered by a considerable number of critics to be "the standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel" (Adam Kirsch, Slate). There is nothing at all "avant-garde" about the way McCarthy treats plot, character, narrative or really any other conventions of the modern novel. Has mainstream literary fiction really become so banal that a novel simply has to have ideas in it for it to pass for avant-garde? Satin Island is a good book with some interesting stuff to say that occasionally even manages to challenge the status quo and flirt with the politically incorrect, but its not even as avant-garde as J.G. Ballard…and I'm not  talking about the J.G. Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibit, a truly outrageous read even by today's standards, but the Ballard of the much less avant-garde Crash. To tout McCarthy's avant-garde creds by claiming that he writes, as some critics have done, in the vein of Robbe-Grillet is not only wildly inaccurate but hilarious when you consider that Robbe-Grillet himself was avant-garde a freaking half-century ago!

Yes, it's true, I suppose. American mainstream literary fiction really is that lame!  It hasn't even caught up with Kathy Acker and she's been dead for nearly two decades! As far as challenging convention goes, Tom McCarthy isn't even in the avant-garde minor leagues when compared to Acker. Or William S. Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch remains an indigestible experiment in avant-garde fiction for the weak-stomached mainstream since it was first served up in 1959.

There is an American avant-garde but I guess the lesson to be learned is that you're not going to find it between the covers of anything published by Random House—or any other mainstream publisher, for that matter. Satin Island is avant-garde only if you stand it alongside something by A.S. Byatt or Julian Barnes. 

Satin Island is a good book, though. I said it earlier, but it bears repeating. It's an entertaining read, timely, and provokes some thought. But it hardly breaks any new ground. It doesn't even travel the ground already paced off by long-dead avant-garde writers. Okay, if you want to say that McCarthy re-chews  some aspects of past avant-garde and postmodern writers and spits them back out in a half-digested mush more easily assimilated by your average reader of New York Times recommended literary fiction, I'll sigh and, resignedly, agree just to end the argument. But don't try to compare him to Gertrude Stein, or, as some reviewers did, to Samuel Beckett! That's just too much to bear. 

Ultimately, It's not McCarthy's fault that the critics and publishers must make the claim that he's something he's not so as to warn the great common denominator that comprises their core audience to be ready for something that doesn't entirely meet their timid middlebrow expectations. At the same time, it enables this same audience to congratulate themselves, to feel they're true literary outlaws reading on the wild edge of the literary frontier. What bullshit! To these folks I'd offer something like pornocalypse by M. Satai and see how fast they run back to the relative safety of a Tao Lin.

America isn't the leader anymore in a whole host of areas. But it's never held the lead when it came to the literary avant-garde. And considering how far behind it is at this point,  and how incredibly dumbed-down and conventional even "smart" commercial literary fiction is in this country, it's hard to believe it will ever get within half-a-century of shouting distance. 

That's fine. That's American publishing. 

American publishing, like American everything else, is about making money. Okay. Have at it. But don't co-opt the term "avant-garde." Don't stick it on what are nothing more than conventional novels with marginally quirky themes and a handful of provocative ideas the way you'd splash the words "new" and "improved" on a roll of paper towels. These terms mean something to some of us. 

As if you ever cared. 

As if you ever will.
  

=mea culpa=

=Conch, Frog, Bonobo by Keith Chambers=

=Paradise, As I Recall It=

Back then, I was living on a small tropical island. It was so isolated and remote that it didn’t even appear on maps. It was the kind of island where Adolf Hitler, John Kennedy, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe would have been living if those stories in the National Enquirer were true.

All the natives practiced some kind of magic. They didn’t think anything of it; it was second nature to them.  At the café you’d see saltshakers floating across tabletops and coffee cups levitating to lips. Cats could talk because they were really people. Coconuts were conjured out of thin air with bored-out holes from which straws emerged, ready for languorous sipping. The magic must have rubbed off on me. Without even trying, I found I could perform a few nifty tricks of my own.

One rainy season a Catholic priest washed ashore looking like a great black beach umbrella turned inside out. There’d been a shipwreck, he explained, though no evidence of a shipwreck was ever discovered. It was a miracle that he’d survived, so he said. He never tired of describing the long days and nights at sea, the thirst, the sun, the sharks and how his faith had seen him through. Clearly he’d been sent to the island by God to free us from the evil demons who’d  taken possession of our hapless souls. The island people, being an easy-going lot, didn’t object. They nodded, they smiled, they conjured more alcoholic coconuts. “Okay mon,” was the general sentiment. "As you say then." 

They'd lived with magic so long that it no longer seemed very magical. They were up for something new. Undergoing a Catholic exorcism seemed just the thing. Why not? It became a fad, like getting an ankle tattoo or your hair braided with shells. Soon the island wasn’t half so magical as before. In fact, it had become downright dull. People  spent a lot of time saying things like “Pass the salt, please?” instead of just floating it across the table like in the old days. They left being a cat to the cats. Inevitably, a McDonald's went up. A Burger King quickly followed. The good times were over. It was time for me to leave.

I waited for the next helicopter to arrive with the latest supposedly dead celebrity. I turned myself into a tse-tse fly and snuck myself aboard for the return trip. Back in New Jersey, I regained my human form. It was the last bit of magic I ever did. Somehow, I had lost the knack. As easily as it rubbed off onto me, the magic had rubbed right back off again. Who knows where it goes? People will tell you that there’s something not quite right about me. They can't put their finger on what it is. It's a feeling. They start to say it, but don't. They're afraid they'll sound crazy. So everyone ends up keeping my secret. I took a job selling life insurance by phone. I get by.

=mea culpa=

=Tom McCarthy on the human equivalent of buffering=

We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events. But when the narrating cursor catches right up with the rendering one, when occurrences and situations don't replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain, when, no matter how fast they regenerate, they're instantly devoured by a mouth too voracious to let anything gather or accrue unconsumed before it, then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it. Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything.

from Satin Island

=from Richard Canard=

=mea culpa=

=grimoire=

=mea culpa=

=Nuns in Space=

Will we still need nuns in outer space? That was the question on everyone's lips as the symposium ground on into its third day. According to one of the papers presented, nuns are being emitted from black holes at a slower and slower rate. Back at the motel, I resented him orbiting the bed. When room service came we had no choice but to inform them: No one here ordered the cream cheese. If you want to impress someone, you'll swallow a tiger. Still, even with the best metaphors in the world, you can't kill germs on contact.

Where are tomorrow's nuns coming from? The question hung in the air like a pair of underwear from a ceiling fan. He packed up his briefcase as if he were an authority on something. Why not? Because we just couldn't, that's why! The last nun left without a fight but with the salt-shaker. What we overheard in the hall does not bear repeating.

=The Autism Madrigals=

=mea culpa=

=What annoys Tan Lin about poetry readings=

The most exasperating thing at a poetry reading is always the sound of a poet reading.


(and I thought I was the only one who felt like this).

=mona lisa duchamp=

=The Werewolf Diet=

There is a period in the life of every regenerating person when he or she sees how it is. There is none so discreet and wise as you. Then you marvel and say,  “My heart tells me we need to get revenge.” The only time I dared tentatively ask he nearly bit my head off. “How does anyone become anything?” he barked, spittle flying everywhere. It’s like this: God has this crazy, impossible-to-attain standard none of us could ever reach. If you go into the kitchen, and look above the cupboard, just over the coffee pot, you'll find an old coffee can on the left, just behind the new can. There are plenty of things in my past I don’t want to talk about. This simple diet has the potential to help you lose up to six pounds in twenty-four hours, although it's more common to lose two or three pounds. You’ll become a shape-shifting creature with unusual speed, strength, reflexes, and senses. It’s nothing new. People are always asking me why I put up with it. By “it” they don’t mean what I carefully keep hidden away as best I can. There is the week every month when he disappears god knows where, eventually dragging his sorry ass home with a hangdog expression and twigs in his hair. We’ve all seen this sort of thing in countless books, films, and television shows. “He treats you like a Honduran illegal!” they squall, outraged, and wring their proverbial hands. And they’re right. Why do I put up with it? The main rule consists of a simple twenty-four hour fast during the full moon and new moon phases. If you need to be down a few pounds to fit into that dress tomorrow, I don’t have an answer. For everything else, this could be the perfect vehicle, candy-apple red.

=mea culpa=

=Irregardless, I=

I had come down with a bad case of glossolalia. No one could understand me, not even myself. I thought I was entering a disc-shaped church, but it was a flying saucer. I was trying to think of a beautiful-sounding word for “industrial hell.” We swooshed up beyond the Milky Way. I was haunted by the recurring image of a carnivorous clown. “Cool it,” I told George. “You might be making a fatal mistake.” (Somehow I was seeing George in another dimension; he was thinking of getting involved with some shady drug-dealer types). But I don’t think he could hear me. I called it the “Milky Way” but I don’t know for sure what it was. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen anyway. There's no such word as "irregardless." It has caused controversy since the early twentieth century, though the word appeared in print as early as 1795.

On Tuesday morning I woke up. The guy on the radio said: “If you remove all grains from your diet, you should see an improvement of your symptoms.” My hair is not white it’s snow white and now quite silvery going towards salt and pepper. I also do not react violently to accidental ingestion of tiny amounts of whatever it is. Certain conditions may generate airborne dust particles but that is beneath my notice. I’m not allergic.  Soon I will be someone else. Hazard control and accident prevention are dependent upon  awareness, concern, prudence. Remember that. Also, remember that sweet potatoes, like a lot of other vegetables, have a best by date.  Because of this distinction, you may safely use sweet potatoes as a compliment. There’s no telling how much of your future may already be bad, rotten or spoiled until you walk up to it with a big smile and say “hello.”

=mea culpa=

=grimoire 10=

=20 Gallon Universe=

When I was a child we had a series of fish tanks and it seemed that there was always one fish that rapidly grew bigger and faster than all the others. He—I always assumed it was a “he”—became the King of the Tank.

It was never enough that this fish had the run of the whole tank, from one glass wall to the other, side to side, front to back. No, the King of the Tank always had to find the smallest, weakest fish at which time he would commence a program of constant harassment that always ended the same way. He would hunt that fish from behind the most obscure rock, from the densest thicket of plant-growth, from inside the most remote and uninteresting shell in the tank. He would chase and nip at its fins and tail until the small fish lay ragged and gasping and exhausted on the filthy gravel too weak even to rise to the surface for food. I would sprinkle dried fish flakes directly above it, hoping some would go uneaten by the other fish and make their way to the bottom close enough for it to eat, but in spite of my skill at this operation the other fish would catch most of the falling food first and what they didn’t scarf down the injured fish seemed too weak and terrified to go for, even if it were only an inch or two away from it’s laboring mouth.

Sometimes I'd stand by the tank for up to an hour waiting for the King of the Tank to dive and attack and then I’d flick my finger loudly on the glass just like I was told never ever to do, risking my father’s wrath, to scare the big fish off. It worked, but not for long; fish, I guess, not having very long memories and, of course, I couldn’t be there all the time. I often fantasized about scooping the King of the Tank out and quarantining him an old jelly jar or throwing him into the tiger lily patch in the backyard where I wouldn’t have to see him flop to his death but I never did either, paralyzed by fear of what my father would do if he found out and cowed by the ethical dilemma of exercising such godlike power of life and death over another creature. 

Inevitably, the morning would come when I’d find the gnawed, faded body of the little fish floating among the yellow leaves sucked near the filter. I would scoop it out using the pocket-sized green net and march it cold-eyed to the toilet as I’d done many times before with many other small, weak, doomed-from-the-start fish. “That’s the way the universe works,” my father would explain, seeming, it seemed to me both then and now, satisfied that he was teaching me something invaluable about life, something that would help me survive in the world, this being back in the days before he split.

=Collaborative Cartooning (Richard Canard)=

=Book recently read=

You won't read a lot of novels where all three protagonists end up getting their heads chopped off.

Mantel's deeply absorbing fictional reconstruction of the French Revolution is, among other things, an object lesson for our own time. It amply illustrates how dangerous people and institutions become when they revert to fanatical faith in abstractions—whether their fundamentalism is religious or political. 

Today, in Amerika, patriotic nationalism is the new opiate of the masses. The Pledge of Allegiance is the new Our Father. And The Star-Spangled Banner our tear-jerking secular version of the Ave Maria. Listen to a crowd mindlessly chanting the mantra USA USA USA! What you're hearing is the cudgel that crushes to powder all rational thought and critical faculty. And it's no wonder—that is what all rote prayer and political sloganizing is meant to do. 

To die for "freedom and democracy" is as stupid and irrational as to die for God. What, essentially, is the difference between martyring yourself for "Mohammed" and martyring yourself for "Amerika"? Both are abstractions, pie in the sky.

Amerikia is an ideal—like heaven. It has never really existed. Take even the most cursory look at Amerikan history—from the extermination of the Indians to the institution of slavery, from the oppression of women and immigrant minorities to racial segregation, from Vietnam to the present day security state and the stranglehold of Amerikan military and corporate intervention across the globe—when did "freedom and justice for all" ever really exist?

Nationalism is nothing more than a secular version of religious fundamentalism. Both are illusions meant to control, mobilize, and sacrifice the individual to a so-called "higher cause." God no more needs your life to exist than does freedom.  Tragically, in the absence of any other "reason" to live, people have been—and always will be—willing to invent and believe in reasons to die.

Meanwhile, those of wealth and privilege do have a reason to live—and live they do, like vampires, off the sacrifice of the manipulated and duped, who they send to their slaughter like cattle, using patriotic sophistries and mindless flag-waving as their goads. From the point of view of the masters: it is a sad (perhaps) but necessary business. 

The aristocracy never died. There has always been a 1%. And there always will be. But you don't have to be one of the 99% who support them. 

=asemic postcard=

=flag=

=grimoire 9=

=Hilary Mantel channeling Robespierre on history=

The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good. This idea of history as made by great men is quite nonsensical, when you look at it from the point of view of the people. The real heroes are those who have resisted tyrants, and it is in the nature of tyranny not only to kill those who oppose it but to wipe their names out of the record, to obliterate them, so that resistance seems impossible. Resistance to tyranny means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page. History is fiction.

=Riding Home with a Busload of Dead Folks=

There was a dead guy

sitting on the bus

in front of me tonight.

He was calling the office

on his cell phone

giving some last minute

instructions to some poor

bastard who worked for him.

He was talking in such a loud,

obnoxious voice I turned

to look if he was disturbing

anyone else. But the woman

across the aisle reading

the NY Times was dead

too and so were the couple

chatting behind her. In fact,

it seemed as if I were the only

living person on the whole

fucking bus. Naturally,

I began to get worried.

I was speeding down the

turnpike in a busload of dead

folks passed a landscape

of petrochemical drums and

mobster swampland. And

then I made the mistake

of looking in the rearview

mirror and seeing the bus

driver’s eyes looking directly

at me. I knew right then I

wasn’t going home alive

that night. It didn’t make a

difference whether he drove

off the bridge or slammed into

a cement mixer. I looked at

my pale reflection in the

darkening window and saw

what he saw: another pale-

faced dead commuter on

her way home to her apartment,

her cat, her microwaved dinner,

her tv, and moonlit sexless bed.

I wanted to laugh but the dead

don’t laugh they just sort of

unhinge their jaws in mute surprise.

Besides, even among the dead

I didn’t want to seem insane.

=candy trio=

=grimoire 8=

=grimoire 7=

=3 Candies=

=story of x=

=Hilary Mantel on the ecstasy of writing (as channeled through her character Camille Desmoulins in her novel A Place of Greater Safety)=

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon. Once paper and ink were to hand, it was useless to appeal to his better nature, to tell him he was wrecking reputations and ruining people's lives. A kind of sweet venom flowed through his veins, smoother than the finest cognac, quicker to make the head spin. And, just as some people crave opium, he craves the opportunity to exercise his fine art of mockery, vituperation and abuse; laudanum might quieten the senses, but a good editorial puts a catch in the throat and a skip in the heartbeat. Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.

=Rpms=

Two citizens were brought in to undergo 
the new skull-boring procedure now mandated
by the State. The first resisted every step
of the way. Cursing and twisting, he had
to be dragged into the chamber by the guards
and strapped down. He did nothing
but make it harder on everyone. The second man—
no problem at all. He jumped up on the table
himself, the very picture of cooperation. 
When the drill touched his forehead, 
he followed it's revolutions with his eyes
as the bit bore inside. We called him
Mr. Pinwheel.

=envelope art=

=Some stuff by Moan Lisa=

=A little prayer for nihilists=

Anytime I hear the word "we" I look around
dumbfounded. "We?" "We?" Who is this "we"
they're always on about? It's got nothing
to do with me. I'm just reciting little prayers
to nothing because we aren't getting more
than this. When I see an infant I think:
who—who was so satisfied with Alzheimers
and bladder cancer that they dragged you
to this party? I'm guilty of always seeing
to the end of things. Life, the palimpsest 
traced lightly over a skull. Everyone has a little
taste of hell under their tongue. Like Tiresius,
I have a problem with my eyes. I figure my
allegiance lies with the ancient astronauts.
The fish has not yet come. The appetizers
have been cleared. You are playing with
your knife as the bombs explode across
the tablecloth in tiny silent plumes. 
With my fork, I taunt a pea escaped from 
the innards of some devoured pastry shell
around the flowered circumference of my
plate. Would Jesus have worn mismatched
socks? How many calories in a crucifixion?
Whither flies the cream canoli?

=mail art from Richard Canard=

=Her secret=

=grimoire 6=

=grimoire 5=

=An Explanation of the Mayan Pyramids=

Love is a big animal, you forget until you see it
throwing a full-grown man around a concrete enclosure
like a chew-toy. Of course, man is a chew-toy.
It's amazing the things you can miss.
A legendary case of dandruff, for instance.
The sirens at 3 am 
going somewhere else.
Some part of me will always be waiting with held breath
for the slamming door, 
the shattered china.
Some part of me will always be locked away
like silverware for special occasions
that never arrive,
the feast where I consume the heart
of my enemy.
I wear an anklet of tiny skulls.
I shake my feathered bone.
I am an exorcism that didn't go so well.
I'm a long series of calculations that ends in null.
I've a gaping hole in my hull.
Because I didn't go down when I was supposed to go down,
people have had to redefine the notion of shipwreck.
I'm most proud of that.
I have the kinds of scars that only cats can see.
They lick them.
The tiger, you estimate, about as big
as the love-seat we don't sit on.
Silence as we contemplate that pseudo-fact.

In any book of family photos

not one of them is me.
I have been excised from everywhere
I used to be.
The glacial drift of cataracts
across her field of vision,
a disturbance on the surface
of the film
where my mother's arthritic finger hesitates
over some indistinct blur.
Right there, that's me.

=grimoire 4=

=2 by Richard Canard=

=envelope art=

=Je te aime Marcel Duchamp=

Marcel Duchamp once lived in Buenos Aries for about a year. 

Marcel Duchamp had two older brothers, the painter Jacques Villon, formerly Gaston Duchamp, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, a sculptor. For a long time, they were considered much better artists than Marcel.

Marcel Duchamp was a great friend of the nihilistic artist Francis Picabia.

I could hear his beating heart, and feel the coolness of his chest. Divinely happy, I never closed my eyes to sleep, 
said Beatrice Wood about spending a chaste night with Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp admired the iconoclastic life and writings of Alfred Jarry.

Marcel Duchamp was beautiful the way Antonin Artaud was beautiful, but without the insanity.

July 28, 1887 was the day on which Marcel Duchamp was born.

It was in Buenos Aries, around the time of his brother Raymond's tragic early death, that Marcel became totally obsessed with chess.

I believe that art is the only form of activity in which man shows himself to be a true individual, Duchamp said. Only in art is he capable of going beyond the animal state, because art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by space and time.

Like virtually all women and many men, I fell in love with Marcel Duchamp on sight. In my case, it was through photographs.

Duchamp, according to the wife of his extremely short-lived first marriage, disliked body hair on a woman.

Marcel Duchamp died on October 2, 1968. He was lying fully dressed on the bathroom floor. Of his demeanor in death, his then wife Teeny said: He had the most calm, pleased expression on his face.

His mother was nearly deaf when he was born. She went increasingly deaf thereafter.

He once spent a week in Spring Lake, N.J.

He once visited Coney Island and rode the rollercoaster.

One of his favorite books was Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own—a book that ruthlessly advances the hypothesis that nothing can be more important to a human being than his or her self.

Despite his cross-dressing feminine alter-ego Rrose Selavy and his painting in a goatee on the Mona Lisa, there is no evidence to suggest that Marcel Duchamp considered himself to be transgendered, or would have, had such a concept been truly feasible in 1920.

Marcel Duchamp was a rated player on the French international chess team but eventually realized he would never be a chess genius, or even a "great" player. He continued avidly to play chess, though, for the rest of his life.

His first readymade was an ordinary snow shovel that he bought in a Manhattan hardware store. He called it "In Advance of the Broken Arm."

Duchamp's daughter grew up to be the painter Yo Sermayer. She painted a lot of chairs.

He made a study of casino gambling and worked out a system for winning at roulette. With modest success.

His mounted bicycle tire was not originally a readymade. He made it for his own pleasure, not as an artwork. He compared watching the spinning wheel to watching a fire in a fireplace.

Duchamp: Much better than to change religion would be to change sex.

It is doubtful that Marcel Duchamp ever saw a real-life puffin. If he did, the event goes unrecorded, at least to my knowledge.

The curious thing about that mustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a real man, Marcel said.

Duchamp very possibly married his first wife, an unattractive overweight woman by all accounts, including Marcel's, for her money. She turned out, however, not to have a lot of it.

We have to accept those so-called laws of science because it makes life more convenient, said Duchamp. But that doesn't mean anything so far as validity is concerned. Every fifty years or so a new "law" is discovered that changes everything. I just don't see why we should have such reverence for science.


Duchamp, unlike many of his fellow artists, including his own brothers, did all he could to avoid military service during World War I. He didn't see where the conflict concerned him at all. He was determined to sit it out "arms folded" and did just that.

In fact, Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own is a masterpiece of solipsistic philosophy. 

Marcel Duchamp could not walk through walls, but he could do the next best thing.

Duchamp died in Neuilly, France, after a dinner party. Among those at table was his old friend Man Ray.

His sister Suzanne, cleaning out his apartment in Paris while Marcel was living in America, threw out the bicycle wheel and bottle-rack readymades, figuring they were garbage.

Duchamp and his wife Teeny chaperoned a twenty-four-year-old Bobby Fischer during a chess tournament in Monte Carlo.

Duchamp was a vampire, but he was very gracious about it. He only took such small sips that almost no one ever minded.

Duchamp's grave marker reads: Besides, it is always the others who die.

Duchamp: The word 'law' is against my principles.

Duchamp fathered at least one illegitimate child. He saw her for the first time when she was eight and not again for more than forty years.

Duchamp had a propensity for attracting—and doing nothing to discourage—wealthy women from supporting him. 

Duchamp's last controversial work prominently features as the very center of attention a woman's shaved pussy.

Duchamp visited Joseph Cornell several times at Cornell's home on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. Cornell helped Duchamp construct a number of his Box-in-a-Suitcase anthologies.

There is no evidence to support the claim that Duchamp was homosexual or even bisexual, although it is considered a fact that he participated in sexual threesomes with his good friend Henri-Pierre Roche on more than one occasion. 

I would have rather been Marcel Duchamp's daughter than his wife or lover. Why?

Duchamp became an American citizen after World War II.

Not long ago I sat in the car at the curb outside of Joseph Cornell's house on Utopia Parkway. I took a picture with my cell phone. It looked just like any other middle-class home on the block. At the time, I didn't know that Marcel Duchamp had once been there.

I'm a pseudo all in all, that's my characteristic. I never could stand the seriousness of life, but when the serious is tinted with humor, it makes a nicer color, said Marcel Duchamp.

=2 poems=

=grimoire 3=

=5 days since=

(for Bob Grumman February 2, 1941-April 2, 2015 who I just discovered by reading that he'd died. I hate when that happens.  http://poeticks.com

=Book recently read=

Duchamp's vast influence today can be traced in large part to his conception of the artistic process, which makes self-expression in any form appear trivial and irrelevant. Instead of the artist-as-hero, the master artificer who can embody, in James Joyce's great phrase, the uncreated conscience of his race, Duchamp proposes the work of art as an independent creation, brought into being in a joint effort by the artist, the spectator, and the unpredictable actions of chance—a free creation that, by its very nature, may be more complex, more interesting, more original, and truer to life than a work that is subject to the limitations of the artist's personal control. —Calvin Tompkins

=Pink, Orange, Turquoise=