Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, spoke recently with/at TED.com:



New Yorker article on Assange and Wikileaks from earlier this month.  Written by Raffi Khatchadourian.

From Lapham's Quarterly

"If Clark Coolidge had a background in linguistics and Jack Spicer knew how to use the bassoon and Gertrude Stein had lived in a land of Swiss misses and misters instead of an atelier in Paris, we might get close to explaining Steve Timm’s poems and poetics.  But then we’d be leaving out his love of puns—especially bad ones—his irritation with the dullards in charge, and his great ability to better explain the “living condition” by reversals and fractures of common sense.  The title alone gets to one of the central ticks of Timm, with his usage of knowingly ungrammatical agreement between the Italian male article un and the female storia.  Apart from the all too human humor of gendering words, he is highlighting a friction, or the fiction of friction, or the friction of fiction.  He doesn’t like the easy and clean.  If the Marx Bros. knew Spanish, if Jaap Blonk was American, etc.  If the world were a soulful place with justice for all, and all for one, we probably wouldn’t need a him like Timm.  But we do.  Oh, Gawd, do we do."

--my blurb for Steve Timm's forthcoming Un storia from BlazeVox Books.

*

Here's a link (pdf file) to his chapbook 'n'altra storio, which is a sequel to Un storia.



       

SUSANA (1951)

Starring Rosita Quintana, Fernando Soler

Luis Buñuel, director



Traveling familiar Buñuel territory here, with his humorous and lacerating depictions of Christian morality and bourgeois life.  It's not on the fabulous level of Viridiana, or the overt religious attack in L'Age d'Or, but the "happiness" at the end, when all is as it "should be," couldn't be more pointed.

NIGHT MOVES (1975)
 Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, a young James Woods, and Melanie Griffith (first credited role)
Arthur Penn, director


We watched this last night, and it's a very weird film, and I'm not sure how intentional that was.  The leaps in time between cuts is something I haven't seen before.  And they're just so randomly cut.  And the dialog, especially in the first half of the film, is seemingly culled from the transcript of a dope party.  It contains some of the finer American automobiles--the Mustang!--and potboiler language, and pretty unconsciously hilarious forays into pop psychology.  Seeing the "mechanic" James Woods in various neck and head accessories also brought brief joy.  The screenplay from the novel obviously deleted much connective tissue, and also left behind some dangling things, breadcumbs leading one down a path that ends on a cliff.  Wacky and entertaining.

The following poem was created by 26 poets and fiction writers. It was originally intended to be read on the top of Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48, but due to a heavy snowstorm on the weekend of our trip, we had to cancel. This was last October. Yesterday, we attempted Matterhorn Peak in the Northern Sierra Nevada mountain range, but we ran out of time, after spending seven hours on the ascent, knowing we would have to still return to the trailhead, and the car, and then drive back to Davis, CA. In all it was 12 hours of climbing and hiking back out. I read the poem at where we topped out, around 11,000 feet--the video follows the poem.



MATTERHORN PEAK’S MT WHITNEY POEM

for Leslie Scalapino




Jesus wept

Splinter of stars--and I do

Not this. What then?

Meta-meta-metadata

Amidst crisp colors at the summit I call

It was a simple job that anyone who could read, hear, and count could do, but after almost a year, the burden of being a good citizen and having to be responsible dragged me down.

HELLO MOUNT WHITNEY!

Their figures and symbols, their intricate buildings of words.

grey whiteness of fog against invisible

ridge, shadowed green black pine branch

in foreground, sound of wave in channel

All I see I here inscribe!

What with what width wades one wallowing wondering whither whispering winds whipping winds whitening one’s wisps, one waits, whiles, whistles wah, works winked whereabouts, western-wonted wanders.

Following the athletics of all those who stand in every train of transit and thought, pick up on every offer and office, drop fancy objects from beneath their skirts, an unwelcome sort of peace that arises like a gentle fog.

But nevertheless, I still can't see your house from here anyway.

Love hinders death.

Paper cliches double as stereotypes unfettered by their reduction to "mere" rhetoric...

Who however holds elections from among the clouds and sky, who’s qualified

A bed of grass and pine become a bloody museum

Fingers glittered with some animal time had wounded

You saw my cheekbones as islands, not yet and under an ocean’s wavy top.

And why's it so hard to meditate with your socks on?

In bed, when I stroke the down on yours cheeks, I stroke also the carrier battle group ships, the guided missile cruisers, and the guided missile destroyers.

Here's the rest of the story.

Faces skyward, we pray for reversal of flesh destructed.

Up is one direction, down another. This much is self-evident.

At night, I pretend like I'm the maid.

But looks don't count on mountains.


_______________________

Individual lines, in order, by:

Paul Maliszewski
Norma Cole
Ron Silliman
James Wagner
Eléna Rivera
Lynne Tillman
Suzanne Stein
Laura Sims
Stephen Ratcliffe*
Kit Robinson
Steve Timm
Sawako Nakayasu
K. Silem Mohammad
Lissa Wolsak
Tyrone Williams
Jackie Lalley
Allyssa Wolf
Eleni Sikelianos
Julie Strand
Dodie Bellamy
Juliana Spahr
Kate Greenstreet
Adrian C. Louis
Vanessa Place
Amina Cain
Julian Brolaski

*Note: lines 9-11 are all by Stephen Ratcliffe


_______________________________