Embrace by Shawn Yu

Just hide me in the antimacassar of a painting, an image. We all have a little Kerouac in us. Feed me naturesque falafel. Khorosho. 

My concepts are vertical, like darkness in retreat. Today may be a pun on French words, fraught with great deeds. If I could have entered the palace of Louis XVI my “fleshless lips of air” would have greeted me like a lit match held underneath one’s feet. Brahms-hums, a kind of rain in my ear—every room is the same: reaching for perfection within four walls, without man-made accompaniments.

A room is full of hidden speech, edible; some of them full of negative energy where one must coax angst out of anger, fleeing from mysterious kinships as this. Empty meditation without impersonal consciousness is a room full of cactuses. In this hidden chamber I caress my books, my papers, my confused mass & run aloof from barking uninviting indestinguishableness. Uninvited people, seeing one’s eyes arrive into view, like great marbled floor patterns, peristaltic shock. During the Festival, I walked through chronic swarms of people; I observed these flourishing crowds, like ravenous ant-eating kleptomaniacs, unlatched like broken doors, fatigue in this sight, fatigue in this dirty mess like a mudhole. I look on, perpetually smiling in ample folds, like an unfilled shape evolving.

A poem:

Doubling every person’s Functioning,
to stretch, surround, the upper & lower
jaws, gums, upper & lowers lips, vocal
chords, gullets, esophaguses, eyeballs,
hearing & not hearing, sound waves,
brightness, perfume, cologne, scents
to behold. Is this flowing, flowering,
forming, growing, scorning, slowing
or separating, shaking, stretching,
surrounding, broadening, clearing?

*

A thought isn’t always a poem, is it? This arose into my ear-follicles, my onrushing mind, just the other evening:

The net has too many holes, gills of undending exhaustion. We’re like the whale, a shark’s chipped tooth, bronze altars of sunsetting sky. Our lungs like stained-glass—a trumpet snarling like a frustrated cat, like a sudden ‘clapping’ of speechlessness. 

Sometimes the printer comes on by itself. What is going through those wires? Electric groupuscules with a Hee-Haw. The same jumpy-reaction like the ice in the cup sounding off without warning. The sounds of two cats eating out of the same plate: Now that is a true symphonic masterpiece. Naturesque Mozarts.

“Took” for what it’s worth. Like the photograph of Obama in 2008  reading “The Post American World” by Fareed Zakaria. What does that tell you? President Obama is a realistic version of Bowser Koopa. Nancy Pelosi should be the spokeswoman for All-Things-Plastic.

O, nature, how you fill me to the very brim. Yahweh, over-flooding me with blessings. When I am in the forest, I feel as if there’s stark visual fields of concentrated surveillance all-around me—the eyes of trees, animals; the ground clutching at every position. Cell phones should not exist in forests; if only they could send shortwave recordings in spy-form into the ether, a la The Conet Project, then perhaps we could code our thoughts to one another via moving clouds, or a sunray or two; all would be sure instinct. I just carve messages on trees, instead.

If the moon’s pupil opened a bit wider, the sun would gasp with rapt attention & reverse every memory, every photo, so that all light & life would become an absolute anfractuous shadow sunken into the infinite mire upon the pressed lips of the universe.

Poem written several weeks ago:

I just want to reach up
and smear the moon
in every direction
so that the entire sky
would resemble
a popcorn ceiling.

*

Brilliance of Creationism—stars literally “singing” to us at one time, via Dr. Carl Baugh:

According to the observation of radioastrophysicists, stars, by radio wave context, are ‘singing’ to us. Stars throughout the universe are emitting radio wave energy. These stars emitting radio wave energy, but that there is music on those radio waves of energy. Not only is music emitted, but the music being emitted is in a major key. The music being emitted from these stars is harmonious. NASA compared the music being emitted from these star sources to the instruments of an orchestral creation. It seems that everywhere we look, creation is orchestrated. Recently, with some special plasma ionized research units, NASA found that Neptune and some of the other planets in our solar system emit a signal which sounds like whistling, as if it were whistling a tune. First of all, there was a firmament of water above the earth in crystalline form. Crystals take on very special characteristics. When energized with a current of electromagnetic energy, crystals amplify long radio waves. Each morning before the Flood, as the earth turned toward the sun, when the angle was just right, the energized radio waves reaching the earth through the universe were amplified by the crystalline firmament canopy. Each morning before the Flood the radio wave signals from these stars, or ‘music,’ could be heard on Earth. Light energy does something to the human body and to all life forms, even if it cannot be seen. In the early hours of the morning, as the fiber optic nature of this crystalline canopy above the earth was transferring light from the sunny side of the globe, it would have very gently enhanced that light. If an individual were asleep, and could not see the light, as the light were enhanced that individual would begin to stir, for the light would be received in the biologic mechanism of his body. Light would gently induce the individual awake. The crystalline water in the firmament canopy before the Flood would filter out the harmful shortwave radiation. The canopy would permit the long waves of energy to go right through it. In fact, the long waves of energy would not only be able to pass through the canopy, but would be enhanced, or amplified by it. While the individual sleeping before the Flood was gently induced awake by the light, about dawn he would also have been greeted by the amplified sound of the radio wave energy being emitted by the stars. NASA had found that there are bursts of energy from these sources, but there would also be sustains, crescendos, diminshes, and terminations. There would be new music every day.

*

Interesting links to articles (particularly that relates to eschatology and the bizarrities of our government), photographers, artists, etc.:

FEMA camps confirmed

Scientists hope to record our dreams

Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority to Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones

 Obama says that we must embrace globalism and the emerging one world economy

Obama confirms his faith in the One World Religion  

Soros advises Obama to use forceful measures to override the will of the people

Al Qaeda Leader Dined At The Pentagon Just Months After 9/11 

Placing the Quran in church pews now

Paintings by Michaell Sowa

Index of The Poems of Georg Trakl

Artisticness from Laura Clark

Photographs by Charles Grogg 

Paintings by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis

America is Becoming a Police State: Senate Passes Bill S 510 
(considered “The most dangerous bill in United States history”) 
to control what you eat! what you can grow in your own yard!)


Obama on the cover of the November 23 issue of Newsweek magazine
depicted as the Hindu god, Shiva the Destroyer, doing the “dance of death”


*

What begins the love nest, 

                              strict demands for imagination... 

Most all governments do not have functioning brains... 

                              Our minds as finite as the universe; a dreamlike sketch... 

All of these smart bombs from idiocy = morbid lies...
                              They want you to dive into waterless swimming pools... 

...Mouths like the beat of horse hooves, and as Conrad once wrote: 

                              a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold.

Do not write a book, let the book write you. 

Tremendous amounts of Eager, vast and uninterrupted. There is a language on the soles of our feet of all of the places we’ve ventured; if you just walk around, dance around, stumble around on a white sheet, many words will suddenly appear as if out of no where.

 

 The Myth of Depth by Mark Tansey

(Subject: Jackson Pollock walking on water; deals with the idea of depth in painting. Greenberg thought depth was an illusion; the flat surface is what Formalism was all about. So what might look like depth here is only an illusion according to Greenberg is shown in the boat lecturing on the nature of flatness and gesturing toward Pollock ... More Here.) 

 

 

The quieter tone, like a disrupted denouement:

 Girl With A Gold Medallion by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

Carlos Pardo: “Even if we fell into a mirror / the compass would still look / for a hole in our ribs / to trace the world”—

Thinking of François Rabelais’s “The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.” A 16th c. masterpiece of comedy and peculiarities abound, from such: “How small rain lays a high wind”: “Cease to fear, good people, cried Pantagruel; this huge Wide-nostrils, this same swallower of windmills, is no more, I will assure you; he died, being stifled and choked with a lump of fresh butter at the mouth of a hot oven, by the advice of his physicians.”

Like Gargantua, I wonder if I was perhaps carried in my mother’s belly for much longer than nine months. This may explain my hot naturedness, and also other peculiar things.

 *

James Wright: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom”

Loretta Diane Walker: “If we could move our souls / to forgiveness / like the hummingbird’s wings, / hate would disappear, / evaporate like a morning mist.”

Youtube comment: “My unborn son & I are jamming.”

*

Molière’s “Tartuffe,” W.H. Hudson’s “Green Mansions” and Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage.” By the time that I get around to reading all of the books that I want to read, I may be an 80 year-old grandpa, sitting by the fire with my grandchildren, reading fairy tales. Perhaps that’s the answer after-all. Later, reading Old wives’ tales to my old wife, like walking anywhere with one shoe on could lead to the death of one of your parents; or the hare, like the cat, was thought to be a witch in disguise. 

Taking a sip of water, then swallowing it. Then thinking, “There wasn't supposed to be texture to that water...” leaves one with a disconcerting sensation.

“Conspiratorially speaking.” Or, nay. Ventured upon a ‘thought’ that had, at the time, suddenly came to mind when my heart was awashed with fluttering solar-plexus magic, which was this: “Leaves leaving their figures in places, like soft tender lips pressed into a cheek, as if they were cumulus clouds pinned to the sky.” I give myself credit, sometimes; Antarctic white shadows. Ant art, like Salvador Dali, dark shadows, darker shadows in Collinwood, perhaps. Let this soak in, by the way: Jim Elliot once said, “He is no fool to give what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Where has my cursor vacated to? My redemption is soon to draweth nigh, and O how exciting it is. Division within the church is the enemy’s primary goal.

Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Ah, peach, plum, pear. Ah, Miss Newsome. But, more-so on a Kate Bush swing lately; such unique originality (second to Yoko Ono, perhaps?)—but let me carry onward: There are many people that have enough morality to keep them out of trouble, but not enough righteousness to get them into heaven! A Christian’s “good works” are the results of his/her faith, not the basis for his/her salvation. There is only one “good work” that takes the sinner to heaven, and that is the finished work of Christ on the cross (John 17:1-4; Hebrews 10:11-14).

*

John Ashbery: “How are we to inhabit / This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing, / As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are, / In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet / Unrealized projects, and a strict sense / Of time running out, of evening presenting / The tactfully folded-over bill?”

*

Ah, I travel, travel, at 186,000 miles per second (speed of light). I could go to sleep right now and not wake for twenty years, channeling Rip Van Winkle. Nevermind that Sleeper behind the transparent curtain.

A poem:

I stood with you at the end of our weight

like a sheaf of stalagmites.

Niagara Falls roared beside us
as if wanting to give rise to a place
where there are no mirrors, eyes, reflections.

Your sisters stood ajar to give us “privacy”
as if they knew of this world that we obsessed,
like the Romans

that conquered & plundered—
& there they were, before you & I,
the nervous peeks of your Sherlockian kins;

their eyes of cross-fertilization,
unplanting & absorbing us
as if like foreigners,

as if perhaps they were imagining
that they had merely imagined me
& that they were therefore existing in the snow,

at the edge of this great Fall,
only, & wholesomely Only,
with their rosy-cheeked sister.

*

My dearest uncle: “I’m never going to have a mid-life crisis, because I never grew up.”

I often find myself grooming in the middle of the night. Ah, I’ve gotta look good for the stars, I suppose. Everything is a Sphere, as if what we see is always the shape of our pupils. The Blind re-invent shape. The smell of spirit gum. Vivid canvasses of sound.

Joanne Linville, Mimi Gibson—from “One Step Beyond”—“Your conscience is your executioner.” Hushtones. Illustrations by James Hill (oil paintings)—“Short stories of Oscar Wilde”—Canadian, b. 1930, etc. Brilliance-abound!

I am too close to the act of winking. I’m in fine position for blinking but am I truly sinking in the evening? Morning now. I feel camouflaged by the astonishingly-gorgeous light———Caught off-guard, literally, like an imposter. Engraved into the entire roster. Tainted with abnormalities with faint gushes of sentimentalities.

Human love is shallow compared to God’s love. Humanity is massfully selfish in nature & this selfishness seems to grow more prominent daily; too many fingers in the ears & too much tongue-flapping; too many Me’s & I’s; too much focus on “status” (the great equalizer to that is death). Not enough love & what one can do to help others. Too many micro-social practices for the dissolutions of one’s own revolving doors.

I asked my uncle, “What, to you, does the ceiling look like?” He answered, “The moon.” I then asked him, “Are you a hunchback?” He responded, “My Mama told me that if I didn’t straighten my posture, that I may turn out to be one.” I then asked him, “What do you want for Christmas? A pacifier?” He responded, “To be left alone.” Heartily-morose jokes, though partially true, produces branches of comedy, scratching the itch of boredom (boredom is always one’s own fault). Speaking of such moon-ditties, recently watched “The First Men In The Moon”—then read the novel by H.G. Wells and found it to be quite entertaining (and better than the film, of course, but the film was delighted all in its own way). Discovered another film based on the novel, of the identical title, from 1919, by J.L.V. Leigh, Here. Apparently . . . “it was the first film to have been adapted directly from a work written by, not only one of the foremost British authors of the period, but arguably the most influential of all science fiction writers.”

The sky is so gorgeously overcast that it resembles the shades of silvery-white moonstone.

Termites and carpenter bees shop at Hole Foods. 

Onward.

 Presentimiento - Vanitas - Paintings by Fernando Vicente 

(Being a fan of anatomical models, books, paintings, and old laboratory manuals, venturing upon Fernando Vincente’s work was quite rewarding. These paintings are intriguing in that they essentially inhabit a realistic, yet illusionistic, display of common predicaments and scenarios for portraiture, but are apparently created to express the anatomy of anti-theatricality and forced conceptualism for the sole purpose of showcasing the photographic-like surrealism of anatomical allegiances to the body, without sinister or morbid implications that are often affixed to such creations. Nonetheless, these are immersed in candy for the eyes.)

Paintings by George Tooker

Paintings by Valeriy Skrypka

 

  

 

Small Fractions of Space

 

Stephen Alcorn's Relief-Block Print 

of Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1984)

We all, or most of us, live in a small fraction of space, and within this space only a small fraction of individuals will ever be a part of our space, or our experiences.

Thinking of trapeze artists lately, ran across this: Madame Saqui: “I myself have witnessed the delicate crossings of Sharif Magomiedoff several times: he places the tip of his wife’s foot on his forehead and walks along the wire while keeping her balanced. To be a wire walker in its profoundest sense means to leave the wire behind you, to discover the cables that have been strung even higher and, step by step, to reach the Magic Wire of Immobility, the Wire that belongs to the Masters of the World. The earth itself rests on it.”
 

Cat-scratch deepest red on the chest like the color of a sky that HG Wells would explain as if some secret pang in the imagination. Illustrative brooding. I’m a galloping hoof where no trail should be entrailed. I could quote everything you have said to me going back years & years & years—how prone I am to loving you, without a reason to, but just to. Have to. Want to. Need to.

What would it be like to see the axiom of my tongue-garlands, you ask? It is like FWIFTNEFS of scents!—a bloomout; a regional route with fertile iron-ring of lispy lint in a dry pocket, a sprocket in the chimney of my glancing outward at the browning grass, as if vapours had choked the life out of it, & with a sigh of sorrow I have realized that Jeopardy has–gasp!–dropped its Bible category! like a groom neglecting the bride.

I miss you like “They don't sell vegetables in this place anymore” & across spacious breadths interjects a reminder, a memory clung, the weary way that a picture might hint.

How many people are drinking cranberry juice right now. A red truck just drove down the street, turned into a driveway.

I fear that if I do not read a poem with my tongue that my fingers will get lonely & my mouth will seal shut. Being beside the point; ferociously inanimate.

I want to see Day behave like Night for a time. I want to see the sun react like the moon. I just dropped a blue M&M onto my lap, stuck between the legs. Melty blush of blue. I want the moon to be this blue.

There is a “change in the air.” Ethereal sunlight kisses my arm & I turn away. Leaves turn their seasonal shy-renderings. “They were green just yesterday & now they are bright yellow.” I preserve a respectful silence as I stand, observing, listening as if I were expecting a pin-drop, or waiting for all of nature to burst into a melodic chorus. Listen closely. Flagrant fragrances, their voices. I spin dreamily, slowly with joy, engendered. Who’s watching? They will think my actions are uncalled-for. Let them. Let them endeavor to devour my love.

In the distance, a lawnmower revvs up hoarsely. My eyes avert. I yearn for juice. The red truck backs out, drives away & out of sight.

Later, I walked through a neighborhood. I noticed that, not only are neighborhoods so silent these days, but so are the homes. The wind blew breezily. I picked up a crumpled yellow advertisement in the yard of a house that is for sale. I tossed it back where it came from. This abandoned house still had its curtains in the windows, and it felt as though someone was watching me through the living room window. I kept walking. There was a woman that was, I’d say, seventy yards behind me in the distance, walking her dog, which was creating a stir within portions of the neighborhood. Dogs barked and barked up a storm. Certain trees were ‘sticking out’ like a voice in the middle of a dark crowd.

Colson Whitehead: “Just when you get settled, a breeze or hooligan ruins things.”—ignore the snore of ignorance and you'll fall asleep. Is that what makes boredom so appealing? John Vincent said, “The poem ends in a knot that cannot be untied.” Yep. Especially if it's a noose.

I have two siblings & a father whom all hope for my misfortune, with envy, bitterness & rage. The may say: “Let the lobster boil in the silver pot! Let him falter & be thrown about the streets!” Tragic, but on the contrary, quite true. In-cahoots these Hoots, tooting their anguish, gnawing like assassins. Only the wicked would feel the quiver of these outstretched bows, but my vessel can never be anchored. These hornets with devil-horns flying above my head as if with helium-sucked vocals. I forgive with love, to love to forgive, to pay no attention to a suffered wrong. What’s for dinner? Oh. That’s okay. I never acquired a taste for seafood.

*

Another thought, a moment years ago, came to mind:

I was a passenger in Katie’s reddish car as we drove down Highway 19 North on a warm, sunny afternoon. The sky was of deepest blue & clear, save for a vapor trail or two. We were both amused at where we would end up; the idea of toasting to no place, to no where, to ride until all of the fuel was kaput. Then what? I thought to myself.  Maybe, just maybe, we would hitchhike back home, or be discovered by a pale, bald man wearing all black who would invite us into his eerie mansion in some undisclosed area of the forest. The entities would likely attempt to back-body-drop us & a one-legged butler with the equilibrium of a whirlpool would attempt to turn us into stunt kites. Anyhow, my mind was doing tornado flips as Katie laughed & talked to me as if I were twenty yards away from her. Is this what mental illness feels like when a nurse or doctor keeps jabbering? Re-thinking our plans, we decided to return home. She turned the car around & began panicking with the apparent impulsive decision to either confuse me or possess me into anger. Suddenly, in a fit of ills, Katie stops the car, pulls over to the side of the road, switches off the ignition, gets out & begins walking down the highway. All without a sound. I sat there like a fixed unalterable thing. I was convinced that this were not like some “luminous after-dinner atmosphere” & that I better go after her, especially considering a rusted, ragged clunker, by this time had stopped near to ask if she needed a lift. Later, as I drove her home, all explanation had evaporated. By that time, the sky was overcast like clouded glass.

*

Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante defunte” beclouds me extravagantly.

Syllable general lunatic.

From Shakespeare:

Iago:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:
But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

*

The offspring of linguistics; everything is made of quotes nowadays.

Pull out the heart, let it beat as a drum beats, wearing it on your sleeve. The cardiologist vanishes. An external alternating voltage powerful enough to produce a thunderstorm in the sky of the mind. I only believe in ideas when I came make them become a reality. Even then, I question this reality: flicked away into the ashtray of an accidental canvas. Let us try something else, shall we? 

*

THREE PROSE POEMS (or just “Thoughts”):

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ON EARTH is spoken into existence by Almighty God & not by brainwashed corporate sponsors. Nor aliens. (Stephen Hawking is alienistic.) A hawk mistaken for an unidentified flying bird. What is there left to understand? Mental-demolition. The human cell, more complex than New York City at rush hour. That is a real page-turner! There are sixteen framed images of senior citizens on the wall someplace in Middleville, Ontario. I see this kind of thing in dreams or in nursing homes. Why am I wry? I see myself in each frame on the wall like a near-conclusive film. I see my father in each frame on the wall & I see my mother as the wall, holding us all tightly, but with a menacing appearance, the way a submarine longs to be a jet, coughing out air—me, six years old, a bathtubful of Army men & foliage. Wintery cragged ice, as if in Norway. The result of staying in the tub too long. Derbyshire is where I should be, as cold as ever, standing beside a woman in a pink sweater, a flower-patterned dress & carnation ballerina flats. I could be the plump girl standing hesitantly beside her, wearing a beige skirt with squintedly-nervous  eyes, as if annoyed. Double-eared audible-spear. I ask my headphones to listen closely to me. Anyhow, I am very male. Sheepskin fur & all. Do soldiers always “keep the peace”? Male or machine, female or machine. Machine or machine to machine. Overpopulated Renaissance. Some girls swim with their Barbie dolls. They lay them out to ‘sun’ with their private parts covered. Here, gravity denies us, kisses the sky, the mind as ruinous as graffiti walls—des Grands Ensembles—toilet-set tongue, near-absent, or near Absence. I ache like a chef in New Orleans, with bodiless architecture, as if oil were classified edible, now as neon black as a politician’s gaping mouth.

MAGNETIC ELEMENTS in this room, staged, but real, pain-staking inking of pressure, like an elder, bent over, unable to revv up the chainsaw, so he kicks it, breaks his foot & thus we enter foolishness, even as youth is a rare treat, a wasted summer watching 18-wheelers drive by carrying goods or flattened vehicles. On an overgrown path (like Leoš Janáček) I rise to see a little child sitting on a train next to a window, his head down, a palm against the pane. The sunlight is as conscious as an armed MOD; a zebra hiding in a wooden crate. United States flags seem to hang in every window of Plumber shops in Texas. Each night I dance amidst the light of the utility pole as if I were a comic strip. I hold my ribcage in place, mouth open under the moon, waiting for a planet to make off with my energy, set up a tent in my backyard & gaze back at where it once resided.

TEMPTRESS FASHION advertisement in the background where two attractive women stand side-by-side both wearing skimpy Patriotic attire. They smile, clinging to one another, as if to define “plastic.” Down the street, a broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man with tattooed arms, a thick, dark black Fu Manchu, wearing a Grim Reaper t-shirt, looks like “Mister Bad News.” Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Fight” gushes into my ears. What is more unique, a stream of silver fish or a photostream of half-naked women? Overture of too-many-questions. No time to answer prolifically.

 

 Michel Henricot, Narcisse (2006)

 Charcoal by Carole Brémaud

SELF-PORTRAIT: expressing more directly, a theory, partly in a dream, in the Light of Asia Minor,
appears plausible. Virgil must have remembered stirring unreality, as I view the starry skylight thru
a partial window view, like a black-faced partygoer. Too much sanction-talk, Mexico’s bleeding. Me to Art: Let's establish a nuclear consortium, just call me Comedy and Tragedy. Cut this room into me, out of me, send the searchlight to check for uranium in my basement; you’ll only find Irony, iron and peculiar paradoxes. You won’t find a Lens Culture with retro demographics. But, you might.

Sometimes you just want to break the law of gravity, or liquidate the eggs at breakfast, after realizing that you have got it all backwards. Every thing that you can imagine, is incorrect, falsified, incomplete. I realized earlier that gravity is nothing more than theory, & I proved it by jumping off of a skyscraper, while my gimp-legged assistant, whoever that may be, raged like a Demotivator; rage of which was so achingly horrendous that it sounded as if he had hammered his thumb, or the kind of rage where one thinks twice before facing a powerfully destructive political & media machine, or fighting an impersonal war with a water gun, or what Van Gogh felt that he was to himself. The flask is full. I have learned to fly. People don't believe me but it was difficult for people to believe that Tiger Woods would cheat on his wife too. Often the subtext of anything is like switching the lights on in a dark room & learning that things have been misplaced, or re-arranged, & suddenly, at that moment,  you think of Einstein’s theory . . . how there is no limit to human stupidity.

John Webster: “Beaufort: When I studied there, I had so fantastical a brain, that like a Phelphare, frighted in winter by a Birding-piece, I could settle no where; here and there a little of every several Art, and away.”

I’ve kept this iridescent beetle out of the sunlight for too long. It’s time that I place it back into the sunlight, let it shimmer in my emerald eyes, let the night fold a rainbow into a pillow, let me sleep through the color-spectrum as if awake with new instinct. Speaking of: Rachmaninoff, lying on his psychiatrist’s couch, as the doctor repeated, “You are a great composer; you will write a wonderful piano concerto. You are a great composer...” over and over until the chronically-depressed Serge decided he was ready to try composing again.

My tongue is stuck in my lungs, what is left to say, like a president—I feel sorry for Less, especially when More has more. To the wise: these words are not enough.

Fibbed ribs
adlib-drip
of the snipped
faucet where
the cat switches
on the hot water
in the bathtub

The other evening, watched a child squirm its way out of trouble (the way a garbage truck squeaks its way out of a cul-de-sac) by pouting and whining. 

An unfinished story that I wrote some moons ago:

The yellow emporer was worshipped by all of the village, until everyone saw him get slain in a war film with American-style exploration. Thus, the yellow emporer was not worshipped any longer, but he felt like a lone hero or a lone ranger & he remained at home as a hermit the remainder of his days, lingering as a shadow of his former self that he felt was a bitter blow to all of the world.

*

Miserable ice next to a furnace. Miserable water within a sewer. Miserable sewer-stench not as miserable as the person catching whiffs of it. Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”

We meet surprised outside of a home like the habitat of a killer-beehive right outside the door, like the disappearance of a breakaway, we are like a major country without bicycle repairs. We are the eye-fatigue in a practice crash, everything reminds me of you and must we salute a crowd or shall we talk with our eyes? I am getting further and further away from the accents of tongues. Deliberate mystery like modern thinking more obsessed with the virtual world. A rare masterpiece is in the novel, evolves into a lazy animal. Unspoken rules depend on value, maybe citing the mountains; blood spewing from their historic penetrations.

Being a Christian is not a belief in a certain type of moral thinking or morality; it is not living according to a certain type of ethical behavior; nor is it following a particular religious group or philosophy. A Christian is one who has received from the Father a revelation of who Christ is and has received His Life into their spirit.

Every living Jew is evidence that the God of the Bible exists and that He keeps His Word.

Words don't allow me to sleep as I would if I didn't keep connecting them within this galaxy of my brain, the heart more-so filled with it.

A poem:

The Object of Flattery
assumes a figurative sense—

the feeling of fabric, let’s say,
on one’s naked body in a cold,

dark room (goosebumps and
moonlight) illicitly thought of

as ‘proper’ to be without another
body represented, so that the

Thought turns around an ample
amount of sufficient ideas,

which therefore suggests a disguise,
in pun, to the room in which

the fabric rests upon the body
of one whole living kinship;

pincushions of an active sense
of imagination; the brain, like

a bee’s entrance into a nest,
the blade of a tongue, a suddenness

of a decision as if pondering which
aromatic soap to “try” next.

Aromatic money-spending
spanking the globe. I once wore

clocks, or watches, until I realized
that I only need a watch

to watch me at night while I sleep,
ticking me into a dream, tics

in the fluttery chest,—the idea that
a watch is worn as if to suggest

that one has just come from the outside.

*

It is all a coin-flip concept, to reject another person's insistence that a flyswatter flies through the air like a flying saucer, or that a cookie mustn't be eaten. I had Chinese food yesterday. I sank through the grub like the Titanic. A hurricane is heading towards the direction of the wreckage. “I don't see why they don't try to pull it up.” Softened metal underneath oceans. A bitter city buried there, stones of emptiness. Earlier, a small lizard with a gray upper-half and iridescent tail slipped my eye, bye-bye, underneath a narrow crevice of the porch. Somewhere on a rowdy beach, Bach’s Air on a G String plays wildly.

Avant-garde music, the sounds of certain pianists playing their instruments as if with torn ACLs. I'm iconographically identifying the re-found senses of my ever-silken childhood. Three blind mice, three blind mice...

*

Edmond Jabes: “WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.”

The first line of Kafka’s diary: “The bystanders stiffen when the train goes past.” My heart loosens with this quote.

Laura Carter said, “[I’m] waiting for the City of Atlanta to self-implode.” I responded: Thinking of Hejinian: “the way things went along, as characteristic and definitive as a person’s gait or way of drinking from a cup, the termination of which is what death brings about”—I think every city is bound for self-implosion. Even Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood had a discerning target on it! Every city should crumble in hindsight; granted, most of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are becoming ghost-town-like; The World Bank yanks the money in places that are disaster-prone. Enormous mansions over there are empty, houses that long for an ego or three. Ice the size of Bermuda breaking off into these oceans. People should begin taking swimming lessons if they cannot swim. Atlanta, and every other city, will soon have limited repertoires.

There was a lot of weirdness happening in the year that I was born, 1982. A dog exploded in the film, The Thing, Seven people died in Chicago from poisoned Tylenol, Ingrid Bergman & Henry Fonda died, although that is not as weird as one may think. The first artificial heart transplant took place. The Clash released “Rock the Casbah,” nuclear issues & world peace were still being discussed by the United Nations General Assembly, yet, mostly importantly, I was born & here I am waving goodbye at the years gone by, like a flutterbye sky in my eye.

Dr. Suess: “Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age.”

My left arm is definitely not right.

Fuyuko Matsui, Eternal Almighty Medicine for Perfect Happiness

Like a clumsy piano, so does thought glow:

My thin aired room, by Yamamoto Kansuke (more Here)

Often times, feeling as if people’re only speaking to me as if to be expecting mistakes within my speech, which thus makes me slightly anxious. “For the record,” if there be a record in the flash of my bubbling, or bubble’d, existence: On 9-11, I likely had a meal of the following: chicken-and-rice, green beans, meatloaf and buttered biscuits. Everyone seemed to appear like blanks, like tossed salads of the world existing as humanity, and at the post office that morning, I sent out a package, of which I’m uncertain to who/m, or of what it consisted of.

Nimble tame humor, let the doubt remain too violent for the cut of a thumb, papercut proportioned orphan’d stoppage of gravity. I seek to speak what in detail what is maintained as awkward. Frog-leaped the fence too pretty for apartment complex neighborhood folks to enliven themselves at my falling duration. Mental-mensurations, leg asleep again, hair matted down, tickle it back to normalcy.

It’s never a boring day. I deflect things outward like Debbie Gibson who got lost in someone’s eyes,
except that when I get lost I cling to the sustained unindividuated mechanical tardies of distracted thumping. I think the cage is rattling. Shortcuts in the evening. Stitch out the isolated. My slender sleep is needed before a retrospective returns, becomes a Postman & delivers another strange repeated crashing.

The next soap opera could perhaps be called, “As The World Bank Turns, So Does Your Money.”—I’m rethinking the validity of democracy when a great deal of the populace appears abysmally ignorant about this horrendous president. Democracy is based on the concept of an informed citizenry making rational judgements about elections. If the citizenry is not well-informed, “democracy” is no more than a popularity contest and an advertising campaign.

*

Stop time, stop the image just before it congeals to the film-strip, just stop everything. We’re shinier than any sunshine state, lumped all in it.

*

 “There was an error in this gadget”—where’s the Inspector?—because, quite frankly, on that long departed note, I’ve been overly-pondering the peculiarities surrounding that of the Roald Dahl-hosted 1961 fantasy/science-fiction television series, “Way Out,” which was a program that was way ahead of its time and was seminal for the early development of horror and science fiction on television. A recent dvd has come out titled, “Way Out DVD TV Roald Dahl Lost Episodes” which features, so they say, the “only 5 episodes known to exist.” I find this to be a pale mistake, particularly in relation to the “lost” part of it—nothing is as lost as a lost puppy, perhaps, but in this scenario, I cannot come to find that there are truly any “lost episodes” of Way Out (there were only 14 episodes altogether, so that would mean that 9 of them are floating about in the ether?—or so they’ll have one believe, perhaps), and here is why:

The Paley Center for Media (located in NY and LA) have the episodes “in full,” as I learned several years ago, and CBS owns the copyrights to the shows, so it’s rather baffling to me why they’ve not released all of the spine-tingling episodes as a set of collector’s dvds, especially considering the fact that there’re fans out there, in abundances, that’re keeping their twinkly little fingers crossed that they do, indeed, release them at some point or another. With that said, the topic came up the other night when I was on the telephone with my dear uncle; I searched and found this particular “lost dvd” and was quite delighted to see that it was available. However, confusion mounted.

If the dvd is advertising the 5 episodes as “lost episodes,” then how does that explain the Paley Center for Media having all of the episodes? If they were “lost,” one would merely think that NO ONE would have them anywhere, period. Yet this dvd comes out and states that there are “lost episodes”? Perhaps it’s just me? or does it seem fishy, dishy, wishy, squishy?

This is what the dvd says:

“In 1961, There was a science fiction anthology that aired on Friday Nights right before The Twilight Zone. Way Out was hosted by Roald Dahl and offered bizarre plays with twist endings. Only 14 episodes were broadcast" And THEN: “This dvd features the only 5 episodes known to exist.”

If those are “the only 5 episodes known to exist,” then how does that explain the Paley Center for Media for having them? Perhaps it merely means that those 5 episodes are the only episodes that have been ‘leaked’ onto a particular video format? I cannot think of anything otherwise that would be a rebuttal towards this reasoning, so until I find out differently, I suppose I may have to get this 5-episode dvd anyhow to at least view what I can while the gettin’`s goin’ good.

The supposed “lost episodes” on the dvd are the following:

Death Wish—#9 (aired 6/9/61)
Dissolve To Black—#8 (aired 6/2/61)
I Heard You Calling Me—#5 (aired 5/5/61)
The Croaker—#6 (aired 5/12/61)
William & Mary—#1 (aired 3/31/61)

*

Thomas Carlyle: “See deeply enough, and you see musically.” Or: See deeply enough and you will suddenly obtain X-ray vision.

Thomas De Witt Talmage: “Help me explain a tear. A chemist will tell you that it is made up of salt and lime and other component parts; but he misses the chief ingredients-the acid of a soured life, the viperine sting of a bitter memory, the fragments of a broken heart. I will tell you what a tear is: it is agony in solution.” ‘But I suggest to you that there is more to tears than sadness, sorrow, regret, and pain. Tears can be a release from stress and anxiety, a vent for frustration, a safety valve for overpowering emotions. Tears can be the most sincere expression of compassion and love. And just as raindrops wash the smoke, smog, and impurities from the atmosphere, so tears can wash away the stains of bitterness and disappointment from our souls.’

Name your next male cat, Catullus.

Catullus: “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have made up many thousands, we will confuse our counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor any malicious person blight them with evil eye, when he knows that our kisses are so many.”

Samuel Adams: “A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”

*

Every breath you take is connected to an email account.

The opening of Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” sounds much like Robert Fripp’s “Remorse of Conscience.”—observance #178, or probably not.

When Hector Berlioz learned that his fiance’, Marie-Felicite-Denise Moke, intended to marry another gent, Berlioz planned on surprising her at a party. The idea was to dress up as a nun to get in. A great idea turned sour, however, when he left his disguise in the carriage.

Gave up the ghost’s sleight-of-hand. A convex mirror & eyesight, what of this mystique, this genuine gladness, my two ears confess more than a tongue! A torque. A dialogical indirect idea, as if Thought were three-dimensional. Why does one assume that a particular event is nothing more than a rare coincidence? Some of the best things are broken, battered, a coffin lid, don’t translate with a closed mind. Like greed, accuracy is a presence, mere thoughts. Humanly intimate spaces, an improvisatory necessity, yoked each day together for bulk of roomy accidental motion. Y’know, Facebook is a Tragedy. Emerson said that perception has a destiny. My ‘status’ is never up-to-date. Each second is a sampler, a sudden moment never stripped of emotion like two battering rams’ horns clashing like two angry strangers meeting at a phone booth late one night, impatient & fragile.


The wind is picking up picking
up leaves tossing them
around the thunder is beating
on the sky again
lightning is its theater
the computer hums & hums
like an electric heater

by Gordon Matta-Clark

Confiance (l926) by Marguerite Burnat-Provins

A peculiar set of experiences from 2004 engulfed me. One evening I walked into my uncle’s room and, not long afterwards, noticed that he was wearing a light green handkerchief around his left wrist. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and just thought it was my uncle “just being my uncle,” and so I didn’t ask. However, each time I would visit, he would always have this light green handkerchief around his left wrist, so of course I could not help but to wonder why, and so I asked, “I’ve noticed the handkerchief around your wrist there; what for?" and he responded, “...because my wrist has been talking to me.” I said, “...what does it say?” and he said, “...it just talks to me.” And I said, “Oh, okay. [pause] So, what exactly are some of the things that your wrist tells you?” and he said, “Oh, you know, it just talks to me often, and so I put the handkerchief over it to keep it quiet.” He wore the handkerchief for a few weeks as I recalled, and then one day I noticed that he had taken it off.

Walked this landscape, wondering if it were an old coffee ground, this blues, this jazz, in my ear,—where is the banana peel? Or perhaps this was a nudist camp, or a famous rock ‘n’ boogey jam-blast, fire of pearl bright white guitar, the bandleader was perhaps a woman that tossed trash cans everywhere. Let me speak where I am speaking co-composingly, as if a layer of dew where in my throat, rainstorms are ahead, mutual metric and pallid sky, some days more simple than others—where’s the magician? The only true weapon-of-mass-destruction is hatred; from that one can build into it what one pleases. Delicate ruins, we walked on eggshells, just knowing that this may have been the final time that we saw one another—no need for handshakes and high fives; we’re now wasps on windowpanes, sunshine brass-burn, merging ballad of clear vinyl throat-sweat.

All I want for Christmas is a yellow submarine for two.

This Could Be A Thought or A Story:

Weather channel music, or supercharged background music, reminds me of being in a grocery store and hearing grocery store jazz playing, and that can be a phrase or a term, but the music always tends to excel at making me feel uniquely engaged nearly more-so than a developing crunchy groove with a touch of big beat. Earlier the cat was lying on a pile of dirty clothes in the hallway, the tungsten light spread from the living room grew more bright as I walked towards the living room and entered into the kitchen where water had been strewn on the floor via one of the cats that has a fascination with moving water and so she flicks it out of the water bowl and onto the floor. So long! I think to myself after pouring more water into the bowl. I feel compelled to speak a type of Asian, but I don’t know any of the languages. If you think surrealism is touching over this story, or thought, then this story, or thought, must come to an apparent end very soon. I was excited to begin writing about the misconceptions of self-taught strange people, but these themes brought me towards other flaps in the subject at the front of my lobes. Music isn’t the topic, nor is anything else. Crime is on the rise. I want to stand near a Chartres rose window and plunge deep into thought, or story, of course. Voltaire’s “Candide” raises questions, wounds the mind; I love romantic stories, but this seems to have a monstrous wrath. My ‘wit’ must be lacking, but alas I will not be stripped of dignity. Some things bend out of the way of Touch. I took off my glasses today to specifically touch the thin skin of my eyelids (when closed, light plays on the backs of them). Some people either have ¼ cup of delight or it is completely full. I mowed the lawn today. I wore a surgeon’s mask to keep my nasal passages and esophagus relieved. The last time I mowed this heaping grass, the next-door-neighbor Richard, who has a shiny bald head and a thick grey goatee, was in his front yard smoking a cigarette and looking around at the sky, then back down at the ground, a toke or two, inhale, exhale, and then back up at the trees, then looking over at me, then a quick wave my way while holding his arm in the air as high as it would rise. His other arm was hanging down. I waved back, enjoying this moment of social sustenance.

Like an oater outfoxing a railroad, I’ve outfoxed the frustrated fowler. Sometimes nature's chorus is only that which points to the phenomenon of a voice. I’ve learned, in art, that if it comes to a point where it feels correct, then walk away. Wrote this a few weeks ago, one late night:

I am looking out of a window & tipping the candle sideways. I have examined closely a blue-ring octopus, but tonight is no different than any other night: the moon’s pretty face espionage is a matrix or a perseverance of some irreversible eclipse that I am reporting soul-abroad, & my guardian angel discusses with me the mixed-media of daylight-skies, God’s eternal “premiere” never losing its edge. The sun, tomorrow, will be my rope-and-pulley tendon, a beautiful voice, or perhaps some Indonesian Bamboo Orchestra. I hear a motorcycle engine in the distance, the night’s funeral blues, with vivid eyelids (in my estimation)—the moon, now barely visible. I spin a nest of paper towel shreds around my fingers, this is a similar concept for a flying lotus, except that I stand still like mechanical behemoths. My wings are alive with you. A soft wind, a gradual force from somewhere & whatever was behind me seemed like a mouth. Most people tend to ‘look’ for the best. Well, I ‘expect’ the best. If no one ever comes to understand why I do these things, and if no one comes to want to understand them, then that is perfectly fine, for as long as I am happy, and as long as I am creating art, along with God’s supreme companionship, this is all that I will ever need. Most of the time, certain artists begin to rely on an audience to satisfy their desire for creating their art, versus creating art for their own enjoyment. It is when “status” and “ego” and “selfish desire” gets in the way is when things can go from “fun” to downright “unenjoyable,” for why should we concern ourselves with what others think?

Imagery is never really “complete” after a photograph has been made.

Hiccup at the end of everything, except one thing—

Interviewer: You didn’t go to art school, did you?

Francis Bacon: No, thank God. I would have been taught all of those techniques that I don’t want to know. I want to find my own technique, because if you’re trying to do something that is rather different and new, you can’t use the old techniques which have already been used. You make your own technique.

Interviewer: So, how did you learn? How did you learn to make your own technique doing it?

Francis Bacon: Trial and error. I just, um . . . trying to do it. That’s all.

Yes, that’s all. “Butter me better,” said the bread. What’re people really expecting? The Interviewer perhaps pauses and then says, “Behind the rubble is a loaf of bread pondered by a group of children.” I say, “Mental Titanic.” Eating your thoughts will keep you full. But, only temporary. Do not be deceived, like how Fu Manchu never had a mustache.


Thomas Disch: “Distance seduces the rational mind, just as closeness seduces the irrational.” Or, “...to the whales, with their slow metabolisms, humans appear speeded-up...jerky, spastic, desperately flapping.” (Susanne Antonetta)—Lack of responding to a disaster is reminiscent of a weapon. Kaufmann once said, “Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without reason are mad.”

Many are puffier than Puffendorf, playing Hangman, we’re all hanging in the balance. Something at sea, where the fig bends, meaning Meaning memory, aid, daybreak—real-life beings, begins, spiritual alchemy. O my, I sipped the last swig of coffee, granules at the bottom, I had them between my teeth. Gnats sting the tongue when bitten into (accidentally, of course—they can enter the mouth when running); tongue-spark soars air of plane descended behind me (a memory) as I shot hoops in my neighborhood as a teenager, in retrospect, possible autobiographical criteria. Retina. Needed a place to hide. Nothing was so quiet, youth of the ageless ones, now my bearded face itches & the wind blows wilder than before & the window seems to have a heartbeat. I learned today that stars are considered angels in symbolism, today I dissolved where memory left off, leaping over my own initials. My heart is in this, like an ornament that hangs on a tree where you look at yourself, using it as a mirror, hovering in that space, it speaks clearly, like a deep-seeded vowel with an attosecond, to collect pictures and cry, the energy in a tear can smear even the most Solitaire like the interior of an abandoned castle.

This is all “spoken word” without the “movement”—what a photograph is. Just keep your ears open.

*

There is nothing more vicious than the commonly expressed desire of parents in merely moderate circumstances to give their children what are ordinarily spoken of as “opportunities.” “We wish our daughters to have every opportunity—the best opportunities,” they say, meaning an equal chance with richer girls of qualifying themselves for attracting wealthy men and of placing themselves in their way. In reality opportunities for what?—of being utterly miserable for the rest of their lives unless they marry out of their own class.—Arthur Train (from “The Goldfish”)

*

Closeness of anonymity, being recognized as if from passages of Ovid. Sit down with me, in-between this theatre, let’s distance ourselves like pyramids, let us remind ourselves who we are, who we are not, what we will become—the spinner & the web. I am a generous shift in the mapping of forests. The first volume of my rhetoric offers no sounds but travels through the physical phrase of meter, rhythm, rhyme, or answering &/or erasing falsitruths (a ‘sic’ in every narrative). Take care of yourself, dear poet, they are calling poetry a science with buckled knees, we swing our swords like musketeers. My diary is breathing its last word. In a nutshell, I am lifted by absence. Word-trafficking for a new vocal dictionary where language is pre-ordered before history is history. Is not. Beaches erode. Before we speak again, we must negotiate a plan, eggroll-wrapped, tasty but perhaps with a drawn-out rant, a “bumping” speaker, a Rapidshare. I enter out of the entrance into the night where feminism is everywhere. I have mistaken my hands for Memory. You’re right behind my eyelids when I close them, electrifyingly.

Ah, touché, touché, touché.

Chaïm Soutine, l918 Self-Portrait

Reflections & Riffs

Portrait of Modest Mussorgsky, by Ilya Repin
(painted in the hospital from March 2–5, 1881,
only a few days before the composer’s death)

“Moment by moment things arise and pass away. Moment by moment we encounter what is not self.”

Every ‘tale’ has a remarkable forecast—natural reactions of wonder. Mathematical thickness of some instantaneous trickery and we’re often back to square one, we silly quacks! I draw a breath from misty mornings, gaining velocities are the splendid sighs of nature’s first light—to all, perhaps? yes, o yes, we but shiver and fall away, like some brilliant arch of continuous unmoving. But “life goes on” and every vapor in the wind merges into resolved conversational endings. In this life, everything ends, except for God. On the heels of this verse comes yet another thought: How to convey images between the mental and the physical. An example of this may be thought of as the words on the pages inside of books as hollow piping, where thought had once existed. Words merely acting as decor. That would be the Physical. The Mental is the subterranean—a reflection of self, or experience, like the reflective eyes of nocturnal creatures.

“I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer....this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts.” (Laughlin, The Personal Eye 14)


My perception of the world, like an orb, exists within the Theatre of The Sensational Visual Transmitter. Bending paths of lightning on Circumference’s infinity. O, speak to me through this thunderstorm, react with the lightning; I am mounted on your deck, I will confirm your words through the thunder.


Wallace Stevens: “...gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch.”


Opening my e-‘male’ every morning as I wake, often tossing myself into a Ring a Ring o’ Roses. “For a limited time only.” My balance is fattened with the agenda of an architect. I need a storage case for multiple explanations. Seeing the light of my face in your face’s light; the oscillation between song, between the mind, the way it hesitates. One moment I am editing pictures, and then the next moment I am looking out of the window, remembering the bird that landed on the window after all of that silence, and was chirping at a high pitch; a naturely flute--clung to this wowscape, scrape me out of these walls, paint me into the song of the bird. Moment succeeds moment and each is complete in itself. Valéry: “Animals, who do nothing uselessly, refuse to comtemplate death.” Perfect.

Speaking of animals. One must consider the “strange company” of the eccentric Lord Bridgewater (known as Francis Egerton), who astonished Paris by giving dinner parties for dogs—the dogs were the guests, dressed as men and women. He was a supporter of natural theology. The French were not surprised by any means that the milord living in Paris was unusually fond of animals, as they, somehow, expected such bizarre conduct of an Englishman. However, they raised their eyebrows quite frequently in the case of Mr. Egerton when they heard that he gave dinner parties for dogs dressed in the height of fashion, even down to fancy miniature shoes! Strangely, Mr. Egerton kept partridges and pigeons with clipped wings in his garden to shoot because of his failing eyesight. Strangely, this odd nobleman was an extremely learned scholar (gotta love the self-education!—Ray Bradbury: “I never went to college. I went to the library”), a connoisseur and patron of the arts, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He was the donor of the important Egerton Manuscripts to the British Museum. However, this was the eccentric who wore each pair of his shoes only once and then had them arranged in rows so that he could measure the passing of time. And to return a book he had borrowed, he would send a sumptuous carriage attended by four liveried footmen. He never married, and with his death in 1829, the title became extinct.

Francis Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater