Diary, November 13, 2020

"Whatever is done this moment in time has the qualities of this moment in time." - Charles Olsen

Charles Olsen was a link between Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and the New American Poets - the New York School, Black Mountain School, Beat poets and the San Francisco Renaissance. He described himself as "an archeologist of the morning."

Walt Whitman :

• poet, lover of life
• carefree optomism
• transcendent self-discovery, new landscapes of beauty & possibility
• transcendent connecting with something larger than oneself : nature, time & space and love
• mystic and indirect chant of aspiration toward a noble life
• reach the highest point a human soul is capable of attaining
• wisdom / past, future, majesty, love

Hanoi

strange gods

"This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.

That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed."
 - D. H. Lawrence
saturn rising
the psychic theater  Read more…

writing, sex and censorship #301

A Chinese computer science professor received a 3.5 year sentence for "crowd licentiousness."  This is vague government wordage. It covers crowds. It covers licenses. It means a crowd gets together and applies for a license. In this case with broad overtones they applied for a license to swap identities.

He led informal swinger clubs for partner swapping. He pleaded innocent. "I had nothing to do with the North Korean submarine attack in an apartment with eighteen people. I was only the middleman. I was formatting my hard drive and downloading data."

He was charged under Criminal Law 301. 

A Chinese academic said...“I feel that the thought process of the Chinese authorities is always to try to manage and control the population, the people. Beyond prosecuting criminal activities, they feel they have to control or manage people to their standards.” read more...

Turkey also has an infamous Article 301 law. This law makes it illegal to insult Turkey, Turkish ethnicity or Turkish government institutions.

Turkey's imprisoned 49 journalists, Iran 45 and China 32 as of December 2012.

Writers Orhan Pamuk, Noam Chomsky, Elif Safak, among others have been charged under this article. All the cases were either dropped or acquitted.

A spoiled young girl in Ankara was recently arrested and charged under Article 301 for insulting her mother's cooking.

"I hate Turkish food. Too many tomatoes. I don't want black olives. I don't want fresh salad. I don't want fresh seafood from the Marmara Sea. I want Italian pizza with extra cheese please squeeze." 

Her mother said, "Eat what I give you. Hurry up. I'm late for my wife swapping seminal seminary with binary logic."

It was thrown out for lack of evidence.

Number 301 is very popular. The number of words mating and swapping with other words is increasing. Words remove an article of clothing like a, an, the.

Burma
 

China

China

Turkey

Awake

"Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore."
 - Stefan Zweig

emotional algebra  Read more…

Thanks Ray

Ray Bradbury has passed at 91.

Venus transits the sun. Ray headed North.

“It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another,” he wrote, noting, “You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.”

Fahrenheit 451, Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, among others.

He never went to college. His university was the library.

A very great and unusual talent.

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

"It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

Thanks Ray.