ilx posts with striking imagery

wow

old but good, thx to Ned 4 revive

And as for 'Running From The Law' - that's a stone cold classic. One in a thousand rock bands ever write a rock song as classic as 'Running From the Law'. People dream fruitlessly about writing a song that good for every decade of their dismal lives, and die bitter, cursing their guitars, which, through the onset of the drugs administered to the dying, take on a haunting, ghostly aspect even as they lie abandoned in the corner of the room, half demon, half Donita, mocking them as they lie in their beds, screaming for even a tiny taste of the kind of inspiration that filled the rocking hearts of L7 as they wrote that classic fucking song. Yeah.

― moley, Thursday, September 29, 2005 4:35 AM (9 years ago)

i wonder whether if you're in a musical based on your life it eventually interferes with your memories, of everything depicted, like it's a few years later & you're remembering somebody you used to know or some night you first realised something about yourself & you can't remember if the whole thing happened just regularly in plain speech or melodically, surrounded by conspicuously fresh faced young people, under peppery torrents of synthetic rain

― schlump, Sunday, November 23, 2014 10:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of my favorite ilx posts of all time

second Ashton Marcus, the only poet I know of whose Collected Poems sequentially predicts the following century of poetric trends from modernist collage, deep image, confessional, New York school, and Language poetry. This was an amazing feat particularly because of Macus's autism, suggesting a complete and total inability to think in language. However, this languagelesness helped Marcus who, rather than focusing on authorship, put his efforts into brute force and randomly formed words together nonstop for 15 hours a day over 60 years, hoping that pure randomness would eventually produce poems other people would find comprehensible.
Aimless--Marcus's lack of popularity can IN FACT be directly explained by his autism, as Hugh Kenner explained in an essay in the Partisan Review. The contemporary poetry's emphasis on philosophy of language holds that language is symmetrical with cognition (cf Wittgenstein's limits of language being the limits of his world). This is a very self-aggrandizing view for poets to take and Marcus--like Temple Grandin--often held that language had little to do with cognition and that it is in fact possible to think without words, as toads and unicorns do. Because this is an inconvenient ideology, comparable to Eliot's fascism and Baraka's anti-semitism, the LANGUAGE poetry cabal has more or less excommunicated Marcus from the canon.

― ts smelliot, Tuesday, 21 June 2005 20:47 (9 years ago) Permalink

oh yes, the response:

Hmmmm. Not having read the work in question, I cannot form much idea of it from your description:
...randomly formed words put together nonstop for 15 hours a day over 60 years...

My first question would be: if this monstrous ouput was ever culled, who culled it and how? If the poet himself was unable to determine what was comprehensible to others, then I would suspect there's an editor lurking somewhere, whose judgement played a particularly critical role - tatamount to co-authorship. Just a suspicion.

Also, it has often happened that the then-current theory of poetics has excluded a contemporary poet from gaining exposure or approval, but a change in the next generation will rescue the poet's work and acclaim it to the skies. If Kenner is championing Marcus, then I would scarcely say he is being buried, but rather resurrected. Fashions do come and go. Cabals die off. In the end it is the poems that count most.

Also, having done some work with writing computer programs for generating language, I would greatly doubt that true randomness could result in effective poetry, however long it was allowed to run. Marcus must have had some sense of words and meaning, however peculiar it may have been.

I am especially interested in the question of editorial intervention, asked above. If Marcus was actually a random word generator, then he can't claim much credit for it.

― Aimless (Aimless), Tuesday, 21 June 2005 21:14 (9 years ago) Permalink

A little further reading would show that the amazing Ashton Marcus did not exist except as a hoax cooked up especially for that thread.

oh i was aware

I mentioned it for the benefit of others who would not know the thread. I think the OP was probably paying a somewhat casual homage to Jorge Luis Borges.

i can't even write posts that good about stuff that is real

i am especially fond of the indignation over the "language poetry cabal," as if more than 0.01% of the US population knew who charles bernstein was.

any phenomenological model that challenges their wittgensteinian premises is as threatening to the people who lord over the canon as "fascism or antisemitism"

just fwiw, i googled ashton martin one sentence into reading that post & the first result both disproves aimless's assertion about randomly generated language's poetic limitations, & vindicates ts smelliot's critical appraisal of marcus & the lyricism of his brutal & abstract language collisions-

Ashton Marcus (@AshtonMMarcus) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/ashtonmmarcus
The latest Tweets from Ashton Marcus (@AshtonMMarcus). PR/Social Media. Fashion+Beauty Addict. World Explorer. Fun Lover. Girl Power Enthusiast. Passion ...

twitter bots definitely produce some compelling poetry, although it's not, strictly speaking, randomly generated

fwiw aimless was right that ashton marcus's writing most likely wouldn't have been random either. smelliot says he couldn't "think in language" and yet he spent 15 hours a day wrestling with it. most likely he would have had some highly idiosyncratic way of relating to text, maybe one that critics couldn't access, but not something.

*not nothing

aim less
tree ship

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNP-Wkgcyz4

ha ha

just fwiw, i googled ashton martin

Jon "What did I do now?" Dipshit, cease addressing me, or you *will* sequentially meet me and Brooklyn pavement.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, November 30, 2005 6:31 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I see what you did there

D'oh!

That's all time, can't decide between that and "how fast could I KO this chicken shit hillbilly?"

Yeah, those two are alltime hardman.

He has mellowed with age.

Dude had a horse wastebasket that was full of kleenex, but he never seemed to have a cold.
― put your money where the maracas are (how's life), Monday, December 1, 2014

yelling at the kids is not burning and raving at close of day

burning and raving at close of day is bewailing one's own mortality and how just as you're closing in on the wisdom and vision you sought, your time starts to run out, and your energy flags no matter how jealously you've guarded your powers, and besides the futility of the whole enterprise becomes more transparent and it doesn't seem fair because seen from the right angle it all seems so beautiful but the clarity of your aging eyes forces to you see both that beauty and its pointlessness

being mad at williamsburg is basically going gentle, because it's what all the olds do when they run out of the power to be properly mad

― The Complainte of Ray Tabano, Saturday, November 29, 2014 1:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the other week i was in a cab stuck in traffic circumnavigating buckingham palace and having given up hope of getting anywere on time i was just staring at the royal-watchers and the victorian normcore-brutalist edifice itself, the political prison ceaucescu would have built if he had survived the coup

the royal-watcher population seems to be almost entirely foreign and oddly torpid, what is it they are hoping to see exactly? the inertial lack of the spectacular as paradoxical anti-spectacle, children scuffing their shoes, periodic commotions as tour groups in brownian motion are summoned together, that vast red asphalt tegument like the running track surrounding a soviet football stadium, a couple of praetorian squaddies with bayoneted assault rifles, the endless soot black perimeter walls delimiting an unseemly amount of hyperprime real estate that will never be realized

― نكبة (nakhchivan), Tuesday, December 2, 2014 8:47 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

[apple polish mode] awesome writer is nakh, beautiful post.

funny enough i'm eating nuts right now and just had sardines for dinner so in a hundred years it's gonna be you me and the cockroaches begging for scraps outside the gates of the mormon robot city

― goole, Monday, December 8, 2014 7:40 PM

Trying to comprehend just how terrible a Flaming Lips album would need to be not to make a single list.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, January 6, 2015 10:20 AM (49 minutes ago)

chills.

I agree with Hurting 2, but I might make a distinction is between a person who makes pickles whether over a lifetime or no, and a handing down over several lifetimes knowledge of pickle-making. the one year journeyman pickle-maker is different from the family of pickle-makers. Pickle-Makers to Their Majesties, with their carefully seasoned oak-barrels, their vinegars derived of the finest vintages of Burgundy vinegars, their cucumbers grown in secret locations, specific leeward riverbanks that catch both the morning and evening light but are shaded from the midday sun by the dappled shade of sycamores, the secret timing of their preparation, ritualised as entire religions, dependent on the cycle of the moon, the mansions of the stars, and the aphelion/perihelion distances of the sun, their hieratic picklemaker robes. The contents of the recipes split between nine unknown pickle men, matching the nine wise men of the east, whose identities are a closely kept secret, and who only convene at intervals of prime-numbers in cloisters inaccessible to all but the very poorest and most humble. their pickles so refined that only a few may be allowed to consume it, they only know the secret words to be uttered at a certain few, shabby establishments that will bring forth from darkened back room the specific gherkin or cornicon required.

One has the ritual and ceremony... and also reliability... of the early industrial, pre-machine age of notions of craftsmanship, and the other an individual and localness and non-guarantee of quality. they bleed into each other - would reiterate the hippie-morris intersect point about cold-war notions of apocalypse feeding into the need to be able to do things yourself.

I think i can probably make an argument of mobile phone companies being crypto-Hanseatic Houses or Guilds from the above, but i can't be aris'd rite now.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, September 11, 2013 5:12 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That Fizzles, a fine fellow

absolutely jam-packed with striking imagery!

yes very wonderful post. i say that as a pickle-maker (albeit a one year journeyman pickle-maker)

fuck now i want a pickle

happy to see that post again

if all we leave is fizzles it'll be quite enough

no need for pickle heaven, already there

fizzles is a quiet, but highly distinguished, force to be reckoned with

cloisters inaccessible to all but the very poorest and most humble

wow

That was a great post. I still sometimes think of the phrase "journeyman pickle-maker"

do you think pankaj mishra and his friends like kant, arendt and roth would see sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?

typically practised its mostly a sort of pass/ag censure or a feelgood gesture of commonality, at its highest aspiration it can even approach the phatic, a reassuring block of text that doesn't need to be read but purportedly affirms the link poster's own views, which a priori are the same as every other right-thinking link poster's views

― Hayat Boumkattienne (nakhchivan), Wednesday, January 21, 2015 8:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imagery?

obscure words awkwardly conjoined

ilx posts with striking horseshit

^^^

:-(

thought that was a great post but maybe more of a truth bomb

sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?
sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?
sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?
sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?
sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?
sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?
sanctimonious uncontextualized linkdumps as an enlightmenment praxis?