Listics

Shelley Powers has pictures of mallards today.  I think duck blogging could take its place right beside cat blogging if you train the little quackers to use a litter box.

Bruce at the River has a review of Bruce at the Jersey Shore’s new album, Devils and Dust.

Dervala Hanley has a new one up called Sal’s Paradise.  Ranger Tim has settled into the Santa Cruz mountains scene.  When I was a kid it was all Big Basin and psychedelics. Before that, Bret Harte:

Winter passed, and the summer came
The trunks of madrono, all aflame,
Here and there through the underwood
Like pillars of fire starkly stood.
All of the breezy solitude
  Was filled with the spicing of pine and bay
And resinous odors mixed and blended;
  And dim and ghostlike, far away,
The smoke of the burning woods ascended.
Then of a sudden the mountains swam,
The rivers piled their floods in a dam,
The ridge above Los Gatos Creek
  Arched its spine in a feline fashion;
The forests waltzed till they grew sick,
  And Nature shook in a speechless passion;
And, swallowed up in the earthquake’s spleen,
The wonderful Spring of San Joaquin
Vanished, and never more was seen!

Meanwhile, around the time Sal’s Jimmy was rolling off the assembly line, Neal and Carolyn Cassady settled down there and Neal worked a brakeman’s job on the Southern Pacific.  "Sal’s Paradise," that Derv - she’s a literate one and that’s for sure.  Here’s a link for the Golby in yer, and here’s a link to add texture for anyone who didn’t get the Sal Paradise allusion.

*

Chick-chick-a-boom...

This story has legs.  I mean she was dooced six months ago and it’s still, like, news?

How embarassingly stupid:

"To be what it is, all writing must, therefore be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence, the ‘death’ or the possibility of the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark…. What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or producer."
             –Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context"

I guess the artist will be the judge.

And it was written by an ex-pat, natch.

…a Buick Le Sabre for 800 bucks leaving us 200 bucks. The car dealer, who was just barely this side of carny, threw some dubious Georgia plates into the deal. Looked like Dickie
Betts coulda been the previous proud owner. This was a special piece of shit car.  The ignition key was not removable. Starting the car up was an exercise in patience. It was like a fucking e meter, a reflection of your state of mind, a big dirty American mechanical zen master. We took the car on the highway. The tires were so worn that when you hit the paint the back end would fishtail.  We decided to take the back roads. Endless shacks with Caddys parked out front at jaunty showroom angles.

Chan Stroman says, "I have a very simple test for whether a poem is good (for me) or not: it either bangs the gong, or it doesn’t."  Banging the gong these days at Allied, Jeneane offers up a bunch of pod-poems, poems she wrote and recorded.  I have two favorites, "1a.m. Birthday Poem for Marek," and "Step Down."