the joy of cutting

amazing! all my life, i've been laden with verbiage. my love for lavish language had led to more than one mediocre morass masquerading as a short story. oh, those callow days when every word i wrote seemed golden. precious. untouchable. somehow, this summer, i've fallen in love with the process of revision. before, cutting caused me unspeakable pain. oh my art! oh my golden words! but now i've discovered the joy of deleting words, sentences--whole paragraphs even. i've been weighing my work on a new scale, and behold!, i have found fat. i feel like a flinser, slicing the blubber from the whale of my words. what pleasure to discover that a story is better at 7000 words than it was at 14000, not anorexic like i'd fear, but svelte, proportionate.

not that i'm going to start worshipping at the altar of the great fart monster of pamplona. sorry, hemingway will never be among the writers whose work i enjoy. give me rushdie, give me roy, give me lorrie moore and tc boyle. i want to declare a moratorium on minimalism. give me words, unabashed and cheeky, but let me learn to make every one count.

closer

the photography of elinor carucci is so intimate that it leaves you feeling as like a voyeur. the images should be pedestrian and yet they are not. instead, carucci captures that elusive quality of quotidian wonder. she reminds us to look at the minutiae of everyday life with a new gaze, bearing witness to the tiny intimacies that make up a life.

CHECK OUT HER SITE

more scathing satire

...from the good peeps at GET YOUR WAR ON

shameless in iraq

June 24, 2004
LOOKOUT by Naomi Klein
Shameless in Iraq
Copyright © 2004 The Nation

"...US occupation powers have been unabashed in their efforts to steal money that is supposed to aid a war-ravaged people. The State Department has taken $184 million earmarked for drinking water projects and moved it to the budget for the lavish new US Embassy in Saddam's former palace. Short $1 billion for the embassy, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said he might have to "rob from Peter in my fiefdom to pay Paul." In fact, he is robbing Iraq's people, who, according to a recent study by Public Citizen, are facing "massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhea, nausea and kidney stones" from drinking contaminated water."


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失眠地喃喃自语

到晚上我有时候睡不到觉。 我的写字台前面的窗户望着旧金山的海湾。整个眼前的夜空散散漫漫的微小砖石在闪一闪。很美，但是寒冷和僵硬。今晚月亮缺一半， 好像夜晚还有自己的夜晚， 月亮也得分， 就像吃梨子一样。人家老说不要分梨－－分梨，那就你们会分离。我想问，跟我自己分离算吗？望着那跟自己分离的月亮，我想它像我那个甜梨的另一半。如果你从世界的另外一头望着我的那个分梨的月亮，你会感到一样悲伤吗？

北岛 《回答》 Bei Dao "The Answer"

The Answer

Baseness is the secret knock of the base
Integrity the epitaph of the noble
Look how the gilded sky drifts full of
The inverted crooked reflections of the dead

The ice age has past,
So why are there icicles everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered
Why do a thousand sails contend for the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
Carrying only paper, rope, a silhouette
To speak aloud before the trial
A voice that has already been judged

I tell you, world
I—do—not—believe!
If a thousand challengers lie trampled beneath your feet
Count me as number one thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue
I don't believe in thunder's echoes
I don't believe that dreams are false
I don't believe in death without retribution

If the sea is destined to breach the dykes
Let all the water of bitterness flow into my heart
If the land is destined to rise up
Let humanity choose a new summit for existence again.

A new turning point and flickering stars
Embroidered now across the unobstructed heavens
These are the pictographs of five thousand years
These are the staring eyes of future generations.

--Bei Dao
tr. 迈涯

回答

卑鄙是卑鄙者的通行证，
高尚是高尚者的墓志铭，
看吧，在那镀金的天空中，
飘满了死者弯曲的倒影。

冰川纪过去了，
为什么到处都是冰凌？
好望角发现了，
为什么死海里千帆相竞？

我来到这个世界上，
只带着纸、绳索和身影，
为了在审判前，
宣读那些被判决的声音。

告诉你吧，世界
我--不--相--信！
纵使你脚下有一千名挑战者，
那就把我算作第一千零一名。

我不相信天是蓝的，
我不相信雷的回声，
我不相信梦是假的，
我不相信死无报应。

如果海洋注定要决堤，
就让所有的苦水都注入我心中，
如果陆地注定要上升，
就让人类重新选择生存的峰顶。

新的转机和闪闪星斗，
正在缀满没有遮拦的天空。
那是五千年的象形文字，
那是未来人们凝视的眼睛。

--北岛

dubya's longest seven minutes

Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 opened today. "Philip Shenon, who covered the hearings of the 9/11 commission, described [a] scene [in Fahrenheit 9/11] in an article on the film in Sunday's Times.

'For the White House, the most devastating segment of Farenheit 9/11 may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of September 11, continuing to read a copy of My Pet Goat to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers.'

Moore stipples his film with damning (and in some cases doubtful) statistics—for example, that Mr. Bush spent 42 percent of the first eight months of his presidency on vacation—and vituperation. But, Shenon concludes, while "Mr. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret,…seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world."

Excerpt from
Bush's Monica Moment | by Jack Beatty
The Atlantic Unbound | June 23, 2004
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the system is US

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" - Mario Savio

hail to the thief 

edgy chinese literature

For some of the most vibrant young (ish) voices of the contemporary Chinese literary scene, particularly the Nanjing circle, check out tamen 他们 if you read Chinese. Zhu Wen, Han Dong and others of their milieu post here.

a generation 一代人

黑夜给我黑色的眼睛
我却用它寻找光明
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
顾城
1979年4月

darkness gave me eyes as black as night
and yet i use them to seek the light

gu cheng
tr. mai ya 迈涯

who i want to meet

Self-seekers, truth-makers, dancers on the grave of the spirit of gravity. Intellectuals, activists,revolutionaries, artists, writers, poets,musicians, queers, sesquipedalians,and freaks. People who are alive to the myriad glorious possibilities in life without pretending that this world isn't thoroughly fucked up. People who would rather stick red hot pokers in their eyes than watch television. People who've got their own thing going on. People with passion and commitment. People who have lived and have stories to share. People who crave intensity like air. People who aren't afraid to give a shit. People who have a sense of fair play and empathy. People who thrive on human connection. People who feel a little lost sometimes but know that nobody can ever really show you the way. People who know their own beauty and aren't embarrassed by it. People who aren't obsessed with the myth of their own hipness, who aren't so fixated on making some lameass scene that isn't going to matter five minutes from now anyway (and doesn't really even matter now), that they can't allow themselves to endure a genuine moment when it happens. People who understand that if just one other person gets it, that's already good enough.

Say what you mean, and mean what you say, but most of all, please HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!
People who are so scared of life that they perpetually hide themselves in pseudo-jaded hiply-ironic quotation marks need not apply.

小泰迪熊 xiao taidixiong 

黑子咪子 heizi mizi 

alice fulton rules the breaks

i have to credit that line to cindy carter, gifted poet, wearer of many hats and sometime guitar noodler.

for breathtaking feats of linguistic kungfu check out alice fulton
THREE POEMS
to order any of her books click here

Random Factoids

i am definitely not for everyone...my sense of humor is self-reflexive and obscure...i fear boredom most in life, but find fascination in almost anything...i have too much to say...logorrhea, if you will...i am narcissistic but more interested in you than in myself...i am easily enchanted...i lack sufficient discipline...i sing a hell of a lot better than i play guitar, which isn't saying much (i never got past chords and have the rhythm of someone having a seizure), but couldn't dance my way out of a paper bag...i speak several languages fluently...i've lived on 3 continents...i rescue strays and befriend underdogs...i love to paint, draw, take photographs (level of talent/skill is debatable)...i hate television and have never owned one, but find pop culture interesting to analyze...i am fascinated by avant-garde art and movements, revolution, experimental life and alternative culture, multiple modernities, urban space and post-socialist subculture...i'm to the left of lenin...i am grieving for the state of the nation...i believe in the vocation of public intellectal...i'm direct, intense and uninhibited but have a strong sense of my principles...i am emotionally engaged but rational to the core...i believe in fair play, even when it is not in my interest...i am nuturing to a fault, but often overwhelm people who don't have a strong sense of self and for this i am thoroughly unapologetic...i know what i want out of life and am not afraid to put myself out there to get it...i am a strange combination of cynical and trusting...I live in leaps of unwarranted faith in human goodness thatalmost inariably leave me, sooner or later, falling flat on my face. hard. but i always, always, always get up...