Rhythm Contains Within its Bounds a Certain Lawlessness

Francis Bacon, from "Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion" (1944)

John Coltrane must have intuited this as he recorded his 1965 album Ascension. Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of Francis Bacon’s paintings in The Logic of Sensation demonstrate his particular fixation on rhythm as it relates to visual art. Yet the concept is impossible for Deleuze to educe without first eliciting the human body: “Everything is divided into diastole and systole…The systole, which contracts the body…while the diastole, extends and dissipates…the body is contracted in order to escape from itself;…The coexistence of all these movements in painting…is rhythm.”

The body is the first source, and music is the art with the nearest proximity to the body. “It [music] is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself.” This escape, or the urge or movement towards escape is paramount, for it propels the art (or the rhythm within the art) towards chaos, or as Immanuel Kant would describe it, towards the sublime, which surpasses form and is not purposive, yet linked to a higher purposiveness.

Kant asserts that it is “in its chaos that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation”. There is, beneath this chaos, a constant. Deleuze calls it a “a germ of order or rhythm” ; For Kant, it is the unit of measure used to apprehend the magnitude of an object. Coltrane was conscious of this “germ of order” as he wrote; beneath the elaborate structure of Ascension is the stark skeleton of melody and metre.

More on this later.

Meanwhile, go see the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan. It's stunning.

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Messages from History

This is what comes up when I google "under the bed".

When we moved the bed to the new apartment today guess what I found underneath?

Seven tubes of chap stick.

Yes, seven. Four tubes of Mountain Mint, two tubes of Harvest Berry, and one tube of Gousse de Vanille. I also found four old New Yorker magazines, sixteen pencils, and fifty three cassette tapes. Not even CD's, which are more or less extinct, but audio cassettes. Antiques.

Alas, there under the bed was the new FENCE.

I rescued it and found poems by Nicholas Shapland, Janaka Stucky, Karla Kelsey, James Gendron, Sarah Lariviere, Sean Kilpatrick, Jennifer Mackenzie, Chris Pusateri, Lizbeth Keiley, Eugene Oshtashevsky, Kate Greenstreet, Robin Clarke, Jennifer Kronovet, Page Hill Starqinger, Lara Candland, Meena Alexander, Marina Lazzara, Nathan Bartel, Amanda Chiado, Steve Langan, Kimberly Johnson, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Melanie Hubbard, David Mills, Chris Tysh, Dean Young, Steffen Brown, Heather Winterer and Christine Hume.



I also found this pocket-size Gertrude Stein book entitled "History or Messages from History".

I opened the book to this page:

Shut up whatever you like with his being liked it is of no use that puppies and birds have little ones they have to respect it themselves. A pressure is that they have fought and told it about how they were wishing to be disappointing they make it be very much which they knew they had out right.

Leave winter to summer. That is what they do when they are within and without you.

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Breeeze

picnic: Last year at Ashcroft Ghost Town, Colorado

We bought our tickets to Denver last night. We could have gotten them cheaper but the cheap flights couldn't accommodate four adults, one infant and a cello. The cello has a seat (and a seat belt) of her own. She collects air miles. Her name is Chantal.

***

:this weekend

LILY BROWN
MATHIAS SVALINA
JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON
+VIDEOS BY BRANDON DOWNING

JUNE 27 8PM
SPACESPACE
390 SENECA AVENUE
RIDGEWOOD QUEENS
JUST BLOX FROM THE DEKALB L
ENTRANCE ON STANHOPE

http://www.poetrytimeatspacespace .blogspot.com

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What Is The Triangle of the Thing

This was on the ceiling above my student's piano. I guess I've taught him well.

The new Harp & Altar is smashing. It flaunts various sundries such as:

Kate Greenstreet

"suddenly as night"

Jennifer Hayashida

On Tourism

Mulen Suburb

Karla Kelsey

Consequence and Garner Run Through

Justin Marks

Sonnet IV

Sonnet V

Patrick Morrissey

Variable Songs

Linnea Ogden

Girl With Sudden Death Syndrome

New Ears Were Given to the Treetops

Edward Wilson

Rob Schlegel

Lives of Tree

Lives of Animal

Andrei Sen-Senkov

translated by Zachary Schomburg

Circus Freaks

Max & Mimi : Conjoined Twins

Gunther : Man-Fish

Steven : Tattooed Man

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What is inside the purple box

What is inside the purple box I swear I haven't opened it before, not since I put the items inside and what to do with the contents now, now that I am far away from that moment, inevitably far it seems, once I was trammeled by such things, a look, a voice perhaps, these things restrained me and now not. Inside the purple box. Photos, maps, receipts from cafés and Italian pensiones where a white-haired woman who slightly resembles a milkmaid hands you coffee as you walk into the dining area sit on embroidered cushions and it smells like the baths in that bath village in the Italian alps you didn't remember until this moment

who was i with, why was he doing so much math, what do I do with the map from milano, have I ever returned to milano, will I ever return there i did not like the city, I prefer venezia now if i return to Italia, or those lakes, the coastal cities like trieste, not milano, what shall I do with this map and these photos everyone spoke German in the italian alps in the village with so many baths

**

In other eventful things LIT MAGAZINE is ten years old. Celebrate this ultra-momentous occasion Lolita Bar on Saturday, June 27th, from 6 to 9 PM. Readings by LIT 15/16 contributors CASEY HAYMES, CHRIS HOSEA, SHELLY ORIA and CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER (and more to come), and a keynote address by LIT founding editor-in-chief JOSEPH SALVATORE on the history of the mag and issue 15/16's fantastical Anniversary Editors' Feature

Lolita Bar is at 266 Broome Street in the LES of Manhattan.

Visit LIT online at http://litmagazine.wordpress.com

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I Used To Be Fat and Prussian Blue

:today

Why did I find 74 colour-coded blank books bound with indian silk? What did I expect to do with them when I bought them? And why so many? To fill with words, I'm sure. Most of them are empty, this is what I found in one of them.

silver of mirrors

crayfish pink

eyes like olives

large leaf shadows

hung with damask

headboard

toss of her hair

like copulating beetles

One the first page, marked September 2005, there is a list of words:

parentheses
lit
peel
filaments
stippled
sepals
dappled
lacy
sweet vetch
blue prints
deciduous
softened fog

On page 3, an attempt at sentences:

trains on the hudson line ebb and go of the trains high trees with outstretched
arms I try to write you inside the lines but can't eye-lids shaking a little bit.
Wandering around house aimlessly, looking for words. You are my parallel
and perpendicular. I think of you eloquently.

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I seem to have dwelt unnecessary lengths on unimportant purposes

I walk to the corner. Six adolescent girls walk into the bodega. They buy one carton of large, non-organic eggs, and a big bottle of apple sauce. Why?

What can you make with six girls, 12 raw eggs and a bottle of apple sauce?

Life is strange.

What is also strange is what comes upon my desk as I am packing. How can one explain the chocolate saxophone, the mini packette of President Obama breath mints ("for powerfully fresh breath") and the unnamed sachet of aromatic tea?


Then there is the calling card that says R A R E C O I N S. Professional numismatist. When did I meet the professional numismatist? I remember. After a Carnegie concert once, at Shelly's with K., Alvin and Nike. A numismatic convention, they had said as they approached our table. Will you ladies perform for us?

We were asked to perform for a party of numismatists.

Numisma from the Greek, "coin" or νομίζειν nomízein, "to use according to law", as in currency...

Enough of that. In other news:

I've joined Twitter.

Also, the illustrious Steven Karl wrote a mini review of my chapbook and on the Black Ocean Blog.

Guess what? The Litpop awards are looking for you...

Don't Call It an Event, It's a Deadline...

The contest will close on 15 July 2009, and rules, regulations, and all the legal rigamarole is available here:

http://www.matrixmagazine.org/litpop.html

Here's something:

Dan Magers is reading again!

THE READING AT CHRYSTIE STREET
http://thereadingseries.blogspot.com/

Nathan Austin & Dan Magers read their poems.
Wednesday, June 24. 7 PM sharp. Or thereabouts.
Home Sweet Home
131 Chrystie Street

Nathan Austin's publications include Tie an O (Burning Press, 1998), (glost) (Handwritten Books, 2002) and Survey Says! (Black Maze Books, 2009). Poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Kiosk, Combo, Phoebe, Aufgabe, Tight, Diagram, and Little Red Leaves.

Dan Magers graduated from The New School's MFA program in 2005, and is co-editor of Sink Review (sinkreview.org), an online poetry magazine. He's had poems published in the tiny and Red China Magazine, Dick Pig Review, and Thirteen Myna Birds. He works at the publishing company John Wiley & Sons and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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I am dismantling my bookshelf

we are relocating our new selves

my scalpula is book-heavy

words

both unruly and reticent

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