Archive for October, 2010
MIXED USE
Coincident with the quiescent anxiousness of whether euphoria and its expression have a fundamental limit—whether having occupied all the minutes uncannibalized and language they can recover, they might emerge of a sudden as some precious rare amphora of honey all scraped bare: a still from Nero’s villa and its aftermath, just north of the Pontine [...]
KIDDISHNESS
Just in time for further thinking about Venice as the underbelly of Enlightenment & shadow city of the modern: the community makes room for the carnivalesque.
LEAD
Encounter with the tall, unmarked and unXrayable cadaver next door from the 4th or 5th century AD wrapped in 800 pounds of lead burrito-style (probably for economic reasons—having no money for marble, nor for a lid, Gianni explains) providing the perfect sunkenness toward the end of daylight savings and the raising of hell by compound [...]
IL CHIARO DI LUNA (AN ALTERNATIVE TO MOON-MURDER MANIFESTOS)
Antipasto of cauliflower, leeks, beets, and fennel with salsa rustica: food for wonder, in response to Sarah & Noga’s solicitousness about the weekend past, over the fact that ambient historical overload has led to a predilection for defensive simplification of late: head drunken merely in patterns of light and the natural cycles expunged from my, [...]
APPROACH
After listening to Andrew Riggsby‘s shoptalk on houses of memory in ancient Roman oratory, wanting to derail our assumptions that the text of memorization must be linear: since it isn’t linear, memory, & requires traversals of us forth and back, jagged, in response to the only partial accommodations of the present: & this must be [...]
TIMEKEEPING
Unclockingly, in which moon and sun, softened in definition while in celu l’ài formate clarite et pretiose et belle, mime one another.
THIS TOO IS ROOTS
Cleft: within a lent “America,” the calming to those displaced because orderly, rectilinear, lawn of graves (replete with glazed panorama and remote control): at Anzio, the landscape of a girl’s ancestry translated into immaculately strategic terms, depicted in futurist radiation by Italian artisans: the taking of Rome. “1941—1945 / MEMORI E FIERI / DELLE GESTA [...]
EX/PORT
at Antium: nevermore.(Poe’s poem, also, untranslatable, as it renders literally into everyday usage, mai più.)
MIGRANT
En route to hear various actors & Andrea Cortellessa, in a painted theater off the Via del Paradiso (“c’è solo la via; non c’è il paradiso,” reports a waiter whom we’ve asked for help from a nearby stoop), strapieno, vocalize Emilio Villa’s plurality of origins, Homers, Bibles (progeny of Vico): spectacular flock ruckus, uploaded here [...]
TUNING/MOON
Rome’s baroque colloquy with the void well highlit by current luna plus lumière (with the Tower of the City of Lights, notes J, echoed proleptically in the splayed legs of Bernini’s Navona fountain base [or at least that's how my rococo makes retrospective prose of it: echoey prolepsis]) furnishes a delectable turning of corners, a [...]
YOUR CRISIS
“WE WON’T PAY FOR THE CRISIS” Talk with Marilena and Gilda, poet/scholars, at the concluding event of Romapoesia about jobs & education: parents of kids in elementary and middle schools here need to send them off with a year’s supply of paper (& that includes toilet paper).
ATTENTION SPIN
My contribution to the lists of eleven treasured readings of the year past here, at Steve Evans’s indomitable Third Factory. Meanwhile, subtracted from abounding peach, in the pale shadow of Galileo, before paler screens, incompatible, arrival of plain & modest gratitude for the fact that Rome, unlike Venice, will continue to be out there, will [...]
IN COUNTERLIGHT
Passed between our machines from one dusk, impatient, intermittent, to the next, another, lo-res: whose impression, then, whose recollection, whose souvenir?
SCORDATÉLLA
To speak of one’s passion for revision in language, for the layers accumulating, wearing, falling away, & find this listened to as a stance toward relations lived, witnessed in oneself: toward action crossing time softened & merciful in disrecording from the seeing forth like a mesh of bough and cloud where the silver’s on fire: [...]
DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA
“I shall not bring to so large a cup only the water of my own thinking, but shall add to it more potent ingredients, taken or extracted from elsewhere, so that from these I may concoct the sweetest possible mead.” —Dante Alighieri, trans. Stephen Botterill
“ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE & PARKING”
Contradictions or inevitabilities of development? In a city where the disparatest basements meet ancora & ancora.
SCACCIAPENSIERI
Sidling through throngs of the flea market behind the 17th-century Janiculum walls in search of mundane socks, mesh of all languages, of the salvaged objects of distances barely imaginable, obliging imagining however, hearkening back to ingenuities of the moment before conspicuous consumption well characterized by Heather Rogers’ Gone Tomorrow, and soundtrack of home for this [...]
EAT, DRAW, CHARGE
Eating to poesis of graven images: flesh, wire, line. Table counsel on digital media in our cortile, subtended by arabesques of bodies, entangled & yet untouching of the Vatican’s divine index, from Ivan’s St. Petersburg.
TRACE
Al rovescio, as in a beginning. Afloat in a fresh lexicon the pale impulse to trace an anniversary (“turning”) for the initial tendering between of each term, coadamic & brave, pale rose as the fall that blooms against this wall, enamorous.
FLUCTUANT
From Giorgio Colli‘s 1948 Physis kryptesthai philei / La natura ama nascondersi / Nature Loves to Hide, picked up in the music room while waiting in the phenomenally, otherwise maddeningly downtempo national library for an ordered tome: “Such a vertiginous multiplicity of historical lines of sight, through which entire worlds of concepts are constructed on [...]
VENERE CLOACINA
Much discussion with the “landscape architect” and partnered architects researching food and waste these days surrounding landfill, as archive, and as a singular, sanctified, however tainted, space accommodating under present conditions to other species, now that development is equal to wasteland (Case Brown on Chernobyl: a “toxic Eden”). Protectress of the portal to Rome’s massive [...]