The Ghosts of Banquo and Icarus [Today's News Poem May 4, 2010]
Floes adrift on lava float away on molten
Clay and grind their teeth together; loosening, then
Crumbling the brittle igneous to boulders,
Else to rifts and canyons. Poles align to colder
Regions, warmer climes, then back again. It shudders;
Vomits rock and ash so hot the vessel's rudders
Fail. The oceans boil the krill. The storks are trailing
Embers, losing feathers, melting skin and wailing.
Splash! The potion's seasoned. Princes feed, while rulers
Sleep in beds of sand and wait for something crueler.
“A tumble in global stocks spread to Asia on Wednesday on heightening fears that Greece's debt woes could spread to other countries.”
– Vikram S Subhedar, Reuters, Wed May 5, 2010 12:28am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6360JO20100505
“BP Plc is fighting the oil slick menacing the Gulf Coast with more than 150,000 gallons of a detergent-like chemical intended to blend oil and water. ”
– Bloomberg Business Week, May 05, 2010, 12:22 AM EDT
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-05/bp-s-cleanup-uses-detergent-like-chemical-to-attack-oil-slick.html
“Every so often, movements deep within the iron core of the Earth mean that the planet flips its magnetic field; south becomes north and north becomes south. The last reversal was 780,000 years ago, and there are signs that another could be on the way soon. "The strength of the Earth's magnetic field has decreased by nearly eight per cent in the last 150 years," says Nils Olsen of Denmark's National Space Institute. "In some regions it has decreased by 10 per cent in just 20 years."”
– Kate Ravilious, The Telegraph, 10:59PM BST 26 Apr 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7636088/After-the-volcano.-.-.-the-threat-of-further-natural-disasters.html
Happily Ever After Epistle [News Poem, April 18, 2010]
“The team discovered that in the deep, rarity is common.”
– Frank Pope, The Times Online, April 19, 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article7101533.ece
“Spam levels have remained resolutely stable despite recent botnet takedowns, according to a survey from Google's email filtering business... The Google spam filtering division concludes that going after botnets is no more effective than the previous tactic of targeting rogue ISPs. The takedown of rogue ISP 3FN bought a temporary respite from the spam deluge for about a month. However, after Real Host, another ISP, was taken out months later spam volumes recovered after only two days. The marked difference was due to use of improved disaster recovery approaches by cybercriminals. ”
– John Leyden, The Register, 18th April 2010 04:17 GMT http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/18/google_botnet_takedowns/
“I saw you talking with a guy,
But here's my pic. We share at least
A ninety six percent—no lie—
I know it's fast, but call a priest?”
“Before I say 'I do,' you need
To cut that hair and watch this clip—
You done? You loved it? What's the creed?
Let's marry on a rocket ship!”
The profiles never lie—at most
They get it wrong; but who's to care?
Online, the databases host
The mind, the body's just hardware.
The Volcano Dreams [Bonus Poem April 17, 2010]
“The UK is enduring a fourth day as a virtual no-fly zone, as the travel chaos caused by volcanic ash drifting from Iceland shows no sign of ending... Meanwhile, one of the UK's biggest fresh fruit importers said business had ground to a halt because of the disruption.”
– BBC, 04:11 GMT, Sunday, 18 April 2010 05:11
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8627545.stm
“The car went off the opposite side of the road. It slashed through a utility pole, hit the top of Johnson’s 2004 Ford Freestar van parked in the driveway, and smashed into his and Coffey’s home... The accident initially knocked out the electricity for 3,400 people. Some did not have power restored until after this afternoon.”
– Charley Hannagan, The Post-Standard, April 17, 2010, 3:23PM
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/04/car_smashes_into_syracuse_hous.html
“A roughly seven-hour 911 outage in the Eagle area has been blamed on a contractor's error.”
– Associated Press - April 17, 2010 7:55 PM ET
http://www.kcautv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12329805
“A majority of scientists maintain that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. However, they must be prepared to acknowledge that there is another view, for which evidence can also be adduced, even if it seems to conflict with the received wisdom.”
– The Telegraph, 8:01PM BST 14 Apr 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/7591286/Climate-change-always-room-for-doubt.html
A butterfly's volcano's dream of flight
Before the birth projects the ash through night.
By wind the dreamers fly on arctic gusts:
One sips the dew, the other's pollen dusts
The airports, farmlands. Little beasts in herds
Demand the laws apply to their absurd
And delicate activities. A puff
Of superheated carbon's sure enough
To blow them off their path—while butterflies
Don't rage at storms: instead they course-revise.
Stay Tuned [Today's News Sonnet, April 16, 2010]
“Former President Bill Clinton warned of a slippery slope from angry anti-government rhetoric to violence like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, saying "the words we use really do matter."”
– The Associated Press. (AP) – 2 hours ago 5:28pm, PST
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iTuEGhEGZTWdpcLoQeprQNF72AigD9F4DBB00
“There Atambayev dropped a bombshell, revealing the provisional government was preparing to launch a "special operation" to grab the deposed but still defiant President, Kurmanbek Bakiyev. ”
– Steve Herman, Voice of America 16 April 2010
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Inside-the-Revolution-A-VOA-Dairy-from--91085179.html
“"People are here because they feel their freedoms have been infringed upon," Miller said. "The tea party is a venue to let our politicians know the people will exercise their right to free speech, our right to peaceful assembly. We believe in the Founding Fathers and the principles they wrote into the Constitution."”
– Michelle Dupler, Tri-City Herald, Friday, Apr. 16, 2010
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2010/04/16/978390/tri-city-tea-partiers-seek-revolution.html
“The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.”
– Kate Zernike & Megan Thee-Brenan, The New York Times, April 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html?src=me&ref=homepage
The New York Times reports another mob
From terror groups the government has banned,
Attacked police and rescuers to rob
The damaged buildings. Riot-bots were fanned
Throughout the city late last night—stay in
And wait for further news... but first a tale
That's great for kids. “The traitor was his kin.
He served his country. Now his book's on sale.”
Stay tuned for what to do when terror strikes
At school. 'Reports at Two' might save your life.
The Internet's to blame for terror spikes:
A doctor-preacher calls it 'Freedom-Strife.'
His show at nine explains how prayer can clash
And win against a mob or nuclear flash.
First thing you should know is we don't refer to ourselves as demons any longer. PR prefers that we use the term "alternative angels." Anyways, it takes nineteen of us alt-angels to control this particular subject. I'm an eye movement expert; though in these cases the eyes don't actually see anything, proper eye movement is essential when it comes to preserving the illusion that the suit is moving of its own volition. Things have changed a lot in the possession business since the old days when one would just take a lift to the surface and just leap into the body in question and, you know, go to town. I miss those days sometimes. In the digital age, possession is a strictly wireless operation, performed via remote control by a team of specialists. We all work at programming our particular bodily function- legs, head, heart, digestive system- and the commands go through a central processor which checks them for accuracy before beaming them via wireless signals to the subject, or suit. It's kind of like a marionette with nineteen different puppeteers pulling the strings. If this sounds complicated, you're right, it is, but remember we've been at this for thousands of years.
So as you know, recently I've been working with this subject we call Lady Gaga. Hey, don't blame me for the name; that's all Marketing's doing. It's not bad work, though I'd prefer a more established vocalist such as Streisand or Liza. I'm not so much into this dance music crap, but it's a job, and it could be a hell of a lot worse. Take for instance my former associate Horkheimer. Both of us started work on the Gaga woman at the same time, right before her second single came out. Poker Face, that's right. Gaga -or Steffi, as we called her- was what you call a cooperative subject, or coop, rather than a hostile takeover. Seems like more and more musicians are seeking out our services these days; I don't mean to brag but business is booming. Those guys and gals down in PR know what they're doing. The internet helps, of course.
Anyways, Horkheimer was a hand man. You probably don't think about how important the hands are when it comes to singing. Horkheimer had been controlling the hand gestures of female performers for a couple thousand years; his big breakthrough was a little chippy name of Salome, maybe you've heard of her. More recently, he's worked with such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Jane Avril. So we felt fortunate to have him on board. It's funny what years in the industry can do to a man though. Horkheimer had a wicked sense of humor that had a real sense of bitterness behind it. Plus he was a little bit full of himself, and I think he felt that by working with a young, relatively unknown singer, that he was slumming it. "Look," I'd tell him, "We're starting with nothing with this one. This is our chance to build whatever we want, to shape her into our image!"
He wasn't having any of it though. "She doesn't have any class," he'd kvetch. "That's something we can't fake. It's either there or it ain't, and with this Gaga bitch, it ain't." Now like I said, I prefer the more traditional vocalist myself, but I wasn't going to kick. I always believe in trying to make the best of things. Besides, my last couple of gigs had been the pits; working with strictly nowhere acts, boy bands mostly. The stories I could tell. But I digress.
So anyways this one time, Gaga's got this big concert to put on at some stadium in England, and we've got everything all programmed and ready to go, and she gets out there, and the first thing she does, before Goldsmith can get her to sing a single note, she raises her left hand, extends her left index finger, and shoves it as far as it will go up her left nostril and starts digging for gold, so to speak. Well, the crowd went nuts, screaming and booing and throwing half-empty cans of Boddingtons. It was a real clusterfuck, believe you me. We had to detain the entire audience, wipe their memories of the evening clean. What's that? Well, to you it may seem like an extreme reaction for such a minor incident. And I know what you're thinking: in the grand scheme of things, what harm can a little nose picking do? It's different in this business though, where careers can hinge on a single wardrobe malfunction, a single inappropriate gesture. It's all about keeping the client happy.
I haven't seen Horkheimer since; no one in our circle has, though rumor has it he's been stuck supervising bowel maintenance for some young act name of Justin Bieber or something. Poor son of a bitch. Me, I play it safe. No crossing or rolling of the eyes, no inappropriate winking. Keep your eyes on the prize, I always say, and keep your nose clean. I plan on being at this job for as long as I can, at least until the inevitable overdose.
Here's a slogan I believe: 'slogans are stupid.' Slogans stifle thought and create false dualisms. They ignore outright the possibility of alternatives not mentioned in the slogan: ie: slogans are shit (I pledge allegiance to that one too). News also creates false dualisms and in so doing, funnels thought into narrow theses that ignore that most current events are RECURRING events.
News is narrative, but what does this mean? Narrative: a story, a glue with which disparate data points are welded together. A manufacture. A report about a scientific paper isn't the same as the scientific paper itself. The medium is the message, so with Google at our side, does that mean a footnote can become a headline? It appears so. I had no clue how easy it was to enter the news-stream. So it is possible to attack the headlines and to become the news.
I believe in eloquence, if not always revision. I believe eloquence is more powerful than base speech—not only in persuasive capacities, but also in expanding thought. Is it not astonishing to one reading this page that he or she already knows most, if not all the words printed here, and yet these words inspire thoughts one had not considered previously? To me, that's one of the many wonders of language. News is the opposite of eloquent; it is reductionist in nature. It seeks to shrink ideas. It presumes a 'state of nature' from its readers. It assumes the reader is ignorant, swayed by irrational prejudice and believes in the false completeness of a dualistic dialectic.
Quantity has a quality all its own as we know, which is why news is capable of infiltrating our subconscious and altering our conditioned responses. Journalists only drive the narrative, because they are expert testimony: paid witnesses. How well does that work in our court-system? They have the heft of the news organization--the news brand--to replicate their bad memes and drive discourse in negative directions. And instead of facing this army of idiots directly, the literary writers flee to the academy. They're such cowards. They write for lit magazines—they're afraid of their best writing getting stolen; of not getting paid for it. That's a fair worry. It's not easy to think up something original with the letters we all know. Still, they have targeted exclusivity and sought sinecure at the expense of relevance: removed themselves from natural selection. Instead of participating within history, the standard literary conceit is to transcend history. This is a valid form of expression, but when it becomes the predominant ethos, there's a problem. Why is it Maureen Dowd gets to pretend to be some sort of literary type? She thinks she's such a fucking word-pixie. She can't stand up, head-to-head against a real author of prose, never mind poetry. The answer therefore is to alter the target of literary efforts. Is the poet some type of manatee, fleeing corporate speedboats? I think the poet is more like a submarine that can transform into a suborbital bomber and back again. Why hide? If poetry can do all these things poets claim it can do, then it should be able to easily defeat the hacks of the world.
Most news stories have few facts and are heavy with narrative. Furthermore, idiotic statements are easy to rebut with other idiotic statements, thus creating a cycle of retaliation between extreme ideological poles. In the name of 'dialectic' the argument is framed by the arguers. One could almost argue that too much time around the legal system has made the common mode of public discourse, nihilistic. Since extremists speak mostly to their opposing pole, this creates discourse filled with slogans, which as I've said before, stifle genuine thought. The best antidote then is careful speech that cannot be easily rebutted. I have chosen to do this with verse, because as I said before, I hate slogans. Poems do far more work with the same number of syllables and poetry—when it's written right—advances dialogue, rather than restricts it.
So what is anti-news? Well, simply put, it's anti-narrator. A bad narrator omits facts and jerks the reader along. A news organization assumes the reader has the memory of a goldfish, or has never read a newspaper before. Even a tv show assumes the viewer is familiar with prior episodes--and if she isn't--that the viewer could easily catch up on netflix. Could you imagine if Voltaire assumed that nobody had read anything before him? “Hmm, better write down to their level first.” It's not done, except in news. Even textbooks assume a kid passed the prior grade.
The whole point behind anti-news is therefore more than a culture-jamming enterprise. The news doesn't occur--it recurs. News is a narrator that presents false dualisms and relies more heavily on speculation based around a news item analyzed in isolation, rather than synthesizing disparate bits of knowledge into a more complete narrative. The journalist is a notary, someone who witnesses and confirms an event (or data) that requires eye-witness testimony. She or he only thinks s/he's a writer, when in fact a journalist is as much a writer as a court reporter. The journalist seeks to step into history, but is she qualified? Who really writes history? Scholars. Artists. Writers. No hacks allowed, except insofar as being the cite in a greater thesis. Attacking the news at it comes out immediately injects alternative points of view into the discourse--at the moment when it can still be effective. And furthermore, the author who writes the first definitive poem or story on a subjectmatter is remembered--not the journalist who witnessed or confirmed the event. The literary minded ought go head-to-head with the hacks of the world and enter the cycle of history now: not after you've died.
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