My first book of poetry is now live on Amazon.com! Buy the book – it’s only 99 cents – Amazon.com takes 30%, and 100% of the rest will go to Camfed USA Charity (the Campaign for Female Education in Africa).

http://www.amazon.com/Female-Figure-Possibly-Venus-ebook/dp/B007S1KNBK

When I was at the San Francisco Writers Conference for BookBaby, I participated in the late-night poetry reading – and the poets encouraged me to publish my own work!  It’s a collection of poems on love, desire, romance, relationships, and the artistic endeavor.

Please buy the book now - it’s only 99 cents – Amazon.com takes 30%, and 100% of the rest will go to Camfed USA Charity (the Campaign for Female Education in Africa).

You can get your copy here:

http://www.amazon.com/Female-Figure-Possibly-Venus-ebook/dp/B007S1KNBK

Yesterday, Anatol brought these home from school.  He was asked to do some writing about what he wanted to be when he grew up, and what he hoped his legacy would be.   This is what he wrote:

and

Peter Bergman, founding member of Firesign Theatre, died last week.  If you haven’t heard them, break out your headphones and check out my two favorite albums of theirs (both on Spotify and iTunes): “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers” and “How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All”

Their work was a huge influence on me – I first heard the Firesign Theatre in college, when I played their albums so many times that the grooves on the records wore thin.  These weren’t merely comedy recordings; they redefined spoken word recorded performance: stereophonic cinematic plays, best through headphones, even better with dwarves.  They played with language not just as hipster word-poetry, but to reveal important truths about the nature of conscious experience – while managing to be as ghastly funny and frightening as the expanding universe itself.  Many consider “Dwarf” to be the greatest comedy record ever made, although I tend to play “How Can You Be…” more often.

http://boingboing.net/2012/03/09/firesign-theaters-peter-berg.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/arts/peter-bergman-satirist-at-firesign-theater-dies-at-72.html?_r=1&hpw

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/firesign-theatre-p163/biography

(click on photo for full size)

This vivid piece of photojournalism, taken in extremely arduous conditions, documents elusive first-person mental states. Here, in the war zone of Fairfield, CT, we braved the forbidding terrain of a middle-aged Jewish lady’s kitchen. The woman was extremely accommodating – until the boxes of snack food started flying around the kitchen, crashing into her cabinets.

This photograph addresses three of my primary intellectual concerns:

Focus and attention. Here, Elif is beckoned by the siren call of snack food, and she’s literally pulled, zombie-like from her work into the kitchen.

Balancing short- and long-term goals. Friends and lovers often endeavor to reward each other and share pleasure in ways which are harmful to their wallets, society, or their long-term goals and future selves.

Butts. A picture is worth a thousand words – yet, while the English language contains hundreds of thousands of words, not one of them does full justice to the marvelous beauty of a woman’s posterior.

***

Here’s a version I mounted on a card for Holmes stereoscope viewers:

Image via Wikipedia

Last night, we were eating dinner at a stargazing gathering in the Mojave desert. Anatol made a comment about death, and I commented, “That’s my little existentialist.”

Anatol: “What’s an existentialist?”

Me: “Existentialism is a school of philosophy which was big after World War II… you know, Camus, Sartre… OK, it means that even if life seems absurd, you have to create your own meaning…”

Anatol: “I don’t understand.”

Me: “Suppose I were to ask, what’s the pupose of life and why are we here?”

Anatol: “We’re here because of the explosion of a supernova!”

At this, the scientists at the table from NASA and JPL pricked up their ears.

Me: “No, I mean… let me put it this way: A lot of people believe in God, and that’s OK, but suppose you don’t – what do you think, then, is the meaning of life?”

Anatol: “The meaning of life is 42!”

The whole table laughed.

Anatol: “Daddy, can I go roast some marshmallows now?”

My 7-year-old is quite proficient in finding his own meaning and living sincerely and passionately, and I’m here to help him roast those marshmallows.

Click for full score

Note: The free Scorch plug-in is required to view the scores in your browser. Turn off your speaker volume, since the score documents are formatted with non-standard MIDI settings and will produce only drum sounds.

Text:

5. Clamoring For Clout

He’s a much cleverer philosopher than I am.
He’s more famous than I am.
We’re all clamoring for clout.
Neither of us wants to be left out.

Think of this dissociation.
Failures in collaboration.

Suddenly, a famine strikes!
Gives a new throw of the dice.

How can science intervene
if nature’s found its golden mean?
Does that mistake cost you hard?
Which of these two things does that mis-snake bite?

But then -
It’s a mutation!

Unpredicted variation
Snowballing acceleration
Will this new line live or die out?
Will this rhythm/rhyme jibe with the last one?
Now we’re subject to spectrums of sensations like pain
He will rebel against me and I will complain!
     My idea is not the same.

(Don’t forget the atavism.
Or the lessons of positivism.)

You think our raw sensations, if they exist, leave naught behind
     So you say…
(Made me realize what was missing from his picture of the mind and mine…)
What concerns us isn’t just the stream of thought but also it’s the feeling…
     (…feeling of being a subject to this spectrum of sensation…)
How can a system take one step back so it can take steps forward?
A fixation! A fixation!
     A fixation at the best level throughout the population
Does this preceding sentence refer to that receding sentence?
     Do these preceding lieder refer to this receding…

How can falling back turn out to have been advantageous?
     Sometimes a mistake can later bring beneficial consequences…
     Are you writing about me?

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Text:

4. The Thick Moment

This patient’s spinning stories in extended present tense,
testing a possibility of selfhood that makes sense.
My rivals claim that consciousness is a nonderivative
activity that’s metaphysically primitive.

I say that we should line up the concepts of mind and brain,
so that the terms on each side have a chance to be the -

He’s still searching, casting about.
His intuition is that I’m leaving something out.
No matter if it’s a contingent,
why is it that perception’s twinned –
with:
The phenomenal experience of red?
The taste of cheese, the pain a-throbbin’ in my head?
What is this thing called sensation?

I know that it’s been shown to be iatrogenic,
but still her symptoms are certainly authentic!
And fill her needs
for boundaries…

In the background, there’s a struggle for supremacy, and then a snap! election
Sentition:
Long ago there were sensory responses organized around the simulation.
     now, sensory responses enclosed inside our brains.
I, for one, would rather hear your opposition than from those who haven’t understood me.
     I – just – wait – OK – then – I disagree.
Sensation, to what does it refer? It refers to itself as it recurs in…
     For planning, you needed to make representations -

Your sensations leave no traces…
Stretching the present brings feelings of resonance…
     Stretching the present feels…

Stretched present –
Thick moment
     Subjective
now contained
     -ject tive present
past and pres-
     Res
ent sustained.
     New domains for an intention
Privacy,
sentiment,
     give a feeling of resonance.
only comes
     Feedback noise decay –
at the
end.

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Text:

3. Speaking For Our Selves

He thinks I leave out (That he omits) phenomena!
Does he overstate (anomalous) phenomena?

I look to the left
I step up to the mirror
I look to the right
Is something coming nearer
Is he down the hall, waiting
For me to leave the bathroom
Will he come to me later
As I make it down the hallway to my room?

What are the implications
Guess how old he is?
To this loose confederation
     Don’t want to burn your bridges!
But rather than a single source,
Her clusters of speech make better sense if you attribute to alters
Separated while
Both this paper’s co-authors seek a common style!

For one of us, without verification, it’s nothing.
(I wonder if he’s trapped by this approach.)
Did I mention how I got him his job cuz I think he’s a truly great romantic scientist!

He’s my friend, and I love to work with him
To zero in on the ramifications of this case -

I
     A
feel
     fail-
some-
     ure
one
     of
watch-
     ac-
ing.
     cess.
Won-
     And
der
     mem-
if
     or-
he’s
     y
lurk-
     lap-
ing?
     ses.

Explanatory fictions without supervision our task is to make descriptions of others’ behavior
     Towel, screen, curtain, seem

Shared philosophies, we have twenty years’ history – who does he think he is to write it – loose cannon!

The feeling of red
     Steam rise!
The taste of the bread
     Rises!
The pain in my head
Continues on as if
It goes to the same
     Round again
From where it came
     Let me do it again
But now closed off in a loop inside of the brain.

Now, private
     Cream rises
It’s private
Just Quine it
     He redlined it
Tell what you think of it
     Self-sustaining
What’s he intimating?
     Is he writing about me?
How to make your many projects cooperate?

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Text:

2. epi sodes

Never have we encountered such a patient with so many different
epi-sodes / bind!
and gaps in
memory

So how can I attribute her actions to one consistent person, when the facts reveal such
     to one, to one
disjunction?
How can she achieve in integrating all of her

parts?
     epi-sodes
     We’re / here!
Gears inside of gears
     My him she
     Gears beside of gears

I was a girl who kept a diary which she would then read to find that it was written in a
Stranger’s hand.
They couldn’t diagnose it
but she held out hope
     But I hoped
someone would come with a cure for the problem;
never knew what she had –

What are you suppressing?
Whom am I addressing?

Sandy’s coming to play.

Let me tell you a story of a friend who would come when nobody else could see -
a person supervisor protecting from what comes in when I was asleep.
A fracturing of identity -

What’s the center of her narrative gravity?
     Center off-center?
The center of narrative -