*impulse

Silver Surfer Vs. Juggernaut

Wharfs whimpered and warped Woden wailed as floes and blustery blasts of slippery ice melted down from the pinnacle of the nova-crusted parasol. A dipping board bobbed down the mercury tide. Tinier than the tiniest pin, wobblier than Horton's Hoo, more crannied than raisin bran, the gnarled tree, the cue ball, the eternal cerulean, earth wobbled and bobbed, unifying the board and the venomous helm.

How would Earth survive the Sandman and Juggernaut clashing and dissolving into and out of each other while the pulsating yellow variable showered magenta and magnetism alternately, flopping from art to Victorian science and back to ancient monuments and eons-ago sunsets?

Crannied Venus, cocooned in furious ether, scalding vapor, verdant doom, unholy miasma, manifold blankets, and drafty streams, whipped its tailed green immensity through pools and momentum ponds. Streaking in behind the curvilinear tail, the Silver Surfer bent forward slightly and fired a brilliant, girder-straight beam at the tumbling Juggernaut and sprawled his ungainly bulk athwart the Van Allen Belt and its shepherd Endymion. The hyper velocity of the Power Cosmic nearly bent the unbendable, but Juggernaut, though stunned and unthinkably agonized by hitherto unfelt power, slowly reared himself back and upward, shrugging off the blast.

Another and another and another. Ten thousand crackling power cosmic rays, bolts and pyrotechnic dazzlings rained fearsomely down on the unstoppable, now a minute crawl, a never sleeping shark near fatal verges. Arboreal monuments, witnesses to meteors washing the idyllic sky of its meaningful silence, vast trunkful legs of petrified stone, aghast in the beech maple biome, aside ferny ferns and flitting mayflies, enormities of growth and life, wept as the clash cocooned the starry night and made all scintillate, the gloomy dawn.

Surfer, not micro not macro not effable nor awake, shiny with despair, a-brimming with overcontemplation and self-righteous moralizing, blasted the Hulk into a flux and returns every 10,000 years to reblast him down the gyre, thus vanquishing forever, or for so long as the Surfer lives, though not physically besting, the deepest harlequin myrtle monster the shale continents have cast away.

Now, a Cepheid Surfer cuts a G-clef arc and curve in the cosmic matrix as he perpetuates a tour of earth, the gyre, and a hundred more gleaming comets and brooding neutron stars, in his sacrifice to the universe. Superman hurls by.

New Years Is The Jingle Jangle Morning

And the thing with feathers, and the fat wild Thor of Asgaradian times, and the warped wendful well of a wee, and the floppy foaming firmament, and the twisted sky-tweaking tree tangle, and the grope master and the free fleers of Ninevah, and the stately spanish galleon dipping through the tropics, and the hope of happiness and the corrosive pewter dripping from the dome onto the peaks, and the century's corpse, and the bloom along the bough, and all the trickling and bubbling circumstance.

It little profits that an idle idyll by this noteless notebook sprinkles glitter onto the morning town.
One-two-three-four, to farmer's market and Whole Foods, it tosses them down.

Spiders spinning weaves of endless complexity cannot corral the whirling, hovering, twisting, revolving, bending, hoisting, jousting and settling fibers of verbiage and verse coalescing cloud into vapory thread.

Spun away by the ratchet and the racket, the carriage whisks the bobbing specters to the worn and bent corners of the cartography. Green, yellow, crushed avocados and sun-dried tomatoes, marble swirls and confection, haunted new years citadels, creaking partitions, settling buttresses, the maco shark and the swarm above Paris, flaunting numbers and possibilities in front of witnesses.

A deep, slow pulse of water, splitting into wavy zippers of shadow that conjure lake monster visions, precedes the silent ferry's glide into the forest-girded wharf, not meters from fright and gasping huge spiders, puling ocelots and glow worms. From wharf to ferny fringe to crippled branches cursing the moon, to the deepest blue darkness splenetic with milky way and bulbous Saturn, to the rushes that wash the reeds, to the crocodiles that creep under the film, to the errant that clashes with berserkers and is victorious.

Where lone violins grind out their song, where grizzled silver grinds along sleak grooves and hushes the blustering oaks, opening their canopied hands to the cumulus for droplets, sages grow. Amid the turtle-slow grind of the spheres, dark blue turns black and dashes into the endless gloom and retrieves pearly collections for novel constellations and drooping pantheons.

The secreted jade barker chirps celebratory cadences to all.

Just some of the items gobbled up or parodied:

• Dickinson's Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
• Bob Dylan's Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
• Old English alliteration
• Weaving
• Mardi Gras
• Masefield's Cargoes
• Tennyson's Ulysses
• Hardy's The Darkling Thrush
• Housman poems
• RPGs
• Whitman's spider poem
• UFO sightings
• Pound imagist short
• Tolkien's Mirkwood Forest

Happy New Years!

Tired Of The Everyday Grind? Looking To Get Away From It All?

We offer you...Cargoes, by John Masefield:

Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

The three stanzas: exotic, exotic, and commonplace, for the time, that is, for even the coaster butting through the turbid channel now seems Dickensian-ly faraway.

Figurine by Pia Langelund.

A Little Wallace Stevens For A Tuesday Morning

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers In red weather.

A few denotations:

Ceinture: happy happy sash.

Periwinkle: pretty little flower on pretty little myrtle plant.

Disillusionment with a fanciful breakdown:

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns. Visual pun. Staleness. Living female Jacob Marleys of unfulfillment.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings. Contrast. Colorful flights of subjectively structured fancy.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures. Sensuous, affluent.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Exotic. Faraway.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers In red weather. Raw but still imaginative. TWC. Argh!

Enjoy.

Sad Autumn, Happy Autumn

If a frosty star
Sips a drop of joy,
Will he flicker brightly
While the cooling cloys?

Or might the morph
From lord to queen
Force a position
And warp him green?

For this, no answer.
The sky is mute.
The beams' dilations
Spangle and toot.

Painting is 'Night With Stars' by Van Gogh

From Keats To Halo Chronicles, Bypassing Lincoln Center

As a lifelong devotee of art, music, and literature, some find it strange that the thought of Lincoln Center, SoHo, and dramatic black and white photo shoots, fills me with nausea, dark brooding cityscapes excepted.

They must be bypassed. Keats' Grecian Urn will dock with the Nanobot Mothership when a Flash-speckled, moon-flecked firmament shrieks at each star-tablet.

Pope's light militia of the lower sky will synergize with Augmented Reality.

Screencapture is from FlashFridge.com.

A More Gadget-like Poem

For some reason, Steven's strangely modern The Emperor of Ice Cream reminds me of Sandburg's Whitmanesque Chicago. Perhaps it is the tone and sequence of images, especially the 'muscular one' suggesting a toiling working class person in a city of big shouldered men.

It is as if the sprawling panorama of Sandburg is transmutated into a small bag full of glass and crystal trinkets that is Stevens' poem: from 'painted women under the gas lamps' to dawdling wenches, from a tidal pulse to a more gadget-like poem.

Photo is the famous photographic portrait of Wallace Stevens by Sylvia Salmni, 1948

Fall In Love With Unreality

A fine sample poem, titled Columbus Avenue, about Asbury Park seer Madame Marie, from the Lilliput Review's occasional feature, The Brobdingnab Feature Poem, that, due to tonal and style temperament, reminds me of a merging of Steven's The Emperor of Ice Cream  and Ferlinghetti's The pennycandystore beyond the El.

Wow, that was a convoluted, emotionally challenged, version of a Miltonian phrasing, in such contrast to this poem's simple beauty and economy of phrase:

Columbus Avenue

Sidewalk slick with rain,
the fortune teller's daughter
sits barefoot in a doorway,
her painted toes curl in moist air.
The florist flirts, sells me white flowers,
casablanca lilies, he likes saying.
A street singer cries through this thick air,
he beats good rhythm on his thighs
and I give him money, of course I do.

by Lonnie Hull Dupont

Longer than typical poems in the Lilliput Review, hence the Brobdingnabian association.

Renaissance Geek Learning Aid, Part I

A few summaries, lists, binary couplings, and silly mnemonics to gently reinforce knowledge and understanding of the arts, sciences, and humanities:

Very very short history of early man:
Paleo-Neo-Bronze-Iron

This one's painful but, perhaps for that reason, almost unforgettable:
'Lipids aint fun. Their O to H aint 2 to 1'

Some gauzy contrasts:

1. Impressionism :: Post Impressionism ... Fleeting :: Permanence
2. Rationalism :: Empiricism ... Deductive :: Inductive

Said in a whiny voice:
'Species change over time, Cuvier.'

Because they kinda sorta rhyme:

1. Genus Linnaeus
2. Vesalius the Anatomist
3. Leuwenhoek the Microscope
4. Evolution Hutton

Copernicus' biggie:
Using math to prove his heliocentric hypothesis.

Classicism vs. Romanticism:

1. objective vs. subjective
2. Inspiration: Greco-Roman vs. medieval-folk-dream-exotic
3. reason vs. imagination

That crazy unconscious:
Schelling knew it was there and that it was big, but Freud mapped it.

Three noteworthy characteristics of DaVinci's paintings:

1. mysterious landscapes
2. atmospheric perspective
3. scientific study of facial gestures

Victorian glimpse of the alienation and disillusionment of the modern world:
Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach

A few critical perspectives:

1. Structuralism: relative difference
2. New Criticism: all interpretations are equal

A mnemonic to help remember three of the main themes of the romantic period:
'I freely express my feelings as I commune with nature because I am a visionary genius'

Ancient Athens was democratic, but what was missing?
The social contract: The Magna Carta, The Constitution

Heard of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but not quite sure what they admired so much before Raphael?
'Twas the detailed depictions of nature.

Thus ends this brief sampler.
Coming soon: Part 2.

Indie Web Subculture: Microformats

All In The Head

Loose, subjective impressions of microformats and the communities that develop them:

This blog, microformats, hAtom, and every other essential wrinkle and being, psychically gather in a secluded Greenwich Village pub. It is some sort of cyber back door into quirky, literary web goings on, much more obscure and offbeat than the galactic channels opened by the upswelling paradigm shifts affected by microblogging, bioinformatics, and Ajax programming.

There is something about the witty, intelligent, impoverished, and fascinating people involved in microformatting that emits a resonation quite unlike the aura of a gadget lover's fair or the giddiness of a tech conference, but, rather, more like the perning gyres of The New Yorker  magazine and the Lilliput Review .

End of loose subjective impressions.

Guaranteed To Make You Cringe

I never thought I'd stumble upon this in my archives, and, if I did, I promised myself I would destroy all copies of it and never let it be seen by human eyes. But, what the heck? Here it is. :)

The year is 1998:
I was trying to impress a girl [a few actually] by telling her that I was going to master a programming language in order to join in on and merge with the IT/dotcom craze that was stirring and fomenting at the time.

For some reason, perhaps the world wide web buzz surrounding it, I chose Java. And, to accompany my inspiration, desire, and excitement, I wrote a poem...

Since then, I have become fairly proficient at reading and understanding code, and pretty much 'getting' all of IT for that matter, at some novice to intermediate level, even some of the more advanced mathematical stuff, but I never mastered any subfield or programming paradigm well enough to be able to use it as an artistic medium in the way that I fancy I use pencil and paper, the written word, and the primordial sketch. Thus, this poem's argument still remains an elusivity.

Without further adieu, I present, in unparalleled geekness, peerless corniness, and skin-crawling  doggerel, worse than an 80s haircut and comparable to Three's Company's most horribly sentimental moment, 'Learning Java Well', the first and only poem that will appear on *impulse:

Learning Java Well

Why haven’t I learned Java well yet?
I do not feel the urgent press yet.
I will soon, very soon.
Java will rise within me like the moon,
And I will surely know it.
In my bosom: It will be true.
I will be the most fluid Java poet.

I will soon be able to woo
Every dryad girl with lustery jewels.
All the moon burnished maiden’s feet
Will be pattering along my silken beach.
At night, they will haunt my meadow like ghouls.
I think I will want to glide with them too,

But I will be too attentive to crafting
The abstracted struts and crossing beams
That make a program like a tenuous fancy wafting
In logical certainty but within a dream.

Such ethereal constructions as these
Will bring the fairy palaces to me
As well as all the forest that I please
And rivers that hem between the stony trees.

But only nymphs that wander vagrantly,
Dallying and dreaming far within the night,
Who let me rescue them so gallantly,
While they have slipped into a state of fright,
Will have my honor as they fill my halls
And scuff their jeweled dresses along the ground.

I will answer to their slightest shriek or call
Then listen to their warbling peacock sounds.
Friendly wolves and bears would only roam
About my pastures and my dappled gardens.

They could be heard as they often moaned:
The dewy, floating damsels made them ardent.