One of the more pleasurable discoveries of my late night Youtube parties has been the songs and videos of Nelson Ned.

So I click on the story “Film Festival Says Roman Polanski Arrested” this morning on the New York Times website and get the following. (click to enrage)

I like the fact that AP reporters communicate in tweet language, and go to the internet for news. But I guess I knew that already. Curious what series of accidents gets an chat dialogue into the a news item approved for circulation to the New York Times.

Reminds me that my first experience with the “internet” was hanging out with my friend Jay Szep, who was then just starting to work for Reuters, in Toronto some time in the early 90s, and he logging onto the Reuters system and being able to read unpublished or raw news articles and notes from around the world which he could then refine, add on to, use for his stories, etc. Seemed so wild.

I wish this happened more often, would make a good book project.

Las ideas verdes descoloridas duermen furiosamente.
Las memorias pegajosas oleaginosas asesinan afablamente.
Los salmos obsoletos futuristas discuten curiosamente.
Los platanos cuadriculados amorfos eructan lateralmente.

Los ateos imbeciles virtuosos excomulgan carismáticamente.
Las sandalias huesudas regordetas analizan frontalmente.
Los susurros manipuladores impotentes ensordecen preferentemente.
Los iglúes chinos teutónicos incuban sabiamente.

Los arbustos inefables irritantes escrutinan discretamente.
Los esclavos contratados autocráticos sindican individualmente.
Los logaritmos ágiles artríticos amplifican silenciosamente.
Las ideas verdes descoloridas duermen furiosamente.

(This is a translation into Spanish of my poem “The Slush of Meaning,” a poem premised on the idea of naturalizing the famous sentence of Noam Chomsky’s that he wrote as an example of a sentence syntactically correct but semantically meaningless. I did the initial translation using Babelfish, but it was refined by Román Luján prior to my reading in Mexico City. You can see Román and I read it at Youtube, about two minutes into this clip.)

I was throwing a party in my very unstable house in Philadelphia and wanted to strongly recommend, in fact command, my guests not to flush anything down the second-floor toilet that might clog it. So I created a simple “Uncle George Says…” poster in Photoshop that stated just that, but had so much fun doing it that I had to create more and hang them around the house.

In hindsight, the writing’s not all that good, but I think the concept of crafting an extended, largely paratactic George Carlin rant about things plummeting into the void, and that veers off into the political and surreal, is still interesting.

The kind of weird shit you can do with Google maps, visit the birthplaces of famous poets:

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=Second%20Ave.%20and%20Pine%20St.%20in%20Hailey%20Idaho&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=vl

Now, I don’t exactly know what you’ll get by clicking the above link. Will you get street view automatically? Can’t say. But if you’re not quite sure what to look for, here’s a photograph I took while visiting Ezra Pound’s childhood home in Hailey, Idaho, early this morning at about 3. That’s me in the yellow jumpsuit.

Coming soon: photographs of William Carlos Williams’ house in Rutherford, New Jersey, which I have actually visited — as a patient!

This has been on heavy rotation on my laptop recently. Elvis singing “one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century,” sweating about a gallon of prescription drugs (mostly during the falsetto break, which he nonetheless crushes) in the process.

I’m also really curious about how he can flash those irreverent, even innocent, smiles during the more dramatic parts of a pretty melodramatic song, and I wonder what the joke was that he was sharing at the moment, and with whom. It’s Mona Lisa all over again.

This was one of those days when I barely ventured outside, just stayed in and took care of business. Here I am at 10:30 kind of amazed at the weird variety of shite I “did” today.

1. booked a ticket to Mexico City for a short vacation in September (with possible artist talks), travelling with my friend, the poet Roman Lujan (he’s got some accents in there which I can’t reproduce)
2. created new header graphic and wallpaper for FSC (which I consider decent work for the half hour I devoted to it, but otherwise not mindblowing)
3. posted long list of electronic literature works on both this and the netpoetic blog (based on notes I had taken in the past few days)
4. figured out the problem with the exploding-letter algorithm in the new version of Scriptor that I am creating in Processing
5. started (finally) reading New Philosophy for New Media by Mark B. Hansen, some of which was making my eyes bleed but is really sinking in (about up to page 70)
6. sent off copies of two of my poems (rather old ones, one a sestina, the other a translation of Jules LaForgue) because they are being nominated for a Pushcart Prize (maybe I didn’t understand the e-mail correctly, but that’s what the editor wrote)
7. did actually venture out to Ralph’s supermarket to buy some decaf coffee, Krazy Glue, and a bottle of wine
8. tried to figure out, with the Russian lady who manages my building, Vera, why the smoke detector in the second bedroom here has been going off all day — she’s a trip, speaks nearly impenetrable English
9. wrote some cranky emails about this or that (an editing project, an old website I designed that went down because the owner didn’t renew his domain name), and also some nice ones (but always very short)
10. acknowledged some Facebook friend requests (of course!), because everybody loves me — never met any of them before
11. read the Wikipedia entry about Paul Mcartney and Wings, as some of their songs had been coming up in Pandora and I was lovin em (read articles about Bill Clinton and Kim Jong-Il also, contemplated changing Facebook photo — again — to portrait of Kim Jong-Il)
12. downloaded the graphics from the Richard Stockton Overdrive website since I know it will be coming down soon (nobody seems to care about it at Stockton), and I want it for my portfolio
13. made dinner for myself, shared it with my sister (this was the brief moment of my day when I actually interacted with organic material, i.e. an onion and several mushrooms; also communicated with organic material, i.e. my sister)
14. received in the mail the mini-camcorder I ordered online, the Flip Ultra HD, and walked around the apartment shooting ridiculous things like my books and my face, and then downloaded the videos to my iMac, then deleted them
15. wrote a very short blurb for an 800-page, $199 book by Matthew Timmons called Credit (I’m afraid he doesn’t like it), and agreed to do a blurb for Catherine Daly (I think hers clocks in at 146 pp.)
16. watched the catcerto
17. totally screwed up my wireless router in an attempt to get my sister on my wireless network, proceeded to panic for twenty minutes, but actually got it working again in a reasonable amount of time (about an hour)
18. reflected on people I miss and should call, or who should call me (but this was all in the process of multi-tasking)
19. used Krazy Glue to repair the broken slats from these creepy Hollywood blinds that come with my apartment — seems to have worked (Vera showed me how to use the blinds properly so they won’t break)
20. listened to a few tracks from Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle (see illustration), an album I’m really trying to love but not quite getting there with (it has some classic tracks, though), and listening to half of this amazing record by Dokaka called Human Interface, recommended by Christian Bok who calls him a “preternatural vocalist” on Twitter — available for free download
21. wrote short email to ubu list about George Kayatta (learned about him from William Poundstone), the self-described megagenius painter, jazz musician, translator of the Bible into rhyming couplets, and one of the “mathematical cranks” in Underwood Dudley’s book of that title — I’m sure I’ll post about him soon
22. checked out the amazing ambigrams — texts that read the same way upside down as they do normally — of Gilles Esposito-Farèse, as well as those of someone he admires, Scott Kim — both of these sites are worth checking out
23. sent information to ex-student who never spoke in class who wants me to write a rec for her for some internship, describing therein her great public speaking and interpersonal skills (a fairly trivial bit of activity, this last, but for some reason I’d like to remember it)
24. finalized plans (I think) for lunch and a visit to LACMA with Johanna Drucker to see show of 12 Korean artists and other fun stuff (also wrote thank-you email to William Poundstone for meeting me for lunch yesterday, sending him, among other links, one to David Daniels’ The Gates of Paradise)
25. watched Youtube video of Ukrainian band Los Colorados do great cover of Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold” — pasting this one below — then proceeded to do “research” on Katy Perry — Wikipedia entry, “I Kissed a Girl” video — since I’m so out of touch (and I read about her in some magazine this month)

26. washed the dishes, drank the wine, wrote this post (didn’t shower, though), and revised post excessively as I remembered things from the day…

I think that’s about it, at least among observable phenomena. The strange thing is that, for the most part, I’ve been quite depressed today. Just feeling glum. I think that’s part of the modern condition, actually, leaving yourself open to a plurality of distraction in lieu of some grand scheme for one’s life, and I guess I get a little bummed because of that.

But I learned a lot. And now I’m writing this, an autobiographical blog post!

Two people, my friend Anna Guercio in Los Angeles, and a Sphynx Cat lover named Allison Reynolds in Australia, managed to locate my header through Google image search. I could have sworn I tried that myself, but I guess I didn’t use the right terms. It’s an archived image of the header from a blog post on a site called Zero Strategist about blogs, and includes a snippet of the fab San Francisco MLA reading poster from December.

Unfortunately, it’s of a lower resolution than the original header, so I can’t take this image and blow it up without it being obviously deficient. But it’s neat to see that the fickle but generous memory of the internet has decided, somehow, to hold on my cats. (And thanks to Todd Pitt at Zero Strategist for using my blog as an example!)

I tried to find the image on the Wayback Machine but I guess this internet archive project just captures the code, not the multimedia aspects of websites, so Free Space Comix, which appears there in bits and pieces, has empty spaces where the header should be as well.

…(if you are reading this on my blog, and not on Facebook), I’ve accidentally deleted the Free Space Comix sphynx cats header, and I don’t have a backup anywhere. I was upgrading WordPress and replaced a directory where, unbeknownst to me, the image was stored. If for some strange reason you have the old sphynx cat header stored on your computer (perhaps in a cache), then send it to me.

I.e. if you see the cats at the head of this page, left click on the image and save it to your computer, and then email it to me! I’d owe you a Tecate and back rub.

Here’s something you might hate me for, excepting those who think that Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes was easy viewing. Actually, I was more grossed out by this one than Brakhage’s (which is about a half hour of footage of autopsies being performed in Pittsburgh).

Delvoye’s video (he’s the creator of several extraordinary works that have to do with bodies and its obscene, i.e. “offstage,” processes, such as the Cloaca, a machine that digests food and produces artificial poopy, which he then packages and sells to collectors), is really quite beautiful. It’s like a nature documentary (Microcosmos, for instance, which I highly recommend) but about skin — if it had a Morgan Friedman narration, it would be in all the theaters.

A better version can be downloaded at ubu.com:
http://www.ubu.com/film/delvoye.html

I don’t quite know how to respond to this torrid review by Alan Davies of two of my books. He’s got a bug up his ass about something:

http://sustainableaircraft.com/?p=4

Here’s a choice bit:

I will note that these passages I’m quoting have been pulled from masses of not-dissimilar-verbiage / but verbiage that only rarely shows awareness of what it is doing.

This is his way of informing the reader, as if it were no small matter, that he will not in fact be quoting from my poems and analyzing them, but that he will merely collage a bunch of poems together as seemingly self-evident support of his claims. This, I guess, is the “luminous detail” method of Pound’s, but with no sense of integrity concerning representing that which he chooses to judge.

Here are a few scattered notes on the rest of the review:

I am accused of “hinting at” things that are “deadly serious,” but apparently have no idea how serious they are — “nor do they [the poems] make an effort to come even somewhat close to doing so.” We never find out what these serious things are, however, or how I’ve hinted at them (in fact, close reading of any nature is entirely absent, here).

I am referred to as “Brian” throughout the piece, which is telling, I think, of the fact that he is writing here mostly about what he thinks of me, not the poems.

My “structures” apparently “insist upon the dissolution of the fragments.” A paragraph later, however, he states that in fact my forms are “conservative,” and that “there is nothing on a formal level to parallel what I take to be a willed break-down of the meaningful.” Huh?

As I stated above, when he quotes from the poems, he prefers taking small bits of 2-5 lines from a number of poems and throwing them together as if they were one. This is, of course, ironic considering that he claims to be so concerned with form in relation to meaning, that he accuses of me of lack of coherence, and that he chooses to lecture (you? me?) about the issue of “caring”:

Brian asks Does it pay to care about things? Yes. Because any action without feeling is empty. Because any-action-with-feeling changes things / and because we can be aware of that and learn from it and further it. Because caring is why we’re here — there’s nothing before it / and nothing comes after it / without caring’s being there. Because argument is empty without caring / because a story is / because a sequence is / because a stack of phrases is / because a lyric (a song) is / because history is / because what-might-happen is / because what-will-happen is / because it all is / because we are. It’s pretty much obvious that it’s caring that binds us together / and without it we (and I) fall apart.

It’s paragraphs like these, the soapboxing ones where we are shown the great humanitarian vision of Alan Davies, that really makes me question what he is in fact trying to do in this review. One thing he is not doing is evaluating (or “caring” about) poems.

Next, he writes of one sequence that there is “more grammar than elsewhere,” but that “this grammar is heavily bolstered by loads of punctuation (which tells us that the grammar is either impacted or scattered (or (quite possibly) both).” I have no idea what he’s saying here. How is grammar “bolstered” by punctuation? How is grammar “impacted”? What is too much punctuation — is that like too many notes?

Again, the irony is that his review, or screed, is, if anything, overloaded with punctuation, i.e. the silly excessive parentheses (to demonstrate the “active” nature of his thinking, I guess), the use of forward slashes to denote, I guess, the line by breath of Olson. He reminds the reader that so much of what I have done in my poems has already been done — by the Absurdist playwrights “sixty years ago”, by Joe Brainard “half a century ago”, etc. — and yet here he is pretending he’s Robert Creeley circa 1957.

Davies is so furious with me, he can’t give an entire sentence over to actually saying something nice about the poems. If there is a moment of approval, it’s immediately qualified by another pointless parenthetical. Here’s a typical example: “The unexpected sequencing of phrases causes one to think (sometimes).” Ho ho ho.

The royal “we” makes it into the essay as well — he really wants to win your vote: “We finish reading this sequence feeling that we have been told that we don’t know where we are and that we’ve been told that we don’t know for how long / and that we’ve been told that (in all probability (maybe)) we never will know those things (or not-know them (for that matter)).” I don’t “tell” people anything in my poems; they are not lectures for moral edification (I am not a Victorian), and if he’s reading them that way, it’s his folly.

Brian Eno is taken to task for his ideas: “the real poverty of the idea is that it is limited to the same old Western dichotomous way of thinking that has soiled all our ideas (and quite possibly all of our actions) since thinking that way was inculcated.” I think Davies’ Olsonian hang-up is really coming to the fore here — he can see way back in time to before “dichotomous ways of thinking” were “inculcated.” When this was, and what it was like, he doesn’t say, but it must feel pretty good to write about it.

Based on one piece of mine, he makes the claim that “(if these texts are to be taken as example) it is a form of embarrassment that plays today as prime substance of humor.” I don’t know how the content of one of my poems (which, indeed, is predicated on embarrassing moments) reflects the nature of humor in all of my poems, nor how it is meant to comment on humor today as a whole. I guess I’m just a tool.

Davies then lectures “us” on what makes a poem endure:

I can’t say that there’s anything about the writing that demands a rereading. Works that have survived have survived because they’ve kept people alive. This work seems to be written in invisible ink (only temporarily apprehensible) on cellophane — not a bad thing / but finally all that there is (here).

This is another cop from Pound — “only emotion endures” (from the “Dos and Donts of an Imagist”) and “What thou lovest well remains / the rest is dross.” In fact, much of Davies’ essay is cliched in this manner — once substantial ideas, or once nobly expressed sentiments, devolved into breathless emoting.

Here’s another choice bit of ad hominem attack:

This writing (in Kluge now) seems to parallel what’s happening in the world nowadays rather than to be in it (ie it’s at the world / not of it). It doesn’t exactly touch the world — (is it because the fear is that deep? (note the use of parentheses here)).

I don’t need to by psychoanalyzed by some crackpot poet from New York; if I have fear, it is mine and mine to know. And why, in this particular instance, are we to “note the use of parentheses”? This is comical, actually.

He then writes, of another piece:

I would like to meet anyone who read this text word-for-word — (actually) I take that back / I would not (not (would not)) like to meet anyone who read it word-for-word.

This is just strange. Later, he comments about another poem, “Sehnsucht,” that he has “not read the whole thing.” It’s quite obvious to me that he hasn’t finished most of the pieces, as in the next paragraph he describes my poem “Kluge” as the following:

These texts are addressed to someone (presumably someone other than the author / possibly more than one such someone) / and purport in a way to deal with a complex of feelings the author has for that someone (or that have been aroused by that person’s existence) / although the feelings are routinely made light of / and the prose is used to not allow them to develop (or even to remain the same). The pieces are dramatic monologues / although it would probably be much more accurate to say that they are monologues.

This is totally inaccurate. The first twelves sections could mistaken for such (clearly, though, they are fictions, as the addresser is occasionally female). The second section doesn’t address anyone at all, but is a revision/copping of a Robert Coover short story called “The Golden Poker.” The third is based on the letters of H.P. Lovecraft to his wife of one year, Sonia Greene. This is just a more salient example of the fraudulence of this review.

Davies’ nastiness comes clear in the end of the essay, when he writes of the two short essays I included at the end of Kluge about electronic literature: “These are informative enough / although they perhaps-more-tellingly serve the function of alerting us to the fact that the author feels a need to himself begin the proliferation of secondary-texts which he might imagine his work engendering.”

Where does he come up with this shit?

In a short coda, Davies writes: “These poems of Brian’s remind me in some ways of German Expressionist poems (which I’ve been reading lately).” Good of you to inform us that you are actually reading the poems that my work reminds you of, Alan; I’ve just been reading your review of my books.

He then notes that David Constantine’s introduction to the anthology he is reading is “slightly more historical” than whatever drivel he, Davies, was just writing about the Germans giving up the “baggage of their myth-laden pasts.” Yes, anything’s more historical than ethnic stereotyping.

We are then treated to a chunky paragraph from the introduction that more or less rehearses the Modernist response to industrialization and urbanization, as if it had anything to do with the review that preceded it (talk about coherence). In fact, it was only to place another soapbox under his feet so that he can lament about the lack of care in this world, etc.

In our own present moment (if we can speak of it as our own) many of us can only wonder if the world will end in economic ruin / political ruin / ruination by war(s) / or ecological ruin / (and there are undoubtedly some ruinations that the moment has conspired to insist that I forget (or (indeed) that I do not come to know)).

The insight this man has into the “present moment”! Someone dial Lionel Trilling, fast!

Anyway, I seem angrier than I am. I actually am just really disappointed. I’ve known Alan for many years, have had him read in my series at Segue, even used a photograph of him for my redesign of the Segue site. We’ve never been close, but acquaintances, and I’ve enjoyed much of his work.

I had no idea he had such antipathy toward me; if he doesn’t like my poems, fine, but the raging contradictions of his review, this marshalling of the forces from Horace to Wittgenstein to William Empson to state unequivocally that there is simply nothing going on in the poems, I find — to use one of his words — “willed.” It’s a sort of useful blindness to give him a platform to vent, if not about the world, about me (unless, of course, his thinking is this bankrupt all the time, which I find hard to believe).

Compassionate conservatism, anyone?

There’s something quite perfect about this old bit from Psychic TV.

I realize I didn’t mention on this blog having three poems in the new issue of Fence. Well, not so new now — actually, I think nearly 5 months old. Includes new work by Jordan Davis, Shelley Jackson, Rae Armantrout, Alexander Kluge (after whom my book of that title is NOT named), Michael Harper, and a slew of others I’d never heard of or sort of heard of (or you haven’t heard of, or might have).

Anyway, they picked my poems for their website as well. But I’m really psyched about is having the big O on my cover, though he looks like he’s trapped in a corkboard (idea for a new R. Kelly series?).

Got this from one of my students a few days ago. Just putting it here so I don’t forget.

I saw you were hot on the trail of Toadex Hobogrammathon and thought I might be able to help… is this the person you are seeking? I found this post on the internets at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0027vI. The email looks right, but there is another name attached to it. Here is the post:

827qk8: a pon a pon: 1974jsykisjudgiyj3dyk928usk8uw4lhhhhnx2n0167aaaapojc in098yj32yk4doi34ki4yujreyj3475y017sky07ybzvdcnevalksjt43589287ygpiuqw etjkhhcckvhqo7235y47y6i356hng8yj087i09384u5kri4y56r.

— Keith Sankas (dagmar_chili@hotmail.com), February 05, 2000.

I searched for Keith Sankas, trying to do this thing backwards, and this post is the only hit. There is another post that I found using the email here http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001iZF.

I say the brain as is invented by scientists, we developed it to soupify so to speak the certain sensitivities of sensitives. And to outsmart the corporation underers, ers. So there are six rules for this type of behavior: 1. scan low and high for microelectron dot multiplication matrices, 2. leave the sorting and parsing and spacing and Farsi pantechnicon macrophageousicicity to personal data handlers, and 3. talk to a second cop about traffic stops. These summarize Bucky Fuller’s thoughts on this topic, also those of Miriam Edelstein and the oo-oomlaut gruppe.

— Telex Codagrammathon (dagmar_chili@hotmail.com), November 14, 1999

It’s like a little poem, really:

There are skills on display here that I can’t begin to comprehend.

This blog post title is taken from one of the links below, a new slew of minor hits, this time using the single word “Toadex” in Google.

Nothing incredibly revealing here except that there is a “Toadex” appearing on a few forum pages (Newgrounds, for example), and there seems to be more evidence of actual correspondence between Mr. Toadex and a few blog authors.

These links are a mess; some are already from my previous post but I don’t feel like weeding out the doubles.

Geegaw
Some literary analysis of a recent Dagmar Chili post:
http://www.geegaw.com/archives/0111.shtml
Correspondence with Toadex?
http://www.geegaw.com/archives/0302.shtml

Apathy
I think these are in the previous post:
http://apathy.pitas.com/06_18_2000.html
http://apathy.pitas.com/04_09_2000.html

Newgrounds
Someone named Toadex contributed to these forums (probably more if I really searched):
http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/128663/14
http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/310812

Sylloge
More correspondence:
http://www.sylloge.com/the_past/2001_03_01_not_recent.html

Amiright
Nothing to do with our author, I think, but the cane toad chemical called Toadex:
http://www.amiright.com/parody/70s/johndenver44.shtml

Synthetic Zero
Another Toadex watcher from back in the day:
http://69.93.195.170/may2001a.html
And folllowing, some correspondence:
http://www.syntheticzero.com/jan2002.php
http://www.syntheticzero.com/dec2001.php

Webwasp
Someone named Toadex contributes to this as well:
http://www.webwasp.co.uk/forum/index.php

Metafilter
This has nothing to do with our author, but the great line that forms this post title is from here. Bonney’s translations of Baudelaire are interesting.
http://www.metafilter.com/63023/Sean-Bonneys-Translations-of-Baudelaire

Green in Australia
Information on “Toadex,” a spray for killing cane toads:

Control of cane toads is extremely difficult. Reproductive potential is high. Traditional techniques of dispatch are painful for the animal. Toadex is a new commercial spray product specifically for cane toads. However freezing is the most humane way to kill them. A CSIRO research program to investigate possible biological control options is in progress.

Evon Evonchoo
The Google search for Toadex led me to this blog which also engages in some strange language play, for example:

toadex went sch , supposed tuu miit ddear e lorhx , bud she cant make iit , den neber go , ad fiirst iintend tuu skiip sch and go shopshop wiiv her !!! L0ls ..
had sum funn iin e recess , chungg told miie tat e church hab dunnoe wad iindustriiex programme , den she saex iie can joiin e fashiion iindustriiex , bud e fuckiin edna saex tiis : afta e LV iinciicdent , can she stiilll make iit ? iie wanna roar !! iie hab alreadiiex regreated wore lyetat and euur hab been laughiin ferr almost 1weeks le lehx !!! L0ls .. home-ed and catch sum tv and chated on phone wiiv edna jux nao ..

Athica
Dagmar Chili included in an online web gallery — without permission, of course — created by a group in Athens, Georgia.
http://www.athica.org/virtualart.php

Some time ago, when I posted a .pdf version of “Name: A Novel” on /ubu editions, I noted that there were exactly 4 Google hits for the author of the book, Toadex Hobogrammathon. Memory being what it is, I can’t remember what those links were, but I gave it another shot recently to see if I could dig up something about this mysterious personage. To date, I know of only the following which can be directly attributed to him/her, or at least to this pseudonym — there might be others out there. Two are weird blogs, one is the novel.

The primo blog to read by Toadex H. is Dagmar Chili Pitas. I’ve already linked to this blog from FSC, but haven’t as yet done any serious writing about it. The real title might just be “Dagmar Chili,” “Pitas” being simply the name of the service provider. But like Kleenex and Xerox, the name seems to have stuck.
http://dagmar_chili.pitas.com/

What appears to be a test run up to Dagmar Chili Pitas is Doxo Wox. I found out about it on a blog that seemed to be following Toadex H. back in the day. I haven’t seen proof, other than a similarity of style, that this is by Toadex H., but the similarities are strong (or more particularly, with the early part of Name, the next link).
http://doxowox.org/

And then there is Name: A Novel, which I describe in some detail on the following page.
http://ubu.com/ubu/toadex_name.html

I can’t find the original page on which “Name” first appeared. I don’t remember who among us (mostly like one of the ubuweb folks) discovered it. But I do remember exchanging an email or two with Toadex about putting it up, all lost in one of several crashed or stolen hard drives.

In any case, I’m trying to, uh, research Toadex Hobogrammathon for some writing I hope to do on digital poetry and the whatnot. Below are the only links (not including links to the ubu page, of which there are several) that come up with “Toadex Hobogrammathon.” Appears that, at some time, he/she occasionally dropped a note on some blogs regarding some issue (Zukofsky one time) that needed addressing, though in typically off-beat fashion.

One poster writes that “Mr. Toadex is a friend” of his/hers, that person being listed only as “a” (with no email address). So I’m hardly hot on the trail. But if any of you out there (does anyone read this blog anymore? If not, I understand, it’s sucked for so long) know anything about Toadex, drop me a line.

Erswhile.net
http://erstwhile.net/?t_z=1091343600&t_s=2678400

Apathay
(Hmmm… didn’t realize that apathy was housed at pitas.com, maybe this is the break I needed.)
http://apathy.pitas.com/compconc.html
http://apathy.pitas.com/04_09_2000.html

Bellona Times
http://www.pseudopodium.org/ht-20011014.html

It’s at this website that Toadex asks about Zukfosky:

thro yr Ardent urgency, have I can come to Z;
accidental Ctrl-b, close window, I wrote a something to Ray, … ;;;; What may I be writing an Rutgersial anthological comment on Zukofsky, do yo have any bookings to recomment,?? Or articles?? Are you attributed to him?
I mean, I’m drafted by class, to write by an anthology of Rutgers, what Z did and said, and so forth. I got a goddamn refridgerator the last guy had to assault me with some whirr less than buzzing, when one dranks enough to listen.

And before a four days ago, I didnaot know tha te emoeuseic of A24 is H via C, so enough of tracking up and through the left,

good days to you and thakn yuo of all the

Gewgaw
http://www.geegaw.com/archives/0111.shtml

Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast
(It’s in this one that one of the commentors mentions that Mr. Toadex is a friend, in the same sentence as recommending Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget for a conceptual audio project.)
http://www.miettecast.com/2006/09/30/the-scarlet-ibis/

[Postscript: the word “Toadex” brings up several more hits that are relevant, but I don’t have the time right now to post them. Will soon.]

I can’t believe the absurdity of the Best American Poetry series’ “Write and Inaugural Ode” contest. Could there be any “integrity” in a project (see list of magnilquent abstractions that they require be used in the poem) that requires that a line from the poem be taken from a poem in this year’s edition (or from the foreword or introduction). This, I am guessing, is to prove that you indeed have a copy of this year’s edition — a marketing ploy!

I suppose poets aren’t to be trusted to write inaugural odes on their own, uncoached by the aesthetics of Hallmark or the 30-second campaign ads available on YouTube. So much for going in “fear of abstractions” (as Pound suggested) — the Best American Poetry asks you to bathe in them. And why don’t they just ask you to write a poem about Barack Obama — must we be so sly? The election’s over!

This really did depress me, coming from such a visible and often provocative publication series. This is just asking poets to be dumb.

THE CHALLENGE: Write an Inaugural Ode

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/

Write an inaugural ode, suitable for reading aloud on January 20, 2009. It must consist of sixteen lines broken into four quatrains, rhyme scheme optional. The ode must include one line lifted from a poem in The Best American Poetry 2008 or from the book’s foreword or introduction, and it must also include at least three of the following words: honor, integrity, faith, hope, change, power.

&tc. &tc.

According to my air conditioner repairman here in Los Angeles, this guy used to live in my apartment with his mother (who died last year at the age of 91 or so). Maybe not as exciting as living in the house that Syd Barrett lived in, but it’s nice to know the history.

Eduard Y. Gufeld, a chess grandmaster and prolific chess writer who coached many Russian players, including the former women’s world champion Maya Chiburdanidze, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 66 and had lived in Los Angeles since 1995.

Mr. Gufeld’s death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, occurred two weeks after a stroke, said Dr. Anthony Saidy, an international master and a friend.

By the standards of the Soviet Union, Mr. Gufeld was only a moderately successful chess player. His best finish in the Soviet Championship was a tie for seventh place in 1963.

Still, Mr. Gufeld was among the few Soviet grandmasters allowed to travel freely outside the Soviet Union in the 1970’s and 1980’s, a privilege usually reserved for the best players.

There were rumors that Mr. Gufeld was permitted such freedom because he was working with or for the Soviet secret police, but friends and people who met him on his travels discounted that.

”He was the good-will ambassador for Russian chess,” Dr. Saidy said.

A large man with an engaging personality, Mr. Gufeld had a childlike obsession with chess, friends said. When he lost, he often threw tantrums and even cried.

He wrote more than 80 books, including an autobiography, ”My Life in Chess” (Inside Chess Enterprises, 1994).

Some reviewers said he sacrificed quality for quantity, reusing material from book to book.

Eduard Yefimovich Gufeld was born on March 19, 1936, in Kiev, Ukraine. He became a grandmaster in 1967. In the 70’s and 80’s, he trained the Soviet teams that dominated the Chess Olympiads.

He is survived by his mother, Eva Yulievna Novak, and his sister, Lydia Valdman, who moved to Los Angeles with him.

He was married to a Georgian woman and had a stepson. Dr. Saidy said that Mr. Gufeld had had no contact with his wife and stepson for many years and that he did not know whether Mr. Gufeld was still married.

Mr. Gufeld summed up his feelings about chess by saying: ”For me, chess is life, and every game is like a new life. Every chess player gets to live many lives in one lifetime.”

Here are some recent, and not so recent, things written about my books and chapbooks over the past years.

I try to keep track of this stuff once in a while, since these books and things often seem to disappear into oblivion, and I like to think my poems and things are meaningful to someone… sigh. I’ve also moved four times in four years, now, and feel pretty out of touch with readers and writers, though finally settling in LA and meeting the poetry folks here and in San Francisco has been pleasurable (and a relief). “Stabilizing” might be more therapy-session way of putting it.

There are two interesting shout-outs tacked on at the end. First, is a poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in which my Flash animation “The Dreamlife of Letters,” which borrowed liberally from a text of hers, is discussed at length in the footnote and poem itself. (She didn’t like the project at all, from what I understand, when she first heard about it and saw the poem, but I think she’s ok with it now. Maybe.)

The second is from the intro to the Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, in which my playful co-option (or “liberal borrowing”) of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (along with other works by other poets like Ashbery, Muldoon and Lisa Robertson) is given as proof that British Romantic poetry is still very much alive and useful to poets of today (or something like that). Anyway, I thought it was funny.

Noah Eli Gordon
Boston Review
microreview of Kluge: A Meditation, and other works

Clive Thompson
Collision Detection (blog)
“Why Interactive Poetry Beats Interactive Fiction”

C St Perez
Tarpaulin Sky
review of What is Said to the Poets Concerning Flowers

Jason Morris
Jacket Magazine
“The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a ‘New Sincerity'” (general aesthetics essay discussing a number of poets)

Michael McDonough
Electronic Book Review
review of Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews

Michael McDonough
Econoculture
review of Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics

Stan Mir
Fascicle
“Matter Ordered to be Made” (review of several chapbooks)

Ben Basan
Luminations (blog)
notes on Fashionable Noise and some digital work

Mark Mendoza
Verse Magazine
review of “The Window Ordered to be Made”

Ron Silliman
Silliman’s Blog
review of “Jai-alai for Autocrats”

Jack Kimball
Talisman (print edition)
“Review of Carter Ratcliffe’s Arrivederci Modernismo, Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets, Brian Kim Stefans’s Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works”

Mark Wallace
Verse (print edition)
review of Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics

K. Silem Mohammed
The Consequence Of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (ed. Craig Dworkin, print)
“Creeping It Real” (this might be on his blog, Lime Tree, somewhere)

Rachel Blau Du Plessis
P.F.S. Post (blog)
Draft 59: Flash Back

James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane
“Introduction: The Companionable Forms of Romantic Poetry”