L. Cohen to P. Ayer

A crooked smile.

As for the songs, "I’ve always held the song in high regard," he says, "because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events." Sometimes, he goes on, holding me with his commanding eloquence, his ill-shaven baritone compounded of Gauloises, Courvoisier and a lifetime of late nights, he’ll catch a snatch of one of his songs on the radio, "and I’ll think: these songs are really good. And it’s really wonderful that they have been written, and more wonderful that they should have found a place in the heart. And sometimes I’ll hear my voice, and I think: this guy has got to be the great comedian of his generation. These are hilarious: hilariously inept, hilariously solemn and out of keeping with the times; hilariously inappropriate."

A line he’s used for years. . .

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (simplified Chinese: 施氏食狮史; traditional Chinese: 施氏食獅史; pinyin: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ) is a famous example of constrained writing by Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin.

The text, although written in Classical Chinese, can be easily comprehended by most educated readers. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years resulted in a large degree of homophony in Classical Chinese, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible when spoken in Modern Standard Chinese or when written in romanization.


In pinyin:

« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì. « Shi Shy shyi shi she »



In English:

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

"Last year's words belong to last year's language, and next year's words await another voice."—T. S. Eliot

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) December 26, 2011

Faces In the Puddle

It is 1023 and raining on the cottage huts and monastery tops of Kenjimonde. A young monk
the other brothers have
named The Smoker is kneeling, splashing his face in a puddle. The cortege of the abbott happens
to pass by,
two or three monks hiking umbrellas over the Old Man's head. "What good does it do, young
sprout," the abbott
asks, to much laughter, "to wash one's face in a rainstorm?" "Oh, all the
difference,
Abba," The Smoker
says, rubbing his face furiously with freshly and again freshly fallen water. "Clarity requires I
wash
not only a dirty face, but a clean one. And once that's done, to scoop from the wealth of my reflection
and
wash it as well." Effortless words. But given the young man speaks so openly, does it constitute an admission,
a gentle flick, or a form
of challenging encouragement? As they look over his shoulder, the answer seeks
focus. So many
more faces in the puddle.


*

A thief with a knife in his side sidles up to the bar. It's already past high moon and the patrons
are Anglo
and Saxonly drunk. "A draught here, a man's bleeding to death," the thief says, "something
to plug
the wound!" "Make it two," shouts the wound. Muffled between the thief's pressed fingers,
"I'm dying of
this man around me." The barman and everyone marvels from stoops and benches. "Hush
now," the
thief chides his side. "You've got the knife you were always asking for." The wound
bubbles
its hilt truly with the ease of a sword-swallower. The whole blade nowhere except on the
thief's face,
where it yelps right off his pocked pallor. "Never you worry, I've got money," it assures
him. "I'll
pay for my draught and yours. Just be my face here this once and you can get drunk on my
shilling." The thief
wrenches the hilt with both hands and sneers. "Oh like my ears haven't heard that before."



*

A parking garage in a mid-sized city, the American South. Two college boys and a squatter
punk, his
girlfriend. Met on South Limestone where the dirty couples panhandle. Instead giving away a
few clean
dollars the clean kids offer to buy passage to a movie at the old historical theater downtown. The girl
brings
her pet
kitten. Sneaks it past the box office tucked in her jacket. During the movie they stink so bad the
boys can't
forget one second they belong in college. What's the movie? Some frivolous drama a comedy
with
curled toes, an action flick with too much sound not enough explosions? They laugh at the spots
that make sense
to the plot. To his left, the younger of the boys watches the girl hold the kitten on her knees. Feeds it popcorn.
Innocently, a
baby zombie, it gnaws that brain like a kernel. In screenlight the girl is Japanese amused and beyond
either their
previous definitions of beauty. Her boyfriend toughly sensitive by way of touch, just like misfits in the
50's. With a
straw doubled up pinched between fingers he etches dried dirt from her bootsoles. Afterwards they
step in
separate breaths and bring the cold along, up the walk back to the garage's third floor. At their car
the boys ask
where do you want to go? The girl, though, not there when they look around. A trickling echo
brings the younger
one around the car. And there she is, beautiful, suddenly of mere earth and frankly significant:
crouched
cuddling her kitten to chest with pants around her ankles. Urine in a thick trickle trails gravity's
contour past her
shadow. Towards him quickly enough he leaps both feet apart to let it pass. Gatorade yellow,
full of light
it fuses to carry his eyes along with it. Almost now, twenty years ago.

John McLaughlin on Bill Evans:

"Bill really blew my mind. His delicacy is beyond strength or weakness..."

Ernest Becker

"As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out according to a particular theory of prosperity--that is, how exactly to get nature to give more life to the tribe. The most striking thing to us about the primitive theory of prosperity is how elemental it was--or organic, as we would say today. Primitive man observed nature and tried to discern in it what made the dance of life--where the power came from, how things became fecund. If you are going to generate life, you have to determine its principles and imitate the things that embody them."

Weldaghost

She dreamt that she saw it, and when she opened her eyes it was almost true, the house
she'd fallen
asleep in was gone forever. As if it had decayed while she was away and went the fast way of
last year's snow.
No bed beneath her, no pillow to hug against her head. Pine needles and twigs and stripped
bark. Evergreens
arrowing out of the earth and playing frail voodoo with the overfed, cattle clouds. The sun
already setting
along the knife-light of the mountains. She had been dreaming she was walking in such-and-such
a place,
as if a pickup had run out of gas miles and years behind her, and instead of the obvious, following
the road
she was on, for fear or impatience she stepped into the woods and tracked the long shadow that
walked a few
paces beyond her. In the pine barren boil around her, birds and not a sound, then clear
calls and
no birds. Albino moss, ferns like enormous exit wounds. A chill of something bearded with
no eyes
standing between birches. Back when she had a house she'd heard stories from people who'd had
girlhoods. Tall tales
overgrown like fingernails. Tubers so long and bloodless and twisted they braided into a mesh
you could
catch sparrows or flies in. Out beyond the hunting camps, beyond the branch cairns that appeared
overnight
and no one knew why, there was some kind of new mammal, some horror on two legs wearing a
suit of
human hair. No evidence, but people just knew it. No children gone missing only to appear weeks
later like
something
chewed pressed to a windshield. Dozens of turkey hunters hadn't seen it. The ranger boy in his
fire tower
had never managed to spot it cresting a far hill. Without any credible visage to aim their fears at
they
went on talking it about it anyway, building it up, feeding it, describing it, dressing it with so many
naked descriptions
the dim, collective thousands out there in the wilder parts began to come together, bond like fat
clucks of
mercury, and spin flesh and bone around the skein they were imagining. A Weldaghost hadn't
breathed snout
or set paw in that country until they'd fed it, patiently and foolishly, like parents fashioning a
golem from
a stillborn. Then chickens did get threshed. Cattle did burst their bellies. Snakes did hang from the
lowest branches
in stripped rows. Only the unimaginative, the least superstitious were spared. Literal as potatoes
miles away
from the nearest knife, they tallied the dead and didn't blame it on some mythological scourge, some
Grendel
of the American hills. They told the law, "killers, escape convicts maybe" and cut the treelines with
their floodlights
with skeptically loaded calm. Wherever they looked for months was down the barrel of a gun. No
beast stepped
to fill its silhouette. The folks who talked courted it, what they thought. The people who didn't leave
moved to
town and watched more television. They kept themselves busy wearing a culture crown. If they forgot,
who could tell
but their roosters, slaughtered into separate wings in a stable. Next to three dead mares and a bucket
of chunky milk
kicked over. She'd been the last to believe and the last to leave, and on the night she'd packed her
stuff and
forced every inch of her car to hold it, there'd been this dream, and in her sleep she went to it, and
spun like
light around its spindle she'd come out the other side and instead of new morning and a road out
she found
brittle leaves clinging with fugue static to her nightgown. Her place was long gone, the forest was
all around. Must have
been what the earliest settlers must have felt, when their tents split and in that instant their dying
fires went out.
She sat up and let the dark take account. Barefoot, skin like a kite of moonlight, white as a white
girl can get
without showing every sinew underneath, each rib and between them the slick throb of organs. So
dark any
bit of light moved like sound. So the frost wore snail teeth and button wet of nearby eyes felt her
through the
acoustics of the hour. Maybe three, four in the morning. Or three, four at night. Those hours less
than late and
more than early. Everything out there could hurt her, but only if she walked or sat still. If she could
keep on
dreaming, maybe she would already know the way back, though there was nothing left of home.
She tried to
blink but couldn't. Good evidence she was dreaming. So she stood up and got going. Up the far
bank, over
rock locks and under roots of holler. The swarm of one element around her, fractally spinning off
trees and
dry bushes and boulders. At the third crest of the third hill, in a crackle of mud broken fresh under
a heavy foot, she
turned and saw it: a hun hulk of something big and straw-bound and dirty. The air coming off of it
anal and
rancid. Too exposed without a sleepwalker's drugged sense of stealth, she stood and took it and
fed it
the passive five feet of her weak presence. But nothing moved. It didn't see or show her. Rather
was busy
doing something involved and woebegone to the thick side of a great tree. Spelling its bowels?
Scratching a
rash? No, a trick of light off her own skin showed her. The two-armed, two-legged thing was
threshing
the tough bark off, tossing lengths of it to the ground. Fifteen minutes of that and it paused as if
some impulse
inside it was done. Then did one small thing she would never forget and which was the sole
witness she brought
back with her to this land where civilization thunders: pressed its whole face, snout, maw and all
to the tender
unborn bark beneath. Now why would it do that, she wondered even then but years later. If
underneath all that there was
nothing to kill or chase or eat. Crouching there, almost ashamed, almost as if it were
hiding from something.

The Lantau Rope

It could very well be raining this morning halfway across the world on Lantau Island, driblets
weeping off the
magnificent bronze pate of the Tian Tan Buddha. Like some choice filling wrenched from the
open mouth
of an ancient, widespread humanely decaying religion. Where he once was in the firmament of
the living and
dead equally, now he occupies a crystal nod to fear, a psychological grip of some
consistently disappearing
rope. It didn't fall from the sky, though that fact didn't manage to stop millions from climbing it.
Nor did it
wiggle out of the earth like a cobra bellydancing on the wavelength of a flute. The rope was born
when they were
and remained well-hidden until one day they took a look at their X-rays
or spied
photographs
of what a person's inner calcium looks like disrobed. Flesh gone, skin, muscle and viscera.
The rope, to
their surprised eye, was there all along. For each a spine that climbs them and which holds them
aloft
like figments of fulfilled gravity. Lying to dredge sleep, they held it lateral above the below
of them. As they
sat up, curved it like space-time in the presence of superior density. But the finest moment
was when
they sent the rope climbing, up a ladder, a flight of stairs, a length of its knotted namesake out there
in the surmountable commotion.
The Buddha was an elegant solution, an intuitive and precise way of talking to it. A choice example
of vigilant ease
and the measuring of fate with awareness. How many saw the huge buddha on his stupa, surrounded
by vegetation
that thrived and fed from the sun in cycles? One among many islands at various distances from the
panicked navel
of Hong Kong? Statues of beings that may not have even lived live more vividly once they've mixed
the seen and
the believed behind both eyes. Not one or the other: both. Because the bridge of the nose, the
cartilage above breath
divides them.

No Idle Science

No really, the man at the party, the man with the wine, the man with the wine at the party
said
we'd gone far enough to figure that out. We had the statistical models for it so all it took
was
some measurements of the different variables--the size of the snowflake, how recently
it'd been
formed, how high the cloud was from the ground. And also: how fast the cloud was moving
and also:
in which direction, and how close it was to its adjacent clouds. Believe it or not, once we
started collecting
the data, a bunch of other variables popped up and suddenly mattered, ones we couldn't
have dreamed
would matter until we got down into the thick of considering all the relevant factors to be
taken into account
when calculating exactly how quickly a single snowflake will dissolve on asphalt when it lands.
Is it a road
or a driveway, where it lands? When was the last time a set of wheels cut across it? The most
absurd details
suddenly offset our calculations by minutes, not even seconds. Was anyone looking when it
trickled down
from miles up to stop in a wet peck on the blacktop? If so, were they looking from the comfort
of a warm room
or out in an attack shock of zero cold? If from the former, which room? Bedroom? Living room?
Kitchen? Foyer?
Or could it be from the amniotic mobility of a defrosted and idling car? A nod to Einsteinian
space-time
here... Snow that is observed from a warm interior will appear to move faster than if the same
were to be seen
rolling through a spare chill. The observed and observer then not only share a common climate
but are if you
can believe it, far out as it sounds, a unified, clarifying action. The panoramic velocity of
perceived quiet, as if
they were either both standing still and watching or both falling without consciousness of the
ground. We initially
were pretty full of ourselves, you could say. We thought the usual particularities would be enough
of a headstart--
height, weight, velocity, dimensions of the frozen ice, temperature of the air and the flake. Oh man
how wrong
we were. In the end you know what we had to do? We had to walk out there and lay with our backs
to the ground
and watch literally hundreds of thousands of them come down before we realized that kind of thing
was too
common to be predicted. I mean, have you ever seen a single one of them fall, all alone? No, not even
one can't make its
way down without synching up with all these millions of distinct mutations, and each one unstitching
the open bulk
above and around you. There's so much information there, it'd take a system the size of the world
to process it.
Instead of calling it a computer, at this point I guess it would be better to call it god.

Funny you should ask...

http://www.tejucole.com/other-words/small-fates/

Question

What is donkey math?

Question

"A pox on all your houses." What kind--chicken?

Question

What are toupees called in the Czech Republic?

Question

What is "full honkey"?

"How To Be A Poet" by Wendell Berry

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Nightwill (stories 2011)

The Smoke Leper /1
Village, Meadow, Tree & Trial /5
Three Mountains /11
Nightwill /15
The Late Master /20
The Death of the Copyeditor /24
A Thing About Mouths /26
The Lucky Body /30
This Way Between Men /34
Mandeville /39
Spring In Zurveyta /53

Zadig's Way (poems 2011)

Zadig's Way /1
One Of Them Was H.G. Adler /2
Stories On The Half Shell /3

The Gates of Fact /7
For The Skull of Adalbert Czaptienonesz /9
Gray's Low /11
A Tale of Two Hospitals /13
Russians and Men /15
On the Corner of 4th and Breath /16
The Dogs of Tachi /17
B.O.H. /18
The Lives of Modern Lovers /19
For Romy Haag To Her Audience (As She Sings) /20
Two Streams /21
Poor in Flesh /23
Murder Ballad /24
The Best Way /26
Reparation /27
The Circadian Pariah /28
Quincunx The Demon /29
Sea To The Thieves /30
Fire From Water /32

Cock in Water /34
A Plate of Ten Thousand Children /35
Kawabata's Bones /36
If They Should Think Ill of Her /37
Revelations in Joanna /38
Like Suicide Healers /39
La Jollans /40
Some Words From The Risen Old /41
Exchange Rate /42
Like Eyelashes on Water /43
Double Aged Amour /44
Ann In Key of Carter /45
The Genealogy of Horrors /47
Four Tunnels /49
The Tao of Social Strategy /51
Consolation (Without A Compass) /52
Machine Breath /54

One For Aaron /56

Verseworms /62
The Monster of La Mancha /63
Double Nursery /64
Blues For Our Buddy Grub Huck /65
Yet Another Odysseus /66
These Facial Letters /68
Blown Job /69
Holy Michaela /70
Ancient Grease /71
Top Three /72
Real Life in the Gray Market /73
The Resurrection of the Guillotine Is A Koan /76

Excerpts From The Minor Ape /78

Another one for Sunday breakfast. Play it loud & be willing, very willing, to close your eyes, to lean in, & forget everything but the one before you

Bowerbirds - Tuck the Darkness In by The 405