I got some more e-mails from my friend Jason:

It happened again.

Just as I had finished putting my laundry away, I felt that mysterious buzz inside my head and suddenly found myself in pure white surroundings, with only Joey’s face before me. I had no body of my own; it was like I was nothingness existing in front of the image of Joey’s head, which seemed about 3 feet across. I could see it in perfect detail. His eyes stared directly into my line of sight, and I could not turn away or blink. In a sudden flash he transferred what seemed an entire movie’s worth of dialog and imagery. I think I am still coming to terms with it but the essence of it was that humanity will soon be faced with a choice: a crossroads from which we can’t go back and change our minds once we decide the course. In my mind I wondered what he meant, and he telepathically answered that it would soon be apparent. The next thing I knew I was getting up from the floor by my bed. I immediately went over to check my laptop to see if he had left anything for me; this time it was a single ominous image. I asked Joey if I could share this knowledge with others, and he told me “Only with those whom you trust.” (more…)

I’ve been meaning to write about President Obama’s implicit support for penile torture. Glenn Greenwald had a pretty comprehensive summary. Basically what the Obama administration has done is apply the Bush administration position on the state secrets privilege: the expansive use of the privilege to get entire cases thrown out of court, whereas earlier administrations had only used it to suppress certain pieces of evidence.

One of the judges on the three-judge panel explicitly asked the DOJ lawyer, Doug Letter, whether the change in administrations had any bearing on the Government’s position in this case. Letter emphatically said it did not. Instead, he told the court, the new administration — the new DOJ — had actively reviewed this case and vetted the Bush positions and decisively opted to embrace the same positions.

After eight years of nauseating crimes by the Bush administration, now we’re beginning to find out what hypocritical shits most American liberals are. Sure, this is a reversal from Obama’s campaign position on the secrets issue, but he gave ample warning of his predilections for authoritarianism and reneging on promises when he voted for the FISA overhaul. Now he wants to deny legal recourse to a man who was kidnapped, tortured genitally, and threatened with rape and electrocution. Everything’s OK as long as our president listens to hip-hop and uses a Mac, right? Our leaders’ awareness of hipster shibboleths is the truest test of our democracy! No wonder this country is such a shithole. (more…)

I haven’t posted any of my own poetry for a while, but hopefully I’ll post new creative works soon. But here is a great anagrammatic poem you should read. And here is a 1996 New York Times book review by Douglas Hofstadter with some other examples of stunt poetry (basically the literary equivalent of stunt guitar), including one totally cunning stunt by Bonita C. Miller, who hasn’t written anything else that I can find on Google.

Here is an index of literary anagrams, naturally including some by Mike Keith, one of the transcendent geniuses of our time. His Cadaeic Cadenza is required reading, or at least required skimming.

The Lester Bangs manqués of the poetry-industrial complex might dismiss such pyrotechnics as extraneous to the goals of real poetry, but they can go fuck themselves (preferably with rolled-up copies of “Praise Song For the Day”).