Listening to Gary Clark Jr.'s new CD, "Blak and Blu."  It's lovely. Good god that man can play guitar.

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A little worried about hurricane Sandy.  My parents and brothers are in Connecticut.  My oldest daughter is in Maryland.  It sounds like we might get a touch of the nastiness here in Ohio, too.

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In today's mail came, in addition to the Clark CD, my electronic guitar tuner and  The Collected Early Poems and Plays by Robert Duncan.

The tuner's been helpful already.

I've leafed through a bit of the Duncan.  Much of what's in this volume is the work of his that I know best--the Stein imitations,  "The Venice Poem,"  Medieval Scenes, Faust Foutu, Letters, Caesar's Gate, etc.

I love this piece from Caesar's Gate:

Eyesight II

The eye opening is a mouth seeing,
an organ of sight gasping for air.
Love in the eye corrupts the seed
stirring new freaks of vision there.

How wonderful in the new sight the world will appear!

The mouth speaking is a heart breathing.
The blood itself has seen something.
The world worm changing, coild in his pit
is the ripeness of the fruit, the organ of sight.

How wonderful in the new eye the world will appear.

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I'm soldiering on with Zizek's Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.  This morning, on the exercise bike, this passage gave me pause:

"Immersion in cyberspace can intensify our bodily experience ( a new sensuality, a new body with more organs, new sexes...), but it also opens up the possibility for someone manipulating the cyberspace machinery to literally steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of control over it, so that one no longer relates to one's body as to 'one's' own.' What we encounter here is the constitutive ambiguity of the notion of mediatization."

That passage is going to rattle around in me for awhile.  It evokes notions of possession that I find to be very powerful.

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I am a person who has never felt at home in his own skin.

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