One of the things I've been reading today is Monogamy by Adam Phillips.

How I discovered it?  Sheila Heti referred to it in a book review in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

Phillips is a British psychotherapist with a strong philosophical bent. Monogamy takes the form of 121 aphorisms.  Here's the one Heti quoted in the Times:

"A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime.  Sex is often the closest they can get."  (21)

Here's another one that I like:

"Suspicion is a philosophy of hope.  It makes us believe that there is something to know and something worth    knowing.  It makes us believe there is something rather than nothing.  In this sense, sexual jealousy is a form of optimism, if only for philosophers."  (41)

A very thoughtful book.

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Guitar progress...So I have an octave worth of notes and a couple of chords and a mix of discipline and play.  I know I'm doing a lot of things wrong but I'm starting to make some connections on the first three strings, in particular.  And I'm playing for nobody but myself.  I'm telling you about it though because maybe you're guitar curious.

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Three books arrived in today's mail which I'm hoping to give myself over to soon:  The Awakening by Eileen R. Tabios, Still Lifes by Eric Selland (Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press) and Exodus by Lars Iyer.

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Listening to Jeff Beck performing this week...Live at Ronnie Scott's.  I've both the CD and the DVD but I've linked to the DVD because it contains cuts that aren't on the CD.  The DVD is great too for the interaction between the band members.  Australian bassist Tal Wilkenfeld is a wonder.  Anyway, it is fabulous.  If I had to rank the top 5 greatest live albums of all time it would be a three way tie for first between this one, The Who's Live at Leeds  and Keith Jarrett's Koln Concerts.  But that's just me.

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Otoliths 28!

 the summer, 2013 issue of Otoliths—#28—has just gone live, with work from Alexander Jorgensen, Paul Dickey, Felino A. Soriano, Alexandra Yurkovsky, Jim Meirose, Simon Perchik, nick-e melville, Tim Suermondt, Mark Melnicove, Adam Aitken, bruno neiva, Philip Byron Oakes, Dane Karnick, Howie Good, Walter Ruhlmann, John Crouse, M. Pfaff, John M. Bennett, William Garvin, Michael Farrell, Willie Smith, Jack Galmitz, Craig Scott, Raymond Farr, Carlyle Baker, Patrick James Dunagan, Sheila E. Murphy, Reed Altemus, Micah Cavaleri, Tom Beckett, Tony Brinkley, Bobbi Lurie, Tom Pescatore, Cecelia Chapman, Tony Beyer, Lakey Comess, George McKim, Steven D. Stark, Orchid Tierney, David Dick, Colin Herd, Michael Caylo-Baradi, Lee Slonimsky, Chris D'Errico, Susan Gangel & Terry Turrentine, Catherine Vidler, John Pursch, Stephen Nelson, Leigh Herrick, Jeff Harrison, Volodymyr Bilyk, Charles Freeland & Rosaire Appel, Márton Koppány, Alyson Miller, sean burn, Donna Fleischer, Bogdan Puslenghea, Paul Pfleuger, Jr., Joel Chace, Bob Heman, Scott Metz, Ed Baker, J. D. Nelson, Nicolette Wong, Michael Brandonisio, Lance Newman, Sam Moginie, Kit Kennedy, Samit Roy, Sam Langer, Aditya Bahl, Cherie Hunter Day, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, & Michael Gottlieb.

I'm excited to have an excerpt from my Appearances project in this issue.

There was an opossum skulking around our back porch this afternoon.  Yes.  It was skulking.

These creatures are nocturnal, so what's up?  I got to thinking that that marsupial (opossums are the only marsupials native to North America) might be the advance agent of Mark Young's invasive kangaroos.

I don't know.  I'm just sayin'.

I changed my sex today
and I'll change it again tomorrow.

I walk in the space of a sound
that can't be easily limned.

I talk in a made-up language
of chords and conundrums.

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Appearances  proceeds slowly, painfully.  I'm working on fragment 175.  Another 190  "fragments" to go.

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After a little more than a year of working on Appearances, my "novel", I've been slowly starting to think poetry again.

I hadn't anticipated how much doing this insane prose thing--if that is what it is--would inhibit my doing what I'd done before/how I'd taught myself to think--over the course of the last 35 years or so.

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Writing, on any level, is a kind of epistemology.  A kind of philosophy of knowing.  That being said, one doesn't always discover one's own sense of things right away.

We speak our philosophies not knowing what we speak. However well-considered our thoughts.

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Years ago I spent a stretch of time with a therapist who would give me a bit of shit whenever I said "I don't know."

I understand that she saw that as an evasive strategy on my part.  And at times, in context,  it was.

However, "I don't know" is one of my default positions.

I distrust certainty.  In myself and others.

Anything I "know" is open to question.  And, of course, that creates problems from time to time.

To admit the possibility that one might be wrong is to display weakness.  In the abstract that's not a problem for me.  In reality it can be a big problem.  There are people who want to take advantage of any perceived vulnerability.

I'm totally open to being wrong and reconciled to failing more often than I'd like.  Still, I don't trust anyone to understand that.

The only thing I'm certain of is that most people are misunderstood.

I'm thinking about how disappointment figures in the practice of art.  And how it figures in the communications between artists.  There's a lot that could be said about this. It's a mine field that runs through the map of contemporary poetry for sure.  I've been tripped up by more than one IPED (Improvised Poetic Expletive Device).

I'm musically troubled

I might be a midget in a giant's frame

The Chairman spoke but the wheel rolled on

Fucking snow