Wednesday, December 22, 2021

jim leftwich -- gonzosemic

gonzosemic


gonzo -- of or associated with journalistic writing of an exaggerated, subjective, and fictionalized style.

gonzosemic, adj. -- having exaggerated, subjective, and fictionalized meanings​

___________________​

At the dedication of the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., George Bush told the story of how one afternoon at an airport, Nixon heard a little girl shouting ``How is Smokey the Bear?''--​ ​at that time living in the Washington Zoo. Nixon smiled as the girl kept repeating her question. Baffled, he turned to an aide for translation. ​"​Smokey the Bear, Mr. President,'' he whispered. ​"​Washington National Zoo.'' Triumphant, Nixon walked over, took the girl's hand, and beamed, ​"​How do you do Miss Bear?''
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-1994-04-25/html/CREC-1994-04-25-pt1-PgH9.htm

___________________​


From a hotel room in San Simeon

Jim Leftwich
Nov 2, 2020, 3:13 PM
to Malcolm
I, too, am filled with anxiety and dread, but I honestly don't feel any hatred for humanity. As always I despise the politicians, the rich, and the capitalist leaders who manipulate and exploit the rest of us. They have earned our hatred, their victims have not.

A couple of months ago I spent a few hours refreshing my memory on the subject of Richard Nixon and the southern strategy. Do you remember it?

Nixon is the foundation upon which my understanding of politics has been built.


Jim Leftwich
Nov 4, 2020, 12:43 PM
to Malcolm

I was awake almost all of the night. We are in for some very strange days indeed. There are always some among us who think violence is an acceptable means to their prefered end. We will almost certainly see some. We need to remember that violence is not a solution to the problem of violence, it is only and always a continuation and expansion of the problem. I feel the same way about hate; hate is not a solution to the problem, or even a component of a solution, it is always and only a part of the problem.
I expect Biden will be our next president. Of course that's better than another four years of Trump. But Trump is a symptom of a very dangerous disease, and removing the symptom does not cure us of the disease.
The next two months will be rough, no question. Also, the next two years. Probably the next two decades, the next two generations.

​​___________________

John Erlichman

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

___________________​

​I went to hear Hunter Thompson speak at The Mosque in Richmond, VA in the fall of 1978. He walked out to the podium pretty close to on time, gazed out over his audience​ for a brief moment, then turned around and left. Forty-five minutes later, he was back, holding a cassette tape recorder above his head. He said: "Richard Nixon is a thieving pigfucker."

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jim leftwich -- bank of assholes, your money is shit -- collab fests, 2008

jim leftwich

bank of assholes, your money is shit

collab fest 6 

10.22.2008



jim leftwich

bank of assholes, your money is shit

collab fest 7 

11.05.2008





jim leftwich

bank of assholes, your money is shit

collab fest 8

11.19.2008




bank of assholes -- pansemic playhouse 194 -- 01.13.12

 

jim leftwich

bank of assholes 

pansemic playhouse 194 

01.13.2012

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Jim Leftwich, ​​Just-In-Time Poem

​​Just-In-Time Poem


Whatever you are
waiting for

is in line
behind

the toilet paper boat
off the coast

of Long Beach


12.22.2021

The Greatest Generation Revisited

​Jim Leftwich
Nov 17, 2021, 4:55 PM
to billy

William Burroughs was born in 1914.
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922.
Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926.
That makes all of them members of The Greatest Generation.

Miles Davis was a week older than Ginsberg, 4 months older than John Coltrane.
Sun Ra was a few months older than Burroughs.
Thelonious Monk was born in 1917.
The Greatest Generation really did build the foundation for the worlds of the Baby Boomers.

Source texts, improvised readings

Captain Beefheart / Tarotplane Blues

You're Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond

Robert Johnson
Terraplane Blues

Son House
Grinnin In Your Face


Tuesday, December 21, 2021

show me a sign -- pansemic playhouse 251 -- 03.13.12

 


jim leftwich
show me a sign... 
pansemic playhouse 251 
03.13.2012

while I scratch the sky... pansemic playhouse 258 -- 03.20.12



jim leftwich
while I scratch the sky... 
pansemic playhouse 258 
03.20.2012

​Thomas A. Williams, from Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism

​Thomas A. Williams, from Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism:

From the very beginning of the act of writing, the poet is struggling to redeem, by some magic, the natural opacity of and impurity of language. The first black mark on the white page is a movement away from that vision which constitutes the poet's essential 'letter to the world'.

From that initial admission of failure - failure insofar as he has not been able to utter the perfect Verbe - the poet must go on to spin out of himself some pattern of sound, image and rhythm, some analogy which will serve as the objective emblem of his subjective conviction. He must embody the truth that he cannot rationally 'explain'. But how?

Any technique that will serve this transcendent end of art is admissible. Mallarmé's concern is not, simply, communication, but a certain kind of communication, the communication of an ineffable, uniquely, and supremely meaningful quality of a subjective experience. If he turns to what others consider inexcusable obscurity of expression, it is because that is exactly what is required by the nature of his vision.

winter solstice 2021-- 12.21.2021

 wishing us all a very vibrant season

jim leftwich

december 2021

pages from William Burroughs, July - August 1953, notebook published as Everything Lost, revised edition, published in 2017

pages from William Burroughs, July - August 1953, notebook published as Everything Lost, revised edition, published in 2017














Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, November 1961 - May 1963

 Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, November 1961 - May 1963

pages 158 to 165







Three Fish With One Head

 https://allenginsberg.org/2020/02/t-f-13-2/


Allen Ginsberg -- “I saw the three fish one head, carved on insole of naked Buddha Footprint stone at Bodh-Gaya under the Bo-tree. Large – 6 or 10 foot size – feet or soles made of stone are a traditional form of votive marker. Mythologically the 32 signs – stigmata, like—of the Buddha include chakras (magic wheels symbolic of energy) on hands and feet. This is a sort of a fish chakra. So antique artists used to sculpt big feet as symbolic of the illumined man – before Greeks brought in human-face representation of Buddha. They never used to have statues of him – umbrellas, Bo-trees, or feet instead – before Alexander came to India.”


Annabel Teh Gallop --"Returning to Southeast Asia, the question remains about how and when this motif of three fish with one head reached Sufi circles in Java.  If it was indeed familiar as an early Buddhist or Hindu symbol, we would expect to find manifestations in pre-Islamic antiquities from Java, but none are known so far.  Perhaps the image was introduced from southern India through mystical networks, but it is also equally possible that a chance encounter with this motif resonated so deeply with one individual in the Shaṭṭārīyah chain of transmission in Southeast Asia that it was incorporated into the guidance texts. Indeed, citing the 16th-century Malay mystical poet Hamzah Fansuri, the scholar Karel Steenbrink noted the profound attachment to fish imagery in the region: ‘The fishes, of course, remind us of the frequent use of the symbolism of the ocean, the waves and the fishes in the mystical poetry of the Southeast Asian divines. […] This is imagery far away from the sand of the Arabian Desert: it developed when the Indian Ocean became an Islamic Mediterranean and the Indonesian archipelago the most populous Islamic civilisation’ (Steenbrink 2009: 70)."image.png
Three fish with one head, on an Egyptian bowl, New Kingdom, 16th-11th centuries BC (Image source: G. Maspero, L’archeologie egyptienne. Paris: Maison Quantin, 1887; p. 255, fig. 228)
image.png
Allen Ginsberg’s sketch of three fish with one head, from Indian Journals (1982) & Harry Smith’s design of the same motif, based on Ginsberg’s sketch, Allen’s official logo, published on the front cover of his Collected Poems (1985) and subsequent HarperCollins volumes, both images (c) the Allen Ginsberg Estate.

Monday, December 20, 2021

workboots pansemic playhouse 242 -- 03.04.12


workboots 
pansemic playhouse 242
03.04.2012

asemic, ongoing (or the pagan gods) -- jim leftwich, excerpts from some emails

​asemic, ongoing
Jim Leftwich
Nov 10, 2021, 2:4​​6 PM
to Bill

I was recently interviewed by Burak Ş. Çelik about asemic writing.
The interview is published in the 8th Issue of Buzdokuz Poetry Theory Criticism Magazine, which is out now.
buzdokuz.com



Jim Leftwich
Nov 12, 2021, 7:13 PM
to billy

I am very happy with it. Burak asked good questions. I was able to cover a lot of ground in my answers.



Jim Leftwich
Nov 12, 2021, 8:14 PM
to billy
If I don't do it, no one will. No one ever will. That's why I treat it the way I do.



Jim Leftwich
Nov 12, 2021, 8:28 PM
to billy

Lots of folks don't agree with me. They think I'm either mistaken, or delusional, or ignorant, or blinded by ego, or simply wrong, or some mixture of the above.
Most of the time, when folks say they disagree with me, I honestly don't know what they mean.
If I said: I was in Fincastle last Tuesday. It was raining.
And someone who wasn't there replied: I disagree.
The only reasonable response for me would be to repeat myself



Jim Leftwich
Nov 12, 2021, 9:48 PM
to billy

Some people don't want asemic writing to have come from poetry. They don't believe me when I say that's where it came from. They think I'm lying about it, for some reason. Maybe because I'm not a trained visual artist. Anyway, like I said. I'll just keep repeating myself whenever I get the chance. Some folks will figure it out.



Jim Leftwich
Nov 12, 2021, 11:00 PM
to billy

We went for a couple of little walks today. No vehicle for the past 2 and a half months, so we missed the fall colors in the mountains. Sue is cat-sitting for a friend, and has her car for a few days.
https://leftwichvanlines.blogspot.com/



Jim Leftwich
Nov 13, 2021, 2:59 PM
to billy

Sue doesn't like Lakewood Park very much. She says my photographs make it look much nicer than it really is.
I say: Good nature photography is a collaboration between the pagan gods and the photographer. Not just any God, or gods. And not any kind of institutional religion. The pagan gods, who inhabit the nature being photographed. And: if they don't know you, they won't help you.




Mojave Desert, Pacific Coast -- Jim Leftwich, in Virginia

​Jim Leftwich
Nov 21, 2021, 4:08 PM
to billy​​

The desert sears an image of self onto its sensorial vastness. We are less than we have ever thought of ourselves, more than we might have imagined. Unless an ocotillo is cliche to the kangaroo rat, there is no sense in which the knowing is separate from the being, known. Around a curve you will hardly remember one vastness opens onto another. The sun setting, sinking, settling into the Pacific Ocean, permits the ego, compressed at a pragmatic density, to openly fall in love with itself, in an exchange of gifts like stars scurrying among their grains of sand -- utilitarian, somatic, existential. We think the desert tortoise is moving slowly, until we look out over the Davidson Seamount, and remember the long, air-conditioned drive from Baker to Bakersfield. The volume of the moment, wrote George Oppen, against all easy modifications of the emptier signified.



Jim Leftwich
Nov 21, 2021, 6:26 PM
to billy

Where the desert spills into the sea... It fills us with itself, as we fill ourselves with it, and as a kind of gift which at times is a kind of love, we fill it with ourselves, our little part of it, which we have of course received from it, itself.



Jim Leftwich
Nov 21, 2021, 7:15 PM
to billy

It is the same, of course, wherever we are. But in the Mojave desert and at the edge of the Pacific the experience comes to us as a teaching, incessant and relentless, in which the world will not permit us to deny our presence in it.



Jim Leftwich
Nov 21, 2021, 8:10 PM
to billy

I look in the mirror of the desert, in the mirror of the Pacific, and see both the old dog and the new teacher. The mind can learn new tricks whenever it is willing to do so. Gratitude wakes us up, and insists that we stay alert






Reaction A pansemic playhouse 260 -- 03.22.12


Reaction A 
pansemic playhouse 260 
03.22.2012

Reaction B pansemic playhouse 260 -- 03.22.12

 


Reaction B
pansemic playhouse 260 
03.22.2012

Sunday, December 19, 2021

some pansemic history at asemous font too

2 comments:


jim leftwich
December 17, 2021 at 6:44 PM​ [edited: 12.19.2021]​

Here's one of my digital storage containers from 10 - 20 years ago.
It's called pansemia and zaum.
There's no zaum there, that's for sure. I don't know what I was thinking, or what he was thinking​ (he = that guy who called himself "jim leftwich" 10 to 20 years ago)​. Poor​.​ old​.​ tired​. dog​.​, barking up the wrong tree at the end of a dead end street.

​​ReplyDelete



jim leftwich
December 19, 2021 at 7:53 AM

Do you guys remember the Pansemic Playhouse?
It was kinda fun. William Blake style. The Road of Excess. A world in a grain of sand. Cleansing the doors of perception. The eye altering, alters all.
Pansemic Playhouse was what happened in my life when the Collab Fests ended.
​​

ReplyDelete