Man vs. Leopard

By ARON HELLER, Associated Press Writer Tue May 29, 6:03 PM ET

JERUSALEM - A man clad only in underwear and a T-shirt wrestled a wild leopard to the floor and pinned it for 20 minutes after the cat leapt through a window of his home and hopped into bed with his sleeping family.

"This kind of thing doesn't happen every day," said 49-year-old Arthur Du Mosch, a nature guide. "I don't know why I did it. I wasn't thinking, I just acted."

Raviv Shapira, who heads the southern district of the
Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authority, said a half dozen leopards have been spotted recently near Du Mosch's small community of Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev desert in southern Israel, although they rarely threaten humans.

Shapira said it was probably food that lured the big cat. Leopards living near humans are usually too old to hunt in the wild and resort to chasing down domestic dogs and cats for food, he added.

Du Mosch's pet cat was in the bed with him at the time, along with his young daughter who had been frightened by a mosquito in her own room.

Shapira said the leopard was very weak when park rangers arrived at Du Mosch's home after the surprise late-night visit. He said nature officials would likely release it back into the wild.

Du Mosch said he probably would not have been able to control the big cat were it in better health. As a nature guide, he said, he was familiar with animals and did his best to hold down the leopard without harming it. He said he took it all in stride, "but the kids were excited."

Jeno - Wicked & Wild

T - minus 14 days and counting...

It's that time again...

Brillaint T Shirt Design

The Wreck of the King Phillip

My pictures of the wreck... finally made it out to the beach at a very low tide... sadly not enough of the sand has been washed away to reveal the aft and full outline of the hull, only the bow pokes out of the sand. You can almost see it heaving, trying to clear cement like substrate of the beach so it too can go to neverland... (read: not michael jackson's cassa)...

Googling One's Self

In a moment of boredom and curiosity I decdied to Google Myself and stumbled across this old article I had written for ComFusion magazine (RIP). Something about it still seems salient today... now that Comfusion is no more, I thought I'd repost it here...

The Definite Article

It’s been ages since I sat down and really poured my thoughts out onto paper, or the digital equivalent thereof. I ran across something today that sparked a train of thought -- or, if you will, this rant.

My company, which will remain unnamed, is involved in the “news clipping” business. We sell select news clips to PR companies/ departments/ agencies and other advertising-oriented institutions. We have a database of closed-captioned text from newscasts, both local and nationally syndicated, from better than 80 markets around the country covering all the major networks in those markets. Our database is searchable by keyword, like Google. For kicks, I did a search today on the word “Iraq” and came up with 1,657 hits within our notes since midnight. I then decided to run the word “war,” which came up 1,796 times. To set a baseline, I chose a simple word, “the,” and that word came up 2,365 times.

Now you don't have to understand the Boolean logic behind the search engine or how it handles multiples and so forth and so on. What you have to recognize is that the words “war” and “Iraq” are as almost as likely to be used as the word “the” and are thus equally as invaluable. Where would we be without, excuse the pun, definitives?

As this very basic statistical analysis shows, the words “war” and “Iraq” are used nearly as frequently as the definite article -- for every four "the"s, we find three "war"s. For every definitive, or mention of something in “the” real world, our real world has become synonymous with the notion of war, of Iraq, a place very few of us have ever visited, and only see now ablaze.

So why is it so important that we understand the preponderance of the word “war” in our vernacular? Let’s contemplate for a moment the manner in which we realize the world around us. We see it, but when we interpret that world and attempt to describe it, we use language. Language is our way of recreating our local reality and disseminating it to others. Given that there's a finite amount of words, a finite amount of meanings, a finite amount of possible sentences -- ways of stating the beauties, horrors, joys and frustrations of this world, and our mortal coils -- I find it somewhat terrifying that a great part of our daily life is predicated on war in a place called Iraq. Despite both distance and time from the actual conflict, the word “war” and the reality of it enters into the language of local realities worldwide, creating a meta-reality that defines the event as a definite mainstay of our local reality and our language.

As responsible adults, we choose not to teach our children foul language. We scoff when an adult forgets his or her tongue and blurts out “shit” or “fuck” or “goddamn.” “Don't curse around the baby!” is a standard and acceptable response when protecting a child’s innocent ears. This practice is a common way to socialize our children and hope that they pick up the tools with which to accurately and civilly communicate their local realities. We know that many of the problems in this life stem from difficulties in communication. It can be said that our president suffers from a difficulty in communicating through the channels established to ensure a stable and civil world order. However, what happens when the definite articles before us, and surrounding us, and internalized by our children, constantly point towards the words “war” and “Iraq”?

War and the implements of war are not the only technological innovations being featured on the battlefield today. Information, intelligence, and visual and audio media are more potent than ever before. It’s possible, at any moment and through any medium, to join into the chatterbox of war footage, dialogue, live news, images, and stories, either by going online, turning on the television, tuning in the radio, or reading the newspaper. It’s even possible to set up a service on your WAP phone or PDA to receive up-to-the-minute updates on how the war is progressing in Iraq.

If we wish to consider the importance of language and how it shapes our reality, we have only to turn to the Old Testament and read the first few lines of Genesis: “And God said let there be light and there was light.” In a metaphysical sense, to speak is to invoke something; we all join in a God-like act of creation through our speech. That which is spoken and invoked takes root like a seed in the mind. It’s scary to think that creation casts such a shadow. This is a form of socialization and enculturation -- the vestiges of war constitute our daily bread that the new generation is being force-fed. The circus side-show of media coverage and verbiage that is spilling out from our “media-access-boxes-du-jour” (TV, radio, web, print) bears with it a frightening trend that will incorporate the word “war” like a self-fulfilling prophecy into, I dare say, our future.

Let’s turn back to the Good Book for a moment ...

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
-- John 1:1

Let’s play a game of substitution, replacing “Word” with “War”:

In the beginning was the War, and the War was with God, and the War was God.

This time, let’s replace “God” with “War”:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with War, and the Word was War.

If we bear God in our words and our hearts -- be it the God of the Old Testament, that fiery angel, or the more forgiving God of the New Testament, or Allah, or Adonai, or Jehovah, or Yahweh, or the many unnamed and unspoken faces of divine transcendence that pepper the annals of human knowledge -- whatever the face or the name, the Word is sacred and held as such in the heart. Language has a certain sanctity, as the vehicle through which we attempt to explain the ineffable by way of metaphors and similes. Our abstract notions of divinity are compartmentalized by a finite language. Our new tongue is filled with war; it is filled with both image and metaphor for war, leaving little space for the sacred or divine.

The words are not a single manifestation. The word “war” is a three-letter word dating back to the 12th Century, of Middle English origin with an etymological root in the north Franco-Germanic werre(1). The word, in essence, is benign as a word. However, the word is not alone: it’s a multidimensional representation complete with image and sound. These images are hand picked vis-à-vis the news media and the instructions given to them by the government. The instructions are simple: Don’t show anything that would hurt morale here at home. Show the war like an action movie-the more green night vision pictures the better. Make the sensationalism as sterile as possible so that “war” is sterile and the grim realities are kept a distant thought until it’s time to build a memorial or celebrate a new holiday. Show the war in good taste.

I was chatting recently with my friend in Spain. He said to me, “You’re missing out!”, referring to what he saw on the news in Madrid. Al Jazeera is broadcast in Europe uncensored and unedited. It’s amazing to think that the land of Free Speech, founded on the freedom to express differences of opinion, is exercising good taste by carefully censoring the minority voice, the unpopular sentiment. Perhaps the only amazing thing about this realization is that it’s nothing new. Free speech is a relative term here.(2)

If you say it, it may come; if you utter it, it may happen; if you fill your language with it, it will fill your reality with itself. Perhaps this more agnostic stance on the abstract notion of words better explains the importance of choosing your words carefully. As we use our many subtongues to speak the languages of international politics, religion, law, philosophy, love, hate, and so many emotions, let’s not forget that everything boils down to a simple fact: we create our world one brick at a time, one word at a time, and so too can it be just as easily undone through careless words.

**FOOTNOTES**

1.) Merriam Webster Dictionary Online:

Main Entry: war
Pronunciation: 'wor
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English werre, from Old North French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German werra, strife; akin to Old High German werran, to confuse
Date: 12th century
1 a(1) : a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations (2) : a period of such armed conflict (3) b : the art or science of warfare c : (1) obsolete : weapons and equipment for war (2) archaic : soldiers armed and equipped for war
2 a : a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism b : a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end: a class war, a war against disease c : see Variance, Odds

2.) From the files of Dave Ross, KCBS Radio Transcript -- March 24, 2003 HOW MUCH TRUTH?
“Central Command sent the correspondents here a frosty e-mail asking that this footage not be aired, and the networks themselves have sent out memos: do not show anything in poor taste.
Interesting concept, covering a war in good taste ...
It's certainly not a consideration for the Iraqi military leadership who were like kids at Christmas:
IRAQI INFORMATION MINISTER Muhammad Saeed al Sharif: ‘They are suffering from shock ... and awe.’
In the end, CNN showed one still photo of a dead marine. No face, no wounds visible, just a corpse in a uniform.
Very tasteful.”

From my working life

News Release
Tuesday 15 May 2007, 9:30 GMT

Tuesday 15 May 2007 Date
Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group

E-Marketers, Senders, ISPs Fight Spam With New MAAWG Sender Best Practices Endorsed by Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, May 15 /PRNewswire/ --

In a major milestone toward industry agreement on how senders can distinguish their legitimate volume email from unsolicited spam, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has issued the MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices (BCP) with collaborative input from both volume senders and Internet Service Providers. The new best practices recommend sender email technologies and subscription methods to improve deliverability rates for newsletters and permission-based email marketing.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070124/CLW180LOGO )

Developed by MAAWG, the best practices involved the industry's largest ISPs, network operators and vendors approving recommendations that were also endorsed by sender firms and other trade associations. Immediate support for the MAAWG Sender BCP has come from CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) and the Email Sender & Provider Coalition (ESPC), according to Dennis Dayman, MAAWG senders subcommittee co-chair and StrongMail Systems, Inc. director of deliverability.

"Both senders and ISPs are allies fighting the same battle, but in the past there has been a language gap between them," Dayman said. "The senders were asking, 'what should we do to work more closely with the network operators?' so MAAWG tackled the issue on a global basis. In these best practices, we have outlined very specific steps that senders can take to reduce the accidental tagging of legitimate email as spam while still protecting consumers from the eighty percent of email traffic that is abusive."

A Different Technical Approach; Supplemental Information for Marketers

The MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices also includes a supplemental Executive Summary for marketers who often manage volume email projects, which was edited by Len Shneyder of MAAWG member company Pivotal Veracity. The summary explains some of the technical recommendations to improve email deliverability and provides a questionnaire marketers can use to determine if their Email Sender Providers are operating within industry best practices.

The complete BCP addresses five topics of concern to both marketers and operations professionals:


-- Obtaining email consent
-- Recommended unsubscribe options
-- Sender accountability and reputation
-- List maintenance
-- Resolving messaging disruption issues

The recommendations are based on reputation management techniques that help identify the sender as the genuine source of the email. This approach differs from the content filters already used by many ISPs to tag messages containing suspicious words or phrases as spam. For example, the MAAWG Sender BCP recommends that service providers managing email for multiple companies, online marketing agencies and other vendors that send large volumes of emails for multiple clients use a separate IP address for each company so that ISPs can determine that a message has come from a verifiable entity. The best practices also include methods for managing subscriptions and improving consumer relationships.

Collaborative Industry Efforts

The document is gathering momentum. In the United States, CAUCE Chair Scott Hazen Mueller said, "This is a remarkable first step. Coordination between the sending and receiving communities is critical toward mitigating the scourge of spam on the Internet."

The CAUCE Chair in Canada, Neil Schwartzman, recognized the importance of the MAAWG best practices as, "a logical evolution" of the BCP document submitted to the Canadian Minister of Industry by the Federal Task Force on Spam that was developed in part by CAUCE Canada.

The Email Sender & Provider Coalition also provided input into the document and supports the best practices. "Both senders and receivers have a stake in preserving email as a channel for legitimate communication and commerce, and only by working together can any real change take place," said Trevor Hughes, ESPC executive director. "The MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices reflect this shared commitment. The ESPC is pleased to have participated in its development and we look forward to working with MAAWG and its members to instigate further positive change in the future."

The complete Sender Best Communications Practices document is available at the organization's Web site, www.MAAWG.org.

Noise from the void

I think I like updating my blog with Jeno's posts from myspace because the damn flyers are amazing! Well I'll be here, finishing up my final project for my playwriting class and kicking Jeno's almighty grooves... come join me, you know the score... 9pm pst (21:00 GMT -7)...

129 Year Old Ship on Ocean Beach

I'm going!!! Tonight!!!



The bones of a 129-year old shipwreck that surfaced on San Francisco's Ocean Beach this week appear and disappear every 20 years or so, like Brigadoon, the mythical Scots village that appears out of the spring mist.

The wreck is of the clipper ship King Philip, which appeared out of the sand Monday. The King Philip was wrecked at high tide in January 1878 and shows itself on very low tides every so often. The last time the ship showed up was after storms in 1985.

The King Philip's latest appearance has drawn hundreds of people, who come and stare at the old ship's timbers, which are awash where the foamy surf meets the shore at the foot of Noriega Street.

"It's wonderful,'' said Stephen Haller, a National Park Service historian who is one of the authors of a book on shipwrecks of the Golden Gate region. "People can see history right under their feet.''

A small piece of wood no bigger than Haller's foot was all that poked though the sand at the stern of the ship. The bow, 174 feet north, was much more impressive. Its pointed prow rose several feet out of the wet sand, exposing vertical ribs, a double row of sealing planks on the interior of the hull and wooden pegs called trunnels holding exterior sheathing planks.



Ocean Beach is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, so the wreck is federal property, like Alcatraz, or Half Dome in Yosemite. "I would hope the public treats the ship with respect,'' Haller said.

So far people have treated the relic with curiosity and awe.

Mila Zinkova and George Kaskanlian live nearby. They'd taken sea trips to Antarctica and the Galapagos Islands. And here was history on their doorstep. "It's just amazing,'' said Zinkova. "I put a picture of it on a Wikipedia site for Ocean Beach history.''

Like most artifacts from the past, the King Philip comes with a story.

The vessel was built as a full-rigged, three-masted clipper ship -- one of those long, lean ships that historian Samuel Eliot Morison called "the noblest of all sailing vessels.''

American clippers were built to sail from the East Coast to San Francisco around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. They carried high-value cargo and were built for speed, as the 19th century defined it. The fastest of the clippers, the famous Flying Cloud, made the trip from New York to San Francisco, 14,500 miles, in 89 days, eight hours, a record that stood for 135 years until a yacht broke it in 1989.

The King Philip -- named for the Indian chief who was involved in King Philip's war in 1675 -- was not as fast as the fastest clipper. It was launched in 1856, in Alna, Maine, and was advertised as "a strictly first-class clipper ship with quick dispatch.''

However the King Philip was advertised, it seemed to have been a hard-luck ship. There were at least two mutinies -- one in Honolulu in 1869 and one off Annapolis, Md., five years later. In both cases, the mutinous sailors set the ship on fire, seriously damaging it twice.

"They worked the ship hard in those days,'' said James Delgado, a maritime historian, "and they worked the crews hard, too."

After its glory days as a clipper, the King Philip went into the lumber trade, working for Pope and Talbot, a San Francisco lumber merchant.

The King Philip was old for a wooden ship, and the best cargo went to newer iron and steel sailing ships, and steamers. The King Philip carried grain and even guano, a fine name for bird droppings used as fertilizer.

On Jan. 25, 1878, the King Philip left San Francisco without cargo -- in ballast, sailors call it. It was customary in those days for steam tugs to tow sailing ships out of the Golden Gate.

There were two other sailing ships in the area, and one of them -- the collier Western Shore, had a serious accident in which the captain was killed. The tug went off to help the other ship, and the King Philip dropped anchor. The seas were heavy, the ship rolled, and the anchor did not hold.

The King Philip ran up on Ocean Beach at high tide and was stranded there, high and dry. No one was killed but the ship was a total loss. The next day, the wreck was sold at auction to a San Francisco businessman named John Molloy for $1,050.

He salvaged the metal fastenings, cut down the masts and sails, and blew up the hulk with black powder.

Storms and human activity -- like building the Great Highway or the San Francisco sewer outfall, changed the beach.

Now the King Philip has appeared again. Haller says the low tides from now until the weekend, will make the ship visible most afternoons for at least a while.

"I thought it was really romantic,'' said Darla Bernard, of San Francisco, who stopped by with her dog, Kodi, to see the ship. "Until I learned that the Philip used to haul manure.'

STOLEN from the blogs of John & James Sakkis:

Here's the tide chart for the next few days. Since the moon is near the New Moon phase, it's pull is waning. In two weeks the tide will get lower and the wreck will become more visible.

2007-05-10 12:31 PM PDT -0.07 feet Low Tide
2007-05-10 7:59 PM PDT 4.78 feet High Tide
2007-05-10 8:08 PM PDT Sunset
2007-05-11 1:30 AM PDT 2.30 feet Low Tide
2007-05-11 6:03 AM PDT Sunrise
2007-05-11 7:04 AM PDT 4.45 feet High Tide
2007-05-11 1:24 PM PDT 0.19 feet Low Tide
2007-05-11 8:09 PM PDT Sunset
2007-05-11 8:33 PM PDT 5.18 feet High Tide
2007-05-12 2:29 AM PDT 1.47 feet Low Tide
2007-05-12 6:02 AM PDT Sunrise
2007-05-12 8:24 AM PDT 4.39 feet High Tide
2007-05-12 2:15 PM PDT 0.54 feet Low Tide
2007-05-12 8:10 PM PDT Sunset
2007-05-12 9:08 PM PDT 5.61 feet High Tide
2007-05-13 3:21 AM PDT 0.55 feet Low Tide
2007-05-13 6:01 AM PDT Sunrise
2007-05-13 9:40 AM PDT 4.44 feet High Tide
2007-05-13 3:03 PM PDT 0.94 feet Low Tide
2007-05-13 8:11 PM PDT Sunset
2007-05-13 9:43 PM PDT 6.04 feet High Tide
2007-05-14 4:11 AM PDT -0.34 feet Low Tide
2007-05-14 6:00 AM PDT Sunrise
2007-05-14 10:49 AM PDT 4.54 feet High Tide
2007-05-14 3:50 PM PDT 1.39 feet Low Tide

Something to break the silence...

Noise from the void

Tune into Noise From The Void, Jeno's weekly Radio Show on www.90hz.org from 9pm PST till around midnight, for a cosmic smattering of acid house, interstellar rock and whatever else the shaman dishes up...

From my working life...

Authentication And Online Trust Summit
by David Baker, Monday, April 30, 2007

I THOUGHT THIS UPDATE FROM Pivotal Veracity from the Authentication and Online Trust Summit (AOTS) was quite valuable to share with the MediaPost audience. As background, Microsoft started AOTS in 2004 to foster adoption of Sender ID and promote email authentication through the industry. I will warn you, if you are a novice to deliverability and authentication, you will be completely lost in this article, so I recommend you read a few things before you dive into this. Authentication: http://www.deliverability.com/resources/emailAuthentication.php DKIM: http://www.dkim.org.

Thanks to Len Shneyder, director of partner relations & industry communications at Pivotal Veracity, for writing this very timely update.

AOL & AIM. Not much new to report except that they plan to incorporate Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) into the reputation model in the coming months. By late summer they hope to be actively using both as a means of authentication and reputation checking for connecting IPs as an added data point to help them determine the final disposition of email. As is always the case, they advocate being responsible with your sending patterns and trying to limit your email to "active" customers who have purchase patterns or some form of response-based relationship.

Comcast. Ninety-one percent of all inbound email to Comcast, the largest broadband provider in the United States, is flagged as spam. Comcast monitors the quantity of hard bounces, specifically unknown users, sent to their domains. They use this as a measure of list quality and maintenance. By the end of the year, Comcast announced, they will adopt DKIM as an extension of their reputation check, in addition to launching a feedback loop.

MSFT, Hotmail, Windows Live Mail. Hotmail receives 4.5 billion emails a day, of which 90 % is flagged as spam. Statistics show that 35% of all spam today is "image spam," or messages comprised solely of one or multiple images. Microsoft advised mailers to use the hard fail flag in their SPF/SenderID records (-all), in addition to covering every sub domain with its own SPF/SenderID record. If you are lost at this point, contact your ESP or one of the delivery auditing companies and they can help you understand how to set this up. It is important to note that IPs sending a low volume of email at infrequent intervals will most likely be flagged as "suspect" by this filter as they have similar characteristics to spammers. Because of this, new IPs with no mailing history will have a harder time getting their email to even the junk mail folder. Microsoft is relying heavily on an IP's mailing history as one aspect of reputation in order to determine where email should be placed. Further insights from Microsoft personnel included information on mailing volumes: It's better to email smaller volumes more often rather than larger volumes at infrequent intervals. Consistent mailings of 5-10K emails per day have been documented as performing well.

Implications. ISPs use a variety of filters, including third-party filters, blacklists, whitelists, reputation metrics, volume filters, and content filters. There are many reasons your message may not make it to the recipient's inbox. Reputation metrics consist of one or all three of the following, depending on the ISP: spam complaints (the number of recipients complaining you are spamming them); unknown user bounce rates (bad addresses), and spam traps (emails you send to email addresses harvested from the Web or purchased). Managing feedback loops (spam complaints), good bounce management (removing bad addresses), and carefully governing your email acquisition methods will remain crucial to sustaining a good delivery reputation with the ISPs.

Authentication will become increasingly important as well. If you are not already authenticating with a combination of SPF, SenderID, and DKIM now is the time to get started. Whereas Microsoft adopted SenderID, many others adopted a combination of SPF + DKIM or SenderID + DKIM. Yahoo is even requiring DKIM in order to sign up for their feedback loop (spam complaint reporting).

I've published an extended version of this article with comments and links to some valuable sources and partners that you may find useful, on my blog.

David Baker is vice president of e-mail solutions at Avenue A/Razorfish. Visit his blog at http://whitenoiseinc.com

Nu Stakan... Shislivo!

Achiote Press!!!

Sunday April 29th at 3PM
Canessa Park Poetry

Help us welcome Achiote Press into the world
with two new chapbooks:

"the immaculate autopsy" by Todd Melicker &

the chap-journal "Achiote Seeds" featuring work
by Barbara Jane Reyes, Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor
& Rich Villar.

& readings from:

Oscar Bermeo
Todd Melicker
Barbara Jane Reyes
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor
& Alfred Arteaga

and possibly echoes of Antonin Artaud

DISCOUNTED chapbooks will be available!!

$3-5 suggested donation at the door

curated by Tiff Dressen

Can you Canessa? Come to 708 Montgomery Street (X-Street Columbus)
tucked among the inner organs of North Beach
***************************************

Achiote Press was founded by Craig Perez, Jennifer Reimer, and Len Shneyder in 2006.

Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award winning poet, educator, literary events coordinator who now makes his home in Oakland, Califas, where he is the poetry editor for Tea Party Magazine.

When not writing, Oscar devotes his time and energy towards new culinary experiments, working admin at a local charter school
and enjoying the bliss of married life with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.

***

Todd Melicker is a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco. His poems have appeared in Switchback, Five Fingers Review, Volt, and the Colorado Review. He currently lives in Santa Rosa, California.

***

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, and her MFA at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including 2nd Avenue Poetry, Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, Interlope, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, and she lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA.

***

Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor received her MA degree in English with honors from Western Washington University in 2003 for her thesis “Notes from the Margins,” a mixed work of memoir and fiction. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in the Katipunan Literary Magazine and the online magazine Haruah. In addition, she has served as a freelance writer and editor for several trade journals. Currently she is working on her first novel, tentatively titled Maganda’s Comb, and she performs regularly as a storyteller in her local area. Her blog Binding Wor(l)ds Together can be found at http://wordbinder.blogspot.com.

Bar Rooms after Claudia Rankine

The friend I made in a random bar while on the road said ‘I was a history major.’ So why are you in marketing? ‘Well marketing is the history of human desire. I love seeing how desires change.’ [people I thought] The history of human desire is a cotter pin in the wheel of tragedy. I didn’t say this to her, but I’m sure she was aware of it. Looking back we were probably drunk enough to explore every desire that was firing through our synapses like electrical storms [this too is supposition]. Distanced from each other’s original desire, maybe in the form of someone– there was a truth in the wine– the word– wine– desire– what is desired.

The history of the cocktail has its roots in the XVIII Amendment. There was a shortage in the supply of good alcohol. Soda Jerks found they had a new life as mixologists watering down the unpalatable taste of bath tub gin with sweet syrups and juices in order to make desire as sweet as possible. This kind of history is a vice.

The vice squad patrols history and recently it has taken to revising, in so many liberal forms: revisionist, revisiting, reinventing the winners and losers to find out if the golden rule holds water.

In the 15th century, modern Gaul, or the Iberian peninsula had a rampant desire for G-d. Social engineering rendered flesh into ash. It seems this is a history of viciousness. Still, desire works itself into the equation, on both signs of the operand, there is the fact of intervention: one man hand god hang man the other. Burning things isn’t new in human history.

There’s the quest for fire, to burn is to control, maybe Benjamin meant the burning bush instead of Adam’s power for bringing things to life in the garden, to life is to be burned, man’s a weatherproofing. Without fire we’d still be living in mud huts.

Fire is a chemical change– raw energy desires fuel and renders it into carbon. We refer to ourselves as carbon based life forms.

Celan uses the term black milk in his poem Todesfugue. Being poetic means being misread. The black milk of Celan’s Todesfugue isn’t a metaphor, it is the fact that milk with ash turns black. This is a concrete fact in an openly metaphoric body.

There’s room for intervention: what does desire have to do with it? Without spending too much time describing unfathomable reasons– there was the desire of history running into the desire for scapegoats.
I wonder if marketing can be applied to human tragedy – how’s it possible to sell destruction? It’s the 21st century and the sale is on for
ribbons–
flags–
experts– resolutions–
plan(e)s–
chiefs–
panels–
reviews–
committees–
alert levels–
supply–
budgets–
support–
bases–
effort–
(extraordinary) rendering–
combatants (invented or otherwise)–
parliaments–
constitutions–
G-d (wholesale desires)–
elections–
distance–
[the] dream (A- or otherwise)–
medals–
the ____ of one–
____ strong–
fliers–
literature–
[paul] wolf[ensohn] [blitzer]

‘you sending the wolf?’
‘Oh– you feel better– motherfucker?’
‘Shit negro– that’s all you had to say.’

There was a debate in the poet circle that [we]’re responsible for the war. Curiously this is a desire too. However a stretch for the poetic imagination – or otherwise engaged consciousness – the poet’s desire for a space in society to be more than fanciful abstraction – a heart ache in prosody – it is the control of language that makes commodities of destruction in short supply. Price figures – a return on investment – only if you collect every soul. What is the return on the written word?

Ancient societies believed their language was sacred and that writing it down would kill the word. Word is telling me that I’ve written 620 words (now 623). Being a writer is bloody work.
Alcohol as interlocutor presents a simple challenge: how honest should we be with each other?
‘You’re Jewish?’ Yes. ‘Look, I don’t mean any disrespect, but believe me when I say some of my dearest friends are Jewish.’ It’s ok, I get that a lot. ‘What?’ Sounding like a Jewish father from Brooklyn. ‘Have you been to D.C.?’ You mean the Holocaust museum. ‘Yeah, did you love it?’ No. I’m not sure that’s something you can love. ‘Well that’s not what I meant’ Of course not. ‘But how moving, I took my oldest daughter and she cried by the end of it.’

This presents a certain challenge in regard to memorials. What is to be their intended effect? I don’t think that tears are the end all and be all of a memorial. If A desire to lubricate our eyes exists, then history is full of wasted tears thanks to repetition.

I really didn’t like it. ‘Why?’ It’s like the Disneyland of Holocaust memorials. ‘That’s terrible.’ I know, but go to Yad Vashem. ‘Why? Well I mean why do you like it more.’ It’s not a question of like, it’s a question of breath. I’ve never felt, even when drowning in the ocean, that this was the first breath in my life, until I walked through Yad Vashem, and had to learn to breathe again.
Paul Klee gave Benjamin a painting called Angelus Novus



Benjamin went on to write about this angel: ‘A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’
Benjamin went on to say ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’ Maybe marketing is about creating a moment of danger between need and desire. The hapless instant when what you have isn’t enough and that which is desired is all there really is. The materialism of historic desire can be then understood as that which makes man most emptiness when destruction is the only satisfactory response bridging the gap between desire and need.

When J-‘s father was alive he would call me his white son. I had then as I do now my own father. I took comfort in knowing that I was a white son to a black father. In Last of the Mohicans Chingachook says ‘where are they taking my white son?’ when Hawkeye is being lead away. Where is my black father today? I’ve never had the desire to be black or even a white son to a black man. However, there was a certain comfort in knowing that the chasm between black and white could be bridged by fathers and son. I’ll extrapolate this to include mothers and daughters. Finally let’s just say people. This too is in my imperfect past.

I’ve slaughtered 1244 words now, twice that which came before. Writing is a bloody preoccupation.

When I was 19 and working in a law office I began to do drugs with a Jewish lawyer from Canada that had a penchant for speed which he called super lawyer juice. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t even enjoyable. He wasn’t all that sane. One day while driving to get a burrito he started the car and the radio came on. ‘You know you’re getting older by how much talk radio you listen too.’ I was glad to be young.

The dictionary defines Commute as ‘to give in exchange for another.’ Solitude for the road. Time for money. Imagination for servitude. During commutes I started listening to talk shows. This was how I exchanged the road for people. I didn’t know it then and I deny it now but it’s not always my preferred state of being – alone. This he probably didn’t know. Just as well he might’ve tried harder to keep in touch when I was done with such a dangerous pace of life.
‘The dead only know one thing, it’s better to be alive.’ Of the lines from Full Metal Jacket (unofficially the official film of the marine core) this one sticks out to me. There’s a lime pit full of corpses executed. Eddie Adams snapped this photograph



During the Vietname war. He won the Pulitzer for this image and it became a firebrand during the 60’s. He never hung this it in his office. As a matter of fact he wanted to forget it. Kerouac said I spent half my life writing On The Road and the other half living it down. No one took anything he wrote quite as seriously as On The Road because it didn’t have the same spiritually charged experience for them. It’s dangerous to come out swinging.

Of that which is forgotten about images, the prisoner being executed had just blown up a building filled with the executioners family. This is a desire for biblical justice. Hamurabi would be proud.

My grandmother had a twin. Besides the memory of a twin that she was too young to remember and only exists through the stories her parents told her while they were alive she has a scar that serves as an umbilical cord. Hades would be proud. A man claiming to be a doctor came to immunize the two of them. He injected something in their backs, close to the spine. My grandmother survived her twin died. My grandfather hunted this man down and shot him in the middle of the village square. This went unnoticed by authorities. Hamurabi is proud. I’m here because of chance.

Desire works itself into everything. Everything can be placed in two buckets: needs and desires. When needs are commodified into variant grades then they become desires. We desire a better toaster, more stylish than the one we have. We desire a faster car when there’s no reason for having such because there are restrictions on the speed at which we can travel. The need to move from point A to point B is a natural phenomenon. We require the freedom, however limited and imperfect to extend beyond the confines of our locality. We’ve given ourselves the ability to do this imperfectly. The degree to which this imperfection is refined and marketed is the extent of human desire’s ability to sustain a marketplace comprised of false needs. The history of such needs crafted through carefully selected words. Market tests must be conducted in order to establish linguist predispositions of the human desire. That which we fundamentally need can be turned into an expensive commodity by exemplifying the cost savings of our desire, should we act on it today, we’ll get a second one free, in four easy payments of 99 99 99 99 99 9 9 9.

9 is the last digit of a base 10 counting system. In the beginning was the 0. 1 is the first occurrence of anything or materiality in the necessary tools we use to create multiplicity in the world. What can be multiplied can ultimately be sold and counting is perpetuated.
Genesis begins with the act of creation. John begins with the logos. These are both places of departure. A desire for reinvention. Euphemisms – to restate how something began and then like Adam we create our world through language. Through language desires are understood as historical materialism. Back in the bar this all seems inconsequential when slurring becomes an involuntary act. This too seems inconsequential because Billy Joel is on the juke box and we’re all staggering through own libidos singing only the good die young.




2022.

Rondellus - Sabattum

1

In place of wind speed I’ve

become an object of myself in order to carry you to completion

to break the skin of the road

2

I grapple with tying

the four corners of

the Earth around

your fear

‘leave your finger there until we’re done…

in a saying to myself,

a half conversation

what not to do

is doing itself,

3

END DETOUR

4

the pluralism of highways – open hand gesture: (finger-freaking-love-bitting-ass-licking-shit-stabbing-motherfucking-useless-man) – double strung-out lanes – order of convention – cineplexes – “son, u iz in Kentucky now” – the despair of middles – masterminded speedtrap – “how fast you think you were going?” – nothing faster than empathic turpitude – the jesus mall – p.t.a. in a carrows – on the road or off – lost destinations ample thoroughfare FOR $ALE – “you’re lucky, I never got to go nowhere” – flaggers | flagstaffers | flagfire | fallow … P A Y / T R E E / A U T I S M

5

we’ve created confession

around our conversation

6

Maybe its as simple as Willie Nelson and his lonesome dove where we last saw the ghost riders in the sky, yeah Johnny ‘n me riding the million mile gesture in styrofoam cups, the ash pot deluxe, we dramatics dream impossible directions, a troika of desire in me the devil and mr. Johnson always make three, or maybe its Dylan – 61 to see if there’s another 9 to make 10 heavens of 7 – jesus saves crumbles station-wagon bumpers, bright full stop in Redding: read the nothing sounds in between clouds to create the means of imagination: for the two selves that recognize each other, a mirror chrome gas tank smiling back – your eyes are always on the back of my head looking forward where I can see their gravity – the calcified church steeple barn door stands on patriotic terms, we’ll only have 20 minutes to go, the way of the dead on the side of the road, we’re mending the absence to fill the world.

VII

[I’ve seen myself pass me by :: a weary smoked glass specter]

sssssssaying something snake-like

bite through to the back of my own lip

chewing miles

burning sign posts in each drag

every mile for you

[from you :: toward you

as much you in the road ::as a road to you]

hung me from the crosses like Ape-ing rebels

NO ROME

we roam to find home

alone :: is a passenger for himself

6

as darkly drawn curtains

as around the hem of a star

as a bejeweled saturnine

as worshippers living in code

as where the west has no name

as spoken coldly at dawn

as midday sun as rational

as an approval as an ablution

as parts of speech called body

as language remains the chief

as objective art form at dusk

as the dreariest days are failing

7

Dear ______,

I’m calling this a pilgrimage in absentia—

sincerely,

I

[When in doubt please forward replies to true believers]

8

The road’s a postcard affair

we call our best intentions

mailed it yesterday.

9

Back at the rest stop

I tried to spot a bird

at rest in the tree atop

the hill back there

where I stopped and

saw the rest of this

playing out not quite

how I had intended

Hemingway to Dietrich

"What do you want to do for a life's work? Break hearts for a dime? You can break mine for a nickle and I'll bring the nickle."

-Hemingway

This is customer service...

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make
sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, April 1st.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...