tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-122662702008-02-26T05:32:14.679-05:00bblyBlogger102125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-60904658178529908812008-02-25T13:42:00.006-05:002008-02-26T05:32:14.801-05:00

Today is the birthday of my grandson, Elijah Bly Arougheti. He's 3. In his honor, I've prepared my first podcast. To play it in your browser (and sing along): Elijah3.mp3 For the multimedia version, head on over to: Elijah3 {at} dot-Mac

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-32035386786907930622007-10-05T12:50:00.000-04:002007-10-05T12:56:45.138-04:00

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing some new plays in Manhattan, part of the Australia Project, a production of the Production Company, an Australian-American alliance, which put on eleven new plays over the past three weekends at Chashama 217, on East 42nd St between Third and Second Aves. Stupidly, I'd written the address down as 217 *West* 42nd St, believing that this was the same Chashama

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-37868427264521886702007-07-05T08:06:00.000-04:002007-07-05T08:21:53.629-04:00

I had seen the snake before. I had watched the copperhead unwind itself from the gut and leather bindings of a pair of snowshoes that hung on the wall in my father's woodshop, though what it was doing there, I do not know. Another time, it slithered away from the woodpile, what at first seemed a nest of dead leaves unfolding in one smooth rope of molasses and honey. Its scales sparkled in the

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-16821090667176119992007-06-15T08:00:00.000-04:002007-06-15T08:11:35.944-04:00

As physics has developed, it has deprived us step by step of what we thought we knew concerning the intimate nature of the physical world. Color and sound, light and shade, form and texture, belong no longer to that external nature that the Ionians sought as the bride of their devotion. All these things have been transferred from the beloved to the lover, and the beloved has become a skeleton of

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-24813100809794059982007-06-03T06:49:00.000-04:002007-06-15T07:56:38.744-04:00

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-74361359257939045122007-05-25T10:01:00.000-04:002007-06-14T10:01:41.719-04:00

Sunset Boulevard blazed, empty, rinsed in sunshine, the stray cars like bugs streaming in the footprint of a vast lifted rock. — Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet, 124.

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-37252551319266727402007-05-13T09:57:00.000-04:002007-06-14T09:58:04.453-04:00

It takes a long time for a mouse to realize he's in a trap, but, once he does, something inside him never stops shaking. — Laurie Anderson, quoted in New Yorker Rock & Pop listings, for May 21, 2007, 10.

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-41588235381932589242007-05-11T09:49:00.000-04:002007-06-14T09:53:45.416-04:00

It was a strange land, With many roads and few destinations. There were signs everywhere Instructing people to do this Prohibiting people from doing that, But mostly people did as they pleased, And the only rules that were enforced Were the one protecting those people in power, The people who broke the rules most often. In the blink of an eye, The soft, irregular shapes of the land Became hard

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-86146384815410080822007-05-10T10:08:00.000-04:002007-05-10T10:19:46.920-04:00

A week ago I attended the ELO/MITH Symposium on the Future of Electronic Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. It had been a long time since I'd seen many of my friends and colleagues from what we used to call the hypertext community, and it was wonderful to catch up on what they were doing. My first job upon returning was to write it up as a feature article for Arts Hub (

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-16641483741214987862007-04-26T06:15:00.000-04:002007-06-15T07:59:20.997-04:00

The idea that our life is a story is by no means new. Thus the great bard Shakespeare said that life"... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (Macbeth) However, it took philosophers some time to discover the philosophical import of this view of life. It was actually a German chap called William Schapp who first gave this age-old idea a philosophical twist. He

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-14837099050348614852007-04-21T06:05:00.000-04:002007-06-13T06:14:35.293-04:00

In a motel in Iowa City I looked at the journal of the first day and a half of my trip. I've learned to write down certain things I've seen rather than the banal thoughts that don't bear rereading, or when you do reread them your soul yawns in the stuffy air... — David, in Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth, 187.

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-60294476399236316862007-04-19T10:20:00.000-04:002007-04-23T08:11:56.240-04:00

In 8th grade, I was a founding member of the Chess Club, which met on Tuesdays during Activity period. I'd originally tried to join the Science Club, but the one that looked through telescopes and studied the stars was full by the time I got there, and I had to take the other one, the one that did Nature hikes on Saturdays and studied pond scum. Didn't last long there. The default Activity if

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-36576694048195331502007-04-17T08:20:00.000-04:002007-04-17T08:27:38.733-04:00

In "Our Town," a most edifying article in the April 2 New Yorker, Jill Lepore considers the reputation of John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown, the first successful English colony in what we once innocently termed the New World. Summing up at the end, she addresses the idea some scholars have that Smith was one of early America's best ethnographers. "After all, compared with his

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-61291349353850753732007-04-11T06:48:00.000-04:002007-04-18T08:25:06.429-04:00

Every day you touch the slopes of strangers' bodies; warm, springy muscles; skin smelling of garlic, or lotion; buttocks kneadable as bread dough; and the funny, sweaty, monkey feet, freed of their boots and stockings, lolling passively, nowhere to go. The whole beautiful landscape laid out before you like an unmapped country. And every week at the same time an old man climbs up on your table.

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-35981190576948297872007-04-06T06:48:00.000-04:002007-04-18T08:20:54.811-04:00

To torment your body, [Buddha] discovered, is really to value it every bit as much as when you coddle it. So leave it alone; do it no harm. Do not harm anything. Time, the recycler, takes care of that job, constantly, dispassionately, inevitably. Which means you're free: free to be nothing, or nothing in particular, which really is freedom when you consider the grief you caused yourself trying to

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-46876849800176891722007-03-23T18:31:00.000-04:002007-04-16T06:41:16.044-04:00

He plays a train She plays a whistle They move away travel. He plays a rope She plays a tree They swing. He plays a dream She plays a feather They fly. He plays a general leader She plays people They declare war. — Dunya Mikhail, Iraqui poet living in Michigan, emended by Emna Zghal in War: an Essay (2005).

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-54679848796830337702007-03-17T20:24:00.000-04:002007-04-16T06:05:14.029-04:00

To appoint oneself... an inspector of spiders' webs for many years in succession, and for long seasons, means joining a not overcrowded profession. No matter: the meditative mind returns from that school fully satisfied. — Jean-Henri Fabre, quoted in "Spider Woman" by Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker March 5, 2005, 73.

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-60083308077983156752007-03-17T10:44:00.000-04:002007-04-14T07:46:07.458-04:00

I found this in Ye Antient Blogge:Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts. (Kafka knew this.) As Friedrich Kittler argues [in Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, 1986], "The spirit-world is as large as the storage and transmission possibilities of a civilization." The oldest available print of a printing press is a 1499 image showing skeletons cavorting about a press, pages in hand,

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-18529090251676021392007-03-17T08:06:00.000-04:002007-04-13T08:11:38.376-04:00

Billy's Downtown Diner Bethlehem, PA When my wife Deb was associate editor for the exquisite (late) quarterly Books & Religion, editorial meetings would often concern the needs & desires of what they affectionately (and not without irony) called Our Reader. Unfortunately, this mythical creature, at least among her masters upstairs in Corporate, wasn't enough of an abstraction, and B & R tripped

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-66221089802075272302007-03-11T09:16:00.000-04:002007-04-14T07:40:00.995-04:00

Yesterday I set up a new computer in my apartment. It was paid for by my new employer, an online journal, for whom I'm the work-at-home managing editor. I've been on the job a couple months, and am just starting to feel like I know what I'm doing. The new machine orphans the laptop that's been my main workspace for most of the millennium so far, and upon which I'm typing these words, through

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-16286047001126063902007-03-01T18:11:00.000-05:002007-04-16T06:27:20.654-04:00

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking,

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-53264937904866254562007-02-26T22:11:00.000-05:002007-04-16T06:20:04.328-04:00

Samuel Beckett, on what it will be like in the afterlife: "We'll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished we were dead." — Louis Menand, "Notable Quotables," in New Yorker, February 19 & 26, 2007.  

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-82038035173479810592007-02-24T06:11:00.000-05:002007-04-16T06:14:12.437-04:00

There's no care except hunger No favors but from an enemy Nothing edible but a bale of hay. No lookout but there's a man asleep No clemency without crime No safety but among the frightened No good faith but a disbeliever's Nor any cool heads but lovers. — François Villon, from "Ballade," translated by Galway Kinnell

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-83627226895260576772007-02-13T08:01:00.000-05:002007-04-13T08:05:35.509-04:00

These are the desolate, dark weeks When nature in its barrenness Equals the stupidity of men. — William Carlos Williams, cited by Lourie's Word of the Day, 2/11/07. First snow day of this winter. Class cancelled, streets white. Septentrional: pertaining to winter. Thanks, Jeffie!  

bblytag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12266270.post-38525388752326513862007-02-11T07:46:00.000-05:002007-04-13T08:00:30.738-04:00

Every check we write is drawn on exactly one bank, for precisely one amount, and each has exactly one check number. If we need to record checks, we don't need to worry about checks that are not drawn on a bank, or where "check number" is not a number, or where "amount" is a poem or a drawing. — Mark Bernstein, The Tinderbox Way, 43. This blog is made with Tinderbox. The book is more than useful

bbly