hallucinatory music

I listen to this, and I can't explain to myself what is happening inside my imagination. Except to say that it's as if I slip off-world or off-time into some realm of mythic dream.

Barney Fife -- genius of the possible

We all liked to watch Barney and Andy back in the early 1960s.

Poor Barney. All around him was the languor of static Mayberry. He could not be still, though. He wanted something to always be happening. He wanted to make something happen. Sure, his schemes and eruptions of nervous energy led to hilarious and preposterous circumstances.

But Barney wanted something to happen. Barney could not sit still while the clock of being ticked sluggishly through the molasses of normality, the dullness of tradition.

In that sleepy town of Mayberry, Barney Fife -- conjurer of sheer situation, impresario of revolutionary theater -- pried open moments onto event, expanded metaphysical space for absurd possibility.

Barney -- heroic jester, tragic agitator!

a colorful and delightful mazurka!

you can read a certain book...

...right now inside the ethersphere, with no muss or fuss, at Google Books:


In the Pale: Stories and Legends of the Russian Jews
by Henry Iliowizi, 1900


The introduction -- "A Word to the Reader" -- is interesting to me.

on the eve of the War Between the States

I wrote this song, and the cool-as-heckfire Robin Willhite plays lead guitar.

I'm posting it in case anyone might be interested in my take on the antebellum era and auguries of catastrophic upheaval.

Gathering Storm

There’s talk in town from the livery to saloon

Just last night, somebody saw a blood spot on the moon

And two counties over it was rumored that three dogs went mad

They put ‘em down with charm salt but those folk’s luck still gone bad

Well, this morning in the pine pews at Calvary Church

The womenfolk were nervous, the sermon unrehearsed

And the newspaper front page spoke of a Mr. John Brown

When they hanged him in Virginia, he wore an abolition frown

There’s a gathering storm

From the North to the South

Swirling with vengeance

There’s thunder in them clouds

That gathering storm

From the Wild West to the East

Is coming like a locomotive 

Engineered by a hellish beast 

‘Ol Sassafras Sassoon was hunting down in Snakebite Hollow

Said he found a dead angel and his tobacco he did swallow

Said that angel was a dire omen of consequence to come

Said he got down on his knees and prayed after a shot of sweet rum

Well, there’s fussing and fighting in the Jenkins household

Tommy told his pappy no man or woman should ever be sold

Pappy said Ham from the bible, he was to blame 

So Tom bought a ticket one way bound on the first northern train

Don’t you feel that gathering storm

Something’s wrong with the weather

A gathering storm is moving

Over the cowering heather

That gathering storm

Gonna shake our sycamore trees

There’s lightning in the firmament

And it’s aimed at you and me

Don’t you feel that gathering storm

From N’Orleans to Arkansas 

Casting a great big shadow

Like a sharp black bear claw 

A gathering storm

From Mississippi to New York

That gathering storm

Gonna rain down pitchforks

That gathering storm

From the North to the South

Swirling with vengeance 

There’s thunder in them clouds

A gathering storm

Hear the nevermore ravens sing

All the hosts of heaven 

And hell are shivering

the Gothic Rangers

a Bruno Schulz letter

My next book will be a volume composed of four stories. The subject, as always, is insignificant and difficult to summarize. For my own use I have several names that convey nothing. For example, the theme of one of the stories bears a title borrowed from Jokai's "Marsz za porte-épée"—I really don't know how to describe the theme before the contents crystallize. The real subject matter, the ultimate raw material that I find in myself without any interference of will, is a certain dynamic state, completely "ineffabilis" and totally incommensurate with poetic means. Even so, it has a very definite atmosphere, indicating a specific kind of content that grows out of it and is layered upon it. The more this intangible nucleus is "ineffabilis" the greater its capacity, the sharper its tropism and the stronger the temptation to inject it into matter in which it could be realized. For example, the first seed of my story "Birds" [inCinnamon Shops] was a certain flickering of the wallpaper, pulsating in a dark field of vision—nothing more. That flickering had however great potential content, enormous possibilities for representation, a quality of ancientness, a demand or claim to express the world itself. The first germ of "Spring" was the image of a stamp album, radiating from the center of vision, winking with unheard-of power of allusion, attacking with a load of content one may conjecture. This state, however poor in content, gives me the feeling of inevitability, a sanction for imagining, certainty of the legality of the entire process. Without this basis, I would be given over to doubt, I would have the feeling it was all a bluff, that what I create is arbitrary and false. At the moment I am drawn to increasingly inexpressible themes. Paradox, the tension between their vagueness and their evanescence and their universal claim, their aspiration to represent "everything" is the most powerful creative stimulus. I don't know when these stories will be ready for print. An inability to take advantage of bits and scraps of time forces me to set aside their completion until vacation. 


-- from the Schulz biography Regions of the Great Heresy by Jerzy Ficowski 

crackling with deep electricity

Imagination is the spark and flame of energy propelling a work into pronounced aesthetic and spiritual life. It's a rare literary aptitude. Hardly anything has that dark and wondrous current running through it. So many novels, stories, and poems -- they are so boring and so self-important that your reading brain becomes an entropic mass of congealed literary disappointment.

Bruno Schulz wrote a thing that is almost beyond belief -- The Street of Crocodiles.

As you read it, you enter the infinity of imagination, the realm of aesthetic wonder. This book is one of the marvels of literature.

A large part of me has been shanghaied or absconded into that partly real, partly fantastic Polish town of Drohobych.