consumptive.org

siphon

james — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:15:28 +0000

Deliver Me

james — Tue, 01 May 2012 23:31:59 +0000

a song by by Robin Holcomb

Deliver me
Deliver me
The light
Is only perfect
For a very short time
Deliver me

When
You’re blinded to
The moon
And it’s rise
How can you know
The planting times?
Streetlights
Tell lies

Father Pinkney’s Preparation for Very Bad Sore Eyes

james — Tue, 01 May 2012 22:22:02 +0000

Castile soap, scraped fine, and half the quantity of very finely pulverized chalk; wet them up to a paste with strong juice of tobacco; when desired to apply to the eye, drop two or three drops of brandy into the box of paste; then take out a bit of it where the brandy was dropped, equal in size to the fourth of a grain of wheat, to the diseased eye; wet it on a bit of glass, and put into the eye with a camel’s hair pencil.

Apply twice daily at first, and from that to only once in two days, for from one to two weeks, will, and has cured wretched bad cases, so says Father Pinkney, of Wayne Co, Michigan, who has used it over fifty years, he being over ninety years of age. His only object in giving it an insertion here is to do good to his fellow creatures; and also for animals, it being equally applicable to horses or cattle.

- from Dr. Chase’s recipes; or, Information for everybody: an invaluable collection of about eight hundred practical recipes

marrow

james — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 03:29:39 +0000

Kerouac

james — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:06:33 +0000

an excerpt from The Book of Haiku

Some Like Poetry

james — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:48:06 +0000

Some -
thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting schools, where one has to,
and the poets themselves,
there might be two people per thousand.

Like -
but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes having the upper hand,
one likes stroking a dog.

Poetry -
but what is poetry.
Many shaky answers
have been given to this question.
But I don’t know and don’t know and hold on to it
like to a sustaining railing.

- Wislawa Szymborska [translated by Regina Grol]

affections

james — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:45:05 +0000

on Instagram

james — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 03:50:44 +0000

with mustered musement and merriment, a dispensation: at its most elemental, photography serves to reify that which the photographer deems worthy. to make a photograph is to assert value, and it is this assertion of value, in the form of a representation, that is, first and foremost, (re)iterated through dissemination. Instagram facilitates both acts: the taking and the trajectory, framing both as, as simple and as swift and as seamless as swiping a few onscreen buttons. And, unlike other models of making [a pro camera, being an artist, etc] and shaking [a book, the newspaper, a gallery or museum for example] that may by convention be bound by cost, time, purpose, profession, skill, education, social standing and/or experience, Instagram offers a relatively unencumbered mechanism to readily participate in a radically differing vista: the quotidian. to peruse a nexus of Instagram connections and to contribute your own photographs to that well, is to play a part in the real time accumulation, a steadying (re)valuation, of some of what gets us, singularly and together, through each day: friends, family, pets, places and food; something beautiful, something funny, something seen, and something done. it is in this way that the common practice of judging the relative merit of an individual photograph falls flat in the face of the Instagram interface. for the import of Instagram is in the very fact of each photograph having been produced and of the near-instantaneous shared profusion of countless such photographs across a network of exchange in which the legal tender is ♥ and minds [ie comments] and the reward, irregardless of the likes, is a reinforced sense of identification. every photograph a shiver not unlike your own.

Trace Lines and Platen

james — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:11:22 +0000

failure of romance #3

james — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 02:18:03 +0000

i quit every other day and the other days i don’t even bother. i should’ve been a poet or a painter, or even smarter, taken those automotive repair classes in high school or got a good job at the shipyard like everyone else. maybe i should’ve went to a vocational cooking school, or better pestered my mother into buying me an electric guitar when i was twelve so i could’ve run away at fifteen to a southern california suburb to star in an angry punk rock band. instead what i’ve got are cameras, film, a darkroom i can’t afford, chemicals and paper. yet even with these riches i scarcely manage to fit any one thing worth your whiles to the confines of the material, never mind the unending erosion, for better or worse, of my very own wiles. it’s a feeble medium and it’s not keen to forgive. on my best days i think to tell the world important things, but let’s be honest, i cannot. it doesn’t work that way. it’s the cameras that do the telling and the most they ever tell me is what i’m in need of knowing. i scratch out the bits and pieces i remember and do what i can to smuggle them out to you. i try my best. i try to guess where you’ll be. i try to pronounce the languages you might speak. i try to carry on the mannerisms that might make your mind. i don’t know. the cameras don’t care what they do. the cameras don’t need to be used. there are long lonely days when i think the cameras are just fine by themselves as if maybe i should’ve been somebody else. like what i should’ve been is a clerk, a conductor, an electrician. some kind of catalyst. pure and invisible.