Dear Flip,

I respectfully disagree.

You do not have that B.I.G. Ready To Die shit.

But I like you anyway.

sincerely,

Josh

'Lived life is tested and fulfilled in the stream alone.'

I've been reading a lot lately, almost manically. One thing that has passed across my eyes is Louis Zukofsky's Complete Short Poetry. There is something reliably thrilling, igniting, about his way with the smallest bits of words and speech, in the poems where I can tell in advance by looking that I'll like them, the way they're trailed thin down the page; so with that, and with my not totally self-assured suspicion of things I have to decode to read, why is it that I feel so compelled to read the poems from 80 Flowers (and - understand them? ever? that seems doubtful, and wrongheaded anyway)?

Telephus Sedum

Tell of us sedum comic
course a zone everlasting fuses
hue green questions cosmos nods
tell of him sempiternal octobers
seat white-purpling house-roof hen-'n'-chicks or
no anthers a kor homer
grass-widow's goldenmoss weigh little lovely
rosette-climbing-3's two-lip dropper bred true

(Of course, Williams, longtime correspondent of Zukofsky (who edited The Wedge for Williams, for one), did say something like: all sonnets are about the same thing, which is plausible when you take him to really be talking about his own poetry, and, hello: he didn't mean looooove.)

(I think.)

I love the Just Blaze / Bleek / Free track (I almost said 'joint' with no reservations whatsoever but then decided that noticing that I was going to say it without reservations was still a reservation, somehow) that Jess tipped (er there it goes again with the reservations and not) me to, inadvertently, a while ago, that I am anxious to hear everything on his list (that I haven't already heard - 'Goodies' is inconsequential but pleasant, especially in the way it refracts off of every other single beat in its little Lil Jon family). Especially 'Frei / Hot Love' - is this the same 'Frei' from Kompakt Total 5 or so?

There have been, obviously, technical problems.

Joel's phone company is to blame.

Everybody seemed to be after us
even the manufacturers
wouldn't press our disc
you know it wasn't fair
fuck everybody who worked there!

The actual film site for The Ister is probably a little more illuminating than that news story.

This is exciting! Though for some reason the note that Terence Malick was a Heidegger scholar before becoming a filmmaker is more exciting than the other dudes' film. Which is, though, as I say, still exciting apart from Terence Malick's being a Heidegger scholar once.

NB: I saw twenty minutes of a Terence Malick movie once. It was nice. That's all I can say with authority.

'There's no part of that sentence I didn't like.'