DEEP SCRATCH

Author: flyagaric23

  • RAW DJVJ

    Robert Anton Wilson and the DJVJ Revolution.

    “enter the mix”–Ninjajamm.




    Sounds Fly: Music Writing

    by Steven James Pratt et al.

    Link: http://a.co/9OHmjhJ

    Friday, March 19, 2010. (edited 01/03/2017)

     

    Steven James Pratt

  • Toot and Come-Inn: Cannabis Seeds and Finnegans Wake, and dogs, you dig?

    Toot and Come-Inn: Cannabis Seeds and Finnegans Wake, and dogs, you dig?

    By Steve Fly Agaric 23. (Dedicated to Sirius, the dog)

    — Is that answers? — It am queery! — The house was Toot and Come-Inn by the bridge called Tiltass, but are you solarly salemly sure, beyond the shatter of the canicular year? Nascitur ordo seculi numfit. — Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter. Securius indicat umbris tellurem.

    –James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pages 512-513.

     

    Back in 2002, when i asked Robert Anton Wilson by email ‘Can you give a list of items for our emergency survival suitcase please?” he replied:
    “Cannabis seeds, Finnegans Wake, one Rottweiler.”

    Cannabis Coffeeshop Journal 2017: Writings On Coffeeshop Culture (Volume 1)

    by Steven James Pratt

    Link: http://a.co/hMWdKax

    (more…)

  • INTRODUCTION THE TALE OF THE TRIBE – Michael André Bernstein

    INTRODUCTION THE TALE OF THE TRIBE – Michael André Bernstein

    Michael André Bernstein
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
    INTRODUCTION THE TALE OF THE TRIBE “I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase ‘a long poem’ is simply a contradiction in terms. . . . If at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality—which I doubt—it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be popular again.” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle”

    1 “A heroic poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform.” —John Dryden, “Dedication Of The Aeneis”

     
    2 In 1920, Georg Lukacs published a critical study entitled The Theory of the Novel. The subtitle of this work, “A historicophilosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature,” announces Lukacs’ decision to treat the novel as the fundamental form of epic literature in modern writing. Subsequently, he justifies this decision, explaining: The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature differ from one another not by their author ‘s fundamental intentions but by the given historico -philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become the problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.
     
    3 The conviction that verse could no longer deal adequately with “the extensive totality of life” (while the novel was now 
     
    4 · INTRODUCTION regarded as uniquely suited to attempt such a task) was by no means original with, or restricted to, Lukacs. Rather, he is representative of a widely shared attitude: a narrowing of the sphere regarded as “appropriate” for verse, which any poet seeking to equal the breadth of scope and subject matter of great novelists was compelled to confront. In 1917, when Ezra Pound began to publish his long modern verse epic, The Cantos, he was distinctly nervous about the problematic nature of his undertaking, and in the unrevised version of Canto I, he speculates whether it would not be wiser to “sulk and leave the word to novelists.”
     
    4 As late as 1922, after he had already completely revised the poem’s opening and published the first eight Cantos, Pound’s correspondence reveals a man still anxiously defending the ambitious intentions of his work-in-progress: “Perhaps as the poem goes on I shall be able to make various things clearer. Having the crust to attempt a poem in 100 or 120 cantos long after all mankind has been commanded never again to attempt a poem of any length, I have to stagger as I can.” (L:180) Underlying both Lukacs’ critical pronouncement and Pound’s initial self-doubt is a questioning of the essential nature of poetic discourse, of the formal limits within which the special language of verse must move if it is to remain faithful to its fundamental character as poetry. The question is really one of “decorum” in the full classical sense, an attempt to discover anew which modes of literary presentations are intrinsically most suitable to the different areas of human experience. By the end of the First World War, a verse epic was not so much a form as an oxymoron, an anachronism that seemed to violate what many poets as well as critics had come to regard as the characteristic structure and horizon of poetic discourse. Edgar Allan Poe’s strictures against the long poem in “The Poetic Principle” (1848) exercised a profound influence throughout the nineteenth century, especially upon the decisive figures in the development of modern French verse— Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Arthur Rimbaud —but, in their own writings, Poe’s argument was taken up as only one aspect of a fundamental upheaval in the connection between language as a literary, poetic artifact and the INTRODUCTION · 
     
    5 world of quotidian reality. At bottom it was the representational nature of artistic language that was challenged, the traditional conception of verse as a mimesis of some external, and consequently independent, event. For Mallarme the poetic text was neither the discoverer nor even the celebrant of previously existent values: it was their sole originator, at once the source and only locus of meaning. The words of a poem, an incantation and hieroglyph, were absolutely divorced from their usage in the mundane world, and art, rather than offering an articulated duplication of reality, was seen as itself conferring the only reality, the only authentic and absolute form of being attainable.
    https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1258462
    .

  • Kurt Vonnegut on Paul Krassner and his poster – Fuck Socialism

    by Kurt Vonnegut
    Paul Krassner, 63 at this writing (1996), old enough to be my baby brother,
    in 1963 created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for
    potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein¹s e=mc2.  With the Vietnam War
    going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and
    the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said
    FUCK COMMUNISM.

    At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic
    as to be unprintable.  In the most humanely influential American novel of
    this half century, “The Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, it will be
    remembered, was shocked to see that word on a subway-station wall.  He
    wondered what seeing it might do to the mind of a little kid.  COMMUNISM was
    to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable.  To call an
    American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany.  By
    having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn¹t
    merely being funny as heck.  He was demonstrating how preposterous it was
    for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie
    Pavlovian fear and alarm.

    What hasn¹t been said about that poster, and surely not by Krassner, is that
    its author was behaving harmoniously with most of the Ten Commandments, the
    Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States and the Sermon on
    the Mount.  So, too, were his now-dead friends Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman
    and Jerry Rubin, roundly denounced and even arrested for bad manners and
    impudence, and now mourned and celebrated as heroes, which indeed they were,
    in this important book.  They were prophets, too, at the service of humanity
    in jeering, like the prophets of old, at mean-spirited hypocrisies and
    stupidities and worse that were making their society a hell, whether there
    was a God or not.

    And this book is emphatically not nostalgic, but raffishly responsive to the
    here and now.  Nor are decades like chains of knockwursts, sutured off from
    one another at either end.  To think of them as such, the 1950s, the 1960s,
    the 1970s and so on, is merely a mnemonic device.  The only 1960s people are
    those who died back then.  Everyone alive today has no choice but to be,
    like Paul Krassner, a 1990s person.  Krassner does a good job of that.  So
    should we all.

    I told Krassner one time that his writings made me hopeful.  He found this
    an odd compliment to offer a satirist.  I explained that he made supposedly
    serious matters seem ridiculous, and that this inspired many of his readers
    to decide for themselves what was ridiculous and what was not.  Knowing that
    there were people doing that, better late than never, made me optimistic.

    http://www.paulkrassner.com/vonnegut.htm

  • Interview with Bruce Sterling

  • A fake poem by an non entity called Acryllic Figa

    A fake poem by an non entity called Acryllic Figa

    tsars like russian oligarchs
    like white supremacist cop tasers
    like bullydon boys in pork

    tie and blazars like a global air born disease
    Severe Global Airborn Rightwing Syndrome

    Fly: Selected Poetry

    by Steven Pratt

    Link: http://a.co/3of5XFj

    (more…)

  • Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

    https://books.google.nl/books?id=7NVxCQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&dq=finnegans%20wake&pg=PP1&output=embed

  • A Note on Christmas and being 2016 by Steve Fly

    So, i really do sincerely hope each and every one of you out there, reading and not-reading this, find whatever meaning you are looking for this holiday. Today, i thought for a moment on the tram…’man…i must be a Christian after all, no matter what i call myself (model agnostic) by the amount of good thoughts and strong memories i have of Christmas, almost every one since being about 4 years old. The highlight of the year for so many many years, the presents, family, food, laughs, drinks, friends. Plus, i feel compelled to address everybody, like a speech at a massive dinner table. And keep up the good cheer. Putting the stark reality outside the front doorstep aside for a day, homelessness, refugee crisis, war, lies. No, today is a slightly bland merry old time, a day when we count our blessings (you see i can’t help but invoke religious terms today) and give thanks to whatever it is we each feel we wish to pay our respect. Jesus and/or Santa i rekon, if you think about it. But not many say so explicitly.  

    We celebrate the birth of Jesus, like it or not, who went on to become the Jesus Christ, a popular figure in western cultures and who seems largely misunderstood to this day, due to interfering belief-systems and the inability to comprehend metaphor in religious and mythical texts and scriptures. So merry Christmas everybody, to mean, wake up to the birth of your own new saviour and muse, the birth of a new inner compass, a loving caring force inside which simply encourages you to be nice and helpful and to share. The birthing is like a filling up with stuff, including the chaos of what comes forth. I hope you quickly get over any difficulty in the beginning of making it new. Happy new year.

    I have probably said and written some awful things about Christianity, sometimes with a similar fury to the likes of Christopher Hitchens, yet without his clarity and forceful fact based assault. (sorely missed in commentary today) I have said and written less about Islam and Judaism, but hold them in similar contempt as Christianity, very broadly speaking.

    The abrahamic religions, as echoed by Timothy Leary, have been responsible for some of the worst trips this planet has ever known. Yet, having tasted the magic and mysticism connected to some other spiritual practices, strains of Buddhism, Taoism and Thelema, i feel that there are some parts to all religions that can be illuminating and informative, if your open to try new things, like simply new thoughts. It seems to me that to claim to BE an atheist rejects consciousness BEING itself…yourself. Theism can be fun and some gods can be exciting and helpful guides, at least, for me. Just because the large majority of theists may seem like zombie followers of some foreign doctrine or other, does not mean others are not progressive, intelligent and rational humans.      

    To refine the idea further, belief itself, weather it be in the form of religious fundamentalism or materialist fundamentalism, leads to similar bad trips. However, i think parallel thinking about these prickly subjects can help bring about a peace for all man kind. You know, like the lyric from the Christmas carol, peace on earth, good will to all man and womenkind. As Bob used to say ‘if you can’t achieve tolerance at least attempt courtesy’ This Christmas, why not try to make a big effort to understand things you might not believe in. Suspend your disbelief, and present it like a fairy on a tree top.

    Only the most ignorant and deluded hermit could not see that the coming years will be challenging for all around the world humanity, and closer to home for the disunited kingdom and disunited states of America, and of Europe. To remind yourself every day of all the trouble in the world can be damaging and unnecessarily, the world is not your problem. The animal and human torture, the terrorism, bombings, invasions and drone strikes, the beating and rapes, killings and daylight robbery are not your problem. Keeping a level head while others may loose it around you will be a daily challenge in a hyper-connected world. I sincerely wish you good luck with that, and i hope you can remember to remember. Violence is psychically self-defeating. Being nice to others is psychically self-affirming. What is there to understand? Just do it. 
    This is the nice part of the Santa Claus story, the surprise and free gifts delivered, good behaviour and being nice to others is rewarded with presents and surprise prizes. So best wishes, all-around-the-world-humanity, and have a good day.

    x
    –Steve Fly

      

               

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    Steven James Pratt

  • FLY BY NIGHT 186

    Fly By Night: Beatnik Youth
    Steve The Fly is spotlighting the new vinyl release of John Sinclair’s Beatnik Youth album from IronMan Records in England, produced by Youth and featuring the late great Howard Marks on the opening cut, plus sides by Sonny Rollins, Sun Ra, the Miles Davis Sextet, Eddie Jefferson, Selah Ragab, and Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, and a closing cut from Sinclair’s Mohawk album in honor of the late great Lee Bridges—The Cannabis Poet.
    The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
    BEATNIK YOUTH
    FLY BY NIGHT 186
    Steve The Fly, Sarwar Studios, Cross Keys, Wales, November 20, 2016 [SFBN-0186]
    [01] John Sinclair & Beatnik Youth: War On Drugs featuring Howard Marks
    [02] Sonny Rollins: Til There Was You
    [03] Sun Ra: The Other Side Of Time
    [04] John Sinclair & Beatnik Youth: Sitarrtha
    [05] Miles Davis: Blue In Green
    [06] John Sinclair & Beatnik Youth: Do It
    [07] Eddie Jefferson: Come Along With Me
    [08] John Sinclair & Beatnik Youth: Brilliant Corners
    [09] Selah Ragab: Naveen
    [10] Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson: Gangster of Love
    [11] John Sinclair: relaxin’ with lee
    A JOINT PRODUCTION
    Produced by Steve “The Fly” Pratt for Radio Free Amsterdam
    Post-production, editing & annotation by John Sinclair
    Executive Producer: Sidney Daniels
    Sponsored by Ceres Seeds & The Hempshopper, Amsterdam
    Special thanks to Sarwar and to Mark Sampson for the Beatnik Youth vinyl
    © 2016 Steve Pratt. Used with permission.

    http://www.radiofreeamsterdam.com/fly-by-night-beatnik-youth/

    Steven James Pratt

  • Fake News & Made Up Truth.

    “Keep it unreal”—Mr. Scruff.

    Silent But Dudley: Black Country Blues

    by Mr Steven James Pratt

    Link: http://a.co/7KhqHcL

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