In Joyce annihilation becomes “abnihilisation”-the creation of new life ab nihilo, from the egg of nothing.–Anthony Burgess.
http://www.metaportal.com.br/jjoyce/burgess1.htm
Author: flyagaric23
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Finnegans Wake: what it’s all about by Anthony Burgess
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Steve Fly Biography From IronMan Records
Steven James Pratt a.k.a Fly Agaric 23 (Steve Fly) Biography
March 7, 2013 by Mark Badger
Born April 15th 1976 in Wordsley, England, and grew up as a competitive swimmer into his teens when he came across Jazz music, speed Metal, hip-hop, drum and bass, and playing drums in a school band. This led to Steven developing his drumming and DJ skills over the next 20 years.Steve Fly’s first ‘live’ gig was drumming with ‘Surgery’ at Thorns School in 1991, and went on to play with local Stourbridge garage punk band ‘Indigo Jane’ at such venues as J.B’s Dudley, The ‘Source’, ‘The Mitre’ in Stourbridge, and support for Babylon Zoo and Fret Blanket in Kidderminster.In 1993 Steven briefly played with Kinver based band ‘Taxi’ and recorded and album together and supported vocalist ‘Sam Brown’ at the Robin Hood R n’B club. In 1994 Steve played drums for a short time with the Birmingham based ‘live’ drum & bass band ‘Plutonik’, featuring vocalist Chrissy Van Dyke.In 1994 fly bought his first pair of turntables, and was instantly attracted to scratching and spinning vinyl, and began buying and playing a mixture of old Jazz, new electronica, drum & bass, break-beats and other soul/funk/jazz oddities. This led to him playing records with local DJ crew’s ‘Lowlife’ and ‘Lifted’ (94-2001) and by 1998 starting a successful ‘soul/jazz/funk/breaks’ night in and around Stourbridge called ‘Pass the peas’. Other gigs included dj slots with Craig Fields and the ‘Nazareth’ DJ crew, and gigs at the Q-club Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Wales, and the Glastonbury festival 2000.In 1998 Fly Agaric was billed with Fuzz Townsend on the bill for Graffiti Bastards 2, an art and music exhibition featuring and produced by CHU. This collaboration led to fly travelling up to York, and Finsbury Park studio’s to record a ‘live’ drum track for the first full album from UK left-field hip-hop crew New Flesh. (Part2, Toastie Taylor, Juice Aleem, DJ Weston) The resulting track ‘Quantum Mechanix’ turned out to be fly’s first release, launched in 1999 on Big Dada Records 0013, and stands as a testament to alternative UK hip hop at the turn of the millennium. -
Liffissippi River to Joyce’s Poundland
…and when the mode of the
music changes
the walls of the
city shakea perspective from relative place
humbled individual to their part
in universe and othersingle individuated mind
in time
gathering tales and knick knacks
of history into a trick bagdo you feel melody and riddim’
in verse
word sound image sandwiches
attention to source
to _____ and just storyword jazz s c r a b l e m and
recontext’ of everything
in John Coltrane and
James JoycePound’s eccentricity flows
to American in Europe, Joyce’s concentricity
circulates the planettwo sides of a new shiny coin
ideograms on side a
hologrammic prose on the fliptwo torrential rivers of ink
bleeding shared currents
liffissippiJoyce’s Be-Bop and
Pound’s symphonic compositions
cut and mixed togetherHomeric history and Ulysses
in a conch shell sunset
and a Dublin street fightthe inner
Joyce and the
outer
Pound dynastic index
Irish American tell all talesThe Cantos awake
a wake Cantos:
a dream/nightmare from
which I am trying to awake
(not)sleepwalking giants leave
footprints in the mud
trackers reverse the prints
into beastsexplicit Cantos give us facts
weights and measures, the dates
places, names and flames to witimplicit Finnegan offers us
truer ficts, rubber inches,
neurological realism and the funnies…like J.C’s Ballads versus
Stellar Regions
it’s a whole different thing
consistent in its genius‘FW is psycho-archaeology
Dr Wilson said.
‘no mystery about the Cantos,
Pound said.
they are the tale of
the tribehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_the_Tribe–Steve Fly
Amsterdam, 9th June, 2013 -
The Believer interview with Alan Moore
(Believer Magazine) BLVR: Is magic’s most authentic expression through the creative imagination?
(Alan Moore) AM: Actually, art and magic are pretty much synonymous. I would imagine that this all goes back to the phenomenon of representation, when, in our primordial past, some genius or other actually flirted upon the winning formula of “This means that.” Whether “this” was a voice or “that” was a mark upon a dry wall or “that” was a guttural sound, it was that moment of representation. That actually transformed us from what we were into what we would be. It gave us the possibility, all of a sudden, of language. And when you have language, you can describe pictorially or verbally the strange and mystifying world that you see around you, and it’s probably not long before you also realize that, hey, you can just make stuff up. The central art of enchantment is weaving a web of words around somebody. And we would’ve noticed very early on that the words we are listening to alter our consciousness, and using the way they can transform it, take it to places we’ve never dreamed of, places that don’t exist.
When that enchantment is the creation of gods and the creation of mythology, or the kind in the practice of magic, what I believe one is essentially doing is creating metafictions. It’s creating fictions that are so complex and so self-referential that for all practical intents and purposes they almost seem to be alive. That would be one of my definitions of what a god might be. It is a concept that has become so complex, sophisticated, and so self-referential that it appears to be aware of itself. We can’t say that it definitely is aware of itself, but then again we can’t really say that about even our fellow human beings.–http://www.believermag.com/issues/201306/?read=interview_moore
Alan Moore reads from ‘Masks of the Illuminati’ by Robert Anton Wilson
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Steve Fly’s review of The Score by Howard Marks
THE SCORE by Howard Marks
Review by Steven James Pratt (Fly Agaric 23)
Howard Marks writes fiction with a natural melody and swish turn of phrase, digging deep into his myriad of encounters with all walks he teases out subtle observations and explores the inner workings of the UK crime game and double-cross system.
The Score follows DC Price, a Welsh female cop who’s coming off prescription tranquilizers after her last case, Howards previous book ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ DC Price carries drum rolling tobacco and on occasion relaxes with a light sprinkle of canna’ on top, like old Sherlock Holmes used to, and smoking seems to help her psychic powers expand into the wide reaching scenarios and puzzles under investigation by her inner prose.
I personally enjoy the subtle telepathic and enhanced sensory articulation of Cat, how she often feels peoples gaze on her, intuits tiny anomalies others would not register, her delicate sense of reasoning is not unlike that of agent Starling from the Thomas Harris novels. This kind of hologrammic detective consciousness allows for many threads to run simultaneous, and the fact that Howard is writing from the perspective of a female character makes his feat of psychological insight border on the majestic.
I felt the dire importance and horror of the subjects explored, the despair of teenage rebellion, the psychology of runaways, excessive drug use and dependence, suicide and/or crimes made to appear like suicide, organized and un-organized crime, torture tactics, rape and physical abuse, collusion between police and crime gangs. This is serious stuff here and I think we should listen up and follow Howard’s narrative voice that brings insightful wisdom and reasoning to these too common daily horrors, and can help his readers begin to process the ‘real’ criminal activities going on around us which only receive a shallow dull description, hardly ever considering the mosaic like constellation of causes at play. Howard drills into such complex cluster fucks to investigate and exercise good philosophy, leaving the reader with a better conception of many Horror stories from the news. To me, this outlines the broader benefits of good fiction and literature in general, in that it helps one to pre-prepare for life scenarios, and often without the sugar coating of hyper-present mainstream TV, radio and loose-papers. I feel that the Novel in the write hand can emit a unique bond with the human psyche, favouring a slower and somewhat richer flow of ideas, allowed to amplify and resonate in the free mind of the reader. Howard seems to understand this strange pickle and serves up all the right flavours at the right moments to create a full bodied taste.
A friend of mine once recommended writing a passage stoned, re-writing it straight, reading it stoned and then reading it straight so as to percolate a fair balance between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain, bubbling and oscillating into a nice harmonious literary brew. I do not know anything of Howard’s writing habits, but I can feel his deep sense of focus and attention to detail, often dazzling the reader with a poetic and descriptive sense of location, wide emotional geographies and of an uncanny ability to scaffold suspense and deploy surprise in just the right dose. Howards prose pills are made with precise proportions.While reading The Score, I began to think of Howard and his own life story that is well known and respected by millions across Wales, England and the world due to the success of Mr Nice, the book and the movie. While reading the book I naturally found myself imagining some of the scenarios and characters within it and the possible parallels to characters and events in ‘real’ life and history, a rather foolish endeavour but great fun for the life of the mind.
In my estimation, Howard understands the psychology of crime and international crime on many levels, and from many multiple points of view (MPOV) essential pluralistic thinking for a good novelist/ story teller/communicator. Therefore, in his fiction Howard can explore many minds at once and many crimes at once, his portal evokes the general feeling of what it is like ‘out there’ where the criminal underworld and the authorities meet and mingle and conduct secret wars on the streets. Howard’s seen, heard, watched, tasted and read first hand his share of the last 50 years of criminal history, and he holds a master’s degree in ‘the philosophy of science’ a healthy mix I suspect, and now he’s delivered us a literary testament to what he’s learnt, in some sense, a demonstration of good communication, good bold writing and independent researcher.
Howard Marks turns the crime fiction genre around, pointing the Novel back at the authorities, out smarting and out thinking them, like the best of crime writers, dancing smoke rings around the goons and dullards, most of the criminals and the detectives, telling good stories and forwarding a feeling of what it’s like on the ground dealing with some of the darkest of violent crimes and weird fuckers.
Howard Marks has published by example and proved to me that marijuana consumers often work extremely hard and commit to highly focused work, sometimes resulting in exquisite art. Nice one Howard.
–Steve ‘fly agaric 23’ Pratt
23/3/2013
http://www.amazon.com/The-Score-Howard-Marks/dp/1846552699 -
Hoggers of the harvest
Hoggers of the harvest
by Steven James Pratt“and they have broken my house” Ez, Canto LXXVI
House of supreme court and
whitechapel packed since 1776?1970’s U.S. Gov. policy trending
deregulation to bait business
less oversight
less disclosure of information
about banks and other financial
institutionsthus, policymakers blind to
gangster role played by
financial inst. investment banks
hedge funds and some gov.
funded enterprises
a.k.a the SHADOW
banking systemOctober 82’ U.S. President Ronald
‘star wars’ Reagan signed into law
the Garn–St. Germain Depository
Institutions Actsleazy adjustable-rate
(mort)gage loans death pacts
the slithering process of banking
deregu’ proceeeds
92’ Euro-members sign
mass-tricked treaty97′ Alan Greenspan fought to keep the
derivatives market unregulated
Nov. 99’ U.S. President ‘Wild’ Bill Clinton
signed into law the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act
more loop holes for dereg’01’Off-balance sheet entities
invoked by Enron as part of the
rabid scandal03’ Warren Buffett on derivatives:
“financial weapons of mass
Augustus Gloop is stuffing his
faceAnd if a few bankers and financiers
were jailed we would all be
better off now?04’ U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission relaxed
the net capital rule and the shit
flowed into the mortgage nappy06’ housing froth and bubble burst
in dung-bloom burst cycle peak
values of securities hand-cuffed to
US real estate
drop
like penniesFannie Mae and co. stroll on…
predatory lending and/or
mortgage fraud,
okey-dokeyGov and central banks
react with fiscal stimulus, an iron fist
further funny-money policy buffering
and institutional bailouts or
jail outs.07’ August 7
BNP Paribas Netherlands
liquidates in financial bone marrow cancer08’ U.S Total over-the-counter
(OTC) derivative
notional value rose to $683 trillion
hell, a bit O.T.T mate?2008’ U.S financial crime wave
Bang! 08-13 global financial crisis
Boom! European sovereign debt crisis
crisis crisis for the love of Isis
what of barley, rice, cotton, tax free?can we have balance and neutrality
in all courts, in ANY courts?
is their a truly honest judge
anywhere on this planet earth?and dullards CasaPound hijack a turtle
and a good poets worst
ever mistakes08’ The U.S. Senate’s
Levin–Coburn Report sez
crisis was the result of:
“high risk, complex
financial products
undisclosed conflicts of interest
the failure of regulators
the credit rating agencies
and the market itself to rein
in the excesses of
Wall Street”Greedy sneaky double crossing
fraud and conspiracy to commit robbery
were not considered seriously
in 08’?Hanging from a cemetery door:
TO BIG TO FAIL
TO BIG TO JAIL.
(1913-2013)Several major financial institutions
collapsed in Sept’08
global recession, we taste
the great credit
crunch
snap!number of U.S unemployed
rose from approx. 7 million in 08
pre-crisis…
to 15 million by 09’and if a few bankers and financiers and ministers
were jailed we would all have been
better off by now?yet the richest
criminals run wild and free
buy footballs teams, industry and
daytime TV
all to raise the price of
stocks09’ Another G20 summit
the great new long lesser global recession
kicks in
ministers only appear at nightIn Ireland unemployment rose from 4%
06 to 14% 10′
the national
budget went from surplus in 07’
to a deficit of 32% GDP in 10’
the highest in the history of Eurozone
control of the outlets?According to the CIA World Factbook
from 2010 to 2011 the unemployment rates
in Spain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal,
and the UK increased
and Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone11’ financial crisis inquiry
committee found that…
over the past 30-plus years
we permitted growth of
shadow banking system – opaque
and laden with short term
debt – that rivaled the size
of the trad. banking system.“criminals have no intellectual interests?” Ez, LXXVI
who knew the multitrillion-dollar
repo lending market?
off-balance-sheet entities? and
abuses of over-the-counter
derivatives were hidden from view
who Who WHO?The crisis was avoidable
disinformation ops on behalf of
international finance capitalism
usuriocracylike giving bunk directions to an
elderly blind touristmass protest movements
errupt
responding to crime wave
with peaceful alternatives, some
riots and open revolts bloom12’ By the end of 11’
Germany was estimated to have
made more than €9 billion
out of the crisis
investors flocked like vultures to safer
but near zero interest rate German
federal gov. bonds, binds, bundles, bunds, punds12’ July, the
Netherlands Austria
Finland benefit from
zero or negative interest rates
may the reader pause for reflectionthe debt crisis crime wave forced
5 out of 17 Eurozone countries
to seek help from other nations
by Dec. 12’
and no such thing as public opinion16 Dec. 2010
the Euro Council agreed
a two line cocaine fuelled amendment to the
EU Lisbon Treaty to allow a
permanent bail-out
mechanism to be established
by political chicanerythe Euro Stability Mechanism (ESM)
is a permanent rescue funding
programme to suck seed
the temporary Euro’ Financial
Stability Facility
and the Euro’ Financial Stabilisation Mechanism
July 12’but postponed… until
after the Federal Constitutional Court
of Germany had confirmed
legality of the
measures 12 Sept’ 2012
dragons snort rolling in pools of gold coinLondon excluded from
future financial regulations
including proposed EU financial
transaction tax
and crime minster Cameron juggles
his nukes
who tried to buy peace with money?26 countries had agreed to the plan
leaving U.K as only
country not willing
to join.in case of economic shocks
policy makers try to improve
competitiveness
by depreciating the currency
as currently in Iceland
which beat-off the biggest financial
crisis in economic history13’ China, India, and Iran
with sluggish growth
some drone attacks and
terrorism have NOT entered
recessionhowever eurozone countries
cannot devalue their
currency
as Silvio Gessel and C. H. Douglas
and Ez might suggestthis may nip usury in the bud
and present a new solution to
boom bust cycles
derivatives and crimes against nature
crimes against humanity“A system which becomes in practice merely another hidden and irresponsible tyranny is no better than any other gang of instigators to theft and oppression—Ez, the proof of the pudding. 1937.
–Steven James Pratt (Fly Agaric 23) 25-28 May 2013.
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Quotes from Ezra Pound Guide To Kulchur
I am currently reading Ez’s guide again and find it very stimulating with great ball of genius striking in the direction of the 2008-2013 global recession, music, painting, sculture and poetry. –Steve fly
Full text at Scribd.
Quotes from…
EZRA
POUND
GUIDE
TO
KULCHUR“To put it another way: it does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order, and quite unlikely to be very “new” in themselves however fresh or stale to the participant.”
“I suggest that finer and future critics of art will be able to tell from the quality of a painting the degree of tolerance or intolerance of usury extant in the age and milieu that produced it… That perhaps is the first clue the reader has had that these are notes for a totalitarian treatise and that I am in fact considering the New Learning or the New Paideuma… not simply abridging extant encyclopedias or condensing two dozen more detailed volumes… May I suggest (not to prove anything, but perhaps to open the reader’s thought) that I have a certain real knowledge which wd. enable me to tell a Goya from a Velasquez, a Velasquez from an Ambrogio Praedis, a Praedis from an Ingres or a Moreau…”
“Ideogram is essential to the exposition of certain kinds of thought. Greek philosophy was mostly a mere splitting, an impoverishment of understanding, though it ultimately led to the development of particular sciences. Socrates a distinguished gas-bag in comparison with Confucius and Mencius… At any rate, I need ideogram. I mean I need it for my own job…”
“Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman It gnaweth the thread in the loom None learneth to weave gold in her pattern; Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered Emerald findeth no Memling… Usura slayeth the child in the womb”
“Dante uses che sanno in his passage on Aristotle in limbo. He uses intendendo for the angels moving the third heaven… Our Teutonic friend, what’s his name (Vossler is it?), talks about schwankenden Terminologie des Cavalcanti’s. I believe because he hasn’t examined it. Till proof to the contrary overwhelms me, I shall hold that our mediaevals took much more care of their terms than the greeks of the decadence.”
“This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford a university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.”
http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Guide_to_Kulchur
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Solar flares and freaky weather (Oaklahoma Tornado?)
It just struck me that maybe the recent solar flare activity might be partially responsible for the freak weather conditions, and tornados in particular.
What are the connections, if any, between solar flares and weather on earth. Is there any evidence to suggest that in the future, rather than putting all the efforts into worrying about radio and communications interfearence on earth after a large solar flare, having the foresight to warm or prepare for freak weather, tornados and wind storms in particular?
Maybe it was Solar Flare M3.2 of May 17th 2013?
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Finnegans Wake in the Bronx by John J. Healey (Huffington Post)
Finnegans Wake in the Bronx
Posted: 05/15/2013 7:00 pm
“I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face: it was so near to me, and her arms were round me, and she sang to me.” George Eliot from Daniel Deronda
In our Highbridge apartment in the Bronx there were hardly any bookshelves to speak of. My father liked to read but I don’t ever recall him lost between the pages of anything more complicated or literary than the novels of John O’Hara. My older brothers, to the best of my knowledge, only read what they were assigned in school. My sister, closest to me in age and who now reads more than all of us put together, was a good Catholic girl devoted to Nancy Drew. My early tastes were wed to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Robinson Crusoe and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. My father was a Congressman and these books were sent to me by his secretary in Washington from the Library of Congress, and the act of reading has been something special ever since.
But one of the few books in our library, if you could call it that, a line of volumes unable to fill a lone shelf in the living room partly hidden behind an easy chair, was a first American edition of Finnegans Wake published by Viking in 1945. I remember looking at it out of curiosity, knowing nothing at all about Joyce, when I was eight or nine-years-old. It stood out from the other books adorned with more romantic covers and titles. And I remember leafing through it, lying on the floor, and finding it absolutely nonsensical.A mystery I’ve never been able to solve is how did it get there? Who bought it? Who might possibly have tried to read it in that household? The only person I can think of is my mother. She had gone to college in an era when not all that many women did. But I knew nothing then, and to this day know nothing about her literary tastes.
In my adolescence and early twenties I used the Wake as a prop, often successfully, with which to impress people. It was only later, as a challenge to myself, living up in the mountains south of Granada, Spain that I forced myself to get through it with the help of auxiliary texts. I have never regretted it. It is still my opinion that the last pages of Finnegans Wake are among the most beautiful ever written in the English language.
It took seventeen years to finish, has a circular form – the last sentence is continued by the first – and it employs a repetitive, Giambatista Vico inspired, four-stages-of-history notion. Many believe it was written to be read aloud. Joyce spoke seven languages and had a working knowledge of eleven more, all of which he employed to create pun-compacted words whose manifest meanings are often only clear thanks to a phonetic similarity to their closest English equivalents.Joyce once described Ulysses as his book of the day and Finnegans Wake his book of the night, written in ‘dream-speak.’ It is for this reason that much of it is, frankly, and famously, unintelligible. But in a gratifying concession to linearity, its language does become somewhat clearer towards its ‘end.’ As it wakes up, regaining consciousness, repression exerts its editorial function and the language pulls itself together. As in Ulysses, it is the book’s main female protagonist, in this case Anna Livia Plurabelle, who brings the tale to its conclusion, its ‘fin-again’, before it begins anew.
Did my mother buy this book? Perhaps someone gave it to her as a gift? It was not inscribed until I put my own name in it when I turned twenty. It is one of the few objects from my childhood I’ve managed to keep. I suppose ascribing its presence in the Bronx to my mother has been part of an idiosyncratic campaign to create the sort of parent I wish to remember having. It’s as if, being the youngest and oddest one in my family, and given her early demise with so few real memories of her, I have tried retrospectively to fashion an ally.
Like all of the characters in Finnegans Wake Anna undergoes many transformations. In the magisterial final pages she becomes the River Liffey that runs through Dublin just before it empties into the Irish Sea. The four stage cycle in play here is that of rivers in general which start in the highlands, flow down and out to sea where they mix with the ocean’s salt, and then rise up as mist into clouds that are blown back over the land where the moisture condenses and falls as rain seeping into the earth again to make its way back to the river’s source. Anna speaks in a tone of regret, a tone of remorse and nostalgia, mourning the past, an Irish tone if ever there was one. But it is a most appropriate tone well paired to a beautiful definition once annunciated by the late Joseph Campbell:‘Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending; death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.’
This also brings to mind the haunting words spoken in the Hebrew service when sitting Shiva: “A final separation awaits every relationship, no matter how tender. Someday we shall have to drop every object to which our hands now cling.”
Ergo, ‘Live Life and be Merry’…Follow John J. Healey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jjhealey3
DEEP SCRATCH 