a stomach for schlegel

Fred Schlegel, 1772-1829
Excerpts from the literary aphorisms of Friederich von Schlegel

• One must drill the board where it is the thickest
• In poetry, too, all that is whole might be only half-done, and yet all that is half-done might actually be a whole
• A classical work doesn’t ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it
• Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man; so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object of art
• In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.
• A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
• …the most necessary: for whenever we do not restrain ourselves, the world will restrain us; and thus we will become its slave. The highest: for we can restrain ourselves only in those points when we have infinite power, in self-creation and self-destruction.
• Not art and works of art make an artist, but sense and enthusiasm and instinct.
• Good drama must be drastic
• The historian is a prophet looking backwards
• Every concept of God is idle talk. But the idea of the Godhead is the idea of ideas.

the pelican parade

This is something Todd Brozman and I co-wrote (he wrote most all of it) way back in January of 2004 on my typewriter in the house on Tennessee Street. I found this in a stack of papers while moving things around at my parents' house. Click on it to make it readable.

A Short History of Mario Linkofsky and the Nintendo Power Poets

Mario Linkofsky (christened Philip Greenhorn) formed the one-man poetry collective, the Nintendo Power Poets, after he underwent a profound hypnosis prompted by the opening strains of the Legend of Zelda musical theme. He probably would have lived out a normative video-game playing childhood had his father not confiscated the family NES after witnessing the alarming behavioral impact the games had upon his children.

"Father was convinced Nintendo was invented by the Japanese to control our minds," Linkosfky later wrote in a letter to his sister. "He was wrong, of course. But only that it was my soul, not my mind, that I surrendered."

Linkofsky's first literary efforts consisted of an album of folk songs protesting the totalitarian regime of Gannondorf, but audiences at coffeeshops and talent shows dismissed him as a novelty act. It wasn't until Linkofsky set aside the lute and turned all the way to verse before he received any recognition.

His first and only success came in a chapbook he called, "Hyrulian Sonnets," which were essentially Homeric Hymns addressed to Zelda in the form of Italian sonnets. Among the most popular was the 1999 poem, "You rule, Hyrule."

I wonder today with a youthful pain
What lay beyond the purple waterfall
The allure of lost landscapes, monsters and all
No lyrical tribute can contain

Let me go back to Hyrule once again
Where warp whistles whisk me away with their call
To lost lakes, sylvan glades and dungeon halls
All the fair lands under Zelda's reign

Oh pixilated princess, I will save you
I'll set sail in a raft across the ocean
On a quest for Triforce; a search for truth
I'll swing my sword and swig healing potion
climb Death Mountain just to enjoy the view
while relishing my Hyrulian youth

Unfortunately for the Power Poets and the entire Nintendo Lit subculture, Linkofsky's later efforts were less evocative, with a series of tone-poems entitled "Odes to Dodongo" bordering on the embarrassing. By the publication of his only 2002 novella, "A Wrong Turn on Rainbow Road," his unabashed glorification of Don Flamingo as masculine idyll had besmirched his reputation, and he died rupeeless in a Parisian prison under the name Sebastian Melmouth.

Karl Heinz wärmst Sie von innen auf

-Smell is the sense most strongly associated with memory
-Each year in Germany, tea drinkers form a line the morning Karl Heinz hits the stores
-Nothing, not even the autumn rain, can wipe the mirthful expression from Karl Heinz' face

family

Some new portraits I drew yesterday with aforementioned art kit.
child
mother
father

February brews us up a winner

While brainstorming about how to create a cereal with the same kind of glow as Stephen's furnace, I brought into existence this little monster, based on the patterns in the carpet. Clear derivations of Van Gogh are present. Glowing chernobyl puffs are yet to hit the streets. Thank you Aunt Margaret for the art set!

cherubs

www.diamantopoulos.ch

-and my favorite postcard company in the world-

www.edgar.de

because we're young

Tonight while discussing the pending revolution with caligula jones, the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner-authored manifesto of Expressionist group die Bruecke (the bridge) came to mind. It is, in the original:

"Mit dem Glauben an Entwicklung, an eine neue Generation der Schaffenden wie der Genießenden rufen wir alle Jugend zusammen, und als Jugend, die die Zukunft trägt, wollen wir und Arm- und Lebensfreiheit verschaffen gegenüber den wohlangesessenen älteren Kräften. Jeder gehört zu uns, der unmittelbar und unverfälscht das wiedergibt, was ihn zum Schaffen drängt."

Which means:

"With the belief in evolution, in a new generation of creators and art lovers, we call on all youth, and as youth, which carries the future, we want to gain freedom of movement and life against the well-entrenched older forces. Everyone who renders what impels him to create directly and without adulteration is one of us."

Kirchner wrote this in 1906.

good bye, turtle

The Campanile Valley specifically the dance pavillion is a place we used to joke was the ancestral home of the trolls.

The valley is also home to a host of many journeys I only undertook through reading -- Hessel's walks through Berlin, Arturo Bandini having nowhere to go after getting his clothes thrown out the window.

Today I sat under the willow trees of Potter Lake and looked at the Campanile, which in the water wavered like a snake under the spell of its charmer. I remembered climbing it the day Andrew "andmoreagain" Morgan rented the thing out to get a custom recording of the bell player. AC sneaked in a backpack of beer and I poked my head out the top and it seemed like I was caught in a terrible windstorm. AC looked out the window grate and shouted to a kid, "I AM THE ELF OF THE TOWER."

But that was in 2003. Today I sat there and drank a cola from Arby's, and as I was taking my sunglasses off a kid who had been searching for turtles with his father ran by yelling "Bye, Bye, Turtle!"

I listened to him laugh and watched him run and sincerely hoped he wouldn't get eaten by the trolls

The Ruins of Legoland

Wade sent me the link to this photo taken in 1990 (post-reunification) that he saw at the Story of Berlin museum. The story was that 2 Americans were playing frisbee by the wall and the disc went over. In order to retrieve the frisbee, they poked their heads through a hole in the wall and asked the soldiers to throw it back. They then threw it back directly through the hole in the wall.

While I'm at it, I'll go ahead and post this picture of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche, made out of legos.

post-Christmas in Joplin, MO

gangster poetry

Went to the Joplin history musem today to pick up a book and wound up poking around for a while. There was a neat display on spook light, the ghostly glow emanating from what is thought to be the spirit of a Confederate officer looking for his head. Apparently the bastard was so big and mean they executed him by cannon instead of the standard firing squad.

The most striking display, however, were the photos and timeline of Bonnie & Clyde, who shot and killed a detective while hiding out in Joplin. Also included was a poem by Bonnie Parker entitled "Outlaws." For all I know this poem is widely known, but it struck me so much I copied it down on the back of one of the color-me-in Diplodicus papers near the musuem's exit.

Rather than type it all out I'll post the poem as I saw it in the museum.

winter in midtown

death by crossbow

While discussing the alarming murder rate in KCMO tonight at Chez Charlie's with Red I decided I was going to have someone shoot me through the heart with a crossbow bolt at 11:59:59 on New Year's Eve so that I will be the last official homicide of the year, and because the nature of my death will be so bizarre in comparison to the hundred-odd shootings, 10 stabbings, 5 bludgeonings and several unknowns the story will make the papers nationwide so everyone will be tuned in and sympathetic about the violence taking place in our fair metro area and possibly these sympathetic readers and government leaders will even turn to brainstorming about how to make things better, because the signs they're putting up along Troost don't seem to be helping much.

welcome to this world

The vital statistics:

Baby-Galerie
Lucas Wetzel (Junge)

Geburtstag: 02.11.2005
Geburtszeit: 08:48
Geburtsgewicht: 3010g
Größe: 47cm

Apparently I am a newborn babe in the town of Freiburg, just outside of the Black Forest.

I wrote my friend Till a message saying "Guck mal, ich bin geboren" (look here, I am born). His reply: Na denn...WILKOMMEN AUF DIESER WELT!!!!!!!!

vision from the wilderness

Jennifer looks like a sorceress in this picture, which she took through the window of a small bird observatory in the middle of the Baker Wetlands.

more photos and stuff on her site.