Hearty Doomish greetings go out to Ian M, his friends in and around UBC's comp sci department and nerds everywhere (hi Admin!)  This is your day

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Alas at some point along the way Ian's old man severely lost his way and became … an Arts nerd?

There was the time back on June 16, 2004 when the Chronicle-Herald picked up a stale wire story and I awoke to find …

"Orlando Bloom Named World's Sexiest Actor"

emblazoned all the way across page E1 of my breakfast newspaper.  I couldn't stop laughing for a week.

That was followed by a year and a half painstakingly constructing a Spenserian sestina to demonstrate the application to D-chiro-inositol of a radical new strategy for cyclitol specification, but for today perhaps it will be just as well if I limit the fun and games to a pair of ghazals inspired by one of the Gray Code examples in Knuth.  They're actually two of the draft sections for a long sequence of celebrations of our neighbourhood catch basins I've been working on titled Empire of Drains.

            Pawns

Be my sword you fat French spade, mucking to the prize.
Glow harder, swifter, smaller, oh spark struck in my father's eyes.

I found the willow wands unasked but they'll look nice
on the mantle, fire crackling, skirts rustling; tinkling of father's ice.

Outside, together, raise the picnic table, praise the cross.
How warm it is to shelter and forgather at my father's house.

Who wants to carry a caldron, mince mushrooms, memorize a curse?
Not I, a diamond scepter let me bear on father's horse.

But maybe it's for me when others judge the case.
If I could spell, would it disturb my father's ease?

Let me bear tankards while the children all carouse.
I see his club, there's no one in this awful house.

Locked fast inside the cockpit; see, this finger knows
I need to scream and dive upon my father's house.

Awake pentacle and float above my cloud. You'll rise
to when you rain like shekels, dancing in my father's eyes.

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            More Pawns

Despite the love no resting in my mother's arms.
I drained that cup for nation (Mother's) harm.

Burn this stick, I'll show you what I am.
Dentistry accorded with my mother's aims.

Sing out, out! It won't contain, this room.
Dance seven-times-seventy-times around my mother's home.

Ring-scores on glass sparkle in the gloom.
Last night I dreamed of mother, home.

Let them perceive a black sizzling when we come.
And what's for this night's supper mother, ham?

They came for singing, but I'll entertain the dome.
Tap wands, pull bunnies till my mother come.

Break in, the gate, I need to dig that loam.
The brush awaits let burn my mother's umb.

Smart toilet – what coin would operate, what alms?
Brush off this straw, then set me in my mother's arms.

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John Wise McLeod

… While these advantages are measured in milliseconds rather than minutes, both high-frequency trading and flash orders enable certain investors to chisel a profit between bid and offer — the same abuse of inside market information and access that the S.E.C. tried to eliminate four decades ago. Now, traders have simply found different ways to tilt the playing field, … – David Silver, a former senior staff lawyer at the SEC, NYT¹

Next week I’m workshopping "Aleynikov Blues" at Halifax’s Dublin St. Poetry Club.  The above should help my colleagues figure out what I’m talking about.

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Under the glaze of transient empire
      earth goes on as before
      colouring summer,
sea, sky a concordant azure.
(90)

Aiken Drum. by Peter Sanger, Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2006.

Sanger’s sixth poetry collection obviously required, for him, thousands of hours of silence.  The lines move slowly and many of the words were unfamiliar, like bent knives or Ike’s hand-made spokeshaves that Alice’s Dave took back to Montreal over the weekend.

It felt weird just touching this book.  Fifty years from now you’d need a pile of documentation and white cotton gloves just to handle it.  The little presses capable of turning out such an object are dying in the present economic downturn while our politicians cheer on the process.

…
and still driving books to market

takes a stick to prod and a string
tied fast to the shank of each colophon.
(46)

The heart of the collection is a sequence that explores the life of a man who may or may not have been Moon, anti-hero of "the first Canadian best-seller." (125) This character blows through New Brunswick like a trickster god, ruffling the people but not overturning them.

The rest of the poems mostly celebrate rootedness.  I think Sanger settled down not too far from Great Village.  It’s perhaps appropriate that somebody would.

We’ve almost built
this room of light

unanchored for now,
adrift and too new

for us to be sure
where even our

pictures have to be
hung. …
(41)

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      What                Duhigg’s
                     chart
                 was telling us
          is                           that Serge’s
                                                         tarball
                                   (inadvertently)
                             threatened
             to illuminate                the
                                                                         churning
                                                                high-
                                                frequency
                            flash trading
             colocated                                          liquidity
                             providers      stocking
                                                            exchanges
                                                                                    with
nanopiraña
                nibbling
                           bips
                                  from naked
                                                  thighs
                                                            of pensioners
                           turning
     microseconds                  of   flesh
                         into
                                                                   bonus
                                                                                 cheques
which is Why
F.B.I.
must Deploy
in July
in Defence
of Corrupt
regimes.

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Congratulations, twist, on the occasion of Doom’s 3rd anniversary.  I’ve been here off and on since almost the beginning, and hope to hang around on the sidebar and with the occasional (mostly non-opinionated) post for a long time to come.

We and our housing blogger colleagues have had some luck recently playing at being minor Prophets of Housing Doom, but our efforts are nothing in comparison to earlier masters like the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973).  In 1967 he wrote one masterpiece titled "City Without Walls" [1] that reads more clearly now than it ever did 42 years ago:

…

‘A key to the street each convict has,
but the Asphalt Lands are lawless marches
where gangs clash and cops turn
robber-barons: reckless he
who walks after dark in that wilderness.

…

‘The week-end comes that once was holy,
free still, but a feast no longer,
just time out, idiorhythmic,
when no one cares what his neighbor does:
now newsprint and network are needed most.

‘What they view may be vulgar rubbish,
what they listen to whitless noise,
but it gives shelter, …

…

‘Quite soon computers may expel from the world
all but the top intelligent few,
the egos they leisure be left to dig
value and virtue from an invisible realm
of hobbies, sex, consumption, vague

‘tussles with ghosts. Against Whom
shall the Sons band to rebel there,
where Troll-Father, Tusked-Mother,
are dream-monsters like dinosaurs
with a built-in obsolescence?

…

‘if all has gone phut in the future we paint,
where, vast and vacant, venomous areas
surround the small sporadic patches
of fen or forest that give food and shelter,
such home as they have, to a human remnant,

’stunted in stature, strangely deformed,
numbering by fives, with no zero,
worshipping a ju-ju General Mo,
in groups ruled by grandmothers,
…

…

‘Still monied, immune, stands Megalopolis:
happy he who hopes for better,
what awaits Her may well be worse. . . .’

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A German saps our new ontology;
drink deep the draught that Google sends–
the stress tests flood the banks with clarity.

Bonds of debt unfold to equity.
A pensioned worker sees his pension end.
The German saps a new car’s warranty.

Sailors patrol, defending Liberty
of dark Tibris and
Whiskey floods the banks with clarity.

Red ink stained ad starved print fraternity
warns, for every Citizen
a network saps their news until it’s free.

What value Jim’s effective guaranty
when treasuries lie farther up the chain
and stress tests flood the banks with clarity.

One drunk fell down December ‘91,
leaving his buddy staring at the ground;
a German saps our new ontology,
the stress tests flood the banks with clarity.

Wow!  it was more than a year ago on Explosion Day that Housing Doom explored some weird impact that Rhonda Byrne’s "The Secret" was having on a group of stressed-out  AZ Realtors.  Well, yesterday a fresh spring dandelion called Prosperity Radio abused YouTube’s notification system to send a couple of e-mails right past Doom Admin’s ordinarily rock solid anti-spam system.  Gonna be a long day at YouTube tech support …

This is classic Americana.  The New Thought Movement came out of Emerson, the early days of the Unitarian Church and a whole lot of other stuff generally rooted in that 19th Transcendentalist wave that hit Concord MA and caused a whole lot of pretty good literature you probably had inflicted on you in High School if you’re old enough to be pre-Politically Correct.  Your Grandad would have known it as The Power of Positive Thinking.  More recently, important parts of New Thought ended up under the aegis of Emotional Intelligence (aka "EQ").  I suspect that at the root of this phenomenon is an important issue in the theory of aesthetics that says something critical about ontology.

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… mmmmmm Seafood!  Marcy and the gang at Versus Plus have a new comedy lyric that really nails the Zeitgeist. UPDATE: Doomers who want to here more new classic hits from The Great Recession (including another of Marcy’s) can check out this front page story from the Feb 6th WSJ.[1]

AND NOW, A WORD FROM THE ECONOMY HERSELF

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… Heads turned as the alarmed captain looked on in stunned disbelief. Bent on vengeance, the two lobsters scuttled swiftly after Madoff. They reached his table in an instant, and Silverman went for his ankle. Moscowitz, summoning the strength of a madman, leaped from the floor and with one giant pincer took firm hold of Madoff’s nose. Screaming with pain, the gray-haired con artist hopped from the chair as Silverman strangled his instep with both claws. Patrons could not believe their eyes as they recognized Madoff, and began to cheer the lobsters. [1]

Somebody’d better tell Woody before it’s too late.  You never put tomatoes in Lobster Stock.[2]  Anyway, this request goes out to Doomer V and #21.

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     in Sunday’s wet snow
          Freedom for … last time singing
     one — two & —

I promise.

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