Category: Goby’s Journal

Goby’s Journal: Interview with Toby Altman from 2011

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In 2011, I wrote a chapbook, self-published (if you can call Kinkos generated pages, “published”); I called it, Overriding Genesis– from the Hebrew text of the 1st creation story in the book of Genesis.

In transcribing pages from the journal, I found a reference to this interview–which I’d totally forgotten, from Damask Press, on the occasion of their publishing pages from a longer poem, Chronos Chronic Kairos, as a chapbook. Damask Interviews: Jacob Russell. This was published on September 16, 2011… the day before the first day of Occupy Wall Street.

The text of the interview following the break Continue reading “Goby’s Journal: Interview with Toby Altman from 2011” →

Goby’s Journal, July 13, 2015

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Cat on my desk beside me, head on my arm. Somethin been working on my mind… just under the surface. Can feel the ripples but don’t know what kinda fish is stirring the waters.
Finished a new piece–first this month.

Making art is something that just happens. It’s all the ways the making and then what’s been made is connected to the rest of the human world that’s difficult and confusing and dangerous. And it is connected. Doesn’t come from within like from a well apart from everything else… the well itself, the waters you draw from it, are fed by countless springs, and it won’t do just to let the pieces sit there. Artists avoid dealing with that, or rather, think that they’re dealing with it by entering the market game, the selling and promoting and galleries and all that shit, even to believing that’s how you know you’re doing it right–even though they say something else. Just about how to make a living, they say, pretending that they haven’t sold themselves to the machine, the fucking empire of money and death just by accepting the idea that that’s what you have to do.

But that’s not what’s been on my mind. Or only a piece of it. I light incense. I have really good incense. I put a piece of window screen over a jar with a candle, and put some pieces on the screen over the flame. Because it involves my body, my senses–without thinking about it. The fragrance. The candle light flickering on the wall and ceiling.

But those fish, or whatever they are… swirls on the surface of the pond. It’s time to sleep. To take this up in dreams.

Personal note: Goby’s Journal

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It’s difficult for me to work at more than one thing at a time. 2007-2011: poetry. 2012 to end of June, making art. This last phase isn’t over, but low energy from gastritis—no new work since end of June. Distressing.

So now I’m reading 8 hours a day.

This made college difficult, with its 4 and 5 different subjects to study. HS not so much, cause I mostly didn’t need to study. Could coast off my own reading. If you don’t fit the cookie cutter pattern in school, you learn to assert your own way or perish. I would never have made it even to a B.A. today. Too expensive. Managed to get a decent education while it was still possible—not being rich.
This is so … I don’t know the word. Young people coming up are caught in this horrid capitalist net–privatizing their very souls. I have tremendous admiration for those who manage to make space for themselves, and who keep learning any way they can. No wonder fantasy fiction is so popular. The worlds described in books like His Dark Materials, come closer to evoking reality–that is, describe the psychic/affective conditions that shape our lives–connect the dots of this otherwise fragmented disorienting hologram we live in more powerfully, on a gut level, than anything in conventional fiction.

Breakfast:
2 slices multi-grain toast, buttered w. honey
small bowl of applesauce
8 oz OJ
1 cup coffee

Not likely to have much more rest of the day.

This is not a diet. I have no appetite. Above, enough to make me feel full.

Important correction to 1st Printing of Ari Figue’s Cat

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MIssing epitaph! First printing of Ari FIgue’s Cat. Head of chap. 41, A Game of Pool, should be a quote from Plato’s Gorgias:
“…he who does injustice, the unjust man, is utterly wretched.”
Polus is incredulous, when Socrates tells him that the tyrant, who wields power freely and takes what he wants–that his life is wretched.
Ari Figue tells a story — seems he met Socrates in a bar in Overbrook (in the guise of Rufus). In the story, they play a game of pool as they consider the merit of this claim.
There are other errors (there always are)–but this one bothers me more. I think it’s important to the content.

Sleepwalkers of the American Hologram

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There are far far too many people–of the people who count–who don’t feel that uncomfortable or oppressed–overworked and in debt though they may be (debt, after all, is American Wealth… until you max the last credit card, you got cash, and cash what matters)–who don’t see, want to see, refuse to see, those who are clinging to the edge, or already long in free fall–or worse, see the plight of those unfortunates as their saving grace, as deserving what they get, as threats to their own precarious, delusional security, when the reality is, every one of those unfortunates got hold the heel or pant leg of the oblivious We Okay Don’t Rock this Leaky Boat majority… if it is a majority, which you might think by walking down Walnut in Center City on any weekday, or 2nd Street after dark on a weekend, or watching the traffic jam up crossing Ben Franklin –all those happy people heading down the shore on a Friday evening.

The late Joe Bageant was right. Called it the American Hologram. Where those people–the ones who count–I mean, the one’s we supposed to believe are the Real America–where they live. In that bubble.
I’m not talkin the filthy rich, the 1%, the .001%. They think they count. And for now, as long as the Bubble People believe them, they do. Naw, don’t mean them. I mean those in the Bubble. The Oligarchs–the filthy rich corporate assholes who think they are in control–they know that. Why they work so hard to control the press, to jack up and maintain the hysterical addiction to consumption, they work them to exhaustion and entertain them to near brain death. Cause they have this righteous fear, maybe some even glimpsing the truth–that no one is in control. It’s all on mindless auto-pilot. They jerk on the levers and pull the switches and the lights flash on and off–but it’s all a show. The machine is self-perpetuating, self-repairing…. as long as those people who it really
depends on, the one’s who actually make everything work, even while the assholes suck the rewards of their labor out of their pockets and bank accounts their paychecks.

Why the political servants of the assholes talk about ‘saving the middle class,’ even while they don’t give a flying fuck about saving the middle class, except that’s the only way they think they can keep the Big Machine running. The Middle Class are that machines Soylent Green.

No election is going to change that. Elections are the Ambien of the Sleepwalker in the American Hologram. There is no democracy. There is only this endlessly repeated burlesque show. Those who have been pushed outside the bubble, who have been refused entrance, who have fallen though the cracks–consciousness at least is theirs, and with them–not in any damn President, lies the hope that a great awakening may yet come.
May it happen. May it happen soon. May all those who are not themselves asleep, work to make it so. And if we are outside the bubble–may we resist with all the power of truth, the temptation of
Assimilation. It is our very exile that is our salvation

Nature’s Mirror

I see these wonderful patterns in the pavement when I walk down the street–where the pavement is brocken. I’ve been doing art from this, from what I see, and what happens in my visual mind between seeing and rendering those patterns in ink or colors. Last night I brought some of these pieces to the book launch for my novel, Ari Figue’s Cat. A man came in early, no one else there. All he could see in the paintings were — human faces. Oh–there’s a nose! There’s the eye!
I don’t own anyone’s take on what they see in my art, so went along with him… but after a while, it got kinda anoying. When the fuck, I was thinking–are we going to stop seeing our own reflecdtion in everything? Maybe nature’s mirror isn’t there to reflect our own faces–or how we want to see them–but to reflect back at us–that we are of what we see–from what we see, and in seeing only the face that exists outside of those natural patterns, we are blind even to seeing our own truest image.

From Whitman to Ferlingetti, a word to the Defenders of the Indefensible

When an artist’s ‘flaws’ are more than personal, but go to the very heart of the social and political miliue that we support with every penny we spend, we get no pass to excuse the person because of “the times,” or because their faults are endemic to the system. Doing so is but a way to excuse ourselves from our own complicity, and from making action to overthrow and replace this racist, misogistist empire of money and death, the centerpiece of our lives and our art.

A response to CA Conrad’s Harriet Essay on Whitman

CA Conrad wrote an important essay on Harriet. One that no one should ignore, or dismiss, or shy away from because it offends. It has pushed my own thinking on art, poetry, revolution, and I would ask that anyone reading this… take a deep breath, step back, and let it work on you—in the context of our received notions of where we have come from.

I have always thought that the strongest works of the imagination were more and other than the intentions of their makers, or of the interpretative constraints of their times. I haven’t changed those beliefs. But Conrad’s challenge is not about that. Defenses of Whitman—that he was a man of his times, that he wrote equally strong passages sympathetic to slaves (if not of native peoples)—are beside the point. What I heard in his essay was an echo of something that has been on my mind for some time.

We want to ignore, or explain away, the complicity of our cultural heritage—I mean, white, Euro-American art, poetry, music, theater, how it has served, directly and indirectly, the Masters of our history. And their wars, their slave holding, their misogyny—kings and empire, and after, the economic empires of colonizing capitalism.

It isn’t enough … or maybe, it’s not yet time, to save what has been passed down, what we (as artists… of all forms), are meant to follow, to renew, to challenge even as we stand on the shoulders of those who we must acknowledge—that we are their heirs. But what, and how much, of what they have left us?

The analogy that comes to mind… the German children and grandchildren of the Nazis. We are the children and grandchildren—and more than that, the brothers and sisters of genocide, of this whole monstrous empire of money and death, and what we have been given—our aesthetic heritage– to build on—is infected beyond our… if not, of future generations… ability to purge and cleanse.

We cannot cannot cannot build a new world, and nothing less will do if we as a species—if life on this planet is to survive– than to build a new world, and we cannot do that but on the ashes and ruins of the old.

This is Conrad’s hard truth.

There may come a time when we will be able to look back, read Whitman for what even he had no inkling of what was there, to find and celebrate again that lightning of imaginative truth, the light of which illuminates the truth neither person nor historical time were able to see. I do not despair of the power of imagination—that whatever come forth from that sublime flash, will endure, and be worthy of our appreciation generation to generation. Whitman, too.

But we are not in that place where we can rescue what flashed through him—not before we are ready to confront the truth of the contamination of Empire and the myth of race and the destiny of State.

I stand with you, Conrad. For your courage, and your truth.

And hope for the day, when we have remade this world—when we will again be able to recite Whitman… and all our failed poets, artists… as we may be remembered… for all our failings.

An artist’s manifesto

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Up from the basement studio–preparing a block for a woodcut, and began a painting that will be 20 in my Pavement series. I may do this to the end of my days. I see years of possibilities in this–and the metaphor of broken foundations is exactly where my head has been. Who knows what may grow out of the cracks–what we can build from the rubble.
All our high culture (especially “high culture”)–white Euro-American, grew in the service of kingship, empire, and from there–slavery, war, capitalist economic colonialism and expansion to the end of life on the planet. What is there to do, but renounce it–all of it. Build a new world from the ruins.