Sunday, October 29, 2017

Are you privy?



Among the rights an American will assert is the right to privacy. We don’t cotton to police putting LoJacks on our or others' car undercarriages - at least not without a warrant. You can't come in my apartment or house without my invitation or a warrant. You can't film me in my boudoir unbeknownst, and so on. It's not exactly spelled in the Constitution, but the right to privacy is somewhere enfolded in the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But digital technology and the Web as a channel has upturned the cart. To Be Cont. - Jack Vaughan

Friday, October 27, 2017

Some small poems






















UPDATED OCCASSIONALLY - Jack Vaughan 

----

Strange Edison Electrical Illumination

At about the age of 10, Edison goes to the creek with young friend George Lockwood, who disappears in the eddies to drown. Edison observes the creek water for a long time, maybe rapt by the dying Lockwood’s breath bubbles. At last, after the long wait for Lockwood to surface, Edison finally goes home to dinner and to bed without telling anyone about the event. Meanwhile, a party searches for Lockwood – eventually they come to hear Edison’s story of his drowning.

Self-taught polymath, 
noted as a man of amazing concentration. 
He could look intently at what was there
and was able to uncover deep first principles 
as he tinkered with pieces of 
metal, carbon, vulcanite, lamp black 
and assorted materials.
More than that, 
he had a gift for 
imaginative re-application of principles 
to conjure new products, 
and improve on existing successes. 
This was all to result from 
long nights and extended work stints.

Edison’s 1st patent was for 
an electro-chemical vote recorder. 
But fast voting was not a ‘must-have.’ 
It failed in the market.
So, he resolved to focus efforts 
only on things that people wanted to use.  
For there is no technology without useful case.  -2021

https://tinyurl.com/2p95tnyt  Source  matter secondary

~~~~~~~~~~~
St Josephs Day 2022

I was born under a nuclear cloud
When Korea flashed n napalm bombed

The cloud moved over the hill
without some of us

without the Rosenbergs
without the Rockefellers
without the Shah
without Momar

The cloud stewed
n slithered n grew
and now alight n alack
the cloud comes back.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The girl in my garden
has grey fractious hair

Silver
radiation
signaling. 
                          -Summer 2021

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Uneven world

Uneven the distribution of pork
Uneven the path of dogfood
Uneven the rebirth of commerce
Uneven the availability of vaccines.
                         -Nov 26 2021

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2018

How suddenly fragile the world it was when i was a lad and nukes first deployed
but what fun to dream in Wisconsin snow globe when the blizzard closed the school


~~~~~~~~~~~

Sweet Sunny South Song

I dreamed I was ported
in a teletime stream
to the sweet sunny south
i did ride

where the past
was sage and mint on the left
and juleps and beer
on the right

how glad jack was
to just be back where
the magnolias blossom
again

until i found the rights of
some voters
tramped like grapes in
the devil's den.

--
Sept 11


Sirens planes birds 
sound different today. 
But the blue sky 
almost the same.

---


Talking with Mark

I was talking with Mark
when we were watching football
a way to sit things out since
black night was falling
on his time here above the ground

Talking with Mark
about the horses
the barrel races on the farm
the boss's wife's horse
the fast beautiful horses of summer

A memory so distinctly
in motion.


---


Milkweed Bistro Morning

She plays with her hair
Like you may not be there
on the sidewalk
on a chair
at the Bistro on the street.

Lone bird
Singing
It's blues

As summer
Gets hotter - 
The conversation
Is more
Choice

And big jets
Of endless commerce
Scarf up what's left
of the sky.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


hologram experiment

i lay awake in summer heat
tossing with the city sounds

wall flowers on the wall they vamp
in a leafy shadow dance

narcotic smoke seeps from the floor
tempests vortex in the air*

in cold sweat in secret writs
they lollygag and linger there.


*dylan: 'the tempests struggle in the air'
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



I'm a bygone day
cant go to the hardware
and  keep from crying
but I go anyway.

!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~!

I hear her on the air
in the rustling leaves
in the communiqués of birds in the trees

She’s the antidote for
peculiar and preponderating facts
that connect this tragic age

Ida mae

Ida mae

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gausian Moon

The full moon tonight is a pearl in a whirly smoke veil that is passing on over to Nova Scotia in silence
And its halo assumes the copper and indigo colors of William Blake’s dramas
The mountains of the moon
The Sun’s distant light
Looking back on the swirl of life 
Looking back at this fool’s errand Earth

And again I ask the sky 
Who’s hostage am I? - Jack Vaughan

[[THere follows...Same poem set with a different approach to abstraction-

Hostage

A smoky image
the moon tonight
a girl
whirling in
a veil
moving toward
Nova scotia
dreaming. - Jack Vaughan

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Invisible Friend - After Champion Jack's TB Blues
i.
when i was just a little boy
i was about the age of five
when i was just a little boy
i was about the age of five
i dint have to pretend
cause I had an invisible friend

ii.
He lived under the kitchen table
the best friend i ever found
on old augusta street
the best friend i ever found
nobody else could see Mel
but i liked him anyhow.

iii.
when i grew up
i became a drinking man.
I'd stop by the bar with a paper
and my friend would understand
we'd talk about assassinations
anything that came to hand

iv.
now my friend is gone
I'm not going to see him again
got Arthur-itus
n I may not drink again
but how i wish that i could see-
see my old invisible friend.
~~~~~~~~~~

When the half-and-half is half full
there’s a guy in the house that fills it

he fills it back with milk
He calls it half and half and half

Don’t ask If it’s half full or half empty
Because he’ll fill it either way.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

skunk in the garden
known for its spray
which
wakes me at night
and tells me to turn
each fan on exhaust

i saw its other side
skunk rooting
low and prehistoric
tending to the earth
slow moving
like a sloth

i have never
seen
such patience
would like to be so calm and cool

but
for now i
tend to
the sky.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(After Apollinaire's "Pretty Red Head" )

Pale, fragile
ruddy red haired girl

and dark nomad-eyed
friend girl

both
in black

they stand close by 
the big box
of silver needles
at the 
institute
of 
contemporary
art

held by a magnetism 
&
i am thinking
maybe
mysticism too. 

- Asa Wentoff-Juan Mourning, 2009

--

Swimming lessons

The farmboys would send
their dogs on me -
as I rode my Schwinn on
the road -
where the cabbage
were humming.
--
(Pua Sadinia)

I came upon a waterfall
on the beautiful island
Light flowed through the greenery
on a flower like a diamond.


--
John the Revelator, great advocator
Get's 'em on the battle of Zion
Lord, tellin' the story, risin' in glory
Cried, "Lord, don't you love some I"
...
Well Moses to Moses, watchin' the flock[13]
Saw the bush where they had to stop[14]
God told Moses, "Pull off your shoes"[15]
Out of the flock, well you I choose[16]


--

Bottle man on sneaker feet with
Shopping cart bumps down the street
Sunday morning in sleepy universe

--
Turn the channel

The cabdriver’s dispatch
speaker calls
Dr. Fine
Dr. Howard
Dr. Fine

Let's throw in
one more
Dr. Howard

And shoes
crazy seek footing
on shiny
linoleum
--

Morn blues

I just remembered | 
that it's election day | 
So I bop on down behind the church | 
n vote for Tito Jackson


From the train I saw | 
radio tower disappear | 
it's top in cloudy mist - 
Next stop Waban  


#NationalPoetryDay 

----

Dont look up

C went out yesterday. It got dark and
she was of course
too far from
Ice Stn. Zebra. 

When I in the Corolla
intercepted her,
we both did agree,
this is a ghost town
and we are wandering ghosts. 

Everything is shut down. 
Eyes dart over masks.

And what do you know
but they were making a movie
there in Copley Sq, near the hotel,
where dad proposed
to ma
over
a long lunch.

To the extras,
 C with cane,
in the frame, says
'what's the movie?' 

And they say
'Dont Look Up'
which,
on cue,
she does,
to laughing
and chuckles.

Jan-2021

--
On leaving my Aunt Gert's burying

Gert's car - a gold Buick -
My dad had her sign over 
On just about her death bed
To me.

It was really small fare
for the care he gave her
on her way out the turnstile.

And - tho not as hip
as her previous SS like Skylark -
it was choice.

Having 
almost literally 
only been used to go
to church. There
in Harwichport.

Gert's car - refused to start
on the sunny day that 
I was leaving her burying.

Did my cousin  or me
jump the starter 
with a screwdriver?

I don’t know - but 
t'was a chuckle and a back shiver
both
as the old gold Buick started
and we held wonderment 
at ghostly electricity
in

the graveyard 
departing.

--













Why get hung up and brung down?
The Bees found the Assumption flowers, bud!


--

Poem: Here Rabbit Here

Hoppin' shadow of rabbit
dance on the morning sunlight 
and crystals in the snow.

OR

Hoppin' shadow
rabbit on the sunlight
in the crystal snow.

---
All a blur of youth

All a blur Springborn's basement. Guys singing sitting on washing machine. 

Drinking Limerock, Orangerock. Bottles everywhere.
Singing Happy Together - bababa-ba-bababa and slipping on the ice falling hilariously walking to the Nitty Gritty. 

Forgetting my manners and groping on Endowed Country Club Girl while dancing to I Think We're Alone Now - Later to be asked by her to the Country Club dance.

Saying no and feeling bad about losing my mind to the Orange Rock crush.

Throwing up lime-colored or orange-colored puke at work at 9am at the childrens bathroom at the Children's Room of the Racine Public Library the next morning. 

Dick Perkins winking and volunteering to clean up my mess. He may even have driven me home. Flash forward: I will never never drink Orancerock again.

Saturday, October 21, 2017

Quantum computing conundrum roll

A recent Wall Street Journal article doesn’t hold back on the hype, at least in its headline. Quantum computing, it promises, will change the world as we know it. Courtesy of Google. The story that follows is a bit more measured. The obstacles to successful quantum computing are discussed, the murkiness of the applications is considered. There is a discussion of activity of some players - Dwave, IBM, and especially Google. Also noted- The NSA is building a quantum computer too. The conjecture is put forward that the nearest closest biggest opportunity for quantum computing relates to machine learning - guess because probability is involved and the computation problems could grow unmanageable eventually. We will see. 

The most obvious expectation is that the NSA is anticipating the possibility of a point where quantum computers could break important codes. And thus disrupt the present status of Internet commerce. Is that as big a threat as Hitler? I ask that because there are parts of the quest for quantum computing that bring to mind the atomic bomb program of the 20th Century.

More -
https://juanignacio.wordpress.com/2017/10/19/quantum-ad-impedimenta-computing/


Saturday, October 07, 2017

Take it to the Bardo, Bridget

Lincoln in the Bardo, the first novel by noted short-story writer George Saunders, is set in a graveyard. It is at the time of the Civil War. Night, the first night of internment for little Willie Lincoln, the departed son of Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Willie was the most wonderful of children, and Great Emancipator Lincoln, completely disconsolate, goes to the graveyard to embrace his son's lifeless form, stacked in a crypt, ahead of an eventual journey to Illinois. Told in episodic bursts, the story reads like a play. That is due to its construction, which has various, graveyard characters delivering a stream of seeming recitations, or statements, many of which do not make immediate sense. Willie, like many of the other souls in the old graveyard, is in a twilight world between death and life - in, as Tibetan Buddhists might have it, a Bardo. We find him there persevering, observing, lamenting. The mood of melancholy is very deep. But broken from time to time by the humorous rim shot, albeit from an old snare from a not-too-far-off battlefield. Saunders' is a mix of low- and high-brow. 'Bardo' is in turns like a Romance novella, a Zombie comedy (or Marvel comic), a Buster Keaton movie but faintly macabre, an rejected outtake from Poe's Ulame era notebooks. It sets one to thinking of Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (unto death), Wiscons Death Trip, Jose Feliciano singing the National Anthem. Characters come and go in Lincoln in the Bardo, as if in an Elliot play. Or, Our Town. But, a little funnier. The book holds interest, mostly because of its commanding mood. It has some --not a lot -- of the flair we find at times with Thomas Pynchon, who, on the dust jacket appears, heralding Sanders as "an astoundingly tuned voice -- graceful, dark authentic and funny." That seems like strong praise, although it may be for another book. Warning : If a you or a loved one are nearing the old cemetery ridge, beyond the vale, gonesville, I can't think it would be a bag of fun to cuddle up with Lincoln in the Bardo. But there is no telling what may fasten one's attention, especially at this moment in history. Bits of it are a bit like Doctorow's best in a way. Something like a French Symbolist prose poem too. While the episodic structure helps, it was finally a slow page turner and something of a dread fest for me. You might like it - but you should be ready for some sleeplessness, some graveyard walking, and some head scratching, I'd adjudge. Keep an ear out for audio version. Elmo is Willie and Alvin Dark plays Lincoln. -Jack Vaughan

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