Blackout Poetry (post 1 of 2)
 

Did anyone see that video that ze posted today
about taking a news article and turning it into poetry?
Lets use this ( v see below)text, copy and pasted from the link
perla posted about the beards to get started .... if
we get to the end and the poem is not finished
I have copy and pasted another article from
LeMonde France (i clicked on "translate this page")
below it
Directions ::
make the word bigger and bold and erase all previous text
feel free to do this for several words per entry if you want

>>if no one enters anything withing the nest
24 hours i will start at that point....
Sincerely, Mo


Excerpted and abridged from The Language of the Beard, originally circulated by The Torchbearer Society, London, 1913. Commentary by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert.

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Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is a classic of Edwardian esoterica, a privately printed leaflet offered by subscription to the informed man of fashion and as a divertissement au courant for reading bins and cocktail tables of parlor cars and libraries and smoking lounges of gentlemen's clubs.

Typifying a once-popular, but nowadays seldom-encountered species of turn-of-the-century ephemera, Poets Ranked by Beard Weight has become a rarity much prized by bibliophiles, and one that still stands out as a particular curiosity among the many colorful curiosities of the period. Its author, one Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881 – 1937), was a deipnosophist, clubman, and literary miscellanist with a special interest in tonsorial subjects. His masterpiece, The Language of the Beard, an epicurean treat confected for the delectation of fellow bon vivants, vaunts the premise that the texture, contours, and growth patterns of a man's beard indicate personality traits, aptitudes, and strengths and weaknesses of character. A spade beard, according to Underwood's theories, may denote audacity and resolution, for example, while a forked, finely-downed beard signifies creativity and the gift of intuition, a bushy beard suggests generosity, and so on. Moreover, in keeping with the tenets of such sister systems as palmistry, numerology, and phrenology, Underwood posits the power of the ancient art of pogonomancy, or divination by beard reading, to forsee future events. Not only does Underwood credit this doctrine with all but infallible accuracy in assessing behavioral tendencies, he insists on its irrefutable validity for purposes of prophecy and prediction and for unerring analyses of fortune and fate. Perhaps this will seem somewhat less far-fetched when one considers that, only two centuries ago, wigs designated social hierarchy, and comprised specific, unmistakable markers of caste, occupation, and position.

Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is the centerpiece of Underwood's estimable, if fetish-fueled treatise on pogonology, or the study of whiskers and associated lore. First published in England on the eve of The Great War, this quaint publication takes the reader on a fascinating excursion through such topics as False Beards, Merkins, and Capillamenta (chin wigs); Effusions of the Scalp and Face; Celebrated Chaetognaths (chaetognathous = hairy-jawed); and even includes an affectionate mini-essay about the wooly mammoth! Poets Ranked by Beard Weight forms a special section devoted to bewhiskered bards.

In forming crinoid comparisons amongst these august worthies, our self-appointed arbiter of all things fuzzy and frizzy applies a grading system structured as a sliding scale he has unassumingly named the Underwood Pogonometric Index. This admirable instrument of scientific classification gauges the presence and projection of a "galvanic imponderable" Underwood calls poetic gravity -- an intangible property which results from the aesthetic "charge" of the beard itself rather than from any intrinsic ability or merit attaching to the wearer in question or to his literary productions. Underwood's index is intended as an adjunct to broad-based beard typology, which tends to focus on detailed physical features such as kinks, curls, knots and braids, and on their qualitative differences, as between bristles and vibrissae or the wispy versus the filamentous. As in his earlier work Whiskers of the World, Underwood touches on such diverse matters as beard hygiene and methods for perfuming, diagrams how the ancient Assyrians anchored their beards with ornamental weights, points out how beards were thought to shield against evil, and outlines an axiom of general beard theory called crinous consequence -- the relationship between history's highest civilizations and the hirsute grandeur of their male populations. Next, the study establishes the inseparability of the perception of the emphatically bearded physiognomy from the indelible image of the biblical prophets and, plausibly if not altogether convincingly, cites this phenomenon as an explanation of the prevalent nineteenth century idea that the poet is an agent of clairvoyance and an intermediary between mortals and oracular messengers from a higher plane.

Pursuant to a spurt of badinage about how the release of cranial and facial hair through the pores unclutters the brain by relieving it of "follicular surplus," Underwood arrives at the gist of his thesis: that there is a direct correlation between personal appearance and artistic proficiency and integrity, or what, in the case of the bewhiskered brethren of the literary fraternity, he elsewhere calls "poetic gravity" or beard weight. It might be said, in short, that Underwood's motto is the beard makes the bard.

That "exalted dignity, that certain solemnity of mien," lent by an imposing beard, "regardless of passing vogues and sartorial vagaries," says Underwood, is invariably attributable to the presence of an obscure principle known as the odylic force, a mysterious product of "the hidden laws of nature." The odylic, or od, force is conveyed through the human organism by means of "nervous fluid" which invests the beard of a noble poet with noetic emanations and ensheathes it in an ectoplasmic aura. This, according to Underwood, is the same force which facilitates the divinatory faculty and affords occult insight into matters of travel, voyages and accidents. More importantly, magnetic waves sparked by the od force give off a radiation whose "wattage" can be calibrated in angstroms of net effect. These waves generate electrical essences which register on special laboratory equipment developed by Underwood and a team of researchers. Testing is conducted in a relaxed setting free from any sense of restriction or cramped confinement. It is imperative that the testing environment be stringently controlled. Static voltage in the atmosphere is minimized by fitting the sitter with a lead apron and resting the pogonic efflorescence on a sterile porcelain tray where it is immobilized during the procedure. The beard must be devoid of wax and other impurities lest it foul the sensitive testing equipment and give a fraudulent reading. Underwood's Pogonometric Index, plotted by means of numerical values designating "poetic gravity" and relative "beard weights," yields readings ranging from zero to a positive value of sixty. The normal range for the average individual is ten to twenty-four. For exceptional individuals, it can run to a value of forty and above.

UNDERWOOD POGONOMETRIC INDEX

6
10 Very very weak
14
18 Very weak
22
26 Fairly weak
30
34 Somewhat heavy
38
42 Heavy
46
50 Very heavy
54
58 Very very heavy
60

POETS RANKED BY BEARD WEIGHT



Sir Walter Raleigh (1552 – 1618)
Beard type: Van Dyke
Typical opus: The Lie
Gravity (UPI rating): 27



Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892)
Beard type: Maltese
Typical opus: Crossing the Bar
Gravity (UPI rating): 33



Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)
Beard type: Dutch Elongated
Typical opus: The Village Blacksmith
Gravity (UPI rating): 24



William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)
Beard type: Van Winkle
Typical opus: To a Waterfowl
Gravity (UPI rating): 43



John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892)
Beard type: Full Velutinous
Typical opus: Snow-bound
Gravity (UPI rating): 38



Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)
Beard type: Hibernator
Typical opus: O Captain! My Captain!
Gravity (UPI rating): 22



James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891)
Beard type: Queen's Brigade
Typical opus: Commemoration Ode
Gravity (UPI rating): 34



Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
Beard type: Wandering Jim
Typical opus: Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life
Gravity (UPI rating): 29



Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882)
Beard type: Italian False Goatee
Typical opus: The Blessed Damozel
Gravity (UPI rating): 38



Edwin Markham (1852 – 1940)
Beard type: Box
Typical opus: The Man With the Hoe
Gravity (UPI rating): 39
......continues on next post >

....continued from previous post
 

page 2 of 2


Sidney Lanier (1842 – 1881)
Beard type: Spade
Typical opus: The Song of the Chattahoochee
Gravity (UPI rating): 41



John Burroughs (1837 – 1921)
Beard type: Claus-esque
Typical opus: Waiting
Gravity (UPI rating): 43



William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903)
Beard type: Spatulate Imperial
Typical opus: Invictus
Gravity (UPI rating): 47



Joaquin Miller (1837 – 1913)
Beard type: Mock Forked Elongated
Typical opus: Kit Carson's Ride
Gravity (UPI rating): 51



Samuel Morse (1791 – 1872)
Beard type: Garibaldi Elongated
Typical opus: What Hath God Wrought
Gravity (UPI rating): 58
***

As will be noted, Underwood awards the highest ranking to Samuel F. B. Morse, laconic linguist and perfecter of the practical telegraph, whose name will be forever linked with that ingenious system of stripped-down prosody masterfully devised for conveying writing over distances by means of a wire which enabled him to transmit from Washington to Baltimore the immortal message: "What hath God wrought." In conferring the prize upon Morse, Underwood cites both the prominence of his whiskerage and the pre-eminence of his poetic gravity ratio, and recalls the little-known circumstances of Morse's poignant demise: "...as the eminent inventor-poet lay on his deathbed huskily breathing his last, and dusk and death's shadow competed to cast their palls over the hushed, but crowded room, vigil-keepers gasped as a sparrow descended from a nearby wire, lit at the windowsill, and began to tap rapidly with its tiny beak." Perhaps the bewildering bird was only attracted by the nest-worthiness of Morse's monolithic mass of whiskers. But, instead of flitting to nestle in the cottony tufts of the moribund seer's chin-fringe, the sparrow, according to astonished onlookers, tapped on the sill in perfect telegraphic code "…that nurtureth speech from silence…," at the precise moment the old sage expired. The testimony of the numerous sober witnesses to this incident is a matter of historical record.


************************************************** **************
March 5, 2009 LeMonde
(French news site)
Islam makes claims that go very far. All religions do, of course, insofar as they claim to know and be able to interpret the wishes of a supreme being. But Islam itself as the ultimate revelation of God's word, the culmination of all the allusions to the truth that have been granted to all other faiths, available as the perfect text that is Koran.

If it sometimes seems that such a claim is implicitly an autocratic or totalitarian, it does perhaps not a fundamentalist reading of the sacred book, but religion itself. It is in any case the Muslims of the "mainstream", grouped under the aegis of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which require the United Nations, that Islam is not only allowed to make claims autocratic, but that it enjoys official protection against criticism.

Drafted in the second degree, in the jargon of human rights and opposition to discrimination, Resolution 62/154 of the United Nations on "The fight against defamation of religions" at the bottom trying to extend the protection not not to human beings, but the opinions and ideas, giving them immunity against any exclusive "insulting."

The preamble is full of hypocrisy, as in this delicious paragraph, that the UN General Assembly "stresses the importance of increasing contacts at all levels to deepen dialogue and reinforce understanding between cultures, religions, beliefs and civilizations, welcoming in this regard the Declaration and Program of Action adopted by the Non-Aligned Movement at its Ministerial Meeting on Human Rights and Cultural Diversity, which was held in Tehran on 3 and 4 September 2007. "

I understand where we are going with this. (By the way, I sincerely regret not being able to attend this meeting and not give you more direct information on the flavor rich and varied culture which have marked it. I have unfortunately been unable to obtain visa.) The provisions that follow the preamble to the bloated style are increasingly biased as the resolution is developing. For example, paragraph 5 says that the UN "expresses [...] deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with violations of human rights and terrorism", while the paragraph 6 "notes with deep concern that the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities has intensified since the tragic events of 11 September 2001."

You see a little perfidy? At the time this resolution must be renewed each year as the UN, the main state that the support (Pakistan) makes an agreement with the Taliban to close girls' schools in Swat Valley (located about 130 kilometers from the capital, Islamabad) and submit people to the law of Sharia. This capitulation is involved directly in the wake of a terrible campaign of violence and intimidation (there have even been public beheadings). But note, you must not mention the religion of those conducting this campaign, for fear that "combines" the faith for violations of human rights and terrorism.

In paragraph 6, there is a clear attempt to confuse ethnicity and religious allegiance. This suggestion is in fact essential to the overall project mapped out by the United Nations. If you put religion and ethnicity in the same plane, can be insidiously apply to religion convictions arising naturally racism. The strategy is clumsy, but it works: the term useless and meaningless "Islamophobia", now widely used to make moral blackmail, demonstrates its success. To be precise, a phobia is a fear or aversion and irrational invincible.

Without this phobia of some of us can explain with clarity and calm, the "faith" in their eyes is the most overrated of virtues. The debate would be both negative and less confusing if, for example, Pakistan had repeatedly said that religion can form the basis of nationality. An outrageous claim that has long been discredited. It is absurd that these amalgams are responsible for connections between religion and ethnicity.

Furthermore, it would also be less complicated if the Hadiths of Islam did not impose the death penalty to those who attempt to leave Islam. It might as well know with near certainty that is a true believer and who is not. And in the case of the veil or headscarf for women, who wears his own free will and is forced by his family. Instead of trying to resolve internal conflicts in Islam or to address other serious issues such as the massacre of Shiites by Sunnis (and vice versa), the desecration of holy places of Islam by criminals Muslims and the discrimination against Ahmadis by other Muslims, the UN resolution aims to bring all the denial that has its origin in the Islamic world at the heart of contemporary democracy, a legacy of enlightenment in which individuals have Above all rights, not religions.

See where the language leads bulb paragraph 10. After a brief mention of support for freedom of expression, he continued: "the exercise of [these rights] comes with it special duties and responsibilities and may be subject to restrictions prescribed by law and required by respect for the rights or reputations of others, national security and public safety, health or public morals and respect for religions and beliefs. "

The bottom of this prose is as artificial as the ugly form that expresses it: careful what you say, because our intention is to make crime the opinions that contradict the true faith. Do not come one day that you have not warned!

Christopher Hitchens

Translated by Micha Cziffra

The return of the crime of blasphemy
The UN wants to criminalize opinions criticizing Islam.
|
Thursday 5 March 2009

Did anyone see that video that ze posted today
about taking a news article and turning it into poetry?
Lets use this ( v see below)text, copy and pasted from (the) link
perla posted about the beards to get started .... if
we get to the end and the poem is not finished
I have copy and pasted another article from
LeMonde France (i clicked on "translate this (page)")
below it
Directions ::
make the word bigger and bold and erase all previous text
feel free to do this for several words per entry if you want

>>if no one enters anything withing the nest
24 hours i will start at that point....
Sincerely, Mo


(Excerpted and abridged from The Language of the Beard, originally circulated by The Torchbearer Society, London, 1913. Commentary by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert.

=+=

Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is a classic of Edwardian esoterica a privately printed leaflet

the page

Excerpted

Commentary

of a privately printed leaflet

offered to the informed man of fashion and as a divertissement au courant for reading

the page
Excerpted
Commentary
of a privately printed leaflet
offered to man for reading bins

the deputy did it

^lots of people singing in unison makes mo's eyes water ;)

on ramp to now hear

is nowhere

The statue of Canon Ezra, a Sudanese priest and martyr
 

:confused: Scottish or Sudanese?

As long as the song amkes old people laugh and polks fun at
"happily ever after" or "no young person ever felt this way before me" then it qualifies as a folk song

in europe

ps,
mo was an evtremely late bloomer ;)

tres x 10

1. ULYSSES by James Joyce
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
CATCH-22
DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
1984 by George Orwell
I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
KIM by Rudyard Kipling
A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
LOVING by Henry Green
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
IRONWEED by William Kennedy
THE MAGUS by John Fowles
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

also ::
1 Don Quixote
2 War and Peace
3 Ulysses
blah blah blah.....