I'm Only Going To Say This Once.
I'm Only Going To Say This Once.

2008-05-24T13:18:00.001-07:00

performative writing requires a new way of reading.

NEW WEBSITE!

2008-05-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

I decided I needed a website specifically focused on my profession as an artist and writer. Thus: http://beverlynelson.wordpress.com

There's not much up there right now, but there will soon be a growing collection of my performance art, installations, photography, and writing. Check it out!

nest
beverly

Red fish and honk

2008-05-15T20:54:00.001-07:00

I Ain't Gonna Fight in a Rich Man's War

2008-05-15T20:23:00.001-07:00

Hans Richter - Inflation (1928)

2008-05-15T20:03:00.001-07:00

Network - Mad as hell

2008-05-15T19:28:00.001-07:00

2008-04-27T14:49:00.000-07:00

MAYBE...WE'RE DAMN CUTE?
WORDSMAYBEMUSIC
MAY 7
8PM
BLACK ROCK BAR
DETAILS IN POST BELOW

korean baby singing hey jude

...or this maybe...

DETAILED ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW

2008-04-27T12:52:00.001-07:00

wordsmaybemusic: we don't know

A reminder to everyone:
I'm no graphic design artist but...

free for all
a super line-up of readers/performers
plus a special guest performer, maybe,

Jim---I heard him rapping on the El

and asked him, "please?"

he said "maybe"

May 7
8pm
Black Rock Bar
(they have food too!)
Reconstruction Room
(damen & addison)
wordsmaybemusic
curated by
beverly (please me) nelson

Free Flo Rapper: Jim (maybe)
and
Justin Cabrillos
Allison Gruber
A D Jameson
Meredith Clark
Karen Faith
Michelle Tupko
Gwenyth Anderson
Alex Jovanovich
Beverly Nelson
Devin King
Ira Murfin
Jeffrey Ediger
Jennifer Sporcich

not necessarily in this order
colors may vary

Come(oh yes come)join us in a game of intellectual leap-frogging or watch us fail in a state of drunken debauchery.
Either way, we will cause your brain to itch beneath your skull
and send you running out to buy a pair of tap shoes.
Undergrads be warned: we have no answer to your question:
Why get an MFA in writing?

(this is a poem, oh yes, by beverly nelson)
Please don't steal it. Okay?

nest,
beverly

--
"when the hermit [hummingbird] starts to build she must work wholly on the wing"

2008-04-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

Notes: Thursday, 3/27/2008 The Lastmaker Performance
Goat Island at the MCA, Chicago

3/27/08 notes: taken at the performance
by beverly nelson
––––––––––

pivotal

maneuvering from inside a womb

parting while halved
a series of splits
pairs that lose then find
each other

a chorus of ten
black shoes squealing
a magpie gallops with
a neighing horse-ghost
jazz begins to play
start a metronome
www.rhythmtempo
syndromic syndrome
germs to avoid
flu-like symptoms of wrongness
I said in fact: metrodome

a faceless clock
doesn't tell its kept time
but five hearts beating
drip sweat

halved and halved again
you make canyons and rainbows
middling halving leaning bending
stirring you rise nesting round a globe
closing the distance of my sight
mapping the spotlights
then falling to embrace
the earth beneath the floor
scratches of leaps and slides

the wall isn't moved
falling half weak half in a fit
left to right left to right
rolling climbing struck contorted shifting
restless

chiasmic flight
running to the border
landing in the gutter
invoking fits
frenzied patriots
strike the pose
salute the walls
rally us to laugh to hope
to wear what doesn't fit

what are you carrying? chasing?
are you waving hello? or goodbye?
are you dying or living?
are you between earth and moon
at the same time risen and fallen?
are these the thoughts I should think?

And your black shoes on and on
stamping pivoting
then lie laced and footless
joined at the tongue

circular phases
the time it takes to remember
stories you built in me
the time it takes for one
tear to get swallowed in a laugh

sing to me

now

softly

clasp me like that
tight and shut in your palms
teach me a voiceless opera
to inhale the wind
with you our air we
imparting departing
parting no not one
but one cannot hold tight
or shut between
or breathe another's air
faceless timeless
not yet not yet

are we? so much? so little?

yes

I'm splitting apart

2008-03-25T10:03:00.000-07:00

Cold
by beverly nelson

Sunday...Mostly sunny. Blustery. Very cold. Highs 4 to 8 above. Wind chills as low as 20 below to 30 below zero. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph. Gusts up to 40 mph until late afternoon decreasing to 30 mph late in the afternoon.

Sounds like a post-post-modern translation of Shakespeare's King Lear purged of
rants and divine intervention. Language about weather, unlike the weather itself, settles calmly on the page like fallen crumbs underneath the table. Mindlessly we shuffle the words and numbers from day to day like herding the same cows back and forth from barn to pasture. It takes longer to get dressed. We stand in front of the closet trying to guess which side of the high rise at work the thermostat will favor today. It can't be expected to keep the entire 27 floors at an even temperature, it tips, the numbers tumble all to one side or the other like people on the Titanic. So you layer, beginning with a tank top and ending up with a wool turtleneck. Then you move on to the exterior, scarves, headband, hat, gloves, and finally a coat. This will get you safely to the car where you'll have to shovel and scrape before getting in, but once safe inside you'll begin to unlayer knowing that it will be at least an hour and forty minutes before you'll be out in the cold again with the way traffic is on the commute there. For an hour and forty minutes, your body and mind will relax, safe within the cozy manipulated environ of your personal automobile, music of choice cranked up, bumper to bumper,reality kept safely on the other side of the glass and steel, reality never reaching your skin.

I play with the announcements, apply literary theories of interpretation, reader/audience, and the like, mainly out of bitterness over class distinction, the haves and the have-nots at my disposal on the page in ways that prevent me in real life. Can I create an effect that will cause readers to never read the weather reports the same way again? Is it possible for me to shake their comfort a little the next time they sit warmly cocooned in their cars, driving on freeways expunged of the less fortunate? They'll see no homeless beggars on that path, no group of elderly and children waiting thirty minutes for their bus, no one toting a backpack to hike the ten blocks to get to work because there are no buses on that route.

4 to 8 degrees and 20 to 30 below zero. The continents have drifted, slid on this ball like silk on a thigh, moved with abandon like adolescent sex. Someone carelessly overlooks our existence like ants mixed in with the crumbs when the tablecloth gets shaken, we're deemed insignificant by a plan so vast we can't see it. Outside our universe someone decides it's time to blink, and our world shifts into the arctic zone, my world shifts into unmanageable fears hidden from the driver peeling off his jacket in his car careful not to spill his coffee in the holder,while the radio announces: "4 to 8 degrees outside, with a wind chill factor bringing us down to 20 to 30 below..."

2008-03-25T02:51:00.000-07:00

The Cryonic Chants

2008-03-25T01:48:00.000-07:00

Untitled
by beverly nelson

for The Last Performance

next myself after fall time opens
a twin tongue onward heights
for nextward we walk clouding
stack ruins
winsome filament
brittle twice till five or seven.
a quota I say but you
barking trains side down
each doglegged try unleaves sunset
ruses dimly kissed and still
sound your stringed instrument
your somber gourds with lilacs
run fingers plucking eyebrows
a quota says more than this
lift my skirts to find the
second wife's dream lost doubling
game two again.

2008-03-25T01:31:00.000-07:00

Untitled
by beverly nelson

part of The Last Performance

1. It was the way the wind tugged at her scarf and made her aware of it's hold around her neck, that the world could mess with her without her permission, uninvited, that she held onto the edges the scarf without thinking about it much. She walked with a briskness that meant nothing about getting anywhere on time since nothing she did was important. It wasn't like the grocery store was waiting anxiously for her, it wasn't like she'd be missed or as if she had an appointment and must arrive on time.

2. I was the way, tugging at her scarf, making her aware of my hold around her neck. She could mess with herself that way, without permission, with the invited arrival of the other pronouns. She, I, we, they. What was so brisk about her walk that meant nothing, meant anywhere, any time? Nothing we do together is important or historical. We, an apparition unlike the grocery store, conveniently missed. Arrive on time.

2008-03-18T03:13:00.000-07:00

Little Edie Beale from the documentary, Grey Gardens by the Marsyles Brothers.

"S-T-A-U-N-C-H"

2008-02-14T19:37:00.000-08:00

I only wanted to dance.
by beverly nelson

2008-01-28T17:25:00.000-08:00

from The Words
by Jean-Paul Sartre
(his autobiography)

Our visitors would leave, I would be left alone, I would escape from that graveyard of banalities and go back to life, to the wildness of books. I had only to open one to rediscover the inhuman, restless thinking whose pomp and darkness were beyond my understanding, which jumped from one idea to the other so quickly that I would lose my grip on it a dozen times a page and let it slip by, feeling lost and bewildered. I was involved in happenings which my grandfather would certainly have deemed unlikely and which nevertheless had the blazing truth of the written word.

In my sight they [the authors] were not dead: at any rate, not entirely. They had been metamorphosed into books. Corneille was a big, rugged, ruddy fellow who smelled of glue and had a leather back. That severe, unwieldy individual whose words were hard, had angles that hurt my thighs when I carried him But no sooner did I open him than he presented me with his engravings, which were as dark and sweet as confidences. Flaubert was a cloth-bound, odorless little thing spotted with freckles. The multiple Victor Hugo was on all the shelves at once. So much for the bodies. As for the souls, they haunted the works. The pages were windows; outside, a face was pressed against the pane, someone was watching me, I pretended not to notice and would continue reading, with my eyes glued to the words beneath the fixed stare of the late Chateaubriand.

From these magazines and books I derived my most deep-seated phantasmagoria: optimism.

2008-01-21T12:44:00.000-08:00

Eric Baus....
http://www.conjunctions.com /webcon/baus.htm

2008-01-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

Dan Beachy-Quick

you won't regret taking the time to read this poem.

http://sawbuckpoems.blogspot.com/2006/11/dan-beachy-quick.html

-----------------------------------------

for myself? I'm very sorry I've become distracted with living. I hope the videos have prompted some thoughtfulness. Yukio Mishima was an unconscious purging of holiday death wishes. I always feel like death is too much a cliche to write about---it's a challenge to write about it well anyway. Now I'd like to be on to something else, at least until Valentine's Day when misery goes fishing for despair. But in th meantime, I've brought you Dan's poem. Check out his book Mulberry for more of the same precision and eloquence.

2008-01-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

More on the Kenya Map link:

This is from another blog post at Sokari Ekine's blogsite

Two weeks into the Kenyan post election crisis has seen a range of technological initiatives being applied by advocacy groups, Kenyan bloggers and human rights organisations.

In an environment of fear and violence with many businesses closed and little or very expensive transport how do you communicate with friends and family? How do you send and receive money when banks and other financial businesses such as Western Union offices are closed? The simple answer is the ubiquitous mobile phone. One activist (for purposes of his personal safety we cannot mention his name) wrote how he was able to distribute a donation of money by purchasing phone credits and dispersing them to colleagues in need. One person in Eldoret needed money for transport, others could not get to a Western Union paypoint to receive funds and so on. He was then able to phone all of his colleagues and ensure they had cashed in their credits and were safe.

One innovative way of using technology was suggested by Kenyan blogger, Ory of Kenyan Pundit and taken up by White African in his post “Using Technology to Chronicle incidents of Violence.” The idea is to use Google maps to create a mashup which would be used to indicate the locations were violence is taking place. The location would be marked, with in this case, a red flame which would reveal the details of the violence in text form.

With this in mind White African and others have put together a dedicated site called USHAHIDI. The site will be having an SMS feature as soon as possible PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD……

[Ushahidi] is a tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya in these post-election times. You can report the incident that you have seen, and it will appear on a map-based view for others to see. Ory and Daudi are working with local Kenyan NGO’s to get information and to verify each incident.

One excellent resource has been created by Worknets a global community Wiki site. They have a series of dedicated spaces which provide a resource of new sites and bloggers, action alerts, commentary and chat rooms by and for Kenyans.

Pambazuka News which last week published a special issue on Kenya has created an Action Alert blog to provide up to date alerts and news on the Kenyan crisis. In addition a number of Facebook groups have been created such as Peace for Kenya and Kenya’s Post Election Humanitarian Crisis.

2008-01-06T20:45:00.001-08:00

2008-01-06T20:03:00.001-08:00

Yukio Mishima
from Wikipedia

Ritual suicide

Mishima, giving his final speech on the balcony of JSDF headquarters in Tokyo November 25, 1970.

On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai, under pretext, visited the commandant of the Ichigaya Camp - the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan's Self-Defense Forces. Inside, they barricaded the office and tied the commandant to his chair. With a prepared manifesto and banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below. His speech was intended to inspire a coup d'etat restoring the powers of the emperor. He succeeded only in irritating them, however, and was mocked and jeered. He finished his planned speech after a few minutes, returned in to the commandant's office and committed seppuku. The customary kaishakunin duty at the end of this ritual had been assigned to Tatenokai member Masakatsu Morita, but Morita was unable to properly perform the task: after several attempts, he allowed another Tatenokai member, Hiroyasu Koga, to behead him.

Another traditional element of the suicide ritual was the composition of jisei (death poems), before their entry into the headquarters.^[4] Mishima prepared his suicide meticulously for at least a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked Tatenokai members had any indication of what he was planning. His biographer, translator, and former friend John Nathan suggests that the coup attempt was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed.^{[citation needed]} Mishima made sure his affairs were in order, and left money for the defense trial of the three surviving Tatenokai members.

[edit] Aftermath

Much speculation has surrounded Mishima's suicide. At the time of his death he had just completed the final book in his The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. He was recognized as one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language.

Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays, as well as one libretto. A large portion of this oeuvre comprises books written quickly for profit, but even if these are disregarded, a substantial body of work remains.

2008-01-06T19:43:00.000-08:00

2008-01-06T19:38:00.001-08:00

2008-01-06T17:36:00.001-08:00

What do I do with this desire, this corny unscholarly bodily desire? How do I excuse it when it won't go away? How do I disquise it as something other than it is or deny it's very existence? It's hopelessly ----here!---without reason.

2008-01-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

Dedicated to the new Starbucks on the corner of North-N.Damen-Milwaukee in Chicago who put some fine home-spun people out of business and uglified our neighborhood with crass consumerism unoriginality.

I'm Only Going To Say This Once.I'm Only Going To Say This Once.