Friday, July 29, 2011

mathias svalina talks about a poem. one thing he says is:

I wanted it to be in a rhetoric of "honesty," which doesn’t really have anything to do with "honesty" in the sense of telling the truth, but more like "honesty" in the sense of paving the streets when they need to be paved.

you can buy his new book by clicking on a 12. you should. it has a beautiful hypnotic cover.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

"As I later learned, my brain was contending with the “ventriloquist effect,” first noted in a study in the 1890s but named by a research team in the 1960s. The basic insight, that “visual information biases the spatial localization of auditory events,” is a key finding in behavioral and neurological research. When it comes to spatial processing, human vision is, by dint of evolutionary adaptation, generally stronger than the auditory sense. (Which is perhaps why it’s infuriatingly difficult to locate a cellphone that is ringing two feet away from you if it’s concealed under a couch pillow.) Human perception, which functions by fusing simultaneous streams of sensory information, works on the assumption that if auditory and visual stimuli occur in proximity—close in both space and in time—they must be caused by a single source, the one you see. So when we watch lips moving in sync with an unrelated sound, our brain simply denies the confusion, the strange coincidence of these two events, and instead processes them as though they were one very normal speech act. Thus, a ventriloquist can modulate his voice to make it sound near or far, as though it were muffled in a box, or gurgling up from underwater, but he doesn’t actually “throw his voice” in any particular direction; he just tosses it to the audience and they—their eyes, their brain—place it in the lips of the dummy."

you can read the rest here

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

how is your summer?

today i'm going to believe everything.

in the other room i saw gun oil. 

i've been eating a slice of peanut butter toast and a banana for breakfast.

i've been viewing waterfalls and snow. 

there were sunburn fingerprints on my back. 

someone said this about galileo: if there is anything that galileo championed it was curiosity--immense, boundless curiosity.

some celan: 

you cathedrals. 

you unseen cathedrals,
you rivers unheard,
you clocks deep in us.


Sunday, July 17, 2011

Saturday, July 9, 2011

"he asked if he had any money; don quixote replied that he did not have a copper blanca, because he had never read in the histories of knights errant that any of them ever carried money."

i have an idea.

let's go here together and live.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

these are my letters from montana

Tuesday, July 5, 2011