In a Baffling Combustions' first we invited one of our fans to propose our topic: Freud, with particular attention to his contemporary relevance, which we managed to find while mulling how little practically his ideas seem to have found register in contemporary mental health therapies. Also, in this session we reveal Freud's actual very last words - never before revealed! Our thanks to Charles Paikart!

2021

38. Freud

Here again, installment in on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs "The nakedness of woman is the work of God"; and "Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.

proverbs of hell 5

52. Proverbs of Hell V

In this fast-paced, spontaneous, testy analysis, we examine the poem "Half-Life in Exile" by Hala Alyan, published in the September 20, 2021 edition of the New Yorker magazine. This session includes the background tuning of Steve Cohn and Carl Baugher's "Heliotropism" and Alyan reading the poem, courtesy of the magazine, the link to which (and its text) is here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/27/half-life-in-exile

56. Half-Life in Exile - Hala Alyan

In this fast-paced, spontaneous, testy analysis, we examine the poem "Without" by Jo Harjo, published in the New Yorker magazine. This session includes Harjo reading the poem, courtesy of the magazine, the link to which (and its text) is here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/without

without - joy harjo

57. Without - Joy Harjo

Here we discuss by turns St. Francis of Assisi's "Canticle to the Sun," most of which was composed in late 1224 while recovering from an illness. according to tradition. Further, the first time it was sung in its entirety was by Francis and Brothers Angelo and Leo, two of his original companions, on Francis' deathbed, the final verse praising "Sister Death" having been added only a few minutes before. From there to here, the Sun and all its raiments, rises here. This sessions ends with a reading of the song read in the native Unbrian language by Tony Cataldo of the All Souls Ecumenical Catholic Church.  For more and the text of the Song we use (so you can read along):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun

58. Canticle to the Sun - St. Francis of Assisi

Here is another installment (no. 8) in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs: "Let man wear the fell of a lion, woman the fleece of a sheep." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.

59. Proverbs of Hell VIII

From March 2020 (read "pandemic start"), we here look into what is "adult," the word and state, touching on various views philosophical, psychological and personal. This session includes the reading and discussion of a number of poems: "This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin; "The History of My Life" by John Ashbery; and "Market Day" by Jonas Meckas (translated by Vyt Bakaitis).

60. Adult

In this session we swerve from the text of William Blake's PROVERBS OF HELL to what news we may find of its shape in Bob Dylan's "I Contain Multitudes," the title and refrain of which is lifted from a line in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." We touch on these two guys, as well as Anne Frank, Emily Dickinson, Mr. Poe and Dr. Indiana Jones, as we seek to fathom as always the heart of the heart of the eternal dilemma.

61. Proverbs of Hell IX ("I contain multitudes")

Here is another installment (no. 10) in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs: "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. The selfish smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool, shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod. What is now proved was once, only imagin'd." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.

62. Proverbs of Hell X

Here is another installment (no. 11) in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs: "The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit: watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits. The cistern contains; the fountain overflows. One thought fills immensity." This session also includes a look at "Fowles in the Frith," an anonymous, short, lyric poem song of the Middle Ages. To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out. To note, this session ends with the definitive proof of the statement, "A thought is a void."

63. Proverbs Of Hell XI

Here we peruse the "Void" (the first of a series of sessions in this non-domain), pulling and pushing and stretching its application until it breaks into words its physical, psychological and cosmic manifestation, with some salting of the metaphysical, to which the term seems to call.

Void I

64. Void I

Here we peruse "Void" (the second of a series of sessions in this non-domain), pulling and pushing and stretching its application until it breaks into words its physical, psychological and cosmic manifestation, with some salting of the metaphysical, to which the term seems to call.

Void II

65. Void II

Here we combine the end of our perusal of "Void" (the third of a series of sessions in this non-domain) - pulling and pushing and stretching its application until it breaks into words, etc. - with the start of a series of sessions on the nature of "Love"(perhaps void's match).

Void III & the slow start of Love

66. Void III & the (Slow) Start of Love

Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "one-point-five" number (note previous broadcasts, including a half combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions on love, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.

67. Love 1.5

Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "one-point-five" number (note previous broadcasts, including a half combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.

68. Love 2

Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "three-point-five" number (note previous broadcasts, including a half broadcast combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.

69. Love 3

Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "four-point-five," final number (note previous broadcasts, including a half broadcast combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.

70. Love 4

Here we waterlock on "Island" in a series of sessions that seek to explore this geological state that has just as much applicability to our psychic experience as it does to our terrestrial one. We touch not only its linguistic evolution (and the mysterious, silent "s") but also its representations as a trope for a family of our experiences that may go back to the start of consciousness as we intuit it.

Island 1

71. Island 1

Here we waterlock on "Island" in this second in a series of sessions that seek to explore this geological state that has just as much applicability to our psychic experience as it does to our terrestrial one. We touch not only its linguistic evolution (and the mysterious, silent "s") but also its representations as a trope for a family of our experiences that may go back to the start of consciousness as we intuit it.

Island 2

72. island 2

Here we waterlock on "Island" in this third in a series of sessions that seek to explore this geological state that has just as much applicability to our psychic experience as it does to our terrestrial one. We touch not only its linguistic evolution (and the mysterious, silent "s") but also its representations as a trope for a family of our experiences that may go back to the start of consciousness as we intuit it.

73. Island 3

The oath has been around, in numerous ways and at different levels of articulation, for a long time, and we will take ours in examining this verbal structure between us - ending in a look inside John Ashbery's THE TENNIS COURT OATH.

74. Oath 1

75. Oath 2

The oath has been around, in numerous ways and at different levels of articulation, for a long time, and we will take ours in examining this verbal structure between us - ending now in a listen and look inside John Ashbery's poem "The Tennis Court Oath."

OATH 3 ("The Tennis Court Oath")

Here after a long summer, and then some, break we strike to the heart of the matter of what the hell we are doing with this enterprise via the 1992  essay "Theory as Liberatory Practice" by bell hooks.

Here's a link to the essay if you want to reach deeper: 
https://www.uwyo.edu/aded5050/5050unit12/theory%20as%20liberatory%20prac.pdf

bell hooks - theory as liberatory practice

bell hooks - Theory as Liberatory Practice

Stress, the state and verb - we all have felt it and rode it yet do we know what we're talking about? Indeed, can we - past Freud/Jung (psyche), load, and our sensual experience abiding its edge - locate it quite (or is it quite there at all)? Whatever it is, we find here an eddy of it among us in words - with a nod to Yoko Ono and David Peel's AMERIKA, their 1972 anthem (with John Lennon abroad), an excerpt of which closes this session.

Stress

Picking up where we left off, in Part 1, discussing a walking that doesn’t involve walking, in “Walking 2” we continue our reading of Thoreau’s essay, touching on the monomyth, John Brown, Charles Olson, Emerson, the art of walking backwards, Robin Hood and Johnny Cash. Gilgamesh as well as the Australopithecus come up as well as Thoreau’s sense of a “new literature” — or we haven’t seen nothing yet.

5.February.2020

2. Walking II

"Walking" is from Henry David Thoreau’s essay of that name, though alternatively he called it “The Wild”—so “Walking the Wild” takes us to what lurks inside it all, including the origins of revolution and ownership in the tyrannies of industrial time and privacy. We also here (in this first of a two-part discussion) talk about walking itself as an act and about getting lost as well as how, Thoreau writes, “In wildness is the preservation of the world”— which was to become the motto of the Sierra Club. Thoreau is a bewilderer who postulates things about 150 years ahead of his time and saw this work as “…an introduction to all I may write hereafter.”

5.Feb.20

1. Walking I

In ANGEL we discuss this winged, pre-, supra- and post-human—-and needless to say fabulous--entity of primordial origin, touching on the Cone of Silence, the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Book of Enoch, Paul Tillich, Milton, the incarnation of evil, and Al-Hallaj, the Persian Sufi mystic martyred for proclaiming, in so many words, “I am Allah.” We speak of angelic sexual practice (if they have gender), the thesis of angels as representative of an influence field—-including Rilke’s meeting and intermingling with it—-and conclude with a reading of Bob Dylan’s “Three Angels.”

ANGEL

5. Angel

In our on-going inquiry into the nature of the Great Pause, this third QUARANTINE session trains itself on John Ashbery’s much ballyhooed poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” an ekphrasis composition taking its frame and flame from the painting of the same name by Italian Renaissance artist Francesco Parmigianino (1503-1540). Without wandering too far from the work, we cite and sometimes linger on Raymond Roussel, Lisa Jarnot, Charles North, Kenneth Koch, the soul and its shapes, the appearance of “sequestered,” Walt Whitman, Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” the word “speculum,” Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham and, once more with feeling, The Tetragammaton.

14. Quarantine III: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Here we speak of Alice Notley’s “Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice,” published in Selected Poems of Alice Notley (Talisman House, Publishers, 1993). Abetted in part by Sparrow having been Notley’s student in the mid-1980s, we turn up what insights we may glean about this work of dictation, actual or implied, from the departed Kerouac, touching on his life story and late challenges with the Beat movement he in part set in motion. This brings us to some discussion of the exigencies of the Lower East Side of New York’s '80s poetry forty years back, the New York School poetry “kit” and Notley’s seeming inveighing against scholasticism. We look into the virtues of the “knotty” poem, gender identifications (and ambiguities), the practice of channeling/clairvoyance, Mark Tansey’s “Triumph of the New York School,” Samuel Beckett’s poem “What is the Word?,” Dave Smith’s THE ONE PURE WORD, his critical essays on the poetry of James Wright, and speculations on the emergence of the universe (again). This podcast includes the sound of an undated video on YouTube of Notley reading the poem.

2020

16. Quarantine V - Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice

"Baffling combustions," Ted said, "are everywhere," and we aim to find and dance, however faultingly, in their light. Join hosts Andrew McCarron, Sam Truitt and Sparrow as they plumb the mundane and cosmic strange, mysterious and beguiling events of the human and natural. Please note that while we sometimes wrench and wrest, it's always inalienably with ourselves: or in these experiments, no idea is ever harmed, only nested.

Baffling Combustions

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