“America was the first 'fascist' country of the modern world..." -- Gary Wills

In Canova's famous statue, Washington renounced his sword by placing it on the ground. Here he hands it on the fasces, pitting it at the disposal of the republic as he returns ot the plow. The fasces is the axial norm between sword and plow, war and peace, as those exist in the life of a citizen, each to be taken up only as the common good requires. The sword's return is therefore provisional..... As the mainstream conservative Catholic historian Gary Wills writes: “America was the first 'fascist' country of the modern world – the first, that is, to make wide use of [the fasces] symbol of a revived Roman republic. The French revolutionaries enthusiastically followed suit – the relationship of Washington to the fasces in Houdon's statue party resembles that of David's design for Hercules standing by a fasces in the fourth stop of the Procession for the Festival of Brotherhood in 1793. The fasces were everywhere in early American art; and they are still encountered all over Washington – on bridges, on Lincoln's chair in his Monument, on the frames that hold Trumball's paintings in the Rotunda. Columbia holds the fasces in Fragonard's depiction of Franklin. The table legs in Sturt's Lansdowne portrait are tapering fasces. William Rush's stern carving for the ship Revolution showed 'the Genius of America binding the fasces with her right hand'. Perhaps the largest pre-Mussolini fasces were raised to the heroes of Fort McHenry by Maximilian Godefroy.” Cincinnatus: George Washington & the Enlightenment, NY: Doubleday, 1984, pp. 227-8.

Carolina Pines (Live in Austin, TX Version)

Creeley, The Rain

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

– Robert Creeley

Zukofsky on death and the literary work (?)

Zukofsky appears to have thought that a poet 'lives' on through the atoms and DNA of his corpus; that  “the body is what counts, at least in this life....  Otherwise the body becomes a mysterious carriage, declaiming the defects of the mind, as Ezra would smile....”  My (probably [mis-/Spinozist] hearing of Zukofsky's comments on Pound's recent death, included in his introduction to Bard College Reading, Annandale Hudson, NY, November 9, 1972, available through http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound)

Mina Ta-ra-ta-ta (Fumo Blu)

Maylon Humphries - Worried About You Baby

The Posies - You're The Beautiful One | 2 Meter Session #922

Not as good as Ken's demo from the box-set At Least, At Last, but a fine live version nonetheless.

pretty pink rose ADRIAN BELEW