The Byron Book

I'm now in the habit of calling Opera Bufa "the Byron book." The Byronic levels built into Opera Bufa as a text are there: playfulness, whimsy, raciness, spiky humor, satire, an emphasis on a light (sometimes deceptively light) approach to textuality; and the weird sense of tumult around some of the (scandalous!) circumstances the book has generated is Byronic, too. I'm ready to flee to Italy, or Chicago...

English 271 (course title: How Does This Sound?): Stacy Blair: Loyola U.: Summer '08 (week five: Ultramodern Metaphor): Opera Bufa (Adam Fieled)

As the book says: To Courtney...

Critical Nexus Hinges

The site Web Citation .org makes possible what I call critical nexus hinges; series of web-pages, connected in the interstitial way customary on the site, which form a way/manner for theory to evolve from critical literary practice (praxis). These two As/Is pages, now preserved on Web Cite, Notes: Cheltenham Elegies and When You Bit... sonnets, and Notes: More on When You Bit..., hinge the original critical texts, which span 2014 to 2017, to the two new Otoliths pages from '17, now preserved on Web Cite. This has the effect of making the critical task of text consolidation both simpler and smoother than what we tend to see online. It also lends a graceful sense of the aesthetic to critical tasks which might otherwise seem dry.

A festive "cha ching" for October

A hinge in Autumn, as festive "cha ching."

Divine Wisdom at St. Matthew Church...

More Butler Pike ambiance...

Halloween on Butler Pike...

Adam Fieled @ 7825 Mill Road, Elkins Park, Pa, fall 1979

Here I am, ready for action. 

& Hallowell...

I tried to capture here how 300 Four Falls looks from 4th & Hallowell. Got some of it. There are other angles to 300 Four Falls and where to photograph it from that are worth exploring during seasonable months.

View down Harry Street...

I snapped this shot on one of my walks a few months ago. This view down Harry Street, which runs precisely parallel to Fayette Street in Conshohocken, is one of the more luminous ones I've seen in the area.

GO Look...

I spent several months last year playing the Asian board-game GO online during my down-time. In the end, I decided I didn't like it; not cerebral enough (as I thought it might be), too much about "my guns versus your guns." The Asian muse I played against, Cosumi, was merciless, ruthless, and boorish to boot. Yet, the aesthetic aspect of the game still pleases me. It's a great-looking game. I may invest in a serious board and stones if I get a chance.

Conshohocken in Autumn

My daily walk up and down Fayette Street is especially pleasant in September and October. This particular vista, looking up Fayette Street from the Fayette Street Bridge, also includes, if you about-face, a nice view of the 300 Four Falls building sitting on the edge of the Schuylkill.

West Nittany Avenue, State College

This house, on West Nittany Avenue in State College, is similar to the one in which I had a second floor sublet in 1998; as appears here, in the new Otoliths.

Hallowell Street, Four Falls

I've been all over the Net looking for a picture of how 300 Four Falls (shown here, over the Schuylkill) looks from the top of Hallowell Street (Hallowell and, I think, 4th Ave)- no dice. If you can make it to Hallowell & 4th to see the sight, it is not to be believed, especially in enchanting September.

Over the Schuylkill...

Putting together a package deal around Aughts Philly, I chose the title Over the Schuylkill, from one of the Apparition Poems. It seems to me that, as a seed to plant, this is as comprehensive a statement as we're likely to make. Why it would have to be that I'm particularly proud is that my finger-in-the-air vibe indicates that, for those of us left standing in the stalemated iciness of this recession, there's really no sense left of being in a rush. We have many issues to face- the cost of living, of food and health insurance especially, is so inflated in 2014 that the media's continual unwillingness to admit population depreciation in the United States is an abusive molestation of the remaining population, and a pestilential one to boot.

In a situation like this, art has to be over to the side, to be picked up or dropped as needed. People interested in the arts have varying and variable reactions to why/how art works for them- some can only immerse themselves in the aesthetic in times of prosperity, while others can receive necessary stimulation from art even during a steep recession and its aftermath. I am of the latter type- the recession has not particularly dulled my appetite for the aesthetic. One thing Over the Schuylkill can do for whatever audience we wind up having is to manifest for them a kind of ideal around possibilities of intimacy, deep companionship, and the redeeming power of profound human connections. I have called 2014 a "scum-scape," in which genuine individuals have largely been replaced by well-protected, powerfully-backed goons, corporate drones, and other types/forms of fraudulent hucksters. For those genuine people, especially genuine artists who have survived the deprivations of the recession, who need to have their humanity affirmed (against the scum), we can offer that particular good/service to them, among others. This collection is a big, bold voice assuring its audience that they are not alone, and that the '14 human scene is not a complete pigsty. So, as the Aughts Philly/Neo-Romanticism juggernaut ambles along, the door is wide open for others of our ilk to follow us. There was/is a certain amount of armature covering us and our endeavor, but we were /are a scene and a city with a soul.

Abs and Keats

Here's an unlikely juxtaposition which works: Abs and Keats. Both packed a world of worthwhile aesthetic vision and knowledge into a small oeuvre. Abs is rather more extreme than Keats: Keats' major achievements, the "Odes," which redefined Romanticism and opened an eternal vista onto conceptions of art, artifice, and temporality in chiasmus with them, only fill up (depending on the volume) 10-20 pages. Yet, there's enough middle-weight and minor Keats material to fill up a small, if compact, volume, with introduction, scholarly critique, and endnotes. Abs' position is more precarious- she has JUST THE ODES, little else- no padding, no middle-weight or minor jive to fill things out. So, an Abby Heller-Burnham coffee table book, of the sort that museums like to sell with exhibitions, would seem to be an impossibility.

This syndrome, the JUST THE ODES syndrome, is what I have to work around, and it applies to Mary too, with even more stringency. I'll spend the next five-ten years working intermittently to overcome this obstacle, and continue to sneer, here and there, at who Pablo Picasso was, whose high-points, for me, are no higher than Marys and Abbys, but who diddled off so much treacle, kitsch, and other dross that coffee table book culture around the man is formidable, and profitable for those appealing to the faux-cultural and sort of art-consonant.

Nature, do you Mind?

Haven't decided whether Elitism/Classicism is finished yet. One way or another, I have some plans about what to do with it when it is. As I've been planning, I decided to do Keats again. His endings are sharper, harder, and more uncompromising than Wordsworth's, his prosody richer, even as WW has more intellectual ambition/depth some of the time. Mind-Nature-Mind or Nature-Mind-Nature are both interesting algorithms for the ages. And that Sex is shorthand for Nature is pure proto-Neo-Romanticism.

Noir Fayette

This is a view, looking down Fayette Street towards the highway which attaches Ply-Mar with Center City Philly. This manuscript I've put into circulation I thought would look decent with this as cover shot; the mss itself, From Conshy: New Apparition Poems, recently finished, attempts to capture the noir aspect of the Philly 'burbs rather than the noir overlay of the city itself.

The Wonders of Abs

Enjoying writing about Abs as usual. And forever.