A 42-year-old Asian man was found hanging by the neck, suspended by a rope attached to the raised shovel of a John Deere model J D 410, diesel powered, backhoe tractor. He was last seen alive by his parents, the prior evening at 10:30 when he walked out of their shared rural home. Shortly thereafter they heard the tractor engine start, as they had on prior occasions, but they investigate no further. The following morning the father noticed that his son’s bed had not been slept in, and he heard the tractor engine idling. When he went out to the yard, he found his son dead, stiff, and cold.
The decedent was suspended in a semi-sitting position by a cloth safety harness strap wrapped around his neck and clipped to a rope that was hooked on the raised shovel of the backhoe tractor. A towel was between the loose-fitting strap and the victim’s neck. A long piece of plastic pipe was connected on one end by conduit tape to the hydraulic control lever of the shovel in the operator’s compartment of the tractor. A broomstick was taped to the other end of the pipe and was partially under the decedent’s buttocks. The hydraulic shovel could be easily raised or lowered by pressure applied to the broomstick. The decedent was fully clothed and his genitals were not exposed. No pornographic materials, women’s clothing items, or mirrors were at the scene.
The decedent was a self-employed engineer who was unmarried and had always lived with his parents. He owned his own successful company and was actively involved in several hobbies, including two high-risk sports. He regularly contributed volunteer work to a charitable organization. His medical history was remarkable only for Reiter’s syndrome with ankylosing spondylitis and clinical urethritis. He had no known psychiatric illness.
Two years before his death he had bought the backhoe tractor as a Christmas gift to himself and named it “Stone.” He used the backhoe on occasional ditch-digging jobs. He wrote about it in a Christmas newsletter to friends, in which he enclosed Stone’s picture. He also wrote about his tractor in a long poem, which alluded to flying high in the sky with his friend, Stone.
[from Amok Journal, an excerpt from "Autoerotic Fatalities with Power Hydraulics" by Ronald L. O'Halloran, M.D., and Park Elliot Dietz, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., originally published in Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 2, March 1993.]

Ê Tao Đây [Hey I'm Here] (2005), a samizdat by Nguyễn Quốc Chánh. The cover shows the poet with his digital camera and his beloved, I assume, vacuum cleaner. Saigon-based, he’s probably the best writing in Vietnamese. Nguyễn Quốc Chánh is available in English in Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), in my translation. Click here for a free download. A sample:
Seven Untitled Poems
The sun lunges forward crossing a boundary puncturing a late sleep.
An egg hatches a sound.
I grip my own hand holding a shadow and releasing it into a glass of water.
On the silent shore the sea of memories spares two shells odorless and empty.
*
Evening holding back a burnt mark a pictogram the pit of an eye the sun immolated,
Evening burning the memory bank arms held in prayer the night heron calling into space,
Night extinguished with one man left behind lunging forward turning into a shadow . . .
Evening Who?
*
Feet without lamp street without lamp the shadow is black.
Feet without lamp street with lamp black is the shadow.
Beneath two lamps two shadows both are black.
*
You ran contrariwise from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, a mad woman, a primitive egg dashed against scrap metal.
You collided then reverted to a rubbery condition a series of warped circles.
The endlessly jarring road with its bad intentioned collisions and drowned rivers.
You ran in panic from the woods onto a tidy stage then smiled and talked in a bisexual manner.
Beneath the conceptual hammer you boldly split in two rhythmically trembling on the resilient mattress.
You chased after a fit of excess and fell into the HIV pit.
A strange wind poured into the fire.
You a gray smoke gathering into clouds metamorphosing into a female bug like the woman in the dunes adapting to a man robbed of freedom without his day on the cross.
You a woman about to be stoned.
*
My eyes do not register the presence of trees animals men or even the arrogant horizon.
Inside my eyes are only distances hierarchies dark holes black boxes zigzags and disquiets.
*
Daybreak frolics with the flowers the night smile disappearing on the street.
Each person a curfew face inside the clock the pendulum oscillates.
The briefest day I throw away as you save the thin pleasured body.
Daybreak swallows you in stages nibbles me to bits.
*
Tic toc tic toc
The horn beak pecks at the night drum,
Two secret revealing eyes are sliding along time’s greasy surface.
The wall displays dead holes variously connected to the inmate.
And only the tic toc sounds remain to count the rolling aspirins.
Night flashes its cold teeth the mouth opens its precipices.
Shadows from cul-de-sacs stretch and stagnate on the brick floor.
Still the tic toc sounds pecking the dense night.
Still the rolling aspirins.

On My Belly: In the Studio
FIVE OUT OF THE LAST SIX YEARS I’VE lived outside the US, more or less out of a suitcase, away from most of my books. I used to feel exhilarated just looking at the spines of all the books in my library. Now I have hardly any books, only memories of books.
I write with a laptop while lying on my belly (like Jarry!). I revise directly on the computer and do not print out working drafts. I am entirely a paperless writer.
The view outside my window is of olive trees and vineyards and the distant towers of San Gimignano but I don’t see them, because I’m lying on my belly. Vallejo: life would be worth it even if one were reduced to lying on one’s belly.
Trained as an artist, I enjoy scrutinizing paintings in museums and galleries but I prefer to keep my own walls absolutely blank. Blank walls are like blank pieces of paper, an inducement to defilement and violent, unhinged expressions.
I do not mind natural noises–bird songs, children whinnying, old men clearing their throats–filtering in through my window but I cannot work with any sort of mechanical din in the background whatsoever, such as canned music or even the ticking of a cheap clock. I own neither a TV nor a stereo. I don’t think we were ever meant to hear the same song sung exactly the same way more than once in a lifetime. People who enjoy listening to canned music 24 hours a day must be the unhappiest of creatures.
I always write while perfectly sober. I don’t write drunk anymore. Before I was married, I kept irregular hours and would often work at night, sometimes through an entire night. The night is truly a different country. Now I can write at any time of the day, because I always carry the night inside me.
When I lived in Philadelphia I used to love to leave the house, dazed, at the first break of light, after a night of writing. At that hour the street lights would still be on, and a teenage male prostitute, pale, scrawny and rather underdressed for the cold weather, could be seen bending over to peer into the crazed side mirror of a parked car. he was fixing his stringy hair.
“What are you doing out so early?”
“Just walking. What are you doing?”
“Making money!”
Underage whores and writers mirror each other in their raw beauty and foolishness. They are only put here on this earth to give older men unsatisfying oral attention. Artaud: “And you are quite superfluous, young men!”
Harold Brodkey said that once you’re satisfied with a piece of writing, once you think it’s “publishable,” then you can really toy with it, just to see what happens. And Isaac Babel said that he could revise a story any number of times, even years later. And Pierre Bonnard was once caught in flagrante trying to retouch one of his own paintings hanging on a museum wall. Last thought is indeed best thought.
Living in non-English-speaking environments I must rely on the Internet to stay in touch with the English language. E-mail provides me with an outlet for virtual English conversations. Otherwise I speak no English whatsoever, just Vietnamese (with my wife) and bad Italian (with strangers). It is interesting to note that e-mailing encourages everyone to write more, a spur to literacy, but the casualness of e-mailing permeates everything we write nowadays.
The Internet allows us to converse without looking at each other’s face. Like Philip Guston, I’ve always preferred to look at the side of a face, instead of straight on. I also like the back of the head. Am I a coward then? No, just discreet. O the tyranny of a human face!
Talking of tyranny, I’ve come to realize that I much prefer to live on the periphery of the English language, so that I can steer clear of the tyranny of its suffocating center. In this sense, I am a quintessential American. A Unapoet, I like to homestead just beyond the long reach of Washington.
How tiresome to always be expressing oneself! Wouldn’t it be better to express other people’s longings and secrets? Faulkner: I am tired of everyone’s individualities, and nauseated by my own.
I have always been inspired by amateur writings and the Internet provides me with instant access to the underbelly of the language. Simply by going online I can plunge into a vast ocean of heartfelt confessions by sappy child molesters and frank racists and uncontrite murderers.
Hearing the rapid syllables of a foreign language, a bigot is infuriated because he’s reduced to the status of an infant. Poets, on the other hand, should welcome all opportunities to become disoriented. To not know what’s happening forces one to become more attentive and to fill in the blanks. Hence, poetry.
One may start with a rather stupid idea, but if one expresses this stupid idea just right, with finesse, then one may still end up with an interesting poem. With irony, everything is possible.
One may begin writing a poem in complete freedom, that is, in complete randomness, but one should end the exasperating process in abject submission.

[first published in American Poetry Review, Mar/Apr 2004.]

“I paint these monkeys with a brush and hand-ground Chinese ink,” she writes in the accompanying article. “I found the paintbrush when I was working on my novel Cruddy, getting nowhere because I was trying to write it on a computer. The problem with writing on a computer was that I could delete anything I felt unsure about. This meant that a sentence was gone before I even had a chance to see what it was trying to become.” She goes on to explain how forgoing the computer in favor of writing her book with a brush “allow[ed] the unexpected to grow. I finished my novel.”
[Linda Barry in the Summer 2008 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, as quoted in Joseph Hutchison's blog.]

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008:
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?��? So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,��? HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.��?
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
[...]

06.11.08 PERMALINK | ONE COMMENT

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One Comment for “Poetry and Technology”

1. This post is heavy; therefore, this general (possibly unnecessary) observation
   about humans and their inventions: The more powerful an invention is,
   the greater its potentiality for both good and evil.
   Just finished (thanks to your e-whip) reading Nicholas Carrr’s
   “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which is in the July/August
   Atlantic Monthly. I think, however Google’s designs play into it,
   what is enhancing/changing/damaging our brains when we
   engage with what is online is what the Internet makes available
   and how those of us who access it choose to use it. During my
   early days online–in 2000 and for a year or so after–I let myself
   get hooked by a game I never was/ quite able to win. Finally,
   one day, the provider of that game sent me a message:
   “Thank you for letting us waste your time.” I haven’t played
   a computer game since.
   The Internet is my present house of learning. Sometimes I need to
   read a long piece in two or more sittings, but if I feel a piece is
   worth reading/ I am willing to spend time with it. Do I skim and
   flit from here to there? Yes, but that is mostly when I am checking
   search results. I keep a notebook specifically for when I am online,
   though I do use it at times when I am offline. I place the date in
   the margin, and note URI/URLs (including my own) and enter
   quotations or whatever else seems of value into it. Certainly the
   Internet influences my daily life and all that I am. My taking
   time to make this comment is evidence of that. My calling a
   hyperlink an e-whip is an example.
   Are we becoming more automaton-like? Of course we are in
   some ways. Using a computer requires acquiring computer
   skills, at least to the degree needed to best carry out those
   projects our funky, creatrive minds embark on. I am into one
   now. Through it I am learning on-the-go. Luckily, I do not
   need to buy special equipment for it. Many things I would
   like to do I do not have the finances for, and so I do not do them.
   Other things I once did, I either can no longer do or simply do
   not want to do. It’s all in the choices one makes. Being online
   is not an essential. Neither is having a computer. Nonetheless,
   I have found it to be for me ever more valuable. My existence
   is a hermit existence. As it is, I will continue to use the spaces
   the Internest provides whether or not anyone visits my blogs
   or communicates with me in other ways. And I am not put
   off by online typing. I am used to making revisions easily.
   Am I happy with the technologies available? No, but they
   do improve over time. I have two blogs, each in a different
   space. In the first of those spaces I can do things I cannot do
   in the second. In the second of those spaces I can do things I
   cannot do in the first. So it is.
   Thank you for being. Thank you for being online. Mr. Carr
   is right about the Internet power entities. He is also right about
   the desires of those entities regarding Aritificial Intelligence.
   The human mind is more than just a mechansim in need of
   upgrading. Just look at how we humans toy with
   whatever we invent.

   Posted By: Brian Salchert on June 12, 2008 at 1:50 pm
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