The book pdf for the 2008 Adam Fieled print book When You Bit... from Otoliths.
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Thursday, July 27, 2017
King of Prussia
Last month, for a rather random reason, I managed to make it over to King of Prussia. King of Prussia, and the King of Prussia mall, are always fun for me, both because I like to gawk at the architecture and because I like to indulge in Nineties nostalgia. My semester breaks home from PSU in '94, '95, and '96, I would drive around KOP doing various errands, not necessarily realizing that the architecture was casting a potent spell on my imagination, which it was. KOP looks like it was imported from outer space (and/or the moon), and yet so much of it is so gracefully melded to what mother nature has to offer that it appears entirely organic. Many Philly 'burbs are magical that way; Conshohocken is. The ride from Bridgeport to Conshohocken is another stunning "on the moon" one. If you have wheels, highly recommended.
Tuesday, July 25, 2017
o debbie jaffe, wherefore art thou?
A sign of the times and the Zeitgeist: now that the British online journal Nth Position is offline, we find the key Fieled Nth Position page preserved on The Wayback Machine, archive.org. This 2006 page is mostly notable to me for containing "debbie jaffe" from Beams. Now, you won't ever get the Ur-page again, but can always come here and get the post-Ur-page, as Blogger ricochets become more distinct/useful, if you so desire. Cheers!
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Something Solid: The Nineties: Trooper (for Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum)
La Tazza was a coffee-shop in Manayunk, where I
was stationed with Chris one autumn, semester-break
night in ’97. We’d been through a brief, coffee pick-up
room, down a stairway, which guided you narrowly into
a steep-ceiling’d, spartan, red-painted basement.
Jeremy’s posse, all in army-jackets, picked us up,
and we all wound up in an apartment, steep-ceiling’d
again, on Main Street. I didn’t know Jeremy well
enough yet that night to understand that he was uncharacteristically
quiet. I was to learn, that by then he had lost control
of this cabal, and blew in the wind. The poems sat,
wrapped in a dossier-file presentation, at Villanova,
as they lay also, in Jeremy’s brain, medals of honor
from his days as a real, poetry punch-drunk army trooper.
I envision— Jeremy walks down Main Street. In his hands
is a copy of “d” magazine, which he hopes to consign anywhere.
Rather, he hopes to dump in the river, a few blocks
down. The fame he wants is fast, or nothing. He always thought
he would make it someday. If he doesn’t, it’s not his fault.
Perhaps he should move to New York, after all. Or teach,
tutor, bartend, give up the architecture routine. His brain is
a jumble of low and high. It’s worth something to him, to be
big. Why starve? Why play pauper? It’s true: unless he feels
royal, royally protected, he can’t write. Main Street dead-ends:
it’s ruthlessly midnight. When Manayunk would lead to
Center City, Jeremy was destined to find me, not
backing up third-world, New Jersey shenanigans,
waiting in a coffee-shop, to get punch-drunk on poetry.
© Adam Fieled 2021-2026
was stationed with Chris one autumn, semester-break
night in ’97. We’d been through a brief, coffee pick-up
room, down a stairway, which guided you narrowly into
a steep-ceiling’d, spartan, red-painted basement.
Jeremy’s posse, all in army-jackets, picked us up,
and we all wound up in an apartment, steep-ceiling’d
again, on Main Street. I didn’t know Jeremy well
enough yet that night to understand that he was uncharacteristically
quiet. I was to learn, that by then he had lost control
of this cabal, and blew in the wind. The poems sat,
wrapped in a dossier-file presentation, at Villanova,
as they lay also, in Jeremy’s brain, medals of honor
from his days as a real, poetry punch-drunk army trooper.
I envision— Jeremy walks down Main Street. In his hands
is a copy of “d” magazine, which he hopes to consign anywhere.
Rather, he hopes to dump in the river, a few blocks
down. The fame he wants is fast, or nothing. He always thought
he would make it someday. If he doesn’t, it’s not his fault.
Perhaps he should move to New York, after all. Or teach,
tutor, bartend, give up the architecture routine. His brain is
a jumble of low and high. It’s worth something to him, to be
big. Why starve? Why play pauper? It’s true: unless he feels
royal, royally protected, he can’t write. Main Street dead-ends:
it’s ruthlessly midnight. When Manayunk would lead to
Center City, Jeremy was destined to find me, not
backing up third-world, New Jersey shenanigans,
waiting in a coffee-shop, to get punch-drunk on poetry.
© Adam Fieled 2021-2026
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Clear Channel?
If by 40 you do not believe in other worlds, above and beyond the world/context of the human race on earth, you can look forward to a pretty paltry existence. Aleister Crowley clearly believed in the existence of other worlds; in Book of the Law, he seems to be channeling one of them. What I find interesting in the book, as the manifestation of a channeling exercise, is the way/manner in which Crowley wrestles with his voices. The first voice is a female voice, and a caressing one (Nuit). With Nuit, Crowley seems simpatico. The second and third voices, Hadit and Horus, are male, imposing, phallic presences. With Hadit and Horus, Crowley not only wrestles with their phallic impositions, it is difficult to tell in the text if Crowley is "clear channeling," or deliberately mangling what may have been being transmitted through the airwaves on those two April afternoons. Why was Crowley quarreling with his voices? The answer seems to be clear: Hadit and Horus espouse a form of spiritual elitism and classicism, against the intercession of plebeians/the plebeian, which Crowley, not wanting to alienate a potential audience, finds distasteful. It is a theory I have that, literary/occult acumen aside, Crowley as an individual may have been less remarkable than has been commonly supposed. His aims in the world were conventional ones, and he craved conventional success. Maybe.
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