i have finally buckled under the pressure of web 2.0 and moved this blog over to a wordpress platform. i looked into custom comment engines and archiving, but it just seemed a bit to peverse to carry on with it when there is such a good package as wordpress. so from now on you can find the 2012 blog here. it's not too far away! see you there!
Inchiki 17 05 12
Couple o things. first, i want to plug the 'iterated dynamics' Fractint for windows beta by Richard Thompson, available at Legalize Adulthood. i spent many long hours with fractint on my old 386 and my 586. i’m looking forward to speedy fractal generation in my new Sandybridge i3, and will post some new juicy images here soon.
i have got my Poem Compressor to a decent level of functionality and welcome the interested to come and play at making their poems even more lithe vehicles of meaning.
finally, i have had a good laugh over at the 13 greatest error messages of all time. i remember very well the countless 'abort, retry fail?' messages i faced working with DOS back in the day. it has reminded me to get going with souping up my custom 404 error page to display some of the original error messages, besides the only-one-keystroke-away 'bad command or file name'.
Inchiki 29 03 12
St valentines day, how exciting. a new mood for the planet for a day. we are all lovers with each other. a skipping rope fillip from google. except, some of us are picky.
i wonder what soulmates are, perhaps just an illusion, collusion, allusion, alluria. i write about lovers but i have never had any. bodies are too sticky sweet for me. i prefer minds, poems, smoke rings. the soul begins where the body ends.
pet hates: gazpachio soup, broccoli, influenza, humming bees. i will learn to love all these. and trees.
we should try to love the most difficult people. osama bin Laden. Barbra Streisand. the Pope. we should see that they were us, at the moment of their birth, and are the result of living in different circumstances. there are lots of people who don't believe this. i say: get to know yourself, you will find everyone else is in there with you. when the mask is torn off we know ourselves, and we instantly know love.
years ago i wrote on open diary about all this, but that site suffered from its own popularity and it was all deleted. such a missed opportunity.. but the internet is still so fragile, even today. we trust it with things that are so precious to us. imagine if it was all lost to some new virus, like a house fire running through the wires, destroying everything.
Inchiki 14 02 12
my latest collection, Poison Bomb is out in an e-book on Amazon for 99c. these poems were all written during a creative spurt that i've been experiencing since August. feels a bit like it could be tapering off now so i've snapped them into this little collection. there is a continuity to these poems, exploring the old themes of love and death, suffering, war. i am experiencing this in a different way now. i think i have touched something new.
Inchiki 09 02 12
i have finally released all my work here into the public domain for good. i first released some of my work onto the public domain about three years ago, but then wavered, and put a creative commons licence on new work for a time instead. but i have come full circle now and decided that it is the best way to express what i believe to be true. the whole copyright industry seems designed to make it difficult for poetry to get out there, be talked about, passed around, shredded, analysed. it makes no sense to me. the argument extends to all avenues of creativity, patents and trademarks but i'm not going to try and change the whole world today.
but how can creativity be rewarded? what's the new model? well, there does have to be a way to recognise creativity when it happens, and then facilitate it happening again. the focus needs to stay on the origin, not the product. follow the smoke to the fire, something good is happening there. there needs to be a way to prevent fraud, passing off an idea as your own - but mechanisms already exist for that. there also needs to be a 'right to remain secret' for unfinished work, and for those who aren't ready to release their creations. using secrecy (in a way similar to privacy laws) could provide many of the benefits that patents and copyright are meant to afford. once in production, released, the chains should come off, so that the full benefits of invention can flow to all.
so supposing i was a great poet(?!), but all my work was in the public domain, how would i make a living? well i could continue to scratch by as i do now in the office. but if people really liked my stuff, really valued it, then probably they'd value my reading it, my talking about it. established poets and writers already make a lot of their income through readings, lectures, running courses, being the 'in house' poet etc. none of that would change. if i wanted to go commercial, i could write poems for people on request, for a fee. the poems would still be released into the public domain but my pen and my time could be bought, just as if i was a fantastic carpenter. i could happily write dedications, do limited signed or handwritten editions of my poems etc which would be of value for their aesthetic and their direct connection to the poet. none of this would require any sort of copyright to be in place. copyright would get in the way, if anything.
in the meantime, publishers could concentrate on the business of publishing. already, much of their source material is public domain - the old poets. imagine if new poetry was as cheap to publish as old poetry. it might actually be worthwhile getting a few more collections together. publishers could pick and chose much more easily - they could concentrate on either bulk collections of new material sold cheaply, or they could work with poets for small print runs which would still be of value to collectors for their quality and connection to the poet. both types of publishing would benefit poets - being published in any way is of benefit to a poet's reputation, and once the reputation is established, the ability to make living from poetry increases. at present, it is hardly worthwhile for anyone to publish poetry, it's expensive to buy, poets don't make any money from it, publisher's don't make any money from it. i can't see how it can get any worse. injecting some sense and freedom into the system can only help.
online is the perfect medium for poetry anyway - a poem stands up fine being read on the screen. they are easy to transmit, blogs seem designed for them. but it is hard for collectors to showcase new poetry if they need to contact every poet for permission to use a piece. it's hard to pass poems or bits of poems around when the author needs to approve every transaction - whether there is a financial component or not. who is this benefiting exactly? it's making it hard for everyone, poets, online publishers. every poem has a chain attached to it - take the chains of copyright off and let poems be free! and see what happens - maybe finally poetry will come into its own. it should do on the internet, which is the perfect media for it, a dream platform for poetry if there ever was one.
poetry is the most explicit of the arts - less bogged down in the sensual like music and visual arts, less circumambulatory than a novel. a poem - even a few lines - can cut through so much. they are the knives in the dark room of ignorance. and good poets like good assassins are hard to find. it takes a long time to develop as a poet, poets often come into their own late in life. copyright is strangling good poets, silencing them. it is like anaesthesia. great poems are lost, trapped in small press publications that never see the light of day. who is going to write to all these poets and ask them if we can publish them again? small presses? they are struggling to pay for all last year's decisions, propping up their favourite few. copyright weighs them down too.
the internet is already changing people's expectations, it feels natural to be able to access all sorts of information and creation for free, and it is natural. the rules are already bending under this expectation. but it is going to take those who are complicit with the vested interests to flick the switch and change things. i dont know what is ahead, and i know that these sorts of changes can be painful to those already plugged into the system, but this is what the future feels like to me.
Inchiki 07 02 12
The Australian media somehow isn't seeing the true significance of yesterday's skirmish outside The Lobby restaurant following Tony Abott's ignorant comments about the significance of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. i unfortunately have no real connections to the Aboriginal community here. but only last year on a cool autumn morning i was walking through the rose gardens, when i caught a whisper of smoke on the air from a campfire burning over in front of old parliament house. it reminded me of the bush, it reminded me of the Australia that exists beyond the monoliths of the parliamentary triangle, that existed on this spot for millenia, and i was immensely grateful for it then.
it is terrible that there can be no recognition among people like Tony Abbott of the importance of the ongoing protest that has been occuring at this spot. it is symbolic of the whole state of affairs that still exists with the role of Aboriginal people in Australia. i thought last Autumn - why don't Aboriginal people have a permanent home here in Canberra, why do they have to keep on with this temporary place? but perhaps by asking that question i am shewing how out of touch i am with the heart of the issues. whatever the solution is, i hope that it does not put out the fires that drift their aromatic smoke among the rosebushes on the lawns of parliament. it seems to be the only signature of humane occupation that exists in Canberra.
Inchiki 27 01 12
it is acknowledged that time travel is possible - in fact, we are going to need to use these kinds of physics if we are ever going to explore the universe, at least according to the framework of general relativity. but the grandfather paradox appears to make this impossible, or at least very difficult to understand. essentially, the moment we go back in time and change an event which has a consequence for the moment at which we left to go back in time, we enter some kind of self iterating loop which traps us forever in a state of semi-existence. we are very uncomfortable with this notion, as we are used to living within a solid cause-effect event tree. however, mathematicians are quite comfortable with infinite loops and use them all the time. the question seems to be - how would this feel to a human being? well, i think i have one possible explanation, which is that it would feel exactly like life already feels today, and that the life we lead is just such an infinite loop.
the moment that one initiated an action which altered the past, we would literally fall into a sea of scenarios all of which could exist as a consequence of that act. it would be like striking a mirror with a hammer, each shard of which reflected a possibility that was created by our act of altering the past. taking the grandfather paradox as an example, if we really did go back in time and kill our grandfather, then we would create a whole lot of futures in which we didn't exist. however, these would still be balanced by all the futures which already existed where we didn't kill our grandfather, plus a whole lot of in-between futures where perhaps we just gave our grandfather a slight flesh wound which didn't alter our existence quite as much but still had some effect. obviously, conceptually, we have trouble with all this existing at once. we are used to being a single being existing in a single body at a single point in time. but i argue that this is just a fudge, that we are tied for i suppose cognitive reasons to a single thread of history, but that this does not reflect reality at all. the moment we become disconnected is when we die. we then have a chance to pick up another thread. this would also be initiated by the instant we initiated a travel back in time to alter history, because implicit in that moment would be the possibility of our own 'death' or, ceasing to exist.
hopping from one stream to another would become a familiar action to a time traveller. the concepts of 'birth' and 'death' would become antiquated. instead, the full mutability of possible life histories would be our terrain. the concept of 'me' would shift each time we leapt from one history to another, as each body we inhabited had sprung from a slightly different seed. we would become an actor in our own life, and in the related lives which became revealed by tinkering with the chains of our own history.
as fantastic as this sounds, it is nothing more than what is happening every day of our lives. perhaps no 'time travel' device demonstrably exists in this current thread of space, in this world. however our consciousness contains the countless visitations of our own self from other time paths, passing fleeting visits, leaving the sticky threads of other worlds in our mind - these are our thoughts, our imaginings and our dreams. we exist in a web of time, connected by the very laws of physics with countless others - 'aliens' maybe - yet they are as familiar to us as our own face shown in the mirror, they are intimates to our inner 'private' world. one day we will become time travellers ourselves and we will join them - this will be the next great leap in evolution - when we are freed from this time and space and will have the whole multiverse to explore, and all through familiar eyes.
i suppose these kind of ideas would make me certifiable... but it's all bread and butter to the poetic humour.
Inchiki 19 01 12
today i have finally finished the first part of my SIN SUM SON trilogy. i've drawn on some of my travel experiences from journal days for part one, and it is actually quite autobiographical, except for the parts which obviously aren't, like the bit where i die. SUM and SON i wrote and posted some time ago, so as this is the last instalment, i have brought the three parts together on their own page now.
Inchiki 04 01 12
