January 2008
Three Trees
Click on photographs to enlarge Accidentals Three trees are lying on the ground this morning They are resting, dust to dust They were standing up last night In the middle of the night they were waving their boughs indignantly at the gods of wind and ice and then they fell missing the house politely missing the garden even ten deer feeding on their branches birds hiding from the snow closer to...
WatchNiagara River ice floe, January 30, 2008 (lumière)
WatchSnow Blowing (using maximum digital zoom on camera with sharpening and boosted contrast)
WatchA guy’s got to eat (lumière)
WatchView of Weather from Bedroom (lumière)
Weather Sounds Tonight there was a high-wind...
WatchFrom a friend in Rio (sound) Regina Célia Pinto sent us this clip of the beginning of Carnaval. shot in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
New HUMAN: Millie Niss →
The founder of Sporkworld, Millie Niss, has been added to poet David Daniels’s HUMANS project, a collection of shape poems in PDF format about a collection of people. The Sporkworld Community Blog had a story by Daniels describing this ongoing work last year. A miniaturized version of the “Millie Niss HUMAN” is shown below, click on it to see the actual PDF in which one can...
WatchIt had to come to this. Too many days of snow in a row.
WatchAfrican Hedgehog
WatchRacing in the rain at Canal Fest
WatchSugar Maple Sap Running
WatchMowing in February Our Special Mowing in February Lawnmowers are not the of the ordinary electric rotor, gas-powered self-propelling, or even hand pushed whirligig human powered variety. Our Mowing in February models come with specially-equipped permanently mounted plows suitable for use by the most dedicated lawnmowing enthusiasts from September through May in those clim’es so specially endowed...
WatchBus Reflection II I am not sure if these are official lumières, because the still camera is in a moving vehicle, but there seem to be some clips like this on the official Lumière site, so I think they qualify.
WatchBus Reflection I
WatchCampus Reflection
WatchCafé Reflection
Lumières
Although this is Martin Luther King Day, which is meant to be a day of peace, there is tension in Sporkworld. It would be a false canard to call it conflict. Nonetheless, disquiet does exist. The point at issue is quite simple in the stating, and much more difficult in the resolution: When does responding to an invitation to link one’s work to another’s become mere imitation? The...
WatchFlag Lumière II
WatchFlag Lumière I I have been going through my old videos, looking for accidental lumieres. I found a large number, which I will be posting every so often.
Lumière Videos →
Lumière videos are videos made using a constraint inspired by the limitations of the earliest moviemaking by the Lumière borthers. The rules for a Lumière are: less than 60 seconds no editing no zoom fixed camera no sound
Of Whiskey and Winter by Peter Conners →
Peter Conners came to Buffalo to read last night at the Small Press Series at Rust Belt Books. He claimed to like the snow, but his reading from his new collection from White Pine Press suggests a more ambivalent response to Winter. Anyone who can start a poem with “Gentrified turds are the stucco of Spring” gets me to open up my wallet… This one is so engaging, I read most of...
In and Out Baobab
The Stout Sinners sing outrageous sonnets during the Seventh Inning stretch at the Annual Round Robin Eat-Out in Outer Washington, Indiana. Cooking in is always out, they shout in perfect iambic pentameter, incisively outshouting and outraging the local infidels who cook kraut instead of Asian cumin cabbage while no doubt counting out the indelicate indiscretions of indiscrete outsider louts with...
A Fable in the Form of a Baobab on "in" and "out"
An indigent Indian Mahout in Indianapolis encountered a lout, who, shouting insults at the devout elephant handler, injured the beast in rut, which outran its outraged keeper, who, slowed by a bout of gout, was in no shape to sprint. Without his elephant, the indignant Mahout was out of a job, so he, an innocent immigrant, went about applying for income from the State of Indiana, where he was a...
WatchIntersection which could be anywhere in America… due to the universal presence of cars, gas stations, and chain stores, but is in fact, Niagara Falls Boulevard at the Robinson Road Bridge over the Erie Canal, on our way from North Tonawanda to the main “strip” where all the stores and malls are.
WatchSame snow, with zoom Also filtered using QT Pro. However these are the colors actually recorded by the camera, with a little added saturation. The previous video’s colors are truer to life, but were adjusted to become more yellow.
WatchSnow Falling in Pharmacy Parking Lot Some of us Sporkies only get out on rare occasions, so we try to make the best of rather poor opportunities for photography. I did a selection of wet snow videos to show our viewers from warmer climes what a Western New York winter looks like. The darkness is not a mere accident; it is dark most of the day here in winter. I did my editing (trimming),...
Pho Saigon Restaurant, Amherst, NY →
We discovered this rather hidden Vietnamese Restaurant while on our way to check out a Southwestern Restaurant which actually is visible from the road. The food was excellent, and we were the only people there at dinner time, so we encourage any WNY locals who like pho, bun, and other fun stuff to check it out before it goes out of business for lack of business.
Sporkworld YouTube Channel →
In our never-ending quest for fame, we have started a Sporkworld YouTube Channel, which so far has only two videos on it, but we will add more soon. PLease visit it and rate and comment on our videos. Query: Should a YouTube Channel have only “YouTubey” videos on it, that is, videos which are funny and/or topical and have the potential to “go viral” on the Internet, or...
WatchI am a Republican (sound) This was the very first video the Sporkworld Team made after purchasing our camcorder. We made it with the terrible Pinnacle trial version video editing software that came with the camcorder. As a result, the movie existed (until today) only in a WMV output file with no editable project I could open in Premiere. Fortunately, the Sony Vaio Content Exporter which came...
Political Poems and the Fear of Timeliness
It happened again this morning. The Sporkworld crew were taking a break and hoping to catch a nap when Bob Schieffer’s “Face the Nation” appeared on our tiny screen TV. Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney were the guests, and so I prepared myself to sleep until the football playoffs were to begin at 1 PM. And then, Schieffer asked, “John McCain has said the jobs in Michigan...
Nixon Poem (resurrected from my archive)
Rachel Loden’s book has an extended series about Nixon, so I have unearthed my Nixon poem from my archive. I wrote this years ago to read at The Poetry Project’s then-informal Friday events when there was a challenge each week to write a poem on a particular topic to read the next week. One week, the organizer, Regie Cabico, asked for poems about Richard Nixon. An Alternate-History...
Recommended Book: Hotel Imperium by Rachel Loden →
Timeless political poetry starring Richard Nixon
Catalog of Oulipian Constraints (in French) →
long list of constraints that can be used as recipes for poems, with examples
Oulipo Exposition in Paris →
For anyone in Paris, check out the Oulipo et La Ville (Oulipo and the City) exposition open until January 31 at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette I wish I were there!
More Baobabs
Here is another “go” at writing with an Oulipo constraint. I’ve been doing these poems-written-with constraints for at least three years. But, if one sticks to poetry pedigrees, a person who writes oulipoems is not an Oulipo poet unless s/he attends the Oulipoet meetings in Paris every month’s first Thursday and preferably speaks far better French than I do. On and Off 1...
Baobab Poem
Another recipe from the Oulipo book: In the Baobab poem, you take two related one-syllable words and write a poem using those syllables as often as possible. I wrote a rather tasteless example today using the words on and off: In Tonawanda’a awful off-shore veranda restaurant Aunt Ophelia and her entourage quaff Cointreau In honor of the oft-mocked ontological proof of the Beyond Offered bonbons,...