{"id":64,"date":"2004-04-27T23:18:29","date_gmt":"2004-04-28T06:18:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/?p=64"},"modified":"2004-04-27T23:18:29","modified_gmt":"2004-04-28T06:18:29","slug":"the-walking-devil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/2004\/04\/the-walking-devil\/","title":{"rendered":"the walking devil"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writng is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. He who even nicks the solidity of this apparition does a piece of work superior to that of Hercules when he cleaned the Augean stables.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>~ William Carlos Williams, in Prologue to <i>Kora in Hell: Improvisations<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I am very grateful to Dr. Williams for giving me the exact words I needed. I finally wrote a thank you note to Robert Bly for the Ponge book. I used this quote to introduce my thanks. It&#8217;s an amusingly exaggerated compliment that does a great honor to the work of Object Poems. <\/p>\n<p>A strange few days. My schedule was disrupted today, but it had no impact, positive or negative, on my work. S got bitten by a dog yesterday, and today bounced seven checks. (I suppose that&#8217;s better than being bitten by seven dogs and bouncing one check.) Yesterday, when my son mentioned what we all thought was an ultra-obscure title, his chemistry teacher went to his bookshelf and pulled out the book: <i>Messages from Water<\/i>, by Masaru Emoto. I saw a segment of rainbow in the cloudscape this evening on the ride home from work. The walking devils of modern life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writng is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}