information upon an empire of coins (1 Viewer)

Another typing exercise for me, and some words for you all. From what I can tell, this was published only in renaissance 3 Vol. 1, No. 3, 1962: It's a good one, indeed.

information upon an empire of coins

the legs are gone and the hopes -- the lava of outpouring,
and I haven't shaved in sixteen days
but the mailman still makes his rounds and
water still comes out of the faucet and I have a photo of
myself with glazed and milky eyes full of simple music
in golden trunks and 20 oz. gloves when I made the semi-finals
only to be taken out by a German brute who should have been
locked in a cage for the insane and allowed to drink blood.
Now I am insane and stare at the wallpaper as one would stare
at a Dali or an early Picasso (he has lost it), and I send out
the girls for beer, the old girls who barely bother to wipe
their asses and say, well, I guess I won't comb my hair today;
it might bring me luck. well, anyway, they wash the dishes and
chop the wood, and the landlady keeps saying let me in, I can't
get in, you've got the lock on, and what's all that singing and
cussing in there? but she only wants a piece of ass, she pretends
she wants the rent
but she's not gonna get either one of 'em.
meanwhile the skulls of the dead are full of beetles and Shakes-
peare rants and old footbal scores like S.C. 16, N.D. 14 on a John
Baker field goal.
I can see the fleet from my window, the sails and the guns, always
the guns poking their eyes in the sky looking for trouble like young
L.A. cops who haven't even shaved yet, and the young sailors out
there, sex-hungry trying to act tough, trying to act like men
but really closer to their mother's nipples than to a true evalu-
ation of existence. I said, god damn it, that
the legs are gone and the outpourings too. beneath my brain
they snip and snap and
pour oil
to burn and fire out early dreams
darling, says one of the girls, you've got to snap out of it,
we're running out of MONEY. How do you want
your toast?
white or dark?

a woman's a woman, I say, and I put my binolulars between her
kneecaps and I can see where
empires have fallen

I wish I had a brush, some paint, some paint and a brush, I say.

why? asks one of the
whores.

BECAUSE RATS DON'T LIKE OIL! I scream.

(I can't go it. I don't belong here. I listen to radio programs
and people's voices talking and I marvel that they can get excited
and interested over nothing) and I flick out the lights, I
tear the shades down and I light my last cigar
the dreamjump down the Empire State Building
into the thickheaded bullbrained mob with the hard-on attitude
already forgotton the dead of Normandy, Lincoln's stringy beard,
all the bulls that have died to flashing red capes,
all the love that has died in real women and real men
while fools have been elevated to the trumpet's succulent sneer
and I have fought red-handed and drunk
in slop-pitted alleys
the bartenders of this rotten land.

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing
is so ridiculous
that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits,
the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the
poets...are interesting?

in the dark I hear the hands reaching for the last of my money
like roaches nibbling at paper, automatic, feelers of inbred
helpnessless, a false drunken God asleep at the wheel...
a quarter rolls across the floor, and I remember all the faces and
the football heroes, and everything is meaning, and an editor
writes me, you are good
but
you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,
study it and put it away to sleep in abstracts.

is there anything less abstract
than dying everyday and
on the last day?

the door closes and the last of the great whores are gone
and they are all great, somehow no matter how they have
killed me, they are great, and I smoke quietly
thinking of Mexico, the rotten horses, of Havana and Spain
and Normandy, of the jabbering insane Japs winning whether
they lived or died, of my dead friends, of no more friends
ever; and the voice of my Mexican buddy saying, you won't die
you won't die in the war, you're too smart, you'll take care
of yourself.

I keep thinking of the bulls. the rotten bulls, dying everyday.
the whores are gone. the shells have stopped for a moment.

fuck everybody.
 
Thanks Purple. That was collected as An Empire of Coins in both The Roominghouse Madrigals and Betting on the Muse.
 
That was collected as An Empire of Coins in both The Roominghouse Madrigals and Betting on the Muse.
One of the things I'm trying to do with the new db (which I am slogging through today) is consolidate those same-poem-different-title works under one title. Problem is it is difficult to cross reference unless you have all the little mag publications to compare to. And it's slow going. And a pain in the ass.

As I sift through them and remove slightly different duplicate titles, the total count of unique works shrinks. I don't know what it will be when I'm finished, but it is already - and I suspect when all is said and done it will remain - significantly less than the current db shows ("There are currently 5599 entries in the database"). Unfortunately there is a lot of duplication in the old database, so that number is way off.

Right now the unique works table in the new db has 4060 entries. I assume that I will consolidate another 30 or 40 titles before I'm through, and then if we add two, three or five hundred (whatever that number turns out to be) previously unknown from cirerita's research, we still come up about a thousand short of the stated total now.

That doesn't take Write into account, of course. ;)
 
That's a problem, but a minor one. The real problem is finding out which poems were published under completely different titles. "Existence" becoming "Life at the P.O." is a recent instance, but there are many more. I posted a brief list a while ago somewhere in the forum. Even if you have copies -or xerox copies- of most poems as they originally appeared in the littles, you still have the same problem. It's not a question of having the material only, you are also supposed to remember what the poems say to find the "duplicates".

The only way to avoid these duplicates for sure is to type up the first line from each poem. I did that with the stories and that's a pain in the ass. It takes hours and hours... The 500 "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" columns alone would kill a sane man ;)
 
For sure, those are worse than the titles that have obvious similarities.

To truly get a grasp of the number you would need a database that includes the works themselves, or at least a few lines. Even then, it would take a bit of time to sort it all out.

It's taken forever just to try to organize the titles. Dealing with the full works would be a nightmare. But also a pretty valuable database. ;)
 
Maybe I just need to stop typing. It reminds me of the story of Miles and 'Trane, after 'Trane was criticized for playing 30-minute solos, and 'Trane said "I don't know, I just can't seem to stop playing...," and Miles said "Have you ever thought about taking the fucking horn outta your mouth?"

Thanks, mjp, for the work on the new DB, and cirerita, for all your knowledge.
 
It's not a question of having the material only, you are also supposed to remember what the poems say to find the "duplicates".

oh, that would be easy:
just feed hank solo with them!
;-))

... you would need a database that includes the works themselves [...] a pretty valuable database.

don't the publishers have the texts in computer-readable formats already? I mean, at least of those texts already collected. this would be a start.
 
don't the publishers have the texts in computer-readable formats already?
I'm sure they do. I don't think they would part with them though, and I don't think they would really like the idea of such a database existing. They would assume it would be used to deliver the poems and stories on demand, and such a thing might not exactly be good for book sales.

Anyway, it seems like such a database is inevitable, and will eventually exist. But I get dizzy thinking about making an attempt on it myself. You would need some very high end automated OCR software, and a lot of books chopped up into single pages...
 
An idea for the future
We have an amazing 9080 Canon scanner (40 pages a minute) with great OCR Omnipage 15 and Kurzweil 3000 version 10.04-I had to list that yesterday for work so it was on the top of my head.
If there are copies of copies to be done send them to me and I'll send back a stick full of items in the format requested.
My end would only take a day.
 
... I don't think they would really like the idea of such a database existing...

maybe not for a public database, like buknet offers.
but if a literary society would hold such a database, only making it available for researcher's purposes ...
you know what i'm thinking of.

An idea for the future [...]

thanks for the offer.
this might come back to you, after the magic binders of c. change their owner. (of course, only when this solution beats the scanning where these binders will be then - thinking about very high costs for insured shipping back and forth.)
 

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