5/24/12

Muppets, uh... Critics.

Critics par excellence!

    "I read the poems I could find by the critics, and I pronounced them not very good. I wondered then just what it is about critics that enables them to know so much about poetry when they obviously don't have the faintest idea how it comes about."
          - A.R. Ammons.

5/15/12

Ludwig Lovelace


     "Even to express a false thought boldly and clearly is to have gained a great deal."
           -Ludwig Wittgenstein.

     "I never realized how many lies you have to tell to sell a book."
           -Linda Lovelace.

     It is estimated that Linda Lovelace has sold up to 10 times as many books as Wittgenstein. Interestingly, Lovelace's book Ordeal begins with the wonderfully philosophical line "My name is not Linda Lovelace." If Wittgenstein had enjoyed anything (he evidently didn't), I think he would have enjoyed Lovelace's double entendre. It's a kind of pornographic version of Rimbaud's je est une autre.

5/8/12

Probably Prose

Armstrong at last month's Cascadia Poetry Festival
     In the seemingly endless argument over what is a poem and what is prose, what fiction, essay, lyric essay, memoir, autobiography, etc. Louis Armstrong offers this morsel of wisdom concerning his own art:
     "If it sounds good, don't worry what it is, just enjoy it."
     He later went on to say, "but if it doesn't sound good, it's probably prose."

4/30/12

PageBoy Hedreen Recording!

Greg Bem is front left, dressed as Khaela M. of The Blow.

     If you want to relive the Hedreen reading, you can, thanks to Greg Bem and his ubiquitous, spy issue fountain pen tape recorder (series 5.01). And if you missed it, you can now laugh, cry, and sigh along as if you were really there then when we did that thing we did.
     Here's the top secret link: awp award.

4/29/12

The Worm in the Apple.

This is a red apple.

     PageBoy Magazine can now be found and fondled at Green Apple Books at 506 Clement St. in SFCA, so go get it, what are you waiting for?
     PageBoy Magazine: Better Than Dolores Park.

Help! Literature Is Not Self Help.


     Maggie Nelson, in discussing Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book, claims that the book "disallows the delusion that writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature," she concludes, "is not, after all, self-help."
          - from The Art of Cruelty.

4/6/12

Lyn Hejinian in the Bath

A Thick Egg.
     "If words matched their things we'd be imprisoned with walls of symmetry. As for we who 'love to be astonished,' thicken the eggs in a bath Marie."
          -Lyn Hejinian.

3/26/12

Don't Eat the Baby!

     The message of the flower is the flower. A rose is a rose is a rose. Je est un autre. Etc. etc. etc:

3/25/12

Look at Me Don't Look at Me!

Cioran picking the nits from his eyebrows.

     "Next to the contemporary 'maker' with his sufferings and his sterility, the creators of the past seem embarrassingly healthy. They were not made anemic by philosophy. These days no one escapes this exacerbation of the intellect and its corresponding diminution of instinct. The monumental, the spontaneously grandiose is no longer. The best thing an artist produces now are his ideas on what he might have done. No age has been so self-conscious."
          -E.M. Cioran (1956)

     Ouch. Fortunately for him, I think (though maybe I shouldn't think), he didn't live to see what we've become (I think). I hope that's clear, maybe I should change it. You should've read what I was going to write. Namely mostly that Cioran was a self-professed "Hitlerist" and an overall dickhead. Really. Still, he's right. We are infested with our own we ares. It's become a kind of In Fest, Ed.

3/18/12

Swallow the Yellowbrkrd

Frye just before eating his glasses.

     "The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either; it swallows it."
           -Northrop Frye.

     I just found this quote on an old receipt from 1/2 Priced Books. Neither of the books listed on the front of the receipt belong to me, at least I can't find them. The receipt was in a coat pocket. It was half-eaten.
   

3/13/12

Susan Sontag Has Worms

The apple and the worm are more than the apple itself.
     "We have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice."
          -Susan Sontag

     I love this quote very much, and even the fact that Sontag goes on to say that "music, film, dance, architecture, painting, and sculpture" are all worth more critical attention than literary forms. This was true in the 1960s when Sontag wrote it, and possibly even more so today. So it is, so.
     The question then, I guess, is whether poetry is being overthrown or throwing over. Is it a rowing thing, over now, a woven ring or owing then? Is it a throwing up or a winged river?
     Personally, I'm grateful it's fallen away from popular culture, and relegated to a kind of parasitical state, freed from obligations to entertain and even to be 'understood.' The parasite has the host and it has itself.
     Poets have a long, rich tradition of slithering around in the dark. Darkness, after all, is full of possibilities, lightness of limitations.

   

3/8/12

Bunga Bunga!

Virginia Woolf is far left
     On Feb. 7 1910, Virginia Woolf, along with her brother and Horace de Vere Cole dressed as "Abyssinians" to fool the British Navy into showing them their flagship, the HMS Dreadnought. The disguises worked, and the supposed Abyssinian emissaries were allowed on board. 
     The group inspected the fleet. To show their appreciation, they communicated in a kind of porridge of words derived from Latin and Greek, as well as the oft repeated phrase "bunga bunga." They asked to pray on the ship's deck and bestowed fake military honors on the officers.
     The disguise's only limitation was that the "royals" could not eat anything or their make-up would be ruined. At a luncheon served for the Abyssinian delegates, the group's interpreter (Cole) had to explain that Abyssinians never eat "on board a ship or off in this way." When asked what he meant, Cole offered, "things such as this are quite nuanced," at which the matter was dropped.
     When the real Emperor of Ethiopia visited sometime later, British children called out "bunga bunga" as he passed on parade.

3/4/12

Best New Magazine!

Crossing our fingers.

     We are proud to announce that at AWP in Chicago this past weekend, PageBoy Magazine was voted "Best New Magazine! (unable to afford to attend AWP)"
     Of course "new" is a bit misleading, as we've been around for three years now. But we are not ones to quibble over facts, not when receiving awards.
     As part of the award, AWP has offered to fund the magazines' expenses to the 2014 event, which, ironically, takes place in Seattle. As our headquarters are on Capitol Hill in Seattle, this award amounts to five days of bus fare back and forth on the 49, that is, "if the weather requires it." If it rains, we may get up to $25, which though not an exorbitant amount still would put AWP in our "Wow You Really Love Us" category for donors.
     We are very grateful and excited about this award, and hopeful that the weather will be shit in 2014!

2/27/12

PageBoy IV 12 Release Party

Drew Christie's
"Union Grove..."
ink and watercolor on paper
     PageBoy Magazine is celebrating the release of its fourth issue! March 10 7-9:30 pm. at the Hedreen Gallery (905 12th Ave) Come hear Sierra Nelson, Jeff Encke, Stacey Levine, Alex Bleecker, Jeremy Springsteed, John Wesley Horton, and Nico Vassilakis read poetry and prose. Come watch short animated films by Drew Christie. Come hear Probable Musical Antics. Come buy a copy of the new issue, with work from the above as well as Ed Skoog, Amalio MadueƱo, and Mary Ellen McAuley Stewart. Just come, don’t worry, it’s fine. There will be wine and funyuns, those funny onions.

2/22/12

A Biological Sport

Horrified medical student observing biological sport (I can't beLIEVE she's wearing that blouse!).
     "Gertrude Stein’s importance is a myth. She is enormously interesting as a phenomenon of the power of personality and as a symptom of a frantic, fumbling, nightmare age – our present – and it is as such that she will live. Later ages will gather about the corpses of her work like a cluster of horrified medical students around a biological sport."
          -B.L. Reid.

     One of my favorite quotes regarding anyone and anything! Perhaps PageBoy will be thought of someday in such glowing terms.

2/15/12

True Sentences

I spy with my eyes morgue is bored.
     "I think that we cannot, indeed that we may not, use the old images because they would sound insincere coming from our mouths. We must find true sentences, which are worthy of our own zone of consciousness and of our changed world."
     - Ingeborg Bachmann

True Sentence 1: Even the hardest brick is soft in the mouth.

T.S. 2: The best smorgasbords never speak their name.

T.S. 3: While it may be true that a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush, it is also true that a hand in the bush is worth more than two on the bird.

T.S. 4: Hate what is evil, cling to what is good, unless what is evil is really really good.

T.S. 5: Know thyself: when in doubt, don't question just about everything.

2/7/12

choo.choo.

Do you like to color trains?

   
"Reality circulates making objects appear as if they belong where they are."
          -Lyn Hejinian

     "In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen."
          -El Wittgenstein

     In the poem everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. Each line appears as if it belongs with every other line of course it does how else. I like to beat people up, my dream a crumpled horn, my horn a Norfolk train, my my, how the flies do time.

1/31/12

In the Funny Culture

Steeped in cold beer.
     "I want to stay funny I want to keep moving ahead of the straight culture. I want to stay in the funny culture ahead of it."
          - Stephen Colbert in an interview at HardeeharHarvard College.

     If you don't stay one step ahead of your audience (in comedy or in poetry) then where are you but in your audience. And if you're in your audience then you aren't writing, you're being written: they are writing you. Hardeeharhar, you can't step in the same river once.

1/26/12

Ms. Used!

Beckett, Samuel

     "Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused."
          -Samuel Beckett

1/19/12

write/unwrite

Bachmann unwriting her fingernails.


     "If [as Wittgenstein says] the limits of my language are the limits of my world, the writer's task is to unwrite the phrasemaking of our ordinary, everyday discourse, the prefabricated sentences by means of which business-as-usual is conducted."
          Marjorie Perloff paraphrasing Ingeborg Bachmann in Wittgenstein's Ladder.

1/7/12

Oh Doctor!

Theodore Geissel in Dr. Seuss glasses.


     "To produce a 60 page book, I may easily write more than 1000 pages before I'm satisfied. The most important thing about me, I feel, is that I work like hell - write, rewrite, reject, re-reject, and polish incessantly."
          -Theodore (Dr.) Seuss Geissel.

     In a later PageBoy interview, Mr. Geissel went on to say that he preferred not to write in cafes or in the rain,
not on boats and not on trains
not in church or after dinner
or while reading Lyn Hejinian or
Gertrude Stein
he never liked Wittgenstein
or The Fat Boys
Pound Eliot or Joyce
even Berrigan's Sonnets
gave him the vomits
and after reading Plaith
he always needed a bath.
The only poet he admitted to liking
was Anvil Hammerstriking
but only all the pre-early muppets and couplets
certainly not the blank verse or German horseshits.

12/14/11

Wittgenstein's Wiener

Lud(e)wig

     "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"
            -Ludwig Wittgenstein

     I feel like Wittgenstein made a mistake here in his choice of metaphor. If his 'ladder' were instead a 'wiener,' as in wienerschnitzel, the statement would be both more logical and more senseless. At least more nonsenseful, for as every good philosopher knows, it is much easier to throw away the wiener once you've climbed up on it.

    

PageBoy: It's a Family Newspaper

     Here's the interview that Chris Rock was so gracious to do for PageBoy while the editors here get ready for the next issue:

12/1/11

Where the Line Is

where the lion is

     "...you know what I like to do, I like to bother people. I like to find out where the line is and deliberately cross it, and drag the audience with you, and have them happy that you did it, and once you get them over there they say, 'yeah that was good.'"
         -George Carlin.

11/25/11

Poetry/Prose: Domingo Domingo Domingo!

poetry and prose wrestle in france


Poetry and Prose

I came to the conclusion
that poetry was a calling
an intensive calling
upon the name of anything
and that prose was not the using
the name of anything
as a thing in itself
but the creating
of sentences that were self-existing
and following
one after the other
made of anything
a continuous thing
which is paragraphing
and so a narrative that is a narrative
of anything

That is what a narrative is of course

one thing
following
any other thing

             -Gertrude Stein

11/15/11

When a Cage Falls

Is he lying?

     "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it."
                       -John Cage.
    
     The most amazing thing about this statement is that Cage was in the forest when he said it and there was no one around to hear him. The original citation has baffled critics for decades. Cage, meanwhile, has admitted to being alone but is unsure whether or not he fell while he was speaking. Conjecture ran rampant as soon as the citation appeared, and the controversy escalated quickly.
     At Naropa Universtity's Summer Writing Program later that year, Cage felt compelled to defend himself: "Some have implied, or even assumed, that I fell that day in the forest when I had nothing to say. I would like to state here that I am unsure if this is true, but resent the accusation nonetheless." Cage then went on to say that he had "nothing further to say and he was saying it again." When asked whether or not this further nothing was poetry as well, he quipped awkwardly: "I don't need to say nothing else there I have said it."

10/30/11

Love Fifteen

Robert Peters' Critical Work - Delicious!

    "You shouldn't pay very much attention to anything writers say. They don't know why they do what they do. They're like good tennis players or good painters, who are often full of nonsense, pompous, and embarrassing, or merely mistaken, when they open their mouths."
              -John Barth.
     I agree entirely, but whether or not he was describing this blog is unclear. Probably not.

10/26/11

Your Immortal Need

Baudelaire: satanic and perverted.

     "Rhythm and rhyme answer man's immortal need for monotony and symmetry, as opposed to the vanity and danger of inspiration."
          -Bowed Lair
     Okay I forgive you, you absinthe soaked madman. Thank the devil you wrote prose!

10/21/11

Fuck the Lotus Eaters May They Rot in Hell

Otis Leader
  

     "Do you hear those voices, charming and funereal
     Singing: 'Come this way, you who wish to eat

     This perfumed Lotus! this is where men harvest
     The miraculous fruits your heart hungers for;
     Come and intoxicate yourself on the strange sweetness
     Of that afternoon which never ends'?"

              -Baudelaire (trans. Fowlie) "Le Voyage" Les Fleurs Du Mal

     This from the au pair of modern poetry? Save us from that afternoon that never ends! Who wants eternity? Let us all be grateful that we end. Yes. Done. No. The eternal is for the brain dead and lobotomous. They can have it, and find other vapor awful there.

10/9/11

Find Morass Here!

Delicious.


     In an essay on 'melody' in Gertrude Stein's work, Marianne DeKoven speaks of Stein's "assertion of the freed magic of the signifier over the repressed, hierarchical order of the signified." That is, the triumph of language as music magic over language as meaning morass.

9/27/11

Darius Polytonalius

Darius Milhaud with G. Stein mug

Terminal Sound

someone has taken Darius Milhaud
and rhymed him with various rainclouds
this is not fair I know
but still he gets thunderous applause

9/12/11

BigFoot

S.izable T.ennies Coleridge

     A weird anecdote in a Wallace Stevens essay:
     Once on a packet on his way to Germany Coleridge was asked to join a party of Danes and drink with them. Coleridge says:
     "I went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with pineapple. The Danes had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed very well for a Methodist missionary. However, I disclaimed my title. What then may you be, a philosopher perhaps? It was at that time in my life in which of all possible names and characters I had the greatest disgust for philosophers.
     "The Danes then informed me that all in the present party were philosophers. We drank and talked and sang til we talked and sang altogether, and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances. My large feet and calves never were so sore as then, dancing on that packet with those men."

9/8/11

who nose




     "I have, of course, been struggling with this thing, to say what you nor I nor nobody knows, but what is really what you and I and everybody knows."
          - G. Stein.

     I know what you're thinking, that you and I and everybody's nose is right above what you and I and everybody knows, which is perhaps what is so difficult about writing what you and I and everybody knows. That is, if you think it's difficult. Perhaps nobody does.

8/28/11

PageBoy in City Lights

     PageBoy can now be found at City Lights Bookstore in SFCA. Grab it before the tourists do (grab it)!

8/23/11

The Poems He Would Have Written

one of her best lines is of course her hairline!

     "...when Gertrude Stein wrote the poems called Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded she began writing them as translations of a group of poems in French by her friend Georges Hugnet. They are far from being literal translations, even in the beginning, but they take their point of departure from his poems, and they remained 'the poems he would have written if he had written them.'"
              -Thornton Wilder in his essay on G.S. "Four in America."

8/22/11

We're Not Shy

PageBoy's been a-traveling, and this time we made it all the way to the big shy shoulders of Chi-cago. Purchase the new issue extrovertedly at Quimby's on North Ave. http://www.quimbys.com/

8/11/11

The One-Eyed Giant




"Most of the time we see only a portion of the person with us, the other parts are hidden by a hat or clothes or by light or shadow. Every one is accustomed to completing the whole entirely by memory. But when Picasso saw a single eye, the other ceased to exist for him."
                            --Gertrude Stein

Whereas often the prose writer's business is to communicate in fullto deliver through seamless language the perfectly framed thought, the argument intact, the most artful reportage—the poet falls wholly in love with one-eyed language. With language's beautifully uncooperative profile. Heather McHugh describes, for example, Dickinson and Celan's lyrical structures as "a math of the missing." Says McHugh: "[Poetry's] economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums...It is the space that defines the words, the skull the kiss, the hole the eye."

7/28/11

Cezanne's Debris


     "Nine days out of ten, all Cezanne saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration."
                            -Merleau-Ponty.

     Look how the garbage piles up! Still, if you could be successful one time out of ten, I think most of us would take it.
     Strangely, the word 'debris' comes from the OFr. debrisier, "to break into pieces," and carries with it as well the geological meaning "an accumulation of relatively large rock fragments." Both of these definitions could describe Cezanne's large block fragments of paint used to portray Le Mont Sainte-Victoire again and again. So then, has he succeeded one out of ten, nine out of ten, or ten out of ten?

PageBoy in the Bay!

     PageBoy Magazine is now being sold at Dog Eared Books on Valencia and Needles and Pens on 16th in S.F.'s Mission District, and at Pegasus Books on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley!
     PageBoy Magazine: If you don't get it soon, you'll contract it.

6/29/11

Some Pics from PageBoy Release Party (Arabica)



Sarah Erickson provides rather unconvincing evidence that the cover image is actually a portrait of her.

Paul Nelson has eyes not only on his head, on the head in front of him and on the heads behind him, but also beneath his hat. It's true!


Whoa! These poems'll knock yr teeth out yo!


The Myriad Minions, having emptied myriad bottles, now search the air for onions... and find them!

The editor being scolded for his loose interpretation of copyright laws and bow ties.


Sarah Galvin: laughing casually after threatening to tie the audience to a radiator.

Thanks to Duvel for sponsoring the event.
 

6/27/11

PageBoy Now at Powell's Burnside*

*see blog entry title for information concerning the nature and purpose of this entry.

6/16/11

H.D. C.U.T.U.P.













Vision is of two kinds:
     Venison of the womb
And
     Venison of the brain

Most of the so-called
     Artists today
Have lost the use of
     Their brain

Over-mind artists
     Usually come in a group
This is called a circle jerk
     And there is no

Great art period
     Without great lovers
Of course:
     There is no great art,

Period.
     Great lovers however
Hover forever
     In a kind of

Jelly-fish mind
     Lingering alongly

To sting you.

PageBoy Magazine Reviewed:

http://www.hugohouse.org/content/tight-cozying-pageboy-magazine

6/8/11

PageBoy at Spine and Crown and

     PageBoy is now at Spine and Crown Bookstore (315 E. Pine St., Seattle) in addition to the other Seattle stores listed on this blog. Go get it.

6/6/11

PageBoy Reading Recording (Regarding Greg Bem)

Philthy

     The honorable Greg Bem has posted a recording of the PageBoy reading at Arabica. Find it here:
http://gregbem.com/wordpress/?p=3943

6/5/11

Over-mind not Over Mined

H.D.


    Here are some quotes from H.D.'s amazing little sketch of a book Notes on Thought and Vision.

     "If you cannot be seduced by beauty, you cannot learn the wisdom of ugliness."

     "There is no trouble about art. There is already enough beauty in the world of art, enough in the fragments and in the almost perfectly preserved charioteer at Delphi alone to remake the world.
     There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreciators we want."
 
     "My sign-posts are not yours, but I have my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.
     But the world of great creative artists is never dead. The new schools of destructive art theorists are on the wrong track. Because Leonardo and his kind are never old, never dead. Their world is never explored, hardly even entered. Because it needs an over-mind or a slight glimmering of over-mind intelligence to understand over-mind intelligence."

6/4/11

Reading Tonight!

     We have magazines yippie! And will have them at the reading tonight, so come get one.
     PageBoy Reading June 4th 8pm at Arabica, 1550 E Olive Way, Seattle. Readers Sarah Galvin, Sarah Erickson, Paul Nelson, Erika Wilder. Artist Shannon Perry (portraits). Music: Myriad Minions oh my god!
     PageBoy: Better than a can.

5/26/11

Shklovskyshklovskyshklovsky

"Go to the reading, pussy cat."

     "Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony - art removes objects from the automation of perception."
                  -Victor Shklovsky

     PageBoy has proofs, and the proof is in the, uh, printer. Issue III 11 will be out and all over everywhere soon - like pudding I guess. If you want to see the magazine FIRST, join us at Arabica (Capitol Hill, Seattle) on Sat. June 4th at 8pm. We will be celebrating with readers Erika Wilder, Sarah Erickson, Paul Nelson, and Sarah Galvin. Shannon Perry will be showing her (amazing) watercolor portraits (featured in the magazine), and Myriad Minions will be performing LIVE NUDE MUSIC!

5/21/11

Caveat



Caveat (for reading a poem at a spoken word event)

Warning:
     I am going to read a poem. It may be metered at times.

Warning:
     It is not in first person. You is.

Warning:
     It may be too masculine for some of you.

Warning:
     It is not pc, why would it be?

Warning:
     It may be too feminine for some of you.

Warning:
     It may be offensive at times
     Remember
     These are just x's and lines.

Warning:
     There is nothing poetic about pc, Pussy Cat.

Warning:
     I am offended too.

Warning:
     I am not mad at anyone. Thanks for letting me read anyway.

Warning:
     Is it spoken word, or 'broken word?'

Warning:
     There is no chip on my shoulder, Chip.

Warning:
     There is, however, a chip in my head.
     Say 'hello' Chip.
     "Hello."

Warning:
     Is it spoken word, or 'broken girl?'

Warning:
     Poetry as therapy
     Is mental midgetry.

Warning:
     Was that an off rhyme, or an offending rhyme?

Warning:
     Everything rhymes with everything.

Warning:
     Boys get broken too. (boo hoo hoo).

Warning:
     Rimbaud's line was: "I is an other,"
     Not "I against other."

Warning:
     Poetry is not therapy.
     Therapy is therapy.

Warning:
     Who speaks more clearly:
     Gertrude or Franken Stein?

Warning:
     White guilt, Black power.
     Can't we all just take a shower?

Warning:
     Perhaps I'm a midget
     and I just don't know it.

5/14/11

Readings!

     PageBoy is hosting a reading in celebration of its third issue, which is due out any day now! 
     When? you might ask... at Arabica on Capitol Hill in Seattle at 8pm sharp on Saturday June 4th (and other prepositions). Readers will be announced soonly. Mark it on your calendar Mark, Gene and Jori. 
     PageBoy Magazine: Better than indie pop.©

     P.otato S.oup: We will also be celebrating in Portland on June 25th at The Waypost. And maybe in Olympia too (thirdly). We will let you know the details when we know de tails. (You still can mark it on your calendars though, just very bigly.)

5/7/11

what american lit needs

Malcom Cowley
     "What American Literature needs is not more poets (we could dispense with most of those already writing), but mature poets who are willing to devote their whole time to the most difficult of arts."
               -Malcom Cowley

     Critics have argued for over fifty years as to what M. Cowley meant by "the most difficult of arts." It seems clear to me, however, that he was either referring to teaching undergraduate creative writing classes, or flash animation.

4/25/11

Boom.


     explode < Lat. explodere meaning "to drive out by clapping."
     What an odd form of exile!

     (Medieval court, rural Europe. JUDGE, cloaked in black robes stands to deliver his verdict; a rather meek and filthy BEGGAR hunches before him obediently,)
     JUDGE: Do you have anything to say for yourself, sir?
     BEGGAR: Please Your...
     JUDGE: Silence! (pause) Well then, due to the heinousness of your crime, the Court hereby and forthwith sentences you to... explodere!
     BEGGAR: No Your Honor, Please not that!
     JUDGE: (forcefully) Exlodere! Bring in the Band of Clappers!
     (Enter several men and women, all expressionless, clapping, who walk up to the BEGGAR, forcing him from the courtroom and out into the street.)