koon woon as critic

AI Robots

To those, who are worried about AI robots having no humanity, hey, it is already too late. We are human actors with less humanity.

The danger of listening to literary figures:

The danger of listening to literary figures: I don’t see why Voltaire should make fun of Leibniz in Candide when the latter said that God made this “the best of all possible worlds…” Voltaire cannot logically do otherwise, he wrote the play that this is the best of all possible worlds, simply, because the rest of them suck even more. Literary figures think they have a duty to comment on philosophers and thinkers. They are without shame. They don’t know what’s going on any more than you or I do. They don’t know what’s real either, Descartes, in his Fifth Meditation, asks, “How would you know, when you wake up, that an Evil Genius hadn’t rearranged the world while you were asleep?” We are all living in the Matrix and we don’t even know it.

Diary which begins a long inight...

Donald Justice wrote, “This poem is for me. You may find yourself wander in and out of it, but it really is about me.” What follows is a satori that makes sense solipsistically. You may think you have the same psychiatric symptom. Well, you may, or you may not, but really it makes sense to me and if you find it may apply to you, it is OK but it is really about me. You ask me where I have been. I have been to Dylan’s hard rains are gonna fall. I have lived the life of a mental patient, albeit one that tells the psychiatrist that he takes my psychosis away for a fee. One doctor tells me that it is so good to talk to me. And his wife, who is also a psychiatrist, said to me, when by chance she substituted for her husband once at the mental health center, exclaimed, “So you are the one who David talks about at the dinner table!” I thought she was beautiful. I was envious of Dr. R. But then suddenly I recall how sexually I was attracted to my own mother. Dr. R was so on top of it; he realized that my mother preferred my intelligence over my father. I realized then the Oedipal thing was real. My hindsight was that my father was proud of me but he was also competing with me, and I suddenly obtained the realization that my father set out to sabotage me. Mrs. R the psychiatrist in so exclaiming told me that my mother pitted me against my father. She was a real narcissist.

who's reading five willows

United States 249 Netherlands 115 Iran 70 Germany 46 Brazil 31 Singapore 22 China 21 France 16 United Kingdom 11 Other 65

the draftboard diary

The draft-dodging diary I couldn’t let myself get inducted because I could be facing my cousin Fong across a rice paddy. Whoever kills the other is a tragedy. I also had some Vietnamese friends in the U district. Believe me, I feel more comfortable sharing a latrine with any Asian than a white dude. They don’t think their shit stinks. So dropping out of school caused this problem. At the Army induction center, the sergeant exhorted, “You men, I don’t mean those of you who are boys, if you step across this line, I will welcome you into the Army!” You know, for a split second of macho, you could find infinity in the jungle. No thanks. I went back to the Aberdeen draft board, which in its history never gave a C.O. I screamed at them and told them not to fuck with me. I am the oldest son in my family and Chinese filial piety forbids joining a death-meting group, especially the Americans because I am the legitimate family line. And I can’t die without siring a son or adopting a godson. They knew I was angry and unhinged it seemed. And my good friend told me to see a psychiatrist and have him write a letter of disqualification. The letter I obtained later said I was passive-aggressive (moderate) and schizoid in personality. The good doctor said it didn’t apply to me, but the Army likes to hear things like that. The draft board gave me IV-F, meaning administratively unfit. I didn’t know if my father greased the wheels for me with cash. My dad was a businessman and his wallet burgeoned with $50 bills. Even though I am problematic, the CIA tried to recruit me when I went back to school in Oregon. They said I would ostensibly be working for the State Department, and they didn’t care if I espoused a Marxist line, as long as I was convincing. I said no thanks and forgot all about the incident until twenty years later. I was having lunch with a lawyer friend, a prosecutor, and he joked, “When you are twenty and you are not a socialist, there is something wrong with your heart. But when you are forty and still a socialist, there is something wrong with your brain!” Suddenly the CIA incident flashed across my mind. Now I am not a socialist, I am the most self-serving poet there is. I’d sell my ass to get published in Poetry (Chicago).

an old diary piece

A New Neighborhood Diary "There is the same foreignness ..." June 20, 2017 There is a same foreignness about this town, the same as the town I came from that I didn’t feel I belonged. The streets are not paved according to code and the shops give one an askew feeling. And any time one could encounter a wild lion pouncing out of a men’s clothing store. I tread gingerly. I have been here for nearly a year now, but I don’t venture out except on the first of the month when I receive my disability check. My ego is inflated when I have some cash in my pocket; yes, I feel harder and more erect and one meal above the homeless man. But mind you, forty years ago, in my hometown of Aberdeen, the fog and rain assailed most of the winter, there were jobs in the fish cannery as the salmon found their way back to the spawning grounds, and yours truly kept going back to the sandy beaches to dig his limit of razor clams at Ocean Shores. But now, Ocean Shores is an investment property, attracting strangers even with strange kinds of money. The foreignness keeps invading these lands. Should I now declare, but to no one’s urgency actually, that I am a different man in the same body or the same man in a different body, as my identity keeps morphing into something unrecognizable, as I become less and less useful, sort of like a crabapple shrinking into itself? Or is this the culmination of a found wisdom, such as a grossly underpriced item in a gift shop run by volunteers for the benefit of the local senior center? And what about the farmer’s market on this block every Sunday to add vegetable colors to the sidewalks with tents erected on the pavement? The greens and cobs and fruit cost you twice as much you know as they do at the local Safeway or QFC stores. Still, it is worth it to help the little organic guys and to remove some of the drudgery of everlasting commerce, when these condos are filled with high-tech geeks, who will soon go to higher grounds. Still, the sea will not drown us out for some time yet, even as global warming gives us no more warning. I am in West Seattle now. Koon Woon