 |
|
|
Erotism rhymes w/
Margaret every fashion Sunday
corrections
made to the pronunciation
of Laotians: blue, purple, green
aggravations of government that
portend future dates
w/ vanity
— I can’t ignore the punctuation
of gentlemen who wait in the station shouting blanks
this war
will never end — she’s lost two sons already to the
mob w/ auto-
matic pleats who never had the nerve
to ask for a second helping of physical comedy, & never spoke of
the after-spirits of tastes
It’s very
nice
we are almost
at the top of
the
sequence of stars
there is a lively
one gone AWOL
to Minnesota
where several poets have died
but only a few
of them
were named Jack Canopy
umbrellas are
my favorite things to chastise
a dog with
on sloping lapwings
when the skyline
is toward the east & the hemlines
— don’t let me say that joke again I am
almost in love
w/ the privilege
that brings your shy legs
to me
in the simulacral Hamptons
the shattered
wrists of your economy
wondering how this idiot
got here clearly holding his breath
— for ardor
I would say that
we are almost tired of
Christmas
growing old when
the galaxies were invented
we didn’t mind them, too
but that was
the day Alexander
Pope
found a heap of orphans
in the pathways under his heart
garden in the alternate pleurisies of late-
night television
rendered opaque
by artless close-captioning — thus, we love
anyway,
never tiring of the prism
of snaking letters at the head of every
sentiment — every song that goes
on stage unrehearsed
w/ battering applause
from the paupers' rows
somehow rendering it all back
The
revolution of the middle
class will not be
televised
but preserved on Caucasian
disks for millennia in several
hundred 96-page books
of limp
poetry w/
titles right out of
Christian songbooks circa
1975 Australia we pledge
allegiance to the
drag of tired instincts w/
victuals served up each night
by bombers’
wives in ashtrays an entire
calendar’s worth of
metered doses and, of course, poetry
advice columns
w/ assurances of sought votes
in over-
confidence — I failed to be annoyed, yes,
nearly forgot
to cough when
the pollen entered the nostril — when the policeman entertained
thoughts of annual events for elected
suicides & there were
wallets beneath every basket case
They say you had
an idea my arthritic
double that brings it
all back to you
buried beneath the austerity
suggesting a charity
— once or twice
is almost a career “choking”
(in medieval Los Angeles
they used to call it) fail
one last time the fireworks
could bystand quite
innocently and watch one
in collusion w/ mediocrity
a cultish, ritual necessity
— so slow you are
paralyzed and hiding here
tracks of the lime sky fluxus night
That was a way to start a poem
in 1963 we barely knew
how to use words then — when
the traveler
stopped,
he learned how to spell “egges” and “shoppe”
in the local style w/ a
Cossack for a backdrop
trying to market the good word of
God
like a Williamsburg Elmar Gantry but this time
w/ promises of increased penetration, um,
the market type
to ambient salsa music
— in
the offices of all
the rural bodegas she took a nap
dreaming of floating Africa
as if it were never there
Who could I love if my
youth was this
violence throat
hands pishy
pishy nights green blue
windowsill best
friend’s Catholic
sister the
Grapones, all
of them palsied for my blood
or brood
— nationalism’s shotgun
temper
looking for another
mind in last year’s immigrant
crew
— a
friend from a different era
in a galaxy far far away, said
he preferred my Jean-Paul Satre style to my
greasy Johnny
Depp — I agree
but for the taint of my pleasure
& the salt of my wandering eye on this book
This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Benjamin at January 19, 2004 05:16 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Helen at January 19, 2004 05:18 AMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Benedict at January 19, 2004 05:18 AMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Holland at January 19, 2004 05:19 AMThat gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Posted by: Ellois at January 19, 2004 05:20 AM