* (restored)

‘Nazis tried to teach dogs to talk and read – and claimed one could even discuss religion. Hitler, a well-known dog lover, hoped the animals would learn to communicate with their SS masters, and supported a special dog school set up to teach them to talk. Nazi officials recruited so-called educated dogs from all over Germany and trained them to tap out signals using their paws. The dog school was called the Tier-Sprechschule ASRA and was based near Hanover. Led by headmistress Margarethe Schmitt, it was set up in the 1930s and continued throughout the war years.

‘Rolf, an Airedale terrier, reportedly ‘spoke’ by tapping his paw against a board, each letter of the alphabet being represented by a certain number of taps. He was said to have speculated about religion, learnt foreign languages, written poetry and asked a visiting noblewoman: ‘Could you wag your tail?’ The patriotic dog even expressed a wish to join the army – because he disliked the French. A Dachshund named Kurwenal was said to speak using a different number of barks for each letter, and told his biographer he would be voting for Hindenburg. And a German pointer named Don imitated a human voice to bark: ‘Hungry! Give me cakes.’

‘But do dogs really talk? Back in 1912 Harry Miles Johnson of Johns Hopkins University said, emphatically, “no.” In a paper in Science, he generally agreed with the findings of Oskar Pfungst of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Berlin who studied a dog famous for its large vocabulary. The dog’s speech is “the production of vocal sounds which produce illusion in the hearer,” Johnson wrote. Nothing in the last century has really changed that scientific opinion.

‘It’s more appropriate to call it imitating than talking, says Gary Lucas, a visiting scholar in psychology at Indiana University Bloomington. Dogs vocalize with each other to convey emotions—and they express their emotions by varying their tones, he says. So it pays for dogs to be sensitive to different tones. Dogs are able to imitate humans as well as they do because they pick up on the differences in our tonal patterns.

‘Owner hears the dog making a sound that resembles a phrase, says the phrase back to the dog, who then repeats the sound and is rewarded with a treat. Eventually the dog learns a modified version of her original sound. As Lucas puts it, “dogs have limited vocal imitation skills, so these sounds usually need to be shaped by selective attention and social reward.” Scientists have made some progress in their study of this important subject: They’ve learned why dogs, and other animals, have rather poor pronunciation and, for example, completely botch consonants.

‘Dogs “don’t use their tongues and lips very well, and that makes it difficult for them to match many of the sounds that their human partners make,” Lucas says. “The canine alphabet differs significantly from ours, featuring a fraction of our consonants (b, f, h, p, r, w, and sometimes y) and the rounder vowel sounds, which are more “sung” than “spoken.” Words are therefore primarily distinguished by minor variations in pronunciation (dogs can differentiate twelve types of r sounds and five degrees of hardness in the letter b).”‘ — collaged

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi, D! I think you’ll love the Dlugos book. It’s big fun. You mean how old was I when I did the regression ceremony? Hm, maybe 13? I’m not positive. I think you need to be really sure you want to be on LSD and in the right circumstances before you take it because it’s pretty intense and, at least in my case, it can totally change your way of seeing the world and yourself. Granted, I took a lot of LSD, and it was the 60s when LSD was a lot purer than it usually is now. I started taking psychedelics at around 13, I think. But I didn’t go hog wild with them until I was 15, 16. Of course I’ve never seen ‘Csillag születik’ or really know what it is, but I looked it up and hoped the idea of him being on it was sufficiently wrong/funny. Oh, that’s so sad about the love you propose. Poor thing. Love transfiguring itself into a hit of LSD so you could safely take it, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Funny thinking of Tim as a Total Babe. Oh my god, Jacob Collier makes my skin crawl. Upside down crucifix and garlic cloves betwixt that link and me. Yes, RIP Cloris Leachman. So great. She deserves immortality just for her ‘Young Frankenstein’ turn. Ha ha, thank you for proposing that movie role for me. I am so extremely the opposite of John’s type however, I can assure you, but if he asked, I would do his bidding. ** Matthew Stadler, Hi, Matthew! How awesome to see you in here! I was shocked/thrilled to find that super early Tim/Brad reading too. I remember when you worked for him. I remember going to some pretentious rich gay guy’s party, probably with Tim and maybe Edmund White, where you were pretend-bartending and where he made you stay in the kitchen even though you were a writer while the guests, who were all gay lit authors or types, talked culture or whatever, and I was completely outraged by that bullshit hierarchy, and I think I even left the party because it pissed me off so much. Anyway, hi! ** Misanthrope, I believe you. Well, you were kind of rubbing it in, dude. Yeah, it’s so bad in the UK. I’m so fearful that we’ll end up like that too. Macron will make his decree in that regard tomorrow night. Scary Strokes is a promising name. We don’t have places like that open here. How teenaged pothead-like of David. But if the shoe fits and all of that. ** Bryan Borland, Hi, Bryan! Thank you very much for gracing my blog. Listen, it’s an honor to do a little part in making people a little more aware of Tim’s great book that great you so kindly published. My total pleasure. Much respect and thanks to you. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s a blast. Hope your class went well, and I’m obviously happy you’re feeling wordy and revved up. ** Jeff J, hi, Jeff. It’s a wonderful book. Thanks about the recent blog. Oh, shit, so sorry about the mysterious recent life maladies. Stoicism and muddling sounds like a plan, and may things take a seismic shift ASAP. I did a Bas Jan Ader post ages ago, but I’m not sure if I’ve restored it. I’ll check. He’s one of my favorite artists. I haven’t heard any recent Zorn, probably for the reasons that you and Steve lay out. He’s been off my radar for no understandable reason. I’ll go get ‘Baphomet’ and start rectifying his absence from my head. Thanks, man. I hope today is your turnaround day. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, J. Yeah, great old Tim, and, yeah, David T. is saintly. It did sometimes seem like Tim was right about everything even when he definitely wasn’t. Morning, buddy. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Is the reason Zorn is squirrelling his work away thusly for the obvious anti-consumerist sort of reason? It seems more self-destructive than anything maybe. I’ll def. find and watch that Dutch documentary. Thanks a bunch. New song! Everyone, Mr. Erickson says … ‘I wrote this song over the past 3 days, taking almost all the sounds from a huge pack of orchestral samples that I recently downloaded (although I wrote my own melodies and chord progressions using them). I am thinking of writing a string quartet using the same sample pack for my next song.’ Hit it, folks! ** Bernard, Well, hello there, Bernard. A rare and great pleasure. Yes, yes, about Tim. Beautiful words. Yours. I saw that Richard McCann died. I never met him, but I remember you speaking about him to me a fair amount. And Cloris Leachman, of course, kind of a total genius. I often wonder why Cecily Tyson did so little work. I feel like she very rarely was in films. Or maybe she was in a bunch of things and they just weren’t things I would ever think of watching. I will very excitedly go read your poems! Wow, even! Everyone, Ultra-superb poet and dude Bernard Welt has new poems up on the site/mag Court Green, and getting to read his poems is a rare occasion, so I think you might really want to go do that. Read his poems, I mean. Here. Happy you’re writing duh, and that interesting stuff is being magnetised by you. Paris is still great, although this is not necessarily the funnest time to be here, but … maybe by the summer? Please dear god? Hugs, B! ** Bill, I feel pretty certain that you will like and even really like Tim’s book. Congrats on surviving. Teaching what you’re teaching, if I understand what you’re teaching, via Zoom or whatever must be really hard. I have a friend who teaches painting at Cal Arts, and she says trying to teach/advise young painters online is the borderline height of absurdity. How do you think your classes are going so far? ** Right. You’ll probably think I’ve lost the plot, but I decided the other day that it was imperative that I restore the post today. See you tomorrow.

‘This diary, written in Tim Dlugos’ first six months in the City That Never Sleeps, is a record of his immersion in the downtown poetry scene and a gay lifestyle that was then relentlessly promiscuous. From the very beginning, when he “gobbles up” some chocolate mints left behind by Joe Brainard, Tim is like Alice eating a cake that changes her size; he’s off and running in a Wonderland of art openings and late-night escapades at the baths. In the forty-four years that have elapsed since Tim wrote this diary, the world has changed several times over: AIDS, 9/11, Coronavirus. The New York that Tim captures in these pages is long gone. While it gives us a few precious glimpses of that lost world, his diary is a reminder of how quickly a world can disappear.’ — SRP

You can buy the book here

“Like a prose version of a chatty Frank O’Hara poem, Tim Dlugos’ New York Diary is dense with the goings-on of a crush of proper names we normally might not care much about. Yet—again like O’Hara—Tim, in his accurately super-speedy rendering of the summer and fall of the now-historical year of 1976, makes them and theirs magical, intimate, and fully alive.” — Brad Gooch

“Tim Dlugos was one of the smartest, wittiest, most socially dynamic presences on the New York poetry scene of the 1970s and beyond. And these diary entries capture his voice at its most intimate and perceptive. As well as displaying the deep delight he took in being a gay man and an out poet at a time and in a place where that was finally seen not as transgressive but as celebratory. Well, a little of both. As with New York poet and predecessor Frank O’Hara, many of Tim’s friends thought they were his best friend, I certainly did. He had the ability to make you confess things to him and look for his approval. Which usually meant his matching your confession with his own. Everyone I know who knew him loved him, and many of us adored him. These glimpses into his life and mind show why.” — Michael Lally

“The Frank O’Hara of his generation.” — Ted Berrigan

Tim Dlugos’ books

1973

1977

1979

1982

1982

1992

1995

2011

Media

Tim Dlugos & Brad Gooch reading 8/18/77

Ry Dunn -reading Tim Dlugos’ “G-9”

jwdenver reads “Great Art” by Tim Dlugos

Gowri Koneswaran reads Tim Dlugos’ “Poem After Dinner”

Tim Dlugos (1950-1990)
from literarydc

Tim Dlugos (born Francis Timothy Dlugos) (August 5, 1950 – December 3, 1990) was an American poet. Early in his career, Dlugos was celebrated for his energetic, openly gay, pop culture-infused poems. Later, he became widely known for the poems he wrote as he was dying of AIDS.

Tim Dlugos was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and raised by adopted parents in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and Arlington, Virginia. In 1968, he joined the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order, and entered their college, La Salle College, in Philadelphia, the following year. At La Salle, Dlugos became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement and started writing poetry. He left the Brothers in 1971 to openly embrace a politically active, gay lifestyle. Less and less motivated by academic life, he dropped out of La Salle in his senior year, eventually moving to Washington, D.C.

Dlugos immersed himself in the Mass Transit poetry scene in Washington, regularly attending readings at the Community Book Shop in Dupont Circle. His friends during this period included Ed Cox, Tina Darragh, Michael Lally, Bernard Welt, and Terence Winch. His first chapbook, High There, was published by Some of Us Press in 1973. Dlugos worked on Ralph Nader‘s Public Citizen newspaper, which led to a successful career as a fundraising consultant and copywriter for liberal and charitable organizations.

In 1976, Dlugos moved to Manhattan, where he became a prominent younger poet in the downtown literary scene centered around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. His poems were praised for their innovation and wit, their appropriation of popular culture (as in his crowd-pleasing “Gilligan’s Island”), and their openly gay subject matter. Dlugos’s friends during his New York years included Joe Brainard, Donald Britton, Jane DeLynn, Brad Gooch, and Eileen Myles. In 1977, he began a correspondence and friendship with Dennis Cooper, then based in Los Angeles. Dlugos published two books with Cooper’s Little Caesar Press: Je Suis Ein Americano (1979) and Entre Nous (1982). Of the latter, critic Marjorie Perloff wrote, “This is poetry of extraordinary speed and energy that fuses fact and fantasy, dream and documentary. Tim Dlugos’ every nerve seems to vibrate.” Dlugos also edited and contributed to such magazines as Christopher Street, New York Native, and The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Dlugos tested positive for HIV in 1987, and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1989. In 1988, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he was enrolled in Yale Divinity School. His intention was to become a priest in the Episcopal Church. He died of complications due to AIDS on December 3, 1990, at the age of forty.

Dlugos is widely known for the poems he wrote while hospitalized in G-9, the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, and is considered a seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic. His long poem “G-9,” in which Dlugos celebrates life while accepting his mortality and impending death, was published in The Paris Review only months before Dlugos died.

Two decades after Dlugos’s death, his friend David Trinidad edited A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, which won a Lambda Literary Award.

In 2011, “At Moments Like These He Feels Farthest Away,” an exhibition of paintings by artist Philip Monaghan based on Dlugos’s poem “Gilligan’s Island,” was held at Fales Library at New York University, where Dlugos’s literary papers are archived.

Book

Tim Dlugos (David Trinidad, editor) New York Diary by Tim Dlugos
Sibling Rivalry Press

‘WHEN TIM DLUGOS MOVED TO NEW YORK in June of 1976, he had already received acclaim as a poet in Washington, D.C., where he was a regular participant in the Mass Transit poetry scene. New York was the big leap, a way of raising the stakes and proving himself as a writer, and he would soon make a name for himself there as well. This diary, written in his first six months in the City That Never Sleeps, is a record of his immersion in the downtown poetry scene and a gay lifestyle that was then relentlessly promiscuous. From the very beginning, when he “gobbles up” some chocolate mints left behind by Joe Brainard, Tim is like Alice eating a cake that changes her size; he’s off and running in a Wonderland of art openings and late night escapades at the baths. During the subsequent months, he meets a great many people; he has a good deal of sex; he absorbs a great deal of culture. In early August, as he notes his twenty-sixth birthday, one realizes he is just a kid—a precocious one, but a youngster nonetheless.’ — David Trinidad

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. I’m very happy that my blog gets to act as one of the entranceways through which public awareness of this spanking new and fantastic book is happening. Tim Dlugos was a great poet/writer, so there’s that, and this book also offers a super addictive and fun portrait of life in the red hot poetry, art, etc., scene in NYC at the the dawn of the 1980s. Tim was one of my best friends, and he was always at the center of everything, and here’s the proof. Very highly recommended. ** Dominik, Hey!! Cool: the post alignment. My mom was so generally weird and kind of awful a lot of the time that the past life ceremony thing was kind of sweet relatively. And interesting too to be able to hallucinate like that without LSD, which was already one of my brain’s pals at that point. Yeah, ‘Goofy’, the name. It was a bit too on the money. Aw, thanks, about my book, and of course i would have been a bit more shy and hesitant to put love in it had I known. Ha ha, if your love was love, I think I would be careful not to fall into it too often. Love like Darby Crash winning the current season of ‘Csillag születik’ in a landslide, G. ** David S. Estornell, The same to you, buddy. ** David Ehrenstein, I think I like films I have to chase. Francois S. is still so mad at me for humiliating him in that scene (which was improvised) that he stares daggers at me whenever I see him on the street. The French press really attacked Christophe re: ‘Homme au Bain’ because they thought using Chiara Mastroianni for her role in that film was an abuse of her talent.She didn’t think so, and she won an acting award at Cannes for her performance in his most recent film. ** _Black_Acrylic, Curious what you’ll think. ** Daniel, 👍 ❤️ ** G, Hi. Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m happy you like the post though. I think that interview must have been in French originally because Christophe’s English is not that great. The Honore film that Golshifteh Farahani is in is kind of odd and sweet, a kids’ movie but with an experimental fringe. Mm, I think maybe my favorites of Christophe’s films are ‘Dans Paris’ and ‘La belle personne’. Have a swell day. ** Sypha, Oh, right, yeah, about your mirror thing, I remember now. If I’d grown up in some place that had actual winters rather than a winter that consists of occasionally cloudy skies and temperatures in the 60s, I’m sure I would feel differently. Okey-doke about the post, cool, thanks. ** ae, Is it possible to read your political theory stuff or poetry anywhere? Maybe you can compromise and do the beast justice in a prose poem. Thank you a lot about Zac’s and my films. That was a fun scene to shoot, although poor Rico, who played the spoken word artist/victim, had broken his shoulder a few days before (you can see the sling on his arms in a couple of shots), and we had to make it as careful a sexual assault as possible. He’s a trooper, that Rico. When there’s not a pandemic, I spend a lot of time in small venues watching electronic and noise gigs. That’s almost my favorite thing. And, man, do I miss it, as I’m sure you do too unless you’re actually open again where you are. That’s interesting: I just restored an old post that’s coming up soonish that has ‘Funeral Parade Of Roses’ featured within it. Great film, yeah. I’ll check my email, cool, thank you. Damn, I wish I could sit at your dinner table. But my pal Zac made me a big vat of my favorite food in the world (cold sesame noodle) as a late b’day gift, so I’m good. This week: ‘praying’ the govt. doesn’t announce re-confinement tonight, finish a draft of this new fiction/novella thing I’m fooling around with, go look at art and hang with my friend Stephen O’Malley (I’m imagining you know his work — Sunn0)) and tons of solo and collaboration work), and … don’t know what else. Enjoy the beginnings of yours. ** Steve Erickson, Christophe’s ethos is clearest in his earlier films, from ‘Ma Mere’ up through ‘La Belle Personnne’, and then he started to diverge quite widely, but, if you know his thing, you see it in the later films too. I don’t know if I would do the acting thing again. Yeah, it would depend on who asked. No one else ever has. Well, actually, ages ago Gregg Araki asked me to play the psychiatrist in ‘The Living End’, but I said no. Eek, that does sound dangerous — open restaurants — but … who knows. ** Bill, Work going okay, or, I guess, you doing okay in its midst? ** Jack Skelley, Ha. Climb down off that beanstalk, Jack! Right, Robert Mitchum, now my bell is rung. I too confuse those two guys. I think that must be not uncommon. Weird. So, there are two new art districts. One is out on the fringes of Paris, and one is walking distance from me. We went to the fringe, and the Scharf show is in the other one, but, you know, walking distance … so as soon as it stops raining. Yeah, Christophe directs operas and theater stuff more than he makes films these days for whatever reason. Versatile. Big day, I hope, man. ** Right. Get with Mr. Dlugos’s book, thank you. See you tomorrow.