CXIV
Hurry hurry hurry to the Möbius Strip Club – where the show never stops
Between Traum-attic and dream cellar, what passes for a house…
New York Post editorial page headlines, July 29, ’15:
“Train Wreck Ahead,” on the NY/NJ rail tunnels, ancient and degenerating, and in need, presumably, of replacement.
“The Magic May Return,” which laments the passing of FAO Schwartz and finishes by wishing the store luck in its search for a new location “because every kid needs a chance to own a stuffed horse bigger than their parents.”
In your conversations with Americans, if often feels like you’re playing see-saw with someone very heavy who refuses to push off with their feet
IN PRAISE OF DREAMS
In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.
I speak fluent Greek
and not just with the living.
I drive a car
that does what I want it to.
I am gifted
and write mighty epics.
I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.
My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.
I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.
Falling from the roof,
I tumble gently to the grass.
I’ve got no problem
breathing under water.
I can’t complain:
I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.
It’s gratifying that I can always
wake up before dying.
As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.
I’m a child of my age,
but I don’t have to be.
A few years ago,
I saw two suns.
And the night before last a penguin,
clear as day.
[Wisŧawa Szymborska, in Poems: New and Collected. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, trans. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998]
In so many ways, direct, oblique and byzantine, so many folks getting their aggression on
Bluto & Sons
And now it’s time to play… Ask Dr. Mandelstam!
Satisfaction harrumphteed
Bleak history month
Wherein we contemplate whether or not, and to what degree, and in what fashion, Bleak Lives Matter
To be young, gifted and…
Oblique lives smatter
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da lives go on…
Come tour St. Petersburg’s boulevards, backstreets and byways with GogolEarth…
Born fuckin’ ready in magic marker on the arm wrappings of the top female in MMA.
But compared to what?
The sick man eats a sick breakfast
In any given relationship, sometimes you will be the asshole
Desperately seeking continuity
If things, such as a story that “doesn’t work,” are distorted (in form), then what sorts of modifications (in structure) need to be made to accommodate them while preserving, insofar as possible, the flow of qi?
Smartphones: the microprivatization of the street
Taking the big haircut
Interesting how, with a certain inflection, the word “basically” sounds like “bicycly.”
Grasping at short straws
Pinchas the Tailor makes a last-stitch effort
Great, and lesser, moments of asymmetry: from one seemingly identical clear bright morning to the next and the next, your Ba Gua spot in Washington Square Park shifts from the Lawn of Sunbathing Women, to the Lawn of Homeless Men, to the Lawn of Amazing Rubber Yoginis…
The summer slipped its leash
Quality of life? Indeed life is replete with qualities.
Let pretty be pretty
Dimly: a character in a speculative fiction
DEATH OF THE STREET! exhorted Le Corbusier. But why kill what you can privatize? Why bury decaying corpses when you can turn your dead into zombies? The important thing is not to destroy the street physically, but to gut it of human possibility, to make it a place where one cannot think, or dream, or act collectively.
And where a shout will no linger be a potential second coming.
Three Chapter Ones and 64,000 The Ends
The 17th century West had Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton – the whole mispocheh. 17th century China had Wang Fuzi…
a.m. Tarallucci interlocution from Table 54:
“Our goal is to change the market.”
“Awesome.”
Mencius, not to be confused with meniscus.
Two egg schist. Or not, Tubby. Dada’s the ?
Let loose the dogs of perception
When the dwarves of perception are cleansed, er, flensed…
Clean or not, Bill, those doors are revolving – nay, revolting
Oy, safflower…
The etymologists say that “disciple” comes from Latin discere, to learn; discipulus, a learner, into Old French, deciple, into Old English.
From discipulus via disciplina, (instruction, knowledge), one arrives again at Old French, into English, disciple, to discipline, except that in journeying across the Channel, instruction and knowledge morph into mortification by scourging oneself.
This gives a whole new spin to auto-didacticism, not to mention “home” and other forms of schooling and being schooled. Nonetheless the old saying goes that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
Old French, muddle English, New Schoolz for Olde…
There is a distinction (discere) to be made between a Freierian and a Free Aryan. Or Arian, whether free or not-so.
I was a free Arian in Paris…
But, during the German occupation, I changed my “i” for a “y.” Because.
And then, the difference, one both of form and function, between the Vatican, and a vatic can.
Which one you gonna listen to, eh, Mr. Disciple? Ms.?
School of Athens
School of Sparta
Where you gonna
go; Siddhartha?
Why I don’t give a sacred fig, sedee
Maitreya’s bettern’ yoursis
Or those even rarer free air-ian gas stations
What’s the matter with matter – or doesn’t it?
What makes human beings truly distinct from other animals is the amount of energy we devote to establishing what makes us distinct from other animals. (As well as endlessly speculating on the nature and meaning of that distinction.)
Build a Chunnel and they will come
For the great migrations are still in sway
Great moments in blurbsmanship: “Eloquent and imaginative, Ms. Faust’s book takes a grim topic – how America coped with the massive death toll from the Civil War – and makes it fresh and exciting.” – The New York Observer on Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, NY: Vintage, 2008.
TRANSPORTATION OF THE DEAD!
[Our rentable] Transportation Case preserves the body in a natural state and [as] perfect condition as when placed in it for any distance or length of time in any weather. It is light, durable, tastefully finished and so arranged as to readily expose the face of the dead for inspection. The corpse requires NO PREPARATION by Embalming, Cutting or Poisoning; but all arrangements for the funeral can be made and held at Church or Home, as though the subject had died on the day of arrival at home…
OUR PRICES have been reduced to a modest profit, and at less than two-thirds the prices before the opening of our offices…
WASHINGTON, cor. 4th Avenue Hotel,
BALTIMORE, Barnum’s Hotel,
PHILADELPHIA, Girard Hotel,
GETTYSBURG, Balt. St., Sign of D.&J. Culp.
[Handbill of the Staunton Trans. Co., printed Gettysburg, August 4, 1863, from Faust, p. 93]
Most men [!?] lead lives of acquired desolation
Great moments in insecurity:
Do you lead your life, or does your life lead you?
Is your smartphone smarter than you?
If it isn’t, why do you have it – it’s not doing its job, which is, in a funny way to take, at very least, your “identity”…
Fish are floatin’
And the cotton is low
But, on the to and fro boat to Monhegan Island, you see porpoises, at least six of ‘em. And instead of anticipating where and when they’ll breach next, you try to feel their breathing and the cycles of their dives and surfaces. Then, gradually, the swim too far off to see clearly, but you’re working in their rhythm which, for as long as the ripples remain palpable within you become a kind of resonating sea.
Wind from the West, fish bite the best.
Wind from the East, fish bite the least.
Wind from the North, do not go forth.
Wind from the South blows bait in their mouth.
The log at the woodpile, the axe supported by it;
The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space carved for a garden,
The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves after the storm is lull’d,
The wailing and moaning at intervals, the thought of the sea,
The thoughts of ships struck in the storm and put on their beam ends, and the cutting away of masts;
The sentiment of the huge timbers of old fashion’d houses and barns…
Sang Whitman in “Song of the Broad-Axe,” 3.
Bodies Embalmed by Us NEVER TURN BLACK! But retain their natural color and appearance… so as to admit of contemplation of the person Embalmed, with the countenance of one asleep.
Sang the full-page ad of Dr. F.A.H. Hutton & Co. in the 1863 Washington, DC City Directory.
“The faces of the dead,” wrote Gettysburg veteran Cornelius Ledger, “as a general rule had turned… a deep bluish black, giving to a corpse with black hair the appearance of a negro.” [Faust, p. 57]
“I did not realize anything about the fight when we were in action, but the battlefield at midnight will bring one to realizing a sense of war… I cannot give such a description of the fight as I wish I could. My head is so full that it is all jumbled up together and I can’t get it into any kind of shape… Tell Mrs. Diggins not to let her boy enlist.” Wrote Henry C. Taylor to his parents in WI, after a night on corpse detail in 1863. [Faust, pp. 56-57]
The day after Antietam, William Stillwell of GA wrote his wife: “I am in good health this morning as far as my body is concerned, but in my mind I am perplexed.” [Faust, p. 57]
“Aufaul Knuse,” an Alabama soldier wrote to the wife of a dead comrade. [Faust, p. 15]
Is money that has been actually, physically dipped in sacrificial blood more valuable? For example, the Euro, dipped in the blood of the Greeks.
Narrative (a story) is like a cloud – one that we continually reread. Ah, it looks like a rabbit; now it’s an buffalo; now a running bear; now nothing at all – blue sky – ah, here comes a thunderhead, now the udders of a cow, a vaulting of cotton, a mare’s tale…
And God said unto Noah, the end of all stories is come before me, and I will destroy them… [Wherefore] make thee an narrative of gopher wood and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of… A window shalt thou make to the narrative, and in a cubit shalt though finish it above; and the door of the narrative shalt thou set in the side thereof, with lower, second and third stories shalt though make it…
Get those children [clap] out of he muddy, muddy!
Herodotus calls the Persians “barbarians” in the sense of foreigners: those whose speech, as opposed to Greek, sounded like “Bar-bar-bar.”
The words come, not as spoken by a voice but in two complete sentences:
You are a person to whom things have happened. Do not make too much, nor to little of them.
Prometheus blond.
