Book of the World Courant CLXVII

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CLXVII

 

Interesting how Pylades helps slaughter the cattle Orestes mistakes for Erinyes [Furies], though he himself suffers from no such delusions.

 

They all laughed when Edison distorted sound…

 

The high heel and the cobblestone

 

I’d like the wild mozzarella oreo crêpe

 

I want to build a virtual currency based on mouse dandruff

 

They claim to be interested in girls.

But they are really interested in money.

Money with which to buy girls.

Take up the straight man’s burden…

 

Can u master ur johnson?

 

A barricade of trump ducks, oops! dump trucks in front of his Fifth Avenue tower, oops, bunker.

 

Amidst the clash of global billionaires, a few leftover docilization tidbits: museums, for example, at least nominally open to the public. Parks… The street…

 

While somewhere on a beach, a kid plays with a trump duck filled with wet sand

 

Think outside the apocalypse

 

Now when Apollo came and drove

Themis daughter of Earth from the sacred seat,

Strange shapes stirred in the womb of the ground,

And visiting dreams of night were born,

And flew to the sleeping cities of men

When darkness and deep rest had laid them still,

And told them of things past and things to come.

Thus ancient Earth, for her daughter’s wrong,

Took from Apollo his pride of place.

And Apollo leapt up and ran to Zeus on Olympus,

Gripped the throne with his baby hand:

‘Father, rebuke the indignant Earth

Who steals my temple’s honor with nightly visions!’

And the Father, laughing

At his child so eager

For men’s worship, and the wealth of gold they bring,

Bowed his will that visions should no more reveal

Word of gods to mortals.

He took from men the elusive light,

The half-remembered dark, of dreams;

Restored Apollo to his prerogative

To answer throngs of suppliants from every city in Greece,

Chanting the high certainties of the will of Heaven.

[Iphigenia at Taurus, Philip Vellacott, trans. Penguin Books, Ltd.: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1968, p. 112]

 

By the time this Courant goes live, who knows what will have gone down. At this moment, the crisis in globalization has finally, and very much in the spirit of the time, brought the United States out of the closet as an oligarchy (albeit one with tremendous internal conflicts, not least among its competing oligarchs) and into the community of oligarchies. This political metamorphosis, in all its shocking butterfly-out-of-the-chrysalis-like clarity – has made obvious our slippage out of alignment with Western Europe. We really are on our own now, as we have so often dreamed of being.

And the mechanism that propelled us over the edge on which we had been teetering for so long and into this new and radical circumstance was a time-honored institution, a presidential election – one in which the most popular candidate’s party could not bring itself to nominate him, and in which the loser won the popular vote by over a million. I do not believe these are accidents or “mistakes.” I believe that they represent the surfacing of powerful unconscious forces within the culture – all the more forceful for having remained beneath the threshold of awareness for so long, always growing, but until now never quite strong enough to openly emerge and proclaim not so much the birth of a new order, as the death of order itself.

 

For well you know

That it’s a fool

Who plays it cool

By making his world

A little colder…

Writ Lennon & McCartney oncet

The young, pony-tailed Yalie at Table 5 orders what sounds like “suicide of fresh fruit.” It takes you a beat…

 

Slices of air! Slices of air! The sad, aggressive cry of a street vendor. Or is it the crows?

 

Sous les pavés

Plus de pavés

 

I always finish off a ten-coarse meal with wafer-thin entitle-mints

 

Book of the World Mourant, For Rent, For Real

Dewey Defeats Huey and Louie. Donald Quacks Up. Uncle Scrooge Surrenders to Culinary Authorities in Beijing…

 

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Lay on MacDuck!

 

Extry! Extry! Read all about it: Pokey Rides Gumby! Centaurs Massacre Lapiths!

            Getcha Classix Illustrated!

 

Revise ye myths, O degraded race

 

Race putain

 

Achilles

When our story begins, the Trojan War had been going on for more than ten years. Many battles had been fought, and many men had died. Soldiers and generals from both sides were exhausted. The Achaean men wanted to go home, but they were loyal to King Agamemnon. If he said they should continue fighting, that was what they would do.

Agamemnon and his men had captured many Trojans after an important battle. These people were soldiers and women from a nearby town. The Achaeans planned to sell these Trojans as slaves. One of the prisoners was the daughter of Apollo’s priest, Chryses. Chryses begged the Achaeans to free his daughter. He promised them riches in return.

“I will give you more riches than you would make by selling my daughter as a slave,” he said.

The Achaean soldiers thought this was a good deal. Agamemnon did not. He would not give Chryses’s daughter back no matter how big the fortune was. In fact, he decided to keep the young woman as his slave rather than sell her.

“Do you think you can control the will of a king? I will not be swayed by your promise of money,” Agamemnon told Chryses. “No one, especially a Trojan priest tells me what I should or should not do!” He laughed at the priest and waved his arms in the air. “Leave now, old man,” Agamemnon shouted. “If I see you again, it will mean the end for you and your daughter!”

The priest Chryses was terrified. He returned to his ship and set sail for home. The priest prayed to the god Apollo. “Hear me, Apollo! God of the silver bow! You know that I have prayed to you for years. I have built you temples and offered sacrifices to you. Please listen to my prayer now. Claim revenge upon the Achaeans for what they have done to my daughter and me. Send your arrows in place of my tears!”

Apollo heard the old priest’s prayer. He protected those who honored him with temples and songs. Apollo strode down from Mount Olympus with his bow and arrows slung over his shoulder. The arrows clanged as the god shook with rage… [Kathleen Olmstead. The Iliad: Retold from the Homer Original. Classic Starts edition. New York: Sterling Children’s Books, 2014., pp. 7-9.]

 

How are things in Guantánamora?

 

How do you get inside the door?

            Well, just open it!

No, I mean, how do you get inside the door?

 

Don, go away you’re no good for us…

To paraphrase the old Four Seasons ballad

 

Quacked up, it was a Chelsea Manning

 

And the Times, the Times…

            The obit begins: Diana Balmori, a landscape architect whose ecologically sensitive designs integrated buildings and the natural environment in projects ranging in scope from urban rooftop gardens to South Korea’s new administrative capital, Sejong City, died on Monday in Manhattan.

Fair enough. But the headline: “Diana Balmori Dies at 84; Rejected Excluding Nature” – now what to make of that?

 

The eyes of Caravaggio’s St. Catherine [see illus. Courant CLXVI – the model is the Roman prostitute Fillide Melandrone] lead our gaze toward a spike protruding from her emblematic wheel and on line with her mouth. Catherine’s left hand strokes the handle of a sword while her right hand caresses the blade. I have left out a lot of adjectives…

 

…which tend to cast what we hope to show the reader into shadow.

 

English as a Second Anguish:

I smell good. Not the same as I smell well. Or I have a good nose. Or, I am good at smelling [things]. Or, I smell, well…

 

Alt right: the manic phase of a bad mood

 

There’s a bad mood on the right

A famous Lady Mondogreen from the olde Creedence Clearwater song, “Bad Moon Rising.”

 

Don’t go round tonight

They’re bound to take your life…

 

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