Be careful. Watch out. I take names, ranks, and serial numbers. That's right, I spent some time tonight searching for a copy of the eulogy, or more specifically, the letter I wrote to a friend then living in San Francisco of the untimely passing of Gene Lee Wilcox. I myself was laid up, recovering from butt surgery to remove a fistula, missed his funeral, and only managed a few weeks later with walking cane to visit the grave of my outrageous but dear friend and brother.
Gene frankly was in a league of his own as the ONLY spirit in Washington, DC who freely showed me the molecule of respect I felt I had earned in this tight-assed town, knew both the brutal extent of my trespasses and the splintered breathe of my genius, despite the wealth of ruthless gatekeepers barring the door to my passage. That has changed a bit, but Gene was a trailblazer. Even after I imposed my own exile from the city's music scene sometime in the early 90s, Gene insisted upon his duty with those occasional unannounced visits which almost always turned into a three day drunk rockathon, and more heart to heart than either of us could weather a fourth day. In a word, there was no trace of COMPETITION between us, just unquestionable friendship, mutual reassurance.
Tomorrow is the ninth anniversary of his passing. I haven't found the letter yet, but I am still mining old files hoping to find it. Meanwhile, I have posted several other compositions written to the same person, a vigorous sass of a woman named Landry, a year or two earlier, none of which have anything to do with Gene, but everything to do with why I think Gene respected me, much to the amazement of everyone circulating on the sad periphery of this insane local culture, myself included.
Not for the easily charmed...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
BACKGROUND CHECK, PLEASE
Originally published on January 31, 1997
And the second phase of literary hiccups...
Yesterday I was drilled by an investigator doing a background check on Bob Blumstein as he seeks some government clearance. I did a decent job deflecting with humor the questions I felt uncomfortable answering for fear my take on truth would hamper Bob's ambitions. The one corner I got backed into concerned Bob's emotional status. I had no choice but to mention his diagnosis and bouts with chronic fatigue syndrome and the medication. I did not mention prozac by name, and the investigator was surprisingly soft on followup in this area. A few one liners I tossed around included:
Question: something along the lines of does Mr. Blumstein strike you as a solid neighbor, easily getting along with others...
GT response: "Well, we've disagreed on things every now and then, but from your own investigative prospective, I don't know whether this reflects poorly on Bob, or me."
Question: something along the lines of has Mr. Blumstein shown any signs of possible emotional breakdown or instability...
GT response: "Well, as I am not a trained psychologist, I certainly am not qualified or comfortable answering such questions with any sort of authoritative voice..."
Question: something along the lines of do I think Mr. Blumstein would be a good security risk...
Answer: "Mmm, again I know nothing about governments clearances except that Bob has occasionally mentioned in passing, of course without specific detail, other accesses and clearances he has won over the years in his job as an Air Force reservist, and I suppose other job hurdles in the past..."
I was asked maybe 40 questions, some overlapping in theme, but only the direct medical liability question led me to a response that I felt could possibly be held against him, although at the end of the interview the investigator apprised me of the Privacy Act of 1983, and how Bob could request a detailed report on this interview and would discover that I had given him favorable marks. But yes, of course this is what the investigator would say to me, so I wonder how much damage my candor and my obvious deflections (as opposed to a drone-like apotheosis) might have done to his chances of winning his clearance, should all Bob's other cronies not play the rat's game.
Overall, I was articulate and calculating, punching through with wordplays and jokes as well as honestly suggesting that Bob is as straight a Joe as I've known. I counted on forthrightness as opposed to monotonic one word responses as a plus. Bob had given Sue the chore of this interview, but she never returned the phonecall after the interviewer came to the house leaving a note I found when checking the mail that day.
I must have slept in flu lethargy straight through the knocking. On the phone, the investigator, after asking for Sue soon turned his attentions to me, and offered a choice of phone or face to face interview. After acknowledging my sickness and joking if he could bear with me, I accepted the challenge, and relieved Sue. She was grateful, and I think Bob would be as well. I believe, despite the one problem area, I executed a more than adequate defense of Bob's integrity.
Question: Have you known Mr. Blumstein to indulge in illicit drugs at any time?
GT response: "Bob has stayed emphatically clear of this sort of indulgence."
Question: Have you known Mr. Blumstein to have a problem with alcohol?
GT response: "Bob is somewhat of a beer connaisseur. He brews his own beer as a devoted hobbyist, but I certainly would not characterize Bob as a problem drinker."
Question: something along the lines of do I think Mr. Blumstein is an honest man, a man of integrity...
GT response: "To tell you the truth sir, Bob is as honest a person as I know, his integrity impeccable. We joke and call ourselves the radical middle, a return to sanity.
And on and on...
Enjoy the rest of the Bracken as biographer commentary. And let me know what you know of these top secret drills. They certainly breed paranoia and intimately define the faith of friendship in terms I know must address in the ouster of Tim affair, so catch ya later...
GT
And the second phase of literary hiccups...
Yesterday I was drilled by an investigator doing a background check on Bob Blumstein as he seeks some government clearance. I did a decent job deflecting with humor the questions I felt uncomfortable answering for fear my take on truth would hamper Bob's ambitions. The one corner I got backed into concerned Bob's emotional status. I had no choice but to mention his diagnosis and bouts with chronic fatigue syndrome and the medication. I did not mention prozac by name, and the investigator was surprisingly soft on followup in this area. A few one liners I tossed around included:
Question: something along the lines of does Mr. Blumstein strike you as a solid neighbor, easily getting along with others...
GT response: "Well, we've disagreed on things every now and then, but from your own investigative prospective, I don't know whether this reflects poorly on Bob, or me."
Question: something along the lines of has Mr. Blumstein shown any signs of possible emotional breakdown or instability...
GT response: "Well, as I am not a trained psychologist, I certainly am not qualified or comfortable answering such questions with any sort of authoritative voice..."
Question: something along the lines of do I think Mr. Blumstein would be a good security risk...
Answer: "Mmm, again I know nothing about governments clearances except that Bob has occasionally mentioned in passing, of course without specific detail, other accesses and clearances he has won over the years in his job as an Air Force reservist, and I suppose other job hurdles in the past..."
I was asked maybe 40 questions, some overlapping in theme, but only the direct medical liability question led me to a response that I felt could possibly be held against him, although at the end of the interview the investigator apprised me of the Privacy Act of 1983, and how Bob could request a detailed report on this interview and would discover that I had given him favorable marks. But yes, of course this is what the investigator would say to me, so I wonder how much damage my candor and my obvious deflections (as opposed to a drone-like apotheosis) might have done to his chances of winning his clearance, should all Bob's other cronies not play the rat's game.
Overall, I was articulate and calculating, punching through with wordplays and jokes as well as honestly suggesting that Bob is as straight a Joe as I've known. I counted on forthrightness as opposed to monotonic one word responses as a plus. Bob had given Sue the chore of this interview, but she never returned the phonecall after the interviewer came to the house leaving a note I found when checking the mail that day.
I must have slept in flu lethargy straight through the knocking. On the phone, the investigator, after asking for Sue soon turned his attentions to me, and offered a choice of phone or face to face interview. After acknowledging my sickness and joking if he could bear with me, I accepted the challenge, and relieved Sue. She was grateful, and I think Bob would be as well. I believe, despite the one problem area, I executed a more than adequate defense of Bob's integrity.
Question: Have you known Mr. Blumstein to indulge in illicit drugs at any time?
GT response: "Bob has stayed emphatically clear of this sort of indulgence."
Question: Have you known Mr. Blumstein to have a problem with alcohol?
GT response: "Bob is somewhat of a beer connaisseur. He brews his own beer as a devoted hobbyist, but I certainly would not characterize Bob as a problem drinker."
Question: something along the lines of do I think Mr. Blumstein is an honest man, a man of integrity...
GT response: "To tell you the truth sir, Bob is as honest a person as I know, his integrity impeccable. We joke and call ourselves the radical middle, a return to sanity.
And on and on...
Enjoy the rest of the Bracken as biographer commentary. And let me know what you know of these top secret drills. They certainly breed paranoia and intimately define the faith of friendship in terms I know must address in the ouster of Tim affair, so catch ya later...
GT
SIGNALING DEBORD
Originally published on January 22, 1997
Well, it's finally finished. The Debord book is packed off to Portland. Took data to service bureau to have my Syquest media converted to Zip, and printed out a color proof of the cover. Nearly a month's worth of work is in the can. Now I can address what happened over New Year's, settle back into my own themes, but first I need to awaken afresh. I am tired, needing a night's rest.
Tomorrow I shall begin the prologue promised those long brackenish weeks ago. The details will no doubt seem shallow now, since most of you no doubt have struck conversations of some sort or another with the exiled in the meantime, but I am urged by inner demons and outer banks of fair recoil to capture the essence of my own perspectives. Thus I presume all of you are still interested in hearing these details, despite their tardiness, free from kneejerk but far from the thunder of that distant hour.
I am forwarding these two recent notes I sent to Steve (who has been remarkably steady in recent days after months of little to say), only because since I've been so busy and completely absorbed by Bracken's project my own e-mail generation had dropped to almost nothing. I didn't want you to think I had blown you off or anything as vulgar or self-preserving like that. Quite the contrary. I've been feeling guilty and depressed that you've written interestingly on several topics that I failed to engage because of my current workload, while simultaneously neglecting my own hefty writing project describing those sordid details of the changing of the guard here at the Dollhouse. Steve meanwhile weighed in with his interest in hearing more about the book project. You did not, but hey, you certainly caused a stir at the so-called Situationist camp a few weeks back that I thought you might still appreciate a few details while they were still warm in the oven.
After a month of working diligently for someone else I had a few general Mac housekeeping chores to manage, a major crash to weather, and I am now on my eighth day of flu sickness without antibiotic calvary persuading me that the end of this misery is yet in sight. So I face the hiss and boos of the faceless crowd as I admit that still the first line of the Great Storm ending 1996 has yet to find its way to page, although this Sunday, Groundhog's Day will mark the first month's anniversary of Tim and Jennifer's exile from the Dollhouse fevers.
Speaking of anniversaries, what day exactly do you turn 31 in all your sass and bosomly anthem? Have you managed to seduce a frozen Swede onto your corporate tab? Would you tell me if you did? You wouldn't be pulling a Jack, now would you Lynn, all bathed in secret lights and bold rationalizations while flogging community standards with one hand tied behind your back and the other on a stack of sci-fi novels, with nothing but your feet and your mouth to accomplish the dirty deeds, now would you Lynn?
Of course I jest with you, but you know that as well as I do that in the eye of the hurricane, few details are lost. It's out there on the swirl that conflict states its name and bends the rules to suit its own game. But have a swell Minnesota memory. Nothing lasts forever, not even a Green Bay Packers grin....
You asked for editorial comments on "GUY DEBORD - Revolutionary" by Len Bracken. I have not forgotten, and was quite pleased that you asked for details of my impressions, so I suppose I should lay in a few lines on the topic right here, seeing as life is settling down again for me.
Considering the Situationist International's (SI) big cheese was, by revolutionary and philosophical necessity a subterranean veiled in secrecy a state of being heightened by idiosyncracies leaning toward an accelerated paranoia and strong diva tendancies, the volume was a decent read for the first biography ever written about the man (vested propoganda offered as fact by Len). I was surprised by the general objectivity of the material, having presumed Bracken of being a terminal sycophant of Debord and the whole romanticized SI movement. I was able to argue plainly and successfully my objections to the man and the philosophy based on details the book offered with Len over the last week of proofing and finalizing the 420 page manuscript.
The author's style was rather straightforward, his voice almost non-existent, a minor flaw in the book as I pointed out to Len. As any serious reader might be I was plagued with the question, who is this Len Bracken fellow of few daylight credentials? Again, I emphasize, this was no ordinary bio, given the secrecy of the subversive material and its originators. Debord's two wives are still alive, intellectuals in their own right, and yet were not interviewed personally by the biographer. And while Bracken's bibliography and footnotes are extensive, this dependency on so much second and third hand information will no doubt register as a flaw with serious reviewers.
Historical threads of Debord's intellectual ancestors are woven rather seamlessly into the cloth of the story, while personal anecdotes from behind the scenes are perhaps in short number. By the end of the volume I had gained probably for the first time ever a respect for both the biographer and the subject, while still disdaining the ultimate outcome of such a philosophical stance. Debord was a tyrant and a romantic. He carved up friendships with bold sweeping strokes. Bracken indeed proved himself capable of putting flesh and flaw onto the man and the myth, much to the book's advantage.
However, his usual bluster and misplaced pomposity (Bracken's Breath) that this was a book that will be read for 500 years fortunately was kept out of the book, and I could only plead in a feeble Gabriel grit and grunt that my own ears had not been spared the oft repeated utterance, no doubt a trumped up cry for respect of a very needy author and personality. I had to tell him repeatedly that I was no cheerleader type, no empty flatterer, a symptom of my childhood no less, but that my comments were sincere and as comprehensive as I could make them. It was a roller coaster ride around here, but I think we did a pretty damn good job on the proofing, the layout, and an unbias review of the material. Could he not just leave it at that. Needless to say, I was not sad to see that job finished.
I am promised another $250 plus two copies of the finished product to add to the original $500. One can only speculate if I'll ever see either. Small press insecurities chewed at Len persistently over the month we worked together. Adam Parfrey is not intentionally a fly by nighter, but the Feral House Books wing span ain't exactly an eagle's badge of honor either...
GT
Well, it's finally finished. The Debord book is packed off to Portland. Took data to service bureau to have my Syquest media converted to Zip, and printed out a color proof of the cover. Nearly a month's worth of work is in the can. Now I can address what happened over New Year's, settle back into my own themes, but first I need to awaken afresh. I am tired, needing a night's rest.
Tomorrow I shall begin the prologue promised those long brackenish weeks ago. The details will no doubt seem shallow now, since most of you no doubt have struck conversations of some sort or another with the exiled in the meantime, but I am urged by inner demons and outer banks of fair recoil to capture the essence of my own perspectives. Thus I presume all of you are still interested in hearing these details, despite their tardiness, free from kneejerk but far from the thunder of that distant hour.
I am forwarding these two recent notes I sent to Steve (who has been remarkably steady in recent days after months of little to say), only because since I've been so busy and completely absorbed by Bracken's project my own e-mail generation had dropped to almost nothing. I didn't want you to think I had blown you off or anything as vulgar or self-preserving like that. Quite the contrary. I've been feeling guilty and depressed that you've written interestingly on several topics that I failed to engage because of my current workload, while simultaneously neglecting my own hefty writing project describing those sordid details of the changing of the guard here at the Dollhouse. Steve meanwhile weighed in with his interest in hearing more about the book project. You did not, but hey, you certainly caused a stir at the so-called Situationist camp a few weeks back that I thought you might still appreciate a few details while they were still warm in the oven.
After a month of working diligently for someone else I had a few general Mac housekeeping chores to manage, a major crash to weather, and I am now on my eighth day of flu sickness without antibiotic calvary persuading me that the end of this misery is yet in sight. So I face the hiss and boos of the faceless crowd as I admit that still the first line of the Great Storm ending 1996 has yet to find its way to page, although this Sunday, Groundhog's Day will mark the first month's anniversary of Tim and Jennifer's exile from the Dollhouse fevers.
Speaking of anniversaries, what day exactly do you turn 31 in all your sass and bosomly anthem? Have you managed to seduce a frozen Swede onto your corporate tab? Would you tell me if you did? You wouldn't be pulling a Jack, now would you Lynn, all bathed in secret lights and bold rationalizations while flogging community standards with one hand tied behind your back and the other on a stack of sci-fi novels, with nothing but your feet and your mouth to accomplish the dirty deeds, now would you Lynn?
Of course I jest with you, but you know that as well as I do that in the eye of the hurricane, few details are lost. It's out there on the swirl that conflict states its name and bends the rules to suit its own game. But have a swell Minnesota memory. Nothing lasts forever, not even a Green Bay Packers grin....
You asked for editorial comments on "GUY DEBORD - Revolutionary" by Len Bracken. I have not forgotten, and was quite pleased that you asked for details of my impressions, so I suppose I should lay in a few lines on the topic right here, seeing as life is settling down again for me.
Considering the Situationist International's (SI) big cheese was, by revolutionary and philosophical necessity a subterranean veiled in secrecy a state of being heightened by idiosyncracies leaning toward an accelerated paranoia and strong diva tendancies, the volume was a decent read for the first biography ever written about the man (vested propoganda offered as fact by Len). I was surprised by the general objectivity of the material, having presumed Bracken of being a terminal sycophant of Debord and the whole romanticized SI movement. I was able to argue plainly and successfully my objections to the man and the philosophy based on details the book offered with Len over the last week of proofing and finalizing the 420 page manuscript.
The author's style was rather straightforward, his voice almost non-existent, a minor flaw in the book as I pointed out to Len. As any serious reader might be I was plagued with the question, who is this Len Bracken fellow of few daylight credentials? Again, I emphasize, this was no ordinary bio, given the secrecy of the subversive material and its originators. Debord's two wives are still alive, intellectuals in their own right, and yet were not interviewed personally by the biographer. And while Bracken's bibliography and footnotes are extensive, this dependency on so much second and third hand information will no doubt register as a flaw with serious reviewers.
Historical threads of Debord's intellectual ancestors are woven rather seamlessly into the cloth of the story, while personal anecdotes from behind the scenes are perhaps in short number. By the end of the volume I had gained probably for the first time ever a respect for both the biographer and the subject, while still disdaining the ultimate outcome of such a philosophical stance. Debord was a tyrant and a romantic. He carved up friendships with bold sweeping strokes. Bracken indeed proved himself capable of putting flesh and flaw onto the man and the myth, much to the book's advantage.
However, his usual bluster and misplaced pomposity (Bracken's Breath) that this was a book that will be read for 500 years fortunately was kept out of the book, and I could only plead in a feeble Gabriel grit and grunt that my own ears had not been spared the oft repeated utterance, no doubt a trumped up cry for respect of a very needy author and personality. I had to tell him repeatedly that I was no cheerleader type, no empty flatterer, a symptom of my childhood no less, but that my comments were sincere and as comprehensive as I could make them. It was a roller coaster ride around here, but I think we did a pretty damn good job on the proofing, the layout, and an unbias review of the material. Could he not just leave it at that. Needless to say, I was not sad to see that job finished.
I am promised another $250 plus two copies of the finished product to add to the original $500. One can only speculate if I'll ever see either. Small press insecurities chewed at Len persistently over the month we worked together. Adam Parfrey is not intentionally a fly by nighter, but the Feral House Books wing span ain't exactly an eagle's badge of honor either...
GT
SELF FLATTERY AS SELF LOATHING
Originally published on October 4, 1996
OR ART WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE TAKEN OFF THE SHELF. This morning I awoke at 10 AM after channel tobogganing until the wee moments of early. Fifteen seconds into my new morning a power spike kills the fan and several scattered appliances around the house. Well, not killed, but put down for a sleep while men at work raid the street for quick fixes.
In the past thirty days this is the fourth major brownout. Hope it doesn't spread to the computer room as I write this. Timing is everything. Lucifer, the author of time. Speaking of Lucifer this morning I also pick up Blum's book, A HISTORY OF THE JEWS for the first time in weeks and was juiced by the page I'd bookmarked when last I read from it. But first, I didn't finish my Liberty Lobby piece the other day. Kevin Kreider is an old drinking pal, part of the Jack, Rob, Rich, Daryl, Dennis, Tim, Jim, Gabriel, BS routine at its most regular interval say from the Forestville warehouse era of 1992-1993. He & Rob Bussius (now married and serving Uncle Sam as a soldier stationed in Hawaii) have worked at Liberty about fifteen years between them. Young Kevin is Jewish, has writerly aspirations, and wife just had their first child. We call him Young Kevin because of his slight but handsome stature.
When I mentioned to Tim about the D'Sousa reference to Liberty I plunged into some speculation of Kevin's employment there, tossing out the line that no doubt he's a planted spy who reports back to the B'nai Br'ith Anti-Defamation League. I've been down there a few times with the two boys of Liberty, even unsuccessful applying for a job there myself at the insistence of Bussius, and reinforced by Avril Shipman, Tim's kindly mom, who gave me a contact name. They weren't hiring was the response I got over the phone. I dropped the chase, but it's a quaint friendly office located at Third and Independence, SE, right in the heart of Capitol Hill, so to speak. Jarred to realize that a barely concealed form of white supremacy was not only alive and kicking in this raging country, but, well, how damned really close I am to it, I begged the question then, and remain unchanged in my opinion, uh, why not? In the knowledge of all these other rather militant groups in opposition, any other opinion would be stupid...
A twisted question of personal purpose keeps me near and far on the issue of race to say anything on the topic. Silence nobody wins. While discussion is hushed up and immediately brands me a foul racist type, yes Lynn, from the south. Go figure, the lemmings.
Page 262 from AHOTJ: "It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism. The difficulty was, of course, despite the Bible's condemnation of sorcery, and despite the Judaic belief that all actions were willed by God alone, ruling out any kind of dualism...
"There were not many devils in the Bible, but they did exist: Mevet the death-god, Lilith the child-stealer (sometimes an owl), Reshev the plaugue-god, Dever, another sickness-god, Belial, a sort of devil-commander, satan, leader of the anti-God forces, Azazel, the scapegoat-god of the wilderness. So the invasion of Judaism by devils over the period of 150 BC to 300 AD had some prcedents. Needless to say, [High Priest] Hillel could understand devil language too. Devils varied greatly, though according to Issac of Acre, they all lacked thumbs. Some, like Satan and Belial, were formidable, serious...
"To comabt these devils, an army of angels came into existence. These too had biblical sanction in some cases. Angels like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combination of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as abra-cadabra...
"Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as 'Practical Kabbalah'. In theory only men of great sanctity could, let alone should, exercise this white magic. In practice, protective charms were mass produced and circulated freely in the ghetto. There was also black magic, invoked by manipulating the 'unholy names'. According to the Zohar, the sources of this forbidden magic were the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis...
"The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a golem, an artificial man into which a ba'al shem, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formulae. The idea derives from the creation story of Adam, but the actual word occurs only once in the Bible, in a mysterious passage in the Psalms. However, Talmudic legends accumulated around the golem. Jeremiah was said to have made one. Another was made by Ben Sira. From the fifteenth to the seventeeth centuries the notion gathered force, so that the ability to make a golem was attributed to any many of outstanding sanctity and kabbalsitic knowledge. The golem was brought to life to perform a variety of tasks, including defending Jews from their gentile enemies. In theory, a golem came to life when God's secret name, with the letters arranged in the correct order, was put into its mouth; it was deactivated by reversing the the name. But a golem occasionally got out of hand and ran amok—thereby generating a new layer of terror-tales..."
As the hollow man of TS Eliot, we are all golems, and the acronymics, ah ha! The soup is always spoiled by too few or too many cooks...
The question being, had I already read the page before bookmarking, or had I finished the previous page, bookmarked the next page as is usually my habit in this matter, or is all this only so much blarney, irrelevant to anything anybody anywhere needs to know? Just asking...
OR ART WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE TAKEN OFF THE SHELF. This morning I awoke at 10 AM after channel tobogganing until the wee moments of early. Fifteen seconds into my new morning a power spike kills the fan and several scattered appliances around the house. Well, not killed, but put down for a sleep while men at work raid the street for quick fixes.
In the past thirty days this is the fourth major brownout. Hope it doesn't spread to the computer room as I write this. Timing is everything. Lucifer, the author of time. Speaking of Lucifer this morning I also pick up Blum's book, A HISTORY OF THE JEWS for the first time in weeks and was juiced by the page I'd bookmarked when last I read from it. But first, I didn't finish my Liberty Lobby piece the other day. Kevin Kreider is an old drinking pal, part of the Jack, Rob, Rich, Daryl, Dennis, Tim, Jim, Gabriel, BS routine at its most regular interval say from the Forestville warehouse era of 1992-1993. He & Rob Bussius (now married and serving Uncle Sam as a soldier stationed in Hawaii) have worked at Liberty about fifteen years between them. Young Kevin is Jewish, has writerly aspirations, and wife just had their first child. We call him Young Kevin because of his slight but handsome stature.
When I mentioned to Tim about the D'Sousa reference to Liberty I plunged into some speculation of Kevin's employment there, tossing out the line that no doubt he's a planted spy who reports back to the B'nai Br'ith Anti-Defamation League. I've been down there a few times with the two boys of Liberty, even unsuccessful applying for a job there myself at the insistence of Bussius, and reinforced by Avril Shipman, Tim's kindly mom, who gave me a contact name. They weren't hiring was the response I got over the phone. I dropped the chase, but it's a quaint friendly office located at Third and Independence, SE, right in the heart of Capitol Hill, so to speak. Jarred to realize that a barely concealed form of white supremacy was not only alive and kicking in this raging country, but, well, how damned really close I am to it, I begged the question then, and remain unchanged in my opinion, uh, why not? In the knowledge of all these other rather militant groups in opposition, any other opinion would be stupid...
A twisted question of personal purpose keeps me near and far on the issue of race to say anything on the topic. Silence nobody wins. While discussion is hushed up and immediately brands me a foul racist type, yes Lynn, from the south. Go figure, the lemmings.
Page 262 from AHOTJ: "It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism. The difficulty was, of course, despite the Bible's condemnation of sorcery, and despite the Judaic belief that all actions were willed by God alone, ruling out any kind of dualism...
"There were not many devils in the Bible, but they did exist: Mevet the death-god, Lilith the child-stealer (sometimes an owl), Reshev the plaugue-god, Dever, another sickness-god, Belial, a sort of devil-commander, satan, leader of the anti-God forces, Azazel, the scapegoat-god of the wilderness. So the invasion of Judaism by devils over the period of 150 BC to 300 AD had some prcedents. Needless to say, [High Priest] Hillel could understand devil language too. Devils varied greatly, though according to Issac of Acre, they all lacked thumbs. Some, like Satan and Belial, were formidable, serious...
"To comabt these devils, an army of angels came into existence. These too had biblical sanction in some cases. Angels like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combination of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as abra-cadabra...
"Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as 'Practical Kabbalah'. In theory only men of great sanctity could, let alone should, exercise this white magic. In practice, protective charms were mass produced and circulated freely in the ghetto. There was also black magic, invoked by manipulating the 'unholy names'. According to the Zohar, the sources of this forbidden magic were the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis...
"The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a golem, an artificial man into which a ba'al shem, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formulae. The idea derives from the creation story of Adam, but the actual word occurs only once in the Bible, in a mysterious passage in the Psalms. However, Talmudic legends accumulated around the golem. Jeremiah was said to have made one. Another was made by Ben Sira. From the fifteenth to the seventeeth centuries the notion gathered force, so that the ability to make a golem was attributed to any many of outstanding sanctity and kabbalsitic knowledge. The golem was brought to life to perform a variety of tasks, including defending Jews from their gentile enemies. In theory, a golem came to life when God's secret name, with the letters arranged in the correct order, was put into its mouth; it was deactivated by reversing the the name. But a golem occasionally got out of hand and ran amok—thereby generating a new layer of terror-tales..."
As the hollow man of TS Eliot, we are all golems, and the acronymics, ah ha! The soup is always spoiled by too few or too many cooks...
The question being, had I already read the page before bookmarking, or had I finished the previous page, bookmarked the next page as is usually my habit in this matter, or is all this only so much blarney, irrelevant to anything anybody anywhere needs to know? Just asking...
EAST TO WEST
Originally published on October 1, 1996
Hope you don't think that you have figured out the whole of my philosophical slant in these few paragraphs to have blitzed your eBox in recent days. The more I write the less I am confident any real communication can exist outside of fuzzy logic. A thousand pages later, and there is still room for clarification, redundancy be damned. However any aspiring philosophy must start from a foundation of concrete suppositions. The GT foundation rest solely upon a single concept. I am nothing in a crowd, and only something by the gift of God.
The concept of God working through the individual rather than institutional flavoring is not unique to me, nor is it universally accepted, but I suspect I can certainly in the face of the de facto collective spirit of this contemporary age put a uniquely 21st century spin on this ancient wisdom, and shed some light on a problem which pits humanity not against itself but against the old demons of the past, and in a word, is sin. In an early poem (circa 1981 of mine) I accuse Lucifer as the author of time. All of nature's manifestations are both inspired and corrupted by the torque of time's perspective. We work finally within this framework of time, but we should suspect its motives.
Perhaps the best model I can use to relate what I mean when I unilaterally dismiss collectivism as the prime mover of spiritual and physical matter, and thus, an unrivaled conductor of truth is the marriage, or lover's problem. I suggest that no matter how close we want to become the mirror of our partner, or merge dissonance to create a more diversified whole, an irreparable separation is evidenced against us. While ancient teachers suggest that the two become one, this metaphor has rarely been illustrated in fact. History as failure in this regard has shown a bigotry against this unification of two into one. And if two cannot become one, how can dozens, thousands, millions, billions simply and without fracture?
Thus my simple and undeniably old-fashioned point. Even the individual is perpetually plagued and ultimately corrupted by opposing forces. One may argue this diversity strengthens the individual, and thus the whole of thousands can thus be strengthened by this diversity, I hold with the old proverb that a house divided cannot long stand. This approach say other, less insightful accusers, steers me into the traditionally conservative camp. I will not reject the label out of hand, but I hardly think anarchism the way I define it can be held up to the conservative light without displacing a few fundamental concepts of both.
My slant of personal responsibility leads to acceptance of a status quo. I am not talking about doing nothing to change the world in which we live, but I am talking about unholy alliances to the threat to personal autonomy. We are not born with natural or civil rights outside of the social contract. Too many folk presume on the basis on envy and tokenism that what Joe Blow possesses (however gained, and true, evil has laways lent a helping hand to so-called progress), Jim Jackoff is entitled to the same.
The conspiracy of universal equality while a feel good aspiration is not played out in reality bytes either. None are free from the taint of evil, and yet we struggle for greener grass in precisely the same spirit that made the grass seem greener to begin with. Competition and greed. Nothing satisfies us when we know someone else has something that seems better than what we have. The marketdriven culture (just as Marxism predicts) is a vicious line of defense against human nature and natural forces from the outside.
But the "clock" can never be turned back without catastrophe. This is human nature corrupted by greed and envy. Doublespeak and unmasked falsehood crowd into every arena stealing from the human spirit every good motive as time's own author extracts a token penalty for every semblence of progress. Confusion multiplies itself with human numbers. We do not argue good versus eveil. We argue me verus them. Confusion versus confusion. Good and evil.
Here's a clarifying sidebar. The year,1982. Mid-summer. Midtown Atlanta. A few days before I had been approached by two strangelooking womenabout my own age just outside the Omniplex. I was 26. Teresa was defiantly overdressed in several layers of streetdrag wool skirting and sweater. I do not recall the other woman's appearance anymore because it was Teresa who gave me her phone number and the Moonie tract. For the next two weeks we saw each other daily. I visited the Unification House in the quaint residential Little Five Points neighborhood. She came by the Howell House highrise apartment I was then sharing with my mother for tea and crackers. It was actually my mother's place, but I stayed with her for six weeks upon returning from Corpus Christi where I lived for twenty months prior. We traversed the city on foot for five or six hours every day, she in low keyed proselytizing mode, me in a gentle informative resistance.
On this particular day we crossed West Peachtree and turned down Peachtree Main along the infamous corner now revitalized but on this day was still marked by the Dunkin Doughnuts and just beyond, the Christian Science Reading Room. Teresa I knew already, was a product of the 1960s subcultural elite. I knew for instance that she had spent her adolescence in a nudist camp, and that background emerging from the fog of unbearable shame had driven her to the neurotic devices of concept-defying heavy clothing and long frizzy hair in which she hide her dark but very attractive facial lines. I knew she confessed great comforts in the teachings of the Moon organization even when she found them lacking, evident in a few details I will save for another time.
But on this day she was questioning me had I read the two or three theological booklets she had given to me a day earlier. These rather thin booklets were published in a very simplistic styling, oversized footprints, large typefaces, and hordes of colorful pictures. This literature literally reminded me of the kiddie biblestory volumes I had voraciously gobbled up as a child, only thinner. They were workbooks, with a quiz at the end. I had not read them. Confident I already knew all the answers I had simply put them aside meaning to take a half hour to skirt through the topics just to meet my obligations to Teresa, but at this point I hadn't. Besides I had loaned Teresa a thousand page theological tome called the URANTIA BOOK that had been given to me by a former lover a couple of years before. I never got it back, but of course after admitting that I had not read the booklets but I intended to do so, Teresa countered with predictable and similar remarks.
These confessions led me straight to the point I wanted to make to her. Everybody believes their own version of the truth is self-evident and required for everybody under the sun. "Oh but if you would just read these..." she countered. I again repeated the premise that all works claim the truth, and great works have great legions of followers. Nothing is proved right or wrong except in the minds of believers of this or that truth. Whatever Teresa might claim, Johnny Can't Read has a contradictory truth. Jimmy Can Read has another. Evereybody's running around in this crazy attempt to convince everybody else that they are wrong. Teresa smiled at this empasse. Just then we were rounding the corner. I spied the Christian Science Reading Room and asked her if she wanted to dip into there for a few minutes, cool off, rest our feet...
She acquiesced with a sweet okay. We strolled to the reading room. This was not a very large place, fitted into a space nestled in the vee between two major thoroughfares converging at roughly a thirty degree angle, but it was airconditioned and pleasant and waiting for us. I found a chair a few feet from the bulk of the library. Teresa sat in a chair on a perpendicular wall where she was soon approached by an old woman of the faith. They were soon engaged in conversation that barely rose above a whisper. I thought nothing of this, and heard only occasional snippets as I dug into a random book I had pulled. This was a libraaaaaaary after all. Bits and pieces of their chat floated over to me. I was surprised to learn Teresa had been born a third-generation Christian Scientist.
Seemed this was a girl with quite a checkered past. They argued in ever polite tones. The woman persisted. Fifteen to twenty minutes into this routine I overheard the words good and evil, and some reference to the edenic tree of knowledge of good and evil. That was when I spoke up. "Does not the tree of the knowledge inspire knowledge of the DIFFERENCE between good and evil? I inquire of the old woman who to this point had only nodded a respectful hello to me upon entering the room. "Yes, you can say that. Different translations render it a little bit differently, but you can read the CORRECT rendering in OUR books." I replied that I had to confess that I did not know the difference between good and evil. Fire immediately plunged into eyes. "Oh you certainly do, and if you do not, you can read it in our literature. You only have to READ it to understand," she growled.
I countered again that men for thousands of years have argued over these things. I am not sure what I said next but I drew upon current ecological and ecopolitical concerns or some matter such as this, to give a few examples of what I meant by my own confusion with this complex issue of good and evil. She flew into a unmistakable rage, "Oh you are just a troublemaker. You'd better leave. Right now I say. Just leave, and don't come back. I mean it. Don't come back!" I returned the book I still had in grip to its rightful place, and said not another word. Teresa was ushered out alongside me. As the glass door swung close, the pinchedface woman, probably in her late sixties, muttered the word troublemaker one more time just in case I had missed the point.
On the street again I immediately sensed what had just happened and inquired of Teresa, "Do you know what just happened?" She didn't know what I meant. "Do you remember what we were talking about just before we stepped inside?" Again she couldn't piece her memories together. I played it out for her. "We were trying to convince each other to read each other's books. I told you that everybody believed they already had the truth, IF ONLY OTHERS WOULD READ OUR BOOKS."
Teresa's face was beginning to show a glimmer of recognition, but I continued. "Then we step inside and you are barraged by yet another somebody who does exactly what I predicted. It's in THEIR book, THEIR truth, THEIR certainty that all life must bow..." Was this the stroke of God himself drawing us into the Christian Science Reading Room for an example of divine truth, I put to her as we strolled on toward downtown on this sweltering summer afternoon. She finally burst into a rapt amazement, profoundly moved by my explantions, and was giddy that God had shown her a sign. Otherwise nothing would have occurred to her. No threads ever match up. Nothing is connected. An intellectual zombie I'm afraid is all so many of the most devoted folks on earth appear to be. Teresa didn't suffer a loss of faith with that event, but I was overwhelmed by the finger of God in this point blank proof of what I knew to be oh so true...
We are all tools in this game nobody can win.
GT
Hope you don't think that you have figured out the whole of my philosophical slant in these few paragraphs to have blitzed your eBox in recent days. The more I write the less I am confident any real communication can exist outside of fuzzy logic. A thousand pages later, and there is still room for clarification, redundancy be damned. However any aspiring philosophy must start from a foundation of concrete suppositions. The GT foundation rest solely upon a single concept. I am nothing in a crowd, and only something by the gift of God.
The concept of God working through the individual rather than institutional flavoring is not unique to me, nor is it universally accepted, but I suspect I can certainly in the face of the de facto collective spirit of this contemporary age put a uniquely 21st century spin on this ancient wisdom, and shed some light on a problem which pits humanity not against itself but against the old demons of the past, and in a word, is sin. In an early poem (circa 1981 of mine) I accuse Lucifer as the author of time. All of nature's manifestations are both inspired and corrupted by the torque of time's perspective. We work finally within this framework of time, but we should suspect its motives.
Perhaps the best model I can use to relate what I mean when I unilaterally dismiss collectivism as the prime mover of spiritual and physical matter, and thus, an unrivaled conductor of truth is the marriage, or lover's problem. I suggest that no matter how close we want to become the mirror of our partner, or merge dissonance to create a more diversified whole, an irreparable separation is evidenced against us. While ancient teachers suggest that the two become one, this metaphor has rarely been illustrated in fact. History as failure in this regard has shown a bigotry against this unification of two into one. And if two cannot become one, how can dozens, thousands, millions, billions simply and without fracture?
Thus my simple and undeniably old-fashioned point. Even the individual is perpetually plagued and ultimately corrupted by opposing forces. One may argue this diversity strengthens the individual, and thus the whole of thousands can thus be strengthened by this diversity, I hold with the old proverb that a house divided cannot long stand. This approach say other, less insightful accusers, steers me into the traditionally conservative camp. I will not reject the label out of hand, but I hardly think anarchism the way I define it can be held up to the conservative light without displacing a few fundamental concepts of both.
My slant of personal responsibility leads to acceptance of a status quo. I am not talking about doing nothing to change the world in which we live, but I am talking about unholy alliances to the threat to personal autonomy. We are not born with natural or civil rights outside of the social contract. Too many folk presume on the basis on envy and tokenism that what Joe Blow possesses (however gained, and true, evil has laways lent a helping hand to so-called progress), Jim Jackoff is entitled to the same.
The conspiracy of universal equality while a feel good aspiration is not played out in reality bytes either. None are free from the taint of evil, and yet we struggle for greener grass in precisely the same spirit that made the grass seem greener to begin with. Competition and greed. Nothing satisfies us when we know someone else has something that seems better than what we have. The marketdriven culture (just as Marxism predicts) is a vicious line of defense against human nature and natural forces from the outside.
But the "clock" can never be turned back without catastrophe. This is human nature corrupted by greed and envy. Doublespeak and unmasked falsehood crowd into every arena stealing from the human spirit every good motive as time's own author extracts a token penalty for every semblence of progress. Confusion multiplies itself with human numbers. We do not argue good versus eveil. We argue me verus them. Confusion versus confusion. Good and evil.
Here's a clarifying sidebar. The year,1982. Mid-summer. Midtown Atlanta. A few days before I had been approached by two strangelooking womenabout my own age just outside the Omniplex. I was 26. Teresa was defiantly overdressed in several layers of streetdrag wool skirting and sweater. I do not recall the other woman's appearance anymore because it was Teresa who gave me her phone number and the Moonie tract. For the next two weeks we saw each other daily. I visited the Unification House in the quaint residential Little Five Points neighborhood. She came by the Howell House highrise apartment I was then sharing with my mother for tea and crackers. It was actually my mother's place, but I stayed with her for six weeks upon returning from Corpus Christi where I lived for twenty months prior. We traversed the city on foot for five or six hours every day, she in low keyed proselytizing mode, me in a gentle informative resistance.
On this particular day we crossed West Peachtree and turned down Peachtree Main along the infamous corner now revitalized but on this day was still marked by the Dunkin Doughnuts and just beyond, the Christian Science Reading Room. Teresa I knew already, was a product of the 1960s subcultural elite. I knew for instance that she had spent her adolescence in a nudist camp, and that background emerging from the fog of unbearable shame had driven her to the neurotic devices of concept-defying heavy clothing and long frizzy hair in which she hide her dark but very attractive facial lines. I knew she confessed great comforts in the teachings of the Moon organization even when she found them lacking, evident in a few details I will save for another time.
But on this day she was questioning me had I read the two or three theological booklets she had given to me a day earlier. These rather thin booklets were published in a very simplistic styling, oversized footprints, large typefaces, and hordes of colorful pictures. This literature literally reminded me of the kiddie biblestory volumes I had voraciously gobbled up as a child, only thinner. They were workbooks, with a quiz at the end. I had not read them. Confident I already knew all the answers I had simply put them aside meaning to take a half hour to skirt through the topics just to meet my obligations to Teresa, but at this point I hadn't. Besides I had loaned Teresa a thousand page theological tome called the URANTIA BOOK that had been given to me by a former lover a couple of years before. I never got it back, but of course after admitting that I had not read the booklets but I intended to do so, Teresa countered with predictable and similar remarks.
These confessions led me straight to the point I wanted to make to her. Everybody believes their own version of the truth is self-evident and required for everybody under the sun. "Oh but if you would just read these..." she countered. I again repeated the premise that all works claim the truth, and great works have great legions of followers. Nothing is proved right or wrong except in the minds of believers of this or that truth. Whatever Teresa might claim, Johnny Can't Read has a contradictory truth. Jimmy Can Read has another. Evereybody's running around in this crazy attempt to convince everybody else that they are wrong. Teresa smiled at this empasse. Just then we were rounding the corner. I spied the Christian Science Reading Room and asked her if she wanted to dip into there for a few minutes, cool off, rest our feet...
She acquiesced with a sweet okay. We strolled to the reading room. This was not a very large place, fitted into a space nestled in the vee between two major thoroughfares converging at roughly a thirty degree angle, but it was airconditioned and pleasant and waiting for us. I found a chair a few feet from the bulk of the library. Teresa sat in a chair on a perpendicular wall where she was soon approached by an old woman of the faith. They were soon engaged in conversation that barely rose above a whisper. I thought nothing of this, and heard only occasional snippets as I dug into a random book I had pulled. This was a libraaaaaaary after all. Bits and pieces of their chat floated over to me. I was surprised to learn Teresa had been born a third-generation Christian Scientist.
Seemed this was a girl with quite a checkered past. They argued in ever polite tones. The woman persisted. Fifteen to twenty minutes into this routine I overheard the words good and evil, and some reference to the edenic tree of knowledge of good and evil. That was when I spoke up. "Does not the tree of the knowledge inspire knowledge of the DIFFERENCE between good and evil? I inquire of the old woman who to this point had only nodded a respectful hello to me upon entering the room. "Yes, you can say that. Different translations render it a little bit differently, but you can read the CORRECT rendering in OUR books." I replied that I had to confess that I did not know the difference between good and evil. Fire immediately plunged into eyes. "Oh you certainly do, and if you do not, you can read it in our literature. You only have to READ it to understand," she growled.
I countered again that men for thousands of years have argued over these things. I am not sure what I said next but I drew upon current ecological and ecopolitical concerns or some matter such as this, to give a few examples of what I meant by my own confusion with this complex issue of good and evil. She flew into a unmistakable rage, "Oh you are just a troublemaker. You'd better leave. Right now I say. Just leave, and don't come back. I mean it. Don't come back!" I returned the book I still had in grip to its rightful place, and said not another word. Teresa was ushered out alongside me. As the glass door swung close, the pinchedface woman, probably in her late sixties, muttered the word troublemaker one more time just in case I had missed the point.
On the street again I immediately sensed what had just happened and inquired of Teresa, "Do you know what just happened?" She didn't know what I meant. "Do you remember what we were talking about just before we stepped inside?" Again she couldn't piece her memories together. I played it out for her. "We were trying to convince each other to read each other's books. I told you that everybody believed they already had the truth, IF ONLY OTHERS WOULD READ OUR BOOKS."
Teresa's face was beginning to show a glimmer of recognition, but I continued. "Then we step inside and you are barraged by yet another somebody who does exactly what I predicted. It's in THEIR book, THEIR truth, THEIR certainty that all life must bow..." Was this the stroke of God himself drawing us into the Christian Science Reading Room for an example of divine truth, I put to her as we strolled on toward downtown on this sweltering summer afternoon. She finally burst into a rapt amazement, profoundly moved by my explantions, and was giddy that God had shown her a sign. Otherwise nothing would have occurred to her. No threads ever match up. Nothing is connected. An intellectual zombie I'm afraid is all so many of the most devoted folks on earth appear to be. Teresa didn't suffer a loss of faith with that event, but I was overwhelmed by the finger of God in this point blank proof of what I knew to be oh so true...
We are all tools in this game nobody can win.
GT
NOSTALGIA IN A BAG
Originally published on September 30, 1996
Friday's notes were written under the influence. Starting drinking about one thirty or so in the sunny after effects of too much joy, always a reel for me —forgive the stilted demagoguery, the whining, and the bitch.
Yesterday the Dollhouse gang was spent in a Australian/punk rock retro-feast. First Perry Farrell's GIFT (a crippling celebration of drug mania and rock music), then two Australian flicks. Blumstein joined Tim, Libra and I for these last two flicks: the "skinhead is stupid" (no arguments here) film called ROMPER STOMPERS where this racist gang of onionheads pretty much self-destructs after picking on some innocent Vietnamese and carry forthy until they run the gamut of such a tiny war against nothing. And from the Dollhouse vault, DOGS IN SPACE, another look at the uselessness of it all, not that ANY lifestyles, alternative, square, patriotic, fuddy or missletoed guarantee anything less humiliating than the chaos and oppression of fighting the nature this planet reflects. But all this energy that goes into rebellion...
You'd think by now somebody would have figured out that revolutions of the masses is a stroll in the park in peace, not some flaming pipebomb in one's own pocket. Every backyard connects to somebody else's. Youth rebellion as fashion statement. Radical man...
Mimicking medieval fashion, mimicking God. Nothing seems to change the way arrogance, greed. stupidity, and pain work their generational black magic across every demographic slice ever calculated. The ricj just USUALLY have a better back-up plan. The hope of billions is a hope based on a madness only the mirror on the wall seems to hide as each of us stare into it murmuring for old time's sake, "Who is the fairest of all?"
We ordered Chinese last night from the old reliable Sechezuan House on Eighth. Been ordering from there I reckon near monthly over a satisfying 12 years of whimsy and fortune cookie analysis. There were no surprises, just good dependable eats. Managed to track into Rio Grande's on Wilson Blvd. Saturday afternoon on our way to Microcenter to play the Macintosh fiddle plus return a German translation program I bought the week before but later thought better of the expense. This is no exaggeration. Rio Grande's is the absolute finest Mex American diner I've ever experienced. A jazzy colorful place with a killer ambiance meshing art and leisure, a winning combo which lobbies the nostrils and flotillas the eyeball for days! Most excellent service staff, handpicked smiles polite to the teeth. A wolf's rack of marinated ribs, fajitas, salsa, nachos...the whole enchilada.
The funniest part was we barely touched our entrees on site, stuffed to the gills on the nacho platter, but the pedigree of the establishment is no longer a well-kept secret. I loved it!
YAST is on the wane around these parts. Both literarily and personally. Nothing I can do about that. The speculative prowl. The beckoning howl. Strong incentives to blow off the streets and into the wind of better things I figger he is thinking. Girls in pearls beat guys on sighs as any decade can prove. Friends are like coffee for two. Cost more than you'd expect, and somebody's bound to be disappointed with the flavor of the month. Meanwhile, the aphrodesiac of appearances is a one-way street no prejudice can navigate without some measure of success.
After a week on the back burner avoiding a few web problems I'm back to the grind today.
Libra's grandmother was rushed to the hospital with internal bleeding this weekend, postponing her son Richard Waller's visit to the Dollhouse planned since spring for the upcoming weekend, indefinitely. She's 90 plus, 95% blind, and won't see her regular physician until today. Get well soon, Mommy Ethel!
Friday's notes were written under the influence. Starting drinking about one thirty or so in the sunny after effects of too much joy, always a reel for me —forgive the stilted demagoguery, the whining, and the bitch.
Yesterday the Dollhouse gang was spent in a Australian/punk rock retro-feast. First Perry Farrell's GIFT (a crippling celebration of drug mania and rock music), then two Australian flicks. Blumstein joined Tim, Libra and I for these last two flicks: the "skinhead is stupid" (no arguments here) film called ROMPER STOMPERS where this racist gang of onionheads pretty much self-destructs after picking on some innocent Vietnamese and carry forthy until they run the gamut of such a tiny war against nothing. And from the Dollhouse vault, DOGS IN SPACE, another look at the uselessness of it all, not that ANY lifestyles, alternative, square, patriotic, fuddy or missletoed guarantee anything less humiliating than the chaos and oppression of fighting the nature this planet reflects. But all this energy that goes into rebellion...
You'd think by now somebody would have figured out that revolutions of the masses is a stroll in the park in peace, not some flaming pipebomb in one's own pocket. Every backyard connects to somebody else's. Youth rebellion as fashion statement. Radical man...
Mimicking medieval fashion, mimicking God. Nothing seems to change the way arrogance, greed. stupidity, and pain work their generational black magic across every demographic slice ever calculated. The ricj just USUALLY have a better back-up plan. The hope of billions is a hope based on a madness only the mirror on the wall seems to hide as each of us stare into it murmuring for old time's sake, "Who is the fairest of all?"
We ordered Chinese last night from the old reliable Sechezuan House on Eighth. Been ordering from there I reckon near monthly over a satisfying 12 years of whimsy and fortune cookie analysis. There were no surprises, just good dependable eats. Managed to track into Rio Grande's on Wilson Blvd. Saturday afternoon on our way to Microcenter to play the Macintosh fiddle plus return a German translation program I bought the week before but later thought better of the expense. This is no exaggeration. Rio Grande's is the absolute finest Mex American diner I've ever experienced. A jazzy colorful place with a killer ambiance meshing art and leisure, a winning combo which lobbies the nostrils and flotillas the eyeball for days! Most excellent service staff, handpicked smiles polite to the teeth. A wolf's rack of marinated ribs, fajitas, salsa, nachos...the whole enchilada.
The funniest part was we barely touched our entrees on site, stuffed to the gills on the nacho platter, but the pedigree of the establishment is no longer a well-kept secret. I loved it!
YAST is on the wane around these parts. Both literarily and personally. Nothing I can do about that. The speculative prowl. The beckoning howl. Strong incentives to blow off the streets and into the wind of better things I figger he is thinking. Girls in pearls beat guys on sighs as any decade can prove. Friends are like coffee for two. Cost more than you'd expect, and somebody's bound to be disappointed with the flavor of the month. Meanwhile, the aphrodesiac of appearances is a one-way street no prejudice can navigate without some measure of success.
After a week on the back burner avoiding a few web problems I'm back to the grind today.
Libra's grandmother was rushed to the hospital with internal bleeding this weekend, postponing her son Richard Waller's visit to the Dollhouse planned since spring for the upcoming weekend, indefinitely. She's 90 plus, 95% blind, and won't see her regular physician until today. Get well soon, Mommy Ethel!
CAMILLE & LIBERTY SUE FOR RIGHTS
Originally published on October 29, 1996
Paglia, eh? Great. You're one up on me. I fondled a Paglia book in Border's once but it was an outrageously expensive hardcover I placed back on the shelves since I was already loaded for bear. Now I too admit to being only a snatch reader of her work, but she is certainly plugged into my short shorts of famous writers I still must exploit for my own terms on theirs by reading a fuller gist of her work.
You are validated indeed in pointing out what you read as gross generalizations on maleness presuming as we agree the topic IS her announced speciality, because most books I have read on race, gender, even pop ass religion & nuclear physics are written by acsendant experts guilty of the similar transgressions against such models of zero, not zero. But if her generalizations of "her men" are just that, aren't those of "her women" just as general?
And yet the defining factor of her work can be said to bestow truth to the fact that the man on the hip side of the manhood schematic is as driven to be a man by forces he struggles to control and improve against great odds of self-discernment as those which women bear inside themselves and which they from their own perspective conclude are just and feminine (but perhaps not righteous for all?), and since you are a woman, your subjectiveness will always remain the trait you can never escape regardless of race, gender, creed or dvisibility by zero...
I think that's what she is trying to say. If only because that's what I believe myself. True gender essence is a fiction, but factors forcing us into certain camps are just & natural all the same. While we may find it fascinating to sit under a banana shrub tree with a cool drink and wish for a formula that would equalize the world. Nothing is further from the true, and is simply a fuzzy concept developed to bring a better cohesion between differences in a crowd. While some political theories have tried to erase, other smudge the inherent differences between men and other men, women and other women, and alliances and enemies cross pollinating the lines, the best we can hope for is a little intelligence when thses sorts of topics are brought to the table.
If Johnny can't read. That's a problem Johnny has. If nobody in Johnny's class can read, maybe that's a class problem. Solving for a class problem is a one Johnny at a time scenario, no matter how many times Billy's, or Rachel's or Al-amid's class (who can all read by the way, but in emphatic degrees of speciality, one to another, and so we say there is no class problem, but an individual level of compliance to a standard which of course is in a state of flux, never at rest, but always evolving with new imput). And so it goes. Natural selection. Crowd warfare disguised as crowd fanfare. I'd like to know Lynn a few Paglia cliches you find utterly testing reality. It could prove an interesting exchange between us.
I hate being the traffic cop and lone cleanup crew around here, but I am a natural for the job. I live among two wouldbee slobs. Tim & Sue give a good bawdyhouse try at neatliness and order of the court, but they wear blinders as narrow as my hunt for the perfect job. They exercise generally weaker powers of observation, and ply a more sluggish recall hard drive. So I get to play the neatnik butch Gabriel who says, I'm running the show and I said THIS is how WE do it. After footing the bill Sue's a gem in saltwater taffy and puts up with it only because she understands the efforts I put in around here go a long way toward making the whole Dollhouse balancing act work.
While I'm still probably not back to fifty percent normal, the Dollhouse clutter piled up for days until I couldn't help myself but to storm around all day picking up in a slow painful hobble. Of course everyone including Lizbeth& Chris last weekend has predicted my left foot without a cast will heal to an ouchy mess, even though my choice to forego the cast was one of the doc's original options as he groped the swollen mob of purple toes and x-rays last week. So I'm taking my chances with Providence but haven't I always?
The body must go. Recycle this dirt is what I say. I feel alive only when co-opting language. One day I'll probably lose this damn limb to bad circulation, gout, diabetes, stroke, or what have I, so I guess I'll just have to find myself a woman who has a sick thang for amputees, hah hah. Sue only this morning after complimenting me for swallowing a couple ibuprofrin and I goo gooed in pointing out how tickled baby dance silly she gets when I'm popping pills, said back that she just wanted me to get better so I could stomp around again. Hmmm. Baby likes my stomping around better than my gimping around. That's normal, ME too, but it's always a fart when Sue dishes out a pill because she seems to have this weird buddy system relationship with pain pills.
She ain't no JUNKY by any stretch. We're just talking over the counter stuff, but she's really blows a goose whenever the pillbox is passed around. In my case, it's as if if she can just get me to pop a pill, she has performed a recognizable measure of social work in heading me in the right direction of the fit & well. But I DO have to give her credit for some fine sweet words of caring as she nagged me gaga about finally going to see Doctor Ford. Do it for MEEEE, she pleaded in the sweet sassy voice of communion she pulls out for these special darling occasions which kinda all blur together after a while and I guess that's what we for lack of a better word call love. And so I did.
And I am redeemed with honors (called GETTING THE CREDIT in Dollhouse parlance) for having been right as a pat hand of three aces and a greenhaired Jack in both diagnosing & proscribing a laissez faire attitude in the first place, but it was good to get pro confirmation. That's the best health care I can suffer. Emergency blockades. Damage control. Squeaky clean is somebody's else triumphant life. Blind faith in OVERCOMING the body in all the rest of my affairs is the method of least resistence I cling to, it's a motto, it's a white flag, black flag, label of a thousand warts...
GT
Paglia, eh? Great. You're one up on me. I fondled a Paglia book in Border's once but it was an outrageously expensive hardcover I placed back on the shelves since I was already loaded for bear. Now I too admit to being only a snatch reader of her work, but she is certainly plugged into my short shorts of famous writers I still must exploit for my own terms on theirs by reading a fuller gist of her work.
You are validated indeed in pointing out what you read as gross generalizations on maleness presuming as we agree the topic IS her announced speciality, because most books I have read on race, gender, even pop ass religion & nuclear physics are written by acsendant experts guilty of the similar transgressions against such models of zero, not zero. But if her generalizations of "her men" are just that, aren't those of "her women" just as general?
And yet the defining factor of her work can be said to bestow truth to the fact that the man on the hip side of the manhood schematic is as driven to be a man by forces he struggles to control and improve against great odds of self-discernment as those which women bear inside themselves and which they from their own perspective conclude are just and feminine (but perhaps not righteous for all?), and since you are a woman, your subjectiveness will always remain the trait you can never escape regardless of race, gender, creed or dvisibility by zero...
I think that's what she is trying to say. If only because that's what I believe myself. True gender essence is a fiction, but factors forcing us into certain camps are just & natural all the same. While we may find it fascinating to sit under a banana shrub tree with a cool drink and wish for a formula that would equalize the world. Nothing is further from the true, and is simply a fuzzy concept developed to bring a better cohesion between differences in a crowd. While some political theories have tried to erase, other smudge the inherent differences between men and other men, women and other women, and alliances and enemies cross pollinating the lines, the best we can hope for is a little intelligence when thses sorts of topics are brought to the table.
If Johnny can't read. That's a problem Johnny has. If nobody in Johnny's class can read, maybe that's a class problem. Solving for a class problem is a one Johnny at a time scenario, no matter how many times Billy's, or Rachel's or Al-amid's class (who can all read by the way, but in emphatic degrees of speciality, one to another, and so we say there is no class problem, but an individual level of compliance to a standard which of course is in a state of flux, never at rest, but always evolving with new imput). And so it goes. Natural selection. Crowd warfare disguised as crowd fanfare. I'd like to know Lynn a few Paglia cliches you find utterly testing reality. It could prove an interesting exchange between us.
I hate being the traffic cop and lone cleanup crew around here, but I am a natural for the job. I live among two wouldbee slobs. Tim & Sue give a good bawdyhouse try at neatliness and order of the court, but they wear blinders as narrow as my hunt for the perfect job. They exercise generally weaker powers of observation, and ply a more sluggish recall hard drive. So I get to play the neatnik butch Gabriel who says, I'm running the show and I said THIS is how WE do it. After footing the bill Sue's a gem in saltwater taffy and puts up with it only because she understands the efforts I put in around here go a long way toward making the whole Dollhouse balancing act work.
While I'm still probably not back to fifty percent normal, the Dollhouse clutter piled up for days until I couldn't help myself but to storm around all day picking up in a slow painful hobble. Of course everyone including Lizbeth& Chris last weekend has predicted my left foot without a cast will heal to an ouchy mess, even though my choice to forego the cast was one of the doc's original options as he groped the swollen mob of purple toes and x-rays last week. So I'm taking my chances with Providence but haven't I always?
The body must go. Recycle this dirt is what I say. I feel alive only when co-opting language. One day I'll probably lose this damn limb to bad circulation, gout, diabetes, stroke, or what have I, so I guess I'll just have to find myself a woman who has a sick thang for amputees, hah hah. Sue only this morning after complimenting me for swallowing a couple ibuprofrin and I goo gooed in pointing out how tickled baby dance silly she gets when I'm popping pills, said back that she just wanted me to get better so I could stomp around again. Hmmm. Baby likes my stomping around better than my gimping around. That's normal, ME too, but it's always a fart when Sue dishes out a pill because she seems to have this weird buddy system relationship with pain pills.
She ain't no JUNKY by any stretch. We're just talking over the counter stuff, but she's really blows a goose whenever the pillbox is passed around. In my case, it's as if if she can just get me to pop a pill, she has performed a recognizable measure of social work in heading me in the right direction of the fit & well. But I DO have to give her credit for some fine sweet words of caring as she nagged me gaga about finally going to see Doctor Ford. Do it for MEEEE, she pleaded in the sweet sassy voice of communion she pulls out for these special darling occasions which kinda all blur together after a while and I guess that's what we for lack of a better word call love. And so I did.
And I am redeemed with honors (called GETTING THE CREDIT in Dollhouse parlance) for having been right as a pat hand of three aces and a greenhaired Jack in both diagnosing & proscribing a laissez faire attitude in the first place, but it was good to get pro confirmation. That's the best health care I can suffer. Emergency blockades. Damage control. Squeaky clean is somebody's else triumphant life. Blind faith in OVERCOMING the body in all the rest of my affairs is the method of least resistence I cling to, it's a motto, it's a white flag, black flag, label of a thousand warts...
GT
GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT
Originally published on October 17, 1996
Just when one thinks that it would be easier to drain all the seven oceans of salty fish nip than to squeeze another drop of self-pity from the story of my life, then boom, another couple of notches later, feeling like shit on a stick is the highest compliment I can pay myself...
This morning while taking out an armful of corrugated cardboard recycleables, I broke my left foot, again! I'm beginning to feel like a sad parody of Tim and his annual collarbone. The foot snapped lengthwise with characteristic audible clarity. I was stepping from the house to the front porch and my unfastened sandles slipped to trigger the occasion. Ten minutes later, wincing on the sofa, with vigor and gruff I jump up at Sue's notice that a man is foraging through our big blue plastic, metal, and glass curbside recycle bags. Once at the door I yell that rather than plunder the dozen or so smaller bags neatly packed inside the big blue ones he should just take off with the whole shebang.
He was an older, maybe sixty year old black man, well-attired, did not exude the aura of a lifelong wino (would it matter?), but he immediately shot back that he wasn't gonna leave a mess. He was merely taking a few cans. I stared in dreaded white silence for ten to fifteeen long seconds before telling him to go ahead. I watched him scavenge for coke and beer cans, leaving the glass wine bottles and plastic milk jugs behind as he rummaged for parts of a penny. I took a bag of cans to the plant once and got nine dollars for what must have been a thousand crushed cans some years ago, never again.
Ah, as I write this, the truck pulls up and regards the trash, and rather early today. Two pickups ago, they missed our whole street altogether. Dutiful citizen on even numbered years, I called Publics Works for a rescheduling. Three days later the trash was snagged, after I was told to leave the stuff at the curb indefinitely until pickup. Neighbor Chisley did not, and so had quite a mess two weeks later the next time. However, without too much gross exaggeration it is safe to say we sprawl along the curb other Tuesday more than the whole side of this block of Eighteenth Street combined. The scavenger in good news to the scafflaw followed his word, and the curb was nice and neat after he left, so I guess my starring role as the Billy Goats Gruff foul-toothed troll who lives under the bridge to the 21st century is safely undisturbed.
Despite this leg drop injury I refuse to rush to the hospital, unmoved by the indignity and the expense of THAT trouble. If I hadn't heard the snap, crackle, and pop at the time of the 265 pound stomp and roll I'd even doubt it was broken. I can even put steady weight upon it, and feel arrgglike pain only when I bend, drag or rest it in a bezier curve along the sofa. But the icy and instant numbing at impact and consequent prickly twinges further identify my condition. Ooh well dearies, fortunately it wasn't my ankle or heel. I still have a fine pair of wooden crutches I inherited for $30 from my last left foot catastrophe in September, 1993. The blood vessel knot and prickly numbness will no doubt subside in a few days if I don't aggravate it by jumping for joy if that Apple monitor ever frickin' gets here. Sue suggests the doctor. Says we've got insurance. Uh, workman's comp for injury on the job? I just ain't inner rested. Who will putter around doing the countless manipulations it takes to keep a hint of order around here? Who wants to lug around some ridiculous cast for six weeks. Oh I know. We'll hire a nanny...
Nausea. Sartre. Simpletons and Simon Magus. Surely I am blessed among men...
Oh course soon after writing this note I receive another nasty reply from my next door neighbor Blumstein, who types, (obviously from his workstation on the job, a job he wished upon me as often as the spirit moved him:
It was interesting to discover he cared, even if it took the form of a Blumfisted flame.
GT
Just when one thinks that it would be easier to drain all the seven oceans of salty fish nip than to squeeze another drop of self-pity from the story of my life, then boom, another couple of notches later, feeling like shit on a stick is the highest compliment I can pay myself...
This morning while taking out an armful of corrugated cardboard recycleables, I broke my left foot, again! I'm beginning to feel like a sad parody of Tim and his annual collarbone. The foot snapped lengthwise with characteristic audible clarity. I was stepping from the house to the front porch and my unfastened sandles slipped to trigger the occasion. Ten minutes later, wincing on the sofa, with vigor and gruff I jump up at Sue's notice that a man is foraging through our big blue plastic, metal, and glass curbside recycle bags. Once at the door I yell that rather than plunder the dozen or so smaller bags neatly packed inside the big blue ones he should just take off with the whole shebang.
He was an older, maybe sixty year old black man, well-attired, did not exude the aura of a lifelong wino (would it matter?), but he immediately shot back that he wasn't gonna leave a mess. He was merely taking a few cans. I stared in dreaded white silence for ten to fifteeen long seconds before telling him to go ahead. I watched him scavenge for coke and beer cans, leaving the glass wine bottles and plastic milk jugs behind as he rummaged for parts of a penny. I took a bag of cans to the plant once and got nine dollars for what must have been a thousand crushed cans some years ago, never again.
Ah, as I write this, the truck pulls up and regards the trash, and rather early today. Two pickups ago, they missed our whole street altogether. Dutiful citizen on even numbered years, I called Publics Works for a rescheduling. Three days later the trash was snagged, after I was told to leave the stuff at the curb indefinitely until pickup. Neighbor Chisley did not, and so had quite a mess two weeks later the next time. However, without too much gross exaggeration it is safe to say we sprawl along the curb other Tuesday more than the whole side of this block of Eighteenth Street combined. The scavenger in good news to the scafflaw followed his word, and the curb was nice and neat after he left, so I guess my starring role as the Billy Goats Gruff foul-toothed troll who lives under the bridge to the 21st century is safely undisturbed.
Despite this leg drop injury I refuse to rush to the hospital, unmoved by the indignity and the expense of THAT trouble. If I hadn't heard the snap, crackle, and pop at the time of the 265 pound stomp and roll I'd even doubt it was broken. I can even put steady weight upon it, and feel arrgglike pain only when I bend, drag or rest it in a bezier curve along the sofa. But the icy and instant numbing at impact and consequent prickly twinges further identify my condition. Ooh well dearies, fortunately it wasn't my ankle or heel. I still have a fine pair of wooden crutches I inherited for $30 from my last left foot catastrophe in September, 1993. The blood vessel knot and prickly numbness will no doubt subside in a few days if I don't aggravate it by jumping for joy if that Apple monitor ever frickin' gets here. Sue suggests the doctor. Says we've got insurance. Uh, workman's comp for injury on the job? I just ain't inner rested. Who will putter around doing the countless manipulations it takes to keep a hint of order around here? Who wants to lug around some ridiculous cast for six weeks. Oh I know. We'll hire a nanny...
Nausea. Sartre. Simpletons and Simon Magus. Surely I am blessed among men...
Oh course soon after writing this note I receive another nasty reply from my next door neighbor Blumstein, who types, (obviously from his workstation on the job, a job he wished upon me as often as the spirit moved him:
Gah Bree Elle,
Why is it that I have to guess at you breaking
a limb. Why make me assume such nonsense
rather than just say it out straight 'I broke my
GD left femur!' Don't assume anyone in your
audience knows all the details so you can
discuss such as old news.
But the reality is that if you did break your
leg, whichever left and/or right, you should
get it professionally set before it heals in
an obnoxious way and must be broken again
to correct it thus fucking it up even more.
God I hate martyrs...
Blum
It was interesting to discover he cared, even if it took the form of a Blumfisted flame.
GT
ACERBIC WIT GONE SOUTH
Originally published on October 15, 1996
I've seen Boston Common a couple, well, maybe three times. It seems the southern sibling pair have the upper hand and most of the punchlines, but of course the jokes and the hardships ARE aimed at them. But hey, after Carter & Clinton with brothers and mothers hanging from a limb from the less than shady side of the tracks, what can you expect the social parrots to seize upon? Tennessee Williams? William Faulkner? Drunks of an elite sort? Ted Turner? Uh, well Hanoi Jane seized Ted by the gonads I guess...
Lynn, your rage (hey I am just as southern as you) over peanut patch humor seems ever gently exaggerated. I say this because I LEFT Georgia to escape the redneck posse and the arrogant southern gaff which at the time frightened me more as a fellow southerner (and I was much more genteel in 1983) than an army of angry Negroes on the prowl, or so I thought. I since have grown to miss the good parts of the south, but I also am abruptly reminded of tough love every time I go home and stop at a roadside pisser looking a mite different than the locals would have me look.
The irony is, particularly since from earliest childhood and teenage sibling mythmaking hours curled up around a Dr. Pepper in a crystalballing projection, I the oldest and the smartest, was SUPPOSED to grow up with the handsome pipe in mouth and patches on my elbows professorial look. Be mayor of my hometown. Be rich, a lawyer, and a philanthropist. Instead I am a bitter old fog with a belly Bull Connor would envy, bad teeth and a scraggly beard James Dickey had in mind when he wrote Deliverance, nary a day in college nor a dime to my name, so embarrassed about my appearance and paranoid about the criminal element in the hood that I am afraid to leave the modest ghettohouse my wife struggles to pay for. Now THAT is what is called NOT living up to one's potential...
The road not taken. Or just another sappy success story. You pick 'em.
So mirror mirror on the wall, is art my saving grace at all, or is this dribble just another blind alley and a terribly blind date.
The billion dollar baby question is why am I clutchingly afraid to produce anything. With a post pedigreed background like mine I am no less a fingerpainting in the mud than some new Pat Conroy in the making, but I have nothing to show for all my grief or imagination. Aborted novel. Aborted poems. A web site not worth the monthly fees, much less an audience. Hell, when all one's friends suggest the bogus mood and intent of failure is all I am, can be, should be, I guess after a while that's all I've got in the crapper. I only hope I make it out of my DC period.
GT
"I fought with my twin, that enemy within, 'til both of us fell by the side..."
—Bob Dylan
I've seen Boston Common a couple, well, maybe three times. It seems the southern sibling pair have the upper hand and most of the punchlines, but of course the jokes and the hardships ARE aimed at them. But hey, after Carter & Clinton with brothers and mothers hanging from a limb from the less than shady side of the tracks, what can you expect the social parrots to seize upon? Tennessee Williams? William Faulkner? Drunks of an elite sort? Ted Turner? Uh, well Hanoi Jane seized Ted by the gonads I guess...
Lynn, your rage (hey I am just as southern as you) over peanut patch humor seems ever gently exaggerated. I say this because I LEFT Georgia to escape the redneck posse and the arrogant southern gaff which at the time frightened me more as a fellow southerner (and I was much more genteel in 1983) than an army of angry Negroes on the prowl, or so I thought. I since have grown to miss the good parts of the south, but I also am abruptly reminded of tough love every time I go home and stop at a roadside pisser looking a mite different than the locals would have me look.
The irony is, particularly since from earliest childhood and teenage sibling mythmaking hours curled up around a Dr. Pepper in a crystalballing projection, I the oldest and the smartest, was SUPPOSED to grow up with the handsome pipe in mouth and patches on my elbows professorial look. Be mayor of my hometown. Be rich, a lawyer, and a philanthropist. Instead I am a bitter old fog with a belly Bull Connor would envy, bad teeth and a scraggly beard James Dickey had in mind when he wrote Deliverance, nary a day in college nor a dime to my name, so embarrassed about my appearance and paranoid about the criminal element in the hood that I am afraid to leave the modest ghettohouse my wife struggles to pay for. Now THAT is what is called NOT living up to one's potential...
The road not taken. Or just another sappy success story. You pick 'em.
So mirror mirror on the wall, is art my saving grace at all, or is this dribble just another blind alley and a terribly blind date.
The billion dollar baby question is why am I clutchingly afraid to produce anything. With a post pedigreed background like mine I am no less a fingerpainting in the mud than some new Pat Conroy in the making, but I have nothing to show for all my grief or imagination. Aborted novel. Aborted poems. A web site not worth the monthly fees, much less an audience. Hell, when all one's friends suggest the bogus mood and intent of failure is all I am, can be, should be, I guess after a while that's all I've got in the crapper. I only hope I make it out of my DC period.
GT
"I fought with my twin, that enemy within, 'til both of us fell by the side..."
—Bob Dylan
BUKOWSKI
Hello editors, regarding the Lynne Bronstein letter of Nov. 15 about my story of Nov. one:
1. The story was about pretentiousness in art. The fact that the pretender had female organs had nothing to do with the story in total. That any female made to look unfavorable in a story must be construed as a denunciation of the female as female is just so much guava. The right of the creator to depict characters any way he must remains inviolate—whether those characters are female, black, brown, Indian, Chicano, white, male, Communist, homosexual, Republican, peg-legged, mongolian and/or ?
2. The story was a take-off on an interview with an established female poet in a recent issue of Poetry Now. Since I have been interviewed for a future issue of the same journal and for future editions of Creem and Rolling Stone, my detractors will get their chance to see how I hold or fail under similar conditions.
3. When the narrator lets us know that he has Janice Altrice's legs in mind might infer more that he is bored with the poetry game, and also might infer that he could have a poolhall, dirty joke mind, at times. That the narrator might be attacking himself instead of trying to relegate the lady back to a "sex object" evidently is beyond the belief of some so-called Liberated women. Whether we like it or not, sex and thoughts of sex do occur to many of us (male and female) at odd and unlikely times. I rather like it.
4. That "she is indeed speaking for Bukowski himself, who has expressed a similar contempt for unknown poets who give each other support." The lady spoke for herself. Her "contempt" was toward poets not academically trained. My dislike is toward all bad poetry and toward all bad poets who write it badly--which is most of them. I have always been disgusted with the falsity and dreariness not only of contemporary poetry but of the poetry of the centuries--and this feeling was with me before I got published, while I was attempting to get published, and it remains with me now even as I pay the rent with poesy. What kept me writing was not that I was so good but that that whole damned gang was so bad--when they had to be compared to the vitality and originality that was occurring in the other art forms. As to those who must gather together to give port, I am one with Ibsen: "the strongest me alone."
5. "Now that he's well-known and the only California poet published by Black Sparrow Press, he thinks that nobody else is entitled to be a poet--especially women, My dear lady: you are entitled to be whatever you can be; if you can leap twenty feet straight up into the air or sweep a 9 race card at Western harness meet, please go ahead and do so.
6. "A lot of us think there's more to write poetry about than beer, drunks, hemorrhoids, and how rotten the world is." I also think there's more to write poetry about than that and I do so.
7. "Female artists, on the other hand, try to be optimistic." The function of the artist is not to create optimism but to create art--which sometimes may be optimistic and sometimes can't be. The female is bred to be more optimistic than the male because of a function she has not entirely escaped as yet, the bearing of the child. After passing through pregancy and childbirth, to call life a lie is much more difficult.
8. "Could it be that the male is 'washed-up' as an artist, that he has no more to say except in his jealousy, to spit on the young idealists and the newly freed voices of women?" Are these the thought concepts you come up with in your "ego-boosting" sessions? Perhaps you'd better take a night off.
9. "Poetry is an art form. Like all art it is subjective and it does not have sex organs." I don't know about your poems, Lynne, but mine have cock and balls, eat chili peppers and walnuts, sing in the bathtub, cuss, fart, scream, stink, smell good, hate mosquitoes, ride taxicabs, have nightmares and love affairs, all that.
10. "... without being negative ..." I thought they'd ridden this horse to death; it's the oldest of the oldest hats. I first heard it around the English departments of LA highschool in 1937. The inference, when you call somebody "negative" is that you completely remove them from the sphere beacuse he or she has no basic understanding of life forces and meanings. I wouldn't be caught using that term while drunk on a bus to Shreveport.
11. I don't care for Longfellow or McKuen either, although they both possess (possessed) male organs. One of the best writers I knew of was Carson McCullers and she had a female name. If my girlfriend's dog could write a good poem or a decent novel I'd be the first to congratulate the beast. That's LIBERATED!
12. Shit, I ought to get paid for this.
Charles Bukowski
1. The story was about pretentiousness in art. The fact that the pretender had female organs had nothing to do with the story in total. That any female made to look unfavorable in a story must be construed as a denunciation of the female as female is just so much guava. The right of the creator to depict characters any way he must remains inviolate—whether those characters are female, black, brown, Indian, Chicano, white, male, Communist, homosexual, Republican, peg-legged, mongolian and/or ?
2. The story was a take-off on an interview with an established female poet in a recent issue of Poetry Now. Since I have been interviewed for a future issue of the same journal and for future editions of Creem and Rolling Stone, my detractors will get their chance to see how I hold or fail under similar conditions.
3. When the narrator lets us know that he has Janice Altrice's legs in mind might infer more that he is bored with the poetry game, and also might infer that he could have a poolhall, dirty joke mind, at times. That the narrator might be attacking himself instead of trying to relegate the lady back to a "sex object" evidently is beyond the belief of some so-called Liberated women. Whether we like it or not, sex and thoughts of sex do occur to many of us (male and female) at odd and unlikely times. I rather like it.
4. That "she is indeed speaking for Bukowski himself, who has expressed a similar contempt for unknown poets who give each other support." The lady spoke for herself. Her "contempt" was toward poets not academically trained. My dislike is toward all bad poetry and toward all bad poets who write it badly--which is most of them. I have always been disgusted with the falsity and dreariness not only of contemporary poetry but of the poetry of the centuries--and this feeling was with me before I got published, while I was attempting to get published, and it remains with me now even as I pay the rent with poesy. What kept me writing was not that I was so good but that that whole damned gang was so bad--when they had to be compared to the vitality and originality that was occurring in the other art forms. As to those who must gather together to give port, I am one with Ibsen: "the strongest me alone."
5. "Now that he's well-known and the only California poet published by Black Sparrow Press, he thinks that nobody else is entitled to be a poet--especially women, My dear lady: you are entitled to be whatever you can be; if you can leap twenty feet straight up into the air or sweep a 9 race card at Western harness meet, please go ahead and do so.
6. "A lot of us think there's more to write poetry about than beer, drunks, hemorrhoids, and how rotten the world is." I also think there's more to write poetry about than that and I do so.
7. "Female artists, on the other hand, try to be optimistic." The function of the artist is not to create optimism but to create art--which sometimes may be optimistic and sometimes can't be. The female is bred to be more optimistic than the male because of a function she has not entirely escaped as yet, the bearing of the child. After passing through pregancy and childbirth, to call life a lie is much more difficult.
8. "Could it be that the male is 'washed-up' as an artist, that he has no more to say except in his jealousy, to spit on the young idealists and the newly freed voices of women?" Are these the thought concepts you come up with in your "ego-boosting" sessions? Perhaps you'd better take a night off.
9. "Poetry is an art form. Like all art it is subjective and it does not have sex organs." I don't know about your poems, Lynne, but mine have cock and balls, eat chili peppers and walnuts, sing in the bathtub, cuss, fart, scream, stink, smell good, hate mosquitoes, ride taxicabs, have nightmares and love affairs, all that.
10. "... without being negative ..." I thought they'd ridden this horse to death; it's the oldest of the oldest hats. I first heard it around the English departments of LA highschool in 1937. The inference, when you call somebody "negative" is that you completely remove them from the sphere beacuse he or she has no basic understanding of life forces and meanings. I wouldn't be caught using that term while drunk on a bus to Shreveport.
11. I don't care for Longfellow or McKuen either, although they both possess (possessed) male organs. One of the best writers I knew of was Carson McCullers and she had a female name. If my girlfriend's dog could write a good poem or a decent novel I'd be the first to congratulate the beast. That's LIBERATED!
12. Shit, I ought to get paid for this.
Charles Bukowski
ENTROPY
Some men are pansies and some women are painters. The lion's roar
can be dressed up in colors neither'd recognize.
The paint can in time is exploded by a handsome bullet
with my name on it and a typewriter's glint.
Fame's not a fruit but the lady bug's as beautiful as the core
a nuclear reactionary must in faith never hypothesize.
Nobody hears and nobody's nose, to unquestionably spool it
I'd need to check the past reconfiguring absolutely every hint.
GT - September 1, 1996 - Washington DC
can be dressed up in colors neither'd recognize.
The paint can in time is exploded by a handsome bullet
with my name on it and a typewriter's glint.
Fame's not a fruit but the lady bug's as beautiful as the core
a nuclear reactionary must in faith never hypothesize.
Nobody hears and nobody's nose, to unquestionably spool it
I'd need to check the past reconfiguring absolutely every hint.
GT - September 1, 1996 - Washington DC
Monday, June 25, 2007
BABYHEAD ANGST
Originally published on June 3, 1996
So, what's new at the Dollhouse, you ask?
Nothing new. Your name came up more times than Jesus Christ this weekend, but nearly always was answered with an I dunno, or a muffled uhmmm...
Yeah, Lynn is cool. I just don't know what to write her in response to the Babyhead show. It was an event worth noting if only for a few days. Frankly I hate critiquing others' work, especially in a genre where I haven't mustered up much myself in the way of surpassing or suppressing it. I liked the shows, but I was glad when the last one was over. I was nearly ready to bolt, already drunk, smoked, and tired from yet another long day saith the old man in dungarees. Tom Howell slopped over earlier in the day with a photography project he needed me to pull off, uh, taking a picture of a fat shiny tow chain he knew I had.
It was to be a typical Howell BIG PRODUCTION with bogus color-reflective transparency drag, but he pocketed a roll of film, and we staggered off to the Babyhead Festival together. Tim met Gigi on his bike. Tom already knew most of the actors, directors, and producers of the show. Safe to say, Lynn was about the only person he didn't know, yet I'm thinking he probably did meet her at Buck Downs place this past New Year's Day. Remember? We'd planned to walk the couple of blocks there after we left Wayne Curtin's absolutely weird houseblessing that evening, but I passed out instead, having had little sleep for several days prior...
Tom was struggling to comment on her work as we were waiting for food at this Sheesh Kabob place in Georgetown after tiring of the reception at the Clark Gallery following the f-fest. Noticing he didn't want to slam her, I filled in the blanks with a typical GT gust of hot air...
"Uh Lynn is an attractive and very intelligent woman, but her acting skills are certainly not ready for prime time..." Tom interrupted with a quick sigh of relief, nodded his head furiously and said, "Yes, precisely!" Tom thought Buck was a natural, however.
I could say, "Oh I liked this." Or, "I liked that." But let's just leave it the way Tom put it: It's not like everybody in the audience would be back next week to watch these flicks again. Oh well, you know me; at the time I couldn't leave it at that. I countered his remark with a perspective-kissing, "Well, I don't think too many people there would line up to see A Few Good Men again a week later either. Tom was in gear high with his Talleyrand tongue, suggesting that the Vampires Suck video we did in 1985 had measured up to the standards we saw upon the screen this night, signalling a been there, done that attitude which I guess summed it all up for both of us. Sue of course didn't have much of anything to say on the subject. Thank God. I might have begged to differ.
The artsy-bosomed women at the Clark Gallery reception however were well worth the price of staring. I knew I had to escape that place soon before I got the urge to touch. This was the same gallery which showed our pal Scott Farnum's little pieces of fame portraits last spring. And by the way, since I am forwarding this to Lynn, there is news Jack might be interested in: Dave Weist and Marcie Dewey, less than a year after marrying each other have split. Marcie has moved to California, uh, where I dunno, but that's the latest via the Quag...
Thanks Lynn for the performance. I did enjoy the night as my awkward nights tend to go. It's just pretty acolades don't roll off my tongue or my keystroke finger as easily as bad beer slips down the ole gullet. And yes I checked out the City Paper blurbs and your picture (which I barely recognize as you), but unless no one else sends you the CP, I won't. Your fans will surely not let you down, buck or no buck.
GT
So, what's new at the Dollhouse, you ask?
Nothing new. Your name came up more times than Jesus Christ this weekend, but nearly always was answered with an I dunno, or a muffled uhmmm...
Yeah, Lynn is cool. I just don't know what to write her in response to the Babyhead show. It was an event worth noting if only for a few days. Frankly I hate critiquing others' work, especially in a genre where I haven't mustered up much myself in the way of surpassing or suppressing it. I liked the shows, but I was glad when the last one was over. I was nearly ready to bolt, already drunk, smoked, and tired from yet another long day saith the old man in dungarees. Tom Howell slopped over earlier in the day with a photography project he needed me to pull off, uh, taking a picture of a fat shiny tow chain he knew I had.
It was to be a typical Howell BIG PRODUCTION with bogus color-reflective transparency drag, but he pocketed a roll of film, and we staggered off to the Babyhead Festival together. Tim met Gigi on his bike. Tom already knew most of the actors, directors, and producers of the show. Safe to say, Lynn was about the only person he didn't know, yet I'm thinking he probably did meet her at Buck Downs place this past New Year's Day. Remember? We'd planned to walk the couple of blocks there after we left Wayne Curtin's absolutely weird houseblessing that evening, but I passed out instead, having had little sleep for several days prior...
Tom was struggling to comment on her work as we were waiting for food at this Sheesh Kabob place in Georgetown after tiring of the reception at the Clark Gallery following the f-fest. Noticing he didn't want to slam her, I filled in the blanks with a typical GT gust of hot air...
"Uh Lynn is an attractive and very intelligent woman, but her acting skills are certainly not ready for prime time..." Tom interrupted with a quick sigh of relief, nodded his head furiously and said, "Yes, precisely!" Tom thought Buck was a natural, however.
I could say, "Oh I liked this." Or, "I liked that." But let's just leave it the way Tom put it: It's not like everybody in the audience would be back next week to watch these flicks again. Oh well, you know me; at the time I couldn't leave it at that. I countered his remark with a perspective-kissing, "Well, I don't think too many people there would line up to see A Few Good Men again a week later either. Tom was in gear high with his Talleyrand tongue, suggesting that the Vampires Suck video we did in 1985 had measured up to the standards we saw upon the screen this night, signalling a been there, done that attitude which I guess summed it all up for both of us. Sue of course didn't have much of anything to say on the subject. Thank God. I might have begged to differ.
The artsy-bosomed women at the Clark Gallery reception however were well worth the price of staring. I knew I had to escape that place soon before I got the urge to touch. This was the same gallery which showed our pal Scott Farnum's little pieces of fame portraits last spring. And by the way, since I am forwarding this to Lynn, there is news Jack might be interested in: Dave Weist and Marcie Dewey, less than a year after marrying each other have split. Marcie has moved to California, uh, where I dunno, but that's the latest via the Quag...
Thanks Lynn for the performance. I did enjoy the night as my awkward nights tend to go. It's just pretty acolades don't roll off my tongue or my keystroke finger as easily as bad beer slips down the ole gullet. And yes I checked out the City Paper blurbs and your picture (which I barely recognize as you), but unless no one else sends you the CP, I won't. Your fans will surely not let you down, buck or no buck.
GT
REALITY ON THE GROUND
Originally published on February 24, 1997
On the other hand, how realistic is it for one to EVER think oneself responsible for the dingbats and wingnuts of the whole stinking world, moonlighting on some pedestal, self-annointed or otherwise, as some holy roller savior of billions, pocketing millions, or maybe not a dime, but nevertheless fainting and feigning lockjawed over that brother's keeper line of reasoning? Steve Taylor often has said he could care less for ANYBODY save his small circle of friends and his family. Worth noting. Hence, a generally happy outlook because he has relieved himself of a responsibility no one can shoulder realistically anyhow.
In this case, the sad-eyed prophet is the delusional one who frets over the world's problems UNREAListically, injuring himself in the process. But undiluted self-interest is as bogus as the converse. So the paradox remains. Is the algebra of happiness a reality marked by self-interest, or is the algebra of reality simply the starting gate for all unhappiness. In others words, might thinkers always think themselves into unhappiness, despite any slant given to the freedom of individuality? After all, paradoxes like nature abhor a vacuum...
Thanks for the gracious input, Lynn. Saw Tim this weekend, partied with him after chasing around northern VA all afternoon and early evening looking for a batting cage with Steve and Sue. He's got a new place up in NW, a rather typical sparsely furnitured male group house with Tim in the basement stocked with his own kitchenette and private entrance, paying less money than he was doing here according to Steve. I was so blitzed by the time we got there I don't even remember where it was, but it was near U Street, 11th, maybe. The boy's finally hit the big time without the safety net of parents or parental surrogates. It was good to see him. Below is an excerpt I wrote just last week in response to a query from Peter Burris, another early but now somewhat distanced while still supportive pal of Tim's...
"I am curious, but not pushy--do you envision ever becoming friends with
Tim again in your life-time? God knows, you saved his life and I don't
know anyone in his circle who doesn't thank you and Sue for doing so. If
nothing else, that gratitude is heartfelt every time I see Tim alive."
I will express my opinions on this matter within the context of the Dollhouse Fevers serial. In fact, you are the primary cause of the serial. You were the first to write me for details, perspective on what happened, and I wanted to give you a clear unambiguous assessment of the whole event, those details directly leading up to, and those details only peripherally inclined, that made the January 2 Dollhouse coup a necessity. Eight parts. I'll resend the first two tonight, and include my commentary on your EVIL piece. Hopefully I will write the third installment this weekend. And may the force be with you to RECEIVE, and thus read ALL. Meanwhile, keep the faith Peter. I don't know how we saved Tim's life. He paid his own way, but then he paid for his own departure as well. A little hint at the future: I'm not angry at Tim in the traditional sense. I was just frustrated that my mark on him was as shallow as warm backwash in a cold beer can. His influence on me was greater than my influence on him. THAT was not a good thing...
Namely, I've cut back drastically on my alcohol intake, although my eating habits have not diminished so I really haven't followed in your path enough to boast a substantial weight loss. Meanwhile just keeping busy, feeling better about life. Have not heard a peep from Jennifer, but I didn't expect too much from her, even after I e-mailed a couple of times alerting her that I hadn't found a Johnny Cash CD she left without, and then again when I did find and subsequently send it back by post. But anywaze, while painful as the event might seem at first glance, it was good riddance purge of all clutter and ingratitude that kept me in high spirits, and now that Tim and I have at least reconciled to a degree, I have nothing to gain by pressing anger in any direction. As I said, I wanted to write this narrative because that's what writers do, they write. I write. I detect and analyze every detail of my life. This may not make me a healthy well-adjusted personality (recalling our recent exchange on that topic), but then I gave up on that flimflam years ago, and simply embrace the spirit that drives me. Some might see it as evil incarnate, or barely functional escapism. Others just don't care. Meanwhile it was good to discover only this past Saturday that Tim had indeed landed exactly where we would have wanted him, upon his own two feet accepting responsibility for himself.
But I had to laugh girl when you wrote your REAL MEN DON'T KEEP JOURNALS piece. You wrote:
"I don't think you can use an historical perspective when it comes to journal writing. It's not at all like evolution or losing our opposing thumbs. If Thom Jefferson referred to himself in a distant and cold manner, well that's his problem; he was always tough to get along with anyhow (specially on slave-buying day when he couldn't get his point-of-views in order). If there is a reason that men may not keep as personal journals, it would have more to do with negative (and positive) socialization, not history. "
This, I believe, is a nonsensical line of reasoning, Lynn. Most male writers and military men kept journals. They simply didn't publish them because they exploited other avenues of fame and fortune. Hiding behind fictional novels in public, writers massaged themselves with the idea that journals were supposedly more private. While true that women found their niche in publishing journals, most men writers felt superior in their false assessments that private thoughts and dialectical exercises were better kept private, suggesting by default that artistic writing should not reveal itself in the first person, and if so was somehow inferior, lacking objectivity, and a whole lotta other mush. These myths have been shattered in the 20th century, with not a small amount of credit due the beat writers. But old classicist blowhards like Gore Vidal still mutter against this straightforward approach on occasion. Other than that singular remark, Lynn, I thought your piece worthy of itself.
On the other hand, how realistic is it for one to EVER think oneself responsible for the dingbats and wingnuts of the whole stinking world, moonlighting on some pedestal, self-annointed or otherwise, as some holy roller savior of billions, pocketing millions, or maybe not a dime, but nevertheless fainting and feigning lockjawed over that brother's keeper line of reasoning? Steve Taylor often has said he could care less for ANYBODY save his small circle of friends and his family. Worth noting. Hence, a generally happy outlook because he has relieved himself of a responsibility no one can shoulder realistically anyhow.
In this case, the sad-eyed prophet is the delusional one who frets over the world's problems UNREAListically, injuring himself in the process. But undiluted self-interest is as bogus as the converse. So the paradox remains. Is the algebra of happiness a reality marked by self-interest, or is the algebra of reality simply the starting gate for all unhappiness. In others words, might thinkers always think themselves into unhappiness, despite any slant given to the freedom of individuality? After all, paradoxes like nature abhor a vacuum...
Thanks for the gracious input, Lynn. Saw Tim this weekend, partied with him after chasing around northern VA all afternoon and early evening looking for a batting cage with Steve and Sue. He's got a new place up in NW, a rather typical sparsely furnitured male group house with Tim in the basement stocked with his own kitchenette and private entrance, paying less money than he was doing here according to Steve. I was so blitzed by the time we got there I don't even remember where it was, but it was near U Street, 11th, maybe. The boy's finally hit the big time without the safety net of parents or parental surrogates. It was good to see him. Below is an excerpt I wrote just last week in response to a query from Peter Burris, another early but now somewhat distanced while still supportive pal of Tim's...
"I am curious, but not pushy--do you envision ever becoming friends with
Tim again in your life-time? God knows, you saved his life and I don't
know anyone in his circle who doesn't thank you and Sue for doing so. If
nothing else, that gratitude is heartfelt every time I see Tim alive."
I will express my opinions on this matter within the context of the Dollhouse Fevers serial. In fact, you are the primary cause of the serial. You were the first to write me for details, perspective on what happened, and I wanted to give you a clear unambiguous assessment of the whole event, those details directly leading up to, and those details only peripherally inclined, that made the January 2 Dollhouse coup a necessity. Eight parts. I'll resend the first two tonight, and include my commentary on your EVIL piece. Hopefully I will write the third installment this weekend. And may the force be with you to RECEIVE, and thus read ALL. Meanwhile, keep the faith Peter. I don't know how we saved Tim's life. He paid his own way, but then he paid for his own departure as well. A little hint at the future: I'm not angry at Tim in the traditional sense. I was just frustrated that my mark on him was as shallow as warm backwash in a cold beer can. His influence on me was greater than my influence on him. THAT was not a good thing...
Namely, I've cut back drastically on my alcohol intake, although my eating habits have not diminished so I really haven't followed in your path enough to boast a substantial weight loss. Meanwhile just keeping busy, feeling better about life. Have not heard a peep from Jennifer, but I didn't expect too much from her, even after I e-mailed a couple of times alerting her that I hadn't found a Johnny Cash CD she left without, and then again when I did find and subsequently send it back by post. But anywaze, while painful as the event might seem at first glance, it was good riddance purge of all clutter and ingratitude that kept me in high spirits, and now that Tim and I have at least reconciled to a degree, I have nothing to gain by pressing anger in any direction. As I said, I wanted to write this narrative because that's what writers do, they write. I write. I detect and analyze every detail of my life. This may not make me a healthy well-adjusted personality (recalling our recent exchange on that topic), but then I gave up on that flimflam years ago, and simply embrace the spirit that drives me. Some might see it as evil incarnate, or barely functional escapism. Others just don't care. Meanwhile it was good to discover only this past Saturday that Tim had indeed landed exactly where we would have wanted him, upon his own two feet accepting responsibility for himself.
But I had to laugh girl when you wrote your REAL MEN DON'T KEEP JOURNALS piece. You wrote:
"I don't think you can use an historical perspective when it comes to journal writing. It's not at all like evolution or losing our opposing thumbs. If Thom Jefferson referred to himself in a distant and cold manner, well that's his problem; he was always tough to get along with anyhow (specially on slave-buying day when he couldn't get his point-of-views in order). If there is a reason that men may not keep as personal journals, it would have more to do with negative (and positive) socialization, not history. "
This, I believe, is a nonsensical line of reasoning, Lynn. Most male writers and military men kept journals. They simply didn't publish them because they exploited other avenues of fame and fortune. Hiding behind fictional novels in public, writers massaged themselves with the idea that journals were supposedly more private. While true that women found their niche in publishing journals, most men writers felt superior in their false assessments that private thoughts and dialectical exercises were better kept private, suggesting by default that artistic writing should not reveal itself in the first person, and if so was somehow inferior, lacking objectivity, and a whole lotta other mush. These myths have been shattered in the 20th century, with not a small amount of credit due the beat writers. But old classicist blowhards like Gore Vidal still mutter against this straightforward approach on occasion. Other than that singular remark, Lynn, I thought your piece worthy of itself.
OF FOLLY & FODDER
Orginally composed on January 28, 1997
WELL...since everyone else is spilling all in declaring the spikes and spokes of their past and present journalkeeping habits, I may as well add my own two pence, having kept a rather informal text of this sort rather irregularly over the years in old-fashioned notebooks and later, on disk.
After giving up the traditional journal task several times I've come to recognize that I don't really appreciate the form as much as I do the E-mail discipline. I suspect my need for instant gratification by way of external response, plus a general distaste for maintaining secrecies result in a preference for calling the bluff on private thought processes and identify the latter form as the my own favored natural journal.
Fortunately for me in this case, ever since the spring of 1992 when I first logged on to AOL and Prodigy, I've always had at least one equally prolific correspondent with whom I have been able to vent any issues of the hour mixed with any general ponderances which the modern mind might tend to address. And presently I can boast that "pour moi" this softly fluctuating group buoyed by Steve Taylor and Lynn Landry in a bicoastal cheek to cheek is indeed the golden age of "writing to keep writing" form the journal has traditionally meant to its creators.
That said, of course all my journals of the past and E-mail are in custody, hardcopies alphabetized and filed according to the name of my correspondent. My computerphobe but oh so revolutionary pal Len Bracken and a few other hanging-wit know-it-alls have taken me to task for my energies focused in this area. What is that? I really don't understand their arrogant tones toward E-mail, but I suppose to utilize a line from a long forgotten poem I once wrote might be a propos: Ignorance and virtue STILL suck on the same straw...
GT
WELL...since everyone else is spilling all in declaring the spikes and spokes of their past and present journalkeeping habits, I may as well add my own two pence, having kept a rather informal text of this sort rather irregularly over the years in old-fashioned notebooks and later, on disk.
After giving up the traditional journal task several times I've come to recognize that I don't really appreciate the form as much as I do the E-mail discipline. I suspect my need for instant gratification by way of external response, plus a general distaste for maintaining secrecies result in a preference for calling the bluff on private thought processes and identify the latter form as the my own favored natural journal.
Fortunately for me in this case, ever since the spring of 1992 when I first logged on to AOL and Prodigy, I've always had at least one equally prolific correspondent with whom I have been able to vent any issues of the hour mixed with any general ponderances which the modern mind might tend to address. And presently I can boast that "pour moi" this softly fluctuating group buoyed by Steve Taylor and Lynn Landry in a bicoastal cheek to cheek is indeed the golden age of "writing to keep writing" form the journal has traditionally meant to its creators.
That said, of course all my journals of the past and E-mail are in custody, hardcopies alphabetized and filed according to the name of my correspondent. My computerphobe but oh so revolutionary pal Len Bracken and a few other hanging-wit know-it-alls have taken me to task for my energies focused in this area. What is that? I really don't understand their arrogant tones toward E-mail, but I suppose to utilize a line from a long forgotten poem I once wrote might be a propos: Ignorance and virtue STILL suck on the same straw...
GT
COMPLAINT AS A YELLOW VEGETABLE
Originally composed by Gabriel Thy on January 08, 1997
Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn...
Yesterday you were giving DC the fat finger of ho! ho! ho! I love my California lifestyle, and a mere 24 later it's I miss the things California can't even begin to hug.
I can sympathize, but from where I sit, stifled in a dangerous room in which I cannot trust another: it's either Steve dropping beers, Tim squawking about what a good boy he is, or Liberty Sue the mere voyeur, who's defiantly not a creator sort sweating me out, and in the midst of all this east coast fog I swear I think your orbit must be a thousand increments swifter than this slow comet to nowhere sane I ride.
Old or better yet, no sex, no friends, no inspiration but my own irredeemable past no one else can even appreciate due to generational bias or just plain selfishness. Even Bracken's $500 publishing job is beginning to run its course. He said he wanted to learn PageMaker, but it's me putting his book all together. But that's okay. That five bill windfall blows away all but Sue's saintly efforts these past few years as I've worked for free so long I hardly know how to break with the tis better to give than receive dead end trail of do unto others before they do unto you routines smothering me into a gray soul of nothingness these past thirteen DC years I now have agreed to despise for the trouble they really were. That includes the Jack years and the Tim years synthesized into one long Eighties decade, now over...
I have yet to begin writing the piece on the Great Rupture of Dollhouse Status Quo of 1996, but hang in there dearies. It promises if I may be so bold to be the most brilliant synopsis of where I stand on the issues I will have written to date. Take me at my word. Mine enemies have yet to become acquainted with the visionary depths and sincerity of my homegrown wrath.
Digging living alone is one thing, Lynn. Manipulating beyond the call of duty to achieve it or its converse is yet another. I've worn those boots, and cannot feel proud.
What exactly is a Buck Down poem in your book, Lynn? It's a damned shame he & I live two blocks apart and still have never met, although Howell still sells him herbal resolve as far as I know. Tom was cut out of my will be done several months back. I now claim no friends from that bygone era. The Tim and Jennifer show closed the door on that whole scene forever. Sorry to be so harsh, but the crimes of personality perpetrated for so long upon Sue & Goo are finally being addressed. We simply want a more honest, "less disturbed adolescent" cast of characters in our lives, even if that means zero is the translator of greater sensitivity.
I do not want to scream in quiet neighborhoods. I want to draw quietude into the neighborhood noises of confusion, criminality, corruption, and hatred. I do not want a revolution or two or many that paralyze the good ears along with the bad ears. I want a revolution asserting that revolution begins and ends with the broken mirror of selfadjustment. You can't preach Boasism where all cultural mores are globally relative, thereby equally important and then claim how exploited the poor natives are in some remote neck of the woods, unblemished by cabbage patch dolls or fast food chains.
Now don't get me wrong. Capitalism and scientific preference as practiced by rightwing multinationals is as evil as the night is long, because nary of us wants to return to the cave this fiscal war machine with its nuclear factor is promising us, but then do we, the hip to almost any cause, middle class Americans think that shackaninny Appalachian coal miners just a few nails and rotten boards away from the caves themselves should simply be content with their obscene lot because that makes them closer to nature and the way MOST folk lived only a few centuries ago before capitalism and the Industrial Revolution catapaulted us into the age of universal materialism on one hand and the brute recognition of both our rich and our poor neighbor's lot on the other?
Sorry guys, the Hoke & Bracken influences rear their ugly trumpets once again. Liberalism, I repeat, despite its formidable attempts to rectify not a few horrific excesses of the conservative might is right rollcall, is simply not the salvation of mankind its hydraheaded constituents would have us believe. The radical middle, inheriting grace and dignity from both ends of the spectrum and discarding the aggression and filth of each, and developing new forms to meet new norms is the only smart approach that 21st century humanity can endorse, a global plan for unification of the planet, sailing straight into a vigorous segregation if need be...
Segregation you say? Hey man, gaze about, the world IS segregated!!! Even as a much ballyhooed white male I cannot mingle among the young and beautiful cliques without suffering their abrupt arrogances. I cannot, by virtue of exclusionary practices of those I would solicit, freely engage in sex, an act many honored minds have stipulated as the driving basis of a healthy psychology itself, the will to life, in Freudian terms. I cannot even buy love with a coin of a different sort of razzle dazzle, although many can and do. I cannot walk among certain so-called neighborhoods without enduring verbal or physical harassment. I cannot even admit publically my favorite singer and poet without illiciting attacks of generational bias or something worse. Whether right or wrong, segregation is a very real fact of life.
Conflict of interests is the number one cause of misunderstanding and subsequent belligerence of rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, dim and bright, fashionable and drab, power ethnic and undergrowth the world over. Admitting this, why is a political, economical, or ecological plan which looks straight into the eye of the beast, recognizing these cold but unchanging facts, suddenly dismissed as intentionally unworkable, unconscionable, fascist, even incorrigibly evil in its very articulation?
These few paragraphs certainly are not a plan, but they do beg the question: why does liberalism fail to meet the needs of the many while seducing the many to despise a more conservative approach to battling the primary nature and nurture questions that simply won't evaporate in the context of a increasingly dissatisfied population where liberalism has reigned supreme for nearly a century in the most powerful goods-generated civilization on earth. After all, before the pendulum began to swing too far to the left, liberalism has been the long slow churn towards improving the liberty and quality of life for the greater bulk of the world's rational populations for centuries.
It's not the goods that corrupt. It's the cancerous envy growing inside us that corrupts, and that envy is a product of a greedy rightwing metabolism and an irresponsible unfocussed leftwing behaviorism, and that my sweets, is the problem, and no revolutionary chant, crisis, or convulsion, and no liberal tax abolition or redistribution scheme will suffer the idiots who continue to misrepresent the human condition or its corruptible nature while denying the importance of a clear-minded and historically proven urgency for not idealizing but of respecting both nurture AND nature in their prime.
On both sides of the political equation where humanity is an irrational number, neither side proves its case with a sloppy solution. Something must be done, and history has shown only a heavy hand ever gets anything done, but of course revisionists of every flavor always love to point to the past heavy hand and call it evil, thinking what THEY are doing today is oh so very different than what has passed by already on this long treacherous hike back up the mudslide mountains of yesterday.
Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn...
Yesterday you were giving DC the fat finger of ho! ho! ho! I love my California lifestyle, and a mere 24 later it's I miss the things California can't even begin to hug.
I can sympathize, but from where I sit, stifled in a dangerous room in which I cannot trust another: it's either Steve dropping beers, Tim squawking about what a good boy he is, or Liberty Sue the mere voyeur, who's defiantly not a creator sort sweating me out, and in the midst of all this east coast fog I swear I think your orbit must be a thousand increments swifter than this slow comet to nowhere sane I ride.
Old or better yet, no sex, no friends, no inspiration but my own irredeemable past no one else can even appreciate due to generational bias or just plain selfishness. Even Bracken's $500 publishing job is beginning to run its course. He said he wanted to learn PageMaker, but it's me putting his book all together. But that's okay. That five bill windfall blows away all but Sue's saintly efforts these past few years as I've worked for free so long I hardly know how to break with the tis better to give than receive dead end trail of do unto others before they do unto you routines smothering me into a gray soul of nothingness these past thirteen DC years I now have agreed to despise for the trouble they really were. That includes the Jack years and the Tim years synthesized into one long Eighties decade, now over...
I have yet to begin writing the piece on the Great Rupture of Dollhouse Status Quo of 1996, but hang in there dearies. It promises if I may be so bold to be the most brilliant synopsis of where I stand on the issues I will have written to date. Take me at my word. Mine enemies have yet to become acquainted with the visionary depths and sincerity of my homegrown wrath.
Digging living alone is one thing, Lynn. Manipulating beyond the call of duty to achieve it or its converse is yet another. I've worn those boots, and cannot feel proud.
What exactly is a Buck Down poem in your book, Lynn? It's a damned shame he & I live two blocks apart and still have never met, although Howell still sells him herbal resolve as far as I know. Tom was cut out of my will be done several months back. I now claim no friends from that bygone era. The Tim and Jennifer show closed the door on that whole scene forever. Sorry to be so harsh, but the crimes of personality perpetrated for so long upon Sue & Goo are finally being addressed. We simply want a more honest, "less disturbed adolescent" cast of characters in our lives, even if that means zero is the translator of greater sensitivity.
I do not want to scream in quiet neighborhoods. I want to draw quietude into the neighborhood noises of confusion, criminality, corruption, and hatred. I do not want a revolution or two or many that paralyze the good ears along with the bad ears. I want a revolution asserting that revolution begins and ends with the broken mirror of selfadjustment. You can't preach Boasism where all cultural mores are globally relative, thereby equally important and then claim how exploited the poor natives are in some remote neck of the woods, unblemished by cabbage patch dolls or fast food chains.
Now don't get me wrong. Capitalism and scientific preference as practiced by rightwing multinationals is as evil as the night is long, because nary of us wants to return to the cave this fiscal war machine with its nuclear factor is promising us, but then do we, the hip to almost any cause, middle class Americans think that shackaninny Appalachian coal miners just a few nails and rotten boards away from the caves themselves should simply be content with their obscene lot because that makes them closer to nature and the way MOST folk lived only a few centuries ago before capitalism and the Industrial Revolution catapaulted us into the age of universal materialism on one hand and the brute recognition of both our rich and our poor neighbor's lot on the other?
Sorry guys, the Hoke & Bracken influences rear their ugly trumpets once again. Liberalism, I repeat, despite its formidable attempts to rectify not a few horrific excesses of the conservative might is right rollcall, is simply not the salvation of mankind its hydraheaded constituents would have us believe. The radical middle, inheriting grace and dignity from both ends of the spectrum and discarding the aggression and filth of each, and developing new forms to meet new norms is the only smart approach that 21st century humanity can endorse, a global plan for unification of the planet, sailing straight into a vigorous segregation if need be...
Segregation you say? Hey man, gaze about, the world IS segregated!!! Even as a much ballyhooed white male I cannot mingle among the young and beautiful cliques without suffering their abrupt arrogances. I cannot, by virtue of exclusionary practices of those I would solicit, freely engage in sex, an act many honored minds have stipulated as the driving basis of a healthy psychology itself, the will to life, in Freudian terms. I cannot even buy love with a coin of a different sort of razzle dazzle, although many can and do. I cannot walk among certain so-called neighborhoods without enduring verbal or physical harassment. I cannot even admit publically my favorite singer and poet without illiciting attacks of generational bias or something worse. Whether right or wrong, segregation is a very real fact of life.
Conflict of interests is the number one cause of misunderstanding and subsequent belligerence of rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, dim and bright, fashionable and drab, power ethnic and undergrowth the world over. Admitting this, why is a political, economical, or ecological plan which looks straight into the eye of the beast, recognizing these cold but unchanging facts, suddenly dismissed as intentionally unworkable, unconscionable, fascist, even incorrigibly evil in its very articulation?
These few paragraphs certainly are not a plan, but they do beg the question: why does liberalism fail to meet the needs of the many while seducing the many to despise a more conservative approach to battling the primary nature and nurture questions that simply won't evaporate in the context of a increasingly dissatisfied population where liberalism has reigned supreme for nearly a century in the most powerful goods-generated civilization on earth. After all, before the pendulum began to swing too far to the left, liberalism has been the long slow churn towards improving the liberty and quality of life for the greater bulk of the world's rational populations for centuries.
It's not the goods that corrupt. It's the cancerous envy growing inside us that corrupts, and that envy is a product of a greedy rightwing metabolism and an irresponsible unfocussed leftwing behaviorism, and that my sweets, is the problem, and no revolutionary chant, crisis, or convulsion, and no liberal tax abolition or redistribution scheme will suffer the idiots who continue to misrepresent the human condition or its corruptible nature while denying the importance of a clear-minded and historically proven urgency for not idealizing but of respecting both nurture AND nature in their prime.
On both sides of the political equation where humanity is an irrational number, neither side proves its case with a sloppy solution. Something must be done, and history has shown only a heavy hand ever gets anything done, but of course revisionists of every flavor always love to point to the past heavy hand and call it evil, thinking what THEY are doing today is oh so very different than what has passed by already on this long treacherous hike back up the mudslide mountains of yesterday.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
AS LONG AS WE ARE NAMING NAMES
I found this stanza from a poem on the delightfully cute but thoughtful blog operated by someone tagged with the equally cute but thoughtful name—Kirbanita.
And who was that elegant feller,
They said, in the shiny gear?
The things they said about Gabriel
Were hardly fit to hear.
I must say, those four lines rank up there with Genet's lines about the soldier who is to come.
And who was that elegant feller,
They said, in the shiny gear?
The things they said about Gabriel
Were hardly fit to hear.
I must say, those four lines rank up there with Genet's lines about the soldier who is to come.
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