Celebrityhood Gets You Laid - Just Enough Time for a Quickie in your Allotted Quarter Hour

9⁰ this morning with a low tonight expected to be around zero. The dog didn’t get very far before he started hopping on three legs. I picked him up and carried him back home. I put him down when we got to the driveway. The slope is steep. I’m fearful of slipping. I need all the mobility I can get. I don’t need a dog under my arm. I’m an old man. Every year I fall at least once. I’ve already had a nasty one this year. I put the dog down and took baby steps down to where the driveway flattens out. There  are still the steps to negoiate. They are the first to ice up. And banging one’s head on a riser might prove fatal. And then what would the dog do when its paws froze as it stood beside my body barking? It sounds like a duck when it barks – quack quack! QUACK! What would it do when I didn’t get up.

The decline of the national ideology means that capital no longer needs to offer the middle class this ideological sense of belonging and is happy to proletarize them – Bill Readings – The University in Ruins, 1996 p52

Claiming to be a poet

            Maybe it is charming

            But will it get you laid? Only

If the lady lives on the Swanee

            And you can pay your own
Way. You’re just another worker 
            With another product for sale

Take the river less traveled and

            Wind up marooned in the middle

            Of the ocean - if lucky
But have you published? Can I find
            You on the shelf?

At nineteen, one lives in utter idolatry, therefore the extreme superstition of sex. Monstrously exaggerated tales about sexual feats, which we listen to greedily determine our expectations. The disappointments are correspondingly great – Gregor Von Rezzori –Memoirs of an Anti-Semite p68

There is more than man and nature (or body and soul) there is also ‘ideology’ without which there would be no language in which to express this, and hence no ‘cognito’ to proclaim here.

There is nothing in the mind that is not already in precis – except mind itself – Leibniz

Stardom predominates every hypercommercial transaction. Celebrityhood sells. Celebrityhood pays.  Celebrityhood is imaginary. Celebrityhood gets you laid. Celebrityhood is shit.

Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson – Goethe

It is not so much a process of converting everything to its economic value (who gains by that?) but of subjecting everything to the needs for capital

A conditional situation determines the limits and possibilities for human action and behavior. Faced by it, there exists only two possibilities: (i) to choose between the distinct alternatives within the situation… ; or (ii)… to change the conditional situation in order to permit other possibilities of action – Theotonio Dos Santos

Is it an insurrection if carried out by the constituted authority – it is not terrorism that a victor had committed. We reserve insurrection and terror for an act that fails to gain legitimacy over history.

I couldn’t understand about things, and it scared the hell out of me… when you don’t feel yourself anything, I mean any part of anything, that’s when you get scared. I was that way for a long time – Lillian Hellman – Days to Come

In a world where the bureaucracy/corporation holds hegemony – the administrator is King.  Extreme wealth is only tolerable when administrators hold all the power.

“Questions” of the day were “treated”, as social problems, suitably “solved”, and the stage, like the history book, became a means of that end – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965  p84

What was once viewed as a scourge is now proudly boosted of – the erstwhile robber barrons have become the represenatives of cultural consciousness

Our standards of modernity are a system of flattering illusions, which permit us selectivity to colonize the past, as are our ideas of what is provincial, which permit some parts of the world to condescend to all the rest – Susan Sontag – Where the Stress Falls, 2001 p40

The beauty of ‘downsizing’ as a strategy is that it turns its oppoisition into a defender of the status quo. The liberals  abandon their platforms and become subject to the synptoms of cognitative dissoance – they ignore their own critique, the act agaist their own interest. They defend what they don't believe in.

The furniture of a home expresses, in its quantity and kind, the division of the concerns of the soul – Paul Goodman - Commitatus p183

Does a consumer need ideology? Yes indeed, if he is to be an object of marketing.

Symbols are… unsought impressions of defining meaning and are incommunicable by process of reason – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965 r p87

Once you lose your faith nothing

Makes any sense – then again

            Maybe it never did

How immortal can you become

            By having a plaque with

            Your name on a park bench

            Even if cast in brass

Or over the door of  the university library

            Maybe your name on a sports arena
            Or a freeway would be best

Or you can leave in your will a request 
            To have daily novenas for your soul

            Read for  ninty-nine years 
Will that  be sufficient?

Everything become is mortal – Oswald Spangler – The Decline of the West, 1965  p90