Meridians and Baselines as Far as the Ohio-Indiana Border

It’s the 16^th of January and I am sitting out side reading and drinking a glass of red wine (Australian Shiraz). The dog watches the roadway as he sits to my left. Two flies have been awakened from their slumber by the unseasonable heat and are buzzing about. The dog and I had taken a walk through the woods. A man wearing a blue t-shirt jogs with his dog. He has his dog a short leash. Trail Dog moves to get a better sniff. The dog is interested in Trail Dog too but his master doesn’t slow up and hollers at him “keep in step, keep in step, stop jumping about.” When we walk, Trail Dog is in charge. Traildog is sitting now in the middle of the yard. Trains on distant tracks toot and their steel wells rumble over iron rails.

In the long run it hardly seems to matter whether one gets excited or to what cause one commits one’s existence. It all arrives at the same goal; everything serves an evolution that is both unfathomable and inescapable – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p784

I’m trying to listen:

            All three of these books

            Are available at CalBooks

To poetry – a reading

            By Judith Goldman at Berkeley

            I’m not there, it’s been archived

I’ve got two buds in my ears:

            A catenary is an arch

            The rope so slack it

                        Forms an arch

The intro lasts for fifteen minutes

            Poor Judith's only got 

            Forty-five minutes to read

Oh so academic

            Detailed explanations

            Something about Benshi

How the Japanese provide commentary

            To silent movies while we 
                     Employed piano players

Get on with the reading – fuck

            These academics

And the poet turns out to be

            An academic too

            Providing her own lengthy

                        glosses

Poets should be heard and not seen

Academics should be seen and not heard

            Academic poets….shit!

I rip out these buds

Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the most modest doses, they are quite content with the appearance of beauty – H L Mencken – The Vintage Mencken, 1990 p124

I am having computer withdrawal. I need to take a pill

In time, one is only  what one is; what one has always been. In space, one can be another person – Susan Sontag – Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980 p 117

One way train

            I’m never coming back

Going the wrong way

            Up around the bend

The current runs away

            With the spoon

            At ebb tide

I can’t come back

I’ve been swept up

            In this flow
We call time

A world whose past has become (by definition) obsolete, and whose present churns out instant antiques, invests custodians, decoders and collectors – Susan Sontag – Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980 p120

He was not exactly an ugly man. He wore a denim jacket over a green and beige checked flannel shirt. He had recently had his hair cut. He had shaved this morning. He is wearing a wedding ring. He looks out the window as the bus goes down Van Ness. He has seen it all before but it was many years ago. Now he is here again. He is now on these streets again. He had been on the road. He had gotten to much sun. He had yet to get acclimated to the sun. There is not much sun here. He was not headed home. He was not running anywhere. He had two small creased brown paper bags with him. The sign says no food or drink on Muni buses. He ignores it. I got off in the Mission. I entered the Elixir. Dave had spent two days working out a new scheme for shelving all the glasses by logos and size. I asked for a SacBrew. It was four dollars. I paid him. There is no happy hour on weekends. I should have used my coupon. I pull out my free beer coupon and look at it. It is only good during happy hours. Oh well. I show Dave my latest drawing. “Dave”, I say, “I think I forgot to pay you for that last beer. He takes my twenty and returns my change. “The next one is on me,” he says. “Remind me.”

Sue and James have just returned from the ball game. The Giants had won. James had got there late, he told me. He had picked up his mother at the hospital, he said or maybe he had said that he had been visiting here there. The Giants had scored twice before he had gotten there. All the action had occurred in the first two innings.  Sue was already there. Another of the season ticket holders had asked him where he had been. That’s when he explained about his mother. He and Sue were not regulars here. They said they were looking for a new neighborhood bar. Their regular bar was now full of spike heads, he said. Sue asks me if I was a student or a teacher. I am neither, but I get that question a lot. “I saw you copying from that book, but I did not want to be nosey”, she said. “I write a lot”, I said. “I call these my field notes”, I told her.

This is one at once the hall-mark and the justification of an aristocracy – that it is beyond responsibility to the general masses of men and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions. It is nothing if it is not autonomous, curious, venturesome, courageous, and everything if it is – H L Mencken – The Vintage Mencken, 1990 p100

Along a straight line

            Without regard

            For empirical geography

Starting at an arbitrary point

            Meridians and baselines

            Demarcating six mile squares

Thirty-six sections; 360 acres each

            Numbered sequentially

            The building of schools, Lot 16

With an unbuilt post office on Lot 11

            Staked out as far

            As the Ohio-Indiana line

The map of places passes. / The reality of paper tears. / Land and water where they are / Are only where they were – Laura Riding – The Poems of, 1980 p87

If you mow your own lawn that is labor but it is not work; if you hire someone to mow it, what he does is work and depending on how he performs it it may be or it may not be labor. If you would rather mow your own lawn rather than work longer hours to pay someone else to do it, then by definition that is happiness. And if you can’t hire any illegal aliens to mow it because they prefer to say south of the border then that also is defined as happiness, at least for them.

What we still refer to as a personal destiny… is being displaced by collective processes that can finally be expressed in statistical terms – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p785

What follows ‘I said’ is a report; what follows ‘I was like’ is a performance – “Say is for telling; like is for showing.” – Geoffrey Nunberg

Work is rationalized labor

A world whose past has become (by definition) obsolete, and whose present churns out instant antiques, invests custodians, decoders and collectors – Susan Sontag – Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980 p120

Science asks how? Religion asks why?

The mysterious is so simple when revealed by science – Edgar Allan Poe

And thirty times a day

The big diesels turn generators

            Driving four locomotives southward

Two pushing and two pulling one hundred hoppers

            Full of Wyoming coal

The generators transmit signals

And thirty times a day

            The television goes on the fritz

The pattern breaks up, the audio is

            Intermittent – oug bra puke pa

Then the screen goes blank and

            A yellow label come on proclaiming

            That there is “no signal”

But this is not true – the TV is announcing

            That electricity will be available

            At least through these winter months

And this is good to know

If the news is to be reported with speed and confidence, today’s news should not be too different from yesterday’s, or what one knows already – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1085

A man’s left testicle hangs lower than his right – it is always the left. This is the only naturally obvious left-right external asymmetrical feature of the human being. In all vertebrates the heart and the stomach are on the left, the liver and appendix on the right.

The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1109