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            I’m not there, it’s been archived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

An Expensive Cup of Coffee

The sun is coming up. There is a white band on the eastern horizon visible through the bare branches. There is no crimson, orange or yellow this morning. I just dumped a cup of coffee on my computer – and ohhhhh! NOOO! It has shut off. It was an expensive cup of coffee. It fried the logic board and wrecked the battery. With a PC it’s not cheap but no big deal but with a Mac they want you to buy another computer. I was finally able to find a referbished board with a six month quarentee. And now two weeks later I’m up and running again. It cost almost as much as a new computer but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give that money to Apple and their corporate strategy of eliminating my options. Screw You, Apple! I love my MacBook Air but not that much. I'm willing to go back to my PC if you make to many demands on me. That was an expensive cup of coffee. God it’s hard to get used to living without a computer. For Internet access I still had the library. God I’d rather have gone cold turkey on cocaine. And I can't go home again, never again.

It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes – W G Sebald – The Rings of Saturn, 1998  p31

In 1986 only 0.8% of the worlds data was stored digitally. Today more that 95% of it is.

All great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one – Walter Benjamin

Saabs. Broken down and worn out. Three of them. At least one is always in the shop. Three young men looking at them. Opening their bonnets and slamming them shut again. They are the sons of the woman who I am going out with. Going out with so you can stay in with. They are trying to determine if the cars can be fixed. One of them comes and tells me, “Man, ain’t nothing that can be done. Haul em off”. The magenta one had weeds growing up around it. The silver one’s odometer had just turned 200,000 today and then it went clunk. Blue smoke had trailed me all the way home. The blue one, at least, I had hoped would still be salvageable. The smell of oil hung in the air. I guess I’ll be staying in.

One of them is talking about the ‘M’ word. Motherhood, I ask? No, marriage, he says. I had already broken off three good relationships because the ‘M’ word had come up. My kids had thought that I should have married Joan. Some people are just not cut out for marriage. I’m one, I think. Maybe once. Thanks for looking them over, I say. I’ll refill the tank if you let me use your truck. I have an old doublewide refrigerator that needed hauling away too. Everyone has an opinion of how I should live my life but me. Everyone is willing to share. I too once had a dream. It’s hard to recall now. It’s hazy now. Sometimes at night it comes back to me and I wake up with tears in my eyes. Staying out. Staying in.  And now I can’t even keep my beer cold.

Life is no dream / Beware and beware and beware / We tumble downstairs to eat the damp of the earth / or else climb to the snowy divide with the choir  / of dead dahlias – Fedrico Garcia Lorca –Poet in New York, 1955  p53

By 1850 humans had already been responsible for pumping 350 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere

Praised… with the ferocity of a theatre audience that applauds far beyond the limits of its real opinion the commonplaces that are designed to arouse its need to applaud – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p851

AFTER READING PINSKY’S “TO TELEVEISION”

I watch live

            Supposedly

Before a live

            Audience

How can you tell

The laughter is not

            As monotonous

            Or monotone

Anyway I was alive

            I thought

Or maybe not

It’s common

Or so said Mcluhan

            One village

            One globe

            One life

Thought can be given only were there is thinking – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p53

Video game consoles are now performing a fourth of all the world’s computing

Multiplicity of meanings is the element in which thought must move in order to be strict thought – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p71

An edge city

City on it’s edge

            Edgy

            On a ledge

Legendary – peripheral

            Lateral

Nondescript – fast cars

            Fast food fasting wives

Surgical sociobiology

            Odorless and credit

            Card thin

The academic jargon

            Practiced out back

            Grilling steak

Disintegrating relationships

            Of lateral distinction

The strolling figures

            Of architectural watercolors

Factory campuses ripe

            For condo conversion

An ego city

City on the go

            Get in and go

            Get on with it

                        And go

Machines were not so much to save time as to save dignity that fears the animate touch – William Carlos Williams – In The American Grain, 1956 p177

Just because there are more men to kill does not necessary make the number dead the measure of how violent we are – its not the total number of murders as it is their per capita rate of occurrence and the argument is that the later is on the decrease. This is certainly one way to look at it. Mankind is becoming less and less violent as the numbers who die as a result of their violence goes up and up. Man is a killing machine or maybe not.

Our men of action look like men bowling; they manage to knock down their nine pens with all the gestures of a Napoleon – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p805

20% of the world’s major civil conflicts since 1950 have been linked to climate extremes associated with El Ninos

Rising  world temperatures in the last thirty years have resulted in reduced production of grain food crops, 3.8% more corn and 5.5% more corn could have been produced had the temperatures not increased.

What is what is what. / That’s what. I’m no wiser for all that, for being wise – Laura Riding – The Poems of, 1980 p117

The Hottest Time of the Day

Where’s Traildog? It’s supposed to get to sixty today. But it is not right now. The temperature has just fallen below freezing as the sun came up. It is beginning to warm up but it is no where near sixty yet. The sun had just come up. I’ve always wondered, Kelly said, and I'm sure there is a simple explanation for this, why is it that the farther north you go in the summer time the later in the day they have their highest temperature? He’s awaiting my googling of an answer. I am curious how you’ll search for that, he says. I try. I am about to give up. It’s a matter of finding the right terminology, I say. Finally I find a clue it has to do with daily cycles of solar radiation and residual heat. I even find a graph in a PowerPoint presentation. The daily low and highs are at the points of zero net solar radiation and not at noon and midnight as one would have supposed.  We had both thought of the temperature only being affected by solar radiation. We had ignored residual heat altogether.

Our spread over the earth was fueled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn… Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artifact we create – W G Sebald – The Rings of Saturn, 1998 p170

The history of the 99% is the story of economics

The closer in time, the more nearly our contemporary a thinker is, the longer is the way to what he has thought, and the less may we shun the long way – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p70

When you don’t understand

            It may be

            Just might be

There’s nothing

            Nothing cannot be

Understood

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone – H L Mencken – The Vintage Mencken, 1990 p188

Girl Scout Cookie Time – 200 million boxes sold each and every year. Savannah Smiles is the new one this year. Only one council will be selling Ice Berry Pinatas this year. The popular ones continue to be Thin Mints, Samoas, Tagalongs, Do-si-Dos and Trefoils. Those no longer available include: Sugar-Free Chocolate Chips (brown box), Cina-spo\ins (replaeced by Daisy Go Rounds in 2009 and then by Shout Outs! In 2011 – light green box), All About Animals/Animal Treasures/Thanks-A-Lots (pink box).  Remember Lemon, Double Dutch, Ole Oles, Lemon Drops, Striped Chocolate Chip, Snaps, Sugarfree Chalet Cremes, Juliettes, Golden Nut Clusters, TrailMix, Caban Cremes, Country Hearth Chocolate Chips, Echos, Chocolate Chunk, Pecan Shortee, Medallions, Van’chos, or Granola Cookies? It's Girl Scout Cookie time again.

But passion will obscure our senses so that we eat and stuff and call its nectar – William Carlos Williams – In The American Grain, 1956 p207

The God Gene

The God Particle

Good God, It all makes sense

            Now

DRD4 = R2D2

            The imagination is real

Star Wars now in 3D

You cannot talk of colors to the blind. But a still greater ill than blindness is delusion. Delusion believes that it sees, and that it sees in the only possible manner, even while this its belief robs it of sight – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p165

Too little dopamine and you become catatonic; too much and you become schizophrenic

The distinction that goes with mere office runs far ahead of the distinction that goes with actual achievement – H L Mencken – The Vintage Mencken, 1990 p175

90% of Angola Louisiana’s 5,500 prisoners will die there. Elderly inmates are the country’s fastest growing prison population

To lose, is harder than to find – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p52

Salt of the earth; salt the earth

                                    Make infertile

Look back and turn into a pillar

                                    All so kosher

In the sea, in the bay, in a pan – wash up

                        In the marsh, grass, lake,

Invade the drawdown cone; water, cellar

                        Scrape down the saltpeter

Salt a mine, mine the salt – rock shaker – along

                        The salt road – caravan

Salted cod, salt beef and peas at sea – iodized

                        Salt tax, in the works, evaporate the lake

                                     Deposit, bath, set the table

Salt, de-salt; salt out, salt away

In a saltbox, eat salty crackers

                        Salted hash; salted passwords

                        Salt cedars on the salt flats

Rub into wounds

Gifted women are merciless observers of the men they love in their lives; but not being inclined to theorize, they make no use of their discoveries except when provoked – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1024

That you believe doesn’t make what you believe true, even if it is true that you believe

Nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the God’s withdrawal – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p10

Polar bears, it turns out, are Irish. DNA studies have traced the ancestors of the Polar Bear back to a brown bear in Ireland 20,000 to 50,000 years ago

It was hard for him to draw the line between a new way of looking at something and a distortion of the ordinary way – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p986

Going To The Sun - What Gene Autry Thought

“You’re right there partner” said Charlie Manson. He is talking of railroading and places in Texas and Arizona.  And the price of gasoline in Utah.  Charlie Manson is standing on my left trying to get the bartender to notice the one dollar bill that he has placed on top of the bar. I have to leave. I have to go. He has only thirty two dollars in his pocket the scrawny little creep. He peels off another one to cover his tab. Lilith  says she just got back from Gainesville Florida. She had gone to her sister’s graduation. No it is her sister whose name is Lilith. Her name is Hannah. She has both names tattooed there on her neck. Charlie Manson as a pentagram on his forehead. She asked me if I were familiar with Gainesville. Yeah, I said, that’s where they finally fried that guy Bundy. I crossed his path a number of times. Manson asks the bartender, “wouldn’t you say there is a little bit of communism here?” The bartender agrees, “yeah”, he says, “there is a little bit of everything in all of us?” Manson nods his head. The Man in Black comes on the radio. It’s time to go but I stay until the end of this song. I gulp down the last few inches of my beer and go. The nursing students were still there studying – something about the symptoms of dementia…. Restlessness, sleep disruption, and…. I am gone. I go out into the night. I lose myself in the fog.

Man is unhappiness, he said over and over, I thought, only an idiot would claim otherwise. To be born is to be unhappy, he said, and so long as we live we reproduce this unhappiness, only death puts an end to it. That doesn’t mean that we are only unhappy… only though the detour of unhappiness can we be happy – Thomas Bernhard – The Loser, 1991  p65

You need a place in which

            You’ll never live

Need to dream about it

Any place to which you

            Move, you’ll ruin

“I move in, the rents

            Go up, coffee

            Shops become

French restaurants, useful

            Stores close” (Ian Frazier)

Going over Logan Pass – Going-To-

            The-Sun sunset in the rear mirror

Only a lone mountain ahead

            Only the sky

            And fenceless

Wheat

The car brakes down

            Two hundred miles on

            Out in the midst of infinity

Take a break, stretch the limbs

            It was a much happier time

So goddamn many stars

            Happiness is just beyond

            Hopalong Cassidy vaults on
                     Gallops off

The danger [is] that conventional man will adhere with growing obstinacy to the trivial surface of his conventional nature and acknowledge only the flatness of thess flatlands… [at] this the moment when man is about to assume domain of the earth as a whole – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p57

In many cases the only part of public education that remains public is the school itself

[He] has a feeling, that the time has come… When a lot of people have such a feeling, there may be something in it. But the time for what?... Well, we don’t need to know that yet – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1050

More Chinese live outside of China than French who live in France

Our civilization is a temple of what would be called unsecured mania, but it is also its asylum, and we don’t know if we are suffering from an excess or a deficiency – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p834

PRESIDENT NIXON

Dr Kissinger

            You wouldn’t know it

            From looking at him

But he’s been underground

A surreptitious life under

                        The sheets

News news news, prime

            Time in the US of A

I like conservatives but I’d

            Not like to find

General De Gualle in

             My bed

Capital-hiss; capital-hiss

Little yellow brains

            Fly about

For the moment one begins to take anything, no matter how foolish or tasteless, seriously and puts oneself on its level, it begins to reveal a rationale of its own, the intoxicating scent of its love for itself, its innate urge to play and to please – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1017

It takes three times as many people to operate an unmanned military aircraft as it does a manned fighter jet: 300 vs 100.

The history of the world is written before it happens; it always starts off as a kind of gossip – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p1064