Green Barb Wire and Saw Palmettos

Green barbed wire – catbriar vines with thick thrones usually scrambling up tree trunks can form impenetrable thickets. Saw palmetto dominates the understory. Lying close to the ground with prostrate trunks – saw-like teeth along their leaf steams.

The aim is to understand, not to judge. The hope is that if one understands enough poems, enough religions, enough societies, enough philosophies, one will have made oneself into something worth one's own understanding. - Richard Rorty (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism

Ultramarine

See Yellow

See Red

See Black &

            White

See Deep Blue

The laundry is done.  The bed has been made. Breakfast has been consumed. The rain is over. The day is half done

The examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its marks on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification… The examination is as it were, the ceremony of this objectification – Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish, 1979  p187

Its 12:12 on 12/12/12 for the second time today. What does it signify? Absolutely nothing. It’s an arbitrary sequence of numbers. It’s a place marker on an arbitrary time line. It means nothing other than that the number twelve gets repeated, over and over. More such dates will occur. Many already have passed.

Cambridge has ‘courts’; Oxford has ‘quadrangles’

All of the kids gather up near the edge of the stage. The like the umph-pa of the tuba. They hop up and down. It’s a dance. This guy thinks I look Native American. He’s from Williamsburg Virginia but came here to take care of his invalid father. He’s taken a job with Alcoa and has to learn the OSHA manual by Monday. He has it open in front of him. They have tickets to the eight o’clock show of the Bathhouse Players. The kids are holding hands and hopping about to the tuba and accordion. The singer has lips like Mick Jagger. There’s a little kid sitting on the stage between his father with the tuba and his mother on the accordion. He has a rattle. The wife has not finished eating. The show is about to start. They grab the kids and depart. The bartender’s name is Bret. I thought they had said Fred and had been calling him that all night. He wants to pay his bill. “If I only knew his name.” “Fred”, I said. The bartender respnds, “Bret.” I can’t tell the difference. I have learned to spell my name, “F R E D”, I say, so that they won’t mistake what I say with “Bret”. It’s that  lazy southern accent that turns Bret into Bread which is heard as Fred.

Anything can be normalized

Everything can become mundane

Life can be lived with contempt

Managed democracy is not a form of democracy at all – nor is representative democracy for that matter.

These peculiar times: the surveilled surveilling the surveillor who’s surveilling him – Jonathan Raban – Driving Home, 2010 p309

Waffles aren’t just for breakfast. Breakfast is good any time. Anythime your hungry is a good time to break fast. Part of this complete breakfast. Hell, almost anything can be part of a complete breakfast. But not everything can be part of a healthy life style.

The lights go down. The noise goes up. Someone wants to know what I’m doing. Do you do this often, she asks? Is she cute?  Is she by herself? The bartender is running as fast as he can. He is just a blur. Slow down Dave or you’ll turn into butter. Do people look at you like your weird, she asks me? She says her name is KC (it might have been Casie – she didn’t spell it). She says she’s interested in sociology. She asked me if I am a sociaologist. No, I replied. I’m sort of drunk, she tells me. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’, she says. Most people just say ‘Oh’ when I tell them that I’m just writing. “Oh”, she says and gets her drinks and rejoins her boyfriend. Either that or they want to know what I’ve published. They want to tell their friends that they met someone famous. But if they’re drunk they probably won’t remember who it was. “Could you write that down for me?” “Sure,” I reply, and write “James Joyce”  on a napkin and hand it to her. Not familiar with the name, she says. It unlikely any of their friends will be either. KC (or maybe it was Casie) thought that a sociaologist was someone who liked people. Yes, well then, I am a sociologist, I has tell her.

Wear the mask from anthrax. / Watch your noodles, your kit and caboodles; / The terrorist have taken Everest! – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p89

A Little Ripple In Time

A white zinfadel is better than no wine at all

Any Shostakovich

Is better than no Shostakovich

Potato chips make you fat

And you get old and decrepit

And yet they’ll still call you honey

            But not when you have no money

I can live without honey

            But not without Shostakovich

And if it just could be as simple

            As Richard Feynman demonstrated

With that bucket of ice water

Then I might be able to forgo

            A string quartet or two

But I gotta have the wine

But heaven forbid

            That it be Mad Dog or T-Bird

Occassionaly some Ripple perhaps

            When I can’t afford  anything better

Sweet wine sets my teeth on edge

            Until I get decscenitized

Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it – Raymond Carver – Where I’m Calling From, 1989 p144

Mass shootings of strangers is the US equivalent of suicide bombers but without the political agenda – psycho terrorism or an asocial society?

In contrast to citizen-as-occasional-voter, the lobbyist is a full-time “citizen” – Sheldon S Wolin – Democracy Omc: managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism, 2008  p194

What Baudelaire Likes

Her hair on the pillow

A heart atremble like a baby bird

To fly above morbid miasma

To the charming smiles of angels

Here the dark storm of youth rages

Time and the damn enemy that gnaws my heart

To plunge as into the bosom of your image

Entwined in blue like a misunderstood Sphinx

A strong criminal soul desiring

Of naked perfumed slaves

To survey at leisure her magnificent parts

Oh, my Giantess when nature brought forth child monsters

And beauty, who cares – whether from heaven or from hell

Led me by scent toward fascinating parts

The perfume of green tamarind trees

Oh fleece, oh ringlets, oh petrified perfume!

Ecstasy! This evening

Passionately drunken

Like a chorus of worms

My fine cat retracts her claws

I like you that way!

Hair, living sachet, bedroom censer

Don’t look for my heart, the beasts have eaten it.

Not as ourselves / we sit on the barstools of Winter / remembering August – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p63

You’ve got another thing/think coming. Historically it was “think”. The present usage favors “thing”. Think has more interesting implications. Another think coming means that you need to rethink what you’re going to do. Another thing coming implies that you will be disappointed by the consequences of your action. If you don’t rethink, then you will have another thing coming. It is difficult to tell if the speaker is pronouncing a ‘k’ or a ‘g’.

Capitalism has two ways of dealing with leisure, stigmatizing it within an ideology of unemployment, or taking it up into itself to make it profitable. The dividing line cuts between prosperity and suffering and it makes a great deal of difference on which side one falls – Susan Buck-Morss – The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore

Naked ladies with numbers

Before Brazilian wax

            Or Lady Shiecks

            In B&W they wore beehives

Some with armbands

            Others wear cowboy hats

            With a number in the hat band

Ladies hold your number

            High so the judges

                        Can see them

Numbers two, seven and twelve

            Remain on the runway

Pass in review again, please

Ladies of the night to the right

            The rest to the left

They all wear high heels

            Numbers held high

Geeks in glasses stare

            Old men have cameras snap away

They are escourted by a

            Naked man with a child’s pretend

            Space helmet on his head

           

Sometimes they don Indian war bonnets

            With turkey feathers colored with analine dyes

            Bright rubies, emeralds and saphires

Dinner coupons for two at the Olive Garden

            For our finaliast

With a hundred dollar gift certificate redeamable

            At Wal-Mart going to the winner