Token to Borading House Denizens Around the Table from an Old Photo Album

In this boarding house it is crowed. It is crowded in this crowded city. Time is now. The place is sitting at this here formica topped dining table – eating (nothing fancy – an unidentified roasted meat, potatoes with lumpy gravey and some mashy peas). A friend of mine arrives and wants to be put up in this house. We make room for him in spite of some grumbling. He may have to sleep on the floor. Later someone else arrives and he gave my name as a reference (yes, I do believe I once met him and may have mentioned to him this place where I am staying). The landlord reluctantly gets up and finds him a space also. I hear a rumor the landlord  is pissed at me. I go to see him. He gives me a lecture about following the rules and says that he requires advance reservations of at least thirty days and that I’m never to do this again. I try to placate him. I don’t know why he is so pissed. He is making money hand over fist and has me as a scapegoat for the complaints from the other tenants regarding these crowded conditions – but everyone must play the game and I apologies and tell him I won’t do it again.

MONEY


Money is a token
Sometimes a token is money
Sometimes a token is ersatz money
Ersatz money is still money
All money is money
But not all tokens are money
Money is not any thing
Money is a token

Arm in arm with your / fiancé you stood // and glared into the lens (slightly out of focus) / while the public eye scrutinized your shape – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p116

To believe your own bullshit is often tragic or at the very least delusional

The tradition of dead generations weights like a bad dream on the minds of the living – Karl Marx – Eighteenth Brumaire

The value of the derivatives market is about ten times the value of the output of the entire global economy. The value of the US government’s commitment to bailout the banks who created this glut of derivative trading was a third of the value of the output of the global economy – or about one dollar for every 30 dollars in the derivative market.

Thinking for successful everyday adaptation requires not only factual knowledge, but the ability to recall it on the right occasion, to relate it to other occasions – Lawrence Weiskrantz – Consciousness Lost and Found, 1997

Poets have to be
     Creative
With the words of
     A language
They have to trod
     Unearthen paths
Flowcharts and recipe cards
      Are of no avail
Calendars nor stopwatches
      Mark progress
They are all on
      Their own, alone

The edge of steel and the glean of ivory are dulled, hives of bees, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air – Pliny the Elder

Only 52% of US personal income came from wages last year, another 17% came from government programs

The good numbers aren’t necessarily the winners, this being a matter of fate, not of money… which means that the losers can be lucky all the time – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p317

59% of adults now access the Internet wirelessly using a laptop or cellphone
[She] had known many men without becoming soiled; some women are like that, like horses caked in lather and the dust of the road, who emerge from the lake cleansed, so noble of form, so glowing with sunshine that you feel proud of them – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p300

Only two states flatly forbid civilians to carry concealed weapons – one state does not regulate concealed weapons at all, nine states have “may issue” concealed gun permits and the remaining 38 states require that concealed weapon permits “shall be” issued unless there exists a good reason for denying such a permit.

No such thing as a port! Not even a berth in the cemetery, unless you can produce half a loaf for the gravedigger – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p116

A Sheep dog – a self-descriptive term for a gun owner and advocate of concealed carry reflecting his believe that by carrying he is thereby protecting the rest of us [the sheep]. What I am curious aboutf is who is the Shepard of this methaphor?

The remedy is metaphysically achieved, not therapeutically: the cure does not lie in finding a cause and rooting it out – Henry Miller – The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941 p33

The victim injury rates of all violent crimes in the United States committed by felons with a weapon:
      Blunt object  36%
      Knives        28%
      Firearms      15%

There are … many sorts of memory, and emotional memory is one of the deepest and least understood – Oliver Sacks – Muscophilia: tales of music and the brain, 2007 p202

13% of the victims of a violent crime tried to attack or threaten the offender. About 2% of the victims use a weapon to defend themselves and about 1% bransihed a firearm. 30% of convicted felons claim to have had to face a firearm in the commission of a crime

Medical men are not interested in health, but in combating sickness and disease. Like other members of society, they function negatively – Henry Miller – The Wisdom to the Heart, 1960 p37

Americans Love Themselves and Treaten Assassins with Waterboarding

The tragedy of the utopia of a self-regulating market is that the state became the protector of capital rather then of man and no one gave a damn about the land

But a rational administration must be humane. Can inhumanity be rational? – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p81

The latest Pew research: Only Kenyans have a more favorable view of Americans than do Americans have of themselves. Among most Muslim populations modest levels of approval for Obama have begun to erode – in Pakistan confidence has gone from 13% to 8%. And while the residents of most countries have a favorable view of the United States and its President, they view the US as still acting unilaterally.

I call from memory an image of  The Rene Magaritte's Painting which I think is entitled “Menacing the Assassin”: It depicts an interior space with an outside scene of a landscape seen through a window. Thee are three persons seen though a doorway in the back of an alcove which is the centered in the frame. At the back of this space are two men with black bowler hats standing with  club like weapons in their hands to both the left and to the right of the alcove. In the alcove is a nude female figure is stretched out on a gurney and a man in a suit talking into the horn of a gramophone. There is a wainscoting running along the walls. The floor is constructed of very wide wooden planks.

I look up an image of the painting. It is actually titled - The Menaced Assassin (I almost got it right). Outside the interior space is a balcony over which three male heads appear. Behind the three men is a mountainous landscape.. Behind the three men is a mountainous landscape. Only one of the bowler hated gentlemen has a club, the other one to his right has a net which he is holding with both hands. The woman is not on a gurney but a sofa. There is a chair in the foreground just inside the alcove with a long coat draped over the back and a brimmed man’s hat lying on its seat . Behind the chair is an overnight suitcase. The gramophone sits on a draped table in the fore right corner of the alcove, There is a light source originating on the upper left side of the picture. So it seems that I don't have a photographic memory - not that I ever thought that I did.

The only thing that must remain officially foreign to a nation’s leader are tears, desperate suffering the most human of human things… - Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p126

If waterboarding is done by foreign countries then the US press will generally call it torture (85% of the articles mentioning waterboarding in non-American contexts) but if it is performed by the United States they will not associate it with the concept of torture (the associations of the two terms occur in only 8% of such articles).

Were there is an anguish and hunger, silence is more eloquent. It wastes less breath and its safer – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p161

A slice is a simplification
Of the whole
(A Poincare section)
When sliced through
It yields it’s full
Quasi-causal component


And also the entire set
Of attractors defining each system
Although it cannot be done mathematically

Either debt ridden consumers return to the trenches of greater spending or we will be forced to shoot a few for cowardness in the face of the enemy. Only by this means will we succeed with a frontal assault on recession – only by such means can we impose discipline on this mess.

Remember us to the shop girls. / Say we have seen no legs better than theirs, / we have the sea to stare at, its treason, copiousness, tedium – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p117

Not so ‘strangely naïve and ultimately perplexing” after all - we do it all the time with commodities

I bought some little girls on the bus pink and yellow balloon flowers. They had no money and were enraptured by the women who had just come from a children’s party at a bourgeoisie residence in a better part of town. The balloon lady said “May you get five hundred times the return on your gift.” I suspected that she didn’t make much money doing children’s birthday parties. Their little brother got a blue sword. Then two more little girls cried for balloon flowers and their mothers paid. Hey Pinkie!  Hey its Pinkie the Clown.

To manifest:  "positive thinking" terminology for charging items to maxed out credit cards that are desired but not needed in order to enhance one’s self-esteem

If you were to interview a hypothetical intelligent fish and inquire as to the nature of its environment, you would probably hear “It is very wet down here.” – David P Barash – How Women Got Their Curves – 2009 p2

The quality of a tavern is not to be judged by how many beers they have on tap, but if they have any porter and an IPA among them (the best tavern will also have an ESP too).

Strategy is More Than Just a Beer or Two in the Late Afternoon

I had just recalled some distant memory - but as fast as it had come, it went. All that I remember is that there had been a trigger for that specific memory. I don't think that it was the rubbing alcohol, there was no such smell present. And the smell of a freshly butchered hog is the same as the smell of war but too often the smell of propellants and of explosives cover up the smell of death itself and the collateral coagulated blood. I have not been recently amidst any death. No, it has to be the bit sized pretzels that is this bar’s appetizer - those salty beer demanding morsels. I bit into another - no - no there is no associated memory of death here. So where is my tea and my Madeline? And all this thought of death gets me to thinking that I am dying - maybe within this  month, maybe right here on the stool on which I now sat, and that was not  just depressing but very depressing and I sank into a funk.

Historians fabricate greatness, as they call it, because they are mediocrities with lame imaginations – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p84

The bartender says that it will be a good night. I want to ask how he can tell, but he had moved on down the bar. Two hours later and the place if filling up, with daylight savings time it is still light outside. Between the jukebox and the chatter a cacophony is building into a roar. The bartender refills the empty pretzel trays again. I can hear his voice but can't make out anyone else individual voice, just noise. I am beyond reading and I order another pint of Sac Brew red and nuzzle my beer as the sun sets.

Strategy is not a game of chess players with a quantity of machines; it is above all a duel of wills – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p132

A cute little Asian girl is trying to slug a boilermaker. She can’t manage it, but her friends are cheering her on. One boilermaker being more than enough for her. She buries her check into her boyfriend’s forearm like a mare wanting a sugar cube. She puts on her black wool sweater and they leave.

His lips tasted sour, his teeth were dry. Rapture is like that, bitter and violent, it hurtles out of the black sky onto the helpless creature and sears it – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p122

Does Justin Timberlake’s stint as a Mousekateer really count? No, No No! It does not – he was not a real Mousekateer. Umpta ta umpta, umpta ta umpta hey hey umpta ta umpta bing bing bing. The bartender is reading Bartending for Dummies and trying to market some new well drinks. He doesn’t like the Moscow Mule but wants to try out a Slippery Nipple on Cynthia and I. It reminds me, I say, of why I don’t like sweet drinks. And? he asks. Because I can’t pace myself. Ah!, he replies. And the Slippery Nipple makes it real difficult for me to return to my beer. Annette, Tommy, Darlene, Bobby, Doreen, Chubby, Karen, Bonnie and Sharon were mousekateers - and I'll even throw in Cheryl, but Justin - no way!

The only way to know for certain that a particular path is a dead end is to walk down it a bit and see what happens – David P Barash – How Women Got Their Curves – 2009 p4

There is a fog in the  Fillmore tonight. I scuttle along obscured in its mist, headed for a warm cup of coffee as the foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge bugles bluesly

Years passed, wars passed, crushing millions of innocent, cities crumbled, a civilization was dying, and the same problems were rearing their heads… The river shimmered – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p277

Truman’s popularity rating during his first three months as President was higher than Roosevelt’s had ever been

The world was in its death throes, we were dying like flies, these people were dining in their customery way, official, over weight, at ease, accomplices in everything… No own will ever understand it? – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p270

What you gain by violence you can only retain by violence

I make just enough to live on… I could easily get rich, like others do… The idea made me ashamed, and I choose instead to pass for a fool. Living among wolves, it would be reasonable to lean what to bite like wolves – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p310

Pre-Columbian American population – how many people lived in the Americas before 1492? No one really knows but guesstimates range from 10 to 140 million. The threshold number of 60 million has some importance as that was the population of Europe at that time and the relative ratio of Americans vs Europeans seems to have some magical significance depending on the political agenda of a specific historian. There is a consensus population figure of 54 million by William Denevan. What does seem to be agreed upon is the relative size of the populations in the various regions of the Americas: Aztec empire – 33%, Inca empire – 33%, American north of Mexico – 10%, Central America – 12%, remainder of South America – 10%, Caribbean – 0.5%.

Seize History


From dead men you hear no more
They are the exception
Destiny is yours
You can tell your tale
And they can’t
Dead men don’t report back
And they never will.

[The] rigidly serious, are among the most playful of people, constantly playing various ‘mind games’ upon the natural world – David P Barash – How Women Got Their Curves – 2009 px

God Wants You to Buy a Gun, It is Part of God's Plan

Pastorprenurs –  are self-styled protestant religious leaders who use business principles rather than theology to fill their parking lots. Full parking lots being their equivalent to “butts in seats” which would be considered a crass usage of language. Their megachurches have more in common with MacDonalds then thy doe with local parish houses of worship and their architecture is corporate in inspiration - boxy and metallic. Target audience rather than community is their principle focus. They conduct surveys of the unaffiliated rather than canvassing their congregations. They stand in three-piece suits in front of fake waterfalls rather than wear vestments in front of crosses. And it all works – their coffers get replenished. It is the way God wants it to be afterall.

The trinity; a trinity
Is always three
And the three always
Constitute a trinity but
Not always The trinity


The family consististing of
     The father
     The virgin Mary
     And their son
But wait, Joseph makes
      It a foursome


Laisse faire – a labor market
             (the holy ghost)
       A self-regulating currency
              (the father)
       And free trade (the son)


Our constitutional democracy
        The legislature (labor under
               the authority of the employer)
         The President (no hindrance
               on the exchange of goods)
         The Supreme Court (an incorruptible
                currency based on the stability of gold)
          Elected every three years – no that’s not right!
          But would be if you averaged the biannial and quadrannial
                Elections


We must not be perturbed
          By minor inconsistences
          They are God's test of
                   Our faith in his Plan
          God wants you to own a gun


Everything has it’s own rules
         Three strikes and your out
         After three bases you can come
                 Home
         After three watered beers you
                  Need to take a pee
                  I know that I need to

To appreciate present conditions / collate them with those of antiquity – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003– p85

At 3:15 this morning a big rig overturned with a fatality. It has now been cleared. I’m getting nit picky and fussy - I got a spot of Crystal Pepper Sauce on my shirt and I just had to change it. It would never have bothered me before. I’m reading my previous field notes. I have just started book three [I'm now on volume 64].  I have purchased an additional four sketchbooks and some water-soluble wax pastels. I plan to soon start adding a little color to this endeavor. I need to get a small day back pack to carry around everything that I am now using, its now more than just a pen and pad, it’s now a project.

What then is the result when people are commanded, encouraged, or – better yet freed up to play at being human? Our guess is that prominent among the outcomes would be play itself – David P Barash – How Women Got Their Curves – 2009 p.x

I am thinking of giving my thirty day notice on my apartment as of July 1 - the eighth anniversary of my lease. I had made a mental note of something that I wanted to write down when I got to the coffee shop but now that I am here,  I have no idea what it was. Now I remember – breakfast, my breakfast menu. I made breakfast at home which is rare for me - scrambled eggs, bacon, hash brown potatoes, toast with strawberry jam and banana-strawberry-orange juice. I found my way to a sunny bench at the arboretum that was not otherwise being used by napping homeless men. It overlooks the redwood (cypress) forest rather than the lily pond with wild irises that are in bloom, but unoccupied benches in the sun are rare - you take what you can. So why make my own breakfast? Why start cooking now. It’s not just the economics. Its that breakfast is not a social time. One does not engage in breakfast conversations with strangers. So why bother going out? So my basic routine for now is to get up and go out for coffee. Come back and do choirs and make my breakfast. Then I putter around and  leave for the day around noon or a by early afternoon at the latest. I try out another coffee shop or I go to a museum or like today  I might go somewhere outside. Today I went to the arboretum. A late afternoon tea and then each my evenings are devoted to beer. Then I come back home and go to bed and then I resume the routine early the next day and the day after that.

Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind repels me against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am affected and what it is that affects me – Sigmund Freud

The sea gulls cover the rocks with guano after they have bathed in these fresh water ponds. They congregate and wash and preen on these rocks. Then they go flapping out on wing, clearing the big cyprus at the end of five looping circles over the pond. A mallard scoots in for a landing. With flaps down it almost stalls out before easing itself onto the water's suface. Five turtles have hauled themselves out onto a sunny rock. There are five benches around the lake upon which six people sit.

In the pursuit of pleasure we have become habituated to displays of stupidity

One cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, [but] there may be ways to infer it – Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia, 2007 p190

Where ever you go you find people spouting the jargon of the marketplace whether from the pulpit or within their bedrooms

Individualism – once you get beyond the crude Darwinian law of war of all against all – is no more than a sorry delusion – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p8

55% of the US labor force claim to have experienced some work-related hardship in the past three years. Among the currently employed 28% have had their hours of work reduced and 23% have been subject to pay cuts. 38% claim to have been unemployed or underemployed during this period. The young and members of minority populations tend to be the most optimistic that things will improve during the coming year. Only 3% believe however that the recession is over. Americans still overwhelmingly believe that this is the land of prosperity.

Women are more damaged than we are. This world is crueler to women… Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p85

It is claimed that the “new privileged class in America” consists of government employees [among whom we can count teachers and firemen and policemen and members of the armed forces – but I think that those making this claim are thinking of regulators and bureaucrats and inspectors]. It is claimed that they are better paid “than the people who pay their salaries” [Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels] which is nonsense – they actually earn 11 to 12% below their comparable private sector workers. It's the one's without a comprable equivalent in the private market that I worry about - say like generals and tax collectors.

Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured – Thucydides

It's Raining Again - The Farmers Say They Don't Need No More Of It

I parked in front of the coffeehouse at 6:28. It wasn’t open yet – the sign was not lit, it was still in the dark inside , thou I could see someone moving about. I sat and waited. The dairy’s truck arrived. It was now 6:33 and I knew she would be busy for a while so I drove the block over to the other coffee shop. There I was greeted by the cheerful talkative young lady wearing her short shorts – she will eventually have a bunch of kids and get fat and lazy but right now she is cute and sweet.

The gentlemen of England judged all persons poor who did not command an income sufficient to keep them in leisure – Karl Polanyi - The Great Transformation, 1944 p87 – in other words wage earners and any one else who has to work (who is not a member of the landed class) – if you are not a rentier (living off of your investments) you are poor – there are the wealthy and there are the poor. The middle class was an anomaly as we are beginning to discover on our own.

They are all salesmen
On their thankless roads
        To partial success
The home office is riding
        Their asses
But without quality assurances
        What can they do
They are told to rid yourselves
        Of their negativity
        Thank only of 'Yes'
        They have been told
That’s what individualism means
This ability to say Yes
Remove anything else
         From your minds
Don’t get spanked with your
         Competitor’s sign
Go out there and throw
          That wining punch
Let’s get with it boys!
Management always talks
          (as generals do too)
          As if it were their own blood
          That was being shed

The suspension of disbelief and the swift orientation to the passively received bombardment by unexpected visual stimuli may approximate aspects of the infant’s state of being – Michael Greenberg – New York Review of Books [March 11, 2010] p26

Americans view themselves as more hard working, more inventive and as more honest than do most foreigners view them. Americans view themselves as less rude and less violent than the residents of other countries view them. Curiously Americans also view themselves as more immoral than do others view them, but this may be because Americans thank of immorality as necessity for success, in other words as a positive characteristic (not hampered by nambi pambi ethical questions – or as the Nike likes to put it -  Just Do It)

Hour and hour / meeting against me / efficiently whipped cream / efficiently metropolitan chatter and snap, / transparent glistening wrapper / for a candy pack – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p34

There is either a substitutability for creativity nor stupidity

Love’s an encumbrance to them who rinse carefully before using, better / keep yourself to yourself – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p38

Both the Drs Spock and Seuss begin their careers in the leftist New York photo newspaper PM (the initials standing for Photo Magazine). The paper was funded by Chicago millionaire Marshal Field and accepted no advertising. Other contributors to the paper included: Erskin Caldwell, McGeorge Bundy, Heywood Hale Broun, I F Stone, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, Tip O’Neile, Ben Hecht. Quit a newspaper. To bad no one read it (or at least enough of them to make a profit – even socialist activities must be self-supporting). That it accepted no advertising was not the problem – no leftist publication was ever been sustained by advertising (after all who is it that pays for advertising – maybe it will prove beneficial to move away from the advertising model for news – but somehow I doubt it). And in the Star it’s successor which only lasted for six months, Walt Kelly first published Pogo.

I do hear, but in a way I hear too much. I absorb everything equally, to a degree that becomes at times a real torture. How does one listen with no filtering system – Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia, 2007 p113

I don’t just jump around the room on one leg but also hopped around while masterbating – no one else came up with this particular method – it made my motivation coach proud – look at how many ways there are to get around the room – look how creative you all are – and indeed I was proud of my creativity. What did you learn today, my mother asked when I got home. And I told her about the motivational coach having us come up with as many ways of getting around the room as we could.

Daydreaming comes easy to the ill; / slowed down to the speed of waiting rooms, / you learn to hang suspended in the wallpaper, / to drift among the magazines and plants, / feeling a strange love / for the time that might be killing you – Tony Hoagland – Donkey Gospel, 1998 p16

Failure is generally viewed as a lack of resolve – if more of the same had been applied, a better effort made, then the hump would have been transversed and the task would have been accomplished – any real recognition of structural failure is either hindsight or it is revolutionary – both the lack of resolve and revolutionary approaches to problem solving involve much misery, but only the former adds guilt, debts and failure to the mix. Revolution replaces failure with uncertainty. People do not like uncertainty, but they don’t like boredom either.

They won’t understand… / why we press our faces / deep into artificial flowers, ./ half-hoping to be stung by bees… Tony Hoagland – Donkey Gospel, 1998 p46

Monkeys Prefer the Simpsons to Family Guy. Some Monkeys Consider South Park Nothing Special Which Results in Frequent Knife Fights

Some

The reported number of US citizens targeted for assignation by their own government has been increased form only 3 six months ago to “dozens”. “There are in my mind, dozens of US persons who are in different parts [in a Yemen or in a Pakistan – in countries other than Iraq or Afghanistan] of the world and they are very concerning to us.” [John O Brennan]

We posses the illusion of truth when we are consistent with a consensus – the trick is to restrict those with whom we associate. If you believe that gain and greed are man’s natural lot it says a lot about who you are hanging out with. The convenience of mediated communications is that it makes such consensus building simple – even the stupid can do it and most of them are good at it.

As long as a democratic façade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment – Chris Hedges

The day had hardly even
     Got underway when
Morning traffic was in
      A gridlock
A woman with fiery red hair told
      Me not to worry
I sat there and sipped lukewarm
      Fair trade coffee
The line for cappuccino had been
      Long and slow
She put her long legs up on
      The dash with both
       Hand cradling her beverage container
If you want to keep it warm
       Put it here between my legs she said
But traffic began to move again and I resumed
       Watching for red taillights
Concentrating on my progress
        Or lack thereof
I didn’t notice that she was gone – the
        Passenger seat was now empty
        Except for puddle of
Spilt coffee

The revolver under my pillow – my brain was seizing it, but a brain without hands is nothing – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p33

These two big stout boys wear on their heads flat tops from which aircraft could have taken off and have bombed those with whom they wared. But their white hats protected and concealed their deadly arsenals. They are instead speaking business, talking business speak - for which many are conversant but to whom very few actually listen. They had taken blue pills, it seemed,  to sleep and had not calculated their correct windows. Lillie of the valley, all in black tonight, sweet iris wading in my lily pond. How sweet it is to be loved by you. How sweet it is to be loved by you.

It takes a simple mind to see simple solutions to simple problems.

Oh, Oh, she has a big shiny black plastic purse - oh, oh - Rambo - oh, oh - Rambo – I’m having a flashback of  my Vietnamese torture - Asian Lily in black pajamas - Eau de Cologne of the jungle. Esmeralda or was it Matilda with her diamond nose studs slings the beer and the good doctor is crying, bent down over the bar sobbing.

I see you, G & T in hand, in your favorite chair, / squinting as you take another drag – Alan Jenkins – “A Late Lunch” (2003)

To have knowledge is to be an insider, to be able to define value - a preserver of what is - to be an author is such a privilege, to pray at an alter not yet convinced. You know there is a difference between a writer and an author? I know. Does he really know? Or is he just agreeing with me? I didn’t ask. Why did I not ask? Am I afraid that he might know that I know  - that he is amusing me - killing time - just being polite – afraid to arouse this sleeping dragon – does he think I’m just another mad man, any old mad man, or maybe he thinks that I am just a common drunk - how insulting?

There is no record of any greater. / It causes a religious revival. / Months… / Years… / … / Nobody mentions it now. // This is the unstable world and / we in it unstable in our houses – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p86

Damn it this is now, I want to say. This (now) is all that there is. And what the hell is the difference between an author and a writer? You don’t know do you? You are not going to admit that you don’t know, are you? This is precisely why I haven’t asked you to distinguish the difference. So it is up to me, is it? He closes his book and finishes off his beer and moves to the other end of the bar.

Every synesthete has his own color correspondence – Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia, 2007 p172

I want, wah aunt! A bald headed lady with a chrome dome, oiled and shinned to perfection. She had been quiet until know. She had not said a word before she suddenly piped up. I am startled. Someone has yelled into my ear. One of the guys with the aircraft carrier haircuts is pouring a pinot noire for all the ladies at the bar. He thinks he is a sommelier. I ask the barmaid if she is charging a corkage fee. Someone comments on his hair style. It is not only I who has noticed it. Yes, he replies, I’m going for the Boy Dylan look. He had told me that he liked Condi Rice’s spunk but said she had said nothing new. On this we agreed.

She has the smell of spearmint and such a tiny bone structure. My eyes were following her gestating fingers. Her hand would fit comfortably in my small mitt. I think I can detect her natural smelll. Natural smells are sexy. I move my thigh close to hers and feel the throbing of  her body heat. This is sexy too - espically if you don't touch. I  wonder if she too  detects the immination of warm as my blood surges.  I wonder if I will I get home in time for the Simpsons.

Until we say the truth, there can never be tenderness. / As long as there is desire, we will not be safe – Tony Hoagland – Donkey Gospel, 1998 p65

Ideological inconsistence is, for me practically an article of faith – Zadie Smith – Changing My Mind

Attack the state and you attack the capitalists which is counter to liberal economic ideology

In exposing objective reason as an ideology, radicalism leaves itself no means of legitimizing its own critique of injustices, exploitation, and of course realism, well I am fed up with that condition… I want out of here – Raymond Federman – The Twofold Vibration, 1982 p124

Lincoln scholarship is a safe scholarship so long as it doesn’t cross the line of “re-writing”

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world – Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism

Driving Monkeys on the Goodnight-Loving Trail

I hear someone yelling “Fred, Fred, Just the man I wanted to see. I need a strong back.” It is Jeff and he wants help moving a TV – it’s not a flat screen he informs me, its as deep as it is wide. And it was. And it was bulky. And it was heavy. And it was awkward to pick up, but we only had to carry it twenty feet. It was getting it to fit on the stand that was the problem. It was like manipulating an object wider than the jam through the opening of that door – it can be done but it becomes an engineering proposition. We got it done and he bought me a beer. I finished my book and returned it to my truck that I had parked around the corner in order to retrieve another book when I heard again “Fred, Fred”. This time it was Joe who was on the patio smoking, “Where are you going?” I didn’t take the time to explain but got my book and returned. I joined him on the patio where I informed him that he had lost his bet with Brian. You owe me a buck, I told him, for every year that you are off – he was off by eight years.

Anger at injustice, as Martin Luther King wrote, is the political expression of love – Chris Hedges

For a motivational coach – failure is success – you didn’t try hard enough (some would have you believe that God is a motivational coach) – you need more of what they have to offer. Beware of schemes that do not provide for graduated success. There is always a catch – it is never their fault. It is always your fault. Some predict with the collapse of the Prosperity Economy there will be an even greater demand for positive thinking and thereby motivational coaching – some industries are always recession proof. More of the same that causes the problem is usually the solution to that problem. Yep, that seems to make sense to me. Get rid of all of the negativity – go out and buy. We need more motivational speakers. Many many more. We can grow this economy with coaching alone. We can spend our downtime attending motivational seminars and maybe we can get the governement to pay for it or at least quarentee loans for our seminar fees and the purchase of their books and their tapes and their tailsmen so we can begin to grow this economy - Oh yeah!

We cannot read the tombs in the eastern prairie, / Who slew the Franks, who / swam the Yellow River – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p114

My new bumper sticker reads: “Obama a Socialist? - I Wish!”

To embrace risk for the sake of the group required no justification. But a risk incurred for oneself? He told himself coarsely: “To live only for oneself is barren – like masturbation” – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p22

Tis a morning of cowboy music
         The dobro in clinking
         The man in the hat
                Is yodeling
Oooh oooh ha oooh
…. from riding the prairie
Oooh oooy ha oooh
The sun is glaring
The grass is waving
My butt is aching
          Sitting in the saddle
          All these hours
I take off my big hat
I whip my brow with a red bandana
          I mop the sweat from my eyes
I ride sleepily behind
          A million drowsy cows
          There is the smell of phoo
                 In the air. It is
Sweet

I would harness ten bulls to my voice / and pass my hand through the darkness like a plough / And in the depth of the watchful night / the eyes would flare at the labourer’s earth – Osip Mandelstam – The Voronezh Notebooks, 1996 p79

Keep me in the loop
I’m going the extra mile
We’re all on the team together
          Here
          After
          All
While multitasking along the way
          There should
          Never be no
          Down
          Time
          Today
Deviation produces distrust
And an insufficient return
          Cash
          Flow
          Is
          CRITICAL
Success means
          Saying YES
And YES is a performance
           Measure in itself
YES! (And I jabbed my
          clenched left fist
          in the air)

The hoops of danger tighten without warning and you can’t breath – Victor Serge – The Unforgiving Years, 2007 p38

I wish I may, I wish I might upon the first slug I’ve seen tonight

Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination – Gerald M Edelman

I am sure that it was therapeutic but now I know more about Muriel Whitcome than ever I wanted to know - and I hadn’t wanted to know anything to begin with. She claims to have made a big deal to get it produced in Hollywood but the bartender and I have our doubts. I am somewhat intrigued by her ability to shift character and see herself in the third person. I have read about forty pages of the manuscript she had dumped on the bar and refuse to read any more.

James Taylor - Sweet Baby James - Call me if you want to. I’ll come running…

A mason times his mallet / to a lark’s twitter, / listening while the marble rests – Basil Bunting – Collected poems, 2003 p59