- Everybody sucks on purpose.
- On the above.
- Meanwhile, I am telling you three times: we are being reprogrammed.
- Proper response to the above.
- I am telling you three times: by 2025 anyone not compelled by prior sentencing to beep GPS 24/7 and anyone not paying assholes to spy on oneself for them will be by law required to submit to a chip.
- If arrested for not having a chip, you will get a chip, you will pay for its implantation.
- Most resistance doesn't speak it's name: James Scott interview.
- Toxic Tour of Underground Ohio.
- Pitchfork tells me I'm Your Man released 30 years ago yesterday.
- The Trial of Victor Emnanuel III.
- Robert Mitchum asked Beefheart to get him pot?
- Two new Clark Coolidge poems (in Tom's daily).
- Joanne Kyger.
- New strategy: I read one chapter of LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness then a section of Gaddis' Recognitions then a section of Murnane's The Plains then a chapter of Krasznahorkai's The World Goes On then a section of Coolidge's A Book Beginning What and Ending Away then repeat. It blurs into one read, which I now jinx: it's working.
- Ten interesting field recordists.
- New Richard Youngs!
[He is pruning the privet]
Joanna Kyger
He is pruning the privet
of sickly sorrow desolation
in loose pieces of air he goes clip clip clip
the green blooming branches fall—‘they’re getting out
of hand’ delirious and adorable what a switch
we perceive multiple
identities when you sing so beautifully the shifting
clouds You are not alone is this world
not a lone a parallel world of reflection
in a window keeps the fire burning
in the framed mandala, the red shafted flicker
sits on the back of the garden chair in the rain
the red robed monks downtown in the rain a rainbow arises
simple country practices thunder
lightning, hail and rain eight Douglas Iris
ribbon layers of attention
So constant creation of ‘self’ is a tricky
mess He is pruning the loquat, the olive
which looks real enough in the damp late morning air
Man is the measure of all things, it is asserted - a footnote
ReplyDeleteIn his book Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (the title of which I greatly enjoy) philosopher of religion Huston Smith says that decades ago, when a new building to house the Philosophy Dept at Harvard was being built, the dept. voted to put the above statement over the entranceway. However, they were overruled, says Smith, and instead, the university president chose a verse from the Bible:
"What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?"
Smith goes on to recount that over the years ivy overgrew most of the motto, with the result that a former student of his, visiting the scene, noted that the only words legible were "that Thou art" - a refrain used, in some intentionally archaic translations of the Upanishads, to translate the claim that "atman = Brahman" - that the listener is him/herself a spark of the Divine Fire, a drop from the Ocean of Reality, a branch of the Vine.