Also too!
Bamster from Heltsville, Happy Birthday!
- A novel I started on a dare working, weird, just jinxed it, meyourdailyfuckwit, I feel bilingual, disloyal, I work as hard against it working as I work for Proust who I've no intention of fluenting French so tourist me for please stop not to work, fine fucking metaphors abound
- Help your independent bookstore
- Covid-19 and the Color Line
- The inevitable coronavirus censorship crisis is here: We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
- Trump the Liar versus Biden the Liar
- Biden, the Democrats' Democrat: Joe Biden is not an “imperfect candidate” for the Democrats. He is the perfect candidate, because he’s everything the party is: Demented. Decrepit. Bloodthirsty. Corrupt. Cronyistic. Authoritarian. Reactionary. Rapey. He is exactly what they deserve. He is exactly what they are.
- I hate motherfucking Democrats
- Myth of the Mole
- Plotting what it was went away
- Neko Case's flaming hamster wheel of panic
- Chapter 26 and (most of) Chapter 27 from This Incredible Sex Comedy
- Review of Mantel's The Mirror and the Light. I did just reread Wolf Hall, first of the three, and I will read the second and this, the third, maybe, I can't imagine when
- Joseph Cornell's constellations
A DISPLAY OF MACKERAL
Mark Doty
They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity
barred with black bands,
which divide the scales’
radiant sections
like seams of lead
in a Tiffany window.
Iridescent, watery
prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soapbubble sphere,
think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way
distinguished from the other
—nothing about them
of individuality. Instead
they’re all exact expressions
of the one soul,
each a perfect fulfilment
of heaven’s template,
mackerel essence. As if,
after a lifetime arriving
at this enameling, the jeweler’s
made uncountable examples,
each as intricate
in its oily fabulation
as the one before
Suppose we could iridesce,
like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer—would you want
to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They’d prefer,
plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting
forward, heedless of stasis.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
all, all for all,
the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,
or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.
Bappy Hirthday, Bamster from Heltsville.
ReplyDeleteThanks, bdr! It's always good (I suppose) to be resurrected. The Neko Case helps. Now get your damn arse out and hike with Earthgirl!
ReplyDeletewith respect to biden the liar, i was familiar with his political lies, but i did not know the following - bruce e. levine writes
ReplyDeletePerhaps it is just me, but I find it especially pathetic when someone exploits family tragedy for political purposes with a lie that creates personal tragedy for someone else.
Specifically, it is Biden’s lie about the horrific traffic accident in 1972 that resulted in the tragic death of his first wife and his baby daughter, as well as resulting in severe injuries to his sons. The truth is that Biden’s then wife was hit by a truck after she drove into an intersection in which the truck had the right of way, and the police investigation cleared the truck’s driver from any blame. To gain greater sympathy for himself, Biden repeatedly lied to the public saying that the truck driver, Curtis Dunn, was a man who “drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch.” This falsehood of course deeply hurt Dunn. His family made many attempts to get Biden to correct it, and finally in 2009, after Curtis Dunn was dead, Biden called Dunn’s daughter to apologize.
speaking of a hamster risen from the grave, the following passage is from meetings with remarkable men by g.i. gurdjieff
ReplyDeleteI saw a group of women at the comer talking excitedly. I went up to them and learned the following: That night in the Tartar quarter a gornakh had appeared. This was the name there of an evil spirit which used the bodies of people who had recently died and appeared in their shape to do all sorts of villainies, especially to the enemies of the dead person.
This time one of these spirits had appeared in the body of a Tartar who had been buried the day before, the son of Mariam Batchi. I knew about the death and burial of this man, as his house was next to our old house, where our family had lived before our departure for Kars and where I had gone the day before to collect the rent from the tenants. I had also called on several Tartar neighbours and had seen the body of the dead man being carried out. He was a young man who had recently joined the police guard, and he used to visit us. I had known him very well.
Several days before, during a dzhigitovka[trick riding] contest, he had fallen from his horse and, as they said, had twisted his intestines. Although a military doctor, named Koulchevsky, had given him a full glass of mercury to 'readjust his intestines', the poor man had died and, according to the Tartar custom, was buried very soon. Then this evil spirit, it seems, entered his body and tried to drag it back home, but someone, happening to see this, raised an outcry and rang the alarm, and to prevent the spirit from doing any great harm the good neighbours quickly cut the throat of the body and carried it back to the cemetery.
It is believed there among the followers of the Christian religion that these spirits enter exclusively the bodies of Tartars because, according to the Tartar custom, the coffin is not deeply buried at first but only lightly covered with earth, and food is often put inside. It is difficult for spirits to go off with the bodies of Christians buried deep in the earth, and that is why they prefer Tartars. This incident completely stupefied me. How could I explain it to myself? What did I know?
I looked round me. Gathered at the corner were my uncle, the esteemed Giorgi Mercourov, and his son, who had nearly finished school, and a police official, all talking about this. All were generally respected; all had lived much longer than I and surely knew many things that I had not even dreamed of. Did I see in their faces indignation, grief or astonishment? No: they even seemed to be glad that somebody had succeeded this time in punishing the evil spirit and warding off its mischief.
I know not this Hamster, but in all my clear wrong-headedness on so many things in this Vole Of Tears, I'd be a dick not to offer the Happies. Be well and all who sail in you.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally; Mort Drucker on the Bears' track: Miss that guy's ability with a nib.
ReplyDelete