Monday, November 5, 2012

I Guess What I'm Saying Is Don't Be More Passive Aggressive or Purposely Vague that You Have to to Clinch the Argument



 
Peter Hammill is sixty-four today. I remember Bavid Dogosian, when we'd park my car or more often his yellow bug in a cornfield off 355 where now the mcmansionist monstrosity called Millstone exists, would play Van der Graaf Generator and Hammill solo, it's been love for Hammill's music since. If you see Bavid, tell him give me a call, he moved to NYC, we fell out of touch. His uncle was Captain Ross on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the facial resemblance is uncanny. I was asked last night by a professor I coffee with what I thought about Tuesday, I said it's extraordinary to not know what I think about Tuesday, to have a head pinging with competing ideas I understand and to some degree agree and disagree with and being unable to make them cohere and to not be upset with that, I've been trained to believe, I've always believed, I should be upset with that.



 
  • Against voting.
  • On voting.
  • The S&M election.
  • Vote or don't.
  • Here's good friend Sasha in comments to the last post in response to my question of what percentage of people are voting against versus voting for: IMO there is no such thing as voting for v voting against unless one is a moronic ideologue. Every vote with some thought is mixed, nuanced, balances good and evil. I love some stuff Obama does, am sort of crabbily accepting about some, and loathing about some. And while I don't want a drone to kill a baby in my name, my and your daughter's need for unrestricted urgent medical care matters more. For example. Repeat for every issue I can think of. As for the notion that no vote is likely to be decisive. True. But misses the point. A very small popular vote plurality encourages/increases the likelihood that the Supremes will decide the election. I don't think that is a good thing for us now and for the future of the nation.
  • Living in lesser times.
  • 90 in 90.
  • The politics of fear.
  • Useless liberal intellectuals
  • Yes, but POTUS 16 starts Wednesday (unless POTUS 12 isn't over by Wednesday).
  • Frostbitten!
  • The next Republican candidate.
  • Yes, they're motherfucking crackers, but: While I do hold the Republicans I know responsible for their hysteria -- I was forthrightly mean to the guy I knew vaguely in high school who posted the above photo to Facebook, especially since it wasn't the first time he's posted such garbage* -- I also hold Democrats responsible for matching the Republicans' frothing.  If they were as rational as they like to think they are, the Intertoobz wouldn't be full of cute-Obama pictures, Ryan-as-Eddie-Munster caricatures, Romney binders-full-of jokes, and worse.  Gary Younge has a not-crazy piece at the Guardian in which he argues that a Romney victory would merely reward the Republicans for bad behavior.  I agree, but an Obama victory would merely reward the Democrats for their bad behavior.  (As I've argued before, an Obama defeat will not convince the Democrats that they should have been more liberal; it will convince them that they should have been more like the Republicans.  But an Obama victory will also convince them that being more like the Republicans was wise politically.)
  • Two political worlds.
  • The fall of liberal gods.












OLD-STYLE PLENTIFUL

John Ashbery


I guess what I’m saying is
don’t be more passive aggressive
or purposefully vague than you have to
to clinch the argument.  Once that
happens you can forget the context
and try some new bathos, some severity
not seen in you till now.  Did they
send the news of you?  Were you forthcoming
in your replies?  It’s so long ago
now, yet some of it makes sense, like
why were we screwing around in the first place? 
Cannily you looked on from the wings,
finger raised to lips, as the old actor
slogged through the lines he’s reeled off
so many times, not even thinking
if they are tangential to the way we
slouch now.  So many were so wrong
about practically everything, it scarcely seems
to matter, yet something does,
otherwise everything would be death. 
Up in the clouds they were singing
O Promise Me to the birches, who replied in kind. 
Rivers kind of poured over where
we had been sitting, and the breeze made as though
not to notice any unkindness, the light too
pretended nothing was wrong, or that
it was all going to be OK some day. 
And yes, we were drunk on love. 
That sure was some summer. 



15 comments:

  1. I would suggest that Sasha think long and hard about the horrific fear that the SCOTUS will be pivotal. Nearly every ...cough cough... "left"-ish person who fears SCOTUS Fulcrum Status is afraid SCOTUS will reverse Roe v Wade or do something scary (?) about The Homosexuals And Their Desire To Be Just As Straightarrow As Their Enemies, The Breeders.

    On those two issues in SCOTUS-land it helps to remember a few things. Namely, that Roe v Wade is 40 years old and we've had a lot of Evil Rethuglican POTUSes installing Evil Rethuglican (supposedly, anyway) Yustices who haven't done a damned thing to Roe v Wade, including deciding a satirical question of how to get across a river constitutionally in Row vs Wade. The damned SCOTUS gets inundated with appeals and requests for Writs of Certiorari and many of them would hold the potential to scrape-and-vacuum old Roe off Wade's walls -- and lookee here, Marge! Hasn't happened!

    I'll tell you what I fear. I fear a bunch of Pwoggies getting their deepest dreams satisfied, a Pwog POTUS with Pwog Congress and Pwog SCOTUS and what would we see then?

    That's right. Murder and punishment of everyone who didn't agree with The Pwog Pewspective. Because, y'know, look at them pwoggies right now.

    Uh huh.

    Maybe you should be afraid of what those people who actually call the shots agree on. Maybe you should be afraid of the fact that Romney and Obama are not dissimilar in any way but image, rhetoric and skin color.

    Maybe you could wake up.

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  2. Hi Oxtrot! for someone who reads this blog every day your reading comprehension skills either truly suck or your rage blinds you. Wait.... Death to the Either/Or!

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  3. Love to be insulted first thing without cause. I obviously wouldn't have thought at all without prodding. Good that you, Oxtrot, know what concerns me and why I've got it all wrong without a scintilla of fact to intrude. Thanks for telling me what should concern me. Also. Fuck you.

    Love me some mansplaining.

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  4. Addendum: To the proprietor - None of that was aimed at you. When you're doing the mansplaining I'll make myself clear. And if my post is distressing or my unchristian language inappropriate, please feel free to delete or do whatever is necessary.

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  5. On to vastly more important things, the MLS Cup should be seen as our version of the League Cup, nothing more. Your 2012 MLS champions, the San Jose ShockQuakes. I wonder who the next sub-.500 "champ" will be.

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  6. Sasha, all's good, I understood the context perfectly, but watch the motherfucking language, there's no motherfucking cursing on this shitty blog.

    Randal, if United doesn't win all I want is motherfucking GAX to throw-up on their motherfucking shoes in return match v San Jose and to complain like the motherfucking whiny motherfucking divers they are.

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  7. If the Minionses proprietor doesn't turn up, perhaps you might explain how a sport has a tied play-off game.

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  8. Sasha, just think of it as halftime, and instead of changing ends, they change stadia.

    Beloved, I think the decidering thing on 7 is this: do we want the money to go here, or to Delaware and West Virginia? The money is going to go, whether or not there's a casino at Indian Head. I'm happier with it staying in state.

    And yes on 4 and 6 is easy. As a fellow union love slave, I'm thinking no on B should be pretty easy for you too. Added incentive: both parties want you to vote for it!

    And actually, United still has a chance to host the MLS Cup. But it's a stretch.

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  9. And it involves San Jose not winning the West.

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  10. So if the second one is also tied, then what happens?

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  11. 30 minutes of overtime - not sudden death, full 30 - then PKs to 5 and if still tied sudden death PKs.

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  12. He lies. If it's still tied, they have a tea party with dolls, and give the MLS Cup to LA.

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  13. Ahh, as I suspected. Pussyball.

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  14. I need to correct something: it's not "motherfucking whiny motherfucking divers" in regards to GAX, the proper formula is "whiny motherfucking motherfucking divers." My apologies. Please use the updated patch wherever needed.

    ReplyDelete