Tuesday, December 6, 2016

I Live in a Body That Does Not Have Enough Light in It




  • Deag Blodgog, I stopped myself monkeying with this shitty blogs wallpaper last night. What the fuck is wrong with me - or what is more wrong with me - that I wanted to or that I stopped myself.
  • Reminder: Death to the Either/Or. And to me.
  • Doing battle with the black snake.
  • Comet Ping Pong is three door down from Politics and Prose. While we don't go to Politics and Prose like we used to (I figured out two Aprils ago I work in a university library and can get books - psst - for free), we've eaten at Comet Ping Pong exactly once for all the dozens times cubed we've been on that block: the pizza failed, was artisan mediocre and artisan expensive, and the kids screaming in the ping pong room (that is their gimmick) reminded me of tripping at the fucking Montgomery County Fair.
  • Nothing but artisan mediocre pizza and overpriced draft beer was offered me for sale.
  • Heaven forever.
  • If you can't read fiction right now (like me!), Brad has poets for you.
  • If you can't read fiction right now (like me!) get off the fucking internet, you fucking idiot.
  • The Mafia State: Systems of governance that are seized by a tiny cabal become mafia states. The early years—Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in the United States—are marked by promises that the pillage will benefit everyone. The later years—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—are marked by declarations that things are getting better even though they are getting worse. The final years—Donald Trump—see the lunatic trolls, hedge fund parasites, con artists, conspiracy theorists and criminals drop all pretense and carry out an orgy of looting and corruption. Duh, but true.
  • We all did. Just not in 2016 - I had 2020.
  • Borzutzky interview: "The Performance of Becoming Human" is the third in a series of books (or perhaps a lifetime project) about how humans survive amid the worst types of state and social violence. Performance, unlike the others, is more directly thinking about borders, about the United States' relationship to Latin America, and our treatment of immigrants and foreigners. Perhaps the book's approach to thinking about war, racism and xenophobia, and the exploitation of the working class by banks and governments, seems particularly poignant right now. It's an angry book. I guess readers relate to its anger. I think it's hopeful to make art about how awful the world is. I guess I'm not alone.
  • Trump and the Present Crisis.
  • Garrison America the Threat of Global War.
  • Hillary Clinton throwing party to thank millionaire donors
  • Barring death - and maybe not even death will stop her - she's running in 2020, yo.
  • On the exhaustion of something or another.
  • What's happening to bees and butterflies? Humans, in case you couldn't guess.
  • One reason assholes love capitalism.
  • New Moon Duo!








Daniel Borzutzky








3 comments:

  1. 1)i have been in the politics and prose bookstore on connecticut avenue in dc only a few times - probably less than ten - in the quarter century since moving to the baltwash metro region - so i only became aware of its proximity to pizzagate in the last few days - thanks for the review of comet ping pong - the thought of patronizing them as a gesture of solidarity had crossed my mind, but instead i'll just let their regular clientele rally 'round them

    see also
    -
    http://www.salon.com/2016/12/06/michael-flynns-conspiracy-minded-son-who-tweeted-about-the-pizzagate-theory-is-on-donald-trumps-transition-team/

    2)borzutsky asserts that his subject is how humans survive amid the worst types of state and social violence - along these lines on sunday i saw on nat geo tv an hour-long program about d-day and the progress of the troops through normandy into paris - a lot of war film, colorized to make it easier to watch, but in pastel tones, showing explosions, dead bodies, ruined towns, processions of troops, dead horses and cows, personages visiting the front (not just ike and marshall and patton and degaulle, but also churchill, e.g.), commentary giving a grittier depiction [more inclusive of less savory aspects of the situation than similar programs i've seen before] of the human dimension of the events taken from first-person accounts, although spoken by actors as voice-overs - i was favorably impressed by the program, and reflected that perhaps the murdochization of nat geo might produce not only more profits, which is good for the owners, but maybe even more effective edutainment to titillate and/or inform the viewers about the wide scope and colorful details of the way people treat each other - a win/win outcome of the corporatization of what had been ostensibly a non-profit organization

    3)in borzutsky's poem jam a knife into my belly brings to mind the trump speech excerpt, replayed often on cable news in the last day or so, in which he scoffs at a claim made in an autobiographic book by dr ben carson that as a youth he tried to stab someone, but the knife broke on the intended victim's belt - this campaign episode made newly relevant by the selection of dr carson as trump's intended secretary of housing and urban development

    4)did you know that paul mccartney recorded "accentuate the positive" as part of his record of standards, "kisses on the bottom"?

    live in the studio version, filmed in black and white
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYo2LrnCOAM



    ReplyDelete
  2. There's a hideous Monster Of Monopoly Capital, which uses two Sock Puppets -- one for the Right hand, one for the Left -- through which political power is exercised, in nation-states; because the Monster has other Sock Puppets to exercise its will through the Finance Sector and Commerce and even Religiositude. Please note the Hideous Monster's hands are (let's keep it clean; this is a family blog, for fuck's sake) always inserted up the behinds of the Sock Puppets, who seem to enjoy that.

    Hill-o in 2020... Man, is that Eva Peron or what? Somewhere, the Gods are laughing so hard they're high-fiving and wetting their togas.

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  3. Some years ago I spent an entire spring hiking in the lovely coastal hills below San Francisco and took photos of all the different wildflowers. I'd read that wildflowers were in decline and through all the years of hiking in those beautiful hills I could see that for myself. In the spring following the meltdown of the nuclear power plant in Japan California was the recipient of radioactive shit. The wildflowers were fewer and many of them looked deformed. Sadly those hills are being filled with the houses of upper middle class assholes which are slowly surrounding the open space parks. Sometimes I think the greatest crimes of humanity are not against other humans but are those against what's left of the natural world. But I suppose this is our greatest delusion, that we expect everything to remain the same in an ever changing world.

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