Tuesday, January 31, 2017

9. New Mutants #14



  • Eye right now ▲. Just saw eye doc, I've a three month respite from surgery, the new meds are working. I'm... surprised. I always expect the worse. Fine metaphors abound, only some obtain.
  • Trial balloon for a coup?  Someone said something like that yesterday here.
  • It's a dark world.
  • The American Terrible.
  • Lessons for "The Resistance" from the Bush resistance: The first is that while partisan Democrats may be one’s allies when opposing a Republic president, their opposition is opportunistic and not principled. The second they are in charge, they will support or wave aside the same actions they condemned coming from a Republican. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with partisan Democrats, it means understand when they’ll stop fighting AND that once they don’t need you, they will regard you as a threat and seek to to eliminate you. The second is more important: The control of a party matters more than the results of any individual election.
  • Just saying. Resist Trump, of course, but know your allies.
  • Willam Gass on tyrants. Important.
  • Yes, I've posted this Notley poem before.
  • Why didn't you tell me there was new Necks?






THE TEN BEST ISSUES OF COMIC BOOKS

Alice Notley

1. X-Men #141 & 142

2. Defenders #125

3. Phoenix: The Untold Story

4. What if. . .? #31

5. New Mutants #1

6. New Mutants #2

7. Micronauts #58

8. Marvel Universe #5

9. New Mutants #14

10. Secret Wars #1



9 comments:

  1. I noticed Yonatan Zunger ("Trial Balloon" and "Things Going Wrong") also uses photos of cute small animals in the middle of his observations that we are all irredeemably and explicitly fuckity fuk fuked.

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  2. Thanks for the eye update. It's important you be able to see clearly to read. Good pull: the Gass! A curmudgeon who can out-curmudgeon even the curmudgeony-ist amongst curmudgeons.

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    Replies
    1. Credit goes to Ed Biblioklept!

      Still tunneling, ten pages a day.

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  3. 1)my comic book buying days were in the Zap! comic era

    2)recently i read a memoir drawn by r. crumb and spouse a. kaminsky - i realized i didn't like them very much

    3)the last comic book i read before that was

    Can't we talk about something more pleasant? : a memoir / Roz Chast

    it fits in well with buddha's five contemplations - see my second comment at
    http://www.blckdgrd.com/2014/10/the-stranded-whale-guided-out-of-coves.html

    it is in that same comment - written octber 31, 2014 - that i presciently expressed the opinion

    with respect to the inexorability of another president clinton, perhaps we will be saved from that fate by another president bush

    4)in the music theory class i'm currently taking, the professor asserts that the "harmonic minor scale" and the "melodic minor scale" are not scales at all - they are the minor scale (the "natural minor scale" i.e. the real minor scale) with some accidentals added for various purposes - i was glad to hear this


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    Replies
    1. i didn't get aline kominsky-crumb's name quite right - the book i meant was



      Title: Drawn together / Aline & R. Crumb.
      Author: Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, 1948-
      ISBN: 9780871404299
      Personal Author: Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, 1948-
      Publication Information: New York : Liveright Pub. Corp., c2012.

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  4. Very good news about Eyes. Should have gone there rather than focus on, uh, that other thing. Good Good.

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  5. 1)i found this at http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/2004/09/28/more-james-tate/

    KINKY'S HEAD

    "Would you like to have your head examined?"
    I said to Kinky, who was holding his head. "Oh yes,"
    he said, "I would like to know what's wrong with
    me." Gloom was his life, despair was his only food.
    I opened up his head. My God, it was dark in there,
    and full of cobwebs with dead flies in them. "There
    are no lights in here," I said. "It looks like you
    have had no visitors in years. And there's not a
    trace of an idea, just a rat gnawing on its tail
    hoping to become a saint in some counterfeit hell."
    "I love that rat," Kinky said. "He's the last of
    my monsters, old skin and bones."

    i started out hoping to find a tate poem with "eye" in it, but i found this because the blog's title is "In a Dark Time...The Eye Begins to See" - as yogi berra could have said, you never know when something surprising might happen

    2)this poem by tate reminded me of the following by red hawk, which appears as the prologue to Self Observation: The Awakening of Conscience: an Owner's Manual



    The Teaching

    It is as old as the stones.
    It came with Humans to the Earth
    and it offers them a way out
    of the web of sorrows
    but at a price:
    we must observe ourselves,
    our behavior, our
    inner and outer responses,
    objectively. This means
    without taking a personal interest
    or doing anything about
    the horror
    which self observation uncovers:
    like a bad boy with a stick
    overturning a stone
    and finding a mass of crawling things
    beneath, but
    he refrains
    from stomping on them.



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  6. speaking of a rat, tate also wrote

    Little Poem with Argyle Socks



    Behind every great man
    there sits a rat.
    And behind every great rat,
    there's a flea.
    Beside the flea there is an encyclopedia.
    Every now and then the flea sneezes, looks up,
    and flies into action, reorganizing history.
    The rat says, "God, I hate irony."
    To which the great man replies,
    "Now now now, darling, drink your tea."

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    Replies
    1. tate also speaks of plump rats darting freely in "shroud of the gnome" - the full text of tate's poem, and a link to an analysis deemed unsuitable for publication in the the paris review comments column, can be seen at

      http://www.blckdgrd.com/2016/11/amidst-piles-of-outcast-citizenry-and.html

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