Sunday, January 14, 2018

From Out of the Bushes Sometimes Someone Still Unearths Rusted-Out Arguments and Carries Them to the Garbage Pile

Is reading everything, finishing nothing, reading?
I bought Destroyer's latest album Ken (and you should too) and listened to it end to end about ten times then into Destroyer playlist where it's always shuffle. I'll never listen to Ken end to end again.
There's side two of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love and all but the jams at the end of George's All Things Must Pass, but but those two I can't remember the last time I listened to an album end to end except when new in ?
Fellow motherfuckers, is it ok to put five, fifteen, a hundred novels novellas books of poetry on song by song shuffle and never finish a motherfucking one ? Please say yes.
Love even if no.











THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Wisława Szymborska
    - Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
 
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
 
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
 
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
 
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
 
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
 
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
 
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
 
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
 
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.



11 comments:

  1. Hastening by to first answer the pressing question (& to remark that "but but for..." is inspired): it's absolutely ok. As a matter of fact, an observation I've recently made regarding the indeed lamentable aspect of the death/post-death of end-to-end album listening is that the Random Play Feature is like a next-to-perfect radio whereon you hear all that's worthwhile in your world, and what you haven't heard — what you'd've got to know previously from the "upon additional listenings effect" — will pop up at random, at which point you'll frequently say to yourself that you recognize it, it is familiar, but you don't know who/what it is. When you like it, then, well, I recapitulate, it is absolutely ok.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1)speaking of the main figure in the band destroyer, dan bejar, wikipedia tells us

    A March 2011 article in The New Yorker revealed the visual artist Dan Bejar's elaborate efforts at impersonating the singer, creating confusion and errors in media coverage between the two different men with the same name.


    2)speaking of what to read next - or not - someone who claimed to be a successful and happy writer wrote -

    If you want to be successful in life — whatever success means for you — and if you want to be happier, ask yourself this crucial question many times a day:
    “What’s the Best Use of My Time Right Now?”


    3)speaking of writers, back in 2005 jonathan schwarz interviewed chris floyd

    http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000475.html




    ReplyDelete
  3. Yep.

    There's a pile beside the bed, and everything I'm reading is there. It's a good-sized stack. I lower my brain into it like an old 'Fishing' circus arcade game, the magnet being my mood, and hey presto. This is the "Fake Shuffle".

    Go for it

    ReplyDelete
  4. Here's my solution (not that it matters or even might to you): I now read mostly intentionally. Or purposefully. A book I choose to read has to have some importance or relevance to my own writing. (Not my life; I didn't spend years of my youth studying philosophy and theology to need fiction/poetry/memoir for that. I worked that shit out long ago and am at peace.) I don't read the latest trendiest hottest thing that everyone's talking about. I don't read for entertainment—music & movies (& sports) fill that for me + I don't have time for what someone once called "sterling mediocrity". I read for, ahem, wisdom. Instruction. Advancement. Craft. That said, I often re-read—but again selectively, not promiscuously.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Also, too: I must disagree. Trump is not breaking kayfabe. Trump is its apotheosis. Dude, he trained with Vince McMahon and the WWF/WWE. Your saying he's breaking kayfabe is just being obtuse. He spews racist comments to Senators then lies about it on Twitter and through spokesperson then mouths bromides for MLK Day. That just is kayfabe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People freak out over his breaches of decorum, not his policies. His shoots reveal not only the ugliness propping the decorum but the public's and polity's desperate desire to hide the ugliness again behind the decorum.

      And the motherfucking Democrats, in kayfabe as usual, vote to expand his powers for when they retake the car keys in reestablished Kayfabe America. It's a shitty gift, but a gift nonetheless.

      Delete
  6. Jim's astute commentary makes me realize two things: 1) that my extension of your analogy isn't apt given the active vs. passive nature of the respective media. (I'm reminded of a study on the effect of reading vs. television in developing young minds wherein it was, duh, revealed that, unlike television, one had to learn to read and short of that would make the ability ever to enjoy reading later in life prohibitive. Speakin' o' which, the gag-worthy "entertainment value" of reading notwithstanding, one'd be hard-pressed to begrudge your enjoying what you pick. Now, if you could apply the passive approach by finding a system that feeds you your cache in virtually random fashion, reapply your analogy.

    2) That DT's going full kayfabe is a good point, but I think you're both right: it is so over the top that it still amounts to breaking, just not as traditionally defined. As examples I submit how he's been able to exaggerate lefty givens to discredit them by default of messenger: that O &/or ➡ "created Isis" so obfuscates how those who represent that nomenclature came to be who & where they are. His hyperbole is only in attributing a largely bipartisan project to individuals in the party whose nomination he wasn't seeking. So he was micro-aggressively breaking kayfabe while using kayfabe for cover at the same time. Not that it's entirely new, as the "Benghazi!!!11" example, its misdirected focus, gave cover to its ever being taken seriously as an object of inquiry.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Aping Glenn Greenwald's self-serving, disingenuous "both sides do it but Dems are worse" *argument* is unbecoming and, frankly, irrational. House Dems voted AGAINST FISA 702 119-65, but yes, go ahead, blame it ALLl on them. (*When I say argument, I really mean trolling.*)

    It makes no sense until you realize that GG is pissed because he got caught up in a FISA 702 surveil conspiring to spread Putin propaganda in the US and then facilitated the exfiltration of Snowden (who may or may not have been an active agent run by GRU) to Moscow as a hero. Thus GG had to expat himself to Brazil. And, what's more, when a true NSA contractor whistle-blower from here in Georgia leaked hard evidence of Russian interference to GG and Intercept, he/they burned their source to the FBI because they didn't want to concede the Russians' involvement.

    Moreover, FISA 702 has to do with foreign actors on foreign soil (If I'm not mistaken). Has nothing to do with domestic surveillance. So, your argument (read your trolling aping of GG's trolling) is simply not a sound take on the issue. It's Russian style "whataboutism" that's designed to harm/slander the one party (i.e., motherfucking Dems) whose majority voted against 702. I'm surprised both that you ape GG's so-called arg and that you can't see through his self-interested, biased trolling.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Greenwald - what the fuck are you talking about? I see Greenwald when someone twaats him into my timeline - I don't follow him, I don't read him at IBT. I really am capable of seeing Democrat as the 2nd team (aiming for 1st team) complicit motherfuckers they are. See 2009.

      Still, Chelsea Manning is running for Senate in my state. I don't know what to think! I'll look for what Greenwald thinks so I know what to think too!

      Delete
    2. Fine. Deny him three times, even. Yet your trolling mimics his almost word for word. Motherfucking Democrats didn't deny unfettered domestic spying power to Trump, a man they claim is a danger. THEY ARE COMPLICIT! THEY ARE THE TRUE WARLORDS!

      Once again, 702 is not about domestic surveillance. And GOP has an iron majority in the House. Without it, Mueller would likely have no ability to prove what happened (if anything did) in the last election. The Dems have no Legislative or Executive power now, but, fine, go ahead blame it on them. It's all their fault, motherfuckers. Empower the Trumpian GOP—which is apparently the aim of your so-called Greenwald lefties.

      I have no idea whether as a celebrity Chelsea Manning would make a good Senator. Vote for her in the primary, but if she loses don't use the Greenwald excuse of blaming Dems for not being pure enough or not being in power to empower the GOP opponent of Cardin(?). That's the GOP MO: divide & conquer the Dems—purity trolling + victim blaming + character assassination. And, as we've seen, it's complicit with Putin's aims to create chaos and install allies/clients in positions of power & influence here.

      Delete
    3. LOL, dude, we've been doing this, what, a decade plus, you know I hated motherfucking Democrats LONG before I got a check (that bounced) from Putin in 2016.

      As Marie said to Robert and Picard, arguing over replicators in the kitchen, This is a very old argument. Let's skip the fight in the vineyard this time.

      Delete