Thursday, January 23, 2014

I See: It's Not You Who Is Not Requiting Me, It's Something in You Over Which You Have No Say Says No to Me





There's an ad running on local radio. The announcer says there's exciting news about a new male testosterone pill with effects so incredible the company can't keep the product on the shelves! He asks the Vice President of Product Distribution for the pill company if it's true it can't be kept in stock. It's a nice problem to have, says the Vice President of Product Distribution, chuckling immodestly. See, it's made from oil from flax grown only on the east bank of the Ob River in Arctic Circle Siberia, and we just can't get enough to meet demand in stores no matter how much we charge. That's why, through this special radio offer, we're giving away free bottles to anyone who calls this toll-free number. Fine metaphors abound.






  • Then Dr Hornsby starts talking, he wants to send me a free $30 book, A Doctor's Guide to My Neuteredness!, he'll cocktail a boner for me IN HIS OFFICE! or my visit is free.
  • Then an add for a free sample of a weight-loss pill only - ONLY - for men between 25 and 65, WARNING! if your weight loss is TOO DRAMATIC! only take one pill per day.
  • No logic or theme to today's songs, they were in my head this morning is all.
  • The only coherent position? and the only position that is responsive even vaguely to reality has to be: oppose all coercive hierarchies. otherwise i'm telling you this just gets worse and worse. it gets worse under neocons. it gets worse under leftists: they all have the same position, really, and it is underlain by the desire to subordinate and to be subordinated. i don't actually see the distinction between the positions of paul wolfowitz and mao. or rather i hear their opposed rhetoric and i see their identical reality. i think that paul ryan and elizabeth warren have the same position, stated in slightly different ways for slightly different audiences. they do not know this about themselves, but they are perfectly complementary: we can oscillate between reinforcing the state hierarchy and reinforcing the corporate hierarchy, but these are the very same hierarchy. but also the tea party and occupy don't know this about themselves either, but they are on the same side too: the only other side.
  • An old friend was in town for the first time in a little more than four years this past week, we found time last night. He is an honest and devout less-shittier. If both sides are equally complicit in fighting to win first access to ownership's tap to guarantee ownership maintains ownership of said tap, he says, root for and support the team, even as it increases its shittiness to keep pace with the increasing shittiness of the other team, with the less-shitty, and I said, Stop. We do this by email, nobody ever wins, it's wrestling in the dead cricket legs that remain after the rest of the cricket bodies have dusted, tell me more about your daughters, tell me what would be a good weekend this summer to take me to a Pirates game at PNC.
  • Death comes for Lamy.
  • Doug Duncan and the Battle of Ten Mile Creek.
  • Boyds!
  • You take Manhattan.
  • Bill Knott.
  • Yes, I've posted his poem below before, I like it.
  • I got a copy of Marguerite Young's Miss McIntosh, My Darling, through consortium loan service (another perk of working at a library), it was on the list of 25 fat novels I posted a week or so ago, I'd never heard of it. Here, an early paragraph on one of the novel's major themes: What was the organization of illusion, of memory? Who knew even his own divided heart? Who knew all hearts as his own? Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart's weakness, have turned stonily away, would there not be , in the vision of some omniscient eye, a deep web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is one illusion.
  • So, I'm going to try.






THE CONSOLATIONS OF SOCIOBIOLOGY

Bill Knott

Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite
I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars
Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went
Waterier and waterier. For days on end or

Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in
My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth.
—Then you explained your DNA calls for
Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely

So to speak its external expression etcet
Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be ...
Ah that movie was so faraway the stars melting

Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you
Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you
Over which you have no say says no to me.



2 comments:

  1. From an evolutionary standpoint, is it better or worse for humanity (and life itself) to have babies being conceived via boner pills? That is to say, does "Mother Nature" (or "God" or "Life Force" or "The Universe" or whatever [assuming there is some whatever]) say "I don't want you to sire any further replications of your particular genomic instantiation and therefore I render you impotent, etc." and the boner pill is contra this—that is to say, an ultimate weakening of a gene pool that needs to be pruned.

    Or, contrariwise, is the inability (or unwillingness) to breed simply a reflection of that person's own vanity: "I am the ultimate flowering of Life. I must bloom and die without replication, my life being a thing of beauty. I am Nature's pinnacle of creation and it need go no further than me."

    Or, is it the case that in the struggle of Life against whatever is not Life, any advantage (a la boner pills) is helpful in advancing the cause of Life's ultimate survival in a cold, dark, uncaring universe?

    Is that question even answerable given our present state of knowledge?

    How do I sleep at night?

    ReplyDelete
  2. BDR,

    Thanks so much for linking to Lamy and tucking us in so comfortingly next to another water battle worth fighting.

    The piece got amplified by santafe.com, which is heartening. http://www.santafe.com/blogs/read/death-comes-for-lamy

    But it's all happening lightning fast. The trucks are scheduled to roll in sometime first quarter.

    ReplyDelete