Thursday, July 17, 2014

Here Is the Man Night-Walking Who Derives Tomorrow's Manifestos from This Midnight Meeting





So today's the day this blog's domain name is supposed to automatically renew. Blooger has been sending me email every week for the past month warning me to renew or else and sending me email every week for the past month telling me all is fine, my automatic renewal is good as long as billing information is up to date. We're talking ten dollars after all for the exclusive domain name ownership of this shitty blog on a free blogging platform, ten dollars on vanity. My billing information DID change since last year's debacle and rescue: Earthgirl lost the credit card, we put a block on it immediately, were issued new cards. I logged into Blooger's weirdass and creepy Blogger admin site and made the change a month ago. I'm told I'm good by one email. Another email tells me I'm not. Maybe I'll get a confirm later today. Maybe this blog will disappear in a week. It's a win-win.







  • Yes, I do post this particular Gubaidulina all the time.
  • Silence for Gaza.
  • America's war crimes in Gaza.
  • Israel's war crimes in Gaza.
  • A slowly unfolding genocide.
  • I haven't wasted breath saying Motherfucking Obama because duh but what the fuck, Motherfucking Obama.
  • The stupidest propaganda since the last until the next.
  • In praise of wearinessSo why would Americans not be weary? The survey results that worry Kagan and Rice – that show Americans growing wary of overcommitment abroad – are actually a sign of vernacular wisdom. They suggest a dawning public recognition that the problems of boarded-up storefronts and evacuated cities present more urgent policy concerns than the remaking of regions abroad that resist remaking. Interventionists will need to evade or overcome this wisdom if they intend to embark on further misadventures overseas. Let us give weariness its due, as a necessary counterweight to the centrifugal force of an activist foreign policy, ever on the prowl for investments to explore and wrongs to set right. Maybe weariness can bring us home before dark.
  • The real world plainly bores us.
  • The weaponized naked girl. The best thing you'll read today.
  • Bossa Nova: on the World Cup and nationalism and stuff.
  • The future of Rocketville? I expect it means our favorite vegetarian Chinese restaurant in a dumpy little strip will disappear as well as our favorite Peruvian restaurant in a dumpy little strip too.
  • A reference of female-fronted punk bands!
  • Shuffling tropes.
  • The serenity and vitality of Proust. I can only read Proust when I'm calm and not angry. I'm rarely calm and not angry, so slow going, but when Proust works it's wonderful.
  • I was not calm and was angry last night, instead of reading Proust I listened to Gubaidulina and read Muriel Rukeyser.








METAPHOR TO ACTION

Muriel Rukeyser

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting : we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose.

Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,
here is the man night-walking who derives
tomorrow's manifestos from this midnight's meeting ;
here we require the proof in solidarity,
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

And behind us in time are the men who second us
as we continue. And near us is our love :
no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close
of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity.
And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding,
charging with heat its softness in a symbol
to weld and prepare for action our minds' intensity.





3 comments:

  1. today the editors of the financial times assert that the palestinians should have their own country

    ReplyDelete
  2. speaking of action, and manifestos, and love, as rukeyser's poem does, here is a selection of some of Gurdjieff’s Aphorisms, inscribed in a special script above the walls of the Study House at the Prieuré

    Like what “it” does not like.

    Do not love art with your feelings.

    A true sign of a good man is if he loves his father and mother.

    Judge others by yourself and you will rarely be mistaken.

    Don't judge a man by the tales of others.

    Consider what people think of you—not what they say.

    Only he who can take care of what belongs to others may have his own.

    Practice love first on animals, they are more sensitive.

    One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind.




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  3. wikipedia says Gubaidulina is a convinced Russian-Orthodox believer.

    gurdjieff's funeral was at the russian orthodox church in paris

    ReplyDelete