Saturday, July 25, 2015

Whoever Loved Him He Loved, Whoever Hated Him He Hated Back





  • So, guess what I listened to last night. Friends below have new content, but post mostly for more Negativland. RIP Don Joyce.
  • Loss, and rededication.
  • Triumph of the Trump. It's an intriguingly fucked-up knot: Trump's popularity to the Angry White Right is based solely on Trump's candidacy pissing you off and if you demonstrate your contempt for the Angry White Right you please the Angry White Right which strengthens Trump's candidacy and thus makes Inevitability more inevitable. 
  • A friend insists Trump's candidacy is in the service of Cruz, staking out vast maps of crazy whose vacuum, post-Trump, Cruz can fill while looking less crazy than Cruz is.
  • #Consumerism #Depression #Change.
  • Jim's bug-splat count, with mileage.
  • What Lincoln left. New novel by Tom LeClair, a critic of postmodern fiction whose scholarship has influenced my reading of especially Stanley Elkin and Pynchon amongst others. Is it rational I should fear reading his fiction? Cause I do. (And Lincoln - snore.)
  • Ten more Negativland songs below the fold below the song below the poem (including, finally, the U2 song).








THE NEGATIVE

Tom Sleigh

Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures
in sex clubs it wasn't the whys and wherefores

but technical details, like going rafting
down the Colorado River; and when he wrote

about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience
was with his stepfather, the friend told him

it wasn't weird, but the best possible thing
that could have happened . . . I saw then that God,

who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart
as a negative: that the negative had been developed

into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky
on a day so clear he sees through the mountain's shadows

to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it—
a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses

jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting
and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes

that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain
as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids

of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing
for what you want, depending on the equipment,

the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek
of come. . . . And my pal the poet, who believed

in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind
of "spooky action at a distance," he communed

with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter
who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles

where he hides himself away—his sanctuary
Asshole Alley where God's own unholy loves

bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears—
and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred

the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem
that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . .

—That was how it was in those days, back when my friend
hadn't yet met the coroner who wrote down

his cause of death as "polysubstance abuse"
that brought on his heart attack while fucking . . .

And regardless if I believed, whenever
we were together God shone clearer—

those were the days when every morning God woke up
in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night

in divine rage. Whoever loved him,
he loved. Whoever hated him,

he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality
of hate or the volatility of love.








 
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3 comments:

  1. Strange. Never heard of Negativland. Thanks for the intro. Too bad it took a dude's passing...

    I'm pretty sure Trump's campaign is all about Trump. Period. He's a narcissist. Full stop. He was all over the local media when I lived in NYC with the same sort of bullshit—appearances on Howard Stern's local radio show and the morning shows, ridiculous unaccountable statements, etc. This is merely the natural continuation of his own bloviating self-promotion. It would be over-estimating to call it 'performance art'. Reality TV, maybe. The _effect_ it has and will have is subject to examination and correction as it unfolds. Think Perot '92, another billionaire's campaign that, quite possibly (and debatably but not certainly), benefitted another Clinton.

    Thanks for the link!

    Good to be back—at least for the next couple weeks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Triumph of Trump is its own confused knot.

    1. It's the GOP that has a Trump problem. He's keeping them from their preferred Bush, Walker, or Cruz scenario.

    2. I hate liberals!

    3. Since you hate liberals! - If the liberals had their own Trump, you had hate him/her too.
    ~

    ReplyDelete
  3. i never heard of negativland before

    writing at 'dangerous minds' last year, richard metzger said "It’s monotheism, but it’s in stereo, putting me in mind of the Firesign Theatre crossed with Richard Dawkins crossed with Madlib. If that sentence is even halfway intelligible to you, the “trailer” for It’s All in Your Head, below, is required viewing, freak."

    as i count it, there are four references in the sentence in question, and i got three of them (Madlib being beyond the borders of my current consciousness) so i did view the trailer, and enjoyed it

    nevertheless, as a regular churchgoer, i want to stand up on behalf of those of us who kneel and/or pray on a regular basis, and so i would like to mention that

    1)erich fromm said "it is the purpose of all the true religions to help man overcome his narcissism"

    2)with regard to christianity, specifically 20th century american protestant christianity, i would like to mention as examplars two prominent clergypersons

    fred rogers, of the 'mister rogers neighborhood' tv show on pbs

    jim jones, of jonestown in guyana

    and while we're talking about religion, and donald trump - one of his recent assertions i found surprising was that he, allegedly a presbyterian, had never in his life asked g*d for forgiveness

    may the creative forces of the universe have mercy on his soul, if any

    ReplyDelete