Saturday, April 30, 2016

Picked Up My Zither and Begun Walking and Strumming Like an Idiot




  • Olive, yesterday.
  • She's probably the one candidate who could lose to Trump, said my Hillaryite Colleague, back in for Hillary, just not as enthusiastically as once. She's not losing to Trump, I said. Yesterday was Illhoptay Day at Illhoptay, a one day cross between Red Hour and Amok Time except lame because drunk ugrads. A parade of students marched to Dixie Liquor to buy or having bought carried back a 30 pack of Notbeer Light in each hand. Bernie shirts, not everywhere but enough to be noted. Bernie'll bring enough home, I said, shrugging at the students, Trump's supporters will scare them home, plus remember that SCOTUS thing, we're gonna be hammered over the head with it for months. I don't know, he said, she could fuck it up. Here's hoping, I said. What, he said, you want Trump. I want to be entertained, I said. That's selfish, he said. Who isn't, I said, and she's not going to lose to Trump.
  • This was three in the afternoon. In the bushes next to Poulton Hall, twenty yards away, one student lay unconscious face down in his puke, his buddy puking his way to unconsciousness. I could tell you one had on a Bernie shirt, the other a Trump shirt, but I'd be lying.
  • The zombies among us.
  • Meeting nowhere, no before or after.
  • Satanists are furious Boehner compared Cruz to Lucifer.
  • Clintonism before Clinton.
  • The author of ▲ responds to a neoliberal responding to ▲.
  • Rhyton, people?















MY MOST RECENT POSITION PAPER

Bob Hicok

A little bit of hammering
goes a long way toward making
the kind of noise I want my heart
to look up to—or have you ever
gone into a woods and applauded the light
that fights its way to the ground,
and the shadows, and the explosions
of feathers where blue jays
have been ripped into the bright
and hungry future of hawks—
and there’s this—writing an etude
by pushing pianos off a cliff
until one of them howls or whispers
just so—like a vagrant
slipping into a clean bed
or a man lifting a dying child
toward the sun and begging help,
rescue—if my eyes could speak,
they’d be mouths—the tongues
of my fingers ask to be words
against your skin—and when I
was a librarian, I lost my job
for exhorting patrons to sing
“Bye Bye Miss American Pie”—
it’s not what we do here, I was told—
yet I know this is a world
made by volcanoes, and don’t want
to keep this awareness of kaboom
to myself—so have picked up
my zither and begun walking
and strumming like an idiot
who thinks music is all
a body needs to feed itself—
and though I haven’t eaten
in years, I have been fed.




3 comments:

  1. Hillary, The Inevitable: So many seem to love Reality Teevee. We all know how this episode ends. We even know how the cliffhanger season finale ends. I'm barely watching any longer.

    The other night a few people came over; we ended up watching 'Reds', and when the soundtrack began playing The Internationale, we wept. I mean, we cried, and it had nothing to do with the film. It was stupid, romanticist, maudlin, and we cried just the same.

    That November Revolution was Oligarched from the beginning. We all knew the history. But people always feel a rising hope when the chains come off, before new shackles are forged and hammered tight. With Herr Obama's election in 2008, people in Kiddietown were partying in the streets, in neighborhoods all over the city: because the man appeared as Hope and Change, we partied like it was Paris in 1944. "Lil' Boots" was still the appointed Leader; the country was still occupied, but you could feel the shackles slipping away. You could believe, you could convince yourself, that this was the moment when the wheel turned and A Righted World was possible.

    And somewhere in that night, some of us who now sat around watching 'Reds' were in one of those neighborhood crowds -- and spontaneously, we started singing The Internationale that night, too.

    There won't be a moment like that when Hillary becomes Leader. It'll only be another chapter in More Of The Same. Recognizing how inevitable that is, and what it signifies, is enough to make anyone weep.

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  2. yikes! I'm back and you lead with Father Dan is dead. I knew his brother Phil.

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    Replies
    1. Hey man, sweet to hear from you. Hope all is well.

      To give you even more bad news (if you haven't heard), Don Joyce died last July. Bad year for Negativland.

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