Monday, August 8, 2016

I Enjoy High Art but Realism Swamps Me




Acadia rangers/volunteers do a wonderful job of using cairns on the bedrock at the top of mountains to mark trails, but in woods the blazing is haphazard and spotty. I don't know if the policy is to blaze as little as possible and trust the hiker to follow the obvious (which is not always obvious) path or whether there is not a volunteer organization (such as Potomac Appalachian Trail Club) that maintains the blazes. We've not got lost, though we've had to backtrack more than a couple of times. My only complaint. We'd thought of going inland to hike Maine, we've five days of hiking left, we haven't covered half of Acadia yet, I'm not spending hours in a car I could be hiking here. We've booked the house for next summer.

Yesterday was Sargent Mountain, Gilmore Peak, and Parkman Mountain, hardest, most beautiful, best hike yet. Today is more ambitious - Dorr and Cadillac Mountains, two ascents, two descents.

We stop after the last ascent of each hike so Earthgirl can paint (I read and write) for a couple of hours.






  • We used up this year's worth of Earth's resources by today.
  • The total obscenity of the American dream.
  • I'm told Hillarium asswipes are smearing Jill Stein as a Putin stooge. I'm told Hillarium asswipes are smearing Jill Stein as a anti-vaxxer kook. I have no idea what Jill Stein thinks or has said she stands for, but here's today's stupidass Star Trek allusion: (Worf voice) I know nothing about Gauron other than he's an outsider who has challenged the Council. But Duras? I know Duras.
  • The hit squad flexes its muscles.
  • The living death of perpetual emergency.
  • Floyd tweeted out ▲ last night, the evening after I had posted Elkin's Dick Gibson's manic monologue on the, to steal from Floyd, living death of perpetual emergency. Elkin wrote Dick Gibson in 1971. I tweeted the link to me back to Floyd, hastening to say that while some of us are wired to dig the perpetual emergencies, there are more people percentage-wise now so wired for the reasons Floyd cites (24 hour news networks, internet, etc). So yes, I dared directly address a bleggaldigitaloverlord, and got the no acknowledgement/no response I deserve.
  • #542.
  • Dysattribution.
  • On art and apocalypse.
  • I am a quarter through Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. So far it's been a conventional novel on the horrors of slave life, but now that the two main characters have runaway from the plantation and actually gotten on an underground railroad - as in a train underground in Georgia in 1822 - it's getting good and weird.
  • Offer ends at midnight tonight! One of you has an Elkin on the way, if you want one email, comment, or DM/twoot me by tonight.
  • Up to H in song titles in the drive-around soundtrack:






THE ARISTOCRACY

Sandra Simonds

I like when the form is kind of stuck-up
   even though I’ve got a Southern accent and my place
looks like a graduate student’s. 1. I enjoy
   high art but realism swamps me.
            2. The material world swamps me.
                              3. I came to understand
                                                the forms of realism,
                                                             the aesthetic phenomenon.
                                                                      4. You take a random person
                                                                                                from daily life.
                                                                   5. You take their dependence
                                                         on their historical circumstances.
                                                                   6. You make them
                                                         the subject.
                                      7. You see, they operate
                                      the modern.
      Things happen ... minutes, hours, days.
       The order of life
          coming from life itself.
                                     Back to life /
                                     Back to reality (like Soul II Soul).
                                                       It is sublime
                                                   and grotesque.
                                                                8. They make rich forms.
   Something steady.
   Less manic.
         Something real
                                                like a bell
                                                  inside the Golden Seahorse Gift Shop.

                                                                Don’t take me
                                                                            on that ride.
                                                            I don’t want
                                                         to go down.

                                         9. To what degree
                                  are the subjects
         taken seriously?
   They naturally swim
                            beneath the icy sheets
                                               and find breathing holes.
                                         They may remember
                                                         their arctic homes.
                                                                            They are one of the park’s
                                                          most sociable creatures. I said
                                          enter the water with them.
                               Graceful imitation of strange
   palms and seaflowers. A seaflower
     of a thousand colors, aquarium
              pigmented. It is my violent
  passion for seaflowers, Molly.
I want the entire
         underwater palace
          built of roaring seaflowers!
    Beluga! Beluga! Wither and mow.
         The child’s song.

  Emerald kayak
        and the femme fatale
                                 who sleeps in it, Victorian,
                                                          long, frothy hair
                                         and the death drive,
     flesh like the statement, “I lost a friend
          in the sea garden.”
                          The notes, staccato, vortex,
                                           paradisiacal, gold bell in a coffin
     just in case I wake up. And the way
                                                 darkness tunnels
       inside a car on its way
                        to its pinpoint destination.
No one tells you
                    the moon’s going
                                             to end up like this.
                                         No one. So you just move towards it.
    That’s all the moon
                               ever was. Ding. Ding.




4 comments:

  1. I feared that there would come a time during this incredibly stupid season when you forced me to violate my policy, and that time has come. I regret this.

    It's no smear. At best, Jill Stein is pandering to anti-vaxxers. And she knows it--she made an effort to walk back her position and got busted at it. If that is true, it's completely unforgivable and absolutely disqualifies her from any leadership position in organized society. I understand that you don't give a shit about that, since you're fundamentally opposed to organized society in general, and that's your business and I've long since accepted it, kindly and lovingly, I hope. But no quarter for a fucking idiot of her magnitude. An idiot who is, I hear tell, an actual medical doctor. Fucking despicable.

    At worst, she's an actual anti-vaxxer, and it looks to me like that's the case, because the language she uses in pandering to anti-vaxxers is exactly the language that anti-vaxxers use to claim they're not anti-vaxxers. EXACTLY that language. I know that you trust my qualifications to gauge that without reference to politics. And I credit that it's possible that she's pandering, which is not, as I noted, a save for her. Not even close.

    She's a nutbar and has no business running for office, and if she's actually an anti-vaxxer instead of just another pandering shithead politician, she and any offspring for which she's responsible have no business being around other humans.

    Write ME off with any nouns you choose, based simply on our differing assessments of the risks and stakes of this stupid season (or any such season). But it's no smear, and your supposition fails you in this case. Pretty badly, I am truly sorry to say.

    And in case you're tempted to run that stupid fucking bass video, I know where you live, mofo. I'll kill a bunch of bass with my bare hands and dump them on your fucking stoop. Actually, never mind. That sounded like a threat to me, but after I typed it, I realized that to cat people and their beloveds, it's a promise of treasure.

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    1. I'll take your word for it on Stein and anti-vaxxing: this is how I figured to do my research on the subject: I know the issue is important to you and you're far more informed than most people on the subject.

      I was hoping the Hillarium was *right* on that: it throws so much bullshit that accurate insightful and useful information that would be vital in forming an opinion about a candidate just sounds like so much Hillarium disinformation. I wish I had been clearer in the post that was part of my point in the first place. As I said, I don't know shit about Stein, but I do know how the Hillarium works.





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  2. Replies
    1. I like her watercolors best, but nowadays she does more with oils and acrylics. But I like washes.

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