William Gass - The Tunnel
- I am writing again. Blame William Gass, blame his Tunnel. The stupid shit that obsesses him is the same stupid shit that obsesses me. Reminder: need a primer on mean petty personal evil (and hence Humanity)? Any Gass, but particularly The Tunnel.
- Forgive me, it fascinates me, HRC's in-game decisions. Seems dumb to me, muting the climate change rhetoric (her credit's not good with Neoliberal, Inc?)(etc?), but she's not after my vote much less my advice.
- It is never HRC's fault.
- Never happen.
- Change of pace: Berlin politics.
- Nature is a battlefield.
- Tom's daily.
- We have never been Star Trek.
- #567.
- Edward Thomas?
- Gravity's Rainbow, page 203.
- Out of nowhere, this Bill Direen song started playing in my head last night.
MY LEFT EYE NEW HURT
Pjoepf of Vriecyh
My left eye new hurt.
I think I'm always crying,
sleep-sand granier,
hiking downhill steep
tricky, left-lower quadrant
blinkered. I can't read.
1)speaking of "feed", as you do in the last word of yesterday's poem, i have just become aware of how tara brach has slightly altered the terms of her RAIN procedure and now terms it "the RAIN of self-compassion"
ReplyDeleteyou may have learned RAIN as a mindfulness procedure in which the steps are called
Recognize what is happening,
Allow life to be just as it is,
Investigate with kindness,
Non-identification.
but now tara, in response to feedback from people working with her, is giving more emphasis to RAIN as a process in which one extends self-compassion, and her more recent formulation, with a significant change for the "N", is
Recognizing what is happening
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is
Investigate with interest and care
Nourish with self-compassion
in listening yesterday to a dharma talk she gave on the topic, i was struck by the way she encourages people to speak to themselves with terms of endearment - she has found that over time, this affectionate process helps overcome the very common "trance of unworthiness"
may the creative forces of the universe smile in our general direction
2)speaking of "maple street", as gass does in today's passage, reminds me that in the town of my birth (framingham, massachusetts) my grandparents home was ON maple street and there was a maple TREE in the front yard - i visited there often and lived there the year i was in first grade and my father was in korea - although i did not know it as a six year old, my grandmother was in the framingham heart study, which has its own wikipedia entry - my grandfather worked at dennison manufacturing - zillow estimates the value of their house, still standing, as $429,953, although it is not currently on the market - it now has 2.5 baths, so a bathroom has been added in the forty-some years since i was last inside
and speaking of pretentious real estate names, as gass does, i smile when i drive by a neighborhood not so far from my current home called "the hamptons" - no, there are no parties there where hillary clinton, billy joel, jon bonjovi, and sir paul mccartney share the stage
ReplyDeletethere are no yacht marinas within a couple miles of this "hamptons" - rather, there are a couple sites where teenage boys from central america have been found shot dead this year, allegedly by their acquaintances
stuff happens - ignore it
1.) It's a GassGassGass.
ReplyDelete2.) She got what She wanted. But, think of the children.
3.) It's all caused by that Hateful. Old. Man.
4.) Yep -- nevgahappen. But, think of the children.
5.) The absorption of 'Die Osti' into The West is very poorly understood outside Eurp (outside The Deutschland, really). No surprise that Merkel, raised in a Soviet-dominated culture, has been a pragmatic centrist Chancellor who supports capitalism and who embraced Austerity as the financial tool to limit the damage after the 2008 Crash ("Thanks, America!") and save the EU.
6.) Tom = good
7.) "All your people must learn before you can reach for the stars."
8.) Rusted scrap, a banana-plant leaf, an unopened door.
9.) The 100th anniversary of the Great War hasn't been much of one. For a conflict which created an even worse conflict, and continues to stretch out a dead hand from the trenches to clutch at our ankles... but, then, it was mostly Eurp's war. We just got rich off of it. So, Saul Goodman.
10.) Did the Preterite Shuffle: right. Did the Tulsa Taser; check. Uh-oh. Snap To, Slothrop... Someday, will have to tell the story of a few bored law enforcement types with a taste for modern literature, who, in the late 1970's, decided to see if they could find that there reclusive author. Because freedom.