Friday, January 27, 2017

Who Decides Against Our Teams




Mary Tyler Moore's death. I've not been moping and not posting, or didn't think I'd been moping, been successful in producing unsuccessful pages on (like always) me and faith. I'm small, I need a team. I saw a tweet Mary Tyler Moore was dead. For Liberals of my age that show was gospel. I thought of the Husker Du cover of her show's theme song, I youtube it, there's the show's theme song, click the arrow, Mary throwing her hat in the air, and it slayed me, a Eucharist of Nostalgia.







  • Serendipity be Blessed.
  • I also have unsuccessful pages on how my brain is being deliberately rewired. I mean, more and much more sloppily than before, and by design. It's frighteningly fascinating.
  • Or I'm old and my chips don't process like they used too.
  • Death to the Either/Or.
  • The gags of litany still salve.
  • RIP Harry Mathews who I've read like a religious obligation but but never quite got, as in dug. My fault, certainly. Just received Tlooth from off-campus storage, I have slim hope it will work this time, my never quite digging it an article of faith I need overcome.
  • RIP, Mannix.





  
Cool gales shall fan the glades

Harry Mathews

But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at?
Who wants to write a poem without the letter e,
Especially for Thee, where the flourished vowel lends such panache to your carnet de bal
(OK, peons: pizzazz to your dance card)? The alphabet’s such a horn
Of plenty, why cork up its treasure? It hurts to think of “you” reduced to u
In stingy text messages, as if ideally expression should be limited to formulas like x ≠ y,

Where the respectable truth of tautology leaves ambiguous beauty standing by
Waiting to take off her clothes, if, that is, her percentage of body fat
Permits it (a statement implicitly unfair, as if beauty, to remain sublime, had to keep up
Lineaments already shaped by uninhibited divinity); implying, as well, fixated onlookers, i.e.,
Men and women kidding themselves that full-front-and-back nudity is the north
Star of delight rather than imagined nakedness, shudderingly draped like a fully rigged, fully laden ship without a drop to bail,

Its hidden cargoes guessed at — perhaps Samian wine (mad-
making!) — or fresh basil
Gently crushed by its own slight weight, reviving memories of delights once stumbled on as a boy,
Delights often wreathed with necessary pain, like the stout unforgiving thorns
That tear shirt and skin as we stretch for ripe blackberries, to be gulped down fast,
Sweeter than butter and marmalade, quenching our thirst better than sucked ice,
Making us almost drunk as we shriek with false contempt at each benighted ump

Who decides against our teams. What happened to those blissful fruits, honeydew, purple plum,
White raspberry, for stealing which from Mrs. Grossman’s stand I invented ingenious alibis
That she never believed (insulting, or what?)? Where are childhood’s innocent sweetnesses, like homemade rice
Pudding and mince pie? Or the delicious resistances of various foods — bony
Lobsters, chops with their succulent tiny interstices, corn sticking to the cob, or the grilled feast
Of brook trout I caught without too much fuss after kicking a 
resentful hornets’

Nest? And when carnality replaced appetite, I was communally pronounced the horniest
Ten-year-old around; and I hadn’t even seen you. But when I did, you became the plume
In the horse’s hat of my lust. I was thirteen when we first danced together. There weren’t many afters
But I cherish my plume. There weren’t any afters, nothing, just a gentle abseil I
Could not climb back up. I still wave my plume, or my horse does, as he canters nobly
Into next year, my eighty-fifth. I hasten to add that “this coyness, lady, were no crime”

If I didn’t, in spite of all, feel so grateful to you. All manner of mercis
Fill my throat, along with immortal memories, of which I must acknowledge the thorniest
To be your disappearance, whether you tanked in river water or were scorched by Zeus’s proximity (or some such baloney);
But your firm breasts, taut nipples, and bent thighs? No thorns. All you wanted was a loosened peplum,
So I still bear your plume, and your name will not die: not to be written here or read, but my voice shall sibilate
It so shrilly that unseeded babies hear me, and every hidden woodworm wake from its dream to fall forever from the rafters.



5 comments:

  1. MTM was for my family part of a long running Saturday night line-up, for me as much the line-up of chips, Doritos, Mama's avocado dip, and Coke. Put another way, mindless consumerism, I suppose, but with memories that will never escape me, many that came from the mouth of the actor.

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    Replies
    1. 800 - All in the Family
      830 - MASH
      900 - Mary Tyler Moore Show
      930 - Newhart
      1000 - Carol Burnett

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  2. I lost it on the YT clip of "A little song, a little dance...". Really, seriously, thoroughly lost my shit for a few minutes. Eucharist of Nostalgia, yes. But we're Boomers, so our Nostalgia is like precious crystal. No wonder people are bottling our fucking tears.

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  3. 1)re your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th bullet points:

    your brain IS being rewired, daily, by your experience
    and it's also subject to age-related differences in functioning
    so yes, it's not either-or

    you might but might not find seeing one of richard "richie" davidson's youtube videos informative

    with respect to changed brain wiring, i recently came across an interesting discussion of the concept "karma", usually understood among english speakers as meaning

    (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.

    informal
    destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.



    the author i'm currently reading, a contemporary buddhist teacher, argues that the above is a kind of superstitious view - and that a more accurate view of karma [and the one that the buddha taught, is the claim] is that karma is the effect one produces on oneself when one identifies oneself with, and acts in accordance with, either wholesome or unwholesome motives

    to paraphrase someone or other (william james, maybe?) action becomes habit becomes character becomes destiny - not in a magical way, but in a natural sequence of cause and effect kind of way

    see also what i wrote at
    https://beingtowarddeath.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/emotional-rescue/#comment-15

    2)i liked mathews poem

    the following passage is from a review of tlooth by danny yee, dated 2002

    The individual vignettes and episodes in Tlooth are, however, more memorable than the framing story. Some of the prison camp inmates are involved with the production and international distribution of maple syrup, using it as cover for smuggling illegal Chinese medicine. An esoteric history of a feud between the families of the Chavenders and the Allants includes a two page document in a mish-mash of languages. There is a passage describing a sexual encounter in which the orthography degrades as the encounter progresses: "She lay on her knack and i lelt straddling her, my bees in her armpits, heading over her lean, my rest head and onds owning on the floor beyarmed her." (A useful device for evading censorware, though also guaranteed to give spell-checkers the fits.) An account of a flood in Rajasthan, in which ants help to rescue cattle, falls half-way between fable and ethnography. And so forth.





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  4. A) As an older Dog, the MTM I imprinted on was Laura Petrie; but I ride the Nostalgia Train much more than I used to, especially when Those We Know leave us. I did like TMTMS, though -- which gave rise to "Lou Grant". And the name of the publisher of the Los Angeles Tribune? Margaret Pynchon. I kept waiting for someone to ask if she were related to, cough, wink wink -- you know -- but, it did not happen. I miss Charlie Hume, too. And that guy.

    B) According to Scott Pelley, anchor of CBS Amusing Corporation Evening News (and a human who knows everything -- everything -- and whom we must revere, as though a God), Joe Mannix was shot seventeen times (but not all at once), and knocked unconscious over fifty times, during his tenure on ABC. In my Doggy brain, he is inseparable from George Peppard in "Banacek". Do not ask why.

    C) Fuck Trump.

    ReplyDelete