Monday, May 28, 2018

and ferns unfurled



  • Yesterday, up on Catoctin, hoping for full bloom Jem'Hadar Mountain Laurel, nope not yet.
  • Still true: all I want to do is hike with Earthgirl, true when I hike seething, true when I don't.
  • Seethe, not exactly - the I.H.M.D-measles is spreading, affecting more Democratic loyalist mumps now mumbling what you and me grumbled at the same stage of our apostasies.
  • I, of course, am behind where I should be now.....
  • Already too late, fellow motherfuckers, period bullet * be Kind to the newly Aghast, such as the always needing daily detox me.




  • Catoctin hit by major rain past two weeks, the ponds, the streams, the green, the ferns, yowza.
  • E, P, & I went to a movie theater to see a movie I promised to see and could only see in a movie theater on strong and pushy recommendations of two analog and four digital friends, The Death of Stalin.
  • (Disclaimer: I hate movie theaters, the theater experience, always have, people can vouch.)
  • I hated the experience.
  • Liked the movie, enough, I'm still thinking about it, a day later, that's unusual for a movie.
  • Anyway, totalitarianism: the movie = funny until you're shot.
  • Reminder: wherever you drive, never go five miles above the speed limit and be relentlessly nice to other drivers, observe other humans initiate interaction with you.











THE CLEARING

Jane Kenyon

The dog and I push through the ring
of dripping junipers
to enter the open space high on the hill
where I let him off the leash.
  
He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss;
twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls
and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth;
his pink tongue lolls.
  
I look for sticks of proper heft
to throw for him, while he sits, prim
and earnest in his love, if it is love.
  
All night a soaking rain, and now the hill
exhales relief, and the fragrance
of warm earth. . . . The sedges
have grown an inch since yesterday,
and ferns unfurled, and even if they try
the lilacs by the barn can’t
keep from opening today.
  
I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens,
and the white-throated sparrow’s call
that borders on rudeness. Do you know—
since you went away
all I can do
is wait for you to come back to me.



6 comments:

  1. on the occasion of the spring holiday in honor of war, quotes from two relevant recent articles -

    "A most sordid profession" - Fred Reed

    The Pentagon learned much in Vietnam, not about fighting wars, which it still cannot do well, but about managing its real enemy, the public. The media, which savaged the war on Vietnam, are now firmly controlled by the corporations that own them. Thus we do not see photos of the horrors committed by American aircraft bombing cities.

    https://www.unz.com/freed/a-most-sordid-profession/

    ====

    "Making Sense of America's Empire of Chaos"
    Mark Karlin interviews Tom Englehardt

    Most people, for instance, don’t grasp something I’ve long written about at TomDispatch: that Donald Trump would have been inconceivable as president without those disastrous wars, those trillions squandered on them and on the military that’s fought them, and that certainly qualifies as “impact” enough....


    What is the role of bombing in the U.S. war-making machine?

    It’s worth remembering, as I’ve written in the past, that from the beginning the war on terror has been, above all (and despite full-scale invasions and occupations using hundreds of thousands of U.S. ground troops), an air war. It started that way. On September 11, 2001, after all, al-Qaeda sent its air force (four hijacked passenger jets) and its precision weaponry (19 suicidal hijackers) against a set of iconic buildings in the U.S. Those strikes -- only one of them failed when the passengers on a single jet fought back and it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania -- may represent the most successful use of strategic bombing (that is, air power aimed at the civilian population of, and morale in, an enemy country) in history. At the cost of a mere $400,000 to $500,000, Osama bin Laden began an air war of provocation that has never ended.

    The U.S. has been bombing, missiling, and drone-assassinating ever since. Last year, for instance, U.S. planes dropped an estimated 20,000 bombs just on the Syrian city of Raqqa, the former “capital” of the Islamic State, leaving next to nothing standing. Since the first American planes began dropping bombs (and cluster munitions) in Afghanistan in October 2001, the U.S. Air Force has been in the skies ceaselessly -- skies by the way over countries and groups that lack any defenses against air attacks whatsoever. And, of course, it’s been a kind of rolling disaster of destruction that has left the equivalent of World Trade Center tower after tower of dead civilians in those lands. In other words, though no one in Washington would ever say such a thing, U.S. air power has functionally been doing Osama bin Laden’s job for him, conducting not so much a war on terror as a strange kind of war for terror, one that only promotes the conditions in which it thrives best.


    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176428/tomgram%3A_making_sense_of_america%27s_empire_of_chaos/

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  2. I think I tweeted something about Monty Python does Stalin back when I saw the film The Death of Stalin (there was even a Palin!). I enjoy the movie experience: the dark, the sound, the giant faces and sceneries, the being caught up in. Was it satire or was it realism? That's, I guess, the mark of really good satire—it's practically believable. And a commentary on our times to boot.

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    Replies
    1. Palin being in it got me in the door.

      As for your question, satire *is* Death to the Either/Or.

      I do wish I liked watching movies more than I do. I try, and....

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  3. One of the very best moments of my life was turning to you with 12 seconds left in that Tolkien movie and telling you it would take two more fucking movies and six more fucking hours for the short hairy guys to blow up the fucking ring.

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    Replies
    1. That fucking movie STILL isn't over. It's almost as long as the NHL playoffs.

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    2. And even then, at the end, they decided to bring in the damn eagles. I mean, really. Why couldn't they have come to the shire and taken our big footed friendlies there in the first place?!

      Delete