For Time Is an Emulsion, and Probably Thinking Not to Grow Up Is the Brightest Kind of Maturity for Us, Right Now at Any Rate

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• Larry Summers: Democrats are not the lesser evil
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• The five hottest guillotines of 2020! 
• Exceptionalistic claptrap
• Forty-five days in the hole
• Lockdown strategy for capitalism
• Our shitlords and blaming China: For decades, America’s corporate elite has outsourced their country’s production capacity to China, very consciously destroying America’s industrial base and its well-paying jobs, and decimating the last bits of this country’s labor power. These people have treated America as little more than a colony to plunder. Now, suddenly, it’s the Chinese who are root of all of America’s problems.
• The philosophy of anger 

  

1. The same guys who fallacy
2. Landscape of abandoned mines 
3. Emptying the human: The pandemic is fetishized and much like the climate alarmism associated with Greta and The Guardian paper, there is a curious fetishized and cultic response in much of the population. And it is the latent masochism of the already terrorized. It also feels like a faint cry of Puritan angst, a call to piety. This is a very American sensibility, this punitive moralism. So one has a declining of experience, a cognitive deficit born of screen damage and habituation, and the psychic violence of social media which is based on paradigms of negative emotions. And the deeply imbued individuality that most Americans associate with frontiersmen and gunfighters. The morality of the Corona gunfighter, the unforgiving Puritan, but who now exhibit an impaired rationality, a rationality already instrumentalized to a pathological degree.  
4. From pandemic to prosaic
5. Dream during a plague 
6. New Sam Prekop song! 
7. On Gerhard Richter. I would get on a bus for a day trip to NYC in a heartbeat

 
      
SOONEST MENDED

John Ashbery

Barely tolerated, living on the margin

In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued   

On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso

Before it was time to start all over again.

There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,   

And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering

The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting

The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.   

And then there always came a time when

Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile

Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,   

Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused   

About how to receive this latest piece of information.   

Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out   

For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind

With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),

Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid?   

To reduce all this to a small variant,

To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau—

This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.   

Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,

A moment and it is gone. And no longer

May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.   

Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.   

Now there is no question even of that, but only

Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,   

With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across   

The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away

And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash

Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:   

This is what you wanted to hear, so why

Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers   

It is true, but underneath the talk lies

The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose

Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

    

These then were some hazards of the course,

Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else   

It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,   

The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.   

They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game   

Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes

And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.

Night after night this message returns, repeated

In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,   

Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,   

The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,   

Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes   

To be without, alone and desperate.

But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting

Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,   

Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,   

But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression

Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day   

When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering   

Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning   

Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that

Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,   

That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint

None of us ever graduates from college,

For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up   

Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

And you see, both of us were right, though nothing

Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars

Of our conforming to the rules and living

Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,   

Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept

The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless

Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,

Making ready to forget, and always coming back

To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.