C and L and me went to Hell in Michigan this past weekend
Wiki's Four Theories on Hell's name:
There are a number of theories for the origin of Hell's name. The first is that a pair of German travelers stepped out of a stagecoach one sunny afternoon in the 1830s, and one said to the other, "So schön hell!" (translated as, "So beautifully bright!") Their comments were overheard by some locals and the name stuck.[7] The second theory is tied to the "hell-like" conditions encountered by early explorers including mosquitos, thick forest cover, and extensive wetlands.[7] The third is that George’s habit of paying the local farmers for their grain with home distilled whiskey led many wives to comment “He’s gone to Hell again” when questioned about their husband’s whereabouts during harvest time.[9] A fourth is that soon after Michigan gained statehood, George Reeves was asked what he thought the town he helped settle should be called and replied "I don't care. You can name it Hell for all I care." The name became official on October 13, 1841.
I didn't intentionally avoid the internet and documenting each day's clusterfuck news here or in tablet while in Michigan and didn't notice I hadn't written in tablet for four days until we were home. No subsequent epiphany graced me: I've been less here and more elsewhere of late anyway, spending more time on canvases than in tablets. The above says what I want to say better than my typing it could at this point in time though I type it here and in grid below anyway.
My daughter teaches high school on the edge of Blue Michigan so she gets kids from blue and red homes, she tells me the majority of the kids that confide in her, both kids from blue homes and kids from red homes, have no intention of voting this year if they will be eighteen in November and no intention of voting ever. Many have no plans for college or trade school or self-teaching themselves coding or some other marketable skill and they expect to work grunt jobs until forced into retirement when they will take late evening shifts at minimum wage at the local Krogers to survive their safety-net-less lives in the 2060s, not that they think they will ever see the 2060s: most think they will be destroyed from within by their coping habits if not killed first in our shitlords' wars of self-interest long before then, and neither C or me think they're wrong. (And it's not just high school kids in Michigan - I hire and supervise college undergraduates, many of them as aspirationally blah as my daughter's students.) (And it's not just the kids - the majority of teachers in my daughter's age-frame adamantly say to almost a man and woman they will never have children - it will be 2088 when a child born today is my age, what freaking world if the world still here?)
Walter Becker born seventy-four years ago yesterday. I love Steely Dan, unfollow if you must
POEM #1022
Daniel Borzutzky
There is not much excess
and what there is is barely perceptible
the blank ones disappear from our vision
no one notices until
there is a dramatic decrease in surplus value
the war is born
and the blank ones disappear again
but really their disappearance is subjective
some see no one
while others see everyone
for some the extermination of the cancer is
inseparable from the decreation of the city
others associate the decreation
with an unstoppable flow of leakage
while others associate the decreation
with falling rates of profit
and the barely perceptible
appearance of the human body
out of the dead refugee sprouts
a breathing poem
out of the dead soldier sprouts
a breathing poem
out of the dead city sprouts
a breathing poem
but when the city disappears
so do the poems
and when the poems disappear
the dead are assassinated
picture a heart covered in dust
and picture a poem sprouting out of it
picture a heart covered in dust
and picture a child chasing it
picture a bullet that kills a child
and picture the soldier who tosses the child into the sea
the soldier kisses the earth and says
it’s not my fault the people are being born and dying
the pastor calls out the names of the children to the congregants
to each name they respond
dead
1/borzutzky's word decreation has 41.2 million instances on google, which surprised me a bit - i haven't encountered it much in my own reading
ReplyDelete2/it reminds me of one of james tate's poems, published posthumously
JAMES TATE
The Bag of Feed
I was on my way home from the farm where I worked when a bull
attacked me. I hid behind a tree, but he came around and charged
at me again. I realized I had a red shirt on and this must have
enraged the bull, so I tore it off as fast as I could and threw
it on the ground. This seemed to have worked because the bull
walked up to the shirt and snorted at it, then walked away. I
picked up my shirt and rolled it into a ball and walked on my way,
naked from the waist up. When I got home I told my wife about
the bull and she laughed and told me I should remember to
never wear red to work. The next day I was milking a cow in its
stall when it turned around and started kicking my face. I laughed
so hard I kicked over the bucket of milk. And the next day I was
feeding the chickens when one of them suddenly flew up and bit my ear.
It bled so hard I had to go to the farmer’s house and get his wife
to bandage it. The next day I was feeding the pigs when one of them
bit me on the ankle. It hurt terribly and I had to quit for the day.
My wife told me I was allergic to the farm and that I had to quit
my job there. It didn’t make any sense to me. I had been working
there for twenty years. Nonetheless, I did quit. It made me
sad to do so. When I told Mr. Johnson, he said he understood.
He said one of his workers had been eaten alive by the chickens
many years ago. He said it’s called The Bag of Feed Syndrome.
The animals think they know you so well they begin to think of
you as a bag of feed. I thanked him for all he had done for us
and said my goodbye. On the way home I secretly cried. My wife
said everything would be alright. On the first morning home I woke
with my left hand missing. I looked everywhere for it. I hid
the stump from my wife, and she didn’t seem to notice. The next
morning my right leg was gone. And so on until there was
just my head lying on the pillow. My wife asked if I wanted
breakfast and I said, “I don’t think so.” The thought of it
made me sick. Well, it gave me a headache.
3/i used to buy bags of feeds for my cats at petsmart - yesterday after an errand at a nearby store i went in and looked at the cats available for adoption - there were only three on display
1/at reddit i recently read
ReplyDeleteIn the owners manual it says to avoid letting the gas fall below a quarter of a tank. Is this just to prevent me from running out of gas, or is there a mechanical reason for this?
the replies said yes, there were mechanical reasons - it's hard on the fuel pump if it has to suck in air as well as gasoline
1.4/speaking of cars, and pumps, i have just ordered an air pump for reinflating the tires of an old stored car that went flat - i was told the towing service wouldn't take the car away otherwise
2/at a music oriented blog i recently posted a youtube link to korean singer yoyomi covering a cyndi lauper song - it was deleted, which surprised me - but as yogi berra said, you never can tell when something unexpected might occur
"I love Steely Dan, unfollow if you must"... For me, the miracle of loving The Dans nestles in the curious fact that I abhor most everything that sounds *like* The Dans. I think The Dans (like many wonderful things of Art) are a gloriously failed attempt at imitating another thing, in this case an attempt at making a kind of "black music" that fails in all the ways that Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald (et al) almost kinda succeeded at. Meaning The Dans transcended... whereas Boz and Mike fell into the quaint Labrea second-stringers Tar Pits of pastiche. I cannot imagine kicking back, with the lights off, on a rainy August afternoon, to listen to... Lido shuffle! Whereas I will happily and cyclically do that with 99% of The Dan's output and 80% of Fagen's "solo" testaments, over the years, because the world-building is immaculate, idiosyncratic, detailed, informatively cynical, mordantly funny-as-a-helicopter-fuck-over-Columbia and never once makes me think of Jimmy Carter: it reminds me of... Eternity. (Lights go down, desert valley star show begins to the mystical opening bars of Do It Again... )
ReplyDelete