Always sideways these days I totally tilted last week at news of a new Cure album and listening to the released first single threw me into dark
It's not that it sucks (though it isn't good), it's that it smackingly reminds me of me, old, hopeless, bemoaning my lost fecundity through new stale creation (though my self-imposed painting ban now in week two with no plans to end or not end it) when I know I should quit but can't because what else is there but farting Fuck you! at the infinitely expanding certainty that nothing will ever be new again and what is old is enshittifying faster and faster, I mean, even something as kaboom as this can't salve:
THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX
Tom Raworth
1. gone to lunch back in five minutes
night closed in on my letter of resignation
out in the square one of my threads had broken loose
the language i used was no and no
while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills
occasionally the metabolism alters
and lines no longer come express
waiting for you what muscles work me
which hold me down below my head?
it is a long coat and a van on the horizon
a bird that vanishes the arabic
i learn from observation is how to break the line
(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan
police band singing ‘bless this house’
as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam
2. walking my back home
the wind
is the wind
is a no-vo-cain band
and the footstep
echoes
i
have conjured people
3. ah, it all falls into place
when it was time what he had left became a tile
bodies held shaped by the pressure of air
were clipped to his attention by their gestures
my but we do have powerful muscles
each of us equal to gravity
or sunlight that forces our shadows
into the pieces of a fully interlocking puzzle
4. good morning he whispered
the horrors of the horses are the crows
the bird flies past the outside the library
many heels have trapped the same way
he tolls, he lapsed with the light from so many trees
check the pattern swerves with the back
the tree that holds the metal spiral staircase swings
aloft the hand removes a book and checked it
for death by glasses or the angle food descends
5. the broadcast
she turns me on she turns on me
that the view from the window is a lake
and silent cars are given the noise of flies dying in the heat
of the library the grass outside goes brown
in my head behind my glasses behind the glass in the precinct
thus, too, they whisper in museums and banks
the "long train" headline reminds me of a joke which i heard in the early 1960s, which includes the names of lyndon johnson and charles de gaulle - although they are only used as placeholders for "a texan" and "a frenchman" and provide the raconteur with an occasion to attempt the colorful respective accents
ReplyDeletesoon after LBJ became president through a series of what some might see as unfortunate events, he and the president of France met at an international conference - as they exchanged banalités LBJ wanted to convey to de Gaulle just how BIG texas is, and finally he said "look at it this, way, General - you can get on a train in texas on monday morning, and friday afternoon you'll STILL be in texas"
de Gaulle replied, "Oui, oui, monsieur -- je comprends enfin -- We have also in France the slow train"
Knausgaard's 'Third Realm' -- gonna do it?
ReplyDelete1/If I had written the title to Pankaj Mishra's piece linked here, I would have called it "The Last Days of Western Civ" - he speaks of
ReplyDelete"the monumental Plato-to-NATO narratives about Western civilization ... in the 1990s ... writers and journalists commonly presented their countries as spiritual heirs of Athenian democracy, Renaissance individualism, and Enlightenment rationality.
One could read millions of words on the merits of Western democracy and liberalism ... without encountering a paragraph on the consequences of slavery, imperialism, and decolonization....[T]hese so-called liberal internationalists barely manifested any awareness of the modern Western history of mass bondage, colonial dispossession, and genocidal wars against indigenous peoples....It is our fate to watch helplessly how a power operating outside all conscience and grounded in ideological fictions can rationalize even a livestreamed genocide."
2/lbj was still president when i was reading plato* in my university's "western civ" course, a year after i first heard the "slow train" joke, and three years after i last saw the NATO base in naples where my father was stationed - the next year i was reading about how iran was being modernized under the shah's regime, in the brutalist building [https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=E53 The architect, Eduardo Catalano, also designed the Stratton Student Center. Catalano taught at MIT from 1956-1977] where polisci profs were consulting on the "strategic hamlet" policy for vietnam
2.5/*but it was thucydides that was the real eye opener on that syllabus
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7142
3/tomorrow night is the vice presidential debate - you never know when something surprising might happen
4/here's something that surprised me today - my neighbor's son - who I've known since he was a high schooler - is on trial for involuntary manslaughter right now - his lawyers today said he can't be guilty of that charge, because it is clear that - in self-defense - he - at that time a police officer - intended to kill the shoplifting suspect he fatally shot and whom he believed to have a weapon - it turned out that man was unarmed
the surprising thing is arguing that he can't be guilty of accidentally killing someone, because he killed him on purpose
"Fairfax County judge Randy Bellows called the argument peculiar at many levels before denying the defense’s request to toss the case."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-police-officer-lawyers-argue-210040351.html