Flem Snopes just married the pregnant-but-not-with-his-kid Eula Varner, the fuck am I doing in Yoknapatawpha County at the turn of the 20th century? I'd forgotten Faulkner can be laugh-out-loud funny. When I'm not there I'm in Acadian Canada in the mid-seventeenth century witnessing the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous North Americans (though, in a typical if vital Vollmann digression, I just spent 50 pages with Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola in sixteenth century Spain before his beatification), the fuck am I doing there? and when I'm not there I'm in David Ohle's Pisstown, I know what I'm doing here. I'm grateful that I'm reading and reading well: I've failed a dozen novels, old and new, first reads and rereads, in the past six months, I blame me
Strangest days of my life. Reflexive tick: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059, the Earth will be here but will the world? The Faulkner, Vollmann, Ohle novels, the lust for power by assholes is a major theme, it occurs to me that humans would have destroyed the world already if they only had the means, and now that they have the means and the end seems unstoppably inevitable I don't want to read fiction about assholes set in today. Why this is reassuring to me - that humans are no worse than ever they just have the means to enact greater and greater assholosity - is, at best, a coping mechanism that offsets my compulsive documentation of said current assholosity. Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop our immiseration and extinction is evaporating exponentially faster by the second. How 'bout that hockey game, huh?
I actually wanted to bump the George birthday post from the top, fuck me. Music too, sounds I once loved unto never conceiving I'd not only not mind not hearing them for a very long time if not ever fucking again are increasing with clusterfuck's swelling and deepening. I listened to *All Things Must Pass* past Tuesday after posting the birthday, at first I vibrated like always but by "Wah Wah," gone; was horrified but unsurprised. I won't truly worry about my head until hiking with L and playing disc golf suck and being finally incapable of reading anything or listening to anything (I've long since stopped watching anything), but my head is changing, not all for the bad but most, and it's not just aging towards my skeleton days. Yes, I changed the name in the title of this post from the line in the Ashbery poem the title comes from. Ashbery still works for me
Éliane Radigue died this week. If you look at my bandcamp page you'd see some of her music and many artists I would not be listening to now if I hadn't discovered Radigue decades ago. My current immersion (to L's annoyance when she's in my car) in ambience and drone and noise directly related to Radigue's seminal music. I've been listening constantly since news of her death. Radigue's music still makes me vibrate and vibrate more resonantly than ever, I'm (almost more relieved than) delighted to report. Need some of the toeholds to my past, yinz
HISTOIRE UNIVERSELLE
John Ashbery
As though founded by some weird religious sect
It is a paper disk, partially lit up from behind
With testaments to its cragginess, many of them
Illegible, covering most of its surface. In the hours
Between midnight and 4 AM it assumes a fitful
But calm sedentary existence, and it is then that
You may reach in and take out a name, any name,
And it will be your own, at least while
The walls of Bill’s villa resonate with the intermittent,
Migraine-like drone of motorized gondolas and the distant
Murmur of cats. To be treated, at times like these,
To free speech is an aspect of the dream and of Dreamland
In general that asserts an even larger
View of the universe pinned on the midnight-blue
Backcloth of the universe that can’t understand
Who all these people are, and about what
So much fuss is being made; it ignores its own entrails
And we love it even more for it until we too
Are parted like curtains across the empty stage of its memory.
The house was for living in,
So much was sure. But when the ways split
And we saw out over what was after all
Water and dawn, and prayed to the rocks
Overhead, and no answer was forthcoming,
It was then that the cosmic relaxer released us.
We were together on such a day. You, oddly
But becomingly dressed, pointed out that that
Day is today, the moral. All that.
cats and a dog in the snow - instrumental music
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woIX3Co0Y8I&list=RDwoIX3Co0Y8I&start_radio=1
to a certain extent someone who lives in my neighbourhood resembles the american poet who said - "I am large - i contain multitudes" - among the multitudinous attributes are a great many email streams aimed in this person's general direction with a variety of concerns and perspectives - one stated
ReplyDeleteMany of us are bearing witness daily to suffering all over the planet. We care about others, and we want desperately to be of use—and seeing the horrors in images and videos and stories every day can be deeply dysregulating to our nervous systems.
If you find yourself feeling unusually tense, exhausted, reactive, numb, or unable to turn away—even when you want to—it may not be a personal failing. It may be a natural response to prolonged exposure to suffering.
As a survival tool in the moment, that urge to withdraw and shut down is understandable. But it’s not a sustainable long-term response, because we need to stay connected (to ourselves and each other) in order to navigate these internal and external upheavals.
this email went on to suggest reading https://www.mindful.org/how-to-respond-to-vicarious-trauma/
1/thinking of how 'the house was for living in' and also other types of buildings and other types of activities in these kinetic days of modern times, i whimsically recalled the three little pigs and thought of how they might have a couple more siblings - one might not have a house at all, even before the commencement of the most recent hostilities, and one might have a fortified bunker
ReplyDelete2/the difference between a fission a-bomb, such as has never been used on a populated area with only a couple of exceptions, and a thermonuclear device is very substantial
3/it was encouraging to read that when one signs up at the hearts of space - slow music for fast times website, with one's free account one can
stream our weekly show up to 4 times each week
browse the collection and hear samples
use our free apps for Android and iOS
subscribe to our weekly email playlists
get special offers on subscriptions and gifts
4/I looked up the etymology of 'exuberance' - originally it referred to an overflowing udder of a cow or goat - metaphorically it has been used in connection with the effect of the carbon pulse as an "overflowing" of transformed solar energy being released by combustion much more quickly than it had been accumulated
5/then my mind wandered to 'truth or consequences' - sources assert "Truth or Consequences was a groundbreaking American game show created by Ralph Edwards. It holds a unique place in history as the first game show to air on broadcast television." - as usual, fine metaphors abound
6/the transition from notochord to vertebrate that made such a difference for the evolutionary exuberance of the latter group, among whom we are numbered, was the jaw, spouse and self heard last night, while watching a program hosted by david attenborough, although the program was recorded in 2013
7/ jaw : vertebrates :: carbon pulse : ?
today i learned, by following a link placed at nakedcapitalism.com, a new acronym:
ReplyDeleteCACTUS
(Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System)
the link i followed was posted by mike day
https://un-denial.com/2026/03/05/cactus-view-of-the-iran-war/
the author's name, occupation, and worldview can be found at
https://un-denial.com/about/
once again i am reminded of
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Child%27s_Garden_of_Verses/Happy_Thought
the poem prior to the one pointed to was about a cow, and the following poem about the wind
i first read these poems in the farmhouse that my father's mother grew up in - her husband, my grandfather, gave me a chance to participate in hand-milking one of his cows [see previous comment on 'exuberance'] - my grandmother's name was harriet, and my grandfather's name was harold, but i have forgotten the cow's name - it is not impossible that a certain number of atoms that are still in my body were transferred to me through that cow's milk, seventy years ago - as pioneering experimental psychophysiologist and metaphysical philosopher gustav fechner wrote, the greatest of all miracles is that anything exists at all