In All My Years As a Pedestrian Serving Juice To Guests, It Never Occurred To Me Thoughtfully To Imagine How a Radish Feels. She Merely Arrived
Barring the unexpected, two new folk moving into our house end of August (they are only five weeks old now), both children of ferals in York, Pennsylvania, rescued by a friend of L's, a crazier cat-person than even us (though we have more garden statuary), I'll soon be able to walk into my house and yell, Lucy, I'm home
Our next door neighbor is luckily (if you're me) or unluckily (if you're L) named Ricky, so Bob, short for Babalu (L did not get my allusion when I said Bob Alou the missing fourth Alou brother, the fuck am I old)
I love all cats but love black cats best. Strangest days of my life, I'm reading, and enjoying, and now jinxing Henry James' The Ambassadors, attempt number 54,798 at reading James, at the insistence of two English professors and longtime friends I promised years ago at a Thursday Night Pints I'd keep trying James' late great trilogy (Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl the other two) until I get it or keep trying until end times if necessary. I can't name Bob Lambert since Lambert, aka Corrente, a lost blogbud, already taken, I can see why. End times? Have a grid below the Miles Davis, today is his centenary
"The psychopaths are conditioning us, through sheer repetition, to inhabit their moral universe of the medieval dark ages, in which prisoners are tortured and raped as a matter of operational routine, and the response of the civilized world is a furrowed brow and a State Department briefing about the importance of continued partnership"
In all my years as a pedestrian
serving juice to guests, it never occurred to me
thoughtfully to imagine how a radish feels.
She merely arrived. Half-turning
in the demented twilight, one feels a
sour empathy with all that went before.
That, needless to say, was how we elaborated
ourselves staggering across tracts:
Somewhere in America there is a naked person.
Somewhere in America adoring legions blush
in the sunset, crimson madder, and madder still.
Somewhere in America someone is trying to figure out
how to pay for this, bouncing a ball
off a wooden strut. Somewhere
in America the lonely enchanted eye each other
on a bus. It goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue.
Somewhere in America it says you must die, you know too much.
"There are no definitive histories," [Elijah Wald] would come to write in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll (2009), "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes."
Somewhere in America ... a bus ... goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue
2/songwriter woody guthrie was named after woodrow wilson
3/in his song hard travelin' guthrie referred to that lincoln highway - see https://tinyurl.com/thatlincolnhighway and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway - "one of the first transcontinental highways in the United States and one of the first highways designed expressly for automobiles"
4/ironically, it is not in the context of hard traveling, but rather more relaxed traveling, that the lincoln highway has entered my personal planning - an intention to drive along u.s. route 30 on the way back east after a family reunion in the midwestern state where my maternal grandfather was born and raised - the state just east of where lincoln came to prominence, whose name celebrates the population displacement of the indigenous peoples by my own ancestors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunpiking
5/on the way west spouse and self will be primarily following the route of the "national road" - u.s. 40 these days - "the United States' first great federally financed highway and a proving ground for national‑scale internal improvements"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road
6/the intention to avoid the limited access, high speed, boring interstate highways increases elapsed time on the road but makes the journey less of a chore and more of an adventure - robert louis stevenson wrote 'to travel hopefully is better than to arrive' - and we will stop overnight not just once, but twice, each way
7/the interstate highway spouse and self drive most often is formally named after eisenhower, who was president when the current interstate highway system was established - although this is not well known to the general public in the area, as the number is always used, not the name
it was dedicated in september 2020 - although the commemorative booklet contains congratulatory letters from the then-president and the living former presidents, none of them attended the ceremony
Re: Babalu: we're almost that old but didn't we sort of fall through the cracks of Ricky's Lore? At some point I became casually aware that Ricky had had a hit song, in the mists of Time (perhaps before Latin Americans as white as Ricky snuck over the White Line to make his mixed marriage okay), and, later yet, gleaned that his initial claim to fame was this song, itself, because when he carted it out it seemed to do so with the generous pomp of a titan feeding the nostalgia his crustier viewers. As I grew higher through the silo of the 1960s experience I started realizing that more of the oldsters I watched loitering on daytime/ late afternoon TV (like Eddie Albert, Van Johnson, Mike Douglas (sp?), Merv Griffith, et al) had each had such a hit, and had each been a heartthrob not terribly long after the Civil War, and it gave me musty fantods that pushed me into the arms of The Partridge Family. Nothing rekindled any interest in that territory until the day, last year, I learned that Lucille Ball had been a stone cold Greta Garboesque fox when whe was 16 (c. 1920). If only I had known (for some reason).
This afternoon I got a fund raising phone call on the landline from Doctors Without Borders. I promptly said I wouldn't be making a donation today. The fellow, from the voice probably an older white male, kept me on the line by asking why I had donated to them several times before, what motivated me. I told him I admired the attempt to bring care to our fellow humans, our "brothers and sisters" in the BOMFOG framework - a mid century acronym from solemn speechmaking, "the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God" I acknowledged the old-fashioned androcentric language.
Then he asked me again for a donation - so I let him have it with both barrels. I told him I thought these are the Last Days - in years, for me, but in decades, for Global Civilization. One consequence of that would be much less human suffering in the future. He didn't reply. Then I apologized for disappointing him and we politely ended the phone call.
I felt some regret. I was too harsh, but I felt pushed. The fundraiser’s willingness to keep pressing, even after I clearly said “not today,” is what escalated it.
- he should realize that these days a lot of people are close to the edge -- in fact it was that closeness to the edge that motivated his unwillingness to keep asking me for something I told him I wouldn't give him now
his "WILLINGNESS to keep asking" - he who does not work shall not eat - it would be a different world if we forgave each other for our trespasses - yeshua says that the kingdom of god is spread out over the world, but people do not see it
"There are no definitive histories," [Elijah Wald] would come to write in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll (2009), "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes."
ReplyDelete1/ashbery wrote
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in America ... a bus ... goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue
2/songwriter woody guthrie was named after woodrow wilson
3/in his song hard travelin' guthrie referred to that lincoln highway - see https://tinyurl.com/thatlincolnhighway and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway - "one of the first transcontinental highways in the United States and one of the first highways designed expressly for automobiles"
4/ironically, it is not in the context of hard traveling, but rather more relaxed traveling, that the lincoln highway has entered my personal planning - an intention to drive along u.s. route 30 on the way back east after a family reunion in the midwestern state where my maternal grandfather was born and raised - the state just east of where lincoln came to prominence, whose name celebrates the population displacement of the indigenous peoples by my own ancestors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunpiking
5/on the way west spouse and self will be primarily following the route of the "national road" - u.s. 40 these days - "the United States' first great federally financed highway and a proving ground for national‑scale internal improvements"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Road
6/the intention to avoid the limited access, high speed, boring interstate highways increases elapsed time on the road but makes the journey less of a chore and more of an adventure - robert louis stevenson wrote 'to travel hopefully is better than to arrive' - and we will stop overnight not just once, but twice, each way
7/the interstate highway spouse and self drive most often is formally named after eisenhower, who was president when the current interstate highway system was established - although this is not well known to the general public in the area, as the number is always used, not the name
https://www.eastcoastroads.com/states/md/inter/i270
7.5/it was only in the process of preparing this comment this morning that i learned of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower_Memorial
it was dedicated in september 2020 - although the commemorative booklet contains congratulatory letters from the then-president and the living former presidents, none of them attended the ceremony
ReplyDelete"Our rich people, whom we celebrate as brilliant, are idiots and fools."
https://www.ianwelsh.net/western-ai-investors-are-the-dumbest-money-in-the-world/
Re: Babalu: we're almost that old but didn't we sort of fall through the cracks of Ricky's Lore? At some point I became casually aware that Ricky had had a hit song, in the mists of Time (perhaps before Latin Americans as white as Ricky snuck over the White Line to make his mixed marriage okay), and, later yet, gleaned that his initial claim to fame was this song, itself, because when he carted it out it seemed to do so with the generous pomp of a titan feeding the nostalgia his crustier viewers. As I grew higher through the silo of the 1960s experience I started realizing that more of the oldsters I watched loitering on daytime/ late afternoon TV (like Eddie Albert, Van Johnson, Mike Douglas (sp?), Merv Griffith, et al) had each had such a hit, and had each been a heartthrob not terribly long after the Civil War, and it gave me musty fantods that pushed me into the arms of The Partridge Family. Nothing rekindled any interest in that territory until the day, last year, I learned that Lucille Ball had been a stone cold Greta Garboesque fox when whe was 16 (c. 1920). If only I had known (for some reason).
ReplyDeleteThis afternoon I got a fund raising phone call on the landline from Doctors Without Borders. I promptly said I wouldn't be making a donation today. The fellow, from the voice probably an older white male, kept me on the line by asking why I had donated to them several times before, what motivated me. I told him I admired the attempt to bring care to our fellow humans, our "brothers and sisters" in the BOMFOG framework - a mid century acronym from solemn speechmaking, "the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God" I acknowledged the old-fashioned androcentric language.
ReplyDeleteThen he asked me again for a donation - so I let him have it with both barrels. I told him I thought these are the Last Days - in years, for me, but in decades, for Global Civilization. One consequence of that would be much less human suffering in the future. He didn't reply. Then I apologized for disappointing him and we politely ended the phone call.
I felt some regret. I was too harsh, but I felt pushed. The fundraiser’s willingness to keep pressing, even after I clearly said “not today,” is what escalated it.
- he should realize that these days a lot of people are close to the edge -- in fact it was that closeness to the edge that motivated his unwillingness to keep asking me for something I told him I wouldn't give him now
his "WILLINGNESS to keep asking" - he who does not work shall not eat - it would be a different world if we forgave each other for our trespasses - yeshua says that the kingdom of god is spread out over the world, but people do not see it
Delete