Wreck Your Head

2010-02-28T04:13:00.000-08:00

In FOREIGN AFFAIRS this month Niall Ferguson is trying to link Spengler, Toynbee, and Paul Kennedy to paintings by Thomas Cole. Will it go?

2010-02-28T04:12:00.000-08:00

Right wing columnist Tony Blankley keeps writing about the idea of mandatory national service for all Americans. Would it ever, ever fly?

2010-02-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

"What's your favorite book?"

If I say THE RECOGNITIONS by William Gaddis do I get to have a diabetic cookie?

2010-02-25T14:42:00.001-08:00

What's your position on Creech Air Force Base?

2010-02-22T18:13:00.000-08:00

On the blues - Francis Davis or Robert Palmer?

2010-02-20T17:53:00.000-08:00

Listen to me - what do you know about J.D. Salinger and Peter Burling's toy bus stop? Never saw that coming huh?

2010-02-19T17:17:00.000-08:00

I'd really like to meet somebody who owns one of Piero Manzoni's cans of shit. Wouldn't you?

2010-02-18T08:40:00.000-08:00

The correct answer to the quiz question is Doyle Dane Bernbach.

2010-02-14T17:10:00.000-08:00

I wish I had the fortitude to review a novel like ECHO HOUSE by Ward Just the way I used to review books for Patsy Moore's zine - bit I just don't have it any longer. Ironically in some ways I'm enjoying fiction more.

2010-02-11T12:19:00.001-08:00

Anne Conway, 1631-1679

There is no picture of Anne Conway. A detail from a Dutch interior painting is often presented as showing her; but the owners of the painting, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, report that recent scholarship has shown that it’s certainly not her.

2010-02-11T08:49:00.001-08:00

What do you think about the death of Eugene Izzi??

2010-02-05T06:58:00.001-08:00

A woman said, "Your indiscriminate use of the word 'cunt' is offensive." Was she talking to me? This was in a most pleasant garden environment. I was sipping a sugar free vanilla latte. We were all strangers, all tan and looking summertime good. There were unspoken quodlibets in the air about propagation. I held up a copy of the book FORGIVENESS: BREAKING THE CHAIN OF HATE by Michael Henderson in front of my face. I understand - you don't think such a book could give off a progenitive vibe. You're wrong. And I was going to go with Jampolski at first - not sexy!

Then a scut in a daffodil dress was asking about Avis Bohlen, Nina Tannenwald and Freeman Dyson. This was an intellectual cafe even if all anybody can think about is grinding the G spot into ecru paroxsym. You think he's let pre-cum seep out? You think she's moist behind that Mac laptop? Have you ever thought you might like to order just a plain old cup o' mud?

A bee approached. A hag lunged at it with a copy of GOLF FOR DUMMIES, swatting. She had hands like a grease monkey - what's that about? Spoliate and plunder.

The waitress of last summer is the hostess now. Cheek to cheek with the proprietor, even. It never ends. Interviewing applicants. Barking commands.

Somewhere a television is repeating Graham Allison's hypotheses about loose Russina nukes. Where is it? In your mind? Your anus? Your partner? No, it's there, behnd the coffee bar. We want, we want, we want!

2010-01-31T16:38:00.000-08:00

I have a brother who was born with Down's, and for this reason I can tell you unequivocally that the American playwright Arthur Miller was a piece of shit. You figure it out.

2010-01-29T18:17:00.000-08:00

124 years ago today - 1/29/1886 - Karl Benz invented the automobile. For no real or discernible reason this flew into my brain as I sat alone sipping tea and reading a porn story FOURTH DATE, FIRST FUCK by Dion Farquhar. That might be wrong. I might have been reading A NEW THEORY OF BEAUTY by Guy Sircello (he died of AIDS (I like obscure philosophy books like that (I am the only person you know who has ever paid $90 for a worn copy of UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING by Paul Ziff))). Then again, it might have been a porn story by Carol Queen or Svetlana Boym. We all have our agendas. Our weaknesses. One of my glaring weaknesses has been revealed to be collecting pixels of the Russian double-headed eagle symbol (because I read an article about it by Kruschcev's daughter). It's like that. You told me you could simultaneously read articles by Matthew Hoey in the BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS and finger your pee hole, but I knew you couldn't. How did I know? Your wife told me.

Thomas Merton informs us that his father painted like Cezanne. Oh really? Like how? Like THE BLACK CLOCK?

2010-01-24T16:58:00.000-08:00

Gather round, my peeps. Dudes! Dudettes! I'm certain everyone knows about Professor Robert Putnam's so-called Uppsala paper and the consequences it has for us all. I mean, it's all over the internet, everywhere. What? Oh really? Oh, all right then. How about Ashley Dupre on the NY Jets and their chances against the Colts? No? Maybe - please - maybe Ashley Dupre on dating and relationships? No? I give up.

She wants $40 for a bikini waxing. "Can I have forty bucks to wax my thing?" I think it was Thomas Berger who wrote, "I absolutely worship the English language."

I want you to understand this: "Soon, when they buy plane tickets online, travelers will be prompted to contribute two dollars, two euros, or two pounds to development aid - a form of innovative financing that could help save millions of lives." This sentence was composed by Philippe Douste-Blazy. What does it mean? What does it mean to you, specifically?

Charles Krauthammer has informed us that Europe wants recognition as a "leader" in world affairs despite (basically) doing little but sucking on America's tit for about sixty years now. Can we have a show of hands?

In one of my largely unknown novels I wrote about a half-erection, "It wasn't hard, but at least he was able to get it in there" - I now confess to all the world that I plagiarized this from Richard Yates. Ya happy? You! And you thought I was going to start ranting about the world's first and only mail order religion, the Psychiana of Frank B. Robinson. You!

2010-01-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

It is well memorialized: when I was twenty two I had a woman wipe her ass with pages she ripped out of my (prodigious) copy of the mots of Baltasar Gracian. This was in a casino I do not care to name. She was thirty eight. She was tired of losers, amongst which she counted students of the humanities. She wanted men who could make money (so she could take it). There were questions as to why I couldn't study business in the university, go to Wall Street, make money. Business. I said "Look, cunt - what is it about business that you need to know, exactly?" I showed her my copy of REALITY IN ADVERTISING by Rosser Reeves. It appeared, somewhat amazingly, that she remembered Reeves' immortal Anacin ad from the early 1960s. Too, she had knowledge of "It melts in your mouth, not in your hands." This was a bitch who understood the power of the belly button 20 years before Britney Spear, yunnerstan? Yunnerstan?

If she were here today (she's not) (she's exanimate, she's inorganic), I would tell her this - "Look, cunt - I read a 700 page biography of Howard Hawks and there is nothing in it like Mariah Carey or Kanye West showing up drunk and appearing on camera on awards shows. Beauty is beauty, and this is all you need to know."

I think I'm a pretty qualified member of what David Brooks calls the "educated class," but I agree with almost none of it. I just can't get behind compassion via paperwork.

2010-01-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

I will say, however, one thing before moving off the political, and that is this: the novel ends beautifully, in what is really a master stroke. As I read deeper and deeper into the book - especially in the chapters where the NYPD starts to take on a role in the narrative - the Huffington Post/Daily Kos/Firedog Lake type pontificating started to grate on me a bit, but in managing to find a conclusion that avoids any one political ideology Hamilton atones for this 'sin'.

2010-01-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

Invariably a novel that aims at the dual objectives of 1) the investigation of the human heart and 2) political commentary will conclude that matters of the first are more metaphysically worthy, more valuable, than matters of the second. Hamilton selects an epigraph from Francois Bizot (once a prisoner of the Khmer Rogue) in order to perhaps illustrate this point:

"I think we should maybe have the courage to identify ourselves with and humanize the torturer. Maybe we should look at ourselves, instead of saying "Never again," which does not work. We could try to ask a new question, as well as a very old one:
"How is it possible?" We may find the answers in ourselves."

This is noteworthy for two reasons - firstly, the fact that an author quoted in an epigraph has to be given credibility by the inclusion of biographical facts about his life is a huge red flag and, secondly, the implementation of this very sentiment is being carried out today, in real life, as a matter of national policy, before our very eyes, with nearly disastrous results.

The novel has, as its main plot, the following story line: an American kid is recruited by radical Islamists to blow up the New York subway. But it is about many other things as well, and has many other engrossing characteristics which I'm going to concentrate on here. In POLITICS AND THE NOVEL Irving Howe wrote "The great test for the writer is: how much truth can he force through the sieve of his opinions?" If we take it as a given that all political commentary and analysis is fundamentally opinion, then the truth that shines through will be what the great aesthetician Arnold Isenberg, in his essay "The Problem of Belief", called 'fancy truths'. I think Hamilton's strength amd skill lie more in this arena than in the political, and so that is what we'll take up as our main concern in the four or five blogs to follow.

2010-01-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

This weekend we suspend our usual incoherent ramblings in order to present a review of the novel 31 HOURS by Masha Hamilton, brand new from Unbridled Books.

In his great book on 70s American film, A CINEMA OF LONELINESS, Robert Kolker discusses, in the chapter on Scorsese, Roland Barthes' concept of "New York-ness" - that is, the idea or archetype of what NYC 'should' look and feel like in the collective psyche(s). There is no one ideal of New York-ness (compare Scorsese's hellhole with Woody Allen's pleasant Fifth Avenue, for example). Masha Hamilton's new novel works within a comparatively new framework of New York-ness that didn't really exist in generations past - terrorist New York. I dabbled in a little bit of New Historicist type Theory while contemplating this novel, reading it side by side with Christopher Dickey's excellent nonfiction book on terrorism and the NYPD called SECURING THE CITY. This was profitable and rewarding.

2010-01-05T05:24:00.000-08:00

hello this is a postmodern post something like el doctorows loon lake or william h gass omensetters luck it has to do with a neuroscientist named ledoux his work with gazzinaga is quietly destroying the notion of free will and volition but the reason i am writing is that i had a synchronicity there...i read a book called on desire by irvine and he discussed ledoux then the very next book i picked up for my personally self imposed required reading was the survivors club by ben sherwood and ledoux was profiled in there too what do you think about this that i had never heard of this man and he shows up in pages like this so forcefully

2010-01-03T05:16:00.000-08:00

I am considering a career in rap:

"Girlfren say she wanna do the nasty
Acuzz it is so fan-tas-tee
Her Jamaican dude, he be a Rasty
Fuck her so hard she need angioplasty"

No? OK then. Let's return:

What should I read tonight? The choices seem to be WHY CAN'T WE BE GOOD by Jacon Needleman and RIDE EM COWGIRL: SEX POSITION SECRETS FOR BETTER BUCKING by Dr. Sadie Allison. Doesn't seem like much of a noviation, does it? Needleman should have done better at holding my attention with MONEY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE.

That? On the wall? That came out of me in a spray. Remind the cleaning lady about that next time you see her, won't you?

Here's a sweet new way to think about credit: you charge a $100 meal. The next day it comes out of your body in an alarming nuclear shit storm. Six months later you still haven't paid off the original balance. Is this an intelligent way to conduct yourself? You decide. I'm preoccupied.

Cinema students: why does Taylor Hsckford use that image of the shifting clouds in every goddam film? Eh? That's E-H, eh? It's most annoying in DOLORES CLAIBORNE, is it not? Or the one where Pacino plays Satan? We know this much: in the crush of history many women have remarked on the curvature of penis. Why does it sway to the right? To the left? (This was the conversation I had with Mamas in the screening of THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE that we attended. They show commercials for the commercials. Waddya think Leo Burnett is doing in his grave? Smoking a Marlboro?)

My only auspices are the auspices of doubt.

2010-01-01T07:45:00.000-08:00

For the New Year our initial intention had been to write about Errol Flynn and his attraction to Tantric Sex or, alternatively, the time I saw a stereotypical hot beach babe at poolside reading THE BOUNDS OF SENSE by P.F. Strawson, but upon slight reconsideration we're going to install a short exercise in intonation and pronunciation.

Note how the meaning changes with the emphasis:

*I* didn't say he beat his dog.

I *didn't* say he beat his dog.

I didn't *say* he beat his dog.

I didn't say *he* beat his dog.

I didn't say he *beat* his dog.

I didn't say he beat *his* dog.

I didn't say he beat his *dog*.

Tally ho.

2009-12-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

If you can believe it, William Arrowsmith - William Arrowsmith!!!! - thinks the final sequence of L'ECLISSE has something to do with Oswald Spengler.

Seymour Chatman's take is more cogitative and postulational, if no less jocund: "In the age of the sports car, people go through lovers like water through sand on a beach."

Of this same sequence Sam Rohdie says: "These are places which are openly non-narrativised, of a pictorial and visual interest which suddenly takes hold, causes the narrative to err, to wander, momentarily to dissolve." Openly non-narrativised.

I need you.

2009-12-27T00:58:00.001-08:00

I have a friend who regularly eats his woman's discarded toenail clippings as a mating ritual - this he does in protest against Ludwig Wittgenstein's protests against Sir James Frazer. You can connect the dots yourself. You know, or you should know, that evolution is optimized by the maximum number of mistakes consistent with survival.

There are urgent matters percolating in my... in my... well, in my percolator. The worst of these is that I have become a late merger. I hate it - it gives me great guilt - and everyone honks and gives the finger - but I've made the commitment to become a late merger. Don't hate me - love me. At least I've made the conscious, premeditated decision. I'm not an improvisational shitgun. For what it's worth.

I've also taken to dancing in my car at red lights, keeping my eyes fixated on points in front of me. Of course, it isn't really dancing as it's all from the waist up, but I've perfected spastic arm waving, head weaving, and distorted facial expressions. One time I even got a pretty girl to throw down some moves herself, from her car, but as you may have surmised by now that is not the principal reaction.
Fun doesn't grow on trees like it used to.

In the center of my bald forehead I have this single annoying hair that grows in faster and stronger than all the others. Every two days I wake up looking like a unicorn. It could be worse, right? I could have to get up and put paint on my face every day like a female. We have all our crosses to bear. Who said that, Gregg Allman?

In abandoning all pretense of sanity in order to master the films of Cassavetes I've taken to wearing shirts with ill fitting cuffs, like Ben Gazzara in the Chinese bookie movie. You didn't know that has some kind of direct line to Pierce, James and Dewey, did you? Scholars do - how come you don't? Pragmatism and the truth!!

The truth of dancing in the car.

2009-12-25T10:19:00.000-08:00

Listen well: I've decided to apportion myself the lariats of experience. To myself alone. I've made contact with Jerzy Grotowski via a conversation I had with a cast member, backstage, of Tony Randall's National Actors Theater production of THE CRUCIBLE. In this, Martin Sheen looked more like Daniel Boone than Proctor. So it was said.

This is about where you lean forward in your chair in breathless anticipation because we're going to listen to Richard Feynman and Deepak Chopra debate the concept of synchronicity. We're going to listen to Richard Dawkins attempt to explain why he chooses Jerry Falwell and Osama Bin Laden as representatives of the religious thinker as opposed to, say, Kierkegaard or Buber. Speaking of this, how many Regina Olsens do you think reside in *your* community?

If you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, don't worry - neither do I.

True or false:

1. In AS I SAW IT by Dean Rusk, Rusk states that President Harry Truman referred to Mao Zedong as "Mousey Dung."

2. In POWER RULES by Leslie Gelb, Gelb states that all espionage and intelligence is massaged to present to the President what the President would like to hear, no matter whom the President happens to be at any given point in time.

3. Any blogger blogging about politics has about as much insight and expertise into politics as they do into the rotation cycles of the moons of Jupiter.

4. Sean Hannity's attempts to link Blago to Obama were so outlandish, so speculative,...I can't go on. My ass is red.

5. On page 514 of THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS Paul Kennedy says the USA has entered the cyclical period of "Relative Decline."

6. Most men are driven insane by the vagina that they crave.

7. In ELIZABETH: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE THRONE, David Starkey claims to actually have done some original, never-before-seen scholarship about the Virgin Queen.

8. In DANGER AND SURVIVAL: CHOICES ABOUT THE BOMB IN THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS, McGeorge Bundy says FDR decided to go for nukes on October 9, 1941.

And so forth.

And you thought I was going to make a smartass remark about the glasses Deepak Chopra wears when he guests on "The O'Reilly Factor," didn't you?

2009-12-20T14:58:00.000-08:00

And today...today...

Today as I was approaching the laundry room I heard loud arguing, two female voices. Hysteria; calamity. Upon entering the room I recognized both. They were in each other's face, arguing so intensely that I thought they would come to blows at any moment. In another quick minute the super was in there, pulling them apart. Someone must have alerted him to the situation.

A couple of the clothes dryers were flung open and there were clothes flung all over the place. Comically, a pair of bloomers hung on a light fixture.

Later, I got the story from the super. It appears that one of the women had been using all six dryers in the room for herself. People are like that - they don't do wash for six months and then try to do it all in one day. Fine. The other, tired of waiting, impatient, evidently didn't want to wait any longer so she took her own clothes out of a washing machine and threw them into a dryer with the other lady's! Mixed them together.

What balls huh?!

I found myself asking myself how I would react if I were the first lady. What would you do?

2009-12-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

Can you imagine me, with the scales on my neck, at 47, among college students? I was like a tourist from Mars in spite of the commonality of crisp autumn leaves and sunshine. The wind of youth could hardly be said to punctuate my walk anymore. Still a piece of work with the peanut butter sandwiches, however.

Sorry.

I held in my hands the pages that Irwin Shaw had held in his hands, in his manual typewriter, in the early 1950s. In a glass case a yard away was a chair that Bill Clinton had once sat in, at some event. Students and librarians alike had the transfixture of NYLOTTERY.ORG foremost on their minds. Wow.

Observe it: when I was a freshman in college I was in the school pub drinking $4 pitchers of waterbeer the day Ronald Reagan was shot. It was pandemonium - people were cheering. Not NYLOTTERY.ORG.

Again - who would attempt Madame Bovary, or something from Kate Chopin, in WW2 America? Lucy Crown, the original Cougar. Irwin Shaw (by the way, Irwin Shaw was already writing about terrorism in EVENING IN BYZANTIUM and BEGGARMAN, THIEF - before DeLillo in PLAYERS). Even Saul Kripke has or had opinions about the Middle East.

We interrupt this foolishness for some thoughts on the economy. I provide you with analysis you will not hear from any politician: the reason the economy sucks is that, for the most part, our salespeople suck. Case in point: I answer my cell phone and a young, monotone male voice asks, "Can I speak to Kwee Oh Knees Peter?" WTF? My name is Peter Kin Yo Nezz. "This is he," I sigh into the phone. "Uh yes, hi. Kwee Oh Knees...Like...most...Americans...you...are...probably...worried...about...disability...insurance...aren't you, Kwee Oh Knees?" So not only does he not realize that he's got my first and last names transposed, he really thinks that my first name is Kwee Oh Knees. Talk about the laws of economics!

Right. Irwin Shaw.

2009-12-18T05:46:00.000-08:00

I shave my head and keep it shaved. Once, on a date that *I* thought was going swimmingly, she said to me "When you put that skin cream on your head you should really check that you've rubbed it all in correctly. You have a puddle of it sitting in the middle of your bald skull. You look like an imbecile." Well. Another thing: I have this crazed single hair in the middle of my forehead that I can't get rid of. It grows back and grows back and grows back so that I look like a unicorn. Maybe I should just resign?

You see where this is going, don't you? The psychology of vanity? Listen. Irving Wallace wrote a cheese novel in the 70s called THE FAN CLUB. Four jerkoffs kidnap a sex starlet, take her to a secret hideaway, and rape the shit out of her for days on end. They've planned so well that the authorites are clueless. Since they have her tied to the bed and nobody knows where she is, it would seem a wee bit hopeless. But you know how she regains her freedom in spite of these impossible odds? Can you guess? You can't? C'mon. C'mon. You can guess.

Speaking of long forgotten novelists - weltanschuung: Irwin Shaw. One of my next projects is to tell you how I connected myself to Irwin Shaw, reached back through the decades and fired the weathered guns of deep exhaustion. At this point in the proceedings I make a motion to apportion myself the haves of am. I have already warned you that my allusions do not end. You know how it is - it's like listening to Michael Savage play an audio of Dylan Thomas reading poetry aloud. Right? Am I right?

My specialty: featureless instigation. Roll it.

Campus of Brooklyn College, fall semester 2007. I have an appointment to examine the original typewritten manuscript of Irwin Shaw's 1950s novel LUCY CROWN. Life is relentless. You just keep on living and living and living. In the moment my balls are acquiring shocking networks of stark blue veins. I mean they would shock you. But they would not shock you as much as what I'm about to tell you about what I learned from Irwin Shaw.

2009-12-13T16:05:00.000-08:00

It is postulated that the night my mother died I pissed oatmeal. It is also inferred that I already had errant brain waves, but since this was 1988 I can't blame it on the proximity of the cell phone to my skull. What, then? Let's call one - the last conversation I had with her was a knockdown drag out argument. What can I say? There was drama in the 1980s. I would come home at dawn shitfaced drunk and we'd sit and talk like the Tyrone brothers in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. Bah! Inamorata! Pond scum! Gambler! Let's Call One - Thelonius Monk.

I want you to learn my fruit.

Check it out: early in the CONFESSIONS Rousseau explains that he feels great culpability over the fact that his mother died as a result of complications she incurred while she was giving birth to him. I think he declares it "the first of my misfortunes." Well, this is the bullshit of literature. This is a microscope upon the bullshit of literature. He's not a sentient being with will and volition. There's no agency there at all. He's a newborn infant in the process of being born!! Drama queen! At most you might be able to say that the physical action of his birth contributed to her death, but to imply that he was somehow "responsible" - well, that's just making up your own language. I think we all do it. You've read Thomas Szaz, correct? Of course you have. Wipe the smirk off your face.

See here: I was going to tell you all about my long abandoned project of New Historicist type criticism involving the reading of CHILDREN OF CAIN by Tina Rosenberg alongside A FLAG FOR SUNRISE by Robert Stone but I whacked off (for eleven years) instead. Theory's loss.

You know how it goes: the sulky, sullen, pouty teenage girl working the cash register announces "Thirty four seventy nine." What does she think, that you can't read the numerals as plain as day on the screen? The cream doesn't come until she woodenly mumbles "Have a nice day," through the wad of gum that her jaws continue to chomp. Like a cow eating grass in the field. This is your life my babies, your spectacle - you created it. Don't look at me. I was reading Robert Stone and Tina Rosenberg.

2009-12-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

I refer you to the post above because you, like me, like the author Jessel, will one day start to cling to the past because you see that the present is too rapidly turning into the future. You become like a person hanging off a cliff by their fingernails, legs kicking wildly in the air. Can I get a what what?

I have a friend who wanted to text the following obscene message to his woman: "I want you to lick my pee hole until its shape is embedded in your tongue." The problem is, when he sent the message he hit the phone number of his 77 year old maternal grandmother, whom he was responsible for (hence he was often texting her, to check on her status and condition). What do you think the end result of this state of affairs was? How does it feel to be Rachel Uchitel? Do you think Immanuel Kant died a virgin? Who's corking the bat?

My friends. We have come to the end of something. Robert Johnson is not Heidegger, I assure you. Damien Hirst isn't Jan Van Eyck and Sally Mann isn't Edward Weston. No major league pitcher alive today is Bob Gibson. This is getting jumbled. I think the rats have hit the bricks.

I've been astonished by the sightings of dead dogs I make on the sides of the highways in Queens and Long Island, a truly shocking number. I report this to you because I once had a girlfriend employed as the roadkill manager for a rural upstate county. Surely you know all about unpleasant memory triggers? But I'm getting ahead of myself, as this is neither the time nor place for either of those reports. Just be aware.

Who wrote this: "Come up, black dada/nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape/their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats." Do you know? Care? Why would such verse be relevant in the age of Obama (if it is relevant at all)? Why is Obama relevant to America? America to the world? The world to the universe? The universe to infinity? You never knew, did you, that your mind is perhaps the Mobius strip of your body?

2009-12-11T13:53:00.000-08:00

Listen babies: I am giving you the bloodline. I have a book called A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF VAUDEVILLE by Bernard Sobel. The foreword is by George Jessel. Put your ear to the wheel and listen:

"People like myself - and there aren't many left - who have been before the public for a half century, are all inclined to favor the yesterdays, and unless they are doing exceedingly well, they live in a capsule of the past, seeing beauty only in that which cannot return, believing to the full that everything that is old is sacred."

Yunnerstan? Death? One day you wake up and you're fifty and people you've known, or known about, your whole life, are dying all around you. It dawns on you: you ain't got that much time left. Better get the Jennifer Michael Hecht book out.

Listen babies: I am giving you the bloodline.

12/07/2009

2009-12-06T05:37:00.000-08:00

What's your stance on the repetition of themes in Led Zeppelin lyrics? Eh? On Zep II, RAMBLE ON has a line, "I've been this way ten years to the day." Then TEN YEARS GONE shows up on PHYSICAL GRAFFITI. Missed that, did you? You and Satchel Paige?

I wandered. We were up to "bleeding heart liberal," always used as an insult in American discourse. I've been looking into it. My conclusion is that, except for stone hearted psychopathic killers, virtually every person alive on the face of the Earth is a bleeding heart liberal, but with this proviso - they are such only in terms of their own private morality. Which is quite a different thing than once's stance toward overall social policy in a society consisting of hundreds of millions of people, don't you think?

The foremost articulator of sympathy-based ethics in Western civilization, David Hume, wrote "Even though I consider myself heterosexual, I am only able to achieve sexual satisfaction by watching lesbians eat each other." Whoops, wrong quote. Actually what he wrote was, "Moral distinctions are not derived from reason. Moral distinctions are derived from a moral sense." Get it? Figure it out, I'm too much engulfed in other morasses today.

What do you want? What is it that you seek? Some pristine insights on learning? OK then:

From Victor Gruen I learned that comfortable social surroundings maximize business opportunities.

From Ray Kroc I learned that you can make millions and millions of dollars in real estate when you disguise it as something having to do with hamburgers.

From Sam Walton I learned the miracle of satellite inventory.

From Ann Wroe, Peter Robb, and Sebastian D. Grazia I learned that Robin Collingwood has the wrong ideas about history.

From Joe Gandolfo I learned...

From Carl Sewell I learned...

From Chainsaw Al Dunlap I learned...

Are you bored yet?

12/06/09

2009-12-05T16:38:00.000-08:00

Have you ever read TRIPMASTER MONKEY? I have the same problem that Kingston has, which is that I've read too much, seen waaaaaaaay too many films. It gets you to where you can't stop quoting and citing. It's better to exist in moderation, believe me.

Observe: one afternoon I was walking with a friend who was walking her chihuahua. Such an archetype of fragility was this animal. We chatted, friendly but not exactly close, the time passing chatter of obligatory acquaintance. As we came around a corner so too, coming the other way, toward us, did another dog walker, a fierce woman with a pit bull. Her face was like a metal spike. After a volley of profound barking and an equally profound death sonata of hair raising squeals I saw the little dog's hind legs sticking out of the pit bull's mouth. There was crunching.

I relate this inciden to you because it appears to contain a moral about suffering. Or maybe it doesn't - you decide.

In other news: if I'm forty eight, and I've masturbated three times a day since I was fifteen, that's 36,135 times. That's arithmetic. Can you get your mind around the numbers?

In other developments: in the novel THE ORIGIN OF THE BRUNISTS by Robert Coover a man has the thought "They all want it." If you had to guess, what would say that refers to? In the song HAIR OF THE DOG by Nazareth a lyric goes "Black hearted mama, love that charmer." What's "charmer" a euphemism for? Your ability to detect patterns is amazing. Congratulate yourself.

Should we start with Goya now? Eh? I have so many perspectives available that it seems like a can of worms to even start - Malraux, Robert Hughes, Evan S. Connell - oy. How many men in history, do you think, have had a Duchess of Alba thing going on in their lives? I know, but what would your guess be?

Which brings us to the investigation of pejorative phrases like "bleeding heart liberal."

12/5/09

2009-12-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

You may not have noticed, but in his film of THE SHINING Stanley Kubrick mocked Stephen King mercilessly by using titles - THURSDAY, 4PM - that are absolutely, completely, utterly without meaning or significance.

If you didn't notice that, then you probably also didn't notice that, centuries before Michelle Obama, Ms. Bonaparte used her bare arms to mesmerize a nation. About this: in high school I had a teacher who would periodically observe that "People don't change - only their toys change." Wow.

If you didn't catch the first two things I mentioned above we're just going to have to skip the discussion of the book LIVING HIGH AND LETTING DIE by Peter Unger. Don't ask.

Along the lines of "don't ask" - what do you know about Paulo Serodio?

For the moment let's put aside the fact that, when unwashed, the tip of my penis begins to give off a smell that could choke rats - what is more important, what is more pressing at the moment, is this: for what possible reason on this Earth would one of Nancy Pelosi's aides go to a briefing on waterboarding other than to report to Pelosi what was discussed? Eh? What reason? Was it for, like, personal enrichment? Slow day at the office, not much else to do? Eh? In HERZOG Bellow wrote: "Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power." Got it?

Pick your major life issues. Mine are literature, the blues, chess, and pussy, in no particular order. We can cover that later if you like. There's something else we must get to now.

Listen up: in both a work of fiction called THE PRIMITIVE and in a volume of his autobiography Chester Himes included the same exact episode. In both books, word for word, verbatim, the story is related identically. If you are not concerned about this you might desire to embark on a steadfast program to get prioritized. Why would Chester Himes go all Derrida on us like that? Speaking of Derrida, doesn't the existence of cell phone cameras kind of blast to shit the conjecture that there is no history and only texts? Doesn't it?

Think: the "text" of your life as opposed to the "history" of your life. Where are the borders? Hmmm? Peter Bonadella famously wrote that, upon the international release of BLOW UP, innumerable hysterical critics wrote as if Antonioni had solved all the outstanding problems of Western metaphysics. Don't let me lose you - this is too important. Look around the corner - your self is following you.

The consequences of our ignorance almost always become the contents of our sorrow. Do you understand me? Yunnerstan?

If you're an Obama voter who considers themself superior to the Palin fan - quick, without Googling, tell me the last five Supreme Court decisions. The last three?