Shitholder.

Love has no pride.  
Hangin' by a thread.

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Here, listen to some'a this:                                   Who's gonna stand up?    Other versions: orchestral, With Crazy Horse, and solo.       A-and: Fork in the Road.

 

It seems obvious that Stephen Harper is the epitome rather than an exceptional case - from the election record alone. And Franklin, lost, maddened by the lead in his (then newly invented) tinned food, personifying all of us (including Stephen Harper) too accurately for comfort. As long as one is alive one has to be somewhere, doing something (even if it's nothing). This post will arrive in early December but it is being composed in mid-November because ... there's nothing else to do.

Pretence. I send my children away believing I am saving them, then sit in pubs all afternoon pretending to read newspapers and go in and out of cinemas until they close pretending to watch movies. Always buy two coffees and pretend to be taking one for an imaginary friend. Pretend to be sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette waiting for the library to open. exculpatory, adjective: Adapted or intended to clear from blame or a charge of guilt; apologetic, vindicatory. atonement, noun: The condition of being at one with others; unity of feeling, harmony, concord, agreement. Restoration of friendly relations between persons who have been at variance; reconciliation. Propitiation (favourable, gracious, kind) of an offended or injured person, by reparation of wrong or injury; amends, satisfaction, expiation (penance). A simpleminded mistake: Buber (I thought) is about categories - Thou/You/It - and it's so, in part, but he is also about process and arriving (possibly) at an authentic 'we'. Nós. dialogue, noun: a conversation between two or more persons; a colloquy (speaking together). dialectic, noun: the investigation of truth by discussion.         This meaning is muddied, the word having been idologically hijacked by the Socialists for         a specialized meaning which you can look up for yourself. dialogic, adjective: pertaining to, or of the nature of dialogue; sharing in dialogue.

Love/hate relationships, maybe this includes all of them, but surely not simultaneously (simply to satisfy mere mechanical feasibility). Pierre Reverdy may be right - «Il n'y a pas d'amour, il n'y a que des preuves d'amour.» One obvious possible proof is choice, which undoes in a way some of the cynical part. Probably no one will mention that the Brasilian cartoons are not translated this week. Oh well.

He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew         Now recks no lord but the stiletto's Thorn,         And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.         No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,         Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero. Sturm und Drang then is it? A Fugue? Theory & Praxis (not knowing too many -axis words)? Twisted sadness? Chagrin? What is our Thomas on about? tacit: Not openly expressed or stated, but implied; understood, inferred. Latin tacere to be silent.

Job's wife says to 'im, "Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die." An odd question and a strange non sequitur kind of rhetorical echo. I'm not telling you any of this because I expect you to (necessarily) do anything but simply because I want you to know it, or (at least) have the opportunity of knowing it, the possibility, perhaps later on in the future sometime. Or not.

A-and, I am putting it into this blog so I can remember it too. There are kinds, modes, of thinking. Darwin in the 1850s, and ... Darcy Wentworth Thompson - 'On Growth and Form' (1917) - scientists. In statistics you trim off the highs and lows, discard the outliers; but in science it may be the very outliers that first show up some crack in the current theory and lead to a superior integration (seems to me). Please Sir, could I have a little yin with that yang? Will it be correctitude & ideology or (essentially) light-hearted observations on consistency designed to enlighten?

Filling time downloading TV programs and watching them; BBC, ITV, British shows mostly, mysteries, dramas, police stuff; there seems to be a band of gypsies who go about making them and the same actors appear frequently. The stories are mostly (99%) dreck, unreal mindless crap-o-la, manipulative shit, improbable, impossible, untrue, and the mind wanders. I forget what I've seen and watch the same series over again several times. Actresses with wide-set eyes, and I wonder how much of whatever is in mind or personality or intelligence or spirit, what you will, is determined by a (presumably) greater bifocal effect? Humming Big Bopper's 'Chantilly Lace' ... "Ain't nothin' in the world like a big-eye'd girl ..." The colours run from one thought to another, into them all, channels of memory remembered (and likely many more unconscious but still active in whatever structures store them). Up pops Pynchon's use of 'palimpsest' and another dozen layers pile on - startin' t'look like a jamboree! I read somewhere - one of the psychologists who designs clearly measurable experiments - that the change in size of the pupils in person A's eyes is perceptible by person B who then registers person A's level of interest and possible intentions. Amazing!   Not me. So much anodyne TV I can hardly recognize entire faces anymore nevermind details.

I pester my NDP Member of Parliament, Matthew Kellway, in public meetings and with repeated emails, to have him explain the detailed mechanics of fossil fuel subsidies. He is the NDP critic for environmental issues and might be expected to know. He never answers, except once, in person face-to-face, when he promises to. Now a report comes out, described in The Guardian, and available for download from Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Many questions are answered. One that isn't: What about government pension plan investments? (And unions for that matter?) I put it about but no one responds so I leave it here not to be forgotten. Suburbs as proxy (poxy) frontier. Gaudi's towers, and Shukhov's, are (certainly) not design-committee exercises. They lack the appalling language of correctitude & appeasement. They are also both incomplete - and don't remind me of dildos or french ticklers either. I am sure that none of these observations are connected.

The concrete column on the right there is for show not blow - there is a gap between it and the beam it appears to support - the structural engineer had integrity.   :-) Back-turnings and cold shoulders too numerous to count. Three 'Antichrist's. (At least) two horrible 'Waddya-still-doin'-here?'s. 'Asshole!' from the kids (specific sins not specified). Silent shunning from all the other kin. And one 'shitholder'. Doesn't guess. Hasta be told again and again. Nine inch nails an' the penny still don't drop. In the event, 'shitholder' is coupled with a flying solid-oak dining-room table (in the days when 'solid-oak' means something). Some people think he holds this against her. Not so. Such strong authentic originality fills him with amazed admiration, love. Put that way they (naturally) assume it's ... sarcasm, some irony some, twist or other. When all it is is true.

What are the facts? Who knows? And the whole computer thing is a red herring too, Vince was right. (God bless 'im - though neither of us would ever say such a thing.) A shitholder to be sure (me not Vince). Viejo verde ('green old man'). Gordo feio e fedorento. Com hábitos ruins, viciado, desesperado, infeliz, só. "To cease upon the midnight with no pain," says Keats ("the blushful Hippocrene" having already been touched upon above). A young man admitting he will live because the muse stops singing? Is that it? A curious inversion. I wish I'd saved enough for a hidey-hole in Brasil or Costa Rica. Disappear up my own arsehole like a dying anemone or coral polyp. I didn't, and I (exactly) do not know now what to do next.

  
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Fnord (quite muddled).

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Reminder

Fnord is not in the OED, but Old English fnast (noun - breath), fnast (verb - breathe, snort), & fnese (verb - snort, puff, sneeze) are; and breath being a euphemism for spirit ... well - close to the bone let's say; or, close enough for the girls I go with. [I think I might have tried to read 'The Illuminatus' once upon a time and gave up. Someone must've shown me the bit where fnord is described (I guess?), or maybe just told me about it. I thought it was Kurt Vonnegut but I can't find it anywhere there. ... So once again I've simply got it wrong. Oh well. Let's say it is Vonnegut, and let's further say that it means the subjectively fearsome experience of taking in ostensible 'truth' which is understood not to be true in any degree. Not Orwell's doublespeak - some other kind of thing - doublespeak plus second degree cognitive dissonance thrown in but without a whisper of an objective correlative ... singular subjective let's say. Muddled; not a fnord at all. Nothing like a fnord. Not even approximately. And the stupid f'un old hippie doesn't even bother trying to sort it out! Doh! There is a (threatened with deletion) Wikipedia article on the subject. I have saved a copy. In the event that they do delete it I will re-post it somewhere.] Vonnegut's Ice-9 is just 180° out of phase, not shabby; and understandable since the dramatic effect of making a phenomenon mostly experienced as gradual (freezing) become instantaneous is greater than the reverse - making a phenomenon expeienced as quick (fire), say, slow down - which is the case. Who knows? Maybe it was intentional. Littel Pome: the comet cools (too, is already,                                                    was always                                                    ice)   Credit Card - exclusive; Private Club - exclusive; Good seats at Carnaval - exclusive; Bank Managers - exclusive. To the poor - inclusion. European Climate Summit: Everything in its time.   First paragraphs of Acknowledgements to two books: Researching this book has been a lengthy process, and I have many people to thank for suggestions and words of encouragement along the way. I am indebted to Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones of UCLA, who offered guidance during the early stages of this project and helpful insights as my research progressed. I am grateful to Paul Boyer, whose seminar at UCLA on nuclear weapons in American culture helped inspire this project and whose ideas have informed my thinking on contemporary apocalyptic beliefs. ... The end of the world as we know it: faith, fatalism, and apocalypse in America, Daniel Wojcik, 1997, ISBN 0-8147-9283-9.   This book (with its successor) has been on my mind for a long time, during which I have given lectures on Biblical topics at various places, including McGill (Divinity School), Minnesota, Cincinnati, Cornell, and several universities in Scandinavia. I am grateful for the patience and attention of audiences who listened to early versions of some of the ideas propounded here, some versions too crude in retrospect to bear thinking about. I owe even more to my students, as I trust my Introduction makes clear. The Great Code: The Bible & Literature, Northrop Frye, 1981, ISBN 0-14-012928-6.   Not a fair comparison of course, but if Daniel Wojcik thought it would be a good idea to publish a book on apocalypse a few years before the millennium (as I now suspect - 'suspect' mind you, not 'know') and so started 'researching' in 1994 or 5 ... Well, you get the idea. And this suspicion having entered, colours everything. Read the bit above carefully. Consider the repeated 'this project'. Then there's the rest of the book. Dreck! Finally, in the last few pages, he offers up four broad categories that don't really divide the ground very well looking like they came out of a high-school essay of some kind. I thought they would have at least belonged up front. The provenance may be interesting:   Someone sent me 'The Portable Atheist' a compendium edited by Christopher Hitchens. Passed through Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' and eventually I got round to what seemed the best in it: Ian McEwan 'End of the World Blues' ... which, curiously, looped back again to Aubade. "One of the supreme secular meditations on death is Larkin’s Aubade," says McEwan. Oh? Is it? Here, try this: No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, Supreme perhaps but not sublime. McEwan also praises this Daniel Wojcik guy, calls him a 'scholar' and his book 'The end of the world as we know it' a "brilliant account of apocalyptic thought in America" - neither is borne out by the text in my opinion. Maybe I will post some excerpts after a while. The best story I have seen from Ian McEwan (having now read a handful of his novels) comes from the 'On Chesil Beach' page in Wikipedia: In a BBC Radio 4 interview, McEwan admitted to taking a few pebbles from Chesil Beach and keeping them on his desk while he wrote the novel. Protests by conservationists and a threat by Weymouth and Portland borough council to fine him £2,000 led the author to return the pebbles. "I was not aware of having committed a crime," he said. "Chesil Beach is beautiful and I'm delighted to return the shingle to it." The personal cooling; the planetary heating. Frost's poem 'Fire and Ice' comes to mind ... but I can't remember which side wins in that one? Maybe it's a draw ... or, or ... both! The human hearts are frozen and cannot speak, and the hot desire brings us down. Is that it?

 
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