Class, or a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals

Fusty, Paul was not, though he also was not apologetic. He said the dropping of the bomb was not a mistake, or at least not a moral abortion, and he thanked god for it, as one who would have fought and maybe died if the war had not ended.

He knew from war. Knew from history too. Irony as the great 20th century mnemonic device. He also knew proles and nouveaux, the signs and sizzle that we bring to a differentiating game.

What I remember most clearly is the middle-middle bathroom (or was it lower-middle?) - with carpeted interior and upholstery on the toilet seat. Which is to say I don’t remember much very clearly, even what I remember most clearly. But it still hits, this ever more granular way in which we hierarchize and slice and offer up sacrifices to the status gods.

Happily, I can report that my acquaintances who choose to come out as “wealthy” by splurging on sports cars have not choked on blood-filled lungs or sprained the anomie of the spleen and I have not confused cloying envy and ego hurt with the aesthetic distance of reproach.

And how even when you talk about painting. Pictures. Portraits. Art objects. Aesthetic currency. The whole shebang. You are talking to in groups, showing status, peacocking.

All so the words used to slay inner and outer demons may (in our delusional but not disillusioned heart of hearts) still be held at a remove and outside.

“do it or do not do it—you will regret both

An inheritance, this undaunted joylessness, making grimness a job. Squareheads with blonde hair and silent troubles, where salt is a spice and boiled mushy fish an extravagant variation. No wonder, except accidentally born, no vivacity, except slipped loose from the cohort. Give me a wagon, a scythe, and a sod house, with four score and fifteen theses and four nails.

Store contents under pressure, proof for two hours, pummel with the heel of the hand, and while waiting, feast on this grimace-as-art

Like what Europe did to its wolves, this place will do to your dreams. Let be be finale of seem, is something you might read before the flame flicks out in the wind that seeps into the floorboards and makes wisps of dust.

But take with a grain of salt and a thimbleful of whiskey as medicine. Nothing competes with the lack of acknowledgment and cankered observations from a sticker (in Stegner’s sense) who gets stuck and feels betrayed.

A strong offended sense of the ridiculousness of the human being

Big hearted but not a sucker, reticent but not dour, flinty but not brutish, capable of losing time but not a dirty hippie: an assemblage of traits that would build and amplify each other into what might pass for spiritual vagabonding.

Whitman in the supermarket, rapping melons and tracing the supple ovals of Roma tomatoes. Chinaski at the track with an eye on the chalk and a fluttering heart. The New York Football Giants dancing asunder on the clotted blood of Exley and his stigmata. Helen and her goshawk, in love with the lengthening tumble of a shadow that just matches the downward slide of another solitary year.

It would take the opposite of onomatopoeia, or at least someone who would tell me this is a “very unique” moment without melting my face off, for me to able to summon the magic that might bolster the velocity to break free from yet another wintry night’s sad clutches.

Flashpoint of cesium, half life of yttrium

From Stuttgart to Jena, from Jena to Breslau, a brief interlude at a sanatorium, then on to Warsaw and the ritual drowning in consonants as a purge against clamped consciousness, before tracing all the way back to Barcelona. Backpack with books and clothes, head full of a dreamer’s itinerant attention and unerring aspirations, thriving on weak tea, hard cheese, and spongy biscuits, buoyed by optimism equal parts unearned and irrepressible.

Dust into dust, yes, and so much of it seems gauzily drifting in the past, but the scene at every rail station along the way is a core memory stamped into every neuron that is still firing.

Philosophy and practice of the everyday

If we’re all wrong about everything, the life so short and the craft so long to learn, the assay so hard, so sharp the conquering, the dreadful joy that passes so quick and then being left alone again, what I mean is love astonishes my feeling with its wonderful working so ardently so painfully that when I’m thinking about such certainty I don’t know like the earth if I’m floating or sinking.

I don’t know why being left alone is a bruise when if I’m Forced to Play the part in a conversation of listening to what is said the klaxon in my brain which only I can hear (have you your own klaxon?) goes off and I just want it to end so I can be left alone again and trace round the edges of the bruise with unthinking fingers.

I keep reading about how poetry does not allow for neutrality and how there is no choice but to protest against this human brutality but there’s so much of it, we swim in heinous acts perpetrated against the relatively innocent, and I am so selfish, so self-absorbed, and my protesting muscles are currently all farmed out to my diaphragm, their exacting principal, which labors with their help to keep the air coming in and coming out, when all forces seem to come together to pin me to the floor and make it the same as the ceiling.

I did not mention that there is a blizzard and I am rendered a homesteader and the dog is restless and the children are embedded in a cinematic experience that tests the boundaries of homage to the Greek gods. To call it kitsch is to falsely summon Walter Benjamin and stuff his suitcase with unlaundered cartel money.

On a personal level, I don’t know what being more tired might feel like, and somewhere in a dark corner for the locating of which thankfully there is no map all of my squanderings have drifted and gathered and this fierce wind will come and scatter them soon.

Not Paul but early Jesus, not Socrates but Heraclitus, not God but gods

Art is for everybody, but specimens of art are for some and not others. the aero plane that flies over the sea in the early 2000s somehow remade me into my eight year old self singing the kyrie eleison full heartedly in the shower when the water flowing from the shower head seemed so high. The first song at least.

By the time Oh comely came on, it would break that believing heart, and I would be back in time, faithless and faltering, with tarred lungs, ashy fingers, uncertain prospects, beset with casual confusion at looming prospect of bills and the wall hangings and the timed and scheduled nature of life.

I thought of that, reading about Davenport and the unity of the archaic form arising at all stages, making it light and animate, acknowledging the underlying virulence of unchanging time.

Is it true about Trotsky and the ice pick in Mexico? A nez perce and a clotted wound, if one soldier deserts then ten men in the company will die. Call it duty or a rearguard annotation of self regard.

Compelled e spirit de corp, in this agonizing century. Bad weather coming soon.

Like how Bruckner, according to Chinaski, wasn’t bad, at best, which was good enough. Or else it goes like this:

there are times when we should

remember

the strange courage

of the second-rate

who refuse to quit

when the nights

are black and long and sleepless

and the days are without

end.

Paying dirt farmers to grind down to the bone

A rush of yellows, whites, blues, reds, hints of green - can a decipherable order be behind such lush wet-on-wet couplings?

A decipherable order in rows of remnant corn stalks, up against every fence line for so long as the fence lines run parallel to the road. Inputs ordered in late December and who knows whether the grain contracts that seemed so auspicious last March will stand up now.

Three boys, the oldest who ropes goats, the middle who ropes the youngest, and the youngest who breeds a fury that comes from being so small for seemingly so long and unable to envision a future where parity is possible.

What puzzling progeny amidst this fearful symmetry that spells out, in the dust and the dark corners, precipitous decline. Five years now since he stopped running pairs, can’t bring himself to do hired man work, hates country music, hates talk radio, can’t stand the committee setting up shop in his head all day. She’s wiping snotty noses and teaching whole language reading and hasn’t gotten poisoned by it yet but her stoicism rankles him a bit too. A sink full of dirty dishes and 11 am Coors light in the shop, just to make the pitiless wind, working away on a piece of siding, halfway tolerable, and no exorcism in sight.

Square pizza on a plastic tray, chocolate milk, and everything is red letter, until third recess and a straight jab from out of nowhere bloodies the oldest’s nose and no he’s not crying it’s just he can’t see straight for minute and he’ll catch more hell tonight for not giving it as much he took it. Will have to eat his cornflakes standing up tomorrow, on account of the domestic ass whooping, and he’ll remember each crystalline moment of this sequence for so long as he still remembers anything, but what will sting most is the piteous looks from the brothers across the table and how they try to revive some semblance of talk before the bus comes and it doesn’t help but call attention to how badly broken it’s all gotten.

All types of orders are decipherable, if not recoverable, so long as the breakaway coordinates aren’t bludgeoned into oblivion or deprived of all attention, confined to the bleak bounded lines of what rarely counts as meaningful.

Still quite popular among the muscovites, but the dream is to be accepted by curmudgeonly weirdos

Everyone got so mean. I want evolution to run its indomitable elimination train over so many mean people ( eg, who take videos of retail workers to get them fired, for micro aggression or for being woke, both in equal parts - everyone is of a tribe that is culpable) and also despite urging for extinction of this cultural execrescence, here I sit, losing my shit, making it possible for random strangers to bring out the worst in me and make me stare at the mirror and puzzle over how truly bad, from a neutral Switzerland-like perspective, the worst in me is.

Howard Zinn, who opines that you can’t be neutral on a moving train, once gave a talk I attended 25 years ago. A man with a Russian accent asked him how he would arrange a system in which the man who cleaned the auditorium would be paid more. Or something like that. Zinn said he didn’t know. The questioner wore an expression that seemed to say QED. Capitalism wins by default. Reification by lack of imagination. And so on.

But somehow it would mean more if everyone who was angrily cool but substantive and not just superficially cool and ephemeral took these off the cuff sketches as pithy, well-rendered sentiments, compressed (sculpted even) in an uncanny and catchy way. What psychologists would DEEM, in all their deeming wisdom, peer validation.

Living low in Europe, but with castles and shit, and walking around haunted like how lucidity is a wound

Recursive lines are not the only lines we can never cross and cannot help but cross.

A BIT OF POESY FOR 2024 POSTMARKED FROM A PERIOD WHEN THE IDEAS GOT PESTILENTIAL

The first house is miles from nowhere, 

One story of right angles and angular velocity

Flat, wide, and seemingly lithe, 

placed on a sloping hill so the exit

Gave it more modernist mystery

Than a boxy slab of practicality 

And you walked into walls 

of sleek white surface

Head to toe wall to wall

A habitat of ceremony

And the host of

This house would begin 

by pricking his finger

And walking from the foyer

Into the next room,

Which would involve 

Another digits worth 

Of bloodletting, and so on,

Until the tenth and final room,

The expanse of the basement floor, 

At which point streams of

red thread were secreting from

Each finger. 

And then you would be expected 

to enact the same sequence, 

A prick and release at each station.

And the weight of that expectation

Set a mood, wet with expectancy, 

Arriving moments after you ring

The bell and walk in to be greeted.

So flinging your hand around,

Spattering self consciously

From the ends of his or fingers,

And then smeared by 

Steps of the follow-one,

So each guest would

Circulate into empty rooms

Making a mark and 

Spinning out a narrative 

Of what came before 

There was no food or wine

But no dust gathered either

Each blood foray of each guest

Inclusive of each room in the house

A winding descent, from

Room to room, then circling

Down a flight of creaking stairs

Still bleeding, gone light-headed

This faux hardcore art gore

the last room’s exit: an open door

Framed by prairie sky 

and the assembled crowd

Of fellow wounded soldiers.

The second house is home

where you grow up

What you can remember of it

Its metes and bounds, the trace of scars

You left in it and it left in you

you go to this place of memory

To perform ministrations

To become drunk on Your oath

 of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on

A place to become rendered

More than just a sheath of meatspace

And wanting to qualify as a genuine article

To inhabiting a self worthy of the name

Like a house is always ineffably a house 

until it definitively is not

Whereas you, encased or marooned

 in your skull, are always already

something else entirely.

Closing words from the Situationist who has you by the lapels:

he history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

Contemporary thought, like Bosustov's heroes, can no longer rest on its own delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it down. It rushes full tilt in front of the reality that will crush it: the reality that is lived every day.

*

Is this dawning lucidity essentially new? I don’t think so.

Fail. Fail better. Failsafe. Forebear.

So much depends on the hard heart’s easy pliable wrath, to a point where the child could not tell whether the night would yield wild yelling and breaking of heirlooms or mild didactic directives about how Seneca would handle a situation. Feelings are not facts, but violence lingers far longer than when its visit ends.

Arrow taken from quiver and notched and coiled, behind clear-eyed conviction taking dead aim, but it could find no release and so could not make a meal of this fleeing opportunity - stag at the brook, urgently drinking.

This blank anachronistic fiction called existence is to be trifled with, bandied about, won over, ruminated on, succumbed to, rendered from, pitied, slandered, and loved with unabashed necessity. Laugh while you can, you’ll be dead a long time.

Elegy for the nobodies nobody knows

What attempts to convince you it loves you by pandering to you does you harm. It teaches you that you are so weak that what does not pander to you—does not obscure difficulty, disagreement and boredom—is to be reviled and punished.

G Jackson, in The Proleptic Line

The meaning of the start of Christendom + the weight of the frankincense + what Blake’s chimney sweeps saw when they closed their eyes to sleep = something akin to this recognition that this moment in its monstrous immediacy is just as much what history is made of as anything ever was or ever will be.

John used a pictorial syntax to pose abstract philosophical questions about meaning and certainty; he was a doubter, mistrustful of absolutes. His work could be puzzling or even obscure, but as he got older, John’s background as a painter reasserted itself, and his work became more visually lush.

D Salle, in Not Dionysius

Contretemps are the warp, kompromat is the woof

Perchance to dream a comforting dream that settles all disputes and resolves all doubts in favor of an ahistorical absolute. Death by boredom to follow quickly, replies anyone with insistence as a conversational style and antinomian spite as a guiding ethos.

I was told there would be platters of barbecue and cheese plates balanced on the backs of Jungian analysts on all fours and seedy elements would be out in full force. This turned out to be a fraudulent inducement.

Instead it was just mini-crowds of young folks, standing in semi circles, saying nothing and watching as others recorded themselves documenting being there on their phones until it came time to document their own selves being there, with Lunchables and boxed wine and large bins of Mr Goodbar minis. No one seemed to be wary of an orgy or a brawl breaking out.

It strikes me now that it was not so much the ahistorical absolute that we were stalking, as the conversations unspooled, with detectable amounts of malevolence hiding in plain sight at the upturned corner of each sparkling smile. It was an urge to end with a grace note of poise, coiled sprezzatura, while still playacting as predators who would not stoop to being prey.

Unkept promises and unkempt premises

I don’t want to be neutralized by what makes the world commensurable, made me get out of bed and pace when I first read it. And brew coffee and throw darts and play imaginary chess games until daybreak.

I was right in the middle of Will the pursuit of “deep feelings,” of “intense life” what seems to be so many desperate people’s last reason to live, ever fully distract them from the fundamental emotional when the phone in my office rang and I was called upon to help defend an innocent man accused of an orthodox crime.

I had tucked the bottom corner of the sheet under the mattress when I recalled The curiously superstitious notion that to have no reason to believe a proposition is the same as having a reason to assert that the proposition is false.

The Cowboys were driving with less than a minute to go, and Exley was pouring Tabasco directly into his eyes, cursing the giants but unable to do anything but listen to the play call and stare out through the bloodied webs blooming around each iris, when I heard it echo in a somnolent Spalding Gray monotone:

In the American grain, it is gregariousness, suspicion of privacy, a therapeutic distaste in the face of personal apartness and self-exile, which are dominant. In the new Eden, God’s creatures move in herds.

as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.

It seems odd, at this point, that the driving musical montage in American Psycho is a Huey Lewis song? Huey seems harmless, a bit daft, not so much uncool as lacking in both the rock and in the roll? It’s not just axe murders and tunneling rats and dissociative manias that drive the plot. It’s also Huey and Bale’s cold empty eyes. Like how Quint describes the eyes of a shark. In yet another movie about naturalized monsters.

There is something denaturing about the hum of an office: the ringing phones, the vomiting copier, the calling out of the same greetings and same tired crutch of stale conversational gambits, tetrabytes of mouth breathers inhaling and exhaling, the fruits of this time (so-called work product) floating dead eyed and limp up there in the cloud and backed up on a remote server in a rack somewhere somewhat secure. And then there is the shared denial of the stolidly indisputable fact that the actual work being done doesn’t really matter all that much to most of the ones doing it, and the work that is done could have been done a lot quicker and a lot better, too, as everyone knows and nobody cares.

But what about art? Will it save us? And if not salvation, exactly, will it entice all who fall into its graves to enter into a reverie just long enough to make bearable another day in the trenches of glib discursive laments and garden-variety alienation? Will it fructify these barren hearts and shake shake shake us out of this slapdash monotony of motions-gone-through?

“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.”

At the school you may recall hearing:

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

And also, on the side of the box, you may recall these instructions:

"The days of irony are here, irony and deception. But do not harden your heart."

And it is in these fleeting moments, remembrances, into which you dip and draw sustenance, however ephemeral it may be, and come to staring face to face with a strange object covered in fur that breaks your heart . . .

Thus, choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour

All these backward-looking arete-loving Spartan-cos playing avatars inspire a kind of hagiographic exercise in the middle-aged, formerly prodigious, supposedly fully formed adult brain which has wrestled with but not been pinned to the Mat by ennui: the idea being something like a Platonic engagement with manly virtue, always coded as necessarily such.

Except the same flaw in the idea of pursuing the ideal comes out, making it horror show overdose of botulism. There’s no such thing as halfway crooks, no turning back on the burnt tongue of a too eagerly hungry wanna-be warrior. Adulation from the crowd, yes; Stockholm syndrome, also yes. Viable hard-won alternative to what actually is, no; path out of the vertiginous maze of clever Daedalus’s clusterfuck double-bind, hard and intractable no.

Shook but momentarily, and yes it’s dark and yes hell is hot

The only one from that era I really want to write about right now is DMX. Alexie channeling Louis, Adrian tells it that poetry = angry x imagination, and I thought at 15 I could amplify the anger and the imagination would take care of itself. I didn’t have either for a long time, inshallah, and seeing as I live in flyover country 3 hours from where I was born and twenty minutes from where I grew up, I’m probably ill equipped to rise to the occasion of that specific artistic formula. But I also read it wrong - as though talking about inbuilt capacities of the speaker. Not the residual takeaway - the sustenance left in the wake - of the audience of one who might hear it and be shook by it, in the darkest recesses of his ownmost cell.

I didn’t have the imagination to hear it, to think of living in a way that summoned it. “I’m slipping” didn’t really hit until I was 40, and the idea of being Humpty Dumpty broken, beyond repair, grabbed and dug and sliced. The new talk of cope and seethe is a dig, seemingly. But it need not be. How is it better or worse to “process” or “metabolize,” as if a man could do either. It’s plain as electric shock therapy on a schizophrenic episode that if the alternative to coping is an Icarus ascent or a 1986 Sally Ride, then cope all day and seethe all night and live to bark about it.

Apologies in advance for obscurity

It can be an affliction, this inability to say things directly. What you love well remains, but not always. Sometimes she leaves, or dies, or becomes a Medusa and you a statuesque casualty of always being the last to know.

What I am ignorant about could fill Alexandria’s stacks. I don’t know how hummingbirds remain aloft, or why oysters are claimed to be an aphrodisiacs.

Sip your kopi luwak while reading Virgil at dawn, and gulp down the salt cod on a saltine at dinner.

The layer cake from the diner is its own salve. I put olive oil and salt in the boiling water before the pasta so it is less likely to cling. How much flour to how many eggs? A puttanesca and baguette then wet the nib of the pen and put another addendum to the obituary. I am a degenerate but not in that.

Everyone rooting for Kissinger to die soon, today even, vouchsafe the great man theory of politics. Metternich is not Goethe. Gert-uh, the smokers outside of Cobb Hall would say.

Malignant Normality and the Busted Heart Machine

It’s not enough to call bullshit on the cankers and callouses, rough hewn from clustered extinctions and wet atrocities. Arrows pierce completely through fish with fat lips and hold them fast, swimming in place, to the bottom of the barrel.

The belief lingers that causal determinism is but one option on the menu. So we must ask: What passes for considerate declension in the enjoyment of life for those of us who used to wonder whether umbrellas were sufficient armor against acid rain and the pushed launch button of intemperate statesmen? Every onslaught on what used to pass for the homunculus comes from these whacked people who used to pass for the Preterite. What presently musters up as rock-ribbed conviction in the idea that the best government is that which governs least no longer gains purchase on the fixed firmament of collective consciousness.

Work is the creed that remains. The weird, having gone to finishing school, no longer deign to nix the elaborate fiction that all will be well in the end. Zero sum games take primacy. Style runs rough over uncertainty, mundanity and banality duel at dawn. The distaff mob stands blinkered and mashed in the face of metaphysical theft prevention. We visit violence on Parnassus and reap every solitary strand of grain, insisting in ravenous stupefaction that next year’s harvest is looking pretty damn good. Logic stands defeated in the lethargy of the rendering plant, with its undead mute beasts finally given free rein to gallop as only ghosts can.

The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal, the child is not father of the man, and the sucking chest wound is not the mandarin’s cauterizing encounter with torched dreams.

A change is gonna come. We will make munitions from the flickering shadows at the back of the cavernous theaters where light and photo realism induce each other, kicking and screaming and fully dilated, into existence. Cain will be called Ishmael, and the dead salesman will be buried with deep seated survival anxieties thrust upon him like a bad rash. Mourners will mill around, eating cubed cheese and coughing from the burning effigies, wondering aloud when it came to pass that mediocrity became lethal.

A memorable fancy, a veritable feast

A facially sincere descriptive statement from a man behind a mask who traffics in elliptical apogethms like Johann Climacus:

What is going on now is a widespread rejection of the ruling authorities and their beliefs, on the part primarily, but not only, of the American youth at large. This is similar to the rejection of communism by dissidents and youth in the Soviet bloc in the 1970’s and 80’s, and driven by similar causes.

An artistically sincere evocative statement from a man whose vision came conveyed by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives:

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answered: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception: but my senses discovered the infinite in everything; and as I was then persuaded, and remained confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”

Then I asked: “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?”

He replied: “All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.”