When in our throat does it finally catch?

As Corleone remarked to the Dons, at the meeting with Barzini, How did things ever get so far?


Is this not what our two generations of Dixie-craving governance had promised us: Rick Perry Apostolic Skateboard Maintenance, Inc.? 

Animals. Animals

reject the rogue

with no regrets.

Animals invoke no

dogma for natural

happiness. Who did

superstition bring

to life?

What on earth do

we bring to life,

to subject it to

such monstrosity?

Francis Ford Coppola and

  Mario Puzo, screenplay

The Godfather

op. cit.

Sunday brunch at Rick Perry's

Hmm. The hot dog

guy's still down

there.

OK, but I gotta

get outta these

itchy pants, first.

                You guys can pay

                a little extra,

                can'tcha,

                to help a fellow

                out?

         

                       

  Hercule, I really

  don't want to be

  here. Can we go?

  If only it were

  that simple,

  Auguste.

Spinosa, Fanon, Baldwin, James

      

 Spinosa, Fanon,

 Baldwin, James.

 What do they read,
 these summer days.


 There never was
 a youth without
 a summer.

   






We see plenty of summers,
staged. This doesn't work.
She doesn't accept reservations.

Saturday commute xxxix: finding value at the flea market

Have I said, I love my camera? This is not foolish, I think, because my camera can handle it. It is by far the most neutral support I've ever known - much more, for example, than a well-placed reading chair - for finding value. It does this by stripping everything I see of what I see in it; restores my world as a flea market. When, as we see, the existence takes place of a book by Richard Cheney, my camera gives me the world as it is, impervious to it. That it gives me a world imper-vious to me, while it's at it, is an observation I can accept from my camera. I go out sometimes with fresh film in my camera, expose it, and ignore its development. I went out to see.

But of all things, my camera is the very most steeped in context; its neutrality is rigidly enslaved to empiricism. It cannot give me this picture, yet this is by all means the most popular style of seeing that dwells in the human mind. We know this, and this is why fear was created, to let us know what to expect from seeing in this mode when it is exuberant.
We learn this terror at an extremely young age, and it exerts an endless warp. Why do I love my viewfinder for restoring the original act of play, only to leave me isolated?

Because I see, I am not? But delight of seeing empirically is still, delight, and how much of this is tolerable before the mind recalls its conditioned reflex to that state? This is not a marginal question; this goes to the heart of what pleasure is, whether in corrupted vision or in a camera's transparent registrations. If I give myself license to extend my pleasure because I deem its vision to be harmless, have I taken Richard Cheney's view with me?

I cannot fear pleasure that asks what it is. Empiricism happens to lack a crucial element of Richard Cheney's vision: tautology. My cam-era is redundant in mode, but not in discovery. 


It is, however, not necessary, that a man should forbear to write, till he has discovered some truth un-known before; he may be sufficient-ly useful, by only diversifying the surface of knowledge, and luring the mind by a new appearance to a second view of those beauties which it had passed over inattentively before.

Samuel Johnson
The Idler
26 February 1754
ibid.

        

Mr Cheney has a book out, and it is quite exciting enough

Scarce any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages. A peace will equally leave the warrior and relator of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie.

We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm, nor willingly decline a pleasing effect to investigate its cause. He that is happy, by whatever means, desires nothing but the continuance of happiness, and is no more solicitous to distribute his sensations into their proper species, than the common gazer on the beauties of spring to separate light into its individual rays.

An incongruous mode for a great memoir of state? Samuel Johnson, no idiot and no ingenue in neurological intervention, has written the only review worth contemplating of the volume in question. He understood and spelled out the astuteness of the demagoguery condensed within its pages, as the gift of pleasure to a client imploring its own debauchery. From soccer moms to credulous boys, from the intellectual Junkers at The New York Times and The New Yorker to the rabid degenerates of Fox, that regime was all but flawless in its manipulations. You watched, I watched, awestruck that they were getting away with it. And it is happening again. Mr Kerry, a student tapped for the elitest society at the University of Virginia once explained to me, "is just not exciting enough." 

My god. Just not exciting enough.

Samuel Johnson
Selected Writings
Patrick Cruttwell, editor
The Idler
 i, ii  11 November  1758
 iii     9 September 1758
Penguin, 1968©

Thursday evening could have gone better, I guess

  He put the coffee

  In the cup

  He put the milk

  In the cup of coffee

  He put the sugar

  In the café au lait

  With the coffee spoon

  He stirred

  He drank the café au lait

  And he set down the cup

  Without a word to me

  He lit

  A cigarette

  He made smoke-rings

  With the smoke

  He put the ashes

  In the ash-tray

  Without a word to me

  He got up

  He put

  His hat upon his head

  He put his raincoat on

  Because it was raining

  And he left

  In the rain

  Without a word

  Without a look at me

  And I  I took

  My head in my hand

  And I cried.

                                                   

Sometimes the balloon does not go up, sometimes it goes where one least expects - except that misdirection is to be expected. One can take the elaboratest precautions to defy the fact, without changing it: one is not the balloon. I deny that the play is ill judged, and I know better than to deny tears. One can manipulate ballast, jettison things, adjust the inflation; one can exercise a good deal of control, or less, which is only harder; but when the mooring is lifted, publication is a balloon. I like it when the balloon goes up, and when it does not, there can be suffering, but no regret. I am a balloonist.

That figure who enjoyed my coffee, smoked in my house, got up and left? I figure, he knew that, and already knew or quickly discovered, ballooning is not for him. Here's a publication which will gain, on any given occasion, the most intense referral, igniting a spontaneous blaze for a single insertion, which originally may simply smoulder in a corner somewhere, for weeks. Comparatively few people habituate this publication, but I do know something about them all. They are balloonists, too. I have one in particular in mind, who can help to illuminate this lark, and who happens to inspire its argument.

Beyond any doubt, he is a cultivated master of his craft, but his passion is to suspend all of that in the pursuit (I beg you to believe) of surfable waves, a species of ballooning known for saltier countenances than our aerialism allows. He writes to me, that the season at his favourite marine haunt is somewhat tepid this year, that they have had years of finer waves - vintages, can you stand it, pretty much exactly as Virgil said; but the company has been marvelous. This is our tendency. If you will the risk, to be tumbled or stolen aloft, you will the company; and sometimes, you must be. 

This morning, then, dispatching the spent coffee and airing out the place from that nervous cigarette, already there are readers who have scattered, and frankly the vestigial company is marvelous. Here, text is not a verb, and only a piece of the noun, which is context; and that is where the balloon, the surfboard is drawn. It's Friday, but the game is still ballooning. We gauge the wave. We pick our breeze; and both are always volatile. The thing is, to let go the line. Faites vos jeux.

The balloon may go up.

Jacques Prévert
Paroles
  Breakfast
1947
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, translation
1949
City Lights Books, 1958©






   

What compels the righteous to renounce the soul?

Lucien

   

So will I compass thine altar, O Lord: That I may publish with the voice of Thanksgiving.

     Thine altar is to me this bathtub

     where my four-year-old twin

     girls tip back their heads.

     They close their eyes.

     I read their faces from above,

     in trust and fear, in holiness,

     heads tipped until the waterline

     has touched their hairlines, cautious.

     Look: their hair flows underwater

     like the scrolls unfurled in heaven.

      

Psalm 26

Translation from the Greek by

  Brooks Haxton

Brooks Haxton

Uproar

  Antiphonies to Psalms

  "Scrolls"

op. cit.

Alexander Agricola
1445 - 1506
Motet, Nobis Sancti Spiritus
San Francisco Chanticleer
Chanticleer Records, 1993©

Only two more days of dreadful office lighting and air

you can handle it, tiger

    it isn't forever

iii  Valéry Lorenzo