My Sword Is My Pen : سيفي قلمي

سيفي قلمي

Within the last week, I heard that expression above.
From whom, we will not go into now.
It translates as "My sword (is) my pen."

The very previous post wherein I wrote that in intelligent beings it is the differences that join us together is a prime example. The differences are proof of Intelligence. Our disagreements are proof of our common humanity.

I attack (my sword!) the old ways of thinking with my writing (my pen!)

I wish I understood all this a bit more... to make me feel at ease.

--

note:
I don't know... maybe I should mention that the phrase is in Arabic?

The Burden Of Brilliance!

Not mine, other peoples' !

I can barely get through reading the news without stumbling across some officious and loquacious bloody genius-essay written by some guys or dolls high on the grey matter scale. I mean, I am desperately looking to close everything and do some real-life work, but Closure of the Browser escapes me... and the brilliant words tick in my tinnitus like some canine Tell-Tale Heart following me around, barking, and waiting for tickle behind the ears!

So I found this essay about the double standard fascinating. It boils down to:  there are no real problems until they affect white men.
I have lived in this country all my life so I get it in spades.

When Life gives you lemons:

Make lemonade... or

or make sure White Men have to suck on those same lemons! Then the government might do something. Sheesh! 25 cents a glass!

I particularly remember Reagan's ignoring the AIDS epidemic, as if disease followed his political inclinations. Incredible.

So read:

CNN
The cruel double standard that could save Obamacare
Story by John Blake, CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/politics/obamacare-double-standard/index.html

...  A change in complexion leads to a change in perception...

--

Technical Words

What do you call compounds words? And, in particular, what do you call them when you just sort of make them up on the fly: like, what would you call "words-made-up-on-the-fly-or-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants" if you wanted to use it in a post?

We have portmanteau words, and we've already added "club bag" words, but this is different.

I just call them maggeph  -
(pronounced maq-qef', with the q being a k in the back of the throat).  Or  mah-keff ', if you will.

I really do not know the English technical term.
I looked it up, and only found "compound words". How bloodless compared to maggeph!

Then I found:

The “-” sign is not a dash, but a hyphen. Words that contain one or more hyphens are said to be hyphenated.

Dashes of various length are used in English writing: “–” is an en dash, and “—” is an em dash. Their names (en and em) are those of typographic units of measurements. The former is used in particular to separate dates in ranges (“Lee, Bruce (1941–73)”), and the latter is used to indicate a break of thought or an unfinished sentence.

I think I have come across these in Word and maybe Blogger, but the difference does not seem to be as large as that shown above, and to be very honest, a few micromillimeters difference in a linear stroke of black on a white background is an area of research for Particle Physics Ph.D.s, not for me to be trying to read.

--

Writing I Like

Val Kilmer in The Thaw

I rarely read showbiz news. It can be very Dickensian and fascinating, but it usually begins to troll along the bottom of the sea of boredom, and all the breath-taking characters that one had fallen in love with at first sight begin to look like drudgery and resemble morning-after people that Jason Lee mused about in Dreamcatcher, as he posed the Meg Ryan question, "Where's the cat?"

I mean, really I try, but this Lamar Odom thing is an extremely tangled skein. No matter how much I read or listened to She-who-must-be-obeyed chatter on about it, I do not understand what's going on.
I mean, Chloe is not a licensed doctor, so what's is she trying to do with a fellow who - by some accounts - is brain dead?
Is there an inheritance at stake?

And Scientology truly baffles me. I mean, when I first heard the word "scientology" about 50 years ago, I thought "What a stupid name!"
I still do.
It brings to mind Aristotle puttering about with Dr. Praetorius in some quaint laboratory with sparking Van der Graff generators and vast distillation appartus filled with bubbling liquids and humors with a chorus line from The Producers, does it not? A mix of... well, I suppose "science" and "logy"...   or "logos", Ancient Greek and all that.
(Or a compact car version of Hugo Gernsback's  "scienti-fiction" and "logy".)


So I read The Guardian today.

 
I read about showbiz.
There was an article about Val Kilmer.
Who could resist?

I have not seen any bit of his oeuvre since The Thaw, so why not?

Well, there was much more.

Marina Hyde

Marina Hyde's Lost in showbiz: high fives all round as Val Kilmer whoops about his new Top Gun mission
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2015/nov/20/lost-in-showbiz-val-kilmer-iceman-top-gun-2-daniel-radcliffe-kardashian#comment-63634401


There was a bit about Daniel Radcliffe's life choices, one of which may have been setting up as role-models the actors Oliver Reed and Peter O'Toole.
"Ten pints for Gryffendor!"

Then there was the Kardashian Xmas Kard, which has been around ever since "Anno Beast"...!
Anno Beast?
What is that?
I looked and looked, but it smelled to me strongly of Rapture Palooza (Anna Kendrick, Craig Robinson... a film which could have been great with just a little bit more work on the script...).

Who writing about showbiz would cite Rapture Palooza? About non-Rapture Palooza subject matter?

Then it ended with a conjuration around the Kardashian annual card with "annus" ( = "year" in Latin)
and a trilitteral texting vulgarism beginning with "WT_" which again pointed back to "Anno" (ablative case of "annus", don't you know), as well as a homonym reference to Beast and a line in Rapture Palooza...

...and all the puns that one might possibly derive from Schopenhauer's observation"

Obit anus, abit onus.

which I won't even translate, because there are too many levels of Swiftian puns here.

Tolle, lege

Pick up and read!

--

Epimetheus

Carter Burke of Weyland-Yutani Corporation

Prometheus - "forethought" - had a brother appropriately named Epimetheus - "afterthought" - who was a Monday morning quarterback type, who kvetched a lot about the best laid plans of mice, men, and his sib Prometheus going "aft aglay".

I was so dissatisfied with the film Prometheus, that I actually have watched it 3 more times after the initial optic disaster just to see if it was as ghastly as I seemed to get the impression that it was.

Each time it keeps coming back the same thumbs down.

Prometheus is not a sequel; it is a sequela, engendered by Alien Resurrection.

(look it up)

It has no function but to serve as a springboard to something better: Epimetheus !

My continuation of the saga !

We have gotten rid of Guy Pearce with his old man Return Of The Mummy make-up, and have instead the presence of the Carter Burke, the alte Kocker who now heads up Weyland-Yutani.

The still shot above comes from 8 minutes into the film, where he is showing the newest version of the Ripley Family Tree around a Wey-Yu facility on some asteroid,

Burke

"I really wanted some 1-on-1 time with you... uh, may I call you Ripley? Ripley 12.3? "

"Ha, a joke. Sorry. "

"Look, what we really need right now is a postmortem on the Prometheus project; you know, like a full run-down.... (waits silently).... Ummm, ya gotta any "asks"?"

Soon he takes her into the deeper interior spaces of the facility, wherein Wey-Yu has the original space derelict:

Ripley

"You got that thing here ?! I spent 10 lives trying to destroy it! You're still trying to find a viable monster, aren't ya?!?!..."

Oops! I'm already slipping into the Ridley Scott vision and dialect.

You know, Ridley Scott has a new film out Exodus: Gods and Kings and there are complaints since there are no Arabs or Jews or Yezidi actors in it: no brown faces nurtured by the harsh sun of the Levant, as it were.
In this, however, he runs true to form, for he has never actually casts a xenomorph as the Alien character.


--

picture of Wey-Yu warehouse:
Neill Blomkamp
http://instagram.com/neillblomkamp/

Wretched Writing

 Lloyd George

From Prairie Weather
http://prairieweather.typepad.com/big_blue_stem/2013/11/we-just-arent-into-praise-even-when-praise-is-due.html

we get the following example of Billy Kristol's wretched writing:

On the heels of winning the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, the unglamorous but undeniably effective OPCW  [Organization For The Prohibition Of Chemical Weapons], using saws, sledgehammers and cutting torches in the middle of a war zone, defied predictions by meeting the Nov. 1 deadline to disable Syria’s chemical weapons program. The bombshell was that there was no bombshell — at least, not of the unconscionable chemical kind.

This wasn’t just a vindication of President Obama’s decision to work with Russia on a non-military solution to the Syrian weapons crisis (and a well-deserved slap in the face to neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, who compared the president of the United States to Groucho Marx, “doing farcical pratfalls as he followed down Neville Chamberlain’s tragic path.”) It was also a success for international organizations like the United Nations and the OPCW, and, indeed, for diplomacy itself. ...Katrina vanden Heuvel,WaPo

I have to admit that I wrote just like that in my time, but it is something I do not like.

First, the reader does not need me to draw analogies.

Second, comparing Bashar Al Assad to Adolf Hitler is goofy.

Third, how does one interpret the Venn diagram of the intersection of "Groucho Marx" and "Nevile Chamberlain"?
I mean, does Mr. Kristol just assume that everyone who wears a black frock coat - such as Mr. Chamberlain and Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush - just sort of meld into each other?

 The Hon. N. Chamberlain

Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush

My entire time writing this blog has been an attempt to understand that the reader is just as smart and sharp as myself. The only thing I can do is add my own slant to things, and I am not going to be effective at it if I write such nonsense as Mr. Kristol's.

I also believe that the returns from bombing everyone that disagrees with us brings fewer and fewer benefits all the time.
The refusal to bomb Syria was the first time since Eisenhower anyone stood up to the war mongering parties.

Neville Chamberlain, my patootie! More like Lloyd George !

--

Why No One Asks Me To Review Books

I finished the novel The Help some time ago. I may have already said I thought it was not too hot. Please note that Family Guy in around 2002 had an episode wherein Nate Griffin, Peter Griffin's black slave ancestor, was having an in-the-mirror-sort-of-dream-sequence talk with Peter, and stated that he used to pee into the master's cereal every morning.
I assume this pre-empts the chocolate pie in The Help, a supposedly funny or ironic or something bit of punchy writing that was telegraphed 150 pages ahead of time.

An Editor was needed.

My wife has been reading Jeannette Walls. She is reading The Glass Castle, a book which I was going to try, because I had not liked the Walls book with some sort of horses in the name  - Half Broke Horses - and thought I give Ms. Walls another try. She seems to be highly recommended.
Well, my wife was just reading a selection of The Glass Castle aloud to me. It was the section on Christmas, and it was for all the world just like The Simpson's... only the Simpson's are funnier and better scripted.
This selection also started out by stating it was Christmas Day morning, and then ended with a jump back in time somehow to Midnight Mass at least 6 hours before... no transition. An editor again was needed. Perhaps all the editors are as goofy as the writers.

The New York Times Book Review blurb said that Castle was a modern fairy tale, and mentioned how we learn about and try to understand the witch - apparently a reference to Ms. Walls mother. Well, I do not remember any fairy tales where we wanted to "get into the mind" of the witch; we wanted to escape from the witch, not to understand her.

--

Ray Bradbury and I

 

The Sunken Pier at Glen Harbor, Michigan

We spent our youths on the shores of lakes and rivers, Bradbury in Waukegan on Lake Michigan and I in Michigan on Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River.

There is some quiet and subliminal effect of water, flowing, moving, breaking on the shore, or carrying the great storm clouds from the west on its mighty back towards you standing expectantly for hours on the shore, as Lake Michigan does in Empire, Michigan - or in Glen Harbor north of the massive sand dunes where the waves lap the ancient piers and the wind blows sand into your eyes.
(refer to Google Earth  45 degrees 54' 22  86" N / 86 degrees 01'30 45 W  for the ancient piers.)

The interior of the country is oppressive; it is a place where change happens with the slow speed of creeks drying up in the summer and the mud cracking wider and wider. The interior is a land from which water escapes and flows away, and everything runs! Runs at the proverbial speed hydrological, which in our hearts is far faster than the speed of light.

My friend was going to go golfing at a place called Canadian Lakes. It certainly sounded great to me, and I was just a bit envious. But when I looked it up in Google Earth, I discovered it was not in Canada at all, and was furthermore in the middle of the Michigan; it consisted of some landlocked lakes throttled by houses and golf courses.
I was no longer jealous.
Golfing in the prison of land stretching as far as the eye can see - with a few spitoons of lake - is not comparable to golfing at a place, like Antrim Dells, where one starts high on the hills near Lake Michigan and drives down a fairway descending into the deciduous forests of autumn... and no matter how dense the foliage and how deep the declivity, one is never far from the life-giving wind off the lake. The only thing better would be the additional salt on your tongue from a sea breeze.

Water has formed our lives.
The impetuous transformations of water and air forced the minds of Bradbury and myself to the vast, foamy, and quick reaches of imagination.
--

Lizard Breath and Gecko Eyes Part Two: The Creepazoid

 

Nemesis

I had been battered about by the Atlantic. While She-who-must-be-obeyed grew up near the ocean, I had been stuck away in the Mid West: I was unfamiliar with the surf. Even though the waves were pretty small potatoes (as it were), on the first day we went swimming on our Florida vacation, I dithered around in the bad area between a rock (a receding wave) and a hard place(an incoming wave), and was treated to an exposition of "How Clothes Feel In Your Sears Kenmore Washing Machine".
My knees were scraped as I was in the agitate cycle, and as much as I like the taste of salt water, I drank a little too much for comfort during the spin cycle.
I came up sputtering.
She-who-etc. and friends were out a bit further in the smile and splash zone, ignoring me cruelly. After another trip through the washer,  I was ready to call it quits, when I spotted Lizard Breath and his sister, Gecko Eyes - a brother and sister I had met watching egrets eating geckos behind the 19th Hole - coming to my rescue.
They grasped my hands, "You have to go out a little farther, Pygopod, so you don't get smashed, " they said, using my nickname derived from a family of Gekkota.
I followed.

Afterwards, the entire crowd dried themselves on the beach, strewn about, chair and towel, like the aftermath of some not too serious disaster.
Pelicans in a row flew along the ridge of the curling waves, and Gecko Eyes thought how nice it would be to be able to fly like that...,  without having to dive into the water every now and then and grab raw fish and gobble it down. We nodded in dreamy acquiescence.
We built a couple of sand castles in a desultory, lazy manner as the day proceeded to dusk, the sun becoming more orange and red.
"Like a Red Giant star," said Lizard Breath.
I told them of my story of how the Earth was slung out of orbit by a passing black hole, and then took up a new orbit at a distance that caused everything on Earth to freeze into a deep, deep cold. The only place life could survive this catastrophe was in the neighborhood of the deep ocean hydrothermal vents, where life continued for a million years or so, until the Sun finally began to exhaust its supply of hydrogen, and became a Red Giant star.
As the Sun increased in size, the radiation during this Red Giant phase, although much less than during our own time, was sufficient to melt the frozen Earth, for the Sun had grown enormously and now was much closer to the displaced Earth.
Life resumed on Earth, and now there were a few million years left for intelligent life to get their acts together, and attempt space travel, and to find a new home for mankind! And this had to be done before the Red Giant phase of the Sun ended, and the star began to shrink and collapse into a White Dwarf Sun, ending life in the Solar System forever!

Lizard Breath had his own story.
There had been a large water slide somewhere along the coast, a huge inflatable vinyl play water slide, and he and his sister had climbed it all the way to the top and slid all the way down a number of times. They dreamed of an even larger water slide structure that extended, not along the beach, but straight out into the ocean, going maybe two miles or more.
It was a long walk out to the ladder two or three miles out in the ocean, and it was a long slide back three miles to the beach. The amount of friction was vanishingly small, otherwise the water slide would have to have been a mile high for the necessary gradient to "slip" all the way back those three miles.
"Maybe it was even 'negative' friction," said Lizard Breath, Gecko Eyes nodding in silent assent.
I suppose negative friction is the slipperiest of the slippery.
While walking along the catwalk on the side of the water slide, a catwalk sort of semi-enclosed by vinyl inflated walls, a wind came up and the waves increased and the air-filled catwalk began to heave and the balloon walls began to buffet against them. A storm was brewing, but they had already gone more than three-quarters of the way out, so it would be quicker to get to the end where the ladder was, get up to the top of the slide, and slide with negative friction all the way back to shore and safety.

The waves got larger and larger. Gecko Eyes began to shiver.
It was right about then that I became part of the story, and the three of us were walking along this inflated tempest-tossed wretched balloon. It was cold and wet, and I did not care for it one bit. I said as much, too, but things were happening too fast.
Just as we were about to get to the far end and begin climbing the ladder to the top of the water slide, we heard gun fire nearby.
"It's the Creepazoid!"  we all yelled in unison.
Now if you do not know who or what the Creepazoid is, you'll get a quick, down and dirty crash course:  Pursuer, a Nemesis T-Type developed by the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil... Racoon City? Remember?
Anyway, Creepazoid was the first thing to pop into the heads of Lizard Breath and Gecko Eyes back when they first saw this monster, and it is a whole lot better name than "Pursuer".

The Creepazoid was firing at us, and if we ascended the ladder to the top of the water slide, we would be completely out in the open like sitting ducks...
"Or fish in a barrel..." said Lizard Breath.
Fish in a barrel, I thought, my mind racing.

The dinner hour intervened, and we had to go our separate ways, leaving the story and Creepazoid to be finished off later. Lizard Breath and Gecko Eyes were called by their mother, and She-who-must-be-obeyed sent a towel boy to fetch me.
Later, I dozed off and had a one-reel dream about the stories that afternoon. I woke up and the big water slide bouncing dangerously in the sea seemed to be part of my Red Giant Sun story: everything reminded me of big, expensive projects into the vast ocean of space with the promise of unlimited horizons of exploration and a potential for a United Nations of space endeavor for the future...
But then the winds came and the waves rose, and we discovered our frailty as we struggled to keep our footing on that bouncing elephantine water slide of gigantic proportions. Wet, cold, and tired, we kept going, helping each other to maintain our balance...

... until the Creepazoid came...
--

Vacation: Lizard Breath, Part One

There are a lot on geckos in Florida. The place is infested by them. They should be the state animal, if they are not already so designated. It was in a discussion of geckos that I first met Lizard Breath, a young man possessing that uncanny ability so well and truly depicted in Jurassic Park of being able to imprint and bond with the first person of advanced years who cannot stand kids.
I mean, it was Spring Break and I had just come down in a flying sardine can filled with the germ-laden X-Box generation, had I not? And who said the economy was in the tank, for had not all of them had some sort of iDevice upon which they were playing Angry Birds or a form of Quidditch; the less athletically inclined formed large flash texting mobs in corner of the aircraft, and threatened to unbalanced the wretched thing, forcing the flight attendants to chase them back to their seats, and wake up their blissfully sleeping parents.

We were staying with friends at Johns Island. It was one of those places where, as our friends drove us around, everyone smiled and waved. Even in the morning the scads of people going early morning walk-about smiled and waved.
When I went walking in the morning, no one smiled and waved to me. I guessed they knew that I was just passing through. Perhaps it was my demeanor. One day as I waited for my friends outside the Publix supermarket, some people asked me if I were on my way back to the marina, indicating I resembled a yacht owner... or a swabby; I did not ask, so I remain in the dark. All I do know is that I had a Tommy Bahama on over a Del Boca Vista T-shirt, and I thought I looked more like Jack Klompus, and an inquiry about the astronaut ball point pen might have been in order, rather than the maritime connection.

I was sitting behind the 19th Hole, the small cafe off the 18th green of the Johns Island Golf Club, sipping a cup of tea, and watching the egrets standing about like statues. So was a woman in dark glasses accompanied by three children. She belonged; I knew it at once. Even without make-up early in the morning, I could see she belonged. She had that air of being able to summon the spirits and faeries of make-up and fashion at a moment's notice, if need be; but there was no need, for she had already sized me up and tossed me into that trash receptacle reserved for tiresome pedants. I think it was my sneakers that gave me away.
The children were of various ages: the oldest girl sipped her orange juice and intermittently did her daily dozen of lip-push-ups, consisting of a series of sucking in the cheeks and compressing the lips outward in emphatic moues, followed by a shrug that seemed to signal it was not really worth the effort.
The younger two, a boy and girl, were a brace of pestilences in training.

There followed a lengthy interlude of muted giggles and Indian burns and almost spilled OJs, interspersed by half serious remonstrations by the mother. It was a lot like sitting in the midst of an elementary school production of Waiting for Godot, only not as thrilling as the original.

Then the egret moved! He was not ten feet from us, and he thrust his beak into the bush, spearing a gecko, and then throwing it down his gullet! It was electric... rather like being a thorough tool and sitting through Warhol's Empire and spilling one's fourth bag of popcorn when startled by the sudden appearance of a sea gull flying by the lofty pile of bricks.
The mother did not move, and the eldest daughter moued at it all, but I positively goggled, and the other two were breathless.
"Wow!" said the boy.
"Shit!" said the young girl.
"Madison...," admonished the mother, leaving unspoken the coda that one should not use the S-word in front of people who had not been properly introduced.
I considered, then spoke, "That egret just ate that gecko!"
Gecko of the infraorder Gekkota I immediately learned from the Science Whiz Kids sitting next to me.
"That was just like school!", I said.
The younger ones of the crowd sort of turned half way to look at me.
"I used to have a nun like that who taught me in fifth grade..." I thought this might be about their age. "... and she would come down the aisles, tall and silent, then suddenly whack people with a ruler!"
They giggled.
The egret struck again. He apparently loved to be the center of attention.
"Thwack! Don't play video games in class!" the boy said. All three of us laughed.

This game of personifying our freedom and play as reptiles and our oppressors as thin, unemotional, goggle-eyed birds went on for a while, and then for a couple mornings thereafter.
And the boy became Lizard Breath, the girl was Gecko Eyes, and I was Pygopod. If you must know, it comes from Pygopodidae, a family of Gekkota, and it is pronounced "PIG-opod", with all the possible emphasis on the  "pig..."   part with a barely muttered  "...opod"  at the end. It often degenerated - in our subversive creole - into something like "piggy-pod".
However, I counted this a real feather in my cap, because just as the nicknames were being dealt out (in the manner of "he who dealt it, smelt it!"), there had been a vigorous show-and-tell about gecko defences and about how some throw feces at aggressors. That was not a good discussion to be in when names were being discovered and assigned.

And that is how I met Lizard Breath.
--

Sinum Conservate! Save the Bay!

reprint

The "Small Brothers" of St. Paul  in Clean Up The Bay Day in 2010 At Neavitt, MD.

I have a high school friend who joined the Order of St. Paul Oikumene, which is actually an abbreviation of "St. Paul of the Oikumene and the Antioikumene, which literally means "St Paul of the Inhabited Lands and the Uninhabited Lands".  Their monastery is down on the Chesapeake on Tilghman Island on highway 33 west and south of St. Michael's on the Outer Shore of Maryland.
Their monastery on Tilghman is actually an aggregation of individual houses that had been built during the bubble by a developer who had declared bankruptcy. They had sat empty for a few years, but had been minimally maintained by Mungo Reeves, a County employee, who had scoured the neighborhoods about for money to keep the development from falling into ruin, and thereby destroying surrounding property values.
Then the Small Brothers came into the picture. ("Small Brothers" is a trans of "Fratres Pauli" which could mean both "brothers of Paul" or "small brothers" in Latin; it is short for Fratres Pauli Oikumenes kai Antoikumenes, a combination of Latin and Greek that is pretty uncommon for the Bishop of Rome and his pals.)

The order bought the development very cheaply and the structure that had been intended to function as a club house and community center was turned into a chapel and refectory and library, the rest of the units becoming domiciles for the members of the order.

Their function as an order is to maintain the ecological quality of the Chesapeake Bay along the Outer Shore and the Inner Shore of Maryland. The Small Brothers are the first ecological order of workers that I am aware of. Their goals are the maintenance of the Bay and the lower reaches of the rivers flowing thereto, which covers an enormous territory which is presently beyond the abilities of the twenty one brothers and their helpers among the laity, but eventually they intend to reach their goal.
When I visited last year, Brother Bob (my old friend, Robert Patterson III from high school) showed me around the grounds. He showed me things you don't expect at a monastery:  outboard motors and run-abouts, working scows, testing equipment... I was amazed.
The State contributes some money, but it is far less than it used to spend on clean up in the area the Brothers can effectively maintain.  In my life, I seem to remember three distinct eras of "The Chesapeake is dying! Let's clean it up!"  Flurry of money and activity, then everyone would forget. That's when the Small Brothers entered the picture. They have but one goal and no other distractions. Most of their monies come from appeals they make at churches around the Chesapeake, not only RC churches but churches of other denominations - and temples and mosques - that want to hear them preach the word of Good Husbandry of Nature.

I understood that the order would be establishing a womens' arm, Sorores Pauli. Where their place would be no one seemed to know as of last year. There were ten women interested, and that would be a welcome addition to their force. I don't know the status of that right this moment.

God bless the brothers and sisters of St. Paul of the Sown, the Settled, and the Empty Lands!

--

Twelfth Day

I have become so lazy that everything I write is short and lapidarian (I wish!) merely because I am too lazy to pick my fingers up and down on the keyboard. The keyboard... there seems to be a loamy soil in the cracks of the laptop's cursor keys. With a glass I can see there is incipient life forming: the stray molecules of water combine with the fine-grained sands of the claylike dirt, and seem to be producing rudimentary life.
I look further. You know, when you look at a keyboard up close, it begins to look like the topography of China, possibly Yandang mountain:

for which a case could be made that they do indeed resemble the keys on a gigantic keyboard... or at least Gargantua's molars; or else possibly the mountains and rivers of Giulin:

where we have very irregular "keys", but they do resemble my keyboard, certainly, the high points, the valleys between them, and the sandy, loamy mulch I have neglected to clean out.

Of course, from where I sit and view them, it looks a lot like a Google Earth view of the land, a view from far away in the stratosphere:

That is how it goes on these lazy mornings when I have no particular inspiration, a sad and mundane state of affairs. The news of the world irritates me, but rarely inspires. Instead of reading the BBC, I wish I had a juke box to play in the mornings;  "1-2-3" by Len Barry would do well right now... or "Just like Romeo and Juliet"... some Motown, Stevie's "Superstition" always drives out the ghosts of tedium.

Today is the Twelfth Day; last night was Twelfth Night, being the twelfth night after Christmas Eve, and officially ends the Christmas season.
Since it was Twelfth Night, I played Sir Toby Belch as usual, She-who-must-be-obeyed as Lady Olivia, and Herman Cain had been invited to play Sir Andrew Aguecheek; he could not come. The rest were supplied by a motley crew of neighbors. Therefore, we sat about all night drinking and singing "trick canons" as did Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in the play:


Sad away the old year chasing,
he sits here after dinner,
and sings of season's many pleasures,
and the evils he omits
and politics he skirts.


with the absent jolly good fellow, Mr. Cain, in mind.
--

How Flustered Was I?

Choosing Sweets at Shatila Bakery, Dearborn, Michigan

I was reading my poem from 2008, The Tunisian Lady,

http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/2008/03/fast-day-39-march-1-2008.html

wherein I and my fellow students of Arabic at the Unity Center Mosque go to dinner, then go to Shatila bakery for desert, and then discover a Tunisian lady in some distress, and my teacher drove her home.

It was dark, and the neighborhood where the lady lived had a lot of uncut grass and dogs barking. My teacher went up on the front porch with the lady, and I was just behind them on the sidewalk. My teacher rang the door bell and the owner of the house, where the lady rented the basement, came to the door.
He was not wearing a shirt, which surprised me, not so much because he was shirtless and it was a hot summer's night, but because my teacher was a good Muslim lady herself, and this was probably a bit infra dig.
I remember distinctly saying to myself: "I hope he's at least wearing trousers!"
That's what I said to myself: trousers, not pants!

That's how flustered I was: I was so flustered that I thought I was a Brit, and not just any Brit, but a chappie into intrigues about trousers during Eights Week at Oxford. The barking dogs and the immodesty scared the Evelyn Waugh out of me!

(Now the only thing I have to worry about is whether Lowe's will pull their commercial support.)
--

Speaker for the Arts

Reprint: it is for Christmas, and it is my favorite.

I was dreaming this morning at 4:00 AM. I know because I woke up as I finished my dream-speech, thrust my arm forward into the air, and fell onto the bedroom floor, having run out of mattress. I woke up, looked around, and remembered having raised my arm outwards, recalling the Levi's commercial which runs "O, Pioneer, My Pioneer!" with cuts of young folks running, jumping, hiking...remembering that the advertisement originally had a shot with a young girl standing nearby a statue, the scene lit by fire light, and everyone raising their right arms in a salute redolent of the 1930's and 40's and very Leni Riefenstahl covering events at Nuremberg. (The later edited versions of the commercial excised this portion.)

Ah, I said, I'm having a Hogan's Heroes moment. I am imagining myself as Werner Klemperer 's Colonel Klink being an absolute toady in front of General Burckhalter. Then it came to me: I had been at a meeting about the Arts, and we had been discussing something along the lines of making the Arts relevant for our community, and I had made a point and finished my speech with a flourish of the radius and ulna...or...and here's where it gets a bit dicey...it may have not been a flourish at all; I may have punched a lady in the face: it wasn't quite clear.

Now it may strike you as odd that we here in this community would have a round table about the Arts and end up fighting like animals in the octagon cage, but that's why we love this town, as Ernie Hudson ( in Ghostbusters ) might say; it is the wonder of its topology.

And it was a dream sequence. Don't forget that. That is an important point: dream sequence versus reality. The entire country forgot this distinction sometime back in the first decade of the 21st century, and imagine the egg on our faces when we couldn't even find any Christmas cracker bon-bons (those tubular constructs with pull tabs on the end you...pull, actually, and it goes...sort of poooof! crack!, and if you're lucky, you may get a small toy or fortune from inside it: party favors!!) ...couldn't even find a Christmas cracker party favor in Saddam Hussein's Holiday Pantry!

So - dream sequence (mind you, if anything profane or untoward happens, I am guiltless) and there is a goodly number of us Art types thronged into what resembles The Shop Around the Corner in the You've Got Mail version - or possibly Gepetto's workshop...or Heidi's grandfather's house...all very cosy, very woodworky, very alpine cum Hochzeit, very lots-a-booksy, library-and-roaring-fireplace-type things, as if Heidi's grandfather did a lot of reading, instead of rescuing stranded skiers from avalanches and giving tokes of brandy to lost pilgrims and what-not. (I think I may have mixed up Heidi's Opa with a St. Bernard, but it does not affect this story in the slightest.)

Anyway, in comes an artsy chick from the cold, layered with four layers of loveliness to protect her from the winter's chill, and she has a determined look on her face. To me, she looked like a Russian Ice Queen, and the sweep of her scarves echoed the sway of her long, pendulant braids! I can't quite see these braids yet, but I'm sure I will later. She comes in and makes an intercept course right at me, looking a bit peeved, and I'm suddenly wondering what happened to the fair damsel I kissed in the summer boathouse (dream sequence, again! dream sequence). Well, it was the guy behind me she was coming full speed after, not me. He was an athletic chappie in a Norwegian sweater; an Arno Breker type that looked as if he could have posed for any number of monumental statues of the 20th century.

An Arno Breker Statue

She reduced her forward momentum considerably as she neared us and hove to; her eyes flashed warning shots across our bows. He handed her some sort of poster or sign that had to do with the whole Artsy deal we were involved in, only it seemed to be about the size of an advert for the side of an autobus. She gave a look of "it's about time!", and secured it on her main deck (continuing the feeble metaphor of ships and vessels), did a 180, and strode off - not before sending the faintest Marconi wireless bit of electro-smile, a spark of white teeth flashing duh-duh-duh-daaaa!...and I heard Vera Lynn whispering that we'd meet again, and actually the time and place were quite well known: about midnight at her place...but it was all for Arno Breker, not for me.

I was getting light-headed from the exhalations off the warming bodies, when the meeting finally came to order, or as much order as is possible in a meeting of the artsy folks. My cousin - who had somehow infiltrated the meeting, obviously to cause trouble - suggested that Montag tell the assembly his opinion on what the group should do to to promote Art.

I heard my name and jolted out of whatever reverie I was then engaged in. (It never ceases to amaze me that even in my dreams, I am usually wool-gathering or daydreaming somewhere. I mean, how many drams of Nepenthe does one need?!)

I rose to my feet slowly, whispering fervidly to my neighbors, "What the heck are we discussing?"

"Arts." they said. "Promotion of..."

They seemed to speak as if they were assembling a card catalog with entries sorted by last name, or pretending they talked like Yoda:

" arts, promotion of "

and

" yourself, don't make a fool of " .

It was one of those dreams of school where one has not studied for the exam and you struggle to remember exactly what the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram looks like, and your hangover keeps humming a Max Steiner motif from " A Star is Born ", and you know you always get Frederic March mixed up with Raymond Massey, and you know you are screwed royally.

I slowly stood up. I thanked my cousin, greeted all the assembled worthies, verities, luminaries, heroes and heroines of the Arts...I kept it going while my brain spun like a Land Rover stuck in a mud wallow somewhere in Kenya. So while my tongue wagged like a red pennant in a strong offshore wind, the extra addition I had had built onto my brain was working overtime to come up with a plausible statement of intent. I knew it was working; I could hear the million typewriters being pecked on by the million monkeys I had hired to do such drudge scripting and editing.

Finally, a runner from my extra brain rushed into the main hall of my intelligence - a structure that eerily resembled a Big Top right now - and thrust a couple sheets of paper into my sweating hands.

"That's it." the runner said.

I looked at the scribbles in amazement and disbelief. "This...is it?!"

"That's it!" and he ran off.

I heard myself intone, "Now, to the main point of my remarks..."

I would like to say the room reverberated, but it was more of a rustling noise, bodies moving around, more layers of clothes being removed, and a distinct scent of eau de pissed-off was in the air, since everyone wanted to get their 2 cents in, and who the heck was this Montag feller anywho?

The lady in front of me popped up. She wore a Burberry scarf, and a brown leather coat. She wore black boots collared with fur over tight jeans painted on her legs, which themselves looked like two sharp stiletto blades pendant from her hips: she was an erotic Aphrodite-Scissors-Legs, used to cutting men in two with those mortal gams, and she was tired of waiting for me. I fancied I heard a whetstone being applied to steel.

She spoke as if I did not exist. She held her head directly in front of me. Her hair was the artifice of time and expense. It settled like a carpet for the Muses, and she frequently had to give one of those twist things women do when their hair descends upon their eyes...exiting it all to the side of the proscenium arch of her lovely face with a managerial flip of the head and combed by an ushering hand; that same fair hand she would not hesitate to knock me aside with.

The chairperson finally thanked her, even though she was not done, not by a long chalk. The chair mentioned that I had not spoken, or at least had not spoken to the point, and it still was my turn to speak, and - by the by - would I be kind enough to wrap it all up in a timely manner?

She glared at me. She sat down, plotting some revenge.

I spoke.

I said that all mankind are artists by nature. (That sounds good. They'll eat it up! Like greedy school boys cramming sweets into their mouths!)

The basics of living beings are the things they do, the crafts, things made, things found; what is Art but the transformation of craft and work and rote, things found and things made, into a higher level of life, the Aesthetic Level. (There was a groundswell of approbation coming my way....it almost made me sway as I stood there.)

If we were to reform the educational system to inculcate into each and every child the fact that Art is transformation of Life by discipline and theory and imagination, we would not have need of constant meetings to ponder what one should do about promoting the Arts, for -indeed!!- to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge, Mankind and the Arts are my business!  
(Everyone was smiling and beaming, except the lady in the Burberry scarf. She turned and glared at me. Her very long scarf had loosened and one end had drooped to the floor, where I had covertly affixed it firmly with the toe of my shoe. And happily I had done so, for she decided to cut off my speech. She stood abruptly in front of me, only to be pulled back down, croaking, as her scarf pulled her back like an unruly mastiff on the business end of a leash. "Sorry,sweetheart," I muttered, as I removed the offending toe from the choke-scarf. I nailed that bogart!)

Returning to the Arts, I said that they are similar in this respect to religion; as St. Paul enjoins us to create within the spirit; put away the things of childhood, and transform yourselves!

At this point, some smiles sort of froze, as if someone had clobbered the individuals on the pate with a rolling pin. A dazed look unrolled over the room... Hastily, I dropped the religious stuff. Christmas had just passed, and everyone had had quite enough of that, thank you. Religion is a lot like cookies, food, and drink: one tends to overdo it during the holidays, and is, thus, forced to go on a rigorous fast after New Year's to try and get back into one's groove.

"The Arts are the business of mankind!" I said. "When this society realizes this, and teaches every child to live his life to its fullest potential, then the Arts will come into their own! " I said, not having a clue what any of this actually meant. I ended with my arm thrust out, saluting that brave, new world of the future.

It was at this point that I fell and kissed the floor, O, Pioneer, My Pioneer!

--

The Green Grocer's

a reprint

I had been buying groceries...at a green grocer's; at Nino's, to be precise... Nino's in Rochester Hills. I was in the express lane, having only four or so items. One of my purchases was a bunch of fresh cilantro. The check-out girl was very fresh, young, and actually seemed to be enjoying her day. Her spirit was infectious, so I decided to play it nice, instead of nasty, brutish, and short. She blinded me with green grocery science.

She picked up the bag of cilantro with a motion I can only describe as that of Botticelli's Venus covering herself from the north wind. She placed it on the scale with a retrograde motion from head downwards, again, Botticelli. All Botticelli from here on. She opened her mouth and said "Italian parsley?" I, of course, smiled and nodded, thinking Si. Si, bella ragazza! Then the continuity girl caught the error, gave me a swift kick in the pants, and hastily whispered No. It's supposed to be cilantro. I coughed. "Er, no. Ummm. It had better not be. It is...or it's supposed to be cilantro."

"Oh," she demurely said. "I never know how to tell them apart." I glanced at the broad, flat leaf cilantro. It did resemble the Italian parsley, bless its chlorophyll. I tried to think of some sort of quip about how many Mexicans would be disappointed were I to show up with Italian parsley instead of cilantro, but it didn't quite come together: I had a distinct image of myself as H.W.F.Fowler standing in quad making derogatory remarks about errors in English syntax peculiar to speakers of Spanish...and I knew this particular goddess was - if anyone was - very, very liberal.
So, feeling a bit of a panic - I had been mute for a few clicks beyond what is socially acceptable - I reached out and grabbed the bag from the scale, lifted it up, and thrust my nose into it, as I imagined a milkman's horse digging into the old nose-bag at the end of a long day must do...and sniffed. "Ah," I said. "Cilantro."
I handed it back to her. She smiled, and said that that was o.k. for me, but she couldn't put her nose into peoples' groceries to tell cilantro from Italian parsley. All very smiley...sort of reminded me of Athena's white-washed picket fence of healthy teeth. The Iliad. Very classic type of day. I laughed and said she was right; her supervisors would hear about that right quick! More laughter. Smiles. I mean, exactly how did I go about buying groceries for the past eons before this? This certainly had that all beat ten ways to Sunday!

Well, like all good things, it came to and end, and the shark-like credit card reared its ugly fin. I chose paper, not plastic...I'm sure she was ecologically minded. I signed my name with a bold, sweeping hand. We bid each other adieu, adieu, until the pantry inventory ran dry and the rocks melt wi' the sun...or something to that effect. But, you know something? When people are that beautiful in our eyes, when they make your heart do that bass drum thing...... we don't really care where they stick their noses.
--

XLIS

 "Jam!" Hank Jakubowski had said. "Jam!" he said, pounding his fist, which was the size of a ham, butt and shank, upon the table.
We looked up from our lentil soup. We were sitting in Hanaan's Diner on the day after Thanksgiving and eating lunch under the inexorable ticking of the clock and the intimidating chop-chop-chop of Hanaan's cutting knife.
Ever since the demise of Colonel Qaddafi she had seemed to have lost focus for her bad moods; she no longer attacked "ugly onions of Libya" with her cutlery; they were just unpersonified onions now and she minced them without political comment in her strokes.
We were on our best behavior, therefore, assuming that she was stalking a new object for her malevolence; a "black widow", as it were, on the make for a new mate to eviscerate. That is why the outburst from the Bialystok Buffalo took us by unhappy surprise.
We looked at him with question marks upon our brows.
He looked around. The chop-chop-chop from the back of the diner had stopped, and there was no earthly reason to assume that that was a beneficent coincidence, so to speak; the silence spoke volumes.
"Jam," he said in a normal conversational tone. "J.A.M." he spelled out. "Where is John Allen Muhammad when ya need him?"

Needless to say, this did not immediately clear things up. Most of us were a bit hazy on the identity of the Mr. Muhammad referred to. I turned and caught the raised and inquiring supercilia of Hanaan herself come into view from the kitchen like two twin rain squalls roiling over a perturbed sea.

That was all; Hank did not seem to want to clarify. This spoken intermezzo between the soup and the sandwich seemed to be taking place solely in his universe of discourse. Everyone decided to let it be.

After lunch, I walked home with Levine.
"That Muhammad character, that was the D.C. sniper, you know." said Levine.
"Ah," I said. I had quite forgotten. I suddenly recalled my daughter - who was living in D.C. at the time - telling me that the D.C. police had cautioned the population to walk in a zig-zag fashion in order to spoil the aim of the sniper, a bit of bureaucracy which was Life imitating Art, à la Monty Python and their Ministry of Funny Walks.
"What do you think Hank meant?" Levine asked.
"Ah," I said, then hastily "Dunno," having gotten my unisyllabic and bisyllabic responses mixed up. I did not know if Hank were advocating violence and mayhem, or were in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. It was just after Thanksgiving and the Budget Super Committee Super Fiasco and nobody was feeling too great. It seemed to me that this was what the end of the Roman Republic must have been like: leaders made weak by a life of wealth and their imaginary greatness, people made witless by no responsibility other than as consumers of breads and circuses; when the soppresata hits the fan, it's like the proverbial chickens with their heads cut off.

"I'm going to have some XLIS." Levine said, as if this were an everyday occurrence.
"Hmmmm...?" I was more providing a sound track rather than responding.
"It's a drug."
No shit. Levine had been a chemist before retirement. He was pretty sharp. He probably had a stash of many, many things stored in a club bag... or a valise... or a steamer trunk, if there had been a goodly amount of personal effects when he retired and cleaned out his office at Pfizer... or a Jenny Lynd... or a Saratoga trunk... or a Wardrode type - a garde-robes... or a Dome-top or Camel-back trunk... or Hump-back or Barrel-top... perhaps a Footlocker...
I had been surprised, and the mind was wandering like a dervish dancing in circles. I asked, "You don't mean X, like Ecstasy, do you?"
He shook his head no. "XLIS is a endocannabinoid - like the marijuana produced inside the body. It's involved with retrograde signaling between brain synapses: instead of presynaptic neuron to postsynaptic neuron - the normal way - XLIS and others seem to encourage transmission from postsynaptic to presynaptic."
"Really," I said, trying to make it sound impressively impressed.
"Yes. I think it is the basis of the monstrous feedback loop of intelligence we call life, a continual flow in and  back of data being processed... all due to THC... or its brothers."
"Und sein Brüder," I muttered, remembering not a German film from 2004, Agnes und seine Brüder, but an ancient thing, a story by Arthur Schnitzler, a writer from the dim past, a writer on palimpsests - his story, Der blinde Geronimo und sein Brüder.
We walked into the sunset.
"It's a 'drug lite'. So, you want a bissel?" Levine said.
For a moment, I felt like Rick in Casablanca walking off with Captain Renault.

XLIS came in transdermal patches, which I felt was a civilized way of delivery compared to smoking or suppositories. It was a long after... meaning afternoon... we were busy defining new ways to speak about things. I had not had a possibly illegal drug in 40 years, not since the government monopoly on the mind and mind-benders. I am not frivolous: I had merely had my fill of the non-drug world of 2011.
XLIS seems to promote interaction rather than putting people into their own little world; we continually spoke to each other, and it was as if dramas were unfolding. These were not some faded diorama of reality, but were - or seemed to be -- truly historic dramas, dramas and actions from ancient Delphi where the ivy and vines of Dionysos grew in the citadel of Apollo, and Apollo was like a johnny-come-lately...
"Why?" I asked Levine.
"I went to Hebrew school," he said. "Ask me about the Maccabees, not the Greeks."
After that, we slipped...

We slipped into the communal guise of the Budget Super Committee...

Washington D.C. resembled Dicken's London, and we felt like the ghosts of Christmases Past, and felt a Scrooge-like urgency to amend our ways...

... It was a recent and tense discussion about European debt, about Greece and about Italy, we stood inside a vast bay window looking out upon the country. There was a group of us, a somber and sober committee. I looked around and saw Levine; he smiled and waved. The group contemplated the scene outside; the landscape went on for miles. At one moment we were within a marble building, very Lincoln Memorial-ish, untouched by the threatening winds and weather about us; merely looking at the vast panorama before us with rapt attention; at another moment we were in the middle of autumn cornfields and wheatfields, or standing near grain elevators where a distant steam locomotive whistle was heard; then we were standing in the slurry of bright sun and dark old architecture of an urban school...
We looked about us at the pain, the loss, and the fear felt by ourselves and by friends in Europe. Looking at each other, we spoke suddenly with our eyes: we swore that we would forge a meaningful agreement so that the country could heal and live without fear.

It was the day before Thanksgiving. We had prepared the ground for a brief season of winter and had made plans for the spring planting. We had done our work, and we had succeeded, knowing that no matter how long the winter, spring will follow with its riot of growth, the time of the robins' call.

Outside, the snow began to fall.

--

Facebook?

I keep being tempted to join Facebook, but I do not. I am aTwitter member, but I don't Tweet, nor do I read Tweets, or maybe once every 6 months. I do not chat nor text. I mean, I always used to resent the intrusion of the telephone's ring, forcing me to talk on the bloody thing, so one may only imagine how I react to a Niagara of fairly tedious information flow.
I used to go shopping in the big department stores we used to have, especially at Christmas time. I did not mind being jostled by the crowds of people. I recall various fugue states I would go into under the impression that some particularly lifelike mannequins were alive, were speaking to me, were approaching me gently. I seem to have suffered from Mannequin Syndrome... which - believe it or not! - promptly thrusts me into the memory storehouse and grabs an old file marked Dr. Coppelius from the stacks, and the name of the author is smudged, but if I keep writing long enough, I am sure I shall ... Bachmann? Biedhofer, Beyerhofer...........Hoffmann!! I think it was one of Hoffmann's Tales. There. Wonder where all the names starting with "B" came from?

As I write this, now I go back and look for the "B" which could come from Jules Barbier who did the libretto for Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffman, but I sincerely doubt that. Sincerely. Doubt. Obviously I had the "mann" in "Bachmann" and the "hoff" in "Beyerhofer" and it was a matter of taking the fattoush salad apart, putting it back to the original condition, running the documentary of salad making backwards until all the pita slices were fresh again.
Disfattoush I calls it, that which others call "deconstruction"; I call it "dis-fattaoush", which is the above: taking a yummy fattoush salad and filming how it is made, then running the film backwards and seeing the wonder of fresh tomatoes being reconstituted, or pita being reconstructed... and not from kneading and floury disputes,  but from the teeth of those who would eat it.
That's my Tweet for the day.

As I have written this, the terrible funk I have had for 4 days seems to have abated. Being in the universe of structured writing seems to help. My mental states are very much like middle school kids at gym class, running about uninterested in any tutorial structure, talking, picking, scratching, gawkwardy on the verge of pubescence - or fallen into that jungle and perversely yearning for virgin and lover at the same time. Awkward anticipation of sport and a sense that Art will soon become flesh.

Thanks for listening. It helps.
--

Brevity

Someone read my post "The Perils of Prophecy 2" ahead and "sort of" liked it. They did ask me why it was so brief. Why did I not expand it out to essay length? That would make it clearer to people, and it might thereby be more effective.

Well, I laughed.
Number one: I am too lazy to write an essay;
Number two: Most people are too lazy to read an essay;
Number three: No matter how crystal clear an exposition I write, I will not change anyone's mind who already believes in the Rapture;
Number four: The absolutely best way to teach anybody anything is to give them just enough to whet their interest and let them "discover" the answers on their own. What if I do not provide enough guidance, and the answers they find are different from the ones I found?!
Oh, well. Welcome to the world of intelligent entities walking around and bumping into things. Of course their answers will be at least a "bit" different! That is to be expected. So if their answers are going to be a bit different anyway, why should I bust my hump trying to get them to agree 100% with me?! 

I really do not like how some writers feel they have to lead us to the water of their wonderful insights, as if we were thirsty, yet rather dumb, horses. Don't like it one bit.
--

The Man in the Dark Fedora 1

(I have never written about this part of my past before now. This is first draft of the first chapter of the book whose title is the title of this post.)

There were skanks left over from the big newspaper strike two years ago. I don’t know what they do with them in between strikes; maybe they go under-cover in a Skank Protection Program, living as normal folks: cook dinner, see their kids off to school, go to PTA meetings, sing hymns at church services. I don’t know. I don't know what you do with people who can turn the adrenalin of hate on and off when they are not working their trade.
They are celebrities and centers-of-attention while the strikes are on. Now they were standing along the side of the road, and those ladies that sang hymns in the off-season were now screeching curses like obscene banshees at our motorcade as it crept toward the front gate of the company. I’m sure it was a lot like this on the way to the guillotine in Revolutionary France, where women took a holiday from selling vegetables at the markets and came to throw turnips at the king... and the classical beauty of Versailles gave way to the electrifying fury of unreason.
There is something about the air being filled with shouting, some dreamlike quality that urges you to think you are asleep and having a nightmare, rather than awake; it urges you to imagine yourself in a hell-scape of Hieronymus Bosch and not at all in the real world.
The tumult at the edge of violence seems to eclipse the sun, blinding it. If you were sitting in one of the cars of the motorcade of the damned, slowly moving down the street, like boats in the sluggish, sewage-filled current of the River Styx as you drifted to the Inferno… if you were sitting in one of those vehicles, a prisoner of the violence that encompassed you… if you could remember there was a sky, and then if you could somehow wriggle your gaze free to look up at it, you would see the sick grey cirrus clouds of vituperation and violence suffocate the sunshine.
Sometimes even now I drive by the streets we used to take on our secure trip to work each day, and I imagine the asphalt streets groaning like Sisyphus. I drive by the shape-up area, where we all met at 8:00 in the morning and got in a line with security vehicles, and then took off for our slow drive along the six city blocks to where our plant was located. It was as slow as a funeral procession, and the security men with their dark glasses hovered on the peripheries like funeral home attendants; I half expected them to plunk down a flag on the hood of my car. We drove with silver coins on our eyes to pay Charon to ferry us…

Books on the Bedside Table 2

I do not actually read all those books. Most of them are supports for other books, and some are used to hold the lamps up higher. The alarm clock sits on one. The alarm clock seems to use them more than I sometimes.
--