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Monday, August 31, 2015

=A good hard fuck=


=William S. Burroughs=

I have observed that in cat fights the aggressor is almost always the winner. If a cat is getting the worst of a fight he doesn't hesitate to run, whereas a dog may fight to his stupid death. As my old jiujitsu instructor said, "If your trick no work, you better run."

((Terrorists & all underdogs fight like cats. Hit & run, that is their strategy. States will always insist on calling them cowards for doing so. They would much prefer them to stand their ground and die like dogs. Pity the State. A cat never cares what you call it.))

=Wayne Dyer=

My beliefs are that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then it becomes a lie. I don't think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don't be Christian, be Christ-like. Don't be Buddhist, be Buddha-like. Religion is orthodoxy, rules, and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally people are raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual.

((Organized religion is organized like any organization—for a purpose: and that purpose is power, hegemony, domination, conformity, self-sufficiency, survival at all costs, & the absorption,  subjugation, or better yet, the elimination of all rivals, whether real or merely perceived.))

=high priestess=


=Revelation 4=



Revelation=Jesus has had enough of our shit. 
That crucifixion thing was the last straw. 
He wanted to see how far humanity would go & he caught an eyeful. 
Payback's a bitch, motherfuckers. 

And you messed with the wrong son-of-a-bitch.

=The Pataphysical Inquirer: August 30th=


Saturday, August 29, 2015

=envelope petroglyphs 2=


=2 from Renata Adler=

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.
*     *     *
That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.


=Revelation 2=


=envelope petroglyphs=



=the room upstairs=


Thursday, August 27, 2015

=Revelation 1=


=Book recently read: Herzog by Saul Bellow=


I never read him.

A dead white male who often draws heavily from the American Jewish immigrant tradition.  Born at the beginning of the last century: 1915.

What could Saul Bellow possibly have to say to me?

I don’t know. 
Quite likely nothing, I reckoned. 
So I gave him 1 page to hook me. 
1 page out of the 317 that comprises his novel Herzog. 
If it didn’t happen in 1 page, 
it was back to the library with Bellow
 and his Herzog.

He did the job in half a page.

                        Herzog…a middle-aged mensch,
a bit of a schmuck,
a ladies man whose success at seduction
is invariably his own undoing,
a scholar whose follow-up book
to an earlier well-received study of Romanticism
lies moribund in stacks of yellowing,
insect-nibbled
manuscript pages
doomed to the status of never-to-be finished.

Herzog—trailing the wreckage of ill-advised marriages and bitter ex-wives and, most painfully of all, the much-loved offspring from those marital ruins, children from whose lives he’s been reluctantly and forcibly ejected.

Herzog, who compulsively writes letters
he’ll never send to addressees 
past and present:
lovers, friends, and family,
the living and the dead,
presidents and philosophers.

These letters are the best part of the book:
funny, erudite, despairing, pleading,
triumphant, apologetic—there’s even
one to God.

Herzog, a man who can always see both sides, and so vacillates while the unthinking & headstrong, those
who never for one second doubt themselves, 
stupid, selfish, & cocksure,
run roughshod over him.

Herzog, the victim,
the conscience of the world,
the butt of the joke just begging to be kicked.

Bellow has written a grand, old-fashioned novel that was going out-of-fashion even as he wrote it half-a-century ago.

Bellow knew it himself.

His rage at what he sees as the death of humanism,
the surrender of the search for meaning and order,
the moral relativism of a culture
where there’s any ethical concern at all,
burns low and steady but fiercely
through every page of Herzog.

Bellow saw what was coming.

What had, in fact, already arrived after World War II and would soon become such “aberrations” as the new novel, deconstructionism, post-structuralism, situationism, post-modernism; in short, the shattered, sophisticated albeit barely disguised nihilistic world-view we virtually take for granted today as best representing “reality.”

Bellow saw it coming, like Yeats’s saw the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, and he deplored it.  

The thing is, that’s the very worldview I have—and it’s reflection in the kinds of anti-novels I feel most comfortable inhabiting are everything Bellow wrote against.

The anti-Bellow.

And yet I enjoyed Herzog.
 I was moved by it. I dreamt about it—or, to be more accurate, the emotions and memories it stirred up informed my dreams. More accurately, they were nightmares.

Herzog, and for that matter, Bellow, too, along with the world they stubbornly believe in and fight for are not entirely dead, after all. All the more obvious evidence to the contrary.

Even in an age that has declared humanity dead and has already heralded the advent of a new era
—the posthuman and transhumance—
there is still something that answers within us
 when Herzog declares himself finished with “big” ideas, finished with “suffering” as a way to spiritual purification, finished with the “drama” and “disasters” 
that he realizes he has in large part called down upon himself by his own calculated, 
if largely unconscious, 
helplessness.

 There is something within us that quickens
 at the simplicity and humility
with which Herzog seeks to conduct the rest of his determinedly anonymous, unspectacular & quintessentially human life 
at the end of this novel.

There is something beautiful, sweet, & true 
about Herzog that I don’t think 
we’ve quite shaken free of, 
no matter how “post” or “trans” human 
we’ve become.

Whether we will leave Herzog, Bellow, and humanism
behind yet and whether that’s a good thing or bad
is another issue altogether. 

For now, Herzog still breathes: a human being, living quietly, in an inconspicuous place, 
waking in the morning, 
stretching in the sun,
thanking God for his brief,
imperfect existence,
needing no further explanation.


                                                       



=Saul Bellow=

We don't know one another. Even that Gersbach, call him any name you like, charlatan, psychopath, with his hot phony eyes and his clumsy cheeks, with the folds. He was unknowable. And I myself, the same. But hard ruthless action taken against a man is the assertion by evildoers that he is fully knowable. They put me down, ergo they claimed final knowledge of Herzog. They knew me! And I hold with Spinoza (I hope he won't mind) that to demand what is impossible for any human being, to exercise power where it can't be exercised, is tyranny. Excuse me, therefore, sir and madam, but I reject your definitions of me. Ah, this Madeline is a strange person, to be so proud but not well wiped—so beautiful but distorted by rage—such a mixed mind of pure diamond and Woolworth glass. And Gersbach who sucked up to me. For the symbiosis of it. Symbiosis and trash. And she, as sweet as cheap candy, and just as reminiscent of poison as chemical sweet acids. But I make no last judgment. That's for them, not me. I came to do harm, I admit. But the first blood shed was mine, and so I'm out of this now.  Count me out. I withdraw from the whole scene as soon as I can. Good-by to all. 

=The Temptation of Satan=


=& the Pratfall of Man=


=dancing figures=


Monday, August 24, 2015

=Saul Bellow=

How the organism maintains itself against death—against thermodynamic equilibrium…

Being an unstable organization of matter, the body threatens to rush away from us. This organism,while it has the power to hold its own form and suck what it needs from its environment, the being of other things which it uses, returning the residue to the world in simpler form. But reluctance to cause pain coupled with the necessity to devour…a peculiar human trick is the result, which consists in admitting and denying evils at the same time. To have a human life and an inhuman life. To bite, to swallow. At the same time to pity your food. To have sentiment. At the same time to behave brutally. It has been suggested (and why not!) that reluctance to cause pain is actually an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos. Thus working both sides of the street.

=I can't imagine a situation in which I'll eat a McDonald's hamburger ever again=


=Steve in the City=




=The Pataphysical Inquirer: August 19th-24th=



=red letter day=


Sunday, August 23, 2015

=Man writing postcard. But the open window why.=


=Steve in the City=


=My first cartoon crush=


When I was a child I thought like a child. And what I thought was that I had a vague, ill-defined crush on Betty Rubble, though I wouldn't have called it a crush at the time. Just a strange, oozy ticklish feeling whenever she appeared on screen. Later, when I came to understand these confused & confusing feelings better, I realized that what I really wanted was to *be* Betty Rubble. 

She was so cute & even as a child I knew that Wilma was something of a nag and a bitch, even if I wouldn't have known to use those terms. She was always on Fred for something or other, such a sensible, level-headed killjoy, a loafer wearing preppy type, she would have been, if they had shoes and slacks and women's polo shirts back in the Flintstone version of the Stone Age. She would have taken up golf and pressed Fred to join the local country club. She would have been a Republican.

Betty, I could instinctively tell, was the "fun" girl, the party girl, the kind of girl all the stone-age guys would have jumped on. The kind of girl I wanted to be. Her hair, her little blue dress, they just seemed so much sexier than plain-Jane Wilma's. Whenever the couples were together,  I was certain Fred preferred Betty to Wilma in spite of all his yabba-dabba-dooing. If they were ever alone together, the sexual tension was thick as a brontosaurus steak. 

That Fred and Barney were both such insufferable oafs prevented my fantasies from turning overtly sexual, which they otherwise might have even at that young age. Still, I felt the erotic undercurrent was always there. It's probably what made me confuse wanting to be Betty for wanting to be with Betty in the first place. There were no truly sexy cavemen around in Bedrock, no one to bop us on the head with a club and drag us off to a nearby cave by our slender ankles. Even when Stony Curtis made a guest appearance, it was played for farce. So, episode after episode, Betty and I had to sublimate our frustrated desires in each other's company, waiting for a real man to come and knock us off our feet. We were, as the saying goes, lipstick lesbians.

Much later, when they got around to making a live-action feature film of the Flintstones, it was with shock & disappointment that I learned that they cast Rosie O'Donnell in the role of Betty Rubble! It was sacrilege—a subverting of all that was right and true, a rewriting of history—and prehistory—to align itself with a contemporary political agenda! I can't help but believe the revisionary casting was done purposely and pointedly, out of some misguided political correctness to change what I rightly perceived, even as a child, as Betty's overtly feminine sexiness, a flirty, playful, kittenish eroticism that can not be allowed to persist in today's sexually enlightened and "liberated" society.

It won't work in the long run. No matter how hard they try, they'll never make Wilmas of us all. 

When all is said and done, guys will never be all that much more than cavemen and cavemen prefer Betty.

That's why it's just so much more fun to be Betty. 




=electric dog in hyperspace=


(as always, to HTC. happy 153! i love you!)

=f3f6=