.
All
the great
ideologies
of the
world
are
predicated
on Malthus’
assumption
that
there is
not
enough
to sustain
both
you
and me.
the great
ideologies
of the
world
are
predicated
on Malthus’
assumption
that
there is
not
enough
to sustain
both
you
and me.
US currency (Federal Reserve): image by Damon Hart-Davis, 2004
yes, great
ReplyDeleteas in
tear g/enerators
but some
joy too, i guess,
the species is successfull
after all.
in a sort of
ontolo-ontic
kind of way
throwness
itself
is sort of both
freudian
and
lacanian
and
wittgensteinian
within the total
network
there is some good
some bad
some potential for
good
some bad
bag
*pop*
sag
gas...
Lanny,
ReplyDeleteI hear you.
And I've been sitting around with my elves wondering, Has Lanny been a good boy this year?
I guess it's Thanksgiving that inspired this -- one of those "holidays" that annually inflict upon the relatively detached yet nonetheless perennially benighted or night-blighted spectator a L'il Abner double-take, one being made to remember the dominant ideology of a society always appears as "neutral" and holds to assumptions, however self-contradictory (like remaining confident of an innate goodness while anxiously avoiding the stalking romero-bots of ambient economic collapse by stuffing oneself to a state beyond thrownness, shall we call it thrown-upness, as on the streets others go hungry), that will remain unchallenged to the end of time... er, that is, to the point of the vanishing of the society.
Only kidding of course, ho ho ho, Love Santa.
aah! well, vomitoriums have been a perfectly natural expression of our, let us say, more indiscreet selves, since at least the age of our less psychologically conflicted prawngenimotors the Romans.
ReplyDeleteEvery neuron a Nero I always say!
"Fiddle Fiddle little glial, little Astrocyte on Astro-site.."
for all is conduitry.
But it is instructive in purely metaphorical terms, or anti?
that one of the primary
traditions
is to plug, or rather
clog, a dead animals ass
with alien matter
and to then let
that be food
Pardon my bluntness!
I've been reading
MONDO SNARFO
and
DOPE COMIX
those folks are
from your neck of the woods
right?
I love those Egyptian underworld
goddesses that vomit eternally.
That's your homework Tom!
:)
I spent all night
trying to remember this
damn French or Canadian
cartoonist's name
who does these weird
sets with no people
in them, just like
jumbles of floating
furniture etc..
you wouldn't happen to?
and
thansk for the Love!
Love, salut.
translation
ReplyDeleteof the experience
of the gaian
petri dish
from biology to ideology
to understanding
is poetics.
for earth-lives
live
regardless of regard
the die off
is always coming
Malthus never predicted
ReplyDeletescientific progress.
If it wasn't for ignorance
there would be plenty to
go around
The answer may DeChardin like
Zevstar,
ReplyDeletethe die off
is always coming
-- suspended animation?
(Reminded of Francis Bacon--the longago one--"Let my death come from Spain". By horse post, a month in those days, to get the message; with that kind of news, slow is/was the next best thing to good; in Zeno's sense, it was almost always coming...)
Lanny,
ReplyDeleteThe picture of those Egyptian goddesses vomiting each other up as a form of creation certainly has a pre-ideological resonance I do not detect in our T-giving bloatations.
Thank you for the holiday homework assignment.
One learns that though the Romans did as it is said deliberately vomit so they could eat more of fine foods, they didn’t have a specifically dedicated locus in which to do this, and in any case the place where they did do it, wherever that was, was never called a vomitorium.
The term was applied instead to the passageways in Roman theatres or amphitheatres that led the audience to and from their seats. The crowd was vomited in and out of the arena through "the voms".
H. Rider Haggard, Pearl-Maiden, 1901, on the fall of Jerusalem:
"Beyond lay the broad passage of the vomitorium. They gained it, and in an instant were mixed with the thousands who sought to escape the panic."
Latin vomitorium also signified an emetic: fr vomere to vomit, thus the figurative idea of an audience suddenly and violently issuing forth at the end of a performance giving rise to its application to an exit.
A computer has generated, in the Egyptian goddess sense (or perhaps it would be more proper, strictly speaking, to say vomited up), this image of A classical vomitorium.
By this understanding the social release/venting space of the blogosphere might be considered a vast vomitorium, Ho ho ho!
(We've got all the great ideologies right here at home.)
ahhh...
ReplyDeleteso true!
suspended animation? like a bridge in time? i like that one!
ReplyDeletereminds me of Dorn from gunslinger:
"22 That if Time is spilled in a gravityless space
And becomes equally distributed
That is if an absolute symmetry occurs
And inertia is total
That's as heavy as hit in suspension can get
or,
send my final effects with magellan around capes horn and hope.
toss all my lover's final pain on that ship
and if it sinks?
the moments remain.
sorry for the proofreading error.
ReplyDeletethe line from Dorn is:
That's as heavy as shit in suspension can get
Damn! The vomitorium thing is a bad cousin or whatever? Oh man. That bites.
ReplyDelete:)
Whaddya think Tom,
Butler school?
I'm thinking Butler school.
living life poorly in your 20's
and 30's sure makes your 40's suck.
I think I'm about to eat one more steak and check out.
Blogging sucks.
Poetry is a mean bier upon a rocky expanse.
Art is a treacherous whore
whose wan languorous mouth
is forever and chimerically involved with truth's other.
Science is entertainment.
Politics is theatre.
Theatre is a too close imitation
of life's very own poverty.
Nothing is left.
a smoking husk.
with hordes pouring out
looking only upon
the countenance
of their personal communication
machines
my alienation
is the ideal version.
Wonder if I can have a genuine thuggee imported to garotte me?
...
:)
zevstar,
ReplyDeleteYou remind me that I've always felt sea travel to be the ultimate human experience of suspension. The suspension for extended periods of the somehow reassuring sense of being on relatively solid ground. This of course "dates" the speaker as someone old enough to have been on a number of long sea voyages (yet). However, the beautiful thought of having one's final effects sunken with Magellan off Cape Horn I find almost as appealing as the idea of death (was it not expiration we were discussing?) as a drifting off like that of a pollen spore blown on the wind.
The Cape of Good Hope, on the other hand, would remain beyond my aspirations.
The shipwreck image haunts me in some ways though. The struggling for breath, while the final effects gracefully float off, and with a dignity we never ourselves possessed. And by the way, whether meaningfully or not, the several shipwreck posts on this blog have been oddly haunted as well. For instance, an innocuous little shipwreck post called Survey Research has astonishingly become, by some trick of the internet fates, a comment thread bulletin board for Tokyo sex trade workers/sex addicts (?) exchanging S&M gear shopping tips, hotel lobby assignation information, etc. I was in a state of suspended disbelief as I padded sheepishly red-faced back from Google translate. (Then the suspension ended, but these ghosts of sex crazed sailors from the Ten Thousand Fathom Hells of the Emperor's Naked Navy, if that's who they are, just keep on coming, like in a cheap b+w sci-fi flick, as fast as I can bin them. I think we may now be floating on a world in which Gunslinger would have been out of his water.)
Lanny, I can so understand this:
ReplyDeleteBlogging sucks.
Poetry is a mean bier upon a rocky expanse.
(I almost heard a "country" song the other day, you know my hearing is but a memory, but I could have sworn there were some lines like, "Blogging is a stick stuck in quicklime/ bulletin boarding two bit career time" and "poetry is a small mean beer/ nursed by a small green being with no ears..." Umm, Rocky Expanse, is not that a municipality in the Smoky Mountains?)
And this:
Art is a treacherous whore
whose wan languorous mouth
is forever and chimerically involved with truth's other.
Science is entertainment.
Politics is theatre.
Theatre is a too close imitation
of life's very own poverty.
Nothing is left.
a smoking husk.
with hordes pouring out
looking only upon
the countenance
of their personal communication
machines
And this:
my alienation
is the ideal version.
On this latter subject, that of a personal aesthetic crossroad crisis type thang, the news of the week comes from Noble Sir You to all of us when A poet asks the eternally echoing question .
Lanny, order two thuggees to go, please.
As to your more positive suggestion:
The top of the scale appears to be the academy of Mr Richard Fink (a butler of 45 years' experience), eight miles north of Oxford, $15 K for the six week course, a bit pricey perhaps. Or if you were into the sterner stuff, the International Butler Academy, at the Hotel Petersberg, in Königswinter (near Bonn) might be the spot, they feature security as a speciality of the institution, with two Former Chief Detective Superintendents on staff. But don't take my word for it.
Butler Schools
(Some nice Etiquette books in the rotating image album at the bottom of the page, by the way.)
And don't try hurling any of that poisoned meat over the fence so as to create a distraction, either. My elves have ears, you know. Small, pointy, yet always alert.
a solemn, silent, very compact
ReplyDeletebough and sweep..
met this gent today.
good sturdy california gent.
http://www.sandowbirk.com/index.php
his surfer paintings had to be my favorite, but the fact that he called to mind a rare print edition of Jacques Callot about the thirty years war didnt hurt.
for the show that was hanging.
plywood sized woodblock prints.
helluva nice show i saw today.
imagine callot and crumb and goya
doing the American Iraq war.
His hanging of Saddam Hussein, and Abu Ghreib images were redolent and astonishing.
but then I will always support a fellow surfer / skateboarder..
:)
Nice looking dude with his board and wet suit in his bio shot.
ReplyDeleteThe heavenly blue tones in this tile mural for the Baywatch Avalon Lifequard Station reminded me a bit of the dreamy blues in the Charles W. Bartlett India woodblocks on Mnemonic .
(P.S. Yo Lanny, speaking of great ideologies, while you were off prepping for Butler School we had Surf week at the Tar Pits, it was virtually tubular.)
that poem of yours is wicked cool!
ReplyDeleteYou even put an amoeba in!
Did you see my Florida shite?
We just got back from Miami Beach.
The ocean is like a tub there.
yeah he seemed like a nice guy.
PNCA has good lectures sometimes,
and I always love to see it when the artist does a slideshow in a gallery. that is the best.
i tried to turn him onto that Norman O. Brown book _Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis_ as I am a tireless advocat for the NOB..
The guy was doing an american illuminated edition of the Koran
so i was like trying to contextualize what he was doing with how the koran is itself constructed. i couldnt remember where i read it
but i do remember reading about the koran having elements of literary pastiche from certain jewish texts, the talmud or whatever. i'm only cursory in that area, but it seemd nicely fitted.
Charles W. Bartlett?
Wow. It looks like Moebius, or rather M looks like B?
Seems to have a very nice take on the ukiyo-e style..
that late 19th century uptake from the japanese arts was phenomenally useful. the flatness gives it paradoxically a conceptual depth
a creamy dreaminess.
so cool Tom!
or is Gunslinger melville's liferaft/coffin?
ReplyDeletealso a personal effect afloat
in the whale's blood ocean
of all bloody oceans which are blood
but one that takes the child back to wisdom
or is it the fool stepping off the cliff?
again
zevstar,
ReplyDeleteWho can say it wasn't good while it lasted?
Lanny,
ReplyDeleteMichael Sells in Approaching the Qur'an cites Norman O. Brown on the creative aspects of the seeming "disorganization" of Qur’anic literary expression: a "scattered or fragmented mode of composition" capable of achieving "profound effects — as if the intensity of the prophetic message were shattering the vehicle of human language in which it was being communicated."
A text with no beginning, middle, or end, a nonlinear structure akin to a web or net, lacking continuity, chronological or thematic order, and persistently repetitive...
Is not Bartlett fine? Creamy and dreamy and flat, sometimes with waves.
You'd have liked him. He hung out at the beach on the Big Island a lot. He was a great listener into conch shells.
I think he's the greatest surf artist in history.
Yes. Yes. I remember his explication of the logic of the phrase Inch'allah as well which oddly enough matches some of the latest physics research into something called if i remember it at all 'temporal granularity'?
ReplyDeleteNOB is a wonderful thinker. This is very subtle.
Bartlett.
Yes, this is very good.
Definitely wonderful.
Lanny,
ReplyDeleteThe NOB text is The Apocalypse of Islam, Social Text, 1983 (Duke University Press). You can find bits of it on the net. If you're one of those people who doesn't mind tumbling down the hole of a pdf. (I have fear of falling in shafts, pdfphobia?)
(Don't mean to pry but more than once it has popped into my head to ask, did you by chance go to UCSC and have NOB as a teacher?)
From the Sells book, here was a comment I found interesting, on the uses of repetition:
"The values presented in the very early Meccan revelations are repeated throughout the hymnic Suras. There is a sense of directness, of intimacy, as if the hearer were being asked repeatedly a simple question: what will be of value at the end of a human life?"
I have all of them I believe.
ReplyDeleteI even have a few of the essays
as in _Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning_ edited by Stanley Romaine Hopper and David L. Miller.
I think there may be a few others laying around. Maybe I did have that Islam one?
I read Love's Body and Life Against Death in High School. I never met or had him for a teacher, but I found his books in an intellectually formative period.
I just read
Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown, Mercury House, 2008
or well I read alot of it
I usually save some back
to read later
I have all these:
* 1947. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth.
* 1953. Hesiod: Theogony.
* 1959. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History.
* 1966. Love's Body.
* 1973. Closing Time.
* 1991. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.
And I based alot of my library
on NOB's bibs in those books so I have alot of the source texts he uses in those works as well.
Closing Time was very important
to me.
certainly not the fool i was or shall become (i hope
ReplyDeleteThis is perhaps foolishly hopeful of you!
ReplyDeletethe fool
ReplyDeletehas always been the significator
used in casting
my tarot