Pigeon's Secret

Young pigeon,
Where is your nestmate?

Where is the drowsing huddler,
His curve your curve,

White down to down,
Gray flesh to flesh, one

Warm, dry, after egg's
Slimy solitudes?

Your hearts whirred
Like synchronized stopwatch's.

Each of you filled
The other's black eye.

You will fly up, pigeon,
You will perch and scan and peck.

He dropped, became a crooked scrawl
Of pigeon on his aluminum landing pad.

After eggs. White, round, the perfect
Thumbprints of emptiness.

A Little Logic

**Transcribed (by myself) from Sarah Palin's interview with Charles Gibson. I apologize in advance for any incidental transcription errors.

**"I think you are a cynic, because show me where I have ever said that theres absolute proof that theres nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in that has had any effect or no effect on climate change."

Let's break this down.

Proposition A: You are a cynic if you cannot show me where I have ever said that there is absolute proof that:

2 sub-propositions:

y. Nothing man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect on climate change.

x. Nothing man has ever conducted or engaged in has had no effect on climate change.

Read statement y as equal to "Man's actions have had no effect on climate change."
And, by double negation, read statement x as "Everything man does has an effect on climate change."

Meaning, Sarah Palin has had no position on climate change.

And we end up with the simplified version of proposition A:

If Sarah Palin has had no position on climate change, then George Gibson is a cynic.

Well? To be fair, she's saved by the cunning "absolute proof" caveat. It would take a stupidity more monstrous than that of a mere backwater conservative to claim absolute proof of anything, ever.

"...we're gonna have to implement in Afghanistan a lot of the same successes allotted that surge solution that have been implemented and proven, proven to be successful in Iraq."

That's double proven for emphasis. But not absolutely, I hope.

Pigeon Song

Oh, young pigeon, nested underneath
A humming air conditioner.

Young pigeon, your scrappy feathers.
What points lie along the line
Of your pigeon future?

A million pecks
Each a flaw
For diamond city.

Oh young pigeon,
May your criticism
Be constructive.

Oh young pigeon,
Your god is humble and wise.
Pray to him with your pink feet.

Do not forget
That you have found the promised land
Of crumbs and quick escapes.

Young pigeon, do not forget
The whole city swivels
In your orange eye.

Un-till

UN-TILL

The ants should have come marching home by now...

There´s a baby carriage waiting, wheels grazing the damp tiles while mami rifles through a heap of ruptured trash bags. White shreds of plastic whisp through the humid air, above and around the eyes. A tiny head peeps from reams of recycled swaddle.

You -- keep walking on at the same pace.

...but they got stuck...

Stuff the metaphors (your fingers are crushed umbrella spines, the mind is a twin-headed worm, you are what you do, etc.) in an old shopping bag, tie it by the handles, chuck it in the street. It´ll get ripped, picked, sorted and carted away.

You -- don´t dally in the past´s pastoral, don´t linger in your reflection, posed over a glass display. Don´t unravel and re-weave canine confessions. Forget the details (passing headlights pulse like a bad headache, the double lollipop dismissal cast by twin lamp-posts, gossip laughter curling from candyland balconies, the batwing shadowpoints thrown by the green glow behind a doorgrate, sequined mannequins tinged glitter-jaundice); forget how to read anything but practical signs.

...on a dead duck.

You are not the ploughblade, splitting now from later from then. Get thorny. Contort. Smile like a cat, lick your lips. Calculate.

Un-till, eyes facing front, put the earth back where it was and walk backwards, happy from the untouched field.

Un-till up to the fangs of the city horizon.

My Mandarins

It happens that I like my mandarins just so.
Orange. Juicy. Flavorfull, with white pulp.
But above all, silent. Secretive. Still.

I can't stand it when my mandarins talk to me.
I don't like their jungle stories,
Stories of blue parrots and coarse, dark hands.

I like to eat my mandarins on September afternoons.
I slowly ripen in the sharp light of my white room.
I'm here; my mandarins are here too.

I don't ask them how they got here.
Let them not ask me.

It's not that I'm in a bad mood.
I'm not malicious. But I will be myself.
Let my mandarins be my mandarins.

That's it. Oh yes. The orange silence.
The curves like smiles in my fridge.
There in their room in the sharp, white light.

A gun asks itself

Is this what comes out of me when I squeeze?

Maybe I should load myself with dreams.

This is not a life experience

I've been out of the country for a year and three months now, just about, and what people usually call a life experience is beginning to cross over into a life.

I get up in the morning, I review what I have to do in my agenda, I take the subway, and I do my job; sometimes well, sometimes, well, not as well as I should. Like everybody else, I guess. But, as nearly everyone I talk to, here and at home, supposes, I am not living. I'm having a life experience.

And sure, that's probably how I'll characterize it on future resumes. After I apply the exact P.S.I. to that future interviewer's hand (neither dead fish nor former marine) and tell him where I'd been teaching English for so long, I may even smile and affirm his chummy small talk definition with "Yes, yes it was" with a voice as slick as K-Y jelly.

But inside I'll be squirming with a question. When did you stop experiencing life? Is that what I have to do to start living?

When the bull says no it means...

Advice to writers:

Everyone has a different metaphor to describe the writing process. And in the final product, if such a thing exists, traces of the process are always left over. Maybe for Conrad it was like trying to see in a dark room that gets darker at a proportional rate to which one's eyes adjust.

I usually feel like I'm trying to wrastle an angry bull. While wearing a superman costume and trying to look graceful. Better, I'm in a coliseum, surrounded by a herd of angry bulls. I have to choose my bull, but, as bulls can be deceiving, I mistake the least angry one for the angriest. A coffee and cream colored bull, lowering his horns and staring at me through one slitted eye. That's the one. There I go.

Most of the action, unfortunately for the viewer, is hidden by a dust cloud. The details are blurred; a toss, a rag-doll triple gainer, a face plant. Needless to say, our would-be hero is left face down in the dirt with his costume torn in an embarrassing spot, wondering what he is doing and hoping no one is watching. The bull stands off to the side, huffing a bit, but not very nonplussed.

Still, he gets up, dusts himself off, grins sheepishly at the crowd, waving his hands over his head for applause. None forthcoming. Oh well, its just him and the bull. Think like a surfer, he says to himself. Just be here now. Don't make it so hard on yourself. Come on, sprezzatura. It's just you and the board and the wave, man, and the wave, and the board, and the you, and the bull...

Oof. Well, maybe its the wrong bull. Don't get discouraged - there are many bulls in the... nevermind.

Anyway, I'm back.

The D-Bomb

"Deconstruction is for those who find today’s pervasive (intellectual, philosophical, religious and commercial hype) inadequate, limiting and unbearable. The D-bomb is for those who would rather sense every leaf and every grain of sand rather than be mentally blocked into just seeing a predetermined tree or desert. Obviously there are those who prefer and even seek power by limiting your thought processes."*

*Ah, the D-Bomb. The real question here is why, on a Sunday afternoon, I feel compelled to respond to a comment lost somewhere in the trail of waste oozing off the bottom of a fairly convincing article on French Theory by Stanley Fish (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/french-theory-in-america-part-two/#comment-27729).
He contends that deconstruction does not and could not influence any kind of political stance. The first following comment is a pretentious howler. I skimmed over the rest, but when my eyes landed on some indignant and mystifying scrap, I couldn't help but feel like I was watching a kind of highbrow Jerry Springer show. Fish is praised, questioned, and scorned in varying tones. One commentator accuses his text of being "highly constructed." This vapid invective brought to mind one of the more striking contradictions that appeared to me in my very brief encounter with "the D-Bomb," namely, the trace of a (non[how I loath flagrant misuse of parenthesis])implication that constructivity (Christ, constructedness, constructiveness - how about construction?) might be avoided, when the cultural construction of all "truths" seems so decisively settled. I generally fall in with those that think that politically charged incomprehensibility is not an acceptable end or start point to any kind of discourse.

Anyway, this is a cautionary post for any Derrida virgins (though I didn't get any farther than a little awkward fingerplay) who, on reading the above post, might think that a heavy dose of the "D-bomb" will induce sudden and comprehensive awareness of the Buddha-nature. If you want to feel like you're aware of every grain of sand, I'd recommend LSD and a prolonged camping trip. While the epiphany that all of one's thoughts, preferences and favorite books are mere cultural constructions does have a kind of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure "woah" value, it won't last nearly as long, for the following logical question, "so what do I do," remains stubbornly unanswered. For me, pointing fingers at constructions does not de-do anything to them.

I chose this selection for another reason, (besides the fact that I like deserts, and find the image of a solitary tree breaking a horizon compelling, be it predetermined or not) - it's final attack, echoing through university halls all across the country since this revolution got started. To those who would accuse someone of limiting their thought by not blindly accepting an academic trend- shame on you. Disliking the D-Bomb does not make one a power-hungry reactionary.

On a Headline

"Hussein Henchman Has Heart Attack"*

*Ah, alliteration in the news. Goodbye, Chemical Ali.

Notes on today's Clarin

Daniel Muchnik writes for Clarin -

"Since the devaluation in the midst of the 2001-2002 collapse, together with the taxes on credits and debts, the "retenciones" initiated in 2002 were a key instrument for the considerable elevation of tax revenue. They were never thought of as an instrument of distribution of revenue but as a collection tool to confront the payment of external debt, a problem that dragged on with persistence and official denial."*

*This change of policy sheds light on the administration's attempt to frame the discourse in fundamental terms. The Pink House (Casa Rosada, the center of executive power in Argentina) defended the export tax on the agricultural sector as a re-distributive intervention of the state, whatever the actual destination of the taxes might be. In framing the discourse as a battle between the state, committed to its duty to share the benefits of growth with the people, and capitalist farmers ,clamoring for a bigger piece of their pie (in Christina's already infamous phrase, "strike of abundance"), they have called into question fundamental issues at play in a capitalist economy together with a populist government. Within these boundaries, the fact that the funds don't go back to the provinces that generated them makes little difference - all must share with all. The ephemeral image of the "small farmer" remains an ambiguous piece of the puzzle. They represent a significant, if lesser, percentage of the producers exporting products, and have played a much larger part in the rhetoric of both groups than a strictly numerical interpretation would merit. Their plight, being hit harder by the export tax than anyone, and the fact that their numbers have been falling sharply in recent years gives them the romantic gloss of a dying breed, and shortly after the strike began, the Kirchner administration announced policy changes favoring producers with less land in an attempt to split the unified base of the protest. In place, these policies recast the principle players in their proper roles - populist government vs. big business. This model doesn't depend on the original intentions of the export taxes; public opinion is a fluid as the changing paradigms of official policy. That was then. However, the generalization inherent in the administration's definition may cost it more than it bargained for:

Alfredu Gutierrez writes for Clarin -

"[Roberto Urquia] is the owner of the 'Aceiteria General Deheza' (AGD), a powerful agricultural holding that supports an entire region of the south of Cordoba. He has investments in other areas and has the franchise of the railroad Central Argentino, the cargo train that moves its produce to the port of Rosario. At first, he took a position almost ambiguous, but all of his friends, neighbors and his constituency are from the area. They made a martyr of him - grafitti, scratches and even a fumigation plane that passed all day in front of his house with a huge sign that flew like a flag: 'Traitor Urkia'. In the end, he leant towards the farmers and asked the suspension of the new export taxes..."*

*Urkia, Senator of Cordoba, is a "kirchnerista". However, the manner with which the administration dealt with the problem puts him in a difficult position - he can stay loyal to his electorate and go against his president (which could have grave consequences for his political future) or he could ignore his responsibility to represent his district and man the party line (which could have grave consequences for his political future). At some point, refusing to deal with the complexities of the issue (not least of which is the presence of kirchnerist officials with strong political and economic ties to the agricultural sector) may not prove worth the rhetorical benefits of a simplistic, two-sided approach to the debate.

**The privilege of being able to frame the debate carries other benefits as well - defining the mainstream positions also defines what radical positions will be effectively excluded from public discourse. One thinks of the almost forgotten disappearing WMD's in Iraq, a cornerstone of the administration's official line. They are irrelevant to the debate on how to move forward with the war. That was then, this is now.

On: Tema del Traidor y del Heroe

"From these circular labyrinths he saved a curious proof, a proof that will later amaze him in other more inextricable and heterogeneous labyrinths: certain words of a wanderer who conversed with Fergus Kilpatrick the day of his death, were prefigured by Shakespeare in the tragedy of Macbeth."*

*Borges writes of a historical murder solved by the great grandson of the victim. Literary and historical coincidences become the evidence on which the case turns, as Borges creates a crucible in which fictions mimic reality and vice versa, interweaving and inter-penetrating diverse fields of esotericism, literature, and history. The exact passage from Macbeth becomes clear with the passage below:

"Kilpatrick was ended in a theater, but he also made a theater of the entire city, and the actors were legion, and the drama crowed by his death covered many days and many nights."*

*An indirect invocation of perhaps the most famous (and most cynical) articulation of a popular Renaissance trope: life as theater. The contrast highlights the differences of context and vision apparent in the two - Shakespeare's metaphor personifies multifaceted existence into one actor, indicating perhaps an anthropomorphic vision or that the line's speaker referred only to his own life. In Borges' version, the metaphor is populated, the stage is a city, and defying Shakespeare's "hour", the drama extends through time. The lines from Macbeth -

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And his heard no more.

**I apologize for the clumsy translations.

Notes on the NYTimes coverage of the farm strike in Argentina

Argentina -

For a decent synopsis of the historic stand-off between the government and "el Campo" (a unified front of farmers and agricultural producers across the country -- simple translations like "the farm" or "the country" fail miserably to describe them, so I'll stick to the spanish), click below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/americas/27argentina.html?fta=y

"The strike has led to shortages of meat and dairy products, paralyzed local grain and livestock trade and forced major exporters of Argentine soy products to renege on some contracts. Thousands of people rallied nationwide on Tuesday evening in support of the farmers. The protesters banged on pots outside the presidential palace after the center-left president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, said she would not give in to “extortion.”"*

*Strangely, the article failed to mention the more controversial event surrounding the anti-government protest. After the march arrived in the Plaza de Mayo, a counter-protest led by an ex-functionary of the last Kirchner administration named D'Elia, amassed and attacked the protesters. Fistfights ensued, and the original protesters were forced out of the plaza. It's rumored that the counter-protesters are on the government payroll. The next day, D'Elia publicly announced his "hatred" for the "bitch oligarchy" which he saw embodied in the protesters, who hailed largely from the historically upper-middle class neighborhood Barrio Norte. D'Elia was fired from his last post for being too pro-Chavez, and in this administration and the last, that's saying something.

"Argentina has been one of the world’s main beneficiaries of a global surge in commodities prices. But farmers abhor government measures like export bans and price controls, which are being put into effect to stem inflation and to increase revenue."*

*Alfonso Prat-Gay writes, for La Nacion (opinion) - "The technical sophisms with which the Government tries to convince public opinion must not hide the true motivation of the tax increase. Its been some time since the taxes left off being a financial redistributive mechanism for social policy and transformed into a weapon for the construction of power and political domination of the central government, at the expense of the provinces and in contradiction with our federal principles." Basically, that the money is being used as leverage over impoverished provincial governors, so that they stay within the official line. Why is the purpose of these measures published as a bald statement of fact in the New York Times?


"Ms. Kirchner has said the taxes help redistribute wealth in a country where nearly a quarter of people are poor."*

*Cristina Fernandez' rhetoric has vacillated between tones of recapitulation and outright invective. She has, in her own words, "humbly" asked that the farmers lift the strike; she has also accused the anti-government protesters of being aligned with defenders of genocide. In a charged speech to thousands of "kirchneristas" bussed to the Plaza de Mayo from all over the country this Tuesday, she related the current strike with the lock-out which paved the way for the military coup in 1976 that would assassinate some 30,000 political dissidents. More specifically, she accused "some people" of "wanting to go back" to that time. This did not sit well with the leaders of the agricultural delegation currently in negotiation with the government. Eduardo Buzzi of the Agrarian Federation of Argentina (FAA) responds, also in La Nacion: "And we [also] have exiles and missing persons, and people punished by this process, in Cordona, in Olavarria and in many other places. It's important that those in the Executive Power inform themselves well so that they can define with clarity who was in the coup and who they abducted and exiled."


**Today "el Campo" announced a thirty-day truce, and lifted the roadblocks early this morning. They have also warned that if the government doesn't meet their demands the truce will only be temporary; the Kirchner administration has said that it will not roll back the export tax to its previous level. Supercharged rhetoric aside, I think (I hope) that both parties are seriously invested in the negotiations. A protracted lock-out of basic staples would have wide ranging consequences in the Argentine economy, much more significant than empty meat counters in urban supermarkets, including layoffs and skyrocketing prices of consumer goods, which could cause serious unrest for a very large group of people. What is unclear at this point is whether, if the mass of Argentines effected by the potential lock-out take to the streets, they would fall on the side of the government, or reject it as the party at fault for not negotiating fairly with "el Campo".

A few more changes*

What stared out as an idea for a kind of serial roman a clef has, for some time, been a completely different animal. For the sake of consistency, the layout and mission of the blog need to be redefined. Thanks to any readers who have stayed with me up to this point. I hope you like the new layout and incarnation.

Following posts will be centered around a textual... Well, you'll find out about the following posts, won't you?

Stay tuned.

A Sonnet

A while ago, as part of preparations for a possible future entry into graduate school, I took it upon myself to make it through the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. Skipping none. Not even Amelia Layner (don't ask). As of this afternoon, I've made it to Jonne Donne, which means I've waded through a crapload of Love Sonnets, Shakespearean, Spencerian, and otherwise.

So here's my contribution to the genre. I'm calling it #1.

Shall I compare thee to a musty toe?
You'd shame a rotting corpse to diffidence.
Rank reeks do sometimes seep up through a shoe
Wi' a stink like Gorgonzola's recompense,
And some neglected feet will rear a mold
To make visible that which ere was smelled;
And every foot of which was ever told
Was at least once with foul odor befelled.
But thou - thy stench remaineth in the rooms
Long after your brief passing was forgot,
Nor bleach nor fire can purge the rancid blooms
Of pestilential clouds by you begot.

So long as men can smell, and lungs take breath,
This lingers just as long: your creeping death.


We'll talk soon, but please man, take shower.

To my readers - sorry for the long absence of posts, but you'll have to excuse me. I'm in South America, a strange world where the poles of everything you have become used to as a constant become inversed. A place where the middle class is a radical margin to national politics. Where you hear screaming so savage, coming from the neighboring apartment, that you consider dialing 911 and reporting domestic violence, or some heinous new form of torture, until the reverberating shout "gol" makes you realize that its just someone cheering Boca - and they're winning. You understand if I haven't been able to be my usual ebullient self.

I said I was in South America. At the moment I feel like I'm lodged somewhere deep in Buenos Aires' eye. I say this because of it appears Buenos Aires is trying to weep me out with a stream of near boiling water.

A lack of hot water has always been a problem for me, as a person that likes to luxuriate in the steam, sometimes for upwards of a half an hour. So you can imagine my surprise when, after adjusting the silver knobs to the perfect temperature and beginning my "knees-to-shoulders" soap-dance, I was abandoned not by the hot but by the cold. The water starts to warm up slowly, which is not nearly so ominous as the water cooling down, but in a few short seconds is up to flaying strength.

A shower that runs out of cold water? Can someone please explain this to me? More bizarre than toilet water spinning in the other direction.


More posts coming soon.

Good point, Mr. Windschuttle

Wikipedia on Philip Roth (reading Portnoy´s Complaint) to the Cormac McCarthy article to a website on current literary bickering on 3quarksdaily.com to another article there and finally, clicking on the hyperlinked text why is Said being revisited, landing here, at The New Critereon. Orientalis Revisited by Keith Windschuttle. What a name! I see blue fields and bright skies, a figure extending loom-chords from his fingertips into the black blue of space, a mystic, dew-speckled web humming the ethereal chords of the Spheres, a pair of arms and hands outstretched black against a sunset, diamondflashing shuttles dancing in warbling breezes... Anyway...


´´For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek’s analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault’s thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism’s picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them. ´´

-http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm

Back up a bit. It's early afternoon in Buenos Aires. I finished a soy sandwich (don't ask me why) in a cobbled park with puke green poured concrete benches arranged in circles under little copses of trees in the center. Though I conquered a "good night's sleep" the night before I get too bleary-eyed to concentrate. There's not enough time to go home and grab a nap before my next class, not enough time to do anything else. For security reasons, sleeping in public parks in the city center is inadvisable, especially for seven-foot blond Americans. I go to an internet cafe - wikipedia isn't quite sleep, but it's damn close.

The point is that I'm feeling completely void of energy. That makes me feel depressed (this isn't going to turn into therapy, don't worry). I click through a few pages before I land on the above article. Lo and behold. I lean in. An energy begins to crackle. I wake up, feeling a little more alive with every sentence. Why is this criticism of one of the hallowed heroes of multiculturalism surging through me like the first five slurps of mate from the gourd?

Righteous indignation! Take that, left wing establishment, right in your dignified, sorrowful, solar plexus! The article goes on to point out historical inaccuracies in Said's breakthrough obra, and Windshuttle (can't get enough of that name) remains even handed until a short paragraph near the end where he unloads a somewhat vicious indictment of self-victimization on the Columbia emeritus' head. His attack on the hypocrisy of Said's self-declared anti-essentialism is particularly on point.

Point: cultural relativism is incompatible with any kind of morality. This has been bothering since a "post-structuralist feminist" lectured me in college. The article brought to the surface a long-held gripe with the politically infused literary theory I gulped down in a starry-eyed lack of comprehension. And, to my credit, many of the texts were incomprehensible. If our values are purely contingent on our cultural context, than we have no basis on criticizing another culture's beliefs or practices. Even terms like value and morality reek of essence fabrication, that is, if I understand it, an imperialist project of creating universals to the effect that minorities can be relegated into a sub-human margin, and thus exploited. The project of the West with a capital dubya.

So please help me understand this point - if our moral imperatives are culturally relative, on what basis can we condemn female circumcision? Doesn't it boil down to cultural preference? Are we so civilized that we can condemn this practice as barbaric? Are we simply imposing ourselves where we're not wanted, passing racist judgment on peoples we have deemed backwards? If we don't appeal to some form of human universal, do we relinquish the right to condemn any behavior whatsoever?

What are we left with? An academy dominated by a self-evident politic of truism and croneyism. A dominant viewpoint is established and dialogue is occluded by sympathetic sighs, indignation and back-slapping. The reason? The academy needs a moral imperative to justify its existence, even if it has itself rendered the idea of a moral imperative incomprehensible and reprehensible. As Windschuttle points out in his critique, Foucault (another giant of post-modernism) asserted that knowledge is always power. As such, the academy of the past served not only to justify the evil of imperial products, but to enable them. Consequentially, if the search for knowledge is put in the hands of right-minded people, that power can be put to use for the greater good. How could it be otherwise? If we all thought correctly, wouldn't the world be a better place? Thus the trick, the hypocrisy of liberal academia - we teach free thought, but only if you think in politically correct terms. Challenge the establishment, but not in the holy walls of this classroom. The establishment is out there, it's the American monoculture, it's rural, and most of all, it's Republican.

I don't support weeping saints or flaming swords, regardless of whether or not they engender each other. It's the tone, that holier than thou, inflamed finger hanging in my face. Maybe it's why I developed the habit of gesticulating at dinner with a steak knife, so in between bites I could dice up that invisible appendage. Whether it's multiculturalism or the Department of Homeland Security, please get that played-out thing out of my face.

Granted, this is an amateur exercise. By way of admission, I did feel disenfranchised to learn that by my race, my class, and my sex, that my opinion was contaminated before I opened my mouth. That's where my righteous indignation comes from. I will also admit that the righteous indignation of a privileged white male holds water like a sieve. I don't want anyone to buy it. I want to get rid of it - righteous indignation by necessity leads to a sclerosis of the spirit. It leads to a closure of the mind. It feels great. I think it should be avoided in general.



P.S. Been watching alot of Twin Peaks. I'm at the point in the second season where the proliferating sub-plots start flailing about like unoccupied tentacles in a Hentai video. What a fall from grace!

True or false?

Old hot dogs never go bad, they just get green and hard.

ON DECLINE

Ah, nostalgia. One of my favorite topics. It just keeps poking it's hydra's heads out of the many gopher holes of memory. Man, I want to mallet the shit out of them. So here goes.

Nostalgia goes hand in hand with the idea of cultural decline. This connection is almost so obvious as to not merit its writing here. But anyway.

The gold old days are gone for good. The young, drunk on freedom they can't appreciate, don't pause to remember those warriors who fought and died to give it to them (this formulation can be as applied by any veteran, whether of a foreign war or the war on the home front of, say, the civil rights movement).

But the good news about the good old days is that their glorification is perennial. A generation past its prime (and obsessed with growing irrelevance) attributes its own obsolescence to general cultural decay. There may be hope for humanity in the mere fact that, despite our dizzying careen down the slippery slope of history, we're still here; still looking for solutions, still producing art worth looking at, still lamenting bygone eras.

The most recent example I've found comes from Beatriz Sarlo. She's arguing that the regurgitation of counter-cultural styles that occurs in retro revivals softens their edge, and in doing so, encourages a new generation to forget their real revolutionary symbolism. In short, a bold challenge to the existing regime becomes an attention-getting "fuck you dad!" A political act becomes "mere" style.

"A 'retro' relationship with the past diminishes its meaning: the miniskirt no longer speaks of the sexual liberation of the 1960; the decorative little rings that punks used to pierce into their ears and noses with gestures of insulting defiance no longer evoke the reactions that they did in the past; the bland ecology movement has forgotten the old libertarian vindication of nature and the body; the New Age does not remember the days when the business of expanding the senses went through physical, psychological, and moral experimentation that touched on all the limits. These forgotten things blot out some of the pages from our history that are really moving, heroic, or fanatic... It is impossible to hang a sign from each miniskirt that says, 'Invented by Mary Quant at the same time as the Beatles were inventing 'Let it be.'' But perhaps it is worth the trouble to reconstruct some histories so that all the ideas don't disappear, 'gnawed away by our habit of forgetting.'"

Beatriz Sarlo, "Postmodern Forgetfulness," The Argentina Reader.

Social movements disintegrate and return in the spiral of fashion, its arc the same but curvature a bit narrower. I think it's worth pointing out that the desire to re-edify the meaning of a past era has to, at some level, spring from the author's own nostalgia for the time when a miniskirt really meant something. So we've got good nostalgia ("history") and bad nostalgia ("retro fashion").

But that's really neither here nor there. Let's go back a few hundred years.

"He was evidently in the background, and his remarks were treated with neglect, which increased his irritability. He had had intellectual encounters with Ivan before and he could not endure a certain carelessness Ivan showed him.
'Hitherto at least I have stood in the front ranks of all that is progressive in Europe, and here the new generation positively ignores us,' he thought."

That's Dostoyevsky doing Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov (sorry, couldn't find the umlaut) in a debate between a dissembling atheist (agnostic? hard to say) and a group of devout monks over the comparative roles of Church and State. Written in 1880. What I love about this one is that Dostoyevsky reveals his character's sententious disgust as vain attachment to his own accomplishments. Sound familiar?

I'll leave it to you to ask the question "just how ironic is it?" of the following lines from Pope, written (according to Wikipedia) in 1709.

Short is the date, alas! of modern rhymes,
And 'tis but just to let them live betimes.
No longer now that golden age appears,
When patriarch wits survived a thousand years:
Now length of fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare threescore is all even that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.

Taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, "An Essay on Criticism, Part II", lines 474-484. Apparently memory wasn't very durable in the early eighteenth century either.

Finally, I have to resurrect one more dead white man from the same anthology. Pope, at least, can still be found in collegiate English courses of 200 level and above - the following poet, I'm sure, is lurking only at the post-graduate seminar level. Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, at the bottom of the river Lethe.

The Silver Swan

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
"Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."

That's Orlando Gibbons, lamenting the cultural decline of 1612. Can we see a pattern emerging? They certainly did have a way of putting things succinctly back in the good old days. But then, I've fallen into my own trap.

Maybe that fear that we will forget the past is well founded. Maybe we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors if we don't spend our youths combing musty tomes of Virgil and Chaucer, we will forget who we are and where we come from. Maybe when you arm your legs in a miniskirt you should take a moment to reflect on its once-militant connotations; maybe the next time you pop acid at a Phish reunion you might try to really push the envelope of your being instead of wandering around mumbling, ecstatic at obtuse metaphors, "Dude, the crow IS the sky!" But maybe the cycle of forgetting and remembering goes on, despite the frenetic acceleration of post-modernity.

Maybe we haven't escaped history just yet.

The next time you find yourself on the brink of opining that "contemporary hip-hop is too commercial, we need to get back to the foundation" or "there hasn't been any good pop music since 1994," remember that there's no reason to join the long gray line of wistful old farts quite yet. Who knows, a revolution, or a really great pop hit, might be just around the corner.

The hotel district of Once.

"Jugamos?" (Let's play)

A subtle, purposed glance from under lowered eyelids, a husky whisper tossed casually from the throat. A prostitute's solicitation, unmistakable.

The heat, evoking an automatic sweat response and fatigue, has driven street people into the shade of overhanging balconies. Even the big chain supermarkets have pulled down and locked the metal grates guarding doors and windows.

I keep walking, eyes forward. Pretend I don't notice, get home. Check my downloads, emails, blogs.

Just like one guards one's change from beggars.

She walks languidly, arms bowing out at the elbows, describing an opposite arcs in the sway of her walk. Her hair's tied up into a bun in back. She's black, and at least six months pregnant.

Scorpion King; Coyboy dreams

This is the Great Scorpion Charm against Demons. The image is from www.luckyscoprion.com, where you can buy it for six bucks. I have a problem with demons. They follow me everywhere in ridiculous disguises, tripping me in the street and forcing me to make unwise purchases in markets. The woodblock print is a charm or an amulet, of Buddhist origin, which is meant to be either folded, wound in string and worn on the body, ingested, or placed in a special amulet box. The following info is from Nik Douglas' "Tibetan Tantric Charms and Amulets."

"The mouth contains the formula tri-dsa-du / sa-na-ga-phu, the head the dharanis (1) ah-ya-ma-du-rur-chasa-na-zhamaya-hum and (2) om-ah-hum-artsig-nirtsig-namo-bhagawate-hum-hum-phat-phat. At the center and main extremeties are the seed syllables hum, dsa, hum, bam, and ho. The Tibetan incantation mentions the types of demons to be protected against and at the six legs, two pincers and sting is an inscription in Tibetan declaring that 'the demons will roar.'"

Artsig, nirtsig, namo. Hmm.

*

This Cormac McCarthy book I just read must have penetrated deeper into my subconscious than I thought. Or maybe that's a bunch of bullshit, I mean, that dreams are constructed by the unseen hand of the undermind. Psychoanalysts have their lists of symbols and situations, their rhebus's (rhebi?), their condensation and displacement. But the rest of us wake up, rub our faces in our hands, and think, "Shit, that was a fucked up dream I had last night."

Of course, dreams are bizarre by nature. After a lifetime of inexplicable scene changes and recurring familial tableaus, you'd think we'd get used to it. I don't spend much time plumbing them for deeper meanings. They're like B-movies about yourself, and you ge to sleep through them. Here's what I watched last night.

I'm riding across an plain on horseback, ahead of a gang of about 5. I've got one of those lever-action rifles associated with the Wild West with a sight on the barrel. The plain up ahead rolls up into a softly cresting hill, long grasses swaying in the wind. Down the incline and to my left lies a gully and a grove of pines, stunted cypress clustered around a single enormous redwood with a massive trunk. Over the crest of the hill comes the cavalry. They're uniformed in blue with white hats, red plumes ticking to the rhythm of the hoofbeats, armed with the same rifle I've got. I reign up my horse and take aim at a staggered line of horsemen galloping full bore towards my position. I shoot, one flips down off his horse like a vertical wind sock taken aback by a sudden gust. I raise my sight and trap another horseman in the tiny steel circle, circumscribing his fate in less than a centimeter, and fire. He tumbles backwards. They are getting within range of taking shots, but for some reason they don't. When they get too close for comfort I duck behind my horse, hanging onto the saddle as they rocket past. When they're passed me to a man I circle around and follow then, sighting and dispatching a few more riders.

Now we hit a blank spot where the action got murky, or a sudden scene change, or maybe I just can't remember the dream in detail. But I'm on the defensive, making for the pine grove. When I get there I'm confronted by a detail of cavalry, posted to stymie my retreat. I dismount, resigned to capture, but not yet resigned to defeat. Their leader is a large bearded man, ununiformed, who wears a fur trapper's motley assortment of pelts and leather. He looks at me with a knowing expression.

"We're taking you in, son."

"I can't face trial," I say. "I can't go back to the United States. I'm a bandit, and the only thing waiting for me is the gallows. Better to die out here."

*

The premise that you can't die in your dreams is well tried in popular movies and culture. You suddenly wake up before the concrete rises to flatten you like a bug. Hand in hand with this goes the premise that if you really die in your dreams you die in real life. I can now attest that there is a third option.

*

I swing my rifle and crank the lever to load another round, inverting the barrel and inserting it into my mouth. Unfortunately, the trigger is now out of reach and my booted feet will not allow me to toe the trigger. I eye the old man.

"Little help here? I'd be much obliged."

"My pleasure."

He reaches down and pulled the trigger. I don't feel anything at first, and think the gun misfired. After a few seconds my mouth fills up with liquid, and I know that the bullet made a fine escape from the crown of my skull. Suddenly I'm wearing the brass-buttoned blue garb of the good guys, riding again for the grove.

*

There's a struggle with another bandit, some arguments about succession of the priesthood (a bishop was killed and a giant man with long black hair in a purple robe ascended to his place) and a stack of bodies, but it's now been almost an hour since I dragged myself out of bed and the order of events and their details lacks even the most basic continuity.

The point being that I like to write and talk about dreams. If you do too, put an account of an interesting dream in the comments section of this post. The most interesting dream will get some sort of prize. I haven't decided what it is yet.

Someone is screaming down the hall of my building, a hoarse throaty man's voice followed by a piercing child's scream. It's either domestic violence or a futbol game - it's often hard to tell. Or maybe its a demon orgy. Artsig, nirtsig, namo.

A few changes; The good old days; Scalping

Hi folks. Sorry for the wait (yuk, yuk, sorry for the Farmsworth). I know, it’s been a while. I’ve been hiding out. But I’m back now, and I’d like to inform you of some changes that occurred to me in deep meditation in a solitary room in Buenos Aires.

First of all, the pretentious third-person dermis of fiction will forever be removed. What you get now is pure unadulterated Larry Farmsworth, his views, his needs, his tangents and digressions. It’s a lot easier to do and a lot less pretentious.

Second, I will no longer be committing myself to a set timetable. The blog will be uploaded on the following schedule – when I feel like it.

*

You know those things that suddenly creep their way unnoticed into our pantheon of underappreciated daily necessities? Things that maybe we can remember living without, or maybe our parents can remember living without, that vague sense of newness genetically passed on. I’m talking about high-speed internet access, which in the space of a few years has become a contemporary necessity. It hasn’t become so taken for granted that it doesn’t make it onto the list of necessities on your apartment hunting checklist (the list that never gets mentioned - does the place have electric light? gas? running water?), but it’s fast on it’s way. To the eyes of this jaded 23 year old, things to seem to be speeding up. Our grandparents would remember a time without cars and turn to their parents, eyes full of obsolete wisdom, to bequeath on them some patronizing phrase about the good old days. Our parents would remember what life was like without T.V., you know, when kids played outside and nerds did stuff like build toy models and radios, clad in coke-bottle glasses and high waters. And in a few years, say, at the ripe old age of 24 or 26, I feel like I’ll be turning to some young whippersnapper and say, “In my day we didn’t even know what a google was!”

I remember, vaguely, an anecdote about some woman commenting on the newly invented bicycle, something to the tune of “Man was not meant to travel at such speeds.” Perhaps man was not meant to have fingertip access to wikipedia. These days, contests of knowledge have a handy arbitrator, and I barely even bother with those long-winded, hard-headed but sometimes entertaining defenses of facts which I made up on the spot and subsequently convinced myself of their verity. Without a wiki, an argument doesn’t make sense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown my hands up at dinner and said “We’ll just have to wait until we get home to wikipedia it.”

But even our more primitive amenities, the ones that don’t make it on the list, have only been around, or been around for large numbers of people, for a few hundred years at most. While chewing on that cud, you may find access to a broader, more mysterious kind of nostalgia that supersedes any concept of experienced or inherited memory, nostalgia rough around the edges yet nostalgia nonetheless, some kind of amorphous race memory haunting us as we turn the corners of centuries towards the illusion of transcendent mastery of space and time. “I wonder how they lived like that,” you might think, “chopping down trees and planing boards with a hand tool to build their own houses, cooking over a fire on the floor of your one room cottage (which consisted of a tamped down dirt.)” Ventilation system = hole in the roof. I hate white rabbits I hate white rabbits. Little Danny is allergic to wood smoke, that’s why he sleeps in the ditch by the side of the road. I’ve been told that some people still live this way in another dimension, the name for which entered our lexicon at some recent point, a strange twilight zone of humanity called the third world. Scary, isn’t it?

There are some kinds of brutalities we’d like to think we’ve left in the past, things that really take the wind out of the noble savage idea, be your noble savage a pretty white couple in a too-good-to-be-true garden, or a long-haired Apache fading into a sunset in a ghost shirt. Of course, we’ve got our variants, our isotopes of a primal violence that only seems to be limited by tool at hand. We’ve got the curb stomp. For anyone who hasn’t heard of (suppose it’s a verb) curb-stomping, it entails having your enemy open his or her mouth to bite the edge of a concrete curb and then stomping on the back of their head, most likely (I’ve never witnessed one) resulting in rapid death. The term was introduced to white suburbia by the movie American History X. At least, that’s where I found it. (By the way, Edward Norton will be playing Lionel Essrog in a movie called “Motherless Brooklyn,” as I just learned from IMDB.com. Check it out. I just finished my second read of the book, and it’s well worth your time.) We’ve got styles of shooting. Execution style. Imagine runways with emaciated teenage girls in black hoods with three ghostly holes where their sunken eyes and puckered lips show through. But no, execution style involves (if my gangster movie memory holds up) having your victim kneel before you and firing point blank into his head with a pistol, preferably of a large and destructive caliber. Safe and certain. (Was it from The Godfather part one? “Two in the head, you know they’re dead.”) We have the real life examples, their reproductions in TV, movies, and video games and vice versa. There’s street scrapping and button mashing, input correct sequence to decapitate your enemy or find the carotid artery with your switchblade, blood on the streets and on your home theater system, but what really interests me today is scalping. Maybe it’s just because there’s never been a video game called “Scalp Hunter,” where a grisly crew of ex-cons ransacks Mexico for any hair pieces they can find. Or maybe it’s because I also recently was pulled by my hair (in the best way) through “Blood Meridian,” my second McCarthy novel.

I distrust the use of the word epic as an adjective. It’s like the adjective poetic, or it’s more gangly cousin poetical, words that denigrate the nouns they modify by excluding them from the category of the noun form of the word itself, Epic with a capital E, let’s say. Poetic to poetry, apocalyptic to apocalypse, prosaic to prose. (The adjective epic makes me think of that made-for-TV movie of “The Odyssey” we watched in high school as a kind of anti-venom to the soporific effect of Robert Fitzgerald’s verse translation on a class full of testosterone jacked teenage boys.)

"Blood Meridian" is the first contemporary book I’ve read that may deserve to be raised up to the category of the noun. The externality of the bleak landscape and of the character’s themselves, wandering outcasts, gives the book a hardened, durable surface. The sonorous, rhythmic prose and idiosyncratic syntax remove the rambling storyline from the historical events the book was based on and put it in that timeless void of prehistory, forcing a gap between the ostensible narrative and it’s masterful execution as storytelling. But that’s all pretty much beside the point. The book’s already been praised and printed, is well on its way to canonization or used bookstore obscurity and has no use for my envious evaluations. What I really wanted to yammer on about was one of the quotations sitting on the first page of the novel, because it challenged several theories I have been introduced to on the origin of the practice of scalping.

I suppose that before people bothered with unearthing a more politically correct history of the US and were more concerned with justifying our sordid western expansion, scalping may have been written off as a Native American practice, a vestige of prehistory to be eradicated by the more Christian method of bullet and smallpox. This supposition was challenged by an explanation based in the pre-revolutionary war history which asserted that it was introduced to the Native Americans by the French. According to this theory, the French were in the business of paying local tribes for the amount of English they killed, measured in ears. Because the Native Americans got into the habit of doubling their profits by taking two ears instead of one, the French started demanding scalps as a form of evidence that couldn’t be duplicated simply by taking two of them from one body. Despite the obvious holes (why not just accept left ears, or right ears? Or noses, for that matter?), my budding liberalism was drawn to this explanation, most likely because it sought to redefine what was seen as a savage’s degradation as the poison of supposedly more civilized culture on an innocent race. And I didn’t think about it much after that. That is, until I hit upon this introductory quote, so here it is.

“Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.”

That’s from The Yuma Daily Run, June 13, 1982, and thanks, Cormac McCarthy, for digging it up for me.

It doesn’t really prove anything either way. But it brings up the question, and made me curious once again about the origin of removing a fallen enemy’s domepiece by drawing a sharpened edge across his forehead and applying pull force to their hairdo. Let’s see what wikipedia has to tell us about the subject and consider our homework done.

The first reference comes from that undisputed lord of historical firsts, Herodotus.

“Scalping was practiced by the ancient Scythians of Eurasia. Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote of the Scythians in 440 BC: "The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together".”

So apparently scalping does run deeper than the Wild West. How’s that for killing two birds with one stone? Handkerchief and war trophy in one. Here we are in ancient Europe –

“Scalps were taken in wars between the Visigoths, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century according to the writings of Abbott Emmanuel H. D. Domenech. His sources included the decalvare of the ancient Germans, the capillos et cutem detrahere of the code of the Visigoths, and the Annals of Flodoard.”

And, by far the most relevant information, right there in good old North America –

“According to ethnohistorian James Axtell, there is abundant evidence that the Native American practice of scalping existed long before Europeans arrived. Axtell argues that there is no evidence that the early European explorers and settlers who came to the Americas were familiar with the ancient European practice of scalping, or that they ever taught scalping to Native Americans. Axtell writes that the idea that Europeans taught scalping to Native Americans became popular recently, during the 1960s. This idea quickly became conventional wisdom because it fit the tenor of the times of the counter-cultural 1960s, writes Axtell, but he argues that archaeological, historical, pictorial, and linguistic evidence contradicts this notion. Certain tribes of Native Americans practiced scalping, in some instances up until the 19th century.”

But before you get too self-righteous about your civilized European ancestry –

“Both Native Americans and American frontiersmen frequently scalped their victims in this era. It is believed that contact with Europeans widened the practice of scalping among Native Americans, since some Euro-American governments encouraged the practice among their Native American allies by offering bounties for scalps during times of war.”

And if your dreams of scalp hunting have been shattered by the soft culture of peace and prosperity of the first world, you just may have a loophole –

“In Canada, a 1756 British proclamation issued by Governor Charles Lawrence offering reward for each scalp has yet to be officially repealed.”

One more quotation from wikipedia, because I love when the reference loop closes, the six degrees of separation in the information age –

“Blood Meridian, the famous novel by Cormac McCarthy, is about a group of mercenaries making a living off of indian scalps, and features the activity extensively.”

In case it wasn’t already obvious, the above quotations were all shamelessly pillaged from www.wikipedia.org. There are some cool images of scalping survivors, too.

So there you have it, spurious historical anecdotes destroyed by the unquestionable authority of Heroditus, a dead Abbot, and someone named James Axtell, who’s obsessions with the closest haircut went and go far beyond my own.

In conclusion, when the presence of modern conveniences makes you feel like a cog in an impersonal machine, or a pixel in a screen playing in the dark for the audience of space, or a node in a network, be grateful that some stinking bearded Frenchman isn’t laying siege to your homestead with the object of removing your hair from your head. With that, I’m back to the world, and remember: if you don’t know, just wikipedia it.