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| Feb 22, 2012: The last months of the year brought a period of peace though disturbed, as usual, by the political conflict. The angry commons refused to take part in consular elections, at which by the votes of the patricians and their dependants Titus Quinctius and Quintus Servilius were returned to office. The new year resembled the old, beginning with internal dissension and ending with foreign war and the patching up of political quarrells—There are dozens of such quotes scattered throughout Livy's The Early History of Rome, but for a quote of a different savour there is always this one, to be found in Livy's preamble to the same work: —and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them—This quote marks the fact that Rome is now in the era of the Caesars and that Roman history has come to have a different feel to it. And then one casts a pallid eye on the antics to the south of here; or it is as if one is hearing echoes from a deeply distant past that, even so, emanates from a rusty tin can that had contained baked beans —Non-sequiturs to follow. One, that so much political failure is self-inflicted. Two, that the proof is in the pudding, or that the liberal's worst nightmare is not so much a Joe Stalin or a Joe McCarthy as it is an enemy eminently capable of wit and satire, or that which was once a liberal monopoly in, say, Esquire—Otherwise, Labrosse had his eye on Fellini Woman, last night in Nikas. He has wondered what makes the creature tick, this sixty-ish bombshell who swaggers about in hauteur and heels and a black prelate's hat; who seems to run pyramid schemes for a hobby and who consorts with ne'er-do-wells at Drunkin Donuts. It was a very slow night, and, besides Labrosse and myself, she was it, along with her partner in crime - another babe seemingly her twin in age and looks. This one is a loudmouth, and she was, at the moment, bemoaning the fact that she had fallen for yet another loser, motherf-ck, God-d-mn it all, anyway, and is there a god in heaven? Labrosse, no question, was being sized up, not in terms of what might possibly constitute winning, but along the lines of how badly can I lose and still keep my self-respect? Fellini Woman seemed to think it best that her companion come to stumble naturally on a conclusion without any enabling factor muddying the waters, Fellini Woman wearing her waistline as a proud memento of who knows how many debauches. Later, I scared up quite by chance a panel discussion on TV, which it was men and women kicking at the can of a 'vision for North America' and what values there may or may not be such as America, Canada and Mexico might share. Clearly, each nation-state had kinks the one with the other to iron out and an act to get together, as there is a bad moon rising. Among the takers in regards to the discourse on display, there were optimists and there were pessimists. The token American seemed a pleasant enough fellow, clearly a 'winner', something of a hot dog, able to cheerfully weather what 'thoughtfulness' his Canadian and Mexican counterparts had to put on the table—I have been having a go at Robert Johnson's 32-20 Blues and the Reverend's Buck Rag. That would be the Reverend Gary Davis who was something of a guitarist. I was sent a video clip by my guitar teach of one of his students having at Dilermando Reis's Eterna Saudade, and it is lovely and very well played, and beyond my skills. One might speak here of a crushing realization—Even so, I thought I had in the aforementioned blues piece by Robert Johnson the Texarkana equivalent of a bit of verse by Archilochus the Greek poet (early 7th century B.C.), just that I cannot now find the verse, and it is all perhaps a joke my memory is fomenting at my expense—But while Johnson sang, brutally enough, of taking his 32-20 and cutting her half in two (with a bullet), Archilochus's lampoons caused two daughters of the nobility to go and hang themselves, or so it is said—He is lumped with the likes of a Juvenal, Villon, Skelton. Theirs is not the highest type of poetry, so prates in some collegial fashion a book entitled Greek Poetry for Everyman. Oh yeah? Feb 21, 2012: There has been in a previous post reference to a figment of Labrosse's tortured mind: something along the lines of an 'Afghan' snowbird that is, nonetheless, well-represented in these parts. Last night, in Nikas, while scarfing down some 'cheese pockets' and fries, which it is an Albanian variation on a theme of poutine, Labrosse came up with the correction: Harfung des neige. Or Arctic owl or 'snowy' owl. Well, that closes that loose end of a chapter, just that the bird has been turning up, of late, in odd places - like Hawaii, breathing down the neck, no doubt, of its food source—Are there lemmings in Honolulu?—Also, to continue from a post previous to this one, as per the insistence of Literary Thug #1, we all of us have our god or gods, even if religion is separable from the state, and, but of course, best that it is separable; just that it is not so readily excised from 'life'. I understand the sentiment and accept the reality of it, although it is often times quite dismaying what certain kinds of people would make of the inevitability: awful stained-glass art, for instance, mind-numbing hypocrisies and the most ludicrous of double-standards when it comes to sex; oh, and shopping malls—Next question: But why is that some hymns are so transcendentally gorgeous and others are just - what? - drearily programmatic, out and out propaganda? Literary Thug #1 who must answer for having raised the question in the first place perversely enough had no answer, nor have I; and I certainly have no desire to further vex Thistle's already strained patience on this score, he who is academe in good standing somewhere in the west where the sun still sets, and who asserts that the slightest sniff of religion will turn a good brain to rot. Perhaps London Lunar's brand new Watermark fountain pen, which it is a triumph of engineering, allowing for the man's opposable thumb, has the ken of such things as when one cannot live with a certain item and one cannot live without it. With his newly acquired instrument, the man intends to insurrect against the tyranny of the computer screen and perhaps even go to Brazil—I have been reading Livy's The Early History of Rome backwards and have finally arrived at Book the first, one of my favourite stretches of writing in all literature, if by literature, we include historical writings in addition to poems and novels and Twelfth Night and Globe and Mail lollapaloozas. Historical writings such as Xenophon's Hellenica which I have also begun to read and should have read years ago. Then there is John Fahey's music to ponder and the possibility that he may have died mad as a hatter, somewhat paranoid and quite probably embittered. A typically American death agony? Which brings to mind Huysman's the French aesthete, author of À rebours, usually translated as 'against nature'; how he, as an end of century decadent, demonstrated the necessity of assuming absurd postures, at times; who, in his later years, returned to his childhood faith (Catholicism and mysticism); who had begun writing as a 'naturalist' a la Zola; who had an excellent eye for detail; but that because of cancer and related maladies, had to have those eyes of his sewn shut, and he accounted this as due to pay for his earlier egotistical cant by way of penitence. Fahey, apparently, disowned everything he ever composed or arranged—There is something of the superstitious in any true artist—I woke up with one of Fahey's open G compositions on my mind, this morning, as well as with one Appius Claudius. This individual, 5th century B.C., was a man the Roman plebs most loved to hate as he was contemptuous of them, as when poverty only reflects the failings of the poor, and yet some accommodation must be made for those same poor—Morning. Nikas. Alexandra the waitress watches some crockery obey, albeit in slow motion, dictates of gravity. A satisfying clatter as crockery hits the parquet floor and smashes. A release of tension in the woman's being, her homeland - Greece - under the gun, from the looks of it, nothing more now than an administrative province of Germany— Feb 20, 2012: In Nikas, last evening, Labrosse caught me up to speed in regards to political developments on the Canadian scene, most of which has now escaped my consciousness. What had he to say? Something about a certain justice minister and American-style scandal. The courting of China. And else—Oh, and that a certain Trudeau, fairly brash young thing, had it known that he could understand, at times, why your garden variety Quebec separatist might wish to decouple from the rest of the country, and so forth and so on. And I countered with an idle remark, one to the effect that, as MH has been sequestered in Ottawa these past couple of weeks, she has discovered that she 'misses' Montreal, and, can you beat it? even ragamuffinish Montreal-NDG. And that it has always seemed to me that I keep encountering anglos in these parts who have more in common with Quebec than with, say, Albertans, only they hush-hush the matter or simply fail to realize it—And Labrosse, awfully spry on his feet, got back to me with the following, to wit: "Yes, there's an expression for it - for those types of which you speak. Westmount Squares. And there's an expression for the expression: oxymoron— No, that isn't it. Come on, what's the word? You're the poet, for eff's sake." Yes, well, if I understood that verbal redundancy would have something to do with the word he sought, I did not know the precise word he wished to procure for the purpose of characterizing his Gallic sense of riposte. But then, as if indefatigable indeed, he had it: pleonasm. "Ah," I said, "but of course. Pleon words. Westmount Squares: Play on words. Heh heh. Or for those of you at play in the fields of the Lord in Idaho or Hounslow, Westmount Square is the gateway to a shopping complex and a metro station. 'Westmount Squares' also typifies the odd inhabitant of Westmount, a borough of sorts where live Westmounters, who are well-heeled English speakers, for the most part, and a bit sniffy; and they always know that you are certainly an un-Westmounter as you migrate through their territory like someone's sore thumb—" In any case, such a violent pun seemed to render the evening unfit for other amusement. So I took my leave of a very much pleased with himself Labrosse and returned to the apartment, expecting to hunker down with John Fahey's arrangement of In Christ There Is No East or West, a guitar piece I have been wanting to acquire for my dubious repertoire. The phone rang. It was Literary Thug #1 sounding low. Eventually, he drifted over at some point, bringing wine and a heavy heart, he having been forced to play the disciplinarian paterfamilias in respect to a child, and he would much rather philosophize. So we philosophized. That he started in on the American civil war perhaps did not do much for lightening a spiritual burden. Even so, I was asked to recall why the war was fought in the first instance; or - forget slavery, forget the 'economic action', it was about preventing a certain passel of states from slipping the noose of the union, and there it is, all she wrote. Alright then - and, well - the likelihood or not of hostilities with Iran. Nah. Don't think so. Too fraught with peril - the threat of war is more profitable to the war machine than any actual violence—And furthermore: there is no question it's getting dumber, this 'dumbed-down' culture in which we find ourselves flailing about. Don't you think? And that no, not all religiously-minded people are drooling idiots. Are the opiated masses. "For Chrissakes," said Literary Thug #1, "that flunkey commentary on the part of anyone who imagines she or he has ingested Marx through the nose really burns my arse. Evangelicals, however? Well, different story. Yes. Too bad they're what most unbelievers associate with being 'religious'". A spate of silence in which the heat with which the man had expressed himself dissipated from the immediate atmosphere. Then: "But it heartens me - it really does hearten me to know there are people around who have the courage and the peace of mind to sacrifice their lives to a principle, or that there are things more important than one's precious little life. Isn't that what Socrates was about? And not to put too fine a point on it - Christ?" I decided it was not the best of times to play devil's advocate, or that Socrates may not have been up to anything especially noble—We continued on about this, that and the other thing. The phone rang. Irate voice: "Well, when do I get a nickname and some play in your musings. This is your publisher speaking—" I advised that I would certainly address the matter. The aggrieved party rang off. To Literary Thug #1 I said: "Publishers. Sleazy lot." Oh, he knew. He knew. I do not know how much his heart was weighing by the time he departed; he was not exactly bouncing off the wall—But - to round things off here - I see that the Pulitzer-winning journo Mr Hedges has written, this morning, of love; managed to tap out a little disquisition (Truthdig) on the 'power of love'; that it and it alone provides humankind with life's meaning; that 'God', as such, is to be experienced not as a noun but as a verb; or that the 'divine' is only ever experienced when one is in a condition of love; just that - caveat - there is such a thing as pseudo-love (just as there is pseudo-poetry) and so forth and so on. It is not exactly Dostoyevski, Mr Hedges's writing, but it has a quality of in a nutshell urgency—'Urgency'. 'Urgent'. For some reason or another, the immediately aforementioned words occurred an unusual number of times in conversation, last night, with Literary Thug #1. Otherwise, to he sure, he is circling about the beginnings of the novel he wishes to write - knock wood. Big predator cat positioning himself for the initial pounce. Then, or so one imagines, the chase. Then, eh voila, the success or failure of the endeavour—But he really means it. Just as those big predator cats always mean it, always— Feb 19, 2012: A sociologist of some sort, a bit battle-scarred from the looks of it, having survived various internecine rivalries and departmental wars, in the course of power-pointing his raft of statistics on a TV ideas-show, suggested that we can, at last, account ourselves as civilized. The reason why? Death by way of violence, and for all the mass slaughters of the previous century, has been steadily on the decline - since when? - since we got ourselves a life on the farm after long, long innings put in as hunter-gatherers. At least this is the drift I think I caught. So then, we are more civilized, and yes, Virginia, there is such an animal as 'progress'. And human nature does change - and, good golly, Miss Molly, for the best. Or else we are simply more craven, and the more transparent we are to ourselves the more hidden we have become to each our inward-looking gazes. We have gotten lazy in respect to dispensing violence against fellow creatures: we need no longer look our enemy in the eye. Too little cost-effective, that. With a button and a toggle, and eh voila, and we can snuff a wedding party from a continent away while simultaneously ordering in for pizza—Indubitably, we are more something today than we were the day before. We are always something. We are always becoming something. Civilized, however? Virgin Radio here in Nikas makes my case, that gaggle of dears offering up sanitized mayhem and lifestyle tips. And one is violated in one's mental regions; one is impinged upon in those resort hideaways; one is dismembered by merciless hackery. Hyperbole?—The sociologist was something of a peacock, quite an aggressive one, a less than socratic sneer comprising the timbre of his best seminar voice. Perhaps he had in his sights types like me who espy little to cheer about in contemporary life. So, hey guys, let's drown the effer in numbers—As if I were the offending anti-intellectual—As per yesterday's post, what I.F. Stone - in his book The Trial of Socrates - accused the philosopher of fomenting upon an unsuspecting Athenian populace was 'negative dialectic', a little game in which the philosopher simply bludgeoned his interlocutors into insensibility by way of in your face irony and paradox. On occasion I myself believe in the necessity of the absurd, it being the only appropriate response to a kind of normality that is and ever was inherently absurd from the get-go, and, and—And a man can go to all the trouble of displaying his feathers in the process of making public declarations of fact but it does not mean anything more than that he has displayed his feathers—As easy to say we are civilized as to say we are not—But that the seas are rising is real enough—London Lunar shivered a great deal from the wet and cold in Palermo. He was shocked, shocked he said, at the level of poverty he saw there, the inner city crumbling, no yuppies around to gentrify the remains. He ate an octopus, head and all. Still, the Piazza Armerina was a pleasant surprise, what with the mosaics depicting bikini-clad girl athletes—Mousike. It is a Greek word that connotes music, yes, but it may also connote all the arts in the sense of something like 'noble endeavour'. Socially, the artist in the old Greek scheme of things had about as much cachet as a garage mechanic and yet, there was more of a regard for art's sacred mission than exists with us who have made of the artist some insufferable icon of God only knows what, one cobbled together out of fraud and supercilious hubris— Feb 18, 2012 (late): Two heroes of my youth have a go at each other in I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates (Anchor Books, but originally published by Little, Brown and Company, 1988). Those two heroes are, in fact, Mr Stone and Mr Socrates. Mr Stone because he was a newspaperman who published and edited the I.F. Stone Weekly - a 'legendary venture in independent one-man journalism' - which it is a little rag that I used to read religiously. And Socrates because he was, well, socratic. Trouble is, Mr Stone in his book destroys that schoolboy's image of the 'secular saint' and replaces it with an image of something quite a bit less savoury. If Socrates always got the best of the arguments in Plato's dialogues - seminars and battles of wit in which Socrates has star billing, in Mr Stone's opus the gadfly gets busted down through the ranks and winds up being deemed a fascist. At best he is a proto-fascist such as are becoming increasingly prevalent in our day. Hailing from the middle-class, he is the worst sort of snob and an implacable enemy of all that is 'democratic', of all that is pro-demos. As such, he was the butt of the jokes that the comic poets cracked, those poets who saw in Socrates the sort of mind that lives only for thought and so is divorced, as it were, from what's real; (and yet Socrates does seem to have taken the gibes in stride, and he certainly did not lack for a sense of humour)—Mr Stone's characterizations do not square with what has long been my view of the man; even so Mr Stone may well have all the weight of the evidence on his side. I see Socrates as not so much a contrarian but as a philosopher, indeed, one whose gift to his fellows is his challenge to their premises and their quality of wits. Athens, to show its gratitude, put Socrates to death. Mr Stone argues that this was a tragedy of the highest order, just that Socrates might easily have survived the trial had he been a more 'reasonable' fellow, less zealous in his prejudices, less contemptuous of the 'commons'. Socrates could only have had a death wish, as Athens was proud of its reputation as an 'open city', one in which anyone could speak freely without fear of penalty; one in which the free exchange of ideas was de rigueur. (Of course there were interludes of outright tyranny in which personages in their thousands were proscribed, interludes such as the Tyranny of the Four Hundred and the Tyranny of the Thirty.) The question in my mind of late is as follows: what does one who is democratically-inclined do when one begins to lose faith in the ability of the commons to tell right from wrong, to exercise common sense, to even 'care' when it comes to the political process? (It is not that I myself am particularly political or ever have been; just that, to put it baldly enough, I sense a sea change in progress, one in which we all of us may well wind up kissing our 'democratic' rights good-bye.) In any case, no immediate answers to my question leap to mind. Socrates - or rather Plato, inasmuch as Socrates was Plato's creation for all that Socrates actually did walk this earth - may have been in every fibre of his being a reactionary wanker always sneering at the 'pepple', but I suspect Mr Stone, on his side of the argument, of romanticizing the demos. As per George Orwell, for example, the 'people' were certainly changed by industrialization and paid a steep price for its benefits. So will we - for all the supposed boons the technological revolution still very much in progress will bring us. For an instance of such a price to pay, and to quote what is already an awfully stale cliché: we are 'dumbed down' and we are not in the slightest embarrassed or shamed or in any way bothered by the reality. No, we rather like it. We like it lots. Otherwise, I do not know if London Lunar managed to molest any almond blossoms whilst in Sicily this past week. My excuse is Ottawa where I have been for the past few days. What, besides Parliament, makes Ottawa Ottawa? London Lunar's early career there, Labrosse's, too? The Elgin Café: 'Your 24 hour patriotic poutine place'? The heavy traffic at the bottle depot? The brick and frame? Lack of a budget outlay for the removal of snow and ice from pedestrian pathways? John Metcalf the somewhat socratic auteur? Back in Montreal-NDG, and I gave Alexandra the waitress in Nikas the gears, accusing her of eating up all the profits. She, being Greek, gave me a look, one which said that she will bide her time. I will get mine— Feb 15, 2012: I had occasion to be downtown, last evening, and was told that, as streets go, Montreal can boast better than Sainte-Catherine. That the honour more properly belongs to a Saint Laurent or a Saint Denis or to a couple of other streets whose names have just now slipped my mind. But for a street that is just a street however long, that may even revel overly much in the commercially tacky and tawdry; that otherwise is not particularly pretentious, I will take it and smile as I take it. I also had occasion to observe - it came at me from out of left field, as it were, that it does seem that the most resilient part of nature, more so perhaps than a granite cliff face, is the human ego in relation to bad poetry. Not that the poetry reading I attended was inordinately awful - it was not - just that, earlier in the day, I had inadvertently received an electronic missive, the import of which is as follows: say the word 'text' and you, too, can collect a million dollars or pass go for another kick at the can or pass through life henceforth as awesomely authoritative on all matters X, Y and Zed. The voiced page. The staged word. Grow your own text! How fetishy. How TV red eye ad. Maximoose! Maximoose! The people luffs ya, said Commodus the wicked emperor. Text? What happened to 'book'? Or 'poem'? Sharks must keep moving so that they can breathe, but must the mediocrities and intellectual hacks of the languidge-based community continually reinvent their mediocrities? Yes, they must - apparently, and call it the reinvigoration of the writing process—And they will have you know, these good persons, bulwarks and stalwarts to a tee that they are, that they are keeping what is fascist and reactionary and grossly less than salutory at bay; that they have all the lollapaloozas of the mind in their sights. Do not count on it. The odds are much much greater that they are at the gates on the inside and have an understanding with the enemy—Yes but, Norm, they've got tenure, the rotters—The evening's featured reader spoke a little about 'truth' in betweenst poems, and it was refreshing to hear. That someone would seemingly utter off the cuff remarks on 'truth' while not obviously denominational or delusional - good golly, Miss Molly, it was eventful. It was eventful to be reminded that 'truth', as a word, is not always so spring-loaded as to blow its mouthpiece to smithereens upon immediate vocalization of any signifying bent you may care to identify. Good to be reminded that while 'truth' is endlessly debatable, there are 'truths', some of which even exist in a state of nature. If you doubt me, try standing in front of a moving bus—Later, at the bar, the same man who had made a few idle remarks on 'truth' spoke of a kind of cynicism prevalent in the in-your-face geist of the moment, but neither he nor I got much further in our discourse, as some lunatic now had hold of the mike and was baying at the moon, a tortured psyche in full amplitude, at the height of its power to vex. Stand-up comic, I believe. I am all for healthy cynicism, considering that, as such, it is nothing more than the content of a concentrated skeptical mind, but one that does not rob the living of their capacity for joy, or any other emotion many-splendoured or not—One of the young 'warm-up' acts at the poetry reading had been wandering about the bar, looking deeply troubled. As if it had dawned on him that he might not have acquitted himself as well as he would have liked. I was not going to disturb his agonies. The onset of a little self-awareness - a precious thing. Got a ride home with Literary Thug #1. With all the sangfroid of a man about to plant a victory garden, he announced he was going to write a novel. Touch wood. Still, the way things are going, it may be necessary - this little cabbage patch to be— Feb 14, 2012: So, in my reading, I come across Horatio, this morning, 'Horatio at the bridge', and we are not talking the bridge of a cruise liner. The reading prompts a memory of grade school where I, among others, was once upon a time regaled with stories of famous early Romans like Horatio and Cincinnatus, the point being that my enduring interest in Roman history came about quite naturally (or unnaturally - if you take the view that a fourth-grader was the victim of a brain-washing), and that it had nothing to do with making a fashion statement or coming it high as a showy contrarian. Of course, the stories presented to us were one-dimensional affairs, as were the stories of early American heroes like 'I cannot tell a lie' George Washington and the fatally wounded cherry tree—In any case, an army of Etruscans (Clusiums) was pouring down the Janiculum hill and about to cross over the bridge into Rome proper; only Horatio took it on himself to stall their advance while his compatriots set about sabotaging the bridge behind him. Which was effected, and Horatio winds up in the Tiber, armour and all, and still he manages to swim to safety despite the spears and arrows raining down all around his person. (He got his reward: a portrait bust in the Comitium and as much land as he could plow in a day.) He had been taunting the enemy all along: "See? See what a free man can accomplish?" Et cetera and so forth. And by that time, Rome had been free of its kings and the hated Tarquins in particular for roughly a year, and freedom still had some 'buzz'. Even so, such an exotic tale. It is not that I doubt the veracity of it, but that, putatively 'free', we are not as free as all that, and people who are as free as all that we deem nutters or outlaws or spaced-out gardeners (and in rare instances, artists). There are those who like to play at soldiers. What of whistleblowers? All are threats to the established order, to the 'system'. Even heroes, as such, are double-edged commodities and not entirely trustworthy; and we suspect that, deep down, they are either psychopathic at worst or a brick short at best. We are necessarily flunkeys, that is, if you wish to eat and see that your garbage is picked up. Quite possibly the liberty that Horatio thought he enjoyed was in itself an illusion, and he was just something of a peacock who liked flexing his pects; or else he desired to be loved. Besides, the 'people' - the plebs, the commons - they were decidedly fickle, and as likely to court the hand of their natural enemies (the patricians) as not. Freedom, I suppose, of a kind. In my lifetime I have known the odd person or three, men and women who have had strength of character to live as freely as possible according to their own lights, their own thoughts. It may seem we all of us do as much, but not really. A stale truism, but here it is: we are creatures of a herd, tossed about by cross-currents, directed by prevailing blows, and then, it is too late and we are already arrived at an ill-omened juncture as defined by time and space, one not terribly user-friendly. We look around and would unroot a conspiracy—Then we (as if we were all of us football coaches or business counsellors or Wal-mart floorwalkers or presidential hopefuls or rah-rahers of some kind) set about turning calamity into opportunity—For Americans, and to some extent Canadians, cannot tolerate failure and do not do metaphysics, and pessimism is verboten. It is a good thing as, who needs the whining? It is a bad thing as, very seldom, is anything learned. And the farce drum-rolls on— Feb 13, 2012: "Well," said Labrosse, "It's not that I think it's happening, but one can see it happening easily enough: one country starts taking over another country like corporations do - without a shot being fired. Seems to be the direction in which things are headed." It was early in the evening. Nikas. Labrosse, I think, was in a mood. Ah, he was in a mood, one verging on funk, he going on to state that, though he has enjoyed watching The Wire so far, he could wish for a bit more discussion amongst us of this 'poh-leese' drama; and 'us' would include E, student-waitress; and in Labrosse's estimation and sometimes in mine, the more school time she puts in the less capable she seems of discussing anything beyond boys and what's cool. Besides, pleading schoolwork, she had opted out, this time around, on the first two episodes of season the third, Labrosse and I having just finished viewing them. In any case, I suggested to Labrosse that he was missing terrasse season at 'bratwurst' and the warm months hereabouts when all the neighbourhood knows good conversation and a half decent beer are to be had whenever Labrosse is holding court on the premises. But back to his earlier train of thought - and I put it to the man: "What you seem to be thinking leads one to speculate as to whether or not Germany is still a menace, even if the European Union, so-called, was designed to prevent another 'risen' Germany." Labrosse, answering: "It does look that way now and then." He, however, and there is in him an ex-financier that must have his innings - he cannot abide a simplistic view of Greece as a put upon commons at the mercy of rapacious bankers. "They didn't pay their taxes - what did they expect?" And one was, by the tone of his voice, invited to draw the appropriate conclusions in light of a farce becoming tragedy—And so forth and so on—And then a wild goose chase, to wit: of a sudden Labrosse had this idée fixe in his head that there is a bird native to Quebec the English translation of which would render it something like Afghan Snow Bird—Me, I was incredulous. Afghan? Quebec? Labrosse, somewhat sheepishly: "Well, wait a minute - bear with me—" Furious googling ensued on handheld devices on the part of certain clientele and Nick the waiter and the cook in the kitchen, business slow; but no such crittur emerged from any data base known to the sentient mind. Still, had Labrosse chance-stumbled across the origins of a new mythological beast on the order of the phoenix or the unicorn? As they were thus discoursing, they discover'd some thirty or forty Wind-mills, that are in that Plain; and as soon as the Knight had spy'd them, Fortune, cry'd he, directs our Affairs better than we our selves could have wish'd: Look yonder, Friend Sancho, there are at least thirty outrageous Giants whom I intend to encounter—Mister Quixote, as per Cervantes— Feb 12, 2012: Just past midnight, and to decompress a little from an afternoon and evening of guitar playing with a fellow John Fahey devotee, I turned on the TV, and there it was: a movie I had not seen before, an oldie with Marilyn Monroe in it, or Bus Stop, based on a play by William Inge. And it was the scene in which she, as a modern saloon girl, and with an implausible redneck accent, to boot, sings That Old Black Magic to a world largely indifferent - her obvious charms notwithstanding - to her artistry. She looked near grotesque, as if she had been on a three day bender; and whether it had been her actual condition at the time of the filming or whether it was an impression I was meant to have as per the screen treatment, I could not say. Even so it was painful, hearing her out, her performance a case she was making against whatever void in the universe had been staring back at her since life in the cradle, and would continue to stare back at her as long as she breathed—My eyes heavy with wine and imminent sleep, I lasted only a few minutes more; but they were minutes in which it was beyond doubt evident to me that every male in the movie was coming off as absolutely inconsequential and irrelevant to the fact of her joys and trials. Just one of those things? Are we characterizing an entire culture here?—In any case, it had been an all afternoon and evening affair of guitar music and general discussion. We comprised, in our persons, two autodidact guitarists, one of whom I shall designate as 'Tricky Finger'. His girlfriend in cahoots. And Literary Thug #1 who perhaps had no excuse. But what is it about Fahey's music? Well, I do not know, but it was one item of discussion. There was the 'political situation'. There is always that. Oh, and the 'fifth hammer' - courtesy of Tricky Finger which has to do with a cave and four miners with hammers whom Pythagoras heard by chance, which led to his invention of musical scale; but that there was a 'fifth hammer' (just as there was a 'third man' - in that classic The Third Man - alright - enough larking about—); that Fahey, no doubt, had his ear glued to that fifth hammer even as he gave voice on the guitar to the other four; that perhaps now and then a poet comes along who also hears that fifth hammer; that even a painter might 'hear' it—Some conversational energy was spent on the following item: the stunning loss of a culture's ability to focus on anything for longer than a few nanoseconds, and how it is we have become a culture of coprophiliacs inasmuch as the culture in which we are mired is eating itself for want of anything to say. Let us have a poem, or so you suggest? No one need any longer write such an outmoded thing. All one need do is announce that one intends to write the wretched item in question and the deed is done. A kind of conceptualist thingamajig, eh, kemo sabe? And perhaps, too, in our conversational meandering, we scraped up against a certain ghost ship or that which used to freight metaphysical inquiry; but that perhaps we were leery of boarding the craft lest it harbour alien creatures and our 'terms' be shown up as insufficiently up to the task of engaging anything remotely other worldly, let alone this-worldly, as would be more to the point—Indeed, in response to a request I put to him that, in twenty words or less - or more, should he wish to go to town on it - he define religion in the best sense of the word or I would know the reason why, Casablanca Rick responded: 'a small knob on a big door'. Not bad, I thought, for all of seven going on an infinity of words— Feb 11, 2012: It snowed a little overnight, and the temperature has dropped. Nikas. No, Montreal-NDG is not the centre of the world-hive but it may as well be, a few mopey worker bees at the bus stop gritting their teeth and bearing up otherwise; an aging Nikas regular picking his way over the pavement with a cane, his heavy with disappointment wife having already lost patience with his rate of pace; having already divested herself of her winter coat and hat inside the restaurant; having already ordered from a menu that she must know by heart - her frame of mind perhaps the heart and soul of the precinct—Ye gods, but I am having a chat with Alexandra the waitress. For once the radio and its decibels are not the matter at hand, elsewise the good woman and I would be engaged in a Cold War stand-off. No, we are discussing Greece and its economic woes. Trouble is, Alexandra the waitress's English is not up to the task of a point by point analysis of what boots it and yet, the fact of her being on the verge of tears is eloquence enough for the moment, she saying, "Once again, Greece is being sold." There is unmistakable fury in her tone of voice. Much earlier this morning, I started in on Book II of Livy's The Early History of Rome. I have been reading the tome back to front for I know not what reason, a tome that I have read before front to back any number of times when the mood strikes me. In any case, I am gradually working my way toward my favourite part of the book which is Book I - to do with Rome's origins, though even Livy admits that what history there was for those times, even in his day, was hazy at best. Even so, Livy's guesswork and outright mythologizing has in it the force of great poetry and that, along with the opening chapter of Frazer's The Golden Bough, a chapter entitled The King of the Wood which tells a tale of the ritual murder of Italian kings, occupy a central part of my working imagination, more so than, perhaps, the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock so as to avail themselves of a New Jerusalem. At the outset of Book II Livy gets the ball rolling by saying that, from now on, he is going to be writing real history, now that we have embarrassed ourselves somewhat with the 'poetic'; and he embarks on a little lecture in which he states that 'monarchy is a necessary precursor to a democratic republic'. I would know this to be the fact without actually having to read Livy's words, as an encapsulation of his words has been scribbled in some distant past in the top margin of the page. The scrawl suggests that premature liberty only leads to disaster—And so forth and so on. Arguable? But of course. Livy goes on to claim that the Rome of his day enjoys a hard won political maturity even as, with another part of his tongue, he condemns Rome for its decadence. Which brings me to this: or that, at some point in the morning so far, I had occasion to hear out a fellow, a cultural critic of some kind, suggest that 'America' has failed and could not have but failed, given that its very raison d'etre is its addiction to the Other; and by 'other' what is meant is some convenient enemy always near to hand; that this is how, as a matter of daily routine, any American forms and maintains his or her identity. There was the Indian - savage brute, for example, a serious impediment to the cause of civilization (as a Puritan would understand civilization). There was the Mexican and how Texas was got from him. There were the commies, of course. The Nazis had been the one enemy that perhaps were a legitimate object of American hostilities. Now there are the Islamists. And tomorrow? There was the North-South divide that produced a civil war the effects of which are still very much in evidence, in which slavery was not so much the issue at first as were two antagonistic modes of life: the industrialism of the north over against the mint julep, plantation culture of the agrarian south. The critic argues that if it is a question of malaise, it is one that obtains as much to the pyramid's bottom as its top; in other words a mere change of leadership will solve nothing; true change will require a wholesale change of heart on the part of the entire populace, an operation akin to 'yanking out the psyche by its roots'—We would be talking more than just politics here—Otherwise, last evening, I sat a while with Labrosse in Nikas, E on shift volubly burbling as she went about her business. What's with her? Turns out she has been dying to put me in the loop in respect to something or other. Turns out she is happy happy because she has just been made a teaching assistant to her professor in French language studies—Well then, a reason to clink glasses, one of Sudbury's daughters come up in the world, to be sure. Congratulations proffered, and, still happy happy, she skips away - in green sneakers, until the next boon shall ravish her. Labrosse then tells me that the state the game of NHL hockey is in has been breaking his heart; he finds it more and more difficult to countenance a goon show that seems to have all the legitimacy of a marketing program. Obviously, a gladiatorial spectacle is what the public wants and what the ownership will mandate. His penultimate year in the financial world, and he had bucked the headwinds stemming from the front office, which got him quarantined to an entire floor by himself in an office tower—"Ah," I said, "walking the hall." Labrosse, as if the euphemism had universal reach: "Yes. They don't need to break your kneecaps any longer. It's so much easier for them to just render your life pointless—" ('Walking the hall' characterizes a 'whistle blower' who has not been stripped of a job but has been stripped of a desk, and who cannot collect a pay cheque unless he or she shows up for work every day. It is said such things go on as a matter of routine at Foggy Bottom and other governmental departments of a certain nation-state to the south of here. Just rather shamelessly repeating scuttlebutt that goes the rounds—) London Lunar, so as to further indulge his godfather reverie, did manage to get on airplane, and he does intend to sniff an almond blossom or two in Sicily unless the unseasonable cold has something to say about it—But is there a thread that ties all the disparate parts of this post together? Could be. Repeat quote: In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy— Feb 10, 2012: Thistle has seen fit to tell me I have failed to strike a chord with him, of late. Well, has he a chord to strike? Apparently I have been pecking away at matters of culture and religion with all the avidity of a pigeon-bird pecking at what appears to be food under sheets of grungy, pavement ice—I may as well be playing mumblety-peg with sticks of dynamite, flinging words like 'culture' and 'religion' around as if I, too, were a beady-eyed perfesser—Ought to restrict these posts to saturnine (as in surly) gossip—As when London Lunar intends to go outdoors and perform an anti-snow dance, today, his escape route to Heathrow compromised by the stuff and so—He has been increasingly exercised in recent weeks by the pharmaceutical industry. It insists on cooking up drugs for more and more newly diagnosed maladies of spirit (especially in children); drugs as will turn brains to mush, or whatever parts of the brain have not already been bludgeoned to a pulp by the pop air our gills would process—I sent a raving screed to P.M. Carpenter, Prominent Political Commentator to the south of here, that was wrong in its particulars but right in its essence. It is to say, should one wish to ask if things in general (and what I mean by 'things in general' is a kind of moral climate in which one need not fear losing one's job should one feel a need to critique one's boss - something along those lines) - well, to return to the question - should one wish to ask if things in general have improved under the Current Administration as opposed to what was the the status quo of the administration previous, one would have to reluctantly conclude that, no, things in general are no better, not by a long shot. Conformity, conformity, conformity. Time-serving. Rat-finking. Message control. Outright delusion. My grandfather's generation had other words with which to describe what is essentially the same phenomenon: Orwell's depiction of a little softshoe number as did yank a whole society into oblivion. I have no desire to see a return of the Sixties and gratuitous weirdness and the market forces all that spawned; and I would concur with the notion that not everything that stumbles into one's mercurial little mind is the stuff of sublimity, but—And it strikes me that perhaps, just perhaps, there was a greater chance that one's thoughts back then, however erroneous, were at least one's own— Feb 9, 2012: It is often said, and it has always been said, that humankind has to or ought to live in harmony with what surrounds it. With 'nature', for example. With the gods. With God. The spirits. 'Nature' again. Nature as perceived through 'science'. Ah, sustainable growth. Because look at what capitalism is doing to us. Et cetera. Well, say what you will in apology for or in diatribe against, but capitalism is doing something to us and it is not especially pretty. Last night, I dreamed I am in some town or other on a visit, and I am out for a stroll in a residential area; and I come across a barefoot, black toddler who has just fallen on the sidewalk and is now crying. It looks to be a fairly well-heeled neighbourhood, a trifle worn at the edges, though high amounts of debris and excrement lying around certainly disconcert. I try and establish which of the nearby houses might be the child's home. I expect the child's mother to come flying out at any moment, intensely suspicious of me, a stranger. Nothing. Only silence. Even the child ceases to cry. There is just no one in the vicinity. Then, one of those bizarre dream shifts, and I am in a taxicab with the child, hoping against hope that the child will recognize something familiar and communicate something to that effect, as we drive through various local streets. Cabbie of unknown provenance is irritated with this exercise and I am irked with him for being irritated. I know he could he making more money hauling passengers out to the airport, and so forth and so on, but even so—For all that he has no use for sentiment and samaritan delusions, I tell the man, "Got to find where this kid lives, so let's just get on with it." The dream now ends or fizzles out. But not before I am running through my head how, now that it is clear I am going to have to deal with the authorities, I am going to get passed down the chain of command - from the cops to the ubiquitous social worker in a game of who will take responsibility for this orphan? Dream science advises me that dreams, in and of themselves, may be utterly pointless; may be nothing more than an expenditure of superfluous energy the brain releases in opportune moments, as when one sleeps, but perhaps I can see in the dream my habitual pessimism reflected—In any case, I am not interest in arguments that militate for or against the existence of 'God' or the efficacy of religion or lack of the same, but I am interested in equilibrium, in notions of 'balance', much of which seems to work out its acquired 'kinks' of its own accord, except when what is ideologically ham-handed gums up the works. The record shows us that a society may get on just fine for a while even when out of whack, but eventually, as the stresses pile on, the being out of whack will do it in. Yes, and 'religion poisons everything' - or so I believe someone famous who recently died is credited with saying. Alright then, double fine. And I suppose it follows that we must learn to live without religion. Any suggestions? I can certainly do without the infantilisms of Jesus loves me, yes I know (which I venture to say has a lot more to do with narcissism than with religion in any true sense). For all that, I do not see how it can be argued that religion does not speak to a very deep-seated need in our psyches to make sense of things; to even go so far as to 'order the cosmos'; and because science may answer for the intellect but does not do much for the soul (it cannot deal with the soul because it cannot, on its own terms, admit of its existence); and because art - through its having become little more than a career option and a commodity-making machine, and this would include poetry - only fails the 'sacred', then I predict - dangerous that, this making predictions - I submit that the need in question, unaddressed in any genuine sense, will, in time, spawn monsters. As simple as that. It is arguable that those monsters are already arrived. History, even recent history, is chockfull of such occurrences as those monsters who do not, as such, object to your having life, though they are blood-thirsty enough; just that your existence should profit them. At any rate, one cannot mouth the word sacred and, willynilly, one is in the realm of the sacred. What is sacred may or may not come about in all sorts of ways: a fallen meteor may find itself of a sudden an object of worship while a sacred mount may require centuries before it can enjoy the benefits of veneration. One might abuse the word sacred in respect to the game of baseball and yet, not really offend against the spirit of the sacred, but to suggest that nothing is, ever was, or ever can be imbued with whatever it is we might mean by the word sacred is a species of spiritual suicide. It is what the poet ought to be doing among other things: reminding the public that certain things in life are, indeed, sacred, and to ignore the fact is to put oneself in very serious peril. But it is balance you wanted, am I right? Well then, the Uffizi - or art gallery. On the one hand, you have da Vinci's Annunciation. Cold, February day. Not a tourist in sight. On the other hand, you have Titian's Venus. (Venus with Cupid, Dog and Partridge.) Which it is a portrait of a woman who has ministered unto herself. As per London Lunar: "The sacred and the profane in the same space. So far apart in theme, and yet totally entwined. Made absolute sense." And when I remark that I have just come across a little write-up of the painting and it seems that the writer could care less about the woman and is enthralled with the dog, London Lunar merely observes: "Ah, English. Must be an English critic." Balance restored— Feb 8, 2012: So I rant and rave a while in my scribblings, and the sinking feeling in my gut tells me that, as an exercise, it is only indulgence of a low order: it contributes nothing to anything. You ought to be thanking me for sparing you a for instance. But even with the pertinent facts pretty well established, that we cannot handle a civilized discussion in respect to climate change gives rise to the following question: how then can we expect to field a conversation to do with God or No-God or whether a purely secular world will free of us all the evils that have beset our species since we started barbecuing the food we eat? When the general in Apocalypse Now (in a briefing session early on in the flick) suggests that all is conflict - rationality versus irrationality, good versus evil, and that 'good' does not always win out, he is only stating what we always suspected since we were tadpoles in the backyard having at bicycles sans training wheels, Heraclitus and Schopenhauer coursing through our neural networks like the Goodships Lollipops, and spiritually the general is closer to the Greek poets than he is to an army field manual—But you can have all that - all those neural networks and all the cool fetish items that go with them, including your personalized Charlie Rose sweatshirt. The fact that I continue to write poetry, however beside the point it is in a world that cannot tolerate a mystery, let alone an instance of silence for a duration of time lasting longer than a nanosecond, indicates that I still believe in the presence of the muse in human affairs. It certainly beats saying I have pressing matters of a sociological, economic, political and psychological nature, as well as overweening notions of careerism, bearing down on the seat of my sentience each time I feel a poem coming on like some episode of epilepsy, like some hissy fit, and, eh voila, I have wandered the wilderness and come home to my very own Identity Crisis. So then, yes, I would rather go about 'musified' than be one step removed from the awesome majesty of 'I exist, therefore I am a computer or some such—' And you still want to leave metaphors to lab techs and scientists? And yet, what makes us think that poets will prove any braver than those Dicks and those Janes already far gone in their knuckling under to those movers and shakers for whom the only realities are profit maximization and the techie means of achieving that end? Never mind that a lot of people will have to continue to die in obscene numbers so that this or that CEO might obtain his or her bonus—I do not much care for the word spirituality either; it only encourages specious thought in glassy-eyed flakes who require no additional encouraging, but even there, to be asked to inhabit a world in which everyone is convinced one is, at last, blessedly free of error such as one has known error - how will it stack up any differently from how it has stacked up these past forty thousand years? Feb 7, 2012: Circa 450 B.C. or thereabouts, and Rome lurched and careened and more or less wobbled from one political crisis to the next, and it was seemingly par for the course: there was no waking up to any other reality. At one point in the proceedings, the tribunes - to be loosely defined as men who spoke for the interests of the commons as opposed to those of patricians - so as to defuse an 'explosive' situation, interceded in favour of the latter, which only caused the patricians to round on the consuls who represented their interests and who claimed to govern for the general population as a whole. It just goes to show that, when it comes to appeasing the one per centers, do not expect gratitude—Now and then, as I scour the news for tea leaves and ill winds, I only receive for my pains a certain knowledge incommoding my gut, or that 'things' are far from bottoming out yet; and while it is not difficult to see what the plutocrats are up to, however hazy the attributions are as to what constitutes a plutocrat (and perhaps it is all about a portion of the populace that would have itself matter more than any other portion) it is not all that easy to make out who the 'good guys' are, if there are any. That is to say, anyone who expects a leg up from the economy, the media circus, the 'virtual' world, and all the ways in which the economy, the media circus and the virtual world are interlocked, is in collusion with Babylon, as am I. There is no other way of putting it. Or else, one has to accept then that certain personages at the top of the food chain who have a better grasp of certain realities than you will ever have, really do have your interests at heart, and that a few misunderstandings and errors in judgment have unfortunately given rise to - well, you may complete the sentence. Morning. Nikas. The radio is blissfully silent. Perhaps Alexandra the waitress has forgotten that the thing exists. I am all for such amnesia. I left E and Labrosse to their own devices, last evening, as I passed on a viewing of the finale of season two of The Wire, what with the cold raging through my body. Even so, used to regarding myself as a stalwart, after initially detecting something akin to guilt in me in regards to my absence, I stumbled across the odd nerve ending that was being tickled by a condition of mind known as guilty pleasure—Well then, another chicken and egg question. What comes first, the brain or the brain when it comes to guilt and guilty pleasure? In other words, apply this or that surgical procedure to the organ of which we speak, and one deals a fatal blow to the bogeyman of guilt; unless, that is, as per Plato, guilt is one of the Eternal Forms antecedent to the human species. But no, not very likely—So then, those of you out there who wish to dispense with the gods and all the attendant superstitions and the encumbering mythologies once and for all, now you have your methodology. You have always had it, even you bible thumpers. God knows you are succeeding, to judge by what passes for sentience in the public arena— Feb 6, 2012: This morning, I am very much a dull boy. This state of affairs began coming on at some point yesterday, a cold in the works. I had met up with Labrosse in Nikas who was entertaining a woman the name of whom I should know but have forgotten, Labrosse treating her to wine that she was drinking with a pronounced Calvinist flourish: the look on her countenance suggested that drinking wine is not the sort of thing she does everyday. However, the fact that she is a perennial art student has not prevented her from articulating the odd intelligent observation in respect to art and the art world and all the human flora and fauna that inhabit such departments of the spirit. Meanwhile, nearby, the dreaded hockey groupie was well-established at her booth. And with what blind optimism was she directing at Labrosse her off-the-wall patter, whether or not the man wished to find himself in communications with a tease. "The team's playing with heart, you know—Really playing with heart—Maybe that's why it's winning—" She getting giddy with herself, Labrosse was unimpressed with her powers of analysis. And yet it has to be said that the rotter encourages her, and I do not believe it has anything to do with chivalry in respect to her harrowing loneliness, the kind of loneliness that can pervade, all by itself, an entire metropolitan area—Apropos of some chance remark regarding economic downturns, the art student began describing life in Oshawa where her parents live. Would it be fair to characterize the municipality as a GM town? "Company town, anyway," said Labrosse, "one trick pony." We were not an inspired threesome. And after a bit of this and a bit of that, discourse concluded on a satiric note, as when the art student, her observation based on some theatrical skit she had recently seen, defined art as anything that is useless. (The inflection in her voice hinted at 'tit-useless', but temptations resisted are a test of character.) For instance, you don't have any use for that crockery in your cupboard, well, now it's art. Ditto for those used tires in the basement—Later, I took a gander at the Super Bowl, expecting it to be a much more obnoxious affair than it came off, the usual bombast that one associates with the spectacle seemingly muted. But then I was moving back and forth between channels and so, may have missed some of the more stellar moments of full spectrum dominance. Even so, the half-time show was positively silly and thoroughly bankrupt as a moral force, shilling for I am not sure what - world peace, was it? Mr Hedges, the Pulitzer-prize winning journo, writes this morning of black-clad anarchists crashing the occupy-everything party and pissing on the parade. He is not best pleased. Ah, punked by nihilism. Here in Nikas, the Albanian waitress with the startling eyes finds my poetry 'deefeecult', and yet, she is well-educated, too well-educated to be mopping restaurant floors with such a besetting mix of I'm not so full of myself that I can't mop the odd floor or two and rage. Enter Irish harpy and retinue about whom I have not written in a long while. She, in case you have forgotten, was born to complain and nitpick and harass, and yet, it has to be said that she is one of those people who are necessarily 'store-minders' and 'standard-setters', as in, why is it so difficult to have a clean restroom? Because the night shift are lazy bastards—Husband was born for a kind of martyrdom to spousal devotion that is, in reality, nothing more and nothing less than a path of least resistance. Cost-effective. Just that, in matters of the soul, one must always operate at a loss or find oneself drifting along with such clichés as the living dead—Now pass me a tissue, would you, and otherwise, keep your distance— Feb 5, 2012: Perhaps he is feeling lonesome or otherwise put upon, but AB flings his hat into the ring with a certain abandon, noting all the while that girls are a lot like people. Damning, no? Or so he puts it. One imagines what he has got on his plate, and one leaves it at that, lest one call into question his good standing in the community. And yet, when it comes to 'fluff' and romantic entanglement, the best scene in a movie like Moonstruck is that one in which the old man and his pack of dogs wind up howling at the moon somewhere by the East River—Morning. Nikas. It is on again, this battle between Alexandra the waitress and myself. (Eddie the cook-owner, with all the moral compunction of an emergency session of the UN Security Council, won't lift a finger to restore justice to this otherwise fine establishment.) The hostilities have to do with the radio and its decibels. Virgin Radio? Virgin, is it? Suggesting what? Integrity? There is nothing maidenly about it. I am hearing some toothless hag gone clear out of her mind. Once music was music and pop had nothing to do with 'popular'— And once again the Crazy Professor inundates my inbox with his advertisements for hisself such as present him cutting a ravishing figure; or that he is Socratic and a rebel, to boot, taking on mighty academic establishments hither and yon - and, fine, I am all for that, just that I suspect underneath it all the man is actively seeking to regain tenure with all the penchant for whimsy as had an Elagabalus, one of the more 'eccentric' Caesars. The man may have the best intentions in the world when it comes to the pursuit of knowledge with or without a little sun worship thrown in and general desportment amidst whoopee cushions; and I may share some of his political outlook, but the proof is in the pudding when it comes to art; especially when it comes to 'awt' and related matters, and the man has not a clue; is, in this respect, a paid up member in full of such coteries as constitute the oppressing party, a constituency of megalomaniacs as deem themselves to have a finger on this or that pulse when all they have a hold of is some love-handle or another of the public exchequer—In any case, my hypnotic gesturing in the general direction of the psyche of Alexandra the waitress is availing me not a whole lot. The decibels, if anything, are creeping onwards and upwards. I am bowled over by the sheer inanity of the voice of one Bryan Adams; that, and Nevada and Romney's little triumph there and a slavering P.M. Carpenter - Distinguished Political Commentator to the south of here - rubbing his hands in anticipation of the electoral debacle looming on the not so distant horizon; that one in which he contends the Grand Old Party will either self-herniate or blow itself to unretrievable smithereens. Perhaps I am unable to see the self-assured, smiling countenance of the creature known as BUSINESS AS USUAL even when it is parked scant millimeters from my mug, but as these are the sort of times when everything is written in quivering Jell-O, not union shop concrete, let alone stone, extra degrees of difficulty are in play when it comes to what the future will be, que sera sera— Feb 4, 2012: I should know better than to think I can take a word as freighted with baggage as 'culture' and run with it for a little while (as per the post previous) without encountering an overpowering urge to drop the thing at some point in the proceedings and relieve myself of a burden—Accordingly, we had an evening of it, last night. Whether or not we reenacted the Feast of Solomon, what with its 22,000 oxen and any number of fatted fowl, remains open to question, but - yes - we had an evening of it. We began having an evening of it at the residence of Literary Thug #1 with a proper sit-down dinner in famiglia. Somewhere in the proceedings he had occasion to observe that he had thought himself so clever, selecting Etta James' I Last as his wedding song, only to discover that, as far as wedding songs go, it is one of the most popular— So much for trend-setting—We feasted. Labrosse then instructed a rather precocious boy child of twenty months in the art of building bridges whereas, on the guitar, I was shamed by a girl all of twelve as she performed Blackbird with noteworthy aplomb. We moved on to my apartment - Labrosse, Literary Thug and I - where we met up with MH and were later joined by the Moesian and the contessa. The contessa is very Italian and very French—Trilingual and, I suspect, impish—Labrosse, in good form, began reminiscing about his parents and how close they were to one another in the course of their long marriage, and how little they complained of all the children they brought into the world - eleven of them - and the struggle to keep food on the table. In a sense, or so he seemed to be saying, he was only just now, at the advent of his seventh decade, beginning to understand what it was they had and what he had been given as a result—This homage of a kind on his part led to a discussion of how, in his opinion, the Scots and the Irish and the Italian and the French in this neck of the woods all seem to find it easy enough to establish common ground as opposed to how it seemed to go between the French and those Brits, plenty of whom, even now, here, there and other places, are still doing their version of noblesse oblige. MH attempted to account for this common ground by way of religion - or Catholicism, a cue for Literary Thug to bring up his Protestant upbringing and how it was that the 'emotions', as it were, did not get a lot of play in his family life, though 'duty' did and 'ethical concerns' and such. Not a touchy-feely lot— I riffed ever so briefly on seventh-generation Canadians, some of whom I have known and lived to tell the tale—The Moesian kicked in, saying that in Mexico one often comes across 'little kids' in the streets late at night; and one is tempted to conclude that there is no parentage for them, no home life, when, in fact, theirs is a culture in which prescribed bedtimes do not figure much. Which is how MH was reared - on the farm in Catholic Ohio. Which explains somewhat the imp in her—Which led to a discussion (do not ask me how we got there) of honour killings, now that a trial is in the news in respect to such deeds—Which led to a remark on my part, by way of a detour through early Roman history, and how a certain 'honour killing' had a great bearing on the political battles between the patricians and the plebs. In the end, so as to kick a can down the road and break up a political as well as a legislative stalemate that was crippling Rome, and even if was no ultimate solution, recourse was had to the 'law'; or that law, as such, eventually trumps everything, even God. Which, so Labrosse pointed out, is how the Canadian judicial system seems to be dealing with the honour killings: as a matter of law, not 'culture'. Labrosse: "Between the corpse and the cause there is no rope—" Well, at this juncture a few quizzical looks did manifest—Time to give this line of inquiry a rest—So we picked up a couple of guitars, Literary Thug and I, and managed to effect something that resembled music. Conversation continued to flow, even if the Moesian interjected a lyric or two of song from Love in Vain (the train pulled into the stay-shun), addressing them to no one in particular; and Labrosse, dressed all in black, began to look suspiciously like the devil doing an imitation of Johnny Cash. He did depart with quite the smile on his mug. The Moesian and the contessa seemed awfully content at the moment of their leave-taking. MH had the look of the cat who swallowed something or other—Literary Thug thundered as to why it always has to be something or other—Why can't we be more precise?—Even so, he appeared to be in a state of mood-uplift as he clambered out into the good night. No one had paid the slightest attention to me when, for one deranged moment, I had sought some opinion as to what 'culture' is and is not - I was not asking for encyclopedic knowledge - just a passing commentary or two - and all I had got for my trouble was an uh, oh, fill his glass with something, anything, and shut the effer up— Feb 3, 2012: I dreamed, last night, that I set a few critics straight on poetry in general and related cultural matters. My goodness, how I managed to get them to sit still long enough to hear me out defies my comprehension. But in any case, it escapes me now what it was I said to them in the particular. Perhaps I said that I have never liked this notion that we make up culture as we go along. It bespeaks a deep and dangerous ignorance of what culture is; that the essence of any culture is, like poetry, indefinable, and yet, there it is in one's face. One embraces it; one rebels against it; one shrugs and sips one's Turkish coffee, as one will do twenty years down the road, provided one is around to do so. To tear a culture from the heart and mind of a person is akin to ripping out his or her intestines. In other words, one tends to take the culture one was born into and raised in for granted, but one will certainly know its absence, especially when that absence occurs through some catastrophe or other—This making up culture as we go along so as to suit, so as to justify this or that whim of the moment - it is nothing more than market forces behind the curtains of which various Wizards of Ozzes count their proverbial gains, be they critics or bankers or artists on the make. Phlimphlammery. On the other hand, cultures are not static, never have been. Nor are they eternal. They do, for one reason or another, get trifled with, become uprooted. They are suppressed; they have even been obliterated from all consciousness; but the consequences of such a disappearance are real enough. One is deracinated, set at the margins of life. Sometimes, what is at the margins becomes part and parcel of the heart of the matter, as did the fact of jazz, if not the musicians who performed the stuff. Perhaps what used to be signified by 'alienation' describes that odd peregrination of an art that projects far beyond where its practitioners stand, and then alienation got to be a buzz word at parties and a driver of bad poems—Rootlessness then. But, again, even urban blues had its roots, did not just mushroom up from nowhere—Troubador poetry—Babylon—To say that culture is the product of an 'organic' process, as is any plant, is to state something that is true enough; but it is also to render rather abstract and impersonal what was concrete; was so much a part of all one's senses that to discuss it is almost always beside the point. Culture is more than the music one listens to, more than the latest hit parade or best-seller list; more than a quarrel as to how much Puccini an opera company should indulge; it is how one thinks and feels and loves and eats and takes life and writes a poem; and so forth and so on. Why am I on about this? Morning, Nikas, and I am sitting here shaking my head, a spew of disconnected thoughts to follow. Alexandra the waitress is folding napkins while a Greek metropolitan in black religious garb holds forth on satellite TV. Eddie the owner-cook is in the kitchen yelling the word frites into his cell phone. Freedom is precious, but playing at 'culture' is mindlessness and nothing but. There is no avante-garde. There has not been one for years. Picasso may have turned the art world inside out, upside down, but he was a Spaniard and, for better or worse, accordingly 'cultured'. Some African figurine might have influenced his art (I don't know, did such a figurine work its magic in his eyes?), but how he chose to interpret the object did not make him ein Berliner—I had better cease and desist—In Livy's history of early Rome, circa 450 B.C., the commons and the soldiery have taken matters into their own hands, 'occupying' the Sacred Mount while the patricians get out of Dodge. It is an attempt to force the senate into actually making a decision about something; that is to say, what is to be done with those decemvirs who have co-opted the political process at the expense of the plebs, even if that process was not all that healthy or balanced in the first instance? It is too complicated a story to relate in a few sentences, but as I read along, I view the current occupy everything movements to the south of here and elsewhere in the world in the light of a 'commons' about to find the end of their respective tethers. Tonight, a number of persons of my acquaintance and I will reenact the Feast of Solomon. There may or may not be reports forthcoming— Feb 2, 2011: Morning. Nikas. Off-kiltre just now, I had every intention of venting; only I will wind up remonstrating with myself should I vent—I also meant to speak of the interiors of taxicabs as being a kind of sacred space, inasmuch as the passenger, en route somewhere to who knows what end has stepped outside his or her routine briefly, and is looking at the world with a different set of eyes. This is even true to some extent for those people who practically live in taxicabs: frequent flyers of all persuasions, and socialites and hookers and druggies, not to mention the cabbies themselves. Alright - not much of an argument—It is snowing in Montreal-NDG. Languidly. Even so, Alexandra the waitress is, at the moment, having to deal with the customer (not me) whom she most hates to serve - a fellow who is the neediest-whiniest fellow in all the world—I suppose he has his reasons. Last night, I had a vague urge to watch a Figgis flick while working through a few exercises on the guitar. However the flick - one of those split-screen jobs, the screen divided into quarters, count-em, those petit-fours - began to mightily irritate me, and I will put up with a lot when it comes to flicks. It struck me then that when one is young and concerning oneself with 'art', one wants to get at what's happening, man, but that, in the course of one's aging, something shifts and one wants to get at what happened, and without a whole lot of fuss and bother and extra degrees of difficulty. What was the movie achieving, if anything? Or so I asked myself. The ham-handed answer: the fetishization of the personal. The voyeur has had his or her set of eyes doubled. Trouble is, none of the characters on view are terribly noble. Ah, here's the thing: they're just kind of - human, you know, it happens. And verily, people might be hollow at their cores, just so many self-automated machines running through such options as appetite and need and 'desire' and various aggressions bring to the table; but, come on, are people that excruciatingly and vacuously and appallingly empty? Oh dear. Really? Switching channels brought me to Peru and some jungle tribe once thoroughly isolated from the contemporary world now subject to the predations of all that would exploit the environs for this or that resource. More switching, and I was delivered unto the world of 'nature'. All will be henceforth explained. Sexed up nature show equals now I guess I must know something as nature has told me so. How different is any of this from those old Sunday school jingles, those that could drive a person mad: Jesus loves me, yes I know—In any case, I have come to view these sexed-up nature shows as obscenities. The one in question was a doozy. But before I get into it, one more click of the channel button, and there I was somewhere in Africa, men through primitive means engaged in slaughtering cows on an industrial scale. Is the whole world an endless loop of carnage? What has gotten so out of whack that this butchery is necessary? Or so I asked myself, wondering if I was, indeed, only born just yesterday. And one of the workers was even heard to say: "What is flesh and blood will suffer—" And just in case we here in La-La Land did not get it, and even as he intimated that he recognized he was not particularly 'civilized', he repeated his mantra treating with flesh and blood—The nature show then. Its celebrity of the moment: a great white shark, carcass thereof, one suspended from a block and tackle apparatus. Curious feature: its stomach was in its mouth. Doughty scientist explains it thus: shark was trapped in a net. Shark panicked. Because shark must keep moving in order to breathe. Breathing is effected by the passage of water through the gills such as do the business of extracting oxygen—Doughty scientist loves sharks. Fine. But there seems something grotesque about all this happening on camera, all this tough love, love of—What, precisely, is being loved?—So there is the grotesquely dead shark. More scientists in orange protective gear. Radioactive beastie? S&M? Well, they are going to flense, flay, gut the thing; that is, they would dissect it with some end in mind, and we are going to know stuff. Fine. We are genuinely going to know stuff. But to this sort of knowing come about in this sort of way, I think I prefer the old superstitions, the old Indian reverence for the bear or the buffalo just killed - and for food and hides et cetera; and that a 'noble' death has made life possible; and that one doesn't crap on one's nest—And then Mr Dawkins, the misty-eyed fellow with the cushy Brit accent that suggests that, yes, life is kind of sacred, but evolution is sacreder, as it is all there is (and, who knows, the man just might be right on that account; but that the way he crushes his vowels and consonants with that velvety voice of his, it suggests he must regard himself as awfully sacred, too), he extols the exquisite design of the shark - look at the miracle that nature has wrought, while on the other channel, humans - bona fide top of the food chain - they keep hacking away at the cows with machetes in a state of barely-controlled mania; and, yet another channel-flip and voila: Egyptian soccer riot - some 70 persons dead; and, all of it, all those channels and all that carnage - it brings to mind Juvenal the poet-satirist and how much he loathed his exile in Egypt two thousand years ago, as he saw the people in situ as unhinged; but that, life was just as brutal in ways peculiar to itself at the centre of the empire, or Rome. I surrendered. I might as well have been the shark that got itself enmeshed in a net, bringing up my own stomach. But here's Letterman to return us to sanity—Who's on first? Yet another comedian? So all the Sarah Palins have destroyed the Grand Old Party or the Republican wing of a two-party system. So all the Dawkins tell the 'believers' that there is no god, and since, there is no god, there is no sitting at the Right Hand of God, just that Dawkins and the like fairly ooze with being 'elect'; and that there is so much obscenity in the world and zealotry, and drone warfare, capitalism in a state of rot, deracination reinvented on a daily basis, ought not surprise me or anyone. I could have saved myself a lot of grief by deep-sixing the idiot box—Could have just sat there and smugly plunked away on the old guitar— Feb 1, 2012: A little bird directs my ear to a certain furor that has apparently erupted in merry old England, to do with an eminence in the poetry world and Carol Ann Duffy who may or may not be considered as 'eminent', I have no effing idea. Just that the former has, it would seem, deemed the latter as having all the savoir faire of Mills and Boon, or, for those of you who wish for the homegrown analog, Harlequin Romance. I can only assume the former meant to effect a judgment in respect to the latter's verse. Perhaps it is the most important bit of business to have come down the poetry turnpike since Ezra Pound got his mitts on Eliot's Wasteland. God knows that a great many squalls since then - trumpeted as a 'game-changers' - have been so much street-theatre akin to the Executive Branch making up reality as it goes along. On the other hand, I am also given to understand that, as 'news, this is old news, a month stale now; and it may be nothing more than a few bored journos looking for a splash. Well, the politics of literature as well as the politics of contending personalities always fascinate - at least, I am fascinated. But is this politics any different in essence from that which one sees played out in the current primary campaign? What is the relation of the 'politics' to truth? Is 'truth' something one can spread on one's toast, let alone sample in a body of verse? Steady on, we are not going to get post-post-post-modern here, are we? Whatever the case for or against 'truth', PPPM (post-post-post-modern) is turf incapable of providing sufficient nutrients for even thalapsi arvense to attain critical mass, stinkweed to you, kind madams and good sirs. In any case, I know what it means to hold with an unpopular opinion in regards to literature. One may as well have some overt opprobrium emblazoned on one's forehead like Nazi or banker or pedophile or Lawrence Welk. Worse than harbouring an unpopular opinion is to be in possession of a genuine opinion as opposed to being in a state of mucking about with feints and theatrical plumage designed to communicate a great deal, everything that is save for what it is genuinely on one's mind. It is the sort of game poet-critics play. It is all about quick feet and follow-through—How does one keep one's sanity in such a roiling 'moral' climate, if 'moral', as such, is not the over-stretching of a once perfectly good word? Is Current President merely a lackey for monied interests? Does he really care, I mean really give a toss about the health of the republic? Does the fate of the souls of Regular Jane and Average Joe exercise his consciousness just before he dozes off at night? What of the more histrionic permutations of Regular Jane and Average Joe all of whom must keep moving like sharks in cultural seas lest the culture wars die down to a dull roar and Cachet depart the pavilion? Does the groupie create the star or the star the gobsmacked? Chicken and egg? Last night I dreamed that various entities were vying for a single parking space. This little dust-up transmogrified itself into contest between a jazz crooner and a rock group each claiming to have authentic bragging rights to the Keys of the Kingdom or that which might deliver us from our proverbial 40 in the most barren of outbacks. Morning. Nikas. The pen just ran dry, oh dear. Eddie - owner-cook - to the rescue. Provided of course that my use of his uptown squib-maker will bring him fame and fortune. Indeed, he taps his foot. We are waiting on you—Waiting, no doubt, on my magic to effect its thing—In Livy's early Rome, things have come to a head with those decemvirs clamping down on the plebs; with them throwing a spanner in the usual way of doing business between class and political faction—Voices are heard declaring that the struggle will be bitter—And in America—Alright then: Old Europe if you must. In which There are four classes of men who pay the debts of the state; the proprietors of the land, those engaged in trade, the labourers and artificers, and, in fine, the annuitants either of the state or of private people—Montesquieu—Perhaps the immediately above is nothing more than the reflection of a by-gone antiquity. If not, then surely the following is, as per Socrates in Plato's Republic: —Socrates: Then beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity—I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for folly?— |
Jan 31, 2012: The Wire, again, two nights running. In company was E tickled by the sight of Bunk passing himself off as a high-life, deep-sea fisherman whilst he and McNulty engaged in poh-leese work: surveillance from a charter boat in the Baltimore harbour, their target drugs and the sex trade and smuggling. Then she was beside herself when Omar, her favourite thug, appeared in some other scene, he sporting a shirt the logo of which read I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM. Is the whole enterprise for her just more pop culture? Could one have pulled a switch and inserted The Mikado into the DVD player and it make no never mind to her? But why Labrosse should have suddenly launched into Camus and Sisyphus beats me. Question: has the financier been hanging around poets too long? Just that E, at his mention of Sisyphus, pretended to know what he was on about when it was clear she had no idea (she thought he was mispronouncing decisiveness). Somewhat telling, that—I have come to a part in my reading of Livy's history of early Rome when, political experiment, the decemvirs were hit upon as a way of cleaning up a mess. That is, a body of ten men, or magistrates, were selected to codify Roman law such as it was, and the process apparently included the participation of the commons, it having been the desire of the plebeians that the codification be carried out in the first place. To render a complicated story simple, everything was then hunkydory and ticketypoo until the next wave of decemvirs ventured on a power grab and got heavy-handed; and they did not just satisfy themselves with the cancellation of Joe Blow's right of appeal, but that they were rounding up people in the streets and having them executed for good measure— It was the order of the day, the day being roughly 450 B.C. or thereabouts. Well, do you see where this is going? Sure, you do. While my baby walks the streets of Baltimore—Yes, you see where this going. Amongst other things, Cruelty had its reward, and often enough, a victim's property was turned over to his murderer. The decemvirs' young toadies were easily corrupted by such pay, and, far from making any attempt to check their masters' brutal conduct, openly rejoiced in it; for them, personal immunity in crime was a more agreeable thing than national liberty—Morning. Nikas. It is the beginning of Alexandra's weekly waitressing shift. She brings with her all the reality TV she has been watching in her downtime. American Idol and such. In any case, all that she brings comes wafting into this venue on the strength of the mood she now institutes here with the same intensity, I suppose, as her distant forbears once accorded their worship of Artemis or Dionysus. Earlier, I was fooling around on my 'classical' guitar, attempting to recapture a lovely little study by Sergi Vicente that I lost, as I had been playing it with a 'vulgar' technique. Trouble is, a proper application of technique has chased away all the notes from my head and I have mislaid the music's overall shape, my 'picking' hand with the ring finger now in the mix so much limp spaghetti—The upshot of all this being, by way of a near non sequitur, is that I was once again presented with a kind of thorough-going heartache; or that there is so much beautiful music out there I wish to play and will never have the time to master—There is, for example, John Fahey's Irish Setter, another one of those deceptively simple compositions of his balanced between a string of blues notes and a handful of - what can I call them? - partial chords signifying a 'classical' and quite solemn passage such as any of the composing B's would not have sneezed at, you know, Beethoven and the like. Poetry? You mean that art by which too many of its practictioners contrive to draw people through the keyholes of their minds, and those people are never heard from again?— Jan 30, 2012: Thistle, incommunicado of late, given to a spell of silence in which he figured he had nothing to say but everything to teach, considers that, as per Marx, the epic - as the Greeks went about making it - is an impossibility in these times as the economic conditions are not appropriate to such endeavour, let alone that we are, in some existential sense, no longer in our childhood. The other kicker is the fact that science satisfies or claims to satisfy all our needs in regards to how animate and inanimate entities actually behave in this world and go about their business and so, who needs fanciful tales of how the gods made men? In other words, reality, as such, did not come gushing forth from Zeus's left temple, or was it thigh? So now there is probably going to be an exam and I will most likely flunk it—For all that, there is, in my estimation, no epic unless it includes the point of view of the gods (no matter that they are but human constructs); without these rather feckless sadists coming in and going out of the picture seemingly at whim, there is no Iliad or Odyssey, just episodism - if I may coin a rather creepy sounding word - and overheated melodrama and not a little narcissism on the part of mortals. In the meantime, I continue rereading Livy's history of early Rome. Perhaps it is nothing but coincidence, but my, Livy's account of the endless patrician-plebeian stand-off does, indeed, dovetail with the wild man wild woman stuff of this current election year, primaries and all, and the ruckus that is the so-called 99 per centers versus the 1 per cent foamage at the top—Livy, of course, and I am only supposing, would have much rather preferred to wine and dine on the patrician side of the ledger, the patricians, for the most part, being better spoken and better loved by the gods; but then, how else was the 'mob' going to get itself heard except by 'din' and 'clamour', necessitating a certain want of decorum—And this in light of the fact that Labrosse, semi-retired financier and business counsellor, and E, ingenue, and I, sat around, last night, taking in more episodes of The Wire, second season, as close as we are going to get to 'epic' in anything like a true sense of the word. And here was E, tickled by the briefly-lived spectacle of Bunk shinnying his ample arse for the delectation of his colleagues on the force, his Poh-leese. Ah, light-hearted moment. She lives for those. Not many of them in The Iliad. Certain pleasant personages of my acquaintance allowed me to pretty much make a fool of myself, the other night, on the guitar and with the new penchant for singing, or breaking into voice of a kind. I am terrified as to what extent I may be in their spiritual debt, even if we otherwise litterateured and gossiped; even if I was put under a gag order, forbidden to speculate on a few rather shocking items of interest—We wound up at Maz Bar, defending a pool table against all comers, so much so we were reduced to playing amongst ourselves, little tin gods aloof to the concerns of hackers, their molls lounging about bored to effing tears—London Lunar seems to have had lunch with the queen. Well, he dreamed he had. "Easy to get on with, she is." Mr Hedges, however, Pulitzer-prize winning journo that he is, in his weekly reflections, considers that Canada isn't what it used to be. 'Fraid so— Jan 28, 2012: Once in a while I come across a sentence in my reading that tells me that on its account I now know everything. Most of the time there is nothing remarkable in or about the sentence - it's just there; it flashes like a strip of neon advising the world of untold delights on the premises, however shabby the reality. I have just read one such sentence in A History of The Early Church, to wit: In character Diocletian was a rude but firm supporter of heathenism of the cruder camp type—And then, a few sentences on, and one has the rub so far as it affects history down to our day: Two courses lay open for a vigorous ruler, either to force it (the church gathering critical mass) into submission and break its power, or enter into alliance with it and thus secure political control of the growing organism— Some might break into one of those eureka-yells here - that there it is, Miss Molly, the point where it all began to go wrong: if Diocletian created martyrs, Constantine, throwing his lot in with the Christians, made for bureaucrats in a category of it was ever thus—Morning. Nikas. Montreal-NDG or the sidewalk directly out front is all ice and black moon pebble. Yes, really. Inside, the toaster just had a little explosion, a little super-nova episode such as caused Alexandra the waitress to catch her breath. London Lunar wants I should turn my ear to Piazzola's Oblivion as rendered up by a certain Kremer. He despairs of our 'literature'. So easy, in respect to it, to appear fearless. All one has to do is shift one's posture ever so slightly while in the heat of an interview; cross the right knee as opposed to the left; suggest that the one nostril is quite capable of flaring independently of the other, and reputations begin dropping from the sky like so many houses of cards. Diocletian the peasant-born autocrat gave up his grip on power and took to raising cabbages. I have always liked this about the man who was, otherwise, as lethal as they came; and I have always liked to believe that his insistence on oriental pomp at court (he had, for all practical purposes, undercut Rome as the capital of the empire by doing business from Nicomedia - somewhere in the Balkans) was purely ironic. Current President on the links - does he have it in mind to 'channel' Eisenhower? Jan 27, 2012: I began reading Livy's The Early History of Rome backwards, yesterday, because I was feeling perverse, and because I have already it read it front to back, as it were, but quite a while ago. So then, I read the final 'book' first, and then started in on the next to the last book and came across the line - in a lengthy set-speech put in the mouth of Canuleius the reformer who, among other things, was attempting to have the law forbidding intermarriage between patrician and plebeian ranks annulled - that 'rape' is a patrician habit. In any case, of a sudden I had images of the Republican primary TV debates in mind, and I cannot otherwise tell you why—Touché - as a word - was probably not going the rounds in the Forum in those days, but the patricians deserved it, those upper-crusters expressing horror at the notion of plebeian presumption to their family honours and the consequent dilution of bloodlines, not to mention the conceivable offense against the gods that intermarriage would entail—For all that the spectacle of a Romney or Gingrich presidency is frightening enough (and here in Nikas we have just been discussing it - Larry the software entrepreneur and myself), it is more likely that Current President will prevail in his re-election bid; and then, if it is a nightmare scenario one is looking for, either events will more dramatically expose him for his not having been all that he seemed when he came on the scene - as per his left of centre critics, or events will pile on and destroy his presidency, he the victim of bad timing. In either outcome, whatever is left of the spirit of the republic, if anything, will find itself in further jeopardy, more so than if a crazy man does, in fact, win out— Rome may have not been 'democratic' in any sense that we would recognize, but it was certainly 'republican' in temperament; that is to say, the rule of kings was frowned upon by all alike (until the Caesars showed up to put in their innings). In the final book of the history in question there is some compelling reading, indeed, if that is, you do not define compelling as a car chase or a matter of whether or not you should seek sex elsewhere should your spouse come down with a debilitating brain disease. It is the story of daily orders, one thing seeming to lead inexorably to the next, until you have finally got the Gauls inside the walls looking to sack and pillage and rapine—Preceding their arrival, you had the final conquest of Veii, which it was an Etruscan power and rival of Rome all of ten miles away; and you had other notable victories and setbacks all against a backdrop of increasing patrician-plebeian hostilities. Then the thing itself, or the dreaded Gauls - hairy beasts of Rome's worst nightmare. And when the Gauls decided to get down to it and sack in earnest, a decision was made by the Romans to have a small portion of its population hole up on the sacred hill and hang on for as long as possible whilst ex-senators and creaky-kneed aristos and so forth would stall the invaders and in due course die along with those more humble below, though the upper-crusters would cop it, as it were, ensconced in their ivory chairs, their trappings of power. But still, it was something of a gesture of solidarity—Eventually, the Gauls began dying off from 'plague', and at the last minute, one of Rome's heroes who had been in exile, appeared at the gates to save the day. It was Camillus. He saved the day. He gave a speech afterwards along the lines of here's what we might learn from our mistakes, one of which pertained to the Mystery Voice, or that which some citizen claimed to have heard, one night, and that no one took seriously; a voice that had prophesied imminent catastrophe. To expiate the guilt incurred on this account it was Camillus who suggested a shrine be erected to the God of Utterance—Perhaps he had been something of a poet? Larry the software entrepreneur offers to cover my coffee as I have nothing but a twenty on me, a gesture on his part in honour of my being given up to all sorts of mysterious voices, and that he has his own perverse itches to scratch— Jan 26, 2012: I see I scribbled in my notebook something Labrosse had to say, last night, or that lover's quarrels are non-contextual. It seemed brilliant at the time but it appears I mislaid the context in the course of sleep. I do recall that he and E had been discussing French-English English-French translation, how translating either way would be good for E's studies, and I had suggested it might be a bit like practicing scales on the guitar—So much for a spiffing analogy: suddenly they were on about relationships—We were in between episodes of The Wire (second season), and perhaps McNulty's futile attempts to regain the affections of his estranged wife had prompted something in E. And then, when she earlier popped into the liquor store for some wine, it had come up that a young clerk there was quite familiar with Labrosse but was surprised to hear that he was into the aforementioned TV series. "Oh yes," E happily responded, "and I've introduced him to all sorts of things—" What? Like the tender sentiments of de Sade? Glue sniffing? In any case, back to The Wire, she much enjoyed watching Omar having his day in court. She chuckled: he's not really a sociopath—We wound up agreeing, however, that 'unfulfilled' parents often hold their progeny hostage to their lack. It seemed to be what was bestirring E's intellects deep down - or her mother. Labrosse nodded sagely: the unfulfilled. But then his parents had been happy with one another more or less, and there had been lots of progeny, and they had gone out and gotten things done. For all that, E's live-in swain could wish that the apple of his eye would be more forthcoming when it gets 'upset', you know, be a bitch, if need be—Once upon a time the Greeks used to throw the word 'agon' around to denote 'conflict'. We might translate the word as 'competition', though I believe the Greeks had in mind something other than Jeopardy or market forces or name-dropping or 'March Madness', and even if Plato noted that natural relations between Greeks consisted pretty much of war. What was meant perhaps was all of it, the blood, sweat and tears of every aspect of endeavour, including the honour of something well-done. To which, no doubt, the buddhist has his riposte—It is the thinnest of distinctions that separates honour from empty-headed, breast-beating vainglory and all the cant of militarism and else, of 'full spectrum dominance' in the heat of some moment, but there is a distinction on either side of which both tragedies and comedies have their origins. A, the little wretch, at one point in the proceedings, texting from Vancouver, indicated that she missed us guys. Yes, well, us guys are not to be found just anywhere— Jan 25, 2012: There is, I suppose, a distance of sorts that separates Geronimo and Current President in a state of State of the Union speechifying. That look of undying hatred on the countenance of the old warrior that one sees in ancient photographs—The 'yes we can' smile of a nation's Number One cheerleader—Perhaps we are talking light-years. Perhaps we are talking so many romps around a theme park that is the American Experience, if not plain old human experience. There is the assumption that all that history, even Iraq, is behind us, so much this and that having passed under a bridge as so much sewage—Almost from the get-go, Current President, in his address, last night, if not uttering a lie, indulged an untruth however politic. But then, if you are Caesar, you must keep the legions thinking cozily of themselves. R E S P E C T - just a little bit—As for justice in an election year? Haditha, you say? Must we? Or that, as London Lunar has put it, if you can let sleeping dogs lie long enough, you can forget that there ever were dogs—No, I cannot say exactly what it was I listened for, but I did not hear it - just some smidgen of something that would attest to the true state of the union, which it is parlous, and which the official opposition - it had to have been a fluke, as all of the official opposition is more or less phobic and off its nut - got more right. In the meantime, I marvelled over P.M. Carpenter's use of the word 'exsanguinated' in a recent commentary of his to do with the political scene to the south of here, he suggesting, I think, that Gingrich is not really to be feared as there is no depth to the well from which he might draw sufficient support for his presidential bid; but that perhaps Mr Carpenter's discovery of 'exsanguinated' briefly went to his head and turned it ever so slightly, who's to say? I continued to reflect on the import of a book like The Gentle Americans, which it is about Bostonians and a certain literary-social set of a certain era, say, from Geronimo's guerilla days to the last days of JFK, an endearing account written by an endearing daughter of an endearing family that seems to be saying there is no such thing as a family tree being utterly free of the taint of slavery and other evils in the U.S. of A., so then lighten up and live a little, you, too, can be endearing and des grâces, sans affectation, and in deep with Lowstoft dessert plates. And I considered, apropos of nothing of the above, why it is that Lampedusa's novel The Leopard is still my most favourite novel to read, and how PC Italian-style nearly scuppered its ever being published; and that the book does nod a little at the notion that 'progress', as it were, consists of a shell and a nut and a hint of razzle-dazzle—It is a notion that leads one to contemplate futility, if no other great truth is ready to hand for a little contemplation by a contraption situated in a case of bone. Considered how a poet like Daryl Hine never has had and never will have even the ghost of a chance of being taken seriously in this particular darling nation-state, as literature and being literary is all about being hip and cool as having been parlayed into the official record by hipsters and coolsters; and I suppose I could draw up of a list of barnstorming personages who used to go about suckering the stuffy types with so-called outrageous behaviour so as to demonstrate that while having neither brain and nor clue, they knew all the time who and what truly mattered and what was at stake; but who, in their increasing dotages, are, in fact, brainless and clueless, as they have been the greater part of what has been stuffy and all-academe for a long while now. Moribund, still-born literature? Is that all? Or might we consider there is some weight to be remarked upon in a comment whose attribution I will keep to myself: that a certain nation-state the world apparently is to continue finding indispensable to its course of progress on a level (ethical - that ethical, eh?) playing field is a 'dead' polity of no use to anyone— Jan 24, 2012: Nikas, the wretched little place, has failed to open, this morning. One may as well say the sun did not bother to materialize in the east; or that the early church, recognizing that its flock was less than saintly - now that the church had proceeded two or three generations beyond the apostolics and their collective memory of things, decided to cancel observances—In any case, I see that at some point in the course of the past couple of days, I have scribbled in my notebook the following: that every time I decided to get serious about reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom there was always someone around to talk me out of it. Right-wing mystical dreck. Or so it was said. Oh, and that Robert Graves (the poet, you know) was an awfully bizarre fellow whose path crossed with that of T. E. Lawrence who was going to change his name to Shaw, perhaps indicating by this that G.B.Shaw was his spiritual father who had such a heavy editorial hand in the writing of the famous book—Having finished a biography of Lawrence written by a French man Villars, I am left with a view of the subject as an ascetic much given to romanticism; a colonialist who had nothing but contempt for the means of colonialism such as army officers and diplomats; and that he was morbidly vain, what with his horror of and fascination for his own publicity, and that he was one of the first world-wide celebrities of modern times, the fact of which greatly compromised his 'moral' nature and perhaps added a wrinkle and a twist or three to what was his notion of the 'mytho-poetic'. In other words, it seems that Lawrence said something to the effect of any fool can write history, he intended to write an epic, i.e. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I have had it said to me that any fool can write a novel, and I proved the truth of the claim by writing one— Jan 23, 2012: It looks like I came out ahead, yesterday. That I was treated to drinks at Les Voyageurs in the Queen E hotel prior to the reading at the Argo bookshop. Casablanca Rick, my fellow reader, did the treating, and held up his own throughout the course of the evening. (At least we both had sense enough not to sample the notorious martinis.) A couple of books with my name on them managed to sell and I settled a spiritual debt with a young person on the strength of the proceeds, and I chatted up and was chatted up by various other young personages, all of whom, so it seemed to me, had their heads on right, or about as right as can be expected, given the times and place. Perhaps I do not get out often enough, but it struck me as noteworthy. As for Casablanca Rick, my impression is that he is well camouflaged and dug in; and for once, in a conversational exchange, I did not feel I was hollering across some immense chasm on the other side of which was an alien spirit sporting a jersey with a capital P look ma, I'm a Poet, no hands, emblazoned on it. His view of the sort of verse that Seamus Heaney writes is somewhat ironic, which it is about the only view a sentient entity can possibly have. Otherwise, we talked Juvenal—Morning. Nikas. Enter Larry the software entrepreneur - speaking of alien spirits. No, just kidding— Jan 22, 2012: Nikas, and the radio, this morning, quite defeats me with its amplified flimflam, and I have not got the stomach this time around to brawl with Alexandra the waitress over the decibels. They bespeak such a stunning dearth of imagination: the same song looping over and over again for the last forty years. Alright then, the same handful of tunes—But enough to drive a person into the clutches of EDJ. Extreme Dissonant Jazz. Yet another example of a people who assume the battle is won before they even begin to fight? Headlines suggest that Mitt got Newtered in South Carolina, and it strikes me that Newt's rhetoric may ripen into something that will have to be reckoned with, if there is in the country a deep enough well of 'liberal-haters' for him to tap into, liberals being the last portion of the electorate alive to their own internal contradictions and hypocrisies. In other words, in an atmosphere from which 'truth-telling', as such, has been expunged, the 'best lie' is likely to obtain the best traction even if there is plenty of internal contradiction, lots of hypocrisy to be had in any camp right of centre. It is said that what makes Current President 'intelligent' is that he calmly assumes he has the attention of that part of the electorate that still values 'intelligence', or what is often referred to as the 'adult in the room' (as if we are all of us fatally and permanently ambered in juvenalia). But in any case, fine. No worries then, if that so-called intelligence is not a house of cards, a chimera, a something-something that is entirely beside the point. A cautionary note, however: it is one thing to have command of the 'facts'. (The fact is, the numbers say Newt, as such, has not got a chance of going anywhere beyond a few transitory moments of notoriety.) It is quite another to read the sun-disturbed surface of a pretty pond—Politics is as much one as the other— Jan 21, 2012: Is there a scientific way to scrounge for stipends at minus 15, Friday night, outside the liquor outlet? For each degree of temperature falling is there a concomitant rise in degrees of sympathy for the one beating his chest so as to keep a blood flow up? (I suppose one plots the peak hours—) And who coughed up in the most heartfelt manner? She in the stilettos very very carefully picking her way across the ice—Here y'are, darlin'—Labrosse and I were in 'bratwurst', last night. We had a good view of the action where we were seated - by the water machine at which there was a steady stream of clientele, the hole in the wall café an enclave of sorts for expats and various and divers. At any rate, the law of gravity seemed to still apply, though it appeared as if it had to think about it, water slow to emanate from its source, thirsty types getting a little panicky. Politics? The economy? Labrosse, cradling his whisky between thumb and forefinger, considered that things are pretty iffy even yet. Been hanging around Sibum too long. Whereas A, the little wretch, she's in Vancouver, Guildford, Surrey, and expects to be painting her new apartment, today. Yahoo territory with boots on—At least it used to be yahoo territory with boots and bells—She loves it, in any case. Perhaps in recent years an invasion force of yuppies softened things up for Labrosse's mock significant Other —I told him I had come across a discussion between a pair of financiers (financiers - can you believe it? -), one of whom was asking the other: when is it too late to flee a place? His interlocutor cited the 30s, Germany, and how one keeps looking for the 'dramatic' moment that will convince you it's time to get out of Dodge; just that such dramatic moments are rare; it is all incremental; it is almost imperceptible the slide from bad to worse—Whence this conversation? Why, in fact, given where it originated and the year? Financiers? A certain Mr R Symes, writing of Rome, will tell you what financiers did to the empire apparently in behalf of the same—I envision myself singing Skip James's Hard Times Killing Floor Blues and then perhaps reciting the odd Sapphic or two or something from the Eclogues—Relax. I only envision it—We flee our homeland; you, Tityrus, cool in shade— Jan 20, 2012: Morning. Nikas. The radio. The weather outside. Sunshine. Minus twelve or thereabouts. Alexandra the waitress is working her gum. Her weighty mood, at least, permits her some laughter ce matin. Her husband must have got off a witticism from where he is, sneaking a cigarette, girding his loins for what the day might bring; that he used to own a share of the place but that he bailed on the glory and has gone in for construction. On other fronts, parenthood has swallowed up Literary Thug #1, and he has slipped beneath those waves and may never be heard from again, though CNQ, which it is a journal bent on Canadian literary themes, did run a fairly testy piece of his in its most recent manifestation, or the 83rd time its head has popped up out of the foxhole—The Moesian is writing a piece on the death of his mother and the state of mind of his father and the poetry of Yeats and Roethke. It has been at least a century since I have heard those two names in conjunction with one another. London Lunar is on about how it is he has never heard of the T.E. Lawrence book I happen to be reading, the thing authored by a certain Villars, and London Lunar has seen them all, he in the business of buying and selling books, including the Seven Pillars of Wisdom which has its champions and detractors. In any case, I have my excuse to perpetrate the odd quote or two from the book in question, whilst I wonder to some extent about myself, seeing as I woke, this morning, with John Fahey's arrangement of I'll See You in My Dreams in my head and how to best effect some bounce in the rhythm pertaining to that mid-point C barre, 5th fret—Getting on with it, war is always blamed on old men. However: For many men (war's) enslavement is also a liberation. It reveals them to others and to themselves in an unsuspected light, and then generally destroys them. Many of the survivors have great difficulty, when peace comes, in reintegrating themselves into a society in which there is neither brutality nor license. (Well, not so much.) // But while it lasts this Kali gives, in the midst of wastage, improvisation, chaos and danger, extraordinary opportunities to young men. She leaves to leaders of twenty the free ordering of sacred things which in time of peace are in the care of old men: the lives of men, the secrets of State. The second lieutenant, because he is around when the colonel is on leave or has 'flu, assumes the responsibilities of an emperor—Just thought I'd mention it—Then this: Besides, he had a base soul: "I liked the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downward. There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety . . . the force of things, years and an artificial dignity denied it me more and more", but he kept a delicious memory of the days of his youth when he had freely degraded himself, mingling with the canaille and the dregs of Syria and Egypt—And this, in light of Allenby's offensive and war ops everywhere: — Lawrence felt overwhelmingly sad. This crowd, this commotion in a country that was meant for almost religious peace, seemed to him a sacrilege. Something eternal and sacred was being brutally violated and destroyed: "Now the desert was not normal, indeed it was shamefully popular . . . ." It was with a heavy heart that he arrived at Azrak, where he at last found silence and solitude—I put it to you: what else couldn't these words speak for? Jan 19, 2012: More episodes of The Wire (second season), last evening. Labrosse and I met up with E at Nikas, and from there we walked to her place above the music store, she cheerfully indifferent to the cold and the ice, though she worried for us old'uns. Her paramour was to be found in situ, laptop on lap, and he did sit in with us once the hockey game had run its course, Montreal skunked, his despair equal to the team's disgrace. He had corrected me. I mentioned something about the Canadiens having traded away one of its brighter lights, and he said, oh no, good riddance. The player had not been scoring. The player 'sucked'. Was a windbag. Always running off at the mouth. Such irate chat in respect to hockey—As opposed to something to be confused with the state of our literary culture? The whole team 'sucked', as he put it, though on paper they are much better than their performance has indicated thus far—Labrosse was bemused by the critique. "Oh yes," said E, "it's pretty sad—" Difficult to tell if she were crestfallen or just having us on—Earlier in the evening, MH let it be known to me that she was feeling somewhat more optimistic about 'art' in general. There is evidence that the 20-somethings have a genuine interest in the thing, one not compromised by the 'industry' of it all, perhaps because they are not yet the 40-somethings who worry over whom they might offend should they get mouthy, reviews and grants on the line—The cynic in me, I suppose, is irrepressible— Jan 18, 2012: After a sleepless night of howling wind - morning. Nikas. Mention of Jamaica on the radio, or that some deejay's sister had had herself a fashionable wedding there. It brings to mind that the Moesian, the other night, was going on about a slave revolt in the island nation (perhaps he was referring to the Baptist War, 1831) but in any case, whichever revolt it was, some British factotum, to set an example, had several thousands of Jamaicans killed—I did not know of this particular event. The Moesian and I were in a bar (the CockandBull), this before the reading at the Argo Bookshop, and we were preparing ourselves for the agony to follow even if we were to be pleasantly surprised. I said something to the effect that one cannot possibly know of all the outrages in particular that were committed in New World regions - even in fairly recent times, though in general one certainly could have, and ought to have, an understanding of the 'colonist' history. He started rattling on about Haiti. At some point in the exposition he stopped, looked around, and asked why it is we are continually surrounded by TV sets, a bank of TV sets on every wall; and, evidently, we were meant to have hockey on the brain—A couple of 'regulars' seemed to be paying us undue attention and I wondered what it was we were doing to rouse their suspicions. What, were we pinko commies? A couple of fops insufficiently workingclass? Ah, the rather comely bar maid and the fact that the Moesian happens to be one of those men whom women, for who knows what reasons, find deadly attractive—The conversation itself had come about courtesy of Patrick O'Brian; that I had finished with the man's twenty volume Aubrey-Maturin series (twenty-one if one counts the unfinished The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey, the beginning of which finds Aubrey off the coast of Chile—); that I have been trying to sort out my thoughts concerning the books and the quality of the prose to be had in them; but that I was not entirely happy with my effort. Then again, I am neither a reviewer of books nor a 'critic' as such, the question in my mind being whether or not I had put myself in a corner and would have to apologize to someone or other for having liked the books, so much so, I would happily read them again. Well, the Moesian had nothing to say on that score, he going on in a vein that might be characterized as literary culture? What literary culture? Oh, you mean that literary culture, that one that produces a sh-tload of books no one cares to read, because, well, who could care about them? It looked like it could be a long evening of it if he was already in a 'mood'. I am due to begin a re-read of Tacitus and Homer, and I have begun a not terribly well-written but nonetheless interesting biography of T.E. Lawrence; how, during his time at the Carchemish dig in Syria with Woolley, he would disappear for days on end in some Syrian outback with his two Arab 'pals', and no one seems to know what he got up to, as he did not tell. It seems the locals saw Lawrence as inept, something of a dreamer, if not crazy; and they decided to protect him, as it were, when they might have as easily slit his throat, for all that their Ottoman overseers did not want dead European tourists on their hands. In any case - poetry. What is the thing? What is it not? Wonderful, perhaps, that one cannot pin it down. Might even write some of it, myself, who's to say? Can see GG (Guitar Guide) tapping his foot—Been lax of late in my 'independent finger exercises'— Jan 17, 2012: Some poets, gifted with 'perfect pitch', nonetheless manage to write fine poetry, even so. Others, flawless in their execution of this or that verse form, only achieve so much finely written, forgettable twaddle. Some poets will say that 'poetry' is to be found in the words themselves, and nowhere else. Perhaps. Some poets insist that poetry is what occurs in between the lines of a poem, in the silences. And so forth and so on. Bear with me: I am trying to piece together what went on, last night, after the poetry reading, and we wound up in a bar on Bishop Street, everyone holding forth, and with gusto. In light of which I see that I scribbled something in my notebook to the following effect (words written in the heat of battle, from the trenches, as it were): Again, shall have to ask why it is that what sounds like poetry, smells like poetry, tastes like poetry, looks like poetry, feels like poetry, is not necessarily poetry—And a great many people, well-intentioned dears, doubtless, have an answer for the question; and perhaps they're right, maybe wrong - I've no effing idea. Just that a rare enough event did occur, last evening, at the Argo Bookshop which was the venue for the reading. A young fellow (who afterwards explained that his 'equipoise' was simply due to the after-effects of a bout of flu) - at any rate, this fellow in a state of grace that may never come around for him again, read a lovely little story to do with love and related matters; and he read what he had to say with such unfeigned and straightforward conviction that we all of us who were there were the better for it. One does not get to say this but once in a great long while. However, whether we were still 'the better for it' after we closed down the bar - this I cannot say—Lastly, I am superstitious enough to worry that in making mention of the above, state of grace and all that, I will only have jinxed the man and that 'poetry', in horror, will depart the area—So then, enough said. Jan 16, 2012: A last word, perhaps, in regards to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. It has to do with a storm at sea as depicted in what would have been volume the twenty-first had O'Brian lived to finish it; and, as such, the writing goes by the name of The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey. The storm, off a New World coast, blows a great many parrots and tiny 'Tierra del Fuegian' honeysuckers (hummingbirds) into the sails and rigging of the ship, the collision fatal to them; that they were dashed against the rigging or the remaining sails with such force that in spite of their lightness they were quite shattered and as the blast died away, deck, lighter rigging and scuppers were jewelled all over with their pitiful but still brilliant fragments—It is an image that will remain unforgettable with me, at least. I wondered, too, as I read the passage, as to what was going through the author's mind in the writing of it, given that he must have known his days were numbered, his powers on the wane—Was he allowing himself one last rather theatrical metaphor? Otherwise, what can be said for someone's life good, bad or indifferent? That a certain amount of rain fell on it? Snow? That now and then, a bad-natured wind did its worst to a body? That a life ingested this amount of food; that it pissed and excreted that amount of waste?—There I was in an Arctic chill, plying myself along a sidewalk on which snow and ice were packed hard, and the thought struck me: indeed, what can be said for someone's life good, bad or indifferent? The thought insinuated itself, but no, not with the force or moral urgency of an epiphany, but as a bit of mental detritus taking the place of some other bit for a brief spate of time, only that it wanted 'answering'. For instance, is the Woody Allen character in his flick Hannah and Her Sisters just being reprehensibly cute when he suggests that even if life has no meaning, one may as well enjoy it? Here's looking at you, kid—MH considered that it was, on Allen's part, nothing more than 'dated' angst. The world's not all like New York: neurotic, self-indulgent—I figured, for a moment or two, as we viewed one of the flick's Thanksgiving family get-together scenes, that we were, in fact, watching some biblical begat instance, as in X begat Y, one generation having spawned another, the neurotic and the self-indulgent ceding pride of place to out and out narcissists—But I might have been in error—Morning. Nikas. It is clear that the Albanian with the startling eyes, waitressing, has not been able to afford an interlude of when I wake up in the morning, think I'll be an artist—Now Mr Hedges - that would be Chris Hedges of Pulitzer Prize-winning provenance - in any case, it appears the man is going to sue Current President for his ill-considered decision to bring into law what has already become infamous; which it is a provision allowing the military not only 'to carry out domestic policing' but to perform end-runs around the courts while subjecting arrestees to indefinite incarceration, off-shore most likely—Current President can rationalize all he likes that no one will exercise the option in anything like a slipshod manner—Civil liberties, anyone? Well, the Very Same has just signalled his lack of enthusiasm, it being an election year, surprises not wanted, for hostilities against a certain I-entity nation-state on behalf of another I-entity nation-state; a round of maneuvers having just been cancelled or postponed with the latter that has wished to make a splash in a category of who has got what by way of ordnance and celeritous moxie —I return you to the image at the top of the post, those bird-splattered sails, though I have nothing especial in my mind or, as it were, up my sleeve— Jan 15, 2012: I am less than happy with the previous post as it smacks of a 'review', and reviewese is not to be encouraged in this precinct. Even so, there is much to attract the reader in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, not the least of which is the quality of the prose. Rich in atmosphere, precise, at ease with details (the sailing ship of Napoleonic times was not a simple instrument); able to render up a complex human psychology and keep a narrative moving along, much is said, and yet, the language, for all that, is restrained and always in possession of itself. They used to call it poise, and perhaps they still do. The truth of it is borne out in the last novel, the twentieth, which is one rewrite or two shy of a 'finished' book. In it, the cracks show, the author by then a very old man near his death—Even so, in the end, I find myself asking: how much of the writing is about how people ought to behave, given their circumstances, as opposed to how the historical record claims they did behave? It is not that Mr O'Brian was spewing forth propaganda or maliciously skewing what he knew of the historical record so as to suit his own predilections; and it is not that he shied off pointing out that some of the 'realities' in question, including any number of British vessels under the thumb of this or that brute were perfect little nightmares, indeed; but that he packed his 'heroes' with the best that a flawed humanity can offer short of saintliness, and one wonders if the result is not, at some level, absurdly quixotic, if for less than absurdist reasons. Maturin the Irish-born spy-naturalist-ship's doctor-coca-leaf chewing-bit of a cold fish - he is perhaps an agent, after all, for civilizing forces in the most generous sense, then again—Aubrey the captain thoroughly relishes his captaincy, the battle-craft, as well as mathematics, music, astronomy, the pleasures of table and bed; moves like a force of nature through a world of men in which women very much figure, and yet, they are at some remove, if not always housebound—Is there something in the Napoleonic years that O'Brian preferred to present day times? Is political freedom everything? Are there no other freedoms then in an hierarchical world that compensate for the hierarchy? Do we live in the best of all possible worlds, the corporate state with its shock troops of financiers riffing on the divine right of kings? Sure, you can vote. Vote away to your heart's content—Are we gutless wonders? Don't know - just saying—All that is missing from the books, the Lord's Prayer aside, is the presence of the gods or we should have had, in this twenty volume length epic sweep, an Odyssey inextricably bound up with an Iliad—Extravagant claim, perhaps, but one closer to the rub than you might think—Morning. Nikas. Frigid out there at minus 25 something—George - owner-cook - he is speechless more or less. His meagre English would come to grips with the fact of the cold. His quasi-Mediterranean sensibility has been violated. Jan 14, 2012: Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, a twenty or so volume novel cycle set in the Napoleonic era and on the high seas for the most part, may or may not be considered a singular achievement, but it is a curious failure of sorts. The novels do not necessarily bespeak a Pollyannaish view of human relations, nor are they necessarily an enthusiast's thumbs up for notions of progress as 'civilization' begins to roll up more and more of the world-getting-to-be-known; and they are not, I suppose, out and out apologies for British imperialism, but they certainly glory in the romance and the 'adventure' of expanding horizons. It is as if the novelist were saying that all one can do with life is live it, warts and all—They revel in the nascent sciences beginning to take systematic stock of the natural world. They exult in the perfect handling of a very complicated instrument - the three-masted sailing ship in peace or war; and they are finally, and perhaps ultimately, a tribute to the notion of amity between human individuals of either sex in all the various permutations of what pairings and groupings humankind may enjoy - despite class or tribal distinctions, as if to say that idealism as such has no other home, can get traction nowhere else but in 'friendship'. It is a very serious declaration for 'human bonds'; a very serious portrait that O'Brian presents of the possibility of love based on something other than Hollywood and hormones; and nowhere does he insult 'love' with overweening, empty-headed, feel-good sentiment in respect to the thing. That is to say there are limits: class, tribe, race, gender, family, and one does not easily transcend these limits, if at all; or that, curiously enough, such limits are more likely to be transcended or put aside in the fray, in the heat of the action, than in the parlour at home. It is also to say that men and women, among other things, are flawed, and flaws do exact their toll and take their prisoners—And cannonballs and disease kill heroes. And sharks eat the virtuous and the less lovely among us alike—O'Brian's champions might say his is a portrait of humankind when it was last living life to the fullest and for the best of reasons - to increase understanding of - of - of what, exactly? - of why one bird's plumage is different from the plumage of another kind of bird and so forth and so on? And yet what is missing from the portrait is the enormous, unquantifiable cost. The 'New World' is very much in the portrait, and if PC outrage is refreshingly absent from the annals of encountering and 'settling' the exotic continents between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, and even if here and there in the writing are harrowing enough sketches of the slave trade, very little, if anything, is said of all that was 'displaced' in the collision between 'worlds', or else I missed something in the writing. These novels, taken in conjunction with the latest declaration from science that the galaxy in which this earth is situated hosts billions upon billions of other earth-like entities, threaten to overwhelm my hitherto unshakable pessimism with something like the winds of change. Rather than life being unique to this earth, unique in the sense of its being a joke in exquisitely bad taste, a jest of the gods or God Himself, life might be pretty routine and not all that much to be remarked upon in the end. We can happily ho-hum the fact of each our existences and knock ourselves out with doing bad poetry—Not that I will suddenly, and some time soon, and because released now from an obligation to 'get the joke' and guffaw accordingly, take to cartwheeling through Montreal-NDG for the sheer joy of living, for the sheer hell of it all, as per some particularly perverse stanza in the oeuvre of Foulard aka a certain Glover Esq.—Otherwise, rich comedy yet again attaches itself to the person of London Lunar there in Londontown, only I am not permitted to treat with 'the latest'. It is regrettable that my hands are tied in this respect as opportunity is lost by which I might could blow myriads of tedious comics out of the water with the material and shatter the odd dour countenance with the odd ghostly grin — Jan 13, 2012: Labrosse, advising me of his presence in Nikas, last evening, provided me with my excuse to skip out on the rest of the Robert Lepage flick The Far Side of the Moon, one of those tidy little conceptualist reveries on life's meaning or the lack of the same—"Lepage," said Labrosse, "is quite the guy. Multi-faceted." It was praise for a countryman, the effect of it condemnatory. In any case, Nikas was sparsely attended: a handful of middle-aged men, E on shift in unflagging effervescent mode. She seemed to have special intimacy with each isolate fellow, each their loneliness palpable. Otherwise, there was hockey on each their brains, and though the men might have wished it differently, hockey was very likely to stay on the brain, Montreal down 1-zip to Boston, second period. At least, it was snowing out, the fact of which prettily mitigated what has been a fairly dreary winter thus far. Like a fool I sat there, wondering if Lepage knew his Orlando Furioso, mad Orlando who also got to the moon without aid of booster rockets. Labrosse, distinctly uninterested in Iran or euro-finance or the Romney-fication of the collective to the south of here, clapped his eyes to the hockey action lest the world disintegrate should his gaze waver; and that les Canadiens could only contribute one body to the up-coming all-star lollapalooza was depressingly predictable. Later on in the evening, there was the spectacle of a senator-hero ex-presidential nominee on the Letterman show. He tried to put something of a face on what Letterman was attempting to wink and blink into the record, or that American politics, if a hoot, is a debacle, man. McCain, by way of paraphrase: "Well, it's good to get all this out - good for the country - good for the people - but there have been some bad decisions made, no question - it may take an election cycle or two to fix - we're still the greatest experiment the world has ever known - everybody wants to be us—" Cheeks McCain as Claudius Caesar (as per Robert Graves): let all the poisons out. Well, did it work back then? My strategy? Since I am always to be found on the losing side of any argument, I figure that so long as I keep chatting up doom I am, in actual fact, preventing its occurrence. Ought to be recompensed for this service—On the other hand, there is nothing I can do about organic croissants and spoken word poetry or any other characterization of an object or a happening by way of the redundancies piling on. And on. And on— Jan 12, 2012: A minor instance of synchronicity: or that, while having Orpheus on the brain, a Latin tag I came across in the book The Gentle Americans - the tag being 'Meum est propositum in Taberna mori' and being very loosely translated as my chief aim in life is to croak in a tavern' - led me to the so-called 'Archpoet', an anonymous poet-crittur of the twelfth century, some of whose lines are in the Carmina Burana. This, in itself, led me to John Fahey and his guitar composition What The Sun Said which appears in his album Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites (1964, the recording of which was apparently carried out in a haze of marijuana smoke, lots of whisky on hand). For all that, the music entranced me, literally, when I was in my early 20s, and now, all these years later, and I am on the verge of learning how to play some of the material, no matter that I am under an injunction from GG (Guitar Guide) not to do anything on the guitar that is not directly connected to the lessons which he is providing me. And right he is, if the thing is to be done at all properly, just that I am nonetheless ignoring the man on this score. Otherwise, last evening, we concluded our viewing of The Wire, season the first, and started in on the second, we being E and her swain and Labrosse and myself, E and swain doing the honours as far as hosting goes. Labrosse admitted that the series has all of his attention now that we are 'into it'.Well, one does not easily forget such characters as Bunc and Omar and Bubbles—A mystery to us as to why the production did not seem to catch on with the masses though the critics gave it their thumbs up. Not cheesy enough as per the more mainstream cop shows? Too unwieldy a business for the jiggly jello cubes that encase most of our getting about from A to B? London Lunar is still cracking up over a certain thin, neurotic Dane. (Previous post.) Kydde, as well he might, is reconsidering his options in respect to anything that has to do with London Lunar. Morning. Nikas. There is weather developing out there in the form of wind and snow. I intimated at the top of this post that I am reading The Gentle Americans. I am reading it on sufferance. I have always been leery of sentiment. Life, however, is not livable without some sentiment. The author of the book is quite fond of her 'people' and her 'period', but she is perilously close in her writing to having the reader view their behaviour as 'cute', let alone 'quaint'; and if none of them, including Henry James the great novelist, had anything resembling a cynical bone in their bodies ever, I, feckless cynic, a third of the way through the book, am no closer to understanding why. Jan 11, 2012: It is not clear to me how he managed to
do it, but it would seem that, last evening, London Lunar disgraced
himself in respect to the poetry scene in his neck of the woods.
The odds are, he mouthed off at an inappropriate moment. But perhaps
it was more theatrical than that, and he chucked an egg at someone's
insufferable eminence. Perhaps he committed an outrage often associated
with those who swear by Thelemite views in polite company—No
doubt, Captain Kydde is reconsidering ever stepping out into a
brave new world in the man's company again. In any case, I have
always suspected London Lunar of being a barbarian at heart—They
intended, Lunar and Kydde, to take in Stephen Watts's recital
of his poem Praise Song for North Uist, one of the great
poems of the time. So then, who knows what set London Lunar off?
Was it the 'thin, neurotic Dane' singing let the Roma into
your lives with what was, so it was implied, a very affected
falsetto? It would be hard to endure if, 1): one has genuine regard
for gypsies who, of late, have been treated badly by the authorities
of various euro states and so, 2): one just might consider that
bad protest music only insults the people it is meant to benefit
while making the most of a showcase for a protestor's shoddy ego—Yesterday,
while marking a bit of time before I was slated to appear for
my next guitar lesson, I scribbled the following in a notebook:
Somewhere I have been going on about the poetry of life. Silly
me. Even so, here I am, waiting for GG (Guitar Guide) to indulge
me with a lesson in the art of guitar. It is the corner of St-Louis
and Saint-Denis. The venue is a hot dog place of gaudy yellows
and greens painful to one's retinas, a reminder of one's U-District
days (Seattle) that were all Nietzsche and druggies and scruffy
poets and campus cops. For all that, no eatery in that vicinity
ever offered up poutine to a discriminating clientele. Enroute,
and I was barely out my door in Montreal-NDG, and I encountered
a mad woman who had commandeered a phone booth and was busy screaming
invective and bile into the receiver of a phone at the other end
of which was either a real interlocutor or someone only perceived
as real—Why make note of her? Why not make note of her?
Because she is always commandeering phone booths and releasing
bile. Always and always. Are we so attached to quantum physics
or nano-technology that human detritus has slid off our radars?
The world's worst painting (it just happens to be in the abstract-expressionist
mode and seems to avail itself of the colours of what was and
perhaps still is the West German flag) is attached to the outside
wall of the nearby Café Cherrier—Old city architecture
- cupolas, spires—I have been reading up on Chopin's
Twenty-four Preludes, one of which is called Uncertainty
and another The Night Moth - ???—In the meantime,
P.M. Carpenter, Prominent Political Commentator to the south of
here, is anticipating Current President's electoral landslide
come this November. He can barely restrain his hooting. My pessimism
tells me that while there might be more satisfyingly melodramatic
punch with a Republican victory coinciding with a further deepening
of the malaise afflicting the country, history's uncanny sense
of irony, let alone its complicated nature, suggests that the
'better man', be he in actual fact better or not, generally gets
stuck wearing the villain's hat—Ah, here's the skinny
in regards to the aforementioned poetry recital: 'Lunar and
I went to a reading last evening at the Sugar Cafe (a Turkish
joint in Finsbury Park), mainly to hear Stephen Watts read. Unfortunately,
there were events before Stephen, particularly a Danish fellow
who refuses to use a name. When I met him and asked his name,
he said, 'I don't have a name' then added, 'but call me Jan.'
This guy read some very long prose piece about his own funeral
in 2011 (fictional, alas) but then treated us to some of his songs,
accompanying himself on the guitar. It was a terrible bout of
caterwauling, as though Dylan had taken up yodeling; and the themes
of the songs were pretty pathetic. When he went crooning on with
"Let the Roma into your lives," Lunar started to giggle
and of course, that spread to me. At one point he hit a high falsetto
note and Lunar giggled so hard he had a nosebleed. We couldn't
control ourselves; even the table was shaking. The woman next
to me started giggling too. So there was Lunar stanching his bloody
nose with a dirty napkin while giggling uncontrollably. The Dane's
next song was called 'Hate' and every time he landed on the word
'hate,' he focussed his beady eyes on the two of us. Speaking
only for myself, I'm doing my best to keep the Roma out of my
life: they pinch everything that isn't nailed down'— Jan 9, 2012: Labrosse: "There isn't an American movie that is not a true story—" E: "Or that isn't, hmmmm, inspired by true events. Coffee? More wine?—" It would seem that in E's somewhat bohemian living room, life and furniture a celebration of the makeshift, E and Labrosse were having at slapdash irony. We were gathered there for an afternoon's marathon viewing of The Wire, season the first. No critique of the production is to be implied by the dialogue above. The horror came later when, returned to my digs, some movie I was idly watching, that was in itself a rather harrowing view of 'human relations', and men and women have not much reason to trust one another, then suggested that not all 'animal shows' are legit; that there are fake predator-victim scenes as when living sacrificial meat is, in fact, thrown to the lions and it is all duly captured on camera; and by way of clever editing, the result is made to appear seamless and to have happened in 'nature'—As ever, I am the last person to hear of it. All this in light of the fact that I recently caught a 'show' featuring crocodiles. What charming creatures they are that have such tender sexual relations. But there they were at their most charming, taking down wildebeests in the attempt of the latter to ford a river as part of their annual migration; but that, such wildebeests as thought twice about the crossing, in turning around and clambering back up the river bank, were then greeted by lions in an ambush. Easy, easy, ridiculously easy kill—Grisly. And all the rest of it. What's so effing noble about nature? And if anything in the 'spectacle' was a result of fakery, I should think the perpetrators ought to be strung up by the tenderest of their parts for both their cynicism and cruelty—Now E insisted that Bubbles (a junkie in The Wire) is not Bubbles so much as he is an actor playing a part. I have always believed otherwise. Then London Lunar goes and tells me that E is in the right of it; which only leads me to suggest that whoever that actor is, he is one of the best of our times, his performance, as it were, 'seamless'; whereas with the likes of a DeNiro, all one gets are the stitches—London Lunar is also on about eugenics and assisted suicide, how the one is perhaps the logical outcome of the other. I have nothing to say on the matter - at least, not yet. Morning. Nikas. Hateful music on the radio. That is to say, besides being shallow and not much more than your basic market forces at work, it is relentlessly vile. Snow falls in Montreal-NDG. I will not go so far as to say that we are busily destroying all the poetry there is in life. Oh? And what's that - the poetry of life? But I will go so far as to say we are busily obliterating all traces of the poetry that there was in life. Talk too much about this sort of poetry and one frightens the very item off. It's skittish stuff— Jan 8, 2012: Yesterday, at the Atwater Library, the little library that perhaps can, I bought for a nominal price some books that had been removed from circulation, one of which is entitled The Gentle Americans - the 'biography of a breed'—The book purports to be a look-see at one hundred years of Boston literati such as include, among others, Whitehead, Frankfurter, Frost, Brooks, Marquand, all centred around the figure of Mark Howe - exemplar of a 'breed' gone extinct, unrepentant liberal and, if you please, Christian gentleman, or the author's father—At first blush it is an extended puff piece on a certain family and its idiosyncrasies, an homage to 'father knows best'; and so forth and so on; and then a curious admission that slavery and rum had a lot to do with how 'family' directly or indirectly got its shekels. An awkward admission, one that produces an image of a woman pinching her nose whilst holding up at arm's length between thumb and forefinger some offending item of garb in need of disinfectant, if not outright disposal. I have not yet read far enough into the book to ascertain whether the persons of which the author speaks were, indeed, any more or less 'gentle' than recent generations of any other dynasty in America; and whether the author has anything to say beyond her effusions; whether there has been the passing away of something deserving of lamentation. In any case, in the course of a rather apocalyptic metro ride to the library, MH, in respect to Dog Day Afternoon, suggested an alternate view to the one presented in the previous post, she saying that the Al Pacino character, for one sweet afternoon, got himself in control of things, and he happily decided cases for everyone concerned; until, of course, at the airport, the getaway plane in view, it all blows up in his face as soon as the 'authorities' take out his partner with a bullet to the head. Then his hostages, all of whom had regarded him with some sympathy and even incipient affection, drop him like something not only to be shunned, but as if he had never existed in the first instance. Silly bank robber. What a loser. Even the street people who had taken to singing his praises as a hero were chucking garbage at him as he sat in the limo with his hostages and partner and driver, about to head for that getaway plane, dirty tricks imminent—"Otherwise," said MH, "there's reading Camus (she has given up on Orwell, it being depressively wintry out) and there's considering the Stoics for what they have to say about fate— " At the outset of the return trip, down in the metro station, we came across a violinist having at some intensely familiar but unnamable classical piece. His sawing away was briefly interrupted by a young woman wearing a stetson who wished to know if he was Russian. He answered that, no he himself was no Russian but that his teacher had been. As soon as he had opened his mouth to speak, the man's voice indicated that a tale of mental troubles, booze and drugs was pretty much his life, but that he still regarded himself as an 'artist'; and, what the heck, I was disposed to believe him and so, I contributed to his coffers. Perhaps MH thought I had gone soft in the head. It was, at any rate, a painful scene, which only got more painful when the train arrived and everyone but the violinist got on, the woman who had struck up a conversation with him now looking a little lost, as if she now had no one to pity, or so my own less than cheery way of looking at it persuaded me. Evidently, the winter blahs have set in— Jan 7, 2012: —Something about oil, the tar sands, keeping the Canadians 'onside', tensions rising out there—The words were Labrosse's, Friday night in Nikas, business slow, hockey on TV, Labrosse bored. Europe on the brink? What brink? What's this brink you're always on about? Oh, that brink. Well, they do keep slipping, slipping—Things keep slipping - you know—And then E, all dressed up with nowhere to go - that is to say, she on shift was primed to work and there was no work to be done and few tips to be had; and here she was reduced to asking me for the third time if I should like my water glass topped up and was I in the loop when it comes to Mayan prognostications? And here was the other waitress, the petite one, chirping something about being on the barricades, only that the revolution was cancelled because everyone got sick of their own and each other's company—I began muttering things about the next war looming, the euro, and John Milton (the esteemed poet) for no reason at all - but yes, was he not addicted to the hoopla surrounding the political passions of his day - or not? - and much of what I read in the blogosphere so as to keep 'abreast' - good golly, Miss Molly, keeping abreast, what a concept - is wearisome, as it is cant rather than thoughtfulness; as it is spew rather than writing; and I am equally as suspect, to be sure. But not P.M. Carpenter, Distinguished Political Commentator to the south of here: he has been fairly humming of late: —or that Donald Trump has returned to running Gary Busey's steakhouse; Michele Bachmann is safely hibernating in some hyperborean rubber room; Herman Cain has been reduced to a YouTube phenom; and Sarah Palin isn't again a conservatively humiliating threat until next month's CPAC coven—And here, Mr Carpenter is only indulging a bit of playfulness - we have not yet obtained the true tenor of august political thinking, which it is a yelp - and then another—Complicating the idyll alluded to in the post previous to this (that idyll to be had in Patrick O'Brian's Blue at the Mizzen, the scene West Africa in Napoleonic times) is the fact that the woman in question who had permitted herself to be bussed at the edge of the swamp, having just received a proposal of marriage from him who bussed her - her fellow naturalist and admirer - and having been soured on marriage by a shoddy excuse of a husband who gave her a bad dose of 'disinclined to ever want to marry again', turns down her suitor, though not outrightly so, thereby keeping him on the hook; and there just might be a change of heart in the offing; that something like tender man-woman relations were not inconceivable, so much so, they might continue calling one another 'dear'. Or else they were just being, you know, Brits. I took my leave of Nikas, went and watched Dog Day Afternoon with MH, and though Al Pacino's character would be the first person to admit that what he was doing - robbing a bank - was entirely screwy and not the best course of action to be taking, given where he was in life, nonetheless, increasingly perceives just how much screwier the supposedly sane people are, including his wife and his mother and 'management', and how much more dangerous; and when the strong arm of the law finally take out his partner with a bullet to the head, his loneliness, the worst kind of loneliness - which is isolation in tandem with utter clarity of perception and thought - is complete and forever. He weeps now. But who wouldn't weep? Worrisome to me was the dream I had, last night, in which the opening chords of a John Fahey tune were not so much 'blues' as the beginnings of a liturgical mass; and they were meant to be strummed, not picked; only that I found myself obsessed with affecting the exactly right intonation of each chord; that to fail in this was to sell the sacramental short— Jan 6, 2012: London Lunar is up in arms against the University of Chicago, that source of wonderful economic theory as well as the notion that the human body, in its guise as assorted molecules, is nothing more than a sh-t-making machine, one feculator among other orders of feculators, and so much for Bach and Classical Gas. Alright then, fine: the natural order is one vast vat of sewage occasionally illuminated by the light of the moon and other celestial objects. But that perhaps the mental giants such as get their succor and tenure under the auspices of the aforementioned campus ought perhaps to try and live a life of chronic pain, one in which one is always 'negotiating' with one's mind so as to scrape by minute to minute, who cares what churns in the bowels—And that, well, chicken-livered poets are more likely to get in line behind the scientists (the latest New World Order wanting its kow-tow) than the Neanderthal knuckling his bowling ball down at Penny Lane's—Myself, I cannot quite divest my assorted molecules of the imprint Labrosse's molecules made upon them as, the other night, we gathered to view another episode of The Wire, and there he was, his arms folded defiantly across his chest: he does not figure he is watching anything that merits special commentary. Business is business is business is business no matter the patois in which it is conducted—Whereas E, each time Bunc had recourse to an utterance consisting of the word pussy, could not help the energetic and restless waggling of a pale foot, let alone the attendant heart-felt giggles erupting from her throat. I do not know - I do not know what the answer is, but whilst we are indefatigably engaged in the manufacturing of excrement, it would seem we are not entirely impervious to the possibility of pleasure. One thing that may or may not signify in the natural order: E is a young woman who does seem terrified of an empty dance card, the fact of which almost renders her endearing—Then Conservative Colonel, over at Sic Semper Tyrannis, observed that if there is to be a successful third party in American politics, it will likely come through Ron Paul's bid to become president. Mr Paul is attracting a great many disparate sorts to his cause mostly on account of his anti-war stance, for all that he is crackers on other matters; and for all that American politics is more fractured than it has been in a long while—I have come across an idyll. It is to be found in Blue at The Mizzen, the last complete volume of the Aubrey-Maturin series, twenty-some naval novels set in the Napoleonic era. (Patrick O'Brian). It has to do with a cranky leopard and an enormous bird of a heron kind, blueish on top, chestnut below, with immense green legs and a deep, furious baying cry; with a man and woman who, despite the prevalence of leech and fly bites on their bodies, opting to remove their clothes so as to dry them on rocks in the hot sun, find time from their loving investigation of the natural world to exchange a kiss or two, the leopard they have been seeking out fondly depicted by the woman as being as touchy as a Roman emperor— My guitar guide, GG, seems to want me back for another devastation. Will we talk Chopin and Symbolist poets while my picking hand receives its obliteration? My Vale Perkins correspondent got herself invited to a private harpsichord recital at the hands of a Madame Legacé out there in the boonies in the mapled hills; was treated to Bach and Scarlatti, and to salmon, mussels, hummus and exotic liquor. More grist for the mill that we are as feculators, say what?—Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles such as admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations—Aristotle. Well, everyone is going to claim the factual as their purview, and the chips are always going to fall where they may, no pun necessarily meant, even as the shit will fly— Jan 5, 2012: It is official now: science (the University of Chicago?) has pronounced free will an illusion, perhaps an invitation to all that is delusionary; and while I have always figured as much, as did some ancients in their day without aid of fancy laboratories, what alarms me in the pronouncement is not so much the declaration itself, but what shall be made of it so as to justify and defend this or that imminent man-created horror impossible to stave off. It is believed, for instance, that henceforth we shall have greater empathy for one another now that it is understood you are and I am nothing more than an assortment of molecules, our behaviour and our very memories nothing more than how it is those molecules have been arranged; and that we cannot help but do what we do and remember what we remember, given the 'arrangement'. Everyone, how convenient, is a victim, then. Everyone was born as such and will die as such, and we might as well continue to put flowers on Stalin's grave, and Mao's and Hitler's - there is one out there somewhere, and chuck a few nosegays Franco's way—Empathy - the next lifestyle buzz word? This assortment of molecules, as opposed to that sort of molecules, will write this sort of verse as opposed to that sort of verse; will butter toast thusly as opposed to thatly; will prefer Hank Williams to Bach; will get voted into the White House or into the loony bin; or, if an assortment of molecules is sufficiently off-colour, will find itself in a prison cell looking at centre-folds. And whether one is a genius or an ignoramus all the while is beside the point—All the while that thugs and swaggering narcissists carry the day, as they have been doing for some time now with the gloves off and without shame; an item such as 'empathy' unlikely to hinder them much or in any way compromise their integrity; if, by integrity, we mean structural integrity or efficiency of motion in a drive toward full spectrum dominance and profit maximization—And you are going to tell me that, no, you are not really into any of that? Think again. Contrariwise, London Lunar points out that if The Iliad is the planned universe, as in, a world plotted out by the gods or plutocrats or all the Dr Suzukis, a 'determined' universe, then surely The Odyssey is the break-out position, a kind of breaking out that some early Christians used to see in the figure of Christ over and against the pagan cycle of birth-life-death over and over and over and over again ad nauseam. The truth of it fairly screams itself in an infinite silence: it is a grimly determined universe as opposed to a happily determined nest (Ithaka, bloody Ithaka) in which we find ourselves and our nearest celestial neighbours, though anything might happen, even happy interludes, and Irish Harpy, grim and dour Irish Harpy of six decades and counting, might girlishly dance a jig on a table of a morning in Nikas—Which brings me, somehow, to the Iowa caucus and the Romney-Santorum stand-off (for the time being, until New Hampshire is over done and with) that was its consequence. It does increasingly look like Current President will get his re-election, only that I contend he will regret it, seeing as the only people who love him nowadays are bankers, and they are likely to love him less the deeper we get into the man's second term—London Lunar swears by the current Anselm Kiefer exhibition in Londontown. Post-apocalyptic and all that. Mad Max as the last of the Knights Templar? And in light of what heralded this post by way of the delusionary, I have been having at e e f g g f e d/c c d e e d D, and a one -ah, two-ah, uh-three-uh and so forth and so on, notes that configure an entree into Ode to Joy; have been striking those notes with a flat pick, going insane with the pecking at it; but that it is what I must do on account of the fact I am an assortment of molecules what has an assortment of molecules to please, or GG, the Guitar Guide— Jan 4, 2012: My evisceration complete at the hands of the rather Virgilian Guitar Guide - to be henceforth designated as GG - I was, nonetheless, permitted a few vital signs with which to carry out the rest of my business in what remained of the day. Something of a cross between Conan the Barbarian and a very fastidious Segovia, never mind a wise-cracking Virgil in Dante's melancholic underworld, GG appeared to reside amidst bachelor clutter; was, for all that, serene; was blissfully absent-minded. Indeed, he had forgotten the fact of my person - that it took up time and space, which contributed to his look of thorough-going skepticism when I appeared at his door looking for direction in life's wilderness. And then, and in not so many words, and after he observed me 'work' the guitar, my fingers all claw and clothesline pin, he announced I was from now to regard the instrument as an alien object. Whether or not I wished to regard myself as alien and hailing from somewhere beyond known limits, the guitar previously unknown to me, was optional. Never mind that I have messed around on the thing for forty years—It could be fairly said I have not played all, given that I have had no proper idea of how to approach the essential requirements of guitar-playing. At the conclusion of which observation or what was the lesson, he perhaps smiled as if to say, "Congrats. You are now in receipt, your devastated ego beside the point, of the first six notes of the C-Major scale, and the beginnings, the very preliminary beginnings of the ability to sight-read music." Man, but the man was pleased with himself, serene - as I have said - and on the side of those angels who wish to reform how it is guitar-playing is generally taught; that is to say he himself would ignore my howls of pain, my eyes glassing over; he would pile on. At which point I sorely required a drink. I did manage to escape his clutches, his gravity field, as it were, and took myself to a downtown hotel where I met up with Tupelo and his wife in town from the UK, and in something of a state of shock in regards to the deep freeze out of doors. And along with RS, a poet of some distinction in these parts, some of whose verses have been heard broadcast on American radio, we headed for the hotel bar and emptied the contents of an entire wine cow that seemed to have been kept in reserve for such ordeals as I had just undergone. We then spoke of other ordeals, other massacres, or CanLit; and we spoke on this subject for an obscene amount of time; and then, minus RS who had, no doubt, more sensible things with which to occupy herself than a continuation of the conversation, we hoofed it very briskly for twenty too many blocks or so to a restaurant that is becoming one of my favourite restaurants anywhere in the world, the Avesta. Turkish chow—The Moesian joined us there, the place his discovery. Literature now on a more worldly scale: Cavafy. Pessoa. The fact of what appears to be Daryl Hines in not such good health. The famous 'short street' of Michael Schmidt and that he has gotten a lot of mileage out of this 'short street' or his depiction of the literary worth of a certain nation-state—I managed to play the boor and bore Tupelo's wife beyond any capacity to shed tears in respect to her boredom, what with my mention of this notable or not so notable; then again I had thought it necessary so as to drive the fact home that the game of literature is finished; that all that remains of literature is the game, and no one really cares, anyway. But then, this saying so risks becoming a rant, and we do not rant here—But of course: I have neglected to point out that now and then, and even now, something or other will see print that is truly deserving, London Lunar about to declare that the recent small press release of a novel entitled Stone Upon Stone to be one of the finest novels published anywhere in the last fifty years. And yet, in view of the rot and the corruption and the pettiness, what does one do, should one consider oneself an honourable litterateur? To which the Moesian had a word or two to spare, he, as ever, both deadly and peculiarly affable - a born hit man. True enough, in respect to Tupelo, I was being perfectly ludicrous: he had had already his baptism of fire, and what an immersion into the holy waters or the holy fires it was, he a party to what was to have been innocuous enough but turned out to be a rather controversial anthology of verse in the end, verse of a certain nation-state; but this is talking 'business' and we do not discuss 'business' at the dinner table—Accordingly, Mrs Tupelo raised the white flag and a cease and desist order was now understood to be in effect; and we all of us took our leave of the pleasant ambience down there on icy St Catherine's. It was cold enough that I was beginning to hallucinate Ahkmatova in bright leggings headed for a St Petersburg cabaret, verses firing in the back of her brain—After walking a short while with the Moesian who seemed dangerously thoughtful, I hailed a cab and went home to salvage what was left for me to salvage of my self-regard. So many complicated and emotionally rich worlds once at my fingertips now in shambles, if not outright ruin. Desperate Man Blues. By the Banks of the Owichita. On the Sunny Side of the Ocean. And much more. Smouldering cinders. Such humiliation at this stage of my life is perhaps a great and wondrous event. Music is perhaps a much truer and more noble world than the world of - you fill in the blank. GG is perhaps a great teacher of the guitar. So I tell myself. As if I have any other choice but this to tell myself— Jan 3, 2012: No, I really I do not wish to impugn the liberal conscience anymore than I already have in these posts, as, excepting my pay grade which is nominal at best, and despite my distrust of academe all mandarin and noblesse oblige and Booker Prize sappy, I am - how shall I put it? - reluctantly liberal. That is to say, I would not ordinarily think twice about it nor detect in my person any need to apologize for the fact, just that the times, those ubiquitous times, have long since caught out the contradictions inherent in the liberal attitude, and those contradictions have ground the attitude to an unpalatable pulp; and because there is no longer any such animal as a 'true' conservative as defined in 'classic terms' in the game of electoral politics, and because the rest of the field of right of centre is inhabited by zealots and idiots, there is nowhere for an old long in the tooth liberal to hang his or her hat with honour, not even amidst commies with a fetish for calligraphy. You see it being played out in bad flicks (some of them Canadian bad flicks - as in execrable flicks) in which the liberal conscience, as defined by screen treatments so transparently catering to 'life-style' and its attendant dilemmas, becomes in itself a mind-numbing manual in how to deal with loss and other unpleasantness through better living in better quality time with yoga. Otherwise, I am once again late to arrive at the party: it seems the music of John Fahey, the man no longer with us, is enjoying a resurgence - if there ever was a 'surgence'; and the next thing you know, Mr Fahey will have been ascribed a virgin birth even if he is to be denied the full splendour of a resurrection. Now and then, in a nonsensical mood, and I have plenty of those in which to fall, I consider that if one of Dostoyevski's more mystically inclined characters had been acquainted with baseball caps and chewing gum and station wagons and girls in penny loafers and cheap California wine, and was given to plucking a little on the mandolin or, indeed, having at the guitar, the result might have been Dance of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg or Dry Bones in The Valley—Give Me Cornbread When I'm Hungry? Thing is, if my memory of having read one of Gorky's autobiographical opuses holds together as a recollection, and I have not imagined that I read the book (the title of which escapes me, and it is one of the great books); and he did wander about Russia, after all, with his monicker that means 'bitter'; and was intimate with weirdness incarnate and all sorts of strange folk while in possession of his caustic world-view, my nonsensicality is not so improbable— Jan 2, 2012: Morning. Nikas. Perhaps we are back to normal, the holidays a matter of record. The Albanian with the startling eyes seems to think so, headed my way with a cup of coffee in hand, she on shift. For all that she is occupied with the particulars of the job, the better part of her brain is elsewhere problem-solving, she one of those women who are consummate nesters, the source of a regimen to which all persons must acknowledge fealty, if they have any sense in their heads—Against my better judgment, I have already elected to 'post' for another year, at the end of which I will see how posting sits with me. I am, as ever, wanting monastic seclusion from the world and its inanities and petty preoccupations, all the while I am much too curious for my own good, wishing to know what boots it - in Rawalpindi, say, or Poughkeepsie or Prince Rupert. Montreal-NDG? I seem to recall glimpsing a similar sort of conflict in verses that John Keats wrote, his fallback position, his refuge the natural world and its beauties; just that, when it comes to the natural world and its beauties I am closer in sensibility to a Leopardi for whom the natural world was a volcano, one as capricious as the human world. It was not necessarily benign, at least not in the short term—What, am I coming it the literary critic? Let us keep to the gossip, shall we? And, shall London Lunar, when he is on the blower to a certain poet, sirrah the fellow now that the fellow is knighted? Although he did not say so in so many words, Kydde recently intimated to me that Havel's Prague funeral got to him as much as the funeral of JFK did a long time ago. And although I cannot credit the latter funeral for having made of me a poet - for better or worse, it had a great deal to do with the sort of poetry I would come to write after a lot of years of mucking about and false starts and dead endings. In light of which there is a price to pay for the 'worldly' existence; and perhaps, before this year now underway has run its course, I will have ripped the radio's speaker from the wall of this restaurant and impaled it with its gibbering deejays on a spike. Perhaps I will have carried a point with management who are, otherwise, good guys. Note: In coming days, I may switch to posting in the afternoon, thereby committing my mornings to such follies as the making of poetry entails— |