No to Funding Bush's war - No in thunder, No in lightning, No in the hurricano

LI has taken a wait and see attitude towards Pelosi and the Dems. The first couple of months looked promising. Pelosi seemed pretty unbothered by the storm about going to Syria, and though she did nothing there but convey the usual pap, symbols are important. We loved the emphasis on decriminalizing union activity. But the last few weeks, and now this – surrendering to a president who has nothing, who is down to his few last pet peeves– makes me wonder if we are in some eternal return of the Pit and the Pendulum. Did they really not know, do they really not know, how to rally this country? Legislators, it is true, are constitutionally more prone to inside deals and endless process than to the kind of ceremonial politik necessary to stand in the face of the Crowned Garbage Fly and his unutterably Lovecraftian sidekick, Dick Cheney, and spit – but the time had come to spit. A big gob, with tobacco juice mixed in with the snot, right between the eyes of that mass murderer. Unfortunately it was not to be – although the misfortune isn’t really mine. I’m merely going to go crazy, I’m going to suffer from the American bulimia, the desire to gorge on this country, its gross stupidities, its failing infrastructure, its insane masses, so I can upchuck on it all the better. All of which is meaningless. No, the sorrow and the pity is for the people over there in Mesopotamia who we are robbing, beating, killing, turning one against the other. What is meaningful is that the Dems have given Bush his mercenary license. They didn’t even challenge him to make this part of the real budget, for Christ sake.

But the habits of D.C. are grooved into the politicos that move and have their being there – and after all, the place is flourishing. The war has been so good, there seems to be endless sweetmeats to pass around, and what will the consultants say? What will the motherfucking consultants say?

This was among the easiest plays in history. Did the Dems really pass the timelimits budget without a sense of what to do next? Has the palsied shadow of Pentagon planning a la Wolfowitz fallen upon their councils? Are they that fucked up? Apparently. Apparently they really thought that a Republican saviour would emerge – in a party that has narrowcast itself into a home place for anti-brown pinheads and peckerhead weekend and weakheaded warriors who consider Iraq an elaborate game of paintball, with good news every day, insofar as the killed on the killing field are mostly of the ever lynchable type they, their lynchhappy, Jimcrowing ancestors and the yahoo murderers of Indian nations before them, have always delighted in making bleed, cry, and die – that from this pustulous mass of zombies there was going to shake lose some bipartisan posse of Good GOP and Moderate Dem (the good housekeeping seal from Fox on his ass) that would rescue American ‘honor’. Sorry fuckers – Jacob Javits is dead, and you can roll over and tell Henry Kissinger the news. You are dealing with the dumbest of the Dixie dumb, the senators from Plains states where the growth industry is all in home produced meth – and even these fearsome freaks, these bible thumpers and child abusers on the far edges of barbarism know deep in their burger filled, gurgling guts that Iraq is lost. The Dems are still suffering the aftereffects of having imbibing stern Washington Post editorials week after week preaching the Truman Democrat, lets cut up and eat girlscouts to show we are tough line. Poor things, scared that they will be ‘soft’ on National security – instead of softheaded. Softheaded, however, is not going to be their option for long.

Well, the tension is exacerbating between the disgust of the majority and the greed and powerlust of the elite. In this contest, all the wise money is on the elite. But I’m betting on some outside rider, some storm within the mass. LI sometimes gets caught up in the politics of party and side, but mostly we do try to avoid that, because it is pointless. These are empty vessels, and if they are driven by demons at the moment, the way to change them is to patiently curse them, every day, curse, malign, laugh at, mock, wave your peepee at, stick your tongue out at, piss on, shit on, elbow, disdain, satirize, analyze, and delight in the utter downfall of when it comes, as it will come. Reality is a hard taskmaster.

PS

Genossen, hört auf, euch hinter den
Massen zu verschanzen! Hört auf, die
Frage des Widerstandes auf die Massen
abzuwälzen! Hört auf, eure Angst vor der
maßlosen Gewalttätigkeit des Systems als
Vermittlungsproblem zu rationalisieren!
Hört auf, eure Ratlosigkeit als Belesenheit
auszugeben, eure Hilflosigkeit als
den großen Durchblick! – RAF Communique, May 31, 1972

Ulrike, je pense a vous

viagra: don't leave home without it

They’ve finally found a purpose for viagra. So far, viagra seems to have been devised solely to coddle the American male watercooler belief that 50 is really just a breath away from 15 – for proof, look at the GOP presidential lineup. Eventually, they will be embalming us with boners intact. This is definitely no country for old men...

But it turns out viagra is really about helping ... jetsetting rodents! I knew it!

“It's a safe bet that most people who take sildenafil — better known under its commercial name, Viagra — aren't looking for a good night's rest. But it turns out that the 'little blue pill' commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction is also good for relieving some forms of jetlag. Well, at least in hamsters.

Diego Golombek and his colleagues at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina, injected hamsters with sildenafil and then pushed the animals' light/dark schedule ahead by six hours, roughly the equivalent of putting them on a plane from New York to Paris. Hamsters who'd had a dose of sildenafil adjusted their busy wheel-running schedules to the new light regime 50% faster, the team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

The upshot is - does this effect also work with human jetsetters?
The thought of all those trans-Atlantic passengers gulping their viagra before they embark leads to... scary thoughts, to say the least.

Happiness vs. sagacity: 1

In the seventeenth century, the rehabilitation of Epicurus became a kind of code behind which was assembled the program of the enlightenment – which, as I have remarked in a post last week, can be looked at, using Fred Hirsch’s terms, as the accompaniment to the loosening of the positional economy as old feudal ties and customs waned. Interestingly, one of the loosened ties had to do with the role of women. Mostly this loosening was about women in the periphery around either the court or the aristocratic salons.

For LI, Epicurus marks an important moment in that covert struggle, that dialectic, between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of sagacity. Here seemed to be a counter-sage to the ascetic Socrates, just as Socrates seemed to counter Jesus for the humanists. The game is to find an emblem to trump an emblem.

Gassendi was the major sponsor of the new Epicurus in the 17th century. He was also the godfather of the line that challenged the Cartesians from what I suppose you could call the philosophical left. But one shouldn’t be too programmatic about these things – while the neo-Epicurians were devising materialist explanations of the world, they were also in sharp disagreement with, for instance, Descartes notion of the anima-machine. Antoinette Deshoulieres, as John Conley points out in his chapter on her in The Suspicion of Virtue: Women philosophers in Neo-classical France, was celebrated for her affection for animals, derived from Lucretius. Bayle, in his dictionary, ‘lauded her naturalist subordination of the human species to nonrational animals: “One of the most lucid and of the most brilliant minds of the seventeenth century preferred the condition of sheep to that of humans.”

In my next post, I want to say some biographical things about Deshoulieres and maybe translate her imitation of Lucretius (it isn’t long – she called it a galimatias).

and another thing we won't get to...

LI is on a grueling editing schedule this week, so we can’t unroll the usual red carpet of delusional associations and retarded insights we do so like to give our readers. We are going to try to write a couple of posts about the sage and the divide between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of sagacity, zeroing in on the seventeen century libertines, the rehabilitation of Epicurus, and that woman lost to French poetry and philosophy, Madame Deshoulieres, a seventeenth century French poet who translated Lucretius, ran a salon for neo-Epicurians, and fell back into the arms of the church as she was dying of breast cancer. And have you heard of Deshoulieres, reader of mine? I hadn’t until a couple of days ago, researching these posts. The lady was buried, and I suspect she was buried because she was a lady. She was still known to the 18th century philosophes, however. In her day, she was aggrieved by being ignored, and wrote this poem “To M. Bouhours on his book entitled The art of expert thinking (de bien penser): on works of the mind”:

“Dans une liste triomphante
De célèbres auteurs que votre livre chante
Je ne vois point mon nom placé.
A moi, n’est-il pas vrai? vous n’avez point pensé.
Mais aussi dans le même role
Vous avez oublié Pascal,
Qui pourtant ne pensoit pas mal.
Un tel compagnon me console.”

Such a poem, I hope, is consoling to the Werepoet.
…
In other news, we have received two emails regarding The Savage Detectives. Our friend K. told us that she actually kept people away because she just wanted time to read it. And from our far flung correspondent, Mr. T., who met the enchanting translator herself, Natasha Wimmer at our never to be forgotten LI party, has been reading it with equal delight, and told us this:

“So, last night S. and his lovely girlfriend R. came over for dinner. At a point, I asked S. to join me on a smoking excursion and as we descended the stairs I mentioned over my shoulder that I also wanted to tell him about a book. He asked: "Is this about The Savage Detectives?" Holy shit, said me, yes it is I said.

There is something in the air, in this time, I am there and I glad to be so.”

the sage enters, wearing a scholar's mask...

“I knew in my time one of many arts, a Grecian, a Latinist, a mathematician, a philosopher, a physician, a man master of them all, and sixty years of age, who, laying by all the rest, perplexed and tormented himself for above twenty years in the study of grammar, fully reckoning himself a prince if he might but live so long till he could certainly determine how the eight parts of speech were to be distinguished, which none of the Greeks or Latins had yet fully
cleared: as if it were a matter to be decided by the sword if a man made an adverb of a conjunction.” – Erasmus, In praise of folly.

LI has always wanted to be that man – a man who took the smallest matters of wordplay as a duelist takes a challenge to his honor. Literature at swordpoint. Not that LI can really manipulate a sword, but we do have a ready steady tongue.

At the same time, we realize that the grammarian who throws himself into the vast matter of the eight parts of speech, the man who searches for the key to the mythologies, the woman who uncovers the false analogies strewn among the no longer read economists of the 19th century, the whole bag and baggage of the scholarly mindset seems pretty absurd. Folly speaks in Erasmus from a point of view that is very close to common sense. The commonest sense, in fact.

David Nuttall, the literary scholar who died this January, wrote a book, Dead from the Waist Down, about the emblematic transformation of the scholar, from the humanistic heretic of the seventeenth century to the dry as dust pedant of the nineteenth century. He uses Isaac Casaubon as a touchstone – first, the real Casaubon from the seventeenth century, then the fictional Casaubon, the scholar as a Fisher King who lacks even a knack for minnow catching in Middlemarch, then Casaubon’s biographer, a nineteenth century scholar named Pattison who George Eliot might have known, whose wife (o those suffering wives of the Victorian sages! married in perpetuity to a toothache!) certainly saw herself reflected in Dorothea.

All of which is of interest to me in my multiply interrupted, omni-directional quest to understand the gradual fading of the sage as a possible mask, to use Yeats’ term. More later.

The exacta - For North

Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go!

The exacta: 1. Street Sense 2. Curlin 3. King of the Roxy

The last named didn’t race at the Derby, and I know, I know that Hard Spun will be out there, biting Street Sense’s flank. Deep in my gut, I have deep doubts about my horsey’s chance of winning this time. On the other hand, he’s a balanced horse. I like his views about getting out of Iraq now, nationalizing health care, and the hydrogen fuel cell. Street Sense is also all about Jackson Pollack, his favorite painter, and mine.

Curlin is a strong horse. Everybody knows he’s a strong horse. He does one hundred push ups every night before he goes to bed. If somebody is going to beat my horsey, it will be Curlin. It might be a KO. Curlin not so secretly wants to be a boxer, having once said, "fuck racin'! I can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." He has also stolen milk money from other horseys in the stables. Bad pony!

Finally, King of the Roxy. Since all eyes are gonna be on the Derby horseys, King of the Roxy is getting’ no kind of look in. Unfair! He’s fast, and he’s got nothing to lose.

Finally: song for this race is Patti Smith’s Horses, of course:

Do you know how to pony?

abusing president backbone

An old friend and foil of LI wrote us an email the other day, asking how we were doing and whether we were still lobbing insults at the president.

The question made us hang our head in shame. In fact, a quick survey of LI backpages lately will show an astonishing paucity of commentary about that human equivalent of the green garbage fly, the POTUS. President Backbone. Or, as he was known to the prophet Isaiah, a drunken man who staggereth in his own vomit.

We might as well confess: we’ve reached the limit with the old pissingpost.

The burden of the torchsinger’s song needn’t be some magnificent object, nor does it need to arouse the deepest sentiments. A song I learned as a lad and could still sing for you on a long car trip, as my friend D. can testify, commemorates a bad day at the races for some slack rounder who didn’t bet on Old Stewball, but took the odds on favorites, the gray mare and the bay. Now, this isn’t the kind of news that should lend its impress to the collective memory of all mankind, but – conveyed by Peter Paul and Mary and then distributed a thousandfold by humdrum strummers in every weekend pizza joint in suburban Atlanta, when they weren’t building a staircase to heaven, Old Stewball has refused to be dislodged from my braincells, and will probably still be ghosting me when, in some public charity ward, I’m trying to figure out where my penis is so I can piss out of it or at least know my I still have my valuables about me.

Yet here I am with one of the great subjects. A rich and semi-educated Republic. A population reveling equally in short term memory loss and its dream of f/x military action, with Doby surroundsound. A man whose sum total of talents would gain him only sporadic employment as a second rate golf pro at country clubs in midsized Southern cities, who descends, fortunately enough for him, from one of those families wealthy in exact proportion to their worthlessness. A suspect, not to say sinister elevation; a lack of interest by our crowned golf pro in leadership so incredible that he simply waves away warnings of an attack that does come because they interrupt his cypress trimming and sleep – besides which, they challenge him to do something, and he has never and will never know fuckall about doing anything; a senseless, vain, cruel war, in which gradually every member of the said yo yo Republic becomes complicit – all of these are surely themes for a satiric epic, an unending Dunciad. Yet LI has eaten the ashy fruit of this for six years, and we have finally had enough. What new insults, shocks, jeremiads can one haul out of the cellar? Isaiah only had to do with uncircumsized armies worshipping Baal in the place of the Lord. He never had to confront the deadly horror of modern mediocrity riding in its nasty little triumph (o, the moralizing of the well fed!) over the necks of taste, sense, sensibility, reason, truth, and the hardwon virtues of the little humanity we might have gained to get us through various bilious nights of the soul – if that is we can’t find sleeping tablets.

So LI has broken the covenant of perpetual abuse which we once pledged to our readers. Cursing and shrieking bores the fuck out of us.

The witch of Endor is dead.

The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and
fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.

The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof;
because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that
dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the
earth are burned, and few men left.