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Flapdoodle Snark Bloviation |
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Words from various sources which have adorned the front pages.
We live in the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.
Every movement - the new left, the new right, the new middle, the new church - should have its own court jester. If he can teach each of the militants to laugh at itself it would be useful, if only for that distant day when there would be nobody else to act as a target. The apparent objective of any of these movements seems to be the complete obliteration of all other dedicated thinkers.
I can only see a kind of gigantic advancing wave of Dynamic Slobbism. Of a very special kind. Of a kind that does not look like Slobbism. Eighteen million people will buy copies of Descartes and keep it for doorstops...It's part and parcel of the peculiar sort of physical restlessness that is, I believe, the handmaiden to boredom itself...buying is a positive action today that has no relation to what is being bought...It is hard to keep their attention focused on any one counter for more than 15 or 20 milliseconds, because they don’t, in short, need any of the things they're after...a war, you see, is the Ultimate form of boredom in motion, it's the ultimate dynamic point of view. There are good guys and bad guys. And furthermore, you are playing. Even if you're ten thousand miles from the front, you are given a part.
And sadly, the rewind button in my brain hasn't been working properly since I reached that point in life where I realized that everything I used to think was really cool was actually pretty stupid.
WANDA: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, Ape?
Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport. The wonder of astronomy lies as much in what is unknown as in the beauty of the 1% that is known. However, when discussing these unknowns, one should heed the wisdom of the past, so when lecturing about cold dark matter, I always quote: "If a thousand men believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
All I have to say is, once this is over the Iraqui people better be the free-est fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly.
Chicago...isn't any tougher at heart than the USA is tough at heart, for all her ships at sea. It just acts with the nervous violence of the two timing bridegroom whose guilt is more than he can bear: the bird who tries to throw his bride off the scent by accusing her of infidelity loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. The guiltier he feels the louder he talks...He isn't a tough punk, just a scared one. Americans everywhere face gunfire better than guilt...You can't push
nineteen-year-olds who want to be good doctors and good engineers into a war for the salvation of importers' investments and expect them to come out believing in anything much beyond the uses of the super-bazooka against "gooks."
Picture your head
I've invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us. They are here in solidarity with me because we like non-fiction. We like non-fiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man who's sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it's the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts. America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your
country.
I picked you for the job not because I think you're so darn smart, but because I thought you were a shade less dumb than the rest of the outfit.
Lonely, hell! I feel crowded.
The camp ground was littered with spent shot and rubbish and pools of congealed blood - my stars, wouldn't I just like to take one of our Ministers, or street-corner orators, or bloodlusting, breakfast-scoffing papas, over to such a place as the Alma hills - not to let him see, because he'd just tut-tut and look anguished and have a good pray and not care a damn - but to shoot him in the belly with a soft-nosed bullet and let him die screaming where he belonged. That's what they all deserve.
As our people move in all directions with great grim purpose the safety valve of humor seems to be missing. Humor is not escape. Sleep is escape. Humor is relief. The laugh of finding out the other fellow is funny because he is the enemy is not enough.
Whenever you come close to where humans live you find layers and layers of nonsense.
Have you ever had a dream where you knew you were dreaming, but it was so real that you didn't trust your judgment? And you thought, Well, maybe it did get this bad, but it got bad so fast and so different. So then you thought, "Nah! It's just a dream. Things aren't this bad yet." When suddenly, it all seemed feasible again...and so boring and normal--convincing--like any other day. Man, when I have dreams like that it scares the hell out of me!
Blessed is he that has reached the point of no return and knows it, for he shall enjoy living.
Like many others I became an artist. I choose not to dwell on that cultural accident. Let's say I have always been brilliant in the realm of play.
The eyes are brain exposed
When you first moved to Paris, that was last summer, I began to look on the streets and in the restaurants for the girl you were when you first came to town. I wanted to meet you before I knew you; I guess I just wanted to watch. You had told me about each one of your boyfriends, what kind of sex you had and at the Odessa, at Kiev. I know what it was - I wanted to be gone, not you. See, it's just me and the boyfriends at the restaurants now. We give each other these funny looks and the new girls who just came to town make me sad.
Before going further, I should define what I mean by porn in this context: it's anything people are ashamed to get a kick out of...The new porn has nothing to do with dirty pictures. It's simply about money...How can you write about the perfect ice cream cone or the perfect diet cola or the perfect philodendron when millions of people have never seen a freezer, suffer from sugar deficiencies, and have no home to put potted plants in? How can you publish a magazine whose motto is "Let them eat cheesecake?" Well, you can. And thousands of people will buy it. But don't give away the game by going too far...your readers will write in to accuse you of terminal decadence. And when this happens, what will be truly shocking will not be the accusation-which will be dead on-but the fact it took them so long to get the point.
Battle not with monsters
Remembering ten weeks running with the children of the streets is not too difficult at all, for most of the time is spent waiting. The devil of the kids, the boredom known as Nothing's Shaking, possesses easily...Waiting and watching, and helping things along if it gets too peaceful...That is the commonest denominator for the kids. They wait.
I made out with a dog today. On all fours in the street in Kreutzberg. It waddled up and started licking my face and I licked it back and before long we were french kissing. Well, it was less like kissing, actually, more akin to frantically licking each others' faces. But I'd like to meet a human that kissed that way.
Please let me tell you about boredom, let me go on about the exquisite varieties of boredom I have known and attempt to describe the range of my indifference, I promise to make it absorbing-indeed the very prospect of doing so opens before me such an ocean of boredom, such a dismal, flat immensity in which to pull you in after me that I'd better not try it because it probably won’t work. The failure of boredom is that it is never gripping.
When I was driving once I saw this painted on a bridge: He had only smiled, condescendingly and therapeutically. "...You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become impossible for you to 'go mad' in the classical sense...you are to hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are to intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard...you may be neurotic as hell for the rest of your life, and miserable, maybe even do a short hitch at Bellevue and certainly good for another five years as a paying patient-but I'm afraid never completely out." ...What a drag. Madness might have been a good way to explain terror and excuse anarchy, I mooned, a good whipping boy to blame in the event of mental discomfort, an interesting avocation to while away the long afternoon of life. What a crashing drag...
But then...on the other hand...you never can tell: it might have constituted as bad a drag as sanity. You would probably have to work too hard at it. And at times, almost certainly, a little sneak of memory would slip past your whipping boy and you would be whacked just as hard as ever by that joker's bladder of reality, of pain and heartache and hassle and death. You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts...you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society.
You know that moment when you want to kiss someone and they just won't be distracted from their fag, well then they're "smoking the everlasing cigarette of chastity". Funny how such ideas seemed crystal clear to me at the time.
The word most often used to describe me is neurotic. Which I take to mean: thinker. Someone who thinks a lot. There's a lot to think about, you know. You've got to watch your back.
There were people...who were born café people, claustrophobes unable to endure a definite place or plan. The café was a sort of union station where they might loiter, missing trains and boats as they liked, postponing the final decision to go anyplace or do anything until there was no longer need for decision. One came here because one couldn't decide where to dine, whom to telephone, what to do. At least one had not yet committed oneself to one parlor or one group for the evening; the door of freedom was still open. One might be lonely, frustrated or heartbroken, but at least one wasn't sewed up.
He was a cowboy, mister, and he loved the land. He loved it so much he made a woman out of dirt and married her. But when he kissed her, she disintegrated. Later, at the funeral, when the preacher said, "Dust to dust," some people laughed, and the cowboy shot them. At his hanging, he told the others, "I'll be waiting for you in heaven--with a gun."
The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy --yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.
It's like Paris in the '20s, without all the art! I love it! ... I love the limitations of a modern education! Keeping it real!
All infants are biologically entitled to unconditional love and protection...Those not given such love as children seek it throughout their adult lives - some in ways very dangerous to themselves and to others. But unconditional love can never be received by adults. It can only be given. All love between adults is conditional. It requires behavior; it must be earned and maintained.
PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE,WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF RESTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHS.
Only last week I murdered a rock,
"I am a congenial liar."
After all we are only human beings down here and we could do with a lot more praise and comfort than we actually get. Earthling reassurance-it's in permanently short supply don’t you think? Be honest, brother. Lady, now tell the truth. When was the last time a fellow-Earther let you rest your head on their heart, caressed your cheek, and said things designee to make you feel deeply okay? It doesn’t happen often enough, does it. We’d all like it to happen a lot more often than it does. Can’t we do a deal? Oh boy (I bet your thinking), that head-on-heart stuff, whew, I could use a little of that.
I don't think we care much about individual bravery anymore. It's better to be efficient than brave. So that's it then. It's regrettable but there it is. And your technology isn't any good if it can't beat the enemy's. Your weapons have to be more efficient than theirs, more reliable, more accurate, more deadly. Your technology has to reach peak efficiency...It won't do this without the stress of war. War brings out the best in technology.
The planes move in, the towers collapse, and people react with heartfelt shock and horror. You cry because you're sad and frightened. And then, before you know it, the images are repeated in slow motion with the Samuel Barber soundtrack and a close up photograph of a singed teddy bear. Then you cry because somebody is making you and you wind up feeling confused and manipulated, like your own feelings weren't quite good enough and you needed professional help.
gotta learn the difference between 'i love ya' and the symptoms of ebola
The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one's future nor ever any place all his own. Had failed before the radio commercials, by the streetcar plugs and by the standards of every self respecting magazine. With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he way always the one left alone, it seemed at last, without enough sense of honor to climb off a West Madison Keep-Our-City-Clean box and not enough ambition to raise his eyes back to the billboards.
The atmosphere of a great event hovers over the city. You can see it: some only become human if death is breathing down their necks. They know how to primitively express their most primitive needs only when death brushes their sleeves. Then it is a joy to be alive. The bourgeois pig, who through the whole four years of murder cared only for his belly, can no longer escape the situation. He stands on his sturdy legs in the middle of hell...Life is torture, life is fear, hatred, and vulgarity. Never has it been more so. Thus let life be praised...Their eyes, which always lodged in their sockets like pebbles, become attentive and active. The sense, darkly, that something is happening-something is happening outside their narrow, so-called God-given private family circle. On the corners, in the streets, everywhere a free space appears, they hack away at each other with poisonous speeches. A crowd quickly gathers around each dialogue. Here, dear reader, dramas are enacted. We find ourselves in Homeric times.
My friend, my friend, I was born
Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity-most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The system may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide...
You know, they’re growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height and then they chop themselves down.
Only two parts of life are really fun-making things and breaking things. Stack that Lincoln log tower as tall as you can, then shove that toy dump truck at it with all your might. Build it and blast it. This is the big fun, the very thing the universe is based upon. God's idea of fun is probably to make a whole planetful of people out of hydrogen and carbon, then have H-bombs turn them back into atoms again.
He wondered afterwards whether he had not written poetry "to find a cure for my own ailment, as constipated cats do when they eat valerian."
The distinction between serious and being solemn seems to be vanishing among Americans, just as surely as the distinction between "now" and "presently" and the distinction between liberty and making a mess.
There is an undoubtedly neurotic and probably incurable delusion, sometimes felt to be a curse but equally or more often experienced as an attenuated form of grace, in which a person from his earliest years onward believes his life possesses an especial and yet almost furtively hidden Significance that is always just about to be revealed. Those who share in this condition-they tend to be dissatisfied priests, snap-eyed bores, blocked writers, madmen and all Scottish television executives-do not necessarily awake at each cock-crow with such a weird imperative bubbling away half an inch from their eyelashes, but sooner or later during the next day or two they are sure to be made aware of their ludicrous plight.
One time Fat found a posted notice that fascinated him. The notice stipulated what could not be done, in order of descending importance. Near the top of the list all parties concerned were told:
...my dreams, or those I could recollect, have always been punctuated with gunfire. Gunfire directed at me, coming from me, or in my general vicinity. And never have I shrunk from the presence of such lethal violence.
Please let me tell you about boredom, let me go on about the exquisite varieties of boredom I have known and attempt to describe the range of my indifference, I promise to make it absorbing-indeed the very prospect of doing so opens before me such an ocean of boredom, such a dismal, flat immensity in which to pull you in after me that I'd better not try it because it probably won’t work. The failure of boredom is that it is never gripping.
Remembering ten weeks running with the children of the streets is not too difficult at all, for most of the time is spent waiting. The devil of the kids, the boredom known as Nothing's Shaking, possesses easily...Waiting and watching, and helping things along if it gets too peaceful...That is the commonest denominator for the kids. They wait.
Emerson wrote once that even a corpse is beautiful if you shine enough light on it. But that is horseshit.
The feelgoodists are heretics who have turned the pursuit of happiness into a search for the endless smile, the total serenity, the complete fulfillment of self, the supreme orgasm and the perfect doughnut. Society becomes a service station to supply fuel and spark plugs for easy motoring from womb to tomb. Just thinking about it makes you feel bad.
When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garland youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Kids, if there are any errors in this letter, I did not proof it carefully.
What does know, what does care about its own beauty? Only beautiful women-oh, yeah, and artists, real artists, not the sack, piss, con and bullshit varieties that I’ve always had to work my way around.
Of course, everyone knows that only a man of vision is capable of common sense. And that was precisely the problem of the age.
Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do. And what goes on its blocks and lots is anything the strong can think of and the weak will admire.
The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.
Especially among popular activities there must be an impulse toward cheering and acclaim. Popular poems require that a new system of punctuation be invented so that inexperienced audiences will know when to huzza, applaud, and there must be an amazing new mark that signifies confetti.
We share 40% of our genetic material with bananas. That doesn’t give bananas 40% of human rights.
Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint. Perhaps that’s the way it had to be; I don’t know. Nor do I know whether accepting the lesson has placed me in the rear or in the avant-garde.
I haven't had a chance to ask the questioners the question they've been questioning.
I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet.
If you believe Newt Gingrich won't try to block President Clinton, you must believe rocks grow.
There is no devil, just God when He's drunk.
These elections are like when a guy goes on too long in bed. Good, bad - I don't care, just finish.
Are these your shoes?
Not Insane!
Nixon’s rules of life:
There is no memory with less satisfaction in it than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
You can watch people align themselves when trouble is in the air
M: I think everything should be banned. So it’ll be fun again. Let ‘em drive us all underground again so we can feel persecuted...So we don't have to take adrenaline pills. Now you have to kill people (which, for the record, I don't do) in order to be noticed. We should encourage the masses to be way conformist.
Down With A World
Countries go insane like people go insane...Most places just are something, but America had to mean something too, hence her vulnerability - to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny. And finally it looked as though the riveting struggle with illusion was over, and America had lost...America thought she was awake, brightly awake, but in reality she was sleeping, and deep-dreaming; and she was all by herself. She wanted to be good, to be better - special. We all do. When you go insane, what happens? Wanting to be good and right: can this do it? Can love do it? Too much love, and all of the wrong kind. Love unreturned, tantrum love, collapsing into hurt feelings. Feelings ripped and torn. Inconsolable America, cruelly stung, breathing deeply, and not coming out to play. Marriageably she slept, and dreamt, and thought she was awake.
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