WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Strange Daze
byVanderleunonOctober 11, 2020
In 1982 Agnes Denes cultivated, grew, and harvested a two-acre wheatfield in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks away from the World Trade Center and the heart of the financial district. KA-CHING!
BREAKING: Presidential Debate moderator Steve Scully (@SteveScully) deleted his account after getting caught conspiring against Trump by posting a tweet meant as a DM, and then claiming he was “hacked.” pic.twitter.com/pBF1MrCnWz
Arcadians versus Utopians : I shudder at the thought that Americans might be fool enough, to vote for the people who have a plan. And won’t even tell them what it is, until after the election. And could win it, only because they have succeeded in smearing the (essentially Arcadian) incumbent; and drilled all the young commies (“liberals”) to do as they say. (And they will make the adults pay their student debts.)
Vox Popoli: A portrait in missing the point This is a prime example of the problem with all the clueless Boomers and GenXers who live in safe white enclaves and believe that diversity is nothing more than a nice dash of spice and color in their comfortable lives. They don’t realize that they no longer live in America… or how desperately they will miss it once they realize what has taken its place.
Cutting out the corporate cancer Allowing the inmates to run the asylum, as Google and the NBA do, is a certain path to corporate extinction. Don’t be surprised to see other companies not only following Coinbase’s example but getting considerably more proactive about not permitting them to infest the organization in the first place.
The Feds announced to great fanfare that they foiled a plot by far-right extremists to kidnap the daffy governor of Michigan. They coordinated this with the governor so she could try to gain some sympathy. Of course, this being the age of lies, the extremists were mostly anarchists and random goofballs talked into this by the Feds. Putting aside the absurdity of this case, it does raise a good question. That is, why has there been so little organized violence in America? A Peaceful End | The Z Blog
Christians, Jews, other religions, have proved to the authorities that they can be easily intimidated. The Church, and the churches, will agree to close down: accepting that public health must take priority, not only over freedom, but also over God. Politicizing Everything – The Catholic Thing
Reading these Strange Daze links can be a bit depressing. Perhaps, for a change of pace, you might want to watch me blow out the candles on my birthday cake. 😉 http://www.ipernity.com/doc/319805/50408362
ghostsniperOctober 11, 2020, 1:32 PM
That Vox Popoli link reads similar to a comment made here a week or two ago.
The author of the VP screed was born in 1969 so most of what he wrote, too, was utter bullshit.
Once again, some are drawn to the worst life has to offer, but most are not.
ghostsniperOctober 11, 2020, 1:37 PM
Now THAT’S the way to blow them candles out, Jim!
And many more…..
NoriOctober 11, 2020, 3:42 PM
Happy Birthday,James! Thanks for sharing that delightful blowout;nicely done.
Next year,a flammenwerfer,perhaps? 💥
SpellerOctober 12, 2020, 3:04 AM
“I shudder at the thought that Americans might be fool enough, to vote for the people who have a plan. And won’t even tell them what it is, until after the election.”
Oh, they’re fool enough alright. That’s exactly what they did in 2008.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
Comments on this entry are closed.
In re Arcadians vs Utopians, I am sure they have a plan that they really don’t want to reveal. Except Keith Olberman couldn’t wait:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pkVnNqWk0Y&feature=emb_logo
Reading these Strange Daze links can be a bit depressing. Perhaps, for a change of pace, you might want to watch me blow out the candles on my birthday cake. 😉
http://www.ipernity.com/doc/319805/50408362
That Vox Popoli link reads similar to a comment made here a week or two ago.
The author of the VP screed was born in 1969 so most of what he wrote, too, was utter bullshit.
Once again, some are drawn to the worst life has to offer, but most are not.
Now THAT’S the way to blow them candles out, Jim!
And many more…..
Happy Birthday,James! Thanks for sharing that delightful blowout;nicely done.
Next year,a flammenwerfer,perhaps? 💥
“I shudder at the thought that Americans might be fool enough, to vote for the people who have a plan. And won’t even tell them what it is, until after the election.”
Oh, they’re fool enough alright. That’s exactly what they did in 2008.