Month: May 2004

Today’s toothbrushing tune was “Hava Negilah.”

(Maybe because I just put it on my IPod?)

For the most interesting take yet on the tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, see mikarrhea.

My favorite line from Guy Maddin’s bizarre and wonderful film, “The Saddest Music in the World”:

“Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass — it’s all show biz!”

A friend to whom I have confessed violent revenge fantasies writes,

i have to ask you– wait a minute? you can’t understand the desire

to torture? what about all those things you’ve wanted to do to ______

My response to her:

i think that the desire to wound for revenge is very different from torture, which is done to show power and break the spirit of the tortured.

it seems to me a very clear distinction.

i can understand violence.

i can’t understand torture.

i’m not being ingenuous here.

i was just saying to gary last night that i never understood how children could torment each other the way they do [i was no angel as a child btw, but i am sure i was not cruel]. but i utterly comprehend the desire of the tortured to kick the asses of the torturers and make them cry out in pain.

There’s nothing “inhuman” about torture, given that there is no animal (besides human beings) that does it.

(Cats fooling around with prey a possible exception?)

Utterly unable to comprehend the human predilection for torture.

True, I do sometimes “torture” Dante and Nemo by (lightly) squeezing them and asking them to tell me the name of the former leader of communist China.

But that’s different.

Can it be that I am really paying the salaries of the torturers?

This has got to stop.

Amy Goodman reporting this morning on how a 70-year-old Iraqi woman was tortured by US soldiers. They called her a “donkey” and rode on her back.

Can someone explain to me why anyone would want to do something like that?

From Minima Moralia:

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength. 192

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof. 210

… legitimate works of art are today without exception socially undesired. 213

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. 57

Normality is death. 56

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology. 123

Listening to Dolly Parton this morning, thinking to teach “position of adverbs” with “I Will Always Love You.”

It’s too easy for my class.

But I was thinking listening to “Coat of Many Colors” that it advocates a politically complacent romanticization of poverty.

Maybe Dolly Parton should read Brecht?

Learned the other day that Sharon Mesmer and I have the same mantra:

“All is Maya.”

Reading Juliana Spahr’s talk on Poetry in a Time of Crisis…

… thinking, I have never preferred Brecht to Adorno.