Imagine my amusement at my horoscope in Sunday’s SF Chronicle:
CAPRICORN (December 21-January 19): Mars generates a moment of truth where up close and personal partnerships are concerned. We’re talking serious contracts here — already an ongoing issue in your life. If you’re not hammering out details now, you will be. Mr. Macho is a force to be reckoned with in your one-on-one house. To think of all that energy. With serious Saturn there, too, a Capricorn could end up married.
Restaurant recommendations sought!
Where should Gary and I take our parents?
We never go to fancy places, so we’re quite ignorant in this area.
Limitations: my mother will only eat plain food — roast chicken or grilled fish OK. Nothing, alas, too spicy or ethnic (with the exception of Japanese).
They’re staying in Tribeca, so somewhere there or in Soho or one of the Villages would be good.
Quiet atmosphere desirable so we can talk.
Help!
Douglas Rothschild gave an engaging talk at the Zinc Bar tonight in which he put forward the not very disputable premise that we are living through a history loop that repeats the major elements of the Third Reich.
I’m hoping that Drew, who was taking notes, will give a more complete report on this talk.
I have issues with Douglas’ conclusion, though, that we *ought* to, subversively, imbue our poetry with subversive content. Didactic/subversive content.
I say that not just because I like poetry to give the effect of a kind of rarefied hothouse bordello/hamam/jungle, though that is true, or because I experience it often as a kind of flight of consciousness away from banality and even fact into perspective-giving absurdity or outrageousness. These are merely my preferences, and I acknowledge them as such.
It’s just that, and here I parrot Gary, poetry has to be interesting. That’s its primal directive. Any other “ought”, to me, raises alarums. Or no, let me rephrase that. Poetry can be boring, but it has to be boring in an interesting way.
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
Otohime 