Lust corrodes my body
I’ve lost count of my lovers
but I can count my money
forever and forever…
Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T., being a hard boiled New Yorker, is ho humming Nostradamas’ prediction that Bear Stearns is toast. As he sees it, it just means someone’s going to get lucky at the fire sale – shed no tears for the scapy, déclassé financial house as it gets that look on its face like the wicked witch of the West after Dorothy slopped the pail of water on her.
Hmm. I can never impress the wise guy crowd. You Gothamites! eating raw steel spikes for breakfast. They talk out of the side of their mouths up there, and never say howdy.
Unfortunately, there is no video for the most appropriate song for today – the Mekon’s Soldier from the Retreat from Memphis album, which I’ve quoted before.
But here’s a link to the second most appropriate song for today – which is a song that stands outside from the society of men in chains, and men who hang themselves in chains. An impossible dream of the past!
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Mr. T tells me it is not spikes, but tacks. Organically grown.
ReplyDeleteI stand corrected
Roger, it galls to offer comfort of any kind, but BS's downfall will hurt a number of rotten people. None in senior management, obviously, but those nibbling each others asses a few rungs below are going to have a hard time. They'll be faced with the yuppie dilemma of selling the Beemer they bought on credit in an effort to salvage the sinking sunk costs of the condo they bought on credit, just as their ARMs adjust and the senior managers who were "grooming" them no longer respond to cell calls.
ReplyDeleteThey're Snopeses in their own right, of course, and will learn nothing, but they have the exquisite sensitivity needed to self-maximize the pain.
Now Now Arkady - we have to establish some limits on our Snopes loathing. Two days a week - otherwise, following in the path of Buddha, Jesus and Lady Ray Bitch , we have to pour out infinite compassion to all human and animal and plant kind from our wounded hearts.
ReplyDeleteLI, following your advice, I've been thinking of the Snopses. It probably won't surprise you that I've also been thinking of that bastard child of the Snopes who fights them, marries a Commie in New York's "Grinnich Village" and goes off to fight with the Loyalists in Spain, the gal with eyes that "were darkest hyacinth, what I have always imagined Homer's hyacinthine sea must have had to look like."
ReplyDeleteAmie
Amie, I have a problem: when I uncork the vials of my wrath and pour out wormwood upon some person or group, I always immediately feel guilty. Here I am again, now feeling sorta guilty towards the poor Snopeses! In the Faulkner world, I'm more like Hightower in Light in August, who can't help himself - striving to to be on one side of the line of either/or, he continually finds himself on both sides at once - is driven to be so by the fact that though we separate the word "confusion" from the word "world" and think we've said a thing or two thereby, they refer to the same object.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a copy of the book to hand, but I looked up a passage in which Hightower listens outside the doors of his former church:
Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whome he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from eithger, without brawling over it. Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying: catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another,he thinks.
LI, that is quite the passage from Light in August. I don't quite know how to respond to it. Or to your problem about balancing anger and sympathy on a road where clarity doesn't come cheap or easy if it comes at all, no matter which side of the road one takes.
ReplyDeleteThough, hmmm, maybe the ending of Light in August provides a response. You know it of course, but since you don't have the book around, hope you won't mind my quoting the last passage of the book.
He laughs, lying in the bed, laughing. "Yes, sir. You cant beat a woman. Because do you know what I think? I think she was just travelling. I dont think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I dont think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn't told him yet. I reckon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. And that she had got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her. And so I think she had just made up her mind to travel a little further and see as much as she could, since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, it would likely be for the rest of her life. That's what I think. Setting back there in that truck, with him by her now and the baby that hadn't never stopped eating, that had been eating breakfast now for about ten miles, like one of those dining cars on the train, and her looking out and watching the telephone poles and the fences passing like it was a circus parade. Because after a while I says, 'Here comes Saulsbury' and she says,
"'What?' and I says,
"'Saulsbury, Tennessee' and I looked back and saw her face. And it was like it was already fixed and waiting to be surprised, and that she knew that when the surprise come, she was going to enjoy it. And it did come and it did suit her. Because she said,
"'My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee.'"
Amie