Barking Dog says... All things in being owned are SLAVES, and owning first makes slaves of those who own
Barking Dog says... First you do stuff. Then you write about it. If what you do is a poem, you are a poet.
Barking Dog says... Just because you're a poet don't make everything you write a poem
Barking Dog says... there is no stasis in nature. All Things have powers. All Things, act. A poem is a trace of the power of Things -- its hidden life cannot be owned.
Barking Dog says... a poem, too, is a Thing among things, what it is remains hidden. Withdrawn. The hidden life of Things cannot be owned.
Barking Dog says... what one reads is always a trace, which is another Thing. There is no end to the labyrinth of Being.
Barking Dog says... no one has ever found the Minotaur. No one ever will.
Barking Dog says... Jack went to Market with the World, and traded it for a hologram called 'reality.'
Good reason why the young reject the wisdom of the old. They know intuitively that there's no shortcuts: wisdom grows out of the accumulation of one's mistakes, so it's always retroactive. The more mistakes, the greater the wisdom... but it's wisdom only in regard to mistakes already made, never to the ones that lie in wait. In this, young or old, wise or innocent, we are all equals
Barking Dog says... elections don't drive change, change drives elections. Become a movement of one in a movement of three in a movement of ten to seed a movement of millions.
From: Teachings of the Barking Dog
Uncanny! And I was just contacted for a contribution to the upcoming Teachings About the Barking Dog. Hard to choose, but I think I'll write up our trip to Bartram Gardens last week. How the entrance to the oldest botanical garden in the U.S. was barred, and at your prompting we climbed over the fence, your spirit stick leading the way--BUSTING IN to the garden, baby!
ReplyDeleteWhich come to think of it is a perfect illustration of your other recent pearl:
“First you do stuff. Then you write about it. If the stuff you DO is a poem… you are a poet.”
The main entrance, though, was open... we came across that one from the back. Why is there an infectious disease waste truck parking in front of my flat?
ReplyDeleteSlip into your HAZMAT suit and go ask them. Maybe James Wood is visiting South Philly? Out of perversity--it's the only possible explanation for doing so--I glanced at his most recent contribution to English literary criticism. Couldn't make it past the abstract this time; it's some sort of a nuclear attack on, get this as a target...the Comic Novel.
ReplyDeleteAs a comic novelist, I really resent it. He can't write funny (at all!) so he derides the form. Bet he can't write a villanelle, either. Watch out practitioners of the villanelle! He fetishizes his own inadequacy; his fear of discovery of his own writerly limitations is palpable, even as he screams them to the world. A more pathetic site would be hard to conjure--the cowering critic who bullies to compensate. Classic.
By contrast, it's what I absolutely love about Tom McCarthy. For all his many gifts, he can't write funny, and he knows it, and he does it anyway. It's so endearing!
Sarah Palin has a reality show
ReplyDelete... and a guy on FB told me I have no sense of humor.
Bio-Hazard Man was delivering red containers to a clinic on Broad at the end of the world.. block.
.. that's really how I first typed it.
I guess there'll be a significant market for HazMat disposal at the end of the world. But what would be left? What there to be put at risk?
Guess we'll have to wait and see.
May not be that far off
I know. Such bad luck to have to be living through this Age of Renegment. It feels like someone has made one of those columnular lists divided into the pros and cons of “Living” and has decided that the whole enterprise, even with the readily available solutions to seemingly intractable problems, is just too much bother, joy is too risky to chance. Not Living, even in a permanent crouch, looks so much more pragmatic, so much more sensible under the immediate and dire circumstances, on paper (or pixels), at least. Unfortunately, we find ourselves tethered, like it or not, to these newly mirthless, untidy and exhausted ones. They drag us Down. And what better poster girl, than the woman who occasionally accessorizes with a Down Syndrome baby?
ReplyDeleteSadly, there will always be men—voters and non-voters alike—who will manage to persuade themselves that it is nothing less than honorable to hide behind industrious, perky women like Sarah Palin—you get all that at “hello.”
When the end comes, at least you and I won't be strafed by shrapnel while trading bon mots at a diverting Faculty/Student pizza party, the hapless weekly event that no matter how many times one swears it off, one finds oneself looking forward to attending as an excuse not to have to go home, where one feels even more hopelessly empty, hollowed out, wooden, ashen, and trapped in faux—I mean, OH-SO-FAUX—nobility, like some miserable, sad sack protag in a Dan Chaon novel.
That's no small consolation, sweetums.