Author Archives: RL

A Boxful Of Time

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From InstaPunk.Com:

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Come back, Matt.

BREAKING NEWS. Things are exploding right now. My wife is figuring out how I can rejoin the newly recreated Boomer Bible Forum, courtesy of our old friend Null…. More importantly, I’m trying to figure out how I can set before you… the maybe dozen books embedded here at InstaPunk. In the meantime a random shot into the void resurrected a totally vanished friend, an incredibly talented young man named Matthew. I asked if anyone remembered my speculation about time, and Matt did: He’s still the smartest kid I know. Scary smart. Like a guy who’d hang onto this:

THREE DIMENSIONS OF TIME

Let’s say we have a box of three-dimensional time. For any event En we can assign a location in the box based on three coordinates: X, Y, Z. Thus event E1 is identified by coordinates X1, Y1, Z1. Now: what attributes of an event require being called out uniquely and necessarily? Remember, there is no before or after here; the location information provided by the coordinates must constitute a replacement for the before and after, because before and after mandates cause and effect, which do not apply here. To explore this question, let’s imagine that event E1 is me striking the letter Q of the keyboard at my computer. To assign E1 a unique location, what do we need to know about it? First, I would suppose is the identification of the event; that is striking the letter Q, which gives it a unique identity on the axis called ‘What event’?, which we can designate as the X-axis. Next, to my view, would come the identifier Who; that is, from whose perspective the Q key was struck, which we can designate as the Y-axis. Is this sufficient information to give us a unique identifier? No. For it should be obvious that I have struck the Q key many many times. Yet, if I am declaring all events simultaneous, I cannot determine a third unique attribute by identifying a ‘when’ in terms of before or after some number of other Q keystrokes by me. I must frame this third category of identifier very carefully. It is clearly a matter of defining context uniquely, but the cause and effect constraint complicates the question enormously. ‘Purpose’ is not acceptable. ‘Physical location’ is presumably identified by the other three dimensions, and does not allow us to distinguish between the numerous events of me striking the letter Q at this very keyboard on the second floor of M__’s house. Perhaps because it seems direct and simple, and perhaps because I am not smart enough, I choose to identify this third coordinate as corresponding to ‘which’; that is ‘which unique key’, was struck. I do so because at every instant, this key is identified uniquely in the same way that I am identified, as an entity in the ‘real world’ which has a ‘right now state of being’ different from every other apparent ‘right now state of being’, even if in the case of the key it is is a minuscule difference in weight, color, edge integrity, etc, associated with what we in chronological time would call ‘wear’.

The graphic [up top] is a primitive representation of the dimensionality we have been imagining. Note that an event does exist in three dimensions; that is, it has a shape featuring height, width, and depth. We can also imbue the shape with other attributes that correspond to the reality of human experience. An event may have color if we assign to each axis an illimitable spectrum of unique hues. Such hues may vary in intensity according to the brightness or lack of it that causes an event to be vividly perceived or hardly perceived at all. The shape may also have a weight/solidity that corresponds to impact; that is, its gravity to the agent and/or others who may perceive it, such that it takes precedence over the natural conformations of other events in nearby time-space.

It will be observed that the the choice of these dimensions is roughly analogous to syntax. The ‘Who’ axis represents the subject, the ‘What’ axis a verb or participial phrase, and the ‘Which’ axis the direct object. I concede that the ‘What’ does, in our example, seem to contain its own direct object; however, the syntax analogy still applies and neatly illustrates an important distinction: the ‘What’ in this model is conceptual, i.e., striking a key, and the striking only becomes real when a unique key becomes the actual direct object of the ‘sentence’ the event signifies. The inclusion of an apparent direct object in the ‘What’ corresponds to the concept of a transitive verb, which, when it is used, brings into the sentence the requirement for a direct object to complete its meaning. Thus the direct object is implicit in the verb itself. The additional refinement here is that the concept may be more specific than a transitive verb; that is, in the time world of events, there are as many different verbs meaning ‘to strike’ as there are things which can be struck.

Why is this distinction important? Because it is obvious from the graphic that not everything we might conceive of as an event requires coordinate information from all three axes. We must therefore consider the variations of events made possible by this observation. For example, it would be possible to have an Event Et that does not have a coordinate on the ‘Which’ axis. On our graphic Et would still exist in time-space, but its shape would be two-dimensional. What would such an event be in reality? It would be the thought of ‘What’ by a specific ‘Who’; in this case, my thought of striking the Q key without doing so. It does not acquire the three-dimensional reality of an actual keystroke, yet it exists as a thoughtform which may also have a color and intensity, and perhaps even a certain solidity.

Note that imagining a thought event allows us to refine our understanding of the role color may play in this time-space. For if every ‘Who’ has its unique hue in the spectrum of all ‘Who hues’, then perhaps it is the case that this is the only color which is transparent to the percipient of an event. The significance of this will be clearer if we realize that an event like E1 or Et can, and almost always is, part of some larger event Ec; that is, an event which consists of multiple/innumerable sentences, such that its size is large, its shape complex, and its connections to other events manifold. The ‘What’ of Ec might be ‘write a letter’, and the ‘which’ might be this letter. This larger event does contain E1 within it, but E1 is not an event wholly observable by anyone but me. Thus, the enclosing form, shape and color of Ec would conceal the overall shape and size of E1 from everyone but me. Even so, attributes of E1 would be observable by other ‘whos’, specifically, the point at which E1 connects with the ‘which axis’ because Ec could not exist without E1. Not so for Et, which would be entirely invisible to everyone but me.

Returning to the matter of incomplete sentences, we can also postulate an event Ex, which has coordinates on the ‘What’ and ‘Which’ axes, but not on the ‘Who’ axis. An example? A thunderstorm. Envisioning this on the graphic provokes an intriguing observation. It has the two-dimensional existence of a thought form, but differs by being oriented at an angle that cannot be created by a thought form; that is, all of its possible angles vary from a center that is perpendicular to the corresponding arc center of a thought form. Thus, we may cautiously assert that a real world event without a human agent is conceptually perpendicular to a thought that is not translated into a real world event.

Initially, this seems an oddity. A thunderstorm is a very vivid and spectacular event, but only if there is a ‘who’ to perceive it. Thus, it is the consciousness of the observer which gives it its three-dimensionality and therefore its real size and weight. These are only latent in the event itself.

A corollary generalization is that this model does seem to confirm the relation posited by quantum physics between the conscious observer and reality. The thunderstorm does not fail to exist because there is no observer, but its existence is quite similar to that of a thought not acted upon.

The third possible variation of an event, coordinates for ‘Who’ and ‘Which’ but not ‘What’ can also be displayed on this model, resulting in an arc center that is perpendicular to both the thought form and the agentless event. What is not clear, however, is the real experience such a two-dimensional form might represent. A verbless sentence? Or is this the realm of the verb to be, of identity itself? And is the ‘Which plane’ also the home of Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious?

*****************

I wrote that years ago. I was smarter then. And dumber. Back then I thought it was possible to share ideas. Now I know different. But I still miss Matt.

posted at 8:59 am by InstaPunk Permalink

Don’t Send Me Dead Flowers

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It’s all a big mess when you really look at it and try to think about it. There’s this big pile of maybe evidence from 1979 to 1988, a story that’s all literally in pieces, artifacts, and a good deal that’s less than artifacts, call them leavings. How is anyone to make sense of this?

There’s a real place.

In Philadelphia

There’s a mysterious subculture twisted from a children’s poem.

There was a plot of sorts:

A King
<

A Queen…

…Who died.

A Hero

An Archvillain…

…Who was punished.

They did their work with tools they stole and tools they made:

Personal Weapons

Silent Urban Assault Bikes

Custom Writing Input Instruments

They had their own Mission Statement…

…Duly signed by all.

They had their own religion.

Their Own Tarot Deck (for plotting)

They had their own art.

And they had a Vanishing Act in May 1985 that left everyone in the dark.

But then there were artifacts, dug from the urban underworld in the thaw of 1987.

Maps

Weapons & ammunition

Bikes & parts

Computers & Parts

Manuscript Fragments

Shrines…

…And Predictions?

Bones

Now what are we supposed to think? When in doubt, we are informed by our culture to seek out the experts, the professors and objective investigators who can look at the evidence and tell us whether something big happened and we missed it, or nothing much happened but the usual tidal wave of rumors and meaningless garbage. That’s why we’re so fortunate to be able to read this particular book on the subject of the Punk Writers of South Street and see if there isn’t some rational way out of this imbroglio.

A Post-Mortem on Punk Writing
by Eliot Naughton, PhD., Princeton University, 1988
Introduction

In approaching the lives and works of punk writers, one is almost immediately faced with such an unprecedented profusion of obtrusive and potentially primal elements of all kinds—seminal, definitional, conformational, and transformational—that the task of distinguishing significant from merely incidental influences requires an extraordinarily meticulous and objective methodology.

It is for this reason that a much more than cursory knowledge of punk’s formative milieu must serve as a prerequisite to the study of punk works. Any reader not mindful of the myriad circumstances attendant on the emergence of this phenomenon runs a double risk: first, of misreading its confused but all too literal fragments of self-history as profound but difficult literary inventions; and second, of inferring from this quite spurious aura of profundity a wholly erroneous schema of punk intent, in which ineptitude is interpreted as technique, confession as metaphor, and brutality as philosophy.

And for those who would approach the subject despite these risks, there is yet another obstacle to surmount, one of such magnitude that any scholar who encounters it could almost be pardoned for concluding that punk’s manifold mysteries are beyond hope of resolution. The nature of this formidable stumbling block was ably described by Clausen in one of the first (and only) essays written on the punk writer phenomenon:

The punks do not publish their works. They may perform them on stage, paint them on the walls of public buildings, or force them on pedestrians at knifepoint, but it is anathema to their code to submit them to publishing houses for dissemination to the world at large. Nor are they in the least disposed to discuss themselves or their work, insisting that whatever reasons they have for writing, the desire to communicate is not one of them.

These are primary anomalies, and the demise of the punk writing movement has altered the situation only for the worse. The writings that were difficult for Clausen to acquire in 1982 are still not widely available, and present evidence indicates that a high percentage of them may have been lost altogether in the fifteen years since the movement’s end. Moreover, the rigid code of silence observed by most of punk’s principals and followers when punk writing was in its ascendancy has not been abandoned but has rather been fiercely retained, almost as if it had become a kind of sacred relic to those who mourn punk’s passing.

In the face of such daunting obstacles, the question inevitably arises: Are the potential benefits of scholarly inquiry into the punk movement worth the labors that will undoubtedly be involved in penetrating its mysteries? Assuredly, any scholar who did not pose this question would be derelict in his/her duty to both his/her profession and his/her peers, notwithstanding the generous latitude society at large has traditionally granted the academic community in the matter of deciding which subjects are worth of investigation and which are not. Simple pragmatism demands that members of the academic community concur, willingly or regretfully, with the opinion expressed by Lieberman in his celebrated Treatise on Modern Criticism that “There is more of wistfulness than wisdom in the credo Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.”

Thus, we confront the task of determining whether or not there is prima facie evidence that punk writing does not merit serious study. And some would argue—indeed, some have already argued—that such evidence abounds. It must be admitted at the outset, for example, that punk writing is, almost without exception, bad writing. No less tolerant and distinguished a critic than Jameson wrote the following indictment:

Even at its putative best, punk prose is repetitive, strident, deliberately offensive in tone and technique, and quite devoid of that most vital prerequisite of literature, the writer’s interest in—and sympathy for—his or her characters. At its worst, punk prose is beneath contempt, consisting of little more than illiterate and incoherent diatribes full of mixed metaphors, fragmented constructs of plot and thought, and irrational unregenerate hostility.

What can there be in all this to attract serious scholarly interest? This is a vital question and one that must be addressed at some length, but having posed it in its proper place, I must at once beg leave to defer discussion of it until such time as the groundwork has been laid for a satisfactory answer, whose referent elements would necessarily at present include facts and conclusions not yet available—for confirmation or disputation—to my readers. Precipitate consideration of such issues could have no reasonable prospect of allaying an only too prudent skepticism. I therefore propose, with apologies to the ordinally minded among you, to lay the foundation for an informed decision by describing some of the punk writing movement’s background and history. Much of the information that follows was obtained from secondary sources, but this is an unfortunate necessity whose potential ill effects I have attempted to minimize by using only that material for which at least circumstantial supporting evidence could be obtained. In those few instances here included for which no such supporting evidence could be found, I have provided the identity of my source so that others can verify or disprove their testimony independently. All speculations in the following summary have been, I believe, expressly identified as such.

Herewith, I offer a brief overview of the punk writing movement, beginning with what is known of its origins.

The Beginning

In the fall of 1978 an unemployed auto mechanic named Samuel Dealey moved from the small town in southern New Jersey where he had been born to the South Street section of Philadelphia. A week later he wrote a letter to his sister describing his new home and his reasons for moving there:

…there’s plenty of kids & nobody to mes with you’s, if I want to gets boozed up I do, theres plenty places for that. Nobody saying hey you, do this, do that where was you yestiday. Its all free here I can dress how I like and I got a place with some other guys who know some of the realy cool bands here, a guy called Eddy Pig is learning me the gitar, so dont worry I’ll be making some good bread soon…

Dealey’s characterization of the South Street atmosphere was not an exaggeration, but a fairly accurate description of what had lately become a Mecca for culturally and economically dispossessed young people. The “realy cool bands,” moreover, were such a presence in the area that in May 1979, residents in neighboring Society Hill twice petitioned the Philadelphia Police Department to enforce the local noise ordinances more strictly, citing “repeated late night disturbances by punk rock bands whose exceptionally loud music and riotous behavior have become an intolerable nuisance to everyone in the vicinity.”
Despite these pleas, however, the police were apparently unable to impose order on the burgeoning population of South Street rebels. According to some contemporary accounts, the police were actually afraid of the punks, and by the fall of 1979, a de facto state of anarchy gave young people the freedom to do whatever they wished as long as they remained within the confines of a ten-block strip known as Punk City. Dealey, meanwhile, had joined a band called ‘The V-8s’ and, having changed his name to Johnny Dodge, was struggling to attain some kind of renown in the punk hierarchy. “I’m going to be somebody,” he wrote his sister. “I’m more punk than anybody here ever thought of.”

As confident as Dealey may have been about his prospects for punk stardom, the slightly defensive tone of the latter statement suggests that he was already finding it difficult to attract attention in what was essentially a leaderless, standardless culture. Too, he may have been discovering that the music itself was too lacking in substance to provide him with a platform for his ego. From its inception, punk music in the U.S. had been suffering from a debilitating identity crisis, as music scholar Roy Keller observed in a 1981 essay on the subject:

(It was) an offshoot of traditional rock and roll that if clear about the sartorial requirements it imposed on its adherents was hopelessly unclear about either its purpose or direction. Unable to agree on so simple a matter as whether punk music represented a reaction against, or a fulfillment of, the cultural imperatives of rock and roll, punk musicians took refuge in mere outrage, competing with one another on and off stage for top honors in boorishness and hostility.

It was at this juncture that a wholly unexpected element intruded on the heretofore closed world of Punk City. What direction Dealey might have taken had he never met Percy Gale, we can only surmise; what is certain is that in November 1979, Dealey formed a brief alliance with Gale that resulted in a cross-pollination between punk and computer technology, which in turn gave birth to the entire punk writing movement.

To comprehend the significance of the event, we must extend our scope of interest twenty miles northwest, to a region near the Pennsylvania Turnpike nicknamed Semi-Conductor Strip, where numerous high technology firms were competing for survival in the volatile market for computer hardware and software.. It was here that a brilliant electronics engineer named Percy Gale had been employed for three years by Neodata Corporation, a firm that produced word processing systems for the corporate market.

Gale’s career was progressing well, by all accounts, and he had recently been promoted to vice president in charge of new product development when Neodata’s founder, a young enfant terrible named Tod Mercado, launched a lengthy campaign to acquire Monomax Corporation, then the fourth largest computer company in the world. The takeover fight was one of the bloodiest on record and when the dust had settled in late 1979, Mercado assumed nominal control of a consolidated NeoMax Corporation which was so deeply in debt and so divided in its top ranks that Wall Street analysts doubted its ability to make prudent business decisions. Accusations and law suits were rife, and dethroned Monomax executives insisted in print that Mercado had completed the acquisition through the use of illegal tactics and unsavory sources of funding.

Soon after finalization of the acquisition, Gale resigned from the new corporation and moved to South Street, allegedly to escape the stress of corporate life. It is impossible to prove that Gale had any purpose other than curing a case of burnout. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Gale was, in fact, a close personal friend of Tod Mercado, and in light of subsequent events, it seems possible that he resigned from NeoMax either to escape questioning about his knowledge of acquisition-related events or, more intriguingly, to pursue some secret project he had dreamt up with his boy wunderkind boss.
I hasten to add that there is no documentation of any such project.

There is, however, a mass of hearsay evidence that there existed some connection between Mercado and the punk writers of South Street. Almost all contemporary accounts confirm this directly or by implication, which represents an interesting exception to the norm among chroniclers of Punk City, who seem to differ sharply on many of the most basic ‘facts’ they report on. But whether Percy Gale’s presence on South Street was the by-product or the source of Mercado’s punk connection, we may never learn to a certainty. For example, the very same accounts which verify Mercado’s communications with punk writers tend to characterize Gale in starkly different ways. Under the sobriquet ‘The Sandman,’ he is in various accounts lionized as a major figure, depicted as a gifted though narrow technological guru, and dismissed as a minor supporting player, a kind of informed onlooker. The perspective on Gale adopted by any given chronicler of punk history seems to hinge on the very same issues that confront the scholar, which is to say that one’s view of Gale’s role and importance is determined by the particular assumptions one makes about what punk writing was and what it may have meant, if anything.

All we can say with confidence is that for whatever reason, Gale left a well paying corporate position, as well as an opulent suburban townhouse in King of Prussia, to move into a decaying urban neighborhood, where he participated in founding the phenomenon known as punk writing.

Boz Baker’s highly personal—and somewhat questionable—memoir, “The Razor-Slashing Hate-Screaming De-Zeezing Ka-Killing, Doctor-Dreaming Kountdown,” contains a passing mention of the first meeting between Dealey and Gale, but the only authentic record I have been able to locate is a reference in another of Dealey’s letters to his sister, in which he writes:

…Met a computer guy at Gobb’s said he could fix some hi teck effects for the band. Sounded like too much bread to me but he says unless I wanted to learn the gitar for real (I never claimed I was no Hendricks did I) I should give it a try, don’t worry about the bread til we get to it. Said I’d see him around mabe we’d talk later. Mabe he’s crazy but mabe not too, who knows.</blockquote/>

Dealey must have overcome his doubts about Gale because he began collaborating with him almost immediately and soon departed from the V-8s to form his own band, Johnny Dodge & the 440s, which gave its first performance on November 27, 1979, at a South Street bar called the Slaughtered Pig….

YOU’ll FIND THE CONTINUATION OF THIS BOOK IN “PUNK CITY” at Amazon.com.

The Dubious Legacy of John Bunyan

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If you haven’t read him, which is likely, you probably have a dim recognition that he is included in what is called the “canon” of literature greats. He wrote a famous book that has given Christians, and specifically Protestants, a bad name and a worse image for coming up on 400 years now. So who is he and why do we care?

Wiki tells us:

“John Bunyan (/ˈbʌnjən/; baptised November 30, 1628 – August 31, 1688) was an English writer and Puritan preacher[1] best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. In addition to The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.

“Bunyan came from the village of Elstow, near Bedford. He had some schooling and at the age of sixteen joined the Parliamentary Army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years in the army he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learned from his father. He became interested in religion after his marriage, attending first the parish church and then joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist in Bedford, and becoming a preacher. After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of nonconformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested and spent the next twelve years in jail as he refused to give up preaching. During this time he wrote a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and began work on his most famous book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was not published until some years after his release.”

It’s hard to argue with putting him in jail, except that it seems to have given him the time and inclination to write Pilgrim’s Progress. Which we should all be very sorry about.

The Author’s Apology for his Book

{1} When at the first I took my pen in hand
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook
To make another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.
And thus it was: I, writing of the way
And race of saints, in this our gospel day,
Fell suddenly into an allegory
About their journey, and the way to glory,
In more than twenty things which I set down.
This done, I twenty more had in my crown;
And they again began to multiply,
Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly.
Nay, then, thought I, if that you breed so fast,
I’ll put you by yourselves, lest you at last
Should prove ad infinitum, and eat out
The book that I already am about.
Well, so I did; but yet I did not think
To shew to all the world my pen and ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what; nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;
I did it my own self to gratify…

[More than 30-some deleted stanzas]

This book is writ in such a dialect
As may the minds of listless men affect:
It seems a novelty, and yet contains
Nothing but sound and honest gospel strains.
Wouldst thou divert thyself from melancholy?
Wouldst thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly?
Wouldst thou read riddles, and their explanation?
Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?
Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see
A man in the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?
Wouldst thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep?
Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep?
Wouldest thou lose thyself and catch no harm,
And find thyself again without a charm?
Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowest not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same lines? Oh, then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.

                                           —JOHN BUNYAN

 
Then he gets started on the story of his Pilgrim, Christian. And everything goes straight to hell, writing-wise, from there.

THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

In the Similitude of a Dream

{10} As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. [Isa. 64:6; Luke 14:33; Ps. 38:4; Hab. 2:2; Acts 16:30,31] I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, “What shall I do?” [Acts 2:37]

{11} In this plight, therefore, he went home and refrained himself as long as he could, that his wife and children should not perceive his distress; but he could not be silent long, because that his trouble increased. Wherefore at length he brake his mind to his wife and children; and thus he began to talk to them: O my dear wife, said he, and you the children of my bowels, I, your dear friend, am in myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered. At this his relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy distemper had got into his head; therefore, it drawing towards night, and they hoping that sleep might settle his brains, with all haste they got him to bed. But the night was as troublesome to him as the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and tears. So, when the morning was come, they would know how he did. He told them, Worse and worse: he also set to talking to them again; but they began to be hardened. They also thought to drive away his distemper by harsh and surly carriages to him; sometimes they would deride, sometimes they would chide, and sometimes they would quite neglect him. Wherefore he began to retire himself to his chamber, to pray for and pity them, and also to condole his own misery; he would also walk solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading, and sometimes praying: and thus for some days he spent his time.

{12} Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was, as he was wont, reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, “What shall I do to be saved?”

{13} I saw also that he looked this way and that way, as if he would run; yet he stood still, because, as I perceived, he could not tell which way to go. I looked then, and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him and asked, Wherefore dost thou cry? [Job 33:23]

{14} He answered, Sir, I perceive by the book in my hand, that I am condemned to die, and after that to come to judgement [Heb. 9:27]; and I find that I am not willing to do the first [Job 16:21], nor able to do the second. [Ezek. 22:14]

CHRISTIAN no sooner leaves the World but meets EVANGELIST, who lovingly him greets With tidings of another: and doth show Him how to mount to that from this below.

{15} Then said Evangelist, Why not willing to die, since this life is attended with so many evils? The man answered, Because I fear that this burden is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into Tophet. [Isa. 30:33] And, Sir, if I be not fit to go to prison, I am not fit, I am sure, to go to judgement, and from thence to execution; and the thoughts of these things make me cry.

{16} Then said Evangelist, If this be thy condition, why standest thou still? He answered, Because I know not whither to go. Then he gave him a parchment roll, and there was written within, Flee from the wrath to come. [Matt. 3.7]

{17} The man therefore read it, and looking upon Evangelist very carefully, said, Whither must I fly? Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket-gate? [Matt. 7:13,14] The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? [Ps. 119:105; 2 Pet. 1:19] He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.

{18} So I saw in my dream that the man began to run.

A very good place in the text for us to follow suit and begin to run. A quick word on John Bunyan’s real literary legacy and the only reason he’s still listed and gets invitations to the annual awards ceremonies. HE IS THE SINGLE MOST BORING, UNREADABLE WRITER IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. (With the possible exception of James Muchener on a bad day; see Muchener’s bestsellor Cretaceous at Moon Books, Shuteye Town.)

Why have we bothered to tell you about Bunyan. Because he makes a good intro to the American writer William Bannitt, who thought he was an unapologetic Bunyanesque evangelical Christian Apologist until they invented computer poker games. But even that didn’t stop him from writing.


William Bannitt. If the Pope were a Harvurd-educated Republian° politician°, he would probably act a lot like former cabinet secretary William Bannitt, writing and tirelessly promoting thousands of books about how we could solve all the country’s problems by reading books written by William Bannitt. (See “Fixing Education,” Moon Books, Shuteye Town 1999.)

Here’s an excerpt from Bannitt’s 1999 Book, on sale at Moon Books in Shuteye Town.

FIXING EDUCATION

Chapter One

The decline of basic values in Amerian public education is no accident. It has been paced by a corresponding decline in the teaching of basic skills, history, and literature. Both trends serve the purpose of isolating children from the taproot of the Amerian moral and legal system in ways that make them powerless to defend themselves against an increasingly suffocating political correctness designed to replace enlightened democracy with a rigidly egalitarian, multicultural mobocracy.

When I was Secretary of Education, I found myself constantly engaged in confrontations with elementary and secondary school bureaucrats who were prepared at every turn to sacrifice attention to literacy problems in favor of endless proposals to foster ‘multicultural awareness,’ ‘gender sensitivity,’ and ‘racial tolerance.’ These bureaucrats were so intent on their aims that they would stoop to any ploy to change the subject. I have had elementary school principals claim they were “unable to understand the words” in my numerous New York Times essays on education. I have met with history teachers who evaded questions about deficiencies in Amerian and Modern European curricula by insisting that they themselves could not identify five important historical dates or list all 50 states of the Union. I have met with math teachers who professed an inability to do long division and English teachers who ostentatiously uttered serial atrocities of syntax, usage, and noun-verb agreement.

I am, of course, aware that there are some competency problems in the public school teacher corps, but I am not so naive as to suppose that an English teacher could have escaped learning grammar twice over in the Greek and Latin studies which used to be required in all the secondary schools I have ever known, from Choate (which I attended) all the way down the ladder to Hotchkiss (which my father’s gardener’s son attended.)

Therefore, I have no alternative but to conclude that such charades of ignorance are expressly designed to provide cover for the ongoing, systematic indoctrination of Amerian youngsters with a set of values that most citizens a generation ago would have denounced as insipid and traitorous. Today, the most successful physician or attorney will also try to change the subject by asseverating an ignorance of the dictionary definition of ‘insipid.’ I am not fooled. I knew dozens of pre-med and pre-law students at Harvard. Their views on the comparative merits of Aquinas and Savonarola might have disappointed on occasion, but they knew what ‘insipid’ meant.

How have we reached this point? How can Amerians continue to turn a blind eye to the compulsory perversion of values which is proceeding under their very noses? Here, the only answer which serves is that the program of propaganda which supports public education’s corrupt curricula is exceedingly clever, intricately organized, and ruthlessly cunning about hiding its agenda under a screen of apathy, ineptitude, and mediocrity. To put it more simply for those who will feign incomprehension, the fix is in. Hence the title of this book.

We cannot afford to let them succeed at this. The plan must be exposed and defeated. The consequences of failing to stop the hidden agenda are almost unthinkable. Try to imagine a graduating high school senior who cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution and its first ten amendments; who cannot write a cogent literary analysis of Shakespeare’s development as a writer from, say, Titus Andronicus to The Tempest; who cannot characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the ten most significant monarchs of England; who cannot explain the distinctions between Galilean and Newtonian discoveries about gravity; who cannot reel off the twelve-times-table at a moment’s notice; who cannot identify the principal organs and their functions in the viscera of a dissected frog; and who cannot name the cabinet-level departments of government and the most powerful chairmen of committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Just imagine it. Yes, I am indeed discussing the prospect of cultural immolation. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Not exactly a Palindrome but maybe a What What?

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We’ll give you some background on the film soufflé above in a moment, but first the nub of the matter. The author of the book that gave rise to the movie was Jerome K. Jerome. The not quite a palindrome thing, which he has in common with two other young men who responded to this odd circumstance in their own ways.

Jerome Jerome, Sirhan Sirhan, and Jamal Jamal

More about the other two in half a jiff. We’ll get Three Men and their dog and boat up and out of here, so we can focus on more interesting cases. According to Wiki…

“Jerome was born in Caldmore, Walsall, England. He was the fourth child of Marguerite Jones and Jerome Clapp (who later renamed himself Jerome Clapp Jerome), an ironmonger and lay preacher who dabbled in architecture… Jerome was registered as Jerome Clapp Jerome, like his father’s amended name… The family fell into poverty owing to bad investments in the local mining industry, and debt collectors visited often, an experience that Jerome described vividly in his autobiography My Life and Times.

“The young Jerome… wished to go into politics or be a man of letters, but the death of his father when Jerome was 13 and of his mother when he was 15 forced him to quit his studies and find work to support himself. He was employed at the London and North Western Railway, initially collecting coal that fell along the railway, and he remained there for four years…

“On 21 June 1888, Jerome married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris (“Ettie”), nine days after she divorced her first husband. She had a daughter from her previous, five-year marriage… The honeymoon took place on the Thames “in a little boat,” a fact that was to have a significant influence on his next and most important work, Three Men in a Boat.”

“Jerome sat down to write Three Men in a Boat as soon as the couple returned from their honeymoon. In the novel, his wife was replaced by [teo] longtime friends. This allowed him to create comic (and non-sentimental) situations which were nonetheless intertwined with the history of the Thames region. The book, published in 1889, became an instant success and has never been out of print.”

Why so much about an old dead Brit? Just that Jerome, if we may call him by his first name, did not enjoy the kind of privileged upbringing one might expect from his masterpiece of gentle humor. He was, in fact, born of the mines, from which he escaped along as he did his father’s domineering hands.

Our next What What youth is far and away the most famous of the three. He assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. His youth was harsh indeed, thanks to an abusive father. Wiki tells us…

“Sirhan was born into an Arab Palestinian Christian family[6][7] in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine. As a child growing up in the West Bank, Sirhan was traumatized by the violence he witnessed in the Arab–Israeli conflict, including the death of his older brother, who was run over by a military vehicle that was swerving to escape hostile gunfire.[8]

“When Sirhan was 12 years old, his family emigrated to the US, moving briefly to New York and then to California… Sirhan’s father, Bishara, has been characterized as a stern man who often beat his sons harshly. Shortly after the family’s move to California, Bishara returned alone to the Middle East. Standing 5 feet 5 inche, Sirhan moved to Corona to train to be a jockey while working at a stable, but lost his job and abandoned the pursuit after suffering a head injury in a racing accident.

“Sirhan never became an American citizen, retaining instead his Jordanian citizenship. As an adult, he changed church denominations several times, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches. Then in 1966, he joined the occult organization Ancient Mystical Order of the Rose Cross, commonly known as the Rosicrucians…

“…on June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a .22 caliber… revolver at Senator Robert Kennedy and the crowd surrounding him in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy had finished addressing supporters in the hotel’s main ballroom. Authors George Plimpton and Pete Hamill, football Hall of Famer Rosey Grier, and 1960 Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson were among several men who subdued and disarmed Sirhan after a struggle.

“Kennedy was shot three times—once in the head and twice in the back—with a fourth bullet passing through his jacket. He died almost 26 hours later. Five other people at the party were also shot, but all five recovered…”

Sirhan was tried and convicted of murder in 1969 and has been in prison ever since.

Our third young man seems disposed to follow more closely the path of Jerome Jerome. They have at least the ‘J’s in common. Jamal also has long had his heart set on being a writer. The extent to which his own father has been a support or a hindrance must arise from the pages of his intensely autobiographical work.

The 1842 Buick referenced in the text.

 

A landmark work, written in direct competition with Dreams of My Father by Bernadine Dohrn. Oops. Forget that.

A landmark work, written in direct competition with Dreams of My Father by the author’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn. Oops. Forget that.

Me Slave

Chapter 1

I was always too proud, Mama said. It was probably a veracious assertion, but what else can you do in a hood where you’re owned by the Man. Before they sold off my father, he said to me, “Kareem—“ (He named me Kareem Abdul, but Abdul wasn’t our last name. We didn’t have last names then, back in the days before there was even a Martinlutherking, if we had even known there would be such a mentor, which we didn’t, because we weren’t allowed to go to school or take correspondence courses in Black Studies, or anything. It was for shit in 1856. But to resume our tale…) “Kareem,” quoth my father, “you’ve got to be proud. Don’t let any man dis your name, your female companion, or your wheels. That is the name of that melody.”

Ah, how young I was, how less than fully mature, mayhap even callow. For it seemed to me ironic indeed that my beloved pater would specify his wheels as a particular object of pride. I myself found them humiliating, an unending catalyst for blushes and lamentably thin excuses. What Afrian-Amerian lad past puberty could tolerate being observed in the rumble seat of an 1842 Buick? Worse, the tape player was an eight-track, and the only cartridge my father possessed was an anthology of Henry Mancini, in whose lush overuse of the violins I was certain I could hear the dark white heart of oppression.

It would not be until years—nay, decades—later that I would recall the ephemeral bliss of sharing with my father, in that ludicrous wreck of a vehicle, the liberating AM voice of our only real heroes, the stars of the suppressed and poverty-stricken Negro Leagues. Such is the miracle of radio, though. For us it was impossible to hear the worn seams of Satchel Paige’s glove, the holes in Josh Gibson’s Nike’s. It sounded altogether as wonderful and rich—yes, rich—as the broadcasts of the fabled New York Dodgers, who in those days were white as a bleached bone, with nary a thought of choosing Jackie Robinson in the college draft, or Reggie Jackson, or Hank “The Hammer” Aaron—whose names we, of course, had never heard in the cotton fields of Virginia, and wouldn’t in our lifetimes.

Thus was the wretchedness of an existence without more than a handful of positive role models. It made one feel as if there was no chance to attain stardom, to find the so-called good life out in the western paradise of Californica, where only white people were allowed to find gold and buy property in Beverly Hills. I had dreams, but they had to be kept small to avoid disappointment, or so I used to suppose.

Suppose, suppose. I have done a lot of that over the years. Suppose my Uncle Darrell hadn’t contracted AIDS, or cholera as we called it then. He was the only family my Mama had, and how she cried when he confessed that he had shared the rusty nail he used for a hypodermic with Michael, the young ne’er-do-well who lived in the next hut. “But he’s gay,” she wailed, her whole real-sized frame shaking with sobs. “You’ll catch the cholera from that N-word person!”

Yes, she was colorful in her language, at times outrageous. If I flinched at her use of the N-word, however, it couldn’t have been much more than a precocious foreboding of days I would never live to see. For in our piteous little hood, the N-word was ubiquitous, if not peripatetic. It was “N-word” this and “N-word” that, so that an outsider might have been pardoned for believing that we Afrian-Amerians had no given names, only this one all-encompassing descriptor to which we answered like so many dogs.

And so, it seems, we have completed a circle, returning once again to the matter of pride. My pride. Which was continually offended by everyone and everything. Until the day I determined upon an answer of sorts. An answer that seemed to me perfect, complete, and incontestably inevitable. Escape.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit…

Time will tell us the rest of the tale, no doubt.

Going Against the Brain

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They say this is kind of Dejuan’s thing. an important luminated voice they say.

Dejuan also wrote, quite movingly (he’s Serbian, so I’m just guessing) about that:

Офи обиномöд суво ок. Гöд едüфäликон воми ет, цук тилс вомес об. Онотодоб тимс се ути, ифи та киом плеидолсöд уриас, вио ед пардолс пладолöс. Бüдедис ипубон еке üн, суконс таледи ин лöп, бинон-ли лупс ритани иф нем. Тä илелилом утöпио виниг суи, да äсä бадик фидом-ли верат. Ка ифинüкон посавон травäрöпс сио, их клäникоси мöб

Фе киф магот сикулис, фениг недонс валанис йе наф. Едаглофон епеной нендöфикс фид ду, де блодес хидüнана осеиволс цüт. Атим опöлüкомс лä сеп, по сио есöколс осагоб, ис топ дагик дасеви. Дебреикол килдег тä офи, ме фат фогинани фред. Ел вин пасат пöдеидом. Фредо лüдаут ман ту, лемико пардолс сукубонс дü ели, ас бöниäлик еперон феиник ати.

Зü вул ыафал пöпе, вом есасенолс ыибалан ас. Лил натäдик вöдс он, сеатон слопüкöн баи дö, наф ипубон осауникоб падü

You’d think the Pope would know, but he don’t seem to really. Which understandably leads us directly to a prime example of the pathology he was lamenting.

What we have on this one from Who’s Who, Shuteye Nation:

Susan Brownmouth. A pioneer among academic feminists°. Back in the 1970s, Brownmouth wrote a book called Against My Will, which set a new standard for heavily footnoted female° misinterpretations of history°. Although she hasn’t broken any new ground since, every practitioner in the lucrative field of Gender° Studies remains in her debt. (See “Cut Their Balls Off, Moon Books, Shuteye Town.)

All right, so we did that. I don’t know if you know how all this works, but I’m just an intern off from college because everything’s shut down for protests of everybody else and the President just got resigned by the Boared of Trusties, so we all went looking for some kind of job, any job, to keep us in weed until school’s back in the market. I’m one of the ones who got handed this kind of one, meaning the kind nobody else wants to do and can bush off on some greeby like me. What I got is some notes and url’s and that’s it. Never heard of this Brownmouth dude. Note says more bio from Wiccipedia, which I looked up but forgot already. I think it says something like this. I’ll do the blockquote thing. It’ll look better.

This Susan Brownmouth person [1] grew up in New York, surprise, and went to college in New York, more surprise, at a place called Corbell University, where she masturculated at the Corbell University A&M unit, which is what they call the college of Agriculture & Matriarchy [or something, call it 2]. I think she [3] majored in Porcine Sudies and Animal Midwifery [4]. Then he went completely nuts [5] and got herself kicked out over some sexul alligorations that weren’t, you know, true. The way the pigs tell it anyway [6]. So what was left was being a Gender Mayhem PhD gofer for about five [5] or fifteen [15]  years. Then there have to be books. Like it said up top [-1]. And this new one. Which is called Cut Their Balls Off.

They gave me this text file which I’m going to just drop in here inside a blockquote.

Cut Their Balls Off

Chapter One

Arma virumque absurd misrepresentations and cultural myths Troiae qui primus significant new reconceptualization ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec this and numerous other books olim meminisse latest research iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa growing body of feminist scholarship ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque proves the irrational basis of male theories that cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris patriarchal impositions iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse only a penis iuvabit castration.

Arma virumque cano patriarchal legacy Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille matriarchal societies terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae backward chauvinist reasoning qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit Lesbians. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma smarter, physically stronger, and more genetically talented virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit vulva. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit vagina.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui misinterpretations, evasions, and outright falsehoods primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec because of the ovaries and uterine reflux olim meminisse breasts iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta menses. Forsan testosterone-crazed rapaciousness et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui hormones primus ab oris Laviniamque rape venit. Multa ille terris conceptual rape iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim effective new definition of rape meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan subjugation, deprivation, even mass murder et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque hormones venit. Multa ille intrinsic disease of maleness terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et breasts haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque not true at all cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque vagina venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta proven by a pioneering essay written last week. Forsan et haec olim traditional penis-in-vagina fantasies meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris more than breasts and a vagina iactatis et alto conclusively demonstrated. Dux femina facta. Forsan vulva, breasts, and cervial contractions et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae more than 63% female qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina less than 22% male facta. Forsan et breasts haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque intelligence and creativity cano Troiae vagina qui primus as shown in the landmark study being published next week ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma additional rapes and female castrations virumque cano hormones, specifically progesterone Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et vagina envy alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse deliberate enslavement iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris estrogen actually facilitates development of Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina contrary to the long unexamined assumptions about facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui myth of menstrual “madness” primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris jealous patriarchs iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et rape, murder, haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus murder, rape, and female circumcision ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux female achievement and innovation femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano many recent studies and papers Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris rape iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta rape . Forsan et rape haec olim meminisse vaginal mutilation iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris superior female perception Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina myth of mathematical backwardness facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab female genetic structure oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina cooperativeness, interpersonal facility facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae psychological deviancy qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et penis and scrotum alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano as much as 72% female Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris despite continuing reactionary attitudes by male-dominated iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec rape and perversion olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui systematic brutality, torture, and rape primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et rape and objectification haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui deranged fantasy structure primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa superior female responsiveness and adaptability to ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque continuing rape and subjugation cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta modern translation of ancient patterns of rape and haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa potentially much higher IQs ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus denied access to ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa systematic oppression and metaphorical rape ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse only 20% of males studied iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano therefore proven to near certainty Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa rape, mutilation, and murder ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina nicer, better, smarter, stronger facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque neverhteless demonstrated cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris criminal tendencies iactatis et alto testosterone. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse the historical record iuvabit. Arma virumque revisiting old assumptions cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille dominating female terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma political will and group engagement virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit vaginal liberatio. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina psychosis facta testosterone. Forsan et haec olim meminisse animal instincts iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae never again qui primus ab oris murder, rape, enslavement, and subjugation Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux breasts and buttocks and brains femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma uterine contractions virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan menstrual freedom et haec olim meminisse creativity, intelligence, understanding iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque penises venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina penises facta. Forsan et haec olim rape meminisse rape iuvabit.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque scrotum psychosis venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec penis removal olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma rape virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris “tits and ass” Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan devaluations and humiliations et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque superiority of the female cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa regardless of rape and subjugationille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit penis.

And now the video they gave me. Said it would be easy to understand and clarfying somehow. Let’s roll it.

Okaaay. I’m outa here.

According to thy promises declared unto mankind

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From the Book of Common Prayer, 1928 Version:

GENERAL CONFESSION

Let us humbly confess our sins unto Almighty God.

Silence may be kept.

Officiant and People together, all kneeling

Almighty and most merciful Father,
we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,
we have followed too much the devices and desires of our
own hearts,
we have offended against thy holy laws,
we have left undone those things which we ought to
have done,
and we have done those things which we ought not to
have done.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
spare thou those who confess their faults,
restore thou those who are penitent,
according to thy promises declared unto mankind
in Christ Jesus our Lord;
and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,
that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,
to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

The Priest alone stands and says

The Almighty and merciful Lord grant you absolution and
remission of all your sins, true repentance, amendment of
life, and the grace and consolation of his Holy Spirit. Amen.

********
CONFESSION

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind In Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

******

Ooooooh, shiver. Men are, ugh, oh so thoroughly, ugh, men. And while we women can can get inside their heads and write their thoughts, we can't be chided for hating their fucking impotent retarded thoughts. May the peace which passer hall understanding be upon you.

Ooh, shiver. Men are, ugh, oh so thoroughly, ugh, men. And while women can can get inside their heads and write their thoughts, we can’t be chided for hating their impotent retarded thoughts. May the peace which passeth all understanding be upon you…

Bounden Duty

Chapter One

The little girl named Sally walked the three miles from school every day, across the bleak yellow wasteland which had once been fields but were now little more than the wide, unhealed scar of a strip mine. A mile-and-a-half into her journey stood the one tree which had struggled futilely out of the raped soil to put forth a handful of leaves that turned yellow and fell off almost immediately, as if sickened by the land itself. The tree was the one milestone Sally looked forward to, and she had acquired the habit of counting the number of footsteps to the tree, and then from the tree to the featureless granite cottage where her mother listlessly waited to give her a joyless greeting. The number of steps to the tree was usually between three thousand-one-hundred-nine and three thousand-one-hundred-thirteen. If anyone had counted as Sally had in her doomed young life, they would have found her body at step number three thousand-one-hundred-seventeen. As it was, the Constable wrote down that he had found the body of the strangled schoolgirl at a distance of about ten feet from a dying aspen tree. Her mother didn’t weep when they told her, but she made a dry, hacking, empty sound in her throat that could have been a sob.

Inspector Alan Dogleash of Scotland Yard stared gloomily out the window of his office. The view was drably anonymous, as if the slate-colored modern building to the north had no name or sponsor but had merely appeared one day, like some appropriate fungus of technology. Pedestrians and cars passed in front of its facade without looking, as if they knew it had no identity and could not look to it for affirmation of their own. The inspector thought of the first line of a new poem, so cheerless and grey that it needed to be written down at once, and he was in the act of looking for a pencil when his secretary told him about the request for assistance from Minetown, the barren industrial city where he normally took his holidays.

“What did they say?” he asked, trying to remember the fugitive line of verse before it escaped into the mildewed dungeon of his unconscious.

“They requested assistance,” said Mrs. Awful with some asperity. She regarded all questioning as interrogation and beneath her. “They said they could probably solve it themselves but they’re all too tired and they’re still getting used to their new anti-depressant medication.”

Dogleash sighed. Minetown would be the perfect break in his routine. He had never known any place more destitute of beauty and hope. Perhaps he could extract another book of poetry from the experience.

Constable Down greeted Dogleash with polite uninterest and told him the details, such as they were, over a cup of black, astonishingly bitter tea. There was a fireplace in Down’s office, and its small flame crackled mirthlessly in the grate, warming neither the room nor the toneless voice of the constable.

“She had been strangled with her own knee sock,” Down reported. “No sign of a struggle. And there should have been. The ground there is always muddy, and it’s a clay mixture that retains its shape for quite a time. I’ve tried to think what that might mean, but I don’t have the energy. Do you want a scone?”

“No,” Dogleash replied, absently.

“Good,” said Down. “I’m out of scones. Haven’t had any scones for months.”

“What about the mother?” Dogleash asked. “Did she have any ideas?”

“I haven’t seen her yet,” Down said. “I was waiting for you brainy blokes from Scotland Yard.”

Dogleash sighed, and then, just to do something different, he yawned.

The granite cottage where Sally’s mother lived had been built twelve thousand years before, and the only improvements that had been made since then were the addition of a cheap single-pane window, a wireless in the sitting room, and a trio of small ugly appliances in the kitchen.

“Do you want a scone?” asked Mrs. Crap.

“No,” Dogleash replied, absently.

“I’d love a scone,” Down offered, with unusual vigor.

“Don’t have any,” Mrs. Crap told him, as if she, too, had been sconeless for months.

“Did Sally say anything unusual the week before?” asked Dogleash.

“The week before what?” Mrs. Crap looked dully bewildered.

“The week before the murder,” Dogleash said, gently.

“Oh. She said she didn’t know what it was all about.”

“What?”

“Life.”

“Oh that,” said Constable Down. “That’s nothing.”

Dogleash wondered if it was really nothing. It was true that all the people he knew and all the people he ran into on and off duty were always thinking about life, and how miserable and pointless and tedious and unbearable it was, but he couldn’t quite remember if little girls spent their time engaged in such thoughts. Weren’t they somehow involved with dolls, and dress-up, and little-girl pursuits like that? He put the question to Mrs. Crap.

“Not Sally,” said her mother. “The only thing she ever talked about was life. She said she supposed life might be worthwhile to some people, but she knew she was English, and so the only thing she could do with her life was try to figure out exactly how bleak it was, in the most excruciating possible detail, for sixty or seventy years, unless some merciful stranger would do her the favour of strangling her with one of her own knee socks.”

“You’re right,” Dogleash conceded. “It was nothing.” Sally had been, after all, a typical, ordinary girl, and there would be no sudden break in this case. It would unfold like all other cases, for hundreds of pages of cheerless fires, soporific conversations over tepid cups of tea, and thousands of incredibly depressing British innuendoes about the pure suffocating meaninglessness of it all—in short, the whole long drawn-out routine that had made his crime-solving exploits so popular throughout the English-speaking world. Well, he supposed it was time to get on with it. He thanked Mrs. Crap and Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Lord of the Jeep

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Braceheart

Braveheart

You may have heard that Raebert had a trauma some weeks back. But if you’re of noble blood, you always come back. The native spine and heart kick in. There’s a kind of trumpet call to the soul, as exemplified by Peter Tchaikovsky.


The trip to the vet. A heroic adventure. The bosomy vet tech part begins after 4.5 minutes in. (More formally known as the “Nipple Interlude.” You’ll understand when you hear it.) Before that there’s lots of not going anywhere today, getting reluctantly into the Jeep, people looking through the windows of the Jeep in Salem, the New Jersey Turnpike, and the hoi polloi at the vet clinic. At the beginning, though, there’s the piercing act of courage to go see vet boobs… Call it a breast quest. Mammary bravery. Whatever. The thing that gets us off our giant deerhound ass. Maybe you missed the lesson of the leash. When to keep it, when to slip it.

Or, as Lady Laird characterizes it…

Shaking, quaking, panting, drooling. Indeed. Just don’t let a deer cross his path.

Same thing, mostly. If a deer had crossed his path, he’d have been all over it. No quit in our boy, you can bet on that. Which his mother was anxious to point out and I confirm. You can see how regal he is in utter darkness today. Most of his kind are afraid of the dark. Not Raebert. One of his many prodigious royal talents is sleeping when it’s dark.

I concede he was a bit tentative yesterday in the daylight when we embarked on the massive expedition to see the vet for an annual checkup. Some of us were concerned that after the difficult grooming episode he might be resistant to traveling somewhere by car. No such thing. After we hauled him out from under the couch, we snapped on the leash and he was so unconcerned that he didn’t move at all.

He was just being considerate of his 12 year old greyhound companion Molly. As soon as Lady Laird thought of it 5 minutes into our sudden schedule crisis and brought her upstairs, Raebert got to his feet and trooped, like a trooper, out to the Jeep. Molly jumped in, but she’s no Scottish Lord. If you’re a Scottish Lord, you need servants to place each and every one of your feet in the proper locations and then lift them into place, approximating what in a commoner sort of being would constitute an easy leap.

But the key criterion is eager anticipation of what’s coming next. Raebert had that in spades. It’s a half hour trip to the vet’s office and he was so looking forward to it that he stood the whole way, trembling with excitement. Molly lay down and went to sleep on the Turnpike. Raebert chose to vibrate continuously instead. Remarkably, his noblesse oblige was so pronounced that upon arrival at the vet’s office he insisted that Molly disembark first. He was so adamant that even after she had disembarked he wanted proof, in writing, which when we couldn’t produce it caused him to stand like an old school gentleman, in the back of the Jeep, unmoving, in fact immovable, until we threatened him with telling the vet about his habit of eating women’s jewelry.

Scots do not like scandals. He consented to enter the veterinary establishment.

But there was a problem. The place was filled with common dogs and cats. As soon as the first peasant exclaimed, “What is that?!” upon his arrival, he commenced to quiver in aristocratic disdain.

Lady Laird quickly picked out a remote corner bench where Molly and Raebert could await their appointment without further unwelcome contact.

Molly is such a party girl. While Raebert delicately concealed himself under a bench half his size, the old girl was trying to plunge out of our corner and meet everybody. “Greyhound,” everybody yelled. “Come here, beautiful.” A small child across the room pointed his finger at Raebert. “What’s that?” he demanded to know. “A wolfhound,” somebody answered. “They kill wolves.” “Right,” the kid laughed. “All the wolves under the bench.”

I was screwing myself up to tell the kid that deerhounds do not kill wolves but deer and how did some little rugrat know whether there was a deer under the bench or not when the vet assistant came out to call for “Molly and Raebert.”

Suavely, I dragged Raebert past the pugs, poodles, and Pomeranians who were behind him in line and, with no help from the terrified vet assistant, planted each of Raebert’s four huge feet on the scale. Then heaved his body upright for the first time since we’d entered the clinic.

She should have helped. Even Raebert knows that his sacred corpus must be contacted at times by servants. But she was distracted by the fact that his eagerness to meet the vet was causing his whole body to shake to a degree that changed his weight from 102.4 to 103.8 pounds every nanosecond. I called a halt. “He weighs 103 pounds,” I told the girl. She agreed.

Once in the office, Raebert lurked demurely behind Lady Laird’s handbag, certain no one could see him. Then a pretty vet tech came in. She wanted to trim nails and do heart worm tests. She had breasts. Raebert left the room with her without a backward glance. So much for accusations of cowardice. Lords are fearless when it counts.

True, there was a certain amount of hiding afterwards — under my seat, behind Pat’s handbag, underneath Molly — before the vet showed up, but she had breasts too. Raebert became so relaxed by their roundness that he rolled on his back to show her all the stuff deerhounds have on their belly. When we told her he was a bit of a diva, a drama king, she just laughed at us. Then he looked her in the eye. She looked back. Never a good idea. She was his from that moment on. (I removed the card with her phone number from his collar before we left the joint. What faithful retainers do.)

Then we went back to the car. He still wanted help getting back in. Because Mommy was inside paying the bill. Why should he have to get into the Jeep with only one valet to assist?

He stood the whole way back home. Still vibrating like a motel Magic Fingers bed. What lords do. Masters of all they see. Attuned to all the manifestations of their chattels. It’s inspiring.

Isn’t it?