GOOG, Bushmills, and Purple Prose

There is so much to catch you up on on life around The Manor.



This socialist no longer owns any GOOG, having managed to dump it a few minutes after trading resumed shortly after 3:20 PM on that fateful day when the firm's publisher "somehow" released earnings data during the day trading period, versus the usual after-market magic time of 4:30.  I made it out at $700, which stemmed the losses a bit, but did nothing to refresh my sour breath.  I found the whole process unfair -- beginning with GOOG's backstabbing report itself, then the cessation of trading (with nary a hint to yer average bear as to when the halt would be lifted), and even including mine own investment company requiring that I give 'em a call at that calm, carefree time to garner their "permission" to trade after hours, despite having done it a good half-dozen times before.  Believe it or not, I terminated that phone call at 3:17 and only by the happest of haphazards learned that I had a whole three minutes to figure stop losses and whether Bushmills or a box of Cabernet was more appropriate to the fleeting moment.

I plugged in $700 and went with Bushmills.

Since then, I decided to put my money where my mouth is -- oh, the terrible jokes aching to be told! -- and no, I won't yet divulge what lucky sector now bulges with my invested wealth.  All I know for sure is that Fred better appreciate the nasty sweat that went into leaving him some sort of inheritance.

What else?

Oh, we lost an entire booking of retreatants who turned left instead of right and ended up in Canada instead of Tête de Hergé.  It's not the first time we have lost 3-day weekend guests in search of elusive repose.  The Haddock parent company even held a troubleshooting skype session that included the top brothers and Abbot Truffatore, the crack-addicted organic pig farmer across the road, plus the hippies down the road (whose cows are giving sweet frothy warm milk once again, thanks to intervention by Local Antiquated and Beloved Authoritarian, Tante Louise, and also thanks to the spirit behind Robert Frost's Mending Wall, a spirit brought to tangible fruition by The Manor Domestic Staff and The Cistercian's 2012 Probies, thereby cutting off the multi-chemical piggy runoff that had been overstimulating the mellow moo cows).  Um... where was I?  Ah!  Yes!  The frustration of losing money and visitors due to a basic ignorance of world geography.

Fred and I joined with the majority to suggest that a link to Google Maps be included in the multimedia materials sent in advance to our over-the-sea or across-the-continent pilgrims.  (If that first link to Google Maps doesn't help you -- you poor map-challenged you, you -- then try THIS ONE, but remember that the results must be rotated NNE by 17 degrees °F to adjust for satellite mendacity.)

Ergo, we hope to no longer be confused with our brethren and sistren Canadians, Français, or Old Earth Saxons.  And we fervently pray for an improvement in the public and parochial school systems of The World, else our revenue is gonna continue to drop off, precipitously, with each graduating, mortarboard-tossing class.

We never let our painstaking preparations for guests go to waste, however.  The Abbott continues to flee to Marlinspike Hall on occasional weekends, especially those dedicated to the tuning of the monastery bells, organs, and guitars -- even on occasional weekdays, when there is the threat of a papal bull.  We also give Ease-Them-Into-Rehab Upgrades to the more haughty circus and freak show addicts before ceremoniously removing them to the barn catty-cornered to the Computer Turret, now home to the Haddock Family Enterprises Addiction Center -- an entity briefly explained in a previous post, "Passing the Duck Test."

If I were allowed to divulge top secret information, I'd be able to suggest that The Captain himself, plus whomever is traveling with him in the pink submarine fleet -- often the Miniature Badminton Team -- are parties whose unexpectedness no longer causes a commotion.  In these uncertain times, who doesn't want to go home now and then?

I am managing to manage things pretty well, despite seeing the world as a visual echo (my terminology for having not quite double vision) and clinging to my trundle bed in an effort to hide out beneath the "real" feather mattress (a humility-inducing thing, as sometimes it is the head that will not quite disappear, sometimes the derrière).  The medicos and I had harbored concern about my liver as I tried out three new medications, but surprise!  It turned out to be my kidneys that are registering their unhappiness.  Whatever -- I am coming off one of the drugs, anyway, the one that enabled not just the visual echo but the mental one, and my hope is that this will calm those spongy filters down.  I've dabbled in kidney failure before, due to lupus, and recovered nicely, and so fully expect to do the same now.  Why not, eh?

I've gone 24 hours without spasms, except for the two hours with.  Monday through Thursday were Hell on Earth, spent writhing and screaming.  I'm sure that I came close to death by overdose or mixing-oopsies as I was so frequently driven to take enough of anything to lose my consciousness.  You can call me "stupid," you can call me "unenlightened," you can also go straight to "The Dickens" -- directions available on Google Maps.

I'm gonna blame my blogging sloth on kidney failure -- maybe folks will fall for that, as they don't seem to have a heck of a lot of sympathy for the CRPS sanity-shattering pain I live with, or the pus-filled mush that are my bones.  Whaddaya think?  Oh, my kidneys are limping along, I'm sooooo tired, just cannot write.

Heh heh.  Purple prose!

"It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that's rich, succulent and full of novelty. Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity. So long as originality and lexical precision prevail, the sentient writer has a right to immerse himself or herself in phenomena and come up with as personal a version as can be. A writer who can't do purple is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks."
(Paul West, "In Defense of Purple Prose." The New York Times, Dec. 15, 1985)

For those of you who have inquired about Fred, Bianca (and, therefore, Sven)?

Fred is a bit tired, as he is leading a tone deaf group of militant lesbian existential feminists in the formation of a ukulele band.  I could share many a humorous anecdote with you, but will limit myself to just one.  The woman whose illuminating idea this was cannot comprehend how to "strum." They spend an inordinate amount of time discussing what "strum" means, how "strumming" might be achieved, as well as using the questionable guidance of a piano with metronome. My contribution to the conundrum has been to shout, midst writhe and vulgar vocalization, "relax, relax, just tell her to relax her wrist." But no one listens to me.

Sven is somewhat stymied, and yes, that is a sight, a stymied Sven!  College basketball utterly transforms our
Castafiore, an unrepentant Duke fan, and Sven is just... lost.

I guess that pretty much sums up this post -- the theme of Lost.  And, sadly, I must sign off, as a large Maine Coon is amorously eyeing my lap, and making lovey-dovey eyes that are simply irresistible.  Yes, I'm off to nuggle with Buddy, the Freakishly Large Kitten.

George Oppen: Escape from ants, water meters, and the revival of the Melita coffee filter cone

We had quite a start to the day:  The café-presse broke, as café-presses will do, right when you want coffee;  Dobby discovered non-hairball inspired projectile vomiting, which I joyously cleaned up; I infused twice the amount of an antibiotic and decided to care less; The West of the Lone Alp Tête de Hergé Water Municipal OverLordShip sent us the sweetest municipal worker ever, even if he did keep slapping me on the shoulder [He told me that I "looked fetching today," so he can slap the hell out of that boneless hump as much as he likes, and he also declared the outrageous water readings to be the fault of the electronic doodad and not the result of a gushing leak, or my two diuretics.]; Then the ants attacked, again, this time traversing the back porch, the kitchen window, and proceeding, lemming-like, to drown themselves, en masse, in a sink full of soapy water.  This was accomplished in the course of 30 minutes, as I *know* there were no aunts committing suicide a half hour earlier, when I so carefully hooked myself up to the wrong antibiotic -- right next to the Death Pool of soapy Lemon Ajax.  Meanwhile, the Special-Oh-So-Special Topiary Team arrived to try and rectify some of the burgeoning Labyrinth issues... and we had to send La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore out to oversee their work, despite her obsessive reworking of the Jewel Song (Gounod's Air des bijoux) into a soulful Lithuanian version.  Unfortunately, her tendency to transpose parts with Latvian translation... well, we're not sure her focus is entirely on the correct training of the British Boxwoods.

I signed up last week for the Poem-A-Day service of the Academy of American Poets.

That can be a real life-saver on mornings such as this 'un.

And as I calmed down, I realized I didn't like today's poem much.  So I locked myself in the Computer Turret (one day soon, I'll explain the modifications we've made to accomodate slithering into that space from a power chair, with CRPS-flaring legs, a reconstructed ankle and elbow, a prosthetic hip, one prosthetic shoulder, and one shoulder gone missing... using the rope ladder/bridge strung from our small tower to the barn, now the Rehab Center for Carnies and Wayward Acrobats.)

And I spent several hours with George Oppen, renewed that love.  Fred was good enough to ferry up a thermos of excellent coffee mid-afternoon, and the Marlinspike Hall Domestic Staff showed me the kindness of pretending they didn't know it was me up here delivering my usual arias of "damndamndamndamn" when the Screaming Ninny CRPS Dystonia Spasms showed up.

I'm in a sharing mood, as your current thought ("Dear Jeezus, does she have to share everything?") attests.

Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation, my intention to start a sort of poetry war action, and my outright theft of their holdings, here are Sections 1-22 of Oppen's Of Being Numerous:

1

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them

Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part

Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told

A tale of our wickedness.

It is not our wickedness.

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’

2

So spoke of the existence of things,

An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say

Arid.

A city of the corporations

Glassed

In dreams

And images—

And the pure joy

Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,

Is impenetrable.

3

The emotions are engaged

Entering the city

As entering any city.

We are not coeval

With a locality

But we imagine others are,

We encounter them. Actually

A populace flows

Thru the city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York

4

For the people of that flow

Are new, the old

New to age as the young

To youth

And to their dwelling

For which the tarred roofs

And the stoops and doors—

A world of stoops—

Are petty alibi and satirical wit

Will not serve.

5

The great stone

Above the river

In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,

Which loves itself

6

We are pressed, pressed on each other,

We will be told at once

Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts

In a paroxysm of emotion

Now as always.   Crusoe

We say was

‘Rescued’.

So we have chosen.

7

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous.

8

Amor fati

The love of fate

For which the city alone

Is audience

Perhaps blasphemous.

Slowly over islands, destinies

Moving steadily pass

And change

In the thin sky

Over islands

Among days

Having only the force

Of days

Most simple

Most difficult

9

‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’

I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me

Have made poetry

To dream of that beach

For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

The absolute singular

The unearthly bonds

Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck

10

Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing.

Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted

And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it.

11

            it is that light

Seeps anywhere, a light for the times

In which the buildings

Stand on low ground, their pediments

Just above the harbor

Absolutely immobile,

Hollow, available, you could enter any building,

You could look from any window

One might wave to himself

From the top of the Empire State Building—

Speak

If you can

Speak

Phyllis—not neo-classic,

The girl’s name is Phyllis—

Coming home from her first job

On the bus in the bare civic interior

Among those people, the small doors

Opening on the night at the curb

Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness—

So small a picture,

A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us

I too am in love down there with the streets

And the square slabs of pavement—

To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks

And it is not ‘art’

12

‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’

the rain falls

that had not been falling

and it is the same world

. . .

They made small objects

Of wood and the bones of fish

And of stone. They talked,

Families talked,

They gathered in council

And spoke, carrying objects.

They were credulous,

Their things shone in the forest.

They were patient

With the world.

This will never return, never,

Unless having reached their limits

They will begin over, that is,

Over and over

13

           unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end.

                                            They develop

Argument in order to speak, they become

unreal, unreal, life loses

solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game

because baseball is not a game

but an argument and difference of opinion

makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change

In an air

That smells stale, they will come to the end

Of an era

First of all peoples

And one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

14

I cannot even now

Altogether disengage myself

From those men

With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,

In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies

Of blasted roads in a ruined country,

Among them many men

More capable than I—

Muykut and a sergeant

Named Healy,

That lieutenant also—

How forget that? How talk

Distantly of ‘The People’

Who are that force

Within the walls

Of cities

Wherein their cars

Echo like history

Down walled avenues

In which one cannot speak.

15

Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me

So that I will exist, find my navel

So that it will exist, find my nipples

So that they will exist, find every hair

Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad),

Find me.’

16

‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat,

and only he who was troubled shall find rest,

and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved,

and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . .

but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’

17

The roots of words

Dim in the subways

There is madness in the number

Of the living

‘A state of matter’

There is nobody here but us chickens

Anti-ontology—

He wants to say

His life is real,

No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public

Of rootless speech

18

It is the air of atrocity,

An event as ordinary

As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance

In which people burn.

19

Now in the helicopters the casual will

Is atrocious

Insanity in high places,

If it is true we must do these things

We must cut our throats

The fly in the bottle

Insane, the insane fly

Which, over the city

Is the bright light of shipwreck

20

—They await

War, and the news

Is war

As always

That the juices may flow in them

Tho the juices lie.

Great things have happened

On the earth and given it history, armies

And the ragged hordes moving and the passions

Of that death. But who escapes

Death

Among these riders

Of the subway,

They know

But now as I know

Failure and the guilt

Of failure.

As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas

We might half-hope to find the animals

In the sheds of a nation

Kneeling at midnight,

Farm animals,

Draft animals, beasts for slaughter

Because it would mean they have forgiven us,

Or which is the same thing,

That we do not altogether matter.

21

There can be a brick

In a brick wall

They eye picks

So quiet of a Sunday

Here is the brick, it was waiting

Here when you were born

Mary-Anne.

22

Clarity

In the sense of transparence,

I don’t mean that much can be explained

Clarity in the sense of silence.

George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous (1-22)” from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 1968 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: New Collected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2008)

Ants be damned, water workers be blessed, gratitude for Melita coffee filter cones, and thanks to Fred, but most especially thanks to George Oppen, who nailed poems to wood, and who STAVED, STAVED, STAVED, and singularly rendered it a not-necessarily transitive verb.