Tarsius is Bored
Tarsius sent HumidCedar and I an email yesterday pointing out that neither of us have posted anything of substance in a long ass time.
While I take issue with the implied accusation that I have ever posted anything of substance on this blog, I am sympathetic to the plight of Tarsius and his fellow non bloggers who need something to entertain them while they are at work.
I would have posted something sooner but after my last post I was censured by the international blogging commission for "crimes against Yeats" and ordered to stop blogging until I had read another poem.
While I did agree with commission's finding that my last post sucked [ed. Or "blew chunks" as the Swedish delegate contended], their demand that I go read another whole poem seems a bit extreme. Reading poems is hard work after all. Many of them are quite long, most tend to be obtuse, and quite frankly a lot of them just sucks ass.
I realize I trod out the "The Second Coming" a lot but it's not as if I don't have an excuse - what with the batshit crazy republicans running my country and all. Finding a pity, short, appropriately apocalyptic replacement poem is real work.
To add insult to injury, the real abuser of Yeats work, the woman who elevated it to an art form remains as free as ever. I don't believe that any of my writing has ever come anywhere near the levels of Yeats abuse that Ms Didion's does. Just look at the table of contents for "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" :
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
After all that did someone pull Ms. Didion over and tell her to go find another poem to pick on?
No they didn't.
Did Didion even have a good excuse for hauling out a Yeats reference every other sentence? Had her country been taken over by batshit crazy republicans?
In a word "No".
Didion was writing if the idyllic time of 1967. Now sure there was some shit going down in '67. A war for one thing and some civil rights stuff, all of which I realize sounds pretty crazy and intense when it's 2:00 am, you're drunk, and you're watching the history channel. But I'm not trying to claim there was no such thing as Batshit crazy back in 1967, just that it was a strictly bipartisan kind of batshit crazy. With all due respect to Ms. Didion 'bipartisan batshit crazy' plus 'the Manson Family' does not make for a "Oh crap there's a pale horse in the front yard again" kind of year.
Yet Ms.Didion continues to get away with the marathon 'things fall apart - oh lordy - the center cannot hold' metaphor to end all things fall apart - oh lordy - the center cannot hold' metaphors (in dead tree form no less) and no one even bothers to say "Bitch Please!"
I on the other hand am still stuck reading poetry.
Now will someone please tell me what the hell Madame Sosostris's cold has to do with anything... I would really like to get back to blogging.
Oh and before I forget:
While I take issue with the implied accusation that I have ever posted anything of substance on this blog, I am sympathetic to the plight of Tarsius and his fellow non bloggers who need something to entertain them while they are at work.
I would have posted something sooner but after my last post I was censured by the international blogging commission for "crimes against Yeats" and ordered to stop blogging until I had read another poem.
While I did agree with commission's finding that my last post sucked [ed. Or "blew chunks" as the Swedish delegate contended], their demand that I go read another whole poem seems a bit extreme. Reading poems is hard work after all. Many of them are quite long, most tend to be obtuse, and quite frankly a lot of them just sucks ass.
I realize I trod out the "The Second Coming" a lot but it's not as if I don't have an excuse - what with the batshit crazy republicans running my country and all. Finding a pity, short, appropriately apocalyptic replacement poem is real work.
To add insult to injury, the real abuser of Yeats work, the woman who elevated it to an art form remains as free as ever. I don't believe that any of my writing has ever come anywhere near the levels of Yeats abuse that Ms Didion's does. Just look at the table of contents for "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" :
by Joan Didion
- Falcons Never Listen.
- Help! I'm Trapped In the Widening Gyre and I Think I'm Gonna Hurl.
- Somebody Better Throw the Ceremony of Innocence a Life Preserver Because It Went Swimming Right After Lunch Instead of Waiting 20 Minutes Like Its Mom Said It Should.
- Oh Dear, The Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed and I Had Oysters For Lunch ... Does Anyone Have Some Pepto?
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the Cheap: Following the Antichrist's footsteps On $40 a Day or less.
- Your Troubled Sight : Spiritus Mundi, What You Need to Know About This Silent Epidemic.
- Indignant Desert Birds Craped on My New Mercedes.
After all that did someone pull Ms. Didion over and tell her to go find another poem to pick on?
No they didn't.
Did Didion even have a good excuse for hauling out a Yeats reference every other sentence? Had her country been taken over by batshit crazy republicans?
In a word "No".
Didion was writing if the idyllic time of 1967. Now sure there was some shit going down in '67. A war for one thing and some civil rights stuff, all of which I realize sounds pretty crazy and intense when it's 2:00 am, you're drunk, and you're watching the history channel. But I'm not trying to claim there was no such thing as Batshit crazy back in 1967, just that it was a strictly bipartisan kind of batshit crazy. With all due respect to Ms. Didion 'bipartisan batshit crazy' plus 'the Manson Family' does not make for a "Oh crap there's a pale horse in the front yard again" kind of year.
Yet Ms.Didion continues to get away with the marathon 'things fall apart - oh lordy - the center cannot hold' metaphor to end all things fall apart - oh lordy - the center cannot hold' metaphors (in dead tree form no less) and no one even bothers to say "Bitch Please!"
I on the other hand am still stuck reading poetry.
Now will someone please tell me what the hell Madame Sosostris's cold has to do with anything... I would really like to get back to blogging.
Oh and before I forget:
Ms. Didion. Bitch Please!
posted by mad science at 1:13 PM
1 Comments:
Well HELL, if THAT was all it took to get you back to posting, I would have done it a long time ago! I've been checking regularly - as a good fan should - and have been consistantly greeted with the sound of crickets chirping... WELCOME BACK!
I too was wondering if you knew any other poems, as well. Although it does suit the points you make, there's only so much gyre widening a fellow can stand! Then our blood-dimmed falcons are loosed and we drown in our passionate convictions! (hey, that almost kind of makes a weird kind of sense - but I don't know what it means...). What the hell is a gyre, anyway? And if it gets too wide do you have to strap a board on your ass to keep from falling in?... (sorry - bad sexist joke reference.) I do look forward to other prosaic references from you - considering the builk of my literary exposure to poetry is via "Dead Poets Society"...
I think you make an interesting point about Ms. Bitch Please expressing similar sentiments about her times (wasn't '67 our birth year Mr. Science?... perhaps you and I are slouching toward a metaphorical Bethlehem?... hmmmm...), but I must respectfully disagree with your dismissal of her reaction to what you call "bipartisan batshit crazy". I think at the time, she felt just as justified in utilizing the analogy. I know that fellow Texan, President Johnson, was pretty batshit crazy, and surely his cronies and the society that put him into his position had to have been just as involved with guano. I suspect Ms. Please felt as you do, that she was a clear-thinking minority, and that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. Let us in the present take a clue from the Grateful Dead of that time long ago, and at least enjoy the ride...
40 years from now, I'm sure that scholars and other clever folk will look back at our times and dismiss our dismay as overreaction to a "bipartisan" climate. What I'M more interested in is the exact underlaying nature of that bipartisanship - it's base elements, so to speak, to use a science term - and how to evaluate things through the more purified lens of that understanding. The Yin and the Yang always end up balancing out in the long run, but they can be tricky to identify sometimes...
I'd better quit before I start making ever more trite and cliched remarks. It's getting late, and today was a tiresome day in endless cubicle land...
Mjt!
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