A funny thing happened on the way to Wallace Stevens' later poetry

[rowens]

My ears are my primary navigation device. I have eagle-eye vision, but I also see what I think. So, to not get hit by a car, I rely on hearing. When I'm walking and pass by a lawn mower or other loud sound, I have to be extra cautious. People who walk around with headphones on seem like sitting ducks to me.


Delmore Schwartz is so musical, people tried to attack him for it. His short stories and poems go together. He wrote comical essays, but they never seemed to matter much to me. He liked to read James Joyce and Shakespeare out loud. There used to be links to him reading his poems, on this site, but they were removed almost a decade ago.

Dylan Thomas if he were a robust but lethally neurotic Jew.

[rayheinrich]

My wife would have enjoyed arguing with you. Unlike me, she was well-read and
conversant in all manner of famous names. She told me once: "I was naive, I thought
you went to college to learn, not to get a job." She did this doubly so with degrees
in both philosophy and religious studies (of course she was an atheist). She would
have adamantly disagreed with you in a way all parties found enjoyable. Not the
least of the enjoyments being that here, once again, was proof that most people,
had they but the brains to understand, would consider themselves peasants.

Unlike my wife, I'm reduced to reading this from the outside. All I know about
most of these famous names is the famous part. For me this thread is like
listening to neurologists, geologists, fans of cooking or locomotives or movies.
I'm fascinated by the language, the structures that are constructed using these,
to me, mystical terms. I don't understand, but I enjoy the enthusiasm. I read a
lot of poetry and only realized late in my life that it was too much. It was usually
"new" stuff, fresh from the mouths of innocents. (Obviously some exceptions: I like
legacy poets that write short poems. I particularly like Emily Dickinson. Not only
because I feel a kinship with her, but because it's fun to try to translate her
poems into newspeak.) But in the old days it was dreadful chapbooks purchased,
when they weren't stolen*, from second-hand bookstores - by the pound.
The coming of the web was a wonderful thing - it's all free now. And since it's
robbed from the old stuff, all the ages are available. One of my favorite sites
is Poetry International - https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/
I especially like the foreign poems that have been translated into English by
someone who's not that familiar with the language. Awkward translations let
the flavor of the original poem seep through and allow for the liberal
(mis)interpretation so necessary for my enjoyment.

*When I was poor, before I'd made a tiny fortune at a high-tech startup and
quickly lost when trying to start a company of my own, a task where I proved
myself a total incompetent.

[rowens]

Since the poets are dead, they are whole. And you can experience them as whole, in the context of poetry. Since they are ghosts, and their lives lend to the spirits of places and items and books and works, they have secrets that are here and there, in old buildings and caves and in dreams and sound and image combinations. People are mediums for the spirits as oujia boards and crystals and inkblotted water are mediums for the ghosts, and versa vice.

The Poets are Figures. Padmasambhava is a Figure who left secrets hidden under rocks.

Dead poets can be invoked, or evoked like Byron was in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, and there you have them to battle and see through, like Shang Tsung.


Full body experience, and by that I mean environments, situations, dreams, walking down the road.

Living poets are like Thunderdomes.

[rayheinrich]

I continue to be impressed by you. I remember in the old days of PigPen quite
a few people would read one of your poems or comments and think/say you
were babbling/being irrational. But when I looked at what you'd written, there was
enough logic/meaning in it for me to realize that most of the confusion was
coming from my side, was coming from me not understanding what you had written.
Or, at the very least, you were good enough to make me doubt who was the crazy one.
I do respect many people from the past, more than the naturally trollish
part of me is willing to admit. And yes, I've felt that mystical, but rationally
explainable, presence when exposed to someone's writings from the past.
And, of course, I'm more than willing to believe that words can have great
power when strung together in the proper sequence, a magic spell that
actually works; because I love to write and am naturally biased towards that
belief. Where I get into trouble sometimes is believing that it has that same
effect on everyone. ...
And I just had to look up Padmasambhava and go down that rabbit hole.
From my late twenties I've thought well of, and been influenced by, the non-deity
strains of Buddhism and their Hindu heritage. (I also looked up The Grim Adventures
of Billy & Mandy, and Shang Tsung, but was able to resist.)

[rowens]

In my room there's a box, a chest, that represents the World's Knowledge. It's empty, or is it? Above that, on the ascending pile of books and rubbish, is a stopped clock, representing Time. On the plateau at the top is a circle of seals and sigils of swirling demons surrounding Padmasambhava, who sits there, perfectly at ease, enjoying.

As for TB's continuity, back to Allen Tate: it's good to read T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. Compare and contrast.
I've read a book called The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren three times over the last ten years. The first two times, I read it without really paying attention. Made it to the end and that was it. Took in things subliminally most likely. This time, I read it with full attention. The author claims three main themes: Passage, the Undiscovered Self, Mysticism.
I like to read books of poetry criticism. I like the rhythms and the timbres of prose and poetry written by different people making one work.

Wordsworth, Housman and Dylan Thomas are also good comparisons and contrasts with the Passage, Pre- and Post- lapsarian, theme.
With Warren in the nineteen-sixties, at that point in his writing, is perfect to break into this combo: Bishop, Robert Lowell, Schwartz and Berryman.
Keeping in mind the more musical and blatantly Modern Romantic trio of Stevens, Hart Crane and a reluctant musician: Robinson Jeffers.

With Berryman, it's good to keep your Shakespeare handy, along with the works of Stephen Crane.
Remember Joyce and other Irish writers and French when plowing through the brief life and work, same thing, of Delmore Schwartz.


Don't forget to perforate the sides of your square with the sharp tongues of Pope, Byron and James Merrill.

There you have 20th Century America Poetry like a bastard in a handbasket.

---

With Berryman, you can read Yeats alongside him in a dark closet with a view of a rural urban area with flat hills and trees.

With the Merrill bunch, return to Auden and add Henri Cole.


https://www.loc.gov/item/88752460/?


Robert Penn Warren's poems are well-guarded online!

---

https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/A_7C9...1BAEBB538B

[TranquillityBase]

"Philip Roth....once declared 'Celine is my Proust!', summed up the ambivalence still felt towards the author, who he still felt deserved recognition for his writing, when he said: 'Even if his anti-semitism made him an abject, intolerable person--to read him, I have to suspend my Jewish conscience, but I do it because antisemitism isn't at the heart of his books.'" 

Ditto for Pound.

[busker]

One of my favorite sites is Poetry International - https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/
I especially like the foreign poems that have been translated into English by
someone who's not that familiar with the language. Awkward translations let
the flavor of the original poem seep through and allow for the liberal
(mis)interpretation so necessary for my enjoyment.

The site is an excellent find.
I like the young women on the landing page. Very exotic, very French. Someone should write a poem about them.

These days, I prefer reading transliterations to translations. The original word order brings me closer to the intended poem.
Poetry, of course, remains impossible to translate. There have been many threads on this.

Good to see you back, ray (did I say that before?)

[rayheinrich]

The site is an excellent find.
I like the young women on the landing page. Very exotic, very French. Someone should write a poem about them.

These days, I prefer reading transliterations to translations. The original word order brings me closer to the intended poem.
Poetry, of course, remains impossible to translate. There have been many threads on this.

Good to see you back, ray (did I say that before?)

Poems are impossible to translate, but it's fun to try anyway cuz the result, even if different,
is a poem. And sometimes it's a half-decent one. And when it isn't, sometimes, the mess you
end up with is amusing. That's one of the things I like about poetry: just reading it makes you
a poet. When you read a poem you're writing one in your own head that's a different one
from the one the writer reads as he's writing it.
        When I read one of my poems I've written years ago, I sometimes wonder
who that person was. He definitely isn't me, the one reading the poem.
I'm often impressed, that person back then was a better poet than I am.
When I write a poem, it doesn't have to be that good (though I'm always trying to write ones I
consider good).
        When I was a kid my dad made furniture for the house. It was sturdy and
functional. I'm sitting at the kitchen table he made many years ago when I was a child.
It's still solid and has worn its years well. There are tens of thousands of cabinet makers
who can make better tables. But this one was made by my dad and there's no table out
there that's as good as this one is to me. That's how I feel about my poetry. All those other
poems, no matter how good they may be considered, are not as good to me as the ones I write.
        Another favorite thing I like to do is read different translations and compare them.
It's always surprising how different they are. I like to get two or three translations and
sort of mush them together to make my own. In the past I would read Emily Dickinson
poems and translate them into my English. As a joke, I sometimes called it newspeak.
Years ago on a poetry board I posted quite a few of my translations of Emily Dickinson.
To some people this was a heretical act. I knew this, I, back then, took great delight in
trolling people I thought were pretentious. Doing translations of poets they respected
particularly bothered them. At some point a few years ago I realized I was being pretentious
when I trolled people I thought were pretentious. So I toned it down quite a lot. Though,
I must admit, I still love doing it from time to time.

And thanks, I really enjoy being back. And I won't tell you if you did it before because
maybe it will make you more likely to forget you did it this time and I can experience
more good vibes.

p.s.
P.S.
I was just thinking about the concept "poems are impossible to translate" we were talking
about. It's hyperbole that's fun to use to emphasize the point that translations are hard.
But a whole lot of the time you can get most of the poem translated so somebody else
reading it gets a good idea of what the original author intended. It just varies widely with
how competent the translator is, how much they know the material, the complexity of the
poem/levels of meaning/subtext, puns, irony, if they're are equivalent idioms, even cliches,
in the two languages, how similar the cultures are, etc. because I'm tired of thinking coming
up with more variables. So you can make it sound as hard as you want. But a whole lot of the
time a half-decent translation is possible and sometimes a lot better and sometimes a lot worse.
Anyway, blah blah blah, I understand second thoughts about calling the translation impossible
when it varies from easy to hard.

[TranquillityBase]

In my room there's a box, a chest, that represents the World's Knowledge. It's empty, or is it? Above that, on the ascending pile of books and rubbish, is a stopped clock, representing Time. On the plateau at the top is a circle of seals and sigils of swirling demons surrounding Padmasambhava, who sits there, perfectly at ease, enjoying.

As for TB's continuity, back to Allen Tate: it's good to read T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. Compare and contrast.
I've read a book called The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren three times over the last ten years. The first two times, I read it without really paying attention. Made it to the end and that was it. Took in things subliminally most likely. This time, I read it with full attention. The author claims three main themes: Passage, the Undiscovered Self, Mysticism.
I like to read books of poetry criticism. I like the rhythms and the timbres of prose and poetry written by different people making one work.

Wordsworth, Housman and Dylan Thomas are also good comparisons and contrasts with the Passage, Pre- and Post- lapsarian, theme.
With Warren in the nineteen-sixties, at that point in his writing, is perfect to break into this combo: Bishop, Robert Lowell, Schwartz and Berryman.
Keeping in mind the more musical and blatantly Modern Romantic trio of Stevens, Hart Crane and a reluctant musician: Robinson Jeffers.

With Berryman, it's good to keep your Shakespeare handy, along with the works of Stephen Crane.
Remember Joyce and other Irish writers and French when plowing through the brief life and work, same thing, of Delmore Schwartz.


Don't forget to perforate the sides of your square with the sharp tongues of Pope, Byron and James Merrill.

There you have 20th Century America Poetry like a bastard in a handbasket.

---

With Berryman, you can read Yeats alongside him in a dark closet with a view of a rural urban area with flat hills and trees.

With the Merrill bunch, return to Auden and add Henri Cole.


https://www.loc.gov/item/88752460/?


Robert Penn Warren's poems are well-guarded online!

---

https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/A_7C9...1BAEBB538B

Thanks Rowens.  It took me almost two weeks (or was it three?) to read The Dream Songs.  I felt like I was drifting in and out of conciousness while reading them. At the end, I wondered if I comprehended anything.  But then I asked my wife to randomly read one of them aloud to me and it all made perfect sense.  So I think it was worthwhile after all.

However, I need a break, so I've now retreated to Hermann Hesse.

Om mani padme hum,
TqB

[rowens]

Hermann Hesse is the go-to guy for light-reading. He's the Charles Bukowski for Existentialists and Jungians and Hippies.


You might want to track down this book:

[TranquillityBase]

Hermann Hesse is the go-to guy for light-reading. He's the Charles Bukowski for Existentialists and Jungians and Hippies.


You might want to track down this book:

Thanks for the tip.  I read around on the Internet about Mr. O'Joyce.  Not much to be found, but I did find a blog that quoted some of his writings, and also found a couple of his Bukowskian poems that I enjoyed greatly:

http://gercrotty.blogspot.com

The problem is I have so many books to read already!  Last night I was watching a detective show that mentioned Aleister Crowley, and I thought about The Confessions of Aleister Crowley that I have sitting on my shelf that I've barely dipped into.  

It's hell for a bibliophile to grow old and realize he's really not going to have time to read even 10 percent of what he's carried around for a lifetime, waiting for the time when he can do nothing but read, but his eyes grow weak and his time grows short.

So it goes.

TqB

[rowens]

Last night I dreamed that I found my fairy book, the one that the library destroyed. It was in the possession of that Daat Darling girl from the Internet. I was staying in a tent in the woods that I couldn't get the rain out of, and she and her boyfriend, women in my dreams always have boyfriends, were taking a walk along a trail, probably scouting for locations to take photos. She had my fairy book. I told her my story about it, and she refused to give it over. I followed her home, she was living with her parents, everyone in my dreams live with their extended families, and tried to talk to her mom about it. I offered 500 dollars, but only had three. For the rest of the dream, I scolded myself for not offering 300, that probably would have done it. I could tell that it was me offering what I didn't have that sunk the deal.

I was no good in school because of a disease called Learning Disabilities, or LD. There were trailers behind the school where people with that disease had classes. They were around the side of the back sidewalk next to the Science Wing, and people would say to the LD kids: "You better hit that corner." To this day, whenever I encounter someone who's obviously not very smart, I say to them to hit the corner. They don't know what I'm talking about, of course. They're very stupid.


From elemetary school, all the way up to a few years ago, I'd check out that fairy book from the library. There were lost [sic: (freudian slip)] of books on folklore and urban lessons [sic: legends] and the so-called paranormal back then. I'd check them out and put them in my bookbag instead of my school books, and I'd gather a couple kids, and we'd go looking for what was in those books. Trees and Rocks and Fairy-Rings. Aliens and Vampires and stuff. Things always happened and dreams. Running water, creeks and pond, river and roots, and scary things out there in the isolated places and under the soothing but eerie lights of closed or closing store parkinglots when we ventured far up the highway with Charlie Brown grownups.


Energetic Encountering and Energetic Reading. That's what I call improvisational adventures. Simple spontaneous engagement with who or whatever you come across. Read, find in the books anything that may be known about what you have encountered, or how to do any tasks or take up any skills. That sounds like common sense. 
   Every book is a field guide. There are books and encounters in dreams and other Realms.

Those books by Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, and many of Colin Wilson's books are like those essay books by Henry Miller, and the William Joyce book. They build up philosophies based on particular Figures and their Works. 
   What to do with these books but use them for academic pursuits or hobbyistic curiosity or, the point of this sketch: Invoking them.


Learning skills, Evoking folkloric entities, Invoking Figures and their Works, making Poems, designing and carrying out Rituals.


Magic is a free and mysterious thing, Magick is a codified system of practice and attainment. 
   I wandered around finding the strange things to contemporary science, finding magic along the way. 
   And I found books on Magick, where I could evoke and invoke, have a say and reign over what Really is and isn't.
   

.....................


Signs and Symbols                Subtlety and Blatancy         Allusion and Decadence



Works make people believe things. Many books carry the message that there is a difference between Signs and Symbols. A Symbol is a rich and layered and mysterious something or other. A Sign is something that means something direct and particular.
   But what is so mysterious and rich about an Egyptian god with centuries of elaboration, and a Stop Sign?

Here, from a Poetry perspective, you can compare the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley. The use of Symbols for Poetry, and the use of Poetry for Ritual. And how Crowley's poetry works as Decadence, as his Symbols become more and more a network of Signs with Blatant and Dogmatic Meanings. You can compare this with Surrealism, and the beef Antonin Artaud had with the codification of the so-called Unconscious Material for Political Use. 

   You can see how Yeats used the same Dogmatic Symbol System in a more layered and nuanced way.  
   You can look at the late 19th century and early 20th, look at Victorian Culture moving from a Classical/Romantic zeitgeist through Surreal Decadence into polished so-called Modernism. 


Sometimes it pays to put down the books and write your own. 


Is anybody interested in this thesis? The 21st Century is an even greater playground of Decadence, in the Art sense.

[TranquillityBase]

I'm borrowing (or stealing) your phrase ("You better hit that corner") for a poem.

[TranquillityBase]

Last night I dreamed that I found my fairy book, the one that the library destroyed. It was in the possession of that Daat Darling girl from the Internet. I was staying in a tent in the woods that I couldn't get the rain out of, and she and her boyfriend, women in my dreams always have boyfriends, were taking a walk along a trail, probably scouting for locations to take photos. She had my fairy book. I told her my story about it, and she refused to give it over. I followed her home, she was living with her parents, everyone in my dreams live with their extended families, and tried to talk to her mom about it. I offered 500 dollars, but only had three. For the rest of the dream, I scolded myself for not offering 300, that probably would have done it. I could tell that it was me offering what I didn't have that sunk the deal.

I was no good in school because of a disease called Learning Disabilities, or LD. There were trailers behind the school where people with that disease had classes. They were around the side of the back sidewalk next to the Science Wing, and people would say to the LD kids: "You better hit that corner." To this day, whenever I encounter someone who's obviously not very smart, I say to them to hit the corner. They don't know what I'm talking about, of course. They're very stupid.


From elemetary school, all the way up to a few years ago, I'd check out that fairy book from the library. There were lost [sic: (freudian slip)] of books on folklore and urban lessons [sic: legends] and the so-called paranormal back then. I'd check them out and put them in my bookbag instead of my school books, and I'd gather a couple kids, and we'd go looking for what was in those books. Trees and Rocks and Fairy-Rings. Aliens and Vampires and stuff. Things always happened and dreams. Running water, creeks and pond, river and roots, and scary things out there in the isolated places and under the soothing but eerie lights of closed or closing store parkinglots when we ventured far up the highway with Charlie Brown grownups.

This is why I read you.

---

Energetic Encountering and Energetic Reading. That's what I call improvisational adventures. Simple spontaneous engagement with who or whatever you come across. Read, find in the books anything that may be known about what you have encountered, or how to do any tasks or take up any skills. That sounds like common sense. 
   Every book is a field guide. There are books and encounters in dreams and other Realms.

Those books by Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, and many of Colin Wilson's books are like those essay books by Henry Miller, and the William Joyce book. They build up philosophies based on particular Figures and their Works. 
   What to do with these books but use them for academic pursuits or hobbyistic curiosity or, the point of this sketch: Invoking them.


Learning skills, Evoking folkloric entities, Invoking Figures and their Works, making Poems, designing and carrying out Rituals.


Magic is a free and mysterious thing, Magick is a codified system of practice and attainment. 
   I wandered around finding the strange things to contemporary science, finding magic along the way. 
   And I found books on Magick, where I could evoke and invoke, have a say and reign over what Really is and isn't.
   

I'm mostly still following you.

---

Signs and Symbols                Subtlety and Blatancy         Allusion and Decadence



Works make people believe things. Many books carry the message that there is a difference between Signs and Symbols. A Symbol is a rich and layered and mysterious something or other. A Sign is something that means something direct and particular.
   But what is so mysterious and rich about an Egyptian god with centuries of elaboration, and a Stop Sign?

Here, from a Poetry perspective, you can compare the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley. The use of Symbols for Poetry, and the use of Poetry for Ritual. And how Crowley's poetry works as Decadence, as his Symbols become more and more a network of Signs with Blatant and Dogmatic Meanings. You can compare this with Surrealism, and the beef Antonin Artaud had with the codification of the so-called Unconscious Material for Political Use. 

   You can see how Yeats used the same Dogmatic Symbol System in a more layered and nuanced way.  
   You can look at the late 19th century and early 20th, look at Victorian Culture moving from a Classical/Romantic zeitgeist through Surreal Decadence into polished so-called Modernism. 


Sometimes it pays to put down the books and write your own. 


Is anybody interested in this thesis? The 21st Century is an even greater playground of Decadence, in the Art sense.

This is where I lose track of your dialogue, your "sketch".  What is your thesis?  That the 21st Century is the greatest playground of decadence in (recent) history?  I'd say it's more than a playground.  More serious than simple decadence.  I haven't travelled enough to know about much beyond the U.S. of A., but I see a country descending into absolute madness.  Probably it's my age; too much has changed and changed into something "strange and terrible" as Hunter Thompson would say.  Souls are bleeding out all around me, or so it feels.  Poetry won't save us.  Maybe magic could.  Is that your thesis?  That magic can save us?

I sat in a Nissan dealership for three hours yesterday morning, getting my car serviced (where do I go to get my soul serviced?), barraged by musak, the desparate voices of salesman making phonecalls on phonespeakers, each one trying to drown out the other with fake bravado, the sad "customers" sitting around glued to their cell phones, some of them even listening to competing musak on their individual phones.  I sat there with my old copy of Hesse's Rosshalde like a polar bear trapped on a melting iceberg.  The audible chaos seemed desgned to keep anyone from having a meaningful thought, much less a conversation, not that I've had a meaningful conversation outside of this forum in a hundred years or so. 

My wife thinks I need to join a Unitarian church. Maybe she's right; she usually is.

We hosted a "Neighbors Night Out" the previous Tuesday; you know, where the neighbors on a street gather to "take back the streets" but I see nothing to "take back".  But there were no poets, no readers there.  Just middle class folks bragging about how wonderful this town is, because it's structured to clamp down on anything disturbing in the slightest way.  I guess I could have stripped naked and started chanting Howl.  At least we wouldn't be asked to host it again. 

Om padme mani hum/a.k.a. "So it goes",
TqB 

[rayheinrich]

Rowens:
"Sometimes it pays to put down the books and write your own.

Is anybody interested in this thesis? The 21st Century is an even greater playground of Decadence, in the Art sense."

TranquillityBase:
"This is where I lose track of your dialogue, your "sketch". What is your thesis? That the 21st Century is the greatest playground of decadence in (recent) history? I'd say it's more than a playground. More serious than simple decadence. I haven't traveled enough to know about much beyond the U.S. of A., but I see a country descending into absolute madness. Probably it's my age; too much has changed and changed into something "strange and terrible" as Hunter Thompson would say. Souls are bleeding out all around me, or so it feels. Poetry won't save us. Maybe magic could. Is that your thesis? That magic can save us?"

I was thinking Rowan's thesis was the "write your own", instead of decadent cosplay.
But I, too, would like him to specify.

P.S. "Probably it's my age" - I'd guess, since you're mentioning Hunter S. Thompson, that it
probably is your age. Which, by the way, is probably less than the average age of those motorcycle
gang members Hunter was writing about. Personally, I think the madness level has stayed pretty much
the same for as long as I've been able to convince myself I was able to judge it. In my humble opinion
(ignoring plagues, both natural and the ones caused by anyone being able to edit DNA in their basement),
the two most probable things that will upset this equilibrium of madness are climate change and sentient AI.
And being the paradoxically cynical optimist that I am, I have great hopes that one will offset the other.

[rowens]

There's nothing wrong with the world. Is it wrong for serial killers to kill people? No, that's what they do. People are animals. You're as likely to be killed by a human as you are to be mauled by a bear or bit by a venomous snake or have an accident with one of our machines or tools. The idea that there is something wrong with the world is based in a sense of there being a right way the world should be.

When you walk down the road, you see grass and trees and flowers, birds and squirrels and dogs and Narcissuses. The human animal is a Narcissus, an animal that has a sophisticated Symbol appreciation system as a form of intelligence that differs from the other forms of life I mentioned that you see when you walk down the road. Though there are differences between Narcissuses, as there are between the other members of species, they all are conditioned by cause and effect.
  Do you feel embarrassed in front of blades of grass or feel harassed by a squirrel standing in the woods behind your house? I used to feel embarrassed in front of dogs, now I don't.
  These are all lifeforms carrying out their natural cause and effect mechanics. There's no reason to experience a Narcissus in any more heightened emotional or conceptional sense than a bird or a dog. That doesn't mean you should go up to a Narcissus and start stomping him anymore than you would a dog.

You see, the body-mind-environment is the Sphinx, some folks call it a Lamassu, I call it a Sphinx, and the living tender self, which is the sense of a spark of life in each assumed organism is in the cradle of the Sphinx. We are all a child and an animal, an innocent child and a pet. We take care of our children and pets, that doesn't mean we have to stress over their barking.

The Art Sense cultivated by Society has a thing called Taste. Decadence is a Taste in a Style of Art. The two Aspects of Decadence I was referring to were the use of Signs instead of Symbols and the mixture of different Cultures and Styles in a sense that feels pinned together. 


Art is the gloss through which Narcissus sees the world. Leisure allows for these categories. Anyone who spends as much time analyzing or defending their culture as they do living it, is by definition a Leisurely Person. 

No one ever told me to hit the corner, because it was evident that I never did any work or spent much time in class. It was the uppity kids who were told to hit the corner. I spent my time exploring the school and surrounding area. I stole leisure time from all around me, and gleefully bit the many hands that fed me.

My thesis, therefore, is an Art thesis, not a Social one. Decadence was Transfigured by T. S. Eliot and the Modern Poetry, taking what had appeared a hodgepodge of wreckage and made things commonplace and meaningful for the zeitgeist. The World Wars, the studies in Physics, the avant-garde, the multiculture, Psychotherapy and its tropes. Anthropology reorganized the Rites of Cults, forming from mysterious magic a Codified Magick, based on the new paradigms of Earthly tropology. Everything from madness and dreams and the so-called content of the unconscious was labelled and set to order and utilization. The misty and mysterious Romantic went through Decadence to Modernity to what someone called a few years ago Liquid Modernity. We can talk about Bukowski in the same breath as the most classical and polished so-called Classical Poets, and tribal rituals and Order Magick, and we can take photos and sounds of anything and add it to anything. And still have a sense of Decadence as we still have a sense of right and wrong when it comes to the world and serial killers.



Fandom and cosplay are part of this so-called Decadence. Documentary Culture, where people watch skillfully made Videos and Documentaries and use them as Bibles for how to behave so that you can make Videos and have Documentaries made about you. This goes for Super Heroes, Rock Stars and Civil Rights Leaders. Play the part, be a walking Billboard. 
   These things could be called Decadence in an artistic sense. And people with Leisure will see this as evidence of a Decadent Culture.


I don't bother writing books most of the time now, except on here. I have written my section of a book for the day.

[dukealien]

I'm borrowing (or stealing) your phrase ("You better hit that corner") for a poem.

Saw it briefly this morning, on the way out to breakfast.  Thought it was good, was going to crit this afternoon but now it's gone.  One of those known unknowns you read about...

[Lizzie]

I'm borrowing (or stealing) your phrase ("You better hit that corner") for a poem.

Saw it briefly this morning, on the way out to breakfast.  Thought it was good, was going to crit this afternoon but now it's gone.  One of those known unknowns you read about...

Don't worry, you'll be able to crit your breakfast on the other end, perhaps tonight or tomorrow morning.   Although, you might want to complain to the restaurant if your food was that ambiguous....

[rowens]

A few years ago, I had a friend who took pictures with his phone all over the place. This is a test, to see if I can post such things on this site. But what makes it relevant to this Thread is, if you look hard, you can see Padmasambhava and the swirling Sigil Seals and the other Items I mentioned. 

[rowens]

Tranquility, where fuck are you?


We all have our gripes with the fat bloated, now thin dead and rotting, cremated, whatever rituals a secular Jew of his stature gets. Harold Bloom. Not A. Bloom, mind you. 


This interview right here has the classic solemnity of a Dick Cavett interview and a black and white film hum.


This is what anyone who reads Harold Bloom would so well to hear.

https://www.npr.org/2005/12/11/5048309/j...mes-divine

---

I think I meant do well to hear.

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" . . . Christian *yawn* theology . . ."

Some will find that pretentious. Most wouldn't notice it, or even be listening to this or reading this. But, most, who admire the Figure of someone, and their style, will say, that's Harold Bloom being Harold Bloom. Like you would say: That's Ash from Evil Dead being Ash.

This "psychic violence" goes on in Imaginative Literature all the time. 

To bring forth Imaginative Literature into the realm of Science is part of Magic.
Harold Bloom does not want to do this. He wants to keep Yod Heh Vau Heh right there in the BOOK. Which he, of course, mentions at the 'end', "here".

---

In the rural South, where I live, there's a great emphasis on Jesus. But the real potent and virile and earthy darkness comes of the dense and confusing texture in the very soil and bones of the so-called Old Testament.

I was, this is my book, started many years ago, called Abbott & Costello Meet the Warrens, where I projected Harold Bloom's misgivings about the South into the equally New England but glaringly Darkness addicted Ed Warren.

I was dying of loneliness, and of course no one I know and have met knew how this all was coming together in that book, as all my other novels. So, they are not finished. If I were Flaubert, I wouldn't care.


But this Hebrew Bible darkness that we experience as the Old Testament, among other folkloric things, are in my novels. Unfinished as they are. Some people, many, have lost all respect for me as a human being, due to their uncreative misreadings of my unfinished novels. It's like I'm Kafka. But instead of antisemites and philistines, I'm confronted with just regular people.