THE INVISIBLE MANLeigh Whannell
Australia, 2020
Sunday, May 31, 2020
C. K. WILLIAMS
“Fire”
____________________
“Fire”
____________________
An ax-shattered
bedroom window
the wall above
still smutted with
soot the wall
beneath still
soiled with
soak and down
on the black
of the pavement
a mattress its ticking
half eaten away
the end where
the head would
have been with
a nauseous bite
burnt away
and beside it
an all at once
meaningless heap
of soiled sodden
clothing one
shoe a jacket
once white
the vain matters
a life gathers
about it symbols
of having once
cried out to itself
who art thou?
then again who
wouldst thou be?
Saturday, May 30, 2020
THEODORE ZELDIN
____________________
____________________
The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.
Friday, May 29, 2020
HANNAH ARENDT
____________________
The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.
In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that
henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death
merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
BJÖRK, SJÓN, and LARS VON TRIER
Black night is falling
The sun is gone to bed
The innocent are dreaming
As you should, sleepy-head
Sleepy-head, sleepy-head:
All the love above
I send into you
Comfort and protection
I’ll watch over you
But don’t ask me
What’s gonna happen next
I know the future
I’d love to lead you the way
Just to make it easier on you
You are gonna have to find out for yourself
My
Dearest
Scatterheart
There is comfort
Right in the eye
Of the hurricane
Just to make it easier on you
You are gonna have to find out for yourself
All the hurt in the world
You know
There’s nothing I’d love to do more
Than spare you from that burden
It’s gonna be hard
If I only could
Shelter you
From that pain
Just to make it easier on you
You are gonna have to find out for yourself
“Scatterheart”
____________________
____________________
Black night is falling
The sun is gone to bed
The innocent are dreaming
As you should, sleepy-head
Sleepy-head, sleepy-head:
All the love above
I send into you
Comfort and protection
I’ll watch over you
But don’t ask me
What’s gonna happen next
I know the future
I’d love to lead you the way
Just to make it easier on you
You are gonna have to find out for yourself
My
Dearest
Scatterheart
There is comfort
Right in the eye
Of the hurricane
Just to make it easier on you
You are gonna have to find out for yourself
All the hurt in the world
You know
There’s nothing I’d love to do more
Than spare you from that burden
It’s gonna be hard
If I only could
Shelter you
From that pain
Just to make it easier on you
You are gonna have to find out for yourself
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Monday, May 25, 2020
Sunday, May 24, 2020
PHILIP LEVINE
“My Father With Cigarette Twelve Years Before The Nazis Could Break His Heart”
____________________
“My Father With Cigarette Twelve Years Before The Nazis Could Break His Heart”
____________________
I remember the room in which he held
a kitchen match and with his thumbnail
commanded it to flame: a brown sofa,
two easy chairs, one covered with flowers,
a black piano no one ever played half
covered by a long-fringed ornamental scarf
Ray Estrada brought back from Mexico
in 1931. How new the world is, you say.
In that room someone is speaking about money,
asking why it matters, and my father exhales
the blue smoke, and says a million dollars
even in large bills would be impossible.
He’s telling me because, I see now, I’m
the one who asked, for I dream of money,
always coins and bills that run through my hands,
money I find in the corners of unknown rooms
or in metal boxes I dig up in the backyard
flower beds of houses I’ve never seen.
My father rises now and goes to the closet.
It’s as though someone were directing a play
and my father’s part called for him to stand
so that the audience, which must be you,
could see him in white shirt, dark trousers,
held up by suspenders, a sign of the times,
and conclude he is taller than his son
will ever be, and as he dips into his jacket,
you’ll know his role calls for him to exit
by the front door, leaving something
unfinished, the closet light still on,
the cigarette still burning dangerously,
a Yiddish paper folded to the right place
so that a photograph of Hindenburg
in full military regalia swims up
to you out of all the details we lived.
I remember the way the match flared
blue and yellow in the deepening light
of a cool afternoon in early September,
and the sound, part iron, part animal
part music, as the air rushed toward it
out of my mouth, and his intake of breath
through the Lucky Strike, and the smoke
hanging on after the door closed and the play
ran out of acts and actors, and the audience -
which must be you - grew tired of these lives
that finally came to nothing or no more
than the furniture and the cotton drapes
left open so the darkening sky can seem
to have the last word, with half a moon
and a showering of fake stars to say what
the stars always say about the ordinary.
Oh, you’re still here, 60 years later,
you wonder what became of us, why
someone put it in a book, and left
the book open to a page no one reads.
Everything tells you he never came back,
though he did before he didn’t, everything
suggests it was the year Hitler came
to power, the year my grandmother learned
to read English novels and fell in love
with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist
which she read to me seated on a stool
beside my bed until I fell asleep.
Everything tells you this is a preface
to something important, the Second World War,
the news that leaked back from Poland
that the villages were gone. The truth is -
if there is a truth - I remember the room,
I remember the flame, the blue smoke,
how bright and slippery were the secret coins,
how David Copperfield doubted his own name,
how sweet the stars seemed, peeping and blinking,
how close the moon, how utterly silent the piano.
Saturday, May 23, 2020
DAISAKU IKEDA
____________________
____________________
One of my favorite Argentine poets, the great educator Almafuerte (1854-1917), wrote: “To the weak, difficulty is a closed door. To the strong, however, it is a door waiting to be opened.” Difficulties impede the progress of those who are weak. For the strong, however, they are opportunities to open wide the doors to a bright future. Everything is determined by our attitude, by our resolve. Our heart is what matters most.
Friday, May 22, 2020
SAMUEL BECKETT
Not to be able to open my mouth without proclaiming them, and our fellowship, that’s what they imagine they’ll have me reduced to. It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed. But I’ll fix their gibberish for them. I never understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they have gutted me with. And I’ll be myself at last, as a starveling belches his odourless wind, before the bliss of coma.
The Unnamable
Not to be able to open my mouth without proclaiming them, and our fellowship, that’s what they imagine they’ll have me reduced to. It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed. But I’ll fix their gibberish for them. I never understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they have gutted me with. And I’ll be myself at last, as a starveling belches his odourless wind, before the bliss of coma.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
KO UN
“In the Temple’s Main Hall”
“In the Temple’s Main Hall”
____________________
Down with Buddha!
Down with handsome, well-fed Buddha!
What’s he doing up there with that oh so casually
elegant wispy beard?
Next, break down that painted whore of a crossbeam!
A dragon’s head? What use is that, a dragon’s head?
Tear down that temple, drive out the monks,
turn it all into dust and maggots!
Phaw!
Buddha with nothing, that’s real Buddha!
Our foul-mouthed Seoul street-market mother,
she’s real Buddha!
We’re all of us Buddhabuddhabuddha real!
Living Buddha? One single cigarette, now
there’s real cool Holy buddha!
No, not that either.
For even supposing this world were a piece of cake,
with everyone living it up and living well,
in gorgeous high-class gear, with lots of goods produced
thanks to Korean-American technological collaboration,
each one able to live freely, with no robbing of rights,
Paradise, even!
Paradise, even!
utter Eden unequalled, plastered with jewels, still even then,
day after day people would have to change the world.
Why, of course, in any case,
day after day this world must all be overturned
and renewed to become a newly blooming lotus flower.
And that is Buddha.
Down for sure with those fifteen hundred years
rolling on foolish, rumbling along:
time fast asleep like stagnant water that stinks and stinks.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
FIONA MAAZEL
“Commercial Grammar”
For a lot of people, good grammar is like the opera - elitist and snobby. Never mind that opera tickets cost less than the nose-bleeders at almost any sporting event in the country or that the stories in opera are as Everyman as it gets: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. It’s all about perception. And if you say less fat, fewer calories, maybe people get the idea you are pretentious, and if pretentious, unpalatable. This is why so many of us don’t use capital letters when we email - because it looks stuffy. Which would all be fine were it not the case that bad grammar falls into the same category as bad prose writing, which heralds the depredation of our culture and the exaltation of fascism.
____________________
For a lot of people, good grammar is like the opera - elitist and snobby. Never mind that opera tickets cost less than the nose-bleeders at almost any sporting event in the country or that the stories in opera are as Everyman as it gets: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. It’s all about perception. And if you say less fat, fewer calories, maybe people get the idea you are pretentious, and if pretentious, unpalatable. This is why so many of us don’t use capital letters when we email - because it looks stuffy. Which would all be fine were it not the case that bad grammar falls into the same category as bad prose writing, which heralds the depredation of our culture and the exaltation of fascism.
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Monday, May 18, 2020
VANDANA KHANNA
“Remnants of the Goddess”
“Remnants of the Goddess”
____________________
Let them come for what’s left:
a chorus of bone, river and soot.
Worthy enough. Holy enough.
Like all the others, singular—or not.
Wanting only for your name to blue
my lips and call it miracle.
Our love double-knotted, saddle-stitched
held the world together. Until it didn’t—
all the words you placed in me flushed
and faltered. From memory, I recited
their worn prattle—cut them clean
with my bite. The jungle we made in blame
grew and grew, fed on our melancholy.
Not even the birds knew to change their songs.
Wanting only for your name to blue
my lips and call it miracle.
Our love double-knotted, saddle-stitched
held the world together. Until it didn’t—
all the words you placed in me flushed
and faltered. From memory, I recited
their worn prattle—cut them clean
with my bite. The jungle we made in blame
grew and grew, fed on our melancholy.
Not even the birds knew to change their songs.
Sunday, May 17, 2020
SAMUEL R. DELANY
____________________
There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.
- - - - -
ei·do·lon (īˈdōlən/)
noun
There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.
- - - - -
ei·do·lon (īˈdōlən/)
noun
- an idealized person or thing.
- a spectre or phantom.
Saturday, May 16, 2020
WILLIAM KRISTOL
The Washington Post, May 12, 2020
I have been surprised by the total capitulation to Trump. I never liked the, Well, in private, they say this. I mean, at some point, that is not an excuse; it’s almost meaningless. People’s behavior in public, if you’re a public official, is your behavior. It really came to a head on impeachment, where we fought hard trying to get Republicans to do the right thing and failed entirely, except for Romney. I think that brought home to me, and should have brought home to everyone, that Republican members of Congress should get zero credit for saying things in private that they’re not willing to say in public. At least the true believers believe it, right? I mean, is going along really a more admirable stance? Is being a cynical apparatchik better than being a true believer?
The Washington Post, May 12, 2020
I have been surprised by the total capitulation to Trump. I never liked the, Well, in private, they say this. I mean, at some point, that is not an excuse; it’s almost meaningless. People’s behavior in public, if you’re a public official, is your behavior. It really came to a head on impeachment, where we fought hard trying to get Republicans to do the right thing and failed entirely, except for Romney. I think that brought home to me, and should have brought home to everyone, that Republican members of Congress should get zero credit for saying things in private that they’re not willing to say in public. At least the true believers believe it, right? I mean, is going along really a more admirable stance? Is being a cynical apparatchik better than being a true believer?
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
SAMUEL R. DELANY
“The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire”
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“The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire”
____________________
One would almost think that they [straight white males] felt empowered to take anything the society produced, no matter how marginal, and utilize it for their own ends — dare we say “exploit it”? — certainly to take advantage of it as long as it’s around. And could this possibly be an effect of discourse? Perhaps it might even be one we on the margins might reasonably appropriate to our profit … or perhaps some of us already have.
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