Friday, January 30, 2004

Experimental post . . . 3:48:26 PM    comment []

Monday, January 12, 2004

Here is the link to the story by Mr. Prince. http://www.fwweekly.com/issues/2003-12-31/metropolis.html Each and everyone of you should read this story. Mr. Prince writes in a fascinating, Texan weave and if that isn't enough to lure you to this story, there is the story itself. If someone doesn't do it first, the Luna Azul Foundation will try to get down to Texas to interview Ms. Webb with our new little tax write off, the digital minicam. However, we fear that Borinanada fine ecclectic knits and wollens will have to sell a few items first so that we can pay for the trip. We'll summarize Ms. Joann Webb's trials and tribulations here, but do read the story. It features a fine picture of Ms. Webb and her legs, which are responsible for her excommunitation from the Baptist Church which she and her husband had been attending, as well as a Webb-based dress code at the local Chamber of Commerce on which she volunteered. Gosh folks, aren't Christianity and small town life wonderful? Isn't this the life to which all Americans truly aspire? Freedom of speech and religion and all that? We're so excited here, that we can't resist trying to copy the picture of Ms. Webb's legs and post it here right now. But we're resisting. As little as this blog offering is thus far, it has taken us a bit of time to type it up, and we don't want to lose it in our enthusiasm. So why don't you just go click on that link up there and take a look at Ms. Webb. See? Doesn't she look like a nice lady? We are just hoping against hope that this goes to the supreme court and that Ms. Webb wins the day. The Texas Penal code is just embarrassing. DILDOS IN AMERICA. The porn industry is larger than the hollywood movie industry. Did you know that? What does that say about us . . . objectively, I mean. Largely a question of technology, really. Thomas Jefferson had a nice collection of pornographic books from his time in France don't you know. Porn is not new. We could even trace it, if we wanted to, for all those out there simply flagelating themselves with gasping delight over this book, The Da Vinci Code--don't buy this one folks if you are interested in reading anything that reads any better than your worst 10th grade history text in 1972; for any who have followed even the least little bit of Biblical history, or the Wiccan thingamabob, or any little tiny bit of feminist literature or even the King Arthur Cartoon Series, there is absolutely nothing new here. The show that the Captain of Deep Space Nine hosted on the History Channel about the Gnostic Gospels was far more interesting . . . but . . . for our readers for which this is a salient luscious lacivious literary delight . . . or for those on the other side who no doubt belive that this author Dan Brown is demon possessed (not true, the book would be far more interesting) the celebration of the sex act could be seen as a form of the ancient fertility rite, the Beltane Fires, that Star Trek Episode wherein everybody walked around with no emotion dressed like extras in Angel and the Badman, until, at the strike of the appoionted hour, they burst into a frenzy of orgiastic behaviour. For some reason Kirk and Spock thought they should stop this . . . much like the folks dealing with Ms. Webb. Our point is this: Porn is not new. For our non-Christian types out there, nature must have created us with a need for visual stimuli so that we could perpetuate our pink and furless little species. For those Christian types, God doesn't make mistakes I believe. No doubt he created porn as a test or some such nonsense. Porn is one of our primary type sources for Dildo research. When we were compiling our four hour blog on December 28th, for example, we found one of the few interesting sites out there on the history of dildos. It had many lovely reproductions of images--looked like 18th Century--of a genre called candlelight--in which candles were used as the item of insertion. Sadly, we did not bookmark this page and, as fun as it might seem to recreate this search of sex toy sites porn sites, it gets just too tedius after the first hour--a marker through which we have just passed. Your basic timeline out there for the history of the Dildo goes something like this: Ancient times--Greece, leather, wood, stone Renaissance Italy--the diletto Asia--Ben wa balls and so on Victorian--pre-Freudian-histeria. Doctors grow fatigued massaging women's wombs all the time so to alleviate their general anxiety disorder, so they create mechanized versions. Some, steam powered. Wouldn't it have been easier to just write up a little manual to send home to husbands, butlers, or grooms so that this could be taken care of at home? Ah, but the medical profession then as now was always in search of a buck. Probably they could charge a pretty penny for a steam powered anxiety relieving session. Modern times--the plethora is there for the asking, unless you're in Joann Webb's home town. None of the sites below are very interesting, and just cause us to long for our original blog, filled with wit and better references to dildo history. But is is not to be, and one shouldn't, after all, cry too much over spilled milk. So we present this sampling. Most of the dildo history out there is from sex toy sales sites, and we're not advertising any of these sites here, just presenting a bit of the dreck that's out there. In general, the uk toy sites have better history pages than the American. http://www.sexyshoppers.com/content/medieval-power-women.html--powerful women in Medieval History--nothing really about dildos here, but you do meet a few gals you'd forgotten about from that History of Western Civilization Class you slept through in your sophomore year. Come to think of it, most of these women weren't even mentioned in that class. It didn't focus much on women after all. http://www.appleofeden.com/Merchant/historyofsex.htm--pretty dull, tries to present a history of sex in one page http://www.hotadultstuff.com/dildohistory.html--some interesting old pictures http://www.hotadultstuff.com/dildohistory.html--your basic history--Greece, Italy, 1800's steam powered and so on Apparently there is a German rock group called Armageddon Dildos. This was a great disappointment to us. When we saw the title, we had high homes for some end of times Bushleague dildo information. http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dildo--defines the dildo for you. Also links you to their summary of the merkin--a false vagina, which according to Wicipedia, men don't really enjoy all that much. http://www.libidomag.com/nakedbrunch/archive/europorn02.html We have to admit that we have learned some things about dildos that we didn't know, and we have recently subscribed to an online library from which we hope to glean more academic ideas on the subject. But as far as we can tell, the online listing is fairly bleak. To try to liven this up somewhat, we will soon, possibly this afternoon, upload a painting of Quin's, or perhaps a few, which we are hoping to include in illustrations to this text. For the moment, we will post so that you can get started on the article by Mr. Jeff Prince. 3:24:44 PM    comment []

Saturday, January 10, 2004

We find that several of our posts have mysteriously disappeared. Could we have so offended the Radio Userland God? We find our attempts at sex toy analysis rather harmless in the extreme. At any rate, we attempt to repost. DILDOS IN AMERICA DILDOS IN AMERICAten. Far be it from us to forget Indeed, on December 28, 2003, in a year already long past, we created a summary for readers who will not want to buy the expensive coffee table tome upon its inevitable publication, of our extensive research thusfar. Really we did. And, true to the tricky nature of this blog technology, when we tripped happily out onto the web in search of further links for our gasping readers, pages and pages and hours and hours of research and blogging were lost sending us into a hiatus of despair and knitting almost equal to that of which Quin is capable, but not quite. No one can match that. We have now, after cups and cups of coffee, yards and yards of knitting, questioning the meaning of life and all that, returned enough to the land of the living to almost be able to try to recreate some of that research. Unfortunately now, we are sure that our readers are no longer gasping and have probably forgotten all about us. As always we will soldier on, hoping that our loyal readership of approximately five or so, along with our new found friends who go searching (STILL, it is truly amazing) for gang bang children . . . everyday we have a new referer from that search. . . . someone out there must be truly desperate to find some prepubescent lethario for this purpose . . .will forgive us for our long abscence. We never forget to carry on, but sometimes frustration and despair temporarily stop us dead in our tracks. Speaking of knitting . . . please stand by for this brief word from our sponsor. The Luna Azul Foudation will soon be partnering with Boringanaeda Fine Ecclectic Knits and Woolens in the opening of a little shoppe on ebay. The shoppee is not up as of yet, we'll let you know when it makes its maiden voyage, perhaps with a press release. Boringanaeda's hand knitted wares are beautiful, eccentric, functional, sexy, one-of-a kind (as we say in the marketing biz) and really quite nice. The line's signature item is the Boringaneada signature hat. This item is truly amazing. We'll try to post a picture to this blog so that you can have a gander before the shoppeeee is actually up. The signature hat can be made to order, complete with whatever spells the potentential wearer would like woven into it . . . no negative spells please. It features a Heathcliff-like mixture of rebellious wools, stitches and colors, can be make in the long version (approximately 24 inches) or the normal size. Boringanaeda works in mohair from happy goats only, and mixes in a plethora of fine wools and upon special request, persian cat wool, and does some of its' own spinning. The long version of the hat will run about $200.00, but there will be other items in the shoppe that will be there for those ebayers who are always searching for bargains. For straight men, there is a muff for your lady which will be sure to win her affections, warm and cozy, just like your bachelor pad, and laced with velvet and ribbons, this is sure to keep her hands and her heart warm on those chilly winter nights--lined for up north, soft and unlined for Texas---where many of our readers reside . . . also, for you married men, come spring time, Boringanada will offer the perfect lingere for the ladies. Knitted from ribbons and silk. These nighties in babydoll short . . . remember those halcion days of raiding slumber parties when all the girls were in babydoll nighties . . .or Jean Harlow long . . . this makes the perfect anniversary gift. But wait! There's more! Manly scarves in greens and browns, sweaters for your pups, blankies for your bairns, guitar straps for the love of your life . . . the witches and fairy folk at Boringanaeda will weave to your hearts' desires. So be on the lookout. Of course, some of the more pricey items were knitted in June of 1933 during the dull daytime hours by the girls in Mrs. Montoya's House of Cards while Koo Cowlick played a few guitar tunes to the poetry of John Donne he had put together the night before in the Dos Passos jail, Beagle Zilchard leaned rolling a cigarette on the porch post outside, and Elizabeth Montoya herself read that hot new poem by T.S. Elliot, Quin's idiot cousin. And now, back to our programme. DILDOS IN AMERICA. We first refer you to an article by Mr. Jeff Prince, journalist of the Fort Worth Weekly dot com and elsewhere. We will post this before linking in fear of losing this portion of today's rendering while we dip into another search engine to the bookmarked page wherein the link resides. Here is the link. 4:44:25 PM    comment []

Saturday, December 27, 2003

Before Quin left on his hiatus this afternoon, he asked us to announce our forthcoming book, Dildos in America: a Short history of the American Pornucopia. In this book, we will have lovely watercolor paintings of dildos with historical narrative, notes and so on. We have already done approximately four hours of research . . . we just started after all. And have found that this promises to be quite a valuable topic indeed. Although there is a plethora of information online which would, and does, allow us to access plenty of pictures of girls and guys with dildos, it takes quite a while to dig deep enough to get to dildos and any kind of historic reference. One does get there after a while, but this takes about ten searches, at least, with many many keywords, including such things as dildo history, historic dildos, Netsuki, Erotic Art--good stuff, not surprisingly, in the Netherlands, oh, and of course we searched under John Donne dildo. Now, I hear some of you chuckling good humoredly, thinking we were just making a little funny just then, but (remember all things are connected, and all things issue forth from The Empire of Dr. Bienke, our interest in John Donne and the CD which has come spewing forth from that interest actually originated from the girls reading the poetry and sermons of John Donne in Mrs. Montoya's whore house during the daytime hours that frequently lay heavy on their hearts. Thence came our interest in Donne, and thence, in part our interest in dildos. There are two Donne quotations which I will include just as soon as I can find our book, it frequently disappears, but in at least one of these Donne mentions the dildo in, really, quite the strongest terms. The other is equally sexually fun. Since I can't, at the moment, find our volume of John Donne so that I can provide you with these quotations, I will refer you to a sweet little academic paper we found this afternoon, on Donne and cunnilingus. You can find this at http://online.sfsu.edu/~draker/sex.html. Our book will be much more interesting than this, but this will begin to place it within other existing academic literature for you, and let you see that, once again, we're not making this stuff up. While we're at it, we might as well go ahead and refer you tohttp://www.ameanet.com/memberz/candles/index.htm, which will give you a nice historical/visual beginning. In addition to Quin's existing interest in the topic, he is now spending between 8 and 16 hours a day in the neighborhood of Perry and West 4th Street in the West Village. We remember when it was actually difficult to find a sex shop in Manhattan. Now, we're not including the peep shows around Times Square. What we mean is the kind of cuddly cozy sex shop which is now positively ubiquitous. There was a time when, as far as we knew, and we tried to always know a great deal about this sort of thing, there were only two. Now, of course, there were probalby hidden corners in Bodegas . . . or other places which have hidden corners for this type of thing, but we knew of only two actual official sex toy shops in the early 90's. One was in an upstairs floor on 57th Street . . . will try to recall the name at some point in the near future, and the other was, perhaps, Toys in Babeland, where Tristan Tarrimeno got her start (sorry, probably misspelling her last name. Her website is puckerup.com) Now, down around Perry and West 4th Street, there are, per Quin, at least fourteen. If you haven't seen one of these, they are lovely little spots, filled with toys in boxes, and examples of such festooned about the store. They are frequented by upwardly mobile young adults, both men and women . . . and women with women, men with men, and all of the various combinations. As far as we can tell, there is no ethnic proclivity one way or the other in these spots, only that of class . . .money. In other words, these toys are not cheap and so you don't see any poor folks in there. There are all sorts of devices, candles, books, pretty pictures, Kama Sutras and the like. And these places smell nice, being filled with the aromas of oils, incense, lube and so forth. So, probabably as a result of the amount of time that Quin is spending down around there while on hiatus, his interest in the topic, Dildos in America, has been rekindled. Not to worry, we're not going to flood you with our research just now. Tomorrow will be soon enough to begin. However, we will say, just so as not to lose our title, the the title: DILDOS IN AMERICA: THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PORNUCOPIA-- is copyright Quin and Elizabeth Withey, 2003. We're not sure if you can copyright a title or not, but if so, we have just done so. 8:32:10 PM    comment []

Here is a passage from a book, old now, first published in 1976, by Annabelle Melzer. The book is called DADA AND SURREALIST PERFORMANCE. It is now available from Johns Hopkins University Press. Interestingly, Ms. Melzer is now teaching in Isreal. We wonder how she finds all of the current war situations going on from the perspective of her research on dada. At any rate, here is a lengthy passage which we will type out from her book. As a preface, we will just let you know that the dadaists in Paris, about which this book is primarily concerned, met and performed out of what they called the "Cabaret Voltaire", which was a kind of bar which they had talked the owner into letting them use. We long for such a bar scene in New York, or anywhere for that matter. Quin would move to whatever city it was in if we could just find one where he could spend his time being Quin among other intelligent types who were interested in collaborating in some way which might bring in income of some sort. Academics put out a "call for papers" whenever they are putting together a book or conference on some subject. Here, we put out a "call for smart people interested in collaborating in some way to make money in some artisticish manner." You wouldn't think that would be so hard to find, but it is. And so on to the lengthy passage from Ms. Melzer's book. We just want to mention that there will be quotes from this one and that one in here, and from this manifesto and that manifesto, which if our other browser, the one created by that zillionaire boy genius, now a man genius whom none of us like overmuch, were not infected by a horrible spyware called Netpal, we could indent and italisize and translate into many nice colors for you. This little detail tends to keep us going here at the Luna Azul Foundation, but since that particular browser is infected, we are working in Netscape, which we feel much better about politically, but which doesn't let us do all of those pretty things to our text. We can't even change the font for you to one which is smaller so you will know where we end and the quotation begins, and so we will just soldier on with quotation marks and double spaces and such like. Here is the passage. It is from Chapter IV, entitled, "Dada Becomes a Movement." "Dada is a tomato. Dada is a spook. Dada is a chameleonof rapid, interested change. Dada is never right. Dada is soft boiled happiness. Dada is idiotic. Dada is life. Dada is that which changes. Dada means nothing. Everything is dada. Dada manifestos, passim." [The above is a quotation from a dada manifesto; the next is Ms. Meltzer.} After the first few months of experimentation, the group at the Cabaret Voltaire chose the word "dada" to describe their work. Despite the great controversy over the origin of the name and its meaning, Hans Arp [one of the major players in dada] wrote: "I am convinced that this word is of no importance and thata only imbeciles and Spanish professors can take an interest in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit, and we are all Dada before Dada came into existence." [back to Ms. Melzer] Dada's raging manifestos do not help clarify the movement; rather the reinforce its many ambiguities. Dada comes out against Art ("Art is useless and impossible to justify"--Francis Picabia), and yet makes art. its spokesmen cry: Dada wants nothing Dada means nothing All real Dadas are against Dada--and yet its adherents continue to create. Destruction becomes synonymous with creation: "order-disorder; ego-nonego; affirmation-negation." How is one to define a movement which cannot be identified with any one personality or place, viewpoint or subject, which affected all of the arts, which had continually shifting focus and which was moreover intentionally negative, ephemeral and illogical. Waht does emerge from the manifestos, journals and recorded diatribes of the "movement" is the oppositio to anything that smacks of traditioalism in literature and the arts: . . ." (Meltzer, page 57). We pause in our citation of Ms. Melzer's work to insert a personal note. The note is this: the above description of dada is one of the best descriptions of QUIN that we have ever seen. And as such, we know our dear readers will understand, in part, why it has been so difficult for us to get a handle on him all these many years (eighteen on January 2nd, for those of you who want to send gifts or at least make a friendly comment to the blog). You see, those of us at the Luna Azul Foundation are worker bees. We analyze, translate, cite, design CD covers and booklets and websites and portfolios and the like. We do our level best, really we do, in our previously noted Pauline fashion, to promote and promulgate the words and works of QUIN. But you just never know what his reaction will be. We know that since he personifies dada, he doesn't mean to be all of those things listed above, (we note especially the words, "intentionally negative, ephemeral and illogical") but he just can't help it. Here is an example. First you should know that Quin has stopped off at the Luna Azul Foundation in order to not celebrate the culmination of the feasts of consumption with us. We expect that he will go back off into the ether and his hiatus at any moment now, probably this afternoon. He has been dada-ing us a great deal lately, more than usual, even purchasing the above cited book as our non-feast gift. And so it was with our usual happy enthusiasm, thinking that we finally might understand something, that we approached him yesterday morning and said something to the effect of, "While you're still on hiatus and making money (he has given the tentative date of January 1 as the date of his ceasing again to officially work and therefore bring in, really quite a sizeable chunk of cash to the Foundation, but even cash is not worth it if this causes Quin to do away with himself, or worse, have a recurrence of the pinched nerve in his neck that causes him great pain, but to continue) we said the above and went on, "what we should do is we should rent a space and have a Dada performance." We were smiling of course, as is our happy little bent, until Quin fixed us with a look of depressed anquish. Knowing that we had again managed to say the wrong thing, we went on " I know I know, this is what you've been talking about for months,"(we watch the anguish deepen and know that he is thinking of the exact year, probably 1999 when he first started talking about this . . . Now truthfully and to our credit, he has NOT been talking about putting on a Dada performance for months or years. He has been talking about doing some kind of performance, in the nude, in hopes of creating some sort of sales, and hopefully we might even get a semi-clad brazillian girl dancer or two to participate; I fear that this will end up being just the members of the Luna Azul Foundation belly-dancing away, with perhaps the Beagle singing along. . . .but it was never clarified as dada--we expect it will be still something about Quentin Crisp--but seeing the look of anguish at our once again evidenced naivte, which always makes us feel just as stupid as we can be, we soldiered bravely on and said " . . . since we're followers of dada . . ." now, just so you know, we aren't really totally stupid here at the Luna Azul Foundation, but we do sometimes say things of that sort hoping to get a laugh out of the Quin when he is in despair. There is, after all, no despair so hard for us to take as Quin despair. At this point, however, Quin's face became, if anything, even more tortured and he said, "We are not followers of dada." and rolled over in the bed, putting his arms and hands over his face as he often does when he wishes to block out the horror of the world. So, you see how the above description of dada is in truth a description of Quin. We are in the buisiness of selling ideas here, and we think this will require a new wardrobe purchased at our local thrift stores of various velvets and pins and finding the right parties to go to. Losing twenty pounds would also help greatly, but that takes more time, unless we contract this flu that's going around, and we can't afford that without donations to the Foundation designated specifically for flu care. Be careful out there in radio land, this flu frequently turns into Peeeenumonia. A close friend and colleague of ours landed in the hospital with it for several days. Here at the Foundation where health insurance is scarce, we can't afford to be sick . . . we and 45 million other Americans. Does that brief description of Dada and Quin help any? What is hard for most people to understand about artists is that they are really terribly terribly absolutely positively serious about all of this. The English language does not have sufficient adjectives and adverbs to describe their seriosity. And so, when loved ones--don't get me wrong here, NO ONE at the Luna Azul Foundation has ever or will ever suggest this, but it has been suggested from time to time sending Quin deeper and deeper under the covers--when loved ones suggest that Quin en famille might move back to Texas where he could work at, oh, say, The Home Depot, or some such place where he could probably have health insurance, these well-meaning suggestions just function to send him to the outer darkness . . . the black hole of the sole (sic) or wherever that well known saint went when he was in prison and being tortured and so on. (Our Star Trek sensibilities will not allow us, at the moment, to recall the actual phrase . . .there it is, the "dark night of the soul") Quin spends a lot of time there, in the black hole of the sole (flounders are depressed creatures after all, flat and spending all of that time on the bottom of the sea). In point of fact, there is just no dragging him out most of the time. Now we know that we say this from time to time, and that quite frankly, it pisses some folks right off, that we talk about Quin's despair and so on. And we say to you, Tough. What is interesting is that the people that it annoys the most that we dare mention this, which is, after all, unfortunately, something that many artists seem to deal with constantly or at least off and on . . . remember POLLOCK? Remember Kirk Douglas in that movie about Van Gough? Even Charleton Heston in that movie about Michealangelo suffered with this kind of thing. But to continue, what is interesting about these pissed off folks is that they are the same ones who believe that there should be no secrets, that secrets cause disfunction. They believe in airing problems and sufferings and talking about other people's alcoholism and fears and deeper inner sufferings and all of that. But here is the key. They think that once these things are spoken aloud, they happily and miraculously just go away. Poof, as our dear Uncle Leo Castelli has said. And so then, after all this has been aired, they don't have to hear about it anymore and everything is rosey. We tell you all that this is not how it works. Those of you who believe this are not serious. Krishnamurti . . . do you know him? He is one of the more amusing, or was, he has passed into the ether now, of the Eastern Guru types of the late 20th Century. Krishnamurti in his writings and quite funny television appearances with his wide 1970's collars and swirling Quetin Crisp hairdos has told us that most of our religious practices are just another form of entertainment. We do this to engage our minds, which are always craving activity so that they don't actually have to be serious--or at least quiet. Those of you who think anything goes away, poof, so that you don't have to hear it anymore and can go get your religious fix, whatever it is, are just not serious. You're biding your time, waiting until you can pass into the ether or be reincarnated or whichever thing it is you are longing to do. Quin is serious, and so nothing ever goes away. We always get to this point in our diatribes here, don't we. The proclamation that Quin is serious, that you should listen, if not to him, to the sounds in your apartment (that is a John Cage quote, not, unfortunately, our own). Perhaps we project out onto our supposed readership what Quin projects on to us, and so, seemingly unable to convince him that we are listening, or at least trying to, we try to convince you to. We tell you this however. One of these years, Quin will have a big retrospective of his art and writing. It may be at the Whitney, or it may be at the Walker in Minneapolis. Hoard your pictures for the lenders dinners folks. We'll be calling on you. We just hope that this happens before he permanently passes into the ether. Sometimes retrospectives do happen when the artist is still around. Tottering manfully in his tuxedo pumps. Usually not. Enough for now, as Osho says. We'll post this and try to move on. 12:58:03 PM    comment []

Thursday, December 25, 2003

We pause in our narrative to discuss a once and future topic. Once and future because it supplies background information to all the works of Quin, and because it will be the next great thingamagig in the series of performance art which is and has been his life. This next great thingamagig is and will be: The dada hootenanny. Readers are probably all already aha-ing on this holy of holy days--the culmination to the great holidays of consumption--when all have completed the required religious rituals of feasting, purchasing gizmos and gadgets in profusion, holding tight to old resentments in their hearts while watching loved ones' disappointed faces as they fight bitterly with the plastic packaging to get at the gizmos, and finally, with relief, anticipating the homeward journey inside some hugely large and heavy gadget, gizmo, or thingamagug, so that they may behold the faces of loved ones no more. The dada hottenanny has something to do with gizmos and thingamagigs, and here is why. First, you might want to try this: Enter the word "hootenanny" in your search engine and see how hard it is to find a description. It is rather hard. Try entering the words 'dada hootenanny', no doubt thinking that you will find pages complete with images of performances et. al. And you find nothing of very much interest. There is very little out there about the hootenanny, let alone a dada hootenanny. So we examine these two confluent words in an attempt to glimpse what Quin's next performance art piece may look and/or sound like. When we check out the word, hootenanny, expecting to find much referencing to, at the very least, Pete Seegar, here is the kind of thing we found. A lot of links to a Magazine called Hootenanny. Something which tantalizingly mentions the words hootenanny and counter culture but turns to be about playing guitars in the Catholic Church. A site for Golden Voice recording? with an interesting comic book style cover. and so on. When we looked up "hootenanny definition," we are taken first to a thing called hyperdictionary, which gave us this: : affair, article, artifact, choral service, dingus, dofunny, dohickey, dojigger, dojiggy, domajig, domajigger, doodad, dowhacky, eisteddfod, eppes, etwas, farewell performance, flumadiddle, folk-music festival, folk-sing, gadget, gigamaree, gimmick, gizmo, hickey, hootmalalie, jam session, jigger, material thing, music festival, musicale, object, opera festival, quelque chose, rock festival, service of song, sing, singfest, sing-in, singing, something, swan song, thing, thingum, thingumabob, thingumadad, thingumadoodle, thingumajig, thingumajigger, thingumaree, thingummy, whatchy, widget. This was not what we expected at all. Apparently, more dictionaries know the term hootenanny in terms of its "thingummy, widgetty, doodad, flumadiddle connotations" than it's" music festival" connotations. So far, we have found nothing referencing our concept of hootenanny, which, although visions of Pete Seegar dance in our heads repeating "one more time . . . . one more time . . . ." into the ether, we have always treasured images conveyed by the word, of bearded Bull fiddle playing Warner Brothers cartoon figures, Arkansas Hillbillies, stamping and fiddling away and reminding us that out there in cartoon land, there were those who dwelled in jug playing anarchy . . . maybe. Finally, we went to Britannica.com where we found the following definition with a nice illustration of Pete Seegar in the Student Encyclopedia, which is always the more interesting of the two reference texts. If Britannica will let us cut and paste onto this blog, we will reproduce it here for you. Seeger, Pete Britannica Student Encyclopedia E-mail this article Print this article Cite this article Pete Seeger, 1971. David Gahr [unfortunately, the photo of Seegar from Britannica is uncopyable] (born 1919), U.S. folksinger. One of the foremost figures of American folk music, Pete Seeger spent decades popularizing his own brand of pop-folk both as a member of various groups and as a solo performer. His most famous songs—‘If I Had a Hammer' and ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?'—became well-known pop-folk classics, and ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!' was a number-one hit for The Byrds. Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, in New York, N.Y. Both his father, a musicologist, and his mother, a violin teacher, were on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music. By the time he was a teenager, Seeger was adept at playing the ukulele, banjo, and guitar. His interest in folk music began when he visited a folk festival in the southern United States. After attending private schools in Manhattan, Seeger enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied sociology for two years. In the late 1930s, Seeger worked at the Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress and appeared on radio programs. He formed the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell in 1940 and released his debut album, Talking Union and Other Union Songs (1941), just as the United States was entering World War II. After serving in the Army, Seeger became the national director of People's Songs, Inc., where he used the term hootenanny to describe the group's pro-labor, antifascist songs. In the late 1940s, Seeger formed The Weavers, a quartet known for popularizing such folksongs as ‘On Top of Old Smokey' and ‘Goodnight Irene'. A performer with a strong social consciousness, Seeger was blacklisted for his alleged Communist sympathies during the 1950s and was unable to get work on network television for 17 years. Throughout this period, Seeger continued to sing and record though his public appearances were limited. By the early 1960s, Seeger had found a new audience among young Americans who increasingly embraced his commitment to political and social change, especially his opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Seeger's albums during that period, such as We Shall Overcome (1963) and Songs of Struggle and Protest 1930–1950 (1964), reflected his antiwar stance. The Byrds recording of his song ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!', which became a number-one hit in 1965, was a fusion of folk and pop with lyrics adapted from a Biblical passage in Ecclesiastes. An accomplished storyteller, music historian, author, and instructor, Seeger educated and influenced many other performers. He played a pivotal role in popularizing the five-string banjo and introduced a variety of instruments into folk music. In the 1990s he continued to perform before audiences young and old in concerts that typically included active audience participation. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. From Britannica, we also gleaned this sugarplum about leadbelly and the hootenanny. 1885?–1949), U.S. folksinger and composer. Leadbelly was born Huddie William Ledbetter near Shreveport, La., probably on Jan. 21, 1885. An African American folk legend whose style influenced the hootenanny movement as well as folk music in general, he became a wandering musician who sang the blues. Although he had frequent run-ins with the law, he used his music to win a pardon and avoid work details while in jail. On a Louisiana prison farm, he was discovered in 1930 by John and Alan Lomax, who were collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress. His best-know songs, ‘On Top of Old Smokey' and his theme song, ‘Good Night, Irene', became hits after his death in New York City on Dec. 6, 1949. (See also Folk Music.) Interesting. The Leadbelly citation mentions the "hootenanny movement . . ." We think we'll just take a moment now to look up "People's Songs Inc." and see what we find. We will let you know in a moment. Oh . . . well, now. You find at least some fairly interesting things when you look this up. First is a lovely long page of text by Woodie Guthrie who with Pete Seegar and others published the bulletin "People's Songs Inc." We'll summarize, and, when we are able again to access this blog in another browser, we'll put in some colors and indentions and things so that you can tell more easily where we stop, and Guthrie starts. You may just want to skip straight to the Guthrie parts. We know that. At any rate, in the excerpt that follows, Woodie is discussing the first ten months of the bulletin's life, and he castigates, or at least it seems so to us, his fellow readers and editors for not including more songs from real people. Read this over and see if you concur. from: http://aztec.lib.utk.edu/~pelton/psi.htm Jingles, jangles, and rangles by Woody Guthrie Vol. I, No. 10; November 1946 You ask me to tell you what I think of our song bulletin at this tenth month of its birth and life. I will talk with my eyes on a world of bloody fights, town rapings, bloodhound lynchings, fiery cross burnings, and with my ears and my feelings set to catch the pogroms, racial wars, the word "verboten", and the words "gentile only", and "no blacks", as well as words painted on boards that say, "no men wanted", "no vacancies", and see what I can say. The nine issues of People's Songs bulletin so far has not been a full blooded, nor a full grown book of People's Songs. It has had soome very good partisan songs, anti-fascist war songs, we will all admit, but it has not had enough, even of these. I think it has had too many jingles, rangles, and tangles right and left, so many that the more deeper and longer ballads and songs have been crowded out. The best loved columns in any magazine or papre are the spaces set aside for the true stories of real living human beings. we have heated our hearth and warmed our bed for outstanding ballad singers and best song writers, and a few of our close kin, but we have pushed the deathless songs and ballads of Sara Ogan, Aunt Molly Jackson, and their classic protest songs about bloody Harlan County, out to stand by the door and wait. Our song file here is running over with a few hundred or so of the sadder, madder, and gladder stories from out of our chain gangs and our work gangs. But the jingle of the day elbows many of our more human tales plumb out of the picture. We have been the talkers when we ought to be the listeners. Our main aim is to cause folks to write their own songs and to sing them. We need more songs that sing about actual fights, battles, on the level of "Montcalme and the Wolfe", "I am a Girl of Constant Sorrow", "The Worried Man Blues", Goin' Down This Road Feelin' Bad", "Columbus Stockade Blues", "John Henry", "East Texas Red", "The 1913 Massacre", "Dream of the Miner's Child", "The Bourgeoisie Blues", "Tom Joad", "The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done", "Joe Hill", "East Virginia Blues", "The Death of Floyd Collins", and thousands more. I can see the parts of my own life reflected here, I believe, stronger and plainer than I can in all of these jingles and jangles. I know a few of us have worked our heads off to keep our bulletin going and growing. It will grow more yet. I see it already bubbling and jumping up faster, as more folks see it, sing it and feel it. I feel sad only because more people haven't run and jumped in with us. I just hope, maybe, to get you to feeling like I feel, and then to set down and write your own feelings in to us. I always was a lot better listener than I am a talker. Your Oklahoma Pal, Woody Guthrie. What gives us the most solace from the above passage is that, it seems even Woodie Guthrie had trouble getting folks to come play in his sand box. Searching for things about People's Songs Inc., we also ran across an FBI report on Judy Holliday--the actress? We encourage all of our readers to look over this link. Since this seems to be where we're heading again, or already are, we'd better get some songs ready, like Woodie says so we can be ready. If you want to read the FBI file on Judy Holliday, here is the link:http://www.wtv-zone.com/lumina/FBI/newyork.html. If you keep going through google pages, you will indeed find some more interesting things there about People's Song's Inc. But for all of this, it's pretty hard to find a nice succinct bit of verbiage about, say, the histori-sociological significance of hootenanny in the mid to latish 20th Century. Now, Let's consider dada for a moment. Here we find reams and reams. http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/Bai/shipe.htm--This one gives you a pretty good summary. Now, we'll discuss dada in our own editorial layperson's terms for a while, knowing all the while that Quin may one day see this and just poo poo the heck out of it. Many times he thinks our work is ok, many other times he tells us that it is bad work, fucked up, crap, or so forth. And so when we type, doodle some little design on the computer, knit, or whatever, we must always mentally prepare ourselves for if certainly not the inevitable, at least the possible. And so, for those of us for whom dada or dadaism may not ring the biggest of bells, we offer . . . this. Many people, since we are now in the absolute heyday of Gulf War: The Sequel, have forgotten all about some of the other wars for money or oil or whatever that the moneyed classes have propegated or promulgated in . . . well, in the previous century, we must now say, meaning, the 20th since we are now in the 21st. Dada, which for simplicity's sake, we can, for the next five minutes think of as perhaps an artistic movement. And to properly begin to discuss it, we need to remember a bit about The War to End All Wars . . . remember that one, no? yes? That one was World War I, or the First World War, circa 1914 - 1918. The one before Hitler. A great many men, especially European men (we include the English in this) died in this war. Zillions in fact. And it all happened soon after and around the continuing time of all of the arguments over the rights of the workers and the proletariet and so on. What we saw was that we can talk and talk and talk about the rights of the working poor, and then as soon as the rich folks and higher ups decide that we need a war, the workers all go marching off to die in one. You may just like to note that this is happening even now. Let yourself do a quick search about military salaries and find out just how much all those children being all that they can be are dying to make for the wives and children they are leaving behind. And those are the quote, professional, unquote, soldiers. The reservists are a different story entirely. We're not going to do that search for you, but let's just do a quick search and see if we can find out approxmately how many men died in WWI . . . According to Britannica, around 8,500,000--eight-million-five-hundred-thousand, soldiers died in WWI. Ponder that a moment. This is carnage. Do you remember how they fought in WWI? It was a style of fighting carried over from the American Civil War, or War Between the States, and made even more manifest as soldiers dug their way across Europe. Both sides dug trenches, say, six to eight feet deep, or deeper perhaps, which were immediately filled with water and mud and dung and rats, and so forth . . . the rats came in handy because they could be eaten, and then when the commanding officers in the lovely homes they had comandeered to run the proceedings said so, they ran out of the trenches while men from the trenches on the other side of things fired on them, or blew them up with land mines they had planted, or bigger guns which fired shells, or if they still had legs to run on, stabbed them until they died with big swords called bayonets which were attached to rifles for that purpose. Did your teachers make you read "Johnny Got his Gun" in school? Among those left, those who were not among the millions who had died, there was bitterness against the upper classes and bourgeois who were responsible for bringing this on, and who also managed to make quite a lot of money, as usual, on the whole enterprise. Dada is a sort of serious minded hysteria which developed among artists/thinkers as they thought about this and what manner of thought processes might be needed in order to prevent another war of this sort. Remember, there weren't many of these people left . . . most of them were men, after all. The Dadaists went after the various systems of thought, ways of life, political organization, and so on, that seemed at the root of this carnage. They went after language for instance. To do this, they used poetry, theater. They went after the traditional ideas about Art--with a capital "a". Most of the men continued in their day to day lives to wear attractive black suits in small sizes. We will continue in our lay discussion of Dada, however, we want now to jump straight to Quin and his Dadahootenanny to be. It's working process may be perhaps best described by a quote from Jean Cocteau regarding a theatrical work, in his preface to Les maries de la Tour Eiffel . . . Cocteau writes: "A theatrical piece ought to be written, presented, costumed, furnished with musical accompaniment, played and danced, by a single individual. This universal athlete does not exist. It is therefore important to replace the individual by what resembles an individual most: a friendly group." In our experience it is much easier for Quin as individual to write, present, furnish musical accompaniment, play and dance everything in a performance, than to find a "friendly group" to perform these functions. And so we expect that Cocteau's description will form the basis of his performance. Their theater pieces were what we would call performance art today, only along more specific guidelines. The dadists, like almost anyone who thought much, could write, and could afford to publish in some way, published many manifestos. This was the fashion of the times--the manifesto. The Communist Manifesto did not get written in a vaccum. People were manifestoing constantly in those days. 7:14:01 PM    comment []

Thursday, December 18, 2003

It was a handbill inviting all sharecroppers, day laborers and tenant farmers to a meeting with Mr. H.L. Mitchell, at Labor Hall in Jonesboro about a month back. Mitchell, it said was Secretary of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and would speak on the topic of fare living conditions and wages for all.  6:21:41 PM    comment []

The sun had shifted over to the east side of the house so that the front room was nice and cool.  Dishes were washed, Purity was out back shelling peas for supper.  There was plenty of ham left, and potatoes.  The greens wouldn't take long to boil up and they could have corn on the cob and hot rolls and that pecan pie in there.  They had been lucky to get this piece of land with the tree on it.  Time enough to sit a while before supper with the men out and taking Clem with them.  Oscar'd said after lunch that he didn't know but what Clem wouldn't be helped by some hard work that afternoon.  The truth was, this was the only morning of the week the boy hadn't been out in the fields with the men, and that was just because she'd needed him to mend the cow's stall in the barn.  It was a wonder young ones managed to learn anything during the school year as hard as the men worked them when they needed them. Clio went to check on Nellie out on the sleeping porch. Saw she was sleeping with Cassie and Jem curled up beside her on the bed. Clem and Jem. Clio shook her head.  Well that had been Oscar's doing having to go and name the child Jeremiah after his father like he did.  Wasn't like the old man had done anything but eat them out of house and home for four years before he died.  And she'd had to look after him like a slave in those days with three little ones to take care of.  She wrinkled her nose, remembering the old man scent of smoke and urine and bad teeth.  Her father had always been clean and neat and he'd smoked sweet strong tobacco in a pipe. Nellie's two girls were down on the floor playing with their rag dolls on the old quilt Momma had made when she and Oscar got married. It was the quilt for everyday, stitched with scraps of old soft cotton from Clio's dresses and things. She could still recognize almost every dress in the pieces of that quilt.  The green one she'd worn to Jersey Dale's fifteenth birthday party, the brown had been a fall dress for church with lace at the collar Momma had tatted, and the white. Clio let herself smile when she remembered the thick soft white cotton nightgown, heavy in the bodice where her mother had smocked it with dark blue silk embroidery thread.  Mamma had cut the pattern so that the bodice was heart shaped and threaded a blue satin ribbon through the neckline.  Clio spent a year of magical nights the year before she married, sunk deep in her feather bed reading the Arthurian Legends and imagining herself as Gwenevere.  Oscar when he started coming around was her Arthur, with his red gold hair and strong hard build.  He had been teaching school in Tuckerman then, but was saving for his own place.  A man couldn't marry and raise a family on a school teacher's salary.  Clio hardened her mind against the memories and forced herself to focus on Nellie's girls. They favored Mamma's side, like Nellie, though not as pretty, too much O.T. mixed in.  But still, they'd be pretty enough girls if they weren't so plump and useless. Well no doubt some farmer would marry them. She'd probably end up having to train them up herself with Nellie always so tired she could hardly turn her hand to her own work.  Clio made a note in her mind to start working them this fall. No need for Nellie to try to do everything with those two big girls around the house.  Always treated them like they were play dolls, dressing them up so they weren't fit for anything.  Well she could see to that well enough. They'd have school during the day, but there was plenty of time to learn some chores after they got home. The dog followed her out onto the front porch and sat at her feet; his tail curved around the heels of her shoes. The sun had started to go down in back of the house, and Clio could see the orange streaks of it across the fields.  Clouds had come up like she'd expected, and there'd be more rain tonight.  Oscar had said the crop was almost in, so it shouldn't hurt too much.  Way far out were the men.  Tiny blue shapes bending and standing, bending and standing.  Oscar could pull over a hundred pounds on a good day, and O.T. not much less.  Clio found herself thinking about Oscar's feet.  Too small for a man his size, not good for a farmer.  They always hurt him but he didn't say much about it.  Maybe she'd put some of those Epsom salts in a bucket for him tonight so he could give them a good soak.  His feet would give him a lot less trouble if he'd use that rub she made for him with he willow bark in it.  And then her lip curled a little.  Oscar never would listen to her about anything he was afraid she might know more about than he did.  The man shot himself in the foot that way.  Clio reached around and rubbed that spot in her lower back.  Like an old woman she thought, what with all these new aches and pains. I don't remember my momma ever talking about hurting like this, but then she'd never had to work hard either. Never a day in her life. The Bible sat where it always did on the round table beside the rocking chair up at the front window.  Clio let herself sit down heavily and felt the cushion on the seat of the chair slide under her.  One of those ties was probably loose.  She considered standing up and retying that tie, but didn't move, and after a moment the chair creaked rhythmically as she rocked forward and back.  For just a second she shut her eyes and felt the world change around her.  There was thunder off in the distance, just starting in the big white clouds, making the room close, even though the temperature had dropped a degree or two and a breeze blew in the scent of the mimosa tree out front.  Somewhere a mockingbird started to sing it's strange song.  The Arkansas lark, Daddy'd always said. This one seemed to have a song of its own, musical and sweet, interspersed between bob white calls and the ugly blue jay sounds it made.  Two years ago there'd been one that clucked like the chickens and crowed like the rooster. Given that old tom cat a run for his money too, diving at him when he got too close to the mimosa where she'd had her nest.  No one was in the room to see that Clio smiled with the memory.  If they had been they might have been surprised at how young she still looked when she smiled.  But Clio didn't smile often, and so like most of the women on Floodline Farm, she always seemed older than she was. For that second, she let sounds drift over her.  The dog's snuffling snores at her feet.  Girls playing quietly in the room beyond.  Dragon flies' big black papery wings buzzing near the ground where she dug up her flower bed every spring and kept the earth wet. A pot clanged from the direction of the kitchen where Purity was shelling the peas.  Probably she'd finished and was fixing to start washing those greens soon.  Soon enough, Clio thought.  Let the child rest for a piece, and Clio hoped she would, though she would never have gotten up from her chair to go tell her to.  The girl wouldn't know what to do with herself if she wasn't working at something. Opening her eyes, she reached for the heavy black Bible.  Flipped without thinking past the smooth family pages where her father had recorded names going back to the Revolution in sculpted handwriting.  There were bright colorful images too of Jesus' ascension into the clouds with the deciples standing by, and the three Marys at the cross.  Her thumb stopped when she got to the page where the dark frayed ribbon lay. Revelation 3:20. Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and I will sup with him, and he with me. There was an illustration across from that page as well.  Jesus, his long blondish hair waving down his shoulders to the bright blue and white robes he wore, stood in front of a round door of deep knotted wood.  His hand was raised as if he was just about to knock on the door, and there was a golden light around his head, though it looked like it was dark outside except for that.  Jesus, always knocking and knocking, and no one ever seeming to let him in.  Clio turned a couple of pages to the spot where she had left off reading to the family the night before.  She lifted the heavy book with both hands and read aloud. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power and his seat. Well that would probably give Jem nightmares again. Maybe she should try to get him to bed before the reading tonight.  Problem was the boy seemed to love the Bible reading and prayer time.  While the others were yawning, he'd be just praying and praying, including every chicken and pig on the place.  Couldn't understand half of what he said either, but maybe that didn't matter to God. She turned a few more pages and found what she was looking for.  A piece of paper folded in quarters and shoved in the back of the book when Oscar had come home a few days ago.  At first, Clio thought she should put it somewhere else, but then figured that the way Oscar was, the Bible would be the last place he'd find it. She unfolded the paper at its creases and read it again.     2:09:53 PM    comment []

Jim Allen cleared his throat.  He should have known better than to set foot in this house.  Oscar never had gotten over him knowing Clio for so long.  "Anyways, I don't know but we may have some trouble in Arkansas before this thing is over. Sometimes it seems to me Mr. Roosevelt is trying to kill cotton farming in the South." "Teacher said Arkansas has the largest cotton production in the world," Clem quoted coming out of his bib a little. "Surprised the boy can remember that so long after school's out."  said Clio.  She took a hot yeast roll from the pan but ate it plain, without any butter. "Well did he now, Clem, did he indeed," said Jim Allen, "Well it's third largest if I remember it right. Whatever it is, it's a hell of a lot of cotton, that's for sure." Across the table, Nellie's two girls giggled.  The man had said hell, and at dinner too. Jim Allen heard them and looked over at Clio, "Excuse me Ma'm," he said. "Roosevelt's got his hands far and away too much into other people's business as far as I'm concerned." Oscar said.  "It's not government's place to be telling people how to live their lives and then taxing em for the privilege.  I don't know but what he's done anything to fix this depression either.  New Deal, New Steal I say." "That Mrs. Roosevelt's sure not much of a looker, is she." O.T. helped himself to the first piece of pie.  Chess, one of his favorites.  Just cooled from sitting in the pie safe for the morning. Clio must have made it that day, or maybe Purity.  Too bad his girls were so little help to Nellie. "Mrs. Roosevelt is a good woman and wants to help the poor." Clio said in her voice with the edge. "It's a far sight more than most rich people do." Jim Allen shifted in his chair and Clio went on. "She's building new houses and towns so that folks with little or nothing can have a place to live and good work to do.  She's as good as the President himself as far as that's concerned." "Building towns for coal miners not farmers. I don't see any help coming from Washington for any around here." The chess pie sat in front of Oscar but he didn't take a slice. "Maybe that'll come in good time." Clio said, "Pie Jim Allen?" Jim Allen said he didn't mind if he did, and the pie passed Oscar by the first go round.  1:40:22 PM    comment []

Cassie sat on the floor of the sleeping porch on an old patchwork quilt.  Colors and shapes without names looked up at her.  That the quilt was one of three that her grandmother had worked for Clio for her wedding, she did not know.  Nor that it had been a place keeper for four other small damp packages of flesh like hers.  She knew soft, and somewhere in her mind a word was forming for the smell of the quilt.  Her own smell mixed with the smell of Clio's lye scrubbed pine floors, the beloved aroma of the dog and the general odor of food and sweat and work that was the family. Her mother's smell was not on the quilt.  Perhaps just a trace.  That smell of lilac water and soap from the store. Woman damp and pie crusts. "What you doing honey?" A voice from above.  Cassie focused her eyes on Nellie's round face and blonde hair and her own face opened up. "Oh look at her smile." said Nellie. "You sure are a pretty little thing. Look like your momma don't you with them eyes.  Daddy always said that's the Indian blood." Nellie's smooth forhead creased.  Their momma had never held with such talk. Said Clio's hair was dark like that queen of Egypt back in Bible times, or sometimes she'd say it was from the Irish on her side of the family. Daddy'd always laughed at that and said that if it was, it was black irish blood for sure. Nellie'd never known what they meant by all that.  And anyway, lots of families in the county had Indian blood.  She rubbed at her forhead with one hand for a second, then remembered Cassie. "Maybe her's going to get herself another little girl cousin to play with before too long, and then before you know it all you girls'l be making them quilts yourself." Nellie went on with her baby talk and Cassie's eyes dropped back down to the quilt.  It was an extension of the fields with greens and whites and blues and browns all stitched into the circular wedding ring pattern. Here and there where the fabric had worn thin, a little of the cotton batting showed and Cassie worked one of these spots tenaciously until she got a wisp of the white stuff out.  Then she screamed with delight.  This was something she knew. From the other room came voices.  Her mother, "Nellie keep that child quiet," and the men, low and speaking in their mysterious worried tongue. Always the worry sound. Always to Cassie like her sound of crying, but low pitched and without tears. All around the sleeping porch were Clio's books and old magazines arranged on low shelves along two sides of the rectangular space below the screening.  They were arranged precisely, in alphabetical order, another code of the world Cassie didn't know.  Some were old with worn brown leather covers with faded gold lettering and fat with hundreds of thin pages. On others the cover had been lost and only the woven thread of the back binding showed.  So many variations of squares. Tall and short, fat and thin.  The magazines filled half of a whole shelf.  Covers slick and shiny with bent corners and frayed paper spines.  People on the covers were faded from the sun that filled the porch in the mornings.  They wore strange clothes that made no sense and looked hot.  Some had a tail like the dog's around their necks.  Magazines didn't smell like books which smelled fresh and old at the same time.  Magazines smelled like they looked.  Like some other world entirely. From the other room came a word Cassie understood.  Her father's voice, raised and rumbling.  Cassie heard him say thatdog, and Clio's reply which came clear to Cassie's ears.  "I don't know why you'd want him out of here today when he sits by me for every other meal this family has." In a moment the dog appeared on the porch with Nellie and Cassie.  He settled his muzzle on the bed and gave Nellie's belly a diagnostic sniff.  Satisfied, he ambled over to Cassie, licked her ear and flopped down beside her, between her and the door to the bedroom.  The black eyes between his paws kept watch, but his ears pricked to the conversation going on two doors beyond.  Understanding more of the language than Cassie. "Now I wouldn't say that, Oscar, " O.T.'s voice whined a little. "I don't think I'd say that at all.  What would you say to that, Jim Allen?" "Well now, I don't know for sure about that. You men would feel differently about it I guess being renters." "Thirds and fourths." The words seemed to come out of Oscar automatically. "Yeah now, the men who are straight sharecropping would have a different idea about it all I reckon." "Pass the potatoes to Mr. Alden, Clemenceau." Clio broke in.  I swear I don't know why I bother trying to teach you children manners at all. For all the good it's done, and get your elbows off the table." "If your name was Clemenso, you wouldn't have no manners either." "Any manners," Clio said. "No manners or any manners either," Clem's voice raised as far as he could get away with. "Nobody can even spell Clemenso.  Not even teacher spells it like you do Momma." "Don't sass your momma or you'll feel the back of my hand boy." Oscar said. "Sunday School teacher says not to swear, Momma," said Purity quietly.  It wasn't fair for Mamma to talk bad about her manners like that, like she was as bad as Clem.  Somewhere in her a small knife turned and she pushed her plate away. "What are you talking about child, no one was swearing at this table," said Clio, " And besides that, little Miss Sunday School doesn't know everything about everything I imagine.  I knew it was a mistake to let you go over to that Baptist church in Jeru this summer.  That dog out there's got more sense than the Baptists, dunking little children in the Cash river like they do.  It's a wonder we haven't had the typhoid on this farm because of you getting Baptised with the rest.  If I'd known about it, I wouldn't have let you do it." And seeing Purity's chin quiver: "Oh stop that now," she went on a little easier, she was a good girl after all, and a hard worker. "I don't know what on earth has gotten into you children. You all showing out because Mr. Alden is here?  I tell you this is not the way to endear yourself to an important man." "Well now, Clio, I guess those children have spirit and that's a good thing." Jim Allen smiled sidewise. "And Clem, that Mr. Clemenceau wasn't as bad as all that.  Especially early on.  Went off there at the end as far as I'm concerned." "You had the great misfortune to be born before my mother died, Clemenseau." Clio pronounced the name extraordinarly clearly and passed a platter with the second to last ham to the nearest set of hands. "And she had the privilege of naming you. She always said that Clemenseau was a refined sounding name and begged me on her death bed never to call you anything common--like Clem." Clem's chin sunk down onto the bib of his overhauls, but he kept quiet. Oscar looked up sharply at Clio and she met his eyes. He wasn't happy.  Oscar never liked it when she talked like that, called it her "book talk."  Well what of it.  She had a right to speak her mind now and then didn't she? If he didn't like it he shouldn't have married her.  Seemed to like it well enough ten years ago when he'd courted her.  Had his own place then too she recalled. "Talk about showing out." he said under his breath.  Loud enough for everyone at the table to hear, it seemed to Clio.         12:46:23 PM    comment []

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

The Editor takes a moment to interrupt the narrative and remind our dear readers of Quin's promised offering on ebay. The iconic portrait of Leo Castelli. We believe that Quin wrote the biography that appears there himself and so we know our readers will want to peruse it. To view Quin's offering and biography, simply go to ebay.com, search by Quin Withey, and there you will be.  We might just also note that any funds received from a sale will go to help support The Luna Azul Foundation, a photograph of the future home of the Foundation will appear in this blog, and on the website RagtimeTexas.com, shortly. 12:10:00 PM    comment []

"Oscar, O.T," Jim Allen pulled off his hat.  Well the wind would have had it off in a minute. O.T. nodded.  Oscar just stood and waited.  "Sorry to come round bothering you right at lunchtime." "Figure it was the only time you could find us all at home," Oscar said, then waited again then: "Must have something on your mind, I reckon." When Jim Allen still didn't say anything, O.T. tried. "Must be something pretty important. to get you away from Miss Eulane's cooking." O.T. shot a look at Jim Allen to see how he'd take that.  He took a lot of guff on account of Miss Eulane taking care of him like she did. But Jim Allen was smiling it looked like.  Something like a smile anyway, his face all pulled to one side like a scar. But Jim Allen just said, "Mamma's gone into Newport to do some shopping." Then he looked at his boot.  Scuffed it around in Clio's hard swept yard.  He was staring at it hard it seemed.  Or maybe he was just listening to the wind. Feeling the humidity go up.  Thinking that it would probably rain again later that day and slow down the crop. Still scuffing his boot, Jim Allen cleared his thoat, glanced up at the house, then spat off to one side.  He looked up over their heads again toward the house and said, "You men been hearing any talk around the place lately?" It seemed like Oscar was thinking about that.  "What kind of talk?" O.T. said. "Seems like all we hear day and night is from the women.  Wish Mr.Alden'd have these houses painted, Jim Allen.  Maybe you could talk to him about it. Our women are at us day and night about the houses and the outhouses the water table's got up so high." Jim Allen looked at O.T. and his face crumpled up on one side again. "I'll get him to do it, O.T.  Likely those outhouses need to be dug out.   And the houses need a new coat before the winter sets in anyway.  Can't guarantee the color though." "What's on your mind?" Ocar said.  Almost butting in, but not quite. Jim Allen looked at him then, "Well I'll just tell you," he said and looked from one to the other. "There's been some men up this way.  Not from around here either.  You men ever heard anything about the STFU?" "Heard about the SCU," Oscar said. "Niggers in Alabama.  Don't think any of them would come around this farm." . "Yeah. No, this is not SCU. It's  a new one.  Got  Blacks and whites," said Jim Allen.  "I heard they've been over to Cassel's farm." "Cassels a long way from here." "Not that far if you've got a car." "Nobody's been coming round here, if that's what you're asking," Oscar's voice hadn't changed, but his face looked hard. "None of the men on this farm would want to join up with the Niggers I expect.  Not as long as your pappa keeps to his word.  Our kids are in school and most of our women don't have to work.  Nobody wants to risk losing his home in these times." "Yeah, I guess you're right about that. Just thought I'd check." He was looking at the house again when Clio came out onto the front porch.  She had come out in mid-sentence, yelling something at Purity or the boys and looking for the men.  Bad as children, they were. How long did it take to wash up. On the porch she stopped. She still had her apron crumpled in one hand and she knew she had wet spots under her arms on her dress. Well she had to work didn't she? At least the yard looked good.  Swept clean by Purity every morning to get off all the droppings.  She frowned at the truck up on her yard.  Those tires of his had left ruts. The ground had dried up since that last big rain, but it was still soft enough for that.  Well Purity would fix that right enough.  Looked like rain again anyway. The big dog nosed his way out the screened door and stood beside her.  His tail folded in the skirt of her dress so that when he wagged it, her dress wagged with it.  Looking down at him, Clio said, "Hello Slim." "Mz. Forrest." Jim Allen said.  Clio straightend her back and came down the steps with the dog at her heels. Her skirts dragged the ground and the hem of her dress, already stained, got dirtier. "Jim Allen," she said. Well she was entitled.  She'd been raised in that church over in Newport for all the good it did her now. "I see you're here again keeping these men away from their dinner. Or is it just that Miss Eulie's off shopping again and you're hungry yourself." Jim Allen smiled then, and this one almost got to both sides of his face. Well now, Momma did say something about going into town this morning. "I thought so, Clio said. "I guess you'll want to eat with us then." "The man's got work to do Clio." Oscar said. "He doesn't need to spend an hour sitting in that house sampling your cooking." "Oh, I don't mind if I do." Jim Allen broke in, "All this talking's hungry work. "All right then," Clio said and brushed at a stray piece of hair that had fallen out of it's pins. "I'll go tell Purity to set an extra plate. I can see that you'll want to wash up like these two.  Only try to be quicker about it.  That food's already been waiting a quarter of an hour." All three men watched as she walked away.  The dog did for a minute too, then took his leave from the men and followed her into the houe.   11:33:13 AM    comment []

Monday, December 15, 2003

Quin as Avatar. 12:45:35 PM    comment []

"You sayin' a good woman like me shouldn't be reading her Bible?" Clio was at the door. Apron off and twisted in one hand.  The rest of her was rail straight. Skinny, O.T. thought, despite five kids, and still with all her teeth.  Maybe that was because she knew what to do when she was expecting better than most women.  Grew all those plants in the summer and drank her teas all winter long. A little shiver went down his spine looking at her.  Clio was the only woman in the community who still wore her skirts to her ankles. Looked like a pioneer woman. "Oh you know sister," Nellie said, "I was just talking.  But I wish you'd let me do something around here.  I feel fine." "And have you nearly bleed to death like last time?" O.T. looked over at Nellie and saw her wince. "No ma'm.  You're doing just like I say this go around.  Now you lay back down there and keep your feet elevated. O.T., she's had enough of you for now.  You go on outside, that pump's waiting." At the door, O.T. looked back and saw Clio messing around Nellie. All at once a wind came up so that Clio's long skirt blew with it and he could hear the big oak tree rustling outside. A shadow lifted and the sun slanted into the porch for a second.  Clio bent straight from the waist and put her ear to Nellie's stomach and to O.T., they seemed frozen there in the wind and the light.  Clio's dark head on Nellie's pink dress.  She did something sharp and swift with her hands that O.T. couldn't see then she was standing straight again, one hand on Nellie's stomach and the other on her hip. "I might be able to hear something if you weren't so fat."  Clio said.  Her voice was hard but Nellie laughed and looked past her to O.T. "O.T. likes me plump, don't you honey.  O.T. says that a man doesn't want to sleep with an old step ladder, don't you O.T." O.T. gave his low chuckle and Clio turned on him.  "Now I'd say that's just about what the problem is here, wouldn't you O.T.?" O.T. was about to duck his head, but he saw Clio's eyes weren't hard like her voice.  The woman had a pari of fine dark eyes if she ever stopped nagging at you long enough so you could see them. "All right, now you've seen your wife, so get out of here and get cleaned up.  Even Oscar looks better than you right now, and that's not saying much.  Go on." Outside the wind had definitely picked up.  Oscar was standing by the pump. His hair was wet and he was wiping down his arms with a towel, slow, like he wasn't paying much attention.  Then O.T. saw he was looking off down the road.  There was just a brown swirl of dust way off in the distance, but they both knew what it was. O.T. started working the handle.  When the cold water rushed out he stuck his head under it fast before the pump handle stopped swinging. "Wonder what he's coming up here for." he said when he stood up.  Oscar handed him the towel and O.T. rubbed it through his hair. "Don't you just, now." Both men stood still and watched the dust ball get bigger.  "One thing you can say for him," Oscar said in a minute, "He don't put on airs like the old man.  Lives right over in Jeru, not in the county seat like his Daddy." "I reckon the old man made him," O.T. said. "So he can keep an eye on us better." "Could be." Oscar said, "Could be at that." As the dust came closer, it turned into a red truck.  Not a new truck either.  Dirt clung to its doors and bumpers and wheels and the back end was loaded with oily equipment and  rubber tires.  It pulled up onto the dirt of the yard sending the old rooster running and squawking.  The engine roared for a full minute, like someone was pressing on the gas pedal.  Then the door opened and slammed, bounced back open again. Soft swearing, then slammed and stayed. Oscar and O.T. stood still at the pump and watched the man walk over. Jim Allen always looked like his legs were too long for his body.  Moved well enough, but kind of disorganized in the way he walked.  The way he looked, you'd almost think he'd been out picking cotton himself, if you didn't know better.   12:36:21 PM    comment []

Saturday, December 13, 2003

At the road O.T. stayed with Oscar. Usually he'd take the fork and turn toward his own house and Nellie's cooking, but Nellie was pregnant again and looked peaked to him this morning.  And earlier that day Oscar's boy Clem had run out to the fields to tell him to eat lunch at their house.  "Wish the old man would paint these houses." Oscar said pulling off his hat and scuffing the dirt off his boots on the front porch step. "Purity!" he called in the house.  Almost instantly a girl of about seven appeared through the screen door and shifted Cassie down from Oscar's hip to her own. Her dress was of  the same pattern and material as Cassie's, only cut bigger to fit. Already she had a curve at her waist shaped to fit Cassie's bottom. "The old man saves a penny where he can find one, " said O.T. behind him. He looked down the gravel road toward his house a half mile or so away. "Think I'll just go check on Nellie before lunch." "She's in here." A voice from the house.  A woman's or maybe one of Oscar's kids.  Inside, the house was dark. Clio kept all the curtains pulled to when the sun got high to hold off the heat. Oscar knocked his toe on a chair and swore under his breath.  Clio didn't take to swearing, even more than most women. "What do you think, I'd leave her down there to herself all day?" Clio's voice this time, clear and a little hard edged, coming to Oscar with the sounds of plates being set on the big table. "Purity, go out to the kitchen and get that pie from the safe." The girl, Cassie still slung across her hip, did as she was told.  "Jem, get out back and call your brothers in here.  I've worked too hard on this meal for it to ruin waiting on them." With the table set and waiting for the pie, Clio turned her attention on the men. Well now, look at you two.  You could have stopped by the pump before you came in, I guess. You come in here looking like that, the kids will all think they can too.  Get on back out there and wash up." "Clio," O.T. held his had in his hands, "Can I just see Nellie first.  You got her in the bedroom or--" Clio looked him up and down and her mouth twisted.  "I don't know why she'd want to see you like that, O.T, but she's out on the sleeping porch.  Too hot to be bundled up in the bed. She's fine, but you may as well go.  She's already had a little lunch and I don't want her bothering about coming in here with us, so just take a minute and then leave her be." O.T. went through the dark bedroom where Oscar and Clio slept and on out to the sleeping porch on the other side.  Oscar had added it on summer before last when Cassie came.  Now in summer the boys could sleep out there, or Oscar and Clio could if they wanted to.  Oscar said he liked it, but Clio said it wasn't proper.  Even she gave in when it got hot enough though and chased the boys into the living room. Nellie was there on one of the beds.  A white sheet was tucked into the bed in tight hospital corners and Clio had propped Nellie's feet up on a pillow.  She'd also made sure Nellie had a cool glass of tea. A church fan sat on the table beside her, and now and then a breeze came through the screens. O.T. saw the glass had a green mint leaf in it from Clio's kitchen garden.  Mint was good for the stomach. "How you doin' hon." O.T. asked coming out to the porch.  Nellie opened her eyes and smiled at him, then reached out with the hand that didn't have the tea in it.  He took her hand and bent down to kiss her on the cheek. "I'm just as dirty as I can be," he said, "Clio got on to me about it." "You work hard," Nellie said, "Clio should leave you alone." O.T. raised up and looked down at her.  She was so sweet, and even now, looked so pretty--all pink and white and gold.  Her face was swollen though and so were her ankles, and her eyes had a look he didn't like. "Clio been taking good care of you?" "You know she has.  Too good.  I haven't been off this bed since she dragged me and the girls over here this morning. She wouldn't even let me help her set the table.  You know how I hate just lying around." "You could have read one of her books I guess, hon.  She's sure got plenty of them. Nellie struggled up on her elbows. "You know reading makes my head hurt, O.T. I don't know why she has all them books anyway.  All she reads these days is her Bible.  And anyway, I feel fine.  I don't know why Clio thinks she has to  make all this fuss." "She's just worried." O.T said. "I know she is, but if I'm not I don't see why she should be." She paused and took his hand again, "Oh O.T., I know everything's going to be fine this time." O.T. smiled but it didn't reach his eyes.  He sat down on the bed beside her and put a hand on her stomach.  It was so big.  Bigger than last summer. She'd been happy then too, and sure like this. A cheerful little soul.  But then there had been all that blood and the baby born dead at eight months.  Clio said it must have been dead inside her a long time before that.  Said it was too soon for Nellie to have another baby too.  But there it is, O.T. thought, and what's done is done.       6:53:29 PM    comment []

We have been set a task, please see below. Cryptic message from Quin, written in red marker on the back of a menu. movie--the empire of dr. bienke--a lifestyle design celebration of RUBOS--rural bohemians.  "we must cultivate a class of bolsevic hillbilly." --ivan the terrible redsky.   . . . the beaty boys in:  RED HILLBILLY--a shocking expose of sex 'n' sedition in de sere sensuous sodden southland up yr. red dirt 'n' other green puff marijuana road. hoo doo tales . . . We begin.   Cotton.  Miles of it scorching the earth.  At eye level the boles white and blazing.  Stalks making soft crackling sounds in the damp breeze. Tough outer petals spotted dry and specked with black.  Inside dark spots. Seeds.  Knees under a crumpled skirt.  All stained with black dirt.  Soft.  Toes digging. Cool.  Nails hallowed by black rings.  Dirt dust clinging to skin and fabric.  A small wind lifts damp hair. Sky and big white clouds. Then wet and hot. Tending and guarding. Bells ringing out.  Voices.  A laugh.  And blue legs, hard arms. Heat and smells and the shade of the broad brimmed hat.        "Well I'll just tell you," Oscar swiped a sweating hand over his sweating forehead, His other arm bounced Cassie on his hip as he walked.      "I don't know but what if this weather holds, we might get this forty in by the end of the week."      "I don't know but you might be right about that. And don't I know that my Nellie wouldn't be glad about it if we did.  She's been after me all summer mend that kitchen shed and what with all the rain, I just haven't got to it.  Course that makes her hotter than ever." O.T. Barnnell chuckled low. O.T. always chuckled low like that. Never laughed right out loud.  Always just chuckled, like he had a secret. High on Oscar's hip Cassie looked out at the world.  It shimmered with sun and heat and white and moved in a mist of wet light.  All across the field tall blue forms moved in the direction of the houses and the road, toward loaded tables and aproned women and home. Soft, something touched her toes rhythmically as she bouced along.  Down below Oscar's arm, dark eyes met hers. Cassies hand went down toward them and the dog jumped up on Oscar's leg to lick it. "Hey, there, hey. Get down you old cuss." Oscar gave the big dog a shove. "I swear, I think that dog is more of a mother to this child than Clio is.  Watches her better anyway. We'll be lucky if this girl here doesn't have the mange or something worse by the time this crop is in." "Clio's got a lot on her mind I guess." O.T. spat casually between the rows. "No more than your Nellie, I guess, "Oscar frowned, "and I don't see her leaving your girls to the dogs and the men all day." O.T. gave his low chuckle but squinted and looked up toward the sun.  Nellie told him too much sometimes he thought.  There were some things a man didn't want to know about his friends' wives. "Oh, Nellie and Clio's so different.  Clio acts more like her mother than her sister, for all she's not so much older. And after Nellie's time last summer--" O.T. stopped. Well, who knows anything about women anyway." "I'm not him, that's for sure, Oscar said. Oscar walked on for a while and didn't say anything.  Lately Clio had seemed even stranger to him than usual.  Under his hat, he glanced down at Cassie's dark brown curls.  And the way she was about this one. Well she'd always been hard on the kids, but she'd never just seemed to forget about the others like she had this one. He'd have to try to talk to her about it again, a man was supposed to be the king of his castle after all wasn't he? Well maybe she figured if he had more of a castle, she'd let him have more say. Oscar's legs were swinging faster now. He didn't know he'd stepped up the pace until Cassie gave a little whimper.  She'd stuck her big toe in the buttenhole at the pocket of Oscars overhauls, and his faster walking was twisting the hole tight around it.     12:44:47 PM    comment []

This is a placeholder for the photo of Quin as Avatar. 10:55:48 AM    comment []

Friday, December 12, 2003

Here is a fun and interesting thing to do. Enter a combination of worlds with which you believe that you could search for almost any sex site and you will get Quin Withey's Radio Weblog.  For instance, we checked our referrers for this morning as we sometimes do, and someone had entered the words Gangbang Child. Sure enough, about five from the top, there was Quin Withey's Radio Weblog.  Below, we post the entry from that day, June 2, 2003 in it's entirety as an example for our readers of how this spider technology works.  We also note that searching for sex sites in this manner is a very good way to find long lost entries to the blog which are no longer posted.  It is the I Ching of the web.  Here is Quin's entry for June 2, 2003.  It is a very good one, long before the darkness of the hiatus came upon him. June 2, 2003 Anarchism begins at Home, the Means are the Home, the End is the Home; anarchism is a stay at home child because all the Fruits of Society are so twisted up with Hierarchies and what I remember Mr. Veblen calling 'Invidious Distinctions' that picking them is nerve wracking and troublesome. Sometimes anarchism goes to galleries or the library or niteclubs. Anarchism likes to get home early. 2. I was being a steppenfetchit out towards Montauk and I was in a kitchen and some Brothers come to me and say: "Mr. Quin, Mr. Quin, we wanna hold a physical manifestation of the Empire of Dr. Bienke. We want to feel the Book." And one particularly lovable Brother says:"Quin, I know I won't be able to understand it, but it would be nice to hold it." From which I drew the hurtful notion that he thought I might try to write a book some Skank Suit should understand better than him. Oh no my Brother, I am not interested in a Fiction for RichBoys and RichGirls - I'm gonna sell them hoaxes - try to make them better - but as far as Fiction goes you gonna understand this as well as anybody, especially after I get some scratch together and send you a Magic Decoder Ring. 3. SuitCulture an amalgam of Academic Accomplishment, PopStar Idolization, and Seemly Religion. The PopStar Idolization is a curious aspect, at least when it spills into Sounds (most PopStars are SportsActionFigures). I have never really been able to deal with the fact that the Rolling Stones are SuitCulture's favorite band. Whoa, I always say. But I have to conclude that if the Rolling Stones had really good juju then SuitCulture wouldn't be so smurfy, so, Keef, yr. mojo ain't mojo enough. PopStar Idolization performs some displacement/vicarious/voyeuristic fuction I don't understand because I Hate PopStars. 6. One time I was working my Ambrose Shrine with this Scottish Child and this PopStar Guitar Picker come in and the Scottish Child say: "Wouldn't it be nice to lead the PopStar life, Quin? Have people be nice to you all the time?" I said: "Scottish Child, if I had tp pick guitar as lame and rotten as that motherfucker I wouldn't be living. I let that motherfucker come in here because his dark skin and tattoos make Old RichGirls a combination of horny and pissed off and it amuses me to watch them twist. Otherwise I'd run his cheap ass out of here." Another time Scottish Child says: "Quin, I want to write a Novel about restaurants in which people can see themselves and recognize how badly they behave." I said: "Scottish Child, you ever read any Cheever? See, the weird thing about Cheever is that the people who read Cheever are mostly the people in Cheever. They read to see themselves and wave like babies." 17. I'm guessing that 1984 was required reading somewhere for all these Skank Suit LeadershipMen we got running things today. That guy who wrote the Bonfire of the Vanities made such a bad movie used to come in to my Ambrose Shrine on hot Saturday August Nights when he could be anywhere and only vermin like me hanging in town. He could be anywhere but he eating by himself with me. That guy a little PopStarrish but he walk around the neighborhood quiet, not being noisy and messy like PopStars can be, so I sorta like him. A long time ago that guy wrote a book about a TexasBoy who wrote a book about a CrazyPerson that Kirk Douglas was gonna play in the movie but didn't. That KoolAid book has a scene I ain't looked at in thirty years maybe but it stuck in my head - it's the GangBang scene. I read that book when I was young - maybe they shouldn't let young people read books like that - but I gotta hold of it young and I swear to this day MotorCycles all tied up in my mind with that GangBang scene and whenever I hear 'Harley-Davidson' I get a little horny. But I don't ride MotorCycles - damn things are noisy and hot (you wanna ride? go child go) and scary fall downy (be careful). They come out with that HarleyDavidson Perfume and I'm like: 'what would that smell like?' sweat and semen, burning steel and burning oil, a whiff of roadkill - RoadKill - 'SuitChildren the wanna smell like that?' Apparently. Whoa. 17. When Ieuan told Justine that they would be staying for a time in LunaAzul Ieuan said: "It's that place on the Radio." Justine did not like Radio. "Is it a real place too?" she asked. "Maybe," Ieuan said. "I've not yet looked at a map." 1:36:09 PM    comment [ 3] © Copyright 2003 Quin Withey. Now, of course what the editorial staff is dying to do is go into a lengthy and complete analysis of this entry complete with maroon numbered notes.  But we fear that such analysis is making our readership fall off.  Although what we lose in our regular readership, we may get back from sex site searchers.  We much prefer this to our other apparent fan club, the young white kkkklan types who go searching weblogs for those that contain the word "jew" and then refer readers to their nasty sites filled with red white and blue banners.  It brings down the class of the blog neighborhood.  Lowers the Property Values.  So, we will resist for a time the intense desire to overanalyze and let readers ponder for a time this pure entry from Quin.  We believe that we will go back and highlight it in bright red, referencing the New American Standard Version of the bible, and see if that makes our readers comfortable or uncomfortable.  Then later this evening, or perhaps this afternoon, we will post a recent photograph of Quin which was sent to us by someone who thinks she has seen him in his hiatus, somewhere in Amsterdam, finally studying to be an Avatar.  It's about time.  We only hope that it will  make him easier to sell.  Our funding runs low here at the Luna Azul Foundation.  Like true deciples always do, we give most of our Quin away for free to try to help the hungry masses yearning to breathe free.  But it makes it difficult to keep up the good work, and other such cliches.   June 2003 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30           May   Jul Home 12:15:22 PM    comment []

Thursday, December 11, 2003

d.'s promo company would seemingly exist to feed schnaybels n englishmen. from: new mafia in town. 2). already correcktness is a  bother. from: happiness in the tower of babble. 1:10:45 PM    comment []

We suppose we see ourselves as Paul.  We have an overpowering need, having had a blinding light fall on our faces but not fully understanding, to get the word of Quin to the masses.  And we have a giant thorn in our flesh, which is Quin himself. The problem is this:  We never liked Paul very much with all his talk of it is better to marry than burn and all that. What he preferred was that men have no sex at all.  He presumed that women had no need of if except to make children.  Perhaps since we have no churches yet which write us endless letters filled with tedious detail about how to do this or that--which clothes to wear, how to wear our hair. Whether women should speak, and all of that--when it is our turn to write letters to our Thesalonians, we will do better. Jesus was supported by rich women, did you know that?  Did you ever wonder how he managed to wander about Judea speaking and being charasmatic and getting the word out? He still had to eat after all, and pee and wear clothes and sandals. Well, he had a lot of rich and middle class women on his side.  He stayed in their homes, accepted their gifts, ate their food, let them sit at his feet.  Remember Lydia?  She was a buyer of purple as we recall [we beg Quin's mother to correct us in the comments section as to whether she bought sold or wore, but we remember that Lydia and purple are inextricably linked in the holy writ].  Purple was a very expensive commodity in those days.  Hard to come by.  Lydia was a wealthy woman.  She supported Jesus. And the Magdalen, she seemed to be doing all right in her business.  She did well enough that she could give it up and follow him.  Some of the gospels not officially condoned by the Church with a capital C when the Church decided which gospels would go in and out of the bible list her as one of the deciples, right along with John, and John the one Jesus loved [we've never fully clarified that issue either have we?] and Peter and Peter's brother, and all the rest.  The Magdalen must have saved up a tidy sum over the years to be able to afford to just drop everything and follow like that.  She was played by Anne Bancroft in one of the Jesus films we saw part of over the blessed holiday of consumption. What Quin needs is some rich women. Perhaps he hasn't found them in all these years because of this 'Beth' character that he insists is real.  Women do not like rivals.  And if you're carting one around in your head all the time, it is likely to make the rich women uncomfortable.  Much preferable to have a nice tasty set of male deciples to mix and mingle with.  Big fishermen and all that. But what's done is done.  Marx had his 'Beth' as did John Donne, and Shelley and Hammett and many other geniuses. However look at the records of their prosperities.  Marx always lived in horrible poverty, living mainly off his womanizing friend, Engels, John Donne, imprisoned for a time for marrying his, then living in poverty creating hordes of children, twelve or thirteen altogether, seven of which lived, quite a record for the Elizabethans. The Donne familiy also lived entirely off of their friends until he finally gave in and took church orders when she promptly died.  Her death caused him to write some of his most wonderful holy sonnets.  He was really broken up about it.  Obviously he liked her quite a lot to run off with her as he did, and then make her bear twelve children.  Shelley was quite a womanizer himself, but in Mary he found an equal.  He ran off with her as well when she was about 17. He had married another 17 year old previously, and couldn't marry Mary until that woman finally committed suicide.  Shelley's writing never really was very good.  But he was intelligent and handsome and an adventurer.  Even in school he was blowing up buildings with his experiments.  Hammett finally made some money, but by that time he was pretty much bedridden from alcohalisma and unloveable, living in Lilian Hellman's house and viciously critiquing her plays, The Little Foxes and so on.  At any rate.  We summarize that men with living muses don't seem to do as well financially as those without.  Because all the rich women stay away. Some will complain that we are so quick to compare Quin to Jesus, but we don't have much problem in that.  We think that Quin has a lot of avatar potential if he would just give in and let there be a god that he could personify.  But he won't give in.  He's very thorny like that.  Quin's god is the future.  And even though he sees it, he can't get to it.  Interesting isn't it.  He really does actually see it, but seeing it doesn't take him to it.  Quin's vision for all of us here below or wherever we are is not all that much different from Jesus after all.  He wants all these stupid wars over money to stop.  He wants us to all have enough so that we can live our lives in modest comfort, doing what it would be best for us to do. [Marx said much the same thing, but the Marxists don't like Marx's  words about everyman an artist . . . we think they prefer art to be elitiest, which it isn't anymore now that paint is so cheap].  Quin's vision of a peaceful world is very modest indeed.  But without some big pie in the sky god to back him up, or at least a few rich women to support him, he doesn't get to get out much to talk about it. Another way Quin's message is like Jesus' has to do with class structures.  Quin acknowledges that they exist [Give unto Cesar and all that] but says that they are bogus. The American class system is just like all the others.  It is about money.  Little pieces of folding paper that we pass around and exchange for this and that.  Except that some people don't exchange it very much.  Either they have so much of it that they can just sock it away somewhere or pay people to build tanks and things with it so that they get more folding pieces of paper, or they have so little that they have none to exchange for things, dead chickens to cook and can's of tomato soup, things like that, and so they can't exchange it very often.  In America, and indeed on much of this small green planet, those with more bits of folding paper make up a higher class, and even as in the olden days of the bible [old and new testaments both--remember the Pharasees and Sadgasees, sorry for this spelling, but you get the drift] those with more of this stuff get to have all the knowledge and they get to argue the fine points of economics, politics, god, how to overthrow the Roman Empire and so on. Enough to chew over for those who will. 12:15:42 PM    comment []

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

We know not why the beast below appeared.  We had begun a sentence about the sudden bleakness of the winter and the accompanying desolation of Quin's hiatus, when suddenly, there appeared this beast--pig, man, or van . . . today's cenotaur . . . or whichever is the beast of the Greeks which was half man half horse. Yesterday was the full moon . . . or so almost full that it seemed so.  Last night after walking in the city snows, we were bitten by a small sad dog.  He would not have bitten had he not been so small and so sad.  We know him well.  We know we will not be hydrophobic.  But now the finger seems to be infected.  We haven't seen Quin and so we don't know how he is doing in the full moon and snow, if he is in the snow.  We see that he writes in his blog from time to time but that is all we know of him.  We hope he is well and not too unhappy.  He has set us a task.  We are contextualizing.  If you look at RagtimeTexas.com, you will see that it has changed.  It will continue to change.  We are contextualizing.  And we are updating. Quin would say that this is too little too late, or at least too late, and probably he is right. But we do feel a mission to get Quin's work to others--we don't think we know best how to do this, but as should be obvious by now, we keep trying.  We'll ramble on here a while, then get to another task we have been set by Quin, which is to write about this: "emma goldman RAGTIME doctorow--reading/Rockland County."  As he was leaving he handed us a piece of plain white paper with these words written in turquoise crayon. But before that, we allow ourselves this ramble. When we read different Buddhist things, we read about desirelessness.  We sometimes reach a point of what we think must be desirelessness.  It is very difficult.  It is difficult because it is so boring.  And because it rankles with the truth of our existentialiality.  Rankles may  not be the right word.  What we mean is that it rings with the truth of our existentiality and this is not very pleasant to think about.  In other words . . . this is it.  That's what desirelessness is.  Realizing that this is it.  There is no desire to buy or eat or have.  This doesn't mean that you don't do these things, only that they don't bring a buzz. Somewhere, after hanging around in desirelessness for awhile, we begin to see differently.  Or maybe it is the reverse, maybe as we begin to see differently, we begin to have glimpses of this desirelessness.  Chicken or egg, egg or chicken.  Read Satre.  Read Pale Fire.  Think about the difference. It is said that when Quin first met 'Beth', they sat in dark bars a great deal, and the conversation would go something like this: Q:  Love, have you read X, Y, or Z? B:  (beginning to bristle, because the her answer was always the same) No. Q:    Well you should because in X, Y, or Z, (this work would be something like Veblen's Theory of the Liesure class, for example) we learn that  . . . And so it is said went their courtship.  He can't help it that he is so smart.  His brain has a zip drive for storing extra data.  Sometimes one has a moment of epiphany when one suddenly understands every word he says and what he means by it.  Then one feels oneself a god.  But those moments are seldom. Quin and 'Beth' are scientists of memory and sound artists.  "Scientists of Memory" is a phrase they picked up from that Nospheratu movie with John Malcovich.  How it applies in our discussion of contextualization is this:  Quin says, and this is the truth, that our history has been stolen from us.  It doesn't belong to us anymore.  He wants to take it back.  All you have to do to see the truth of this is to think about the American Indians or Native Americans and then think about westerns.  Quin and 'Beth' like westerns very much.  But that doesn't mean that they believe in them.  Some people do you know.  It is very strange.  You can also think about the Buffalo. Quin talks about the Buffalo a great deal.  He is very serious about them.  No one seems to pay attention.  Here is why:  People seem to think that if Quin were serious about the buffalo, he would be out fighting for their rights.  Raising them, fostering them, teaching them to fetch.  Have we not told you that Quin speaks in metaphor and parable.  Here is what he says about the Buffalo, over and over.  In a herd of Buffalo, there is one who is the watcher.  That is his job: to watch.  And that is what he does.  Who is he watching for? The Cowboy. The Railroad.  Let's bow our heads for a moment and think about the Cowboy and the Railroad and the Buffalo.  Now why do we think that the Buffalo would be watching for cowboys and railroads?  Quin and 'Beth' were both raised to endless pictures of the holocaust.  We hesitate even to type the word for fear that some spider will post a comment to a link of some kind.  Those of you who read the comments section will understand what we mean.  Quin and 'Beth' were both raised to endless pictures of the holocaust.  This was so that they would learn that this should never happen again. This lesson was effective for they did learn this.  The pictures were in black and white and were of many different scenes.  Usually these were moving pictures and were shown in history class.  One of 'Beth's' favorite high school teachers, her 10th grade history teacher, coach macmichael showed her most of the films.  Others were in the class as well.  The army had taken the films when they opened the death camps.  One of the climactic images in the films was of piles of bodies--very thin bodies, bony bodies.  It is amazing that these bodies had so recently been alive. How could they have possibly been alive and so starved.  There were many other images.  Quin and 'Beth' also learned the ineffable from these.  The ineffable is a thing that cannot be described in words.  Some people, for instance, say that the notion of god is ineffable, and some people say that the notion of infinity is ineffable.  The images of the holocaust are ineffable.  They cannot be described, they are so horrific--you see, that word doesn't work at all, it does not describe the impact of the images at all, it is too weak--and so the sentence must remain unfinished. In the case of these images, ineffable applies because there is no possible method which can be used to comprehend them.  They simply cannot be understood.  They make no sense.  They are bewildering.  This is why they are so terrible.  We cannot comprehend why any person would have done this thing.  All of the rational explanations, hatred, greed, fear, do not explain it.  They are too weak. Quin says that some Buffalo are watchers.  They watch for the  Cowboy.  They watch for the railroad.  They watch for the ineffable.  They watch for the things that bring piles of bodies.  Have you seen the pictures of the buffalo hunters standing on top of piles of dead buffalo?  The piles are fifteen feet high and more.  Then, later, there were piles of bones, not quite so high.  There are other pictures of Indian hunters with many Indian scalps hung on their belts.  For those who think people are more important that Buffalo, you can look at these.  The Indian hunters were paid by the U.S. government for every scalp--so much money for each.  This is the rational explanation for these ineffable images. The same old one.  Hatred, greed, fear.  But these words don't explain these images. In The Empire of Dr. Bienke, Quin has a character he calls Clyde the Tortured Buffalo.  Clyde is a god now.  But he used to be a watcher.  Things didn't work out well.  We can't remember exactly what happened, but, despite all of Clyde's watching, The Cowboy and the Railroad got in and the piles of bodies came. In The Empire of Dr. Bienke, Clyde suffers so, that he becomes a god, and when Koo Cowlick,  goes into the desert with his mojo bag, Clyde appears to him and tells him to kill no man or he will surely die, and Koo vows that he will not.  But when Koo sees that Mrs. Montoya will kill the gangster who has killed Big Nigger, he kills him, himself so that she won't have to.  For this, Koo has to pay, and on Christmas Eve, 1933 in Dos Passos, while playing the electric slide guitar, Koo dies and ascends into the ether.  So ends the first reading from The Empire of Dr. Bienke.  Some people think that Quin is joking.  I tell you, he is not. Quin is a watcher.  He predicts things that happen.  The things that he predicts that happen are generally things that could be thought of as coming from the Zeitgeist.  You can think of the Zeitgeist, if you want to, as the collective unconscious.  A lot of people resist what he says.  Here is why:  it is because what he says is ineffable.  And you see, when Quin knows the Cowboy and the Railroad are coming, he tends to yell about it, then if that doesn't work, he may try to be very creative in his way of expressing it--this could manifest itself in writing a song, or a novel or a blog or by painting a picture.  And when that doesn't work, he gets angry and demanding, and then finally when that doesn't work he goes into despair.  Someday he will probably be a god, but that doesn't seem like an improvement on his situation when you think about what happens to gods. Even we on the editorial staff who know these things, don't help very much.  Why should it be so hard just to run when the watcher says run?  We think it may be that same old thing, what was it . . . but I know him, he's the Carpenter's son . . . oh, we can hear readers hissing at that.  But think about it?  Isn't that exactly that same old thing?  'Beth' once was asked by an English teacher to write an essay about love.  Her essay went on and on.  Most of what she writes tends to go on and on.  She wrote many words and sentences that basically said this:  Love is just an excuse for greed and fear.  Love, she held, was not mainly about wanting to do good, but about wanting not to lose.  We think that most buffalo do not run because they don't want to lose something--grass, pasture--that kind of thing--in other words, whatever is had at the time.  The easiest way to justify not running when the watcher says run is to say something like . . . "I know him, isn't he just . . ." Right now, in this full moon second which some say unfolds continually, right now, in this Zeitgeist, there is only one way for a watcher to get anyone to listen to him.  He must possess.  When he possesses, then the buffalo follow.  This is the reason Quin wants money.  He wants you to start running. Enough for now.   9:04:33 PM    comment []

6:06:31 PM    comment []

Friday, December 05, 2003

bob dylan wrote 'positively fourth street' in 1965. i was seven. that's the copyright date. on album it was not released until 'bob dylan's greatest hits' in 1967, but i think it was a single or a b side in england prior to that and maybe in america too. 'positively fourth street' was notable as sort of an anti-pop offering and non-love song. it is a protest song but you are not sure against whom dylan is protesting. baez maybe? i read the lyrics today and i think it might be that he's protesting against me... but i was seven in 1965 so i didn't grin when he was down and out and it seems to me that bobby is the one that stays on the side that's winning. i suppose it would be the conventional thing to feel grateful for bobby for the profound impact he has had on my life. i can remember my music teacher in coventry in 1972 telling me that 'no one will know who bob dylan is in ten years'. i was skeptical, but then i was 14 so i wasn't sure he didn't have a better grasp of history than me. over thanksgiving we go to the cedar tavern and they play bob dylan's greatest hits. damn. i didn't look to live with the motherfucker my whole life. 3:40:33 PM    comment []

somehow duchamp's green box became s.r.a. i would read all the s.r.a.s but then i hated doing the written work at the end and so nominally remained in low colors. purply colors. we could download pieces of blog and laminate them and fill up old lunch boxes painted green. there'd be a plastic fold out 'board' like twister on which you might lay your pieces of blog. we could offer the lunch boxes in a twofer commodity package with a plastic ukelele with a wind up music box inside you could jam along with. we could make a movie of pretty teenagers playing with their blog filled lunch boxes and their jam-along ukeleles and then they'd get eaten by monsters if they'd ever done it. actually i'm tired of that movie. when koo dies he goes to "the radio ranch in the ether". it will be from the Radio Ranch in the Ether that we shall revisit the 1596 battle of cadiz (after the style of cy twombley) where we shall see essex and raleigh and mr. john donne.   2:42:11 PM    comment []

"Posters, photos large and small, and other mementos from his music career were tacked up on the walls of every room, along with a calendar portrait of Jesus. The living room walls were painted bright red, and after a half hour or so I noticed that the wallpaper was made of old newspapers. This last detail shocked me. How was it that a famous musician was living in a place like this? I suddenly found myself sitting in Mance Lipscomb's reality, not my own, and I realized that if I was going to write about his life, I would have to do it by leaving my prejudgements back in Austin and living in his world for however long it took me to come to know it." Glen Alyn. "I Say Me For A Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman." as told to and compiled by Glen Alyn. Da Capo Press. New York. this is a great book and da capo has been a great imprint.... so much more is available than when i was a kid and the blues and jazz literature sucked and was hard to come by.... not that the increase in the availability of knowlege seems in any way to positively help.... of the above quote however i will note that alyn is speaking of the summer of seventy three. bright red walls are sort of trendy in seventy three and what you want to bet i can put lipscomb in a room with a rauschenberg before then and likely in a room with rauschenberg himself? scholars can be awful condescending towards old negros pretending they cannot glimmer conceptions of modernity and minimalism. 2:02:55 PM    comment []

april 1937. mexico. trotsky testifies before dewey in some kind of crazy show anti-show show trial the aim of which i have trouble imagining.   when i have some money i'm gonna get me some paint and i'm gonna paint this blog. i have a little balsa wood buddhist shrine like a doll's stage and the backdrop is already trotsky in profile in ballpoint on peeling acrylic. it's on top of the wardrobe and contains very important artifacts like my daddy's tupperware sandwich box and my dog sarah's ashes.   poverty reigns. some kind neighbor leaves a sack of boss pants and polo jeans for me to wear. another has a sweater she knitted she wants delia to have. people are sweet and tired of watching us fall apart.   when i was at art students league i can remember my instructor saying that he felt the vogue in kahlo sleighted rivera's work... it's a question of scale... kahlo is more post-modernly humanistic in that her stuff ain't so whoppingly big and thussly alienating.   1:27:21 PM    comment []

1937: satchell paige and cool poppa bell and josh gibson and more from the negro baseball leagues desert their teams to go to the dominican republic to play for trujillo. i first run across this story in a book by art rust. why, i swear that's his real name. trujillo is standing for re-election and has not yet so consolidated his political machine that he feels safe. baseball is his bread and circuses. roosevelt says of trujillo about this time: "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." trujillo is currying favor in the roosevelt administration by promising to accept refugees from germany where things are getting nastier and nastier. a nastiness which trujillo will increasingly pattern himself upon. in the autumn of thirty seven genocidal raids upon haitians living on the mountainous border 'twixt the dominican republic and haiti will be launched. i forget what the death count is... fifty thousand maybe? keeping up with twentieth century death counts is hard.   the bitter irony is that paige and bell and gibson are momentarilly escaping a racist united states where they are unable to pursue big league careers because of their skin color and playing for a political figure looking actively in those years to 'whiten' his country. when paige's team loses a game they are encouraged to do better by being fired upon by machine guns on trujillo's order.   trujillo gets his start in the united states army. as i remember the story. you could look it up. be all you can be.   sugar is what is paying for all this.   paige promises to return to the dominican republic to play for trujillo again when the season is over. (about june maybe? they played a spring season in the dominican republic that year.) he never does.   in my fictional version i had this experiece be the genesis of the paige wisdom: "don't look back. something might be gaining on you."  12:52:44 PM    comment []

Thursday, December 04, 2003

1:15:24 PM    comment []

And so dear readers, with no pictures in evidence, we digress from the usual notes to the Concordance.  It hase been requested that the editorial staff begin the task of composing the Life of Quin  section which will fall within the Brief Biography, or perhaps Preface, or Introduction to the concordance.  We will attempt to begin this work with timeline of sorts, noting that this will require further filling in as we go along. Let us begin.  The Life of Quin  timeline May 22, 19--,  Quin is born in Houston, Texas at the Baptist Hospital. 19--, Quin is taught to read by his father John Frederick Withey in Austin, TX at the age of four using The Illiad as his text. [really, sic]. Around this time or thereabouts, Quin watches  the Palladin series avidly on television. 19--,  Quin enters the first grade at the age of five, at the notorious Anna Raguet Elementary School in Nacogdoches, TX.  It is here that he refuses to read the text, The Nutty Squirrel. 19--, Quin takes first IQ test at age 7 years.  Score is recorded as 168. Also around this time, Quin and a younger sibling stand on one leg waiting for the indian on the television set to clear before cartoons come on on Saturday Mornings.  The Withey family attends Christ Church Episcopal Church in Nacogdoches, TX.  At one Christmas Carolling event, the Rector of the Church plays accordian. 19--, Quin has his first poptart.  It is red on the inside. Around these years, John Frederick Withey tells Quin that their house [one of four houses in which the family lived in a six year period in Nacogdoches, TX] may be bombed due to his [JFW] involvement in the civil rights movement in that town. 19--Quin's parents divorce.  Custody is awarded to Quin's mother. 19--John Frederick Withey remarries in Austin, Texas. 19-- to 19--Quin spends much time at the home of his maternal grandmother, in Pearland, TX.  Here he frequently mows her lawn, talks, drinks cokes, and watches The Edge of Night.  Quin's maternal grandmother was once heard to say of her tomato plants, "I let them grow up wild and tall like that.  I don't trim them back like some people do."  Quin is greatly influenced by his maternal grandmother and his mother during this period. 19--Quin enters Ryan Junior High School in Houston, Texas where he is one of 14 white students in a population 1800.  The remainder of the students are African-American.  Per Quin, he chose to attend Ryan rather than a white high school he felt to be preppy [or whatever the term at the time would have been.] 19--Quin, his mother and his three younger siblings move into the Episcopalian Community founded by Episcopal Priest Graham Pulkingham who had received the gift of the Holy Spirit  and speaking in toungues by David Wilkerson of The Cross and the Switchblade fame. Pulkingham had been pastor of The Church of the Redeemer, an inner city church in Houston, TX.  Here, Quin hears much glossilalia, though he says that he never spoke in toungues himself.  He has also stated that he doesn't remember that any of the children in Community ever spoke in tounges. However, Quin's future music is greatly influenced by the hearing of glossilalia, as well as by the artistry and choral work of Betty Jane Pulkingham. The timeline of  the  Life of Quin   will continue. 12:30:28 PM    comment []

At any moment the picture aforementioned may magically appear.  We cannot write overmuch while it is voodooing itself into the blog because then our netscape viewers will be faced with images and text everywhere and all over the place.  We appreciate your your patience. However, 30 minutes later, we no longer have any patience left, and so with fear and trembling post this entry, not knowing when or if an image may appear.  As of this writing, we have gone through the process by which pictures are uploaded to this site at least three times, and so we may find that we have three images popping up like crocuses through the snow.  Nevertheless, we are bored with waiting and are bravely pushing the "post to weblog" button.  Oh for world enough and time to do nothing but wait upon Quin's weblog.  11:43:20 AM    comment []

ANNOUNCEMENTS: The editor notes that there ARE NO COMMENTS [flame mildly sic], and observes that perhaps the blog format is indeed one fraught with despair as Quin has often asserted--or as others have emphatically declared is perhaps indeed a mere mastabtory effort.  We take comfort in the fact that the use of the word 'mastabortory' or masterbate will at least get us some interesting referrers by those doing a porn search in google.  Alas, we are reduced to this.  Perhaps our loyal readership is falling away during the Quin hiatus.  We encourage Quin, wherever in the ether he may be, to continue to come forward and blog for the sake of his public, and for the sake of the editor and the editorial staff who, in the maelstrom of ensuing depression brought on by blogging ceaslessly into the ether, are wreathed in cigarette smoke and submerged in caffiene while attempting to carry on in his absence.  Regarding the CD:  For those eagerly awaiting a John Donne CD, or for those who would expect to receive one based on previous experience of receiving things from Quin--ie, primarly three men in Texas whose initials are J, J, and D, [D is not actually currently in Texas but hails from that state] and C in Minnesota, we note that we are having technical difficulties (what else is new) with our equipment, which may necessitate that the editorial staff contact with tech support [arrgh, sic].  We will get these to you complete with it's beautiful and informative booklet containing many portraits of Quin, one in the near buff as soon as possible and hopefully in time for your festive holiday parties. [We know that some of these initials mentioned are not yet aware of the existence of this CD.  It would have been, then, by way of a surprise--possibly in conjunction with the ensuing holiday season.  For any who like surprises, we apologize for letting this cat out of the bag]. Regarding the painting on ebay:  At long last, Quin's promise of many moons ago will be fulfilled.  The Iconic Portrait of Leo Castelli will appear on ebay, we imagine, this month. We will keep our readership posted so that you can bid. Finally, we wish to apologize.  Yesterday's entry was one of our favorites, and we pushed some rogue button and lost it.  It is no more.  While we cannot attempt to recover that entry, we will continue with as much verve as is possible.  First, however, we will post this announcements section, and perhaps a painting. 10:58:07 AM    comment []

Monday, December 01, 2003

Notes from the Concordance to THE COMPLETE WORKES OF QUIN--entry 30 November 2003 from the text-- walk through union square last night everything is beautiful, all the people are beautiful like they just walked off the set of friends the vibe is funky, and prosperity has returned with perpetual war a poster for wired tells me that philip k. dick has ressurected. i dare say (1) (1)  The majority of this poem is self-explanatory.  The mention of philip k. dick's ressurection refers to a poster for and by Wired Magazine which announces this fact. (2)  From the text-- (i'm ten and on the front steps of our caroline street house in nacogdoches when my daddy warns me that since our house has been the meeting place of local civil rights advocates it is possible we might get bombed and so he wants me to look out. (2a) that wouldn't have been klan, but what they called, as i remember, 'minute men'. birchers. insofar as you care to distinguish twixt the various sub-plots of rural fascism.) (2b) Quin's father, John Frederick Withey, also marched in Civil Rights marches in Nacogdoches, Texas in the middle to late 1960s.  Twenty years later, in front of the Nacogdoches Public Library, a young African-American woman in her early twenties recognized him and embraced him. (2b)  For those unacquainted with the Birchers Quin mentions, please see the brief description below, from The Reader's Companion to  American History. As a further note, we know that truckloads of men with various weapons [believed to be shotguns] arrived in Nacogdoches, Texas one night in 1970 as the schools were attempting to desegrate. We learned anecdotally that these men were John Birchers and or minutemen.  [We have declined to enter a link to Minutemen because the major sites regarding them appear to be their own, and we do not want to be referrers for these sites].  In the summer of 1986, Quin was approached by a young journalist who was founding an alternative newspaper in the Nacogdoches area. Quin chose to write about that evening in 1970, at which he had not been present, his family having already joined the Community mentioned in a previous note, and moved abroad.  Sherrif Roebuck agreed to be interviewed by him at Shepherd's diner.  The sherrif's primary statement to Quin in this interview was, "Boy, you want to go starting all this up again?"  By this, we believe that he meant that the African-Americans of the town might attempt to move out of their primary enclave, known as Shawnee Street.  We will not describe Shawnee Street, but encourage our readers to go and have a look. We also refer you to the African American Heritage Project, at: http://www.cets.sfasu.edu/aahp2/Pages/activity.htm. The Reader's Companion to American History http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_047800_johnbirchsoc.htm JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY The John Birch Society, an organization of the radical Right, was established in Indianapolis in 1958 to combat what was perceived to be the infiltration of communism into American life. Its founder, Robert H. W. Welch, a Massachusetts businessman, named the society after a Baptist missionary who had been killed by Chinese Communists in 1945. Starting with only eleven members, the John Birch Society grew rapidly, drawing considerable support from rich conservatives; by the early 1960s it had an estimated annual income of $5 million and a membership of 60,000 to 100,000. John Birchers placed their principal emphasis on the extent to which communism had established control over the U.S. government; among those they accused of being "dedicated, conscious agents of the Communist conspiracy" were President Dwight D. Eisenhower, cia director Allen Dulles, and Chief Justice Earl Warren. The society has produced an extensive list of publications, offered cash prizes for college essays on topics like the impeachment of Warren, and maintained that the United States must become as conspiratorial as the communists in order to combat their subversion of American society. The editor apologizes for this brief entry to the Concordance.  We will resume tomorrow.   10:17:03 PM    comment []

i cast tristan and lani guinier as bad girls in my luaazul cathouse... in my bolo tie and beaded shirt i'll sing sheanendoah real plaintive... tristan can read veblen aloud and we'll pipe in the sounds of waves to get that mermaid effect... steel guitars... we'll imagine a new jerusalem in our islands of brazil... 1:03:46 PM    comment []

spend yesterday looking at hymns in the jewish section of my 1942 army navy hymnal. there's a nice take on rock of ages. watch: 'repo men, stealing for a living', the last bit of 'carnivale' (a show with a strange take on the dress and manners of protestantism), and tristan taormino in "real sex #31". (taormino? sp? aargh! anyway she's at pucker up dot com.) an evening of lower east side t.v.: (you were sitting next to a table of young goombas in from the burbs at katz when you ate that guilty pastrami. big fleshy boys with big piles of dead flesh in front of them, trumpeting their badnesses and misdemeanours like young moose.) in my poor little empire of dr. bienke i had aimed for something like carnivale. i wanted better music though. jazz, in a story i heard, i ain't gonna say it's true, (i don't know what true is anymore and i'm guessing to the extent you been reading much you don't neither), was the musical formulations of white boys trying not to be in houses full of bad girls. that's the story in the oxford companion of music 1937 which is a great book i'd recommend (the companion's author doesn't like the story very much). truly i had proposed a visit with tristan to beth but i'll have to be anonymous now. i don't think you can sloppy second hbo righteously. we'll see. 12:24:06 PM    comment []

Sunday, November 30, 2003

We see that Quin, in hiatus, is in a slipping one in on us mode for sure. Based on our previous experience with Quin, we are forced to believe that this is, at least in part, an attempt to thwart the speedy and expeditious completion to the writing of the Concordance to THE COMPLEATE WORKES OF QUIN. Nevertheless, and after numerous hasty dark of the night meetings held by the editorial staff, we have concluded that Quin is best served over the long haul, by our carrying on in as thorough and complete a citation of his works as is humanly possible under the extenuated circumstances in which he is placing us. Therefore, we will continue in this writing with citation of the 11/28/2003 entry by Quin, begun on 11/29/03. Continuing notes to the Concordance to THE COMPLETE WORKES OF QUIN--entry 28 November 2003 (5) from the text-- popular culture fails us continually. (5a)  leftest thought is perpetually squelched where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy, hence the wall street journal is this country's most left wing paper and jameson works out of duke. (5b) meanwhile here as abroad right wing fundamentalism is encouraged in order to prop up corrupt regimes and when it bubbles up out of control the proposed remedy is we blow stuff up. (5c) (5a)  Quin has often been heard to comment on the problem of a failing of popular culture; most often he has been heard to rail against the mediums of television and film, and secondarily, fiction.  Regarding television, the existence of 300+ stations where little of interest or entertainment is to be found. Regarding film, he has commented, and indeed written about the lack of anything of much realilty or interest since the production of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Regarding fiction, we believe it is the general unreadability of current popular fiction as opposed to that of former years, basically since the 1930s that most concerns and oppresses him.  To further clarify this point, we will excerpt a selection of lines from a few works with which Quin feels a strong affinity.  We have selected the genre of mystery writing for this demonstration, as it is one of the most popular of popular genres; the selections will be taken randomly, as are some people's predictions from The Bible, by opening books to pages at random so that the reader may compare styles. Though the authors of these works vary greatly in stylistic characteristics, each, writing in the 1930s has an intrinsically entertaining way of combining words into sentences, paragraphs, and so on, and each has something quite interesting to say. We should add that we are using the original publishers and copyrights here for the readers' reference.  Most or all of these books are still available, although the reader may well have to conduct an online search to find either new editions, or those which are out of print.  Example 1, from:  Hammett, Dashiell, The Thin Man.Alfred A Knopf; New York, 1933. Nora sighed. "I wish you were sober enough to talk to." She leaned over to take a sip of my drink. "I'll give you your Christmas present now if you'll give me mine." "I shook my head. "At breakfast." "But it's Christmas now." "Breakfast." "Whatever you're giving me," she said, "I hope I don't like it." "You'll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the Aquarium said he positively wouldn't take them back. He said they'd already bitten the tails off the--" "It wouldn't hurt you any to find out if you can help her, would it? She's got so much confidence in you, Nicky." "Everybody trusts Greeks." "Please." "You just want to poke your nose into things that--" "I meant to ask you: did his wife know the Wolf girl was his mistress?" "I don't know. She didn't like her." "What's the wife like?" "I don't know--a woman." "Good-looking?" "Used to be very." "She old?" "Forty, forty-two. cut it out Nora. You don't want any part of it.  Let the Charleses stick to the Charleses' troubles and the Wynants stick to the Wynants'." She pouted. "Maybe that drink would help me." I got out of bed and mixed her a drink. As I brought it into the bedroom, the telephone began to ring.  I looked at my watch on the table. It was nearly five o'clock. From: Biggers, Earl Derr. The House Without a Key [a Charlie Chan mystery]. Bantam Books, New York: 1925. Miss Minerva Winterslip was a Bostonian in good standing, and long past the romantic age. Yet beauty thrilled her still, even the semi-barbaric beauty of a Pacific island.  As she walked slowly alog the beach, she felt the little catch in her thrat that sometimes she had known in Symphony Hall, Boston, when her favorite orchestra rose to some new and unexpected height of loveliness. It was the hour at which she liked Waikiki best, the hour just preceding dinner and the quick tropic darkness.  The shadows cast by the tall cocoanut palms lengthened and deepened, the light of the falling sun flamed on Diamond Head and tinted with gold the rollers sweeping in from the coral reef.  A few late swimmers reluctant to depart, dotted those waters whose touch is like the caress of a l over.  On the spring board of the nearest float a slim brown girl poised for one delectable instant. What a figure! Miss Minerva, well over fifty herself, felt a mild twinge of envy--youth, youth like an arrow, straight and sure and flying.  like an arrow the slender figure rose, then fell; the perfect dive, silent and clean. From: Rohmer, Sax. President Fu Manchu. Doubleday and  Company, Inc., New York: 1936. "What is it, mister," the taximan whispered, "some new kind of fever?" "No," said Nayland Smith. "It's a new kind of murder!" "Why do you say so?" the hotel doctor asked, glancing in a puzzled way at the ghastly object on the sofa. But Nayland Smith did not reply.  Turning to the night manager: "I want no one at present in the foyer," he said, "to leave without my orders. You--" he pointed to the night manager: "I want no one at present in the foyer," he said, " to leave without my orders. You--" he pointed to the house detective--"will mount guard over the taxicab outside the main entrance. No one must touch it or enter it.  No one must pass along the sidewalk between the taxi and the hotel doors. it remains where it stands until further notice. Hepburn--" he turned--"get two patrolmen to take over this duty. Hurry.  I need you here." (5b) leftest thought is perpetually squelched where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy, hence the wall street journal is this country's most left wing paper and jameson works out of duke.  Once again, the editor finds it expedient to interject a bit of economic theory-ese into the discussion in order to clarify Quin's thought for the reader not generally acquainted with such, which means most Americans educated within the lower and higher educational systems of these United States--excepting for those educated in the very very very high. We base this largely on primary research conducted by interviewing recent graduates of American Institutions of higher learning, both those of the State and the Ivy League. We begin by a paraphrase of Quin's first statement in the above sentence. leftest thought is perpetually squelched where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy . . . We think that there will be little disagreement with the conceit that leftest thought is perpetually squelched. One has only to consider recent events.   Consider that institution, the third estate--that which the political right in the United States continually refers to as the left wing media. If the American media was or ever has been left wing, this tendency became completely invisible during the most recent Gulf War, popularly referred to as Gulf War II.  Most Americans were glued to their television sets during this episode, while embedded reporters thrilled in their discomfort, fear, and peak experiences and related these to us.  It is not overstating the fact to suggest that during these operations, the media functioned as no less than a propaganda machine for the war. While the editorial staff tries not to editorialize, we must note that the current media does go where the best story and the most money is, as may be noted now that supposedly, the war is over and the peace has begun.  The best story out there now is the failure of the peace.  While the  media is not reporting this with quite the hydophobic ferver that it did while the tanks were rolling across the desert, it is managing to salivate quite heavily over this change in affairs. We also mention the recent "Patriot Act" with regard to this concept of squelching citing what is common knowledge at this point, that the FBI now legally has access to such things as library records, all internet records of personal internet browsing, medical records [did our readers wonder why their doctors required them to sign all those photocopied forms about privacy at their last appointments?] and all sorts of information that even the most demur an a-political citizens would no doubt prefer remain truly private.  where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy, hence the wall street journal is this country's most left wing paper and jameson works out of duke. As usual, what might appear to be a fairly simple statement of fact by Quin, actually holds many layers of meaning and allusion.  The financial technocracy, in general terms are those who run money. These aren't just your boys at Edward Jones. You can think of them, if you like, as Alan Greenspan his X-files minions. These are not just your run of the mill MBA's.  They are not your local CPA's.  These people have been educated in all of the postmodern theories of economics that most American citizens think of as hocus pocus.  They know Marxist theory, the theories of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, et. al. The Wall Street Journal disseminated the information which allows them to use these theories to do their work which structures a capitalist government.  It is not fiction that the recent tax cuts were more beneficial to those with the highest income per capita.  This is a fact.  It is not propaganda.  Frederick Jameson is one of the best known and most accessible of the economic theorists.  We therefore submit a brief excerpt of his writing and refer our readers to the site: http://www.popcultures.com/theorists/jameson.html where they can find further information by and about him.   We also submit this picture, which we believe will quiet any fears readers may have that Marxist scholars may be terrifying, unapproachable, or, as the editor has heard some of extreme religious belief aver, "of the devil." Excerpt from Culture and Finance Capitalism by Fredric Jameson For the problem of abstraction--of which this one of finance capital is a part--must also be grasped in its cultural expressions. Real abstractions in an older period-the effects of money and number in the big cities of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism the very phenomena analyzed by Hilferding and culturally diagnosed by Georg Simmel in his pathbreaking essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"--had as one significant offshoot the emergence of what we call modernism in all the arts. In this sense, modernism faithfully--even "realistically"--reproduced and represented the increasing abstraction and deterritorialization of Lenin's "imperialist stage." Today, what is called postmodernity articulates the symptomatology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have drawn on Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism: the finance capital moment of globalized society the abstractions brought with it by cybernetic technology (which it is a misnomer to call postindustrial except as a way of distinguishing its dynamic from the older, "productive" moment). Thus any comprehensive new theory of finance capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of cultural production to map its effects; indeed mass cultural production and consumption itself--at one with globalization and the new information technology--are as profoundly economic as the other productive areas of late capitalism and as fully a part of the latter's generalized commodity system. Fredric Jameson is professor of French and comparative literature at Duke University. His latest book is entitled The Seeds of Time (1994). (5c) from the text-- meanwhile here as abroad right wing fundamentalism is encouraged in order to prop up corrupt regimes and when it bubbles up out of control the proposed remedy is we blow stuff up. Quin has been heard to summarize these thoughts thusly:  Religion is promulgated as the justification for authority. The editor reminds the reader of a broader sense of the history of the above.  Historically, religious institutions, [in western history, largely the Catholic Church] granted the right of rule by Divine Right.  This continued for centuries through what might be thought of a an unholy union between rulers and church.  The most familiar break between a ruler and the Roman Catholic Church is probably that of Henry VIII of England who split from the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself Head of the Church of England so that he might divorce his first wife Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Bolyn.  This took place, however, after England had long been a vassal of Rome and the Catholic Church. During which time, by the authority granted by the church many many corrupt regimes were propped up, and many things blown up. the film crew who came over last week none of them knew who granpa al lewis is... (6) from the text-- the film crew who came over last week (6a) none of them knew who granpa al lewis is... (6b)   ( 6a) See Quin entry 11/20/1003 and the accompanying note to the text in entry 11/24/2003 for further on their brief involvment in the making of an independent film (6b) Al Lewis, perhaps best known for his role as Grampa on the 1960s television program, The Munsters, has been a political activist for left wing causes since the 1930s.  One of his most prominent social projects is his pen pal program for inmates of prisons. While in a improvisatory scene during the shooting of the aforementioned film, in an interview scene disputing whether "anyone actually cared about prisoners,"  it became apparent that no one among the stars or crew, other than Quin and 'Beth' knew of Lewis' work in prisoners' behalf. (7) from the text-- the quin withey radio weblog be the chart of the depths of quin despondency sure. if i say anything i believe very clearly am i understood, no, but i have the agents of reaction soliciting me to be their friend. apparently the search engines of the right trawl for dissent and if you express anger why then they look to enlist you in their campaigns of hate. (7) Undoubtedly, this sentiment on Quin's part refers to the a previous comment to this blog made by a group which Quin wishes to have absolutely nothing to do with. Here end the notes to the Concordance to THE COMPLETE WORKES OF QUIN for the entry of 28 November 2003.     5:52:13 PM    comment []

walk through union square last night everything is beautiful, all the people are beautiful like they just walked off the set of friends the vibe is funky, and prosperity has returned with perpetual war a poster for wired tells me that philip k. dick has ressurected. i dare say 1:32:40 PM    comment []

aargh. a brother and i are speaking of rural spots in texas and the fact that the political and religious climate can be a little hair raising. you be driving around and bam there's a klan flag. whoa. (i'm ten and on the front steps of our caroline street house in nacogdoches when my daddy warns me that since our house has been the meeting place of local civil rights advocates it is possible we might get bombed and so he wants me to look out. that wouldn't have been klan, but what they called, as i remember, 'minute men'. birchers. insofar as you care to distinguish twixt the various sub-plots of rural fascism.) i say: my experience is that the aryan brotherhood pentecostal fundamentalist preacher has a closetful of gay porn. it is the intensely conflictual and divided character of our culture that makes it hard to negotiate. the simpsons brought to you by the u.s. army. david o. selznick brings you 'gone with the wind' (which with 'birth of a nation' i would suggest marks american cinema as being the chief causation for that silly dressing up in sheet stuff. everybody is teaching themselves how to be from the movies. looking for a place for themselves from the movies.) i learn that my mother-in-law, a lifelong baptist, has been the featured singer for the last year at the friday night services of the jewish members of her senior community in dallas. "what does she sing?" i ask one of her daughters. "god bless america." "every week?" "yes. i suggested that she might learn something in hebrew or yiddish but she said: 'they like god bless america.'" 12:51:05 PM    comment []

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Notes from the Concordance to THE COMPLETE WORKES OF QUIN--entries 11/28/2003 from the ongoing Winter hiatus. Note: Perforce, the editor must organize the placeholders [arabic numerals, 1, 2, 3, and forward] for the notes out of order within the text, as there are items within this most recent and surprising entry which must be dealt with first, second, third, and so on What this means for the reader is that he or she will be required to jump backwards and forwards throughout the Quin text.  The notes, per usual, will be assembled below in numerical order.  We hope that this additional exercise upon ou rreaders' parts will cause no great inconvenience. We advise a thorough through reading the text below, indeed a reading of several times over would do the reader no harm and probably great good, prior to attacking the deeper level of the notes given here. Because of the slipping one in on us nature of the November 28, 2003 entry, we will be required to go back through the text of this entry at a later date and add the placeholders within the text.  For the readers convenience, we will include direct quotations from the entry here. Notes from the Concordance to THE COMPLEATE WORKES OF QUIN--entry, 28 November 2003 (1)  from the text-- i did not read the wasteland until i was fifteen... maybe i looked at it when i was fourteen... (1a) it would've been because of that bobby dylan desolation row... (1b) i wouldn't necessarily cousel believing what beth writes.... (1c)  all of this fiction...(1d) (1a) Truly, this citation alone requires pages of analysis.  Firstly, the editor holds to the previous report that Quin actually did read The Wasteland when he was around eight years of age or thereabouts.  Despite his claim here, that he was in his mid-teens, it is well known that Quin's early IQ tests, administered by the time he was seven years old, scored in the over 180 range, that his father, John Frederick Withey, taught him to read at the age of four using the Illiad as his text [an early experiment in the toughest of loves, the gory details of which are not appropriate in this context], that he began first grade at the notorious Raquet Elementary School at age five, and refused at that time to read a text entitled THE NUTTY SQUIRREL on the grounds that it was beneath his abilities. Based on these solid facts, the editor believes that the earlier report of Quin's reading of The Wasteland at the age of eight is right in line with what was going on in the youthful Quin's mind and life at that time. (1b) bobby dylan--a popular jewish folk and protest singer who came to fame in the 1960s at the height of the Viet Nam war. Although claiming at that time that he came from the wilds of Oklahoma or other more folkish climes, Dylan actually hailed from Minnesota. The "Desolation Row" referred to here is the name of a song by this artist from the album Highway__ [the editor is unsure if this highway is 61 or 51 but it is one which Quin frequently referred to as "the one running out of Memphis" We invite our readers to supply the correct number for this highway in the comments section of this entry] Revisited.  (1c)  i wouldn't necessarily cousel believing what beth writes.... The editorial staff can only believe that this is another of Quin's little jokes.  As stated with what we thought was perfect clarity in notes to the entry of 11/20/2003, it is widely held that 'Beth' is a fictional character within Quin's mythos, which means that she could in no way actually 'write' anything herself.  As was also stated, imbuing one's fictional characters with the tasks and powers of the living is something that their authors often do, and which some think a sign of burgeoning neurosis. cousel--we believe this to be a simple typo, and that the actual word intended is counsel. It should be noted, however, that Quin frequently uses various spellings of words to demonstrate the continually evolving nature of the English language, and to harken back to memories, as recent as four centuries past, when sundry spellings of the same word were considered the norm.  For a fine example of such spellings, see any edition of the Complete Works of John Donne. (1d) all of this fiction--We believe that Quin is incorporating two, three, possibly more, meanings of the word 'fiction' here.  Firstly, "all this" could refer to a close reading of this blog, secondly, 'all this' could refer to the greater world and life at large.  It is well known that many gurus, and teachers of the mysteries (of which Quin is definitely a one, rather in the Mojo vein) instruct us to view our lives as a passing scene, or more recently, since the advent of moving pictures, a movie in which we play a part.  This 'viewing' technique is often used in instructing students in the modes of meditation. Finally, Quin frequently uses the term 'fiction' as the term 'theory' is used by academicians and French Theorists (Baudrillard, et al.). As a point of clarification, we provide a brief illustration.  It is said that at the U.N a European Ambassador or such like held forth at great length and with much specific detail about the necessary steps for the rebuilding of a certain nation. At the conclusion of his address, one of his colleagues rose and commented, "I understand that this plan will work in practice, but will it work in theory?"  This business of theory is serious stuff folks.  We highly reccommend that all of our readers bone up a bit.  The fastest and simplest way is probalby to read a biography of Marx, very easy and entertaining reading, while cross referencing with Derrida (deconstruction) then find some Baudrillard (the site recommended in a previous entry is a good enough place to start) and learn about technology and consumption.  The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan is another decent, though quite different starting point.  We advise boning up not because there is any desire to turn anyone's coats into those of godless commies, but because the people running and or ruling the world right now all know this stuff.  They are educated with this information from very early ages, learning this sort of thing rather than being required to read exerpts from THE NUTTY SQUIRREL and its ilk, and it does us no harm at all to understand why they are doing the seemingly mysterious things they do. (2) from the text-- anyway i am gonna let beth take over in writing mostly because i think she's funnier than i am... See note (1c) above.  We observe that perhaps Quin views the 'Beth' character as his female alter ego, if this is indeed the case, then his comment that "she's funnier than i am . . ." becomes slightly more feasible. (3) from the text-- happily, despite the length of my marriage, (3b)  i do sneak into some categories of 'queer'.(3a) (3a) From Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary [the editor apologizes for not having the OED at hand. Frankly it is too expensive to keep onhand.  We welcome donations of the OED to the editorial staff at any time anyone feels moved a donation so to make.  This would be of great assistance in our continuing work on the Concordance.  Please feel free to let us know in the comment section should you like to make this, or any other donation to this work, and we will send you the information necessary]. queer--adj. 1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular; a queer notion of justice. 2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away. 3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer. 4. mentally unbalanced or deranged. 5.Slang. a. homosexual. b. bad, worthless, or counterfeit.  --v.t. 6. to spoil, ruin. 7. to put (a person) in a hopeless or disadvantageous situation as to success, favor. etc. 8. to jeopardize.--n. Slang. 9.a homosexual. 10. counterfiet money. [<G quer oblique, cross, adverse]--queerly, adv. --queerness, n. (3b) Please see notes to the Concordance, for 11/20/2003 in the 11/25/2003 entry of this blog. As explained in note (2) Quin's marriage to anyone, let alone 'Beth' is widely disputed. (4) from the text-- so the jewish blood in my family would come down through my father's mother's father. (4a) my understanding is that "jewishness" is something considered to be passed on maternally within much of the faith itself,(4b) so my ability to claim to be a godless jew, as well as a godless episcopalian (4c) is terrible weak and i am mournful so.(4d) thus also such african and or native american descent as i might claim through my father's father's father is sort of iffy. i'm sad. (4e) (4a) Again we are forced to mention Quin's father, John Frederick Withey, who according to Quin, asserted that his (JFW's) mother's father had indeed been all or at least somewhat jewish.  This may clarify Quin's continuing familiarity in writing in terms of Jews and Jewishness, as we have observed that many of our Jewish acquaintances in this city where more Jews reside than in the state of Israel, discuss their ancestry, and of the participation of their people in history, the making of Hollywood, and the current media in just such terms. (4b) This is the understanding of the editorial staff and its many jewish acquaintances as well. (4c) Ambiguous. Quin seems to be indicating here that he can claim to be niether a 'godless jew' nor a 'godless epicopalian'. It is a well known fact that, due in large part to the devoutness of his mother, Quin lived in the charasmatic glossalalia singing Episcopal Community founded by Graham Pulkingham, originating from The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in the diocese of Houston, and that, on the rare occasions when he is now seen in an Episcopal Church, he frequently genuflects to the ground [editor's term] upon entry. (4d) is terrible weak and i am mournful so--A further note on Quin's somewhat suspect ethnicity. He has often been heard to relate that his ancestry may be traced through African-American lines in addition to  his Mayflower and possible Jewish heritage.  This may perhaps account for his comfort while attending Ryan Junior High School in Houston, Texas where he was one of approximately 14 non-African-Americans in a school 1800 students, and his extreme discomfort in schools where the ratio was reversed. (4e) please see above. [it is with regret that the editor must now post this entry into the Concordance, to be finished at a later date. We suggest a careful study the urtext entry of Quin and the images below in the interim.] 2:41:35 PM    comment []

11:56:04 AM    comment []

The editorial staff of THE COMPLEATE WORKES OF QUIN is extremely excited/flummoxed, as once again, as so often his wont, Quin has seemed to slip one in on us.  Remember, that from wherever in the ether he is, he has access to his blog, as it is his blog, now and forever, ah hem. And in being his very blog, he can make additions, whenever he so chooses, and from wherever, he so is, and indeed so has done.  The editors must therefore like a young gazelle, in mid leap, completely change course, not always an easy task for editors, and provide comment on this recent entry from Quin.  This is something we did not expect from him in his hiatus, but having so received, cannot now ignore.  We also received on our doorstep, like an abandoned waif left on the steps of a nunnery, images of his thoughts from the ether.  These we have dutifully scanned and will attempt to clarify in these notes as well.  Since this new and sudden appearance of Quin is lengthy, we anticipate that it may take the editorial staff up to five days to complete our notes for the clarification and edification of our readers.  We can only hope that, while we are working in his travail, Quin will not deign to enter more from the ether as then we would be necessitated to leap gazellishly once again, and might never manage to complete the Concordance at all. In hopes of sparing those Netscape and other non wizziwig (sic) readers more images here, there and everywhere, a problem necessitated, apparently by the current technology of this blog host, we will now post this preface-atory entry and add the images prior to providing notes to the entry below. 11:34:00 AM    comment []

Friday, November 28, 2003

when you wish upon a star makes no matter where you are your wishing never seems to cease if your wishes are for peace. 6:52:46 PM    comment []

the quin withey radio weblog be the chart of the depths of quin despondency sure. if i say anything i believe very clearly am i understood, no, but i have the agents of reaction soliciting me to be their friend. apparently the search engines of the right trawl for dissent and if you express anger why then they look to enlist you in their campaigns of hate. so we say nothing? ain't this a sorry state of affairs... the film crew who came over last week none of them knew who granpa al lewis is... popular culture fails us continually. leftest thought is perpetually squelched where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy, hence the wall street journal is this country's most left wing paper and jameson works out of duke. meanwhile here as abroad right wing fundamentalism is encouraged in order to prop up corrupt regimes and when it bubbles up out of control the proposed remedy is we blow stuff up. the people who blow stuff up represent a totality to me... i don't like any of them.. kazinsky bin laden shamir bush... (and not billy clinton either, i shall never forgive him for letting waco slide. so, david koresh was crazy. {up here where i'd just moved all the liberals i knew [three maybe] told me they didn't think waco was a problem...i was aghast...}) surely i'm not the only one in the world concerned when nobel prize winners accept that nasty blood money? so the jewish blood in my family would come down through my father's mother's father. my understanding is that "jewishness" is something considered to be passed on maternally within much of the faith itself, so my ability to claim to be a godless jew, as well as a godless episcopalian is terrible weak and i am mournful so. thus also such african and or native american descent as i might claim through my father's father's father is sort of iffy. i'm sad. happily, despite the length of my marriage, i do sneak into some categories of 'queer'. anyway i am gonna let beth take over in writing mostly because i think she's funnier than i am... i did not read the wasteland until i was fifteen... maybe i looked at it when i was fourteen... it would've been because of that bobby dylan desolation row... i wouldn't necessarily cousel believing what beth writes.... all of this fiction... everything now is fiction... whoa.... 6:42:27 PM    comment []

Thursday, November 27, 2003

Friday, 27 November 2003 Thanksgiving day, 10:14 am. In honor of the blessed holiday, the editorial staff of the Concordance to THE COMPLEATE WORKES OF QUIN, will, for this hour preceeding the annual gorge (something the editorial staff has for years attempted to avoid without success, due to the hurt feelings of, not only those who have claim to blood ties, but seemingly of the entire world) (1) will digress from the usual citation to relate the charming holiday story which follows. A Charming Thanksgiving Story On the eve of the blessed holiday of consumption, (2) it is written that the editorial staff of the Concordance to THE COMPLEATE WORKES OF QUIN went forth to a hostelry of a man whereat was dwelling blood ties of said staff. Upon arrival, and following a joyous reunion, the husband, beloved of the blood held forth.  "Welcome and good cheer," quoth he, "for I have pictures of great joy to show thee." Staff approached with moderate, qualified, and delimited cheer.  The beloved husband of blood tie had greatly improved the living of the blood, for which staff was grateful. Verily, staff and the beloved husband had at times sat in the darkness of a suburban Texas pre-dawn morning, among the scents gasoline, new mown lawn, of concrete, newly hosed and glissening in the coming light of day.  Together they had sat together sharing the silence of flannel nightgown and shirt, strong brewed dark coffee, heavy with sugar and cream, and listening to the waking of that far distant city--birds, happy dogs, and rubber tires on asphalt. Still, staff approached with caution.  Seeming peace does not always indicate an end to strife, and the downy sound of comfort may well muffle the memory of truth. And so it was, in a hostelry on the eve of the blessed holiday of consumption, the staff approached the beloved of her blood to view his joyous images.  One man's joyous images are another sadness. From a pocket or small bag a small digital camera was produced. "Cute," or some such remark of compliment made the staff. Smiling, the beloved husband of the blood replied, "yeah, this baby has 3 pixels." Sharing the joyous moment of technology, the staff responded in kind. "Yes, mine has four pixels," then, recognizing the potential faux pas, continued, "but of course, it's much bigger, it couldn't fit in a pocket nicely like that one, well, it can fit in a pocket, but a bigger pocket . . ." At that staff stopped abruptly.  Beloved husband was flipping through pictures.  Holding the small screen out for her perusal. The husband of the blood was looking for images of his daughter () and dogs, but on the way to these, he paused. He was happy and proud.  For lo, the image showed in the bright color this age showed the carcases of five proud stags () strung on branches like Absalom. They were rent asunder from their breasts to their bellies which were red from the gashes in their flesh. The staff looked away, but could not pass in the smiles of politeness that was expected.  "You know I can't approve of those pictures of dead dear," staff said. The smile on the face of the beloved husband hardened; his accent grew thicker. "Well, here's another one," or some such thing, he said. And more death appeared on the screen. Staff made more comments of dissent.  The tie of blood remonstrated from the hostelry bed where she had reclined, now sat up sharply smiling with her light tight fear of all conflict. She said light nonsenscal things. Ending with "you know I just want everyone to be happy."  Staff replied "We are happy, aren't we happy?  We both know how we feel about this." () How many pictures of slaughtered beasts recorded in the mystical language of 1010101010101, is not known.  Topics changed to others less important than death and the love of killing. But when others arrived, beloved by all, the pictures and strories resumed.  There was the usual right of passage when staff was heard to say that it was known that none of their minds would be changed regarding this.  At these moments, there is always an "in your face" statement made by the husband of the blood. An agressive moment of defense of his view of himself as a person of goodwill, something he believes of himself with all his heart and mind and soul. More stories ensued.  The killing of a two hundred pound wild pig, white and fleshy. Much the same size and consistency of the mother of the staff and blood tie.  Of this beast 'taken' and more beasts to be 'taken' in the spring of the year. All to be sliced into pieces and left in the huge freezers in the garage of suburbia.  The story of the sighting of a huge bobcat was told.  Many times the husband of the blood described his 'scramble for his rifle' until in confusion and a misguided attempt at reconciliation, staff was heard to say, "Was he coming for you?" and in frustration the husband replied "I was scrambling for my gun, I was in the truck (), I would have killed that sucker." (). And later, "If I had taken him, we would have had him stuffed and put in the living room."  Just before leaving, the husband of the blood tie, produced the camera once again, "Now, here you go," he said calling the staff by given name, "I thought you'd like the scenery in this one." By this time in the evening, other pictures had been seen. Beautiful pictures of far off lands with mountainous peaks tipped in snow.  Again the staff approached, believing that perhaps this was husband's own attempt at reconcilation.  She did not look closely at the image at first, for the screen on the camera was small, and she focused indeed on the scenery in the background.  A great plain of seeming grasses floated in the background, and through a mist of fatigue the staff heard the husband saying, "See, there is the lease, the broad flat land, isn't that pretty?" And, "yes, it is," she replied, oblivious to the figures in the forefront of the scene.  One must suppose that this wasn't the response looked for, for the husband of the blood went on, "And look at him, isn't he a beauty?" And focusing, the staff saw that in the forefront of the tiny image, was the husband, holding in his arms the head of a stag, dead with it's rack broad and shadowed.  And with sadness, she realized that this was not what she had thought, an attempt at peace within the moment, perhaps even a recognition of a thoughtfulness of the ideas of others, but another defense of the love of the power over death.  More pushing of man's dominion over other creatures as quoted in Genesis. A belief so viscerally important to the husband that it in some way defined his idea of who he was.  A kindly, happy killer.  A man of bloodsport, a Christian man, a lover of dogs, but a believer in his right to enjoy a good and bloody death.    This enjoyment of the kill, the blooding, the gutting--this pride of right over life and death, the image of man made in the image of god, an image crafted around killing and death, not of mercy. Or if of mercy, of mercy only to the chosen. This hardening of the empathy for beasts not man, so that they are slaughtered for sport, for the enjoyment of it, is a great mystery.  It is a conscious decision to remain low.  To ignore the highest teachings of the greatest of teachers of the centuries.  It is very strange. But the end of the story is stranger still.  Much of mankind is without humor, without irony, without a vision of its continual satire of itself. Staff was given gifts upon her leaving.  One of which she is wearing now as a reminder, like some wear a cross, a star, a pentagram, or a turban.  Staff is wearing a gift from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  A pair of red flannel pajamas gifted by the tie of the blood covered with smiling white reindeer, their racks spreading broadly in a charicature of themselves.  cliches:  The truth will set you free.  Truth is stranger than fiction.  The Truth is out there. 12:51:17 PM    comment []

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Continuing notes from the Concordance to THE COMPLEATE WORKES OF QUIN [spelling John Donne's]. We find below a continuation of the passage dated 11/20/2003 followed by notes from the Concordance. from Quin, 11/20/2003 Note: Had Vonnegut any notion of String Theory when he wrote Cat's Cradle? (one) Beth suggests to me that in Austin my derogatory usage of the term 'suit' causes concern.(2) In Austin? (3) Known to much of the world through the movie 'Slacker'? And C. Wright Mills wrote all his best stuff before I was born? (4) Into this Wasteland, which was demarcated by my idiot Cousin Tom way before that? (5) I reason my strings must got all the wrong knots and I be in some other dimension which is why everything seems so fucked up and strange. (6) Notes from the Concordance: (one) Here, as in many cases, Quin mixes his metaphors, or at least combines ideas in his usually, unusual fashion.  We note, however, that this fashion is only unusual until the reader is enlightened as to his parabolic meaning.  In this case, Quin combines in meaning the hot,  but not so new idea in theoretical physics, String Theory--basically the next step smaller from quantum mechanics, and the small novel by Kurt Vonnegut, CATS CRADLE.  [ recent edition available as: Vonnegut, Kurt. CATS CRADLE. Delta, New York: 1998] We will list further, references to String Theory below, but first, wish to clarify Quin's thinking on the confluence of these two, seemingly dissimilar things.  The CATS CRADLE allusion is fairly obvious, and so we'll start there.  A 'cat's cradle' in western games and folklore is the game played with bits of string, often by children, to create a basket like shape within the fingers. We are not absolutely certain as to how the title of this novel relates to the content--a fictionalized version of Baby Doc, or Doc or whomever the dictator was in the small country about which the novel is written.  As further reference for the reader of Quin, we provide two further notes.  First, that it is reported anecdotally that Quin read this novel aloud to Beth on their honeymoon.  We question the credibility of this, however, as Quin scholars dispute the fact of a honeymoon between the two, indeed of the fact of their marriage, and of the fact that 'Beth' exists at all except in the function of fictionalized narrator/character within the greater context of Quin's work. On the next point, however, there is no dispute. Quin began [it's completion is in the dark] a novel referencing Vonnegut's CATS CRADLE, the working title of which was CATS LANDING.  The last known siting of the work was in Dallas, circa 1986.  It is believed lost.  The working premise of the novel was the quarantining of terminally ill and contageous patients of a new plague.  As always, we find Quin's writings prescient in the extreme.  We believe that the novel, or parts of it, may exist in the hands of one of Quin's many Dallas syncophants and collectors. If this be the case, we welcome the publication of exerpts in this venue.  No questions will be asked.  It is far too important to attempt to piece together this early, and perhaps seminal work, to ask any questions.  A word about String Theory.  We attach a lengthy and quite readable summary below.  String Theory has been touted as the possible solution to Einstein's desire for a Universal Theory, and is is now popularly titled, 'The Theory of Everything.'  Proponents of String Theory believe that, although the theory appears to be scientifically 'unprovable'--some argue that it fares better in the category of philosophy than of 'hard physics'-- that it may be the long awaited missing link which can reconcile quantum mechanics to Einstein's theories of relativity, theories of the true nature of gravity, old style Newtonian physics, and the like.  The attached is from http://www.superstringtheory.com/basics/basic4.html.  We apologize for the length in this format, but there just didn't seem to be anywhere to cut out a nice cogent paragraph. Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension. In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings. In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in spacetime, they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. The string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/(2 p a'), where a' is pronounced "alpha prime"and is equal to the square of the string length scale. If string theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then the average size of a string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity, called the Planck length, which is about 10-33 centimeters, or about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. Unfortunately, this means that strings are way too small to see by current or expected particle physics technology (or financing!!) and so string theorists must devise more clever methods to test the theory than just looking for little strings in particle experiments. String theories are classified according to whether or not the strings are required to be closed loops, and whether or not the particle spectrum includes fermions. In order to include fermions in string theory, there must be a special kind of symmetry called supersymmetry, which means for every boson (particle that transmits a force) there is a corresponding fermion (particle that makes up matter). So supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles that make up matter. Supersymmetric partners to to currently known particles have not been observed in particle experiments, but theorists believe this is because supersymmetric particles are too massive to be detected at current accelerators. Particle accelerators could be on the verge of finding evidence for high energy supersymmetry in the next decade. Evidence for supersymmetry at high energy would be compelling evidence that string theory was a good mathematical model for Nature at the smallest distance scales. (2) In this case, it is obvious that 'Beth' is a fictionalized character, as others have come forward and reported that this conversation about Quin's usage of the term 'suit' came directly via conversations with them (the others).  We note that it is often the case that great writers seem to channel information through their major characters, and often assert that they 'speak' to them.  One would at first assume that this is a symptom of neurosis, however since so many writers seem to say this same thing, one must assume that there is some validity in the claim. [editor's note:  while this may be true, it is also the case that many writers do seem to evidence signs of neurosis in its many and various forms.] (3) Here, Quin seems to question the possibility of a conservative viewpoint arising in the city of Austin, known to him in his childhood as a very with it university town. Loaded with people not wearing suits.  [Further note:  Followers of Quin will recognize his use of the term 'suit' to identify those who wear them, usually persons who hold positions of authority and demonic control. . . managers of grocery stores, lawyers, corporate managerial types and the like.  We note that this does often seem to be the case, and that we actually have heard the use of the term 'suit' to designate workers of this sort in speaking with inhabitants of Austin.  For the most part, those who use the term in this manner are not required to wear the said uniform in order to assert authority over, and or, conform to the established social mores of their working environment.] (4) For further information on C. Wright Mills, see:  http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Mills/. (5) Quin frequently references THE WASTELAND, by T.S. Elliot which he read at an early age, approximately 8 years old, and which has been highly influential in his world view.  Especially that recurring bit about Michaelangelo. We have been unable to date, to establish any blood relationship of Quin to Elliot, despite Quin's description of the poet as 'my idiot cousin Tom.' Perhaps, again, this is Quin's use of metaphor to establish an artistic relationship, and or literary lineage to or from Elliot. (6) Here, brilliantly, Quin guides us back to the beginnning of his original thought in this passage as he references, all three of his extended metaphors, these being, the literary reference, here morphed from the original Vonnegut allusion, to Elliot's Wastland, the literal image of the child's cat's cradle and playing with string, or less literally, one's own attempts to play at life by stringing it together, and, as is often the case, getting the knots all wrong, and, finally the reference back to String Theory in his mention of another dimension.  Indeed, String Theory proposes up to ten simultaneously existing dimensions as of this reading. [As a final note to this excerpt of the concordance, we give one last note. It has once again been brought to the editor's attention that some readers think that we are making up all of this stuff about String Theory and the like.  To those of you to whom this assertion applies, we suggest humbly that you take a look at the blatent attempt to make this all accessible in the series aired on your Public Broadcasting Station, entitled, we believe, THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE.  In this work, besides going on and on about how elegant the universe is, many high level physicists go on ad finitum about String Theory and what it means to you and me.  They do this on a number of mirrored and revolving sets which are designed to transmit the comforting feeling of the Sci fi channel, and none of them wear a traditional suit.  What this means, we do not venture to say.  We do submit, oh gentle reader, that truly, most of what Quin has written is simply a reworking of what has gone before.  As he was frequently heard to say before his most recent hiatus, "I didn't make this stuff up.  It's not my fault."]     12:43:47 PM    comment []

Monday, November 24, 2003

And then the great moth appeared to Treavor, saying: Glory to fluzz in the highest, and hereabouts, plumff, swzzzz, and glbfffs. And Treavor was sore afraid. 10:46:33 PM    comment []

Perhaps the last portion typed by [the editor] was eaten.  One never knows. What we were discussing is the fact that it is possible that Quin may at times be on hiatus from this weblog.  Then we went on to recall that for those who have happened onto RagtimeTexas.com, and paid any attention at all, it should already be apparent that the whereabouts of Quin are often in flux.  I tell you, most of the time he is in the ether.  It can be quite wonderful or terribly upsetting.  One never knows; however, (we went on to say) those of you who are scholars of Quin will not be disappointed.  The Concordance to the burgeoning, THE COMPLETE WORKS OF QUIN, will make its sometime appearance here.  Like all of his sort, the speech of Quin often appears to be written in code, or parables, or parabola.  Many differing and various interpretations of his message are already being made by many and few.  Before this all gets out of hand, and while making no claims that the Concordance can clarify all of his message, it can, as all such accompanying documents to major texts try to do, at least point up pertinent references made in his text and speak to what is known of the experience of his life.**  Let us take a specific example.  Please turn in your blogble to entry 11/20/2003.  The first portion is cited below. Following the citation are the notes from the Concordance to THE COMPLETE WORKS. "Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification." Karl Popper.(1) Quoted in some thriller I picked up off the street. Poverty reigns. (2) Beth, and Delia, and I perform for Mr. Larry Kammerman in the making of his movie yesterday. (3) Now we penninless movie stars. (4) Larry is reticent concerning the plot. I should rather guess that we shall be blown up in a Kiss Me Deadly denouement. (Hopefully Beth and Delia and I will escape harmful radiation by wading in the surf.) (5) If I say that everything is surreally Baudrillardian why then I shall be accused of pretension.(6).. Actually I wonder what happens when you hit Baudrillard into Google. (7) Notes from the Concordance: (1)  Karl Popper is someone that Quin has been lecturing us about for the past few days. The exerpt below is from the 'About Karl Popper' section which may be found at: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/intro_popper/intro_popper.html . The editor doesn't want to hear anyone out there claim that he or she 'doesn't understand' the exerpt below.  Unlike the mystic musings of Quin, this is straight biography that should make even the most resilient empiricist, if not happy, at least moderately content.  If some find some of the terms such as 'logical positivism,' or 'linquistic philosophy' difficult or unfamiliar, it is believed that through a careful consideration of each word in the suspect phrase (ie, "logical, hmm, now what does that mean, oh yeah, I know that . . . positivism, well gee, I know what 'positive' means) he or she can probably get close enough for jazz. Popper challenged some of the ruling orthodoxies of philosophy: logical positivism, Marxism, determinism and linguistic philosophy. He argued that there are no subject matters but only problems and our desire to solve them. He said that scientific theories cannot be verified but only tentatively refuted, and that the best philosophy is about profound problems, not word meanings. Isaiah Berlin rightly said that Popper produced one of the most devastating refutations of Marxism. Through his ideas Popper promoted a critical ethos, a world in which the give and take of debate is highly esteemed in the precept that we are all infinitely ignorant, that we differ only in the little bits of knowledge that we do have, and that with some co-operative effort we may get nearer to the truth. (2) Poverty reigns--At first reading, one might think that this is another of Quin's entertaining metaphors. There is now some question as to his actual meaning here. We know that as of the writing of the 11/20/2003 entry, those mentioned, Quin, Beth, and Delia, were suffering a great deal of financial, emotional, creative, psychological, and physical ups and downs.  In answer to the questions most put to them about these various crises, the answers most heard during this period were, "yes," and "Oh sure." [the questions most often put to B and Q about the above crises are "Are you eating?", and "Are they being nice to you?" ] It is certainly true that at the time this entry was made, the three aforementioned were living in what might have been termed, "genteel poverty", beginning to border on the less genteel side of things.  However as Beth was heard to say at this time, "what have we learned from this?" [one source recalls that following the repetition of this comment, Quin often seemed to take to his bed for a period of days]. It is the editor's contention that Quin might have meant 'poverty reigns' in a broader context as a comment on the state of the economy, or, in his usual fraught with inner meaning style, that he might have even been speaking of a general poverty of the state of popular culture, or the soul.  We do not give serious creedence to the soul theory, however, as we have it on strong authority that Quin does not believe in the existence of these. [editor's note:  As always, information concerning Quin's belief or lack of belief, and in what, is hotly debated.  He has been overheard to discuss his personal experiences with poltergeists, and spirits of various sorts. The conflict over the particular term 'soul' may depend on what the meaning of 'soul' is, ie, The Soul (capital S) or souls, a more generic plural. (3) This refers to a movie in which Quin and Beth, but particularly Delia, featured. (4)  Please see note (1) above. (5)  As the screenwriter and producer of the above movie never, ever revealed the basic conceit of the film, Quin made up his own, referencing "Kiss Me Deadly," as mentioned in the entry, as well as others, including one, the title of which, Quin was never able to recall, but which apparently starred Tim Allen,  and  ended with the happy resolution of Mr. Allen and the female romantic lead kissing joyfully as an atomic explosion deatonated under the ocean off the coast of Florida. (6) If I say . .  . pretension:  For an impenetrable exlication of the basics of Baudrillarian theory, see: Horrocks, Chris and Zoran Jevtic. INTRODUCING BAUDRILLARD. Totem Books, New York: 1996. [editors' note:  the easiest part of Baudrillard to understand is his contention that we have moved to a global economic/sociological functioning of consumption rather than production. A fairly obvious conclusion to any who walk their Beagles on 85th Street on Thursday evenings . . . recycling night.] pretension: Quin is frequently accused of being pretentious when he is desperately trying to be himself.  (7) When one enters the word 'Baudrillard' into Google, the first entry is Baudrillard on the Web.  This contains many quite readable selections, including interviews.  Try it out and take a chance on discovering that french theorists and others who bother to pay attention are actually writing about what affects what is going on in your life.  Remember, however, that these guys came up in post-war Europe and its educational system, which, unlike the system in the United States, thinks about Marxism in terms of social theory not just the boogy man ******************************************************************************************* I believe that Quin readers will see from the above exerpt of the Concordance, its value to the study and close reading of Quin.  One may also expect to see further artwork, sometimes with commentary, sometimes alone.  From this we hope that you draw a few conclusions of your own. Please feel free to add additional commentary, or personal experiences of Quin in the comments sections of this Blog.  Details of his life are especially welcome, as it is often these gaps that are the most difficult to fill in. **  For excellent examples of concordances or other work of this sort, see the various Concordances to The Holy Bible (authors, various), and the running notes to Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov).       9:53:43 PM    comment []

This is the particular dog which was prescient.  He looks innocent enough.  I shall type very little here because the last time we posted a picture, we got the terrifying macroerror message ("warning, warning Will Robinson").   7:56:52 PM    comment []

or 1596? see already we are off on the wrong foot and dancing wrong... 12:57:16 PM    comment []

Sunday, November 23, 2003

there were at least two battles of Cadiz, one about 1588 and one in 1597, and it was that latter one where John Donne was attending 5:35:13 PM    comment []

I thought I wrote something about this art dealer but now I don't see it. Maybe I wasn't supposed to wrire about himm... Theat's looks good... I'm gonna quit correctin for awhile be cause what's it matter really? It would be my contention any way that you wanna see through the text to the thought anyway i'm sorta guessin we have finished the chapter on mrs. Montoys and be moving into a new Chapter called: the Battle of Cadiz this si all i realize very unsatisfactory... i sent this very early dog dripping to Austin.. i gotta picture... I'll get Beth to put it up... it was from before i had contextualised the dog dripping paintings into the life of esteban... a red dog with a tennis ball on a black and white bacground with some words: it's all good it's all sommmm it's all fucked up. (something like that...) i sent down to this little girl i saw disappear one autumn afternoon an she so slackly beautiful sayin : " it's all good." maybe. sorta. i have found painting to be a process not unallied to fortune telling they made tarot cards up. not very long ago. you don't think made up things go supernatural? 12:13:29 PM    comment []

Thursday, November 20, 2003

The girls at Mrs. Montoya's really liked it when Koo sang John Donne songs. After Koo got burnt up they missed hearing them. Though sometimes, it is said, they come back at you through the white noise of the radio dial. 2:25:13 PM    comment []

"Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification." Karl Popper. Quoted in some thriller I picked up off the street. Poverty reigns. Beth, and Delia, and I perform for Mr. Larry Kammerman in the making of his movie yesterday. Now we penninless movie stars. Larry is reticent concerning the plot. I should rather guess that we shall be blown up in a Kiss Me Deadly denouement. (Hopefully Beth and Delia and I will escape harmful radiation by wading in the surf.) If I say that everything is surreally Baudrillardian why then I shall be accused of pretension... Actually I wonder what happens when you hit Baudrillard into Google. Note: Had Vonnegut any notion of String Theory when he wrote Cat's Cradle? Beth suggests to me that in Austin my derogatory usage of the term 'suit' causes concern. In Austin? Known to much of the world through the movie 'Slacker'? And C. Wright Mills wrote all his best stuff before I was born? Into this Wasteland, which was demarcated by my idiot Cousin Tom way before that? I reason my strings must got all the wrong knots and I be in some other dimension which is why everything seems so fucked up and strange. Ball of Twine Girl might justly criticize me in that I did learn such I know of Karl Popper in skool. George Botteril's Sociology of Science course in Aberystwyth (the University College of Wales), '78 - '80 sometime. Botteril was a chess player and pretty good apparently. He went away one time to play somewhere and he comes back with his neck bruised up ( 'hickeys' was the name for those in Texas when I was coming up, 'love bites' in England). I made mention of them to my classmates in the hall after the tutorial broke up (there were only three of us in the class) and I turned around to find Botteril right behind me. I was embarrassed and I can, interestingly, still feel the embarrassment, though, if it happened today, I wouldn't care at all. What Popper is trying to do as I remember is offer some kind of strategy to soften the impact Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He wants Science somehow to correspond to 'Truth' in a way more firmly rooted than that in Kuhn's analysis. It doesn't work out. Science ignores Karl Popper (e.g. string theory) and in doing so strengthens the status of Kuhn's paradigm. Or maybe something else.. I stayed drunk a lot in those days. I didn't do my homework... 2:15:25 PM    comment []

Monday, November 17, 2003

We're working on pictures. Netscape doesn't seem to want our pictures in the places we put them. We shall continue our investigations. Rauschenberg can really irritate in me in his desire to be pleasant. I remember watching him on Nightline sometime I was in Dallas living in those apartments behind Ianni's and working on Cats Landing. It's a no news night and they've brought Rauschenberg in to address the issue of the way his stuff is falling off the walls even as it's selling for millions in that particular art boom. Koppel seems to be implying that this is some kind of conspiracy to defraud the public. I pray to the screen that Rauschenberg tell Koppel that the Museums and indeed Koppel can go fuck themselves. Scotch tape don't last. That's not a Formalist concern? To document the failed promise of the paradigm of Scotch (t.m.) tape? But Rauschenberg can't even bring himself to giggle derisively. He's weak. It is very irritating. All the successful Neo-Dadaists adopt that Cagean Jesus Silence with reference to politics. It's not hard to understand why in milieu of their times. But you can see the poison of it creeping into Rauschenberg's stuff in those sixties prints. Silence can get dull, oh that's why we started playing things in the first place. A view of American History: The evil was in the rocks. The rat-noses ate it up quick and having started their piles on building slave ships they got into the armaments and oil business. The armaments and oil business need war to make money. It is therefore rat-nose policy to create militaristic tyrants we can righteously oppose. Prescott Bush is Banker Boy to the Nazis, then George Bush has to go to War. I get the impression George was a little miffed at Daddy, for he distances himself for a time, but then Prescott is Senator (for Connecticut, but truly I'm not sure how they do that in Connecticut and if that's the bit with Washington in it) and George then makes peace and then apparently it becomes Family Policy to set up tyrants you can send boys to die fighting (here I include Allen Dulles as family because I know he was Prescott's lawyer. But maybe Allen hated Prescott Bush. Course lots of people hate their family.) Meanwhile: In the "Liberal" Media such 'balance' as has been achieved has been demarcated pretty much upon 'racial' lines. (Judaism is hard for me to get my head around because 'race' has been defined for me by Southern skin pigment segregation where race has been proscribed from above as it were as a punishment but in Judaism is an essential part of the dogma. If I say that I dream of living in a World without Race I am not being inclusive of Jews. For it is essential to their theology that they be a race apart.) Rat-Noses and Jews run our T.V. Networks and our Record Companies and Book Publishers. If you ever get anything good it is usually because some Jew brought it out. But whereas Jewish Liberalism favors peace in Indochina in the Middle East is another story. I keep meaning to do this painting, a Jasper Johnsy encaustic map of Israel with the word "Disneyland" beneath. I've been planning it awhile because I was gonna do another one of Manhattan with "Disneyland" written on it too. That seems sort of old news now. Maybe I'll do a map of Manhattan with "Israel" underneath it. All them Jews in Israel should come home to Manhattan. Them environmentally unsafe ones in Florida too. They should get their silly butts back here. A view of World History: God is always giving things to the Jews, the Jews are never happy with them, and it ends up in everything being fucked up. Meanwhile: So, once upon a time, we thought if Women were allowed the Vote we'd see Peace. Ain't that a sad thought? Inclusivity as a progressive paradigm is really stupid and rotten since it don't hardly seemed to have worked at all. 1:41:54 PM    comment []

Sunday, November 16, 2003

CITY OF DOGS     Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)                     6:24:14 PM    comment []

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Rauschenberg's twist on Dada is his assumption of a medicine man or witch doctor's role in the creation of rituals and totems of 'healing'. In its earlier European manifestations Dada has been a more purely negative statement but Rauschenberg layers into it a very American syncretic Cabeza De Vaca heritage. Glossolalia, 'speaking in tongues', shows up a little bit in Church history prior to the nineteenth century but my reading suggests that it really blows up about the 1820s in America as part of that nationwide religious revival that manifests itself in all sorts of curious ways, as in Mormonism, etc. ( I wonder if anybody's done anything on Mormonism and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books? Leading rather nicely into Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard...) I should imagine that this is the result of a new awareness of spirit possession resulting from the mixing of African and Native American cultures with the unhierarchical protestantism given new force by Methodists and by the Revolution. When a Voodoo God takes possession of you you are called a 'horse'. 'Dada' is French babytalk for a stick horse. When I am dead and my friends' curiousitee shall have me cut up they're gonna find some really pretty snapshots in my heart from the summer of 2001 which I spent stepnfetchin' out in Southampton. It was my 'Pauline at the Beach' summer. I had never in my white trash life had occasion to live so completely in sunny sandy Mermaid beauty. It was marred only by the fact that my baby dog of fifteen years, Sarah, was dying. (Finally the week after the Fourth of July I came home and found Beth trying to force feed the poor wasted beast with a turkey baster and I said 'baby, this is over' and the next day I carried Sarah into the vets and killed her. I cried sitting on Lexington Avenue waiting for our appointment. That's rare for me. I was not unaware of the fact that in doing so I made a good picture. I think of the Monet story where he analyzes the color of his dying wife's eye and hates himself doing it.) Southampton is a beautiful place filled with insane weird people and more money than it is possible for a poor boy to get his head around. Though of course I try. New acquaintances, people you run into on the beach, will say: "Isn't this a beautiful place?" "Yes," you'll respond. "Aren't the people horrible?" This casual recognition of the ever hungry status seeking social milieu and its nasty and remarkable effects is partly anti-semitic in character, but it's also the kind of inverse dysfunctional snobbery I think of when I read Evelyn Waugh. And then it's partly just realism. You need to remember that this is the summer that Grubman girl drives through the wall of that club screaming "White Trash". You gotta watch out 'cos some people's status seeking tantrums can kill you. The teenagers in Southampton have nothing to do and drive the night aimlessly looking for trouble. This is a phenomena pointed out to me by a Dominican chef I work with long before I ever go out to the Island myself. "The kids have so much money and they're so bored and unhappy," he tells me wonderingly. Always I run into considerable opposition when I propose that Texas is the frontier of Modernity, but damn in my life if I haven't watched 'Dazed and Confused' spread across the world. Like 'Chainsaw'. Oh I cannot see this working out good. 2:45:31 PM    comment []

Friday, November 14, 2003

When you get enough to money to be able to look like you're respectable in America what you do is is you build youself a place of worship that looks like an Episcopal Church. That's the New York rule. Sir Thomas More where Jackie O. got sent off is my favorite of those. Anglo-Catholicism, Aestheticism, and Status are way tied up in each other. Fu Manchu, Mr. Sax Rohmer tells us, speaks English in the accent of Cardinal Newman. 4:56:50 PM    comment []

I'm absolutely a Voodoo Economist. If you could construct a medicine bag that would make a rich person think better, why then it would beneficially trickle down on all society. That's the Dream. The promise of Democracy seeming not merely mythical but absolutely poisoness in the manner it mis-leads. I consider the life of William Morris and I figure the Dream is way unlikely. But I am unable to discern another course. What you gonna do? 4:39:05 PM    comment []

In Houston, in the Sixties, Real Estate Agents would 'break' neighborhoods. They'd move some colored people into a house and the whole street would run away to the suburbs as fast as they possibly could. In the Seventies and Eighties up here in towns like Southampton out on Long Island, and like Washington Connecticut, Real Estate Agents 'broke neighborhoods' by allowing Jews and 'Show People' (who, check it out you don't believe me, were often specifically excluded in the leases) into communities notable for their contempt of same with the result that prices went through the roof because then all the Jews and Show People wanted to live there. Somebody in my family who doesn't know better actually asked me if "the Hamptons wasn't mainly a Jewish neighborhood?" So around me I got silly Negroes with Fendi panty hose on their head dreaming of when they blow up and can drive their Boom Bouncing Hummers up and down the South Fork. If this silliness was not being paid for by War, why then it would be just stupid. 4:20:08 PM    comment []

All my life I listen to my Daddy bad-mouthing Washington Connecticut because he truly hated that town, and so when Bob Dylan's manager who had the Rolling Stones then bought himself a place there I was 'huh?'. That was before I had spent enough time around the well to do to realize that Washington Connecticut is one of those strange black holes that sirens money for reasons inexplicable to me. Rich folk are weird. If I was gonna go to Connecticut I'd probably go to Hartford. They have sidewalks there. It is my ghetto child nature to crave sidewalks. 3:51:15 PM    comment []

"You look like you believe." This is apparently my cross. I play up at Marcus Garvey Park where I do a set of my new John Donne songs which are truly sort of nifty. Afterwards this girl tells me my stuff is "sort of peaceful and relaxing". Me? Damn. Drunk, watching porn, a video entitled 'Power Blonde' as I remember (it wasn't any good, don't get it), one night in '93 in my apartment up on 94th street, I knock over a ceramic salad bowl and going down to pick up the pieces I fall on the thing slicing a two and a half inch sabre scar into the left cheek of my face. Looking into the mirror I remember thinking: "This is going to be such a fucking embarrassing nightmare. Then it's gonna be good." "Now I can skip the tattoo," I tell Beth. I would be motivated by anything but rabid egotism? Exactly why? I note that The Savior's humility in my reading is limited to the donning of vile man's flesh. And washing feet. But, hell, don't I know motherfuckers who get off on washing feet? In admiring his strange love I find myself mostly drawn to the ponderation of the nature of his silences before authority. === From 1969 to 1976 I am, as a satellite of my Mother, involved with the Church of the Redeemer and its Rector W. Graham Pulkingham and with his family. This is interestingly the only aspect of my life a literary agent has ever asked me to write about and that may be because in the Nineties, prior to his dying, Graham was outed for having had homosexual relationships with the (slightly) younger men who travelled around with him preaching. Except in your nastier States these were never crimes. The Church of the Redeemer seethed with faggotry, oh it is true, just like all the religious institutions I've had experiece of. But truly I have never been wired to much care about shit like that. Graham had been given the Parish in '63 and what he got was a High Church in a Low Neighborhood. I can't even remember what you call that part of Houston anymore but it's southeast of downtown and over where Telephone Road starts, a little north and east of the University on the other side of the Gulf Freeway. In the Sixties that neighborhood 'went Mexican'. Graham suffered a crisis of faith which sent him up to New York City where the "Gift of Tongues" was prayed upon him by David Wilkenson, Wilkerson, whoever that 'Cross and the Switchblade' preacher be. Sunday Mass would go long. Four hours. (I'm thinking like in '71 now.) The congregation would break into tongue-singing two or three times. (It wasn't quite written in but these were Episcopalians so their spontaneous raptures would tend mystically to emerge in the proper liturgical spaces. The 'Prayers of the People' was a good bet.) Those services were recorded on big reel to reels. Oh I do crave to sample up that tongue-singing into dance music. Belgians and Hollanders need some tongue-singing dance music templates because unless there's been a radical transformation just recently the stuff they are listening to is weak. ==== Strangelove. Chainsaw. Poltergeist. There ain't something essentially Modern about the Texas Experience? When you dig into the history Neo-Dadism in Cold War America it would seem to be venereal disease communicated by Robert Rauschenberg's dick. 3:31:10 PM    comment []

Thursday, November 13, 2003

cy twombly moved himself from america the year before i was born. 3:23:50 PM    comment []

Bubel's gonna meet up with the Hollywood Twins and they gonna rampage their way southerly through the Mid-West until they meet up in conflict with Mary in and around Harvey's Kingdome which is announced so, "this is Harvey's Kingdome", in wax crayon upon a cardboard box and stuck up on a barbed-wire fence along Highway 59. It's a sign Deela Stimpson made, Deela being one of Mary's kids by Harvey and the cousin of Charles Atkins. Charles is the Krazy Kid described by Raoul DuBuffet to the author of ROADHOUSE TRAMP J. Evardd Herman that summer in the fifties when they're out at the seaside dreaming up an "earthy" entertainment which becomes, of course, ROADHOUSE TRAMP, the hippy cult classic, "but, frankly," says Mr. Herman, "I never knew that Mr. Hoover was a transvestite. That was simply the hand of God." Beth says: "I don't remember how ROADHOUSE TRAMP and the Empire of Dr. Bienke fit up together," and I say, on reflection: "the only place they fit up together is I have Mary singing a Koo Kowlick John Donne song." Charles colors furiously caught in an artistic renaissance stimulated by his exposure to the graffitti adorning the men's room of the Dersher Truck Stop in Memphis where Harvey has taken him for a pee on the trip back from Detroit to Mary in Texas Harvey makes with Ginnie and Charles following Ginnie and Charles' parents' deaths in an automobile accident on Saturday December the sixth. Claire, Ginnie's Mom, didn't pass until late on the seventh because Ginnie had aleady heard about the bombing. Everyone whispered Hawaii and with the sound of it Ginnie heard ukuleles. The 'real' Charles, the Krazy Kid, was a boy that Raoul Dubuffet met in a sanitarium his Mother sent him to in an attempt to curtail his multifariously aberrant behavior. 3:10:50 PM    comment []

Bubel burns up the Senator's son and the tramp. He skedaddles with Grossman's Green Box in one compartment of which is a collection of photos of famous cross-dressers and features a notable law enforcement personage. It's Bubel's Ace but he's scared to lay it down seeing as the rest of his hand's another ace and a couple of eights. i gave my heart to jesus one night after getting terribly sad from viewing the first half of billy wilder's 'ace in the hole', a movie i don't know that i've seen since. that was in nacogdoches in the east austin house, '65 or '66. and i gave my heart to jesus again in the costernation leading up to our departure to england in '72. this was partly inspired by a hearing of billy preston on the bangladesh album. i lost my faith in dundee one night (winter of '76- '77) trying to open the sticky lock of the front door of the big house down on the tay river where i roomed. it had been my habit to invoke supernatural assistance when faced with wordly obstacles. prayer, it turned out was the ritual that bound me to faith. that night it suddenly struck me that praying was silly. my faith evaporated. i thought it might return, but it hasn't. i had picked up faith to deal with my fear of dying. when i was sufficiently miserable and depressed that dying didn't seem so bad i put it back down. truly hell had never scared me. it always seemed ridiculous and redundant. yet i continued to occasionally attend services. of my church-going my wife would tell me: "you look like you believe." judging by the way clerics sniff when i pass these days i think i have overcome that specific appearance/reality dissonance. 2:12:28 PM    comment []

Bubel returns from his meeting with the G-Man and fixes the groggy Senator's son another "special drink". He goes out and hires a man about his size and build from down on a corner near the local itinerant labor camp. "You from around here?" Bubel asks. "No sir, I'm from down Tennessee. I'm tramping my way over to Washington. Gotta cousin there. I try to earn my way, best I can, with the help of kind people like you." "Must get lonely for you," says Bubel. The tramp reaches over and pats Bubel's hand. "Yes sir." Bubel is shocked. The tramp thinks Bubel has picked him up for a trick. When they get to the apartment up over the warehouse where Bubel has left the Senator's son Bubel shoots the tramp in the head fast. Bubel is repulsed by perverts who look like him. He doesn't like mirrors either. 12:53:14 PM    comment []

For years the gregarious Abe Grossman had made for himself a comfortable life off the seductive entertainment possibilities of his Green Box. He was a regular of luxurious house parties and posh resorts. Mr. Grossman collected intimate photographs. These were filed away into the seemingly endless compartments of the Green Magician's Box Mr. Grossman had purchased from a vaudeville trouper. One compartment was given to snaps of european royalty in dalliance with their horses. Grossman did not admit the authenticity of Russian Nobility, else he should never have been able to close the drawer. 12:11:13 PM    comment []

Bubel Andriessen outlines to the G-Man a possible future in which the G-Man will discover two charred bodies in a secret hideaway apartment leased by the Great Lakes German-American Friendship League whose purple shirts (the Senator's son was set on purple shirts) had been a staple of anti-war involvement agitation in the years running up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor which rendered such discussion sort of moot (can i use it that way?). "Goddamned Roosevelt," the G-Man cusses, "I know he fixed this with the Japanese somehow. He's a maniac. The Director is furious, but of course in a very defensive position. They say that internal complicity was a pre-condition. We'll round up all the Japanese of course. But we have to round up known Nazi associates too. You, Bubel." Bubel reiterates the alternative future with him publically dead. He knows from experience that the G-Man seizes concepts slowly. Bubel has an Ace up his sleeve but he doesn't want to play it on the G-Man. Bubel is in possession of Grossman's Green Box. 11:33:06 AM    comment []

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

the lesson of twentieth century music has been that the mathematics applied to it by skolars of the past didn't work. hell, the skolars of the past recognized serious problems, but these were subsequently, amazingly, ignored. it is the role of art, when you're godless like me, to illuminate the directions we might move. indeed many of the godly once would have so conceived it unlike our present godly who all of them seem interested only in jacking on their inspirations... billy graham christians in a twilight zone of driving back and forth from the nazi designed stadium built of mobland concrete underwhich are sepulchered who knows how many goomba corpses. so: since mostly you are trying to get your ear around sounds unwesternly programmed it doesn't do you any good to have a cheat to keep you from hearing. another stupid status symbol to maintain your powerlessness. from: i hate electric tuners... so often, from all sorts of directions, cornel west for instance, we are exhorted to maintain the "simple faith" of our fathers or our grandmothers or howsoever the modus of property devolution might be in whatever tradition is being promulgated. it's a crock, folks. and it's insulting too. my forebears and likely some of yours had complex and ambivalent thoughts concerning living. you might consider mr. john donne.   rosita the kitty was found by her people and has gone home. poverty reigns.   people always dissing you when you're an artist trying to pretend you're some kind of whore entertainer or house decorator or something, and not a serious man righteously pondering the direction of society in this horrible motherfucking year of two thousand and three. priests have taught them this over the generations.   but this is the thing: clearly the folks in power listen to the wrong shit. or they listen wrong or something. 'cos if we were to accept they could groove, well then there's no use making music. might as well be quiet.   1972-1980. United Kingdom. Graham Pulkingham is called over by the Bishop of Coventry to provide whiteface charismatic minstrel entertainment for the proles out in this housing estate on the edge of the city. Where I live a year and a half. Then two and a half years outside Reading. A year in Scotland. Three years betwixt Scotland and Wales. 12:56:37 PM    comment []

Monday, November 10, 2003

summer 1973 - fly, me, carter, anna and carl, from england to new york. daddy picks us up there and drives us to houston. meet brother aaron freshly born. then, in an opal station wagon and big orange fifties ford pick-up pulling a u-haul, we move daddy to new york state. arranging such a summer of fun is typical of daddy's genius. "what you gonna do for your summer, john?" "oh, i'm gonna drive six kids, one of 'em newborn, around the country in junky, breaking down cars staying the eight of us in one motel room." course i've been living in momma's crazy-ass commune so none of this seems unusual to me. played marcus garvey park yesterday with the beautiful starlight for a throng of maybe twelve. i can remember a time not so distant when quin playing out in the open in that part of harlem would've seemed sort an unlikely proposition. find lost cat on way home - rosita her collar says but i can't read the phone number... if you have lost a little balck and white kitty named rosita then call me. 12:59:16 PM    comment []