'(The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher.)'

Wittgenstein, Zettel, 455.

I work at a bookstore, & one of my tasks is to select, out of the quantities of books brought to us by customers, which ones to take, either for cash or for store credit. It occurred to me the other day, as i was going through a boxful rapidly picking & rejecting, that the proper function of binary thinking is just this: to sort, when circumstances mandate an abrupt result. But how did this become, so to say, the default-philosophy of all humanity? It must be that in times of change (& the impact of globalizing-modernism upon all of us, in whichever of the numbered "worlds", is crushing & inescapable--) the temptation toward Manichaean habits of thought, & especially in the realm of public discourse, is felt, not so much as the easier path, as the only one.

In practice, i have two different criteria for choosing books: those i know are likely to sell, & those i know are good but might sell someday (okay, maybe not, but they should). So even at this task i leave myself the space for a slightly more considered judgment. Yet, when the pace or the volume increases, it becomes much harder to maintain even this degree of discrimination. So i conclude, i probably am vastly overestimating the amount of free choice involved, when i condemn the masses & the elites alike, for their "stupidity". That in itself partakes of the binary thoughtplague.

"For athwart our thinking the threat looms,
Huge and awful as the hump of Saturn
Over modest Mimas, of more deaths
And worse wars, a winter of distaste
To last a lifetime."

Auden, "The Age of Anxiety" (1946)

"It was better to be alone to listen to the monkeys that chattered without offending; to watch them occupied with the unserious business of their lives. With that luxuriant, tropical nature, its green clouds and illusive aerial spaces full of mystery. They harmonized well in language, appearance and motions;--mountebank angels, living their fantastic lives far above earth in a half-way heaven of their own."

W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions (1916)

Attending a poetry reading today is like going to a Latin church service; attending a slam, like going to a service that's been painfully rendered into the vernacular. The ritual stands for its own defiant persistence. Which is not, however, the same as transcendence: we've given up hoping for the same thrill we might find in dancing, say, or a really good movie. But it is not nothing that some of us still feel pious toward a dead culture. And in fact its deadness becomes ever more relevant, as the tricks of the moment begin to pall on us. For dead things never get any deader, & that, in a world of violently gyrating meaninglessness, can be something to hold onto.

"the occiput which rolls is ecstatic" --Javant Biarujia

"the silken skilled transmemberment of song" --Hart Crane

"A major function of the mass media is to deflect envy away from those with power to those with ability. The way most people use the word ELITIST shows how well it's working."

Arthur Hlavaty, Derogatory Reference 100

Faith in disaster, is religion that works. --sayings of Asmodeus

A genealogy of dada-rock: Zappa, Faust, Mr Bungle.

Music for drottkvaett: Sly & the Family Stone's "Thank You For Lettin' Me (Be Myself Again)"; the Beatles's "Come Together".

"It's the job of the poem to find names for all these noises." --Rae Armantrout. Exactly. More than communication, more than self-expression, i think the true role of the poet is to name things. And it is a measure of how disenfranchised our poets are, & how unprofessionally they take their job, that we are surrounded almost entirely by things that are badly named, whether that be stores, movies, rock groups,--or the peculiar phenomena of what passes for public life.

'Instead of a heart, a hornet drones in vain.' --Radovan Karadzic

"the frail, illegal fire balloons appear" --Elizabeth Bishop

"  returning
with the memory of smoke
  the ocean air
of the gull-colored village
sacred with my history"

Jane Reichhold