Weather all storms. Eventually the sun will surely shine. In due time, after negative karma gets washed away, a feeling of purity and cleanliness will be felt. Radiate truth. Deconstruct lies. Banish wickedness. Embrace goodwill. Charity of the seven seas. Cross any body of water to reach the shoreline of inner peace. All paths lead to paradise.
When I was asked to review Eric Larsen’s The Decline and Fall of the American Nation (New York: Olivers Arts & Open Press, 2013), I was intrigued by the title. Now I am firmly of the conviction never to apperceive the contents of a book by its title.
Literature has served an indispensable purpose in exploring ethical and political themes. This remains true of sci-fi and fantasy, even if there is such a thing as reading too much politics into fictional work or over-analyzing.
Author’s note — House Organ out of Youngstown, New York, edited and published by Kenneth Warren. Number 87, Summer 2014, just arrived in the mailbox. Some good shit in it. Comes stapled, folded in half, ten total 11×8 1/2 sheets, printed to equal 40 pages. No web site, but plenty of accolades. What a back to the future idea? Out of your house, on a printer, no internet connection.
Anyone who reads his work will quickly be made aware of the enormous amounts of study that lie behind the writing of Paul Levy—study in the form of wide and vast reading, of deep and patient thought, and, perhaps above all, a never-ending process of extraordinarily close observation. Observation of what? For the moment, the answer to that question can best be given in two parts. First, Paul Levy is an acute and close observer of the nature of life. Second, he is an acute and close observer of us, of we, of the ones who live inside of that life.
You get what you pay for, and if it’s money and debt, you get nothing, really. The money changers of culture have bastardized it until we have accepted 90 percent of NY books publishing and West Coast movie making. Forget about NYT Review of Books, APR, all the MFA rags, all the preening and ID politics and denuded life in all those poets’ works. Forget about Terri Gross of Fresh Air, The Q out of CBC, and freaks like Charlie “I Am an American-through-and-through” Rose.
It is a sea change, the kind of transformation that the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said was caused by “gales of creative destruction.” In his model, systems change when new ideas, products, and technologies bring about the destruction of the old.
Tax day in America — My Ass!
I’ve been meaning to fix up the bio-sketch below. Certainly, fix the age 56, since I hit 57 two months ago. Born in 1957, now 57 witnessing another lunar eclipse, and the great eclipsing of humanity by algorithmic putzes and their masters: too-big-to-fail multinationals and transfinancials and a media that are so whore-fied, that, well, the new Black is Orange.
Marxist aesthetics has yet to ask: What are the qualities of art which transcend the specific social content and form and give art its universality?
—Herbert Marcuse1
so why aren’t we listening, shaping policy around what the downtrodden know and see?
