Apple Flotsam

We rode the Staten Island Ferry on the 5th to brunch on leftovers from the 4th while sitting on a bench at St. George's port walkway and imagined the previous night's fireworks and teeming masses. Way cooler.

Walked uptown along the East River to South Street Seaport (the main building with all the shops and eateries is closed and under construction). Give it a pass, mates.

Hoofed over to 17 Mott Street for takeout of Shrimps with Black Bean Sauce over noodles.

Hauled ass up Avenue A by way of Christie Street to St. Mark's Place & Tomkins Square Park (saw a guy OD and roll over in front of us stone cold dead). 911 was called.

Chowed down from Wo-Hop's goody bag (way too much food! Re-secured bag for a possible dinner on the 6th.)

Legged it over to the Shake Shack in the Flatiron's shadow to rest our barking dogs before heading over to Herald Square and Hajni's compulsory Macy's scouting. I sat at a table for 40 minutes watching and listening to the sights and sounds of tourists (and re-opened the Wo-Hop bag for a midair re-fueling).

Chatted up the security guard at Victoria's Secret while Hajni completed her mission.

Shuffled over to the #1 Train, got off at 96th and Broadway and painfully made our way to the car on Riverside and 93rd. Drove home upriver to Stony Point, flipped out of my sneakers and socks. Hajni poured herself a Marques de Riscal, I gulped some iced ginger ale and we played the DVR recording of the Macy's fireworks spectacular from the previous night. Still, way cooler.

We woke up early on the 6th and went for a 3-mile hike before the heat and humidity got out of control. Now, I think I will soak my feet. Where's that bag of peppermint-scented Epsom salts?

String Theory

I could, or you, or almost anyone, these days,
Could Google it, but why bother?
We already know that the answer won't be there.

Besides, there are more important things for us--
Things like Chaos and Relativity and--
Well, we can just do the math.

There's so much we already don't know:
Ourselves, Others.
Why keep looking for more?

Living is pushing on a string.
That's my theory. I didn't find it on Google.
I looked down a Wormhole and saw it for myself.

The Holy Wall: Who Will Pay For It?

From the Encyclopaedia Britannica Edition---
The Annals of America---
Volume 7, 1841-1849:
MANIFEST DESTINY

May 6-July 8, 1844. Several armed conflicts between Protestants and Catholics at Philadelphia leave 20 persons dead and about 100 injured. Clashes result from agitation by nativists, who are anti-Catholic and who resent naturalization of foreign immigrants, especially those from Catholic countries.

From the Grasmere Edition*---

The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth

Volume IX, 1834-1847:

LAST POEMS

TO THE PENNSYLVANIANS

1845

DAYS undefiled by luxury or sloth,
Firm self-denial, manners grave and staid,
Rights equal, laws with cheerfulness obeyed,
Words that require no sanction from an oath.
And simple honesty a common growth--
This high repute, with bounteous Nature's aid,
Won confidence, now ruthlessly betrayed
At will, your power the measure of your troth!--
All who revere the memory of Penn
Grieve for the land on whose wild woods his name
Was fondly grafted with a virtuous aim,
Renounced, abandoned by degenerate Men
For state-dishonour black as ever came
To upper air from Mammon's loathsome den.

*Houghton Mifflin. Boston 1911
10 Volumes.

Loser Wins!

Don DeLillo, whom Harold Bloom calls one of the four best American writers of the late 20th century knows how to riff (which is probably why Uncle Harry has endorsed his fellow Bronx-native).

Following is but one example from DeLillo's first novel, Americana, which shows his easy-flowing, though fragmentary, style which preciously (and precociously) foreshadows the inviting depths of his modernist ouevre.

Presidential runners-up this season ought to take heart, because you don't have to be a Marxist to see the blister of truth embedded like a stone in the kishkes of this reality.

"I'll tell you a true story right out of one of the country's most distinguished scientific journals. They pulled an experiment on two monkeys. They gave them electric shocks every sixty seconds. Now the first monkey had a button and all he had to do was press it and he wouldn't get any shock. The second monkey also had a button but it was completely useless. Eventually monkey-A caught on to the gimmick and started pressing the button like mad to avoid that juice. Whereas monkey-B realized that his button wasn't worth shit and he just squatted in the corner, scratching himself and getting jolted every minute. So what happens? The first monkey gets stomach ulcers and kicks off in two weeks. The second monkey, who had resigned himself to the shocks, lives happily ever after. That little experiment is a moral for our time. It shows the price you have to pay for working yourself up to a decision-making post. I'll have to show you around the office sometime. You'll see sixty-five executive monkeys weeping into their telephones and pissing blood. But don't worry about me, kid. I've got a cast iron gut and I'm an odds-on favorite to pull through. In my heart I'm deeply conservative. I come from a long line of secret Presbyterian drinkers. My grandfather was a blacksmith in Sag Harbor. What was the point I was trying to make?"

Chasing Our Own Tale: From Ouroboros to ISIS

"Hark ye yet again," sayeth Captain Ahab, the following:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think that there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth has no confines."

Herman Melville from his/theirs/ours, Moby-Dick.

(T)rump (R)ubio (A)ll (C)ruz (K)asich

I have devised my own system of deciding who won last night's Republican Debate. As I watched the proceedings  I T R A C K E D each actor's character in 26 different categories from A to Z. By this method I have deduced that John Kasich was by far the most rational, mature, and prepared of the four contestants and made of Presidential timber, which probably will disqualify him from winning the nomination.

Using a (T) (R) (A) (C) (K) grading system for each category resulted in the following list.
There is a zero probability of error in this result:

Agonistic (A)
Benighted (T)
Catarrhine (C)
Duplicitous (TRC)
Embarrassing (TRC)
Feculent (TRC)
Guttering (TRC)
Havering (TRC)
Ignominious (TRC)
Juddering (R)
Kaltblutig (C)
Lumpen (T)
Mendacious (TRC)
Nugatory (TRC)
Otiose (TRC)
Peculating (T)
Querulous (R)
Risible (T)
Sententious (C)
Turbid (T)
Unpresidential (TRC)
Vulpine (C)
Wily (C)
Xenophobic (TRC)
Yapping (TRC)
Zealous (C)
 

Joanna Russ: An Amazonian Visionary

Joanna Russ writes:*

Assuming this to be free advertising space, I will now put in a plug for writers, who—with a very few exceptions—are day laborers paid piecework in an industry that is shaky, badly advertised, and poor, largely due not to its choice of books or its editing of them, but to an impossible distribution system for paperbacks (in which the distributors and the retail outlets do not share in the risk and in which books are merchandised like Kleenex) and a vehement confusion between old-style paperback selling (impulse buying) and the emerging reality that soon there ain’t gonna be hardbacks except for specialized books and library sales. Nobody has adjusted to this yet. Nobody knows who buys books where and why. It is a mess.

It is rude and crude to rend the lovely veils of spidery illusion which blow so gently over our work, but for a field that prides itself on being down-to-earth there is an extraordinary reluctance to look at the economic facts. Many Americans seem to be like this—maybe art is supposed to be Above All That.

My own, quixotic dream for the paperback-book industry is a giant Sears-Roebuck-ish, centralized store which will carry remaindered books at lowered (or raised) prices (depending on their bibliographic value and the rise due to inflation) and have wee beautiful catalogs in every hamlet, village, and town where people (now that the movies are too expensive) can go when TV palls and find old Phyllis Whitney gothics (Look! I found a copy of Fear in the Old Castle!) or HPL (Look! Horrible Monsters from Old New England!) or controversial books (How can anybody bear to talk about such filthy things in public? I’ll buy it.), order them (see? No problems with shelf space), pay for them, and get them (quickly). The books would move only when paid for, copies would not be shredded (as they are now when they’re not sold within about ten days). But how would prices on old paperbacks be changed? With a goddamn supermarket stamp, nudnick!

College bookstores (as three of them have told me) always sell SF if it remains on the shelves long enough. The real problems are distribution and information (really identical).

Of course, such an operation would require a vast capital outlay. Or would it? Specialized bookstores do this kind of thing already. At any rate, it points in the proper direction, I think. The first step is for some brilliant sociologist or computer programmer out there (hello, hello?) to get a grant to study just who buys books and why, something about which there are a lot of publishers’ theories and no facts. A big grant. And then . . . ?

Say, why don’t one of you readers . . . ?

*This piece was added following Joanna Russ's short-story, "Existence" which appeared in the SF collection, Epoch: The State of the Art of Science Fiction Now
Edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg
(c) 1975 Berkley/Putnam Publishing  593 pp