Hello, everyone! As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine. This is the eighth incarnation, as meaty as ever. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, interesting and entertaining writing and, second, 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
Often, unlike today, a particular edition will have a theme, or at least a thematic rubric, so to speak. Numbers 6 and 7 dealt with a rarely examined here-and-now conjunction, that of empire and human sexuality, an unexpected intersection of geopolitics and personal intimacy that will continue to be ‘of interest’ now and in future posts even as this particular number is more scattershot in its orientation. In any event, thanks for stopping in and all of that sort of thing. I’d love to hear from people; blah blah blah, and keep reading!
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Complicated Stories & the Strength to Survive
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Some Recent Spreads
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter VIII
3. Wood Words Essays—A Quintet of Pieces That Will Be on the Table By Spring
4. Empowered Political Forays—A ‘Blast From the Past’—‘Caitlyn’s’ Campaign: TRANSGENDER ‘IDENTITY’ & CONSCIOUSLY SUBSTITUTING SURREAL FOR REAL
5. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, PART EIGHT
6. Old Stories & New—”Faith, Bad Faith, & the Catholic Church,” continued
7. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”Little Red,” continued from #7
8. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Part Six
9. Nerdy Nuggets—The Oneida ‘Free Love’ Community & Its Meaning
10. Communication & Human Survival—Internet Origins, War, ‘Pornography,’ Continued
11. Happy Union Grammar Nerds—Santa’s Claus, Satan’s Claws, & Other Clauses of Life
12. Erotic Snippets—”Consciousness & Chemistry: ISO of Simple Longshots”
13. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”We’re All Cousins…” a Biosocial Golden Rule, Part Two
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Complexity & Strength & Their Inseparable Bonds
What can I say? How should I draw the lines or delineate the connective tissue between analysis and lived experience, between cognitive assessment and heartfelt desires, between the carnal and the spiritual? My Tarot work may become a SPAARAS practice, Sex Positive Advice About Relationships & Sexuality; I may soon have a video channel that employs an ELFEN approach, Enhancing Life Force Energy Now. Transition and reinvention loom large in my life now, with the entire Big Tent Review process, with its pointing to an even huger incarnation of a popular media, a People’s Information Network, a Southern People’s Information Network, audio and video extravaganzas, and whatever attendant blah blah blah comes forth as a result of the yarnspinning that is occurring here.
The aphorism that the military uses is also an acronym: KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. To a limited extent, such an approach is possible, so long as others, whether in plain sight or hidden away behind the scenes, are managing the inherently intricate and inevitably complicated skeins of interconnectedness that underlie even seemingly simple endeavors. As the Wizard admonishes in the story of Oz, ‘Don’t look behind the curtain!’
At times, I think of myself as having a ‘gypsy’s soul,’ in the sense that I am peripatetic and more than slightly wild and flamboyant, ever ready to set up a tent and a colorful space to ‘wend my ways and my wiles and my wares,’ as one of this month’s Driftwood Message Art couplets states the case. In all these instances of offering myself to the world, I have no choice but to extemporize, to make things up as I go along.
The Big Tent Review is an instance of this, ha ha. In a sense, my entire existential arc merely instantiates, as it were, one case of such extemporizing after another. Writing and storytelling about myself and those whom I encounter thus amounts to a codifying of this impromptu manifestation of matters, so that each day’s yarn provides the threads essential to delineate fabrication of the here and now a ‘chapter’ at a time, more or less. To fantasize such a process as simple is, simply put, impossible. Expanding the entire operation in various directions will undoubtedly make for even further complications of both context and interconnection.
In such a vein, in the realm of connubial conjugations, I quip that ‘desire is a fact; love a choice.’ In the arena of contextualizing one’s existence as a component of an ever-evolving All-That-Is, one can articulate the situation like this: ‘curiosity is a fact; meaning a choice.’ Were we not compellingly curious about our own and our fellow cousins’ transits through things, gossip and the entire confabulation of fanatical feelings of being fans would not be such a powerful presence wherever one turns in the mediated expression of everything, every minute of every day—with every text, every like, every chat, every virtual variation of real connection with which we assuage our longing for intersection and intimacy. Again, such a skein of varied threads must ever describe a tangle.
In this evolving fabric of fashioning reality, Big Tent Review resembles a magic trick in which the magician, which is to say the ‘Wizard Jimbo,’ has no plan or preformulated process to guide things but relies on reality to supply the necessary ingredients to cook up a satisfying dish in life’s ongoing smorgasbord. As an offshoot of one of Dickens’ immortal characters inflects this point, “Something will turn up, Mrs. Micawber; it always does,” either from one’s own juicy orchards or through whatever combination of documentary efforts and imaginary confabulations that come this way.
Along those lines, we might begin to examine what the universe has offered for this issue by assessing the work and ideas of a ‘giant’ of Italian philosophy, Giorgio Agamben, whose ‘biopolitics of fear’ gives readers and citizens and sojourners a methodology for pondering, practically and pointedly, the manipulation and falsehood that so characterize the current context that imperial nudity, so to say, almost goes without saying, whether the naked lies in question concern Ukraine, Israel’s conquest of Palestine, conflicts with China, Russia, etc., ‘border clashes,’ or other manipulated and reputedly quite profitable concatenations of imperial hubris’ appearance of omnipotence. A reader was kind enough to refer me to this thinker whose presence I ought already to have noticed!
In his work, Agamben is most pointed in pointing out that he does not speak with certainty about what is actually unfolding in the social environments of the here-and-now, even as he makes the defiantly definite point that ‘the official story,’ ‘viewed in the light most favorable to the defendant,’ as it were, can amount to nothing more meaningful than nonsense, or bullshit, in the parlance of Princeton Philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, who makes a possibly initial appearance in today’s particular BTR. Perhaps the most pertinent way to punctuate this observation comes down to insisting that our Community Conversations needn’t universally be pointless rubbish or non sequitur and that therefore we have a duty to try to make them live up to that minimal standard.
Specifically, of course, much of Agamben’s critique of contemporary protocols revolves around the onset of a COVIDification of all existence, a ‘sit-down, shut-up, do-as-you’re told’ way of operating, or at least of threatening to operate. Needless to say, perhaps, but much that ought to ‘go without saying’ these days must be constantly stated, since otherwise the very idea doesn’t exist. BTR agrees wholeheartedly with Giorgio Agamben. The entire established account of the origins of a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus at the end of 2019 is, put most charitably, vague and nonsensical.
Furthermore, and most critically, at each stage of official response to the SARS-CoV-II pandemic, clinically ridiculous and grossly negligent practices predominated: masking, the practical banning of Ivermectin, the mass imposition of barely-tested inoculations that might have devastating public health consequences; in these and other instances, the Standard Operating Procedure was false in its justification and pernicious in its results. BTR #9 will have the first of many investigations of COVID’s origins and operational protocols. Along similar lines, next issue also includes a review of the little masterpiece, “COVID, Tango, & the Lagom Way,” a documentary that examines the Swedish success story about which most headlines tell one demonstrable lie after another, ha ha.
Along with Agamben, another beneficent interloper into the thickets of today’s episode is in some sense an acquaintance of my ex-wife and former brother in law, a Chilean privileged genius, who wields his well-heeled status in favor of the social equality on which human survival depends. Pablo Larrain, pronounced ‘La-Ra-Aign,’ has just released another sparkling gem of a film, El Conde, or The Count, a Southern Hemispheric exercise in a kind of Documentary Fiction.
The movie’s protagonist is a bloodsucking brother of Augusto Pinochet. The import of this story in my life is impossible to overstate. Francine Prose presents one of her typically incisive and interesting dissections of a cultural phenomenon like Larrain’s new movie in a recent New York Review of Books article, that publication of course a lifeline to ‘the good liberals’ out there.
Not having seen the film yet, nor having ever set foot in the entirety of Hispanic America South of Mexico, how can I know the deep knowing in El Conde? The answer is that the actual golpa, the initiation of mass murder at the behest of the imperial leadership of Kissinger and Nixon, happened as I was embarking on my intellectual life as a conscious Marxist, in my junior year at Harvard, with my empathetic Hegelian tutor. Even then a broader reader than average, I took in authoritative accounts, from socialist and other grassroots reporters on the ground, about the planned promotion of butchery in Santiago so as definitively to destroy any specter of even a possibility of revolutionary social transformation in favor of equality.
In many ways, these unfolding eventualities demarcate epic yarns of our epoch’s warp and woof, as it were. To an extent, they show up in All God’s Cousins. Whatever the case may be, accounts of empire and the struggle against it here in the Americas, including in relation to Salvador Allende’s assassination so as to ‘save Chile from communism,’ are forthcoming in April’s issues, with an examination, as an overview, of Southwest Asia’s many hot messes to appear next month along with the first couple of COVID contextualizations.
So, what about today’s issue? Well might we start by quoting Professor Frankfurt’s little jewel, On Bullshit. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. (Yet) we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. …In other words, we have no theory” of bullshit to guide us.
In the terms that the emeritus academic lays out, no current conversation demarcates manure with such comprehensive precision as does ‘public discussion’ of so-called LGBTQ issues. Today’s BTR leaps into that fraught fray with a piece about how Bruce became Caitlyn in part as a result of public relations campaigns to support this sort of bodily choice, in effect centering as ‘social justice’ this bastion of privilege, the capacity to ‘live as another gender.’
Following this foray into the gender wars, later in the mix a fun little nugget of sexy history comes to the fore that completely unravels much thinking about America’s ‘halcyon’ past of prudent, or perhaps prudish, chastity. Whereas ‘free love’ for most people suggests hippies and relatively recent American counterculture, the roots of the idea are ancient, what with universal practice of group marriage and all such blah blah blah. In this vein, today’s first piece about the Oneida community’s evolution, near the center of ‘Victorian America’s’ Yankee heartland, must seem suggestive indeed.
Sex and its relational attributes, in any event, will ever remain close to the central beating heart of Big Tent Review, as ongoing fictional installments make more or less graphically clear. Of course, too, Winter’s profferals will always include a new piece of erotica, while the rest of the year at least one item a month along those lines will appear. So saying, in the event, none of what might pass for smut in these pages will ever glorify pain or domination or anything more akin to kink that healthy appetite. Sex, all on its own, is plentiful beyond measure in meeting our wanting ways, whether as concerns my own thoughts and observations, or, especially as well, from a feminist or female point of view, in which a woman’s agency leads the way as in today’s little naughty jewel.
In the meantime, today’s third-of-fourth part of BTR’s web origin series, although it examines the continuing luster of flesh and betting online, especially focuses on the economic causes of AOL’s emerging atop capital’s heap only to face one of the more precipitous falls in all the annals of bourgeois society’s latest toying with the newest version of technique in order to salvage capitalism itself from the routine wreckage of its seemingly irresistible cycles. Whatever the case may be, ‘casino capitalism’ does obviously persist a quarter century hence, both in the ‘markets’ for equities hither and yon and in every click of our mouses on our collective cursors as we surf the net’s never ending tsunamis of glitchy, glitzy frenzy.
Today’s final portal reveals the middle part of a first BTR delineation about the false ‘racial’ categories that commonly trip off the lips of corporate commentators and entrepreneurial pundits so as to explain why things are the way that they are. Undoubtedly, unfortunately, accurate contextualization is no more possible from surreal nonsense than is baking tasty pie crust from sandy beachhead leavings of ground quartz.
Issue Number Eight’s grammatical analysis is the first of two pieces that circumscribe the fundamental building block of linguistic meaning, the clause. As a language, English has one of the best approaches for managing multilevel complexity within the bounds of a single sentence, a process that in some ways begins and ends with clauses.
Thus, we’ve arrived again at the culmination of internal summary and hopefully wonderful nuggets that each Introduction here includes. Outside the bounds of the juxtaposition of documentation and yarn-spinning that goes on in each BTR process, ‘life goes on,’ as my Mother liked to say.
I can’t resist sharing a snippet therefrom, yet another wholly unexpected encounter in the erupting here and now, this time with one whom I’ve been calling ‘Boris, the giant flying black bear beast.’ Last month, having just completed bedding down BTR #7, I was headed home from my studio on a moon-drenched night, coasting at a languid fifty miles per hour down from the Tanyard Gap summit around 10:30 on January second toward home and bed.
On the periphery of my vision to the right, suddenly, loomed up what at first looked similar to a massive flapping empty leaf bag, an apparition that, as it took clearer shape directly in front of Black Beauty, turned out to have the churning chubby legs of a huge bear shape with which, physics being the inexorably logical force that it is, I soon collided with a resounding ‘thump’ that ‘shivered me timbers’ and came close to stopping my Subaru in its tracks.
In the event, my radiator exploded as the bonnet imploded and ‘Boris’ loped off down the hill pulling pieces of embedded Subie from its hide, where, packing an enhanced-ordnance .38 pistol, the bear hunter who stopped to assist me found them strewn about, no sign of blood, no indication of an injured large mammal except in the grill of Black Beauty, where tufts of charcoal fur clung in the interstices of fractured plastic and indented steel.
People who don’t acknowledge the part of chance have never gotten out much, or at least that would be my best guess, ha ha. Then again, every miraculous eruption of random happenstance can feel, if not fated, at least a destined choice. One friend suggests that the great monstrous beast, careening down the hillside to leap in the air in my path, was a messenger from the Great Goddess to whom I have been praying, assiduously, for a loving partner’s presence in my life.
I have no idea. What I do know is that the entire experience, so like other twists and turns in my existence, combines the utterly odd with the absolutely unexpected: I mean, deer, okay but not the other chief predator in this system, none other than an uninvited guest appearance by a gigantic organic instance of Ursus Americanus. Of course, my whole life has been like that, about which more will inevitably be forthcoming, no matter the tangled thickets in which I find myself, in similar fashion as what is already here mirrors my earlier incarnations on all my trajectories to the Winter of 2024, ha ha.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
Just as I can claim no credit for whatever spooky congruence marks a likely perception of reality in regard to an array of randomly plucked explanatory cards, so too is the narrative arc of falling cards’ sequence outside anything even approximating my personal imprimatur as a storyteller. In Tarot, as in poker, ‘the cards speak’ is apt, even if in the case of the Goddess’ interventions, dialectically opposed expressions can coexist.
That potential for concomitant plausibility of polar opposition appeared in a recent spread that I plucked for what we might call a 'social client.' My standard shtick is none the less true for being a formula: I claim no credit; I'm uncertain what occurs, although, for myself, something does happen, if only 'food for thought,' provocative and evocative always. The upshot of the Tarot portal is that the seeker is the guide: I don't know the question—I insist on this; after I clear the deck, the questioner's heart comes through her hands, the inquirers heart comes through his fingertips; only the one on the quest can ascertain whether to take the session with a ‘grain of salt’ or to see some universal resonance in the experience’s particular cosmic ‘grain of sand.’
In the event, I served as interlocutor to ‘Deidre,’ at Asheville’s Dobra Tea House, truly a ‘cosmically groovy’ venue and hence not part of my normal course of doing business, LOL! She plucked a Spiral Spread that describes, at minimum, a delicious narrative arc, one which, in addition, illustrates the paradoxical potential of the entire Tarot process.
The Essence manifested The World’s magnificence, meaning that I cautioned against too much satisfaction in such a bonus pluck, one which we will nonetheless see has two polarized possible meanings. The Past Influences, Present Pass, and Likely Future Developments cards followed, respectively the Nine of Pentacles’ justifiable pride, the Six of Swords’ cognitive easing, both of which are two-sided, and Judgment’s decidedly dual potential for the getting-what-one-deserves dynamic that must ever delineate desserts.
The Page of Wands showed up in the No-Matter-What, Opportunities position, the one placement in the mix that is only possible to interpret in some type of fairly positive fashion. Problems & Prospects then emerged with its clearly amoral application of mental mastery’s guile, wit, tact, diplomacy and other tricky cognitive capacities, the essential ‘sneakiness,’ for good and ill alike, of the Seven of Swords.
Finally, then, as a Synthesis, the Two of Wands appeared, with its early validation of a creative idea or venture, with plentiful potential not to achieve such beneficent prognosis’ completion, as it were. Mostly, this paradoxical upshot comes about as a result of the inherent human ‘creative personality’s’ inevitable likelihood, at least occasionally, to let optimism trump diligent awareness.
How might we view, as a narrative spinning of a complete yarn, most clearly the apparent contradictions in interpretation that are possible here? Doing that will accomplish much of the task of delineating how and why Tarot and its ‘mantic arts’ might salubriously serve to sustain human thriving and survival. (continued below the PayWall)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(Having served up an initial profferal of nerdy analysis in Chapter VII, a Documentary Fiction instantiation of ‘Lit-Crit-Shit,’ we now return to the narrative flow of characters whose trajectories are impelling them toward unavoidable encounters with Lou James, whose life course is the central thread in the sprawling yarn of All God’s Cousins. Here, we meet the youthful Alyson, she who would in less than a decade-and-a-half coauthor the children whom Lou would father. She herein remembers and explicates core experiences that would drive her from her native Michigan, ultimately to her Dixie conjunction with AGC’s chief interlocutor of this complicated ‘hero’s journey.’)
CHAPTER VIII
She hadn’t counted the tips. She feared that her fingers would simply drop the crumbled bills. The ache in her hands and shoulders and neck felt as if someone were randomly tightening and untightening knots at all the pressure points in her head and upper extremities.
Lower down, she had essentially lost all feeling, unless she tried to move, in which case the sensation approximated having someone drive a hot wire into her nerve endings. How she had finished her first shift at such draconian drudgery without collapsing was simply one of those ineffable questions that one would never answer; natural opiates that she’d recently learned the body produces sounded plausible and in any case brought a smile to her lips.
“None to speak of.” This had been Alyson’s answer to each initial interview query.
That had been three weeks ago. “So what experience do you have as a waitress?” Valerie Chung’s voice was all American, even if she was her mother’s daughter, squat and olive-complected, with every feature of her face fully Chinese.
“Well, what about Chinese food then?” She’d arched her left eyebrow.
“In retail, perhaps?” She smiled encouragingly after yet another one of Alyson's no-equivalents. “Or at least in ‘customer service,’ “ she’d inquired, her hands marking the phrase in air-quotes.
The reply was the same. “Well what is this that you won’t speak of then?” Her tone wasn’t exactly frustrated, but definitely inquisitive.
“I’ve got two older brothers who order me around,” a slight lie since Mitchell was by now four years gone, “and a younger sister and brother who treat me like they’re my elders. It’s a lot like serving people.” She laughed, not too harshly, but not with anything like a genteel intonation either.
Young Valerie, her entrepreneurial Nationalist-Chinese parents’ manager and factotum in what they had advertised as “Western Metro Detroit’s first experience of fine Mandarin and Cantonese dining,” laughed at that as well, before returning to the attack: “Why in the world would you want to work here? You couldn’t possibly know…”
Alyson cut her off. She was having one of her ‘intuitive flashes;’ her father—“at least I’m dad’s favorite” was her favorite dig against the siblings whom she labeled “the gang of four”—had been a dandy instructor about negotiating from “a listening and watchful place.” “Listen, would you like a cigarette?”
When Valerie drew back, but then smiled and said, “Why, yes! I would like a smoke,” Alyson grinned unreservedly and lit a Winston for both of them.
She continued, “Well, you see, I can’t live at home anymore, and I hate college worse than busting my butt; it’s so pointless.” She could tell that the young Ms. Chung heard what she was saying, so she persisted. “I read the ads and figured, ‘hey, I can hustle and take a lot of grief, I’m scrawny but pretty sturdy, why not give it a try?’” Again, she smiled widely when she noticed that her interviewer was nodding.
All fifty-two of the servers—a ‘lucky number,’ according to father Chung, fifty-two, as in a pack of playing cards; like a fair number of Detroit’s Chinese community, who had known Mrs. Chiang Kai Shek herself and been part of her coterie, he liked to play bridge —‘trained’ for free, excepting very tight-fisted tips, at a family and Chinese community banquet, respectively, on Thursday and Friday, June 17 and 18. Everything had gone perfectly those first two nights, "the easy ones" according to the owners, although the erstwhile employees themselves might have had a different interpretation of both the ease and the perfection given Mama Wei Chung’s expression, all matronly smiles for her friends and relations, unblinking, unsmiling, and tight-lipped with her staff as she watched over every detail from her outpost between the kitchen and the immense, half acre main dining area.
The venue for this venture in what she was soon terming 'Chinese work ethics' was far from prepossessing, what with the garish red and green and magenta sign that blared, Mama Chung’s: GOURMET CHINESE!! in front of the warehouse-sized floor that had two hundred twelve four top tables. Nonetheless, lined up hordes from all the environs near Twelve-Mile Road, who had apparently been hungering for ‘authentic Mandarin cuisine,’ snaked in a frenetic queue out of sight round the back of the shopping center on the nineteenth, as Alyson's bus rolled up to its mark and disgorged its gulping erstwhile waitress. "What a night," she reflected on her trek back to a berth with her sister.
She pondered, almost in a dream state. The Saturday opening had certainly flown by, so quickly that aching misery remained at bay, from Alyson’s arrival outside the tacky strip-mall façade to the moment, just two hours and forty-nine minutes after the last time that she checked her watch for the first time that evening, toward the clean-up end of things when the haze of pain and fatigue from her first wage-earning effort was beginning to grab hold of her: like a "cop trained to torture" was how she put it in the event.
As her home stop came into view in the headlights, she glanced down once more to note that the hour was now a single minute past two-thirty in the morning. "Time flies when you're having fun," she giggled: then, “The last bus to Tombstone,” she said in her head.
She continued her inner ruminations. “So, up to eleven minutes till closing, I was rocking and rolling,” she quipped internally, with the sassiest tilt of her head that she could manage as she stood with a tiny groan.
“Oh, Christ,” she said aloud. Her canvas shoes, sensible flats though they were, almost but not quite brimmed with blood from the blistered soles and insteps and toes that protruded from her legs like so many random appendages of raw meat. Her equally sensible white knee socks had wicked up the fluid, red, tinged with yellow, from below, so that flaming tentacles protruded up from her ankles toward her shins. She felt a little sick as she reconnoitered where exactly she stood in the world, other than on a Southeast Michigan Transportation Area bus coming up to Farmington Hills.
She knew, for example, but for her generally favorable attitude toward marijuana, her fanatical desire for mushrooms and the company of boys, and her disinclination “to study bullshit and parrot half-baked theories of nothing,” as she had termed her Business Administration classes at Fremont College, “a highly selective four year liberal-arts institution that prepares its matriculants for leadership in the world of government and business and education,” according to its own estimate, that she could still have occupied her own room at home instead of having to shack up with her “arrogant-prick-of-a-sister” Beth, who was only fifteen and insufferable. Alyson had graduated from Farmington Hills’ High with slightly above average grades a year before, when she was only sixteen.
“It was either that,” she’d explained to her mentor and guide at Fremont, Ricardo, “or kill myself, or everybody else in my household, or both.” High school was even pettier and less pretty than college.
Her parents were both, at a minimum, incipient alcoholics but hated “drugs”…(continued below the PayWall)
Wood Words Essays—Five New Instances of Iconic Items
Alicia delivered. One of the items that she’d undertaken, a fourth “Seasons Box,” will need some filler, given my horror vacui, my ‘fear of empty spaces’ in the composition, an attitude that my ex to some extent shares but which she has ignored in order to make her preferred hourly rate. In general, the austerity of the modern is completely missing from Marshall Arts’ bits and pieces. The complicated and multi-tiered ideas that appear on the work make relatively straightforward a process of packing in new details, either realistic or symbolic, so that the surfaces of these three dimensional canvases simply brim with incidents and notions, with depictions and icons of one sort and another.
The new “Seasons Box” message is illustrative. “From Welcome Rains & Melting Snows, Spring’s Torrential Freshets Cascade Grinning Greens That Inaugurate Summer’s Searing Salubrious Succor, Which Then Blossoms to Plumb Gaia’s Autumnal Harvest in All Its Fecundity of Fruitful Plenty, From Which Flows in Winter’s Frigid, Windy, White & Wispy Blizzard of Bare Necessity, Awaiting Anew the Vernal Return’s Eternal Renewal."
A first-among-equals conceptualization, meanwhile, much more a philosophical incarnation of agency in the face of fate’s implacable substrate, has been languishing unfinished for over a year now, on a magnificent found-item from Alicia’s former arts-nonprofit employer, an instance of cast-aside fire fuel driftwood. Its resonance with much of the sense of potent intention and elective purpose that today’s BTR encompasses is, simply put, perfectly in tune.
“Life’s Longest Sojourn Starts With a Birth That One Does Not Plan & Finishes With a Death That, Under Standard Circumstances, One Does Not Invite; in Between Emerge the Daunting Difficulties, the Crazed Concatenations, the Somehow Both Sublime & Mundane Scenes of Everyday Routine, Inevitably Arenas of Ongoing Action & Potentially, Quite Reasonably, Realms of Useful Or Even Critical Choice Where, Just Possibly, One May Discover a Path, Full of Honorable & Passionate Purpose, That One Desires to Pursue.” In the Grateful Dead’s iconic “Ripple,” one finds echoes of a Marshall Arts imitation of life’s simulacrum of artistic majesty: “There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow—that path is for your steps alone.”
I call the sacred emplacement of my humble tented presence on Hot Springs and other streets a Feral Nerd Performance Space, a place in which clear traces of humanity’s racing endeavors brace the mind to consider our social collectivity in ways that are congruent with a new New York Review of Books account about Kevin Mitchell’s new monograph, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. The review quotes the author as he is insisting how we should examine “fundamental truths of our existence” in choosing, deciding, and acting.
“If science,” he begins with added emphasis, “seems to be suggesting otherwise, the correct response is not to throw up our hands and say, ‘Well, I guess everything we thought about our own existence is a laughable delusion.’ It is to accept instead that there is a deep mystery to be solved,” a not altogether unfathomable harbor of clear and novel contextualization despite “the apparent determinism of the physical universe.”
An essential element of Marshall Arts messages, after all, is that nihilism is not only maladaptive and fruitless, an evolutionary freak as it were, but that this eschewing of meaning is also provably false, that life from its most primal forms to its human faces retraces afresh paths of purpose that all creatures, great and small, in some sense will always ‘desire to pursue.’ Undoubtedly, the fine line between fate’s teleology and a ‘rationally purposive’ pursuit of matters not yet in evidence demarcates a delectable dance, the ‘delicate miracle of embodiment’ writ large… (continued below the PayWall)
Empowered Political Forays—Caitlin’s Campaign: Surreal, Not Real
Just as so often will be the case in these occasional ‘Popular Topix’ installments of this ‘Empowered’ section’s thinking, so too in this inaugural instance we would do well to remember Harry Frankfurt’s pointed opening to his essay, On Bullshit. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory” of bullshit to guide us.
Frankfurt’s explication of the ‘theory of bullshit’ will serve us well today, as we consider what one stalwart defender of advertising and monopoly media called “The Making of Caitlyn Jenner: A Media Campaign Like No Other.” The author described simply what was “(t) he goal: To make it possible for Bruce Jenner to live normally, and perhaps even profit from, his new identity as Caitlyn Jenner.”
How this concerns bullshit is simple. Varied cases of the framing of Jenner’s decision have used descriptors such as courage, commitment, human rights, determination, and freedom, among other fashionable phrasings of identity and individualism. At best, such characterizations tell barely half the story, and precisely this partiality and selective focus are the prototypical attributes of propaganda and other aspects of contemporary public relations and purposefully mediated bullshit.
Before unfolding the brief that constitutes the fleshing out of this relatively simple concept, i.e., ‘Caitlyn Jenner’s reinvention = bullshit,’ we would do well to recognize a few things that this missive is not. It in no way disrespects the possibility or choice of transgendered ‘identity,’ whatever in the biosocial universe such a notion amounts to; it does not criticize or cast aspersions at Jenner hermself, or at the former Jenner himself; it does not question the right of anyone to make such choices.
But it fiercely disputes the celebration of celebrity culture and the elevation of incredibly marginal social phenomena to the absolutely central, obsessively and strategically so, spectacle that the whole affair has become; furthermore, it takes issue with imperious and arrogantly certain naming practices, pronomial and otherwise. Its stalwart critique, today at any rate, stems from four central points, and one intellectual concept, though with even a modicum of additional attention, the entire assessment could easily expand to cover many a monograph of social deconstruction.
To inaugurate this discussion, one might focus on data about just how widespread anything that we might call transgendered life and consciousness is. …(continued below the PayWall)
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(continued)
PART EIGHT(Our characters, both the bruiser Bates and the Bard Hawkins, have seen and heard the parameters—in essence, expanding BSE destruction of food sources and, on top of that, general ecological decimation—that have bound their fated binding together in some competitive contest to see which of the duo might help demarcate a path to tomorrow. One of this pair, with Dr. Winston’s oversight and the enforced constraints of the technical context, will select a way to determine a winning player in this new and deadly version of a ‘Zero Sum Game.’ The coin toss was ready to happen at the culmination of the previous section.)
At my shrug, the big golden plug launched toward the ceiling, and, even as I spat with disgust at my opportunism and my longing to live through anything, no matter the ethical aspects of the deal, I said "Heads!" with a lot more intensity than I'd intended.
No matter the bonds of inherent possibility or impossibility, though, every moment appears to contain the potential for the unlikely outcome. How could mere mammals have replaced the dinosaurs without the happenstance of a hurtling asteroid? How can a closet chemist create a more melodious buzz than the most recently manufactured version of FanTCX? How could a non-martial opponent outduel a muscle-bound monster in hand to hand combat? How could simple
cleverness outwit a certified expert in a contest of skill? Whatever the answer to such questions, they invoke the necessity of a careful decision, not the fateful adherence to a choice of necessary nuance.
"Heads it is!!" Doc barely glanced at Norman; was that a knowing leer that our dribbling host favored me with? I'm both superstitious and paranoid, but I would definitely bet, even money, that some elements of the entire set-up were completely worked out in advance.
My breath felt stuck, my guts roiled, and, though I hadn't a clue what I might do next, I felt the familiar rush of victory that comes with the victimization that we so frequently visit on each other.
"Yes! Heads it is," Doc repeated, lowering his voice. "And you, good Tom, must now 'choose your weapons,'" he intoned, enunciating each of the last three words, before concluding, with a slight smile, "as it were."
Yes, indeed. My head buzzed with articulation. "Clearly, I cannot hope to emerge the victor-who-may-hope-for-continued-life if I challenge Norman physically. Such a suicide might represent an interesting literary device, moral choice, or ethical point, but my response is 'Fuck that!'" This, and other thinking akin to it, skipped through my head as I contemplated this surreally bizarre and twisted situation that, ever the pragmatic opportunist, I was dealing with as a zero-sum game that I intended to win.
So some contest of skill must be what I select. …(continued below the PayWall)
Old Stories, & New
Faith, Bad Faith, & the Catholic Church, Or, How I Masturbated My Way to Mental Health
(We had left our narrator, about to wash down the drain a palpably adult stench of sweat and testosterone, on the cusp of his coming-of-age shower. A sleepy, sultry San Antonio Saturday summoned nature’s course.)
…Nothing I knew previously prepared me for the fiery ecstasy of achieving my first climax under an, at least for a while, fierce and fiery stream of water. Not even a shadow of memory remained of any infant erection I experienced. And although my brother, the Blassingame brothers, and I had cavorted like little sodomists four years earlier, on an outing into the woods just after my parents divorced, the little boy boners of that episode were barely as palpable as my fingers. Nor had my nine-year-old escapades contained anything of the heady, superheated carnality of what I felt in the bathroom the week that I turned thirteen.
The cicadas droned like a chorus against the afternoon’s miasmic heat. My sisters played together in their room. My brother was off somewhere, making money and getting into trouble(delivering marijuana and worse on his precociously acquired motor-scooter, supposedly). My mom was on the phone and in a good mood; confession, on this particular Saturday, had affirmed something sublime for her. Whatever problems afflicted our rental house, the adequacy of the water heater was not one of them. It reliably put out a parboiling stream, which would last as much as half an hour.
I focused on how large and rubbery my penis had become, and sense impressions from any other point of reference began to slip away. I held my breath as I gyrated my hips and made it graze first one thigh and then the other. A low chortle emerged unbidden from deep in my chest, and I drew back the plastic curtain and let the whooshing mist bubbling forth from the tub envelope me.
A routine had defined every shower I took until that instant. Starting with my feet, the cleansing would proceed upward until the shampoo rinsed down the drain from my hair. In this instance, however, I rubbed soap right into my groin first, the increasing luxuriance of pubic hair there providing the perfect brush to raise slickening suds.
As has happened on so many occasions that I’ve stumbled on knowing already long discovered, I felt a swelling pride at the novelty of my innovation, in this instance of my swelling tissue. I might almost have said to myself, “Well then, no one could have ever discovered anything quite so clever as this.”
In the event, my adroit fingers probed and stroked, my scrotum’s contraction a palpable pinch as my throbbing penis, like a fresh out-of-the-frying-pan jumbo sausage, still sizzling from the grease, pointed out and up as if it were Satan’s spear.
My head seemed so light, I felt certain I was either about to float or fall. So I lay on my back in the tub, the shower’s warm tempest meeting the boiling juices rising from inside of me.
“So this is what he means!” I thought about Father O’Brien’s query as I alternately squeezed, kneaded, and flipped myself this way and that. “OI’m ‘touchin’ meself’ now,” my imagined brogue bringing a cackle to my lips. …(continued below the PayWall)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated
Today’s selection offers up a sixth and final thread of an initial ‘fairy tale’ recontextualization, with only a denouement to come, a stab at storytelling that reveals in such ancient yarns connecting layers, perhaps, of the entire fabric of mythos and psyche and human awareness.
Little Red(an old tale in new garb)(Continued from #7)
(We’ve left Red in the thrall of a longstanding question that young women have been posing for many, many generations in our patriarchal pass, to wit, ‘Should I plight my troth with a particular fellow?’ She has been fulfilling her timebound duty to fashion a womanly cape according to sacred ways of working. Having managed it, she seeks, in a sacrosanct ceremony of fire and rebirth, assistance in answering her query.)
CHAPTER SIX— — —Her steps among the half-clad trees revealed the path that only she had followed, many meters into the woods until nothing of town or human life remained, though the light from Luna's fullest gleaming cast shadows wherever the trunks of the early-shedding species, the oaks and the sweet-gums, stood thick together, like a pack of wooden boys who had dropped their clothing for a midnight run that they would always be ready to make but on which they would never embark.
Without thought or plan, she soon found herself beneath the boughs of a great, overhanging spruce, its long needles silky black and as good at hiding the moonglow as the oaks were at revealing it. Still, after a few moments of panicky inhalations against the cold and dark, she could begin to see. Soon enough, the spot, almost like a little fireplace or shallow oven, in the enfolding legs of the giant pine's roots revealed itself, darker from soot stains than even the already charcoal hue of the tawny midnight bark in front of her nose.
Gathering leaves and twigs and other likely dry pieces of tinder was as easy as stretching out her hands. Here in the folds of the forest, the wind only rarely spat more than a mere puff, so, following the ritual's rules literally, her two matches should be plenty to accomplish her mission, if indeed the goddess and all the other forces of the world wanted her to be in union with the burly and good-natured Sam. Although her loss of her cape had indeed resulted purely from accident, instead of the artifice with which other girls often tried to put off too enthusiastic or somehow unwanted beaus, the rite remained the same when one of those boys persisted and the girl decided to consider him as a mate in spite of her initial unwillingness.
If a swatch of the newly-woven garment, at least the size of both of a maiden's hands, did with no more than two matches burn to ash, then a match with the fellow in question would keep the girl warm for at least a few long Winters and a few good Summers. Though Little Red was very dubious, she wanted to give the elements--the parts of the world that we cannot see or sense properly but that so often seem to guide the hand of fate--an opportunity to speak to her.
She had made sure that she had selected dry exemplars of the precious horde of matches that her mother kept in a cool, dry corner opposite their own little hearth. The stillness of the night was so deep that her own quickened shallow gasps were akin to gales. Nonetheless, as she placed kindling so as to catch fire with a blazing rush, and placed atop this fuel the red cloth shot through with gold and silver which she imagined seeing sparkle in the gloom, Little Red was certain that Luna would snuff out the flames of the firesticks with which she would attempt to turn her cloth into cinders.
The sunny explosion when once Little Red struck the stick against a rock nearly blinded her, causing a reflex that might have let to the combustion of the entire forest floor, things were so dry. In the event, she held onto her burning flash, and in a whoosh her bitty stove caught fire when she touched the flame to the tinder below the piece of her cloak. As she held her breath, in a few seconds the fingers of fire had grasped hold of the now thoroughly red and gold piece of wool, and before she could properly draw air into her body again, the cloth had disappeared in a heated rush of fiery fury. …(continued below the PayWall)
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—VII
(Succeeding again in beating our innocent hero senseless, the conspirators find themselves facing a decidedly daunting path, if only psychologically. In order to fulfill Sir Robert’s murderous mandates, they must cross through Faeries’ Glen, a spooky spot that Ricky Wilder finally sputters out is decidedly horrifying to all of them. Perhaps some more or less gruesome haunting is at hand. We’ll see.)
Having regained his wind, having contained his own throbbing, bleeding, swelling bruises and lost tissue and sinew, and having even more firmly settled on his insistence that his wayward offspring witness the summary execution of her lover, Sir Robert's reply resumed his imperious briskness. "What utter nonsense;" he flicked his gloves dismissively. "Leaving aside the heresy inherent in your foolhardy fears, I presume that I needn't remind anyone present that all actions, all choices, carry with their selection detectable consequences."
The oft-described spineless timidity of the Anglo-Irish peasantry and lower gentry, so much idealistic hot air for the most part, was not a prime factor in leading these now no-longer-sodden and, increasingly, sorrowful trekkers to flinch acceptance of Sir Robert's off-handed threat, nor did the aforementioned tendency toward dimwitted overoptimism come into play here. Nay, matters much more real and material led this sad and weary threesome to nod agreement to what they so loathed, even as they intuited their doom in bending to their better's whim and will.
Morgan's paltry income, for example, the smallest reduction of which would certainly cast him into the charnel pit of the laboring masses, depended in large part on Sir Robert's willingness to lease from him land that he didn't need, of a quality barely fit for pasturage and a rate at least a bit higher than the market commanded. And the Wilder clan almost entirely subsisted on their substandard farming of 'Fat Bob's" holdings which many a more diligent and skillful and hopeful cohort of yeoman might be happy to rent on terms slightly more favorable to our forceful landlord.
So the three acceded to Sir Robert's demands, bundling the seemingly already half-dead and decidedly still unconscious Jack in the back of a formidable hay wagon that they drove or in which they rode, while lithe Martin "scouted ahead" on his steed, a mission that his trio of hapless comrades—even relatively slow Billy Wilder—knew would be the last they saw of the astute gambler this night. That even their dour estimation in this regard would turn out to be optimistic, they did not yet foresee. …(continued below the PayWall)
Nerdy Nuggets—A Mid-American Free Love Extravaganza
The Oneida ‘Free Love’ Community & Its Meaning
The integrity of the past consists of two things simultaneously. The first are the interrelated intersections that defined particular historical interstices as some component of a fleeting dynamic of All-That-Is; in other words, this past really did happen. The second is the ineluctable fact that this procession of history’s annals has yielded today as clearly as our great grandparents yielded us.
Of possibly especial import, in such a process of recognition, would be examining those specific components of passing sets of phenomena, in this case the marriages and erotic entanglements of a small group of religious zealots, that had little or no impact on popular awareness at that time other than to foment scandal. While the proselytizing and practices were largely ignored, at one and the same time multiple non-sequiturs and falsehoods occupied common consciousness in regard to women and sexuality, clinging to people’s apparent beliefs as irresistibly as the scent of a nasty fart occupies one’s nose for a time.
Without likely counterexample, such ‘passing phenom sets’ as these must axiomatically include any sphere or eventuality in which sex shame or other negative beliefs about our animal natures hold sway, the aforementioned falsity and nonsense. No excerpt from American history more clearly and comprehensively illustrates this truism than does the four decades of John Noyes’ working with his comrades to form the erotic and material communism of the Oneida experiment.
Thus, a scholar from Syracuse, in an issue of the University’s Library Journal, has proffered a pithy way to ponder the Oneida Community’s contemporary relevance. “I am drawing upon twenty-five years of reflection on the Oneida Community to present what to me have been some of the most salient issues raised by the Oneida experiment, which may have implications for dealing with our present sense of crisis in community life and relations between the sexes."
Overview
These long ago visionaries and iconoclasts and entrepreneurs and joyous, loving, seeking Homo Sapiens were not anticipating us, however. They were responding to the disconnects and contradictions and possibilities and inadequacies that marked their own life and times.
Obviously then, this briefing about John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community and the marital, family, and social practices of these forbears from almost two hundred years back starts, descriptively, in those long gone days. Oneida’s place on the planet, and the people who defined it, existed at a fiery time in America’s past—antislavery activism was erupting throughout New England and New York; an often volcanic ‘Great Awakening’ was unfolding in real time. To a large extent, general political tensions about ‘the usual suspects’ of immigration, industrialization, and other aspects of class conflict were, to state matters mildly, volatile indeed.
At that time, in the late 1830’s, as Noyes was preparing fully to embrace a Perfectionist spirituality that promoted radical social thinking, he wrote to the iconic abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison. “Noyes described the various social evils destroying American society and characterized the United States government as 'a bloated, swaggering libertine, trampling on the Bible; its own Constitution; its treaties with the Indians; the petitions of its citizens: with one hand whipping a negro tied to a liberty-pole, and with the other dashing an emaciated Indian to the ground.' Noyes predicted the divinely ordained overthrow of the corrupt, hypocritical nation, but he could not say how this would happen.”
In the 1840’s, primed for his fierce belief in somehow perfecting himself and others despite an alcoholic, violent father, he successfully enlisted his mother and sisters and their husbands to join him in his community-building attempts near his Vermont homeplace. He married a woman who had also become an adherent and was patronizing his spiritual journalism. When this core congregation of plus or minus a score of followers together came to the conclusion that open relationships, what Noyes termed Complex Marriage, would be their choice, they found themselves outcast.
Noyes development as a thinker, meanwhile, led him to emphasize the rejection of typical marriage relations even more insistently, despite such conflict and rejection. He and his cohorts gravitated to Central New York, a decision that a dissertation about Noyes and Oneida described in this way.
“Throughout much of the nineteenth-century, the region was ablaze with religiosity, earning it the nickname the 'burned-over district' because religion was so prevalent and strong that it burned over the area. Religious and utopian communities popped up all over, from the Great Lakes, across the Finger Lakes, and all the way to the Hudson River. Groveland, NY was the site of a small but important community of Shakers, three Owenite communities appeared between the 1820s and 1840s, and several Fourier phalanxes struggled to keep going. Several years before the arrival of Noyes, Joseph Smith proclaimed to have seen a vision of an angel and translated the Book of Mormon in Palmyra, and in 1844, the Millerites in Rochester were disappointed when Christ did not return as they had hoped. Noyes and his followers could not have picked a better location to begin building their community and begin realizing their social experiment.”
Although the Oneida Community’s ‘freely partnering’ ways lasted but a handful of decades, the few hundred members of the congregation for the most part found their ways commendable and joyous. Today’s essay, a first of two installments, considers Oneida’s experience on its own terms, with assessments as well of how we might make sense of this phenomenon in the context of ‘the bleakest love landscape in history.’ …(continued below the PayWall)
Communication & Human Survival—Web Roots & War & Porn, #3
Today’s installment in this four-part series examines the fiscal and social fallout of AOL’s fall from the top of capital’s heap, a seemingly irresistible and organically necessary assumption of bourgeois society’s cutting edge by that combination of physics and electricity and communication that underlie huge parts of modern social and economic existence. Not a pretty picture, this depiction demonstrates the undeniable cyclical pattern that new techniques always promise to eliminate and yet never do.
An overview of this dynamic of rising and falling, creation and destruction, the storied ‘boom and bust’ of capital’s five centuries of one ‘crisis’ after another, from the ‘tulip bubble’ to 2008, might read as follows. ‘In one way and another, whatever new thing that bourgeois practitioners proffer seems unerringly to rise to the highest levels of free-market socioeconomic schemes, consuming and subsuming all earlier methods and practices; these new waves, combining technique and hype, truly novel approaches and mere pretense, replace or consolidate the former market leaders, promising to avoid the pitfalls of the prior protocols and predatory potentates, only, often with astonishing rapidity, to succumb to the very crushing crashes that the ‘never-before-seen’ methodologies supposedly could finesse, forever.’
In any event, multiple expert analysts of business practice detected such a putative rubric of salvation as AOL rose from its less-than-humble origins of losing money hand over fist to become capital’s newest savior, in so doing undertaking the behemoth endeavor of swallowing Time-Warner, the pinnacle of the very media marketplace now at the center of the business class’ bourgeois existence. “As many as several thousand Internet firms received venture capital funding to pursue Get Big Fast (GBF). GBF was a single, prolonged bet on a future state of the world in which a select group of ‘winners’ would dominate the e-commerce landscape."
In this scheme of things, AOL would be the ‘big fish’ that swallowed other properties to end up atop the bourgeois heap, so to speak. At the same time, a more generous point of view about this process is also possible. David Kirsch and David Goldfarb, for example, in their “Small Ideas, Big Ideas, Bad Ideas, Good Ideas,” propose a model of emphasizing novel technological innovation as the key prime mover of Capital’s evolution generally.
In their way of thinking, the Internet phenomenon, whatever cyclical downturns’ inevitable expression, demonstrated viable business models in a basic marketplace sense. “Against a highly salient backdrop of destroyed market value, we interpret the high survival rate of dot-com firms to mean that many of the business ideas that flowered during the dot- com era were basically sound. In other words, good ideas were oversold as big ideas. Most Internet opportunities were of modest scale—often worth pursuing, but not usually worth taking public. Because most Internet business concepts were not capable of productively employing tens of millions of dollars of venture capital does not mean they were bad ideas."
In Battleground: the Media, on the other hand, contributors point out the irremediable loss of both participation and evenhandedness as huge conglomerates do what they need to do in order to pay for their conglomerating ways. The example of General Electric serves as an illustration. “NBC Universal contributes less than 10 percent of the total revenue of General Electric, but with a number of news outlets, among other things, NBC might be far more important to the parent company by helping shape public debate over contentious issues, such as militarism and energy production, through NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC. In 1987, for example, less than a year after the meltdown of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, NBC News aired an hour-long show entitled ‘Nuclear Power: In France It Works.’"
This volume is merely a first in an ongoing series about this key vector of influence in capital’s commodification and control of all of culture’s expression. The authors locate AOL’s ‘introduction to dot-com meltdown’ as one in a series of dozens of exemplary instances of this dynamic, of which GE is merely another case. For our BTR purposes, this process, and out assessment of it, proffers the potential to parse how coups become catastrophes and vice versa in capital’s concatenations of technical and cultural applications that serve primarily to keep money in the markets, and pockets, where the purveyors of the system intend the cash and prizes to remain. (continued below the PayWall)
Happy Union Grammar Nerds—A Pause to Ponder the Clause
Communication does not necessitate grammar. However, not to mention a universal access to comprehension, clarity and precision absolutely do necessitate the sorts of grammatical constructs that, so to speak, form a part of the Homo Sapiens cranial architecture.
At the heart of this innate wiring for ‘correct usage,’ at least in one sense, is the notion of a clause, each of which is akin to a container for a thought. Inasmuch as each sentence is, by definition, a complete thought, it must reveal a performer who or subject that, as a noun, makes complete, or otherwise carries forward, the action or being that the idea’s verb expresses. Whatever phrasing a sentence serves up, its clause or clauses intertwines with all the rest to make clear in the tangle both the actor and the action, as it were.
Here then, are working definitions. A clause is any collection of words, with both a subject noun and an action or being verb, that expresses a point. A dependent clause is one that cannot play the part, on its own, of articulating a sentence. An independent clause, therefore, is just such a linguistic conceptual construct, as it were.
At least vaguely, most everything that is possible to convey in speech and writing, through listening and reading, results from the operation of these ways of analyzing our sentences as exercises in either construction or deconstruction of both phrases and clauses. In this scheme, pretty figures of speech, generally for our purposes in the form of varying ways of phrasing English, provide decoration for and details about what each clause contains, something like the soul and power of a particular idea’s specific expression.
As will also be the case going forward, this initial venture into the ‘Land of Clause’ passes through the standard formatting, as defined above, into dependent and independent expressions thereof, on the one hand today through the magic of relative pronouns and on the other via the quotidian connectivity of the coordinating conjunctions. One beautiful capacity of English, a comely characteristic too, supposedly, of both Russian and Turkish, is permissive layering together and otherwise conjoining of entire strings of clausal things into whirling dervishes of subtly intoned shades of meaning. Thus, connecting tissues like the relative pronoun and coordinating conjunctions serve as tools and materials with which to build sentences.
Next month finishes this first pair of forays into ‘the kingdom of the clause’ with a look at the subordinating conjunctions, the conjunctive adverbs, and other methods for making clauses that carry meaning’s work. In ways that are invariably adaptive in an evolutionary sense, this handful or two of connective tissue options allow blending many ideas, often enough contradictory or at odds, into coherent and compelling memes, as it were.
Understanding such matters may rarely if ever rank high on any basic bambino’s bucket lists, yet for nerdy sorts, or people who practice punctilious speech acts, learning these things can reveal the hidden architectural mysteries of meaning that invariably underlie our articulate expression so as convey key nuggets of nuance en route to accurate assessment of what the speaker or writer intends to say.
Before we examine how the relative pronoun operates to blend ideas like a stew simmers its mix of ingredients, we ought perhaps first to note the most common members of this special grammatical breed. That and which, which themselves have both a loose and a stringent set of operating instructions, are the two leading lights of the relative pronoun universe, though who, whom, and whose are also exemplary. How does one make the list complete? (continued below the PayWall)
Erotic Snippets—”Consciousness & Chemistry”
The combination seems so simple, organic and obvious. All one needs to happen to inaugurate, and possibly instantiate, a bonded-pair, life-partnering love match is compatible cognitive and emotional congruence and chemical, alchemical carnal sparks. Today, dear Goddess, contextualizing such a circumscribing ‘consciousness and chemistry’ seems roughly as likely as a freak elephant with two heads and no anus, so it can only live if it can shit out of its own mouth. Ha ha.
The life cycle plays a role in these contemporary concatenations. If, through whatever combination of hard luck and lack of awareness, one cannot hold a bonded union together, then one faces a prospect of seeking to end a surcease of loving embraces as an elder. Just the thought brings a chuckle, as likely as not, at least from the guts of the tens of millions of lads and lasses who find themselves in such d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d or other, more organic and earthy, sundered straits. Yet, no matter the constrained hilarity that such seeking of renewed and rejuvenated congress might elicit, at age seventy, for example, as life and breath persist, so too in some measure does desire.
Such reflections are the easy part; we are all encountering “Life & Love & Art in the Time of COVID,” when yet more miraculous pharmaceutical monstrosities threaten to intercede even if two people, amazingly enough in itself, click in a slick and sweetly prickly manner. Whatever this element of things means, that summation simply cannot suggest a likely expansion of the ‘dating pool,’ in which easy meetings of the mind manifest so as to lubricate incantations of incarnate fleshly feasting.
That our Mr. Louis James delighted in his own ironies in this sphere did not somehow make easy his attempts to find true love, or at a minimum consistent mutual gratification. His heart would flutter on occasion, awaiting what he eventually formally prayed-for, begging the Goddess for miraculously unexpected conjunctions of metabolic melding and soulful intersection that could still, conceivably, vault him and a conscientiously cognizant collaborator—a woman who would scoff at mandates of masking and isolation—to the sort of everlasting interlinking that ‘happily ever after’ truly embodies, not some universal hunky dory but a persistent insistence on staying the course because doing so is part of what our humanity requires.
This interlude is not of that sort. Quite the contrary, Joanie, having clarified that her feelings for B.o.B. had revivified, had just scurried off on her final ‘Irish Exit.’ And the math of seven decades in the bank was easy to figure; Lou realized that ten more good years, juicy with jellied damsel delight, would be a marvel of magical magnificence. Thus, every month that he delayed in making some sort of connection, at least a chance to participate in a twirl around the floor to the music of ‘the only dance there is,’ was just shy of losing one percent of a hoped-for stipulation of love’s projected maximum ongoing ecstatic jubilation.
While ‘taking that kind of deleterious upshot lying down’ seemed nuts, Lou would laugh at least once a week about the inability of even a love-magician to cast a spell guaranteed to deliver an enamored sweetheart’s sweetly heated beastliness. “I might write a fairy tale about it, ha ha,” but irl such matters required something like a plan and real, if not altogether bold, action.
Since Unjected did not yet exist, and every other ‘dating site,’ without exception, “blew dead bears,” in Stevie-baby-Renahan parlance from college days, that left three obvious decent choices for a fellow who detested bars and drank at most a few beers a year. In the event, each of these methods delivered results, the wandering through local events—courtesy of Mountain Express, the Daily Planet, and other effluvia of ‘printed matter’ about Asheville—the matter at hand here in #8.
Paying attention to venues that he knew might present not just willing women, but females whose feelings about the world were neither fascist nor prudish, who were neither ‘vaccine Nazis’ nor insistent on PC uniformity, was a key element to this little endeavor, so he checked out all the listings that involved Firestorm Books, whose ‘subtitle’ tutored Lou’s heart and soul: “Collaboration, Connection, Collective Liberation.” The third entry that he found in ME at the West Asheville venue, erstwhile ‘revolutionary’ awareness in the thick of the local petty bourgeoisie’s favorite thickets of coffee and the cosmically groovy, seemed almost ideal.
‘Dating After 50,’ the header read, continuing with this quip that evoked Mencken’s sarcastic aplomb: “Safe Passage Through the Sahara of Eros’ Arts.” On his second visit, Angie, with whom he’d been exchanging some smoky glances’ glazed gazes, sauntered up to him, arms extended for the hug that he proffered, announcing as she centered their loins in her saunter, “I like how you smell!”
An hour later, a frost-bitten peck on the lips adieu ended with their tongues entwined like slippery otters in search of something meaty. Angie held his hand. “I’m just two blocks away.” They looked wide-eyed at each other. “You could walk me home.” …(continued below the PayWall)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A Biosocial Golden Rule: ‘We’re All Cousins, After All;’ Part Two
(“Plotting a Course From Kinship to Kindness," the original subtitle, might serve as ‘marching orders’ for a survivable humanity campaign. However one conceptualizes human relationship in the modern context, one must acknowledge at least a moderate sense of disconnection between biological ties and social mayhem. In other words, all about our fair globe, we’re murdering our close cousins whom we view as ‘others.’
This note, of which #8 provides the second piece, offers a way of thinking about such matters in a plausibly explanatory fashion. Like almost every entry in BTR, in some way of considering ‘how matters truly stand,’ this one stems in no small part from the mathematically and existentially incontrovertible truth, to wit that one cannot reasonably navigate one’s way to a true proposition about the realm of the real via false premises that we willfully and ignorantly elect so as to obfuscate reality in ways that, somehow, perversely, make us feel stronger and safer.)
In a 1959 interview for BBC, Carl Jung presented us with the fundamental rationale for today's narrative. "We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself . . . We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil." Of 'all God's dangers' that now threaten our collection of cousins today, few, if any, strike with more lethal force than our all too frequent obsession with 'race.'
INTRODUCTION
Joseph Graves might not be able to win a debate against either Cornell West or Manning Marable on style points, but the intellectual acuity of his critique surpasses all the finely turned phrases that these and other geniuses more rhetorically gifted have storehoused in their persuasive larders. His book, The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, gave me the intellectual ammunition to further my case about this matter.
As today's article unfolds itself in a reader's mind, I ask that they repeat the accurate notation that the title advances: "We're all cousins after all." Graves gives us a sturdy simple tool with The Race Myth, which he follows up with the expanded and updated The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. Matthew Hughey proffers an informative orientation to the path down which Graves wants to take us, and, quite plausibly, down which we had better move our fannies directly.
"Graves' work was written to dismantle the so-called scientific basis, for first, of the actual existence of race as a typology devoid of racist content and conjecture, and second, to expose the politically motivated ideological underpinnings of biological descents into the abyss of racism. Thus, Graves examines the history of biological diversity from a modern scientific perspective. He writes, 'what we call race is the invention not of nature but of our social institutions and practices.' The social nature of racial categories is significant because social practice can be altered far more readily than can genetic constitution."
In this view, I must point out,…(continued below the PayWall)
Last Words For Now
Just as many people find frank discourse about carnal matters insufferable to the point of revulsion, so too do many erstwhile citizens eschew trying truly to attempt an ascent to understanding’s higher peaks, so to speak. Ha ha. This disinclination remains the case despite the ultimately self-destructive dynamics that such stubborn delusion daily precipitates, needless to note, much to our mutual detriment.
Just to be clear for the presumptuous in the audience, I obviously don’t inhabit the ethereal realm of complete knowledge, environs only accessible to All-That-Is as such. But as a mandate from the cosmos, I aspire to such an exalted state of oneness despite its presenting at best a ‘fool’s errand’ to attain the never achievable, to climb the unscalable, to encapsulate what can never be completely contained.
A piece of wood in the queue expounds on this point. “Wisdom’s Flaming Flagon” is its title. “Intelligence Activates Deepened Creativity, Yet It Also Oh-So-Clearly Illustrates a Key Paradox, a Persistent Conundrum, of All Human Existence & the Consciousness that Flows Therefrom: the Utter Necessity of Seeking to Fill Wisdom's Flaming Flagon to the Very Brim Despite the Immutable Impossibility of Ever Doing So."
However resonant these words, despite the elusive chimera of comprehensive comprehension, so to speak, I do have a certifiable expertise in guiding myself and anyone else who wants on journeys of discovery, very useful even though they are at best only partial, about this, that, and the other. Every fictional phantasm’s flowing forms in these pages delve themes and concepts that might guide or otherwise elucidate aspects of how we all find our ways through life’s ‘thickets of antithesis.’ That’s part of the adaptive magic of storytelling.
The journalism, the commentary, the reviews of others’ cultural endeavors, the contextualization of my own cultural work, every capsule of analytical deconstruction of our social lives, all of these more or less documentary exercises speak for themselves. One thing is certain. Nowhere else will readers find a broth so whimsically flavorful, steamy with sex and stodgily correct with grammar, investigating the exigencies of empire alongside examinations of popular experiments in reform, parsing mediated nonsense alongside actually helpful reportage, and always with Eros and Aphrodite and all of desire’s denizens ever close at hand.
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